Education as edification: Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatist philosophy of education

Rorty draws from pragmatism, conversation, edification, and hermeneutics, but in spite of his reference to Dewey’s thesis on pragmatism, Rorty’s notion of ‘pragmatism’ is not offered as an idea of something that might fill the gaps left by slowly dying traditional philosophy. It is rather a more relaxed attitude of mind. He goes beyond the traditional notion of pragmatism and insists that the search should not focus on truth but on solidarity, in other words, what we as a group of people create and decide what is true. Truth, for Rorty, is a society’s exercise and agreement of what is true. It is achieved by discourse and not limited conversations. In order to educate a person as an individual who lives in a particular society with all the factors contributing to his/her growth, Rorty adopts a new word for education, namely edification, with its philosophical consequences. He draws on the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer to explore the idea of ‘edification,’ a word Rorty uses to gloss Gadamer’s Bildung (education, self-formation) (Rorty 1979).