Ep. 350: Rorty on Justification and Essentialism (Part One)

0:09 Mark: Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 350 is something like, what should a pragmatist say about truth and essentialism? We read lectures three through five about epistemology, continuing in Richard Rorty's Pragmatism as anti authoritarianism in 1997. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, convincing to all possible audiences in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:42 Seth: This is Seth Paskin at a cocktail party with all the major figures in the history of philosophy in Austin, Texas.

0:49 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, Only what I Am in Virtue of My Relations to Other Things in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:57 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, convicted by the charge of performative self contradiction in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:03 Mark: So we had read the beginning of this book last time focusing largely on religion, but we could not help ourselves in getting into the epistemology, since that is clearly the more interesting part of this. The book is as a whole about promoting democracy. And so in this, the main thing we read it was sort of two lectures stuffed together into one chapter presentation. It's called Universality and Truth. But then after that was a lecture called Pan Relationalism, which was at least kind of clear in some ways we sort of made optional. There was one more epistemological lecture after that called Against Depth, which is just really giving some implications of Pan Relationalism and getting into some examples that we won't get into about Qualia and Cartesian skepticism and things.

But these are reasonable things to bring up, even in our universality and truth. Right? Because you would think if you're Descartes, that there is a way that the world really is. And the question that skepticism is posing is whether we can get to that. And it's long been posed as, you know what the pragmatist starting point is that we're not going to take challenges like that seriously. Because if we were in the Matrix, if you were really a brain in the vat that's experiencing what seems like a very consistent world, you would just want to call pragmatically that what Descartes would call an illusion, your actual reality.

And so a strict pragmatist is just going to deny that. No legitimate distinction, that doesn't make a difference.

2:36 Wes: So if you want to say difference to practice, yeah, A difference to practice, yeah.

2:40 Mark: You want to say it would make no difference to your practice to find out that actually all of this is some sort of veil of illusion, then it doesn't even make sense to say that it is or to think that there is a transcendent truth.

2:52 Dylan: Yeah, I quibble with the Matrix analogy because of course in the Matrix you find out that there is a distinction that makes a difference. Right. So. Yeah, but anyway, right.

3:02 Mark: That's just the way to help people imagine. Yeah, yeah.

3:04 Wes: But also obviously, yeah, you don't have to be Descartes to think there's a mind independent reality. You just have to basically be anybody but Rorty.

3:12 Dylan: Well, so I also quibble with that because it's clear that he does think that is. It's just the terms under which I

3:17 Wes: don't think he has a coherent Right. Yes, he wants to say there's a causal mind independent reality, but not something that is for us in any relevant sense of mind independent reality. But we'll get to that. But I think, I mean the other thing about the Matrix and him wanting to say my argument in the past has been it doesn't matter if it's God or the Matrix or whatever you want to call it, that doesn't deprive us of a mind independent reality and one to which we have a representational relation. Even if the thing in itself underneath is hidden from us and all we have are isomorphic phenomena that are correlated to what is underneath in a systematic way, it's still mind independent even if it's a computer simulation.

So. But my argument has been, you know, again, I think from a subjective point of view we have to conceive of their. As Aristotle and many others have pointed out, the an Habermas, the implications of our use of language in discourse is that there's something conceptually central about the notion of mind independence and it doesn't not make a difference. It's central anyway. Go ahead.

4:31 Dylan: Yeah, the whole nub of this is going to be at what point does that force an adjudication? And this is where Rorty's going to disagree. He thinks that the saying that it's true and insisting that the terms of that is going to always be contextual. That's what he's going to emphasize. And thus I agree. I think that in the end there's some. I don't know if it's incoherent or if it's just that he is too sanguine about the force of it, that once you say that there is a set of causal connections that you can claim about the world that's external from ourselves and those have some kind of force which he seems to admit in numerous cases then that it doesn't form some kind of waypoint in the way in which we interact with the world and each other.

Seems kind of strange. He wants to diminish that because he wants to emphasize very strongly that the terms under which we convince one another is really a moral agreement. And that's the bottom of it for him. It's all about moral agreement.

5:37 Seth: So the last time when we were recording, I said, I love this, and Wes got somewhat upset, or at least he was like, oh, no, yeah, don't

5:44 Wes: make me angry again.

5:46 Seth: Yeah, well, no, that's my job.

5:47 Wes: Wes, tone it down a bit.

5:49 Seth: I clearly don't take this whole project seriously. And you take it too seriously. I love the diagnosis. He was criticized in his day for being the person who brought Anglo American and, and Continental figures together and for kind of seeing, you know, he'll drop Habermas, Heidegger, Foucault and Davidson like in a single sentence. But I actually like that. I like that he's trying to see common themes in the problems that philosophers are trying to solve, which I think is true. And I love his diagnosis of, you know, the ontotheological mess that we've been in for the last couple thousand years.

