On the Relationship between Truth and Liberal Politics
This paper examines the relationship between truth and liberal politics via the work of Bernard Williams and Richard Rorty. I argue that Williams is right to think that there are positive relations between truth, specifically a realist understanding of truth, and liberal politics that Rorty's abandonment of the realist vocabulary of truth undermines. At the heart of this concern is the worry that abandoning the realist vocabulary opens up the possibility that the standards of justification for our true beliefs can be manipulated by those with the power to do so in order to further their own political ends. The political benefit of realism is that it fixes the standards of justification and makes them immune to manipulation by the use of power. However, I suggest that there is a form of realism available that Rorty can accept which would deliver the political benefits of the realist vocabulary without requiring him to accept the thick realist metaphysics that he wants to avoid. My conclusion is that there is a positive and important relationship between truth and liberal politics, a relationship that can be sustained without any necessary commitment to realist metaphysics.
The Aims of Political Philosophy in John Rawls, Bernard Williams, and Richard Rorty
What ought a political philosophy seek to achieve? How should political philosophy address itself to its subject matter? What is the relation between political philosophy and other forms of reflective inquiry? In answering these metaphilosophical questions, political philosophy has long been dominated by a roughly utopian self-image. According to this conception, the aim of political philosophy is the rigorous development of theoretical ideals of justice, state, and law. I show that leading political philosophers of the twentieth century, most notably John Rawls, have continued to perpetuate this utopian conception of the aims of political philosophy. I then explicate an emerging alternative metaphilosophical view of political philosophy which has recently emerged in two seemingly disparate strands of political philosophy: the first strand being Bernard Williams's realist conception of political critique and the second strand being Richard Rorty's pragmatist conception of cultural criticism. The views developed by Williams and Rorty leave to the side questions about political ideals and focuses instead on definite ways in which we can improve the situations in which we find ourselves. Such improvement, Williams and Rorty provocatively argue, does not require an ideal theory of best justice.
Problems of the Self: Deciding to believe
When the subject of belief is proposed for philosophical discussion, one may tend to think of such things as religious and moral beliefs, belief in the sense of conviction of an ideological or practical character. Indeed, many of the most interesting questions in the philosophy of belief are concerned with beliefs of this type. However, this is not in fact what I shall be talking about, though what I say will, I hope, have some relevance to issues that arise in those areas. I wish to start with the question of what it is to believe something, and then go on from that to discuss (rather briefly) how far, if at all, believing something can be related to decision and will. In order to discuss this, I am not going to take religious and moral beliefs, but cases of more straightforward factual belief; the sort of belief one has when one just believes that it is raining, or believes that somebody over there is one's father, or believes that the substance in front of one is salt. I shall be talking about belief as a psychological state. The word ‘belief’, of course, can stand equally for the state of somebody who believes something, and for what he believes. And we can talk about beliefs in an impersonal way, when we talk about certain propositions which people believe or might believe.