So We Need Something Else For Reason To Mean

International Journal of Philosophical Studies
ISSN: 0967-2559 (Print) 1466-4542 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riph20
So We Need Something Else for Reason to Mean
Nikolas Kompridis
To cite this article: Nikolas Kompridis (2000) So We Need Something Else for
Reason to Mean, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 8:3, 271-295, DOI:
10.1080/096725500750039282
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So We Need Something Else for
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F r a n c is
Reason to Mean
Nikolas Kompridis
Abstract
In this paper I give considerable attention to Richard Rorty’s attempt to
make plausible a conception of non-rational semantic and cultural change
– change which Rorty insists on describing as identical with progress – in
order to show the extent to which this attempt is compromised from the
start by an unjustiably narrow and inconsistent view of reason. The point
of this immanent critique is not just to make Rorty’s view of non-rational
change look bad. It is meant to do more justice to his claim that intellec-
tual and moral progress is inseparable from speaking and acting differently
by incorporating this claim into a philosophically enlarged picture of reason.
So the value of taking Rorty’s claims about change seriously lies less in
showing the shortcomings of his conception of reason than it does in bringing
a sense of urgency to the need to renew the project begun by Kant, Hegel,
and German Idealism – the project of conceiving reason as an agency of
change by reinterpreting reason in terms of self-determining freedom.
Keywords: reason; semantic and cultural change; freedom;
self-determination
I Zeitdiagnose
Under the inuence of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kuhn, among others,
the last few decades have been distinguished by a lot of controversial,
still unabated talk about the limits of reason. Philosophers most associ-
ated with such talk claim that reason – or what we normally mean
by reason – cannot reach far enough down to the linguistic and
cultural ‘frameworks’, ‘schemes’, ‘paradigms’, ‘forms of life’, ‘language
games’, ‘vocabularies’, ‘traditions’, ‘episteme’, ‘grids’, ‘horizons’, ‘worlds’
(Heideggerian, Kuhnian, or Goodmanian), etc., which are said to consti-
tute our self-understanding and practices, our speech and action. More
International Journal of Philosophical Studies

ISSN 0967–2559 print 1466–4542 online © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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I N TE R NAT IO NA L J O U R NA L O F P H ILO S O P H ICA L ST U D IES
than the sum of the beliefs and values they express, frameworks and
paradigms cannot, therefore, be formalized in terms of explicit rules
and criteria in respect of which these beliefs and values may be assessed:
they are held to be more binding and encompassing than the rules and
criteria abstracted from them.
Obviously, all these terms exhibit a salient family resemblance, having
been coined to characterize some such structure purportedly anterior or
prior to reason in virtue of which our practices and self-understanding are
logically rendered intelligible to us. The need to coin such terms, along
with the sheer frequency of their use, can be regarded as part of a ubiq-
uitous and continuing deation of the idea that reason is self-determining,
that it is the embodiment of our power of self-determination. Subscription
to any of the deationary conceptions of reason that follow from this often
compelling group of insights into the constitution of our social practices
and self-understanding leads to an obvious but nonetheless disturbing
consequence: it becomes extremely difcult if nigh impossible to attri-
bute to reason and, by implication, to attribute to our own agency the
capacity fundamentally to alter our practices and our self-understanding.
Deationary models of reason are not only inadequate for purposes of
comprehending individual and cultural change; they effectively remove
reason from the arena of fundamental change. It is perhaps not so curious
that the momentum for deation is generated by professionally respectable
analytic philosophers bent on ‘naturalizing’ reason along the lines
suggested by Quine and Davidson, as well as by professionally transgres-
sive poststructuralists and postmodernists bent on ‘unmasking’ reason
along the lines suggested by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault. Under
the naturalistic gaze, what can’t be ‘scientized’ or ‘formalized’ falls outside
the boundary of rationality; and under the gaze of the hermeneutics of
suspicion this ‘scientized’ form of rationality functions as a mask for rela-
tions of power and domination. And so these deationary impulses,
however different their respective source, converge in remarkably similar
sceptical conclusions regarding the transformative power of reason.
The more radical this scepticism becomes, the more it fosters the condi-
tions for an intellectual paralysis which any attentive observer will now
see reected in a much broader paralysis, a much more encompassing
malaise, gripping the whole of our culture as it lurches nervously and hesi-
tantly into the new millennium. This scepticism bursts the boundaries of
high culture, coursing through the whole of the culture of modernity. What
I am referring to is the widespread decline of condence, the pervasive
doubt among the members of late modern societies concerning their
capacity for self-determination – which is to say, their capacity to under-
stand and shape, as self-consciously as possible, their individual and
collective reality, and to change for the better, themselves and their world.
It would not be stretching the claims of my Zeitdiagnose too much to say
272
S O WE N E ED SO M ET H IN G EL SE F O R R EA SO N TO M EA N
that the ‘mood of the times’ is one which manifests a considerable fatalism
in the face of massive change – change which is experienced as happening
to us, rather than initiated by us.
By enlarging the historical perspective of our diagnosis of the times, we
can see that the raging rationality debates of the last three decades are
in many ways contemporaneous with those which took place during the
heyday of German Idealism. But something that was extremely promi-
nent in those debates has been much less prominent in those of our time:
the relation of reason to freedom and self-determination.1 Our rationality
debates, on the other hand, have been structured by the need to criticize
(or justify) various forms of relativism which have become virulent in the
human sciences, and in the broader culture. The primary focus of our
rationality debates, then, has been on questions of non-local truth and
justication.2
Between Hegel’s time and our own, the concern with redening reason
in terms of a vision of human emancipation and ourishing, a rather grand
vision, to be sure, has been forgotten, buried, or abandoned. This is due
partly to the radically original nature of this way of dening reason, one
which goes completely against the grain of the predominantly epistemo-
logical construal of rationality as a medium or instrument of knowledge.3
Today, anyone attempting to renew the attempt to think of reason as an
agency of individual and cultural transformation will appear naive, a little
soft-headed, and hopelessly romantic. For in addition to the powerful hold
which the epistemological-cum-instrumental picture of reason still retains
over our philosophical imaginations, the appeal or plausibility of reason
as an agency of radical social change, as the vehicle of emancipatory
projects, has lost its romance. We are more inclined to associate the roman-
ticism which fuels such projects with irrationalism and the metaphysical
yearning for absolutes than with the idea of human emancipation and
ourishing. In effect, what we have witnessed during the course of this
century is the drain of utopian energies from the idea of reason, energies
which once propelled the realization of reason within a vision of human
emancipation and freedom.
As it now stands, currently available interpretations of reason cannot
really make sense of attempts to change ourselves and the world as a
rational activity: out of quite different considerations, neither naturalistic
nor deconstructive accounts of reason regard change as proper to the
activity of reason. In the light of this pathetic circumstance, I think
that it is time to reconsider the viability of reformulating reason in the
light of Kant’s and Hegel’s insights into reason as an agency of change,
through which reformulation it might become possible to regenerate
its utopian energies. Primary among their insights are Kant’s attempt
to articulate a conception of reason in connection with the power to
begin anew, and Hegel’s attempt to display the capacity of reason to
273
negotiate transitions between old and new social practices, old and new
self-understandings.
In what follows I shall be renewing these insights in conjunction with
an immanent critique of Richard Rorty’s views of reason and his noto-
rious attempt to describe individual and cultural change in non-rational
terms. Among contemporary philosophers, no one has pressed the
case more forcefully than Rorty for the Nietzschean, Heideggerian, and
Deweyan idea that serious individual and collective change requires
new ways of speaking and acting, and a transformed relation to our prac-
tices and self-understanding. Now, what makes Rorty’s view of reason
particularly relevant to my concerns is the fact that Rorty fuses the decon-
structive critique of reason with the naturalistic deation of reason, making
equally explicit how two very different but highly inuential philosoph-
ical outlooks unknowingly work together to render senseless the idea that
reason might mean something more than ‘instrumental’ or ‘prudential’
reason.
I want to challenge Rorty’s critique of reason by staking a claim for
reason precisely where Rorty and many others have claimed that it is inef-
fectual, irrelevant, or non-existent. One way to understand what is to come
is to see it as an elaboration of the following remark made by Hilary
Putnam:
It is true that we speak a public language, that we inherit versions,

that talk of truth and falsity only make sense against the background
of an ‘inherited tradition’, as Wittgenstein says. But it is also true
that we constantly remake our language, that we make new versions
out of old ones, and that we have to use reason to do all this and,
for that matter, even to understand and apply the norms we do not
alter or criticize.4
II What Reason Can’t Do

