Neopragmatism

Neopragmatism is a 20th-century revival of classical pragmatism that states that language is best understood as a problem-solving tool, and traditional philosophical problems are the result of contingent vocabularies. This is in direct opposition to traditional philosophy, which sees the mind or language as a mirror representing a mind-independent reality, and traditional philosophical problems as eternal problems concerning the mind or language's mirroring capacity.

It is characterised in opposition to a number of longstanding philosophical positions, most notably foundationalism, essentialism, representationalism, and the correspondence theory of truth. It is a nominalist position that denies the existence of independently existing Forms, Ideas, essences, etc. It also denies the existence of an autonomous mind or self, instead holding that the mind/self is a linguistic construct.

Neopragmatism was originally developed by American philosopher Richard Rorty in his influential book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). The position articulated in the book is essentially a synthesis of formal arguments from analytic philosophy with the pragmatic hope of William James and especially John Dewey, who was Rorty's philosophical hero. Rorty uses such arguments to effectively dissolve analytic philosophy from within and create a kind of postanalytic philosophy.

Another notable philosopher who identified as a neopragmatist later in his career was Hilary Putnam. While Donald Davidson, who was a major influence on and close friend of Rorty, never publicly identified as a neopragmatist, he did notice that his views did not differ that much from Rorty's, with there being more difference between them in terms of style and attitude. The following contemporary philosophers are also often considered to be neopragmatists: Nicholas Rescher (a proponent of methodological pragmatism and pragmatic idealism), Jürgen Habermas, Susan Haack, Robert Brandom, and Cornel West (the latter two being Rorty's students at Princeton).

Background

Classical pragmatism

Neopragmatists, particularly Rorty and Putnam, draw on the ideas of classical pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Putnam, in Words and Life (1994), enumerates the ideas in the classical pragmatist tradition which neopragmatists find most compelling. To paraphrase Putnam:

1. Rejection of skepticism (pragmatists hold that doubt requires justification just as much as belief);
2. Fallibilism (the view that there are no metaphysical guarantees against the need to revise a belief);
3. Anti-dualism about "facts" and "values";
4. That practice, properly construed, is primary in philosophy.

Neopragmatism is distinguished from classical pragmatism (the pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey) primarily due to the influence of the linguistic turn in philosophy that occurred in the early 20th century. The linguistic turn reduced talk of mind, ideas, and the world to language and the world. Philosophers stopped talking about the ideas in one's mind that are used to think about the world, and instead started talking about the words in one's language that are used to talk about the world.

Early analytic philosophy

In the early 20th century, philosophers of language (e.g. Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, the early Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists) believed that analyzing language would bring about the arrival of meaning, objectivity, and ultimately truth concerning external reality, and so they initiated the linguistic turn. In this tradition, it was thought that truth was obtained when linguistic terms stood in a proper correspondence relation to non-linguistic objects (this can be called "representationalism"). The idea was that in order for a statement or proposition to be true, it must represent or correspond to a state of affairs which is actually present in reality. This is the basis behind the correspondence theory of truth and is essentially what neopragmatism formed in opposition to.

Later analytic philosophy

In the mid-20th century, there were many arguments raised against the methods and assumptions just outlined of the early analytic philosophers. Of particular importance for Rorty are the arguments of W. V. O. Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, Thomas Kuhn, and Donald Davidson.

Quine argued in his famous 1951 essay Two Dogmas of Empiricism that the analytic–synthetic distinction (the distinction between sentences true by virtue of meaning alone and sentences true by virtue of both meaning and fact) is untenable, instead replacing it with his metaphor of the web of belief. This means that the meanings of words are contaminated by the science of the day, and thus a pure, objective science of meaning that the early analytic philosophers wished to create is impossible.

Sellars argued in his 1956 essay Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind that the "Myth of the Given" (the foundationalist idea that something can be self-justified in experience and also justify other knowledge) is untenable, challenging the early analytic assumption that beliefs are justified by standing in a certain causal relation with the world. Sellars instead proposed that beliefs are justified by standing in a certain normative relation with other beliefs (what he called the "logical space of reasons").

Kuhn argued in his landmark 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that the notion of linear "scientific progress" is mistaken, instead replacing it with his idea of the paradigm shift and his view of science as more of a problem-solving activity. This challenged the early analytic view of science as an authoritative, objective voice on what exists in a "mind-independent reality".

