Ep. 349: Rorty’s Pluralistic Pragmatism (Part One)

0:09 Mark: Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 349 is something like, what's the most pragmatic attitude toward religion? We read the first two lectures from Richard Rorty's Pragmatism as Anti authoritarianism, written around 1997 but not published until 2021. The essays are called Pragmatism and Religion and Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partialexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, substituting fraternity for authority in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:46 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, obliged to empathy but not rationality in Austin, Texas.

0:52 Wes: This is Wes Alwan de Eternalizing My Hopes in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:57 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, exhausted by my alcohol obligation to take account of other people's doubts and objections in my own beliefs in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:06 Mark: All right, Dylan, you suggested this one, I think, in light of our William James varieties of Religious Experience. Start us off. What attracted. You had already read it when you suggested it, right?

1:16 Dylan: Yeah. So I picked up the book. I've long been a Rorty fan and studied him all the way back in undergrad. And I met him once and we've done a few episodes on him, and I was really attracted just by the title. It'd been something that has been on my mind for a long time, just the notion of the relationship to authority as being a defining principle of pragmatism, but also, honestly, of democracy. But when I started reading it, we were in the middle of reading James and he was engaging with James on the very book that. In part on the very book that we had been reading.

So I thought that's why I suggested those first two chapters. I thought they would apply, and that's why I did it. And he, I think, both engages and then has some criticism of James and ultimately his. You know, he sides with Dewey in a. A slightly different take on the question of religion. But he also has a, I think, a convincing but certainly engaging take on the role of sort of an alternate take on the history of sort of philosophy and religion and government and authority having to do with the way in which we understand how we make those judgments.

And I think ultimately that the question of governmental rule having to do with where we choose to seat the authority in the end, him coming down on the. Agreeing with Dewey and in particular that the authority for how we ought to govern ourselves is wholly within us as human beings. And this proper aim is one that we choose, but a definite partisan of individual. Cultivating individual human flourishing along the. Basically in agreement with Mill. So I thought for all those reasons, it was worth engaging. Yeah.

3:22 Wes: I think the last thing we read by him. Right. Was Achieving Our Country.

3:25 Dylan: Yes. Which has.

3:26 Wes: Which we all liked, as I remember, we all thought was really great. So my reaction to him this. And then before that, what we had read a bit of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Is that right?

3:38 Mark: Yeah.

3:39 Wes: And I probably ranted and raved in opposition to his epistemological theory, but. So I have very mixed feelings about Rorty and even this piece of writing. He's a wonderful writer. He's full of psychological insight. Even brings up some Freud in some. In an interesting way, makes a connection to Freud. And I'm on board with the general thesis about our relationship to authority at a methodological level. So, for instance, something I've mentioned before is that I think we ought to think of discursive authority is not vested in individuals and experts.

For instance, if we are trying to combat misinformation or conspiracy theorists. The answer isn't that there's authority in any given individual. The authority is in what I call the discursive process. And that is precisely the thing that the conspiracy theory distrusts. And I think it's one of Rorty's insights, is that is, from our perspective, the ultimate authority, that discursive process and its norms. But I think, at least as I read him, he's still wedded to an epistemological position that doesn't make any sense because it seems to deny an external mind, independent reality pretty clearly.

And I think just poking around in Stanford, I feel like I'm not misreading him. He's generally read this way by analytic philosophers and other pragmatists, and they similarly dislike this about his work. I will say the Brandom introduction gives a very, very generous reading of him, even though, as you might expect, Brandom ends with the caveat that, yeah, I part ways with Rorty and the whole there's no reality thing outside of her own perspectival approach. But. So if you could replace this idea that. That he's giving a theory of truth. Or if you could replace the relativism with an assertion of skepticism in the ancient sense of skepticism of just not knowing.

Right. So it's not that there is no truth, it's just that we don't have access to the truth except through. Except as mediated by the discursive process and by pleasure and Pain and all the things the pragmatists want to want to bring into this. I'm fully on board with that as a matter of our epistemic predicament and methodology. But as a theory of truth or as an implied ontology, I really don't like it.

