How Pragmatism Replaced the Classical Commitments: Fuller, Rorty, and the American Recasting of Western Philosophy

 

How Pragmatism Replaced the Classical Commitments: Fuller, Rorty, and the American Recasting of Western Philosophy

Framework: Grant C. Sterling’s Six Commitments. Article under consideration: Steve Fuller, “How America hijacked Western philosophy: Richard Rorty and the reinvention of Pragmatism,” Institute of Art and Ideas, May 28, 2026. Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly.

I. The Issue Fuller Raises

Steve Fuller’s article on Richard Rorty and American Pragmatism is important because it identifies a decisive transformation in modern philosophy. The point is not merely that America produced a philosophical movement called Pragmatism. The deeper point is that Pragmatism did not simply join the Western philosophical tradition. It altered the governing question of philosophy itself.

Classical philosophy asks: What is true? What is real? What is good? What can be known? What is the human being? What is the structure of rational agency?

Pragmatism changes the question. It asks: What works? What has consequences? What does a belief enable us to do? What does a community permit us to say? What future can a vocabulary create?

That shift is not minor. It is a change in philosophical regime.

Fuller’s article is therefore highly relevant to Grant C. Sterling’s Six Commitments because those commitments identify precisely the classical philosophical structure that Pragmatism weakens, displaces, or openly rejects. The Six Commitments are:

1. Substance Dualism
2. Metaphysical Libertarianism
3. Ethical Intuitionism
4. Foundationalism
5. Correspondence Theory of Truth
6. Moral Realism

Fuller’s discussion of Pragmatism, especially Rorty’s neo-pragmatism, can be read as an account of how modern American philosophy replaced this structure with a different one: anti-foundational, anti-representational, anti-realist, social, historical, instrumental, and political.

II. Pragmatism as a Replacement of Truth by Use

The most important line in Fuller’s article is his description of Pragmatism as involving the reduction of meaning and truth to instrumental value. That single idea marks the decisive break.

Under the classical commitment to correspondence truth, a proposition is true because it corresponds to reality. Reality is the measure. The mind does not create truth by finding a useful vocabulary. A community does not make a proposition true by approving it. A belief does not become true because it produces desirable results. Truth is not usefulness. Truth is agreement between judgment and what is.

Pragmatism reverses the order. It shifts attention away from correspondence and toward practical effect. The question becomes not, “Does this proposition correspond to reality?” but, “What difference does holding this proposition make?”

That is the central Sterling objection. Once truth is interpreted through usefulness, the authority of reality over judgment is weakened. The mind no longer stands before the real and submits to it. Instead, thought becomes an instrument for coping, adapting, organizing, persuading, solving, or constructing.

That is not a harmless change of vocabulary. It is the replacement of truth by function.

III. Rorty as the Completion of the Pragmatist Turn

Fuller treats Richard Rorty as the great twentieth-century reviver of Pragmatism. This is accurate, but from Sterling’s perspective Rorty is not merely a reviver. He is the figure who makes explicit what was already latent in the pragmatist project.

Rorty rejects the idea that philosophy is a mirror of nature. He rejects the idea that knowledge consists in accurate representation of reality. He rejects the search for neutral foundations. He rejects the idea that truth has a metaphysical structure independent of human practice. He relocates philosophy into conversation, solidarity, historical contingency, and social hope.

This is why Rorty matters. He does not merely modify classical philosophy. He abandons its governing architecture.

For Sterling, this is a direct assault on the fifth commitment: correspondence theory of truth. If truth is no longer correspondence, then examination is no longer a correspondence audit. Judgment is no longer measured by reality. Philosophy becomes cultural redescription.

Rorty’s position therefore marks a major modern substitution:

• Correspondence is replaced by conversation.
• Reality is replaced by vocabulary.
• Foundations are replaced by contingency.
• Reason is replaced by social practice.
• Moral truth is replaced by liberal hope.

This is the philosophical meaning of Rorty’s neo-pragmatism.

IV. The Collapse of Foundationalism

The second major Sterling commitment challenged by Pragmatism is Foundationalism.

Foundationalism holds that reasoning must ultimately terminate in first principles, basic truths, or bedrock recognitions. Not every belief can be justified by another belief indefinitely. At some point, thought reaches what is immediately known, self-evident, rationally necessary, or otherwise foundational.

Sterling’s Stoic framework depends on this. The proposition that virtue is the only good is not treated as a social convenience. The proposition that externals are neither good nor evil is not treated as one optional vocabulary among others. These are foundational truths within the system. They govern judgment. They are not themselves submitted to cultural fashion.

Pragmatism resists this structure. It treats foundations as suspect. It sees philosophy’s search for final grounds as an illusion inherited from older metaphysics. Rorty radicalizes this suspicion. He wants philosophy to stop searching for foundations and become a form of cultural conversation.

