## 1. Biographical Sketch



Richard McKay Rorty was born on October 4th, 1931, in New York City.
He grew up, as he recounts in *Achieving Our Country* (1998,
hereafter AOC), "on the anti-communist reformist Left in
mid-century" (AOC, 59), within a circle combining anti-Stalinism
with leftist social activism. "In that circle," Rorty
tells us, "American patriotism, redistributionist economics,
anticommunism, and Deweyan pragmatism went together easily and
naturally" (AOC, 61). In 1946, Rorty went to the University of
Chicago, to a philosophy department which at that time included
Rudolph Carnap, Charles Hartshorne, and Richard McKeon, all of whom
were Rorty's teachers. After receiving his BA in 1949, Rorty
stayed on at Chicago to complete an M.A. (1952) with a thesis on
Whitehead supervised by Hartshorne. From 1952 to 1956 Rorty was at
Yale, where he wrote a dissertation entitled "The Concept of
Potentiality." His supervisor was Paul Weiss. After the
completion of his Ph.D., followed by two years in the army, Rorty
received his first academic appointment, at Wellesley College. In
1961, after three years at Wellesley, Rorty moved to Princeton
University where he stayed until he went to the University of
Virginia, in 1982, as Kenan Professor of the Humanities. Rorty left
the University of Virginia in 1998, accepting an appointment in the
Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. In the
course of his career, Rorty received several academic awards and
honours, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1973-74) and a
MacArthur Fellowship (1981-1986). He held a number of
prestigious lectureships, giving, among others, the Northcliffe
Lectures at University College, London (1986), the Clark Lectures at
Trinity College, Cambridge (1987), and the Massey Lectures at Harvard
(1997). Rorty died on June 8th, 2007.


## 2. Against Epistemology



On Rorty's account, modern epistemology is not only an attempt
to legitimate our claim to knowledge of what is real, but also an
attempt to legitimate philosophical reflection itself - a
pressing task, on many accounts, once the advent of the so-called
*new science* of the sixteenth and seventeenth century
gradually gave content to a notion of knowledge obtained by the
methodological interrogation of nature itself. Because the result of
this kind of interrogation, theoretical empirical knowledge, is so
obviously fruitful, and also carries with it seemingly uncontentious
norms of progress, its mere presence poses a legitimation challenge to
a form of thought, and claim to knowledge, that is distinct from it.
Cartesian epistemology, in Rorty's picture, is designed to meet
this challenge. It is sceptical in a fundamental way; sceptical doubts
of a Cartesian sort, that is, doubts that can be raised about any set
of empirical claims whatever, and so cannot be alleviated by
experience, are tailor-made to preserve at once a domain and a job for
philosophical reflection. Rorty's aim in PMN is to undermine the
assumptions in light of which this double legitimation project makes
sense.


### 2.1 Epistemological Behaviorism



That any vocabulary is optional and mutable is the basic conviction
behind Rorty's attack on representationalist epistemology
carried out in PMN. It informs, for instance, the genealogy (chapter
one) and deconstruction (chapter two) of the concept of mind offered
in the book's first part, "Our Glassy Essence." This
historicist conviction, however, is not itself a central theme of PMN,
and it emerges for explicit discussion only in the final section of
the book, "Philosophy," which is the shortest and in some
ways least developed of its three parts. The argumentative core of PMN
is found in its second part, "Mirroring." Here Rorty
develops and extends a diverse lot of arguments - notably from
Wilfrid Sellars, Willard van Orman Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, and Donald Davidson - into a general critique of
the defining project of modern epistemology, viz., the conceptions of
mind, of knowledge and of philosophy bequeathed by the 17th
and 18th centuries. Rorty's key claim is that
"the Kantian picture of concepts and intuitions getting together
to produce knowledge is needed to give sense to the idea of
'theory of knowledge' as a specifically philosophical
discipline, distinct from psychology" (PMN, 168). According to
Rorty,



> 
> 
> This is equivalent to saying that if we do not have the distinction
> between what is "given" and what is "added by the
> mind," or that between the "contingent" (because
> influenced by what is given) and the necessary (because entirely
> "within" the mind and under its control), then we will not
> know what would count as a "rational reconstruction" of
> our knowledge. We will not know what epistemology's goal or
> method could be. (PMN, 168-9)
> 
> 
> 



Epistemology, in Rorty's account, is wedded to a picture of
mind's structure working on empirical content to produce in
itself items - thoughts, representations - which, when
things go well, correctly mirror reality. To loosen the grip of this
picture on our thinking is to challenge the idea that epistemology
- whether traditional Cartesian or 20th century linguistic
- is the essence of philosophy. To this end, Rorty combines a
reading of Quine's attack on a version of the structure-content
distinction in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) with a
reading of Sellars' attack on the idea of givenness in
"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956/1997). On
Rorty's reading, though neither Sellars nor Quine is able fully
to take in the liberating influence of the other, they are really
attacking the same distinction, or set of distinctions. While Quine
casts doubt on the notion of structure or meaning which
linguistically-turned epistemology had instated in place of mental
entities, Sellars, questioning the very idea of givenness, came at the
distinction from the other side:



> 
> 
> ...Sellars and Quine invoke the same argument, one which bears
> equally against the given-versus-nongiven and the
> necessary-versus-contingent distinctions. The crucial premise of this
> argument is that we understand knowledge when we understand the social
> justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy
> of representation. (PMN, 170)
> 
> 
> 



The upshot of Quine's and Sellars' criticisms of the myths
and dogmas of epistemology is, Rorty suggests, that "we see
knowledge as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather
than as an attempt to mirror nature" (PMN, 171). Rorty provides
this view with a label: "Explaining rationality and epistemic
authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than the
latter by the former, is the essence of what I shall call
'epistemological behaviorism,' an attitude common to Dewey
and Wittgenstein" (PMN, 174).



