Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism by Richard Rorty

Author:Richard Rorty [Rorty, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2021-08-16T22:00:00+00:00

Nagel’s paradigm of the use of a higher-order view to explain a lower-order view as part of the world is Locke’s use of corpuscularian physics to explain our use of the vocabulary of colors. Intellectual optimism, in his sense, is the hope that we shall get more and more “objective” explanations of how we behave and talk. In contrast, Deweyans regard what Locke and physiological optics accomplished not as a vertical progression from lower to higher orders, or from the inside view to an outside view, but as the development of one more tool for the improvement of man’s estate. So when confronted with Nagel’s claim that we must go beyond intellectual optimism to humility, to the realization that no conceivable higher-order view taken by humans will exhaust the world, Deweyans have to see this claim as itself one more tool—one more sketch of a language-game which human beings may find it useful to play. But of course Nagel will view this way of taking his suggestion as one more way of putting human beings in the center—one more version of the deflationary impulse which led to verificationism.

What seems to me most interesting about the opposition between Nagel on the one hand and Dewey and Wittgenstein on the other is that it is not going to be resolved by argument, or by the production of new evidence. It is an admirable example of the ability of competing philosophers to spin cocoons around themselves by providing comprehensive redescriptions of what both rival philosophers and they themselves are doing—redescriptions so comprehensive as to form self-sustaining linguistic practices, practices which can offer a redescription of everything but an answer to nothing.

The wide and intense interest aroused by Nagel’s work seems to me due to the fact that he has appreciated, better than anyone else, the radically pragmatist and pan-relationalist implications of the later Wittgenstein’s thought. Unlike such less subtle “realist” philosophers as John Searle, Nagel realizes that the issue between himself and his opponents is beyond the reach of argument—that these opponents do not differ from him because they are stupid, but because they are playing a different language-game, one Nagel cannot imagine playing. One of the few points on which Nagel and I agree is that each of us can redescribe everything the other says in ways to which there is no argumentative reply. All that either of us can hope is a conversion experience, an overcoming of what is at present a psychological impossibility.

Consider Nagel’s remark that

If Wittgenstein is right, then my claim to have formed a significant thought about what is entirely beyond the reach of our minds clearly won’t stand up … But though I have no alternative, I find it completely impossible to believe Wittgenstein’s view—psychologically impossible.”9

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