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

by Richard Rorty

Thus some tender-minded philosophers have risen above the “warfare between science and theology” and seen Bonaventure and Bohr as possessing different, noncompetitive “forms of consciousness.” The question “consciousness of what?” is answered by something like “the world” or “the thing-in-itself” or “the sensible manifold” or “stimulations.” It does not matter which of these is offered, since all are terms of art designed to name entities with no interesting features save placid neutrality. The analogue of this tactic among tough-minded philosophers of mind is neutral monism, in which the mental and the physical are seen as two “aspects” of some underlying reality which need not be described further. Sometimes we are told that this reality is intuited (Bergson) or is identical with the raw material of sensation (Russell, Ayer), but sometimes it is simply postulated as the only means of avoiding epistemological skepticism (James, Dewey). In no case are we told anything about it save that “we just know what it’s like” or that reason (i.e., the need to avoid philosophical dilemmas) requires it. Neutral monists like to suggest that philosophy has discovered, or should look for, an underlying substrate, in the same way in which the scientist has discovered molecules beneath elements, atoms beneath molecules, and so on. But in fact the “neutral stuff” which is neither mental nor physical is not found to have powers or properties of its own, but simply postulated and then forgott...