BOOKS
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dissatisfaction caused by the uninformativeness of correspondence
theories of truth. Alfred Tarski's formula, "'Snow is white' is true if
and only if snow is white," introduces the belief-verifying fact only in
the conceptually polluted terms we use to express the belief in ques–
tion. It fails, people feel, to refer to the fact as it is in itself, indepen–
dent of our way of articulating the world in discourse. That is hardly
surprising; a theory is a conceptual and so essentially linguistic
thing. We cannot get a fact into it except in linguistic clothing. But
there is a conceptually hygienic kind of way of bringing words and the
world together, as when we teach someone the elementary vocabulary
of factual description . We teach someone to come out (or be ready to
come out) with "this is white" by uttering it in circumstances in
which something white is salient. The learner's attention is directed
to a chunk of the perceivable environment, that is, so far as he is
concerned, conceptually unravished.
If
he catches on to the socially
prevailing practice of applying "white" to things, we have reason to
conclude that the same feature of the world determines his use of the
word, by way of its effect on his sense organs, as determines ours .
Rorty writes rhetorically of the correspondence theorist's con–
ception of our being
compelled
by the world to form certain beliefs , in
the spirit of a hearty parent who thinks one should be outdoors doing
something, not skulking inside in front of the television . This is like
the naive liberationism that sees logic as an instrument of bourgeois
repression, a fantasy of infantile omnipotence dressed up as a
theory. It draws on the same ideological animus as his egalitarian
condemnation of epistemologists for supposing themselves to be a
rational elite. In fact, much current epistemology denies that the
world forces any beliefs on us. Sharing the fallibilist point of view of
Charles Sanders Peirce , the first, greatest, but, according to Rorty,
; overrated, pragmatist, it maintains that the world, at most, more or
; less strongly inclines us to form certain beliefs, which must then be
reconciled with other beliefs of the same sort and with the theories
we have developed from them.
In such a big book it is curious how little Rorty has to say about
the specific consequences of his proposal apart from the re–
employment of epistemologists. On the one hand, he says, in the
first essay of
Consequences of Pragmatism,
that in fact "the number of
beliefs that changed among the educated classes of Europe between
the thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries is ridiculously small com–
pared to the number that remained intact." That suggests that the
cognitive mystery ride he is inviting us to join him on is really com-
