Bjørn Torgrim Ramberg

Naturalizing Idealizations: Pragmatism and the Interpretivist Strategy

Let us say, with Quine, Davidson and Dennett among others, that a person’s language and psychological attitudes have their identities fixed with the theories generated by an idealized interpreter of that person (Quine 1960; Davidson 1984, 1986a, 1986b, 1989a, 1989b, 1990a; Dennett 1978, 1987a, 1991a). A reason for saying this is that it will help us see how the capacities to entertain attitudes and to communicate linguistically can be natural capacities, capacities we may happily attribute to creatures who fall squarely within the scope of evolutionary biology. This, at any rate, is Rorty’s principal reason. The interpretivist strategy permits us, Rorty suggests, to give an account of persons which introduces

Irony’s Commitment: Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

Abstract With Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) Richard Rorty tries to persuade us that a case for liberalism is better served by historical narrative than by philosophical theory. The liberal ironist is the complex protagonist of Rorty’s anti-foundationalist story. Why does Rorty think irony serves—rather than undermines—commitments to liberal democracy? I distinguish political from existential dimensions of irony, consider criticisms of Rorty’s ironist (by Michael Williams, J. B. Schneewind, Jonathan Lear), and then draw on recent work by Lear to argue that Rorty’s ironist character nevertheless can be recast as an image useful to the self-understanding of contemporary liberal democrats.

Davidson’s Derangement Revisited: Guest Editors’ Introduction

‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’ was first published 30 years ago (1986). This was just two years after the appearance of Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, the volume that collected Donald Davidson’s by then already classic papers in philosophy of language from the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, one of us (the oldest) had the pleasure of hearing Davidson give Derangement as a talk at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario) in September 1984. The obvious delight and excitement for a fledgling graduate student just then submerged in a struggle to make sense of truth, meaning, and radical interpretation in hearing Davidson give a colloquium paper on language, were tempered, however, by a certain sense of bewilderment. Just enough had been absorbed of Davidson’s early papers that this talk, with its startling, negative concluding claim that there is no such thing as a language, induced the impression that the exegetical target had, somehow, shifted; but how? In what direction? Davidson’s truth-theoretic conception of meaning and his account of the kind of evidence such a theory is built on seem to rest on at least two idealizations; that of a language—an object to be interpreted—and a radical interpreter. The latter is a device that makes vivid and explicit the way in which empirical evidence can be brought to support systematic imputations—in the form of a truth theory for the language—of propositional meaning to linguistic utterances. But the former, the language that is to be thus understood—how exactly is this to be construed? What is the truth theory of the radical interpreter a theory of? This is the question pursued in Derangement. In this paper,