Richard Rorty, Thomas Nagel, and the Platonic Myth
by Bill Ramey
I. G. E. Moore and Thomas Nagel
J. M. Keynes had this to say about G. E. Moore's intuitive acceptance of philosophical realism:
Moore had a nightmare once in which he could not distinguish propositions from tables. But even when he was awake, he could not distinguish love and beauty and truth from the furniture. They took on the same definition of outline, the same stable, solid, objective qualities and common sense reality. (Qtd. in White: 94)Commenting on the various attempts by realists to bridge the gap between belief and knowledge, Thomas Nagel writes: "A fourth reaction is to turn one's back on the abyss and announce that one is now on the other side. This was done by G. E. Moore" (69n). Given that Nagel's response to this reaction is confined to this one statement, found in a footnote, Nagel does not seem to share Moore's philosophical optimism in crossing the abyss. Nevertheless, Nagel at least thinks that we should try to cross the abyss, even if we never get to the other side:
[T]he thing we can do which comes closest to getting outside of ourselves is to form a detached idea of the world that includes us, and includes our possession of that conception as part of what it enables us to understand about ourselves. (70)Though this is not the common sense realism of Moore, it is realist in its assumption that one can become detached from one's particular point of view and form a general point of view that in varying degrees corresponds to reality. To be sure, this is not the Platonic picture of going above the divided line and seeing the forms, but in Richard Rorty's language, it is still part of the transcendental tradition of Philosophy.
It is this tradition, whether represented by Plato, Moore, or Nagel, that Rorty opposes and critiques. This paper will look at his specific critique of Nagel, his general critique of the "Platonic myth," and some possible responses to Rorty from a realist point of view.
II. Rorty and Nagel
Rorty makes a distinction between two types of realism: technical realism and intuitive realism. Technical realism comes from a physicalist view of the philosophy of language, namely that language refers to the physical world regardless of one's intentions toward the world. Nagel, according to Rorty, is an intuitive realist, one who argues that philosophical problems do not arise merely from language or the clash of vocabularies. Using Nagel as his main example, Rorty makes three overall critiques of intuitive realism.
First, Rorty questions the usefulness of Nagel's argument that (1) science cannot reduce the first-person point of view to a physicalist third-person point of view and that (2) it cannot account for the intuitions left over after an analysis, for example, of moral judgement. Rorty does not take issue with the idea that non-reducible intuitions exist; rather he questions the conclusion drawn from the existence of such intuitions:
[H]ow do we know whether to say, "So much the worse for the solubility of philosophical problems, for the reach of language, for our 'verificationist' impulses," or whether to say, "So much the worse for the Philosophical ideas which have led us to such an impasse"? (xxxiv)The intuitive realist views the existence of leftover intuitions as a beacon pointing to something beyond. Rorty wonders why it is not seen as a feature of a particular vocabulary.
Second, Rorty makes a similar point regarding the status of these intuitions vis-à-vis Wittgenstein's view of language. Nagel opposes both the physicalist rejection of the incorrigibility of first-person states and Wittgenstein's rejection of the Cartesian tradition, again arguing that the existence of intuitions indicates something more fundamental about consciousness than third-person brain states and culturally-limited vocabularies. But Rorty asks "whether we should abandon the pragmatical 'verificationist' intuition that 'every difference must make a difference' ... or instead abandon Nagel's intuition about consciousness" (xxxv). Again, Rorty's concern is not over the existence of intuitions, but the usefulness of seeing them as indications of a metaphilosophical reality. He does not see the "cash-value" of a tradition focused on the pursuit of incorrigible intuitions.
