by Prof. Michele Marsonet

Many thinkers nowadays react against the strictures of the analytic tradition by reviving the American philosophy par excellence: pragmatism. The forerunner of this trend of thought in the second half of the past century is Quine, even though he has never been a full-fledged pragmatist: his stance is better pictured by saying that he inserted pragmatist elements in a largely analytic (and even logical empiricist) stance. Following Quine we find Rescher, who began re-evaluating pragmatism in the late 1960’s. Rescher’s work, however, is less popular than other, more recent neo-pragmatist endeavours, essentially due to Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. In my opinion, the reason may mainly be found in Rescher’s particular brand of idealistically flavoured pragmatism.
Idealism has never been popular in analytic philosophy, and this despite the well known connections between British idealism and early analytic philosophy, and the unconscious linguistic idealism endorsed by prominent representatives of the analytic tradition. Apart from the bad reputation that idealism continues to have in the Anglophone world, it may also be noted that Rorty (whose present distance from analytic philosophy is far greater than Putnam’s) took advantage of the growing challenges that the analytic paradigm began to face in the late 1970’s and early 80’s to launch his more hermeneutically inspired critique.
In any event, the revival of pragmatism has been for several years a typically American phenomenon. In continental Europe all those thinkers who were previously trained in the analytic tradition and subsequently got tired of it, are generally more interested in the so-called epistemology of complexity or in the naturalistic turn. Only in the last few decades has neopragmatism become popular in Europe, mainly thanks to Rorty’s writings which were extensively translated. No doubt the neopragmatism that is currently fashionable is closer to James (and to the early John Dewey) than it is to Peirce, C.I. Lewis and to the most mature of Dewey’s writings. The central tenet of pragmatism is then viewed in a Jamesian fashion: the pragmatic method is primarily devised for settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable, and to interpret philosophical notions by tracing their practical consequences. And if there is no practical means to settle disputes between philosophical systems, then the alternatives will generate the same consequences and all dispute is idle.
Rescher’s pragmatism is distant from theses like these. Because, if we say that we are only justified in believing that which is useful to us, and if we add that the sole task pertaining to philosophy is helping to improve humankind conditions, we will have serious problems in defining just what these improvements are supposed to consist in. In other words, if we give up any kind of objective standard, it will become impossible just to know which theories are useful to obtain the aforementioned improvements in human life. Clearly we need some kind of standard, even though admitting that “truth” is somehow a human artifact, and not a metaphysical idea living its own life in a Platonic world of eternal forms.
Prior to the present revival, pragmatism was never really popular in Europe; most European thinkers, in fact, took it to be a typical expression of the American utilitarian spirit (where the adjective “utilitarian” was given a negative meaning). The deep sense of the pragmatist stance was thought to be given by one of William James’ most famous sentences: “True is what is good in the way of belief” and, needless to say, a parodistic version of pragmatism was the one reported in philosophical textbooks. Only now that the cultural climate is changing Europeans come to understand that pragmatism is the forerunner of several theses made popular by the post-empiricist turn. For instance, many affinities were discovered between pragmatism and the thought of the later Wittgenstein, and the same is true even for the Popperian fallibilism. Hilary Putnam has published a book titled “Pragmatism: An Open Question”. But why – one might ask – should pragmatism be an “open question” for an American philosopher like Putnam? It makes sense to speak of the re-evaluation of pragmatism in Europe, but this should not be the case in the United States, given the fact that pragmatism is taken to be the typical American philosophy. In order to answer this question, we need to take a short historical detour.
Starting from the late 1930’s, the United States became the major centre of activity for analytic philosophy and logical positivism. Up to that time pragmatism was by large the philosophical trend dominating American universities. Following the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, Austria’s annexation and the subsequent German occupation of Poland, most representatives of logical positivism – and of scientifically oriented philosophy in general – emigrated to the U.S. (a few of them, among whom Karl Popper, chose England instead). Rudolf Carnap, Alfred Tarski, Hans Reichenbach, Carl Gustav Hempel, Herbert Feigl and many others were given chairs in American universities. The reasons for this philosophical diaspora is clear: racial persecution apart, none of these thinkers could stand Nazi anti-intellectualism and irrationalism. American pragmatists largely favoured this exodus, and a pivotal role was then played by Willard Quine, who was at that time a young instructor of logic at Harvard University. He had in fact met personally many analytic philosophers – including the main representatives of the Vienna Circle and of the Lvov-Warsaw School – during a trip he made in Europe in 1933. Supported by C.I. Lewis, a pragmatist who was particularly sensitive to logical, linguistic and scientific issues, Quine worked hard to bring the European thinkers to the American continent. Here is how he describes those heroic years:

