I have recently finished reading Richard Rorty’s Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism (Harvard UP, 2021).  The book is basically a series of lectures Rorty gave in Spain in 1996, but which (although published in Spanish in the late 1990s) were only published in English in 2021.  Some of the material from the lectures, however, were incorporated into essays Rorty did publish in English.

The occasion for reading the book was to participate in a conversation with my friends Graham Culbertson and Meili Steele—a conversation that will be published as a podcast on Graham’s site, Everyday Anarchism.  I will post a link when the episode goes live.

We did not, in our conversation, get deep into the weeds about Rorty’s epistemology.  We were more interested in his politics and directly in his “anti-authoritarianism” (as befits the context of an interest in anarchism).  Rorty’s claim in the lectures is that a “realist” epistemology (that aspires to a “true” account of how the world really is) is another version of theology.  That is, realism off-loads “authority” to some non-human entity, in this case “the world” instead of “God or gods.”  We must bow before the necessity of the way things are.

For Rorty, there is no definitive way things are, only different ways of describing things.  He understands that his claim 1) goes against “common sense” as well as the views of realist philosophers like Peirce, John Searle, and Thomas Nagel; and 2) cannot be itself justified as a statement of how humans process the world (i.e. as any kind of claim about how humans “are”).  There are no knock-down arguments for his non-realist position as contrasted to the realist one. 

The only basis for argument is comparative.  Try out my way of seeing things, says Rorty, and judge whether you find the consequences better.  I was surprised, reading Rorty this time, just how hard-core a consequentalist he is. The only criteria for making choices (whether they be choices of philosophical positions or choices about how to act) is whether one choice leads to more desirable outcomes than another.

Better for what?  That depends entirely on what one’s purposes are.  I can piss in the urinal or I can put it up on the museum wall and call it “Fountain.”  Neither use (or description) gets the urinal “right” (i.e. gets to some “truth” or “essence” or core identity about it).  Both are possible descriptions/uses of it amid a myriad of other possible uses/descriptions—and no one description/use is more fundamental or real than any other one.  Rorty’s is anti-reductionist and anti-depth. There is no basic “stuff” that underlies appearances, no essence lurking in the depths.  The physicist’s description makes sense within the language game of physics just as Duchamp’s description makes sense within the language game of modernist art.  But neither one can claim to tell the “real truth” about the urinal; each only illuminates another way the urinal can be described in relation to languages that humans deploy in pursuing different endeavors.

Along with being anti-reductionist (no description is more fundamental than any other or offers a way of comprehending other descriptions) and anti-depth, Rorty’s position is that identity is always relational and only activated (valid) in specific contexts.  Hence the appeal to Wittgensteinian “language games.”

What a thing “is” is only a product of its relation to the human who is describing it.  Rorty names his position “pan-relationalism.”  (Title of Chapter Five.)  His position is “that nothing is what it is under every and any description of it.  We can make no use of what is undescribed, apart from its relations to the human needs and interests which have generated one or another description. . . . A property is simply a hypostatized predicate, so there are no properties which are incapable of being captured in language.  Predication is a way of relating things to other things, a way of hooking up bits of the universe with other bits of the universe, or, if you like, of spotlighting certain webs of relationships rather than other webs.  All properties, therefore, are hypostatizations of webs of relationships” (85-86).

As a fellow pragmatist, I am inclined to accept pan-relationalism.  I very much want to be an anti-reductionist and an “appearances are all we get” kind of guy.  Many years ago I coined a slogan that I think captures this pragmatist view.  To wit:  “nothing is necessarily anything, but every thing is necessarily some thing.”  What this slogan says is that (to go back to the previous two posts) the things we encounter are plastic; they can be described—and related to—in a variety of ways.  Those things underdetermine our responses to, understandings of, and descriptions of them.  We can adopt any number of relational stances toward what experience offers.  So that’s the denial that anything is necessarily some particular, definitive, inescapable thing.

The other side of the slogan says: we do adopt a stance toward, we do make a judgment about, we do describe what we encounter.  We characterize it.  And in the Putnam/Burke manner of denying the fact/value divide, that adoption of a stance or a mode of relationship is dependent on the assessment we make of what experience (or the “situation”) offers.  We don’t just perceive or encounter something; we assess it, enter into a relationship to it (even if that relationship is indifference.  Relationships come in degrees of intensity, from judging this is something I needn’t attend to all the way to passionate involvement.) The claim is that we necessarily adopt some stance; there are multiple possibilities, but not the possibility of having no relation to the thing it all, to leave it utterly uncategorized. It will be “some thing,” although not necessarily any one thing.

Rorty offers his own version of this denial of the fact/value divide.  “To be a pan-relationalist means never using the terms ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ except in the context of some well-defined expert culture in which we can distinguish between adherence to the procedures which lead the experts to agree and refusal to so adhere.  It also means never asking whether a description is better suited to an object than another description without being able to answer the question ‘what purpose is this description supposed to serve’? (87).  Since all relations to objects are relative to purposes, there is no such thing as a non-relational observation that allows one to “represent the object accurately” (87) as it is in itself. 