Rorty's critique of Nagel culminates in the question "can one ever appeal to nonlinguistic knowledge in a philosophical argument?" Nagel does not think that a vocabulary to explain the consciousness of a bat or a Martian is needed before one can know that bats and Martians have intuitions, because we know that we have intuitions even if Martians lack a vocabulary to describe theirs. This metalinguistic view of knowledge is exactly what bothers Rorty about intuitive realism. He and other pragmatists do not have an argument against it or another philosophical theory to set in its place; rather they question the usefulness of realism and present an alternative view stressing the ubiquity of language:
[The pragmatist's] only argument for thinking that these intuitions and vocabularies should be eradicated is that the intellectual tradition to which they belong has not paid off, is more trouble than it is worth, has become an incubus. Nagel's dogmatism of intuitions is no worse, or better, than the pragmatist's inability to give noncircular arguments. (xxxvii, emphasis Rorty's)Presumably--he does not say in this passage--Rorty does not believe that the tradition has paid off because after 2500 years no standard agreement over philosophical issues has emerged, or at least no agreement which has made a difference in people's lives. Following Dewey, he argues that the relative strength of a vocabulary comes from its ability to cope, Baconian-style, with life. Using Nagel's example, the fact that Martians have intuitions that cannot be described is empty, not deep; it does not make any difference except to a vocabulary which grants it a significance. If Rorty were an analytic philosopher, he might argue that Nagel's case, at best, is trivially true--like the analytic proposition "all bachelors are unmarried males," which is true, but hardly profound and hardly what pragmatists such as Rorty and Dewey see as being useful in a Baconian sense.
III. Rorty and the "Platonic Myth"
Rorty's critique of intuitive realism, however, is only one part of a critique of what he calls the "Platonic myth." He places nearly every non-pragmatic philosophy--from Platonism to positivism--within this tradition and even places Kant and Plato, who had vastly different things to say about transcendental philosophy, within that tradition. As with his analysis of realism, Rorty denies that he has a new theory, a new tradition, or new arguments to replace the traditional ones. Instead, his critique is based on a picture of the history of philosophy à la Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy, Nietzsche's descriptive genealogies, and Foucault's archaeologies. The critique of that picture focuses on key pragmatist (as defined by Rorty) concepts, four of which stand out.
The most overt one is what Rorty calls the pragmatist theory of truth: "This theory says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about" (xiii). He qualifies this view to mean that though one can attribute truth to a particular statement or belief, one cannot say anything about truth as a whole; one cannot say what is common to all true statements. Against the positivists, who argue that all true statements are either analytically true or empirically verifiable, Rorty rejects the idea of correspondence:
[M]odern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope. [The pragmatist's] argument for the view is that several hundred years of effort have failed to make interesting sense of the notion of "correspondence" ... (xvii)What Rorty means here and in other passages by "interesting" is difficult to tell. It looks a lot like a criterion for making judgments about the merit of a theory or philosophy, but Rorty's views preclude him from giving a universal criterion for distinguishing a good theory from a bad theory.
Even more troublesome is the pragmatic theory of truth (as defined by Rorty), according to which no interesting theories of truth can be had. It is obvious that if this theory includes itself, then the pragmatist theory of truth is itself not philosophically interesting. This is the same kind of problem the positivists had with the verification principle; the principle itself is neither analytically true nor empirically verifiable. Rorty is aware that he cannot offer noncircular arguments and that pragmatists face a dilemma:
[I]f their language is too philosophical, too "literary," they will be accused of changing the subject; if it is too philosophical it will embody Platonic assumptions which will make it impossible for the pragmatist to state the conclusion he wants to reach. (xiv)If Rorty solves the problem, he does so with another key concept--philosophy as a literary genre founded by Plato: "Philosophy is best seen as a kind of writing" (92). By making this move, Rorty can argue that if the pragmatist theory of truth cannot support itself with a correspondence argument, then neither can the Platonist or positivist theory of truth, as he does above in saying that Nagel's "dogmatism of intuitions" is no better than the circularity of pragmatism. Each theory of truth is a literary genre, a vocabulary, a perspective; what makes one "better" than another is the use to which it is put.
Philosophy as a literary genre leads to another Rortian concept that tries to cope with the dilemma, namely, his view of a post-philosophical culture as a diverse conversation, in which the philosopher does not have a privileged status:
The question of whether the pragmatist view of truth--that it is not a profitable topic--is itself true is thus a question about whether a post-Philosophical culture is a good thing to try for. (xliii, emphasis Rorty's)Rorty knows that this question will not be resolved dialectically, through argumentation and theorizing, but through putting "everything up for grabs at once." This, if anything, is the rock-bottom claim of Rortian pragmatism. The Platonic and pragmatist views of truth will not struggle dialectically for victory; there will be no glorious victor, no vanquished loser, only the passing of one era into another.
Works Cited
Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.
Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982.
White, Morton, ed. The Age of Analysis. New York: New American Library, 1983.