Rorty's neo-pragmatist rhetoric in viewing Kuhn's relativism

The article deals with Rorty's non-pragmatist position in relation to the relativistic history of science represented by Kuhn in the concept of the structure of scientific revolutions. The transfer of the basic ingredients of Kuhn's methodology of science to philosophy required Rorty to introduce a new rhetoric for the pragmatic version of relativism. Central to this rhetoric is the conception of the fallacy of the epistemic-ontological hierarchy inherent in Kuhn's concept. In this hierarchy, the natural sciences occupy a higher position in knowledge than humanitarian studies of the nature of society and man. The neo-pragmatist rhetoric introduced by Rorty has two goals: on the one hand, to discredit the epis-temic-ontological hierarchy by presenting his vision of the development of the natural sciences in the spirit of extreme relativism; on the other hand, to get close to Kuhn's relativism as a paradigm shift. It is shown, firstly, that Kuhn did not accept the identification of his concept with Rorty's relativism, and secondly, that Rorty's non-pragmatist philosophy requires its autonomy from the natural sciences, which reinforces the contradictions between Rorty and Kuhn. In trying to overcome these contradictions, Rorty calls himself a philosopher of “the only marginally ‘analytical' kind - the kind with a lot of literary interests, a fondness for metaphor, and other symptoms of intellectual squishiness.” This rhetoric illustrates the basic contradiction in Rorty's philosophy: the desire to unite completely different figures into the concept of “reactive” non-systematic abnormal philosophy as an alternative to the analytic philosophy he tailored.

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