Comments on: Rorty vs Soames

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Brian,
Thanks for the very useful analysis. I think you’re largely right. My only question is why you found Rorty’s good points to be “surprising”. I know he annoys quite a lot of folks, and he’s often used as either a wipping boy or a boggy-man by a certain set of philosophers, but he’s obviously not stupid not uninformed.

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Matt, you’re right that I’m just showing (off) some prejudices with that remark. In this case since Rorty was arguing that Soames was wrong, and Soames is intelligent and well-informed, I could try and express surprise that such a smart person was wrong. Sadly, “Philosopher makes mistake” is not exactly a news headline.

For what it’s worth I thought Rorty did a perfectly fine job in what I think are dreadful environments (philosophical roundtables) at the big St Andrews realism conference last summer. So maybe I should check my surprise at the door.

By: sacha

sacha — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks for the links. These were both excellent articles – and it is hard to say that either Rorty or Soames have ‘won’.

It seems to me what the debate rests on is that Soames wants us to believe that Kripke was a genuine advancement in philosophy, whereas Rorty simply believes Kripke broadened the domain of discourse.

Which, of course, seems like a terrible question to answer, because in many ways, an advancement in philosophy is entirely equivalent to a broadening of the domain of discourse.

Then again, I’m inclined to simply agree with Rorty, but only because I don’t like Kripke in the first place.

By: Rob

Rob — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I think the heart of Soames and Rorty’s disagreement is over Kripke. As I remember the LRB article, Rorty’s main problem with Soames’s account was the centrality of Kripke in that account. If you don’t agree with Kripke about the possibility of a posteriori necessary truths, if you take seriously the Quinean attack of necessity and analyticity, as Rorty does, then Kripke’s work looks like an attempt to smuggle back in all the bad old claims of analytic truth by the backdoor. Understandably, then, you wouldn’t think well of Soames’s claim that he’s important, and explains why analytical philosophy is as it is, and why it ought to be as it is. The key claim is Soames’s reply then is ‘Rorty cannot understand the Kripkean achievement of expanding the philosophical conception of the necessary beyond the purely linguistic’, and unless you want to start talking about whether sticks a metre long are always and everywhere a metre long, and what we might mean by that, that’s a fair enough reply.

About the other stuff, they actually seem to agree: Rorty’s take on the importance of vagueness is that it tells us something about realism and anti-realism, while Soames seems to see it as part of a similar project, just slightly more fragmented. Rorty is a bit polemical, but when you are regarded as a strange outlier in the way he is, that’s understandable, if a bit unfortunate.

By: Anderson

Anderson — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t think it’s a very good sign for realism when Soames appears to be writing about a different review from the one Rorty wrote.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Is it some philosophical injoke that everyone’s being so equivocal and he-said-she-said about this debate? Surely someone can give us some straight, clear answers about vagueness?

I demand clearly and rigorously demarcated areas of vagueness and uncertainty!

By: russkie

russkie — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Didn’t Wittgenstein cure people of the desire to discuss this stuff?

Wouldn’t you rather read Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, or Strauss instead?

By: ionfish

ionfish — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

As a hideously ignorant undergrad, I’d just like to ask whether—from the wider perspective of the authors and commenters here—there are many “history of philosophy” courses available for undergrads reading analytic philosophy? For myself at least, I find it far easier to comprehend and evaluate philosophical notions once I can place them in a historical framework. While my lecturers are happy to do this, if asked, it often seems as if there’s not enough time to cover seemingly tangential issues (I say “seemingly” because for me, they’ve very central); an odd situation for an Arts degree with a minimum of lectures and seminars. Sorry if this is dragging things away from the topic at hand, but to me at least such questions are an important corollary to any discussion of the history of philosophy; after all, if students don’t learn it when they’re undergraduates, what chance is there for analytic philosophy to “burst the boundaries of the English-speaking world”? An understanding of one’s position within, and relationship to, the academic tradition in which one claims to stand would seem to be a fairly important prerequisite of any boundary-bursting activity.

On a totally unrelated note, Brian, I was wondering whether there was any particular significance attached to your use of Emma Story’s Amazon referral links for Soames’ books?

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

I use Emma’s Amazon links because she donates the referral income to charity. I could set up my own links to do this, but I’m worried that when the checks came in I’d be weak-willed. (Or, more likely, feel comfortable with making a smaller donation out of my normal income.) So this way I buck-pass the weakness of will worries.

How much history of analytic philosophy is taught varies a lot between departments. At Cornell we do a lot. I’m teaching a course that goes roughly from Ayer to Quine right now. Like most departments we have a Frege, Russell, early Wittgenstein course. And when we’re feeling especially attached to the period we’ll sometimes offer courses on the period between those paradigm early analytics and the rise of logical positivism. (That’s actually my favourite historical period, just because it contains Keynes and Ramsey.) Few departments will have as many such offerings as Cornell, but plenty will have a course on Frege through Wittgenstein. And of course if you want to look further back, most departments will have some fairly good combination of 17th, 18th and 19th century courses (and earlier).

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Some departments, including some I’ve been involved with, teach the history of analytic philosophy under cunning names such as “contemporary philosophy” or “philosophy of language” or the like. So, one might also look at those classes as well.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

So this way I buck-pass the weakness of will worries.

Would it be fair to say that “vagueness is the new weakness of will”?

By: Enzo Rossi

Enzo Rossi — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Fodor argued along these lines in a recent LRB essay:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/fodo01_.html

Evil Kripke gave the unphilosophical analytic nerds their toys back -booh! Long live Quinenstein!

By: radek

radek — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Isn’t the paradox of the heap just Zeno’s paradox dressed up in some fancy new clothes?

Just like an arrow cannot fly from point A to point B, one cannot build a heap starting from a single grain of sand.

By: bza

bza — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Not really. Zeno’s paradox concerns the summation properties of indefinitely small quantities. The paradox of the heap (aka the Sorites paradox) concerns the boundaries of concepts. Pace your description, no one doubts that, starting from one grain of sand, you will eventually arrive at a heap of sand by adding grains. The paradox arises from the difficulty of specifying at what point one goes from just having some sand to having a heap thereof. (For what it’s worth, the Sorites paradox is of ancient provenance as well, so it’s not new.)

The analogue to Zeno’s paradox would be to ask whether we could ever achieve a certain finite volume of sand by adding grains of sand whose volume was always smaller than the remaining volume we have to fill.

By: John Landon

John Landon — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Interesting, but…Rorty’s final statement that the only two philosophers still worth reading in 2005 are Frege and Nietzsche I find entirely odd. Speaking as a non-specialist who failed to submit to the pragmatism binge I am left wondering how philosophy got where it is. Rorty suffers the strange delusion he has down away with Kant and Plato. Anyone but a specialist in analytical complications is left scratching his head.