“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….
“I argue that an antirepresentationalist view of inquiry leaves one without a skyhook with which to escape from the ethnocentrism produced by acculturation, but that the liberal culture of recent times has found a strategy for avoiding the disadvantage of ethnocentrism. This is to be open to encounters with other actual and possible cultures, and to make this openness central to its self-image.” -Rorty, Richard (1990-11-30). Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Volume 1: Philosophical Papers (p. 2). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
While we can share the spirit of these two points, I think we have to be wary of the paradox we race towards here. While open discourse is always the goal, there are always discourses that seek to shutdown open discourses for the sake of some chosen method, discourses that cannot be tolerated in order to maintain that open discourse. This is where Deleuze (especially in his work with Guatarri (may have the upperhand on the pragmatism of Rorty in that it tends to focus on the ways in which those discourses do so: overcoding, territorialization, the paranoid/fascist center. And we can see it as well in Marcuse’s concept of operationalism as we see in extreme forms of scientism and materialism: the claim that free will and consciousness is an illusion simply because it sounds scientific to say so, that is when if we cannot trust the basic experience we have every day of free will and consciousness, then how can we trust any other experience we might have through the empirical methods of science. Through this kind of operationalism, the champion of such positions gets to cherry pick which observations get to be considered the result of empirical observation and experiences that are not the product of some kind of illusion. And as our cyber-circles have shown repeatedly, those who engage in these kinds of discourses have no problem with utilizing any tactic available to them to shut out the discourses of those who don’t agree with them. We who work the boards know all too well the very real manifestations of Foucault’s power discourses.
This leaves us no choice but to distinguish between productive and unproductive discourses, a distinction that is all over the writings of Rorty, and would expose us to accusations of hypocrisy. And perhaps this is because even pragmatism is not meant to be a grand narrative but, rather, one tool among others. And I think Rorty sees this and, as a solution, approaches the nihilistic perspective. This becomes evident in a quote from Davidson:
“Beliefs are true or false, but they represent nothing. It is good to be rid of representations, and with them the correspondence theory of truth, for it is thinking that there are representations that engenders thoughts of relativism.” -Rorty, Richard (1990-11-30). Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Volume 1: Philosophical Papers (p. 9). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
When I finally got it, this quote offered one of those little tweaks in one’s understanding that can warrant the status of epiphany: that which constitutes a step forward in one’s process. Up until this, I had generally understood Rorty’s downplaying of relativism as a defensive gesture in the face of accusations by anti-pragmatists. But this indicates that the problem is not so much that pragmatists are being accused of relativism; it is, rather, an indictment of relativism in that it doesn’t go far enough. It fails to escape the clutches of representationalism by choosing to give validity to all representations.
It is in this approach towards the nihilistic perspective that I see pragmatism’s escape from the paradox described above: that which just does what it does and lets the rest come out in the wash while denying participation to any discourse that seeks to sabotage that process.