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7/28/2019 Richard Rorty, "Realism and the Reasons of the Heart", May 3, 1999
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REALISM AND THE REASONS OF THE HEART
In a footnote to his seminal article The Natural Ontological
Attitudean article which begins with the sentence Realism is dead
Arthur Fine offers a pregnant analogy between realism and religion.
In support of realism there seem to be only those reasons of the
heart which, as Pascal says, reason does not know. Indeed, I have
long felt that belief in realism involves a profound leap of faith, not
at all dissimilar from the faith that animates deep religious
convictions. I would welcome engagement with realists on this
understanding, just as I enjoy conversation on a similar basis with my
religious friends. The dialogue will proceed more fruitfully, I think,
when the realists finally stop pretending to a rational support for
their faith, which they do not have. Then we can all enjoy their
intricate and sometimes beautiful philosophical constructions (of,
e.g., knowledge, or reference, etc.) even though to us, the
nonbelievers, they may seem only wonder-full castles in the air.
In various recent articles, I have tried to expand on Fines analogy
between realism and religion. I have been suggesting that we see realism
as an etiolated version of the religious attempt to bow down before a
non-human power to which human beings owe respect. I have also
urged that we see the idea that natural science is privileged over other
parts of culture as a version of the priestly project of c laiming respec t from
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other humans because of ones purported special relation to such a
power. As I see it, the great divide in contemporary philosophical
thinking is between representationalists who believe that there is an
intrinsic nature of non-human reality to be held in human thought and
antirepresentationalists who believe that scientific, like moral, progress is a
matter of finding ever more effective ways for enriching human life.
Representationalists are necessarily realists, since if they did not believe
that there was a Way the World Is In Itself they would have no reason to
insist that culture is divided between areas where there is a fact of the
matter and areas in which there is not. Whereas realists find pathos in the
thought of the gap which seperates human thought from its non-human
object, we antirerpesenationalists find pathos in thinking of the distance
which seperates us from a utopian human futurefrom the world in which
our remote descendantsl have developed far better ways of dealing with
the non-human environment, presently unimaginable artistic genres, and
far kinder and more decent social institutions and customs.
On my account of modern times, the pathos of mans seperation
from God has been succeeded, among the intellectuals, by these two
alaternative forms of pathos. If you do not like the term pathos, the
word Romance will do as well. Or one could use Thomas Nagels term
the ambition of transcendence. The important point is not the choice of
terms but the recognition that both sides in contemporary philosophy are
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trying to find a suitable replacement for religion. Representationalism and
realism are no more or less passtionately irrational than anti-
representationalist humanism. Neither side is ever going to have a knock-
down argument, any more than Enlightenment secularism had a knock-
down argument against traditional theism. .
The heartfelt conviction that there just must be a non-human
authority to which we can resort has been, for a very long time, woven
into the common sense of the West. It is a conviction common to Soc rates
and to Luther, to scientists who say they love truth and fundamentalists
who say they love C hrist. Reweaving the network of shared beliefs and
desires which makes up Western culture so as to get rid of this conviction
will take centuries, or perhaps millenia. This reweaving, if it ever occurs, will
result in an inabilty to share the intuitions which, in our culture, are
pumped up by the cosmological argument for the existence of God and
by the argument that only correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality
can explain the success of natural science.
I think that it is a bit misleading to say, as Fine does in the quotation
with which I began, that such arguments as these cannot provide
rational support for the view being defended. What counts as rational
support, like what counts as valid inference, is a matter of what people
are willing are accustomed to take as rational or as valid, and this in turn is
what coheres with their intuitions. Those intuitions are determined by the
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culture in which they have been raised, and there is no way to short-
circuit culture by appealing either to Reason or to Nature. The battle is
always between an old culture and one striving to be born.
As an example of what I mean, consider the theist who is told that
the term God, as used in the conc lusion of the cosmological argument
is merely a name for our ignorance. Consider the realist who is told that his
explanation for the success of science is no better than Molieres doc tors
explanation of why opium puts people to sleep. Both are, in most cases,
equally unfazed. Even if they go so far as to admit that their opponents
objection to their favorite argument admits of no refutation, they insist that
it produces no conviction. For they feel the need for answers to questions
like What came before the Big Bang? and Why does science
succeed? So they typically fall back on rhetorical questions such as If
not God, what? If not correspondence to reality, what? They think that
anyone who does not share the need to answer these questions, anybody
who just shrugs them off, is being irrational. Realists think that it is irrational
for Fine to shirk the attempt to explain the success of science, just as
theists think it irrational of Hume, Kant and Steven Weinberg to speculate
about the nature of the First Cause.