You know, I disagree with his way out of it because I think I've realized I'm a romantic. So for me, the much maligned, irrational romantic path is the actual way out. And that he's just. By trying to use reason and appealing to pragmatism, he's really still just caught up in the same nexus of issues. He's trying to detranscendentalize, if that's a word. It's not. He's trying to give some foundation for democratic principles that doesn't rely on some kind of a transcendent idea. But the fact that he's still trying to provide justification, I think is what's ultimately the failure here or will fail.

And that's. That opens him to criticism. But I think the analysis is brilliant.

7:14 Mark: I don't know that he actually is providing, trying to provide justification for democracy. He says democracy can stand a its own two feet, that it is just from the benefits it brings. And he's not going through, hey, look at what the benefits democracy brings.

7:29 Seth: No, no, no, no.

7:30 Mark: Are aware of what the benefits it brings.

7:31 Wes: But talking about benefits is justification. And why do we agree on, Ben, what's beneficial and what's not?

7:38 Mark: Right? He's not. That's why I'm saying he's not doing that. He's saying it has to compete for itself. There is no. If you're going to argue with a fascist or argue with somebody else who's severely anti democratic, you cannot just appeal to universal principles. You have to just say this one works better than that way.

7:57 Wes: No, you have to brainwash them from an early age. You have to engage in education and

8:02 Seth: you also have to say what works better means. And even though it's a pragmatic, the point is that a pragmatic justification is still a justification. It just doesn't make appeal to transcendent principles. Right.

8:14 Mark: And it's not also appealing to all possible audiences. So if you were appealing to transcendental principles, then these should be available to everybody, anybody who wishes to turn their eyes upward right out of the cave, as Plato would put it, to see the objective transcendent principles of justice and right that would then ground your viewpoint both morally and epistemically. And he just thinks there is no such thing. It is all in our hands that we can discuss with each other. And I guess I want to suggest that we do our best to adopt just what we do on most of our episodes rather than Wes, now that you immediately jumped in with, I know you. You didn't even necessarily want to do this because you're like, how many times do I have to just say relativism is stupid. But he says repeatedly, I'm not a relativist. So let's just try to figure out like where he.

9:08 Wes: He can say that.

9:09 Mark: Let's wear his. You can't even restrain yourself to let somebody. I just, I feel like this has made you so angry. I'm just hope that we can just relax, explore the thing at the end. You can dump on him. But like, is there a way to just not have every single little point be.

9:25 Wes: No, I'm not trying to dump on him. I'm trying to clarify. So I tried to, you know, I did a as charitable reading as I could and I'm open to being persuaded and having it explained. But these clarifications have to be made because what he's saying is confusing. If we are trying to sell democratic politics to someone who's not interested in it, you know, we can say, oh, we don't appeal to transcendent principles. That's. What are we appealing to then? Are we appealing to anything? Do we have to do the re education thing that he talked about? If you say that we're appealing to the benefits of it. I'm not sure how you appeal to the benefits of Something for other human beings. Right. If they're in an exclusivist society that rejects democracy, how do you appeal to those benefits? To the benefits of democracy? Or if you do. Right, right.

10:13 Mark: The brain in a Nazi without saying,

10:16 Wes: well, this is better for human beings because we have a human nature and this is better. Right. Making the appeal. I'm very sympathetic to his ideas about perhaps we can't be democratically minded on universalistic grounds. And it's just a matter of, look, we're just. We're the good liberals who are like this and we've been conditioned to be like this and to be interested in this form of life. And other people might be differently constituted. And the best we could do in that circumstance is not try to sell this form of life to people who are so constituted as to be allergic to it. But we have to change them at a deeper level, which would require an educational project, not a project of just rational persuasion.

11:06 Mark: Right. It is the limits of rational persuasion. And I recall, you know, listening to Sam Harris, who was a student of Rorty's, took classes from Rorty's and his repeated, you know, common sense appeals to, look, either we're going to rationally discuss things or we're going to descend into violence. So shouldn't we have rational discussion? And I guess he saw Rorty as not providing significant enough foundation. Even though I don't think Sam Harris as a foundationalist in some strong sense and said, you know, reason itself is like. Like God, like original sin, like something, you know, certainly he's very anti theological like Rorty is, but still thinks, I think, reasonably so, that if we have to choose between rational discussion and armed conflict, that we should hope that there is some way of doing the former.

And so, I guess, does Rorty. It seems like you're saying Wes Rorty actually doesn't leave it open to that, that either you have to get to people before they're rational and educate them into our norms, or else it's just a lost cause, we can't even talk to them. We might as well just kill each other.

