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Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard
Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists

Chris Voparil
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Reconstructing Pragmatism
Reconstructing
Pragmatism
Richard Rorty and the Classical
Pragmatists
C H R I S VO PA R I L
1
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Voparil, Christopher J., 1969–author.
Title: Reconstructing pragmatism : Richard Rorty and
the classical pragmatists /Chris Voparil.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, [2022] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021024181 (print) | LCCN 2021024182 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197605721 | ISBN 9780197605738 | ISBN 9780197605752 |
ISBN 9780197605745 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Rorty, Richard. | Pragmatism.
Classification: LCC B 945 . R524 V67 2022 (print) | LCC B 945 . R524 (ebook) |
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197605721.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
For Mariana—
Gracias por tu paciencia y amor
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction: Learning from Rorty’s Reconstructed

Pragmatism 1
1. Rorty and Peirce: Pragmatism, Realism, and the

Practice of Inquiry 43
2. Rorty and James: The Ethics and Epistemology of

Belief 94
3. Rorty and Dewey: Pragmatist Philosophy as Cultural

Criticism 140
4. Rorty and Royce: The Cultural Politics of Community,

Loyalty, and Difference 181
5. Rorty and Addams: Pragmatist Social Ethics and

Undemocratic Relations 226
Conclusion: Post-Rortyan Pragmatism 259
Notes 285
References 337
Index 363
Acknowledgments
This project has been a long time in the making and has incurred
incalculable debts with each passing year. My understanding of
classical pragmatism, fallible and incomplete as it is, owes much
to the fine work of many scholars of the pragmatist tradition, as
evidenced throughout this book’s references. In a way, this book
took as long as it did because to carry it out I had to grow into the
thinker capable of completing it. This may suggest a journey of self-
edification, but such growth is really about listening to and learning
from others, whether in print or in person, and getting to the point
where one can see what they see. I feel deep gratitude for the many
learned interlocutors I have had the good fortune to know. Their
generosity of wisdom and patience with my persistent queries ex-
emplify the pragmatist philosophical spirit at its best.
There was a time when writing on Rorty wasn’t especially
embraced in many philosophical, or even pragmatist venues. What
is more, the body of scholarship on Rorty, until relatively recently,
was not particularly helpful for thinking about his relation to clas-
sical pragmatism. Not only did nearly all of it pass negative, some-
times downright dismissive, judgment on what Rorty had to say
about the classical figures, there was virtually no overlap between
those who studied the classical pragmatists and those who had sub-
stantive interest in Rorty. The state of affairs has improved since
I embarked upon this project. But it was quite an obstacle at the
outset. The book in your hands (or on your screen) has its flaws
and shortcomings, among them, no doubt, a tendency to overem-
phasize sites of positive connection between Rorty and the clas-
sical pragmatists considered here and to undersell some of the
x Acknowledgments
disagreements. Future scholars of pragmatism, I trust, will chart

course corrections in my interpretations. My hope is that there is
value in their having some initial signposts.
I am grateful for the philosophical communities where much of
this work was first presented. These contexts provided opportunities
to receive feedback, but also to build relationships and, in some
cases, deep friendships. These groups include the Society for the
Advancement of American Philosophy, the Central European
Pragmatist Forum, the European Pragmatism Association, the
Southeast Roundtable on Philosophy of the Americas, and the
Richard Rorty Society, as well as various other pragmatist research
groups in South America and Europe that I have been fortunate to
attend. I also thank, for their immense learning and insightful dis-
cussion, the participants in the “Peirce, James, and the Origins of
Pragmatism” summer workshop at Emory University in 2012, led
by John Stuhr and Vincent Colapietro.
I want to acknowledge, in particular, illuminating conversations
and exchanges with Douglas Anderson, Richard Bernstein, Rosa
Calcaterra, James Campbell, Vincent Colapietro, Harvey Cormier,
William Curtis, Susana de Castro, Ramón Del Castillo, Susan
Dieleman, Roberta Dreon, the late Michael Eldridge, Marilyn
Fischer, Jim Garrison, Neil Gascoigne, the late William Gavin,
Judith Green, Richard Hart, David Henderson, Larry Hickman,
David Hildebrand, Brendan Hogan, Marianne Janack, Mark
Johnson, Jacquelyn Kegley, Colin Koopman, Alexander Kremer,
David Macarthur, Giovanni Maddalena, Stéphane Madelrieux,
Wojciech Małecki, the late John McDermott, Eduardo Mendieta,
Carlos Mougan, Gregory Pappas, Federico Penelas, Scott Pratt,
Bjørn Ramberg, Michael Raposa, David Rondel, Henrik Rydenfelt,
John Ryder, Mark Sanders, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Richard
Shusterman, Kenneth Stikkers, John Stuhr, Dwayne Tunstall, Emil
Višňovský, and Judy Whipps. Three anonymous reviewers were
enormously helpful in improving the manuscript. Lucy Randall’s
insights and support were invaluable throughout the overlong
Acknowledgments xi
process of gestation. Special thanks are due to several who took time
to read and comment on parts of the manuscript: William Curtis,
Neil Gascoigne, Colin Koopman, and Scott Pratt. For his unending
encouragement and exemplary mentorship, to Dick Bernstein, my
former teacher and Rorty’s lifelong friend, I owe a debt of grati-
tude beyond words. It was in his year-long seminar on pragmatism
circa 1995 that unbeknownst to me the seeds for this book were
planted and that I first met Rorty, when we showed up to class one
day and found him sitting in the front of the room. There no doubt
were others whom I have failed to recall. The shortcomings of this
work remain despite their best efforts, without which this book and
my own grasp of the pragmatic tradition would be immeasurably
inferior.
Finally, I thank my supportive parents, parents-in-law, family,
and friends, especially my wife, Mariana, and sons, Aidan and
Devin, for putting up with my reclusive ways and giving me the
space and loving support to see the project to fruition.
Early, briefer versions of Chapters 2 and 3 appeared as:
“James and Rorty on Irony, Moral Commitment, and the Ethics

of Belief.” William James Studies, 12, no. 2 (2016): 1–27.
“Pragmatist Philosophy and Enlarging Human Freedom: Rorty’s
Deweyan Pragmatism.” In Richard Rorty: From Pragmatist
Philosophy to Cultural Politics, ed. Alexander Gröschner, Colin
Koopman, and Mike Sandbothe. New York: Bloomsbury,
2013, pp. 107–126.
I gratefully acknowledge their permission to reprint parts of these

essays.
Abbreviations
Citations to Charles Sanders Peirce’s writings will be keyed to the

8-volume Collected Papers (Harvard University Press, 1958–1966).
Parenthetical citations will follow the standard formula, according
to which (CP 1:123) denotes page 123 of volume 1 of Peirce’s
Collected Papers.
Citations to John Dewey’s writings will be keyed to the 37-
volume The Collected Works of John Dewey (Southern Illinois
University Press, 1969–1991). The Collected Works is organized
into three chronological periods, The Early Works, The Middle
Works, and The Later Works. Parenthetical citations will follow the
standard formula, according to which (EW 4:30) denotes page 30 of
volume 4 of The Early Works and (MW 6:100) designates page 100
of volume 6 of The Middle Works.
Citations to Richard Rorty’s major works will use the following
abbreviations:
AOC Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century

America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)
CIS Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1989)
CP Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982)
EHO Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
LT The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method, ed.
Richard Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967)
OPP On Philosophy and Philosophers: Unpublished Papers,
1960–2000, ed. W.P. Małecki and Chris Voparil
xiv Abbreviations
ORT Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1

PCP Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4
PMN Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1979)
PSH Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999)
RR The Rorty Reader, ed. Christopher J. Voparil and Richard
J. Bernstein (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
RRP Richard Rorty Papers. MS-C017. Special Collections and
Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California. Citations
to RRP include Box#, Folder#
TP Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3
Introduction
Learning from Rorty’s Reconstructed Pragmatism
The contemporary resurgence of philosophical pragmatism faces a

critical impasse. On the one hand, creative energies abound. A new
generation of scholars and practitioners of American philosophy
who were drawn to the tradition’s classical figures by the leading
voice of the pragmatist revival, Richard Rorty, is supplanting an
older one that viewed him as an unhelpful interloper who did as
much to distort as to revive. On the other hand, divisions and in-
ternecine quarrels continually thwart and fragment these new
energies. Devotees of American philosophy often seem content to
incite antipathy among and between “classico,” “paleo,” “neo,” and
“new” pragmatisms, and to self-isolate through factions and exclu-
sionary identifications with single thinkers.1
Paradoxically, Rorty’s work, and the massive body of secondary
literature around it, are at the center of both dynamics: resurgence
and fragmentation. His intellectual creativity, lively prose, bridge-
building across traditions and disciplines, and immense interna-
tional renown continue to be a font of creative and critical energy.
The cross-disciplinary influence and global reach of Rorty’s thought
have interjected pragmatism into conversations not only in phi-
losophy but in fields as diverse as political theory, sociology, legal
studies, international relations, feminist studies, literary theory,
business ethics, and the philosophy of education. International in-
terest in the pragmatic tradition is at an all-time high and actively
ascendant.
Reconstructing Pragmatism. Chris Voparil, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197605721.003.0001
2 Reconstructing Pragmatism
The success of Rorty’s championing of pragmatism nevertheless

remains double-edged. Back in 1982 Garry Brodsky predicted that
Rorty’s writings “should initiate a new stage of creative and schol-
arly work on pragmatism and the several pragmatists” (1982, 333).
Rorty indeed proved influential in initiating a period of renewed
interest in pragmatism and widened its relevance, though much of
his reception was outside philosophy, as the preceding list suggests.
Among those already doing scholarly work on pragmatism,
Brodsky’s prognostication missed the mark. Rorty’s overtures were
not received constructively, to put it mildly. Quite the contrary; for
years, if you came to pragmatism through the classical thinkers and
the scholarship on them, you were taught to be reflexively critical
of Rorty.2 Nearly four decades later, for all his international renown
and role in pragmatism’s resurgence, when it comes to the classical
pragmatists we might say that Rorty’s work has blocked the road of
inquiry. His polemical claims and selective interpretations spurred
the community to draw sharp lines of demarcation that distinguish
“classical” or “paleo” pragmatism3 from its “neo” and “new” off-
spring to protect both classical and new pragmatisms alike from
Rorty’s alleged distorted readings. Compounding matters, those
who discovered pragmatism because of Rorty often lacked a strong
motive to delve deeply into the classical figures. As a result, the
landscape features separate camps, with little bridge-building and
fruitful dialogue, and many missed opportunities for growth.
To put it another way, contemporary pragmatism as a whole
has yet to learn from Rorty, in the sense of fully engaging his
challenges and thinking through their implications for their own
commitments and preoccupations. This is not to say that Rorty
hasn’t been read and written about. If Rorty indeed was, for a time,
“the most talked-about philosopher” (Gottlieb 1991), much of what
was said was not particularly positive. Rorty’s iconoclastic, stinging-
gadfly assaults on long-cherished notions of traditional philos-
ophy earned him enemies far and wide.4 Pragmatist philosophers
in particular found his embrace of language over experience, his
Introduction 3
apparent dismissal of pragmatist methodology (Seigfried 1996, 5),5

and his blatant disregard for truth and objectivity (Misak 2007),
strikingly offensive.6 Deweyan pragmatists, above all, found Rorty’s
freewheeling interpretations to transmit sufficient distortion and
misunderstanding as to threaten the integrity of the pragmatic tra-
dition as a whole.7
The specter of Rorty functions as a negative, fixed pole against
which philosophers and intellectuals of all stripes position them-
selves. Virtually all pragmatists on the contemporary scene, whether
classical or “new,” Deweyan, Jamesian, or Peircean, use Rorty as a
foil to justify their positions, including Richard Bernstein, Robert
Brandom, Susan Haack, Larry Hickman, Joseph Margolis, John
McDermott, Cheryl Misak, Richard Posner, Huw Price, Hilary
Putnam, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Richard Shusterman, John
Stuhr, Robert Talisse, and Cornel West, among many others. While
these contrasts and divisions may have heuristic value within lim-
ited contexts, when reified into opposing camps, they become
one-dimensional and obstruct further advancement. The need to
defend the classical figures and discredit Rorty, while showing signs
of abating as of late, has sidetracked contemporary pragmatists
from the development of shared projects which realize Dewey’s aim
of making philosophy “a resource in dealing with the problems that
are urgent in contemporary life” rather than “ruminating on its own
cud” (LW 17:85). This diagnosis is not new. Others, like Douglas
Anderson, have lamented the “scholasticizing of the American tra-
dition in which folks tend to associate with one thinker and then
focus on what makes that thinker different from—and perhaps
‘better’ than—the others,” culminating in “schools of Peirceans,
Jamesians, and Deweyans who overlook or downplay the very real
and important agreements among the pragmatists” (2009, 495).
Alas, little progress has been made in alleviating it.
Contributing to this state of affairs are two limitations in the ex-
isting secondary literature that result in having virtually nowhere
to turn for constructive scholarly treatments of Rorty’s relation to
classical pragmatism. One is the overwhelmingly negative, critical

