richard rorty, "realism and the reasons of the heart", may 3, 1999

7/28/2019 Richard Rorty, "Realism and the Reasons of the Heart", May 3, 1999

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REALISM AND THE REASONS OF THE HEART

In a footnote to his seminal article The Natural Ontological

Attitudean article which begins with the sentence Realism is dead

Arthur Fine offers a pregnant analogy between realism and religion.

In support of realism there seem to be only those reasons of the

heart which, as Pascal says, reason does not know. Indeed, I have

long felt that belief in realism involves a profound leap of faith, not

at all dissimilar from the faith that animates deep religious

convictions. I would welcome engagement with realists on this

understanding, just as I enjoy conversation on a similar basis with my

religious friends. The dialogue will proceed more fruitfully, I think,

when the realists finally stop pretending to a rational support for

their faith, which they do not have. Then we can all enjoy their

intricate and sometimes beautiful philosophical constructions (of,

e.g., knowledge, or reference, etc.) even though to us, the

nonbelievers, they may seem only wonder-full castles in the air.

In various recent articles, I have tried to expand on Fines analogy

between realism and religion. I have been suggesting that we see realism

as an etiolated version of the religious attempt to bow down before a

non-human power to which human beings owe respect. I have also

urged that we see the idea that natural science is privileged over other

parts of culture as a version of the priestly project of c laiming respec t from


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other humans because of ones purported special relation to such a

power. As I see it, the great divide in contemporary philosophical

thinking is between representationalists who believe that there is an

intrinsic nature of non-human reality to be held in human thought and

antirepresentationalists who believe that scientific, like moral, progress is a

matter of finding ever more effective ways for enriching human life.

Representationalists are necessarily realists, since if they did not believe

that there was a Way the World Is In Itself they would have no reason to

insist that culture is divided between areas where there is a fact of the

matter and areas in which there is not. Whereas realists find pathos in the

thought of the gap which seperates human thought from its non-human

object, we antirerpesenationalists find pathos in thinking of the distance

which seperates us from a utopian human futurefrom the world in which

our remote descendantsl have developed far better ways of dealing with

the non-human environment, presently unimaginable artistic genres, and

far kinder and more decent social institutions and customs.

On my account of modern times, the pathos of mans seperation

from God has been succeeded, among the intellectuals, by these two

alaternative forms of pathos. If you do not like the term pathos, the

word Romance will do as well. Or one could use Thomas Nagels term

the ambition of transcendence. The important point is not the choice of

terms but the recognition that both sides in contemporary philosophy are


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trying to find a suitable replacement for religion. Representationalism and

realism are no more or less passtionately irrational than anti-

representationalist humanism. Neither side is ever going to have a knock-

down argument, any more than Enlightenment secularism had a knock-

down argument against traditional theism. .

The heartfelt conviction that there just must be a non-human

authority to which we can resort has been, for a very long time, woven

into the common sense of the West. It is a conviction common to Soc rates

and to Luther, to scientists who say they love truth and fundamentalists

who say they love C hrist. Reweaving the network of shared beliefs and

desires which makes up Western culture so as to get rid of this conviction

will take centuries, or perhaps millenia. This reweaving, if it ever occurs, will

result in an inabilty to share the intuitions which, in our culture, are

pumped up by the cosmological argument for the existence of God and

by the argument that only correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality

can explain the success of natural science.

I think that it is a bit misleading to say, as Fine does in the quotation

with which I began, that such arguments as these cannot provide

rational support for the view being defended. What counts as rational

support, like what counts as valid inference, is a matter of what people

are willing are accustomed to take as rational or as valid, and this in turn is

what coheres with their intuitions. Those intuitions are determined by the


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culture in which they have been raised, and there is no way to short-

circuit culture by appealing either to Reason or to Nature. The battle is

always between an old culture and one striving to be born.

As an example of what I mean, consider the theist who is told that

the term God, as used in the conc lusion of the cosmological argument

is merely a name for our ignorance. Consider the realist who is told that his

explanation for the success of science is no better than Molieres doc tors

explanation of why opium puts people to sleep. Both are, in most cases,

equally unfazed. Even if they go so far as to admit that their opponents

objection to their favorite argument admits of no refutation, they insist that

it produces no conviction. For they feel the need for answers to questions

like What came before the Big Bang? and Why does science

succeed? So they typically fall back on rhetorical questions such as If

not God, what? If not correspondence to reality, what? They think that

anyone who does not share the need to answer these questions, anybody

who just shrugs them off, is being irrational. Realists think that it is irrational

for Fine to shirk the attempt to explain the success of science, just as

theists think it irrational of Hume, Kant and Steven Weinberg to speculate

about the nature of the First Cause.

