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

4. The Pragmatic Twist of the Linguistic Turn1

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MIKE SANDBOTHE The Pragmatic Twist of the Linguistic Turn1 Translated by Lowell Vizenor Modern academic philosophy currently finds itself in a transitional period marked by the increase in alternative, pragmatic approaches to philosophy.2 Those approaches have come to stand alongside the longdominating theoreticist conception of academic Philosophy. In the theoreticist approach the central question is the conditions under which human knowledge is possible. The mentioned alternative approaches suggest that we no longer place the emphasis of philosophy’s self-understanding on the theoreticist question of the conditions under which the knowledge of reality is made possible, but rather on the intelligent collaboration in the shaping of pragmatic ways to alter human reality. The institutional propensity of the academic field of philosophy toward the theoreticist approach appeared in the nineteenth century.3 It has been—within the framework of the linguistic turn that came to pass in modern philosophy in the twentieth century—not simply continued, but at the same time problematized. The following reflections attempt to lay bare the tense relationship between the pragmatic and the theoreticist understanding of philosophy that permeates the linguistic turn. This takes place in recourse to historical -systematic considerations, which Richard Rorty sketched out in the 68 Mike Sandbothe “Introduction” to his collection The Linguistic Turn (1967) and has further worked out in his later writings.4 It has often been overlooked that Rorty already foregrounds the inner ambivalences of the linguistic turn in his “Introduction” from 1967. This is in part due to the fact that Rorty had not explicitly characterized these as ambivalences. In order to indicate the inner tensions that permeate the linguistic turn across their entire spectrum, I give here by way of introduction a brief outline of the three, in my view, crucial ambivalences of the linguistic turn.5 I will refer back to these ambivalences in the continuation of my considerations, albeit placing greater emphasis on the third, as it is the deciding one as regards the pragmatic twist of the linguistic turn. The first ambivalence relates to the status of the linguistic method. While the logical empiricists (Russell, Carnap I, Ayer I, among others), hold fast to the philosophically neutral value of logical syntax as the kernel of language in general, the representatives of ideal language philosophy (Carnap II, Ayer II, Bergmann, among others), as well as the champions of ordinary language philosophy (Ryle, Austin, Strawson, among others), relativize the claims of the linguistic method with respect to meaning criteria that are, respectively, relative to ideal languages or dependent on languages-in-use. The second ambivalence relates to the goal-determination of the linguistic method and permeates both the school of ideal and ordinary language philosophy. The goal of a linguistic reformulation of philosophical problems is seen by different representatives of the two schools, on the one side, as a constructive solution to the problems, and on the other as their therapeutic dissolution. Finally, the third ambivalence relates to the metaphilosophical presuppositions that generally underlie the search for a linguistic method, and with it the theoreticist conception of method, of ideal and ordinary language philosophy. While both schools hold fast to the notion that the linguistic method places at their disposal a reliable set of tools for the analysis of philosophical problems, within the surrounding field of the linguistic turn positions have emerged at the same time that put in question exactly this presupposition and its connected dogmas. My explorations concentrate on the reconstruction of these positions, still not thematized in Rorty’s “Introduction” of 1967, but which step into the foreground in his later work under the title of the socalled “Wittgenstein-Sellars-Quine-Davidson attack on distinctions between different classes of sentences.”6 My considerations proceed in two parts. In the first part I will illustrate the pragmatic twist of the linguistic turn by way of the pragmatization movement that has been realized in analytic philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. In the second part I show, by way of Rorty’s confron- The Pragmatic Twist of the Linguistic Turn 69 tation with John McDowell and Robert Brandom, what sociopolitical implications could result from the current debate between representationalism and antirepresentationalism. THE PRAGMATIZATION OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY Against the background of the attacks that Wittgenstein, Sellars, Quine, and Davidson have led against the residual dogmatism of linguistic philosophy, Rorty suggests in the Introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), “that...