The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy: Contemporary Engagements between Analytic and Continental Thought

7. A Pragmatist View of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy

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RICHARD RORTY A Pragmatist View of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy This paper has two parts. In the first I discuss the views of my favorite philosopher of science, Arthur Fine. Fine has become famous for his defense of a thesis whose discussion seems to me central to contemporary philosophy—namely, that we should be neither realists nor antirealists, that the entire realism-antirealism issue should be set aside. On this point he agrees with my favorite philosophers of language, Donald Davidson and Robert Brandom. I see the increasing consensus on this thesis as marking a breakthrough into a new philosophical world. In this new world, we shall no longer think of either thought or language as containing representations of reality. We shall be freed both from the subject-object problematic that has dominated philosophy since Descartes and from the appearance-reality problematic that has been with us since the Greeks. We shall no longer be tempted to practice either epistemology or ontology. The second, shorter, portion of the paper consists of some curt, staccato , dogmatic theses about the need to abandon the intertwined notions of “philosophical method” and of “philosophical problems.” I view the popularity of these notions as an unfortunate consequence of the overprofessionalizaton of philosophy that has disfigured this area of culture since the time of Kant. If one adopts a nonrepresenationalist view of thought and language, one will move away from Kant in the direction of Hegel’s historicism. 132 Richard Rorty Historicism has no use for the idea that there are recurrent philosophical problems that philosophers have employed various methods to solve. This description of the history of philosophy should, I think, be replaced by an account on which philosophers, like other intellectuals, make imaginative suggestions for a redescription of the human situation; they offer new ways of talking about our hopes and fears, our ambitions and our prospects. Philosophical progress is thus not a matter of problems being solved, but of descriptions being improved. I Arthur Fine’s famous article “The Natural Ontological Attitude” begins with the sentence “Realism is dead.” In a footnote to that article, Fine offers a pregnant analogy between realism and theism. In support of realism there seem to be only those ‘reasons of the heart’ which, as Pascal says, reason does not know. Indeed, I have long felt that belief in realism involves a profound leap of faith, not at all dissimilar from the faith that animates deep religious convictions. . . . The dialogue will proceed more fruitfully, I think, when the realists finally stop pretending to a rational support for their faith, which they do not have. Then we can all enjoy their intricate and sometimes beautiful philosophical constructions (of, e.g., knowledge, or reference, etc.) even though to us, the nonbelievers , they may seem only wonder-full castles in the air.1 In an article called “Pragmatism as Anti-authoritarianism,”2 I tried to expand on Fine’s analogy. I suggested that we see heartfelt devotion to realism as the Enlightenment’s version of the religious urge to bow down before a nonhuman power. The term “Reality as it is in itself, apart from human needs and interests,” is, in my view, just another of the obsequious Names of God. In that article, I suggested that we treat the idea that physics gets you closer to reality than morals as an updated version of the priests’ claim to be in closer touch with God than the laity. As I see contemporary philosophy, the great divide is between representationalists , the people who believe that there is an intrinsic nature of nonhuman reality that humans have a duty to grasp, and antirepresentationalists. I think F. C. S. Schiller was on the right track when he said that “Pragmatism . . . is in reality only the application of Humanism to the theory of knowledge.”3 I take Schiller’s point to be that the humanists’ claim that human beings have responsibilities only to one another entails giving up both representationalism and realism. A Pragmatist View of Contemporary Analytic Philosophy 133 Representationalists are necessarily realists, and conversely. For realists believe both that there is one, and only one, Way the World Is In Itself, and that there are “hard” areas of culture in which this Way is revealed. In these areas, they say, there are “facts of the matter” to be discovered, though in softer areas there are not. By contrast, antirepresentationalists believe...