Rorty, the disappointed realist

Putnam writes, “I agree with Rorty that the metaphysical assumption that there is a fundamental dichotomy between ‘intrinsic’ properties of things and ‘relational’ properties of things makes no sense; but that does not lead me to view the thoughts and experiences of my friends as just the intentional objects of beliefs that help me ‘cope.’ If I did, what sense would it make to talk of ‘solidarity’ [Rorty’s substitute for ‘objectivity’]? The very notion of solidarity requires commonsense realism about the objective existence of the people one is in ‘solidarity’ with.” These examples show “that it is is important not to confuse one or another metaphysical interpretation of the notion of objectivity (for example, the idea that we can make sense of talk of things ‘as they are in themselves’) with the ordinary idea that our thoughts and beliefs refer to things in the world.”

Rorty, in short, “is so troubled by the lack of a guarantee that our words represent things outside themselves that, finding a guarantee of the only kind he envisions ‘impossible,’ he feels that he has no alternative but to reject the very idea of representation as a mistake.” He is “right in saying that it makes no sense to think of standing outside of one’s thoughts and concepts and comparing ‘reality as it is in itself’ with those thoughts and concepts. How could that idea make sense?” But then Rorty concludes that since there is not “this sort of guarantee” that one must be skeptical “about the possibility of representation in a perfectly everyday sense.” Rorty’s skepticism is “the flip side of the craving for an unintelligible kind of certainty.” Philosophy should aim to “illuminate the ordinary notion of representation (and of a world of things to be represented), not to rest frozen in a gesture of repudiation that is as empty as what it repudiates.”