Interesting. Maybe a performative contradiction after all. Is “recommending” a type of rhetoric, or is it an attempt to convince? The distinctions start to get blurry.
The only thing I can offer in Rorty’s favor (apart from that he’s a superb rhetorician) is his honesty about what he was doing. That was really commendable. If every philosopher who shared Rorty’s approach would similarly make it clear that they are no longer arguing, that they no longer care about “the force of the better argument” except as a tactic, but are instead engaging in a different kind of discourse, with a different end . . . we’d know much better where we stand with them.
Rorty invents a vocabulary to get around philosophy, but it doesn’t work. Say useful instead of true and you just get asked useful for what, and how would we know - the same questions are in new clothes. And his new vocabulary only makes sense if you already know the old vocabulary, so he never left.
I don’t disagree entirely, but I think it might be a bit too strong. The questions ordinary people ask are often those that form the basis of philosophy, a practice that no doubt starts around the table and ends up in the lecture hall, often becoming supremely abstruse and specialised along the way. There is clearly a vast difference between having expertise and having none.
Personally, I don’t consider my contributions to be philosophy, and I am definitely outside the discipline. So are many of us here. What we generally do is have conversations about values and reflections on the world, augmented by philosophical ideas acquired through secondary sources and often not particularly well understood. To call this philosophy would be like comparing the ritual of flossing one’s teeth to the practice of dentistry.
I’m not sure that anyone is defending a form of common sense? Has this appeared much around here?
I don’t know much about Rorty, and coming from a non-philosophical background, he may be more attractive to me than he should be. But when I’ve read some of his thinking in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, I’ve found that they are positions I’ve often arrived at independently, albeit in a much less sophisticated way. Hilary Lawson, a kind of Rorty-lite, holds similar positions which I find appealing. Perhaps this is because I began as an existential nihilist, so perhaps moving towards Rorty is a tentative step towards a form of meaning.
I know Rorty is a divisive figure, which makes me suspect he may be onto something. Didn’t he spend a lot of his career defending himself against a charge like this? Personally, I think the question “useful for what?” seems a lot more workable than trying to attach human choices to some kind of foundational truth. Would you say you were a foundationalist?
I know you think you’re not doing philosophy, at least in some sense, but you are. Argue a position or draw an inference and you’re using logic. Believe that something is true and you’re doing epistemology. If you believe some actions are better than others, or hold any ethical view that guides what you do, then you’re doing philosophy.
Flossing isn’t the right analogy. Flossing is a different activity from dentistry, i.e., it never tries to do what a dentist does. The right analogy I’d use is someone untrained pulling a tooth. They know they need the pliers, they’re working on a tooth like a dentist would, and sometimes it comes out clean. But without the training it often goes badly, and the difference shows up in the failures.
I’m not that familiar with Rorty even though I’ve made some comments about him based on what others have said.
Ok, well I disagree with this. I’d just call this discursive practice and it’s pretty hard for a human being to avoid doing this. For me it only becomes a form of philosophy when it is systematised. But maybe I need to be more charitable.
I’d say it’s the perfect analogy precisely because flossing is critical for dental health but it’s a triviality compared to actual dentistry. That said, my dentist does floss her patients, so there is that. But the point is that if you are pulling teeth, then you are doing actual dentistry, so as an analogy for my point, this misses the mark entirely. Although it might be an analogy for your position.
Perhaps we’ve reached the stage where the question becomes: when does discursive practice and ordinary conversation become philosophy? And when it comes to the question of reason, at one point does providing reasons become Reason? No doubt there will be a range of views, and much will depend, as always, on definitions and personal opinion.
Irrationalism is somewhat of an obscure movement. It seems to have emerged from the failure of reason to solve philosophical problems. Rationalism distills down to a somewhat risible Come, let us calculate. We’ve made considerable progress and yet we haven’t been able to cross out any of the problems on our list.
I should further specify what I mean. I am not — just to be clear — against discussion. Not at all. Quite the reverse !
For me the “enacted metaphor” is optional but dominant specification of this discussion. The goal in philosophy is often taken for granted to be a “mirroring” of an “objective reality” that is “already out there.” This phrase “objective reality” and its surrogates are left unchallenged. There is a “sentimentality” about the word “truth.”
Much of my thinking stems from a strong sense of the primacy of the perceptual. The “solid basis” of the “still innocent” version of “objective reality” is the co-perceivable. The “picture theory” understood in terms of the “bestowal of surrogate perceptions” is actually great ! The vervet monkey cries “eagle.” The human boy cries “wolf.” The “truth” or “validity” of this kind of cry is potentially perceptually available to other monkeys, other humans.
