Rorty is such a huge inspiration. Really interesting character, I enjoy listening to him more than Foucaultian types--they're interesting, but I find this sort of philosophy more practical for whatever reason.
@Corey Anton Yes, it is a concern. We'll have a video on James' essay "The Ph.D. Octopus" (and responses) up in the next few weeks, which relates to this. Thanks for the comment. Please share!
He touches on an interesting point. If it is fatal for a discipline to become self-absorbed insofar as it ceases to hold relevance or communicate with others, yet jargon-ridden specialized vocabulary becomes inevitable as part of professionalization, then to what extent can one continue to expect exchanges across disciplines and between the academy and non-academic practices to occur? Doesn't the very nature of professionalization, which Rorty admits is a 'necessary evil', entail a progressive specialization of each discipline, an absorption into its own issues and jargon, and thus an tendency to insulate and seclude itself by default? If so, isn't the tendency of professionalization, at least in what concerns the humanities, to become alienating to the point of becoming irrelevant and dying?
Yes, I think he is contradicting himself. He complains about parochialism within disciplines but then defense parochialism. If this doesn't signify a "crisis," then it is at least a chronic condition.
A solution is to create new disciplines which draw together multiple disciplines. These are united by a question or problem rather than a methodology. Cognitive science comes to my mind, which draws together psychology, biology (neurology, physiology), engineering (electronic, computer, and mechanical), philosophy (of mind, ethical). Generally if you ask a question, that's an interdisciplinary thing because there are many ways to approach answering that question. Complexity science is similar, being interested in studying complex systems, emergence, self organisation, criticality, evolution, etc. Complexity science developed due to people noticing these phenomena popping up in many different contexts (read: disciplines), as well as a general dissatisfaction with reductionism (plus, importantly, the arrival of powerful computers). On the other hand, maybe complexity science is more united in methodology (computer simulation, non-linear dynamics, non-gaussian statistics, evolutionary models, game theory, information theory, thermodynamics ...), so you can do complexity science as a biologist, anthropologist, economist, physicist, chemist, engineer, as long as you broadly employ these methods. Complexity science might be a bad example because it's pretty much re-doing all of science in a non-reductionist way. So the cognitive science example is more illustrative here. I think this is easier to do if there is some practical project. For example, if the social sciences unite behind the question 'how do we improve quality of life?', or cognitive science unites around 'how do we create a human level intelligence?' or some medical problem. It's worth asking what healthy communication between disciplines looks like, as in how do we know we're there? Because obviously there isn't much for cosmologists and entomologists to talk about. Or maybe there is (thinking of Steven Strogatz writing about the science of syncronisation, for example in fireflies).
Increased professionalization in the "hard" sciences leads to, in some cases, more complicated mathematical equations. But these equations can be understood by all who pursue the disciplines with rigor, and they can be automated via computer programs so that even neophytes in these professions can make use of the equations to provide useful products and predictions. Increased professionalization in the humanities and "soft" sciences, however, does not lead to unambiguous equations. Instead it leads to more and more obscure language which, however much the speaker tries to eliminate ambiguity and equivocation, seems inevitably to lead to multiple and often contradictory understandings of the texts generated. Even if it were the case that all professionals in a given discipline agreed on the texts, communicating the meaning and justification of these texts to the common reader is much more complicated than the equations generated by the hard sciences. Educated readers eventually "get" a notion of what relativity or quantum mechanics means. However, we have yet to "get" what constitutes a fair, just, and thriving polity.
Rorty, however intellectually brilliant he may be (he is), is distinctly strong as a philosopher because he is able to think and resonate in the "normal" world. From the days of Plato, that ordinariness has been scorned in a sense by philosophers and intellectuals in general. I have had the good fortune to be around a lot of brilliant people in my life. Because of that experience, I have found that those who are often able to contribute to humanity the most are the ones who are successfully able to reconcile their unusual intelligence with the fact that they are ordinary, eating, breathing and shitting human beings. Rorty is like that. And I mean that as a high compliment.
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Rorty is such a huge inspiration. Really interesting character, I enjoy listening to him more than Foucaultian types--they're interesting, but I find this sort of philosophy more practical for whatever reason.
Well, Rorty's philosophy _is_ called _pragmatism._
Rorty is lit. He feels normal and trustworthy.
Rorty is very unpretentious. He expresses himself clearly, he doesn't aspire to make himself sound fancy and impressive. That goes a long way.
I sense such warm humanity in him!
