The Journal of Value Inquiry 23: 259-274, 1989. �9 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Moral and political implications of pragmatism

J. van BRAKEL B.A.C. SAUNDERS Department of Cultural Anthropology, University of Utrecht, P.O. Box 80.140, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands

The purpose of this paper is to raise a point about the moral and political implications of pragmatism. To make our point, the story must be con- crete: we present certain philosophical views of Putnam and Rorty painting Putnam white and Rorty black. By performing on our stage as the white and black knight, together they serve a good cause. 1

We should stress at the outset that we are sympathetic to a point made by both Putnam and Rorty as well as others, that there is no reason to think of argument as good and rhetoric as bad, or to think of science as objective and ethics or literary criticism as subjective. Our aim in this paper is not to present a narrowly conceived argument, but to raise an issue that may promote subsequent discussion.

To set the scene we first comment on early American pragmatism and some central Enlightenment ideas and we explain what we mean by "moral and political implications". Then, we present certain aspects of

Rorty's position, followed by a summary and elaboration of the central part of Putnam's The Many Faces of Realism. 2 We go on to compare the types of pragmatism present in the positions of Rorty and Putnam (as we depict them) and end with a plea for the belief that it makes sense to say that certain things are good and others are bad.

Early American Pragmatism and the enlightenment

When we use the terms "pragmatism" or "pragmatic realism" we do not want them to be confused with any kind of contemporary political pragmatism or realism. Philosophical Pragmatism in general, is not the same as the political doctrine which say, Thatcher and Reagan have staked out for themselves. Nevertheless, it is tempting to see the genius locus of

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their political credos, that is, their pseudo-democracies-without-moral- dimensions, 3 in William James' definition of truth: that which "works" or

has "cashvalue" is true. 4 But this would be a very grave misunderstand- ing of what philosophical Pragmatism is about - although, as we hope to show, Rorty can be accused of misusing Pragmatism in the same way as Reagan and Thatcher. 5

Early American Pragmatist thinkers (Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, and Lewis) developed theories which are diametrically opposed to the contem- porary political use of the terms pragmatism and realism. 6 The original Pragmatists worked out their ideas in fierce response to one another, yet held in common theories of thought and mind as aspects of behaviour.

Thought and mind were meaningless abstractions unless related in some way to on-going behaviour. This did not imply "behaviorism" (as it is nowadays called), but that the relationship of thought and mind to be-

haviour was purposeful, such that beliefs, if true, would be instrumental in leading us satisfactorily from experience to experience. From this fol- lowed their rejection of the spectator theory of knowledge - that is, that the mind would passively process the external world as it is without any form of mediation.

Secondly, the early Pragmatists also rejected the Enlightenment idea that the passions or emotions are to be separated from "objective" percep- tions of the world. 7

They rejected both theories totally, i.e. the "copy-theory" of truth and the separation of emotive and cognitive categories. They claimed instead, that we make knowledge - scientific, moral, aesthetic and all the rest - out of "made-up" facts which are made out of other made-up facts; and this made-up knowledge, based on made-up facts, makes up reality. 8 Hence Pragmatists can be called realists, in the common-sense meaning of realism with a small "r" (not in the sense of Realism capitalised, which

goes with a copy-theory of truth). Moreover, Pragmatists are realists in the sense that they claim there is as much a moral reality, as there is a physical reality. What we can say about any reality is true or false, without there being any grand claims about truth. Truth is merely that which makes the world intelligible, what which fits more or less with everything else, that which makes our experiences coherent and in some sense meaningful. On these premises, interpretations or world-makings of scientific, aesthetic and moral knowledge are equal - equally coherent and integral features of deliberative behaviour, equally made-up by facts about reality. 9 Scientific facts are not more true or more objective than artistic or moral facts; and

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artistic and moral facts are not in some sense more subjective than scien-

tific facts. 10 The Enlightenment dichotomies of fact and value, subjective

and objective, are therefore considered completely irrelevant by the Pragmatists. The various domains of behaviour become equal, and all

knowledge is seen as a social construction.

