Ep. 350: Rorty on Justification and Essentialism (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life Episode 350, Part 2. We've been doing our final episode on Rorty's Pragmatism as Anti Authoritarianism. Because even though there's more to this book about ethics, we wanted to just. It's enough to cover this epistemological stuff you mentioned in your last comment in part one, Wes, this thing that is actually the thesis perhaps of the first essay that we read, Universality and Truth lectures three and four, which is that it's not truth that we should be shooting for. It's not that there's a universal desire for truth.

And that's what all conversation is converging on and all investigation is converging on. It's about justification that we have. We do have a universal desire to justify ourselves. But that according to Rorty, has to be context dependent, right? We justifying ourselves to a particular audience, to ourselves, you know, given that we have some particular worries that we want to have addressed or something like that. Not to all possible future audiences, some transcendent justify ourselves to God.

1:15 Wes: Yeah. So this brings us to maybe the most relevant part to look at is the section three, truth and justification to begin with on page 51 PDF, page 87. But the idea is that, right, so he wants to forget obvious reasons, reduce true to ways of talking about justification. So true will be a way of talking, creating a contrast with justification. And there's a reason for that, right? So we know about this contrast between truth and justification from Gettier, for instance, we can say is justified and yet it is false. We need that kind of contrast.

They can't just collapse into each other. And for him, he wants to cash this out in terms of the use of true, the word true as a cautionary use, which is to say we think this, we believe this now, but there may be new objections later on, there may be new data or new theories. So to talk about truth, something being true versus not true really ultimately boils down to a gesture towards an unpredictable future. And ultimately truth versus justification becomes a way, he says, about. Of talking about, oh, to old audiences versus prospective new audiences.

That's on the next page. I'll let someone else Take it up.

2:46 Mark: Who did we just read talking about? When other cultures say I love you, then they actually are not making some sort of universal I will love you till the end of time, but, you know, I will love you. Given the fallibility, did we not just as a group, just read something?

3:04 Wes: I don't remember that.

3:06 Dylan: I don't either.

3:07 Mark: All right, this might be something outside the Pel Umbrella dream you dreamed one

3:11 Dylan: of your other 25 other podcasts that you happen to read for.

3:15 Mark: Well, I was thinking about, about that and also in terms of, you know, our treatment of nyaya and trying to figure out, you know, when we are encountering a different culture, of whether they have the metaphysical baggage packed into these things that it was, you know, nyaya had this weird. Well, let's just, you know, if it's supported by a knowledge source, we're just going to call it true. We're going to part. Call it part of the furniture of the world of propositions that we're building this knowledge that we're building up. And if somebody later comes along and questions it, okay, well, then we'll.

But this just seemed a weird use of truth. But maybe Nyaya is more in line with what Rorty is suggesting. Rorty suggesting is actually would have been the natural way of approaching this if we hadn't been bamboozled by centuries of philosophy or something. To say that when, you know, it sounds very weird when you read William James initially to say, oh, well, that's true. We have let's call it true insofar forth, because it seems very weird to say, well, this is true for me in that it is useful for me to believe, or I have some verification, or I have some justification, but that is not necessarily true for you, but it has been justified for my purposes and it has been justified like that syntax works way better.

And so I think that's what Rorty's suggesting here is that we do want to keep the word true, but not, you know, let's not like James, just redefine the word true to mean something that is really anti intuitive, counterintuitive. But just keep it for this one purpose of, well, it's justified, but, you know, maybe it won't later.

4:50 Seth: I mean, the key thing he says is that, well, let's keep the word true, but let's divorce it from the concept of correspondence, that we're not talking about sentential or propositional relationship to reality, we're talking about coherence. It's like true to say something is true. Is shorthand for saying, to the best of my ability right now, this is justified given the way the world is what I know and what other people know, right? Something like that, Yeah.

5:24 Dylan: I agree with you, Seth. What I find strange about it, not it is, but the. To me, this is like, exactly how. This is exactly how science works. It's like it's exactly how it works and how it's always worked, that it's true insofar as it holds together until I come up with something better. Well, and.

5:51 Wes: Yeah.

5:52 Dylan: No, I mean. I mean, seriously.

5:54 Wes: Well, no, the cat. Okay, so the cat is on the mat or it's on the couch. When I say it's true, the cat is on the mat. Look, the cat is on the mat. Perhaps given my human fallibility, I mean. Yeah, Well, I could be convinced otherwise if there are new data or hypotheses. But that doesn't change the fact that there's a truth of the matter, even if I've gotten it wrong. So there is a truth of the matter independent of my particular at any given time or my purposes. So those are two different things. This is part of the problem I have with Rorty. This switchback between our epistemological predicament and then the ontology.

