Rorty on Soames' History of Analytic Philosophy

For those of you who may not have come across it, Richard Rorty has published this blistering review in the London Review of Books on Scott Soames' two recent books on the history of 20th century analytic philosophy. Rorty doesn't actually take Soames' books to task. Rather, it's our entire discipline, post-Kripke that he has worries about.

A few choice passages:

‘I had hoped my department would hire somebody in the history of philosophy,’ my friend lamented, ‘but my colleagues decided that we needed somebody who was contributing to the literature on vagueness.’

‘The literature on what?’ I asked.

‘Dick,’ he replied, exasperated, ‘you’re really out of it. You don’t realise: vagueness is huge.’

My friend’s judgment is confirmed by Scott Soames’s 900-page history of analytic philosophy. In an epilogue titled ‘The Era of Specialisation’, Soames cites ‘the investigation of vague predicates’ as an area of philosophical inquiry that has ‘exploded in the last thirty years’. The intensity with which such specialised inquiries are being pursued is, he says, indicative of the fact that ‘the discipline itself – philosophy as a whole – has become an aggregate of related but semi-independent investigations, very much like other academic disciplines.’

Soames welcomes this change...

To see what philosophy may look like in the future, consider the problem that gave rise to the huge literature on vagueness: the paradox of the heap. Soames formulates it as follows: ‘If one has something that is not a heap of sand, and one adds a single grain of sand to it, the result is still not a heap of sand . . . if n grains of sand are not sufficient to make a heap then n+1 grains aren’t either.’ So it seems that ‘no matter how many grains of sand may be gathered together, they are not sufficient to make a heap of sand.’

An educational administrator (a dean in the US, a pro-vice-chancellor in Britain), asked to ratify the appointment of someone who has produced a brilliant new theory of heaps, might be tempted to ask whether this sort of thing is really philosophy. Most analytic philosophers would think this a dumb question – as silly as whether inquiry into the neural processes of squids is really biology. Fruitful work in an academic discipline is whatever those trained in that discipline find it important to do. Outsiders do not get to kibitz. But suppose the dean remains obdurate. I know that biology has not reached the stage of decadent scholasticism, she might say, if only because biological research links up with medical progress. The biology department, she continues, had no trouble explaining to me why the work of their squid-neurone specialist might eventually culminate in a cure for Parkinson’s Disease. I expect something similar from the philosophy department. I am told that many philosophy professors in France and Germany think that Anglophone philosophy has lost its way: that it no longer has any relevance to anything else in the intellectual world, and that its hyper-professionalism is a symptom of senescence rather than of robustness. I also hear that the undergraduates keep complaining that your department never gives courses on the philosophers whom they want to hear discussed. Before I ratify the proposed appointment, I need to be told why I should disregard such rumours...

Faced with such obduracy, the head of the philosophy department might look around for a book that will straighten the dean out, one that will help her understand why analytic philosophy is (whatever disgruntled foreigners and disappointed undergraduates may say) a very good thing, deserving not only of autonomy, but of enthusiastic encouragement. Soames’s book will not serve this purpose. It is a book for insiders. If you do not know before reading it why the philosophers whose work Soames treats at length – Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Stevenson, Ross, Quine, Ryle, Strawson, Hare, Malcolm, Austin, Grice, Davidson and Kripke – are thought important, you may still be baffled after finishing the second volume...

Quine’s repudiation of Russell’s central doctrine was of a piece with the line of thought – ‘Don’t look for the meaning; look for the use’ – pursued in Wittgenstein’sPhilosophical Investigations. That book was sceptical about the ‘analytic’ approach to philosophy that had appealed both to Russell and to the younger Wittgenstein. The confluence of Quinean and Wittgensteinian lines of thought – found, for example, in the work of Donald Davidson – created a philosophical climate in which the very idea of ‘necessary truth’ was viewed with scepticism.

But the climate suddenly changed, thanks to Kripke. Celebrating the entrance of his hero on the philosophical scene, Soames for once allows himself a bit of drama: ‘With the publication in 1951 of his celebrated article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”,’ Quine ‘became the dominant philosopher in America, which he remained until January of 1970, when Saul Kripke . . . gave the three lectures at Princeton that became Naming and Necessity.’

Soames regards the deposition of Quine and the enthronement of Kripke as a great intellectual advance. What he calls Kripke’s ‘discovery of the necessary a posteriori’ – the observation that the truth of sentences like ‘Whales are mammals’ and ‘Water is H2O’ is neither contingent nor knowable by examining the uses of words – is ‘one of the great philosophical achievements of the 20th century’. ‘No single insight,’ he continues, ‘has been more important in gaining the perspective needed to understand and critically evaluate the philosophical tradition stretching from Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein, through logical positivism and the ordinary language school, to Quine, Davidson and Kripke himself. Without Kripke’s discovery, the history told in these pages would have been very different; indeed, these volumes would scarcely have been possible...

To succeed in demonstrating Kripke’s importance, however, Soames would have to tell us more about how the discovery of the necessary a posteriori has changed things. He frequently remarks, at the end of a chapter, that the pre-Kripkean philosopher he has just polished off has confused necessary truth with analytic truth. But he often fails to make clear what revisions that philosopher would have been forced to make if he had written after the discovery of the necessary a posteriori. For example, would Ryle’s anti-Cartesian polemic have been seriously weakened if he had accepted the Kripkean point that the connection between a mental state and a neural state might be necessary without being knowable a priori?