tenor that characterizes most work on Rorty’s relation to classical
pragmatism by scholars of American philosophy. Despite glimpses,
in the time since Rorty’s death in 2007, of a less hostile, more ecu-
menical approach, the idea that there exists an unbridgeable divide
separating classical from neopragmatism remains entrenched.8
One is hard-pressed to find accounts written in the last four decades
on any of the classical pragmatists, or by any “new” pragmatists (see
Misak 2007), that does not use a caricature of Rorty as a wedge.9
Reams of dismissive critical interpretation which obscure more
than elucidate and seemingly obligatory passing swipes which re-
inforce shallow readings have made the figure and oeuvre of Rorty
more caricatured than understood. This dismissive orientation
toward Rorty, insofar as it has preempted learning from him, has
become an obstacle to the future development of the pragmatic
tradition.
The second limitation is the dearth of discussion of the classical
pragmatists’ influence on Rorty’s intellectual positions in even the
best Rorty-friendly treatments.10 Some treat in brief compass the
“big three” of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John
Dewey, but nothing at all regarding other classical pragmatists,
like Josiah Royce and Jane Addams.11 Among the very good ac-
counts we find comparative examination of the relation of Rorty’s
project to the classical pragmatists (again, only the big three),
but independently of the question of their direct intellectual in-
fluence on Rorty.12 Robert Westbrook (2005), Richard Bernstein
(2010), and Michael Bacon (2012b) offer enlightening expositions
of the ideas and arguments of both classical and contemporary
pragmatists, highlighting important continuities between them.
Colin Koopman (2009) and David Rondel (2018) refreshingly
draw from both classical pragmatist and Rortyan perspectives
to capture their best and most timely collective insights. None of
these fine works gives us an internal account of the relation be-
tween classical and Rortyan pragmatism. In sum, Rorty not only
Introduction 5
still awaits a (full) definitive intellectual biography;13 there exists

no in-depth scholarly treatment of his relation to the classical fig-
ures of pragmatism.
Reconstructing Pragmatism seeks finally to overcome pre-
vailing caricatures of Rorty and dominant assumptions about
his neglect or misunderstanding of the classical pragmatists. It
might be thought of as a prolegomenon to the future development
of pragmatism that does a lot of road-clearing work, sweeping
away misconceptions and caricatures that block inquiry, but also
intimating productive avenues for the tradition’s collective self-
criticism and renewal. The book’s basic claim is that the path for-
ward runs through, rather than around or against, Rorty. The value
of this direct approach is twofold: first, Rorty offers both critical
challenges and affirmations, largely untapped, for articulating
classical pragmatism’s ongoing relevance; and second, reading the
classical pragmatists in nonpolemical dialogue with Rorty reveals
limitations of received images of the classical pragmatists that pre-
dominate in current debates, opening up exciting potential for new,
fresher modes of understanding. The chapters that follow endeavor
to understand Rorty’s relation to the classical figures of American
pragmatism, specifically Charles Sanders Peirce, William James,
John Dewey, Josiah Royce, and Jane Addams. The best metaphor
for characterizing this relation, I argue, is “reconstruction.” Viewing
Rorty’s relation to pragmatism’s classical forebears through the lens
of reconstruction directs us to confront the motivations and aims
of the larger project guiding his critical engagement with their
perspectives.14 Interpreting Rorty’s philosophical positions in iso-
lation from these broader intentions has impoverished our under-
standing, making his stances appear shallow and ill-conceived, and
deprived us of the creative impulse to growth that his work, at its
best, sought to inspire. Rorty’s relevance for the ongoing vitality of
pragmatism stems from his commitment to what Philip Kitcher has
described in James and Dewey as the effort “to focus philosophy on
issues that matter to people” (2012, xii).
Before proceeding, let me address the question begged here: Why

not simply go around Rorty? Why is this such a problem? After all,
among contemporary pragmatists we have the fine work of leading
thinkers like Robert Brandom (e.g., 2011) and Huw Price (2011;
2013), who not only eschew Rorty-bashing but acknowledge their
intellectual debts to him even as they judge his perspective critically
and move past it. Others, like Susan Haack (1993a; 1998), Cheryl
Misak (2000), and, to some extent, Kitcher (2012) and Scott Aikin
and Robert Talisse (2017), define their positions against Rorty’s and
say little more about him, seemingly no worse for the omission.
This latter group falls into a slightly different category to the ex-
tent that they more explicitly seek to update or refresh the thought
of classical pragmatist figures, especially Peirce and Dewey, in a
way not on the agenda for Brandom or Price. Nevertheless, I want
to suggest that our understanding of pragmatism as a whole, our
grasp of Rorty’s thought, and even the stances of these contempo-
rary pragmatists themselves, are enriched by taking Rorty more se-
riously. That is, each time Rorty’s work is caricatured rather than
learned from, contemporary pragmatism remains not as strong
or critically self-aware as it could be. Opportunities for further in-
quiry are closed and no one learns anything new.
To be clear, I am not advocating uncritical acceptance of Rorty’s
pragmatism. Take the example of Price’s recent work (e.g., 2011;
2013). Fundamental differences abound between them on a
number of substantive philosophical issues (see Rorty and Price
2010). Nonetheless, the development of Price’s own nuanced
thinking around representationalism owes much to his sus-
tained engagement with Rorty. Moreover, Price illuminates im-
plicit tensions in Rorty’s own account that Rorty, arguably, could
or should have accepted without violating his own commitments,
potentially resulting in new insights. I seek to call attention to the
missed opportunities and what is lost by dismissing him as con-
fused, incoherent, or a pragmatist infidel. For another case, let us
look at Kitcher, a more germane example given our interests here
Introduction 7
in classical pragmatism.15 Kitcher aligns himself with Rorty over

neopragmatists like Putnam and Brandom, who, in Kitcher’s view,
domesticate the reconstructive impulses of the classical pragmatists
to make them safe for the conventional practice of philosophy. By
contrast, Kitcher acknowledges, “Rorty reads the pragmatists, as
I do, in a more radical way” (2012, xiv). Indeed, Kitcher recognizes
that “One of the great merits of Richard Rorty’s reading of the clas-
sical American pragmatists, particularly James and Dewey, lies in
his recognition of their desire for a completely different approach
to philosophy” (2012, 192–93). Kitcher even holds that Rorty’s “cri-
tique of philosophy-as-usual is as necessary today as it was in the
1970s or the 1920s.” However, he immediately adds: “I differ from
him only in seeing the possibility of renewal where he envisaged a
burial.” With this reductive characterization—Rorty’s thought isn’t
engaged beyond broad brushstrokes and nothing after the 1980s is
even cited—he unfortunately moves past Rorty rather quickly with
a mere “So I side with Dewey” (2012, 21). It is taken as axiomatic
that Rorty has nothing to offer Kitcher’s own reconstructive efforts
and that contemporary reconstructions like Kitcher’s demand an
either/or choice between Rorty’s and Dewey’s pragmatisms. And
this dismissal is one of the more sympathetic instances. Kitcher is
by no means hostile to Rorty and generously acknowledges his per-
sonal debt to him.
It should be said that Rorty often was his own worst enemy in in-
viting caricatured interpretations. He seemed to take mischievous
pleasure in pushing the buttons of philosophers with offhanded
dismissals of long- cherished commitments and maverick
pronouncements of seemingly unwise and unnuanced nature. At
times, Rorty did utter claims that seemed only to distort. In these
cases, the visceral reactions they sparked often derailed productive
inquiry. We easily could catalog a short list of insouciant assertions
that were responsible for the lion’s share of anti-Rorty ire.16 As we
shall see in the first chapter, there is no better example than his
needless despoiling of Peirce’s contribution to pragmatism in his
1979 APA Presidential Address. Based on that remark, one would

not guess that he had learned from leading Peirce scholars, devoted
considerable study to his writings, and published his earliest ar-
ticles on Peirce’s Categories. We must, then, distinguish the rhet-
oric of what Santiago Rey (2017) dubbed “Rorty the outrageous”
from the substantive positions developed in his more thoughtful,
reasoned mode. Perhaps, as Rey argues, the bold and outlandish
statements served an intentional purpose in the performative di-
mension of Rorty’s breaking the crust of philosophical conven-
tion and shouldn’t be cast aside as unreasoned or discounted as
carelessly excessive. At the same time, as Bernstein has observed,
Rorty underestimated the “double-edged” nature of his rhetoric,
how his attempts to break the crust of philosophical convention
both gave ammunition to critics and, ironically, hardened the
very commitments he sought to transform (2014, 13). One of our
tasks in this book is to reconstruct the full scope of his sustained
arguments and longstanding commitments to provide the schol-
arly elaboration that Rorty himself not only was disinclined to pro-
vide but often, wittingly or unwittingly, obscured. Learning from
Rorty sometimes requires reconstructing his radical rhetoric to
factor in what Bernstein calls “the more ‘reasonable’ ” Rorty (2014,
12). As a result, we will traffic not only in Rorty’s reconstructions
but my own.
To be a little more specific, the book seeks to elucidate Rorty’s
reconstructions of the thought of the classical pragmatists and to
gather the insights and implications within these reconstructions
that bear on the ongoing development of the pragmatic tradition.
Broadly speaking, there are multiple aims at work throughout these
pages. The first is straightforward scholarly recovery that seeks to in-
troduce little-known historical and textual backgrounds to illumi-
nate Rorty’s relation to the classical pragmatists as well as to clarify
his own positions. The second aim is to highlight points where
constructive dialogue is possible between Rorty’s commitments
and objectives and those of the classical figures, as a corrective to
Introduction 9
the many polemical readings that exist. The third is to offer in-
sight into the precise nature of Rorty’s reconstructive efforts—
that is, the why of his selective readings and partial endorsements
of their views. Accomplishing this requires appreciating the least
understood aspect of Rorty’s philosophy—namely, the intention-
ality and normative orientation driving his reconstructions: what
I refer to as Rorty’s “pragmatic maxim,” a notion elaborated in the
next section. The fourth aim looks to the future of pragmatism after
Rorty and involves sweeping away the entrenched caricatures to
alter the terms on which Rorty’s relation to classical pragmatism
is evaluated, toward the goal of better marshalling the positive re-
sources for internal collective self-criticism and development of the
tradition.
Because Rorty’s relation to each of the five classical pragmatists
who receive a chapter is different, the relative weights of the four
aims—scholarly recovery, constructive dialogue, understanding
Rorty’s reconstructions, and advancing pragmatism’s future—
shift in each case. For example, in Chapter 1 on Peirce, the aim
of scholarly recovery predominates, as Rorty’s early work on the
founding pragmatist is likely the least familiar to most readers. In
the case of James in the second chapter, there is less emphasis on
the second aim of transcending polemics because there has been
so much less ink devoted to contesting Rorty’s reading of James
than his reading of Dewey. As the figure who shares the most with
Rorty in basic orientation, Rorty’s critical reconstruction of James
is less radical and controversial. As a result, constructive dialogue
dominates in the chapter. In Chapter 3, less attention to the first
aim is needed, given the amount of scholarly attention Rorty’s re-
lation to Dewey already has received in the secondary literature,
and the second and third aims take center stage. Chapters 4 and 5
diverge somewhat from the three that precede them based on the
nature of Rorty’s relation to Royce and Addams, respectively. In
the chapter on Rorty and Royce, the third aim fades, since Rorty
wrote so little on Royce. Nevertheless, a bit of scholarly recovery
is necessary to make sense of the prominence of Rorty’s appeal to