6:37 Dylan: Yeah. And I guess I'm lumping them together because in the end, you might change the terms under which what you're talking about is true or not true. This will go to the paradigmatic shift that you might have that Kuhn wants to emphasize.

6:51 Wes: Right.

6:52 Dylan: Is that one answer. Is that. Oh, actually, what I was looking at, what I thought the cat was on the mat. What I really saw was an image of a cat reflected through a bunch of mirrors. And it made it look like it was on the mat, but actually was on the dresser.

7:06 Wes: Okay.

7:07 Dylan: And I find that out later through other reasons.

7:10 Wes: So the dresser is the mat. So we have a gettier problem. Sorry.

7:13 Seth: Okay.

7:14 Dylan: Yeah, so you have the gettier problem. But it might be also that actually I. Because of. For other reasons, I end up reclassifying what I mean by a cat. That all cats are dogs, actually. And so therefore, the cat is on the mat. Doesn't admit of my ontology anymore because the way I, you know, cats are actually now dogs. Just the way caloric was now becomes heat. And I've changed what I mean by those things.

7:40 Wes: But I wasn't making a general statement about cats. I was just picking out this big, particular cat. And if it turns out to be a dog, that's fine.

7:46 Dylan: No, I understood my Only point is that. So you can have a quote, unquote fact. We're green. You can have the fact of the matter regarding a particular ontology. And Rorty would of course say that that particular ontology is a language game. And then the terms under which you are correct in your judgment about truth is always provisional. And again, I still don't see why it's. Why that's a big.

8:14 Wes: That's not a problem. I mean, I'm all on board with that, but if that's compatible with being a skeptic. or a zetetic skeptic. Like, I don't. Right. I don't know what the truth is. And it's always fallibilist and it's always revisable. But there is a truth, whether I know it, know what it is or not. Well, yeah, so he doesn't want to be a skeptic. He wants to go beyond that a bit. And it's unclear to me what that means. And yes, it enrages me and I curse. You know, every minute of reading this, I'm trying to be charitable and then cursing my existence because it's making me so angry.

But I am, you know, I am. If it can be explained to me. There, there's sometimes it's like something's on the tip of my, you know, there's something, it's like something being on the tip of your tongue. Maybe there's a point here and maybe I'm just not getting it, but if so, I wish he was. Would explain it more carefully. And I, you know, I know my reaction is not uncommon among other philosophers. So anyway, I feel like he, he

9:19 Mark: is, it's a certain refraining. Right. In our first discussion, I was like, okay, I kind of like what he's saying about religion and democracy, but I just wish he would kind of get his theory of truth out there. And, and here he's made it clear I have no theory of truth. No theory of truth is required. So he's engaging in a certain kind of sort of like the behaviorists aren't going to tread on, we're not going to talk about mental properties here. He's just, he's not going to talk about transcendent stuff because it just, he doesn't think that it matters.

It matters only again, within a language game. So he acknowledges, like, well, it might be, you know, something you're trying to do that you're trying to rip yourself out of the, your mundane existence and connect with God, connect with something higher. And that Is okay, that's a language game you could be involved with. I don't like that language game. I don't think that is helpful for democracy. But there's going to be a communicative wall between people who are playing that transcendent language game and I, the pragmatist who, you know, am trying to keep things down and dirty.

10:26 Wes: But my point is, I think like Habermas, I would want to say he's engaged in a performative contradiction and that it doesn't make sense to talk about justification without talking about a transcendental truth. Like the whole idea of justification just breaks down.

10:40 Mark: That's certainly a Kantian sort of approach.

10:42 Wes: I'm not going to try to defend that at length and get, well, that's off track.

10:46 Mark: But yeah, this is ultimately getting us to a philosophy of philosophy. So if we invite Tim Williamson on as we, as I said, maybe we would before he's written about, you know, where does philosophical disagreement. And Rorty is positing that there, there are just disagreements because we have different purposes and you could maybe be converted from one to another, but you could not be just simply convinced because all reasons take space within, you know, a set of purposes and he just doesn't have these purposes that you. But you're saying, you know, per a Kantian sort of approach that, well, we are just by speaking, we are implicitly expressing certain purposes. Right. That's Kant's basic thing for why should be.

11:33 Wes: Okay, let's give credit where credit's to some more. Bottom.

11:38 Seth: I thought your rejoinder was good, Mark. I was, you know what I was going to say to Wes when he says, like when you say the phrase, you know, there's something true even if I don't know it. I think you said something like that or there's a fact of the matter, even if I'm unaware of it. I think the question is to ask yourself what that means from trying to do this from within. We'll call it a Rortyan perspective. So essentially what you're saying is there is a mind independent reality that is the way it is without recourse, without reference, without relation to the way that I perceive or understand it. Right.

