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

by Richard Rorty

Let me now remind the reader of the course I have followed in this chapter. In sections 1–2 I argued that we could make no sense of the notion of “mental entities” as a distinct ontological genus without invoking the notion of “phenomenal entities” such as pains, entities whose being was exhausted by the single property of, for example, painfulness. I claimed that the real problem was not to abjure such hypostatized universals but to explain why anyone had taken them seriously, and how they came to seem relevant to discussions of the nature of personhood and of reason. I hope that sections 3–6 have given an idea of how I think these historical questions can be answered (although I am painfully aware of the lacunae in the story I have told). My answer to the question “Why do we tend to lump the intentional and the phenomenal together as ‘the mental’?” is that Descartes used the notion of the “incorrigibly known” to bridge the gap between them. So I now need to spell out more fully my own anti-Cartesian, Wittgensteinian, view of the nature of “our privileged access to the mental.” In the following chapter, therefore, I put aside personhood and reason, and discuss consciousness almost exclusively. I shall try to show that the purportedly metaphysical “problem of consciousness” is no more and no less than the epistemological “problem of privileged access,” and that once this is seen questions about dualism versus materialism lose their interest.

09-03-2020. 69.