I think What Boghossian calls facts here is what Rorty would refer to as ”the world causally constraining us” . Rorty has a line in his book ”Philosophy and social hope” that goes something like ”We can never be more arbitrary than the world lets us be ..so even if there is no way the world is, or an intrinsic nature of reality, there are still causal pressures and these will be described, at different times, for different purposes, but they are pressures none the less” At the end of the video here they seem to be talking about the same thing , about things being described in multiple ways, and none of the descriptions can get reality/the world right. I guess what Boghossian would call objectivity Rorty would merely call enough intersubjective agreement / consensus Btw, I tweet some Rorty stuff every now and then @rorty_tweeting
Interesting, but I'm not convinced. He didn't refute Rorty's argument about the space-man or amoeba, he just mischaracterized it. He seemed to be struggling at the end. A giraffe is not an asteroid because of some inherent giraffeness about it, oh yeah and also because that's not what those words mean, he sneaks in, as if that 2nd reason wasn't doing all the heavy lifting.
He didn't have to refute that latter view about the so-called "social relativity of the usefulness of descriptions". He only had show how it is compatible with realism, which is precisely what he did.
@@Philosophy_Overdose The point is that foundationalism is always someone's particular foundation, and there are too many foundations out there, and we can have science but also a more open approach to knowledge -- indeed knowledgeS.
As far as I can see, the amoeba or space-man example is trivial and silly, since of course an amoeba will have all kinds of perceptual, semantic, or other capacities/constraints, which will not make it apprehend a giraffe. What's the big deal about that? As Boghossian mentions later on, realism doesn't commit one to a god's eye view of the ultimate perception or conception of giraffe. If anything, the giraffe example commits Rorty to believing that there are innate dispositions or capacities that enable us to differentiate between giraffe and the air surrounding it, which I'm pretty sure he will hesitate to do.
I second other commenters in not being at all convinced by this line of argumentation. It seems to me that his point at the end as to the infinity of reasonable descriptions of a given plot of space-time is a point in the favor of, and not contrary to, Pragmatism. The number of relations which could be truthfully posited is, if not infinite, then practically innumerable; but how to decide between any of these relations as taking primacy, or as being worthy of expression, would seem to depend on the context in which this plot is being examined-depend, in other words, on our needs and purposes in a particular context. I suppose I feel as though Boghossian has failed to demonstrate that the validity of these relations over others is dependent on the way things are in themselves independently of us. As another commenter mentioned, if someone asserted that a giraffe were an asteroid, the issue would not be settled by appeal to the way it is in itself, but instead to some other mode of investigation which would open up new relations. Suppose they pulled a zipper and it actually turned out to be an asteroid in a giraffe costume. But there is no equivalent demonstration for laying bare its essence. (If there were, how could there be room for argument?)
As usual, "arguments" with Rorty jump straight to the boogeyman. 13:50 - No, "fact as construct" does not mean "everything is true." Obviously. Even if facts are constructs, we still evaluate between claims of facts the same way we do now. If a person said a giraffe was an asteroid, we would ask them what they meant. And if they couldn't tell us to our satisfaction, we feel justified in ignoring them. "If Rorty is right, then giraffes are asteroids, arraaagghhh!!" - this guy.
Well, as long as you're willing to accept that dinosaurs and other things in the universe are independent of human beings and were around long before we came on the scene lol
@@Philosophy_Overdose that hardly seems problematic, which is the whole point. I think you are conflating anti-realism with anti-representationalism. It certainly seems like there is a reality independent of us, including dinosaurs. But, alas, we can't tell the difference between dino-facts that are "constructed" and dino-facts that are "discovered." And yet we get along fine. Which is how we know the difference doesn't matter and insisting it does is just a howl of outrage by the epistemologically pious.
@@ericb9804 ‘dinosaurs went extinct before humans existed’ | ‘there were dinosaurs on Noah’s ark’ -ALAS WE CANNOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THESE SO CALLED “FACTS”
@@williamfenton274 You don't get it. Of course we can tell the "difference" between "facts" when we compare them to each other. But that is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about comparing "facts" to some "external state of affairs," some metaphysical standard by which we can declare that a "fact" is "true" independent of humanity, or some such fantasy. But all we really know is that one of your "facts" is "justified" by human experience. The other much less so. This justification by human experience the only sense in which either of them need to be "true" because we can't tell the difference between a fact that is "justified by human experience" and one that is "true in virtue of the state of affairs." They look the same to us.