12:23 Wes: So the cat, when I make a claim like the cat is on the mat, it's not up to my conceptual scheme or my purposes or my description, which is not to say that the cat might not be, you know, we're behind a veil of illusion and all that stuff. That's all fine, but we still have to, even if We're Kantians, and behind a veil of illusion, we still have to explain contingency and contingent facts. This was the big problem for the German idealists. Right? So how do we explain contingency and contingency not in Rorty's sense of contingency difference. So how do we explain that there's got to be something out there that isn't just what we make it.

How do we explain intersubjectivity and possibility of agreement and disagreement and justification if the world is indeterminate? Right. This is Aristotle's argument. We can't even talk, we can't even communicate if the world is fundamentally indeterminate.

13:16 Seth: But Rorty's point is not that the world is indeterminate. That's the equivalent of saying that the panrelationalists are relativists. Right. What he's saying is you.

13:26 Wes: Well, I think he wants to. Not. He wants to say he's not a relativist. So that's why.

13:29 Seth: Yeah, of course he wants to say he's not a relativist. But let me. I'm trying to explain how I think he says he's not a relativist in the context of what you're saying, which is it just. He says, when you say there is something, that is the case. There are facts, whether I know them or not or whether I'm aware of them or not. You've already essentially bought into, call it a language game, if you want, of correspondence that there is reality and that the purpose of our mind is to represent that reality accurately, like that's the functional mechanism of consciousness.

And then he ties that to intentionality, and then he's on and on and on. And what he's saying is, if I'm a pragmatist, what I say is the cash value. The utility of that framework is less to me than whatever alternative he's going to propose. But more importantly, I'm just telling you that that paradigm, that linguistic paradigm that you use, the way of talking about things doesn't work and ultimately is going to lead to contradiction. That does not mean that there is no mind independent reality. What he's saying is to talk about it, to talk about something as if there's mind, and mind independent reality gets you trapped into this discourse.

And what I'm saying is if I, you know, if I have a linguistic practice that doesn't rely on a notion of truth, that's correspondence, I can just as easily account for all of the same things that you do. I can explain science. I can account for Fallibility. And I can justify beliefs. I just don't have to have recourse to the mechanism of correspondence. And then when you accuse me of being relativist, you've already essentially assumed correspondence, reality and the thing in it, not the thing in itself, but mind, independent reality, in order to be able to accuse me of relativism.

15:28 Wes: So we, you know, we don't need a simple. Right. Correspondence is a big word. It can mean a lot of things. And yeah, it's cor. In the broad sense. It must be correspondence. It doesn't have to be, oh, there's a picture and the. You know, there's got to be some systematic relationship between subjectivity and reality. There's got to be systematically related. And he wants to say, well, I. Look, I've got. There are causal relations. So let me to say this about it because I think it's enlightening about Rorty's position as well. And I think Mark's use of the word behaviorism is spot on.

Do we want to say that human behaviors, per se, not their subjective states, are systematically related to causal inputs, or do we want to say they're subjective states? Forget about correspondence and whether there's a picture and all that. I just want to say it's not just that human behaviors are systematically related to causal inputs, but that their subjective states are systematically related to causal inputs. That is the fundamental disagreement. I think the word representationalist and all that. That's just a scare word because we can cash that out in a sophisticated way as we want.

The difference is between behavior and subjective state.

16:45 Mark: Just to clarify, I know in our last Rorty discussion long ago, there was some accusations that Rorty was himself a behaviorist. I see no evidence in this text at all that he's a behaviorist. I was merely comparing his reluctance to talk about.

17:00 Wes: Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to accuse you of that.

17:02 Mark: Right. So the choice is not between. The world is objectively in. In itself before human beings come along, or we build the world out of an indeterminate mass. That is not the choice because Rorty does not think that there is a meaningful difference between those things. We cannot ask the question, was it out there and you discovered it, or did you construct it? That is something that is simply not a legitimate question.

17:29 Wes: Why? Because it makes no difference about. Well, that's just his slogan. It makes no difference to pray.

17:36 Dylan: Well, I don't.

17:36 Wes: That's not my taste, Rorty. I don't. There are lots of people don't agree with that. So it has to make a difference to that, to practice before it's worth discussing. Well, people have been discussing it for thousands of years. It made a difference to them.

17:49 Mark: Right, because they were engaged in this weird particular language game that involved fundamentally anti democratic sentiments. And this is the whole reason. Right. The whole point of this book is that it's not just that I don't like transcendental talk about truth, but that talking about truth transcendentally, even though you might think like Habermas does this gives you a good argumentative move to make in defending democracy. It actually doesn't work and it's fundamentally anti democratic. That until we get the lesson of Dewey, the lesson of Darwin, we put, you know, we see that we are just clever animals who are making stuff up as we go along and are not reaching out to some transcendent divine thing until we completely acknowledge that God is dead and put all of the value in our own hands, then were not true advocates of democracy.

