Rorty and Dewey on Warrant

Abstract

1. Rorty between Putnam and BrandomIn an interview for the film American Philosopher, by Phillip McReynolds,1 one can hear Hilary Putnam saying: says that the notion of warrant, justification, is a sociological notion. None of the classical pragmatists was a cultural relativist about warrant. The statement is plain and straightforward, as one should expect from a philosopher trying to convey a crucial point to a non-specialized audience. We skilled philosophers know that each and every word of it needs further qualification, though it captures in an admirably concise form the core of the Putnam-Rorty debate. A second merit of Putnam's statement is that its two sentences, taken as premises of an enthymeme, confront us with the twofold character of that debate. On one hand, it is a debate about the nature of justification, and in what relation it stands to cultural or sociological determinations. On the other hand, it is a debate about what it means to give a response to that problem, for Putnam's argument points to the unstated conclusion: No one who believes that is a sociological notion is m the same boat with classical pragmatists. According to Putnam, a true interpretation of should avoid the kind of cultural relativism that Roity allegedly promoted.Another influential representative of contemporary pragmatism, Robert Brandom, considers that Roily was, in other respects, still too close to the classical conception of warrant, that is, of our nonnative assessments of beliefs and assertions. According to Brandom, pragmatism in the broad sense claims that beliefs or judgments must be understood in tenus of practical commitments.' Brandom's view is that such commitments refer to other assertions inferentially related to the judgment or belief, whereas for the classical pragmatists and Rorty they are instrumental and refer to non-mferential consequences. Roity's characteristic talk of vocabularies as more or less useful would not provide a satisfactoiy account, by Brandom's lights, of what is involved in a belief being justified or warranted/In what follows I will not attempt to disentangle the rather vexing questions posed by the Putnam-Rorty-Brandom debate about what pragmatism is or should be. More modestly, I wish to take Putnam's and Brandom's criticisms as a starting point for a summary re-examination of Roity's position in relation to classical pragmatism, and to Dewey in particular. My remarks will be aimed to show that Rorty was not as far from the ideas of the classical pragmatists as Putnam suggests, nor as close to Brandom's interpretation of those ideas as he suggests. In a sense, then, this is a vindication of Roily as a respectable pragmatist (whatever this may mean), despite the real differences that will also emerge between lus position and that of the old school.2. Warranted Assertibility and InstrumentalismContemporary pragmatists agree that Jolui Dewey transformed the approach to epistemological problems in a decisive way. In a nutshell, Dewey suggested that we should drop the abstract notion of knowledge as an unfathomable subject/object relationship, and ask instead what lies at the bottom of our knowledge claims, or what entitles us to think that we are light in believing what we believe. If one makes this sluft, then the problem of which beliefs count as trae knowledge amounts to, as far as we are concerned - that is, as far as knowledge is considered a human activity - the problem of what aie we in believing. Pragmatist epistemologists therefore adopt the Deweyan concept of warranted assertibility as the proper object of concern for epistemology. As we have seen, it is the nature of that warrant which is controversial, so let us turn first to the concept as originally stated.The tenu warranted assertibility was introduced by Dewey in lus 1938 Logic. It appears for the first time in the following paragraph:That inquiry is related to doubt will, I suppose, be admitted. …