Fosl: Professor Rorty, how would you define 'realism'?

Rorty: As the belief that reality has an intrinsic nature, which some descriptions are closer to than others.

Fosl: How do you think the shortcomings or flaws of realism are, as you see them, best described? Is realism 'false', or 'useless', or 'harmful', or 'senseless', or 'incoherent', or even 'dangerous'?

Rorty: It's immature, in the sense that it is prized for the suggestion that there is something big and powerful on the side of us good guys - namely, Reality as it is in itself. It is the equivalent in theoretical philosophy of 'the will of God' in moral philosophy. One can rubber-stamp the result of one's theoretical or moral deliberations with expressions like, 'and that's the way the world is' or 'that's what God wills', but it is more grown-up not to do so.

Fosl: Yours seems to be an argument from analogy. But isn't it a strained one? Surely the notion of a transcendent, non-sensible object like 'God' is significantly different from an independent material reality with which we are directly, publicly, technically, and experientially related. Isn't your characterisation of realists as simply rubber stamping their results with the seal of 'reality' something of a straw man? Isn't what's fundamentally at stake understanding what knowing something is all about and what our relation to the world is like? How is your calling realists 'immature' anything more than ad hominem abuse? Why is it more grown up not to appeal to 'God' or 'reality'?

Rorty: Sure we are directly, publicly, technically and experientially related to something - something which has a lot of different descriptions. Theists think their description of this something superior to materialists' descriptions, and materialists think the converse. Pragmatists think that no description is superior in respect to catching the intrinsic nature of that something. Rather, they say, descriptions are superior to one another only in respect to their ability to satisfy various human purposes. I can't give much of an argument to back up the claim that the purpose which is to 'describe things as they really are in themselves' is an immature purpose. But it strikes me as just the sort of thing it would be good for a culture to outgrow. (See my 'Pragmatism as anti-authoritarianism' in a recent issue of Revue Internationale de Philosophie, on this point.)

Fosl: How have your views on realism changed over time, and in what way would you say your views today surpass those characterising your original criticisms, say in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature?

Rorty: I still persist in the anti-representationalism which was the main burden of that book. There are doubtless bits - particularly in the philosophy of mind - which I would now change. Daniel Dennett's work seems to me to have rendered a lot of what I said in that area obsolete. But I don't think my views have changed on issues relevant to realism.

Fosl: Which philosophers do you think present the strongest cases for realism, and why? Which realists' work do you admire most? Which arguments for realism do you find most difficulty to answer and challenge you most deeply?

Rorty: I'm not sure I can break the matter down into distinct arguments. It's like asking an atheist which of the traditional natural theological arguments he finds most difficult to refute. His attitude is likely to be: 'I have no use for the concepts used to state the conclusions of the arguments, so they all strike me as equally bad.'

Fosl: Your colleague at the University of Virginia, Cora Diamond, has argued that a realistic notion of truth is necessary to defend us against tyranny and totalitarianism. Realistic truth, you might say, in her view is generally the first casualty of and the most potent prophylactic against oppression. If truth isn't tied to an independently existing reality, isn't it entirely vulnerable to being used and abused - as Foucault would have it - by the powerful? One might say that George Orwell, in 1984, advanced a similar claim: '2+2 equals 4', says Orwell's hero, Winston Smith, no matter what the party or anyone else says. To this his captor/instructor, O'Brien, replies along the lines of: 'If the party says, Winston, that 2+2 equals 5, then 2+2 does equal 5.' How do you respond to this challenge?

Rorty: I've written at length about this in a reply to James Conant in a forthcoming volume - Rorty and His Critics, edited by Brandom (Blackwell, 2000). My reply might be summed up as follows: Suppose that Winston and O'Brien are both realists, and O'Brien says, as the Popes used to, 'There is a Way Things Are, and the Party (or the Pope) is in the best position to find it out.' Does agreement on realism do Winston any good? How could absence of such agreement do him any harm?

Fosl: Well, in Orwell's vision, wouldn't Smith be harmed in at least two ways. First, isn't it his belief in realism a large part of what sustains him in his struggle against Big Brother, and therefore wouldn't his loss of that commitment undermine his ability to resist? In a similar way, aren't those who resist, say, Holocaust deniers, sustained by a commitment to the reality of the Holocaust, that is to the notion that it happened whether or not people today or in the future agree that it happened?

Secondly, wouldn't Smith be harmed in the sense that a commitment to realism by both him and O'Brien would make possible proofs or demonstrations to which one or both must yield even if they don't wish to yield. In a similar way, I suppose adherents to Aristotlelianism were forced by Galileo to yield to the reality of the surface of the Moon having craters even though neither they nor those with whom they'd been agreement wished to do so.