Epistemological behaviorism leaves no room for the kind of
practice-transcending legitimation that Rorty identifies as the
defining aspiration of modern epistemology. Assuming that epistemic
practices do, or at least can, diverge, it is not surprising that
Rorty's commitment to epistemological behaviorism should lead to
charges of relativism or subjectivism. Indeed, many who share
Rorty's historicist scepticism toward the transcending ambitions
of epistemology - friendly critics like Hilary Putnam, John
McDowell and Daniel Dennett - balk at the idea that there are no
constraints on knowledge save conversational ones. Yet this is a
central part of Rorty's position, repeated and elaborated as
late as in TP and PCP. Indeed, in TP he invokes it precisely in order
to deflect this sort of criticism. In "Hilary Putnam and the
Relativist Menace," Rorty says:



> 
> 
> In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties
> into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to
> move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural
> politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to
> suggestions about what we should try. (TP, 57)
> 
> 
> 



That epistemological behaviorism differs from traditional forms of
relativism and subjectivism is easier to see in light of Rorty's
criticism of the notion of representation, and the cluster of
philosophical images which surround it.


### 2.2 Antirepresentationalism



Rorty's enduring attitude to relativism and subjectivism is that
both are products of the representationalist paradigm. Though the
theme is explicit in PMN and CP ("Pragmatism, Relativism,
Irrationalism"), it is with Rorty's later and further
appropriation of Davidson that his criticism of the idea of knowledge
as representation becomes fully elaborated (ORT,
"Introduction" and Part II). Drawing on Davidson's
criticism of the scheme-content distinction ("On the Very Idea
of a Conceptual Scheme") and of the correspondence theory of
truth ("The Structure and Content of Truth"), Rorty is
able to back up his rejection of any philosophical position or project
which attempts to draw a general line between what is made and what is
found, what is subjective and what is objective, what is mere
appearance and what is real. Rorty's position is not that these
conceptual contrasts never have application, but that such application
is always context and interest bound and that there is, as in the case
of the related notion of truth, nothing to be said about them in
general. Rorty's commitment to the conversationalist view of
knowledge must therefore be distinguished from subjectivism or
relativism, which, Rorty argues, presuppose the very distinctions he
seeks to reject. Equally, Rorty's epistemological behaviorism
must not be confused with an idealism that asserts a primacy of
thought or language with respect to the unmediated world, since this,
too, is a position that is undercut by Rorty's Davidsonian
position. In light of the view of truth and of meaning that Rorty
appropriates from Davidson, his conversationalism is not a matter of
giving priority to the subjective over the objective, or to
mind's power over world's constraint. Rather it is the
other side of his anti-representationalism, which denies that we are
related to the world in anything other than causal terms. Differently
put, Rorty argues that we can give no useful content to the notion
that the world, by its very nature, rationally constrains choices of
vocabulary with which to cope with it (TP, "The Very Idea of
Human Answerability to the World: John McDowell's Version of
Empiricism"). This has implications for Rorty's
view of the contribution of philosophy to intellectual progress:
"what matters in the end are changes in the vocabulary rather
than changes in belief, changes in truth-value candidates rather than
assignments of truth-value" (CIS, 47-48). As Rorty reads
philosophy, its significant achievements are not discoveries of the
truth or falsehood of certain propositions, but innovations in our
descriptive capacities - changes in what we are able to say and
think.


### 2.3 Rationality, Science, and Truth



Attacking the idea that we must acknowledge the world's
normative constraint on our belief-systems if we are to be rational
subjects, Rorty has drawn a great deal of criticism that takes
science, particularly natural science, as its chief reference point.
Two general kinds of criticisms are often raised. The first insists
that science consists precisely in the effort to learn the truth about
how things are by methodically allowing us to be constrained in our
beliefs by the world. On this view, Rorty is simply denying the very
idea of science. The other kind of criticism seeks to be internal: if
Rorty's view of science were to prevail, scientists would no
longer be motivated to carry on as they are; science would cease to be
the useful sort of thing that Rorty also thinks it is (see, e.g.,
Bernard Williams, "Auto da Fe" in Malachowski, 1990).
However, Rorty's view of science is more complicated than he
himself sometimes implies. He says: "I tend to view natural
science as in the business of controlling and predicting things, and
as largely useless for philosophical purposes" ("Reply to
Hartshorne," Saatkamp, 32). Yet he spends a good deal of time
drawing an alternative picture of the intellectual virtues that good
science embodies (ORT, Part I). This is a picture which eschews the
notion that science succeeds, when it does, in virtue of being in
touch with reality in a special way, the sort of way that
epistemologists, when successful, can clarify. It is in this sense
specifically that Rorty disavows science as philosophically
significant. Good science may nevertheless be a model of rationality,
in Rorty's view, exactly in so far as scientific practice has
succeeded in establishing institutions conducive to the democratic
exchange of views.



The provocative and counterintuitive force of Rorty's treatment
of rationality and science in terms of conversational ethics is
undeniable. It is important to realize, though, that Rorty is not
denying that there is any bona fide use of notions like truth,
knowledge, or objectivity. Rather his point is that our ordinary uses
of these notions always trade for their content and point on
particular features of their varying contexts of application. His
further point is that when we abstract away from these different
contexts and practices, in search of general notions, we are left with
pure abstract hypostatizations incapable of providing us with any
guide to action at all. The upshot, Rorty holds, is that we simply do
not have a concept of objective reality which can be invoked either to
explain the success of some set of norms of warrant, or to justify
some set of standards over against others. This is perhaps clearest in
Rorty's treatment of the concept of truth. With regard to truth,
Rorty's rhetoric and philosophical strategy has indeed shifted
over the last three decades. As late as in 1982 (in CP) he still
attempts to articulate his view of truth by drawing on William
James's famous definition in terms of what is good in the way of
belief. Soon after this, however, Rorty comes to doubt the point of
any theory of truth, and, following Davidson's lead, explicitly
rejects all attempts to explicate the notion of truth in terms of
other concepts. Rorty's mature view of the point and
significance of the concept of truth is first elaborated in
"Davidson, Pragmatism and Truth" (in ORT). Recent
expressions are found in the first of the two Spinoza Lectures given
at the University of Amsterdam in 1997, "Is it Desirable to Love
truth?", in the paper, "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald
Davidson versus Crispin Wright" (TP), as well as in the
introductions to, respectively, TP and PSH. In these writings, Rorty
argues that while "truth" has various important uses, it
does not itself name a goal towards which we can strive, over and
above warrant or justification. His argument is not that truth is
reducible to warrant, but that the concept has no deep or substantive
criterial content at all. That is, there are only semantic
explanations to be offered for why it is the case that a given
sentence is true just when its truth conditions are satisfied. So
aiming for truth, as opposed to warrant, does not point to a possible
line of action, just as we have no measure of our approximation to
truth other than increasing warrant. Indeed, for Rorty, this is part
of what makes the concept so useful, in a manner not coincidentally
analogous with goodness; it ensures that no sentence can ever be
analytically certified as true by virtue of its possession of some
other property. Rorty's attitude to the concept of truth has
been much criticized, often on the grounds that the very notion of
warrant, indeed the concept of belief in general, presupposes the
notion of truth. However, it may be that we can do justice to these
connections without supposing that the notion of truth thus involved
backs up the notions of belief and warrant with any substantive
normative content of its own. Indeed, that neither the concept of
truth, nor those of objectivity and of reality, can be invoked to
explain or legitimate our inferential practices and our standards of
warrant, is the essence of Rorty's conversationalism, or
epistemological behaviorism.


