On the Road with Rorty, Davidson, and Ramberg

This piece builds a discussion of themes from Rorty, Davidson, and Ramberg on two pieces of mine from 1999. One piece is 'Location, location, location' (LLL), my AAP Presidential Address that year. The other is 'Truth as convenient friction' (TCF), written for a conference with Rorty at ANU, and later published in the Journal of Philosophy. LLL is previously unpublished, but is reproduced as Section 2 here, with minor modifications. Section 3 is then in three parts. §3.1 begins with an objection to my conclusions in LLL, based on Davidson’s remarks about externalism and triangulation. I don’t claim that Davidson would endorse this objection. On the contrary, it is clear that he would not—and partly for reasons that Ramberg emphasises, in criticising Rorty’s interpretation of Davidson. In §3.2 those reasons link to Rorty’s invocation of Davidson, in response to TCF. I argue that this move backfires for Rorty, supporting the main claim of TCF. I realised recently that in responding to Rorty on this point, I could have appealed to Bernard Williams’s (2002) characterization of ‘imaginary genealogy’. For this, Williams’s model is Edward Craig’s genealogy of the concept of knowledge (Craig, 1990). Yet, citing Davidson, Williams declines to seek what TCF claims to offer, a genealogy of truth itself. In §3.3 I argue that TCF thus has lessons for Williams and Davidson, as well as for Rorty.