Rorty vs Soames

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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”?

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.

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.

Maybe it is only because I was thinking of the topic, but it seems that the idea of vagueness (especially in the heap example) apply quite well to such practical problems as Constitutional interpretation. There are many well taken criticisms of what is called textualism because it has a vaguely defined concept of ‘faithfulness to the text of the Constitution’. This is taken by some as suggesting that faithfulness to the text of the Constitution is a purely politcal window-dressing.

Let me second Endicott’s book, which I read in conjunction w/ a seminar taught by Steven Gross at Penn a few years ago. It’s a very good over-view of the legal issues, even if it’s wrong in several important points ;) There was also a special issue of Law and Philosophy from a few years ago about vagueness in the law, w/ Endicott, Greenawalt, Samuel Schiffer, and others. That’s likely to be of more interest to speicalists, though.

Brian:

I like your take on the Soames-Rorty exchange. I think you get it about right.

I would just add that although I actually probably agree with a lot of Scott’s substantive positions on many matters, I do think he overestimates the degree to which the Kripkean “revolution” has been consolidated. I think there is an important reason for that incomplete consolidation. There’s a lot missing in Kripke, a terrible lot. For example, though Kripke makes pretty powerful arguments about the semantics of names, natural kind terms and also about belief ascriptions, he never gives us very deep diagnoses of much of this stuff. I mean he pretty much leaves unaddressed what I regard as some deep questions very much in need of addressing before the “revolution” can be consolidated. For example, he never really diagnoses just how and why natural kind terms manage to be “rigid designators” that pick out underlying essences rather than superficial appearances. He argues powerfully that they do, but never explains why this should be so. Similarly, though he gives us pretty convincing arguments — at least I’m convinced — about the semantics of singular reference, he barely illuminates the metaphysics of singular reference, by his own admission, really. But without the metaphysical picture in place I think he can’t really answer Davidsonian, Brandomian style scepticism about reference. I don’t think having “pre-philosophical common sense” on your side is nearly enough to do that. He also never gives us an account of what we might call discursive community. I think such an account is needed if we are to do more than gesture at issues about deference, the division of linguistic labor, first person authority with respect to our thought contents and the whole lot. Not that none of this can be done. I think it can be done. But I think until it is done there can’t be a consolidation of the Kripkean revolution, really. Why not? Because once we delve into these matters we see that there is an “ideational” side to all this that is insufficiently examined and problematized by Kripke. One worries — or, at least I do — that his results tacitly presuppose a lot about what our “ideas” must be like, especially a lot about how ideas relate to the world and what their roles in determining thought content is, and what the dynamics of a rational mind must be like if a Kripkean story about ideas is right. And maybe, just maybe, the rough picture of the ideational side of things more or less presupposed by Kripke’s results simply can’t ultimately be made good or coherent. I don’t think that’s true. But I think it still needs to be decisively demonstrated.

Anyway, I think that’s really what bothers Rorty. I think he doesn’t think Kripke gets it right about concepts and ideas and all that goes with that. And I don’t really think that Rorty thinks it’s Quine and Wittgenstein so much as Davidson that spells trouble for Kripke.

Again, I certainly don’t think it’s been decisively demonstrated that a roughly Kripkean “ideology,” if you will, is wrong. But I don’t think it’s been decisively demonstrated that it’s right either.

I find people who cite and quote Rorty utterly irritating (not you, Brian). By contrast, whenever I actually read something by him I am struck by the intellectual seriousness and worthwhileness of what he has to say, even when I think he’s completely wrong.

Should I try Derrida again?

Interesting, but…Rorty’s final statement that the only two philosophers still worth reading in 2005 are Frege and Nietzsche I find entirely odd.

That’s a slight misquote (I had to go back to the original article and check, because you’re right, it is odd!) — he says nobody in 1904 could have predicted F & N would have been the only two to be studied “intensively” in 2005.

I suppose this is like saying nobody in 1983 couuld have predicted the future trajectories of U2 vs. Echo and the Bunnymen would be so wildly divergent. It’s a false intuition to think the former band is or was 10,000 times as talented as the latter, despite the fact the career and influence of the former has been ~10,000 times greater. Clearly, external influences have played a role.

Soames seems to be concerned with this dynamic since in his reply letter he attacks an eminent figure in his field for giving him a lengthy, evenhanded and generally favorable review in a high-circulation magazine aimed at nonspecialists. Whatever.

