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

by Richard Rorty

The simplest way to describe the common features of Quine’s and Sellars’s attacks on logical empiricism is to say that both raise behaviorist questions about the epistemic privilege which logical empiricism claims for certain assertions, qua reports of privileged representations. Quine asks how an anthropologist is to discriminate the sentences to which natives invariably and wholeheartedly assent into contingent empirical platitudes on the one hand and necessary conceptual truths on the other. Sellars asks how the authority of first-person reports of, for example, how things appear to us, the pains from which we suffer, and the thoughts that drift before our minds differs from the authority of expert reports on, for example, metal stress, the mating behavior of birds, or the colors of physical objects. We can lump both questions together and simply ask, “How do our peers know which of our assertions to take our word for and which to look for further confirmation of?” It would seem enough for the natives to know which sentences are unquestionably true, without knowing which are true “by virtue of language.” It would seem enough for our peers to believe there to be no better way of finding out our inner states than from our reports, without their knowing what “lies behind” our making them. It would also seem enough for us to know that our peers have this acquiescent attitude. That alone seems sufficient for that inner certainty about our inner states which the tradition has...

November 29, 2020. Page 174.