Richard Rorty (1931—)

Richard Rorty is an important American philosopher of the late
twentieth and early twenty-first century who blended expertise in
philosophy and comparative literature into a perspective called "The
New Pragmatism" or "neopragmatism." Rejecting the Platonist tradition
at an early age, Rorty was initially attracted to analytic philosophy.
As his views matured he came to believe that this tradition suffered
in its own way from representationalism, the fatal flaw he associated
with Platonism. Influenced by the writings of Darwin, Gadamer, Hegel
and Heidegger, he turned towards Pragmatism.

Rorty's thinking as a historicist, anti-essentialist found its fullest
expression in 1979 in his most noted book, Philosophy and the Mirror
of Nature. Abandoning all claims to a privileged mental power that
allows direct access to things-in-themselves, he offered an
alternative narrative which adapts Darwinian evolutionary principles
to the philosophy of language. The result was an attempt to establish
a thoroughly naturalistic approach to issues of science and
objectivity, to the mind-body problem, and to concerns about the
nature of truth and meaning. In Rorty's view, language is to be
employed as an adaptive tool used to cope with the natural and social
environments to achieve a desired, pragmatic end.

Motivating his entire program is Rorty's challenge to the notion of a
mind-independent, language-independent reality that scientists,
philosophers, and theologians appeal to when professing their
understanding of the truth. This greatly influences his political
views. Borrowing from Dewey's writings on democracy, especially where
he promotes philosophy as the art of the politically useful leading to
policies that are best, Rorty ties theoretical inventiveness to
pragmatic hope. In place of traditional concerns about whether what
one believes is well-grounded, Rorty, in Philosophy and Social Hope
(1999), advises that it is better to focus on whether one has been
imaginative enough to develop interesting alternatives to one's
present beliefs. His assumption is that in a foundationless world,
creative, secular humanism must replace the quest for an external
authority (God, Nature, Method, and so forth) to provide hope for a
better future. He characterizes that future as being free from
dogmatically authoritarian assertions about truth and goodness. Thus,
Rorty sees his New Pragmatism as the legitimate next step in
completing the Enlightenment project of demystifying human life, by
ridding humanity of the constricting "ontotheological" metaphors of
past traditions, and thereby replacing the power relations of control
and subjugation inherent in these metaphors with descriptions of
relations based on tolerance and freedom.

1. Life

Richard McKay Rorty was born on October 4, 1931 in New York City. He
held teaching positions at Yale University from 1954 to 1956,
Wellesley College from 1958 to 1961, Princeton University from 1961 to
1982, and the University of Virginia since 1982. In addition he has
held many visiting positions.

As he relates in his autobiographical piece, "Trotsky and the Wild
Orchids," Rorty's early and informal education began with the books in
his parents' library, particularly Leon Trotsky's two books History of
the Russian Revolution and Literature and Revolution as well as two
volumes on the Dewey Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow Trials.
These materials, along with his family's association with noted
socialists such as John Frank and Carlo Tresca, introduced Rorty to
the plight of oppressed peoples and the fight for social justice.

At the age of fifteen in 1946, Rorty entered the University of Chicago
where he eventually earned B.A. and M.A. degrees. After initially
embracing Platonism and its replacement of passion by reason as a
method to harmonize reality with the ideals of justice, a reluctant
Rorty came to hold that this rapprochement was impossible. Opting
rather for the rigors of the study of the philosophy of mind and
analytic philosophy, Rorty left Chicago for Yale University, where he
received his Ph.D. degree in 1956. He developed the theory of
eliminativism materialism in "Mind-body Identity, Privacy and
Categories" (1965), The Linguistic Turn (1967) and "In Defense of
Eliminative Materialism" (1970). Here he clarifies and adjusts his
commitment to the analytic tradition, a commitment that began with his
Ph.D. dissertation "The Concept of Potentiality." He eventually was to
become disenchanted with analytic philosophy.

After reading Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit, Rorty began to
appreciate the degree to which the incessant conflict of philosophers
and their competing first principles might, with the cunning of
reason, be transformed from a seemingly interminable debate into a
conversation that weaves itself into a "conceptual fabric of a freer,
better, more just society." This appreciation matured with Rorty's
study of Heidegger's works.

During his tenure at Princeton University, Rorty was reintroduced to
the works of John Dewey that he had set aside for his studies on
Plato. It was this reacquaintance with Dewey, along with an
acquaintance with the writings of Wilfrid Sellars and W. V. Quine that
caused Rorty to redirect his interest to the study and development of
the American philosophy of Pragmatism.

The publication of his first book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
in 1979, the same year he became President of the American
Philosophical Association, publicly marked Rorty's thorough break with
Platonic essentialism as well as with Cartesian foundationalism. He
attacked assumptions at the core of modern epistemology—the
conceptions of mind, of knowledge and of the discipline of philosophy.

Calling himself "raucously secularist," Rorty rejected contemporary
attempts at holding justice and reality in a single vision, declaring
this to be a remnant of what Heidegger called the ontotheological
tradition whose metaphors had frozen into dogmatic truisms about truth
and goodness. In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), Rorty
extended this claim by abandoning all pretenses to an analytic style.
Opting for a Proust-inspired narrative approach where arguments for
universal rights, common humanity, and justice are replaced with
references to pain and humiliation as motivation for society to form
solidarities (contingent groupings of like-minded individuals) in
opposition to suffering, Rorty substituted hope for knowledge as the
main thrust of his efforts. Tolerant conversations rather than
philosophical debates and idiosyncratic re-creation rather than
self-discovery have been hallmarks of his pragmatic pursuit for social
hope, the pursuit of which can be characterized as a historicist quest
for human happiness that abandons a search for universal truth and
timeless goodness in favor of what works. Rorty's pragmatic aim was
and continues to be the development of a liberal society where there
is freedom from pain and humiliation and where open-mindedness is
practiced.

More recently, Rorty has developed his notion of the uses of
philosophy by using as his template a reading of Darwinian evolution
applied to Deweyan democratic principles. This development appears
most notably in Achieving Our Country (1998), Truth and Progress:
Philosophical Papers III (1998) and in Philosophy and Social Hope
(1999). Rorty died on June 8, 2007.
2. Thoughts and Work

The failure of Rorty's youthful attempt to synthesize into one vision
his identification with the downtrodden together with his search for
the "Truth beyond hypothesis" was the making of his career in
philosophy. As early as 1967, Rorty had moved away from an initial
interest in linguistic philosophy as a way of finding a neutral
standpoint from which to establish a strict science of language, and
he began his shift to pragmatism. With the publication of Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty further elucidated his maturing
anti-essentialist, historicist positions as applied to topics such as
the philosophy of science and the mind-body problem, as well as the
philosophy of language as it pertained to issues of truth and meaning.
With Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Rorty developed in greater
detail the themes covered in his 1979 work.

With Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), Rorty first implicitly
linked his rejection of philosophical appeals to ahistorical
universals with that of his pragmatist narrative, a narrative of free,
idiosyncratic individuals who, inspired by intuitions and
sensibilities captured in great works of literature, commit themselves
to contingent solidarities devoted to social and political liberalism.
Furthermore, these individuals, detached from the need to justify
their world-view by an appeal to the way the world is, would see moral
obligation as a matter of social conditioning by cultural forces,
which are in turn structured by the prevalent human needs and desires
of a specific era.

In Part III of Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (1991), Rorty
continued to develop his pragmatist views on politics in a democratic
society. In Parts I and II he set his sights on contemporary ideas
about objectivity, using the writings of Donald Davidson and others
for support in debunking the claim that the human mind is capable of
discovering ahistorical truth concerning the nature and meaning of
reality from a "God's-eye," ideal perspective. Supporting the entire
work is Rorty's challenge to the notion of a mind-independent,
language-independent reality to which scientists, philosophers, and
politicians appeal when professing that they have a corner on the
truth. His Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991) is devoted to
harmonizing the works of Heidegger and Derrida with the writings of
Dewey and Davidson, particularly in their anti-representational
insights and stances on contingent historicism.