So I am down with Rorty’s pan-relationalism.  But where he and I part company—and what generates the title of this blog post—is his denial of any relations that are non-linguistically mediated.  What Rorty wants to jettison from the pragmatism that he inherits from his hero Dewey is the concept of “experience.”  To Rorty, “experience” is just another version of the realist’s desire to establish a direct contact with the stuff of the universe. 

“Pragmatists agree with Wittgenstein that there is no way to come between language and its objects.  Philosophy cannot answer the question: Is our vocabulary in accord with the way the world is?  It can only answer the question” Can we perspicuously relate the various vocabularies we use to one another, and thereby dissolve the philosophical problems which seem to arise at the places where we switch over from one vocabulary into another? . . . . If our awareness of things is always a linguistic affair, if Sellars is right that we cannot check our language against our non-linguistic awareness, then philosophy can never be anything more than a discussion of the utility and compatibility of beliefs—and, more particularly, of the vocabularies in which those beliefs are formulated” (165).

In the vocabulary of my last two posts, Rorty writes: “Sellars and Davidson can be read as saying that Aristotle’s slogan, constantly cited by the empiricists, ‘Nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the senses,’ was a wildly misleading way of describing the relation between the objects of knowledge and our knowledge of things. . . . [W]e [should] simply forget about sense-impressions, and other putative mental contents which cannot be identified with judgments” (160).  No percepts in the absence of concepts.  No sensual experiences or emotional states that have not already been judged, already been subsumed under a concept.

This position—that there is no “non-linguistic” experience against which our words are measured leads to Rorty’s denial of “qualia.”  He accepts Daniel Dennett’s assertion that “there are no such things as qualia” (113), a position Rorty must defend (as Dennett also attempts to do in his work) against “the most effective argument in favor of qualia,” namely “Frank Jackson’s story of Mary the Color Scientist—the history of a woman blind from birth who acquires all imaginable ‘physical’ information about the perception of color, and whose sight is thereafter restored.  Jackson claims that at the moment she can see she learns something that she didn’t know before—namely what blue, red, etc. are like” (113).

In his usual maddening fashion, Rorty tells us the debate between Jackson and Dennett is not resolvable; it just comes down to “intuitions”.”  “The antinomies around which philosophical discussions cluster are not tensions built into the human mind but merely reflections of the inability to decide whether to use an old tool or a new one.  The inability to have an argument which amounts to manning one or another intuition pump results from the fact that either tool will serve most of our purposes equally well” (115).  I always think of Rorty of the Alfred E. Neumann of philosophers.  “What me worry?” as he makes his characteristic deflationary move: nothing much hangs on this disagreement, and there is no way to rationally adjudicate it.  You talk your way, I’ll talk mine, and let a thousand flowers bloom.

I do believe, along with William James (in the first lecture of Pragmatism), that we should be concerned about disagreements that actually generate consequential differences in behavior and practices.  Perhaps it’s because I come from the literary side of thinking about how and why one writes that I do find this difference consequential.  From the literary viewpoint, there is a persistent experience of the inadequacy of words, and a resultant attempt to “get it right,” to capture the “raw feel” of love, jealousy, envy—or of the perceptions and/or emotions that arise during a walk down a crowded city street.  Rorty’s only approach to this sense of what a writer is striving to accomplish seems to me singularly unhelpful.  He tells us that “the alternative is to take them [our linguistic descriptions] as about things, but not as answering to anything, either objects or opinions.  Aboutness is all you need for intentionality.  Answering to things is what the infelicitous notion of representing adds to the harmless notion of aboutness. . . . Aboutness, like truth, is ineffable, and none the worse for that” (171). So, it seems, Rorty accepts that we talk and write “about” things, but denies that worrying about the “accuracy” of our talk in, in any way, useful. And tells us that there really is nothing we can say about “aboutness.” Not helpful.

Note how this passage trots in the notions of “things” and of “the ineffable.”  The problem with positions that eschew common sense (i.e. the prevailing way we think about things) is that they must strive to revise the “errors” built into the very ways we talk.  Think of Nietzsche’s fulminating against the idea of “selfhood” as generated by grammatical form.  In any case, it’s awfully hard to jettison the hypostatization of “things”—which possess a kind of permanence and relative stability in their modes of manifestation in favor of a purely relational account of them (of what exactly are we talking if things have no existence except in relationship; is it impossible to identify separate entities in any relationship, or are all boundaries dissolved?)  Rorty, in fact, smuggles the world that has been well lost back in when he tells us that “we are constantly interacting with things as well as persons, and one of the ways we interact with both is through their effects upon sensory organs. But [this view dispenses with] the notion of experience as a mediating tribunal.  [We} can be content with an account of the world as exerting control on our inquiries in a merely causal way” (178-79). 

