Rorty QOTD

Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007): pragmatist, ironist, and panrelationalist.

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

On the eve of Richard McKay Rorty's 94th birthday*, announcing @rortyquotes: dedicated to tweeting a fresh #Rorty banger each and every day of the year—starting tomorrow!

* And the day, 79 years ago, that Rorty went off to the University of Chicago's Hutchins College.

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

Pragmatists substitute the idea of a maximally efficient explanation of a maximally wide range of data for that of the theory which cuts reality at the joints.
PasAA p.137
#Pragmatism
#Rorty

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

The switch from metaphors of vertical distance to metaphors of horizontal extent ties in with the pragmatists’ insistence on replacing traditional distinctions of kind with distinctions in degree of complexity.
PasAA p.136
#Pragmatism
#Rorty

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

Moral progress is a matter of wider and wider sympathy. It is not a matter of rising above the sentimental to the rational. Nor is it a matter of appealing lower courts to a higher court which administers an ahistorical, non-local, transcultural moral law.
PasAA p.136
#Morality

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

Justificatory ability is, on the pragmatist view, its own reward. There is no need to worry about whether we will be rewarded with a sort of immaterial medal labeled “Truth” or “Moral Goodness.”
PasAA p.136
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Morality

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

Long after you are dead, better informed and more sophisticated people may judge your action to have been a tragic mistake, just as they may judge your scientific beliefs to have presupposed an obsolete cosmology.
PasAA p.136
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Morality

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

Pragmatists think the idea of something non-human luring us human beings on should be replaced with the idea of getting more & more human beings into our community—of taking the needs & interests & views of more and more diverse human beings into account.
PasAA p.136
#Morality

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

You can aim at ever more sensitivity to pain, and ever greater satisfaction of ever more various needs.
PasAA p.136
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Morality

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

You cannot aim at “doing what is right” because you will never know whether you have hit the mark.
PasAA p.136
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Morality

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

The trouble with aiming at truth is that you would not know when you had reached it, even if you do in fact reach it. But you can aim at assuaging ever more doubt.
PasAA p.136
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Truth

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

The ideal limit of this process of enlargement is the self envisaged by Christian and Buddhist accounts of sainthood—an ideal self to whom the hunger and suffering of any human being (and even, perhaps, that of any other animal) is intensely painful.
PasAA p.133
#Evolution

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

Cultural evolution takes over from biological evolution without a break. From an evolutionary point of view, there is no difference between Neanderthal grunts and German philosophical treatises save complexity.
PasAA p.129
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Evolution

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

The story of how we got from Neanderthal grunts and nudges to German philosophical treatises is no more discontinuous than the story of how we got from the amoebae to the anthropoids.
PasAA p.129
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Evolution

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

There was no point at which practical reasoning stopped being prudential and became specifically moral, no point at which it stopped being merely useful and started being authoritative.
PasAA p.129
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Morality

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

The point of Dewey’s analogy between language and morality is that there was no decisive moment at which language stopped being a series of reactions to the behavior of other humans and started to represent reality.
PasAA p.128
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Dewey

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

Pragmatists are going to have doubts about the suggestion that anything is unconditional. For they doubt that anything is, or could be, nonrelational.
PasAA p.127
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Panrelationalism

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

Pragmatists ask the practical question: are our ways of describing things, or relating them to other things so as to cope with them better by making them fulfill our needs more adequately, as good as possible? Or can we do better?
PasAA p.127
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

Pragmatists insist that we can only talk about things under more or less optional descriptions of them, descriptions dictated by our own human needs, and that this is not a spiritual or epistemological disaster.
PasAA p.127
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

By thinking of everything as relational through and through, pragmatists attempt to get rid of the contrast between reality and appearance.
PasAA p.127
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

I have also portrayed pragmatism as a generalized form of antiessentialism—as an attempt to break down the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic features of things.
PasAA p.127
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Antiessentialism

[Rorty QOTD @RortyQuotes]

I can talk the funny little language-games of philosophers who verge on metaphysical realism, if I want to, and sometimes do so for pedagogic purposes. But I do want to say that I think it would be a bad idea for us to play those games.
PasAA p.123
#Pragmatism
#Rorty
#Realism