Later writings, such as Truth and Progress (1998); Achieving our
Country: Leftist Thoughts in Twentieth-Century America (1998); and
Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), clarify his anti-essentialist
stance by integrating a neo-Darwinian perspective into a
Dewey-inspired pragmatism.
3. Major Influences

Although the writing of any philosopher will have countless
influences, there are generally only a handful which stand out as
major inspirations. Rorty is no exception. While Nietzsche,
Wittgenstein, Derrida, James, Quine, and Kuhn contribute much to his
worldview, of central importance to Rorty's narrative of New
Pragmatism are five influential thinkers: G. W. F. Hegel, Charles
Darwin, Martin Heidegger, John Dewey, and Donald Davidson, each
contributing a significant layer to Rorty's complex take on questions
central to contemporary philosophy.
a. Hegel's Historicism as Protopragmatism

It was G. W. F. Hegel's willingness in his Phenomenology of the Spirit
(1977) to abandon certainty and eternity as philosophical and moral
goals/ideals that inspired Rorty to appreciate the irreducible
temporality of everything as well as to understand philosophy as a
contingent narrative readable without a moral precept existing behind
the storyline. Calling Hegel's switch from the metaphor of individual
salvation through contact with a transcendental reality to salvation
through the achievement of the completion of an historical process
"protopragmatism," Rorty asserts that this move was a critical step
forward in human thinking, taking us from the notion of how things
were meant to be to a perspective on how things never were but might
be. The change of focus from epistemological stasis, the adequate
discernment of God's Will or Nature's Way, to interpretive processes
opened the way for subsequent intellectuals to envision their task as
that of constructing a better future rather than the discovery and
conforming to a static idea of the Good Life. The refocused purpose of
philosophy, from Rorty's perspective, would be best captured by
Hegel's phrase "time held in thought," that is, a narrative of a
community's progress across time that can be described in terms of its
current and parochial needs; societal growth not measured against some
non-human, eternal standard. Thus, Rorty contends, Hegel helped us to
begin to substitute pragmatic hope for apodictic knowledge.

Of course, Hegel saw his own philosophical efforts as elucidating the
progression by which the rational becomes real. That is, he conceived
history as the process of the Absolute becoming increasingly
self-manifest (the Incarnate Logos) through the development toward,
and concrete realization in, the human consciousness. This Rorty
rejects as a form of pantheistic fantasy that attempts to maintain a
"closeness of fit" between word and world by rendering humanity as the
mere manifestation of the Divine Mind, and one that is not consistent,
ironically, with Hegel's own anti-representational doctrine of
historicism. To address this inconsistency and for a corrective to
Hegel's Absolute Idealism, Rorty turns to Charles Darwin.
b. Darwin's Evolution

In 1998 Rorty contended that Darwin has demonstrated how to naturalize
Hegel by the former's dispensing with claims that the real is rational
while allowing for a narrative of change understood as an endless
series of progressive unfolding. Purpose that transcends a given
organism is eliminated in favor of a particular organism's fitness for
the local environment. It is an evolutionary process, one that fully
involves human beings; we are no exception. What we, as creatures of
the earth, do and are, Rorty maintains, "is continuous with what
amoebas, spiders, and squirrels do and are." Consciousness and thought
are not distinct kinds; they are inextricably linked to the use of
language. Language is the practice of using long and complex strings
of noises and marks to successfully adapt to one's environment. If
language is at all a break in the continuity between other species and
humans, it is only insofar as it is a tool that humans have at their
disposal, which amoebas, squirrels, and the like do not. Nevertheless,
just as other species have developed the tools of night-hunting,
migration and hibernation to adapt to environmental change, we have
used language as a tool for our survival. Thus, for Rorty, language is
not a mysterious add-on over and above human creaturehood, but part of
our "animality," as he puts it. As a conveyer of meaning, language
should be understood as the use of sentences to achieve a practical
goal through a cooperative effort. It is "the ability to have and
ascribe sentential attitudes" that contributes to our species'
successful survival in a world of dynamic possibilities. In this way,
borrowing from Darwin, Rorty naturalizes language.

Darwin also has made materialism respectable to an educated public
once, according to Rorty (Truth and Progress, 1998), his "vitalism" is
dismissed. Darwin's detailed account of the way in which both life and
consciousness might have evolved from non-living, non-conscious
chemical soup gave plausibility to their emergence free from
teleology. Taking the new-found respectability of materialism along
with the recognition of the human species' full-fledged animality, the
search for a non-natural cause for the prolific display of life on
earth can be dispensed with as misguided. So too can a hunt for a
non-human purpose for human life. "After Darwin," Rorty asserts, "it
became possible to believe that nature is not leading up to
anything—that nature has nothing in mind."

Without transcendent standards or intrinsic ends to aspire to, we
humans find ourselves radically free to invent the purpose of human
life and the means to achieve it. Rorty, well aware of the need for a
consistent anti-representationalist narrative, acknowledges that even
Darwin's theory of evolutionary change is just one more image of the
way things "are," one no more privileged than any other coherent
narrative in representing reality in-itself—an impossible task. In
fact Rorty suggests that the main, albeit unintended, contribution of
Darwin is the de-mythologizing of the human self (considered as part
of an unnarrated, objective reality). Rorty argues that we should
"read Darwin not as offering one more theory about what we really are
but as providing reasons why we do not need to ask what we really
are." Old habits of deferentially attributing to an immaterial spirit
or to nature's intrinsic life-force (for example, élan vital) the
power to determine the structure, meaning of, and means to our
existence ought to be set aside as outmoded and replaced by a story of
dynamic cultural innovation and humanistic pluralism. This is the
pragmatic vocabulary that Rorty envisions Darwin preparing with his
notion of evolutionary change, a vocabulary that is further molded by
the writings of Martin Heidegger.
c. Heidegger: Contingency over Certainty

Martin Heidegger influenced Rorty in the direction of process over
permanence. Labeling the history of Western metaphysics "the
ontotheological tradition," Heidegger postulated that an underlying
assumption persisted from Plato down to the positivists: the power
relation of "the stronger overcoming the weaker." Rorty (in
"Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism," 1991) notes that Heidegger
finds that thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, St. Paul, Descartes, and
Hegel assume this sort of asymmetrical power relation in the process
of searching for the truth that overcomes ignorance, tames sensual
desire by reason, or defeats sin with the aid of God's grace. Each
thinker in his own fashion seeks a force that overwhelms the subject
as it makes its project evident. By doing so, the individual ceases to
create and live his own projects in deference to the presence of the
stronger influence. The submission to this influence would be both a
concession to a power greater than oneself and identification with it.
And it is in this identification, Heidegger claimed, that a subtle
shift from an attitude of subservience to one of control and
domination occurs within the seeker.

Rorty agrees with Heidegger that the "quest for certainty, clarity,
and direction from outside can also be viewed as an attempt to escape
from time, to view Sein as something that has little to do with Zeit."
For the ontotheological tradition, time, in its fleeting
manifestations, receives the unfavorable comparison with the reality
of the eternal. Thus the unspoken goal of the metaphysically-inclined
advocates of this philosophical tradition is to be free from the
contingency, the uncertainty, and the fragility of the human condition
by a release into and identification with the eternal. Valuing power
above fragility, propositions over words, truth to metaphor,
philosophy above poetry, in the hands of pre-Heideggerian philosophers
the use of language becomes merely a means in the pursuit of a reality
and a force which rises above the signifier.

Heidegger rejected this family of philosophical thinking along with
its "quest for disinterested theoretical truth" as an
over-intellectualized escape from the human condition. It is at its
core inauthentic. The will to truth of the metaphysician is actually
the poetic urge in disguise. Since antiquity, the ontotheological
tradition is the attempt by (poetic) thinkers to deploy a series of
metaphors to break away from the contingency of poetic metaphor. More
than hypocritical, in Heidegger eyes, the ontotheologian exhibits
hubris in his belief that Western philosophy is capable of getting it
right and be clear about what is real, rather than appreciating his
attempt as just one of many practices trying to give voice to the
"reality" of Being. Instead Heidegger urged that an amalgamation of
beliefs and desires had to be made in order to recover and reassert
the "force of words" heard as when they were first spoken—original and
potent—in order to open a space for Being.

Rorty understands Heidegger to be saying that there are just we humans
and the power of the words we happen to speak. There is no designer,
no controller, and no choreographer of human projects, only ourselves
and the languages we create. "We are nothing save the words we use."
Thus the poet, in dealing forthrightly with the contingency and
historicity of words is an authentic coiner of metaphor. And metaphor
is what discloses Being, just as Being is formed and manifested in
metaphor. As Rorty writes in "Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism,"
"As long as an understanding of Being is ontically possible 'is there'
Being."

The use of the term "Being" by Heidegger is, for Rorty, somewhat
problematic. With Heidegger, Rorty agrees that there is no hidden
power called Being. Rorty interprets Heidegger's Being as what "final
vocabularies" are about. When he declares that "Being's poem is the
poem of Being," Rorty is not claiming that there is a work of reality
that Being "writes"; rather he means that there is no meta-vocabulary
to distinguish the adequacy of one final vocabulary above others. Nor
is there any non-linguistic, pre-cognitive access to an already
present Being that underscores some narrative as preferred. There is
no way to escape the contingencies of language to get at
Being-in-itself. We are all enmeshed in final vocabularies that
present Being in diverse and incommensurate ways. No understanding of
Being is better than any other understanding. Heidegger thus cleared
the way for Rorty's dismissal of the realism-antirealism debate and
his gloss of Western tradition as the development of pragmatic
practices designed to cope with contemporary conditions while
remaining open to future descriptions.

