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The Philosophy of Richard Rorty Interpreted As a Literary Philosophy of Education

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The Philosophy of Richard Rorty Interpreted As a Literary Philosophy of Education The Philosophy of Richard Rorty Interpreted as a Literary Philosophy of Education Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Todd Aaron Bitters Graduate Program in Education: Policy and Leadership The Ohio State University 2014 Committee: Philip Smith, Advisor Bryan Warnick, Co-Advisor Ann Allen Copyrighted by Todd Aaron Bitters 2014 Abstract The central question of the dissertation is: what significance do Richard Rorty’s ideas have for education and for philosophy of education, broadly defined? Three major themes dominate Rorty’s scholarship, from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature to his late work, that have consequences for education. One, we should suspend correspondence theories of truth and, instead, focus on a pragmatic concept of truth that eschews Cartesian models of epistemology. Two, people can be viewed as having two distinct sides—one, public, and one private. Each side may share common attitudes with the other, but one’s public and private outlooks are not necessarily reconcilable. Three, literary criticism, or literary study, is the ultimate intellectual enterprise. The primary claim of the dissertation, resulting from the interpretation of Rorty’s three ideas, is that a culture rich in literary study—based on a literary philosophy of education—is preferable to a culture in which only an elite few enjoy the benefits of serious engagement with literature. I review works by a series of scholars, published in the field of philosophy of education, that address Rorty’s ideas and their connections to education. I argue that, for the most part, scholars in the field have ignored the intersection of literary criticism and education in Rorty’s work. Finally, I outline several problems in education, as I see them in my role as an academic advisor and college administrator at The Ohio State University. The final chapter carries out a thought experiment, entitled “The Hypothetical Rorty,” that considers a Rortyan perspective on such problems. ii For Stella Laing Virginia Greer iii Acknowledgments To my mentor Phil Smith, my committee, my colleagues in philosophy of education and in the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State, my friends, my family, and my wife Anna: thank you. Without your support, this project would not be possible. iv Vita June 1995 ....................................................... Thomas Worthington High School May 1999 ....................................................... B.A. Bowling Green State University December 2002 .............................................. M.A. University of Kentucky June 2011 ....................................................... M.A. The Ohio State University December 2003 to present ............................. Advisor, Coordinator, and Director, College of Arts and Sciences Advising and Academic Services Fields of Study Major Field: Education: Policy and Leadership v Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments .............................................................................................................. iv Vita ...................................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... vi Chapter 1: Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 2: Rorty on Truth ................................................................................................. 13 Chapter 3: Education, Literature, and the “Ironist” ........................................................... 40 Chapter 4: A Literary Philosophy of Education ................................................................ 69 Chapter 5: Conclusion: The Hypothetical Rorty ............................................................... 93 References ....................................................................................................................... 118 vi Chapter One: Introduction Richard Rorty, in a 1990 article published in Educational Theory, says he doubts the importance of philosophy for education. Given that the central question of my dissertation is: “what significance do Richard Rorty’s ideas have for education,” it would seem that Rorty preemptively derailed the project years ago. Rorty’s pithy statements, however, do not always tell the whole story. As Rob Reich (1996) points out about Rorty and his claim that philosophy may not have much to say for education, “Rorty is a bundle of seeming contradictions” (p. 342). Indeed, Rorty (1990) tempers his doubt at the end of the Educational Theory article, saying that philosophy is not irrelevant for education but, rather, that “we should not assume that philosophy is automatically relevant to political or educational change” (p. 44). Educational change, says Rorty, is more likely to come from educational policymakers than philosophers. Moreover, Rorty says he does not have the understanding of educational policy to “have more than suspicions” about how educational change happens (p. 41). Richard Rorty’s work, as others have pointed out, cuts across many academic fields—the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, in particular. Rorty writes, too, about the subject of education, but it was never the focus of his scholarship. To be sure, Rorty wrote more about analytic philosophy—in an attempt to lay bare the problems he saw with the analytic tradition—than about the subject of education itself. Rorty, however, does not reject analytic philosophy so much as he puts it aside. For example, in 1 the last chapter of Consequences of Pragmatism, he gives a brief history of the rise and stabilization of analytic philosophy. Rorty (1982) writes: In saying that “analytic philosophy” now has only a stylistic and sociological unity, I am not suggesting that analytic philosophy is a bad thing or is in bad shape. The analytic style is, I think, a good style…. All I am saying is that analytic philosophy has become… the same sort of discipline we find in the other “humanities” departments—departments where pretensions to “rigor” and to “scientific” status are less evident. (p. 217) In other words, Rorty claims that analytic philosophy is one approach to intellectual inquiry, among many, that does not hold any higher status than others. Rorty says that analytic philosophy has done its job (or, perhaps, run its course), and that working over and over the problems it seeks to solve—mainly epistemological ones that he says start with Descartes and end with Nietzsche—does not get us anywhere, in philosophical terms. He sees analytic philosophy as having evolved but meeting its end; Rorty (2000) writes in response to Hilary Putnam: “I see the progress of analytic philosophy of language from Russelian empircistic representationalism to Brandom’s neo-Hegelian inferentialism as progress from a rather primitive to a fairly sophisticated form of anti- Cartesianism” (p. 88). Rorty, however, knew the field of analytic philosophy as well as anyone; as Neil Gross (2008) points out, Rorty began doing professional analytic philosophy when he was at Wellesley out of concern for his career; it was the method of philosophy one practiced if one wanted to become a distinguished philosopher. But it would be a mistake 2 to say that Rorty was, in his career, an analytic philosopher. As I’ve said, Rorty used the methods and language of analytic philosophy, especially in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, to advance his ideas and to critique the span of western philosophy; but these are neither his methods, nor is this his language. Beginning with his tenure at Princeton, Rorty left the analytic project behind and struck out in his own direction, freeing himself from disciplinary Philosophy. Thus, Rorty didn’t feel the need—nor should he have felt the need—to pay close attention to the analytic critique of his ideas on truth or analytic critiques of any of his other work. Interestingly, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty says that part of the project of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature as I’ve defined it—to challenge the concept of truth as correspondence to reality—is impossible. Rorty (1989) claims: Philosophers should not be asked for arguments against, for example, the correspondence theory of truth or the idea of the “intrinsic nature of reality.” The trouble with arguments against the use of a familiar and time-honored vocabulary is that they are expected to be phrased in that very vocabulary. They are expected to show that central elements in that vocabulary are “inconsistent in their own terms” or that they “deconstruct themselves.” This can never be shown…. Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is… a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises new things. (pp. 8-9) 3 The long quotation above should not be misconstrued as undermining the importance of Rorty’s discussion of a pragmatist view of truth versus absolute truth. Rather, in a typically Rortyan way, he is acknowledging that one cannot simply dismiss existing paradigms and that his challenge to correspondence theories
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