I'm unfamiliar with Rorty's work. Could you clarify how/why Rorty isn't an anti-realist? Kant is definitely not an anti-realist though, so I'm with you on that part.
@@lordfarquaad3939 It's hard to prove that he wasn't an anti-realist (certainly easier to show that he was what he actually was). Why do you think he was an anti-realist? How do you understand the word?
@@hss12661 my very very limited understanding of Rorty seems to be that he is committed to a worldview in which propositions are only true or false insofar as we are playing a specific language game-we create the rules that govern what is/isn’t true by virtue of concept creation. If I’m not misunderstanding his metaphysics, then he appears to be an anti-realist because truth claims are always speaker relative (aka they are based on the specific system of thought/schemes of understanding/language that we’ve adopted). Or at the very least, if not speaker-relative, then language relative. My assumption is that this view can’t capture the same sense of objectivity with the strength that moral realists would like to.
@@lordfarquaad3939 Yes, but are we talking about moral realism/anti-realism or realism/anti-realism in general? You're almost correct in your description of Rorty's views, although he doesn't speak of explicitly following any rules. Some aspects of our discursive practices are made explicit by rules (as Brandom would say it) but we don't follow rules consciously, because they are not fixed but instead created by engaging in skillful coping. Furthermore, Rorty, following Davidson, rejects the idea of conceptual relativity (radically different conceptual schemes) as incoherent and unintelligible, although he speaks of vocabularies. Nothing is however vocabulary-relative in a strong sense, because a vocabulary, like a language game, is just a way of speaking, a redescription, a making-explicit of our practices which are already implicit before we become aware of it. And, as creatures who are causally constrained by world, we use vocabularies to speak *of* that world, so there's never total incommensurability, but there's also no privilleged relation of correspondence between sentences in a vocabulary and facts (Rorty argues for a deflationary account of truth). Perhaps, to paraphrase Sellars, mastery of the use of one set of words is independent of mastery of the use of another set of words - and according to Rorty, if I understand him, that's what incommensurability amounts to at best. Regarding speaker-relativity, Rorty, once again following Davidson (and Quine), takes engaging in linguistic practices to be dependent on the process of triangulation which involves the ability to coordinate one's responses to stimuli with someone else's. And this ability requires having a solid grasp on the world in a significant sense of the word (this is a very superficial description of the idea, but I hope it's not too cursory to be altogether confusing). Rorty would say, following Heidegger, that we cannot take the threat of nihilism, or our norms failing to be binding, seriously. We're social creatures, our very ability to think meaningful sentences involves participating in a normative framework which is socially instituted. Is there more to it? Rorty would say: no, but you can die for an idea even if your grandchildren won't understand its significance.
@@hss12661 I see what you are saying. I also think I originally misunderstood-I assumed you meant that Rorty wasn’t a moral anti-realist, and idk why I didn’t specify that in my question lol. Thank you for explaining Rorty’s view; that was all incredibly helpful and you are great at explaining ideas. I appreciate you giving me your time of day to help further my understanding!
Or is Rorty saying something more like "races (dinosaurs) are a social construct" i.e. we can't easily separate "the facts" from the fact that many kids find dinos cute and cuddly, they appear in cartoons (often with humans, counterfactually), that we think they evolved into birds (we used to say reptiles) -- and then there's the concept itself: did some dinosaurs live underwater or do we call those something else? Maybe some cultures call the underwater ones something else. Are they factually wrong or is taxonomy somewhat arbitrary? With races, only some ethnicities think in terms of humans grouped into black, white, red, yellow, brown. Or maybe that's where some think we're headed, if "the great dumbing down" continues.
