conclusion 381others, and one that does not automatically trump all other needs’
(ibid.: 37 ).
Religion and science can both, if they promote the need for uni-
versal agreement above all other needs, be regarded as part of the
‘ontotheology’ to which Rorty wants to say farewell. The same cannot
be said of art, even if some philosophical theories might suggest that
it could. Communicative reason has, in Rorty’s view, to be preferred to
the philosophical desire for universal agreement, and this connects it
to aesthetics. While science involves the possibility of public validation
in the terms we encountered in Brandom’s inferentialist ‘game of giv-
ing and asking for reasons’, religion does not. That need not, however,
be a reason simply to dismiss religion, because it may be vital in giving
meaning to individual lives, as Marx’s ‘heart of a heartless world and...
soul of soulless conditions’. Rorty therefore thinks that religion should
be ‘privatised’, and that it can opt out of the inferentialist game, so
long as the actions of religionists do not bring them into the game of
public justification. One is not likely to be justified in criticising the
religion which consoles somebody for the loss of a loved one, but one is
rightly going to criticise religion when it leads to the refusal to provide
condoms for those at risk ofaids.
Art has an in-between status with respect to evidence and justifica-
tion.^5 Aesthetic judgements must cite evidence, but this evidence is not,
as Cavell makes clear, of the same order as scientific evidence. Both
art and science admittedly depend on normative evaluation, but the
way this functions differs in each. The initial moment of unexplain-
able engagement with art required for norm-based aesthetic judge-
ment to begin at all has to do with the complex webs of meanings
that we build up in our lives. The registering of scientific data for the
purposes of explaining a specific phenomenon need not (though it
can) depend on such an engagement, and scientific webs of mean-
ing can be methodologically explicated in ways that aesthetic ones
cannot.
Rorty addresses what I have termed metaphysics 2 in an essay on why
he thinks we should drop the realism/anti-realism dichotomy. He says
of the opposition between representationalist realists and pragmatist
anti-representationalists:
equivalent issue with regard to philosophy will depend on how philosophy is construed:
not ‘getting’ epistemological scepticism of the kind that obsessed empiricism is hardly a
problem, for example.
5 See Bowie 2003 b, where I question some aspects of Rorty’s view.