Truth and Freedom

Abstract

Richard Rorty once famously remarked that, “if you take care of freedom, truth will take of itself.” I take there to be something deeply right about this thought—but I also think there is something profoundly misleading about it is as well. In this essay I want to say why that is, and why truth and freedom need each other—neither can go it alone.

Thanks to David Pruitt, Nate Sheff and Samuel Wheeler for comments.

Notes

1. David Estlund, “Beyond Fairness and Deliberation: The Epistemic Dimension of Democratic Authority,” in Deliberative Democracy, ed. J. Bohman and W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 173–203.

2. The obvious example here is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, but interpretations of the marketplace argument obviously vary enormously.

3. See Michael Fuerstein, “Epistemic Democracy and the Social Character of Knowledge,” Episteme 5 (2008): 74–93, and Michael P. Lynch, In Praise of Reason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012) for variations on this theme.

4. For a direct argument of this sort, see Robert Talisse, Democracy and Moral Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, ed. W. Rehg, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 107.

5. Richard Rorty, “Education as Socialization and Individuation,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 118.

6. Rorty, “Education as Socialization and Individuation,” 119.

7. Richard Rorty, “Universality and Truth,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. B. Brandom (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2000), 7.

8. Rorty, “Universality and Truth,” 2.

9. Rorty, “Universality and Truth,” 5.

10. I pursue it in Michael P. Lynch, Truth as One and Many (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

11. We may be unaware that we are committed to some principles by our commitments to other principles. Thus if you challenge my commitment to principle P, I might successfully give you a reason for my commitment even if you fail to appreciate that I’ve done so simply because you are unaware that P is entailed by some more fundamental principle to which you are already committed. This should come as no surprise.

12. This conclusion is slightly softened by the fact that it leaves open the possibility that a negative change in epistemic view—transitions from holding a principle to not holding it—might well be recognizable as rational. But this is small consolation.

13. Michael P. Lynch, “Democracy as a Space of Reasons,” in Truth and Democracy, ed. A. Norris and J. Elkins (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

14. See Lynch, In Praise of Reason and “Democracy as a Space of Reasons.”