MARK
LILLA
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Wittgenstein himself, in his later years, rejected the "cor–
respondence" theory of language put forward in his
Tractatus-
the
view that language can be related in direct connection to things in
the world - arguing instead in the
Philosophical Investigations
that
language can only express a "coherent" view of the world, the truth
of which cannot be determined outside that language . Different ar–
guments against "correspondence" theories in logic and language
have been put forward by W. V . Quine and Donald Davidson as
well. In the past several decades this question of "correspondence
versus coherence" has been at the root of philosophic and historical
disputes about science, with Thomas Kuhn and others chipping
away at the "realist" picture of the foundations of the modern scien–
tific enterprise .
This disjointed critical tendency has lately come to be called
"antifoundationalism," to distinguish it from the "foundationalism"
implicit in the Anglo-American absorption with technical questions
of logic , language, and scientific method; "foundationalism" has
become a widely, if vaguely, used pejoration meant to criticize the
belief that such inquiry will eventually undergird timeless, invariant
facts and judgments. The recent work of Nelson Goodman, Hilary
Putnam, and Richard Rorty can be considered a culmination of this
recent critical turn within twentieth century academic philosophy .
Each has taken account of the antifoundationalist arguments which
have been made separately with regard to language, science, logic,
and epistemology, and each has distilled them into quite powerful
critiques of the foundational program of modern analytic philoso–
phy . The differences between Goodman, Putnam, and Rorty remain
large : each has a different view of "what went wrong" with analytic
philosophy, and they disagree sharply about the future of philoso–
phy . But for the first time in decades the attention of professional
philosophy is focussed on a common set of questions, the answers to
which may determine the character of what, for lack of a better term,
might be called "postmodern philosophy."
Academic philosophy, given its technical preoccupations with
method , has been peripheral to American intellectual life for some
time; apart from a now dormant interest in Deweyan pragmatism
and a flirtation with European existentialism, intellectuals as a
group have not "kept up" with contemporary American philosophy
for decades. I do not think it an exaggeration to say that the work of
Goodman, Putnam, and Rorty could change all that. For not only
