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

by Richard Rorty

limine

exiguous

This objection gives me a chance to introduce a final point to round out my account of the origin and nature of the idea of a “department of thought concerned with the origin and nature of human knowledge.” Plato, in my view, did not discover the distinction between two kinds of entities, either inner or outer. Rather, as I have remarked earlier, he was the first to articulate what George Pitcher has called the “Platonic Principle”—that differences in certainty must correspond to differences in the objects known.38 This principle is a natural consequence of the attempt to model knowledge on perception and to treat “knowledge of” as grounding “knowledge that.” If it is assumed that we need distinct faculties to “grasp” such different objects as bricks and numbers (as we have distinct sense-organs for colors and for smells) then the discovery of geometry will seem to be the discovery of a new faculty called νου̂ς. This in turn will generate the problem of reason discussed in chapter one.

October 25, 2020. Page 156.

It is so much a part of “thinking philosophically” to be impressed with the special character of mathematical truth that it is hard to shake off the grip of the Platonic Principle. If, however, we think of “rational certainty” as a matter of victory in argument rather than of relation to an object known, we shall look toward our interlocutors rather than to our faculties for the explanation of the phenomenon. If we think of our certainty about the Pythagorean Theorem as our confidence, based on experience with arguments on such matters, that nobody will find an objection to the premises from which we infer it, then we shall not seek to explain it by the relation of reason to triangularity. Our certainty will be a matter of conversation between persons, rather than a matter of interaction with nonhuman reality. So we shall not see a difference in kind between “necessary” and “contingent” truths. At most, we shall see differences in degree of ease in objecting to our beliefs. We shall, in short, be where the Sophists were before Plato brought his principle to bear and invented “philosophical thinking”: we shall be looking for an airtight case rather than an unshakable foundation. We shall be in what Sellars calls “the logical space of reasons” rather than that of causal relations to objects.39

October 25, 2020. Page 157.

Before Locke, it would not have occurred to anyone to look for foundations for knowledge in the realm of the senses. Aristotle, to be sure, had remarked that we cannot be in error about how things appear to us, but the idea of basing knowledge on appearances would have struck both him and Plato as absurd. What we want to have as an object of knowledge is precisely what is not an appearance, and the idea of propositions about one sort of object (the appearances) being evidence for propositions about another sort of object (what is really there) would not have made sense to either of them.

October 25, 2020. Page 160.

The difference between the “mainstream” Anglo-Saxon tradition and the “mainstream” German tradition in twentieth-century philosophy is the expression of two opposed stances toward Kant. The tradition which goes back to Russell dismissed Kant’s problem about synthetic a priori truths as a misunderstanding of the nature of mathematics, and thus viewed epistemology as essentially a matter of updating Locke. In the course of this updating, epistemology was separated off from psychology by being viewed as a study of the evidential relations between basic and nonbasic propositions, and these relations were viewed as a matter of “logic” rather than of empirical fact. In the German tradition, on the other hand, the defense of freedom and spirituality through the notion of “constitution” was retained as the distinctive mission of the philosopher. Logical empiricism and, later, analytic philosophy were dismissed by most German (and many French) philosophers as not “transcendental,” and therefore neither methodologically sound nor properly edifying. Even those with the gravest doubts about most Kantian doctrines never doubted that something like his “transcendental turn” was essential. On the Anglo-Saxon side, the so-called linguistic turn was thought to do the job of demarcating philosophy from science, while freeing one of any vestiges of, or temptation to, “idealism” (which was thought the besetting sin of philosophy on the Continent).

October 25, 2020. Page 162. Continental philosophy verses analytic philosophy.

