The conceptual foundations of decision-making in a democracy

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The Confusion About Reality.

INTRODUCTION. In PART TWO the information process has been defined as an activity of living beings in which a subject attempts to bias its choice of actions towards survival and propagation by getting a grip on the reality outside the decision-making subject. That assumes the existence of a reality which is independent of the information processing subject, i.e. has an objective reality. In the paragraph about factual objectivity. I presumed that the reader shares this assumption and promised to provide a justification for this assumption. (Remember, this assumption concerns only certain classes of objects of an information process. Other classes, such as representations of reality generated by that process, do not share that property.)

The existence of such an objective reality is denied by two schools of thought. One consists of physicists who are confronted with the behaviour of photons etc. which seems to change according to whether it is observed or not. Some of them have concluded that this behaviour can be explained only by rejecting the notion of a reality which is independent of the observer. I will deal with that subject in the chapter below about quantum theory.

The existence of an objective reality is also rejected by some intellectuals of a somewhat unde-finable group known as postmodernists. I assumed that this school of thought would have no following amongst the audience to which my book is addressed, the decision-makers. To my surprise I found that assumption to be wrong. So I will also have to deal with that view in a second chapter.

1) Quantum Theory and Reality.

That is the subtitle of the 1984 book on which I rely for this chapter: ‘In Search of Schroedinger's Cat’, by John Gribbin. It presents an overview of the development of quantum theory, and some philosophical conclusions drawn from it by physicists.

A central assertion of quantum theory is that energy can come only in minimum packages defined by the Plank constant: E/v = h, where h = 6.55 × 10(power −27) erg/sec. Using that constant, it has further been deduced that there is a minimum to what can be meaningfully described by the concept of length: 10(power −35) meters, and a minimum time interval: 10(power −43) seconds. It would however be an error to deduce that these are the absolute limits to the use of the categories of space and time. The correct interpretation of these constants is that they define the lower limit of the size of an object or the duration of a process, below which we cannot meaningfully apply today's concepts of physics such as speed, energy, momentum, mass etc. For these minima have not been deduced from the concepts of time and space themselves, but from their application in the above concepts of physics. They mark the smallest detail in which we can describe our world in terms of these concepts, they define the ‘resolution’ of the ‘physical lens’, the smallest ‘grain’ of the any medium of registration and thus of an empirical science based on these concepts.

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Technology plus money has enabled us to construct laboratory settings in which we can submit atoms to accelerations which give them such an enormous momentum that they can break up the atoms with which they collide. We can thus create new and single particles at will. And we have succeeded (in 1984) in reducing observation time to ten nanoseconds, making it possible to ‘see’ a photon.

The observations made possible by that technology, especially the ‘Aspect’ experiment, have lead to strange findings and the only theory which can adequately explain these findings is that matter and energy are in some way interrelated, that particles, photons or electrons behave as if they can be both a wave and a particle and can switch between these identities according to whether they are observed or not.

Equally counterintuitive results are found when dealing with the direction of the spin (clockwise or counterclockwise) of quantum particles around their axle. Recent experiments, such as the ones accomplished in 2000 by the physicist H. Mooij in Delft, seem to confirm that such a particle contains spin in both directions at the same time unless a disturbance, any disturbance, even absolutely minimal, entices it to make a choice, and the very fact of observing it seems to be such an interference. More recently, physicists developed another counter-intuitive concept: entanglement. It seems that if - for some reason - the positron and electron normally composing an elementary particle become separated, they retain a bond whatever the distance which separates them.

As will be evident from the above, I am not a physicist, and thus not qualified to explain or comment on quantum physics. I would never have written on this subject if all physicists did what a scientist should do: to attribute the above findings to their theories, concepts and experimental methods. Instead some of them decided that if their theory and findings are counterintuitive, then nature (or reality) must be the culprit.

The Copenhagen interpretation roughly is that - by our very choice of what to observe - we ‘force’ the observed into a certain state and that this choice of what to observe thus changes reality. In the end reality then must be of our own making.

