I - Richard Rorty

Summary

Richard Rorty has flirted with the label “postmodern”; and, in any case, critics typically see his views as a rejection of modernist rationality. There is no doubt that he rejects classical modern construals of rationality in terms of representationalism and foundationalism. The question is whether his critique of epistemology is an attack on reason itself. He may think he is merely exhibiting the deficiencies of modern explications of knowledge, but, his critics maintain, he excludes any coherent notion of knowledge and leaves us caught in a morass of relativism, subjectivism, or skepticism. Critics are even more disturbed by what they take to be the moral consequences of Rorty's pragmatism. I think there are some important deficiencies in Rorty's position: in epistemology, it fails to come to terms with the fundamental truth of realism (both in science and in everyday life) and, in ethics, it tends toward a deeply misleading decisionism and overrates the value of moral pluralism. Nonetheless, I still regard Rorty's pragmatic appoach as one of the best starting points for contemporary philosophical reflection, and this chapter is intended to develop the rudiments of my pragmatic liberalism by a critical appropriation of some of his key ideas. Rorty's pragmatism is certainly critical of classical formulations of the Enlightenment project. But, as I will show, properly clarified and modified, it renews rather than rejects the fundamental Enlightenment idea of human autonomy through reason.