“Coping with reality”: the Limits of Absolutizing the Pragmatic Approach in Epistemology
RUDN Journal of Philosophy June 30, 2026 Boris Sergeevich Solozhenkin
In twentieth-century pragmatist thought, a conflict emerged between two epistemological orientations: coping with (interaction) and copy (representation). Richard Rorty’s philosophy, along with radical constructivism, embraces coping while rejecting copy as an explanation for cognition. This work argues that completely rejecting copy is unfeasible: Rorty’s model, like any absolutization of the constructive aspect of cognition, contains a hidden form of asserting the real, forming an “exhausted realism.” Drawing on enactivism, the authors describe three ways the “real” impacts constructive activities. Anti-representationalism is practically inadequate, worsened by Rorty’s understanding of practice and language. The article justifies the absolutization of coping through the classic opposition between knowledge-how and knowledge-that, which reflect different tasks and modes of legitimizing knowledge. Coping is structurally linked to copy, just as practice is linked to reality.