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

by Richard Rorty

One philosophical method which will do no good at all is “analysis of meanings.” Everybody understands everybody else’s meanings very well indeed. The problem is that one side thinks there are too many meanings around and the other side too few. In this respect the closest analogy one can find is the conflict between inspired theists and uninspired atheists. An inspired theist, let us say, is one who “just knows” that there are supernatural beings which play certain explanatory roles in accounting for natural phenomena. (They are not to be confused with natural theologians—who offer the supernatural as the best explanation of these phenomena.) Inspired theists have inherited their picture of the universe as divided into two great ontological realms—the supernatural and the natural—along with their language. The way they talk about things is inextricably tied up with—or at least strikes them as inextricably tied up with—references to the divine. The notion of the supernatural does not strike them as a “theory” any more than the notion of the mental strikes us as a “theory.” When they encounter atheists they view them as people who don’t know what’s going on, although they admit that atheists seem able to predict and control natural phenomena very nicely indeed. (“Thank heaven,” they say, “that we are not as those natural theologians are, or we too might lose touch with the real.”) The atheists view these theists as having too many words in their language and too many meanin...

September 18, 2020. Not bed yet. Page 89. Believing in the mental as a theist.