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Rorty making conversation possible
1. Opening up
In an increasingly authoritarian world, one may ask what could make it more democratic? This blog entry reads Richard Rorty’s metaphilosophy as a project of “making conversation possible” — disarming philosophy’s fixation on objectivity, knowledge, and timeless truths in favor of solidarity and the ongoing work of public exchange.
Rorty’s public/private distinction provides the framework: in the public sphere, solidarity is sustained through open, inclusive dialogue; in the private sphere, individuals cultivate their own life-projects and vocabularies without the demand for universal assent.
This vision draws implicitly on Charles Sanders Peirce’s fallibilism— the recognition that all our beliefs, no matter how well established, remain open to revision in light of new experiences or arguments. Fallibilism is inherently anti-authoritarian: it rejects the idea that any person, institution, or tradition holds the final word, and it keeps the conversational space open against the closures of dogma.
As a literary analogy, the article turns to William Golding's novel "Lord of the Flies" in which the conch shell, which guarantees the speaker’s right to be heard, becomes a symbol of the fragile order that makes peaceful discussion and debate possible. Piggy’s defense of the conch is a defense of democracy’s conversational heart; when the shell is smashed, talk is replaced by violence and domination.
The article concludes that democracy is sustained not by secure foundations but by the fragile, persistent practice of conversation — a practice central to Rorty’s anti-authoritarian hope, and one that depends on our willingness to keep passing the conch.
2. Conversation as practice
In a Richard Rorty society, conversation is king — but it is an anti-authoritarian and fallible king, always open to revision, redescription, and even dismissal. For Rorty, this practice is best understood as a kind of Sellarsian “game of giving and asking for reasons” (GAR) (1): a communal activity where participants justify claims, undertake commitments and entitlements, and draw inferences from the words and gestures of others.
Different thinkers highlight different aspects of this game. Robert Brandom stresses the norm-governed structure of assertions and inferences within the practice itself; Hilary Putnam appeals to shared standards and pragmatic realism, arguing that we are answerable to the world as well as to each other; Nietzsche (2) , in his genealogical mode, seeks to overturn the rules altogether, privileging creative metaphors (3) and exposing the power struggles behind competing interpretations. Though sympathetic to Nietzsche, Rorty insists that what matters most is the openness of the exchange - its capacity to foster solidarity by giving voice to a plurality of participants and cultivating understanding.
Yet this very openness makes the practice vulnerable: to manipulation, to exclusion, and to power grabs. After all, we cannot be in solidarity with every perspective. Rorty’s anti-foundationalism thus demands not a naive openness, but a virtue he calls truthfulness — the willingness to say publicly what one believes, even when doing so is dangerous or disadvantageous. In contrast to “Truth” with a capital T, truthfulness preserves the space of conversation itself. It is a political and epistemic virtue — and one that authoritarian regimes actively punish.
Jürgen Habermas once claimed that Rorty suffers from the melancholy of a disappointed metaphysician, driven by nominalist spurs(4). But those spurs are also what drive Rorty to make conversation possible — by breaking down the universalist and foundationalist pretenses that close it off. Like a poet working to keep language fresh, the edifying philosopher does not aim to ground knowledge, but to enliven the democratic exchange: by offering new metaphors, new vocabularies and discarding stale ones, and refusing the finality of any single voice.
3. Philosophy against objectivity?
Richard Rorty’s intellectual journey can be viewed as a movement away from epistemological certainty – prioritizing conversation and contingency over truth and objectivity – while at the same time trying to offer political hope (respect and hope being key nodes of his thinking). The once young Platonist who wanted to hold “truth and justice in a single vision” became an unabashed antiplatonist. Over time, he turned against a range of philosophical commitments: representationalism, foundationalism, Cartesianism, and dualism — while in a moral sense he remained broadly Humean.
Rorty proclaimed that truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying, given the norms of justification in a particular conversational context. In other instances, taking a more explicitly semantic angle, we are told that the use of the adjective “true” is merely a compliment paid to sentences that are so well justified that they do not require further justification. In this way, he shifts the focus from truth as correspondence with reality to truth as what is warranted within a community of inquirers. This occurs alongside a broader displacement from experience to language. However, in a late response to Björn Ramberg, he makes what appears to be a qualified realist concession, stating in a broadly Davidsonian register that “what’s true in realism is that most of what we talk about we get right” and that “what’s true in pragmatism is what it pays you to talk about”. We thus become aware of a certain instability in his treatment of truth.
In the book "Rorty and his Critics", Richard Rorty receives friendly pushback from James Conant over the single-mindedness of his norms of inquiry. Rorty insists that the primary norm of inquiry is consensus, whereas Conant argues that we also require a norm of getting things right about the world, otherwise we are in big trouble. It is as if Conant is asking: what if the only peers you had were Machiavellian authoritarians?
