Rorty and Beyond by Randall Auxier

Author:Randall Auxier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LEXINGTON BOOKS

IV

Nature, Knowing, and Naturalisms

EBSCOhost - printed on 3/11/2020 6:21 AM via MCGILL UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

11

Vocabularies and the Lifeworld

A Criticism of Rorty’s Naturalism

Roberto Gronda

In this chapter I will try to develop some of the ideas that lie at the basis of Rorty’s naturalism, and I will take the liberty of treating Rorty’s philosophical arguments and ideas as a springboard to reach conclusions different from those that Rorty wanted to reach. In particular, I will move from what Rorty says in his response to Bjorn Ramberg concerning the privileged status of the vocabulary of normativity in order to argue for the importance of keeping the language of normativity separate from the language of intentionality. The thesis that the vocabulary of normativity is more fundamental than that of intentionality leads directly to the issue of identifying what is the nature of that vocabulary, and in which practice it is actually instantiated. My suggestion is that the normative vocabulary should be identified with what it is usually called common sense, that is, the set of habitual and institutionalized practices taken for granted in every “community of minds.” According to this reading, common sense is nothing but a more comfortable and less emphatic way of saying “human nature.” The statement of the identity of human nature and common sense is philosophically interesting since it helps counteract a tendency toward intellectualism that strikes me as a possible undesired side effect of the linguistic turn. There is a sense in which one is entitled to say that it is not correct to question the “givenness” of certain forms or “representation”: we cannot choose how things appear to us because their mode of manifestation is dependent both on their constitution—what Rorty calls “causal pressure”—and on our biological endowment.

I will therefore argue that the community of minds is grounded at its deepest level on the community of common sense, that is, on the fact that we human beings are animals who share a common stock of needs, impulses, and habits. There is no necessary connection between that conclusion and an alleged unmodifiability of human nature: the recourse to the notion of human nature is not a move available only to those who want to restore a metaphysical language which paves the way for a metaphysical view of reality, as Rorty seems to believe. Rather the contrary, it seems to me that the notion of human nature is deeply intertwined with Price’s idea of subject naturalism, a philosophical project that Rorty endorses in his article “Naturalism and Quietism.” Through the confrontation with Rorty’s philosophy I hope to succeed in sketching a sound philosophy of praxis revolving around the concepts of practice, normativity, and nature.

The Nature of Normativity

In his article “Post-Ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson,” Ramberg remarks that Rorty’s concerns about Davidson’s thesis that the irreducibility of the language of intentionality to the language of scientific explanation are misplaced, and that Rorty should be less worried about the normativity that Davidson acknowledges as the distinctive character of the language of intentionality—what Ramberg calls the “vocabulary of agency.

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