first note on Rorty

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For reasons having to do with my own exposure to ideas and works of Richard Rorty, it's become inescapable that I should eventually say my piece about the guy and his metaphilosophy.

This isn't because I consider him an important philosopher. I don't intend this as an insult. Rorty himself would probably have been pleased to be recognized as something other than a philosopher, in the same way antivenin, were it suitably opinionated, would be pleased to be seen as something completely apart from venom yet complementary to it, namely, as the thing that neutralizes its opposite.

But Rorty has been significant in raising metaphilosophical questions about what it means to do philosophy and whether philosophy is a worthwhile occupation.

I feel as though I'll never be motivated to become a great, or even passable, Rorty scholar, and in my lack of deep interest I seem to mirror Rorty's self-distancing from philosophy once he discovered how inessential or beside-the-point an activity it was.

The reasons for my uninterest, I want to say, are two:

(1) I don't find Rorty useful pragmatically, which may be to say that I don't agree with his variety of pragmatism, which I've heard described as "linguistic." So often the philosophical foundations and modes of expression that he decries continue to strike me as neither here nor there in practical terms. His linguistic pragmatism makes a linguistic turn of its own (the first having been the focus of analytic philosophy on language), in seeing language use as a central pragmatic consideration. I think it always was one practical consideration among others, as Austin made explicit but which lurks beneath the surface of nearly every Platonic dialogue. In the ethical scheme of things, language has always been a consideration, just not the most self-consciously pressing one.

(2) I've provisionally arrived at a quietist attitude of my own, and it's not Rorty's. Rorty's is (something like) that we should quiet our furious pursuit of Truth, because it is damaging to the more important condition of political comity in the quest for social justice. That is, high-aspiration philosophy as quasi-science should be abandoned for pragmatic reasons, because it sows dischord and tribal dichotomies.

The initial problem with this, for me, is that abandoning the question of truth doesn't seem to lead to pragmatic advantage. Truth is just another problematic that philosophy can raise without burning anyone at the stake, and philosophers can debate it in a civil (or at least a mock-invective) manner. Whither Socrates?

There will be a lot to say about the orthogonality of linguistic pragmatism to the legitimacy of philosophical topics, but the main point for present purposes is that the quietism Rorty advocates serves the pragmatic aims he discusses (though BTW I do consider him a philosophical skeptic and his opposition to truth-seeking "foundational" for him, for lack of a better word), whereas the quietism I've come to embrace is less about practicality and more about the inescapability of certain tendencies most of us humans seem to share.

It will still be of some interest whether there is free will, for instance, but regardless of whether there is or isn't, after all the careful definitions and epistemological parsing is done, we poor players will continue to act and feel as though we're making decisions.

Ditto for various other philosophical bones of contention. It's not that the foundational questions behind those controversies suddenly become uninteresting—and, as I've mentioned, I don't believe they become anti-pragmatic—it's just that we can, even as we indulge in theoretical speculation, recognize that our own lived experience and that of most people is going to treat the philosophical outcomes of many of the Big Questions as irrelevant to, or separate from, how we live and how we feel inside our own skins.

I'll just assert the following, for the sake of future discussion: we may be discoverers of reality and makers of strong theories, but we're also, to great extent, creatures who act and think as we do because we can't do otherwise.

a quiet place of my own

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of years after I dropped out of academic philosophy, I began to reflect on a suite of philosophical problems that have several features in common:

their apparent importance, even cruciality,
controversy surrounding them based on differing philosophical commitments, intuitions, or assumptions, and, nonetheless,
persistent, empirical judgments regarding them, by most people, that don't go away, even when a skeptical philosophical argument against the intuitive position is accepted by a given person.

A central example would be the question of free will. It seems as though a lot would be riding on the answer, but I assert, in rather Moorean fashion, that ordinarily all humans feel and act as though they are in control of their own actions, no matter what theories they may espouse. Personally, I find epiphenomenalism somewhat compelling, the idea that our conscious minds may be "just along for the ride," but that can't change the factoid that we're in the driver's seat, and that sense is not going to go away even if I (for instance) become convinced that we don't "actually" have free will.

The epiphenomenalist view is interesting, because it helps to demonstrate in the sharpest way that the correctness of a theory of consciousness (and consequently of agency) doesn't change how things seem to go for us. Imagine that epiphenomenalism is correct, and my conscious experience and sense of deciding on my own actions is just an illusion. Because, however, I still have feelings of making decisions and acting on them in a way that is seamlessly coordinated with my brain states and my body's behavior, I will never have a confounding experience to refute this sense. For whatever whacky reason, my conscious awareness is along for the ride in just such a way that, like George W. Bush, I'm the decider.

Dennett argues against homonculus theories of consciousness and self. I'll need to review his position, but I suspect it doesn't have much to do with the condition I'm talking about, the inescapability of the homunculus pose within our own experience.

It will be important to point out that I'm not talking about the psychological deformations that can take place in an individual when they become convinced there is no free will. We can imagine one person trying real hard to do the right thing, in case the theory is incorrect, but another person might throw caution to the wind and commit atrocities, supposing that no compunctions they may feel have any real, ethical force.

The further objection that the latter rather proves, doesn't it, that our consciousness does have some effect on changing our actions, can be addressed simply: just because we're aware of our change in theoretical posture and we consciously support our having embarked on a life of crime doesn't refute epiphenomenalism or any other anti-free will theory. If epiphenomenalism were correct, everything would continue to be synchronized just so that we felt we were making efficacious decisions.

My preferred reaction to what I would call the Inescapability Principle is a peculiar form of philosophical quietism. The quietism I've been exposed to the most is Rorty's, in which he extends Wittgenstein's "whereof we cannot speak…" to include most of what is practiced in anglophone, analytic philosophy departments. He advocates a quietism that puts to rest theories about right and wrong, free will, and, indeed, anything about which we feel tempted to say, "This is the [right|correct|true] view," the reason being largely that arguing over truth is the source of strife, invective, and damage to others, and is an obstacle to collegiality and solidarity which are obvious desiderata.

I may talk about Rorty's quietism another time, but I think it differs from mine. He is saying that philosophical theory-making is a bane pragmatically and should be avoided, while I'm saying there's no getting away from certain fundamental impressions we tend to have in human experience and out of respect for which we act, or seem to, in certain ways. My quietism, on its own, doesn't lead to any prescriptions for how it would be better to think; it merely acknowledges that we do seem to think and sense in certain ways, and that this seeming, contra Hamlet, is enough.

The eventual essay would deal with other examples of the Inescapability Principle besides free will.

long and short

first note on Rorty

a quiet place of my own