## 3. Cultural Politics



Taking epistemological behaviorism to heart, Rorty urges, means that
we can no longer construe the authority of science in terms of
ontological claims. Though many disagree, this is not, for Rorty, to
denigrate or weaken the authority of science. Indeed, a prominent
feature of Rorty's post-metaphysical, post-epistemological
culture, is a thoroughgoing Darwinian naturalism.


### 3.1 Naturalism



To be a naturalist in Rorty's sense,



> 
> 
> is to be the kind of antiessentialist who, like Dewey, sees no breaks
> in the hierarchy of increasingly complex adjustments to novel
> stimulation - the hierarchy which has amoeba adjusting
> themselves to changed water temperature at the bottom, bees dancing
> and chess players check-mating in the middle, and people fomenting
> scientific, artistic, and political revolutions at the top. (ORT,
> 109)
> 
> 
> 



In Rorty's view, both Dewey's pragmatism and Darwinism
encourage us to see vocabularies as tools to be assessed in terms of
the particular purposes they may serve. Our vocabularies, Rorty
suggests, "have no more of a representational relation to an
intrinsic nature of things than does the anteater's snout or the
bowerbird's skill at weaving" (TP, 48). Pragmatic
evaluation of various linguistically infused practices requires a
degree of specificity. From Rorty's perspective, to suggest that
we might evaluate vocabularies with respect to their ability to
uncover the truth would be like claiming to evaluate tools for their
ability to help us get what we want - full stop. Is the hammer
or the saw or the scissors better - in general? Questions about
usefulness can only be answered, Rorty points out, once we give
substance to our purposes.



Rorty's pragmatist appropriation of Darwin also defuses the
significance of reduction. He rejects as representationalist the sort
of naturalism that implies a program of nomological or conceptual
reduction to terms at home in a basic science. Rorty's
naturalism echoes Nietzsche's perspectivism; a descriptive
vocabulary is valuable insofar as the patterns it highlights are
usefully attended to by creatures with needs and interests like ours.
Darwinian naturalism, for Rorty, implies that there is no one
privileged vocabulary whose purpose it is to serve as a critical
touchstone for our various descriptive practices.



For Rorty, then, any vocabulary, even that of evolutionary
explanation, is a tool for a purpose, and therefore subject to
teleological assessment. Typically, Rorty justifies his own commitment
to Darwinian naturalism by suggesting that this vocabulary is suited
to further the secularization and democratization of society that
Rorty thinks we should aim for. Accordingly, there is a close tie
between Rorty's construal of the naturalism he endorses and his
most basic political convictions.


### 3.2 Ethnocentrism and Relativism



One result of Rorty's naturalism is that he is an avowed
ethnocentrist. If vocabularies are tools, then they are tools with a
particular history, having been developed in and by particular
cultures. In using the vocabulary one has inherited, one is
participating in and contributing to the history of that vocabulary
and so cannot help but take up a position within the particular
culture that has created it. As he puts it,



> 
> 
> ...one consequence of antirepresentationalism is the recognition
> that no description of how things are from a God's-eye point of
> view, no skyhook provided by some contemporary or yet-to-be-developed
> science, is going to free us from the contingency of having been
> acculturated as we were. Our acculturation is what makes certain
> options live, or momentous, or forced, while leaving others dead, or
> trivial, or optional. (ORT, 13)
> 
> 
> 



This view looks to many readers like a version of cultural relativism.
Granted, Rorty does not say that what is true, what is good, and what
is right is relative to some particular ethnos, and so in that sense
he is no relativist. But the worry about relativism - that it
leaves us with no rational way to adjudicate conflict - seems to
apply equally to Rorty's ethnocentric view. Rorty's answer
is to say that in one sense of "rational" that is true,
but that in another sense it is not, and to recommend that we drop the
former (TP, 186-201). Rorty's position is that we have no
notion of rational warrant that exceeds, or transcends, or grounds,
the norms that liberal intellectuals take to define thorough,
open-minded, reflective discussion. It is chimerical, Rorty holds, to
think that the force or attractiveness of these norms can be enhanced
by argument that does not presuppose them. It is pointless, equally,
to look for ways of convicting those who pay them no heed of
irrationality. Persuasion across such fundamental differences is
achieved, if at all, by concrete comparisons of particular
alternatives, by elaborate description and redescription of the kinds
of life to which different practices conduce. In his own work,
Rorty's offers such comparisons, descriptions, and
redescriptions, with the goal of making liberalism the most attractive
alternative.


### 3.3 Liberalism and Irony



Rorty is a self-proclaimed postmodernist bourgeois liberal
("Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism," ORT). His
liberalism is postmodernist because it does not depend on a
metanarrative according to which liberalism is the realization and
embodiment of transcultural and ahistorical conceptions of rationality
and morality. Rather, its institutions and practices are the lucky
result of a contingent history. His liberalism is bourgeois because
this contingent history includes economic conditions that make these
institutions and practices possible (see section 3.7).