Nevertheless, for Heidegger the evolving pattern of power relations
that has been the history of Western metaphysics culminates in the
"technical," pragmatic interpretation of thinking. Rorty obviously
must differ with Heidegger in the latter's rejection of pragmatism as
the concluding, and unfortunate, outcome of the ontotheological
tradition. In "Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism," Rorty suggests
that if Heidegger had only to choose between pragmatism and Platonism,
pragmatism would be his choice, fully aware of Heidegger's distain for
pragmatism and his offering of a third option: authentic Dasein's
primal understanding of Being. Yet Rorty maintains that he opts for
the early Heidegger's construal of the "analytic of Dasein" as an
interpretation of the Western world-view rather than the later
Heidegger's reading of it as "an account of the ahistorical conditions
for the occurrence of history." In doing so Rorty dismisses all
suggestions by Heidegger that some historically embedded
language-users' understanding of Being (for example, the ancient
Greeks') can be more open to (less forgetful of) Being than any
subsequent appreciation due to their status as "primordial" inventors
of the Western tradition's metaphors. Yet Rorty also insists that it
is impossible to rank understandings because no descriptive account
can better help us get behind that which is poetically construed.
There is no validating reality behind our narrative; Being and
interpretive narrative arise together. Therefore, Rorty appropriates
for pragmatism only Heidegger's sense of contingency and the
transitory condition of human life, along with the ability to
radically redescribe Western culture. He sets aside Heidegger's
nostalgia for an authentic world-view that says something neutral
about the structure of all present and possible world-views. By doing
so, Rorty aligns himself more with John Dewey's brand of
anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism than with Heidegger's
project. For Dewey's vision of a democratic utopia includes
"technical," pragmatic thinking that is put in service to social
practice for the purpose of achieving the integration of inquiry and
poetry, theory and practice.
d. Dewey's Pragmatic Democracy

As with Hegel and Darwin, Rorty intentionally "misreads" or
"redescribes" John Dewey from a late-Twentieth-century pragmatist's
perspective. This "hypothetical Dewey" is shorn of what Rorty
considers to be dead metaphors in the former's philosophy (that is his
"scientistic" empirical rhetoric and panpsychic notion of experience).
Conversely for Rorty, a continuing live option in Dewey's thought is
his naturalism and pragmatism. Seen in this light, Rorty's Dewey
becomes the synthesis of historicism and the expediency of
evolutionary adaptation. Most notably, Dewey manifested this fusion in
his rejection of the "crust of convention" born of a tradition that
took language as representational of reality rather than as
instrumental in satisfying a society's shared beliefs and hopes. The
fading conviction originating with Plato that language can adequately
represent what there is in words opens the way for a pragmatic
utilization of language as a means to address current needs through
practical deliberations among thoughtful people.

This view of language is critical for Rorty. With the shift in
attitude away from the expectation, on one hand, that through
narrative a revelation of moral perfection may become manifest, or, on
the other, that through the clear and methodical use of language
epistemic certainty may be achieved, humanity is freed to view
morality and science as being evolving processes, where means lead to
ends and those ends in turn become means toward future aims. Rorty
characterizes this, Dewey's means-ends continuum, as the claim that we
change our ideas of what is true, right and good on the basis of the
particular blend of success and failure produced by our prior labors
to fulfill our hopes. Rorty writes that philosophers such as Dewey
"have kept alive the historicist sense that this century's
'superstition' was the last century's triumph of reason and the
relativist sense that the latest vocabulary, borrowed from the latest
scientific achievement, may not express privileged representations of
essences, but be just another of the potential infinity of
vocabularies in which the world can be described."

In rejecting representationalism and the essentialism that it implies,
Dewey abandons the Cartesian-inspired spectator account of knowledge,
which radically separates the knowing subject from the object being
studied. No longer considering that objectivity a result of a
detachment from the material under study but rather as an ongoing
interaction with that which is at hand, Dewey elevates practice over
theory; better said, he puts theory in service to practice. From
Rorty's perspective, while Dewey had a great insight, he ought to have
taken the next step and rejected scientism—the claim that scientific
method allows humanity to gain a privileged insight into the
structural processes of nature. His failure to reject the alleged
epistemologically privileged stance is one main reason Rorty must
re-imagine Dewey. Nevertheless, Dewey's elevation of practice
continues the movement away from the pre-Darwinian attachment to the
belief in a non-human source of purpose and the immutability of
natural kinds toward a contingent "world," where humans define and
redefine their social and material environments. It is within a social
practice or a "language-game" that specific marks and sounds come to
designate commonly accepted meanings. And, as Rorty states in
"Feminism and Pragmatism," (1995) no set of marks or sounds (memes)
can ever bring cognitive clarity about the way the world is or the way
we as humans are. Instead, memes compete with one another in an
evolutionary struggle over cultural space, just as genes compete for
survival in the natural environment. Unguided by an immanent or
transcendent teleology, the memes' replication is determined by their
usefulness within a given social group. And it is through their
utility for the continued existence and prospering of a social group
that the group's memes—like their genes—are carried forward and
flourish. They establish their niche in the socio-ecological system.

By the linkage of meme selection with Darwinian natural selection,
Rorty can reasonably say that "the history of social practices is
continuous with the history of biological evolution." He adds a
crucial caveat: memes gradually usurp the role of genes. Thus the
driving force in human existence becomes the socio-linguistic. And as
in the process of natural selection there is no social practice that
is privileged and final; no one cultural "species" is intrinsically
favored over another. It follows that, as Dewey has said "The worse or
evil is a rejected good." Before deliberation and choice there can be
no intrinsic good, no God's-Eye clarity as to what the true, the right
and the just are. All options are competing goods. It is only with the
triumph of one set of memes over another by means of manipulation,
coercion or force that the determination of a society's memes as the
good (or the bad) of the situation can be asserted. Rorty recognizes
that the Deweyan approach, which denies that knowledge is the stable
grasping of an independent reality and which asserts "reality" to be a
term of value, may lead to the charge of relativism and power-worship.
But he believes that the benefits for a democratic society where there
is an unfettered competition of ideas outweigh the downside of his
anti-universalist stance. Therefore, given the historicist belief that
there is no viable alternative to being immersed within the
contemporary understanding of one's time, place and culture, then to
abandon the memes with which one chooses to be identified—together
with the solidarity one has formed with like-minded others around
those memes—would be an absurd denial of one's self and one's beliefs.
(This is the basis of Rorty's ethnocentricism.)

Rorty wishes to promote consciously a democracy of plurality and hope
rather than one where either private autonomy or communal solidarity
dominates. This sentiment can be found most clearly beginning with
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), culminating in Philosophy
and Social Hope (1999). By developing an evolutionary sense of history
through Dewey's writings Rorty associates a generalized Darwinism
directly with democracy. Growth, or the flourishing of ideas in a
political environment that is conducive to the flowering of ideas and
practices, is the hope for the future. While there is no metaphysical
grounding of this hope in the essence of humanity or in the structure
of the world, Rorty maintains that a future where we may continue to
be astounded by the latest creative endeavors is a future where human
happiness has the best chance.

This democratic trope is acceptable to Rorty because he agrees with
Dewey that the essentialist-foundationalist worldview was a product of
Europe's inegalitarian past. The conservative, leisure-class's desire
to maintain the status quo was incorporated into a philosophy that
favored eternal necessities over the temporal contingencies and the
uncovering of static natures over the engagement with the dynamic
processes. As such it stood in the way of growth and constructive
change. By shifting attention away from traditional memes to those
that focuses on the future, Dewey meant to reconstruct philosophy into
the exercise of practical judgment, a dedication to the kinds of
understanding that are geared to contemporary obstacles that obstruct
the flow of expressive creativity. Rorty endorses Dewey's intention.

As Rorty characterizes Dewey's vision, Pragmatism would, for the first
time, "put the intellectuals at the service of the productive class
rather than the leisure class." Theory is to be treated as an aid to
practice, rather than practice being seen as defective theory. With
the assent of practice, the distinctions characteristic of dualism,
those between mind and matter, thought and action, and appearance and
reality, blur and fall away. Following precisely on this notion is
political egalitarianism. If there is not to be dualistic distinction
in the abstract, then none should be manifested in practice. Rorty
accepts that individual self-reliance ought to be exercised on a
communal level. Dewey promotes philosophy as the art of the
politically useful. His is a social democracy where the policies that
bring social utility are the policies that are best. This is where
theoretical creativity ties into Rortyan pragmatic hope: "that one
should stop worrying about whether what one believes is well-grounded
and start worrying about whether one has been imaginative enough to
think up interesting alternatives to one's present beliefs." Rorty
holds that this is uniquely possible for all citizens in a democratic
environment, where the clash of memes can happen under an auspicious
tolerance that suppresses to a minimum pain and humiliation and allow
for a flourishing of diversity. This is where pragmatism fuses with
utilitarian values. Rorty suggests that it is reasonable to offer
persuasive rhetoric rather than the use of physical assault or its
preludes of mockery and insult, because coming to terms with people
will likely increase human happiness in the long run. That is, by
keeping open the lines of communication, new and exciting projects for
the betterment of our condition has the best chance to develop than if
fear and intimidation are the norm. It is the establishment of
conditions conducive for human happiness that is the utopian hope
within the human heart.
e. Davidson on Truth and Meaning

