Rorty's Early Work

1. 1979 — What was actually radical about eliminative materialism; 2. “The Limits of Reductionism” — The rhetoric of moves — The metaphor of conversation; 3. Why republish the early work? — The technical conversation of philosophy; 4. So much missing — In this age of access — Where are the lectures?

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1.      At the end of his career, Richard Rorty was known as a stylish, philosophical crossdresser and stout reformist liberal who was the prime reason for the renaissance in pragmatism that occurred at the end of the 20^th century. In 1979, though, Rorty wasn’t known for any of this. Rorty’s reputation at that time was as an innovator in the philosophy of mind, and for being widely identified with the phrase “the linguistic turn.” The combined effect of the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and his delivering the APA Eastern Division Presidential Address, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” in 1979 was to wipe out memory of that early work. From then on, for those inside the analytic philosophy establishment he was known as the betrayer, and for those outside...well, they didn’t need to know anything about it precisely because he’d betrayed it. In particular, philosophy of mind could get on without him because his innovation—dubbed “eliminative materialism”—was being carried on by people more radical than he anyways, namely the Churchlands.

This neglect has seemed a pity, particularly as the Churchlands’ “eliminative materialism,” as Robert Brandom notes, has nothing much to do with what Rorty pioneered. [1] However, it makes a certain kind of sense since it is also true, as Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia note in their introduction to the new posthumous collection of Rorty’s early analytic work, Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy (2014), that Rorty’s philosophical stance changed remarkably little when viewed from the right angle. Indeed, Brandom shows quite well how Rorty’s eliminative materialism quite naturally leads to his mature position on the contingency of social practices, and thus the optionalness of vocabularies. Rorty’s eliminative materialism was the idea that the mind/body distinction is based on the fact that we use two different vocabularies to describe what goes on between our ears, and that we could plausibly phase out the one that refers to it as “the mind” given certain changes in our technical ability to manipulate the brain, the centerpiece of the other vocabulary we use.

The Churchlands took that point—based on Rorty’s view of our practices of observation and reflection—and made it a reductionist claim, that we should eliminate the Mentalese vocabulary and the folk psychology that goes with it as quickly as possible in order to better talk about the world and ourselves, since, after all, all that’s between our ears is really just a brain. As Rorty’s point was simply that it was possible, going the next step and arguing we should make it actual does have the ring of a more radical step. But from the vantage of his later work, one can see how this is regressive—the Churchlands’ claim is just one more metaphysical claim about Xs really being Ys, and that knowing the Truth will help us say more true things. But thinking of Materialism as the Truth just reifies that particular vocabulary, freezing it into the place where we had before thought only Mentalese could exist. Rorty’s thought flowed from the Nietzschean thawing, the realization that all vocabularies are mortal, and thus all should be judged on their own merits for getting a particular job done, not on the false enthronements of a divine right of philosopher-kings.

2.      That Rorty was working his way toward this Nietzschean stance can be seen much more clearly now that Leach and Tartaglia have made Rorty’s early work more widely available. The absolute gem, “The Limits of Reductionism,” (1961) is a wonderful piece of metaphilosophical reflection on philosophical argument, one of a trio of his earliest full essays. He begins with the brazen move of implicitly suggesting that wielders of the epithet “Reductionist!” know not what they wield, for the “general procedure” of inferring from “X has the property of Y” to “X is nothing but Y” is constitutive of abstract thought itself: “all abstract thought takes selected aspects of a subject matter as paradigmatic and ignores other aspects. Thought is reductionistic or nothing, and the criticism only makes sense if it is narrowed down” (39). The idea here is that thinking necessarily uses the “is” to predicate properties, and that rational inquiry can only function if it is legitimate to narrow your inquiry to a single kind of object, with kinds being delimited by the predicate you use to pick it out. [2]

What Rorty is concerned with in the essay is philosophical conversation, how philosophical arguments are traded and for what purpose. Thus the rhetoric of “moves” I’ve already deployed, as in “moves made in a game,” is central to Rorty’s stance and discussions in this early period. What it yields is not only a useful bird’s-eye view of a number of different sites of contention (realists vs. idealists, logical positivists or Marxists or Freudians on the attack, etc.), but an interesting, contextual definition of philosophy. Rorty identifies the three great patterns of argument in the history of Western philosophy as the appeal to simplicity, the appeal to fact, and the appeal to self-referential inconsistency—the latter of which is what the antireductionist is really wielding. What the antireductionist is concerned about is that “the result of the reduction does not permit an account of the reduction itself,” and is thus self-referentially inconsistent.

This treatment of philosophizing as itself a fact in need of explanation is the metaphilosophical attitude par excellence. It is the rhetorical device which moves discussion up to the level on which the questions “Necessary for what?” and “When is a fact not really a fact?” must be raised explicitly. The acceptance of this gambit might indeed be taken as the defining characteristic of that species of discourse which we call “philosophy.” For it is precisely when the gambit is refused, and the reductionist replies that his concern is with a certain delimited subject matter which does not include his own activity of inquiry, that a given type of inquiry is liable to separate itself from philosophy and to set up shop as science. (41)

This, I think, is a tremendous insight with significant ramifications for our understanding of inquiry and its relationship to social institutions. [3] From the beginning, Rorty was concerned with metaphilosophy—thinking about why and how we do philosophy—an attitude impressed upon him most by his teacher at Chicago, Richard McKeon. This collection makes available another gem, “Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?” (1967) This is usefully read as a follow up to “Limits,” focusing now on the specific conversational state of analytic philosophers who took the “linguistic turn” and their older colleagues who resisted the turn by continuing to speak of “essences” and “experience.” Rorty again displays his technique of ad hoc botanization, splitting philosophers into the categories of “critical,” “speculative,” and “empirical,” and though this tempest is largely missing from the teapot these days, it is still instructive to watch Rorty go through his motions. [4]

And it is interesting to see how the man identified with the linguistic turn never really felt comfortable with what it denoted, denying in the essay the usual ways of cashing out the differences between the two putative sides. There are many biographical nuggets like this in these essays, and it’s a little disappointing to see Leach and Tartaglia’s editorial criteria cut Rorty’s “Recent Metaphilosophy” (1961) from being collected. That essay begins with more interesting botanization, the analogy of philosophy to a game, and the first major instance (in, again, one of his first essays) of his deployment of the concept of conversation that he became so identified with in his post-PMN phase, though avant la lettre. Declaring that “philosophy is the greatest game of all precisely because it is the game of ‘changing the rules,’” Rorty goes on to draw the conclusion that the goal of philosophy must be communication, then. ”Since communication is the goal, rather than truth (or even agreement), the prospective infinite series is a progress rather than a regress: it becomes a moral duty to keep the series going, lest communication cease.” [5] But as the essay moves on to minute discussion of two philosophers lost to time, it’s understandable that it wasn’t reproduced.

3.      But biographical nuggets and removing the tarnish from Rorty’s reputation isn’t reason enough to publish the collection. The only people who would care about those two things are people already motivated enough to find the originals (as I have). After all, we already have several complete bibliographies of Rorty available, so the difficulty of finding far-flung essays is reduced. And digital archives make getting essays from the Review of Metaphysics or the Journal of Philosophy easier than getting a copy of the book—so long as you have access to a major research library. [6] But who else is going to be interested than those already with such access?

Leach and Tartaglia’s reasoning, and their view of why Rorty’s early work should be more widely available, is that it has something to say to the current conversations of philosophy. (Daniel Dennett—a contemporary of Rorty’s and a continuously major figure in late 20^th century philosophy of mind—says so as well, in his short preface to the volume.) The editors have two basic categories: Rorty’s metaphilosophy and his stuff on language and mind. His reviews have already been cut (this isn’t a “collected works” project), as well as two (excellent) articles in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy and one essay on Whitehead. [7] But what are his essays on mind and language going to add? A lot of it—in particular “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental” and “Indeterminacy of Translation and of Truth”—was superseded by Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. (And some of them, like “Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn’” (1962) and “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism” (1970), just aren’t that interesting.) And again: people working on the technical problems of anglophone philosophy are going to have access to research libraries with databases to throw pdfs right onto your iPad from home.

Essays collected in a book work differently on our psyche, though, that I cannot deny. But the principles the editors used, I think, should’ve been modified. They say they stopped at 1972 because Rorty began his Consequences of Pragmatism collection in 1972 with “The World Well Lost” and that he could’ve, presumably, selected later essays like “Criteria and Necessity” (1973) if he had wanted to. But this is specious as against the designs of their project because this is about the technical conversation of philosophy—and the reason Rorty says in CP that he doesn’t collect them is because they were technical. So instead of “Realism and Reference” (1976), which is referred to (and thus implicitly “up to date”) in “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?” (in CP), we get the utterly dispensable “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism.” [8] But more importantly, we’re missing “Transcendental Argument, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism” (1979), a great piece of metaphilosophy that bookends nicely “The Limits of Reductionism.”

