[lit-ideas] Re: Richard Rorty, Nietzsche and Jungian Darwinism

From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 31 Dec 2009 08:00:50 +0000 (GMT)
I think Rorty misrepresents things (as they are, in themselves [as it were]).

--- On Thu, 31/12/09, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On
> page 3 of Essays on Heidegger and Others, Richard
> Rorty writes, “ . . . when you
> switch over from Deweyan talk of experience to
> Quinean-Davidsonian talk of
> sentences, it becomes easier to get the point of
> Nietzsche’s famous
> remark, in ‘Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral
> Sense,’ that truth is a
> ‘mobile army of metaphors.’ 

Yeh, yeh. Provided, for example, we take a _vacuously wide_ idea of "mobile 
army of metaphors". What Popper might say is this: a "mobile army of metaphors" 
- along with many other armies and non-armies, and mobile and immobile stuff - 
_might play a role_ in the search for truth: but _they do not constitute truth_ 
(and only relatavist legerdemain might convince you otherwise). Truth is the 
correspondence (of a proposition) to the facts [a la Tarski]. There is nothing 
crucially _metaphorical_ about this correspondence relationship [though 
admittedly it cannot be taxonimised into a one-to-one correspondence between 
linguistic terms and their objects, as perhap W tried to "show" in his TLP].

> “I
> interpret this remark along the lines of my treatment of
> Davidson’s
> treatment of metaphor . . .  I take its point to be
> that sentences are
> only things that can be true or false, that our repertoire
> of sentences grows
> as history goes along, and that this growth is largely a
> matter of
> literalization of novel metaphors.  Thinking of truth
> in this way helps us
> switch over from a Cartesian-Kantian picture of
> intellectual progress (as a
> better and better fit between mind and world) to a
> Darwinian picture (as an
> increasing ability to shape the tools needed to help the
> species survive,
> multiply, and transform itself).” 

But this is another sleight-of-hand which posits a (perhaps interesting but 
nevertheless) false opposition. It is a false opposition to suggest that 
Darwinism does without any idea of better and better fit between mind/organism 
and world/environment whereas Kant (who actually claims the world in itself is 
unknowable and all we can know is the world relative to our cognitive 
limitations) believes there is anything like a simple measure of this 'fit'. 
This false opposition overlooks a key intellectual-historical fact, that Kant 
was writing pre-Darwin (and pre-Einstein). 

Part of Popper's philosophy is to reapply Kantian ideas in the post-Darwin (and 
post-Einstein) intellectual world. Post-Darwin we might say that the idea of 
'fittedness' can be assessed relative to survival and reproduction (though this 
is not the only or even most interesting or important way it can be assessed) 
but the degree to which this kind of 'fittedness' reflects a _correspondence_ 
between the organism's _programme of action_ and actual reality remains open to 
question in the Kantian way. That is, Darwinian 'fit' does not supplant the 
question of "correspondence to reality"; rather it complicates things for, as 
Popper aptly puts it, even the most unfit thing can survive (and this, for 
Popper, is true for things as diverse as organisms and theories) - at least, 
until they fail to survive.

Donal
L-plates




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References:
- [lit-ideas] Richard Rorty, Nietzsche and Jungian Darwinism
  - From: Lawrence Helm
[lit-ideas] Re: Richard Rorty, Nietzsche and Jungian Darwinism

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