On both sides of the Channel, however, most philosophers have remained Kantian. Even when they claim to have “gone beyond” epistemology, they have agreed that philosophy is a discipline which takes as its study the “formal” or “structural” aspects of our beliefs, and that by examining these the philosopher serves the cultural function of keeping the other disciplines honest, limiting their claims to what can be properly “grounded.” The great exceptions to this neo-Kantian consensus are, once again, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. In connection with the topic of this section—the notion of “foundations” of knowledge as based on an analogy with the compulsion to believe when staring at an object—it is Heidegger who is especially important. For Heidegger has tried to show how the epistemological notion of “objectivity” derives from, as he puts it, the Platonic “identification of ϕύσις with ἰδϵ́α”—of the reality of a thing with its presence before us.41 He is concerned to explore the way in which the West became obsessed with the notion of our primary relation to objects as analogous to visual perception, and thus to suggest that there could be other conceptions of our relations to things. The historical roots of the Aristotle-Locke analogy of knowledge to perception are beyond the scope of this book, but we can at least take from Heidegger the idea that the desire for an “epistemology” is simply the most recent product of the dialectical development of an originally chosen...

October 25, 2020. Page 163. Heidegger

Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”

In what follows, I shall confine myself to discussing two radical ways of criticizing the Kantian foundations of analytic philosophy—Sellars’s behavioristic critique of “the whole framework of givenness” and Quine’s behavioristic approach to the necessary-contingent distinction. I shall present both as forms of holism. As long as knowledge is conceived of as accurate representing—as the Mirror of Nature—Quine’s and Sellars’s holistic doctrines sound pointlessly paradoxical, because such accuracy requires a theory of privileged representations, ones which are automatically and intrinsically accurate. So the response to Sellars on givenness and Quine on analyticity is often that they have “gone too far”—that they have allowed holism to sweep them off their feet and away from common sense. In order to defend Sellars and Quine, I shall be arguing that their holism is a product of their commitment to the thesis that justification is not a matter of a special relation between ideas (or words) and objects, but of conversation, of social practice.

November 29, 2020. Page 170.

Once conversation replaces confrontation, the notion of the mind as Mirror of Nature can be discarded. Then the notion of philosophy as the discipline which looks for privileged representations among those constituting the Mirror becomes unintelligible. A thoroughgoing holism has no place for the notion of philosophy as “conceptual,” as “apodictic,” as picking out the “foundations” of the rest of knowledge, as explaining which representations are “purely given” or “purely conceptual,” as presenting a “canonical notation” rather than an empirical discovery, or as isolating “trans-framework heuristic categories.” If we see knowledge as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature, we will not be likely to envisage a metapractice which will be the critique of all possible forms of social practice. So holism produces, as Quine has argued in detail and Sellars has said in passing, a conception of philosophy which has nothing to do with the quest for certainty.

November 29, 2020. Page 171.

The Concept of Mind

I do not think that there any longer exists anything identifiable as “analytic philosophy” except in some such stylistic or sociological way. But this is not a disparaging remark, as if some legitimate expectation had been disappointed. The analytic movement in philosophy (like any movement in any discipline) worked out the dialectical consequences of a set of assumptions, and now has little more to do. The sort of optimistic faith which Russell and Carnap shared with Kant—that philosophy, its essence and right method discovered at last, had finally been placed upon the secure path of a science—is not something to be mocked or deplored. Such optimism is possible only for men of high imagination and daring, the heroes of their times.

November 29, 2020. Page 173.

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.

Explaining rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than the latter by the former, is the essence of what I shall call “epistemological behaviorism,” an attitude common to Dewey and Wittgenstein.

November 29, 2020. Page 174. Epistemic behaviorism.

Epistemological behaviorism (which might be called simply “pragmatism,” were this term not a bit overladen) has nothing to do with Watson or with Ryle. Rather, it is the claim that philosophy will have no more to offer than common sense (supplemented by biology, history, etc.) about knowledge and truth.

November 29, 2020.

If we are not to have a doctrine of “knowledge by acquaintance” which will give us a foundation, and if we do not simply deny that there is such a thing as justification, then we will claim with Sellars that “science is rational not because it has a foundation, but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.”14 We will say with Quine that knowledge is not like an architectonic structure but like a field of force,15 and that there are no assertions which are immune from revision. We will be holistic not because we have a taste for wholes, any more than we are behaviorist because of a distaste for “ghostly entities,” but simply because justification has always been behavioristic and holistic.

November 29, 2020. Page 181.

“Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,”

It is just to have pain. The snare to avoid here is the notion that there is some inner illumination which takes place only when the child’s mind is lighted up by language, concepts, descriptions, and propositions, and does not take place when the child inarticulately wails and writhes. The child feels the same thing, and it feels just the same to him before and after language-learning. Before language, he is said to know the thing he feels just in case it is the sort of thing which in later life he will be able to make noninferential reports about. That latent ability is what sets him apart from the photoelectric cell, not his greater sensitivity. Thus he may respond directly to a lack of oxygen in the air, the overly rapid motion of molecules, kinky alpha-rhythms in his brain, and so on, but he is not said to “know what they are” unless and until he comes to grasp the relevant vocabulary. But suffocation, heat, ecstasy, pain, fire, redness, parental hostility, mother love, hunger, loudness, and the like, are “known” pre-linguistically, or so ordinary speech would have it. They are known just by being had or felt. They are known without being able to be placed in classes, or related in any other way to anything else.

November 16, 2020. Page 184. Kinky.

This dilemma highlights the fact that traditional notions of givenness have run together raw feels and ability to discriminate, using the lack of the first to eliminate machines and include babies, and then using the presence of the second to make what babies have resemble propositional knowledge. The argument between Sellars and his critics on this point boils down to: Shall we take conceptualization as a matter of classification or of justification? Sellars can say that he will give up the term concept to those who wish to endow record-changers or their protoplasmic counterparts with concepts, as long as he can have some other term to indicate what we have when we can place classifications in relation to other classifications in the way language-users do when they argue about what class a given item should fall in. Once again, Sellars falls back on saying that justification is a matter of social practice, and that everything which is not a matter of social practice is no help in understanding the justification of human knowledge, no matter how helpful it may be in understanding its acquisition. The naturalistic and the genetic fallacies have, Sellars thinks, combined in traditional empiricism to produce the view that we would be in a better position to congratulate ourselves on accurately mirroring nature (or to lament our failure) if we could only bring to consciousness the stages of our childhood development. Confused by Descartes’s conflation of thought and feeling, b...

November 20, 2020. Page 187.

It is not as if we might be mistaken in thinking that a four-year-old has knowledge but that no one-year-old does, any more than we might be mistaken in taking the statute’s word for the fact that eighteen-year-olds can marry freely whereas seventeen-year-olds cannot. It may be injudicious to take the prattle of certain four-year-olds seriously, just as it may have been injudicious to have set the age of legal responsibility so low, but no greater understanding of how knowledge (or responsibility) “works” will decide such matters.

November 29, 2020. Page 188. 18 year olds.

Having reverted yet again to the community as source of epistemic authority, I shall end this section by reemphasizing that even the nonconceptual, nonlinguistic knowledge of what a raw feel is like is attributed to beings on the basis of their potential membership in this community. Babies and the more attractive sorts of animal are credited with “having feelings” rather than (like photoelectric cells and animals which no one feels sentimental about—e.g., flounders and spiders) “merely responding to stimuli.” This is to be explained on the basis of that sort of community feeling which unites us with anything humanoid. To be humanoid is to have a human face, and the most important part of that face is a mouth which we can imagine uttering sentences in synchrony with appropriate expressions of the face as a whole.20 To say, with common sense, that babies and bats know what pain and red are like, but not what the motion of molecules or the change of seasons is like, is just to say that we can fairly readily imagine them opening their mouths and remarking on the former, but not on the latter. To say that a gadget (consisting of a photoelectric cell hitched up to a tape recorder) which says “red!” when and only when we shine red light on it doesn’t know what red is like is to say that we cannot readily imagine continuing a conversation with the gadget. To say that we just don’t know whether androids who have been manufactured out of protoplasm (and are all ready to go except f...

November 16, 2020. Page 190.

