Pascal Engel

There are far better books available for those wanting a good insight into Richard Rorty's writing on truth: Philosophy and Social Hope is an outstandingly readable, engaging collection of essays which sets out his views in much more clarity than this volume, which takes the form of a rather pedantic argument between Pascal Engel, a former "continental philosopher" (believing in relativism and all those wacky gallic notions) who has seen the light of analytic truth and Rorty, a former analytical philosopher who famously became persuaded that there isn't actually a light and who adopted a pragmatist view (which is a polite way of saying he ended up believing in "cultural relativism" and all those wacky gallic notions).

Like Rorty, I have trouble seeing any way round objections to the correspondence theory of truth, so I'm firmly in his camp (wacky though it may seem): There's no correspondence between sentences and reality, the marginal utility of a statement being "true" (and not just "useful") is minimal and we should instead satisfy ourselves for descriptions of the world we find to be useful without caring how, whether or why they map onto some intangible external thing called reality.

Engel's arguments strike me as technical and implausible, since his first move is to surrender a large part of the ground by conceding there are real problems with correspondence - I doubt I do him justice, but he's reduced to saying things like 'correspondence or no, we *do* talk in terms which assume there is such a truth, and that mode of discourse in itself has some essential value and meaning which would be lost were we to relegate ourselves to merely finding sentences useful'.

I'm not persuaded, and Rorty's brilliant writing elsewhere (especially Philosophy and Social Hope and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) heaps grist to his wacky gallic mill.

Lastly, this book is short - it's about an hour's read, partly comprises a book review by Rorty of Engel's book on truth which is available online, and the copy I purchased was absurdly expensive.

One day the world may be turned on to (the recently deceased) Richard Rorty, but this isn't the book to do it.… (altro)