Spring 2000, J.W. Powell, CRN 24254, 4 Wednesdays in UANX 152

The first part of this course, since Richard Rorty is visiting campus in late March, will be given to worries about his methods as we can get at them in his Philosophy and Social Hope (Penguin, 1999). One of my goals in this is to articulate methodological issues on which Rorty may be vulnerable to attack. I told Onur Azeri, to whom we owe thanks for this opportunity to converse with one of the most influential philosophers of our day, that I also have the goal of revealing the despair that underlies pragmatism, and so I am delighted by what seems to me an unconscious irony in his title. After his visit and some debriefing, we may broaden our interests to include questions about how he ought to fix what's wrong. Or maybe we'll become pragmatists.

In "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" (pp. 3-20) Rorty provides an autobiographical account of how he has come to take his pragmatist positions on some large philosophical questions. I find in that essay some confirmation of one major way I think philosophers can be drawn to pragmatism by way of disillusion. Here's that story.

Once upon a time, though not too far away, the American philosophical community was in a pickle, a pickle Western philosophy had been in since Plato's dialogue The Theaetetus. Some Americans wound up providing an important new alternative for dealing with that pickle. Here's how the pickle goes: Suppose there is such a thing as perception, and that human beings derive a great deal of their knowledge about the external world by way of perception. But when we think about this, there's a problem. This might not work, since how things appear to us when they are the result of true perception can be the same as how those things appear to us when they are the result of, say, someone slipping LSD in our coffee, or the result of our dreaming or being deluded or deceived by mirages or afterimages or other tricks of perception or such. The dreaming argument and its generalization into the argument from illusion leads to, at the least, grave problems for epistemology (the philosophical investigation of the nature of knowledge), and at the worst an inescapable argument that really there is no such thing as knowledge.

Before we get to pragmatism, there have been other alternatives besides the home-grown American alternative. Some of those alternatives can be grouped under the heading of foundationalist answers, those which give an account of knowledge by way of providing a list of necessary and sufficient conditions, such that if all the conditions are met then we can be guaranteed on the basis of that foundation that some candidate for being knowledge really is knowledge. The Theaetetus provides the first candidate for this kind of account, one which is still influential in the field and which frames many of the later accounts: knowledge will be those things which, first, we believe; second, they are true; third and finally, they are justified. Socrates points out the last condition won't work, partly because we have to be able to separate out proper justification from improper, but we do that by being able to tell whether we really know the thing we are investigating as a candidate for knowledge, which is circular. In some ways much of 20th Century epistemology can be seen as within the framework of Socrates' last moves, as an investigation then of proper justification, a sort of narrowing of interest or tunnel-vision kind of epistemology. Next, it's thought to be an alternative to foundationalist accounts to give a coherentist account instead, which stresses consistency and mutual support (so, coherence) which beliefs give each other, a web of beliefs, rather than some list of conditions which will provide guarantees for any individual beliefs such that we can kick them upstairs to the category of knowledge.

How we categorize the world and its furniture in terms of physical and mental, real and unreal, may also influence how we conceive of and how we assess our alternatives. If we think (perhaps as a result of the formidable barrier to true knowledge erected by the argument from illusion) that real physical things are unreachable by perception, since perception after all is just ideas or produces only ideas, then we might find ourselves entertaining assent to idealism, the account which goes that all that really exists is in the realm of ideas and that the purported existence of physical objects is a hoax. In this case knowledge will be an essentially mental phenomenon or activity. On the other hand, if we find ourselves unable to bite the bullet, unable to give up on physical objects, and especially if we find ourselves unable to shake the notion that physical objects are just the things which have to be most real, such that we suspect mental activity of being some sort of ghostly byproduct of bad digestion, then we will regard knowledge as true knowledge only when inextricably linked to or involving the physical or material world, and will exert all our ingenuity to give an account of knowledge (we will put "mental states" in scare quotes), for instance, in terms of underlying brain states.

William James, C.S. Peirce, John Dewey, and a host of other 20th Century Americans provide the following response to this: this pickle is unsolvable and besides it doesn't matter. We have to live our lives as though we do know we are awake, as though we could count on not being under the influence of illusion, as though when we claim to know it could be right. If we are dreaming right now there is nothing we can do about it except ignore it. The "cash value" (a term of which James is fond) of the dreaming argument and the argument from illusion comes to nothing when one is stepping onto the street and sees a bus coming. Whether it's dream or illusion or not one must step out of the way. Knowledge then can only be, and should be considered as, that which we use and on which we rely in our actions.

