Better and the Best

1. Practical stance against the Best – Platonic prophecy as theory – Romantic prophecy as poetry; 2. Theoretical stance against the Best – Evaluative platonism and robustness – Possible betters vs. actual best; 3. The Village Champion argument – Truth and justification; 4. Sloughing off the relativist with self-referential arguments – Contradiction is a practical infelicity; 5. Practical attitudes should be allowed to trump theory – Absolutes are parasitic, not autonomous – Sellars’ parasitism argument about ‘looks’-talk on ‘is’-talk; 6. Is ‘best’-talk parasitic on ‘better’-talk? 7. You can’t say what’s best without saying what’s worse – Self-justifiers as platonism – Closing aperçu

1.      In an interview toward the end of his life, Richard Rorty was asked if he thought that advocates of black reparations had valid and serious arguments. Rorty responded that:

There are valid and serious arguments, but there are also valid and serious arguments for taxing the citizens of the First World down to the standard of living of the average inhabitant of the Third World, and distributing the proceeds of this taxation to the latter. But since neither set of arguments will lead to any such action being taken, I am not sure how much time we should spend thinking about them, as opposed to thinking about measures that have some chance of actually being carried out. It would be better to think about what might actually be done than to think about what an absolutely perfect world would be like. The best can be an enemy of the better. [1]

The stance Rorty is here taking is a practical stance against the Best. Rorty is not against thinking about what the world should be like, as utopic and prophetic thinking is central to how Rorty conceives of the intellectual’s role in democratic culture. But what he is suggesting here is that we cannot spend the day in imagination. Rorty’s conception of prophecy is romantic, not platonic. A platonic conception of prophecy got off the ground when Plato began using metaphors of sight to articulate his sense of philosophy—“theory” derives from theoros, or “onlooker,” “spectator.” Plato’s transformation of the common Greek word for an audience member of a festival is what produced Dewey’s attack on the “spectatorial account of knowledge,” and when theoria was Latinized by contemplatio, it became invested with our derived word “speculation” from speculum, or mirror. Hence Rorty’s devastating attack on platonism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

The romantic conception of prophecy, however, is different—it gains its sense, not from theoria, but from poiēsis, “making,” which we get “poetry” from. Rather than seeing something already there, the romantic conception of prophecy rests more on the Renaissance trope of building “castles in the air.” While the platonic conception gains a sense of urgency from its positing of a Best behind a veil that, if only we could just see it, we’d have our blueprint from how to order the world—the romantic conception loses that urgency, but in compensation we get a picture of how toying with castles too far off in the sky can distract us from the reality around us.

2.      What undergirds Rorty’s practical stance toward the Best is his theoretical stance against the Best, which is to say against platonism. For Rorty’s stance at the level of theory is that the Best is a mirage because it is circumscribed by our fallibility and our lack of method—for any X said to be the Best, we have to admit something better might come along. Such an admission of fallibility is what then produces the search for a method with which one could know certainly that one has in fact found the Best. Dewey and Rorty thought that this Quest for Certainty showed a lack of maturity, and that we should rather face up to the contingency of our assertions of what is the best.

The problem for this line of thought is that a new form of platonist has come along that suggests that you can’t have a notion of what’s better if you don’t have a robust notion of the Best. Rorty wants to deny needing one. This new version is a particular species of the more general form of what I will call evaluative platonism. There are many species, but the basic form is that if you don’t have the Best in mind as a sort of ideal to shoot for, you won’t progress toward anything. The industrial strength version is a full-blooded Platonism, which posits an Absolute Good that can be reached (at least in theory—you can see the Sun outside the Cave, even if you can’t reach it). There are, however, important knock-off brands, the most important of which for my purposes are Peircian end-of-inquiry notions which suggest that one needs a robust focus imaginarius to make sense of inquiry—these are important precisely because of the range of agreement Rorty shares with these other pragmatists. Rorty’s romantic notion isn’t robust enough because it simply expands our repertoire of possible betters without narrowing one of them as the actual best. Since the traditional enemy of the platonist is the relativist, it should be no surprise that that is the epithet pragmatists like Hilary Putnam wield at Rorty for continuing to resist attempts at robustness. [2]

3.      To get a sense of how Rorty responds, we might turn to his Village Champion Argument against Jürgen Habermas, another pragmatist admirer of Peirce. Rorty sets the stage by contrasting the Peircian strategy with what I’ve called “full-blooded Platonism”:

Instead of arguing that because reality is One, and truth correspondence to that One Reality, Peircians argue that the idea of convergence is built into the presuppositions of discourse. They all agree that the principal reason why reason cannot be naturalized is that reason is normative and norms cannot be naturalized. But, they say, we can make room for the normative without going back to the traditional idea of a duty to correspond to the intrinsic nature of One Reality. We do this by attending to the universalistic character of the idealizing presuppositions of discourse. [3]

To “naturalize reason” in this context is to reject the utility of the concept of truth when attempting to figure out what is and is not knowledge—instead, naturalizers argue, justification is all that does any real work. Rorty does not want to collapse the distinction between the two, however, only argue that the T in the JTB conception of knowledge, exactly like the B, does not play an operative role in the determination of what people know. [4] Peircians think that the T does play an operative role, a transcending moment in which more than justification is had. Without the ability to transcend the moment of justification, they think, everything would be relative to a particular audience. Rorty continues:

Habermas’ doctrine of a “transcendent moment” seems to me to run together a commendable willingness to try something new with an empty boast. To say “I’ll try to defend this against all comers” is often, depending upon the circumstances, a commendable attitude. But to say “I can successfully defend this against all comers” is silly. Maybe you can, but you are no more in a position to claim that you can than the village champion is to claim that he can beat the world champion. [5]

Rorty later glosses this argument:

When we have finished justifying our belief to the audience we think relevant (perhaps our own intellectual conscience, or our fellow-citizens, or the relevant experts) we need not, and typically do not, make any further claims, much less universal ones. After rehearsing justification, we may say either “That is why I think my assertion true” or “That is why my assertion is true,” or both. Going from the former assertion to the latter is not a philosophically pregnant transition from particularity to universality, or from context-dependence to context-independence. It is merely a stylistic difference. [6]

I hope it is apparent how the Village Champion Argument, and therefore the relationship between justification and truth, bears on the relationship between the better and the Best. To claim that X is “the best,” you are asserting the truth of the claim “X is the best.” Rorty’s point is that these assertions are necessarily always in front of some particular audience, and therefore the pragmatic power of any particular claim is relative to an audience.

4.      I think we can be a little more precise than Rorty’s usual mode of sloughing off the relativist as something he needs not be concerned with. The Village Champion Argument carries a lot of force, but there is more in the area than just a stylistic difference. The pattern of Rorty’s mode is set in his infamous APA presidential address, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism.” There he says, succinctly and some might say too perfunctorily, “‘Relativism’ is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinion on an important topic are equally good.” [7] The reason he wishes to dispose of the relativist quickly is because he thinks, rightly, that it hides the real issues at work behind the conflict between pragmatists and platonists. So he says that “if there were any relativists, they would, of course, be easy to refute. One would merely use some variant of the self-referential arguments Socrates used against Protagoras.” [8] The argument is like this:

Protagoras: Every view is as good as any other!
Socrates: Does that include yours?
Protagoras [sensing already the end]: Er, well, yes, it must, then hunh?
Socrates: Okay, so if your view that “every view is as good as any other” is as good as the view that “not every view is as good as any other,” why should we adopt your view over the ones that say yours is shit?
Protagoras: Because…it’s true?
Socrates: Yah, okay, but what grip do you have on truth that is independent of your relativism about goodness? Isn’t goodness in the way of views just truth? How can you have a view that is itself true where others are false, but the false views are just as good? Doesn’t that just make truth an idle curiosity, and therefore your own view idle as well? Can you give me no reason for adopting your view?
Protagoras: I…will…get back to you on that one…
Socrates: Yes, Miss Palin, please do.

Since pragmatism is heir to a discernible Protagorean tradition, we are, in fact, better positioned to get back to Plato on this issue. The first step is recognizing what underpins self-referential contradiction arguments. The invalidity of contradiction is the foul incurred when you say both “X” and “not X.” But this is just to say that in the practice of saying thou shalt not incur such violations of the rules of that practice. Following Wittgenstein, one has to think, here, of practices on the analogy of games. You don’t get to count as playing the game of football, as practicing football, if—as many turd to third football comedies have underscored—you jumpkick the quarterback. In some definable Practice of Saying, it is against the rules to hold contradictory claims. (This isn’t to say that there are other practices that involve words in which it is okay to do this. Poetry and lying are the most obvious examples, which is why Plato thought poetry was a form of lying.)

