This volume reflects the development and theoretical foundation of a new paradigm for critical thinking based on inquiry. The field of critical thinking, as manifested in the Informal Logic movement, developed primarily as a response to the inadequacies of formalism to represent actual argumentative practice and to provide useful argumentative skills to students. Because of this, the primary focus of the field has been on informal arguments rather than formal reasoning. Yet the formalist history of the field is still evident (...) in its emphasis, with respect to both theory and pedagogy, on the structure and evaluation of individual, de-contextualized arguments. It is our view that such a view of critical thinking is excessively narrow and limited, failing to provide an understanding of argumentation as largely a matter of comparative evaluation of a variety of contending positions and arguments with the goal of reaching a reasoned judgment on an issue. As a consequence, traditional critical thinking instruction is problematic in failing to provide the reasoning skills that students need in order to accomplish this goal. Instead, the goal of critical thinking instruction has been seen largely as a defensive one: of learning to not fall prey to invalid, inadequate, or fallacious arguments. (shrink)

This paper aims to queer evidence‐based practice by troubling the concepts of evidence, knowledge and mental illness. The evidence‐based narrative that emerged within biomedicine has dominated health care. The biomedical notion of ‘evidence’ has been critiqued extensively and is seen as exclusive and limiting, and even though the social constructionist paradigm attempts to challenge the authority of biomedicine to legitimate what constitutes acceptable evidence or knowledge for those experiencing mental illness, biomedical notions of evidence appear to remain relatively intact. Queer (...) theory offers theoretical tools to disrupt biomedical norms and challenges biomedical normativity to indicate how marginalisation occurs when normative truths about mental health classify those who differ from the norm as ‘ill’ or ‘disordered’. Queer theory's emphasis on normativity serves the political aim to subvert marginalisation and bring about radical social and material change. Reference will be made to mental health subjects within each discourse by indicating how the body acts as a vehicle for knowing. Deleuzian notions of the rhizome are used as metaphor to suggest a relational approach to knowledge that does away with either/or positions in either biomedical, or queer knowledge to arrive at a both/and position where the biomedical, constructionist and queer are interrelated and entangled in needing the other for their own evolution. However, queer does not ask for assimilation but celebrates difference by remaining outside to disrupt that which is easily overlooked, assumed to be natural or represented as the norm. The task of queer knowledge is to do justice to the lives lived in the name of evidence‐based practice and demands that we consider the relations of power where knowledge is produced. This pursuit creates different knowledge spaces where we identify new intersections that allow for socially just understandings of knowing or evidence to emerge. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe article investigates which epistemological considerations justify how religious life fits into the school life, and examines the debate on the participation of religiosity in the education system. I do this, first, by addressing the pedagogical implications of the distinction between public and private as maintained by Richard Rorty and, second, by reconsidering the pluralist metaphysics held by William James as an alternative path to understanding and re-addressing the question of religious life in school life. The article analyzes how the (...) strict separation of projects of individual self-creation and the public sphere, as defended by Rorty, poses problems in implementing pluralism in democratic societies and their educational institutions. (shrink)

Acknowledging the power of the id-drives, Freud held on to the authority of reason as the ego’s best tool to control instinctual desire. He thereby placed analytic reason at the foundation of his own ambivalent social theory, which, on the one hand, held utopian promise based upon psychoanalytic insight, and, on the other hand, despaired of reason’s capacity to control the self-destructive elements of the psyche. Moving beyond the recourse of sublimation, post-Freudians attacked reason’s hegemony in quelling disruptive psycho-dynamics and, (...) focusing upon the social domain, they sought strategies to counter the oppressive (repressive) social restrictions and conformist impositions impeding individual freedom that result from thwarted desire. Postmodern celebration of desire at the expense of reason and sublimation leaves the Enlightenment prospects altogether and moves psychoanalysis into a new terrain, where the very notion of rationality and an autonomous ego upon which much of Freudianism rests has been deconstructed. Thus the debate that begins with Freud’s social theories reflects the deeper divisions, which arose with postmodern ethics and discarded Cartesian–Kantian notions of personal identity. Here we consider the moral framework in which Freudian social theory sits and a contrasting understanding of agency that confronts his modernist conception. In that debate, we discern the larger humanist confrontation with postmodernity. Yet, all who engaged Freud shared some version of his utopian ethos, albeit radically restructuring the theory upon which social reform might occur. (shrink)

