Hi Dave,
Dave said:
Right, scientific materialism is the most common form of Platonism
in our time. It would be to a bit crude and ham-handed to accuse
Rorty of taking up that stance. My point in bringing up behaviorism,
physicalism and the brain-mind identity theory was much, much
broader than that. That point was made in the context of a discussion
of basic temperaments like classic and romantic and how the various
schools of philosophy answer the needs of those temperaments. It's
only on that very broad level of analysis that it makes any sense to
connect Rorty with materialism.
Matt:
Uh-hunh, and when I called this an "atmospheric" diagnosis that I
couldn't really deal with aside from blowing my own smoke, you got
a little agitated. My trouble has been that I can't make out what
other gun you have aside from this one.
I should also add that a mounting number of commentators beginning
in the 80s, seeing Rorty's apotheosis of Dewey above all, have
pointed out that it's funny, because temperamentally, Rorty's more
like James than Dewey. You disagree, clearly, but I tend to agree
with them.
Dave said:
Rockwell wants to say that Rorty makes an unwarranted leap from
one to the other and that it's perfectly plausible to say that
astronomers can do astronomy without looking for crystalline spheres
and, by the same token, philosophers can have truth theories without
search for thee Truth. And I think you mean to say that Rorty is really
only prohibiting the search for Truth and heavenly spheres. That's
where we're going to disagree. Not because Rorty explicitly slams the
door on anything like a truth theory but he certainly moves as if the
door where closed and those are the consequences of his views.
Matt:
I'm afraid I don't understand what you meant at "that's where we're
going to disagree." Syntactically, I wasn't clear at that point what
you were affirming and I was denying (or vice versa). I guess I'm
not sure what you mean by a "search for Truth" that you think is
open and Rorty doesn't.
Matt said:
However, when Seigfried says that Thayer "points out that for
pragmatists, truth and falsity are not properties of ideas, nor even
the relation of ideas to facts, but instead are characteristics of the
performance of ideas in situations," this states something that Rorty
agrees with because of the social-practice understanding of language
paved by Sellars and Davidson and codified by Brandom. All of the
emphasis in Brandom is on the performance of persons in situations.
Dave said:
I think you might be glossing over a very important distinction here. I
fairly certain that "the social-practice understanding of language" is
not what the Jamesian means by "the performance of ideas in
situations". He is talking about concrete, lived experience and this is
opposed to verbal abstractions.
Matt:
Well, I think James was paving the way for an articulated
social-practice understanding of what language is. I can't see how
what Brandom describes as the pragmatic and semantic core of
language-use is _not_ being concrete and part of lived experience.
Much like you've been pointing out that "experience" does not mean
the same thing in Sellars's critique of empiricism as in James's
philosophy, "verbal abstraction" would not mean the same thing in
Brandom's philosophy of language as it means in James's philosophy.
Brandom just has a different way of setting things up, one that puts
the concrete back in language (if I do say so).
Dave said:
Rorty would look at James's theory of truth and say that it's not really
of theory of truth because it provides no promise of thee Truth.
Matt:
No, he would say it's not a theory of _truth_ because it is a theory of
_knowledge_, i.e. of justification, the dynamic of a live being
ascribing truth to sentences, a live being deciding to believe or not.
This is what Rorty thinks the analytic conversation has helped
sharpen in a good way--the understanding that we cannot collapse
truth into justification, as Dewey and James sometimes seem to
suggest.
I guess what I don't understand is what you think a "theory of truth"
is or an "epistemology" is, an understanding against which I could
judge whether Rorty has one or not (in order to get the translation
right, and not just stop at what he says and miss what he means).
Dave said:
There are scholars who make a case that Dewey and James do not
need to be brought up to speed or brought up to the state of the
debate. Hildebrand's bood and Larry Hickman's book (Pragmatism as
Post-Postmodernism) both make a case that Rorty and Putman were
struggle with issues that James and Dewey had already resolved. As
I see it, the things I like about Rorty are just the things he took from
Dewey and James and I think he didn't take enough of their ideas on
board, not least of all because of his anti-Platonism. But if you have
something in particular in mind, I'd be glad to hear about it. What
insights on truth theories did they miss? Tarski sentences? I'm pretty
sure James would scoff at that, for temperamental reasons if
nothing else.
Matt:
Okay, fair enough. I didn't know what I was missing out of Frege
until after I understood, either. It's hard for me not to conclude,
however, that you really don't have a good in-depth understanding of
Rorty's philosophy, or the analytic work on language that stands
behind him. My impression during this discussion is that every time
I trot out basic Rortyan terms, or basic analytic tools like a semantic
definition of truth, you say you don't understand. My impression is
that, largely for temperamental reasons, you don't think--just as you
did in 2002--that it is worth you time and energy to work your way
into that vocabulary because you don't think the prospects are high
that there will be any profit for you to do so.
I don't want to argue against this impression. I'm all for a hundred
blooming flowers. If Rorty's tools don't seem worth learning about,
that's fine, but I don't see how you can have such confidence in
_denying_ the philosophical positions they were built to hold up.