“loyalty” in his famous essay, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” which
contains no allusions to the author of The Philosophy of Loyalty.
The treatments of both Royce and Addams emphasize unexpected
lines of constructive dialogue that generate critical resources for
pragmatism’s contemporary relevance. The chapter on Addams
contains little of the first and third aims, given the dearth of direct
philosophical influence of Addams on Rorty. However, the second
and fourth aims generate valuable insights toward the development
of pragmatist social ethics that emerge from juxtaposing their sur-
prisingly consonant commitments. An emphasis throughout the
chapters is highlighting commonalities and shared projects where a
deeper engagement with Rortyan resources should be of interest to
pragmatists of all types, including Peircean and Deweyan.
Rorty’s Pragmatic Maxim: Putting

Democracy First
In this book, I read Rorty as reconstructing the ideas of the clas-

sical pragmatists, integrating contemporary philosophical insights
their work came too early to absorb and foregrounding emphases
that align with his own aims. These basic aims are Deweyan in na-
ture: deepening democracy and using philosophy as a vehicle for
social change. On my reading, Rorty’s work falls within rather
than outside existing broad-brush characterizations of the prag-
matic tradition. For example, Bernstein (2010) emphasizes the
deep rejection of Cartesianism and the spectator theory of know-
ledge. Scott Pratt identifies four commitments as “a common core
of classical pragmatism”: interaction, pluralism, community, and
growth (2002, 20). Talisse and Aikin point to the shared “aspiration
of devising a philosophy that is at once naturalist and humanist”
(2011, 4). Attention to the classical pragmatists’ anti-Kantianism—
one of Rorty’s most persistent themes— including Peirce, in
Introduction 11
particular, has emerged to suggest more commonality than previ-

ously recognized.17 I hope to give the currents of Rorty’s pragma-
tism that cohere with these common commitments the exposition
they have long lacked.18
The metaphor of reconstruction resonates with an active prag-
matic attitude alive to the transitional character of human life and
oriented to improve rather than unconditionally accept existing
forms. This is a key point. As Kitcher has explained,
Those who disparage pragmatism, as well as some admirers of

the movement, are all too eager to suppose that James and Dewey
wanted to offer general theories of Truth and Meaning, Mind and
Reality, and thus to ignore explicit pronouncements about “the
whole function of philosophy,” about the need for “reconstruc-
tion in philosophy,” and about the centrality to philosophy of “the
general theory of education.” (2012, 193)
Indeed, perhaps no one is more associated with the notion of re-

construction than Dewey. In his Reconstruction in Philosophy, he
envisioned, as an alternative to the “vain metaphysics and idle epis-
temology” that seeks refuge in the fixed and certain, an engaged
practice of philosophy that works to ameliorate “the stresses and
strains in the community life” from which it emerged (1982, 151,
256).19 Reconstruction also is apt for illuminating the classical
pragmatists’ relations to each other.20
But does this emphasis on reconstruction overstate or mis-
represent the driving force behind Rorty’s work? After all, one
of the most entrenched views among pragmatists is the con-
trary one that “Rorty seeks to deconstruct philosophy; Dewey
sought to reconstruct it” (Westbrook 1991, 540). No less astute
reader of Rorty than Bernstein has postulated that Rorty often
“protests too much.” Rorty’s personal and intellectual journey
cannot be disassociated from a deep sense of disillusionment re-
garding philosophy’s promise—the “God that failed” syndrome, as
Bernstein diagnoses it—that contributed to an obsessive pattern of

blanket critiques of representationalism, traditional epistemology,
and foundationalism in repeated fashion for decades. For many
other philosophers, like Bernstein himself, who never harbored
such grand hopes for Philosophy, with a capital “p,” Rorty’s un-
ending desire for philosophical therapy to free us from such
ailments seemed of limited utility and understandably grew tired.
For Bernstein, more explicit attempts to reconstruct philosophy, in
a Deweyan spirit, and more fully developed details on how to at-
tain his ideals, would have been much more helpful from Rorty
than his continual harping on the sins of Philosophy (Bernstein
2010, 214–15).
There is a lot to support this perspective. No doubt it has
resonated with countless others besides Bernstein. My own sense
is simply that it is partial and doesn’t tell the whole story of Rorty’s
pragmatism.21 For it undervalues the positive examples Rorty left
us of how to practice philosophy differently, in a more human-
istic, socially and politically aware, and communally grounded,
way. A crucial dimension largely unaddressed by Rorty’s critics is
the extent to which, from his earliest essays, one of his persistent
messages to philosophers was that philosophers, like all humans,
have agency and make choices for which they must take responsi-
bility.22 The philosophies we affirm and philosophical problems we
take up are not imposed upon us by The Way Things Are or even
the ineluctable pull of philosophy’s timeless questions. Rather, they
are expressions of intellectual choice colored by temperaments
and ethical orientations that are better recognized as such than left
unacknowledged.
We encounter here the twin pillars guiding Rorty’s reconstruc-
tion, the normative orientation that motivates his selective ap-
propriation of the ideas and positions of the classical pragmatists,
as well as the ethico-political core of his pragmatism. Without
this crucial normativity his philosophical positions appear in-
coherent, irrational, and even irresponsible. Rorty’s project of
Introduction 13
reconstruction in philosophy is grounded in two fundamental

commitments: the need to recognize agency and choice, and the
importance of foregrounding the implications of our ideas and
perspectives for democratic life. If we were permitted a single slogan
to characterize the whole of Rorty’s philosophical project, it is hard
to top “the priority of democracy to philosophy.” (A close second
may be its slightly more precise cousin, “take care of freedom and
truth will take care of itself.”) First stated in a 1984 essay by this title,
Rorty not only was explicit in this prioritization but never wavered.
But what, really, does it mean to prioritize democracy over philos-
ophy? In an interview, Rorty explained it this way:
Dewey is saying: suppose you’re a pragmatist about truth—that

is, you think that truth is what works. The obvious question, then,
is whom does it work for? . . . You then ask political questions
about whom you want it to work for, whom you want to run
things, whom you want to do good to—questions that come prior
to philosophical questions. Then let democratic politics be what
sets the goals of philosophy, rather than philosophy setting the
goals of politics. (qtd. in Mendieta 2006, 48)
To the extent they regard human knowers as necessarily

constrained by The Way Things Are and seek Objectivity and Truth
as goals, many philosophers have found Rorty’s unwillingness to
separate the real from the human and the philosophical from the
ethnocentric most confounding. For this reason, perhaps, readers
comfortable on the contested and contingent terrain of political
theory often have been Rorty’s more sympathetic interpreters.23
The idea of “putting politics first and tailoring a philosophy to
suit” (ORT 178) makes intuitive sense to those inclined to view
all theories as interested interventions that emerge in response to
conflicts in specific contexts and seek to enact transformation.24
For many philosophers, by contrast, it falls outside how they have
been trained to think about philosophical matters.
I have written elsewhere about the parallels between

Rorty’s understanding of philosophical disagreement in his
early metaphilosophical writings and the moral and political
commitments that become more pronounced in his work of the
1980s and beyond. His background metaphilosophical orienta-
tion remains largely the same, even as his explicit concerns shift
from the problems of philosophers to moral and political issues
(see Voparil 2011). Yet if this background orientation is under-
stood solely as a set of decontextualized philosophical stances
to be evaluated on grounds of logical validity alone, we not only
miss his Romantic and humanistic commitments, Rorty’s philo-
sophical positions appear frivolous and untenable, becoming easy
targets for critics. Nowhere did Rorty articulate this ethico-political
orientation more poignantly than in his 1979 APA Presidential
Address. Once we give up the idea that “objects will constrain us
to believe the truth about them, if only they are approached with
an unclouded mental eye, or a rigorous method, or a perspicuous
language,” we come face to face with our intellectual agency and
the ineluctability of choice—the choice between accepting contin-
gency and the responsibilities that come with owning our agency
and commitments, or evading it and subjugating ourselves to some
nonhuman authority to unburden ourselves of this agency and,
along with it, our freedom and autonomy and the fragility of our
condition as fallible, all-too-human knowers:
To accept the contingency of starting-points is to accept our in-

heritance from, and our conversation with, our fellow-humans
as our only source of guidance. To attempt to evade this contin-
gency is to hope to become a properly-programmed machine. . . .
In the end, the pragmatists tell us, what matters is our loyalty to
other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our
hope of getting things right. James, in arguing against realists
and idealists that “the trail of the human serpent is over all,” was
reminding us that our glory is in our participation in fallible and
Introduction 15
transitory human projects, not in our obedience to permanent

nonhuman constraints. (CP 166)
In this passage we see how the humanism of James and F.C.S.

Schiller provides the overarching ethical and epistemological
frame against which philosophical commitments from the Plato
to Descartes to Kant lineage are judged. We also see the implicit
invocation of Royce’s notion of loyalty, which we will examine in
Chapter 4. Realism and representationalism, as vestiges of earlier
stages in a narrative of human progress, threaten rather than foster
this democratic humanism.25 Since compromising the latter is un-
thinkable for Rorty, it is the traditional philosophical commitments
to the necessarily True and Real that must give. For this reason he
holds that both the institutions and culture of liberal democracy
would be “better served” by an alternative vocabulary of moral and
political reflection than one structured around notions of truth, ra-
tionality, and moral obligation (CIS 44).
These commitments ultimately translate into the idea of
antiauthoritarianism (see Rorty 1999).26 What we have here is the
normativity guiding Rorty’s larger philosophico-political project as
well as his reconstructions of the classical pragmatists. It culminates
in what we might call Rorty’s pragmatic maxim: Philosophers
“should ask themselves whether taking one side rather than an-
other will make any difference to social hopes, programs of ac-
tion, prophecies of a better future. If it will not, it may not be worth
doing. If it will, they should spell out what that difference amounts
to” (PCP x).27 For Rorty, choice between competing philosophical
vocabularies comes down to “a question of efficiency” regarding
“how best to bring about the utopia sketched by the Enlightenment.”
His infamous rejections of traditional views of truth, representa-
tionalism, objectivity, and so forth are a matter of “causal efficacy”
for achieving the moral and political ends of democracy, nothing
else (TP 172). He was quite explicit about this, suggesting that we
“modulate philosophical debate from a methodologico-ontological
key into an ethico-political key” to make clearer what is at stake

(ORT 110). As he explained it, “I urge that we look at relatively spe-
cialized and technical debates between contemporary philosophers
in light of our hopes for cultural change. Philosophers should
choose sides in those debates with an eye to the possibility of
changing the course of the conversation” (PCP x).
More often than not, critics of Rorty have resisted these efforts
to recontextualize perennial philosophical disputes in this way.28
At times perhaps they simply have been unable to make sense of
them. As Rey has observed, Rorty’s redescriptions “only appear
attractive to someone who has felt the full force of Rorty’s cri-
tique, someone who has been unsettled by his vision of a post-
metaphysical culture that can no longer appeal to the transcendent
to anchor its hopes” (2017, 318). Moreover, Rorty’s application of
his pragmatic maxim often led him to positions that better realize
his antiauthoritarianism and aspiration to put democracy first,
but at the expense of philosophical coherence. To take a notorious
example, Rorty’s antiauthoritarian zeal to cut off appeals to non-
human authority to which we owe allegiance, whether Truth or ob-
jective reality, compelled him to conceive knowledge in terms of
nothing more than other human beings—“what our peers will, ce-
teris paribus, let us get away with saying” (PMN 176)—and seem-
ingly to reduce philosophical inquiry to mere conversation and
truth to mere agreement, to the horror of Peircean pragmatists like
Haack (e.g., 1998), among many others. While more conducive
to democratic politics, this stance did not hold up to philosoph-
ical criticism, in the terms it was expressed, as Rorty himself later
recognized. As we shall see in Chapter 1, the three-cornered view
Rorty initially embraced via Peirce and later expressed through
Donald Davidson is rather close to the “characteristic semiotic
triad of persons, words, world” that Haack herself proselytizes
(2013, 96). Evaluating Rorty’s positions as abstract philosophical
commitments, as most do, severed from his ethical and political
project of prioritizing democracy over philosophy, not only has
Introduction 17
contributed to misconstruals, it blunts the force of his challenges to

