Epistemology Notes on Richard Rorty's Ideas

Richard Rorty - Epistemology

The Shift in Understanding Truth

• Historical Context: Around two centuries ago, the concept of truth as made rather than found gained traction in Europe.
  • The French Revolution demonstrated the potential for rapid and radical societal change, influencing intellectuals to embrace utopian politics.
  • Utopian politics focused on creating new societal forms, disregarding traditional constraints like divine will or human nature.
• Romantic Poets: Contemporaneously, Romantic poets redefined art as self-creation rather than imitation.
  • They elevated art to a position traditionally held by religion, philosophy, and, more recently, science—a status the Enlightenment had championed for science.
  • The impact of novels, poems, plays, paintings, and sculptures on social movements has reinforced the Romantics' claim.
• Cultural Hegemony: These combined tendencies have achieved cultural dominance.
  • Contemporary intellectuals view questions of purpose and meaning in life as belonging to art and politics, rather than traditional fields like religion, philosophy, or science.

The Philosophical Schism

• Enlightenment Philosophers: Some philosophers remain aligned with Enlightenment ideals, emphasizing the importance of science.
  • They see an ongoing conflict between reason (science) and forces that view truth as constructed, not discovered.
  • Science is considered the exemplary human activity, discovering objective truth.
  • The idea of "making truth" is dismissed as metaphorical and misleading.
  • Politics and art are seen as domains where "truth" is not applicable.
• Philosophers Embracing the Made Truth: Other philosophers see science as merely a tool of technology, offering no moral or spiritual guidance.
  • They align themselves with utopian political thinkers and innovative artists.
  • They view science as one of many human activities, not necessarily encountering a "hard," nonhuman reality.
  • Scientists, like poets and political thinkers, invent descriptions of the world that serve specific purposes.
  • No description can be considered an accurate representation of the world as it is in itself; the very idea is deemed pointless.

The Emergence of Philosophy as a Discipline

• Historical Contingency: If the pro-science philosophers had been the only kind, philosophy might not have emerged as a distinct discipline.
• German Idealism: Philosophy as we know it is only about 200 years old, arising from German idealists’ attempts to contextualize science and articulate the notion that humans create truth.
• Kant and Hegel:
  • Kant sought to confine science to the realm of phenomenal (second-rate) truth.
  • Hegel viewed natural science as describing spirit not fully conscious of itself, thus promoting art and political revolution as offering first-rate truth.

Limits of German Idealism

• Incomplete Repudiation: Kant and Hegel only partially rejected the idea of truth as "out there."
  • They saw the empirical world as constructed by the mind but believed the mind/spirit had an intrinsic nature knowable through non-empirical philosophy.
  • For them, only scientific truth was made; philosophical truth about the mind was still discovered.
• Radical Repudiation Needed: A complete rejection of the idea that anything (mind or matter) has an intrinsic nature is necessary.
  • Idealists conflated the idea that nothing has an intrinsic nature with the notion that humans cause the spatiotemporal world.
  • It is critical to distinguish between the world being "out there" (i.e., not our creation) and truth being "out there."

The Nature of Truth and Language

• World vs. Descriptions:
  • The world exists independently of our minds, and most things are caused by factors excluding human mental states.
  • Truth, however, is tied to sentences within human languages, which are human creations.
  • Truth cannot exist independently of the human mind because sentences cannot.
  • The world is external, but descriptions of it are not. Only descriptions can be true or false.
• Critique of Pre-Human Language: The idea of truth being "out there" stems from a view of the world created by a being with its own language.
  • We should avoid the notion of a nonhuman language and the confusion that the world causes us to believe a sentence is true with the idea that the world divides itself into "facts."
• Avoiding Capitalization of Truth: Clinging to self-subsistent facts leads to equating "Truth" with God or God's project, as in "Truth is great, and will prevail."

Vocabularies and Language Games

• Sentences vs. Vocabularies: Conflation is easier when focusing on individual sentences rather than entire vocabularies.
  • The world influences our justification for holding a belief (e.g., "Red wins"), but this doesn't mean a nonlinguistic state of the world is truth.
• Alternative Language Games: Considering alternative language games (Athenian politics vs. Jefferson’s, Saint Paul vs. Freud, Newton vs. Aristotle, Blake vs. Dryden) makes it difficult to argue that the world decides which is better.
  • When “description of the world” shifts from sentences within language games to language games as wholes, the idea that the world decides which descriptions are true loses meaning.
  • It's difficult to believe that a vocabulary is already out there, waiting to be discovered.