The problem, as I see it, is that this wildly successful metaphor is taken out of its effective “habitat.” Philosophers run with this picture theory while ( pretending ) to doubt the primacy of perception. Abstract statements are assumed to have a “truth-maker.” The word “truth” itself becomes “mystified,” since it has been yanked out of its empirical context. The “truth” about “truth” is “seeing is believing.” The “surrogate perception” bestowed upon me by signs from a peer is weighed against my own perception proper. Belief is fundamental. Truth is an indicator of belief that is grounded in personal perception. Does this statement itself offer a surrogate perception ? Is it offered as somehow secured by a truth maker ? I’d say rather that it’s an attempt to point back at experience. I in fact do believe ( without proof) that others are “enough like me” for this pointer to “make sense.” If we don’t co-perceive shared objects, “proof” is a hopeless sign anyway.
Right. One strategy is an immanent critique. Work within the framework to show that it fails on its own terms. Another strategy is to “vandalize” the idol. I think that many who like philosophy like its critical edge. Like sharks, they follow the blood in the water. But taken-for-granted metaphors function for the most part “invisibly.” This is precisely their “taken for granted” status. They “hobble” as a kind of “false necessity.”
I like Rorty’s values, even if I personally — in a different social context — choose a different style. But he prudently emphasized relatable social goals and assimilated exotic and fascinating “pomo imports” in a lucid style. He could even come off as “more radical” than those he appropriated, within that lucid style. A literary man, he was quite shrewd on the fundamental issue of the total effect of a persona. Rorty is a “brand.” Both “hot” and “cold.” Both “radical” and “old-fashioned Norman Rockwell American goodness.”
There’s a “computerized” cartoon of rationality — as I see it — that still “haunts” philosophy. “Rationality” is often viewed in “Euclidean” terms. Whether P \implies Q is vaguely taken to be “already true or false.” Words are just marks and noises subject to blurry norms. No. They “carry eternal essences” and these “essences” are subject to “eternal logical laws.” I think many would reject the vision expressed in these terms —and then go on to approach “rationality” like a Chess engine anyway. Basically as if “meaning” and “truth” can be cleanly separated from motive and context. Those who question this presupposed framework ( good critical suspicious minds ) come off as impious and perhaps as “irrationalists.” But from the POV of the “irrationalists,” they are being ( informally, pre-theoretically) “realistic” about human existence.
Just to clarify, I’m “pouring cold water” on a certain style of discussion that gets called “philosophy.” Of course I celebrate some writers in this genre.
I don’t think there’s a easy border to draw, but I think we have a “reality facing” side of philosophy and a “speculative-neurotic” side. For instance, the first chapter of Leviathan is potent stuff, written by a highly placed experienced man in exile, who many wanted dead for his impiety. On the other side, we get attempted “proofs” perhaps that other people “exist,” which are accidentally comical. Another chunk of philosophy is something like an attempt to harmonize religious hopes with the scientific worldview. Existentialism gives us an atheist attempt to fuse a holistic vision of existence. This is “personal for sale.” A personal solution is generalized as a possibility of others. The philosopher invents a new role for the stage of the world.
I am also in the US. Ugly times over here ! Almost like a bad dream, like a parody of reality. I am strangely comforted by my Schopenhauer-influenced pessimism, but I of course want things to get better.
I would agree with you that discussion cannot be escaped. But there’s a tendency for people call discussion “philosophy” or “metaphysics” — while ignoring that others really areno longer playing the same game.
I see what is reasonable in this, but there’s a point on this line where you end calling an atheist bored with babble about “God” a “theologian.”
In this context ( where Rorty has come up ), we are dealing with “post”-philosophers who have looked in to those “tools” and found plenty of “superstitions” about a fetishized image of “rationality.”
Rorty is pretty explicit about this. A classic “self-appointed” role of the “philosopher” is “expert on logic itself.” So the “philosopher” pretends to a kind of authority on “what words really mean” or “what really follows from what.”
Putting aside one’s personal belief in such a speciality, the philosopher is not taken seriously, generally speaking, in our technological society. As Rorty saw, the specialization and departmentalization led to a kind of “insider discourse” of little relevance even to other educated people. The exception here is the broader philosopher who is a fleshed-out personality. For instance, Sartre was huge in his heyday. Even Bertrand Russell was socially important, but largely as a non-Christian, as a symbol for secular rationality. We are both fans of Wittgenstein. His own legacy is complicated, but I’m confident that his story and charisma are far more important to most people than the details of his work. And I see his later stuff as intensely “post-philosophical” anyway, more in the direction of Rorty, if we ignore his conservative cultural feeling. His philosophy of mathematics still offends mathematicians who bother to read it.
Here I agree with you. The most powerful assumptions are the most difficult to excavate. “A picture held them captive.” In many cases, it was a picture of a picture, a picture of philosophy as a picturing. Many enact philosophy as a picturing of picturing itself. The picture should be “true.” But this “picture picture” is “taken for granted” as something that makes sense. Inquiry is “pictured” as fundamentally as “picturing.” It’s all “clean and bloodless,” the same old Aristotelian “theory god” of a Greek society where slaves did the manual labor. An alternative is of course to see inquiry as primarily visceral and only secondarily verbal. The verbal itself is still visceral, still noises and marks exchanged by social mammals trying to modify their environment. “Pictures” play a role here, but that role is secondary.
