in: The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy. Contemporary Engagements Between Analytic and Continental Thought, ed. William Egginton and Mike Sandbothe, New York: SUNY 2003, 67-92.
Mike Sandbothe
The Pragmatic Twist of The Linguistic Turn1
Modern academic philosophy currently finds itself in a transitional period. This transitional period is marked by the increase in alternative, pragmatic approaches to philosophy.2 They have come to stand along side the long-dominating theoreticist conception of academic Philosophy. In the theoreticist approach the question of the conditions under which human knowledge is possible stands central. 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 19th Century.3 It has been-within the framework of the linguistic turn that came to pass in modern philosophy in the 20th 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 to its core. This takes place in recourse to historical-systematic considerations, which Richard Rorty sketched out in the "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 foregrounds the inner ambivalences of the linguistic turn already 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 across their entire spectrum the inner tensions that permeate the linguistic turn, 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 respectively.
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 underlie in general 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, at the same time within the surrounding field of the linguistic turn positions have emerged that put in question step for step 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 so called "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 the second half of the twentieth century in analytic philosophy. In the second part I show, by way of Rorty's confrontation with John McDowell and Robert Brandom, what socio-political implications could result from the current debate between representationalism and antirepresentationalism.
The Pragmatization of Analytic Pilosophy
Against the background of the attacks that Wittgenstein, Sellars, Quine, and Davidson have led against the residual dogmatism of linguistic philosophy, Rorty, in the Introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), suggests, "that what Gustav Bergmann called 'the linguistic turn' should not be seen as the logical positivists saw it-as enabling us to ask Kantian questions without having to trespass on the psychologists' turf by talking, with Kant, about 'experience' or 'consciousness'."7 Rorty continues in the same vein: "That was, indeed, the initial motive for the 'turn', but (thanks to the holism and pragmatism of the authors I have cited) analytic philosophy of language was able to transcend this Kantian motive and adopt a naturalistic, behavioristic attitude toward language."8 Through the naturalistic and behavioristic perspective on language opened up by Wittgenstein, Sellars, Quine, and Davidson, the dialectic that permeates analytic philosophy and its underlying linguistic turn, receives a positive meaning. Rorty sees the deciding point of this meaning in the so called "pragmaticization of analytic philosophy."9
In order to avoid terminological vagueness it is important in this context to separate out Rorty's affirmative use of the concepts pragmatism, pragmaticization, pragmatic etc., from the ways of using these terms that are associated with the conception of a formal, or rather quasi-transcendental pragmatics, as has been developed in the framework of ordinary language philosophy. The pragmatism represented by Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and in Consequences of Pragmatism aims to underscore the linguistic differentiation between 'semantic' and 'pragmatic', insofar as it presupposes the difference, problematized by Wittgenstein, Sellars, Quine, and Davidson, between 'necessary' and 'contingent.'
In the place of this twofold difference, Rorty backs in a use of 'pragmatic', which aims at reconnecting linguistic utterances to a naturalistic context of non-linguistic behavioral practices, which are to be investigated by empirical means. This use of 'pragmatic' in the sense of 'naturalistic' or 'behavioristic' is made explicit in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Rorty writes: "Epistemological behaviorism (which might be called simply "pragmatism," were this term not a bit overladen)?is the claim that philosophy will have no more to offer than common sense (supplemented by biology, history, etc.) about knowledge and truth."10
Rorty's interpretation of the "pragmaticization of analytic philosophy"11 initiated by Wittgenstein, Sellars, Quine, and Davidson has frequently been misunderstood as saying that nothing remains of philosophy in view of its pragmatic naturalization other than its self-dissolution. Nonetheless, Rorty clearly stresses in the concluding passages of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: "There is no danger of philosophy's 'coming to an end'."12 What in Rorty's view can and should come to an end in view of the pragmaticization movement is the regressive persistence of academic philosophy in the theoreticist disciplinary matrix of the "traditional problems of modern philosophy."13
This persistence is broken through, following Rorty in reference to the "Wittgenstein-Sellars-Quine-Davidson attack,"14 by a transformative self understanding of philosophical thinking. Through this it becomes possible for philosophy to work in close cooperation with the sciences, arts and technology in developing a pragmatic vocabulary. This new vocabulary of philosophy no longer attempts to analyze or give reasons for the foundations of the sciences, arts, and technology. On the contrary it is a "new way of describing knowledge and inquiry,"15 which puts the emphasis (from the external perspective) on causal links and (from the internal perspective) on those useful aspects of knowledge that feed back normatively and can be described by the social sciences, the humanities, and literature.
With this new way of describing knowledge and inquiry a second aspect of Rorty's usage of "pragmatic" comes into play. This usage connects "pragmatic" with "transformative" in the sense of "abnormal," "innovative," and "changing." It is closely connected with the opposition central to the third ambivalence of the linguistic turn. The pragmatic vocabulary of philosophy recommended by Rorty does not regressively aim to solve or dissolve the old philosophical problems with new means. Rorty's "new way" is, on the contrary, characterized by the fact that under the description of a pragmatic vocabulary the theoreticist text book problems of philosophy step into the background and new questions and problems take their place.
The pragmatic twist of the linguistic turn can be understood as transformative in three different ways. First, it can be understood as transformative in the weak sense of a transition, which comes to pass within the continuing tradition of philosophical research from an old to a new disciplinary matrix. Second, it can be understood in the strong sense of a typological change affecting the activity of philosophical research itself in its fundamental determinations. And thirdly it can be understood as transformative in the strongest sense, which claims that philosophical activity undergoes a redefinition that makes transformation as such the main purpose of philosophical inquiry. Philosophy is then no longer understood as the methodological analysis of present states of affairs or existing linguistic structures. Instead it is comprehended and carried out as a transformative activity that experimentally works toward changes in common-sense in order to develop new knowledge practices.
In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Consequences of Pragmatism , Rorty recontructs the genealogy of the pragmatic "new way" of philosophy in such a way that deciding impulses for the development of a pragmatic vocabulary arise from the immanent dialectic of the linguistic turn itself. To this end he distinguishes three types of authors within the "Wittgenstein-Sellars-Quine-Davidson attack."16
The first group of authors move within the second ambivalence of the linguistic turn. Sellars and Quine are authors of this type. They negatively prepare the "pragmaticization of analytic philosophy"17 through its therapeutic de-transcendentalization.
