Name: Putnam on Rorty, Dewey, Davidson and Truth
Uploaded: 2016-10-19T06:39:07.000Z
Duration: 6 min 3 s
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You know, my friend Richard Rorty is a pragmatist. I think Richard Rorty is a skeptic in the

Adverbs of degree

almost the old Greek sense. Give up this talk about truth. But he likes to say that he agreed

with Donald Davidson and Davidson never repudiated this but nobody else has been able to see

that Davidson and Rorty agreed. I think Davidson was flattered to have as well known an author

as Rorty citing him and quoting him on all possible occasions, but I don't. But, you

know, Donald said the notion of truth is as clear and simple a notion as we have and it

sounds just the reverse of Rorty. Rorty and I once co-sponsored a conference

on truth in Paris back in I think oh many, may years ago, before 19, about 1990 I guess

in which he said -- he later said, tried to deny this, but he said and there's a tape

of it, we should have a moratorium on the use of the word truth and I raised that to

him a couple of years ago and he said I just meant in philosophy, but I don't think he

just, at that point, actually did just mean in philosophy. I mean his spirit of let's

just get rid of this question is something true or false and, again, Rorty says, and

this he doesn't deny having said. It's in print that as far as I'm concerned the notion

of warrant, justification, is a sociological notion. No prag--, none of the classical pragmatists

was a cultural relativist about warrant. And Rorty is an explicit cultural relativist about

warrant and a skeptic about truth and I just don't see.

He did an important job in getting people to read the pragmatists again. He was influential

in getting me to read James and to start teaching James so I'm grateful to him for having called

attention to classical pragmatism, but he's, and he's read everything, but he has a philosophy

of his own in which he, Rortyanism is a good enough name. He d-- [laughs] call it pragmatism.

And I don't' think, and as I say for Davidson. Yeah. Davidson was a very, very original philosopher.

I don't really see him as a member of any school. I mean the biggest influence on him

was Quine but then he's...his interest in value theory and action theory and so on are

very un-Quinean interests. Rorty oscillates between, you know,between

give up the notion of truth or the notion of truth is harmless but we shouldn't put

any weight on it in any discussion, you know. The only question you should really ask is

does this enable us to cope, right? And, you know, when you were defending Dewey's

realist credentials, at least as far as the world of qualities is concerned, that there's,

that there's, well, that there is a world out there at least, a perceptible world out

there, that is not made up by us and there is a fact. I mean he doesn't. There is a fact

as to. And as I say he doesn't like to lean on the word true. He prefers to talk about

warranted assertability. He doesn't identify the two, I mean. Sleeper and I would totally

agree. He doesn't identify truth and warranted assertability. But he's saying the important

question is what's warrantedly assertable but with respect to warranted assertability,

the full quote from Rorty is warrant is a sociological matter to be ascertained by observing

the reaction to S's -- S is his symbol, capital S is his symbol for the speaker -- to S's

statement by her peers close quotes. Now that idea that something is warranted

or not is just a matter of how her peers react to S's statements is certainly utterly, as

unDeweyan as you can get. For Dewey, I think, warrant is a matter of

whether a problematic situation has been objectively resolved. The word objective is his word.

That problems have objective solutions is something its' again and again and again.

I think that's his real answer. He didn't write. Theory of Valuation which is his answer

to emotivism is not well written. It's not nearly as good I think as the much earlier

1908 Ethics or the 1934 ethics, but what I think he's saying in the Theory of Valuation

is that there are ethical facts because there are facts about when a problem has been solved

and that's not just the same thing as being subjectively solved or seeming to be solved.

Problems are out there. They are transactional, as you say. They involve not just me but the

world and what's going on between me and the world and between us and the world. And there

is such a thing as the objective solution of a problem.

And it seems to me that that use of objective is one that Rorty would have to quarrel with.

That's just, if I understand Rorty at all and I think I do, that's what he wants us