This article makes a case for the capacity of "social practice" accounts of agency and freedom to criticize, resist, and transform systemic forms of power and domination from within the context of religious and political practices and institutions. I first examine criticisms that Michel Foucault's analysis of systemic power results in normative aimlessness, and then I contrast that account with the description of agency and innovative practice that pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom identifies as "expressive freedom." I argue that Brandom can (...) provide a normative trajectory for Foucault's diagnoses of power and domination, helping to resolve its apparent lack of ethical direction. I demonstrate that Foucault, in turn, presents Brandom with insights that might overcome the charges of abstraction and conservatism that his pragmatic inferentialism frequently encounters. The result is a vindication of social practice as an analytical lens for social criticism that is at once both immanent and radical. (shrink)

The article considers how Richard Rorty's writings on religion dovetail with his views on the philosophical significance of hope. It begins with a reconstruction of the central features of Rorty's philosophy of religion, including its critique of theism and its attempt to rehabilitate religion within a pragmatist philosophical framework. It then presents some criticisms of Rorty's proposal. It is argued first that Rorty's "redescription" of the fulfilment of the religious impulse is so radical that it is hard to see what (...) remains of its specifically religious content. This casts doubt on Rorty's claim to have made pragmatism and religion compatible. The article then offers an analysis of Rorty's key notion of "unjustifiable hope". Different senses of unjustifiable hope are distinguished, in the course of which a tension between the "romantic" and "utilitarian" aspects of Rorty's pragmatist philosophy of religion comes into view. (shrink)

Many have been struck by Hannah Arendt’s remarks on loneliness in the concluding pages of The Origins of Totalitarianism, but very few have attempted to deal with the remarks in any systematic way. What is especially striking about this state of affairs is that the remarks are crucial to the account contained therein, as they betray a view of agency that undergirds the rest of the account. This article develops Arendt’s thinking on loneliness throughout her corpus, showing how loneliness is (...) connected to thoughtlessness. In so doing, the article also suggests a connection between Arendt’s notion of loneliness and Stanley Cavell’s notion of skepticism. This connection, it is argued, allows us not only fully to answer a question Arendt leaves unaddressed (the cause loneliness), but also allows us to see how we, as agents and users of language, are perpetually prone to loneliness. (shrink)

Rorty regards himself as furthering the project of the Enlightenment by separating Enlightenment liberalism from Enlightenment rationalism. To do so, he rejects the very need for explicit metaphysical theorizing. Yet his commitments to naturalism, nominalism, and the irreducibility of the normative come from the metaphysics of Wilfrid Sellars. Rorty's debt to Sellars is concealed by his use of Davidsonian arguments against the scheme/content distinction and the nonsemantic concept of truth. The Davidsonian arguments are used for Deweyan ends: to advance secularization (...) and anti-authoritarianism. However, Rorty's conflation of theology and metaphysics conceals the possibility of post-theological metaphysics. The key distinction lies between “metaphysics” and “Metaphysics.” The former provisionally models the relations between different vocabularies; the latter continues theology by other means. Sellars shows how to do metaphysics without Metaphysics. This approach complements Rorty's prioritization of cultural politics over ontology and his vision of Enlightenment liberalism without Enlightenment rationalism. (shrink)

In the course of developing a semantics with epistemological intent, Brandom claims that his inferentialism is Hegelian. This paper argues that, even on a charitable reading, Brandom is an anti-Hegelian.

