§91. A New Pragmatism
The compulsion to disqualify experience has always come from some version of rationalism: Parmenides against the Ionians, Plato against Democritus, Plotinus against Aristotle, Leibniz against Newton, Bradley against James, Russell against Bergson, Sellars against the sons of Schlick, and Rorty against his pragmatist predecessors.
Rorty sees “nothing worth saving in empiricism,” and “would rather forget empiricism than radicalize it” He artfully transposes Sellars's psychological nominalism into a nominalism of knowledge, which becomes a conversational trajectory through the space of reasons, not an ideal genesis. Genesis determines nothing philosophical; everything depends on statements and how they stand in the eyes of scorekeepers in the language game. Like Sellars, like Davidson, and against the grain of American pragmatism, Rorty disavows empiricism for a more consistent nominalism.25Nominalism and empiricism have been associated since they first came together in Ockham (§32). Peirce and James saw pragmatism as empiricism liberated from this nominalism. Rorty's initiation into analytic philosophy was an initiation into nominalism, indeed, two waves of it, first with Sellars, and later Davidson. What he advocates as a new and better pragmatism is a pragmatism without empiricism. It is understandable that the step was resisted by friends of James and Dewey. Pragmatism without empiricism is utilitarian nominalism, pragmatism without pragmatism.
According to empiricism, knowledge of nature begins with experience, meaning much memory. Rorty thinks knowledge begins with discourse, language games, conversations in the space of reasons. Knowledge is discursive, dialogically articulated, its statements justified in the estimation of others. He explains how “the linguistic turn in philosophy” (with which he is associated) was conceived as “a turn away from the very idea of human answerability to the world.” He thinks we should eliminate “the assumption that justification must repose on something other than social practices and human needs” Experience matters only as much as a community agrees that it does, which is what matters most.
To matter, experience has to matter to others, which requires translation into statements. Then what matters are those statements and how they stand in the logical space of reasons, not the experience that caused them.26Rorty may have thought these claims were implications of Sellars's argument against the given, which he takes as read. Knowledge is a trajectory in the space of reasons, which is public and discursive. But Sellars offers as little defense as Rorty does, and simply assumes that “all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc.... is a linguistic affair.” This is his nominalism, and it is an assumption, not a conclusion.27
Rorty disavows radical empiricism because he thinks any empiricism addresses a problem that should be set aside rather than rehashed. His understanding of empiricism and its concept of experience is that of Green in his analysis of Locke and Hume, the prototype of Sellars's argument. Like Green and Sellars, Rorty draws a sharp line between experience as a cause, and what he regards as the specifically empiricist notion of experience as a potential reason or rational basis, as if sensation itself could be a reason. Empiricists supposedly think experience is a privileged cause, a justification-inducing genesis, but there is no such thing. The idea confuses the mechanical movement of causes with discursive exchange in the logical space of reasons.
Ockham directed his nominalism against this error in another guise, and nominalists refute it wherever it arises. Justification and even truth are values internal to an economy of language and its signs. Their meaning is their use, and use as little requires a transcendent referent as dollars require gold. All you need is faith. Rorty says that the right idea about language “according to us nominalists” is that recognition of linguistic meaning “is simply [the] ability to substitute sensible signs (i.e., marks and noises) for other signs, and still other signs for the latter, and so on indefinitely.” We do not require “experience” to explain anything that wants explaining about language games with “true” and “false.” Let us therefore apply The Razor and dismiss the notion of experience from philosophy.28
Rorty restores the nominalism James and Dewey tried to chase out of pragmatism.
What is lost with the loss of experience? For one, we lose the difference between learning and not having learned, or having tried and not having tried. We also lose the difference experiments make, the difference between trials and fantasies, or technics and imagination. To associate these differences with experience implies something about perception and something about memory. Empiricism values the experience from which we learn, which is nothing immediately given to sense. Experience requires memory, living through trials, a history of being changed by experience. If you have not been changed, you have learned nothing, and there is as yet no experience.What Rorty dislikes about James's “pluralistic universe” is what Jean Wahl calls its romanticism, which he explains as fidelity to what the philosopher sees and feels rather than to a professional consensus. Wahl describes James's pluralism as “a sort of empirical romanticism. To the pluralist, experience is romantic, facts are hard, strange, threatening.... It is observation, fidelity to what the pluralist sees and feels, that we see at the origin of his romantic theories of volunteerism, of temporalism, of vaster consciousnesses absorbing consciousnesses of a lesser span.” All of that is for Rorty the worst of William James, an aversion fueled not by a more consistent pragmatism but by nominalism.29