The title of this paper comes from a suggestion made by Rorty in an essay
discussing the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and Roberto Unger. It
appears in a context in which Rorty is assessing the role reason might
play in initiating the kind of change these social theorists propose. I use
it as the title of my paper not only because this statement echoes (I
presume unintentionally) the critique of narrow conceptions of reason
from Hegel to Habermas and Putnam, but also because the position it
occupies in this paper, and in Rorty’s oeuvre as a whole, is extremely
instructive and not without some irony. Unfortunately, the suggestion that
‘we have to nd something else for “reason” to mean’ is not made in
order to prompt serious reconsideration of the meaning of reason.5 Instead
274
of setting a trajectory which moves his reections beyond the current

interpretations of reason, the suggestion that we need to nd something
else for reason to mean is made simply in order for Rorty to pivot
from his debunking description of the standard notion of reason ‘as appeal
to the conventions of a presently-played language game’ to Habermas’s
reinterpretation of reason as ‘appeal to democratic consensus, to “argu-
mentative procedures” rather than to “rst principles”’ (EHO, p. 189).
The difference between these two interpretations of reason can be
captured by the distinction Hilary Putnam draws between ‘criterial’ and
‘non-criterial’ conceptions of reason, as well as by Habermas’s own distinc-
tion between ‘subject-centred’ and ‘communicative reason’.6
Rorty clearly endorses the point of distinguishing between these two con-
ceptions of reason, whether the distinction is stated in Habermas’s or in
Putnam’s vocabulary. He acknowledges that criterial or subject-centred
construals of reason are simply not in a position to put into question or
substantially alter the practices of reason which they express and repro-
duce. From the standpoint of such a conception of reason, the form of life
which coheres around such practices must appear to be the only ‘rational’
possibility. Any critique of reason which is continuous with the attempt to
reinterpret reason, to expand its possible meaning and, thereby, its possi-
ble practice, cannot appeal to already institutionalized norms and criteria
of rationality. According to Habermas, what is required is an appeal to the
less restrictive, more open-ended meaning of reason embodied in demo-
cratic procedures of argumentation, procedures which do not predetermine
or restrict in advance either the form or content of possible arguments.
While granting that this reinterepretation of reason (along the lines
of Kant’s notion of ‘public reason’) goes some way towards making
democratic forms of life more responsive to inexible practices and to
self-induced social pathologies, Rorty strongly questions whether the crit-
ical and transformative powers of democratic procedures of argumentation
– the core practices of ‘communicative reason’ – are sufciently critical
or transformative. As much as open-ended and unrestricted procedures
of justication are a necessary feature of democratic forms of life, they
cannot insure against the danger that such forms of life will harden, that
they will become less responsive, weary, and ‘Alexandrian’.
To say that the aim of social change should be a society in which

such procedures are all that we need – in which passionate, romantic,
only retrospectively arguable breaks with the past are no longer
necessary – is like saying hat the aim of psychoanalysis should be
‘normal functioning’. . . . Of course we should aim at such a society,
but that does not mean that the only sort of social change we should
work for is the kind for which we can offer good arguments.
(EHO, p. 189)
275
On Rorty’s view, to the extent that we rely only upon our familiar,
already available procedures of justication, procedures whose argumen-
tative force is derived from the background of shared (but never fully
surveyable) premises and beliefs, we shall be little disposed to recognize
that ‘a new voice is needed’.7 Indeed, Rorty claims controversially that
‘[a]rguments (whose premises must necessarily be phrased in familiar
vocabularies) often just get in the way of attempts to create an unfamiliar
political vocabulary, a new lingua franca for those trying to transform what
they see around them’ (EHO, p. 181). Now, Rorty is not making the self-
refuting claim that arguments don’t do any good work at all; all he is
asserting is that arguments can’t do any of the work of fundamentally
transforming (as opposed to justifying) our beliefs and practices. Reason,
so Rorty seems to think, is good for the justifying kind of work, pretty
much useless for the transforming. Is Rorty right? Does reason end just
where arguments carried on against the background of shared premises
and practices of justication end?
I think that Rorty is right at least in this: that we cannot always argue
our way from a language-game that has become disturbed and distorted
to the reform of that language game. More often than not, we shall need
to come up with an alternative practice when an old one has become
exhausted or dysfunctional, when it has become unable to serve either
our needs or our attempts, prompted by unforeseen circumstances and
unintended consequences, to reformulate them. Progress of this kind
requires a change of vocabulary, for changes within a vocabulary are taken
to be constrained by that very vocabulary. In lieu of the disrepute into
which linear conceptions of progress (and the philosophies of history from
which they grew) have fallen, the question then becomes, Can there be
non-linear progress across vocabularies and paradigms? If so, how is it to
be described? Rorty is clearly sanguine about the possibility of progress,
but not very sanguine about the possibility of rational progress across
vocabularies and paradigms. This stance is indeed as puzzling as it sounds.
Now, as far as I am able to understand, the transition from an exhausted
language game, paradigm, vocabulary, etc. to a better one would minimally
require: 8
(a) that we recognize that our needs are no longer well served by some
current social practice, that they are no longer articulable in our
current interpretive and evaluative language/s;
(b) that we can create alternatives to these;
(c) that we can successfully negotiate the transition from the old practice
or vocabulary to the new one; and
(d) that we are able in the light of the new vocabulary or social practice
to understand and explain the shortcomings of the old, to understand
why that which is articulable in the new language was not articulable
in the old.
276
Much of what Richard Rorty has to say about individual and collective
transformation appears to be compatible with these four requirements,
but he excludes a transformative role for reason. I shall argue that the
consequences of this exclusion render futile Rorty’s attempts to describe
the change from one vocabulary or social practice to another as a learning
process. Were Rorty able to understand that changes in our vocabularies
and social practices call for rather than exclude reason, he would himself
reject these unfortunate, highly premature, and self-undermining conclu-
sions:
1 that reason is not suitable for describing ‘the relation between the old
and the new’;9
2 that the distinction between the rational and irrational loses its utility
‘when we raise the question of how we get from one vocabulary to
another, from one dominant metaphoric to another’ (CIS, p. 48);
3 that we cannot describe intellectual or political progress as rational,
‘in any sense of “rational” which is neutral between vocabularies’ (CIS,
p. 48); and
4 that the very topic of reason – as well as the topic with which it is
entwined, modernity – is exhausted.10
Perhaps I’m one of the few who regard Rorty’s attempt to recast a number
of philosophical, moral, and political issues in terms of the difference
between old and new, between actual and possible social practices, as
extremely promising and important. To realize its considerable promise
as well as to rearticulate its utopian dimension, however, we need to make
clear why conclusions 1–4 are unwarranted and mistaken, and why an
enlarged, ‘non-criterial’ interpretation of reason may allow us not only to
connect reason to transformation, but to show that reason is continuous
with transformation. That means that we must turn into afrmations the
negations of reason contained in these conclusions. We must turn Rorty
upside down by showing that:
1.1 the difference between the old and new requires changing rather than
limiting what reason can mean;
1.2 the distinction between the rational and irrational gets a new life
and nds a new application when we raise the question of not
only how, but of why and when, to move from one vocabulary to
another;
1.3 while we cannot describe progress in any sense of rational that is
neutral between vocabularies, we do not need a neutral conception
of rationality to describe such progress;
1.4 it is not the topics of reason and modernity that are exhausted,
but only the latest round of debates concerning their meaning and
relevance.
277
III To Be or Not To Be Criterial about Reason

