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Richard Rorty dies
Here is one account, not many obits are up yet. Rorty was important for economists for a few reasons...
1. He emphasized that there is no unique way to translate the results of a model into an interpretation of the real world. This is trivial for those who know it, but not everyone does.
That means when DSquared writes: "[The case for free trade] can't be derived in an economy with a positive rate of profit; Ian Steedman proved this one in a series of papers discussed on Rob Vienneau's blog" the correct response is one never thought it could be derived in the first place.
See Rorty's readable Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; to some this is warmed-over Quine mixed with Continental gobbledy-gook but you can think that and still value the book. This book (only $200!) has a wonderful essay on the importance of Rorty for economists and economic method.
2. Rorty stressed the importance of knowing fiction and the humanities for the social sciences or policy assessment.
3. Rorty wanted to erect "avoidance of cruelty" as a starting point for thinking about the liberal order. I don't think this quite works but it does represent a major and important challenge to the economic way of thinking and indeed to the entire classical liberal tradition.
Unlike many modern liberals I take "the inevitability of death, probably painful" to be one of the starting points for political thought. That being the case, cruelties are looming all the time and we need to pick and choose our noble actions. I have mixed feelings about the "letting happen/causing" distinction and I place greater weight on ensuring the peaks of human existence. Rorty's view, consistently applied, would turn the entire planet over to the (other) animals. I am not comfortable when I hear the phrase "optimal amount of cruelty" but I don't wish to ignore those issues either.
Check out these comments.
The bottom line: Rorty is easy to criticize, but he remains one of more important contemporary thinkers to read.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 10, 2007 at 05:25 PM in Philosophy | Permalink
Comments
My favorite Rorty quote is from his November 1999 Atlantic Monthly article "Phony Science Wars:"
"... 'the homosexual,' 'the Negro,' and 'the female' are best seen not as inevitable classifications of human beings but rather as inventions that have done more harm than good."
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jun 10, 2007 5:45:28 PM
'The female', classic. I wonder what his wife thought of her womanhood being a harmful invention.
Posted by: herman at Jun 10, 2007 6:24:12 PM
Isn't fiction stuff that didn't actually happen? What should it have to do with "the social sciences or policy assessment"?
Posted by: TGGP at Jun 10, 2007 7:09:28 PM
Unlike many modern liberals I take "the inevitability of death, probably painful" to be one of the starting points for political thought.
Does this mean you exclude transhumanism a priori?
Isn't fiction stuff that didn't actually happen? What should it have to do with "the social sciences or policy assessment"?
One thing it does is helps us consider concrete scenarios instead of abstract possibilities. Unfortunately, our minds really need that.
Posted by: Nick Tarleton at Jun 10, 2007 8:04:25 PM
great post. Rorty might be avoided like the plague in philosophy departments, but his influence spreads to other, more receptive areas.
Posted by: thehova at Jun 10, 2007 9:30:29 PM
I spent several years deep into Rorty's work - and I would disagree with Tyler that he is one of the important contemporary thinkers to read.
I think it is better to skip Rorty unless:-
1. you are a demotivated quietistic Wittgensteinian who needs to get worse before you can get better and
2. you are prepared to devote a lot of time to the matter.
Posted by: Bruce G Charlton at Jun 11, 2007 2:04:02 AM
A fun Rorty quote:
"I think that the English departments have made it possible to have a career teaching English without caring much about literature or knowing much about literature but just producing rather trite, formulaic, politicized readings of this or that text. This makes it an easy target. There's a kind of formulaic leftist rhetoric that's been developed in the wake of Foucault, which permits you to exercise a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion on anything from the phonebook to Proust. It's sort of an obviously easy way to write books, articles, and it produces work of very low intellectual quality. And so, this makes this kind of thing an easy target from the outside. It permits people like Roger Kimball and D'Souza to say these people aren't really scholars, which is true. I think that the use made of Foucault and Derrida in American departments of literature has been, on the whole, unfortunate."
FWIW, may I suggest as an alternative to Rorty the much-too-underknown Stephen Toulmin? I wrote an intro to Toulmin's thinking here. Just as subtle, far less political, much more useful.
Posted by: Michael Blowhard at Jun 11, 2007 9:28:16 AM
And another thing:
I had an interesting e-mail exchange with Rorty a few years ago, but I seem to have lost the messages. I had been reading 'Achieving our country' and 'Against bosses, against oligarchies'.
The nub of it was that I was taking a somewhat magisterial non-partisan view of politics by suggesting that - given the assumption that democracy was a good thing - that the fact Democrats and Republicans alternated in power over the decades maybe implied that each party's view was incomplete and after a while required correction by a dose of the alternative. At any given time one party's approach might be somewhat better than the other party's, but this situation would almost inevitably reverse after a while.
Rorty's reply included the belief that he didn't think the Republicans really had any valuable positive ideals, but maybe had a small role in undoing the excesses of the Democrats; and also the belief that the problem with democracy was that people usually voted against their own interests (and usually therefore got it wrong - resulting in too many Republican administrations).
This gave me a sudden insight that many on the political left (old left) like Rorty were not genuinely democratic (of course this applies to the right as well, but this is less surprising perhaps) - but R. regarded democracy as a means to the end of electing the Democrats. Or, let's say, he was a Democrat first and democratic second.
This helped me clarify the idea that democracy entails the assumption that - on average and in the long term - the democratic process is better at choosing between governments than are expert intellectuals.
This in turn requires a certain deference from intellectuals towards the outcome of elections. Such deference is pretty rare - Rorty didn't have it. But I think it is necessary from truly democratic intellectuals, and in this respect Rorty was deficient - he was nothing like as democratic as he thought he was!
As for his philosophy - the key error IMHO was that he did not take seriously the point made decades ago by Ernest Gellner in Words and Things - which was that the starting point for modern philosophy had to be understanding _why_ science is such an amazingly successful (valid, progressive) mode of knowledge. And therefeore not, as in Wittgenstein and Rorty, trying to evaluate _whether_ science is a valid and progressive form of knowledge.
The same point - mutatis mutandis - could be made about capitalism.
Posted by: Bruce G Charlton at Jun 11, 2007 11:02:29 AM
... warmed-over Quine mixed with Continental gobbledy-gook ...
No better seven-word summary of a philosophy book has ever been written.
Read Quine. Read Davidson, who polishes smooth many of the rough edges of Quine's philosophy.
Skip Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
Posted by: Brock at Jun 11, 2007 12:11:46 PM
If Rorty was even warmed over Quine, he could be read.
He isn't and shouldn't.
Posted by: michael webster at Jun 12, 2007 10:53:44 PM
Tyler's comment responding to DSquared citation of myself and Ian Steedman is pure ignorance. DSquared was referring to mathematical properties of models of, for example, comparative advantage. The "real world" does not come into it, and one would have to do some work to show that Ian Steedman's work was not consistent with the idea that he was participating in some community's language game.
Posted by: Robert at Jun 13, 2007 6:16:27 AM
