Anglais philosophique/Philosophie anglo-saxonne. ANB102LY. Philippe Birgy

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Neopragmatism, sometimes called "linguistic pragmatism" lacks precise definition. It has been associated with a variety of thinkers, among them Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, W.V.O. Quine, Donald Davidson, and Stanley Fish though none of these figure have called themselves "neopragmatists." Neopragmatists, particularly Rorty and Putnam, draw on the ideas of Classical Pragmatists such as Peirce, James, and Dewey. TEXTE 8

Putnam, in Words and Life (1994) enumerates which ideas in the Classical Pragmatist tradition newer pragmatists find most compelling. To paraphrase Putnam: (1) antiscepticism (the notion that doubt requires justification just as much as does belief; (2) fallibilism (the view that there are no metaphysical guarantee against the need to revise a belief; (3) antidualism about "facts" and "values"; and (4) that practice, properly construed, is primary in philosophy. (WL 152) In 1995 Rorty wrote, "I linguisticize as many pre-linguistic-turn philosophers as I can, in order to read them as prophets of the utopia in which all metaphysical problems have been dissolved, and religion and science have yielded their place to poetry." ["Response to Hartshorne." In Rorty and Pragmatism : The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, edited by Herman J. Saatkamp (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 35.] This "linguistic turn" strategy aims to avoid what Rorty sees as the essentialisms ("truth," "reality," "experience") still extant in classical pragmatism. Rorty writes, “[A]nalytic philosophy, thanks to its concentration on language, was able to defend certain crucial pragmatist theses better than James and Dewey themselves. ...By focusing our attention on the relation between language and the rest of the world rather than between experience and nature, postpositivistic analytic philosophy was able to make a more radical break with the philosophical tradition." [Rorty, "Comments on Sleeper and Edel," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 21, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 40.] Hilary Putnam suggests that the reconciliation of antiskepticism and fallibilism is the central goal of American pragmatism. Although all human knowledge is partial, with no ability to take a 'God's -eye-view,' this does not necessitate a globalized skeptical attitude.… Doubt, like belief, requires justification. It arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant matter of fact (which Dewey called a 'situation'), which unsettles our belief in some specific proposition. Inquiry is then the rationally self-controlled process of attempting to return to a settled state of belief about the matter. Fallibilism is the philosophical doctrine that absolute certainty about knowledge is impossible; or at least that all claims to knowledge could, in principle, be mistaken. As a formal doctrine, it is most strongly associated with Charles Sanders Peirce, who used it in his attack on foundationalism, but it is already present in the views of early philosophers, Xenophanes, Socrates and Plato. Unlike scepticism, fallibilism does not imply the need to abandon our knowledge - we needn't have logically conclusive justifications for what we know. Rather, it is an admission that because empirical knowledge can be revised by further observation, any of the things we take as knowledge might possibly turn out to be false. Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to prominence during the 20th Century… It is characterised by the following features: - First, the positivist view that there are no specifically philosophical truths and that the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts…. - Second, the view that the logical clarification of thoughts can only be achieved by analysis of the logical form of philosophical propositions. The logical form of a proposition is a way of representing it (often using the formal grammar and symbolism of a logical system) to display its similarity with all other propositions of the same type… - Third, a rejection of sweeping philosophical systems in favour of close attention to detail. Among some (but by no means all) analytic philosophers, this rejection of "grand theory" has taken the form of a defence of common sense and ordinary language against the pretensions of metaphysicians.[5]

Anglais philosophique/Philosophie anglo-saxonne. ANB102LY. Philippe Birgy

Abstract: Pragmatists often find themselves under fire for being relativistic. Not surprising, given that most anti-foundationalist epistemologies occasionally have to weather this. But pragmatists can count on frequent attacks largely because of public association with Richard Rorty, the most famous living pragmatist who is, for many philosophers and cultural critics, also the most notorious relativist. My paper has two parts. First, while many aspects of Rorty’s work explicitly oppose traditional (or absolutist) doctrines, several Rortyan ideas should dissuade us from calling him a relativist. “Absolutist” is a better label. Second, the meliorism ingredient in Dewey’s pragmatism renders it especially defensible against the pejorative label, “relativism.” Meliorism connects pragmatism to moral life and can help pragmatists exculpate their views and distinguish them from Rorty’s narrower linguistic/ethnocentric neopragmatism. The danger posed by relativism is overestimated; preoccupation with relativism distracts us from more pernicious obstacles to moral progress: jingoism, dogmatism, careerism, and absolutism. TEXTE 9

