I like Richard Rorty, but will say a bit in defense of the negative line taken by Damon Linker in his TNR piece. Well, actually, I don’t have access, so I haven’t read it. I’ll respond to the bits available at Matthew Yglesias site, which dovetail nicely with thoughts I’ve had about Rorty’s liberal politics, quite independently of anything Linker says or thinks.
Matt’s first post summarizes Linker, like so:
Linker accuses Rorty of “implying that every outlook but his own inevitably clashes with liberal politics” and of therefore coming “perilously close to transforming liberalism into a monistic philosophy – a comprehensive doctrine to which all liberal citizens must pledge absolute allegiance.”
Matt says Linker cites no evidence that Rorty says, or implies, anything of the sort.
Then Linker sent Matt a reply, which Matt posts here. Go read it. He asserts, among other things, “In Rorty’s ideal world, everyone would be … just like Rorty – denying the existence of capital-T truth, treating metaphysical commitments with moral and intellectual suspicion, and so forth.”
Here’s the thing. I don’t think it’s right to say this is Rorty’s ideal – not at all. But it is right to say that he says things which pretty much imply it. I’ll try to supply the evidence in a moment. I made a post at the Valve about this a while back. I was responding to specific criticisms of Rorty’s ‘Pyrrhonnism’, by Dave Maier. I’ll just rewrite my points, tightening them a bit. (I also have a forthcoming paper that, I hope, makes this point well.)
Rorty has a signature sort of meta-stemwinder rhetorical mode he works himself into, a thing I call ‘the rhetoric of anticipatory retrospective’. (Imminent critique – or – ‘soon you will have been critiqued’. Anti-foundationally speaking: ‘all your bases will have been belong to us.’) In comments to my original post, Ben Wolfson quips: he conflates the future perfect with a perfect future.
How does it go? Rorty wants to change your mind about politics. How does he do it? Not by giving you reasons not to think a certain way. Rather, by inviting you to consider the ‘hopeful’ possibility of a future when ‘we’ will no longer think this way. That is, he imagines a time when the sorts of people he is disagreeing with will, ex hypothesi, have had their paradigm shifted, so that it will simply ‘no longer occur to them’ to think the thoughts Rorty thinks are not useful to think.
But the fact that my paradigm might shift (yes, I suppose so) doesn’t give me a reason to shift my paradigm. So preaching paradigm shift in this meta- ‘paradigm shift might happen!’ mode is not just rationally uncompelling but, I fear, rhetorically unmoving. (Galileo didn’t shout at the Pope ‘did you ever consider that someday you will have had your mind changed about astronomy?’ Lenin didn’t write an essay: ‘What is to have been done?’)
It would be possible to lodge Linker’s complaint at this juncture: always fondly imagining it will ‘no longer occur to people’ to think in ways you find disagreeable sounds suspiciously intolerant, doesn’t it? Isn’t Rorty some sort of closet monist? Isn’t he demanding everyone turn into compliant Rorty-bots? It seems to me fine to bring out the problem by pointing out that he can be read this way. But I think it should be read as a symptom of something gone wrong elsewhere. Rorty was not officially intolerant in the least. He was fine with all sorts of pluralism. And even personally I don’t think he had a bully bone in his body. It isn’t that he was, on any level, itching to impose his will, illiberally. He appreciates the importance of all the Rawlsian stuff Linker evidently wants to urge against him.
The real problem is that Rorty’s torn between a ‘Pyrrhonist’ (I’ll go with that tag), anti-foundational epistemology and a progressive politics, in which he would like to demand lots of social changes, for the sake of social justice. His reformist reach exceeds his justificatory good conscience. He really thinks he’s right, but doesn’t think he can give his opponents rational grounds that they are compelled to accept. The one point he’s got is that, if the sort of change he wants comes, it will come as a sort of ‘conversion’ to a new way of thinking (cultural shift, call it what you will). This is true, but – again – not exactly a reason to convert. But what else can he say? Rorty ends up more or less boxed into a narrow hortatory row: not even straight preaching to the unconverted. Instead, preaching the meta-possibility of conversion to the unconverted. I don’t read this as authoritarian or monistic in the least, although I agree with Linker that it is politically problematic.
I said I would provide evidence. Here is a long passage from Achieving Our Country that seems to me typical enough. I think those of you who know the man’s writing will read, nod, and say ‘yeah, that’s the way he talks all the time’. I take it this is the sort of thing Linker has in mind, even if he omitted to cite examples. (This first paragraph won’t be such a clear illustration, but it leads into what follows. So bear with me.)
The reason I cite poets, critics, and painters, rather than dentists, carpenters, and laborers, as having careers is that the former, more typically than the latter, are trying to make the future different from the past trying to create a new role rather than to play an old role well. The difference is obviously not hard and fast, since there are such things as hack poetry and creative dentistry [freakodontics strikes again!]. But the creative artist, in a wide sense that includes critics, scientists, and scholars, provides the paradigm of a career whose conclusion leaves the world a bit different from what it used to be. If there is a connection between artistic freedom and creativity and the spirit of democracy, it is that the former provide examples of the kind of courageous self-transformation of which we hope democratic societies will become increasily capable – transformation which is conscious and willed, rather than semiconsciously endured.
OK, but now what what we hear about good careers and campaigns is cast largely in terms of people NOT thinking in ways Rorty disapproves:
If, following Latour and Descombes’ suggestions, we were to start writing narratives of overlapping campaigns and careers which were not broken up into chapters with titles like “The Enlightenment,” “Romanticism,” ‘Literary Modernism,” or “Late Capitalism,” we would lose dramatic intensity. But we might help immunize ourselves against the passion of the infinite. If we dropped reference to movements, we could settle for telling a story about how the human beings in the neighborhood of the North Atlantic made their futures different from their pasts at a constantly accelerating pace. We could still, like Hegel and Acton, tell this story as a story of increasing freedom. But we culd drop, along with any sense of inevitable progress, any sense of immanent teleology. We could drop any attempt to capitalize History, to view it as something as big and strong as Nature or God.
Such narratives of overlapping campaigns and careers would contain no hint that a career could be judged by its access in aligning itself with the movement of history. Both political and cultural history would be seen as a tissue of chances, mischances, and lost chances – a tissue from which, occasionally and briefly, beauty flashes forth, but to which sublimity is entirely irrelevant. It would not occur to someone brought up on this kind of narrative to ask whether Joyce, Proust, Schönberg, Bartók, Picasso, and Matisse signified one of the major turnings in the cultural history of the West, or to ask whether that turning was perhaps not better signified by Rilke, Valéry, Strauss, Eliot, Klimt, and Heidegger. It would never occur to such a person to ask whether Dissent was central or marginal to the cultural or political life of its day. She would ask only whether Dissent did some good, whether it contributed to the success of some of the campaigns in which it took part. The answer to that question is clear … (pp. 122-4)
It’s this lengthy pouring on of the hypothetical imaginings, plus the ‘it would never occur to such a person’ language that is setting off Linker, I’m sure. But, to repeat, I don’t really think that Rorty should be read as sinister. Rather, his one tool – preaching conversion by preaching the meta-possibility of conversion – is unsatisfactorily limited in a number of ways.
