1. Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism
John Dewey and Richard Rorty

2. Richard Rorty’s Postmodernism and the Theory of Truth
Richard Rorty is arguably the most famous philosopher in the world for the last 30 years.
He learned both from German existentialism of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger and from the American pragmatism of William James and John Dewey.
Richard Rorty
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3. These two intellectual movements of German existentialism and American pragmatism merged together into an American version of postmodernism for which Rorty is responsible and which often is called neopragmatism.

4. Nietzsche was Rorty’s ideal of a “strong poet” who deals with the world where God is absent and where truth is nothing more than a subjective metaphor.

5. For Rorty, Nietzsche is as an “edifying philosopher” who opens “space… for the sense of wonder,” and a “prophet of diversity” who helps us envision a society in which “creative self-destiny” is valued.
(Philosophy as the Mirror of Nature 1979 and “Ein Prophet der Vielfalt 2000)

6. “It was Nietzsche who first explicitly suggested that we drop the whole idea of ‘knowing the truth’… and thus the idea of finding a single context for all human lives should be abandoned.”
(R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 1989)

7. Rorty focuses his philosophy on criticizing the principle of foundationalism, that is, the attempt to justify the objectivity of our knowledge of the world by “true” philosophical principles or “unquestionable” sense data.

8. Rorty sees all “primary” philosophical principles and all statements of sense data as infiltrated by human theories and perspectives.
For him, as for other neopragmatists there is no “God’s eye view” of the world.
As a philosopher Lawrence Cahoone concludes, “Foundationalism is dead. The person who wrote the obituary was Richard Rorty.”

9. Rorty argues that the search for the foundations of knowledge is a bankrupt enterprise;
our understanding is always mediated by what Rorty calls a “final vocabulary” of culture, which we impose on our experience.
The term “final vocabulary” means the widest set of our beliefs, ideas, and language, which always mediate between our statements of what we perceive and the objects of our perception. 

10. Rorty rejects what he calls “representationalism” - the notion that our language represents reality.
From this perspective, both realism and antirealism are answers to mistaken questions such as
“How do we know that our descriptions of the world are true?
What’s the relationship between knowledge and reality?”

11. Realists argue that we can prove that our ideas correspond to reality.
Antirealists argue that we can only show that our language corresponds to itself, that is, one bit of language corresponds to another. But there is no way to prove that any verbal claim corresponds to reality.

12. Rorty suggests that both claims are answers to a mistaken question.
We cannot examine the relation of our statements to reality.
We cannot stay outside of language and ask, ”Does language as a whole map onto the world?”

13. The relation of the vocabulary to reality can never be checked;
if I am wearing rose-colored glasses, everything looks rosy;
I can’t take these glasses off, therefore I can never know whether reality is really rose-colored or not.

14. Rorty rejects that whole notion of truth
Rorty rejects that whole notion of truth. He insists that it’s a mistake for philosophers to try to define what is “true.”
Our capacities for understanding the world are thoroughly linguistic; we inevitably translate into language whatever evidence we find in the world.

15. Rorty believes in the legitimacy of scientific knowledge, which help us navigate in everyday life.
His only objection is to philosophers’ attempt to prove that our knowledge is “true.”

16. There are three canonical theories of truth:
the correspondence theory,
the coherence theory, and
the pragmatic theory.
R argues that the pragmatic theory of truth isn’t in fact the theory of truth.
Pragmatism for R is the denial of the need for any theory of truth at all.

17. Rorty substitutes “solidarity” for objectivity as the precondition for truth.
He claims that we in the West should be “ethnocentric.”
There is no philosophical foundation that can tell us which ultimate values and commitments are the right ones.

18. Western “ethnocentrism,” in Rorty’s interpretation, means that we should follow a particular tradition of understanding truth as connected with individualism and science because that’s how the Western culture has evolved.

19. Through history, we in the West developed certain procedures for seeking truth, such as modern science.
Science is valid for us not because it is more true than every other method of looking for truth, but because we have used modern science and enlightenment methods in our society,
and, in the long run, we’ve wound up with better social conditions for everyone.

