Summary
THIS PAST JANUARY I was visiting the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) on Constitution Avenue for a meeting of engineers who were developing curriculum to integrate ethics in their teaching. Given the recent election, the meeting could not have been more ironic. The National Academy of Sciences was established by an act of Congress, which was signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, at the height of the Civil War. Today, the NAS is made up of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the National Academy of Medicine (NAM). The building is austere and serene, but majestic and imposing. Its facade is made of white Dover marble. The Great Hall, where lectures and ceremonies are held, is laid out in cruciform style, with its dome cupped with a gorgeous ceiling made of Art Deco mosaics, full of colors framed in golden edges, representing the history of science and the different academies that antedated the NAS. It is truly a temple to science, and one does have the sense of entering a cathedral as one ascends from the street into its neoclassical foyer, where one finds a welcoming desk with only one guard. The building flanks one of the corners of the National Mall in Washington and in front of it, is the Lincoln Memorial. We know Trump has taken aim at the budget of the NAS as well as that of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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This way of sketching Rorty’s adjournment of truth, agnosticism about absolutes, and the espousal of metaphysical quietism that advocates a deflationary view of truth that reduces it to the affirming uses of true would seem to give warrants for holding the first of the second hypotheses I invited us to contemplate. However, I want to close by offering a counter hypothesis to this one: had Rorty lived to see the fulfillment of his prophecy of the coming of the rise of Trumpism he would have begun to write insistently and profusely, as he did against Bush, Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld, on what I would call, along with Joshua Cohen, a “political conception of truth.” In one of the interviews included in the volume I edited, Rorty in fact talks about two versions of truth: the philosophical one and the public or political one. There Rorty talks about a public’s concern with truthfulness and the public concern with their being lied to. He also talks about the role of the media in making sure that our public officials are held accountable. Let me make a stronger claim here about what I would call Rorty’s inchoate “political conception of truth” by making a brief reference to a brilliant essay by Joshua Cohen, whom I just mentioned. Most apropos, Cohen presented a draft of this essay in the fall of 2006 at the Stanford Law School, in their legal theory colloquium, at which Rorty was present. Cohen acknowledges Rorty’s “generous and illuminating comments.”
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