Roger Scruton on 'Pragmatism'

One of the best attacks of the 'Pragmatist' philosophy of Richard Rorty, who died last week, remains Roger Scruton's 1999 essay What Ever Happened to Reason, (which also derides Foucault, Derrida, and Edward Said):

"Crudely put, pragmatism is the view that "true" means "useful." The most useful belief is the one that gives me the best handle on the world: the belief that, when acted upon, holds out the greatest prospect of success. Obviously that is not a sufficient characterization of the difference between the true and the false. Anyone seeking a career in an American university will find feminist beliefs useful, just as racist beliefs were useful to the university apparatchik in Nazi Germany. But this hardly shows those beliefs to be true.

So what do we really mean by "useful"? One suggestion is this: a belief is useful when it is part of a successful theory. But a successful theory is one that makes true predictions. Hence we have gone round in a circle, defining truth by utility and utility by truth. Indeed, it is hard to find a plausible pragmatism that does not come down to this: that a true proposition is one that is useful in the way that true propositions are useful. Impeccable, but vacuous.."

read full essay: City Journal

related: Scruton's obit. of Rorty: Open Democracy