Ironies abound

Richard Rorty famously defines an "ironist" as "the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires" (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p. xv). Rorty has his own story about what this means, and what it is to "face up" to it, a story which most interpreters, myself included, aren't particularly happy with. On that account, it remains unclear how one can regard one's beliefs as "contingent" without thereby simply giving them up. The resulting skepticism, perversely unacknowledged as such, is precisely not what the doctor ordered. Or so I claim.

On p. 96-7 of CIS, Rorty comes very close to spelling out an explicitly Pyrrhonist position: "The goal of ironist theory is to understand the metaphysical urge, the urge to theorize, so well that one becomes entirely free of it. Ironist theory is thus a ladder which is to be thrown away as soon as one has figured out what it was that drove one's predecessors to theorize." Remarkably, given the use of that familiar image, the accompanying footnote cites neither the ancient Skeptics nor even the early Wittgenstein (TLP 6.54), but instead the later Heidegger's "motto of ironist theorizing": "A regard to metaphysics still prevails even in the intention to overcome metaphysics. Therefore our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself" (Time and Being, 1962).

I don't know about Heidegger, but in Rorty the thought seems to be this. Traditional metaphysics is a mug's game; but if philosophers proceed in the usual fashion to try to show this once and for all, all we'll get is a philosophical theory, or doctrine, to that effect. But philosophical theorizing just is "metaphysics" in the controversial sense – that is, it succumbs to the same questionable urge (to escape finitude, or whatever). Instead of the traditional doctrines, then, we must target the urge which made them, or even their negations, seem necessary. If "overcoming" requires refutation, and refutation indulges the suspect urge, then we must abandon "overcoming" as well. We might not be happy about having to "leave metaphysics to itself," where anyone can still trip over it if they're not careful, but it can't be helped. We'll just have to develop other ways to help each other avoid that pitfall. Rorty's conception of pragmatism as "anti-authoritarianism," for example, exhorts us to spurn the siren song of metaphysical transcendence, with its chimerical promise of ideal grounding for our beliefs and values, in favor of more homespun methods of coping with our problems.

In chapter 5 ("Self-creation and affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger"), Rorty explains why literature of a certain kind is better than philosophy for doing what needs to be done:

So the lesson I draw from Proust's example is that novels are a safer medium than theory for expressing one's recognition of the relativity and contingency of authority figures. For novels are usually about people – things which are, unlike general ideas and final vocabularies, quite evidently time-bound, embedded in a web of contingencies. [...] By contrast, books which are about ideas, even when written by historicists like Hegel and Nietzsche, look like descriptions of eternal relations between eternal objects, rather than genealogical accounts of the filiation of final vocabularies, showing how these vocabularites were engendered by haphazard matings, by who happened to bump into whom. [107-8]

I'll get back to raking Rorty over the coals some other time, but let me get to my point here. To that last quotation is appended its own footnote, which reads: "There are, of course, novels like Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus in which the characters are simply dressed-up generalities. The novel form cannot by itself insure a perception of contingency. It only makes it a bit harder to avoid this perception."

I like Mann a lot, but that's definitely a fair criticism (q.v. The Magic Mountain, or anything else for that matter). However, the impetus for this post is that I'm just now (very slowly) reading Doctor Faustus, and on p. 45 our narrator Dr. Zeitblom is telling us about the early years of his friend Leverkühn, the subject of the book:

In those years school life is life itself, it stands for all that life is, school interests bound the horizon that every life needs in order to develop values, through which, however relative they are, the character and the capacities are sustained. They can, however, do that, humanly speaking, only if the relativeness remains unrecognized. Belief in absolute values, illusory as it always is, seems to me a condition of life. But my friend's gifts [i.e., Leverkühn's] measured themselves against values the relative character of which seemed to lie open to him, without any visible possibility of any other relation which would have detracted from them as values. Bad pupils there are in plenty. But Adrian presented the singular phenomenon of a bad pupil as the head of the class. I say that it distressed me, but how impressive, how fascinating, I found it too! How it strengthened my devotion to him, mingling with it – can one understand why? – something like pain, like hopelessness! [Lowe-Porter translation, altered slightly]

So described, the young composer sounds quite a bit like Rorty's "ironist," and indeed, the next paragraph discusses "one exception [i.e., mathematics] to [Leverkühn's] uniform ironic contempt." Here, though, the skepticism is explicit. Belief in absolute values, however necessary "as a condition of life," is always illusory. The only alternative to "absolute" is "relative," and regarding some value as (merely) "relative" is equivalent to rejecting any claims it may have to validity. Where Leverkühn differs from Zeitblom is that the former did not let the recognized illusoriness of absolute value stop him from acting as if he accepted it. He even excelled at what others took seriously, while he himself saw it as merely a game – one he was good at, but a game nonetheless.

No doubt Rorty takes his own position to differ, not simply from Zeitblom's, but also from that of Leverkühn. (He might, for example, have mentioned this passage as anticipating his own views, rather than simply knocking the book for not being sufficiently Proustian.) As I read him, I think Rorty would say that in allowing a norm or value to structure one's actions – to be seen as "playing the game" at all – is, in that context, to accept it as fully as it makes sense to do so. To demand a further "metaphysical" commitment to its truth (pardon me, Truth) is to fall into unintelligibility, or at least disutility. That's why recognizing "contingency" isn't the same as skepticism or nihilism.

Now, this is indeed a more attractive thing to say. It's just that I don't think Rorty can do so consistently. For example, Rorty tells us repeatedly that his pragmatism points us past the "stale dichotomy of realism and anti-realism"; but he just as consistently endorses anti-realist doctrine when it suits him, as in the continuation of the very definition of "ironism" with which I began. Ironists, he says, are that way because they are "sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance." Naturally going "beyond realism" will involve rejecting realist doctrines like this one. Still, when overt appeals to anti-realism are qualified, in the definition of the central concept of one's view, only by words like "sufficiently," it's hard to see how that itself is sufficient for us to avoid the one as well as the other.

Is Rorty a "textualist"? And if so, is that bad?

Happy New Year to all. I'd like to begin this year's blogging (which may be sparser this year, as I have resolved to waste spend less time online) with one more post on Rorty, who as you know passed away in 2007.

As I have often complained, most of Rorty's early critics just weren't getting him at all. (This made it hard to see where he really does go wrong, and what to do instead.) Ernest Sosa's 1987 Journal of Philosophy article "Serious Philosophy and Freedom of Spirit" is a case in point. It's not directed against Rorty in particular, but against relativistic "free spirits" as a group and their attacks on realistic "serious" philosophy. Here's Sosa on Rorty's "textualism":

In the book of some free spirits [in Sosa's sense of "subjectivists" et al], the Word was not only in the beginning, but is even—incredibly—said to be everything.

[footnote:] According to Derrida, "there is nothing outside the text," and "there has never been anything but writing" [Of Grammatology, p. 158-9]. Derrida's pronouncements find an echo in Rorty's introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism [p. xxxvii]: "The intuitive realist thinks that there is such a thing as Philosophical truth because he thinks that, deep down beneath all the texts, there is something which is not just one more text but that to which various texts are trying to be 'adequate.' The pragmatist does not think that there is anything like that."

[continuing in the text:] Free spirits are often textualists, readers and authors who live for the conversation, the only point of which, insofar as it has any extrinsic point at all, is to go on and on without end. [p. 710]

So: what Rorty's work shows is that some wackos—incredibly!—think there's no real world out there. Yet of course there's a real world! (Sosa points us later to William Alston's "lucid defense" of "strong realism" in the appropriately titled "Yes, Virginia, There is a Real World." I should point out that those capital letters are in the title only. I think.) No wonder "textualists" don't want to find anything out about the world – they don't think it exists. Instead of such "serious" (and boring) literalism, "playful" free spirits, like the childish and imprudent grasshopper as opposed to the mature and industrious ant, want the meaningless "language game" to go on forever. Sosa makes the customary qualifications (that "seriousness" and "freedom" are on a continuum, and that most people are in the middle rather than one extreme, where only the most hardcore Platonism seems to count as "extreme seriousness"), but he makes no bones about where his sympathies lie. Resisting realism in any significant way is equivalent to failing to realize that "dog" refers to dogs, rendering one a candidate for the lunatic asylum.

Speaking of "language games," Wittgenstein doesn't come in for especial abuse here, but at one point Sosa refers us to Kripke for further reflection on the dangers of relativism in Wittgenstein's "familiar theme" that "reasons inevitably give out." Putting Kripkenstein well to one side, together with his relativist demons, let's look again at that Rorty quote, this time without the distracting parallel to Derrida:

The intuitive realist thinks that there is such a thing as Philosophical truth because he thinks that, deep down beneath all the ______, there is something which is not just one more _______ but that to which various _______ are trying to be "adequate." The pragmatist does not think that there is anything like that.

Rorty's point about "texts" might just as well be put in terms of "interpretations" (and indeed, he sometimes brings in Nietzsche's famous but cryptic remark (about there being no "facts" but only interpretations, itself often interpreted as a skeptical point) here for this very purpose). This suggests a construal in terms of the Wittgensteinian image: reasons, like interpretations, give out (i.e. without ever reaching a transcendentally sanctioned stopping point). Now of course, as this formulation suggests, Wittgenstein's own suggestion is not that "everything is an interpretation" (let alone a "text") but that there is a way of following a rule which is not an interpretation. This wording seems to put Rorty and Wittgenstein at odds. (Not to mention Wittgenstein and Derrida: see Martin Stone's take on this matter in "Wittgenstein and Deconstruction" in Crary and Read, The New Wittgenstein and "On the old saw, 'every reading of a text is an interpretation': some remarks" in Gibson and Huemer, The Literary Wittgenstein, where the target is not so much Derrida as Fish; see also Sonia Sedivy's contribution to the latter volume.)

