conclusion 383need to buy into his position as a whole to be aware that his focus
on how philosophy informs the rest of culture challenges many domi-
nant assumptions. This challenge cannot be a question just of the truth
of philosophical claims, because what is at issue are competing norms,
such as those relating to when, whether, and how philosophy really mat-
ters. Here, propositional truth may not always be the primary concern,
and the focus of attention depends precisely on appeals to intuitions
about what matters most. These intuitions are unlikely to be surren-
dered merely on the basis of specific arguments, because they are con-
nected to a whole web of connected convictions, feelings, investments,
etc., which could not all be addressed at once by such arguments.^6
What interests me in our context is, then, the ‘sense of how things
hang together’ (ibid.) which can be immune to what is achieved by the
volunteering of specific philosophical and other arguments. Music’s
role in this context can be approached by considering another aspect
of how Rorty characterises the difference between the realist and the
pragmatist. He claims, in relation to the basic idea of metaphysical
realism, that no ‘pragmatist [is] likely to be convinced that the notion
of something real but indescribable in human language or unknowable
by human minds can be made coherent. A concept, after all, is just the
use of a word’ (Rorty 1999 ). If the word is effective we will continue to
use it, and, if not, we will be forced into a local change of vocabulary.
This need not involve wholesale changes of ontological commitment,
but there may be times when large-scale changes of vocabulary become
necessary. Although this rejection of metaphysical realism explains why
some of us don’t think it a good idea to pursue the realist intuition – as
Rorty puts it elsewhere, we have norms for things like ‘snow’, but not for
‘reality’ – the limitation of the notion of the real to what is describable
in human language and knowable by human minds excludes important
dimensions of our concerns. As I have suggested, our relationship to
the world does not just consist in what we are able to describe and to
know. It is with respect to his failure to do very much with this fact that
Rorty still sometimes seems tied to the focus of the analytical tradition
which he otherwise wishes to move beyond.^7
6 Cf. Wellmer’s remarks on expanding the scope of how we think about truth discussed in
chapter 9.
7 Rorty does, however, say the following: ‘a culture which has substituted literature for
both religion and philosophy finds redemption neither in a non-cognitive relation to
a non-human person nor in a cognitive relation to propositions, but in non-cognitive
relations to other human beings, relations mediated by human artifacts such as books
and buildings, paintings and songs. These artifacts provide glimpses of alternative ways
of being human’ (Rorty 2000 ).