From Sterling’s standpoint, this is not intellectual liberation. It is the dissolution of rational authority. If there are no foundations, then no judgment has final standing. Everything becomes revisable, contingent, historical, conversational, and dependent on communal practice.

That means the mind is no longer disciplined by first principles. It is absorbed into a moving social horizon.

V. Moral Realism Against Pragmatist Historicism

The third conflict concerns Moral Realism.

Moral Realism holds that moral truths are real. Virtue is not good because a society approves it. Vice is not evil because a community condemns it. Moral reality is not created by convention, usefulness, emotional preference, democratic agreement, therapeutic benefit, or historical progress.

For Sterling, this is indispensable. Stoicism stands or falls on the objective distinction between virtue and vice. If virtue is not objectively good, then Stoic ethics collapses into attitude management, preference adjustment, or therapeutic technique.

Pragmatism tends to dissolve this objectivity. It interprets moral judgment through consequences, social practice, reform, experimentation, and future possibility. Dewey makes ethics experimental. Rorty makes ethics literary, liberal, and solidaristic. The good becomes less a reality to be recognized and more a future to be created.

That is a fundamental change. Classical ethics asks the soul to conform itself to moral reality. Pragmatism asks human beings to construct better social futures.

Sterling’s objection is plain: a better future is not the same thing as the good. Social hope is not moral truth. Utility is not virtue. Solidarity is not justice unless it corresponds to what justice really is.

VI. Ethical Intuitionism and the Loss of Direct Moral Recognition

The fourth conflict concerns Ethical Intuitionism.

Ethical Intuitionism holds that some moral truths can be directly recognized. This does not mean emotional preference. It does not mean arbitrary feeling. It means that the rational faculty can apprehend certain moral distinctions without deriving them from empirical utility or social consensus.

This commitment is essential to Sterling’s interpretation of Epictetus. The trained rational faculty sees that externals are not good or evil. It sees that only the use of impressions is morally decisive. It sees that assent, impulse, judgment, and moral purpose belong to the agent in a way externals do not.

Pragmatism relocates moral judgment away from this direct rational recognition and into experimental practice. Moral claims are tested by consequences. Their meaning is found in their use. Their value is interpreted by their role in human problem-solving.

That is why Pragmatism cannot easily preserve Ethical Intuitionism. It does not trust the direct rational apprehension of moral truth. It prefers method, experiment, adjustment, social learning, and historical revision.

From Sterling’s standpoint, this weakens moral perception. It teaches the agent to ask what works before asking what is right.

VII. Substance Dualism and the Naturalistic Drift

Fuller’s article does not focus on Substance Dualism, but the implication is still present.

Classical philosophy often treats the rational subject as more than a biological organism responding to stimuli. Sterling’s framework requires this. The agent is not reducible to body, history, environment, social construction, instinct, or conditioning. The human being is a rational subject capable of judgment, assent, refusal, and moral responsibility.

Pragmatism, especially in Dewey, tends toward naturalism. The human being becomes an organism in an environment. Thought becomes adaptive behavior. Intelligence becomes problem-solving. Truth becomes what enables successful coping.

Rorty is less crudely naturalistic than Dewey, but he is still anti-metaphysical. He does not recover the rational soul. He does not defend the metaphysical distinctness of the agent. He redescribes the human being in linguistic, historical, and social terms.

That is why Pragmatism is structurally inhospitable to Substance Dualism. It does not need a rational soul. It needs an adaptive organism, a language-user, a social participant, a historical inheritor of vocabularies.

Sterling’s view is different. The agent is not merely a node in a practice. The agent is the one who assents or refuses assent. The agent is accountable because the agent is not identical with the stream of impressions, social pressures, bodily reactions, or inherited vocabularies.

VIII. Metaphysical Libertarianism and the Pragmatist Reduction of Agency

The sixth commitment is Metaphysical Libertarianism.

This is the view that the agent has genuine freedom in assent, judgment, and moral choice. Freedom is not merely acting according to one’s conditioning. It is not merely the absence of external constraint. It is not merely behavior flowing from character. It is the real capacity of the rational agent to assent, refuse, suspend, and choose.

Pragmatism has an ambiguous relation to this commitment. William James is the most favorable case. His defense of the will to believe and his concern with real possibility place him closer to libertarian freedom than Dewey or Rorty.

But the broader pragmatist tradition tends to translate agency into practical adjustment. Agency becomes the capacity to navigate experience, solve problems, adopt useful beliefs, and participate in collective inquiry. Freedom becomes functional rather than metaphysical.

Rorty moves even further from Sterling’s position. His emphasis falls on contingency, vocabulary, redescription, and solidarity. The agent is formed by historical vocabularies and seeks freer redescriptions. But this is not the same as metaphysical freedom of assent.

For Sterling, the decisive moment is not redescription. It is assent. The agent is free because the agent can refuse the false appearance of good and evil in externals. No social vocabulary can substitute for that act.