pragmatists. Our collective understanding of Rorty’s project and its
challenges to us has suffered as a result.
The book’s main thesis is that getting beyond the Rortyan im-
passe demands taking Rorty seriously as an integral part of the
pragmatist tradition and coming to terms with his efforts to recon-
struct it. This project requires more than an accurate accounting of
what his positions are relative to Peirce, James, and Dewey; such
accounts, even when hermeneutically charitable, do nothing to
problematize the internal divides and “scholasticizing” of prag-
matism on the contemporary scene that separate Peirceans from
Jamesians and Deweyans, or classical from neopragmatism.
Explicating the epistemic and moral normativity guiding his
reconstructions promises to shed new light on Rorty’s relation to
the classical pragmatists. If nothing else, my hope is to diminish
automatic, knee-jerk assumptions that take Rorty to be obviously
outside such general characterizations of pragmatism as “a way
of thinking about abstract and concrete problems that oriented
[its practitioners] to historical analysis and away from inherited
dogmas” (Kloppenberg 1996, 106), and preoccupied with “how
to reconstruct philosophy in a manner that was compatible with a
fallibilistic orientation and an appreciation of the radical plurality
of experience” (Bernstein 1992, 837). Put another way, I seek to
problematize the unquestioned partitioning inherent in viewing
Rorty’s pragmatism as “little more than a ground-clearing phi-
losophy,” in contradistinction to the classical figures’ stress on “a
constructive dimension embedded in its commitment to effective,
cooperative communities of inquiry” (Westbrook 2005, 16).
Chapter Overview
As noted earlier, this book considers Rorty’s thought in juxtaposi-

tion to five thinkers associated with classical pragmatism: Peirce,
James, Dewey, Royce, and Addams. The precise nature of their rela-
tion to Rorty’s pragmatism differs in each case. Inclusion of the so-
called big three—Peirce, James, and Dewey—was a straightforward
decision given their centrality to the origin and early development
of the tradition. Rorty wrote considerably about each of the three
and was directly influenced by their ideas. However, each case is sui
generis. The time Rorty devoted to Peirce peaked in graduate school
and is evident only in his earliest, least-familiar essays. Indeed, those
who know Rorty from Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and later
should be forgiven for thinking that Rorty never discussed Peirce
substantively at all. Yet we shall see that while Rorty’s early Peircean
commitments later fade from view, there are important residues
that prove crucial for a full appreciation of Rorty’s mature philos-
ophy, including valuable correctives for common misconstruals of
his views around things like Secondness and mind-independent
reality. While Rorty studied and taught James’s writings consist-
ently from early in his career, he didn’t write about James in a di-
rect and sustained way until relatively late. In overall temperament
and chief commitments, Rorty perhaps shared more with James
than with any other pragmatist.29 Rorty’s most explicit and familiar
connection to classical pragmatism is of course via Dewey. There
exists an extensive body of secondary literature challenging Rorty’s
adoption of the Deweyan mantle, which we will address. The depth
and significance of the influence of Dewey on Rorty are inspira-
tional and aspirational, as well as substantive, and the differences,
when inquired into, most instructive. Even where Rorty diverged
from Dewey he often did so for what he took to be good Deweyan
reasons, many of which have yet to be appreciated fully.
The inclusion of Royce and Addams requires a bit more expla-
nation. Royce’s philosophical idealism, religiosity, and “absolute”
pragmatism seem antithetical to Rorty’s secularism and valoriza-
tion of contingency. Rorty wrote next to nothing about Addams.
Why include these two marginal figures of classical pragmatism,
especially when they play little role within prevailing analytic
Introduction 19
pragmatisms like that of Brandom and Price? Here as well each one
is its own case. The aim of scholarly recovery is central to the Royce
chapter as we seek to understand the lack of reference to Royce in
Rorty’s published writings, especially around his notion of justice
as a larger loyalty, a puzzle that we make some strides in solving.
But the bigger motivation for their inclusion comes from the aim of
marshalling the resources of the pragmatic tradition for its future
development and, in particular, its ability to address the problems
of our day. Both Royce and Addams—especially Addams—sought
ways to practice their ideas and to follow the implications of their
philosophical orientations for democratic life in ways surprisingly
consonant with Rorty’s own pragmatic maxim. Addams’s status as
a philosopher in her own right has been unduly neglected, though
there are positive signs that this recognition is growing.30 There is a
lot that contemporary pragmatists can still learn from a critical dia-
logue between the ideas of Royce and Addams and Rorty’s.
The first chapter begins, fittingly, not only with Rorty’s earliest
writings but the origins of pragmatism in Charles Sanders Peirce.
Its aim is to present a fuller, more accurate picture of Rorty’s early
appreciation for and indebtedness to Peirce. The most obvious ob-
stacle we face in this recovery is Rorty’s own infamous categorical
dismissal of Peirce’s importance—that is, the infamous claim, in his
1979 APA Presidential Address, that Peirce’s “contribution to prag-
matism was merely to have given it a name, and to have stimulated
James” (CP 161). The second obstacle is that Rorty’s most in-depth
engagements with Peirce and with issues pertaining to pragmatism
and realism date to his least-known early writings.31 Add to this
the fact that these early philosophical positions appear to directly
counter Rorty’s more well-known mature views, particularly when
it comes to realism, and the uphill climb my argument faces comes
into view. Nevertheless, these early writings on Peirce illuminate
Rorty’s philosophical project writ large and in fact are essential
to understanding his relation to the classical pragmatists and to
appreciating the full scope of his philosophy. Beyond our grasp of
Rorty, I believe the stances in this early work have implications for
current debates and for the future of pragmatism after Rorty, as
I shall suggest in the Conclusion chapter.
Briefly stated, the fundamental insight Rorty derives from Peirce
is the primacy of practice in philosophical discourse.32 Rorty’s em-
brace of pragmatism in his early work—primarily via Peirce but
with several key invocations of Dewey—equates pragmatism with
translating metaphilosophical problems to a practical context
and then draws out the consequences of this shift. In Chapter 1,
I focus primarily on the realism Rorty endorses in this early work.
Getting a handle on his commitments around realism not only
gives us a better grasp of stances that have proved the most trou-
bling to critics, it alleviates an enduring point of contention be-
tween his work and the classical figures. Specifically, I make the
case that Rorty was by his own lights, at least for a time, a Peircean
realist. Further, I argue that the distinctive version of realism the
early Rorty labels “Peircean” is a useful notion for understanding
Rorty’s mature positions, though in his later work he abandons the
Peircean vocabulary for a Davidsonian one. Before explicating this
realism, I establish how Rorty’s early reading of Peirce’s end of in-
quiry and normative theory of self-controlled conduct enables
him to grasp the dependence of epistemology on ethics and to see
philosophical discourse as a rule-governed realm that necessitates
choice of vocabulary and hence responsibility. Here we see the
metaphilosophical stance that develops into the first pillar of
Rorty’s reconstruction focused on agency and choice. Three phases
of Rorty’s relation to Peirce can be distinguished: 1) key early ap-
preciation and engagement from his graduate studies until the
1970s; 2) a middle-period blanket rejection of Peirce as having
contributed anything to pragmatism other than the name; and 3) a
later view of Peirce as prophet of the linguistic turn. Understanding
Rorty’s early interest in and surprising affinities with Peirce sheds
light on important continuities between their philosophies that
prevailing views of each obscure. In key moments, Rorty turns out
Introduction 21
to be more of a realist, as traditionally understood, and Peirce less

of one—at least in terms of correspondence—than we might ex-
pect. The “ethically-centered epistemology” aimed at the growth
of knowledge Rorty sees in Peirce contrasts sharply with the view
dominant among contemporary Peirceans, like Misak and Talisse,
preoccupied above all with justification.
Unlike all the ink spilled contesting Rorty’s claim to a Deweyan
heritage, which we will examine in the third chapter, scholars
of William James have been largely silent on Rorty’s reading
of James, beyond a few pregnant claims, by Richard Bernstein,
Harvey Cormier, and others, that James is the pragmatist Rorty
most resembled. Fewer than ten essays exist on Rorty and James,
only a handful of which are constructive; there are no sustained
treatments of Rorty’s indebtedness to James or of the commonalities
in their philosophical projects. Chapter 2 aims to fill this gap by
establishing their like-minded approach to the interrelation of
ethics, epistemology, and meliorism. The pluralistic, “unfinished”
universe heralded by James, and the contingent, linguistically-
mediated landscape open to endless redescription embraced by
Rorty, both evoke a conception of knowledge in which humans are
active participants in the construction of what is right and true.
Like James, Rorty can be read as a philosopher of agency,
preoccupied with how we move from the old to the new, and
from where we derive normative resources to guide us in these
transitions to new beliefs when we leave our existing principles
or procedures behind. Both reject an ethics that appeals to fixed
principles, yet nonetheless combine their fallibilism and plu-
ralism with an account of commitment and responsibility that
manifests in a more acute attentiveness to what James called the
“cries of the wounded” and the obligations that the claims of con-
crete others place on us. Drawing on James’s brief but important
appearances in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, I highlight the
combination of epistemic modesty and willingness to listen and
learn from others with an account of ethical responsiveness as a
signal contribution of their pragmatisms. This approach generates

insights into Rortyan irony, which I claim is best read as an ethical
form of antiauthoritarian fallibilism, and elucidates the resources
James and Rorty offer for what recent scholars, like Miranda
Fricker (2007) and José Medina (2017), have called epistemic injus-
tice.33 The normative resources of Rorty’s reconstructive project are
on full display in this juxtaposition with James, as well as in Rorty’s
reading of James. Because of how much they share, commonalities
rather than divergences predominate in this chapter. Nevertheless,
Rorty’s reconstruction of James identifies a tension between “The
Will to Believe” and Pragmatism, on the one hand, and Radical
Empiricism and Varieties of Religious Experience, on the other, in
that James’s famous defense of the right to believe in the absence of
evidence does not go far enough in its antiauthoritarian impulse.
Chapter 3 shows how both Rorty and John Dewey were com-
mitted to a conception of philosophy as an instrument of social
change which aims, in Sidney Hook’s phrase, at “enlarging human
freedom.” Elsewhere I surveyed the four decades–long cottage in-
dustry of documenting Rorty’s alleged distortions of Dewey and
concluded that the one-sided preoccupation with the question of
Rorty’s fidelity to the Deweyan heritage had the effect of blunting,
or eschewing altogether, the fundamental challenges posed by
Rorty’s attempt at reconstruction (see Voparil 2014a). The claim
I advance here is that Rorty’s reinterpretations are best seen as
attempts to read Dewey in a way that promotes a particular vi-
sion of democracy and social change, rather than as misreadings.
In short, Rorty radicalizes Dewey’s own reconstruction of phi-
losophy, using Deweyan critiques against Dewey himself. Like
Dewey, Rorty aimed to promote ethical, social, and political
change by reconceiving our understanding of philosophy and its
role in the culture. When Rorty objects to particular elements in
Dewey’s work, like the project of constructive metaphysics in
Experience and Nature, it is because he believes they get in the way
of reconstructing philosophy as an instrument of social change.
Introduction 23
I support this interpretation through a reading of Rorty’s work

over the last decade of his life, particularly the essays collected in
Philosophy as Cultural Politics, that suggests Rorty’s embrace of the
idea of philosophy as cultural politics brings him closer to Deweyan
ideas about the role of philosophy than his earlier stances. I then ex-
amine the shared territory that comes into view as a result of this
reading to offer the kind of fruitful engagement with their points
of divergence that we still largely lack, including their attention to
marginalized groups. Three additional shared elements emerge: an
attention to the cultural context in which intellectual inquiry is
embedded; an engagement with the pressing social, moral, polit-
ical, and cultural issues of the day; and a foregrounding of the soci-
opolitical character of philosophical work, in the sense exemplified
in Reconstruction in Philosophy. Rorty’s effort to reconstruct what
he took to be the limitations in Dewey’s conception of philosophy
as an instrument of social change deserves to be considered on its
own merits, not simply dismissed as an alleged misunderstanding
of Dewey. By reading Dewey as giving us an account of inquiry and
warrant under conditions of normal discourse and Rorty as fo-
cused on abnormal contexts where belief correction proceeds via
unwarranted assertions and nonlogical changes in belief, I suggest
how pragmatists can learn from them both.
Despite the evident lack of pragmatist family resemblance be-
tween the “absolute pragmatism” of Josiah Royce and Rorty’s
antifoundationalism, historicism, and contingentism, Chapter 4
identifies a shared project of particular importance to the ongoing
relevance of pragmatism: the philosophical imperative, in Rorty’s
parlance, of intervening in cultural politics. In this chapter I ad-
vance three key claims: first, that Royce’s work, roughly from The
Philosophy of Loyalty to The Hope of the Great Community, can
be productively viewed as a series of philosophical interventions
in cultural politics; second, that while evidence of Rorty’s engage-
ment with Royce’s thought is scant, drawing on thinly veiled tex-
tual allusions and material in the Richard Rorty Papers archive,
I establish it nonetheless exists and was more influential on Rorty