Davidson argued in his 1974 essay On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme that scheme–content dualism (the idea that there exist an organizing mind or language and an unorganized world or experience), as well as the related concept of conceptual relativism, is unintelligible, undermining the early analytic dualism between mind/language and the world. He instead believed that knowledge and truth presuppose a shared, objective world populated by language users who are able to make sense of each other.

The upshot of all of these arguments, according to Rorty, is that we can abandon the old metaphysical, Cartesian-Kantian view of the mind as a mirror of an objective world, with accurate mirrorings of the world counting as knowledge, justification as coming from how the world is, and truth being what actually exists in the world. We can instead just switch to a naturalistic, Darwinian view of humans as intelligent, social animals who have evolved language in order to help them solve problems and survive in the world better. On this view, philosophy becomes a kind of cultural politics akin to religion and poetry, its ultimate aim being to sustain interesting conversations in society. This is the central thesis of neopragmatism, at least of the Rortyan variety, that Rorty lays out in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

The later Wittgenstein and language games

The later Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations (1953) argues contrary to his earlier views in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) that the role of language is not to represent reality but rather to perform certain actions in communities. The language game is the concept Wittgenstein uses to emphasize this. Wittgenstein believed roughly that:

1. Languages are used to obtain certain ends within communities.
2. Each language has its own set of rules and objects to which it refers.
3. Just as board games have rules guiding what moves may be made, so do languages within communities where the moves to be made within a language game are the types of objects that may be talked about intelligibly.
4. Two people participating in two different language games cannot be said to communicate in any relevant way.

Many of the themes found in the later Wittgenstein are found in neopragmatism. Wittgenstein's emphasis on the importance of "use" in language to accomplish communal goals and the problems associated with trying to communicate between two different language games finds much traction in neopragmatist writings.

Continental philosophy

While Rorty was originally trained as an analytic philosopher, continental philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida and their views on language have been highly influential for him.

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he employs a genealogical method inspired by Nietzsche and Foucault in order to trace the contingent and historically situated origins of contemporary philosophical problems. In Part Three of the same book, he explicitly draws on the existentialist and hermeneutic traditions of Gadamer and Jean-Paul Sartre to develop his concept of "edifying philosophy".

He also published a collection of essays under the title Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991) in which he explores the similarities and differences between his own neopragmatist philosophy and the views espoused by various continental philosophers.

Richard Rorty and anti-representationalism

As Rorty read his biggest influences (James, Dewey, Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, Kuhn, Davidson, Derrida, Heidegger), he started to believe that they were all, in one way or another, trying to hit on the thesis that our language does not represent reality in any metaphysically relevant way. Rather than situating our language in ways in order to get things right or correct, he says in the introduction to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1990) that we should believe that beliefs are only habits which we use to react and adapt to the world. To Rorty, getting things right as they are "in themselves" is useless if not downright meaningless.

In 1995, Rorty wrote, "I linguisticize as many pre-linguistic-turn philosophers as I can, in order to read them as prophets of the utopia in which all metaphysical problems have been dissolved, and religion and science have yielded their place to poetry." This "linguistic turn" strategy aims to avoid what Rorty sees as the essentialisms ("truth," "reality," "experience") still extant in classical pragmatism. Rorty wrote, "Analytic philosophy, thanks to its concentration on language, was able to defend certain crucial pragmatist theses better than James and Dewey themselves. [...] By focusing our attention on the relation between language and the rest of the world rather than between experience and nature, post-positivistic analytic philosophy was able to make a more radical break with the philosophical tradition."

See also

• Pragmatism
• Confirmation holism
• Fallibilism
• Linguistic turn
• Postanalytic philosophy
• Two Dogmas of Empiricism
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
• Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the foundational text of the tradition
• Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, another influential book by Rorty

Further reading

• Malachowski, Alan (ed.) (1990). Reading Rorty. Wiley-Blackwell.
• Brandom, Robert (ed.) (2000). Rorty and His Critics. Wiley-Blackwell.
• Malachowski, Alan (2002). Richard Rorty. Princeton University Press.

External links

• Pragmatism — The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Pragmatism — The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Richard Rorty — The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Richard Rorty — The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy