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On Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Part I: "Our Glassy Essence" (mostly Ch. 1).
"The mind" seems to be an unavoidable part of our basic conceptual vocabulary, but Rorty thinks not, and he wants to use the history of philosophy as a kind of therapy to show that many of our seemingly insoluble problems like the relation between mind and body are a result of philosophical mistakes by Descartes, Locke, and Kant.
Our recent guest John Searle diagnosed the main mistake similarly: Instead of looking at knowledge as a matter of us being in direct contact with external things, Locke and his ilk erroneously thought that we can only ever know our own ideas. Rorty says this view of the mind as the thing closest to us, the only thing we can really know with certainty, came from Descartes, with only hints of it earlier in the tradition. Before that, people didn't think of the mind as an "inner realm" and mental elements like pains as particular things that don't seem to be of the same type as events in the physical world.
So the solution is not to deny that the mental exists like a behaviorist, or to insist that mental terms actually refer to brain states or that mental events and brain states are two aspects of the same underlying substance: Rather than bridge the "ontological gap" between mental and physical in this way, Rorty would rather we back up and reject the conceptual system that gives rise to this apparent problem in the first place.
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Mark, Wes, and Dylan are joined by Stephen Metcalf of Slate's Culture Gabfest podcast, a former pupil of Rorty's. We plan to return to the book in ep. 155 to talk about Rorty's take on epistemology. If you're new to the philosophy of mind, we recommend you pick up our ep. 21, which gives a broad overview of the topic. I'd also recommend our ep. 55–56 on Wittgenstein, whose "private language" argument (and overall approach to philosophical problems as language games) is a key influence here.
Rorty pic by Corey Mohler.
The line “Buy the PEL 2017 Wall Calendar and other merch at our store.” contains a typo and a broken link. “Merch” should probably be spelled “Merchant”, and the link from “our store” is missing an “h” in the url.
Thanks Vishal. The link is now fixed and I added a link directly to the calendar. “Merch” is short for ‘merchandise’ and is a common colloquialism that we think folks will get.
So lets sit around the yuletide fire wile imbibing good spirits and chat with the exquisitely insecure Richar Rorty. Or we can think better of that and choose his better, overly-secure avatars, the PEL group and Rorty specialist Steven. As usual, this was a fun expression of Rorty pragmatism in a loquacious, playful and informed jolly get-together.
Ok, so it’s always already about doing philosophical therapy, which means you can never know for sure when you are done. All we need to know is that we have no problem of mind, unless we think it is a problem, for which Rorty’s proper therapy is necessary.
Through a genealogical review of how the mind-body problem developed, Rorty seeks to downgrade the parallel Nietzschean Good-Evil misperception to the equivalent of the more simple good-bad problem. In this case, there is no division, no real ontological difference between mind and body, just a false epistemological division which came about via Descartes, Kant and modern philosophy.
Rorty does well to attack the concept of knowing as a “glassy essence” or mental mirroring/representation (correspondence) of the external world. He also makes good points in distinguishing between the universal (non spatial) and particular (spatial) as parallel to the mind-body false dualism.
Perhaps most applicable for today is his argument that being able to identify the neurology of a person’s thinking would not be the same as “knowing” what a person is thinking, or as PEL analogized, knowing the syntax (neuronal structure) does not give the semantics (knowledge of the thought). If someone’s brain is blown up as a factory, and we could walk around in it and see the mechanics of thinking, that doesn’t mean we could know the meaning of the person’s thinking processes.
So Rorty therapy eliminates the metaphor of mind as a medium of appearances, of the mere phenomenal. His pragmatism, antiessentialism, and genealogical position paints philosophical problems as merely transient tensions in the dynamics of evolving, contingent vocabularies. Analytic philosophy has no refuge in essentialism and continental philosophy can not claim phenomenological truth–there is no ontological gap.
That was a very high quality philosophical discourse as usual on this podcast. Everyone was on fire, every sentence was informative and fluently articulated. Contemporary “analytic” philosophy happens to be the kind of philosophy I’m most interested in, while political might be the least interesting to me, so I’m ecstatic to hear you guys are doing another couple analytic episodes in a row after those couple political ones (which were apropos and probably very popular and satisfying to most people).
It made me wonder how many contemporary episodes you guys have done (anything 20th Century and later). These figures are rough, since I quickly scrolled through without putting much thought into the categories:
Analytic: 42/153
Continental: 26/153
Miscellaneous: 12/153
Total: 80/153
I think that’s a very healthy variety of episodes. You all have covered a lot of ground, and it’s been fun listening. Love all your episodes, ancient, modern, and everything in between. Thank you for the time and work you put into this podcast.
thanks guys (and Stephen who was an excellent addition), this was a welcome and well done return to this pivotal text in my own philosophical development.
grist for the mill:
http://faculty.cas.usf.edu/sturner5/Papers/CogSciencepapers/WebDavidsonsNormativity.pdf
would add tho that I don’t think I need to make a Kierkegaardian leap in terms of sociality/sociability if I follow something like Davidson’s principle of interpretive charity, which might well be extended to AI or other such aliens, this is indeed Wittgensteinian, see:
Do you guys have transcripts of your episodes?