12:14 Dylan: Well, I don't think he makes it quite that extreme either. Right. I mean, he gives examples of the importance of education and he talks about it at the limits of it. I think that the thing that he seems to be struggling, I mean, he feels like he's struggling with it, that he has this criticism of it, of the notion of foundationalism as being misguided because it doesn't do the work that it purports to do and that we can't have any kind of understanding of the world and any communication with each other without triangulation between other things.

And that means that he ends up at this point of all of it is an agreement that we make between one another. And that there's only so far that you can go into convincing someone in cases of those agreements because there's terms under which you're going to need to have actual agreements. But he does have these things on the other hand, that are kind of universalist, the notion that I forget where it is later in Universality and Truth, he effectively appeals to Aristotle's reasoning for the principle of non contradiction by saying that the very fact that we have language that communicates between one another is the way in which we have forces that impel us to things like self consistency and non contradiction.

And those kinds of. That bring us together. And I don't know how he can say those things without understanding them as being, if not foundationalist, at least, you know, part of the. And if not transcendent, part of the way in which sort of the drift of human conversation goes.

14:00 Wes: Yeah, I think, you know, regarding that point, I think you're right, Dylan. In it, once you've pointed to causal relations to.

14:07 Dylan: Yeah.

14:07 Wes: The world as being your anchoring point, that's a representational position. In the same way that this Kant says there's a thing in itself that's beyond representation. Well, it actually, you've already represented it because you've used the category of being, you've used the category of unity and so on and so forth. So I don't think you can escape saying we have a. But beyond that. Just getting back to Mark's point about education. What if we. So we go to the University of Texas and we're TAs or professors or whatever, and we find ourselves with a classroom full of Hitler Youth for some reason of neo Nazis.

How do we break through to them? Do we tell them to rip out the preface and stand on the table and I forget what they do? Oh, Captain, my Captain, how do we get through to these kids? Do we say, oh, let me give you all my rational arguments for democracy or whatever and tolerance and inclusion. They're not rational creatures. And so supposedly that doesn't work well.

15:06 Dylan: But the way he appeals, the way he appeals, the way Rorty points to it in the way in which most people do is exactly that presentation of something that is a coherent piece of commentary on. This is why you have people who Were anti Semites. Read the diary, Anne Frank. And then why you have all these other books that are. And the whole idea with those things, and this goes all the way back to someone like Plato or Aristotle, right? And enlightenment stuff, is that you are anchoring yourself to the notion that the individual, upon seeing something that is coherent, that some percentage of them will be there, will be like a huh, what's going on here kind of thing.

And that the exposure to different points of view is refining and expanding. Now, you may not be able to completely say where that gets refined and expanded to, except to something that's more like tolerance. So then you get someone like Spinoza, right?

15:59 Wes: So the reading Anne Frank, he says, is an appeal to sentiment. So you're making an appeal to sentiment rather than rationality. You want to open up people's capacities for compassion and empathy. So you're doing something a little bit different there psychologically. You can, you might even call it therapeutic. But the point that I want to add to that so that in a way is almost like, you know, I called it jokingly brainwashing. I do think it's an inevitable part of education, right? We're inculcating people in a democratic society with certain values.

What would happen if no one cared about free speech? What would happen if no one cared about elections? Right. And due process and all those things? Caring about those things is not a default children. We care about them in part because we were inculcated with that. But I think you can also inculcate people with a greater capacity for reflection. And it's not unconnected to the capacity for empathy or for Right. Theory of mind mentalization getting into other people's heads. So I think he underestimates the extent to which presenting reflective and rational arguments in a class, even for irrational Nazi creatures, can be quite effective and therapeutic and even empathy producing, because it's modeling a certain kind of comportment of the world.

It's modeling a certain type of activity. And even therapists do this, right? You just model a calmer, more reflective approach to the world and hope people take that in. It's a therapeutic process also. So I think that's a bit over. You know, again, I like the point in general that I think it's a bit overstated.

17:43 Mark: Right. I think the way that you just described it is very Rortyan, is that if what you think you're doing in presenting reasons is referring a la Plato to some objective standard, that I'm inviting the audience to look up and see the objective standard. That's not what I'm doing. What I'm doing is behavioral modification in some more subtle way. And he definitely, you know, wants to have, you know, here's one of the critiques that you could make of. Because he says he's not a relativist. The whole idea of competing conceptual schemes, you know, that Davidson argues against on the very idea of a conceptual scheme episode.

He's with Davidson, he thinks that's entirely nonsense. So he's not that kind of relativist. So he wants to sort of have his reason cake and eat it too, or something. He wants to have all the benefits of being able to refer to sort of, yes, we're arguing about something that is true, but he just wants to say, when I say this is true or this is objectively true, or I'm making moves in a language game, I'm not transcending the language game. And so the question is just, can you do that, or does it presuppose some regulative ideal towards which you're aiming?

He brings up Habermas as a specific person he's arguing against, who seems to agree with him about what it's good to foster in people in getting them to appreciate a democratic society.

