There is no such thing

as the unvarnished truth

There are only "versions,"

and the versions current

at any place or time are

the results of these hidden forces

The truth is not even to be discerned

at the end of a tunnel

It's varnish all the way down

Rorty's most profound idea is that

there is no such thing as

an outside or "alien authority."

His hostility to the notion of "representation"

is that for him it goes along with

the idea of an objective reality

- which has replaced God in peoples' minds

- as constituting this authority.

These two arguments give Rorty his chance

to upset the concept of truth

The question "Is it true?" is, he claims,

no more verifiable than "Is he saved?"

In the secular west we have lost interest in the last question

We have got bored with the theological vocabulary

It is time we got bored with the first,

the vocabulary of accurate representation or truth

RICHARD RORTY: 1931 - 2007
A Philosopher Who Couldn't Be Ignored

Postmodernists - the very word is like a knell.

According to popular fears, they scoff at everything we hold dear, replacing truth, reason, objectivity, knowledge, and scientific method with fashion, rhetoric, power, subjectivity and relativism.

Thereby summoning our history and politics, literature and art, indeed western civilisation itself, to its doom.

According to these fears, almost all the humanities have answered the diabolical call.

Currently leading the danse macabre, in the steps of Nietzsche and Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida, capers the cloven-hooved and triple-horned figure of Richard Rorty.

Against Truth, Reason & Science [Original]

Rorty has made us uncomfortably aware of a large distance between the truths at which we aim, whether in science or history or law or economics, or any field of interpretive endeavour, and the forces that shape our minds.

There seem to be forces at work of which we have little knowledge that generate the categories - socio-economic, cultural, gender-related - in which we work.

They mould the practices of our "interpretive community," determining which approaches count as respectable at any given time.

Hence there is no such thing as the given, or the unvarnished truth. There are only what the Harvard philosopher Nelson Goodman called "versions," and the versions current at any place or time are the results of these hidden forces.

The truth is not even to be discerned at the end of a tunnel: it is varnish all the way down.

Reason is primarily a patriotic badge pinned onto our own ways of carrying on, and one we deny to others who disagree with us (a thought, incidentally, not peculiar to postmodernists).

Can we escape such melancholy meditations? Can we get off the unhappy seesaw of either staying with Hume and losing confidence that we represent the world correctly, or going with Kant and holding that we represent only a world which is in some sense constituted by us?

This question sets the scene for Rorty's contribution. For suppose that Hume and Kant commit the same mistake. Suppose there is a way of undercutting the whole problem, of pointing the gun at some concept that each side unwittingly shares.

And there is, indeed, a way. Each side is bothered about our capacity to describe truly, or represent the world. So each shares an ideal of representation.

But suppose that this very idea is itself a delusion - suppose the mind is not even in the business of mirroring the world?

The idea that the mind is the arena of appearances, so that it is up to the philosopher to undertake the task of telling which appearances rightly represent the world - suppose that is all a mistake?

This is Rorty's proposal. We must scrap the idea that thought, and the language in which it is couched, is there to enable us to represent the world.

Instead, Rorty takes from Darwin the idea that language is an adaptation and words are tools.

Like his other heroes William James and John Dewey, the American pragmatists of the early 20th century, he thinks the essence of language is what we do with it.

Thought is about knowing how, not knowing that; or, as Rorty likes to put it, for coping not copying. So he writes:

"There is no way in which tools can take one out of touch with reality. No matter whether the tool is a hammer or a gun or a statement, tool-using is part of the interaction of the organism with its environment.

"To see the employment of words as the use of tools to deal with the environment, rather than as an attempt to represent the intrinsic nature of that environment, is to repudiate the question of whether human minds are in touch with reality... No organism, human or non-human, is ever more or less in touch with reality than any other organism."

This is a typically bravura statement of pragmatism (the last sentence alone is enough to annoy many of us, since some people seem to be much less in touch with reality than others).

But the attractive idea is that linguistic tools have their purpose, and so can be retired when that purpose is done, while other projects and other tools rise to supersede them.

Rorty calls this a change of vocabularies, echoing Thomas Kuhn's famous description of scientific change in terms of paradigm shifts, and echoing as well Carnap's view that questions about the overall adequacy of any particular conceptual scheme represent choices not discoveries.

Rorty believes he can now walk away from the traditional problems with his head held high.

He does not have to accept the labels of relativism or scepticism that the old dialectic forced upon us.

Those labels apply if we think that representation is "just us" (relativism), or alternatively that our thoughts tell us nothing of the real nature of what they represent (scepticism).

Rorty's idea is that he is free of representation altogether, so he refuses the labels.