Thus, his liberalism is a pragmatic liberalism. He is skeptical of
political thought purporting to uncover hidden, systematic causes for
injustice and exploitation, and on that basis proposing sweeping
changes to set things right. (ORT Part III; EHO; CIS Part II; AOC).
Rather, liberalism involves piecemeal reforms advancing economic
justice and increasing the freedoms that citizens are able to enjoy.
It is also a romantic liberalism. He follows Judith Shklar in
identifying liberals by their belief that "cruelty is the worst
thing we do," and contends it is our ability to imagine the ways
we can be cruel to others, and how we could be different, that enables
us to gradually expand the community with which we feel solidarity
(CIS, 146).



It is possible, Rorty thinks, to be both a liberal and an ironist. The
ironist, a figure Rorty contrasts with "the
metaphysician," is a central character in CIS. The metaphysician
is someone who adheres to the "common sense" view that it
is possible to discover the true nature of reality or the true nature
of the self, whereas the ironist is someone who understands that any
particular description of reality or of the self that she might adopt
will be adopted only for contingent reasons, often having to do with
her culture and upbringing. Because she recognizes that the
descriptions she uses are optional, she is often on the lookout for
new ways of describing things, particularly when she "has
radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently
uses" (CIS, 73). Because she believes "there is nothing
beyond vocabularies which serves as a criterion of choice between
them" (CIS, 80), these doubts can only be resolved by comparing
alternative possible vocabularies. Thus, she seeks out different and
compelling descriptions that she can adopt or incorporate into her own
final vocabulary.



Rorty's liberal ironist, recognizing - indeed, affirming
- the contingency of her own commitments, is explicitly
ethnocentric (ORT, "Solidarity or Objectivity"). She
accepts that bourgeois liberalism has no universality other than the
transient and unstable one which time, luck, and discursive effort
might win for it. Recognizing the contingency of these values and the
vocabulary in which they are expressed, while retaining the
commitments, is the attitude of the liberal ironist (CIS, essays 3,4).
Liberal ironists have the ability to combine consciousness of the
contingency of their own evaluative vocabulary with a commitment to
reducing suffering - in particular, with a commitment to
combatting cruelty (CIS, essay 4, ORT, Part III).


### 3.4 Public and Private



Rorty's version of liberalism is expressed also in the
distinction he draws between the private and the public (CIS). This
distinction is often misinterpreted to imply that certain domains of
interaction or behavior should be exempted from evaluation in moral or
political or social terms. The distinction Rorty draws, however, has
little to do with traditional attempts to draw lines of demarcation of
this sort between a private and a public domain - to determine
which aspects of our lives we do and which we don't have to
answer for publicly. Rorty's distinction, rather, goes to the
purposes of theoretical vocabularies. We should, Rorty urges, be
"content to treat the demands of self-creation and of human
solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable" (CIS,
xv). Rorty's view is that we should treat vocabularies for
deliberation about public goods and social and political arrangements,
on the one hand, and vocabularies developed or created in pursuit of
personal fulfilment, self-creation, and self-realization, on the
other, as distinct tools. The attempt to bring them together, in an
overarching theory, is part of what has led philosophy to pursue
projects that have exceeded their usefulness.



Rorty's distinction between public and private is personified in
the figure of the liberal ironist (CIS, chapter 4). She is a person
who recognizes that her final vocabulary can be split into two parts,
where the public part of her final vocabulary has to do with her
responsibilities to others (justice), and the private part of her
final vocabulary has to do with her responsibilities to herself
(self-creation). Arguably, the liberal ironist is the type of person
Rorty himself aspired to be, as evidenced by his autobiographical
essay, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" (in PSH). There, he
admits that much of his early philosophical career had been an attempt
to reconcile public and private, but he "gradually decided that
the whole idea of holding reality and justice in a single vision had
been a mistake" (PSH, 12).



Critics have often worried that Rorty's line between public and
private simply reinscribes one of the most problematic features of
liberalism. However, the line Rorty draws between public and private
is necessarily porous; it is in part because of the move of private
vocabularies to the public realm that social progress occurs.


### 3.5 Redescription and Social Progress



The key imperative in Rorty's ethico-political agenda is the
deepening and widening of solidarity. Consistent with his
ethnocentrism, he distinguishes between "us" and
"them," arguing that thinking of more and diverse people
as "one of us" is the hallmark of social progress (CIS,
191). Solidarity is brought about by gradual and contingent expansions
of the scope of "we;" it is created through the hard work
of training our sympathies rather than through the recognition of
antecedent criteria that stipulate what we have in common. We train
our sympathies, Rorty thinks, by exposing ourselves to forms of
suffering we had previously overlooked. Thus, the task of the
intellectual, with respect to social progress, is not to provide
refinements of social theory, but to sensitize us to the suffering of
others, and refine, deepen and expand our ability to identify with
others, to think of others as like ourselves in morally relevant ways.
(EHO, Part III; CIS, Part III). The liberal ironist, in particular,
sees "enlarging our acquaintance" (CIS, 80) as the only
way to assuage the doubts she has about herself and her culture.



