I was recently reading Richard Rorty’s “Contingency, irony,
and solidarity.” In the introduction, he delineates the core problem he is
talking about: relationship between individualism and solidarity. Should people
be altruistic or should they be antisocial? Following a common philosophical
practice, Rorty completely ignores the entire scientific body of evidence related
to this topic which was available to him at the time when he was writing the
book. There is no mention of evolutionary basis for altruism or other scientific
theories of human motivation and social interaction. Instead, Rorty discusses
what people like Nietzsche or Hegel, ignorant of any scientific investigation
into the topic, pulled out of thin air hundreds of years before. This is why I
don’t like (most) philosophers.
In the following chapter Rorty explains what he thinks “the
truth” is. The explanation contains statements like “The world can, once we
have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs” and culminates
in a statement that “truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences.”
As it turns out this is a common understanding of what the truth is, among
people involved in humanities like, say, anthropologists. Rorty himself is a
popular philosopher having his part in shaping of the modern liberal academic
ideology. The book I am discussing here was cited over 10,000 times according
to Google Scholar.
The aforementioned definition of truth made me come up with
a quick example. Consider a dog. Show two cups to the dog and put a bone into
one of the cups. Then, distract the dog and quickly swap the cups. Then, let
the dog choose one of the cups. The dog will choose the cup it remembers to
have a bone in it. That is, the dog believes that bone is in a certain cup.
This belief is false if you swapped the cups and is true if you did not swap
the cups. Since the dog cannot speak, the existence of beliefs and their truth
or falsehood do not depend on existence of a language.
This definition of truth is an expression of anthropocentrism
that seem to be central to the modern liberal academic ideology. Nothing but
humans is important. Nobody bothers to question whether the reasoning presented
would be valid for agents who do not share all human characteristics, in this
particular case, the use of language. As a result, Rorty’s arguments depend on
how he implicitly defines human nature. Yet he is explicitly against the notion
of human nature. The whole structure is internally inconsistent.
Why is it important? Well, it shows how modern liberal
ideology is grounded in ignorance. This ignorance gives rise to dogmatically
defended stances like cultural relativism. It makes otherwise perfectly
reasonable people to say things like “2+2=4” is no better than “2+2=5” if the
latter is an inherent element of a culture which assigns truth to it. The intellectual discourse deteriorates.
Harmful policies gets enacted.
