In 1996, Rorty gave a series of ten lectures in Girona, Spain. Only in 2021 were they printed as a book, Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism. Robert Brandom wrote a foreword in which he explains the argumentative shape of Rorty’s late pragmatism; the final form, so to speak, that Rorty’s philosophical thinking took. On the one hand, Brandom’s foreword is genuinely enlightening. On the other hand, it is not easy — I noticed that even my students, third year BA students in philosophy, had trouble with it. My purpose in this little blog post is to explain Rorty by explaining Brandom. In particular, I will explain the sentence into which Brandom’s story culminates:

The route from a pragmatist understanding of norms as instituted by social practices to anti-authoritarianism in epistemology — the theme of the second, pragmatist Enlightenment that Rorty envisages — goes through a semantic understanding of representation in normative terms. (p. xxii)

Don’t worry, it will all become clear. Let’s start with the middle part, the second, pragmatist Enlightenment. The first Enlightenment is a period in European thought that is often identified roughly with the 18th century (1700-1800) and with thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant. It is an age of criticism, especially criticism of religious authorities, superstitions and irrational dogmas. According to Rorty, this first Enlightenment admirably succeeded in freeing us from the idea that ethics is a matter of listening to a non-human authority. Before the Enlightenment, it was standard to think of a good action as an action that is accordance with the Will and commandments of God. Being good meant obeying a non-human authority. The Enlightenment substitutes for this the idea that ethics is based in our human capacities; either in our Reason (Kant) or in our Sentiment (Hume), or perhaps yet something else — but certainly something that we can recognise as our own. If God came and told us to do something, that might make it the prudent thing to do (if we fear punishment), but it would not make it the morally good thing to do. This is an example of what Rorty calls anti-authoritarianism. We rely on our capacities for judgement.

But Rorty thinks the Enlightenment did no go far enough. For the thinkers of this time — and for that matter, most of the thinkers of our time — still believe that we have to submit to a non-human authority in epistemology. When we attempt to understand the universe, we must try to speak the language of the world and conform our thoughts to the way the world is. While our practical thinking no longer has to bow down before God, our theoretical thinking still has to bow down before this independent Reality. While there is no longer a gap between the good-for-us-to-do and the morally-right, there still is a gap between the good-for-us-to-believe and the epistemically-right. A scientific theory could help us fulfil literally all of our practical needs, yet still be false.

(Rorty likes to illustrate this by pointing at Kant’s thing-in-itself, the Reality we may never be able to get to. I think this gets Kant exactly wrong; as I read him, transcendental idealism is in fact the attempt to perform Rorty’s second Enlightenment. But that’s not something we can discuss here, so I merely flag it.)

So Rorty wants a second Enlightenment. And this will be an embrace of anti-authoritarianism in epistemology; an embrace of the pragmatist idea that truth too is a human standard, and not something imposed on us from without.

The argumentative starting point, Brandom tells us, is an understanding of norms as instituted by social practices. The idea is that all normativity — all good and bad — is social. Suppose you are the only person on Earth. Then you will never have to make an ethical choice; ethics disappears along with other people. And you will also never have to justify your beliefs; epistemic normativity also disappears along with other people. You can believe that God is purple and has seventeen tentacles, and you’re not doing anything wrong, for there’s no social practice in which right and wrong can be distinguished. You’re not harming a person or a shared project.

A brief aside to take away a possible misunderstanding. Rorty is not saying that right and wrong are determined by majority opinion. It is not the case that if most people believe that immigrants should be locked up, therefore immigrants should be locked up. After all, people also believe other things; they believe that kindness is better than cruelty, and that love is better than hate, and so on. Our beliefs can exhibit all kinds of tensions; our judgements can be based on all kinds of blindness, e.g., on a totally wrong picture of immigrants, that is, on a picture we ourselves would recognise as totally wrong if we did more research. What is right is not necessarily what we at this moment believe, but more something like what we would believe if we were to do our utmost to learn about the situation and think through our commitments. In fact, learning is part of our practices. We believe in argument, in investigation, in changing our minds. So it is part of our practices that our current practices are to be seen as imperfect. It is important to see, then, that Rorty is not suggesting a new way of finding the truth, namely, just take a majority vote. He is only suggesting that we should recognise that our practices of truth-seeking are our practices of truth-seeking. They do not consist in obeying Reality.

