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

by Richard Rorty

Philosophers who are concerned (as Tarski and Davidson are not) to tell us something about truth which will explain or underwrite the success of our search for truth are like philosophers who want to tell us more about “good” than that it is used to commend, something which will explain or underwrite moral progress. But there may be little of this sort to be said. To use the analogy with moral philosophy once again, it is no help in understanding either why “good” is indefinable, or how it is used, to explain that a good action is one which corresponds to the Form of the Good, or to the Moral Law. It is equally pointless to be told that true statements correspond to the way the world is.19

December 2, 2020. Page 281.

Most of what passes for discussion of “truth” in philosophy books is, in fact, about justification, just as most of what passes for discussion of “goodness” is about pleasure and pain. The price of sharply distinguishing the transcendentalia from their common-sense counterparts may be to leave one without material for theory-construction, and without problems to resolve.

December 2, 2020. Page 282. Morality sucks!

It is hard to imagine anyone taking exception to such a principle, so the issue is not joined until Boyd claims that we can only account for this principle’s leading to useful results “on a realistic understanding of the relevant collateral theories”: Suppose you always “guess” where theories are most likely to go wrong experimentally by asking where they are most likely to be false as accounts of causal relations, given the assumption that currently accepted laws represent probable causal knowledge. And suppose your guessing procedure works—that theories really are most likely to go wrong—to yield false experimental predictions—just where a realist would expect them to…. What explanation beside scientific realism is possible? Certainly not the mere effect of conventionally or arbitrarily adopted scientific traditions…. Unless, as no empiricist would suggest, the world is molded by our conventions, there is no way that the reliability of this principle could merely be a matter of convention. (p. 12)

December 2, 2020. Page 283.

Tarski,

“Meinongianism”—

What, then, is it? There is no answer to this question, no such “criterion.” The considerations which dictate choice between strategies (1)–(4) above are so diverse that the request for a criterion is out of place. We might be tempted to say that “really talking about” is a relation that can hold between an expression and what we think exists, as opposed to “talking about,” which holds between an expression and what its user thinks exists, and to “refers,” which can hold only between an expression and what really and truly does exist. But this would be wrong, since, once again, not only can we talk about nonexistent entities, but we can be discovered to have really been talking about nonexistent entities. Really talking about X is not the same as talking about a real X. “Really” here is just a matter of “placing” the relative ignorance of the person being discussed in the context of the relatively greater knowledge claimed by the speaker. There are as many ways of doing that as there are contexts of discourse. Consider, for example, “You think you are talking about Thales, but you are really talking about a tale told by Herodotus”; “You think you are talking about your analyst, but you are really talking about yourself”; “You think you are talking about a fictional deity named Artemis, but you are actually talking about a flesh-and-blood woman who lived in Thebes in the ninth century B.C.”; “You think you are talking about lithium, but you are really talking about kryptoni...

December 2, 2020. Page 293.

The question “What determines reference?” is ambiguous between a question about the best procedure for comparing large coherent sets of false beliefs (other epochs, cultures, etc.) with ours and a question about how to refute the skeptic. Debates about theories of reference get their concreteness from attempts to answer the first part of the question, and their philosophical interest from hints that they might somehow answer the second. But nothing can refute the skeptic—nothing can do what epistemology hoped to do. For we discover how language works only within the present theory of the rest of the world, and one cannot use a part of one’s present theory to underwrite the rest of it. Theory of reference is as hopeless as a “theory of transcendental constitution of the object” for this purpose.

December 2, 2020. Page 294.

The difference between the recanted “metaphysical” realism and the uncontroversial internal realism is the difference between saying that we are successfully representing according to Nature’s own conventions of representation and saying that we are successfully representing according to our own. It is the difference between, roughly, science as a Mirror of Nature, and as a set of working diagrams for coping with nature.

December 2, 2020. Page 298. Coping with reality.

personalistic pantheism.

