Richard Rorty E-Book

Neil Gascoigne

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 500

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Neil Gascoigne provides the first comprehensive introduction Richard Rorty’s work. He demonstrates to the general reader and to the student of philosophy alike how the radical views on truth, objectivity and rationality expressed in Rorty’s widely-read essays on contemporary culture and politics derive from his earliest work in the philosophy of mind and language. He avoids the partisanship that characterizes much discussion of Rorty’s work whilst providing a critical account of some of the dominant concerns of contemporary thought.

Beginning with Rorty’s early work on concept-change in the philosophy of mind, the book traces his increasing hostility to the idea that philosophy is cognitively privileged with respect to other disciplines. After the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, this led to a new emphasis on preserving the moral and political inheritance of the enlightenment by detaching it from the traditional search for rational foundations. This emerging project led Rorty to champion ‘ironic’ thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, and to his attempt to update the liberalism of J. S. Mill by offering a non-universalistic account of the individual’s need to balance their own private interests against their commitments to others.

By returning him to his philosophical roots, Gascoigne shows why Rorty’s pragmatism is of continuing relevance to anyone interested in ongoing debates about the nature and limits of philosophy, and the implications these debates have for our understanding of what role the intellectual might play in contemporary life. This book serves as both an excellent introduction to Rorty’s work and an innovative critique which contributes to ongoing debates in the field.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Epigraph

Acknowledgements

Introduction: No Single Vision

1 Politics and the authority of philosophy

2 Actor and martyr

3 Far, far away …

1 Out of Mind

1 Our Rortian ancestors

2 Materialism and the mind–body problem

3 Dogmas of empiricism

2 What is Eliminative Materialism?

1 Introduction

2 Analysis, explication and elimination

3 Eliminative materialism

4 Incorrigibility

5 Troubles with eliminativism

6 Far, far away, lies . . . 

3 Rorty’s Kehre

1 Introduction

2 Realism and reference

3 Scepticism, relativism, truth

4 Overcoming Philosophy

1 After philosophy?

2 The linguistic turn

3 The future of philosophy

4 Whither epistemology?

5 The reappearing ‘we’

6 In conversation

5 New Selves for Old

1 From epistemology to politics

2 Dewey’s redescription

3 Contingency, irony and solidarity

4 Metaphorlosophy

5 Two concepts of freedom

6 Liberalism and the limits of philosophy

7 The last ironist

6 The Whole Truth

1 The authority of norms

2 The view from nowhere

3 Relativism redux

4 Triangulation

Conclusion: The Ends of Philosophy

1 Double vision

2 Nothing but the truth

3 The ends of philosophy

Bibliography

Index

For my beloved if …

Copyright © Neil Gascoigne 2008

The right of Neil Gascoigne to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2008 by Polity Press

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So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! Throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.

Ishmael

Acknowledgements

Material from chapters 2, 3 and 6 has been presented at seminars at the Universities of Central Lancashire, Copenhagen, East Anglia, Granada, Keele, and Sussex, and I am grateful to those who took part for their comments. A draft of the first half of the book was written in 2005 while I was a visiting Senior Lecturer at the University of Auckland. I would like to thank John Bishop and Rosalind Hursthouse for hosting my visit; other members of the philosophy department for their kindness; and the students enrolled on my graduate class on Rorty for requiring me to give a clear shape to my thoughts. My visit would not have been possible without the support of colleagues at my former employer, Roehampton University, and in particular of the Dean of its School of Arts, Lyndie Brimstone.

I have learned a great deal about the subjects discussed in this book from conversations with friends and colleagues; preeminently, over the years, with Andrew Bowie and Tim Thornton. Others deserving of special mention are Rachel McEvilly, Julia Borossa, Richard Raatzsch, Jonathan Derbyshire, Jason Gaiger, and in particular Katerina Deligiorgi who gave me encouraging notes on an early draft. Comments from two anonymous readers at Polity also helped greatly in the production of this final version, as did those of my editor Emma Hutchinson. Needless to say, my greatest intellectual debt is to Rorty himself, who invited me out to the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student at Cambridge and showed me great kindness. I hope that in some small way this book will clarify the contribution he made to the subject to which he could never quite say ‘farewell’.

Introduction: No Single Vision

1 Politics and the authority of philosophy

I am sometimes told, by critics from both ends of the political spectrum, that my views are so weird as to be merely frivolous. They suspect that I will say anything to get a gasp, that I am just amusing myself by contradicting everybody else. This hurts. So I have tried, in what follows, to say something about how I got into my present position – how I got into philosophy, and then found myself unable to use philosophy for the purpose I had originally in mind. Perhaps this bit of autobiography will make clear that, even if my views about the relation of philosophy and politics are odd, they were not adopted from frivolous reasons.

PSH: 5

This passage appears a little way into ‘Trotsky and the Wild Orchids’, an apologia for what many readers will regard as the hallmark of Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatism: the primacy of the political over the philosophical. The main theme of this book concerns how Rorty came to arrive at and defended such a view. Since this is not a biography, the theme will be elaborated in terms of changes that are internal to philosophical discourse. However, the fact that Rorty’s attempt to exculpate himself of the charge of frivolity took the form of an autobiographical1 reflection on how he came to view the political as pre-eminent is significant. After all, it is customarily taken to be part of the philosopher’s remit that they strive to transcend the idiosyncratic and subjective in an attempt to arrive at objectively good reasons for the views they hold; reasons that, as such, can be used to convince others of the truth of their beliefs. The purpose of this introduction, then, is to explore both the content and use made of this stylistic device in order to present in outline the shape of Rorty’s changing conception of philosophy’s relation to political life; the detail will of course comprise the content of the subsequent chapters. Before turning to the autobiographical fragment, however, it will be helpful in situating it if we examine briefly what it is that for Rorty unites these otherwise antagonistic critics; namely, their conviction that philosophy retains a position of critical authority in relation to political discourse.

