5 - Reductionism

Summary

In “Reductionism,” Rorty takes up the question “Can we abandon reductive analysis as a method of philosophical discovery and still keep the intellectual gains which have accrued from its employment as a method of deciding what questions to discuss?” Rorty uses the notion of reductionism to both present a synoptic vision of the history of Western philosophy and put forward an original metaphilosophical position. After presenting the twentieth-century program of reductive linguistic analysis as a mature form of the seventeetn century’s “reductionist conception” of the goal of inquiry, he examines J. O. Urmson’s arguments, ultimately finding that Urmson falls short of applying reductive analysis to the technical vocabularies of philosophers. Even though Rorty agrees with Urmson that most reductive analyses, judged by their own standards, are unsuccessful, Rorty nevertheless thinks a basis for distinguishing useful from useless analyses is possible. We also see here Rorty’s early interest in eliminability, which shortly thereafter becomes the basis for a distinctive contribution.