"Galileo claimed to have discovered, by astronomical observation through a telescope, that Copernicus was right that the earth revolved around the sun. [Cardinal] Bellarmine claimed that he could not be right because his view ran counter to the Bible. Rorty says, astoundingly, that Bellarmine's argument was just as good as Galileo's. It is just that the rhetoric of "science" had not at that time been formed as part of the culture of Europe. We have now accepted the rhetoric of "science," he writes, but it is not more objective or rational than Cardinal Bellarmine's explicitly dogmatic Catholic views. According to Rorty, there is no fact of the matter about who was right because there are no absolute facts about what justifies what. Bellarmine and Galileo, in his view, just had different epistemic systems."
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Philosophers from the United StatesEducators from the United StatesPeople from New York CityMacArthur FellowsYale University alumni
Original Language: English
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John Searle, "Why Should You Believe It?", The New York Review of Books, 24 September 2009
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Rorty
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Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 in New York City – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher and pragmatist.
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