This first step gets us onto pragmatist ground: there’s nothing inherently wrong with saying X and not-X. There are many contexts in which it is fine, like when you say the latter with your fingers crossed or in the context of saying the sentence before this one. Contradiction is, then, a practical infelicity of a special kind. And once this has been identified, we can see the point in Habermas’ notion of a “performative contradiction.” This is part of the idea that you can’t say one thing and do another. And this displays the larger genus that the species of self-refutation falls under with regards to relativism, for it has often been accepted as a refutation of relativism (and nihilism, for that matter) that when someone says “peeing standing up is as good as sitting down” and they then pee sitting down, to say, “if they are both just as good, then on what grounds did you make the choice?” For giving any grounds at all is grounds enough for identifying criteria being used to adjudicate truth from falsity, good from bad. And having done something is ipso facto having made a choice. So the doing contradicts the saying.

5.      So what underlies Rorty’s blithe rejection of relativism as a real concern is the pragmatic understanding that to behave at all is to refute the very idea that grounds of choice are all made equal. And while this is true, that our everyday practice refutes every day the theoretical thesis of relativism, it does not refute it at the level of theory. Rorty’s attitude tells us that we shouldn’t care about that, that we cannot, as Emerson says, “spend the day in explanation.” [9] And I think this is true as well, that our practical attitude toward the world should be allowed to trump pressures at the level of theory. [10] However, at the level of theory, it should be possible to show how relativism and platonism go the wrong way at things.

Robert Brandom, I believe, has shown how we might go at this. The charge of relativism leveled by platonists is motivated by the idea that you cannot talk about “betterness” without the Best, whereas heirs to Protagoras think all claims are of the form “X is better than …” with the ellipsis being filled in by specific claims. Brandom, in his notion of the pragmatically mediated semantic relation, has shown us how charges of relativism leveled at the pragmatist can be refuted by showing how Absolutes, like the Best, are parasitic, and not autonomous.

To understand this argument we need to understand the basic form of Wilfrid Sellars’ master argument in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” against the Myth of the Given and elsewhere. [11] For one example, one project in what Brandom calls the “empiricist core program of the classical analytic project” is to establish phenomenalism. Think of phenomenalism on the model of Berkelyan idealism, whose commitment to empiricism was so powerful that unlike Locke who thought our knowledge starts with our individual experience, he thought all we could know was our individual experience. This gets transposed into the analytic idiom as a reductionist program—the attempt to reduce talk about how things are to talk about how things seem or look. If that reduction can be shown to be successful without remainder, then we’ve shown how we don’t need to talk about how things are, but only about how things seem. (Consider the analogous materialisms about supernatural entities—we can do without talk about witchcraft because we can get along fine in explaining what happens by talking about bad mushrooms. [12]) Reductionism in the analytic idiom is a semantic relation—when you explain what you mean, you are relating your first misunderstood statement with a second, hopefully better understood statement. So when you suggest that when you talk about tables what you are really talking about are clouds of electrons at particular spatialtemporal vectors, you are suggesting a special form of paraphrase. “When you say ‘table,’ you really mean ‘cloud of electrons.’” [13]

So this is what “autonomy” means in this context—if you attempt to explain away a particular vocabulary (e.g., the vocabulary for saying “how things are”), you are suggesting that all the work can be done by a different vocabulary (e.g., the vocabulary for saying “how things seem”). For this reduction to work, the alternative vocabulary must be independent of the target vocabulary you are reducing into nothingness. If it isn’t, if you need the target vocabulary to use the alternative, then the reduction was misguided because you have a remainder (that being something you need but now can’t explain the existence of or how you do it, etc.). So if you can show that a marked for demolition vocabulary is needed to use the alternative, then you can combat the reductionism. Brandom says that Sellars’ argument “turns on the assertion of the pragmatic dependence of one set of vocabulary-deploying practices-or-abilities on another” [14]:

Because he thinks part of what one is doing in saying how things merely appear is withholding a commitment to their actually being that way, and because one cannot be understood as withholding a commitment that one cannot undertake, Sellars concludes that one cannot have the ability to say or think how things seem or appear unless one also has the ability to make claims about how things actually are. [15]

Sellars argues that ‘is’-talk is pragmatically dependent on ‘looks’-talk because you wouldn’t be able to do (i.e. deploy) the latter without being able to deploy the former. So while you might not be actually deploying ‘is’-talk when you say, “There seems to be water over there,” you are implicitly relying on your grasp of the difference between “there is water over there” and “oh, there only seemed to be water over there—it’s actually a mirage…too bad we’re gonna’ die now.” If you didn’t have a grip on this implicit distinction, and all you had was ‘seems’-talk, then you’d have to say that “there seems to be water over there” was false when it turned out to be a mirage. This would impoverish our ability to say true things, though, for with the distinction in hand I can say two potentially true statements (“there is…” and “there seems…”) while without I can only say one. Now, what that one statement is is a good question, for the way ‘seems’ is being used appears to be the way ‘is’ is normally used—after all, the cases of falsification are exactly the same between “there is…” in our current modes of speech and “there seems…” within the reduced language-game (where “there is…” isn’t used).

To review: a reductive semantic relation can be refuted if it can be shown that the target vocabulary to be reduced is needed to use correctly the alternative vocabulary. If so shown, we will see that the alternative vocabulary is parasitic upon the target vocabulary and so the latter not a suitable candidate for reduction. And what we will have shown is that the semantic relation between the two vocabularies is pragmatically mediated. The relationship between saying “seems” and saying “is” is that saying “seems” is mediated by your ability to say “is.”

6.      It is beyond my powers to show that what I called evaluative platonism can be so refuted, so the best I can do is suggest the path to be taken. The problem here is that it is beyond my ability to show that the reconstructed versions of platonists that follow Peirce are suggesting a reduction of ‘better’-talk to ‘Best’-talk. That is, roughly, what Plato was after when he set up his divided line between the parasitic world of shadows and the autonomous Realm of Forms, with the Good (i.e., the Best) being most autonomousest of them all (being the sun that produced all the shadows). But we need to acknowledge that Habermas and Putnam need not be suggesting this when they level their criticisms at Rorty for not having a robust enough notion of betterness to make inquiry function right. All they need to say is that ‘better’-talk is intertwined with ‘best’-talk, and Rorty seems to be suggesting that ‘best’-talk can be reduced away without remainder to ‘better’-talk. In other words, the arguments I’ve just elaborated could be the ones used against Rorty to hit back against the Village Champion Argument.

I don’t think this will end up being the case. My suspicion is that the only way to get the robustness criticism to stick is to reconfigure in such a way that one would ipso facto fall within the bounds of the reductive form of platonism. (That was the form of Rorty’s criticism of Putnam’s labeling of him as a relativist: if I am, so are you!) Further, it is also my suspicion that ‘best’-talk is in fact parasitic upon ‘better’-talk, though I cannot see how to refute the idea that ‘better’-talk is also parasitic upon ‘best’-talk. If they are both parasitic, then they are intertwined, neither being autonomous of the other. So the best I can do is suggest that you can’t get rid of ‘better’-talk.

7.      For saying something is “the best” is pragmatically mediated by your ability to say what is better. The Best is parasitic on the better because you can’t specify what is best without specifying what is worse. This is the effect of having to answer “how do you know?” by justifying yourself. And since everyone agrees that the ability to justify is parasitic on the selection of a community, ‘best’-talk is as relative as ‘better’-talk, as much as you may wish that your claim about what is the Best transcends the community it is directed at. For it is simply not the case that your claim “X is the best!” is ipso facto better than “X is better than Y.” Perhaps you mean it more, but then by the same token you’re being less cautious and perhaps more dogmatic. But either way, when did caution or dogmatism tell us anything about the truth of the statements? People can have a terrible attitude and still be right.

Say we back up, though, and say that you won’t specify worse things in justifying the Best. We will concede that justification happens in front of communities, but we’ll avoid the implication of relativism by confining ourselves to an interlocking set of self-justifying things (principles, forms, whatever)—in other words, the community the justification is happening in front of is itself (and we just happen to be onlookers). This is the form of those fuller platonisms. If your justification for the Best, however, is another Best, then you generate a regress, for given the form of the Best, I will want to know what it is better than. “You say ‘the best’—the best of what?” What set does the Best reign supreme over? (Itself? Now it seems like a useless phrase.) So an interlocking set of Bests will generate an infinite regress, and so hence the easy, unanswerable skepticism we can apply to any claim about what is the Best. “How do you know that’s the best? Are you able to survey all possible counterclaims and pronounce upon them beforehand?” To say you can is to pronounce yourself Village Champion, and we all know how quickly such hubris can make you look like the Village Idiot.

The only way to stop the regress is to accept the relative justification as sufficient, and this amounts to rejecting platonism and taking “the best” as expressive of “that I know of”—we might call that a transcendental fallibilism. The warrant for this redescription of what “the best” expresses is the pragmatically mediated semantic relation between the best and the better. You can’t do the best without doing better, but you might be able to do better without doing the best.

