E-piss-temological Behaviorism

Epistemological behaviorism as an argument is based on a false dichotomy. That is, it offers a way out of a difficulty that has different aspects than the ones Rorty suggests. Although the correct aspects of the underlying problem are similar to those laid out in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the difference is compelling enough to take another look at this pivotal hinge of that book. For on this hinge swings Rorty’s claim to a “pragmatism” that insists there is nothing interesting to say about “knowledge and truth” other than what “common sense” says there is.

Rorty’s pragmatism has been pushed already, as have two other false dichotomies in PMN. This last push should put to rest the question of whether the therapy Rorty offers is a cure for the “quest for certainty” and its subsequent “mirror of nature,” or merely the latest episode in what one might call its hangover.

Rorty says epistemological behaviorism is the correct of two alternatives: 1) justification as negotiated publicly in “the space of reasons” by “what society says” or by “what society will let one get away with,” or 2) justifications as based on private, privileged representations that mirror the reality of nature.

As a methodological commitment, this epistemological behaviorism relies on what he also calls a new “species of holism,” one that says to be a participant in it the process of justification, one must participate in and understand the rules of a language game; that once one does this, one also understands all that is needed to know about moves within that language game, and therefore about justification as well.

The result of this view: all discrimination and evaluation is ultimately linguistic, and with this implication in mind Rorty says: “nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept, and that there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence.”

The upshot: there is no pre-linguistic awareness that can count toward justification, even in a functional and strictly evidentiary way, since any pre-linguistic awareness — if it exists at all (and he thinks it doesn’t) — would be limited to having apprehensions as opposed to comprehending ideas. For Rorty, any such “having” — which doesn’t exist anyway — could never be useful for justification, even in an evidentiary way, for even this knowing — i.e., this cognizing— requires language.

As an necessary adjunct to this holism, he states, rather truistically, that it is only within language that the exchange of reasons can take place.

Rorty’s hope is that philosophy will take this linguistic holism and its consequent epistemological behaviorism to heart and realize there is nothing interesting left to say about truth and knowledge, beyond what common sense tells us.

Set aside for the moment that the “holism” Rorty describes makes it difficult — if not impossible — to understand how one ever learns a language at all — a problem quite separable from the claim that holism doesn’t treat infants “fairly.”

Set aside too that it is empirically false; that this has been demonstrated six ways to Sunday by research into infant and primate cognition.

Set aside also that it begs the question of just what justification is, as it states — without argument — we are trapped “inside” language, and therefore justification has to be exclusively linguistic, not just in the sense of being expressed in language, but based also in an elemental way on the workings of language itself.

Set aside finally that “what society says” and “what society will let one get away with” are stupid metaphors that clarify nothing.

All this set aside, Rorty’s “holism” still runs into a deeper problem: the dichotomy it allegedly resolves is false — or more precisely, it is merely philosophical.

In other words, Rorty’s holism and epistemological behaviorism both poses and resolves the question of justification as a philosophical puzzle that is in fact foreign to common sense. It never arises there at all. As such, it potentially contains a lot — if not all — of the conceptual baggage Rorty wants to clear away with his therapeutic holism.

The legitimate question thus arises: why not just start with the plain old common sense Rorty calls for? Why see the issue of justification against the background of epistemological alternatives at all? To put it in Rorty’s terms, why even do hermeneutics because epistemology fails, when the best response is just not to do epistemology in the first place?

For common sense, justification doesn’t have to be framed as a choice between ‘private privileged representations that mirror reality’ versus ‘public statements issued in the space of reasons.’ Common sense has never heard of “privileged representations”; therefore it will scratch it’s head over what the “public space of reasons” means. Rather, for common sense “justification” is a public exchange that employs both conceptual and existential subject matter in order to come to a reliable conclusion that solves a problem, and it does this by examining the implied and testable consequences of prospective solutions — again, both factually and conceptually — until a final judgment is made.

Whew. Would common sense ever say that?

No, of course not, but Dewey did, echoing and refining what common sense does say in its attempts to know and solve problems.

In any case, let’s just say common sense doesn’t rely a choice between mutually exclusive “private privileged representations” or “public linguistic reasons.” Instead, it relies on the cooperative and mutual interplay between the philosophically-laden but nonetheless valid common sense terms like “facts” and “ideas,” in order to solve particular problems, in all their particularity.[1].

The difference is both subtle and dispositive, for posing the question of “justification” this way preserves everything Rorty asserts with his holism, and it makes “justification” public, without either begging the question over what justification entails or making it impossible to account for how it could ever be learned in the first place.

It also avoids useless metaphors like “society says” or “what society lets us get away with.”

As a reliance on what common sense says about how justification actually occurs, it is in fact nothing more than a description of the process common sense uses every day to solve problems — a process (as Dewey points out) it shares with all forms of inquiry, including even satisfying biological needs, creating cultural products, or doing science.

