>
> > Really, do reread the relevant parts of Philosophy and the Mirror of
>Nature. --jks
>
>I've recently reread one of his books, CIS - as far as I can see, Rorty
>does not at all dispute the ultimate privacy of *some* of our experiences -
Rorty acknowledges the obvious, that normally I know better than anyone else what I think and feel. But this has nothing to do with ultimate priavcy. My own view of the matter doesn't always trump. I can be wrong, indeed even unjustified about my own internal states, and others can be right and indeed better justified than I. And this goes for any internal state, experience, thought, feeling, or whatever.
>regardless of how mediated they are (ie. our experiences are mediated by
>language, but they are *our* experiences).
Right, that is why we are usuallly the authority on them.
In any event - the stuff
>that
>goes on inside our heads, however socially constructed, still goes on
>inside our heads in a way that is not immediately and transparently
>apparent to other people.
Or to us. I am not denying that we have "direct" experiences, that I just see that the ball is red and don't infer this from anything. But I can see it wrong. Likewise, I can feel sad, and not infer this from anything. But I can be wrong even if I think I'm sad.
I truly don't understand what the problem
>is with
>this. Yes, as Lacan says, the only think we can know about the unconscious
>we know about through language (the uncs is structured like a language) -
>but this does not mean we don't have a nonlinguistic substratum of
>'happenings' apart from language.
Course! And I am opposed to Lacan and Rorty on this: Rorty, anyway, thinks all thought in linguistic, and I don't. The point isn't that language gets in the way, but that our experience and thought isn't self-validaiting, immediately clear, even to us. It's just that we normally are the experts on our own minds, unless there is something funny going, or there is someone else taking particular interest.
Am I missing your point, or are
>you
>missing mine? Or do we just disagree, or is this just a matter of
>reformulating something that is significant?
>
Does this help?
--jks
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