Richard Rorty 2: Propositions and stuff
Jul. 3rd, 2010 07:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
koganbotFor a person to form a predicative judgment is for him to come to believe a sentence to be true. For a Kantian transcendental ego to come to believe a sentence to be true is for it to relate representations (Vorstellungen) to one another: two radically distinct sorts of representations, concepts on the one hand and intuitions on the other. Kant provided a framework for understanding the confusing seventeenth-century intellectual scene when he said that "Leibniz intellectualized appearances, just as Locke... sensualized all concepts of the understanding." He thereby created the standard version of "the history of modern philosophy" according to which pre-Kantian philosophy was a struggle between "rationalism," which wanted to reduce sensations to concepts, and "empiricism," which wanted the inverse reduction. Had Kant instead said that the rationalists wanted to find a way of replacing propositions about secondary qualities with propositions which somehow did the same job but were known with certainty, and that the empiricists opposed this project, the next two centuries of philosophical thought might have been very different. For if the "problem of knowledge" had been stated in terms of the relations between propositions and the degree of certainty attaching to them, rather than the terms of putative components of propositions, we might not have inherited our present notion of "the history of philosophy." According to standard neo-Kantian historiography, from the time of the Phaedo and Metaphysics Z through Abelard and Anselm, Locke and Leibniz, and right down to Quine and Strawson reflection which was distinctively philosophical has concerned the relation between universals and particulars. Without this unifying theme, we might not have been able to see a continuous problematic, discovered by the Greeks and worried at continuously down to our own day, and thus might never have had the notion of "philosophy" as something with a twenty-five-hundred-year history. Greek thought and seventeenth-century thought might have seemed as distinct both from each other and from our present concerns as, say, Hindu theology and Mayan numerology.
--Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979, pp 148-149.
I'm rereading chapters 3 and 4 of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature with the intention of trying to master them. My difficulty isn't the complexity of the ideas, since he's trying to be clear and not overcomplex, but that he assumes familiarity with various writers not all of whom I've read much of, and he'll use terms of art that I'm not all that familiar with; he also can be fast with his reasons (coming a sentence or two short, so you have to fill them in yourself) and vague and glib in presenting his own ideas, though the ideas are rarely glib themselves. So he often doesn't do right by his own complexities, doesn't come up with the detail and precision that he needs, doesn't have the fierce search for the best word that a Wittgenstein has, will futz along with tired old vocabulary that doesn't do the job. That said, he's got a broad historical and cultural view that Wittgenstein doesn't even try for. He gets Wittgenstein's challenge to philosophy - the import of Wittgenstein's complaint that language goes on holiday in philosophy is that philosophy isn't addressing the questions its vocabulary cons itself into thinking it's addressing - but Rorty goes on to ask why intelligent people thought (and maybe still think) the issues mattered, asks what assumptions they were making, what they thought was at stake. For better or worse I've not only bought into Rorty's narrative of modern philosophy - which at least to undereducated me clarifies and puts into perspective a whole lot of material - but I've also copped the questions he asks: what's at stake, what do people think is at stake, what do I think is at stake, what assumptions are they making, what assumptions am I making, what else might be at issue if we stepped aside from this issue, and so forth.
About the passage I quoted: it comes in the middle of chapter 3; I'm going to circle back, but I liked this quote for its long view, its implied questions (what's going on in Plato and Descartes and Locke that Kant didn't teach us to look for, and that gets obscured if seen through Kantian eyes? what's going on with us that our Kantian heritage gets in the way of our seeing?). Some semi-random thoughts:
(1) "...the rationalists wanted to find a way of replacing propositions about secondary qualities with propositions which somehow did the same job but were known with certainty, and... the empiricists opposed this project." Rorty clearly thinks that this is a better way than Kant's of describing what the "rationalists" and the "empiricists" were up to. But he's not claiming that this is how the "rationalists" and "empiricists" would have described it themselves.
(2) "Predicative" may be a key word - the subsection is entitled "Kant's Confusion of Predication with Synthesis" - but I don't immediately see its import, actually. In a sentence, a predicate gives us an attribute of a subject (e.g., "You are sad") or tells us something a subject does ("You ran to the store crying") or something that is done to a subject ("You were mistreated, by me"). A "predicative judgment" means a judgment put in sentence form, but so what? What's so interesting about sentence form?