Rorty: Pragmatists too think that the Holocaust happened even if people come to think it didn't. They do not infer from agreement to truth, merely from (free) agreement (among all interested inquirers) to our current best guess at the truth. About being 'sustained': I am nor clear why believing that reality has an intrinsic nature captured by some of our descriptions and not by others would be a comfort to Winston. If there were a way to get from such a belief to 'proofs or demonstrations' which compel assent to particular assertions, then indeed realism would be a great help. But I do not see how, either in the case of Galileo or in that of Winston, what this way is. You write as if non-realists thought that it was OK to believe whatever one wanted to. But how would such a view be implied by the belief that reality does not have an intrinsic nature? For pragmatists, the problem about Winston is political - lack of freedom to inquire - rather than metaphysical or epistemological.

Fosl: Giambattista Vico maintained in his New Science in1725 that 'verum ipsum factum' ('the true is the made') and that consequently the reality of independently existing nature remains opaque to us while the truths of things human are accessible. How would you distinguish your position from his? Would it be correct to say you hold that truths of 'nature' are every bit as artificial as the truths of human thought and culture? Is there, in other words, a distinction between the forms of knowing characteristic of Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) and the natural sciences?

Rorty: Not a distinction of forms of knowing, only a sociological distinction in, e.g., degree of controversy concerning the topics discussed and in extent of agreement on the aims of inquiry.

Fosl: Some would argue that, despite the protestations of philosophers, realism is simply a fundamental category of human existence, that we can't help but think of our words as referring to and disclosing an independently existing reality as it is in itself. Philosophers like Harvard's Stanley Cavell (and others who follow his sort of reading of Wittgenstein) maintain that we have a fundamental connection to an independent, public world from which misguided philosophy alienates us but to which the proper philosophical therapies return us. Why do you disagree?

Rorty: The same could have been said about belief in God. But a lot of people now find belief in God immature, and eventually a lot of people may find realism immature.

Fosl: Isn't there a self-reflexive problem with your position? Don't your views require as a condition of their assert-
ability claims referring to a specific independent reality - namely, the independent reality composed of the people who reach agreements, of their agreements themselves, and of the social and linguistic institutions in which they participate that make those agreements possible? In other words, in presenting your theories, don't you explicitly deny but implicitly actually maintain something like this: 'The independent reality of the matter is that truth is a social agreement among participating parties'?

Rorty: Why should I say that, rather than 'discarding realism seems likely to increase human happiness'?

Fosl: But isn't saying even this just saying that 'the independent reality of it seems to be that discarding realism increases human happiness'? I suppose that what I'm getting is that you seem to hold that calling a claim 'true' just means that we've come to an agreement about the claim. In other words, 'X' is true if and only if the relevant interested people agree that 'X' is true. (Let's call this 'RD' for Rorty's definition.) But RD itself doesn't seem to be true if an only if the relevant interested people accept RD. Rather, RD seems to claim to be true if and only if it describes the independent reality of the what people do in arriving at agreements concerning the truth of propositions.

Rorty: I don't define 'true' at all. I don't think that anybody has or could give an interesting and satisfactory definition of this term. I've spelled out this Davidsonian point in a number of articles. If you define 'true' as 'underwritten by an independent reality', then of course I am caught in a self-contradiction. But surely the question is whether this latter 'definition' is more than empty verbiage.

Fosl: Even if determining which statements are to be called 'true' is a matter of social negotiation and agreement, isn't what people agree upon the nature of some independently existing reality? It may be a matter of social agreement that we come to decide that, for example, the statement, 'The cat is on the mat', is true. But in reaching that decision don't we agree that an independently existing cat is on an independently existing mat and that our decision has not made that fact so but simply acknowledged or recognized it?

Rorty: It all depends on whether you mean something more by 'independently existing cat' than 'cat whose existence is independent of the human beings who are describing it.' Nobody doubts the causal independence of the cat. It's some other, deeper, more mysterious and interesting sort of independence that is being debated. Realists do not give one much help in figuring out what this sense is.

Fosl: I suppose what I mean is something along these lines. By 'independently existing cat' I mean something (namely, a cat) which can act as a criterion of the truth or the statement, 'the cat is on the mat.' That is, isn't it the case that the truth conditions for 'the cat is on the mat' are not simply bound up in our agreement to call that proposition 'true' but in whether the cat is on the mat?

Rorty: How can a cat be a criterion of truth? The notion that they can just restates the claim that propositions are made true by correspondence to what they are about. But has anybody explained what 'corresponds' means in this context? Has anybody explained how the cat by itself, as opposed to beliefs about the cat, 'make' another belief about the cat true?

peter fosl, the philosophers' magazine
www.philosophers.co.uk/archive/rorty_interviewed.htm