“By an antirepresentationalist account I mean one which does not view knowledge as a matter of getting reality right, but rather as a matter of acquiring habits of action for coping with reality.” -Rorty, Richard (1990-11-30). Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Volume 1: Philosophical Papers (p. 1). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
Here again, we see the important role that the evolutionary model is playing in the evolution of philosophy which along with culture in general, as Rorty points out in his writings, is an extension of our physical evolution. (And once again: I cannot help but see a core overlap with Deleuze’s agenda here.) To get to the depth of it, we have to look at the evolutionary feedback loop that resulted in the experience he have as conscious beings and the language we developed in order to deal with it: that between an evolving brain attached to a body and the environment it has to negotiate. These are the tools we are working with. Therefore, it makes no sense to sit around and debate about the nature of that negotiation in order to (as Rorty puts it:
“To find some epistemological system that will underwrite any statement we might make about the world.”
That can only lead to quagmires. For instance, note how science has lately gotten into the mindset that it can make philosophy obsolete. And as Hegel rightly pointed out: such arrogance can only lead to self contradictions: an overheating that can result from an ideology trying to be the simple solution in a complex world. Scientism and realism, however, are based on the notion of empiricism which is based on a trust in what we can experience and see for what it is. Then it makes statements like Free Will and consciousness doesn’t exist, that they are illusions, mainly because such statements feel like the scientific/ realist thing to say. The problem is that we actually experience consciousness and free will. So, if we can’t trust our experiences of that (that which we experience at every point in our point A to point B (how do we trust any other “empirical” experience we might have?
Plus that, the scientific/realist approach acts like it has some kind of monopoly on the method with which it works. But everyone, by our evolutionary heritage, uses it. We all retreat into our own little mental labs, form hypotheses about the reality we are dealing with, then go back out and test them and, depending on the results, retreat to our own little mental labs and either eliminate, keep, or revise those hypotheses. So why even sit around and nitpick over terms like “objectivity” or “reason” or “the scientific method” when we could be just putting it out there and letting it all come out in the wash –that is when we know perfectly well that arguments backed by empirical evidence will generally fair much better. Flashing around such words (and such debates (only constitute, as Layotard points out in The Postmodern Condition, powerplays: attempts to control the rules of the language game as compared to just letting the argument speak for itself.
Rorty, in this spirit, later goes on to connect his anti-representalist position to his liberal one:
“I read Dewey as saying that it suits such a society to have no views about truth save that it is more likely to be obtained in Milton’s “free and open encounter” of opinions than in any other way.”
Here we only need look at what props up the arrogance of scientific/realist position: the corporate funding it tends to draw. It only seems more right because it has access to cooler toys indulged in by children who happen to have more market value: the so called “greatest minds among us” whom we can also see as well trained -children, BTW, who had the resources to go to universities in the first place.
This is why I’m actually enthusiastic about increasing corporate funding (due to decreasing state funding (driving the fine arts and humanities out of universities. It just seems to me that they may be more effective at doing what they do best in workshops which most people, who can’t afford to go to universities, might actually be able to afford without an expensive bureaucracy driving up tuition. Such workshops could actually serve the Promethean purpose of bringing the fire to the people where it belongs, where it needs to be if we are to change the general sensibility.