Anyone familiar with the writings of Richard Rorty is acquainted with his playful, ironic, even outrageous, side. Once dubbed “the bad boy of American philosophy” (Reé 1998, 7), Rorty was a persistent gadfly who knew where to sting philosophers so it hurt. On traditional philosophical topics like truth, reality, and objectivity, a short list of his most provocative and ire-generating statements readily could be produced. Near or at the top likely would be his claim that truth is “what our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying” (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [henceforth, PMN] 176). He went further, calling truth “an empty compliment” (PMN 10) and asserting that “truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophical theory about” (Consequences of Pragmatism [henceforth, CP] xiii). He equated objectivity with “intersubjective agreement” (Objectivity, Relativity and Truth [henceforth, ORT] 23), treated warrant as “a sociological matter” (Truth and Progress [henceforth, TP] 50), and reduced science to “a model of human solidarity” (CP 39), suggesting “the very idea of a ‘fact of the matter’ is one we would be better off without” (ORT 193).
Rorty’s statements about the pragmatic tradition proved no less infuriating. Charles Sanders Peirce’s contribution, he baldly asserted, “was merely to have given it a name, and to have stimulated James” (CP 161). Dewey, he offhandedly opined, “should have dropped the term ‘experience’” (TP 297). A mere handful of such outlandish declarations, spread across several decades and numerous articles and books, was responsible for the lion’s share of Rorty-backlash. The negative fallout was so severe that it overshadowed Rorty’s positive contributions – at least for a considerable time.
One can’t help but wonder whether this fate could have been avoided. Gadflies no doubt incur risks in fulfilling their role, which Martin Luther King, Jr. once described as producing “creative tension” that generates growth, spurring an individual or community to overcome a state of ignorance or half-truth and reach a higher level of understanding (1991, 291). Provoking tension that functions creatively, rather than divisively, is a delicate task, easily derailed by offending in an unconstructive way or being misunderstood.
Rorty seemed especially prone to the latter. Reflecting in 2002 on some 1200 pieces of secondary writing on Rorty, virtually all of which was negative, Richard Rumana classified the reactions to Rorty in terms of three categories: partial criticism (which Rumana sums up as “one can accept some of what he says, but the rest is wrong”); sarcasm; and outright hostility (2002, ix). A rough estimate of the 1200 entries compiled by Rumana reveals that less than one percent of those writing on Rorty were non-negative. Anyone who knew Rorty, heard him speak and take questions from an audience, or is versed in the commentaries on Rorty, can repeat stories about the outright hostility. The time since Rorty’s passing in 2007 has seen something of a reassessment of Rorty, or at least the advent of a new generation interested in Rorty who seem less exorcised by his writings. Nevertheless, the impact of Rorty’s negative reception is lasting and hard to overestimate.
Reflecting on Rorty’s critical treatment and its impact on his legacy raises the question of what exactly was overlooked or overshadowed, and whether the hostility could have been avoided. If Rorty had tempered the outrageousness of his claims, would that have made a difference in preempting the negative backlash? Would this even have been desirable, given the gadfly’s aims? What might have been the cost? Perhaps on the margins there were places where curtailing his outrageousness might have mitigated negative fallout. For instance, his quip that Peirce’s contribution to pragmatism “was merely to have given it a name” served no substantive purpose and needlessly alienated many. It also obscured the depth of Rorty’s own early knowledge of Peirce (see Voparil 2021). When it comes to his substantive positions on issues of truth, reality, and objectivity, what he might have done differently to alter his reception is a puzzle.
