Realism Without Mirrors

Abstract

Contemporary pragmatists, especially those who follow Richard Rorty’s lead, have contested the philosophical paradigm they have referred to as “representationalism”: the idea that our claims or beliefs describe or are “about” the world. These “new pragmatists” have often been seen to be in an antagonistic relationship with their antecedents, the pragmatists of the turn of the twentieth century: these “classical pragmatists” advanced at least moderate forms of realism, towards which the non-representationalist position is taken to be hostile. A case in point is Charles S. Peirce, who proposed that our beliefs are to be fixed by the scientific method which entails an assumption of an independent reality which those beliefs may accord with.