Rorty's Debt to Sellarsian Metaphysics

Rorty regards himself as furthering the project of the Enlightenment by separating Enlightenment liberalism from Enlightenment rationalism. To do so, he rejects the very need for explicit metaphysical theorizing. Yet his commitments to naturalism, nominalism, and the irreducibility of the normative come from the metaphysics of Wilfrid Sellars. Rorty's debt to Sellars is concealed by his use of Davidsonian arguments against the scheme/content distinction and the nonsemantic concept of truth. The Davidsonian arguments are used for Deweyan ends: to advance secularization and anti‐authoritarianism. However, Rorty's conflation of theology and metaphysics conceals the possibility of post‐theological metaphysics. The key distinction lies between “metaphysics” and “Metaphysics.” The former provisionally models the relations between different vocabularies; the latter continues theology by other means. Sellars shows how to do metaphysics without Metaphysics. This approach complements Rorty's prioritization of cultural politics over ontology and his vision of Enlightenment liberalism without Enlightenment rationalism.     

Outgrowing representationalism: Semantic remarks on Tracy Llanera's Richard Rorty: Outgrowing modern nihilism

This article provides a semantic reading of Tracy Llanera's brilliant book Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism. Llanera is reframing the debate of how to react to the malaise of modern nihilism by proposing a change of metaphor: instead of trying to “overcome” nihilism, we should try to “outgrow” nihilism. This article invites Llanera to shed more light on her project with respect to the semantic categories of realism and representationalism, and with respect to the growing field of conceptual engineering. Can Llanera's project be fruitfully understood as engineering the concepts of “transcendence” and “redemption”? How much of the project hangs on the idea that language does not represent but is rather a tool that helps us fulfill our varying needs? How neat is the entanglement of semantic and existential meaning?     

Take care of egotism,and redemption will take care of itself: Comments on Tracy Llanera's Richard Rorty: Outgrowing modern nihilism

This commentary critically examines two facets of Tracy Llanera's recent book Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism. First, it considers her interpretation of Richard Rorty's redemptive project. It argues that, while Llanera succeeds in resolving tensions in Rorty's public-private distinction, her account downplays the role of abnormal discourse within projects of self-creation. Second, it raises several questions about Llanera's strategy for situating this redemptive project within debates concerning existential nihilism. On her view, one ought to follow Rorty in addressing the problem of egotism instead of the problem of nihilism, since the former is prior to the latter. But it is not clear who counts as an egotist, or why egotists are especially prone to becoming nihilists. Moreover, there are reasons to think that egotism and nihilism are fundamentally different kinds of problems.     

Rorty's Dewey: Pragmatism,education and the public sphere

In Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, Bellah et al. diagnose our loss of public life in areas such as education and relate this loss both to flaws in moral ecology and to our institutions. Their opposition to the Lockean metaphysic of self and community and to objectivist epistemology as a way of understanding schools is helpful in that it naturally suggests the kind of piecemeal, contextualized change that we locate within Dewey's viewpoint. But, I argue, Bellah et al.'s penchant for first philosophy ultimately taints their work. While I applaud their turn to Dewey, I find their choice of a metaphysical, rather than a Rortyan reading of Dewey misguided. The proper alternative to a Lockean metaphysics is not a communitarian/Aristotelian one; the proper corrective to objectivist epistemology is not Deweyan epistemology or critical theory. We need to see, as in Rorty (1991b), that democracy exists prior to normative philosophy just as it has priority over substantive religion. To think otherwise would lead to a loss of contact with the ordinary, specific, ever-changing realms where our lives, and our democratic institutions — including the university — must either thrive or flounder. Finally, there is no epistemology or metaphysics that will adequately ground the university's workings. Instead, there is only, as Dewey put it, growth or failure to grow, guided by hints and resonances that arise in evolving circumstances.     

Ethical Pragmatism

Beginning with a thought experiment about a mysterious Delphic oracle, this article motivates, explains, and attempts to defend a view it calls Ethical Pragmatism. Ethical Pragmatism is the view that we can and should carry on our practice of moral deliberation without reference to moral truths, or more broadly, without reference to metaethics. The defense the article mounts tries to show that neither suspicions about the tenability of fact‐value distinctions, nor doubts about the viability of global pragmatism, nor worries about the “force” of ethical injunctions without reference to moral truths constitute good reason to reject Ethical Pragmatism.     