It is often said that religion was refuted by showing the incoherence

of the concept of God or by showing that there is no evidence for the

existence of God. It is often said that realism can be refuted by showing


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the incoherence of the notions of World or correspondence as the

realist uses them. Both claims seem to me almost entirely wrong. No one

accustomed to throw around a term like the will of God or mind-

independent World in complex and sometimes persuasive arguments is

ever going to be persuaded that his concepts are incoherent. A concept

is just the use of a word, and useful words cannot be denied coherence

simply because their users can be forced into tight dialectical corners.

Insofar as religion is dying, it is because of the attractions of a humanist

culture, not because of flaws internal to the discourse of theists. Insofar as

realism is dying, it is because of the attractions of a culture which is more

deeply and unreservedly humanist than that offered by the arrogant

scientism which is the philosophical position most frequently associated

with the ideals of the Enlightenment.

For all these reasons, it seems best to stop saying that either religion

or realism is unsupported by rational argument, and instead to say that

the notion of rational support is not apropros when it comes to proposals

to retain, or to abandon, intuitions as deep-lying and long-lasting as those

to which theists, realists, and we anti-representationalists appeal. Where

argument always seems to fail, as J ames rightly says in The will to

believe, the reasons of the heart should have their way. But this does not

mean that the human heart always has the same reasons, asks the same

questions, and hopes for the same answers. The gradual growth of


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secularismthe gradual increase in the number of people who do not

find theism what J ames called a live, momentous and forced option, is

testimony to the hearts malleability.

Only when the sort of cultural change I envisage is complete will we

be able to start doing what Fine suggests--enjoying such beautiful and

intricate theistic or realistic constructions as SpinozasEth ic sand Kripkes

Nam ing a nd Nec essityas aesthetic spec tac les. Only when realism is no

longer a live, momentous and forced option for us, only when Dummett

can no longer find an audience for his view of the history of philosophy,

will we be able to hear questions about the mind-independence of the

real as having the quaint charm of questions about the consubstantiality

of the Persons of the Trinity. In the sort of culture which I hope our remote

descendants may inhabit, the philosophical literature about realism and

anti-realism will have been aestheticized in the same way as we have

aestheticized the debate between Occamites and Scotists.

Dummett capitalizes on a hope which has burned brightly since

Platothe hope that we can divide up the culture into the bits where the

non-human is encountered and acknowledged, the hard areas, and the

softer areas in which we are on our own. This need to divide culture into

harder and softer areas is, I think, the most familiar and pervasive

contemporary form of the idea that there is something to which human

beings are responsible save other human beingssomething like God or


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Truth or Reality. The idea of a hard area of culture is the idea of an area in

which this responsibility is salient. Dummetts suggestion that a lot of

philosophy is about the question of whether bivalence obtains for a

certain range of sentences amounts to the c laim that philosophers have a

spec ial responsibility for telling us where the hard ends and the soft begins.

A great deal of Fines work is devoted to casting doubt on the need

to draw that line. He is the philosopher of science who has done most to

deflate the arrogance embodied in Quines quip that philosophy of

science is philosophy enough. Much of what he has written gears in nicely

with the writings of two other contemporary philosophersDonald

Davidson and Robert Brandomwho are trying to put all true sentences

on a referential par, and thereby to erase the line between the hard and

the soft. Fine, Davidson and Brandom have helped us understand how to

stop thinking of intellec tual progress as a matter of increasing tightness of

fit with the non-human world and how to picture it instead as our being

forced by that world to reweave our networks of belief and desire in ways

that make us better able to cope. Humanism, in the sense I am using the

term, will only triumph when we no longer discard the question Do I know

the real object, or only one of its appearances? and replace it with the

question Am I using the best possible description of the situation in which I

find myself, or can I find a better one?


