Peirce’s concept of science entails that normative judgment in science, about which types of theory or explanation or evidence, etc., are good, must depend on the evidence provided by the experience of inquiring (Chapter 2), a thesis supported by the history of science (Chapter 3). This implies a method, at once empirical and normative, which Peirce’s late sketch of a trio of ’normative sciences’ (aesthetics, ethics, logic) generalizes and rationalizes. Its generalization is supported by Peirce’s expansion of empiricism (Chapter 7), and its rationalization depends on the rediscovery of final causation (Chapter 6). Although sketchy, Peirce’s idea of normative sciences is important; for its plausibility undermines that most pernicious of dichotomies, of fact and value. This chapter explicates Peirce’s idea of normative science, traces its method from Schiller’s aesthetics through Kant’s ethics, and suggests that the rediscovery of final causation corrects what is most problematic in Kant’s metaphysics of morals, viz., its anti-naturalism.

This chapter introduces the book’s key aims: showing how a logical possibility operator helps formulate potentialist set theory, intuitively justify the ZFC axioms, clarify applied mathematics and more.

This chapter presents (and notes certain advantages of) a basic modal if-thenist strategy for nominalistically paraphrasing Platonism theories in response to indispensability arguments.

This chapter presents the referentialist revolution that occurred in 1970 through the new arguments, notions, and theses it introduced in semantics and philosophy. In particular, it introduces modal, semantic, and epistemic arguments against descriptivism, the central concept of a rigid designator, and the theses of semantic externalism and Direct Reference.

Rorty believed that taking the linguistic turn meant rejecting the idea of “immediate experience,” and he was equally certain that philosophy had nothing of value to offer social and political theory. Those convictions distinguished his version of neopragmatism from those of his contemporaries Hillary Putnam, Ruth Anna Putnam, and Richard J. Bernstein, and from the ideas of his predecessors William James and John Dewey. In his last book, Achieving Our Country, Rorty sought to respond to the critics who challenged his public/private dualism by aligning himself with the Cold War-era labor movement. He remained unwilling, however, to acknowledge the costs of moving from the social democratic “historical Dewey” to his preferred “hypothetical Dewey,” an insouciant proto-Rorty who attributed progressive changes to “lucky accidents” and championed the poetized culture of liberal ironism over the hard work of forging new democratic alliances among a new generation of activists inspired by demands for recognition as well as redistribution.