The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy (2004) defines "neo-pragmatism" as "A postmodern version of pragmatism developed by the American philosopher Richard Rorty and drawing inspiration from authors such as John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Wilfrid Sellars, W. V. O. Quine, and Jacques Derrida".
[3] Neopragmatists, particularly Rorty and Putnam, draw on the ideas of classical pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.
In this tradition, it was thought that truth was obtained when linguistic terms stood in a proper correspondence relation to non-linguistic objects (this can be called "representationalism").
A second critically influential philosopher to the neo-pragmatist is Thomas Kuhn who argued that our languages for representing reality, or what he called "paradigms", are only as good as they produce possible future experiments and observations.
Kuhn was a fallibilist; he believed that all scientific paradigms (e.g. classical Newtonian mechanics, Einsteinian relativity) should be assumed to be, on the whole, false but good for a time as they give scientists new ideas to play around with.
The "later" Ludwig Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations[8] argues contrary to his earlier views in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus[9] that the role of language is not to describe reality but rather to perform certain actions in communities.
Rather than situating our language in ways in order to get things right or correct, Rorty says in the Introduction to the first volume of his philosophical papers that we should believe that beliefs are only habits with which we use to react and adapt to the world.
In 1995, Rorty wrote: "I linguisticize as many pre-linguistic-turn philosophers as I can, in order to read them as prophets of the utopia in which all metaphysical problems have been dissolved, and religion and science have yielded their place to poetry.
"[11] This "linguistic turn" strategy aims to avoid what Rorty sees as the essentialisms ("truth," "reality," "experience") still extant in classical pragmatism.
[...] By focusing our attention on the relation between language and the rest of the world rather than between experience and nature, post-positivistic analytic philosophy was able to make a more radical break with the philosophical tradition.