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I see Fines NOA papers as fitting in nicely with Davidsons claim

that we can make no good use of the notion of mind-independent

reality and with Brandoms Sellarsian attempt to interpret linguistic

meanings as a matter of the rights and responsbilities of participants in a

social practice. The writings of these three philosophers blend together, in

my imagination, to form a sort of manifesto for the kind of anti-

representationalist movement in philosophy whose aspirations I have just

outlined.

Occasionally, however, I come across passages, or lines of thought,

in Fines work, which are obstacles to my syncretic efforts. There are two

sets of passages in his 1984 paper (The Natural Ontologica l Attitude)

which arouse doubts; passages about reference and passages about

method. An example of the first reads as follows:

When NOA counsels us to accept the results of science as true, I

take it that we are to treat truth in the usual referential way, so that

a sentence (or statement) is true just in case the entities referred to

stand in the referred-to relations. Thus NOA sanctions ordinary

referential semantics and commits us, via truth, to the existence of

the individuals, properties, relations, processes, and so forth referred

to by the scientific statements that we accept as true. (p. 130)


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Reading this passage leaves me uncertain of whether, like

Davidson, Fine wants to read all the sentences we accept as truethe

ones accepted after reading literary critics as well as after reading

scientific textbooksas true just in case the entities referred to stand in

the referred-to relations Davidson thinks that the sentence

Perserverance makes honor bright is true in this way, just as much as

F=MA. But Davidson thinks this because he does not think that reference

has anything to do with ontological commitment, and indeed has no use

for the latter.

Fine does seem to have a use for this notions, and I suspec t he

drags in ordinary referential semantics because he thinks that reference

and ontological commitment have something to do with each other. I

think it would be more harmonious with the overall drift of his thinking to

mock that Quinean idea rather than to try to rehabilitate it. NOA, Fine

says, tries to let science speak fo itself, and it trusts in our native ability to

get the message without having to rely on metaphysical or

epistemological hearing aids. (And not, p. 63) So why drag in a semiotic

hearing aid such as ordinary referential semantics? If, as Fine

recommends, we stop trying to conceive of truth as a substantial

something, a something that will then act as limit for legitimate human

aspirations (And not, p. 56) , as a goal of inquiry, should we still say that

we are committed, via truth, to the existence of this or that? Whey


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should we conceive of existence as something which we sometimes

commit to and sometimes refrain from committing to? If we give up the

notion that we are trying to correspond to reality, as he suggests we do,

will we still ask ourselves questions like Am I committed to the existence of

X?

As support for my suggestion that the notion of ontological

commitment is one Fine could get along nicely without, let me cite

another of his instructive remarks about the analogy between religion and

realism. Fines answer to the question Do you believe in X?, for such Xs

as electrons and dinosaurs and DNA, is I take the question of belief to be

whether to accept the entities or instead to question the science that

backs them up. (Afterword, p. 184) Then, in response to the objection

But does not believe in mean that they really and truly exist out there in

the world? Fine says that he is not sure it does. He points out that those

who believe in the existence of God do not think that is the meaning, at

least not in any ordinary sense of really and truly out there in the world.

I take the point of the analogy to be that people who talk about

God as the unquestioningly and unphilosphically religious do not need to

distinguish between believing in God and talking the way they talk. To

say that they believe in God and that they talk the talk are two ways of

describing the same phenomenon. Similarly, Fine is saying, for a physicist

to say that to say that she believes in electrons and to say that she does


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not question the science behind electron-talk are two ways of describing

the same situation. When Kant or Tillich ask theists whether they are not

really talking about a regulative ideal or a symbol of ultimate concern,

rather than something that they think really exists, they are justifiably

irritated. Physicists should be equally irritated when asked whether they

think that statements about electrons are true or merely empirically

adequate. The theist sees no reason to resort to demonstrations of

existence, or analyses of the meaning of is when applied to God for he

talks God-talk into his life as true in exac tly the manner, in her capacity as

physicist, she talks electron-talk into her life as true.

It accords with the overall humanist position I outlined in the first

section of this paper to say there are no acts called assent or

commitment which we can perform that will put us in a different relation

to an object than simply talking about that object in sentences whose

truth we have taken into our lives. To use a word in a certain way and to

believe in the existence of the referent of that word is the same

phenomenon. The idea that we might be in a better position to figure out

what to believe by first finding out what there really and truly isby finding

the right ontology--is an impossible attempt to separate thought and

language from action.