This view of the attribution of pre-linguistic awareness—as a courtesy extended potential or imagined fellow-speakers of our language—has as a corollary that moral prohibitions against hurting babies and the better looking sorts of animals are not “ontologically grounded” in their possession of feeling. It is, if anything, the other way around. The moral prohibitions are expressions of a sense of community based on the imagined possibility of conversation, and the attribution of feelings is little more than a reminder of these prohibitions. This can be seen by noticing that nobody except philosophers of mind cares whether the raw feel of pain or redness is different for koalas than for us, but that we all care quite a bit about a koala when we see it writhing about. This fact does not mean that our or the koala’s pain “is nothing but its behavior”; it just means that writhing is more important to our ability to imagine the koala asking us for help than what is going on inside the koala. Pigs rate much higher than koalas on intelligence tests, but pigs don’t writhe in quite the right humanoid way, and the pig’s face is the wrong shape for the facial expressions which go with ordinary conversation. So we send pigs to slaughter with equanimity, but form societies for the protection of koalas. This is not “irrational,” any more than it is irrational to extend or deny civil rights to the moronic (or fetuses, or aboriginal tribes, or Martians). Rationality, when viewed as the fo...

November 16, 2020. Page 191. For the antinatalist.

Ever since Descartes made methodological solipsism the mark of rigorous and professional philosophical thinking, philosophers have wanted to find the “ground” of cognition, morality, aesthetic taste, and anything else that matters within the individual. For how could there be anything in societies which individuals had not put there? Only since Hegel have philosophers begun toying with the notion that the individual apart from his society is just one more animal. The antidemocratic implications of this view, not to mention its historicist and relativist implications, have made it difficult for Hegelian modes of thought to have any impact on the hard core of analytic philosophy—epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. But Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”—self-described as “incipient Meditations Hegeliènnes”24—succeeds in prying raw feels and justified true belief apart and depriving raw feels of their status as privileged representations. It thereby shows how behaviorism in epistemology can avoid the confusion between explanation and justification which made empiricist epistemology seem possible and necessary. In chapters seven and eight I shall try to show how the emphasis on the priority of the public to the private which results from repudiating empiricism paves the way for further Hegelian and Heideggerian projects of deconstruction.

November 16, 2020. Page 192.

What Quine calls the “‘idea’ idea” is the view that language is the expression of something “inner” which must be discovered before we can tell what an utterance means, or interpret the linguistic behavior of utterers (e.g., attribute beliefs, desires, and cultures to them). To abandon this idea is at once to abandon the logical-empiricist notion of “truth in virtue of meaning” and the sometime Oxonian notion of “conceptual truth,” since there are no meanings or concepts from which truths might be read off. This attitude toward the concept of “concept” makes it possible to dismiss Kant’s distinction between necessary truths (which can be determined by looking at concepts alone [analytic truth] or pure concepts and pure forms of intuition alone [synthetic a priori truth]) and contingent truths (which require reference to empirical intuitions). But Quine regards concepts and meanings as merely one species of intentions, and he wishes to obliterate all intentions. Thus, admitting that “means,” “believes,” and “desires,” for example, have no behavioristic equivalents (as Brentano and Chisholm, in an effort to preserve some kernel of truth in traditional mind-body dualism, had also attempted to show), Quine concludes that this shows that the notions of “belief” and “desire” are (for “scientific” purposes) as dispensable as those of “concept” and “intuition”: One may accept the Brentano thesis either as showing the indispensability of intentional idioms and the importance of an ...

November 16, 2020. Page 194.

Quine thinks this anti-intentionalism of a piece with his polemic against analyticity. But it is not. The author of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” should have said that concepts and meanings are harmless if posited to give explanations of our behavior, and become harmful only when treated as the source of a special kind of truth and of a special sort of authority for certain assertions. In particular, we would expect him to say that the reasons normally given for translating languages one way rather than another (or for ascribing one set of beliefs and desires rather than an odd alternative which would predict the same linguistic behavior) are justified simply by their internal coherence, and that such practices as translation and ascription of intentional states are justified by their social utility. Quine grants the utility, but he thinks it philosophically important to insist that the sort of truth proffered in such remarks as “‘Hund’ is German for ‘dog,’” and “Robinson believes in God” is not the sort of truth which expresses “matter of fact.”26 He thus offers us a distinction between truth by convenience and truth by correspondence, so to speak, rather than the old positivist distinction between truth by convention and truth confirmed by sensory experience. Truths about meanings and beliefs and propositions are, somehow, not really truths in the full sense of the term—just as the positivists used to say that necessary truths were not really “about the world.”

