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Anti-Authority: Comparing Popper andRorty on the Dialogic Development ofBeliefs and PracticesJustin CruickshankPublished online: 03 Jul 2013.

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Anti-Authority: Comparing Popperand Rorty on the DialogicDevelopment of Beliefs and PracticesJustin Cruickshank

For many, Rorty was a postmodern relativist and Popper was a positivist and ColdWar liberal ideologue. The argument developed here rejects such views and exploreshow Rorty’s work is best understood from a Popperian problem-solving perspective. It isargued that Rorty erred in seeking justification for beliefs, unlike Popper who replacedthe search for justification with criticism. Nonetheless, Rorty’s arguments about post-Nietzschean theory and reformism function as important updates to Popper’s argumentsabout methodological essentialism and piecemeal social engineering, respectively.

Keywords: Authority; Criticism; Popper; Problem-Solving; Rorty

1. Is Rorty A Postmodernist And Popper A Positivist?

Rorty’s criticism of philosophy, cultural theory, and the political Right and Leftmade him one of the most (in)famous contemporary philosophers and his work

unsurprisingly attracted significant attention, ranging from sympathetic to hostilecriticism.1 Here, it is argued that Rorty’s work is best understood from a Popperi-

an perspective. This may seem surprising given that Rorty is often criticised forbeing a postmodern relativist, and Popper is often criticised for being a positivistand Cold War liberal-capitalist ideologue.

Rorty once described himself as a “postmodern bourgeois liberal” (1991a). Hesupported liberalism or, more correctly, liberal democracy, because he argued that

such societies had the potential to improve their practices by reducing sufferingthrough dialogue. Specifically, for Rorty, the potential benefit of living in a liberal

Justin Cruickshank is a senior lecturer in Social Theory at the School of Government and Society at the Uni-

versity of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK, with research interests in pragmatism and Popper’s work

on fallibilism. Email: j.cruickshank@bham.ac.uk

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. Any errors remaining are entirely my

responsibility.

Social Epistemology, 2013http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2013.782589

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democracy was that educated citizens could expand their understanding ofsuffering through dialogue, revising their values if necessary, and pressing for

reforms to both policies and prevailing attitudes (Rorty 1991a, 1999). Whilst Rortyadvocated liberal democracy, he did not turn to the usual philosophical

justifications for it which invoke a universal human essence, defined in terms of amaterially acquisitive instrumentally rational competitiveness. For Rorty, liberal

democracy was justified in terms of the practical benefits it could potentiallyafford, concerning the freedom to engage in critical dialogue and the construction

of policies to reduce suffering, rather than in terms of it being congruent with afixed human nature. Consequently, Rorty would have no truck with any argumentthat liberal democracy was an historical inevitability, in the sense that it had to

emerge at some point in history to provide a political system that “fitted” humannature. This was described by Rorty as a “bourgeois” approach to liberalism

because he accepted the Marxist argument that the development of liberalism wascontingent upon the development of a capitalist economy. Nonetheless, whereas

Marxists held that history was following a pre-determined path towards commu-nism, Rorty eschewed all notions of particular epochs being necessary develop-

ments. For Rorty, history was a series of contingencies. This led Rorty to refer tohimself as “postmodern” as a way of indicating that he rejected any “metanarra-

tives” that claimed the philosophical/scientific authority to legislate on matters ofpolitics and ethics, by virtue of having certain knowledge of the laws of history ora fixed human nature.

Rorty came to regret using the term “postmodern” for three reasons. First, it istaken to imply a commitment to a relativist epistemology. This in turn led some

commentators on the political Right, such as Kozody and Neuhaus, to argue thatRorty espoused an irresponsible “anything goes” relativism which undermined

intellectual and moral standards, and those on the political Left, such as Eagleton,to argue that Rorty’s work undermined the possibility of describing socio-political

problems as real problems (see Rorty 1999, 3–4). For Rorty, as we will see, thephilosophical problem of defining what truth is has to be regarded as a pseudo-problem, whether this is approached in terms of a relativist theory of truth or in

terms of arguing that beliefs and statements can “represent” reality. Consequently,he denied the charge of advocating a relativist position. Second, Rorty (1999)

argued that the term “postmodernism” was generally used to express nihilistic des-pair, with this running counter to his hope that liberal democracies would pro-

mote reforms to reduce suffering by, for example, reducing poverty and improvingaccess to healthcare. The humanities would be important for reformism because

they would help create an educated, critically minded citizenry capable of engagingin an informed dialogue about socio-political matters and arguing against suffer-

ing. Third, in the “science wars”, postmodernism came to be associated with theview that science failed to provide knowledge, because knowledge itself was impos-sible, given that all claims to know the world emanated from a particular “dis-

course” (or power-knowledge nexus). Against this, Rorty (1999) argued that whilsthe had not been particularly positive about the sciences in his earlier work, this

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was not because he was trying to invert the sciences——humanities hierarchy in the“cultural pecking order”. Rather, it was because he was just trying to stress the

need for the recognition of the value of the humanities alongside the sciences.Both the humanities and the sciences were, for Rorty, important because they

addressed different problems and trying to establish a hierarchy between intellec-tual disciplines was as pointless as trying to establish a hierarchy between different

tools in a toolbox (1999, 186).As regards Popper, Rorty states that he supports Popper’s fallibilism and cri-

tique of methodological essentialism in politics (1991b, 66–7, 1999, 31). That is, hesupports Popper’s rejection of the view that scientific knowledge is certain infavour of the view that theories can always be replaced by better theories. Conse-

quently, he also supports Popper’s rejection of Marxism’s claim to have certainknowledge of the “laws of history” and the liberal philosophical claim to have cer-

tain knowledge of the defining essence which controls human behaviour. However,Rorty rejects what he takes to be Popper’s “positivist dualism” which distinguishes

science from lay knowledge, with science being regarded as a form of knowledgethat is qualitatively different from lay knowledge because it penetrates a deeper

reality (Rorty 1999, 31).For some critics of Popper, he was not simply a positivist in the sense that he

held that science had an algorithm to unlock reality, with science therefore beingsuperior to all other disciplines. Rather, he was a positivist in a broader sense,viewing knowledge in purely instrumental terms, with science being justified in

terms of its ability to increase the efficiency of capitalist production, and policymaking being a matter of elitist technocratic top-down measures to ensure the

reproduction of Cold War capitalism (see for instance the debates in Adorno et al.(1969)). A number of authors, including Fuller (2003), Hacohen (2000) and

Sassower (2006), have challenged the view that Popper is an elitist technocraticpositivist and Cold War liberal. The view taken is that Popper did not argue for a

bureaucratic–scientific elite to impose social and economic policies on a passiveand compliant populace, with the objective of ensuring the smooth functioning ofcorporate capitalist accumulation, and the use of science solely to increase the effi-

ciency of capitalist production. Rather, it was argued that Popper supported avision of democracy whereby epistemic and ethical progress turned on a constant

critical dialogue. What is of central importance here is that criticism allows peopleto develop by being open to changing their views on politics, science and ethics

etc. For Popper, a successful democracy was one where as many people as possiblecould partake in critical dialogue over as many issues as possible which in turn

required, amongst other things, the alleviation of chronic poverty, removal ofracism and construction of a good state education system.