There is one familiar interpretation of reason that Rorty has consistently
urged us to reject: the idea that reason forms ‘a permanent neutral matrix
for all inquiry and all history’,11 that it represents a ‘transcultural human
ability to correspond to reality’.12 I agree that we should deate this wholly
metaphysical interpretation of reason. That still leaves up for grabs what
reason can mean. Close inspection of Rorty’s writings from Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature to the present shows him to be of two minds
regarding the available candidates, shows him swinging back and forth
between endorsing non-criterial proposals, such as those offered by
Putnam and Habermas, and backsliding to criterial conceptions of reason.
In effect, he has carried out an inconsistent policy of deation based some-
times on non-criterial, sometimes on criterial premises. On the one hand,
he has pursued on consistent grounds a deationary critique aimed not
only at patently metaphysical conceptions of reason and truth, but also
at such attempts as Putnam’s and Habermas’s to interpret truth and ration-
ality in terms of universally necessary and unavoidable ‘idealizations’.
Rorty commends their attempts to interpret reason non-criterially while
objecting to their contradictory attempts to reinstate Peirce-like assump-
tions about ‘convergence’ and ‘consensus’ to explicate reason and truth.13
On the other hand, Rorty has pursued this deationary policy – this
time in violation of his own non-criterial strictures – to show the limita-
tions of reason in respect of its power to transform our social practices
and self-understanding. In such contexts, contexts in which he’s discussing
the ‘imaginative’, ‘novel’, ‘metaphoric’, and ‘prophetic’ uses of language
in contrast to its ‘rule-governed’ or ‘argumentative’ uses, Rorty simply
forgets the critical position he has taken towards identifying reason
with ‘the philosophical dogmas of the day’ (PMN, p. 269), with ‘applying
criteria’ (ORT, p. 25), or with ‘procedures laid down in advance’ (ORT,
p. 36). Instead, he backslides to a criterial interpretation of reason,
suggesting that we regard rationality and cognition pretty much the way
the logical positivists did, as ‘conned to familiar and relatively uninter-
esting uses of language, to discourses for which there are generally
accepted procedures for xing belief’ (ORT, p. 163). I attribute most
of Rorty’s failure to understand reason in transformative terms to his
apparently uncontrollable backslide to criterial conceptions of reason, a
backslide to the positivist claim that the realm of the rational coincides
with what is ‘criterially veriable’.14 It is only in virtue of a criterial concep-
tion of reason that Rorty’s conclusions regarding the transformative limits
of reason make any sense; but what makes them intelligible also makes
them untenable.
Consider how in one context Rorty urges us to get over the idea that
rationality consists in ‘the satisfaction of criteria which are stable in
advance’, to get over the idea that ‘there is some special virtue in knowing
278
in advance what criteria you are going to satisfy, in having standards by

which to measure [intellectual and political] progress’ (ORT, p. 37). Yet
in another (conclusions 1–3), he attempts to persuade us that reason is
unsuitable for describing the relation between the old and the new, and
unsuitable for describing progress between vocabularies. To put it bluntly,
he shouldn’t be talking non-criterially out of one side of his mouth, while
talking criterially out of the other. If we should not construe reason in
criterial terms, if we should not identify it with applying criteria, then why
should we disqualify reason from describing the difference between old
and new on just such a criterial basis? The fact that Rorty accepts a conclu-
sion based upon premises he has elsewhere correctly rejected shows just
how divided his own thinking is. To launch a convincing argument that
reason is unsuitable for describing the relation between the old and the
new, and that it plays no part in the movement from an old to a new
vocabulary, Rorty would have to adhere consistently to non-criterial
premises. But if he were consistently non-criterial about reason, Rorty
wouldn’t bother making such an argument; he would instead channel
his intellectual energy towards nding another way to understand the
difference between old and new.
Let me clarify my point by treating the following, rather pertinent, ques-
tion. What is the normative difference between old and new that Rorty
wants so much to preserve? What makes the new different from the old?
What makes the new new? And what makes it signicant and potentially
transformative? First of all, what makes the the new new is that we can
only state in what its newness consists after we have recognized and under-
stood the difference it introduces in virtue of what we can say and do.
Our old ways of speaking and acting could not have prepared us in advance
for the difference the new introduces. Another way to put this is to say
that between the new and the old there are no empirical or inferential
relations that allow us to move from the old to the new without expanding
our empirical or logical space: the new introduces empirical and inferen-
tial relations that were not already there. One couldn’t trace the formation
of psychosomatic symptoms back to processes of repression before the
new theory of the self introduced by Freud; one couldn’t trace the suppres-
sion and domination of women in certain of our social practices and in
aspects of our self-understanding before feminists came up with a language
which made the necessary empirical and inferential relations available
and perspicuous. Thus in his Tanner Lecture, ‘Feminism and Pragmatism’,
Rorty glosses a point made by a number of feminist theorists: ‘unless
women t into the logical space prepared for them by current linguistic
and other practices, the law does not know how to deal with them’, and
‘injustices may not be perceived as injustices, even by those who suffer
them, until somebody invents a previously unplayed role’.15 On the other
hand, we need to be careful not to exaggerate the difference between old
279
and new to such an extent that new social roles and vocabularies will have
to be regarded as created ex nihilo. In her response to Rorty’s Tanner
Lecture, Nancy Fraser offers an instructive example for how old social
roles and vocabularies can be transformed rather than invented from
scratch, and it is an example of transformative practice that has a gener-
alizable signicance. The example in question concerns the Victorian cult
of ‘pure womanhood’ which promoted a picture of women’s superior
moral sensibility while glorifying domesticity and excluding women from
participation in the public sphere.
[T]his originally disabling notion of women’s moral superiority was

soon appropriated by some middle-class and elite women and trans-
formed into a springboard and platform for reformist activity in the
public sphere on behalf of causes such as abolitionism and women’s
suffrage. These women in effect redeployed a traditional, conning
female moral identity precisely in order to expand their eld of
action. They thereby turned a disability into an enabling identity, an
identity one could want to claim.16
What is at issue here is reducible to a case neither of pure discovery

nor of pure creation. The temptation to draw a strong line between the
two must be avoided just as much as the temptation to eliminate the
distinction altogether. Instead, we should see that the transition between
old and new requires a learning process which reposes upon an interde-
pendence between discovery and creation. Patriarchy and the domination
of women existed long before feminist vocabularies came along; but it
was only through the introduction of these vocabularies that we could
give the names domination and sexism to what we had hitherto described
as ‘just the way we do things around here’. In other words, the creation
of these feminist vocabularies was constrained by the fact of women’s
oppression, yet without these vocabularies there would have been no fact
to establish. Of course, new vocabularies not only bring previously
neglected or unseen phenomena to light; they unavoidably shape what
they bring to light, which is why the need for new and better vocabularies
is in principle inexhaustible.
Yet another way to put this, in terms which will grow in importance
throughout the remainder of my paper, is to say that the difference which
the new introduces into our social practices and self-understanding is a
difference we must learn to state, and learn to state in the language which
the new vocabulary or social practice rst makes available to us. While
there are no deductive relations between old and new ways of speaking
and acting, there are retrospectively accessible relations of comparative
evaluation and justication. Retrospectively, we recognize that what the
new enabled us to say or do is something we could not have previously
280
said or done; although we may have inarticulately recognized that we