I returned in the fall of 1933 [from the trip to Europe] and was appointed junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard. In 1938 I became an instructor, and I’ve been here ever since. Carnap came over on the occasion of Harvard’s tricentenary, in 1934. I had given several public lectures on Carnap, and I hoped that Harvard would hire him, but we didn’t swing it; he was hired by the University of Chicago. But we had good times when Carnap was in this part of the world. Tarski arrived in 1939 and we found him a job at City College in New York. Thirty-eight to ’41 were splendid years.

At this point two facts may be noted. In the first place logical empiricism and pragmatism certainly are compatible philosophical outlooks on the world, and this greatly helped the European thinkers to settle in the new environment. Secondly, American analytic philosophy was, in its early period, much closer to neopositivism than to the everyday language analysis which was thriving in the British universities. The “Tractatus Logico-philosophicus” was well known, while some decades will be necessary to get the Americans interested in the theses of the second Wittgenstein. Pragmatism on the one side, and analytic philosophy on the other (particularly in its logical positivist brand) present many similarities: both are interested in scientific results and methodologies; both trust human reason and its capacity to comprehend nature; both request that philosophers give serious and rigorous reasons to support their assertions. Intersubjectivity plays in sum a key role in both traditions, and this marks their difference from all those trends of thought which, instead, exalt intuition and pure subjectivity.
However, the neopositivists deemed formal logic fundamental and, after a little while, they began to attack an alleged lack of rigor on the part of the pragmatists. Today we can summarize the situation in a few words: the neopositivists endorsed scientism while the pragmatists did not. According to pragmatism scientific knowledge is indeed central, but by no means the only kind of knowledge important to mankind; according to neopositivism, instead, all kinds of knowledge must be reduced to the scientific one. On the one side we thus have monism and reductionism (neopositivism), and on the other pluralism and anti-reductionism (pragmatism).
As always happens, the young scholars were fascinated by the more radical and newer approach of neopositivism, so that the pragmatist hegemony in the American academic institutions soon vanished. Despite the appearances, however, the neopositivists did not score a total victory. Pragmatist ideas continued to influence, like an underground river, the brightest representatives of the American analytic philosophy. Carnap himself adopted a somehow pragmatist stance in his later works, while Quine’s thought can be defined as a brilliant synthesis of analytic, neopositivist and pragmatist tendencies (think of his famed paper “Due Dogmas of Empiricism”).
Today neopragmatism can thus be traced back to this permanent – even though not always visible – influence of traditional pragmatism on American philosophy. Quine’s refusal to set up a precise borderline between analytic and synthetic propositions, and his image of the field of force where all propositions are subject to revision, is one of the key theses endorsed by neopragmatist thinkers in the last few decades. Quine’s thought became, thus, a sort of bridge between the old and the new. But, while the Harvard philosopher never threw neopositivism away, some of his pupils – Donald Davidson, for instance – go well beyond his benevolent criticisms to endorse more radical positions.
In the aforementioned book, Hilary Putnam rightly underlines the importance of some beautiful remarks by William James concerning the relationships between theory and observation. According to James, in fact, “the knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foothold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor, and coefficient on the truth and registers the truth on one side, while on the other he registers the truth which he helps to create.” If we recognize that the theoretical and the observational dimensions cannot be neatly separated, we are no longer sticking to a neopositivist view of the mind’s working, but endorse, to the contrary, a view which was made popular by post-empiricist authors. It might even be said – but a posteriori, of course – that despite the appearances pragmatism was more “modern” than neopositivism, even though “modernity” is a concept bound to be always tied to the particular period of time in which is put forward.
The principle of the primacy of practice led the pragmatists to deny a milestone of logical empiricism, i.e. the existence of the true method to be adopted in both philosophical and scientific inquiry, a method obviously based on the tools offered by mathematical logic. John Dewey understood – well before the post-empiricist turn – that such an unified method, conceived of as an algorithm able to solve any problem, is only a philosophical utopia. And even pragmatism’s intuitions about the relationships between science and ethics deserve to be mentioned at this point. This theme is, nowadays, at the centre of the philosophical stage, while the logical positivists did not deem it really important. Dewey, for instance, used to claim that the primary purpose of science is not that of creating abstract and formal models, but to solve human problems. In his view any rigid dichotomy pure/applied science is meaningless: they are interdependent activities, so that scientific research must be “democratized” to some extent in order that human community at large can control its actual goals.
The last fact to be noted is that pragmatism, thank to its broader speculative perspectives, is likely to favour a greater influence of philosophers on political, social and ethical issues. The best example is, of course, given by John Dewey, who became an ideologist of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. But pragmatism as a whole is certainly far distant from the analytic tradition, whose hyperspecialization has almost always isolated it from the rest of society. The following words depict well this situation:

If it is true that, starting with Quine and continuing with Davidson, Nozick, and Danto, the analytic project has been hollowed out from the inside using its own tools, with Rorty and Cavell it finds itself attacked from the outside. Cut off from its ties with the present, it is embalmed as a museum piece, its scientific hypotheses seen as one system among many when rechanneled into a historicist world view. The analytical movement is accused of a tangle of faults, such as canonizing a philosophical discourse that remains within rigid disciplinary and professional confines, bleakly isolating philosophy from history, culture, and society. This knot was created by the analytical isolation, but it is untied with the recovery of two crucial traditions of thought in the intellectual history of the United States, pragmatism and transcendentalism. Rorty was the first to resurrect in a new key that distinctively American line of thought inaugurated at the end of the nineteenth century by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. Thanks to the long life of John Dewey, that tradition grew throughout the first half of the twentieth century, only to disappear, swallowed up by the Viennese emigration between the two world wars.

So the almost exclusive emphasis on formal logic and the analysis of language – be it scientific or ordinary – caused the isolation of analytic philosophy from the other sectors of culture. Some words now to illustrate Rescher’s position, since it happens that Rorty was not the first philosopher to resurrect the tradition of American pragmatism.
Let us then start with Willard Quine, to whom Rescher often pays homage in his works. As is well known, according to the logical empiricists a proposition may be defined as “analytic” if its truth is granted by definition, while on the other hand synthetic propositions are directly related to some available experience. Reductionism naturally follows from these premises, since the meaning of factual statements resides in the capability of ultimately reducing them to synthetic ones. Quine rejects the thesis that there actually are “neutral” synthetic observations which are supposed to give meaning its ultimate ground, and added that experience – in and by itself – can make no statement true. In other words, observation and background beliefs are not separated by a neat borderline, and no statement is immune to revision. His famous article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” marked the end – at least for many contemporary philosophers – of the so-called analytic/synthetic distinction which played a key role in the logical empiricists’ speculation, and on the other a resurgence of holism within the analytic tradition.
It is not difficult, at this point, to understand the similarities between Quine and Rescher, who agrees in rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction. There is a common pragmatist heritage shared by the two authors. But differences soon come to light because, while Rescher clearly endorsed a full-fledged pragmatist stance starting from the late 1960’s, Quine always tried to reconcile its pragmatist insights with some of the main tenets of the analytic tradition, viewing formal logic and the philosophy of language as the milestones of any significant philosophical enterprise. This explains why it is possible to find some inconsistency in Quine’s thought. A pragmatist would be expected to endorse logical pluralism and to maintain that the choice among alternative systems ultimately rests on practical considerations. Rescher made this step, while Quine did not.