(3) I think that Rorty considers Kant to be making a mistake in relating the components of a sentence, rather than affirming or disconfirming the sentence as a whole. But I'm also certain that Rorty would follow Quine and Kuhn and Wittgenstein in taking sentences not to stand alone but to only be true (or make sense) in the context of a whole lot of other stuff, so again, what's the big deal about a sentence? Or conversely, what's a problem with a component?
(4) Throughout the chapter, the words "sentence" and, especially, "proposition" function as buzzwords. They're continually brought up; also brought up is that there are "relations" to and between propositions; but I have no idea why Rorty thinks sentences and propositions are more relevant here than are notions, ideas, formulas, theories, paragraphs, chapters, rants, spiels, arguments, contentions, social practices, language games, conventions, behaviors, events, and so forth. In fact, given that Rorty endorses Quine's holism (Quine said that statements can be neither confirmed nor disconfirmed in isolation from their fellows), I'm not getting why Rorty thinks that propositions and sentences, and subjects and predicates, are particularly at issue, as opposed to the overall behavior of sociolinguistic creatures, i.e., human beings. And the "relations" at issue would be social relations, I'd think, not merely relations among propositions. "Proposition" seems just as reductive as "sense impression" and the Kantian "concept" and "intuition." In any event, while Locke's and Kant's ideas get carefully examined in this chapter, phrases like "relations between propositions" just kind of show up, without explication or elaboration. To understand, I may have to translate into different or better terminology. Obviously Rorty chose "sentences" and "propositions" for reasons that matter to him and it would be good if I could work out what those are; and he's read scads on the subject of "propositions" that I haven't by Moore, Carnap, Ayer et al. Presumably Locke and Kant talked about "propositions," though I don't know what they said on the subject. But honestly I don't get why Rorty is using those words here, since his basic point as far as I can tell doesn't have to do with "sentences"/"propositions" in particular. Rather, it's that inquiry and justification are fundamentally social and conversational. "Stuff people say and write that they can argue about" would be more accurate, would better reflect what Rorty is trying to say; whereas "sentence," "proposition," and "predicate" sound linguistically precise and all, but in fact I don't think he's being technical or precise with them. EDIT: Oh yeah, as Mark and I talk about in the comments, when Kant defines "analytic" and "synthetic" it's in relation to subject and predicates, which implies sentence form. But since Rorty is talking about concepts and intuitions, I still don't get why sentences/propositions are particularly at issue or, even if they were a bit at issue for Kant, why Rorty should go along with this.
(5) The phrase "relations between propositions and the degree of certainty attaching to them" is ambiguous. It could mean relations between (a) propositions and (b) other propositions, some being more certain than others, which is what I'm pretty sure Rorty means (given what he'd said earlier in the paragraph about propositions concerning secondary qualities versus those somehow known with more certainty). But it could mean relations between (a) propositions and (b) degrees of certainty, though "degrees of certainty" would seem to be a judgment, not something you relate to. Earlier in the chapter he'd used the phrase "relations between persons and propositions," which I'd also found baffling.
(6) "Representations" is a key word too, though Rorty believes the confusion here is Locke's and Kant's, and Rorty is trying to disentangle it. A representative is an emissary, but of what?
(7) "For if the 'problem of knowledge' had been stated in terms of the relations between propositions and the degree of certainty attaching to them, rather than the terms of putative components of propositions, we might not have inherited our present notion of 'the history of philosophy.'" Not quite getting this, either. For Kant, the relation between "intuitions" (a.k.a. "sense impressions," right?) and "concepts" is that the intuitions are never known directly but only as "synthesized" by concepts - intuitions being many, hence in need of synthesis. (I don't remember my Kant: are the concepts embodied by the intuitions? If you never get the intuitions directly, how do you know if the concepts are embodied, or that they even exist? Did Kant feel he'd laid Hume's skepticism to rest?) Are intuitions components of propositions? How could they be? I'd think that only concepts could be, and I'm not even sure of that. Can't there be a concept that needs to be expressed in more than one proposition? How is a concept a component of a proposition? Words and clauses and the like are components, but concepts? Kant thinks he's describing the components of experience, right? Well, someone who's read more of Kant than I have needs to help me here. A sentence "synthesizes" a subject and an attribute, but neither the subject nor the attribute are intuitions. They've been pre-synthesized, as it were. Right? [EDIT: Well, I'm confused by the word "synthesis" here. Such defects arise when I haven't read the relevant Kant material for 34 years. Would Kant reserve "synthesis" for what a predicate does for a "synthetic" statement's subject (it adds info not already part of the subject's concept), or does he also use it for what concepts do for intuitions, which Rorty's text leads me to believe? Or are they somehow the same thing? See my inconsistent comments about this in the comment thread.]