The entire discussion or philosophical problem so it appears hinges on the level of subject-predicate or subject-object dichotomy. It seems to be a sensual effort on the part of the thinker to go high on the examination of that habit or way of seeing. To peirce through it by the tools of rational thought. As Wittgenstein puts it, problems in philosophy are problems in our language. When such problems are solved they are no more. We are all arisen from the world with the world. There is no "us" apart from the world. Wittgenstein puts it best when, in Notebooks 1914-1916, he asks "Is seeing an activity?"
always a bad sign in philosophy when one feels obliged/is reduced to making use of absurd examples to deliver one's point. perhaps this reflects a form of unconscious self-sabotage for fear of revealing that we have no idea what we're talking about! it seems to me the infinite regress to semantics is trying to tell us something. wouldn't it be helpful to have some idea, any idea at all of whence human language itself comes into existence?!
Well, anything would be disappointing if you looked at it in this way - i.e. if you zoom in on one statement while ignoring the role it is playing in the overall argument. Philosophical arguments often involve making some mundane and completely uncontroversial statements, but using those to build a more interesting and controversial point. In this case, he wants to defend the idea that certain things are objectively real from the arguments that reality is constructed. The idea that "not everything is the case" is just one of his responses to one of the constructivist arguments he is addressing. It would obviously be lame if that was all he was saying, but it is playing a purpose in his argument. It's like looking at one note in a song. The note itself isn't interesting except when properly examined in relation to the other notes of the song.
@@macw.7686 I disagree. "Not everything is the case" is the quintessential self-congratulation of the obtuse realist. Do you really think Rorty, or any other constructivist, wants you to believe that we just have to accept as "true" the claim that giraffes are asteroids? c'mon, man. No one is actually claiming that "everything is the case." No one. And that's the point flyinghamster9 is making - that the "mundane and uncontroversial statements" made in support of the "objectively real" lead, predictably, to such a useless conclusion.
I think What Boghossian calls facts here is what Rorty would refer to as ”the world causally constraining us” .
Rorty has a line in his book ”Philosophy and social hope” that goes something like ”We can never be more arbitrary than the world lets us be ..so even if there is no way the world is, or an intrinsic nature of reality, there are still causal pressures and these will be described, at different times, for different purposes, but they are pressures none the less”
At the end of the video here they seem to be talking about the same thing , about things being described in multiple ways, and none of the descriptions can get reality/the world right.
I guess what Boghossian would call objectivity Rorty would merely call enough intersubjective agreement / consensus
Btw, I tweet some Rorty stuff every now and then @rorty_tweeting
Interesting, but I'm not convinced. He didn't refute Rorty's argument about the space-man or amoeba, he just mischaracterized it. He seemed to be struggling at the end. A giraffe is not an asteroid because of some inherent giraffeness about it, oh yeah and also because that's not what those words mean, he sneaks in, as if that 2nd reason wasn't doing all the heavy lifting.
He didn't have to refute that latter view about the so-called "social relativity of the usefulness of descriptions". He only had show how it is compatible with realism, which is precisely what he did.
@@Philosophy_Overdose The point is that foundationalism is always someone's particular foundation, and there are too many foundations out there, and we can have science but also a more open approach to knowledge -- indeed knowledgeS.
@@josephhellweg3763 “the point” lmao
As far as I can see, the amoeba or space-man example is trivial and silly, since of course an amoeba will have all kinds of perceptual, semantic, or other capacities/constraints, which will not make it apprehend a giraffe. What's the big deal about that? As Boghossian mentions later on, realism doesn't commit one to a god's eye view of the ultimate perception or conception of giraffe. If anything, the giraffe example commits Rorty to believing that there are innate dispositions or capacities that enable us to differentiate between giraffe and the air surrounding it, which I'm pretty sure he will hesitate to do.
I second other commenters in not being at all convinced by this line of argumentation. It seems to me that his point at the end as to the infinity of reasonable descriptions of a given plot of space-time is a point in the favor of, and not contrary to, Pragmatism. The number of relations which could be truthfully posited is, if not infinite, then practically innumerable; but how to decide between any of these relations as taking primacy, or as being worthy of expression, would seem to depend on the context in which this plot is being examined-depend, in other words, on our needs and purposes in a particular context. I suppose I feel as though Boghossian has failed to demonstrate that the validity of these relations over others is dependent on the way things are in themselves independently of us. As another commenter mentioned, if someone asserted that a giraffe were an asteroid, the issue would not be settled by appeal to the way it is in itself, but instead to some other mode of investigation which would open up new relations. Suppose they pulled a zipper and it actually turned out to be an asteroid in a giraffe costume. But there is no equivalent demonstration for laying bare its essence. (If there were, how could there be room for argument?)