Wittgenstein appears against these as a mixed type. On the one hand, his thinking still moves very strongly within the second ambivalence of the linguistic turn. On the other hand, however, we already find in his thinking transitions to the problem level of the third ambivalence.
The third type of author distinguished by Rorty is represented by Donald Davidson. In Davidson, the passage from the problem level of the second to the third ambivalence is carried out in a more radical way than in Wittgenstein. From Rorty's perspective it is thus Davidson who, within the "Wittgenstein-Sellars-Quine-Davidson attack,"18 made the central contribution to the pragmatic twist of the linguistic turn.
It remains to be shown that on the basis of the commonalities set forth by Rorty, residual differences nevertheless persist between Davidson and him. But before I go more closely into Davidson and the third ambivalence of the linguistic turn, I would like to call attention to how the second ambivalence of the linguistic turn determines the thinking of Wittgenstein, Sellars and Quine.
a) Wittgenstein, Quine, and Sellars
The second ambivalence of the linguistic turn results from the tensions existing between a constructive problem-solving and therapeutic problem-dissolving way of dealing with the fundamental problems that have been passed on by modern philosophy. For Wittgenstein, this tense relationship is to be diagnosed in two ways. First, his thinking diverges into two philosophical positions: the logicist position, which the early Wittgenstein represented in the Tractatus, and the use-theoretic view, which the late Wittgenstein developed in the PhilosophicalInvestigations (posthumous 1953).19
The constructive claim formulated in the "Preface" of Wittgenstein's early major work, theTractatus, consists in the claim "that the problems [of philosophy-M. S.] have in essentials been finally solved."20 Against this, the therapeutic claim of the Philosophical Investigations is not so much directed at the solution of the theoretical textbook problems of modern philosophy, but rather their dissolution.
Secondly, the perspective of the Philosophical Investigations is in itself ambivalent. On the one hand, Wittgenstein is ironic as regards the program, defended by him in the Tractatus, of a linguistic philosophy based on logic, and still concedes to philosophy only the negative task of unmasking the false claims of purity. On the other hand he falls back (as in the weak meaning of transformative philosopher) on the idea, which he first ridiculed, of the difference between the empirical and the grammatical, or between the non-philosophical and philosophical investigation, in order to develop on its basis a "Theory of Philosophy as Oversight."21
The second ambivalence of the linguistic turn also determines to a large extent the thinking of Sellars and Quine. As opposed to Wittgenstein, who at the same time (in the strong sense of a transformative philosopher) made important contributions toward the development of a pragmatic vocabulary of philosophy,22 it is the case with Quine and Sellars that their achievements are to be described as above all therapeutic or destructive. In this sense, Rorty observes: "Neither Quine nor Sellars?has developed a new conception of philosophy in any detail."23 Rather, the historically significant achievements of both authors consist on the contrary in the problematization of the fundamental dogmas that from Kant to the major representatives of both schools of the linguistic turn have served unquestioned as the fundaments of the theoreticist conception of modern philosophy (as an autonomous discipline over and against the sciences).
Sellars put into question the difference between the empirically given and that which is conceptually postulated. Quine destroyed the synthetic-contingent/analytic-necessary distinction as well as the separation between the sciences and philosophy that went along with it. The specific ambivalence of Sellars' and Quine's positions is shown by the fact that each respectively failed to recognize as problematic the distinctions problematized by the other, and presupposed more or less without question his own constructive program: "It is as if Quine, having renounced the conceptual-empirical, analytic-synthetic, and language-fact distinctions, is still not quite able to renounce that between the given and the postulated. Conversely, Sellars, having triumphed over the latter, could not quite renounce the former cluster."24
With a view to Sellars as well as to Quine it should be noted that the constructive elements of their thinking at the same time make clear the transformative traits. Nevertheless it is a question of transformative traits only in the weak sense made explicit above, since both thinkers conceive their transition to a naturalistic discourse as a change in the disciplinary matrix of academic philosophy, which is carried out within a continually presupposed categorization of philosophical activity.
Hence Sellars sets forth, albeit critically, "that the atomistic conception of philosophy is a snare and a delusion"25 and that the hierarchical and separatist structuring of the disciplinary matrix is problematic. But at the same time he holds fast to the dogmatic division between the empirical sciences, which engage in synthetic-contingent truths, and the non-empirical philosophy, which should be about analytic-necessary truths, when he takes as self evident, "that philosophy is not a science."26
The transformative aspects of Sellars' thinking are expressed in his critique of the atomistic understanding of the academic discourse: "As long as discourse was viewed as a map, subdivided into a side-by-side of sub-maps, each representing a sub-region in a side-by-side of regions making up the total subject matter of discourse, ... one could view with equanimity the existence of philosophical specialists ..."27 As a consequence of this understanding philosophy supplies the conceptual definitions and logical analyses, while the sciences, resting on the foundation of a terminology clarified by philosophy, work on empirical questions. Against this, Sellars describes the emerging new configuration of the analytic work of philosophy as follows: "For 'analysis' no longer connotes the definition of terms, but rather the clarification of the logical structure-in the broadest sense- of discourse, and discourse no longer appears as one plane parallel to another, but as a tangle of intersecting dimensions whose relations with one another and with extra-linguistic fact conform to no single or simple pattern."28
With this a new structure of the disciplinary matrix of philosophy steps into view, which no longer is hierarchically centered on an fundamental discipline, but rather operates in the fashion of a network. In this sense Sellars emphasizes: "No longer can the philosopher interested in perception say 'let him who is interested in prescriptive discourse analyze its concepts and leave me in peace.' Most if not all philosophically interesting concepts are caught up in more than one dimension of discourse,?"29
Against this background, the relation of philosophy and science also changes for Sellars. When philosophy is no longer only responsible for the atomistic analyses and definitions of the individual scientific terms, but rather aims collectively at the holistic analysis of the relational inner dependencies of everyday, scientific, and philosophical discourse, that is, when it is to be understood as a "discourse-about-man-in-all-discourse,"30 then "familiarity with the trend of scientific thought is essential to the appraisal of the framework categories of the common-sense picture of the world."31
But at the same it remains certain for Sellars that a holistic philosophy that aims "toward that articulated and integrated vision of man-in-the-universe"32 remains structurally separated from the sciences. This is the case insofar as it makes this vision in a specifically philosophic way its object. Philosophical activity as such remains for Sellars-as opposed to Quine, Davidson, and Rorty-methodologically separated from the research practices of science. This becomes clear when one views the above-quoted passage in its context. It reads: "The procedures of philosophical analysis as such may make no use of the methods or results of the sciences. But familiarity with the trend of scientific thought is essential to the appraisal of the framework categories of the common-sense picture of the world."33 And in the same context Sellars makes clear: "I am not saying that in order to discern the logic-the polydimensional logic-of ordinary discourse, it is necessary to make use of the results or methods of the sciences."34
It is otherwise for Quine. In Word and Object, Quine simply remarks: "And philosophy?, as an effort to get clearer on things, is not to be distinguished in essential points of purpose and method from good and bad science."35 Common sense, science, and philosophy form for Quine only a gradually -but not principially- separated whole, which he described already in his earlier essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" as "total field,"36 of which it is a question of "a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges."37 Whereas Quine's residual dogmatisms of an empirical foundation of our "web of belief"38 in a holistically thought dimension of immediate experience has been problematized by Sellars (and later especially by Davidson and Rorty), Quine's naturalistic description of the inner state of the network of human beliefs goes beyond Sellars' holding fast to a deep structural separation between philosophical and scientific discourse.
