School of thought

Neo-Pragmatism

Movement

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Classification

Period
c. 1979 CE onward
Regions
North America (origin)
Domains
Epistemology, Philosophy of Language

Overview

Neo-Pragmatism recasts and radicalizes classical pragmatism's anti-foundationalism. Rorty argued that philosophy should abandon the quest for objective truth and instead see knowledge as a matter of social conversation and solidarity. Brandom developed inferentialism — meaning is constituted by inferential relations between concepts. Putnam sought to reconcile realism with pragmatist insights.

Key ideas

  • Anti-Representationalism: Rorty: the mind does not 'mirror' nature. Knowledge is not a representation of reality but a set of practices for coping with the world. Drop the mirror metaphor.
  • Solidarity Over Objectivity: We should not seek to transcend our community's standards to reach 'objective truth' but instead expand the community of conversation and deepen mutual understanding.
  • Inferentialism: Brandom: the meaning of a concept is determined by its role in inferences — what it follows from and what follows from it — not by what it refers to.

Key figures

Richard Rorty · Hilary Putnam · Robert Brandom · Cornel West

Influenced by

  • Analytic Philosophy
  • Post-Structuralism
  • Pragmatism

    Rorty called Dewey one of the three most important philosophers of the century, and Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature carries Dewey's attack on the spectator theory of knowledge into its case against analytic epistemology.

References

  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Richard Rorty
  • Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Richard Rorty, §§1–2; Pragmatism, §1.2 — Formation: Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), written at Princeton.
  • Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature — Richard Rorty
  • Making It Explicit — Robert Brandom