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Method, Social Science, and Social Hope1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

Galileo and his fellowers discovered, and subsequent centuries have amply confirmed, that you get much better predictions by thinking of things as masses of particles blindly bumping each other than by thinking of them as Aristotle thought of them — animistically, teleologically, anthromorphically. They also discovered that you get a better handle on the universe by thinking of it as infinite and cold and comfortless than by thinking of it as finite, homey, planned, and relevant to human concerns. Finally, they discovered that if you view planets or missiles or corpuscles as point-masses, you can get nice simple predictive laws by looking for nice simple mathematical ratios. These discoveres are the basis of modern technological civilization. We can hardly be too grateful for them. But they do not, pace Descartes and Kant, point any epistemological moral.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , December 1981 , pp. 569 - 588
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1981

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Footnotes

1

This paper is a revision of one called ‘Method and Morality’ which was delivered at a conference in Berkeley in March of 1980, and was read to a meeting of the Western Canadian Philosophical Association at the University of Regina in October of that year. The earlier version will appear in HahnN.BellahR. and RabinowP. eds. Values and the Social Sciences.1981.

References

2 Cf. Williams, Bernard Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (London and New York: Penguin 1978) 64ff.Google Scholar

3 Rabinow, Paul and Sullivan, William M. ‘The Interpretive Turn: Emergence of an Approach’ in Rabinow, P. and Sullivan, W.M. eds., Interpretive Social Science, (Berkeley: U. of California Press 1979) 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 See the discussion of Searle's ‘Minds, Brains and Programs,’ in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980) 417-57, especially my ‘Searle and the Secret Powers of the Brain’ at pp. 445-6 and Searle's ‘Intrinsic Intentionality’ at pp. 450-6.

5 ‘Reply to Dreyfus and Taylor,’ Review of Metaphysics 34 (1980) 39-46.

6 Dewey, John Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Modern Library 1930) 196.Google Scholar

7 Foucault, Michel Power/Knowledge (Brighton: Harverster Books 1980) 93.Google Scholar

8 Danto, Arthur Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Macmillan 1965) chapter 3.Google Scholar

9 James, William Pragmatism (New York: Longmans Green 1947) 58.Google Scholar

10 Dewey, 196.

11 Nietzsche, Friedrich The Will to Power, trans. Kaufmann, W. (New York: Random House 1967) 290.Google Scholar

12 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House 1967) 290.

12 Nietzsche, Friedrich Werke, ed. Schlechta, lll, 726Google Scholar (Kaufmann 314).

13 Foucault, Michel The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row 1972) 229.Google Scholar

14 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.42.Google Scholar

15 Ian Hacking, review of Foucault's Power/Knowledge, New York Review of Books, April 1981.

16 Dewey seems to me the twentieth-century counterpart of John Stuart Mill, whose attempt to synthesize Coleridge with Bentham is paralleled by Dewey's attempt to synthesize Hegel with Mill himself. In a brilliant critique of liberalism, John Dunn describes Mill as attempting to combine the ‘two possible radical intellectual strategies open to those who aspire to rescue liberalism as a coherent political option’:

One is to shrink liberalism to a more or less pragmatic and sociological doctrine about the relations between types of political and social order and the enjoyment of political liberties. The version of liberalism which embraces this option is usually today termed ‘pluralism.’ a conception … which is still in effect the official intellectual ideology of American society. The second possible radical strategy is simply to repudiate the claims of sociology, to take an epistemological position of such stark scepticims that the somewhat over-rated causal status of sociology can safely be viewed with limited scorn. (Western Political Values in the Face of the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 1979) 47-8.)

Dunn thinks Mill's attempt to ‘integrate intellectual traditions so deeply and explicitly inimical to one another” failed, and that modern pluralism fails also:

Modern pluralism is thus at least sufficiently sociologically self-aware not to blanch from the insight that a liberal polity is the political form of bourgeois capitalist society. But the price which it has paid, so far pretty willingly, for this self-awareness, is the surrender of any plausible overall intellectual frame, uniting epistemology, psychology and political theory, which explains and celebrates the force of such political commitment. (Ibid., 49)

My view is that such an overall intellectual frame was exactly what Dewey gave us, and that he did so precisely by carrying out Mill's combination of strategies. (For some links between Rawls (who is Dunn's favorite example of modern pluralism) and Dewey, see Rawls’ Lectures, Dewey ‘Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory’ (Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980) 515-72).Google Scholar Note especially p. 542, on a conception of Justice which swings free of ‘religious, philosophical or moral doctrines,’ and Weltnaschaungen generally. See also p. 519 for Rawls' repudiation of an ‘epistemological problem,’ and his doctrine of ‘moral facts’ as ‘constructed.’) Dunn seems to me right in saying that liberalism has little useful to say about contemporary global politics, but wrong in pinning the blame for this on its lack of a philosophical synthesis of the old, Kantian, unpragmatic sort. On my view, we should be more willing than we are to celebrate bourgeois capitalist society as the best polity actualized so far, while regretting that it is irrelevant to most of the problems of most of the population of the planet.

17 ‘Nineteenth-Century idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,’ The Monist, 64.2 (1981).

18 Foucault, Michel The Order of Things (New York: Random House 1973) 386.Google Scholar