One of Richard Rorty’s most famous aphorisms is “Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way”. (Actually, he didn’t quite say this anywhere. What he said wasn’t quite as pithy, and he credited someone else, “On James’s view, ‘true’ resembles ‘good’ or ‘rational’ in being a normative notion, a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit with other sentences which are doing so”.)
It’s a great sound bite, and a very controversial one, because it suggests that truth doesn’t have to “get things right” about the world, it only has to be useful. However, I think in his essay, “Response to Ramberg”, in the book “Rorty and his Critics”, Rorty partially recanted the sentiment expressed in the aphorism: “Ramberg sets me straight here too. He tells me, in effect, that it was a mistake on my part to go from criticism of attempts to define truth as accurate representation of the intrinsic nature of reality to a denial that true statements get things right. What I should have done, he makes me realize, is to grant Davidson’s point that most of our beliefs about anything (snow, molecules, the moral law) must be true of that thing — must get that thing right”. p374 (All bolding is added for emphasis.)
In his reply, Rorty clarified what he means by “true of”. He does so by more fully embracing and explicating Donald Davidson’s concept of triangulation: “Since I now want to agree with Davidson on this point, I am going to have to stop saying, in imitation of Sellars, that ‘true’ and ‘refers’ do not name word-world relations. Nor shall I any longer be able to say that all our relations to the world are causal relations. I shall instead have to say that there are certain word-world relations which are neither causal nor representational— for instance, the relation ‘true of’ which holds between ‘Snow is white’ and snow, and the relation ‘refers to’ which holds between ‘snow’ and snow”. p374
I think it unfortunate that Rorty still referred to “certain” relations that are neither solely causal nor solely representational as “word-world” relations, because this still categorizes such relations as binary relations. What would have been clearer would have been to categorize them as triadic relations, which is the essential point that Davidson makes. All our relations with the world are triadic— among speaker, interpreter, and world. This is how we avoid the relativism implicit in “Truth is simply a compliment…”-type sayings.
I think Rorty’s quotation of Davidson makes clear how seeing all relations as triadic avoids relativism: “The ultimate source of both objectivity and communication is the triangle that, by relating speaker, interpreter and the world, determines the contents of thought and speech. Given this source there is no room for a relativized concept of truth”. pp15–16
Another way of emphasizing the necessity of viewing all relations as triadic, according to Rorty, is that it is wrong to use the phrase “norms set by our peers”: “It was a mistake to locate the norms at one corner of the triangle — where my peers are— rather than seeing them as, so to speak, hovering over the whole process of triangulation. (Brandom’s slogan ‘We have met the norms, and they are us’ is acceptable only if ‘us’ means ‘us as engaged in the process of triangulation’.) It is not that my peers have more to do with my obligation to say that snow is white than the snow does, or than I do”.
Finally, I think Rorty would largely agree with Peirce’s claim that “[T]he objectivity of truth really consists in the fact that, in the end, every sincere inquirer will be led to embrace it…”. Rorty says roughly the same thing, but substitutes freedom for sincerity: “My claim that if we take care of freedom truth will take care of itself implies that if people can say what they believe without fear, then…the task of justifying themselves to others and the task of getting things right will coincide. My argument is that since we can test whether we have performed the first task, and have no further test to apply to determine whether we have performed the second, Truth as end-in-itself drops out”. p347
Truth is not out there, but what is out there is part of the triad that makes most of our sentences true. Truth is also not “in here”, if that means solely in the norms of a language community. Rather, normative truth “hovers” in the triangle between speaker, interpreter, and world, outside any one or even pair of them.
Given his embrace of triangulation, Rorty proposed this less pithy aphorism about truth paying its way, which acknowledges the key insights of both pragmatism and realism: “What is true in pragmatism is that what you talk about depends not on what is real but on what it pays you to talk about. What is true in realism is that most of what you talk about you get right”.
Perhaps this modified version gets Rorty right, and stays close to his pithy one: “Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be both getting things right and paying their way”.
This essay was inspired by this tweet thread.
It turns out that I’d already published a Medium essay discussing Rorty’s “Response to Ramberg”. I found it when googling [“response to ramberg” rorty triangulation]. What else have I forgotten that I’ve written…