ABSTRACT:This essay describes three commitments that have become central to the author's philosophical outlook, namely, to liberal naturalism, to metaphysical realism, and to the epistemic and ontological objectivity of normative judgments.Liberal naturalismis contrasted with familiar scientistic versions of naturalism and their project of forcing explanations in every field into models derived from one or another particular science. The form ofmetaphysical realismthat the author endorses rejects every form of verificationism, including the author's one-time ‘internal realism’, and insists that our claims about (...) the world are true or false and not just epistemically successful or unsuccessful and that the terms they contain typically refer to real entities. ‘Representationalism is no sin’. The central part of the essay is an account oftruthbased on a detailed analysis of Tarski's theory of truth and of the insights we can get from it as well as of the respects in which Tarski is misleading. The account ofthe objectivity of the normativein this essay draws on insights from Dewey as well as Scanlon. (shrink)

In Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism , Robert B. Brandom puts forward a general method of formally representing relations between meaning and use (between vocabularies and practices-or-abilities) and shows how discursive intentionality can be understood as a pragmatically mediated semantic relation. In this context, the activity that pragmatically mediates the semantic relations characteristic of discursive intentionality is specified as a practice of discursive updating —a practice of rectifying commitments and removing incompatibilities. The aim of the paper is (...) to take a closer look at the practice of discursive updating and to show that the role of inconsistencies and disagreements in discursive practice can only be fully understood if the interactional dimension of updating processes is taken into account—i.e. if one looks at the explicitly social, interactional role of discursive updating in cases of disagreements between different subjects. (shrink)

This article presents and analyses a social-practice contextualist version of meaning holism, whose main root lies in American pragmatism. Proposing that beliefs depend on systems of language-use in social practices, which involve communities of people and worldly objects, such meaning holism effectively breaks down the Enlightenment tradition’s philosophical subject–object dualism. It also opens the human mind up for empirical research – in a ‘sociologizing’, ‘anthropologizing’ and ‘historicizing’ vein. The article discusses the implications of this approach for the human sciences, for (...) instance certain parallel developments in anthropology and archaeology. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the relation of religious language and public debate within the context of postsecularism and defend a falsificationist model. I argue that the postsecular public sphere...

This paper identifies cultural disenchantment as a crucial concept in Rorty's understanding of liberalism, and considers how Rorty's use of this term draws on but also differs from similar ideas in Nietzsche and Weber. It argues that Rorty's notion of disenchantment complements his Darwinian view of human nature and his conception of the self as a centerless web of beliefs and desires. These three principal ideas form the basis of Rorty's novel theoretical approach to liberal democracy and of his belief (...) in its ability to sustain itself without its traditional rationalist justifications. (shrink)

Minimalists generally see themselves as engaged in a descriptive project. They maintain that they can explain everything we want to say about truth without appealing to anything other than the T-schema, i.e., the idea that the proposition that p is true iff p. I argue that despite recent claims to the contrary, minimalists cannot explain one important belief many people have about truth, namely, that truth is good. If that is so, then minimalism, and possibly deflationism as a whole, must (...) be rejected or recast as a profoundly revisionary project. (shrink)

Minimalists generally see themselves as engaged in a descriptive project. They maintain that they can explain everything we want to say about truth without appealing to anything other than the T-schema, i.e., the idea that the proposition that p is true iff p. I argue that despite recent claims to the contrary, minimalists cannot explain one important belief many people have about truth, namely, that truth is good. If that is so, then minimalism, and possibly deflationism as a whole, must (...) be rejected or recast as a profoundly revisionary project. (shrink)

It is curious why a secular pragmatist like Richard Rorty would capitalize on the religiously-laden concept of redemption in his recent writings. But more than being an intriguing idea in his later work, this essay argues that redemption plays a key role in the historical development of Rorty’s thought. It begins by exploring the paradoxical status of redemption in Rorty’s oeuvre. It then investigates an overlooked debate between Rorty, Dreyfus and Taylor that first endorses the concept. It then contrasts Rorty’s (...) notions of essentialism and edification to link redemption to self-transformation. After providing a historical legitimation to the idea of redemption, the essay reconstructs Rorty’s modern version of the concept. Redemption for Rorty centers on human relationships and not religion or philosophy; it is also pluralist and liberal in character. Finally, it concludes that Rorty uses redemption—a primary component of religious language—to capture the salvific force of religion. This power is redirected toward the protection of secular, democratic hopes, which are demanding and fragile by nature. (shrink)