The worry is that if justification is understood primarily in terms of persuading others, then those with greater rhetorical skill or institutional power may shape the justificatory space in ways that distort not only what is true, but also what comes to count as “truth” within a community. On this view, Rorty’s emphasis on consensus risks making inquiry vulnerable to forms of strategic manipulation, where success in argument is decoupled from any sensitivity to how things actually are.
Rorty’s response is to appeal to the virtue of truthfulness, often associated with his claim that “take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself”. On this view, what resists manipulation is not an external standard of correspondence, but a disposition to speak openly and without strategic distortion, even when doing so is costly. If freedom is institutionally secured, truthfulness can sustain a more honest form of discourse, and through continued exchange, critique, and revision, inquiry will tend toward better outcomes in a practical sense. This remains, however, a hope rather than a guarantee, and it retains the vulnerabilities of the very conversational model it seeks to defend.
So, from Rorty’s side there’s a hope that we can have democratic institutions that can safeguard freedom of speech to ensure that people can speak their minds without fear of punishment and that truth (or justification within the community) will emerge from that freedom. But, as pointed out, this idealism could be dangerous in the wrong context. In totalitarian societies, or societies where power is concentrated in the hands of a few, the task of "justifying" oneself could easily become a tool of oppression, not a means of reaching something close to truth.
Similarily, Rorty’s dismissal of objectivity has also received critique from new pragmatists like Steven Levine who hold that we cannot give up the notion that we are answerable to the world (5), as well as to each other. On Levine’s view one may remain broadly Deweyan and go for warranted assertibility, but there are still norms of correctness, of getting the world right, we can’t just reduce it all to intersubjective justifications. Levine argues that Rorty’s view is traceable to his idea of the second enlightenment. If we in the first enlightenment renounce the authority of God, we are, according to Rorty, in the second enlightenment renouncing “the epistemic authority of objective reality”. It’s as if Rorty is paraphrasing Nietzsche: “Truth and objectivity are dead; we should just stick to justification”. To Rorty, the world is out there, sure, and there are causal pressures, but they hold no rational authority, they cannot enter into the game of giving and asking for reasons, only we can do that.
Robert Brandom who wants to keep objectivity alive, makes a few distinctions and says that,
* Subjective things – are those over which each individual has incontestable authority.
* Social things – are those over which communities have incontestable authority.
* Objective things – neither individuals nor communities have incontestable authority but which themselves exercise authority over claims, that in the normative sense that speakers are responsible to them count as being about those things.
Brandom tells a story that Rorty’s hostility toward objectivity came into being when Rorty started to treat the authority of the objective in the same eliminativist (or deflating) way that he treated the authority of the subjective. In this view the subjective and the objective are vocabularies among many and neither of them carry a special authority, objectivity-talk is useful(6), but it does not represent an independent authority outside our practices. Brandom wants to hold on to objectivity and maintains that the architecture of authority that underlies objectivity is compatible with the notion that it is we who grant authority by making and taking reasons. What he is groping for is that objectivity is somehow built into the very framework of authority in the practice of giving and asking for reasons. The practice itself is organized so that no one is the final authority; to be really entitled, a claim must withstand challenges from the community of inquiring scorekeepers. This open-ended recursiveness gives the practice its objectivity. For Brandom, objectivity is a result of a system of checks and balances, a reciprocal authority and responsibility. Objectivity to Brandom can be construed as “the stability and normativity that arises from the structure of mutual scorekeeping” (7). From this standpoint, objectivity is not something external out there, it is already inside our practices and something we enact because the very act of granting authority is governed by rules that no one individual controls.
So, does a Brandomian perspective align with Rorty’s views?
In his activity of setting aside “bad questions”, Rorty has sometimes redescribed objectivity to mean solidarity — agreement within a community of inquirers. Brandom agrees with Rorty that the normative statuses – the commitments and the entitlements – are being instituted by us. They differ from one another when Brandom asserts that it is the normative framework itself – the way authority is distributed, challenged and conferred – that underwrites objectivity. Steven Levine ponders that had Rorty accepted this “he could have endorsed the new pragmatic way of seeing things without endangering his central commitment to epistemological antiauthoritarianism”.
4. Rorty and the facts
Hannah Arendt once wrote “Facts and events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries, theories—even the most wildly speculative ones—produced by the human mind.” (8).
To Rorty, facts are understood as, on the one hand, a physical stimulus, causal pressure, and, on the other hand, our antecedent linguistic choice. So, invoking or engaging with a fact is, in this view, always enmeshed in the workings of a pragmatic, linguistic social practice. This finds an analogy in Dewey when he speaks of the self as “not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action” (9).