This holistic view of meaning amounts to the view that a theory of meaning for a language must do no more than “give an account of how the meanings of sentences depend upon the meanings of words” (p. 304). The crucial move is to say that we need not think that “individual words must have meanings at all, in any sense that transcends the fact that they have a systematic effect on the meanings of the sentences in which they occur” (p. 305). The traditional view is that we anchor language to the world by giving meaning by ostension (or some other nonintentional mechanism—one which presupposes no “stage-setting in the language”) to certain individual words, and then going on holistically from there. Davidson’s neo-Wittgensteinian point is that even “red” and “mama” have uses—can help make possible the statement of truths—only in the context of sentences and thus of a whole language (cf. p. 308). Whatever role ostension (or neural pathways, or any other nonintentional setup) plays in learning a language, one need not know anything about these mechanisms to know the language, nor to know how to translate that language. The same goes, Davidson points out, for Tarskian truth-conditions for the sentences of English, and this is why it turns out that “a theory of meaning for the language L shows ‘how the meanings of sentences depend upon the meanings of words’ if it contains a (recursive) definition of truth-in-L”; for what we require for a theory of meaning for a language L is that...

December 2, 2020. Page 304.

This picture of holism ceasing to apply at the point at which reference is least problematic—at the interface between language and the world where demonstratives do their work—is one way to get the scheme-content distinction going. If we think of language in this way, we will be struck by the thought that somebody else (the Galactics, say) will have “cut up” the world differently in their original acts of ostension and thus given different meanings to the individual words in the “core” of their language. The rest of their language will thus be infected by this divergence from our way of giving meaning to the “core” of English, and so there will be no way for us to communicate—no common points of reference, no possibility of translation. Davidson’s attack on these metaphors parallels Max Black’s Wittgensteinian criticism of the so-called inverted-spectrum problem—the possibility that some people may (for colors and presumably all other perceptual “quality spaces”) start off on the wrong foot. Black points out that we can “divide through” by the difference for all purposes of communication—language will, of course, go through equally well no matter what we were ostending.38 Similarly, Davidson can say that if a difference in the original ostension does not show up at the holistic level—in the use of the sentences that contain the word—then the theory of meaning for the language can divide through by that difference.

December 2, 2020. Page 305.

My point in suggesting that there are two senses of “good” is, of course, to make plausible the suggestion that there are also two senses apiece of “true” and “real” and “correct representation of reality,” and that most of the perplexities of epistemology come from vacillation between them (just as most of the perplexities of meta-ethics come from vacillating between senses of “good”). To begin by pursuing the analogy between goodness and truth, consider the homely use of “true” to mean roughly “what you can defend against all comers.” Here the line between a belief’s being justified and its being true is very thin. That is why Socrates had trouble explaining the difference between these two notions to his interlocutors, the same trouble we philosophy professors still have in explaining it to our freshmen. When the pragmatists identified truth with “what we will believe if we keep inquiring by our present lights” or “what it is better for us to believe” or with “warranted assertibility,” they thought of themselves as following in the footsteps of Mill, and doing for science what the utilitarians had done for morality—making it something you could use instead of something you could merely respect, something continuous with common sense instead of something which might be as remote from common sense as the Mind of God.

December 3, 2020. Page 308.

Davidson can say, without any attempt at anticipating the end of inquiry and blocking Putnam’s skeptical “meta-induction,” that most of our beliefs are true. This claim follows from his claim that we cannot understand the suggestion that most of them are false—a suggestion which has sense only when backed up with the phony notion of an “alternative, untranslatable, conceptual scheme.”

December 3, 2020. Page 309.

The trouble with Platonic notions is not that they are “wrong” but that there is not a great deal to be said about them—specifically, there is no way to “naturalize” them or otherwise connect them to the rest of inquiry, or culture, or life.

December 3, 2020. Page 311.