(and, ionfish, John Emerson is just taking your remark as an occasion to have some fun with the others here. It’s well-meant, I am sure. :-) )

ha! roger, I was going to point out the same thing. and SOC is indeed an exploration of ‘borders’. In a way, the pile of sand is not a heap until it is no longer a heap (ie, the moment of SOC destroys the order and returns the system to something like an initial state of disorder again).

in a similar vein, is soames joking around by calling philosophy “an aggregate of related but semi-independent investigations”? is his perfect philosophy a heap? how did it get to be that way? at what point did it stop being simply scholastic degeneration and attain heaphood?

and might it not be better to see the ‘synoptic vision’ that he decries as the metric (a moment of SOC), rather than some godlike all-encompassing overview?

Neel K. makes an excellent case for moving the analytic philosophers into the Comp Sci department. I’ll help them pack.

My only question is why you found Rorty’s good points to be “surprising”.

ISTR some consider the author of “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” an unreliable witness to the doctrines of his colleagues.

[Soames] attacks an eminent figure in his field for giving him a lengthy, evenhanded and generally favorable review in a high-circulation magazine aimed at nonspecialists.

Well said. OTOH, Soames’ withers are not entirely unwrung. One valid summary of Rorty’s review is “Soames can’t popularise philosophy and I can.”

Russkie, you might want to ponder the meaning of a remark by (iirc) Tim Poston, to the effect that the fate of a good theorem is to become a definition.

Dasmoment, I have no prejudice against analytic philosophy, although I was educated in “continental” philosophy — but my allergic reaction to it does kick in with Kripke and Lewis, and especially the overuse of counterfactuals to create arguments that, I believe, are often illegitimate — that is, the argument framing the counterfactual often makes the same assumptions entailed by the counterfactual — and of thought “experiments”. Ironically, analytic philosophy, which shows a lot of scorn for the lack of rigor of continental philosophy, seems to spend a lot of time in the science fiction mode.

But I do like analytic philosophers like Davidson and Bennett and Kim on events, and I would figure that there is something there to help us understand what Bak’s self-organizing criticality is about. Ontologically. Frankly, who cares if it is useful to computer science, or useful at all at present. Philosophers up to now have tried to understand the world — and done a pisspoor job when trying to change it. Perhaps they ought to go back to the first objective.

To me, scientific questions are those which have been successfully answered or made algorithmic, or which there is reason to think might be made so. (Chomsky istinguishes between “problems” and “mysteries”, where problems are questions which you think you know how to solve, though you haven’t yet).

There are also many large areas of discourse which are not on the point of becoming algorithmic and given scientific answers. These include much of social thought, ethics, etc., plus areas like cosmology, etc.

The positivistic point of view says that only scientific, alghorithmic answers have any value at all, and that everything else is just nonsense where one man’s answer is as good as another’s.

It is also believed that eventually all valid questions will have scientific answers, as if there were a stack of answers in a warehouse to be solved one at a time until they were all gone.

And also that the problems not solvable scientifically are just nonsense, as I said. (One problem with that view is that each new answer generates new questions.)

I do not think, for a lot of reasons, that we can get ethical or political answers the same way we get mathematical or scientific answers. So the scope of philosophy would include what Chomsky calls “mysteries” (not my preferred term at all).

Some mysteries are nonsense, some will be solvable later, but some are just difficult, complex questions that need discussion but will never have algorithmic answers.

“And the dissolution of the epistemological project- but has everybody, pace Rorty, heard the news?- means that philosophers don’t know anything; that is, there is no distinctively philosophical knowledge as such.”

Yeah, as Russell indicated in about 1903. See also Heisenberg’s comments (re the Copenhagen position on quantum phyiscs) on positivism (which he felt was needed to some degree) and the irrelevance of Kant, Descartes, etc. Once the language is in order (via Tractatus, Carnap, semantics, etc.) there’s really nothing much left, at least for analytical types, except amalgamating material from other disciplines.

When American rightwingers rage about “secular liberalism” as far as I can tell they mean Margaret Mead, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey. The first two were living presences in my youth. Dewey wasn’t, but when you hear someone ranting about “progressive education”, they mean him exactly.

Dewey’s contribution is at risk, but not nonexistent at all.

The early Russell does seem close to platonic realism occasionally–his writing on sense datum and universals and so forth is quite metaphysical as is Wittgenstein’s “gegenstande” and logic as the great mirror and so forth–yet their intentions were toward clarifying language in light of modern science, were they not? Though it may offend some I think the project–say On Denoting—was as much semantic as logical. The Tractatus is also very concerned with syntax and semantics, and programmers have noted some of Wittgenstein’s contributions to artificial languages. And doesn’t W. in the last section of the Tractatus proclaim that all of what has preceded is in accord with natural science? Positivism is, in essence, physicalism: as Quine stressed later as well.