An authoritarian regime can obviously suppress both dimensions of a Rortyan fact so that it better aligns with their views: they can deny the physical stimulus ever occurred and they can make a linguistic move that is somehow blurring the story of the thing or the event so that it better suits their needs. Crudely, one can say that they “pick a picture to serve a purpose “.But in a limited sense this is what everyone does. As William James said, “there is no truth without some interest [from the agent],” and to Rorty this chimes with the idea that our descriptions of reality are tools rather than mirrors, shaped by purposes and aims. This line of thought is reinforced by Hilary Putnam’s pragmatist critique of the fact/value distinction: against the idea that facts and values belong to separate domains, Putnam argues that “knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of values” and vice versa, and that knowledge of theories, facts, and values are mutually entangled. In his view, the essence of pragmatism lies precisely in this entanglement of fact, value, and theory — a theme already present in James and Dewey, and carried forward in different ways by Rorty. Descriptions are shot through with normativity: they carry intentions, rules, inferential commitments, and entitlements. In that sense, our use of facts is always already caught up in the normative space of giving and asking for reasons.
5. Second Enlightenment
Robert Brandom suggests that “pragmatism points us at the sort of freedom that consists in humans taking full responsibility for our own doings and claimings.”
This resonates with Rorty’s understanding of pragmatism as anti-authoritarianism in both ethics and epistemology.
Prior to the first Enlightenment, human beings were largely committed to the view that “the ultimate sources of our responsibilities and obligations lie outside us, in something non-human, in the way things anyway are, apart from and independently of our practical activities and attitudes.” The Enlightenment marked a decisive shift toward autonomy: we were no longer rationally answerable to a divine authority or transcendent command. We took responsibility for our commitments.
Rorty radicalizes this movement. In what he calls a “second Enlightenment,” we cease to regard Reality itself as an epistemic tribunal. This is not a denial that the world exists or that it exerts causal pressure upon us. Rather, it is the rejection of the idea that reality “as it is in itself” carries rational authority. It cannot enter the game of giving and asking for reasons; only participants in that game can do so. This is the epistemological dimension of Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism.
The ethical and political dimension follows from this shift. As Brandom puts it, “instead of looking outside of human practices for our ultimate commitments we are to look to what emerges in conducting the human conversation.” When he ponders that “liberal political institutions are to structure that conversation procedurally — in effect to provide the language in which that conversation takes place,” the implication becomes clear: once we abandon non-human tribunals, the burden falls on our institutions to keep conversation “going”. The responsibility once attributed to God, and later to Reality, now rests with us.
If authority is a wholly human affair, and no vocabulary can claim final triumph over the others, there is still no guarantee that conversation will remain open. The very fact that authority arises within our practices means that it can also be captured, distorted, or insulated from challenge. We must therefore keep in view what Brandom describes as the ethos of the Enlightenment that: “the liability to criticism — assessment of reasons — and genuine authority are inseparable. Only what can be queried and challenged to justify itself by providing reasons is properly authoritative.” The question, then, is what institutional and cultural arrangements can sustain this liability to criticism — and prevent authority from congealing into coercive finality.
6. Public/private distinction
If we are to follow Rorty, we need to view objectivity not as correspondence with reality “as it is in itself,” but as whatever we no longer have good reasons to doubt within our shared practices of justification. Furthermore, we have to abandon foundations and accept a world in which no one has the final word. In Rorty’s parlance, we need to drop our metaphysical urge — the desire to locate some authority outside conversation that could settle disputes once and for all, be it God, the ultimate nature of Reality, “the way the world really is”, or the idea that Human Rights are somehow written into the fabric of the universe rather than sustained by historical struggle and democratic solidarity. Rorty also tells us that cruelty is the worst thing we do, and this sets the stage for his public/private distinction. In the public sphere, we keep conversation going democratically — through imaginative empathy, tolerance, and shared institutions — and we try to prevent disagreement from sliding into authoritarianism and cruelty. The public sphere must be structured so that no vocabulary can exempt itself from challenge. In the private sphere, which Rorty famously defines as “what we do in our solitude,” individuals can pursue their projects of self-creation without demanding universal assent.
The public side of this distinction can be likened to the conch in Golding’s novel "Lord of the Flies": as long as the conch remains in circulation, every voice can be heard. A public ethic of mutuality is at work, and no go-getter can assert final authority through his private vocabulary of force and resentment. The conch, which can be understood as a fragile institutionalization of the space of reasons, does not guarantee wisdom or agreement, but it guarantees a minimal democratic norm: that speech, rather than violence, is the medium through which disputes are negotiated. In the novel, speech and conversation come to a brutal end with the death of Piggy and the smashing of the conch. The message from the authoritarian brutes is clear: conversation doesn’t matter. The conch functions only insofar as the participants recognize it as authoritative; its power is normative rather than physical.
