Abstract

Paul Boghossian and Hilary Putnam have presented arguments designed to show self-referential difficulties within Rorty’s pragmatism. I respond to these arguments by drawing out the details of the pragmatic account of justification implicit within Rorty’s writings, thereby revealing it to be a sophisticated form of relativism that does not undermine itself. In Section I and II, I motivate my strategy of attributing a positive position to Rorty in order to respond to detailed, analytical arguments such as those of Boghossian, and present an outline of this position, agreeing with Rorty’s critics that it can be justifiably classified as a form of relativism. Sections III to V concern the detail of Boghossian’s argument, in which I show that Boghossian’s contention that Rorty’s rejection of all absolute justification is inconsistent can be satisfactorily answered by explaining the differences between “epistemic systems” in terms of the different purposes they serve. Then in Sections VI to VIII, I further develop Rorty’s account of justification in order to answer Putnam’s charge that Rorty tries to say “from a God’s-Eye View there is no God’s-Eye View.” I reject Rorty’s own “social-reformer” response to this argument, but show that it can be satisfactorily answered by distinguishing two integrated components within Rorty’s pragmatism, one holistic and coherentist, and the other causal and social-evolutionary.