(8) Whenever Rorty says "If we think in terms of A rather than B, we will ______," I see red flags and hear warning sirens. Such statements always oversimplify his own ideas, and in making them he's casually asserting what he I think he intends to be challenging, that philosophical suppositions are fundamental to life ("philosophical" pertaining to "philosophy" as its definition and history was narrowed owing to Kant).
(9) Why don't we just say, "The rationalists wanted to derive secondary qualities of stuff from stuff that was known with certainty, and the empiricists opposed this project"? And we can say, "If the 'problem of knowledge' had been stated in terms of how to give good reasons for the stuff you believe and the degree of certainty attaching to your reasons, rather than in terms of how our mind supposedly constitutes stuff, we might not have inherited our present notion of 'the history of philosophy'"? I absolutely don't see any value in adding the word "proposition" to the thought, or what we lose by its absence - whereas its presence creates confusion, by adding the very unclear (to me, anyway) idea that "intuitions" and "concepts" (as Kant uses those terms) are components of propositions, as well as the mystifying talk of relations to or between propositions. I suppose its presence would correctly allude to the fact that when we give reasons we tend to do so through speech or writing, which often includes sentences. But so what? And why sentences as opposed to longer utterances?
(10) Despite what one might infer from the final sentence of the quoted passage, Rorty doesn't think that Greek philosophy and 17th century philosophy are unrelated. In the previous subsection he presents Locke as having one foot in Aristotle and one foot not, and in the next he talks of the ocular metaphor that Locke and Kant carry forward from Plato. What Rorty is attacking is the idea that you can discover within all of Western philosophy (and Western life) a distinction between what is given to us in experience and what is added by the mind - the distinction can also be thought of as a distinction between particulars and universals - and a concern with such a distinction. (The meaning of "philosophy" is also at issue here, since, if no one can find that distinction in your thought, post-Kant you might not get called a philosopher, or so Rorty claims. [I'm pretty sure he's speaking of what you might get called in philosophy departments, as opposed to, say, in politics, or used bookstores.])
(11) Even though I've been picking at it, I like the quoted passage very much.
(12) I'm calling this post "Richard Rorty 2"; I've ex post facto gone and called this one "1." For other Rorty-relevant stuff (esp. this one) click the Rorty tab.
--Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979, pp 148-149.
I'm rereading chapters 3 and 4 of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature with the intention of trying to master them. My difficulty isn't the complexity of the ideas, since he's trying to be clear and not overcomplex, but that he assumes familiarity with various writers not all of whom I've read much of, and he'll use terms of art that I'm not all that familiar with; he also can be fast with his reasons (coming a sentence or two short, so you have to fill them in yourself) and vague and glib in presenting his own ideas, though the ideas are rarely glib themselves. So he often doesn't do right by his own complexities, doesn't come up with the detail and precision that he needs, doesn't have the fierce search for the best word that a Wittgenstein has, will futz along with tired old vocabulary that doesn't do the job. That said, he's got a broad historical and cultural view that Wittgenstein doesn't even try for. He gets Wittgenstein's challenge to philosophy - the import of Wittgenstein's complaint that language goes on holiday in philosophy is that philosophy isn't addressing the questions its vocabulary cons itself into thinking it's addressing - but Rorty goes on to ask why intelligent people thought (and maybe still think) the issues mattered, asks what assumptions they were making, what they thought was at stake. For better or worse I've not only bought into Rorty's narrative of modern philosophy - which at least to undereducated me clarifies and puts into perspective a whole lot of material - but I've also copped the questions he asks: what's at stake, what do people think is at stake, what do I think is at stake, what assumptions are they making, what assumptions am I making, what else might be at issue if we stepped aside from this issue, and so forth.
