[MD] DMB and Rorty

[Steven Peterson]

DMB,

Here's more from that essay on Rorty's view of pragmatism versus
positivism in the analytic tradition and philosophy of language:

"Among contemporary philosophers, pragmatism is usually regarded as an
outdated philosophical movement – one which flourished in the early
years of this century in a rather provincial atmosphere, and which has
now been either refuted or aufgehoben. The great pragmatists – James
and Dewey – are occasionally praised for their criticisms of Platonism
(e.g., Dewey on traditional conceptions of education, James on
metaphysical pseudo-problems). But their anti-Platonism is thought by
analytic philosophers to have been insufficiently rigorous and by
non-analytic philosophers to have been insufficiently radical. For the
tradition which originates in logical positivism the pragmatists’
attacks on “transcendental,” quasi-Platonist philosophy need to be
sharpened by more careful and detailed analysis of such notions as
“meaning” and truth. For the anti-Philosophical tradition in
contemporary French and German thought which takes its point of
departure from Nietzsche’s criticism of both strands in
nineteenth-century Philosophical thought – positivistic as well as
transcendental – the American pragmatists are thinkers who never
really broke out of positivism, and thus never really broke with
Philosophy.

I do not think that either of these dismissive attitudes is justified.
on the account of recent analytic philosophy which I offered in
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the history of that movement has
been marked by a gradual “pragmaticisation” of the original tenets of
logical positivism. On the account of recent “Continental” philosophy
which I hope to offer in a book on Heidegger which I am writing, James
and Nietzsche make parallel criticisms of nineteenth-century thought.
Further, James’s version is preferable, for it avoids the
“metaphysical” elements in Nietzsche which Heidegger criticises, and,
for that matter, the “metaphysical” elements in Heidegger which
Derrida criticises. On my view, James and Dewey were not only waiting
at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy
travelled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example,
Foucault and Deleuze are currently travelling.

I think that analytic philosophy culminates in Quine, the later
Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson – which is to say that it
transcends and cancels itself. These thinkers successfully, and
rightly, blur the positivist distinctions between the semantic and the
pragmatic, the analytic and the synthetic, the linguistic and the
empirical, theory and observation. Davidson’s attack on the
scheme/content distinction, in particular, summarises and synthesises
Wittgenstein’s mockery of his own Tractatus, Quine’s criticisms of
Carnap, and Sellars’s attack on the empiricist “Myth of the Given.”
Davidson’s holism and coherentism shows how language looks once we get
rid of the central presupposition of Philosophy: that true sentences
divide into an upper and a lower division – the sentences which
correspond to something and those which are “true” only by courtesy or
convention.

This Davidsonian way of looking at language lets us avoid
hypostatising Language in the way in which the Cartesian
epistemological tradition, and particularly the idealist tradition
which built upon Kant, hypostatised Thought. For it lets us see
language not as a tertium quid between Subject and Object, nor as a
medium in which we try to form pictures of reality, but as part of the
behaviour of human beings. On this view, the activity of uttering
sentences is one of the things people do in order to cope with their
environment. The Deweyan notion of language as tool rather than
picture is right as far as it goes. But we must be careful not to
phrase this analogy so as to suggest that one can separate the tool,
Language, from its users and inquire as to its “adequacy” to achieve
our purposes. The latter suggestion presupposes that there is some way
of breaking out of language in order to compare it with something
else. But there is no way to think about either the world or our
purposes except by using our language. One can use language to
criticise and enlarge itself, as one can exercise one’s body to
develop and strengthen and enlarge it, but one cannot see
language-as-a-whole in relation to something else to which it applies,
or for which it is a means to an end. The arts and the sciences, and
philosophy as their self-reflection and integration, constitute such a
process. of enlargement and strengthening. But Philosophy, the attempt
to say “how language relates to the world” by saying what makes
certain sentences true, or certain actions or attitudes good or
rational, is, on this view, impossible.

It is the impossible attempt to step outside our skins – the
traditions, linguistic and other, within which we do our thinking and
self-criticism – and compare ourselves with something absolute. This
Platonic urge to escape from the finitude of one’s time and place, the
“merely conventional” and contingent aspects of one’s life, is
responsible for the original Platonic distinction between two kinds of
true sentence. By attacking this latter distinction, the holistic
“pragmaticising” strain in analytic philosophy has helped us see how
the metaphysical urge – common to fuzzy Whiteheadians and razor-sharp
“scientific realists” – works. It has helped us be sceptical about the
idea that some particular science (say physics) or some particular
literary genre (say Romantic poetry, or transcendental philosophy)
gives us that species of true sentence which is not just a true
sentence, but rather a piece of Truth itself. Such sentences may be
very useful indeed, but there is not going to be a Philosophical
explanation of this utility. That explanation, like the original
justification of the assertion of the sentence, will be a parochial
matter – a comparison of the sentence with alternative sentences
formulated in the same or in other vocabularies. But such comparisons
are the business of, for example, the physicist or the poet, or
perhaps of the philosopher – not of the Philosopher, the outside
expert on the utility, or function, or metaphysical status of Language
or of Thought.

