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11. Cartesian Realism and the Revival of Pragmatism
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223 11 JOSEPH MARGOLIS Cartesian Realism and the Revival of Pragmatism I Richard Rorty is widely credited with having revived pragmatism’s sagging fortunes. And so he has. But it is hardly clear, whether what Rorty revived, beginning with Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), is indeed the recovery of pragmatism proper. Certainly, he has earned the pragmatist badge through sheer exuberance and drive and the inventive continuity he’s forged between his views and the classic pragmatists’; but the connection seems to owe as much to a kind of squatter’s rights and the skillful use of the obiter dictum as to any compelling, fresh version of a pragmatist argument or canon. Think, for instance, of Rorty’s mistaken disjunction between the public and the private, offered as genuinely Deweyan1 ; or Rorty’s deliberate deformation of Dewey in Heidegger’s direction and Heidegger in Dewey’s2 ; or, possibly even more puzzling, the flat-out reversal of the intent of William James’s original theory of truth. Rorty says straight out, in the Introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism : “The essays in this book are attempts to draw consequences from a pragmatist theory about truth. This theory says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about.”3 Informed readers will protest: “Whatever you make of the misunderstanding 224 Joseph Margolis between James and Peirce, James surely believed his theory of truth was the most important conceptual plank in the whole of pragmatism.” One may also react to that reaction: “Well, Rorty never meant to dismiss James’s theory, he hardly thought it was pointless or misguided; he meant rather to salvage its essential lesson!” But if you say that, you must ask yourself whether Rorty’s theory about theories of truth, especially James’s, is sufficiently like James’s theory to count as an extension of it—hence, as an extension of pragmatism —or rather a clever subversion of James’s doctrine. And then we’d be off to the races. My own sense is that, without Rorty’s wide-ranging discussion of the classic pragmatists, Dewey chiefly, there would never have been a revival at all. After all, pragmatism was moribund by the end of the ‘40s. Even so, the sense in which pragmatism has gained a second life may depend more on the free-wheeling dispute that arose between Rorty and Hilary Putnam, which began in the ‘70s before the publication of Consequences, than to any particular thesis of Rorty’s. The energy of those running debates effectively defined the significance of the American revival—or, better, defined pragmatism’s reinvention , which is now neither Rorty’s nor Putnam’s creation. Questions about what pragmatism now means cannot possibly be answered in textual terms, but neither are those questions pointless. Both Rorty and Putnam do exhibit pragmatist loyalties, I concede, although neither can be said to have recovered the force of any particular tenet favored by the original pragmatists. Rorty and Putnam rather nicely feature (between them) a number of the essential quarrels of our own time, which they designate (not altogether plausibly ) as a debate about the nerve of pragmatism itself. They also define an opportunistic space in which additional options opposing their own contest and their own opposed doctrines suggest themselves and invite comparisons with pragmatism’s past. In any case, the pragmatist revival is the invention of a substantially new confrontation drawn from the saliencies of our own time that claim a measure of congruity with pragmatism’s original “spirit”—not, however, by adhering closely to any explicit pragmatist doctrine or program. To see this is to see how little we may care to invest in terminological quarrels. But it would be a blunder to ignore altogether the question of what now to count as the essential pragmatist issue. There’s a great deal of power compressed in controlling the name—and, as a consequence, influence in affecting the perceived validity of opposing arguments. The trick is to find a strategy that can command a measure of attention collected at an unlikely point of entry that might force an honest reckoning. I suggest beginning with Rorty’s account of his own attempt to present Donald Davidson’s theory of truth in a fair light, his candid report about Davidson’s opposing his own summary view, and his interpretation of what Davidson’s rebuff signifies. I doubt you will find a more perspicuous way of entering the heart of...