Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers

by Richard Rorty

• ISBN13: 9780521358774
• ISBN10: 0521358779
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1990-11-30
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Richard Rorty’s collected papers, written during the 1980s and now published in two volumes, take up some of the issues which divide Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophers and contemporary French and German philosophers and offer something of a compromise - agreeing with the latter in their criticisms of traditional notions of truth and objectivity, but disagreeing with them over the political implications they draw from dropping traditional philosophical doctrines. In this volume Rorty offers a Deweyan account of objectivity as intersubjectivity, one that drops claims about universal validity and instead focuses on utility for the purposes of a community. The sense in which the natural sciences are exemplary for inquiry is explicated in terms of the moral virtues of scientific communities rather than in terms of a special scientific method. The volume concludes with reflections on the relation of social democratic politics to philosophy.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgment	ix
Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, ethnocentrism, and liberalism	1	(20)
Part I
Solidarity or objectivity?	21	(14)
Science as solidarity	35	(11)
Is natural science a natural kind?	46	(17)
Pragmatism without method	63	(15)
Texts and lumps	78	(15)
Inquiry as recontextualization: An anti-dualist account of interpretation	93	(20)
Part II
Non-reductive physicalism	113	(13)
Pragmatism, Davidson and truth	126	(25)
Representation, social practise, and truth	151	(11)
Unfamiliar noises: Hesse and Davidson on metaphor	162	(13)
Part III
The priority of democracy co philosophy	175	(22)
Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism	197	(6)
On ethnocentrism: A reply to Clifford Geertz	203	(8)
Cosmopolitanism without emancipation: A response to Jean-Francois Lyotard	211	(12)
Index of names	223