needed a ‘new voice’, we were not yet able to speak in this ‘new voice’.
Indeed, the very idea of the new contains an expectation or promise of
a difference that can make a genuine difference to practice. Thus, after-
wards, we may speak of a moral and epistemic gain in understanding, the
test of which (requirement d above) is the capacity of our new way of
speaking and acting to reorder, reorganize, and redescribe our previous
empirical and inferential relations in a manner that is both richer and
error-reducing. Because the language we currently speak is neither ‘all the
language there is’ nor ‘all the language we shall ever need’, we are in
better position to recognize the importance of new interpretive and eval-
uative vocabularies. And from this recognition it follows that there can
be no interpretive or evaluative vocabulary, no commensurating language
‘known in advance, which will provide an idiom into which to translate
any new theory, poetic idiom, or native culture’ (ORT, p. 215). The inter-
pretation and evaluation of these new theories, languages, and cultural
practices will require language learning in addition to language transla-
tion. In learning these alternative theories, languages, and practices, we
also learn in the light of them to reinterpret and re-evaluate our own.
Advocates of the new from Nietzsche to Rorty and Lyotard have been
oddly reluctant to make their case for the new explicitly in terms of the
epistemic and moral gain that can issue from it, preferring to stress its
transgressive or transformative signicance. They are ready to defend the
power of the new in the service of freedom, but this defence seems to
require uncoupling freedom from reason. This is a serious mistake which
follows directly from their narrow conception of reason and, concomi-
tantly, from their narrow conception of freedom. Part of the explanation
for the contemporary (or ‘postmodern’) aversion to reason lies in the
cumulative effects of successive unmasking critiques of reason from
Nietzsche to Foucault – critiques that have simply undermined our trust
in the very idea of reason; but another part lies in the conclusions that
many have drawn from Kuhn’s analysis of paradigm shifts, Nietzsche’s
analysis of perspectivism, and Heidegger’s analysis of world disclosure.
One inescapable conclusion of their analyses is that what shows up as
relevant, as mattering, is a function of the worlds, perspectives, and para-
digms in virtue of which anything can show up at all. So when two or
more scientic or cultural paradigms confront each other, there will be
disagreement as well as lack of convergence, not only because different
problems will show up as relevant, but also because there are no neutral
(non-circular) criteria to which appeal can be made to evaluate the
strengths and weaknesses of the paradigms in question.
The thesis of incommensurability that follows from this conclusion
can be taken in one of two ways, each of which has specic consequences
with respect to the question of whether reason can be regarded as a
281
transformative agency. If it is taken as the claim that translation between

conceptual schemes and paradigms is simply not possible – as was so often
the case at the height of this debate – the thesis of incommensurability
can be straightforwardly rejected as a self-refuting thesis on the now
familiar grounds adduced by the likes of Davidson and Putnam.17 But this
outcome does not really affect the question which concerns us here, for
it is quite clearly the case that deationary and non-relativistic accounts
of reason are quite compatible with each other, as the example of
Davidson’s work shows. If, on the other hand, incommensurability is taken
instead as the realization that translation is not enough to enable and
manage the transitions between paradigms or perspectives, that such tran-
sitions will require language learning, we shall be in a position to defend
a reinterpretation of reason in transformative terms. The learning that
such circumstances demand is not one that is governed by problems of
intelligibility alone. We can accept Davidson’s point that our ability to
render the speech and actions of another minimally intelligible by our
lights is due to what it means to interpret and communicate. But that does
not address the problem that arises from differences between ‘us’ and
‘them’ – differences that take the form of mutual or asymmetrical norma-
tive challenges to change our language and our life; for the kind of learning
we are called upon to initiate in such circumstances is transformative in
kind. Only transformative learning is able to respond to normative chal-
lenges to our self-understanding and practices which come in the form of
new perspectives, vocabularies, paradigms, and the like.
Since the emergence of post-empiricist and hermeneutic developments
in philosophy and the human sciences this point is rather familiar if not
widely accepted; furthermore, it is a point Rorty has repeatedly made in
his own way. The question we need to ask now is why Rorty is not prepared
to conceive of reason in terms of transformative learning, in terms of the
capacity to begin anew. It is both important and useful to understand just
what motivates Rorty’s backslide to a criterial interpretation of reason in
order to preserve the difference between the old and new. The concerns
involved in motivating this backslide are genuine and generalizable, arising
out of a combination of fear and habit. First of all, Rorty is afraid that
any interpretation of reason that makes it continuous with the transfor-
mative potential of the new will deprive the latter of its power to disturb,
its power to push us towards previously unimagined possibilities – in short,
Rorty is afraid that if reason incorporates transformation, the new will be
just one more thing we can subsume under a category or a rule, some-
thing for which we can offer ever-ready criteria, and so relieving ourselves
of the obligation really to learn something new.
This fear is precisely what is behind his suspicion of and objections
to attempts in the philosophy of science to come up with a ‘logic of
discovery’, to offer, in response to Kuhn, a ‘“rational” and principled
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change of meaning’ (PMN, p. 271). Here “rational” change of meaning

refers to the negotiation of transitions from old to new paradigms
according to invariable and immediately available criteria or handy trans-
lating machines, all of which presupposes the presence of an ‘overarching
structure of rationality’. This way of understanding rational change is
greeted by Rorty’s mocking remark about the pretensions of philosophers
who believe themselves to be in a position to tell the rest of us when we
‘could start meaning something different’ (PMN, p. 272). I think that Rorty
is right to be critical and suspicious of such attempts, for they succeed
only in taking the novelty out of novelty, in removing the threat from the
new and the unexpected, and thus in neutralizing the future: a ‘logic of
discovery’ based on connecting reason and transformation criterially must
revoke any signicant difference between old and new, past and future.
But once again, all that Rorty’s criticisms show in this respect is the limi-
tations of criterial interpretations of reason, not the discontinuity between
reason and transformation.
Secondly, Rorty has not fully dishabituated himself of the traditional
philosophical tendency to identify reason either with rules and criteria
which unproblematically stipulate how they are to be applied, or with
practices of justication which function unproblematically within a life-
world of shared beliefs and premises. In order to reinterpret the relation
between old and new in non-criterial terms – which is, after all, what
Rorty is aiming for – he would have to get over the tainted image he has
of reason. Rorty has often called for a change in our culture’s self-image.
He would like to see a change from a ‘scientistic’ to a ‘poetic’ self-image,
a change which crosses the divide from a culture whose practices have
been based on ‘discovering’ essences and unchanging realities to a culture
whose practices are based on ‘self-creation’. But he has never issued a
call for changing our self-image through a change in our image of reason.
And this is because of Rorty’s conviction that the practices of reason are
inherently uncreative. Here I need to make a brief digression concerning
Rorty’s view of the history of modern philosophy, especially the philos-
ophy of reason.
In his discussion of Kant in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty
notes the change in the reception of Kant, whereby what Kant was up to
stopped being described as Vernunftkritik, and began fatefully to be
described as Erkenntnistheorie instead. But Rorty fails sufciently to
account for the signicance of this change in his deconstruction of the
representationalist tradition of philosophy-as-epistemology. He doesn’t
really provide a sense of just what is lost when we neglect the attempts
between Kant and Hegel to change the meaning of reason through a
critique of reason, and through the identication of reason with freedom
and critique. The difference between philosophy as Vernunftkritik and
philosophy as Erkenntnistheorie or Erkenntnislehre can be seen as the
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difference between thinking of reason as an agency of social change and

