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to preserve and sustain Rorty`s edifying conversation. Firstness is pure potentiality, the simple quality of

feeling, that which makes a thing what it is in itself. Secondness is the element of struggle or of brute,

resistant fact, that by which a thing is related to others. Thirdness is what mediates between Firstness and

Secondness, the universals, laws, generalities, or habits that ensure the continuity of the things in their

environing relationships.

All things are what they are as only as Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds--viz.,

having self-identity independent of anything else, having a relational identity in reaction to other things,

and having a mediational aspect through which it is brought into relation with other things.

Rorty is correct, of course, to emphasize the web of interrelatedness which constitute us and our

place in the world. Yet his non-essentialism and nominalism is reductionistic in insisting that relations

are all there are. Central axioms of Rorty`s vision beg for a more robustly ontological and realistic (rather

than linguistic) account of otherness than he provides.

The value of tolerance assumes the differences

between others and ourselves, and ethnocentrism presumes the pluralism of cultures and societies.

We finds its contrast only with they. But if relations are all there is, then how are others distinct from

(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994); and Nicholas Rescher, Realistic Pragmatism: An Introduction to Pragmatic Philosophy
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), all of whom take the antirealism of the post-linguistic turn to task.

I provide a more detailed reading of Peirce elsewhere: see Yong, The Demise of Foundationalism and

the Retention of Truth: What Evangelicals Can Learn from C. S. Peirce, Christian Scholar's Review 29:3 (2000):
563-88, and Spirit-Word-Community, esp. chs. 3 and 5.

Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. I-VI, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds.;

Vols. VII-VIII, Arthur W. Burks, ed. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1931-58), 1.300-53, 5.41-66, and 6.32-34.
Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Peirce will be according to the convention of Peirce scholarship in the
form of v.p, denoting volume and paragraph number.

To be sure, Rorty is not denying that mountains obviously existed prior to human beings: But the utility

of those language games has nothing to do with the question of whether Reality as It Is in Itself, apart from the way it
is handy for human beings to describe it, has mountains in it (John Searle on Realism and Relativism, in Truth
and Progress, 84-97, quote from 72). Obviously, there are mountains that cause our descriptions of them; not
obviously, there are non-causal senses in which mountains describe Reality as It Is in Itself. There is here a fine line
between Rorty`s antirealism and Berkeleyan idealism. Thus Alvin Plantinga is led to write that before there were
human beings, Rorty thinks, there was no such thing as the sentence 2 + 1 = 3` (Warranted Christian Belief [New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 434). Of course, given Rorty`s ironic stance, it is unclear whether
he is serious or not about otherwise giving Plantinga and other readers the impression that pragmatic antirealism
should lead to any other conclusions. Similarly impressions of incoherence are communicated to readers about
Rorty`s project in Stephen Louthan, On Religion--A Discussion with Richard Rorty, Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas
Wolterstorff, Christian Scholar's Review 26:2 (1996): 177-83.

Chantal Mouffe argues that democratic politics is and should inevitably be conflictual since without

conflict, then, e.g., a Habermasian universality or a Rortyean public consensus would erase difference, diversity and
pluralism, the former by forcing consensus and the latter by privatizing difference and making it irrelevant; see
Mouffe, Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy, in Mouffe, ed., Deconstruction and