19:08 Wes: Right.

19:08 Mark: We want to be. Listen to more voices. We want to be more inclusive. We want to take more things into consideration. We don't want our narrow provincial interests. But Habermas quite naturally sees, you know, the open attitude, this tolerant attitude as better, as something that we are shooting for, as something that maybe society is trending toward. If, you know, you could even take Hegel's view of, like, we're going. The whole mass enlightenment is mass democracy. This is sort of the, if not inevitable. It is the teleological. It's the natural end.

It's the thing that we are shooting for. And I raised last time Peirce's idea of truth as the regulative ideal. Peirce is kind of following Kant on this. But truth is what all the people who are doing honest investigation and talking to each other about it would eventually reach to. And so Rorty just thinks that talking about something which we're aiming basically an infinity, something beyond our understanding, our direct understanding, we actually can't aim at something that we don't understand. So let's just talk about the on the ground. So I compare this to these philosophies of mathematics, that there are some.

The rationalist position of mathematics is we already have to have a notion of infinity to even go 1, 2, 3. We have to have the notion as opposed to the empiricist take, which is, no, we can sort of deal. I see two apples, I see four apples. That's where mathematics comes from. And that creating the infinity out of that, well, that's. We're not actually identifying some additional reality. We are creating a model, constructing a system that has that as one of its. You know, so you can talk about teleology within a language game within a system you've constructed, but you cannot talk about it as sort of a fundamental presupposition that we have to understand.

We have to have, according to Descartes, a notion of God. We have to have, according to Plato, the notion of the best, the good, in order to do the everyday. Calculations and comparisons.

21:05 Wes: Do they say we have to have that to do the everyday?

21:08 Mark: Yes.

21:09 Wes: What do you mean? I mean, we can function perfectly without philosophy, Right.

21:13 Mark: But for Plato, the whole reason that we could do finite mathematics is because we have within us unrealized a memory from before we were born of infinity and how the whole system works and ultimately how, you know, the form of the good and all this stuff.

21:29 Wes: I see. Yeah. So latent. Yeah, recollection, which is just another way of saying we have a brain. Lots of stuff encoded in there that is not right. That is procedural and not necessarily consciously accessible.

21:43 Mark: But there's nothing procedural about the notion of infinity or something like that.

21:47 Dylan: For Plato, for sure.

21:48 Wes: Well, if it creates the capacity to count. Right. Then it has to have a procedural effect even before we come to realize there is such a thing as infinity.

21:58 Mark: Shall we jump into some more specifics here?

22:03 Wes: Do we want. Yeah, I mean, how do we want to do this? Do we want to try to run through it or.

22:08 Dylan: So just. Even though I complained a lot on Slack, I did read through five, and so I think there's plenty of stuff in three and four that is on point of what we're talking about. But, Mark, you had thought that five had a kind of distillation, and so I'm fine with.

22:26 Wes: Yeah, I thought five was the priority.

22:27 Dylan: Yeah.

22:28 Mark: So let's start with that. So, Pan relationalism. And this is a direct response to. We just read Brian Ellis on essentialism, and he's saying. And we read Aristotle, and everything has an essence. It has intrinsic properties, but then it also has relational properties. And this is the distinction that Rorty says the pragmatist must reject that actually there is no distinction between objects and then the relations that connect them to other things. Every object is just defined as a nexus of relations to other things. You Always have to, to make sense of any given thing.

This sounds like Hegel, right? That you think I can just talk about this pen. But no, I actually have to refer to, you know, even the doing the. This brings in a universal. It relates to calling it a pen, relates it to other pens, relates it to the category of spatiotemporal object. There's all these things that are relations and which, of course, nobody's going to deny that they're relations, but to say the object is merely the sum of relations, and in fact, no relation is more important, full stop, than any other relation. There are plenty of relations that are more important for specific purposes.

I mean, it being a pen is important if I want to write with it. It being a number is important if I want to do addition and subtraction and other manipulations with it. But. And he gives numbers as this prime example of. You might think that the essence of four is two plus two, but is the essence of four 2048 minus 2044 or something like, you know, if there was some complex add in some square roots and things that you would not be able to figure out, you might think that, oh, we understand, we get the foundation. We understand the essence of the number by the simple things.

And then the complex things are sort of things that fall out of that by implication. But really there's no reason to think anyone is more or less essential. And he wants to generalize that case to everything else.

24:28 Wes: So are we going to go through this in detail or let's just walk

24:32 Dylan: through it from 5?

24:33 Wes: There's more to be said about relations. But, you know, I was wondering if we should go to the beginning before we get more into that.

24:40 Dylan: Okay, yeah, let's go to the beginning.

24:42 Wes: Okay. So he cast as he starts with the continental analytic philosophy divide, and of course he's famous for bringing together the worst aspects of both traditions. Just kidding.