Thus Quine describes the program, developed in his main work Word and Object, of a "naturalized epistemology,"39 in his essay of the same name, as an undertaking that not only dislodges "epistemology from its old status of first philosophy,"40 but beyond this also brings it about that "epistemology merges with psychology, as well as with linguistics."41 This "rubbing out of boundaries"42 between philosophy and science emerges naturally from Quine's critique of the dogmatic pair of opposites of analytic-synthetic and necessary-contingent, with whose help the theoretical demarcation of modern academic philosophy from the empirical sciences has been realized both within the framework of logical empiricism as well as by the two schools of linguistic philosophy.
At the same time it is important to see that the dissolution defended by Quine of the border between philosophy and science does not aim at a new determination of philosophical activity as such. In Quine's view the disciplinary matrix of philosophy can be entwined with the empirical sciences like psychology or linguistics, without the original purpose of epistemology thereby running into danger. This purpose is, according to Quine, not only not betrayed by the naturalization movement he promotes, but on the contrary cured of its traditional aporiae and thus for the first time made actually realizable in a progressive way.
This self assessment of Quine's becomes especially clear in his demarcation of the late Wittgenstein and the therapeutic current running through linguistic philosophy. Quine writes, "Wittgenstein and his followers, mainly at Oxford, found a residual philosophical vocation in therapy: in curing philosophers of the delusion that there were epistemological problems. But I think that at this point it may be more useful to say rather that epistemology still goes on, though in a new setting and a clarified status. Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science."43 Now, as Quine continues, "it studies a natural phenomenon, viz., a physical human subject."44 And at the same time the naturalized epistemology devotes its attention to a thematic "we are prompted to study for somewhat the same reasons that always prompted epistemology; namely, in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one's theory of nature transcends any available evidence."45
The holding fast to the presupposition of continually writing off the theoreticist conception of philosophical activity-supported at different times by Quine and Sellars respectively-refers back again to the fact that their thought moves within the framework of the second ambivalence. The behavioristic naturalism that Quine and Sellars developed as a new paradigm of philosophical research is related back by them to the fundamental questions of modern academic tradition, i.e., placed in the regressive horizon of the question concerning the problem-solving or problem-dissolving potential of the new (naturalistic) research matrix. They boast of it in different ways: Sellars, in that he newly structures the disciplinary matrix of philosophy, thereby at the same time securing the discipline in its academic identity from outside; and Quine, in that he brings the borders of the disciplines into a trans-disciplinary movement, all the while adhering to the basic epistemological alignment of philosophical activity, and placing the sciences in the service of this theoretical alignment.
In this respect the situation in the thought of Donald Davidson is different than with in that of Sellars and Quine. Davidson overcomes the second ambivalence of the linguistic turn, in that he conceives the task of philosophy neither as problem-solving nor as problem-dissolving, but rather starts out from an understanding of philosophy that is transformative in the strong sense, i.e., newly defining philosophical activity itself. That connects with Rorty, who at the same time stands for a transformative understanding of philosophy in the strongest sense, according to which philosophical activity is itself to be determined as transformative.
b) Davidson and Rorty
In his influential essay "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" (1974) Davidson developed, on the basis of his critique of the "dualism of scheme and content,"46 the twisting point within the linguistic turn for Rorty's suggestions for the development a pragmatic vocabulary of philosophy.47 Davidson's reflections focus on the critique of an understanding of philosophy, at the center of which stands the question-which he characterizes as "empirical"-of the schematizing relations of language to reality. The original scene of this questioning for Davidson is a result of the simple idea "of [an] organizing system and something waiting to be organized."48 This idea, Davidson continues, lies at the base of a large part of contemporary philosophy as "the third dogma ? of empiricism."49
The dogmatic determination of philosophical achievement as a reflexive scheme analysis is juxtaposed by Davidson against his own position of a holistic coherence theory: "What distinguishes a coherence theory is simply the claim that nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief. Its partisan rejects as unintelligible the request for a ground of source of justification of another ilk."50 In this way is the recourse to an immediate given (the uninterpreted content) as well as the reference to conceptual schemes (linguistic categories, logical forms, formal-pragmatic universals) excluded.
