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

by Richard Rorty

For the remainder of this chapter, however, I shall try to support my claim that we should drop (P) and thus be neither dualists, skeptics, behaviorists, nor “identity-theorists.” I do not know how to argue against (P) directly, since the claim that incorrigible knowledge is a matter of being presented with a phenomenal property is not so much a claim as an abbreviation for an entire theory—a whole set of terms and assumptions which center around the image of mind as mirroring nature, and which conspire to give sense to the Cartesian claim that the mind is naturally “given” to itself. It is this image itself which has to be set aside if we are to see through the seventeenth-century notion that we can understand and improve our knowing by understanding the workings of our mind. I hope to show the difference between setting it aside and adopting any of the positions which presuppose this image. So the remainder of this chapter is devoted to behaviorism, skepticism, and the mind-body identity theory, in an attempt to differentiate my position from each of these. In the concluding section of the chapter—“Materialism without Identity”—I attempt to say something more positive, but this attempt needs to be linked up with the discussion of other “mind-body problems” in chapter one in order to appear plausible.

September 18, 2020. Not bad yet. Page 98. Rorty's claim. What is P?