24:58 Dylan: Zing.

25:00 Seth: And that one hurt Wesley.

25:03 Wes: No, I'm hoping I'll be converted at some point by, you know, that there'll be an epiphany moment where I understand. But. So he points out that whatever contact there is between analytic and continental philosophers, it's often between Kantians, interestingly enough, like Rawls and Habermas, but not really between people who are pro Kant and anti Kant, like, say, Davidson and Derrida are two of his examples.

25:33 Mark: Sorry, between analytic anti Kantians and continental anti Kantians.

25:37 Dylan: Yeah. So the ones who are Kantians on the analytical continental side, they are talking to one another, but the anti Kantians on the Analytic and continental divide aren't talking to each other.

25:48 Wes: And he associates Kantianism with what he calls modal questions, which we would ordinarily take to be questions of necessity versus possibility. Or as he puts it, what is transcendental versus what is empirically real? Right. The empirically real is the contingent, the factual, and the transcendental is what is formal, what is a part. Right. A necessary part of every experience, like space and time or causality. Likewise, contrast between the unconditional and the conditional. So he wants to liberate us from taking the realism, anti realism debate seriously, which is to say, liberate us from these modal questions and dreaming up still

26:41 Dylan: fancier linguistified versions of transcendental idealism.

26:44 Wes: Yeah, how we're going to use. We're going to save ourselves via Dewey.

26:49 Mark: Yeah. And he sees this as a leap in paradigms. It's not just. It's one of those things where, yes, you could keep carving and kind of trying to update Kant, but maybe you should just throw the whole thing away. So it's, you know, we saw a similar thing in Williamson. You could keep modifying justified true belief, or you could just take a completely different approach. That's what Rorty is.

27:12 Wes: Without giving in to anti Enlightenment irrationalism, which is sort of what's in vogue in certain sectors of the continental tradition. So it is an interesting project that Rorty is engaged in. He wants to. He's embracing democratic ideals and the Enlightenment, but he thinks that we can do that ultimately without appealing to this, the transcendental.

27:34 Dylan: So at the end of the first main paragraph on 85, referring to people he groups as pan relationalists, Derrida, Putnam, Latour, Brandom, Foucault says they're trying to replace the various world pictures constructed with the aid of Greek oppositions by the picture of a flux of continually changing relations, relations whose terms are themselves dissoluble into a nexus of further relations. And then it has a footnote that refers to Whitehead and stuff and even Leibniz and the notion he would link Leibniz's monadism in here.

28:11 Wes: Yeah, so let's get into. I mean, he says there's a number of. He lists a bunch of consequences of the. What he calls the pan relationist thesis, which Mark has outlined. You know, there are. Things are what they are by virtue of their relations to other things, and they don't have an intrinsic nature apart from those relations. So one of them is the one you just mentioned. We get this. It's all relations all the way down other is that we get rid of these metaphysical dualisms between essence and accident, substance and property, or versus between extrinsic and relational properties.

And then we don't have any use for modal distinctions, necessary versus contingent. And then, you know, no relations, as he ends up saying, are more essential than anything than any other, except under some particular description of that thing. But I thought maybe we should get into some examples of what he means by relations, because I think he takes any predication. Right, yes. That we would normally think of maybe in terms of a substance, accident, ontology, as attributing a property, for instance, as really asserting a relation, even if covertly.

Right. So if we took, you know, a sentence about the box being red, seems like I'm attributing a property to an object. It wouldn't be normally what we would call a relational sentence, like X is to the left of Y or something like that. But if we drill down, right, once we start giving our complicated philosophical accounts of color and how it's perceived and what the box is in corpuscular terms, we start drilling down into something that is essentially relational.

29:51 Dylan: Yeah. So the section. So on 86, he ends the section on listing these modal distinctions. Just before he brings up the predication,

30:01 Wes: he

30:03 Dylan: summarizes this and he does this thing that we've been bringing up and arguing or wrestling with is he talks about the importance of causal links, right. In replying to the charge of relativism. Even at this point, once we cease to describe knowing about something as representing its intrinsic nature accurately and thereby break representational links to the world, we still have causal links. Anybody who grants that the world has the causal power to change our descriptions of it, they claim they, being the pan relationists, would be immune from accusations of subjectivism and relativism.

Then he follows up that property is simply a hypostasized predicate. Predication is a way of relating things to other things. So in that very, very going down, and I was going to say to the bottom of things, but there isn't a bottom, right. All predication is all knowing is. And predication is just all other ways of relating things. You don't ever get a knowing of anything without having it be related to other things.

31:05 Wes: It's got to be propositional or sentential, right. There's no direct acquaintance knowledge.

31:11 Dylan: That's right.

