I am, by nature and upbringing, dogmatic, but I fell in among bad companions earlier in my life – Lisp and Smalltalk programmers, certain philosophers of science, and the American Pragmatist philosophers. They made me better at my job of a software consultant.
Something that really struck me, way back when, was part of the Introduction to Richard Rorty’s Consequences of Pragmatism. I offer it to you, with a little light commentary.
Rorty is writing to other philosophers. A topic in philosophy is “When are you justified in saying something is capital-T True?” Pragmatists have their own theory of truth that I think the vast majority of philosophers disagree with. So here’s Rorty. Emphasis and paragraph breaks are mine.
Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define the word “true” or “good,” supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area. It might, of course, have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition of “number.” They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven’t.
The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call “philosophy”—a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness.
This does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions any more. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that “there is no such thing” as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a “relativistic” or “subjectivist” theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. (pp 1-2)
It is very freeing to realize that you don’t have to have an opinion.
(As an aside, Rorty is providing a strategy for working with what an earlier post called “essentially contested concepts.” The strategy is: derail the conversation into a more productive topic.)
But just changing the subject isn’t enough. The purpose of thinking is to successfully get around in the world. Controversies about essentially contested concepts, if resolved, typically “cash out” by guiding action. Wanting to change the subject doesn’t remove the need to make choices. So, in the absence of any firm notion of Truth or the Good, how do you decide what to do?
I’ll touch on that later with another catchy snippet, William James’s story of a squirrel. I’ll explain how OG Extreme Programmer Ron Jeffries used the point behind the snippet in a joint consulting gig we had.