4.      I don’t know what I would’ve done. The criteria Leach and Tartaglia use are kind of arbitrary, but you have to end a book somewhere. When you look out over Rorty’s corpus, though, there are gems everywhere that should be more widely read. The trouble is that there’s no net to capture his career-making (and still fascinating) “Mind-Body Identity, Categories, and Privacy” (1965), the encyclopedia article “Intuition” (1967), “Searle and the Special Powers of the Brain” (1980) in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, “Contemporary Philosophy of Mind” (1982), “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching” (1982), and “Against Belatedness” (1983)—and this is just a variegated group up through 1983. ”Mind-Body” has historical interest, “Intuition” is interesting, “Searle” is polemical, “Contemporary” is technical, “Hermeneutics” is about education, and “Against” is a book review of Hans Blumenberg. The four basic editorial choices of criteria for inclusion of Influence, Subject, Audience, or Form cannot get all those pieces in the same book, but they all should be read...by somebody.

I assume somebody’s working on a chronological Collected Works edition of his stuff, ala Dewey’s, or at least it’s an obvious enough idea that somebody at the right moment will put it into motion. In this Age of Access, though, I wonder how needed it is after you get a complete bibliography. I already own copies of all of Rorty’s published material. Granted, some of it I was lucky (finding a copy used of some obscure Catholic Association conference proceedings for the one year Rorty was there—can you imagine the odds?) and then not, in one case; I still have not been able to locate The American Peoples’ Encyclopedia with all the high-powered databases at my library. But what do we really need a Collected Works edition for? If the scholarly apparatus doesn’t add a whole bunch of use-value to it (for example, tracking some of Rorty’s sometimes obscure allusions), then I don’t see why we would. [9] What I would like, however, are his lectures. That would be new, and that would be interesting. I see all these collections of lectures by like John Rawls and Stanley Cavell—Rorty taught for years; was it all extemporaneous? They must be hiding in a file folder somewhere at UC-Irvine. Maybe I’ll be the one to have to drag them out.

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Endnotes

[1] See the beginning of Brandom’s essay “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism” in his Perspectives on Pragmatism.

[2] This move is the first instance of a move that Rorty would later use in discussing the antiessentialism common to, e.g., Jacques Derrida and Donald Davidson. Derrida’s attack on “logocentrism,” which foregrounded the presupposed center/margin distinction implicit in the project of metaphysics, produced in certain crowds (mainly harboring English departments) the repetitious parroting of “binary thinking!” every time a distinction was made. Rorty claims that Derrida and Davidson are “antidualists,” but “this does not mean that they are against binary oppositions; it is not clear that thought is possible without using such oppositions” (PSH 47).

[3] For if the Kuhnian perspective is right, that disciplines arise around common sets of problems, but those problems are not “natural” in the sense that the metaphysical tradition has used the term to describe what Reality impresses on us whether we like it or not, then what’s to stop every person from being entitled to set up shop for themselves and work on whatever problem they’ve delimited for themselves? The implicit object-Meinongianism here breeds inquiry-Meinongianism, whereby all it takes for a new one-person discipline to arise is a refusal to answer another person’s question. One might take this to be a reductio ad absurdum, and people have, but I think it forces the right kind of metaphilosophical reflections on the two sides of pragmatism, the Emersonian and the social practice traditions.

[4] I’ve discussed this essay previously in my own “Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?” (I consider it juvenilia, but it mainly presents the content of the essay, so could prove a useful summary.)

[5] “Recent Metaphilosophy,” Review of Metaphysics, Dec. 1961, 301-302. Compare that to “the point of edifying philosophy is to keep the conversation going rather than to find objective truth” (PMN 377). Also, read it against note 2, above. David L. Hall’s excellent critical introduction to Rorty’s thought, Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism (1994), first dug out this early essay and made much of this line for the continuity of Rorty’s philosophy (see 77).

[6] *NOTE ADDED MAY 2015* In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's not that hard to discover that the bibliographies aren't quite complete. Rorty wrote a couple short reviews for the Review of Metaphysics in grad school, run as it was out of Yale and partly by his friend Richard Bernstein. (His first was in 1955 on Nelson Goodman's instantly famous Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.) Also, it is unfortunate that Leach and Tartaglia didn't discover the errata for "In Defense of Eliminative Materialism" in the Review of Metaphysics, June 1971. One is a partial misquote of James Cornman on 203, but the other is an entire missing line on 203. It kind of made sense, so it's not too surprising that the original editors of the Review and then Leach and Tartaglia missed it. Here's the sentence reprinted:

Now my answer to (T) is that what appears to us, or what we experience, or what we are aware of, is a function of the language "We customarily use 'F' in making non-inferential reports about X's."

Here's what it should read:

Now my answer to (T) is that what appears to us, or what we experience, or what we are aware of, is a function of the language we use. To say that "X's appear to us as F" is merely to say that "We customarily use 'F' in making non-inferential reports about X's."

As you can see, it doesn't really change anything interpretationally. And besides, of the essays reproduced, "In Defense of Eliminative Materialism" is the most negligible. If I could fault the editors for anything, it would be reprinting it in the first place.

[7] Though another essay on Whitehead is included, presumably because the latter, “The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn,” isn’t just exegetical. Whitehead is just not part of the current conversation (“we judged that one paper about Whitehead would probably suffice,” say the editors in a footnote on 7), though those still talking about him did reprint “Matter and Event” (1963), the dropped essay, in 1983.

[8] To be fair, I have no idea what’s happening in the technical conversation of contemporary philosophy professors. (I hope this isn’t too much of a frightening reveal.) My suspicion is that Dennett is being generous when he says that the papers he earmarks should be “required reading” for up-and-comers. But despite my lack of definite knowledge about what current philosophy professors are taking seriously, based on the trajectory of it from the 60s to 90s, which I might claim some know-how with, I doubt that these professors are going to find useful, for example, Rorty’s essay on Kant, “Strawson’s Objectivity Argument.” There’s much to be said about the importance of that essay on a number of different fronts, but none of them seem relevant to what I imagine an aggregate of philosophy professors spend their time on. But maybe analytic philosophy has taken a good turn, back to the concerns that Rorty was speaking to. (Though, come to think of it, that would mean philosophy hasn’t gotten any further than they were 50 years ago. Great for my hero; so much wasted time for philosophy. Or not—if this is all a kind of inquiry, then wasted time is never wasted time because you won’t know which tunnel is a dead-end until you reach it, turn around, and say, “Gee, that was a waste of time.”)

[9] I’ll just add here my general unhappiness with Leach and Tartaglia’s introduction. They largely limit themselves to biographical context for each of the essays as they are chronologically published, and this is sometimes useful for somebody who hasn’t read all the interviews or Neil Gross’ book. (See my review “Waiting for More: Gross and Rorty.”) And they make a few good connections between some early parts and Rorty’s later work, and add some useful bits of historical context. But their critical patter is too often genuinely misleading for an amateur acolyte like myself not to be annoyed. One example: during a discussion of his first paper, a compare-and-contrast of Peirce and Wittgenstein, Leach and Tartaglia say that “Peirce was the classical pragmatist for whom the mature Rorty had least sympathy owing to the former’s lack of concern for moral and social issues, a worry foreshadowed here in an ambivalent footnote” (5). I don’t think there’s anything ambivalent about the footnote. After noting that “renewed interest in pragmatism has led to a new interest in Peirce, who somehow seems the most ‘up-to-date’ of the pragmatists” (16), Rorty footnotes, “perhaps because he was neither as concerned with religion and morality as James, nor as interested in social and political issues as Dewey.” This strikes me as ironic, but not ambivalent. The irony is that analytic philosophy can’t countenance James or Dewey because of those commitments, and so they focus on Peirce. It’s an arrow at the analytic establishment’s aridness, not Peirce’s. The reason Leach and Tartaglia’s comment is misleading about the later Rorty’s reason for lacking sympathy in Peirce is because 1) he stated in Consequences of Pragmatism that it was because Peirce was too Kantian and, more importantly, 2) he’s not entitled to have lack of political utility as a reason for lack of sympathy (at least, consciously—but Leach and Tartaglia’s “owing” is ironically ambivalent in articulating which is their claim). The thrust of Rorty’s understanding of the relationship between those sides of a philosopher’s work is that of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: some people are useful for politics, some aren’t. And indeed, Leach and Tartaglia even use Rorty’s use of that idea on Heidegger (i.e. that Heidegger’s politics is irrelevant to our reception of his philosophy) in their introduction just two pages before. It would be strange for Rorty, who was a huge fan of Sellars’ and Brandom’s very unpolitical work, to hold that against Peirce.

Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”

1. Getting Davidson better press — Talking about your own problems; 2. Pragmatic holism — Words are not stilts — Idealism — Linguistic holism; 3. Avoiding idealism; 4. Incommensurable paradigms — Smells like idealism; 5. Close reading the conclusion of “Very Idea” — Empiricism motivated by realism — Conceptual relativity; 6. Truth is between sentences — On the very idea of mediation

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1.     

Davidson’s and Wittgenstein’s writings are not easy for the nonspecialist to grasp. Neither are those of Kant and Hegel. But the work of original and imaginative philosophers such as these, in the course of generations, gradually comes to have an influence on the entire culture. Their criticisms of our intellectual heritage change our sense of what it is important to think about. A couple centuries from now, historians of philosophy will be writing about the changes in the human self-image that Donald Davidson’s writings helped bring about. [1]

Richard Rorty, who was a personal friend of Davidson’s, wrote this shortly after Davidson’s death. So this strong claim has two strikes against it: 1) friendship often colors and 2) interesting prophesies are often wrong. But as amplification, and from someone deeply immersed in intellectual history, it’s a striking thing to say about a philosopher no one outside of small coteries of isolated individuals—called Anglophone Philosophy Departments—has heard of. Not so with Wittgenstein, who gets good press amongst other departments, even if there aren’t many who really know what he was on about. However, Wittgenstein was an eccentric person and carried out his philosophy eccentrically—he just seems more interesting, and so attracts the mind at a more superficial level. Davidson, so far as I know, led a quiet life carrying out a philosophical project amongst a group of fellows who increasingly separated themselves from the life of other disciplines.

I’m not a specialist, but I’ve picked up some things about anglophone philosophy, and I tend to think Rorty was probably right about Davidson’s significance. So what I’d like to do is just provide a little of the context that I understand to be at work to make one of Davidson’s most famous essays more accessible to the layreader, especially students of literature. [2] Davidson once told Rorty “that he had never tried to solve anybody else’s problems, never discussed an issue simply because others were talking about it.” [3] This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can aid in the avoidance of the entropy that sets in quicker for those whose writings are too timely. Most of us are doomed to be only understood within the claustrophobic space of our immediate situation—you could understand what our remarks mean if you knew more about the history of the conversation we were taking part in, but why would you want to? In the hands of a thinker of genius, however, such ignoring of your context can give a freshness because if you know beforehand that these are just your problems, then you are usually more careful to make sure your reader knows what you’re concerned about. Davidson has this freshness, based on his idiosyncrasy, but he is also not completely idiosyncratic—he is taking part in the Conversation of Philosophy, and sometimes in setting up his problems, it’s not always apparent how to situate him in philosophical space. You have to know something about the history of a conversation to understand any conversation. These are just a few notes toward that end.

2.      The first thing to know is that if you haven’t already read Willard van Orman Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951), there is no point in reading Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974). Davidson generally should be seen, in many aspects, as extending certain basic Quinean ideas, and in “Very Idea” he is pursuing an argument that extends the basic pragmatic holism that underlies that earlier paper. The basic gist of that extremely influential essay is that the empiricist project of analysis—“linguistic analysis” being built into the self-image of anglophone philosophers since Bertrand Russell and Rudolph Carnap—is fundamentally flawed if is based on two very bad ideas. “One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in the meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.” [4] The second dogma represents the specific manifestation of empiricism as a core philosophical project after the linguistic turn. If, as empiricists since Locke have maintained, we are born tabula rasa, a blank slate, then everything is learned and thus rooted in experience. This means you have to build backwards to experience if you think there is anything at a distance from it. This is a kind of atomism, where the goal is to give an account of our conceptual activity by constructing complexities out of simples that can be tied directly to their origin in our immediate experience of the world. Words are like stilts—they each are grounded in the world, and if they aren’t, you’re just floating in the air, unconnected.

The linguistic turn in anglophone philosophy, however, made an important move away from the realm of philosophical action that had animated 18^th and 19^th-century philosophy—the mind. Experience, for most empiricists, happened in the mind, which is also where conceptual activity occurred because before the linguistic turn, ideas were concepts, not words. [5] Tired of the Hegelian Absolute Idealism of the preceding generation of British philosophy, Russell and G. E. Moore said sucks to that—skip the ideas and go to the only manifestation we deal with. “Philosophical analysis is linguistic analysis” became a kind of fighting faith as this kind of metaphilosophical, methodological viewpoint swept Philosophy Departments. However, part of the motivation for rejecting the Bradleys and the McTaggarts was to move away from a wooly-headed spiritualism and towards an embrace of the natural sciences. The hard, tough natural sciences are empirical, and the founding of analytic philosophy also marked the resurgence of empiricism in philosophy. But empiricism—rooting everything in experience—poses a problem for a philosopher who also thinks that the natural sciences are the best at doing that kind of thing. What’s left for philosophy to do?

Linguistic analysis! We’ll study words and meaning, and how they mean. However, the only way for this to be a distinct project that can’t be taken over by a science is if some of our words aren’t rooted in experience in the requisite way. So the analytic/synthetic distinction took hold as a means to keep something distinctive for philosophers to do, helping the scientists with their words, if you will. The iconic example to establish the plausibility of analyticity—the notion of a statement that depends for its truth only on the meanings of the words composing it—is “A bachelor is an unmarried man.” That statement is true and the shenanigans of married and unmarried men matter not a whit to that judgment. So definitions are a paradigm of the analytic, as opposed to a synthetic statement like “That rock just fell on my foot,” where you’d have to check my foot for a bruise and the vicinity for a proximal and culpable rock.

Against the atomism of trying to give an account of simples connected to experience being put together to create complexes and trying to separate out the “just language” parts from the “experience decides the truth” parts—which the project was foundering on—Quine substituted a holistic picture of our interaction with our environment:

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. … But the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole. [6]

This is, essentially, the picture that holists like Davidson, Rorty, and Robert Brandom all wish to remain loyal to. The only difference is that all three are a lot less likely to conflate what Quine elsewhere calls the “web of belief” that is described here with “total science.” With that metaphor of the self as a web of belief, Rorty and Brandom in particular take the further step of thinking of belief as Alexander Bain did—as a habit of action. [7] In this case, one of the most relevant habits of action here is the action we take to articulate a belief in words. The core idea here is that our beliefs, and the sentences we use to articulate them, mean what they do both because of their relationship to each other and the whole of them to the environing world. The use of any particular word or sentence is underdetermined by the world by itself. “Snow is white” might be true, but why use it instead of “La neige est blanche”? Both are true, but only in relationship to their home language in English or French and the world doesn’t tell you which one to use. The picture here is of a self as a kind of amoeba, whose permeable sides can be crossed in specific ways. On the inside are linguistically articulable beliefs and on the outside is the organism’s environment. [8] What Brandom calls language-entries (i.e. “perception”) and language-exists (i.e. “action”) are fundamental to how this self interacts with its environment. [9]

3.      One problem this picture has incurred is of avoiding the charge of idealism. The problem of idealism in philosophy in the last 200 years is the problem of avoiding Cartesian solipsism. Descartes inaugurated the problem by means of his radical doubt—if I can doubt everything but that I’m doubting, then at least I know that. The premise of this line of thought, of course, is that a certain primacy is given to knowing, or epistemology. Idealism, however, first got off the ground as a corollary of empiricism, not the rationalism of Descartes. Berkeley felt that the consequence of a thoroughgoing empiricism, an effort to put experience first, led to the belief that the only thing you really know then is your experience—the stuff happening in your own mind. This is the connection between empiricism and phenomenalism, the 20^th century manifestation of the notion that the appearances just are the reality.

This is troubling, for it seems like admitting that the only thing you can really be sure of is in your own mind, and that is reality. Kant’s transcendental argument, about what we think of as empirical reality needing the categories of the mind, hoped to avoid this problem of idealism, so that as the old formula has it, only a transcendental idealist can be an empirical realist. But given his descendents in German Idealism, who had other agendas, idealism has remained the bugbear of realists, those who demand a robust sense of a world out there. When you look at Quine’s holistic picture, it seems nice, but realists want to know an awful lot about why there’s such radical underdetermination and how one defuses the problem of connecting to reality attendant to the relative independence of the inside of one’s web of beliefs.