From a purely historical viewpoint it is interesting to note that they just went in the opposite direction with the passing of time. In the 1950’s Quine shocked analytic philosophers by saying that “The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges […] Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections – the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field.” No doubt this is full-fledged pragmatism in the best tradition of Peirce, James, Dewey and C.I. Lewis. Starting with the 1960’s, however, Quine slowly turned back to logical positivism and linguistic analysis, with the final outcome that a sort of logical monism opposing all kinds of “deviant” logics replaced the pluralistic stance implicit in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” On the one side, the Harvard philosopher ends up supporting a strong version of empiricism, according to which reality is simply (and only) what we can have experience of from the sensory viewpoint; while, on the other, he endorses a sort of logical and linguistic realism, according to which reality is simply (and only) what we are able to express within our language adequately modified by recourse to logical formalization (i.e., first order logic). He does not seem to have a clear perception of the difficulty of putting together the two alternatives just mentioned. His neopositivist legacy led him to a form of radical empiricism, while his logical realism took him in quite a different direction. To all this we must add a strongly behaviourist stance. In the end, this means that Quine only takes into account language on the one side and human behavior on the other. But, of course, we need something else to explain how our language really works. If all that one has to work with is observable behaviour and language use – and nothing else – then one is driven into perplexity by the problem of other minds.
In contrast, Rescher’s evolutionary approach is distant from both behaviourism and linguistic absolutism. In noting that man is an integral part of nature, he claims that “The intellectual mechanisms we devise in coming to grips with the world – in transmuting sensory interaction with nature into intelligible experience – have themselves the aspect of being nature’s contrivances in adjusting to its ways a creature it holds at its mercy. It is no more surprising that man’s mind grasps nature’s ways than it is surprising that man’s eye can accommodate nature’s rays or his stomach nature’s food. Evolutionary pressure can take credit for the lot.” Theoretically, Quine would have nothing to object to such statements, but his rigid behavioristic stance, coupled with the overestimation of the role of language in human knowledge, prevent him from providing a picture broad enough to sustain his self-proclaimed empiricist and naturalistic attitude.
However, some inconsistencies (or tensions, if you prefer) may also be detected in Rescher’s writings. This is particularly evident in the way he deals with the distinction between factual and logical truths. In the late 1960’s he provided a pragmatic philosophy of logic where, endorsing a functionalistic instrumentalism, the choice between various systems of logic is taken to be guided by purpose-relative considerations of effectiveness, efficiency, convenience and economy. Logic, thus, is neither a descriptive discipline nor a Platonic-style search for abstract objects located in a world different from ours, but a man-made manufacture of intellectual tools. Needless to say, this stance agrees with Quine’s pragmatist position in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” A few years later, however, one finds in Rescher’s “The Coherence Theory of Truth” a rather different kind of remark:

Our difference from Quine [in “Two Dogmas”] lies in our refusal to combine logical with factual considerations so as to throw everything at one go into the melting-pot of simultaneous re-evaluation. We are prepared to retain the traditional distinction between logical and factual theses […] The validation of logical machinery […] is to be resolved first with primary reference to the non-empirical domain of mathematical, semantical, and logical considerations […] Only after the mechanisms of logic are secured can we press on […] to deploy coherence mechanisms in the factual domains […] Our own theory envisages a multi-stage process, within each phase of which the logical and the factual sectors are kept separate and treated differently, although, to be sure, there can be feed-back effects going across sector boundaries as one moves from one stage to the next.