By now, the gap between the “postmodernist” Rorty and the technocratic “pos-itivist” Popper can be seen to have narrowed. Before comparing their views inmore detail, it is necessary to state which aspects of Popper’s work from his oeuvre

are going to be drawn upon and which will not be. Here, the problem-solvingepistemology developed by Popper will be used to assess Rorty’s positions on the

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development of beliefs, values and practices. Basically, it will be argued that Rorty’swork is strongest where it is closest to Popper’s problem-solving epistemology and

weakest where it is markedly different from this. This problem-solving epistemol-ogy can be described as follows. For Popper (1963, 1972, 1999), if it is accepted

that knowledge is fallible then it follows that one should always seek out betterinterpretations and explanations of reality. To do this, existing solutions to prob-

lems in ethics, science, politics, etc., need to be subject to criticism, with new solu-tions to the problems found then being subjected to criticism and eventually

replaced by new solutions, in a never-ending critical dialogue. With this approach,the focus is on using criticism to drive change rather than on justifying solutions.This stands in contrast to the traditional philosophical view that knowledge is jus-

tified true belief and the emphasis in traditional epistemology on finding epistemiccriteria to establish justification. For Popper, we are organisms situated within a

reality that includes us, namely the environment, and we have to develop beliefs toact in a fashion analogous to tools, to help us overcome practical problems in our

environment, rather than trying to justify claims about beliefs being ideationalcopies of objects outside the mind. Whilst the natural sciences are a very sophisti-

cated form of interaction with our environment, they do not produce knowledgethat is qualitatively different from other branches of knowledge because, contra

positivism, all knowledge is fallible and open to change through critical problem-solving dialogue (Popper 1963, 1972, 1999). Commenting on the differencebetween the amoeba and Einstein, Popper (1999) does not argue that Einstein, as

a scientist, has a uniquely privileged algorithm to unlock nature’s secrets, unlikelay human knowledge which will be flawed and animal “knowledge” which is

incapable of penetrating nature’s secrets. Rather, Popper’s argument is that boththe amoeba and Einstein learn by solving problems in their environment

but, whereas the former dies if it fails to adapt to a problem, the latter can putexpectations into language, thus allowing theories qua adaptations to problems in

our environment, to die in our stead if and when they fail (1999, 39). Allknowledge for Popper, whether scientific or lay, human or non-human, is a matterof problem-solving adaption, rather than a matter of beliefs being justified as

ideational copies of objects (Popper 1999, see also 1963, 1972).The focus just on Popper’s problem-solving epistemology means that there are

two contentious areas of Popper’s work that will not be discussed in detail. The firstconcerns Popper’s prescriptions for a scientific method. For critical discussions of

Popper’s arguments for falsification and the use of the hypothetico-deductivemethod see, for instance, Lakatos (1970), Newton-Smith (1981) and O’Hear (1980).

The second area concerns Popper’s (1972) philosophical shift from metaphysicalagnosticism to his arguments in defence of metaphysical realism together with his

later support of the correspondence theory of truth and argument for verisimilitude.Metaphysical realism sets up a dualism between our beliefs and a reality that is alwaysindependent of our beliefs——reality in effect becomes an unknowable domain. As

regards the correspondence theory of truth and verisimilitude, Popper (1972) heldthat whilst all scientific theories are “strictly speaking false”, it was the case that the

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elimination of false theories increased the verisimilitude (or truth-likeness) of newertheories. On this view, science was getting closer to the truth through a never-ending

process of falsification. Popper (1972) refers to this as an evolutionary epistemology,treating falsification as the removal of failed adaptations, which assists the movement

of knowledge towards increased verisimilitude. Many criticisms have been raisedconcerning the argument that the removal of false theories gets us closer to a reality

that we will never actually know in itself, and the argument that there is a strong sim-ilarity between the evolution of species and the evolution of theories: see for instance

O’Hear (1980, 1984), Psillos (1999), Radnitzky and Bartley (1987), Schilpp (1974).Rorty writes, broadly speaking, in a pragmatist tradition and Popper (1972)

rejects pragmatism, arguing that theories have to be true as well as useful. How-

ever, without getting drawn into the extensive arguments about metaphysics andthe correspondence theory of truth which there is not the space to enter here, the

following point can be noted. Popper’s problem-solving epistemology, which wasdeveloped before his arguments for metaphysical realism and the correspondence

theory of truth, is similar to the pragmatist emphasis on usefulness. One couldargue about whether——or not——useful theories replaced with other useful theo-

ries via criticism led to increased verisimilitude, but the main emphasis in explain-ing the development of knowledge would be on the practical matter of solving

substantive problems and then criticising those solutions. Where one could try tosay there was a major difference between pragmatism and Popper’s philosophy waswith the issue of justification. For pragmatists, a theory is justified if it is useful

whereas for Popper no theory can be epistemically justified because all theories arefallible. However, although one may accept that no theory can be epistemically jus-

tified in the sense that it can be shown to achieve certainty by mirroring a mani-fest truth, but is instead a fallible interpretation of reality, it is still the case that

one may say that one is logically justified in choosing a theory that has yet notbeen shown to have anomalies and refuted predictions over one that has. Whilst it

is rational to choose a theory which has not yet been shown to have problems overa theory with problems, one cannot seek epistemic guarantees for the former interms of such a theory being justified by its ability to mirror or represent a “mani-

fest truth”.So, the focus here will simply be on how the problem-solving epistemology of

Popper can be used separately from his later arguments about metaphysics and thecorrespondence theory of truth to assess Rorty’s arguments for the dialogic devel-

opment of beliefs and practices. A dialogic approach would not be required ifthere was an authority to legislate on beliefs and practices, but both Popper and

Rorty contest the notion of such an authority.

2. Authority

In his autobiographical essay, Popper (1974) states that “his faith” in the

philosophical/scientific, moral and political authority of Marxism ended during aprotest where the police killed several protesters. Popper concluded that he was

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partly responsible for the deaths because he had supported what purported to be ascientific doctrine which offered certainty about the overcoming of capitalism and

injustice, coupled to a “moral law” to help realise the inevitable revolution. Whilstmany years after this incident Popper formulated his criticism of Marxism as a

pseudo-science, this event was of major importance because it made him eschewany search for an authority in beliefs and practices. As Popper puts it:

The encounter with Marxism was one of the main events in my intellectual develop-ment. It taught me a number of lessons I have never forgotten. It taught me the wis-dom of the Socratic saying, “I know that I do not know”. It made me a fallibilist, andimpressed on me the value of intellectual modesty. And it made me most conscious ofthe differences between dogmatic and critical thinking. (1974, 27–8)

This rejection of authority also underpinned Popper’s (1963) subsequent rejectionof dualist epistemology, which held that individuals are able to recognise a “mani-fest truth”. With dualist epistemology the mind of the epistemic subject was split

off from the objects of knowledge external to this and the problem to solve wasthat of explaining how the beliefs in the mind were ideational copies of objects.

