A Conversation Between John Dewey and Richard Rorty

(Or: The Scolding of Richard Rorty by John Dewey

Or:  Brett’s Whiggish Interpretation of Dewey)

by Brett Anderson

One night after a long reading session of Derrida, Richard Rorty fell asleep.  He was awakened by the ghost of John Dewey, who was setting the clock on Rorty’s DVD player which was blinking “12:00”.

Dewey:  You know Dick you should really learn how to use your tools properly.  How much time have you wasted looking at this clock, only to find that it is not set?

Rorty:  Well, a lot I suppose.  I couldn’t figure it out right away so I gave up.  I’m flabbergasted to see you.  I didn’t know there was an afterlife.  Also, I’m your biggest fan.

Dewey:  Yes, so I’ve heard.  I’ve been rolling in my grave about it, so let’s have a chat about a few things shall we?

Rorty: Wow, that would be super.

Dewey:  Let’s cut to the chase.  I am worried about the sorts of political programs that you have put forth.  And the fact that you invoke my name, as if in a séance, to lend authority to your claims, is a bit of a bugaboo for me.  The two proposals that I can recall at the moment are that there should be a platform that all intellectuals and unions agree on (hee hee) that will be endlessly debated by the public (haw haw) that will serve to steer the country in the right direction, pardon my laughter.  The second proposition that I’ve read is in response to the actual and potential loss of freedom and liberal culture resulting from terrorist attacks.  You give a mild mannered call for individual citizens to ask politely, through the proper channels, for the government to be more forthcoming about their activities.  Frankly Dick I find this all a little weak, like the lemonade you used to serve Sydney.  

Rorty:  Why is this?  I would have thought that you would approve of my writings.  I mean…I’m not a communist or any sort of radical.  I don’t believe revolution is the answer.  When communitarians and libertarians claim that the liberal project is a failure, I ask “compared to what?”  What societies have ever produced more of the institutions and ideas necessary for the realization of the good life than the western democracies?  My critics can provide no answer and their utopian schemes do not inspire confidence.  You taught me that it was best to work with what you have, with the materials and tools available, and that in the face of a cold universe, our task is to alleviate suffering in solidarity with our community.

Dewey:  Yes, I agree with what you have said so far.  But I think that your problem is in regards to the foundations that serve as the basis for inquiry.

Rorty:  Ahh haa!  You’re trying to trick me!  I know that you don’t believe in any sort of foundationalism.  There are no foundations for democracy, or knowledge, or anything else.  There is only  the conversation, where people use tools we call language to get what they want.  Our task is to make those language games more humane.   

Dewey:  You’re half right.  You just said that we have to work out from what we have, and you’re right, but this is uninformative.  What else do we have to work with than what we have?  I enjoy your writing most when you criticize Derrida and Heidigger for thinking of language as an presence that hovers over us, always acting as an oppressive force from which we cannot escape.  You are right to think of language as tools, nothing more nothing less.  But language is not a tool with a capital ‘t’.  Words and sentences are natural objects; they are put to use by humans in response to our shifting cultural and physical environment.  Your mistake is to think that provisional foundations for knowledge and democracy must be a priori ones.  But by nature, language is hooked into the world.  

One thing that I don’t think you’ve quite accepted, despite your fascination with language, is our theory of meaning.  Meanings are the total sum of causes and effects that an object has accord to a set of purposes.  We acquire and enrich our meanings by making connections with these systems of cause and effect.  We can criticize our meanings by asking whether the total of our predictions and interactions bear out in our dealings with the object in question.  Another way to put it is that meanings are models of relations that a thing has, according to a set of purposes.  True beliefs are beliefs that adequately predict and control objects in light of those purposes.  You accept that meanings are tools, but you forget that some meanings are not licensed by our interactions with the world.  Beliefs are false to the extent they do not jive with the possible and actual interactions we have with the object in question.

Rorty:  Yes, yes, I know all this.  The problem is that you can’t cash out this theory of meaning beyond what you have already said.  As the death of logical positivism has shown us, you’ll never be able to match up these “models” of cause and effects with the world, because there is no way for us to have the access to raw sense data of the world with which to compare our meanings.  Sense data always becomes propositionalized in which case you have lost the untaintedness that was supposed to provide the standard.  We only have language and our words are not the world.

