© Roger M Tagg 2010-2011
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This is a series of essays, dating from the 1990s, from an American pragmatist philosopher who died in 2007. His pet aversion - appearing several times in the book - is the "correspondence theory of truth", i.e. the idea that what makes statements true is that they correspond to reality, which implies the existence of an external real world. His preference is for an inter-subjective view of truth, which corresponds to the FROLIO idea that "the real world is the consensus of observed relationships". Of course this implies a population which reaches such a consensus, and that its members are not acting inauthentically, e.g. in denying what they observe because they are maintaining some political, religious or self-serving line (like Nelson's "I see no signal"). But it does allow for whole populations to be wrong through ignorance or incomplete understanding, which might get corrected when better observations are possible, e.g. Ptolemy's spheres, Flat Earth, Galileo's moons of Jupiter, Einstein v Newton etc.
It's a long book, and it gets quite tough in places, but it's full of roguish fun, and there is a lot that I could agree with.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | 1 | The "authoritarian tradition" suggests "deference to authority". Such deference would presumably be to a religious book, a religious individual, a group or a regime. Secular cultures can be just as authoritarian as religious ones. |
| 2 | Philosophy will get on better without the notions of "the intrinsic nature of reality" and "correspondence to reality". True is an absolute term, but its conditions of application will always be relative. | |
| 3 | Davidson: nobody should even try to specify the nature of truth. It is only the relative about which there is anything to say. Tarski: we have no understanding of truth that is distinct from our understanding of translation. Truth is unserviceable as a goal of inquiry. | |
| 4a | The only criterion we have for applying the word "true" is justification, and justification is always relative to an audience. We have been making intellectual and moral progress, but FOR the purposes we wish to serve, and to cope with the situations we wish to face. | |
| 4b | Kant: as long as we try to project from the relative to the absolute, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. | |
| 5 | Philosophical progress comes from integrating what we inherit from the past with new scientific theories and sociopolitical institutions. Dewey: the subject matter of philosophy grows out of the stresses and strains in community life. | |
| 6 | A large part of the job of philosophy is to persuade people to throw away some of the ladders up which our culture has climbed in the past. | |
| 7 | There is nothing in the notion of objectivity save that of inter-subjective agreement. | |
| 8 | We should reject the suggestion that natural science should serve as a paradigm for the rest of culture. Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative. | |
| 9 | Analytic versus Continental philosophy strands: the former - concentrating on current frontline problems; the latter - making an informed choice between narratives offered through history. Just be glad you have both of them (p 10). | |
| 10 | Rubbish disposal projects of non-geniuses, tidying up after the great men (RT: like searching for gold or opal in the htailings?) | |
| 1 Davidson v Wright | 24 | Davidson: we should not say that truth is correspondence, coherence, warranted assertability, ideally justified assertability, what is accepted in the conversation of the right people, what science will end up maintaining, what explains the convergence on single theories in science, or the success of our ordinary beliefs. Rorty calls this minimalism or quietism (i.e. that there's nothing worth saying about truth). "Deflationism" = reliance on "warranted assertability". |
| 27 | Wright: it's our duty to seek the truth. "Warranted assertability" is different, so "deflationism re-inflates". He talks about "cognitive command", while Rorty calls it "metaphysical activism". | |
| 30 | Wright: talk about "representation of the facts" is not just admissible phrasing, a harmless gloss on talk of truth, but incorporates a philosophically correct perspective on the truth predicate (at least for discourses where realism is appropriate). | |
| 32 | Viewing prejudice and superstition as "sand in the wheels" as a foreign ingredient that causes malfunctions, implies a view of humans constructed by God as machines to get things right. | |
| 33 | Pragmatists think of cognitivity as a purely empirical, historico-sociological problem. | |
| 38 | What is the goal of inquiry? Pragmatists say there could be many, e.g. getting what we want, improving man's estate, convincing as many audiences as possible, solving as many problems as possible. | |
| 41 | "Pursuit of objective truth" could equally well be seen as "pursuit of inter-subjective, unforced agreement among larger and larger groups of interlocutors". But the former is OK as a rhetoric of contemporary common sense. | |
| 42 | Phew - that was a really tough chapter, and might put most readers off continuing. | |