than currently appreciated; and, third, that reading Rorty and
Royce within the same frame generates helpful insights about the
transformative moral resources available to pragmatists—namely,
the power of affective ties and ethical commitments exemplified
in the notion of loyalty. What results is an approach to questions
of justice through the lens of community, involving conceptions
of interpretation, loyalty, and atonement, that illuminates those
who have used Roycean resources in their justice work, including
Horace Kallen, Howard Thurman, Martin Luther King, Jr., and
Cornel West. Philosophically, they each grasped that truth, know-
ledge, and reality cannot be understood in isolation from the
communal relations that constitute us. We see that Rorty’s critical
reconstruction of Royce stems from his worry that Royce’s appeal
to the Absolute risks generating sociopolitical complacency and a
loss of human agency. After outlining where their projects align in
promoting an intensification of community, I identify a limitation
that both thinkers face when it comes to learning from outsiders
within, drawing on others in the pragmatist orbit, including
Randolph Bourne and W.E.B. Du Bois, to suggest remedies. The
stance toward which both Royce and Rorty seemed to be moving,
but never fully arrive, was discerned by Du Bois, in his insight that
his status as a devalued other makes him “singularly clairvoyant.” If
indeed we understand truth and reality from within the horizon of
our community, the perspective of that community’s marginalized
and excluded others is necessary for gaining knowledge oriented to
the cultural politics of social change.
Because lines of direct philosophical influence of Jane Addams
on Rorty and philosophical appropriations by him of her work don’t
exist, Chapter 5 begins with intellectual biography to trace their
common early awareness of social injustice. Only in the last few
decades has Addams’s rightful place in the pragmatist pantheon,
not merely as an activist and reformer but a social philosopher,
been secured. On the few occasions in recent scholarship when
Rorty is mentioned in the context of Addams, it typically is to mark
Introduction 25
the distance between them. With one notable exception by a sociol-

ogist (see Schneiderhan 2013), there are no extended treatments of
these two thinkers in tandem. Yet despite Rorty’s oeuvre containing
in total scarcely a paragraph of commentary on Addams and her
work, he valorized her as a member of the “reformist left” exalted
in Achieving Our Country. Interestingly, the Social Gospel tradition
of Rorty’s grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, is a shared influence
on both the Settlement Movement and Rorty’s own development.
I argue that Addams and Rorty secularize the ethical dimension
of the tradition, deriving from it the importance of community
responses to the needs of the poor and immigrants. Interpreting
them in this light illuminates their distinctive contribution to prag-
matist ethics: They merge epistemic and ethical priorities to unite
sympathetic understanding with the cultivation of social ethical
responsibility and orient their ethical projects explicitly toward re-
sponsiveness to marginalized or excluded others. My chief claims
are: first, that Rorty can be read as extending Addams’s project of
creating a democratic moral community; and second, that a con-
structive dialogue between Rorty and Addams reveals key points
of complementarity that, when taken together, generate a more
robust conception of democratic social ethics than Addams’s
alone. Reading Rorty alongside Addams elucidates the ethical
commitments behind or alongside his more familiar epistemo-
logical critiques in previously unappreciated ways. For instance,
Rorty’s understanding of the social practice of justification can be
understood as a philosophical defense of Addams’s idea of a “social
test,” wherein “what our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away
with saying” functions in a similar way as Addams’s notion of “con-
tact with social experience” as a corrective of opinion. The social
dimension that comes into focus by reading Rorty with Addams
depicts a facet of Rorty’s ethics not captured in Chapter 2’s engage-
ment of Rorty and James.
In the Conclusion I gather the insights from the preceding
chapters and revisit influential lines of criticism of Rorty in
their light. To offer a brief precis: the first chapter’s elucidation
of Rorty’s Peircean roots reveals Rorty’s apparent rejections of

truth, objectivity, and the mind-independence of reality to have
been overstated, concealing his more nuanced reconstructions of
these notions. Chapter 2’s account of Rorty’s alternative concep-
tion of ethical normativity via James offers a basis for more ro-
bust Rortyan responses to the criticisms of Habermas and Misak
that his pragmatism lacks adequate motives for expanding our
community and for answering the Nazi. The reading of Rorty’s
relation to Dewey in the third chapter suggests that Rorty’s dis-
avowal of method is less broad than often thought and offers
resources for grappling with tensions within Dewey’s work.
Juxtaposing Dewey and Rorty enables pragmatists to account
for the improvement of belief under conditions of both normal
and abnormal discourse. Chapter 4 ultimately finds limitations
in both Rorty and Royce, particularly from the vantages of Du
Bois and Bourne. Nevertheless, their shared effort to use philo-
sophical ideas for bringing about social change and expansion of
provincial loyalties toward an inclusive global moral community
must not be overshadowed by their philosophical differences.
The unexpected alignments of Addams and Rorty which are the
subject of Chapter 5 yield not only synergies in their ethical and
epistemic projects but important complementary and mutually
corrective insights into how to practice pragmatist meliorism.
Addams’s notion of a “social test” of belief blunts critiques of
Rorty’s picture of social justification, and Rorty helps us see the
limits of social experience without an attendant expansion of the
moral space of deliberation through nonlogical means. Lastly,
I sketch the broad contours of a post-Rortyan pragmatism free
of partisan allegiances and self-protective impulses, animated by
creative energies resulting from working through and beyond his
challenges to pragmatists to better realize the aims of moral and
epistemic growth toward more just and inclusive communities.
* * *
Introduction 27
In the remainder of this introduction, I address several issues

that help orient us toward the nature and scope of Rorty’s project
of reconstruction: his role in prevailing narratives of continuity,
eclipse, and revival in the pragmatic tradition’s odyssey; the per-
sistent partition between experiential and linguistic pragmatisms;
and pragmatism’s relation to humanism, where I briefly treat sev-
eral other figures of classical pragmatism who are not examined
here, but also promise avenues of productive dialogue with Rorty’s
thought.
Rorty and Pragmatism’s Resurgence
As the thinker most associated with pragmatism’s contemporary

resurgence, Rorty looms large in virtually all narratives that seek to
explain the twists and turns of its twentieth-century journey. The
most dominant of these, dubbed the “eclipse narrative,” holds that
after being ascendant since the last decades of the nineteenth cen-
tury, pragmatism was pushed from the philosophical scene around
the Second World War by the rise of the more technical approach
to philosophy associated with logical positivism and analytic phi-
losophy, which was characterized by decontextualized logical rigor.
Appearing by comparison muddled and lacking the mathematical
proof-like clarity of argumentation prized by these new traditions,
on this narrative pragmatism suffers enough near-fatal blows to
endure only on life support until the 1979 appearance of Rorty’s
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which heralded Dewey as
one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century,
alongside Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, and sparked
a revival of the tradition that subsequently blossomed across the
humanities and the globe.34
The ironic wrinkle in this story is the seemingly contradic-
tory dual role Rorty occupies as both chief spokesperson for the
linguistic turn in analytic philosophy that hastened the eclipse
of pragmatism and architect of a renewed vision of pragmatism’s

timeliness and importance. It should not be overlooked that the
eclipse narrative represents events as they were felt in certain quar-
ters.35 For a time, Rorty clearly played the part of villain and con-
venient scapegoat for both sides. By now this story rightly has lost
much of its influence; it surely obscures more than it reveals. By
the early 1990s, Bernstein already discerned the limits of the domi-
nant narrative as overshadowing “the continuity and persistence of
the pragmatic legacy” that endured even while allegedly in eclipse
(1992, 817).36 Yet this message of continuity gained little currency
until Rorty’s passing in 2007 and the shift in his reception that
followed.
For a time, Bernstein’s 1992 claims about continuity were
drowned out by the din of that decade’s struggles— between
modernists and postmodernists, foundationalists and
antifoundationalists, and analytic and continental traditions. By
the mid-1990s what we might call narratives of fragmentation
came into fashion among pragmatism’s scholars. Little written by
pragmatists or about pragmatism failed to delineate not just clas-
sical from contemporary versions but to resist drawing lines of
demarcation across the growing pragmatist community: classical
versus neopragmatism, experiential versus linguistic pragmatism,
and modernist versus postmodernist pragmatism, to name only
a few. The widely-read account of historian James Kloppenberg
(1996), to take one example, entrenched not only these divides but
one between, on the one hand, Bernstein and Hilary Putnam, and,
on the other, Rorty, Stanley Fish, and Richard Poirier. Before long,
“new” pragmatists distinguished themselves from neopragmatists
(i.e., Rorty), and “paleopragmatism” and “primapragmatism” were
spawned.37 It took the realignment of pragmatism’s tectonic plates
initiated by Rorty’s departure from the scene to alter the geography
of contemporary pragmatism’s divided map.38 A factor in this shift
no doubt has been the recent generation of pragmatists, worldwide,
who have come to the tradition via Rorty’s work, free of the scars
Introduction 29
and trauma borne by those who lived through the apparent eclipse
and the Rorty-led revival.
Fully appreciating Rorty’s reconstruction of classical pragma-
tism entails recognizing the importance of Willard Van Orman
Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, and Donald Davidson in the story of the
tradition’s development. To be sure, Rorty’s own insights regarding
this continuity have not gone wholly unnoticed.39 However, the ex-
tent to which his insights both undermine the eclipse narrative and
suggest novel lines of inquiry for pragmatists of all allegiances has
not been widely grasped. It is instructive to recall that the opening
line of Rorty’s first published article was: “Pragmatism is getting
respectable again” (1961a, 197). Even if this remark may have
been more prophecy than fact at the time, it was not totally un-
founded. To understand what could have prompted Rorty to make
such a statement during the time of pragmatism’s alleged retreat,
we have to appreciate something omitted by the dominant eclipse
narrative: what John Murphy called “Quine’s revival of pragma-
tism in 1951” (1990, 95). Murphy usefully highlights how Quine’s
“Two Dogmas of Empiricism” had “tolled the death knell for log-
ical positivism” (Murphy 1990, 82). Like most, Murphy’s narra-
tive dates pragmatism’s “moribund” state to the 1930s and 1940s.
Unlike most, he characterizes the 1950s and 1960s as dominated by
Quine’s version of pragmatism (1990, 82).40
Pegging Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature as the source of the
pragmatist revival unhelpfully pulls a curtain across the important
midcentury philosophical drama in the decades that preceded it.
For his part, Rorty himself advanced a narrative not of eclipse but
of continuity. Indeed, the historical account offered in Mirror, as
he explained a few years later, is of “a gradual ‘pragmaticization’
of the original tenets of logical positivism” (CP xviii). The re-
sult of this pragmaticization, he suggests, was that with Quine,
the later Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson, analytic philosophy
“transcends and cancels itself ” (CP xviii). The most noteworthy
invocation of pragmatism in Mirror indeed is Rorty’s surprising
inclusion of Dewey among the three most important philosophers