The Everett interpretation is that there are an unlimited number of universes corresponding to the different states which reality could take, and that by choosing for a certain way of observation we decide on which world to live in.

Other interpretations, such as a holistic world linked by instant communication, are too esoteric to explain even in the rough and imprecise terms I have used for the above two.

All these interpretations have in common that in an information process they render suspect any distinction between the subject and the object, even a functional one. In my theory this distinction is limited to the position of an entity in an information process. It does not entail that they belong to different realities: the subject of one information process can be the object in another, and vice versa. Even in that limited sense, my view of the information process cannot accommodate the notion that the object can be influenced exclusively by the fact that it is the

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object of an information process. It presumes that any such influence implies a process by which the means of observation can have a ‘real’ effect on the object, ‘real’ meaning that this effect has at least one physical component, if only as a carrier of information.

If the above interdependence between the behaviour of photons and the act of observation should indeed imply a physical process, we would not have to change our view of reality and of the subject-object relationship. The above views of a multiple reality defined by the observer is based on the assertion of physicists that no such physical interaction whatsoever is at play in their experiments. That assertion however is totally based on their present theories, concepts and experimental methods. Let me repeat that I do not question these theories or experimental methods, only the conclusions drawn from them about reality as a whole.

WHAT CAN THESE EXPERIMENTS ‘REALLY’ TELL US? What is their explanatory scope? Extending their findings to the whole of reality is based on two assumptions:

1)	that today's physics can adequately generate knowledge (theoretical and practical) about everything which ‘really’ exists in our universe, our ‘objective’ reality, with sufficient reliability and precision to preclude any possibility of a physical influence on the elementary particle by the act of observing it.
2)	that the actual process of observation in no way could have had any physical influence on the outcome of the experiment.

ad 1) The first implies that if any such influence existed, it would have been detected by today's physics. Obviously, defining everything that really exists as that which is amenable to today's tools of physics is a petitio principii and to prove that assertion is logically impossible. It takes more, much more, than a counter-intuitive result of an experiment to justify even the likelihood of the statement that nothing amenable to empirical science can exist outside today's physics, that physics will never encounter ‘things’ smaller than the minimum packages in which today's quanta can come or which travel faster than light. Therefor even if we accept the second assumption, the experiments do not permit the conclusion that an explanation will never be found within the confines of an observer-independent reality, that the behaviour of the experimental particles cannot be the result of a physical process which the current theoretical and experimental set-up did not enable us to apprehend.

ad 2) In fact, any observation presupposes a physical process involving the object of our observation, and thus can have an influence on that object. It can generate effects which are real, yet not noticeable to the observer. If I look at my dog, I experience only the impact on my retina of the photons which he reflected which therefore must have struck him first. Photons have momentum and thus exert a force on my dog. Yet the instability of the ‘picture’ due to photons buffeting the object of observation is irrelevant in human vision. For the range of movement, and thus of that ‘fuzziness’, is far smaller than the maximum resolution of which our eyes are capable and which is limited by the number of cones and bars in our retina registering photons. Note that if my dog has seen that I observe it, that will influence him, but only through another information process also involving physical entities.

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The physical element of an observation process like vision is observer-independent whenever it has nothing to do with the process generating the impulses which it registers. We can reasonably consider the sunlight bouncing off my dog to be independent from myself, whatever its influence may be on the dog. Contrast this with the physicist observing a photon. There is no way in which he can observe such small entities without using means which have profound impact on them. In most nuclear experiments the elementary particles are generated by the observer. And per definition, his means of observation cannot be smaller than the smallest entities we know if they are to be apprehended by us. We must deduce their properties in terms of the very concepts, like energy, which have come near their maximum theoretical resolution. We have no knowledge about photons until an event has happened which involves a change of the same order of magnitude as the photons themselves. All we know about individual photons are the effects of manipulating them. We cannot ‘see’ in much more detail than the elements of our experimental set-up. The is only conclusion which a scientist can draw from all these experiments is: Elementary particles ‘at rest’ seem to contain two opposite states in themselves. In experiments they behave as if they were aware of being observed. The present stage of physics allows only purely speculative explanations for these phenomena.