The World Does Not Speak

• Focus on Vocabularies: Attention to vocabularies (as promoted by intellectual historians like Kuhn and Skinner) shows that the predictive power of Newton’s vocabulary does not mean the world "speaks Newtonian."
  • The world doesn't dictate which language games to play; other humans do.
  • The world can cause us to hold beliefs once we have a language, but it can't propose a language.

Criteria and Choice of Vocabulary

• Beyond Objective/Subjective: The realization that the world doesn't tell us which language games to play shouldn't lead to the conclusion that the decision is arbitrary or an expression of inner feelings.
  • Criteria and choice are irrelevant when changing language games.
• Cultural Shifts: Europe didn't decide to accept Romantic poetry, socialist politics, or Galilean mechanics through an act of will or argument.
  • Instead, Europeans gradually abandoned certain words and adopted others.
• The Copernican Revolution: As Kuhn argues, Europeans didn't decide the Earth wasn't the center of the universe based on telescopic observations; they gradually adopted a way of speaking that took these theses for granted.

Intrinsic Nature and the Self

• Temptation to Look for Criteria: The temptation to find criteria for decision-making stems from the idea that the world or self possesses an intrinsic nature or essence.
  • This is the result of privileging one language among many habitual descriptions.
• Vocabularies-as-Wholes: As long as we believe there's a relationship like "fitting the world" or "expressing the real nature of the self," we'll seek criteria to identify vocabularies with this feature.
• Indifference of Reality: If we accept that reality is mostly indifferent to our descriptions and that the self is created by vocabulary use, we'll assimilate the Romantic idea that truth is made rather than found.
  • The truth of this claim is that languages are made, and truth is a property of linguistic entities.

Role of the Philosopher

• Philosophical Humility: A philosopher sympathetic to this idea, who sees himself as auxiliary to the poet rather than the physicist, should avoid implying that his philosophy is inherently correct or corresponds to reality.
  • Correspondence brings back the idea of the world or the self having an intrinsic nature.

Explanations and Jargon

• Empty Compliments: Explaining the success of science or political liberalism by "fitting the world" or "expressing human nature" is like explaining opium's effects by its dormitive power.
  • Saying Freud's vocabulary captures truth about human nature or Newton's about the heavens is an empty compliment paid to those whose novel jargon we find useful.
• Intrinsic Nature as a Problematic Term: Saying there's no such thing as intrinsic nature isn't to say it's surprisingly extrinsic; it's to say the term is more trouble than it's worth.

Dropping the Idea of Truth

• Shifting Focus: Dropping the idea of truth as waiting to be discovered is not discovering that truth doesn't exist but rather ceasing to see truth as a topic of philosophical interest.
  • "The nature of truth" is unproductive, like "the nature of man" and "the nature of God," but unlike "the nature of the positron."
• Recommendation: This claim about profitability is a recommendation to say less and observe the results.

The Philosopher's Task

• Beyond Arguments: Philosophers shouldn't be asked to argue against the correspondence theory of truth or the idea of "intrinsic nature."
  • Arguments against familiar vocabularies are expected to use those vocabularies, showing inconsistencies within them, which is impossible.
  • Such arguments are parasitic on claims that a better vocabulary is available.
• Entrenched vs. New Vocabularies: Interesting philosophy is a contest between an entrenched, problematic vocabulary and a half-formed, promising new vocabulary.
  • This is similar to the "method" of utopian politics or revolutionary science.
  • The method involves redescribing things until a linguistic pattern emerges, tempting the next generation to adopt it and seek new forms of behavior.

Holistic and Pragmatic Approach

• Try Thinking This Way: This philosophy works holistically and pragmatically, suggesting alternative perspectives and ignoring traditional questions by substituting new ones.
  • It doesn't claim to do the same things better but suggests stopping those things and doing something else.
  • It doesn't argue based on criteria shared by old and new language games, as the new language would lack such criteria.

