(Apr 22, 2026 04:51 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] https://iai.tv/articles/even-if-truth-is-an-illusion-we-must-keep-pursuing-it-auid-3556?fbclid=IwY2xjawRVyuBleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFSaGZDbjd6TGNjTlVVZEpvc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHuvl4jF8XCvIuL9yiDZuvMEZWiokkEAbcZ6sZ36lTjRLmqvkoISRdmCxFhmV_aem_QpQMXkf3WJwy5eBH4E7gQg

[...] Before turning to the figures who will try to resolve some of these questions in Hay, we should look back to Richard Rorty, one of the last century’s principal theorists of this question of the limits of our knowledge.” In his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty argued that knowledge is not a matter of mirroring an objective reality, but rather “a matter of conversation and of social practice.” Building not only on the American pragmatists and critically minded analytics but a wider mood in philosophy outside the Anglosphere, Rorty argued that the mind is not a faithful reflector of a world “out there.” Instead, it is a tool for coping, a generator of useful fictions. “Truth,” he wrote with characteristic provocation, “is what your contemporaries let you get away with.” And if that weren’t enough: “There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.”

Rorty’s position represents the terminus of a long road away from Enlightenment confidence. If he is right, then the question the festival poses—have we moved from a world where knowledge has limits to one where there is no knowledge at all?—must be answered with a bleak yes. The map doesn’t correspond to the territory because there is no territory. Only other maps. [...]

https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/3171255/1/200523338_Mar2023.pdf

EXCERPTS: In Rorty’s view, Western philosophy has been excessively concerned with discovering the ultimate nature of reality, or the purpose-independent truth about a given topic. Instead, Rorty thinks, ‘The point of philosophy. . . is not to find out what anything is “really” like, but to help us grow up – to make us happier, freer, and more flexible’. To be anti-representationalist is to say, then, roughly, that ‘there are many descriptions of the same things and events, and . . . there is no neutral standpoint from which to judge the superiority of one description over another’.

[...] Rorty takes from Dewey the thought that anti-representationalism frees us from a kind of obligation to think one way rather than another in order to represent the world (or reality, nature, the universe etc.)

[...] The problem with representationalism from Rorty’s point of view is that it introduces an obligation – specifically, an obligation upon how we think – that may override or obscure moral obligations to our fellow human beings. Therefore, for Rorty, ‘we would be better off if we dropped the idea that we have a duty to represent reality accurately, and replaced it by the idea that our only duty is to our fellow inquirers’.

The idea that we are responsible, or answerable, to something non-human in our thinking is anathema to Rorty. He draws numerous parallels between the idea that there is one way that things really are, to which the intellect must conform, and the familiar religious idea that human behaviour should conform to the dictates of a God, or gods. Indeed, Rorty views ‘reality’ as a secular substitute for the notion of ‘God’, and regards his own anti-representationalism – ‘a continuation of atheism by other means’ – as a contribution to the Enlightenment project of liberating humanity from subservience to harmful forms of authority, particularly those justified by appeal to putative higher, non-human, sources of power.

[..] In this thesis I treat ‘anti-authoritarianism’ as the core of Rorty’s anti-representationalism.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/

EXCERPT: Rorty is a self-proclaimed postmodernist bourgeois liberal. His liberalism is postmodernist because it does not depend on a metanarrative according to which liberalism is the realization and embodiment of transcultural and ahistorical conceptions of rationality and morality. Rather, its institutions and practices are the lucky result of a contingent history. His liberalism is bourgeois because this contingent history includes economic conditions that make these institutions and practices possible.

Thus, his liberalism is a pragmatic liberalism. He is skeptical of political thought purporting to uncover hidden, systematic causes for injustice and exploitation, and on that basis proposing sweeping changes to set things right. Rather, liberalism involves piecemeal reforms advancing economic justice and increasing the freedoms that citizens are able to enjoy. It is also a romantic liberalism. He follows Judith Shklar in identifying liberals by their belief that “cruelty is the worst thing we do,” and contends it is our ability to imagine the ways we can be cruel to others, and how we could be different, that enables us to gradually expand the community with which we feel solidarity.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/philosophy-and-religion/philosophy-biographies/richard-rorty

EXCERPT: Rorty’s pragmatism and antifoundationalism were disturbing to both sides of the political spectrum. To the Right he represented the worst of liberal relativism, and to the Left his “liberal ironist” pose seemed to justify political quiescence. From Rorty’s standpoint both sides mistake the issue—we need neither ontological foundations to justify our political stances, nor a fixed vocabulary to inspire us to political action.