That sums up the matter.I concur.
As usual, "arguments" with Rorty jump straight to the boogeyman. 13:50 - No, "fact as construct" does not mean "everything is true." Obviously. Even if facts are constructs, we still evaluate between claims of facts the same way we do now. If a person said a giraffe was an asteroid, we would ask them what they meant. And if they couldn't tell us to our satisfaction, we feel justified in ignoring them. "If Rorty is right, then giraffes are asteroids, arraaagghhh!!" - this guy.
Well, as long as you're willing to accept that dinosaurs and other things in the universe are independent of human beings and were around long before we came on the scene lol
@@Philosophy_Overdose that hardly seems problematic, which is the whole point. I think you are conflating anti-realism with anti-representationalism. It certainly seems like there is a reality independent of us, including dinosaurs. But, alas, we can't tell the difference between dino-facts that are "constructed" and dino-facts that are "discovered." And yet we get along fine. Which is how we know the difference doesn't matter and insisting it does is just a howl of outrage by the epistemologically pious.
@@ericb9804 ‘dinosaurs went extinct before humans existed’ | ‘there were dinosaurs on Noah’s ark’ -ALAS WE CANNOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THESE SO CALLED “FACTS”
@@williamfenton274 You don't get it. Of course we can tell the "difference" between "facts" when we compare them to each other. But that is not what we are talking about here. We are talking about comparing "facts" to some "external state of affairs," some metaphysical standard by which we can declare that a "fact" is "true" independent of humanity, or some such fantasy. But all we really know is that one of your "facts" is "justified" by human experience. The other much less so. This justification by human experience the only sense in which either of them need to be "true" because we can't tell the difference between a fact that is "justified by human experience" and one that is "true in virtue of the state of affairs." They look the same to us.
@@ericb9804 “they look the same to us” 🤓
His portrayal of Rorty's position is ridiculous. Rorty is not an anti-realist and Kant isn't an anti-realist either.
I'm unfamiliar with Rorty's work. Could you clarify how/why Rorty isn't an anti-realist? Kant is definitely not an anti-realist though, so I'm with you on that part.
@@lordfarquaad3939 It's hard to prove that he wasn't an anti-realist (certainly easier to show that he was what he actually was). Why do you think he was an anti-realist? How do you understand the word?
@@hss12661 my very very limited understanding of Rorty seems to be that he is committed to a worldview in which propositions are only true or false insofar as we are playing a specific language game-we create the rules that govern what is/isn’t true by virtue of concept creation. If I’m not misunderstanding his metaphysics, then he appears to be an anti-realist because truth claims are always speaker relative (aka they are based on the specific system of thought/schemes of understanding/language that we’ve adopted). Or at the very least, if not speaker-relative, then language relative. My assumption is that this view can’t capture the same sense of objectivity with the strength that moral realists would like to.
@@lordfarquaad3939 Yes, but are we talking about moral realism/anti-realism or realism/anti-realism in general?
You're almost correct in your description of Rorty's views, although he doesn't speak of explicitly following any rules. Some aspects of our discursive practices are made explicit by rules (as Brandom would say it) but we don't follow rules consciously, because they are not fixed but instead created by engaging in skillful coping.
Furthermore, Rorty, following Davidson, rejects the idea of conceptual relativity (radically different conceptual schemes) as incoherent and unintelligible, although he speaks of vocabularies. Nothing is however vocabulary-relative in a strong sense, because a vocabulary, like a language game, is just a way of speaking, a redescription, a making-explicit of our practices which are already implicit before we become aware of it. And, as creatures who are causally constrained by world, we use vocabularies to speak *of* that world, so there's never total incommensurability, but there's also no privilleged relation of correspondence between sentences in a vocabulary and facts (Rorty argues for a deflationary account of truth). Perhaps, to paraphrase Sellars, mastery of the use of one set of words is independent of mastery of the use of another set of words - and according to Rorty, if I understand him, that's what incommensurability amounts to at best.