This can be shown with a concrete example, but first, a little house cleaning.

It is both entirely true and entirely trivial to point out that all assertion of reasons takes place in concepts, propositions and statements, and that all concepts, propositions and statements are a linguistic affair. From this trivial observation, however, it simply does not follow that “there is no way to get outside our beliefs and language so as to find some test other than coherence.”

In fact, common sense shows that people “get outside” their beliefs and use tests other than coherence all the time, otherwise they wouldn’t learn anything new, and new problems would be unsolvable — which they are not. That is, without potentially always being “outside” the given coherence of their reasons, no one could learn to adjust means to better achieve ends because any adjustment would already have to cohere with what one already knew to be true, instead of undermining that coherence and offering a new one in its place.

Furthermore, common sense shows that everyone who has learned a language not only started from “outside” language and still learned it; once learned they “get outside it” all the time as they speak it. For you can’t go from “being outside language” to “being inside language” just by fiat that closes the threshold once crossed. There has to be some kind of common ground, some kind of existential (read “non-linguistic”) reference and shared (but unarticulated) intentions between people, otherwise language couldn’t be learned and no communication about objects in common would be possible.

How both occur is a legitimate problem for inquiry (and is has been investigated extensively without the help of analytic philosophers), but obliterating the issue in advance with a “holism” that makes resolving the issues impossible[2] is kind of a crappy idea.

God forbid we pull another Quine.

To see common sense at work without Rorty’s “holism” and its unholy step-child, epistemological behaviorism, consider the Bellamine-Galileo debate out of which Rorty gets so much mileage in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

Rorty wants to say that Galileo can’t appeal to “science” and “rationality” against Bellamine’s “lack of science” and “irrationality” because the canons we now take for granted about science and reason were being formed during the debate; therefore at that time they cannot offer a grid for evaluating competing knowledge claims about the relative movements of the sun and the earth. The paradigms are not “commensurable” on the basis of fixed notions capturing the nature of “science” and “rationality.”

Fair enough, and posing the issue this way looks like an example of holism at work: one can grant that neither party could ‘get outside’ of their respective belief systems and appeal to a permanent, neutral framework of science as such because such a matrix does not exist — and what does exist, as we understand it now, was being formed in the first place, so it’s no candidate for an appeal either.

Does it follow, then, that paradigms, as coherent belief systems housed in language, are incommensurable — period ? In other words, does it follow that competing knowledge claims can’t be arbitrated as “more true” or “more false” than one another because there can’t be an appeal to privileged representations mirroring a permanent, neutral framework attenuated by Science with a capital “S”? Do we give up arbitration because traditional epistemology fails?

Of course not. Posed that way the issue doesn’t even arise for common sense. In fact, it doesn’t even make much sense at all. It is a purely philosophical recreation.

As it actually occurs, common sense is nothing like the clash of ‘paradigms’ or appeal to ‘privileged representations’ Rorty describes. Instead, it is a contest of beliefs that utilizes both “ideas” and “facts” in mutual cooperation with one another, in order to arrive at an explanation that solves a problem, however long this solution might take [3]. In the processes there is usually disagreement about what counts as a relevant fact or what serves as a good idea. In fact, once a solution is proposed, there may even remain disagreement about how good it is (the solution itself may only be presumptive, or probable). Nevertheless, these disagreements and this presumption truth are publicly negotiated; they are not appealed to and settled on via ‘private representations’ with a ‘privileged grip’ on Reality. None of these notions even come up.

Additionally, in common sense virtually all problems and their prospective solutions rely on “local,” “contingent” and “temporary” material instead of the “all encompassing”, “absolute” and “permanent” framework Rorty suggests isn’t possible anyway. In other words, as a rule people don’t get all epistemological on one another — or even with themselves — regardless of how strident and absolutist they become.

That recreation is reserved for philosophers.

So, reconsider the case of Galileo and Bellamaine from a common sense point of view (read also from a “scientific” with a small “s” point of view, given their contiguity).

First, the problematic situation at issue is the relative motions of the sun and the earth. In their debate with one another, Bellamine and Galileo could have — and probably did — blend facts and ideas in divergent efforts to establish competing knowledge claims. Conceptually Galileo probably referred to Copernicus’s heliocentrism, and factually he probably referred to the tides, as explained by the motions of the earth and moon in that theory. Conceptually Bellamine could refer to the stipulations in scripture, and he could refer to the factual evidence of the senses — namely, that the sun traverses across the sky (duh), right there for all to see.

Given this similarity, it could be argued neither party was more “rational” than the other in their respective use of conceptual and existential subject matter, but this possibility has no bearing on the effectiveness of their respective explanations. Instead, the effectiveness of their arguments can be — and in fact has been — tested by the consequences implied in the explanations each reached. Whichever explanation passes that test, then of the two rational approaches, it is the better one.