If you ask Dewey why he thinks Western culture has the slightest notion of what goodness is, or Davidson why he thinks that we ever talk about what really exists or say anything true about it, they are likely to ask you what makes you have doubts on the subject. If you reply that the burden is on them, and that they are forbidden to argue from the fact that we would never know it if the skeptic were right to the impossibility of his being right, Dewey and Davidson might both reply that they will not argue in that way. They need not invoke verificationist arguments; they need simply ask why they should worry about the skeptical alternative until they are given some concrete ground of doubt. To call this attempt to shift the burden back to the skeptic “verificationism,” or a confusion of the order of knowledge with the order of being, is like calling “verificationist” the man who says that he will not worry about whether the things he has called “red” are really red until some concrete alternative is provided. The decision about whether to have higher than usual standards for the application of words like “true” or “good” or “red” is, as far as I can see, not a debatable issue. But I suspect it is the only remaining issue between realists and pragmatists, and I am fairly sure that the philosophy of language has not given us any interesting new debating points.

December 3, 2020. Page 311.

gainsaid.

hermeneutics,

By “commensurable” I mean able to be brought under a set of rules which will tell us how rational agreement can be reached on what would settle the issue on every point where statements seem to conflict.1 These rules tell us how to construct an ideal situation, in which all residual disagreements will be seen to be “noncognitive” or merely verbal, or else merely temporary—capable of being resolved by doing something further. What matters is that there should be agreement about what would have to be done if a resolution were to be achieved. In the meantime, the interlocutors can agree to differ—being satisfied of each other’s rationality the while. The dominating notion of epistemology is that to be rational, to be fully human, to do what we ought, we need to be able to find agreement with other human beings. To construct an epistemology is to find the maximum amount of common ground with others. The assumption that an epistemology can be constructed is the assumption that such common ground exists. Sometimes this common ground has been imagined to lie outside us—for example, in the realm of Being as opposed to that of Becoming, in the Forms which both guide inquiry and are its goal. Sometimes it has been imagined to lie within us, as in the seventeenth century’s notion that by understanding our own minds we should be able to understand the right method for finding truth. Within analytic philosophy, it has often been imagined to lie in language, which was supposed to supply...

December 6, 2020. Page 317.

I think that the view that epistemology, or some suitable successor-discipline, is necessary to culture confuses two roles which the philosopher might play. The first is that of the informed dilettante, the polypragmatic, Socratic intermediary between various discourses. In his salon, so to speak, hermetic thinkers are charmed out of their self-enclosed practices. Disagreements between disciplines and discourses are compromised or transcended in the course of the conversation. The second role is that of the cultural overseer who knows everyone’s common ground—the Platonic philosopher-king who knows what everybody else is really doing whether they know it or not, because he knows about the ultimate context (the Forms, the Mind, Language) within which they are doing it. The first role is appropriate to hermeneutics, the second to epistemology. Hermeneutics sees the relations between various discourses as those of strands in a possible conversation, a conversation which presupposes no disciplinary matrix which unites the speakers, but where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as the conversation lasts. This hope is not a hope for the discovery of antecedently existing common ground, but simply hope for agreement, or, at least, exciting and fruitful disagreement. Epistemology sees the hope of agreement as a token of the existence of common ground which, perhaps unbeknown to the speakers, unites them in a common rationality. For hermeneutics, to be rational is to be wil...

December 6, 2020. Page 318.

The pragmatic approach to knowledge suggested by epistemological behaviorism will construe the line between discourses which can be rendered commensurable and those which cannot as merely that between “normal” and “abnormal” discourse—a distinction which generalizes Kuhn’s distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary” science. “Normal” science is the practice of solving problems against the background of a consensus about what counts as a good explanation of the phenomena and about what it would take for a problem to be solved. “Revolutionary” science is the introduction of a new “paradigm” of explanation, and thus of a new set of problems. Normal science is as close as real life comes to the epistemologist’s notion of what it is to be rational. Everybody agrees on how to evaluate everything everybody else says. More generally, normal discourse is that which is conducted within an agreed-upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution, what counts as answering a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it. Abnormal discourse is what happens when someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of these conventions or who sets them aside. ’Eπιστήμη is the product of normal discourse—the sort of statement which can be agreed to be true by all participants whom the other participants count as “rational.” The product of abnormal discourse can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution, and there is n...

December 6, 2020. Page 321.