Defining Relativism Definitions of “relativism” are much discussed. Today, I’m concerned with relativisms which fall along the following lines: 1. Reality (Metaphysical relativism)— there is no world radically external to us, i.e., no complete and determinate set of mind-independent objects whose existence and character subsist regardless of whether we are around to know them. 2. Truth and knowledge (Epistemological relativism, perspectivism)—all knowledge is relative to a perspective (perhaps individual, perhaps cultural). Because of this, all knowledge is necessarily correlative in scope and certainty with its knower; this goes for the objective of knowledge as well, which is why it is more accurate to speak of knowledge allowing one to “cope” or “succeed in one’s objective,” than to speak of correspondence to reality. Philosophical truth, then, is a fiction, created by abstracting from particular past successes and hypostatizing them into a singular and general object. 3. Values and Principles (Ethical relativism)—there are no immovable and eternal values to discover. Values are conventions, constructed by individuals or groups/cultures and applied to objects and events; value judgments, and the principles that guide those judgments, are also matters of convention. Many facets of relativism can be discussed, but the one worth fixing on here is the way epistemological and metaphysical relativisms (1 and 2, above) entail, for many critics, relativism about morality (3)—and a pernicious, dangerous relativism at that. Blackburn on Rorty To get motivated, let’s consider something current. In the April 2003 issue of the British popular magazine, Prospect Simon Blackburn ambushes Richard Rorty. Initially describing Rorty as a pragmatist, a relativist, a “postmodernist” (about whom Blackburn snidely quips, “the very word is like a knell”), and a “radical American who is against the war in Iraq” Blackburn goes on to denigrate Rorty’s views by identifying them with relativism. About Rorty’s project, Blackburn writes, Rorty takes from Darwin the idea that language is an adaptation and words are tools…[that] …have their purpose, and…can be retired when that purpose is done, while other projects and other tools rise to supersede them. Rorty calls this a change of vocabularies….[and] believes he can now walk away from the traditional problems with his head held high. He does not have to accept the labels of relativism or skepticism that the old dialectic forced upon us. [But Rorty’s] solution looks worse than the problem: [because words are] not there to represent how things stand—what an absurd idea—[but are] tools [you can] pick up any you like, and the Darwinian jungle, not reason, will determine which comes out on top. In [Rorty’s] après-truth literary world, the aim of voicing opinion is not to arrive at the truth, but to bring the others to your opinion, thereby gaining their solidarity with you…i

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Anglais philosophique/Philosophie anglo-saxonne. ANB102LY. Philippe Birgy

Rorty, lost lamb, has no patience for talk of Enlightenment-style rationalism (in the mode of Locke, Kant, or Rawls) that argues that it is irrational to choose to live in an illiberal or undemocratic state. Using “irrationality” as a yardstick to measure this choice is, Rorty thinks, useless. All we can say is that “theocratic states seem not to work very well [in] comparison with liberal democracies… we can cope, and theocracies cannot.”ii There is one main consequence Blackburn hopes we’ll consider before imbibing this postmodern Rortyan relativism: it renders one useless: Blackburn continues, …[G] iven his reputation as a fearsome radical, Rorty turns out not to be much use to anyone who fears that the US is on the way to becoming a world tyrant. Economic and military domination is, after all, extremely useful for those doing the dominating. It is even more useful if you can shelve the literature of classical liberalism, and discount the humanity of the dominated.…Rorty talk[s] in terms of intellectual virtues of curiosity, open-mindedness, diligence, modesty, and so on, and he even allows the idea of some audiences being better informed than others. But how can these virtues survive if they are stripped of all connection with the idea of an earned authority or of getting something right? iii Blackburn’s is a standard complaint against pragmatists and relativists. It boils down to this: by denying that there is an absolutely objective world that can be known—gotten right, is another reiterated mantra— the pragmatist subordinates knowledge to whatever dominates any given moment. Truth is then defined by the whims and desires of Darwinian pugilists or the victors of military domination.iv Once knowledge and truth are relativized (in Rorty’s case, to language) moral arguers are helpless, left without objective value protections; all philosophers have left is the power to rationalize the discounted humanity of the dominated. David L. Hildebrand, “Neopragmatism and the Relativist Menace” NOTES i Prospect, Issue 85: APRIL 2003 http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/ArticleView.asp?accessible=yes&P_Article=11896 ii Blackburn, ibid. iii Blackburn, ibid. iv John McDowell, far less of an antagonist to Rorty or pragmatism expresses a similar worry in Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). He wants to find a way to stand up for the constraints placed on our knowledge by "the way things are" without resorting either to a Given (of the kind Sellars warned us about) or a Davidson-style coherentism (where beliefs can be justified only by other beliefs, not by some kind of epistemic relation to something extra-mental). The prospect of looking for such a constraint in some shared (Kantian) ability to make concepts raises for McDowell "the spectre of a frictionless spinning in [the] void." (MW 18) We need, McDowell writes, "rational constraints on thinking and judging, from a reality external to them, if we are to make sense of them as bearing on a reality outside thought at all." (MW 25)

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