of the twentieth century. While Dewey’s name appears often in
the book, his relevance to Rorty’s argument consists largely in
representing broad philosophical currents which carried him and
others— Wittgenstein and Heidegger, on one end, and Quine,
Sellars, and Davidson, on the other—in a particular direction more
than in anything distinctive to Dewey. These currents, which Rorty
sought to affirm, include, among others: the critique of the spectator
theory of knowledge, the general sweep of anti-Cartesianism and
anti-Kantianism, an embrace of holism and naturalism, and a genre
of “edifying” rather than “systematic” philosophy. Pragmatism as
such is not especially conspicuous in the book. Rorty labels his po-
sition with the awkward phrase, “epistemological behaviorism,”
adding parenthetically, “(which might be simply called ‘pragma-
tism’, were this term not a bit overladen),” and attributes it to not
just Dewey but Wittgenstein, Quine, and Sellars (PMN 176).41
We have here, then, not a narrative of eclipse, but on the con-
trary, a story of pragmatism, through precise targeting of funda-
mental assumptions, slowly chipping away at logical positivism’s
foundations until it collapses, with pragmatism in the role of van-
quisher rather than vanquished—all of this a decade or two before
Mirror. How are we to make sense of this alternative narrative,
which rests on the claim that a revival of pragmatism already was
initiated by Quine in 1951? Here too we must recognize conti-
nuity, starting with the influence of Dewey on Quine that the clas-
sical versus neopragmatism divide masks. Quine’s “Two Dogmas
of Empiricism” appeared in January 1951, eighteen months before
Dewey’s death. As a graduate student, Quine had heard Dewey
deliver the first William James Lectures at Harvard in 1931, later
published as Art as Experience (Quine 1969, 26).42 The opening
paragraph of “Two Dogmas” makes clear that Quine understands
the consequence of his critique as “a shift towards pragmatism,” in-
cluding his own stance, which he describes as “a more thorough
pragmatism” than that of Rudolf Carnap and C.I. Lewis (1980, 20,
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have slain.” Here Mr Godwin assured us that he had visited the
Gannet Rock ten seasons in succession, for the purpose just
mentioned, and added, that on one of these occasions, “six men had
destroyed five hundred and forty Gannets in about an hour, after
which the party rested a while, and until most of the living birds had
left their immediate neighbourhood, for all around them, beyond the
distance of about a hundred yards, thousands of Gannets were yet
sitting on their nests, and the air was filled with multitudes of others.
The dead birds are now roughly skinned, and the flesh of the breast
cut up in pieces of different sizes, which will keep good for bait about
a fortnight or three weeks. So great is the destruction of these birds
for the purpose mentioned, that the quantity of their flesh so
procured supplies with bait upwards of forty boats, which lie fishing
close to the Island of Brion each season. By the 20th of May the rock
is covered with birds on their nests and eggs, and about a month
afterwards the young are hatched. The earth is scratched by the
birds for a few inches deep, and the edges surrounded by sea-
weeds and other rubbish, to the height of eight or ten inches,
tolerably well matted together. Each female Gannet lays a single
egg, which is pure white, but not larger than a good-sized hen’s egg.
When the young are hatched, they are bluish-black, and for a
fortnight or more their skin is not unlike that of the common dog-fish.
They gradually become downy and white, and when five or six
weeks old look like great lumps of carded wool.”
I was well pleased with this plain statement of our pilot, as I had with
my glass observed the regularity of the lines of nests, and seen
many of the birds digging the earth with their strong bills, while
hundreds of them were carrying quantities of that long sea-weed
called Eel-grass, which they seem to bring from towards the
Magdalene Islands. While the Ripley lay to near the rock, thousands
of the Gannets constantly flew over our heads; and although I shot at
and brought several to the water, neither the reports nor the sight of
their dead companions seemed to make any impression on them.
On weighing several of the Gannets brought on board, I found them
to average rather more than seven pounds; but Mr Godwin assured
me that when the young birds are almost ready to fly, they weigh
eight and sometimes nine pounds. This I afterwards ascertained to
be true, and I account for the difference exhibited at this period by
the young birds, by the great profusion of food with which their
parents supply them, regardless in a great measure of their own
wants. The Pilot further told me that the stench on the summit of the
rock was insupportable, covered as it is during the breeding season,
and after the first visits of the fishermen, with the remains of
carcasses of old and young birds, broken and rotten eggs,
excrements, and multitudes of fishes. He added that the Gannets,
although cowardly birds, at times stand and await the approach of a
man, with open bill, and strike furious and dangerous blows. Let me
now, Reader, assure you that unless you had seen the sight
witnessed by my party and myself that day, you could not form a
correct idea of the impression it has to this moment left on my mind.
The extent of the southward migration of the Gannet, after it has
reared its young, is far greater perhaps than has hitherto been
supposed. I have frequently seen it on the Gulf of Mexico, in the
latter part of autumn and in winter; and a few were met with, in the
course of my last expedition, as far as the entrance of the Sabine
River into the Bay of Mexico. Being entirely a maritime species, it
never proceeds inland, unless forced by violent gales, which have
produced a few such instances in Nova Scotia and the State of
Maine, as well as the Floridas, where I saw one that had been found
dead in the woods two days after a furious hurricane. The greater
number of the birds of this species seen in these warm latitudes
during winter are young of that or the preceding year. My friend John
Bachman has informed me that during one of his visits to the Sea
Islands off the shores of South Carolina, on the 2d of July 1836, he
observed a flock of Gannets of from fifty to an hundred, all of the
colouring of the one in my plate, and which was a bird in its first
winter plumage. They were seen during several days on and about
Cole’s Island, at times on the sands, at others among the rolling
breakers. He also mentions having heard Mr Giles, an acquaintance
of his, who knows much about birds, say, that in the course of the
preceding summer he had seen a pair of Gannets going to, and
returning from, a nest in a tree! This is in accordance with the report
of Captain Napoleon Coste, who commanded the United States
Revenue Cutter, the Campbell, placed at my disposal during my visit
to the Texas, and who was Lieutenant as well as Pilot of the Marion.
He stated that he had found a breeding place on the coast of
Georgia, occupied by a flock of old, and therefore White Gannets,
the nests of all of which were placed upon trees. No one can be
greatly surprised at these reports, who knows, as I do, that the
Brown Gannet, Sula fusca, breeds both on trees and on dry elevated
sand bars. During winter months I have generally observed single
birds at some considerable distance from the shore out at sea,
sometimes indeed beyond what mariners call soundings, but rarely
young ones, they generally keeping much nearer to the shores, and
procuring their food in shallower water.
The flight of the Gannet is powerful, well sustained, and at times
extremely elegant. While travelling, whether in fine or foul weather,
they fly low over the surface of the water, flapping their wings thirty
or forty times in succession, in the manner of the Ibis and the Brown
Pelican, and then sailing about an equal distance, with the wings at
right angles to the body, and the neck extended forwards. But,
Reader, to judge of the elegance of this bird while on wing, I would
advise you to gaze on it from the deck of any of our packet ships,
when her commander has first communicated the joyful news that
you are less than three hundred miles from the nearest shore,
whether it be that of merry England or of my own beloved country.
You would then see the powerful fisher, on well-spread pinions, and
high over the water, glide silently along, surveying each swelling
wave below, and coursing with so much ease and buoyancy as to
tempt you to think that had you been furnished with equal powers of
flight, you might perform a journey of eighty or ninety miles without
the slightest fatigue in a single hour. But perhaps at the very moment
when these thoughts have crossed your mind, as they many times
have crossed mine on such occasions, they are suddenly checked
by the action of the bird, which, intent on filling its empty stomach,
and heedless of your fancies, plunges headlong through the air, with
the speed of a meteor, and instantaneously snatches the fish which
its keen sight had discovered from on high. Now perchance you may
see the snow-white bird sit buoyantly for a while on the bosom of its
beloved element, either munching its prey, or swallowing it at once.
Or perhaps, if disappointed in its attempt, you will see it rise by
continued flappings, shaking its tail sideways the while, and snugly
covering its broad webbed feet among the under coverts of that
useful rudder, after which it proceeds in a straight course, until its
wings being well supplied by the flowing air, it gradually ascends to
its former height, and commences its search anew.
In severe windy weather, I have seen the Gannet propelling itself
against the gale by sweeps of considerable extent, placing its body
almost sideways or obliquely, and thus alternately, in the manner of
Petrels and Guillemots; and I have thought that the bird then moved
with more velocity than at any other time, except when plunging after
its prey. Persons who have seen it while engaged in procuring food,
must, like myself, have been surprised when they have read in
books that Gannets “are never known to dive,” and yet are assured
that they “have been taken by a fish fastened to a board sunk to the
depth of two fathoms, in which case the neck has either been found
dislocated, or the bill firmly fixed in the wood.” With such statements
before him, one might think that his own vision had been defective,
had he not been careful to note down at once the result of his
observations. And as this is a matter of habit with me, I will offer you
mine, good Reader, not caring one jot for what has been said to you
before on the subject.
I have seen the Gannet plunge, and afterwards remain under the
surface of the water for at least one minute at a time. On one
occasion of this kind, I shot one just as it emerged, and which held a
fish firmly in its bill, and had two others half-way down its throat. This
has induced me to believe that it sometimes follows its prey in the
water, and seizes several fishes in succession. At other times I have
observed the Gannet plunge amidst a shoal of launces so as
scarcely to enter the water, and afterwards follow them, swimming,
or as it were running, on the water, with its wings extended upwards,
and striking to the right and left until it was satiated. While on the
Gulf of Mexico, I wounded a Gannet, which, on falling to the water,
swam so fast before the boat, that we rowed about a quarter of a
mile before we reached it, when it suddenly turned towards us,
opened its bill, as if intent on defending itself, but was killed with the
stroke of an oar by one of the sailors. When shot at without even
being touched, these birds often disgorge their food in the manner of
Vultures; and this they always do when wounded, if their stomach
and gullet happen to be full. Sometimes, after being wounded in the
wings, they will float and allow you to take them, without making any
attempt to escape. Nay, my young friend, George C. Shattuck, M.
D., of Boston, while with me at Labrador, caught one which he found
walking amongst a great number of Guillemots, on a low and rocky
island.
When they are on their favourite breeding rocks, and about to fly,
they elevate their head, throw it backward, open the bill, and emit a
loud prolonged cry, before launching themselves into the air, in doing
which they waddle a few paces with their wings partially extended.
After starting, their first motion is greatly inclined downwards, but
they, presently recover, and seem to support themselves with ease.
When they are twenty or thirty yards off, you observe them shaking
the tail sideways, and then hiding their feet among the under coverts
of the tail. At other times they suddenly open their feet, moving them
as if for the purpose of grasping some object below, in the same
manner as some hawks, but only for a few moments, when again the
tail is shaken, and the feet hidden as before. They beat their wings
and sail alternately, even when flying around their breeding places.
On the ground the movements of the Gannet are exceedingly
awkward, and it marches with hampered steps, assisting itself with
the wings, or keeping them partially open, to prevent its falling. Their
walk, indeed, is merely a hobble. When the sun shines, they are fond
of opening their wings and beating them in the manner of
Cormorants, shaking the head meanwhile rather violently, and
emitting their usual uncouth guttural notes of cara, karew, karow.
You may well imagine the effect of a concert performed by all the
Gannets congregated for the purpose of breeding on such a rock as
that in the Gulf of St Lawrence, where, amidst the uproar produced
by the repetition of these notes, you now and then distinguish the
loud and continued wolfish howling-like sounds of those about to fly
off.
The newly-finished nest of this bird is fully two feet high, and quite as
broad externally. It is composed of seaweeds and maritime grasses,
the former being at times brought from considerable distances. Thus,
the Gannets breeding on the rocks in the Gulf of St Lawrence, carry
weeds from the Magdalene Islands, which are about thirty miles
distant. The grasses are pulled or dug up from the surface of the
breeding place itself, often in great clods consisting of roots and
earth, and leaving holes not unlike the entrances to the burrows of
the Puffin. The nests, like those of Cormorants, are enlarged or
repaired annually. The single egg, of a rather elongated oval form,
averages three inches and one-twelfth in length, by two inches in its
greatest breadth, and is covered with an irregular roughish coating of
white calcareous matter, which on being scraped off, leaves exposed
the pale greenish-blue tint of the under layer.
The birds usually reach the rock when already paired, in files often of
hundreds, and are soon seen billing in the manner of Cormorants,
and copulating on the rocks, but never, like the birds just mentioned,
on the water, as some have supposed. The period of their arrival at
their breeding grounds appears to depend much on the latitude of
the place; for, on the Bass Rock, in the Firth of Forth, which I had the
pleasure of visiting in the agreeable company of my learned friend
William Macgillivray and his son, on the 19th of August 1835, the
Gannets are first seen in February, whereas in the Gulf of St
Lawrence they rarely reach the Great Rock until the middle of April
or beginning of May; and at Chateau Beau in the Straits of Belle Isle,
not until a fortnight or three weeks later. Like the members of most
large communities, the Gannets, though so truly gregarious at this
season, shew a considerable degree of animosity towards their more
immediate neighbours as soon as incubation commences. A lazy
bird perhaps, finding it easier to rob the nest of its friend of weeds
and sods, than to convey them from some distant place, seizes
some, on which the other resents the injury, and some well-directed
thrusts of their strong bills are made, in open day and in full view of
the assembled sitters, who rarely fail to look on with interest, and
pass the news from one to another, until all are apprized of the
quarrel. The time however passes on. The patient mother, to lend
more warmth to her only egg, plucks a few of the feathers from some
distance beneath her breast. In sunny weather, she expands those
of her upper parts, and passing her bill along their roots, destroys the
vile insects that lurk there. Should a boisterous gale or a thick cold
fog mar the beauty of the day, she gathers her apparel around her,
and shrinks deeper into her bed; and should it rain, she places her
body so as to prevent the inundation of her household. How happy,
Reader, must she be when now and then her keen eyes distinguish
in the crowd her affectionate mate, as he returns from the chase,
with loaded bill, and has already marked her among the thousand
beauties all equally anxious for the arrival of their lords! Now by her
side he alights as gently as is in his nature, presents her with a
welcome repast, talks perhaps cheeringly to her, and again opening
his broad wings departs in search of a shoal of herrings. At length,
the oval chest opens, and out crawls the tender young; but lo! the
little thing is black. What a strange contrast to the almost pure white
of the parent! Yet the mother loves it, with all the tenderness of other
mothers. She has anxiously expected its appearance, and at once
she nurses it with care; but so tender is it that she prefers waiting a
while before she feeds it. The time however soon comes, and with
exceeding care she provides some well macerated morsels which
she drops into its open mouth; so well prepared are they that there is
no instance on record of a Gannet, even of that tender age, having
suffered from dyspepsia or indigestion.
The male Gannet assists in incubating, though he sits less
assiduously than the female; and, on such occasions, the free bird
supplies the other with food. The sight of the young Gannet just after
birth might not please the eye of many, for it is then quite naked, and
of a deep bluish-black, much resembling a young Cormorant. Its
abdomen is extremely large, its neck thin, its head large, its eyes as
yet sightless, its wings but slightly developed. When you look at it
three weeks afterwards, it has grown much, and almost entirely
changed its colour, for, now, with the exception of certain parts of the
neck, the short thighs, and the belly, it is covered with yellowish soft
and thick down. In this state it looks perhaps as uncouth as at first,
but it grows so rapidly that at the end of three weeks more, you find
its downy coat patched with feathers in the most picturesque manner
imaginable. Looking around you, you observe that all the young are
not of the same growth; for all the Gannets do not lay on the same
day, and probably all the young are not equally supplied with food. At
this period, the great eyrie looks as if all its parts had become
common property; the nests, which were once well fashioned are
trampled down; the young birds stand everywhere or anywhere;
lazy-looking creatures they are, and with an appearance of non-
chalance which I have never observed in any other species of bird,
and which would lead you to think that they care as little about the
present as the future. Now the old birds are freed of part of their
cares, they drop such fish as they have obtained by the side of their
young, and, like Cormorants, Pelicans, or Herons, seldom bring a
supply oftener than once a-day. Strange to say, the young birds at
this period do not appear to pay the least attention to the old ones,
which occasionally alight near them, and drop fish for them to feed
upon.
Gannets do not feed, as some have supposed, and as many have
believed, on herring only; for I have found in their stomachs codlings
eight inches in length, as well as very large American mackerels,
which, by the way, are quite different from those so abundantly met
with on the coasts of Europe.
The young never leave the spot on which they have been reared
until they are well able to fly, when they separate from the old birds,
and do not rejoin them until at least a year after. Although I have in a
few instances found individuals yet patched with dark-grey spots,
and with most of their primary quills still black, I am confident that it
is not until the end of two years that they acquire their full plumage. I
have seen some with one wing almost pure black, and the tail of that
colour also; others with the tail only black; and several with pure
black feathers interspersed among the general white plumage.
I know of no other bird that has so few formidable enemies as the
Gannet. Not one of the species of Lestris with which I am
acquainted, ever attempts to molest it; and, although I have seen the
Frigate Pelican in quest of food within a short distance of it, I never
saw it offer injury. The insular rocks on which it breeds are of course
inaccessible to quadrupeds. The only animals, so far as I know, that
feed on the eggs or young, are the Larus marinus and Larus
glaucus. It is said that the Skua, Lestris Cataractes, sometimes
pursues the Gannets, but that species does not exist in North
America; and I am inclined to doubt the truth of this statement, for I
have never seen a Lestris of any kind attack a bird equal to itself in
size and strength.
Soon after the young Gannets are able to fly, all the birds of the
species leave the breeding place, and absent themselves until the
following season. While at Newfoundland, I was told that the English
and French fishermen who inhabit that country salt young Gannets
for winter provision, as is done in Scotland; but I saw none there. In
my estimation, the flesh of this bird is so bad that, as long as any
other can be procured, it ought to be rejected.
It is a curious fact, that the Gannets often procure mackerels or
herrings four or five weeks before the fishermen fall in with them on
our coast; but this is easily explained by their extensive wanderings.
Although this bird is easily kept in captivity, it is far from being a
pleasant pet. Its ordure is abundant, disagreeable to the eye as well
as the nose; its gait is awkward; and even its pale owl-like eyes glare
on you with an unpleasant expression. Add to this, the expense of its
food, and I can easily conceive that you will not give it a place in your
aviary, unless for the mere amusement of seeing it catch the food
thrown to it, which it does like a dog.
The feathers of the lower parts of the Gannet differ from those of
most other birds, in being extremely convex externally, which gives
the bird the appearance of being covered beneath with light shell-
work, exceedingly difficult to be represented in a drawing.
My highly esteemed and talented friend William Macgillivray
having given a full account of the habits of the Gannet, as observed
on the Bass Rock in Scotland, I here present it to you.
“The Bass is an abrupt rock, having a basis of about a mile in
circumference, and of an oblong form. The cliffs are perpendicular in
some places, overhanging in others, and everywhere precipitous,
excepting at the narrow extremity next the land, where, sloping less
abruptly, they form at the base a low projection, on which is the only
landing-place. Above this are the ruins of the fortifications and
houses, the Bass having formerly been used as a State-prison. The
rocks are in some places apparently two hundred feet in height, and
the summit, towards which the surface rises in an irregular manner,
is probably a hundred and fifty feet higher. In as far as I observed,
the whole mass is of a uniform structure, consisting of trap,
intermediate between greenstone and clinkstone, of a dull brownish-
red colour, and small granular structure. Although a great portion of
the upper surface of the island is composed of rock, there is an
abundant vegetation, consisting chiefly of Festuca ovina, F.
duriuscula, and a few other grasses, mixed with the plants usually
found in maritime situations.
“The circumstance connected with the Bass most interesting to the
Zoologist, is its being one of the few places in Britain to which the
Gannet resorts during the breeding season. The number which I saw
on the 13th May 1831, when I for the first time visited it along with
some friends, might be estimated at twenty thousand. Every part of
the mural faces of the rock, especially towards their summits, was
more or less covered by them. In one spot near the landing place,
about forty yards in circumference, and on a gentle slope of gravelly
ground, about three hundred individuals were sitting in peaceful
security on their nests.
“The Gannets arrive about the middle of February or the beginning of
March, and depart in October; some years a few individuals remain
during the winter. The nests are composed of grass and sea-weeds,
generally placed on the bare rock or earth, elevated in the form of a
truncated cone, of which the base is about twenty inches in diameter,
with a shallow terminal cavity. On the summit of the island are
numerous holes in the turf, from eight to fifteen inches deep, and
from six to nine broad, formed by the Gannets in pulling away grass
and turf for their nests. They are placed on all parts of the rocks
where a convenient spot occurs, but are much more numerous
towards the summit. Some of them on the face of the rock, or in a
shallow fissure, and which have been occupied for years, are piled
up to the height of from three to five feet, but in this case they always
lean against the rock. The egg, which is solitary, and presents
nothing remarkable in its position, is of an elongated oval form,
bluish-white, dull, with a chalky surface, usually patched with
yellowish-brown dirt. It is subjected to what might appear rough
usage, for the bird in alighting, flying off, or when disturbed by the
intrusion of human visitors, tosses it about, and often stands upon it.
“When sitting, the Gannets usually allow a person to approach within
three feet, sometimes much nearer, so that one may even touch
them. When one approaches them, they merely open their bill, and
utter their usual cry, or they rise and express some degree of
resentment, but seem to have very little apprehension of danger.
They take advantage of the absence of their neighbours to pilfer the
materials of their nests, frequently two join in this act, and
occasionally two may be seen tugging at the same bunch,
endeavouring to wrest it from each other. They are constantly
repairing their nests, which being composed in a great measure of
sea-weeds, shrink up in dry weather, and decompose in wet; and
when seated close together they have frequent quarrels. I saw one
seize its neighbour by the back of the neck, until the latter, I may say,
roared out; but in general, they are satisfied with menacing each
other with open bills and loud clamour. In leaving the nest, they
generally scatter about a quantity of the materials of which it is
composed, for they are extremely awkward in their motions when on
the ground, hobbling and limping along, aiding themselves with their
wings, and draggling the abdominal feathers and tail.
“In launching from the cliffs, they frequently utter a single plaintive
cry, perform a curve, having its concavity upwards, then shake the
tail, frequently the whole plumage, draw the feet backwards, placing
them close under the tail, on each side, and cover them with the
feathers. In some the feet were entirely covered, while in others
parts of the toes were apparent. In flying, the body, tail, neck, and
bill, are nearly in a straight line, the wings extended and never
brought close to the body, and they move by regular flappings,
alternating with short sailings. In alighting, they generally ascend in a
long curve, keeping their feet spread, and come down rather heavily,
often finding it difficult to balance themselves, and sometimes, when
the place is very steep, or when another bird attacks them, flying off,
to try it a second time. On the rocks they stand with the body nearly
horizontal, or they lie on their belly, although some may be seen in
an oblique or even nearly erect posture. They usually repose with
the head resting between the shoulders, the bill concealed among
the feathers of the back. I caught one in that state, by walking up to
it, and seizing it by the tail and the tips of the wings, which cross
each other over it.
“Owing to their interference with each other, a constant noise is kept
up amongst them. Their cry is hoarse and harsh, and may be
expressed by the syllables carra, carra, carra, or kirra, kirra, kirra, or
crac, crac, crac. The cry varies considerably in different individuals,
some having a sharper voice than others, and when unusually
irritated they repeat it with great rapidity. An ornithological writer
thinks they cry grog, grog; but neither Mr Audubon nor myself
interpreted their notes so, otherwise we could have satisfied a few at
least, as we had a bottle of whisky and a keg of water.
“The young are at first covered with very beautiful close snow-white
down; at the age of about six weeks the feathers make their
appearance among the down; when two months old the birds are
pretty well fledged, and at the end of three months they are able to
fly. The old bird at first feeds the young with a kind of fish-soup
prepared in its gullet and stomach, and which it introduces drop by
drop as it were into its throat. But when its nursling is pretty well
grown, it places its bill within its mouth, and disgorges the fish either
entire or in fragments. They never carry fish to the rock in their bills.
The smallest number of young killed in a year is a thousand, the
greatest two thousand; but in general the number is fifteen or sixteen
hundred. After being plucked, they are sold at from sixpence to a
shilling each. The price of a young bird for stuffing is two shillings; of
an old bird five, of an egg one. For the information contained in this
paragraph I am indebted to the keeper.
“At the period of my second visit with Mr Audubon (the 19th August
1835), the nests in most places had almost entirely disappeared, for
it is only during incubation that the birds keep them in constant
repair. The young were in various stages, a few quite small and
covered all over with white down, the greater number partially
fledged, with the down remaining on the head and neck, and some
nearly ready to fly, and having merely a few tufts of down on the hind
neck. The young lay flat, either on the remnants of their nest, or on
the bare rock or ground. They are very patient and uncomplaining; in
fact, none uttered a single cry while we were inspecting them. I
observed an old bird, with its own young beside it, squeeze the neck
of another youngling with considerable force The poor bird bore the
persecution with perfect resignation, and merely cowered under the
bill of the tyrant. The young of the latter also attacked its neighbour,
but was instantly checked, on which it meekly desisted. One of the
men informed me that last year there were fourteen nests, each with
two eggs. In such cases, one of the young is said to be much smaller
than the other.”
Pelecanus bassanus, Linn. Nat. vol. i. p. 217.—Lath. Ind. Ornith. vol. ii. p.
891.
Sula bassana, Ch. Bonaparte, Synopsis of Birds of United States, p. 408.
Gannet, Nuttall, Manual, vol. ii. p. 495.
Adult Male. Plate CCCXXVI. Fig. 1.