IX. Fuller’s Historical Claim and the American Recasting of Philosophy

Fuller’s article is especially valuable because he does not treat Pragmatism merely as a technical school of philosophy. He presents it as a historical act of philosophical displacement. America did not simply enter the European conversation. It recentered the conversation around itself.

This matters because Pragmatism is not merely a doctrine about truth. It is a civilizational posture. It reflects a culture oriented toward action, innovation, future-making, experimentation, democracy, technology, and expansion. It is philosophy in the image of America.

That is why Fuller’s use of the word “hijacked” is significant. Pragmatism did not inherit the classical philosophical project and continue it faithfully. It redirected the project. It took inherited terms — truth, meaning, reason, morality, philosophy — and reinterpreted them according to a new national and historical spirit.

From Sterling’s perspective, this is exactly how formation traditions operate. A formation tradition does not always deny inherited language. Often it keeps the language while changing the governing commitments beneath it.

Thus Pragmatism can continue to speak of truth while abandoning correspondence. It can speak of morality while abandoning moral realism. It can speak of reason while abandoning foundations. It can speak of agency while abandoning metaphysical freedom. It can speak of philosophy while turning philosophy into cultural politics.

This is why the article is not merely about American philosophy. It is about the replacement of one philosophical grammar by another.

X. The Sterling Diagnosis

Using Sterling’s Six Commitments, the diagnosis is straightforward.

Pragmatism represents a partial or complete rejection of the classical structure:

• Substance Dualism: generally displaced by naturalism, social practice, or anti-metaphysical vocabulary.
• Metaphysical Libertarianism: weakened, except partially in William James; replaced by practical agency and historical contingency.
• Ethical Intuitionism: rejected or marginalized; moral knowledge becomes experimental, practical, and social.
• Foundationalism: directly rejected; foundations become suspect philosophical relics.
• Correspondence Truth: directly rejected or reinterpreted; truth becomes usefulness, justification, or social assertibility.
• Moral Realism: weakened or rejected; moral claims are interpreted through social hope, solidarity, reform, or consequences.

That means Pragmatism is not merely another school within the same philosophical universe. It is a rival universe.

XI. Why Rorty Is the Key Figure

Rorty matters because he removes the hesitation. Earlier Pragmatists sometimes still sound as though they are trying to preserve parts of the older tradition. James retains a sense of moral seriousness and real decision. Peirce retains a stronger concern for inquiry and reality. Dewey retains a public ethic of intelligence and reconstruction.

Rorty cuts deeper. He accepts contingency. He accepts anti-foundationalism. He accepts the abandonment of representation. He accepts philosophy as redescription. He accepts the replacement of metaphysics by cultural politics.

That is why Rorty is the completed form of the modern displacement Fuller describes.

From the Sterling standpoint, Rorty is not dangerous because he is confused. He is dangerous because he is clear. He sees that once correspondence, foundations, and metaphysical realism are abandoned, philosophy cannot continue as before. It must become something else.

And he is willing for it to become something else.

XII. The Deeper Conflict: Reality or History

The final conflict is between reality and history.

The classical commitments say that reason is answerable to reality. The structure of things is not created by historical success. Moral truth is not created by cultural victory. The good is not whatever the future ratifies. Truth is not what survives the conversation.

Pragmatism places history in the commanding position. What matters is what a belief does, what a vocabulary enables, what a community can justify, what future becomes possible.

That is why Fuller’s article touches the central nerve of the Sterling project. Sterling’s Six Commitments are a defense of philosophy against its absorption into history, culture, utility, and social practice.

The Sterling question remains:

Does the judgment correspond to what is?

The pragmatist question is:

What does the judgment enable us to do?

Those questions generate different civilizations of thought.

XIII. Conclusion

Fuller’s article is important because it helps identify Pragmatism as one of the great vehicles by which modern philosophy departed from the classical commitments. America did not merely produce a local school of thought. It produced a philosophical reorientation: from truth to use, from foundations to contingency, from reality to vocabulary, from moral recognition to social hope, from metaphysics to history.

Rorty’s neo-pragmatism is the purified form of that reorientation. It is Pragmatism without embarrassment before the old philosophical court. It no longer asks permission from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, or Hegel. It does not want to represent reality correctly. It wants to redescribe the world in a way that serves human purposes.

Sterling’s Six Commitments stand as the counter-position. They insist that philosophy is not merely redescription. It is not merely social hope. It is not merely practical coping. It is not merely the production of useful vocabularies.

Philosophy is answerability to reality.

Truth is correspondence.

Moral truth is real.

The rational agent is free in assent.

The mind has access to foundational truths.

The good is not made by history.

That is the conflict Fuller’s article exposes. Pragmatism did not simply modify Western philosophy. It changed the subject. Sterling’s Six Commitments restore the original subject.