The Irenic Turn: Neo-Pragmatism Beyond Anti-Representationalism

Neo-pragmatism took shape in Rorty’s opposition to representationalism. Brandom and Price have since moderated that opposition while maintaining its framing, obscuring how much their views share with the analytic mainstream. This paper develops and defends irenic pragmatism not as a partisan thesis but as a core position in philosophy of language: a practice-level, metaphysically minimalist framework that representationalists and their ‘anti-representationalist’ critics can equally accept before adding the further commitments that distinguish their views. In doing so, it completes what I call the irenic turn in neo-pragmatism. I first disambiguate Price’s self-described ‘global anti-representationalism’ into four distinct theses. Two of these exhaust his actual position, which I argue lies much closer to the representationalist mainstream than the label suggests. I then introduce meaning quietism: a stance that declines to identify meaning with either inferential role or any semantic link between language and reality. Building on Price’s distinction between i-representation and e-representation, I develop practice-level accounts of truth and of two corresponding kinds of facts—i-facts and e-facts. Finally, I refine Price’s cluster concept of representation through a taxonomy distinguishing physical from symbolic e-representation, with the latter subdivided into linguistic, diagrammatic, and formal types. Symbolic e-representations turn out to be a subset of i-representations, distinguished not by anything intrinsic to the representations but by whether a community is entitled to treat them as world-directed. The resulting framework explains how language functions in inference, justification, and inquiry while leaving the metaphysics of meaning and representation as optional elaborations upon the shared practice-level core.