Rorty begins ‘Trotsky … ’ by locating his political position:

[the left] see [America] as what Foucault calls a ‘disciplinary society’, dominated by an odious ethos of ‘liberal individualism’, an ethos which produces racism, sexism, consumerism, and Republican presidents … I see America … as opening a prospect on illimitable democratic vistas. I think that our country … is a good example of the best kind of society so far invented. (p. 4)

While the right regard his pro-American stance as vitiated by the ‘nihilism’ of his ‘relativistic, irrationalist, deconstructing, sneering’ (ibid.), the left see it as little more than old-fashioned, cold war liberalism; the result of an invidious failure to follow through on the ‘relativisitic’ and ‘deconstructive’ critique of the philosophical tradition he purports to favour.2 As Rorty observes, ‘my philosophical views offend the right as much as my political preferences offend the left’ (p. 5). The insinuation, then, is that the critical responses of leftist and rightist alike are shaped by a presupposition regarding the nature of the relationship between philosophy and politics. For rightist critics this is expressed in the belief that one’s commitment to democracy and liberal values is genuine only if the latter are regarded as objectively good: expressive of a rational order that all right-thinking people will acknowledge once prejudice and parochialism are overcome. The American philosopher John Searle offers a pithy account of the central tenets of this traditional philosophical picture:

Knowledge is typically of a mind-independent reality. It is expressed in a public language, it contains true propositions – these propositions are true because they accurately represent that reality – and knowledge is arrived at by applying, and is subject to, constraints of rationality and logic. (1992a: 69; emphases added)

As we’ll come to see, one of Rorty’s long-standing aims was to debunk this metaphysically realist or ‘representationalist’ view of the relationship between language (or mind) and the world. What Searle brings out nicely is the assumption that this philosophical thesis has a much wider import. Specifically, on this account of knowledge we have the idea of a ‘mind-independent reality’ being ‘accurately represented’ (‘mirrored’ as Rorty famously has it) by knowers only when subject to the ‘constraints of rationality and logic’. Since these normative constraints are operative across all discourses, the clear implication is that philosophy, which takes them as its unique subject matter, has a natural authority over not just political discourse but all areas of action and inquiry.

It would appear, then, that the rightist’s conviction that an authentically held liberalism requires a rigorous Realism about values presupposes this structure of authority. Turning once again to Searle, we find this conclusion given ingenuous expression:

An immediate difficulty with denials of metaphysical realism is that they remove the rational constraints that are supposed to shape discourse, when that discourse aims at something beyond itself. To paraphrase Dostoevsky, without metaphysical realism, anything is permissible. (1992b: 112)3

At first blush it seems odd that a mere denial of a philosophical thesis could have so corrosive an effect on our norms. To adapt an example of Carnap’s (1967), Idealist and Realist chess opponents have incompatible metaphysical beliefs, but they don’t as a result disagree either on the norms (rules) of the game4 or on its value. Since it seems improbable that even the majority of those who espouse liberal values would know what metaphysical realism is, Searle seems to be suggesting that they are either self-deceiving nihilists or unwitting Realists. Of course, we can reject this disjunction without denying that there are strong inferential connections in the minds of some between Realism and liberalism; even to the extent that they appear to them to be necessary. But this implies that what is being challenged when Realism is denied is not the validity of a person’s beliefs or values but the authority of a certain discipline to identify the norms (‘constraints of rationality and logic’) that are ‘supposed’ to shape them: philosophy qua representational realism. Indeed, this helps explain why Searle’s foreboding sounds so paradoxical. After all, if the contents of our beliefs are fixed by something as hard and ultra-human as ‘mind-independent reality’, it’s difficult to understand why the norms that constitute our methods of inquiry and action should be so vulnerable. It’s almost as if the greater the degree of the world’s mind-independence, the more fragile our purchase on it and the more acutely felt the need for an authority to police our norms. This suspicion is reinforced when one considers that amongst the consequences that Searle fears follow from the ‘rejection of the Western Rationalistic Tradition’ and the abandonment of the ‘traditional standards of objectivity, truth and rationality’ is that it ‘opens the way for an educational agenda one of whose primary purposes is to achieve social and political transformation’ (1992a: 72). Once again, the implication is that only a formal commitment to the central tenets of Realism will sustain an otherwise fragile culture and keep the barbarians from the door. The authority of philosophy is reinforced by the view that it is only under its tutelage that the political values of liberalism are safe.

Turning now to those leftist critics, Searle’s paraphrase of Dostoevsky reveals all they need to know about the quasi-religious strivings and authoritarianism of Realism. But, although they mock such pretensions, they believe that if you’re serious about your rejection of the concepts of ‘disinterested knowledge’ and ‘objective truth’ you must be willing to throw out the liberal baby with the ‘Western Rationalist’ bathwater. They see claims like those made by Searle as the shadow-play of an overweening cultural arrogance, or as expressions of the will to power; forces which, when unmasked by theory, will expose ‘liberal values’ for what they really are and bring about the ‘social and political transformation’ Searle fears. Whereas for the right the sign of Rorty’s ‘frivolousness’ is his disdain for the rational foundations of the values he purports to cherish, for the left it’s his blatant disregard for the political implications of his predilection for ‘anti-Platonic, antiessentialist, historicizing, naturalizing writers’ (PSH: 128).

From Rorty’s perspective, then, critics from the left and right share the same dogmatic belief that philosophy is privileged over politics. For the rightist, philosophy is authorized to legitimate the norms that shape political discourse; for the leftist, it is authorized to unmask those selfsame norms. The task, then, is to decouple the liberal values shared with Searle and others from the philosophical views shared with those on the left by adumbrating an understanding of the source of the authority of norms that neither requires for their legitimacy, nor is subject to the (ultimate) criticism of, a ‘master’ discourse like philosophy. This requires articulating or in some way defending the view that norms are embedded in contingent practices; though, crucially, not by conceiving of the standpoint from which that defence or articulation is made in the same way as those who aspire either to legitimate those norms or to subject them to a fundamental critique. With this in mind, let’s look at how Rorty presents his own path to this insight, which constitutes both a defence against that ‘hurtful’ charge of ‘frivolousness’ and a continuation of the ongoing attempt to persuade his audience that they too could share it.