RORTY ON REALISM AND CONSTRUCTIVISM

Abstract: This article argues that we can and should recognize the mind dependence, epistemic dependence, and social dependence of theories of mind‐independent reality, as opposed to Rorty, who thinks not even a constructivist theory of mind‐independent reality can be had. It accuses Rorty of creating an equivocation or “dualism of scheme and content” between causation and justification based on various “Davidsonian” irrelevancies, not to be confused with the actual Davidson. These include the Principle of Charity, the attack against conceptual schemes, the linguistification of social practice, intersubjectivism, and causal naturalism. It follows that realists and constructivists need neither follow Rorty's mischaracterizations nor succumb to his internal paradoxes.     

Romantic Longings,Moral Ideals,and Democratic Priorities: On Richard Rorty's Use of the Distinction Between the Private and the Public

Abstract

The heart of Richard Rorty's philosophy is his distinction between the private and the public. In the first part of this paper, I highlight the profound influence that the inherited vocabularies of Romanticism and Moralism have had on Rorty's understanding of both the distinction and the problems he intends to solve with it. I also suggest that Rorty shares with Plato, Kant, and Nietzsche philosophical habits that cause him to treat two importantly different problems as one. Once the moral problem is disentangled from the political, it becomes clear that Rorty's distinction is unnecessary to the former and inadequate for the latter. In the second part of the paper, I argue that Rorty's non‐foundationalist pragmatism supports the view that the political problem is best resolved by what I call a democratic mechanism of arbitration. It is the lingering influence of Romanticism and Moralism, I suggest, that is the cause of Rorty's reluctance to embrace fully the political priority of democratic consensus. Finally, I discuss why this analysis of Rorty's liberalism may have implications for the general question of how best to resolve political disputes in pluralist societies.     

Joseph Margolis on Pragmatism

This paper begins with a memoir of the author’s interactions with Joseph Margolis that delineates both Margolis’s importance as a teacher and their disagreements on aspects of American philosophy. It then turns to Margolis’s discussions of pragmatism as a philosophical movement, with an emphasis on his understanding of John Dewey. The paper considers, third, Margolis’s account of the decline and rebirth of pragmatism, the latter process attributed largely to the work of Richard Rorty. The paper concludes with an examination of what it sees as Margolis’s most valuable work: his explorations of the nature of the self and of human society.     

Pragmatism, Science, And Society: A Review Of Richard Rorty's Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1

Richard Rorty's Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 is a collection of papers that explores the implications of philosophical pragmatism in several areas, including natural science, mind—body issues in philosophy, and perspectives on liberal democracy and social change. Similarities between Rorty's pragmatism and Skinner's radical behaviorism are explored in each of these three areas. Although some important and interesting differences are found regarding the role of science in social change, most areas show remarkable similarities between the two systematic perspectives.     

HISTORICISM IN PRAGMATISM: LESSONS IN HISTORIOGRAPHY AND PHILOSOPHY

Abstract: Pragmatism involves simultaneous commitments to modes of inquiry that are philosophical and historical. This article begins by demonstrating this point as it is evidenced in the historicist pragmatisms of William James and John Dewey. Having shown that pragmatism focuses philosophical attention on concrete historical processes, the article turns to a discussion of the specific historiographical commitments consistent with this focus. This focus here is on a pragmatist version of historical inquiry in terms of the central historiographical categories of the object of historical inquiry and mode of historical periodization. After describing the basic historiographical consequences of pragmatism's historicism, the article moves to a discussion of the philosophical results of this historicism. The focus here is on the role that historical inquiry can play in the general philosophical perspective of pragmatism as well as on some recent texts that exemplify the dual pragmatist commitment to philosophy and history.     

Ardent realism without referential normativity

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses a central positive claim in Matti Eklund’s Choosing Normative Concepts: that a certain kind of metaphysically ambitious realist about normativity – the ardent realist – is committed to the metasemantic idea that the distinctive inferential role of normative concepts suffices to fix the extension of those concepts. I argue first that commitment to this sort of inferential role metasemantic view does nothing to secure ardent realism. I then show how the ardent realist can address Eklund’s leading challenge without appeal to distinctively metasemantic commitments.     