It is curious why a secular pragmatist like Richard Rorty would capitalize on the religiously-laden concept of redemption in his recent writings. But more than being an intriguing idea in his later work, this essay argues that redemption plays a key role in the historical development of Rorty’s thought. It begins by exploring the paradoxical status of redemption in Rorty’s oeuvre. It then investigates an overlooked debate between Rorty, Dreyfus and Taylor that first endorses the concept. It then contrasts Rorty’s (...) notions of essentialism and edification to link redemption to self-transformation. After providing a historical legitimation to the idea of redemption, the essay reconstructs Rorty’s modern version of the concept. Redemption for Rorty centers on human relationships and not religion or philosophy; it is also pluralist and liberal in character. Finally, it concludes that Rorty uses redemption—a primary component of religious language—to capture the salvific force of religion. This power is redirected toward the protection of secular, democratic hopes, which are demanding and fragile by nature. (shrink)

Science depends on judgments of the bearing of evidence on theory. Scientists must judge whether an observation or the result of an experiment supports, disconfirms, or is simply irrelevant to a given hypothesis. Similarly, scientists may judge that, given all the available evidence, a hypothesis ought to be accepted as correct or nearly so, rejected as false, or neither. Occasionally, these evidential judgments can be made on deductive grounds. If an experimental result strictly contradicts a hypothesis, then the truth of (...) the data deductively entails the falsity of the hypothesis. In the great majority of cases, however, the connection between evidence and hypothesis is non-demonstrative, or inductive. In particular, this is so whenever a general hypothesis is inferred to be correct on the basis of the available data, since the truth of the data will not deductively entail the truth of the hypothesis. It always remains possible that the hypothesis is false even though the data are correct. (shrink)

In recent years, a renascent form of pragmatism has developed which argues that a satisfactory pragmatic position must integrate into itself the concepts of truth and objectivity. This New Pragmatism, as Cheryl Misak calls it, is directed primarily against Rorty's neo-pragmatic dismissal of these concepts. For Rorty, the goal of our epistemic practices should not be to achieve an objective view, one that tries to represent things as they are 'in themselves,' but rather to attain a view of things that (...) can gain as much inter-subjective agreement as possible. In Rorty's language, we need to replace the aim of objectivity with that of solidarity. While the New Pragmatists agree with Rorty's 'humanist' and .. (shrink)

Pragmatism’s heartening recent revival (spearheaded by Richard Rorty’s bold intervention into analytic philosophy Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) has coalesced into a distinctive philosophical movement frequently referred to as ‘neopragmatism’. This movement interprets the very meaning of pragmatism as rejection of metaphysical commitments: our words do not primarily serve to represent non-linguistic entities, but are tools to achieve a range of human purposes. A particularly thorough and consistent version of this position is Huw Price’s global expressivism. We here critically (...) appraise Price’s understanding of a commitment to pragmatism as a rejection of metaphysics, and argue that such rejection is not as easy or desirable as Price claims. First we argue that Price’s global expressivism itself draws on significant metaphysical assumptions (a ‘word-world’ dualism, and a nominalism concerning the meaning of general terms). Then we seek to resolve neopragmatist anxieties about metaphysics by arguing that metaphysics is indispensable for pragmatist philosophizing insofar as it seeks ways for human beings to realise themselves through practices of understanding reality and their place in it. If, as we argue, metaphysics consists in a maximally general inquiry into the nature and structure of reality, to try to block it seems a puzzling exercise in epistemic self-harm. (shrink)

Rorty claimed that politics is more important than science and philosphy, even his own philosophy. From pragmatist point of view science is also problemsolving and belongs to practice in broader sense.