Rorty had claimed (prior to Ramberg's essay—see section 5b below) that
there was no more of a gap between human psychology and biology than
between biology and chemistry ("McDowell, Davidson, and Spontaneity",
1998). This follows easily from his Deweyan take on Darwinism. Once we
accept Dewey's pragmatism, then the vocabularies that allegedly could
distinguish between the human and the natural come under serious
challenge. Different disciplines are founded to achieve different
purposes. There is no way for a discipline to try to be more "adequate
to the world" than any other when, with Rorty, one gives up on, say,
Quine's physicalism which ranks some vocabulary (physics) as
ontologically superior to others. If we generalize this rejection, as
Rorty does, then one is able to reject scientism, a position which
holds that a descriptive practice's success or failure depends on its
capture of a determinative material reality. Once we abandon the idea
that one vocabulary is best suited to express the intrinsic order of
things, then the ability to express the truth through the use of one
vocabulary but not another is due to the different focus of interest
that each vocabulary has, and not because one excels beyond all others
in the expression of facts. There is a flat, deontologized, playing
field among different descriptive strategies. These strategies are
tools in the pragmatist's toolbox to be utilized under appropriate
conditions of need-fulfillment. So, for instance, if psychology is
rightly conceived as a different practice than, say, economics, it is
a practice that is geared to achieve a particular outcome deemed as
important by the discipline of psychology, but not necessarily to
economics, or for that matter, physics, ethics, and so forth.
Psychology is merely a different causal strategy which an individual
may choose to engage "nature" to achieve a specific outcome. But no
strategy can claim to have the unique language-strategy that gets
things right. Rorty believes there is no "super-language" that
achieves a more adequate description of our relation to something
other than ourselves because all vocabularies merely describe our
practices as we engage in a causal interaction with "reality" as
understood through those practices.

This position is available to Rorty largely due to Donald Davidson's
argument against the content-scheme distinction. This distinction,
common in all dualisms, is seen as necessary only when credence is
given to there being disparate ontological realms—one containing
beliefs, the other containing non-beliefs (for example, matters of
fact). Truth then becomes the correct analysis of the non-causal
relation between particular beliefs and specific non-beliefs. But
Davidson argues that such a dichotomy lacks credibility. That there is
a mysterious relation between human and the non-human which tertia
such as "experience," "sensory stimulation," "the world," and so
forth, act as epistemological bridges is, according to Davidson, an
illusion created by the endeavor to take language as a medium or an
instrument used to define truth. Rorty explains that Davidson avoids
this representationalist pitfall by understanding "true" in terms of
one's own linguistic know-how. The "language I know," the way that
one's community copes with the environment in practice, is enough to
erase the alleged schism between intentional objects (the objects that
most of the rules of action of one's—or some other—linguistic
community are true of; that is, are good for dealing with) and their
referents. This is Davidson's "Principle of Charity."

The central understanding that Rorty draws from Davidson's notion of
"radical translation" at the heart of the "Principle of Charity" is
that we language-users have already the causal link established
between our beliefs and their referent(s). There is no need to
establish a connection, it is the human condition. This linkage allows
us to get things for the most part correct and thus make most of our
statements about the world true, and to recognize that any translation
is a faulty translation which renders as wrong most of a speaker's
beliefs about the world. Rorty suggests that it follows that any
wholesale gap between intentional objects and referents would be
impossible since survival depended upon humanity's pragmatic
application of beliefs to the environment. This carries over to our
own individual webs of belief. Most of anyone's beliefs must be, on
the whole, true. Rorty uses this insight to explain that though we
cannot get outside our beliefs and our language to establish some test
besides the coherence of our own or others' webs of belief we can
still speak objectively and have knowledge of a public world not of
our personal design.

It is through a Davidsonian holistic view of language that Rorty,
contra Davidson, takes "truth" as a misguided slide back into
representationalism. For Davidson, truth is a transparent term that in
itself does not explain anything but emerges when the rules for action
causally interact successfully with the world. Rorty rejects all
appeals to truth, Davidsonian or otherwise, in favor of social
justification. Because there are no comprehensive barriers between
oneself and the world, we are free to advance beliefs with the aim of
persuading others as to their efficacy in obtaining the outcomes they
most desire. This is how Rorty blends Davidson's notion of radical
translation with Dewey's naturalism to yield Rorty's neopragmatism.
4. Positions
a. Overview

The overarching theme of Rorty's writing is a promotion of a
thorough-going naturalism. Recognizing the value of the Enlightenment
challenge to religious speculation, and its offering of a humanist
philosophy in its place, Rorty argues that the Enlightenment program
was never completed. It fell short of it goal by keeping one foot in
the past. By substituting the notion of Truth as One in place of a
monotheistic worldview, the Enlightenment reformers repeated the
tradition's error by continuing to seek non-human authority, now in
the guise of what Wilfrid Sellers called "the Myth of the Given."
Holding that reality has an intrinsic nature, and by advancing the
correspondence theory of truth, Enlightenment philosophers turned away
from full-blown naturalism, ironically, in service to a scientific
objectivity that required a radical separation of the observer from
the observed. Rorty's neopragmatism is meant to ameliorate this
perceived shortcoming by rigorously following through on Immanuel
Kant's distinction between causality and justification.

Rorty holds that our relation with the environment is purely causal.
However, the way in which we describe it—the linguistic tools we
employ to cope with the recalcitrance of that environment in an effort
to achieve our purposes and desires, as natural creatures in the
natural world—determines how we understand that world. Once we are
causally prompted to form a belief, justification may take place in a
social world where, as Davidson notes, only a belief can justify a
belief. In short, Rorty maintains that there can be no norms derived
from the natural, but only from the social.

This position allows Rorty to reject scientism (the
representationalist view that cleaves to the Myth of the Given) while
endorsing the development of a fully-naturalized science as an
extremely useful tool for prediction and control. It also opens the
way for Rorty to advance naturalized democracy with confidence.
Instead of seeking some underlying fact about human nature which is
essential, ahistorical, and universalizable, Rorty proposes we seek
the justifications that are relevant to a contextually embedded
practice. The loss of the unconditionality associated with
long-established notions of truth is actually a gain, pragmatically
speaking. While truth is an aim that is unachievable due to its
definitional ambivalence prior to commitment to action, justification
is a recognizable (and contingent) goal that permits practical
satisfaction without closing the door on future recalibrations in
response to inevitable challenges to such justifications. The best way
to allow for justification of a belief with no neutral standpoint,
Rorty suggests, is to allow competing beliefs to be evaluated on their
performance capabilities and not on their ability to ground themselves
in universal validity. This leads directly to Rorty's ethnocentricism.

The following are various positions Rorty takes in accordance with his
project of New Pragmatism.
b. Philosophy: Neither Realism nor Antirealism

For Rorty one of the results of the merging of Dewey's naturalism with
Davidson's view of truth is the dropping of the realist-anti-realist
issue. One is always in touch with reality as a language user, thus
the distinction between truth-conditions and assertibility-conditions
dissolves. However, it is important to note that although we humans
use language to engage the environment it does not make the process
artificial, in the sense of language concealing a transcendent reality
behind social constructs, or by its being in wholesale error
concerning the inherent character of the natural world. Rorty writes
in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991) that "Davidson, on my
interpretation, thinks that the benefit of going 'linguistic' is that
getting rid of the Cartesian mind is the first step toward eliminating
the tertia which, by seeming to intrude between us and the world,
created the old metaphysical issues in the first place." He continues
that once we dispense with the tertia that try to breach the now
discredited scheme-content gap, the distinction between appearance
("useful fictions") and reality ("objective facts") disappears. What
remain are one's community practices unfolding in a seamless and
endless process of reweaving webs of beliefs in response to current
and future conditions. From his rejection of the realist-anti-realist
distinction springs Rorty's anti-essentialist nominalism and
anti-foundationalism.
c. Anti-essential Nominalism

Related to Rorty's rejection of what he characterizes as the false
dichotomy between realism and antirealism, is his dismissal of all
ideas of essentialism. The Neurath's Boat thought experiment poses no
problem for Rorty. Terms like "boat" or "self" are strictly linguistic
in nature. That is, they do not refer to Platonic Forms or
Aristotelian essences, but to linguistically constructed, intentional
objects. Boats or selves may undergo complete change piece-by-piece
and still maintain their identity if and only if there is social
agreement about the continuance of such notions. What is radical in
Rorty's linguistic principle is that there is no ultimate difference
between the human and the non-human "entities;" they are definable and
redefinable "all the way down." There is nothing standing under
[sub-stance] or above to anchor the ever-evolving linguistic parsing
of metaphors.

Similarly, reference to reflexive consciousness, the hallmark of
unique and private Cartesian self distinct from all non-conscious
objects is, for Rorty an illegitimate attempt to nest metaphysical
assertions about the existence of a separate human mind in the
epistemology of first-person, self-evident awareness. Equally
illegitimate is the appeal to materialism common to scientism.
Language that reduces consciousness to brain functions creates a
vocabulary that attempts to explain mental events as happenings of
material alteration. There is a metaphysical assumption in materialism
that Rorty, as an anti-essentialist, cannot countenance: that there is
a physical world that is "really there" adequate to the cause of the
mental.