But forget the wording for a minute and look at the image. Following a chain of reasons or interpretations is likened to digging down for foundations. Some of us think that at some point we must strike upon a final, self-justifying reason, or a final interpretation which, unlike the others, represents the real independently of our interpretive conventions, simply in virtue of how things are. At the end of the chain of similar things, there is a final thing which is different in kind from the others ("not just one more ________"), such that we can bring the process to a definitive conclusion. Others believe that such a thing is impossible, yet the demand is still coherent (indeed, constitutive of inquiry in its essential orientation toward truth).

Here Rorty and Wittgenstein are in agreement. There is nothing like what Wittgenstein calls "rigid rails," which determine the ultimate correctness of our procedures from "outside" them. Nor, however, is there any need for any such thing. That is, we need not, as in Kripke or Crispin Wright, see ourselves as depending on such frail reeds as community agreement to substitute for what we thought we needed "rigid rails" to do. (So it is more toward these two than to Rorty, let alone Wittgenstein, that Sosa's realist bile should be directed.) Instead of this qualitatively distinct regress-stopper (or, again, a lame stand-in for same), we have only more of the same.

But that's only half the story. Even if there is no qualitatively different thing at the end of the chain of reasons (and thus no metaphysical gap to be bridged), there may be what we might as well call a quantitative difference in the successive iterations. In particular, the shared assumption of both skeptic and dogmatist that we cannot stop (i.e., until we reach the "end" so construed), is making me more and more frustrated with this pointless demand. Finally I've had enough. I can't think of anything more to say to you. I can't make it any more obvious than it already is. I'm going home. No, there isn't any shining transcendental justification here – it's just another reason. But if I had known that (the former) was the only thing that would satisfy you, I wouldn't have bothered talking to you in the first place. Yet your early demands for justification were innocent enough.

When, as Wittgenstein puts it, we "hit bedrock" ("when my spade is turned"), it is not, as on some interpretations, that, although I wanted to keep digging in search of ultimate validation, I must throw my hands up in despair that I cannot get it, and that I am forced to accept a substitute. There never was any such thing to be had, and the demand for it is incoherent. Again, contrary to Sosa's assumptions, this is not a (characteristically) skeptical or relativist point, but in fact is aimed in both directions. Just as the skeptic rejects each successive reason as not definitive (because not self-justifying), as part of his argument that maybe things aren't as we think they are after all, the dogmatist takes that bet and digs farther down in search of something that he hopes will really clinch the case. He agrees that without such a thing, we won't have shown that things really are as we think they are. In other words, the skeptic is just a frustrated dogmatist – and a dogmatist is a self-deluded skeptic (as other skeptics will be happy to point out). A pox on both!

"Hitting bedrock," then, on this construal, is not after all an absolute prohibition on continuing to dig. After all, different people have different levels of patience in dealing with increasing obviously poorly (i.e. theoretically, rather than practically) motivated demands for even firmer (say, ideally firm) foundations. Some would have stopped as soon as they see the skeptical/dogmatist pattern; some go on until they really can't think of anything else to say. What Wittgenstein wants us to do is not so much to keep going until "bedrock" is reached – which is after all what happens only when things go wrong in this way – but not to keep going, or try to, even after it's reached – which makes no sense. [Note: last sentence updated (1/6) to restore missing "not"]

But now what about that verbal difference between Rorty (or the textualist) and Wittgenstein? After all, what Wittgenstein says in making what I have suggested may be the same point is not that "interpretation goes all the way down" but that "there is a way of following a rule which is not an interpretation." When we juxtapose these two slogans, it does seem (as it does to Stone) that the two are irrevocably opposed. But Wittgenstein is using the term in a significantly different way. The former slogan, as I explained it, emphasizes the qualitative continuity of the series of reasons, such that no endpoint of the demanded form can be reached. That none is needed is a separate claim, which is what makes this locution look skeptical (and which may be why Wittgenstein tells us not to make it look like "there's something we can't do").

Wittgenstein's locution, on the other hand, emphasizes a discontinuity in the series, one which is meant to explain why I (may) now leave off digging. But he needs the relevant continuity as well in order for the point to go through. This is what is supplied in his case by the fact that everything in the series is an instance of rule-following, of being directed by reasons. That the final one is "not an interpretation" does not invalidate Rorty's (or even Derrida's) "textualist" way of making the point (that is, the point about continuity, i.e. the lack of the particular sort of transcendent or metaphysical discontinuity demanded by both dogmatist and skeptic). For Rorty, the "ubiquity of interpretation" is the Davidsonian point that each context of inquiry (fixation of belief) is one of interpretation as well (attribution of meaning), such that we can never come to the end of interpretation and read a bare fact off of the world, to serve in our ideally objective representation of same. (Indeed, in the Davidsonian context, that "interpretation is ubiquitous" is virtually trivial; yet there is no reason to deny that I may consider my translation manual to be essentially finished, if not, per impossibile, guaranteed to be error-free.)

For Wittgenstein, on the other hand, the non-ubiquity of "interpretation" means instead that a series of reasons, or instances of rule-following, should not be thought of as one of successive "substitution[s] of one expression of the rule for another", such that "each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it" (§201) – and this because "any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support" (§198). That sort of series really would go on forever; and the remark about rule-following without "interpretation" (in this sense) is meant to show how we can break it off.

Even if Rorty's "textualist" point can be squared with Wittgenstein's in this way, though, it does perhaps suffer from an insufficiently compelling characterization (compared with Wittgenstein's) of how the series of "interpretations" is actually broken off. I described it above as the point where one simply loses patience with the skeptic's perverse demands (and the dogmatist's equally perverse submission to them). There's not a whole lot to say about such an occurrence – except to argue that the demands really are perverse, which removes us from the scenario of the unending series of reasons, without seeming to resolve it at any particular point. This makes it sound like the point about the "ubiquity of interpretations" really is a skeptical one, and that its consequence is that we must indeed continue the process without hope of resolution.

This of course fits in with Sosa's characterization of the textualist (and with many other critiques of Rorty) as more concerned with "continuing the conversation" – now removed, qua (supposedly) skeptical concern, from determining the truth about anything (Sosa: "the only point ... is to go on and on, without end"). I've already suggested how we can see this as the opposite of Rorty's point. Let me finish by saying how I think this misinterpretation leads to another, concerning Rorty's insistence that "the only constraints on inquiry are conversational ones" – that is, as opposed to ones coming from the alleged intrinsic nature of reality, demanding to be mirrored in an ideally objective manner. This is of course closely related to Rorty's endorsement of Davidson's "coherentism," where "only a belief [i.e. and not the world] can be a reason for another belief." (I won't go into why Davidson himself need not be held to the idealistic consequences of this doctrine, but I do think even he may have to give something up.)

Here again it looks as if we're not trying to get reality right (whereupon we can stop conversing, having reached agreement both with each other and with the world), but simply to have a good time at the dinner party (which we hope will never end). After all, do we ever decide anything during such conversations? And do we mind that we do not? But here again Rorty is making what is at bottom a potentially useful point in a characteristically lopsided way (threatening its utility, ironically enough). For what are "conversational constraints on inquiry"? There are several, but the relevant one here might be one according to which we are not perversely to ignore the obvious in order to press a purely theoretical point about the nature of knowledge – or, in Peirce's words, to "pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts" ("Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," in The Essential Peirce, p. 29; right before this, he claims that "a person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim [i.e to begin with universal doubt and build only on ideally secure foundations]"). This perverse dissembling is exactly what the skeptic does in demanding to "dig below bedrock"; and that is exactly what keeps the conversation stuck in a rut rather than continuing in a natural way (e.g. deciding the consequences of what we have just agreed on).

Thus, following "conversational" constraints rather than illusory metaphysical ones coming from the world (in) itself can be perfectly compatible with agreeing that something is the case and considering that question settled for now. And I think Rorty really did see this, and at least sometimes meant it that way; but of course I also believe he sometimes let his aversion to realism overcome his better judgment, and, yes, lead him to recoil into relativism and/or skepticism. Still, Sosa's snark rubs me the wrong way, and I hope we never see any more blanket dismissals of a philosopher whom history may yet judge to have been not significantly more wrong than any other great philosopher.

McDowell, Davidson and truth

James at spontaneity&receptivity, that new McDowell-centered blog I mentioned the other day, wonders about McDowell's possible adherence to something called "the identity theory of truth." Here are a few (okay, more than a few) thoughts on the matter.

Truth is obviously a central notion for philosophers. It has seemed natural, nay obligatory, to try to provide a theory or at least a definition of truth. That's what philosophers do, isn't it? Unless you think that truth doesn't exist – and how could anyone think that? – then the word refers to something, and the task of metaphysics (ontology) is to say what there is, and that includes truth. That's the thought, anyway.

So we have the "correspondence theory of truth," the "coherence theory," etc. The problem with these accounts, generally speaking, is that they take us one step forward and two steps back. So truth is "correspondence" between true statement and fact. What does that mean? What sort of mysterious metaphysical relation could this "correspondence" be? And how is it supposed to explain the concept of truth?

On Davidson's view, the concept of truth is "admirably clear" compared with anything we might use to explain it (or, as I like to say, perhaps to show off my Latin, theories or definitions of truth are necessarily per oscurius). Consequently, he is sometimes described as having "taken truth as primitive." I don't think this is quite right. It's true that one of the key moves in his early work on semantics is the switch from a) providing a Tarski-style theory of truth for a language in terms of T-sentences, to b) "holding truth constant and solving for meaning," giving the meaning of each of the quoted sentences on the left-hand side of those T-sentences in terms of their truth-conditions ("grass is green" is true iff grass is green). The result, then, is a theory of meaning, one which has the virtue (for Quineans such as the early Davidson) of being extensional (and thus in principle empirically verifiable).

