La experiencia de fe cristiana un camino de sentido

Many of us may think in terms of one world. God only had to make a piece of terrain once with all its abundance of features. But he did not thereby bring it about that there could only be one proper take

on the piece of terrain. You can map it how you like: map the geo-logy, topography, population, rivers, crops, and you can map all these in different ways for different purposes. A unique world is one thing, but it does not demand just one description.

So perhaps Rorty has failed to notice that his question of authority is ambiguous. Does a landscape tell us how it is to be mapped? In one sense, clearly not. Your purposes may dictate that you map on any of many scales, depicting topography, population, rainfall, geology, or a multitude of other things. Here you can choose whatever turns out useful. You can stress what you like and be as vague or precise as you like, and leave out what you like. Sometimes a brief sketch is enough, and sometimes only an admiralty chart will do. Pragmatism and Darwin and multiple perspectives are all in order. There is no compe-tition between a geological map and a rainfall map.

In another sense, however, the landscape indeed dictates some-thing. It dictates how it is to be mapped, given a set of conventions determining the meanings of the signs and shapes on the map, and the meanings of their presence or absence. That is why, once a set of con-ventions has been put in place, a map can be correct or incorrect. In other words, it can represent the landscape as it is, or represent the landscape as it is not. The map can show that there is a church in Little Gidding, when there is, or show that there is a church there, when there is not. It can show cliffs where there are none, and fail to show cliffs where they lurk.

These harmless platitudes should be sharply distinguished from the ludicrous idea that the only true map would map the landscape

‘in itself’, somehow embodying a ‘final vocabulary’ or ‘nature’s own vocabulary’ dictating just how it is to be mapped, as if human selec-tions, purposes and interests had nothing to do with it.

Maps may be made in many different ways, but they do not encour-age an attitude that places all authority about what they mean in the diverse subjectivities of their various readers. Certainly, a maverick may decide to ‘interpret’ the Ordnance Survey map of Cambridge as the blueprint of the Great Pyramid (if this seems outlandish, we might remember that in order to capture some of the prestige of Greece, ancient historians have actually interpreted the geography of the

Odyssey as pertaining not to the Mediterranean, but, for instance, to the Caspian sea). He might have fun doing so, clambering in and out of burial chambers intently following the course of the Great Ouse on his map, but he is ignoring something that the rest of us have learned:

the cartographic conventions, and the stability of the expectations and interests of map-makers and map-readers. Apart from anything else, these explain the production of the map in the first place. And those of us who have learned the conventions and know how to use them have acquired a technique or a skill, map-reading, which others may lack. Our projects of going to church or walking the hills go better as a result. If we are to read complex maps properly, we do well to defer to the equivalent of a Trilling or a Leavis after all.

That much cannot be denied by the pragmatist, but now we can hear Rorty declaiming the mantra of coping not copying, trying to drive a wedge between pragmatic success, which he admits and likes, and representation, which he does not. And all we have pointed out, he may say, is the success of the map, its utility to the churchgoer or the walker. Similarly the one undeniable measure of science’s author-ity is the fact that its productions work.

At this point the unconverted ought to complain – loudly, very loudly – that the opposition between coping and copying totters and falls. The map enables us to cope, indeed, but we also know why. It enables us to cope precisely because it represents the landscape cor-rectly; it enables us to anticipate what we shall find. Similarly, if Rorty is to catch a plane, he will doubtless look up the time of departure in a timetable. That enables him to cope better, but it does so just because the times written in the timetable represent the intended times of departure. It is not a miracle that the timetable helps Rorty cope. It would indeed be a miracle if there were no stable way of read-ing the figures on the page. But there is, and timetables beat tea leaves and crystal balls as a result. As we are about to see in the next chapter, science too offers us its own explanation of why it works, and there is none better. It works because it identifies the powers of things and the physical forces that make stuff happen. That enables us to harness those forces and adjust them, and make different stuff happen. That is how we cope.

If this disarms one part of Rorty’s thought, we can similarly under-mine the idea that in talking of truth and representation we are vainly attempting to stand outside our own skins, measuring a correspon-dence between what we say and how the world is. A map can bear hallmarks of curiosity, accuracy, care and labour in the making. These are not hidden or mythical virtues, but ones on display. Great makers of maps and charts are revered because they display them. They are virtues you have to exercise if you care about truth, and we can be aware of them, or be aware of productions that lack them. We can also be aware of improvements in them, or fearful of decline. The maps of some countries are shoddier than those of others. Certainly, no map gives us the whole truth, entire, complete and final. There are new things to map, as new interests grip us. But many maps give us some truths, and some more than others. Good ones do not contain misinformation similar to ‘Belgium invaded Germany’.