Much of Analytic philosophy seems inspired by a drive for a systematically consistent and complete naturalism. But I fail to see why many matters concerning language, meaning, human agency, or even “mind” and cognition must needs be addressed in the naturalistic attitude, which may very well deform, if not lose altogether, the relevant phenomena, rather than in the framework of a socio-cultural form of life. But then I am an incomplete and inconsistent naturalist, and don’t cherish the allegedly unique virtues of either systematicity, or completeness. And, estimable as the natural sciences are, are they really the paragon and paradigm of all thought? Natural science is itself a human cultural activity, and the temptation to self-reification invited by the methodological elimination of human agency from the picture might only damage a proper appreciation of science and its problematic impacts. Alas, poor Yorrick, there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in such philosophy.

As for performativity, of course, that happens all the time, but one might equally inquire into the constraints on performativity, which, after all, might be what renders it possible. One doesn’t want to go mongering paradoxes simply to disguise the banality and inefficacy of what one is saying. I no more believe that there is such a thing as a “pure” semantics than I believe that language could be effectively organized without a tendency to semantic self-stabilization.

Halasz–“Natural science is itself a human cultural activity, and the temptation to self-reification invited by the methodological elimination of human agency from the picture might only damage a proper appreciation of science and its problematic impacts.”

Bilgewater. It’s amusing how postmodernists often appear in the guise of clerics from 12th century Padua or something. Don’t drive your car or use your computer or cross a bridge or visit your doctor. Grow your own food. Yes, of course science may be used for nefarious ends but that in no way diminishes the fact that you are a biologically-determined primate who existence depends on the products of naturalism and positivism (e.g. your computer) Philosophy itself is produced by those comfy enough to have time and space to contemplate its futilities. Perhaps ponder “self-reification” when you order your sprout burger and motor home to Astroglide Arms in your electric yugo or whatever.

I’ve said this how many times?
When you can explain, Hick, why systems of justice are based on adversarial formalisms rather than the ‘objective’ ‘scientific’ search for truth then I’ll take your ‘bilgewater’ seriously.
Given a choice between listening to an academic discussion of language, and listening to the great Philadelphia lawyer Henry W. Sawyer III perform cruel surgery- while drunk[?]- on the arguments by the state concerning the costs of constructing a platform on which the Pope was to offer mass, I chose the latter. It was quite a show.
And as far as naturalism is concerned- legal naturalism- when Brian Leiter can give us a naturalist analysis of the contradictions of his imagination- the intellectual snobbery and demi-leftism; when he is willing or able to be self-aware enough to REFLECT, I will take that discussion seriously.

Academic specialization means that a person can write all day about the ins and outs of the details of language and then after hours be a U-2 fan.
And all my life I’ve assumed that fandom was like, anti-philosophical.

But then I’m a generalist.

“Naturalism, Darwinism, and/or biological determinism as a whole do not bode well for the philosophy business, nor for literature, nor for law I guess.”

That’s not an answer.

You posit a false dichotomy between technocracy and faith, when the dichotomy is between overdetermination and passivity and the acceptance of the ambiguities of experience.

Things do fall into place sometimes.

Read the article carefully, and it gives almost the definition of the problematics of a scientific philosophy. Judges are members of society; they are not isolates, intellectually or emotionally. But why not argue simply as members of society, from their own definitions of terms? Anyone who speaks uses the language of the time, whether s/he wants to or not. Polling is passivity, as it implies an unwillingness to have an opinion.

It is not possible for us to become science machines. All that we can do is pretend, which means that we end up ignoring our blind spots. Better to have opinions, be aware of them as such and to take responsibility for them.
Better two people with opposing perspectives than two people with none at all. The pretentions of vulgar naturalism are that people as individuals don’t exist in any important ‘meaningful’ way. The opposite is not idealism but the realist acceptance that they -we- do exist: as animals capable both of rational thought and of being subject to conditioned response.

If you can prove to me that you can always tell the difference between one and the other in your own life, or if you can give me even one example of someone else who has achieved this I’ll concede.