To solve this problem, rationalists such as Descartes held that we had a prioriideas which were ideational copies of objects, and empiricists such as Bacon held

that we had a posteriori ideas from sense-data inputs which furnished us with ide-ational copies of objects. In other words, with rationalism individuals can recog-

nise a manifest truth because of the authority of the intellect and with empiricismindividuals can recognise a manifest truth because of the authority of the senses(Popper 1963). Thus with these dualist epistemologies, justification is achieved

because we can know, thanks to the inner epistemic authority, that our beliefsreflect objects outside the mind. Focusing on empiricism, Popper argued that it

failed to solve the problem because the end result was idealism given that therewas no logical basis to infer the existence of material objects beyond the ideas in

the mind. Popper (1963) also argued that dualism can have a politicallyauthoritarian potential. He argued that epistemology is not free from political

assumptions about humankind. Plato developed a “pessimistic” epistemologywhere the majority could not but remain in ignorance, and thus required totalitar-

ian rule by an elite who could know ultimate reality (the Forms). By contrast, the“optimistic” epistemologies of Descartes and Bacon held that God made it possiblefor all to recognise a manifest truth. However, as the truth is not manifest, igno-

rance and error will remain ubiquitous, and the failure to recognise a putativelymanifest truth can be taken by an elite as a sinful abnegation of God by a fallen

populace, which requires the elite to impose the “manifest truth” on the fallenmajority (Popper 1963). Optimism can easily give way to pessimism——which

Rorty (1998a, 1998b) argues too, as we will presently see, in his critique of thoseon the political Left becoming post-Nietzscheans and abandoning any notion of

reform to argue that the world is always already fallen.Unlike Popper who developed a problem-solving philosophy to replace the

traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief, Rorty sought to reject phi-

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losophy per se taking it to be intrinsically connected to the search for authority. ForRorty (1991a), there is no “skyhook” that can pull us out of the contingent sociohis-

torical perspectives in which we are situated. Accepting this means not trying toescape such contingency by finding an aperspectival “view from nowhere” from

which to claim the authority to legislate on matters of defining reality, defining howjustified true belief may be arrived at or defining what constitutes ethical behaviour.

Nonetheless, philosophers seek to escape such contingency by constructing and try-ing to solve problems deemed to be uniquely philosophical problems. In construct-

ing philosophical problems though philosophers are actually engaged in the task ofredescribing agents’ practices (Calder 2007, Rorty 1980, 1991a, 1999). What thismeans is that a set of practices are redescribed as problematic by the philosopher

who claims the authority to legislate on how agents should justify their beliefs orbehaviour. Dualist epistemology provides an example of this.

Rorty (1980) argues that the rise of the natural sciences undermined philoso-phy because whereas the sciences provided explanatory knowledge, philosophical

debate appeared as increasingly redundant speculative thought. Philosophy’s placein the “cultural pecking order” (Rorty 1999) was thus under threat. To deal with

this, philosophers invented a role for the discipline that would assure its place inthe cultural pecking order. As the sciences were successful in producing explana-

tory knowledge, the way to defend the place of philosophy was to redescribe phi-losophy as a general theory of knowledge. Philosophers would have the authorityto legislate how knowledge was to be arrived at in other domains such as science.

Thus, those other domains would be redescribed as having a problem; namely, thelack of coherent or explicit justification for their current views. For those domains

to keep producing knowledge in the future, the solution was to construct knowl-edge claims in accordance with the philosophical legislation on how to arrive at

knowledge. This led to the invention of the mind of the epistemic subject and thephilosophical problem of explaining how beliefs in the mind could mirror objects

outside the mind. Rorty argued that the impossibility of reuniting the subject andobject domains led to a marked “problem”——drift where the issue switched fromexplaining how beliefs could represent reality to saying, as with Kant’s philosophy,

that what we know is as much as product of our “categories” as reality. For Rorty,this was a rather desperate manoeuvre that ended up, as he puts it, defining the

lock to fit the key (1982, 192).2

For Rorty (1980, 1991a), epistemology is based on the “representationalist

problematic” of explaining how beliefs or statements represent reality, which is anuntenable problematic, because it requires us to step outside all perspectives to

check them against reality. This does not lead Rorty to argue for a relativist theoryof truth because he holds that the problem lies with the concept of “truth”. For

Rorty, if one cannot establish a relationship of representation, one cannot then tryto save the concept of truth by arguing that truth exists but is relative to differentperspectives and cultures etc. Rather, one should drop the concept of truth as part

of a shift from the representationalist problematic to the anti-representationalist

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problematic, which replaces representation with the notion that beliefs are adapta-tions to our environment (Rorty 1991a). Rorty argues thus:

The Cartesian mind is an entity whose relations with the rest of the universe are repre-sentational rather than causal. So to rid our thinking of the vestiges of Cartesianism,to become fully Darwinian in our thinking, we need to stop thinking of words as rep-resentations and to start thinking of them as nodes in the causal network which bindsthe organism together with its environment. (1999, xxiii)

Similarly he argues that:

Our minds or our language could not (as the representationalist sceptic fears) be “outof touch with the reality” any more than our bodies could. […] On an antirepresenta-tionalist view, it is one thing to say that a prehensile thumb, or an ability to use theword “atom” as physicists do, is useful for coping with the environment. [… Turningfrom Descartes to Darwin we should regard] beliefs as adaptations to our environmentrather than as quasi-pictures. (1991a, 5 and 10. Emphasis added)3

In arguing that beliefs are to be understood as adaptations rather than representa-

tions, Rorty does not follow Popper and argue that beliefs need to be subject toconstant critical dialogue. Rather, Rorty argues that beliefs are socially justified by

being in conformity with the prevailing social conventions or rules of the languagegame. Rorty argues thus:

Justification is not a matter of a special relation between beliefs (or words) and objects,but of conversation, of social practice. Conversational justification, so to speak, is nat-urally holistic, whereas the notion of justification embedded in the epistemological tra-dition is reductive and atomistic. […] The crucial premise of this argument is that weunderstand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thushave no need to view it as accuracy of representation. (1980, 170)

This social approach to justification does not, as far as Rorty is concerned, under-mine the notion that beliefs develop through an interaction with our environment.

He argues that:

When the die hits the blank something causal happens, but as many facts are broughtinto the world as there are language games for describing that causal transaction. […]To say that we must have respect for facts is just to say that we must, if we are to playa certain language game, play by the rules. (1991a, 81. Emphasis in original)

This attempt to reject epistemology and argue for the social justification of beliefmisses the true import of the problem.

Part of Popper’s originality lay in his rejection of the traditional definition ofknowledge as justified true belief, replacing the search for justification with criticaldialogue. While Rorty wanted to transcend epistemology, his anti-epistemology fol-

lows in the same steps as dualist epistemology. By retaining a commitment to theview that beliefs and statements about the world have to be justified, Rorty needed

to posit a new source of justification. To do this, he turned from the mind of theepistemic subject to the prevailing social conventions or rules of the language game

we are situated within. These conventions or rules were self-justifying in the sense

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that they were not justified by their ability to represent reality (or develop fallibleinterpretations of reality) but by their own standards. Given this, these conventions

or rules constitute an authority for agents’ beliefs and statements. In place of theauthority of the senses allowing an agent to recognise a manifest truth, the authority

of the conventions or rules would allow an agent to “go on” within a languagegame; that is, to talk (and act) in a way deemed appropriate and correct. This social

approach to authority leads to Rorty’s argument replicating the epistemologicaldualism——and its problems——that he sought to overcome. The conventions and

rules of the community or language game become completely separated from theworld beyond those rules and conventions and these conventions and rules cannotthen be reunited with the world beyond the conventions or rules, in the same way

that the subject and object domains remain separated with dualist epistemology.The reason for this is that once the conventions or rules become an authority for

our descriptions of events there can be no meaningful notion of the environmenthaving any role in the selection or deselection of our descriptions. One could not

refute a language game by holding that it failed to help us adapt to a problem.Instead, on this account, what we perceive to be facts about our environment and

the causal processes we are subjected to are determined by the prevailing conven-tions or rules. Thus, as noted above, for Rorty, there are as many facts as there are

language games.This critique does not presuppose the veracity of metaphysical realism, with

the argument being that Rorty fails by not holding to the metaphysical realist view

that there is a reality that is independent of our beliefs of it. Rather, the claim isthat Rorty is correct to argue, in a fashion similar to Popper’s problem-solving

epistemology, that beliefs develop through adapting to the environment we arealways already interacting with (so, reality is not defined as an ultimately unknow-

able domain beyond our beliefs). Where Rorty’s argument is incorrect, though, iswhere it re-introduces the epistemological dualism between the subject, which is

now a collective subject in the form of a community or form of life (rather thanthe lone mind), and the object domain. The result is the same problem that befellclassical epistemology; namely, the separation of the subject from the object. In

both classical epistemology and in Rorty’s attempt to transcend it, the attempt tolink the subject and object fails, leaving us with just the ideas of the subject, that

is, leaving us with an idealism. Thus, Rorty’s attempt to transcend philosophy andthe subject——object dualism of classical epistemology ended up redescribing this

problem in a collectivist lexicon, with communities rather than individuals havingbeliefs that were cut-off from the world beyond those beliefs. In sum then, an

adaptationist view of the development of beliefs requires a problem-solving episte-mology which replaces justification with criticism rather than a social account of

justification, which ushers in an idealist dualism.4

3. Abstraction

We can now use the problem-solving epistemology developed by Popper to

consider how the types of theoretical abstraction used by the social sciences may

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facilitate or impede a dialogic approach to gaining knowledge of problems in thesocio-political environment.

With Popper’s problem-solving epistemology, we approach our environmentwith expectations, concerning problems and their solutions. Language can convey

those expectations and it can facilitate criticism because once expectations are putinto language they can be tested by others (Popper 1963, 1972, 1999).5 The more

complicated uses of language give rise to theories. Thus, for example, in cooking,one can use language to convey expectations and in conducting experiments in

physics one would use theories to convey very complex sets of expectations aboutthe behaviour of particles. In both cases, language tells us what to look for and itallows us to criticise the solutions developed to previous problems concerning, for

instance, the best way to cook a particular dish or the solution of an explanatoryproblem in physics. Whilst the latter may be far more sophisticated than the for-

mer, there is no qualitative difference between the two uses of language (Popper1999).

Popper argues that what he terms a “methodological nominalist” approach tousing theoretical abstractions is congruent with a problem-solving epistemology,

whereas a position he terms “methodological essentialism” is not. He argues thus:

Methodological essentialists [from Aristotle on] are inclined to formulate scientific ques-tions in such terms as “what is matter?” or “what is force” or “what is justice?” andthey believe that a penetrating answer to such questions, revealing the real or essentialmeaning of these terms and thereby the real or true nature of the essences denoted bythem, is at least a necessary prerequisite of scientific research, if not its main task.Methodological nominalists, as opposed to this, would put the problems in such termsas “how does this piece of matter behave?” or “how does it move in the presence ofother bodies?”. For methodological nominalists hold that the task of science is only todescribe how things behave, and suggest that this is to be done by freely introducingnew terms wherever necessary, or by redefining old terms wherever convenient whilecheerfully neglecting their original meaning. For they regard words merely as usefulinstruments of description. […] Most people will admit that methodological nominal-ism has been victorious in the natural sciences. (1957, 28–9. Emphasis in original)

Whereas the natural sciences were characterised by methodological nominalism,the social sciences, Popper argued, often took a methodological essentialist

approach to explanation, developing what he termed “historicist” theories. Popper(1945a, 1945b, 1957) identifies two types of historicist theories, namely “psycholo-

gistic” theories about a fixed pre-social human nature and “holist” theories aboutsocial structures. As regards psychologistic theories, Popper takes J.S. Mill to task

arguing that people are “social prior to being human” (1945b, 93) in the sense thatsocial institutions such as the family influence people’s development rather thanbeing expressions of a pre-social human nature. Holist historicists presume that

their approach is scientific because they regard science as a matter of achievingepistemic certainty by defining the moving forces that control historical develop-

ment and the behaviour of agents, with such certain knowledge of these forcesallowing scientific predictions to be made. Thus, Marxists predict the inevitable

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downfall of capitalism and its replacement with communism. Against this, Popperargues that such a prediction is unscientific because it lacks the specificity to be

refuted. If such a revolution was predicted to happen at time point T1, it could betested. If though no time point is specified and such a revolution happened at

some distant point in the future, it would not be a matter of the prediction beingscientifically correct but of an unscientific prediction being open enough to allow

enough time for the possibility of a contingent event in the future to be read, erro-neously, as a confirmation of the veracity of the theory that yielded the prediction.

Furthermore, the current lack of confirmation is not treated as a threat to the pre-diction. There can be no problem-solving progression of knowledge through criti-cism if a theory fails to specify the conditions under which it would be judged to

be in error and instead was general enough to always be regarded by its adherentsas not shown to be in error (Popper 1945b, 1957).

As many critics have argued though, even if a theory had a prediction falsified,the theory itself may still be useful. Thus, Lakatos (1970) modified Popper’s posi-

tion to talk of theories as “research programmes” and to distinguish between ahard core of assumptions in a research programme and its auxiliary hypotheses.

For Lakatos, the latter could be changed whilst still allowing for a “progressiveproblemshift”, that is, auxiliary hypotheses could be refuted and changed without

this necessarily undermining the ability of the hard core of assumptions to gener-ate useful hypotheses. Whether or not Marxism is a research programme with aprogressive or degenerating problemshift is beyond the scope of this article but we

can note that the main point for the discussion here is that, for Popper, any claimto philosophical/scientific authority in knowledge, that is, any claim to certainty,

was erroneous, given that all knowledge is fallible and thus open to criticism andreplacement.

Methodological essentialism is not just an erroneous approach to science andtheoretical abstraction for Popper. It is also part of a tradition of metaphysical

thought that seeks to base political authority on philosophical authority. The out-come of this tradition, Popper (1945a, 1945b) argues, is totalitarianism. This isbecause an elite claim the political authority to impose a utopian blueprint based

on philosophical authority in the form of metaphysical speculation about adomain of ultimate reality that is treated as certain (and, in modern times, scien-

tific) knowledge of a domain unknown to lay agents. Popper argues that this tradi-tion started with Plato and has its latest manifestation with Marxism.

A scientific and methodological nominalist approach to social science, by con-trast, would entail the construction of theories that could be potentially falsified

through quantitative research. A theory would have to postulate a general law (forexample, that people from a particular social class have the same voting behav-

iour), postulate the specific conditions (for example, sampling the voting behav-iour of people in a particular class) and make a prediction (for example, thatpeople in social class A voted for political party P). If the prediction was supported

by the data then the theory would be corroborated rather than verified/justified.The theory would then need to be tested until a prediction was refuted, at which

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point the theory would need to be replaced unless, that is, one followed Lakatos(1970) and distinguished auxiliary hypotheses from the hard core of assumptions.6

Rorty also holds that there is a tradition of basing political authority onphilosophical authority which stretches from Plato to Marx. Rorty argues that:

We intellectuals have, since Plato, supplemented […] small concrete, local, banal fanta-sies [for reforms] with a story about human beings’ relation to something ahistori-cal——something like God or Human Nature or the Scientifically Knowable Nature ofReality. After Hegel, and especially after Lenin, we switched to a story about humanbeings’ relation to History. History itself, reified into something that has a shape and amovement, took the place of an atemporal power. (1998a, 232)

Rorty’s main concern though is not with Marxism but with what he (Rorty 1999)

terms post-Nietzschean theories such as Foucault’s post-structuralism. Now, Ror-ty’s rejection of traditional philosophy may seem to place Rorty in the “continental

tradition”. To be sure, Rorty (1991b) does say that some thinkers in that traditionhave interesting insights into metaphysics.7 However, Rorty is highly critical of the

development and application of “continental philosophy” in post-Nietzscheansocial and cultural theory. He argues that although post-Nietzscheans would

eschew notions of truth, reality, objectivity, essential properties and structuralforces shaping agents’ beliefs and behaviours, post-Nietzschean social and cultural

theory does tacitly rely on using theoretical abstractions to define a real movingforce that controls agents. This moving force is “discourse”, meaning a power-knowledge nexus, with language constructing and carrying relations of power that

shape agents’ subjectivity. An example of post-Nietzschean theory is provided bythe Foucaultian theory of “Governmentality” developed by Rose (1989). With the

theory of Governmentality, power is not wielded by one class over another withideology masking this and repressing the development of revolutionary class con-

sciousness, as with Marxism. Rather, discourse is productive of agency in the sensethat it shapes all agents’ attitudes, preferences, thoughts about what is “normal” or

desirable etc. Applied to the domain of liberal democratic citizenship, this wouldmean that citizens qua subjects of discourse would perceive themselves as free indi-viduals with rights and would hold preferences that were amenable to the smooth

functioning of a liberal democratic state. So, for instance, with the shift fromsocial-democratic notions of citizenship to neo-liberal notions of citizenship,

agents’ subjective preferences will be shaped by the prevailing discourse to see theincreasing shift from state to private provision as legitimate. To be clear, Rose is

not holding that his position is making objective claims about some form of struc-tural force but, contrary to the stated rejection of notions of truth and reality, such

an argument does tacitly rely on making a truth claim about an objective forcethat controls agents.

Like Popper, Rorty is concerned with the negative political consequences thatstem from this attempt to seek out philosophical authority by defining a domainof ultimate reality that controls agents. Whereas Popper was concerned about

Marxists creating a totalitarian state in the attempt to realise a utopian blueprint

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based on what they took to be an authoritative science of history, Rorty is con-cerned with the dystopian views of post-Nietzscheans inadvertently supporting

what he takes to be a dystopian politics stemming from neo-liberalism. Rorty’sargument is that post-Nietzscheans see power, transmitted through discourse, as

all pervasive and all corrupting——and so inescapable. For Rorty, “[t]he ubiquityof Foucauldian power is reminiscent of the ubiquity of Satan, and thus of original

sin——that diabolical stain on every human soul” (1998b, 95). Given this, theworld is taken to be always already fallen. Despite the ubiquity of discourse, an

elite manage to arrogate to themselves the ability to transcend this to know theforce that controls others. As there can be no redemptive outcome with the tran-scendence of discourse though there is no point in trying to engage in substantive

politics to change policies and prevailing attitudes.Rorty’s criticism of post-Nietzschean theories can be read as an important

update and application of Popper’s arguments about holist methodological essen-tialism. Post-Nietzscheans seek philosophical authority about a domain of ultimate

reality that controls agents, namely discourse. Unlike the Marxist version of holistmethodological essentialism, post-Nietzscheans do not seek to base political

authority on philosophical authority in order to legislate on what agents ought todo to change socio-political reality. This obviously avoids the problem of an opti-

mistic attempt to realise a utopian blueprint ending in a dystopian totalitarianstate. However, this does not mean that the post-Nietzschean version of methodo-logical essentialism has no negative consequences. This is because those on the rad-

ical Left influenced by post-Nietzschean theory have evacuated the domain ofsubstantive political dialogue, which means there are less critical voices to chal-

lenge the neo-liberal redefinition of all socio-political problems as problems con-cerning individuals’ innate ability. Neo-liberalism is itself of course a form of

(psychologistic) methodological essentialism because it is based on the presump-tion of philosophical authority derived from having certain knowledge of a fixed

pre-social human essence, which is conceptualised in terms of an acquisitive,instrumentally rational and competitive human nature. Political authority is thenbased on this claim to philosophical authority, with neo-liberals legislating on

socio-political matters by redefining problems concerning inequality into problemssolely concerning individuals’ ability, with the state having no role to play in

tackling inequality. Contrary to these contemporary forms of methodologicalessentialism, critical reformist dialogue is required to tackle problems of inequality

without reducing them to matters solely pertaining to individuals’ innate ability.

4. Reformism

To sum up so far, Popper succeeded in overcoming the search for authority in

knowledge by replacing the traditional definition of knowledge as justified true beliefwith the view that knowledge was fallible and thus open to change via criticism

based on problem-solving. By contrast, Rorty’s attempt to transcend philosophyended up replicating the problems concerning authority and the subject–object

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dualism that he sought to overcome. Moving from issues of epistemology to issuesof social scientific knowledge, Popper rejected methodological essentialist attempts

to base claims to political authority on claims to philosophical/scientific authority.For Popper, theoretical abstractions could not be justified in terms of their ability to

define some ultimate moving force that controlled history or human behaviour.Rather, developing a methodological nominalist approach to theoretical abstraction

based on his problem-solving epistemology, Popper argued that theoreticalabstractions were to be used critically and redefined as necessary——concepts were

names in fallible interpretive schemes that could be reworked and replaced. Rorty,as we have seen, shared Popper’s concern about the attempt to base a claim to polit-ical authority on a claim to philosophical/scientific authority. More will be said

about that in this section. Here, the argument will start by comparing Popper andRorty’s positions on liberal democracy. Both support liberal democracy because it is

predicated upon free speech, tolerance and openness to dialogue. Whereas Popperdefends liberal democracy by holding that is it conducive to a problem-solving

approach to the development of beliefs and practices, including the development ofreformist solutions to socio-political problems, Rorty’s attempt to transcend the

philosophical justification for liberal democracy ends up replicating the problem hesought to overcome. That is, Rorty ends up seeking to justify liberal democracy by

making a tacit psychologistic methodological essentialist appeal to a fixed humanessence. Furthermore, his argument lends support to the neo-liberal attempt to pri-vatise problems making them solely a matter of individuals’ innate ability. However,

when Rorty comes to criticise the post-Nietzschean political Left in the USA, hedoes not just provide an important update to Popper’s arguments about methodo-

logical essentialism but he also develops a problem-solving approach to reformismwhich is congruent with Popper’s arguments for problem-solving reformism or

“piecemeal social engineering”. Popper’s focus on Marxism as the threat to liberaldemocracy may make his work seem dated. However, the post-Nietzschean

disengagement from socio-political problems and the rise of neo-liberalism whichprivatises problems means that Popper’s view of what constitutes a successfuldemocracy; namely, a society where as many people critically discuss as many issues

as possible and where reforms are used to reduce suffering, is under threat frommethodological essentialist positions. Rorty’s work on reformism helps criticise the

psychologistic and holist forms of methodological essentialism, in the form of neo-liberalism and post-Nietzscheanism, respectively, and also shows the contemporary

relevance of Popper’s work on piecemeal social engineering by developing aproblem-solving approach to reformism which eschews the search for authority for

a dialogic notion of progress.Popper did not argue that theories which sought to justify liberalism, by saying

that it was in accord with a pre-social competitive human nature, were correct.Rather, he argued that the liberal values of freedom of thought and freedom ofexpression could be defended “pragmatically” in terms of their ability to assist our

search for truth (1963, 352). The liberal democratic “open society” would promotefree speech and tolerance of criticism and thus it would be an amenable environ-

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ment for problem-solving and the development of agents as reflexive self-criticalbeings. All of which stood in contrast to the “closed societies”, such as the Soviet

Union and fascist states, which sought to control what agents’ believed as well aswhat agents did (Popper 1945a, 1945b). As Popper sought neither to justify liberal-

ism in terms of a pre-social competitive human nature that needed to be expressedin “free market” competition, nor to argue for the imposition of a utopian blue-

print via revolutionary change, he was able to argue for reformism or “piecemealsocial engineering” (Popper 1945a, 1945b, 1957). The motivation to argue for

reformism came from Popper’s recognition that whilst liberal democracy was aconducive environment for problem-solving and critical dialogue it, like any set ofarrangements or beliefs, was open to improvement. Such improvement was to be

understood not in terms of trying to make people happy but in terms of reducingsuffering (1945a, 158) and so this position may be referred to as “negative utilitari-

anism” (Stokes 2006). Popper listed the “greatest evils” that beset people as fol-lows: poverty, unemployment, sickness and pain, penal cruelty, slavery, religious

and racial discrimination, lack of educational opportunities, rigid class differencesand war (1963, 370). He held that in post-war liberal democracies many of these

problems had been overcome through “piecemeal social engineering” which led tothe construction of the welfare state. Piecemeal social engineering was held by

Popper to be a scientific approach because it was based on the recognition that welearn from our mistakes (1945a, 163); that is, it was not scientific in the positivistsense that a technocratic elite claimed some form of algorithm to improve society

(as with Comte’s (1974) positivism for instance). What this means is that thepiecemeal engineer will try to solve a problem by introducing a new policy,

reforming an institution or even developing a new institution, whilst being able torecognise that such attempts to solve problems may be replaced by better options

or cause unintended consequences that militate against the initial solution andrequire another solution to be tried.

Rorty seeks to justify liberal democracy, rather than defend it “pragmatically”,and he presents two arguments for this, which are the ethnocentric argument andwhat will be termed here the “individualist” argument. The ethnocentric (Rorty

1991a) argument for liberal democracy parallels the anti-epistemology argumentfor the social justification of belief. As we saw with the anti-epistemology argu-

ment, there were as many facts as there were language games. Similarly, with theethnocentric argument, there are as many beliefs about what constitutes a legiti-

mate political order as there are language games. As there can be no appeal to anynotion of a subject being able to form beliefs independently of the language games

which provide the social justification for beliefs, these beliefs are determined bythose language games. Thus, liberalism is socially justified for liberal citizens

because those citizens have been socialised into following the rules of the liberallanguage game.

One could argue that the ethnocentric argument and the anti-epistemology

argument commit a “performative contradiction” (Habermas 1990). What thismeans is that in arguing that beliefs and statements are socially justified by the

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prevailing rules of a language game Rorty has transcended his location in a partic-ular language game to posit a universal statement about meaning. Rorty could try

to reject this criticism by pointing to his disagreement with Lyotard over how toread Wittgenstein. Rorty (1991a) rejects Lyotard’s view that different language

games are incommensurable. Instead, Rorty argues that:

Whereas Lyotard takes Wittgenstein to be pointing out unbridgeable divisions betweenlinguistic islets, I see him as recommending the constructions of causeways which will,in time, make the archipelago in question continuous with the mainland. […] On myreading, Wittgenstein was not warning us against attempts to translate the untranslat-able but rather against the unfortunate philosophical habit of seeing different languagesas embodying incompatible systems of rules. If one does see them in this way, themthe lack of an overarching system of metarules for pairing off sentences […] will strikeone as a disaster. But if one sees language learning as the acquisition of a skill, one willnot be tempted to ask what metaskill permits this acquisition. One will assume thatcuriosity, tolerance, patience, luck, and hard work are all that is needed. (1991a, 215–16)

So, if one sees meaning stemming from rules and there are no metarules to estab-

lish meaning via correspondence or “representation” between statements and anextra-linguistic reality, then different language games will be hermetic because their

rules will be self-justifying. By contrast, if language is seen to function in terms ofagents’ practical knowledge of how to use language in different situations then the

meanings of other language games may come to be understood, if an agent learnshow to “go on” in another community. This approach to commensurability would

turn on adaptation rather than social justification because the emphasis is onadapting to a problem concerning understanding. If Rorty held this view then hecould reject the argument about committing a performative contradiction by hold-

ing that social conventions are not hermetic self-justifying rules that determineagents’ beliefs. Two points can be made about this “adaptationist/problem-solving”

defence of ethnocentrism. First, this approach to language games clashes withRorty’s anti-epistemological argument for social justification because with that

argument language games were clearly self-justifying, with languages games deter-mining the “facts” perceived. Second, this defence of ethnocentrism reduces it to a

truism. This is because if the rules of the language game do not determine agents’views on what is a legitimate political order then all one is saying is that agents

will be influenced by the prevailing norms of the society in which they are raised.Alternatively, rather than say that the ethnocentric argument was reduced to a

truism, one could argue that embedded in the adaptationist/problem-solving argu-

ment about ethnocentrism there was an implicit universalist justification about lib-eralism in terms of it being a political system that is good for all and not just those

socialised in liberal democratic societies. Such an argument would hold that thedesire to understand other communities and the willingness to put in the “hard

work” required to understand them stem from the liberal commitment to toleranceand openness, with this being a better approach to dealing with other communities

that approaches based on illiberal beliefs that do not tolerate difference and diver-

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sity. It could be countered that such an argument may be a defence rather than ajustification, in the sense that Rorty was just acknowledging, like Popper, how liberal

open societies are more conducive to certain types of activity (such asunderstanding others) than illiberal societies. However, Rorty does actually develop

a universalist justification of liberal democracy with his individualist justification forliberal democracy, which swings the focus from the social justification of belief

(and the need for a social authority for beliefs) to individual creativity.Rorty argues that as agents have no fixed defining essence they are free to exer-

cise their creativity and reinvent their identities and fundamental values——or“final vocabulary” (Rorty 1989). The benefit of living in a liberal democracy is thatagents have the freedom in the private sphere to exercise such creativity, whereas

the state regulates the public sphere to ensure agents are not harmed by having anidentity imposed upon them. As agents are creative beings the imposition of an

identity——or humiliation as Rorty (1989) calls it——is the worst form of harmand whilst illiberal states (such as communist states or theocratic states) seek to

impose an identity upon their citizens, liberal states ensure that citizens are notharmed in this way. In recognising that their final vocabularies are contingent and

open to change, educated and cultured agents will adopt what Rorty (1989) termsan “ironic” attitude. This does not mean that Rorty envisages liberal societies as

ones where a privileged group of “dandies” take an unserious attitude to all socialconventions and mock the less privileged who take their final vocabularies seri-ously.8 Rather, taking an ironic attitude for Rorty means taking an attitude that

celebrates the lack of a philosophical authority to legislate on beliefs and whichleads agents to take responsibility for improving their practices by expanding their

sense of sympathy for the suffering of others. This will be achieved by reading lit-erature, using the free press and entering into dialogue with other agents (Rorty

1989, 1999). So, liberalism is justified because it prevents harm and allows individ-uals the freedom to exercise their creativity, and illiberal states are unjustified

because they may impose the worst form of harm on their citizens by humiliatingthem.

The problem here is that creativity becomes detached from any meaningful

notion of problems and ends up creating a justification for neo-liberal politicswhich Rorty is highly critical of, as we will presently see. Rorty’s argument about

feminism illustrates this. Rorty (1991c) holds that feminists cannot use theoreticalabstractions to gain philosophical and political authority by arguing that some

form of real essence is being oppressed by patriarchal culture, with the solution tosuch oppression being a feminist imposition of new values in the public sphere.

This is despite the fact that according to his own theory, patriarchal culture would“humiliate” women by forcing an identity upon them and stifling their defining

creative essence in the process. Instead, if women are unhappy with their finalvocabularies, they are free to exercise their creativity and change their final vocabu-laries in the private sphere. As feminists may construct final vocabularies that are

radically critical of existing institutions, laws and norms in the public sphere, sepa-ratism may be required, so as not to “humiliate” others by imposing a new iden-

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tity upon them. Consequently, what is deemed to be a problem is a product ofindividuals’ creative reworking of their final vocabularies with the solution to any

such problem being a purely private matter concerning an individual’s finalvocabulary in the private sphere or a collection of individuals leaving the public

sphere to create a separatist community based on shared final vocabularies. Asmany have argued, this approach is conducive to neo-liberal politics because neo-

liberalism is based on privatising problems to reduce the responsibilities of thestate.9 That is, both neo-liberalism and Rorty’s individualist justification for liber-

alism make problems concerning inequality purely a matter of individuals’ innatecompetitive or creative ability, respectively, and thus not a problem for the stateor anyone else to solve.

Although Rorty starts by denying that there is a defining essence for humanity,he does end up tacitly presuming the existence of an essence, in the form of an

innate creativity. This is why humiliation is not merely the worst form of harm toinflict on someone socialised as a liberal but the worst form of harm to inflict on

any human being. Consequently, Rorty’s individualist justification for liberalismends up becoming a form of methodological essentialism. With this position, philo-

sophical authority was tacitly assumed because Rorty ended up holding that his the-ory “represented” the essence that defined human being (namely an innate creative

capacity). This in turn ended up tacitly leading to a claim to political authority con-cerning the justification of liberalism based on its ability to protect individuals fromhumiliation and enhance their freedom to rework their final vocabulary. Given this,

Rorty’s work would end up having the same outcome as the post-Nietzschean theo-ries he criticised, for there would be no way to sustain the notion of agents trying

to get other agents to change their beliefs and practices by engaging them in criticaldialogue and holding that their existing beliefs and practices were wrong. Here, dia-

logue would be replaced by hermetic creativity confined to the private sphere, withthe neo-liberal political Right being free to define what constituted a problem and a

legitimate solution in the public sphere. However, when Rorty considers the conse-quences of post-Nietzschean theory on the political Left in the USA, he does breakfrom this methodological essentialist position to develop a theory that updates Pop-

per’s arguments for problem-solving reformism.Rorty (1998b) notes that the Left, in the USA, was a “political Left” concerned

with issues of economic inequality up until the 1960s when it became a “culturalLeft”. The cultural Left was concerned with identity politics which helped make

important reforms, concerning the treatment of ethnic minorities and women, butultimately it led to the adoption of post-Nietzschean theories that held that the

USA was intrinsically bad, which in turn led to a withdrawal from any concernwith reformism. This view that the USA was fallen, without any hope for redemp-

tion, and thus without any possibility of reform, created a space for powerful cor-porate interests and the political Right to dominate policy making and the termsof reference in which policies are discussed. This has helped lead to a situation

where problems are framed solely in terms of individuals’ ability to provide forthemselves which increases suffering as class differences become more rigid and

