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Rorty and the New Hermeneutics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Frank G. Verges
Frank G. Verges
Affiliation:
California State University, Fullerton
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Extract

Wittgenstein's genius, John Wisdom has suggested, was uniquely revealed in his ability to formulate such questions as ‘Could one play chess without the queen? Would it still be chess?’ The central questions raised by Richard Rorty's work may be cast in a parallel form: ‘Could one do philosophy without the notion of truth as “correspondence with the Real”? Would it still be philosophy?’ Both pairs of questions, Wittgenstein' and Rorty's, are quintessentially anti-essentialist. The scope and ingenuity of Rorty's ‘philosophy without mirrors’ has challenged philosophers to reconf ront basic questions about the nature and purposes of philosophical inquiry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 62 , Issue 241 , July 1987 , pp. 307 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1987

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References

1 Richard, Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979), hereinafter PMN, and Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), hereinafter CP.Google Scholar

2 Cf. Donald, Walhout, ‘Hermeneutics and the Teaching of Philosophy’, Teaching Philosophy 7, No. 4 (1984), 303-312, for an example of this formof response to Rorty.Google Scholar

3 Cf. Palmer, Richard E., Hermeneutics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,1969), for a useful historical account of the development of hermeneutics.Google Scholar

4 The terms ‘interpretative phenomenon’ and ‘hermeneutical phenomenon’ are used interchangeably. As sometimes happens withother technical terms in philosophy, the term ‘hermeneutic’ (pi. ‘hermeneutics’) and its cognates is used to designate both a purportedly central feature of human understanding, and a group of writings and positions which highlights such a feature.

5 C. I., Lewis, Mind and the World Order (New York: Dover, 1929), 228.Google Scholar

6 Wilfred, Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), 169.Google Scholar

7 Green, T. H., Hume and Locke, Ramon, Lemos(ed.) (New York: Crowell, 1968), 19.Google Scholar

8 Thomas, Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), 100.Google Scholar

9 Price, H. H., Perception (London: Methuen, 1964), 2.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., 1.

11 Cf. Norman, Malcolm, ‘Direct Perception’, in Knowledge dnd Certainty (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963Google Scholar), and J. L., Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).Google Scholar

12 For a defence of the incorrigibility thesis, see, Frank, Jackson, ‘Is There a Good Argument Against the Incorrigibility Thesis?’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 51, No. 2 (May, 1973Google Scholar), 51-62. For a critique of Jackson' arguments, see Frank Verges, ‘Jackson, on Incorrigibility’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 52, No. 3 (December 1974), 243-250.Google Scholar

13 The proceedings of a symposium on hermeneutics involving Dreyfus, Taylor, and Rorty, were published inthe Review of Metaphysics, XXXIV, No. 1 (September 1980), 3-55. References to this exchange will be cited as ‘symposium’, with the name of the symposiast.Google Scholar

14 Taylor, Symposium, p. 30. For a much fuller exposition of Taylor' positions, see the recently published two volume collection of his papers: Human Agency and Language, Vol. 1, and Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Vol. 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1985). See also Rorty' review of Taylor' collected papers, ‘Absolutely Non-absolute’, in The Times Literary Supplement 6 December (1985) (No. 4,314).Google Scholar

15 Taylor, Symposium, p. 48.

16 Rorty, Symposium, p. 43.

17 Cf. Alasdair, Maclntyre' ‘Relativism, Power, and Philosophy’, 1984 APA Eastern Division Presidential Address, in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 59, No. 1 (September 1985), 5-22, for the defence of a provocative version of ‘relativism’ which claims its lineage, in part, from Vico, Hegel and Collingwood.Google Scholar

18 Georg W. F., Hegel, ‘Vorlesungen iiber die Geschichte der Philosophic’, cited by Jurgen Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests, Jeremy Shapiro translation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 7.Google Scholar

19 Dreyfus criticizes the programme of cognitive science and artificial intelligence in What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artifical Intelligence (New York: Harper and Row, 1979). Taylor' The Explanation of Behaviour (New York: Humanities Press, 1964) was a seminal work in one approach, so-called ‘action theory’, to the philosophy of the social sciences.Google Scholar

20 Dreyfus brands Rorty as a nihilist, apparently on the quite general grounds that ‘if one holds that there is no crucial difference between things and people, one must embrace some form of nihilism …’ (Symposium, p. 3). By such reasoning, anyone who rejects a nature/spirit ontological dualism must be a ‘nihilist’. This is metafoundationalism with a vengeance.

21 Gilbert, Ryle, Dilemmas (Cambridge University Press, 1956), Ch. Five, ‘The World of Science and the Everyday World’, pp. 68–81.Google Scholar

22 Cf. Donald, Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, reprinted in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 207-227.Google Scholar

23 Rorty, PMN, 28, footnote 4.

24 See, for example, ‘Keeping Philosophy Pure: An Essay on Wittgenstein’, in CP, where both the purity and the possibility of ‘ending philosophy’ are discussed in accordance with three broad but very distinct senses of the term ‘philosophy’.

25 Rorty, PMN, 9.