No pragmatism without realism

Abstract

In a passage quoted in the present book (228), Simon Blackburn says that ‘‘there is a contemporary river that sometimes calls itself pragmatism, ...[which is] the denial of differences, the celebration of the seamless web of language, the soothing away of all distinctions, whether primary versus secondary, fact versus value, description versus expression, or of any other significant kind. What is left is a smooth, undifferentiated view of language, sometimes a nuanced kind of anthropomorphism or ‘‘internal’’ realism, sometimes the view that no view is possible: minimalism, deflationism, and quietism.’’ Huw Price belongs to the minority among Australian philosophers, since he is not a realist. But he does not belong to the brand of pragmatism which is Blackburn’s target. His own version of pragmatism is meant to respect Wittgenstein’s motto ‘‘I’ll teach you differences.’’ His style is argumentative and analytical, although it is resolutely metaphilosophical. The book is a collection of thirteen previously published essays spanning over 20 years, together with a new general introduction. The unifying theme of the book is a critical attack on realist metaphysics and semantics and a defense of a generalized version of quasi-realism which Price calls, alternatively, ‘‘pluralism,’’ ‘‘global expressivism,’’ ‘‘pragmatism,’’ and ‘‘naturalism without mirrors.’’ Some of the essays, such a ‘‘metaphysical pluralism’’ (1992) ‘‘Two paths to pragmatism’’ (1991), ‘‘How to stand up for noncognitivism’’ (1992), ‘‘Truth as convenient Friction’’ (2003), and ‘‘Metaphysics after Carnap: The Ghost who walks’’ (2009) have been widely read, others, like ‘‘Ramsey on Saying and Whistling’’ (2003) or ‘‘Pragmatism, quasi-realism, and the global challenge’’ (2007) are less well known. Two of the essays are co-authored (with John Hawthorne and Richard Holton). As the author acknowledges, there is a certain amount of unavoidable repetition and of overlap between the essays. Price’s strategy, in most of these essays, starts from both the metaphysical and the semantic ends of what we might represent as a tree with two main ramifying