Rorty took from Kuhn the contrast between “normal” and “abnormal” discourse. Basically “abnormal” discourse puts the way we otherwise automatically do things into question.
If we acknowledge context, then some philosophy is abnormal discourse, while much of it “ringing the changes” or “playing an old game.”
On the old forum, I’d always follow the “X got banned” threads. Because that was “framework deep” stuff. What was the discourse around “execution” and “police action” ? How did the system “preserve itself” ? People would debate, to some degree, what the site was “about” and so on. To me those were especially philosophical moments. Whose right to speak was recognized or not, and why ?
My only concern is that maybe this old Greek word is “ruined” already. “Philosophy” has a pompous ring now. I’m reluctant to “wear” the term. Personally, I’d rather say that “I like phenomenology.” That is specific enough. The tent is otherwise too big.
When I read this topic’s OP, I started thinking about “reason”. I was a little surprised to discover it’s a word whose meaning I have gleaned from context. And the meaning I gleaned is two-fold,
Reason is the name of the tool/technique we use to structure our arguments, and
Reason is the tool/technique we use to assess the correctness or validity of our ideas.
N.B. These words are from memory, without the advantage of search engines or < spit > AIs. I didn’t even refer to my modest library of paper books.
Do my words accord with the understanding of others, I wonder?
Fair point about the word, and that pomposity is exactly what I’m referring to, i.e., it’s probably why some people come in here insisting they’re not doing philosophy while they’re doing it. But saying you like phenomenology doesn’t get you out of the tent, it just picks a corner. If the tent is too big, that’s a reason to qualify the term, not drop it. Physics, for e.g., covers everything from cosmology to condensed matter and nobody refuses the term.
Almost every subject contains philosophy. For e.g., philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of history, philosophy or religion, philosophy of science, philosophy of chess, philosophy of linguistics, on and on. Almost every subject is its domain, which is why I say you can’t escape philosophy. And as soon as someone makes an argument against this point they’re doing philosophy.
I saw an interview with Rorty near the end of his life. He essentially made the point that we can leave philosophy to those who find it engaging and to improve the world a good start might be as a “simple-minded utilitarian” and a reformist leftist (not a cultural leftist). Sure, he put his biases on the table.
I would say it’s this sort of oversimplified cartoon that genuine rationalists should reject. Personally I find a lot of daylight between these two extremes.
Glad a lot of my Rortyan analysis makes sense to you, though.
I’m going to be boring. Apologies. At the very least we need to qualify the term. But taking physics as an example, we wouldn’t say someone is a physicist if all they’ve ingested is a couple YouTube videos on the subject. They are not doing physics merely by having a position on the double slit experiment. Why would philosophy deserve a less rigorous entry point?
Which is why I would be reluctant to call someone a philosopher just because what they say is drawn from philosophy in some way. I am unsure about the use of the term “doing philosophy” but I guess you are advocating for a charitable use of the expression.
There’s no doubt that people hold unexamined metaphysical positions and often blind dogma. I wonder how useful it is to call a defence of an ignorant viewpoint philosophy? Or for you would this just be called “bad philosophy”?
I choose not to call what I understand philosophy and I think we need to allow people the courtesy of self-description. I choose this because my views are not founded on any systematic thinking or tradition and lack expertise and I would hate for anyone to think I had arrived at a viewpoint through appropriate study. I reserve the term philosophy for someone who knows what they are doing, who is not reinventing the wheel and can draw from texts. There may well be amateur philosophers here but I am not one. Just as I am not a mathematician or a physicist. Thoughts?
Steven Pinker defines rationality as the use of knowledge to achieve goals. Seems slightly lacking. In my OP I was thinking more about logic and the idea that we can attain certainty through the “magic” of logic.
Self-description is yours, and that’s fine as far as it goes. But this isn’t about a label, it’s about what you’re doing. If I see someone playing chess, they’re playing chess. They can decline to be called a chess player, but that doesn’t change what’s happening on the board. Someone who’s never opened a book and keeps reinventing lines from 1890 is still playing chess, just not well. And math and physics are the wrong comparison, because most people never do much. However, and this is my point, everyone reasons about what’s true and what’s good, every day, trained or not, and this is philosophy.
Philosophy is going on all the time between people. Think of what’s going on in politics. People are arguing for their point of view or the view of their party constantly; and supposedly they’re claiming one conclusion over another based on good evidence or good reasons. So, they’re using one of the tools of philosophy, viz., logic (actually they’re also using other philosophical tools too).
So you seem to be arguing it’s a practice, perhaps like yoga, and people range from really shit to professional?
I have debated this point also in past years but it seems not unreasonable. You are suggesting that philosophy is inescapable and this doesn’t seem all that useful to me. But let’s move on for now. Thanks for the chat.
I found him convincing on this point. I don’t pretend to be an agent of salvation personally, but I am skeptical about high theory playing a significant role in such salvation. Call me cynical, but I see rival poets vying for prestige, working within a pretense that such work is for the proles, etc. I’m a “prole” myself, or at best a hangnail of the managerial class.
