Rorty, Putnam, and the Pragmatist View of Epistemology and Metaphysics

Rorty, Putnam, and the Pragmatist View of Epistemology and Metaphysics Teed Rockwell Although Dewey's influence has remained strong amongst the community of educators, his reputation amongst philosophers has had a remarkably volatile history. He was unquestionably the most influential figure in American philosophy until his death in 1952. Almost immediately after his death, however, Dewey's writings almost completely disappeared from the American philosophy syllabus. They were replaced by the analytic philosophers of the logical positivist tradition, who thought that philosophical problems could be solved by unraveling puzzles that came from a lack of understanding of proper language use. After several decades, however, the inadequacies of this view became unavoidably obvious, and the next generation of analytically trained philosophers began to find themselves saying things that sounded remarkably like Dewey. Many analytic philosophers began to use the word "pragmatist" to describe some aspect of their positions: Quine, Churchland, Davidson, Feyerabend, Rorty, Putnam, among many others. Putnam and Rorty, in particular, have made a serious effort to restudy the original pragmatist texts, and reinterpret them for use in modern contexts . Not everyone is satisfied with their reinterpretations, however. Rorty, in particular has been criticized in some detail by Dewey scholars (see especially Saatkamp, 1995). But Rorty admits that his ideas differ significantly from Dewey's, because he is trying to revive only those aspects of Dewey's ideas which are relevant for our times. I will argue, however, that those aspects of pragmatism which Rorty claims are the most relevant are actually the most out of date, and vice versa. The pragmatists were caught between two different philosophical movements and were equally critical of both. On the one hand, they were reacting against nineteenth century idealist philosophy, which often got hung up in metaphysical disputes that had no possibility of being resolved. But on the other hand, they were equally critical of the positivist's belief that it was possible to not do metaphysics. Nineteenth century idealist philosophy is a dead horse in the twenty-first century, and thus the pragmatist's arguments against it are of relatively little use today. But analytic philosophy has lived under the spell of positivism for over a half a century, and still has not figured out what should go in its place. Rorty captures this dilemma quite well when he refers to philosophers like Quine, Sellars and Davidson as "post-analytic philosophers." The pragmatist alternative to positivism is an alternative which many of these post-analytic philosophers have been drifting towards. But as long as we assume that the pragmatist's contributions to metaphysics and epistemology should be ignored, I believe that we will not be able to free ourselves from the last reverberations of the positivist hangover. In this paper, I will examine some of the modern debates between pragmatism and so-called "realism," especially those between Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. My claim is that many of these debates are based on misunderstandings of the pragmatist tradition. If we rely on Dewey's original ideas, rather than Rorty's reinterpretations of Dewey, these problems can be radically transformed, and in many cases dissolved. The Rorty-Putnam Debate In the debate between pragmatists and realists, Rorty is currently seen as the most adamant spokesman for pragmatism . Putnam is seen as slightly to the "epistemological right" of Rorty, because although he speaks highly of pragmatism, he considers his position to be less pragmatist, and more realist, than Rorty's. This balance between pragmatism and realism is nicely expressed in the title of Putnam's book "Realism with a Human Face." This title is not just an historical reference to Czechoslovakian socialism. Putnam's realism acknowledges that knowledge is always from a human's, never a God's eye, view. Reality, in other words, necessarily has a human face, for it makes no sense for us to talk about a reality which is completely independent of our human lives and activities. However, Putnam differentiates himself from Rorty by saying that he, unlike Rorty, believes that there is a reality which exists independently of our beliefs about it. Putnam argues that we cannot avoid claiming that some beliefs are warranted (i.e., justified, in some...