6:11 Dylan: So we should get into that a little bit more. I mean, the short version, I think Rorty's response was that distinction just doesn't matter. And that'll be his long and short answer to this. He would say, yeah, sure, but that distinction you're making doesn't cash out. And so we should talk a little bit more about what ways in which that distinction cashes out. I tend to agree with you, Wes, that there's something fetishistic about Rorty's emphasis on there being no, he does talk about truth, but it certainly comes up to the heart to not see his. Him as being deeply relativistic. And he kind of delights in leveling things in that respect.

6:59 Seth: He uses the term fetishistic when he's talking about.

7:02 Dylan: Yes, he does.

7:03 Seth: So it makes sense that he would reply with his own fetish. I guess that's because we're talking about a polytheism of poetry as we could have a polytheism of fetishes.

7:13 Mark: So this was a series of lectures, 10 lectures, originally given in 1997. Brandom refers to it as his long lost last book. So it was not published during his lifetime. He died in 2007. This is 10 years before that this was written. And we had decided after reading this much on Dylan's recommendation, that we would read more about the epistemological stuff next time. So to some extent I'm going to say let's postpone. In some ways he just lays out an epistemological thesis in this part. And I was very unsatisfied with his actual defense of it is a neat image.

So the image is the anti authoritarianism thing is that basically this whole thing is that exegesis of God is dead and we've killed him. That's how I, you know. And he says some nice things about Nietzsche here, with the exception of, you know, Nietzsche famously didn't like democracy and Rorty is all on John Dewey. A lot of these lectures are just sort of secondary literature on other pragmatists. He talks about Peirce, talks about James a lot, he talks about Dewey a lot. And he throws in things about Nietzsche and others here and there. But you know what they all this thing that maybe Nietzsche started and that James and the rest of them and even Mill were high on, according to Rorty, is we should not be bowing down to something that is non human in any sense.

And so strangely enough, even though this is sort of a book ultimately about politics, right, because he's a practical guy, pragmatists like to say, what's the cash value of this in terms of us living a good life, us living a good collective life. And so it is about primarily the politics of religion and then the politics of epistemology. And so the politics of religion part is what I was just saying about God is dead, right? At least the idea of a monotheistic that you know, everybody to get your life ordered, you should acknowledge that there is a higher power than us.

We should be appropriately attuned to that. That is the thing that he says. We should not be sacrificing one iota of service toward other people and projects they're working on with other people in the name of some God that is telling us to do stuff. So if you say, I'm sorry son, I don't approve of trans people and I renounce you and you know, then you are doing something very, very wrong. You know, this is a conversation that we are having among people about sexuality or any other behavioral or even creedal type things.

9:49 Wes: But this is not to say that anything goes, right? Norms come from somewhere.

9:52 Dylan: Well, there's one norm, right? The norm of basically mill statement that basically we should be cultivating individuals, being able to do whatever what they want to do, as long as it doesn't interfere with what other people are doing to satisfy their own flourishing.

10:08 Wes: And that's the basic fundamental collective happiness is the standard. It's a utilitarian standard ultimately, yeah, with

10:16 Dylan: collective happiness, but with the emphasis on a cultivating individual flourishing, yes.

10:23 Mark: If an individual wants something, then prima facie we should encourage in, we should help them want that thing. Like that's where motivation in the world comes from, is we just find ourselves and it's only just is this going to hurt somebody else? And so ultimately on religion he kind of comes down to a public versus private, like if it helps you to believe something wacky and that's not going to affect your morality, your any sort of project you would have with other people, then you're welcome to that belief. But if as soon as it's going to, you know, impinge, and this is not just even on how you're going to act, but what you're going to believe, if as soon as it's going to impinge on the Projects that we have involving other people on politics, then actually you do have a responsibility to consult with the group to act in light of them.

And so epistemologically it's going to be kind of the same thing that if I just want to say the world is flat and say, oh, relativism is true. So it's flat for me, like, well, insofar as I am doing anything that would, you know, I'm. I'm booking trips to jump off the edge of the world or something like that. Like, no, you know, we have a responsibility to each other. But at the same time, if, if it really is just about some cosmological thing that that just has no effect on anybody, then you might say that that falls into the sphere of the private and there's just no.

