Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature RICHARD RORTY Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey Copyright© 1979byPrincetonUniversityPress PublishedbyPrincetonUniversity Press,Princeton,NewJersey TO M. V. R. AllRightsReserved LibraryofCongress Cataloging-in-PublicationData Rorty,Richard. Philosophyandthe mirrorofnature. Includesindex. 1. Philosophy. 2. Philosophy, Modern. 3. Mind and body. 4. Representation (Philosophy) 5. Analysis (Philosophy) 6. Civilization-Philosophy. I. Title. B53·R68 190 79-84013 ISBN0-691-07236-1 ISBN0-691-02016-7 pbk. Publicationofthisbookhasbeen aidedbyagrantfrom TheNationalEndowmentfor the Humanities ThisbookhasbeencomposedinLinotypeBaskerville PrincetonUniversityPressbooksareprintedonacid-freepaperand meettheguidelinesforpermanenceanddurabilityoftheCommitteeon ProductionGuidelinesfor BookLongevityoftheCouncilonLibrary Resources Printedin the UnitedStatesofAmerica Secondprinting, withcorrections, 1980 FirstPrincetonPaperbackprinting, 1980 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 II 10 When we think about the future of the world, we always have in mind its being at the place where it would be if it continued to move as we see it moving now. We do not realize that it moves not in a straight line, but in a curve, and that its direction constantly changes. Philosophy has made no progress? If somebody scratches whereititches,doesthatcountas progress?Ifnot,doesthat mean it wasn't an authentic scratch? Not an authentic itch? Couldn't this response to the stimulus go on for quite a long time until a remedy for itching is found? Wenn wir an die Zukunft der Welt denken, so meinen wir immer den Ort, wo sie sein wird, wenn sie so weiter Hiuft, wie wir sie jetzt laufen sehen, und denken nicht, dass sie nicht gerade Hiuft, sondern in einer Kurve, und ihre Richtung sich konstant andert. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Verrnischte Berner· kungen, Frankfurt, 1977, p. 14·) Die Philosophie hat keinen Fortschritt gemacht? Wenn Einer kratzt, wo es ihn juckt, mussein Fortschritt zu sehen sein? 1st es sonst kein echtes Kratzen, oder kein echtes Jucken? Und kann nicht diese Reaktion auf die Reizung lange Zeit so weitergehen, ehe ein Mittel gegen das Jucken gefunden wird? (Ibid., pp. 163-164.) Contents Preface xiii Introduction 3 PART ONE: Our Glassy Essence 15 CHAPTER I: The Invention of the Mind 17 1. CRITERIA OF THE MENTAL 17 2. THE FUNCTIONAL, THE PHENOMENAL, AND THE IMMATERIAL 22 3. THE DIVERSITY OF MIND-BODY PROBLEMS 32 4. MIND AS THE GRASP OF UNIVERSALS 38 5. ABILITY TO EXIST SEPARATELY FROM THE BODY 45 6. DUALISM AND "MIND-STUFF" 61 CHAPTER II: Persons Without Minds 7° 1. THE ANTIPODEANS 7° 2. PHENOMENAL PROPERTIES 78 3. INCORRIGIBILITY AND RAW FEELS 88 4. BEHAVIORISM 98 5. SKEPTICISM ABOUT OTHER MINDS 107 6. MATERIALISM WITHOUT MIND-BODY IDENTITY 114 7. EPISTEMOLOGY AND "THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND" 125 PART TWO: Mirroring 129 CHAPTER III: The Idea ofa"Theory ofKnowledge" 131 ix CONTENTS CONTENTS 1. EPISTEMOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY'S PART THREE: Philosophy 313 131 SELF-IMAGE 2. LOCKE'S CONFUSION OF EXPLANATION CHAPTER VII: From Epistemology to Hermeneutics 315 WITH JUSTIFICATION 139 1. COMMENSURATIONANDCONVERSATION 315 3. KANT'S CONFUSION OF PREDICATION 2. KUHN AND INCOMMENSURABILITY 322 WITH SYNTHESIS 148 3. OBJECTIVITYASCORRESPONDENCE 4. KNOWLEDGEAS NEEDING"FOUNDATIONS" 155 ANDASAGREEMENT 333 4. SPIRITANDNATURE 343 CHAPTER IV: PrivilegedRepresentations 165 CHAPTER VIII: Philosophy Without Mirrors 357 1. APODICTICTRUTH, PRIVILEGEDREPRE- SENTATIONS,ANDANALYTICPHILOSOPHY 165 1. HERMENEUTICSANDEDIFICATION 357 2. EPISTEMOLOGICALBEHAVIORISM 173 2. SYSTEMATICPHILOSOPHYAND 3. PRE-LINGUISTICAWARENESS 182 EDIFYINGPHILOSOPHY 365 4. THE" 'IDEA' IDEA" 192 3. EDIFICATION, RELATIVISM, AND 5. EPISTEMOLOGICALBEHAVIORISM, OBJECTIVETRUTH 373 PSYCHOLOGICALBEHAVIORISM,AND 4. EDIFICATION AND NATURALISM' 379 LANGUAGE 2°9 5. PHILOSOPHYINTHECONVERSATION OFMANKIND 389 CHAPTER V: Epistemology andEmpirical Psychology 213 Index 395 1. SUSPICIONSABOUTPSYCHOLOGY 213 2. THE UNNATURALNESSOFEPISTEMOLOGY 221 3. PSYCHOLOGICALSTATESASGENUINE EXPLANATIONS 23° 4. PSYCHOLOGICALSTATESAS REPRESENTATIONS 244 CHAPTER VI: Epistemology andPhilosophy of Language 257 1. PUREANDIMPUREPHILOSOPHYOF LANGUAGE 257 2. WHATWEREOURANCESTORS TALKING ABOUT? 