Here's a snippet from Rorty on from Consequences of Pragmatism, which is apposite I think, about discarding fiction/non-fiction and truth correspondence in favour of more practical questions and warranted assertability
The question whether to view truth as 'correspondence to reality' or as 'warranted assertability' is the question of whether to treat language as a picture or a game. This latter issues - very roughly, that between the younger and the older Wittgenstein - is brought to a head by debates about 'truth in fiction' because the whole problematic of realism vs. idealism, or of 'representationalism' vs. 'pragmatism' can be crystallized in the question: what, if anything, turns on the difference between being 'really there' and being 'made up'? For what purposes is a convenient fiction as good as reality?
and 'if we became wholeheartedly pragmatic in science and morals, if we every simply identified truth with warranted assertability, our fantasts would have no theme, our modernists no irony. Neither William nor Henry James would have had anything to say in a world without Russells, nor would Borges in a world without Donnellans ... The modern revolt against what Foucault calls 'the sovereignty of the signifier' helps us think of the creation of new descriptions, new vocabularies, new genres as the essentially human activity - it suggests the poet, rather than the knower, as the man [sic] who realizes human nature' (136)
It may pay for design to think closer to the poet and poiesis than the knower
One of the fundamental acts of creating new vocabularies is approrpriating others for our purposes. Designers do this when they appropriate the parts of Herbert Simon they like and discard the rest. Rorty does it with Derrida and Wittgenstein. The Talmud does this with the Masoretic text. People on this list do it with their favourite stalwarts. The black box of citation (to appropriate Latour) is a central mechanism of culture and history and text. People who are appropriated can, of course, then say , no you didn't read me right or you're misinterpreting me with possible responses - 1) so what 2) further conversation ...
Dr Gavin Melles
Lecturer, Research Degree Skills
Faculty of Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Mob (03) 0402927278
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