Richard Rorty - The World Well Lost

Richard Rorty's The World Well Lost (1972) is an early article which prefigures some of the themes of Rorty's later works, like Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Criticising the idea of conceptual schemes and its (supposedly) Kantian origin, Rorty argues that Davidson's attack on the scheme/content distinction allows us to drop any realist notion of 'the world'.
Victor Gijsbers teaches philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands. This video is part of an ongoing look at various philosophical papers: • Philosophical Papers

[@andytaylor4138]

I saw a Rick Roderick lecture in which he summarised Rorty’s article as “well, any problem that’s been around in philosophy for 2500 years and we don’t have an answer for yet, well let’s forget about it “

[@VictorGijsbers]

I don't think it's fair towards this particular article, but Rorty certainly sometimes says things like that -- we've tried to solve this problem, didn't work out, maybe it's time to try something new.

[@JoePalau]

Can’t agree entirely. Rorty can be a bit haughty, sarcastic and dismissive when he thinks he is going the way o Wittgenstein or Dewey (and others) by urging us to give up the problems that cease to appear other philosophical outlooks. The so called Problems of Philosophy are Cartesian in origin. They largely concern the ramifications of the mind/body dualism, radical and methodic skepticism and the epistemic problems concerning veridical representations of the world beyond the ontic reach of mind. Dewey’s embrace of Pierce’s anti-Cartesian, and philosophical inspiration of Darwin’s vision of an organism and its ecology, take him directions that require concepts and categories quite different from Hume or Kant. Other problems arise but they don’t stem from Cartesian dualism. In this regard Rorty has a persuasive point to be made. I confess to getting heated reading Rorty’s seemingly glib dismissals. Dialectally, it’s a sucker punch bc there many solid arguments to support anti-Cartesian viewpoints. Dismissal is not one of them.

[@mansivaish2984]

You have put this so well. Will request you to post some more content related to Rorty, especially Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

[@justinslade1348]

So glad I found Victor on his own.......his Leiden Uni lectures are excellent!

[@heirsir1904]

Hey I was writing a paper on WWL and thought it was exceptionally cryptic. I'm incredibly grateful for this summary, it cleared up alot, and gave me a jumping point for breaking it down.

[@pascalbercker7487]

I've always thought that if there's an alleged conceptual scheme that is otherwise completely incommensurate with yours, and admits of absolutely no translations into any terms of yours at all, wherefore can you even allege that it's a conceptual scheme to begin with? That seems to be Davidson's view which I must have read somewhere many years ago, if I've understood it correctly. Otherwise, who is to say that some random rock - just seemingly lying there, inert and doing nothing, is in fact using a conceptual scheme so different from my own that I mistake it for just an inert rock just sitting there doing nothing at all.

[@VictorGijsbers]

Yep, that's exactly (part of) Davidson's argument in On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme!

[@pascalbercker7487]

@@VictorGijsbers Does everyone in the Netherlands speak such clear English as you? I live in southern France, and not so many English speakers here! Will you be doing anything on Baysianism in the near future?

[@VictorGijsbers]

@@pascalbercker7487 Relatively speaking, the Dutch are good at English. I won't be ranking myself, but of course I spend a lot more time reading and speaking English than most. No plans to do lectures on Bayesianism at the moment -- I'm not too big a fan -- but it might happen.

[@yuriarin3237]

Thanks for the video 🙂

[@suzettedarrow8739]

So far as Kant’s views about what follows from judgment (namely, that all things that judge have the same conceptual scheme), wouldn’t Kant run into the judgment/shmudgjment problem? Can’t there be things that, although they don’t have judgments, have shmudgments?

[@williammcenaney1331]

Why not replace "the correspondence theory" with "the conformity theory?" Sometimes I wonder whether each truth theory is circular because you can ask whether it's true. Do we need to know what truth consists of to know what theory of truth is correct?

[@Jivansings]

A fairly honorable defeat

[@saimbhat6243]

Don't use so many air quotes dude. It is quite annoying.

[@VictorGijsbers]

Thanks for the tip, 'dude'.