266 3. IDEALISM 273 4. REFERENCE 284 5. TRUTHWITHOUTM1RRORS 295 6. TRUTH,GOODNESS, ANDRELATIVISM 3°6 xi X Preface ALMOST as soon as I began to study philosophy, I was im pressed by the way in which philosophical problems ap peared, disappeared, or changed shape, as a result of new assumptions or vocabularies. From Richard McKeon and Robert Brumbaugh I learned to view the history of philos ophy as a series, not of alternative solutions to the same problems, but of quite different sets of problems. From Rudolph Carnap and Carl Hempel I learned how pseudo problems couldbe revealed as such by restating them in the formal mode of speech. From Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss I learned how they could be so revealed by being translated into Whiteheadian or Hegelian terms. I was very fortunate in having these men as my teachers, but, for better or worse, I treated them all as saying the same thing: that a "philosophicalproblem" was a product of the unconscious adoption of assumptions built into the vocabu lary in which the problem was stated-assumptions which were to be questioned before the problem itself was taken seriously. Somewhat later on, I began to read the work of Wilfrid Sellars. Sellars's attack on the Myth of the Given seemed to me to render doubtful the assumptions behind most of modern philosophy. Still later, I began to take Quine's skeptical approach to the language-factdistinctionseriously, and to try to combine Quine's point of view with Sellars's. Since then,. I have been trying to isolate more of the as sumptions.hehind the problematic of modern philosophy, in the hope of generalizing and extending Sellars's and Quine's criticisms of traditional empiricism. Getting back to these assumptions, and making clear that they are op tional, I believed, would be "therapeutic" in the way in xiii PREFACE PREFACE which Carnap's original dissolution of standard textbook Aldrich, ed. Donald F. Gustafson and Bangs L. Tapscott problems was "therapeutic." This book is the result of that (Dordrecht, 1979). Other portions of that chapter appeared attempt. in Philosophical Studies 31 (1977). Portions of Chapter VII The book has been long in the making. Princeton Uni appeaJ;ed in Acta Philosophica Fennica, 1979. I am grateful versity is remarkably generous with research time and sab to the editors and publishers concerned for permission to baticals, so it is embarrassing to confess that without the reprint thismaterial. further assistance of the American Council of Learned Societies and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foun dation I should probably never have written it. I began thinking out its plot while holding an ACLS Fellowship in 1969-1970, and wrote the bulk of the first draft while hold ingaGuggenheimFellowshipin 1973-1974.I ammostgrate ful to all three institutions for their assistance. Many people-students at Princeton and elsewhere, audi ences at papers given at various conferences, colleagues and friends-have read or listened to various drafts of various sections of this book. I made many changes of both sub stance and style in response to theirobjections, and am very grateful.I regret thatmymemoryis toopoor to listeven the most important instances ofsuch help, but I hope that here and there readers may recognize the beneficial results of their own comments. I do wish, however, to thank two peo ple-Michael Williams and Richard Bernstein-who made very helpful comments on the penultimate version of the entire book, as did an anonymous reader for the Princeton University Press. I am also grateful to Raymond Geuss, DavidHoy, andJeffreyStout,who took time out to help me resolve last-minute doubts about the final chapter. Finally, I should like to thank Laura Bell, Pearl Cava naugh, Lee Ritins, Carol Roan, Sanford Thatcher, Jean Toll, and David Velleman for patient help in transforming what I wrote from rough copy into a printed volume. • • • • • Portions of Chapter IV appeared in Neue Hefte fur Philosophie 14 (1978). Portions of Chapter V appeared in Body, Mind and Method: Essays in Honor of Virgil C. xiv xv Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Introduction PHILOSOPHERS usually think of their discipline as one which discusses perennial, eternal problems-problems which arise as soon as one reflects. Some of these concern the dif ference between human beings and other beings, and are crystallizedinquestionsconcerning the relation between the mindandthebody.Otherproblemsconcernthelegitimation ofclaims to.know, and are crystallized in questions concern· ingthe "foundations" ofknowledge. Todiscover these foun dations is to discover something about the mind, and con versely. Philosophy as a discipline thus sees itself as the attempt to underwrite ordebunk claims to knowledgemade by science, morality, art, or religion. It purports to do this on the basis of its special understanding of the nature of knowledge and of mind. Philosophy can be foundational in respect to the rest of culture because culture is the as semblage of claims to knowledge, and philosophy adjudi cates such claims. It can do so because it understands the foundations of knowledge, and it finds these foundations in a study of man-as-knower, of the "mental processes" or the "activity of representation" which make knowledge possi ble. To know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind; so to understand the possibility and nature of knowl edge is to understand the way in which the mind is able to construct such representations. Philosophy's central concern is to be a general theory of representation, a theory which will divide culture up into the areas which represent reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent it at all (despite their pretense of doing so). We owe the notion of a "theory of knowledge" based on an understanding of "mental processes" to the seventeenth century, and especially to Locke. We owe the notion of 3