But "holding truth constant and solving for meaning" isn't the same as "taking truth as primitive," even given Davidson's reluctance to provide a theory of truth. It's not that we can't say anything about this ineffable concept; it's that whatever we do say would not be intelligible to anyone who did not already understand the concept of truth (enough, that is, to know what a "definition" or "theory" or even "statement" is). It is in this sense that truth is "central."

Supposedly following Davidson (but not exactly claiming agreement – see "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth"), Rorty sometimes talks as if he endorses a "deflationary theory" of truth, which consists simply in what we like to call the "disquotational platitude": "p" is true iff p. (I really should use Quinean square brackets here, but you know what I mean.) This is supposed to put all that tendentious metaphysics behind us; but while it's certainly true that (say) the English sentence "grass is green" is true just because grass is indeed green, that doesn't mean the "deflationary theory of truth" is of any use to us. Rather than spurning the very idea of providing a "theory" for a concept that cannot support one, the "deflationary theory" makes it look as if we have indeed provided one, without in fact telling us anything. (See also, but without taking what he says there to be that important, Crispin Wright's argument, in Truth and Objectivity, that "deflationism reinflates.")

So what about the "identity theory" of truth? James points us to Stewart Candish's article at SEP, which he quotes as saying at one point that “One such pressure [i.e. in favor of this theory] is the wish that there should be no gap between mind and world: that when we think truly, we think what is the case.” And of course McDowell says things very much like this all the time (James has a typical quote from M & W), and for that very reason: that we not be misled into thinking that there is a metaphysical gap between mind and world, such that (say) we should attempt to construct over it a philosophical bridge. In McDowell's thinking (though he does not put it this way), that would be to try to build a bridge between the two peaks of Kilimanjaro, a (philosophically) suicidal undertaking.

As commenter Tom rightly points out, though, while McDowell is indeed willing to accept the "identity theory" in these terms (Tom points us to McDowell's replies in Willaschek, ed., Reason and Nature, even giving a link to a pdf), his position (as Tom puts it) "seems to be another 'quietistic' one, that the identity theory is a truism and not really a theory in the philosophical sense at all." Why bother affirming it then? McDowell now (p. 94): "Just that keeping it in view helps to prevent unprofitable philosophical anxieties from arising."

So far, so good – the "quietist" refusal even to take on the theoretical requirements seemingly foisted on us simply by employing the Cartesian picture is an important part of McDowell's conception of his Wittgensteinian heritage. But still, when such a "truism" is something of which we must be reminded, it seems that we might indeed take a close look (closer, paradoxically, than one at that of "truisms" usually rewards) at its content (or, better, its (overlooked or misunderstood) consequences) in our context. That is, we might look at it, for the moment, as if it were a "doctrine" or "theory" after all. (It is McDowell himself who reminds Rorty that, and I forget the exact quote, traditional philosophy has resources Rorty overlooks – that is, for combating the confusions of traditional philosophy itself.)

But it is not as the "identity theory of truth" that I think we should look at it. Here's what the SEP article says, in an introductory section, about this theory:

The simplest and most general statement of the identity theory of truth is that when a truth-bearer (e.g., a proposition) is true, there is a truth-maker (e.g., a fact) with which it is identical and the truth of the former consists in its identity with the latter. The theory is best understood as a reaction to the correspondence theory, according to which the relation of truth-bearer to truth-maker is correspondence. A correspondence theory is vulnerable to the nagging suspicion that if the best we can do is make statements that merely correspond to the truth, then we inevitably fail to capture the reality they are about and thus fall short of the truth we aim at. An identity theory is designed to overcome this suspicion.

This doesn't sound right at all to me. I'm not denying that people do indeed talk this way, as Candish claims they do. But it won't work for our purposes. For one thing, that's not the problem with the "correspondence" theory, or at least that's not the best way to put it. In fact I'm surprised that this slipped past the editors. What's that "nagging suspicion" again? The correspondence theory is an account of what it is in which the truth of true statements consists (assuming, of course, that it is indeed of statements that truth is to be predicated). When we speak truly, then, what we say "corresponds" to how things are; and historically it has been this account which has (e.g. as laid out in Aristotle: "to say of what is not, that it is not, or of what is, that it is, is true"), been regarded as virtually truistic. So when we do "the best we can," what happens is not that we "make statements that merely correspond to the truth"; what happens is that we speak the truth, which "corresponds" not to the truth, which we have, but to how things are.

So what's the problem? I presented it above, as Davidson does, as being that the idea of "correspondence" is impossible to cash out intelligibly (i.e., as an informative theory of truth). Candish presents it here as being an essentially skeptical worry (so that he should say that the worry is that even when we speak the truth, all we do is make statements that "merely correspond" to how things are). That's not exactly wrong, but it deflects attention from the real problem (i.e. with giving a "theory of truth" in the first place) to what is at least a slightly different one. Rorty does this too: he equates the idea of "correspondence" with the dualistic conception it is (usually) meant to illuminate (or at least manifest). That is, he essentially allows the correspondence theorist intelligibly to advocate a theory Rorty believes false or problematic: that when we speak truly, we make statements that describe a reality which is ontologically detached from, or transcends, anything to which it seems that we can be sure of having epistemic access. In other words, he equates it with metaphysical realism.

This makes it look like the skeptical difficulties into which that position "inevitably falls," as Kant puts it, are problems concerning the notion of truth, and that we need therefore to deny or redefine that notion, or downplay its importance. But it is important, and (as Davidson protests) even central – and it certainly should not be redefined as "that which our contemporaries let us get away with"! (How can someone who claims such inspiration from Davidson – even to the point of defining pragmatism in Davidsonian terms, as trying to do away with the scheme-content dualism – say such a thing??) [Actually I have an answer to this one...]

They are instead, these skeptical difficulties, due of course not to the very idea of "correspondence" – which in its truistic form says pretty much what we said before: that when we think truly, we think what is the case – but to its characteristically Cartesian metaphysical perversion. (So to rescue it, all we need do is, as Wittgenstein would say, to retrieve it "from its metaphysical to its everyday use.") At root, then, the problem here is the Cartesian picture itself, with its metaphysical dualism of subject and object. One aspect of our attack will then be, if perhaps not straightforwardly described as a metaphysical theory of our own, at least something which takes place on a characteristically metaphysical battlefield (as in Kant and Hegel; which partly explains McDowell's interest in these thinkers).

It is with this in mind – that our concern is with multiple manifestations of the same fundamental Cartesian confusion – that we should handle the concept of truth. That is, while it is true that one manifestation of that disease is a metaphilosophical compulsion to lay down specific requirements [see PI § 107 and environs, discussed below] or constructive tasks for our philosophical theories to fulfill, another head of that same hydra is the realistic/skeptical metaphysics/epistemology that complements that compulsion at the ground-philosophical level. In other words, I think we can kill two birds with one stone; or, better, show, by killing them with simply the one stone differently construed, that there was just the one Übervogel after all. Going back to our above context, this means seeing what does the work of what might otherwise seem to be (just another) metaphysical theory – a non-dualistic one – as at the same time the straightforward consequences of a mere truism, newly recognized as such. If the "identity theory" of truth isn't even seen as a truistic non-theory, as it seems Candish would have it, then we aren't left with either one of the two things I want us to bring together. It asks us to put just the wrong spin on the dictum "when we think truly, we think what is the case" – however true that dictum may be.

Okay, so let's get back to it. What, then, are the supposedly overlooked, momentous-but-not-necessarily-theoretical consequences of the "truism" that when we think truly, what we think is the case?

While he does resist the call for a "theory of truth," Davidson, unlike McDowell, does not put the point in the Wittgensteinian terms of the salutary effect of reminding ourselves of forgotten truisms. Instead, as I began to discuss above, he trades that purported obligation for his preferred project, a theory of meaning. For Davidson, as we shall see, truth is the transparent conceptual link between what we mean and how things are. We might say, then, that for Davidson truth is a semantic notion, not a metaphysical one. Indeed, a key article of Tarski's to which Davidson refers is called "The Semantic Conception of Truth." But (again) what Davidson says is best considered not w/r/t the form of its treatment of truth, but instead the content of that of meaning. It is when we understand the latter that we will be able to see the former in its properly truistic light (as in McDowell).

Davidson can naturally be read as a semantic externalist. But his externalism is not the metaphysically realistic kind, like that of Kripke et al. As early as "The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," Davidson says (let me quote the stirring conclusion):

In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth—quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. [Inquiries, p. 198]

Compare his criticism of Quine in "Meaning, Truth, and Evidence," in which Davidson makes a corresponding move. Here he rejects Quine's explanation of meaning and content in terms of the "firings of sensory nerves" (Truth, Language, and History, p. 47.) Instead of this "proximal" theory, Davidson substitutes a "distal" theory, where the relevant content-bestowing cause of our belief and/or utterance is (say) not the sensations which are (in fact, when they are) caused by a rabbit, but instead the rabbit itself. Just as the content of our thought is not so far removed from us as a potentially, or indeed inevitably, inaccessible world-in-itself, it is also not so near as the excitations of our sensory surfaces. As Davidson points out, "proximal theories, no matter how decked out, are Cartesian in spirit and consequence" (p. 58). The problem with seeing the senses as "epistemic intermediaries," he says, um, somewhere else, is that "we cannot swear them to truthfulness," and skepticism is again the unexpected result.