As a consequence of dismissing the scheme-content dualism, Davidson limits himself to the behavioristic perspective of the linguistic field researcher, which Quine had already introduced in Word and Object. By doing this, he brings about at the same time definite alterations in the way Quine models the activity of the field linguist. For Davidson, what are from the ethnocentric perspective of the linguist to be described as physical objects, and to which the natives acting as test-subjects are linguistically conditioned, take the place of the nervous stimuli claimed by Quine as neutral reference points.51 The question for the linguistic scheme of the interpretation of the given "irritations of all the far-flung surfaces,"52 is replaced by Davidson with the hermeneutic naturalism of his theory of "radical interpretation,"53 in which it is a question-as Rorty pointedly formulated- of the field linguist "going around and around the hermeneutic circle until he begins to feel at home."54
Davidson's radical interpretation theory aims from the external perspective of the field linguist at external causes, i.e., at the causal mechanism of conditioning that lead to a specific sign being used in a specific situation in a specific way. In this way it is clear to Davidson's linguistic ethnologist that there is no neutral procedure at his or her disposal for the description of these causes. The linguistic ethnologist can only attempt to fit, as best possible, the convictions that he or she assumes the speakers he is investigating, to those convictions he or she brings to the situation him or herself. The linguistic field researcher is thus at the same time conscious that radical interpretation begins at home. He or she knows that, as far as the relation existing between his or her own beliefs and the world is concerned, "there is nothing more to be known?than what we learn from an empirical study of causal transactions between organisms and their environment."55
The situation of so called "triangulation"56 is, according to Davidson, characteristic of both the field linguist's going out into the unknown as well as of the acquisition of his or her mother tongue, which comes about as a child at home. This is because in both cases it holds that "[the] identification of the objects of thought rests, then, on a social basis,"57 i.e., it occurs in a "simple triangular arrangement of the two agents and a commonly observed object."58 The first foundations of linguistic instruction, in whose framework "one person learns from another how to speak and think of ordinary things,"59 Davidson describes as follows: "the learner is rewarded, whether deliberately or not, when the learner makes sounds or otherwise responds in ways the teacher finds appropriate in situations the teacher classes together?. Success at the first level is achieved to the extent that the leaner responds with sounds the teacher finds similar to situations the teacher finds similar. The teacher is responding to two things: the external situation and the responses of the learner. The learner is responding to two things: the external situation and the responses of the teacher."60 In conclusion, Davidson reveals that "[a]ll these relations are causal. Thus the essential triangle is formed which makes communication about shared objects and events possible."61 In this way, the conception of an "externalized epistemology"62 connected with social-pragmatic triangulation takes the place, for Davidson, of the introspective-Cartesian perspective of traditional epistemology, which is (up to and including Quine) "essentially first person."63
Under the conditions of a linguistic turn that remains under the spell of the scheme-content dualism, linguistic competence (in part still with Wittgenstein, but especially with Quine and Sellars) was understood as the introspectively investigating capacity to form contents inside a differentially structured or holistically conceived scheme, and thereby to make something distinguishable and identifiable as something. This view is juxtaposed by Davidson against the provocative thesis "that there is no such thing as a language."64 This is a consequence of the dismissal of the fundamental premises of the philosophical tradition, elaborated by Davidson as "the third dogma of empiricism,"65 which can be traced back to Kant66 and lies at the basis of the various versions of the linguistic turn from Carnap and Bergmann to Quine and Sellars.
Against this Davidson suggests that we, "think of linguistic competence as a kind of know-how,"67 i.e., as a pragmatic set of tools that allows us to interact with other humans and the non-human environment. It is this aspect of the way he uses "pragmatic" that Rorty first highlights in his interpretation of Davidson. This emphasis is made explicit in Davidson's suggestion that we should remove "the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally."68
According to Davidson, a new typological determination of philosophical activity becomes possible under the conditions of a pragmatized understanding of language, which makes Davidson a transformative philosopher in the strong sense. While Quine takes the empirical work of the field linguist to be oriented toward the philosophical service of a pre-given epistemological questioning, Davidson understands philosophical activity as an activity that does not already have its goal determined from outside, but rather attains this determination in new ways in the mist of the work of the field linguist.
Philosophy can thus, from Davidson's perspective, bring into the research context of the field linguist logical tools that spring from Davidson's application to natural languages of the Tarskian theory of truth. Nevertheless-so Davidson believes-no second, possibly genuine philosophical perspective is added to or propped up on the perspective of the field linguist. On the contrary, the typological transformation of philosophical activity, which Davidson supports on the basis of the situation of triangulation that he moves to the foreground, consists precisely in the fact that the philosophical perspective is dissolved in the contingent external perspective of the field linguist, who works empirically with the formal set of tools and thereby determines anew and in non-reductionistic ways scientific activity itself.
Davidson and Rorty share the opinion that the pragmatic naturalization of philosophy of language and epistemology is to be radicalized beyond Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Quine. Also common to both is the diagnosis and the affirmative realization of a "sea change in contemporary philosophical thought,"69 connected with the establishment of the pragmatic vocabulary in philosophy. Nevertheless, different from Davidson, the pragmatic naturalization of Rorty leads to a transformative conception of philosophical activity in the strongest sense. According to this conception, philosophy becomes an epistemological experiment aimed at making possible future changes in common sense.
Against this Davidson understands himself as a champion of a typological change that is less radical than the suggestions of Rorty. His hermeneutic naturalism aims at establishing a philosophical-linguistic type of inquiry that for all its naturalistic embeddedness is nevertheless to be designated as genuinely theoretical in the sense of descriptive observation. This is because from Davidson's view, the inquiries of the philosophically versed field linguist do not aim at the change of the linguistic reality. Rather, Davidson's work is concerned with the empirically founded and hermeneutically relativized description of various natural languages, which are grasped as pragmatic tools of interaction.
Against this backdrop, Davidson's analytic antirepresentationalism, which aims at the formal-logical reconstruction of natural languages' truth theories without recurring thereby introspectively to representational tertia, allows itself to be differentiated by Rorty's pronounced transformative pragmatism. The latterrenounces the instruments of symbolic logic, because it does not aim at the descriptive analysis of existing forms of interaction, but rather at the politically and socially motivated transformation of future rules of action. In contrast to Davidson Rorty does not orientate his approach on the model of science, but rather on models that he takes from the cultural domains of literature and art and transfers over to science.
The related socio-political perspectivization of Rorty's recommended pragmatic vocabulary is still not contained in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and in Consequences of Pragmatism. Rorty first develops it in the later works, published in the nineties, which grew out of his late major work Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). Rorty has described the basic strategic idea of these works as follows: "In short, my strategy?is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics to cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try."70
The humanistic embeddedness of philosophical activity, which is expressed in this strategy, stands at the center of Rorty's (in the strongest sense) transformative pragmatism. It marks a usage of "pragmatic" according to which the adjective means something like "oriented toward the socio-political realization of the ideals of democratic enlightenment." I will now turn to this usage and to its resulting perspective on the current debate between representationalism and antirepresentationalism.
