Rorty thinks that in showing that the mind is not "the mirror of nature" he has disproved the correspondence theory of truth. What he has really shown is that the activities of the human mind cannot be fully expressed by metaphors based upon the operations of the eye [see Ong's visualist tendencies]. We do not know simply through "looking at" reality as though our minds were simply mirrors of reality. One needs to be very careful not to confuse the activities of the mind with the operations of any (or all) bodily senses [see Ong's critique of the corpuscular sense of life]. In describing how our minds work, one needs to beware of being bewitched by the metaphors that spring from the operations of our senses. Our minds are not like our eyes; or, rather, their activities are far richer, more complex, and more subtle than those of our eyes. It is true that we often say, on getting the point, "Oh, I see!" But putting things together and getting the point normally involve a lot more than "seeing," and all that we need to do to get to that point can scarcely be met simply by following the imperative, "Look!" Even when the point, once grasped, may seem to have been (as it were) right in front of us all along, the reasons why it did not dawn upon us immediately may be many, including the fact that our imaginations were ill-arranged, so that we were expecting and "looking for" the wrong thing. To get to the point at which the evidence finally hits us, we may have to undergo quite a lot of dialectical argument and self-correction.
I do not understand Jacques Derrida's thought about phonocentrism and logocentrism well enough to compare his thought with Ong's critique of the corpuscular sense of life, so I will leave it to someone else to undertake constructing a comparison and contrast of their thought.
In any event, had Samuel P. Huntington understood Ong's multivariate account of Western cultural history, he could have used Ong's thought to deepen and strengthen his clash-of-civilizations thesis in the 1990s, which seemed to be confirmed by the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001.
For readers who might be interested in reading further about the quantification of thought, agonistic structures, the inward turn of consciousness, and visualist tendencies, I add now a bibliographic listing of selected relevant works. We can obviously separate these factors for study and discussion. But these factors at times inter-acted with one another in ways that are at times difficult to discuss.
SELECTED WORKS ABOUT THE QUANTIFICATION OF THOUGHT
Bochenski, I. M. A History of Formal Logic, translated from the 1956 German original and edited by Ivo Thomas. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961. See the index for quantification.
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