A work of rhetoric is pragmatic; it comes into existence for the sake of something beyond itself; it functions ultimately to produce action or change in the world; it performs some tasks. In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action. The rhetor alters reality by bringing into existence a discourse of such a character that the audience, in thought and action, is so engaged that it becomes mediator of change.

One of the few domains in which I am a consistent pragmatist is pragmatism itself: use it when it is useful, but don’t when it isn’t.

On the one hand, from the normative point of view, there is no ‘outside’; wherever we stand, we are always, to use a Sellarsian turn of phrase, inside the practice of giving and asking for reasons. Yet it is also quite clear that we can take an ‘outside’ point of view on our own reasons and, still standing within the space of reasons, look at our own and others’ claims as the products of class, history, self-deception, as expressions of some kind of depth psychology, and so on.

As I see it, the whole point of pragmatism is to insist that we human beings are answerable only to one another. We are answerable only to those who answer to us – only to conversation partners. We are not responsible either to the atoms or to God, at least not until they start conversing with us.

Everything which is not a matter of social practice is no help in understanding the justification of human knowledge.

We know many things, and will learn more; what we will never know for certain is which of the things we believe are true. Since it is neither a visible target, nor recognizable when achieved, there is no point in calling truth a goal. Truth is not a value, so the ‘pursuit of truth’ is an empty enterprise unless it means only that it is often worthwhile to increase our confidence in our beliefs, by collecting further evidence or checking our calculations. From the fact that we will never be able to tell which of our beliefs are true, pragmatists conclude that we may as well identify our best researched, most successful beliefs with the true ones, and give up the idea of objectivity. […] But here we have a choice. Instead of giving up the traditional view that truth is objective, we can give up the equally traditional view (to which the pragmatists adhere) that truth is a norm, something for which to strive. I agree with the pragmatists that we can’t consistently take truth to be both objective and something to be pursued. But I think that they would have done better to cleave to a view that counts truth as objective, but pointless as a goal.