thinking of reason as a faculty of correct representation. Rorty is content
to treat Kant as someone who belongs chiey to the epistemological tradi-
tion, which made the problem of correct representation primary. He
ignores Kant’s attempts to change the meaning of reason in connection
with the idea of self-determining freedom, an idea which is not subsum-
able under the problem of correct representation.
A very important but too little exploited aspect of the change in the
meaning of reason Kant initiated, one which even his post-Kantian critics
from Fichte to Hegel embraced wholeheartedly, is his suggestion that
reason involves the power to being anew, to initiate ways of speaking, think-
ing, and acting different from how we’ve spoken, thought, and acted. I am
referring to the discussion of the ‘cosmological idea of freedom’ in the
Critique of Pure Reason, particularly the passage at B582, where Kant
describes the causality of reason and freedom in terms of the ‘spontaneous
power to initiate a series of events’, and the passage at B576, where he
describes reason as having the capacity to form ‘for itself with perfect spon-
taneity an order of its own according to Ideas . . . according to which it
declares actions to be necessary even though they have never taken place,
and perhaps never will take place’.18
Unfortunately, Kant’s suggestion has too often been lost in the con-
troversies generated by the intelligible/empirical, nature/freedom, cause/
reason distinctions in which it is lodged. But we should not allow these
controversies to crowd out the originality of Kant’s suggestion, which is
crucial to any contemporary attempt to renew the links between reason
and self-determining freedom. By ascribing to reason the power to begin
anew, Kant shows that he is aware of the need to think of reason not only
as a justicatory practice, but also as a possibility-disclosing practice, a
practice which we can accountably ascribe to our own activity.19
Thus the point of my Kantian digression is to show that only an
extremely narrow construal of reason excludes a creative role for reason.
If we follow Kant and hold that the power to begin anew is an inelim-
inable element of what reason ought to mean, we might avoid the mistake
which Rorty, among many others, continues to make in trying to isolate
some agency of individual and social change independent of, or ‘other’
to, reason. Now, that is precisely the mistake Rorty makes in ‘Philosophy
as Science, Metaphor, and as Politics’, where he refers to a learning process
with the power to alter our self-understanding and social practices – a
learning process Rorty describes as discontinuous with reason.20 But as
I’ve been arguing throughout this section, the only reason which is discon-
tinuous with transformative learning is of the criterial kind, the kind
Rorty describes as operating within a eld of already established infer-
ential relations which are largely closed semantically, epistemologically,
and ontologically. Only the practices of criterial reason allow Rorty to
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claim that they ‘leave our language, our way of dividing up the realm of
possibility unchanged. They alter the truth-value of sentences, but not our
repertoire of sentences’ (EHO, p. 12). Thus, in order to open up logical
space and the realm of possibility we would need a ‘voice from outside
logical space’, and that voice speaks metaphorically. Once we think of
‘language, logical space, and the realm of possibility as open-ended’, we
shall see that ‘large-scale change of belief is indistinguishable from large-
scale change of the meaning of one’s words’ (EHO, pp. 12, 13).
The point that there is some interdependence between change of
meaning and change of belief is extremely important, and one which
we must grant to Rorty, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kuhn. Therefore, I
don’t have a problem with the claim that any fundamental transformation
of our practices and self-understanding requires thinking of our language,
logical space, and the realm of possibility as open-ended – not to think
of them as open-ended leads to the paralysing scepticism I referred to in
the rst section of this paper. What makes Rorty’s point problematic is
the suggestion that we should restrict the meaning of reason to practices
which leave the realm of possibility unchanged (!). Shouldn’t the insights
of two centuries of philosophical critiques of reason have taught us
to describe those practices which leave the realm of possibility as it is,
and which perhaps stand in the way of its enlargement, as practices
which suffer from a lack of reason?21 Indeed, must we not uphold the
idea that any practice of reason worthy of the name must presuppose
as well as contribute to the open-endedness of language, logical space,
and the realm of possibility? Otherwise, if we follow Rorty to this
point, we shall have to think of reason as culminating in semantically and
logically closed rather than in open-ended practices, and so shall be
forced to place rationality where we had placed (or tried to, at least)
irrationality.
As has been said many times, what reason can mean is not exhausted
or properly captured by formalizable rules or argumentative procedures.
Reason is not a tool, not an innocent or neutral instrument of knowledge,
not an algorithm, not some entity which once discovered remains iden-
tical with itself across historical time and cultural space. Understanding
reason exclusively in this way has brought about the reication of reason
and, with it, a decline in our self-condence as self-determining agents.
In the light of both the theoretical and historical experiences of this century
it behooves us to start thinking of reason in terms of socially mediated
learning processes that enable us to correct and transform our practices
and self-understanding, making them more capable of self-correction and
self-transformation than they were. Practices that open our eyes and ears
to what we had failed to notice, that give us a new tongue with which
to speak and new ears with which to hear, practices that enable us to
overcome stubborn social pathologies, communication breakdowns, and
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partial, one-sided interpretations of ourselves and others, are as an

important an expression and application of reason as any we now have,
and any we may hope to have.
IV Changing our Language and our Lives

Progress without Reason?
In a number of his recent essays Rorty has tried to make his deationary
critique of reason compatible with an account of linguistic and cultural
change fashioned out of Davidson’s views on metaphor, and it is this
account which I now want to examine. My analysis will proceed in two
steps, looking rst at the claim that metaphors are ‘causes, not reasons for,
change of belief’ (CIS, p. 50), and then at the claim that metaphors are
‘calls to change our language and our life’ (EHO, p. 13). I shall show that
Rorty’s somewhat idiosyncratic use of Davidson actually undermines the
case he wants to make for the new. While Davidson’s views on metaphor
lend themselves to the twist Rorty gives to them, Rorty grossly overesti-
mates the possibilities they offer for understanding the difference between
the old and new, and for elaborating an ambitious account of how our
practices and self-understanding change. Davidson’s views on metaphor
simply weren’t designed to provide the basis for such an account, and all
Rorty succeeds in proving is how inadequate they are in this respect.
In this rst step of my analysis, I want to look at how Rorty uses
Davidson’s causal picture of metaphor to disconnect reason from trans-
formation and uphold conclusions 1–3. Following Davidson, Rorty maps
the distinction between reasons and causes onto the distinction between
the literal and metaphorical uses of language. This last distinction is further
mapped onto the distinction between rationality and irrationality. The
effect of this compound mapping is to make reason practically irrelevant
to the transformation of our social practices and self-understanding. By
restricting the distinction between reason and cause, and thus the distinc-
tion between persuasion and force, to the interior of a language game,
Rorty believes that he is making room for the idea that ‘progress for the
community, as well as for the individual, is a matter of using new words
as well as arguing from premises phrased in old words’ (CIS, p. 48). All
that reason needs to mean, then, is ‘internal coherence’ among beliefs and
desires. Within a language game we can distinguish reasons for belief from
causes for belief which are not reasons. However, as Rorty’s conclusion
2 states, when we raise the question of how we get from one vocabulary
or language game to another, this distinction loses its utility. Because
reasons can have unforced force only within a language game, the
‘rational–irrational distinction is less useful than it once appeared’ (CIS,
p. 48). Once we come to see that, argues Rorty, we shall have to give up
the idea that ‘there can be reasons for using languages as well as reasons
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within languages for believing statements’ (CIS, p. 48). So once we see