The article discusses the relevance of ontology, the metaphysical study of being, in social sciences through a comparison of three distinct outlooks: Roy Bhaskar's version of critical realism, a pragmatic realist approach the most renowned representatives of which are Rom Harré and Hilary Putnam, and the authors’ own synthesis of the pragmatist John Dewey's and the neopragmatist Richard Rorty's ideas, here called methodological relationalism. The Bhaskarian critical realism is committed to the heavy ontological furniture of metaphysical transcendentalism, resting on essentialist (...) presumptions of causality and social structures, tacitly creating a dualism between individuals and society. Pragmatic realists, for their part, carry much lighter metaphysical baggage than critical realists and, much in a pragmatist vein, accept the idea that social scientists should study society by studying social life—the interwoven activities of individuals. Nevertheless, pragmatic realists only reluctantly, if at all, renounce the subject–object dualism and its ontological implications. Drawing on the ideas of Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty, the writers outline their own antirepresentationalist, antiessentialist approach to social sciences. The proposed methodological relationalism is a pragmatist approach of Deweyan origin. Based on a Darwinian understanding of human beings as organisms trying to cope with their environment, it emphasises the insight that one can neither step outside one's own action, nor withdraw from the actor's point of view, just as one cannot cognitively step outside language. (shrink)

Richard Rorty suggests that we should stop looking for something common to us all, for universal justifi cations and truth. Rorty argues that focusing on a single truth sooner or later serves those who claim that there is a proper, true model of living. In the end, they use violence and cause pain, as they are driven by the idea that everyone should accept their truth. In this article I shall argue that such reasoning is not justifi ed and whether (...) we are universalists or constructivists, our actions may be the same and cause pain. At the same time, having the same beliefs will not stop us from acting differently. What matters is how we use a particular concept in accordance with our interests and not the concept itself. I shall also argue that dialog can help to prevent violence and that while Rorty is right, there are also a number of problems with that proposition. (shrink)

In Historied Thought, Constructed World, Joseph Margolis identifies the philosophical themes that will dominate philosophical discussions in the twenty-first century, given the recognition of the historicity of philosophical thought in the twentieth century. In what follows I examine these themes, especially cognitive intransparency, and the arguments presented in favor of them, noting the extent to which they rest on a view of language that takes a written text, and not speech, as the paradigm of language. I suggest if one takes (...) speech as a mutual embodied action in a shared space as a model for language, the theme of cognitive intransparency—and the problems it brings in its wake—does not loom so large for those of us working in the history of philosophy. I conclude by showing that if we adopt this suggestion in relation to early Greek philosophy, that is, the period in the history of historied thought in which philosophy itself emerges as a linguistic and intellectual activity, we can better understand how and why philosophy emerged as it did—in the form of dialogues by Plato. (shrink)

Robert Brandom and John McDowell pursue similar, yet strikingly different approaches to a shared problem: that of how we can be answerable to the world in our beliefs about it in the wake of Sellars' critique of the myth of the given. While McDowell attempts to rehabilitate the idea that experience is capable of providing justifications for our beliefs, Brandom constructs a sophisticated social-pragmatist account of the objectivity of our conceptual commitments in which experience is, as he says, not one (...) of his words. In this article, I argue that McDowell is right in stressing the indispensability of the idea of experience, but that he is wrong in believing that Brandom lacks the resources for making sense of the idea of being answerable to the world in experience. Especially when we expand Brandom's account of discursive practice to include its relation to what he has called practical intentionality, his work provides the resources for an answer to McDowell's concerns, but only if it is understood not as an attempt to simply deny McDowell's claims about experience, but as an attempt to explain what we must be capable of doing in order for experience, in McDowell's sense, to be possible. (shrink)

This article considers the implications of inferentialist philosophy of language for debates in the historiography of philosophy. My intention is to mediate and refine the polemics between contextualist historians and ‘analytic’ or presentist historians. I claim that much of Robert Brandom’s nuanced defence of presentism can be accepted and even adopted by contextualists, so that inferentialism turns out to provide an important justification for orthodox history of philosophy. In the concluding sections I argue that the application of Brandom’s theory has (...) important limits, and that some polemics by contextualists against presentists are therefore justified. (shrink)