Hick:

I am not an academic, elite or otherwise; in fact, I’m not even a college graduate. I’m simply a wage laborer. I’m not a theologian, but, in fact, an atheist, and I would not be uncomfortable being called a materialist, though I prefer to think of myself as some sort of non-metaphysical realist, since materialism/idealism is a metaphysical aporia that one should be wary of embracing. And I don’t even know what an “immaterialist” is, unless it’s just a figment of your imagination. So your aggressive resentments fall rather wide of the mark, for all that you think that their asservations make for an argument. In fact, I did not even challenge one iota of settled science. I only stated that science is a human activity, or, to put it overemphatically and onesidedly, science is what scientists do, so that it is not at all really an estrangement of human agency, and that is a perspective that needs to be taken into account in considering the multiple roles it plays in modern social life and thought. Indeed, I did mean to question whether natural science is the unique, self-sufficient and exclusive model of all rationality, or whether rather science is part of a broader panoply of forms of rationality and in part depends for its rationality on that broader field. That question does not at all delegitimate natural science, but only questions the positivist account, which badly misconstrues the actual modus operandi of science and is barren of any account of the normativity of scientific cognition, other than dogmatic assertion. But that is enough to substantiate that you have been unfairly mailgned by all those evil sophisticates with their sinuous equivocations? That physical reality exists is hardly news; in fact, one can’t even prove its existence, (since one can’t prove a tautology), but why would one ever have cause to doubt it, or, conversely, to make it an article of faith? Do you really imagine that the affirmation of physical reality is a priori the answer to all possible questions? (That would be an even-more-than-Nietzschean affirmation!) Do you even know what it is to entertain, that is, to seriously consider a question as a question? And together with your intolerance for questioning, your intolerance for ambiguity suggests a weak-minded need to repress any threat of doubt. Do you really think the elimination of ambiguity is possible? Most real thinking is a disambiguation of ambiguities rather than their elimination. If a prior elimination of ambiguity is required to guarantee one’s access to reality, then one has a very long way to go indeed before one even begins to deal with any real issue.But then, just as your notion that literary types really need to know chemistry laughably indicates your ignorance of the function and enjoyments of literature, perhaps you are just not interested in anything so futile as thinking.

As for “biological determinism”, -(and I hardly think that Dawkins and Wilson constitute the last and definitive word in biology; why not, say, Gerald Edelman or Stuart Kaufman? the former two are more like purveyors of a biological cult)-, whereas it’s obvious, say, that brain processes form the substrate of thought, it should be equally obvious that such accounts do not determine the contents of thought, nor even begin to address all the issues that surround cognition, not least, the grounds and procedures of its rational justification. (Consider that if cognition were such-wise biologically determined the brain processes of, say, a medieval theologian and a modern biologist would have to be different, in accordance with the different contents of their thinking, and, further, millenia of cultural struggle and differentiation to arrive at modern science would have been superfluous, since it would already have been pre-given as an adaption.) But, most of all, isn’t the appeal to biological adaption as the ground and function of knowledge precisely a form of instrumentalistic reductionism with respect to knowledge, which ill-accords with the fact that knowledge is supposed to be true?

Finally, for all that you cite the “Tractatus”, you are aware that Wittgenstein thoroughly criticized and, for the most part, repudiated his “Tractatus” views, aren’t you? (Indeed, the large reputation of the “Tractatus” is rather puzzling, since no one has ever been able to make exactly heads or tails of it.) Have you considered those criticisms and just how Wittgenstein found a way out of his own dead end?

Hick, if that is your real name and not just a character you play, you’re a rather comical fellow, bared incisors and all.

If you go all the way back to Aristotle and consider what “pure actuality”, which characterizes the godhead, means, you’ll find that the notion is unconstruable, virtually unthinkable,- (which is perhaps a hint of why it is characterized as divine.) The rough point of all that analysis of language games is to build up from almost-too-primitive-to-ever-be-actual cases through adding on further layers for analysis to the real potentiality, the constrained possibilities, of our form of life, which exceeds the natural, and from which emerge the needs and necessities by which to assess the adequacy of our concepts of the actual. Reference does not occur through abstraction from the workings of language, as if to thereby lay bare its already logical structure, completely independent of any actual behavior, but rather works precisely through all the other “junk” of language. And Wittgenstein had scarcely anything to do with Oxford “ordinary language” philosophy: PI occurs at a deeper “foundational” or “logical” level, as a critical dissolution of epistemology, with its mistaken efforts to ground knowledge in certainty, itself a residue of the metaphysical recursion to the pregiven. Henceforth, knowledge is not subject to philosophical fiat, but is left to the empirical openness of the specialized sciences.

