[7.] Richard Rorty.[1]

 

·         1931-2007; born in New York City

·         Rorty began his studies in philosophy at the University of Chicago at age 15. He eventually received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale. He then taught at Yale and Wellesley, after which he spent two years in the army. He then took a position as professor of philosophy at Princeton.

·         He received a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1981.

·         In 1982, he became an interdisciplinary humanities professor at the University of Virginia. His last position was as professor of comparative literature and philosophy at Stanford University.

·         His earliest work was in the central areas of analytic philosophy, including the philosophy of language.

·         In the 1970s his work began to show the influence of classical pragmatism, especially that of John Dewey.

·         He considered Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger to be the greatest 20^th century philosophers.

·         Like Putnam, Rorty was a modern pragmatist and is sometimes called a “neo-pragmatist.”

·         He didn’t think very highly of Peirce, about whom he wrote: “His contribution to pragmatism was merely to have given it a name, and to have stimulated James.” (637)

·         His best known book is Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).

 

Rorty said some radical-sounding things about truth and reality:

·         truth is “what you can defend against all comers” [i.e., against all opponents] (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979, p.308)

·         to call a sentence true is merely to give it “a rhetorical pat on the back”. (Consequences of Pragmatism, 1982, pp. xiii).

·         there is no such thing as “the way things really are” (“Truth Without Correspondence to Reality,” in Philosophy and Social Hope p.27).

 

Not surprisingly, this has led critics to accuse Rorty of accepting a sort of relativism according to which truth and reality are somehow dependent on human beings. But Rorty always claimed that he was not a relativist.

 

One of Rorty’s harshest critics, Susan Haack[2], has described his distinctive brand of neo-pragmatism as “vulgar pragmatism.”

 

 

[7.1.] “Pragmatism, Relativism and Irrationalism” (1979).

 

[7.1.1.] No “Theories” of Truth, Knowledge, Etc.

 

Rorty thinks there is much of value to be taken from the work of James and Dewey—but not from the work of Peirce.

 

On his view, what is most valuable about James’s and Dewey’s pragmatism is their denial that philosophers ought to have theories of truth, knowledge, or morality...

 

As long as we see James or Dewey as having “theories of truth” or “theories of knowledge” or “theories of morality” we shall get them wrong. We shall ignore their criticisms of the assumption that there ought to be theories about such matters. (636)

 

On its face, this claim about James and Dewey seems wrong...

·         James made elaborate philosophical claims about truth (as well as about morality … see ch.11, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”).

·         Dewey had quite a lot to say about the concepts of knowledge and truth (as well as about associated concepts, like experience, and about morality).

 

But Rorty also says:

 

[James and Dewey] had things to say about truth, knowledge, and morality, even though they did not have theories of them, in the sense of sets of answers to the textbook problems. (637-38, emphasis added)

 

In articulating what James and Dewey said about these topics, Rorty distinguishes among three different “sloganistic characterizations of” pragmatism:

 

1.      “anti-essentialism applied to notions like ‘truth,’ ‘knowledge’ ‘language,’ ‘morality,’ and similar objects of philosophical theorizing.” (638)

 

2.      “there is no epistemological difference between truth about what ought to be and truth about what is” (640).

 

3.      “there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones” (642).

 

We will consider each of these in turn.

 

 

[7.1.2.] Anti-Essentialism.

 

[7.1.2.1.] Essence and Accident.

 

To understand the view that Rorty calls “anti-essentialism,” we first need to consider a traditional philosophical distinction: that between essence and accident, a.k.a. the distinction between essential properties and accidental properties…

 

essential properties (a.k.a. essence) (df.): the properties belonging to a thing and without which that thing would not exist; if a thing x has a property F, and F is an essential property of x, then if x were to cease to have F, x would cease to exist. For example…

·         It is commonly thought that an essential property of a physical object is extension in space. If something does not take up any space whatsoever, then it is not a physical object. If this table were to lose the property of being extended in space, it would no longer be this table (the table would no longer exist).

·         The essence of Socrates is (or is in part) that he is human—if he ceases to be human, he will cease to be Socrates. Being human is thus an essential property of Socrates.

·         Descartes held that minds are essentially things that think, i.e., that a mind that loses the property of thinking is no longer a mind at all.

 

accidental properties (df.): a thing’s inessential properties, i.e., the traits that the thing could lose and still be the thing that it is; if a thing x has a property F, and F is an accidental property of x, then if x were to cease to have F, x would not necessarily cease to exist. For example…

·         Being black is an accidental property of this table; if the table were painted red, it would still be the same table, just with a different (accidental) property.

·         Socrates’s accidental properties include having a broad nose and being a heavy drinker. Any and all of these could change, yet Socrates would still be Socrates.

 

 

[7.1.2.2.] Essence and Traditional Philosophy.

 

Within the tradition of western philosophy, the task of philosophy has sometimes been conceived as the discovery of the essence of such things as truth, knowledge, goodness, reality, justice, etc. ... to say what it is for a claim to be true, for a belief to count as knowledge, for an action to be good, for something to be real, etc.

 

Rorty’s “pragmatism as anti-essentialism” is the denial that there are any such things as the essence of truth, of knowledge, of goodness, of reality, etc. for philosophers to discover.

 

 

Stopping point for Wednesday November 9. For next time, continue reading Rorty’s “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism” (640-43). [We are one day behind the original course schedule.]