Davidson and Language

• Language as Communication: Davidson's account views linguistic communication without the idea of language as an intermediary between self and reality or as a barrier between people.
  • Saying a language was inappropriate for dealing with something (e.g., stars or passions) means one can handle it easier with a new language.
• Knowing Language vs. Knowing the World: Trouble between communities due to hard-to-translate words means that one community's behavior is hard to predict for the other.
  • As Davidson says, we've abandoned the standard notion of language and erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing the world.
  • There are no rules for arriving at passing theories that work, just as there are no rules for creating new theories to cope with new data.
  • There's no such thing as a language if it's like what philosophers supposed.
  • We should abandon the idea of a shared structure mastered by language users and stop explaining communication by appealing to conventions.

Metaphor and History

• History of Metaphor: Seeing the history of language, arts, sciences, and morals as the history of metaphor means dropping the idea of minds or languages becoming better suited to express meanings or represent facts.
  • The idea that language has a purpose vanishes when the idea of language as a medium vanishes.

Non-Teleological View of Intellectual History

• Triumph of Modern Thought: A culture that renounced both the idea of language having a purpose and the idea of language as a medium would represent the triumph of modern thought since German idealism, Romantic poetry, and utopian politics.
• Analogy to Natural Selection: A non-teleological view of intellectual history does for culture what Mendelian mechanics did for evolution.
  • Mendel showed mind as something that just happened, not the point of the process.
  • Davidson lets us see language/culture history as Darwin saw coral reefs.
  • Old metaphors die off into literalness, serving as platforms for new metaphors.

Contingency

• Contingent Language and Culture: This analogy makes science and culture in 20th-century Europe the result of contingencies.
  • Our language and culture are as contingent as orchids and anthropoids—results of mutations finding niches.
• Metaphoric Redescriptions: We must see scientific revolutions as metaphoric redescriptions (as Mary Hesse suggests) rather than insights into intrinsic nature.
  • We must resist seeing contemporary physical/biological science as closer to "the things themselves" than cultural criticism.
  • Causal forces producing talk of DNA or the Big Bang are of a piece with those producing talk of "secularization" or "late capitalism."
  • These factors have made some things subjects of conversation and projects possible.

Nietzsche and Metaphor

• Mobile Army of Metaphors: This chimes with Nietzsche’s definition of truth as "a mobile army of metaphors."
• Tools for New Actions: It also echoes the idea that individuals like Galileo, Hegel, and Yeats developed new vocabularies, giving them tools to do things previously unimaginable.

Literal vs. Metaphorical

• Davidson's View: We need to see the literal vs. metaphorical distinction as Davidson does: not two sorts of meaning/interpretation, but familiar vs. unfamiliar uses of noises and marks.
  • Literal uses can be handled via old theories about what people will say.
  • Metaphorical use prompts new theory development.

Metaphor as Effect, Not Meaning

• Metaphor as a Tool: Davidson denies metaphors have meanings distinct from their literal ones. Metaphors, by definition, don't have a place in a language game.
  • Tossing a metaphor into a conversation is like making a face, showing a picture, or slapping someone: producing effects, not conveying messages.
  • It's inappropriate to respond with "What are you trying to say?"
  • Using familiar words in unfamiliar ways doesn't mean it has a meaning. Stating that meaning would require finding a familiar sentence instead.

Unparaphrasability of Metaphor

• Unsuitability of Familiar Sentences: The unparaphrasability of metaphor is the unsuitability of any familiar sentence for one’s purpose.
  • Uttering a sentence without a fixed place in a language game is neither true nor false, not a "truth-value candidate" (per Ian Hacking).
  • It's not confirmable/disconfirmable but can only be savored or spat out.

Becoming Literal

• Habitual Use: If savored, a metaphor may be repeated and become habitual, acquiring a familiar place in the language game and ceasing to be a metaphor.
  • It becomes a "dead metaphor," just another literally true/false sentence.
  • Our theories about linguistic behavior will suffice to cope with it unthinkingly.

Views of Metaphor: Platonist, Positivist, Romantic

• Reductionist View: Platonists and positivists share a reductionist view: metaphors are either paraphrasable or useless.
• Expansionist View: Romantics have an expansionist view: metaphor is mysterious and wonderful, attributed to the "imagination."
• Divergent Focus: Metaphor seems irrelevant to Platonists/positivists; the literal seems irrelevant to Romantics.
• Hidden Realities:
  • Platonists/positivists: Language represents a hidden reality outside us.
  • Romantics: Language expresses a hidden reality within us.

