This chapter provides an introduction to American pragmatism as an ethical tradition with educational ramifications. The chapter first explains the origins of pragmatism and accounts for the primary features of pragmatist ethics. It then profiles the ethical views and educational bearings of two classical pragmatists: William James and John Dewey, and the most prominent neopragmatist, Richard Rorty. The chapter shows how pragmatism, from its nineteenth-century origins to its contemporary iterations, approaches education as integral to the ethical and political cultivation of a vibrant, pluralistic, democratic culture. Its philosophical orientation – away from the fixed and timeless and toward the contingent and contextualized – conceives of humans as active but fallible agents pursuing knowledge to address the concrete problems of their communities. Despite their differences, James, Dewey, and Rorty recognized the need to foster individual habits and collective sensibilities that center our moral imaginations, sympathetic attachments to others, and our situatedness in concrete social and natural environments.

In “Remarks on Nishida and Nishitani,” Rorty examines Kyoto School philosophers Nishida Kitaro and Nishitani Keiji in relation to the pragmatist tradition. Characterizing their epistemological orientations as the “Argument from Holism to Monism,” Rorty likens their perspectives to the idealism of T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Josiah Royce. He then contrasts those perspectives with the “Argument from Holism to Pragmatism” advanced by William James and John Dewey. He concludes by embracing those aspects of Nishida’s and Nishitani’s positions that are consistent with pragmatism’s “democratic humanism,” but rejecting their traces of transcendence, all while offering one of the more concise accounts of his classical and neopragmatist commitments.

In “Bald Naturalism and McDowell’s Hylomorphism,” Rorty distinguishes between two views of the mind’s relation to the world. One view, which he calls “bald naturalism” and attributes to Donald Davidson, sees the mind as a network of intentional states profitable to attribute to certain complexly behaving objects to predict and control their interactions with the environment. The other view, which he dubs “naturalized Platonism” or “hylomorphism” and attributes to John McDowell, sees the mind as a device for getting the world right, where this process consists in the reproduction of the world in the mind. Rorty then uses the distinction to assess the force of McDowell’s criticisms of Davidson’s bald naturalism in Mind and the World. He argues, first, that those criticisms rely on attributing to Davidson a set of views only expressible in terms for which there is no place in his bald naturalism. Second, Rorty holds that those terms belong to McDowell’s hylomorphism and that this view needs to be abandoned, along with the intuitions it expresses. The paper makes this case by pointing to various counterintuitive consequences of McDowell’s view, such as its implication that the world has its own language.

This paper and the one that follows it exemplify Rorty’s use of his early metaphilosophical insights to take on then-prominent topics in linguistic philosophy. “The Paradox of Definitism” critiques modern philosophy’s pervasive privileging, in metaphysics and epistemology, of sharp-edged definiteness over fuzzy indefiniteness, where the latter is deemed a function of human “ignorance and confusion,” rather than, with Aristotle, seen as something existing in nature. Dubbing this bias “definitism,” Rorty characterizes it as “the view that there is nothing which can reasonably be called a statement which is neither true nor false.” A “resurrection’ of pragmatism, he argues, with its contextualism, creates problems for definitists. But he also invites definitists into the pragmatist camp to avoid the paradox they face by recognizing Dewey’s insight that “every transaction will involve both fuzzy and non-fuzzy elements” and Peirce’s view of logic “as a normative rather than a descriptive discipline.”

In “Reductionist vs. Neo-Wittgensteinian Semantics,” Rorty does two things: proposes a distinction between reductionist and neo-Wittgensteinian semantics and suggests we see Robert Brandom’s philosophy as contributing to the latter. By “reductionist semantics,” Rorty means a semantics that aims at purifying language by finding equivalent and more perspicuous expressions for expressions we currently use. “Neo-Wittgensteinian semantics” entails a semantics for which such a program does not make any sense because it assumes any expression has a perfectly respectable meaning merely by virtue of having a use. It is “neo-Wittgensteinian” because the view of meaning as use originates in Philosophical Investigations, and “neo-Wittgensteinian” because it relies on how that view was later developed by the likes of Quine, Sellars, Davidson, and Brandom. Having explained why Brandom should be so classified, Rorty then proceeds to discuss Brandom’s most valuable and original contribution to this type of semantics: Brandom’s account, in Making It Explicit, of the constraints on the use of marks and noises that make it possible for us to be said to be reasoning rather than simply sounding off in habitual, accepted ways.

The most accessible paper in this volume, “Philosophy as Ethics” traces the historical origins of philosophy and the initial spur to philosophizing to the desire to justify values. Ethics, on this view, includes “aesthetics, political philosophy, and the philosophical parts of moral theology” and is at the root of the main branches of philosophy – metaphysics, logic, epistemology, even science. Yet it is only when questions cease to have ethical implications, Rorty argues, that they are ceded to these areas of inquiry. In the spirit of William James, Rorty underscores the futility of the two-thousand-year “pathetic history” of failed attempts to justify ethical imperatives. Still, he finds a positive lesson here, arguing that “a bad reason may be a good story.” He uses James’s theory of truth to show that there is a pragmatic way to argue an “ought” to an “is” that avoids problems associated with positivism and foundationalism.