In this essay, I address the question of whether the indisputable progress being made by the neurosciences poses a genuine threat to the language game of responsible agency. I begin by situating free will as an ineliminable component of our practices of attributing responsibility and holding one another accountable, illustrating this via a discussion of legal discourse regarding the attribution of responsibility for criminal acts. I then turn to the practical limits on agents' scientific self-objectivation, limits that turn out to (...) be mirrored philosophically in the conceptual problems that plague reductionist strategies. Having shown that free will is rooted in unavoidable performative presuppositions belonging to agents' participant perspective, I then take up the difficult issue of how to reconcile an epistemic dualism of participant and observer perspectives with the assumption of ontological monism. I critically review a range of proposed physicalist solutions, including non-reductionist and (standard) compatibilist approaches. An underlying problem with scientistic, physicalist approaches is the methodological fiction of an exclusive ?view from nowhere? which relies on the problematic move of disengaging the objectivating perspective of the scientific observer from the investigators' participant perspective of those engaged in scientific practice. Since there is no way of getting around the requisite complementarity of both the observer's encounter with the objective world and the participant's involvement in shared lifeworld practices, the remaining option is to take an epistemological turn. But even the recognition that science is ultimately constituted from within the lifeworld still leaves us with the question as to how the human mind can understand itself as the product of natural evolution. I conclude with some tentative suggestions as to how this difficult question might be addressed. (shrink)

Many philosophers of education emphasise the impossibility to really ‘solve’ philosophical—and with that, educational—problems these days. Philosophers have been trying to give philosophy a new, constructive turn in the face of this insolvability. This paper focuses on irony-based approaches that try to exploit the very uncertainty of philosophical issues to further philosophical understanding. We will first briefly discuss a few highlights of historical uses of irony as a philosophical tool. Then we concentrate on two different interpretations of irony, formulated by (...) Bransen and Rorty, that aim at gaining insight into how we make meaning of the world, while at the same time recognising that such an understanding would be impossible. After discussing some problematic aspects of these interpretations a third interpretation of irony is developed, based on a third view of the nature of meaning-making. Following these three interpretations, we will discuss their philosophical merits and the different kinds of insight they can produce for philosophy of education. (shrink)

When Peter Strawson subtitled the most celebrated book in ordinary language philosophy, Individuals, ‘An essay in descriptive metaphysics’, he shocked mainly for having reintroduced ‘metaphysics’ into intellectually respectable English a quarter-century after A.J. Ayer had consigned it to the logical positivists' index of forbidden philosophical words . Few at the time appreciated the import of the modifiers ‘descriptive’ and its opposite, ‘revisionary’. Now, another half century on, philosophers have come around to Bertrand Russell's original view that both the ordinary language (...) philosophy Strawson championed and the ideal scientific language philosophy Ayer championed offer alternative metaphysical visions. The remaining question of philosophical interest is what hangs in the balance between a descriptive and revisionary approach to metaphysics – or, for that matter, any branch of philosophy. This paper critically examines the currently dominant descriptive approach from a revisionary standpoint, initially relying on the terms Strawson uses to frame the distinction, and then moving outward to consider its implications for our understanding of the history of modern philosophy, especially the ‘naturalist’ sensibility that has been especially influential in analytic social epistemology. (shrink)

