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taken the linguistic turn toward the humanities, they have neglected the sciences and retrieved only half

of the tradition of classical American pragmatism. And, given the centrality of experimentation to

classical pragmatism, the interpretation of the text of reality needs to be restored alongside the neo-

pragmatist emphasis on interpretation of literary texts.

What is interesting is that given Rorty`s own neo-Darwinist framework, he has overlooked the

fact that the Darwinian account requires not only a causal relationship between the world and language

users, but also the rejection of nominalism. A thoroughgoing evolutionary epistemology takes Rorty to

task for ignoring the requirements of his own Darwinian presupposition since evolutionary biology

shows that organisms adapt to their environment through expectation of regularities or laws--Peirce`s

Thirdness.

What has happened is that another of Rorty`s strong misreadings--in this case of Darwin--

has legitimated his doctrine of chance and disregarded the teleological suggestiveness of evolutionary

naturalism, and that precisely because Rorty is opposed to any overarching conception of meaning apart

from the purposes suited to the needs of particular organisms in particular situations.

Now it is certainly

the case that Peirce`s optimism regarding truth converging in the infinite long run reflected, in part, the

power the idea of progress held over Western intellectuals in the late nineteenth century. But to expose

such unwarranted optimism does not require lapsing into pessimism or embracing Rorty`s anti-

teleological position. It is, on Peirce`s and Dewey`s terms, to insist on the difference between pragmatism

and the earlier empiricisms, the former emphasizing consequent phenomena and the latter antecedent

ones. In other words, pragmatism is focused on the future, and requires a metaphysics of the future, of

H. S. Thayer, Pragmatism: A Reinterpretation of Its Origins and Consequences, in Robert J. Mulvaney

and Philip M. Zeltner, eds., Pragmatism: Its Sources and Prospects (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1981), 1-20; quote from 18.

For more argument on this point, see Peter Munz, Philosophy and the Mirror of Rorty, in Gerard

Radnitzky and W. W. Bartley, III, eds., Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge
(La Salle: Open Court, 1987), 343-98, esp. 374-78.

Thus Rorty writes: Teleological thinking is inevitable, but Dewey offers us a relativist and materialist

version of teleology rather than an absolute and idealist one....It pays for us to believe this [Dewey`s vision] because
we have seen the unfortunate results of believing otherwise of trying to find some ahistorical and absolute relation
to reality for truth to name.... As Dewey said, growth itself is the only moral end` is the moral theory it now pays us
to have, for we have seen the unfortunate results of trying to divinize and eternalize a given social practice or form of
individual life (Dewey between Hegel and Darwin, in Truth and Progress, 290-306, quote from 305).