The tension between the outrageous and the serious Rorty hasn’t gone unnoticed. Richard Bernstein has observed that the “clever, outrageous, and at times extremely funny” side of Rorty existed alongside “a deep sense of moral commitment and a sense of social justice” (2002, vii).[1] Rorty himself lamented that the latter commitments had been misunderstood or misconstrued by those who thought his views morally frivolous and even irresponsible (see Rorty 2010b). Bernstein elsewhere called attention to the bifurcation in Rorty’s thought between his “radical” or “sublime” side, which valorized the invention of drastically novel vocabularies, and the “more ‘reasonable’ beautiful” Rorty whose aims were more modest – just keeping alive a spirit of openness to new and different ideas in philosophy. Bernstein recognizes the instrumental value of Rorty’s provocations for what Dewey called breaking “the crust of convention.” But he also grasps the downside, inasmuch as Rorty’s rhetoric
… provided ammunition to those who wanted to dismiss Rorty by suggesting he had given up on “serious” philosophy and was catering to “literary types.” He sometimes failed to realize that his radical attempts to break the crust of convention had the unfortunately pragmatic consequence of hardening the conventions he exposed and reinforcing the ressentiment that he so passionately opposed (Bernstein 2014, 13).
In a different take, Santiago Rey has argued that we resist the impulse to bracket the “the reasonable and constructive Rorty” from “the outrageous, destructive and irresponsible enfant terrible of twentieth century American philosophy.” In his view, this “decontamination” approach to interpreting Rorty is not only hermeneutically dubious but actually “hinders our ability to make sense of what Rorty was trying to say.” Certain troublesome trends in contemporary philosophy, for Rey, call out not for a “muted, cautious” version but Rorty’s irreverent voice “in all its loud intensity” (Rey 2017, 307–8).
Rather than distinguish the radical from the reasonable Rorty or attempt to excise his seemingly ill-considered remarks via what Rey calls a “decontamination” process, I want to suggest an alternative frame for understanding Rorty holistically. My aim in this brief reflection is to entertain the possibility that Rorty’s alleged outrageousness may not be as extreme as it has been taken to be. What I mean is that his outrageous claims often were, from his point of view, little more than banal truisms characteristic of his pragmatist orientation. As he suggested in 1990, “Pragmatism was reasonably shocking 70 years ago, but in the ensuing decades it has gradually been absorbed into American common sense” (Philosophy and Social Hope [henceforth, PSH] 95). Might it be that Rorty’s purported outrageousness, at least to a significant degree, tells us more about his readers in mainstream philosophy than his ostensible radicalism or frivolity?
To be sure, the “banality” of Rorty’s pragmatism is in the eye of the beholder.[2] I think Bernstein is right that Rorty underestimated the consequences of his statements and misjudged how they would be received. If so, Rorty perhaps could have done more to anticipate his audience’s reactions and to curb, or at least better explain, his apparent insouciance. At the same time, I often find myself wondering whether Rorty’s “rhetoric” was intended to be as outrageous as it was received, considering his well-known shyness and awkwardness reading social cues. This isn’t to deny that Rorty had a “contrarian streak,” as Mary Varney Rorty, for one, has attested (2010, 115). He certainly relished poking holes in the pretensions of dogmatists. However, he wasn’t a gadfly for a gadfly’s sake. As he lamented,
I am sometimes told, by critics from both ends of the political spectrum, that my views are so weird as to be merely frivolous. They suspect that I will say anything to get a gasp, that I am just amusing myself by contradicting everybody else. This hurts… [E]ven if my views about the relation of philosophy and politics are odd, they were not adopted for frivolous reasons (Rorty 2010b, 501).
As he goes on to explain, his gadfly stings clearly were motivated by his commitment to social justice.
My interest is in understanding the underlying moral stance of the serious Rorty that his outrageousness obscured. To be sure, Rorty himself contributed to the eclipse of his seriousness – for example, by erecting a wall between the banalities of pragmatist philosophy and his moral and political efforts to promote growth and change. He distinguished “Dewey the pragmatist philosopher” from “Dewey the prophet” and proclaimed that “No argument leads from a coherence view of truth, an anti-representationalist view of knowledge, and an antiformalist view of law and morals, to Dewey’s left-looking social prophecies” (PSH 96-7). No necessary argument, that is, in the sense of a logical deduction from first principles. Rorty’s acceptance of contingency was too fundamental for that.