November 16, 2020. Page 195.

Oxonian

Geisteswissenschaften,

irradiations.

If he is to assert (5) as well as (1)–(4), Quine must give a sense to the distinction between “matter of fact” and “convention” which has no links with the usual instrumentalist-phenomenalist distinction—that between what we are really acquainted with and what we “posit” to cope with stimuli. The only way he can do so, as far as I can see, is simply to pick out the elementary particles of contemporary physics as paradigmatically matter-of-factual and explain that the sense in which there is no matter of fact about meanings or beliefs is that different things can be said about what a sentence means or a man believes without any implications for the movements of these particles. This tactic makes his preference for physics over psychology, and thus his concern about “irresponsible reification,” purely aesthetic. Further, it will not work. For alternative biochemical (e.g.) as well as alternative psychological theories will be compatible with all and only the same movements of the same particles. Unless and until there is a genuine deduction of all true nomological statements from the laws of physics (which no one seriously expects), there will be no complaint to be made about intentions which cannot be made about mitochondria.42

November 16, 2020. Page 203.

intensionality

intentionality

homonomic

heteronomic

Davidson goes on to say that purported psychophysical laws are like “All emeralds are grue.” They combine terms taken from disparate vocabularies. We may talk about emeroses and grueness, or about emeralds and greenness, but not about both at once (at least not if we want a useful comprehensive theory). Even so, we may talk about actions and beliefs, or about movements and neurons, but not (comprehensively) both at once. But there is an obvious sense, in the former example, in which we are talking about the same things, whichever set of predicates we choose. Even so, Davidson says, in the latter case. The difference in choice of vocabularies is not a mark of the difference between the real and the ontologically disreputable, nor of that between the factual and the mythical, but is on all fours with the difference between talking of the activities of nations-as-such and talking of the activities of ministers and generals, or between talking of mitochondria as such and talking of the elementary particles they contain. We may usefully and truly say things like “If Asquith had remained prime minister, England would have lost,” or “If there had been a few more neutrons in there, the mitochondrion would not have survived,” or “If we had just stuck in an electrode in the right place in the cortex, he would never have decided he was Napoleon,” or “If we could get hold of an emerose, we should have just the right shade of green,” but we cannot (so far as we know now, at least) deve...

November 29, 2020. Page 207.

wissenschaftlich,

But Quine’s distrust of privileged representations leads him to distrust all representations, to distrust the “‘idea’ idea” itself. Yet ideas in the mind are no more or less disreputable than neurons in the brain, mitochondria in the cells, passions in the soul, or moral progress in history. The damage done by the “‘idea’ idea” in modern philosophy was done by the pseudo-explanation of epistemic authority through the notion of “direct acquaintance” by the “Eye of the Mind” with mental entities such as sense-data and meanings. But this is epistemological damage, not ontological damage. If I am right in the criticisms of Quine I have been making (and in the general line I am taking in this book) the only way in which one can do ontological damage is to block the road of inquiry by insisting on a bad old theory at the expense of a good new theory. It may be claimed that nineteenth-century introspectionist psychology did briefly block the road of inquiry, but even if that were so it would be quite a different thing from saying that the Geisteswissenschaften are preventing us from seeing reality plain, or that their shady ontology must be tolerated for the sake of practical ends. The lesson of epistemological behaviorism is just that there is no “philosophical point” to be made about translation or intentionality, nor about any other “ontological” subject. Rather, it helps us see that explanatory power is where we find it, and that the philosophical attempt to distinguish betwe...

November 16, 2020. Page 209.

The first of these attempts is the revolt against logical behaviorism in the philosophy of psychology, leading to the development of explanations of behavior in terms of inner representations without, necessarily, any linkup with the justification of beliefs and actions. I have already said that once explanation and justification are held apart there is no reason to object to explanation of the acquisition of knowledge in terms of representations, and that such explanations can be offered without resuscitating the traditional “mind-body problem.” But I think that the defense of such explanations against Ryle and Skinner can easily be distorted into a rehabilitation of the traditional seventeenth-century philosophical problematic, and thus I shall devote chapter five to a discussion of such defenses. My aim will be to disassociate empirical psychology from the remnants of epistemology by defending it against both Wittgensteinian criticisms and Chomskyan compliments.

