21 ideas
| 2557 | Analytical philosophy seems to have little interest in how to tell a good analysis from a bad one [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: There is nowadays little attempt to bring "analytic philosophy" to self-consciousness by explaining how to tell a successful from an unsuccessful analysis. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 4.1) |
| 2556 | Rational certainty may be victory in argument rather than knowledge of facts [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: We can think of "rational certainty" as a matter of victory in argument rather than relation to an object known. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 3.4) |
| 4726 | Rorty seems to view truth as simply being able to hold one's view against all comers [Rorty, by O'Grady] |
| Full Idea: Rorty seems to view truth as simply being able to hold one's view against all comers. | |
| From: report of Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980]) by Paul O'Grady - Relativism Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: This may be a caricature of Rorty, but he certainly seems to be in the business of denying truth as much as possible. This strikes me as the essence of pragmatism, and as a kind of philosophical nihilism. |
| 2549 | For James truth is "what it is better for us to believe" rather than a correct picture of reality [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: Truth is, in James' phrase, "what it is better for us to believe", rather than "the accurate representation of reality". | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], Intro) |
| 2548 | If knowledge is merely justified belief, justification is social [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: If we have a Deweyan conception of knowledge, as what we are justified in believing, we will see "justification" as a social phenomenon. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I find this observation highly illuminating (though I probably need to study Dewey to understand it). There just is no absolute about whether someone is justified. How justified do you want to be? |
| 6599 | Knowing has no definable essence, but is a social right, found in the context of conversations [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: If we see knowing not as having an essence, described by scientists or philosophers, but rather as a right, by current standards, to believe, then we see conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], Ch.5), quoted by Robert Fogelin - Walking the Tightrope of Reason Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: This teeters towards ridiculous relativism (e.g. what if the conversation is among a group of fools? - Ah, there are no fools! Politically incorrect!). However, knowledge can be social, provided we are healthily elitist. Scientists know more than us. |
| 2566 | You can't debate about whether to have higher standards for the application of words [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: The decision about whether to have higher than usual standards for the application of words like "true" or "good" or "red" is, as far as I can see, not a debatable issue. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 6.6) |
| 2553 | The mind is a property, or it is baffling [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: All that is needed for the mind-body problem to be unintelligible is for us to be nominalist, to refuse firmly to hypostasize individual properties. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: Edelman says the mind is a process rather than a property. It might vanish if the clockspeed was turned right down? Nominalism here sounds like behaviourism or instrumentalism. Would Dennett plead guilty? |
| 2550 | Pain lacks intentionality; beliefs lack qualia [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: We can't define the mental as intentional because pains aren't about anything, and we can't define it as phenomenal because beliefs don't feel like anything. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: Nice, but simplistic? There is usually an intentional object for a pain, and the concepts which we use to build beliefs contain the residue of remembered qualia. It seems unlikely that any mind could have one without the other (even a computer). |
| 2554 | Is intentionality a special sort of function? [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: Following Wittgenstein, we shall treat the intentional as merely a subspecies of the functional. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: Intriguing but obscure. Sounds wrong to me. The intentional refers to the content of thoughts, but function concerns their role. They have roles because they have content, so they can't be the same. |
| 2565 | Nature has no preferred way of being represented [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: Nature has no preferred way of being represented. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 6.5) | |
| A reaction: Tree rings accidentally represent the passing of the years. If God went back and started again would she or he opt for a 'preferred way'? |
| 2560 | Can meanings remain the same when beliefs change? [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: For cooler heads there must be some middle view between "meanings remain and beliefs change" and "meanings change whenever beliefs do". | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: The second one seems blatanty false. How could we otherwise explain a change in belief? But obviously some changes in belief (e.g. about electrons) produce a change in meaning. |
| 18033 | The meaning of a representation is its role in thought, perception or decisions [Block] |
| Full Idea: According to conceptual role semantics, the meaning of a representation is the role of that representation in the cognitive life of the agent, for example, in perception, thought and decision-making. | |
| From: Ned Block (Semantics, Conceptual Role [1998]) | |
| A reaction: I never believe theories of this kind, because I always find myself asking 'what is the nature of this representation which enables it to play this role?'. |
| 2562 | A theory of reference seems needed to pick out objects without ghostly inner states [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: The need to pick out objects without the help of definitions, essences, and meanings of terms produced, philosophers thought, a need for a "theory of reference". | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 6.3) | |
| A reaction: Frege's was very perceptive in noting that meaning and reference are not the same. Whether we need a 'theory' of reference is unclear. It is worth describing how it occurs. |
| 2559 | Davidson's theory of meaning focuses not on terms, but on relations between sentences [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: A theory of meaning, for Davidson, is not an assemblage of "analyses" of the meanings of individual terms, but rather an understanding of the inferential relations between sentences. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 6.1) | |
| A reaction: Put that way, the influence of Frege on Davidson is obvious. Purely algebraic expressions can have inferential relations, using variables and formal 'sentences'. |
| 22709 | We should first decide what are the great works of art, with aesthetic theory following from that [Murdoch] |
| Full Idea: Our aesthetic must stand to be judged by great works of art which we know to be such independently. …So let us start by saying that Shakespeare is the greatest of all artists, and let our aesthetic be the philosophical justification of this judgement. | |
| From: Iris Murdoch (The Sublime and the Good [1959], p.205) | |
| A reaction: She offers this view in specific contradiction of Tolstoy, which says we should first have a theory, and then judge accordingly. I take Murdoch to be entirely right, but it means that our aesthetic theory will shift over time. |
| 22715 | Great art proves the absurdity of art for art's sake [Murdoch] |
| Full Idea: The work of the great artists shows up 'art-for-art's-sake' as a flimsy frivolous doctrine. | |
| From: Iris Murdoch (The Sublime and the Good [1959], p.218) | |
| A reaction: She keeps referring to tragedy (as the greatest art), but it is hard to see how we learn love and morality from a great pot or a great abstract painting. Wilde makes the doctrine frivolous, but I think it contains a degree of truth. Music. |
| 22714 | Because art is love, it improves us morally [Murdoch] |
| Full Idea: It is of course a fact that if art is love then art improves us morally, but this is, as it were, accidental. | |
| From: Iris Murdoch (The Sublime and the Good [1959], p.218) | |
| A reaction: Is an enhancement of one's love necessarily a moral improvement? Love is a fine feeling, but how does it motivate? Has no wickedness ever been perpetrated in the name of love? 'All's fair in love and war'. |
| 22712 | Art and morals are essentially the same, and are both identical with love [Murdoch] |
| Full Idea: Art and morals are (with certain provisos) one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. | |
| From: Iris Murdoch (The Sublime and the Good [1959], p.215) | |
| A reaction: The idea that art, morals and love are all just a single thing seems unhelpful. What about satire? What about duty without love? What about pure abstract painting? What about Stravinsky's highly formal view of his music? |
| 22713 | Love is realising something other than oneself is real [Murdoch] |
| Full Idea: Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. | |
| From: Iris Murdoch (The Sublime and the Good [1959], p.215) | |
| A reaction: I suspect that this is a necessary condition for love, but not the thing itself. The realisation she describes may not be love. You would attain her realisation if you shared a prison cell with a terrifying psychopath. |
| 2558 | Since Hegel we have tended to see a human as merely animal if it is outside a society [Rorty] |
| Full Idea: Only since Hegel have philosophers begun toying with the idea that the individual apart from his society is just one more animal. | |
| From: Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [1980], 4.3) |