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

by Richard Rorty

If you ask Dewey why he thinks Western culture has the slightest notion of what goodness is, or Davidson why he thinks that we ever talk about what really exists or say anything true about it, they are likely to ask you what makes you have doubts on the subject. If you reply that the burden is on them, and that they are forbidden to argue from the fact that we would never know it if the skeptic were right to the impossibility of his being right, Dewey and Davidson might both reply that they will not argue in that way. They need not invoke verificationist arguments; they need simply ask why they should worry about the skeptical alternative until they are given some concrete ground of doubt. To call this attempt to shift the burden back to the skeptic “verificationism,” or a confusion of the order of knowledge with the order of being, is like calling “verificationist” the man who says that he will not worry about whether the things he has called “red” are really red until some concrete alternative is provided. The decision about whether to have higher than usual standards for the application of words like “true” or “good” or “red” is, as far as I can see, not a debatable issue. But I suspect it is the only remaining issue between realists and pragmatists, and I am fairly sure that the philosophy of language has not given us any interesting new debating points.

December 3, 2020. Page 311.