November 29, 2020. Page 211.

Because language is a “public” Mirror of Nature, as thought is a “private” one, it seems that we should be able to reformulate a great many Cartesian and Kantian questions and answers in linguistic terms, and thereby rehabilitate a lot of standard philosophical issues (e.g., the choice between idealism and realism). I devote chapter six to various efforts at such rehabilitation, and argue that semantics should be kept as pure of epistemology as should psychology.

November 29, 2020. Page 211.

Once both the inner representations needed in psychological explanation and the word-world relations needed by semantics to produce a theory of meaning for natural languages are seen as irrelevant to issues of justification, we can see the abandonment of the search for privileged representations as the abandonment of the goal of a “theory of knowledge.” The urge toward such a theory in the seventeenth century was a product of the change from one paradigm of understanding nature to another, as well as of the change from a religious to a secular culture. Philosophy as a discipline capable of giving us a “right method of seeking truth” depends upon finding some permanent neutral framework of all possible inquiry, an understanding of which will enable us to see, for example, why neither Aristotle nor Bellarmine was justified in believing what he believed. The mind as Mirror of Nature was the Cartesian tradition’s response to the need for such a framework. If there are no privileged representations in this mirror, then it will no longer answer to the need for a touchstone for choice between justified and unjustified claims upon our belief. Unless some other such framework can be found, the abandonment of the image of the Mirror leads us to abandon the notion of philosophy as a discipline which adjudicates the claims of science and religion, mathematics and poetry, reason and sentiment, allocating an appropriate place to each.

November 16, 2020. Page 212.

The counter-intuitive consequences of behaviorism, reductively interpreted, are illustrated by Malcolm’s polemic against much recent work by psychologists: Thus, it is the facts, the circumstances surrounding the behavior, that give it the property of expressing recognition. This property is not due to something that goes on inside. It seems to me that if this point were understood by philosophers and psychologists, they would no longer have a motive for constructing theories and models for recognition, memory, thinking, problem solving, understanding, and other “cognitive processes.”1 If we follow out this line of thought, we can decide that the whole empirical science of psychology is based on a mistake, and that there is no middle ground for research between common-sensical explanations of behavior on the one hand and neurophysiology on the other. The notion that there is a middle ground for psychology to investigate will, in this view, be a product of Malcolm’s “myth of cognitive processes and structures”—what Ryle called “Descartes’ Myth.” Malcolm seems inclined to take the matter to this point, for example, in his description of the Chomskyan notion of an “internalized system of rules” as typical of the root mistake of the “traditional theory of Ideas,” viz.: The assumption … that in speaking a person must be guided. There must be something at hand that shows him how to speak, how to put words together grammatically and with coherent sense…. What is being explained i...

November 30, 2020. Page 214.

“Epistemology Naturalized,”

Oxonian

Since the brain is almost certainly not such a machine, the point here is one of principle, but the principle has philosophical importance. For it shows that the distinction between psychology and physiology is not a distinction between two distinct subject matters in any stronger a sense than is, say, the distinction between chemistry and physics. It might have turned out that chemical phenomena such as the formation of compounds never had anything to do with the submicroscopic makeup of the elements in question. But in fact they do, and so now whether we use physicists’ or chemists’ terms to explain a reaction is a matter of convenience or pedagogy. If it turns out that physiology has as much to do with multiplying as electrons have to do with explosions, then the psychology-physiology distinction will be equally pragmatic. So the paradoxical conclusion offered earlier—that had physiology been more obvious psychology would never have arisen—can be reaffirmed. Indeed, we can strengthen it and say that if the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind.26

December 1, 2020. Page 239.

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.

