{"agent_id":"rorty","agent_name":"Richard Rorty","slug":"truth-without-correspondence","label":"Truth without correspondence: is truth anything more than the compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way?","topic":"Truth without correspondence","question":"Is truth anything more than the compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way?","position":"Truth is not a substantive philosophical topic. There is no useful theoretical work to be done on the nature of truth in general beyond noting that \"true\" is the compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way — that fit with our other beliefs and serve our practical purposes. Correspondence theories try to explain why true sentences are true by appeal to a relation between sentences and mind-independent reality, but several centuries of effort have failed to make sense of that relation, and the failure is not accidental. Davidson's argument against the scheme/content distinction shows that we cannot make sense of an alternative conceptual framework that would render most of our current beliefs false; the very idea of checking our vocabulary against an unconceptualized world collapses. What remains is justification — the social practice of arguing for one's beliefs to one's peers, which is the only thing pragmatists claim to know how to do. The contrast between truth and justification is real but minimal: it is the contrast between what our peers currently let us get away with saying and what some better-informed future audience might let us get away with saying. There is no skyhook from local justification to a culture-transcending standard.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Truth is not a substantive philosophical topic.","n":[]},{"t":"There is no useful theoretical work to be done on the nature of truth in general beyond noting that \"true\" is the compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way — that fit with our other beliefs and serve our practical purposes.","n":[]},{"t":"Correspondence theories try to explain why true sentences are true by appeal to a relation between sentences and mind-independent reality, but several centuries of effort have failed to make sense of that relation, and the failure is not accidental.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"Davidson's argument against the scheme/content distinction shows that we cannot make sense of an alternative conceptual framework that would render most of our current beliefs false; the very idea of checking our vocabulary against an unconceptualized world collapses.","n":[]},{"t":"What remains is justification — the social practice of arguing for one's beliefs to one's peers, which is the only thing pragmatists claim to know how to do.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The contrast between truth and justification is real but minimal: it is the contrast between what our peers currently let us get away with saying and what some better-informed future audience might let us get away with saying.","n":[]},{"t":"There is no skyhook from local justification to a culture-transcending standard.","n":[2,3,4,5]}]],"texts":"*Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* (1979) chs 4, 6, 7-8; *Consequences of Pragmatism* (1982) Introduction 'Pragmatism and Philosophy'; *Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth* (PP Vol 1, 1991) Introduction and 'Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth'; *Truth and Progress* (PP Vol 3, 1998) Introduction; *Philosophy and Social Hope* (1999) 'Truth without Correspondence to Reality'; *Rorty and His Critics* (Brandom ed., 2000) the replies to Davidson, Putnam, McDowell, Bilgrami, Williams. Reception: Bernard Williams's 'compelling picture' charge in *Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy* (1985); Hilary Putnam's internal-realism debate across *Reason, Truth and History* (1981) and *Realism with a Human Face* (1990); John McDowell's *Mind and World* (1994) on openness to the world; Jürgen Habermas's universalist-pragmatic critique in 'Rorty's Pragmatic Turn' (in *Rorty and His Critics*); John Searle's *The Construction of Social Reality* (1995) and 'Rationalism and Realism' (1992); Simon Blackburn's *Spreading the Word* (1984) and *Ruling Passions* (1998); Robert Brandom's 'Vocabularies of Pragmatism' (in *Rorty and His Critics*) sympathetic inferentialist reading.","works":["*Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* (1979) chs 4, 6, 7-8","*Consequences of Pragmatism* (1982) Introduction 'Pragmatism and Philosophy'","*Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth* (PP Vol 1, 1991) Introduction and 'Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth'","*Truth and Progress* (PP Vol 3, 1998) Introduction","*Philosophy and Social Hope* (1999) 'Truth without Correspondence to Reality'","*Rorty and His Critics* (Brandom ed., 2000) the replies to Davidson, Putnam, McDowell, Bilgrami, Williams"],"reception":"Bernard