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Endnotes

[1] Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself, 105

[2] See, e.g., Putnam’s “Realism with a Human Face” in his collection of that name and Rorty’s response, “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” in Truth and Progress. Rorty’s reaction in that essay boils down to: “We seem, both to me and to philosophers who find the view of both of us absurd, to be in much the same line of business. But Putnam sees us as doing something quite different, and I do not know why” (59). I suspect Putnam’s long-standing use of Rorty as a punching bag has more to do with Rorty standing too close to Derrida and the events of the 1979 Eastern Division APA meeting than any thesis he’s ever promulgated. That’s my suspicion, at least, though I have no particular evidence for judging Putnam’s attitude in the latter case. (His remarks about the French littering his corpus I consider enough for the former.) The best description I’ve come across of what actually happened at the infamous APA meeting is Neil Gross’s description in Richard Rorty, 216-227.

[3] “Universality and Truth,” Rorty and His Critics, 5

[4] The JTB—“justified true belief”—conception of knowledge derives from Plato’s Theaetetus, and most epistemologists have accepted it as the beginning, though not the end, of wisdom in regards to knowledge. For a somewhat embroidered discussion of the relationship of pragmatism to the distinction between truth and justification, see my "Rhetorical Universalism." I say that belief doesn’t play a role in the determination of knowledge because all the belief concept tells you is that it is a claim being held by some person. And if you test that claim by wondering whether a claim being held doesn’t tell you something about its plausibility—like a show of hands, one being better than none—then you need to consider the fact that authority is a structure built into the nature of justification, and so a claim being actually held lending it therefore credence already has the conceptual shape of justification.

[5] Ibid., 6. Rorty is discussing Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms. Though Robert Brandom, who I will be discussing shortly, tells us the title of Between Saying and Doing comes from an old Italian proverb ("between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out"), I think there’s a felicitous ratio with Habermas recorded there—for though Habermas considers himself an heir to American pragmatism, the difference between Habermas’ objects and Brandom’s gerunds suggests a greater commitment to the priority of pragmatics over semantics.

[6] Ibid., 56

[7] Consequences of Pragmatism, 166

[8] Ibid., 167

[9] Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

[10] Every person tired of an interminable conversation with a deaf and dogged interlocutor knows this to be true, but again, only at the level of practice. By this I mean that when the deaf dog retorts that you’re being dogmatic because you haven’t answered their objections, the rules of open inquiry we’ve venerated (explicitly) at least since the Enlightenment demand that we grant their point. However, only recently might we be able to work out the theoretical entitlement for allowing attitude to trump reason-giving, and the overarching reason is why Brandom says that in pragmatist philosophy of language, semantics must answer to pragmatics. Something of this orientation is elaborated in what follows, but on this particular point, at the beginning of Making It Explicit, Brandom justifies it via Wittgenstein’s regress argument about rules, which is roughly that if every statement needs rules to regulate correct interpretation, and those rules need to be stated, then the rules need to have rules—and then those rules need rules, etc. (see 20-23). What stops this regress from being infinite? Nothing, not at least if you haven’t fixed things so that normative attitude precedes normative rule/reason-giving. The trick here is seeing that we do, obviously, have the power to stop regressing. Platonism, in this area, is a form of intellectualism that says that rules precede attitudes, and thus nothing should stop the regress (except for something rule-like, which is where the idea of self-evident principles comes from). So one way to think about pragmatism is as the orientation that accepts our power to stop the regress as not in itself illegitimate, but rather seeks to investigate when it should and should not be. For example, notice how much leeway is in Rorty’s notion of “justifying our belief to the audience we think relevant”—who determines relevancy? That’s a question that would keep platonists up at night, though pragmatists understand that such relevancy is hashed out in the course of inquiry as people determine their attitudes to various communities. Is every attitude that determines our relationship to a community kosher? No, as every angry parent knows. But what about the black separatist, or black radical demanding reparations? That’s justifiably more complex in America. On that particular complexity, of being African-American in America, still the best negotiations are Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. For Rorty’s interesting discussion of Baldwin and Elijah Muhammad, see 11-13 of Achieving Our Country (whose title comes from Baldwin’s book).

[11] Brandom elaborates this master argument in “A Kantian Rationalist Pragmatism” in Perspectives on Pragmatism. This particular argument about phenomenalism is the one Sellars forwards in his essay “Phenomenalism,” written around the same time as the more famous attack on the Myth of the Given.

[12] This was, of course, Rorty’s first famous argument in the philosophy of mind, striking an analogy between talk about the mind and talk about demons. Brandom suggests in “Vocabularies of Pragmatism” (in PP) that that argument hinged on the social pragmatism that he would later become famous for, there isolated on a social practice account of minds.

[13] If you noticed a wobble in my vocabulary in this last passage, you’re probably smarter than I am. And hopefully the wobble isn’t pernicious. Given the precision with which analytic reductions have been deployed, I technically slid between the semantic relation between what two things mean and an ontological relation between what two things are. Sloppy, I know, but when you work in the analytic idiom—where “how things are” is, because of the linguistic turn, always paraphrased as “talk about how things are”—it’s easy to do. However, the larger philosophical commitment pragmatists like Rorty and Brandom (if not Peirce, James, and Dewey) are in favor of keeping might be thought of as specifying that the category of “ontological relations” be reduced to another idiom, which is in part semantic. (This would take me too far afoot, but they are not committed to reducing everything to language, the linguistic idealism critics keep foisting on Rorty and Brandom. Brandom thinks they are only committed to what he calls “the entanglement thesis,” which in this context I understand to be the entanglement of pragmatic relations of nonlinguistic bodies with semantic relations of linguistic bodies.) For a recent discussion of Rorty's relationship to anti-analytic pragmatists, see "Some Notes on Rorty and Retropragmatism." For a discussion of the relationship of language to experience after Quine and Sellars, see "Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn."

[14] In Between Saying and Doing, Brandom develops a very sophisticated apparatus for talking about talking. One area of underdeveloped territory he takes on is beginning to talk about the practices necessary or sufficient for deploying a vocabulary and, conversely, the vocabularies necessary or sufficient for deploying a practice. However, while Brandom favors talk of social practices, his aim in the book is to abstract away from that particular commitment, and so he speaks of (social) practices or (individual) abilities.

[15] BSD 12; this first chapter of his Locke Lectures also appears by itself in Perspectives on Pragmatism, this passage at 169.

Philosophy, Metaphysics, and Common Sense

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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Socrates essentially defined philosophy as a common, basic human activity when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Plato said that philosophy was for the very few people who were able to do it. Pirsig said philosophy isn’t worth doing if it doesn’t help with life. Rorty said philosophy is pretty remote from life.

Is there a way of coordinating all of these thoughts? Do they all fit together? I think they can, in their way, fit together coherently, but there have been better and worse ways of construing them.

Socrates came upon the Greek scene at a very important point in its cultural evolution. For some years, leisured aristocrats had begun popping up around the Aegean Sea and composing themselves in a manner that had previously been unheard of—our first intellectuals. They for the most part had begun speculating about the way reality as a whole functioned, though they did occasionally drift into the way humanity, specifically, functioned (humans being a natural enough subject within the purview of “reality”). These drifts didn’t pick up speed until democracy had taken hold in Greece. The hold of democracy on Athens produced a shift in the educational institutions of Greece. The existence of a citizen class in Athens created a need for a means of educating them, one that surpassed the means that existed for the needs of fickle aristocracies. For the first time in history, an opportunity was created in which people could live on their wits.

These were the Sophists, the first professional intellectuals, and, like most people I know, they soon began talking about themselves and what they do. The trouble for them was that nobody had really done what they did before. Their only real models were the poets, the previous educators of Greece, but the poets’ profession had itself begun to change, too, at about the same time. It was a common enough feature for Greek rhapsodes, oral poets, to brood about what they were doing (captured well by Hesiod in his musings on the Muses) and the earlier physiologoi, Thales, Heraclitus and the rest, had themselves produced occasional remarks, but we can imagine it wasn’t until the pressure of professional differentiation set in for the Sophists (produced by the high concentration of them in Athens) that real self-consciousness kicked in. The Sophists had to attract customers, which meant not only displaying their wares in public, but arguing for why they knew what they were doing, over and against their competitors.

What they did, in fact, was increase the ability of public speakers to convince their audience that they were right. In Athens, in contrast to today, every man was their own politician and lawyer. This meant that arguing your view (say, of innocence) became dramatically more important than in previous, aristocratic generations, where oratory was more for the battlefield (the first great place you had to convince people of doing something, like bleeding). So the Sophists, our first rhetoricians, began to reflect on the process of argumentation, persuasion, how a person is convinced to do something.

The Sophists, however, fell victim to the forces of rampant cultural evolution. Not only were they working without a net on the self-image and practice of intellectuals in general, but they were still working with the tools of their forebears. The Sophists saw quite clearly, and correctly, that the process of persuasion, and particularly argumentation, only works with an understanding of your audience—a persuader, if to prove effective, must work with the beliefs of his audience to have any chance of being understood, let alone be successful. This, however, produced some hasty formulations, a few of which equated the conventions (nomos) and opinions (doxa) of society with what is right and just. Socrates would have none of this. Socrates saw quite clearly, and correctly, that what society currently believes couldn’t possibly be full-blown equated with what is ultimately right and just. This would leave no place for change.