| 2 Putnam | 44 | Putnam had written suggesting that Rorty wanted to alter everyday ways of using words like know, objective, fact and reason - but he says no, we can continue to use these terms in the commonplace sense. |
| 45 | Putnam says Rorty scorns the realism/antirealism and emotive/cognitive controversies. He admits this is fair, but disagrees on whether such things are inherent in the nature of human life. Conant says Rorty is "impatient to get onto something more fruitful" (p47, footnote 17). | |
| 47 | Putnam doesn't like Rorty's use of Darwinism as a vocabulary to formulate the pragmatist position. | |
| 49a | Putnam's 5 principles about use of "warranted". 1) "in ordinary circumstances, there is usually a fact of the matter as to whether the statements people make are warranted or not"; 2) this "is independent of whether the majority of one's cultural peers would say" so; 3) "our norms and standards of warranted assertibility are historical products; they evolve over time"; 4) they "always reflect our interests and values"; 5) "our norms and standards of anything - including warranted assertibility - are capable of reform. There are better and worse norms and standards". | |
| 49b | Rorty is happy with 3) to 5). On 1) and 2) he says he is unsure. | |
| 51 | Regarding principle 5, Rorty then says Putnam can't also cling to the idea of truth as "idealized rational acceptability". | |
| 54 | Does "better" mean in the view of wet liberals, Homeric heroes or "language users whom we can recognize as better versions of ourselves"? We certainly think that charity is a virtue, whereas Achilles didn't. Other recently evolved values include racism, avoiding brainwashing, positive value of literacy, liberal education, free press, free universities, and genial tolerance of Socratic gadflies and Feyerabendian tricksters. | |
| 57 | Rorty's strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties of being seen as too Relativist is: 1) move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics to cultural politics; 2) from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try. | |
| 60 | Putnam asks "does our familiar use of normative expressions show that there is some kind of correctness which is substantial (and the rightness and wrongness of what we say is not just for a time and a place)?". Rorty says no. | |
| 61 | Putnam and Rorty disagree on the meaning of "transcendent" when applied to reason. Rorty takes it to mean "getting beyond our present practices by a gesture in the direction of possibly different future practices", whereas Putnam, he says, believes that "philosophy, as culture-bound reflection and argument about eternal questions, is both in time and eternity". Rorty sums up by saying that their difference is how much can be saved from the realist tradition if we agree to the 5 principles. | |
| 62a | He suggests Putnam's position leaves room for something like the Apel-Habermas notion of a "universal validity claim". | |
| 62b | In my own view, there is not that much serious difference between Rorty and Putnam. Clearly they respect(ed) each other. | |
| 3 | 64 | "Although the empirical-philosophical distinction is itself pretty fuzzy, ... a belief is on the empirical end .. if we are clear what would falsify it." |
| Searle | 66a | Rorty views it as a mark of moral and intellectual progress that we are more prepared to judge things by the good they seem to be doing than by any philosophical or theological beliefs. |
| 66b | Eisenhower said that the US is firmly founded in religious belief and that it doesn't matter what religion it is. He might have added that any religion that is dubious about US democratic institutions (or, Rorty adds, academic freedom) must have some thing wrong with it. | |
| 67 | Rorty says that Searle disagrees on 66a, although they agree on a lot. Rorty quotes Searle as saying that "knowledge is typically of a mind-independent reality". | |
| 68-9 | Rorty agrees that some anti-realists have lapsed into relativism, yet are forcing the view (that claims of disinterest or objectivity cannot be trusted) on universities and others. Analogy: Christianity survived many groups abandoning the Aristotelian-Thomist view of the Eucharist (RT: presumably literal transubstantiation). | |
| 71 | The main thing is to keep people outside universities from redrawing the lines between social utility and inappropriate politicization. | |
| 72 | Rorty thinks it is pointless to ask whether reality is independent of our ways of talking about it. | |
| 73 | The notion of truth as "accurate representation" of reality: non-philosophically, we mean "look hard for documents and evidence, don't discard what doesn't support your case, don't quote out of context, tell the same story to everyone etc". | |
| 75 | Whoever is right, it doesn't make much difference anyhow. So why make a big issue? We should just make sure outsiders don't force one side's view. | |
| 78 | Chesterton implicitly admitted that the best reason for sticking with realism was that it satisfied a human need. But we may outgrow such needs, just as we outgrow Father Christmas, parental control, the need to feel sinful and guilty. But we might still need new distinctions. Berkeley: "speak with the vulgar and think with the learned". | |
| 80 | Searle ridiculed "the general air of vaguely literary frivolity that pervades the Nietzschean left". Analogy: the deconstructionist car mechanic who says that "a carburettor is just a text, so there is nothing to talk about except the textuality of the text". Rorty thinks that is a bit far-fetched. | |
