[MD] Are There Bad Questions?: Rorty

[Matt Kundert]

This is a post going up on my website (pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com) 
tomorrow morning.  It is split into two halves, the first about 
Rorty, the second wondering about Pirsig.  If you are curious 
about Rorty, you might like the first part.  If you are curious 
about how Pirsig can be read in tandem with Rorty, you might 
take a look at the second, which is completely detachable 
from the first (and sent separately).



Are There Bad Questions?

 

Richard Rorty spent the last ten years of his life redacting
some 
of his more controversial rhetorical strategies, which included 
endlessly apologizing
for hyperbole.  One of his favorite
strategies 
was to say that there were bad questions: to pursue a certain line 
of thought was to put yourself on the path to a conversational 
cul-de-sac,
ending in aporia, a seeming inability
to get anybody to 
agree to an answer. 
This inability to find criteria that you could get people to agree on to
explain what a good answer would look like 
was the tell-tale sign of a bad
question.  The “bad question” approach 
to
philosophical disagreement is hiding in his earliest writing, but began 
to
truly flower when Rorty first formulated the groundplan for 
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in
1970 with “Cartesian 
Epistemology and Changes in Ontology,” became solidified
in that 
book, and most famously codified in the introduction to 
Consequences of Pragmatism.  In that intro, the bad-question 
approach
becomes entwined with another strategy Rorty came to 
embrace: the I-don’t-have-a-theory
approach.  “[The pragmatist 
theory of
truth] says that truth is not the sort of thing one should 
expect to have a
philosophically interesting theory about” (CP xiii).  

 

The ironic self-contradiction has always been plain to
people, 
though most who have taken to pointing it out leave out the irony 
and
what it means: the pragmatist theory of truth is one about why 
we won’t have an
interesting theory about truth.  That’s important, 
though I’m not sure Rorty
always understood quite how important. 

For a page later he says, famously:

 

“Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate
the Truth 
or the Good, or to define the word “true” or “good,” supports 
their
suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this 
area.  It might, of course, have turned out otherwise.  People have, 
oddly enough, found  something interesting to say about the
essence 
of Force and the definition of “number.”  They might have found 
something interesting
to say about the essence of Truth.  But
in fact 
they haven’t.  The history of
attempts to do so, and of criticisms of 
such attempts, is roughly coextensive
with the history of that literary 
genre we call “philosophy”—a genre founded by
Plato.  So 
pragmatists see the Platonic
tradition as having outlived its usefulness. 

This does not mean they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to 
Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we 
should ask
those questions anymore.  When they
suggest that we 
not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they
do 
not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man 
which
says that “there is no such thing” as Truth or Goodness.  Nor 
do they have a “relativistic” or “subjectivist”
theory of Truth or 
Goodness.  They would
simply like to change the subject.”  (CP xiv)

 

This “I have no theory” approach gets broadened into “and
neither 
arguments nor theses,” as when he said in the late-70s, 
“Non-Kantian
philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida are 
emblematic figures who not only do
not solve problems, they do not 
have
arguments or theses” (CP 93).  This
eventually turns into his 
claim that Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity contains no 
arguments (evidence to the contrary).  The interrelationship between 
what Rorty
means by “theory,” “argument,” and “thesis” at any given 
moment can be parsed,
and I think it would show that it depends on 
which direction he’s facing—whether
towards Platonists, who think 
we must
have a theory, or towards pragmatists, who think they are 
optional.  This can be a complicated needle to thread
(principally 
because it involves the fact
that people have, e.g., selves though 
having a theory or thesis about that fact
is optional), but to make 
the first pass in knitting the row, I would point out
that Rorty 
doesn’t mention who finds
the essence of Force or definition of 
“number” interesting.  Because I certainly don’t.  There are two 
different audiences for “number”
and then “truth.”  In the former 
case,
the audience is likely mathematicians. 
In the latter case, 
Rorty’s audience is professional philosophers.  And it is those who 
disagree with how
interesting results about truth have been. 
So 
what does Rorty mean be “interesting”?

 

Rorty usually means by “interesting” in these contexts “discernable 
effect on people’s lives.”  In the case
of numbers, though 
non-mathematicians could care less, the fact that
mathematics 
professors do and keep producing results that pan out into the 
warp of society means that the woof of what they do has interest.  
This is not the case with “truth” and “good”
as of yet, for Rorty’s 
claim is that inquiry into Truth has not helped people produce
more 
true statements.  And by and large (emphasis on the “large”)
this 
is true.  The trouble is that Rorty
has to admit that for philosophers, 
inquiry into Truth has helped them
produce more true 
statements—for example, Davidson’s claim that “most of our
beliefs 
are true.”  This, as Rorty
admits, is interesting and could not have 
been done without the context of
logical positivism and their 
unacknowledged Platonic goals.

