ABSTRACT
Rorty’s ‘pragmatism’ is directed towards the ‘dissolution of the traditional problematic about truth’.1 This traditional problematic is provoked, according to Rorty, by sceptical worries, the need to ask and try to answer questions like ‘Why believe what I take to be true?’ and ‘Why do what I take to be right?’2 In order to answer such questions we have to appeal to ‘something more than the ordinary, retail, detailed, concrete reasons which have brought one to one’s present view’. This ‘something’ must transcend the actual procedures for justifying beliefs and actions of any community since it is what will determine whether and to what extent their procedures are capable of producing true beliefs or right actions. This ‘common ground’ of all communities has sometimes been located in the realm of Being as opposed to that of Becoming, as with Plato’s Forms, sometimes within ourselves, as with the seventeenth-century idea that examination of our minds could show us the method for discovering truth, and more recently in the nature of language itself.3 This urge to transcendence leads to the notion of truth as correspondence to ‘the way things really are’ where this relates to the ‘common ground’ and how things appear in its light, and to the idea of procedures of justification which are in accordance with reality and not just a historical community’s ways of doing what it calls ‘justifying’. We thus get the development of the philosophical disciplines of ontology, as the specification of the nature and fundamental structure of reality, and epistemology, as showing how we are to get in touch with reality as so understood.4 The attempt to resolve sceptical questions leads to the view that the universe has an ‘intrinsic nature’, either, as it were, speaking its own language (which we can perhaps learn) or having been made in accordance with a language, the world as God or as made by God.5 In order to think or act correctly we must subordinate ourselves to something non-human, to ‘the Intrinsic Nature of Reality’.6