About the passage I quoted: it comes in the middle of chapter 3; I'm going to circle back, but I liked this quote for its long view, its implied questions (what's going on in Plato and Descartes and Locke that Kant didn't teach us to look for, and that gets obscured if seen through Kantian eyes? what's going on with us that our Kantian heritage gets in the way of our seeing?). Some semi-random thoughts:
(1) "...the rationalists wanted to find a way of replacing propositions about secondary qualities with propositions which somehow did the same job but were known with certainty, and... the empiricists opposed this project." Rorty clearly thinks that this is a better way than Kant's of describing what the "rationalists" and the "empiricists" were up to. But he's not claiming that this is how the "rationalists" and "empiricists" would have described it themselves.
(2) "Predicative" may be a key word - the subsection is entitled "Kant's Confusion of Predication with Synthesis" - but I don't immediately see its import, actually. In a sentence, a predicate gives us an attribute of a subject (e.g., "You are sad") or tells us something a subject does ("You ran to the store crying") or something that is done to a subject ("You were mistreated, by me"). A "predicative judgment" means a judgment put in sentence form, but so what? What's so interesting about sentence form?
(3) I think that Rorty considers Kant to be making a mistake in relating the components of a sentence, rather than affirming or disconfirming the sentence as a whole. But I'm also certain that Rorty would follow Quine and Kuhn and Wittgenstein in taking sentences not to stand alone but to only be true (or make sense) in the context of a whole lot of other stuff, so again, what's the big deal about a sentence? Or conversely, what's a problem with a component?
(4) Throughout the chapter, the words "sentence" and, especially, "proposition" function as buzzwords. They're continually brought up; also brought up is that there are "relations" to and between propositions; but I have no idea why Rorty thinks sentences and propositions are more relevant here than are notions, ideas, formulas, theories, paragraphs, chapters, rants, spiels, arguments, contentions, social practices, language games, conventions, behaviors, events, and so forth. In fact, given that Rorty endorses Quine's holism (Quine said that statements can be neither confirmed nor disconfirmed in isolation from their fellows), I'm not getting why Rorty thinks that propositions and sentences, and subjects and predicates, are particularly at issue, as opposed to the overall behavior of sociolinguistic creatures, i.e., human beings. And the "relations" at issue would be social relations, I'd think, not merely relations among propositions. "Proposition" seems just as reductive as "sense impression" and the Kantian "concept" and "intuition." In any event, while Locke's and Kant's ideas get carefully examined in this chapter, phrases like "relations between propositions" just kind of show up, without explication or elaboration. To understand, I may have to translate into different or better terminology. Obviously Rorty chose "sentences" and "propositions" for reasons that matter to him and it would be good if I could work out what those are; and he's read scads on the subject of "propositions" that I haven't by Moore, Carnap, Ayer et al. Presumably Locke and Kant talked about "propositions," though I don't know what they said on the subject. But honestly I don't get why Rorty is using those words here, since his basic point as far as I can tell doesn't have to do with "sentences"/"propositions" in particular. Rather, it's that inquiry and justification are fundamentally social and conversational. "Stuff people say and write that they can argue about" would be more accurate, would better reflect what Rorty is trying to say; whereas "sentence," "proposition," and "predicate" sound linguistically precise and all, but in fact I don't think he's being technical or precise with them. EDIT: Oh yeah, as Mark and I talk about in the comments, when Kant defines "analytic" and "synthetic" it's in relation to subject and predicates, which implies sentence form. But since Rorty is talking about concepts and intuitions, I still don't get why sentences/propositions are particularly at issue or, even if they were a bit at issue for Kant, why Rorty should go along with this.
(5) The phrase "relations between propositions and the degree of certainty attaching to them" is ambiguous. It could mean relations between (a) propositions and (b) other propositions, some being more certain than others, which is what I'm pretty sure Rorty means (given what he'd said earlier in the paragraph about propositions concerning secondary qualities versus those somehow known with more certainty). But it could mean relations between (a) propositions and (b) degrees of certainty, though "degrees of certainty" would seem to be a judgment, not something you relate to. Earlier in the chapter he'd used the phrase "relations between persons and propositions," which I'd also found baffling.