However, once again the solution looks worse than the problem: language is not there to represent how things stand - what an absurd idea. It is as if Rorty has inferred from there being no innocent eye that there is no eye at all.

We protest that surely a wiring diagram represents how things stand inside our electric bell, that our fuel gauge represents the amount of petrol left in the tank, and that our physics or history tells how things stand physically or historically.

Rorty only shakes his head and sighs. He thinks the protest shows a naïve attachment to the old vocabulary which he wants us to abandon. And the way to get people to change vocabularies is not by argument but by persuasion. He has many techniques of persuasion, but two stand out.

The first is to persuade us that the Kantian ambition must be flawed if it requires standing outside our own skins, on a point free from all theory or preconceptions.

Hume was right to see that this was an absurd ambition. The second diagnosis is much more interesting.

It associates the idea of representation with the idea of a world that demands to be talked of one way or another.

Rorty often presents his opponents as supposing that there is "one privileged discourse" or a preferred vocabulary, the vocabulary of the Book of Nature.

His enemy is the idea that "the final vocabulary of physics will somehow be Nature's own," or that there is a vocabulary that is "already out there in the world, waiting for us to discover it."

Rorty rejects this triumphalism, and he compares his rejection to the realisation that it is not God who provides moral laws.

The human race attained one stage of maturity when it realised there was no alien, external giver of laws, as God was supposed to be.

Similarly, it attains a further stage of maturity when it realises that the world is silent about how it is to be described. Rorty's most profound idea is that there is no such "alien authority."

His hostility to the notion of "representation" is that for him it goes along with the idea of an objective reality - which has replaced God in peoples' minds - as constituting this authority.

These two arguments give Rorty his chance to upset the concept of truth. The question "Is it true?" is, he claims, no more verifiable than "Is he saved?" In the secular west we have lost interest in the last question.

We have got bored with the theological vocabulary. It is time we got bored with the first, the vocabulary of accurate representation or truth.

We must learn to think that any reaction to the causal flux is as reasonable as any other, although some may stand us in better stead.

Words are tools, and beliefs are habits of action: pick up any you like, and the Darwinian jungle, not reason, will determine which comes out on top.

And just as evolution has no direction, neither does thought or science or any other field of human cognition.

This is puzzling stuff, but a useful example of its application comes from literary criticism, which Rorty considers a paradigm intellectual endeavour. According to Rorty, there is never one right reading of a text.

There are only the different meanings that different readers find bubbling up as they read it.

In older times, a grandee of literary criticism, a Trilling or a Leavis, could assert a hard-won right to determine how a text was to be read.

They could proclaim truth and real authority for their reading. But now there is only a plurality of voices vying to establish their own view as the view that is to be preferred by fellow interpreters.

The notion of discovery is then not one of uncovering something that was there already, but something more like invention, such as discovering a new way to play King Lear.

It is what Rorty calls inventing a new vocabulary. In the apres-truth literary world, the aim of voicing opinion is not to arrive at the truth, but to bring the others to your opinion, thereby gaining their solidarity with you.

There is no difference between inventing something new and discovering what was there anyway.

This sounds a bit like abolishing the distinction between wishful thinking and accuracy, and that's fine by Rorty.

Writing of feminist accounts of the difference between men and women, he says:

"The question of whether these differences were there (huddled together deep down within the entity...), or are only there in the entity after the feminist has finished reshaping the entity into a social construct nearer her heart's desire, seems to me of no interest."

You can make it up as you go along: discourse is a social activity, with a largely social purpose.

If a Trilling or a Leavis looks down his nose and proclaims reason and truth for his own interpretations, it is just one more power move in the democratic conversation.

It is what conservatives say when they see Lear played a new way; it is not an exercise of authority, but an exercise of conservatism.

If we agree with the conservatives, well and good, but if we do not agree, well and good too. Or, at least, well and good unless our innovations fail to gain an audience, and it turns out that we do not cope very well as a result.

The best way to understand Rorty is simply to see him as generalising this view of literary criticism across the board. In science or history, law or psychology, politics or ethics the same model applies.

There is the community of interpreters, and the aim of getting them to be of one mind. There is invention and innovation. But just as a text allows for multiple readings, so does the world.

Truth, and reason as the anointed method of sifting it, disappear. No wonder serious scientists and historians, priding themselves on their accuracy, are outraged.

Rorty encapsulates a great deal of contemporary self-consciousness. He is a landmark. If you follow out the themes I have mentioned you may end up nearer to Rorty than you expected. So can any of us avoid joining the postmodern dance?

Postmodernists like Rorty are disenchanted by the convictions around them.

This results in the universal rejection of the central notion that conviction depends on the notion of truth itself.