Gadamer’s Hermeneutics in Rorty’s Neopragmatism: Philosophy as “Conversation”

Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism was influenced by many sources, from John Dewey’s classical pragmatism to postmodern “postphilosophical” concepts. Despite the harsh criticism of analytic philosophy, his style bears a significant imprint of the latter’s argumentative methods. His promotion of the subject of continental philosophy in America was accompanied by the adoption of its methods, in particular, hermeneutics as an alternative to scientism. Bringing Rorty’s concept of language to the fore is thus a combination of contradictory processes: on the one hand, the revision of the famous Linguistic Turn and, on the other hand, the concept of philosophy as “the conversation of mankind”. Although separated by time, these two tendencies nevertheless continued to conflict in Rorty’ s works, and one of the manifestations of this conflict is the implicit opposition of the methods of argumentation and hermeneutics in non-pragmatism. The article analyzes Rorty’s idea of the place of hermeneutics, especially in the Gadamer style, in the conflict of scientist pragmatism and continental philosophy’s postmodernism. Rorty’s borrowing of the concept of conversation leads to a collision of two linguistic manifestations-argumentation and rhetoric. The tendency of preference for rhetoric in this situation is one of the important doctrines of the so-called “new neopragmatism” of Richard Bernstein and Joseph Margolis. Rorty’s position is controversial: in his writings, the argumentative technique of the scientist type is gradually replaced by a hermeneutic interpretation. The aim of this article is to demonstrate several examples of the transformation of argumentation into rhetoric as a philosophical method. According to Gadamer’s hermeneutics, understanding cannot surpass description, and, besides, there can be no single correct description of nature. Based on this, Rorty concludes that no “insights” of scientists can claim a privileged description if it is based on argument. This is a justification for the fact that rhetoric should be the main tool in the methodology of new neopragmatism. It is shown that Rorty’s efforts are aimed at understanding how Gadamer’s description of philosophical thought can be integrated with alternative descriptions used by analytic philosophers.

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