Rorty’s only extensive and systematic treatment of Saul Kripke’s work, “Kripke on Mind-Body Identity” puts Kripke’s arguments back into an often overlooked historical and philosophical context that sheds new light on them and their viability and overall significance. Anyone interested in mind-brain identity theory, in particular, those who think it was shown to be untenable by Kripke’s criticisms and remain puzzled by its still being alive and well, will appreciate Rorty’s explanations why those criticisms, in fact, must “leave the issue about mind-body identity where it stood.” Rorty predicts that in the wake of Kripke’s criticisms, “The old issues will go over into the new vocabulary – with less talk about meaning and more about reference, but without dialectical loss to either side.”

“The Current State of Philosophy in the United States“ begins by asking why the sense of crisis prevalent within the contemporary humanities seems absent from American philosophy departments. Rorty proposes that this is because these departments are largely analytic and analytic philosophy does not consider itself a humanistic discipline. He then traces that view to the logical positivists’ attempt to put philosophy on the secure path of a science by developing a rigorous method of conceptual analysis. He argues that while the project of conceptual analysis had collapsed, analytic philosophy retained a sense of being a science and its sense of superiority to other traditions in philosophy and other humanistic fields. Finally, he proceeds to show some negative consequences of the dominance of this model in American philosophy departments by comparing analytic philosophy with continental philosophy and putting it in a larger academic and social context. Among the consequences are a growing isolation from other academic fields, as well as the insufficient attention analytic philosophy gives to philosophy written in languages other than English, to the history of philosophy, and to questions of social justice.

In “Brandom’s Conversationalism: Davidson and Making It Explicit,” Rorty offers a clear and concise summary of the main argument of Brandom’s book its proximity to Davidson’s thought, and its particular limitations. Rorty takes the reader through a careful, point-by-point explication of where in their respective texts Brandom and Davidson endorse each other’s positions and where the apparent divergences in their attempts to naturalize semantics and philosophy of mind are not differences that make a difference. Rorty pays particular attention to where Brandom violates his claim that “there is no realm in which concepts do not apply” to endorse the existence of nonlinguistic facts.

“Philosophy as Epistemology: Reply to Hacking and Kim” replies to criticisms of Rorty’s work made by Ian Hacking and Jaegwon Kim. While both expressed some sympathy with Rorty’s rejection of foundationalism about knowledge, they believed, pace Rorty, that philosophy can still say something interesting about knowledge that other fields cannot say. The paper tries to show that these two positions cannot be consistently held at the same time. Philosophy can either have something distinctive and interesting to say about knowledge, but only at the price of succumbing to foundationalism, or it can avoid foundationalism, but only at the price of being unable to say anything interesting and distinctive about knowledge. The paper also addresses a few more specific points made by Kim and Hacking in their criticisms, clarifying, correcting or refining Rorty’s position on issues such as conventions, truth-makers, and hermeneutics, as well as on Kant and Foucault.

“Naturalized Epistemology and Norms: Replies to Goldman and Fodor” addresses the views of Alvin Goldman and Jerry Fodor and concerns the question of how much psychology can contribute to epistemology. The position Rorty adopts is that it contributes very little and that whatever it can is of not much use because epistemology is of not much use in the first place. The paper develops this point by drawing on Rorty’s views on mind and knowledge and applying them to Goldman’s distinction between three kinds of epistemology (descriptive, analytic, and normative) as well as to Fodor’s project of explaining the intentionality of mental states by referring to the semantic properties of mental representations. The paper concludes by situating its criticisms of Fodor and Goldman in the larger context of the conflict between realism and pragmatism in the philosophy of mind.

This paper aims to explain why the question about “the objectivity of values” is a bad one. It begins by investigating its historical roots in Plato and in the philosophy of the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries. It then argues that the question presupposes a distinction between qualities of objects that are “in them” and those that are “in us,” a distinction Rorty suggests is pointless. In light of this stance, it goes on to criticize J. L. Mackie’s famous argument that there are no objective values, the notion of moral principles, and the very idea of moral philosophy.

In “Reductionism,” Rorty takes up the question “Can we abandon reductive analysis as a method of philosophical discovery and still keep the intellectual gains which have accrued from its employment as a method of deciding what questions to discuss?” Rorty uses the notion of reductionism to both present a synoptic vision of the history of Western philosophy and put forward an original metaphilosophical position. After presenting the twentieth-century program of reductive linguistic analysis as a mature form of the seventeetn century’s “reductionist conception” of the goal of inquiry, he examines J. O. Urmson’s arguments, ultimately finding that Urmson falls short of applying reductive analysis to the technical vocabularies of philosophers. Even though Rorty agrees with Urmson that most reductive analyses, judged by their own standards, are unsuccessful, Rorty nevertheless thinks a basis for distinguishing useful from useless analyses is possible. We also see here Rorty’s early interest in eliminability, which shortly thereafter becomes the basis for a distinctive contribution.

The first text where Rorty addresses Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics in this paper Rorty explains the reasons for his lack of interest in the French thinker’s views. A nice companion to the “Kant as a Critical Philosopher” paper, Rorty here suggests that both phenomenology and linguistic analysis are united by the shared enemy of Cartesianism. Rorty judges the linguistic analyst to be the better candidate of the two to lead “the anti-Cartesian revolution” and distills their position to three central metaphilosophical claims: the Pragmatist thesis; the Naturalistic thesis; and the Conventionalist thesis. He uses this platform to critique Ricoeur’s phenomenological approach to problems in the philosophy of language.