Abstract
This chapter traces the role of what Rorty calls anti-authoritarianism in his work from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature onwards. It begins by examining Rorty’s hope of replacing the idea that human conduct is governed by a non-human authority (be it theological or secular) with an account in which normative authority is constituted by, and located within, social practices. It considers why Rorty takes this position to be consistent with aiming at objectivity, once this is re-described as a matter of securing solidarity between the members of social practices. The chapter then turns to the “ideally liberal society” first described in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. In that society, the only authority citizens recognise is that of free democratic consensus. Rorty’s later engagement with feminist theorists led to a shift in his view of what that society looks like, and how it might be achieved.
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Notes
- 1.
In this context, we can take note of Rorty’s place in the pragmatist tradition. Robert B. Talisse and Scott F. Aikin call the dominant account of the history of pragmatism “the eclipse narrative”, according to which pragmatism fell into neglect around the time of Dewey’s death in 1952 and the emergence of “analytic” philosophy, to be resurrected in the 1970s, primarily as a result of the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Talisse and Aikin 2011). Talisse and Aikin rightly take this narrative to be historically and philosophically inaccurate. With regard to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, one mark of its implausibility is that the version of pragmatism (“epistemological behaviourism”) presented there is developed through Rorty’s use of “analytic” philosophers such as Sellars and Quine rather than the classical pragmatists.
- 2.
For his part, Davidson came to amend some of his commitments in response to comments from Rorty. In the “Afterthoughts” to his paper “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge”, Davidson writes that “Rorty urges two things: that my view of truth amounts to a rejection of both coherence and correspondence theories and should properly be classed as belonging to the pragmatist tradition, and that I should not pretend that I am answering the skeptic when I am really telling him to get lost. I pretty much concur with him on both points” (Davidson 2001b, p. 154).
- 3.
This ambiguity can be seen in Rorty’s paper “The World Well Lost” (Rorty 1982b). There Rorty outlines his objections to the idea that reality has an intrinsic nature, but is prepared to talk about “getting the world” (as opposed to the “World”) right. Neil Gascoigne points out to me that over the course of this paper, Rorty drifts into an apparently more radical rejection of “getting the world right”, and that his comments in response to Ramberg should be seen as affirming that the language of agency requires that inquirers think of themselves as trying to do exactly that.
- 4.
This does not entail that the answers given to either question are necessarily true. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty writes that truth is “what our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying” (Rorty 1979, p. 176, emphasis in original). The apparent conflation of truth with what a community of inquiry agrees on is one which Rorty distances himself from in later writings; at one point, he describes the sentence I have just quoted as “incautious and misleading hyperbole” (Rorty 2010, p. 45). In the light of what he came to call the cautionary view of truth, the “incautious” sentence from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature should be read not as a definition of truth but rather as a description of what is taken to be true by a community of inquiry.
- 5.
As we have seen, Rorty takes language to be a tool, the purpose of which is to enable us to meet our various ends. However, he is also committed to the importance of re-description. Taking note of both points, Robert Brandom argues that this produces what he calls “a major tension in Rorty’s thought, between his robust appreciation of the transformative potential of new vocabularies and his continued appeal to instrumental models for thinking and talking about them” (Brandom 2011, p. 81n34). In a later comment, Rorty accepts that his work does contain such a tension, but does not consider in any detail its implications for his thought (Rorty 2015, p. 864). The best analysis of this tension is provided by Nancy Fraser (Fraser 1990).
- 6.
My thanks go to Martin Müller for his helpful comments, as well as his invitation to contribute this chapter.
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Recommended Literature for Further Reading
Brandom, Robert B. 2011. Linguistic pragmatism and pragmatism about norms: An arc of thought from rorty’s eliminative materialism to his pragmatism. In Perspectives on pragmatism: Classical, recent, and contemporary, 107–115. London: Harvard University Press. As in the present chapter, this paper locates Rorty’s work around his understanding of anti-authoritarianism. It traces this theme from Rorty’s early work through to his pragmatism about social norms according to which authority and responsibility are socially instituted, which it then connects to Brandom’s own position sketched in Making It Explicit.
Ramberg, Bjørn. 2013. For the sake of his own generation: Rorty on deconstruction and edification. In Richard rorty: From pragmatist philosophy to cultural politics, ed. Alexander Groeschner, Colin Koopman, and Mike Sandbothe, 49–72. London: Bloomsbury. Ramberg links Rorty’s anti-representationalism to his account of edification and the hermeneutic subject presented in the third part of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and examines how this is developed in the description of ironic self-creation in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.
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Bacon, M. (2021). Rorty’s Anti-Authoritarianism. In: Müller, M. (eds) Handbuch Richard Rorty. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16260-3_47-1
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