Richard Rorty's Persons Without Minds

The purpose of this research is to examine an excerpt from Richard Rorty's "Persons Without Minds." The plan of the research will be to set forth the context for Rorty's use of the Antipodeans for philosophical discourse, and then to discuss his explanation of the difference between giving an account of mental states and experience in psychological and physical terms on one side, and giving an account of such states and experience in exclusively physical terms on the other. Additionally, Rorty's Antipodean discourse will form the basis of an evaluation of the extent to which he can be identified with eliminative materialism.

The Antipodeans that Rorty creates can be interpreted as the fruit of labor in the exercise of asserting an ontology of science fiction, but in this context science fiction is not to be understood as a species of narrative entertainment. Rather, Rorty's Antipodeans inhabit what could be called a parallel or "possible" universe in which the articulation of what human beings (Terrans) take to be mental states is unambiguously neurophysical. The key to what could be called the nature of the Antipodean mind is the history of their mind:

Neurology and biochemistry had been the first disciplines in which technological breakthroughs had been achieved, and a large part of the conversation of these people concerned the state of their nerves. . . . [E]ach well-formed sentence in the language which anybody bothered to form could easily be correlated with a readily i

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om and indeed the entire cosmos. This possibility, which is fully realized Antipodean potential and performance, is consistent with what Rorty refers to as the need for "some generally ontological categories" that would assimilate or distinguish "referents of expressions" (i.e., that would make meanings) regarding physical and mental entities. It is also consistent with Rorty's reference to the claim that: (1) it is sufficient for being a mental state that the thing in question be incorrigibly knowable by its possessor, and (2) we do not literally attribute any nonphysical states (e.g., beliefs) to beings which fail to have some such incorrigibly knowable states (Rorty 272). The notion of the sufficiency of incorrigible knowledge points toward the decisiveness of ontological categories as having significant explanatory power. Indeed, a sufficiently developed ontology might have the effect of obviating epistemology or more exactly making it irrelevant to the description either of the material world or to what may conveniently be called the subjective experience of the world. That is why Rorty raises what he calls "a real issue" (272) in connection with the reports of pain in terms of neurons or feeling. Undoubtedly it is the case t

Category: Philosophy - R