"Even if truth is an illusion, we must continue pursuing it"

[Magical Realist]

Big fan of Rorty's here. Here's one of my favorite quotes of his:

"Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths."---Richard Rorty


https://iai.tv/articles/even-if-truth-is...5eBH4E7gQg

"As science, philosophy, and politics collide, the idea that we can truly know the world is under mounting pressure. From radical pragmatism to object-oriented ontology, leading thinkers now question whether truth is something we discover, construct, or abandon altogether. Anticipating the upcoming HowTheLightGetsIn festival on 25th May and the questions permeating so many of the upcoming debates, IAI Contributing Editor Omari Edwards argues that what is at stake is not just knowledge, but whether inquiry itself can survive without it."
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"Imagine you are standing at the shoreline of a vast ocean. You can see as far as the horizon, but you know that the horizon is not the edge of the world. It is merely the edge of what your height allows you to see. Is the ocean beyond the horizon real? Of course, but what else lies hidden beyond that edge?

So much of our world relies upon our ability to overcome uncertainty, and yet the more we learn, the greater the ocean of knowledge beyond the horizon. This expanse reaches into the foundations of science, politics, and the quiet assumptions we make every time we say the words “I know.”

For centuries, the Western intellectual tradition operated on a kind of promissory note. Enlightenment figures insisted that reason was the master key. Given enough time, better methods, more rigor, every mystery would yield. The limits of knowledge were merely temporary, edges of a map waiting to be filled in. The universe was, in principle, legible.

The map doesn’t correspond to the territory because there is no territory. Only other maps.

That confidence has taken a battering. Heisenberg showed that at the quantum level, the act of observation disturbs the thing observed. Hawking spent decades confronting the limits of what any theory of everything could actually tell us. And in the humanities, a quieter but no less devastating critique was building. Wittgenstein suggested that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. Kuhn argued that science doesn't accumulate truth so much as periodically overturn its own frameworks. Feyerabend went further still, insisting that methodology itself is a kind of mythology. Across every domain, progress is being made, but like Zeno’s paradox of the man crossing a room, to reach the truth, each step reveals that there are many more steps between us and that final account.

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.

It is against this backdrop that I want to consider three speakers joining us in Hay. Graham Harman arrives into this fractured landscape with something genuinely unusual: a position that refuses both the exceptionalism of the old Enlightenment and the vertigo of total relativism. Harman, the philosopher most associated with Object-Oriented Ontology, has spent his career arguing that perspective doesn’t merely color knowledge—it constitutes it. But crucially, he does not take this to mean that knowledge is therefore groundless. As Harman puts it, “to think a reality beyond our thinking is not nonsense, but obligatory.” The world, for Harman, is real and densely populated with objects, forces, and relations that exceed any single account of them. Yet those objects are never fully available to us. “If the human perception of a house or a tree is forever haunted by some hidden surplus in the things that never become present, the same is true of the sheer causal interaction between rocks or raindrops.” Nothing, in other words, is ever really available; we get just a sensation, a sensual touch of what is out there.

This leads Harman to a striking and somewhat uncomfortable conclusion about the nature of knowledge itself. Rather than celebrated as our highest faculty, he treats it with suspicion: knowledge, for Harman, is best understood as “justified untrue belief,” a useful but ultimately reductive enterprise, a form of “mining” that flattens the inexhaustible depth of objects. What gets us closer to reality, paradoxically, is not more rigorous description but art, metaphor, and allusion, the sideways orthogonal glance rather than the direct stare.

This is a philosophy for a post-Enlightenment age that has not yet given up on the real. But it still relies upon a notion of efficiency, or better yet, the capability to be useful.

To abandon the distinction between truth and fiction is not a liberation. It is a very particular kind of trap.

Set against Harman stands post-realist philosopher Hilary Lawson, and the contrast is clarifying. Lawson does not merely suggest that knowledge is perspectival—he argues that the very concept of knowledge, as something that accurately captures the world, must be abandoned. “I sometimes describe humans as closure machines,” he has said. “That’s how we’ve evolved—to make closures. We look around our environment, and we somehow think we see reality. But we hold things in these ways in order to achieve things.” In place of knowledge, Lawson offers what he calls “closure”: the idea that our frameworks don’t represent reality but close over it, creating workable fictions that allow us to act. As he puts it, we see the world as divided into things, characteristics, and relationships “not because that is how it is but because this is the structure of human thought.”