William James' definition of truth in terms of what "works" or has "cash-value", can now be seen in a different light, as that which gets us

along in the world, as that on which to build, or that which can be wrong

and has to be rejected or revised. Hence, although we are in a process of revision all the time, making and remaking reality, we nevertheless make do with what we 've got, with all the limitations implicit in that, and are

willing to call that which is true today, false tomorrow. Truth (not capital- ized) mutates, depending on the facts and realities we make. Does this mean that pragmatism is a form of relativism? We'U argue below that this

is the case for Rorty, but not for Putnam. Thirdly, the Enlightenment had another, even more central idea, which

was that All Humanity is One. Aristotle had already suggested that our

unity is rooted in our rationality, ll Following a certain strand of Enlighten- ment thought, some anthropologists have argued that we must assume that people everywhere are more or less equally rational. 12 Thus the doctrine of

the Rational Unity of Humanity forces on us - as if from outside - the view that cultures, customs and ideas cannot be subjected to comparative

assessment (only God might be able to do that). We cannot therefore criticize cultures, customs or ideas because they are all equal. All possible meaningful differentiations are levelled, all values are transvalued, the Other becomes the Same, and pluralism becomes monism.13 However, if

Rationality articulates conceptual schemes or worlds, if Rationality is best exemplified in criticizing, evaluating, and leaming about cultures, cus- toms, and ideas, then Rationality clashes, profoundly, with its own notion

of the Unity of Humanity. The deep error here, is a view of human rationality which is passive and individualistic, a product of the solus ipse, rather than a view of rationality that is active, critical, social and construc-

tive. It is an error that limits "critical assessment of human works, it disarms us, dehumanizes us, leaves us unable to enter into communicative interaction; that is to say, unable to criticize cross-culturally, cross-sub-

culturally, cross-individually; ultimately it leaves no room for criticism at all. ''14 It leads in fact to the most extreme form of cultural relativism. It is this relativistic, solipsistic, and nihilistic dimension - correctly predicted

by Nietzsche as being one of the inevitable fates of the Enlightenment -

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that has recently become popular as a response to dissatisfaction with other Enlightenment ideas.

Morality and rationality

Both Putnam and Rorty are presented in recent literature as exemplary present-day American Pragmatists and as pioneers in integrating the so- called analytic and continental philosophies. But, we believe there are vast differences between them, and that these differences are precisely to do with our notions of truth and reality, as well as with how to understand and interpret the works of the early American Pragmatists. This difference is already apparent from the fact that Putnam would seem to align himself with the modernists, such as Habermas, and Rorty presents himself as one of the leading spokesmen of the post-modem era. 1~ He flirts with Nietzsche and Derrida and claims to be a new-style Pragmatist, inspired by the works of John Dewey.

Hence, just like early Pragmatism, the New Pragmatism is disunified, However, we want to go further and show that there is a fundamental moral distinction between the positions of Rorty and Putnam. We'll indicate this difference by calling Putnam a pragmatist and Rorty a relativist. Putnam gives an alternative for certain dangerous aspects of the Enlightenment. Rorty only draws the dangerous sides of the Enlighten- ment into the extreme.

We have already indicated how the early Pragmatists opposed the Enlightenment ideas of a correspondence theory of truth and a strict division of facts and values. The moral and political implications of this heritage of a false morality based on an absolute, rigidified, and formal- ized rationality has been discussed by many, and one illustration will suffice. Sabini and Silver ask how the following entry in the diary of an S.S. Professor at Auschwitz is possible: 16

"September 6, 1942. Today, Sunday, excellent lunch: tomato soup, half a hen with potatoes and red cabbage (20g. fat), sweets, marvellous vanilla ice .... in the evening at 8.00 hours outside for Sonderaktion".

Sabini and Silver ask: How can a Sonderaktion - the burning of live prisoners, and especially children - be mentioned in the same breath, be given less importance, than an excellent lunch? In their analysis of this problem they claim, as Durkheim and the American Pragmatists had done

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before them, that moral matters are objective and external, part of the structure of society.