Response‐dispositional (RD) properties are standardly defined as those that involve an object's appearing thus or thus to some perceptually well‐equipped observer under specified epistemic conditions. The paradigm instance is that of colour or other such Lockean “secondary qualities”, as distinct from those—like shape and size—that pertain to the object itself, quite apart from anyone's perception. This idea has lately been thought to offer a promising alternative to the deadlocked dispute between hard‐line ‘metaphysical’ realists and subjectivists, projectivists, social constructivists, or hard‐line (...) anti‐realists. A chief source text is Plato's Euthyphro, where the issue is posed in ethical terms: do the gods infallibly approve virtuous acts on account of their divine moral omniscience or are virtuous acts just those the gods approve? Among the areas proposed as amenable to an RD approach are epistemology, ethics, political theory, and philosophy of mathematics. It is claimed that by making due allowance for the involvement of normalised or optimised human responses one can steer a course between the twin poles of an objectivist realism that places truth beyond our cognitive grasp and an epistemic conception that confines truth within the limits of humanly attainable proof, knowledge, or verification. Here I argue—on the contrary—that RD approaches can be shown to offer nothing more than a variant of the same old realist versus anti‐realist dilemma. That is, they work out either as a trivial (tautologous) claim that ‘truth’ simply equates with ‘best judgement’ in the ideal (quasi‐objective) limit or as the claim—advanced by anti‐realists like Michael Dummett—that we cannot form any adequate conception of objective (recognition‐transcendent) truths. After looking at this issue in various contexts of debate, I conclude that one useful (if pyrrhic) outcome is to demonstrate the non‐availability of any middle‐ground stance. We are left with the strictly unavoidable choice between a realist or objectivist approach and one that assimilates truth to the consensus of accredited best opinion. This latter amounts to a roundabout, elaborately qualified version of the anti‐realist case. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of inter-normative engagement, of constructing dialogical interaction across substantive normative difference. Focusing on how this affects democratic and pluralistic contexts, it argues that a social-practice-based approach to normativity and reasoning offers unique resources to understand and frame such encounters. It specifically draws on pragmatism and the work of Richard Rorty to reframe normativity, authority, identity, and reason, linking these understandings to recent trends to deliberative political inclusivism in democratic theory. The upshot is that framing inter-normative (...) engagement as calls to responsive engagement between diverse systems of normative authority offers real insights for constructing and maintaining ongoing democratic engagements in a non-hierarchical manner. This, the article argues, extends emerging methodological trends in the broader literature while overcoming the morass between conflict- and consensus-oriented approaches in democratic th... (shrink)

Debates about nonconceptual content impact many philosophical disciplines, including philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language. However, arguments made by many philosophers from within the pragmatist tradition, including Quine, Sellars, Davidson, Rorty, and Putnam, undercut the very role such content purportedly plays. I explore how specifically Sellarsian arguments against the Given and Rortian defenses of “epistemological behaviorism” undermine standard conceptions of nonconceptual content. Subsequently, I show that the standard objections to epistemological behaviorism inadequately attend to the essentially social and (...) practical nature of justification. (shrink)

John McDowell has defended a position called minimal empiricism, that aims to avoid the oscillation between traditional empiricism’s commitment to a set of contents working as external justifiers for our system of beliefs and a coherentist position where our thought receives no constraint from the world. We share McDowell’s dissatisfaction with both options, but find his minimal empiricism committed to the idea of a tribunal of experience where isolated contents are infused into our network of inferences. This commitment is prone (...) to sceptical attacks and waters down McDowell’s holism. We propose to retain McDowell’s partial re-enchantment of nature—without appealing to McDowell’s Kantian conception of experience—, and argue that it is sufficient to avoid the oscillation and to make sense of the objectivity of thought. (shrink)

This article explores the question of the role of religion in the public square through the lens of Richard Rorty’s more general public–private distinction. When we note his various positions over the years on the role of religion in the public square we observe a shift that yields a more favorable public role for religion so long as it limits itself to social action and refrains from making knowledge-claims that serve as tools of the powerful. But if, according to Rorty, (...) religion per se is no longer the problem, then what becomes of his efforts to endorse a more general public–private distinction? The argument set forth assesses the inadequacies and limitations of Rorty’s assumptions about the public–private split and suggests another way of framing the issue that will prove productive in debates concerning the role of religion in the public square. (shrink)