The Socio-political Implications of the Debate over Representationalism vs. Antirepresentationalism
The opposition introduced by Rorty between representationalism and antirepresentationalism is to be distinguished from the difference originating from Michael Dummett between realism and antirealism.71 In the current debate over the self-understanding of contemporary philosophy, many misunderstandings have emerged as a result of the first opposition being equated straightforwardly with the latter one. In Rorty's use, the difference between realistic picture theories of knowledge and antirealistic construction theories of knowledge does not serve as a synonym for the opposition between representationalism and antirepresentationalism, but rather as an inner difference, in which this distinction gets worked out within the area of representationalist positions. Rorty explicitly emphasizes this when he writes: "I claim that the representationalism-vs.-antirepresentationalism issue is distinct from the realism-vs.-antirealism one, because the latter issue arises only for representationalists."72
In his more recent publications, Rorty uses the correspondence theory of truth in both its underlying variants as the central characteristic of representationalism: "There is no point to debates between realism and anti-realism, for such debates presuppose the empty and misleading idea of beliefs 'being made true'."73 The idea that human knowledge aims primarily at giving an adequate representation of reality determines both picture-theoretic as well as constructionist epistemologies. Even though realistic picture-theories and antirealistic constructionisms apply different criteria of adequation and presuppose different concepts of reality, both remain within the paradigm of a representationalism that aims at correspondence. While the adequation of a representation is determined picture-theoretically by its relation to a represented transcendent object, the constructionist correspondence criterion is defined as immanent to the process of representation. The deciding question here is whether the representation of a state-of-affairs formally corresponds to the rules of the construction of something as something, understood as the conditions of the possibility of representation in general.74
According to Rorty, the underlying presupposition in both the case of the realistic as well as the antirealistic concept of correspondence is the acceptance of an "ontological homogeneity"75 between beliefs and non-beliefs. The physicalistically arguing realist, "thinks that nothing can correspond to a bit of spatio-temporal reality except by being another bit linked to the first by appropriate causal relationships."76 On the other hand the idealistically arguing antirealist maintains: "nothing can correspond to a representation except a representation."77 This contention is then propped up by the interpretation, "that there was an intermediary 'scheme' which 'shaped' the non-beliefs before they became talkable-about."78
Advanced representationalists like John McDowell attempt to reconcile realistic and antirealistic thinkers with one another in a linguistically reflected realism. Rorty describes McDowell's position in relation to the linguistic turn in the following way: "In McDowell's picture, the linguistic turn in philosophy helped us see that nothing is part of the process of justification which does not have a linguistic shape. It did not, however, take away the need to 'make sense of the world-directedness of empirical thinking.'"79 Rorty summarizes McDowell's strategy of connecting both aspects together, when he continues in reference to McDowell: "He thinks of a perceptual appearance as a request to you by the world to make a judgment, but as not yet itself a judgment, even though it has the conceptual form of a judgment."80
In fact, McDowell's fundamental idea is that the space of experience guarantees "a constraint from outside exercises of spontaneity,"81 which suceeds, "though not from outside what is thinkable, so not from outside the space of concepts."82 On the basis of his Hegel-inspired reading of Kant,83 McDowell assumes that the relation to nonlinguistic facts is not to be understood as an immediate certainty, but rather as a reflexively won determination of language itself. The realistic intuition of the independence of the facts, to which our linguistic statements relate, becomes in this way a determination capable of being made explicit as something which is itself linguistically composed and has the character of interpretation on its side. If one understands the realistic manner of speaking with McDowell cum grano salis, i.e., in linguistically reflected form, then it says that we have no immediate certainty of nonlinguistic entities, but rather we rightly refer within language to objects in such a manner such that we interprete these as non-linguistic and independent of interpretation.
From Rorty's perspective the linguistically difficult rehabilitation of empiricism, which McDowell performs, is "brilliantly original and completely successful."84 But at the same time it is-and this is the deciding point for Rorty-either politically irrelevant, because it cannot be effected by common sense, or instead politically contra-indicated, if it should in the long run against all expectations sediment into everyday epistemology. So, according to Rorty, not only the empirical dogmatism criticized by Davidson, but also McDowell's reflective concept of experience, aim, in the last instance, at "the figure of 'the world' as a nonhuman authority to whom we owe some sort of respect."85
The sublime authority of an interpretation-independent instance of reference for our linguistic statements is understood by McDowell as itself being an interpretation, and insofar as this is the case it is relativized a bit further. But at the same time this relativized interpretation still takes place with the goal of carrying out a legitimation of the realistic intuition of transsubjective instances of reference, which transcends the space of intersubjective understanding from within.
Even if one, going beyond McDowell, understands with Robert Brandom the objectivity of reference as an intersubjective obligation, in which we have implicitly committed ourselves in the context of a linguistic use that is well established in social practices,86 the question, according to Rorty, is whether it is desirable to hold fast to this intersubjectively established language game of transubjectivity or reference.87 Rorty gives two arguments that move him to answer this question in the negative. Both arguments, from Rorty's view, hold true even in the unlikely case that the social signature of the reference-language-game should be able to make itself explicit not only for philosophers but also for the common man. The first argument Rorty names is already found with Davidson. It says that through the establishment of a transsubjective frame of reference the actual use of language as a pragmatic tool of communication, which serves thereby to make possible the coordination of behavior, comes out of view.
Following Brandom, it can be responded against this argument that the realistic frame of reference with its associated representationalist terminology is not to be understood as an inner determination of language itself (as with McDowell), but rather as a social tool that serves the coordination of behavior. Rorty anticipates this response when he argues "that Brandom and Davidson pretty much agree on all the issues and are simply employing different rhetorical strategies to make essentially the same points."88
While Davidson gives the linguistic turn a pragmatic twist by describing natural languages as instruments of interaction in an antirepresentationalist terminology, Brandom's strategy consists in adhering to the representationalist terminology in order to redefine it pragmatically into a (in Brandom's sense) 'normative' fundamental vocabulary.89 What appears on the surface as merely a strategic difference shows itself instead to be a deep underlying difference in philosophical understanding. Rorty makes this clear by the following remark: "But rhetoric matters, especially if one sees, as I do, the pragmatic tradition not just as clearing up little messes left behind by the great philosophers, but as contributing to a world-historical change in humanity's self-image."90
The second argument that Rorty brings into the field against Brandom's representationalist pragmatism results from the background of Rorty's (in the strongest sense) transformative pragmatism, according to which the task of philosophy consists in contributing to the development of human societies organized along secular, liberal-democratic lines. This is what is meant when Rorty understands the pragmatic tradition as a tradition of thought that, since William James91 and John Dewey,92 attempts to perform philosophy not above all as a professionalized specialty, but rather transdisciplinarily as democratically engaged thought, which in the context of the political project of the enlightenment actively cooperates in a "world-historical change in humanity's self-image."93
It is this sociopolitical background from which the already mentioned rhetorical difference for Rorty acquires its meaning: "The choice is between dropping the notions of 'answering' and 'representing'?and keeping them. My argument for dropping them is that they preserve an image of the relation between people and nonpeople that might be called 'authoritarian'-the image of human beings being subject to a judgment other than that of a consensus of other human beings."94 And in direct reference to Brandom, Rorty puts forward: "?I see Brandom's persistence in using the terms 'getting right', 'really is', and 'making true' as tools that will fall into authoritarian hands and be used for reactionary purposes."95
By reactionary purposes Rorty means purposes which still get expressed in McDowell's linguistically reflected representationalism, which McDowell describes as a "relaxed Platonism."96 The Platonic heritage of representationalist epistemologies consists according to Rorty in the continued attempt to legitimate the agency of a sublime authority, to which we have to show respect. In his book Hoffnung statt Erkenntnis, Rorty describes the desire for an internal or external legitimating agency that transcends the intersubjective consensus as the desire for a theoretically aligned culture in whose center stands the determination of humans as knowing beings.
Actually knowledge has been understood since the ancients as an activity, removed from the burden of performing practical deeds, that has its goal in itself.97 Rorty points out with reference to Dewey the politically motivated signature of this separation, and the determination of humans as essentially knowing beings supported by it, when he writes: "In Dewey's view, all the noxious dualisms handed over by philosophy were the flotsam and jetsam of the social separation between observing and doing, between a class of flâneurs and one of producers."98
From Rorty's perspective McDowell's thought, which in a curious way claims for itself to represent a pragmatism "less half-baked than Rorty achieves,"99 remains beholden to the theoreticist signature that connects the philosophical self-understanding of modern academic philosophy with that of the ancients. Rorty opposes this signature to his alternative design for philosophical activity: "Pragmatists do not think inquiry can put us more in touch with non-human reality than we have always been, for the only sense of 'being in touch' they recognize is causal interaction (as opposed to accurate representation). So in their view the only question is: will human life be better in the future if we adopt this belief, this practice, or that institution?"100
Rorty confronts the theoretical orientation toward the sublime authority of an externally pre-given or internally constituted frame of reference, to which we have to show respect in our thought and knowledge, with an alternative understanding of philosophy. The latter goes back to Dewey and is currently being pursued by politically minded philosophers like Habermas, Rawls and Rorty himself. With regard to Habermas' thought Rorty writes: "Such a philosophy politicizes epistemology, in the sense that it takes what matters to the search for truth to be the social (and in particular the political) conditions under which that search is conducted, rather than the deep inner nature of the subjects doing the searching."101
Rorty has further explicated in the three volumes of his Philosophical Papers (1991-1998) the sociopolitical signature of the antirepresentationalist pragmatism, which he suggests as a model for determining new types of philosophical activity. And in his books Achieving Our Country (1998) and Philosophy and Social Hope (1999) he attempts to shift the philosophical practice a bit further. Succinctly, the central thought that links the philosophical antirepresentationalism (as it is represented by Rorty in connection to Davidson) with political pragmatism (as it was developed in the first half of the century by James and Dewey) reads as follows: "The pragmatists' anti-representationalist account of belief is?a protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human."102 And in a more positive manner: "I?think that a world of pragmatic atheists - people who thought realism versus antirealism is as little worth thinking about as Catholicism versus Protestantism - would be a better, happier world than our present one."103
Here the politicization, which Rorty adds to Davidson's antirepresentationalism, becomes explicit. Davidson is not interested in the political implications of his antirepresentationalism (or - as he calls it - his "new antisubjectivism"104). But he develops a naturalistic description of knowledge and language by which these get released from the representational relation to a realistic pre-given or antirealistic construed authority. What interests Rorty in this description is not the question, itself under the spell of representationalism, of whether it is in agreement with our established intuitions, but on the contrary the question of what contribution it could make to the political project of enlightenment, if it sometimes became the signature of common sense.
The "priority of democracy to philosophy"105 defended by Rorty gets expressed in this sociopolitical perspectivization of epistemological questioning. At the same time it is setting his thinking apart from the motives of philosophical foundation, characteristic of the transcendentally grounded pragmatism of Habermas.106 According to Rorty, philosophy as a (in the strongest sense) transformative activity under the conditions-to be recognized as contingent and thus as presupposing normative frames of action and valuation-of the grand socio-political experiment of modern enlightenment, does not serve to ground the political form of government of democracy. Philosophical thinking works much more actively within an interdisciplinary academic environment to perform a contribution to the working out, realization, and optimizing of democratic forms of human coexistence.
A pragmatic philosophy-in an exacting sense-subjects this project also from a theoretical perspective to the traditional questions that investigate the relation of mind and world, of the structure of knowledge and language, of the inner constitution of sense and meaning. The theoretical reflection on the conditions of the possibility of our realistic or antirealistic understandings of reality is replaced by a pragmatic experiment with various common sense epistemologies.
It is a central vision of the pragmatic conception of philosophy suggested by Rorty to transform the representationally-impressed common sense, which is directed at external or internal authorities, into an antirepresentationalist or antiauthoritarian common sense, by which the goals of the democratic culture of political enlightenment could be further advanced. This vision is articulated in Rorty's thought as the "romantic hope of substituting new common sense for old common sense."107
The weak point of Rorty's romantic pragmatism consist in the fact that he does not attempt to name any concrete instruments that could serve as the means for the realization of his vision of a antirepresentationlist transformation of common sense.108 Instead he hopes for a lucky turn of history, which could lead to the idiosyncratic mutations of philosophical thought-insofar as they at least once in a while seep down into common sense-being as a result of this sedimentation so selected that "the spin-offs from private projects of purification turn out to have enormous social utility."109
Translated by Lowell Vizenor
1. This text originates in an essay that appeared under the title "Die pragmatische Wende des linguistic turn" in the volume I edited, Die Renaissance des Pragmatismus. Aktuelle Verflechtungen zwischen analytischer and kontinentaler Philosophie (Weilerweist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2000), 96-126. The first part of the present essays comprises a reduced version of the original. The second develops further considerations that are not to be found in the German version.
2. For examples of this see Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 1992), and Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London and New York: Penguin, 1999).
3. Cf. Klaus Ch. Köhnke, Entstehung und Aufstieg des Neukantianismus. Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus (Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp, 1993).
4. The Linguistic Turn. Essays in Philosophical Method, ed. Richard Rorty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1967]).
5. For a detailed exposition cf. Sandbothe, ibid., 97-105.
6. Rorty, "Introduction: Pragmatism and Philosophy," in Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays: 1972-1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xiii-xlvii, xix.
7. Ibid., xxi.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 2nd printing, with corrections (Princeton/ New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1980), 176.
