The Legitimation Crisis That Was Not to Be
When I was an undergraduate, I was really into the work of Richard Rorty. Reading Rorty (1979), I thought I had it — academic philosophy — all figured out.
Rorty identified the heart of academic philosophy: its concern with a foundational theory of knowledge and reality. According to his story, philosophers sought out a way to prove, once and fall, that we can unfiltered, unquestionable access to an external reality. Philosophers — wrongly, in his view — sought a way to vindicate our practices from the outside: reality, god, the facts, etc. Instead, Rorty encouraged philosophers to think that the only thing required to vindicate our practices — whether philosophical, empirical, or moral — were with whether other people liked them. This was Rorty’s pragmatism.
As Brandom (2023) points out in a new series lectures, and as Rorty himself realized, most philosophers generally aren’t concerned with the foundational fears he described in his hit book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The first example of this concerns the philosophy of language.
Here is a foundational question: how does language make contact with reality? Analytic philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century — Russell, Frege, Kripke, Putnam, etc — cared about this question. This is not the kind of question that animates contemporary philosophers of language, however.
Many (if not most) prominent philosophers of language are now either working in (a) compositional semantics or (b) social or non-ideal philosophy of language. In the former case, foundational questions about what terms mean are set aside in favor of determining what a good compositional theory of language would look like. In the latter case, you are concerned with socially significant or non-ideal uses of language. In either case, philosophers of language are not haunted by the kind of metaphysical questions about language that Rorty highlighted.
Something similar is true in metaphysics, even. There is a small group of metaphysicians — e.g., Thomas Hofweber, Robert Smithson, Amie Thomasson, myself — that are interested in the Big Picture question about how language makes contact with reality, but we are a small and disunified group. Much of metaphysics is about taking for granted some existing account about how language represents (or fails to represent) reality.
If philosophers were never, for the most part, haunted or trapped by foundational questions about realism, what are we to make of Rorty’s Philosphy and the Mirror of Nature? Is it simply outdated? Or are there some lessons we can take from Rorty’s anti-foundationalism? At the moment, I strongly believe there must be something worth taking from PMN, but I don’t have the slightest clue what that is.