Kuhn says that he offers students the maxim: When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, … when these passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.4 Kuhn goes on to say that this maxim does not need to be told to historians, who, “consciously or not, are all practitioners of the hermeneutic method.” But Kuhn’s invocation of such a maxim was disturbing to philosophers of science who, working within the epistemological tradition, were bound to think in terms of a neutral scheme (“observation language,” “bridge laws,” etc.) which would make Aristotle and Newton, for example, commensurable. Such a scheme could, they thought, be used to render hermeneutical guesswork unnecessary. Kuhn’s claim that there is no commensurability between groups of scientists who have different paradigms of a successful explanation, or who do not share the same disciplinary matrix, or both,5 seemed to many such philosophers to endanger the notion of theory-choice in science. For the “philosophy of science”—the name under which “epistemology” went when it hid itself among the logical empiricists—had envisaged itself as providing an algorithm for theory-choice. Kuhn’s claim that no algorithm was possible save a post factum and Whiggish one (one which constructed an ep...

December 6, 2020. Page 323.

Kuhn says that he offers students the maxim: When reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, … when these passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.4 Kuhn goes on to say that this maxim does not need to be told to historians, who, “consciously or not, are all practitioners of the hermeneutic method.” But Kuhn’s invocation of such a maxim was disturbing to philosophers of science who, working within the epistemological tradition, were bound to think in terms of a neutral scheme (“observation language,” “bridge laws,” etc.) which would make Aristotle and Newton, for example, commensurable. Such a scheme could, they thought, be used to render hermeneutical guesswork unnecessary. Kuhn’s claim that there is no commensurability between groups of scientists who have different paradigms of a successful explanation, or who do not share the same disciplinary matrix, or both,5 seemed to many such philosophers to endanger the notion of theory-choice in science. For the “philosophy of science”—the name under which “epistemology” went when it hid itself among the logical empiricists—had envisaged itself as providing an algorithm for theory-choice. Kuhn’s claim that no algorithm was possible save a post factum and Whiggish one (one which constructed an ep...

December 6, 2020. Page 324.

But can we then find a way of saying that the considerations advanced against the Copernican theory by Cardinal Bellarmine—the scriptural descriptions of the fabric of the heavens—were “illogical or unscientific?”12 This, perhaps, is the point at which the battle lines between Kuhn and his critics can be drawn most sharply. Much of the seventeenth century’s notion of what it was to be a “philosopher,” and much of the Enlightenment’s notion of what it was to be “rational,” turns on Galileo’s being absolutely right and the church absolutely wrong. To suggest that there is room for rational disagreement here—not simply for a black-and-white struggle between reason and superstition—is to endanger the very notion of “philosophy.” For it endangers the notion of finding “a method for finding truth” which takes Galilean and Newtonian mechanics as paradigmatic.13 A whole complex of mutually reinforcing ideas—philosophy as a methodological discipline distinct from the sciences, epistemology as the provision of commensuration, rationality as possible only on the common ground which makes possible commensuration—seems endangered if the question about Bellarmine is answered in the negative. Kuhn does not give an explicit answer to the question, but his writings provide an arsenal of argument in favor of a negative answer. In any case, a negative answer is implied by the argument of the present book. The crucial consideration is whether we know how to draw a line between science and the...

December 6, 2020. Page 330.

Obviously, the conclusion I wish to draw is that the “grid” which emerged in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not there to be appealed to in the early seventeenth century, at the time that Galileo was on trial. No conceivable epistemology, no study of the nature of human knowledge, could have “discovered” it before it was hammered out. The notion of what it was to be “scientific” was in the process of being formed. If one endorses the values—or, perhaps, the ranking of competing values—common to Galileo and Kant, then indeed Bellarmine was being “unscientific.” But, of course, almost all of us (including Kuhn, though perhaps not including Feyerabend) are happy to endorse them. We are the heirs of three hundred years of rhetoric about the importance of distinguishing sharply between science and religion, science and politics, science and art, science and philosophy, and so on. This rhetoric has formed the culture of Europe. It made us what we are today. We are fortunate that no little perplexity within epistemology, or within the historiography of science, is enough to defeat it. But to proclaim our loyalty to these distinctions is not to say that there are “objective” and “rational” standards for adopting them. Galileo, so to speak, won the argument, and we all stand on the common ground of the “grid” of relevance and irrelevance which “modern philosophy” developed as a consequence of that victory. But what could show that the Bellarmine-Galileo issue “di...