As for induction, that is an especially weak form of inference, as has been broadly known since Hume. In fact, that was precisely why Popper replaced it with his criterion of falsification, though he then signally failed to inquire into the sources of the concepts needed to construct scientific theories, which then could be subject to falsification. In a way, Kant was right about “synthetic judgments a priori”, it’s just that they are not nearly so invariant, ahistorical, unempirical, and subject to “transcendental” grounding as he made them out to be; nowadays they are usually discussed in terms of the buzzword “paradigms”. And I am not terribly enamored with pragmatism: to cite the instrumental success of actions as a criterion would seem to require nonpragmatic criteria not just for the identification and structure of actions, but for their “success”, and the latter is always,- very broadly speaking,- a political matter. But the pragmatic emphasis on paying attention to the “follow through” is important: it’s just that we don’t really know how far our inferences or their broader structures extend and can carry us and they don’t necessarily possess a prior guarantee every step of the way. That is a good reason to be wary of being too systematic.

As for the need to take account of the material world, both biologically and economically, coming from a quasi-Marxist background, I quite agree, with the proviso that that is not all there is, really or potentially. What remains of philosophy is not any sort of knowledge, nor any prescriptive authority. Philosophy simply concerns the analysis and interpretation of meaning, that is, understanding rather than truth, and the elucidation of what is already obscurely or implicitly there, though unthought in its implications. It also concerns the elucidation of norms, whether cognitive or ethical, and, though it lacks the capacity to mandate them, it can bring to the understanding the stakes involved in the inevitable clash and conflict between different norms, as well as, between the counterfactual status of norms and reality.

Any generalization is, by definition, vague. Only pigeons pecking at grain are relieved of the burden of vagueness.

For someone who is into Perfect Clarity, Hick, you’re awfully confused. It’s called saving one’s ammunition- mercy killing is still illegal.

So we meet again in the underworld… A crude reductionism that backs one into a self-chosen corner, resulting in the “necessity” of resort to polemical reflexes- that’s certainly news! Among other things, it leads to an ignorance of and inability to recognize/misidentification of other positions and their possible grounds. As to shysters and legality, I am entirely inclined to take a cynical view, as a good many are, but that is just a starting point for the consideration of those issues and not a definitive conclusion. However, legality is a good case in point for where the appeal solely to physical criteria or “physicalism” can gain no purchase. But if one limns the bounds of permissible utterence solely in naturalistic terms- (and wouldn’t that really amount de facto to a kind of transcendental claim?)- then perhaps one is incapable of seeing that. As for “verificationalist/falsifiable criteria”, verificationalism, aside from having an oddly instrumentalized conception of meaning without otherwise accounting for its source, quickly proved inadequate for carrying the load intended, which is why falsification was proposed instead, but then “naive” falsificationalism, (Popper, if only in part), needed to move to more advanced falsificationalism, (Lakatos), with consideration of criteria for theory replacement. And even that is not the definitive last word, as “degenerating research programs” might just be a sign of intractable problems, such as, e.g., the limits on predictability in complex systems. So the truth about everything was not definitively revealed in 1905, though Einstein did make a good start toward a new beginning, even if you have been unable to move on since and if you’re own tendency for non-responsive repetitiveness has been amply revealed this week. So you’re insistent mistaking me for a metaphysician just serves to indicate that you have swallowed the rather shallow and unreflective positivist rhetoric on metaphysics whole and are entirely unfamiliar with the terms and stakes of the broader progressive critique of metaphysics since Kant, paradoxically a painful, but masterful product of the capacities for self-critical reflection cultivated by philosophy. As for being a hip aesthete, actually I’m quite dowdy, even shabby, and am not at all interested only in the latest “thing”, even if I could afford the expense. And I think the notion of “role models” vulgar, indicating a sickly idealization of conformist mimetic behavior.

You two still at it? I told you you were too vague John and I meant it. Hick insults my examples but does not attempt to refute them. F’n briilaint move kiddo.
Hick, last I heard they haven’t been able to predict combinations on a pool table beyond what: 4? 7? You tell me.

And again:
So far at least- in the future who knows?- no one has been able to develop a system for poker, and yet it is considered a game of chance and skill [dig the italics] Quantify that skill for me if you would, H. Please

And where’d you get your religious idealism, cloudcookooland bullshit: business school?
No, don’t tell me.
Chicago?

My brother plays chess and blackjack. He’s one of the better players in the the US at the former and he makes money at the latter, but again you’ve avoided my point.

” So I agree that math and logic are very limited in terms of predictive hypothesis, and that intelligence is not just quantitative”

Or maybe not.