Barry Allen

Dewey was a pragmatist, and pragmatism is an empiricism. I think Dewey would insist that his empirical orientation in the theory of knowledge is not independent of his democratic orientation in social philosophy. My contribution to the discussions of this volume pursues three questions. One is how Dewey saw the connection between empiricism and democracy. Another is whether there is a comparable empiricism in Chinese tradition. A third is whether ideas of knowledge and ideas of government are really as close as Dewey, American Pragmatism, and indeed Western philosophy as a tradition tend to assume they are.

The principal difference between Rorty’s pragmatism and that of Peirce, James, and Dewey is his commitment to the nominalism that Peirce identified as the Achilles heel of modern empiricism. In their different ways, Peirce, James, and Dewey sought to eliminate nominalism from empiricism. That is their “radical empiricism.” Rorty, by contrast, is impressed by the nominalism and anti-empiricism of post-war analytic philosophy, especially the work of Wilfrid Sellars, Donald Davidson, and Robert Brandom, and reverses the trenchant anti-nominalism of the classical pragmatists. The result is a pragmatism without much pragmatism though a lot of nominalism; an ironic pragmatism more ironic than pragmatic.