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

by Richard Rorty

I can now tie together the result of examining the “infinite regress” argument with that of the last section by saying that the notion of psychological states as inner representations is unobjectionable but fairly uninteresting. To say that psychological states are states postulated to explain behavior, ones which we do not yet know how to identify with physiological states, is not to discover the true nature of the mind; it is only to reemphasize that there is no “nature” to be known. The analogy between minds and computers drawn by Dodwell and Fodor is better than Plato’s analogy between minds and aviaries simply because the former avoids the epistemologically (not metaphysically) misleading picture of introspection as observation of our interior. Illumination from such analogies is a matter of responding to what philosophers are worried about, and they are worried about unified science on the one hand and “subjectivity” on the other. If we agree that mentalistic explanations would not have arisen if our hardware had been more perspicuous, that will be enough to make the mind-body distinction pragmatic rather than ontological. That, in turn, is enough to reconcile us to the fact that we may never get a neurophysiological account of what is going on inside us which is as perspicuously related to psychological states as the engineer’s account of how the hardware “realizes” the computer’s program. Once, for Quinean reasons, we stop thinking that the possibility or impossibi...

December 1, 2020. Page 243. Yes! Putnam and square pegs in round holes.