SERIOUSLY, BUT NOT LITERALLY: PRAGMATISM AND REALISM IN RELIGION AND SCIENCE

Abstract. Critical realists would have us believe that representations have a connection to the world, that of truth or reference for example, which is independent of their usefulness to us. They would have us believe further that knowledge about this connection serves to put religion and science in their proper places with respect to one another. This essay raises pragmatic objections to these belief's.     

A defence of informational structural realism

This is the revised version of an invited keynote lecture delivered at the 1st Australian Computing and Philosophy Conference (CAP@AU; the Australian National University in Canberra, 31 October–2 November, 2003). The paper is divided into two parts. The first part defends an informational approach to structural realism. It does so in three steps. First, it is shown that, within the debate about structural realism (SR), epistemic (ESR) and ontic (OSR) structural realism are reconcilable. It follows that a version of OSR is defensible from a structuralist-friendly position. Second, it is argued that a version of OSR is also plausible, because not all relata (structured entities) are logically prior to relations (structures). Third, it is shown that a version of OSR is also applicable to both sub-observable (unobservable and instrumentally-only observable) and observable entities, by developing its ontology of structural objects in terms of informational objects. The outcome is informational structural realism, a version of OSR supporting the ontological commitment to a view of the world as the totality of informational objects dynamically interacting with each other. The paper has been discussed by several colleagues and, in the second half, ten objections that have been moved to the proposal are answered in order to clarify it further.     

PROSPECTS FOR THE FIELD OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION: AN OCTOPUS VIEW

The organic unity between the head and the vital arms of the octopus is proposed as a metaphor for science and religion as an academic field. While the specific object of the field is to pursue second‐order reflections on existing and possible relations between sciences and religions, it is argued that several aspects of realism and normativity are constitutive to the field. The vital arms of the field are related to engagements with distinctive scientific theories, specialized philosophy of science, representative theological proposals, and the input from the study of world religions.     

Empirical tests of scientific realism: A quantitative framework

The scientific realism debate in philosophy of science raises some intriguing methodological issues. Scientific realism posits a link between a scientific theory's observational and referential success. This opens the possibility of testing the thesis empirically, by searching for evidence of such a link in the record of theories put forward in the history of science. Many realist philosophers working today propose case study methodology as a way of carrying out such a test. This article argues that a qualitative method such as case study methodology is not adequate for this purpose, for two reasons: to test scientific realism is to pose an effects-of-causes question, and observational and referential success are quantities that theories possess to a greater or lesser degree. The article concludes that an empirical test of scientific realism requires a quantitative method.     

Did Rorty’s Pragmatism Have Foundations?

Abstract

There is an overt tension between Rorty’s pragmatist critique of philosophy and his apparent epistemological and metaphysical commitments, which it is instructive to examine in order to assess not only Rorty’s overall position, but also renewed contemporary interest in pragmatism and its metaphilosophical implications. After showing why Rorty’s attempts to limit the scope of his critique failed to resolve this tension, I try reading him as a constructive metaphysician who was attempting to balance a causal account of the language / world relation with panrelationism. However, Rorty intended these commitments to be interpreted in light of his pragmatism about vocabularies, and relied upon a ‘social standpoint strategy’ to render his overall position consistent. I conclude that to the extent that this strategy succeeds, it removes almost all of the argumentative force from Rorty’s pragmatism.     

结构实在论评析

The epistemological version of structural realism, proposed by Cao Tianyu, has great influence in the philosophy of science. Syntheses has published a special volume discussing the topic. Cao criticizes anti-realism, as well as the epistemic and ontic versions of structural realism. From the concepts of structure, ontology, and construction, he analyzes the objectivity of scientific theories as having five aspects: construction, historicity, holism, revision, and revolution. This paper systematically analyzes and comments on Cao's structural realism. The author agrees with his criticism of the under-determination thesis, is neutral to his argument against ontological discontinuity, and questions his universal language argument. Translated by Yu Jinlong from Ziran Bianzhengfa Yanjiu 自然辩证法研究 (Studies in Dialectics of Nature), 2006, (11): 34–38