We must pass over the best part of Davidson's (later) account, which he explains in the often misunderstood terms of a semantic/epistemic "triangulation" among inquirer, interpreter, and world. Let's cut directly to the bottom line in this context. Once the idea of explaining meaning in terms of truth-conditions, and semantic externalism generally, is rescued from the imputation of a perverse Kripkean realism, it becomes clear how the semantic content of what we say can indeed be provided by the "external" world. At the same time, the world to which we answer (semantically and epistemically) is, in McDowell's terms now, nothing more independent of us, in the relevant sense, than "the world as it figures in our world view," a locution meant to fit with its Kantian/Hegelian counterpart in Mind and World, i.e. the "unboundedness of the conceptual realm," which can now (if not before) be seen as having no more idealistic consequences than the former did skeptical ones.

In other words, again, the thought is perfectly symmetrical. Let us not be distracted by the qualifications I have added; they merely reflect the holistic and contextual constraints on interpretation and inquiry revealed by the triangulatory account.

What X means (in my mouth at a certain time) is how things are when X (so construed in that context) is true.

By the same token, again, turning the thought around: just as what I mean cannot be conceptually detached from how things are, how things are cannot "transcend" my meanings. How things are can, of course, "transcend," in a perfectly ordinary sense, my knowledge; but that's different. All that means is that sometimes I speak or believe falsely, and sometimes I don't know how things are; and sometimes I simply don't know what to say. But even when I speak falsely, what I mean is how things would be if I had instead spoken truly. There's no reason to think that what I don't know must be thought of in this metaphysically transcendent way – even if there are things I can never know. That impossible sense of "transcendence" is a gratuitous Cartesian addition.

So while there is a certain sort of unobjectionable realism here, it cannot lead to the sort of skepticism we feared, due to the lack of the necessary metaphysical "gap." (Ignorance, even necessary ignorance, is not a metaphysically loaded state of affairs.) McDowell himself calls his view "naturalized platonism" rather than "domesticated realism," perhaps because of the plethora of similarly modified "realisms" of the past – "empirical" realism, "internal" realism, "external" realism, "scientific" realism, "pragmatic" realism, "common sense" realism – none of which have panned out, and some of which simply repeat the errors of metaphysical realism in a new register. And in fact this lines up with my own usage, as I tend to use the term "realism" only for the bad kind, and for the same reason. (Still, "platonism," ugh; and "naturalized," no less: double ugh.)

And if there is no gap, then there is no need for philosophy to construct theoretical bridges over them. Let me conclude by once again recommending the attempt to bring about in oneself a "Magic Eye" sort of shift in perception here. When Davidson is criticizing Quine, there is no question of (what would in that context seem to be) a limply quietistic retreat to the mere reaffirmation of non-theoretical platitudes. Davidson thinks Quine is wrong and he is right, about, well, meaning, truth, and evidence. He refers, after all, to the combating positions as proximal and distal "theories," and gives arguments (convincing ones, even) for the truth of the latter. But just as in "Very Idea," Davidson's ultimate opponent is the metaphysically dualistic Cartesian picture – the very one which, in the metaphilosophical context, it can be effective to combat by resisting the characteristically Cartesian temptations to "constructive" philosophy against which (McDowell's) Wittgenstein warns.

So seeing (a properly "theoretical" reason) why there is no metaphysical gap can be the same thing, in the end, as seeing a reason to reject the seeming requirement to cross a metaphilosophical gap: i.e., that between naïve pre-philosophical ("truistic") intuition over here and solidly grounded philosophical results over there. Even better: it is the very rejection of scheme and content which Davidson's theory of meaning and interpretation demands which allows us to see it, qua theoretical, as not inconsistent with (as if we had to choose a single "scheme"), but simply another way of grasping, the anti-dualistic confluence of mind and world which licenses rejection of Cartesian philosophical requirements. It is no accident that a favorite quotation of McDowell's from Philosophical Investigations (§95, excerpted: "When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact, but we mean: this—is—so") comes a mere page before Wittgenstein indicts those – including his former self (§114) – who would read the forms of our language back into philosophy as supplying an ideal which must be found in our philosophical accounts of reality as well; see e.g. §101: "We want to say that there can't be any vagueness in logic. The idea now absorbs us, that the ideal 'must' be found in reality. Meanwhile we do not as yet see how it occurs there, nor do we understand the nature of this "must". We think it must be in reality; for we think we see it there." §107 contrasts the actual use of language with the picture implied by the requirement (and vice versa); and soon we are into the heart of the Investigations' call for a rethinking of the entire idea of thinking philosophically.

Grated Romano

A recent post by Brian Leiter eviscerates Carlin Romano for his recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education noting Richard Rorty's passing. (The whole chunk of Romano is behind a sub wall, but in addition to Leiter's quotes, it's excerpted here and (differently) here.) Romano is mainly known as a book reviewer (for the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Nation, and other periodicals), but I'm pretty sure he has a Ph. D. in philosophy, and has definitely taught in philosophy departments (he had an adjunct position, and even his own office, at Penn when I was there). I wouldn't be surprised if Leiter knew this, but rhetorically at least, the post slams "Mr. Romano" as an empty-headed journalistic dilettant; the post's actual subtitle is "Total Ignorance of Philosophy is No Obstacle to Opining about Richard Rorty." Yikes!

Leiter's points against the poor man are generally correct, as Professor Romano has indeed tended (needlessly carelessly, in my view) to sacrifice accuracy (and often cogency) to his florid narrative agenda. But let's take a look. The issue about the usual practices concerning Festschrifte we may put to one side, as no one cares (for the record, I think of Rorty and his Critics as, well, a "... and his critics" volume more than as a Festschrift); but the next bone of contention is more serious. Here's the contested sentence:

The big chill began with [Rorty's] 1970s apostasy from positivistic analytic philosophy.

Leiter jumps on this slip like the wolf on the fold:

What in the world is "positivistic analyic philosophy"? Logical positivism was moribund by the 1970s, and Princeton in the 1970s was the fertile ground for new metaphysical theorizing, launched by Kripke and Lewis, which would have been anathema to positivists. The make-believe label "positivistic analytic philosophy" is the first clear giveaway that Mr. Romano has no idea what he is talking about.

At the very least, this is a giveaway that our author is writing for non-philosophers. Now of course this is no sin in itself; and a couple of posts ago I allowed as how non-philosophers might indeed, in a quick-and-dirty way, see many or even most philosophers as having failed to grasp something that, when stated as a philosophical thesis, looks trivial or false or both, or in any case not that helpful even if true (in that case, it was that the answers to Is there a world out there? and If so, do the differences and similarities we see in it come from it, from us, or both? are "yes" and "both" respectively). Here too, non-philosophers often do refer very generally to a certain philosophical tendency typical of those analytic philosophers who were Rorty's targets, even when we within philosophy see them (i.e. as well) as differing significantly from and indeed as opposed to each other. The confusion is compounded – again, unnecessarily, as Romano might very well have taken the opportunity to clear it up – when the term used to denote this tendency is "positivist." For Leiter is right that no analytic philosopher called his own view "positivist" for 50 years; the term functions within philosophy as labeling a tendency which everyone takes to have been overcome. Accusing fellow Princetonians Kripke and Lewis of being "positivist" is precisely what Rorty did not do, and rightly so.

Yet I have suggested that the terminological muddle conceals a similar point. For we should indeed see metaphysicians like Kripke and Lewis as targeted by Rorty in much the same way he (with Davidson) targets the residual positivism in Quinean empiricism (but see below for his ambivalence on this matter). How so? What, if not "positivism," do these philosophers have in common, which we would fail to see if we accepted Leiter's point at face value? Here Romano has a chance to save himself; but he boots it. For what he accuses analytic philosophers of (as an implicit explanation of the "positivist" jab) is a lack of interest in history:

Princeton philosophy professors and grad students at that time liked to act as if any work not mimeographed within the past three years, and circulated exclusively in the department, was probably too passé to be worth studying.

But of course this leaves Leiter with the obvious comeback:

Really? This would certainly come as news to [a whole list of historians of philosophy at Princeton in the 70's].

and allows him to make a valid, if delimited, version of Romano's (and Rorty's) point himself:

What is unfortunate about Mr. Romano's mindless polemic is that there is a real point that could be made here, namely, that some Anglophone philosophers really were (and are) indifferent to the history of philosophy, and that includes some of those at Princeton: but it is just a falsfication of the history to saddle the Princeton Department in toto with that attitude.

Maybe a look at Rorty's key break with the tradition, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, will help. Here's Romano:

In the shrinking Fach of academic philosophy — its territory truncated by psychology, invaded by literature, long ago reduced by natural science — Rorty challenged the theory of knowledge, the last remaining crop philosophy professors could sell to overlord deans and presidents, and declared it practically carcinogenic.

As Leiter points out in rhetorical puzzlement ("did Mr. Romano actually read the book, one wonders?"), this can't be right. Philosophy in 1980 was much more than epistemology. So what was Rorty's project in PMN? Leiter fills us in, turning to one of his two favorite contemporary reviews of the book, this by Jaegwon Kim (the other, equally dismissive, is Ernest Sosa's). According to Kim,

the argument of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is directed [not against epistemology specifically, but instead] against three very general doctrines, none of which are peculiar to (or even distinctive of) English-speaking philosophy in the 20th-century. Kim identified them (again, correctly) as [quoting Kim now]:

(1) The Platonic doctrine concerning truth and knowledge, according to which truth is correspondence with nature, and knowledge is a matter of possessing accurate representations.

(2) The Cartesian doctrine of the mind as the private inner stage, "the Inner Mirror," in which cognitive action takes place. The Platonic doctrine of knowledge as representation was transformed into the idea of knowledge as inner representation of outer reality. The Cartesian contribution was to mentalize the Platonic doctrine.

(3) The conception of Philosophy according to which it is the business of philosophy to investigate the "foundations" of the sciences, the arts, culture and morality, and adjudicate the cognitive claims of these areas. Philosophy, as epistemology, must set universal standards of rationality and objectivity for all actual and possible claims of knowledge.

