Rorty

I think I am finally getting old enough to appreciate Richard Rorty. I spent a leisurely morning reading some of the essays in Consequences of Pragmatism and enjoyed them — particularly this long quote from “Method, Social Science, Social Hope”, which cuts through several tangles of anthropological ethics:

I said that… it was a mistake to think of somebody’s own account of his behavior or culture as epistemically privileged. He might have a good account of what he’s doing or he might not. But it isnot a mistake to think of it as morally privileged. We have a duty to listen to his account, not because he has privileged access to his own motives but because he is a human being like ourselves. Taylor’s claim that we need to look for internal explanations of people or cultures or texts takes civility as a methodological strategy. But civility is not a method, it is simply a virtue.

Yeah page 202 of Consequences of Pragmatism!