[MD] Royce and Wittgenstein- does Rorty concur?

[John Carl]

I've often wondered at the antipathy towards Royce by dmb, but then I also
have wondered at his rejection of Rorty as well.  Because in many ways, I
see the congruence that Matt Kundert has provided and explicated.  Came
across this:


Royce and Wittgenstein on the Context of Privacy
Robert Burch

The upshot of this "private language argument" of Wittgenstein is that
language is essentially a public, social phenomenon that requires for its
cogency a backdrop of shared verbal practice in a community of
interpretation and communication.  Wittgenstein's position was thought for
about two decades to be entirely new in the history of philosophy and was
often cited to sustain the image of Wittgenstein as a mysterious genius who
ex nihilio created vistas of the philosophical spirit almost beyond the ken
of ordinary mortals.  Perpetrators of the Wittgenstein legend might have
softened down their hagiography if they had been more closely acquainted
than they were with classical American Philosophy, for argumentation and
doctrines similar to Wittgenstein's can be found in several of the classical
American thinkers.  Dewey is a prominent example, as Quine has noted in his
own John Dewey Lectures.  Even those philosophers, however, who are
knowledgeable about classical American thought may still not realize how
early in the course of its development ideas similar to Wittgenstein's were
elaborated.  By at least 1885, as we shall see, Josiah Royce, in arguing for
his idealist thesis of the Universal Consciousness, had developed a position
about the context of privacy that is remarkably like Wittgenstein's.

... at bottom the interests of both philosophers center about the same
phenomena -- meaning, error, and truth-- and they have remarkably similar
doctrines about these matters.  Both philosophers consider these phenomena
incoherent in the context of privacy, and for similar reasons.  Both
philosophers insist, moreover, that meaning, error and truth depend for
their cogency on a community of understanding."


Sounds like a conversation to me.

John