The Conversation Continues

How do you know?

A child asks you how you know the Earth goes around the Sun. You say your teacher told you. The child asks how the teacher knows. You mention astronomers and their measurements, and photographs taken from spacecraft. The child keeps asking and you keep answering. Every answer you give is another reason offered to another person. Eventually you run out of reasons, or the child runs out of patience.

Look closely at that exchange. At no point did you step outside all your reasons and hold your belief up against the solar system to see whether the two matched. You could not have done that. Everything you had to offer was something else you believed, or something someone else had reported. The punchline is that this seems to be true of every belief we hold. Yet most of us still picture knowledge as a kind of match: a picture in the head that corresponds to the world outside it.

Who Rorty was

Richard Rorty was born in New York City in 1931 and died in 2007. He studied at the University of Chicago and at Yale. He taught at Princeton from 1961 to 1982, then at the University of Virginia, and finally in the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford.

By the 1970s he had made his name in analytic philosophy, the technical style that dominated English-speaking philosophy departments. He was elected president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association for 1979–1980. In 1979 he also published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the book that made him famous and, among many philosophers, unwelcome. He is worth hearing because he took the pragmatist doubts we have followed all week to a conclusion that many of his fellow pragmatists refused to accept.

Giving up the mirror

The book’s title names the picture Rorty wanted us to give up. Since the seventeenth century, he argued, philosophers had treated the mind as a mirror of nature. On this picture, knowledge is accurate reflection: our thoughts represent the world, and when things go well they represent it correctly.

That picture gives philosophy a special job. Philosophy is supposed to find the foundations, the firm starting points that guarantee some of our reflections are accurate. With those foundations in hand, it can sort the accurate reflections from the distorted ones.

Rorty thought the job could not be done, and the child’s questions show why. We never get a view of the mirror and the world side by side. All we have is our practice of giving reasons and asking for them. Drawing on the philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and Willard Van Orman Quine, he argued that “we understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation” (Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979, p. 170). His recommendation was that “we see knowledge as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature” (p. 171).

An everyday case makes this plainer. A mechanic tells you your brakes are worn. You ask why she thinks so. She shows you the thin pads beside new ones and points to the manufacturer’s limit. You are satisfied, and you are entitled to be. Rorty’s claim is that nothing more happens when we call your belief knowledge. The belief does not pass a further test in which the world itself stamps it as accurate. He never denied that the pads are really worn, or that the world causes what we see. His view was that the world causes our beliefs but does not take part in the argument over which beliefs to accept. That argument happens among people.

This leaves philosophy without its old post. With no foundations to inspect, philosophy cannot sit above the rest of culture and rule on its claims to knowledge. Rorty treated philosophy as one voice in the conversation. On his view, its best achievements are new ways of describing things that others find worth taking up. In short, Rorty says: knowledge is what we can justify to one another, and there is no higher court.

Dewey’s heir, and his critics

Rorty grew up among left-wing reformers for whom, as he later recalled, Deweyan pragmatism came naturally. For him the central pragmatist was always John Dewey, whom we met yesterday. He read Dewey as someone who had already seen through the mirror. He described his own position as “an attitude common to Dewey and Wittgenstein” (Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979, p. 174).

But Rorty read Dewey selectively. He openly separated what he considered the good Dewey from the bad. He criticized Experience and Nature as a slide back into metaphysics, the study of what ultimately exists. He had no patience for Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, the very book whose account of inquiry we followed yesterday. Many Dewey scholars object that this discards what Dewey himself cared about most. One of them, Thelma Lavine, argued that scientific method was Dewey’s central concept. Rorty also dismissed Peirce, whose test for meaning began the tradition, as still too attached to the old picture.

These choices made Rorty the most controversial pragmatist of his time. The philosopher Susan Haack, whose own pragmatism draws on Peirce, thought his view unworthy of the name and consistently put his ‘pragmatism’ in quotation marks. Cheryl Misak argued that when Rorty gave up objectivity he also gave up the ability to criticize. Even sympathetic readers such as Hilary Putnam and John McDowell held that what we believe must answer to how the world is, and not merely to what other people will accept. Rorty replied that the charge of relativism depends on the very mirror picture he had rejected. Scholars still disagree about whether that reply works.

I find the objection hard to dismiss. When brakes fail on a hill, it feels as though the world has had its say, whatever anyone agreed. Rorty would answer that the world spoke causally and that we then argued about what it meant. I am not sure that answer satisfies me. I do notice that, on his own terms, the dispute can only be settled by more of the same conversation.

The next word

Rorty held that no way of describing things is final. The figure he most admired in his later work, whom he called the ironist, believes that “there is nothing beyond vocabularies which serves as a criterion of choice between them” (Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989, p. 80). That belief applies to Rorty’s own vocabulary too. His view invites replacement by a better one, if someone can make a better one persuasive.

All week we have watched pragmatists revise one another, and Rorty’s reworking of Dewey is simply the latest revision we have room for. If he was right, nobody gets to close the argument, including him. Someone else speaks next.