Pragmatism, Objectivity, and Experience

This is an Author Meets Critics panel on Levine's "Pragmatism, Objectivity, Experience" (Cambridge 2019). The book attempts to pragmatically rehabilitate objectivity in the wake of Richard Rorty’s rejection of the concept. Whereas “new pragmatists” like Robert Brandom, argue that thought’s answerability to the world is best understood in communicative-theoretic terms—i.e., in terms that can be cashed out by capacities that agents gain through taking part in linguistic communication—the book argues that objectivity is best understood in experiential-theoretic terms. It claims that 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, in the so-called game of giving and asking for reasons; we also need to see it as emergent from our experiential interaction with the world. The book is significant because it redeems and re-actualizes for contemporary philosophy a key insight developed by the classical pragmatists, especially James and Dewey.

The panelists are internationally recognized experts in classical pragmatism and neopragmatism, or "the Pittsburgh School" and have been chosen for their expertise in responding to Levine's book.