Richard Rorty

Neil Gascoigne

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745633411, 9780745633404
• eBook ISBN: 9780745654515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Neil Gascoigne provides the first comprehensive introduction Richard Rorty's work. He demonstrates to the general reader and to the student of philosophy alike how the radical views on truth, objectivity and rationality expressed in Rorty's widely-read essays on contemporary culture and politics derive from his earliest work in the philosophy of mind and language. He avoids the partisanship that characterizes much discussion of Rorty's work whilst providing a critical account of some of the dominant concerns of contemporary thought.

Beginning with Rorty's early work on concept-change in the philosophy of mind, the book traces his increasing hostility to the idea that philosophy is cognitively privileged with respect to other disciplines. After the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, this led to a new emphasis on preserving the moral and political inheritance of the enlightenment by detaching it from the traditional search for rational foundations. This emerging project led Rorty to champion 'ironic' thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, and to his attempt to update the liberalism of J. S. Mill by offering a non-universalistic account of the individual's need to balance their own private interests against their commitments to others.

By returning him to his philosophical roots, Gascoigne shows why Rorty's pragmatism is of continuing relevance to anyone interested in ongoing debates about the nature and limits of philosophy, and the implications these debates have for our understanding of what role the intellectual might play in contemporary life. This book serves as both an excellent introduction to Rorty's work and an innovative critique which contributes to ongoing debates in the field.

1

Out of Mind

1 Our Rortian ancestors

Far, far away, lies an astronomical body much like our own precious Earth, populated by creatures much like us. On this planet – long ago named Rort by an amateur Terran astronomer who’d taken a few philosophy classes before becoming disillusioned – there are two distinct civilizations. The Nortians have a tribal society, with the title of chief passed along the male line and deriving its authority from the purported adventures of a distant ancestor Da-Ka, who had stopped to fish and pulled the world up on the end of his line. They have many strange beliefs, in turn peculiar and repulsive by our standards, amongst which their view of the aetiology of various maladies is noteworthy. For them, illness in general is caused by demons, with each distinct complaint caused by a specific fiend. The Nortian world-view is dominated by speculation about these demons, which were dragged up along with the world and whose fate is intimately linked with that of the chiefs and thus to the legitimacy of their rule. Interestingly, a certain priestly caste, after ritually consuming a particular kind of plant, purport to see the various demons that make people sick lingering by the bodies of the infirm. A bilious blue demon, for example, accompanies the epileptic, and a lewd fat red one pursues the asthmatic. These adepts have discovered a variety of naturally occurring substances, each of which drives a particular type of demon away when administered to the patient, thereby (indirectly) facilitating their recovery.

Turning to their neighbours, Sortians have evolved a liberal-democratic, welfarist, political system, based on principles of justice and the rule of law. Although technologically advanced and economically dynamic, there is little material inequality in Sortian society; but since most Sortians have rich intellectual and cultural lives, they express little concern with whether they have more or fewer material possessions than others. Sortian society is in many respects, then, much like our own … There is, however, one big difference. A peculiarity of Sortian intellectual history is that it was the area of the brain sciences that emerged first and developed fastest. Neurological knowledge has been central to Sortian self-understanding for so long that it is not second- but first-nature for them to report on specific states of their brain and central nervous system. Young children are told that if they go too near to the fire their C-fibres will fire, and adults occasionally report that although neuronal bundle S-1101 is excited there is in fact no castle hovering in the air. Indeed, since their knowledge of physiology is such that any sentence in Sortian can be correlated with a specific neural state, it is rather a matter of personal style if a Sortian chooses to say ‘I had X-10474 so I ducked my head’ or ‘I saw the ball come flying towards me so I ducked my head’.

Imagine now that an expedition from Earth finally arrives on Rort. What would they say about the Nortians, and in particular about the existence of demons? While the tender-minded anthropologists in the team might conclude that, since there is no neutral standpoint from which to evaluate a culture, from the only one that matters (the Nortian) demons clearly do exist, the tough-minded scientist would doubtless disdain such relativism. For these the operative contrast is not between competing world-views but between true and false beliefs; or, at the very least, between good theories and bad theories. With that contrast in mind it seems clear what to say to the Nortians: germs and bacteria cause sickness and disease, not demons. The so-called demon-perceptions of medical experts (‘witch-doctors!’) are hallucinations brought on by the ingestion of psychotropic chemicals found in the local flora, the manifest content of which is suggested by the culturally pervasive concern with demons and, in particular, its retrogressive relation to political authority.