That causation merits the adjective “merely” follows from Rorty’s insistence that the world’s (or others’) causal powers upon us are distinct from the practices of (the language games of) “justification.”  We should “avoid a confusion between justification and causation, [which] entails claiming that only a belief can justify a belief” (179).  Justification is not based on an appeal to some way the world is, but to the warrants I offer for my belief that a certain stance or a certain course of action is preferable in this context.  Understanding justification in this linguistic, practice-oriented way means “drawing a sharp line between experience as cause of the occurrence of a justification, and experience as itself justificatory.  It means reinterpreting “experience” as the ability to acquire belief non-inferentially as a result of neurologically describable causal transactions with the world” (179-180). 

At this point, I think I must totally misunderstand Rorty because it seems to me he has reintroduced everything that he claimed to be excluding when he declares “I see nothing worth saving in empiricism” (189).  If the world generates beliefs through some causal process—and, even worse, if that generation of beliefs is “non-inferential”—then how have we escaped from the “myth of the given?”  Here’s what Rorty writes immediately following the passage just quoted: “One can restate this reinterpretation of ‘experience’ as the claim that human beings’ only ‘confrontation’ with the world is the sort which computers also have.  Computers are programmed to respond to certain causal transactions with input devices by entering certain program states.  We humans program ourselves to respond to causal transactions between the higher brain centers and the sense organs with dispositions to make assertions.  There is no epistemologically interesting difference between a machine’s program state and our dispositions, and both may equally well be called ‘beliefs’ or ‘judgments’”(180).  Generously, we can translate “We humans program ourselves” to mean “natural selection” has done that work—since (surely) we have been “given” the neurological equipment required to be sensitive to (to register) the world’s causal inputs.  I am pretty sure I didn’t program myself—at least not consciously.  Then again, Rorty is inclined to deny the whole notion of “conscious experience” (see page 121).

To repeat: I must be missing something here, since Rorty thinks appealing to what the world “causally” provides is radically different than appeals to qualia, or conscious experience, or non-linguistic percepts.  And I just don’t see the difference.

More directly to the point, however, is Meili’s brilliant observation in our podcast conversation that Rorty’s politics is based upon sensitivity to suffering, which is hard to claim is linguistic.  Do computers feel pain? Presumably not, which does seem to introduce an “epistemologically interesting distinction” between the computer’s processes and human dispositions. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge UP, 1989), Rorty characterizes “moral progress” as “the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation” (192).  His politics works from the hope of fostering solidarity through “imaginative identification with the details of others’ lives” (190), with an understanding of others’ vulnerability to pain and humiliation central to that identification, which can produce “a loathing for cruelty—a sense that it is the worst thing we do” (190).  Meili’s point was that “pain and humiliation” are distinctly non-linguistic.  We are being gas-lighted when someone tries to convince us we are not feeling pain, have not been humiliated.  Thus, Rorty’s political commitments seem to belie his insistence that it’s all linguistic, that there are no percepts, no experiences apart from linguistic categories/concepts.  Is a dog or a new-born incapable of feeling pain? Surely not. Maybe incapable of feeling humiliated—but even that seems an open question.

Still, I don’t want to end by suggesting some kind of full-scale repudiation of Rorty’s work, from which I have learned a lot, and I remain sympathetic to much of it.  So I want to close with the passage in the book where I think Rorty’s make his case most persuasively.  It is also where he is most Darwinian in precisely the ways that James and Dewey were Darwinian—namely, in viewing humans as “thrown” (Heidegger’s terms) into a world with which they must cope.  Humans are constantly interacting with their environment, assessing its affordances and its constraints/obstacles, adapting to that world (which includes others and social institutions/practices as well as “natural” things), learning how to negotiate it in ways that further their purposes, acting to change it where possible, suffering what it deals out when changes are not feasible.  In this view, there can never be a “neutral” view of something or some situation; things and situations are “always already” assessed and characterized in relation to needs and purposes.  “The trail of the human serpent is over all” as James memorably put it; there is no “innocent” seeing.

Here’s Rorty’s version of that way of understanding how humans are situated in the world.  “Brandom wants to get from the invidious comparison made in such de re ascriptions as ‘She believes of a cow that it is a deer,’ to the traditional distinction between subjective appearance and objective reality.  It seems to me that all such invidious comparisons give one is a distinction between better and worse tools for handling the situation at hand—the cow, the planets, whatever.  They do not give us a distinction between more or less accurate descriptions of what the thing really is, in the sense of what it is all by itself, apart from the utilities of human tools for human purposes. . . . I can restate my doubts by considering Brandom’s description of ‘intellectual progress’ as ‘making more and more true claims about the things that are really out there to be talked and thought about.’  I see intellectual progress as developing better and better tools for better and better purposes—better, of course, by our lights” (172).

We are in the Darwinian soup, always navigating our way through an environment that provides opportunities and poses threats.  There is no way to abstract ourselves from that immersion.  And Rorty thinks we will be better off if we make common cause with the others in the same predicament.