Even worse, the Sophists thought of themselves as teachers of aretê. Aretê was long translated as “virtue,” and it’s hard to have any sympathy for the Sophists in the face of Socrates if they thought they were teaching virtue, good moral behavior. In this light, Socrates appears as the crusading anti-professionalist, damning the know-it-alls for supposing they had the market cornered on the good and righteous. I think this is the good light that comes out of the Delphism Socrates cleaved to: the unexamined life is not worth living. For Socrates, we couldn’t simply take what we were taught at face value because there might be better ways of doing things. This isn’t something for a professional class, but something for everyone. The Socratic spirit is the critical spirit of looking askance at the ways things are done, particularly if they are defended on the grounds of “that’s the way we’ve always done them.” Philosophy, in this sense, is reflection, thinking, taking what you do, your habits, apart to see what it is you’re actually doing and whether it makes any sense to continue to do so. The Socratic interaction between common sense and philosophy is that between the wisdom of the ages and the love of something better.

While there is certainly some truth to Socrates’ scorn of the Sophists, things are never quite that cut and dried when it comes to the Greeks. As I’ve mentioned, things were changing, and quite quickly, during what we now call the Greek Enlightenment. Scholars in the latter half of the 20th century have now mostly come to agree that “virtue” is not a very good translation of aretê and doesn’t quite capture what the Greeks meant by it. Most nowadays go with “excellence,” and one prominent scholar has even suggested “success.” These terms, and in particular the latter, make much more sense out of what the Sophists thought they were doing. “Virtue” may make sense of Socratic enmity, but are we really to believe that a whole class of people of such pomp and arrogance actually existed, as a class? Aretê was a word in transition and in the earlier aristocratic age it was more narrowly confined to the nobility and the things they did. But the rise of democracy spread out the things they did and the application of the commendation. If an Athenian citizen makes his way through his political life (which for them, much more than for us, was their life) by the power of his speech, does it not make sense for the professional orators, teaching the skills of persuasion and argumentation, to not think of themselves as teaching success, aretê?

Much like today’s social misfits, Plato agreed with Socrates that if that’s what success is, give me failure. Neither of them wanted money (easy for Plato since he had money), they simply wanted something better for humanity. They took seriously the idea that an ethical life is possible, but something that must be worked towards, and not just handed (like the nobleman’s aretê). Plato saw democracy at work and saw the blind leading the blind. And so Plato institutionalized the life of the critic, created a home and a tradition of transmitting the skeptical attitude toward contemporary modes of life. This mode of life might best be generally called the “life of inquiry.” Unlike Socrates, however, Plato was far more interested in how inquiry takes place, the methods and instruments of inquiry. Much like his Sophist counterparts, Plato meditated frequently on how we dig into ourselves and reality generally. Plato concluded that, whatever it was that Socrates did, it was hard and not, sadly, for everyone.

With Plato’s notion of the philosopher-king, he crystallized the notion of a professional wisdom-seeker, and for all of the reasons of his idol, Socrates, it must founder. Inquiry into ourselves is better done by ourselves. However, as much as looking askance at the world is a common ability for all, the tools are not. The Sophists were right in that. The tradition that branches out from Plato is philosophical, but it is a specific formation, one which I shall call “metaphysics.” The trail of metaphysics over the centuries is a trail of attempts to inquire, of trying new methods for, and objects of, inquiry. Exploding out from Plato, the paths weave about, branching off in a multitude of directions. Some succeed—these branches break off and fall from the tree of metaphysics and set up shop for themselves, become different disciplines. Some simply die, still-born in the breast of the never-heard-from-again thinker. But the tradition continues on.

It is on the other side of this 2500 year process that we find Pirsig and Rorty, and it is only by understanding their reactions to this process that we can make sense of their opinions about philosophy. To bridge into Pirsig, I’d like to first meditate on my use of “metaphysics,” which is a sort of wedding of Whitehead (“we are footnotes to Plato”) and Heidegger (“metaphysics is Platonism”). The philosophers one studies in Philosophy Departments, these footnotes, have been placed there because of the way contemporary philosophers tell the story of their own discipline. A typical way of narrating it gives us license to break philosophy into three branches: metaphysics (study of being), epistemology (study of knowing), and axiology (ethics and aesthetics—study of valuing). Kant, the first professional philosopher, gave us these branches, and our canonized selection of philosophers, when he looked back at the course of amateur philosophical writings and saw a way of breaking up his near contemporaries into two groups, the Rationalists and the Empiricists, which he was able to broker a peace agreement between and launch true professional study of being and knowing—at least, a kind that didn’t tread on science’s accelerating ground. Many of these philosophers studied other things, but the obsession Kant centered his narrative around, which preselected his choice of exemplars, was of how we are and how we know it.

Metaphysics is a handy moniker for the professional philosophy that stems out of the Kantian historiographical tradition because the understanding it breeds is that the study of being will never be far from the study of knowing. When you assert the way something is, an interlocutor will always be interested in how you know that. Philosophers in this tradition have always gone back and forth as to which is primary, whether you can intelligibly answer the question of knowledge by itself before wielding it upon instances, or whether one must lock down a conception of the way the world is first before wondering about how you know it. One thing in this tradition is certain however—ethics and aesthetics are secondary studies. If one takes the activities of being and knowing as basic, one will naturally think that valuing is secondary because the explanation given is predicated on the earlier assumption of primacy. “What is beauty/good/value and how do you know it?”, metaphysical and epistemological questions, will seem primary in ethics and aesthetics and need to be answered ahead of actual ethical and aesthetic questions, “What things are beautiful/good/valuable?” Taking philosophy to be the life of inquiry, we can see why Pirsig takes the field of aesthetics, as an inquiry into Beauty, to task for being impossible and insipid—what is one going to say about it in general, ahead of instances?

One way to understand what Pirsig did is to think of him as reversing the traditional order of things in professional philosophy and making axiology (Quality) primary to metaphysics (objects) and epistemology (subjects). If we flip the order of axiology and metaphysics, however, we will need new definitions for them, ones that won’t seem naturally metaphysical. I think if we construe metaphysics as “inquiry into how things work” and axiology as “inquiry into what we should value” we can see better, for one, philosophy’s relationship to science. Kant said that philosophy was queen of the sciences, ruling and judging all other human activities, institutionalizing the pretentiousness that Socrates accused the Sophists of. However, if we think of metaphysics as inquiry into how things work, we can see the sense of Newton having described himself as a natural philosopher. Inquiry into how things work began with the Pre-Socratics, who still get treated in history of science classes. The broad inquiry began breaking off into specialties as a new method or new way of looking at an old problem took off. On this view, metaphysics today in Philosophy Departments is the way it is because the natural and human sciences have set up shop on their own, taking with them part of what used to be in the philosophical purview. In fact, we might say that philosophy’s success lies in the fact that it has birthed these specialized fields, and might continue to do so.

With our new definitions, we can also see Socrates’ admonition of the Sophists for thinking they could professionalize, specialize the field of aretê as presaging the failure of 2500 years of trying to specialize ethics and aesthetics. When Pirsig attacks Plato for enshrining the Truth over the Good, he is suggesting that Truth, or “how things work,” is a distinct field and activity within life, but it is a value choice for us to perform that activity amongst other activities. Axiology is Socrates’ pure amateur field of inquiry into ourselves and what we should do. When Pirsig says that metaphysics isn’t worth doing if it doesn’t help with life, he is saying that knowing how things work doesn’t always help with our choices in what we should do, let alone tell us which ones to make.[fn.1]

Pirsig comes to this conclusion from the outside of professional philosophy. Standing at the gates looking in, Pirsig sees a lot of sterile, pointless debates about subjects so seemingly remote from life that it almost amounted to dereliction of duty. Rorty comes to very similar conclusions, but from the inside. Rorty did his time in grad school and spent 20 years burrowing to the center of these debates. Rorty, also, sees a lot of sterile, pointless debates about subjects seemingly remote from life, but for Rorty, the notion of “duty” only makes sense within the parameters of a profession. Physicists have a “duty” to perfecting their models of the physical world and the degree to which they’ve gotten better is the same proportion to which their conversations have become more insular and incomprehensible to the outside world. Rorty’s only concern is that some of the debates in philosophy departments don’t seem to have any outlet into the pool of life. This itself wouldn’t necessarily mean so much, except that many of these same debates, like in ethics, seem to be directly about life—and the professionals start to think they know something no one else does.

There is a prima facie distance between Pirsig and Rorty on the utility of metaphysics, study of being and knowing, to people living their lives. I’d like to help surmount this distance by inquiring into how Pirsig’s view of metaphysics actually functions. The context within which Pirsig’s inquiries occur are that of a culture-wide spiritual crisis. In ZMM, Pirsig sees the dysfunctional attitude of his friends, the Sutherlands, towards technology as expressions of a deep-lying attitude that undergirds Western culture in its relation to life, one he traces to Ancient Greek philosophy. In an odd way, Pirsig’s ZMM parallel’s Plato’s Republic—the central argumentative figure of the Republic is the analogy between the city and the soul and in the same way Pirsig draws an analogy between the individual’s spiritual crisis (Phaedrus’) and his culture’s (this particularly occurs at the end of Chapter 10, as Pirsig narrates the end of Phaedrus’ first university experience). Plato makes the analogy to help show that justice is uniform across the two units and to establish the unity of the questions and answers for both city and soul. Pirsig’s Socratic individualism rejects Plato’s requirement for a professional class of philosophers and reinstates the personal search for aretê. Pirsig’s search is conditioned, however, by its locus in the tradition of philosophy that extends from Plato to Kant to his own philosophy professors. This causes him to point to conceptual distinctions, generated in the Platonic tradition, as the locus of our, of his, spiritual crisis.