| 82 | Rorty says that moving from objectivity to inter-subjectivity is a sign of maturation - we don't need the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. | |
| 83 | "Objectivity as Inter-subjectivity" is better because it will free philosophers from perpetual oscillation between skepticism and dogmatism, and take away a few more excuses for fanaticism and intolerance. | |
| 4 Charles Taylor | 84-5 | Rorty's issue with Taylor is the latter's concept of "hypergoods" (i.e. things beyond ordinary goods) and his view that in one form, poetry, the poet is pointing to something "there for all of us" - which effectively means the need for some form of correspondence theory of truth (one of Rorty's bêtes noirs). |
| 86 | Anti-representationalists don't doubt that most things in the universe are causally independent of us, but what they question is whether they are representationally independent of us. | |
| 91 | "Was the solar system waiting around for Kepler?" We can't answer, but reply with 2 questions: 1) can one find some way of getting between language and its object? and 2) if not, how can one claim that some descriptions correspond to reality better than others? | |
| 95 | Taylor thinks Heidegger on Zuhandsein and Merleau-Ponty on action on the body help us out of epistemology, but Rorty thinks they leave in the notions of representation and correspondence. | |
| 5 | 99 | Nagel, Searle etc talk about the "first person point of view", which produces knowledge of intrinsic, non-relational properties of mental events (independent of the language we use). Holists, like Wittgenstein, Ryle and Dennett replace intrinsic features with relational ones. |
| Dennett | 105 | Rorty, who supports Dennett, suggests that, when arguing for his view, he puts his claim that "the self is a centre of narrative gravity" in the context of the more general claim that "all objects resemble selves in being centres of descriptive gravity". |
| 107 | Quine's notion of "the web of belief", like Putnam's of "cluster concepts" and Wittgenstein's "overlapping strands" all helped to break the hold of the idea that we all have, in the back of our heads, semantical rules that enable us to give [neat answers to paradoxical questions]. | |
| 112 | Dennett and Davidson think intentionality is intrinsic. For although unicorns do not exist, sentences using the word "unicorn" do, and are no more mysterious than sentences about collisions of atoms. | |
| 114-5 | Does "accurately represents" mean the same thing in the case of charts and that of folk psychology? In the former case, one can test it by matching A against B. | |
| 119 | Dennett should drop his claim to have found a mild and intermediate sort of realism. | |
| 120 | Dennett: "metaphors are not just metaphors; metaphors are the tools of thought". | |
| 6 | 122-3 | Brandom restates pragmatism without talking about "experience"; McDowell argues that to banish the term is too high a price to pay, that we are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water, and losing the insight that motivated the empiricists. |
| Brandom | 129 | Brandom prefers the term "social practices"; discussions about truth and falsity are always a matter of rendering practices more coherent or of developing new practices. |
| 133 | Aboutness (which is all you need), like truth, is undefinable; but "answering" and "representing" are metaphors that cry out for further definition. | |
| 134 | What is intellectual progress? Brandom: "making more and more true claims about the things that are really out there to be talked and thought about". Rorty: "developing better and better tools for better and better purposes (by our lights)". Searle: "getting closer and closer to the way things are in themselves". | |
| 136a | Rorty finds Brandom's neologism "claimable" as useless for explanatory purposes; should avoid the implication that human inquiry is answerable to something. | |
| 136b | Paradox is a small price to pay for progress. | |
| 137 | D Lewis: philosophy is a matter of collating our intuitions and finding a way to keep as many of them as possible. Rorty: it is a matter of treating both intuitions and paradox as the voice of the past, and as possible impediments to the creation of a better future. Of course the voice of the past must always be heeded (sometimes!). | |
| 7 | 138 | McDowell's central notion is "answerability to the world". But many beliefs can't be judged as true or false, they are matters of personal judgment. |
| McDowell | 139 | Brandom is happy enough with "answerable to one another". |
| 141 | Sellars and Davidson draw a sharp line between experience as the cause of the occurrence of a justification, and the empiricist notion of experience as itself justificatory. | |
| 142 | McDowell regards Sellars, Davidson and Brandom as "renouncing empiricism" because they renounce the idea of experience as a tribunal. His 3 central notions follow. | |
| 143-4 | Bald naturalism: "we must sharply distinguish natural scientific intelligibility from the kind of intelligibility something acquires when we situate it in the logical space of reasons". But particle physics is very different from say planetary motion, and plate tectonics is narrative. He should admit that strict laws are the exception. | |
