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More On Incorrigibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

Professor Sikora rightly says that the claim that there might turn out to be no mental events turns on finding some mark of the mental “such that certain events could be mental at one time and then cease to be mental at another time.” This sounds paradoxical, but perhaps the paradox can be mitigated as follows. On the view that I want to recommend, “being mental” resembles “being a capital crime.” One might want to say that there never were any such crimes—for there never were any acts which deserved death. Or one might want to say that there used to be such crimes, but that now, thanks to new legislation, there no longer are.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , September 1974 , pp. 195 - 197
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1974

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References

1 Cf. Tormey, “Access, Incorrigibility, and Identity,” Journal of Philosophy, LXX (1973), p. 125Google Scholar. Tormey also notes, correctly, that “philosophers have persistently attempted to capture” the notion of certainty in their discussions of incorrigibility, and that my account fails to explicate incorrigibility-as-certainty. But my account was designed so to fail. I think that the quest for certainty has given a bad name to many a useful and harmless notion-“knowledge,” “truth,“ and “incorrigible report,” among others.