Realism without Mirrors

Contemporary pragmatists, especially those who follow Richard Rorty’s lead, have contested the philosophical paradigm they have referred to as ‘representationalism’: the idea that our claims or beliefs describe or are ‘about’ the world. These ‘new pragmatists’ have often been seen to be in an antagonistic relationship with their antecedents, the pragmatists of the turn of the 20th century: these ‘classical pragmatists’ advanced at least moderate forms of realism, towards which the non-representationalist position is taken to be hostile. A case in point is Charles S. Peirce, who proposed that our beliefs are to be fixed by the scientific method which entails an assumption of an independent reality which those beliefs may accord with. I argue that the views of the classical pragmatists are amenable to an expressivist and non-representationalist interpretation. The prevalent assumption that this cannot be the case is due to the received wisdom that realism entails representationalism. But for Peirce, the scientific method and its commitment to what I will refer to as hypothetical realism is not derived from a robust notion of representation. As such it is fully compatible with the non-representationalist view: it is a realism without representationalism. I will further show that this position enables us to reconceptualize different brands of realism, such as normative realism.