| 146 | Second nature: "being initiated into conceptual capacities, whose interrelationships belong in the logical space of reasons". The world is a sort of conversation partner; experience is being open to the world. But we are vulnerable to the world playing us false. But the others (see 142) think the world shapes the space of reasons more by exercising brute causal pressure on us. | |
| 148 | Rational freedom: "responsiveness to reason is a good gloss on one notion of freedom. But there may be philosophical puzzlement about how such responsiveness fits into the natural world. But the others (including Rorty) think that such puzzlement should disappear when we see that the tools we use to apply and change our norms are often different to those we use to predict what will happen next. | |
| 149 | Some uses of words do not have empirical content, e.g. witch, Boche, phlogiston (RT: these look like labels). The others don't need this contrast. | |
| 150 | McDowell does a splendid job of reconciling common turns of speech such as "a glimpse of the world", "openness to the world" and "answerability to the world". He has rehabilitated empiricism. But Rorty thinks they are just common turns of speech and we shouldn't try to give them philosophical backup. | |
| 151 | When two philosophers start quarrelling about whether there is a third thing intermediate between two other things, they may have traded cultural significance for professional rigour. | |
| 152 | Darwin's way of describing human beings (supplemented by later ideas on cultural evolution) does give us a useful gimmick to prevent people from over-dramatizing dichotomies and thereby generating philosophical problems. | |
| 8 | 153 | Williams put forward a powerful line of argument against epistemological skepticism (RT: i.e. that we can't really know anything). |
| M Williams | 155 | The "objectivity requirement": does knowing anything have to assume reality? But it's not the same as saying all knowledge must be objective ("totality"); one needs both. The alternative is "contextualism". |
| 156 | Williams believes that the threat of skepticism is intimately linked to a foundational concept of knowledge (unlike Davidson). | |
| 157 | Davidson is not one of those who believe that every belief, by virtue of its content, "has an unalienable epistemic character which it carries with it wherever it goes and which determines where its justification must finally be sought". | |
| 161-2 | What's the gloss on "reality being independent of thought"? Is it just the objectivity requirement? Williams thinks the totality component is more important. | |
| 9 Human Rights | 167 | The perpetrators of human rights abuses do not think of themselves as doing so, since they relegate the victims to being sub-humans. Example given: Serb atrocities against Muslims in Bosnia, but it could be Nazis, Abu Ghraib warders, crusaders, jihadists, slave owners (including Jefferson), sex worker exploiters etc etc. |
| 168 | At a safe distance we label the perpetrators as subhuman too, and say "what can you expect from that lot?", but we didn't lift a finger to help or stop it. | |
| 169a | Repression of women is not much different | |
| 169b | Plato thought all humans have rights; Nietzsche thought that is doomed to failure - we are a uniquely nasty and dangerous kind of animal. | |
| 169c | (Fortunately) there is a growing willingness to neglect the question "what is our nature?" and substitute "what can we make of ourselves?". | |
| 170 | Human Rights as a "foundational" culture? Rabossi (Argentinian) suggested otherwise, and Rorty is sympathetic. | |
| 171 | We think that the most philosophy can hope to do is to summarize our culturally influenced intuitions about the right thing to do in various situations. | |
| 172 | We pragmatists argue from the fact that the emergence of the human rights culture seems to owe nothing to increased moral knowledge, and everything to hearing sad and sentimental stories (Rorty approves of this). | |
| 173 | We remain profoundly grateful to philosophers like Plato and Kant, not because they discovered truths but because they prophesied cosmopolitan utopias - utopias most of whose details they may have gotten wrong, but utopias we might never have struggled to reach had we not heard their prophecies. | |
| 174 | Why has moral philosophy become such an inconspicuous part of our culture? Why did Darwin succeed so very easily, and not create a philosophical ferment (RT: at least at the time!). | |
| 175 | Rorty suggests it's because of our big (in the west) increase in wealth, literacy and leisure, and an associated acceleration in moral progress. We should set aside Kant's question "what is man?" and substitute "what sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?". | |
| 176 | We should distinguish ourselves from animals not by saying "we can know and they can merely feel" but "we can feel for each other to a much greater extent than they can". | |
| 177 | Plato concentrated on what to do about the psychopath; moral philosophy has neglected the more common case of the person whose treatment of a rather narrow range of "featherless bipeds" is morally impeccable, but who remains indifferent to the suffering of those outside this range, the ones he thinks of as pseudo-humans. | |
