Being that can be understood is language

Letters

Vol. 22 No. 7 · 30 March 2000

From Galen Strawson

When Richard Rorty says that only a sentence can be relevant to the truth of another sentence (LRB, 16 March), one wants to reply, on behalf of the millions of human beings murdered in the 20th century, say, that what makes the sentence 'millions of human beings were murdered in the 20th century' true, and is therefore relevant to its truth, is not a sentence, but the (non-linguistic) fact that millions of human beings were murdered in the 20th century. One wonders if he means what he says, or knows what he is saying, especially when one remembers the remark, in his 1993 Amnesty Lecture, about the contempt we always feel for losers – Jews in the 1930s, Muslims in Bosnia.

Galen Strawson
Jesus College, Oxford

Vol. 22 No. 8 · 13 April 2000

From Jerry Fodor

As far as I can tell, Richard Rorty (LRB, 16 March) is seriously confused. It's a leitmotif of his piece that 'understanding is always of objects under a description,' a principle from which he apparently thinks it follows that there's never a way of getting 'behind' the description to the object that you're trying to understand. I doubt that does follow, but bother the inference – the premise isn't true. Not, at least, if you parse it the way Rorty apparently wants to: viz, it's always objects under descriptions that understanding is of.

'Why is Fodor in such a snit?' 'Because he's late for work again.' What's explained here is Fodor being in a snit, which is a property of Fodor tout court, not of 'Fodor under a description' (whatever, exactly, a Fodor under a description might be). The point is this: if 'because he's late for work again' explains Fodor being in a snit, then it does so however Fodor may be described. Suppose (what's arguable) that Fodor is the world's most ill-tempered philosopher. Then if Fodor being late again explains his being in a snit, it likewise explains the world's most ill-tempered philosopher being in a snit; and, mutatis mutandis, the husband of Mrs Fodor being in a snit; and the friend and patron of Mr James the cat being in a snit … and so forth, world without end, for whatever descriptions Fodor satisfies.

What is true is not that understanding is of things under descriptions, but only that we understand things by invoking descriptions that they satisfy. It explains my being in a snit that the description 'is late for work' is true of me. This is a not frightfully illuminating way of saying that it explains my being in a snit that I'm late for work; which is where we started. And from which, I imagine, nothing of any great epistemological interest follows.

Jerry Fodor
New York

From Alex Fox

Richard Rorty's critique of Gadamer became a little 'fuzzie' during his discussion of descriptions of objects, and of what makes one 'better' than another. His gloss on the process of one descriptive paradigm replacing another stated that 'new predicates are attributed to the things previously identified by old predicates … making these new attributions cohere with the older ones in ways that save the phenomena.' But often the phenomena are not saved: the universe as described by Newton is fundamentally different from the universe as described by quantum mechanics. If we accept that we have no understanding of objects, only of sentences about objects, we are faced with a paradox (our ability to see that descriptions can be contradictory and still refer to the same phenomenon) which Rorty attempts to sidestep by rejecting metaphors of depth and penetration in epistemology while himself using a weaker version, comparing objects to onions: we peel back layers of descriptions to reveal new ones, 'but without a non-linguistic core that will be revealed once those layers have been stripped off'. I would like to know what we do when we run out of onion.

Alex Fox
Leeds

Vol. 22 No. 9 · 27 April 2000

From Michael Haslam

Re: Rorty, Fodor, Fox et al. As much as any plant on earth, an onion has a core: a cone that buds into a bulb of fleshy leaves. There may well be philosophies composed of layers around an absent centre: they don't, however, describe the onion but an old and worn symbolic platitude. The good philosophers had better know their onions.

Michael Haslam
Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire

Vol. 22 No. 10 · 18 May 2000

From Michael Steger

Maybe Jerry Fodor is in such a snit (Letters, 13 April) because he believes that Rorty's insistence that 'understanding is always of objects under a description' means that Rorty must think that sentences have no referents. Rorty's point, as I see it, is that the ways by which we make references – and thus the way we construct referents – always take place within already existing contexts and conventions (or 'under descriptions', as G.E. Anscombe first put it, I believe). We will always know 'Jerry Fodor' as something (a mammal, a person, a citizen, a philosopher, the result of a genetic code etc), seen from a certain angle, as it were. The 'real' Jerry Fodor, seen from the view from nowhere, we will never know, however: there is no real, true Jerry Fodor to know.

Michael Steger
New York

From Melvyn Firth

Jerry Fodor's refutation of Richard Rorty was weakened by his self-chosen descriptions. As a practising counsellor I can imagine meeting him, maybe to understand his 'being in a snit'. In the process we might experience an in situ snit, perhaps occasioned by his lateness for an appointment. By observing this without reaction or response I might be doing something extremely valuable for him, although I would need to use language to describe his behaviour and my thoughts and feelings. Through this process, by making connections with other observations, his history, some reports of other people's histories and perhaps some theory, Fodor, myself and my supervisor would come to a greater understanding of him, his snits or why the phrase 'the world's most ill-tempered philosopher' could occur in any text produced by or about him even for the sake of argument. Perhaps, following Rorty and Gadamer, I would argue that we would never understand him partially or 'tout court' without description, nor could we justify our understanding without explaining the point of view behind our descriptions which would privilege one set of observations over another.

Finally, some time after our work together was finished, Fodor and I might bump into each other in Central Park and become friends; he might, by virtue of the photographs I took, the presents I bought, the guests I invited to dinner with him, and in countless other small ways, come to feel understood. Could we be sure this was understanding without bringing him under description again? Isn't this epistemology?

Melvyn Firth
London SE24