Richard Rorty on Pragmatism & Truth
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- Опубліковано 21 вер 2024
- Richard Rorty discusses his own postmodern conception of pragmatism, neopragmatism. This is a version of a re-upload. The clips all come from the documentary "Of Beauty and Consolation".
You may also be interested in the following discussion between Rorty, Putnam, & Conant on Truth and Pragmatism: • Pragmatism & Truth - R...
#Philosophy #Rorty #Postmodernism
That clear, straightforward answer was helpful. I loved how he broke it down to make it digestible for everyone but still used essential technical terms to connect to what we already know in epistemology.
His mastery of philosophy is so obvious
Unlike Jordan Peterson lollll
Mick and Rorty
Blessed comment
I miss Rorty, a voice of moderation sadly absent now in this post-literate age of extremism.
define extremism
@@davidwu4510 The tendency to take hyperbolic positions, such as white Christian nationalism, that deviates from the consensus. I wish I could say there was a counterpart on the left with as much popular appeal as Trumpism, but the best we can come up with is Bernie. I'm also speaking of our online tendency to stake out "edgy" positions to troll others, hence the "post-literate" part.
@@ericv7720 Thanks. I wanted the explanation on extremism because the same christian nationalists you mentioned are the first to call everyone else extremists
in the context of the history of philosophy, Rorty's voice is far from moderate
@@DaggerMan11 In philosophical terms, yes. In political terms, his views were akin that to Bernie Sanders, or any mainline liberal Democrat from before 1980.
Great clip. Thanks. Feels like I'm hearing stuff that's excellent. It's clicking. Though I feel still a doffing of the cap to reductionism and the power of science as seen in pure logic and inhuman thinking.
This guy is a complete and utter idiot!where is the common sense 😢
I like what he says
What kind of life (4:33)?
so he's saying following
scratch a pragmatist and you get a broken logical positivist
Both pragmatism and logical positivism (as well as phenomenalism) are just different kinds of empiricism. Indeed, I become interested in pragmatism as I realized that logical positivism was undefensible, but I didn't want to dismiss empiricism as a whole.
That's not a pragmatic way to think about it.
No, pragmatists simply view logic as a means to an end instead of the positivists seeing it as the end itself.
@@pyb.5672 No, Logical Positivists pursue that all Truth statements be scientifically verifiable. and if its not, then it be discarded, turns out that is not possible.
Pragmatists dont believe in "truth" per se... they just think "whatever works and is practical" which is also a false way to think, because you need to discard Truth it self. like Truth Value Statements.
Some people are jealous and resent pragmatism, because it's an easy way to get good results fast; so they lump it in with positivism in order to blame it for the failures of positivism. This viewpoint may evolve from an individuals fear of fixing external problems in order to maintain a worldview in which the subject interprets criticism and inaction as resulting in a more emotionally stable psychology and a less "unpredictable" or "volatile" existence. People who hold this view are usually very physically or emotionally weak, which is what it directly compensates for (i.e. threat avoidance).
It's the same group of people who get mad at capitalism, because it rewards productive people with profits, so they nitpick it about pollution, monopoly, wages etc. (i.e. things that would exist either way).
A pragmatist would stop doing something if it resulted in an objectively negative outcome, so it has nothing to do with positivism beyond the interest in achieving good results.
In this way, a pragmatist may be viewed by someone who sees a glass half full as "a wise positivist", and by someone who sees a glass half empty as "a broken positivist".
Not on his A game
Depressing end
How would you justify what it means to make the lives of your descendants better?
i think he says somewhere in his writings- when defending liberal democracy- that you can't justify it with the same "philosophical "/ "scientific" rigor that a skeptic would demand. You just go with it because it's what has worked, and given large sums of people a good life, freedom, bla bla... I may be misrepresenting him, but i get that impression of him when he's defending democracy , and I guess he might use that line of thinking to defend "making the lives of our descendants better"
@@philkariuki1109 this is rigor applied to anyone taking a skeptical stance, for myself, it is not for a skeptical end. I like the pragmatic method. Based off of his points I would claim he falls closer to a true skeptic as anyone would struggling with epistemology. These indications defined in pragmatists terms, which themselves may slightly vary, are in relation or justification to what? But yeah just goes on and on. Til what.