It is often said that religion was refuted by showing the incoherence
of the concept of God or by showing that there is no evidence for the
existence of God. It is often said that realism can be refuted by showing
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the incoherence of the notions of World or correspondence as the
realist uses them. Both claims seem to me almost entirely wrong. No one
accustomed to throw around a term like the will of God or mind-
independent World in complex and sometimes persuasive arguments is
ever going to be persuaded that his concepts are incoherent. A concept
is just the use of a word, and useful words cannot be denied coherence
simply because their users can be forced into tight dialectical corners.
Insofar as religion is dying, it is because of the attractions of a humanist
culture, not because of flaws internal to the discourse of theists. Insofar as
realism is dying, it is because of the attractions of a culture which is more
deeply and unreservedly humanist than that offered by the arrogant
scientism which is the philosophical position most frequently associated
with the ideals of the Enlightenment.
For all these reasons, it seems best to stop saying that either religion
or realism is unsupported by rational argument, and instead to say that
the notion of rational support is not apropros when it comes to proposals
to retain, or to abandon, intuitions as deep-lying and long-lasting as those
to which theists, realists, and we anti-representationalists appeal. Where
argument always seems to fail, as J ames rightly says in The will to
believe, the reasons of the heart should have their way. But this does not
mean that the human heart always has the same reasons, asks the same
questions, and hopes for the same answers. The gradual growth of
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secularismthe gradual increase in the number of people who do not
find theism what J ames called a live, momentous and forced option, is
testimony to the hearts malleability.
Only when the sort of cultural change I envisage is complete will we
be able to start doing what Fine suggests--enjoying such beautiful and
intricate theistic or realistic constructions as SpinozasEth ic sand Kripkes
Nam ing a nd Nec essityas aesthetic spec tac les. Only when realism is no
longer a live, momentous and forced option for us, only when Dummett
can no longer find an audience for his view of the history of philosophy,
will we be able to hear questions about the mind-independence of the
real as having the quaint charm of questions about the consubstantiality
of the Persons of the Trinity. In the sort of culture which I hope our remote
descendants may inhabit, the philosophical literature about realism and
anti-realism will have been aestheticized in the same way as we have
aestheticized the debate between Occamites and Scotists.
Dummett capitalizes on a hope which has burned brightly since
Platothe hope that we can divide up the culture into the bits where the
non-human is encountered and acknowledged, the hard areas, and the
softer areas in which we are on our own. This need to divide culture into
harder and softer areas is, I think, the most familiar and pervasive
contemporary form of the idea that there is something to which human
beings are responsible save other human beingssomething like God or
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Truth or Reality. The idea of a hard area of culture is the idea of an area in
which this responsibility is salient. Dummetts suggestion that a lot of
philosophy is about the question of whether bivalence obtains for a
certain range of sentences amounts to the c laim that philosophers have a
spec ial responsibility for telling us where the hard ends and the soft begins.
A great deal of Fines work is devoted to casting doubt on the need
to draw that line. He is the philosopher of science who has done most to
deflate the arrogance embodied in Quines quip that philosophy of
science is philosophy enough. Much of what he has written gears in nicely
with the writings of two other contemporary philosophersDonald
Davidson and Robert Brandomwho are trying to put all true sentences
on a referential par, and thereby to erase the line between the hard and
the soft. Fine, Davidson and Brandom have helped us understand how to
stop thinking of intellec tual progress as a matter of increasing tightness of
fit with the non-human world and how to picture it instead as our being
forced by that world to reweave our networks of belief and desire in ways
that make us better able to cope. Humanism, in the sense I am using the
term, will only triumph when we no longer discard the question Do I know
the real object, or only one of its appearances? and replace it with the
question Am I using the best possible description of the situation in which I
find myself, or can I find a better one?
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I see Fines NOA papers as fitting in nicely with Davidsons claim
that we can make no good use of the notion of mind-independent
reality and with Brandoms Sellarsian attempt to interpret linguistic
meanings as a matter of the rights and responsbilities of participants in a
social practice. The writings of these three philosophers blend together, in
my imagination, to form a sort of manifesto for the kind of anti-
representationalist movement in philosophy whose aspirations I have just
outlined.
