Rorty and Experience

A vocal advocate of the linguistic turn, Rorty’s calls for replacing experience with language cast a long shadow on the contemporary pragmatist landscape, marking a defining characteristic of neopragmatism’s break with classical pragmatism. Yet the choice between experience and language wasn’t always a live one for Rorty. His early work not only admits of no dichotomy between the two, his views on language owe more to Peirce and Dewey than has been recognized. Even Rorty’s take on the implications of the linguistic turn was less anti-experience than he himself later recalled. This chapter takes a fresh look at Rorty’s familiar antipathy toward experience and challenges the prevailing orthodoxy of an unbridgeable rift between Rorty’s linguisticism and the experientialism of the classical pragmatists, a set of assumptions which blocks the road of inquiry into continuities within the tradition. An oppositional view of language and experience, I argue, is a contingent rather than necessary corollary of Rorty’s pragmatism which appears only around 1990 in debates with Deweyans. Once positions are carefully distinguished and contextualized, Dewey emerges as less opposed to the linguistic turn than often assumed and Rorty as unopposed to some, if not all, of Dewey’s affirmations of experience. I highlight largely unexplored territory shared by classical and neopragmatists, including commitments to a behavioral account of meaning and a conception of social practice, revealing that Rorty’s own pragmatism relies on experience in positive ways, even as he eschewed giving a philosophical account of it.