4.      These are the problems Davidson concentrated some of his most original work on. For in the time between Quine’s “Two Dogmas” and Davidson’s “Very Idea,” a revolution had occurred in the philosophy of science, which given the fighting faiths of analytic philosophy was a very important subground. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published in 1962. In it Kuhn made the argument that scientific theories and experiments were elaborated within in what he called paradigms. A paradigm for Kuhn is essentially the guiding assumptions that undergird the conceptual content of those theories and experiments. [10] Given the nature of the relationship between assumptions, inferences, and conclusions, however, this means that if you change your root assumptions, it doesn’t make sense to say the old conclusions are false—you simply can’t draw them from your new assumptions. [11] Kuhn drew from this kind of consideration the conclusion that different scientific paradigms were incommensurable, that paradigm shifts in scientific activity—such as the shift from geocentric, Ptolemaic astronomy to the heliocentric, Copernican—are not logical transitions from the falsification of assumptions, but rhetorical transitions by simply replacing one set of assumptions with another. But this means, then, that proponents of alternative paradigms beg the question over each other in argument because they are working from different assumptions. Paradigms are incommensurable because from each standpoint one cannot attain a position in which to even judge whether the other is true. And thus Kuhn was led to his most regretted line, that “though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world.” [12]

“Works in a different world”—smells just like idealism. It’s against this background that Davidson intervenes, collecting together the linguist-anthropologists Sapir and Whorf, the calm Kuhn and the fiery Feyerebend, and his mentor Quine—quoting the passage I pointed to above as the holistic picture—as all suggesting a picture of different conceptual schemes organizing a world that is otherwise a blank without such organization. The criterion that seems to be implicitly at work in all of them to tell when we actually have different conceptual schemes at work is failure of translation. This philosophical perspective then infers from this failure an inability to translate between them.

Davidson doesn’t think there’s a “between” here. He thinks that whatever the picture of language is that has given rise to what Hilary Putnam called the “cookie-cutter view of reality” is false. He calls the scheme/content distinction, that between “organizing system and something waiting to be organized,” “a dogma of empiricism”—“the third, and perhaps the last, for if we give it up it is not clear that there is anything distinctive left to call empiricism.” [13]

5.      The above should put you in a better position to read the essay. (I’m not confident enough to think it’s sufficient, but it might be a good start.) The view of Davidson articulated above is pretty much that of Richard Rorty. [14] In what follows, I’d like to close read Davidson’s conclusion in order to bring out how the above interacts with his specific mode of articulation. The final paragraph of “Very Idea” runs like this:

In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth—quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. [15]

As I’ve tried to suggest above, in the program of empiricism as a motivation for analysis, the idea was to reduce words to nonwords, to get back behind the complex mechanics of semantic meaning to the atomistic simples directly tied to reality or experience, the individuated things that made some sentences true and not others. If there was not some “uninterpreted reality,” empiricists thought, then we’d have no hold on reality for it would just be a morass of relativism—words pointing to words in a nightmarish Cartesian solipsism. This is empiricism itself motivated by realism. [16]

The thing to understand in this context is how this is empiricism through the looking glass of Kant. What Davidson is saying in the first two sentences might be paraphrased as “you might think that we are giving up on objectivity if we give up the idea of an uninterpreted reality and thus sink into relativism [first sentence], but it is that very idea of an ‘uninterpreted reality’ that produces the possibility of relativism.” That’s what Davidson means when he says “this kind of relativity goes by the board”—i.e., we can’t even make sense of this vulgar relativism without the dogma, so none of its considerations, objections, concerns, or arguments are relevant.

In the rest of the paragraph, then, Davidson is trying to reconstrue what we should mean by conceptual relativity and objectivity. At this point, it is important to not construe Davidson as having identified language with conceptual schemes. At the beginning of the essay, he says, “We may accept the doctrine that associates having a language with having a conceptual scheme.” [17] But what Davidson is doing at the beginning of the essay is leading us dialectically through the inside of this line of thought. We might paraphrase his mode this way: “we may accept this hypothesis about how to understand language, so if we do, this is how it would have to work...oh, it doesn’t work the way we need it to...guess we have to reject it.” (Obviously there are two points at which the mechanics of the argument might be criticized, then: whether Davidson has correctly gotten a handle on how it has to work and whether he’s identified things we need to be done by the theory.) Everything at the beginning leads up to his famous line about the third dogma. He’s attempting to show how contemporaneous discussions of “incommensurability,” then white hot because of Kuhn and Feyerabend’s explosive fight with the Popperians, run back through Quine’s gauntlet of the two dogmas, and how Quine then isn’t enough to show what the problem is with radical incommensurability of languages/schemes/vocabulary.

6.      So here’s the last two sentences again: “Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.” To understand what Davidson is saying here I find it helpful to think of Alfred Tarski’s Convention T (which Davidson, I think, has in the back of his mind). “Claim ‘P’ is true if and only if P.” Here’s the famous example: “The claim ‘Snow is white’ is true iff snow is white.” (I’ve thrown in the shorthand of “if and only if.”) This is now sometimes called the disquotational theory/definition of truth: take off the quotes to find out what needs to be the case for the sentence to be true. (Lately this is also called the deflationary theory of truth.)

Davidson is saying here, first, what Rorty repeats in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: truth is a property that only holds in languages, between sentences (“relative to language”). So, there is a kind of relativity here, since I might say “Snow is white” or “I think snow is white” or “La neige est blanche,” all of which might say the same thing. However, these three claims are as objective as can be, Davidson thinks, because we already know how to judge their truth by the way the world is. Snow is white if snow is white; likewise, since the French use their sentence in exactly the same contexts as our English one, we can say the two sentences say exactly the same thing, talk about the same world. “I think snow is white” can express the same thing as the first two, but Tarski shows us that it might also tell us something slightly different: “The claim ‘I think snow is white’ is true iff I think snow is white.” And depending on who is using that sentence, you might come up with different answers, unlike “snow is white.” For why would we say that the claim “I think snow is white” is true tout court just because I happen to think so? (“I” is what they call an indexical, like “here” and “now”—they refer very differently depending on context, and thus can radically change truth-values.)

When Davidson says “unmediated touch,” what he’s saying here is the same as when Rorty rejects the metaphor of thinking of language as a medium. Davidson shouldn’t have said “reestablish,” for his real point is that we couldn’t possibly be in a position where we weren’t in contact with the world in such a way that our common modes of adjudicating the truth of sentences might globally be suspicious. (This the Cartesian threat of skepticism.) Rorty’s argument goes backwards to Hegel, whose attack on “immediacy” in the Phenomenology of Spirit is the first attack on the Kantian framework that Davidson is, we could say, rephrasing in the analytic idiom. [20] Rorty wants to say that language is more like an arm than it is a veil (or a map). That means “snow” is just as connected to snow as your hand.

There are a number of more general problems scared up by this discussion, most especially how we are to understand Davidson’s argument’s relationship to Kuhnian notions of radical conceptual shifts. Kuhn is ostensibly a target, so does Davidson’s argument require us to reject Kuhnian paradigm shifts? I will return to these problems.

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Endnotes

[1] Richard Rorty, “Out of the Matrix,” Oct. 5, 2003 in the Boston Globe

[2] I should add that literary critics have not remained completely ignorant of Davidson’s work. (And putting it that way, I hasten to add, makes it sound like it’s their fault, when it isn’t. Really, it isn’t anybody’s fault—and that’s despite the tone in the body, above, where it sounds like I’m sliding blame in the direction of the philosophers. That’s a rhetoric I’ve more picked up from Rorty than I should feel entitled to. In the last few years, I’ve become increasingly tired of people complaining about how their particular hero has been “ignored” or someone else’s hero was “anticipated” by theirs—and you can probably find me making such complaints, but I’d really rather weed that out. They sound so uncouth in others, so why should I keep it up as well? In our lengthening age, who actually has time to stay abreast of everyone? Why can’t we learn to lay off the horn, and just show people why we happen to like so-and-so and leave omniscience to the gods? Scholars have an interest in promulgating a sense that there are certain things you need to know to be considered in the club—the problem is that there are a lot of different clubs now, and generally this is a good thing. I have more thoughts about this in “Do We Need a Center, or Generalities?.”) There is a very good collection of essays edited by Reed Way Dasenbrock, Literary Theory After Davidson, and though a philosopher, Samuel Wheeler III’s book, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy, is of inestimable value for literary critics desiring an approach to Davidson because of their general familiarity with Derrida and de Man.

[3] “In Memoriam,” 318 in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2006

[4] Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” 20 in his From a Logical Point of View

[5] I say “most empiricists” because many pragmatists would like to include pragmatism within the ranks of empiricism. In particular, for James and Dewey, everything was experience—they collapsed the distinction between experience and world that is needed to constitute the idea of a mind radically distinct from the world, and thus create the possibility of being out of touch with it, a problem hovering in the background of all of this. For a different version of this story about the foundation and demolition of analytic empiricism at the hands of Quine, Sellars, Davidson, and Rorty that discusses its relationship to the pre-linguistic turn maneuvers of James and Dewey, see my “Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn.”

[6] Quine, “Two Dogmas,” 42-43

[7] Brandom, as he likes to cutely point out, technically does not believe in belief. In his systematic philosophy of language, he avoids it in the official account, though provides the means of seeing how to move back and forth between various common ways of understanding the concept of “belief.” See in particular his Making It Explicit, 195-6. He’s also proud of the fact, and his Ph.D. dissertation advisor Rorty is as well, that “experience” does not appear once in that massive book, though that is tangential to the issues here.