Occasionally, however, I come across passages, or lines of thought,
in Fines work, which are obstacles to my syncretic efforts. There are two
sets of passages in his 1984 paper (The Natural Ontologica l Attitude)
which arouse doubts; passages about reference and passages about
method. An example of the first reads as follows:
When NOA counsels us to accept the results of science as true, I
take it that we are to treat truth in the usual referential way, so that
a sentence (or statement) is true just in case the entities referred to
stand in the referred-to relations. Thus NOA sanctions ordinary
referential semantics and commits us, via truth, to the existence of
the individuals, properties, relations, processes, and so forth referred
to by the scientific statements that we accept as true. (p. 130)
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Reading this passage leaves me uncertain of whether, like
Davidson, Fine wants to read all the sentences we accept as truethe
ones accepted after reading literary critics as well as after reading
scientific textbooksas true just in case the entities referred to stand in
the referred-to relations Davidson thinks that the sentence
Perserverance makes honor bright is true in this way, just as much as
F=MA. But Davidson thinks this because he does not think that reference
has anything to do with ontological commitment, and indeed has no use
for the latter.
Fine does seem to have a use for this notions, and I suspec t he
drags in ordinary referential semantics because he thinks that reference
and ontological commitment have something to do with each other. I
think it would be more harmonious with the overall drift of his thinking to
mock that Quinean idea rather than to try to rehabilitate it. NOA, Fine
says, tries to let science speak fo itself, and it trusts in our native ability to
get the message without having to rely on metaphysical or
epistemological hearing aids. (And not, p. 63) So why drag in a semiotic
hearing aid such as ordinary referential semantics? If, as Fine
recommends, we stop trying to conceive of truth as a substantial
something, a something that will then act as limit for legitimate human
aspirations (And not, p. 56) , as a goal of inquiry, should we still say that
we are committed, via truth, to the existence of this or that? Whey
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should we conceive of existence as something which we sometimes
commit to and sometimes refrain from committing to? If we give up the
notion that we are trying to correspond to reality, as he suggests we do,
will we still ask ourselves questions like Am I committed to the existence of
X?
As support for my suggestion that the notion of ontological
commitment is one Fine could get along nicely without, let me cite
another of his instructive remarks about the analogy between religion and
realism. Fines answer to the question Do you believe in X?, for such Xs
as electrons and dinosaurs and DNA, is I take the question of belief to be
whether to accept the entities or instead to question the science that
backs them up. (Afterword, p. 184) Then, in response to the objection
But does not believe in mean that they really and truly exist out there in
the world? Fine says that he is not sure it does. He points out that those
who believe in the existence of God do not think that is the meaning, at
least not in any ordinary sense of really and truly out there in the world.
I take the point of the analogy to be that people who talk about
God as the unquestioningly and unphilosphically religious do not need to
distinguish between believing in God and talking the way they talk. To
say that they believe in God and that they talk the talk are two ways of
describing the same phenomenon. Similarly, Fine is saying, for a physicist
to say that to say that she believes in electrons and to say that she does
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not question the science behind electron-talk are two ways of describing
the same situation. When Kant or Tillich ask theists whether they are not
really talking about a regulative ideal or a symbol of ultimate concern,
rather than something that they think really exists, they are justifiably
irritated. Physicists should be equally irritated when asked whether they
think that statements about electrons are true or merely empirically
adequate. The theist sees no reason to resort to demonstrations of
existence, or analyses of the meaning of is when applied to God for he
talks God-talk into his life as true in exac tly the manner, in her capacity as
physicist, she talks electron-talk into her life as true.
It accords with the overall humanist position I outlined in the first
section of this paper to say there are no acts called assent or
commitment which we can perform that will put us in a different relation
to an object than simply talking about that object in sentences whose
truth we have taken into our lives. To use a word in a certain way and to
believe in the existence of the referent of that word is the same
phenomenon. The idea that we might be in a better position to figure out
what to believe by first finding out what there really and truly isby finding
the right ontology--is an impossible attempt to separate thought and
language from action.