Where does this leave the serious Rorty’s moral project? In moments when Rorty was not refuting those who sought too tight a link between philosophical commitments and political beliefs, he gave us some clues. In a recently published 1980 response to Ian Hacking’s and Jaegwon Kim’s respective commentaries on Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty pointed out the difference between asserting: “(a) there are no such things as truth-makers; and (b) social approval is the only truth-maker” (On Philosophy and Philosophers [henceforth, OPP] 151). Despite accusations to the contrary, Rorty only claimed the former, not the latter. As he put it, “Kim speaks of me as ‘socializing’ truth, but it would be more accurate to say that, like James and Dewey, I am trying to moralize it” (OPP 151). For example, what Habermas calls undistorted communication should be valued not because it is “the best way to get accurate representations of reality but because undistorted communication is a morally good thing” (OPP 152).
Trying to moralize truth? Is this Rorty the outrageous intentionally jabbing traditional philosophers yet again? To some, perhaps. I want to suggest that this notion is key for understanding his view of the relation of philosophy and politics, and for how the outrageous and the serious – both morally and philosophically serious—sides of Rorty cohere. Even though there are no necessary links, philosophical commitments already for Rorty are morally charged because they emerge within actual social practices. His project, taken as a whole, is about moving from authoritarian practices to democratic ones—precisely by changing us.
We can see the interrelation of the banal and the serious or moral within his transformative project if we revisit and unpack several of Rorty’s most provocative claims. Let’s take his stance that “truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophical theory about” (CP xiii) and related claim that truth is nothing more than “what our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying” (PMN 176). To any philosopher steeped in representationalist epistemology and metaphysics, nothing could be more absurd to assert. Cheryl Misak pinpointed this stance as the chief reason that compelled “new” pragmatists to reclaim pragmatism from his clutches: “Richard Rorty’s view that there is no truth or objectivity to be had, only solidarity, or agreement within a community, or what our peers will let us get away with saying” (2007, 1). Susan Haack likewise charged Rorty with reducing truth to agreement and barring evidence from justification such that to “justify a belief is to defend it to some audience or other” (1998, 19–20), and with embracing a “cynicism which would undermine not only epistemology, but all forms of inquiry” (1993, 6). Absent a concern for truth and why it is important, we have no reason to reject “sham reasoning” (Haack 1998, 7–8) and no motive for improving our beliefs (Rorty and Price 2010, 259).
Understood from the vantage of Rorty’s pragmatism, however, this seemingly outrageous reduction of truth to our peers follows quite naturally from his longstanding view that practically speaking truth carries no special markers. As he explained in a response to Haack, one of his most vehement and persistent critics on this issue:
everything turns on whether there are criteria for truth distinct from criteria for justification to the best, most critical, and most informed audience that I can imagine. If there are not, then to say that I take the latter criteria to be truth-indicative adds nothing to saying that I use them in justifying my beliefs (1995, 149).
Surprisingly, the distinction between the knowable and unknowable mattered for Rorty – not for its offering any special epistemological criterion but simply for the difference between what is recognizable and unrecognizable.[3] As he went to say to Haack, “it seems to me misleading to use the word goal to refer to something we could not recognize when we had found it, and from which we shall never be able to measure our distance” (1995, 151).[4]
Absent any independent, recognizable measure of truth-indicativeness, then, agreement of our peers is all we have as a fallible but usually “good sign of truth” (Rorty and His Critics [henceforth, RC] 342). Like Haack and others, Rorty wasn’t thrilled with this state of affairs. Unlike them, he saw no viable alternative in the offing. Indeed, he invited his critics to provide such an alternative: “the burden is on Peirceans to explain what actions are motivated by a desire for indefeasibility that are not motivated by a desire for justification” (2010a, 45).
