True enough, but… We could also imagine situations where the community has no concern for “performance” and this could be viewed as a bad thing. Philosophy has always been tangled up with claims about usefulness (going back to stories about Thales cornering the market on olive presses). The truth is not adulterated by being useful. The truth is inherently useful, I should think…
Of course. I don’t deny that what is true is also useful. Nor do I deny that what is true
should be useful. And notice that pragmatism, at least from what I can tell, maintains the old-school idea the knowledge can be defined as “justified, true, belief.” However, what I’m convinced is so dangerous about pragmatism is its overall deflation of the epistemic notion of justification to mere performative fruitfulness, untying it completely from having anything to do with the allegedly “nonsensical” notion of “truth”. It says we are justified in believing X
merely because X is performative in this or that context, when we should be saying *in addition to this *that we are justified in believing X because X is that kind of belief which is also
true. The following kind of claims I find deeply problematic. From the little I can gather someone like Rorty says,
(1) “Truth,” in principle, is nonsensical and, hence, epistemically unattainable.
(2) There are no distinctions between appearance/reality, relative/absolute.
(3) Epistemic justification is pragmatically grounded in communal performative activity independent of any hope for attaining certainty in knowledge.
(4) How the world as it is in itself is not a normative constraint on our epistemic practices, since “the world as it is in itself” is a nonsensical (perhaps Kantian) notion in the same way “truth” is.
The “Cartesian Anxiety” Rorty so readily disparages I find absolutely necessary if we are going to maintain any lasting respect for our pursuit of what is true. The “old philosophical problems”
should be unnerving to us, because every human being
is deeply and anxiously concerned about his or her mortality, life/death, the meaning of existence, God, religion, what he can and cannot know, what is morally right/wrong, just/unjust. When you abandon the hope that truth is ever attainable, this very pursuit of the truth originally fueling all our epistemic engagements is lost, and these very engangements become nothing more than effective game-playing. After all, what’s the use in pursuing truth if it is unattainable? So our epistemic pursuits are reduced
solely to our pragmatic intents.
The ontology of science is fascinating subject. I’m not sure what you mean by its ‘innocence’ or by its ‘becoming a slave’ (not that I’m unsympathetic to such notions) - in your mind would this have something to do with Francis Bacon’s redefining the true end of knowledge as being for “the benefit and use of life” rather than also as an end in itself? It would for me.
Yes, something like that. I’ve tried to articulate some things above. But it has been a while since I’ve had to address the big-picture of Rorty/Dewey-style pragmatism since I dismissed it years ago. Swamped with the analytic approach to philosophical questions has stunted my ability to articulate more general lines of thought I’m trying to get across because I pay more attention to the details of particular arguments. I am not that talented writing abstracts for the back cover of pop-culture books like Leela is.
Nevertheless, I consider that a virtue, not a vice.
If you haven’t already, check out JPII’s Encyclical “Fides et Ratio,” Faith and Reason, that in many respects articulates what I’m saying about the “pragmatic” state of affairs within which scientific/philosophical inquire today finds itself. I own it, but haven’t read it for a couple years. It provides an awesome birds-eye view on this general pursuit of truth and what it means for our lives. (I’m such a Platonic realist with this stuff, as you can tell, even though I’m surrounded by nominalists and reductionists in some form or another.)