| 178 | Most people don't respond to the idea that we should be cognizant of the suffering of all humans anywhere; they think of themselves as being a certain good sort of human being - a sort defined by explicit opposition to a particularly bad sort. (RT examples: Pharisees v the rest, our religionists v their religionists, our tribe v their tribe, whites v natives, security forces v terrorists, freedom fighters against repressive regimes). | |
| 179 | Producing lots of nice, tolerant, well-off, secure, other-respecting students in all parts of the world is all that is needed to achieve an Enlightenment utopia. But it is not good to encourage these students to label "irrational" the intolerant people they have trouble tolerating. | |
| 180 | Instead of treating all those people out there who are trying to find and kill Salman Rushdie as irrational, we should treat them as deprived (of security and sympathy). | |
| 181a | Hume: "corrected (sometimes rule-corrected) sympathy, not law-discerning reason, is the fundamental moral capacity". | |
| 181b | Baier thinks that something stronger than sentiment is needed. | |
| 182 | "It is revolting to think that our only hope for a decent society consists in softening the self-satisfied hearts of a leisured class. We want moral progress to burst up from below." Rorty, too, would like that, but he does not think that is how utopia will in fact come into being. But we resent this condescension. | |
| 183 | Nietzsche and Kant had a desire for purity, or as Sartre said, a synthesis of the in-itself and for-itself, getting rid of everything sticky, slimy, wet, sentimental and womanish. But Rorty thinks this is out of date, and we humans are distinguished by capacities for friendship and "flexible sentimentality" rather than the capacity to know and rigorous rationality. | |
| 10 | 186 | Three senses of "rationality": 1) technical reason, skill at survival; 2) what humans have and animals don't; 3) tolerance, flexibility with others. We should drop (2). |
| Cultural Difference | 188-9 | Three senses of "culture": 1) shared habits of action; 2) virtue, art etc (monasteries and universities have it, prisons don't); 3) the "human spirit", Hegel's Geist etc. |
| 189 | Some cultures(1) are not worth preserving, e.g. concentration camps, criminal gangs, conspiracies of bankers, (RT: oil cartels?). They can also be sick or decadent. But the suggestion that every culture is a work of art worth preserving, and not judging by Eurocentric standards, has gained recent popularity. | |
| 190 | Some leftist intellectuals see only oppressed cultures as real. Similarly, much art that is popular falls short of the status of "art". | |
| 191 | Memes are a concept used by Dawkins and Dennett as the cultural counterparts of genes. Triumph of one culture over another happens through survival of the fittest memes, by analogy with Darwinian evolution. | |
| 192 | According to Dewey, the new science and liberal reforms of the 17th and 18th centuries were simply exemplifications of a new flexibility and adaptability that some human communities had come to exhibit (NOT humans realizing their true potential). | |
| 193 | There is nothing intrinsically emancipatory about a greater degree of rationality (1) (i.e. technical). But the 2 seem associated: maybe it was Christian rhetoric in the communities that developed the technology; maybe it was religious tolerance resulting from the large migrations of refugees from religious persecution in Europe. | |
| 194 | Would this Deweyan utopia preserve the cultural differences (often geographically bounded) between Buddhist and Hindu, Chinese and Japanese, Islam and Christianity, or would it throw all or most into a blender? Nobody knows. We do not miss the cultures of Ur or Carthage. | |
| 195a | We suspect that, given peace, wealth, luck and utopian rationality (3), these cultures will only be extirpated when new, better cultures of at least equal grandeur come along. | |
| 195b. | According to Ashis Nandy, Gandhi's view was that a culture which did not have a theory of transcendence (as Dewey's doesn't) cannot be morally or cognitively acceptable. | |
| 196 | But: 1) some of the west's achievements - controlling epidemics, increasing literacy, improving transportation and communication, standardizing the quality of commodities etc are not likely to be despised by anybody who has had experience of them; 2) the West is better than any other known culture at referring questions of social policy to the results of future experimentation rather than to principles and traditions taken over from the past; 3) the West's willingness to go secular has done much to make the second achievement possible. | |
| 197 | Nandy largely neglects the Romantic social idealism that has pervaded European and North American thought since the French Revolution. psychoanalysis and the Socialist International are as good representatives of the west as the KGB and the Union Carbide Company. | |
| 198a | Nandy claims that "violence lies at the heart of modern science and science has a built-in tendency to be an ally of authoritarianism. The traditional cultures, not being driven by the principles of absolute internal consistency and parsimony. allow the individual to create a place for himself in a plural structure of authority". | |