If you want to believe in the flying spaghetti monster as a fact, then why not? Like if it's not affecting your ethics.

11:55 Wes: So he makes this part of a larger point, epistemological point, right? About the standard for belief in general, right? Not just the standard for our moral norms or for religion, the standard for belief in general not being something non human in the sense of a thing in itself that's independent of human cognitive capacities and interests. So the way he puts it at the very beginning of the essay is I see the pragmatist account of truth and more generally they're anti representationalist account of belief as a protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non human, whether the will of God or the intrinsic nature of reality.

So the intrinsic nature of reality is not our standard when it comes to belief formation, which from a methodological point of view, there's a point to that. Most of what I believe really depends upon it is a product of my interaction with a discursive community. As a methodological point, I can't simply take a belief and try to and go out and say, okay, does this. I'm gonna. Is this a copy of mind independent reality? Let me see if it's a copy. Oh, is it? Isn't it? That's not the way it works. There's more of a. We have to be more of a coherence theorists when it comes to the way our beliefs are actually warranted.

But my problem of course is I'm not going to beat this. I'm not going to keep beating this horse until it's dead. But that's fine as methodologically, but I don't think it can be made sense of ontologically that there is no Intrinsic nature of reality. Because I don't think there are. There is a discursive process or any discursive obligations or obligations to communities. Discursive communities, except under the assumption that there is such a standard, even if it's inaccessible to us, even if from a methodological point of view, we don't form our beliefs through some direct access to it.

14:02 Dylan: So this is where you get into Rorty playing games with reality with a capital R and reality with a small R. And he is completely on board with Dewey and James ineffectively having a Darwinian view of this, that it's our environment in the world that's going to shake this out. And is that aspect of Rorty's justification about truth and his discussion about truth, which I admit that he doesn't. He definitely emphasizes much more the discursive nature of the conclusions and the judgments being made. But he regularly comes back to this fact that, yes, there's this world out there that we're interacting with.

And his paradigm for that is natural science and the way in which natural science is a discursive activity. He would also lambaste the priests of the. The physicist priests out there and stuff like that and their notion of reality with a capital R, which I also find. I think it reveals him not interacting with enough scientists to understand how often science just gets revised in this context. Effectively Darwinian context of whatever works is the way in which we're going to understand it. He would definitely disagree with the notion about the ontological status of anything that we would say as real in what way in which they were real.

I think you're right about that. He would just find such discussions kind of worrying about whether or not quarks quote unquote actually exist or don't exist and stuff like that. He would find that just not a very sensible conversation.

15:40 Wes: You know, the methodological. And I know, Mark, you're trying to keep at some point with the religion, but I think this is. It's helpful to try to understand this. Yep, the methodological insight is important. So the way he ends this first section of the essay is with a discussion of Dewey and two plus two equals five or any other error you want to choose. You know, a historical claim that's false, for instance. You could say the same thing about it, which is that it is unconditionally false. Dewey would claim, according to Rorty. But that's not because the false sentences fail to accurately represent reality in itself. This is Rorty's claim.

16:18 Mark: Say why say what?

16:19 Wes: The alternative Is, well, the only good criterion for accepting a belief or rejecting a belief is whether it'll make for greater human happiness. The more granular insight here, which I'd like to emphasize, is that at a psychological level, if there were no negative hedonic consequences for false beliefs, we would never conclude that they were false. Right. There has to be some element of pleasure and pain or reward and punishment involved for me to get to the concept of truth or falsity in the first place. So it's important that there is this priority to happiness or to the hedonic or however you want to, you want to put it. We couldn't know the more abstract concepts related to realism.

17:08 Mark: Right.

17:08 Wes: We would never develop them except through this process of, oh, this. So, for instance, it just, it feels good to figure something out. Or as Aristotle puts it, man by nature desires to know. It feels good when beliefs cohere with each other and are consistent and bad when they. They aren't.

17:29 Dylan: Yep.