[8] When did this web of belief become a biological construct? Sleight of hand, given that it would take me too far afoot to justify the suitability of this picture for humans, though clearly it won’t work, say, for actual amoeba who have an environment but no language. This is a problem that needs an account, and some of Brandom’s best work goes some way in justifying the analytic’s fighting faith in thinking that it’s a good idea to just avoid talking about “mind” and “experience” given how other animals probably have them and instead find a way of talking about the specific problems that arise for us language-users. Brandom calls this the demarcation problem and it is terribly important, particularly for various ecologically-minded intellectual movements, e.g. forms of “posthumanism.” (I apply this Brandomian insight to posthumanism and give the example of one particular treatment of intentionality in “Posthumanism, Antiessentialism, and Depersonalization,” sections 3-5.)

[9] Rorty gives a Davidsonian account of this kind of thing—with a picture!—in his “Non-reductive Physicalism” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth.

[10] They are much more interestingly complex than this—for example, the nature of an exemplar in Kuhn’s vocabulary points in a particularly pragmatic-attitudinal direction, as opposed to my reduction of the paradigm to a semantic-conceptual essence—but for my purposes this may suffice.

[11] Say you have an argument like this:

Assumptions: P and If P, then Q
1. P
2. If P, then Q
3 Q

This codifies in symbolic notation the inference from the two premises, (1) and (2), which are assumed to be true, to the conclusion (3). But what if you had a different set of assumptions?

Assumptions: P and R
1. P
2. R
3 …

There is no inference to be drawn from just P and R. Does that, then, make Q false? Nope—it doesn’t, in fact, say anything at all about Q or the conditional If P, then Q.

[12] Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3^rd ed., 121. A new fourth edition, with a long essay by the most important philosopher-historian working after Kuhn, Ian Hacking, has recently come out, and the pagination is near-identical to the 3^rd, but not quite. (Note: I’m not counting Foucault in that evaluation because he worked out of a different tradition than Kuhn. Interestingly, however, Hacking is the heir of both Kuhn and Foucault, being one of the earliest and still most cogent commentators and appreciators of Foucault’s project.) There are significant differences in pagination from the 3^rd to the earlier ones.

[13] Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” in Inquires into Truth and Interpretation, 189

[14] One of Rorty’s more infamous essays, “The World Well Lost” (in Consequences of Pragmatism), is in fact an excited extrapolation of the argument Davidson makes in “Very Idea,” except that Rorty published it a year before Davidson got around to publishing his. (Rorty, similarly to Kuhn, later regretted the rhetoric of that essay.) Rorty’s most thorough treatment of what he takes the importance of Davidson to be is his “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth” (in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth).

[15] “Very Idea,” 198

[16] In Note 5, I suggested that James and Dewey considered themselves empiricists of a different stripe, and talking about motivation—the connections and relative priority given to different doctrines—is another way of articulating kinds of difference within camps marked out by isms. For example, one might think of James and Dewey as empiricists who aren’t realists and Davidson and Brandom as kinds of post-linguistic turn, analytic philosophers who are neither empiricists nor realists.

[17] “Very Idea,” 184

[18] See CIS 4-5

[19] See CIS, Ch. 1, esp. 10-13

[20] An earlier important attack on immediacy in the Hegelian tradition was Sellars’s in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.”

Second Thoughts on Existentialism

Over a decade ago now, I discovered Robert Pirsig. My first encounter was blasé—I read the first 60 pages of ZMM for a high school class on philosophy and religious studies and faked my way through a paper on it. My interest in Pirsig didn’t surface until the next year, as I took Phil 101 and had ZMM assigned on the syllabus. I groaned inwardly, but—in the context of a semester on Plato, Nietzsche, and Kuhn—I found him much more interesting. I became simultaneously interested in philosophical problems and the life-entanglement that ZMM represented. Here’s a guy who went to the mat for these problems. It was very interesting.

I was on my way up to my 101 discussion group one day in an elevator with my TA, when he asked me what philosophy courses I was taking the spring semester. I looked quizzically at him and kind of shook my head saying, “I’m…not taking any…?” He got a funny look on his face: “Oh—I thought you were a philosophy major.” I said no, I was still undeclared. He said I should think about it, and a month later when our professor asked me to assist her in a class that spring, I thought the least I could do was declare (though it took me till mid-spring—I’m very lazy).

I took three philosophy courses that spring, in addition to the aesthetics course I helped out in (a complete farce: what do I know about aesthe—wait, I’m a literary critic in training now…I love aesthetics! Ha!, and boy do I know a lot about beauty, and stuff!) . They were in Greek philosophy, existentialism, and a random cavalcade of 20th century people, including the existentialists. The deal with the 20th century class was that we could pick out any philosopher we wanted, even if we didn’t study them specifically, and write our final on them. I chose Pirsig, and because he wasn’t well known as a philosopher, my professor suggested I compare Pirsig with someone else. Because I was taking so much existentialism, I picked Sartre. This turned into “Phenomenological-Existentialism and the Metaphysics of Quality.” I read Lila for the first time for this paper, and became enamored with Pirsig’s arguments about needing a new metaphysics for our culture. And because I had so much Pirsig on the brain, when it came to writing my existentialism paper, I couldn’t help but refute Camus with the help of my newly learned Pirsig-foundation called the MoQ. This was “Absurdity and the Meaning of Life.”

It never ceases to fascinate me that of all the junk I have lying around the internet, this particular essay sends me the most random readers who feel like writing (all of my reply letters begin “Thanks for reading and writing!”). Having written it a decade ago, though, I have mixed feelings about the arguments. (I have no mixed feelings about the writing—it’s horrid.) At the close, with the help of Pirsig’s theory of static levels, I get to state that Camus’ most pressing of philosophical problems, the question of suicide, of why I should not just off myself, has an easy answer: “It’s simply that Life has Meaning: to live.” Really? Life’s purpose is to be lived? I suggest that this “rather simple ethics” “leaves the door open” for the further development of a teleological ethics, but why on earth should we think that the firm foundation of the ultimate telos of life is “to be lived,” and this because we are cellular beings? At root, life has biological meaning, so now Camus’ full of crap. “Life’s purpose is to be lived” is at best a tautology, and how boring is that? Why on earth would somebody think that that’s an interesting answer to Camus’ problem?

In my estimation, there are two types of 19-year-old philosophy students: 1) people who thought Nietzsche was probably right when he said “God is dead” at 18 and still do and 2) people who thought Nietzsche was right at 18 but now don’t. I was the latter type. Most people who go in for philosophy these days do not make it through their teenage years undisillusioned (saying “illusioned” would be unfair to people for whom it hasn’t even occurred that life might be an illusion—and since Platonism is predicated on the appearance/reality distinction, such an awareness does seem to be intrinsic to philosophy). I, certainly, didn’t make it. However, I also didn’t really care that God was dead. Some people like Camus do. He cared very much, for only somebody that takes Nietzsche far too seriously could take seriously the question, “Why should I not commit suicide?”—let alone as the only truly pressing philosophical question. Passing through Nietzsche makes some people (call them “existentialists”) really pessimistic about humanity, even cynical. I wouldn’t say I was optimistic—I spent much of my time making fun of everything around me and I thought most other people were idiots (it’s hard not to when living in a dorm)—but cynical? It seemed like the perverse twin of the eternal optimism of people who go in for God. I just couldn’t get up the energy for that—it seemed like I’d have to spend just as much energy pissing on God’s grave as I would have had to do propping Him up, and when it comes right down to it, I’m very lazy.

So, what happens to some lazy 18-year-olds who go in for philosophy is that on their way to 19 they discover an easy way out—someone offers them a quick dialectical fix, a cheap but sturdy looking foundation that claims to give more polemical bang for your argumentative buck. (If they don’t find one of these by 20, they either cease to be lazy and declare as political science or sociology majors and try to save the world, or—if still lazy—enter an English department.) That was Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality for me. The trouble is, you still have something you need to prop up, and that’s no fun. It ends up being just as much work as a full-fledged God. Here you are, standing your philosophical ground, and you need something to cover yourself from all those existentialists pissing on you, but you choose a shack with a leaky roof, when at least the God-guy across the street has somebody to talk to for comfort. And so many, by 22, leave philosophical ground and never come back. I mean, shit, you just move a hundred yards south and you can watch all the football you want without ever worrying about the pissing match occurring right up the alley.

True enlightenment happens, though, when you realize that you can avoid the golden shower while still remaining on philosophical terrain. You don’t need a foundation, you just move up hill and let the others piss themselves all they want. Doing this means seeing the need for a house, even a shitty leaky one, as a small problem in a larger landscape. Seeing this, where there’s suddenly a dry hill out back you’d never noticed before, means seeing that not only is the tautology, “Life’s purpose is to be lived,” both true and boring—but it makes you wonder why you thought you should’ve been excited by it. Seeing the larger terrain of life starts to make you wonder about everyone’s motivation for saying and doing certain things, like praying or building houses or pissing on them.