Looked at another way, this idea epitomizes a confusion between
existential commitment and a profession of satisfaction with a way of
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speaking or a social practice. An existential commitment, as Brandom
nicely says in MAKING IT EXPLICIT, is a claim to be able to provide an
address for a certain singular term within the structured space provide
mapped out by certain canonical designators. (See MIE, pp. 444ff.) To
deny the existence of Pegasus, for example, is to deny that a continuous
spatiotemporal trejectory can be traced out connecting the region of
space-time occupied by the speaker to one occupied by Pegasus. To
deny that Sherlock Holmes fairy godmother exists is to deny that she can
be related to Conan Doyles text in the way that Moriarity and Mycroft
can. And so on for other structured spaces, such as those of
mathematics. The point of putting the matter Brandoms way is to make
clear that metaphysical discourse, the discourse of ontological
commitment, does not provide us with a such a structured space. It is,
instead, a discourse in which we express our like or dislike, our patience or
impatience with, various linguistic practices. We do so by pretending that
our decision about whether to engage in those practices can be based
upon reflection on the desirability of certain ontological commitments. But
this is fantasy. We talk first, and commitment falls out of the talk. Similarly,
as Davidson points out, we talk first, and reference falls out of the attempt
to interpret what we are saying.
Fine and Davidson seem to me entirely right in saying that we need
to stop the pendulum swinging back and forth between an analysis of trut
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of correspondence and an analysis of it as acceptance. I entirely agree
with Fines claim that we should be neither realists nor antirealists, and
should acknowledge that the concept of truth cannot be explained
or given an account of without circularity (And not, p. 62). But there
seems to me at least the potential for a division between Find and
Davidson when it comes to reference. If one takes Davidsons line on
reference, one will not find it natural to hook it up with the notion of
ontological commitments or attitudes. One will lots of sentential attitudes,
but no ontological ones.
Davidson urges that we not treat reference as a concept to be
given an independent analysis or interpretation in terms of non-linguistic
concepts. (Inquiries, p. 219) Rather, reference is, he says, a posit we
need to implement a theory of truth (bid., p. 222) For Davidson, a theory
of truth for a natural language does not explain reference, at least in this
sense: it assigns no empirica l content direc tly to relations between names
or predicates and objects. These relations are given a content indirectly
when the T-sentences are. (ibid, p. 223) If one assumes that a theory
which permits the deduction of all the T-sentences is all we need in the
way of what Fine calls ordinary referential semantics, then the notion of
reference becomes hard to tie up with that of ontological commitment. It
seems equally unnatural to ask whether I am committed either to the
existence of jejuneness or of magnetic monopoles. The notion of
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ontological attitude, or ontological commitment, seems to have no
function in the life of someone who takes the results of both physics and
literary criticism in the same way as we accept the evidence of our
senses (to use Fines phrase).
Perhaps, however, Fine would agree both with Davidson about the
nature of the notion of reference and with me about the need to treat
literary criticism and physics as producing truth, and reference, of exactly
the same sort. That he would is suggested by his saying that those who
accept NOA are being asked not to distinguish between kinds of truth or
modes of existence or the like, but only among truths themselves in terms
of centrality, degrees of belief, and the like. (NOA, 127)
This last quotation chimes with Fines remark that NOA is basically
at odds with the temperament that looks for definite boundaries
demarcating science from pseudo-science, or that is inclined to award
the title scientific like a blue ribbon on a prize goat. (And not, p. 62) It
chimes also with the last paragraph of his recent Presidential Address to
the APA, in which he says that the first false step in this whole area is the
notion that science is spec ial and that scientific thinking is unlike any
other. (Viewpoint, p. 19) If Fine would carry through on these remarks by
saying that there is no more point in using notions like reference and
ontological attitude in connection with physics than in connection with
literary criticism, then he and I might agree that nobody should ever
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bother to have an ontology. Nobody should have the sort of worries
Quine had, about having more things in his ontology than there are in
heaven and earth. To give up on the project of dividing culture into the
hard and the soft areas would lead one to give up on the project of listing
the things that there are in heaven and earth, a list presumed to be
shorter than the list of expressions in our language which can be
nominalized and thereby reified.