| 198b | Rorty is not sure that there is much point in debating whether the presence of a theory of transcendence, or the 40 hour week and the welfare state, has done more or less for individuality. | |
| 199 | Whereas Nandy follows Gandhi in thinking of religion as a better place to find support for democratic values, Dewey, with an eye to the dangers of religious fundamentalism, prefers art. He prefers the sort of art that derives from Renaissance humanism to the sort of temple decoration found at Varanasi, Nara or Chartres. | |
| 200 | But Dewey prefers the Romantic strain to the Rationalist strain of Hegel and Marx. he might point to the novels of Salman Rushdie, VS Naipaul, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Kazuo Ishiguro and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to mediate encounters between cultures (of type 1). He would look for small concrete compromises. | |
| 201 | Attempts to erect large theoretical oppositions between distinct cultures are only stopgaps and makeshifts. The real work over the next few centuries will be to unravel each culture and weave the threads into a better, more widely-appealing culture. | |
| 11 Feminism | 203 | Universalism: all important truths about right and wrong can not only be stated but be made plausible, in the languages available, at any time. Hegel and Dewey disagree: moral progress depends on expanding this space. The latter applies to sex discrimination, since some forms might not have appeared yet. "Until then, only the language of the oppressor is available." |
| 206a | Pragmatism redescribes both intellectual and moral progress by substituting metaphors of evolutionary development. | |
| 206b | The history of human social practices follows the pattern of evolution with memes gradually taking over from genes. | |
| 207 | The enslavement of one species, tribe or gender by another is not an intrinsic evil, but a rejected good. It's an ethnocentric claim made from the point of view of a given cluster of genes or memes. | |
| 208 | Derrida's 'phallogocentrism' - logocentrism with a male bias built in. | |
| 210 | Feminists are (RT: becoming?) much less inclined than Marxists were to fall back on a comfortable doctrine of teleology. | |
| 211 | "Pragmatism offers all the dialectical advantages of postmodernism while avoiding the self-contradictory postmodernist rhetoric of unmasking." | |
| 212 | We pragmatists are not in the foundations business. | |
| 214 | One will praise movements of liberation not for the accuracy of their diagnoses but for the imagination and courage of their proposals. | |
| 223 | Women (and Lesbians) may need a separate club to provide mutual support while their aspirations are not yet recognized in society generally. This is not so unlike Plato's Academy, early Christians in the catacombs, Lollards etc. This also helps evolve a new more inclusive language (RT: more memes, I'd say). | |
| 12 | 228 | (After 1989, i.e. the collapse of East European communism) the left will have to settle for social democracy. The best we can hope for is a kind of welfare capitalism with a human face. |
| Leninism | 229 | Drop the terms capitalism and socialism, and "the anti-capitalist struggle" and substitute "the struggle against avoidable human misery". Banalize the whole vocabulary! But will it all become too boring? |
| 230a | The Plato-Hegel-Marx-Heidegger brand of romance is something that intellectual life and leftist politics would now be much better off without. | |
| 230b | Kojève, Strauss, Adorno, Nietzsche and Heidegger are linked to Lenin and Mao by an urge to extirpate (the bourgeoisie), and replace it by the emancipated working class. | |
| 231 | Are we (leftist intellectuals) more interested in alleviating misery or in creating a world fit for Socrates, and thus for ourselves? Maybe it's regret that we, like Plato and Marx, may just be parasitical eccentrics living off the surplus value of a society to which we have nothing in particular to contribute. | |
| 234 | Rorty confesses that he has no clear sense of how "the emancipation of human beings from willed immaturity and from degrading conditions of existence" might be realized. | |
| 236 | What possible vision for the young is left? Rorty likes Vaclav Havel's style - substituting groundless hope instead of theoretical insight. | |
| 238 | Part of the reason why the next century (i.e. the 21st) looks so blank and formless is that we intellectuals have grown accustomed to thinking in eschatological terms. We look down on small local improvements and ask "where are we really going globally?". | |
| 240 | We should drop History as a temporalized substitute for God or Nature. Instead we should see the past as a collection of anecdotes that help us construct a "comic frame " (Kenneth Burke). (RT: I think he meant "with a happy ending", not "side-splittingly hilarious".) | |
| 241 | We should see (Laclau) the cycle of events which opened with the Russian Revolution as one in which we leftists, often with the best intentions, tricked ourselves, fooled ourselves, outsmarted ourselves, yet gained a lot of useful experience. | |
| 242-3 | If we adopt Burke's conception of History, we might become less fond of apocalyptic talk of "crisis" and "endings", less inclined toward eschatology. We would avoid the Logos called Humanity whose career is to be interpreted as heroic struggle or as tragic decline. We would stop trying to pick out historical turning-points or figures. | |