Looked at another way, this idea epitomizes a confusion between

existential commitment and a profession of satisfaction with a way of


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speaking or a social practice. An existential commitment, as Brandom

nicely says in MAKING IT EXPLICIT, is a claim to be able to provide an

address for a certain singular term within the structured space provide

mapped out by certain canonical designators. (See MIE, pp. 444ff.) To

deny the existence of Pegasus, for example, is to deny that a continuous

spatiotemporal trejectory can be traced out connecting the region of

space-time occupied by the speaker to one occupied by Pegasus. To

deny that Sherlock Holmes fairy godmother exists is to deny that she can

be related to Conan Doyles text in the way that Moriarity and Mycroft

can. And so on for other structured spaces, such as those of

mathematics. The point of putting the matter Brandoms way is to make

clear that metaphysical discourse, the discourse of ontological

commitment, does not provide us with a such a structured space. It is,

instead, a discourse in which we express our like or dislike, our patience or

impatience with, various linguistic practices. We do so by pretending that

our decision about whether to engage in those practices can be based

upon reflection on the desirability of certain ontological commitments. But

this is fantasy. We talk first, and commitment falls out of the talk. Similarly,

as Davidson points out, we talk first, and reference falls out of the attempt

to interpret what we are saying.

Fine and Davidson seem to me entirely right in saying that we need

to stop the pendulum swinging back and forth between an analysis of trut


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of correspondence and an analysis of it as acceptance. I entirely agree

with Fines claim that we should be neither realists nor antirealists, and

should acknowledge that the concept of truth cannot be explained

or given an account of without circularity (And not, p. 62). But there

seems to me at least the potential for a division between Find and

Davidson when it comes to reference. If one takes Davidsons line on

reference, one will not find it natural to hook it up with the notion of

ontological commitments or attitudes. One will lots of sentential attitudes,

but no ontological ones.

Davidson urges that we not treat reference as a concept to be

given an independent analysis or interpretation in terms of non-linguistic

concepts. (Inquiries, p. 219) Rather, reference is, he says, a posit we

need to implement a theory of truth (bid., p. 222) For Davidson, a theory

of truth for a natural language does not explain reference, at least in this

sense: it assigns no empirica l content direc tly to relations between names

or predicates and objects. These relations are given a content indirectly

when the T-sentences are. (ibid, p. 223) If one assumes that a theory

which permits the deduction of all the T-sentences is all we need in the

way of what Fine calls ordinary referential semantics, then the notion of

reference becomes hard to tie up with that of ontological commitment. It

seems equally unnatural to ask whether I am committed either to the

existence of jejuneness or of magnetic monopoles. The notion of


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ontological attitude, or ontological commitment, seems to have no

function in the life of someone who takes the results of both physics and

literary criticism in the same way as we accept the evidence of our

senses (to use Fines phrase).

Perhaps, however, Fine would agree both with Davidson about the

nature of the notion of reference and with me about the need to treat

literary criticism and physics as producing truth, and reference, of exactly

the same sort. That he would is suggested by his saying that those who

accept NOA are being asked not to distinguish between kinds of truth or

modes of existence or the like, but only among truths themselves in terms

of centrality, degrees of belief, and the like. (NOA, 127)

This last quotation chimes with Fines remark that NOA is basically

at odds with the temperament that looks for definite boundaries

demarcating science from pseudo-science, or that is inclined to award

the title scientific like a blue ribbon on a prize goat. (And not, p. 62) It

chimes also with the last paragraph of his recent Presidential Address to

the APA, in which he says that the first false step in this whole area is the

notion that science is spec ial and that scientific thinking is unlike any

other. (Viewpoint, p. 19) If Fine would carry through on these remarks by

saying that there is no more point in using notions like reference and

ontological attitude in connection with physics than in connection with

literary criticism, then he and I might agree that nobody should ever


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bother to have an ontology. Nobody should have the sort of worries

Quine had, about having more things in his ontology than there are in

heaven and earth. To give up on the project of dividing culture into the

hard and the soft areas would lead one to give up on the project of listing

the things that there are in heaven and earth, a list presumed to be

shorter than the list of expressions in our language which can be

nominalized and thereby reified.