Why did I go in for being a quasi-metaphysician for a time, to want to build some sort of foundation, but not an expensive God-like one? The presupposition in this is: I felt that Camus’ question needed to be answered. I felt that the cynics needed to be answered on their own ground. But once one looks at that dry hill, you have to wonder: why would I want muddy ground that’s been pissed on for 2500 years? I.e., why does Camus feel the need to ask his question? Is every question a good question? Maybe not—maybe we should wonder about Camus.

Once you start wondering about the foundation metaphor, about the need for a knock-down answer to stubbornly stupid questions like “Why should I not kill myself,” you start seeing philosophy as just another mode of articulating yourself. And you notice that you can articulate yourself anywhere, not just at your pissed-on house. So you think about moving up hill. You start to think of philosophy as just another piece of your clothing, that keeps you warm and comfortable, but is mobile and flexible, and if it becomes threadbare, you get something new—because it’s all about having something nice to wear while you wander through the landscape of life. (If anybody’s wondering what expensive, well-worn term of opprobrium to apply to this attitude, if you guessed “aestheticism,” give yourself a serious, stern nod of approval. Sorry, all the gold stars and hot bling are reserved for the people who care about the appearances—you only care about reality, a cold, bleak place which could give a shit if you get it right. So while you shiver in your patched-up hovel, dripping like an R. Kelly wet dream, console yourself—as you watch the carnivalesque, tiki-torch party on the side of the hill—with the thought that all those people are going to hell…or whatever equivalent you’ve dreamed up for them.)

The argument I made in the essay was valid, I think, but it was also—much like my last parenthetical—just silly. Why would one make it? I made it because I thought life needed a big Telos, even if it was a silly one. And, come to think of it, mine was perfect: if Camus is going to ask a stupid question, then I’m going to give a stupid answer. If you demand that the space where the Grand Telos used to be is filled, then in a disillusioned age the only way to fill it is with the inverse of God’s grandeur—tautological insipidness. Some people think that the space does need to be filled. Those who think, for instance, that free will is impossible because Darwin and Newton have proven determinism true, and therefore moral action is in trouble—these people think the hole left by God needs to be filled. They want a Grand Telos.

But why? Why not just have a little telos, or a bunch of little teloses? Why even continue using the Greek? Just say “purpose,” think of all the little things you do and why you do them, and if you like fulfilling these little goals, then keep doing them. If not, then don’t. If you break things into small enough pieces, then odds are that you’ll never answer “no” to all of them and have to start contemplating suicide. Camus’ mistake was to take all the little things as emblems for one big thing, to take riding the subway or going to work as symbols that don’t signify various little purposes, but all signify One Big Purpose. And the only thing he could figure out to fit was Nothing, and hence the absurdity. But if we thought it was a good idea to stop contemplating the big guy named God, maybe the trouble wasn’t God, but the continual contemplation of something big, parenthetical or otherwise.

My attempt to resurrect “teleological arguments” was a short-lived effort to save my leaky roof. In “Absurdity and the Meaning of Life,” I answered for ethics by taking on Kantian deontology. I still think that’s right. Deontology rests on the assumption that the World, or Reason, or Something—Something Big—gives us obligations to be performed. I don’t think that’s true. I think the only reason we have any obligations is because somebody gives them to us, meaning we give them to ourselves, and we can start breaking these obligations off into small pieces and deal with them in terms of the purposes they fulfill—which is to transform “obligation,” and deontology, into a utilitarian ethics of some kind. Not the old teleology, but a pragmatist notion of only being obligated to each other, a notion of solidarity rather than the old, cosmological obligation Kant tried to keep alive (for more on this train of thought, see “Religion, a Utilitarian Ethics of Belief, and the Public/Private Distinction”). In a later paper, “Mechanistic Philosophy and the Yellow Brick Road of Science,” I tried to give sense to “teleological argument” for science. That failed miserably, as one helpful commentator pointed out ruthlessly, and was the beginning of my suspicions that I should just can the telos talk.

So while I still think Nietzschean anti-Kantianism is right, the whole idea of pressing philosophical ethical questions doesn’t, and that’s because the notion of “philosophy” is typically the “big view.” As my metaphor earlier suggests, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a big view—the problem just seems not knowing when to give it a rest. The big view is necessarily, because of its bigness, abstract—the “high country of the mind,” as Pirsig put it. But some problems are down in the woods, under the canopy, and being up high obscures them. My engagement with Sartre and Husserl brings out somewhat the part of existentialisme français I still think is true. Whatever Husserl’s scientism and Sartre’s decisionism (let alone Camus’ woeisme), the easy slogan we might distill from existentialism is “existence precedes essence.”

The slogan signifies two movements: 1) the movement away from essentialism, the notion that there are set, defined centers to each particular thing that can be discovered rather than fluid, evolving centers created by the thing (any “essence” is created by the way in which we exist) and 2) the movement away from Platonic other-worldliness, away from the Realm of the Forms and back down to the ground-level of life. If there is any utility left in the “Absurdity” paper, it is the slapping around of deontology; if any in the “Phenomenological-Existentialism” paper, it is my playing up of lebenswelt, the “lifeworld” that Husserl wanted us to get back to. (Oh, and Demonstration Stick Man, who finally made an uncredited comeback in “A Spatial Model of Belief Change.” What a mysterious person—is he a man who is a demonstration-stick or a stickman used for demonstrations?) The notion of lifeworld is useful in reminding philosophers, people who occasionally think too big for their own britches, that their reflections are rooted in a world that is not itself the world of reflection. This sounds other-worldly again, but perhaps a comparison with fiction may help—the words of a novel serve to create a world in which we can live through the reading of the words. Philosophy does that, too—the only difference is that if the words of philosophy do not connect up usefully enough with the things we do when not reading philosophy, then we might begin to doubt that it is philosophy we’re reading, but perhaps rather fiction (which is what well-read pragmatists think of large swaths of Plato’s dialogues and what most of my dorm-mates thought of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, as much as I tried to persuade them to the contrary).

Waiting For More: Gross and Rorty

I thought about being sarcastic and urbane in writing about Neil Gross' new book on Rorty, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, the obvious puns coming to mind, but the thought passed as I came to realize that Gross wrote pretty much the book he had intended to write. It is only partly a biography as Gross intends Rorty to be a case study for what Gross calls the "new sociology of ideas." Having only really heard about the book as the first biography, my expectations were for something like what Ray Monk did for Russell and Wittgenstein, though obviously not enough time had passed for something exactly like it. Given this, let me waste no more time and say upfront that if you are looking for a good biography of Rorty's life, keep waiting. This isn't what you are looking for.

I should confess that I didn't read the book straight through. Most of the book is laid out simply as a biography of Rorty's years up to his exodus from Princeton, and so I jumped to the chapters where might lay hidden answers to the most intriguing episodes of his life: his divorce from Amélie and his tenure as president of the Eastern Division of the APA. I read those with great interest and then trailed back to read the whole thing. The book did give me some interesting new details of his life, but no new insights. If you've had the time and obsession to read almost everything Rorty's ever published (small though that number of persons may be), then Rorty pretty much gives you the same insights to his life and work that Gross thinks he is providing. As I read, I began to suspect that Gross was up to something other than biography because, while providing more than a few details and making judicious use of Rorty's unpublished letters, Gross wasn't developing anything like a classic, biographical narrative.

This suspicion was cleared up handily when, after finishing all the biographical chapters, I went back and read his introduction and then his concluding chapters. In the intro, Gross disabuses the reader of the notion that he is writing a biography centered around any of three types: humanistic, contextualist, or poststructualist. The humanistic approach is the kind Monk wrote, whose "goal is to bring life and work together as part of the project of taking measure of a particular intellectual's life, asking after its significance and broader meaning, with special reference to questions of creativity and virtue, the ethics of intellectual and political engagement, the dilemmas of authenticity, the dangers of corruption and self-aggrandizement, and the value of the ideas themselves." (6) Sad for me, since this strikes me as a great thing to do and an enjoyable thing to read, but fair enough: not humanistic. Check.