Rorty does indeed attack these very general doctrines in PMN, and again Leiter's riposte is a natural one: that these doctrines (as the terms "Platonic" and "Cartesian" suggest, as does Rorty's explicit blaming of Kant for (3)) are not particularly "analytic":

Romano's polemic gives the wholly false impression that Rorty was simply overcoming a "recent" blip in the history of philosophy ("analytic" philosophy) in order to return the discipline to its "traditional" concerns. In fact, the opposite is the case: Rorty, like Marx (though for different reasons), would have us give up two thousand years of philosophical inquiry in order to do something else. He pitched part of that case as being against "analytic" philosophy, though the latter was far more continuous with the philosophical tradition than Rorty's (hard to pin down) alternative.

Leiter segues into his next point with another dismissive swipe at Romano ("Romano, however, has no actual interest in or knowledge of philosophy, even of Rorty's critique of it, so he moves right along"), but in fact his disagreement with Romano's Rorty is getting tangled up with his rejection of Rorty himself, which tends to dilute the former somewhat. If Rorty did "[pitch] that part of the case as being against 'analytic' philosophy," which he certainly did, then it is hardly "wholly false" to speak in terms of "overcoming a 'recent' blip in the history of philosophy ("analytic" philosophy)", even if the ultimate destination is not after all the status quo ante. If there is a mistake here, it is just as much Rorty's (as accurately portrayed by Romano) as Romano's own. (I smiled here at Leiter's characteristic tic, a substitution for argument, on points to win which it would require more than a vitriolic wielding of proof-texts or obvious counterexamples, of attribution of obscurity, a tactic which Leiter often deploys against McDowell, an "unclear" writer. Still, he's not exactly wrong here, that Rorty's positive views are "hard to pin down." Indeed, on certain important points he flat-out equivocates.)

The next quotation features another gratuitous use of "positivistic," as well as a reference to Rorty as "a red-white-and-blue Nietzsche," the latter of which Leiter surprisingly lets pass without comment. Later, though, Leiter objects when Romano suggests that analytic philosophers were threatened by Rorty's endorsement of such controversial thinkers as Wittgenstein and Heidegger. He sidesteps the point about Heidegger, pointing to other, less radical appropriators of his thought (Dreyfus et al.); but even if we hadn't seen it before we could surely predict Leiter's riposte w/r/t the other guy:

Wittgenstein is, of course, part of the philosophical canon throughout the Anglophone world, even if opinion is divided about the import and sometimes the meaning of his ideas.

Here again is the familiar "heads I win, tails you lose" attitude towards Wittgenstein's reception in contemporary philosophy. Do analytic philosophers ignore Wittgenstein? Heavens no, he's one of us! Russell's student, patron saint of the Vienna Circle, influence on Kripke and Dennett and Searle and Stroud! Don't you know anything?? Oh, it's your version of Wittgenstein you mean – well, opinions differ, you know – hard to say what he really meant, what with that obscure style of his.... But you "literary" types like that sort of thing, don't you....

We'll get back to this, as well as another look at the idea that "epistemology" is the target of PMN. Let's continue with Leiter's post first. What happens next is that both Romano and Leiter, in turn, take both opposing positions on whether Rorty was "marginalized." Romano: he was marginalized by the profession ... but he was discussed and honored the world over. Leiter: he marginalized himself by not responding to criticism ... and other philosophers besides Rorty were also discussed and honored the world over, so he's not that special. [Huh?] Leiter just falls down here; the idea that Rorty didn't respond to criticism is absurd. He didn't respond to the stupid criticism (duh, realism is so true, you, you relativist you), but not only are there detailed replies to essays in at least two books of criticism (the Brandom book and Saatkamp, ed., Rorty & Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics), many essays are entirely dedicated to responding to criticism (okay, some implicitly, but still, he engages the issues, or at least tries to): see Truth and Progress, which replies to Taylor, Dennett, Putnam, Brandom, McDowell, Davidson, and Michael Williams, among others. Plus there are a number of interviews and other things. Would that other people had done as well with him as he did with others (modulo, that is, the limitations in his view inherent in, well [heh heh], not saying about these matters what I would ...). Naturally the main issue here is that Romano writes as if Rorty had in fact won the day and rightly so (referring, in a phrase which Leiter naturally mocks, to "Rorty's devastating exposure [my emphasis – DM] of positivistic [there's that word again] philosophy's ahistorical, pocket-full-of-examples approach to knowledge"), while Leiter seems at one point to imply that Rorty as well as Romano falls into the category of non-philosopher (that is, non-actual philosopher). If Romano had characterized Rorty's views in exactly the same way, yet taken (mutatis mutandis) a negative view of them, I don't think Leiter would even have bothered to correct what are after all mostly minor and typically journalistic infelicities.

Let's get back to Mirror of Nature. It's certainly true that the three theses Kim mentions (above) are all targets in that book. But why does Romano say that Rorty thought that 1) all that was left of philosophy (analytic or otherwise) was epistemology, and 2) that he was set to deliver the death blow to it and thus to philosophy (or analytic philosophy) as a whole? Without going into great detail, we can look at Rorty's project in PMN like this (so this is my paraphrase, not Rorty's). At the time, the philosophy associated with the scientific revolution of the 17th century looked like (in the words of 1066 And All That) a Good Thing. The cure for metaphysics was a healthy empiricism. Descartes, however, bought the independence of the material world from (the need for) metaphysics at the unacceptably high price of substance dualism. This allowed the immaterial mind itself to remain a subject (no pun intended) for metaphysical speculation. Viewed from the empiricist angle, though, the salient thing about the mind is not its metaphysical constitution but the nature of its epistemic access to the external world. We are presented in experience with sensory data: how do we get from there – i.e., all we are entitled to, epistemically speaking – to knowledge? This is not metaphysics but epistemology.

Indeed, even today most people identify the Cartesian picture of the mind with substance dualism, and take empiricism (say in its Humean form) as the proper antidote, justifying a form of materialism to replace dualism. (This is why people like Searle can present themselves as "anti-Cartesian," i.e. materialists about the mind.) But Rorty sees the empiricist picture, which he naturally traces to Lockean foundationalism, and the epistemological problem of how to justify our knowledge (i.e., as an accurate representation of an external world our only connection to which passes through the senses, from which we must build said representation) as no improvement on Descartes. (Indeed, in the form of the skeptical problem it is Descartes.) So the supposedly "anti-Cartesian" movement from metaphysics to epistemology merely moves the bump in the rug from one place to another. A natural way of continuing the thought might then be that if (as Kim says) Cartesianism "mentalizes" Platonism, and empiricism "epistemologizes" Cartesianism, then if we can dissolve the empiricist problematic we may be able to achieve a final victory against Platonic metaphysics – the novelty in this thought being, again, that it was empiricist materialism which billed itself as the natural opponent, indeed the undertaker, of metaphysics. In this context, one in which it is qua metaphysics that epistemology is to be criticized, it makes sense to see contemporary metaphysicians like Kripke and Lewis as subject as well to Rorty's critique of what we might call the metaphysical realism-epistemological skepticism axis (especially given what he then goes on to say about "capital-P Philosophy" as what we must leave behind in order to usher in the pragmatist utopia). Again, though, calling this "positivism," as Romano does, is just odd.

I myself sing a version of this song (except for the part about the "pragmatist utopia," for which I substitute a Wittgensteinian acknowledgment of the ineradicable stain of original philosophical sin), although I have come to hear Rorty's own rendition as being importantly off-key in several ways. Ironically, given Romano's bizarre application of the "positivist" label to Rorty's target, one of the things holding Rorty back is his own ambivalence about his positivist heritage. The problem is not, I hasten to add, that he was ambivalent: we see an analogous ambivalence in Quine (Carnap's student and critic), and pragmatists cannot deny the positivist elements in their (our) own doctrine (Carnap, for example, sounds very pragmatist in spots – though not enough, for most people, to count as one himself). As an example of his own positivist sympathies, consider Rorty's near-pathological resistance to talk of (say) "believing the truth about how things are" in favor of consensus or "coping" or whatever – as well as, of course, the rank eliminativism on display in chapter 2 of PMN ("People Without Minds").

The other main problem (not counting his use of Davidson, about which I am myself ambivalent) was Rorty's attitude toward Kant. Kant figures in PMN, and Rorty's philosophy generally, as the poster child for a pernicious unpragmatic foundationalism. In bringing out the point about epistemology above, I elided Rorty's connection of the epistemic foundationalism of Lockean empiricism with the methodological foundationalism Rorty finds in Kant (philosophy as the "queen of the sciences" and all that). Leiter pounces on this as well, pointing out that for naturalists like Quine (i.e. an "analytic" philosopher if anyone is) philosophy is no queen but instead merely a "handmaiden" to natural science. (While true, this seems more like a point against Romano's sloppy summary than against Rorty himself; but let's not get into it here.) This use of Kant gives a superficially attractive symmetry to Kim's three theses above: Plato founds the discipline looking into Eternal Questions; Descartes mentalizes the Platonic picture, throwing the ball to epistemology; Kant rescues the tradition by cementing philosophy as the ground of intellectual culture generally (i.e., as the universal arbiter of intelligibility). I agree, although I guess not everyone does, that everyone telling this sort of world-historical story has to make narrative sense of the Plato-Descartes-Kant sequence. But if you do not bring out how Kant was just as much an anti-Cartesian as he was Cartesian, in the relevant senses, you make hash of the subsequent reaction to and development of that powerful anti-dualist force ("anti-dualist" in the most general sense). As only one example: why would Dewey want to "naturalize Hegel" if Hegel thought of his own task as that of finishing the Kantian project?