11. "Introduction," xxi.
12. Mirror, 394. Cf. also Rorty, "Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace," in Truth and Progress, Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP, 1998), 43-62, 47, see note 16; first appeared: The Journal of Philosophy, 90, no. 9 (September 1993), 443-461. For a critical confrontation with what he calls the "demonizing approaches" within Rorty reception, cf. Bjørn Ramberg, "Rorty und die Werkzeuge der Philosophie," in Renaissance, 127-166.
13. Ibid.
14. "Introduction," xix.
15. Rorty, "Twenty-Five Years Later," in The Linguistic Turn, 371-374, 373.
16. "Introduction," xix.
17. Ibid., xxi.
18. Ibid., xix.
19. The difference between the early and late Wittgenstein may also be described with reference to the first ambivalence of the linguistic turn. Similarly, the inner tension that permeates the thought of the late Wittgenstein implies a relation to the third ambivalence.
20. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), preface.
21. Anthony Kenny, "Wittgenstein über Philosophie," in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Schriften, Beiheft 3: Wittgensteins geistige Erscheinung (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979), 17.
22. Cf. Mike Sandbothe, "Pragmatismus und philosophische Medientheorie," in Repräsentation und Interpretation, ed. Evelyn Dölling, Reihe: Arbeitspapiere zur Linguistik (Berlin: TU Berlin, 1998), 99-124, esp. 113-122.
23. Rorty, "Epistemological Behaviorism and the De-Transcendentalization of Analytic Philosophy," in Hermeneutics and Praxis, ed. Robert Hollinger (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 89-121, 96.
24. Ibid.
25. Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, second printing (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 80.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 80-81.
30. Ibid., 81.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object (New York and London: The Technology Press of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960), 3-4.
36. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point of View, second edition, revised (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1964), 42.
37. Ibid.
38. Thus reads the title of a book that Quine published together with Joseph S. Ullian, (New York: Random House, 1978).
39. Quine, "Epistemology Naturalized," in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York and London: Columbia UP, 1969), 69-90.
40. Ibid., 87.
41. Ibid., 89-90.
42. Ibid., 90.
43. Ibid., 82.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 83.
46. Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford/ New York: Oxford UP, 1984), 189; first appeared in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1974): 5-20.
47. In his retrospective on the path of his own thought, which is to be found in the essay "Davidson between Wittgenstein and Tarski," (Crítica. Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofia 30, no. 88 [April 1998]: 49-71), Rorty writes: "In 1971 my philosophical views were shaken up, and began to be transformed. That was the year in which Davidson let me see the text of his 1970 Locke Lectures, which included an early draft of his On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" (51). Cf. also Davidson's commentary: "I have always been grateful to Richard Rorty for his response to my thoughts about conceptual schemes. For a time it seemed to me almost no one else understood what I was getting at in On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, and it mattered a good deal to me that Rorty not only grasped the main point but also endorsed it" (Davidson, "Reply to Rorty," The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn, The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. XXVII [Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 2000], 595-600, 595). A documetation of the ongoing debate between Davidson and Rorty may be found in Wozu Wahrheit? Schlüsseltexte der Davidson-Rorty-Debatte , ed. Mike Sandbothe, forthcoming (Weilerswist, Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2002). For a summary see Sandbothe, "Davidson and Rorty on Truth", in Analytic/Continental: A Fresh Look, ed. Carlos G. Prado, forthcoming, 2002.
48. Davidson, ibid., 189.
49. Ibid.
50. Davidson, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," in Kant oder Hegel? Über Formen der Begründung in der Philosophie, ed. Dieter Henrich (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1983), 423-438, 426. Cf. also Davidson's more precise (or rather corrective) formulation in "Afterthoughts, 1987": "My emphasis on coherence was probably just a way of making a negative point, that 'all that counts as evidence or justification for a belief must come from the same totality of belief to which it belongs'" (Davidson, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge: Afterthoughts, 1987," in Reading Rorty. Critical Responses to 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature' (and Beyond), ed. Alan Malachowski [Oxford and Cambridge/Mass., Blackwell, 1990], 120-138, 135).
51. Cf. Quine, Word and Object, chapter 2. On the distinction between the "distal theory" represented by Davidson and the "proximal theory" favored by Quine, see Davidson, "Meaning, Truth, and Evidence," in Perspectives on Quine, ed. Robert Barrett and Roger Gibson (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990), 68-79.
52. Word and Object, 22.
53. "Radical Interpretation," in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 125-139.
54. Rorty, "Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth," in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers: Vol. 1, (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge UP, 1991), 126-150, 133; first appeared in Truth and Interpretation. Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore (Oxford/ New York: Blackwell, 1986), 333-355.
55. Ibid., 135.
56. "Epistemology Externalized," Dialectica 45 (1991):191-202, 201.
57. Ibid.
58. "Meaning, Truth, and Evidence," 70.
59. "Epistemology Externalized," 201.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 191.
63. Ibid., 193.
64. Davidson, "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," in Truth and Interpretation, 433-446, 446.
65. "On the Very Idea," 189.
66. Davidson, "The Myth of the Subjective," in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Michael Krausz (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 159-172, 160.
67. Rorty, "Sind Aussagen universelle Geltungsansprüche?," in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 42, no. 6 (1994): 975-988, 976.
68. "A Nice Derangement," 445-446.
69. "The Myth of the Subjective," 159.
70. Rorty, "Relativist Menace," 57. Cf. as well Contingency, Irony, 68; and "Pragmatism," in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 7: 633-640: "The naturalist strain in pragmatism (...) is (...) important mainly as a strategy for shifting philosophers' attention from the problems of metaphysics and epistemology to the needs of democratic politics" (638).
71. Michael Dummet, "Realism," in Truth and Other Enigmas (Camridge, Mass./London: Harvard UP,1978), 145-165. On the realism/antirealism debate, cf. also Realism/Antirealism and Epistemology, ed. Christopher B. Kulp (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997). On Rorty's opposition between representationalism and antirepresentationalism, see Rorty, "Pragmatism as Anti-Representationalism," in Pragmatism. From Peirce to Davidson, ed. John P. Murphy ( Boulder: Westview Press, 1990); Rorty, "Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, Ethnocentrism, and Liberalism," in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 1-17; Rorty, "Representation, Social Practice, and Truth," ibid., 151-161, first appeared in Philosophical Studies 54 (1988): 215-228.