2 Actor and martyr

In the romantic fragment the then sixty-year-old narrator tells the story of how a ‘clever, snotty, nerdy only child[‘s]’ attempt to combine his adolescent passion for orchids with his inherited belief in social justice led to philosophy:

I grew up knowing that all decent people were, if not Trotskyites, at least socialists … So, at 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice.

But I also had private, weird, incommunicable interests. In earlier years these had been in Tibet … A few years later … these switched to orchids … I was not quite sure why those orchids were so important, but I was convinced that they were … I was uneasily aware, however, that there was something a bit dubious about this esotericism – this interest in socially useless flowers … I was afraid that Trotsky … would not have approved of my interest in orchids.

At 15 I escaped from the bullies who regularly beat me up … by going to the so-called Hutchens College of the University of Chi-cago … Insofar as I had any project in mind, it was to reconcile Trotsky and the orchids. I wanted to find some intellectual or aesthetic framework which would let me – in a thrilling phrase which I came across in Yeats – ‘hold reality and justice in a single vision’. By reality I meant, more or less, the Wordsworthian moments in which, in the woods around Flatbookville … I had felt touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance. By justice I meant what Norman Thomas and Trotsky both stood for, the liberation of the weak from the strong. I wanted a way to be both an intellectual and spiritual snob and a friend of humanity – a nerdy recluse and a fighter for justice. (PSH: 6–8).

In 1946 the University of Chicago was dominated by neo-Thomists, and refugees from Europe like Leo Strauss. They shared a disdain for the pragmatism of John Dewey, whose ‘relativistic’ rejection of absolute values and deflation of truth to what ‘worked’ seemed to leave no standpoint from which to justify one’s moral rejection of the barbarism that had engulfed Europe. To his ‘15-year-old ears’, the view that ‘something deeper and weightier than Dewey’ was needed to explain why ‘it would be better to be dead than a Nazi’ sounds ‘pretty good’ (PSH: 8). Talk of moral and philosophical absolutes recalls those orchidaceous numina; and since Dewey was a hero to his parents and their friends, scorning him is ‘a convenient form of adolescent revolt’ (p. 9). Lacking ‘the humility which Christianity demanded’, Platonism beckons as the most promising way in which to combine the contemplative life towards which the orchids gesture with the ‘ability to convince bullies that they should not beat one up, the ability to convince rich capitalists that they must cede their power to a cooperative, egalitarian, commonwealth’ (p. 10).

From age fifteen until twenty, then, the task is to elaborate on the Platonic-Socratic identification of virtue with knowledge. Unfortunately, the virtue-knowledge pairing proves inadequate to overcome the original dualism; for it can be constituted either by the public use of reason to convince others or by the private bliss one feels when one contemplates the eternal, but not both. At the same time, the journeyman philosopher finds himself confronting another, equally ancient, problem: it seems reasonable to ask of any two competing philosophical theories what justifies the choice of the fundamental principles of one over those of the other. Since they are fundamental, the question cannot be posed from a neutral (but inclusive) standpoint and so cannot be answered without begging the question in favour of one or the other (or a third, etc.). Of course, this sort of sceptical impasse is precisely the sort of thing liable to occur when one exercises one’s public use of reason to convince others, and is thus apt to disturb one’s pursuit of private, incommunicable and ultimately not terribly socially useful bliss.5

The failure to make good on the promise of Platonic realism constitutes an original disillusion with the discipline that accompanies him on to Yale, where he acquires his doctorate, and thence (after a spell teaching at Wellesley College) to Princeton.6 The leitmotif of the ensuing forty years is a response to that original disenchantment: the search ‘for a coherent and convincing way of formulating … worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for’ (p. 11). There is, however, a lesson learned from the earlier period; namely, that if the notion of philosophical truth can be given no purchase, the activity of philosophy can nevertheless be given some content as a power of redescription. Moreover, a discovered ‘flair’ for being able to respond to philosophical arguments by ‘redescribing the nearby intellectual terrain in such a way that the terms used by one’s opponent would seem irrelevant, or question-begging’ (p. 10) takes on greater significance with the discovery of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and the first inkling of how one might construe a non-absolutist conception of philosophy. What Hegel offers does not rely on the Platonic promise of escaping appearances in order to get to the unchanging Reality held in abeyance. When the world is embraced in its finitude and contingency, the power of redescription – of changing concepts rather than merely aiming to understand them (cf. p. 25) – becomes a way of world-making: an opportunity to put philosophy in the service of freedom and justice (p. 11). ‘About 20 years or so after I decided that the young Hegel’s willingness to stop trying for eternity, and just be the child of his time, was the appropriate response to disillusionment with Plato, I found myself being led back to Dewey’:

Dewey now seemed to me a philosopher who had learned all that Hegel had to teach about how to eschew certainty and eternity, while immunizing himself against pantheism by taking Darwin seriously. This rediscovery of Dewey coincided with my first encounter with Derrida … Derrida led me back to Heidegger, and I was struck by the resemblances between Dewey’s, Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s criticisms of Cartesianism. Suddenly things began to come together. I thought I saw a way to blend a criticism of the Cartesian tradition with the quasi-Hegelian historicism of Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking and Alasdair MacIntyre. I thought I could fit all these into a quasi-Heideggerian story about the tensions within Platonism. The result of this small epiphany was a book called Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. (PSH: 11–12)

Despite its success ‘among nonphilosophers’, however, this comes to be regarded as something of a detour, for it does not address the very task that aroused his interest in philosophy. The apotheosis of the search for a ‘single vision’ comes with the realisation that ‘the whole idea of holding reality and justice in a single vision had been a mistake – that the pursuit of such a vision had been precisely what led Plato astray’ (p. 12); that the narrator’s own ‘hope of getting a single vision by becoming a philosopher had been a self-deceptive atheist’s way out’ (p. 13), a sort of sublimation of the religious desire for a ‘surrogate parent who, unlike any real parent, embodied love, power and justice in equal measure’ (p. 12).