To take this line would mean that Einstein would not have been

worrying about a serious question when he, as Fine puts it, wanted to

claim genuine reality for the cnetral theoretical entities of the general

theory, the four-dimensional space-time manifold and assoc iated tensor

fields. Fine goes on to say that had Eintsteins claim been right then

space and time cease to be real. But if Fines ultimate view is what I

think it ought to be, he should hesitate to say that the war between

Einstein, the realist, and Bohr, the nonrea list, was not just a sideshow in

physics, nor an idle intellectual exercise. He should say rather that an idle

intellec tual exercise was the outward and visible form of a serious

discussion about what young physicists should and should not spend their

time looking for. Nor, if Fines view were what I would like it to be, would

he himself express the hope that quantum theory is at least consistent

with some kind of underlying reality. He would translate this ontological-

sounding remark into some sort of suggestion about what lines of research


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physicists will find profitable and which not. He would, in short, translate

remarks about what non-human things there really are into remarks about

what human beings should do to improve the human future.

One more example of a passage which makes me wonder whether

Fines view coincides with my own can be be found in the Afterword to

THE SHAKY GAME. There Fine says that

It is no possible to have a globa l characterization of scientific

productsneither as constructions, nor as externally real things, nor

as generally reliable models. If science is genuinely open, we need

to go local and particularist. We need to look at each case and see

what there is to say about the character of scientific products and

representations and whether any general characterization is

needed at all. (p. 188)

On the view I am suggesting, there is no need for a local characterization

either. For once we have decided that a scientific product (a set of

statements, a new device, a new hormone, a new vocabulary) is useful

for this and useless for that, and once we know how to get, or avoid

getting, similar products by steering students into this disciplinary matrix

rather than that, it is not clear what else we need to do. It is not clear why

we should want any further characterization, for the only

characterizations which might come to mind are likely to be variations on

the worn-out themes of hardness and softness: characterizations such as


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made found, instrumental and real. So although I applaud the

spirit of Fines remark that the realists determinate, external world is just

one more social construction, I balk at the letter. The realists conception

of inquiry, like the theists conception of mans position in the universe, is

no more or less constructed than is the human self-image which will, I

hope, dominate the culture of our remote descendantsa self-image in

which non-human authority plays no role, and in which the notion of love

of truth has become interchangeable with that of love of conversation.

I would rather say that we shall only escape the need for a hard-

soft distinction when we have abjured the made-found distinction, and

that therefore never start asking, about some given scientific product,

what our share and what natures share in its production has been. This is

why I am dubious about the Fines claim that Constructivism is a useful

antidote to realism; its attention to science in action deepens our

understanding of the soc ial in science and the myriad ways in which

science is open (p. 188). It seems to me that one can follow Latour

around on his tours of laboratory life without adopting anything remotely

like constructivism. I take the moral of Davidsons doctrine of

triangulation to be that everything we can ever speak of is a much

constructed, and as much real, as anything else. If that doctrine is right,

we do not need Latours notion of quasi-object, because there are no

objects which are not quasi..


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Before leaving the topics of reference and ontological

commimtment, let me remark that the passage I quoted about ordinary

referential semantics has been seized upon by Alan Musgrave tp ridicule

Fines claim to have a position distinct from that of the realist. Musgrave

would have had less ammunition, I think, if Fine had not only omitted this

passage but had been more explicit in admitting that NOA, as J ared

Leplin has lately said, is not an alternative to realism and antirealism, but

a preemption of philosophy altogether, at least at the metalevel. (Leplin,

p. 174) Leplin is right, in my opinion, to say that Fines idea that scientific

theories speak for themselves, that one can read off of them the

answers to a ll legitimate philosophical questions abouit science, cannot

be squared with the rich tradition of philosophical debate among

scientists over the proper interpretation of theories. So I think that the

Fine should not attempt to take the Einstein-Bohr debate at face value,

nor to rehabilitate notions like ontological commitment. He should grant

to Leplin that Philosophy of science in the role of interpreter and

evaluator of the scientific enterprise, and realism in particular, as such a

philosophy of science, are superfluous. (Leplin, p. 139) He should say that

we felt the need for such an interpreter, evaluator, and public-relations

man only so long as we thought of natural science as privileged by a

spec ial relation to non-human reality, and of scientists as the priests of the

modern age. .