The point to appreciate is that it is less that Rorty irresponsibly jettisoned a perfectly functioning normative concept of truth than that he simply underscored unanswered questions about both its practical and philosophical status. Neil Gascoigne and Michael Bacon (2020) have shown how crucial Huw Price’s distinction between active and passive rejection is when evaluating Rorty’s positions. As they put it, “the lack of seriousness that is discerned [by critics] in Rorty’s attitude towards philosophy relates to the impossibility of seeing how it could be effectual… not from his per se rejectionist attitude towards concepts like ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ but on his (‘active’) attempt to evaluate metaphilosophically—to treat as the topic of cultural politics; interpret ‘rhetorically’—concepts, debate about the status of which for them should take place at the philosophical level” (Gascoigne and Bacon 2020, 5).
Perhaps the problem, then, is that we have lacked an adequate account of how Rorty’s pragmatic philosophical commitments could be effectual. This isn’t to say that Rorty himself offered nothing on this score. Unfortunately, his patient and careful explications of his pragmatic view of philosophy garnered far less interest and attention than his outrageous claims. His positions on the world being “well lost,” on objectivity as a matter of solidarity, on science and philosophy as genres of literature, and against metaphysics, epistemology, and method, all aim to undercut a special role for philosophy that transcends what is available to agents in “real-life moral and political deliberation” (OPP 174). This context of mundane practice almost always was Rorty’s default paradigm, as he was at pains to get critics to appreciate: “I do not think that I have ever written anything suggesting that I wish to alter ordinary ways of using ‘know,’ ‘objective,’ ‘fact,’ and ‘reason’” (TP 44). He had held previously that his problem is with “a non-epistemic, theory-independent, sense of ‘true,’” not with the “unexciting notion of ‘true’” we employ in situated inquiry (1979, 87, 97). Indeed, he called for philosophers to practice philosophical “ambidexterity”—being able to distinguish ordinary descriptions from philosophically sophisticated ones without succumbing to the “metaphysical urge” to privilege the latter over the former (RC 88-89).
Is this some outrageous distortion of pragmatism? Well, Price has summed up the general pragmatist view as the notion that truth is “explained in terms of its role in practice, not via metaphysics” (Rorty and Price 2010, 254). In my view, Rorty’s outrageous statements are consistent with this conception. As he wrote near the end of his life,
Eternal and absolute truth is the only kind of truth there is, even though the only way we know what is true is by reaching a consensus that may well prove transitory. All that can be salvaged from the claim that truth is a product of consensus is that finding out what other people believe is, most of the time, a good way to decide what to believe oneself (2007, 923).
When it comes to truth, realism, objectivity, and the like, we must remind ourselves that Rorty discards philosophical notions that are obstacles to realizing his commitment that “truth and reality exist for the sake of social practices, rather than vice versa” (PCP 7).
In redescribing these philosophical notions in ways that for Haack and like-minded critics render them nonsensical, Rorty merely sought to preempt the belief that appeals to such forms of philosophical knowledge are capable of automatically settling questions of vocabulary or theory choice, independent of human purpose and interest and our agential capacity. “The only serious philosophical questions,” for Rorty, “are about how human beings can find descriptions of both nature and culture that will facilitate various social projects.” Our fundamental responsibility, then, is not to Truth or Reality or “getting things right,” but “responsibility to larger and more diverse communities of human beings” (2003, 46). Here we of course have his familiar prioritization of democracy over philosophy and of achieving moral progress over epistemic validation—stances that also are precisely what offended so many fellow philosophers and spurred the critiques of his reduction of truth to our peers. I just want to underscore that his infamous rejections of traditional views of truth, representationalism, objectivity, and so forth indeed are tied to an account of “causal efficacy,” though in this case for achieving the moral and political ends of democracy (TP 172). For many, it seems, it simply was not the use of philosophy they were after.