Such statements are by no means isolated in Rescher’s works. Thus in 1977 we were told that “Without logic to guide us we might conceivably be in a position to describe how people do reason, but we are muzzled on the topic of how they ought to reason so as to resolve belief-conflicts.” In these and the preceding remarks logic is still held to have a slightly aprioristic character, which establishes its ultimate superiority over praxis. However, the later Rescher no longer endorses such a thesis. Like mathematics, logic is the cross-product of a two-sided story in which nature and our evolutionary-endowed conceptual apparatus play a conjoint game. Nature is always the same, but the conceptual machinery places heavy constraints on nature-as-we-see-it (which, in turn, is the only nature to which we have direct access). This being the situation we face in everyday life, it would be quite misleading to say that logical theses have some kind of priority over the factual ones. We must instead resort to a sort of “holistic circle”. A causal dependence of logical theses from factual ones can be envisioned, without forgetting, however, that a conceptual dependence of factual from logical theses may be detected as well. Rescher’s holistic attitude has it that the realms of logic and factuality are indeed coordinated and interrelated.
Some similarities can, however, be found between Quine’s and Rescher’s approaches to the problem of the relations between ontology and epistemology. Quine’s thought reflects an unexpressed Kantian influence, in the sense that a distinction between linguistic-experiential “phenomena” and non-linguistic “noumena” often surfaces. We can find there two different concepts of reality. According to the first, reality is composed by common sense objects that we perceive through our sensory apparatus. Language differentiates reality into particular objects, which means that, whenever talking about reality, we do it relatively to language. In a second sense, reality is less determined, because it resembles a sort of raw material that produces the flux of experience (a substratum). In Quine’s view (but it should be recalled that often he seems to endorse different positions in this regard) ontological talk rises when the human mind – which cannot be clearly distinguished from language – gives an order to the disordered fragments of raw experience which, in turn, are provided to us by the just mentioned substratum. And, needless to say, this notion closely recalls a concept of non-differentiated reality similar to the Kantian one.
Quine’s ontological criterion does not reveal “what there is,” but is built in order to let us understand what a certain assertion or theory “claims” about reality. From this it would seem to follow that we can never reach reality-in-itself, but only reality-as-we-(humans)-say-it-is. If we now switch the attention from language to thought, and from philosophy of language to the theory of knowledge, Quine’s and Rescher’s pictures do not appear to be very distant. In both cases we have no hope of getting to an absolute ontology, and must therefore admit that an ontology-for-us is the only choice which is available to human beings. Two main differences can at this point be found. In the first place, Rescher never assumes that language has a sort of priority and sees it as one (out of many) forms of human activity. Secondly, in Rescher the creative role of our conceptual machinery is both argued for and supported by his doctrine of conceptual idealism. In Quine, instead, it never transpires in a neat way, probably because an admission of this sort would clearly be at odds with his self-proclaimed empiricist behaviorism.
To sum up, we arrive at the following overview: Quine abandoned his pragmatism of the 1950’s turning into a basically analytic philosopher who keeps some pragmatist elements in his speculative building. Rescher, by contrast, tried for several years to reconcile pragmatism with the ideological tenets of linguistic analysis, turning eventually into a full-fledged pragmatist, whose basic theses are at odds with the ideological tenets of logical empiricism and the analytic tradition at large. Both of them are faithful to analytic “methodology”.
This observation brings us to the second philosopher we will shortly take into account in the present section, i.e. Wilfrid Sellars. The major link between Sellars and Rescher is given by the fact that they are both systematic thinkers. For example, we read with respect to Sellars that:

While much of recent philosophy has been of the piecemeal variety, one contemporary philosopher who has carried on the tradition of philosophy in the “grand manner” is Wilfrid Sellars. His work not only ranges over the various systematic areas of philosophy but unifies the various areas in terms of a distinctive perspective. As a result, while the corpus of most contemporary philosophers is simply the sum of self-intelligible atoms of inquiry, in Sellars’ case the result is a systematic unity. Moreover, his synoptic vision involves not simply a theoretical unification of scientific understanding with our ordinary conception of the world but also embraces the practical dimensions of human existence.