December 6, 2020. Page 331. He calls Americans European.

“Subjective” is a term with several established uses: in one of these it is opposed to “objective,” in another to “judgmental.” When my critics describe the idiosyncratic features to which I appeal as subjective, they resort, erroneously I think, to the second of these senses. When they complain that I deprive science of objectivity, they conflate that second sense of subjective with the first.17

December 6, 2020. Page 336.

δϵινός

To see this point, it helps to bear in mind that there are plenty of occasions on which we do well simply to ignore the pour-soi of human beings. We do this in the case of particularly dull and conventional people, for example, whose every act and word are so predictable that we “objectivize” them without hesitation. Conversely, when we come up against something nonhuman which wriggles out of the conceptual net presently used, it is natural to start talking about an unknown language—to imagine, for example, the migrating butterflies having a language in which they describe features of the world for which Newtonian mechanics has no name. Or, if we do not go this far, we at least fall naturally into the notion that the Book of Nature has not yet been deciphered—that it no more contains “gravitation,” say, than it contains “natural motion.” The temptation is to anthropomorphize the nonhuman world, or some part of it, just as soon as it becomes clear that, as with the native of an exotic culture, or the genius whose talk is over our heads, we do not “speak the same language.” Nature is whatever is so routine and familiar and manageable that we trust our own language implicitly. Spirit is whatever is so unfamiliar and unmanageable that we begin to wonder whether our “language” is “adequate” to it. Our wonder, stripped of mirror-imagery, is simply about whether somebody or something may not be dealing with the world in terms for which our language contains no ready equivalents. ...

December 7, 2020. Page 353.

Physicalism is probably right in saying that we shall someday be able, “in principle,” to predict every movement of a person’s body (including those of his larynx and his writing hand) by reference to microstructures within his body. The danger to human freedom of such success is minimal, since the “in principle” clause allows for the probability that the determination of the initial conditions (the antecedent states of microstructures) will be too difficult to carry out except as an occasional pedagogical exercise. The torturers and the brainwashers are, in any case, already in as good a position to interfere with human freedom as they could wish; further scientific progress cannot improve their position.

December 7, 2020. Page 354.

Gadamer’s Truth and Method.

diremptions

There is no “normal” philosophical discourse which provides common commensurating ground for those who see science and edification as, respectively, “rational” and “irrational,” and those who see the quest for objectivity as one possibility among others to be taken account of in wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewusstsein. If there is no such common ground, all we can do is to show how the other side looks from our own point of view. That is, all we can do is be hermeneutic about the opposition—trying to show how the odd or paradoxical or offensive things they say hang together with the rest of what they want to say, and how what they say looks when put in our own alternative idiom. This sort of hermeneutics with polemical intent is common to Heidegger’s and Derrida’s attempts to deconstruct the tradition.

December 8, 2020. Page 300 and

I raise this banal point that education—even the education of the revolutionary or the prophet—needs to begin with acculturation and conformity merely to provide a cautionary complement to the “existentialist” claim that normal participation in normal discourse is merely one project, one way of being in the world. The caution amounts to saying that abnormal and “existential” discourse is always parasitic upon normal discourse, that the possibility of hermeneutics is always parasitic upon the possibility (and perhaps upon the actuality) of epistemology, and that edification always employs materials provided by the culture of the day. To attempt abnormal discourse de novo, without being able to recognize our own abnormality, is madness in the most literal and terrible sense. To insist on being hermeneutic where epistemology would do—to make ourselves unable to view normal discourse in terms of its own motives, and able to view it only from within our own abnormal discourse—is not mad, but it does show a lack of education. To adopt the “existentialist” attitude toward objectivity and rationality common to Sartre, Heidegger, and Gadamer makes sense only if we do so in a conscious departure from a well-understood norm. “Existentialism” is an intrinsically reactive movement of thought, one which has point only in opposition to the tradition. I want now to generalize this contrast between philosophers whose work is essentially constructive and those whose work is essentially reac...