| 13 Historiography | 247 | Four approaches to the history of philosophy: 1) Rational reconstructions, e.g. "what would dead philosopher(s) X or Y have said?"; 2) Historical reconstructions, e.g. "how did the benighted times in which X lived affect what he said?"; 3) Geistesgeschichtlichte, meaning talking about what the questions were and why were they important; and 4) Doxography, attempts to write a unified history of all philosophy (involving "cream skimming"). Rorty detests the last one. |
| 265 | The distinction between knowledge and opinion: to say that something is a matter of opinion is just to say that deviance from the current consensus on that topic is compatible with membership in some relevant community. To say that it is knowledge is to say that deviance is incompatible. | |
| 266a | One wouldn't get a job or a grant in a biology department if one believed in 6-day creation though. | |
| 266b | Intellectual history - going beyond what is counted as philosophy, including minor philosophers and non-philosophers (e.g. Freud).. | |
| 14 | 275 | Revolutionary philosophy - saying that most work up to now has been based on mistakes. |
| M Ayers on Locke | 278 | Contingency - the idea that what issues are important depends on the moment in time, as opposed to being important for all time. Rorty is with the former idea. |
| 280 | Rorty claims Ayers used his comments about Locke (very much affected by his time) as a basis for criticizing many current positions (mainly linguistic approaches) that he disagreed with, but R says that we can't throw off our current concerns. | |
| 282 | Psychological nominalism = "all awareness is a linguistic affair". Ayers labels them as "linguistic idealists" - Rorty counts himself as one. Ayers, however says "there is no raw material of sensations". Sounds like a good issue. | |
| 283 | Ten theses on which the same people tend to agree (or disagree) on: 1) there is a real issue about whether there is such a thing as "the fact of the matter" about something; 2) Crucial struggles in philosophy history are between realism and anti-realism; 3) one should be dubious about the contingency of philosophical problems; 4) one must not let one's moral and political views influence one's metaphysical and epistemological views; 5) the "mind-body" problem is indissoluble; 6) Cartesian skepticism (e.g. brain in a vat) is a permanent issue; 7) the senses are quasi-informants possessing intrinsic intentionality; 8) self-identity is an intrinsic, non-relational feature of an object (some terms designate rigidly); 9) acknowledgement of ineffability is commendable humility; 10) Locke's work is great philosophy, not just a step on a shaky road. I see Rorty as generally disagreeing with all, but admitting that there is no knock-down argument against them. | |
| 15 | 291 | Pragmatists (and some others) "talk about sentences a lot" and do not think anything is given immediately in experience. |
| Hegel-Darwin | 292 | Davidson rejects Quine's notion of "stimulus meaning", and claims "no intermediate terrain of philosophical inquiry between linguistically formulated beliefs and physiology". (RT - How does this tie in with sentient animals?) |
| 294 | W James: "The true ... is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in our way of behaving." | |
| 295-6 | A blurring of the questions "what causes our beliefs" and "what justifies our beliefs" is essential for any representationalist theory of knowledge. | |
| 296 | How can we get continuity between us humans and brutes (if we accept Darwin)? | |
| 297 | Dewey should have dropped the term "experience", not redefined it. He should have (with Peirce) agreed that a great gulf divides sensation and cognition, decided that the break was between language users and non-language-users (RT: I presume language then has to include body language, bird calls etc). | |
| 298 | With evolution, species gradually developed more sophisticated "language" for communicating. So Dewey should have said "we can construe thinking as simply the use of sentences, both for cooperative action with others and attributing our inner states so that we could convey them to others". | |
| 300 | The problem with wedding Hegel to Darwin is that in Hegel's view, human civilization could never be wiped out by plague or comet - the Geist is above all this. But a "de-absolutized" Hegel is not so far from Pragmatism. | |
| 306 | We should substitute Deweyan questions like "which communities' purposes shall I share?" and "what sort of person should I try to become?" for Kantian questions like "What should I do?" "What may I hope?" and "What is man?". | |
| 16 | 308a | The philosophy of subjectivity - Rorty says "one more misguided metaphysical attempt to combine the public and the private." |
| Habermas | 308b | Ironists - people who are interested in their own autonomy and individuality, rather than in their social usefulness. |
| 309 | Habermas proposes a "philosophy of intersubjectivity". What matters to the search for truth [is] the social and political conditions under which the search is conducted, rather than the deep inner nature of the subjects doing the searching. | |