31:12 Mark: Yeah. That seems like a big. Like he even gets explicit about this in relating this to the like. Are there qualia in the lecture six that we didn't all read? Just is there Some moment before sentences come in, right, where we have some direct acquaintance. So we have the Mary, the color scientist who learns everything, all the causal facts. So Rorty's diagnosis there is actually, following Dennett, that if Mary the color scientist knew all the causal facts, she would even know. This is the thought that I would have. When I finally see red for the first time.

I've been in a black and white world, I finally go out. And so actually she would not be surprised because she would know exactly the kind of thought. Because according to this view, it is our relation to the world is inelimitably propositional, that we just have no knowledge. There's no distinction that makes a difference in actually having a raw feel for something versus then trying to. You know, this is. Even again, in that first Hegel thing, you might think I just can point to a. This. I can just say that. But no, even that is linguistified, that it uses a demonstrative, a pointing, which is a universal.

I think this is the same point that's being made.

32:33 Wes: I think the problem with this, I think they take the myth of the given way too far. It's a very desperate argument to say that Mary would come out or Mary would have seen color by virtue of doing science. That popped into her head. And also, we know that animals get along just fine without language. We know there's direct acquaintance and knowledge of the world without language. We have to account for that. Yes, you could call it theory laden for many different reasons, but theory laden is not necessarily linguistic. And it is quite procedural if you want to really appeal to language as use and all of that. What we normally call conceptual and what we'd normally call language is there's a large procedural element to that. And so arguably animals do use concepts without using language.

33:26 Dylan: Did you guys think of Tomasello a lot?

33:29 Seth: Yes, all the time. I've been thinking of him ever since we read him.

33:32 Dylan: Yeah, and this particular spot and this section on pan relationalism and the emphasis on language, it really. It's just Wes's point. I mean, Wes just basically summarized the kind of point that Tomasello would make about the predication without language in the way that we would not consider it linguistic except in some kind of really, really abstracted way.

33:57 Wes: And you know, he'll say at some point, like Wittgenstein, that ostension only happens against the background of a language community. And Tomasello, like Rorty, is very influenced by Wittgenstein. But Tomasello's insight is its language only happens against the background of ostension and joint attention. Pointing and joint attention precede language. Pointing is the first manifestation of language and all that is required is this theory of mind and this biological basis for joint attention. So science has something to say here. And I think unfortunately Rorty is a bit behind on the science and it's the same with Darwin in the end. But we'll get to that.

34:37 Mark: So Rorty has this weird take though on ostension supposedly providing us direct access to the essence of a thing. And then we despair because when I try to put it in language, language is always universal, it always avoids the particular experience. Vivid. But I never thought that the ostensive moment, the pre linguistic moment was getting us at the essence of the thing. That seems a very weird. I'd have to look to figure out where what the passage in Rorty I have in mind is.

35:10 Wes: Well, he talks a bit about.

35:12 Dylan: Right.

35:12 Wes: Banging on the hard table. I think that's. Look, I have. Here's the real thing in itself. Object that resists. You know, that isn't simply a product of my. Right. He's giving a possible objection there and then what does he say about that?

35:27 Dylan: Was it Searle that did that or.

35:30 Wes: Seems like a lot of those analytic philosophers banged on the table.

35:34 Mark: I mean it sounds a lot like the GE Moore kicking the stone. I have refuted idealism.

35:40 Dylan: Yeah, it's the same thing. Yep.

35:42 Seth: Yeah.

35:42 Wes: So this is on page 89.

35:44 Mark: Yes. He gives this term from Sellars, psychological nominalism. The doctrine there is nothing to be known about anything save what is stated in sentences describing it. Which is not to deny that you have experiences that are pre linguistic but that those do not constitute knowledge.

36:01 Wes: Yeah, I don't get it. I mean, no non sentential knowledge by a acquaintance. Clearly to me we have access to the world by acquaintance which does not

36:10 Mark: take the form of sentential attitude. There's nothing to be known save its relations to other things.

36:15 Seth: Okay, isn't the hard table example supposed? It's two things. One is the hard table example. We should explain what it is just that. Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but if you want to have a non linguistic or pre linguistic experience of a thing, kick it really hard. Hit. Kick it really hard. Slam your hand down on the table. And that is a refutation of the idea that everything is linguistic. Linguistic or conceptual or what have you.

36:48 Wes: Well, and relational. So we.

36:50 Seth: And relational.

36:51 Wes: Right. So the essentialist might say you can't have relations without something related, even if it's ultimately just elementary particles. But maybe it's the table because it is a thing that I can write, bang my hand on and say, this is a node in the relational web, not just something that boils down into relations. So that's the essentialist is trying to say a table is not like the number 17. It isn't just what it is by virtue of, as with 17, all these relationships to other numbers, there's something intrinsic to it and non relational.