Gross' "contextualist approach" is exemplified by intellectual historians like Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock. In these, the intellectual historian is interested in "understanding what [a text's] author was trying to do in writing it: what kinds of argumentative moves she or he was attempting to make, against whom, and with what intended effect." (6-7) As I think of Skinner and Pocock as intellectual historians par excellence, this was also disappointing, for they do the kind of work that brings us down to the nitty gritty of what lost-to-time writers' self-image was, of reminding us of what life used to be like and what these writers were saying to themselves about what they did. What Gross called poststructuralist reminds me of what Rorty called Geistesgeschichte: big sweeping stories of where we were to where we are now. In these stories, we tend to ignore what writers thought they were doing to play out what they did to move us further along whatever path we are choosing to highlight. So--not what Hayden White or Foucault were doing? Fine--but what is Gross doing, then? (I should note that the above is not exactly what Gross meant by "poststructuralist," but he suggests that "concern with historical objectivity" and "belief in the singularity of authorial intentionality" (7) is illusory for them, and these are, not only possibly contentious attributions, but certainly philosophical add-ons, not something that conditions the type of histories they write.)

As I said earlier, Gross thinks of himself as writing a case study for the "new sociology of ideas." This endeavor, apparently, is a search "to uncover the relatively autonomous social logics and dynamics, the underlying mechanisms and processes, that shape and structure life in the various social settings intellectuals inhabit: academic departments, laboratories, disciplinary fields, scholarly networks, and so on." (11) Taking off from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins, this basically sounds to my ears like doing for the humanities what Kuhn and Latour did for the sciences. Which sounds great, though indeed a little different from the other three approaches.

What emits, however, in the course of the investigation are what I can't help but think are commonsensical platitudes about how intellectuals live their lives and do their work. Gross first describes the "explanatory models" that Bourdieu and Collins have laid out before him, which is basically a focus on the social network of rewards and punishment in academia: "Struggling with other academics to win as much intellectual prestige as they can, they typically end up cleaving to theories, positions, and approaches defined as high status...." "On the whole ... ideas serve strategic functions for thinkers, helping to position them in academic hierarchies...." (12) This, itself, smells of a foul reductionism--we can read ideas as tools in the academic marketplace, and sometimes it pays to do so, but nobody except--if we believe Plato--the Sophists self-consciously did so at a general level. Intellectuals, even the evil post-modernists, do not believe and think the things they do simply because it will get them money and fame.

Which isn't to say that this is all Bourdieu and Collins (on Gross' account) are suggesting. Their larger point, I am to understand, is something more like, "People from socially privileged backgrounds are more likely to rise in the academic hierarchy because the ones raising others were also from socially privileged backgrounds." This is more pointed, but this is, again, part of at least a leftist's common sense, and still says nothing exactly about why intellectuals believe the things they do from their own perspective. "From their own perspective" isn't, however, what the sociologists are after--which is fine. They want to explain the mechanisms of an academic community's reproduction of itself. And in this sense, pointing out the advantages of the rich and/or well-networked (only the latter in Rorty's case) is to the point. My problem is that Gross writes that "these theoretical frameworks are useful in explaining aspects of Rorty's life":

"Rorty sought to be more at the center of the disciplinary action and so refashioned himself as an analytic philosopher, working to bring himself to the attention of the analytic community. These efforts proved successful, allowing him to convert what was to be a temporary position at Princeton into a tenure-track post and giving him new network connections that made possible his further ascent in the disciplinary status structure." (13)

All I can think is that, while all basically true enough, this is quite the effort to use some expensive, theoretical tools for obvious, commonsensical junk that everyone already understands. I can just imagine conservatives seeing this as an indictment, because Gross' subject is Rorty, against post-modern, sophistical relativists, but all Gross is saying is that to get tenure, you have to impress the people giving it out. And to do that, you have to talk about what they think it is important to talk about. This doesn't seem insidious to me, as it might to some who haven't really thought much about cultural reproduction, but it also doesn't strike me as something path-breaking. Is the sociology of knowledge really in such a state?

Perhaps it is, and in that case Gross' "new sociology of ideas" would seem much needed, though again very boring on its surface. Gross' major addition is the concept of the "intellectual self-concept" to help combat the aforementioned reductionism and its tendency to flatten out the "richness and complexity of intellectual life," (15) which I take to be a huge understatement. The reason I think so is because of Gross' "central empirical thesis":

"that the shift in Rorty's thought from technically oriented philosopher to free-ranging pragmatist reflected a shift from a career stage in which status considerations were central to one in which self-concept considerations became central." (15)

I would certainly agree that there was a shift, and one thing that Gross' digging suggests is that the financial difficulties his parent's struggled during his childhood left an impression on Rorty, which in part explains the energy with which he pursued retooling from, roughly, a metaphysician to an analytic philosopher (and the fact that he was trained by McKeon explains how he could do so without a significant change in his identity as an intellectual). But everyone knows that Rorty suffered a shift of some sort because he did it on an international stage. Gross' thesis is still too reductionistic, and in fact I think it may get Rorty wrong. I think Rorty may indeed have liked having the high status of an "important philosopher" at Princeton, the number one program in the country, but nothing Gross offers as evidence really solidifies 1) status considerations as ever being central and 2) that self-concept struggles didn't guide in a significant way his behavior at all stages.

It seems to me, even after reading Gross' book, that Rorty's search for great ideas, his push for an environment that would help develop better and better ideas, his search for stimulating conversation--this explains the same phenomena Gross is looking at and this version shows continuity through his whole life and it ties to his own expressed views (not only theoretical but, for instance, his comments about why he liked Princeton's graduate students). In explaining why Rorty wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Gross says that Rorty,

"well positioned in a variety of intellectual networks, may have been better able to anticipate what the book's reception would be. In an environment where many humanists were coming to have their doubts about the new rigorism, there would be tremendous interest in a book--particularly one written by an insider--that used 'rigorous' arguments to make a case for why foundationalist versions of analytic philosophy, and by implication its cognates in other fields, were ill conceived. That Rorty may have realized there would be such interest helps explain why he was eager to write the book and, perhaps--with the idea in mind of eventually accumulating status by writing it--why he allowed himself to drift more out of an analytic orbit over the course of the 1970s." (315)

This strikes me as just wrong. In the first case, there was no evidence presented that I read to support that Rorty anticipated PMN's positive reception by non-philosophers, and in fact Rorty's said quite a few times in interviews that it still boggled his mind even years after. In the second, it is possible that Rorty may have thought that the book he was writing might help leverage him into a position outside of Princeton, but I certainly don't think it prompted its writing--when Rorty says he was surprised it's because PMN really is an insider book for insiders, written to continue an insider's conversation.

I don't think I'm squeamish about what many people take to be concerns that cloud truth--money, status, job security--because Rorty had always been so frank about it. The problem is that this kind of supposition on Gross' part just seems to punch up the fact that ideas can't be reduced to social conditions, that whatever the sociology of knowledge is going to be good for, it's not telling us why particular intellectuals make the choices they do, because self-understanding is the whole bit: Gross' introduction of the "self-concept" concept seems to add back in the bits that originally would've allowed it to differentiate itself from the humanist and contextualist approaches. But then all we get are badly written biographies that don't claim to be biographies, but science, and say things with big, shiny new theoretical toys that everybody, being people who are not only familiar with biographies, but live out their own biographies, already knows and understands, and then calls it an advance. It's just scientists doing badly what humanists already do well.

An example: "if an intellectual were to find himself in an institution that celebrated and attempted to foist on him an identity he found noxious, he could make an attempt to exit, do his best to ignore the views of those around him, or even try to change the institution." (280) Gee, really? This is supposed to be a claim that "synthesizes contributions from different lines of social-scientific investigation," (278) but it sounds to me as if he read a lot of boring research and forgot that he didn't himself need to be that boring. It sounds like the classic college freshman conundrum: told to always support my argument, what do I do about commonplaces? So they end up citing articles backing them up on the most obvious of "claims." Normally by the time one graduates, you've figured out what you need support for and what not. But more than a little of Gross' argument seems designed to inaugurate platitudes into a field that you begin to think must have been an absolute desert.

Another example: in explaining Rorty's choice in master's thesis topic, he says,

"The theory of intellectual self-concept helps us better explain the intellectual choice at hand. Rorty's time at Chicago occurred during prime identity formation years in his life course and was a period when he was making the transition from one institutional affiliation to another. The institution with which he had been most closely affiliated as a child and young adolescent--his family--had all the characteristics likely to make it a site of identity formation." (304)

I think the really difficult thing would be to find a family that doesn't have "all the characteristics likely to make it a site of identity formation."

I think my main disappointment with the book was not its argument with other sociologists, but that it seemed so close to saying something interesting. The idea of a self-concept, that an intellectual's self-understanding is centrally important to understanding their work, may be a commonplace to biography, but it is also something that Rorty argued for years was missing from philosophy. Rorty argued for years that lack of an historical sense in philosophy has handicapped its ability to understand what it was doing. Opening up the table of contents and seeing a chapter titled, "The Theory of Intellectual Self-Concept," caused me to think that some sort of interesting combination of Rorty's biography and his work to illustrate a larger point about philosophy being a kind of autobiography was in the offing, but nothing interesting ever appeared.

