CORRESPONDENCE AND COMMENTS-BOXING: An interesting little thread–too short, but maybe there will be more soon:

…The problem, as in your link, is the tendency to talk about the the negative consequences of Rorty’s philosophy rather than creating a meaningful argument for why he is wrong.

There is an exterior world, but that world is removed from us by our consciousness. We have many reasons to believe that this consciousness is an imperfect or incomplete tool for understanding the exterior world. And as long as that disconnect exists, there can be no perfect one-to-one correspondence notion of truth. That is not to abandon the project of philosophy or even to question the utility of questions about truth. But it does ensure a certain cap on the degree of certainty we have about anything, and I think that simple fact–that, by all accounts, we have a consciousness medium which acts as an intermediary between the world “out there”–fatally undermines the correspondence theory of truth.

Of course, such a theory of truth is possible if we haven’t abandoned god, as I take it you haven’t. I just have never found a convincing critique of Rortian/postmodern concepts of the limits of truth claims that don’t require some degree of divine revelation.

and it gets better!

And if you want way too much more on this tangle of topics, a really old, related batch of posts from me starts here; also of course there is ye olde senior essaye, which is less concerned with truth claims, but does maybe give a sense of where I generally come from on these questions; and here I defend overturning the birthday cake of existence (more here–and good grief, how that post would’ve been helped if I’d just discussed philosophy as a practice and tradition, rather than a DVD user’s manual!)