Nevertheless, we shouldn’t allow this disconnect to obscure the philosophical coherence of even the outrageous Rorty. Contrary to the dominant view, Rorty doesn’t jettison the idea that our discursive practices of inquiry involve a confrontation with reality outside those practices. As he usefully explained in an early essay, he rejected only “vertical” attempts to transcend or go behind the indeterminacy we must encounter in such confrontation. Vertical accounts respond to the problem of indeterminacy by either going down “in search of the Deepest” or up “in search of the Highest” to secure something determinate that transcends the indeterminate (Rorty 1961, 219). By contrast, horizontal regresses do not posit a level distinctive in kind to what was there already. Instead, they make the original view more determinate by adopting a different vantage on the same plane. The example he gives is the relation between a particularly mystifying book and an insightful commentary on that book. The commentary does not supersede or transcend the book, only renders it more readily understandable. Ditto for a commentary on the commentary. while the horizontal view loses the possibility of appeal to non-linguistic facts independent of the semiotic web, it retains “the down-to-earth character” of realism (1961, 220, 223).
Appreciating this stance helps us see as wrongheaded criticisms that Rorty was committed to “a kind of anti-realism” that “reduc[es] truth and objectivity to matters of social fact” (Stout 2007, 10). Because Rorty reduces objectivity to solidarity or agreement and rejects truth as a goal of inquiry, the argument goes, his pragmatism lacks answerability to anything outside the community of inquiry that is necessary to make it more than an expression of “collective narcissism” (Stout 2007, 29). As few critics on this issue have recognized, however, “Objectivity or Solidarity?” and “Science as Solidarity” (both in ORT) expressly address the desire for objectivity; they are not accounts of objectivity itself. When he claims that “For pragmatists, the desire for objectivity is not the desire to escape the limitations of one’s community, but simply the desire for as much intersubjective agreement as possible,” he is quite explicit that “the pragmatist is not holding a positive theory” (ORT 23). Indeed, it is hard to imagine how Rorty could have been clearer:
The pragmatist suggestion that we substitute a “merely” ethical foundation for our sense of community—or, better, that we think of our sense of community as having no foundation except shared hope and the trust created by such sharing—is put forward on practical ground. It is not put forward as a corollary of a metaphysical claim that the objects in the world contain no intrinsically action-guiding properties, nor of an epistemological claim that we lack a faculty of moral sense, nor of a semantical claim that truth is reducible to justification. It is a suggestion about how we might think of ourselves in order to avoid the kind of resentful belatedness… which now characterizes much of high culture (ORT 33).
Ultimately, Rorty, not unlike Peirce and Davidson, adopted a triadic view in which objectivity is a function of successful interactions and that recognizes the normative background of our communal moral landscape, including the importance of shaping its habits, in a way that notions of objectivity which rely on unmediated facts or realities, like those of Stout and Robert Brandom, neglect.
There are, then, serious philosophical stances operative in Rorty’s alleged outrageousness. Still, on occasion Rorty did misspeak, or at least did not express his positions as clearly and accurately as he could have. More often than not, he agreeably offered emendations when this was pointed out. He later recognized that his talk of “what our peers let us get away with saying” was misleading since it leaves out the third corner of Davidsonian triangulation—namely, reality (RC 374-76). In his “Response to Ramberg” he admitted that it was “a mistake” on his part to fuse criticism of truth as accurate representation of the intrinsic nature of reality with rejection of true statements getting things right. As Rorty clarified, what he should have said, following Davidson, is that “most of our beliefs about anything (snow, molecules, the moral law) must be true of that thing—must get that thing right.” Rorty’s issue always was with attempts to get “Reality,” as a philosophical abstraction understood as outside our fallible determinate indeterminations, right, not with our efforts to get right “snow, fog, Olympian deities, relative aesthetic worth, the elementary particles, human rights, the divine right of kings, the Trinity, and the like” (RC 374-75). Perhaps the best explication of his stance on “facts of the matter” came from Mary Rorty:
I think that Rorty might argue that what “true” means when you talk about matters of possible fact has to do with how any given claim fits into the context of associated factual claims. And what you might have in mind when you say something like “harming a child is wrong” is a different kind of claim. It might be something more like Luther’s: “Here I stand, and I can do no other.” Or something like: “A person who could do that is not a person with whom I wish to identify myself, not a person who acts according to my notion of how people should aspire to act” (2010, 122).