My concern right now is not whether Pirsig is right to do this. I’m sure that he is justified in doing so, though perhaps we shouldn’t be assured as to whether these are the only sources of our problems. What does interest me currently is how Pirsig turns philosophy into a kind of therapy. Phaedrus’ descent into madness is analogized, in the concept of the mythos, to the plight of dissident outcasts from culture in general. In Lila, Pirsig draws this parallel further in his discussion of a philosophy of insanity in Chapter 26. The utility of Pirsig’s philosophical pursuits are the extent to which they can be made applicable to concrete situations in life, which infuses the dynamic between the “philosophical” scenes and “narrative” scenes of both books. Pirsig employs philosophy to help him reintegrate with Phaedrus in ZMM and so become a full human being again and, in Lila, to reorient our culture more generally. This is why Pirsig develops a systematic metaphysics of distinctions—its only purpose is to help the individual life. Our sickness stems from the conceptual apparatuses handed us by the past and so we must seek their solution there.

Rorty treats professional philosophers the same way. As Rorty entered the professional ranks he shifted from an historically-oriented, Whiteheadian systematic metaphysician to a conceptual analyst. It wasn’t long before he encountered Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and became imprinted by the sense (and the attendant metaphors) that the textbook problems of philosophy were not only engendered by bad conceptual distinctions, but that philosophy’s obsession with what they took to be natural intuitions of life were neuroses that needed to be massaged out. The image of the Wittgensteinian therapist charmed Rorty most of his career and surfaced in most of his writings, so much so that Hilary Putnam once commented that Rorty wishes to “play doctor to the modern soul.”

I think Putnam get’s Rorty just about right, though Rorty wished more often to be thought of as playing therapist to the modern philosopher. To help understand what’s both right and wrong in Putnam’s comment, it helps to remember that both Freud and the New Science breathed new life into the notion of broiling, unseen causes behind appearances. The Greeks used the appearance/reality distinction to give sense to the notion that how our common sense (the mythos, doxa/opinion, nomos/convention) functions isn’t how reality actually functions and that we should perhaps inquire further into the matter. Pragmatists would like to demolish this supposition by noting that no one’s been able to tell us whether “it works because it's true” or rather “it’s true because it works,” and without being able to tell the difference between the two, we won’t be able to tell whether we’re finding out how reality really is or simply finding better and better understandings of it.

Freud and physical scientists, however, gave us a good, solid sense of what a reality behind an appearance actually looks like. Physicists started telling us that tables aren’t actually tables but clouds of electrons. Psychoanalysts started telling us that our problems getting an erection were because we wanted to do unhealthy things to our mothers and fathers. The reason why we believed them is because they were able to get results—they were able to tinker with the inputs to effect, in predictable and controllable ways, the outputs. The interesting thing about psychologists, of course, is that they don’t work with rocks, they work with us, much like the philosopher. Both the psychological therapist and philosophical therapist offer to help us with our lives, but there is a big difference—the psychologist’s patient isn’t required to know, understand, or even believe the truth of, the psychologist’s theoretical viewpoint to receive the benefit of the therapy that the theory enables. It isn’t clear, on the other hand, that the philosopher is working with anything other than what we know and believe.

Plato marked the birth of expertism, of inquirers knowing something about their objects of inquiry that others can’t follow. However, he also continued a tradition of esotericism, out of which the notion of an expert flows. This is the birthmark of any priestly tradition, which Plato gained through his exposure to the Pythagoreans (and their’s from an Orphic tradition, of which some think was not indigenous to the West, but an Eastern import). The esoteric is a class of mystery and secrets, and though we can clearly see its similarity to expertise, its separation through long affiliation is past due. There are many secrets, but the shift from esotericism to expertise is a shift in attitude, orientation, from viewing life and its variegated problems as ineffable mysteries to discussable difficulties.

There is a sense in which the philosopher, like the psychologist, knows something a little more than the regular Joe or Jane on the street. But this sense is the same in which Joe and Jane’s profession gives them the same distinction over the philosopher and psychologist. When we are talking about ourselves, our beliefs, views, attitudes, desires, habits, hopes and dreams, we are, in a sense, an expert over this area against which no one else could come close. But that doesn’t mean those who study the generalities of which you are a particular instantiation might not be able to help with your difficulties. What you should rebel against, like Socrates, however, is the notion that anyone knows some mystery about you, the reality behind your beliefs that swings free and independently of your view of your beliefs.

Socrates marked the birth of a self-critical culture. He thought it was important for everyone to examine themselves in an effort to better their future selves over their past selves. Plato swung the critical attitude at particular general problems, one’s that may be instantiated in particular people, but might be studied separately to help gain a handle on them. If we define the Socratic spirit as the spirit of Philosophy and the Platonic as Metaphysics, we might say that Philosophy is an amateur genre, one everyone should take part in, while Metaphysics is a specialized genre, one which might help for those who want to take the time and energy to delve into, but for which—because of the very fact of its generality over the particular life—we might not, and simply ask for help from time to time from the experts, should we need it.

If Common Sense is the continuing, evolving body of belief that is passed from generation to generation, then the Socratic spirit is the blood that keeps it moving. Pirsig may have been right, that a certain depth of attention, born of passing the buck on to specialists on too many scores, is lacking in our culture, and that the blood is beginning to stiffen and coagulate. What Pirsig was certainly right about, however, is that the Socratic spirit is not a flame lit in secret and watched over by robed priests called Professional Philosophers—it is the heritage of all reflective individuals. Rorty may have been right that the professionals are rightly picking special nits that might yet play out into the cultural blood stream, but like many specialized fields it isn’t immediately apparent how. What Rorty was certainly right about, however, is that the Socratic spirit is not only unprofessionalizable, but to be all the more protected because of it—it pays to have leisured self-explorers teaching our children how to explore, if not exactly what to explore.

Endnotes

[1] This construal of metaphysics as inquiry into how things work also has the virtue, I think, of shedding important light as to what Pirsig meant by the intellectual level and why Plato was wrong to enshrine Truth.

Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn

Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is thought of by most analytic philosophers as the watershed moment in the destruction of logical positivism. He may have been the first major post-linguistic turn philosopher to identify themself as a pragmatist (and here I'm not counting his Harvard colleague Morton White in the equation). Replaying the death agonies of logical positivism is a good way of seeing where the classical pragmatists tie in with the contemporary, analytic dialectic, and that paper is a must read in that sense.

What Quine wanted to do was purify empiricism, which in its post-linguistic turn phase is what logical positivism was supposed to be a form of. Analytic philosophers, ever since somebody thought it would be brilliant to turn to the study of the way we use words (whether mainline positivists like Rudolph Carnap and A.J. Ayer or Oxford/ordinary-language philosophers like P.F. Strawson and Gilbert Ryle), thought their job was to study "meaning," to find the meanings of words, display how meaning was created, etc. "Conceptual analysis" became what philosophers thought they did, what their special provenance was in relation to the other disciplines. It promoted the thought that, since science was the empirical discipline, science would tell us about the stuff of the world, but philosophy would explain to science what their words meant.

How empirical is that? is roughly the thought that motivated Quine. The very idea of "conceptual analysis" was of basically an a priori discipline, an activity where one didn't have to study anything in the world, but could just sit in your armchair and figure the stuff out--just like Descartes' problems of other minds and the external world. But wasn't the motivation behind logical positivism the destruction and avoidance of pointless metaphysical problems, weird things like whether there was anything going on outside your door ("leave your office" would have been G.E. Moore's reply), which are specifically produced by a kind of armchair speculation that required no input from the world?

Quine's first dogma was the analytic/synthetic distinction, something Kant had made up at the spur of the moment in the First Critique as a way of splitting the difference between the Rationalists and Empiricists (only so named because of Kant's work). Kant's distinction became the basis of the distinction between statements whose meaning and truth was derived only in virtue of their relationship to other statements ("analytic statements" such as "All bachelors are single") and statements whose meaning and truth one not only needed other statements, but also participation of the world to figure out ("rocks fall to the earth," the truth of which can only be determined by a synthesis of the meanings of each individual word and then looking out into the world). Science would do the "looking out into the world" bit, but they would need someone to help them with the other bit, the analytic statements you don't need experiments for. This, for someone like Quine, basically just looks like a Rationalist throw-back, a haven for the Cartesian speculation the sober-minded English Empiricists had wanted to throw cold water over.