The identification of philosophy’s self-arrogated authority with that of a quasi-parental deity that transcends anything within the control of finite creatures like us – a trope ever present in Rorty’s work from the late 1970s onwards – is a variant on a common theme;7 as is the idea that metaphysical thinking is misleading or deceiving. If there is anything to Whitehead’s apothegm that philosophy consist in ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’, then Plato’s dream of a single vision is philosophy’s defining goal, one that can only be pursued by a philosopher in the mode of self-deception. Of course, if a thinker wishes to expose that deception the temptation is to render it part of a grander narrative of how her predecessors were misled and how she liberated herself from it: a narrative exposing the sources of the deception within a true account of how things really stand philosophically, thus retaining for the discipline its traditional authority. One might of course simply turn one’s back on philosophy; refuse to continue doing something that has betrayed one’s intellectual ambitions. And perhaps there are those who have liberated themselves from the philosophical impulse and disdain the compulsion to communicate how they did it; or, rather, feel no such compulsion because that too is an expression of the philosophical urge. In this case one frees oneself from the authority philosophy had over one’s own intellectual projects, but one does nothing to liberate others from it.

The narrator did not choose the latter path; perhaps because, although the tranquillity it would bring might recollect the orchidaceous, it would bring no peace to those feelings inspired by Norman Thomas, Carlo Tresca and his own parents: the unavailability of a ‘single vision’ does not dissipate its components. Of course, many people address these in their own lives without troubling themselves with philosophy. So evidently the narrator’s conclusion that there is no single vision does not alone necessitate a wholly negative answer to the question ‘is philosophy any good for anything?’ It would seem that if he is to remain loyal to the animating desires of his youth he must free not only himself from the authority of metaphysics but also liberate others. Ultimately, then, what philosophy is good for is to help bring about its own demise in a way that frees others from the idea that there is an authority (philosophy, God) that transcends the merely human. The task is to unfetter the authority invested in something other, and make it available to renew the sense of our own control over our own (human) destiny; the sort of autonomy announced by Kant as the theme of Enlightenment thinking:

Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man’s inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! (Dare to be wise) ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’ – that is the motto of enlightenment. (Kant 1784: 462)

It is in this sense that, as Habermas notes, Rorty ‘attributes a culturally critical significance to his anti-Platonic turn, a significance that is supposed to extend far beyond his own person and his private switch of philosophical allegiance’ (2000: 32). It is only on the assumption that Western culture is constrained by its ‘self-incurred tutelage’ in the form of an immature desire for a quasi-parental authority that Rorty’s own rejection of such – in the form of Realism – could have greater significance. And it is only by simultaneously offering a diagnosis of that immaturity, and a vision of what human beings might be like without it, that the renewal of the Enlightenment’s promise of freedom can be given shape as a task for us.

Rorty’s account of his intellectual progress ends with the publication of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity in 1989. That work constitutes the most complete expression of how a dominant conception of philosophy’s task is exhausted in and through the recognition that the Platonic desire for a single vision is deceptive, and aims to give intellectuals a narrative of self-understanding that is free of such deception. It is written from the perspective that the autobiographical fragment reveals as the one its author achieved at the point when the controlling deception was unmasked, which in turn allowed the ‘narrative of maturation’ (Habermas ibid.: 31) to be written. To share the viewpoint of the narrator is to see that in promoting philosophical theory over political practice both leftist and rightist critics are captivated still by the Siren-call of that ‘single vision’; and that it is indeed possible both to reject it and, as ‘a single person’ (CIS: 198), combine in one’s life the elements that comprise it.

3 Far, far away …

I have dwelt upon the link between Rorty’s self-reported overcoming of his Platonic sickness and the diagnosis of philosophy’s original sin in order to convey some sense of what he came to regard as his intellectual project and of the sort of considerations that attempts to overturn or ‘overcome’ philosophy’s authority give rise to. This emphasis on Rorty’s metaphilosophical concerns does no more than reflect his own preoccupations, however, and we will never be far from them in what follows. A further, related reason for having stressed this link appertains to how Rorty’s work might usefully be approached. It is, for example, a familiar criticism that finding common ground upon which to engage critically with it is hard to find.8 It is not difficult to sympathize with both sides here. The common ground for most intellectual disciplines at most periods is in part constituted by the existence of recognized problems with identifiable criteria for their resolution. This is not inconsistent with the thought that new theories, or new ways of looking at things, aim to determine the norms according to which they are evaluated; but such theories or world-views generally have sufficient overlap of substantive content or of human interest with their competitors to be regarded as (say) physical theories or historiographical approaches.

Like all putative ‘revolutionaries’, then, Rorty’s aim in offering his revisionary alternative to the ‘Platonic’ view of human self-understanding is to set the standard by which it is to be judged. For many, however, the redescription he offers is not something recognizable from ‘where we are’. Broadly sympathetic critics like Habermas, McDowell and Putnam share Rorty’s disdain for the view that the world has an objective and unchanging, value-neutral structure which is accurately represented in the minds of the cognitively well-endowed. Nevertheless, although they regard Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) as a considerable achievement, even these are apt to regard the positions on truth and objectivity promulgated in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) and related pieces as relativistic or idealist inversions of Realism, as constituting a view that could not even be construed as self-understanding.

Needless to say, most critics are not of the sympathetic variety. These are the ‘fellow philosophy professors’ who ‘disliked’ (PSH: 12) the earlier book’s attempt to diagnose a restricted form of the Platonic ‘self-deception’ to which they had fallen prey, one which ramified to the analytic philosopher’s pet inquiries into the nature of mind and meaning. Part of the reason for this antagonism brings us to an aspect of Rorty’s story that he leaves out; namely, his ‘successful career as a young analytic philosopher’ (Habermas ibid.: 31) whom ‘Carnap and others had persuaded … that philosophers should … try to become more “scientific” and “rigorous” ’ (PSH: 177–8). He initially made his mark in the 1960s when he advanced a new materialist response to the traditional mind–body problem and edited an influential collection of papers under the title The Linguistic Turn. For the sympathetic critic, then, Rorty is a gamekeeper turned poacher; for the non-sympathetic, an apostate whose abandonment of the Platonic project amounts to what Thomas Nagel calls ‘a rebellion against the philosophical impulse itself,’ part of ‘a vain effort to grow up too early’ (1986: 12).