December 8, 2020. Page 366.

On the periphery of the history of modern philosophy, one finds figures who, without forming a “tradition,” resemble each other in their distrust of the notion that man’s essence is to be a knower of essences. Goethe, Kierkegaard, Santayana, William James, Dewey, the later Wittgenstein, the later Heidegger, are figures of this sort. They are often accused of relativism or cynicism. They are often dubious about progress, and especially about the latest claim that such-and-such a discipline has at last made the nature of human knowledge so clear that reason will now spread throughout the rest of human activity. These writers have kept alive the suggestion that, even when we have justified true belief about everything we want to know, we may have no more than conformity to the norms of the day. They have kept alive the historicist sense that this century’s “superstition” was the last century’s triumph of reason, as well as the relativist sense that the latest vocabulary, borrowed from the latest scientific achievement, may not express privileged representations of essences, but be just another of the potential infinity of vocabularies in which the world can be described.

December 8, 2020. Page 367.

The later Wittgenstein and the later Heidegger (like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) are of the latter sort.

December 8, 2020. Page 369.

One way to see edifying philosophy as the love of wisdom is to see it as the attempt to prevent conversation from degenerating into inquiry, into a research program. Edifying philosophers can never end philosophy, but they can help prevent it from attaining the secure path of a science.

December 8, 2020. Page 372.

Philosophers who have doubts about traditional epistemology are often thought to be questioning the notion that at most one of incompatible competing theories can be true. However, it is hard to find anyone who actually does question this. When it is said, for example, that coherentist or pragmatic “theories of truth” allow for the possibility that many incompatible theories would satisfy the conditions set for “the truth,” the coherentist or pragmatist usually replies that this merely shows that we should have no grounds for choice among these candidates for “the truth.” The moral to draw, they say, is not that they have offered inadequate analyses of “true,” but that there are some terms—for example, “the true theory,” “the right thing to do”—which are, intuitively and grammatically, singular, but for which no set of necessary and sufficient conditions can be given which will pick out a unique referent. This fact, they say, should not be surprising. Nobody thinks that there are necessary and sufficient conditions which will pick out, for example, the unique referent of “the best thing for her to have done on finding herself in that rather embarrassing situation,” though plausible conditions can be given which will shorten a list of competing incompatible candidates. Why should it be different for the referents of “what she should have done in that ghastly moral dilemma” or “the Good Life for man” or “what the world is really made of”?

December 8, 2020. Page 374.

The edifying philosophers are thus agreeing with Lessing’s choice of the infinite striving for truth over “all of Truth.”20 For the edifying philosopher the very idea of being presented with “all of Truth” is absurd, because the Platonic notion of Truth itself is absurd. It is absurd either as the notion of truth about reality which is not about reality-under-a-certain-description, or as the notion of truth about reality under some privileged description which makes all other descriptions unnecessary because it is commensurable with each of them.

December 8, 2020. Page 378.

prolegomenon

To drop the notion of the philosopher as knowing something about knowing which nobody else knows so well would be to drop the notion that his voice always has an overriding claim on the attention of the other participants in the conversation. It would also be to drop the notion that there is something called “philosophical method” or “philosophical technique” or “the philosophical point of view” which enables the professional philosopher, ex officio, to have interesting views about, say, the respectability of psychoanalysis, the legitimacy of certain dubious laws, the resolution of moral dilemmas, the “soundness” of schools of historiography or literary criticism, and the like. Philosophers often do have interesting views upon such questions, and their professional training as philosophers is often a necessary condition for their having the views they do. But this is not to say that philosophers have a special kind of knowledge about knowledge (or anything else) from which they draw relevant corollaries. The useful kibitzing they can provide on the various topics I just mentioned is made possible by their familiarity with the historical background of arguments on similar topics, and, most importantly, by the fact that arguments on such topics are punctuated by stale philosophical clichés which the other participants have stumbled across in their reading, but about which professional philosophers know the pros and cons by heart. The neo-Kantian image of philosophy as a prof...