The task of achieving solidarity is, for Rorty, divided up between
agents of love (or guardians of diversity) and agents of justice (or
guardians of universality). Rorty writes,



> 
> 
> The moral tasks of a liberal democracy are divided between the agents
> of love and the agents of justice. In other words, such a democracy
> employs and empowers both connoisseurs of diversity and guardians of
> universality. The former insist that there are people out there whom
> society has failed to notice. They make these candidates for admission
> visible by showing how to explain their odd behavior in terms of a
> coherent, if unfamiliar, set of beliefs and desires - as opposed
> to explaining this behavior with terms like stupidity, madness,
> baseness or sin. The latter, the guardians of universality, make sure
> that once these people are admitted as citizens, once they have been
> shepherded into the light by the connoisseurs of diversity, they are
> treated just like all the rest of us. (ORT, "On Ethnocentrism: A
> Reply to Clifford Geertz" 206)
> 
> 
> 



This distinction between guardians of universality and guardians of
diversity corresponds to Rorty's distinction between
propositions and vocabularies (see section 2.2). A change in our
beliefs may result from convincing argument that occurs at the
intra-vocabulary level, within what Rorty earlier refers to as
"normal discourse" (PMN, 320). A change in what we
perceive as interesting truth-value candidates occurs at the
inter-vocabulary level, within "abnormal discourse."
Abnormal discourse, Rorty contends, can produce "anything from
nonsense to intellectual revolution" (PMN, 320). Which of these
it will produce depends on whether the new descriptions offered up
catch on more broadly. Rorty identifies romanticism as the view that
the latter sort of change is the more significant one (CIS
"Introduction," essay 1).



The guardians of diversity contribute to social progress by offering
new descriptions that the liberal ironist might find in her search for
new and compelling descriptions to adopt or incorporate into her own
final vocabulary. In CIS, this role is attributed to strong poets and
ironist theorists on the one hand, and novelists and journalists, on
the other. Strong poets and ironist theorists, like Marcel Proust,
Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida, offer new
descriptions in their private attempts to achieve autonomy by getting
out from under the final vocabularies they have inherited. Novelists,
like Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, and Radclyffe Hall, offer new descriptions that draw our
attention to the suffering of previously-overlooked people and groups.
They contribute to social progress by pointing out "concrete
cases of particular people ignoring the suffering of other particular
people" (ORT, 79). Because reading novels is one of the best
ways to sensitize ourselves to the suffering experienced by others
- to see that they have "the same tendency to bleed when
pricked" (RR, 465) - Rorty thinks a liberal arts education
is key to maintaining liberal democracy, and for strengthening a
global human rights culture ("Human Rights, Rationality, and
Sentimentality" in TP). In other essays, like "Feminism
and Pragmatism," the role of guardian of diversity is expanded
to include prophetic thinkers, like Catharine A. MacKinnon and Marilyn
Frye, who offer new descriptions in their public efforts to reduce
suffering.



Rorty ultimately refers to these methods for securing social progress
as "cultural politics." Cultural politics includes both
negative projects - abandoning words and descriptions that block
our ability to sympathize with others - and positive projects
- new ways of speaking that help us see that
"others" are "just like us," and therefore
deserve to be part of our moral community ("Cultural Politics
and the Question of the Existence of God" in PCP). Cultural
politics thus involves imagining and articulating utopian visions, a
task he contends falls naturally to the Left, which is, "by
definition, the party of hope. It insists that our nation remains
unachieved" (AOC, 14).


### 3.6 Rorty's America



Rorty's utopian yearnings describe an America that has taken up
his proposal to replace theory with metaphor and universal moral
principles with feelings of solidarity ("Looking Backwards from
the Year 2096" in PSH). He also argues that achieving solidarity
requires economic security; when our economic circumstances are such
that we are forced to choose between feeding our families and feeding
strangers, the community to which one is loyal will contract. In his
words,



> 
> 
> Our loyalty to ... larger groups will, however, weaken, or even
> vanish altogether, when things get really tough. Then people whom we
> once thought of as like ourselves will be excluded. Sharing food with
> impoverished people down the street is natural and right in normal
> times, but perhaps not in a famine, when doing so amounts to
> disloyalty to one's family. The tougher things get, the more
> ties of loyalty to those near at hand tighten, and the more those to
> everyone else slacken. (PCP, 42)
> 
> 
> 



Following the pragmatist insight that beliefs are habits of action,
Rorty contends that to hold a belief simply means that one is inclined
to act in certain ways and not in others. Thus, "to believe that
someone is 'one of us,' a member of our moral community,
is to exhibit readiness to come to their assistance when they are in
need" (Rorty 1996, 13). Thus "an answer to the question
'who are we?' which is to have any moral significance, has
to be one which takes money into account" (Rorty 1996, 14).



This helps to explain why Rorty calls for a return to the reformist
Left of the 1960s in America, when universities and unions found
common cause. What Rorty calls the "cultural Left" -
the contemporary, academic left - is plagued by two related
problems. First, it has ignored economic inequality (Rorty's
shorthand for which is "selfishness") and focused on
other, identity-based forms of inequality (Rorty's shorthand for
which is "sadism"). While Rorty thinks attempting to
ameliorate racial and gender inequality is a laudable goal, he laments
the fact that this focus has displaced the focus on economic
inequality. Second, Rorty worries that the cultural left tries to
theorize its way "into political relevance," and thereby
adopts a "spectatorial approach" (AOC, 94). In so doing,
it prioritizes knowledge over hope. Thus, Rorty enjoins the cultural
Left to abandon its spectatorial approach by abandoning theory and
reviving its hope in the promise of America.



A reinvigorated Left would have to reclaim the sort of pride in
America that animated the work of the reformist Left. Rorty opens
*Achieving Our Country* (1998) by writing,



> 
> 
> National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a
> necessary condition for self-improvement. Too much national pride can
> produce bellicosity and imperialism, just as excessive self-respect
> can produce arrogance. But just as too little self-respect makes it
> difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient
> national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national
> policy unlikely. (AOC, 3)
> 
> 
> 



While philosophical theorizing about America is a symptom of
hopelessness, engaging in debates about what America can do and become
represents a hopeful attitude that he thinks is required for social
progress.


## 4. Rorty in the Conversations of Philosophy



The wide scope of Rorty's metaphilosophical deconstruction of
representationalism in PMN, together with a penchant for uncashed
metaphor and swift, broad-stroke historical narrative of the sort
displayed in CP, earned Rorty a sturdy reputation as an
anti-philosopher's philosopher. At the same time, however, as
his reputation within the dominant cultures of analytic philosophy was
waning in the wake of PMN, his writings from the 1980s in particular
gained a significant readership beyond the confines of the profession.
Still, while his academic engagement certainly ranged far beyond the
confines of analytic philosophy, it would be wrong to say that Rorty
turned his back on that enterprise. The relationship, as we shall see
- though both complicated and shifting over the decades -
has continued to develop as Rorty's work is appropriated by new
generations of readers.