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I said earlier that there is a sec ond set of passages in Fines writings

which made me wonder if I am really entitled to include him in my

syncretic projects. These are the passages in which he uses the term

method. Sometimes Fine seems to take this notion more seriously than I

think it deserves. At the beginning of The Natural Ontological Attitude

Fine says that Boyd and Putnam have focused on on the methods

embodied in scientific practice, methods teased out in ways that seem to

me accurate and preceptive about ongoing science, methods that

lead to scientific success. (NOA, p. 113) Here Fine speaks in the same

idiom as Philip Kitcher who, in his book THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE,

undertakes to to defend realism on the basis of an examination of what

he calls processes that are well-designed for promoting cognitive

progress (Kitcher, p. 192)

Kitchers argument for the residual truth of rationalism in the philosophy

of science is based on the claim that we can isolate such proc esses and

attribute the achievement of cognitive progress to their use. To make his

case, he would have to find a middle ground between the substantive

explanations of events put forward by scientists, and the disciplinary

matrices which shape themselves around acceptance of those

explanations, on the one hand, and uttterly general and completely

uncontroversial methodological platittudes on the other. I do not think


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that he, or any other writer on scientific method I have read, succeeds in

this task. When Kitcher commends, for example, elimination of

alternatives through the production of inconsistency, forced retreats that

open problems, and employment of background constraints (Kitcher, p.

288), he is not recommending anything that deserves to be called a

method or a cognitive process. He is describing an activity which all

human beings perform every day. When, on the other hand, Kitchers

examples of superior cognitive strategies are more spec ific, theya re

simply summaries of the arguments by means of which some victorious

scientific theory triumphed. Kitcher fails to give us an interesting difference

the difference between a process of reasoning and and an explanatory

schema, between a method a good idea.

I suspect that Fine became more dubious about the notion of

method, and less sympathetic to such efforts as Kitchers, in the years that

separate his 1984 article from his Presidential Address to the APA. For in the

latter we find him making fun of the idea that There are universal

principles governing the procedures that make for objectivity, principles

whose absence would lead to something that involves relativisim and

irrationalism. (Viewpoint, p. 13) His attitude in this paper chimes with

that in the Afterword, where he says that NOA is an attitude of trust in

two senses, the first of which he describes as follows:


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NOA trusts that scientists are serious people trying to do good work

and that scientific procedures are reliable ways of conducting that

serious enterprise. (the contrast here is with antiscience attitudes,

ranging from general skepticism to the derisive contempt toward

science that one sometimes encounters in the humanities.)

If one trusts that scientists are serious and reliable, then one will not

be inclined to ask what methods they employ. One will not try to find

something intermediate between their practices and their successes

something which can be called a cognitive strategy or a process of

reasoning, and evaluated for reliability in a general, methodological,

way. So one will not distinguish between epistemic and non-

epistemic or rational and irrational factors in scientific research, any

more than between artistic and non-artistic or creative and non-

creative factors in artistic production. One will settle for saying that we

call a scientists results true, and instances of cognitive progress, when we

think they compare well with those of her competitors, just as we praise an

artists productions when they compare well with his.

The same goes when one regards various other groups of people as

serious and reliable: for example, those politicians, literary critics, lawyers,

theologians, philosophers, hairdressers, carpenters, bird-watchers,

astrologers or engineers whom one has gotten in the habit of trusting.

One may have no use for, and therefore neither trust nor distrust


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concerning, one or another of these groups of experts. One may feel

derisive contempt for such a group if, having once been tempted to rely

on their results, one was severely disappointed. But ones attitude toward

any such group will not be determined by any methodological critique of

their procedures of justification. If I attribute a blissfully happy marriage, as

well as spectacular financial and professional success, to faithfully

following my favorite astrologers advice, I will not ask for an account of

how his procedures fit in with the nature of things, any more than I ask

how the expert bird-watcher can tell the Great Yellowlegs from the Lesser

from a hundred yards away. I shall trust them both, and no mere

philosopherand certainly no specialist in comparative methodologist--is

going to make me dubious. My trust is determined by their past utility, not

by ones grasp of the procedures of justification which are employed

within the group.

As I see it, the notion of method is a residue of the idea that

natural scientists, unlike literary critics, politicians and chicken-sexers, have

found a way to cut through appearance to reality. Viewed

etymologically, a method is a road that takes one from subject to object.

If one stops thinking of knowledge as a relation between mind or

language and an object, and instead thinks of it as the grasp of more true

sentences, then the notion of such a road becomes less plausible. Instead

of thinking of how we can get access to a kind of object, we view the


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object as whatever it is we are trying to talk about. If we talk about it, we

are never without access to it, and our attempt to say more useful things

about it is not a matter of getting closer to it or getting a clearer view of it

or fitting it better.