Plus you get Kant wrong. Leiter ends his post with a compound slam at Romano and Rorty, attacking Rorty for his, and I quote, "'bad' or 'fraudulent' scholarship" and Romano for his defense of it. This is an important issue (to tip my hand, I do think Rorty was too careless, and Romano says far too little to explain Rorty's practices), but let me provide the traditional ending for my post by promising to get back to that some other time.

Rorty links

More stuff on Rorty continues to pour in.

Here are a few from the Continental Philosophy blog, including (generally positive) remarks from Habermas and (generally dismissive) remarks from Roger Scruton.

Here is more comment from Crooked Timber, with a few links of its own.

Here's a good summary of Rorty's path (and a comment on his most famous book).

Some more personal blog reflections here and here.

Here's a 1995 interview.

Here's a brief respectful note on Rorty's passing (with a link to something with a bit more bite to it).

Richard Rorty, RIP

Via Crooked Timber (also Leiter Reports), I have just learned of the passing of Richard Rorty.

As I've mentioned several times on this blog, Rorty was a major influence on me, solidifying my inchoate but deep-seated anti-Cartesianism and turning me on to Davidson, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche (i.e., as possible allies in this context). As I read these other philosophers and my own views developed, I ultimately became dissatisfied with Rorty's particular approach toward (what I continue to see as in some way) our joint project. He even comes in for some pretty harsh treatment in my dissertation (esp. ch. 3 – yow!). But if it weren't for him I can't imagine where I'd be, philosophically speaking. Probably just another clueless epistemologist or something.

I met him once, when he gave a talk. I'd seen him a couple of times before but never spoken to him), but we didn't talk then. I later emailed him, on the urging of my advisor, asking him for an as yet unpublished paper, which he supplied immediately, with a few others to boot. He wrote that he admired the "audacity" of my thesis, but thought that the difference between Davidson and McDowell was too "abyssal" for them (i.e., their positions) ever to be reconciled. (I think he never got what McDowell was up to, seeing him as simply another outraged realist; but I also think Rorty's reading of Davidson makes that inevitable – one of its problems by my lights.) I never sent him my dissertation (not that I regret not doing so or anything).

As some commenters on the CT thread, myself included, have opined, Rorty was blatantly disrespected by a large segment of the philosophical community. Even now, many commentators seem to regard his willingness to challenge "common sense" as an excuse not to read him at all charitably (or even, in some cases, at all). Maybe Rorty does, ultimately, fall into relativism or instrumentalism. (That is, after all, my own verdict.) But it takes some careful engagement to show this; and I would argue that rejecting Rorty's position simply to defend "common sense" realism amounts at best merely to salvaging an unenlightening draw. And that's at best. Some purported refutations (I won't name names, not this time) are simply shameful – there's no other word.

My own advisor was a student of Davidson and a personal friend of Rorty's, so it is not surprising that he was (as I am now – and yes, the two facts are causally related), a sympathetic critic; but he did warn me not to write a dissertation on Rorty "if you want a job." As I've mentioned, I partly ignored this warning – partly from obstinacy, but also because to explain my views without engaging Rorty's would be impossible. Our differences notwithstanding – and perhaps this will motivate me to make them clearer – Rorty still strikes me as in some ways the most important pioneer of the second half of the last century. Would that more than a handful of us had had the courage to follow him where he himself was unable to go. If that makes any sense.

Here's a fitting quotation from the man himself, writing on his hero Davidson:

As befits a reviewer [i.e., of Davidson's fourth volume of papers, Problems of Rationality] who is also a fervent disciple, I have used the space at my disposal to expound Davidson's views rather than to criticize them. I think that most of his critics have failed to grasp the audacity of his outlook—to realize that he is calling for what he once referred to as a "sea-change" in philosophical thinking. That change would make much of contemporary philosophical discussion seem as absurd as scholastic philosophy seemed to Hobbes and Descartes.

Davidson had no taste for polemics, and he was too courteous ever to adopt a merely dismissive tone toward colleagues with whom he disagreed. But his ideas were as radically subversive of the traditional problematic of post-Cartesian philosophy as were Wittgenstein's.

Many who have no use for Wittgenstein have none for Davidson, and for the same reason: to adopt the views of either would be to dissolve problems which they have spent the best years of their lives trying to solve.

Wittgenstein is no longer much read in graduate philosophy programs, and perhaps Davidson too will cease to be assigned. But if these five volumes of essays do suffer the neglect presently being suffered by Philosophical Investigations, they will remain, like time bombs, on the library shelves. They will be detonated sooner or later.

With any luck (and subject to the by now familiar caveats), the same may be said of Rorty's work as well.

Rorty and his critics (warning: this is a long 'un)

[X-posted to The Valve; I imagine more and better comments will be over there (once everyone's had time to plough through it), so if you got here from somewhere else, be sure to check over there too.]

John [Holbo, head Valvester] has invited me to say a bit more about the (R. Brandom, ed.) Rorty and his Critics collection we both like, for those interested (the rest of you can go back to arguing about whether Nabokov was a perv, or a robot, or whatever). I was going to say "dragooned," but I must admit I'm always up for talking about Rorty and his critics (seeing as the latter group includes me, me, me). And I see that I have written a bit more than "a bit." Oh well.

The Brandom volume came out in 2000. There are of course a number of previous books collecting critical responses to Rorty, including this one from 1990, and this one, from 1995. These critics, however, tend to be unsympathetic ones, and unsympathetic critics are not only less interesting to begin with, but bring out the worst in Rorty, who replies (in the second collection) in kind, i.e., less with careful engagement than with more of the same and then some. There are two basic kinds of unsympathetic critic. First we have realists who want to remind us that "yes, Virginia, there is a real world" (an actual title, as I recall, although this particular essay is not included in either of these books), and that relativism is self-refuting (an essay in the former collection is called "Auto-da-Fe"). The second group of critics is made up of scrupulous scholars of American pragmatism, outraged at Rorty's "creative misreadings" of their guys (esp. Dewey; Peirce is not so much "creatively misread" in Rorty as he is dissed and abandoned), and in service of (what they see as) a facile postmodern relativism to boot (as opposed to Dewey's, and Peirce's, explicitly scientific and experimental approach; Peirce was a working scientist, you know). And of course we also have critics on Rorty's political left, frustrated with the "piecemeal nudging" of reform and downright conventionalist quietism they see in his self-attributed "postmodern bourgeois liberalism" (compare criticism of Gadamer, as well as Wittgenstein, on similar or at least analogous grounds).

Now of course none of these groups is entirely wrong (I will not discuss the third). In my view as well, Rorty has never given a completely satisfactory answer to the charge that his views are, if this is how we want to put the point, insufficiently realistic; and of course 1990 is ten years earlier than 2000. I also agree with the second group that when we are concerned with what Dewey was actually up to, we should turn to Ralph Sleeper or Thomas Alexander rather than Rorty; but that doesn't mean that Rorty's use of Dewey doesn't help illuminate his own views, which should be evaluated on their own merits, and not with a set of Deweyan or Peircean doctrines already in place, which would allow us to elide failure to get Dewey or Peirce right with failure to get the world right.

I should also mention two other books. The single best response to Rorty's early views (that is, his early pragmatist views, not his even earlier materialism) is the essay on Rorty in Thomas McCarthy's book (his being a Habermas scholar notwithstanding); and if you are interested in these matters but think the Brandom volume might be too advanced for you (it is indeed difficult; but so is philosophy), I recommend this recent collection, which shares some of the same virtues, but is intended as an introductory book. In fact I think I'll read it again after I finish this.

But our topic today is the Brandom book. I won't discuss every essay, but zoom in on a few important topics addressed by a few of them, and say why I think this book is more than just a good book on Rorty.


Everybody knows that Descartes believed that mind and matter were two different substances. That meant that our beliefs, qua mental states, were "in here" while the world they purport to represent is "out there," such that the former are true if they "correspond" to the latter. Substance dualism is a tough sell for various reasons, but even when materialism became the dominant view, the Cartesian conception of
mind remained (although now thought of as a state of the physical world). The dualism changed from one of different substances (subject and object) to one of different points of view (subjective and objective). Belief remained a subjective representation of objective reality; and so the metaphysical dualism remained, even if not in "substance" form.

Descartes did not invent the philosophical problem of skepticism, but simply put it in a new and pressing form (the ancient skeptics agreed that objective knowledge was impossible, but basically told us to chill out about it – just accept the appearances and get on with your life). The Cartesian conception of mind presents an intolerable paradox: either we have no knowledge at all of the "external" world, not even that it exists, or we must show that we can bridge the epistemic gap between incorrigible subjective states (sense data and the a priori) and the objective world beyond. But no such bridge seems possible. Yet it is impossible simply to give up our beliefs as unjustified and unjustifiable, even in the face of this problem.

The most common responses to this paradox are 1) dogmatism, i.e., continuing to argue (or just assume) that the gap is crossable, and trying to shift the burden of proof back onto the skeptic; and 2) relativism, i.e., admitting the gap is uncrossable, even inconceivable, leaving each subject with his or her own "truth" faute de mieux, as that's all there is. The first leaves us with a possibly hopeless and maybe even incoherent aspiration to ground our beliefs; but the latter leaves our beliefs ungrounded and even themselves incoherent qua belief about a world beyond the subject.

Rorty tries another tack. As he sees it, the problem lies in the idea that our beliefs need "grounding," if that means seeing them as achieving "objectivity," which he agrees is either impossible or incoherent (he goes back and forth as to which). Yet he agrees that relativism is incoherent as well. So how are we to know what to believe, if we can't just believe whatever we want? Sounding a bit like the ancient skeptics here, Rorty suggests that the only "grounding" our beliefs need is in our practices as they stand. That is, if it is inherent in the very concept of belief that it points beyond the subjective realm – which is what makes relativism incoherent (how can a relativist really be said to "believe" anything?) – and we cannot see it as grounded in an inconceivable "correspondence" to an "objective" world (as we cannot jump out of our skins, as if to attain a "view from nowhere"), then let us turn to a third, intermediate realm: the intersubjective.