It would also have been useful if Soames had been more specific about how the Kripkean revolution has changed the agenda of philosophical inquiry. He does not try to relate the necessary a posteriori to the literature on vagueness, or to another of his examples of the vigour of contemporary analytic philosophy, ‘the explosion of philosophical and logical work on the Liar done in the last thirty years’. (The ‘Liar’ is shorthand for the various paradoxes created by assertions that comment on their own truth: e.g., ‘This sentence is false,’ which is true if false and false if true.) It is hard to see how to reconcile the thesis that Kripke made a decisive difference to analytic philosophy with Soames’s claim that ‘it is a mistake to look for one big, unified picture of analytic philosophy in this [post-Kripkean] era.’...

My own sense of the matter is that the discovery of the necessary a posteriori has not made the big difference that Soames attributes to it, and that it is unlikely to do so. I do not see much evidence that analytic philosophers are using different ‘fundamental methodological notions’ from those they were using before 1970. My impression is that now, 35 years after the Kripkean revolution, a lot of philosophers would say to Kripke: We see your point about the Aristotelian intuitions of the plain man, and so we are willing to go along with you in calling ‘Water is H2O’ and ‘Whales are not fish’ necessary truths. We hereby abjure the claim that necessity is, if anything, analyticity. But so what? What follows? What have you done except alter our use of the term ‘necessity’ so that we now sound a bit less paradoxical?...

Thoughts? (I figured we could use some livening up around here!;)

Comments

[Elisa Freschi]

Very interesting quote, not just beacuse of the controversy about Kripke, but also because of the more general question regarding the significance of philosophical work. Personally (since I work in Europe and am paid by the State), I feel a moral obligation to be able to explain to a tax-payer why she has to pay (taxes so that the State can pay) me. Perhaps the situation is different for scholars who are paid through student-fees or who can survive out of writing books?

p.s. (Just a provocative question: Was not Kant enough to understand that a necessary truth is not tantamount to an analytic truth?)

[Craig]

Just on the heaps bit: Rorty implies we're interested in heaps because heaps are intrinsically interesting rather than because of what they might be able to tell us about the way our language connects with the world. Obviously this makes analytic philosophy look ridiculous but it's an unfair implication (and one I'd only expect from someone who's never studied philosophy). And the sorites is surely ancient enough that Rorty is wrong to cite it as a problem that analytic philosophers are peculiarly interested in.

As to what philosophy professors in France and Germany think or thought... who cares? What authority do they have? I've met too many continental European students in English universities who are delighted to have escaped the stultified, self-satisfied, elitist atmosphere in French and Italian (admittedly not so much German) universities to care much about the opinion of the professors there.

I do not think philosophy as practiced in Anglophone departments is beyond criticism by any means - there's tonnes wrong with it. But Rorty misses the mark.

[Rob Gressis]

Rorty's administrator says:

"I know that biology has not reached the stage of decadent scholasticism, she might say, if only because biological research links up with medical progress. The biology department, she continues, had no trouble explaining to me why the work of their squid-neurone specialist might eventually culminate in a cure for Parkinson’s Disease. I expect something similar from the philosophy department. I am told that many philosophy professors in France and Germany think that Anglophone philosophy has lost its way: that it no longer has any relevance to anything else in the intellectual world, and that its hyper-professionalism is a symptom of senescence rather than of robustness. I also hear that the undergraduates keep complaining that your department never gives courses on the philosophers whom they want to hear discussed. Before I ratify the proposed appointment, I need to be told why I should disregard such rumours..."

I'm wondering: what kind of answer would satisfy this administrator? Rorty gives two criteria that he thinks would -- or perhaps, should -- satisfy the administrator:

(1) Show the administrator that philosophy has relevance to something else in the intellectual world.

(2) Give courses on topics that undergraduates are interested in.

Regarding (2), first: why should this be a criterion that philosophers care about? Which kinds of philosophers are undergraduates interested in whom they don't usually get from analytic departments? My guesses would include: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, Foucault, Derrida, and Rand. I suspect that a lot of undergraduates don't know much about these philosophers, but are interested in them because they're somehow 'sexy'. But why are they sexy? And why should we cater to undergraduates' possibly ill-informed preferences on this score?

Regarding (1), I worry that it either threatens the relevance of just about any humanities, or it's arbitrary. First, imagine that the administrator asked she should care about work done on Derrida, and you tell her, "oh, people in the English department love Derrida. So my work on Derrida helps them make better use of Derrida to approach texts." Perhaps this would satisfy her. If it didn't, she might say, "great, but why should we care about these texts? How does reading Ulysses help find a cure for Alzheimer's Disease?" If it did satisfy her, why should it? Is there something good about interdisciplinarity for interdisciplinarity's sake? That seems arbitrary to me.

Moreover, what about this possibility: scientists -- I suppose they're the only people who matter? (A wrong-headed charge to make against Rorty himself, but not so wrong-headed to make it against the administrator?) -- often make rely on implicit philosophical theses, and these theses are often over-simplistic or simply wrong (I've known at least a couple physicists who endorse the verifiability criterion of meaning). When philosophers try to engage these scientists, they're often rebuffed, usually with a derisive snicker. If we're trying to engage scientists, but they don't care what we have to say -- even if it's clearly relevant to the interpretation of scientific results -- is this our fault?