There are two sources for the discipline presently called “philosophy of language.” One is the cluster of problems pointed out by Frege and discussed, for example, by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus and by Carnap in Meaning and Necessity. These are problems about how to systematize our notions of meaning and reference in such a way as to take advantage of quantificational logic, preserve our intuitions about modality, and generally produce a clear and intuitively satisfying picture of the way in which notions like “truth,” “meaning,” “necessity,” and “name” fit together. I shall call this set of problems the subject matter of “pure” philosophy of language—a discipline which has no epistemological parti pris, nor, indeed, any relevance to most of the traditional concerns of modern philosophy. An ancestry can be traced for some of Frege’s problems in Parmenides, Plato’s Sophist, and some other ancient and medieval writings, but they are issues which rarely intersect with other textbook “problems of philosophy.”1 The second source for contemporary philosophy of language is explicitly epistemological. The source of this “impure” philosophy of language is the attempt to retain Kant’s picture of philosophy as providing a permanent ahistorical framework for inquiry in the form of a theory of knowledge. The “linguistic turn,” as I have said in chapter four, started as the attempt to produce a nonpsychologistic empiricism by rephrasing philosophical questions as questions of “logic.”...

December 1, 2020. Page 259.

Davidson’s work can best be seen as carrying through Quine’s dissolution of the distinction between questions of meaning and questions of fact—his attack on the linguistic reinterpretation of Kant’s distinction between the receptivity of sense and the a priori concepts given by spontaneity. Davidson is saying that if we are serious in renouncing an a priori knowledge of meaning, then the theory of meaning is going to be an empirical theory. Thus there can be no special province for such a theory save, roughly, the traditional province of the grammarian—the attempt to find ways of describing sentences which help to explain how those sentences are used. From this perspective, Quine’s “canonical notation” should not be conceived of as an attempt “to limn the true and ultimate structure of reality,”8 but rather as an attempt to find the most perspicuous ways of describing a fairly small portion of reality—the use of language. The point of constructing a “truth theory of English” is not to enable philosophical problems to be put in a formal mode of speech, nor to explain the relationship between words and the world, but simply to lay out perspicuously the relation between parts of a social practice (the use of certain sentences) and other parts (the use of other sentences).

December 1, 2020. Page 262.

I shall be claiming that if we press Quine’s and Davidson’s criticisms of the language-fact and scheme-content distinctions far enough, we no longer have dialectical room to state an issue concerning “how language hooks onto the world” between the “realist” and the “idealist” (or the “pragmatist”). The need to construct such an issue seems to me one more manifestation of the Kantian need for an overarching permanent neutral matrix within which to “place” and criticize past and future inquiry. This nostalgia for philosophy as an architectonic and encompassing discipline survives in contemporary philosophy of language only because of the vague association of “language” with “the a priori” and of the latter with “philosophy.” Insofar as there is a real issue between “realists” and “pragmatists” in contemporary philosophy of language it seems to me a metaphilosophical one—the issue about whether philosophy can retain its Kantian self-image once the notion of language as the source of a priori knowledge is dropped. On this point, to be sure, I shall be siding with the “pragmatists.” But I hope that my discussion may help to frame this metaphilosophical issue in less Aesopian language than that in which it is usually stated.

December 2, 2020. Page 266.

Actually, however, this clamor about “idealism” is a red herring. It is one thing to say (absurdly) that we make objects by using words and something quite different to say that we do not know how to find a way of describing an enduring matrix of past and future inquiry into nature except in our own terms—thereby begging the question against “alternative conceptual schemes.” Almost no one wishes to say the former. To say the latter is, when disjoined from scary rhetoric about “losing touch with the world,” just a way of saying that our present views about nature are our only guide in talking about the relation between nature and our words. To say that we have to assign referents to terms and truth-values to sentences in the light of our best notions of what there is in the world is a platitude. To say that truth and reference are “relative to a conceptual scheme” sounds as if it were saying something more than this, but it is not, as long as “our conceptual scheme” is taken as simply a reference to what we believe now—the collection of views which make up our present-day culture. This is all that any argument offered by Quine, Sellars, Kuhn, or Feyerabend would license one to mean by “conceptual scheme.” However, Putnam, having cleared up part of the confusion created by Feyerabend’s talk of meaning-change, unfortunately proceeded to treat the difference between Feyerabend and himself not as a difference between taking the notion of “meaning” seriously and abandoning it, b...

December 2, 2020. Page 277.

“redundancy theory”;

warranted assertible.