Given the intimidating presence of Terran technology, demon-talk might be radically undermined by this confrontation with another race, and begin to loosen its hold on Nortian culture. But since no prediction that Nortian medical science makes is disconfirmed by Terran medicine it is entirely open to the sophisticated Nortian to reply that Terran science has shown merely that the presence of demons is constantly correlated with the microbiological entities of Terran medicine, and that eating certain plants can make some people see things that aren’t there. It seems the only response available to the Terran is to emphasize the relative minimalism of his approach: eliminating demon-talk simplifies medical theory by reducing the number of entities it needs to pay heed to; especially those entities the existence of which suggests some rather perplexing questions. But now the complexity and embeddedness of demon-ontology in Nortian social and political life (in Nortian self-understanding) ensures that their medical practices are not as readily isolatable from such broader concerns as they are for the Terrans. The appeal of, and to, simplicity is not in itself neutral.

With that in mind, let’s continue the expedition with a visit to the Sortians. While their culture will be of little interest to the anthropologists, their grasp of neurobiology will attract the delight rather than the disdain of the scientists. And yet despite this there seems to be something wrong here. One way of capturing this intuition is to remark that the Sortians don’t seem to know that they have minds! Although they use intentional idioms to communicate, they do not think that this talk about beliefs, desires, feelings and so on refers to mental as opposed to physical states; rather, it refers to (in general) the same sorts of states as talk about ‘sexual arousal’ and ‘standing up’. Now one can readily imagine a person not knowing that they are ill or in trouble, but not knowing that they have a mind seems altogether different. That difference seems to lie with the intuition that knowing that one has a mind is in some way constitutive of having a mind. This is why Terran thoughts about the mind are linked to the topic of consciousness: to have a mind is to have that special sort of awareness of, and unmediated access to, the ‘inner space’ that is the mind. If this is the case, then to be ignorant of the fact that one has a mind is not to lack some specific item of knowledge: it is to lack a mind, to lack consciousness. But without a mind how can one know anything at all, since knowledge is quite naturally thought of in terms of the mind’s representation of the world ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ it? And without a mind how can something be a moral agent, a person? An assemblage of brain-states following whatever neurological laws there are doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that could be considered free, and therefore be judged in moral terms.

Such reflections lead to the conclusion that the Sortians don’t have minds, are not persons, and don’t know anything; they are just biological organisms interacting in complex ways, making meaningless noises that nevertheless have multifarious effects on other such organisms; like a colony of featherless bipedal ants. But how can this conclusion be squared with the active interest taken in these meaningless noises by the Terran scientists, economists and others who find the achievements of Sortian civilization fascinating? Pragmatically, at least, they are treating the Sortians as persons; so the question ‘do the Sortians have minds or not?’ is clearly neither one that interests them nor one they are qualified to answer. So who is so qualified, and how would they go about answering such a question? It seems natural to turn to philosophy for an answer, since philosophers have traditionally been concerned with identifying the nature or essences of things, and one clearly needs to know what the mind ‘is’ in order to determine whether an entity has one or not. But the very concepts the philosophers have at their disposal to describe what it is that they have and the Sortians lack are those for which the science of the latter can find no use. While tender-minded Sortian anthropologists might say that minds exist when one adopts a Terran world-view, the neurophysicists are likely to conclude that this is rather a matter of better and worse theories; that given the explanatory superiority of Sortian science over its Terran counterpart there is no compelling reason to believe that Terrans possess something the Sortians themselves either lack or are unaware of. Eliminate talk of minds, they tell the Terran philosophers, and not only will you be able to embrace fully the neurophysiology we can teach you, but you’ll be spared all those tortuous philosophical problems that involve the relationship between the mind and the world, and be able to get on with the more productive business of improving the lives of less fortunate Terrans.

It is not clear how things will develop here; after all, the complexity and embeddedness of mind-ontology in Terran social and political life – and therefore in Terran self-understanding – ensures that brain sciences are not as readily isolatable from such broader concerns as they are for the Sortians. But at this point we might begin to feel a certain sense of resistance. The narrative tries to seduce us into seeing an analogy between the Nortians and the Sortians and make it seem that in respect of the concepts the Terrans use, those relating to the mental are no more determined by their essential nature or by the essential nature of the world or of language than the pre-scientific concept of a demon is. But, despite the distancing device of the thought-experiment, are we not Terrans? Is the concept of mind not of a wholly different order? Our intuition is not just that it would be difficult to abandon it – that it is central to how we see ourselves – but that it is essential to what we are. Allied to this is the suspicion that the insistence that scientific practices establish the appropriate linguistic norms is far more tendentious than the view that it’s rather how things feel to us minded creatures. In this regard it seems that the unquestioned phenomenology of conscious experience is on the side of philosophy against science.

