Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism
&gt; <i>The point of pragmatism is that a philosophical problem or distinction is only real to the extent that it has consequences—and those consequences are, in fact, the meaning of the problem or distinction. Dissolving those questions, casting doubt on the existence of any such consequences, was a frequent move by James and Dewey and a favorite move of Rorty’s.</i><p>It reads like an argument technique and not a tool for illuminating truth about the world. Just in the previous paragraph, he takes  
all the meaningful value of philosophy off the table and puts it out of scope:<p>&gt; <i>Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism speaks to and for those who, living in a post-positivist, Wittgensteinian world, would never ask themselves questions like: “Do objects really have the properties they seem to, or are they only appearances? How can we know?” “What is the essence of a human being? Soul? Personality? Genetic code?” “Is mind material or immaterial?” “Are some actions intrinsically right or wrong, regardless of all consequences (or none) to all parties concerned, anywhere in the universe, in saecula saeculorum?” “Can an act be both caused and free?” “Can something be objectively good even if no one anywhere thinks it so?” “Can a proposition be true if no one exists?”</i><p>Maybe I&#x27;m misreading, and I&#x27;m going to go way out on a limb here with my reaction to it. It&#x27;s just more dialectic materialism, where to even start a conversation with someone using it, you have to accept ontological premises that are necessarily absurd. To another commenter here, it does indeed sound like Poppers paraphrase, which is a thought terminating cliche that protects lazy minds from dissonance. When inclusion of authors and texts from unexpected* places was transgressive it added perspective, but now, it&#x27;s just designed to homogenize and liquify culture to produce nihilistic ideologues who can&#x27;t be trusted as fellow citizens to share a recourse to truth.<p>Personally, I think secular philosophers were tricked into giving up the one tool or razor that would have kept them from drowning in the hall of mirrors flooded with bullshit that their field has become, and that is the question, &quot;is this philosophy, ideology, or critical theory designed to deceive and subordinate us to others, and if so, who, how, and to what end?&quot;<p>The beauty of it is you can apply it to religion easily, even though the result is pretty clumsy, but it gets interesting when someone like this Rorty takes all the meaningful questions off the table first, as you should feel the hairs on your neck stand up, because you are being rounded on by an intellectual predator.<p>If you just take a cryptanalyst or a hackers mindset to it and ask, &quot;am I being deceived?&quot; the whole secular dialectic materialist edifice crumbles. I would argue that this question is also necessarily theistic, as it presupposes truth, and a belief in truth is proof of a belief in <i>something</i> divine by which truth can be measured or compared. That is how fragile secular presuppositions are. As in, boom, you just found out you belive in god and that mythical evil is just plain old deception, just what the crazies have been banging on about for millennia. For many that&#x27;s kind of an oh shit moment, because if that&#x27;s true, some other things become very urgent.<p>Nobody articulates this stuff, but it&#x27;s the underlying schism in the culture, where though we might see barberous religious fundamentalists filling the heads of children with hate, what these people really believe is that there is truth, and they are innoculating kids against being deceived by thinkers who begin by taking truth off the table, since once you&#x27;ve done that, nothing has fixed meaning or consequences, and all that&#x27;s left is a material power struggle.<p>While I don&#x27;t need for anyone to agree with my views, they should at least try to understand that the irreconcilable difference between conservatives and liberals reduces to a fixed belief in truth. It&#x27;s the only meaningful question, and based on a light reading of the article, this Rorty guy seems like he&#x27;s just producing more deceptive misdirections.<p>To me, the ideas in the article sounded like just more NINO: Nihilisim-In-Nihilism-Out.