Rorty, Richard McKay (1931–2007)

3. Knowledge and truth

Rorty’s anti-foundationalism, drawing on arguments of Quine and Wilfrid Sellars, denies that the justification of our knowledge claims must or can terminate in beliefs or statements that provide a foundation for knowledge. Nor does Rorty think that knowledge has any other overall structure. On his view (epistemological behaviourism), one justifies a belief or statement by adducing other beliefs or statements that do not require justification in that context, so as to satisfy the standards implicit in our social practice of justification (see Contextualism, epistemological). He consequently denies both that scepticism is a problem for philosophy and the theories whose appeal is that they purport to solve the problem of scepticism (see Scepticism). Rorty’s anti-foundationalism also denies that there is some particular discipline or part of culture that has the job of providing justification for, or making sense of, all the rest. In particular, he insists that it is a mistake to try to justify practices and institutions like liberal democracy, academic freedom and scientific research by appeal to philosophical theories that show them to correspond to or be in touch with the ultimate nature of reality or the human self or the will of God or something else bigger or deeper than our actual practices. This is not the view that such practices do not need any justification, which some critics have accused Rorty of holding, but rather that appropriate justifications will always be piecemeal and local (see Justification, epistemic §7).

Epistemological behaviourism is an account of justification but not a theory of truth. Rorty denies that there is any interesting theory of truth, that is, any general account of what makes beliefs and sentences true. He endorses James’ dictum that the true is just the good in the realm of belief; there is no general account of why beliefs are true any more than there is a general account of why things are good. He rejects correspondence theories and coherence theories of truth alike. His anti-representationalism denies that the essence of language is to represent or picture reality in such a way that bits of language match up with bits of reality; languages – the noises, gestures and marks we humans make – and thoughts – the brain states we get into – are part of the repertory of devices we have accumulated for coping with the world (including ourselves). While some stretches of language or thought might work by such matching-up techniques, these stretches have no special privilege or philosophical importance. Rorty rejects both realism and antirealism (or idealism) as products of a misguided representational view of language. No class of truths has foundational status with respect to the rest of the truths. While we usually call beliefs true when they are better justified than their competitors, ‘true’ does not mean ‘justified’ or ‘warranted’; it is indefinable and ineliminable.

Since there is no foundation for truth or knowledge, there is nothing outside our social practices to ground them, according to Rorty. Hence, he has sometimes rejected objectivity as a goal of inquiry (and objective–subjective as a relevant dimension of appraisal in the cognitive realm) in favour of solidarity with our community of inquirers; less provocatively, he urges that objectivity be understood as intersubjectivity or taken as shorthand for practices, like not taking bribes, that we have found very helpful in most kinds of inquiry.

Rorty is often accused of relativism and as often rejects the accusation. He claims that relativism about truth is easily refutable. The alternative to relativism about justification that he espouses is ‘ethnocentrism’, the view that justification is relative to our practices. The defence of our beliefs against challenges by other communities (Nazis, religious fundamentalists, the Nuer) must always be question-begging, but this does not vitiate the defence, since no other kind of defence is better or even as good, and appraisal must always be against relevant alternatives (see Cognitive pluralism).

Opponents with epistemological and political concerns have regarded Rorty’s ethnocentrism and epistemological behaviourism as viciously circular and conservative, making existing practices and institutions self-justifying and impervious to rational criticism, an objection also brought against other epistemological behaviourists such as Wittgenstein. Rorty’s response has been to appeal to Kuhn and Davidson. According to Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions, relatively large-scale changes in the standards and practices of rhetorical communities are not justifiable by criteria available to those in the community before the change, but one result of the change is that new criteria become available to the reconstituted community after the revolution. Rational justification of the new beliefs and vocabulary, and rational criticism of the old beliefs and old vocabulary are available, but only when the new vocabulary and its attendant standards are established. According to Davidson’s account of metaphor, metaphorical uses of old words to make new judgments that are false and even irrational by existing practices of justification, can change people’s practices so that, as dead metaphors, the sentences are true and justified. Our accounts of the development of thought to its present (or future) achievements are always ‘Whiggish’. The recognition that our most important values and practices are without foundation or non-question-begging justification is ironism.