20. Rorty supports what he calls American-style politics, not linked to Marxism and not as “rhetorically shrill” as the politics of the French postmodernism, represented by Michel Foucault.

21. By undermining philosophical foundations, he can only offer an” ironic” defense of liberty and human welfare:
We argue for a political or social cause, but, at the same time, we recognize that we cannot give a foundation for our argument.

22. To the question:
“Why do you value freedom, individuality, and equality?” Rorty’s answer is
“The only reason I can give you is that it’s my culture, it’s my tradition, and I believe it’s good enough.”

23. In his talk to Latin-American philosophers twenty five years ago Rorty explains,
“We in the West, had John Locke, J-J Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson who gave us philosophical reasons for thinking the universe wants us to be free individuals living in a democracy.
“People in Latin America who live within military dictatorships may want to recruit a foundationalist philosophy that can prove that freedom is better than tyranny.

24. “You want foundational philosophies you can use as weapons in your fight against tyrants who control you.
“But you can’t use these philosophies anymore because foundationalism is dead.
“The only reason you can give for wanting to increase freedom in your societies is ethnocentrism.”

25. The only approach to the world Rorty can offer is a non-philosophical naturalism.
Our naïve, everyday, natural approach to the world has no philosophical justification.
Thus, while supporting progressive society and freedom Rorty doesn’t see any way to prove that he is right.

26. John Dewey’s Pragmatism and the Theory of Truth
In contrast to neopragmatism of Richard Rorty, John Dewey considers philosophy as the only way to consensus available in contemporary cultural situation.
John Dewey

27. Dewey suggests that philosophy focus on providing a guide to the evolution of culture, which otherwise oscillates between “outworn tradition” and “casual impulse.”
The business of philosophy is to accept and to utilize for a purpose the best available knowledge of its own time and place”
(Experience and Nature 1929)

28. Philosophy is responsible for criticizing the habits of mind, when “criticism” represents the concern about the consequences of our beliefs.
This concern about consequences is for Dewey a main discriminating characteristic between philosophy and other realms of cultural creativity, such as science, art, and literature.

29. “Philosophy as well as literature deals with the meanings of experience.”
In literature, however, the free imagination rules, and a successful writer is one who wins the imagination of the reader, while
philosophy has a great measure of responsibility for the consequences of its conclusions.
(Experience and Nature)

30. Philosophy is responsible for values that emerge through the exploration of causes and results of human actions.
That is why philosophy develops in a close cooperation with science with its expertise in natural processes.
The findings of science are the materials and tools with which philosophy operates.
The intelligent action in the world is necessarily based on the perception of its casual relations, for which philosophy is responsible.

31. To live successfully we need a perception of what the whole situation is at a given moment.
Hence the vital function of “general ideas” is, according to Dewey, “to guide our acts intelligently, instead of either blindly following habit, or being dazed by each new event as though we had never seen anything like it before…
It means looking ahead to forecast all the consequences of a decision.”
(Ethics 1932)

32. So what is the subject matter of philosophy: the “meaning” of life or the “truth” about life?
Dewey contemplated the two approaches in the context of the relationships among science, philosophy, and poetry.
The quality of “meaning” is inherent in its “richness” and “freedom” as well as in its “truth.”

33. The task of philosophy is “liberating and clarifying meanings, including those scientifically authenticated.”
Dewey uses the example of history; while not knowing “ultimate truth” about the past history enhances culture with meanings it discovers.
(Experience and Nature)

34. The most important cultural function of philosophy for Dewey is providing culture with meanings enhanced by scientific “truths.”
The importance of philosophy lies in “directing the way of life.”
We act in accordance with the “character” we assign to the world. When our actions fail, this failure forces us to surrender an unsuccessful picture of the world and develop a more “adequate” one.

35. “Man needs the earth in order to walk, the sea to swim or sail, the air to fly.
Of necessity he acts within the world, and in order to be, he must in some measure adapt himself as one part of nature to other parts”
(Experience and Nature).

36. Like Rorty, Dewey does denounces the absolute character of the truth found once and for all.
The world is continuously changing and so does the human condition.
No absolute truth can keep its finality during this process.