It is this problem hit on by Sabini and Silver which we think is what is at the back of Pumam's pragmatic realism and is missing in Rorty's philosophy. What we intend to show in the rest of this paper, is that Rorty fails, where Putnam succeeds: Rorty advocates rhetoric simpliciter,

lacking moral dimensions, and Putnam, like Socrates, demands true

rhetoric.

R o r t y ' s p o s i t i o n

Rorty despises truth, reality, objectivity, validity in argument, and clarity of definition. 17 He rejects foundational epistemology and ahistorical realism. He claims there is no intellectual supremacy, privileged position or purveyance of the essence of rationality for philosophy. Philosophy is just a big pre tender - nothing more.

According to Rorty, we have no objectivity whatsoever. We have texts and lumps. 18 Lumps are what used to be called objective things in the world, studied mainly by scientific, or quasi-scientific methods. Texts are, well, just texts, - that is to say - they have no author, or at least, not one that we need to understand the text. Rorty has taken up and re-read one of Dewey's assertions: if we say that a statement is "true", we only agree with it, admit it, concede it or confirm it. Rorty reads this as saying: We are never saying anything descriptive about the world or any other subject matter. He pushed this point to extremes at the 1985 1 lth Inter-American Congress, where he provoked bitter reaction and response. 19 He pretended to deliver the last word on the world-historical fusion of Continental and Anglo-American thought, which obviously is taking place in his own work - the main themes of which are: recent Continental and British philosophies are more similar than they are different; there is no genuine representation of the world (as we all know, it is well lost), there are only texts about the world, and "reweaving our beliefs and desires" is the only game left to play. Philosophy should not try to describe political reality, and philosophers should not try to be the avant-garde of political move- ments. With regard to politics, philosophy can only operate within the category of hope - exercising its function as play and constructing ideas of utopia. All this, Rorty implies, is best understood through his own brand of pragmatism. But, as Auxter says "When Rorty urged philosophers to

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defend the European model of the university as an "enclave of freedom", that rejects political agendas and lives in the "spirit of playfulness", the audience suspected a covert political agenda that finds reason to ignore the suffering of the oppressed, at the same time as it justifies its own condition of leisure". 2~

We can sum up Rorty's position in his own words: "All that is needed to make communication and persuasion and thus Knowledge possible, is ... agreement on a reasonable number of propositions, using the relevant term". 21 Hence, many of the people from the other Americas - Mexico, Central America, South America and Canada, were angered by Rorty's philosophy, because it urges agreement with his "relevant terms" (which is what Rorty calls "solidarity" in some of his other publi- cations). 22

Putnam recognises just how dangerous Rorty's philosophy or similar forms of relativism are. He maintains that agreement on criteria of justification is never, ever, enough. It is not enough in the case of science, in the case of painting and poetry, in the case of law, in the case of medicine, in politics, or anywhere else. Agreement might be all right as our ultimate court of appeal if we all belonged to one community, or one world, or one reality. But each of us knows that we move through multiple communities, multiple worlds, multiple realities, just within ourselves, even before we move out into wider communities. Only when we've realised this, can we start to appreciate some of the subtleties of trying to understand and translate different individuals, different sub-sub-cultures, different sub-cultures, and different cultures.

Rorty has substituted in place of the justification of cognitive and moral

judgements, the consensus of the bourgois liberals, scientists, and speakers who share a form of life. Putnam calls this a kind of transcendental Skinnerianism. 23 He says that if all there is, is talk, and objects internal to talk, then the idea that some pictures are real or misleading, or metaphysi- cal, and others are not, is totally empty. If you really believe that language is about Nothing, that may give a certain "frisson", but that position cannot be taken seriously. As Plato and Aristotle said, if a philosopher's doctrine won't allow him to say anything you don't have to refute him. And if he goes on not saying anything, he's no better than a plant. 24 In contrast, Putnam claims that we must concern ourselves with real things of serious human importance, because it matters, and it matters deeply and profoundly, whether we say something true or false about human life, and therefore we must have concepts like truth, reality,

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objectivity, validity of argument and clarity of definition - although these concepts do not have one, unique, fixed, meaning, independent of time and place. They are our concepts and subject to re-evaluation. They are not absolute, but are all we have, and are therefore, objective, a5

Putnam's pragmatic realism

Central to Pumam's internal or pragmatic realism is its moral implication, to be found for example in his discussions of equality. Here are his three vague and minimal principles - foundations if you like. 26 Hence three

Principles: 27

(I) There is something about human beings, some aspect which is of incomparable moral significance, with respect to which all human beings are equal, no matter how unequal they may be in talents, achievements, social contribution, etc.

(II) Even those who are least talented, or whose achievements are the least, or whose contribution to society is the least, are deserving of respect.

(III) Everyone's happiness or suffering is of equal prima facie moral importance.

Let's illustrate the application of these general principles to a concrete case where we will also meet again the detached, individualistic, rationality that goes with the inconsistent Enlightenment idea of the Rational Unity of Humanity.

Colin TumbuU, an anthropologist, studied a people called the Ik who live in Uganda, on the border with the Sudan and Kenya. 28 Tumbull claims to have found a society which is depraved by starvation. When he found them, they had lost all those characteristics which we think of as specifically "human": there was no affection between people, no social grouping for work or play, no system of laws or religion, no respect for the old, nor care of the young. On arrival, he found they had been literally starving, due to prolonged drought, and individual survival was the only thing that mattered to them. The first to die were the old, denied food, water or shelter by their children; then the young children, neglected and actively ill-teated by their parents. Only the toughest could survive, by

snatching food from the weaker ones, or from the old. There were excep-

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tions: some of the very old could remember other times, and there was one little girl who was considered mad, because she craved affection from her parents, and returned to them again and again, in spite of their cruelty to her. TurnbuU considered the Ik better disbanded and dispersed than allowed to continue. In consequence of this judgement, he was severely reprimanded in the leamed joumals for violating professional ethics. 29 He had drawn the line and had said (as Wittgenstein and now Putnam, quoting Wittgenstein, have also said) "this is where my spade is turned. ''3~ It was objected by his colleagues that by invoking our moral standards of Post- Enlightenment, Post-Kantian "think for yourself, think in terms of the other, and do as you would be done by", TumbuU patronized the natives.

What he was supposed to do was report in good Enlightenment spirit, simply what he saw - just those hard, raw, objective, scientific, data. Tumbull confronted a true moral crisis: he refused to be an observer. He

correctly said that there was a moral dimension to observation and that what he saw was depravity. He drew the line, in other words, got involved with moral problems, and said that he could not separate his observations

from his moral judgement. He then went so far as to say that there was a better moral version of life than the Ik had and that the rest of the world had to do something about it, because the Ik were human beings too.

Putnam's three foundational principles applied to the Ik will read:

1. A member of the Ik is of incomparable moral significance. 2. Each member of the Ik is deserving of respect. 3. The happiness or suffering of everyone - including the Ik's - is of

equal prima facie importance.

To this, we might add a fourth, more "applied' principle:

4. We will only consider those people, who have enjoyed a moderately healthy diet for some time, who are not suffering from what we call collective depravity as a result of what we call "starvation", as having any kind of conceptual scheme that is equal in some sense to our own.

In saying this, we are, of course, assuming that Putnam's position allows one conceptual scheme to judge, or compare, another. But on what basis can this be asserted? Aren't Putnam's, Tumbuli's, or our arguments just as culture- and concept-bound as those of the Ik? Perhaps Putnam, Turnbull and we are mistaken, and the Ik are very happy in their own terms, in

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ways that are incomprehensible to Tumbull, Putnam and us. Perhaps the Ik have their concepts and hence their world, and Putnam, Tumbull and we, have ours.

