Rorty against the Ontologists

Abstract

This essay contrasts Richard Rorty’s the low-key, naturalistic handling of ontological concerns with the metaphysical approach that has recently become predominant within philosophy. It identifies some features of the latter approach that will surprise many outsiders who sympathise with the anti-metaphysical turn taken since Hume. The essay suggests that while Rorty does not provide a theoretical antidote to metaphysically-laden ontology, he does offer pragmatic advice that its advocates would do well to heed.

Notes

1. W. V. O. Quine, “Speaking of Objects,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 1. Quine’s pivotal text was “On What There Is,” in From a Logical Point of View, 2d rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 1–19.

2. Quine, “Speaking of Objects,” 1.

3. As we later observe, this understanding is broadly Wittgensteinian, in the sense of recognizing the need to “Bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (Philosophical Investigations, 116).

4. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

5. See R. A. Posner, Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), chap. 1.

6. See, especially, Richard Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

7. John Dewey, “The Subject Matter of Metaphysical Inquiry,” in The Essential Dewey, Vol. 1, Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, ed. L. A. Hickman and T. M. Alexander (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 177.

8. Rorty derived his well-known notion of a pure philosophy of language from Donald Davidson. In this, as Ramberg astutely points out in “Rorty, Davidson and the Future of Metaphysics in America,” “truth is construed in purely semantic terms and no notion of reference with epistemic or ontological implications can get any traction at all” (435). For a detailed and insightful discussion of Davidson’s ‘lite’ approach to ontology, see Stephen Neale, “Meaning, Truth, Ontology,” in Interpreting Davidson, ed. Petr Kotatko, Peter Pagin, and Gabriel Segal (Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2001), 155–97. However, here and elsewhere, Neale is mostly unsympathetic to Rorty’s interpretation of Davidson (e.g., in Facing Facts [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Ramberg also argues that it is quite difficult to pin an anti-metaphysical stance on Davidson. However, what matters is whether Rorty could usefully extract views that support such a stance from Davidson’s work regardless of whether Davidson himself would have endorsed the results. Trying to find a better use for a philosopher’s ideas by invoking fresh contexts was Rorty’s modus operandi.

9. Much of Robert Brandom’s work is relevant, but the grounding text is the early “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time,” The Monist 66 (1983): 389–90. Richard Rorty, “Robert Brandom on Social Practices and Representations,” in Truth and Progress, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 127.

10. For a useful discussion of Rudolf Carnap’s pragmatist leanings, see Alan Richardson, “Carnapian Pragmatism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Carnap, ed. M. Friedman and R. Creath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 295–315.

11. Saul A. Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980) has often been identified as the main stimulus for a revival of metaphysics, but Kripke’s interests seem far removed from the recent rarefied work of ontologists.

12. Henry Kissinger once remarked that academic political squabbles are so fierce precisely because so little is at stake.

13. Trenton Merricks, Objects and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1.

14. A text that graphically illustrates the sort of features we have drawn attention to is D. Chalmers, D. Manley, and R. Wasserman, eds., Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The ethos generated by such texts is one in which serious, substantial objections even from within are simply swallowed up. Here I am thinking particularly of Eli Hirsch, Quantifier Variance and Realism: Essays in Metaontology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and Stephen Yablo, Things: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

15. Compare Rorty: “The reason why quarrels among metaphysicians about the nature of Reality seem so ludicrous is that each of them feels free to pick a few of her favourite things and claim ontological privilege for them” (“Pragmatism and Romanticism,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 106).

16. The notable exception here is Wittgenstein, though Rorty takes issue with certain influential interpretations of his work and with Wittgenstein himself over both his strictures about ‘nonsense’ and his lack of “interest in putting himself in the shoes of the great dead philosophers” thereby failing to treat “them as responsive to the intellectual and sociopolitical exigencies of particular times and places.” “Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 167.

17. Rorty, “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” 106.

18. Rorty points out, for example, that “Many of the issues discussed by Descartes, Hume, and Kant had cultural resonance only as long as a significant portion of the educated classes still resisted the secularization of moral and political life. ... But, as the so-called ‘warfare between science and theology’ gradually tapered off, there was less and less useful work for philosophers to do” (“Naturalism and Quietism,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 148). Those working on such problems usually pay lip service to notions of sociopolitical relevance, but these are invariably pitched at a high level of generality so that their philosophical results attract little wider interest.

19. Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, x.

20. Quine, reprinted in From a Logical Point of View, 20–46.

21. William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 35.

22. See Brandom, “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time.”

23. Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, x.