Pragmatism, Objectivity, and Experience
Cambridge University Press, 1/24/2019
EAN 9781108422895, ISBN10: 1108422896
Hardcover, 270 pages, 23.7 x 16.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
In this book Steven Levine explores the relation between objectivity and experience from a pragmatic point of view. Like many new pragmatists he aims to rehabilitate objectivity in the wake of Richard Rorty's rejection of the concept. But he challenges the idea, put forward by pragmatists like Robert Brandom, that objectivity is best rehabilitated in communicative-theoretic terms - namely, in terms that can be cashed out by capacities that agents gain through linguistic communication. Levine proposes instead that objectivity is best understood in experiential-theoretic terms. He explains how, in order to meet the aims of the new pragmatists, we need to do more than see objectivity as a norm of rationality embedded in our social-linguistic practices; we also need to see it as emergent from our experiential interaction with the world. Innovative and carefully argued, this book redeems and re-actualizes for contemporary philosophy a key insight developed by the classical pragmatists.
Introduction
Part I
1. Rorty and the rejection of objectivity
2. Brandom, pragmatism, and experience
3. Communication, perception, and objectivity
Part II
4. An experiential account of objectivity
5. Pragmatism, experience, and answerability
6. Meaning, habit, and the myth of the given
Conclusion.