“Coping with reality”: the Limits of Absolutizing the Pragmatic Approach in Epistemology

Abstract

In twentieth-century pragmatist thought, a conflict emerged between two epistemological orientations, expressed through the metaphors of coping with (interaction) and copy (representation). This work examines the reductionist approach to resolving this conflict. The starting point is Richard Rorty’s philosophy, which, alongside radical constructivism, embraces the metaphor of coping with while rejecting copy as an explanation for cognitive activity. However, the complete rejection of copy is hardly feasible: we demonstrate why Rorty’s model, like any other that absolutizes the constructive, instrumentalist aspect of cognition, contains a hidden form of asserting the real. In its attempt to escape metaphysical heritage, relativist thinking forms its own “exhausted realism”. Following pragmatist reasoning, we describe, drawing on examples from enactivism, three ways in which the “real” impacts our constructive activities, considered both in passive and active terms. Together, these three arguments highlight the practical inadequacy of anti-representationalism, which is further exacerbated by Rorty’s specific understanding of the practice-language relationship. After examining some paradoxical consequences of his interpretation, related to the underdevelopment of the category of practice and the elimination of pre-linguistic forms of experience, we proceed to justify the emergence of such a solution as the absolutization of coping with . This involves the classic opposition between “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-that”. These not only reflect two different tasks facing human cognition but also two modes of legitimizing knowledge. The attainment of certainty occurs both through the satisfaction of practical interests and through the construction of accurate descriptions that reveal the essence of “what is” in the world. Prioritizing one of these ways is inevitable in the course of cognition, depending on the task at hand. However, given the problems discussed in the article, this prioritization cannot be final: coping is structurally linked to copy , just as practice is linked to reality.