 

Being forced to face this equivocation in his rhetorical
stances, Rorty 
began to finally admit that he does have theses, or theories, or 
pictures, of this or that philosophical-looking kind of object (“the 
self” or “reality”
or “experience” or “language”).  This
means a 
disentangling of the bad-question approach and no-theory approach.  
“I have no theory” is really code for “you
are going to be really 
disappointed when I tell you what it is…,” and this
because of the 
Platonic expectations typically carried by people asking for
one.  
But this means that “bad question”
isn’t inherent, but rather a 
conversational stability produced by the
instability of criteria for 
what counts as a good answer.  Rorty can
answer the question of 
what truth is, but because of the wildly ranging
differences of 
opinion over what it is good for, it will seem a bad answer to 
somebody.  The light in which Rorty’s answer, or anybody’s,
can 
appear good is a stipulative light—“if for the moment we agree 
on X, Y, and
Z, then this theory will satisfy it.”  Rorty’s
stipulation 
on truth has been the stipulation that truth, properly speaking 
(which is to say “for the occasion of my theory”), is a semantic 
and radically
non-epistemic concept.  That is not the
only way we 
use the word “true,” but
when push comes to shove, we should 
stop trying to incorporate those uses, e.g.
the endorsing use, into 
our theory of truth because doing so is what leads to
bad questions 
that we can’t seem to answer, or would have any practical 
consequences even if we could (like how we know when “snow is 
white”
corresponds to the fact that snow is white).  When Rorty 
would say, “That’s a bad question
we shouldn’t ask,” he was 
suggesting there might be other, more profitable
questions to 
discuss.  And when Rorty
gave an answer to the bad question, e.g. 
a disquotational theory of truth, it
was intended shut down avenues 
of thought that have proven interminable
cul-de-sacs (hence the 
epithet for disquotationalists of “deflationists” and,
more generally 
on Platonic questions, “quietists”).

 

Rorty had begun sorting out these equivocations and changes
in 
stances in his last ten years, but in Rorty’s reply to Jaroslav 
Peregrin in
his installment to the Living Library of Philosophers, 
Rorty says most clearly
what I’ve articulated above (and what 
produced the impetus to further
articulate this point on the scope 
of his writing):

 

“I should also have been careful not to invoke Wittgenstein’s 
contrast between “advancing theses” and “practicing therapy.”  
Doing the former now seems to me a perfectly
legitimate, and 
often useful, therapeutic technique.  Peregrin cites Wittgenstein’s 
claim that he
was “in a sense making propaganda for one style of 
thinking as opposed to
another.”  He says that this would be a 
good description of my preferred mode of philosophical activity.  
I am happy to accept the suggestion, but less
happy about this 
suggestion that “neither Wittgenstein nor Rorty thinks that it
is 
possible to give a theory answering ‘philosophical questions’.”

 

“Consider Davidson’s thesis that most of our beliefs must be
true, 
or Brandom’s inferentialist theory about the origin of singular
terms.  
Such theses and theories provide
answers to questions like, “Well, 
what will we say about the relation between
language and 
nonlanguage, once we abandon the familiar ‘realist’ account?”  By 
providing the pragmatist with such
answers, they facilitate his 
propagandizing efforts.  Not everybody feels it necessary to pose 
such
questions seriously, but when somebody does it is nice to be 
able to gratify
her.  Though sometimes it works best to
say, “that’s 
a bad question, one that we pragmatists don’t ask,” with some 
interlocutors it is more effective to reply, “here’s an answer to that 
question, since you insist on asking it.” (The
Philosophy of Richard Rorty 247-8)

 

If I had to speculate on what most produced this change in
Rorty, 
I would have to say it was the work of his student, Robert Brandom.  
Rorty grew up, philosophically speaking, on
Davidson, who was at 
Princeton for a time in the late 60s.  Rorty spent much of the 60s 
retooling as an
analytic philosopher, which meant falling in love with 
Sellars and becoming
acquainted with Davidson’s cast of mind. 

Rorty was left to his own devices after Davidson left, and the 
formative
70s—when Rorty was drawing out the consequences of 
Sellars, Quine, and Davidson—were
also the years Brandom was 
at Princeton, ’72-’77.

 

Rorty’s fall from analytic-grace was initially a souring
with “system,” 
with the hopes of pay-off attending all the work that must be
done 
to create a system.  Rorty was first
and foremost a voracious reader, 
and he loved reading systems in the hopes
there has a hidden source 
of power in them (he wrote his master’s thesis and
dissertation on 
Whitehead).  In the end,
I think Rorty liked reading too 
much—sitting
at a desk, pouring energy into getting the system just 
right, didn’t seem
appealing because it took him out of the library 
stacks too long (or away from
the forests where he loved bird-watching). 

And combine this with his reading of so many systems, whether 
Kant’s or
Hegel’s or Carnap’s or Whitehead’s (or Dewey’s, for 
that matter), all claiming
to have the hiddern power, and all of them 
contradicting each other, and you
have a recipe for someone with a 
pretty good self-justification for not writing
a system himself.  
Rorty’s disagreement
with Davidson throughout his career pretty 
much amounts to the fact that
Davidson always wanted to write a 
system, but never got around to it—so Rorty would always wonder 
about the
aspiration, since the work he was doing in essays was so 
good itself.  Brandom, however, is a brilliant
systematizer, and has 
done in Making It
Explicit what Davidson was never able to do 
and Rorty never thought worth
doing.  From the time of that book’s 
publication in 1994, you can see a slow slide in Rorty’s responses 
to Brandom,
beginning with a queasy reaction to his rehabilitiation 
of “representation” to
a final “I still don’t think regular people need 
a system, but if you want one,
get a load of this…totally worth it.” 		 	   		  
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