Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

Having reverted yet again to the community as source of epistemic authority, I shall end this section by reemphasizing that even the nonconceptual, nonlinguistic knowledge of what a raw feel is like is attributed to beings on the basis of their potential membership in this community. Babies and the more attractive sorts of animal are credited with “having feelings” rather than (like photoelectric cells and animals which no one feels sentimental about—e.g., flounders and spiders) “merely responding to stimuli.” This is to be explained on the basis of that sort of community feeling which unites us with anything humanoid. To be humanoid is to have a human face, and the most important part of that face is a mouth which we can imagine uttering sentences in synchrony with appropriate expressions of the face as a whole.20 To say, with common sense, that babies and bats know what pain and red are like, but not what the motion of molecules or the change of seasons is like, is just to say that we can fairly readily imagine them opening their mouths and remarking on the former, but not on the latter. To say that a gadget (consisting of a photoelectric cell hitched up to a tape recorder) which says “red!” when and only when we shine red light on it doesn’t know what red is like is to say that we cannot readily imagine continuing a conversation with the gadget. To say that we just don’t know whether androids who have been manufactured out of protoplasm (and are all ready to go except f...

November 16, 2020. Page 190.