RORTY QUOTES

Rorty is tough on the idea that while your emotions are your own business, "your beliefs are everybody's business."

Thus, since "believing is inherently a public project:all of us language-users are in it together. We all have a responsibility not to believe anything which cannot be justified to the rest of us.To be rational is to submit one's beliefs -- all of one's beliefs -- to the judgment of one's peers."

THIS IS THE BEST POSSIBLE VERSION OF CLIFFORD'S VIEW, AND RORTY SAYS THAT JAMES DID NOT AGREE WITH IT.

Clifford people says the following:

Here is the sum:

"Desire, hope and other noncognitive states can be had without evidence -- but belief cannot. In the realm of belief, which options are live or forced is not a private matter. The same options face us all; the same truth candidates are proposed to everyone. It is intellectually irresponsible either to disregard these options or to decide between these truth candidates in any other way than by argument from the sort of evidence which the very meanings of our words tell us is required for their support."

James of course cannot agree with this position because he believes that "the only point of having beliefs in the first place is to gratify desires", not to gets things right about the world. 

The issue here is to sort out which claims need public testing of the Clifford sort and which do not and how to keep the kinds from clashing.

Science and religion, as Rorty says, "fulfill two different sets of desires. Science enables us to predict and control, whereas religion offers us a larger hope, and thereby something to live for."

Rorty admits that some beliefs incur intellectual responsibilities. :

We must " cooperate with others on common projects designed to promote the general welfare, and not ... interfere with their private projects. For the latter, projects such as getting married or getting religion -- the question of intellectual responsibility does not arise."

Now Rorty says one of his most important things:

He says that James is "insisting that the impulse to draw a sharp line between the cognitive and noncognitive, and between beliefs and desires, even when this explanation is relevant to neither the explanation nor the justification of behavior, is a residue of the false (because useless) belief that we should engage in two distinct quests - one for truth and the other for happiness."

Now Rorty moves to his reservations about crucial points at which James fails his own enterprise, points that we will take up next week.