To take this line would mean that Einstein would not have been
worrying about a serious question when he, as Fine puts it, wanted to
claim genuine reality for the cnetral theoretical entities of the general
theory, the four-dimensional space-time manifold and assoc iated tensor
fields. Fine goes on to say that had Eintsteins claim been right then
space and time cease to be real. But if Fines ultimate view is what I
think it ought to be, he should hesitate to say that the war between
Einstein, the realist, and Bohr, the nonrea list, was not just a sideshow in
physics, nor an idle intellectual exercise. He should say rather that an idle
intellec tual exercise was the outward and visible form of a serious
discussion about what young physicists should and should not spend their
time looking for. Nor, if Fines view were what I would like it to be, would
he himself express the hope that quantum theory is at least consistent
with some kind of underlying reality. He would translate this ontological-
sounding remark into some sort of suggestion about what lines of research
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physicists will find profitable and which not. He would, in short, translate
remarks about what non-human things there really are into remarks about
what human beings should do to improve the human future.
One more example of a passage which makes me wonder whether
Fines view coincides with my own can be be found in the Afterword to
THE SHAKY GAME. There Fine says that
It is no possible to have a globa l characterization of scientific
productsneither as constructions, nor as externally real things, nor
as generally reliable models. If science is genuinely open, we need
to go local and particularist. We need to look at each case and see
what there is to say about the character of scientific products and
representations and whether any general characterization is
needed at all. (p. 188)
On the view I am suggesting, there is no need for a local characterization
either. For once we have decided that a scientific product (a set of
statements, a new device, a new hormone, a new vocabulary) is useful
for this and useless for that, and once we know how to get, or avoid
getting, similar products by steering students into this disciplinary matrix
rather than that, it is not clear what else we need to do. It is not clear why
we should want any further characterization, for the only
characterizations which might come to mind are likely to be variations on
the worn-out themes of hardness and softness: characterizations such as
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made found, instrumental and real. So although I applaud the
spirit of Fines remark that the realists determinate, external world is just
one more social construction, I balk at the letter. The realists conception
of inquiry, like the theists conception of mans position in the universe, is
no more or less constructed than is the human self-image which will, I
hope, dominate the culture of our remote descendantsa self-image in
which non-human authority plays no role, and in which the notion of love
of truth has become interchangeable with that of love of conversation.
I would rather say that we shall only escape the need for a hard-
soft distinction when we have abjured the made-found distinction, and
that therefore never start asking, about some given scientific product,
what our share and what natures share in its production has been. This is
why I am dubious about the Fines claim that Constructivism is a useful
antidote to realism; its attention to science in action deepens our
understanding of the soc ial in science and the myriad ways in which
science is open (p. 188). It seems to me that one can follow Latour
around on his tours of laboratory life without adopting anything remotely
like constructivism. I take the moral of Davidsons doctrine of
triangulation to be that everything we can ever speak of is a much
constructed, and as much real, as anything else. If that doctrine is right,
we do not need Latours notion of quasi-object, because there are no
objects which are not quasi..
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Before leaving the topics of reference and ontological
commimtment, let me remark that the passage I quoted about ordinary
referential semantics has been seized upon by Alan Musgrave tp ridicule
Fines claim to have a position distinct from that of the realist. Musgrave
would have had less ammunition, I think, if Fine had not only omitted this
passage but had been more explicit in admitting that NOA, as J ared
Leplin has lately said, is not an alternative to realism and antirealism, but
a preemption of philosophy altogether, at least at the metalevel. (Leplin,
p. 174) Leplin is right, in my opinion, to say that Fines idea that scientific
theories speak for themselves, that one can read off of them the
answers to a ll legitimate philosophical questions abouit science, cannot
be squared with the rich tradition of philosophical debate among
scientists over the proper interpretation of theories. So I think that the
Fine should not attempt to take the Einstein-Bohr debate at face value,
nor to rehabilitate notions like ontological commitment. He should grant
to Leplin that Philosophy of science in the role of interpreter and
evaluator of the scientific enterprise, and realism in particular, as such a
philosophy of science, are superfluous. (Leplin, p. 139) He should say that
we felt the need for such an interpreter, evaluator, and public-relations
man only so long as we thought of natural science as privileged by a
spec ial relation to non-human reality, and of scientists as the priests of the
modern age. .