17:29 Mark: I feel like we've seen a sort of commonsensical way that this could operate in our Nyaya discussion, which is that if I put forward a knowledge claim that, you know, assert it's from a knowledge source, there's a cat on the mat because I saw the cat on the mat, then that just counts as knowledge. Unless some other human being comes along and has a similar spontaneous reaction that says, are you sure? I just looked there and there isn't one. Okay, well, now we have to get together and resolve. Whereas if you just say, are you sure you can trust your senses?

Then you're a wise ass. Are you sure that your senses really accord with reality? Then you're, you know, you're deluded by some sort of, perhaps Buddhist in their case, but, you know, some sort of a ideology that would make you deny the obvious. And so you can say, I mean, what's going on here? That our responsibility is to work out problems that come up with other people and there's no responsibility to the truth. And it could be yourself. You know, you look twice at this thought and you don't see the cat the second time. You count as a you at time one and time two in that sense count as different members of the community here.

But that it just, it makes more sense to think of this as a cooperative enterprise of figuring stuff out. than correctly getting at the transcendental truth or reality of the situation. And there might be many things that we just let go because we agree on for years and years and years, and then we find out 20 years, oh, you know, actually, there are no cats. They're all aliens and what we've been calling cats. We just want to actually change that word completely. But unless somebody is coming to the table with that proposition from a reasonable spot, then there's no reason to consider it.

So we don't need to do foundationalism in epistemology or anything like that. We just need to start from a more common sense, practical standpoint.

19:30 Seth: So I'm very sympathetic if I characterize this as a dialog in some sense between Dylan and Wes. As an advocate for Rorty versus an opponent. I'm sympathetic to both sides. And it seems to me that it would make some sense to think carefully about what he appears to kind of gloss a bit. This idea that appeal to authority, which is the transcendent, right, which is the Platonic, the Christian God is powerful, blah, blah, blah, versus an appeal to reality. The idea that reality takes the place of the transcendent. And that the way that scientists, like, we defer to scientists the same way we used to defer to priests.

And. And I don't think he's. I didn't read enough, you know, secondary literature, Wes, to know if there are other places where he explicitly says this. But appeal to reality to settle a dispute is not the same thing as appeal to authority. When you're talking about. And the idea that I think this is where you have to talk about beliefs versus something else, and it. It gets dangerous because we start talking about maybe sensation. It's almost like, oh, well, I'm looking across the room at the bed, and I see there's a set of headphones on the bed.

I don't have a belief that there's a set of headphones on the bed. That's not something. It's like, that's an experience of that. I'm not appealing to reality about the status of those headphones or whether I'm actually seeing them. I'm just seeing them. And so when you talk about consensus, I feel like there's a mechanism in the social consensus, the pragmatic social consensus that he describes that doesn't completely divorce. We're not divorced from reality. We're not divorced from our connection to the world. And so when we want our beliefs to cohere, is it maybe that Rorty just thinks that he's thinking specifically about, like, for example, religious beliefs and scientific beliefs, and he's not thinking about something that you mentioned, a historical fact that somebody might believe such and such happened?

Somebody else might believe such. You know, it didn't happen that we have no recourse, we have no way to. To make an appeal to anything to try to determine the truth of that.

21:51 Wes: Well, part of his motivation is. Right. He's very impressed by Sellars and Quine.

21:55 Seth: Yeah.

21:56 Wes: So Sellars, we don't have this immediate access to a given that is not already theory laden, that is not already affected by our own conceptual schemes, let's say. And we don't, as per Quine, have incorrigible access to these analytic truths. Right. So another version of the given in

22:18 Mark: a way, rational intuition. Yeah.

22:20 Wes: There is no foundationalist starting point in that sense. We can't just say because someone might want to say, well what do you mean? We can't make any appeals. I can go out and make an observation. Isn't that an appeal? Isn't an experiment, in a sense an appeal? Not according to this point of view. It's not an appeal. It's just part of a discursive communal cooperative process through which we can reach agreement. But I think as Dylan points out, he's going to want to say I'm not. It's not that I'm rejecting reality as a standard or accepting reality as a standard. Exactly. He's rejecting reality insofar as he thinks it's an incoherent idea, reality as this external non human authority to which we can appeal. We can only appeal to the discursive process. We can only appeal to the community in a sense.

