#propositions

Richard Rorty and Contemporary Philosophy by Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley

I appreciate the clarity and conciseness of this introduction, but among other things I don't think the views of Quine and Sellars are compatible. How is the usual talk about "having concepts" any different from the "idea idea"?

In the introduction to Philosophy and Social Hope, Rorty says -

The very idea of 'being out of touch with reality' presupposes the un-Darwinian, Cartesian picture of a mind which somehow swings free of the causal forces exerted on the body. The Cartesian mind is an entity whose relations with the universe are representational rather than causal. So to rid our thinking of the vestiges of Cartesianism, to become fully Darwinian in our thinking, we need to stop thinking of words as representations and to start thinking of them as nodes in the causal network which binds the organism together with its environment.

To the latter question I have pointed out one possible answer: that what corresponds to the negation of p, although not the fact, are the constituents of the fact. For example, corresponding to "There is no chair here" there is the place here, and there are chairs in the world. A similar thing can be said of wishing for something which does not happen...

The problem as to the constituents of the wish is the problem concerning part of a complex sign, taken separately. Just as a box consists of a bottom and lid, we suppose that a proposition such as "I wish Smith would come" must consist of constituents put together in some way. We wrongly compare this proposition with a box consisting of parts, "I wish that" and "Smith comes"' being the different parts.

If "~p" is understood, then "p'" must also be understood. But if p is false, then nothing corresponds to it. We know what it means even though it is not true; but what is it to understand it, or know what it means?

For example, what does it mean to understand the order "Leave the room", when you do not leave the room? Your understanding may be a picture of your leaving the room, but of course that is not the same as leaving the room.

...it won't do to say that understanding the order consists of nothing more than translating the words into a visual image or picture. If that were all, one might say you did not understand the order; you were not ordered to have an image or make a picture but to leave the room. You have not carried out the order, and are no nearer to carrying out the order by making a picture. It is as if understanding ought to have taken you up to the point of carrying out the order. Yet one does not mean that you should have carried it out, for it may be understood without being carried out. The difficulty would disappear if a class of cases of understanding orders was correlated with a class of acts of carrying them out.

Ø

In this symbolism you will see that the picture does represent understanding the order. Thus, "Do not draw a line through the circle" will represented by a circular figure with a line drawn through it. Does this mean that in the understanding of the order there is contained the carrying out of the opposite order?

Here we need the index "not", meaning "to be avoided". It is an index accompanying "Draw a line through the circle", just as "understand" was the index accompanying "Smith leaves the room".

In both pairs of sentences, (a) "Smith leaves the room" and "Smith understands he is to leave the room'" and (b) "Draw a line through the circle" and "Don't draw a line through the circle", the same subordinate sentence appears as constituent. And you think the same fact must occur as constituent. But nothing of the sort may occur.

The mistake which leads us into philosophical trouble is supposing that just as a subordinate sentence can appear in the sentence, so a fact corresponds to this constituent as to the whole. "Not" and "understanding" are only indices and can change the whole way in which a sentence is used. When I have a sentence "p'" and add an index such as "not" or "understand", all it may describe is a projective relation. To understand "p" is not like doing something described by "p".

Similarly for sentences beginning with "wish'. The sentence "I eat an apple" and "I wish to eat an apple" are entirely different. But it is wrong to explain why sentences so different use the same words by saying that the constituents of one are included in the other, or that "I eat an apple" and "I did not eat an apple" differ in having a different arrangement of the same constituents. In "not-Fx", "not" is an index which changes the way in which Fx is used. "not-Fx" expresses a projective relation.

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