CONTINGENCY AND NORMATIVITY: THE CHALLENGES OF RICHARD RORTY BY ROSA M. CALCATERRA

Abstract

Reviewed by: Contingency and Normativity: The Challenges of Richard Rorty by Rosa M. Calcaterra Chris Voparil (bio) Rosa M. Calcaterra. Contingency and Normativity: The Challenges of Richard Rorty Leiden; Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2019; xv + 138 pp. Somewhat unexpectedly, given the weighty baggage of anything-goes relativism that long trailed him, a central concern in work on Richard Rorty since his passing in 2007 has been his normativity.1 Rosa Calcaterra's Contingency and Normativity is the most ambitious and most illuminating effort to date in this vein. The book helps us better understand Rorty's pragmatism by using his challenges to us as the basis for an inquiry into epistemic and moral normativity in the wake of the critique of foundationalism and rise of "contingentism," which Calcaterra understands as "a conceptual net tied to the criteria of indeterminacy, ambiguity, uncertainty and randomness" (ix). Ultimately, Calcaterra's contribution is the systematic explication of Rorty's philosophical project that he himself, for various complex reasons, was disinclined to offer. All those who either have hoped or demanded that Rorty provide such an account will find the book immensely enlightening. Refreshingly, Calcaterra offers "not an apology for Rorty" but rather an invitation to take up his provocations—critically, to be sure, but, in contrast to much existing work, in a spirit of hermeneutic charity. As she recounts in the preface, she overcame her long-held skepticism about what yet another work on Rorty's neopragmatism possibly could contribute only after many years of continual confirmation of how often and how thoroughly his stances have been mischaracterized and misunderstood. This orientation makes Calcaterra one of our best readers of Rorty. In contrast to the recent generation of thinkers who encountered pragmatism because of Rorty, Calcaterra has turned to the leading neopragmatist relatively late in a career devoted to understanding Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead, among others. The book's chapters span the full breadth of Rorty's philosophico-political project. The opening one settles, hopefully once and for all, that Rorty's interest in pragmatism predated his foray into the analytic game. Calcaterra rightly emphasizes the continuity of Rorty's pragmatic interests, from early to late, beginning with his early attention to metaphilosophical cul-de-sacs from which pragmatism provides an exit. A novelty in Calcaterra's account of the early Rorty is her focus on the influence of Carnap's semantics of the 1950s, which she suggests, "help us to illuminate the link between neo-pragmatism and the 'strong realism' that we can find in the original pragmatism of Peirce, [End Page 351] Dewey, Mead and Lewis" (10). Rorty's critiques of representationalism and foundationalism, as well as his linguisticism, Calcaterra establishes, all owe something to Carnap. The second chapter illuminates Rorty's "linguistic pragmatism," which Calcaterra immediately clarifies entails "the coextension of language and reality" rather than a linguistic idealism severed from objective reality. By focusing on the shared "post-Cartesian" orientation, she usefully depicts Rorty's thought as a product not only of post-Wittgensteinian analytic philosophy, like that of Sellars and Davidson, but also the pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey. Although their escapes from Cartesian-Kantian epistemology's conceptual net of "experience, foundation, objective reality, and representation structure" follow different routes—reconstructing vs. jettisoning altogether the notion of experience as the "internal world" that functions as "the basis and guarantee of cognitive processes" (26)—Calcaterra shows how a desire "to restore the language–world question to the concreteness of socio-linguistic practices" unites not only the classical pragmatists, post-Wittgensteinians, and Rorty himself, but the work of those who follow Rorty, including Robert Brandom, Michael Williams, Huw Price, and Bjørn Ramberg. Many would concur with her conclusion: "Probably Rorty should have just questioned the ambition for a total description of experience, recognizing the plurality of semantic and functional values that this notion acquired in the works of classical pragmatists" (37). Yet the careful accounting of what Dewey, Quine, Sellars, Davidson, and Rorty share that gets her there suggests the putative classical-neopragmatist divide runs less deep than often characterized. Chapter 3, devoted to Rorty's views on truth and justification, recounts how Rorty arrived at his...