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 identifiable neural state (Rorty 268).
Rorty says that Antipodeans could use language such as "It looked like an elephant"; however, he makes that point in order to drive home a more compelling point about what is fundamental to Antipodean consciousness. When he equates the phrase just cited with "I had G-412 together with F-11" and characterizes it as an example of an "offhand reference," he is saying that notions of, desires for, and beliefs about observa...