### 4.1 Critical Responses



By 1970, the year Rorty was promoted to full professor at Princeton,
he had made a name for himself in analytic philosophy. He had written
a series of original and often prescient essays (MLM) on issues then
at the of center of professional attention, notably in philosophy of
mind and metaphilosophy, and he had also edited the volume, *The
Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method* (1992). This
collection of papers by prominent contributors, framed by
Rorty's extensive introduction, received a great deal of
attention and acclaim. It did much to cement the idea of a linguistic
turn (Rorty attributes the notion to Gustav Bergman (Rorty 1992, xx))
as a sea change in the history of philosophy.



Throughout the 1970s Rorty's metaphilosophical papers prodded
the self-understanding of contemporary analytical philosophy,
advocating the relevance of American pragmatism, Wittgenstein, and
thinkers in the European Continental tradition to the self-conception
of post-positivist analytic philosophy. It is well documented that
Rorty became increasingly disenchanted with the practice of philosophy
as it was conducted by the dominant figures in the Princeton
department during this period, and no doubt the feeling was
reciprocated (Gross, 2008).



Nevertheless, within the philosophical community at large,
Rorty's standing was such that he was elected President of the
Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association for the
academic year 1979-1980. Just weeks before he gave the
Presidential Address ("Pragmatism, Relativism, and
Irrationalism," see RR), however, PMN was published by Princeton
University Press. To Rorty's surprise (Rorty in Lewis-Kraus,
2003), this monograph was read as an attack on the basic creed of
analytic philosophy as such, rather than as an attempt at benevolent
reform. Most reviews were hostile to what was regarded as
Rorty's end-of-philosophy message, and in the years that
followed, Rorty's challenge to representationalist epistemology
was in many influential quarters studiously ignored.



In retrospect, the hostility may appear excessive, but understandable.
As we have seen in connection with Rorty's attitude to science,
it is particularly Rorty's treatment of truth and knowledge that
drew fire from philosophers. While a great variety of philosophers
have criticized Rorty on this general score in a great variety of
ways, a common concern stands out; Rorty's conversationalist
view of truth and knowledge leaves us entirely unable to account for
the notion that a reasonable view of how things are is a view suitably
constrained by how the world actually is. This criticism is levelled
against Rorty not only from the standpoint of metaphysical and
scientific realist views of the sort that Rorty hoped would soon be
extinct. It is expressed also by thinkers who respect Rorty's
dialectical acumen, who have some sympathy with Rorty's
historicist view of intellectual progress, and who find persuasive his
critique of Kantian and Platonist features of modern philosophy. John
McDowell (McDowell, 1994), for instance, claims that Rorty's
view of the relation between agent and world as merely causal runs
afoul of the notion that our very concept of a creature with beliefs
involves the idea of a rational constraint of the world on our
epistemic states. Pascal Engel, in his exchange with Rorty on the
notion of truth (Rorty and Engel, 2007), takes Rorty to task for
giving up the very notion that undergirds rational argument and
conviction, without which it is hard to see what the remit of
philosophy might possibly be.



However, critics are not concerned only with what they see as a
misguided view of belief, truth, and knowledge, whether relativist,
subjectivist, or idealist in nature. An important reason for the high
temperature of much of the debate that Rorty has inspired is that he
appears to some to reject the very values that are the basis for any
articulation of a philosophical view of truth and knowledge at all. As
Engel emphasizes, Rorty is indeed critical of the role of argument in
intellectual progress, and he is dismissive of the very idea of
theories of truth, of knowledge, of rationality, and the like.
Philosophers such as Hilary Putnam and Susan Haack, who shared
Rorty's view that analytic philosophy would do well to
incorporate the lessons of American pragmatism, focused their
criticisms on exactly this aspect of Rorty's views. Haack, in
particular, frames her attacks on Rorty along these lines in moral
terms; to her mind, Rorty's efforts to abandon the basic
concepts of traditional epistemology are symptoms of a vulgar
cynicism, which contributes to the decline of reason and intellectual
integrity that Haack and others find to be characteristic of much
contemporary thought. The charge of intellectual irresponsibility is
sometimes raised, or at last implied, in connection with Rorty's
use of historical figures. Rorty's reading of Descartes and of
Kant in PMN have often been challenged, as has his more constructive
uses of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. The kind of
appropriation of other writers and thinkers that Rorty performs will
at times seem to do violence to the views and intentions of the
protagonists. Rorty, however, is quite clear about the rhetorical
point and scholarly limitations of these kinds of redescriptions, as
he explains in "The Historiography of Philosophy: Four
Genres" (Rorty, 1984).


### 4.2 Claim to Pragmatism



Rorty's reading of earlier philosophers has always been
unabashedly appropriative, and hence often controversial. His
heterodox reading of Dewey and his generally dismissive attitude
toward Peirce has also meant that Rorty found few friends among the
keepers of the pragmatist tradition in the American academy. Prominent
readers of the classical American pragmatists have expressed deep
reservations about Rorty's interpretation of Dewey and Peirce,
in particular, and of his construal of the pragmatist movement in
general (see, for instance, Misak, 2013.) Consequently, Rorty's
entitlement to the label "pragmatist" has been challenged.
Haack's strong claims on this score are notable, but there are
many others. (See the discussions of Rorty in Alexander, 1987;
Brodsky, 1982; Campbell, 1984; Edel, 1985; Gouinlock, 1995; Lavine
1995; R.W: Sleeper, 1986; as well as the essays in Langsdorf and
Smith, 1995.) For Rorty, the key figure in the American pragmatist
movement is John Dewey, to whom he attributes many of his own central
doctrines. In particular, Rorty finds in Dewey an anticipation of his
own view of philosophy as the facilitator of a humanist politics, of a
non-ontological view of the virtues of inquiry, of a holistic
conception of human intellectual life, and of an anti-essentialist,
historicist conception of philosophical thought. To read Dewey his
way, however, Rorty explicitly sets about separating the
"good" from the "bad" Dewey (see
"Dewey's Metaphysics" in CP, and "Dewey
between Hegel and Darwin" in TP). He is critical of what he
takes to be Dewey's backsliding into metaphysics in
*Experience and Nature, and* has no patience for the
constructive attempt of *Logic: The Theory of Inquiry*. Rorty
thus imposes a scheme of evaluation on Dewey's works which many
scholars object to. Lavine, for one, claims that "scientific
method" is Dewey's central concept (Lavine 1995, 44).
Sleeper holds that reform rather than elimination of metaphysics and
epistemology is Dewey's aim (Sleeper 1986, 2, chapter 6).