Neither a reductive materialist nor dualistic subjectivist, Rorty opts
for nominalist-pragmatism. That materialists deal with reality is to
be understood as their concentrating on the concepts and descriptors
they find most useful to discuss. When dualists maintain that there is
an awareness which stands distinct from that which is extended and
non-conscious, it shows their stubborn commitment to the dead
Cartesian metaphor. Descartes' reconstruction of the world was
designed to secure the study of physics in a religious environment
hostile to its practice. To reify Descartes' "mind as a mental eye"
metaphor as that which "perceives" itself as a self-evident "given" is
to misunderstand the application of language to personal experience.
This is a major theme of Rorty's Philosophy as the Mirror of Nature
(1979), as captured in his "Antipodean Analogy." It is a challenge and
reminder to the reader that the way we speak about the mental can (and
will at some future time) be radically reconceived. If there can be
found nothing essential to the mental that extends beyond and grounds
our description of it, the very process with which we seem most
intimate, then it follows that there is nothing
essential—non-linguistic—to the non-mental either. There is no
essential constitution to our minds. Rorty declares that privacy,
immediacy, introspectibility, intentionality, incorrigibility, and
self-evidency can be redescribed in terms that do not involve
subjectivism (see also "Dennett on Awareness").
d. Anti-foundationalist Historicism

Rorty denies the utility of all foundational philosophies (for
example, Cartesian clear and distinct ideas, Kantian a priori truths,
and so forth) on the basis that they share with representationalism a
belief that the mind is the "mirror of nature." Once the metaphysical
distinction between appearance and reality disappears, so too ought
the need for a knowing subject with a special faculty for apodictic
truth. Seen by Rorty as secular theories meant to identify the
necessary grounding of knowledge previously provided by the Divine or
natural order, foundationalisms of all stripes have in common the
desire for the subject to escape temporality and contingency into a
transcendent viewpoint capable of experiencing the power of truth (for
example, "truth resists attempts to refute it"), pressing rational
minds toward consensus. Thus, in Rorty's opinion, the invention of the
transcendent subject is an attempt to salvage epistemologically a
relation to a metaphysical realm that has been abandoned by
post-Kantian thinkers. He holds that foundationalists arbitrarily
raise to the level of universal the mundane linguistic practices and
social norms that have dominated minds at some moment and in some
locale. Rorty rejects the cultural hegemony implied in foundationalist
narratives, and by doing so asserts a historicist belief in the
inescapable embeddedness of the human condition in the flux and flow
of evolutionary change. There is, from his perspective, no neutral,
ahistorical standpoint, no "God's-eye viewpoint" from which to gain a
Parmenidean perspective on what there is. What we can assent to is a
plurality of standpoints that achieve social acceptance because of
their utility in and for the here and now.
e. Ethnocentricism

A natural order of reason is one more "relic" of the idea that truth
consists of correspondence to the intrinsic nature of things. Absent
an ahistorical standpoint from which to judge the intrinsic nature of
reality, there is no such thing as a proposition that is justified
without qualification or an argument which will better approximate the
truth per se. For Rorty, there is no natural context-independent
reason which somehow heralds and underlies all descriptive vocabulary.
He considers the idea of context-independent truth a misguided effort
to hypostatize the adjective "true" by repackaging it in
epistemological terms of the Platonic attempt to hypostatize the
adjective 'good.' Only such hypostatization causes one to believe that
there is a goal of inquiry beyond justification to relevant
contemporary audiences. Rorty holds: "All reasons are reasons for a
particular people, restrained by spatial, temporal, and social
conditions." When we have justified our beliefs to an audience
considered pertinent, we need not make any further claims, universal
or otherwise.

To insist on context-independence would be to endow reason with causal
powers that enable a particular descriptive vocabulary to resist
refutation regardless of time, place, and social conditions.
Alternately, one could suppose an ideal audience with the ability to
speak a privileged vocabulary that allows its speakers to escape human
limits and achieve a God-like grasp of the totality of possibility.
But Rorty insists that there is neither such an audience, nor a
privileged vocabulary that provides a priori a language of
justification with the potential to draw all mundane audiences into
universal consensus. There are only diverse linguistic communities,
each of which has its own final vocabulary and its shared
context-embedded perspective on reality, a reality that is forever and
already interpreted from that standpoint.

Since, from the Rortyan outlook, the reality-appearance distinction is
a relic of our authoritarian ontotheological tradition—the
transmutation of the extrinsic, non-human power (that must be
submitted to) into the secularized intrinsic nature of reality that
still carries with it all the authoritarian drawbacks inherent in the
tradition's outdated metaphor (for example, Habermasian "universal
validity")—then the secularized metaphor of power/submission ought to
be discarded along with the remnants of its religious origin.

But Rorty does not want to throw out entirely the fruits of Western
culture. To the contrary, he says that he is "lucky" to having been
raised within this cultural tradition, especially because of its
tendencies for critical analysis and tolerance. In this vein, Rorty
responds to a Habermasian critique: "I regard it a fortunate
historical accident that we find ourselves in a culture . . . which is
highly sensitized to the need to go beyond (dogmatic borders of
thought)." Nevertheless, he does not hold that his luck is any
different from that felt by Germans who considered themselves
fortunate to enroll in the Hitler Youth. It's simply a chance matter
as to which society one is born, and what set of beliefs is valued
therein.

Carrying forward his naturalistic, Darwinian views, Rorty sees humans
as creatures whose beliefs and desires are for the most part formed by
a process of acculturation. With no non-relative criteria or standards
for telling real justifications from merely apparent ones, it follows
that there can be no teleological mechanism independent of specific
social narratives to determine the socioethical superiority of one
solidarity over another. Since we all acquire our moral identity and
obligations from our native culture (the niche in which we find
ourselves), why not embrace our own social virtues as valid and try to
redefine the world in terms of them? This is Rorty's argument for
ethnocentricism; a position from which one "can give the notion such
as 'moral obligation' a respectable, secular, non-transcendental sense
by relativizing it to a historically contingent sense of moral
identity." And if this is a form of cultural relativism, so be it.
Rorty does not fear relativism, since fear grows from the concern that
there is nothing in the universe to hang onto except ourselves. This
is his humanist point against the claim that reason transcends local
opinion; there is only ourselves nested in the habits of action
evolving over time into the current, contingent societal solidarities
we find useful for achieving our purposes.
f. Philosophy as Metaphor

In line with Rorty's nominalism is his idea of philosophy as metaphor.
Once one abandons the search for truth and for a reality that is
concealed behind the everyday world, the role of a social practice in
the vanguard of cultural change and innovation (philosophical or
otherwise) is, or ought to be, to liberate humanity from old metaphors
that are rooted in superstition, mystification, and a
religion-inspired mindset. He suggests that this can be done by
offering new metaphors and reshaping vocabularies that will
accommodate new, "abnormal" insights. In this function, philosophy
will note the fears kindled by past practices as well as the hopes
springing from the present, and reconcile them by avoiding ancient
fallacies while projecting contemporary justified beliefs into the
future. Key to this project is the acknowledgement that philosophical
theories have tended to reify that which had been proposed in the past
as useful metaphors. This cognitive "idolatry" is an outgrowth of the
adoption of the correspondence theory of knowledge. Beginning with
Plato's use of perception to analogize the relation of the psyche to
the Forms, philosophers have mistakenly tried to make a word-world
connection in order to ground reality in thought. The trouble with
this approach is that it causes one to look behind the vocabulary for
a non-human entity or force which grounds its meaning in our
consciousness. Rorty thinks that this representational scheme is
wrongheaded because it confuses use for content. He holds that it is
rather in the use of words that we come to grips with our
ever-changing environment. Successful adaptation of metaphors to new
conditions is more likely when one drops the expectation that words
are made adequate by that environment, or a creative agency of that
environment. It is left to humans to consciously fashion their own
metaphors to cope with the world. Freed from the tyranny of locating
and adopting a non-human vocabulary, human ingenuity and creativity
will craft undreamt of possibilities as surely as Galileo reinvented
our understanding of the "heavens" by jettisoning of the outmoded
Aristotelian crystalline celestial metaphor, or as Thomas Kuhn
reinvented our understanding of paradigms by recasting the Kantian
idiom.
g. Anti-representational Metaphilosophy

Rorty's anti-representationalism is closely associated with his
anti-essential nominalism. While Rorty does not doubt that there is a
reality that is recalcitrant to some (but not all) linguistic
approaches (that is to say that not all attempts at constructing
language-games prove useful to our local purposes work), he rejects
that there can ever be a narrative that has a privileged viewpoint
and/or has the final determination on "What there is." Traditional
Western Philosophy's establishment of, alternately, rationalist,
empiricist or transcendental worldviews to address the problem of
depicting in words and ideas what is, in fact, does not so much
outline a pattern of progress in expressing more adequate
illustrations of reality; rather, it presents a history of the "idea
idea" which Rorty holds as a red herring. Since the time of Plato,
struggles over first principles have yielded academic debates that are
seemingly endless attempts to characterize the world, but that are
counterproductive to conversations aimed at changing the world. Rorty
suggests that philosophers change the subject. Subject-changing is
possible because there can be no common framework in which all minds
participate. The possibility of different language-games offers a
multitude of frameworks from which to choose, given Rorty's
anti-representational stance. No framework is more or less part of the
fabric of the universe. Rather, dialogue ought to supersede certainty;
interpretation to trump the search for truth. First-order
philosophical search for a stable, final vocabulary that coherently
captures the world in words or accurately corresponds to it drops out
and is replaced with narrative-driven conversation. The plurality of
interpretations that follows opens the way for an ever-evolving
exchange concerning the function of proposed statements relative to a
context; a series of pragmatic dialogues about what course of action
is best fitted to a contemporary situation.

