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Abstract
Richard Rorty has been taken to task for his apparent inability to defend democracy to the anti-democrat. Cheryl Misak, for example, in developing her own epistemic defense of democracy, argues that because he abjures truth, Rorty cannot provide any argument to show that democracy is superior to other political arrangements. In this paper, I agree with Misak that Rorty is unable to provide an argument, epistemic or otherwise, in defense of democracy, but show that this doesn’t mean he, or someone who takes his insights seriously, needs to be silent about its shape or its promises. Instead, I follow Rorty’s lead and develop out of Fabienne Peter’s work an epistemology that, though it cannot be used to defend democracy, does comport well with it.
In this response to David Rondel’s Pragmatist Egalitarianism, I suggest that the disagreement between vertical egalitarians and horizontal egalitarians has deeper roots than Rondel acknowledges. Using feminist egalitarianism as my example, I suggest that this is because Rondel fails to note that horizontal egalitarians do not merely offer an alternative account of the sites of and remedies for inequality than do vertical egalitarians; they also see vertical egalitarianism itself as contributing to inequality. Yet I also contend that, even though the two sides of the vertical-horizontal debate are more divided than Rondel lets on, a pragmatist egalitarianism, because of its emphasis on problem-solving, is still able to circumvent this debate.
Abstract
In this response to Chin’s The Practice of Political Theory: Rorty and Continental Thought, I complete two tasks. First, I clarify that Chin’s project is a metatheoretical one, aiming to reconstruct Rorty’s account of political theory as practice. Second, I claim that this reconstruction makes it possible to respond, on Rorty’s behalf, to charges that his position is complacent and acquiescent, especially as it relates to the contemporary issue of post-truth politics.
My goal in this paper is to determine whether there exists good reason to apply to Rorty the label “deliberative democrat.” There are elements of Rorty’s work that count both for and against applying this label, which I investigate here. I conclude that, if we can conceive of a deliberative democracy that is not informed by a social epistemology that relies on Reason; if we can conceive of a deliberative democracy that has a wider view of reason and of reasons than is traditionally understood, then we can think of Rorty as a deliberativist; perhaps as a virtue deliberativist with an expansive idea of what counts a reason and what counts as a virtue.
Abstract
Chris Voparil’s Reconstructed Pragmatism provides an opportunity to reconsider existing debates from a new pragmatist vantage point, one that takes seriously Rorty’s contribution to the tradition. In this commentary, I take advantage of this vantage point to briefly reconsider debates about deliberative democracy, including pragmatist contributions to them. Typically, such debates revolve around either the ethical/political constraints or the epistemic benefits of deliberation. Yet Voparil’s redrawn pragmatist map reconfigures the relationship between the ethical/political and epistemic dimensions of communities engaged in democratic deliberation. I use the vantage point made accessible by Voparil’s map to think about how the ethical/political and epistemic are simultaneously instantiated in the creation and expansion of communities, which suggests many existing attempts to justify or explain democratic deliberation are misguided.