RORTY’S NEOPRAGMATISM AND THE IMPERATIVE OF THE DISCOURSE OF AFRICAN EPISTEMOLOGY
RORTY’S NEOPRAGMATISM AND THE IMPERATIVE OF THE DISCOURSE OF AFRICAN EPISTEMOLOGY

Summary/Abstract: Pragmatism, as a philosophical movement, was a dominant orientation in the Anglo-American philosophical circles in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Pragmatism, as expressed by its classical advocates, namely, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey, emphasized the primacy of practice or action over speculative thought and a priori reasoning. The central thesis of pragmatism (though there exist other variants) is the belief that the meaning of an idea or a proposition lies in its “observable practical consequences”, And as a theory of truth, it diverges from the correspondence and coherence theories which see truth in terms of correspondence of a proposition to facts and coherence of propositions to other propositions within the web respectively, but instead contends that “truth is to be found in the process of verification”. In other words, pragmatists would emphasize the practical utility or “cash value”, as it were, of knowledge and ideas as instruments for understanding reality. Neopragmatism is used to refer to some contemporary thinkers whose views incorporate in a significant way, though with minor differences bordering on methodology and conceptual analysis, the insights of the classical pragmatists. Our intention in this paper is to explore Rorty’s neopragmatism, particularly his critique of analytic philosophy and then argue that his views have potential for the establishment of African epistemology as an emerging discourse within the African philosophical tradition.

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