A special case stands out for Rorty's anti-representationalist
critique, that of scientism. Since the Enlightenment, objectivity via
method has been the standard for scientific investigators. The
systematic reading of the material world by those who are expert in
the vocabulary of the sciences (that is, the quantification of
observation statements) privileges these "rational" interpretations
over all others. The assumption is that the universe is at its core a
unified complex readily available for accurate and thorough analysis
once one assumes the proper epistemological stance. And once taken
that stance will build upon itself in an ever-increasing accumulation
of objective knowledge. This optimistic progressivism is questioned by
Rorty. Following Dewey's dismissal of the dispassionate, autonomous
knower of culturally neutral, objective knowledge, Rorty criticizes
scientism's image of the givenness of the world and the ability of
scientists to discover the rational structures inherent in it. Viewing
knowledge as an historical and cultural artifact, Rorty wishes to
replace scientism's systematic worldview with an "edifying" philosophy
that treats science as just one among many non-privileged approaches,
each of which projects sets of rules designed to bring about the
well-being of a community. The choice of which of these approaches is
most beneficial is the topic of the open-ended, interdisciplinary
conversation favored by Rorty. Being free from teleological
constraint, this sort of dialogue carries with it the expectation that
convergent consensus is never possible; thus science cannot be the
focal point of, or unique conduit for, an ever improving meeting of
minds. Instead, Rorty considers all consensuses as contingent,
partial, and on-going solidarities directed toward some specific
practical outcome.
h. Pragmatic Pluralism

With no neutral ground from which to establish convergent consensus,
all positions are competing ideas; presumed goods struggling for their
existence. Thus, each is a live option until the practice is accepted
by, or it is abandoned as non-workable for, a society. Appeals beyond
the social environment have been eliminated by Rorty's
anti-foundational and anti-essential stances. Without a vocabulary
that captures either the way the world is or a core human nature,
there is never any possibility to locate a metaphysical foundation for
truth. Equally unrealizable is a distinct epistemological platform
from which to resolve differences between incongruent intuitions.
Without transcendent or transpersonal standards, Liberal and
Conservative narratives, atheist and fundamentalist ideologies, and
realist and pragmatist approaches all vie equally for a cultural niche
determining what works for a group at a given time. With everything
unanchored and in flux, there is never a settled outcome, no final
vocabulary that prevents the emergence of novel practices that
threaten to eclipse the established ways of life. A plurality of
metaphors thrives and in doing so upsets the settled, the canonical,
the convergent consensus, keeping the conversation going. Rorty
contends that it is the bruising competition among rival frameworks,
including his own, that will result in a shakeout of the best
framework fit for the times, around which will form a solidarity
(albeit, contingently) of similarly-minded individuals. And the bounty
of ideas, project, and programs will be surprisingly novel and
astoundingly different.
i. Solidarities, Poets, and the Jeffersonian Strategy

The idea of a convergent consensus is built around the expectation
that there is a grounding metaphysical standard "beyond" the flux of
time, culture and circumstance, and that this standard has been the
object of search for millennia. But to locate this standard, the
seekers already must be at the consensus point which is being sought;
they must already know what this is in order to find the real. Rorty
considers this sort of Platonist reminiscence to be a vicious circle
that assumes the consequent, i.e., that an objective point of view, in
fact, exists. Even the Kantian attempt to circumvent this problem by
asserting that we can have a priori knowledge of objects that we
constitute ignores the troubling fact, according to Rorty, that Kant
never explained how we have apodictic knowledge of the "constituting
activities" of a transcendental ego. This attempt at self-foundation
founders in another, more threatening way. In the placing of the
"outer" into the "inner, constituting space," the rational mind (seen
as Reason itself) becomes the arbiter of cultural norms ("culture"
being conceived as a collection of knowledge claims). Thus the
discipline of philosophy becomes the keeper of the status quo, whose
opinions and mode of thinking becomes the one true standard for any
other discipline to measure itself against. However, Rorty
emphatically denies that Philosophy as a discipline holds this crucial
role. In fact, he argues that we should put aside the Kantian
distinctions between disciplines as inegalitarian, and favor an
open-mindedness based upon the Jeffersonian model of religious
tolerance.

This Jeffersonian strategy, in line with Rorty's historicist
anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialist nominalism, is designed to
encourage the abandonment of any claim of the discovery of an
all-encompassing system of thought that serves as the legitimizer of
all other practices. Seen as a remnant of the onto-theological period
in human thinking, systematic philosophy suffers the same ills as
traditional dogmatic theologies in that they both project as universal
historically embedded, cultural values. The remedy that Rorty wishes
to apply to this systematizing is to split public practices from
private beliefs, treating all theories as narratives on par with each
other, and to shelter edifying impulses toward poetic self-creativity
from all pressures to conform. This dual strategy levels the playing
field in the public sector, allowing unrestricted democratic dialogue
between groups holding rival narratives (solidarities), while at the
same time liberating creative thought from the normalizing restraints
of the alleged privileged rationality asserted by Theological,
Philosophical or Scientific solidarities. What is denied in Rorty's
Jeffersonian strategy is any universal commensuration in either the
epistemological or metaphysical sphere, as well as the privilege of
the rational in a supposed hierarchical system of reality. What is
gained is the possibility for the expression of alternative,
"abnormal" voices in the conversation of humankind, which, in
potential, may prove to be persuasive enough to draw a growing number
of adherents into its ranks, thereby creating a new solidarity better
adapted to the contemporary environment, with its unique set of issues
and requirements than are prior narratives. The evolution of unique
narratives is progressive in the sense that each society and every era
can discard encrusted customs and embrace novel practices that seem
best in addressing the problems at hand. It is also contingent because
there can be no final vocabulary that gets it right about human nature
or the nature of existence. All is in play "all the way down" in an
essence-less world where any foundational pretence to a harmony
between the human subject and the objects of knowledge is eschewed,
and where justification is confined to "beliefs that cannot swing free
from the nonhuman environment."
j. Non-reductive Materialism and the Self

Rorty sees the division between reductive materialism and subjectivism
as a pseudo-problem originating with the Cartesian mind-body dualism.
These incommensurate descriptions both pose as the sole truth on the
subject of the nature of ontologically real objects. Wishing to
"dedivinize" philosophy, science and discussions on the self, Rorty
occasionally concentrates on the last of this troika in an effort to
unsettle the western notion about an underlying substantial
metaphysical center grounding existence. In his "Contingency of
Selfhood," Rorty defends contingencies and discontinuities of the "I"
against realist thought. It is plausible that most Enlightenment
thinkers could not fathom how inert matter and its motion could
account for the first person experience of human consciousness. Rorty
suggests that fear against the association of selfhood to the dying
human animal may be a motivation for philosophers since Plato to posit
a central essence for individuals. To this concern Rorty resorts to
non-reductive materialism to explain away the mind-body issue that has
concerned thoughtful people for the last four hundred years.

The use of descriptive vocabularies plays an important part in Rorty's
gloss on the human "self." In his narrative, one vocabulary is
centered on the description of physical objects and another is
concerned with the discursive agent. The discursive agent may
redescribe all objects, including him/herself, as subject in ever more
"abnormal" terms without limits. Nevertheless, once a description is
dedicated to a physicalist's accounts of brain activity, it becomes
incumbent upon the describing agent to note differences in human
experience with a different vocabulary, vocabulary that does not
assume the consequent concerning the alleged existence of the mind
independent from the body. Rorty claims to do this by assigning
parallel descriptions to both mind and brain without claiming that
there is a center to either.

Whereas the brain can be redescribed as the continual reweaving of the
electrical charges across the web of neural synapses, the mind can be
redescribed as the constant reweaving of different beliefs and
desires, redistributing truth values among the web of interlocking
statements. Under Rorty's description the brain is simply the
amalgamation of synapses with no center, i.e., nothing that is
independent of this agglomeration. Equally, Rorty holds that the mind
is exactly a contingent network of beliefs and desires, having nothing
at its core to which the bundled beliefs and desires adhere. It
follows there is no self that has these mental elements, rather the
self is these elements, and nothing more. Gone is the Cartesian
tendency to reify the self and a material object as substantial in
order to acknowledge that they each have causal effects. Gone is the
mistaken idea of a self as an object represented to ourselves (for
example, Descartes' claim that he is a "thinking thing"). And gone
also is the urge to completely separate the mental from the physical
ontologically. There are two incommensurate descriptions of causal
interaction. In this way, Rorty's non-reductive materialist account of
the self accords well with his nominalism, which rejects the
sentence-fact dichotomy as firmly as his anti-essentialism rejects the
subject-object split.

