Neo-pragmatist accounts of truth: Rorty's "ethnocentrism" and Putnam's "internal realism"

Abstract

This work will discuss a recent series of public exchanges that took place between the two founding figures of neopragmatism, Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, regarding truth and its relation to justification. Like the classical pragmatists Peirce, James, and Dewey, both Rorty and Putnam argue that we should refrain from taking the term “true” to denote a successful correspondence between a proposition and a single, fixed, absolute reality. Given this substantial common ground, their exchanges provide a direct insight into a tension that lies right at the heart of neopragmatism. Both attempt to interpret truth as importantly related to the prospect of justification amongst peers, without simply providing a reductive definition of “true” as synonymous with “whatever happens to be the contemporary consensus.” Rorty and Putnam thus attempt to navigate an approach to the notion of truth that avoids the problems associated with “absolute” theories of truth on one extreme, and utter “relativism” about truth on the other. In this essay I will attempt to clarify the points of compatibility and points of departure between Rorty and Putnam’s views by closely examining the debates that occurred between the two.