By ditching the first dogma, we eliminate the basis for an armchair, a priori discipline like "conceptual analysis," thus putting us back on the path of a thorough-going empiricism. Quine, it is largely thought, didn't quite make it by himself, however. His second dogma, reductionism, was the pernicious reduction of knowledge statements to sensations, or "immediate experience." People impressed by James and Dewey, who still used such locutions, shouldn't be fooled by the term into thinking that Quine's dogma swings at what the classical pragmatists were talking about. James' radical empiricism was supposed to be as much a purification of the terms of empiricism as the post-positivist dialectic was. Quine, though, didn't in the end mean the end of that dogma was much as he should have. He erects in his work the idea of "observation sentences" as opposed other sentences, and the latter end up playing the same role as before. And then there's Quine's over-bearing scientism, his penchant for saying that everything can/should be reduced to physics, the only language that "limns the world."

Philosophers dissatisfied with Quine's tack at reductionism have increasingly turned to Wilfrid Sellars, a by-comparison neglected figure that I believe recently has been receiving a substantial reappreciation (primarily motivated by the rise of Robert Brandom and John McDowell). Sellars' seminal "Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind" was produced at just about the same time as Quine's "Two Dogmas," but received much less attention. Sellars' enemy in that paper is what he calls the Myth of the Given, the idea that there is a bald experience given to our minds that we simply add the hairplugs of language to. This was the attack Quine should have made on reductionism, but didn't.

Sellars, too though, didn't quite make it to a pure empiricism. He, too, liked to talk about science as the end all be all, and his way of making the point was a distinction between our manifest image of the world and the scientific image of the world. The manifest one was the fake one that, while not reducible to the scientific one, needed to be dealt with properly in the face of the true, scientific image--and philosophy could help with its "conceptual analysis."

Rorty liked to say that it was almost as if Sellars and Quine were only able to reject the one dogma of the other, and needed their respective second one to retain their self-image as analytic philosophers. Donald Davidson, Quine's greatest pupil, helped ditch the whole damn thing and finally set us on the path of a fully purified empiricism. He called the third, and hopefully last, dogma of empiricism the scheme/content distinction. This distinction underlaid the others and its motivation was to call into question the idea that language was a kind of scheme we laid on top of experienced content. This, too, was a Kantian relic, that between what he called "concepts" and "intuitions," such that one could say, "thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."

This is what Kant meant by the mind constituting the world--the world's there, sure enough, but its only presentation to us is by virtue of our mind's constitution of it in our own mind. But this raises the Cartesian spectare again, that we are trapped in our own minds, maybe knowing that there are other ones out there, but not knowing whether we are constituting the world in just the same way--if we are using different conceptual schemes, we might be living in different worlds. Please Obi-philosophy Kenobi--tell us what our conceptual schemes are and how they constitute. Davidson's ditching of the scheme/content distinction again destroys the basis for an armchair, speculative discipline and thrusts us all back into the same world, the one no one has ever really left.

The punchline to the story is that whereas Quine wanted to be both an empiricist and a pragmatist, Davidson isn't sure what's left of either once we pull the underpinnings out. Rorty and Hilary Putnam, the two most prominent post-linguistic turn self-identified pragmatists, themselves have wondered explicitly about what is left of empiricism once one ditches all the dogmas of positivism, though they think the core insights of James and Dewey untouched. (I have a brief talking up of Putnam on this score here.) Even more weird is Brandom calling his Sellarsian inferentialism a kind of rationalism--a much different sort than the 17th century Europeans, but the resurrection of the title bearing out how much damage Brandom thinks Locke's confusion of causation with justification caused philosophy.

The "confusion of causation with justification" is a direct allusion to Rorty, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In the chapter that opens the second part, the part that deals with representational epistemology, he titles one of the sections "Locke's Confusion of Explanation with Justification," which is roughly between knowledge of where something came from and knowledge that something is so and so. This leads to Davidson's distinction between reasons and causes, such that a reason (part of the web of justification) can be a cause (can change your mind, spur you into action, etc.), but a cause is not in itself a reason. You can be caused to think you see water, but the fact that you see water is not, by itself, a reason to think so--it is only within a network of other beliefs, the whole context of the situation, that a caused-belief can become a reason-to-believe. For instance, the fact that you are in a desert, dying of dehydration, and gored out of your mind on shrooms might give one pause before transferring the sight of water to having a good reason to think there's water over that horizon ahead.

I think it an open question as to whether retro-pragmatists like David Hildebrand are right about there being an important line to be drawn between classical pragmatists like James and Dewey and neopragmatists like Rorty and Putnam, one roughly centering around the "radical empiricism" of the former set, and supposed lack there-of in the latter. I still tend to think that there's simply an unimportant line between the classical tendency to talk about experience and the neo tendency to talk about language, with no further major philosophical implications.

The main thesis for this line of thought is that the role radical empiricism plays for James (with Dewey having an analogous section of his philosophy that could be so-named) is the same role "psychological nominalism" plays for Sellars (with a likewise analogous section in Rorty). We might call the slogan of radical empiricism "everything is experience," and the intuitive appeal of this slogan makes it easy to see why James and Dewey might wield it opposition to those who take, for instance, meanings to be analytic, and therefore non-experiential (for if they were, they'd be synthetic in the requisite sense). Psychological nominalism's slogan, however, is "all awareness is a linguistic affair," which on the surface seems counter-intuitive--am I really aware of that sunset I'm appreciating silently linguistically? I don't think psychological nominalism, however, quite means this kind of thing. It has to be understood in the context of various kinds of atomism, particularly the kinds that surfaced in early analytic philosophy.

My suggestion about the parallel qualities of radical empiricism and psychological nominalism is that both are kinds of holism, and that the only difference between the two is a difference in jargon, in the state of the philosophical dialogue that each arose out of and responded to. We might encapsulate the differences by saying that modern philosophy was birthed out of Greek when talk moved from being about "reality" to being about "experience." Rorty, Whitehead, and Dewey all advanced historical arguments about the lack of an internal "place" called the mind where reality played itself out for us (Whitehead called it the birth of the "subjectivist principle"). This created a divorce between reality and our experience-of-reality such that now we had to deal with problems about just when we were in touch with reality.

The atomistic response are various correspondentisms, philosophical theories about how this bit of experience rubs up against this bit reality, which it does in a one-to-one relation. Dewey and James advanced their ideas about experience in this milieu of experience-talk, and their basic suggestion was to collapse experience back into reality--experience is reality (witness James' "a world of pure experience" and Dewey's appreciation of Aristotle's pre-modern, anti-Platonism). Their's was a kind of holism, for it consisted in the idea that our experiences all relate to each other in a hanging web, and trying to pinpoint connections between this web and something else is pure folly. For the web, our experience of life, works in getting us through life, and it is only a kind of retrograde metaphysical dogmatism that keeps us trying for something more--we need to stop thinking there is something more.

Psychological nominalism, on the other hand, consists in the same move, except now the linguistic turn has made philosophers think that there is a divorce between language and experience. Early atomists like Russell and Carnap spent their time trying to elaborate theories that specified when this linguistic-bit here connected to that experience-chunk over there. Sellars attack on the Myth of the Given was on the idea that our linguistic concepts overlaid bald experiences. "All awareness is a linguistic affair" is simply the analogous collapse of language into experience that James and Dewey did for experience into reality.

What we basically have is a line that looks like this: language-about-experience-of-reality. The Greeks, having just become leisured, reflective individuals, talked about "reality," though they occasionally would stumble down a path where it sounds as if they recognize the modern fact that we each experience reality differently. They did understand this commonsensically, but they didn't charge it with any special philosophical significance. It was only after the march of thousands of more philosophers, trampling down the philosophical terrain, trying to get various theories to work, that Descartes, Locke, and the rest suddenly get the idea that, maybe we should charge the fact that different eyeballs see different ways with philosophically-charged metaphorical significance. And so they began promoting an expansion of what knowing is of from the object "reality" to tacking on "experience-of-reality."

This new philosophical situation took hold in part because of an equivocation in terminology--Descartes and Locke used the word "idea" to denote both (what we might now distinguish as) perceptions and conceptions. As modern philosophy moved passed Kant, who isolated explicitly the two (in intuitions and concepts respectively), and thousands of more philosophers (aided by expansions in population, education, and professionalization) trampled down this new terrain, philosophers began sniffing more and more around the idea that, hey, what really is the difference between a concept and word? Isn't it just a silly Platonism, with a universal Realm of Forms, that would make us think otherwise? (This is what makes sense out of the "nominalism" bit in Sellars' platform name--nominalism was the medieval counter to Plato's Realm of Forms idea.)

The linguistic turn was roughly the realization that when we talk about reality, we are talking about experience or reality, we are using words, language, and that when this or that philosopher, be they Platonist, Thomist, Cartesian, Kantian or Russellian, suggests taking up this or that philosophical position, they aren't changing the world like a bridge-builder does, they are suggesting a change in thought, which is to say, in our conceptions, which is to say, in the words we use to describe the world. And so analytic philosophers began promoting a further expansion of what knowing is of from the object "experience-of-reality" to tacking on "language-about-experience-of-reality."