Richard Rorty challenges Jurgen Habermas's belief that validity-claims raised within context-bound discussions contain a moment of universality validity. Rorty argues that immersion within contingent languages prohibits any neutral, context-independent ground, that one cannot predict the defense of one's assertions before any audience, and that philosophy can no more escape its contextual limitations than strategic counterparts. Alfred Schutz's phenomenological account of motivation, the reciprocity of perspectives, and the theoretical province of meaning can articulate Habermas's intuitions.Since any claim can be analyzed from (...) an observer's perspective for its because-motives, it can always be shown to be context-related; but to the participant involved in the in-order-to project of establishing a claim's validity, the claim appears objectively valid until counter-evidence surfaces. Rorty, even when explaining what it is to make a truth claim, resorts to the observer perspective and omits reference to the in-order-to perspective, within which alone unconditional validity becomes visible. Furthermore, the expectation that one's claim is universally valid depends not on an empirical prediction that one''s claim can survive hypothesized future possible audiences. Rather, because of the reciprocity of perspectives, making possible communication and a common life, theoreticians assume that others will recognize what they take to be objective or valid, independently of diverse biographical circumstances. Finally, within the theoretical province requiring relevances different from those of everyday life, philosophy articulates claims with a greater potential to arrive at universal validity than projects that aim less universally, in spite of the fact that its theoretical context is always susceptible to because motive analysis. (shrink)

Rorty claims argument is inherently conservative and philosophical progress comes from "sparkling new ideas," not argument. This assumes an untenable opposition between the generation and the evaluation of ideas, with argument relegated to evaluation. New ideas that contribute to progress arise from critical reflection on problems posed by the tradition, and constrained by the criteria governing evaluation. Thinking directed toward the criticism and evaluation of ideas or products is not algorithmic; it has a generative, creative component. An overall assessment in (...) any complex circumstance requires constructing a new view from the questioning, weighing, rejecting, reconciling, and integrating of numerous divergent points of view. Thus, the process of argumentation can issue in new ideas. (shrink)

review of Evans & Over *ifs*, a book on the psychology of conditionals.

After tracing the rise in interest in the phenomenon of interpretation to events in the early post-Kantian period, I argue that this development is highly relevant to understanding contemporary philosophy's methodological status and its relation to fields such as science and literature. I argue that much of recent philosophy is best understood in terms of an "interpretive turn" that has now provided philosophy with a modest but valuable and distinctive role. I illustrate the procedure of philosophy in this key by (...) critically appropriating ideas about interpretation advanced by Harold Bloom and Richard Rorty, and by using hints about the role of history that arise from discussions of Kant's notion of genius. (shrink)

After delineating the distinguishing features of pragmatism, and noting the resources that pragmatists have available to respond effectively as pragmatists to the two major objections to pragmatism, I examine and critically evaluate the various proposals that pragmatists have offered as a solution to the problem of induction, followed by a discussion of the pragmatic positions on the status of theoretical entities. Thereafter I discuss the pragmatic posture toward the nature of explanation in science. I conclude that pragmatism has (a) a (...) generally compelling solution to Hume's problem of induction; (b) no specific position on the status of theoretical entities, although something like the non-realism of the sort developed by van Fraassen seems a defensible candidate for most pragmatists in general, even though there are non-trivial objections to van Fraassen's position; and (c) central to the pragmatic conception of scientific explanation is the abandonment of our common conception of truth as a necessary condition for sentences to provide adequate explanations, and a drift in the direction of a contextualist account of explanation. (shrink)

The author argues that is not obvious what it means for our beliefs and assertions to be "truth-directed", and that we need to weaken our ordinary notion of a belief if we are to deal with radical scepticism without surrendering to idealism. Topics examined also include whether there could be alien conceptual schemes and what might happen to us if we abandoned genuine belief in place of mere pragmatic acceptance. A radically new "ecological" model of knowledge is defended.

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The (...) centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. Characterizations and illustrations of a post-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN (part III) and CP (xxxvii-xliv), are more richly developed in later works, such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, hereafter CIS), in the popular essays and articles collected in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), and in the four volumes of philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991, hereafter ORT); Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991, hereafter EHO); Truth and Progress (1998, hereafter TP); and Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007, hereafter PCP). In these writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time. (shrink)