Byline: Tokyo
I have some friends who are biological ideologs of the E.O. Wilson variety. Richard Rorty effectively refutes this position in a recent article.
He also does a great job of defining the pragmatic worldview many of us share:
"I've never quite understood what postmodernism is, but what I think that people have in mind, at least in this context, is the philosophical view that reality doesn't have a nature and that therefore truth is not an attempt to correspond to the nature of reality. This view goes back at least to Friedrich Nietzsche and William James at the beginning of the century, so postmodernism strikes me as not the right word for it -- it's a good century old. But I think it is true. So let me for a moment enlarge on the implications of that view.
" Postmodernists don't say that truth is relative or socially constructed, or at least my kind of postmodernist doesn't, the pragmatist kind. We say truth is eternal, objective, absolute, and so on, but it is not one; it is a bad inference from the claim that reality is one to the claim that truth is one. There is not a particular way that the world is, there are many ways the world is, as many as there are useful human vocabularies used to describe the world. This view suggests that no area of culture -- not physics, not theology, not biology -- is privileged in the sense of being closer to reality than any other portion of culture. From the pragmatist point of view, culture is a tool kit, and we pick up various tools as needed for various purposes. None of the tools has epistemological or ontological privilege; none of them has priority over any of the others".