The Pluralist

Rosa M. Calcaterra's new book is a critical interpretation of Richard Rorty's intellectual path as structured around the problem of normativity. How can we justify our normative claims in epistemology, morality, and politics, without lapsing into either ahistorical foundationalism or some form of skepticism? Calcaterra discusses the Rortyan answers to this question with a critical but sympathetic eye. In doing so, she stresses Rorty's relation to the broader pragmatist family even more than Rorty himself would have been willing to do. Overall, three major strategies to bridge contingency and normativity emerge from the book. The first centers on meliorism as a powerful instrument to make sense of the idea of progress in a non-foundationalist scenario. The second deals with procedural hermeneutic criteria (such as the Davidsonian "principle of charity") that help us carry out our social interactions in a responsible manner. Finally, the third analyzes those widespread traits of human experience that oblige us to turn our backs on all practices involving humiliation, cruelty, and oppression.

After a concise preface, the book's opening chapter serves as an introduction by reconstructing the first period of Rorty's intellectual development and its main turning points. Calcaterra focuses specifically on the 1961 transition between Yale and Princeton as the biographical shift that catalyzed Rorty's detachment from analytic philosophy and his embracing of pragmatism. Calcaterra takes Rorty's early, perceptive reading of Peirce (especially the 1961 essay on "Pragmatism, Categories, and Language") as evidence that his acquaintance with the founder of pragmatism was much less dismissive than some interpreters have taken it to be.

The subsequent two chapters make up the epistemological bulk of the book. Chapter 2 focuses on the much-discussed question of experience versus language. As is well known, Rorty ushered in a heated debate among philosophers with his attempt to move pragmatism away from the Deweyan focus on experience and closer to the twentieth-century linguistic turn. Calcaterra discusses some of the most prominent critics of this project, such as Joe Margolis and Richard Shusterman. While taking their misgivings seriously, she defends what she takes to be Rorty's deepest philosophical point, namely, [End Page 126] that experience is always already a "linguistic construct" (27), and goes on to present a "temperate" reading of the latter's emphasis on language.

On Calcaterra's account, the notion of a pre- or extra-linguistic experience does not disappear altogether from Rorty's philosophy. Instead, it keeps working covertly as the ineliminable anchor of our linguistic practices. As she puts it in the conclusion of the book, "it would be senseless to say that [Rorty] does not include in the very functioning of our linguistic ability the effective role of certain 'natural' human dispositions, exigencies, potentialities and physical vulnerabilities" (128). Furthermore, it is precisely thanks to the existence of this non-linguistic dimension that we can appeal to the normative force of such moral obligations as the obligation to fight humiliation or cruelty. In fact, Calcaterra goes so far as to say that our "vulnerability to pain and suffering" is (or should be) a "universal criterion"—even for a radical anti-universalist as Rorty (96).

In chapter 3, Calcaterra expands on the problem of epistemic normativity by focusing in particular on the main topics of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, namely, anti-representationalism and the status of philosophy vis-à-vis modern science. Here, Calcaterra's discussion is oriented toward the metaphilosophical implications of Rorty's arguments. The American philosopher was famously at pains to conceive of philosophy not so much as a legislator of other cultural domains—such as science or religion—but rather as one critical voice among many in the cultural "conversation" of humankind. Calcaterra insists that this project is by no means tantamount to declaring the end of philosophy. Instead, it entails a radical re-articulation of philosophy's goals.

In this re-articulation, the concept of culture becomes particularly significant—though not in the sense adumbrated by Dewey in his late notes...