Theory-Change And The Logic Of Enquiry: New Bearings In Philosophy Of Science

Review of Metaphysics, The, Sept, 1999 by Christopher Norris

Now it might well be said that Rorty is untypical in pushing so far with the incompatibilist argument that it severs every link between the two kinds of aboutness relation, that which "ties s to its objects" in a straightforward causal way and that which concerns "the inferential relations between our belief that s and our other beliefs."(28) Clearly one motive for adopting this line is Rorty's desire to avoid being characterized as a downright antirealist or cultural relativist while still leaving maximum scope for his claim that we can redescribe the world in as many different ways as there exist different language games, final vocabularies, metaphors we can live by, and so forth. Nevertheless Rorty's route to this wished-for denouement is one that follows a path well-beaten by other analytic (or post-analytic) thinkers, Quine and Davidson among them. In Quine it takes the form of a naturalized or physicalist epistemology, along with a range of interconnected theses--semantic holism, meaning variance, ontological relativity, the theory-laden character of observation statements, the underdetermination of theory by evidence--all of which conduce to a radical split between the baseline (causal) and higher-level (normative or interpretive) stages of belief acquisition.(29) In Davidson, likewise, the argument works out as a doctrine of direct realism which allows us to "re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false," joined to an all-purpose principle of charity according to which we have no choice but to interpret other people's sayings and beliefs on the assumption that they must be counted right in most matters, and hence sufficiently in agreement with us for those sayings and beliefs to be rationally construable.(30) So it is that Rorty can enlist Quine and Davidson in support of his case for combining an outlook of sturdy commonsense realism vis-a-vis beliefs and objects of belief with the idea of their always being open to creative redescription in line with our current best interests or most favored cultural values.

From here it is a short step to those varieties of jointly post-analytic and depth-hermeneutical thinking which look to Heidegger for a way beyond the apparent dead end--or the seeming triviality--of truth definitions of the type proposed by thinkers in the mainstream analytical tradition.(31) For these latter reduce either to a Tarskian notion of truth as a purely definitional construct ("snow is white" is a true statement if and only if snow is white) or else to a crudely empiricist conception according to which the truth content of sentences, statements, theories, and so forth, should best be construed as a matter of surface irritations--sensory stimuli of different kinds--plus whatever is needed in the way of Quinean across-the-board pragmatic adjustment. So it is not hard to see why some recent commentators have thought this a somewhat impoverished account of what goes on when we actually engage in the process of trying to figure out meanings and beliefs. One response is to urge that this whole way of thinking is hopelessly in thrall to an outworn epistemological paradigm which conceives truth in terms of correspondence (Of accuracy, factual content, propositional form, or whatever), and which thus remains closed to that other, more authentic or primordial dimension where truth is a matter of unconcealment, of the bringing to light of a wisdom concealed by the accretions of so-called "Western metaphysics."(32) On this view philosophy has much to gain by the turn toward Heidegger and depth hermeneutics, even if tempered, as in Rorty's case, by a measure of pragmatist skepticism as regards Heidegger's more portentous or echt-ontological pronouncements. To another way of thinking, no such drastic remedies are called for, but rather a careful reengagement with issues of truth, meaning, and interpretation that have so far not been adequately treated by philosophers in the broadly analytic camp. On this view, therefore, we had much better stick with the resources of conceptual analysis and critique, whatever the problems hitherto encountered in applying those resources to particular questions of epistemology and interpretation theory.