(6) "Representations" is a key word too, though Rorty believes the confusion here is Locke's and Kant's, and Rorty is trying to disentangle it. A representative is an emissary, but of what?
(7) "For if the 'problem of knowledge' had been stated in terms of the relations between propositions and the degree of certainty attaching to them, rather than the terms of putative components of propositions, we might not have inherited our present notion of 'the history of philosophy.'" Not quite getting this, either. For Kant, the relation between "intuitions" (a.k.a. "sense impressions," right?) and "concepts" is that the intuitions are never known directly but only as "synthesized" by concepts - intuitions being many, hence in need of synthesis. (I don't remember my Kant: are the concepts embodied by the intuitions? If you never get the intuitions directly, how do you know if the concepts are embodied, or that they even exist? Did Kant feel he'd laid Hume's skepticism to rest?) Are intuitions components of propositions? How could they be? I'd think that only concepts could be, and I'm not even sure of that. Can't there be a concept that needs to be expressed in more than one proposition? How is a concept a component of a proposition? Words and clauses and the like are components, but concepts? Kant thinks he's describing the components of experience, right? Well, someone who's read more of Kant than I have needs to help me here. A sentence "synthesizes" a subject and an attribute, but neither the subject nor the attribute are intuitions. They've been pre-synthesized, as it were. Right? [EDIT: Well, I'm confused by the word "synthesis" here. Such defects arise when I haven't read the relevant Kant material for 34 years. Would Kant reserve "synthesis" for what a predicate does for a "synthetic" statement's subject (it adds info not already part of the subject's concept), or does he also use it for what concepts do for intuitions, which Rorty's text leads me to believe? Or are they somehow the same thing? See my inconsistent comments about this in the comment thread.]
(8) Whenever Rorty says "If we think in terms of A rather than B, we will ______," I see red flags and hear warning sirens. Such statements always oversimplify his own ideas, and in making them he's casually asserting what he I think he intends to be challenging, that philosophical suppositions are fundamental to life ("philosophical" pertaining to "philosophy" as its definition and history was narrowed owing to Kant).
(9) Why don't we just say, "The rationalists wanted to derive secondary qualities of stuff from stuff that was known with certainty, and the empiricists opposed this project"? And we can say, "If the 'problem of knowledge' had been stated in terms of how to give good reasons for the stuff you believe and the degree of certainty attaching to your reasons, rather than in terms of how our mind supposedly constitutes stuff, we might not have inherited our present notion of 'the history of philosophy'"? I absolutely don't see any value in adding the word "proposition" to the thought, or what we lose by its absence - whereas its presence creates confusion, by adding the very unclear (to me, anyway) idea that "intuitions" and "concepts" (as Kant uses those terms) are components of propositions, as well as the mystifying talk of relations to or between propositions. I suppose its presence would correctly allude to the fact that when we give reasons we tend to do so through speech or writing, which often includes sentences. But so what? And why sentences as opposed to longer utterances?
(10) Despite what one might infer from the final sentence of the quoted passage, Rorty doesn't think that Greek philosophy and 17th century philosophy are unrelated. In the previous subsection he presents Locke as having one foot in Aristotle and one foot not, and in the next he talks of the ocular metaphor that Locke and Kant carry forward from Plato. What Rorty is attacking is the idea that you can discover within all of Western philosophy (and Western life) a distinction between what is given to us in experience and what is added by the mind - the distinction can also be thought of as a distinction between particulars and universals - and a concern with such a distinction. (The meaning of "philosophy" is also at issue here, since, if no one can find that distinction in your thought, post-Kant you might not get called a philosopher, or so Rorty claims. [I'm pretty sure he's speaking of what you might get called in philosophy departments, as opposed to, say, in politics, or used bookstores.])
(11) Even though I've been picking at it, I like the quoted passage very much.
(12) I'm calling this post "Richard Rorty 2"; I've ex post facto gone and called this one "1." For other Rorty-relevant stuff (esp. this one) click the Rorty tab.
