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from Judith Shklar) "that liberals are people who think that cruelty is the
worst thing we do." Compassion (or solidarity) thereby replaces truth or
justice as the central public virtue.
Rorty presents irony, unlike solidarity, as a private rather than a
public virtue - doing so, ironically, in the context of a public book. The
"ironism" he advocates "results from awareness of the power of re–
description." Redescription - Goodman and Elgin advocate something
similar in
Reconceptions in Philosophy
(Hackett 1988) - is the ironist's al–
ternative to knowledge and truth, truth being no more viable than jus–
tice for postmodernism. Rorty's liberalism, unlike Hayek's, is sustained by
hope
rather than by truth and justice. It is a strength of Rorty's view that
his irony is not at all cynical; ironism undermines and replaces knowl–
edge-claims about truth and justice, but cynicism is not allowed to im–
pugn hope. Another strength is his acknowledgment that the abuses of
irony can be as grave as the abuses of metaphysics; hence the stress on
gentleness and solidarity.
While the sustained articulate rejection of pugnacity is attractive,
the abandonment of
knowledge
is not. It results from a lingering Cartesian
fallacy. Descartes noticed that his senses could
sometimes
deceive him and
concluded that they could
never
be reliable. The hidden premise of this
inference is that knowing anything requires knowing everything. Simone
de Beauvoir made the best possible use of this philosophical absurdity
when she remarked, "To
know
anything you must know everything, but
to
say
anything you must leave out a great deal." Like Descartes and de
Beauvoir, Rorty has noticed that justifications come to an end in some–
thing taken for granted (that is, unjustified) and infers that this obvious
fact impugns every justification, and hence every knowledge-claim. This
conclusion leaves him in sharp contrast to Wittgenstein and Putnam. It is
curious that this eloquent apostle for postmodernism should remain so
inextricably entangled in such a long-discredited Cartesian premise.
The scientific realism that Putnam refutes is a type of reductionism
he formerly advocated. It holds that the only thing real about beliefs,
meanings, intentions, and so forth is what can be represented in terms of
some present or forseeable scientific theory. The currently fashionable
forms of scientific realism, which dominate artificial intelligence and
cognitive science generally, employ Turing machines or some other
computational model of the brain, all thoughts then being reduced to
brain-states, and all meaning to thoughts. Putnam's critique of this view
(of his former self) is extraordinarily clear for such technical subject–
matter. It is extraordinarily convincing too. One of the many fine
passages (116-118) derives, as an extension of G5del's famous work in
mathematics, the general conclusion "that reason can go beyond
whatever reason can formalize," a point which seems sufficient in itself to
