Antirepresentationalism

The article reconstructs Rorty’s dismissal of realist positions in epistemology and semantics, his reframing of the realist claim that the world is determinate, material, and independent from our thoughts and descriptions, his position regarding scientific realism, and the comforting role that truth and realism play in metaphysical realism. Further, the article addresses the open question of whether Rorty had a realist turn toward the end of his career.

Anarchist movements have been a prominent feature of the twenty-first-century political landscape, providing the basis for modes of political engagement that foreground the necessity of unmediated direct action and horizontal organisation, in pursuit of the eradication of all forms of domination. This thesis frames contemporary anarchist movements and subcultures in the United States as sites of literary production, and examines the texts produced in these spaces in terms of their literary functions, resonances and inheritances. It proposes as a theoretical orientation an anarchist literary instrumentalism, which draws extensively on Deleuze and Guattari’s work on representation and the possibilities of a non-representational philosophy. This approach takes anarchism’s critique of representation as the basis for a new approach to texts which casts them as tools in political struggle. Anarchist texts are read for the political effects they produce, and the ways representation is negotiated and, to differing extents, evaded.

In subsequent chapters, attention is turned to a series of formal and generic orientations in contemporary U.S. anarchist literature. First, anarcha-feminist “consent zines” are considered: do-it-yourself texts that develop responses to abuse and interpersonal violence, and in so doing develop an account of an anarchist domesticity. Second, the thesis looks at communiqués and report-backs produced by anarchists during the anti-globalisation movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s: narrative and reflective texts that describe, in terms that manifest the preoccupations of contemporary literature with embodiment and temporality, the experience of collective action on the streets. Finally, the thesis turns to texts associated with nomadic anarchist “dropout cultures”. These texts, including several published by the CrimethInc. collective, are marked by a preoccupation with problems of hypocrisy and complicity: how, they ask, can one live an authentically anarchist life amidst the excesses of American consumer culture? This thesis contends that an instrumentalist approach which, in terms suggested by Deleuze and Guattari, follows texts’ effects rather than seeking to evaluate them, is both a necessary orientation for comprehending contemporary U.S. anarchist literature, and one that is capable of reflecting upon and responding to anarchist political commitments.

There is a well-known tension in Rorty when it comes to our linguistic agency. Famously, Rorty follows Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson and others in that there are no private languages. However, in Rorty, the innovator of our language is an individual-the "strong poet"-who Brandom calls Rorty's "genius self". This tension in Rorty is well described and has been problematized many times and from various angles. Going against the common compulsion to mitigate Rorty's commitment to individuality and normative detachment, this article provides a rationale for what I will call Rorty's "vocabulary of rupture" which follows a) from fully implementing Rorty's particular version of antirepresentationalism and b) from taking temporality into account. Concerning a) once we embrace that words and theories do not represent the world as it is in itself but rather function to serve particular aims, there are contexts in which insisting on the possibility of normative detachment becomes interesting and worth pursuing. This is the case when the aim of writing is to motivate people to engage in democratic practices and embark on creative endeavors. As for b) once we bring temporality into play, we can switch between the Davidsonian perspectives of triangulation and radical interpretation and freely choose which perspective to favor for describing the moment of emergence of new vocabularies-that is either the first or the third-person account of meaning.

There is a famous puzzle in Rorty scholarship: Did or did Rorty not subscribe to a form of realism and truth when he made concessions regarding objectivity to Bjørn Ramberg in 2000? Relatedly, why did Rorty agree with Ramberg but nevertheless insist upon disagreeing with Brandom, though large parts of the research community hold their two respective requests for shifts in Rorty’s stance to be congruous? The present article takes up the discussion and tries, for the first time, to make sense of Rorty’s insistence that there is a difference between Brandom’s notion of “made true by facts” and Ramberg’s notion of “getting things right” by showing that Ramberg’s appropriateness-conditions are fully compatible with Rorty’s revised interpretation of Davidson’s concept of “triangulation,” whereas Brandom’s inferential “made-true-by-facts”-language game is not. The reason why Rorty agrees with Ramberg but not with Brandom, I argue, is that Brandom’s contemporary concept of objectivity, as developed in his contribution to the debate and in his Making It Explicit, works with a scheme-content distinction, whereas Ramberg’s Davidson-based version does not. As many of his critics suppose, Rorty’s concession to Ramberg entails a substantive revision of Rorty’s position, not just a clarification. However, this new position is not in conflict with Rorty’s most important commitment, namely his anti-authoritarianism. The revised account still does not bind him to the forms of realism and truth that his critics favor. The article explains to which forms of realism and truth Rorty’s concessions to Ramberg commit him instead.

Philosophers interested in the theoretical consequences of predictive processing often assume that predictive processing is an inferentialist and representationalist theory of cognition. More specifically, they assume that predictive processing revolves around approximated Bayesian inferences drawn by inverting a generative model. Generative models, in turn, are said to be structural representations: representational vehicles that represent their targets by being structurally similar to them.
Here, I challenge this assumption, claiming that, at present, it lacks an adequate justification. I examine the only argument offered to establish that generative models are structural representations, and argue that it does not substantiate the desired conclusion. Having so done, I consider a number of alternative arguments aimed at showing that the relevant structural similarity obtains, and argue that all these arguments are unconvincing for a variety of reasons. I then conclude the paper by briefly highlighting three themes that might be relevant for further investigation on the matter.

In this paper, I argue that radical constructivists shall refrain from using formulations such as " We can only experience our constructed world but never reality as it is in itself ". Ernst von Glasersfeld's claim that knowledge in principle cannot reflect reality is symptomatic in this respect (von Glasersfeld 1981, 95). The problem is that many radical constructivists take these formulations and the idea behind it for granted – although they are self-contradictory. To resolve this problem, I propose that constructivists are well advised to adopt Richard Rorty's " antirepresentationalist particularism ". In this way we do not answer the problem of self-contradiction in an argumentative way, but we lose interest in making such problematic statements. As I take it, after we freed ourselves from the ensnarement of such statements forced upon us by philosophical tradition, radical constructivism becomes even more fascinating and enchanting. 2

The aim of this paper is to explore the minimal representational requirements for pointing. One year old children are capable of pointing – what does this tell us about their representational capacities? We analyse three options: (a) Pointing presupposes non-perceptual representations (b) Pointing does not presuppose any representation at all (c) Pointing presupposes perceptual representations Rather than fully endorsing any of these three options, the aim of the paper is to explore the advantages and disadvantages of each.