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

by Richard Rorty

But Quine’s distrust of privileged representations leads him to distrust all representations, to distrust the “‘idea’ idea” itself. Yet ideas in the mind are no more or less disreputable than neurons in the brain, mitochondria in the cells, passions in the soul, or moral progress in history. The damage done by the “‘idea’ idea” in modern philosophy was done by the pseudo-explanation of epistemic authority through the notion of “direct acquaintance” by the “Eye of the Mind” with mental entities such as sense-data and meanings. But this is epistemological damage, not ontological damage. If I am right in the criticisms of Quine I have been making (and in the general line I am taking in this book) the only way in which one can do ontological damage is to block the road of inquiry by insisting on a bad old theory at the expense of a good new theory. It may be claimed that nineteenth-century introspectionist psychology did briefly block the road of inquiry, but even if that were so it would be quite a different thing from saying that the Geisteswissenschaften are preventing us from seeing reality plain, or that their shady ontology must be tolerated for the sake of practical ends. The lesson of epistemological behaviorism is just that there is no “philosophical point” to be made about translation or intentionality, nor about any other “ontological” subject. Rather, it helps us see that explanatory power is where we find it, and that the philosophical attempt to distinguish betwe...

November 16, 2020. Page 209.