This article has two main objectives: 1) to compare how two of the most influential contemporary thinkers, Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas, relate to the legacy of American philosophical pragmatism and 2) to use this case to illustrate a meta-theoretical proposal of mine. The Rorty/Habermas comparison will allow me to present what I refer to as "dialogical pluralism", that is, a theoretical and methodological perspective which, inspired by the American pragmatism of Dewey and Mead, refuses to adopt the separation between theory and history of theory. On the contrary, the dialogical pluralism that I propose conceives social sciences’ past as a repository of forgotten treasures that must be urgently reconstructed in order to better solve the problems of our time.
Habermas; Rorty; dialogical pluralism; pragmatism