Bill longer than the head, opening beyond the eyes, straight,
elongated-conical, moderately compressed. Upper mandible with the
dorsal line straight and declinate, at the end convex and a little
decurved; ridge very broad, convex, with a slight median carina, and
separated on each side, from the sides, which are nearly
perpendicular, slightly convex, and have an additional narrow jointed
piece below the eye; edges sharp, direct, irregularly serrate, with
numerous slender cuts directed backwards; tip compressed, a little
decurved, rather acute. No external nostrils. Lower mandible with the
angle very long and narrow, the dorsal line straight, ascending, the
sides erect, convex, the edges sharp and serrated, the tip
compressed and sharp.
Head large; neck of moderate length and very thick, body of
moderate bulk, rather elongated; wings long. Feet short, strong,
placed rather far behind; tibiæ concealed; tarsus very short, rounded
before, sharp behind, at its upper part anteriorly with rather large
roundish-flat scales, in the rest of its extent with very small oblong
tubercles; anteriorly there are three lines of small transversely
oblong scutella, which rim down the toes. The latter are long and
slender, all united by membranes, which are reticularly granulated,
and have their margins straight; first toe rather small, directed
inwards and forwards, middle toe longest, the outer almost equal.
Claws of moderate size, slightly arched, those of the first and middle
toes depressed, the latter with its inner edge thin and pectinated.
Plumage generally close, rather compact, the feathers small and
rounded; those on the head and neck blended and slightly glossed.
A bare space between the bill and the eye, surrounding the latter,
and extending an inch behind the angle of the mouth. The gular
membrane also bare for a small breadth, extending two inches
beyond the base of the mandible. About a quarter of an inch of the
tibia bare. Wings very long, narrow, acute; primaries strong, narrow,
tapering rapidly to a rounded point; first longest, second about a
quarter of an inch shorter, the rest rapidly graduated; secondaries
short, rather broad, rounded, with a minute acumen. Tail rather long,
cuneate, of twelve narrow tapering feathers.
Bill pale bluish-grey, tinged with green towards the base; the lines on
the upper mandible blackish-blue; the bare space about the eye, and
that on the throat, blackish-blue. Iris white. Tarsi, toes, and webs
brownish-black, the bands of narrow scutella on the tarsus and toes
light greenish-blue; claws greyish-white. The general colour of the
plumage is white; the upper part of the head and the hind neck of a
fine buff colour. Primary quills brownish-black, their shafts white
toward the base.
Length to end of tail 40 1/2 inches, to end of wings 38 1/4, to end of
claws 41; extent of wings 75; wing from flexure 20 3/4; tail 10; bill
along the ridge 4, along the edge of lower mandible 6; tarsus 2 2/12;
first toe and claw 1 1/4; middle toe 3 8/12, its claw 7/12; outer toe
1/
38 /12; its claw 4/12. Weight 7 lb.
2
The Female is similar to the male, but rather smaller.