I won't rehearse Rorty's arguments and slogans here (see his collection of mid-1980's papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, for his most concerted effort to defend them properly), but we should take a look at his often-misconstrued "ethnocentrism" (a word I'm surprised he uses for his view; but see his response to Clifford Geertz, who himself uses the word quite differently, in the above collection). The idea is that we avoid relativism by recognizing normative constraints on our beliefs (we can't believe just anything if we are to be rational), but also avoid realism by recognizing that these norms come not from "the world itself" but from our fellows. The norms of justification vary from culture to culture, so whose norms should we use? If we are not to derive them a priori, nor to abandon them entirely, we can only answer: ours. These norms are revisable, not dogmatic; and that process of revision is itself subject to an ideal of free and unforced agreement, indeed open-ended conversation, appropriately enough if one considers one's own "ethnos" to be that of post-Deweyan "wet liberals" committed primarily to democracy and the avoidance of cruelty (rather than the accumulation of ideally accurate representations of objective reality, or of fealty to the One True Faith, or whatever).

We should thus reject "representationalism," and see our inscriptions and utterances as just one more set of tools for coping with the world, as it is the subject-object dualism lingering in that picture which causes the endless cycles of realism and anti-realism which have characterized the philosophy of the last century (I almost wrote "this century," which is of course what Rorty called it at the time). In other words, again, we should turn away from the world (i.e., so considered, as the object of our subjective representations) and toward our fellow inquirers, as it is to them and not to it that we are obliged. We thus abandon "capital-P Philosophy" as manifested in the traditional problems, and turn instead to our practices themselves, without worrying about grounding them transcendentally.

This is what provokes Rorty's turn to Deweyan conceptions of democracy as the political arm of philosophical pragmatism ("The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in ORT), and his favoring of Gadamerian Horizontverschmelzung over the Habermasian obsession with somehow locating the key to an "ideal speech situation" in Critical (i.e., philosophical) Theory rather than implicit in practice itself. There is a back-and-forth-and-back between Rorty and Habermas in Rorty and his Critics, but that's not what I'm going to discuss here. (For some specifically Deweyan criticism of Rorty's treatment of Dewey, see Rorty and Pragmatism, the 1995 collection I linked above, esp. James Gouinlock's contribution.)

As the reference to Gadamer vs. Habermas might suggest, most critics see Rorty's "ethnocentrism" as just another kind of conventionalism, the left lamenting the loss of critical leverage against tyrannical consensus, and the right bewailing the loss of transcendent objectivity. In either case, they often suggest that Rorty's views sound suspiciously like Orwell's O'Brien, who as I recall actually cops to (metaphysical) "idealism," seeing "realists" like Winston as naive. Rorty has addressed the Orwell issue in "The last intellectual in Europe: Orwell on cruelty" (in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity), and in the Brandom collection James Conant has a typically lengthy and footnote-ridden article in response, which makes some excellent points, and is worth reading until you just can't get any farther, which should be about halfway through. Rorty defends himself surprisingly ably in response.


While Conant is the most detailed in his case for the view that, even in attempting to navigate a middle path, Rorty falls off to the relativist side (that is, he fails even by his own lights, a common charge among the commentators here), other commentators are more effective, even provoking unprecedented concessions which will, or should, or so I claim, be the focus of all subsequent Rorty scholarship, as I think Rorty would agree.

Bjørn Ramberg is the author of a fine book, Donald Davidson's Philosophy of Language: short, introductory, and yet substantive, although as a 1988 release it misses important developments in Davidson's philosophy since then. He also wrote the entry on hermeneutics at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; and while we're over there we might as well check out Jeff Malpas's article on Davidson.

"Post-ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson," Ramberg's article in Rorty and his Critics, is itself well worth reading, but it is Rorty's response that is the most compelling reading in the book. (Portions of this response, Rorty tells us, come from "Davidson between Wittgenstein and Tarski" (Critica 1998; Davidson's reply is available online here (scroll down) and on paper here; unfortunately, at the moment at least, the online archives at Critica go back only to this very issue, not the one in which the articles appear to which he is responding.)

Get this. "Ramberg," Rorty says in his response (p. 375), "has persuaded me to abandon two doctrines which I have been preaching for years: that the notion of 'getting things right' must be abandoned, and that 'true of' and 'refers to' are not word-world relations." More specifically, "it was a mistake on my part to go from criticism of attempts to define truth as accurate representation of the intrinsic nature of reality to a denial that true statements get things right" [374]. He explains this realization in the Davidsonian terms Ramberg had used – in particular, the later-Davidsonian picture of interpretation/inquiry (my slash) as a triangle with vertices of speaker, interpreter, and world. This is the key to Davidson, and for that reason I won't make a big deal out of my quibbles with the details of Rorty's long overdue mea culpa.

But let's at least look at them, and finish up by considering, in the context of three more articles in Rorty and his Critics, the effect of this doctrinal shift on one more key issue: the value of truth in inquiry. Consider Rorty's answer, immediately following the above concession to Ramberg [p. 375] to the following question he naturally asks himself: "How many of my previous positions – positions criticized by McDowell, Dennett, and others in this volume – am I now forced to give up?" That answer? "Not many. Here are some doctrines which remain unaffected:

"1. No area of culture, and no period of history, gets Reality more right than any other [as there is] no such thing as Reality."

Okay, but you won't like the subsequent exegesis, which still sounds antirealist.

"2. Pace McDowell, there is no second norm given us by the facts, in addition to the norms given us by our peers."

Here the brief explanation looks fine – except one thing: in the sense in which it is correct, there's no reason to take McDowell as disagreeing with it. I'll talk a bit about McDowell's article below.

"3. To say that we get snow mostly right [i.e., for Davidsonian reasons] is not to say that we represent snow with reasonable accuracy ... The holism of intentional ascription forbids any such talk."

Poppycock. Representation, like correspondence and objectivity, can be perfectly well domesticated. If you don't think we get snow right, then say so, and give us a better account. Perhaps naturally, after making such a big concession, Rorty is still concerned with minimizing what he is forced to say rather than with deciding what he still wants to say (or avoid saying).

"4. I [...] still maintain that there is no such thing as the search for truth, as distinct from the search for happiness [ = "getting more of the things we keep developing new descriptive vocabularies to get"]. There is no authority called Reality before whom we need bow down."

Yes, yes, realism is false. We get it. Note the dualistic form here, which is really what we should be jettisoning: our goal, he says, is not truth – that would be Realism! – but instead happiness (as if embracing the one still involved abandoning the other). Yet to be entitled to the Davidsonian picture, I would argue that we must reinstate truth – given its role there – as a goal. After all, if we want to know whether snow is white, doesn't that mean, given its meaning, we are ipso facto concerned with the truth of "snow is white"? Answer: sure we are. I'll say this again in a second.

So this is a big step for Rorty, but it seems he has not yet internalized this shift in doctrine (which, given all the rest of his views, may take some time to do). It is with this in mind that the other papers and responses should be read (some of which were written before 1998, but if Rorty wanted to change his responses he would have said so, either there or in the response to Ramberg).


In "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson vs. Crispin Wright" (1995, so pre-Ramberg; but this part seems to be something Rorty has not retracted (see #4 above); reprinted in Truth and Progress), Rorty elaborates his view in the following way (T & P, p. 39).

Some Davidsonians might see no reason why they too [i.e., as Wright does] should not say, ringingly, robustly, and commonsensically, that the goal of inquiry is truth. But they cannot say this without misleading the public. For when they go on to add that they are, of course, not saying that the goal of inquiry is correspondence to the intrinsic nature of things [i.e., metaphysical realism], the common sense of the vulgar will feel betrayed [footnote: for an example see such-and-such typical realist griping from Searle and Rorty's reply]. For "truth" sounds like the name of a goal only if it is thought to name a fixed goal – that is, if progress toward truth is explicated by reference to a metaphysical picture, that of getting closer to what Bernard Williams calls [in his book on Descartes, I believe] "what is there anyway." Without that picture, to say that truth is our goal is merely to say something like: we hope to justify our belief to as many and as large audiences as possible. But to say that is to offer only an ever-retreating goal, one that fades forever and forever when we move. It is not what common sense would call a goal. For it is neither something we might realize we had reached, nor something to which we might get closer.

So instead of saying truth is our goal, because we can't tell when we have reached it, Rorty would have us say instead that justification is our goal, not truth. Now as you may know Rorty has been trying to get Davidson to go pragmatist in one way or another for many years. So prepare yourselves for another landmark in RahC. Davidson has resisted (as well he might) any "pragmatist theory of truth" In which truth just is "the good in the way of belief" (James) or something "good to steer by" (Dewey); but in "Truth Rehabilitated" (RahC pp. 65-73), he finally joins Rorty in this "somewhat tamer, but clearly recognizable, version" (p. 67):

What is clearly right is a point made long ago by Plato in the Theaetetus: truths do not come with a "mark," like the date in the corner of some photographs, which distinguishes them from falsehoods. The best we can do is test, experiment, compare, and keep an open mind. [...] We know many things, and will learn more; what we will never know for certain is which of the things we believe are true. Since it is neither visible as a target, nor recognizable when achieved, there is no point in calling truth a goal. Truth is not a value, so the "pursuit of truth" is an empty enterprise unless it means only that it is often worthwhile to increase our confidence in our beliefs, by collecting further evidence or checking our calculations.
From the fact that we will never be able to tell which of our beliefs are true, pragmatists [i.e., those committed to the "pragmatist theory of truth"] conclude that we may as well identify our best researched, most successful, beliefs with the true ones, and give up the idea of objectivity. (Truth is objective if the truth of a belief or sentence is independent of whether it is justified by all our evidence, believed by our neighbors, or is good to steer by.) But here we have a choice. Instead of giving up the traditional view that truth is objective, we can give up the equally traditional view (to which the pragmatists adhere) that truth is a norm, something for which to strive. I agree with the pragmatists that we can't consistently take truth to be both objective and something to be pursued. But I think they would have done better to cleave to a view that counts truth as objective, but pointless as a goal.

