Rorty, Geertz, Brandom, and Peirce: Using Pragmatist thought to Resolve Ethical Dilemmas of Post-Colonial Legacies

Iyko Day, writing about Asian American racialization and settler colonialism, identifies a dichotomy regarding Asians: as a racial identity, they have historically been treated both as a foreign threat that needs to be neutralized and as a critical cog in the machine of the American Empire. Richard Rorty argues that truths are not objective, nor are they normative, but instead a matter of relating a foreign principle to one’s own truth conditions that must be assumed to be held in common with the other. Clifford Geertz uses the case of “The Drunken Indian and the Kidney Machine” to challenge Rorty’s views of the world, arguing that the historical background and trauma should be evaluated in ethical hypotheticals. Rorty responds in “Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers” that a model of procedural justice must be used to resolve ethical dilemmas. The identity of the people involved in the certain circumstances is irrelevant. This paper uses the epistemological frameworks of philosophers to explore the question of whether pragmatism allows for historical inquiries into the impact of post-colonialism, particularly in Asian American spaces. This paper compares Rorty and Geertz’s worldviews with those of pragmatist philosophers Robert Brandom and Charles Peirce. Brandom and Peirce’s theory leaves a gray area for whether procedural justice is the best mode of evaluation, but at the very least allows for the possibility of an alternate historical inquiry, which highlights the need in the 21st century for middle ground.