This paper attempts a sympathetic comparison between John Dewey and Richard Rorty. In particular I establish the ways in which both Dewey's and Rorty's aesthetical modes require qualitative starting points (or some indeterminate-event trajectory) as a condition for any poetic/novel movement into the future. I show how Dewey's notions of "indeterminate situation," highlighted in his event-metaphysics, resonates with Rorty's notion of metaphor, and that finally Rorty does in fact (wittingly or not) harbor a place for the noncognitive and nonlinguistic via, (...) interestingly enough, a linguistic device. How Rorty uses his notion of metaphor (inspired by Donald Davidson's groundbreaking work) starts very much to take on the feel of what Dewey meant by "primary experience." My emphasis, then, falls on the necessity to both of their respective pragmatic positions of a qualitative starting point (QSP). In this way, the troubling dualism that has developed between experience and language starts to dissolve. (shrink)

DEFORGE R and SHAW J. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 83–95 Back‐ and fore‐grounding ontology: exploring the linkages between critical realism, pragmatism, and methodologies in health & rehabilitation sciencesAs two doctoral candidates in a health and rehabilitation sciences program, we describe in this paper our respective paradigmatic locations along a quite nonlinear ontological‐epistemological‐axiological‐methodological chain. In a turn‐taking fashion, we unpack the tenets of critical realism and pragmatism, and then trace the linkages from these paradigmatic locations through to the methodological choices that (...) address a community‐based research problem. Beyond serving as an answer to calls for academics in training to demonstrate philosophical‐theoretical‐methodological integrity and coherence in their scholarship, this paper represents critical realism and its fore‐grounding of a deeply stratified ontology in reflexive relation to pragmatism and its back‐grounding of ontology. We conclude by considering the merits and challenges of conducting research from within singular versus proliferate paradigmatic perspectives. (shrink)

What can nurse scientists learn from Rorty in the development of a philosophical foundation? Indeed, Rorty in his 1989 text entitled Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity tantalizes the reader with debates of reason 'against' philosophizing. Forget truth seeking; move on to what matters. Rorty would rather the 'high brow' thinking go to those that do the work in order to make the effort useful. Nursing as an applied science, has something real that is worth looking at, and that nurse researchers need (...) to think about. And as a profession built upon relationships, we should be thinking of the exchanges we have with those around us, of the contrasts in vocabularies used and of the contingencies involved, letting this launch us into our imaginings and areas of enquiry. The business of nurse researchers is to study what nurses do – how we care; Rorty would have us care. But, not to dismiss the reflective thinker as Rorty advocates for the self-doubting ironist to continue to seek the final vocabulary, the ideal of what 'this' means, accepting this as the best to be offered at the time. As a science struggling to find foundation, we need only to look at what we do and value – as antifoundational as Rorty portrays himself, Rorty 'ironically' may have revealed a foundation for nursing science that is consistent with its path. (shrink)