Newton famously compared himself to a ‘small boy playing on the sea shore and diverting himself by now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me’.²⁴He could not have got the same effect by saying that the great ocean of vocabulary change lay all undiscovered before him.

When we came across minimalism about truth, in chapter 3, we may not have realized its full implication for these debates, but now we can see that just by being so small and modest, truth is not a candidate for retirement. And when we see this, we see that Rorty’s position cannot be sustained either.

Consider this question for Rorty’s own alternative to talk of truth and the rest. What exactly goes on in the après-truth salons where the conversation of mankind murmurs on? The problem is that it seems integral to the self-conception of mapmakers and timetable producers, as well as scientists, historians and perhaps even literary critics, that there is a kind of success that goes beyond common agreement. We do not make a map by sitting and talking it through until we are all agreed, but by measuring and checking. There is such a thing as get-ting it right, and agreement with others is a very imperfect signal of having got things right, being neither necessary nor sufficient. We

cannot find truth by sitting around in the coffee-house, chatting until we seem to be all of one mind.

If they are denied any concept of a bull’s-eye of truth, the target or goal of their activities, what do the après-truth mapmakers, historians and scientists actually do? Do they any longer make measurements, burrow in archives or build laboratories? The dilemma is that if they don’t, then they have stopped being surveyors, historians and scien-tists altogether, like a child who draws what he calls maps but with-out checking what he does against any features of the landscape. But if the cartographers measure, the historians consult archives and the scientists carry out experiments, then they need some concept of discovery to make what they are doing intelligible. They are uncover-ing how thuncover-ings stand, uncoveruncover-ing the truth. Minimalism gives them this, with a conspicuous lack of fuss. The issue is the issue: once we know what they are looking to find out, we also know what its truth would be.

Thus, it is one thing to wonder whether some particular thing is true. And it is a quite different thing to wonder whether in asserting it we will be ‘gaining the assent of our peers’. Asking that question is already looking at things with a squint. For normally our gaze is fixed not on the assent of our peers but on whatever is the issue at hand.^* Thus minimalism showed us that any sentence comes with its own

‘norm’ of truth. If the issue is whether pigs fly, the truth would con-sist in pigs flying, and that is what we must investigate. If the issue is

* Here I can’t help recalling an anecdote I also told in Ruling Passions (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1998), about a relativist historian and philosopher of science I once heard at a conference, who took himself to have learned the lesson of displac-ing the norm of truth by the norm of assent of our peers. The problem he then posed for his own view was that Michael Faraday, long celebrated as one of the greatest experimentalists, seemed to have designed instruments only for registering such things as electrostatic charge and never ones designed to detect the approval of his peers. The idea was that Faraday should have been more concerned to invent something like a Gallup poll, or perhaps an internet chat room, since consensus was his aim, and these provide ways of measuring whether we are getting towards it.

What seemed left out was that one of the things Faraday’s instruments were excel-lent at doing was not registering the assent of his peers, but precisely creating such a consensus. When, hitherto, people did not have a view or share views on electrostat-ic charge, after Faraday they came to do so.

whether Cambridge is north of London, it is a different investigation, but equally directed at truth, that is, at whether Cambridge is north of London. So the very content of a sentence – the issue it introduces – directs where the serious inquirer should look and how to evaluate it. And only some very small subset of contents concern the assent of our peers.

Rorty has attempted to answer such queries. He insists that his view allows for the distinction between the serious and the frivolous, and he wants to insist that serious inquiry survives his reinterpreta-tion of it. ‘What, I still want to ask, is so “mere” about getting togeth-er with fellow inquirtogeth-ers and agreeing on what to say and believe?’²⁵ This is by way of resisting one critic’s comparison between aiming at solidarity and aiming at unison in ‘some perhaps purely decorative activity on a level with a kind of dancing’.²⁶Rorty falls back on insist-ing that he fails to see ‘how anythinsist-ing can be relevant to decidinsist-ing whether a sentence is true except the outcome of actual or possible practices of justification to our fellows’.²⁷

It is worth thinking about this a little more carefully. At first sight there seem to be two very different ‘norms’: one of answerability to the facts, and the different one of gaining unison or solidarity with our fellows. Rorty replies that he sees only one norm, rather than two. He does however admit some content to the cautionary or ‘fal-libilist’ thought that current practice might tell us to affirm that X happened, although the facts may be otherwise. But he glosses the dis-tinction as that between two answers to the question ‘To whom are we trying to justify ourselves?’ namely ‘current practitioners’ on the one hand, or ‘some other, better informed or more enlightened prac-titioners’ on the other.

This is fairly astonishing: how can Rorty deny and debunk truth, but keep notions such as ‘better informed’ or ‘more enlightened’

which are obviously inextricably entangled with it? We can see the cul-de-sac that lies this way, by looking at a dispute of a similar kind.