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I said earlier that there is a sec ond set of passages in Fines writings
which made me wonder if I am really entitled to include him in my
syncretic projects. These are the passages in which he uses the term
method. Sometimes Fine seems to take this notion more seriously than I
think it deserves. At the beginning of The Natural Ontological Attitude
Fine says that Boyd and Putnam have focused on on the methods
embodied in scientific practice, methods teased out in ways that seem to
me accurate and preceptive about ongoing science, methods that
lead to scientific success. (NOA, p. 113) Here Fine speaks in the same
idiom as Philip Kitcher who, in his book THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE,
undertakes to to defend realism on the basis of an examination of what
he calls processes that are well-designed for promoting cognitive
progress (Kitcher, p. 192)
Kitchers argument for the residual truth of rationalism in the philosophy
of science is based on the claim that we can isolate such proc esses and
attribute the achievement of cognitive progress to their use. To make his
case, he would have to find a middle ground between the substantive
explanations of events put forward by scientists, and the disciplinary
matrices which shape themselves around acceptance of those
explanations, on the one hand, and uttterly general and completely
uncontroversial methodological platittudes on the other. I do not think
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that he, or any other writer on scientific method I have read, succeeds in
this task. When Kitcher commends, for example, elimination of
alternatives through the production of inconsistency, forced retreats that
open problems, and employment of background constraints (Kitcher, p.
288), he is not recommending anything that deserves to be called a
method or a cognitive process. He is describing an activity which all
human beings perform every day. When, on the other hand, Kitchers
examples of superior cognitive strategies are more spec ific, theya re
simply summaries of the arguments by means of which some victorious
scientific theory triumphed. Kitcher fails to give us an interesting difference
the difference between a process of reasoning and and an explanatory
schema, between a method a good idea.
I suspect that Fine became more dubious about the notion of
method, and less sympathetic to such efforts as Kitchers, in the years that
separate his 1984 article from his Presidential Address to the APA. For in the
latter we find him making fun of the idea that There are universal
principles governing the procedures that make for objectivity, principles
whose absence would lead to something that involves relativisim and
irrationalism. (Viewpoint, p. 13) His attitude in this paper chimes with
that in the Afterword, where he says that NOA is an attitude of trust in
two senses, the first of which he describes as follows:
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NOA trusts that scientists are serious people trying to do good work
and that scientific procedures are reliable ways of conducting that
serious enterprise. (the contrast here is with antiscience attitudes,
ranging from general skepticism to the derisive contempt toward
science that one sometimes encounters in the humanities.)
If one trusts that scientists are serious and reliable, then one will not
be inclined to ask what methods they employ. One will not try to find
something intermediate between their practices and their successes
something which can be called a cognitive strategy or a process of
reasoning, and evaluated for reliability in a general, methodological,
way. So one will not distinguish between epistemic and non-
epistemic or rational and irrational factors in scientific research, any
more than between artistic and non-artistic or creative and non-
creative factors in artistic production. One will settle for saying that we
call a scientists results true, and instances of cognitive progress, when we
think they compare well with those of her competitors, just as we praise an
artists productions when they compare well with his.
The same goes when one regards various other groups of people as
serious and reliable: for example, those politicians, literary critics, lawyers,
theologians, philosophers, hairdressers, carpenters, bird-watchers,
astrologers or engineers whom one has gotten in the habit of trusting.
One may have no use for, and therefore neither trust nor distrust
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concerning, one or another of these groups of experts. One may feel
derisive contempt for such a group if, having once been tempted to rely
on their results, one was severely disappointed. But ones attitude toward
any such group will not be determined by any methodological critique of
their procedures of justification. If I attribute a blissfully happy marriage, as
well as spectacular financial and professional success, to faithfully
following my favorite astrologers advice, I will not ask for an account of
how his procedures fit in with the nature of things, any more than I ask
how the expert bird-watcher can tell the Great Yellowlegs from the Lesser
from a hundred yards away. I shall trust them both, and no mere
philosopherand certainly no specialist in comparative methodologist--is
going to make me dubious. My trust is determined by their past utility, not
by ones grasp of the procedures of justification which are employed
within the group.
As I see it, the notion of method is a residue of the idea that
natural scientists, unlike literary critics, politicians and chicken-sexers, have
found a way to cut through appearance to reality. Viewed
etymologically, a method is a road that takes one from subject to object.
If one stops thinking of knowledge as a relation between mind or
language and an object, and instead thinks of it as the grasp of more true
sentences, then the notion of such a road becomes less plausible. Instead
of thinking of how we can get access to a kind of object, we view the
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object as whatever it is we are trying to talk about. If we talk about it, we
are never without access to it, and our attempt to say more useful things
about it is not a matter of getting closer to it or getting a clearer view of it
or fitting it better.