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Josh 06.13.07 at 6:54 am
Don’t leave us dangling, John! Did/Does Dissent do any good?
(a different) josh 06.13.07 at 7:46 am
I think the original Linker piece is available to all: try this URL:
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070611&s=linker061207
Otherwise — a very good post. “His reformist reach exceeds his justificatory good conscience” – that seems to me to get the matter just right.
Nick L 06.13.07 at 9:13 am
I find myself sympathetic to Rorty’s pragmatism in some ways, but there is a similar passage in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity that made me want to hurl the book accross the room. I think it is truly astounding that an educated adult can persist in the belief that artists, poets and writers have somehow been more pivotal (or ‘done more(?) good’) than political thinkers, activists, demonstrators, petition signers, union members and other active, politically engaged individuals.
Apologies if this is not what Rorty is saying, I’m not intending to set up a straw man here (although Rorty makes a good one), but it seems truly bizarre that anyone but the most cloistered literarian could ever believe such a thing.
The first Josh up there 06.13.07 at 9:56 am
Nonetheless, Nick L, people keep taking that “cloistered literarian” tack of ignoring the historical agency, convictions, or practices of the vast majority.
T. J. Jackson Lears, back in 1987, said that it would be wrong to overestimate the role that the counterhegemonic private sphere in the Fifties played in generating Sixties liberatory movements:
“It made no difference how eloquently convictions were expressed around kitchen tables or in church basements if those private points of view were never admitted into the charmed circle of ‘responsible opinion.’ Some groups had more power than others, including the power to set the boundaries of permissible debate, to legitimate some ideas and values while declaring others ‘tasteless’ or ‘irresponsible’.” Lears went on to explain that good things happened in the early Sixties because the fragile alliance of hegemonic forces began to crumble and “many intellectuals and academics†were prompted to become counterculture leaders. I don’t think he gives enough attention (or attributes enough agency) to where those intellectuals and academics got the idea to go down to Mississippi, to oppose the war, to write about sexual politics, and generally to raise a ruckus.
More unambigously cloistered are the claims that prompt PZ Myers to say Stanley Fish is a blind man, and possibly Walter Benn Michaels’ “I don’t mean that there is no racism in America today or that white supremacism has disappeared—I mean instead that it has been either privatized or pushed to the fringes of American public life,” which I think only works for certain values of “public.”
Sorry for hammering on that point at a time when we should be mourning what we’ve lost; but the narrow scope of the Fish-Rorty-Jameson worldview is an immense hurdle to examining some of their arguments.
Robert Justin Lipkin 06.13.07 at 10:26 am
The idea that Rorty anoints only art broadly construed–but including, of course, poets, novelists, composers, and so forth–distorts the positive contribution of Rorty’s pragmatic conversationalism. Rorty is committed the pragmatist ideal of improving the world, of reducing cruelty and suffering. The means to do so (which itself has inherent value) is to re-create, conjure up, imagin, new descriptions of our problems which hopefully include including new solutions. Rorty sees the noblest pursuit to be the quest for edification, for being stuck in the mud of seemingly intractable controversy, not by directly formulating solutions, but rather by indirectly forging new “modes of being” robbing the original controversy of any force. Though not pellucid Rorty’s idea is that indirection, piecemeal constructions of new ways of seeing things and new ways of acting on the world is the only hope for “salvation” (of course Rorty would probably cringe at that term). The quest for truth, reason, reality, and knowledge inter alia is a dead-end not only because answers to these views are essentially contested, but more importantly, because even if we could achieve consensus on their content, their practical effect on social reality is minimal or what’s worse, their practical affect distorts the sorts of real solutions which are possible only by eschewing the temptation to engage fully in the practical conversations which might help us envision new ways if seeing the world and interacting with others through which the inclination to raise philosophical questions is no longer strong enough to prompt action. Rather in the context of our many conversations we’re directed toward alleviating cruelty and suffering-primarily locally but also at distance–and simply find the philosophical emphasis on the importance of understanding “truth,” reason, “mind,” “knowledge,” and so forth as uninteresting because its payoff is largely irrelevant to contriving better “mouse-traps” aka news ways of achieving solidarity.
Matt 06.13.07 at 11:11 am
I’m not sure how far I disagree with your take, John, but I would have presented his picture a bit differently. As I understand it part of Rorty’s position is that people rarely change their moral or political views in any lasting way because of some reasoned argument. That’s obviously too strong but might well largely be right. Rather, they change because some other story becomes more compelling. This seems largely right though of course I can’t say for sure. It fits with Rorty’s idea that the spread of human rights is more likely to progress by the telling of new, more inclusive sentimental and sad stories than through universalistic, abstract moral language. Again, pratically speaking I think he’s at least partly right, maybe largely so. Where I might disagree with him is in thinking this leaves no role for philosophy but that’s a bit of an aside. So, again, I’m not sure I really disagree with you here but I think it’s important to stress the causal story Rorty is telling as well, that moral and political change actually comes through the telling of compelling stories more than through argument.
thag 06.13.07 at 12:13 pm
at least two of the strands are surely separable:
1) the anti-grandiose preference for incrementalist muddling and
2)the belletristic blindness that tends to narrow the genus of creativity to the species of creative arts (which Rorty does seem to have fallen for, despite efforts at self-correction).
after all, if one wanted to find a paradigm of non-teleological, nearly directionless, deeply conversational change that nevertheless often does result in incremental improvements in the human condition, the horse-trading sausage-making of an LBJ or any other small-time state legislative pol would be a far better model than either Schönberg or Rilke.
yeah, legislating is an ugly inglorious business, and it’s hard to wax enthusiastic over Babbitts. But they fit the model of 1) better than the cast of characters he arrives at via 2).
engels 06.13.07 at 2:35 pm
She would ask only whether Dissent did some good, whether it contributed to the success of some of the campaigns in which it took part. The answer to that question is clear …
Unfortunately, these two questions are no longer equivalent…
Anderson 06.13.07 at 3:07 pm
there is a similar passage in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity that made me want to hurl the book accross the room
I think most copies of CIS bear the scars of such treatment.
Matt: As I understand it part of Rorty’s position is that people rarely change their moral or political views in any lasting way because of some reasoned argument. That’s obviously too strong but might well largely be right. Rather, they change because some other story becomes more compelling.
I think that puts Rorty’s position very well, but it doesn’t get Rorty or us very far.