23:07 Dylan: So he would say something like, from the early moderns, in replacing religion as an authority with science, they effectively weaponized reality with a capital R and turn that into the substitute for that. And that turning it into a substitute effectively generated hundreds of years of discussions about what ultimate reality is. That is directly akin to talking about what God is. And Rorty would say both of them are fools, errands. Right.

23:42 Mark: He gives a history of, you know, you got the worship of gods and then Plato comes along and depersonalizes it. And so it is a transcendent goodness, oneness, something the form that, you know, that will give us the forms. But there is a gap between it and our everyday knowledge that somehow we have to bridge. And then how Christianity re personalized that and took over Platonism and said, oh, Platonism, just describe what we've got going. And then it gets depersonalized again by science as you're talking about. And we've seen this in Nietzsche again describing.

It's really asceticism, that is, what's really important is this thing whether It's God or the good or truth or whatever. And so I will set aside all the practical details and focus on this one thing that should be the center of my. All my strivings. And so, yes, when scientists. When atheists. Atheists can be a flavor of monotheism by putting getting all in and being ascetic. And I will not allow myself the luxury to pray to God as my plane is crashing because I am an atheist, damn it, and I will focus all my attentions there. Whereas Rorty thinks that the pragmatist move is basically polytheistic.

Not that we want to just throw away everything that is sort of transcendent in any sense, but we want to say, you know, like being in love with various poets that, like, oh, wow, I'm really into this image. This is really inspiring to me. It helps me to be a better person. There's so many people that thought, you know, the imitation of Christ or this thing, you know, so there's actually a lot of good to be said about Christianity, for instance. But he describes it as being too enthralled to one poet to be able to pay attention to other poets. And he wants something more like what Nietzsche says about ethics, that there's lots of different ways of being awesome, right?

There's a plurality of possible sages, possible excellences that we can aim at. And this is what the function of the political is, to enable people, per Mill's On Liberty to strive in whatever direction they see fit and achieve all a diverse kind of wonderfulness. So this is what you get when you get rid of all types of monotheism, all types of. I will put aside everything else for the favor of this one thing. And then we need to impose the love of that one thing on every other human being. So as far as a political thing, even if you don't like the epistemological connect, you know, analogy between God and truth with a capital T, still, it does seem like politically this is a really desirable picture.

26:25 Wes: Yeah, well, yeah, it's just. It's all in the service of liberal pluralism and the, you know, Mill's On Liberty and all that stuff. So, yeah, everything about this to me is very. I'm very amenable to all of it except for that one little philosophical detail that I'm not going to mention again. And the psychology of it is. I mean, there's like the mark, which you alluded to with the purified, right. The Platonic form is a purification of the Father under his account, which we should get into detail on. That. So there's a lot of psychological acumen here, too, and even some funny images like us, you know, sort of cozying up to a purified Platonic ideal that is supposed to be a father substitute and a God substitute.

So it's a psychological need, in other words, for this. This external sort of authority, as opposed to a kind of maturity where you advance beyond the need for that authority, for that father figure, to the point where you can live in a fraternity, where you can turn the authority into the democratic cooperative effort, per se.

27:36 Dylan: He doesn't talk about it exactly. He says some language that's in this direction, but it amounts to democracy as being part of the natural cultural evolution of human beings. When I say it that way, then I get into a kind of teleological talk that he would deny, but that there is that evolutionary force going on. And when we bring up something like the natural pull of having an authority, it does raise for me the question, maybe we'll just talk about it more as we go on about the relative political astuteness of it. Or when are, you know, to what extent are there conditions that are required for the circumstances for democratic existence, that. Or democratic politics that just make it possible to happen.

