... Becoming Richard Rorty. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
"... the leading figures in this area today — to my mind Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins — have tended to depict intellectuals as strategic actors who develop their ideas and make career plans and choices with an eye toward accumulating intellectual status and prestige. ... I argue that intellectuals do in fact behave strategically much of the time, but that another important factor influencing their lines of activity is the specific “intellectual self-concept” to which they come to cleave. By this I mean the highly specific narratives of intellectual selfhood that knowledge producers may carry around with them — narratives that characterize them as intellectuals of such and such a type."
If I understand this, it sounds like choosing ideas for the dual-purpose of self-definition and self-advancement. What has this to do with the pursuit of truth, I wonder. Because I presume that Rorty regarded his ideas as being, at least to some extent, true.
"... the leading figures in this area today — to my mind Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins — have tended to depict intellectuals as strategic actors who develop their ideas and make career plans and choices with an eye toward accumulating intellectual status and prestige. ... I argue that intellectuals do in fact behave strategically much of the time, but that another important factor influencing their lines of activity is the specific “intellectual self-concept” to which they come to cleave. By this I mean the highly specific narratives of intellectual selfhood that knowledge producers may carry around with them — narratives that characterize them as intellectuals of such and such a type."
If I understand this, it sounds like choosing ideas for the dual-purpose of self-definition and self-advancement. What has this to do with the pursuit of truth, I wonder. Because I presume that Rorty regarded his ideas as being, at least to some extent, true.
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