Why can’t the compelling narratives be Nazi? Of course they can, on Rorty’s theory. We just have to hope that our narratives win. Why would they do that? Because there are more of us? Because we’ve killed a lot of Nazis and driven the rest to the fringe? I dunno, and neither does Rorty. (Hence the “hope” in “liberal hope.”)
So on the one hand, you’ve got this theory that we’ll all cry when Old Yeller dies (in a way, Rorty adds, that Peter Singer would never move us, or most of us), and on the other, you’ve got Rorty’s pessimistic sense that liberal success comes down to “weapons and luck.”
John Emerson 06.13.07 at 3:47 pm
What I see Rorty as doing is 1.) imagining a world organized on Rortian liberal principles, 2.) claiming that that world would be better than the present world, and 3.) claiming that people living in that better world would not find Rortian principles problematic, but would accept them by default.
This does not amount to an argued proof of Rortian liberal principles, but it does provide a motivation for thinking that maybe Rortian principles would be a good thing to live by.
Why does he not provide proofs that Rortian principles are superior? Mostly because he’s a pragmatist and does not believe that proofs of that kind are possible. As I remember (no citations though) he was willing to respond to specific concrete criticisms of the proposed Rortian world (e.g. regarding education or law enforcement).
Beyond being impossible, philosophical arguments on the foundations of liberalism are poltically futile, and as a Deweyan pragmatist Rorty could not dismiss this point as irrelevant the way pure philosophers are happy to do. The illiberal forces in our actual society (conservative Christians, militarist authoritarians, and Pinochet-loving free-marketers) are really beyond argument.
The anticipatory retrospective (which is pretty explicit in Rorty, it’s not as though you’ve caught him out) is of the nature of a project proposal or imagined goal. Only after something has been imagined can making it real begin.
Anderson 06.13.07 at 4:01 pm
The illiberal forces in our actual society (conservative Christians, militarist authoritarians, and Pinochet-loving free-marketers) are really beyond argument.
That writes off a rather large number of people as “beyond argument” and thus having to be squelched in some manner or other. It’s an understandable frustration, but I don’t think it can be called politics, unless Lenin was a politician.
Rather, I think my conservative-Christian neighbor is susceptible to agreement with me on a number of shared principles. That may be metaphysics, but it’s (1) rhetorically more effective than treating him as a brute, and (2) doesn’t resort to “weapons or luck.”
Now, whether *I* think our shared premises are True or not, doesn’t necessarily matter; my neighbor will think so, and since he’s the one I want to persuade, that’s good enough for me.
Rorty falls prey, I think, to the notion that the ironist’s viewpoint is more true; he denies it of course, but how else to explain his blindness to the idea that a metaphysical approach is more useful to the ironist than an ironist approach? (Using “metaphysical” and “ironist” in the CIS sense.)
John Emerson 06.13.07 at 4:14 pm
They’re certainly beyond the kind of argument Rorty was rejecting, the kind done in philosophy departments. I don’t want to start one of my rants, but philosophy spent twenty or thirty years deciding whether we even know that other minds exist.
While beyond argument, the right may not be beyond persuasion and — that’s what Rorty was talking about with “changing the narrative”.
The Leninist smear is bullshit. What I said is true or not. If it’s true, then a.) liberalism may be in serious trouble, and b.) precise argument certainly isn’t the way to deal with the threat. I think both a and b.
In 1932 more than half of German voters were committed illiberals — Communists or Nazis. As a result, German liberalism was destroyed. Liberalism probably never could have survived that.
Anderson 06.13.07 at 4:28 pm
Sorry, I don’t see how “the Leninist smear” is a smear or inaccurate. If you want to explain in more detail how the people “beyond argument” are to be treated, please do so.
Anyway, my point is clearly that what you say *isn’t* true, and that most people are not beyond argument.
Germany in 1932 came about because Germany never *had* a liberal state; Weimar’s own “supporters” seem to have regarded it as a temporary situation, a liberal truce not a state. Only the Social Democrats seem to have taken Weimar seriously, god bless ’em, and their association with the regime was enough for people who should’ve known better to consider Weimar hopeless.
And I think you exaggerate Communist *and* Nazi support, btw — the numbers that made “more than half” of Germans vote for one or the other, reflected a lot of economic despair, not an ideological commitment to illiberalism.
John Emerson 06.13.07 at 4:33 pm
With persuasion, Anderson. As I just said. Argument is something specific.
And if there are a lot of people beyond either argument or persuasion, you have a very serious problem, whether you’re a Leninist or not.
I regard people for whom the Book of Revelation is a guide to the future, for example, as beyond argument. Persuasion may be possible within Christian framework, but that’s not argument.
I’ll leave you to your apparent opinion that the actually-existing German liberal state (1918-1932) was not destroyed by Communists and Nazis supported by more than half the electorate.
Anderson 06.13.07 at 4:52 pm
Okay, I did miss the persuasion/argument distinction you were making – sorry.
But then I think that Rorty, and perhaps John Emerson, are using “argument” in a straw-man sense that never actually applies in politics, or in many other places outside philosophy departments. Cf. Aristotle on enthymemic arguments.
(And I have to say that I find it very odd to blame the Communists for the collapse of Weimar, but we can debate German history some other time. If we look at 1932 in isolation, I think Evans’s recent survey would support you – he thought democracy was done for by the 2d half of 1932. But I think democracy was never really accepted by the conservatives, and that their eagerness to declare the system wrecked played a big part in bringing 1932 about.)
John Emerson 06.13.07 at 5:09 pm
“After Hitler, then us”.
Dave Maier 06.13.07 at 6:20 pm
I agree with you in general here, John H., as you know, but I would like to defend Rorty on a couple of points. First, the “anticipatory-retrospective” move wasn’t simply a reminder of the ultimate ungroundedness of our beliefs, as in the famous Sartre quote about fascism (but see my comments at the Valve post on this). In other words, it’s not just the anti-foundationalist version of the realist nyaah-nyaah that “Truth is mighty and will prevail.” It’s supposed to work on our imaginations rather than our deductive faculty (like John E’s “persuasion,” I presume). That’s the particular advantage (for Rorty) of novels over philosophy in moving moral progress along. As a book I am currently reviewing has as its epigraph: “In order for something to be so, we first have to think it” (Einstein). So there was supposed to be some content there – which of course you may not like, but that’s different.
Also, I don’t take the distinction Rorty urges between poets and laborers to mean that only the former are valuable, even for moral progress. As a red-diaper baby himself, Rorty was a harsh critic of the sort of beret-topped salonista types who thought they were above the nitty-gritty politics of, say, union organizing. I forget where, but he wrote once about reading a passionate story of political awakening, culminating, to Rorty’s scorn, in the author’s firm intention to further the revolution by … applying to graduate programs in English literature.
Oh, and can you correct the spelling of my name in your post? It hurts my eyes. (Also, remember the jingle: “P, Y, double-R, H; O-N-I-S-M spells Pyrrhonism (Pyrrhonism)”.)
