Truth-ism?

LISTEN. Time to get back in the saddle. All holidays, moral and otherwise, must end.

For the record, I have been up at dawn every day through this winter-break interregnum, faithfully reporting to a journal whose circulation, unlike Henry's, shall in all likelihood remain exclusive to its author. 

For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.

There was something pleasantly liberating about not pushing Publish every time the sun hit my eyes, these past weeks. 

But there's also something usefully motivating about intending to do so. That's why I first started pushing these partially baked ruminations into the vast void of what we used to call the blogosphere, when I started the earlier version of Up@dawn almost thirteen years ago. I've come to regard blogging as more archival than reportorial: I post stuff so I can find it, somehow the internet is more accessible than my personal filing system. But useful motivation is also still a good thing. Whatever works, as we say.

School resumes next week, and the Chicago conference where I'm to present thoughts about pragmatism, authoritarianism, and truth is coming. I have questions. 

It's tempting to indulge the pattern-seeking impulse and add an 'ism to truth too, but my concern is really more with that form of post- or anti-truthism Colbert called truthiness. 

The big question: is Richard Rorty's posthumously-published Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism the right text for our anti-democractic time? 

Or, has the fantasyland environment that’s emerged since his death in ‘07--the conspiracy-fueling I believe it because I want to dereliction of fealty to facts, reality, and truth Kurt Andersen named--so altered the philosophical landscape that we who value intellectual integrity and "the relevance of philosophy to life" must rededicate ourselves to a more robust (still a fine word, academic overuse notwithstanding) realism about facts/reality/truth than Rorty has been perceived to support? 

If the facts are the facts but the truth is what we make and say of them, is that a sufficiently robustious realism in either Rorty's terms or James's? And are those two terms, or the same?

Does the Rortian story about stories (the “truths” we make of the facts) enable the fabulists and conspiracy nuts? OR, is the anti-authoritarian emphasis EXACTLY what we need to combat them? 

And in general: is the philosophical/meta-philosophical debate relevant to the challenge of the historical moment? Should we be more focused on the neo-pragmatists' metaverse, or on Zuck’s?

Lots to chew on. Happy New Year.