Young fully fledged. Plate CCCXXVI. Fig. 2.
Bill light greyish-brown; the bare space around the eye pale greyish-
blue. Iris green. Feet dusky, the narrow bands of scutella pale
greyish-blue; claws greyish-white. The head, neck, and upper parts
are chocolate brown, each feather with a terminal narrow triangular
white spot; the lower parts greyish-white, spotted with greyish-brown;
each feather having a broad terminal margin of that colour. The quills
and tail-feathers are brownish-black. An individual shot in October
measured as follows:—
Length to end of tail 38 inches, to end of claws 32 1/2; extent of
wings 72. Weight 3 lb. 4 oz. This individual, however, was very poor.
Three individuals shot in the neighbourhood of Boston,
Massachusetts, presented the following dimensions, which are here
given as indicative of the difference of size frequently observed:—
Length to end of tail, 38 3/

4 38 3/
4 37
................................wings, 37 1/
2 37 1/
2 35
................................claws, 34 1/
4 34 1/
2 33
Extent of wings, 73 1/
2 72 68 1/2
Wing from flexure, 19 1/
2 17 1/
2 19 1/2
An adult Male killed near Boston. The cellular tissue of the back
exhibits vacuities of very large size, intervening between the skin
and the muscles: one, at the lower part of the neck behind, being 5
inches in length; another 5 1/2 inches long, extending from the
furcula down the humerus; and behind the wings four others,
extending to the last rib. Branches from these pass between the
muscles, which present the appearance of having been as it were
dissected. A cell of enormous size covers the side of the abdomen,
and another pair run down the middle of it, separated by a partition in
the median line. That part of the cellular tissue which adheres to the
bases of the feathers is also remarkably loose; and, close to each of
them, is a roundish aperture of large size, communicating with the
great cavities mentioned above. Between the pectoralis major and
the subjacent muscles is a large interspace formed by a great cell.
The internal thoracic and abdominal cells are also very large.
On the roof of the mouth are five sharp ridges. The nasal aperture is
1 inch and 5 twelfths long, linear, with a soft longitudinal flap on each
side. The tongue is extremely small, being only 7 twelfths long, 1
twelfth broad, blunt at the extremity, and with two papillae at the
base. The bare skin between the crura of the mandibles is of the
same structure as that of the Pelicans and Cormorants, but of small
extent, its posterior acute extremity not extending farther than that at
the base of the bill. The aperture of the glottis is 7 1/2 twelfths long.
The thyroid bone has an anterior curved prolongation, which projects
forwards, and from the extremity of which comes the elastic ligament
by which it is connected with the hyoid bone. The œsophagus, a, b,
is 15 inches long, measured to the commencement of the
proventriculus, extremely dilated, its diameter 2 1/2 inches at the top,
contracting to 2 inches as it enters the thorax, its narrowest part 1
inch 4 twelfths; its transverse muscular fibres moderately strong. The
proventriculus, c, d, is excessively large, 3 1/2 inches long, its
greatest diameter 2 1/4 inches. The glandules are cylindrical, 3
twelfths long, forming a very broad belt, separated however at its
narrowest part by a longitudinal interval of 5 twelfths of an inch, and
having three partial divisions on its lower edge. The greatest length
of the proventriculus, or breadth of the belt of glandules, is 2 1/2
inches. The mucous coat of the œsophagus is smooth, but thrown
into longitudinal plicæ when contracted; that of the proventriculus is
continuous, and of the same nature, being marked with extremely
minute reticulated lines, of which the more prominent have a
longitudinal direction. The stomach, properly so called, d e, is
extremely small, being only 1 inch 9 twelfths long, and about the
same breadth. Its inner coat is similar to that of the œsophagus and
proventriculus; being destitute of epithelium; several large mucous
crypts are scattered over its surface. The pylorus is small, having a
diameter of nearly 3 twelfths, and a marginal flap or valve on one
side. The intestine, f, g, h, is of moderate length, measuring 53
inches. The duodenum at first passes upwards in the direction of the
liver for 2 inches, f g, is then recurved for 3 inches, g, h, ascends for
4 inches, h, i, and receives the biliary ducts, then passes toward the
spine and forms a curvature. The average diameter of the intestine is
5 twelfths at the upper part, and it gradually contracts to 3 twelfths.
The rectum, k, measured to the anus is 5 1/4 inches. It gradually
enlarges from 4 to 6 1/2 twelfths. The cloaca, m, is globular, 9
twelfths long, 8 twelfths broad. The cœca are 3 twelfths long, 1 1/2
twelfth broad.
The lobes of the liver are extremely unequal, as is always the case
when the stomach or the proventriculus is excessively large, the right
lobe being 2 3/4 inches long, the left 1 inch and 8 twelfths. The gall-
bladder, n, is very large, of an oblong form, rounded at both ends, 1
inch and 8 twelfths long.
The trachea is 12 inches long, moderately ossified, round, its
diameter at the top 7 twelfths, gradually narrowing to 4 twelfths; the
rings 124, the lower 4 united, The bronchi are large, their diameter
greater than that of the lower part of the trachea; of 25 cartilaginous
half-rings. The lateral or contractor muscles of the trachea are of
moderate strength; the sterno-tracheals strong; a pair of inferior
laryngeal muscles attached to the glandular-looking, yellowish-white
bodies inserted upon the membrane between the first and second
rings of the bronchi.
The olfactory nerve comes off from the extreme anterior point of the
cerebrum, enters a canal in the spongy tissue of the bone, and runs
in it close to the septum between the eyes for 10 twelfths of an inch,
with a slight curve. It then enters the nasal cavity, which is of an
irregular triangular form, 1 1/2 inch long at the external or palatal
aperture, 10 twelfths in height. The supramaxillary branch of the fifth
pair runs along the upper edge of the orbit, and by a canal in the
spongy tissue of the bones, enters the great cavity of the upper
mandible, keeping nearer its lower surface, and there branching.
This cavity appears to have no communication with the nasal; nor
has the latter any passage towards the obliterated external nostrils.
The lachrymal duct passes obliquely inwards from the anterior
corner of the eye, and enters the nasal cavity by an aperture 1/2
twelfth in diameter, near its anterior margin.
In the cloaca was found a solid calculus, half an inch in diameter, of
an irregular form, white within, externally pale yellowish-brown, and
marked with grooves impressed by the action of the sphincter ani.
The digestive and respiratory organs of the American Gannet are
thus precisely similar to those of the European. In external form,
proportions, and colours, there are no appreciable differences. The

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Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard

Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2022

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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Introduction: Learning from Rorty’s Reconstructed

1. Rorty and Peirce: Pragmatism, Realism, and the

2. Rorty and James: The Ethics and Epistemology of

3. Rorty and Dewey: Pragmatist Philosophy as Cultural

4. Rorty and Royce: The Cultural Politics of Community,

5. Rorty and Addams: Pragmatist Social Ethics and

disagreements. Future scholars of pragmatism, I trust, will chart

“James and Rorty on Irony, Moral Commitment, and the Ethics

I gratefully acknowledge their permission to reprint parts of these

Citations to Charles Sanders Peirce’s writings will be keyed to the

AOC Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-​Century

ORT Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1

The contemporary resurgence of philosophical pragmatism faces a

The success of Rorty’s championing of pragmatism nevertheless

apparent dismissal of pragmatist methodology (Seigfried 1996, 5),5

classical pragmatism. One is the overwhelmingly negative, critical

still awaits a (full) definitive intellectual biography;13 there exists

Before proceeding, let me address the question begged here: Why

in classical pragmatism.15 Kitcher aligns himself with Rorty over

1979 APA Presidential Address. Based on that remark, one would

is necessary to make sense of the prominence of Rorty’s appeal to

Rorty’s Pragmatic Maxim: Putting

In this book, I read Rorty as reconstructing the ideas of the clas-

particular, has emerged to suggest more commonality than previ-

Those who disparage pragmatism, as well as some admirers of

Indeed, perhaps no one is more associated with the notion of re-

Bernstein diagnoses it—​that contributed to an obsessive pattern of

reconstruction in philosophy is grounded in two fundamental

Dewey is saying: suppose you’re a pragmatist about truth—​that

To the extent they regard human knowers as necessarily

I have written elsewhere about the parallels between

To accept the contingency of starting-​points is to accept our in-

transitory human projects, not in our obedience to permanent

In this passage we see how the humanism of James and F.C.S.

key into an ethico-​political key” to make clearer what is at stake

contributed to misconstruals, it blunts the force of his challenges to

As noted earlier, this book considers Rorty’s thought in juxtaposi-

to be more of a realist, as traditionally understood, and Peirce less

signal contribution of their pragmatisms. This approach generates

I support this interpretation through a reading of Rorty’s work

I establish it nonetheless exists and was more influential on Rorty

the distance between them. With one notable exception by a sociol-

of Rorty’s Peircean roots reveals Rorty’s apparent rejections of

In the remainder of this introduction, I address several issues

Rorty and Pragmatism’s Resurgence

As the thinker most associated with pragmatism’s contemporary

of pragmatism and architect of a renewed vision of pragmatism’s

inclusion of Dewey among the three most important philosophers

Adult Male. Plate CCCXXVI. Fig. 1.

The Female is similar to the male, but rather smaller.

Length to end of tail, 38 3/

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Introduction: Learning from Rorty’s Reconstructed

1. Rorty and Peirce: Pragmatism, Realism, and the

2. Rorty and James: The Ethics and Epistemology of

3. Rorty and Dewey: Pragmatist Philosophy as Cultural

4. Rorty and Royce: The Cultural Politics of Community,

5. Rorty and Addams: Pragmatist Social Ethics and

AOC Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century

Bernstein diagnoses it—that contributed to an obsessive pattern of

Dewey is saying: suppose you’re a pragmatist about truth—that

To accept the contingency of starting-points is to accept our in-

key into an ethico-political key” to make clearer what is at stake