Positivist, Romantic, and Nietzschean History

• Positivist History: Language gradually shapes itself around the contours of the physical world.
• Romantic History: Language gradually brings Spirit to self-consciousness.
• Nietzschean History: Language (and Davidsonian philosophy of language) sees language as evolution: blindly killing off old forms.

Galileo and Yeats: Re-envisioned

• Scientists and Poets as Tool-Users:
  • Positivist: Galileo made a discovery.
  • Davidsonian: Galileo hit upon a tool that worked better.
  • Romantic: Yeats expressed something nobody had before.
  • Davidsonian: Yeats found tools to write poems unlike his precursors.
• Shifting Interests: Once we saw what Galileo's vocabulary did, we lost interest in Aristotelian vocabulary. After Yeats, we were less interested in Rossetti.

Philosophers: Dissolving Problems

• Strong Philosophers: Strong philosophers like Hegel and Davidson dissolve inherited problems rather than solve them.
• Changing Talk, Changing Being: Substituting dialectic for demonstration or dropping the correspondence theory of truth isn't discovering something about "philosophy" or "truth" but changing how we talk and what we want to do.
  • In a Nietzschean view (dropping the reality/appearance distinction), changing how we talk changes what we are.

Nietzsche and Self-Creation

• God is Dead: Nietzsche's statement that "God is dead" means we serve no higher purposes.
  • The Nietzschean substitution of self-creation for discovery replaces a picture of humanity approaching the light with one of generations treading each other down.
• Metaphorical Problems: A culture literalizing Nietzschean metaphors would see philosophical problems as temporary as poetic problems and see no problems binding generations into "humanity."

Conclusion

• The Poet as Vanguard: Seeing human history as the history of successive metaphors would portray the poet (maker of new words) as the vanguard of the species.
• Beyond Language: The world doesn't give us criteria for choosing metaphors; we can only compare languages/metaphors with each other, not with something beyond language called "fact."
• The Book of Nature: Philosophers of language and science show the sterility of efforts to define "the way the world is" or "fitting the facts" and explain why a Galilean vocabulary enables better predictions than an Aristotelian one, not because the book of nature is written in math.

Historical Context

• Similarities Between Ages: Intellectual historians link these philosophical arguments to the similarities/dissimilarities between the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason.
• Intrinsic Nature: The idea that the world/self has an intrinsic nature is a remnant of viewing the world as a divine creation, made by someone with a language describing their project.

Wittgenstein and Language

• De-divinizing the World: Dropping the idea of languages as representations and embracing a Wittgensteinian approach would de-divinize the world.
• Truth Depends on Humans: We can then fully accept that truth is a property of sentences, which depend on vocabularies, which humans make.

Resisting Hubris

• Respect for Fact: As long as we see "the world" as something to respect (person-like, with a preferred description), we'll insist that philosophical accounts of truth save the "intuition" that truth is "out there."
• Priestly Function: This intuition reflects seeing scientists/philosophers/poets as having a priestly function, connecting us to a transcendent realm.

Challenging Intuitions

• Reactionary Slogan: The claim that a doctrine must accommodate our intuitions is a reactionary slogan and begs the question.
  • We have no prelinguistic consciousness that language needs to satisfy, only dispositions to use ancestral language.
  • Unless we have "Heideggerian nostalgia," we'll see our intuitions as platitudes or old tools without replacements.

Story of Worship

• Shifting Objects of Worship: Once we needed to worship something beyond the visible world; in the 17th century, we substituted love of truth for love of God, treating the scientific world as quasi-divine. In the 18th, we substituted self-love, treating our spiritual/poetic nature as quasi-divine.

The Goal: Contingency

• Embracing Chance: Blumenberg, Nietzsche, Freud, and Davidson suggest we stop worshiping and treat everything (language, conscience, community) as a product of time and chance.
• Freud's Influence: Reaching this point means treating chance as worthy of determining our fate (Freud).
• Contingency: Freud, Nietzsche, and Bloom do for conscience what Wittgenstein and Davidson do for language: exhibit its sheer contingency.