This is a bracing thought. And in certain moods, it feels undeniable. All that certainty, built on frameworks all the way down. And yet this could be said to once again sidestep the issue. The problem is that “does this work?” must mean something. Work for whom? Toward what end? If I say that a framework “works better” than another, am I not smuggling in a standard of truth through the back door? Lawson’s position risks a kind of performative contradiction: the claim that there is no knowledge seems to ask us to know something rather important about the nature of the world. In this sense, he is perhaps Rorty’s most committed heir—and inherits all of Rorty’s vulnerabilities along with his insights.

It is here that Cheryl Misak, and most especially her rich analysis of pragmatism, becomes essential. Misak, drawing on the American pragmatist tradition—particularly Peirce and the not-quite-American Frank Ramsey—argues that giving up on truth is not a philosophical sophistication but a philosophical catastrophe. For Misak, a true belief is “one upon which inquiry could not improve, a belief which would not be defeated by experience and argument.” Truth is not a metaphysical absolute hovering above human inquiry; it is what inquiry, conducted rigorously and honestly, converges on over time. It is not found but earned. As she puts it with admirable economy, “truth is that property of beliefs that enables us to succeed in our actions.”

And without the willingness to say that some claims are better supported, more reliable, more honest than others, we lose something irreplaceable. Not just in epistemology, but in ethics, in politics, in the basic functioning of a society that must make decisions together. To abandon the distinction between truth and fiction is not a liberation. It is a very particular kind of trap. And given the world we inhabit, one of weaponized misinformation, algorithmic bubbles, and epistemic tribalism, this trap has teeth.

Misak is, in a sense, the direct answer to Rorty. Where he insisted that truth is merely whatever your contemporaries let you get away with, she insists that this is precisely the kind of thinking that gets people killed. Not because truth is simple or easily accessed, but because abandoning the aspiration to it abandons us to power. Both an ethical and epistemological perfectionism, my chosen philosophy (though a cursory search to find fellow travellers leaves me in poor company), an attempt to reach the unattainable leaves me at least hopeful that we can, in fact, keep searching higher to see more of the horizon.

What emerges from placing these three views in tension is something more interesting than a simple debate between believers and sceptics. Harman is not defending the old Enlightenment dream. Misak is not naively asserting that science has all the answers. Lawson is not celebrating nihilism. All three are grappling with the same underlying fracture: the realization that our inherited picture of knowledge, with its clear, cumulative, framework-independent view, is flawed. The question is what to fill the map with now.

The real danger is not that we have reached the edge of knowledge. It is that we give up on the enterprise altogether.

Misak’s answer, I find, has the most to offer, not because it is the most reassuring, but because it is the most honest about what is actually at stake. To say that a true belief is one that inquiry could not improve is not a return to naïve Enlightenment certainty. It is something harder and more demanding than that: a commitment to keep testing, keep revising, keep submitting our frameworks to the pressure of experience. The limits of knowledge are real. But they are not a reason to abandon the enterprise. They are the very conditions that make inquiry worth pursuing at all.

A cartographer who knows their map is imperfect does not burn it. They keep surveying, keep correcting, keep submitting their lines to the resistance of new terrain. There is something in this that Lawson and Harman both grasp. Lawson is right that our frameworks are not windows onto reality, but instruments we wield, and the best of them are the ones that continue to open onto new experience rather than close it down. Harman is right that the world exceeds any description we give it, and that this excess is not a failure but a feature. But neither of these insights requires us to abandon the aspiration to truth. If anything, they sharpen it. A framework that refuses to be tested is not a closure; it is a dead end.

This is where Misak’s pragmatism feels not like a retreat but like a discipline. The real danger is not that we have reached the edge of knowledge. It is that we give up on the enterprise altogether; retreating into frameworks not because they are illuminating but because they are comfortable, confirming, and ours. That would be the true epistemic surrender. The debate at Hay offers necessary resistance.”