I think that the idea of scientific method and the idea that such
disciplines as philosophy or political science or law should become more
scientific are symptoms of our having been held capture by the picture
of an abyss which seperates human minds from non-human reality If we
instead get our pathos, romance, and ambition of transcendence by
contemplating the gap between ourselves and a utopian human future,
we should stop lamenting our lack of method and scientificity, and also
stop trying to reveal the natural scientists secrets of success.
If it were not for the public relations role of philosophy of science--a
role which was necessary in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
but which should have doffed in the course of the nineteenthI doubt
that we should ever have been told that geologists, astrophysicists,
evolutionary biologists, and botanists all used the same method. We
should not have thought that there was a natural kind called natural
science which had a subject and method of its own. We should have
assumed that one became a good scientist by going into somebodys lab
or seminar room and getting the hang of it. We should have found it
natural that no scientist would want his apprentices taking time off to
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study Cohen and Nagels INTRODUCTION TO LOGIC AND SCIENTIFIC
METHOD, or any other work which advised them about what cognitive
processes to use.
In arguing, as I have in the past, that natural science is not a
natural kind, I am of course speaking out of dense ignorance. All I am
entitled to say is that I have not yet encountered a work of philosophy of
science which gave me reason to think that geology, astrophysics and
the rest are any more closely linked to one another than to medicine, law
and engineering. It is always possible that Paul Gross is right when he says
that people who have not practiced science cannot understand the
nature of science. Perhaps Daniel Dennett is right that what he calls
flatfooted ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking
and their power is responsible for my holding the philosophical views that
I do, and for my lack of what he calls the intellectual leverage provided
by scientists fa ith in truth. Dennett claims that on the view I espouse it is
all just conversations, and [that] there are only politica l or historical or
aesthetic grounds for taking one role or another in an ongoing
conversation
I do indeed want to substitute the notion of conversation for that of
method. Agreeing as I do with Brandom that conversation is the highest
good for discursive creatures, I think that to take conversation seriously
to trust, at least initially, that ones interlocutors are serious and reliable
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inquirersis the best way to display the virtue Dennett calls love of truth.
Dennett thinks my writings discourage people from acquiring this virtue.
But he is wrong to suggest that, on my view, only such traditionally soft
grounds as might be labeled politica l or historical or aesthetic are
available. I think that the obvious grounds for being on one side or
another of a conversation about choosing between scientific theoires are
specifically scientific grounds. But I do not think that one can explicate
specifically scientific in any way that accords with the traditional project
of philosophy of science. One can identify a scientific ground for taking
a conversational side only by immersing oneself in the disciplinary matrix
within which a particular conversation is going on, and by making the
current state of that conversation part of your life.
To love truth in a given area of culture is, ninety-nine times out of a
hundred, simply to immerse oneself in one or another conversation
among people one trusts as serious and reliable, and then do ones best
to meet the expectations of ones interlocutors. In the hundreth case, of
course, the love of truth may lead one to break out of the disciplinary
matrix within which that conversation has been going on, and to try to set
up a new one. But I cannot see that either fidelity to disciplinary
expectations or the courage to effect a break-out can be correlated with
ones view on the philosophical questions over which Dennett and I, or
Fine and Leplin, disagree.
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Dennett, and many other critics of my work, seem to think that
scientists and desirably hard-minded philosophersargue, whereas literary
critics, bird-watchers, astrologers, and politicians simply c h a t . But
astrologers, like the the Oxbridge and Sorbonne Aristotelians of the
seventeenth century. do argue. One should grant them all the clarity and
rigor they claim, even if one agrees with Bacon and Descartes that the
topics they argue about are not worth discussing. The argument-chat
distinction is perfectly real, and most of us can tell which we are doing
when. But it does not map onto the traditional hard-soft distinction.
Argument between Heidegger and Sartre, or between T. S. Eliot and
Harold Bloom, are just as unchatty and just as serious as arguments about
Tyler Burge and Donald Davidson, or between Einstein and Bohr.
Dennett says that we have created a technology of truth and
that its name is science, I would respond that its name is high culture.