With the foregoing in mind, the suggestion prompted by Rorty’s autobiographical reflection is that a similar sort of narrative redescription might provide for his work a more critically amenable context. On behalf of the non-sympathetic critic, the aim is to show how a tension Rorty comes to diagnose in his early analytic work in the philosophy of mind leads to a ‘turn’ in his thinking and thence to the more flamboyantly ‘postmodern’ views with which he becomes associated latterly. This will in turn conduce to a better understanding of what is at stake in the conflict with the sympathetic critic, and of where to locate the burden of evidence in it.

To this end, chapters 2 and 3 focus on how Rorty’s original contribution to the debate about the mind–body problem – his so-called eliminative materialism – is motivated by a metaphilosophical concern to understand the phenomenon of conceptual change. Of central importance here is the construal of normative authority in terms of a concept’s embeddedness in a social practice, rather than through a purported ability to help ‘represent’ the world or because of its role in the ‘logic’ of ordinary language. The attack this implies on the authority of philosophy becomes increasingly radical, and in chapters 4 and 5 is expressed through the effort to articulate what a post-philosophical culture might be like. This involves a shift from the eliminativism of the early work to the more familiar account of concept change that constellates around metaphors of redescription. It culminates with the attempt made in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity to redescribe the Enlightenment’s promise of autonomy by proposing a new self-image for the liberal intellectual, one suited for a milieu in which the dream of a single vision is no longer the dream of reason.

What becomes apparent from chapter 3 onwards is the importance of Rorty’s non-Realist conceptions of truth and objectivity. Chapter 6 examines the criticisms made of these on the part (largely) of sympathetic critics, while the conclusion evaluates their implications for the cogency of Rorty’s neo-pragmatism. For the most part, chapter 1 fills in some of the philosophical background against which Rorty’s eliminativist account of mental events appears and will be helpful for those unfamiliar with the work of the positivists, Ryle, Quine and Kuhn. However, it begins by attempting to alert the reader to what might be involved in eliminating concepts that play a central role in the way people make sense of their lives. To that end, it describes a place both far away and close to home …

Notes

1 Rorty’s model here is Dewey (1930), but there are interesting connections with Mill (1971).

2 The sort associated with Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger et al.

3 See TP: ch. 3 for a reply.

4 Searle’s warning resonates with that given by theists in the nineteenth century concerning the dangers to public morals of denying the existence of God.

5 This would be the view of the ancient sceptics, who suspended belief about all contentious matters in order to attain tranquillity. See Gascoigne (2003: ch. 2).

6 Rorty was at Princeton from 1961 until 1982; the University of Virginia until 1997; and at Stanford until his death in June 2007.

7 Cf. Feuerbach, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger; and, of course, Dewey.

8 Cf. Conant (2000: 268–9).

1

Out of Mind

1 Our Rortian ancestors

Far, far away, lies an astronomical body much like our own precious Earth, populated by creatures much like us. On this planet – long ago named Rort by an amateur Terran astronomer who’d taken a few philosophy classes before becoming disillusioned – there are two distinct civilizations. The Nortians have a tribal society, with the title of chief passed along the male line and deriving its authority from the purported adventures of a distant ancestor Da-Ka, who had stopped to fish and pulled the world up on the end of his line. They have many strange beliefs, in turn peculiar and repulsive by our standards, amongst which their view of the aetiology of various maladies is noteworthy. For them, illness in general is caused by demons, with each distinct complaint caused by a specific fiend. The Nortian world-view is dominated by speculation about these demons, which were dragged up along with the world and whose fate is intimately linked with that of the chiefs and thus to the legitimacy of their rule. Interestingly, a certain priestly caste, after ritually consuming a particular kind of plant, purport to see the various demons that make people sick lingering by the bodies of the infirm. A bilious blue demon, for example, accompanies the epileptic, and a lewd fat red one pursues the asthmatic. These adepts have discovered a variety of naturally occurring substances, each of which drives a particular type of demon away when administered to the patient, thereby (indirectly) facilitating their recovery.

Turning to their neighbours, Sortians have evolved a liberal-democratic, welfarist, political system, based on principles of justice and the rule of law. Although technologically advanced and economically dynamic, there is little material inequality in Sortian society; but since most Sortians have rich intellectual and cultural lives, they express little concern with whether they have more or fewer material possessions than others. Sortian society is in many respects, then, much like our own … There is, however, one big difference. A peculiarity of Sortian intellectual history is that it was the area of the brain sciences that emerged first and developed fastest. Neurological knowledge has been central to Sortian self-understanding for so long that it is not second- but first-nature for them to report on specific states of their brain and central nervous system. Young children are told that if they go too near to the fire their C-fibres will fire, and adults occasionally report that although neuronal bundle S-1101 is excited there is in fact no castle hovering in the air. Indeed, since their knowledge of physiology is such that any sentence in Sortian can be correlated with a specific neural state, it is rather a matter of personal style if a Sortian chooses to say ‘I had X-10474 so I ducked my head’ or ‘I saw the ball come flying towards me so I ducked my head’.

Imagine now that an expedition from Earth finally arrives on Rort. What would they say about the Nortians, and in particular about the existence of demons? While the tender-minded anthropologists in the team might conclude that, since there is no neutral standpoint from which to evaluate a culture, from the only one that matters (the Nortian) demons clearly do exist, the tough-minded scientist would doubtless disdain such relativism. For these the operative contrast is not between competing world-views but between true and false beliefs; or, at the very least, between good theories and bad theories. With that contrast in mind it seems clear what to say to the Nortians: germs and bacteria cause sickness and disease, not demons. The so-called demon-perceptions of medical experts (‘witch-doctors!’) are hallucinations brought on by the ingestion of psychotropic chemicals found in the local flora, the manifest content of which is suggested by the culturally pervasive concern with demons and, in particular, its retrogressive relation to political authority.

