“What is data is also contextual and based on values, such as whether data is skewed and what individual pieces of information should be included in overall data. Then facts may be inferred, so it is a long string of subjective assertions. We need data and we need facts, so the best thing is to acknowledge the subjectivity by which they are constructed, go ahead and do that, and quit assuming any points to reality or is representational.” –David McDivitt
“Yes, David, and we also need truths to temporarily anchor us and give us something to work with until further facts and data force us to move on to further truths.” –me
This discourse was basically a bounce (or a couple of them (off of the distinction I made between facts, data, and truths: facts being the building blocks of data and data being the build blocks of truths which are always shifting according to incoming facts and data. Now I want to connect this with a quote I extracted from Rorty’s Essays on Heidegger and Others:
“To my mind, the persistence on the left of this notion of ‘radical critique’ is an unfortunate residue of the scientistic conception of philosophy. Neither the idea of penetrating to a reality behind the appearances, not that of theoretical of theoretical foundations for politics, coheres with the conception of language and inquiry which, as I have been arguing, is common to Heidegger and to Dewey. For both ideas presuppose that someday we shall penetrate to the true, natural, ahistorical matrix of all possible language and knowledge. Marx, for all his insistence on the priority of praxis, clung to both ideas, and they became dominant within Marxism after Lenin and Stalin turned Marxism into a state religion. But there is no reason why either should be adopted by those who are not obliged to to practice this religion.”
Now I want to re-emphasize a quote in David’s quote:
“What is data is also contextual and based on values, such as whether data is skewed and what individual pieces of information should be included in overall data.”
And further emphasize a point in Rorty’s:
“For both ideas presuppose that someday we shall penetrate to the true, natural, ahistorical matrix of all possible language and knowledge.”
Now I want to zero in on the term “ahistorical”.
The point I’m trying to get at here (in my bricolage/found poem kind of way (is that truths are always shifting according to the facts and data (both formal and informal (available to any given truth: that point of capture in a process of constant becoming. In other words: truths can never be truly “ahistorical”. They must, as my audio book on Dewey points out to me, be always conditional on the facts and data (the contingencies and variables (that a given point in history offer them. This is why, for instance, solutions that might have worked in the past can no longer work for us now: such as Adam Smith’s notion of Capitalism –as brilliant as it may have seemed at the time.
Rorty then goes on to say:
“The moral I wish to draw from the story I have been telling is that we should carry through on the rejection of metaphilosophical scienticism. That is, we should let the debate between those who see contemporary democratic societies as hopeless, and those who see them as our only hope, be conducted in terms of the actual problems now being faced by those societies. If I am right in thinking thinking that the difference between Heidegger’s and Dewey’s ways of rejecting scientism is political rather than methodological or metaphysical, then it would be well for us to debate political topics explicitly, rather than using Aesopian philosophical language. “
I fully agree with Rorty here. And it is why he is part of my holy triad. At the same time, I return to my main criticism of Rorty in that he talked a lot about how we should approach the discourse about social justice while never really addressing individual issues concerning social justice. On the other hand, it was like he was fighting the good fight on another front. What we have to put in mind here is that he was making his way through the academic system in opposition to the increasing influence of the analytic approach to philosophy (via the universities’ increasing dependence on corporate financing (and the consequent hierarchal notion of philosophy. It’s as if he got so caught up in the debate over the rules of the language game (basically distracted (that he never got to apply his rules in the very tangible ways he describes above.