Abstract
The chapter reconstructs Rorty’s dismissal of realist positions in epistemology and semantics, his reframing of the realist claim that the world is determinate, material, and independent from our thoughts and descriptions, his position regarding scientific realism, and the comforting role that truth and realism play in metaphysical realism. Further, the chapter addresses the open question of whether Rorty had a realist turn toward the end of his career.
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Notes
- 1.
On this point, also see Michael Bacon on Rorty’s antiauthoritarianism in this handbook and Dieleman 2017.
- 2.
For a comprehensive outline of the “scheme-content” distinction: Baghramian 1998.
- 3.
In Consequences of Pragmatism and Truth and Progress, the same points with different foci sound like this: In “The World Well Lost,” Rorty argues that without the Kantian dualisms, there is no need for the realist notion of “the world.” Once, following Quine, analyticity and, following Sellars, the Myth of the Given are gone, and respectively once Kant’s “Ding and sich” together with the Kantian epistemology is gone, there is no need to bridge the gaps (Rorty 1982b, pp. 13–16). In “Antiskeptical weapons: Michael Williams vs. Donald Davidson” Rorty writes: Davidson “thinks the only way to get rid of the dualism of subject and object is to say that the purported gap between the two is an arbitrary line drawn across this web – a line that serves no purpose except to create a context within which Descartes and Stroud can get to work” (Rorty 1998a, p. 161).
- 4.
Also see the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism: language is not “a tertium quid between Subject and Object, nor […] a medium in which we try to form pictures of reality, but […] part of the behavior of human beings. On this view the activity of uttering sentences is one of the things people do in order to cope with their environment” (Rorty 1982a, p. xviii); and Rorty’s introduction to Truth and Progress: “the appearance-reality distinction falls for the useful-not-useful-distinction” (Rorty 1998b, p. 1).
- 5.
In “Realism and Reference” Rorty defines three notions of “reference.” The first one is common sense, which does not imply existence: “In this sense one can talk about phlogiston, Santa Claus etc. Then there is an intermediate notion […] in which one can only talk about what exists, but in which the truth of one’s remarks is not determined by the discovery of what one is talking about. Rather, the subject is changed. If one says ‘There are no such things as X’s; what you are talking about are Y’s,’ one does not mean that X’s are identical with Y’s” (Rorty 1976, p. 325). The third notion of reference “is fully transparent” (Rorty 1976, p. 325) and corresponds to the philosophical notions of Reference and Truth for which, in Rorty’s account, no one outside the practice of a certain kind of philosophy has any use.
- 6.
On Rorty never being against science but only against scientism also Brandom 2000a.
- 7.
This freedom comes in grades.
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Recommended Literature for Further Reading
Bernstein, Richard. 2014. So much the worse for your old intuitions; start working up some new ones. Contemporary Pragmatism 11(1): 5–14. Bernstein elaborates on Rorty’s take on intuitions and underlines the concept’s bearing in the discussion Rorty had with Ramberg and Brandom in 2000.
Dieleman, Susan. 2017. Realism, pragmatism, and critical social epistemology. In Pragmatism and justice, eds. Susan Dieleman, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil, 129–146. Oxford University Press. Dieleman spells out why and how Rorty’s antirepresentationalism pairs well with Critical Social Epistemology, especially Miranda Fricker’s concept of hermeneutical injustice, and gives concrete examples from the feminist and LGBT movements.
Ramberg, Bjørn. 2015. Davidson and Rorty: Triangulation and anti-foundationalism. In Life and world. The Routledge companion to hermeneutics, eds. Jeff Malpas and Hans-Helmut Gander, 216–235. London/New York: Routledge. Ramberg gives a comprehensive outline of Rorty’s and Davidson’s position regarding “triangulation” and “anti-foundationalism” and widens his interpretation of Rorty in the context of hermeneutics.
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Huetter-Almerigi, Y. (2023). Rorty on Realism, Antirealism, and Antirepresentationalism. In: Müller, M. (eds) Handbuch Richard Rorty. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16253-5_49
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