72. Rorty, "Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, Ethnocentrism, and Liberalism," in Objectivity, 2. Elsewhere Rorty writes: "(...) on my view the futile metaphysical struggle between idealism and physicalism was superseded, in the early years of this century, by a metaphilosophical struggle between the pragmatists ... and the anti-pragmatists ... The latter struggle is beyond realism and anti-realism." Rorty, "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth," 149. Cf. also Rorty, "Beyond Realism and Anti-Realim", in Wo steht die Analytische Philosophie heute?, eds. Ludwig Nagl and Richard Heinrich (Wien/München: Oldenbourg, 1986), 103-115.
73. Rorty, "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth", 128.
74. Martin Heidegger has already pointed out, as regards the state-of-affairs, that "the old concept of truth in the sense of the 'correspondence' (adaequatio) of knowledge to the being is so little shaken that it [the Copernican Revolution] actually presupposes it [the old concept of truth], indeed even grounds it for the first time." Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990), 8. His reconstruction of the Kantian arguments goes as follows: "Ontic knowledge can only correspond to beings ('objects') if this being as being is already first apparent [offenbar], i.e., is already first known in the constitution of its Being. Apparentness of beings (ontic truth) revolves around the unveiledness of the constitution of the Being of beings (ontological truth); at no time, however, can ontic knowledge itself conform 'to' the objects because, without the ontological, it cannot even have a possible 'to what'" (ibid).
75. Rorty, "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth," 131.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid., 136.
79. Rorty, "The Very Idea of Human Answerability to the World: John McDowell's Version of Empiricism," in Truth and Progress, 138-152, 142. Rorty's own positive assessment of the linguistic turn differs from McDowell's in the following way: "I take the linguistic turn in philosophy (...) to be a turn away from the very idea of human answerability to the world."
80. Ibid., 148.
81. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard UP, 1996), 144.
82. Ibid.
83. Cf. John McDowell, "Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality," in Journal of Philosophy, XCV, n. 9 (September 1998): 431-491, esp. 466ff and 490ff.
84. "The Very Idea of Human Answerability," 150.
85. Ibid.
86. Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard UP, 1994), esp. chapt. 8, 495-613.
87. Rorty, "Robert Brandom on Social Practices and Representations," in Truth and Progress, 122-137, esp. 130ff.
88. Ibid., 132.
89. "Normative" means, for Brandom-who designates his own thought as "normative-pragmatic"-not "moral-practical," but rather touching on intersubjective relations of obligation. See Brandom, Making It Explicit, 3-66.
90. Rorty, "Robert Brandom on Social Practices," 132.
91. Cf., for example, William James, "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," in The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green & Co, 1897).
92. Cf., for example, John Dewey, Democracy and Education. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York, Macmillan, 1916); Reconstruction in Philosophy, New York: Henry Holt, 1920); Human Nature and Conduct. An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1922); The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927); The Quest for Certainty. A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1929).
93. Rorty, "Robert Brandom on Social Practices," 132.
94. Ibid., 135.
95. Ibid. Cf. also "What Do You Do When They Call You a Relativist?", in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LVII, n. 1 (March 1997):173-177: "My hunch is that Brandom would do well (...) to situate his philosophy of language within an immodest metaphilosophical framework, according to which philosophical reflection can reject the intuitions of the vulgar as well as the metaphors of the learned" (177).
96. Mind and World, 178.
97. On the recontruction of the "spectator theory of knowledge" based on the model of the gaze, which goes back to Plato and Aristotle, see Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, esp. chapts. 1,2, and 4, as well as Reconstruction in Philosophy, esp. chapt. 1 .
98. Rorty, Hoffnung statt Erkenntnis. Eine Einführung in die pragmatische Philosophie (Wien: Passagen, 1994), 18. Cf. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, esp. chapts. 1 and 2; as well as Reconstuction in Philosophy, esp. chapt. 1.
99. Mind and World, 156.
100. Rorty, "Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism," in Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 207, n. 1 (1999): 7-20, 16.
101. Rorty, "Habermas, Derrida, and the Functions of Philosophy," in Truth and Progress, 307-326, 309. For Rorty's critique of Habermas' attempt to universalize the procedural aspects of language, cf. Rorty, "Sind Aussagen universelle Geltungsansprüche?"
102. "Anti-Authoritarianism," 7.
103. Rorty, "Response to Frank Farrell," in Rorty & Pragmatism. The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, Herman J. Saatkamp ed. (Nashville/London: Vanderbilt UP, 1995), 189-195, 195.
104. Davidson, "The Myth of the Subjective," 168.
105. "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, Merrill Peterson and Robert Vaughan eds. (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge UP, 1988), 257-288.
106. In contrast to Davidson and Brandom and in alliance with Rorty, Habermas configures philosophy in a decidedly sociopolitical way. But unlike Rorty, Habermas is of the opinion that the political ideals of modern democracy cannot be realized without an intersubjectively founded representationalism. Habermas configures this as "pragmatic knowledge-realism" (Habermas, "Einleitung: Realismus nach der sprachpragmatischen Wende," in Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung. Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999, 7-64, 14) or rather as a "Kantian pragmatism, supported on the transcendental fact that subjects capable of speech and action who allow themselves to be affected by reasons, can learn-in the long run even, cannot not learn (ibid.). Cf. as well Thomas McCarthy's critique of Rorty (Ideals and Illusions. On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory [Cambridge/Mass.: MIT Press, 1991]), which Habermas cites for support.
107. Rorty, "On Moral Obligation, Truth, and Common Sense," in Debating the State of Philosophy. Habermas, Rorty, and Kolakowski, Józef Niznik und John T. Sanders eds. (Westport, Conn./London: Praeger, 1996), 48-52, 52.
108. I make a suggestion as to how this weak point might be greatly compensated for by means of media-philosophy in my book, presently in press, Pragmatische Medienphilosophie (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2001). Cf. as well "Pragmatic Media Philosophy and Media Education in the Age of the Internet," in Enquiries at the Interface: Philosophical Problems of On-line Education, Paul Standish and Nigel Blake eds. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 59-77(also in The Journal of Philosophy of Education, 34, n. 1 (February 2000), 53-69), as well as "Media Temporalities of the Internet: Philosophy of Time and Media in Derrida and Rorty," in Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication, Special issue of AI & Society, Charles Ess and Fay Sudweeks eds., 14, n. 1 (London: Springer, 2000).
109. Rorty, "Heidegger, Kundera and Dickens," in Essays on Heidegger and others. Philosophical papers. Volume 2 (Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 66 - 82, 72.