One way to conceive of what the holists are up to is to see them as trying to get us back to a kind of pre-Platonic common sense position, before the whole obsession over knowing what knowing was even started. The only point in collapsing language-into-experience or experience-into-reality is if you'd also be just as willing to finish the collapse into the remainder, unconsidered term.

The classical pragmatists got the feeling that philosophy was taking us away from life, and they adumbrated radical empiricisms as a way of returning us to the scene of life. Retro-pragmatists see the linguistic turn as another philosophical circumlocution that just gets in the way life. Retro-pragmatists are attracted to the classicals' repeated insistence that their philosophical positions will reestablish life as first in the philosophical order of things.

My thought tends to run, "How could life not come first? Life is everything." As I understand Dewey, his notion of indirect experience was as reflective experience, but direct experience wasn't necessarily non-linguistic (I adumbrate this understanding here). Abstract, reflective thinking pulls us out of "direct experience," but this is just to say that it pulls us out of our typical habits with which we approach the world. The first principle that all three classical pragmatists held in equally tight fashion was Alexander Bain's, that thoughts are habits of action. People who live in their heads live in worlds constructed out of their imagination, an indirect world if you will. But people who write, read, or talk a lot aren't necessarily neglecting direct experience, in Dewey's sense. We can easily achieve equilibrium in our lives, between reading the newspaper, watching sunsets, loving our partners, and writing philosophical papers about the pointlessness of atomism.

I think at the heart of the difference between philosophers attracted to the classical pragmatists but repelled by Rorty is the thought that radical empiricism returns us to the scene of life, a counter to abstract philosophical sterilities. I can empathize with the formulation, to the idea of pragmatism "returning us to the scene of life," a formula I've grown fond of. However, what I think we should rather say in most cases, is that philosophy is abstract by nature--that's what it is--and returning to the scene of life is something that people need to figure out how to do, not necessarily philosophies, or other abstract activities. For instance, why would we necessarily want theoretical physics to do so? Philosophy is Dewey's indirect experience--returning to life is knowing, as Wittgenstein put it, when to put philosophy down.

And yet still, to say as many want to, particularly amateur philosophers, as I am, that we should return philosophy to the scene of life, I have continued sympathy with. But I also have a strong regard for the division of labor, and a suspicion that if we let a thousand flowers bloom, there's a good chance we might find one we like in a garden that we didn't plant. That's what I take amateur philosophy, in particular, to be--one of our major purposes is to steal other people's flowers and bring the ones we like, even if they were grown in a sterile hydroponic farm, back to the grubby garden we got going behind the house. We shouldn't rip on the hydroponic farmers too much--without them, we wouldn't have gotten that flower and, hey, at the end of the day, they go back to their houses, too. I sense this wisdom in Rorty's writings about the relative merits of professionalization in philosophy, and that that is the parallel to James and Dewey's talk about getting back to life. All three talked a lot about setting aside pointless philosophical puzzles. This is just to say that perhaps we've improved this particular flower as much as we can, so perhaps we should move on to some others.

Be that as it may, reading Quine or Sellars or Davidson can help one figure out what kind of empiricist one wants to be by helping see what the destruction of logical positivism pans out to mean. Empiricism began as a reaction to Descartes' attempt to laud science's place in culture. The rationalists thought the New Science was an expansion of Reason's will over us (it was) whereas the empiricists thought the New Science was inauguration of a new experimentalness (it was). They were both wrong in their rightness, and while there may yet be interesting disagreement about the rhetorical upshot of this or that old wine bottle ("Empiricism stands and falls with the idea of unconceptualized content, and to say otherwise is just confused." "Nominalism? Really? Should we really be going back to the Middle Ages?"), what needs to be kept at the forefront is the new wine that everybody is drinking.

Important Rorty Essays, or So You Want to Dig Into Rorty?

I figured I’d give a run down of important essays of Rorty to read for people who like reading lists. The essays I’ll be choosing from are the ones that are anthologized, ones that are easily accessible. If you’ve never read Rorty and want a general intro to him, there’s no better place than the beginning of his Philosophy and Social Hope (PSH):

1. “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids”: his autobiographical essay, this gives a brief synopsis of his philosophical motives and his general project. Probably the best overall single essay for getting one oriented with Rorty.

2. “Truth without Correspondence to Reality”
3. “A World without Substances or Essences”
4. “Ethics Without Principles”: these three essays taken together probably outline succinctly the effects of pragmatism Rorty foresees in the broad areas of philosophy, roughly metaphysics and ethics (meaning, "What happens to the other two traditional branches of philosophy, metaphysics and axiology, when you take out the third branch, epistemology, at its knees?"). I also leaned on these three essays for my Intro to Richard Rorty.

Outside of that, the single best essay for seeing the broad brush of pragmatism is:

5. “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism” in Consequences of Pragmatism (CP)

Aside from that essay, the next best two are:

6. “Solidarity or Objectivity?” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (ORT)
7. “Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics” in Essays on Heidegger and Others (EHO)

The best essay for Rorty’s philosophy of science is:

8. “Is Natural Science a Natural Kind?” in ORT

The best essay for Rorty’s mature views of materialism is:

9. “Non-Reductive Physicalism” in ORT

The best essay on Rorty’s political philosophy is:

10. “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy” in ORT

The two best essays for Rorty on literary criticism are:

11. “The Pragmatist’s Progress: Umberto Eco on Interpretation” in PSH
12.“The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature” appended to Achieving Our Country

Aside from that, everything else is cake. Of Rorty’s two books, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (CIS) is the most important and probably worth reading straight through after reading several of the above, or first (if you have the time) because it (somehow) blends together pretty much every preoccupation Rorty has ever had. Everything before leads up to it and everything after leads out of it. The first third blends Davidsonian philosophy of language, Freudian moral philosophy, and Rawlsian political philosophy into a pragmatist picture of language, self, and community. The second third blends this all together with his preoccupations with Heidegger and Derrida. And the last third takes the mess and throws in his love of literature. I say “mess”, but the result, in my opinion, is very successful. He somehow manages to include quite a lot of subjects and gear them all in the same direction, and all under 200 pages. For something that can be seen to be so comprehensive, it is by far the shortest great work of philosophy in the 20th century.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN) is worth reading on its own merits, but for people just looking around for extra tools or a little excitement, you can probably neglect it. It is something of a Mystery Tale for Pragmatists, and most philosophers consider it to be a classic, but those philosophers are professional philosophers. For amateurs (like myself), one can neglect it unless (a) you’re really jiving for more Rorty and want to work your way backward into the older stuff, (b) you want more specific, technical arguments for some of the issues raised in his later work, or (c) you want to learn about the history of early 20th century analytic philosophy.

If (c), then I couldn’t suggest a better place, though just remember that it all ends in Rorty’s lap. If you want other suggestions about the history of analytic philosophy I would suggest John Passmore’s comprehensive A Hundred Years of Philosophy and Ian Hacking’s Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?.

If (b), then knock yourself out, just remember that they are ­technical, which means it will be difficult to understand them without understanding what analytic philosophy is up to. Thankfully, my answer to (c) suggests that PMN does that for you along the way, which it does, but, in my experience, it is still difficult to get into. PMN was definitely not the first thing I read.

If (a), then oddly enough I don’t think reading PMN is the best place to start unless you already understand some technical, analytic philosophy. What this means is that, if you want to read back into Rorty, start further back, not with PMN—again, unless you already understand some analytic philosophy. I seem to be repeating this a lot, but you won’t understand why until you try getting into technical analytic philosophy. I didn’t find it easy. I still don't find it easy. I still don't understand it and I still don't like it. God, I'm reading a paper right now by Michael Williams, one of Rorty's former students, and it's about Davidson and it's all like "Convention-T" and "if and only if" and some other incomprehensible words all strung together.

My advice for amateurs looking for a way into Rorty’s old stuff is his three papers of 1961, pretty much the first things he ever wrote: “Recent Metaphilosophy”, “The Limits of Reductionism”, and “Pragmatism, Categories, and Language”. The last is technical, but if I remember correctly it’s readable and a great lead on a number of issues. Aside from them, there’s no better entry point for Rorty’s old stuff then the heavily anthologized “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories” of 1965 which is the paper that made Rorty’s name.

If you want to read PMN, or back into his corpus, my advice is to read CP’s “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?” and the volume's large Introduction as a litmus test. If you can read the former, you’re good to go. If you can only read the latter, then you’re almost ready and could give it a run. But if you still can’t get into PMN, try reading the beginning of Richard Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. That book parallel’s PMN and Rorty and Bernstein disagree on very little. The latter half of the book has more to do with Continental philosophers than analytic, but the first half is about analytic philosophy of science which may help gear one into the terminology. Another outlet is some of Hilary Putnam’s later work. I’ve suggested The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy before, but there is also Putnam’s Reason, Truth, and History. I haven’t spent a lot of time with that book, but it sees Putnam at his closest to Rorty and it even suggests that you can read the last half before the first if you aren’t acclimated to technical philosophy.