Because, as Pirsig pointed out in ZMM, form and content are at the
end of the day intertwined, and to really understand what
philosophical position is hiding underneath a jargon and pattern of
argument, you'd have to work through the thinker. I don't doubt
that you get the same impression about me when I see some
standard bits of Jamesian jargon from radical empiricism, that I
don't know how they work systematically in his philosophy. This
I've never denied, nor that I don't have the time or passion to work
my way into James's radical empiricism to have that real, concrete
understanding of how everything fits together on a detailed level.
I'm not a philosopher. However, I also don't _deny_ any of James's
philosophy. You might think I screw James or Pirsig up because I
don't understand them at an intimate level, but at that level, who
does? Are you disallowing me James and Pirsig as heroes? Am I
really screwing them up that badly? Maybe so. But I recommend
that your confidence in thinking Rorty not worth studying based on
your reading of, say, Hildebrand, Hickman, and Seigfried stay at
the level of he's not worth studying, and not at the level of "I reject
Rorty's philosophical positions" without first reading more Rorty
directly. Because being surprised about Rorty's definition of
"poetry" is a good indicator that you haven't read enough.
>From the other post--
Dave said:
I do not think Rortyism has any positive program. ... This doesn't
mean that Rorty has absolutely no answers or suggestions about
what to do next. I'm drawing this conclusion based on his most
famous assertions, ones that you've articulated over the years and
that I also find in books and articles. Specifically, I mean the slogan,
his view that truth is not something we should have theories about,
that we ought not be doing epistemology. And the answers he does
provide to take their place - conversation, ethnocentrism,
intersubjective agreement - are answers that I take to be a form of
relativism. That's really my case in a nutshell. As you can see, this
case is more or less predicated on the idea that Rortyism is
overwhelmingly negative and the positive side, such as it is, amounts
to relativism.
Matt:
Okay, well, you've reach your conclusion about how to understand
Rorty, so I'm not sure what you've wanted me to do in this
conversation. I think you're wrong to construe his positive
suggestions that way, but I'm not sure what good more of me
trying to intimate why is going to do.
Steve replied to your assertion that Rorty doesn't have a positive
program that "Rorty didn't just get us to stop asking bad questions
but also offered better alternatives." There are four things that I
think interpreters of Rorty should acknowledge about Rorty's
philosophy: 1) most of his written corpus is negative, anti-Platonism,
2) part of his written corpus is positive, philosophical thesis
articulation (e.g., "Inquiry as Recontextualization" and "Non-Reductive
Physicalism"), 3) Rorty only came to understand himself in quite this
way toward the end (e.g., in "Cultural Politics and the Question of
the Existence of God" in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, his last
collection of essays), and 4) most of these suggestions were
placeholders--they were suggestive of something that could be
worked out in more detail, but Rorty didn't himself have that
temperament. I can't see how any of these four things are
inherently bad, though I can understand how people looking for
something else might look someplace else. The other thing to
understand is that while in the first part of his career he was
suspicious of systems (epitomized in his distinction between
systematic and edifying philosophy in Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature), he became increasingly less so after the publication of
Robert Brandom's massive Making It Explicit. He finally saw that it
was worth it to work out systematically the things he and Davidson
never did. It didn't convince him to try his hand at one, nor did
Davidson ever move past brilliantly compact essays, but I'm not
sure we should think less of them for all that. I think there is still
something interesting to be dug out of Rorty's evoluting attitude
toward systems, but I haven't seen anyone move past the surface
of Rorty's bombastic sloganeering about it. (Not that I'm
super-well-read in Rorty scholarship, but my impression is that the
field is still largely in "criticism" mode, as in he is still mainly
treated as a punching bag, rather than a "scholastic" mode which
tries to treat him comprehensively and as coherent first, and
critically evaluating only secondarily. There is some very notable
work in this second mode, though, namely by Jerome Schneewind,
Bjorn Ramberg, and Brandom.)
So, in a nutshell, despite the huge amount of philosophers who agree
with you (a fact which was never in dispute, a fact in which I knew
about and told you about long before you found out about it yourself),
I think you and they are misreading Rorty. However, I do not have
the technical skills to engage professional philosophers on their
homeground at the present (nor do I think I will ever have the leisure
to make the attempt), so I can merely offer my impressionistic, ad
hoc rebuttals to specific pieces put in front of my face.
Dave said:
So I don't mean to jump the gun but the idea that Rorty has no real
answer is the main point.
Is this not true? Is it not true that he's given up on truth theories
and
epistemology altogether? Isn't that why his answers take the shape
they do. Is this not the center of his vision?
Matt:
As I've been attempting to intimate, no, that is not true. It is based
on a deformation of the meaning Rorty was after in his slogans (and,
partly, on real shifts in his thinking). As I suggested, to figure out
whether Rorty has given up on "truth theories" depends on your
definition, likewise for epistemology. I've struggled to see the point
behind your oscillation between "Rorty gives up on truth theories"
and "why don't we give up his _definition_, like James and Pirsig do."
I've always assumed that thinking the latter would be a good ways
toward being more precise about the former according to whatever
nominated "home vocabulary." And I haven't seen anything you've
articulated about Pirsig or James that leads me to believe that Rorty
would reject any of the particular philosophical theses that they
articulate under the headings "truth theories" and "epistemology."
I, however, am also not sure how to continue a conversation about
this subject. It isn't clear to me that I can tell you anything about
Rorty that you don't already have an unmovable opinion about.
Matt
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