In his new book Meaning and Modernity: Social Theory in the Pragmatic Attitude, Rochberg-Halton uses Fritz Janschka's painting of 1948 Wohin gehst Du? as a central illustration of his thesis. Janschka's painting depicts a 'bombed-out Boschian/Flemish village' in which isolated people stand, each clutching an 'icon' of the Western tradition. Rochberg-Halton finds the 'catastrophic situation' the painting depicts to reflect the modem condition -a condition dominated by 'cultural nominalism.' Cultural nominalism has helped to create a world of individuals whose actions are motivated no longer by sympathy or a sense of community but by empty labels and slogans. It is a world governed by 'generic generals.'
Where are we? Apparently nowhere we want to be. Where are we going? If nothing changes, nowhere we want to go. Where, then, should we be going? Rochberg-Halton argues that, confronted as we are with the failures of cultural nominalism, we should consider pragmatism -especially as articulated by C.S. Peirce -as a serious mode of understanding and transforming the world.
I. The book is divided into four parts. The first introduces us to pragmatism through an analysis of the multifarious claims made by its proponents. Rochberg-Halton argues that social theory would do well to pay attention to the pragmatic notions of living inquiry, qualitative immediacy, and iconicity. The second part is a critique of positivistic semiotic theory. [The section on the foundations of modem semiotics is co-authored by Kevin McMurtey]. By contrasting pragmatic and positivistic interpretations of sign, situation, structure, and meaning, the author shows how under positivistic interpretation these notions have led to a fetishism of signs, an