37. Unlike Rorty, however, Dewey assigns to philosophy the responsibility for constant revision of the world picture.
According to Dewey, philosophy functions as a “liaison officer,” whose task is mutual translation, communication, and appropriation of different fields of experience.
Philosophy supervises interactions among cultural meanings that continuously emerge during human actions in the world.

38. Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism
In his analysis of the relationship between American pragmatism and postmodernism, Larry Hickman confirms Richard Rorty’s observation that the classical pragmatists are “waiting at the end of the road” that postmodernists are still traveling.

39. The achievement attributed to the postmodernism is the rejection of foundationalism and the deconstruction of the “grand narrative” as the mandatory cultural context.
Yet a side effect of deconstructing the grand narratives of “God,” “Natural Law,” “Reason,” and “Progress” is the lack of a common symbolic system that would provide a cultural context for meaningful experience.

40. While postmodernism seems to be incompetent in providing meaning for either individual life or social cooperative action,
classical pragmatism seems to overcome separation and isolation of the individual.

41. John Dewey insists on an “intelligible use” of the term “individualism
He distinguishes between “possessive” and “developmental” types of individualism.

42. Possessive individualism is a “perversion of the whole ideal of individualism to conform to the practices of a pecuniary culture,” while
developmental individualism applies to “enriching the meanings of individual human life.”

43. “Within the flickering inconsequential acts of separate selves dwells a sense of the whole which claims and dignifies them.
In its presence we put off mortality and live in the universal.
The life of the community in which we live and have our being is the fit symbol of this relationship.”
(Human Nature and Conduct 1922)

44. For Dewey, “ongoing conversation” within human community is more important than any particular conclusion.
When engaging in dispute we should focus on successful social practices, rather than “doctrinal conformity.”

45. Dewey asserts that when we are looking for the answers to particular questions provided by social practices, we have little use for general conceptions and universal claims.
The only foundational claim that Dewey accepts is the orientation of culture toward “meliorism.” For him the need of truth is the need for the results in improving social conditions.

46. The end of the era of “grand narrative” might have twofold consequences.
It might bring us to see the varieties of human experience as “ungrounded and incommensurable” and thereby lacking any common context for cultural discussion, or
it might destroy the artificial divisions among “narratives” provided by different groups and coalitions.

47. According to Rorty, Dewey’s “vocabulary… allows room for unjustifiable hope and ungroundable but vital sense of human solidarity.”
("Method, Social Science, Social Hope” 1982)
However, Dewey’s philosophy provides a much richer (thicker in Geertz’s terms) cultural context than postmodernist “hyperrelativism.”
Dewey’s “social hope” means more than Rorty’s “whistling to keep his spirits up” (R. Sleeper)

48. Dewey’s democratic culture is founded on the underlying assumption that people “owe reasons to one another.”
Our moral obligation is not to avoid mistakes at any price (which is impossible anyway) but to “increase intelligence.”

49. While in agreement with postmodernists in a rejection of “foundationalist” certainty, Dewey is not a postmodernist but a “post-postmodernist” (in Hickman’s terms).
The art of living in terms of Dewey’s pragmatism seems to be the art of a continuous selection of an appropriate cultural resource.

50. The shift is made from asking:
“what is and should be the ultimate ground of our actions?”
to asking”
“what resources are available to us for dealing with these problems and opportunities?”

51. We live… in a haphazard mixture of a museum and a laboratory.
There is the problem of selection, of choice, of discrimination. What are the things in the past that are relevant to our own lives and how shall they be reshaped to be of use?..
Creation and criticism…To produce and then to see and judge what we and others have done in order that we may create again is the law of all natural activity.
(J. Dewey, “Construction and Criticism” 1930)

52. In terms of classical pragmatism, “anti-foundationalism” does not mean “formlessness” or “arbitrariness.”
Even Dewey’s most “deconstructive” ideas imply the sense of direction.

53. Culture continues only if it does not lose touch with “natural constraints.”
For Dewey it is not that “anything goes, that there are no rules for helping us to solve our problems. It is just that the old rules often no longer apply. We need new ones.”
(Ralph Sleeper, “Rorty’s Pragmatism: Afloat in Neurath’s Boat, But Why Adrift?”)