What We Say and What We Do: A Rortian Perspective on Justification

Abstract

In his work on the Putnam-Rorty debate, Luis Robledo supposes a reductionist conception of Rorty's notion of justification, and, against it, he defends the independence between justification and consensus, through the argument of the possibility of consensus without justification. From his point of view, not supporting such an independence would lead pragmatism to problematic situations. In this work, I will try to present an alternative, non-reductionist perspective of Rorty's notion of justification, a perspective that, even when it doesn't accept a total independence between consensus and justification, avoids those problematic situations, and, besides, shows Robledo's example as not within the spirit of pragmatism.