Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate by Susan Haack

...Rorty, by contrast, declares that: "Philosophy is best seen as a kind of writing...

...And what does literature now mean...

...Mary Midgley is the author of Can't We Make Moral Judgments...

...How then could we describe the world...

...Yet the rejection of authenticity leaves Frey in a bind...

...Bernard G. Prusak is a graduate student in philosophy at Boston University...

...Pilgrim Stories gives the reader much information, but it is unduly repetitive...

...As she says: "The Old Deferentialists, taking the rationality of science for granted, assumed that there must be a uniquely rational method of enquiry exclusive to the sciences...

...That, however, evidently isn't the most natural way of reading them...

...How," Frey asks, "do you say good-bye to a man whose presence made your ovaries pitch and turn one night simply by being in the next bed...

...Also, the writing is sometimes ungainly, even unintentionally comic...

...though they are, to be sure, kinds of writing, as are bus timetables, and could be read as one reads literature—as one might notice happy alliterations and rhymes in the bus schedule...

...So are bus tickets, moral judgments, and a good deal of literature...

...They all aim at truth—not just persuading people—even though they are often found to be mistaken...

...Haack points out interestingly how often flamboyant rhetoric alone is left to do the work of discrediting the concept attacked...

...But why be auxiliary to either...

...But the ideological Law of Pendulums, by which every action must have an equal and opposite reaction, does (it seems) require this...

...Of course there are real problems about truth and reality, especially in science...

...The Camino gave him an opportunity to apply his accumulated knowledge and new sensibility"—to be an echt pilgrim—but he did not take it...

...His assessment of the meal was that it was fit not for a pilgrim, but for a dog...

...Most of these remarks come from a particularly hilarious chapter where she ingeniously intersperses Rorty's remarks with quotes from the founder of pragmatism, Charles Pierce, so as to form a continuous argument which shows how totally Pierce rejected these extreme positions...

...What he wants it to mean is of course something called irony, in the current sense of a detached or slightly frivolous mood, an abstention from taking anything quite seriously...

...Pierce wrote, "I desire to rescue the good ship Philosophy from the hands of lawless rovers of the sea of literature...

...Real irony, however, is not a bit like this...

...It is not obvious why this startling discovery should now force us to ditch the whole concept of truth...

...The upshot is that she goes back and forth between making judgments and decrying judgmentalism...

...Indeed, the possibility of mistakes is itself the strongest testimony to the importance of a strong concept of truth, a concept independent of conversational tactics...

...She wants to speak of the meaning of the pilgrimage, but she is suspicious of claims to authority...

...On the one hand, she is willing to criticize a Dutch pilgrim who rejects the free meal offered by the Hostal de los Reyos Catolicos in Santiago...

...The pragmatist] drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality" [emphasis mine...

...Since Rorty and his school often claimed to be pragmatists, this is interesting in itself...

...Neither the Old Deferentialism nor the New Cynicism will do...

...Haack maps this awkward country skillfully for those professionally involved in exploring it, devising a balanced and convincing form of critical realism...

...It would be a mistake, though, to give frustration the last word...

...Without that strong concept, we could not speak properly of falsehood, error, or lying...

...and thus have 24 no need to view it as accuracy of representation....I do not have much use for notions like 'objective truth'...Truth is entirely a matter of solidarity....Nominalists like myself...see language as just human beings using marks and noises to get what they want....[To call a statement true] is just to give it a rhetorical pat on the back....'Truth' is whatever can overcome all conversational objections...

...This is, of course, a current battlefield...

...among other books...

...She is generally critical of this struggle, and rightly so, for it is often at once silly and destructive...

...Rorty's reduction stretches the idea of literature so far that it must either become empty or mean something very strange...

...Still more oddly, however, he classifies science too as "one genre of literature...

...Real irony is not a mood but a mode of expression, an indirect language used to give extra force to what can be a deadly serious meaning, as in Erewhon and Gulliver's Travels and Swift's Modest Proposal...

...the New Cynics, noticing the failure of efforts to articulate what that uniquely rational method is, conclude that science is not a rational enterprise, in fact, that the whole idea of an objectively better- or worseconducted enquiry is ideological humbug...

...Ugh...

...With the reverent care of a naturalist, Haack collects specimens of Hyde at work: "Justification' is a social phenomenon rather than a transaction between 'the knowing subject' and 'reality.'...We understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief...

...Haack's main business in this book is, then, to examine and explode this current truth-phobia in the writings of various thinkers, above all of perhaps America's most widely read philosopher, Richard Rorty...

...Well, no...

...TRUTH & COHSEQUENCES Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate Mary Midaley This is a good book, which might perhaps have had a better title: In Defense of Truth...

...Frey discusses at length (and several times over) what she calls the "cult of authenticity," the struggle over what makes an edit pilgrim...

...Astrophysics is meant seriously...

...Yet, on the other hand, Frey observes that "there are many types of pilgrims, many ways of going, and many ways to interpret what it means"—which is less than helpful...

...It is delimited, as in any literary genre, not by form or matter but by tradition....Literature has now displaced religion, science, and philosophy as the presiding discipline of our culture....A philosopher like myself thinks of himself as auxiliary to the poet rather than to the physicist...

...She further writes that the Camino provides the opportunity to develop "a personal metaphysics...

...Philosopher and logician Susan Haack does passionately seek a middle position between absurd extremes on a number of questions...

...But her central passion concerns, as the blurb puts it, "whether there is such a thing as truth, whether there is a real difference between knowledge and propaganda," particularly in the case of science...

...Accordingly, a genuine recognition of the way in which social backgrounds affect science has been inflated into the claim that this background is the whole picture...

...Reasonably, Haack comments: "The idea of chemistry or astrophysics as genres of literature is nothing short of laughable...

...But the biggest stumbling block is theoretical...

...For Pierce, genuine inquiry consists in "diligent inquiry into truth for truth's sake," and the effect of sham inquiry "is that men come to look on reasoning as purely decorative...

...there is no real quest for scientific or philosophical truth...

...After all, we have known for a long time that science is not infallible or unique in the way that Descartes hoped...

...I ate that meal: his assessment of it was correct...

...Frey gives the reader to understand that, rather than "reject the gift as inadequate," the Dutch pilgrim should have "recognize[d] it as such...

...But it raises, too, a wider question about the literary approaches to philosophizing of Rorty and others...

...A pilgrim asked her, Frey writes, to "tell us about ourselves," and this she does better than anybody I have read in the gigantic body of literature on the pilgrimage...

...Inquiry thus becomes simply social interaction...

...Rorty seems still so obsessed by the Old Deferentialists' exalted view of science as the only rational form of thought, that he can see no role for philosophy outside science except in a kind of literature which is so thought-free as not to aim at truth at all...

...Like everyone who takes these positions, Rorty oscillates between being a quite reasonable Jekyll, making useful statements about particular relativities, and a Hyde who pours out vertiginous, paradoxical generalities...

...But she also writes clearly, forcefully, and funnily, shooting down a lot of academic nonsense which is a serious nuisance to the general reader, and for that we are all in her debt...