I think that the idea of scientific method and the idea that such

disciplines as philosophy or political science or law should become more

scientific are symptoms of our having been held capture by the picture

of an abyss which seperates human minds from non-human reality If we

instead get our pathos, romance, and ambition of transcendence by

contemplating the gap between ourselves and a utopian human future,

we should stop lamenting our lack of method and scientificity, and also

stop trying to reveal the natural scientists secrets of success.

If it were not for the public relations role of philosophy of science--a

role which was necessary in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

but which should have doffed in the course of the nineteenthI doubt

that we should ever have been told that geologists, astrophysicists,

evolutionary biologists, and botanists all used the same method. We

should not have thought that there was a natural kind called natural

science which had a subject and method of its own. We should have

assumed that one became a good scientist by going into somebodys lab

or seminar room and getting the hang of it. We should have found it

natural that no scientist would want his apprentices taking time off to


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study Cohen and Nagels INTRODUCTION TO LOGIC AND SCIENTIFIC

METHOD, or any other work which advised them about what cognitive

processes to use.

In arguing, as I have in the past, that natural science is not a

natural kind, I am of course speaking out of dense ignorance. All I am

entitled to say is that I have not yet encountered a work of philosophy of

science which gave me reason to think that geology, astrophysics and

the rest are any more closely linked to one another than to medicine, law

and engineering. It is always possible that Paul Gross is right when he says

that people who have not practiced science cannot understand the

nature of science. Perhaps Daniel Dennett is right that what he calls

flatfooted ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking

and their power is responsible for my holding the philosophical views that

I do, and for my lack of what he calls the intellectual leverage provided

by scientists fa ith in truth. Dennett claims that on the view I espouse it is

all just conversations, and [that] there are only politica l or historical or

aesthetic grounds for taking one role or another in an ongoing

conversation

I do indeed want to substitute the notion of conversation for that of

method. Agreeing as I do with Brandom that conversation is the highest

good for discursive creatures, I think that to take conversation seriously

to trust, at least initially, that ones interlocutors are serious and reliable


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inquirersis the best way to display the virtue Dennett calls love of truth.

Dennett thinks my writings discourage people from acquiring this virtue.

But he is wrong to suggest that, on my view, only such traditionally soft

grounds as might be labeled politica l or historical or aesthetic are

available. I think that the obvious grounds for being on one side or

another of a conversation about choosing between scientific theoires are

specifically scientific grounds. But I do not think that one can explicate

specifically scientific in any way that accords with the traditional project

of philosophy of science. One can identify a scientific ground for taking

a conversational side only by immersing oneself in the disciplinary matrix

within which a particular conversation is going on, and by making the

current state of that conversation part of your life.

To love truth in a given area of culture is, ninety-nine times out of a

hundred, simply to immerse oneself in one or another conversation

among people one trusts as serious and reliable, and then do ones best

to meet the expectations of ones interlocutors. In the hundreth case, of

course, the love of truth may lead one to break out of the disciplinary

matrix within which that conversation has been going on, and to try to set

up a new one. But I cannot see that either fidelity to disciplinary

expectations or the courage to effect a break-out can be correlated with

ones view on the philosophical questions over which Dennett and I, or

Fine and Leplin, disagree.


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Dennett, and many other critics of my work, seem to think that

scientists and desirably hard-minded philosophersargue, whereas literary

critics, bird-watchers, astrologers, and politicians simply c h a t . But

astrologers, like the the Oxbridge and Sorbonne Aristotelians of the

seventeenth century. do argue. One should grant them all the clarity and

rigor they claim, even if one agrees with Bacon and Descartes that the

topics they argue about are not worth discussing. The argument-chat

distinction is perfectly real, and most of us can tell which we are doing

when. But it does not map onto the traditional hard-soft distinction.

Argument between Heidegger and Sartre, or between T. S. Eliot and

Harold Bloom, are just as unchatty and just as serious as arguments about

Tyler Burge and Donald Davidson, or between Einstein and Bohr.

Dennett says that we have created a technology of truth and

that its name is science, I would respond that its name is high culture.