that the force and cogency of reasons are paradigm-relative, we shall have
to accept Rorty’s conclusion 3: ‘This amounts to giving up the idea that
intellectual or political progress is rational, in any sense of “rational” which
is neutral between vocabularies’ (CIS, p. 48).
Like conclusions 1–2, this conclusion rests on obviously criterial
premises. In simple terms, if progress can’t be ‘criterially veriable’, then
we are in no position to talk about rational progress (‘in any sense of
“rational” which is neutral between vocabularies’). If rationality gets its
sense and force only inside a specic language game, talk about any
progress which might follow from dropping one vocabulary for another
becomes unintelligible; when the distinction between rationality and irra-
tionality goes, however, so does talk of progress in any relevant sense of
the term. Without some distinction between rationality and irrationality
which is neither internal to nor neutral between language games or forms
of life, there is no basis for describing as irrational an individual or culture
that does not transform (or abandon in favour of more promising ones)
practices and self-understandings which have become problematic,
distorted, or self-undermining.
The question which obtrudes at this point is why, given conclusions 1–3,
Rorty still wants to talk about progress. Why does he thinks it is neces-
sary to use this concept to describe what happens when the individual
and the community start using ‘new words’? Why doesn’t he drop, along
with the distinctions between rationality and irrationality, force and
persuasion, and the like, the (implied) distinction between progress and
its opposite – regression, stagnation, degeneration, or any other appro-
priate antonym – when describing transitions between paradigms and
language games? Must not the distinction between progress and regres-
sion be pushed into the interior of a language game along with the
distinction between reason and cause? And, thereby, doesn’t the concept
of progress perforce lose its utility? Can we intelligibly speak of progress,
then, if there can be no ‘reasons for using languages as well as reasons
within languages for believing statements’?
It should be rather obvious by now that Rorty is in the embarrassing
situation of straining to say something which his preferred vocabulary
precludes; in spite of his deationary rhetoric, naturalistic temper, and
criterial construal of reason, he wants very much to say that these
‘new words’ give us something more, where ‘more’ means something
both normative and empirical – namely, a change which makes our self-
understanding and practices open where they had been closed, exible
and responsive where they had been congealed and rigid. In other words,
what Rorty wants to say, and what he ought to say without his typical
wafing, is that there are occasions when one vocabulary really is better
than another.22 He simply can’t continue to provide back-up for claims
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like ‘notions of criteria and choice are no longer in point when it comes
to change from one vocabulary to another’ (CIS, p. 6) when he has
conceded that ‘adopting a new vocabulary only makes sense if you can
say something about the debilities of the old vocabulary from the inside,
and can move back and forth, dialectically, between the old and the new
vocabulary’ (ORT, p. 221). (This is just what requirements a–d tried to
capture in the second section of my paper, and I shall return to it in the
concluding section.)
Now, this concession puts paid to the claim that there can be reasons
within languages for believing statements but not reasons for using
languages. The dialectical transition between two vocabularies which Rorty
describes presupposes the possibility of progress, and presupposes that
reason plays a role in the transition. Otherwise, as Rorty makes very clear,
the very idea of dialectical movement between vocabularies would be
unintelligible. At the very least the transition from an old to a new vocab-
ulary has to be motivated by an awareness, if only an inchoate awareness,
that we need a ‘new voice’ with which to speak. As has often been said
from Heidegger and Dewey to MacIntyre and Kuhn, this awareness is
most often prompted by the recurrence of recalcitrant or intractable prob-
lems, communication breakdowns, and ‘epistemological crises’ which our
existential, moral, political, and intellectual predicaments are heir to.23
Because such experiences almost invariably involve our relations to others,
they provide us with sufcient impetus and reason for believing that we
must learn to speak, think, and act differently, even if we do not yet know
how. The fact that we don’t know in advance what we are going to learn,
or how we are going to get from ‘here’ to ‘there’, in no way establishes
the transformative limits of reason; it only exposes the limitations of
criterial interpretations of reason.
In any case, we no longer have to infer from the correct but potentially
misleading premise that we cannot have neutral criteria for adjudicating
progress from one vocabulary to another to the invalid conclusion that
nothing rational can decide between them. By expanding the meaning of
reason non-criterially, we shall not only be in a position to recognize with
Putnam that ‘rationality and justication are presupposed by the activity
of criticizing and inventing paradigms’ (RHF, p. 125); we shall also be in
a position to recognize the converse: that critique and invention are
presuppositions of rationality and justication. In other words, we shall
be in a position to recognize the creativity of reason in initiating and
negotiating the transition between paradigms and vocabularies.
Through such an enlargement of our understanding of reason we shall
be able to support much more convincingly than Rorty has the claim that
a new metaphor can be ‘a call to change one’s language and one’s life’
(EHO, p. 13). With this claim, I come to the second step of my analysis.
It should come as no surprise that what Rorty nds attractive in Davidson’s
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views on metaphor is the possibility of a non-criterial interpretation of

metaphor. He thinks that Davidson’s restriction of metaphor to the domain
of use, a domain that stands apart from the regular and predictable domain
of linguistic meaning, makes it possible for us to get over the mistaken
attempt to understand metaphorical uses of language ‘as dictated by rules,
or conventions, or the program of an interpreting machine’ (ORT, p. 166).
This way of understanding metaphors is indeed mistaken. However, a non-
criterial understanding of metaphor has to go along with a non-criterial
conception of the normative, and of reason. For it is just as mistaken to
think of everyday practices of reason as governed by rules, conventions,
or the program of interpreting machines. Otherwise, we shall continue to
think of metaphor as an ‘other’ to reason, and so keep alive the mistaken
idea that reason’s practices are rule-governed and criterial, while those of
the ‘imagination’ are free and unconstrained.
The serious aws of Rorty’s account of reason-less change can be all
the more concretely exposed by looking at his attempt to square the idea
that metaphors should be construed as calls to change our language and
our life with the idea that they should be understood as causes, not reasons,
for such change. Understanding metaphors as calls to change our language
and our life supposes, pace Rorty, that we rst of all understand ourselves
as the addressees of such calls and, as such, that we understand ourselves
as obligated to respond to them. For what is involved here is the estab-
lishment of an ethical relation between ourselves and possibly better
versions of ourselves that evades description in causal, physicalistic, and
normatively deprived naturalistic language. Agents who regard funny
‘marks and noises’ as suggestions about how they might live must have
some prior interpretation of what in them needs and desires change. They
must have some rational motivation to speak and act differently, some
reason to desire this difference; without such motivation they would not
be in a position to establish the dialogical relation between the call and
the response, between the address and the addressee, that I just described
as an ethical relation. So it does Rorty no good at all to try to explain
this relation ‘on the model of unfamiliar events in the natural world’ which
prompt us to revise our theories (ORT, p. 163). Unlike ‘thunderclaps and
birdsong’, metaphors are addressed, however unfamiliarly, to human
beings by other human beings. Unfamiliar events in the natural world do
not have addressees whose eyes and ears they seek to open, whose habits
they seek to alter, addressees with whom they share a form of life, a
history, and some common aspirations.24
The claim that metaphors can bring about a change of belief by a cause
which is not a reason simply does not wash, not if by change of belief
we are referring to a change of long-held convictions about the kind of
beings we are and want to be. The beliefs (and desires) which shape our
self-understanding do not change without a ght; they’re quite tenacious,
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as anyone who has attempted such change already knows. Long-held