Given the intimidating presence of Terran technology, demon-talk might be radically undermined by this confrontation with another race, and begin to loosen its hold on Nortian culture. But since no prediction that Nortian medical science makes is disconfirmed by Terran medicine it is entirely open to the sophisticated Nortian to reply that Terran science has shown merely that the presence of demons is constantly correlated with the microbiological entities of Terran medicine, and that eating certain plants can make some people see things that aren’t there. It seems the only response available to the Terran is to emphasize the relative minimalism of his approach: eliminating demon-talk simplifies medical theory by reducing the number of entities it needs to pay heed to; especially those entities the existence of which suggests some rather perplexing questions. But now the complexity and embeddedness of demon-ontology in Nortian social and political life (in Nortian self-understanding) ensures that their medical practices are not as readily isolatable from such broader concerns as they are for the Terrans. The appeal of, and to, simplicity is not in itself neutral.

With that in mind, let’s continue the expedition with a visit to the Sortians. While their culture will be of little interest to the anthropologists, their grasp of neurobiology will attract the delight rather than the disdain of the scientists. And yet despite this there seems to be something wrong here. One way of capturing this intuition is to remark that the Sortians don’t seem to know that they have minds! Although they use intentional idioms to communicate, they do not think that this talk about beliefs, desires, feelings and so on refers to mental as opposed to physical states; rather, it refers to (in general) the same sorts of states as talk about ‘sexual arousal’ and ‘standing up’. Now one can readily imagine a person not knowing that they are ill or in trouble, but not knowing that they have a mind seems altogether different. That difference seems to lie with the intuition that knowing that one has a mind is in some way constitutive of having a mind. This is why Terran thoughts about the mind are linked to the topic of consciousness: to have a mind is to have that special sort of awareness of, and unmediated access to, the ‘inner space’ that is the mind. If this is the case, then to be ignorant of the fact that one has a mind is not to lack some specific item of knowledge: it is to lack a mind, to lack consciousness. But without a mind how can one know anything at all, since knowledge is quite naturally thought of in terms of the mind’s representation of the world ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ it? And without a mind how can something be a moral agent, a person? An assemblage of brain-states following whatever neurological laws there are doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that could be considered free, and therefore be judged in moral terms.

Such reflections lead to the conclusion that the Sortians don’t have minds, are not persons, and don’t know anything; they are just biological organisms interacting in complex ways, making meaningless noises that nevertheless have multifarious effects on other such organisms; like a colony of featherless bipedal ants. But how can this conclusion be squared with the active interest taken in these meaningless noises by the Terran scientists, economists and others who find the achievements of Sortian civilization fascinating? Pragmatically, at least, they are treating the Sortians as persons; so the question ‘do the Sortians have minds or not?’ is clearly neither one that interests them nor one they are qualified to answer. So who is so qualified, and how would they go about answering such a question? It seems natural to turn to philosophy for an answer, since philosophers have traditionally been concerned with identifying the nature or essences of things, and one clearly needs to know what the mind ‘is’ in order to determine whether an entity has one or not. But the very concepts the philosophers have at their disposal to describe what it is that they have and the Sortians lack are those for which the science of the latter can find no use. While tender-minded Sortian anthropologists might say that minds exist when one adopts a Terran world-view, the neurophysicists are likely to conclude that this is rather a matter of better and worse theories; that given the explanatory superiority of Sortian science over its Terran counterpart there is no compelling reason to believe that Terrans possess something the Sortians themselves either lack or are unaware of. Eliminate talk of minds, they tell the Terran philosophers, and not only will you be able to embrace fully the neurophysiology we can teach you, but you’ll be spared all those tortuous philosophical problems that involve the relationship between the mind and the world, and be able to get on with the more productive business of improving the lives of less fortunate Terrans.

It is not clear how things will develop here; after all, the complexity and embeddedness of mind-ontology in Terran social and political life – and therefore in Terran self-understanding – ensures that brain sciences are not as readily isolatable from such broader concerns as they are for the Sortians. But at this point we might begin to feel a certain sense of resistance. The narrative tries to seduce us into seeing an analogy between the Nortians and the Sortians and make it seem that in respect of the concepts the Terrans use, those relating to the mental are no more determined by their essential nature or by the essential nature of the world or of language than the pre-scientific concept of a demon is. But, despite the distancing device of the thought-experiment, are we not Terrans? Is the concept of mind not of a wholly different order? Our intuition is not just that it would be difficult to abandon it – that it is central to how we see ourselves – but that it is essential to what we are. Allied to this is the suspicion that the insistence that scientific practices establish the appropriate linguistic norms is far more tendentious than the view that it’s rather how things feel to us minded creatures. In this regard it seems that the unquestioned phenomenology of conscious experience is on the side of philosophy against science.

The case of what I have called the Nortians is freely adapted from an analogy offered in one of Rorty’s earliest contributions to the debate about the nature of the mental;1 the (similarly modified) example of the Sortians is the central thought-experiment in chapter II of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN).2 Both texts focus on demonstrating the in-principle eliminability of the concept of mind, and tracing how Rorty’s approach to this task develops in the intervening period will highlight its significance for our understanding of conceptual change, and of the relationship between language and the mind. More importantly, since the possession of a mind is connected to the capacity for rational reflection, and the latter naturally thought of as, in its highest form, constitutive of philosophical inquiry, Rorty’s attempt to undermine the idea that having a mind is an intrinsic feature of creatures like us has obvious implications for one’s understanding of the status and limits of such inquiry, in relation both to the natural sciences and to culture conceived of in the broadest sense.

