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Letters


Letters


The Truth About Richard Rorty • Time This was Published! • Nifty Arguments • Learning and Evaluating • Minds and Memories • Shock Value • Science as Religion? • Unacceptable Theory • Spooky Stuff? • Pipe Dreams • Drugs & Cheating


The Truth About Richard Rorty


DEAR EDITOR: If Roger Caldwell (‘How to Get Real’, July/August 2003) had read and understood Rorty he would not have quoted Bricmont’s fatuous misunderstanding that Rorty proposes to replace the notion of truth with that of usefulness. To quote Rorty himself:




“Philosophers, like everybody else, should seek to justify their beliefs. ‘True’ is the commendatory adjective we apply to beliefs we think better justified than their competitors. So in an obvious sense we could not cease to seek for truth as long as we seek to justify our beliefs to one another. I do not want to replace the philosophical aim of finding truth with the pragmatist aim of acquiring the intellectual habits which best assist us in coping.


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