What's the Use of Truth?
by Pascal Engel, Richard Rorty
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Book Summary Information
Author: Pascal Engel, Richard RortyTranslator: William McCuaig
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-01-23
ISBN: 0231140142
Number of pages: 96
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Book Reviews of What's the Use of Truth?
Book Review: A Debate on Truth
Summary: 4 Stars
This recent short book, "What's the Use of Truth?" (2007) consists of the text of a debate held between two distinguished contemporary philosophers, Richard Rorty and Pascal Engel, at the Sorbonne in 2002. Rorty began his career as an analytic philosopher who edited a collection of texts in a book called "The Linguistic Turn." (1967) But, in his book "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979) and many later writings, Rorty became disillusioned with analytic philosophy and, indeed, highly skeptical of the philosophical project as traditionally conceived. Rorty became a self-styled "pragmatist" in the tradition of John Dewey. Pascal Engel, in contrast to Rorty, began as a European philosopher steeped in Heidegger. He has since tried to bring European thought closer to the techniques and questions of analytic philosophy.
The subject of the Engel-Rorty debate is the nature of truth and whether the concept of truth is philosophically important. Rorty argues for a "deflationist" account of truth, and maintains that there is little benefit to be gained from studying the conundrums that philosophers have erected around the concept. Rorty claims to adopt the pragmatist maxim of William James that "if a debate has no practical significance, then it has no philosophical significance." To simplify greatly, Rorty rejects an approach in which true statements are thought to bear a relationship of correspondence to an independent reality. True statements are those accepted by a community under standards used by that community whether the statements be scientific, artistic, technical, political, religious, ethical what have you. There is no metaphysical entity called Truth for Rorty, and to say, for example, that ""The cat is on the mat" is true" is, in most circumstances, only to say "The cat is on the mat."
In the debate, Pascal Engel agrees with Rorty on some important points. Notably, he rejects any metaphysical notion of "the Truth" and he also rejects representationalism for the most part. But while Rorty claims to be a follower of James and Dewey, Engel is closer to the earlier American pragmatist, Charles Peirce. Engel argues that the concept of the truth as an important regulatory role to play in human thought by setting a goal and limiting condition of human inquiry. Engel discusses what he describes as the assertion-belief-truth triangle by which he endeavors to show that the question of the acceptability of a particular statement by a group cannot be reduced to the question of the truth of that statement.
Following the statement of their basic positions, Rorty and Engel engage in a brief discussion which grows increasingly heated.
As is often the case, Rorty states his position eloquently and rhetorically, with references to himself and those who think with him as "we pragmatists", "we quietists" and the like. It is difficult to take a good hard look at Rorty's views. Rorty does not seem to me entirely consistent in his pragmatism and anti-metaphysical orientation, as he slips, in places in his discussion, into a philosophical naturalism with no place for any form of theology. In other places, his approach seems to be of the breadth to allow theological discourse, just as any other discourse, as long as it serves a human need. Engel works hard in the debate to establish the importance of a limited concept of truth, but I was struck by how much the contours of philosophical debate have shifted towards a position much influenced by Rorty.
This book is short, lively, and provocative. I think it too brief and too concentrated to make a good introduction to the issues it addresses. This book will be of interest to serious students of philosophy and to those interested in the claimed death of or at least reformulation of this venerable discipline.
Robin Friedman
Philosophy Books
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