WHY IS THAT CONCLUSION NOT GENERALLY ACCEPTED? Why do we find no mention in Gribbin's book of the hypothesis that what causes the apparent breakdown of causality need not be our cosmological view of reality, but might be a sign that physics has reached the limits of the explanatory power of the concepts it currently uses? Why would eminent physicists spend much time and energy to impute the cause of an apparent paradox to our general concept of reality instead of to the present limitations of their discipline? The answer lies in the attitude of physicists, as exemplified by Ernest Rutherford when he said: ‘All science is physics, the rest is stamp collecting.’

Granted that physics enters in just about all theories of empirical science and that it therefore merits its prominent position in the world of science. But Rutherford's statement is a clear example of hubris. His attitude can be explained by the undeniable success of physics in exploiting nature. But it cannot be justified. As I hope to have substantiated, the success of physics is mainly due to the simplicity of its traditional field of enquiry: inert objects which have the property to ‘hold still’ for observation and whose behaviour can be reproduced in a way which is independent from their position in space. With electrons, photons, quarks and bosons physicists have run into entities which will not ‘hold still’ and which therefore are far less amenable to any ‘simple, physical and deterministic’ explanation.

The concept of life and information which I presented in Part Two is an attempt, however inadequate it may be, to apply as far as possible the available knowledge of physics and biochemistry to the field of living beings in general and man in particular. Its conclusions therefore should appeal to physicists, specifically the role of information in the process of life and its functional and subjective character, which justifies looking at scientific knowledge as functional from the point of view of the decision maker who needs it for his decisions.

The apparently wrenching anguish which people seem to experience when confronted with the conclusions of quantum physics probably finds its origin in their implicit assumption that the

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laws and theories of physics are part of reality, that they dictate (or, in Rorty's terminology, mirror) what the entities about which they write, atoms, light, etc. really are, in short that they assume that this knowledge really can be totally objective.

CONCLUSION. In terms of the ‘reality’ problem troubling the physicists, my investigations lead to the conclusions that:

-	the reality is one indivisible whole which includes the observer
-	the division between the observing ‘I’ and the reality around it is created by the ‘I’ for its subjective purpose of knowing and controlling that reality
-	attempting to observe the reality, including the observer, therefore does lead to a paradox, but not because there ‘is’ a paradox, but because we have created the concept of an objective reality precisely because we want to ‘look’ at it, i.e. we have chosen to take a position outside of it. A paradox arises only if we want to eat our cake and have it too, i.e. be at the same time inside and outside of what we want to observe.
-	the whole procedure works only as long as the fiction of us standing ‘outside’ generates an error which is negligible in relation to the knowledge gained
-	this error can be reduced, but never eliminated: human understanding will always run into limits
-	the only adequate and paradox-free standard for judging knowledge is its contribution to the survival of life
-	this contribution by physics has been enormous, but will never lead to ‘true’ knowledge of reality
-	physicists therefore should abandon any totalitarian position and - as a very honourable and senior member - join the democratic community of stamp collectors such as psychologists, sociologists, economists etc. in an all-out effort to ensure the survival of the human race and its environment
-	speculations about reality à la Copenhagen and Everett contribute little if anything to that effort. It might however hamper it because of the authority with which Rutherford and consorts have implicitly but illegitimately endowed physics and its practitioners
-	such speculation is inevitable, is fascinating and might lead to new insights and thus is perfectly legitimate... as long as physicists acknowledge its speculative character and - more important - also face the alternative that physics may simply have reached the lower limit - in terms of the size of the systems investigated - to which its current concepts can be fruitfully applied.

2) Philosophical Postmodernism and Its Guru: Rorty.