Phaedrus 06.13.07 at 7:05 pm
Rorty has a signature sort of meta-stemwinder rhetorical mode he works himself into, a thing I call ‘the rhetoric of anticipatory retrospective’. (Imminent critique – or – ‘soon you will have been critiqued’. Anti-foundationally speaking: ‘all your bases will have been belong to us.’)
Or, in other words, Rorty is “in ur futures criteekin ur foundashunlisms”?
Sorry, blame these people. :-)
JM 06.13.07 at 7:08 pm
#4 – What is that Lears quote from?
Tracy W 06.13.07 at 9:43 pm
It would not occur to someone brought up on this kind of narrative to ask whether Joyce, Proust, Schönberg, Bartók, Picasso, and Matisse signified one of the major turnings in the cultural history of the West, or to ask whether that turning was perhaps not better signified by Rilke, Valéry, Strauss, Eliot, Klimt, and Heidegger.
I wonder where Rorty thought that thoughts came from in the first place.
Anything thought now must have been thought for the first time at some point. People can be brought up in a particular framework and still question it from a different framework – eg Galelio with the earth moving, Newton dropping the idea of impetus, Adam Smith attacking mercentalist ideas of the nation.
So it strikes me that someone brought up in any particular narrative still could form a view like “Joyce represented one of the major turning points in the cultural history of the west”.
Such a thought might be rare if all people were brought up in a particular narrative, but I think the 20th century idea that our beliefs are determined by our upbringings is rather over-stated and cannot account for the intellectual changes in the history of western thought.
Anderson 06.13.07 at 9:57 pm
19: The quote exemplifies btw Rorty’s peculiar habit of name-dropping; I suspect that those names were “artist guys” to Rorty, and that he would’ve been hard pressed to explain why (say) Klimt was in the second list & not the first.
Even when he does discuss someone in a bit of detail, one finds for example that “Nietzsche” really means “Nehamas.”
I should add that my criticism at 11 above, based on my reading of CIS, is rebutted by a Rorty interview quoted over at Yglesias’s blog — Rorty accepts that the ironist can pretend to agree with the metaphysician’s premises, if that’s what it takes. Not sure yet if I’ve misread CIS or if Rorty revised his vocabulary ….
Anderson 06.13.07 at 9:57 pm
Oh, and “19” above means “22.” See, I can do it too.
William Knorpp 06.13.07 at 10:28 pm
I’m no Rorty fan (though currently I think he’s less bad than most analytic philosophers think he is), but Linker’s criticism is fairly daft.
If you think that it’s right to think x-wise and wrong to think y-wise, then it’d be fairly weird for you NOT to think that things would be better if everybody thought x-wise. (Actually, I can tell without even reflecting on it that there’ll be some counter-examples to that…but just go with me…). “Monism” of this kind is in no way a bad thing.
Wishing that no one were racist doesn’t make you a bad person.
Now, Rorty doesn’t seem to think that reason can help us figure out and defend the good ways of thinking from the bad ways of thinking…and there I can’t really agree with him.
But one thing to keep in mind:
You can also think THAT without being a bad person (or a weak thinker).
Many of us *hope* that Rorty was wrong about that point, but I’m not sure that we can *prove* that he was. At least it’s a vexed question.
And another thing: here’s one way to interpret a chunk of Rorty’s position:
Reason can’t ground norms. Damn. But that doesn’t mean that all is lost! We’re still better than the Nazis, and there’s still lots for us to do to make the world a better place. So let’s quit moping about the failure of moral philosophy and hop to it!
Admittedly that interpretation is inconsistent with his sometimes derisive attitude toward the rest of us who don’t accept the first premise…but I’m trying to be charitable here.
Oh, and also: in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature he says repeatedly that reason *does* have a role in morality…as much of a role as it has in theoretical pursuits, anyway. Or so he says.
Jon H 06.14.07 at 2:08 am
OT: Original art from the comic series Action Philosophers is on sale.
No Rorty, but there’s lots of others. Here’s Ayn Rand, beating up on Nathaniel Branden.
Bobcat 06.14.07 at 1:42 pm
John Emerson wrote in comment 10:
The illiberal forces in our actual society (conservative Christians, militarist authoritarians, and Pinochet-loving free-marketers) are really beyond argument.
I’m not familiar with the distinction between argument and persuasion. Is it just that argument attempts to appeal explicitly to reasons, etc., whereas persuasion involves showing people things in addition to appealing to reasons (e.g., Singer’s Animal Liberation vs. showing people a film of animals being slaughtered)? The way John Emerson puts it (“I regard people for whom the Book of Revelation is a guide to the future, for example, as beyond argument. Persuasion may be possible within Christian framework, but that’s not argument.”) makes me think that persuasion is simply appealing to premises another person already accepts rather than to putatively ‘neutral’ premises. In which case persuasion wouldn’t be that different from argument.
Incidentally, Mr (Dr? does it matter to you?) Emerson, would you count Plantinga, van Inwagen, or Swinburne as conservative Christians? I take it that all three of them regard the Book of Revelation as a guide, in some sense, to the future (though maybe not). If so, do you think you (or at least one who is not Christian) could argue with them? Or do you not really count them as conservative Christians because they’re, well, extremely well-known philosophers rather than normal, everyday people?
John Emerson 06.14.07 at 2:50 pm
i could think of nothing to say to someone who is trying to match present-day nations to the symbolism of Revelation with the intention of knowing the future. Some Christian might be able to communicate with such a person.
“Argument” refers to the kind of thing that professional philosophers do (and philosophy is Rorty’s context). Rorty has even described analytic philosophers semi-sympathetically as technician of argument. Philosophers have very stringent standards for argument.
Persuasion is a more open-ended, free-handed way of changing someone’s mind. It would include talking Bible talk to Bible readers, a form of argument philosophers do not accept. (A philosopher COULD legitimately say “Suppose we accept the Bible as an authority — even then….” but the opening clause would make everything he says unpersuasive for someone for whom the Bible is OF COURSE the prime authority).
Mostly it involves persuading people according to their own concerns rather than in an abstract, universal, argumentative framework.
Martin James 06.14.07 at 3:43 pm
But don’t “professional” philosophers all know now that an “abstract, universal, argumentative framework” cannot prove anything about the world – including the world of politics and morality.
Where is the philosophical argument that shows that philosophical argument is a good thing? It all seems hopelessly circular – reason knows that reason is reasonable.
Rorty just seems to be be saying the obvious.
My favorite thing about Rorty is that he made it clear to me how my own view differed from “we liberals” that think cruelty is the worst thing we do. “We conservatives” think that being a coward is the worst thing we do.
John Emerson 06.14.07 at 4:03 pm
I am not a Rortian down the line, but I agree with him about the irrelevance and uselessness of rigorous philosophical argumentation when discussing thick political and ethical questions. The philosopher of today has the ability to defer answers almost infinitely. I call it “perfectionist defeatism”.
