Rorty’s hostility towards talk about a “world out there”apart from human intersubjectivity will always baffle me. If he outright deniedan external world, I could shake my head at an absurdity and move on with my life; but instead he waffled on the issue, and never acknowledged his dissonances as dissonant.
He never explicitly denied a human-independent reality, but always spoke with consternation about external-world realists. He might have just been criticizing those who insinuated they had formulated a “final vocabulary,” a conceptual scheme qualitatively better than all others at describing reality. But his hostility towards realism seemed deeper than that.
This tendency is especially strange when considered against Rorty’s avowed loyalty to James, Dewey, and Darwin. All three thinkers understood activity and thought to be adaptations to a world only semi-hospitable to our existence; our minds and practices are ways of coping with the preexisting world out there that gives us nothing for free.
All this sank in for Rorty, but not deep enough. Famously, Rorty rejects accounts of mind and language which liken them to “mirrors,” passive reflectors of things outside ourselves. Instead, he likens them to “tools,” things we can mold and manipulate to solve problems.
However, the only problems he dwells on are social problems. He thinks poetry, novels, and democratic discourse can enlarge sympathies, leading us to a more inclusive leftist politics. Which is all well and good. But to hear him tell it, social problems are the only problems—weather, earthquakes, and cancer notwithstanding. Despite his emphases on the situatedness of persons in time and space, for him the human is weirdly immaterial. We can talk, and be sharp and cruel or soft and kind with our words; but that we can also be cut and bleed is ignored.
That human intellect is used to shape material reality to our ends is not entirely lost on Rorty. He’s willing to concede some successes to the sciences; but even then, he mostly praises them in their capacities as great alleviators of human misery, rather than as epistemic undertakings. He insists the various sciences are more contingent vocabularies, more literatures.
Of course, we don’t have to be relativists to admit that science is conducted by fallible, biased humans. Most theories that have ever been advanced are now considered false, and a good number that are accepted today will also be superseded. Empirical observations are always filtered through preexisting conceptual schemes. Some of those schemes are self-serving, and some serve various kyriarchal interests.
However, without treating science as the enterprise of picking out actual patterns in the world, and refining the means by which those patterns can be predicted and manipulated, we have no way to explain its success, relative to other attempts at describing and controlling the world. Demonology and molecular neuroscience may both be “ways of talking”; yet exorcisms cannot stop seizures, while carbamazepine does. And there’s a reason for this—demons do not exist, but synapses do. It's not pragmatic to ignore this.
(Apologies for a tasteless illustration in the Demonology link.)
