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PRAGMATISM, OBJECTIVITY, AND EXPERIENCE
In this book, Steven Levine explores the relation between objectivity and experience from a pragmatic point of view. Like many new pragmatists, he aims to rehabilitate objectivity in the wake of Richard Rorty’s rejection of the concept. But he challenges the idea, put forward by pragmatists like Robert Brandom, that objectivity is best rehabilitated in communicative-theoretic terms – namely, in terms that can be cashed out by capacities that agents gain through linguistic communication. Levine proposes instead that objectivity is best understood in experiential-theoretic terms. He explains how, in order to meet the aims of the new pragmatists, we need to do more than see objectivity as a norm of rationality embedded in our social-linguistic practices; we also need to see it as emergent from our experiential interaction with the world. Innovative and carefully argued, this book redeems and reactualizes for contemporary philosophy a key insight developed by the classical pragmatists. is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He has published articles on the work of Sellars, Brandom, McDowell, and Davidson, as well as on a range of issues in classical and contemporary pragmatism.
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Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. UCL, Institute of Education, on 20 Dec 2019 at 04:58:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108525534
PRAGMATISM, OBJECTIVITY, AND EXPERIENCE STEVEN LEVINE University of Massachusetts Boston
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. UCL, Institute of Education, on 20 Dec 2019 at 04:58:54, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108525534
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