You know, my friend Richard Rorty is a pragmatist.
I think Richard Rorty is a skeptic in the almost the old Greek sense.
Give up this talk about truth.
But he likes to say that he agreed with Donald Davidson and Davidson never repudiated this
but nobody else has been able to see that Davidson and Rorty agreed.
I think Davidson was flattered to have as well known an author as Rorty citing him and
quoting him on all possible occasions, but I don't.
But, you know, Donald said the notion of truth is as clear and simple a notion as we have
and it sounds just the reverse of Rorty.
Rorty and I once co-sponsored a conference on truth in Paris back in I think oh many,
may years ago, before 19, about 1990 I guess in which he said -- he later said, tried to
deny this, but he said and there's a tape of it, we should have a moratorium on the
use of the word truth and I raised that to him a couple of years ago and he said I just
meant in philosophy, but I don't think he just, at that point, actually did just mean
in philosophy.
I mean his spirit of let's just get rid of this question is something true or false and,
again, Rorty says, and this he doesn't deny having said.
It's in print that as far as I'm concerned the notion of warrant, justification, is a
sociological notion.
No prag--, none of the classical pragmatists was a cultural relativist about warrant.
And Rorty is an explicit cultural relativist about warrant and a skeptic about truth and
I just don't see.
He did an important job in getting people to read the pragmatists again.
He was influential in getting me to read James and to start teaching James so I'm grateful
to him for having called attention to classical pragmatism, but he's, and he's read everything,
but he has a philosophy of his own in which he, Rortyanism is a good enough name.
He d-- [laughs] call it pragmatism.
And I don't' think, and as I say for Davidson.
Yeah.
Davidson was a very, very original philosopher.
I don't really see him as a member of any school.
I mean the biggest influence on him was Quine but then he's...his interest in value theory
and action theory and so on are very un-Quinean interests.
Rorty oscillates between, you know,between give up the notion of truth or the notion
of truth is harmless but we shouldn't put any weight on it in any discussion, you know.
The only question you should really ask is does this enable us to cope, right?
And, you know, when you were defending Dewey's realist credentials, at least as far as the
world of qualities is concerned, that there's, that there's, well, that there is a world
out there at least, a perceptible world out there, that is not made up by us and there
is a fact.
I mean he doesn't.
There is a fact as to.
And as I say he doesn't like to lean on the word true.
He prefers to talk about warranted assertability.
He doesn't identify the two, I mean.
Sleeper and I would totally agree.
He doesn't identify truth and warranted assertability.
But he's saying the important question is what's warrantedly assertable but with respect
to warranted assertability, the full quote from Rorty is warrant is a sociological matter
to be ascertained by observing the reaction to S's -- S is his symbol, capital S is his
symbol for the speaker -- to S's statement by her peers close quotes.
Now that idea that something is warranted or not is just a matter of how her peers react
to S's statements is certainly utterly, as unDeweyan as you can get.
For Dewey, I think, warrant is a matter of whether a problematic situation has been objectively
resolved.
The word objective is his word.
That problems have objective solutions is something its' again and again and again.
I think that's his real answer.
He didn't write.
Theory of Valuation which is his answer to emotivism is not well written.
It's not nearly as good I think as the much earlier 1908 Ethics or the 1934 ethics, but
what I think he's saying in the Theory of Valuation is that there are ethical facts
because there are facts about when a problem has been solved and that's not just the same
thing as being subjectively solved or seeming to be solved.
Problems are out there.
They are transactional, as you say.
They involve not just me but the world and what's going on between me and the world and
between us and the world.
And there is such a thing as the objective solution of a problem.
And it seems to me that that use of objective is one that Rorty would have to quarrel with.
That's just, if I understand Rorty at all and I think I do, that's what he wants us
to stop arguing about.