Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey and Rorty (review)

Colin Koopman's Pragmatism as Transition (2009) is a welcome addition to a growing collection of "third wave" pragmatism, by which is meant deliberate proposals about how best to reconceive and redirect pragmatism's revived energies for the near future, confronted, as we are, by the near-demise of classic pragmatism (somewhat more than fifty years ago) and the freewheeling heterodoxies introduced by Richard Rorty (in the last quarter of the last century) in his running dispute with Hilary Putnam and (beyond that) his variously contrived, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, not infrequently beneficial (even brilliant) recommendations for enlarging the company of near-pragmatists: neglected, contested, not yet adequately acknowledged (Wilfrid Sellars, Donald Davidson, Robert Brandom, for instance), who (in my opinion) cannot possibly be said to form a congruent trio of like-minded philosophers, or, with the addition of Rorty himself, a congruent quartet— in the opportunistic space suddenly made accessible and worth capturing by Rorty's own successes and excesses and the inability of analytic and continental philosophy to command (in any way comparable to their earlier hegemony) the new enthusiasms of turn-of-the-century Western philosophy.

Koopman, I would say, is largely (problematically) persuaded by Rorty's "linguistic turn" (more than by Rorty's "postmodernist" dismissal of canonical philosophy)—which I take to be a sensible choice independent of the contest he draws from Rorty's reading of Sellars and Brandom's reading of Rorty. Both Rorty and Brandom deform the more innocent taxonomic purpose of the original Introduction to The Linguistic Turn (1967), along philosophically disjunctive lines somehow (indefensibly) caught up with the need to exorcise foundationalist tendencies mistakenly discerned in Dewey's and James's use of the umbrella notion "experience," which (as I say) Koopman equivocally allows.

I favor Koopman's project, though I confess I don't believe Koopman supports it in the most perspicuous way. I'm not entirely sure why that is so, though it must be in good part due to Rorty's being an extremely compelling pamphleteer more than a completely reliable philosopher. Rorty is, after all, a sort of philosophical Til Eulenspiegl. At the end of Koopman's book, however, we are indeed led to see just how to separate Koopman's contribution from the Rortyan "turn" on the original "turn." But Rorty's and Brandom's longish philosophical holiday is never frontally addressed. It would have confirmed a decisive advantage in favor of what Koopman calls his "transitionalism" and it would have added an important philosophical lesson.

To put the point frontally: Rorty simply is not in the habit of looking back to earlier papers in order to correct misleading views he's already circulated or to reconcile one such view with another, wherever that no longer suits his current episodic mission. Ultimately, the correction needed is really a correction of conceptual detour (of Rorty's own making, made even more unyielding by Brandom's glosses on Rorty's views). The matter cannot be entirely ignored, though it may finally be no more than a nuisance, because it entrenches a compelling, obviously mistaken impression (I won't call it a reading) of Dewey's and James's treatment of the "givenness" of "experience," which then infects Koopman's treatment of his own issues.

The best I can say on this score is that Koopman accepts without sufficient qualification Rorty's worries about the classic pragmatists and Brandom's extension of Rorty's worries about relying on the concept of "experience," even where he (Koopman) also insists (correctly) on Dewey's and James's "antifoundationalism"—compare, here, pp. 92, 96, in Chapter 3—which I take to be the true nerve of Koopman's book. Koopman, I'm guessing, relies more on Rorty's "Ten Years After" (1977), though probably not as much (though some) on Rorty's "Twenty-Five Years After," included in the 1992 edition of The Linguistic Turn, than on Rorty's 1967 Introduction to the...