He would, however, deny that there are any “realist assumptions embodied in scientific practice”. That’s the point in saying that the realist and the pragmatist scientists would perform the exact same experiments. Realism is just a gloss the Platonist puts on scientific practice — on any epistemic practice — after the fact. Scientific practice, in James’s terms, “pays its way”: it doesn’t need any fancy metaphysical justification.

It’s important to note, I think, that Rorty is not suggesting that scientists — or anybody else except philosophers — should change the way they talk. Scientists will still say, “Have they found the Higgs boson yet?” and “We don’t know yet whether gravitons exist.” Rorty is just saying that, when the philosophy professors, in their basement classrooms, are debating such questions as *how* (as opposed to what) words mean, and what ontological claims amount to, they jettison the Platonist/Cartesian/Kantian metaphysical apparatus.

“we have not, as a matter of scientific fact, discovered that the world’s structure is dependent on human classificatory activity”

Of course not. It’s not something we could, in principle, discover. Again, the philosophical disputes have no bearing on scientific practice. Philosophical theories are not empirically testable, which, per Rorty, is a good reason to get rid of the ones that just give rise to lots of pointless wheel-spinning.

“the rhetorical upshot of much of his writings is to discourage us from trying to settle things on rational grounds”

I think Rorty would be dismayed to think that that’s the moral people drew from his writing. There is a notion of “rationality” that Rorty, indeed, militated against: the Platonist notion of rationality as the faculty, unique to humans, that allows them to perceive ahistorical, transcultural facts. Rorty thought there were no such facts, and thus no such faculty. But he defended a notion of rationality as the “attempt to make our webs of belief more coherent.” The ungainliness of the mixed metaphor aside, that’s pretty much what all argument in ethics classes consists of: the attempt to point out internal inconsistencies in your opponent’s position.

On the other hand, I think that Rorty felt that, indispensable as rational (in his sense) argument may be to moral progress, it wasn’t nearly as effective as poetic seduction, or as he put it, “telling sad and sentimental stories.” And from the pragmatist perspective, one technique of achieving consensus is as good as another.

Also, we have not, as a matter of scientific fact, discovered that the world’s structure is dependent on human classificatory activity. Do you disagree?

I don’t think I implied Rorty is again moral deliberation. But the rhetorical upshot of much of his writings is to discourage us from trying to settle things on rational grounds. I’m going to spend my time trying to understand what really does make people healthier, happier, wealthier, etc. Since there is a fact of the matter about all this stuff, arguing about it simply is not the same thing as trying to seduce agreement with disguised poetry.

If you’re a realist scientist, and I’m a pragmatist scientist, and we both want to prove X, we go back to our labs and conduct exactly the same experiments. Our philosophical dispute has nothing to do with our practices. Rorty’s point is just that, if the realist-pragmatist debate makes no difference whatsoever to practice, why not just jettison the notion of the “real world” and the 2,000 years of pointless epistemological wheel-spinning that it has bequeathed to us?

RE ethics: Are you trying to say that Rorty is opposed to moral deliberation? The claim that there’s less consensus about its aims doesn’t imply that consensus is not something to strive for. The point was just that disputants on opposite sides of the stem cell debate probably agree less about what constitutes a winning moral argument than scientists do about what constitutes a successful experiment.

There are plenty of clear criteria for success in areas that are relevant to most conceptions to morality. Wealthier, happier, longer-living people, with greater opportunity, etc., are desirable according to most major moral theories. These are things we can and should try to measure scientifically. What’s the problem? And what’s the advantage of obscurantism?

It is not, however, *happenstance* that scientific consensus is easier to come by. It’s not a fluke, or coincidence. It’s just that science has a clear “criterion of success”, and that criterion is “accurate prediction”. The vast majority of scientists agree both on what their criterion should be and on how to measure accuracy. Hence, the objectivity of science.

In moral argument, however, there is no clear criterion of success. Should it be minimization of suffering, preservation of human dignity, accordance with the divine/natural law, or something else? Nor is there agreement on how to measure suffering or dignity, or how to uncover the natural law.

But such abstruse, philosophical arguments have nothing to do with the actual practice of asking for and giving reasons–for moral or scientific beliefs. Indeed, that’s exactly the *reason* that Rorty thinks we should get rid of the notion of “intrinsic features of objects”: it makes no difference to practice. So why keep knocking our heads against it?