Let's not get fuddled by Davidson's use of "pragmatist" here. He thinks of Rorty as a "pragmatist" in the sense he uses it on the basis of Rorty's endorsement someplace or other of the "pragmatist" reduction of truth to utility. But as we have just seen, Rorty endorses both of the last two sentences of this quotation (and is thus not a "pragmatist" in this sense, at least not by 1995). Even without the (later) concession to Ramberg that true statements "get things right," it would surely be pointless for Rorty to say both 1) that truth is not objective, but instead to be identified with utility, and 2) truth is pointless as a goal; for that would mean that utility is pointless as a goal, which is nuts. So in agreeing to (2), we lose any motivation to deny that truth is objective. After all, as Davidson tells it, the whole point of (2) was to improve on (1). But we still have a version of pragmatism here. Compare e.g. Davidson's invocation of the Theaetetus with Peirce's dictum that "the final opinion [his criterion of truth] does not glow in the dark." And of course realists won't want to save the objectivity of truth by giving it up as a goal.

But here's where it gets sticky. For neither do I. (Ironic, isn't it, that after all this time, Davidson and Rorty finally agree on a version of pragmatism ... and it's wrong. Ironic, anyway, for those of us who hoped it would go the other way.) And neither do Akeel Bilgrami [full disclosure: my dissertation adviser at Columbia, not like he necessarily agrees with me on anything besides this] and John McDowell, whose articles here are essential (but not essentialist; that's something else).


Here's my paraphrase of Bilgrami's argument (but don't hold him responsible; read it yourself). For both Rorty and Davidson, the key point that requires that truth not be a goal (almost wrote "gaol"; who's that, Foucault?) is that (as Davidson puts it) "we can never tell which of our beliefs are true" (because, again, they don't come with a "mark" distinguishing them from the false ones). But wait a second. There is indeed a truth in there somewhere; but that's not it. Let's be more careful. We are fallible; our methods of justification do not guarantee that the resulting belief is true. So every believer (that's everybody) has some false beliefs (he thinks they're true, but they're not; because truth is objective and doesn't depend on what we think). Each of us may be required to revise our beliefs in the future, as new evidence comes in.

So far so good. But you have to watch that first-person plural (the very aspect of "ethnocentrism" that was supposed to help us). I can say "we all have some false beliefs" because a) everybody else does, and b) I'm fallible too. But I can't say "I have some false beliefs just like everybody else," for Moorean reasons (Moorean paradox: both "it's raining" and "I believe that it is not raining" may both be true, but to say "It's raining, but I don't believe that it is" makes no sense on any remotely straightforward interpretation). Similarly, you can't say "I can't tell which of my beliefs is true." Try it.
-- How about this one? Is this one true?
-- Of course it is. Everyone knows that.
-- So you can tell. How about that one?
-- Maybe not.
-- Maybe not? It might be false?
-- Maybe.
-- So you're in doubt about it; it's not a "belief" at all. If you believe something, what can that mean but "I have checked this every way I know how (or at least every way I care to) and it is true true true"?

Moral: only on a third-person view of inquiry can we disavow the transparency (in this sense) of belief. From the first-person point of view, an inquirer's beliefs must be true. But that's what each of us is – a first-person inquirer. (Akeel says a lot more, but that's the gist.)

Let's just solve the skeptical problem while we're here. Here comes a skeptic now.
-- Okay, okay, you believe it (he says). But maybe you're wrong about what you believe; you're fallible, aren't you?
-- Yes, I am; I've made mistakes before.
-- So maybe you're wrong this time too.
-- We'll see, won't we. Did you have any of my beliefs in mind?
-- Well, how about this one? Is this one true?
-- Why yes. Yes it is.
-- But it might be false, say if this (admittedly unlikely) situation were the case.
-- It would be then; but we're not in that situation.
-- So you say.
-- Yes I do. Let me ask you: do you believe it?
-- Me?
-- Yes, you. Do you believe that belief of mine?
-- Of course I do. I'm a philosopher, not a moron.
-- So you agree it's true.
-- Yes, but it might not be.
-- It's true, but it might not be true?
-- Okay, wait. No, I don't believe it.
-- You don't? What are you, a moron?
-- No, I just, uh, it might be false.
-- So you say. But if I am to credit you with actually believing that it might be false – that is, that you don't believe it (i.e., in order to be a consistent skeptic) – then you have to act that way, or you're just flapping your mouth. So go ahead, act that way. Go on.
-- Um...
-- See, you can't – they'd lock you up. Congratulations, you're not a moron after all. But you have to give up your skepticism. Either you believe something or you don't; and if you do, you can't be a skeptic; but if you don't, then we're not talking about the truth of our beliefs; we're talking about what to believe. And that's just first-order inquiry, not philosophical reflection. Only Cartesians confuse the two, i.e., those who see philosophy as laying down requirements for our practices, not (as Wittgensteinians say) elucidating them or (as pragmatists say, with Peirce) making them clear (of course that's just what "elucidating" means, isn't it).

Now, where were we? Oh yes – we can too tell when our beliefs are true. To say otherwise is to give them up. But doesn't this require absolute certainty? And wouldn't that be dogmatic? Yes, it would; but all we need do is distinguish between degrees of certainty and types of certainty. Certainty is just the absence of doubt; but the absence of doubt is just belief. So when I believe something, I'm completely or entirely certain; but I'm not "absolutely" certain, if that means something like incorrigibly certain. And all I need to do to avoid that is to pledge to revise my views if new and persuasive evidence comes in; but I was going to do that anyway. So since we can indeed tell when our beliefs are true, there's no reason that truth can't be a goal after all. QED.

Almost done (for today). My favorite article here is McDowell's "Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity" (pp. 109-23). (By the way, that may seem short, but the pages are big, with close print. You would have gotten your money's worth with this book, if the price hadn't gone up to $35.99 in paperback.) Covering some of the same territory as Bilgrami, McDowell hits Rorty on the same points, but from a metaphysical rather than an epistemological angle. (This makes sense given McDowell's turn to Kant and Hegel.) As I've already mentioned, there's no point in denying that truth is objective, once we make the necessary pragmatic connection to our practices of inquiry and interpretation (although that connection cannot take the form either of reducing truth to utility or of giving it up as a goal). McDowell elaborates this point, in the context of showing Rorty's "pragmatism" to fail by its own anti-Cartesian lights (that's gotta hurt).

I won't go into the whole McDowellian picture, which would require a detour into Mind and World and a dozen or so of his most important articles (ooh, and the one in here), but let me just give you a taste (pp. 114-5):

Rorty's picture is on these lines. If we use an expression like "accurate representation" in the innocent internal [i.e., to our practices, as in Putnam] way, it can function only as a means of paying "empty compliments" to claims that pass muster within our current practice of claim-making. Now "the representationalist" finds a restriction to this sort of assessment unacceptably parochial. Recoiling from that, "the representationalist" tries to make expressions like "true" or "accurate representation" signify a mode of normative relatedness – conformity – to something more independent of us than the world as it figures in our world view [i.e., as an objective world – one, that is, that does not depend our our thoughts about it – so that what the Cartesian demands is fealty to a world more independent of us even than that; this distinction is McDowell's metaphysical analogue to Bilgrami's "first-person" epistemology, of which McDowell has his own variant]. This aspiration is well captured by Thomas Nagel's image of "trying to climb outside of our own minds" [The View From Nowhere; but of course Nagel – a sap, but a good philosopher nonetheless – thinks that this task, which we should all deplore as irretrievably Cartesian, is "philosophically fundamental"]. The image fits a conception, or supposed conception [there's the Wittgensteinian in McDowell speaking], of reality that threatens to put it outside our reach, since the norms according to which we conduct our investigations cannot of course be anything but our current norms. [...]
This conception is naturally reflected in just the sorts of philosophical wonderment at, for instance, the meaningfulness of language, or the fact that we so much as have an "overall view of the world," that Rorty tellingly deplores. In this conception, being genuinely in touch with reality would in a radical way transcend whatever we can do within our practices of arriving at answers to our questions. Thus a familiar gulf seems to open between us and what we should like to think of ourselves as able to get to know about. And the only alternative, as Rorty sees things, is to take our inquiry not to be subject to anything but the norms of current practice [i.e., as we have seen above]. This picture of the options makes it look as if the very idea of inquiry as normatively beholden not just to current practice but to its subject matter [that is, the idea that we want to "get things right," which Rorty is now willing to equate with "believing true sentences" – but only to abandon both as goals] is inextricably connected with the "Augustinian" picture [i.e. as so described in the opening sections of Philosophical Investigations] and the impulse to climb outside of our own minds. But a piece of mere sanity goes missing here.

Ooh, the Devil don't like that kind of preachin' (as Jimmy Swaggart would say, in rather a different context)!

Okay, that's enough for now. Putnam and Dennett have short bits here, and there are also articles from Jacques Bouveresse, Michael Williams, Barry Allen, and the editor himself, all worth reading (but with less gold, by my lights). Check it out!

Thanks to all for reading this far, if you did, and thanks to John for the invite. I'll take questions if you got 'em.