convictions constitutive of our personal or cultural identity can’t be shed
like out-dated fashions or falsied hypotheses, which is why new candi-
dates for belief are so often resisted or neglected (and why our desires
resist re-education). The news that birds are descended from dinosaurs
may prompt me to alter my beliefs about birds; but to think that this kind
of belief-change gets at what is involved in changing our language and
our life is an example of scientism and deep misunderstanding.
Similarly, the Davidsonian point that metaphors don’t express beliefs
and desires shouldn’t license the exclusion of metaphor from the sphere
of reason. The question of the rationality of metaphors, and of semantic
change in general, should not be indexed to the narrow conception of
rationality presupposed by the belief–desire model. If we are prepared to
defend the idea that reason is also a possibility-disclosing practice, then
we shall see that what Rorty calls metaphor belongs to the activity of
disclosing possibility. Metaphors open up the world in previously unavail-
able (and unforeseeable) ways, and they open us to other ways of
‘being-in-the-world’. Rorty is quite right in claiming that metaphors do
not ‘leave our language, our way of dividing up the realm of possibility
unchanged’; and right in claiming that the value of metaphors lies not
only in showing us how to think of ‘language, logical space, and the realm
of possibility as open-ended ’, but in keeping open the openness of
language, logical space, and the realm of possibility. In order to make this
point persuasively, however, Rorty has to connect the talk of openness
and open-endedness to evaluative questions concerning the rationality of
our self-understanding and social practices.
A presumption of any sane conception of reason is that the practices
of reason suppose as much as they contribute to the openness of language,
logical space, and the realm of possibility. Social practices and self-under-
standings which close themselves off to new experiences, to alternative
ways of speaking, thinking, and acting, which immunize themselves against
being called to change their language and life, cannot be judged to be
rational in the enlarged normative sense I’m invoking. Without the will-
ingness as well as the ability to respond to the normative challenge of the
new – to think about ourselves in terms different from the past – the prac-
tices of reason would never transcend the horizon of merely instrumental
reason. Making sense of metaphors cannot, therefore, be rendered inde-
pendent of making sense of ourselves and of our practices. As Rorty
rightly says without fully appreciating what he says, metaphors call for a
change to our language and our life, the intelligibility of which call
supposes the activity of making better sense of ourselves. Metaphors may
unproblematially be construed as causes, but not reasons, for taking notice
of some feature of our self-understanding or practices which we other-
wise would not have noticed; but in order for metaphors to be construed
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as ‘causing’ a change in our language and our life, a change for which we
can be held accountable and for which we are prepared to take respon-
sibility, the cause in question must be transformed into a reason we can
freely and reectively endorse. Otherwise, what we would be describing is
arbitrary and thoroughly incoherent change, change we could neither
attribute to our own agency nor describe as progress.
Rorty’s way of describing the effects of new metaphors emphasizes one-
sidedly the passive or receptive side. One reason why we would want to
emphasize this side of our encounter with the new is to show that it can’t
be instrumentalized or formalized; to show that we are not indisputable
‘masters’ of linguistic and cultural meaning. The idea that we are not in
fact ‘masters’ of linguistic and cultural meaning has been compellingly
shown by the likes of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and it has become
incorporated into our historicist and linguistic self-understanding.
Certainly, to make sense of metaphors as calls to change our language
and our life we must suppose a certain pre-intellectual openness to the
world which is passive and not at our disposal. Kant thought of this recep-
tivity as a condition of possible experience, Heidegger, of possible
intelligibility. ‘Openness’ in this sense is a condition of possible learning
and understanding, without which something couldn’t be experienced or
show up as something at all. But there is another sense of openness which
philosophers like Heidegger, Kant, and Rorty draw upon; a sense of open-
ness which is neither passive nor constant, but active and variable. When
we’re speaking of openness in this sense we may describe ourselves as
suffering from too much as well as too little openness to the world. If we
are not sufciently open, we shall be deaf to calls to change our language
and our life; if we are too open we shall be unable to call our language
and our life our own. The kind of opennness I’m describing here is of a
kind that admits of a right or wrong or better relation to the world, a kind
for which we can be held accountable and responsible. In this second
sense, openness will gure unavoidably in evaluations of the rationality
of a given social practice or self-understanding as well as the rationality
of individual actions and judgments.
When Rorty is talking about the difference between practices which
leave language, logical space, and the realm of possibility unchanged
and those which do not, he is drawing on this second normative sense of
openness. But in his causal account of metaphor Rorty is supposing the
passive meaning of openness, while at the same time underplaying the
active aspect of our agency – the aspect which shows up in our capacity
to initiate, negotiate, and justify transitions from old to new ways of
speaking and acting. In a limited sense, Rorty seems to be following
Kant by dividing reason and freedom from nature; but what Kant ascribed
to the ‘causality of reason’ – the power spontaneously to begin anew –
Rorty ascribes to the ‘causality of nature’! Thereby, Rorty severs the
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internal connection between reason and freedom, which connection Kant

had shown to be conceptually and practically necessary. As a consequence,
the (largely Humean) kind of agent that Rorty’s model of change seems
to project is one who is determined by the metaphor of the month;
a being who blows with the metaphorical winds, who has no history
relevant to his self-understanding, who lives in a perpetual present, and
for whom the distinction between old and new, past and present, would
be neither intelligible nor relevant. Such a being cannot be called a self
in any normative sense; rather, it is an arbitrarily mutating web of
beliefs and desires, madly reweaving itself without any sense of gain
or loss from one self-understanding to the next, however ‘internally
coherent’ its respective self-understandings might be. Perhaps the most
disastrous consequence of Rorty’s decision to disconnect reason from
transformation is that his account of individual and cultural change must
do without a concept of accountability and responsibility, without which
his account of transformation is such that it is indistinguishable from
conversion.
V Something Else for Reason to Mean (A Brief Conclusion)

The critique of modern reason that stretches from Foucault and Habermas
back to Kant and Hegel is by no means a homogeneous one; what conjoins
its various facets is the assumption that whatever modernity has become
and what it might one day be is fatefully entwined with the practices of
reason which it claims as its own. In its most optimistic form, as in the
work of Habermas, this critique points towards an enlargement and recti-
cation of reason, towards practices of reason that make for healthier
forms of life. In a similar vein, Putnam has argued that our understanding
of reason is crucially involved with our conception of ‘human ourishing’.
And as such, our stand towards what reason can mean projects an idea
of the good.
Rorty is right to claim that we cannot have a non-circular interpreta-
tion of reason, but we’re no worse off for that. In fact, we are much better
off overcoming our historical tendency to conceive of reason in terms that
transcend time and space. I think that Rorty would agree with Putnam
that there is ‘no neutral conception of rationality to which one can appeal
when the nature of rationality is itself what is at issue’ (RHF, p. 139). The
very contestability of what reason can mean makes clear that its meaning
is not stable or settled, makes clear that each of its meanings is tied up
with our ideas of the good, and with the ‘ethical-political’ question of what
we are and want to be. Of course, in the pluralistic and multicultural soci-
eties of the west such a ‘we’ can hardly be taken for granted; but that
does not preclude the possibility that it can be created and recreated in
and through new forms of discourse.25
292
Therefore, I think that Rorty’s conclusion 4 is far too premature. The

