Rorty‘s Adaption of Darwinian Evolutionary Principles to Philosophy of language; and
Rorty‘s Completion Phase of the Enlightenment Project.
imperfectly visible to the untutored eye. To Plato, the project of philosophy, and of all natural science, was to enhance man's understanding of ideal reality.‖ 4
Accordingly, Weaver argues that since the time of Plato, representationalism has been exemplified by three beliefs namely;
1. Objectivity-reality, in principle, may be perceived objectively, without "distortion,"
through some neutral medium such as language, sensation, experience, etc.
2. Convergence- with each new advance, say, in science, the new, better group of beliefs (for example, those of Einstein over those of Newton) is seen as coming closer to reality than the old set of beliefs. This "convergence" of belief with reality is a way of assessing how far along we are toward achieving objectivity.
3. Privileged discourse-a special way of speaking is necessary to separate reality from appearance. Our normal way of speaking elides appearance and reality and is too blunt and imprecise to do the surgical trimming necessary to get at the truth of the world.5 For Rorty, representationalism is bad because it provides the ingredients necessary for global skepticism. In addition to his critique of Plato, Rorty also rejected the tradition received from Descartes to Kant which holds that Philosophy‘s first goal is to seek justified knowledge and accurate representation of reality; and to achieve this goal philosophy needs first to discover the foundation of knowledge. In rejecting the above view, Rorty denies that that ―the essence of language is to represent or picture reality in such a way that bits of language match up with bits of reality‖.6
Liegland puts Rorty‘s anti-representational views within context by explaining that it is part of the views of the pragmatist school of thought to which he belonged. For him, ―the most efficient way to characterize pragmatism according to Rorty is to state it as a view that questions the legitimacy of a particular set of traditional philosophical issues or problem‖.7 He further added that the issues or problems in question were ―representationalist in character‖.8
4.2.2. Against the Philosophy of the Schools
Following from the above, it becomes expedient that an examination of the framework within which Rorty‘s anti-representational positions were developed must be done in order to appreciate his views. Rorty‘s anti-representational meta-philosophy began with his campaign against the Philosophy of the schools. As Grippe noted, Rorty was convinced that the cognitive idolatry ravaging his time was ―an outgrowth of the adoption of the correspondence theory of knowledge‖.9 Tracing this attitude to Plato‘s use of perception to analogize the relation of his psyche to forms, Rorty argues that philosophers have fallen into the error of trying to make a word-world connection in order to ground reality in thought. In his view;
Plato developed the idea of such an intellectual by means of distinctions between knowledge and opinion, and between appearance and reality.
Such distinctions conspire to produce the idea that rational inquiry should make visible a realm to which non intellectuals have little access, and of whose very existence they may be doubtful. In the Enlightenment, this notion became concrete in the adoption of the Newtonian physical scientist as a model of the intellectual. Ever since, liberal social thought has centered around social reform as made possible by objective thought of what human beings are like – not knowledge of what Greeks or Frenchmen or Chinese are like, but of humanity as such.10
From the Ancient period, Gutting noted that Rorty saw the modern period as replacing the ancient sciences of which philosophy had been the culmination and queen, with the new modern sciences of Galileo, Newton, Dalton, and (eventually) Darwin. Summing up Rorty‘s conviction,
Gutting writes that ―the triumph of these new sciences was quickly seen by many intellectuals – Hobbes and Descartes, for example – as the destruction of the ancient system of philosophy, which by their day had become the philosophy of the schools‖.11 Williams agrees with Gutting and avers that Rorty, ―Descartes‘ invention of the mind- his coalescence of beliefs and sensations into Lockean ideas - gave philosophy new ground to stand on‖.12 In his view, ―it provided a field of inquiry which seemed 'prior' to the subjects on which the ancient philosophers had opinions.