@@philkariuki1109 he could also just be pointing out the changing of general thought towards these concepts over time
I am guessing that improving the lives of your decendants is to increase their choices, to grant them more options to change and adapt to the world, rather than making clear choices for them. A pragmatist know that they can't decide what is best for the next generation, but they know that they can attempt to create a world that the next generation will be more capable of remaking in their own image.
He says the Greeks were trying to get away from the miseries of life and couldn't imagine a better existence as the main motivation for their belief in the eternal. Despite the fact that Plato and Aristotle in particular were part of the wealthy nobility. Life couldn't have been better for them. So that explanation makes absolutely no sense.
he said nothing, he is as dumb as it gets
Ok but his point is just that there were things which seemed like unalterable aspects of the world that were fundamentally bad or flawed. So, they imagine another world which is not a part of this world but from this world we get hints of it’s existence. It’s the displacement of possibility into another realm. It’s not to say that some peoples’ lives couldn’t be bettered - I think that’s kind of obvious. But rather it’s to say that there was a limit that they believed they had already sufficient reason for believing in based on the seemingly unalterable state of impermanence and suffering. Such is the analogy with truth.
Walker Jessica Smith Shirley Martin Kevin
Says a bunch of stuff about the concept of truth including some use rules and maintains that nothing can be said about it...proceeds with justification being relative as a condition of inteligibility (which beliefs can be unjustified but true and justified yet false IS true) and says that isn't true...
I'm not very familiar with Rorty, but isn't what you're saying kind of the point? Philosophers create concepts - they play language games and provide new lenses for viewing the world. Even this description of the task of philosophy is just a construct of thought - there's no referent to give it ultimate justification. The justification is relative to the standard of the person who is spoken to, and that is descriptively always the case. Almost no one denies that there are facts about things in the world around us, but that is because our standard of justification is our senses. If someone did not have that standard (which is admittedly difficult to imagine), then the standard by which most people call a descriptive statement about the world "true" would not work for them. All descriptions of the world rest on human intuitions and appeals to them. Even critiques of human consciousness and ability to discern truth are complex schemes of weighing some stacked intuitions against others. I don't think Rorty is saying that "there is no reality" or that "there are no statements about reality that are accurate"; I think he's just saying that we don't actually have access to the noumenal, as it were - we only access our experience. Thus, "truth" is an arbitrary line on a scale of subjective justification. That is descriptively accurate no matter how much you believe or disbelieve in our ability to access reality.
@@thoughtful1233 I dunno what the task of philosophy is (people who try to answer that question tend to have interesting things to say), but you're right about Rorty. He isn't denying that existence of the external world, only our ability to ever know that our justifications/vocabularies pick it out, or are "True" (whatever that means). If the argument is that justification is relative and truth isn't; something that isn’t relative isn’t meaningful (including that?); therefore, we can never know if our justified beliefs refer to truths--then it's unsound. The second premise is false because even if a truth were standard/perspective invariant, that doesn’t entail that it’s meaningless--it entails that all standards would imply that truth, or Truth (again, whatever that means). Or, if standards were truth variant, then some standards don’t countenance some truths (e.g., that standard x denies the truth of biological evolution says nothing about whether biological evolution is true or even if we can come to know that it’s true. Or that biological evolution has nothing to say about tomorrow's weather).
Rorty contradicts himself in arguing that we can never know that our justified beliefs correspond to mind independent reality (global skepticism). If that were simply another justified belief (or pragmatic vocabulary), then it isn’t saying anything about the limits of our knowledge (corresponding to reality); if not, then it’s saying something that is True as Rorty would have it. (It might say something about the limits of our knowledge, but that we could never know this, but that would entail that we could). But if it’s endeavoring to say something True/true, Rorty is saying we can know it or that it’s meaningless. I don’t think that he’d say that it’s meaningless (quite the contrary!); therefore, we can know non-relative truths through relative justifications even if you assume that all truths must be non-relative.