Rorty's least favourite pragmatist is Peirce, whom he regards as
subject to both scheme-content dualism and to a degree of scientism.
So it is not surprising that Haack, whose own pragmatism draws
inspiration from Peirce, finds Rorty's recasting of pragmatism
literally unworthy of the name. From Haack's perspective,
Rorty's opposition to the epistemological orientation of modern
philosophy breaks fundamentally with the American pragmatists, in so
far as he dismisses the very project that gave direction to their
work. While classical pragmatism is an attempt to understand and work
out a novel legitimating framework for scientific inquiry, Haack
maintains, Rorty's "pragmatism" (Haack consistently
uses quotes) is simply an abandonment of the very attempt to learn
more about the nature and adequacy conditions of inquiry. Instead of
aiding us in our aspiration to govern ourselves through rational
thought, Rorty weakens our intellectual resilience and leaves us even
more vulnerable to rhetorical seduction. To Haack and her
sympathisers, Rorty's pragmatism is dangerous, performing an
end-run on reason, and therefore on philosophy. Cheryl Misak, who is
one of the most influential voices among contemporary pragmatists, and
who also shares Haack's enthusiasm for Peirce, criticizes Rorty
along similar lines. When Rorty abandons the notion of objectivity,
Misak argues, he also dispenses with the capacity for normative
critique (Misak, 2013). Rorty, from this perspective, ends up with a
pragmatism of subjectivity in the tradition of William James.


### 4.3 Analytic Philosophy



Rorty is sometimes portrayed as a renegade, as someone who went
through a transformation from bona fide analytical philosopher to
something else, and then lived to tell a tale of liberation from
youthful enchantment. This portrayal, however, distorts both
Rorty's view of analytical philosophy and the trajectory of his
thinking. Indeed, Rorty's relationship to the traditions of
Western philosophy is more nuanced than his reputation might suggest.
So, too, is his relation to analytical philosophy in particular.



Though the introduction to the 1967 volume on the linguistic turn
(Rorty, 1992) and the early papers in philosophy of mind from the
1960s do show Rorty adopting frameworks for philosophical problems
that he later dispenses with, these writings at the same time very
clearly bear the mark of the fundamental metaphilosophical attitude
which becomes increasingly explicit in the next decade (see Stephen
Leach and James Tartaglia, "Introduction," MLM
1-15). In the Preface to PMN, referring to Hartshorne, McKeon,
Carnap, Robert Brumbaugh, Carl Hempel, and Paul Weiss, Rorty says,



> 
> 
> I was very fortunate in having these men as my teachers, but, for
> better or worse, I treated them all as saying the same thing: that a
> "philosophical problem" was a product of the unconscious
> adoption of a set of assumptions built into the vocabulary in which
> the problem was stated - assumptions which were to be questioned
> before the problem itself was taken seriously. (PMN, xiii)
> 
> 
> 



This way of stating the lesson, however, appears to leave open the
possibility that certain philosophical problems eventually may
legitimately be taken seriously - that is, at face value in the
sense that they require constructive solutions - provided the
assumptions which sustain their formulation stand up to proper
critical scrutiny. Taken this way, the attitude Rorty here expresses
would be more or less the same as that of all those philosophers who
have diagnosed their predecessors' work as mixtures of
pseudo-questions and genuine problems dimly glimpsed, problems which
now, with the proper frame of questioning fully clarified, may be
productively addressed. But the full force of the lesson Rorty learned
emerges only with the view that this notion of proper critical
scrutiny is questionable. For Rorty, to legitimate the assumptions on
which a philosophical problem is based would be to establish that the
terms we require to pose that problem are really mandatory, that the
vocabulary in which we encounter the problem is in principle
inescapable. But Rorty's construal of the linguistic turn, as
well as his proposals for eliminating the vocabulary of the mental,
are really at odds with the idea that we might hope to construct a
definitive vocabulary for philosophy. Even in his early days,
Rorty's approach to philosophy is shaped by the historicist
conviction that no vocabulary is inescapable in principle. This means
that progress in philosophy is gained less from constructive solutions
to problems than through therapeutic dissolution of their causes, that
is, through the invention of new vocabularies achieved by the launch
of new and fruitful metaphors ("Introduction" in PMN;
"Unfamiliar Noises: Hesse and Davidson on Metaphor" in
ORT).



To hold that no vocabulary is final is also to hold that no vocabulary
can be free of unthematized yet optional assumptions. Hence any effort
to circumvent a philosophical problem by making such assumptions
visible is subject to its own circumvention. Accordingly, the fact
that Rorty often distances himself from the terms in which he earlier
framed arguments and made diagnoses is in itself no reason to impose
on him, as some have done, a temporal dichotomy. It may be that
Rorty's early work, inspired by a less critical, less
dialectical reading of Quine and Sellars than that offered in PMN, is
more constructive than therapeutic in tone and jargon, and therefore
from Rorty's later perspective in an important sense misguided.
However, what ties together all Rorty's work, over time and
across themes, is his complete lack of faith in the idea that there is
an ideal vocabulary, one which contains all genuine discursive
options. Rorty designates this faith Platonism (an important theme in
CIS). That there are no inescapable forms of description is a thought
which permeates Rorty's work from the 1960s through his later
therapeutic articulations of pragmatism right up until his
characterization of philosophy as cultural politics (PCP).
Characterizations of pragmatism in terms of anti-foundationalism
(PMN), of anti-representationalism (ORT), and of anti-essentialism
(TP) are all explicitly parasitic on constructive efforts in
epistemology and metaphysics, and are intended to highlight the
various ways these efforts remain under the spell of a Platonic faith
in ideal concepts and mandatory forms of descriptions.