For all this, I was still satisfied in reading the book because for whatever it lacks in art and new insight, it is still quite capable in supplying the material and arranging it in pattern that, though not new, is still largely right. Gross was able to stay out of the way of his subject and is entirely neutral to the content of Rorty's ideas, and in fact his portrait is quite sympathetic and rebuts a few of the more pernicious views of Rorty floating around (like his relationship to Peirce and Dewey). However, as I mentioned at the outset, most of what Gross supplies can be gained by reading Rorty himself. If you want pretty much the same picture Gross offers, I would recommend his autobiographical "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" in Philosophy and Social Hope and the collected interviews in Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself. One thing Gross does do inadvertently is give us corroborative evidence that Rorty really was being as honest and frank as he seemed to have been all those years.

POSTSCRIPT, NOVEMBER 2016
I was extremely gratified to have run across Bruce Kuklick's review of Gross's book in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Winter 2011, and find that the abstract read: "This review argues that the biographical narrative in Gross’s book is excellent, but that its theory is silly." That is essentially the abstract I would've used, and I find it comforting a heavyweight of American intellectual history agrees with me on pretty much every point I make above. Sometimes in the academic humanities, humanists can feel, in the words of Will Ferrell in Zoolander, like they're taking crazy-pills.

A Map of Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

An Overlong Introduction That Stretches the Limits of Even My Own Vaunted Lack of Brevity

Almost 30 years too late, I’d like to offer something of a review of Rorty’s PMN, which is to say I’d like to summarize Rorty’s epochal book by providing a road map to reading it. When PMN appeared in 1979, it had an immediate effect on its readers. By Rorty’s professional colleagues, it was taken as a betrayal, an abandonment of not only the projects to which Rorty and the professionals had dedicated themselves to, but also of the standards of rigor and merit by which good philosophy should aspire. By readers outside of philosophy departments, particularly in American English departments, it was taken as an exciting dragon slaying, the crushing of dreams that had punished and oppressed disciplines living in Philosophy’s tyrannical shadow. It wasn’t exactly either of these, but there is a kernel of truth in both. Rorty was attacking traditional philosophical projects like foundational epistemology, but the book itself did not display any lack of rigor or merit. Rorty was attacking the pretensions of philosophy’s self-image, a self-image that many philosophers held on to. Kant’s image of philosophy as the queen of the sciences held sway in many quadrants and Rorty sought to dispel that image. The effect, however, isn’t as stunning as all that and to dramatize it as Brutus murdering Caesar is to miss the care and love Rorty has for contemporary philosophy. On the other hand, by attempting to give philosophy a new self-image, people shouldn’t follow the professional philosophers’ love of drama by buying into the “Et tu, Brute?” story and rejoicing in the saving of Rome. Despite their often pretension, philosophy has never had the regal position it wished and Rorty’s aspirations are not that of Beowulf, but that of an underlaborer clearing away some brush.

One of the surprising things at the time of PMN was Rorty’s choice of heroes, his lineup of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey as “the three most important philosophers of our century.” (5) We might not get so excited about that announcement now (“Yeah, of course they are important and of course they have a lot of similarity. Du-uh. We know that.”), but that is only because we are living in the wake of Rorty’s written corpus, who probably did more than any other single person to ensure all three’s entwined legacy. In 1980, analytic philosophers, Rorty’s fellow professors at Princeton, could accept the choice of Wittgenstein, but Heidegger? Most believed that Carnap had successfully and satirically dispensed with him years ago, which isn’t to mention his deplorable behavior before and after World War II. Admirers of Continental philosophy, mainly located in English departments, could understand Heidegger, being Derrida’s precursor, but Wittgenstein? Sure, he was from the Continent, but his first book was perfectly boring (who writes that systematically?) and his second goes on and on obscurely about obscure topics. And Dewey? Dewey hadn’t been in vogue anywhere for at least 30 years, barely kept alive by marginalized philosophers like Sidney Hook, Morton White, and John McDermott. What was the deal?

It turns out that Rorty was performing one of the most impressive rhetorical power plays I have ever seen. For years Rorty had been accruing a very respectable and pronounced position in American philosophy, with important, influential and tightly argued papers in the philosophy of mind and metaphilosophy. He had become so respectable, in fact, that he had been elected the President of the American Philosophical Association in 1978—just in time to drop the bomb of “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism” in 1979 at New York in front of a whole crowd of the most important American philosophers, from Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Yale, all the eastern universities, just as PMN was being released, read, and the indigestion was just beginning to be felt.

Of course, there was nothing suspicious or underhanded about it, like there were back alley orchestrations going on, it was all serendipitous (though as I understand it, Rorty caused a lot of consternation with the analytic establishment that year, not with his book or with the presidential address, but with regular ole’ stupid, peripheral academic politics: he made a ruling against the establishment in favor of the “pluralists,” who felt they were getting the short shrift, because he felt he was being bullied a little too much), and it is not the power play I was referring to. Rather, Rorty used his respectability and authority (as a “philosopher to pay attention to”) to reinvent Wittgenstein and Heidegger for their respectively uncomprehending audiences (“Wait, Wittgenstein/Heidegger is saying the same thing as Heidegger/Wittgenstein?”) and to all but single-handedly resurrect Dewey—but he did it in a book that, contrary to the appearances of the introduction, actually has only a superficial reliance on them.

Rorty is fairly upfront about all this, but it is still nevertheless very interesting to behold. The general tone and underlying message of PMN is designated by his choice of heroes, a sort of synthesis of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (with its therapeutic stance towards philosophical problems), Heidegger’s Being and Time (with its redescription of philosophy into existential terms, what Hook and Dewey saw as a recasting of Experience and Nature in “transcendental German”), and Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty (with its tracing of the history of foundationalism). But while that may be true of its tone and inspiration, PMN’s closer point of departure is a synthesis of Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” and Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It might be summed up best as doing for philosophy what Kuhn did for science.

The structure of the book is very important to both its readability and to its argument. The book is at its core dialectical and not, unlike philosophical systems from Descartes to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, deductive. System writing in philosophy has often been taken to be the prime motivation of a philosopher, writing something that says something about everything, that creates a context in which to put everything. A philosopher gets clear about his first principles (whether “clear and distinct ideas,” a single substance of God, or the logical form of language) and then derives the rest of his system from that. This is a bottom-up approach, one that is quite fitting for the foundationalism that is commonly associated with it. Rather than seeing our reasoning as sitting vertically on top of foundations that we should secure, Rorty sees our reasoning as stretching horizontally across time. Rorty does not start with first principles with which to construct a system out of, but is rather led back to root assumptions, the uncovering of which will help us understand the structure of our reasoning. These assumptions have a history and if we understand that history we will understand why we think the way we do.

Rorty’s book, then, is laid out into eight chapters split into three parts, plus an introduction. The introduction does a fine job of laying out precisely what Rorty has in mind to do, who the heroes and villains are and a bird’s eye view of what he shall be arguing in more detail. The first part consists of a treatment of a particular problem in the philosophy of mind: the relation between mind and body. Rorty brings us along step by step, getting us clear about what possible problem there could be, what possible solutions there have been, and why this matters to philosophers and to him.

As he works at dissolving the problem of consciousness, he leads us back to why this is important for philosophers—because epistemology has created it as a problem. As long as philosophers feel motivated by epistemology, they will feel that there is a problem with consciousness. So in the second part, the largest, Rorty moves to a confrontation with epistemology—where did it come from, why is it important, what have we done, what should we do? Rorty uses this chapter to range over issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language, going over all kinds of attempts to milk some sense out of the idea of a “theory of knowledge.”

And finally Rorty works us all the way back to the very idea of philosophy. What is philosophy if it has expunged epistemology? Here Rorty proffers suggestions about how philosophy has viewed itself and how it might now instead view itself. Rorty begins with the idea of the “mind” and by the end of the book shows how the notion of the “mind” has gained its philosophical strength from a number of other interlocking notions that were also in place, notions about representation, language, and systematic methodology. If you only knock one or two out, the others will still come and bring you down.

This dialectical structure is important for PMN because Rorty is working with an antagonistic crowd. Rorty is trying to convince us that we should question some of our most deeply held beliefs by taking us on a tour of how others have questioned a few of these beliefs. By dialectically going back and forth between his intended goals and his current topics, Rorty is able to meet our current objections and pull us further and further into the story, from debates about materialism, to debates about knowing generally, to debates about the enterprise of philosophy itself—showing us doubts about a particular thesis, to doubts about the general confirmation of such theses, to doubts about the very activity of forwarding such theses.

In what remains, I would like to go into more specifics about each of the chapters, what Rorty’s up to and for what purpose, then move to Richard Bernstein’s very sympathetic review of PMN where I hope to reply to some of his criticisms, and then finally offer a map of Rorty’s corpus, how we might understand his evolution as a philosopher and PMN’s place in it.