28:34 Wes: Yeah, so I think like. So, for instance, Mill would say fallibilism. People have to think of themselves as fallible. And this is part of the part and parcel of not simply thinking you can appeal to some ultimate authority, whether it's a cult leader or political leader or religious doctrine or even. Even the leading scientific theory of the day, and say, look, this is the truth, and therefore you can't say the opposite. We could be fallible about anything, according to Mill. And why is that required for democracy? Well, see our On Liberty episode. But there's a. There's a long argument about how the discursive process, freedom of discussion, as Mill puts it, is, in a sense, the engine of democracy. So that sense of fallibility has to be there for that discursive process to be successful and therefore for democracy to be successful, which I completely buy into.

29:31 Seth: So this is probably best articulated by the end of the second essay, when he equivocates Agape the Christian, love thy neighbor with Mill's formulation of, you know, the greatest good for the greatest number. This is Rorty, page 38. Suppose that a source which you believe to be non human tells you that all men are brothers, that the attempt to make yourself and those you cherish happier should be expanded into an attempt to make all human beings happy. For Dewey, the source of this suggestion is irrelevant. You may have heard it from a God or a guru, but you might just as well have found it carved out by the waves on a sandy beach.

It has no validity unless it is treated as a hypothesis, tried out and found successful. The good thing about Christianity, Dewey is saying, is that has been found to work. So it's not that there's not an appeal to something, or it's not that there's not a telos, an end towards which we strive. It's that that thing, whatever that thing is, can be perfectly rationally and suitably generated from our own interactions. It can be socially constructed and we don't need to make appeal to anything non human. You don't need God to use brotherly love as an ideal, is his point.

30:55 Wes: But it's been found to work for who, right? It's not just for me. This is a problem that besets utilitarianism, but utilitarianism as well. Saying things work or it's pleasurable or it makes happy, that equivocates between communal happiness and my happiness. And if I'm a serial killer and it's a society of brotherly love, that doesn't work for me. So I have to be able to appeal to some sort of authority. And the authority in this case is communal. The community is a form of authority. And it's not only a form of authority, it's a potentially disastrous form of authority, which is part of what Mill's On Liberty is about.

You could have a tyranny of the majority. So the appeal to the community, this is, I'm just leveling an objection here is to me not good enough. And the appeal to a discursive process is fine, but to even call it a discursive process implies a relationship to an authority outside of that process, to a mind, independent reality. So I'm just, I want to point us to, you know, there are nuances to this argument and I think problems with it. It's fine to say very vaguely, well, something's been found to work, but you know, again, work for who? And what if someone disagrees that it works?

32:08 Mark: One of the first things he talks about in the first essay is, you know, he briefly touches on Peirce. And we've, we've talked before about him, how his view of truth is what an ideal group of interlocutors would eventually agree on. So there's still, that is something that is at play. When we say it's just up to the group, it's not necessarily up to the group, right? Now, Right. We can include all future humans in the group. And so that gives room for. You're saying that this is a transcendental argument, that there actually has to be an objective reality or something that these things are coalescing around. Peirce doesn't seem to think that that is required.

32:49 Dylan: That.

32:49 Wes: Right, but Rorty doesn't like Peirce. Right. He explicitly says, well, he can't make sense of that idea.

32:55 Dylan: The coherence of correspondence he puts off

32:57 Wes: talking about the convergence at the ideal limit of convergence.

33:00 Dylan: Yeah, yeah.

33:01 Wes: Rorty does not like. Yeah, so.

33:03 Dylan: So one thing I think we should take seriously on this point and when we talk about, you know, taking, you know, saying, yeah, there's this appeal to mind, independent reality is Rorty is definitely taking very seriously the notion that this whole thing is Darwinian in a deep sense and that the fact that it works. I agree with you that there is something a lot more to be said about the way in which there are underlying norms that are then getting agreed to. So in his case, he's pointing out the agreement to the norm that's exemplified by Mill. And then there's a lot more to say about the conditions under which that norm actually comes to be a norm and has occult normative force.

I've been listening to a long podcast on the rise of Alexander the Great and the circumstances of Philip, his father. And when I listen to that, I'm like, there's no freaking way that somebody talking about democracy or the will of the individual or free speech or anything like that matters. A fricking hill of beans in that environment that's like going to be screaming into a chasm and just have your head chopped off. That's just not the way that society worked. And so there's going to be more to say about.