Exactly these same words could apply to Rescher, who often declared his distaste for piecemeal philosophy and expressed a determination to restore a concern for wholeness and system – not by abandoning the penchant for exactness and detail of the pre-war generation, but by fusing details into meaningful structures.
However, while Sellars was not a typically orthodox analytic philosopher, nevertheless, even in his case the dictum that analysis of language provides the best (and, in most cases, the only) way for understanding the world applies. As was the case before with Quine, then, this overvaluation of language analysis marks a first and significant difference between Sellars and Rescher. A second, more specific difference is given by the fact that Sellars held a typically “representationalist” (and, thus, non-pragmatist) theory of knowledge. In other words, we get to know the objects of the world through representations which, in turn, must share with them at least some of their features. A representation is a partial reproduction of “similar” features belonging to the object that we purport to known. Thus Sellars maintained that knowledge is no replica or reproduction, but a sort of “projective” relation between the structure of reality on the one side, and mental states and practical activities on the other. Things must be that way because, otherwise, physical reality would be unknowable to conscience. The main job of conscience is in turn translation, especially with regard to physical events. It follows that it is incorrect to claim that conceptualization prevents our knowledge of an external world. Language truly “describes” the world in the sense that linguistic expressions are nothing but linguistic projections of non-linguistic objects, even though the key notion of “projection” is always given, in Sellars’ writings, a metaphorical meaning, so that it is not clear what he really intended it to be.
Rescher’s holistic and evolutionary epistemology is rather different, since he argues that conceptualization is not a veil that hides the real world, but our way for dealing with it. While in Sellars there seems to be a neat separation between the knowing subject and an amorphous world that waits to be known, in Rescher the relation subject/object has a dynamically interactive character (as in Dewey, for instance). Our capacity to know is not an inevitable feature of conscious organic life, but a peculiarly human instrumentality that can – and must – be explained in terms of evolutionary heritage. So knowledge is not an abstract picturing relation holding in only one direction (i.e., from us to the things), but is itself praxis, stemming from the fact that a rational animal, as such, is practically forced to explain what goes on around him. To put it in another way, knowledge is the outcome of a practical impetus to “coherent information,” so that “information represents a deeply practical requisite for us humans. A basic demand for understanding and cognitive orientation presses in upon us, and we are inexorably impelled towards (and are pragmatically justified in) satisfying that demand.”
Turning once more to the “hermeneutic circle,” we cannot oversimplify a process that is intrinsically very complex. The causal dependence of mind from physical reality is balanced by the conceptual dependence of reality from the mind. As long as we are concerned, we are bound to conceive the world along peculiar lines, which are in turn dictated by the particular niche we have come to occupy in the history of evolution at large. In other words, we “scan” the world in ways that may be very different from that of other living beings. Nothing prevents us from imagining alien intelligent creatures whose view of reality is totally different from ours, because they gear it to physical parameters to which we pay no attention or that we may even be unable to perceive with our sensory apparatus. Sellars is still tied to the typical – and abstract – theory of knowledge of the analytic tradition, while evolutionary epistemology takes Rescher into a radically new path.
A third and major difference has to do with the problem of scientific realism, which plays a pivotal role in both Sellars’ and Rescher’s systems. This happens because these two authors take science seriously, deeming it the best instrument for getting to know reality. On his part, Sellars put forward a constant effort to define the proper place of science in his global view of the human situation. This is his famous “synoptic vision,” defined as follows:

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under ‘things in the broadest possible sense’ I include such radically different items as not only ‘cabbages and kings’, but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death […] It is therefore, the ‘eye on the whole’ which distinguishes the philosophical enterprise […] the philosopher is confronted […] by two pictures of essentially the same order of complexity, each of which purports to be a complete picture of man-in-the-world, and which, after separate scrutiny, he must fuse into one vision. Let me refer to these two perspectives, respectively, as the manifest and the scientific images of man-in-the-world […] by calling them images I do not mean to deny to either or both of them the status of ‘reality.’ I am, to use Husserl’s term, ‘bracketing’ them, transforming them from ways of experiencing the world into objects of philosophical reflection and evaluation.