Having glanced at Derrida and read reviews or excerpts of other publications, I thought that I could dispense with discussing philosophical postmodernism in a book aimed at practical decision-making. How wrong I was.

Postmodernism first manifested itself in architecture as a reaction to the arid and lifeless constructions of modernism. I liked it... in architecture. I first ran into its philosophical version in a doctoral thesis of a colleague on, of all things, business management. The postmodernist

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paradigm he used (David Harvey's ‘The condition of postmodernism’) had been recommended to him by his professor.

It got worse. I ran into it when attending a conference organised by my political party and in ever more publications: Richard Rorty had made philosophical postmodernism fashionable. Discussions with his followers were reruns of the ones I had with Marxists in my student years: they were right and everybody else was wrong, period. These postmodernists denied the existence of an observer independent reality and thus branded absurd the search for truth and objectivity. Deirdre McCloskey took it to the practice of social science, promoting the replacement of objectivity by rhetoric and of truth by ethics. That saps the foundations of my work and, to my mind, of empirical science in general.

1) RORTY'S PHILOSOPHY. The motivating and unifying element in all postmodernism is identical with mine: an allergy to any authority, secular, religious or conceptual, above the human individual. It holds that whatever we think or say about reality never is that reality and contains an irreducible subjective element. It emphasises the social component of knowledge, noting that man's view of reality is shaped by social interaction and that the variety of groups and experiences results in a corresponding variety of often incompatible ‘realities’. All very democratic and in tune with today's knowledge. Up to here I am 100% postmodernist. But from here on our ways part.

Rorty builds his view on the axiom that there is an unbridgeable gulf between the representations we make and the object of these representations. All such representations are constructs of our mind. The images they generate is of a totally different kind than the image which a mirror produces. They are interpretations of a set of nerve impulses which bear no direct resemblance to the object. We construct such representations from elements which were in our mind before we received the information concerned. It is therefore impossible to prove that a representation is indeed about something outside of us, and not just a figment of our imagination. We cannot know, let alone prove, that there is any reality outside of us. Kant already thought as much, which forced him to grapple with the question: where do these a priori elements come from, a question which by now has been answered (see Volume One). That relieves us from the necessity to engage any transcendental concepts. From this axiom Rorty correctly deduced that there is no superhuman authority in Truth, Reason or Objectivity, that absolute Truth or Objectivity are chimeras, that they provide no point of reference for the evaluation of statements, in short, in short that they have to be discarded. His axiom is again identical with the conclusions which I drew from my analysis of information. It is completely congruent with the view of information presented in my book and is justifiable by arguments meeting the criteria for democratic argumentation.

But postmodernism goes one step further. It claims that from denying the possibility of a totally objective representation of reality and asserting that the existence of an observer-independent reality can never be proved, we must then conclude that assuming an observer-independent reality is scientifically and philosophically untenable, that we must extend the subjectivity of human knowledge to the objects of that knowledge. It considers meaningless the distinction between the subject of an information process and its object.

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I have gone through Rorty's two books with a fine-toothed comb in search of an argumentation explaining the path from premiss to conclusion. In vain. Yet without further premises or arguments, the assertion that we cannot prove or know the existence (or non-existence) of something can never justify any conclusion about such an existence (or non-existence). The only justifiable conclusion is that the choice for or against any observer-independent reality is subjective and its acceptance in social discourse is conventional. It justifies denying - as I do - logic, reason and method any claim to authority over other considerations, but it does not provide any justification for rejecting methods like logic and criteria like objectivity if we find them suitable for our purpose. I chose for the assumption of such reality in full consciousness that it is only an assumption. But I provide arguments. One is the essential functionality of the information process. The other can be derived from the same process I used to justify induction: a decision matrix which will show that we can only lose and never gain by rejecting the assumption while accepting it can provide a gain and never a loss.