December 8, 2020. Page 393.

To drop the notion of the philosopher as knowing something about knowing which nobody else knows so well would be to drop the notion that his voice always has an overriding claim on the attention of the other participants in the conversation. It would also be to drop the notion that there is something called “philosophical method” or “philosophical technique” or “the philosophical point of view” which enables the professional philosopher, ex officio, to have interesting views about, say, the respectability of psychoanalysis, the legitimacy of certain dubious laws, the resolution of moral dilemmas, the “soundness” of schools of historiography or literary criticism, and the like. Philosophers often do have interesting views upon such questions, and their professional training as philosophers is often a necessary condition for their having the views they do. But this is not to say that philosophers have a special kind of knowledge about knowledge (or anything else) from which they draw relevant corollaries. The useful kibitzing they can provide on the various topics I just mentioned is made possible by their familiarity with the historical background of arguments on similar topics, and, most importantly, by the fact that arguments on such topics are punctuated by stale philosophical clichés which the other participants have stumbled across in their reading, but about which professional philosophers know the pros and cons by heart. The neo-Kantian image of philosophy as a prof...

December 8, 2020. Page 394.

The only point on which I would insist is that philosophers’ moral concern should be with continuing the conversation of the West, rather than with insisting upon a place for the traditional problems of modern philosophy within that conversation.

December 8, 2020. Page 394. Yes!

Not only the educated laypeople, but also their fellow academics, are usually utterly in the dark as to what philosophers do with their time. A geneticist can, if he takes the trouble, visualize roughly what his colleagues in economics or French literature are trying to do, and what means they employ to do it. They, with a bit more trouble, can do the same for him. But all of them find it much more difficult to do this for their friends in the philosophy department. Such phrases as “a spectator of all time and all eternity” and “the investigation of the being qua being” are appropriate to august and long-dead figures like Plato and Kant, but it’s hard to associate them with young Professor Dimble, who, desperately bucking for tenure, keeps promising to finish his book (entitled “Structure, Interpretation, and Choice: A Linguistic Approach to Value”). Dimble, it appears, is interested in language and in ethics. But when asked to resolve concrete moral dilemmas, he is embarrassed and annoyed. When asked questions about linguistics (in the sense of comparative grammar, phonematic analysis, and the like), he is blankly ignorant. When asked what his research for the book consists in, it turns out that he simply reads other philosophers and makes notes about their mistakes. When asked whether what he’s doing has any relation to what Plato and Kant did, he assures you that it does indeed—adding that, although of course Plato was thoroughly muddled about ethical choice, Kant did g...

December 8, 2020. Page 397.

epigraphists

Philosophy as a specialized academic discipline, then, is viewed with a mixture of reverence, perplexity, and distrust. Somehow, philosophy when practiced by amateurs seems preferable to philosophy practiced by professionals. It is high praise for a specialist in some other field (a Schrödinger, or a Toynbee) to say that his work has “philosophical implications.” Among professional philosophers, we are happiest with those who first won distinction in other fields (as, for instance, Russell and Whitehead in mathematics). Like athletic skill or personal beauty, philosophy seems an excellent thing to have as an added attraction (“the bloom on the rose”), but there is something odd about a full-time and exclusive concern with it.

December 8, 2020. Page 400.

But if we ask ourselves where the pigeonholes come from, whether they’re adequate, and whether we need really be uneasy if such distinctions seem not to be exhaustive or exclusive, where do we turn? Presumably to philosophy. What sort of questions are these? Presumably philosophical questions. Philosophy, as the discipline that asks the largest questions and establishes the most comprehensive schemes of classification, always has the last word. The one sort of question that can never get a definite answer is a question that asks about itself. It is precisely reflection on the adequacy of questions, rather than answers, that has determined the course of the history of philosophy. Reflection on whether and when we can pose the questions “science or art?” “objective or subjective?” takes pride of place. Thus to insist that philosophy fall, once and for all, under one side or the other of such dichotomies is ipso facto to forbid it to raise questions as to the status of such distinctions. Such an insistence, as we’ve noted, has been the driving force behind each historic revolution in philosophy; the unacceptability of the concomitant prohibition is the reason why no such revolution has been, or can be, the last.