Regarding speaker-relativity, Rorty, once again following Davidson (and Quine), takes engaging in linguistic practices to be dependent on the process of triangulation which involves the ability to coordinate one's responses to stimuli with someone else's. And this ability requires having a solid grasp on the world in a significant sense of the word (this is a very superficial description of the idea, but I hope it's not too cursory to be altogether confusing).
Rorty would say, following Heidegger, that we cannot take the threat of nihilism, or our norms failing to be binding, seriously. We're social creatures, our very ability to think meaningful sentences involves participating in a normative framework which is socially instituted. Is there more to it? Rorty would say: no, but you can die for an idea even if your grandchildren won't understand its significance.
@@hss12661 I see what you are saying. I also think I originally misunderstood-I assumed you meant that Rorty wasn’t a moral anti-realist, and idk why I didn’t specify that in my question lol. Thank you for explaining Rorty’s view; that was all incredibly helpful and you are great at explaining ideas. I appreciate you giving me your time of day to help further my understanding!
You’re having a giraffe
Thank You
Or is Rorty saying something more like "races (dinosaurs) are a social construct" i.e. we can't easily separate "the facts" from the fact that many kids find dinos cute and cuddly, they appear in cartoons (often with humans, counterfactually), that we think they evolved into birds (we used to say reptiles) -- and then there's the concept itself: did some dinosaurs live underwater or do we call those something else? Maybe some cultures call the underwater ones something else. Are they factually wrong or is taxonomy somewhat arbitrary? With races, only some ethnicities think in terms of humans grouped into black, white, red, yellow, brown. Or maybe that's where some think we're headed, if "the great dumbing down" continues.
Supreme. Thank you!!:)
FASCINATING BRILLIANCE!
WOW!
... still, WAY COOL!!:)
Rorty is the Boss 😂 metaphysicians cry
And confused.
@@fsab2159 Hardly confused, just tired of the intellectual imperialism for which people misuse science and philosophy
@@fsab2159 more clear impossible
@@daimon00000 Is that a fact, a construct, justification, consensus or just a conversation?
@@fsab2159 depends
The entire discussion or philosophical problem so it appears hinges on the level of subject-predicate or subject-object dichotomy. It seems to be a sensual effort on the part of the thinker to go high on the examination of that habit or way of seeing. To peirce through it by the tools of rational thought. As Wittgenstein puts it, problems in philosophy are problems in our language. When such problems are solved they are no more. We are all arisen from the world with the world. There is no "us" apart from the world. Wittgenstein puts it best when, in Notebooks 1914-1916, he asks "Is seeing an activity?"
always a bad sign in philosophy when one feels obliged/is reduced to making use of absurd examples to deliver one's point. perhaps this reflects a form of unconscious self-sabotage for fear of revealing that we have no idea what we're talking about! it seems to me the infinite regress to semantics is trying to tell us something. wouldn't it be helpful to have some idea, any idea at all of whence human language itself comes into existence?!
spending a quarter of an hour saying "rorty makes me nervous."
What?
This oratory was extremely disappointing. The beginning is tempting but then it bumbles and flops. "Not everything is the case" 🙈 ok, thanks 🙏, 👍
Well, anything would be disappointing if you looked at it in this way - i.e. if you zoom in on one statement while ignoring the role it is playing in the overall argument.
Philosophical arguments often involve making some mundane and completely uncontroversial statements, but using those to build a more interesting and controversial point. In this case, he wants to defend the idea that certain things are objectively real from the arguments that reality is constructed. The idea that "not everything is the case" is just one of his responses to one of the constructivist arguments he is addressing. It would obviously be lame if that was all he was saying, but it is playing a purpose in his argument.
It's like looking at one note in a song. The note itself isn't interesting except when properly examined in relation to the other notes of the song.
@@macw.7686 I disagree. "Not everything is the case" is the quintessential self-congratulation of the obtuse realist. Do you really think Rorty, or any other constructivist, wants you to believe that we just have to accept as "true" the claim that giraffes are asteroids? c'mon, man. No one is actually claiming that "everything is the case." No one. And that's the point flyinghamster9 is making - that the "mundane and uncontroversial statements" made in support of the "objectively real" lead, predictably, to such a useless conclusion.
This was an elegant and decisive criticism.
I agree . It was quite insightful and thought provoking.
The shnauzberries taste like shnauzberries
Rorty's project is just hopeless.
How so?