ABSTRACT
At a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, when John Dewey was eighty, William Pepperell Montague praised him for practicalizing intelligence. Dewey replied that this mistook his aim; he wanted to intellectualize practice. The contribution of pragmatism that Richard Rorty chiefly invokes is William James’s account of truth as what is better in the way of belief. He insists that this is not a theory of truth but simply shelving the question of correspondence. Rorty is too learned not to know that anti-philosophy has been one of the great philosophical traditions. He does not, however, appear content simply to add “Against the dichotomies” to Sextus Empiricus’ “Against the logicians”, physicists, ethicists. Our two case studies of Dewey’s development show the role of growing knowledge and its impact on philosophical ideas. That Rorty neglects this dimension explains why he takes pragmatism out of the mainstream of philosophy and sees it as overcoming the tradition.