Rorty's use of Quine and Sellars to make his fundamental points
against the idea of philosophy as a knowledge legitimation project, as
well as his articulation of his critique in terms of typically
"analytical" philosophical problems, has contributed to an
impression of PMN as an internal indictment of analytic philosophy as
such. Many - some gleeful, some chagrined - have read PMN
as a purported demonstration of the bankruptcy of one of the two
contemporary main streams of Western philosophy. Such readers draw
support for this view also from the fact that much of Rorty's
writings since PMN have been concerned to show the virtues in thinkers
like Heidegger and Derrida (EHO). Forty years later, however, it seems
unwise to superimpose the analytic-continental divide onto the message
of PMN, or onto Rorty. In PMN, his central point is that philosophy
needs to break free from the metaphor of mind as a medium of
appearances, appearances that philosophy must help us sort into the
mere and the reality-corresponding ones. Rorty made this point in a
vocabulary that was developed by Anglo-American (whether by birth,
naturalization, or late adoption) philosophers in the course of the
preceding half-century. It is not necessary, and probably misleading,
to see Rorty's criticism of epistemology and the assumptions
that make it appear worthwhile as a criticism of a particular
philosophical style of philosophy or set of methodological habits.
Reading PMN in conjunction with the essays in CP (see particularly
essay 4, "Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist
Culture", essay 12, "Philosophy in America Today",
and also "Introduction"), one quickly sees that the target
of PMN cannot be a putative school or branch of the subject called
"Analytic Philosophy." Because Rorty thinks philosophy has
no essence, has no defining historical task, fails to mark out a
special domain of knowledge, and is not, in short, a natural kind (CP,
226), he leaves no ground from which to level that sort of critique.
Nor is it his intention to do so. Around the time of the publication
of PMN, Rorty's view of the matter was "that
'analytic philosophy' now has only a stylistic and
sociological unity" (CP, 217). He then qualifies this point as
follows: "In saying [this], I am not suggesting that analytic
philosophy is a bad thing, or is in bad shape. The analytic style is,
I think, a *good* style. The *esprit de corps* among
analytic philosophers is healthy and useful" (CP, 217). However,
while Rorty apparently bears no prejudice against analytic philosophy
in particular, the very reason for his tolerance - his
antiessentialist, historicist view of philosophy and its problems
- has for many critics been a point of objection. After his
faint praise, Rorty goes on:



> 
> 
> All I am saying is that analytic philosophy has become, whether it
> likes it or not, the same sort of discipline as we find in the other
> "humanities" departments - departments where
> pretensions to "rigor" and to "scientific"
> status are less evident. The normal form of life in the humanities is
> the same as that in the arts and in belles-lettres; a genius does
> something new and interesting and persuasive, and his or her admirers
> begin to form a school or movement. (CP, 217-218)
> 
> 
> 



This is perfectly consonant with the attitude to the notion of
philosophical method Rorty expresses 20 years later: "So-called
methods are simply descriptions of the activities engaged in by the
enthusiastic imitators of one or another original mind - what
Kuhn would call the "research programs" to which their
works gave rise" (TP, 10). Rorty's metaphilosophical
critique, then, is directed not at particular techniques or styles or
vocabularies, but toward the idea that philosophical problems are
anything other than transient tensions in the dynamics of evolving,
contingent vocabularies. If his critique has bite specifically against
analytic philosophy, this may be because of a lingering faith in
philosophical problems as lasting intellectual challenges that any
honest thinker has to acknowledge, and which may be met by making
progress in methodology. Rorty himself, however, nowhere says that
this faith is part of the essence of analytical philosophy. On the
contrary, it is clear that pioneering analytical philosophers, people
like Sellars, Quine, and Davidson, provided Rorty with indispensable
critical tools in his attack on the epistemological
legitimation-project that has been a central concern in philosophy
since Descartes.



Shorn of the ambition to make progress on perpetual problems,
philosophy in the analytic tradition remains a dynamic enterprise, as
Rorty's own work demonstrates. It is true that Rorty, as a
professor of the humanities at the University of Virginia, found a
larger intellectual audience outside philosophy departments, as he
increasingly turned to literary theory and to political thought.
However, while drawing on sources outside the analytic tradition and
also outside the field of philosophy, Rorty never ceased to engage
with analytic philosophy, and he retained a significant audience among
Anglophone philosophers critical of the resurgence of metaphysics
brought on by the seminal work of Saul Kripke. A slow but persistent
resurgence and rearticulation of pragmatic naturalism beginning in the
1990s, gaining force after the turn of the millennium, provided new
perspectives on Rorty and on the dialectical role of his
metaphilosophical critique.



In the years since Rorty's death, the publication of monographs
and anthologies dedicated to his thought suggests that interest in
Rorty's contributions is on the rise in the world of Anglophone
philosophy. The tone of these critical appraisals is generally
different from the frequently harsh responses to the slayer of
representationalist epistemology that appeared during the 1980s.
Perceptions of Rorty's critique have clearly softened; recent
commentators appear less concerned to defend the epistemological
enterprise, and more interested in coming to terms with Rorty's
critique and to understand it in historical perspective. Moreover,
Rorty's work is increasingly being addressed as a contribution
to political thought, with attention shifting away from
meta-epistemology and on to Rorty's vision and defense of
liberalism, his distinctive conception of social progress, and his
assessments of the prospects of reform toward greater social justice.
While his attack on representationalism gained Rorty notoriety as a
metaphilosophical nihilist, the legacy that is now taking shape tends
rather to highlight Rorty's fundamental and enduring concern
with the connection between philosophical thinking and the pursuit of
human happiness, thus making a place for Rorty's voice in a
conversation that springs from the founding impulses of Western
philosophy.