@Corey Anton Yes, it is a concern. We'll have a video on James' essay "The Ph.D. Octopus" (and responses) up in the next few weeks, which relates to this. Thanks for the comment. Please share!
Thanks for the video. 4:17 seems spot on
Ha! You were right, last week's vid *wasn't* the last I ever heard of Rorty...thanks for this.
He touches on an interesting point. If it is fatal for a discipline to become self-absorbed insofar as it ceases to hold relevance or communicate with others, yet jargon-ridden specialized vocabulary becomes inevitable as part of professionalization, then to what extent can one continue to expect exchanges across disciplines and between the academy and non-academic practices to occur? Doesn't the very nature of professionalization, which Rorty admits is a 'necessary evil', entail a progressive specialization of each discipline, an absorption into its own issues and jargon, and thus an tendency to insulate and seclude itself by default? If so, isn't the tendency of professionalization, at least in what concerns the humanities, to become alienating to the point of becoming irrelevant and dying?
Yes, I think he is contradicting himself. He complains about parochialism within disciplines but then defense parochialism. If this doesn't signify a "crisis," then it is at least a chronic condition.
A solution is to create new disciplines which draw together multiple disciplines. These are united by a question or problem rather than a methodology. Cognitive science comes to my mind, which draws together psychology, biology (neurology, physiology), engineering (electronic, computer, and mechanical), philosophy (of mind, ethical). Generally if you ask a question, that's an interdisciplinary thing because there are many ways to approach answering that question.
Complexity science is similar, being interested in studying complex systems, emergence, self organisation, criticality, evolution, etc. Complexity science developed due to people noticing these phenomena popping up in many different contexts (read: disciplines), as well as a general dissatisfaction with reductionism (plus, importantly, the arrival of powerful computers). On the other hand, maybe complexity science is more united in methodology (computer simulation, non-linear dynamics, non-gaussian statistics, evolutionary models, game theory, information theory, thermodynamics ...), so you can do complexity science as a biologist, anthropologist, economist, physicist, chemist, engineer, as long as you broadly employ these methods. Complexity science might be a bad example because it's pretty much re-doing all of science in a non-reductionist way. So the cognitive science example is more illustrative here.
I think this is easier to do if there is some practical project. For example, if the social sciences unite behind the question 'how do we improve quality of life?', or cognitive science unites around 'how do we create a human level intelligence?' or some medical problem.
It's worth asking what healthy communication between disciplines looks like, as in how do we know we're there? Because obviously there isn't much for cosmologists and entomologists to talk about. Or maybe there is (thinking of Steven Strogatz writing about the science of syncronisation, for example in fireflies).
Increased professionalization in the "hard" sciences leads to, in some cases, more complicated mathematical equations. But these equations can be understood by all who pursue the disciplines with rigor, and they can be automated via computer programs so that even neophytes in these professions can make use of the equations to provide useful products and predictions.
Increased professionalization in the humanities and "soft" sciences, however, does not lead to unambiguous equations. Instead it leads to more and more obscure language which, however much the speaker tries to eliminate ambiguity and equivocation, seems inevitably to lead to multiple and often contradictory understandings of the texts generated.
Even if it were the case that all professionals in a given discipline agreed on the texts, communicating the meaning and justification of these texts to the common reader is much more complicated than the equations generated by the hard sciences. Educated readers eventually "get" a notion of what relativity or quantum mechanics means. However, we have yet to "get" what constitutes a fair, just, and thriving polity.
Yes! I'll post more when I can. Thanks for watching.
my favourite villain
Rorty, however intellectually brilliant he may be (he is), is distinctly strong as a philosopher because he is able to think and resonate in the "normal" world. From the days of Plato, that ordinariness has been scorned in a sense by philosophers and intellectuals in general. I have had the good fortune to be around a lot of brilliant people in my life. Because of that experience, I have found that those who are often able to contribute to humanity the most are the ones who are successfully able to reconcile their unusual intelligence with the fact that they are ordinary, eating, breathing and shitting human beings. Rorty is like that. And I mean that as a high compliment.
Thanks for sharing!
I wish I had read more by the time I met Rorty and got to talk to him. He was an original thinker and a likable person.
Great interview. Concise, dense, rich!
does anyone know what book chapter he is talking about at 1:20? is it from contingency, irony, solidarity (the chapter on Proust) or elsewhere?
In 'Contingency' he spoke about them and maybe in 'Essays on Heidegger and others' too.
speed at 1.25 works perfectly
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity was just about impossible for me to finish. So loaded with pedantic trash, it’s quite a feat that I managed it.