Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

My point in suggesting that there are two senses of “good” is, of course, to make plausible the suggestion that there are also two senses apiece of “true” and “real” and “correct representation of reality,” and that most of the perplexities of epistemology come from vacillation between them (just as most of the perplexities of meta-ethics come from vacillating between senses of “good”). To begin by pursuing the analogy between goodness and truth, consider the homely use of “true” to mean roughly “what you can defend against all comers.” Here the line between a belief’s being justified and its being true is very thin. That is why Socrates had trouble explaining the difference between these two notions to his interlocutors, the same trouble we philosophy professors still have in explaining it to our freshmen. When the pragmatists identified truth with “what we will believe if we keep inquiring by our present lights” or “what it is better for us to believe” or with “warranted assertibility,” they thought of themselves as following in the footsteps of Mill, and doing for science what the utilitarians had done for morality—making it something you could use instead of something you could merely respect, something continuous with common sense instead of something which might be as remote from common sense as the Mind of God.

December 3, 2020. Page 308.