And Rorty Came Bubbling Up
An old friend brought up Nietzsche, the silver fox of a philosopher (or man-on-the-street) mumbled something about Chomsky, and something at work this week made me think of Richard Rorty. What do I understand about philosophy? Next to nothing. And yet I sometimes dabble, choosing this person or that primarily on the way that he/she shuffles words. Anyway, I dug up the Rorty text that I was thinking of and will jot down just a couple of passages I highlighted long long ago. * From Rorty's introduction to Essays on Heidegger and Others: Consider sentences as strings of marks and noises emitted by organisms, strings capable of being paired off with the strings we ourselves utter (in the way we call "translating"). Consider beliefs, desires, and intentions -- sentential attitudes generally -- as entities posited to help predict the behavior of these organisms. Now think of those organisms as gradually evolving as a result of producing longer and more complicate...