I still don’t see how any of this is relevant to AP as such. AP certainly is productive of more consensus than continental philosophy or any non-analytic style of western philosophy. That’s a sociological observation, not an argument for the superiority of AP. So pointing out that there are plenty of controversial issues in AP doesn’t achieve much.

Are you saying the answers are controversial inside philosophy or just outside?

If inside, then how can I check your answers?

Well, you asked.

(Do you really think that some other way of doing philosophy will get you less controversial answers?)

1. are we morally obliged to obey the law because it is the law?

2 should we care that some people have less than others or should we only care that some people don’t have enough?

3.should the state be concerned with people’s happiness or with their access to the resources necessary to pursue their aims?

4. how far are we obliged to tolerate the intolerant?

5. if we can prevent famine victims from dying at a cost to ourselves that involves no sacrifice of comparable moral importance, are we obliged to do so?

Yes, I know this but I don’t see the relevance to what I’ve said. Do you think it contradicts something? Try again, especially if it’s interesting.

[A]nalytic philosophy is defined mainly by the qualities it values in philosophical writing, a certain explicitness that strongly mimics [sic] the structure of a logical argument. By that standard, most historically phillosophical work is not really philosophy. And even Plato and Aristotle need to be reconstituted before they are fit for analytic philosophical consumption.

So Aristotle has to be “reconstituted” before he can manifest “a certain explicitness that strongly mimics the structure of a logical argument.”

Steve, Aristotle’s complete works, in a translation revised by Jonathan Barnes, are published in two volumes by Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-09950-2.

To 150: Thanks, but I still think this reconstruction is lumping him together with a very less interesting brand of thinker.

He did not argue that changes in vocabulary cannot involve progressive approximation to truth. He argued that the positive claim that the sciences do involve progressive approximation to truth cannot be given any substantive content, given the deflationary nature of truth. He was not an anti-realist. He was “against pro-realism.”

The argument was something like the following:

(1) ‘True’ does not name a substantive property that can be investigated demonstratively or empirically. Rather, in the words of his mentor, Quine, truth is ‘a trivial device of disquotation.’ To say that ‘p’ is true is to say no more than p.

(3) Given (2), there was no substantive theory of truth that we could use to show us that changes in vocabulary involve a progressive approximation to truth.

(4) Given (3), there was no justification for the epistemic success of the methods of science that would not draw on resources for justification that were internal to the methods of science.

(5) Given (4), he then made the value judgment that there were more important things for people in philosophy to be doing than trying to find a justification outside of the methods of science for the epistemic success of the methods of science. To be glib, he was enough of a Romantic to think that it was not necessarily the case that it was truth or knowledge of a scientific variety that “will set us free.”

NB: I do not endorse this argument. I do think there is something special about sensory observation of the world and theorizing that attempts to be constrained by it. I am also a lot more optimistic than Rorty was in standard Enlightenment ideals “taken neat.” However, it is more than misleading to summarize his views as “there is no truth, only consensus, and I like this view because people I like to talk to will agree with me.” Also, for a thinker who engaged with the range of people he did (and annoyed as many people as he did), it just strikes me as impossible to accuse him in good faith of typifying a style of argument that was the academic equivalent of “insider trading” (impossible, that is, for anyone who did not have an ideological axe to grind in a public forum). Enough: RIP. I’ll let you have the last word.

But this is a weak argument ( as it stands )for the claim that account of ontology of mind in the analytic tradition must be fruitless.

Nothing interesting follows from the fact that such accounts must change as our vocabulary changes because it is possible that such change involves verisimilitude.

Of course that maybe itself is false but you cannot just assume that, that is question begging in this context.

To put it in another way, you need another argument to defend the assumption that the change in vocabulary does not involve getting closer and closer to truth and of course that is precisely where Scruton type criticisms get their bite from i.e. there is no nonquestion begging argument any of the post modernists have presented to show that change in vocabulary cannot involve verisimilitude.

The Rortybots are coming! Run for your lives! :)

“I therefore cannot go along with what seems to me, whenever I encounter it, to be a wholly specious and even cheap way of arguing, which Rorty typified and indeed perfected. Rorty was paramount among those thinkers who advance their own opinion as immune to criticism, by pretending that it is not truth but consensus that counts, while defining the consensus in terms of people like themselves.”

To 143: I actually find the Scruton piece fundamentally wrong in many ways. Though the first part of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is couched in the language of analytic of philosophy of mind, it is mostly, iirc, using that language to show that the kind of debates David Armstrong, Jaegwon Kim, David Lewis, and even Donald Davidson were having about the correct account of the ontology of mind were fruitless, because our understanding of that ontology will change as our vocabulary for describing the mind changes (and our vocabulary will only change as a more robust, biologically grounded empirical investigation of the mind advances). In this, Rorty revealed himself—along with Feyerabend—to be the real trailblazor for people like the Churchlands (who, it should be noted, frequently cite his early papers in defence of their views).

The second part of the book is controversial because it veers towards claiming that the blurryness of the boundary between empirical investigation of the world and hermeneutic interpretation of texts shows that there is no distinction to be drawn in the vicinity (the argument being, roughly, that each domain advances by producing new models and/or vocabularies and that the justification of claims in either domain will always be in the form of “what one’s informed peers allow one to get away with”). He later lamented the sloppiness of some of the claims in that part of the book (this is from Joshua Knobe’s 1995 interview” :

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Int: Do you have any idea why Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was so widely read?

Rorty: I still don’t understand it. One of the referees for Princeton Press answered the standard question on the form they send him, ‘will this be of interest outside its own field?” by saying, “Absolutely not. It’s strictly a book for philosophy professors.” That seemed right to me, so I never did understand it. I think many more people read it outside the feld than ever read it inside the field; maybe because it was sort of a follow-up to Kuhn. Many people outside of philosophy were impressed by Kuhn, and my book was sort of more along the Kuhnian line.

Int: Your more recent work is less concerned with the specifics of analytic philosophy. Does that indicate a change in your views or just a shift in your interests?

Rorty: A little of both, I suppose. Mainly a change of interest. I don’t know; maybe there isn’t any change in views. Maybe its just an interest in seeing philosophy in a longer-term, historical perspective.

Int: You also seem to have shifted your interests from Quine to Davidson.

Rorty: No, I just think Davidson went way beyond Quine. I think Quine had certain ideas in germ which only came to fruition in Davidson.

Int: And Dewey seems to have superceded them all.

Rorty: I think it’s because Quine and Sellars are philosophy professors and nothing more, whereas Dewey was a larger figure than just a philosophy professor, more suitable for hero worship.

Int: In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, you attacked Putnam’s early philosophy. What do you think of his more recent work?

Rorty: I think our views are practically indistinguishable, but he doesn’t. He thinks I’m a relativist and he isn’t. And I think: if I’m a relativist, then he’s one too.

Int: Why do you think Putnam sees you as a relativist?

Rorty: Beats me. I wrote an article about it, but that was as far as I got.

Int: Do you still believe that epistemology should be replaced by hermeneutics?

Rorty: No, I think it was an unfortunate phrase. I wish I’d never mentioned hermeneutics. The last chapter of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature isn’t very good. I think I just should have said: we ought to be able to think of something more interesting to do than keep the epistemology industry going.