Before a philosopher of the postmodernist school of argumentation uses it against me, let me emphasise that I do not assume the converse, namely that all reality about which we make ‘truth’ statements is observer-independent. My thoughts and all the representations I make about the outside world pertain to reality, I ‘really’ think and see; but I do not consider them observer-independent. Neither are representations which I make of the outside world by acting on that world. If I look at somebody and notice he blushes, the process is not observer-independent if he has seen that I look at him. The statement that he has blushed may be about an observer-independent reality (his colour), but deductions from this event are not. The major problem of social science is that social reality hardly, if ever, is observer-independent.

RORTY'S ARGUMENTATION IS A POWER PLAY. The above shortcomings of postmodernism are elementary and one wonders why so many well-educated people failed to notice them. Quite clearly the culprit is the way the findings are presented.

I devote a large portion of my book to a step-by-step presentation of how I arrive at my conclusions. Other authors are mentioned only if necessary to do justice to the contribution they have made to my book and to point out differences with the best-known theories in the field concerned; when quoting authors, the accent is on those differences. That provides additional information on the subject. I do my utmost best to insure that if anyone agrees with my propositions, he knows exactly what he has agreed to and why. In this way I respect his authority over himself,

Rorty devotes the bulk of his pages to quoting and commenting on other authors; his generally accepted foundational propositions (the above premises) are exposed and justified at the outset; his own and more questionable conclusions are just stated without specification of the deductive chain which is supposed to justify them. His selection of authors and quotations seems to be driven exclusively by the extent to which they corroborate his points of view. That generates very little additional knowledge but it serves a purpose: it impresses his competence and authority on the more impressionable.

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The language of Rorty and fellow postmodernists is appalling in its imprecision: they never define any concept sufficiently for deciding whether a word or statement is covered or excluded by it. That is no oversight. Their rhetoric explicitly aims at persuasion, their first concern is the affective effect of a concept on their audience, and the second consideration is to never provide a fulcrum to dissenting arguments. That is what politicians do to remain in power. For instance postmodernists never specify whether the rejection of an observer-independent reality aims at the concept for ‘what-is-out-there’ or its referent: ‘what is out there’. And with good reason. Seeing it as a mental concept justifies the rejection of the objectivity of the concept, but not of whatever is ‘out there’. It is precisely this negation of an observer independent-existence of ‘what is out there’ which is required for the invalidation of truth and objectivity as criteria for ‘is’-statements, and that negation cannot be deduced from Rorty's premises. Switching from one meaning of ‘what is out there’ to the other avoids the issue but also makes discussions with postmodernists exercise in frustration: confronted with the above arguments, they first say that they means reality as a mental concept; when shown that one cannot deduce their conclusions as to the ‘what is out there’, they waffle and/or break off the discussion.

Applying Reflective Equilibrium to Rorty and Consorts.

The postmodernist's objective of an unforced agreement, achieved through a free and open encounter, is precisely the basis for my democratic principle. In the spirit of striving for such an agreement, I always start by looking for elements which are shared by all participants in the discussion. One element I share with Rorty is respect of Rawls. My only objection to Rawls' theory concerns his implied autonomous, non-functional, existence of the concept of Justice which forces him to resort to the artifact of an original position and the assumption of a shared rationality of citizens. This objection is quite in tune with Rorty's premises. Rorty did not make this objection to Rawls (even though he should have), he did not make any objection to Rawls' work. So we must assume that he agrees with Rawls method for evaluating principles: reflective equilibrium whose definition was presented in the chapter about Rawls (p. 349).

Briefly, Rawls distinguishes between everyday judgements which we make and the principles which underlie them. We are in reflective equilibrium when there is no contradiction between the judgements and the principles. (Of course Rawls never implied that finding equilibrium endows that principle with truth or authority.) Whenever we find such a contradiction, we should critically investigate either our judgement or our principles, or both. If we have to choose between principles, we should prefer those that generate the fewest contradictions and thus have the highest probability of being applied. Rawls implicit justification is ethical: if we make judgements that are incompatible with a principle that we proclaim, we put ourselves above those to whom the principle is intended to apply. His ethical justification thus also follows from the democratic principle of respect of subjective equality. Rejecting the democratic principle opens the way to impose one's own will on others, to obtain their agreement against their own will, which then cannot really be free; it is mental coercion which - as democrats - we must resist.

