[MD] DMB and Rorty

[david buchanan]

Steve quoted Rorty:
One difficulty the pragmatist has in making his position clear, therefore, is that he must struggle with the positivist for the position of radical anti-Platonist. He wants to attack Plato with different weapons from those of the positivist, but at first glance he looks like just another variety of positivist. He shares with the positivist the Baconian and Hobbesian notion that knowledge is power, a tool for coping with reality. But he carries this Baconian point through to its extreme, as the positivist does not. He drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether, and says that modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope. His argument for the view is that several hundred years of effort have failed to make interesting sense of the notion of “correspondence” (either of thoughts to things or of words to things). The pragmatist takes the moral of this discouraging history to be that “true sentences work because they correspond to the way things are” is no more illuminating than “it is right because it fulfils the Moral Law.” Both remarks, in the pragmatist’s eyes, are empty metaphysical compliments – harmless as rhetorical pats on the back to the successful inquirer or agent, but troublesome if taken seriously and “clarified” philosophically."




Steve said to dmb:


I already anticipate your response. "Where in there was a denial of SOM???"  Right?



dmb says:

Thanks. I can see that you're making a sincere effort. But I want to tackle this thing from a slightly different angle because there is an important subtlety in this criticism that is not registering. I'm not exactly saying that Rorty is a SOMer or a positivist. I've mentioned this several times. This Rorty quote allows me to get at the point I'm trying to make. I've only reproduced the last paragraph but he's summing things up pretty neatly there. If you think some crucial piece is missing just put it back and tell me why it matters.


It's quite clear that Rorty is rejecting the correspondence theory of truth. He doesn't think sentences work because they correspond to the way things really are. He doesn't think science works because it corresponds to the way things really are either. His argument for this view is based on several hundred years of failure. You might be surprised that I agree with Rorty up to this point. But from here he makes a leap that's invalid. The correspondence theory is just one particular answer to the question of truth and knowledge but because that particular answer has failed, he concludes that we should abandon the questions too. Because the various attempts to get the subject to correspond with objective reality, he refuses to do epistemology at all. He refuses to have a truth theory at all. And this is the reasoning, apparently, which leads you and Matt to dismiss radical empiricism and the pragmatic theory of truth, despite the fact that both of them also reject the correspondence theory of truth.

That's my actual point. I'm saying that Rorty's criticisms of truth theories and epistemologies are directed against SOMers and can not be applied to Pragmatists like Pirsig, James and Dewey. The crucial mistake, in it's simplest form, is to reject the whole enterprise of asking questions because a particular conception of the answer did not pan out. The big difference is that James and Pirsig don't just reject the answer or the metaphysical assumptions underlying that answer, they also move forward without abandoning the questions. They get rid of the metaphysical assumptions of SOM and replace them with something better. Rorty, like the positivists he rejects, thinks he can do philosophy with a small "p" in the absence of metaphysical assumptions. That's how you get lines like, "it does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope", which sound so much like linguistic idealism. Add the slogans like "it's text all the way down" and "there is nothing outside the text" to the general idea that there is no non-linguistic thing that makes our sentences true and you get this picture where words don't refer to anything and everything is up for grabs. In that picture, the only thing like truth will be degrees of verbal consensus. You know, intersubjective agreement.
Teed Rockwell says, "But Rorty is apparently saying that we should reject traditional realism because it is a bad theory, even though the majority of people currently believe it. And once he makes that move, Putnam claims that he contradicts himself. "What can 'bad' possibly mean here but 'based on a wrong metaphysical picture'? I think that Putnam is right that there are conceptual incoherencies in Rorty's arguments, and that some of them do involve the old logical positivist error of formulating a metaphysics/epistemology that denies that it is a metaphysics/epistemology". Like the positivists, Rockwell says, Rorty suffers from an anti-metaphysical disease. 

"One is not likely to see this if one uses Rorty as one's main source for pragmatist insights, for he refers to books like James' "Essays in Radical Empiricism" and Dewey's "Experience and Nature" as 'pretty useless, to my mind'. (Rorty 1994, p.320n). These books contain some of the best expressions of pragmatist metaphysics and epistemology, and ignoring them is to lose an essential part of the pragmatist worldview. When we take a close look at Rorty's critiques of the epistemological enterprise, we can see that he simply ignores pragmatist epistemology, and thus closes off what is perhaps the most fruitful new perspective on the subject. This is why he assumes that once he has disposed of the pre-pragmatist answers to the metaphysical questions, he has disposed of the questions themselves. This is also why he is unable to see that the himself is still hanging on to highly questionable epistemological assumptions, which he himself cannot question because he refuses to explicitly think about epistemology."

Rorty thinks, as Rockwell puts it, "that once we have given up the possibility of finding something that all true sentences have in common, we have changed the subject, and are no longer doing epistemology. ... This sentence sounds to me like, 'You are not really an astronomer if you are not trying to find out what turns the crystal spheres'''.

By the same reasoning, a sentence about empiricism would sound like, "You are not really an empiricists if you are not trying to find out how our subjective beliefs correspond with the way things really are." Again, the correspondence theory is a particular answer to the question of truth and knowledge. Radical empiricism is an entirely different answer, one that rejects the correspondence theory and replaces the objective world with a world of "pure experience". 

This bring us back to the DQ/sq distinction. To claim that there is a discrepancy or a distinction between the preconceptual reality and the concepts that are derived from it does not entail a claim about the way things really are independently of us. It is only a claim that humans have experiences and engage in activities other than language. It only means that the world of experience involves the non-conceptual as well as the conceptual and that the distinction between them is felt and known within the ongoing process of experience. 

It's worth pointing out that James and Dewey were dealing with Platonists and positivists too. James's essays on radical empiricism are aimed directly at those targets and in fact the central thesis in Hildebrand's book is that Rorty was unsuccessfully grappling with problems that had already been dissolved by James and Dewey. His main point is that the debate between realists like Putnam and anti-realists like Rorty was already shown to be a fake problem by the original pragmatists. 

Rockwell sees it that way too. "I think the only reason Putnam still clings to something like a 'realist' world is that he cannot accept Rorty's claim that consensus among language users is the only thing that determines the nature of their world. Neither Rorty nor Putnam have considered the possibility that the world could  be constituted by our activities, and still be distinct from what our language says about it, because language is not the only human activity." 

Because Rorty says, "edifying philosophers have to decry the very notion of having a view, while avoiding having a view about having views" and other things like that, I think Rorty is too often offering convoluted nonsense, incoherence and contradiction. There is such a thing as irony, but then there are positions that are just impossible to maintain. 







 		 	   		  
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