Abstract
A critical outline is given of Rorty’s early, “eliminativist” attempt to formulate a materialist version of the mind-body identity theory that does not fall foul of the “irreducible properties objection” (the thought that if mental states are brain states then the latter must exhibit the same properties as the former). An explanation is offered of why Rorty continued to describe himself as a materialist/physicalist despite having come to reject any version of mind-body identity.
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Notes
- 1.
Rorty first proposed what he refers to as the “disappearance” form of Identity Theory in his 1965 essay “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories.” The position is extended and defended in the “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental” (1970) and “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism” (1972). These and other important essays from the period are collected in Rorty 2014 (Chaps. 6, 8, and 10 respectively). The more popular descriptor “eliminative” materialism was coined by Cornman (1968a).
- 2.
I’ll say more about the Antipodeans in Sect. 5.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
Ryle was of course familiar with the German phenomenological tradition and famously reviewed Being and Time (Ryle 1929).
- 6.
For an influential contrasting view of the status of such identities see Kripke 1980.
- 7.
For a response to this from the ‘Oxford’ school see Grice and Strawson 1957.
- 8.
“for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits” (Quine 1980, p. 44).
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
The name is of course a tongue-in-cheek homage to the Australasian materialists who first propounded the reductive version of the identity theory.
- 12.
See Gascoigne (forthcoming) for a fuller account.
- 13.
The positing of what we need to “talk about.” See Rorty 1976.
- 14.
“If we are limning the true and ultimate structure of reality, the canonical scheme for us is the austere scheme that knows no quotation but direct quotation and no propositional attitudes but only the physical constitution and behavior of organisms” (Quine 2013, p. 202).
- 15.
In Gascoigne 2008, ch. 3 I melodramatise this as Rorty’s “Kehre.”
- 16.
My thanks to Martin Müller for “encouraging” me to finish this and for his editorial acumen!
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Further Reading
Brandom, Robert. 1998. Making it explicit. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
A systematic development of the innovative approach to the practice-based explication of social norms that Brandom ascribes to Rorty’s eliminative materialism.
Davidson, Donald. 1980. Essays on actions and events. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Essays outlining the ‘reason can be causes’ thesis that Davidson calls ‘Anomalous Monism’ and which is one of the sources of Rorty’s non-reductive physicalism.
Gascoigne, Neil. 2015. Richard Rorty. In Oxford bibliographies in philosophy, Ed. D. Pritchard. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0190.
A critical bibliography of works on and by Rorty.
McDowell, John. 1998. Reply to commentators. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53(2): 403–432.
On the ‘baldness’ of Rorty’s naturalism amongst other things.
Ramsey, William. 2013. Eliminative materialism. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, summer edn. Ed. E.N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/materialism-eliminative
An informative overview of how eliminativism developed in the aftermath of Rorty’s early work.
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Gascoigne, N. (2022). Philosophy of Mind: Mind-Body Identity and Eliminative Materialism. In: Müller, M. (eds) Handbuch Richard Rorty. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16260-3_36-1
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