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Let us apply Rawls' reflective equilibrium. As I agree with postmodernists that our representations of reality are never observer independent, our disagreement is about the two remaining positions which we can take on this subject:

-	The assertion that no observer-independent reality exists
-	the assumption that there are objects and events about which we make representations which do have an existence which is independent from our observing them.

Let us now - in accordance with Rawls' recipe - apply the above two choices to actual judgements. Those judgements will not concern statements about those representations about which we agree that they are not observer-independent, such as all abstract concepts. And they should be ‘is’ statements, not ‘ought’ statements which I hold to be essentially subjective.

Suppose you are a scientist not engaged in the field of the extremely small or the extremely large. If you make an experiment or use observations, would you consider the objects of the experiment or observation (not the experiment or observation itself) to be observer-independent? I think most scientists do. But what if you would not? Would you then attach the same value to the justification of an assertion about a fact or theory if it substantiated by extensive tests or observations as you would to the justification: ‘that is what I think’? If you prefer the extensive substantiation, why? It cannot be something like reliability, for without the notion of some observer-independent reality reliability can have no meaning except something like ‘the opinion of the majority, the current practice in my community etc.’ As a democrat I would have to accept your preference, but I would require that you submit it to a vote and either accept the view of the majority or secede into a separate community. If you win, I will secede. But - in accordance with Rawls' reflective equilibrium - I will also require that you act accordingly in your own actual decision making.

If you feel sick and want to know your temperature, do you go to the trouble of finding and using a thermometer, or do you ask the opinion of the people in the room and use the average of their guesses?

The law states that theft is to be punished. A man is convicted of it and thrown into jail. What is the moral status of that punishment if we do not see the conviction as an attempt to reflect a reality, namely that he is the thief, which is independent from the judges, the jury, from all democratic citizens? Do postmodernists really think that the complex procedures leading to a conviction in a modern court of law are to be considered as just rituals and applaud lawyers who act accordingly? Were the poor wretches burned as witches really witches because that was the consensus? Is accepting such a consensus showing solidarity?

PHILOSOPHICAL POSTMODERNISM IS IRRELEVANT TO SOCIAL DECISION-MAKING. What kind of World are Rorty and McCloskey talking about? Philosophy, and only philosophy. In his own words, Rorty's book is ‘therapeutical rather than constructive’. He wants to cure philosophy of any pretension to be ‘foundational’, of the compulsion to construct a ‘permanent, neutral framework for inquiry, and thus for all of culture’. In her paper submitted to the conference ‘Fact or Fiction, Perspectives on Realism and Economics 1997’ of the

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‘Erasmus (university) Institute for Philosophy and Economics, McCloskey writes: ‘The disagreement (with realists) I would say are about the philosophical world, the world conceived sub specie aeternitatis - or at least under the aspect of something beyond practicalities’.

As long as practicalities like the process of law, the safety of constructions and products like bridges, taxes, social security, employment, hunger in the Sahel, genocide in Ruanda etc. are unaffected by philosophy, postmodernism is irrelevant to social decision making on such subjects. McCloskey has ipso facto also immunised her creed to Rawls' test of reflective equilibrium: it is hard to even imagine how judgements on subjects beyond practicalities can be about anything else than abstract concepts which - as all of us agree - do not have an observer-independent existence. Unfortunately, postmodernists want their creed to have political consequences, so we must take a stand on their assertions. That is rendered difficult by their astonishing imprecision.