Although this will be detailed in chapters 2 and 3, it can be related to the foregoing by reflecting briefly on the relevance of thought-experiments to philosophical inquiry. In general such imagined forms of life help us to see ourselves from a perspective other than the one we normally occupy. By allowing certain features of the world or of ourselves to vary, we hope to loosen the grip of customary thinking and investigate just how different things might (be thought to) be while remaining in some crucial sense possible. Another way of describing this process is that it allows us to explore the geography of our concepts, with regard both to their plasticity and their potential eliminability. This is pursued customarily as an armchair exercise, but such reflections are not immune to empirical change. Certain things that we can imagine as possible – indeed, many beliefs we hold true – could not only not have not been conceived as possibilities in the past; they could not have been thought at all. Likewise, it would be hubristic not to imagine that as yet unthinkable thoughts will be thought in the future, or are perhaps being thought right now on some distant planet.

For present purposes, then, thought-experiments can be regarded as heuristic devices that help us explore the possibilities of concept change in general; but there is a temptation in philosophy to think that, robustly analysed, they can help identity concepts that are ineliminable: irreducible features of our, or perhaps of any, conceptual terrain. This is one way in which philosophy aims to mark itself out as a distinct activity with a specific subject matter: one dealing with pure meanings or the logic or our language; standing icily aloof from the pressures of empirical change and whose cognitive authority requires that some sense can be made of such detachment. It is one of Rorty’s principal claims in PMN that philosophy cannot arrogate to itself legitimately any such authority (p. 3 ff.) because such a disengaged standpoint cannot be rendered fully intelligible; which is to say it is of ill-defined use.

In the Anglo-American tradition, the attack on the authority of philosophy that Rorty develops – and in particular the authority philosophy claims as an enterprise wholly distinct from the empirical sciences, the former searching for conceptual truths, and the latter for mere empirical generalizations – emerged as part of an immanent critique within the philosophy of science, and is associated above all with Quine and Kuhn. In section 3 we’ll look briefly at an account of the contribution these made to the naturalistic, historicist, anti-authoritarian turn in the philosophy of science, which will provide a basis from which to appreciate the broader significance of Rorty’s neo-pragmatism. As we’ve already observed, however, this originally manifested itself as an intervention in the (then) ongoing debate about the mind–body problem. In order to better appreciate Rorty’s contribution to that debate, it will be useful to have some account of what had occurred prior to the arrival of the ‘Nortians’ on the philosophical scene.

2 Materialism and the mind–body problem

The Kantian shift of religious concerns into the realm of faith helped consolidate the Enlightenment’s project to undermine the intellectual appeal of theology, and in particular its claim to any cognitive authority over the fast-developing natural sciences. An increasingly secular culture emerged in the West in the nineteenth century, with discoveries such as Lyell’s in geology, and this was given a huge boost with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859. The advances in physics associated with Bohr, Heisenberg and Einstein tempt us to think of the twentieth century as exemplifying an increasing confidence in the ability of the natural sciences to explain phenomena that had hitherto eluded the nomological net. Notwithstanding the enormous cultural shift expressed in this more naturalistic conception of the world, one area in particular seems recalcitrant to such a view, and that the most fundamental to our self-understanding: the mind. Attempts to view the mind or the mental as on a par ontologically with the material world go back in the modern tradition at least as far as Hobbes, but successive versions of ‘materialism’ have failed to unsettle the intuition that even if the mind doesn’t comprise some non-material ‘stuff’, as Descartes supposed, mental states nevertheless have properties like intentionality and phenomenal (‘raw’) feel that resist reduction to the properties of any physical or material entities or processes. In addition, there is the familiar conviction that the possession of a mind is linked to the capacity to recognize the norms of rationality and through that to the capacities for cognition and agency. This leaves us with something of a split conception of ourselves and of the world: we look to science to explain the latter, and regard ourselves as but one more set of objects in that world subject to the same fundamental laws. And yet, as possessors or instantiations of minds (and thus as knowers), we seem not only set apart from the world, but necessarily so in order that the world becomes an object of such scientific knowledge in the first place. But how can we finite creatures of blood and bone, having evolved on this planet as a result of innumerable contingencies, not be a part of that knowable world? One name for this paradox – of how to find a place for the mind or the mental in nature and thus achieve a unified conception of ourselves – is the mind–body problem.

In the first half of the twentieth century it had come to seem obvious that, if the mind–body problem did not merely evoke the Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa, then it must take its form from a distinction found within language. That is to say, the mind–body distinction came to be regarded in terms of the contrast between sentences that deploy mentalis-tic or psychological terms (M-sentences) and those that do not. This is one expression of what was, according to Bergmann’s immortalizing phrase, philosophy’s ‘linguistic turn’ away from a speculative concern with the constitution of what there is, for which no clear criteria of success had been forthcoming, and towards how we mean, how we come to speak with objective purport. Accordingly, semantic analysis can provide the necessary criteria of success; and, since our prima facie evidence for the presence of a mind is the behaviour of the organism in question, one suggestion was that M-sentences could be analysed into sentences that contain only terms that refer to the behaviour of bodies and to their dispositions to behave (and not to mental entities). This led European philosophy in two, oftentimes antagonistic, directions depending on how this linguistic-behaviourist intuition was interpreted. According to the tradition deriving from the Vienna School, which was later to flourish in the United States, the analysis is in terms of an ideal language, which derives its semantic authority from its conditions of empirical verification. The competing tradition took its naturalistic inspiration not from the natural sciences but from language as purportedly used in the ordinary contexts of everyday life. We’ll take Hempel’s as an example of the ideal-language attempt to eliminate the referring use of mental terms, and Ryle’s as an example of the ordinary-language attempt to do likewise.

