From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu Apr 03 2003 - 06:13:27 BST
All,
For a while now, Scott has been making his critiques of Rorty known and
I've mainly been evasive. I honestly don't have a lot to say because I
don't really find Scott's criticisms that persuasive as I've made known in
the past. But I'll set them out again.
Scott has been accusing Rorty of adhering to a materialist
metaphysics. This puts Rorty in an awkward position because Rorty wants to
get rid of metaphysics. I find the notion that Rorty is operating under
any kind of metaphysics to beg the question. Scott does not. I don't know
what else to say.
To say that Rorty spends "a considerable amount of Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature trying to to [sic] show that the appearance of a
non-spatial somewhat (our minds) is 'really' no more than neural activity
(the mind-brain identity hypothesis)" is a misconstrual. Rorty spends part
of his time attempting to show that we could have just as easily spoken a
language that spoke of "neural processes" rather than "mind." He
constructs a hypothetical race called the Antipodeans and suggests that,
even though they speak only of neural processes rather than mind,
"C-fibers" rather than pain, and "G-14 quivers" rather than wonder, they
can both say and do the same things we do when we speak of mind, pain, and
wonder. Rorty says, "the materialist should stop reacting to stories such
as that about the Antipodeans by saying metaphysical things, and confine
himself to such claims as 'No predictive or explanatory or descriptive
power would be lost if we had spoken Antipodean all our lives.'" (PMN, p.
120) Rorty calls himself a materialist, but this is misleading if it is
thought of as a metaphysical position. "Only a philosopher with a lot
invested in the notion of 'ontological status' would need to worry about
whether a corrigibly reportable pain was 'really' a pain or rather a
stimulated C-fiber."
I take the moral of PMN and his post-PMN non-use of the word "materialism"
to be that Rorty takes the attempt to say that one way of describing
reality is _really_ the vocabulary Reality wants to be described as is
pointless and uninteresting and that he really doesn't want to get caught
up in it. So I don't think Rorty is guilty of falling into an
appearance/reality distinction. Only if you construe all Darwinisms as
falling into a metaphysical materialism, does he fall on that count and I
think that is a misconstrual, too. Rorty states on many occasions that he
sees "natural science in general, and Darwin in particular, as simply one
more image of the world to be placed alongside others, rather than as
offering the _one_ image that corresponds to reality." ("Dewey Between
Hegel and Darwin") He considers Darwinism to be a narrative in which to
contextualize human development, not a piercing beyond the veil of
appearance to True Reality.
So, I still see Scott as begging the question. Scott either assumes a
definition of metaphysics that includes Rorty and makes his repudiation of
metaphysics look silly, or he misconstrues Rorty's stance as being
metaphysical under his own terms. Either way, I'm unconvinced by the
persuasiveness of the critique.
Matt
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