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ourselves? Certainly, we are what and who we are precisely in relationship with others. Yet we are also

not others and distinct from them. What is it that distinguishes us from them, and what is it that organizes

and establishes our identities in relationship to others? In short Rorty`s account assumes a unity-amidst-

plurality, a self-identity in relationship, a coherent we interdependent with but discrete from them.

He needs to acknowledge that there is self-identity (as individuals and as communities) which provides

greater or lesser integration of the web of relationships which constitute us (again, as individuals and as

communities) apart from which our distinctness from others is lost, even while advocating, as he does,

the fact that the identity in and through which we are is constituted precisely by our relations with those

(things and persons) that we are not.

It is precisely this account of otherness lacking in Rorty`s own neo-pragmatism which can be

found in Peirce`s categories. Firstness ensures that things have their own identity which make them

different from other things; Secondness results in what James called the pluralistic universe of facts,

details, particulars, individuals, exceptions, mutations, discrepancies, discontinuities, fissures, ruptures,

faults, etc.; and Thirdness ensures that there are generalities and laws which govern the interactions and

relationships within the pluralistic universe so as to ensure its consistency and predictability (both to

greater or lesser extents), sustain engagement, and enable inquiry. More importantly, this kind of

pluralistic pragmatism provides the metaphysical and ontological grounding not only for our everyday

realist intuitions, but also for a truly methodological interdisciplinarity and communal mode of inquiry.

In contrast first to the Kantian turn to the subject and the bifurcation of the knowing self and the

unknowable Thing-in-Itself, and second to Rorty`s inconsistent ethnocentrism and rejection of Things-

external-to-ourselves, Peirce affirmed that real knowledge is achievable as human beings interacted with

Pragmatism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 1-12.

For a contemporary restatement of Peirce on this point, see Robert Cummings Neville`s theory of identity

as comprising, irreducibly, of both essential and conditional features; see Recovery of the Measure: Interpretation
and Nature (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), esp. ch. 5.

See Sandra B. Rosenthal, Charles Peirce's Pragmatic Pluralism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), and Beth

J. Singer, Pragmatism and Pluralism, The Monist 75:4 (1992): 477-91; cf. John E. Smith, Community and