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Escape from Boredom: Edification According to Rorty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Isaac Levi
Isaac Levi*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

Richard Rorty sings in the antifoundationalist chorus. His song equates the rise of foundationalist epistemology with the professionalization of philosophy. The discordant notes he finds in the foundationalist score become, as a consequence, subversive of philosophy as an autonomous discipline.

Nonetheless, the most salient feature of Rorty's recent book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, is that it is by a professional philosopher, for professional philosophers and about the future of philosophy as a profession. The early chapters of the book are polished pieces of professional philosophical prose addressed to issues which have provoked interest in recent years among members of academic philosophy departments. They represent efforts to undermine foundationalist epistemology even in some of its currently fashionable guises as philosophy of language.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , December 1981 , pp. 589 - 601
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1981

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Footnotes

*

David Weissman first drew my attention to the centrality of the concern with boredom in Rorty's view. Frederick Schick made some constructive editorial suggestions. In no other respects are Weissman or Schick to be held accountable for what I have written.

References

1 Rorty, R. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell 1980) 320.Google Scholar

2 loc. cit.

3 Ibid., 316.

4 Ibid.,318.

5 Ibid., 317-318.

6 Ibid., 358-359.

7 Ibid., 394.

8 Ibid., 327.

9 See Levi, I. The Enterprise of Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1980), 180-2Google Scholar and ‘Abduction and Demands for Information,’ in The Logic and Epistemology of Scientific Change, Niiniluoto, I. and Tuomela, R. eds., Acta Philosophica Fennica, 30 (1979) 405-29.Google Scholar

10 Rorty,317.

11 Ibid., ch. 6.

12 Rorty does worry about the difference between conceptual shifts and revolutionary shifts (footnote 1, p. 316) but nowhere comes to terms with the main point — namely, that revolutionary shifts, like conceptual shifts, are changes of doctrine which cannot be assessed from a ‘neutral’ point of view. I suspect that his failure to address this point stems from his confusion of the feasibility of moving to a point of view neutral for the issues under scrutiny with the feasibility of moving to a point of view neutral for all controversies.

13 Ibid., 322.

14 In ‘On the Seriousness of Mistakes’ (Philosophy of Science, 29 (1962) 47-65), I suggested that the choice of caution levels in statistical testing reflected a tradeoff between the urge to remove doubt and to avoid error. This idea was elaborated and extended to scientific inquiry generally in my Gambling with Truth and ‘Information and Inference,’ (Synthese (1967) 387-91) in 1967. The relations between my views on these matters and Kuhn's rather later observations about tradeoffs are discussed in chapter 3 of my The Enterprise of Knowledge.

15 Rorty, 322-3.

16 Ibid., 331.

17 Dewey, John Logic (New York: Holt 1938) 79.Google Scholar

18 Some ramifications of this view are discussed in the first three chapters of The Enterprise of Knowledge.

19 Dewey, 78.

20 Ibid., 78-9.