Realism after the linguistic-pragmatic turn

Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 1988

his essay offers a rational reconstruction of the career of a certain heroic apT proach to truth-the approach whose leading idea is that the special linguistic roles of truth ascriptions are to be explained in terms of features of the ascribinns of truth, rather than of what is ascrided. The explanatory emphasis placed on the act of calling something true, as opposed to its descriptive content, qualifies theories displaying this sort of strategic commitment as 'pragmatic' theories of truth, by contrast to 'semantic' ones. The starting point is an articulation of a central insight of the classical pragmatist theories of truth espoused in different versions by James and Dewey. Developing this insight in response to various objections yields a sequence of positions ending in contemporary anaphoric semantics: prosentential theories of 'true' and pronominal theories of 'refers'. These theories articulate an antirealist position about truth and reference, of the sort here called 'phenomenalist'. Insofar as theories of this sort offer adequate accounts of the phenomena they address, they assert relatively narrow and clearly defined limits to the explanatory ambitions of theories couched in traditional semantic vocabularies.

A prominent late twentieth-century debate between Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam focused on evaluating the cogency of realisms and relativisms of various sorts. Both Putnam and Rorty rejected traditional forms of realism, but Putnam went on to defend two alternative varieties of realism (in turn), while Rorty abandoned realism of any kind. At the same time, both Rorty and Putnam rejected relativism as putatively incoherent. In the midst of these developments, Joseph Margolis proposed a position that was (self-avowedly) simultaneously realist and relativist, and argued for its superiority over Rorty’s and Putnam’s alternatives. In this paper I review Putnam’s, Rorty’s, and Margolis’s arguments for their positions on the issues of realism and relativism. Mostly in agreement with Margolis, I argue for an empirically enriched construal of epistemic situations that includes attention to historically-contingent mediating factors within these situations (where these factors include languages, conceptual schemes, artifacts, and institutions, among other things). Theories formed within such contingently mediated situations lack closure, primarily due to this contingency, and thus familiar anti-realist and anti-relativist arguments (including internalist, ethnocentric, and deflationist arguments) do not succeed.

After analysing Habermas' philosophical evolution from his theory of interests to his late pragmatic realism ((), I will focus on the problems of this last conception ((), trying to draw a plausible way out which avoids both naturalistic reductionism and a too weak form of realism ((). While doing so I will focus on the concept of objectivity, highlighting the problems that come from Habermas' approach to it. I suggest a gradual approach to objectivity and realism as a possible way out from Habermas' impasse. is is also compatible with Habermas' critical theory as it keeps for truth the role of an opening device for social and theoretical discussions.

Synthese, 2017

Characteristic of neo-pragmatism is a commitment to deflationism about semantic properties, and inferentialism about conceptual content. It is usually thought that deflationism undermines the distinction between realistic discourses and others, and that the neo-pragmatists, unlike the classical pragmatists, cannot recognize that truth is a norm of belief and inquiry. I argue, however, that (1) the distinction between realistic discourses and others can be maintained even in the face of a commitment to deflationism, and (2) that neo-pragmatists can recognize that truth is a norm of belief and inquiry. If deflationism is true, realistic discourses, it turns out, are those that are inferentially integrated with a large body of other commitments, whereas those that call for an anti-realist treatment are inferentially isolated. Now, Grimm has persuasively argued that inquiry aims at achieving understanding, and that to understand something is, roughly, to grasp a large body of inferential connections in which it features. So, if he is right, realistic discourses are those in which the aim of inquiry can be achieved. This fact, together with an inferential theory of conceptual content, will, I argue, allow neo-pragmatists to recognize truth as a norm of belief and inquiry, despite their commitment to deflationism.

2016

Synthese, 2019

Scientific realism is a critical target of anti-representationalists such as Richard Rorty and Huw Price, who have questioned the very possibility of providing a satisfactory argument for realism or any other ontological position. I will argue that there is a viable form of realism which not only withstands this criticism but is vindicated on the anti-representationalists' own grounds. This realist position, largely drawn from the notion of the scientific method developed by the founder of philosophical pragmatism, Charles S. Peirce, will further be compared with the accounts of truth and objectivity proposed by the contemporary pragmatists, Rorty, Price, and Robert B. Brandom.

Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso, 2016

In this paper I seek to articulate and develop Roberto Torretti's advocacy of pragmatic realism. At the core of Torrietti's view is a rejection of the notion that the truth of scientific theories consists in their correspondence to the world. I propose to understand correspondence in that sense as a metaphorical notion. I articulate a notion of pragmatist coherence, on the basis of which I make new coherence theories of truth and reality. Then it becomes possible to say that pragmatic realism consists in the pursuit of true knowledge of reality, in a way that is also consonant with Torretti's pluralism.

1986