December 8, 2020. Page 402. Philosophy breaking the 4th wall.

As to “vision,” of course, this is fairly obvious: what is demanded of a philosopher is that he should be able to see what is presupposed by asking a certain question that other philosophers (or scientists, or people at large) have been in the habit of asking. Having seen this, his contribution to the dialogue is to raise a new question about whether this presupposition is justified. It is this “seeing through” the unexpressed assumptions of a previous philosophy, or of a culture, or of some particular discipline, that sets apart a Kant, a Kierkegaard, a Whitehead, or a Wittgenstein. This is the side of philosophizing that is closest to the arts, the side where there is room for individual creativity and for “greatness.” It is also, oddly enough, the side that is most easily available to the outsider. The works of such men as these have a kind of freshness and power that (even when wrapped in the jargon of a Kant or a Whitehead) will make itself felt in a rapidly expanding series of extraphilosophical concerns.

December 9, 2020. Page 406.

When a philosopher tells us that pleasure is not a good, or that matter doesn’t exist, or that the law of noncontradiction is false, we may be willing to admit that he’s succeeded in questioning a presupposition that we’d never dreamed of questioning ourselves, but we still need to be shown that doing so is worth the trouble.

December 9, 2020. Page 408.

For example, idealism, which was “in” up until the First World War, and had by then reached its stage of decadent scholasticism, is currently “out.” But it is only a matter of time until the philosophical movements that took its place (analytic philosophy, phenomenology) reach their own decadence.

12-08-2020. Page 408.

The sketch of different modes of philosophizing that we’ve been presenting has aimed at answering the rhetorical question “What do philosophers do?” This question needed to be answered before we could take up the practical questions suggested by our original paradox: Should the professional philosophers be doing something different from what they are doing? Should they be getting more attention than they are? As to the first question, it should be clear that, if there is any truth at all in our description of what philosophers do, it follows that this question is at best silly, and at worst potentially very dangerous. It is a question that will usually be raised only if one’s notion of what philosophy is comes from inspection of a single philosophic school, engaged in working out the consequences of a single set of insights. If one is aware that there are alternatives to these insights, but fails to notice the context of dialogue within which this school lives and has its being, then one can delude oneself into feeling competent to redirect philosophical inquiry. In particular, if one is entirely preoccupied with a single question, and doesn’t take the trouble to find out whether this may not be the first time the question has been raised, then one can easily become exasperated at finding philosophers discussing quite different questions. It is precisely the mark of the amateur in philosophy to picture philosophy as a discipline possessing a certain set of methods and inst...

December 9, 2020. Page 413.

What I have been saying is no more than a corollary of my thesis that, because philosophy’s product is dialogue, there is no extraphilosophical standpoint from which judgment may be passed upon it. This thesis can be seen as simply a way of encapsulating the point of the miniature dialogues that we set out above—the point that one can’t say anything about philosophy without being a philosopher oneself. But the suspicious neatness of this comeback, and the flavor of trickery in the dialogues that incarnate it, suggest that the real question is still being evaded. The real question, perhaps, is “O.K., so what do I have to do to count as a ‘philosopher’?” In other words, just how much about the history of philosophy does one have to know before one is entitled to decide either that (a) the philosophers should be doing something different, or that (b) one doesn’t have to know any more? Now the general answer to this is: lots. The specific answer is: enough to be able to offer answers to the questions that the philosophers of one’s day are asking. One ceases to be an amateur in philosophy when, and only when, one stops asking philosophers to speak one’s own language and starts telling them in their language why they should cease to speak that language. To put it another way, one ceases to be an amateur in philosophy when one stops saying that certain questions are pointless, and begins explaining not only why different questions should be asked, but why answers to these new one...

December 9, 2020. Page 415.