This is the area of culture which contains those disciplinary matrices in
which power and money matter less than achieving free agreement on
the answers to questions unintelligible to the vulgar. Philosophy is one
prominent part of high culture, so defined. One of the differences
between Dennett and myself is about whether Kant, Husserl, Russell on
others who wanted to put philosophy on the secure path of a science
improved or damaged the quality of philosophical conversation. I think
that these effects were harmful, and in my utopian human future they
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would c ease to be made. More specifically, I think that the question
What should the method of philosophy be? should cease to be asked.
J ust as the way to become a good scientist is to go into
somebodys laboratory and try to get in the swing of things, so the way to
become a good philosopher is to throw oneself into the works of some
well-reputed philosopher and try to talk his or her talk. This will work no
matter whether the good philosopher in question is Kant or Hegel,
Heidegger or Davidson, Nietzsche or Mill. You get into the philospohical
conversation by discussing what such people discussed, and in particular
by answering or being persuaded by their critics How good a philosopher
you get to be as a result of throwing yourself into one philosophical
conversation rather than another is not determined by your initial choice,
but of how conversable you are in later life: how well you can fuse your
own c onversational horizons with those of lots of other philosophers,
philosophers trained in different matrices and different countries.
In particular, there is no point in adivising young people, looking for
a philosopher whom they can heroize and imitate, that they should
attend to the methods being used. If I were told that Davidson uses a
good method, and Heidegger a bad one, or the converse, I would be
baffled. They seem to me to be distinguished not by methods but by
contexts of discussion, and further distinguished by the fact that they, but
not most of the other membesr of their respec tive cohorts, happened to
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come up with some brilliantly original ideasideas which wer no more the
result of applying a method than were Einsteins or Bohrs. .The terms
analytic method and phenomenological method strike me as of no
use. I would not know how to teach either method to a student. Neither
notion helps explains what differentiates Davidson from all the second-
rate hacks who also call themselves analytic philosophers, or Heidegger
from all those slavish disciples of Husserl who never had the guts to break
out on their own. Davidson entered philosophy by getting in on a
conversation between Quine and Carnap. Heidegger entered the field
by imagining a conversation between the Marburg neo-Kantians and
such figures as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Both men turned out to have
some original ideas. The search for a criterion which would make one of
them a good clear, rigorous philosopher and the other a bad, unclear,
unrigorous philosopher seems to me pointless,. Such a search, once
undertaken will always become a public relations exercise on behalf of
ones favored candidate. The notions of clarity and rigor, like that of
rationa l support, are determined by cultural expec tations. Differing
expectations about what to get out of physics accounted for the fac t
that, as Kuhn recounts, it took a hundred years to domestic a non-
Aristotelian mechanics. Differing expectations about what to get out of
philosophy typically take even longer to be resolved.
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. Leplin has one set of expectations about what counts as
philosophy of science, Fine another. Fine is, as Leplin suggests, staging a
break-out from a familiar disciplinary matrix. So, in less obvious ways, are
Brandom and Davidson; if there work were taken to heart, huge piles of
books and articles in the philosophy of language would be thought to
contain nothing but clever answers to pointless questions. The dec isions
participants in the relevant conversations come to about whether to
follow these three men into a non-representationalist philosophical utopia,
will not be made on what Dennett calls political or aesthetic or historical
grounds. They will be made on philosohical grounds, in the sense that
they will be the outcome of conversations in which only people who have
read quite a lot of philosophy will be able to take part.
But they will not be made by following a good or a bad
philosophical method, any more than you and I dec ide whom to vote for,
whom to propose marriage to, or where to go to school by following a
good or a bad method. They will be made in the way human beings have
always made such decisions when faced with a choice between two sets
of people, both made up serious, reliable, trustworthy interlocutors. When
the trustworthy disagree, we are on our own. But this is not to say that are
choices become irrational or aesthetic or political. They remain
conversational.
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In the areas of culture traditionally called hard, most of the
participants in the conversation eventually agree about what decision
was best. In other areas they do not. But this is not to be explained by the
existence of contact with the non-human in the former areas and lack of
such contacts in the latter. It is to be expalined by the fact that in the
former there is more agreement about what kind of product a given
disciplinary matrix is expected to produce. The sources of such
agreement are to the province of historians and sociologists, not of
epistemologists or ontologists.
Richard Rorty
May 3, 1999