Dewey:  Humans are creatures that have been designed by natural selection and we must be constantly interacting with the world in order to survive.  Pragmatists’ natural conception of persons tells us that the way (in general) humans form correct beliefs about the world is by the cause and effects the world has on the human organism.  This naturalistic picture gives us the metaphysics necessary to prop up our theory of meaning.  For we are in constant contact with the world, and our language can often hook on to it by using exploiting the patterns of information our senses deliver and by testing and modifying our interactions with the world and with other people.  This is not the theory of truth or meaning, but the synopsis of what science has told us about ourselves.

Rorty:  But the only way you can secure your conception of the human organism in the world is through the meanings that are properly linked with the world.  You can’t use one to justify the other.  That’s circular reasoning!

Dewey:  Why Dick you’re not trying to answer the skeptic are you?

Rorty:  No sir.

Dewey:  Good.  You’re right, it is circular, but it’s more like a wide web of beliefs that mutually support one another.  Darwin licenses our beliefs about the world, since it is unlikely that natural selection would allow creatures that are massively wrong to survive.  And allow our conception of truth does is not the same as the success that natural selection cares about, it does for a natural transcendental base for our basic beliefs.  True beliefs ride a top the robust mechanisms and modules that evolution has designed.  The rest of our beliefs are formed by bootstrapping; we criticize and test our beliefs against one another, using tools to help us correct our mistakes, and to gain and test reality at levels deeper than our ancestors had access.  None of this is foundational in the a priori sense of course.  We could be wrong; the evidence could change parts of the story, or the whole thing.  But it is hard to see what form this evidence could take.  Some planks in the boat are more foundational than others.  And some of those planks are pretty darn well foundational, but they are not entirely beyond criticism.  But it is difficult to see how some of them could be replaced.  Logic, math, and probability are about as foundational as they get.  For the pragmatist, the naturalistic picture I just sketched is just underneath.  None of this is an answer to the skeptic, it is more of a clairifcation of the story science tells us about ourselves.

Rorty:  Fine, but what about the indeterminacy of translation and meaning of Quine and Davidson?  These arguments seem to undercut any hope of a workable ‘theory’ of meaning and truth, even if you outsource the work to specific domains of inquiry.

Dewey:  Quine and Davidson are right that the only evidence we have of others’ meanings is the evidence we gather about their behavior, especially speech behavior and the objects in the worlds they are reacting against.  But as I see it, meanings are created and made up of successful interactions between the world and two or more speakers.  What Quine and Davidson synchronically call ‘indeterminacy’ I diachronically call ‘situations that are ripe for meaning making’.  Moreover, Davidson holds that indeterminacy is like measuring temperature in fahrenheit or centigrade, both get the job done, but in different ways.  I would go one step further and say that since meaning makers are the interactions between speakers and the world, then successful interaction is what creates meaning and determines content.  Hence there’s no indeterminacy.  I think of indeterminacy as only occurring when two speakers have not yet had the interactions necessary to determine each others meanings, rather than a permanent condition that obtains after all the behavioral evidence is in (which it never is).

A consumer does not need to have the same knowledge of apples an apple farmer has acquired in order for both to have true beliefs about apples.  They get by quite well with the different meanings they have.  Their meanings generally correspond to the purposes they have for apples and the experiences they have with them.  The apple farmer in turn may have different apple beliefs from the geneticist who experiments with apples.  In the case of the farmer and the scientist each set of purposes leads to different interactions, discoveries and connections.  But the two can get together and corroborate, discuss, and correct each other. Their different meanings are enlarged and they find that their different meanings (caused by the different interests) are translatable and not incommensurable, given their goals.  They are talking about the same things.  Successful interaction between the two, from each point of view, is constitutive of successful translation and determination of meanings.  Successful interaction is successful translation.  Our desires and cognitive mistakes often corrupt our meanings such that they over or under shoot the interactions with the world on which our meanings grow.  But if we adhere to the pragmatic theory of meaning, we have a way to criticize each other when a concept does not correspond to the world.  

Rorty:  Ahhgg!  You used the word “correspond”!  You taught me that we should abandon the correspondence theory of truth!  