Take the above ‘foundational’. One would understand it to refer to foundations, to the underlying assumptions we make in our thinking. But that is precisely what philosophy, including Rorty's work, are about. If these are not the subject of philosophical inquiry, then what is? Only by guessing at what he means can we infer what he really objects to: the notion that philosophy can supply rock-solid foundations. He denies that the assumptions which we make in that process can claim any authority, total objectivity or general validity. If so, there exists a far less drastic and more generally palatable cure: to accept the notion that one cannot deduce ought from is and to take account of the implications for knowledge of the current theory of life which also forms the basis of Rorty's work, namely the functional nature of such concepts. But consistent in his behaviour, he selects only those findings which suit his case and neglects those which argue for the assumption of an observer-independent reality and for striving for whatever degree of objectivity is possible when establishing the de factii as a precondition for taking correct decisions, correct being defined as promoting the objectives of the decision-making individual and society.

Rorty claims allegiance to the holistic nature of knowledge and culture but does not practice his own teaching. He keeps to his discipline and makes no effort to integrate philosophy with the rest of human information processing, he is a philosopher's philosopher. His language is mostly understandable only to professional philosophers, his ‘facts’ are the writings of other philosophers. He provides no means to make the connection between his writings and their application in other fields such as social philosophy and decision-making. He extensively quotes Rawls yet ignores Rawls' recipe for the evaluation of principles. He wants his writings to have political consequences, yet never investigates the main task of politics, decision-making, and ignores the prevailing condition of the environment in which it takes place: disagreement. He never discusses what to do if no agreement has been reached by the time a decision must be taken. Sending food has to be done before the people have died of hunger or have become incurable invalids.

Unenforced agreement in a free and open encounter will not do. As soon as one moves from the purely abstract - which engages nothing and nobody - to the ‘who has to do what and when’, the particularities of individuals, their preferences, interests and beliefs, come into play. Very

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few will openly confess to a neglect of solidarity. Arguments mostly are about the de factii, and all the techniques of persuasion are used to hide the underlying conflict of interests. Calling in experts usually shows that disagreement is not strange to Rorty's cherished community, the university. Decisions must be taken, and in the absence of rules of argumentation, they will be taken purely on the basis of power.

PHILOSOPHICAL POSTMODERNISM IS PERNICIOUS AND UNDEMOCRATIC Pernicious? If, as I hold, nobody really acts as if he believed that an observer-independent reality does not exist, why could such a creed be pernicious? The reason is not that many wrong decisions will be taken. It is pernicious because many necessary decisions will not be taken. For this creed can, and therefore will, be invoked by those who lack adequate arguments as an excuse for hanging on to their point of view without having to admit that they only follow their own interests by doing so. It is pernicious because it undermines efforts to achieve the minimum efficiency in decision-making required to meet our challenges by reaching a timely agreement through democratic procedures. It is pernicious because it rejects the minimum of rules in decision-making which are necessary to safeguard the subjective equality which is the basis of democracy.

Most of all, it is pernicious because it corrupts youth by presenting them with a ready-made and simple creed which allows them to satisfy their need to rise and to rage against authority, to negate, to destroy, while avoiding the labour and discipline required to build something out of the ruins. It is the modern version of Hegelian Marxism because it imputes all our troubles to a common enemy, this time not capital but the quest for truth and objectivity and reliance on reason when establishing the facts implicated in social decisions. It promises that a better world will emerge after the demise of such practices without telling them how. It preaches solidarity without any guidance on what it takes to achieve it. It is this kind of argumentation which made it possible for the disciples of Marxism to turn a blind eye to its failures and misdeeds in its implementation. It allows the followers of postmodernism to bathe in the warm glow of solidarity without incurring the travails implicated in really doing something for their fellow men, which cannot be achieved without rationality and - if the de facto is in cause - a minimum of objectivity and search for truth.

In ‘Objectivity, Relativity and Truth’, p 39, Rorty writes (the figures in brackets refer to and precede the points on which I will comment):

‘(1) Pragmatists (2) would like to replace the desire for objectivity - the desire to be in touch with a reality which is more than some community with which we identify ourselves - with a desire for solidarity with that community. (3) They think that the habits of (4) relying on persuasion rather than on force, of respect for the opinion of colleagues, of curiosity and eagerness for new data, are the only virtues which scientists have. (5) They do not think that there is an intellectual virtue called rationality over and above these moral values.’