Now it may seem as if there is a quick route from a pragmatist understanding of norms as instituted by social practices to anti-authoritarianism in epistemology. For your could simply say that truth is a norm; therefore, it is determined by social practices; these are our social practices, not those of some independent Reality; hence, we must be anti-authoritarians in epistemology. And in essence this is what Rorty believes. But there is a powerful idea that he must deal with. This is the idea that we already have another and much better account of truth; namely, that truth is correspondence to reality. Forget about social practices. Your belief that grass is green is true if and only if real grass is really green. Social practices have nothing to do with that.

This brings us to the final ingredient of Brandom’s story, where we apparently need a semantic understanding of representation in normative terms. In order to understand what that means, let us first think about representation. Since Descartes, it has been quite standard to think of the relation between mind and world in terms of representation. I have the idea of a green table; and if there really is a green table in the world, then my idea is true and I know the green table. Now Brandom points out that in order for there to be knowledge that has the form of representation, there also has to be knowledge that is not representational. I know about the table when I have an idea that represents it accurately; but it had better be the case that I know about the idea immediately, without needing a second idea to represent the first, and then a third idea to represent the second, and so on. This is why Descartes claims that ideas are a special class of entities, whose very nature is that we know them immediately, without representation.

Now let us think about the three things that we have when I supposedly know about the table. First there is the idea, the representing. Then there is the table, the represented. And third, there is the relation of representation that links the idea to the table. Descartes is well aware of a serious problem in his philosophy. If we are only immediately aware of the ideas, and not of the things in the world, then how do we know that our ideas accurately represent the world? We cannot go beyond our ideas to check them by comparison with the world! Thus is born Cartesian scepticism about the external world, which Descartes himself can only solve by proving the existence of God. But Descartes does not think about the third element, the relation of representation itself. Yet this is also something of which we are not immediately aware. How do we even know what our ideas purport to say about the world? How can they even be about reality? This is the great question of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason — or one of its great questions.

We will not delve into Kant’s answer here; what is important is Rorty’s answer. The representational relation is one which determines the meaning of our terms. But meaning is a normative notion; there is no different between telling us what the word ‘fire’ means and telling us in which circumstances it is right to use the word ‘fire.’ If all normativity is social — as the pragmatist tells us, and as anyway seems fairly likely when it comes to semantic relations like meaning — then the relation between language and world is social. When Descartes says that there is a fire in front of him, he is making a move in a social practice of giving and asking for reasons. “Why do you believe that?” “Because I see it.” “But are you sure it’s not just one of these relaxing fireplace movies on a screen?” “Yes, you fool, I am quite sure of that, because I live in the 17th century and screens have not yet been invented!” “Oh, right you are.” There is no possibility beyond the social practice of being wrong; our language cannot be magically hooked up to a Reality that is inaccessible to us and hence incapable of governing our practices. If our use of the word ‘fire’ works well for us, then everything is fine; there is no worry that perhaps ‘fire’ actually means something beyond what we are doing with it. (Compare the idea that maybe the name ‘Rorty’ doesn’t refer to Rorty, but instead, without anyone knowing about it, refers to a frog in Bolivia, and all we have been saying about Rorty is wrong! This makes no sense.)

This is how a semantic understanding of representation in normative terms combined with a pragmatist understanding of norms as instituted by social practices leads to the idea that the search for truth is conducted under human, socially determined standards; hence, to what Rorty calls anti-authoritarianism in epistemology, which is the core of the second, pragmatist Enlightenment. And that wraps up my explanation of Rorty through an explanation of Brandom’s foreword. Of course there then still follows an entire book of almost 200 pages, of which this summary gives only the vaguest sense. But that’s for another time and place.