Dewey:  Quite.  What I’m against is any theory of truth that posits a reality of objects independent of the ways in which we find out about those objects.  My theory of truth links true beliefs directly with the interactions we have with things.  This is what “things” are, sets of cause and effect relationships.  True beliefs are cashed out as the sum of predictions and retrodictions of things, according to a set of purposes, where our predictions and interactions are successful with the world.  But there is no general story, or absolute criteria to check off, only specific stories and criteria.  If you treat correspondence to reality as merely a synonym for truth, then sure, true beliefs correspond to reality.  If you try to build an a priori theory of how our interactions with the world allow us to grasp the essence of things, which is independent of these interactions, then I will become Searley and object.

Now, back to politics.  The reason I went on this little tirade is to show you why your specific proposals are so wishy-washy.  The reason is that you fail to acknowledge that some methods and beliefs are more foundational that others.  We do have a standard to check and criticize our beliefs.  Your belief that the whole history of western philosophy is merely a contingent conversation with no grounding is an underestimation of the middle path that pragmatism can offer.  Your political proposals are wishy-washy because you think that that science, just as philosophy, is one more conversation and that all beliefs are merely tools that cannot be objectively criticized.  You’re response to the intellectual historians is illuminating, you don’t think it matters all that much which way many philosophical debates turn out.  You are probably right that the actual debates that professional philosophers have with one another often do not impact politics one way or another.  But you are wrong to think that this never happens, or that it couldn’t happen more.  

I’ve kept up with the literature while I’ve been away, so I’ll give you an example.  The individual behavior and political policies that flow out of compatabalism and libertarian views of freedom are very different.  Our courts, prisons and social services all have tacit and explicit views of freedom built into them, and as far as these systems are under democratic control, they can be changed to fit one or the other.  Gambling addicts in certain states can voluntarily sign themselves up to be banned from casinos for life.  This is a non-libertarian policy, for it is the result of thinking of humans as deterministic systems that sometimes need a nudge from the wider social environment to be free.  The libertarian view of humans as insulated atoms, whose causal responsibility is totally internal, would likely not approve of such a policy because it would infringe on individuals freedom.  The questions involving human freedom can be impacted by inquiry into how humans actually function.  Using these results in debate and criticism can in turn help us clarify what the results actually mean and make those meanings available for uptake in policy formation.  Part of this process is the conceptual work that philosophers can offer.  The only way to gain knowledge about the world and ourselves is to interact with the world and adhere to the theories of truth and meaning that I have articulated above.

Rorty:  But you assume by your remarks that there is a definite thing called “humanity” to investigate.  But there is no such thing as “human nature” to study!  Any conception of human nature is a tool for people with power to justify the status quo as being the way things ought to be.  We should be glad to be rid of such ideas, as they are both false and harmful to social justice.

Dewey:  Certainly we must be careful not to overshoot our evidence, and the judgments we make about human nature are more subject to revision due to changes in the ways we gather evidence, and the way humans themselves are in any time and place.  But this difficulty is only that, a difficulty.  Perhaps “human nature” will be a term that is too loaded for us to use, but even if we don’t use the term, we must be able to make such judgments.  Let me ask you this; is it possible for a human to grow a set of wings, or to produce a human that can breathe unassisted underwater?

Rorty:  Well, it’s certainly possible.  

Dewey:  What?  Sounds like you have an a priori notion of necessity and possibility.  Despite the need for concern with genetic engineering in general, I don’t think the possibility of people with wings is one in which we need take into account when we make political or moral decisions is it?

Rorty:  Well...not at the moment.

Dewey:  OK then, haven’t you just circumscribed a view of “human nature”?  One that is based on natural necessity and not any spooky a priorism?  And wouldn’t it behoove us to investigate further what is usually actual and make sure that our concepts of human nature, while never final or complete given our purposes, are well informed?  And shouldn’t we take these considerations into account when making political decisions?   For if we don’t investigate human nature, some conception or other of humans will fill the void, and it probably won’t be very successful or just if it isn’t based closely on experimentation and interaction.  

As you are fond of pointing out, nothing is necessarily the way it is.  There is no essential nature to an apple beyond our possible and actual interactions with it.  But we can get a good meaning going that is adequate for our needs, and then handle the hard cases and gray areas by definition.  We shouldn’t let our tools use us by thinking our words should be about ‘real essences’, but neither should the fallibility of our tools cause us to give up.  Despite the difficulties, a retreat from the investigation of human nature will not make it go away; it will only invite poor concepts to run the show.

