Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty

“...what people really worry about is truthfulness. They think they are being lie to all the time, and usually they are right. They are being lied to. And they wish that people would tell them the truth. But what they mean here is not a question of the nature of truth. They just want people to say what they believe, governments to say the same things to the public that they say to other governments, and so on. Truth as a philosophical problem is a question of whether true statements are representations of reality, or whether the notion of representation applies to statements, and so on. This is really technical.” 57

“If you take care of freedom, truth takes care of itself. A true statement is just one that a free community can agree to be true. If we take care of political freedom, we get truth as a bonus.” 58