18:41 Dylan: Yeah. And what you're getting to Mark is I think his take on trying to defend democracy is he interprets someone like Habermas is not having a response that doesn't amount to also being the justification for totalitarianism. And his strategy is to level the playing field and say basically no, there isn't any difference between the way in which I'm going to justify democracy in the way in which a totalitarian would justify their regime. And we're going to have to try to make the whole argument down at a lower level that he thinks that democracy can win. But in the end it's going to be that it is, as we were talking about earlier, a process of moral solidarity and some conversation as well as education and stuff like that, getting basically enough people in the same group effectively.

19:36 Mark: And I think we've had this discussion a lot. Every time we have an existentialism episode, then we talk about whether, you know, a self aware serial killer who seems all existentially together, like, well, what argument would we have against such a person? And we kind of just have to bite the existentialist bullet and say there is no argument against such a person. We are simply because there is no objective morality that all of us should turn to, you know, or that is written like the categorical imperative into our very speech and our very fundamental attitude towards each other. So we have to not have regard, you know, recourse to simple. And so I think this, I'm getting

20:15 Wes: a very Judge Holden vibe from you.

20:17 Mark: Yes, exactly. So I feel like we still feel like we can confidently condemn Judge Holden and not feel like we're just being whimsical in doing so, yet we still buy Nietzsche's thing that God is dead. So why can we not do that? With regard to politics is his main point. And then further from that with regard to transcendental truth, which is a different kettle of fish entirely. But not for Rorty. So any more to say about the politics stuff? I mean, do we agree that like we. Or go ahead wherever you want to.

20:47 Dylan: Well, the thing I would ask about politics and. And I'm not sure I was trying to understand why Rorty makes this move. Like is he actually concerned along the ways of which I described is that trying to improve or strengthen the argument for democracy? Or is it that he just has a bee in his bonnet about transcendental arguments and that he thinks it's more important to be contrary than it is to talk about what he's for? The pragmatism is anti authoritarianism. I get it. And maybe that's the argument is that in the end if you're going to be pragmatic, you end up being an anti authoritarian. But. But I feel like in numerous cases you end up having plenty of arguments. That doesn't get you going one way or the other. It doesn't get you the thing that it feels like he's trying to get us to.

21:39 Wes: Which is.

21:40 Dylan: Well, he would say there isn't a foundationalist argument. Pragmatism isn't foundationalist to get you to anti authoritarianism or democracy. And so the path is different than it seemed to be on the face of it.

21:51 Wes: So he has this concern with Habermas and Habermas view on communicative reason. This is section 2 PDF. Page 85 is where it begins.

22:01 Mark: Yep. 49. Yep.

22:03 Wes: So Habermas's view seems to be something like. And according to Rorty, they agree with their critique of logocentrism and representationalism. But they disagree on this point, which is that Habermas has this Kantian idea that an Aristotelian that communication basically necessitates claims to universal validity. That universal validity claims are sort of built into the possibility. They are grounds for the possibility of communication to use Kantian language and that in turn speaks to democracy. It's almost like an a priori derivation of democracy and democratic organization.

Inclusivist democratic hopes as the human ideal, as the thing that is corresponds to human nature. Right, Right. Or that is best for us. And we can point to those who argue for a different view of, say, an authoritarian political regime. And we could say, hey, you're engaged in a performative contradiction because you're saying Hitler is great. But any truth claim includes a claim to. Right. Universal validity. And any claim to universal validity implies ultimately this vision of an inclusivist community. And therefore you've contradicted yourself.

And Rorty wants to say, well, first of all, that's not going to be effective. The Hitlerites are not going to be, oh, you're right. Oh, I'm in the performance. Oh, I didn't see the performative contradiction. You ever see the Mitchell and Webb video about Nazis? There's two SS officers and they're having a reflective moment and looking at the skulls on the caps, and one of them goes, you ever think that maybe we're the bad guys with baddies start having an existential crisis? So, yeah, it's got to be something a little bit more profound than performed a contradiction.

It has to be what Rorty will call education. Although, as I've pointed out in education in the broadest sense. Right, right. Like liberal arts sense, you can communicate. You can therapeutically communicate rationality. Now, the therapeutic component of it is not itself rational. So you don't get people to be rational necessarily by arguing against them and defeating them in arguments or having them defeat you, or maybe you do some of that. But it's not like they become convinced that the way they become convinced by sort of absorbing that frame of mind.

And I think that is actually important. So anyway, what do. Yeah, what do we think about the critique of Habermas here?

24:42 Mark: From my scanty recollections of Habermas, I guess we just have to go on faith that Rorty is giving us a good example here.

24:50 Wes: You just have to bore the Nazis to death. That's really the. The strategy. Skip them a Habermas book until they fall asleep again.