34:27 Wes: You should see what they did to the climate activists. Exactly.

34:31 Dylan: So there is something to be said about how those norms happen. But Rorty would say, I think, is that, you know, when you say, well, you know, there's this, you know, we're going to have to appeal to reality and otherwise it's not going to have any standard. Rorty would say. He would say, sure, that doesn't really matter because in the end we're going to end up with a. Some kind of set of norms that's based upon some discursive convergence. And it might not be the one that I most advocate, which is the one that cultivates individual human freedom the most, which I think is the best one.

And I have Arguments for why that's the best one. And human beings could just. Just like a individual species could go extinct. Human beings could go extinct. I think that's what he would say. He would say the circumstances of the environment and the way in which a species reacts to that environment could lead to their extinction. Totally could do that. A mind independent reality wouldn't matter a hill of beans to that because mind independent reality isn't going to make any

35:36 Wes: judgments for anybody but it as a methodological matter, yes. But as a matter of discursive norms, the norm is to believe what is true. And if you don't believe anything is true, there is no such norm. And you and power, you do what you want according to your power.

35:52 Dylan: I agree with you, Wes, about. And that is sort of the challenge here, that you end up part of your discursive norm is to agree not just in the power of individual human flourishing, but that we as a community have a third thing to talk about within some kind of box. And Rorty would point to science as being a perfect example of there being pretty wide agreement within the confines of the culture of science about what that box looks like.

36:20 Seth: I was going to try to take that point and pivot it back to kind of the psychological aspect, because I think that's really interesting. So, you know, Rorty talks about how the. And we talked about this with Danto and Rorty talks about it in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The idea that, you know, our relationship with reality is. What's the word? I lost it. But essentially that we're trying to mimic, we're trying to recreate or recapitulate the basis of truth is to try and mirror what's out there in the world. And then we come to realize, actually, you know, mathematical abstractions which don't. Sorry, resemblance. Resemblance, that's the word I'm looking for. You know, you start to realize that mathematics does a much better job of articulating reality, but it doesn't resemble reality. Like, it's not like a triangle.

37:12 Dylan: It represents. This is the distinction between resemblance and representation.

37:15 Seth: Exactly.

37:16 Dylan: That he attributes to Descartes.

37:18 Seth: He attributes to Descartes, although I thought later on he also kind of suggests that's there in Plato. But anyway, the point being, he says there's a shift from resemblance to representation. And that means there's a shift from something like presentation to judgment. Representation necessarily involves judgment because you have to make a judgment that this thing is representing accurately, since you no longer have resemblance as a yardstick. And then he goes on to point out that judgment sort of inherently has a psychological character for the judger that we want to be right.

When you make a judgment, you're staking a claim, you're asserting your own personal authority that such and such is the case or such and such is true. And so, and he, you know, he, he likes the shift to representation, but he says, you know, the, the failure of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment rationalists, was that, you know, we still had representation caught up in this ahistorical, a psychological or non historical, non psychological subject. But in fact representation is judgment. And that's where he thinks Kant got it. Right. Right. So when we, I don't know that I'm going to be able to tie this back to what we were talking about, but essentially the idea that our epistemological relationship with the world and with others is inherently judgmental, which in his view means inherently normative to the extent that there is a desire on our part, or maybe it's not normative, it's not the right word, there's a, an emotive or a passionate element in there.

But that we want to be right, that when we make claims we're taking a stand. And this is in a sense acting as an authority, that the whole notion of representation is authoritative. And I think he's trying to say that is why we don't need an appeal to some kind of non human authority. Because it's not as though we're passive subjects that require something that can have authoritative judgments to give us the truth. We're perfectly capable of generating truth ourselves because we are by nature in the way we represent authoritative beings.

39:45 Wes: Yeah. So I would just say appeal to authority can mean multiple things. It's tragic that we can't figure out what's true by going out to the truth tree and comparing our beliefs to the fruit that's growing on it. Can only do it indirectly. But we have to believe in the truth tree. We're never going to see it, we're never going to encounter it. But nothing works if you don't believe in it. It's not that we make methodologically, we make an appeal to, you know, in the sense of, oh, I've got to, you know, to figure out if my belief is true, I've got to go out and make this comparison.