37:25 Mark: Well, talking about the. What it is, I wonder if we. Rorty's going to want to linguistify. So it seems like you can talk about essences if you want to talk about what makes this a table. And how would I distinguish it from things that are not tables, even if they might look like tables. Or better yet, you know, what makes this water? Does it have to have the microstructure of H2O? Sort of the Kripke Putnam point about that. But are we actually getting to the essence of a thing or are we just discovering something about it that's useful in a particular language game?

I guess is. So is it right to say that there are this set of observations about water that correlate to these other set of observations? You know, when you do whatever the chemist does to figure out, the physicist does to figure out what its fundamental components are, like, yes, that's all very useful information to be able to hook those things up. But what makes you think that this is giving? Like you only care about the essence of water in particular situations. Is this safe to drink? Is this, when added to this other chemical, going to produce the thing that I want to happen, et cetera.

38:34 Wes: You know, I kept waiting for him to talk about emergence, but I think there's a good reason that he doesn't want to talk about emergence, because the emergent phenomena is less essential than what underlies it. Right. So if the properties of phenomenal properties of water are emergent phenomena, and H2O is the essence, the corpuscular version of the world underneath it, they aren't just on equal levels, like he wants to say, or perhaps they aren't. Maybe he can make an argument that they are, but he seems to want to cast it as bidirectional and really it's asymmetrical. And that. That doesn't look good for his picture.

39:13 Dylan: Yeah, unless you think that you have genuinely new entities created by emergence. Like if you say that a human being is an emergent property of the cellular structure of the human being.

39:24 Wes: The ontological dependence doesn't go both ways. There's an ontological dependence, you know, the emergent phenomenon depends in some way on what's underneath it. You don't have those properties of water without H2O. But H2O depends in no way on our nominal phenomena. That's true realm and that asymmetry. I don't know how that would work for his picture.

39:48 Mark: I think he just has to say that there's. You're now setting up a language game in which in that language game the microstructure has priority. But to say beyond any language game, this just has priority is meaningless to him. And you could say, I don't know what the hell transcendentalism you think that I have that I. That you're denying. Like it's Rorty bringing up some sort of straw man here. Because there's nothing that makes Ellis an obvious Platonist or Kantian by saying that he believes that there we should define an entity in terms of its microstructure. This is how we know that this is water and this is not water, even if they have the same phenomenal properties.

40:29 Wes: I mean anything with Ellis, though, we say the world is at bottom. These dispositional properties, which is a bit spooky and they're natural kinds and we can't, you know, he does want to say the electron is a natural kind. But if one were more cautious, one might say, well, we really maybe don't know what the natural kinds are. We just know that they have to be there. The electron, right, could also be reducible in some sense. So I'm open like Rorty to reducibility to underlying relations. But I think it has to, like Aristotle, I think it has to stop somewhere and it has to be firmly mind independent and all that. And it might be unknowable.

41:09 Mark: What is next page wise here?

41:11 Wes: I think we're on 9090 91.

41:14 Dylan: So this is where we get into the. He has summarized the table business and sort of the essentialist rejoinder to the pan relationalist that he's been summarizing. And now he goes back to what the anti essentialist response is to this. The anti essentialist reiterates that if you want to know what the table really intrinsically is, that best answer you're going to get is that of which the following statements are true. It's brown, ugly, painful to banging hands capable of being stumbled over, made of atoms and so on and so on. The painfulness, the solidity and the causal powers of the table are on all fours with its brownness and its ugliness.

Just as you do not get more intimate terms with the number 17 by discovering a square root, you do not get on more intimate terms with the table closer to its intrinsic nature by hitting it than by looking at it or talking about it. All that hitting it or decomposing it into atoms does is to enable you to relate it to a few more things. It does not take you to a language into. From language into fact, out of appearance into reality, or out of remote and disinterested relationship to its more immediate and intense relationship.

42:28 Mark: And yes, and of course, Ellis is not going to say that you get the essence by banging on it. So I wasn't sure exactly what essentialist he thinks he's responding to here well,

42:36 Dylan: but I do think the kind of thing that he's saying that just like all the ways in which you can talk about the number 17 and have relations in mathematics, and that who's on the left of equal sign such that the equal sign on the right is 17, he says all of those are of equal form. They have no more priority in telling you what anything about 17 in terms of it. So let's block that for a second. And whether or not that also actually seems true or not, that there's no priority of the kinds of relationships that you get by any of these, all of these causal powers that are on all fours with the other kinds of aesthetic judgments.

It's ugliness or its brownness that I think is something that in the end is part of the quibble, right? That there are things that are more. Even if you don't go full essentialist like Ellis, it does seem like there are things that are of higher priority about the table and more revealing about the table than other things.