7. The Conch and the fragility of democratic authority
In the opening chapter of Lord of the Flies, William Golding depicts a group of children stranded on a deserted island, and who are attempting to construct a miniature civilization without the guidance of adults. They are, in a sense, beginning from scratch — negotiating how to coexist, deliberate, and cooperate.
The discovery of the shell marks an early critical junction in this fragile social order:
“Ralph stopped smiling and pointed to the lagoon. Something creamy lay among the ferny weeds.
‘A stone.’
‘No, a shell.’”
At this stage, the shell is merely an object of nature. It becomes something more only when Piggy proposes a use for it:
“We can use it to call the others. Have a meeting. They’ll come when they hear us.”
With this suggestion, the shell is transformed from a natural object into an institutional device. It acquires a function within a shared practice. As the narrative progresses, it is increasingly referred to not simply as a shell, but as “the conch.” The linguistic shift reflects a normative one: the object now carries authority.
That authority, however, is not nature-given. It rests entirely on mutual recognition. The conch has force only insofar as the boys continue to treat it as binding — as the marker of who may speak and be heard. In this respect, it calls to mind Hannah Arendt’s remark that “the power of judgment rests on a potential agreement with others.” The authority of judgment, like that of the conch, depends on the expectation of shared acknowledgment.
When recognition collapses — through resentment, foul play, domination, or violence — the institution collapses with it. The smashing of the conch does not merely destroy an object; it signals the withdrawal of mutual recognition.
8.Democracy as Anti-Authoritarian Hope
Rorty’s penchant for the word hope — as in the phrase “hope instead of knowledge” — signals something central in his pragmatism, namely the idea that democracy, like inquiry, is not oriented toward final truths but is open to future possibilities. If knowledge suggests certainty, closure, and the attainment of something secure, hope is instead gesturing to what has not yet been realised, to what may still become possible through human effort. We can hope that future human beings, future audiences, may succeed in creating freer and more humane societies than the ones we inhabit now. We can hope for more fruitful ways of talking and thinking, and for forms of social life in which we become increasingly anti-authoritarian in both ethics and epistemology.
This futurity is already present in Dewey’s notion of “warranted assertibility,” which Rorty admired for shifting the focus away from truth as correspondence and redirecting it to the practical conditions under which claims are justified. As Larry A. Hickman observes, the “warranted” part of the phrase refers to the past — to inquiry already carried out, to judgments already rendered — while the “assertibility” part point to the future, to situations not yet encountered and tests not yet performed. In that sense, warranted assertibility is always provisional: it gathers the results of previous inquiry but remains exposed to revision in the light of future situations. This temporal structure is central to pragmatism’s preference for justification over truth.
Rorty’s emphasis on justification rather than truth carries the same temporal orientation. A justificatory process is always revisable; what is justified now may later be challenged by a future audience with better tools, richer experiences, or more fruitful redescriptions. Truth, by contrast, often suggests something unconditional and final, something standing beyond revision. The danger, from a pragmatist outlook, is that appeals to truth can function as closures of conversation. Justification remains open to criticism, whereas truth easily takes on the role of final authority. In this sense, justification is anti-authoritarian in a way that truth often is not.
Something similar can be said about democracy. Democracy, in its strongest sense, contains within itself a form of institutional self-criticism. It maintains spaces in which beliefs, institutions, and authorities can be challenged, defended, revised, or even abandoned. It does not rest on metaphysical certainties but on ongoing practices of free speech, public deliberation, and what Sellars and Brandom describe as the game of giving and asking for reasons. No point of view is placed beyond criticism; every claim is, in principle, answerable to others. Democratic authority is therefore not final authority but revisable authority. It is anti-authoritarian not because it abolishes authority, but because it subjects authority to continual criticism.
This is why democracy can be understood as a form of anti-authoritarian hope. It is the hope that by taking care of freedom — by preserving the institutions and practices that keep conversation open — we may continue to revise our beliefs and widen our solidarities. In this sense, democracy is not the triumph of truth but the preservation of the possibility of revision. It keeps open the space in which future audiences may do better than we have done, they may even pursue entirely different Emersonian projects (10) of becoming. To say, with Rorty, that if we take care of freedom truth can take care of itself, is to say that democratic hope lies not in the possession of certainty but in the willingness to keep the conversation going — to keep passing the conch.