Bobcat 06.14.07 at 6:31 pm
John Emerson wrote,
“Persuasion is a more open-ended, free-handed way of changing someone’s mind. It would include talking Bible talk to Bible readers, a form of argument philosophers do not accept.”
Well, I know that some serious Christian philosophers (e.g., Robert Adams, Dean Zimmerman, Eleonore Stump, Derk Pereboom) do talk this way, at least at Christian philosophy conferences, but given your definition of argument–persuading people based on premises anyone could accept (i.e., using “an abstract, universal, argumentative framework”)–I suppose this wouldn’t count.
Still, I’m pretty sure that a lot of philosophers take the quest to convince people according to premises anyone can accept to be a hopeless quest, at least if it’s supposed to involve any kind of deductive certainty (admittedly, most philosophers with whose work I’m acquainted often try to use only premises they regard as very plausible, but even then they often add a premise they know will seem contentious). Maybe I’m just not as well-versed in contemporary philosophy as I should be!
Bobcat 06.14.07 at 6:32 pm
Sorry, by “premises anyone can accept” I meant “premises everyone accepts or is committed to (either implicitly or explicitly).”
Anderson 06.14.07 at 6:44 pm
Rorty just seems to be be saying the obvious.
This is why I called “argument” a straw man, above, because no one actually argues like that outside a philosophy department, if then.
The argument/persuasion distinction goes back at least to Aristotle on rhetoric.
I would disagree with Rorty & Emerson as to whether philosophical argument is useless; it may not be useful in persuading others, but it can be useful in persuading oneself, i.e., in helping one decide what’s the better course, etc.
John Emerson 06.14.07 at 8:27 pm
Outside philosophy departments persuasion and argument are not clearly distinguished and probably shouldn’t be. Much of Rorty’s work was meant to be read within philosphy departments, however, and within departments of a special rigorous type.
Martin James 06.15.07 at 4:47 am
Roger Scruton said 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.
It seems Rorty had this in common with every blogger on the web.
Sam C 06.15.07 at 12:16 pm
Another thread, another sweeping, poorly-informed generalisation about philosophy from John Emerson. The relationships between persuasion and argument, and the possibility and political utility of arguments appealing to universal premises, are both topics of a great deal of discussion and disagreement in philosophy departments, and feed directly into more immediately political questions. See, just for example, the literature around Rawls’s notion of ‘public reason’.
John Emerson 06.15.07 at 2:35 pm
I’m not the only one who thinks this way, Sam. If philosophy really is different than I say it is, it’s the philosophers’ responsibility to get the word out. Very few educated people not specifically trained in philosophy think that philosophers want to talk to them or that philosophers have much to say. The “public philosophy” sphere is dominated by non-philosophers, and a significant proportion of philosophers think that’s the way it should be.
Anderson 06.15.07 at 3:43 pm
Very few educated people not specifically trained in philosophy think that philosophers want to talk to them or that philosophers have much to say.
Hard to argue with that. Recent case in point — a commenter at Balkin’s blog was lamenting how the public doesn’t know who Saul Kripke is. I asked what Kripke’s done that I, as the educated non-philosopher citizen, should know about. Still waitin’.
Now, that doesn’t go to whether Kripke’s important, or a great philosopher; but for example, I wouls guess that there are lots of scientists who are important and great, but whom no one outside their field needs to know the first thing about.
Sam C 06.15.07 at 4:49 pm
John E:
1) My point is that you are mistaken about what philosophers think about argument and persuasion, and that your mistake is obvious to anyone who knows the first thing about the subject. That you’re not alone in your mistake doesn’t mean it isn’t a mistake.
2) As I pointed out in an earlier thread, you (and Steve Fuller) are also mistaken about what philosophers are doing to ‘get the word out’. That you haven’t read books by, for instance, Frankfurt, Nagel, Blackburn, Nozick, Anderson, Singer, Pogge, Dennett, Barry, etc., is your problem, not theirs.
3) Anderson has a good point: probably, no-one outside philosophy (and mathematical logic) needs to know about Kripke. So what?
Walt 06.15.07 at 5:04 pm
Sam C: Are you an actual analytic philosopher? Because you are incompetent arguers. The conclusion a disinterested person would draw from your argument is not “John Emerson is totally wrong”, but “Analytic philosophers sure are dicks.”
John Emerson 06.15.07 at 5:39 pm
Sam C: I read lots of books, and I’ve read Dennett on Gould / Dawkins. I’ve also looked at Frankfurt, Singer, and Nozick and found them extremely unimpressive. Most of what I’ve seen by philosophers attempting to write for a wider audience has one of two flaws. Sometimes (Dennett’s case, and I think Frankfurt’s) it talks down to the reader. Other times it maintains the austere scrupulosity of analytic philosophy, with the consequence that no non-specialists really want to read it.
There’s an art to writing high-quality books for a non-specialist audience. Many historians and scientists have mastered this art, but very few philosophers have. I believe that this is because philosophy have to vigilantly guard its claim to be expert and specialist at all, and as a result philosophers watch each other vigilantly for signs of degeneration into common sense, wisdom literature, folk philosophy, or cracker-barrel philosophy. Rooting out all traces of these is a majr part of philosophy education, even at the advanced undergrad level but above all at the early grad level.
Rorty’s PMN is hardly a non-technical book, but it was popular enough to get the real pros to sneer at him.
Your mistake is obvious to anyone who knows the first thing about the subject.
Blah blah blah, and yo mama.
Anderson 06.15.07 at 7:28 pm
Emerson: Very few educated people not specifically trained in philosophy think that philosophers want to talk to them or that philosophers have much to say.
Sam C: probably, no-one outside philosophy (and mathematical logic) needs to know about Kripke. So what?
Not being trained in philosophical analysis, I fail to see how Sam C. hasn’t just exemplified Emerson’s point.
Kenny Easwaran 06.16.07 at 5:03 am
Hmm, just skimming this, it suggests something like van Fraassen’s reflection principle to me – if you know that at some future time, you will believe P, then you should already believe P (unless you have reason to believe that this future self will be somehow irrationally influenced, like Ulysses with the sirens). It sounds like Rorty might have suggested that at some point we’ll all think this way anyway, so we should all think this way already.
Sam C 06.16.07 at 4:00 pm
John: You claimed that philosophers believe a number of implausible things about argument and persuasion. I pointed out that this generalisation is false. You claimed that, in that case, it was up to philosophers to ‘get the word out’ about their actual work. I pointed out that they are, and gave a few examples. Your criticism now, if I’ve got you right, is that you don’t think much of what you’ve read of those philosophers who are doing exactly what you claimed no philosopher does. Fine, tastes vary. But it’s hardly big news, or much of a criticism of philosophy, that John Emerson doesn’t like Harry Frankfurt’s prose style. Frankfurt’s books sell fine, and are displayed (in my local Borders) alongside other popular non-fiction by historians, scientists and other philosophers. I agree with you if you’re saying that more philosophers should be doing the same thing, and that more publishers should be willing to put their work out in mass-market editions, but that cause isn’t helped by pretending that it isn’t happening already.