Appreciating the serious Rorty helps us grasp that Rorty didn’t reject notions of truth and objectivity tout court, only questioned their relevance to practice when they remain philosophical abstractions conceived as isolable from our practical bearings as morally and politically interested beings. As he explained, “although there is indeed a nice clear distinction between objectivity and intersubjectivity, and between truth and utility, at the level of statements about particular objects, as discourse becomes more general, this distinction gradually fades out. Once we start talking about natural kinds, and about our overall worldview, the distinction between objectivity and intersubjectivity becomes pointless” (OPP 212-3).[5] These stances are all profoundly consistent with his pragmatism. Whether or not they cohere with the varied positions of the classical pragmatists is a longer conversation.[6]
Rorty’s gadfly stings possessed not only philosophical seriousness but had a moral purpose in keeping with King’s conception of fostering creative tension: Rorty sought to change us. Yvonne Huetter-Almerigi insightfully discerns how on the view Ramberg counsels Rorty to accept, “descriptions alter our dispositions, and by doing so they interact with the world – this is what the ‘language as tool’ metaphor means.” By contrast, she continues, “Brandom’s version does not actively alter our dispositions, nor does it want to” (2020, 10–11). Rorty himself already had expressed as much in largely unnoticed ways:
Haack is more or less right in suggesting that I am prepared to turn sociologist of knowledge… But I should prefer to say “historical, sociologist, and moralist of knowledge,” where moralist means something like “somebody with suggestions about the costs and benefits of changing your sense of relevance in specific ways” (1995, 225n11; emphasis in original).
The tools of such a moralist, for Rorty, include trying to change intuitions, telling stories, and offering “remarkable new readings of old philosophical texts” (RC 107).
I have no doubt that Rey is right in attesting to how much we still need Rorty’s voice, in all its intensity, today. If anything, he should have done more to convey the depth of his moral conviction and commitment to social justice. At the same time, the more that philosophers catch up with Rorty’s pragmatic commitments, the more the serious Rorty that has always been there will come into view. Hopefully, the extremes of Rorty backlash are behind us and the serious commitments motivating his perceived outrageousness can be engaged on their own terms. Rorty himself, we should note, believed the distinction between the frivolous and the serious surely is “serious and important.” He likened the frivolous to “being unconversable, incurious, and self-absorbed,” in contrast to the “serious inquirer” who makes “a serious effort to hitch his jargon, his interests, and his goals, up with yours—who is willing to go to considerable effort to build conversational bridges” (RC 105). It is high time for philosophers to initiate such efforts, for—I can’t put it any better than Gascoigne and Bacon—“taking Rorty seriously is taking philosophy seriously” (2020, 3).
[1] See also Bernstein (2008).
[2] See “The Banality of Pragmatism and the Poetry of Justice” in PSH.
[3] Actually referring to him as an “epistemologist,” Mary Rorty has held that the distinction between what was knowable and not knowable was important for Rorty (2010, 120).
[4] Or, in another place: “you cannot aim at something, cannot work to get it, unless you can recognize it once you have got it” (RC 2).
[5] As Gascoigne and Bacon put it, “pragmatism teaches us that to take truth—as opposed to truths—seriously prevents us from making philosophy of use” (2020, 3).
[6] For a start, see (Voparil 2021; forthcoming).
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_____. forthcoming. Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists. New York: Oxford University Press.
