Rorty and Reference

Jamie Smith (Who’s Afraid of Relativism?) defends Richard Rorty against the charge that he leaves behind an antirealism that implies we cannot refer to the world, perhaps an antirealism that denies the existence of extra-linguistic things.In Smith’s summary, “realist critics . . . . Continue Reading »

City of Language

In Who’s Afraid of Relativism?, his recent brief for Christian pragmatism as a philosophy of contingency and creaturehood, James KA Smith summarizes a wonderful little analogy from Wittgenstein: “Language [is] a city. While referentialist theories of meaning might recognize . . . . Continue Reading »