It would be nice if we could unlock the secrets of the Universe. It would be wonderful if we found the final theory, the single equation that served as the master key to opening all the doors of nature for us. It would be wonderful if there were a final language-game that all human beings in all times and places could accept as descriptive of their world.
Unfortunately, none of these things are ever to be. Should we ever finalize a marriage between quantum mechanics and general relativity, it will in all likelihood create as many new problems as it solved old ones. One of the lessons of science is that each new theory doesn't so much close doors for research as it does open up whole new wings on buildings for further research.
Taking his cue from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, philosopher Richard Rorty is trying to wean us away from a view of science as somehow the metanarrative for the human race. Rather than view science as the key to opening the locked doors of nature, or (to take another metaphor from an early work), cleaning the mirror of nature that resides in something we call "the human mind", science is the unexciting and rather mundane pursuit of the human species figuring out ways of coping with its environment in order to survive, and perhaps thrive a little. Indeed, from Rorty's perspective, science isn't even the most fruitful, or interesting, or important way human beings are coming to grips with the world in which we live. Literature, art, the social sciences - these are not so much keys to something we call truth as avenues for discovering ways of living in solidarity with our fellow human beings as we traverse this world through our 3 score and 10 years. Science, then, like literature, and music, sociology and anthropology, are nothing more and nothing less than one more adaptations human beings have for survival. It is not qualitatively distinct from the discovery by chimps of tool use and the art of war; it only differs because we want to insist, on no evidence other than wish-fulfillment, that human beings themselves are somehow qualitatively distinct from all other creatures on earth.
The service of philosophy is less as arbiter of final truth - because there is no such thing - or judge over all the narratives we have to cope with our lives to find the "best fit" to the world, than it is one more therapy. Philosophy does us all a service when it points us in possible directions towards those language-games that serve the greatest need of the greatest number; it should allow for the possibility of error, and cheerfully eschew the idea that it has a judicial role. Philosophy, like science, is best when it helps us cope.
Echoing Dewey, who claimed that most of our beliefs are mostly true most of the time, Rorty describes "truth" as something that not so much resides in some final vocabulary toward which we are working through whatever mechanism - be it science, philosophy, sociology, or whatever - as a web of beliefs and desires we use to cope with the world. This web of beliefs and desires is in constant flux as we encounter new words, new sentences, whole new paragraphs that describe the world in new and surprising ways. Sometimes these new words and sentences become woven into the fabric of our beliefs and desires, and in so doing, the whole warp and woof is changed, not through some occult phenomenon known as rationality or argument, but just through the adaptation of new words and sentences that open up exciting possibilities for us.
The best we can ever do is learn to cope in better and better ways with the world around us. We will never know the world as it is in itself, because this fiction serves no purpose. Things do not exist in themselves, but as parts of the various webs of relationships we come to represent through various sounds and marks on paper to try and make sense of them. These sounds and marks are not occult phenomenon, but the part of another unremarkable human adaptation we call language. Language is another way we have of coping with our environment.
I find Rorty's views refreshing because, by flattening out the artificial hierarchies we use to congratulate ourselves on our cleverness, it reminds us that we are just Darwinian creatures having to cope with our environment. Unlike tigers, who hunt, or zebras, who herd together, we use things like language and science and anthropology and philosophy as part of the package natural selection has given us to survive. That's really all there is to it.
Virtual Tin Cup
