"So Much the Worse for your Old Intuition; Start Working Up Some New Ones"

Abstract

The history of the philosophic concept of is a complex and tangled one - and Rorty certainly knew tins. In 1967 he wrote the entry for Intuition for Paul Edward's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where he distinguishes four principal meanings of and traces its history from the medievals to Russell, Wittgenstein, and Sellars. I want to focus on the second of the four meanings that Rorty distinguishes:Intuition is of the truth of a proposition where immediate means not preceded by inference. Tins is a philosophically important sense, since philosophers have found it puzzling that one can have and thus justified belief, without having made oneself aware through the process of inference of any justification for this belief.1The veiy way in winch Rorty formulates this sense of intuition indicates one of the deepest and most persistent influences on him - Sellars' critique of the Myth of the Given in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Recall that Sellars began Ins famous lectures by telling us; Many tilings have been said to be 'given': sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, even givenness itself. And there is, indeed, a certain way of construing the situations which philosophers analyze in these tenus which can be said to be the framework of givenness.' Rorty finds the arguments that Sellars advances against any and all forms of givenness persuasive. And from the time when he first started reading Sellars, Rorty accepted what Sellars had awkwardly labeled psychological nominalism, the view that: All awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short all awareness of abstract entities - indeed, all awareness even of particulars - is a affair.3 Rorty presses this doctrine all the way, and, as we know, he uses Sellais and Quine to raise doubts about the veiy foundations of Analytic Philosophy. In short, there is no epistemological given, no knowledge, no by direct acquaintance, no knowledge when these expressions are understood as professional epistemological shoptalk to suggest that there is prelinguistic epistemic awareness. Or, as Sellars tells us, there are no self-authenticating epistemic episodes. To be a bit more explicit, Sellars really distinguishes two senses of immediate. We can say that there is direct in the sense that we can and do make first person non-inferential reports. But the ability to make such first person direct non-inferential reports presupposes our mastery of inferential processes. Sellars argues that we learn how to make such direct reports.The critique of the Myth of the Given was already anticipated by Peirce in his 1868 papers Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man and Some Consequences of Four Incapacities - the two papers which I take to be the real beginnings of pragmatism.4 Despite some of the nasty comments that Rorty makes about Peirce in lus 1979 American Philosophical Asscoiation presidential address, Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism, Rorty is sympathetic with Peirce's critique of intuition, and with Peirce's claim that Cartesianism set the framework for much of modem epistemology.5 Now, this critique of intuitive and the Myth of the Given (in its many varieties) becomes the basis for Rorty's antifoundationalism and lus skepticism about the veiy enterprise of modern epistemology. When we add that Rorty accepts the type of linguistic holism that is implicit in Wittgenstein's understanding of language games and is explicit in Quine and Sellars, we can begin to appreciate lus distinctive emphasis on vocabularies - especially on the plurality of historically contingent vocabularies. One should also mention the influence of Davidson - or more accurately Rorty's appropriation and use of Davidson. For Davidson showed Rorty how we can speak about languages and extirpate any reference to ocular metaphors. …