I agree that justification is relative to a justifier and our senses are in large part responsible for our understanding of the world. But that doesn’t get us the skeptical conclusion that Rorty argues for, only that people believe what they believe and that our senses are the standard by which we largely come to understand truths (and if our senses were different, our ways of arriving at Truths/truths/whatever would similarly differ). That’s trivial and uninformative. Saying that we can’t know that our senses are picking out truths because we can’t verify this independently (…of our senses…with our senses?) can be a big epistemic commitment, no? Do we need to perhaps know that we know that p to know that p, or know that we know that p to know that p ad infinitum? In what sense is experience insufficient to access the truth?
Rorty wants us to put the emphasis on justification and disregard truth. But if a car were bearing down on me, I wouldn’t care about any justification of that circumstance, including my own; rather, I’d care about whether the car is about hit me, i.e., the “ultimate” truth. I could be accused of being unfair to Rorty here, but that’s not obvious to me.
@@Khuno2 he doesn’t think the pursuit of the definition of truth is pragmatic. He states that what people have held as being true has never changed, but that the methods of justification have changed. How we determine if a statement or proposition resolves to the world, or not. Knowing how truth works, as a function of language, is enough for a pragmatist. He accepts history’s failed attempts to define truth and figures we don’t need it to accomplish our goals, in philosophy, or life.
"Says a bunch of stuff about the concept of truth"
No, he didn't. To Rorty Truth is not a concept. Truth (with a capital T) is absolute. Truth is NOT relative (he says).
And so there's not much to be said about Truth, because any perspective on Truth is relative to the person holding the view. No individual; or group of individuals can encompass an absolute.
He's promoting ineffability with respect to Truth.
The same sort of ineffability that some mystics and theologians promote with respect to God.
The other thing to remember about Rorty is that he was a great great fan of irony/ironism. Just as you thought he's a relativist with respect to Truth - he means the opposite...
I really like this pragmatism thing.
Pragmatism!
If it works, why bother, bother it.
There seem to be a "little" problem with its current existence!!!
That of!!!
For whom.
So much of a problem, that it took pragmatist's quite a long time to have a reform and not a revolution about the risks of smoking.
(After the theory of evolution was "completely understood that is")
I would have said slavery, but I don't want to be that much of a pragmatist.
On the other hand if you trace it's origin's back to pre socratic/Persian-Babylonian philosophy!!
Then pragmatism simply works.
Meaning!
If nature works for everyone, why bother it, why bother extra to make it work only for who?!
If human nature works for everyone, why bother it, why bother extra to make it work for who?!
The clue is in this!!
If in the culture of Socrates, Aristotle and Plato some of the most important god's are women, and not even weapons or war are out of their reach nor forbidden!!!!
Then the complete dislike of women that is claimed, might not originate from the culture of Socrates Aristotle and Plato, but a culture that claims to be that, and by doing so for a very long time, it did manage to be that in the end.
(Or such says Zarathustra)
That is pragmatism for whom and not simply pragmatism for everyone.
🤓
🤡 you got me at the word "culture"...
... so don't waste time delving into escapist bullshit that takes you away from stuff that is actually as real and present as it's ever been and that is ever going to be ...
he just said a whole lot of absolutely NOTHING....wow
That you in particular don’t understand something does not mean that nothing is being said. It might just mean that your own abilities and/or willingness to understand are not enough.
hopeless
wtf is he talking about. there is an objective truth in 99,99% of cases. the rest 0,01% is metaphysical/theoretical or where there is not enough evidence to determine the truth. what's the point of muddying the worth truth when there is obviously an objective truth. we might just not be able to observe it all the time.
he is saying nothing, but using lots of fancy, very vague worddsss
if you actually read his writings you'd see that he doesn't deny that truth is a useful or even indispensable concept. his criticism of truth goes insofar as he denies the correspondence theory.