DMB, Here's more from that essay on Rorty's view of pragmatism versus positivism in the analytic tradition and philosophy of language:
"Among contemporary philosophers, pragmatism is usually regarded as an outdated philosophical movement – one which flourished in the early years of this century in a rather provincial atmosphere, and which has now been either refuted or aufgehoben. The great pragmatists – James and Dewey – are occasionally praised for their criticisms of Platonism (e.g., Dewey on traditional conceptions of education, James on metaphysical pseudo-problems). But their anti-Platonism is thought by analytic philosophers to have been insufficiently rigorous and by non-analytic philosophers to have been insufficiently radical. For the tradition which originates in logical positivism the pragmatists’ attacks on “transcendental,” quasi-Platonist philosophy need to be sharpened by more careful and detailed analysis of such notions as “meaning” and truth. For the anti-Philosophical tradition in contemporary French and German thought which takes its point of departure from Nietzsche’s criticism of both strands in nineteenth-century Philosophical thought – positivistic as well as transcendental – the American pragmatists are thinkers who never really broke out of positivism, and thus never really broke with Philosophy. I do not think that either of these dismissive attitudes is justified. on the account of recent analytic philosophy which I offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the history of that movement has been marked by a gradual “pragmaticisation” of the original tenets of logical positivism. On the account of recent “Continental” philosophy which I hope to offer in a book on Heidegger which I am writing, James and Nietzsche make parallel criticisms of nineteenth-century thought. Further, James’s version is preferable, for it avoids the “metaphysical” elements in Nietzsche which Heidegger criticises, and, for that matter, the “metaphysical” elements in Heidegger which Derrida criticises. On my view, James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy travelled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently travelling. I think that analytic philosophy culminates in Quine, the later Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson – which is to say that it transcends and cancels itself. These thinkers successfully, and rightly, blur the positivist distinctions between the semantic and the pragmatic, the analytic and the synthetic, the linguistic and the empirical, theory and observation. Davidson’s attack on the scheme/content distinction, in particular, summarises and synthesises Wittgenstein’s mockery of his own Tractatus, Quine’s criticisms of Carnap, and Sellars’s attack on the empiricist “Myth of the Given.” Davidson’s holism and coherentism shows how language looks once we get rid of the central presupposition of Philosophy: that true sentences divide into an upper and a lower division – the sentences which correspond to something and those which are “true” only by courtesy or convention. This Davidsonian way of looking at language lets us avoid hypostatising Language in the way in which the Cartesian epistemological tradition, and particularly the idealist tradition which built upon Kant, hypostatised Thought. For it lets us see language not as a tertium quid between Subject and Object, nor as a medium in which we try to form pictures of reality, but as part of the behaviour 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. The Deweyan notion of language as tool rather than picture is right as far as it goes. But we must be careful not to phrase this analogy so as to suggest that one can separate the tool, Language, from its users and inquire as to its “adequacy” to achieve our purposes. The latter suggestion presupposes that there is some way of breaking out of language in order to compare it with something else. But there is no way to think about either the world or our purposes except by using our language. One can use language to criticise and enlarge itself, as one can exercise one’s body to develop and strengthen and enlarge it, but one cannot see language-as-a-whole in relation to something else to which it applies, or for which it is a means to an end. The arts and the sciences, and philosophy as their self-reflection and integration, constitute such a process. of enlargement and strengthening. But Philosophy, the attempt to say “how language relates to the world” by saying what makes certain sentences true, or certain actions or attitudes good or rational, is, on this view, impossible. It is the impossible attempt to step outside our skins – the traditions, linguistic and other, within which we do our thinking and self-criticism – and compare ourselves with something absolute. This Platonic urge to escape from the finitude of one’s time and place, the “merely conventional” and contingent aspects of one’s life, is responsible for the original Platonic distinction between two kinds of true sentence. By attacking this latter distinction, the holistic “pragmaticising” strain in analytic philosophy has helped us see how the metaphysical urge – common to fuzzy Whiteheadians and razor-sharp “scientific realists” – works. It has helped us be sceptical about the idea that some particular science (say physics) or some particular literary genre (say Romantic poetry, or transcendental philosophy) gives us that species of true sentence