In any event, Rorty argued, rationality and foundationalist claims to knowledge are never the effective agents in history, since contending ontological positions (say between a Thomist and a Kantian liberal) are not themselves capable of rational resolution—it is in the “sad, sentimental” stories that we tell to one another that ultimate hope for the elimination of cruelty is to be found.

This shift in the self-understanding of philosophy is Rorty’s most lasting contribution to the Anglo-American philosophic tradition, and while his idea of philosophy is not universally accepted, it is almost always the one proffered by his opponents as the relevant position to be refuted.

Quote:"The idea that we are responsible, or answerable, to something non-human in our thinking is anathema to Rorty. He draws numerous parallels between the idea that there is one way that things really are, to which the intellect must conform, and the familiar religious idea that human behaviour should conform to the dictates of a God, or gods. Indeed, Rorty views ‘reality’ as a secular substitute for the notion of ‘God’, and regards his own anti-representationalism – ‘a continuation of atheism by other means’ – as a contribution to the Enlightenment project of liberating humanity from subservience to harmful forms of authority, particularly those justified by appeal to putative higher, non-human, sources of power..."

(Apr 24, 2026 07:44 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] Rorty apparently honed in on this need to exclude other perspectives and ultimately enforce its own as the one solving/absolving truth that underlies these absolutist mindsets. If anything, and as a true pomo would do, he merely critiques the dominant representationalism of our day while never substituting it with some other grand and modernist narrative. This may be frustrating to most of us who are used to having our ideas concise and neatly packaged for us. Which only emphasizes more the need to leave things "open" and mercurially relational in order to, not just answer our questions, but to lift our consciousness to a higher and more liveable perspective.

Rorty’s socio-ethnocentrism: the problem of its justification: Western (Anglo-Saxon) ethnocentrism, Rorty argues, is of a special kind: it is the ethnocentrism of a “we-community” (“we liberals”) which is dedicated to enlarging itself and creating more and more variegated, inclusive and heterogeneous society. It’s a worldview of a liberal “ironist” and cosmopolitan who is always aware of the contingency of her language and moral self, and who “has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses”. But to say, with Rorty, “We are lucky that our ethnocentrism is based on distrust of itself,” amounts to recognize the truth of anti-ethnocentrism. One who believes in cultural and social progress towards “a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society” is de facto anti-ethnocentrist. Even if he denies it verbally.

Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America: A 1998 book by American philosopher Richard Rorty, in which the author differentiates between what he sees as the two sides of the left, a cultural left and a reformist left. He criticizes the cultural left, which is exemplified by post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault and post-modernists such as Jean-François Lyotard. Although these intellectuals make insightful claims about the ills of society, Rorty holds that they provide no alternatives and even present progress as problematic at times. On the other hand, the reformist left, exemplified for Rorty by John Dewey, makes progress its priority in its goal of "achieving our country." Rorty sees the reformist left as acting in the philosophical spirit of pragmatism.

Richard Rorty (from that book): The cultural Left has contributed to the formation of this politically useless unconscious not only by adopting “power” as the name of an invisible, ubiquitous, and malevolent presence, but by adopting ideals which nobody is yet able to imagine being actualized.

Among these ideals are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism. Power will pass to the people...

[…] Sixties leftists skipped lightly over all the questions which had been raised by the experience of non market economies in the so-called socialist countries. They seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, “the people” would know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how “the people” would learn how to do this.

The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about “the system” rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like “late capitalism” suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function.

The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in participatory democracy –– the liberation of the people from the power of technocrats –– until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess. […]

The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites. These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical.

If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it, I think that the left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy. This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century.

Someday, perhaps, cumulative piecemeal reforms will be found to have brought about revolutionary change. Such reforms might someday produce a presently unimaginable non market economy, and much more widely distributed powers of decision making. […] But in the meantime, we should not let the abstractly described best be the enemy of the better. We should not let speculation about a totally changed system, and a totally different way of thinking about human life and affairs, replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have. --Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

Quote:They (60's liberals) seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, “the people” would know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how “the people” would learn how to do this.

The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about “the system” rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic.."