Neopragmatism

Neopragmatism, sometimes called linguistic pragmatism, is the idea that meaning is produced by using words in familiar manners.

The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy (2004) defines "Neo-pragmatism" as "A postmodern version of pragmatism developed by the American philosopher Richard Rorty and drawing inspiration from authors such as John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Wilfrid Sellars, Quine, and Jacques Derrida". It's a contemporary term for a philosophy which reintroduces many concepts from pragmatism. While traditional pragmatism focuses on experience, Rorty centers on language. The self is regarded as a "centerless web of beliefs and desires".

It repudiates the notions of universal truth, epistemological foundationalism, representationalism, and epistemic objectivity. It is a nominalist approach that denies that natural kinds and linguistic entities have substantive ontological implications. Rorty denies that the subject-matter of the human sciences can be studied in the same ways as we study the natural sciences. (Bunnin & Yu, 467)

It has been associated with a variety of other thinkers including Hilary Putnam, W.V.O. Quine, Donald Davidson and Stanley Fish though none of these figures have called themselves "neopragmatists".

Neopragmatists, particularly Rorty and Putnam, draw on the ideas of classical pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Putnam, in Words and Life (1994) enumerates the ideas in the classical pragmatist tradition, which newer pragmatists find most compelling. To paraphrase Putnam:

Neopragmatism is distinguished from classical pragmatism (the pragmatism of James, Dewey, Pierce, and Mead) primarily due to the influence of the linguistic turn in philosophy that occurred in the early and mid-twentieth century. The linguistic turn in philosophy reduced talk of mind, ideas, and the world to language and the world. Philosophers stopped talking about the ideas or concepts one may have present in one's mind and started talking about the "mental language" and terms used to employ these concepts. In the early twentieth century philosophers of language (e.g. A.J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore) thought that analyzing language would bring about the arrival of meaning, objectivity, and ultimately, truth concerning external reality. In this tradition, it was thought that truth was obtained when linguistic terms stood in a proper correspondence relation to non-linguistic objects (this can be called "representationalism"). The thought was that in order for a statement or proposition to be true it must give facts which correspond to what is actually present in reality. This is called the correspondence theory of truth and is to be distinguished from a neo-pragmatic conception of truth.

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