i think i picked up the idea of "conversation" from a b3n w4tson backlash argt against de saussure!

[dubdobdee]

geuss on rorty on "conversation" (and some discontents)

have only skimmed this: am totally back-achey and mentally fuzzy today and not getting my ideas in order on ANYTHING, least of all chumpdom left right or elsewhere

am tryin to do a (small) bit of spring cleaning -- or at least its pintsize cousin "putting stuff away"

Comments

[koganbot]

Well, one of my own critiques of Rorty (see the "Acknowledgements" in Real Punks) is that temperamentally he was inclined towards dealing with "civil" conversation. But that doesn't mean he wouldn't have considered planes crashing into towers and Bosnian Serbs massacring Bosnian Muslims and kids beating him up in high school as part of the conversation of mankind - if he sees the conversation of mankind as including the French Revolution, it's hard to see him excluding these others, esp. given that he himself talks about the Bosnian massacres and the high-school bullies. And I just don't see that Rorty does overrate words or what point Geuss was making in saying that Rorty did. Again, the word "conversation," which Rorty explicitly uses as a synonym for social practice ("In order to defend Sellars and Quine, I shall be arguing that their holism is a product of their commitment to the thesis that justification is not a matter of a special relation between ideas (or words) and objects, but of conversation, of social practice") isn't meant as a limit, but as taking in what foundationalist philosophy is ill-advisedly claiming to get beyond and underwrite rather than participate in. And yes, where there are justifications and reasons there are words in play, but I don't see where planes attacking towers are excluded. Unless one thinks of 9/11 as a random event, I don't see how it's somehow beyond the social world of justifications and reasons. And as someone who loves music and spends too much time listening to it, I don't see how Rorty's paying more attention to music could have made his argument any different.

Here's a passage from Rorty's "De Man and the American Cultural Left" (in Essays On Heidegger And Others):

One can generalize Quine's and Wittgenstein's points by saying that the significance of a sentence, like that of a belief or a desire, is its place in a web of other sentences, or beliefs or desires. To say this is to emphasize the context-sensitivity of signs and of thoughts - to treat them not as quasi-things but as nodes in a web of relations. But that is simply to describe them as antiessentialists wish everything - tables, quarks, people, social institutions - to be described.

Now, in making descriptions, words would be crucial, I'd think, given that you don't have descriptions without words (or, anyway, to call such things as bee displays and meerkat warning barks "descriptions" would seem to stretch the use of the word "description" for no good purpose), but Rorty is saying that there's nothing about words that make them especially more contextual and relational than anything else. So when he's using the word "conversation" he's not using it because he thinks that our use of words is somehow more social and contextual than our use of quarks or tables or melodies or dance moves or bombs, and I don't see where he'd exclude our use of any of those things from "the conversation of mankind." So, again, I'm not sure how a stronger interest in music would have inspired him to make his points any better, or to make different points.

I think when he starts making social commentary he underplays the normality of social conflict in our linguistic practices (that's why he doesn't write about Superwords and I do), but if he'd substituted the phrase "the brawl of mankind" for "the conversation of mankind" (philosophy is just another fist in the brawl of mankind) his point and his critique of foundationalist philosophy wouldn't have been any different.