Truth without correspondence: is truth anything more than the compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way?

Richard Rorty, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

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.1234

Sources

  1. This last claim sums up die antifoundationalism that has now become die conventional wisdom of analytic philosophers. But antifoundationalism in epistemology is not enough to rid us of the metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality.
    Truth and Progress, p. 11
  2. 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.
    Consequences of Pragmatism, pp. 23–24
  3. It might be able to overcome the temptations to scientism which its own scientific and technological success has engendered. Davidson's non-reductive physicalism gives us, I think, all the respect for science we need, combined with more respect for poetry than the Western philosophical tradition has usually allowed itself. Pragmatism, Davidson and truth i.
    Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 129
  4. 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.
    Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 32

Where the argument is made

  • 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

How the argument was received

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.