Rorty:  I love science and I’m sensitive to its results, but I’m just as sensitive to other ways of looking at the world, ways that are autonomous from each other and from science.  Given that the correspondence theory of truth fails, no specific domain of inquiry has any more claim to legitimacy than any other, so I don’t see why your ‘pragmatist’ theory of meaning has to rely so heavily for its inputs on the results of science.  I see no necessary connection between the results of science and how we should treat people.

Dewey:  Your claim that there is no necessary connection between prediction and control of humans and how you treat them is true, but it misses the point.  Since Hume we’ve known that you can’t get an entailment from ought to is, but stopping there misses the fact that we will get from ought to is, simply because we must act.  The question is whether we will decide how to connect ought and is blindly or with intelligence.  The connection between prediction and control and ethics (is and ought) will be from the specific and concrete connections about how humans are (properly contextualized to time and place) to how we should treat them.  If we find through our empirical investigations humans are highly susceptible to a certain form of fallacious reasoning, shouldn’t we take this into account into our policy decisions?  Stating that there is no necessary connection between the two, and leaving the matter at that, implicitly implies that our factual findings have, not only no necessary bearing, but no bearing of any sort on our actions.  The connection between ought and is, is not one of necessity but of concreteness and specificness.  You’re right that there will not be a true general theory of how the two should come together, but there can be true ones that are properly qualified to a certain time, place, population etc.  You’re afraid, just as I was, to put forward any specific connections, because they could turn out to be false.  Perhaps it is all well and good for a philosopher not to enter into such debates if they do not know the details, but just because you are afraid to enter into such specific nitty-gritty fact/value debates doesn’t mean that you should imply that such debates are misguided or optional.  For the real action is in such debates, thinking otherwise is to miss the point of what I’ve always said. 

Rorty:  You seem to be criticizing my position on the grounds that it contains a priori premises, but surely I’m careful enough not to base my position on a dead metaphysical and epistemological world view.

Dewey:  It may not be strictly construed as a priori, but it functions the same way as an a priori theory in that you ignore the connections investigation has elicited for a sweeping generalization from your armchair (in this case that there is no necessary connection between prediction, control and ethics).  Our connections between investigation of the facts and values will be much more fruitful and successful if we argue and debate the specific connections between the two, rather than throwing up generalizations about how the interaction should or should not proceed.  For all generalizations will, under a natural world view, be based upon such connections, but with armchair reasoning the genesis of such generalizations are more likely to go unarticulated and unnoticed, a recipe for getting things wrong, and for undemocratic elements to take control by default.  The pragmatist attack against the a priori is also an attack on all armchair reasoning, whether or not the premises involved can be construed as a priori.  The main thrust of what Charlie, Bill and I are saying is that we will be much better off mucking around in the world and then reflecting on it than just reflecting on what we happen to find in our heads.  This is not an a priori connection or a priori claim, but one that is true, or warrantably assertable, none the less.

Take your DVD player for instance.  Every time you look at it you find its not set.  Now, there is no necessary connection between reading the directions and setting the clock.  The directions might be for the wrong model, or maybe the player’s clock is defective.  But to remind us of these possibilities is uninformative.  Given what else you know, you can be very sure looking at the directions will let you set the clock.  And your values will be served better by knowing the time.  Speaking of time, where has it gone?  I have a breakfast appointment with Walt and Karl.  We’re writing a play together. [Dewey shakes his head] Karl keeps talking about the final scene while I keep telling him to keep his mind on the next line.

Rorty:  So, you’ve given up philosophy?

Dewey:  Well after I died I found out I was right about everything and so I don’t need to do it anymore.

Rorty:  You were right about everything except the part about the afterlife.

Dewey:  No, I knew that.  I just didn’t get around to giving that lecture.  You were right about one thing.  We need belief in civic religion.  You just didn't know that it includes a civic heaven.

In a puff of ectoplasm, Dewey returns to Civic Heaven.  Rorty is so excited by his encounter that he cannot get back to sleep.  He picks up Derrida and again becomes enchanted by his ironic tone and playful jests.  Slowly his memory of the encounter with Dewey slips away and in the morning he remembers nothing.