Of course, in keeping with Rorty's narrative, there is no reason why
one should limit the descriptions of the self, the mind, and the brain
to Rorty's vocabulary usage. If sometime in the future it serves the
purpose of those who live at the time to redescribe Rorty's account,
say along strictly neuron-physiological lines that may accurately pair
specific beliefs and desires to identifiable brain functions, then its
utility would demand the adoption of this narrative. But until then,
Rorty would argue for a holistic approach that does not seek a
one-to-one identity between brain functions and mental occurrences, or
a reduction of one to the other.
5. Critics

A philosophy that is controversial and iconoclastic as Richard Rorty's
is bound to have an abundance of critics. Space permits the
consideration of only a few, those considered serious objections to
his neopragmatism. Here is a representative sample of philosophers who
pose challenges to key aspects of Rorty's philosophy.
a. Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, and James Conant

Hilary Putnam doubts Rorty's ability to sustain his claim to be a
pragmatic realist. Turning to Rorty's pivotal view of justification,
Putnam, in Rorty and His Critics (Brandom: 2000), characterizes it as
having two aspects: contextual and reforming. About the former, Putnam
says that Rorty, by making justification a sociological matter, has
apparently made a commitment to majority sentiment. Nevertheless,
Putnam declares, by allowing that the majority can be wrong, Rorty is
being either incoherent or illicitly introducing a standard that is
independent of the social context. Knowing that Rorty rejects
ahistorical foundations Putnam takes up the reformist aspect of
Rortyan justification to see if Rorty can escape his apparent
inconsistency. Rorty's reformist position suggests that progress in
talking and acting results not from being more adequate to some
non-human (natural or transcendent) independent standard than one's
predecessors. Rather progress occurs because it seems to us to be
clearly better. To this definition of progress Putnam responds that
whether the outcome of some reform is deemed to be good or bad is
logically independent from whether most people see it as a reform.
Otherwise, the meaning of "progress" reduces to a subjective notion
and "reform" to an arbitrary preference for a way of life. Therefore,
the implication is that if we are to meaningfully use the terms
"progress" and "reform," there has to be better and worse
non-subjective standards and norms. So it follows that there are
non-sociological, objective ways to appreciate reality. Otherwise in a
Rortyan anti-representationalist world of competing "stories" enabling
one to cope or failing to help one cope with the "environment,"
Rorty's own narrative of redescriptions becomes one among many
non-privileged, solipsistic perspectives, and thus loses its
persuasive power.

James Conant and John McDonald complement Putnam's position. James
Conant argues that Rorty's narrative, when taken to its logical
conclusion ultimately undermines the tolerant, liberal, egalitarian
society Rorty claims to value. Conant offers that a liberal democratic
community must contain three internally-linked, non-transcendent
concepts necessary for human voice: freedom, community, and truth. He
argues that in the absence of this interlocking troika an alternative
triad arises: the prevalence of solitude, uniformity, and an Orwellian
doublethink. This latter threesome force upon those inculcated into
such a social order barren conformity to meta-ideology that denies the
very ability to reformulate language in ways that might threaten the
veracity of that order. This is accomplished by relativizing truth; by
reducing truth to the status of empty compliments and by utilizing
cautionary doubt as a method by which each individual replaces
inconvenient memories with group 'justified' assertions.

John McDowell refines Putnam's position, by offering a distinction
that actually makes Rorty, Putnam, and Kant allies! He attempts this
difficult association by distinguishing the fear of a contingent life
and the subsequent appeal to a Freudian father-like force that
provides us iron-clad answers and norms to live up to from the desire
to have us answerable to the way things are. McDowell suggests that
Kant too wished to combat the denial of human finitude, and the
consequent withdrawal from the contingent into the safety of an
eternal realm, by claiming that appearance was not a barrier
preventing us from gazing at reality objectively, but is the very
reality we as rational human beings aspire to know. In this way
McDowell thinks that Kant, admittedly anti-metaphysical, was as
anti-priesthood as Dewey—extending the Protestant Reformation's
idiosyncratic connection to a non-human reality into Philosophy—and in
line with Rorty's anti-epistemology stance—that we are always
ensconced within the human frame of reference. The upshot of
McDowell's distinction of objectivity from epistemic escapism is that
even as we are located inextricably within a vocabulary there can be
joined a unified discourse where the combination of a disquotational,
descriptive use of the word "true" and the use of "true" that treats
this term as a norm of inquiry is possible.

Conant builds Putnam's and McDowell's arguments for the ascendancy of
objectivity (properly understood) over solidarity by linking Orwell's
"Newspeak" and Rorty's New Pragmatism. Conant constructs his argument
first by offering the non-controversial claim that freedom of belief
is achievable only when one can decide for oneself concerning the
facts in a community that nurtures this sort of freedom. This
community can only be sustained when its norms of inquiry are not
biased toward lock-step solidarity with one's peers, but are geared
toward the encouragement of independent attempts at relating one's
claims about the way things are with the way things are, in fact (or
as Conant writes: 'turning to the facts'). Real human freedom can be
expressed when one is able to autonomously believe and to test one's
belief for its truth and falsity in a public forum unconstrained by
sociological determinants. Freedom, Conant claims, is therefore a
human capacity that emerges from the human condition and need not be
attributable to any Realist thesis. Thus, Conant agrees with Rorty
that there is nothing deep within us; there isn't any indestructible
nature or eternal substance. Nevertheless, a systematic effort to
eliminate the vocabulary containing terms such as 'eternal truths,'
'objective reality,' and traits 'essential to humanity' would be akin
to George Orwell's Newspeak, in that such an elimination would render
impossible human freedom by making it impossible to share in language
such ideas and concepts. The very possibility of interpretive
communication and dialogue among free thinkers engaged in the search
for truth would be banished by the sort of control exerted over
language that Rorty ironically insists is necessary to change
vocabularies and to establish a liberal democratic utopia.
b. Donald Davidson and Bjorn Ramberg

Donald Davidson combines the theory of action with the theory of truth
and meaning. For him an account of truth is simultaneously an account
of agency and vice versa. By referring to "rationality,"
"normativity," "intentionality," and "agency" as if they were
co-extensive predicates, Davidson is able to claim that descriptions
emerge as descriptions of any sort only against a taken-for-granted
background of purposeful action. Agency—the ability to offer
descriptions rather than merely make noise—only appears if a normative
vocabulary is already in use. Normative behavior on the part of the
communicators involved makes the case that the intentional stance is
unlike the biological stance. In Rorty and His Critics, Davidson
raises the "underdetermination/radical interpretation" issue,
disputing Rorty's long-held pragmatic claim that there is no
significant philosophical difference between the psychological and the
biological, as there is no significant difference between the
biological and the chemical, once we abandon the idea of "adequacy to
the world."

Bjorn Ramberg, in support of Davidson's contention in
"Post-ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty Versus Davidson," suggests
that the linkage between mind and body is not the irreducibility of
the intentional to the physical, but the understanding of the
inescapability of the normative. Considering each other as persons
with mutual obligations presupposes all pragmatic choices of
descriptive vocabularies. We could never deploy some descriptive
narrative unless we first deployed a normative vocabulary. As
followers of norms, we cannot stop prescribing and just describe.
Describing is part and parcel of a rule-governed conversation, an
exchange conducted by people who talk to each other assuming the
vocabulary of agency. Thus, members of a community are to be
considered as interlocutors and not as "parametrics" (causal
happenings). Rorty is correct in that there are many descriptive
vocabularies (ways to bring salience to different causal patterns of
the world) and many different communities of language-users. Yet,
until recently, Rorty did not accept Davidson's position that all
individuals who engage others in descriptive language-use must speak
prescriptively (see section 3e above), or that it is the
inescapability of the vocabulary of normality (rather than the claims
about the irreducibility of intentionality, rejected by Rorty) that
marks off agency from biology. This leads directly to Davidson's
Doctrine of Triangulation. We are a plurality of agents (one corner of
a triangle) each engaged in the project of describing to each other
the "world" (a second corner), and interpreting each other's
descriptions of it (the third corner). As Ramberg writes:

We can while triangulating criticize any given claim about any
description, we cannot ask for an agreement on the process of
triangulation itself, for it would be another case of triangulation.
The inescapability of norms is the inescapability—for both the
describers and agents—of triangulation.

