Rorty characterizes pragmatism as fundamentally anti-representationalist (Cheryl Misak strongly disagrees and considers Rorty to be a false heir of the tradition)
Representationalism is an ideology - that the meaning of thoughts/talk should be principally understood in terms of representational relations the thinkings/sayings stand in to what they (purport to) represent.
It’s a crippling ideology that must be rejected wholesale, no hope of redemption.
It’s synonymous with modern philosophy, so that must be jettisoned too.
Two sides of Wittgenstein:
Tractatus = representationalism (but providing the model for moving beyond it w/r/t logical vocabulary)
Logical tradition from Frege/Russell, operative paradigm of formal calculi for artificial symbolic languages.
Possible world semantics best distillation of its representational approach to meaning
Investigations = anti-representationalism.
Anthropological tradition focuses on natural languages, in tradition of Dewey. Rorty claims Heidegger also in this tradition, which both sides (pragmatists and Heidegger allies) don’t like. Focus is not on meaning but on use.
Arguments:
(Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) - representational in semantics leads to an unproductive oscillation in epistemology between skepticism and foundationalism
Pragmatism about norms
antiauthoritarianism argument (completing the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment)
Simon Blackburn applies local expressivism in order to get a distinctive flavor of antirepresentationalism.
“Fact stating discourse” can be regarded as crucially important without dismissing all other kinds of discourse as defective/reducible.
Expressivism is a broad family of views claiming some areas of discourse are ‘in the business’ of giving expression to sentiments/commitments/non-cognitive or non-representational mental states or attitudes.
Huw Price synthesizes these two strands of anti-representationalism.
Agrees with Rorty that representation should never be used to do substantial explanatory work. They are global antirepresentationalists, which is a radical position currently.
He unites original German global expressivism (beginning with Herder) with second wave local expressivism of Blackburn and Gibbard.
rejects local expressivism, which requires us to distinguish vocabularies which should be given representational analyses or not - however he argues this cannot be done without embracing declarativism which the local expressivists wanted to avoid.
He reads into later Wittgenstein to unite global expressivism with Rorty
involves distinction between traditional object naturalism (how can we reduce facts in terms of natural science truth-makers) and the pragmatist’s subject naturalism (only seeks that reduction for the discursive practices consisting of use of language).
Brandom argues this global antirepresentationalism goes too far - prioritizing use over meaning (i.e. semantics answers to pragmatics) does not rule out representational/descriptivist accounts of vocabularies in general.
Disagrees with Pryce’s argument that local expressivism is not possible.