| 310a | In the above sense, we can just skip Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and most of Foucault (although they are good "private" philosophers). | |
| 310b | Heidegger's and Derrida's only relevance to the quest for social justice is that, like the Romantic poets, they make more vivid and concrete our sense of what human life might be like in a democratic utopia [where] the quest for autonomy is impeded as little as possible by social institutions. | |
| 314 | Derrida's admirers (Culler, Gasché and Paul de Man) have set him up as demonstrating something original (i.e. deconstruction), whereas maybe they should have treated him as just an ironist. | |
| 315 | Derrida has no use for "essential contents"; like Quine, Goodman, Wittgenstein, Bergson, Whitehead etc he dissolves substances, essences and all, into 'webs of relations' (RT: sounds like Frolio?). | |
| 318 | Habermas still wants to say that "the validity claimed for propositions and norms transcends spaces and times". | |
| 320a | Dewey's view: every form of social life is likely, sooner or later, to freeze over into something the more imaginative and restless spirits of the time will see as "repressive" and "distorting". | |
| 320b | Today's chains are often forged from the hammers that struck off yesterday's. This sequence of hammers into chains is unlikely to end with the invention of hammers that cannot be forged into chains, but the chains might get a little easier to break each time. Types of chains include (p 321) chattel slavery, priestcraft, wage slavery, racial or gender discrimination and mindless bureaucracy. | |
| 321a | "Human nature" and "humanity itself" are (like God, the Good, the Subject, Language, Ereignis and Différance) just more dubious candidates for this position of Something Larger. | |
| 321b | Bernard Yack's 'The Longing for Total Revolution': characterizes the sort of social theory that aims at "enabling human beings to realize their humanity" with the demand that "our autonomy be realized in our institutions". | |
| 322a | Rorty rejects the idea of people having a central core which resists external conditioning. Instead, we need to keep a private-public distinction. The ideal liberal community will be one in which respect for particularity and idiosyncrasy is widespread, including negative liberty - i.e. being left alone. | |
| 322b | What would guard a society from feeling comfortable with the institutionalized infliction of pain and humiliation on the powerless? It would be detailed descriptions, that would bring home the contrast between the powerful and powerless to both sides. These descriptions would be provided by journalists, anthropologists, novelists, dramatists, moviemakers and painters. | |
| 323 | Has the longing for total revolution done more harm than good? Rorty is a bit uncertain. | |
| 324 | German longing for something higher ( the more "sublime") versus Anglo-Saxon desire to avoid infliction of unnecessary pain and humiliation (the more "beautiful"). | |
| 325 | The illusion that ironists' sense of contingency rots the moral fabric of democratic societies (e.g. Nietzsche's antidemocratic frothings, Heidegger's attempt to climb on Hitler's bandwagon, Sartre's period of mindless allegiance to Stalin and Foucault's quasi-anarchism). | |
| 326 | Terms like "late capitalism", "modern industrial society" and "conditions of the production of knowledge" will be employed less frequently and terms like "worker representation", "laws against unproductive financial manipulation" and "journalists' union" more. | |
| 17 | 327 | Not a chapter I found easy to follow! |
| Derrida | 339 | It is hard to separate the notion of rigour from that of a consensus of enquirers. Rigour (it seems to Rorty) is something you can have only after entering into an agreement with some other people to subordinate your imagination to their consensus. It is hard to be rigorous all by yourself, or on the first try. |
| 341 | What is the appropriately relaxed relation to philosophy? "Keep in touch with it just enough to remind yourself that it would be both inhuman to ignore it and fatal to take it too seriously." | |
| 344 | Your behaviour cannot be explained without reference to various unconscious beliefs that your upbringing produced, various pictures that will always, in some measure, hold you captive. | |
| 345 | What Deconstruction affirms is not pure game or expenditure, but the necessity of contamination. (RT: I think this means that it's not best to keep too pure, but better to let other strands influence one a bit.) | |
| 347a | St Augustine and Derrida - two boys from North Africa who made it big in Europe. | |
| 347b | Ever since Freud, biographers of great thinkers have gotten their effects by revealing that Oz, the Great and Powerful, is just a nerd with a gimmick. These biographers' inability to synthesize the hang-ups and the mind-bending words parallels our inability to reconcile the transcendental and the empirical. | |
| 348 | In their joint book Jacques Derrida, Bennington's "Derridabase" (top half of each page) is the adventures of a quasi-person named Deconstruction. Derrida's "Circumfession" (bottom half) contributes some reminders of the bloodstained empirical conditions of actuality of this particular quasi-person. |
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 13th January 2011
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .