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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/9/2022, SPi
  

  

Every year the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of
Amsterdam invites a prominent philosopher to occupy the
Spinoza Chair and give two public lectures on a topic in
philosophy. Books based upon these lectures are then published
in the Spinoza Lectures Series.
Pragmatism and Idealism

Rorty and Hegel on Reason and Representation
Robert B. Brandom
The First Person in Cognition and Morality

Béatrice Longuenesse
PRAGMATISM
AND
IDEALISM
Rorty and Hegel on Reason
and Representation
ROBERT B. BRANDOM
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX DP,

United Kingdom
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CONTENTS
Preface vii
. Pragmatism as Completing the Enlightenment:

Reason against Representation 
. Recognition and Recollection: The Social and
Historical Dimensions of Reason 
Afterword 
References 
Index 
PREFACE
I n early , the University of Amsterdam philosophers

invited me to take up the Spinoza Chair, and in connection
with that post to deliver the Spinoza lectures there in the spring
of . I was privileged to be able to try out a first version of
the material I was working on for those lectures at the second
annual meeting of the Richard Rorty Society, at Penn State
University in November , at the invitation of Eduardo
Mendieta. He and I were already working together on the project
of publishing Rorty’s  Ferrater Mora lectures at the
University of Girona (which appeared under Harvard
University Press’s distinguished Belknap imprint in  with
the title Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism). Since those Girona
lectures figured prominently in the story I wanted to tell, the
Rorty Society was a natural venue that promised (and delivered)
an interested and friendly audience. At that meeting I profited
greatly from comments on the lectures by Rorty’s lifelong friend
and colleague, Richard Bernstein, and by Brady Bowman. The
onset of the Covid- pandemic required that my visit to
Amsterdam be postponed until —and in the end, both
my seminar and all my lectures, including the Spinoza lectures,
ended up having to be delivered remotely for the same reason.
I am very sorry to have missed the opportunity to spend a
semester at the University of Amsterdam in person. I would
like to thank my gracious hosts there, especially Professor Beate
Roessler, who overcame the disruptions to make the whole
interaction pleasant, stimulating, and constructive, in spite of
the difficult circumstances.
Lecture 
PRAGMATISM AS
COMPLETING THE
ENLIGHTENMENT
Reason against Representation
G enerations of German philosophy students were taught

early on that they face a stark, ineluctable, existentially
defining choice: “Kant, oder Hegel?” The thought was not that
one needed to pick one or the other of these seminal, difficult,
multifarious philosophers to concentrate on and master. It was
that, struggle as one might, one would inevitably find oneself
allied with one or the other—conceptually, methodologically,
and even temperamentally—and that the difference would res-
onate throughout one’s thought, beyond one’s conscious con-
trol, affecting the topics one found it important to address, the
tools one used to do so, the manner in which one proceeded,
and the standards to which one held oneself. If they got a bit
further, the students would learn to line this question up with
the more focused one: “Verstand oder Vernunft?” This is asking
whether one organizes one’s thought and philosophical
Pragmatism and Idealism: Rorty and Hegel on Reason and Representation. Robert B. Brandom,
Oxford University Press. © Robert B. Brandom 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192870216.003.0001
 ·  
aspirations according to the metacategories of scientific under-

standing or of the more exalted and self-reflective reason, in
something like the sense Hegel gave to this originally Kantian
distinction. If the students didn’t get that far, the question would
still live on for them in the form of a vague background concern
with how seriously to take the Romantics’ critique of the
Enlightenment.
Though he himself never put the point like this, I think a
useful way to understand the basic principle animating the two
books in which Richard Rorty first found his distinctive philo-
sophical voice—Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature () and
Consequences of Pragmatism ()—is as applying a sophisticated
form of this “Kant oder Hegel?” framework to then contempo-
rary analytic philosophy. So construed, the critique and diagno-
sis of the ills of the kind of philosophy he found himself
immersed in at Princeton that is developed at length in Mirror
condemn it for its Kantianism. (When at the end of that book, in
a phrase he came not only to reject, but to regret, he prophesied
the “death of philosophy,” the quintessential anti-essentialist
explicitly defined what he meant by the term “philosophy”—
what he thought we could, and urged we should, no longer go on
doing—as “the sort of thing that Kant did.”) And the new kind
of pragmatism with which Rorty proposed to replace that sort of
philosophy is evidently and avowedly Hegelian in spirit—albeit
inspired by the naturalized (but still social and historical) form of
Hegelianism he admired in Dewey and self-consciously emulated
in his own work.
Later, Rorty would applaud the broadly naturalistic, sociolog-
ical, historicist impulse he saw Hegel as having bequeathed to
the nascent nineteenth century, and speculate about how much
further we might have gotten by now if at the end of that
century Russell and Husserl had not, each in his own way,
  · 
once again found something for philosophers to be apodeictic

about, from their armchairs. Rorty’s idea of the form of a
justification for a recommendation of a way forward always
was a redescription of where we have gotten to, motivated by a
Whiggish story about how we got here that clearly marks off both
the perils already encountered and the progress already achieved
along that path. This is the literary genre of which Rorty is an
undisputed master. He said that already during his undergradu-
ate years at the University of Chicago:
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas,

and Lovejoy’s The Great Chain Being gave me a taste for ambi-
tious, swooshy, Geistesgeschichte that I have never lost. This taste
was gratified in later years by such writers as Étienne Gilson,
Hans Blumenberg, and, above all, the later Heidegger. My taste
for synoptic narratives has sometimes made me think that my
real métier was intellectual history, and that I might have been
better off in that discipline than in philosophy.1
Rorty here explicitly acknowledges his appreciation of the liter-

ary genre that Hegel both brilliantly practiced and centrally
thematized, putting Hegel’s distinctive new master metaconcept
of recollective rationality at the center of his own approach.
It might seem that bringing the Kant versus Hegel conceptual
framework to bear to illuminate the state of Anglophone phi-
losophy in the last third of the twentieth century was no great
innovation and required no great insight. After all, hadn’t that
tradition already pugnaciously divided itself into analytic and
continental camps that more or less lined up with that
1
Pp. – of Rorty’s “Intellectual Autobiography” in the Schilpp volume The
Philosophy of Richard Rorty in the Library of Living Philosophers series (Vol. ),
edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago, IL: Open Court
Publishing, ).
 ·  
framework—with a more narrowly professionalized research

discipline using technical definitions and formalized arguments
to address problems construed as perennial, and an epistemo-
logical focus on empirical science, on the one side, and on the
other side a more broadly intellectual, thoroughly historicized,
self-consciously hermeneutic pursuit, more interested in litera-
ture, art, and politics? But further reflection undercuts simply
lining up these movements with Kant and Hegel. It is true that it
was the continentalists, and not the analysts, who continued to
read Hegel. But among the towering figures in that tradition,
Husserl decisively identified himself with Kant rather than Hegel,
and Heidegger had quite complicated attitudes toward both
figures, unified in the end by his violent recoil from and vehe-
ment rejection of the pair of them, and all they stood for (“the
horse they rode in on”). In any case, the broadly Hegelian project
Rorty was then recommending as an alternative to the degen-
erating Kantian research program he saw in analytic philosophy
did not look to Europe for its inspiration, but to the substantially
distinct tradition of classical American pragmatism.
Rorty’s remarkable diagnosis of the ills of analytic philosophy
as resulting from an uncritical, so undigested, Kantianism is at
least equally radical and surprising as the reimagined, rede-
scribed, and revived pragmatism that he developed as a con-
structive therapeutic response to it. For Kant emphatically was
not a hallowed hero of that tradition. Anglophone analytic
philosophers thought that the “Kant oder Hegel?” question sim-
ply didn’t apply to them. After all, Russell and Moore had read
Kant out of the analytic canon alongside Hegel—believing
(I think, correctly as it has turned out) that one couldn’t open
the door wide enough to let Kant into the canon without Hegel
sliding in alongside him before that door could be slammed
shut. Both figures were banished, paraded out of town under
  · 
a banner of shame labeled “idealism,” whose canonical horrible

paradigm was the Bradleyan British Idealism of the Absolute,
from which those codifiers of the analytic paradigm were
recoiling—having been acolytes early on. So in diagnosing
twentieth-century analytic philosophy as constrained by con-
ceptual bounds put on it by Kant, Rorty in Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature was in fact taking a remarkable and original line:
offering a retrospective redescription and reconceptualization
that was both disquieting and disorienting. The dominant
self-conception (combatively made explicit by Carnap) was of
analytic philosophy as an up-to-date form of empiricism, a spe-
cifically logical empiricism, whose improvement on traditional,
pre-Kantian, Early Modern British empiricism consisted in the
much more sophisticated sort of logical tools it deployed to
structure and bind together essentially the same atoms of pre-
conceptual sensory experience to which the earlier empiricists
had appealed.
II
To see why and how Rorty blamed Kant for what he saw as the
calamitous state and degenerating research program of analytic
philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, one
must look more closely at the argument of Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature. Its most focused target is epistemological foun-
dationalism. Rorty saw epistemology as unable to escape the
Agrippan trilemma. Attempts to justify empirical knowledge
must either move in a circle, embark on an infinite regress, or
end by appeal to unjustified justifiers, which must accordingly
supply the foundations on which all cognition rests. The ani-
mating thought is that justifying, by inferring conclusions from
 ·  
premises, can only transmit antecedently possessed positive jus-

tificatory status. So the first two options lead to skepticism
about justification.
On the third, foundationalist, option, two kinds of justifica-
tory regress threaten. For when a set of premises is appealed to
in justifying a conclusion, one can inquire further after the
warrant either of those premises, or of the implication of the
conclusion by the premises. The two sorts of regress-stoppers
Rorty saw appealed to by epistemological foundationalists were
immediate sensory experiences, as ultimate justifiers of premises,
and immediate grasp of the meanings of our terms or the
contents of our concepts, as ultimate justifiers of inferences. In a
telling phrase, he refers to these as two sorts of “epistemically
privileged representations.” (The phrase is revelatory because
and insofar as privilege is a normative concept, and as we shall
see, it is that kind of concept that his later social pragmatism
principally addresses.)
Rorty takes Kant at his word when Kant says that what he is
doing is synthesizing rationalism and empiricism. But Rorty
takes it that what logical empiricism made of Kant’s synthesis
in the end takes over both sorts of privileged representations: the
sensory given from the empiricists, and the rational (logical,
inferential, semantic) given from the rationalists. This is one
sense in which Rorty diagnoses Anglophone philosophy as
still in thrall to Kantian commitments. In this story, Carnap
shows up as a neo-Kantian malgré lui—though that is not at all
how he thought of or presented himself. It is, however, how
Rorty’s hero Wilfrid Sellars regarded Carnap. (Perhaps the reve-
nant neo-Kantian philosophical spirit of Heinrich Rickert,
passed on through his student Bruno Bauch, Frege’s friend and
colleague and Carnap’s Doktorvater, was just too strong to be
wholly exorcised by the empiricist rites and rituals practiced by
  · 
the Vienna Circle.) But the roots of these foundationalist com-

mitments can be traced back even further, to Descartes. For he
assimilated the images delivered by the senses and the thoughts
arising in intellect together under the umbrella concept of pensées
precisely in virtue of what he saw as their shared epistemic
transparency and incorrigibility. These were precisely the fea-
tures needed for them to perform the regress-stopping function
in a foundationalist epistemological response to the skeptical
threat posed by the other two alternatives in the traditional
trilemma.
In rejecting both sensory givenness and meaning- or concept-
analytic inferential connections, Rorty relies on the arguments
of two of Carnap’s most important and insightful admirers and
critics: Sellars in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and
Quine in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” respectively.2 (These are
in any case surely two of the most important philosophical
essays of the s.) Tellingly, and with characteristic insight,
Rorty finds a common root in their apparently quite different
critiques. Sellars and Quine, he sees, both offer ultimately prag-
matist arguments, which find the theoretical postulation of such
privileged representations to be unable to explain cardinal fea-
tures of the practices of applying empirical concepts.
Rorty then widens the focus of his own critique by deepening
the diagnosis that animates it. The original source of foundation-
alism in epistemology, he claims, is representationalism in semantics.
Thinking of the mind in terms of representation was Descartes’s
invention. But the idea was brought to a new level of sophisti-
cation by Kant. He codified representation as the semantic genus
2
These particular arguments are assembled for this anti-foundationalist
purpose with exceptional clarity in Rorty’s student Michael Williams’s disserta-
tion, rewritten as Groundless Belief (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ).
 ·  
of which both sensory intuitions and inference-engendering

concepts are species, and certified our epistemological privileged
access to both under the residually Cartesian slogan “Nothing is
better known to the mind than itself.” It is perhaps ironic that in
digging down beneath epistemological issues to unearth the
semantic presuppositions that shape and enable them, Rorty is
following Kant’s example. For Kant’s argument, culminating in
the “Refutation of Idealism,” was that once we understood how
to respond to the threat of semantic skepticism about the intelli-
gibility of the relation between representings and what they
represent, there would be left no residual issue concerning
epistemological skepticism about whether any such relations actu-
ally obtained: whether things were ever as we represent them
to be.
In the end, I think that while Rorty’s objections to founda-
tionalism are made pretty clear in the text, the rationale for
laying responsibility for this epistemological view on semantic
appeal to the concept of representation are less so. But putting
together clues he offers us, an argument for seeing the necessity
for two sorts of objectionably privileged representations as
already implicit in the idea that the mind’s cognitive relation to
its world is representational might be reconstructed along the
following lines. The starting point is the Cartesian idea that if we
are to understand ourselves as knowing the world by represent-
ing it (so that error is to be understood as misrepresentation),
there must be some kind of thing that we can know non-
representationally—namely, our representings themselves. On
pain of an infinite regress, knowledge of representeds mediated
by representings of them must involve immediate (that is, non-
representational) knowledge of at least some representings. Our
nonrepresentational relation to these representings will be epi-
stemically privileged, in the sense of being immune to error. For
  · 
error is construed exclusively as misrepresentation. (This is the

representationalist semantic analogue of the justificatory episte-
mological regress on the side of premises.)
Next is the thought that when we ask about our knowledge of
the relation between representings and representeds, another
potential regress looms if we are obliged to think of this knowl-
edge also in representational terms, that is, as mediated by
representings of it. (This is the representationalist semantic
analogue of the justificatory epistemological regress on the
side of inferences.) On this dimension, too, appeal to immediate,
nonrepresentational access to representational relations seems
necessary. The pair of threatened semantic regresses, one on the
side of relations and the other on the side of their relata,
exactly parallels the pair of threatened epistemological regresses
invoked by the Agrippan trilemma. Along both dimensions, the
threat of an infinite regress seems to force a choice between
foundationalism and skepticism, depending on whether we
invoke something known immediately and nonrepresentationally,
or allow that mediation by representings goes all the way down.
Rorty saw that according to such a picture, the epistemological
choice between foundationalism and skepticism is already built
deeply into the structure of the semantic representational model.
III
Looking back, in his intellectual autobiography, Rorty said:
I still believe most of what I wrote in Philosophy and the Mirror of

Nature. But that book is now out of date. … I vaguely sensed
that the trouble with analytic philosophy was that it had never
advanced from Kant’s eternalization of the intellectual situation
of eighteenth-century Europe to Hegel’s historicism. But I had
 ·  
not yet made myself sufficiently familiar with the post-Hegelian

European philosophers who had resisted the temptation to go
“back to Kant.”3
I think Rorty came to be dissatisfied with the Philosophy and the

Mirror of Nature strategy of arguing against representationalist
paradigms in semantics on the basis that they force an episte-
mological choice between skepticism and foundationalism. He
never wavered in his view that finding oneself in that epistemo-
logical predicament demonstrates the need for radical concep-
tual revision of one’s semantic model. And he continued to
believe that the concept of representation was so burdened by
epistemological baggage that a new start was needed. But his
strategy for delegitimizing representational semantic models
changed. He realized that as a matter of sociological fact, con-
cern with epistemological skepticism and foundationalism were
not in fact central, orienting concerns of the analytic philosophy
of his day, centered as it was on the philosophy of language. He
still identified the ultimate culprit and enemy as semantic rep-
resentationalism. And he saw that it was still the orienting and
organizing principle of philosophy of language and philosophy
of mind. (His Princeton colleague David Lewis had already been
busily developing and reinforcing the edifice of possible world
semantics for some time when Rorty wrote Mirror.) Yet those
who took representational models of semantics for granted
were for the most part blithely unconcerned with the suppos-
edly life-and-death struggle between skepticism and foundation-
alism. During the last decade of his life Rorty formulated a new
line of attack: seeing anti-representationalism in semantics as a
version of pragmatist anti-authoritarianism. This more overtly
3
Rorty, “Intellectual Autobiography,” p. .
  · 
political line both drew on and, in an important sense, brought

to a logical conclusion the evolution of his thought in the
intervening decades. This is the argument and the development
I want to consider in more detail.
He introduced the new idea in his June  Ferrater
Mora lectures at the University of Girona, entitled “Anti-
Authoritarianism in Epistemology and Ethics.”4 In connection
with those lectures, he was encouraged to invite discussants of
his choice. I was privileged to be among them, along with my
colleague John McDowell, and Bjorn Ramberg, whose sympa-
thetic yet penetrating reading of Davidson had deeply impressed
Rorty. One memorable extended discussion during those happy
days led to a consensus among us about how three of our
positions should be understood in relation to one another. We
all agreed that if one found oneself obliged to choose between
epistemological skepticism and epistemological foundational-
ism, then somewhere well upstream something had gone
badly wrong conceptually. Shifting the metaphor, that predica-
ment could be thought of as a bottomless abyss that must be
avoided at all costs.
Rorty’s view was that one put oneself severely at peril
of falling into that chasm as soon as one permitted oneself
to think in terms of the concepts of experience and representa-
tion at all. Although he conceded that these powerful and
4
Published as El pragmatismo, una version: Antiautoristarismo en epistemologia y
ética, trans. Joan Verges Gifra (Barcelona: Ariel, ). These lectures were not
published in English during his lifetime. The English text is included in the
Richard Rorty Papers among the Special Collections and Archives at the
University of California, Irvine Libraries (“Born digital writings”—Subseries
., –). The lectures have now been published in full in English in a
volume edited and with an Afterword by Eduardo Mendieta, with Rorty’s own
Preface, and a Foreword by me under the title Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ).
 ·  
dangerous philosophical concepts—one epistemological, the other

semantic—were progressively and productively employed
beginning in Early Modern times, he took it that we were
now in a position to see where their use inevitably led: free-
fall into the abyss, doomed to oscillate endlessly between
skepticism and foundationalism. To keep us safe, Rorty
thought, a protective fence needs to be erected sufficiently far
from the edge that the temptation of the dilemma would not
even be visible from the safe side of that fence. His radical
proposal then, as already in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,
was that both concepts must be given up once and for all. For
Rorty, a principal virtue of the sort of pragmatism he endorsed
and developed as a successor framework is that it had no need
and no use for the traditional concepts of experience and repre-
sentation in talking about how vocabularies help us cope with
the vicissitudes of life. Indeed, from a pragmatist point of view,
the very distinction between epistemology and semantics
becomes unnecessary—a lesson he took himself to have
learned from “Two Dogmas.” As he thought of it, pragmatism
carves out an entirely different conceptual path from the
modern philosophical tradition that grew up around those
concepts. He sums up his anti-representationalist linguistic
pragmatism in the pithy slogan: “language is for coping, not
copying.” He also used to repeat with approval Rebecca West’s
irritated rejection of mimetic approaches to art, as paraphrased
by Nelson Goodman: “A copy of the universe is not what is
required. One of the damned things is enough.”
Rorty thought that if it were possible for the concept of
experience to be rehabilitated, if it could be purged of its
Cartesian contagion, then surely Dewey would have been the
one to have brought it off. Dewey worked tirelessly to give
“experience” the processual, interactive, broadly ecological
  · 
sense of Hegelian “Erfahrung,” rather than the atomic, episodic,

self-intimating, epistemically transparent Cartesian sense of
“Erlebnis.” (Dewey’s is the sense in which, as he says, it is
perfectly in order for a job advertisement to specify “No expe-
rience necessary.” It is not intended to be read in the Cartesian
sense, which would invite applications from zombies.) But
Dewey signally failed to get the philosophical and generally
cultured public to shake off the Cartesian associations of the
term. And his own practice degenerated to the point that, as
Rorty said (thinking especially of Dewey’s practice in Experience
and Nature), “he ended up using the term ‘experience’ merely as
an incantatory device to blur every conceivable distinction.”
Rorty remained convinced that Dewey had been right to eschew
representation talk as giving aid and comfort to exactly the sort
of static, spectatorial, intellectualist, “mind as the mirror of
nature” views that lead to the skepticism/foundationalism
dilemma. Ramberg agreed with Rorty on these basic points.
I was entirely of his mind as far as the concept of experience is
concerned. Outside of explicitly Hegelian contexts, where it
figures in his conception of recollective rationality, it is not
one of my words. It is not used (but only mentioned) in the
many pages of Making It Explicit, even where topics such as
perceptual knowledge are addressed. I agree that the associa-
tions and correlated inferential temptations entrained with the
term “experience” go too deep, easily to be jettisoned, or even
for us to succeed in habituating ourselves completely to resist.5
The light of day neither drives out the shadows nor stays the
5
A bold and powerful, conceptually revisionary stratagem that gives me
pause in this assessment is due to Anil Gupta’s recent work—see his Conscious
Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). He shows us how to
think of experience as a nonconceptual force that is articulated by the transfor-
mations of conceptual commitments it occasions.
 ·  
night. We are on the whole better off training ourselves to do

without this notion.
But by contrast to the concept of experience, it seemed to me
then, and seems to me still, that things are otherwise with the
concept of representation. There are many things one might mean
by “anti-representationalism.” When I use the term “representa-
tionalism,” I mean a particular order of semantic explanation. It
starts with a notion of representational content (reference, exten-
sion, or truth conditions) and understands proprieties of inference
in terms of such already representationally contentful contents.
Those contents must accordingly be assumed to be, or made to
be, theoretically and explanatorily intelligible antecedently to
and independently of the role of representations in inference.
“Representationalism” in this sense contrasts with inferentialist
orders of semantic explanation, which begin with a notion of
content understood in terms of role in reasoning, and proceed
from there to explain the representational dimension of discur-
sive content. I recommend and pursue inferentialist rather than
representationalist semantic explanations.
But not giving representation a fundamental explanatory role in
semantics does not disqualify it from playing any role whatso-
ever. And subsequent discussions with Huw Price (another
younger pragmatist after the linguistic turn for whose work
Rorty expressed particular enthusiasm) have made clear that
there is a big difference between rejecting global representationalism,
in the sense of denying that the best semantics for all kinds of
expressions assigns them a fundamentally representational role,
and being a global anti-representationalist, by insisting that no
expressions should be understood semantically to play repre-
sentational roles.6 Perhaps their representational roles are
6
I discuss this issue further in “Global Anti-Representationalism?” In
Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism Huw Price, Simon Blackburn,
  · 
essential to the content and use of some kinds of expressions

(such as ordinary empirical descriptive locutions) and not to
others (such as logical, modal, or normative locutions). It
seemed to me in Girona, and still does today, that a suitable
pragmatist explanatory strategy, beginning with social practices
of using expressions to give and ask for reasons, could unobjec-
tionably both underwrite theoretical attributions of representa-
tional content to some locutions and also underwrite the
viability and utility of the common-sense distinction between
what we are saying or thinking and what we are talking or
thinking about—that is, representing or describing by saying
or thinking that. In particular, I pointed then to the Making It
Explicit strategy for explaining what one is doing in using the
principal representational locutions of ordinary language—de
re ascriptions of propositional attitudes, such as “Benjamin
Franklin believed of electrons that they flowed through metal
and not glass,”—as expressing explicitly differences of social
perspective among various interlocutors.
So it seemed to me that a distinction should be made between
the reprobate, irremediably tainted concept of experience, which
should be banished from careful philosophical discourse, and
the prodigal, errant, and admittedly potentially dangerous con-
cept of representation, which might still be tamed, rehabilitated,
sanitized, and reintroduced to perform carefully supervised pro-
ductive labor in a new, hygienic guise. In the image we all found
useful, I thought the fence keeping us from sliding into the abyss
of the foundationalism-or-skepticism epistemological dilemma
could be located much closer to the edge than Rorty did.
Although, by contrast to the notion of experience, the concept
of representation is not a particular focus of McDowell’s Mind and
Robert Brandom, Paul Horwich, and Michael Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, ).
 ·  
World, he was, and is, convinced that both concepts can be

relieved of the excess baggage of associations that, he agrees,
can and have made them principal villains enticing philosophers
to their doom down the path that leads to the foundationalism-
or-skepticism oscillation Rorty convincingly diagnoses. Rorty
and I agreed that McDowell had successfully brought off the feat
of disciplining a notion of experience to the point where it could
do crucial philosophical work without falling into Sellars’s Myth
of the Given. Given that remarkable achievement, it is no sur-
prise that the relaxed way in which he invokes the representa-
tional dimension of empirical concept use also manages not to
be philosophically theory-laden in a way that leads to the trou-
bles Rorty diagnoses. It helps here that McDowell shares with
Rorty a Wittgensteinian version of the pragmatist anti-
metaphysical conviction. That conviction entails that calling
on any concept to do heavy lifting in philosophical explanations
of some supposedly puzzling phenomenon (such as the possi-
bility of genuinely knowing how things visibly are) is infallibly a
sign of deep antecedent conceptual confusion in understanding
the situation that seems to call for that distinctive philosophical
kind of explanation.
As a result of his resolute rejection of the impulse for deep
metaphysical explanation, McDowell doesn’t think that a fence
is necessary to avoid the abyss at all. If we are just sufficiently
careful with our use of the concepts of experience and representa-
tion, cutting them free of entanglement with dubious and ulti-
mately disreputable metaphysical, epistemological, and
semantic programs motivated by ill-posed and ill-considered
questions, we can keep carefully circumscribed versions of the
ordinary language terms around and use them as necessary in
philosophical clarifications. He shows that is possible by skip-
ping merrily along the very edge of the foundationalist
  · 
precipice, sure-footed as a mountain goat, never putting a foot

wrong or seeming to be in danger of losing his balance.
Rorty and I agree that McDowell brings this off. But we want
to say “Kids, don’t try this at home. This man is a skilled
professional. It is not as easy as it looks.” The balancing act
can indeed be brought off, because he can do it and does do it.
We thought that prudence nonetheless dictates the erection of a
fence to protect the unwary, less careful, and less skilled philo-
sophical public from what remains a dangerous temptation.
McDowell seemed to us not to be sufficiently concerned about
the danger to those less capable than himself. Edinburgh strin-
gently enforces a legal prohibition on jaywalking (crossing the
street against the traffic signals)—which is illegal if and only if it
is done within sight of anyone under the age of twelve. The
motivating principle being enforced is: risk your own life, but
don’t encourage the young and impressionable to follow suit
and risk theirs. McDowell, we felt, insufficiently appreciates the
practical wisdom of the Edinburgh rules when applied to the
metaphilosophical case.
IV
This three-sided discussion in Girona was in many ways a

satisfying survey for us all. It usefully rehearsed and fixed our
general locations in philosophical space, along with the hopes
and suspicions that motivated them. At the end of it, Rorty told
us that what we would hear about in his immediately upcoming
lectures was a new line of argument against representationalism.
It took the form of a recharacterization of the lesson and
significance of the pragmatism that he had all along aimed to
establish as the principal rival of, and ultimate successor to, the
 ·  
pervasive representationalism of the day. According to this new

way of pitching things, what pragmatism aims at—beginning
already, if only incipiently, with the classical American
pragmatists—is nothing less than a second Enlightenment.
My principal concern here is with the particular way Rorty
picks up and develops a line of thought he identifies in Dewey,
elaborating it into a distinctive, anti-fetishist, anti-authoritarian
version of a specifically pragmatist second Enlightenment—or,
sometimes, as the second phase needed to complete the original
one. Before laying out the new Enlightenment vision that Rorty
articulates in his Girona lectures at the end of the twentieth
century, however, I want to fill in some of the background
picture of how the classical American pragmatism that took
shape a hundred years earlier could credibly be seen as already
enacting a second Enlightenment. This is a picture I think Rorty
largely takes for granted, but never specifically expounds in the
terms I will suggest. Rehearsing it provides important context
for Rorty’s move, and, I think, both strengthens his case and
serves to highlight his further contribution to the tradition he
both inherits from his American pragmatist heroes and retro-
spectively rationally reconstructs. The story I will outline is a
broad, but I hope recognizable, characterization of the constel-
lation of ideas that Peirce bequeaths to James and Dewey, and
through them, to Rorty.7
The motor of the first Enlightenment was the rise of the new
natural science—in particular, the mathematized physics of
Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. The philosophical project
7
I tell the story retailed here in somewhat more detail in the context of an
extended review of Louis Menand’s wonderful book The Metaphysical Club in
“When Philosophy Paints Its Blue on Grey: Irony and the Pragmatist
Enlightenment,” boundary , Vol. , No. , Summer , pp. –.
  · 
animated by its spectacular achievements centered on the

question: what should the fact that these new empirical and
theoretical practices turn out to be the best way to understand
the nonhuman world teach us about the nature of that world,
about what knowledge and understanding are, and about our-
selves as knowers in that sense of, and agents in, the world as
science reveals it to be? Because their thought was principally
oriented by this project, all of the canonical philosophers from
Descartes through Kant can sensibly be understood as at base
philosophers of science.
The physical science they were inspired by and interpreters of
put forward mathematical theories in the form of impersonal,
immutable principles formulating universal, eternal, necessary
laws. Enlightenment empiricism sought to ground all our
knowledge in self-contained, self-intimating sensory episodes
whose brute occurrence is the most basic kind of knowing.
Just how the natural light of reason could extract secure and
certain knowledge of things as law-governed from those deliver-
ances of fallible perception was a perennial puzzle. A further
problem was fitting into the picture of the world as delivered by
the best science of the time the sensing, theorizing, and exper-
imentally intervening scientific minds with which we were
encouraged to identify ourselves. Even had Hume succeeded in
his aspiration to become “the Newton of the mind” by perfecting
Locke’s theoretical efforts to understand the psychological pro-
cesses of understanding in terms of mechanisms of association
and abstraction, the issue of how the subject of that science was
to be found among the furniture of the universe described by the
real Newton would have survived untouched, as an apparently
intractable philosophical embarrassment.
The founding genius of American pragmatism, Charles
Sanders Peirce, was, like the original Enlightenment philosophes,
 ·  
above all, a philosopher of science. He, too, took as his basic

philosophical project the task of explaining what the best sci-
ence of his time taught us ontologically about the ultimate
nature of the world we live in, epistemologically about the
character of the best understanding of it as epitomized by that
science, and about how we should understand that world as (in
Jay Rosenberg’s phrase) “growing knowers.” But the contempo-
rary sciences that provided his master ideas were very different
from those that set the agenda for seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century philosophers. He was impressed by the broadly selec-
tional forms of explanation that he presciently saw as common
to Darwinian evolutionary biology, at the level of species, and
the latest psychological theories of learning, at the level of
individual organisms. And he was also impressed by the new
forms of statistical explanation that were both essential to the
new physical science of thermodynamics and becoming increas-
ingly central to the new social sciences of the late nineteenth
century.
A principal feature distinguishing both selectional and statis-
tical forms of explanation from the Newtonian model of
explaining particular occurrences by deriving them from or
subsuming them under universal laws is that instead of showing
how what actually happened had to happen—why what is actual
is at least conditionally necessary—the new methodologies make
it possible to explain events that are acknowledged to be con-
tingent and merely probable. Accounts that appeal to natural
selection in biology, or to supervised selection in learning, or
to statistical likelihood (whether in physics or sociology or
economics), show how observed order can arise, contingently,
but explicably, out of an irregular background of variation—as
the cumulative result of individually random, contingent hap-
penings. Peirce saw this as nothing less than a new form of
  · 
intelligibility. Understanding whose paradigm is Darwin’s

evolutionary theory is a concrete, situated narrative of local,
contingent, mutable, practical, reciprocal accommodations of
particular creatures and habitats. Peirce speculatively generalized
this model to a vision in which even the most fundamental laws
of physics are understood as contingently emerging by selec-
tional processes from primordial indeterminateness. No less
than the behavior of biological organisms, those laws are to be
understood as adaptational habits, each of which is in a statistical
sense relatively stable and robust in the environment provided
by the rest. The old forms of scientific explanation then appear
as special, limiting cases of the new. The now restricted validity
of appeal to laws and universal principles is explicable
against the wider background provided by the new scientific
paradigms of how regularity can arise out of and be sustained by
variability. The “calm realm of laws” of the first Enlightenment
becomes for the second a dynamic population of habits, win-
nowed from a larger one, which has so far escaped extinction by
maintaining a more or less fragile collective self-reproductive
equilibrium.
Since laws emerge only statistically, they may change. No
Darwinian adaptation is final, for the environment it is adapting
to might change—indeed must eventually change, in response
to other Darwinian adaptations. And the relatively settled, fixed
properties of things, their habits, as Peirce and Dewey would say,
are themselves to be understood just as such adaptations. Peirce
was a naturalist, but through the lens of then contemporary
science he confronted a new sort of nature, a nature that is fluid,
stochastic, with regularities being the statistical products of
many particular contingent interactions between things and
their ever changing environments, hence emergent and poten-
tially evanescent, floating statistically on a sea of chaos.
 ·  
Like many of the philosophers of the original Enlightenment,

Peirce combined ontological naturalism (of his new, statistical-
selectional kind) with epistemological empiricism. Like them,
too, Peirce and his pragmatist followers subscribed to Wilfrid
Sellars’s scientia mensura doctrine: “In the dimension of describing
and explaining, science is the measure of all things: of those that
are, that they are, and of those that are not that they are not.”8
And for both groups, science is not just one sort, but the very
form of knowing: what it knows not, is not knowledge. But just
as Peirce’s was a naturalism based on a radically different con-
ception of nature, so his empiricism was based on a radically
different conception of experience. The science to which the
later pragmatist Enlightenment looked for its inspiration had
changed since that of the earlier in more than just the conceptual
resources and the distinctive new forms of scientific intelligibil-
ity that it offered to its philosophical interpreters and admirers.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the impact of
science was still largely a matter of its theories. Its devotees
dreamed of, predicted, and planned for great social and political
transformations that they saw the insights of the new science as
prefiguring and preparing. But during this period those new
ways of thinking centered around the Scientific Revolution
were largely devoid of immediate practical consequences. By
the middle of the nineteenth century, though, technology, the
practical arm of science, had changed the world radically and
irrevocably through the Industrial Revolution. From the vantage
point of established industrial capitalism, science appeared
as the most spectacularly successful social institution of the
previous  years because it had become not only a practice,
8
Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, ), section .
  · 
but a business. Its practical successes paraded as the warrant of its

claims to theoretical insight. Technology embodies understand-
ing. The more general philosophical lessons the pragmatists
drew from science for an understanding of the nature of reason
and its central role in human life accordingly sought to com-
prehend intellectual understanding as an aspect of effective
agency, to situate knowing that (some claim is true) in the
larger field of knowing how (to do something). The sort of explicit
reason that can be codified in principles appears as just one, often
dispensable, expression of the sort of implicit intelligence that
can be exhibited in skillful, because experienced, practice—
flexible, adaptable habit that has emerged in a particular envi-
ronment, by selection via a learning process.
Thinking of scientific practices primarily from the side of
technology rather than theory is the key to the pragmatists’
updated form of empiricism. For them the unit of experience
is a Test-Operate-Test-Exit cycle of perception, action, and fur-
ther perception of the results of the action. On this model,
experience is not an input to the process of learning.
Experience is the process of learning: the statistical emergence
by selection of behavioral variants that survive and become
habits insofar as they are, in company with their fellows, adapt-
ive in the environments in which they are successively and
successfully exercised. The rationality of science is best epito-
mized not in the occasion of the theorist’s sudden intellectual
glimpse of some aspect of the true structure of reality, but in the
process by which the skilled practitioner coaxes usable observa-
tions by experimental intervention, crafts theories by inferential
postulation and extrapolation, and dynamically works out a
more or less stable but always evolving accommodation
between the provisional results of those two enterprises. The
distinctive pragmatist shift in imagery for the mind is not from
 ·  
mirror to lamp, but from telescope and microscope to flywheel

governor.
These new forms of naturalism and empiricism, updated so as
to be responsive to the changed character and circumstances of
nineteenth-century science, meshed with each other far better
than their predecessors had. Early Modern philosophers notori-
ously had trouble fitting human knowledge and agency into its
mechanist, materialist version of the natural world. A Cartesian
chasm opened up between the activity of the theorist whose
understanding consists in the manipulation of algebraic sym-
bolic representings, and what is thereby understood: the
extended, geometrical world represented by those symbols.
This was precisely the gap that the concept of representation was
designed to fill. Its difficulties in doing so are what raise the
specter of skepticism. The difficulty for philosophers of the first
Enlightenment was that understanding, discovering, and acting
on principles exhibited for them one sort of intelligibility, with
matter moving according to eternal, ineluctable, mathematically
expressible laws another. On the pragmatist understanding,
however, knower and known are alike explicable by appeal to
the same general mechanisms that bring order out of chaos,
settled habit from random variation: the statistical selective
structure shared by processes of evolution and of learning.
That selectional structure ties together all the members of a
great continuum of being stretching from the processes by
which physical regularities emerge, through those by which
the organic evolves locally and temporarily stable forms,
through the learning processes by which the animate acquire
locally and temporarily adaptive habits, to the intelligence of the
untutored common sense of ordinary language users, and ulti-
mately to the methodology of the scientific theorist—which is
just the explicit, systematic refinement of the implicit,
  · 
unsystematic but nonetheless intelligent procedures character-

istic of everyday practical life. For the first time, the rational
practices embodying the paradigmatic sort of reason exercised
by scientists understanding natural processes become visible as
continuous with, and intelligible in just the same terms as, the
physical processes paradigmatic of what is understood. This
unified vision stands at the center of the classical American
pragmatists’ second Enlightenment.
This happy concord and consilience between the distinctively
pragmatist versions of naturalism in ontology and empiricism in
epistemology stands in stark contrast, not only to the prior
traditional British empiricism of the Enlightenment, but also to
the subsequent twentieth-century logical empiricism of the
Vienna Circle. The reductive physicalist version of naturalism
and the reductive phenomenalist version of empiricism they
inclined to endorse were exceptionally difficult to reconcile
with each other. Hume had already shown how difficult it is to
provide suitable empiricist credentials for the way in which
mathematical laws supporting subjunctive reasoning—the
crowning glory of Newtonian physics—outrun observable reg-
ularities, not only epistemically, but semantically. Adding the
powerful methods of modern logic to articulate the phenomenal
deliverances of sense did not alter this fundamental mismatch.
A threatening and recalcitrant tension accordingly concerned
how to proceed when respect for the deliverances of natural
science as the measure of what there is and how it is in nature
collides with empiricist strictures on when we are entitled to
claim to know what there is and how it is. Otto Neurath thought
that naturalism should prevail, while Moritz Schlick thought
that empiricism should. Rudolf Carnap struggled mightily to
keep these two wings of the movement from flying off in
different directions. In spite of his many pragmatist corrections
 ·  
to and emendations of his hero Carnap, Quine could never bring

into harmony his own scientific naturalism and residual empir-
icist hostility to modality.
According to this way of construing the tradition, Peirce

initiated the American pragmatist school of philosophical
thought already as a second Enlightenment, centered, as the
first had been, on new conceptions of reason and models of
intelligibility drawn from the best contemporary scientific
achievements. Rorty thinks that Dewey added to the reconcep-
tion of both knowers and the known that Peirce had
bequeathed, a further substantial element inspired by and mod-
eled on the first Enlightenment’s principal advance in practical
philosophy: its secularizing and humanizing disenchantment of
traditional theologically based ethics. Peirce had provided a
constructive alternative to the spectatorial picture of knowing
as mirroring nature. But in his Girona period, Rorty draws from
Dewey the leading idea and basic conceptual raw materials
for a critique of Enlightenment philosophy’s basic orienting
representationalist semantic paradigm. He saw the critique he
now envisaged as more radical and fundamental than the line he
had pursued in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, where he had
diagnosed that paradigm as inevitably precipitating a sterile
oscillation between foundationalism and skepticism in episte-
mology. Astonishingly, Rorty would criticize the Enlightenment
understanding of cognition in terms of representation as
a politically objectionable form of authoritarianism. He took
himself thereby to be following Dewey in turning the
Enlightenment’s own devastating practical critique of received
  · 
religion against its own dominant theoretical strategy for under-

standing cognition. Thought of this way, pragmatism as Rorty
wants us to understand it just consists in following out the
Enlightenment’s own best insights and principal achievements
to their logical conclusion, completing its humanistic transfor-
mation of our philosophical self-conception.
The central strand of original Enlightenment thought that
Rorty takes over as the fixed end of his analogy extends Kant’s
characterization in “Was ist Aufklärung?” The Enlightenment
marks the ending of humanity’s self-imposed tutelage, the
achievement of our majority and maturity, for the first time
taking adult responsibility for our own character and destiny.
It is our emancipation from submission to the alien, nonhuman-
because-superhuman authority of Old Nobodaddy in matters of
our practical conduct. Henceforth we should deem it incompat-
ible with our human dignity to understand ourselves as subject
to any laws other than those we have in one way or another laid
down for ourselves. No longer should our ideas about what is
right and good be understood as having to have been dictated to
us by a superhuman authority.
The deep Enlightenment insight was the diagnosis of what
Marx, following Hegel, would later call “fetishism,” concerning
the practical norms we acknowledge and identify with as mak-
ing us what we are. Fetishism is mistaking the products of our
own practices and practical attitudes for features of the objective
world that are what they are independent of and antecedent to
those practices and attitudes. Marx’s favorite example was the
traditional conception of the value of precious metals, which
thought of the value of metals the same way it thought of
their density—so that there was, for instance, an objectively cor-
rect answer to the question of how many ounces of silver are
really worth as much as one ounce of gold.
 ·  
The first Enlightenment, as Rorty construed it, concerned our

emancipation from nonhuman authority in practical matters:
issues of what we ought to do and how things ought to be.
The envisaged second Enlightenment is to apply this basic
lesson to our emancipation from nonhuman authority in theo-
retical, cognitive matters. Here the nonhuman authority in ques-
tion is not that of God, but that of objective Reality—the
philosophical conception Rorty liked to write with a capital
R. In an essay published in English a few years after the Girona
lectures, “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism,” Rorty sum-
marized the view he had announced there:9
There is a useful analogy to be drawn between the pragmatists’

criticism of the idea that truth is a matter of correspondence to
the intrinsic nature of reality and the Enlightenment’s criticism
of the idea that morality is a matter of correspondence to the
will of a Divine Being. The pragmatists’ anti-representationalist
account of belief is, among other things, a protest against the
idea that human beings must humble themselves before some-
thing non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic
Nature of Reality. ()
He adds that “seeing anti-representationalism as a version of

anti-authoritarianism permits one to appreciate an analogy
that was central to John Dewey’s thought,” namely the analogy
between ceasing to believe in Sin and ceasing to believe in
Reality. The connection is:
The representationalist tradition in philosophy which was

dominant in those  years hoped that inquiry would put
9
“Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie,
Vol. , No. , , , pp. –, and in John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis
(eds), A Companion to Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, ), pp. –.
  · 
us in touch, if not with the eternal, at least with something

which, in Bernard Williams’s phrase, “is there anyway”—some-
thing non-perspectival, something which is what it is apart
from human needs and interests. ()
By contrast:
What Dewey most disliked about both traditional “realist”

epistemology and about traditional religious beliefs is that
they discourage us by telling us that somebody or something
has authority over us. Both tell us that there is Something
Inscrutable, something toward which we have duties, duties
which have precedence over our cooperative attempts to avoid
pain and obtain pleasure. ()
Again:
Dewey was convinced that the romance of democracy, a

romance built on the idea that the point of a human life is
free cooperation with fellow humans, required a more thor-
oughgoing version of secularism than either Enlightenment
rationalism or nineteenth-century positivism had achieved.
As Dewey saw it, whole-hearted pursuit of the democratic
ideal requires us to set aside any authority save that of a
consensus of our fellow humans. ()
Eduardo Mendieta says of the lesson of these lectures (in his

introduction to Take Care of Freedom and the Truth Will Take Care of
Itself 10):
In the end, Rorty’s adamant skepticism and anti-dogmatism are

simply ways to be anti-authoritarian and irreverently anti-
fetishistic. There is no supreme power that can offer an alibi,
10
Take Care of Freedom and the Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard
Rorty (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ).
 ·  
warrant, or proof for our claims and beliefs, nothing except

fallible human authority. There is no supreme authority, other
than the authority of human justifications and reasons, whose
only power is the power of persuasion. (p. xvii)
Rorty’s call for a second pragmatist Enlightenment, completing

the first, is a Hegelian extrapolation of the original Kantian
understanding of Enlightenment, extending the application of
that conception from ethics to encompass also semantics and
epistemology. Further on, I will say more about what makes it
Hegelian, and what difference that step beyond Kant makes. But
first it is worth filling in the argument behind this subsumption
of semantic anti-representationalism under the banner of human-
istic Enlightenment anti-authoritarianism. In its largest structure,
I think it consists of two moves: a Kantian appreciation of the
normative character of representational relations, and a Hegelian
social pragmatism about normativity in general.
The first is part and parcel of Kant’s radical recasting of
Descartes’s division of things into minds and bodies in terms
of the distinction between norms and causes. Kant reconceives
discursive intentionality (apperception or sapience) as a norma-
tive phenomenon. What principally distinguishes judgments and
intentional actions from the responses of merely natural crea-
tures is their normative status. Knowers and agents are responsible
for how they take things to be and make things be. Candidate
knowings and doings express commitments as to how things are
or shall be. They are exercises of a distinctive kind of authority:
the authority to commit oneself, to make oneself responsible.
This is the authority to bind oneself by rules in the form of the
concepts discursive beings apply in judging and intending.
Merely natural creatures are bound by rules in the form of
laws of nature. Discursive beings are bound by rules they bind
themselves by: concepts they apply, which are rules determining
  · 
what they have thereby made themselves responsible to and for.

Their normative statuses (responsibilities, commitments) are
instituted by their attitudes of undertaking or acknowledging
those commitments. Autonomy is the essence of Kantian
rationality. It is a distinctive normative sort of freedom, which
Kant develops by turning Rousseau’s definition of freedom—he
says “obedience to a law one has prescribed for oneself is
freedom”11—into a criterion of demarcation for genuinely nor-
mative bindingness.
As we have seen, one of the principal grounds on which in
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty condemns then contem-
porary analytic philosophy as still in thrall to Kantian concep-
tions is the central role Kant gives to the concept of representation
in understanding the contentfulness of thought and experience.
I think that in his later critique of representationalism in seman-
tics on the basis of a more thoroughgoing and general version of
Enlightenment anti-authoritarianism, Rorty follows Hegel in
focusing on the rulishness of Kant’s conception of representation.
For Hegel reads Kant as offering a normative conception of
representation, as a way of filling in his normative conception of
intentionality. Kant dug down below Cartesian epistemological
concerns about the warrant for our confidence in the success of
our representational undertakings to uncover the underlying
semantic understanding of representational purport they presup-
pose. Where Descartes takes for granted the representational
purport of our thought (construing it as something we imme-
diately know, just by having thoughts at all)—their being, in his
phrase, tanquam rem, “as if of things”—Kant asks what it is about
11
Social Contract, Book I, section , in Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social
Contract and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ).
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Pragmatism and Idealism

The First Person in Cognition and Morality

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX DP,

. Pragmatism as Completing the Enlightenment:

I n early , the University of Amsterdam philosophers

G enerations of German philosophy students were taught

aspirations according to the metacategories of scientiﬁc under-

once again found something for philosophers to be apodeictic

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas,

Rorty here explicitly acknowledges his appreciation of the liter-

framework—with a more narrowly professionalized research

a banner of shame labeled “idealism,” whose canonical horrible

premises, can only transmit antecedently possessed positive jus-

the Vienna Circle.) But the roots of these foundationalist com-

of which both sensory intuitions and inference-engendering

error is construed exclusively as misrepresentation. (This is the

Looking back, in his intellectual autobiography, Rorty said:

I still believe most of what I wrote in Philosophy and the Mirror of

not yet made myself sufﬁciently familiar with the post-Hegelian

I think Rorty came to be dissatisﬁed with the Philosophy and the

political line both drew on and, in an important sense, brought

dangerous philosophical concepts—one epistemological, the other

sense of Hegelian “Erfahrung,” rather than the atomic, episodic,

night. We are on the whole better off training ourselves to do

essential to the content and use of some kinds of expressions

Robert Brandom, Paul Horwich, and Michael Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge

World, he was, and is, convinced that both concepts can be

precipice, sure-footed as a mountain goat, never putting a foot

This three-sided discussion in Girona was in many ways a

pervasive representationalism of the day. According to this new

animated by its spectacular achievements centered on the

above all, a philosopher of science. He, too, took as his basic

intelligibility. Understanding whose paradigm is Darwin’s

Like many of the philosophers of the original Enlightenment,

but a business. Its practical successes paraded as the warrant of its

mirror to lamp, but from telescope and microscope to ﬂywheel

unsystematic but nonetheless intelligent procedures character-

to and emendations of his hero Carnap, Quine could never bring

According to this way of construing the tradition, Peirce

religion against its own dominant theoretical strategy for under-

The ﬁrst Enlightenment, as Rorty construed it, concerned our

There is a useful analogy to be drawn between the pragmatists’

He adds that “seeing anti-representationalism as a version of

The representationalist tradition in philosophy which was

us in touch, if not with the eternal, at least with something

What Dewey most disliked about both traditional “realist”

Dewey was convinced that the romance of democracy, a

Eduardo Mendieta says of the lesson of these lectures (in his

In the end, Rorty’s adamant skepticism and anti-dogmatism are