Rarely have I read such a blatant attempt at obfuscation through abuse of the basic ethics and rules of argumentation. As the following comments will show, it is a perfect illustration of the necessity for clear rules of argumentation and exposure of its infringements.

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(1)	Philosophical Pragmatism is defined by Webster's Dictionary as ‘a system or tendency in philosophy which tests the validity of all concepts by their practical results’. It is also given other connotations, such as ‘without a priori concepts beyond criticism’ or ‘without universal or eternal ideals’. I consider myself a pragmatist. On the basis of his premises Rorty is correct in claiming that his kind of postmodernist is a pragmatist. As so often, the sting is in what he implies: that all pragmatists are ipso facto postmodernists. By only implying it, he can avoid the need to justify such an assertion. Note that McCloskey, according to his above quotation (p 432: ... are about the world conceived sub specie aeternitatis, ... something beyond mere practicalities’), would not be a pragmatist. In searching for examples of free agreement in open encounter, Rorty has not gone beyond the university. He certainly did not attempt to test the validity of his concepts by their results in practical decision-making situations. Pragmatist?
(2)	That is a blatant petitio principii. His conclusion derives from his very particular definition of the desire for objectivity. For me, as for many others, it does not stem from a desire to be in touch with ‘a reality’, but from the search for a correct representation of the facts which we need for our decisions if we are to survive. Obviously that implies some form of ‘being in touch with reality’, but that form is quite different from the meaning it obtains if opposed to ‘community’ and the ‘virtue of solidarity’. In that way he spirits away the obvious conclusion: the desire for objectivity is incommensurable with the desire for solidarity and is quite compatible with it.
(3)	Pragmatists do not think so, only postmodernists do, or claim to do, see (1). I cannot believe that postmodernists really do feel comfortable if the surgery they are about to undergo has been developed on the basis of only those virtues, that they really consider truth and objectivity in developing medical methods to be irrelevant.
(4)	There are extremely few scientists who use physical force to get their theories accepted. Physical force in itself is not bad, we use it all the time to prune trees, clean our car etc. The really undemocratic endeavour is to thwart people in the pursuit of their own objectives, and in modern democratic societies the most ubiquitous means to that end is not physical force, but persuasion through the manipulation of information; hence my part on democratic argumentation. As explained there, the quest for objectivity when establishing the de factii is a precondition for real solidarity. Setting off their proposals against an irrelevant but generally disreputable practice is an often used device of demagogues for drawing attention away from the weak points of their own position.
(5)	The conclusion is correct, but the implication is not, namely that one can meaningfully rank the elements of a set which includes ‘moral values’ against ‘rationality’. Any pragmatist worth his salt will consider that values, moral or otherwise, can only be ranked in respect to a common objective and function and that ranking them in the abstract is an exercise in futility. Solidarity refers to a motivation; rationality and objectivity refer to the process of realising that motivation; all are virtues promoting the human existence as a social being. I therefore resent another implication: that non-postmodernist intellectuals consider rationality to be above moral values; I certainly do not.

[p. 435]

There is a common denominator to all those breaches of the rules of argumentation. Rorty is not satisfied with obtaining the allegiance only of those who would have given it if fully conscious of the implications of his arguments. By hiding those implications from view he thwarts and dulls the power of reasoning of his audience, he tries to persuade instead of to convince (see my chapter ‘The rhetoric of democratic argumentation’, p. 223) others to bias their decision-making towards the achievement of his own objectives. However high-minded those objectives may be, that is undemocratic, is the hallmark of all totalitarian creeds.

We have today broken the shackles of theocracy. We have defeated Hegelian-Marxist and fascist dictatorships. The modern theory of life and evolution has provided us with the means to pull reason from its transcendental throne and put it at the service of mankind. I hope to have contributed to the demotion of Truth as above the authority of man. Now another would-be master is grabbing for power under the ubiquitous guise of democracy: Fashion.