Rivercoil (or anyone else interested in the book) --
since you've started reading "Philosophy and Social Hope", I've dragged down my copy and started reading back over the introduction. I thought I'd go ahead and start a thread in case you'd like to discuss it.
As a potential starting point, I'll go ahead and say that I find Rorty's Dennett-influnced take on consciousness a little dubious. It seems to me that it errs by starting with Peirce's definition of belief, which boils all belief down to its impact on action. While I have argued in the past that how a person acts is usually our most tangible evidence as to what they believe (as opposed to what they claim to believe), I wouldn't take that argument so far as to say that action should serve as definitive proof of belief, or even that it makes sense to define belief as being merely descriptive of action. Peirce's definition of belief (at least, as Rorty presents it) views belief as an ascription made by another person in describing a third party's behavior. But that seems to ignore the experience of belief, as though we only ever spoke of belief when we were talking about how other people behaved -- as though, that is, we routinely identified belief deductively.
Anyway, that's a start.
since you've started reading "Philosophy and Social Hope", I've dragged down my copy and started reading back over the introduction. I thought I'd go ahead and start a thread in case you'd like to discuss it.
As a potential starting point, I'll go ahead and say that I find Rorty's Dennett-influnced take on consciousness a little dubious. It seems to me that it errs by starting with Peirce's definition of belief, which boils all belief down to its impact on action. While I have argued in the past that how a person acts is usually our most tangible evidence as to what they believe (as opposed to what they claim to believe), I wouldn't take that argument so far as to say that action should serve as definitive proof of belief, or even that it makes sense to define belief as being merely descriptive of action. Peirce's definition of belief (at least, as Rorty presents it) views belief as an ascription made by another person in describing a third party's behavior. But that seems to ignore the experience of belief, as though we only ever spoke of belief when we were talking about how other people behaved -- as though, that is, we routinely identified belief deductively.
Anyway, that's a start.
