Susan Dieleman

many contemporary pragmatists reject Richard Rorty’s views because they think he neglects an important, if not pivotal, aspect of the classical pragmatists’ thought: experience. His claim that Dewey’s metaphysics of experience unwittingly perpetuates foundationalism has been met with both incredulity and frustration among contemporary scholars who are interested in revitalizing Dewey’s work. Similarly, one of the main reasons feminists have offered for their hesitance to ally themselves with the neo-pragmatists, focusing their efforts instead on the allegiances to be forged between and the resources to be borrowed from the classical pragmatists, is the former’s neglect of experience. For example, in Pragmatism and..

In “Farming Made Her Stupid,” Lisa Heldke suggests that those who inhabit the metrocentric position participate in the marginalization of rural people and farmers through a process of “stupidification.” Rural people and farmers become “stupid,” a status that, on Heldke’s account, is worse than ignorant because “stupid people” are thought to be constitutionally incapable of knowing the right sorts of things because they know the wrong sorts of things. It seems reasonable, I suggest in this paper, to think that contemporary urban agriculture movements can serve to mitigate the harms which Heldke argues arise from practices of stupidification. However, I argue that, insofar as such movements rely on and perpetuate the image of the Idyllic Farmer—an image constituted by early, romantic versions of agrarianism—they cannot serve this function. This is because the Idyllic Farmer, which is to agricultural ethics as the Ecological Indian is to environmental ethics, is both descriptively and prescriptively problematic. As such, any urban agricultural movement that takes this image as its guide—which, I argue, some important elements of the movement do—will not help to undermine stupidification and the harms it causes.

Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism is more similar to the self-described pragmatisms of his contemporaries Jürgen Habermas and Hilary Putnam than it is dissimilar from them. Indeed, the only significant difference between Rorty’s views and those of his interlocutors, and what forms the basis of their many public exchanges, is their respective stances toward the status of epistemic norms. Rorty’s arguments against Habermas’s endorsement of transcendental conditions that ground successful communication, and against Putnam’s contention that there exists a limit conception of truth upon which the possibility for critique depends speak to the very heart of his philosophical differences from the Kantian pragmatisms of Habermas and Putnam. This paper engages in a detailed exploration of the debates between Rorty and Habermas and between Rorty and Putnam over these matters. These debates provide us with a direct route to understanding Rorty’s own views on epistemic norms. That is, the comparison between his own position and those of his fellow neopragmatists throws into sharp relief Rorty’s belief in the radical contingency of epistemic norms. This exploration profits from engaging a feminist lens because feminist critiques, specifically of Habermas’s work, draw attention to the inadequacies of his views that Rorty seeks to correct, inadequacies that can be easily translated to Putnam’s case as well. By approaching this issue from a feminist angle, the paper highlights the dissimilarities in the theoretical positions between Rorty and his contemporaries, and shows why this difference is more significant than it might seem at first blush. The paper concludes with the suggestion that Rorty’s emphasis on the radical contingency of epistemic norms can provide a basis for the kind of revolutionary social, political, and cultural change that is central to much recent feminist theory.

This is the second paper in the invited collection. Dieleman provides an overview of the “state-of-the-field” debate between Analytic Social Epistemology, represented by Alvin Goldman, and what Dieleman calls the Sociological Social Epistemology, represented by Steve Fuller. In response to this ongoing debate, this paper has two related and complementary objectives. The first is to show that the debate between analytic and sociological versions of social epistemology is overly simplistic and doesn’t take into account additional positions that are available and, indeed, have been available since social epistemology was introduced in the mid to late 1980s. The second is to uncover and tell a story of how Lorraine Code’s Epistemic Responsibility is one such additional position. Looking to Code's Epistemic Responsibility reveals the artificiality of the debate between analytic and sociological social epistemologists.