But for the Ik, there is no room for doubt and defence; there are no other worlds or versions of worlds; there is no room for criticism, for self- criticism or any kind of reflection on the system; there is no room for learning, for expansion, for generating new ideas. They cannot evaluate, they cannot judge: they are pre-determined and doomed. If we consider the Ik's conceptual scheme as equal to ours, that is, they, born into starvation, we, into secure meals, then we have limited what activity can

achieve. We become like them, passive, fatalistic, without room for criticism, and devoid of the capacity to imagine other possible worlds. Then we may not criticise cross-culturally, cross-sub-culturally, cross individually, or at all. Then we may not judge anything at all.

The Ik have one community, one reality, one world. They exemplify a Rortian world, where consensus is enough - their consensus being of course about individual survival (not about attaining some ideal good). They also exemplify the Absolute Truth of any conceptual scheme, demonstrating the (existential) absurdity of Rorty's philosophy: a confla- tion of Absolute Truth, consensus, and the free play of signifiers. Dewey

(who Rorty considers his guru), said that philosophy is "the critical method of developing methods of criticism" and that imagination and criticism form the basis of a better world. 31 Without the capacity to

imagine other worlds, or versions of worlds; without the ability to criticise the given or the here and now, we would become like the Ik. We would have no capacity for change, for generating something new, for building a different kind of reality. 32 Tumbull 's critics were morally blind. And we suggest that Rorty's position is morally blind as well.

Relativism and conceptual relativity

Both Putnam and Rorty present themselves as pragmatists. Both deny that they uphold a simple-minded self-refuting form of relativism. Both are described in "the literature" as relativists. What sort of relativism is inherent in their respective positions? For Putnam the basic postulate is that many conceptual schemes or worlds co-exist, even within one individual, and that any scheme or world can be judged by or from another scheme or world; but no ultimate scheme or world can possibly exist

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which is defined by absolute, transcendental Truths and from which all other schemes can be judged. However, some schemes or worlds are better than others: of these, we tend to say that they get it "fight".

We have no claim to an Outsider view; we are all Insiders in some sense or other. This is why Putnam's pragmatic realism, is also called internal realism. What we do have is the imaginative critical capacity to create new conceptual schemes, new worlds, and new versions of worlds and to do this makes sense with reference to an ongoing community of inquirers. 33

The Outsider view, or External view, or God's Eye View, is an ideal which Putnam opposes and calls metaphysical realism. Rorty, also opposes it as a species of foundational epistemology. The difference however, lies in Putnam's avowed realism. He will not favour rhetoric rather than evidence, or style rather than argument, as Rorty does, who is committed to rejecting every kind of realism. Rorty identifies with the great engines of post-modem self-doubt, personified by the disappearing subject or self, and the problematic "other". Of course, if the Ik are disappearing subjects, there is no reason to worry about them being human beings (at best they are texts). Putnam is not taken in by this fashion. What Putnam does say is an echo of William James: 34

there is still something new, something unfinished and important to say about reality and truth ... Internal realism is, at bottom, just the insis- tence that realism is not incompatible with conceptual relativity. One can be both a realist and a conceptual relativist. Realism (with a small "r") ... is a view that takes our familiar commonsense scheme, as well as our scientific and artistic and other schemes, at face value, without helping itself to the notion of the thing "in itself".

That which makes our beliefs true, and that which verifies our beliefs lies within our conceptual schemes, not outside them. Our concepts and moral images are culturally relative, but it does not follow that the truth or falsity of everything we say (using those concepts and moral images) is simply " d e c i d e d " - ready-made - by the culture we live in (as Rorty says). Although "conceptual relativity" sounds like "relativism", it is not. relativism boils down to being locked up in one's private conceptual scheme, or to being tied to the conceptual scheme of the group one plays with. Conceptual relativity refers to the situation, which we described a little while ago, where we have many versions of worlds, some equal, some better than others, some very similar, some very different, using one scheme to criticise another and imagination to build new ones.

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According to Rorty's relativism:

1. There is no truth to be found; 2. "True" is just a name for what a bunch of people can agree on.

According to Putnam's realism plus relativity:

1. There is truth to be found, but no truth independent of any conceptual

scheme; 2. "True" is more than what a bunch of people can agree on; it is an ideal

that can be aimed at through the particulars of the actions of an ongoing community of inquirers.

Putnam agrees with Wittgenstein that what we have are ordinary ways of talking and thinking - ordinary talk of "following a rule" or ordinary talk

about "seeing-as" or ordinary talk about "understanding". And all of this is not mythology (as Rorty would have it). Putnam says "We walk on thin

ground, but we do walk". 3s And that's what ordinary pragmatic realism is about. Rorty, on the other hand, suggests that ordinary talk about objec- tivity, or rational acceptability, or truth, is somehow mythological.

We mentioned earlier that Rorty holds that all that is needed to make communication and persuasion, and thus knowledge possible, is the use of the relevant term in a way sanctioned by consensus. Putnam obviously will not accept this. While we are certainly first and foremost social, using the relevant term is not enough to have or speak about knowledge. We need expansion, revision, criticism, and learning; we need to be able to make new facts, and create new meanings, we must be able to create new worlds and moral images, and new versions of worlds and moral images. We need to be able to judge when something is going right and something is going wrong, and we need to know where our spades are going to be turned; where in other words, we draw the line. This needs more than a

given, agreed upon set of terms within the community: this needs imagination and judgement.

Rorty claims that his reading of Dewey leads down a road on which Foucault, Heidegger, Sartre and Derrida also travel 36 and Rorty no doubt sees himself already to be recorded in the Annales as the philosopher who travelled truely the way down to the end of this road. Perhaps the problem with this road is just that Dewey didn't go down it after all, or perhaps it leads straight into Brave New WorM, or one of the other Right-wing Utopias, where consensus has been achieved through banishing criticism and imagination. 37

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According to Derrida - whom Rorty admires - we don't have to worry about author's intentions (and remember we are all authors producing texts all the time), we don't have to worry about precisely what a text means, or about distinctions between texts and the world, because every- thing is just a free play of signifiers. In contrast, we maintain that if we talk about "intention", we know there is no mechanical criterion of verification; nevertheless, we do have all sorts of criteria for telling what a person's intentions are, doing that in all sorts of ways - often getting our

inferences wrong, but also getting them right. These practices neither require nor admit rigorous internal boundary lines, nor simple mechanical methods of ascertaining the presence or absence of an intention. But it does not follow that intention and meaning are non-existent. Did you really plough your way through this article to enjoy a free play of sig- nifiers, or to have fun, as Tumbull ought to have had with the free play of the Ik?

Concluding remarks

Carol Gilligan, writes about an event that truly happened. 38 The protagonists in her story, a husband and wife saw a car veer off the road at midnight. The driver, a young boy, was killed instantly, and his girlfriend was in shock from internal bleeding. The woman, a nurse, drove the girl to

the nearest doctor, more than two hundred kilometers, across the floor of Death Valley and over three ranges of lethal mountain road, while her husband, a talc miner, stayed with the boy's body to protect it from coyotes, until the coroner could get over the mountains at dawn. In the nurse's statement, "you can't just leave a body on the highway; it's immoral". Our question is, in Rorty's world of mythology, texts, and the free play of signiflers, on what code of morality could these people have been basing their actions? GiUigan says, "Reason, contingent on human relationships, is sustained by a morality that protects relationship - morality whose essence lies in not abdicating responsibility, not breaching primary loyalties, in not giving way to acrimony, in not deserting one another." This is a form of solidarity that reaches further than Rorty's ethnocentrism. The actions of the people involved in this tragedy have a specific meaning: they did not doubt the truth of what they saw, they acted on the basis of preserving human relations, accepting responsibility, and confirming primary loyalties to other human beings. They attained an

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ideal good in the particulars of their actions: and philosophy arises from just such specific human situations. These people did the right thing - to use Goodman's terminology - although there is nothing in the external world to mechanically verify that. Putnam's pragmatic realism is about this kind of everyday moral situation or dilemma. Rorty's isn't. Needless

to say, we think that Putnam is right. If we cease to believe that certain things are objectively good or bad, true or false; if we refuse to criticise and judge, and therefore deny our responsibilities, our loyalties, our relationships, preferring, instead, the free-play of signifiers, preferring fiction to reality, the denial of objective morality and the denial of all

truth, tout court, then, we suspend our moral judgement. This is rhetoric simpliciter. Then we become One with the SS Professor who found his meal more important than a Sonderaktion.