topics of reason and modernity are hardly exhausted if the ethical ques-
tion of what we are and want to be hangs together with the question of
what reason should mean. To speak in the language of the early Heidegger,
we must see that reason is ‘one of the elemental words’ comprising our
self-understanding; we must not only ‘preserve the force’ of this word,
but, to speak with Kant and Hegel, we must actively enlarge its meaning.26
In other words, if we’ve nally outgrown, or are in a position nally to
outgrow, metaphysical and deationary interpretations of reason, we
should strive to enlarge the meaning of reason by illuminating the role it
plays in transforming our practices and self-understanding. Drawing once
again on some Heideggerian language for rather un-Heideggerian
purposes, we can redescribe reason in terms consistent with Hegel’s and
Kant’s intentions: as that ensemble of practices that contributes to the
opening and preserving of openness.27 For Heidegger, as well as for Rorty,
the opening and preserving of openness is an idea of the good; unlike
Heidegger and Rorty, however, we need to recognize that the fate of this
idea of the good is entwined with the fate of reason.
University of Dundee, Scotland, UK
Notes
1 On this point see Susan Neiman, The Unity of Reason (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994) and Richard L. Velkley, Freedom and the End of
Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). More generally, see
Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1987).
2 The following three collections may be regarded as summaries of the ration-
ality debates which took place in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s: Bryan R. Wilson
(ed.) Rationality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970); Martin Hollis and Steven
Lukes (eds) Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982);
and Michael Krausz (ed.) Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989). One will be hard pressed to
nd in these collections a sustained discussion of reason in terms of freedom
and self-determination. In every case the principal focus is on the possibility
or impossibility of non-local standards of truth and what that entails for the
practice and self-understanding of the sciences.
3 Of course, the epistemological construal of reason expresses its own ideal of
freedom and self-determination. But this ideal of freedom and self-determi-
nation depends on what Charles Taylor has called an ‘ontology of
disengagement’, giving the epistemological construal of reason its apparently
irresistible attraction. See Taylor’s ‘Overcoming Epistemology’, in his
Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
4 Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1990), p. 254, my italics. Hereafter cited as RHF in paren-
theses.
293
5 Richard Rorty, ‘Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future’,

in Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991). Hereafter cited as EHO in parentheses.
6 See ‘Two Conceptions of Rationality’, in Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and ‘An Alternative
Way Out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject-
Centred Reason’, in Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).
7 Rorty, ‘Feminism and Pragmatism’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 30(2) (Spring
1991), p. 236.
8 The following four requirements of cross-paradigmatic progress are derived
from the writings of Hegel, Habermas, Taylor, and MacIntyre. Of course the
locus classicus for the idea that reason appears in the transition between
worldviews, traditions, social practices, and self-understandings is Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit. For the most interesting recent attempt to think of
reason in terms of transitions, see Charles Taylor’s ‘Explanation and Practical
Reason’, in his Philosophical Arguments, cited above.
9 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), p. 49. Hereafter cited as CIS in parentheses.
10 Rorty, ‘Sind Aussagen Universelle Geltungsansprüche?’, Deutsche Zeitschrift
für Philosophie, 42(6) (1994), p. 986.
11 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979), p. 179. Hereafter cited as PMN in parentheses.
12 Rorty, Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers Volume 1
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 28. Hereafter cited as ORT.
13 For a useful discussion concerning what divides Rorty from Putnam and
Habermas on this issue, see Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Truth, Contingency, and
Modernity’, in Modern Philology, 90 (May Supplement 1993). Rorty’s ‘Sind
Aussagen Universelle Geltungsansprüche?’ is, in part, a response to Wellmer.
14 Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History, p. 111.
15 Rorty, ‘Feminism and Pragmatism’, p. 232.
16 Nancy Fraser, ‘From Irony to Prophecy to Politics: A Response to Richard
Rorty’, Michigan Quarterly Review, 30(2), (Spring 1991), p. 264.
17 See Davidson, ‘The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, in Inquiries into
Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), and Putnam,
‘Philosophers and Human Understanding’, Realism and Reason (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).
18 Original in Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, ed. R. Schmidt (Hamburg: Felix
Meiner, 1954).
19 Of course, for Kant, the ontological space of possibility for beginning anew
is predominantly moral rather than epistemic.
20 This is the lead essay in Essays on Heidegger and Others.
21 It seems to me that Rorty has never understood this tradition, never under-
stood why its representatives – from Hegel to Habermas and Putnam – have
been committed to the idea that the critique of our social practices must take
the form of a metaphilosophical critique of reason.
22 In a recent rejoinder to Putnam, Rorty goes to extraordinary lengths to nesse
a much-picked-on claim made in the introduction to The Consequences of
Pragmatism. That claim went as follows: ‘in the process of playing vocabu-
laries and cultures off against each other, we produce new and better ways
of talking and acting – not better by reference to a previously known stan-
dard, but just better in the sense that they come to seem better than their
294
predecessors’. R. Rorty, The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xxxvii. Rorty’s nessed rejoinder to
Putnam’s objections appears in ‘Putnam and the Relativist Menace’, Journal
of Philosophy, 90(9) (September 1993), pp. 453–8. For a critique of Rorty’s
rejoinder to Putnam, see Mark Okrent, ‘The Truth, the Whole Truth, and
Nothing but the Truth’, Inquiry, 36, (1993) pp. 381–404.
23 On this notion, see Alasdair MacIntyre’s ‘Epistemological Crises, Dramatic
Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science’, in Gary Gutting (ed.) Paradigms
and Revolutions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980).
24 Of course, natural events can bring about eye-opening effects, as Kant made
clear in the third critique; the point is that we cannot think of ourselves as
their addressees in the same way. Rorty’s way of naturalizing metaphor creates
a picture of nature as brutely causal, on the one hand, and a picture of
metaphor as belonging to a nature-preserve, on the other. And this shows
the unreconciled inuences of both romantic and naturalistic modes of thought
in Rorty’s view of language.
25 Habermas has made some potentially useful suggestions along these lines in
a number of recent papers. See, for example, ‘On the Pragmatic, the Ethical,
and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason’, in Justication and
Application (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), and ‘Historical Consciousness
and Post-Traditional Identity: The Federal Republic’s Orientation to the West’,
in The New Conservatism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
26 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p.
262.
27 See Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Poetry, Language, Thought
(New York: Harper and Row, 1971). I develop this suggestion in the following:
‘Heidegger’s Challenge and the Future of Critical Theory’, in Peter Dews
(ed.) Habermas: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, 1999) and Crisis and
Transformation: The Aesthetic Critique of Modernity from Hegel to Habermas
(Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).
295

So We Need Something Else For Reason To Mean

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International Journal of Philosophical Studies

ISSN: 0967-2559 (Print) 1466-4542 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riph20

So We Need Something Else for Reason to Mean

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International Journal of Philosophical Studies

It is true that we speak a public language, that we inherit versions,

II What Reason Can’t Do

of setting a trajectory which moves his reections beyond the current

To say that the aim of social change should be a society in which

III To Be or Not To Be Criterial about Reason

in advance what criteria you are going to satisfy, in having standards by

[T]his originally disabling notion of women’s moral superiority was

What is at issue here is reducible to a case neither of pure discovery

said or done; although we may have inarticulately recognized that we

transformative agency. If it is taken as the claim that translation between

change of meaning’ (PMN, p. 271). Here “rational” change of meaning

difference between thinking of reason as an agency of social change and

partial, one-sided interpretations of ourselves and others, are as an

IV Changing our Language and our Lives ­

within languages for believing statements’ (CIS, p. 48). So once we see

views on metaphor is the possibility of a non-criterial interpretation of

as anyone who has attempted such change already knows. Long-held

internal connection between reason and freedom, which connection Kant

V Something Else for Reason to Mean (A Brief Conclusion)

Therefore, I think that Rorty’s conclusion 4 is far too premature. The

University of Dundee, Scotland, UK

5 Richard Rorty, ‘Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future’,

predecessors’. R. Rorty, The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis:

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of setting a trajectory which moves his reections beyond the current

IV Changing our Language and our Lives