Further, it provided a field within which certainty, as opposed to mere opinion, was possible‖. 13
Following from the above, Rorty opined that ―Locke made Descartes‘ newly contrived 'mind' into the subject matter of a 'science of man' - moral philosophy as opposed to natural philosophy‖. 14 He noted that while later modern philosophers rejected Descartes‘ dualism of two substances, mind and body, they accepted his understanding of the division between the mental and the physical as between what was conscious and what was not. Kant‘s intervention attempted to resolve the problem of dualism created by the above position. Rorty thus credits Kant with resolving the problem of dualism by introducing the idea of certainty of a priori knowledge and thus placed ―philosophy 'on the secure path of a science' by putting outer space inside inner space (the space of the constituting transcendental ego) and then claiming Cartesian certainty about the laws of the inner for what had previously been thought to be outer‖. 15
Describing Kant‘s submission as his Copernican resolution, Rorty explains that revolution was based on the notion that we can only know objects a priori if we 'constitute' them‖. 16 Thus, epistemology as a discipline came of age when Kant replaced ―the 'physiology of the human understanding of the celebrated Mr. Locke' with ... 'the mythical subject of transcendental psychology‖.17 Gutting inferred that in Rorty‘s estimation, it was from this point that,
―Philosophy is no longer, as in ancient times, the culmination of human knowing. Rather, it is the foundation of human knowing, providing the ultimate justification of all epistemic claims and adjudicating conflicts between rival bodies of alleged knowledge‖. 18
From the above, it is clear that an important step in Rorty‘s rejection of epistemology centered philosophy is his dismissal of the philosophy of the schools. Also, related to the above are his criticism of the scheme-content distinction and the correspondence theory of truth. Rorty thus rejects any philosophical position or project which attempts to draw a general line between what is made and what is found, what is subjective and what is objective, what is mere appearance and what is real. Rorty regards Putman‘s insistence on using the term ―representation‖ as a mistake.
Following Davidson‘s argument, Richard Rorty thinks that ―it is good to be rid of representations and with them the correspondence theory of truth, for it is thinking that there are representations which engenders thoughts of relativism‖. 19
4.2.3. Anti-Foundationalism
The philosophical position which rejects foundationalism (i.e. the view that there are epistemically privileged basic propositions which are justified for a person) is generally described as anti-foundationalism. Richard Rorty had maintained that ―the doctrines of Sellars and Quine properly interpreted and integrated have destroyed the pretensions of the traditional theory of knowledge by which he means in particular the supposition that knowledge needs foundation‖. 20
Richard Rorty is not a lone traveler in the journey of rejecting foundationalism. Indeed, his anti-foundational attitude is a reflection of the postmodern outlook of his time. As mentioned in the
review of related literatures, criticism against foundationalism came from different sources.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Wentzel Van-Huyssteen, Adam Wosotowsky, Hans Albert quoted by B.
H. Smith, the Coherentists, Nietzsche and C.S. Pierce in supporting Rorty‘s repudiation of foundationalism argued that;
On all fronts foundationalism is in bad shape;
A dream for the impossible, a contemporary version of the quest for the Holy Grail-;
Sophism, Pragmatism and Skepticism make foundationalism irrelevant;
The efforts to ground the validity of certain norms on a priori foundations is logically untenable, being caught in an infinite regress;
There is no basic, privileged class of beliefs that serve as foundation for justifying other beliefs but which need no justification from other beliefs;
There is no objective order or structure in the world except what we give it; and
Philosophy must begin wherever it happens to be at the moment and not at some supposed ideal foundation, especially not in some world of ―private references‖;
Borrowing from Quine‘s critique of the analytic/synthetic distinction and Wilfrid Sellars‘s attack on ―the Myth of the Given‖, Richard Rorty avers that the naive assumption that representationalism gives us the right picture of our basic predicament is at the heart of the confusion in philosophy. As an escape route from this confusion, he suggested an abandonment of all foundationalist agenda. According to him, we must substitute ―the notion of knowledge as the assemblage of representations‖21 with ―a pragmatist conception of knowledge‖. He proffered what he called ‗epistemological behaviourism‘ as his idea of a pragmatic conception of
knowledge. We shall examine Rorty‘s epistemological behaviourism extensively in the next chapter.
4.3. Rorty’s Adaption of Darwinian Evolutionary Principles to Philosophy of