Abstract
Most transcendental arguments are anti-sceptical and anti-reductionist, claiming that the reduced world the skeptic holds out as the only legitimate option is not a genuine alternative. They have as their paradigm Kant’s arguments against Hume. Such arguments fortify those philosophers who want to insist, with Kant, that there is such a thing as philosophical criticism of the rest of culture — that the philosopher can say something which science cannot about the claims to objectivity and rationality to which various parts of culture are entitled. Thought of in this way, transcendental arguments seem the only hope for philosophy as an autonomous critical discipline, the only way to say something about human knowledge which is clearly distinguishable from psychophysics on the one hand and from history and sociology of knowledge on the other.
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Notes
Bubner, Rudiger, ‘Kant, Transcendental Arguments, and the Problem of the Deduction’, Review of Metaphysics 28 (1928), 455–6. All further references by page number to Bubner are to this article.
Strawson, P. F., Individuals, London 1959, p. 35.
Sellars, Wilfrid, Science and Metaphysics, London and New York 1968, p. 142.
Cf. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, The Blue and Brown Books, Oxford 1958, pp. 24, 34.
Rosenberg, Jay, Linguistic Representation, Dordrecht 1974, pp. 117–118. Further references to Rosenberg, unless otherwise indicated, are to this volume.
See Sellars, Wilfrid, Science, Perception and Reality, London and New York 1963, pp. 157–161.
Davidson, Donald, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, 1973, p. 11.
Keith Lehrer, ‘Skepticism and Conceptual Change’ in Empirical Knowledge: Readings from Contemporary Sources, (ed. by Roderick M. Chisholm and Robert J. Swartz ), Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1973, p. 50.
Hilary Putnam, ‘What Is Realism?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1976, p. 184.
This article appeared in Synthese 7 (1967), 304–23. See also Davidson’s True to the Facts’, The Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969), 158–74, and his ‘In Defence of Convention T’ in Truth, Syntax, and Modality (ed. by H. Leblance), North Holland, Amsterdam, 1973. For some good comment on these papers, and an attempt to fill out the larger picture which they adumbrate, see Chapter 12 of Ian Hacking’s Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy’., Cambridge 1975.
For this notion of the function of canonical notation, cf. Quine, Word and Object, Cambridge, Mass. 1960, p. 161. For the reference to adventitious puritanism, see Davidson, ‘Truth and Meaning’, p. 316.
For the first phrase, sec Sellars, Wilfrid, Science and Metaphysics, London and New York 1968, p. 52n. For the sccond, see Strawson, P. F., The Bounds of Sense, London 1966, p. 32.
I borrow this formulation of the problem of ‘transcendental grounding’ from Apel, K.-O., ‘The Problem of Philosophical Fundamental-Grounding in light of a Transcendental Pragmatic of Language’, Man and World, 1975.
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© 1979 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Rorty, R. (1979). Transcendental Arguments, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism. In: Bieri, P., Horstmann, RP., Krüger, L. (eds) Transcendental Arguments and Science. Synthese Library, vol 133. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9410-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-9410-2_7
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