Academic philosophy is not the monolithic, self-isolated activity you paint it. Just as in science, there are specialist philosophers who are important, but not of any great interest to people outside their fields. Kripke is a good example (which is the point I, perhaps mistakenly, took Anderson to be making). Other philosophers are considerably more politically and socially engaged: Thomas Pogge works with NGOs on planning and distributing humanitarian aid, for instance; Onora O’Neill is a member of the UK house of lords, and her work on Kant informs her thinking and writing about autonomy, trust and consent in health care.
Any discipline will have both outward and inward-looking practitioners, and in any discipline, there will be tensions between those who want to communicate more widely, and those on guard against oversimplification, grandstanding, and pretentious waffle. I have sympathies with both, but I’m more on the side of the outward-looking types, which is one reason why I get annoyed when you assert that they don’t exist.
I think that we have similar aspirations for philosophy: we think it should be socially useful, not just a glass bead game. But that aspiration is not helped by misrepresenting the current situation as carelessly as you have been doing.
John Emerson 06.16.07 at 9:44 pm
Sam C., I wish you luck on your aspiration, but I don’t agree that I’m not helping. Perhaps if philosophers become aware of how they are perceived, they will take steps to a more favorable perception persuasive and propagate it. I have not found that successful professional philosophers care much about this problem, and many are fairly hostile to the idea that they should be.
As with economics, the critical points are introductory undergrad philosophy for majors, the first years of grad school, and hiring and promotion practices. As I understand, at these three key points aspirants are systematically driven in a direction which I regard as unfavorable.
The careers of Rorty and Toulmin do not encourage me at all. I’m reading Putnam on ethics right now, and while he says many of the right things, it’s like he’s learning his ABCs.
Sam C 06.16.07 at 10:09 pm
And I’ve found that many successful professional philosophers care about doing useful, socially engaged philosophy. I think they’re right to do so, and I don’t see why they should make it a priority, instead, to change your mistaken perception of what they do. I’m no longer sure why I’m bothering, either. Have you thought that, just perhaps, the reason why professional philosophers don’t take your warnings and demands very seriously is that you’re flat wrong about the discipline? I’ve now spent enough time on this rather circular conversation, though, so I’m going to drop it and get back to marking exam scripts. I wonder if the next time I see a John Emerson post about the terrible state of philosophy, anything I’ve said will have made any difference…
John Emerson 06.16.07 at 10:24 pm
Sam, it’s not just me. Lots of people have this perception. People looking for insight into reality end up finding professional philosophy a poor source. People who go into philosophy with that kind of thing in mind end up dropping out or switching to a differetn discipline. Very few professional philosophers cut it as public intellectuals, and not too many try.
zdenek v 06.17.07 at 9:38 am
john emerson writes “People looking for insight into reality end up finding professional philosophy a poor source.”
This seems very unlikely because the books are out there and they sell, dealing with just about anything from nature of consciousness ( Dennett ), the recent developments in trying to naturalize morality ( Levy )or truth ( Blackburn , Williams )or meaning of life ( Cottingham ) and so on down the line.
Yes I know the reply john e makes to this is that such work does not work stylistically ( too dry, authors speak down to their audience ) but this is silly and really involves changing a subject from whether there is intellectually satisfying work by analytic philosophers dealing with big questions to whether they present their results in a pleasing manner. But this , even if it was true, is a red herring.
So the complaint when it is expressed like this can not be taken seriously. But what about seeing it as a complaint about the capacity of the analytic approach to deliver anything interesting ? In other words Rawls ? forget it, boring . Gibbard on naturalizing normativity ? boring. Dennett on consciousness ? irrelevant and boring.
Is this better ? I suppose this is an embryo of a first step but looking at the other things john emerson has already told us I doubt he can put some flesh on it.
cont 06.17.07 at 1:27 pm
Here’s the real kicker: Continental philosophy, with all its obtuseness, does a much better job getting across — even to relatively ordinary readers — that philosophy says something deep that nonetheless non-specialists can think about. I’m afraid the issue of analytic philosopher’s rhetorical failure isn’t one of style in any straightforward sense because even Rawls is easier to read than Derrida but Derrida has the wider impact.
In answering this question, please refrain from implying that non-specialists are easily fooled by impressive talk because clearly this is not an art that analytic philosophers have mastered — not even at the level of impressing non-specialists that they shouldn’t be reading continental philosophy. Funny, how no one has managed to write another ‘Language, Truth and Logic’ in 70 years. How come????
Sam C 06.17.07 at 2:48 pm
OK, I can’t resist one more shot, despite my earlier resolution to drop out.
This is an unsupported and unsupportable empirical generalisation. It doesn’t fit my experience as a philosopher, or as a teacher and friend of other philosophers. It’s also mildly offensive, given its entailment that, since we’re still in philosophy, I and my friends, students and colleagues must not have any interest in ‘insight into reality’. I suspect that, by ‘people’, you mean John Emerson. But as you’ve amply demonstrated, you don’t really know much about the discipline you’re attacking, or about how other people react to it and take part in it. Now I really am done, I hope.
John Emerson 06.17.07 at 5:23 pm
You’re huffing and puffing too much, Sam C. Do you really think that I was claiming to be offering a supportable empirical generalization, with regressions and standard deviations? I was talking about a lot of people I have known, including myself. The people I’ve known who stayed in philospphy have been puzzle-solvers and gameplayers, and a lot of philosophers think that’s the way it should be.
If in your career you prove me wrong, that will be a good thing.
But as I said, in a profession within which Rorty and Toulmin did not get grad students and so will not have heirs within the profession, I’m not optimistic.
engels 06.17.07 at 7:36 pm
People looking for insight into reality end up finding professional philosophy a poor source.
Do you think Rorty felt that the task of philosophy was to offer “insight into reality”? Is that why he was forced out?
John Emerson 06.17.07 at 8:55 pm
I’m not a Rortian, but to me by expanding the scope of philosophy he would have moved philosophy in a favorable direction. Anti-realism is a pretty limited technical idea.
Neil 06.18.07 at 5:45 am
Because it’s not necessary: there are copies of the original in a library near you.
John, you never answered my question in the previous thread on Rorty. Perhaps you didn’t see it (I posted it late in the thread’s life). I want to know whether I should read the criticisms of AP you cited earlier, and therefore want to know whether you know what you’re talking about. So the question: tell me about AP. What’s been happening over the last 10 years?
horned toad 06.18.07 at 8:02 am
John, you never answered my question in the previous thread on Rorty. Perhaps you didn’t see it (I posted it late in the thread’s life). I want to know whether I should read the criticisms of AP you cited earlier, and therefore want to know whether you know what you’re talking about. So the question: tell me about AP. What’s been happening over the last 10 years?
