Tom Swann Rorty Against Mc Dowells Empiricism

Rorty on Mc Dowell

answerability to the world MW: “A belief or judgment that things are thus and so… must be a posture or stance that is correctly or incorrectly adopted according to whether or not things are indeed thus and so.” so it is a normative relation

one can play a game of matching symbols in certain ways. to play the game is to make one answerable to the rules of the game. but are the ways the rules would have us pair symbols normative?<<<

problematic use of perceptual experience as the model. what about art morality and politics, where we also make judgments? another site for realist/antirealist debates.

Not so much a problem for Brandom - for him normativity is answerability to one another. Works in any field.

THinks the clinging to Kant over Hegel is distortive. Thinks there is no need for

“minimal empiricism”.

Sellars, Davidson, Brandom: one of the ways we interact with things is causally through our sensory organs. That such a “merely causal”, non-rational connection “will not do is the first, and largely unargued, premise of Mc Dowell’s book” P140

Mc Dowell thinks the inferentialist trio too obsessed with rejecting the Given realm of law v.s. space of reasons

sellars and davidson both think adopting psychological nominalism in order to distinguish causation from justification entails that only a belief can justify a belief

why?<<<

P141“reinterpreting”experience" as a result of neurologically describable causal interactions with the world"

confrontation with world as computation

we and computers describable in normative as the software, non-normative as hardware terms. P142 “No problem arises, in either case, about the interface between software and hardware, the intentional and the nonintentional, the space of reasons and the space of laws.”

wtf<<<

Rorty wants to give up on the notion of answerability to the world.

##Bald Naturalism reductionist - everything not physicalistically expressible is a concession to convenience.

Mc Dowell lament the refusal to see the dichotomy betwen the logical spaces

Rorty laments Mc Dowell’s refusal to see the distinction between particle physics and the rest of natural science.

P144 “To guard against this simpleminded and reductionistic way of thinking of nonhuman nature, it is useful to remember that the form of intelligibility shared by Newton’s primitive corpuscularianism and contemporary particle physics has no counterpart in, for example, the geology of plate tectonics or in Darwin’s and Mendel’s accounts of heredity and evolution. What we get in those areas are narratives, natural histories, rather than the subsumption of events under laws.”

not entirely accurate. Not as if any old narrative will do. use of models as of law governed things<<<

P145 “We should treat the fact that you cannot use intentional talk and particle talk simultaneously as just as philosophically sterile as the fact that you cannot play baseball and jai alai simultaneously.”

bald naturalists problems, as with Mc Dowell’s, are caused by talking about intelligibility rather than convenience

measure of convenience?<<<

we should substitute the notion of techniques of problem solving

##Second Nature wants an interface between reason and law so the world rationally constrains thought eyes opened to reasons the trio think the world merely thrusts upon us certain beliefs. we are answerable only to other people

how can we be answerable to other people, as part of the world, if we can’t be answerable to the world?<<<

Knowledge and the Internal 1995 “we are fallible in our judgments as to the shape of the space of reasons as we find it, or - what comes to the same thing - as to the shape of the world as we find it”.

because most of our beliefs must be true, P147“we can make no sense of the idea that a great gulf might separate the way the world is and the way we describe it” >>>then it is simply our having some beliefs that makes the world more or less that way?<<<

the world asks us to judge of it

##Rational Freedom Rorty a cheerful compatiblist

“If we are to avert the threat of emptiness, we need to see intuitions as standing in rational relations to what we should think.” MW68

The trio think all a word needs to have content is to feature as a node in a pattern of inferences.

Mc Dowell wants to revive Russell’s idea that nonrefering singular terms are pseudo-terms, whereas the trio are that any term that has a use is as good as any other. thinks Mc Dowell takes ‘witch’ to be a psuedo-concept

don’t think this is right!<<<

thinks the Kantian talk of freedom is a mistake. just talk of problem solving

but what about the problem Mc Dowell is posing?<<<

MD has a go at Rorty for thinking the progress of language games would on his account have nothing to do with the world. MW P151 leads back to the idea that the progress of inquiry is to fit the world. BAD Mc Dowell accuses him of ignoring his own obligations. Rorty thinks he has rejected the siren that has seduced Mc Dowell.

Mc Dowell in correspondence accuses Rorty of priveledging Darwinian thought over others to describe reality. Rorty denies that Darwin describes humans better than anyone else. Darwin is a useful gimmick to stop people from overdramatizing dichotomies and

thereby generating philosophical problems.