Davidson's insight, as elucidated by Ramberg, has caused Rorty to
revise his view that norms are set within solidarities alone. Rorty
now holds that norms hover, so to speak, "over the whole process of
triangulation." While he still does not accept the positing of a
second norm of factual reality as suggested by John McDowell, the
emergent property of norms springing from dialogue cannot be reduced
to, or identified with its biological (in a fashion similar to
flocking, schooling, etc) or chemical (like H2O from hydrogen and
oxygen, and so forth) counterparts.
c. Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett, in "Faith in the Truth" and "Postmodernism and Truth,"
rejects postmodern critiques of physicalist science. Dennett's target
is relativism. Specifically, he charges that Rorty's stance against
the "chauvinism of scientism" leads to blurring the line between
serious scientific debate and frivolous historicist exchanges that
include science merely as one of many voices in the conversation of
humankind. Thus, there is a danger in jettisoning "the matter of fact
versus no matter of fact distinction." What is lost is the ability to
make true assertions about reality in terms other than the
sociological. Dennett objects to the postmodern notion that what is
true today—that leads us to assert, for example, that DNA is a double
helix—may not be true tomorrow if the conversation shifts. Rather, he
claims that there are actual justifications of what certain
sociological facts obtain when it comes to the natural sciences (that
is, that there is more agreement among scientists, that the scientific
language-game is a better predictor of future events than other
vocabularies, and so forth). To confirm our observations we must form
good representations of reality. This is what allows these
representations to be justified, beyond being good tools that lead to
further coping strategies vis-à-vis nature. Otherwise, Rorty's
attitude—expressed as "give us the tools, make the moves, and then say
whatever you please about their representational abilities. . . (f)or
what you say will be, in the pejorative sense, 'merely
philosophical'"—dismisses scientific objectivity while aiding and
abetting postmodern relativists who threaten to replace theory with
jargon. Dennett considers writers holding such attitudes to be in
"flatfooted ignorance of the proven methods of scientific
truth-seeking and their power."
d. Jurgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, and Norman Geras

Jürgen Habermas writes in "Richard Rorty's Pragmatic Turn," "In
forfeiting the binding power of its judgments, metaphysics also loses
it substance." With its loss philosophy can be rescued from its drift
only by a post-metaphysics "metaphysics." This is what Rorty is
attempting to do. In his hands, philosophy must become more than
academic; it must become relevant in a practical way. Recasting
Heidegger in post-analytic terms, Rorty see the deflationary trends in
contemporary philosophy as leading to its own negation if left
unchecked by edifying creativity. It is a pattern that can lead to
extinction if there is not new life breathed into old metaphors by
restating them, stripped of their Platonic bias. Central to this bias,
according to Habermas' understanding of Rorty, is the Platonic
distinction between "convincing" and "persuading." Rorty wishes to
replace the representational model of knowledge with a communication
model that means to replace objectivity with successful
intersubjective solidarity. But, Habermas contends that the vocabulary
which Rorty employs blurs the line between participant and observer.
By assimilating interpersonal relationships into adaptive,
instrumental behaviors, Rorty cannot distinguish between the use of
language directed towards successful actions and its use oriented
toward achieving understanding. Without a conceptual marker to
distinguish manipulation from argumentation, "between motivating
through reason and causal exertion of influence, between learning and
indoctrination," Habermas concludes that Rorty's project results in a
loss of critical standards that make a real difference in our everyday
practices.

Nancy Fraser provides in her "From Irony to Prophecy to Politics: A
Response to Richard Rorty" a Habermasian case of Rorty's difficulty in
distinguishing between edification and indoctrination. While Fraser is
sympathetic to Rorty's anti-essentialist stance and his linguistic
turn relative to politics and power, she has objected to his depiction
of the process he suggests for the advancement of causes, Feminist or
otherwise. In her response to Rorty's "Feminism and Pragmatism,"
Fraser rejects the notion advanced by Rorty that women must make a
complete break with the memes that have been employed by males in
Western cultures and redefine themselves out of whole cloth. The
reason she gives for her objection is that the neo-Darwinian
revolutionary vision that Rorty offers to Feminism is itself too
embedded in the chauvinism of the past. Likening the suggested
redefinition of memes to form a new feminist solidarity to the Oedipal
struggle between a son and his father—manifested in the need for women
to confront and overthrow those males who currently assert their
semantic authority—Fraser dismisses Rorty's zero-sum-game struggle
over semantic space as one that replicates the male competitive model
and does not easily fit into the psychological profile of pluralist,
communal dialogue that contemporary feminists favor.

Furthermore, Fraser questions the notion of women forming
solidarities, or as Rorty puts it "feminist clubs," for the purpose of
redefining themselves. She wonders which of the various definitions
(for example, radical, liberal, Marxist, socialist, traditionalist,
and so forth) will count as "taking the viewpoint of women as "women"?
Would this not be an imposition of semantic authority by one elite,
privileged "club" onto all other women? And would this not be a return
to the Oedipal, confrontational style she is rejecting by inflaming
the definitional differences among women along masculinist lines of
class, sexual preference, and racial categories? Therefore, Fraser
wants there to be a political movement along the lines of democratic
socialism, where the various voices of women (and other feminists)
move to create (and not discover or be assigned even in the most
supportive terms) their own post-rationalist meanings, thus empowering
women to speak for themselves, not as "prophets" but as themselves.

Similarly, Norman Geras takes exception to Rorty's liberalism and his
democracy of hope. Geras's "Solidarity in the Conversation of Humanity
(1995) is concerned with the possibility (more to the point, the
impossibility) of a (Deweyan) humanism without any human nature. In
this work, Geras refers to a lecture given by Rorty in the 1993 Oxford
Amnesty series on "Human Rights": the culture of human rights is,
Rorty says, a "welcome fact of the post-Holocaust world"; it is
"morally superior to other cultures." Such affirmations, Geras notes,
are part of the more general viewpoint Rorty recommends to western
cultures: the viewpoint of liberalism without philosophical
foundations, a pragmatically inspired hope for a tolerant and open
democratic society on the basis of historical contingencies only. But
in answering Geras' rhetorical question "To whose morality is Rorty
referring?" it seems, at first glance, that Rorty would answer that it
is the solidarity of western liberal individuals' values. Upon
reflection, however, it would be a surprise if most of these liberals
agreed with Rorty's view on the denatured self and the ungroundedness
of supporting humanitarian principles. Therefore, with principles
being ad hoc adaptations of past ethnocentric norms and without the
firm peg of a centered self upon which to hang his web of beliefs,
Rorty has to be advancing his own idiosyncratic values. Furthermore,
his values are packaged persuasively by the artful use of
equivocations, allegedly as part and parcel of the human right's
culture based on a universalist notion of transcultural human
integrity, notions that Rorty stoutly rejects. In short, Rorty's
reading of the human rights culture appropriates the notion of rights
for his own anti-foundational, pragmatic ends: the command of semantic
space of his view of humanity's future. By doing so, Geras contends,
in line with Habermas, there can be no clear distinction between the
Rortyan democratic contribution to a dialogue on human ideals and a
subtle insinuation of his idiosyncratic viewpoint into everyday
practices making the world in his own image.
6. References and Further Reading
a. Works by Rorty

* Rorty, Richard, Ed., The Linguistic Turn: Essays in
Philosophical Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
* Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1979.
* Rorty, Richard. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
* Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989.
* Rorty, Richard. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth:
Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991.
* Rorty, Richard. On Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers,
Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
* Rorty, Richard. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume
3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
* Rorty, Richard. Achieving our Country: Leftists Thoughts in
Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1998.
* Rorty, Richard. "McDowell, Davidson, and Spontaneity."
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58: 2, (June, 1998): 389-394.
* Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books, 1999.
* Rorty, Richard. Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of
Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty. Ed., Edwuardo Mendieta.
Stanford: Sanford University Press, 2006.

b. Works about Rorty

* Brandom, Robert B., ed. Rorty and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2000.
* Calder, Gideon. Rorty and Redescription. London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 2003.
* Geras, Norman. Solidarity in the Conversation of Humanity.
London: Verso, 1995.
* Goodman, Russell B., ed. Pragmatism: A Contemporary Reader. New
York: Routledge, 1995.
* Hall, David L. Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New
Pragmatism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.
* Malachowski, Alen, ed. Reading Rorty. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.
* Murphy, John P. Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson. Boulder
Colorado: Westview Press, 1990.
* Saatkamp, Herman J., ed. Rorty & Pragmatism: The Philosopher
Responds to His Critics. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University
Press, 1995.

c. Further Reading

* Darwin, Charles. The Origin of the Species. New York: Random House, 1979.
* Davidson, Donald. Inquiries Concerning Truth and Interpretation.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
* Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained. New York: Little, Brown, 1991.
* Dewey, John. The Quest for Certainty. New York: Capricorn Books, 1960.
* Habermas, Jurgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Tr.,
Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992.
* Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Tr., A. V. Miller.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
* Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translators John Macquarrie
and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
* Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1962.
* Putnam, Hilary. Words and Life. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1994.
* Quine, Willard. V. O., Word and Object. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1960.
* Sellars, Wilfrid. Science, Perception and Reality. New York:
Humanities Press, 1963.