24:59 Mark: I'm kind of seeing a comparison here to that Peirce on truth that, you know, whenever we're engaged in any sort of inquiry. I think this is what you were saying before, Wes. You know, we're assuming that there is a, to use this Kantian term, regulative ideal, Regulative idea, this thing that we're implicitly shooting for. And so that's what Habermas is basically saying about political discussion. And I'm just not sure what. I think that. I think we can construct it. I think we could say, like, if there were a thing, like, imagine what would happen if we just kept this.

25:35 Dylan: And.

25:35 Mark: And then we kind of come up with this abstract. But again, that's kind of like the empiricists kind of saying, well, okay, we know what 1 and 2 and 3 and all these finite numbers are. Let's go Cantor. Let's talk about different levels of infinity. And in some ways, like, well, is what you're doing when you create these abstractions, these things that we're implicitly shooting for, is it something that we're actually implicitly shooting for in the activity, or is it something that just. Well, if you continue to draw the line, that's where it would lead.

26:04 Wes: Right.

26:05 Mark: You're basically engaging in a constructive, imaginative act.

26:08 Dylan: Yeah, I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're talking about, but this kind of thing makes me think of Spinoza and like the theological political treatise and stuff where I feel like that's the kind of thing Rorty would point to is, or he should be pointing to is someone who's making an argument for or in the context of effectively authoritarian regime, in a case, a religious regime, using the arguments within that regime for a more inclusivist politics. That's what that book does. So it's effectively trying to undermine within its own context the exclusivist claims of the biblical interpretation. And going through a biblical interpretation and saying, well, you know, actually, here you go. It doesn't quite mean what we've been implying it to mean, but it actually is more tolerant. And he presents an argument that effectively points you towards a kind of liberal democracy.

27:03 Mark: Out of that, I would like to see Plato, the Platonic dialogue, the Nazi, where he takes the Nazis assumptions. Oh, you like the Volk? What do you like so much about the Volk? Well, it's because they try and they love each other and they're. Well, look.

27:22 Wes: Yeah, that's what he said.

27:23 Mark: Here's some people in Mexico that you might have dismissed for racial and other cultural reasons. And look, they actually have a very similar thing going for them. So you should be actually okay with that and not so exclusivist and neither. That's not making some reference to some objective transcendent thing. This is sort of playing on. Yeah, you're given the assumptions of your language game, you should also be okay with this.

27:52 Dylan: Well, that's the way a lot of arguments regarding slavery or, you know, or the protest, you know, nonviolent protests, all those things, they try to latch onto the understandings and moral sensibilities of the entity in power and try to make the others seem more like them. And then that becomes a universalizing or at Least enlargening worldview. And I think Wes is right that effectively a lot of that activity in education ends up being effectively therapeutic. It's not an argument being presented, but as much as the activity of being presented with these other points of view that also have some recognition as well, it ends up the activity that Rorty himself refers to in the name of.

He doesn't want to call it he abandonment. That doesn't want to say with Aristotle that we reach out to. No, but he'll say we are intrinsically curious, which I don't know what distinction that difference makes at all. When I read that, I was like, really? Really? You're going to say human beings are intrinsically curious? I mean, isn't that all Aristotle's saying?

29:05 Mark: I don't know. Does the cat really want to. No. Or does the cat just want to, like, have some different experiences or something?

29:11 Dylan: Yeah, there's a cat. So this is where I feel like there's a kind of post, like some kind of childhood pain that Rorty is fighting against with regards to the concept of knowing. Like some kind of analytical philosophy trauma that he overextends what knowing means.

29:31 Wes: Well, maybe let's look at that where he makes that statement. Well, no, we could go either way. Maybe we should read that little part

29:37 Dylan: that Dylan is referring to 71 in the book. And this is in section I think 6, 7 is reason unified by universalistic presuppositions. And this is in some ways a continuation of the conversation about Habermas that we were having from section two. I guess here in this one he's bringing in Davidson a lot. And you know, he refers to. On 68. The philosophical tradition has tried to stitch exclusivist communities together by saying there's more overlap between infidels and true believers, masters, slaves, men and women than you might think. And he goes, do we not bleed? Yes, exactly. Exactly.

30:19 Wes: Is that the Al Pacino Merchant of Venice or the. That one's like Al Pacino.

30:25 Mark: That was the Mel Brooks to be or not to be version.

30:28 Dylan: Yes. And so he goes through this and he's sort of articulating the parts that he agrees with and the parts that he doesn't agree with. And he says on 70, this is just before the curiosity business. You cannot have any language or any beliefs without being in touch with both human community and non human reality. There's no possibility of agreement without truth, nor truth without agreement. And he goes on in this section right after it, that coherence, truth and community go together. Not because truth is to be defined in terms of coherence rather than correspondence, in terms of social practice rather than in terms of coping with non human forces, but simply because to describe a belief is automatically to ascribe a place in a largely coherent set of mostly true beliefs. This is the section in which he's basically calling on the principle of non contradiction from Aristotle.