‘Analytic’ or ‘logical behaviourism’ is associated with the work of Carnap and Hempel in the 1930s and 1940s. In ‘The Logical Analysis of Psychology’ Hempel opens with a question that will recur in later chapters: ‘Is psychology a natural science [Naturwissenschaften], or is it one of the sciences of the mind and culture [Geisteswissenschaften]?’ (1935: 373). Hempel acknowledges that the concepts (mass, field, intensity, etc.) and methods (causal explanation) of physics3 appear remote from those of psychology, which ‘has for its subject-matter notions which are, in a broad sense, mental’ (p. 374). He identifies this with ‘the fact that the objects investigated by psychology – in contradistinction to physics – possess an intrinsic meaningfulness’ (ibid.) and consequently require not explanation, but understanding.4 The following dramatizes the image of an unbridgeable divide:

Take … the case of a man who speaks. Within the framework of physics, this process is considered to be completely explained once one has traced the movements which make up the utterance to their causes, that is to say, to certain physiological processes in the organism, and, in particular, to the central nervous system. But, it is said, this does not even broach the psychological problem. The latter begins with an understanding of what was said, and proceeds to integrate it into a wider context of meaning. (1935: 374–5)

For Hempel, what motivates the linguistic reconstruction of the mind–body problem is the threat of a fundamental metaphysical cleavage that places human beings astride an ontological and epistemological gap between the objects referred to in one discourse and those referred to in another. As such, it is a standing challenge to the unity both of human understanding – of ‘science’ broadly construed – and of the creatures so understood.

In response Hempel remarks that, although Watson’s attempt to restrict psychology to talk of ‘bodily behaviour’ is on the right track, it is nevertheless not within the gift of psychology to announce itself a science.5 That is to say, Hempel assumes that only philosophy, through the epistemological insights of the Vienna School, can legislate with respect to the cognitive status of a putative scientific discipline. At this point, he offers a quick summary of the most important of those insights; namely, that we know the ‘content’ or the meaning of a proposition ‘when, and only when, we know under what conditions we would characterise it as true, and under what conditions we would characterise it as false’ (p. 376). Consider the following:

Today at time t in place x the temperature was 31°C

What it is to know what this sentence means is to know that it is true when at the time and in the place specified, the upper extent of a line of mercury, inside a tube of a certain kind, coincides with a mark on a scale numbered ‘31’.6 The important points are:

1 A target sentence can be translated, ‘without change of meaning’ (p. 376), into a (longer) sentence that makes no use of a term, the referring use of which might be thought to imply the existence of some problematic entity.

2 ‘That the meaning of a proposition is established by the conditions of its verification’ and thus two propositions have the same meaning or content ‘when, and only when, they are both true or are both false in the same conditions’ (p. 377).

3 A proposition that has no verification conditions has no content or meaning: it is ‘a sequence of words correctly constructed from the point of view of grammar’ but not a real proposition.

In (2) and (3) attention is drawn to how the verificationist criterion of meaning allows the logical positivists to give a semantic (neo-Kantian) twist to the legacy of Locke et al. Rather than complex ideas being relations of simple ideas, whose aetiology is to be traced back to the simple impressions that cause (and justify) them, the positivist argues that talk about a particular object X is meaningful only if it is possible to analyse (reduce) it into reports by a cognizing subject of what is ‘given’ to her in elementary experiences. This in turn offers an apparent solution to the standing problem of the status of necessary, analytic, a priori truths. When we undertake the semantic analysis of certain claims, their truth turns out to rest entirely with the meanings of the concepts used. The truth of ‘a dolphin is a mammal,’ for example, follows from the meaning of ‘dolphin’: if you know what a dolphin is (that is to say, the conditions under which it is correct to use the term), you know that a dolphin is a mammal. So it turns out that all truths are either verifiable or satisfy the principle of contradiction (are so-called ‘conceptual truths’: true in virtue of the meanings of the words used, rather than because of the way the world is). The relationship between the analytic–synthetic distinction and the translation thesis of (1) is important, but for the time being let’s return to Hempel.

At this juncture the line Hempel takes should be clear. Recall that unless we are willing to dismiss an overwhelming number of utterances as meaningless, thereby depriving psychology of any subject matter, we must acknowledge that they have truth-values; and, indeed, that many if not most are true. But the meaningfulness of a sentence seems to commit us to the existence of the entity to which it refers. Russell had shown that grammatical form could mislead us with respect to what entities must or must not exist if a sentence is to be meaningful. For example, the sentence ‘I met nobody today’ seems to function in the same way as ‘I met Tim today’. Since the latter can only have a truth-value if Tim exists, one might be led to suppose that ‘nobody’ names an entity. Of course, we know that the sentence ‘I met nobody today’ should be translated into something like ‘It’s not the case that I met any people today’, which does not include the term with the problematic referring use. Given the analysis of the theoretic term ‘temperature’ and the desire for the unification of science, Hempel’s view is that sentences with mentalist/psychological terms are to be treated likewise: translated into physical test sentences that specify – or, rather, constitute – their meaning or content through the use of ‘only the concepts of physics’ (p. 378). So in the sentence:

The Terran is in pain,

the translation will eliminate the referring use of ‘pain’ in the way the referring use of ‘temperature’ was eliminated, thus allowing that such statements have truth-values while retaining ontological parsimony.

Hempel recognizes, in one form, an objection that will take on many others: that ‘physical test sentences … are absolutely incapable of formulating the intrinsic nature of a mental process’ (p. 379; emphasis added). For the verificationist this is only so much hand-waving, of course. No one can ascribe a mental state to another without some behavioural clues, which are describable using sentences that make no use of mentalist terms. But those clues aren’t just the physical evidence for the mental state, they are what it means to ascribe the state, just as the height of the mercury column lining up with the number 31 isn’t a tip-off to the temperature, but constitutes what it means to be 31°C. If ‘intrinsic nature’ is meant to indicate the possession of a property that cannot in principle be expressed using a ‘concept of physics’, then any sentence deploying it is devoid of content. It follows swiftly from this that since there are no contentful sentences deploying mental terms that cannot be translated without loss into the physical test sentences that constitute their meaning, there is no standpoint from which one could even state the mind–body problem: it is a pseudo-problem (p. 380). More importantly, since all meaningful sentences are so by virtue of their conditions of verification, there is no body of sentences – those pertaining to the Geisteswissenschaften – that require their own method of scientific investigation. In Hempel’s view, ‘all the branches of science are in principle of one and the same nature; they are branches of the unitary science, physics’ (p. 382).