Horacio Rau

An exposition is made of some fundamental aspects of classical philosophical pragmatism, represented by C.S. Peirce and William James, and then some ontological and epistemological positions of the English neopragmatist Susan Haack are made explicit, to contrast them with the ontological and epistemological positions on facts of the Italian jurist Michele Taruffo. From this contrast, broad coincidences can be extracted in the ontological sphere, identifying both with a realist and synechist metaphysical stance. They also have great coincidences in the epistemological sphere, considering that language does not exhaust the description of the world, and both adopt a correspondentist thesis on truth, moving away from the sceptical and irrationalist attitudes held by postmodernist authors, such as those of Richard Rorty. There is a difference in some of the conceptual foundations of realism held by both, and that is with respect to Nelson Goodman's irrealism: for Haack, her own metaphysical choices distance her from such a conception, but Taruffo explicitly assumes the important relativistic charge of Goodman's conception of possible worlds.