31:17 Wes: Sorry, are you on page 70?

31:20 Dylan: That's page 70, regular page, not PDF regular page 70. Okay, okay. And then he began thinking about Aristotle. On the bottom of page 71 he says, the only thing that can play a role in which Aristotle, Peirce, Apel and Habermas have cast the desire for knowledge, and thus for truth, is curiosity. I use this term to mean the urge to expand one's horizons of inclusion, inquiry in all areas, ethical as well as logical and physical, so as to encompass new data, new hypotheses, new terminologies and the like. This urge brings cosmopolitanism, democratic politics in its train. The more curiosity you have, the more interest you will have in talking to foreigners, infidels, and anybody else who claims to know something you do not know, to have some ideas you do not have yet had. How the heck is that different than wanting to know things?

32:12 Wes: Yeah, so this is kind of similar to my objection about justification implying being a truth. Right. So how do we say we are. He want, okay, there's the urge to expand one's horizons of inquiry. So that's his way of getting around, you know, saying the desire to know the truth. It's not the truth that we're leaning towards, it's horizons of inquiry. It's something more internal to us in our frame of mind. Maybe, but I would say. Well, it doesn't, you know, if you cash out what horizons of inquiry means, it's hard to say what it means even psychologically, without an interest in the truth, which I do think human beings, as an empirical matter of empirical fact, are interested in.

32:56 Mark: You can't just say, he had said earlier, it's not that we have a love of truth, we have a love of justification. Well, curiosity is I want to expand the justifications available to me. I mean, that's okay. I mean, if you have more data, then there's more potential to. But it's clearly not the same point. Like there seems like a semantic content in the word knowledge, in the word. No, that he's just saying, I guess this is off limits to me because of my. It's just. It raises too many philosophical problems. You know, William James would probably have no Problem.

Just saying it's more knowledge. But you have to understand by knowledge something that I, you know, doesn't have to be true even necessarily right or true. It's true on so far forth. Right. I'm going to. I'm going to redefine truth. I'm going to redefine knowledge to make them more commonplace and less. And as a linguistic strategy, that probably makes more sense than what Rorty's doing here.

33:51 Wes: Seth, do you have a defense?

33:53 Seth: Well, in a Rorty sense, probably not a defense, but a description.

33:58 Wes: We can disagree. We can have a disagreement and communication without having an argument.

34:03 Seth: Yeah. Now, so I find, like, I think part of what Rorty would say to Wes is, you know, it comes down to trying to find a commensurate vocabulary. I mean, the bottom line is, it's like we're talking past each other now, what that means in a pragmatic sense, like how you would describe a disagreement in a pragmatic sense. Because one of Rorty's thesises is all languages are commensurate in the sense that you can find equivalencies. You can. There are ways to translate from one. There's no such thing as incommensurate languages. So if I'm going to make the accusation that you're working in a linguistic paradigm and I'm working in a different one, then there has to be some way for us to come together.

And I feel like I don't have a good answer, at least not right now, for, well, what if we can't get to that point or, you know, then does it become a matter of dispositions? You're just holding on to your beliefs, I'm holding on to mine that are represented in two different linguistic frameworks. And we can't agree on common terms. How do we adjudicate that? Because ultimately. Right. His move is, I want to incorporate you into my community, my audience. And if I'm unable to do that through persuasion, I don't really know what the next move is in terms of, like, Dylan's criticism, I think, you know, he has an easier response in the sense that I don't know if maybe it's the same thing that when you use the word, he's.

I'm using the word curious. You're using the word, you know, desire. All human beings are curious. And you say, all human beings desire to know that. He can say, well, you know, no, just carries that baggage, that transcendental correspondence or metaphysical baggage that we're trying to get free From. And it wouldn't be, I wouldn't be shocked given his, you know, given how he likes or at least is finds Heidegger useful. Heidegger essentially tried to invent an entire language that was anti metaphysical to solve this, to solve the same problem in some respect that.

But you know, Heidegger was starting from human, subjective, human experience. And Rorty wants to talk about relationalism or community as the basis for where we, we build this description of the world. So I think what's hard, what strikes me as difficult is just. And why it's hard to do a charitable. Why it's hard for y' all to do a charitable reading is it's really hard to fully embrace a pragmatic perspective the way that he characterizes it. It's hard to let go of some of the assumptions. And I think what, you know, in some respects what he's saying is when you start to look at things and he spends a lot of time in the.