43:45 Mark: So I thought you were going to stop first just on the mathematical point, because I thought this was just asking the question that we asked before about, like, for Kant, arithmetic is synthetic, right? You can know what the essence of the number one without knowing all the mathematical truths about it. And so there's essential properties of a number, and then there's something that you can find out. They would be, I guess, relational properties, but you could still know them a priori. Whereas for Hume or another empiricist, no, the entire number system is sort of a model, is it definitional creation? So all arithmetic truths would be true by definition just by reference to the system, which I think is in accord with what Rorty is saying here, is that you set up this language game and so these things all have equal priority within that language game.

44:33 Dylan: Yeah, but he doesn't talk about it that way either. When he's saying that 17, he's generating a different set of relations. He's imagining. Okay, well, I have all the cardinal numbers and I'm going to talk about, well, what's the essence of 17? Now, first of all, I don't know that. I think that right at that moment, both accounts, whether it be the Kantian or the Humean account, would both say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, there isn't an essence of 17. 17 is tied to the whole system and there might be an essence of one and there might be a procedure.

45:05 Wes: Exactly, exactly. Seventeen is more like a phenomena. One is the thing.

45:11 Dylan: Yes. And there might be other things like additional that you talk about and then out of which you get a rise a phenomena like 17. And to talk about 17 as being, well, 34 divided by 2 and 9 plus 8 and you know, that kind of way of saying all those are 17. While that's true and 17 is related to all those other numbers and combinations of numbers. That's true. Those aren't essential. That would be the argument. Those aren't equivalent to understanding as 17 as being a accumulation of units by addition. That would be the rejoinder.

45:53 Wes: Yeah, Counting it out would be the more essential thing.

45:57 Dylan: Yeah. And so there would be an immediate rejoinder to his analogy with the number system as being like all relations, all things in the world are like numbers. That's what he says. All things in the world are just like numbers and they are related to all other things in the world by a series of perfectly equivalent relations. And the contrary to that is that your analogy doesn't work because even in mathematics that's not the way it works. That would be the rejoinder.

46:29 Seth: Dylan to the rescue.

46:31 Dylan: Well, I don't know if it's me. I just think it's.

46:33 Mark: Well, yes, I think he's open to criticism of both points. That you could criticize the mathematical model itself and then even if you agreed with him on the mathematics, say physical objects, H2O water is not like that. That there actually are some significant differences between water is a drinkable, you know, whatever surface level properties it has versus its microstructure and say that there is good reason to say, you know, just for the reasons that Kripke gave, that if we ran into something, or maybe this is Putnam, if we ran into something on another planet and it had all the same phenomenal properties, we found out that it had a different microstructure, would we say that is water or not?

And as I responded at the time, well, it depends why you want to know, Kripke is an essentialist and he says it is definitely not water. Whereas I kind of wanted to go the pragmatist route and say, well, if you just want to drink it, then just call, okay, okrab, fine, you want to call it something else, you know, but it's the drinkable stuff. That is what I was considering for my purpose to be water.

47:36 Dylan: Yeah. And. But then this gets to the power of the causal relations. Right. So the drinkability is a causal relation. Right. And that right there. And this is where Rorty gets confusing to me because it seems inescapable that certain kinds of relations have at least some priority over other kinds of relations, even if they don't come down to one primary relation. That's the only relation that matters or an intrinsic relation. There are relations that matter more than others. And he even seems to admit this it causal relations on the face of them, but also use relations and they matter more. They matter more, yes.

48:15 Mark: I mean, I guess it sounds like you're asking though, what's the utility of utility or something like that, like a meta question that we could say what is the use of? Is it more useful for me to know the microstructure versus the drinkability, you know, versus the surface level stuff? But then even just to establish in the first place the priority of utility.

48:31 Wes: These do depend on purposes. I mean, he's right about that. Right. So if I need to drink water, who cares about the microstructure? But you know, the scientist has a purpose of figuring out what the truth is or at least getting in relation to the truth in some way. Even if. Right. We can't represent the thing in itself or whatever, however you want to put it. But you know, the person who's drinking water doesn't have that goal and those are different orders of purpose. I mean, obviously Rorty is going to want to say there really isn't a primary goal of knowing. I think that's in the previous essays. Right, right.

49:08 Mark: It's prediction. The science is just trying to predict

49:12 Wes: future prediction and truth is reducible to justification and ultimately and to justification between ever expanding audiences and all that stuff. But you know, I, person of my ilk and dispositions would say actually human beings by nature do desire to know and we can't get rid of concept of truth in that way. And yeah, it's not equal.

49:35 Seth: Right.

49:36 Wes: Nothing happens when you say, well, like the question, is it water or not? If you're interested in the truth, the H2O picture has more priority than the drinking picture.

49:48 Mark: All right, this seems a good place to wrap up part one. Come back next week for a part two or become a partially examined life supporter. Partiallyexaminedlife.com support and perhaps get it right now. Although if you support us through the Apple podcast app, that's still probably going to come up next week. Thanks, everybody.

50:04 Wes: Thanks.

50:05 Dylan: Thanks.