which is not just a true sentence, but rather a piece of Truth itself. Such sentences may be very useful indeed, but there is not going to be a Philosophical explanation of this utility. That explanation, like the original justification of the assertion of the sentence, will be a parochial matter – a comparison of the sentence with alternative sentences formulated in the same or in other vocabularies. But such comparisons are the business of, for example, the physicist or the poet, or perhaps of the philosopher – not of the Philosopher, the outside expert on the utility, or function, or metaphysical status of Language or of Thought. The Wittgenstein-Sellars-Quine-Davidson attack on distinctions between classes of sentences is the special contribution of analytic philosophy to the anti-Platonist insistence on the ubiquity of language. This insistence characterises both pragmatism and recent “Continental” philosophising. Here are some examples: Man makes the word, and the word means nothing which the man has not made it mean, and that only to some other man. But since man can think only by means of words or other external symbols, these might turn around and say: You mean nothing which we have not taught you, and then only so far as you address some word as the interpretant of your thought... ... . the word or sign which man uses is the man himself Thus my language is the sum-total of myself; for the man is the thought. (Peirce) Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign. (Derrida) ... psychological nominalism, according to which all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short all awareness of abstract entities – indeed, all awareness even of particulars – is a linguistic affair. (Sellars) It is only in language that one can mean something by something. (Wittgenstein) Human experience is essentially linguistic. (Gadamer) ... man is in the process of perishing as the being of language continues to shine ever brighter upon our horizon. (Foucault) Speaking about language turns language almost inevitably into an object ... and then its reality vanishes. (Heidegger) This chorus should not, however, lead us to think that something new and exciting has recently been discovered about Language – e.g., that it is more prevalent than had previously been thought. The authors cited are making only negative points. They are saying that attempts to get back behind language to something which “grounds” it, or which it “expresses,” or to which it might hope to be “adequate,” have not, worked. The ubiquity of language is a matter of language moving into the vacancies left by the failure of all the various candidates for the position of “natural starting-points” of thought, starting-points which are prior to and independent of the way some culture speaks or spoke. (Candidates for such starting-points include clear and distinct ideas, sense-data, categories of the pure understanding, structures of prelinguistic consciousness, and the like.) Peirce and Sellars and Wittgenstein are saying that the regress – of interpretation cannot be cut off by the sort of “intuition” which Cartesian epistemology took for granted. Gadamer and Derrida are saying that our culture has been dominated by the notion of a “transcendental signified” which, by cutting off this regress, would bring us out from contingency and convention and into the Truth. Foucault is saying that we are gradually losing our grip on the “metaphysical comfort” which that Philosophical tradition provided – its picture of Man as having a “double” (the soul, the Noumenal Self) who uses Reality’s own language rather than merely the vocabulary of a time and a place. Finally, Heidegger is cautioning that if we try to make Language into a new topic of Philosophical inquiry we shall simply recreate the hopeless old Philosophical puzzles which we used to raise about Being or Thought. This last point amounts to saying that what Gustav Bergmann called “the linguistic turn” should not be seen as the logical positivists saw it – as enabling us to ask Kantian questions without having to trespass on the psychologists’ turf by talking, with Kant, about “experience” or “consciousness.” That was, indeed, the initial motive for the “turn,” but (thanks to the holism and pragmatism of the authors I have cited) analytic philosophy of language was able to transcend this Kantian motive and adopt a naturalistic, behaviouristic attitude toward language. This attitude has led it to the same outcome as the “Continental” reaction against the traditional Kantian problematic, the reaction found in Nietzsche and Heidegger. This convergence shows that the traditional association of analytic philosophy with tough-minded positivism and of “Continental” philosophy with tender-minded Platonism is completely misleading. The pragmaticisation of analytic philosophy gratified the logical positivists’ hopes, but not in the fashion which they had envisaged. it did not find a way for Philosophy to become “scientific,” but rather found a way of setting Philosophy to one side. This post-positivistic kind of analytic philosophy thus comes to resemble the Nietzsche-Heidegger-Derrida tradition in beginning with criticism of Platonism and ending in criticism of Philosophy as such. Both traditions are now in a period of doubt about their own status. Both are living between a repudiated past and a dimly seen post-Philosophical future." Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