Descartes would cackle. "As though?" The pragmatists have provided an important reminder about the philosophical problem of knowledge and the argument from illusion, namely that we can't live like that. But of course the pickle never was presented as a reason to go jump off a bridge or slit your wrists, though some of the existentialists took it that way. Instead it was meant to show that what we call knowledge may not really be knowledge, and the pragmatist tactic of renaming and revising how we talk involves a tacit acknowledgement that you (or I) might be dreaming right now, that we don't really know much. In the face of the argument from illusion, the pragmatist says, well, we have to act as though we do know, so let's call what we thought we knew knowledge.

There are some implications. On a pragmatic view, the old view of knowledge looks as if it is something romanticized and simple, a throwback to a time when we thought there was such a thing as reality or even Reality, a time when we thought there were hierarchies such that all that is the case could be made part of one overall account, a unified science such as Carnap and his friends were working toward. Rorty points out in a section on politics how glorious hopes are a setup for despair, and often strikes a tone of letting his audience know about the unfortunate facts of life in the face of our tendency to yearn for impossible things like outdated concepts of truth, reality, and knowledge--that while we thought they were bright and shining beacons, fixed in the intellectual firmament so all could steer by them, in actuality each culture has to carry them around and keep them lit with whatever muddy fuel we can manage to bring. If you like hard truths, truths which sting, Rorty is your man. If you were attracted to cosmic and profound Truth permeating all but have come to entertain doubts, Rorty will seem scary and profound. If you are worried whether philosophers have dreamed up mythological beasts and then spent their and our time doing dissection work on phantasms, Rorty will seem as though he is asking you to open your eyes to the real world right here and now, rather than fix them on some floating island like Swift's Laputa. Of course if you find the world intolerable without a rack of concepts that hold the whole together, you may find him intolerable too.

It turns out there are some new concepts to take their places, though, and we will need to examine them carefully. Oddly for a school of thought identifying itself partly by its opposition to dualisms, most of them can be set up as binary oppositions. Here's a partial list: tyranny vs. freedom/liberation/diversity; liberalism vs. the right; contextualized vs. context-free (as in contextualized identity or contextualized difference, contextualized reality, contextualized knowledge); human freedom and social justice and democratically derived decisions vs. authority; dualisms vs. nondualistic thinking.

To the extent that they are thought by Rorty to provide coherence to the whole, these concepts stand vulnerable to his own attacks on our yearning for such coherence. To the extent that they require an opposing view for them to make sense (as for instance his odd identification of Platonism with any kind of philosophy which endorses dualisms and his insistence that pragmatism is in important ways constituted by its opposition to dualisms), they may not be able to survive their own victory. And to the extent that the new concepts are tarnished substitutes for concepts (like knowledge, truth, reality) which have been abandoned because of the argument from illusion, then they tacitly give power to that argument and imply its correctness.

Students will be expected to

1) attend;

2) read one essay per week;

3) write a half page every other week and supply copies to everyone in the group;

4) write a two to three page paper at the end of the semester.

Any person sitting in is also asked to meet the first three expectations above. We may be able to allow some students to read other essays providing they can report to us.

Assignments:

First read the Introduction, "Relativism: Finding and Making," and the autobiographical essay, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids."

Next: Chapt. 14: Failed Prophecies, Glorious Hopes;

Next: Chapt. 17: Globalization, the Politics of Identity and Social Hope;

Next: Chapt. 3: A World Without Substances or Essences;

We'll decide where to go from there.

Questions for Rorty:

Consider two alternative visions of philosophy [this is prompted by the discussions in Truth and Progress of Derrida and Habermas, and I'm after a distinction which requires me to put the two visions in as similar terms as I can]:

a. Traditional philosophy has been mistakenly working within a framework of dualisms ripped out of context and the result is that it is impotent to effect helpful change for human beings who need help in resisting oppression. That they do need help is something we do not need philosophy to see. Providing help is something beyond the scope of philosophy, at least traditional philosophy. What's needed is something different. What is needed will be a way of working which emphasizes usefulness and liberation, and it will use the models we have been so richly provided by literature and by revolutionaries.

b. Traditional philosophy has been mistakenly working with problems generated by our misleading ourselves with bits of language ripped out of context, and the result is that we have emphasized an artificial need for context-free theories and decision procedures which only skid when we try to apply them or to bring them to nonphilosophical problems. Indeed, the force of the theories and models we provide has been to blind us, to make us unable to recognize the live issues around us. What's needed is something different. What is needed will be a way of paying attention to our own ways of raising the problems that so beguile us and a way of contrasting those to the alternative ways that live [social, scientific, religious, household, relationship, aesthetic] issues arise. It will use the discussions outside of philosophy as grounding models and criteria of sense.

The question is, does the former contains any protections from things like misplaced missionary zeal for egalitarianism turning into fascism, or new methods of making decisions in a context-free way which are similar in all the important respects to the various absolutisms resulting from rejected philosophies, or despair at thinking there is no way to justify our moral judgments?

The answer is no. Were the same answer to be put to the latter, the answer would be yes.