But in a weaker sense of appeal are the discursive processes and activities by which we do try to get at the truth. And the whole notion that it is a truth seeking activity implies a belief in the truth. So the norms, these norms and discursive activities which are our very human way of going about this, and I'm completely on board with that. They just imply, unfortunately you can, maybe it's tragic, but you can't get around the implication. And any other suggestion I just think is not logically consistent. It's self contradictory in the way that Aristotle points out and Plato points out and everyone has since the dawn of time.

It's an inescapable objection. This anti relativistic objection. It puts us in a predicament, it's true, but we can't just wish our way out of it by saying we need not have that belief. And I don't think it's necessary for a political anti authoritarianism. The danger is that the standard will become the wishes of one tyrant or one majority, one group or another, or one dogma or one bit of closed minded this or that. And if there is no belief in something external to that, then might does make right.

41:37 Dylan: Yeah. So I think that you're making a really important point here, Wes, which is that it's indispensable to have a standard that allows you to coalesce what the focus of human consensus ought to be. And that ends up being a important linchpin, even if it's still kind of muddy. Even if that discursive nature can lead to wrong pathways and stuff like that. Without it, you end up having no way to focus what you're talking about. And I think you could also argue in the end that that sort of bare minimum piece that you see Rorty himself refer to with little R's and stuff like that, even if he goes back to fetishizing the, you know, turning the reliance on the discursive nature of truth as a kind of fetish.

And he wants to make the distinction between talking about truth with the capital T and truth of the little T, he ends up. In some ways that's why I call it fetishizing and just overemphasizing it. The thing that we agree more or less, that we're talking about.

42:49 Mark: I know we're getting to the end of part one here, so I'm not going to try to shift us back to God for the last two minutes.

42:55 Dylan: Well, we can go to sin. We can go to sin and truth. Right. The beginning of pragmatism or religion, I suppose.

43:01 Mark: Yes. Just.

43:02 Dylan: So this is.

43:03 Mark: This was my objection to this whole thing and why I want to push it, wanted to push the epistemological discussion off until next whole episode when we read the essay specific lounge here. Because here he just throws out this analogy. But as we've kept saying, between God and God's commands and stuff on the one hand, and then truth, capital T, and the devotion that we're supposed to have toward seeking out the truth to the detriment of everything else. And we read about this, for instance, in Truth and Lie by Nietzsche, where he was questioning why do we think the will to truth is such a central thing, which he seems to be.

Not that there's no such thing as. I mean, he. Other stuff he says there's no such thing as the true world. You know, that's one of his. I think in Twilight of the Idols there, he's just talking about, you know, as a pragmatic thing. Truth is something that we should put among other potential values, you know, So I don't know that we have to decide. I think there's a lot to be said about this ontological issue of truth, but Rorty is not talking about that. So I don't know how much we should be distracted or whether this is something that is. Unless you admit that he's a radical relativist, then you can't go with the rest of his program.

I guess this is why, Wes, you keep going back and forth between, oh, it's just a little point and no, this is actually the core of his belief. And because you don't buy that, then, like, it just sours you on this whole thing.

44:31 Wes: No, it's not. I'm not meaning to say I'm soured on the whole thing, and it just happens to interest me. But he does actually talk about it a lot, I think. So. It's in here a lot. But we can go, you know, if we want to focus on the gods. Well, I mean, I think the first thing to focus on is Section Two, because I think it's his comparison of the different pragmatists and their different approaches to religion is very useful. And then the psychology in Section three is brilliant. The. The idea of pragmatism is liberation from the primal Father. There's a lot that's brilliant in here to discuss. So we should do that in part two.

45:08 Mark: Yes, you can hear about that. If you're already a Partially Examined Life supporter, it should be in your feed now, or at least soon. Otherwise, wait until next week or go to partially examinedlife.com support. Become a Supporter now.

45:21 Wes: Thanks.