Well, let’s see, the most interesting development in epistemology is probably Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits, and its unreadable by anyone who is not a specialist in the area. There have been some lame efforts like Frankfurt’s and Blackburn’s to popularise the kind of thinking associated with analytic philosophy, and for the most part the results simply consist of a lot of high-minded whining about straw man definitions of relativism. The analytic philosophers (perhaps broadly speaking) who do have a public presence, like Peter Singer and Martha Nussbaum, were despised not too long ago and are only tolerated now because they actually have a following outside philosophy. As for Dan Dennett, he’s an example of someone who managed to give his philosophy a public presence by starting hang out (and have his books hang out) with scientists rather than philosophers.
Maybe you have something in your back pocket about some earth-shattering development in analytic philosophy over the past ten years that would cause the scales to fall from his eyes. If so, pray tell, tell us what it is…. I bet it’s not something that could easily be translated into something of broader public interest.
By the way, Neil, we never established whether YOU know anything about philosophy more generally to make you a good judge of whether analytic philosophy has contributed anything interesting to philosophy. But we shouldn’t have to be playing these games of who’s competent to criticise.
zdenek v 06.18.07 at 11:43 am
horned toad you are clearly unfamiliar with Dennett’s work because in his ‘Consciousness Explained’ or ‘Elbow Room’ which present developments in phil. of mind/ phil. of action , Dennett addresses himself to a general reader and discusses number of philosophical problems ( and hints at how they can be tackled ) that arise when one tries to naturalize ( where Darwin is the underwriter) mental phenomena.
I would say the same thing about your remarks regarding Blackburn because ( as is obvious to anyone who has read his work ) he goes to great trouble to unpack relativism’s intellectual strenghth/appeal.
So when you write :
“for the most part the results
simply consist of a lot of high-minded
whining about straw man definitions of
relativism “.
you are doing it either out of ignorance or mischief.
John Emerson 06.18.07 at 2:49 pm
I am not up to date with analytic philosophy. However, a journal search about three years ago (12 randomly selected current journals at a library) revealed nothing to change my mind. (Every time I look at Leiter’s self-congratulatory Gourmet Report I also have all my prejudices confirmed.)
As I said, both Toulmin and Rorty left the field. As a result, they haven’t had grad students for some time, and their influence within the field will be minimal. I have also heard fairly recent stories of grad students being warned what to study and not to study if they ever wanted to have jobs. Just now I read one of Putnam’s recent books on ethics, and I’m waiting for another, and while I agree with much of what he says, it seems evident that at the end of a long career he’s finally just getting the idea of what kind of thing he should be doing.
As I said, I read Dennett’s Gould/Dawkins book. I thought it was OK, not great, but I also am under the impression that he had made a deliberate decision (which I applaud) to write for a non-specialist (but highly educated) audience, and that in this he is untypical.
Compared to ten years ago, relatively more defenders of AP are saying “AP isn’t that way at all!” instead of just “Yes, AP is that way and that’s the way it should be, you ignorant humanist peasant!” This is progress of a sort.
John Emerson 06.18.07 at 2:55 pm
I just saw Slate’s Rorty memorial. The only American philosopher included was Dennett. The reasons for this I do not know, but Dennett did say only nice thigs about Rorty.
zdenek v 06.18.07 at 3:23 pm
yes but the following criticism is endorsed by Dennett ( true he goes on to add that Rorty’s position is more nuanced and defensible but he echoes the Scruton criticism nevertherless; the gist is exactly the same ) :
“It seemed to be an abandonment of truth, rational proof, and scientific method in favor of some dubious, if fashionable, aesthetic values celebrated by deconstructionists and other postmodernist enemies of science. “
zdenek v 06.18.07 at 3:32 pm
This is also Dennett in 1998 paper (“Postmodernism and truth ):
” Like
many another naif, these thinkers, reflecting on the manifest inability of their methods of truth-seeking to achieve stable and valuable results, innocently generalize from their own cases and
conclude that nobody else knows how to discover the truth either.
Among those who contribute to this problem, I am sorry to say, is, my good friend Dick
Rorty. Richard Rorty and I have been constructively disagreeing with each other for over a
quarter of a century now. Each of us has taught the other a great deal, I believe, in the reciprocal
process of chipping away at our residual points of disagreement. I can’t name a living
philosopher from whom I have learned more. Rorty has opened up the horizons of contemporary
philosophy, shrewdly showing us philosophers many things about how our own projects have
grown out of the philosophical projects of the distant and recent past, while boldly describing
and prescribing future paths for us to take. But there is one point over which he and I do not
agree at all–not yet–and that concerns his attempt over the years to show that philosophers’
debates about Truth and Reality really do erase the gulf, really do license a slide into some form
of relativism. In the end, Rorty tells us, it is all just “conversations,” and there are only political
or historical or aesthetic grounds for taking one role or another in an ongoing conversation.”
Essentially the same point Scruton and others are making.
John Emerson 06.18.07 at 3:36 pm
“Endorsed” is too strong a word for something introduced by “seemed to be”.
“Struck some of his colleagues as outrageous to the point of irresponsibility” is not an endorsement of that view either.
Dennett’s conclusion is that Quine and Rorty were both right.
zdenek v 06.18.07 at 3:46 pm
Of course Dennett is not going to be to critical on this occasion ( wrong time ) so his remarks (and knowing from other work where Dennett stands ) his remarks are best seen as hints what Dennett’s considered view is.
John Emerson 06.18.07 at 3:49 pm
“Both right” goes beyond politeness.
zdenek v 06.18.07 at 4:05 pm
What makes Rorty special and why we are talking about him , why he is original is the conclusions he draws from Quine and not his endorsment of Quine. So the question is does Dennett agree with *that*, well no :
“But there is one point over which he and I do not
agree at all—not yet—and that concerns his attempt over the years to show that philosophers’
debates about Truth and Reality really do erase the gulf, really do license a slide into some form
of relativism. In the end, Rorty tells us, it is all just “conversations,†and there are only political
or historical or aesthetic grounds for taking one role or another in an ongoing conversation.”
zdenek v 06.18.07 at 4:17 pm
Dennett link:http://ase.tufts.edu.cogstudpapers/postmodernism.tru.htm
John Emerson 06.18.07 at 4:27 pm
Dennett seemed to respect Rorty, and he seemed to believe that Rorty plays a valuable role of the conversation. My guess is that most philosophers disagree with Dennett, and I think that they are wrong. I wasn’t claiming that Dennett endorsed Rorty’s conclusions.
It’s probably just coincidental that Dennett has an unusual willingness to write for a general audience.
aaron_m 06.18.07 at 5:41 pm
John says:
“Dennett’s conclusion is that Quine and Rorty were both right,”
“I wasn’t claiming that Dennett endorsed Rorty’s conclusions,”
and other incoherent things.