Notes

1. Publications by Putnam and Rorty are referred to in subsequent notes. Rorty's views have been discussed, and are being discussed, at great length in "the literature" and reactions have been both positive and negative. However, criticisms of Rorty have been directed primarily at his anti- fundamentalism, his criticism of theories of mind, his historical caricatures and his ambiguous attitude towards scientific knowledge. See A.B. Levison, "Rorty, Materialism, and Privileged Access", Nous 21 (1987):381-393; J. Margolis, Pragmatism Without Foundations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); K. Nielsen, "Scientism, Pragmatism, and the Fate of Philosophy", lnquiry 29 (1986):277-304; S.E. Rosenbaum, "Rortian Rationality", Metaphilosophy 17 (1986):93-101; D. Rothberg, "Gadamer, Rorty, Hermeneutics, and Truth", Inquiry 29 (1986):355-361; T. Triplett, "Rorty's Critique of Foun- dationalism", Phil. Studies 52 (1987): 115-129; and references given there.

The moral and political implications of his ethnocentric pragmatism have so far received little attention. Only after we had finished writing this paper did we come across publications in which similar criticisms are directed at Rorty. See J.P. Cadello, "Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: An existential critique", J. Value Inquiry 22.1 (1988):61-76; M.F. Goodman, "Rorty, Personhood, Relativism", Praxis Int. 6 (1987):426--441; K. Nielsen, "Can There Be Progress in Philosophy?", Metaphilosophy 18 (1987): 1-30; E. Sosa, "Serious Philosophy and Freedom of Spirit", J.Phil. 84 (1987):707-726.

2. H. Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (LaSalle: Open Court, 1987), further referred to as MFR.

3. See for "democracy without a moral image", Putnam, MFR, pp. 57--62. 4. See W. James, Pragmatism (Indianapolis: Hackett), "Lecture VI: Prag-

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matism's Conception of Truth", pp. 91-105. 5. See for Rorty's support for the "triumphs of liberal democracy" in particular

R. Rorty "Method and Morality" in Social Science as Moral Inquiry, ed. N. Haan et ah (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); "Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism", J.Phil. 80 (1983):583-589; "Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity", in Habermas and Modernity, ed. R. Bernstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).

6. See for example H.S. Thayer (Ed.), Pragmatism: The Classic Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982); A.O. Lovejoy Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1963).

7. See for example D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby- Bigge (Oxford University Press, 16th ed., 1973), p. 458. This idea has been criticized in particular by J. Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn Books, 1934); Compare R.A. Putnam, "Poets, Scientists, and Critics", New Literary History 17 (1985):17-21.

8. See on making facts, needs, etc. R.A. Putnam, "Creating facts and values", Philosophy 60 (1985): 187-204.

9. See on the terminology of making worlds or world versions N. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), and "On Starmaking", Synthese 45 (1980):211-215.

10. This has been worked out by Putnam in his Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981) and comes back in MFR. Similar views of Rorty can be found in many of his writings, in particular in his "Method and Morality" and his "Texts and Lumps".

11. Aristotle, De Rhetorica, 1421al 1. 12. See for example B. Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London:

Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922). 13. See W. James, Pragmatism, "Lecture IV: The One and the Many", pp.

61-76. See also E. Gellner, Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge University Press 1974), Ch. I and P. Rabinow, "Humanism as Nihilism: The Bracketing of Truth and Seriousness in American Cultural Anthropology" in Social Science as Moral Inquiry, ed. H. Haan, et al. (New York: Columbia Univer- sity Press), pp. 52-75.