Sellars then depicts what he calls the “manifest image” in terms that might even recall Rescher’s theses, since he claims that the transition from pre-conceptual patterns of behaviour to conceptual thinking had an holistic character, a sort of jump which determined the coming into being of man. All the great speculative systems of ancient, medieval and modern philosophy have been built around the manifest image of man-in-the world.
As for the second kind of image we mentioned above, Sellars admits that it is an idealization, because there are as many scientific images of man as there are sciences that have something to say about man. Nevertheless, he thinks that there is the scientific image that stems from the many ones which it is supposed to integrate. And we must also note that a typical theoretical image like the scientific one is a construction whose foundations are always provided by the manifest image. This means that the latter has a methodological priority over any theoretical construction. Now, it happens that the two images advance conflicting claims concerning the true and complete account of man-in-the-world, so that any serious philosophy must, nowadays, take such conflicting claims into account in order to evaluate them. Sellars’ conclusion is that the dualism of the two images must be transcended (if only in imagination), because “the conceptual framework of persons is not something that needs to be reconciled with the scientific image, but rather something to be joined to it. Thus, to complete the scientific image we need to enrich it not with more ways of saying what is the case, but with the language of community and individual intentions, so that by construing the actions we intend to do and the circumstances in which we intend to do them in scientific terms, we directly relate the world as conceived by scientific theory to our purposes, and make it our world and no longer an alien appendage to the world in which we do our living.”
No doubt there are many elements of this picture that can be reconciled with Rescher’s general perspective. But Rescher would cast many doubts about the possibility of construing the scientific image (however idealized) as Sellars has it. The Rescherian question in this regard would most likely be: Which scientific image are we talking or thinking about? He would deem a stable synthesis like the envisioned by his former colleague practically unachievable. Unlike the logical positivists, Sellars indeed takes history into account, but he does that only to a limited degree. In other words, one has often the impression that Sellars wrote as if scientific research could come to a resting point, while Rescher argues that we have no evidence that this is the case (or, even better, evidence goes in just the opposite direction). To shed more light on the two perspectives at issue, we may note that, according to Rescher:

One cannot move from scientific knowledge-claims to the objective characterization of reality without the mediating premiss that these claims are substantially correct. And this mediating premiss is not available with respect to existing science – science in the present state-of-the-art – but only with respect to ideal science. Only in the idealized case of an unrealistic perfection can we unproblematically adopt the stance of a theory-realism that holds that the world actually is as theorizing claims it to be. The canonization of the theory-claims of science as reality-descriptive requires the idealized stance that science is substantially correct.

What kind of account of man-in-the-world can an image – which admittedly is an idealization – provide? It should be noted, furthermore, that even the manifest image cannot be taken to be stable. As a matter of fact it continuously evolves, bringing within its framework elements that come from the scientific image.
Sellars’ and Rescher’s points of departure in philosophy are ultimately different. Sellars’s reference point has always been the “received view” of the logical empiricists. Of course he criticized at length their conclusions, but this, after all, remained his conceptual horizon. His criticisms of logical empiricism, in fact, are more internal modifications – sometimes even radical – than real upsets of the neopositivists’ global account of the relations between philosophy and science. In Rescher’s case, instead, the initial fascination with neopositivism was soon replaced by an ever growing critical attitude towards all brands of analytic philosophy. By the end of the 1960’s Rescher’s turn to pragmatism and conceptual idealism was already on its way, to be completed a few years later.

University of Genoa, Italy
Philosophy Department