Okay, I’ll close with three more essays. The first is the best about Dewey, the second the best about Derrida, and the third is an important essay about education.

13. “Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin” in Truth and Progress
14. “Deconstruction and Circumvention” in EHO
15. “Education as Socialization and as Individuation” in PSH

Introduction to Rorty

The not-so-silent partner in this blog is Richard Rorty. Rorty is the philosopher from whom I've learned most, and all of my philosophical meanderings are infused with his influence. For people who don't know me from moq.org, I can imagine a situation much like Pirsig in ZMM realizing what's going on at the University of Chicago ("In the title of your blog, you've omitted one important name." "Yeah, whose that?" ". . . Rorty . . ." "Oh, I see . . . you didn't know . . ."). So, again very belatedly, I thought I'd offer a brief introduction of some of Rorty's philosophy.

Rorty, in fact, studied at the University of Chicago in the Hutchins School while it was still around. It was there that he studied with Mortimer J. Adler and Richard McKeon (who were mentioned in ZMM, McKeon being the "Chairman"), but also with Leo Strauss, Rudolph Carnap, and Charles Hartshorne. Rorty was most attracted to the classical, history-oriented side of philosophy that occured with McKeon and Hartshorne, but he did learn a bit from Carnap. It is a coincidence of life that he should have studied with three philosophers at Chicago and then at Yale (for his PhD) that so parrallel each other: McKeon and then Robert Brumbaugh, Carnap and then Carl Hempel, Hartshorne and then Paul Weiss. But despite studying with Carnap and Hempel, he came out the other side ill-prepared for work in the linguistic philosophy that had taken over most American philosophy departments. Rorty was well-versed in the history of philosophy, but not in the logic and linguistic tools that, because of emigrees like Carnap and Hempel, had swept from the Vienna Circle. So he spent a few years at Wellesley, and then after being hired by Gregory Vlastos to teach Greek philosophy at Princeton, his first few years at Princeton, the primere philosophy department in the United States, retooling himself as an analytic philosopher, figuring out what everybody was talking about.

The point in this little detour through Rorty's biography is that Rorty never felt totally at home in analytic philosophy and he also had far more historical depth then those who came out of Harvard and Princeton. Through the course of the 60s and 70s, watching the downfall of logical positivism at the hands of Quine and Sellars, Rorty began putting pressure on his collegues in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, calling into question their most basic premises. And then in the late 70s he wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature which summarized the problems he saw in analytic philosophy both in the short view (by neatly showing the dialectical path of self-destruction in 50s and 60s philosophy) and the long view (how this path is part of a larger path stretching from Plato and Aristotle, though more particularly from Descartes to Kant). His acheivement was to not only dialectically tangle with those various positions that had arisen in the course of mid-20th century philosophy, but to also sketch a historical narrative that attempted to show the recurring folly the mode of logical positivism, and analytic philosophy generally during this period, kept repeating, something they had learned from their predecessors.

The position Rorty found himself in during the 70s was that of pragmatism. He took up its mantle and carried it forward, taking what he took to be advances in philosophy (by, for instance, Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett) to show more of the same thing, the things James and Dewey were trying to show us. Three very general positions taken by pragmatism (or at least Rorty's version of it) can roughly be summed up by three slogans (culled from the titles of lectures he gave in Germany and France and published in Philosophy and Social Hope): "truth without correspondence", "a world without essence", and "ethics without principle".

If you take Philosophy 101 and you cover theories of truth, they'll usually describe three: the correspodence theory of truth, the coherence theory of truth, and the pragmatist theory of truth. The first says truth is what corresponds correctly to reality, the second that truth is what coheres best with everything else, and the third that truth is what works. None of those theories work (which is why many philosophers joke that adopting pragmatism will only cause you to reject it). The correspodence theory is roughly something we've had since Plato and the other two have been reactions to that default position of philosophical inquiry--that our statements need to cut through the appearances to the reality of a situation. The coherence theory is something that arose with idealists like Royce. It was also forwarded somewhat by Davidson early in his career. The pragmatist theory came about with Peirce, James, and Dewey's responses to Plato. Rorty's aligned himself with all of them through the course of the sixties and seventies, but by 1980 he had seen that what Davidson and the classical pragmatists should be seen as suggesting is not a theory of truth but the idea that "truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about." (CP, xiii)

The basic gist of this position is that if truth is correspondence to reality (a position sometimes called "representationalism"), then we need to have specific, definable criteria for determining when we've correctly connected up to reality. However, all we have as criteria are such pragmatic criteria as corroboration by evidence, coherence with other beliefs, efficiency of explanation, etc. None of these could tell us that we've correctly seen reality because history quite plainly shows us that our beliefs keep changing according to these criteria. Pragmatic criteria are good for justifying a belief, but not for telling us if it is universally and eternally true. Hence, pragmatists suggest that, though truth may be absolute, there's no sense in having a theory about it because all we'll be able to do is justify our beliefs.

What follows from this is the second slogan, "a world without essence". When one renounces the correspondence theory of truth, one also renounces the idea that there is an essence to reality (or any other particulate). The existence of essences are what produced the idea that we should correspond to them. So with the failure of correspondence, we should redescribe our situation without the use of essences. Rorty says that philosophers like James, Nietzsche, Putnam, and Foucault are "trying to shake off the influences of the peculiarly metaphysical dualisms which the Western philosophical tradition inherited from the Greeks: those between essence and accident, substance and property, and appearance and reality. They are trying to replace the world pictures constructed with the aid of these Greek oppositions with a picture of a flux of continually changing relations. One effect of this panrelationalism is that it lets us put aside the distinction between subject and object, between elements in human knowledge contributed by the mind and those contributed by the world, and thereby helps us put aside the correspondence theory of truth." (PSH, 47. This is the same panrelationalism I talked about with Pirsig and Pirsig also begins to show how the Eastern philosophical tradition can help us shrug these dualisms off, connections that Paul Turner has continued to make explicit, particularly here, here, and here.)

What philosophers need to shrug off is representationalism, the idea that knowledge is an accurate representation of the object. Pragmatists suggest redescribing knowledge in terms of power, "that a claim to know X is a claim to be able to do something with or to X, to put X into relation with something else." (PSH, 50) To be able to make this description stick, pragmatists also need to "break down the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic," (ibid.) between an intrinsic, nonrelational property of X (which is what makes it X) and an extrinsic, relational property that can change as much as it wants without affecting X (defined by its intrinsic essence). Pragmatists reject the notion of a nonrelational property on the basis that all attempts to get at this property are going to be ways of relating to it. "Everything that can serve as the term of a relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on forever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations." (PSH, 53-4)

One of the most important areas that this pragmatism impacts is that of moral philosophy, which is what gives us "ethics without principles." Kant conceived of morality as different in kind from that of mere prudence. Prudence are those habits of action that are merely convenient, that arise in our interactions with others. Morality, however, is an area of intrinsic authority, giving us laws of action that must be obeyed. The attack on essentialism and representationalism, however, leaves us without any sense of being able to find these laws. Pragmatism thus breaks down the distinction between morality and prudence and leaves us with rules of thumb ranging from uncontroversial situations ("trust family more than strangers") to controversial ones ("treat others as you would have them treat you"). Morality ceases to be a law-finding enterprise and reasserts itself in the contingent web of relations that we find ourselves. It ceases to be the reflective exercise of finding a priori guides and strictures to action that Kant conceived of and becomes an exercise that must include history and anthropology and literature, the learning of how other people interact with each other to accumulate the experience and wisdom in dealing with different people in sometimes surprising circumstances. General, arid authoritative structures of action are out and living in the detailed, sloppy mess of life with other people is in.

Pragmatism suggests that we give up the attempt to find philosophical foundations for morality or knowledge. Such attempts at trying to undergird science or our human rights culture simply end in drained out principles that are no more universal than the details of life they were culled from. Life is increasingly complex and we can search for wisdom and guidance. It would make it all a lot easier if there was a book with the Meaning of Life inscribed in its pages that would tell us exactly what to do in which circumstances. This book is what Plato was after, but all the attempts to find it have failed because life keeps changing. Heraclitus was right, reality is flux. But it is exactly this flux and complexity that gives all the color and joy in life. If you knew everything that was going to happen, would life really be worth living, would it really be all that fun? The Platonic flight from complexity to simplicity, from surprise to knowingness, is the philosophical flight from the exorbitant richness of life to the austere metaphysical foundations of life, from the details of one's own life to the cloistered search for ascetic purity away from all the hubbub going on around you. Kierkegaard first made that connection between asceticism and the Greeks and Nietzsche rejected it in favor of effusive self-creation. Likewise, pragmatism rejects all those dualisms which naturally direct our attention towards ascetic purity and suggests that you just get on with life and do what you can and what you may. Asceticism can be useful, but it is no truer or better a life than any other.


Common book acronyms for Rorty
----------------

PMN -- Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
CP -- Consequences of Pragmatism
CIS -- Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
ORT -- Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
EHO -- Essays on Heidegger and Others
AOC -- Acheiving Our Country
TP -- Truth and Progress
PSH -- Philosophy and Social Hope