The case of what I have called the Nortians is freely adapted from an analogy offered in one of Rorty’s earliest contributions to the debate about the nature of the mental;¹ the (similarly modified) example of the Sortians is the central thought-experiment in chapter II of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN).² Both texts focus on demonstrating the in-principle eliminability of the concept of mind, and tracing how Rorty’s approach to this task develops in the intervening period will highlight its significance for our understanding of conceptual change, and of the relationship between language and the mind. More importantly, since the possession of a mind is connected to the capacity for rational reflection, and the latter naturally thought of as, in its highest form, constitutive of philosophical inquiry, Rorty’s attempt to undermine the idea that having a mind is an intrinsic feature of creatures like us has obvious implications for one’s understanding of the status and limits of such inquiry, in relation both to the natural sciences and to culture conceived of in the broadest sense.

Although this will be detailed in chapters 2 and 3, it can be related to the foregoing by reflecting briefly on the relevance of thought-experiments to philosophical inquiry. In general such imagined forms of life help us to see ourselves from a perspective other than the one we normally occupy. By allowing certain features of the world or of ourselves to vary, we hope to loosen the grip of customary thinking and investigate just how different things might (be thought to) be while remaining in some crucial sense possible. Another way of describing this process is that it allows us to explore the geography of our concepts, with regard both to their plasticity and their potential eliminability. This is pursued customarily as an armchair exercise, but such reflections are not immune to empirical change. Certain things that we can imagine as possible – indeed, many beliefs we hold true – could not only not have not been conceived as possibilities in the past; they could not have been thought at all. Likewise, it would be hubristic not to imagine that as yet unthinkable thoughts will be thought in the future, or are perhaps being thought right now on some distant planet.

For present purposes, then, thought-experiments can be regarded as heuristic devices that help us explore the possibilities of concept change in general; but there is a temptation in philosophy to think that, robustly analysed, they can help identity concepts that are ineliminable: irreducible features of our, or perhaps of any, conceptual terrain. This is one way in which philosophy aims to mark itself out as a distinct activity with a specific subject matter: one dealing with pure meanings or the logic or our language; standing icily aloof from the pressures of empirical change and whose cognitive authority requires that some sense can be made of such detachment. It is one of Rorty’s principal claims in PMN that philosophy cannot arrogate to itself legitimately any such authority (p. 3 ff.) because such a disengaged standpoint cannot be rendered fully intelligible; which is to say it is of ill-defined use.

In the Anglo-American tradition, the attack on the authority of philosophy that Rorty develops – and in particular the authority philosophy claims as an enterprise wholly distinct from the empirical sciences, the former searching for conceptual truths, and the latter for mere empirical generalizations – emerged as part of an immanent critique within the philosophy of science, and is associated above all with Quine and Kuhn. In section 3 we’ll look briefly at an account of the contribution these made to the naturalistic, historicist, anti-authoritarian turn in the philosophy of science, which will provide a basis from which to appreciate the broader significance of Rorty’s neo-pragmatism. As we’ve already observed, however, this originally manifested itself as an intervention in the (then) ongoing debate about the mind–body problem. In order to better appreciate Rorty’s contribution to that debate, it will be useful to have some account of what had occurred prior to the arrival of the ‘Nortians’ on the philosophical scene.

2 Materialism and the mind–body problem

The Kantian shift of religious concerns into the realm of faith helped consolidate the Enlightenment’s project to undermine the intellectual appeal of theology, and in particular its claim to any cognitive authority over the fast-developing natural sciences. An increasingly secular culture emerged in the West in the nineteenth century, with discoveries such as Lyell’s in geology, and this was given a huge boost with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859. The advances in physics associated with Bohr, Heisenberg and Einstein tempt us to think of the twentieth century as exemplifying an increasing confidence in the ability of the natural sciences to explain phenomena that had hitherto eluded the nomological net. Notwithstanding the enormous cultural shift expressed in this more naturalistic conception of the world, one area in particular seems recalcitrant to such a view, and that the most fundamental to our self-understanding: the mind. Attempts to view the mind or the mental as on a par ontologically with the material world go back in the modern tradition at least as far as Hobbes, but successive versions of ‘materialism’ have failed to unsettle the intuition that even if the mind doesn’t comprise some non-material ‘stuff’, as Descartes supposed, mental states nevertheless have properties like intentionality and phenomenal (‘raw’) feel that resist reduction to the properties of any physical or material entities or processes. In addition, there is the familiar conviction that the possession of a mind is linked to the capacity to recognize the norms of rationality and through that to the capacities for cognition and agency. This leaves us with something of a split conception of ourselves and of the world: we look to science to explain the latter, and regard ourselves as but one more set of objects in that world subject to the same fundamental laws. And yet, as possessors or instantiations of minds (and thus as knowers), we seem not only set apart from the world, but necessarily so in order that the world becomes an object of such scientif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Epigraph
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: No Single Vision
• 1 Out of Mind
• 2 What is Eliminative Materialism?
• 3 Rorty’s Kehre
• 4 Overcoming Philosophy
• 5 New Selves for Old
• 6 The Whole Truth
• Conclusion: The Ends of Philosophy
• Bibliography
• Index