From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Wed Nov 12 2003 - 18:20:12 GMT
Wim,
Wim said:
My point was not that Rorty would advocate such resistance (I only guess that he would advocate resistance against some "group-think", e.g. -being considered leftist by you- rightist "group-think"). My point was that he doesn't defend "group-think" and that his theory can be used to support resistance against it.
There's no point in principled resistance against all "group-think". Every intellectual pattern of value in which several people participate (e.g. the MoQ) constitutes a form of "group-think". No relevant intellectual pattern of value (with relevance to others than its initiator) can do without. I haven't read Rorty, but from what I read about him via others (on this list) it may well be a fundamental premise of his philosophy that there's no other way to justify a statement that something is 'true' than to quote others stating the same.
Matt:
The last two things Wim has written on intersubjective agreement (the above and the post before) are just great. I think Wim's major point is that we should think of "intersubjective agreement" as a philosophical redescription and "groupthink" as a political desire. When Rorty redescribes the subject/object axis in terms of more or less intersubjective agreement, he isn't prescribing any change in our behavior or the way we conduct ourselves. He's simply redescribing what's going on, much like Pirsig's redescription of causation. Groupthink, on the other hand, I take to be the political desire that everybody conform to what the "group thinks," calling up the picture of communist satires where what the group thinks isn't decided by the group, but by a few elites.
Wim, I think, is entirely correct that Rorty's redescription aids in justifying a fight against groupthink because the idea of intersubjective agreement is based entirely on justificatory practices: you have to justify what you do to others in the public sphere. With SOMic, objectivist descriptions, the fear is that a small elite will claim special relation to Truth and attempt to force everybody to conform to it, e.g. the priesthood during the Middle Ages. What the objectivist priests do is the same as the anti-SOMists (they try and justify to other people what they do, particularly their special relation to Truth), but if we follow Rorty's redescription, we will at least not have to worry about people falling for the idea that _anybody_ has a special and exclusive relationship with Truth.
On the idea of Rorty's fundamental truth, I think Platt has the idea that Rorty can't admit that he has these without contradicting himself. This is wrong. Rorty fully admits to having fundamental beliefs, like the belief in democracy. He simply doens't think they are ahistorical, born to us from outside history. The blood spilt and the arguments made on behalf of democracy are, for Rorty, enough to have belief in democracy to not need a special relation to something beyond these two things.
Matt
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