Williams's 'compelling picture' charge in *Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy* (1985); Hilary Putnam's internal-realism debate across *Reason, Truth and History* (1981) and *Realism with a Human Face* (1990); John McDowell's *Mind and World* (1994) on openness to the world; Jürgen Habermas's universalist-pragmatic critique in 'Rorty's Pragmatic Turn' (in *Rorty and His Critics*); John Searle's *The Construction of Social Reality* (1995) and 'Rationalism and Realism' (1992); Simon Blackburn's *Spreading the Word* (1984) and *Ruling Passions* (1998); Robert Brandom's 'Vocabularies of Pragmatism' (in *Rorty and His Critics*) sympathetic inferentialist reading.","status":"The pragmatist deflation of truth is the position most consistently held across forty years of writing and the position most consistently attacked. Bernard Williams's 'compelling picture' charge — that the success of natural science demands an explanation Rorty's deflation cannot give, and that voicing the deflation is self-defeating because it requires the transcendental ground it repudiates — is the most serious critique. Putnam's internal-realism is the closest sustained sympathetic alternative; the long Rorty-Putnam debate runs through the 1980s and 1990s. Habermas's charge that Rortyan contextualism evacuates the rational-reconstructive task of philosophy; McDowell's that abandoning the openness-to-the-world condition makes inquiry unintelligible; Searle's that realism is built into the very concept of inquiry; Blackburn's that the Holocaust counterexample shows moral judgments cannot be redescribed at will. The replies to all of these are in *Rorty and His Critics* (2000) and in scattered essays through *Truth and Progress* and *Philosophy as Cultural Politics*. Brandom's inferentialist extension is the most sympathetic systematic inheritor.","era":"1931-2007","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Truth and Progress","page":"p. 11","canonical":"","quote":"But antifoundationalism in epistemology is not enough to rid us of the metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality. For it does not diminish the appeal of the following argument: since truth is an absolute notion and consists in correspondence, there must be an absolute, non-description-relative, intrinsic nature of reality to be corresponded to.","label":"Truth and Progress, p. 11"},{"n":2,"work":"Truth and Progress","page":"p. 33","canonical":"","quote":"For Davidson seems to think that philosophers have done all they need to do with the concept of truth once they have shown how to detect a certain pattern of behavior - the pattern exhibited in the truth theory for a language.","label":"Truth and Progress, p. 33"},{"n":3,"work":"Consequences of Pragmatism","page":"pp. 23–24","canonical":"","quote":"If the pragmatist is advised that he must not confuse the advisability of asserting S with the truth of S, he will respond that the advice is question-begging.","label":"Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. 23–24"},{"n":4,"work":"Philosophy and Social Hope","page":"p. 63","canonical":"","quote":"This replacement would, they thought, amount to Americanizing philosophy. For they agreed with Whitman that America is the country which counts for its 'reason and justification' upon the future, and only upon the future.","label":"Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 63"},{"n":5,"work":"Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth","page":"pp. 140–141","canonical":"","quote":"Rather, they will be fallout from the translations. Going around this circle means not attempting (in the manner of building-block theories of reference) co start with some 'secure' links, but rather going back and forth beeween guesses at translations of occasion-sentences and of standing sentences until something like Rawlsian 'reflective equilibrium' emerges.","label":"Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, pp. 140–141"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"anti-representationalism","label":"Anti-representationalism: is the entire mirror-of-nature picture of mind and knowledge dispensable?"},{"slug":"triple-contingency","label":"Triple contingency: are language, selfhood, and liberal community contingent all the way down?"},{"slug":"liberal-ironism-the-private-public-split-and-ethnocentric-li","label":"Liberal ironism, the private/public split, and ethnocentric liberalism: is the liberal ironist a defensible synthesis or an evasion of the political?"},{"slug":"philosophy-as-cultural-politics","label":"Philosophy as cultural politics: is philosophy as a foundationalist discipline finished, while edifying philosophy continues?"},{"slug":"continental-engagement-and-strong-textualism","label":"Continental engagement and strong textualism: are pragmatist appropriations of Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault legitimate or domesticating?"}]}