This is the area of culture which contains those disciplinary matrices in

which power and money matter less than achieving free agreement on

the answers to questions unintelligible to the vulgar. Philosophy is one

prominent part of high culture, so defined. One of the differences

between Dennett and myself is about whether Kant, Husserl, Russell on

others who wanted to put philosophy on the secure path of a science

improved or damaged the quality of philosophical conversation. I think

that these effects were harmful, and in my utopian human future they


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would c ease to be made. More specifically, I think that the question

What should the method of philosophy be? should cease to be asked.

J ust as the way to become a good scientist is to go into

somebodys laboratory and try to get in the swing of things, so the way to

become a good philosopher is to throw oneself into the works of some

well-reputed philosopher and try to talk his or her talk. This will work no

matter whether the good philosopher in question is Kant or Hegel,

Heidegger or Davidson, Nietzsche or Mill. You get into the philospohical

conversation by discussing what such people discussed, and in particular

by answering or being persuaded by their critics How good a philosopher

you get to be as a result of throwing yourself into one philosophical

conversation rather than another is not determined by your initial choice,

but of how conversable you are in later life: how well you can fuse your

own c onversational horizons with those of lots of other philosophers,

philosophers trained in different matrices and different countries.

In particular, there is no point in adivising young people, looking for

a philosopher whom they can heroize and imitate, that they should

attend to the methods being used. If I were told that Davidson uses a

good method, and Heidegger a bad one, or the converse, I would be

baffled. They seem to me to be distinguished not by methods but by

contexts of discussion, and further distinguished by the fact that they, but

not most of the other membesr of their respec tive cohorts, happened to


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come up with some brilliantly original ideasideas which wer no more the

result of applying a method than were Einsteins or Bohrs. .The terms

analytic method and phenomenological method strike me as of no

use. I would not know how to teach either method to a student. Neither

notion helps explains what differentiates Davidson from all the second-

rate hacks who also call themselves analytic philosophers, or Heidegger

from all those slavish disciples of Husserl who never had the guts to break

out on their own. Davidson entered philosophy by getting in on a

conversation between Quine and Carnap. Heidegger entered the field

by imagining a conversation between the Marburg neo-Kantians and

such figures as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Both men turned out to have

some original ideas. The search for a criterion which would make one of

them a good clear, rigorous philosopher and the other a bad, unclear,

unrigorous philosopher seems to me pointless,. Such a search, once

undertaken will always become a public relations exercise on behalf of

ones favored candidate. The notions of clarity and rigor, like that of

rationa l support, are determined by cultural expec tations. Differing

expectations about what to get out of physics accounted for the fac t

that, as Kuhn recounts, it took a hundred years to domestic a non-

Aristotelian mechanics. Differing expectations about what to get out of

philosophy typically take even longer to be resolved.


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. Leplin has one set of expectations about what counts as

philosophy of science, Fine another. Fine is, as Leplin suggests, staging a

break-out from a familiar disciplinary matrix. So, in less obvious ways, are

Brandom and Davidson; if there work were taken to heart, huge piles of

books and articles in the philosophy of language would be thought to

contain nothing but clever answers to pointless questions. The dec isions

participants in the relevant conversations come to about whether to

follow these three men into a non-representationalist philosophical utopia,

will not be made on what Dennett calls political or aesthetic or historical

grounds. They will be made on philosohical grounds, in the sense that

they will be the outcome of conversations in which only people who have

read quite a lot of philosophy will be able to take part.

But they will not be made by following a good or a bad

philosophical method, any more than you and I dec ide whom to vote for,

whom to propose marriage to, or where to go to school by following a

good or a bad method. They will be made in the way human beings have

always made such decisions when faced with a choice between two sets

of people, both made up serious, reliable, trustworthy interlocutors. When

the trustworthy disagree, we are on our own. But this is not to say that are

choices become irrational or aesthetic or political. They remain

conversational.


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In the areas of culture traditionally called hard, most of the

participants in the conversation eventually agree about what decision

was best. In other areas they do not. But this is not to be explained by the

existence of contact with the non-human in the former areas and lack of

such contacts in the latter. It is to be expalined by the fact that in the

former there is more agreement about what kind of product a given

disciplinary matrix is expected to produce. The sources of such

agreement are to the province of historians and sociologists, not of

epistemologists or ontologists.

Richard Rorty

May 3, 1999

richard rorty, "realism and the reasons of the heart", may 3, 1999

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