In other words, it need not be a matter of deciding between competing labels like “rational” and “scientific” in a clash of paradigms. The problem could be — and has been — resolved without recourse to either notion.

Second, as Rorty (sort of) correctly points out, we are only inclined to say that Galileo was more “scientific” and more “rational” because further inquiry has shown him to have had the better ideas and to have been more right about the sun, the moon, and the earth (Rorty would omit “better” or “more right”). One could also point out, however, that however right he was about the better method of inquiry (aka, science), we now also know that Galileo was wrong about Copernicus because Copernicus was (mostly) wrong about the solar system (the orbits are not circular, etc.).

But — and this is the crucial butt — we know this using the same process that Bellamine and Galileo could have and probably did use. It’s just that time, technology and ingenuity has enabled us to resolve the problematic situation better than either one of them at that time, and that resolution now is evident enough to show retrospectively how well conceptual and existential evidence was used back then.

It also shows that one is not “trapped” in holism because we in fact know differently now than both did then, even as we can see a continuity with this past, i.e. we can now see the ways in which both were wrong and right.

In any case, from a philosophical point of view, the controversy over the nature of the solar system could be seen as one over competing belief systems justified by their own internal coherence — a clash of paradigms within holisms, as it were. But as it actually occurs in common sense and science, new inquiry has since fractured both “coherences,” though one more than the other, and the current understanding of the solar system affords a hindsight that illustrates how belief systems, however internally justified, can in fact be transformed in light of better explanations than what came before them, such that one explanation can be considered more believable, more accurate, and more reliable than the other.

In a words, better knowledge than what came before can be obtained (remember, this is common sense talking!).

As common sense would put it, we now know the earth orbits the sun, and we know this using both new conceptual material and — among other things — new ‘crude sensory evidence’ from a different point of view than the one of simply residing here on earth (just looking out a window from orbit, for instance). Regarding this current knowledge, it is neither here nor there that at the time neither Galileo nor Bellamine could appeal to a neutral, antecedent, permanent matrix of privileged representations to justify their assertions. Nor is it here nor there that we can’t appeal to one now. As a question of fact, existential matters “outside” language cooperated with conceptual matters “inside” language to determine what we know about the solar system.

Again, what he know, not just believe…

This, at least, is what common sense asserts, no matter how difficult it might be to account for philosophically (and it may not be that difficult, once you stop trying so hard!).

In any case, while this example may not be as compact as it could be — and the Anus likes his things compact! — it could be multiplied ad infinitum with others from daily life, where people learn new things using “facts” and “ideas” to solve problems, all the time. Rorty thinks his epistemological behaviorism works within this common sense framework, and he appeals to it as the last interesting thing philosophy has to say about truth and knowledge, but nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature describes what common sense actually does or how it actually works.

As such, e-piss-temological behaviorism swirls in an empty bowl.

There is an alternative. Dewey offered it more than half a century ago in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, a book Rorty never cites and apparently consigns to the flames of a wrecked attempt to do epistemology. At least this is his take in Consequences of Pragmatism, where he chastised Dewey for hanging on.

Is he right in that assessment?

Actually, no, he gets it exactly backwards. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry is what philosophy should look like once it ditches the futile quest for certainty, the inane logic of epistemology, and the headache of the mirror of nature. By contrast, “epistemological behaviorism” and “linguistic holism” are what one still hungover from the drunkenness of epistemology pees out in the morning, in an attempt to finally clear his system. It still contains traces of alcohol. In fact, one is probably still drunk, as Rorty appear to be when he ignores the lessons of common sense, even as he appeals to it as the thing for philosophy to do.

In any case, as shown already, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature suffers from a serious self-referentiality problem and an array of conceptual distortions. The basis of those problems and distortions come together in the dichotomy posed and ostensibly solved by epistemological behaviorism and linguistic holism. The two issues are one of apiece. As such, the therapy Rorty offers is best seen as a pseudo-pragmatism that — as said before — confuses means for ends and ends for means in an unresolvable quest for edifying comfort. This is a shame, since the motive for the book and the issue it addresses is could be so compelling.

Compelling…but not new, and Rorty’s crack isn’t even a useful formulation of the problem.

[1] It is not a coincidence that Dewey’s first statement of pragmatic ‘epistemology’ was a three parts article entitled “The Control of Facts by Ideas.” Rorty would have profited from a careful study of that statement before writing PMN in the name of Dewey’s pragmatism.

[2] A good place to start is Tomasello, who often cites Wittgenstein as setting a context for his work. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, Constructing a Language, The Origins of Human Communication, and A Natural History of Human Thinking would be good sources for a plausible account that also discusses competing accounts in a massively cited literature.

[3] See the above citation, “Control of Ideas by Facts” for an example of how facts and ideas mutually cooperate to solve a practical problem, being lost in the woods.