If Derrida's Baby Boomer detractors were correct about him being a charlatan, then thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Sam Wheeler, Lee Braver, and Martin Hagglund would have to be the lowest kinds of carny marks, about as gullible as the professional wrestling connoisseur from the American South who has yet to cotton on to the fact that the match endings are predetermined. You can always pick out this type because he tells you during intermission just what he's going to do if CM Punk tries to shave his kid's head.
Wheeler's Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy probably did the most to help me get over the analytic/continental culture wars that I saw so many of my undergraduate professors wage. But Wheeler's recent NeoDavidsonian Metaphysics (the introduction is available here) looks fascinating independent of that context.
Check out this recent 3AM magazine interview, (hat tip Leiter*) where Wheeler articulates the connections between Davidson and Derrida. It's fascinating stuff, making explicit a number of issues sympathetic readers of Rorty will have already sort of suspected:
In spite of the differences, there is at least one similar progression of questioning. One issue with similar trajectories in both traditions is the nature of meaning. A (very rough) version of my narrative is the following: Husserl and Frege are working on the same issue from the same general position. They are both against psychologism as an explanation of why logical truths and mathematical truths are true. They both postulate some kind of abstract object which is meaning or carries meaning independently, by its very nature. Derrida, following Heidegger’s lead and Davidson, following Quine’s lead, attack these meanings.
Derrida’s first book was a critique of Husserl, arguing that Husserl, on his own account of the experience of time, could not construct presence. His next works develop consequences of there being no present-to-the-mind meanings. If there are no language-transcendent meanings, then the idea of Truth as the matching of meanings to reality is unhinged. There is no such thing as a fixity of meanings which grounds a single correct interpretation, and so on.
The progression from Carnap to Quine’s “Two Dogmas,” to Word and Object and then to Davidson seems to me an analogous trajectory. Davidson continues and purifies Quine’s project, dropping the idea of a given manifold and Quine’s scientism.
I read “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” as showing that the attempted denial of essences in the analytic tradition implicitly recognised meanings as one kind of entity which, by their very nature, determined their referents. Meanings as Fregean senses are quasi-linguistic items with Aristotelian essences. The kind of meaning that supports the analytic-synthetic distinction is an entity that means something in virtue of what it is. Carnap and other empiricists could only hope to ground meaning empirically with an unrealistic picture of how experience and belief interact. As Quine points out, Carnap’s Aufbau itself recognized the holistic relationship of experience to sentences. Quine’s argument against meanings is very like what Derrida calls “deconstruction.” Implicit in a view which seeks to overcome X is a commitment to X.
Derrida, responding to Husserl in somewhat the way Quine responds to Carnap, denies logoi just as Quine and Davidson reject Fregean senses. Derrida, being also a Heideggerian and French, places Husserlian noemata in a tradition that goes back to Plato—the distinction between logos and rhemata, between the genuine meaning (logos) of a word and other features of a word. Derrida questions this distinction. If we are skeptical about this distinction, then the critique of a discourse can focus on rhetorical features as well as what are considered ‘logical” features of the discourse. I have argued that Quine should agree. Since there are no meanings, the language cannot be divided into the truth-conditional (logical) and “other.” Quine did not pursue this line of thought. Derrida does, and his discussions of Plato illustrate what it would be like to really take there to be no clear “logical” core to a text.
Given their different traditions and backgrounds and interests, the consequences they explore are different. Derrida is interested in the topics and writers that are in his tradition. Derrida’s philosophical writing refers to a different set of background texts and different discussions, most of the time.
I never asked Derrida what he thought about Tarski or deflationism. His denial of “truth” seems to be based on the idea that, given Aristotle’s formulation of truth as correspondence, and given that there are no self-interpreting tokens, there cannot be “adequation of language and reality,” so that a consequence of denying meanings is a denial of truth.
I think that other possibilities were just not salient enough in his background of texts so that he could appreciate Davidson’s or Tarski’s or Quine’s conceptions of what ‘true” could mean beyond correspondence of a logos and Being. I think that the fact that Davidson takes truth to be primitive and fundamental, while Derrida takes the end of meaning to be the end of genuine truth does not undermine the fundamental agreement between the two.
Sellars’ Myth of the Given is actually very much a phenomenological position, rather than a view about how to think about language. Sellars in many ways is much more akin to the early Derrida’s critique of Husserl than either Quine’s or Davidson’s discussions. Davidson’s denial of the given is primarily an ontological view. There is a sequence of interesting essays to be written by someone on Husserl, Sellars and Derrida.
The Sellars thing is pretty apposite I think. Wheeler and Brandom's accounts of the upshot of much of this are very similar (again, Rorty has to be the connection there). Anyhow, Joe Bob says check it out.
[*As is his want, calling him "U Conn's Samuel Wheeler." Space-alien readers of the contemporary philosophical blogosphere don't understand our (to them) odd obsession with the spatial location of university employees.]
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