The solidarity or objectivity essay talking about essentialists versus you know, versus the pragmatists is that ultimately it's almost like a religious section, like how does one persuade the other? And he, you know, says well the best I can do is to tell you that the pragmatic way, his characterization of pragmatism as a way to try to address the. The problem that he's trying to solve, which is the question of legitimizing democratic principles is ultimately better. But that's different than having just a flat out pragmatist versus essentialist debate about metaphysics which becomes realist versus anti realist.

37:51 Wes: Have we said enough about how pragmatism is supposed to serve democratic politics?

37:58 Seth: Probably not.

37:59 Wes: Who wants to do that?

38:01 Mark: I mean, I've just been saying that he doesn't say actually a lot about that. He does it by getting rid of exclusiveness. Transcendental, like a theocracy is not very democratic or any, you know, we Volk have the truth on our side. If you get rid of the idea that truth is exclusive, then you're open to more your curiosity. Just what we would say about curiosity.

38:25 Seth: Well, and also there's the element of is, you know, when you appeal to transcendental principles, you know, pursuit of happiness, liberty, justice, equality, those sorts of things, then competing principles can arise and when they come into conflict, they're resolved violently. Whereas if your mechanism for determining what's good for society is pragmatic from the sense of like, well, what you see here is we're more prosperous, you know, like this Society just is more prosperous and happier and flourishing and people have more freedom of movement, whatever.

So you can say, well, this is better than that. You don't make a judgment about the moral worthiness of the other people. You just try to convince them that your way of life is better than the way of life they're currently living. You can't demonize someone from a pragmatic perspective in the same way that you do when you call them infidels, he

39:28 Wes: says on page 71. Putnam and the Habermas have offered similar criticisms of my attempt to get rid of a specifically epistemic concept of reason, the concept according to which one is rational only if one tries to represent reality accurately and to replace it with, by the purely moral idea, ideal of solidarity. So I thought he was making more of a direct statement about moral. You know, I would say it sounds like solidarity. The idea, the ideal of solidarity is important to him. And ultimately a democratic community would be, is built on certain shared values.

This is from the sectional education. And we would have to inculcate people with those values. We wouldn't be arguing others out of their values, but we would be. I don't know. Is there another word that he uses other than educating? Attracting. I mean, appeal to sentiment on page 75, as I've mentioned before, attracting. Yeah, but ultimately I don't think we escape the fact that there's an exclusivism to the democratic community as well. Right. It's not like we escape the fact that we have a certain set of ideals that are not compatible with authoritarian ideals, for instance.

40:47 Dylan: Yeah, and I don't think that he would say that we do in the end, you know, at the beginning of universality and truth. The first section is the topic of truth about relevant to democratic politics. In his first paragraph he basically makes the distinction between a vision of a utopian inclusivist human community which prides itself on different sorts of people it welcomes, rather than on the firmness with which it keeps strangers out. And most human communities are exclusivists. Their sense of identity and their self images of their members depend on pride in not being certain other sorts of people, people who worship the wrong God, eat the wrong foods, have the wrong, or have some other perverse repellent beliefs or desires.

Philosophers would not bother trying to show that certain beliefs and desires are found in every society or implicit in some inevitable human practice, unless they hoped to show that the existence of these beliefs demonstrates the possibility or obligation to construct a planet wide inclusivist community. So he Aligns democratic politics with, broadly speaking with the inclusivist goal of a human community. And as we've talked about, he doesn't think that truth matters for making that argument.

42:00 Wes: He does say talk about the quote unquote universal desire for justification. I should be arguing that what philosophy. Did you already read this? What philosophers have described as the universal desire for truth is better described as the universal desire for justification. That does sound like a statement about human nature when she wants to deny exists at a certain point. But regardless of that it does sound like, well maybe that's something we can leverage to get the Nazis straight. Scare the Nazis straight. Hey, you care about justification too. You're not doing a Habermasian performative self contradiction. Forget about that. I know that doesn't work. But we all care about justification, don't we?

42:43 Dylan: Well, I mean. And he also has at the end of Section 6 in talking a little bit about agrees with Wellmer. The democratic and liberal institutions are only ones which could possibly coexist with the recognition of contingency and still reproduce their own legitimacy. At least if one takes reproduce their own legitimacy to mean something like makes its views of the situation of human beings in the universe hang together in its political practice. But he goes on by the end where he's thinking about about Nazis and the power of Habermas to convince a anti democrat that they're in a contradiction.

He just doesn't agree. He says the most that an assistance on contingency can do for democracy is to supply one more debating point on the democratic side of the argument. Just as the insistence that only the Aryan race is in tune with the intrinsic necessary nature of things can supply one more debate debating point on the other side. I cannot take the latter point seriously, but I do not think that there is anything self contradictory in the Nazis refusal to take me seriously. We may both have to reach for our guns.