Join Cheryl Misak for the panel Closer to Truth, and Hilary Lawson and Graham Harman at HowTheLightGetsIn Hay 2026 for The Edge of the Known and ask yourself whether, from where you’re standing, you could ever have seen it differently."

[Ostronomos]

See my thread: The Theory-Reality Correspondence to see how truth and reality correspond to each other.

[C C]

[...] https://iai.tv/articles/even-if-truth-is...5eBH4E7gQg

[...] 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. [...]

No actual access to a non-represented world, so it is maps referencing other maps. But the external world of the senses is still the primary "map" and standard for testing things, even if that manifestation is dependent on a brain. Survival is ultimately dictated by it, and there's a limit to how much language-dependent ideas can deviate or fly away from its constraints.

But Rorty's antirepresentationalism is largely motivated by humanities scholar concerns (i.e., generating as much freedom as possible by undermining "authorities" deriving power from inflexible ontologies). The problem with having Judith Shklar's “cruelty is the worst thing we do” as the remaining global item that can adjudicate right/wrong in the context of moral relativism, is that even that is subject to interpretation, rather than being universal. What is considered "harsh suffering" can be broadened to something as general as capitalism or refined down to the most ridiculous trivialities (like killing microbes by striking a match).

Varying individual and group cognitive perspectives apply to it as much as everything else, after we're all handed over to the societal biases of different ethnocentrisms. As a self-professed "postmodernist bourgeois liberal", Rorty's hope that liberal neutrality will endure because it's the only hub for allowing different cultures to get along with each other was his own naïve Western prejudice exercising itself. Those postcolonial guilt-trips are themselves a product of Western intellectuals, not the other societies they desire and demand their work to be adopted by.

https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/31...ar2023.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/phil...hard-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.

[Magical Realist]

"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..."

I was thinking the other night about the commonality between monotheistic religion and metaphysical monism. Both seem to be fixated on one absolute -- either as a God or as a reality absolutely real in itself. The former being of course Abrahamic religions and the latter being the dominant physicalist paradigm of the sciences.

The seeds of authoritarianism inside these worldviews are identical--a need to control the unpredictable and uncertain world of the subjective with immutable laws, the sub-narrative of a chosen exclusive group to whom the truths of the universe are solely revealed, the demonization and suppression of opposing worldviews, and the reliance on "infallible" canonical texts that basically "set in stone" or "encode" the absolute truths defining the world.

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.

“A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.”
― Richard Rorty

[C C]

[...] 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.

One thing to clarify (from previously) is that Rorty was not anti-Western (a guilt tripper). He was an ethnocentrist because he viewed the West's liberal society as "special", the one culture that can critically analyze itself, evolve, and integrate others.

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.

It seems the only way to make sense of the above is that Rorty was only advocating temporary ethnocentrism until _X_ global utopia was achieved. Both the West and the other cultures it assimilated gradually transforming themselves into whatever _X_ socioeconomic paradise at the end of the rainbow. And Rorty, in contrast to the revolutionary Left, was epistemologically humble about what that system was. He criticized the anti-capitalist Left for pretending to know but refusing to fill in the blanks (below). And clearly was a gradual reformer, not wanting to trash the current system in any sudden way.

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

[Magical Realist]

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.."

That's what I noticed with various liberal movements over the past few years. This protesting and demonstration that they naively believe can correct an injustice that is entirely systemic and baked into our society. Like Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter or socialist activism towards getting rid of corporate capitalism. Even if you remotely had a chance to effect wide scale change in that, what would you replace it with? It is indeed a rhetoric of revolution and subversion rather than incremental cultural reform. The Who: "Meet the new boss..Same as the old boss." All the energy being invested in fighting and being against with no energy left for unifying and being for.

Maybe though the drama of war and the fight is more symbolic than practical. More a media event than an actual riot. The televised images of common people out there standing up for something they really believe in. Perhaps that in itself is enough to trigger long-term cultural change, which while being slow and lethargic DOES have historical precedence in the Civil Rights movement, the LGBT movement, the 60's anti-war movement, the anti-slavery movement, and the "Me Too" movement..