Finally, I also think we have to ask ourselves what kind of practices would follow if we accepted Barnes’ and Rorty’s arguments. One line of critique is that such views are critically disabling… Rorty’s favoured ironists cannot present descriptions of society as empowering or emancipating by claiming they reveal real structures of oppression or injustice. Yet emancipation in real social systems may clearly require more than redescription; it may require the transformation of real and enduring social structures whose mechanisms of oppression need to be accurately identified.
Even worse, it has been suggested, Rorty’s voluntarism encourages fleeting paradigm shifts and exotic redescriptions which are largely judged on aesthetic grounds. To Bhaskar (1985: 134–35), Rorty’s project smacks of ‘an ideology for a leisured elite … neither racked by pain nor immersed in toil – whose lives may be devoted to the practice of aesthetic enhancement’. Even more harshly, Haack (1994: 139) warns, ‘there would be no honest intellectual work in Rorty’s post-epistemological utopia’.
The underlying argument then is that critique and emancipation would seem to require some element of philosophical realism as a basis. The identification of real structures, powers and tendencies is necessary to enable us to uncover ideological distortions and forms of domination, and to carry out thought experiments to explore the possibility of different, and better, social organizations.
Keith Basset, “Is There Progress in Human Geography? The problem of progress in the light of recent work in the philosophy and sociology of science,” Progress in Human Geography 23,1 (1999) p. 37–38
The honors thesis proposal is coming up soon.
This blog has been retired.