14. In this and the following two sentences we are following I.C. Jarvie, "Rationality and Relativism", Brit. J. Soc. 34 (1983):44-60.

15. See for Putnam's appreciation of Habermas and Apel, MFR, pp. 53-56; for Rorty's association with post-modernism in particular his "Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism" and his "Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity".

16. See J. Sabini and M. Silver, Moralities of Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 57, Compare also S. Hampshire, Public and Private Morality (Cambridge University Press, 1980) on the U.S.A. and Vietnam ~p. 51): "An illusory image of rationality distorted the moral judgment of the American policy-makers."

17. See his well-known books Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980) and Consequences of Pragmatism (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982) and his articles referred to in other notes.

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18. R. Rorty "Texts and Lumps", New Literary History 17 (1985): 1-16. 19. R. Rorty, "From Logic to Language to Play: A Plenary Address to the

InterAmerican Congress", APA Proc. 59 (1986):747-753. Several commen- taries have been published in the APA Proc., 1986, Vol. 59, No. 5, and Vol. 60, Nos. 1 & 3.

20. T. Auxter, "The Debate over Cultural Imperialism", APA Proc. 59 (1986):753-757; quotation on p. 756 (emphases added).

21. See his "Texts and Lumps", p. 12, emphases added. 22. See R. Rorty, "Solidarit6 ou Objectivit6", Critique 39 (1983):923-940. See

for a parody on Rorty's "conversation of mankind" and who will be admitted at this gathering: P. Munz, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Rorty", Phil. Soc. Sci. 14 (1984):195-238.

23. See Rorty's "Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism" for his plea to be "frankly ethnocentric" and loyal to "those untheoretical sorts of narrative discourse which make up the political speech of the western democracies". For "transcendental Skinnerianism" see H. Putnam, "A Comparison of Some- thing with Something Else", New Literary History 17 (1985):61-79.

24. For the comparison of the relativist with a plant see Plato, Theatetetus and H. Putnam, "The Craving for Objectivity", New Literary History 15 (1984):229-239.

25. See MFR, p. 77 and throughout. 26. Of course, if we call them foundations, Rorty won't listen to us -~ he only

applauds non-foundational discourse, i.e. playing, floating, jumping around, having fun etc.

27. MFR, p. 45. Putnam points out that Nietzsche vehemently attacked the idea that we owe respect to those who are untalented and whose achievement is not significant. We agree with Putnam when he says that it is fundamentally right, therefore, not to share fully the current admiration for Nietzsche.

28. C. Turnbull, The Mountain People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972). 29. See F. Barth, "On Responsibility and Humanity: Calling a Colleague to

Account", Current Anthropology 15 (1974):99-102, and reactions to this paper by Turnbull and others in Current Anthropology (September 1975).

30. MFR, p. 85, quoting L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I, trans. G.E.M. Anscome (Oxford: Blackwell), par. 217.

31. See J. Dewey, Experience andNature (New York: Dover, 1929), 32. Wittgenstein put the same point differently. He pointed out that unless we

transcend a given local world-picture, by means of a wider world picture, there will be no ground for imagining the social practice of a community of mental defectives "under the aspect of disorder". If we were unable to transcend the world-picture of this community of "mental defectives", we would have no way of imagining them as "mental defectives". If we were unable to imagine the community as "mental defectives" we would be "morally blind". See L. Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), par. 371 and 372.

33. See on the ongoing community of inquirers MFR, pp. 53-56, 83-86. 34. MFR, p. 17.

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35. Putnam, "Comparison of Something with Something Else". 36. See for example his Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xviii, Chs 3 and 5. 37. Compare Putnam's discussion of Bernard with the World Controller,

Mustafa Mond (in Brave New World) in MFR, p. 58. 38. C. Gilligan, "Do the Social Sciences Have an Adequate Theory of Moral

Development?" in Social Science as Moral Inquiry, ed. N. Haan et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).