The Wittgenstein-Sellars-Quine-Davidson attack on distinctions between
classes of sentences is the special contribution of analytic
philosophy to the anti-Platonist insistence on the ubiquity of
language. This insistence characterises both pragmatism and recent
“Continental” philosophising. Here are some examples:

Man makes the word, and the word means nothing which the man has not
made it mean, and that only to some other man. But since man can think
only by means of words or other external symbols, these might turn
around and say: You mean nothing which we have not taught you, and
then only so far as you address some word as the interpretant of your
thought... ... . the word or sign which man uses is the man himself
Thus my language is the sum-total of myself; for the man is the
thought. (Peirce)

Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the
de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or
another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to
sign. (Derrida)

... psychological nominalism, according to which all awareness of
sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short all awareness of abstract
entities – indeed, all awareness even of particulars – is a linguistic
affair. (Sellars)

It is only in language that one can mean something by something. (Wittgenstein)

Human experience is essentially linguistic. (Gadamer)

... man is in the process of perishing as the being of language
continues to shine ever brighter upon our horizon. (Foucault)

Speaking about language turns language almost inevitably into an
object ... and then its reality vanishes. (Heidegger)

This chorus should not, however, lead us to think that something new
and exciting has recently been discovered about Language – e.g., that
it is more prevalent than had previously been thought. The authors
cited are making only negative points. They are saying that attempts
to get back behind language to something which “grounds” it, or which
it “expresses,” or to which it might hope to be “adequate,” have not,
worked. The ubiquity of language is a matter of language moving into
the vacancies left by the failure of all the various candidates for
the position of “natural starting-points” of thought, starting-points
which are prior to and independent of the way some culture speaks or
spoke. (Candidates for such starting-points include clear and distinct
ideas, sense-data, categories of the pure understanding, structures of
prelinguistic consciousness, and the like.) Peirce and Sellars and
Wittgenstein are saying that the regress – of interpretation cannot be
cut off by the sort of “intuition” which Cartesian epistemology took
for granted. Gadamer and Derrida are saying that our culture has been
dominated by the notion of a “transcendental signified” which, by
cutting off this regress, would bring us out from contingency and
convention and into the Truth. Foucault is saying that we are
gradually losing our grip on the “metaphysical comfort” which that
Philosophical tradition provided – its picture of Man as having a
“double” (the soul, the Noumenal Self) who uses Reality’s own language
rather than merely the vocabulary of a time and a place. Finally,
Heidegger is cautioning that if we try to make Language into a new
topic of Philosophical inquiry we shall simply recreate the hopeless
old Philosophical puzzles which we used to raise about Being or
Thought.

This last point amounts to saying that what Gustav Bergmann called
“the linguistic turn” should not be seen as the logical positivists
saw it – as enabling us to ask Kantian questions without having to
trespass on the psychologists’ turf by talking, with Kant, about
“experience” or “consciousness.” That was, indeed, the initial motive
for the “turn,” but (thanks to the holism and pragmatism of the
authors I have cited) analytic philosophy of language was able to
transcend this Kantian motive and adopt a naturalistic, behaviouristic
attitude toward language. This attitude has led it to the same outcome
as the “Continental” reaction against the traditional Kantian
problematic, the reaction found in Nietzsche and Heidegger. This
convergence shows that the traditional association of analytic
philosophy with tough-minded positivism and of “Continental”
philosophy with tender-minded Platonism is completely misleading. The
pragmaticisation of analytic philosophy gratified the logical
positivists’ hopes, but not in the fashion which they had envisaged.
it did not find a way for Philosophy to become “scientific,” but
rather found a way of setting Philosophy to one side. This
post-positivistic kind of analytic philosophy thus comes to resemble
the Nietzsche-Heidegger-Derrida tradition in beginning with criticism
of Platonism and ending in criticism of Philosophy as such. Both
traditions are now in a period of doubt about their own status. Both
are living between a repudiated past and a dimly seen
post-Philosophical future."