43:50 Mark: Let's talk about attractiveness. And this did make me think of this whole thing as potentially aesthetic and aesthetic in my theory of aesthetics, which is that when you say that you like something first that as I've argued on a few. I think when sort of natively when you say I like, I think ice cream is delicious, you're not just saying there is a, an interaction between my taste and the ice cream and that has rendered a. I'm saying universally I think everybody that will taste this will find this delicious. But you know, we find that that's actually a very immature take on it and we revise and get more and so this is what he thinks he's doing about.

About everything. And I've even put this in terms of. I appeared on the. Oh, those South African guys that have the podcast when I was a guest on there. I was arguing about tastes. Tastes in music, tastes in individual things and tastes in philosophies. And that, you know, this is a very Nietzschean sort of point. And when you say this makes sense to me, I find this true. You're actually saying, just like this ice cream pleased me in the way you're talking, truly, you're making an accurate assessment of an interaction you had and that you think people who are like you will have with this philosophy, with this proposition, blah, blah, blah.

But if you say and therefore you know its opposite is false, in other words, no one could possibly have a positive reaction like I had to this proposition with its. What seems to be a direct contradiction to it. I'm just wrong about that. I don't know what other people's tastes are. I don't know what my tastes would be in a different circumstance. So at least I. This is a way that I can try to make sense of Rorty, that. Let's consider that my closing. Do you guys have other closings? If Tim Williamson will come on the show, we'll talk more with him about deciding between philosophies that seem to be at an impasse.

And he's definitely. Williamson is definitely not of the opinion that it's just a matter of taste.

45:49 Seth: Well, I would say this. I mentioned at the beginning of this that. Well, the beginning of the last episode that I like the diagnosis. You know, I don't necessarily agree with the solution, but I think we've got to. Rorty has put his finger on something that is pathological in our intellectual tradition, which is we keep trying to solve the same goddamn problem. We keep dealing with the same thing over and over and over again in different ways, and it's not working. We're not going to get whatever it is we're looking for by relying on reason and transcendence or reason and concepts.

You know, the lesson for me from Tomasello is, and this is the 20th century, right, we got to go back to language. But we can't go back and put language in the place of reason or language in the place where it's like, okay, well, now we're just couching everything in linguistic terms instead of social terms. Our consciousness, the way that we conceive, interact, and function in the world, is a product of evolution, and we are constituted fundamentally socially because we are linguistic beings and language is a social construct. And I don't mean that that means there's no real things or everything is made up or it's only made of words or anything like that.

I mean, the way we come to learn language is to solve a social problem. Language is designed to help us interact with others. That's what it does. And then what we do as human beings because we have reified our own experience into something that we call ego, we want to reify everything in the world. There's this, been this fetish since Plato about eternal and unchanging, prioritized over change and development and evolution. This is. He's right in my mind about the problem. Now, he had a concern, you know, if his concern is about politics, not necessarily about metaphysics.

So it may be that he's a little fast and loose on trying to put away. But for his purposes, if we focus on what he's trying to accomplish, I think he makes a pretty good argument that he can do what he wants to do from the perspective of justifying or rationalizing democratic principles and democratic organization. From a pragmatic perspective, I think there's nothing wrong with what he's trying to do. It's just not satisfying. If what you want to do is get a response to the metaphysical, the realist, anti realist question, I'll just give

48:26 Wes: it two sentences as my closing. One of the things I think he gets wrong about evolution is this idea that language is the result of natural selection as opposed to sexual selection. I think there's a much stronger argument, and this is what Darwin spent most of his career on, sexual selection. It was puzzling. It's a much better argument to say that the human mind and language are the results of sexual selection. So they are not there because they're useful. They're much more like the peacock's tail. I'll leave that for now.

48:55 Mark: Dylan, this was your suggestion. How do you leave this? Satisfied that we did more pragmatism? Hungry for more.

49:03 Dylan: I like reading pragmatism. I'd like to read some more. We've talked about doing some pragmatists who basically disagree with Rorty. And I was reminded of the things. I've liked Rorty for a long time, but I've also found them frustrating. I want to hear more about his positive account than his negative account. But I think that you get pieces of it in there anyway. And so I end up feeling like thou doth protest too much often with Rorty. Now, like reading this made me feel like he's inconsistent on this point. The power that he ascribes to the causal powers of the world and the power of, you know, the force of something like consistency and our ability to communicate. If they don't have the fundamental power of, you know, that maybe philosophy has attributed to them, they have a lot more power and need than he seems to be attributing to them.

50:08 Mark: Next time is our long awaited Trans philosophy episode. We are interviewing Professor Sophie Grace Chappell about her book Transfigured. Let's call that the end. Thanks everybody for listening. You can reach out to us plus partiallyexaminedlife. Com or through Facebook or X Com or many other places. The blog associated with this on the website. Tell us what you want us to read. Tell us what you thought of this episode. Good night, everybody.

50:35 Wes: Good night.