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

Introduction

Introduction In recent years the classical authors of Anglo-Saxon pragmatism have garnered a renewed importance in international philosophical circles. In the aftermath of the linguistic turn, philosophers such as Charles S. Peirce, William James, George H. Mead, Ferdinand C. S. Schiller, and John Dewey are being reread alongside, for example, recent postmodern and deconstructivist thought as alternatives to a traditional orientation toward the concerns of a representationalist epistemology. In the context of contemporary continental thought, the work of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Gilles Deleuze comprises just a few examples of a culturewide assault on a metaphysical worldview premised on what Michel Foucault called the empirico-transcendental doublet, and presents a wealth of potential exchange with the pragmatist critique of representationalism. In both cases, aspects of pragmatist thought are being used to add flexibility to the conceptual tools of modern philosophy , in order to promote a style of philosophizing more apt to dealing with the problems of everyday life. The hope for a pragmatic “renewing of philosophy ” (Putnam) evidenced in these trends has led to an analytic reexamination of some of the fundamental positions in modern continental thought as well, and to a recognition of previously unacknowledged or underappreciated pragmatic elements in thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Within the current analytic discussions, a wide spectrum of differing and at times completely heterogeneous forms of neopragmatism can be distinguished, which for heuristic purposes can be grouped into two general categories according to the type of discursive strategy employed. The first of these consists in a conscious inflation of the concept of pragmatism in order to establish it as widely as possible within the disciplinary discourse of philosophy. The second consists in a deflationary application of the concept, in order to distinguish it from the professional self-image of academic philosophy in a marked and even provocative way. What each variant has in 1 2 Introduction common is its tendency to criticize as “representationalist” the debate between realism and antirealism. At the center of this debate, which has left its imprint on twentiethcentury thought, lies the problem of whether our mental representations should be understood realistically, as pictures of some externally existing reality, or antirealistically, as constructions of that realm. For the deflationists, this debate is seen as a case of fruitless bickering around the quasi-religious question of a sublime, metaphysical reality that—whether from the outside or from the inside—is believed to determine the contours of our speech and thought. Instead of searching ever further for this ultimate authority or foundation, the deflationists recommend that we view our knowledge as a collection of tools for the democratically-oriented transformation of reality, for which we alone are responsible (Rorty). In contrast to this political and humanistic critique, the inflationists formulate their critique of the debate between finding and making from a logical and analytic perspective. Their response to representationalism is an antirepresentationalist epistemology whose foundations are developed in such frameworks as normative pragmatics (Brandom), undogmatic empiricism (McDowell), or interpretational theories of truth (Davidson). The contributions to The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy explore how these various discursive strategies are related and what their pertinence is to the relationship between pragmatism and philosophy as a whole. Perhaps the primary importance of this collection, however, lies in its demonstration that, in light of the current reinvestment in pragmatic thinking, the fabled divisions between analytic and continental thought are being rapidly replaced by a transcontinental desire to work on common problems in a common idiom. Of course, much of the work of deconstructing the continental/ analytic divide remains to be undertaken, and imposing obstacles remain. Idiom and style, to mention two, would seem to transcend categorization as merely external or secondary differences. Analytic philosophers tend to dismiss continental philosophers as being too literary, tend to fault their lack of rigor, of clarity, of precision. Continental thinkers, in turn, often ridicule analytic philosophy for its pretensions to scientificity and spurn it as positivistic, dry, irrelevant. Richard Rorty once characterized, in his inimitable way, the difference between continental and analytic philosophy as being little more than the difference between those philosophers who thought what was important was to read the history of philosophy and those who thought what was important was to read the last ten years of journal articles; and, indeed, in American departments of philosophy those who pay attention to thinkers of the continental tradition are referred to more often than not as historians. What this volume puts forth...