Ten PRAGMATISM AS ANTI- REPRESENTATIONALISM?

Ten

PRAGMATISM AS ANTI- REPRESENTATIONALISM?

Eva Picardi

1. Introduction

“Pragmatism as Anti-Representationalism” is the title of Richard Rorty’s introduction to the posthumously published book by John Murphy, Pragmatism: from Peirce to Davidson. The main tenet of anti-represen- tationalism is the rejection of the spectator view of knowledge and, according to Rorty and Murphy (or Murphy as read by Rorty), this re-orientation is part of the legacy of the Pragmatist tradition. Rorty credits Davidson with a number of fundamental insights that have helped to uncover the path leading from representationalist conceptions of belief contents to the pernicious doctrines of relativism and reductionism – scientism being a corollary of an extreme form of materialistic reductionism. A chief ingredient of representationalism is the idea – foreign to the tradition of American Pragmatism, as Rorty construes it – that truth can be characterized as a relation of correspondence between bits of language and bits of reality. Davidson has contributed like few others to showing the weakness of this picture, while still assigning a central role to the notion of truth in his theory of radical interpretation. Should anti-representationalism, as Rorty conceives it, be viewed as a substantive doctrine, or does the prefix “anti” signal the injunction to give up all attempts to construct systematic theories of epistemology that could replace the misleading pictures inherited from the Cartesian tradition? Rorty, when speaking on behalf of therapeutic Wittgensteinians, favors the latter reading: he is already beyond the representationalism/inferentialism dispute, for he declines to participate in it. However, Rorty does not follow this policy consistently, and occasionally slips into the role of the constructive Wittgensteinian. For instance, in his introduction to a reprint of Sellars’s classical essay of 1956, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, he applauds the distinction between representationalists and inferentialists made by Robert Brandom in his book, Making it Explicit. Unsurprisingly, the good guys fall squarely within the inferentialists’ camp, for it is within this broadly prag- matistic framework that the explicit interpretive equilibrium, described by 130 EVA PICARDI

Brandom as a form of social self-consciousness, can be realized. Rorty considers the notion of a social practice employed by Sellars and Brandom reminiscent of the tradition of Mead and Dewey. Seen from this perspective, inferentialism is a substantive doctrine whose aim is to replace the mistaken doctrine of representationalism. Who are the bad guys in Rorty’s scenario? The place of honor is occupied by Michael Dummett, with Thomas Nagel a close second, and by all those philosophers who take the issue of realism-antirealism seriously, concern themselves with the construction of substantive theories of meaning, and in their writings make use of notions belonging to traditional metaphysics.1 Since Brandom’s program is an obvious heir to Dummett’s justificationist theory of meaning, Rorty’s declared philosophical preference is surprising. But, as we shall see, there are significant differences between Dummett’s and Brandom’s philosophical programs – differences insufficient, however, to justify Rorty’s differential assessment. One of Dummett’s books bears the title The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, and makes a number of controversial claims on behalf of the role that the theory of meaning can play in solving traditional metaphysical disputes. In addition to a better grasp of the role played by the notion of truth in shaping the contents of our thoughts, Dummett also believes that we can shed light on old problems such as the freedom of the will, our conception of time and tense, and the dispute between Platonists and Intuitionists over the status of logical and mathematical propositions. In Rorty’s opinion, Dummett’s error is to remain in the thrall of these discredited metaphysical notions – an error that goes hand in hand with his rejection of the semantic holism of Quine and Davidson and an incurable nostalgia for foundations. Rorty holds Crispin Wright in higher esteem. Wright, unlike Dummett, places less weight on the semantic issue of bivalence and no longer works with a monolithic concept of truth. Moreover, Wright, unlike Dummett, is inclined to believe that the construction of a systematic theory of meaning is not a promising program in philosophy. However, in Rorty’s opinion, Wright fails to appreciate the lesson implicit in the pragmatists’ dismissal of metaphysics, and the deep truth of the philosophical quietism implicit in their works. According to Rorty, pragmatists share with the later Wittgenstein precisely this inclination to quietism, and a deflationary attitude towards the problems surrounding the relations between truth and meaning. Pragmatists – Rorty urges – should see themselves

as working at the interface between the common sense of their com- munity, a common sense much influenced by Greek metaphysics and by patriarchal monotheism, and the startlingly counter-intuitive self- image sketched by Darwin, and partially filled in by Dewey. They should see themselves as involved in a long term attempt to change the rhetoric, the common sense, and the self-image of their community.2