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people find it increasingly difficult to access health care and good education. AsRorty puts it:

The Foucaultian Academic Left in contemporary America is exactly the sort of Left theoligarchy dreams of: a Left whose members are so busy unmasking the present thatthey have no time to discuss what laws need to be passed in order to create a betterfuture. (1998b, 139)

He argues that the Left and others need to know that:

The last 100 years of [the USA’s] history has witnessed a brutal struggle between thecorporations and the workers […] and that the corporations are winning. They needto know that the deepest social problems usually go unmentioned by candidates forpolitical office, because it is not in the interests of the rich to have those problems dis-cussed in public. (Rorty 1999, 257–8)

The outcome of this domination of politics by the Right and the rich could be thebreak-up of the USA into hereditary economic castes, Rorty (1999, 258) argues,

because the gap between rich and poor will be so astronomical that equality ofopportunity will become a meaningless concept. Liberal democracy will become a

plutocracy. Rather than continue like this Rorty states that:

I think the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within theframework of a market economy. This was the business of the American Left in thefirst two-thirds of the [twentieth] century. (1998b, 105)

The task for intellectuals, novelists and journalists, is thus that of making realproblems about suffering stemming from sustained inequality become recognised

as such in political debate.This approach to reformism is congruent with Popper’s arguments about piece-

meal social engineering because Rorty is basing his position on the same negativeutilitarian outlook: for both, reforms are about reducing suffering. Furthermore,

Rorty’s position is an important development of this piecemeal approach toreforms. Whereas Popper took the social-democratic consensus for granted andthought that the only threat to it was from attempts at utopian engineering, Rorty

is writing in a context where the threat to reformism is from the cultural Left’sdystopian contempt for the world of politics as well as the rise of a neo-liberal

consensus in many liberal democracies. Popper wrote in a context where there wasagreement over what constituted a problem and the task became that of seeking

the most useful solution to the agreed problem. In contrast, Rorty is writing in acontext where problems are being privatised, the post-Nietzschean Left presents no

challenge to this having evacuated the domain of policy debate, and the task is thatof getting real problems, concerning suffering, to be recognised as such, withreformist solutions then being generated.

It may be objected that describing Rorty’s position on reformism as pertainingto real problems concerning suffering clashes with Rorty’s rejection of the concept

of truth. On this, the following may be argued. Rorty seeks to avoid the concepts

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of truth and reality because he wants to transcend the search for authority that hetakes to be intrinsic to philosophy. However, if he holds that what constitutes a

problem depends entirely on some individuals with a particular final vocabularydefining a set of circumstances as a problem then there is no scope for critical

dialogue because different groups will have no common criteria to assess eachothers’ views and no basis for taking a critical attitude to their own beliefs. Fur-

thermore, if one group monologically criticised another for having beliefs that weredifferent from their own that could run the risk of such a group trying to humili-

ate their opponents. Thus, when Rorty (1991c) discussed feminism, he held thatfeminists may need to build separatist communities. Given this, there seems littlescope for reformist dialogue being able to redefine what constitutes a problem,

change attitudes and change policies. Consequently, one may argue that Rorty’swork on problem-solving reformism has to be motivated by some form of tacit

commitment to a problem-solving theory of truth. If Rorty had explicitly adoptedPopper’s problem-solving epistemology, he could clearly avoid the problems asso-

ciated with the search for epistemic authority and the problems that arise with thereduction of problems to individuals’ final vocabularies.

5. Conclusion

Contrary to the view that Rorty was a postmodernist who eschewed all forms ofepistemic authority to celebrate an anything goes relativism, in an attempt to tran-

scend the authority sought by philosophy, we have seen that the problems thatemerge with his work concern his return to authority which occurs when he seeks

out justifications for his positions. Further, contrary to the view that Popper was atechnocratic positivist and Cold War liberal, who fetishised the authority of science

for its alleged ability to furnish an algorithm that produces knowledge that is qual-itatively different from lay knowledge, we saw that Popper advocated a problem-solving epistemology, where all beliefs, practices and policies were open to change

through critical dialogue. Rorty could have avoided the problems those arose fromhis search for justification and authority if he had not tried to transcend philoso-

phy per se but instead adopted a problem-solving philosophy of knowledge thatreplaced justification with criticism. Rorty was correct to support Popper’s fallibi-

lism and rejection of methodological essentialism but incorrect to hold that Pop-per was committed to a “positivist dualism”. Nonetheless, it is not the case that

Rorty’s anti-philosophy is to be understood as a failed position that simply repli-cates the search for authority he sought to overcome in philosophy because he stillsought out justifications for beliefs. Rather, his work on post-Nietzschean theory

and reformism are not only congruent with Popper’s problem-solving epistemol-ogy, but are also important contemporary applications of Popper’s arguments on

methodological essentialism and piecemeal social engineering, respectively. To anycritic who argues that Popper’s work was a positivistic reaction to the Cold War

which is of no lasting consequence, it can be argued that Popper’s problem-solving

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approach to knowledge and politics is very much of relevance. This ends up beingillustrated by Rorty, when it comes to criticising the two contemporary threats to

the development of a successful democratic public life and reduction of suffering,namely pessimistic radicals who regard the world as fallen and neo-liberals who

privatise problems.

Notes

[1] See for instance Calder 2007, Geras 1995, Malachowski 1990, Malachowski 2002, Mouffe1996, and the exchange between Fuller 2008a, 2008b and Turner 2008.

[2] This was implicit in empiricism with Locke’s 1961, 58 distinction between “primary quali-ties” that are of the object itself such as size and “secondary qualities” that are properties inthe object that cause sensations in the subject such as taste.

[3] Rorty is not advocating an evolutionary epistemology because he rejected epistemology.[4] This position may be “realist” in a commonsense way, because it presumes the reality of

the environment and organisms in that environment, rather than holding that all categoriessuch an “environment” are discursive constructs or ideas with no material referents. How-ever, it is different from metaphysical realism, because it eschews the metaphysical dualismdrawn between our ideas, beliefs and attempts at representation on the one hand, and areality that is defined as ultimately unknowable, because it is independent of all attempts toknow or represent it, on the other hand. Talking of the environment and organisms maybe to talk of two components of reality but this is not a metaphysical dualism because thosecomponents are held to be in interaction.

[5] Popper 1972 spoke of this in terms of the “three worlds” whereby the physical world wascalled world 1, the world of subjective experiences was called world 2 and world 3 was adomain of “objective knowledge” in the sense that cookbooks and articles on physics etc.conveyed expectations that transcended the subjective experiences of one individual andwhich could be tested by others.

[6] Some, see Sassower 2006 for instance, take a problem-solving epistemology to be compati-ble with many methodological approaches.

[7] See the exchanges between Critchley, Derrida, Laclau, Mouffe and Rorty in Mouffe 1996 formore on this.

[8] See Fraser 1990 for an argument about Rorty’s position being elitist.[9] See for instance Bernstein 2002 and Calder 2007.

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