John Emerson 06.18.07 at 6:36 pm
That’s a real zinger, Aaron. You analytic philosophers can really argue!
“Both right” is a quote. On the other hand, Quine and Rorty both can’t both be right, since they said very different things! How can this be?
The problem obviously was with Dennett, not me. Or maybe the problem was with someone who doesn’t know how to read. Figure out what Dennett meant when he said “both right”, granted that he leans toward Quine in the debate, and get back to me.
aaron_m 06.18.07 at 10:38 pm
That’s a real zinger, Aaron. You analytic philosophers can really argue!
Both right†is a quote.
1) You were insinuating that Dennett was not in fact critical of Rorty on the main aspect of his philosophical work under discussion in this thread; namely Rorty’s style of relativism.
2) Your evidence was that Dennett said “Quine saw philosophy as continuous with science, and Rorty saw philosophy as continuous with art. I think they were both right.â€
3) Yet what we learn from you in your comments is the vague and suggestive paraphrase that “Dennett’s conclusion is that Quine and Rorty were both rightâ€
4) Other people reading here thought you made a genuine mistake in your interpretation of what Dennett was saying as opposed to being just disingenuous
5) These other people went the effort to point out what Dennett thinks on the issue at stake and how one could more subtly think about the “both right†comment.
6) Instead of acknowledging that your interpretation was wrong or that you were being disingenuous you simply claimed that you never insinuated that Dennett was supportive of Rorty’s main argumentative/philosophical approach.
7) This adds up to not much fun.
I happen to know that you are almost always disingenuous or lazy when you make arguments here so I did not make the effort. Yet at the same time I do not think anybody owes you the effort anymore either.
John Emerson 06.18.07 at 10:55 pm
I doubt that you’re impressing anyone, Aaron. You’re relying on insults, though apparently you think that’s my fault. Your two-line zinger required a seven point justification.
If you look back at what I’ve been saying, I was pleased to find that even one analytic philosopher, Dennett, could be dug up to say something nice about Rorty. To me that spoke well for Dennett. I wasn’t claiming that Dennett agreed with Rorty about everything, and still less that Rorty was in dire need of Dennett’s good opinion.
My main point was that no other analytic philosopher could apparently be found to say anything nice about Rorty, so that everyone else quoted by Slate was a non-philosopher. To me this speaks ill of analytic philosophy, though of course maybe Slate was just lazy.
I think that it’s a fair conclusion that anyone who agrees with Rorty should get out of philosophy.
Neil 06.19.07 at 12:26 am
Horned toad,
You’re right that it’s not unreasonable for people to be able to criticise without having to establish their credentials. I was asking, politely, because (as I explained the first time I asked John; this is the second time he’s ignored the request) life is short and I need to know that an investment of time is worth making. My reading time is precious to me, and each book I read has opportunity costs associated with it. John told all and sundry to go read some criticisms of AP that I have never heard of. I wanted to know whether John’s recommendation is something I should take seriously. Since John (and you, for that matter) seem to have little sense of what AP actually is, I think I’ll pass.
John Emerson 06.19.07 at 12:53 am
You can lead a horse to the water, Neil.
It seems characteristic of analytic philosophers to worry about anyone ever reading the wrong book.
Neil 06.19.07 at 1:41 am
Opportunity costs, John. I’m a slow reader; for me a book represents a significant investment. There are lots of books that I should read, more than I can read. It’s a question of priorities.
John Emerson 06.19.07 at 1:49 am
Right now I’m reading Putnam’s “Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy” and “Ethics Without Ontology”. They are pretty powerful rejections of a major tradition to which Putnam made significant contributions (as Rorty did). I do not claim to be up to date on the current state of the field, but the way Putnam argues suggests that I’m not far off.
Neil 06.19.07 at 2:04 am
I like Putnam, fwiw, including the later Putnam. A model of intellectual integrity and of epistemic humility. But I doubt very much that you can get a sense of the current state of play, or what philosophers see in AP, from reading his work. The point is this: in order for anyone to understand whether any mature discipline has value, it is really necessary to understand it from the inside (if you want convincing of this, read Alasdair MacIntyre: see, I’m making it easy by recommending accessible – and not particularly analytic – philosophers). You’re just not in a position to comment on whether the discipline has internal goals that are of value. We’re all in that position, wrt the great majority of the intellectual achievements of humanity. If it doesn’t produce general purpose goods – goods that anyone should value, no matter what they do or want, like health or nutrition – then part of its value is closed off to us unless we engage *very* seriously with it (it’s not a question of reading a few books or articles, but understanding the way the discipline works, which takes years of study). I have a sense of the comparative projects of analytic and continental philosophy, since I have seriously studied both. I have made an informed decision to commit to AP, because it’s internal goals and values (which are somewhat different to those of CP; they are not simply different ways of doing the same thing) seem to me more valuable. Of course there are many ways of doing philosophy – and of doing other things altogether – that I don’t know from the inside. I can’t say AP is uniquely valuable. I do think I can say that I have enough acquaintance with several other disciplines that I can say that AP can hold its head up in the community of intellectual disciplines. It has made and continues to make significant contributions to the practice of cognitive science; but it also has its own internal goals and values that satisfy me.
One further comment. You regret the hegemony that AP has on hiring practices in North America. One reason for this hegemony might be the fact that the criteria for quality in AP are clearer than in CP. It’s just much easier to sort out the poseurs from those with at least some substance. It takes much more effort to make the same distinctions in CP. When it’s a matter of hiring junior faculty, and therefore making the decision on the basis of rather limited information, you can raise the probability of hiring someone who is intellectually competent by hiring a decent analytic over someone who seems a decent continental.
John Emerson 06.19.07 at 4:31 am
My animus against AP is entirely based on its monopoly and on its exclusions.
It’s just not true that no discipline can be judged except by experts within that discipline. Putnam makes very harsh criticisms of the whole history of academic ethics which are completely intelligible to someone such as myself who has only a moderate technical knowledge. Furthermore, Putnam’s critique relies in part on extra-AP knowledge that I have that most APs do not have.
You are assuming that I am a CP advocate, which I am really not. The opposite of “AP” is not “CP”, it’s “not-AP”. “Not-AP” is a residual class made up of everything not accepted by AP.
A fairly elementary logical point, but AP people fuck it up all the time in arguments of this type.
As for the bullshit question, AP has standardized the bullshit by stipulation. Talk to Putnam about this.
Neil 06.19.07 at 5:05 am
I wrote:
John Emerson wrote:
You got me, John. I concede the point: I thought that all philosophy was AP or CP.
I still see no reason to think that you understand AP sufficiently well to be justified in your criticisms (I didn’t say you needed to be an expert). You seem to read nothing but disaffected critics of AP; that’s not a good basis for your criticisms.
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