Rorty, Richard

Rorty, Richard (b. 1931), American pragmatist and self-described bourgeois, liberal ironist, established himself as philosophy's “anti-philosopher” in his 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In this work, Rorty critiques the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of modern philosophy and, in particular, rejects the belief of knowledge as representation. According to Rorty, we should be critical of epistemology because it is the equivalent of foundationalism and suspicious of metaphysics because it amounts to essentialism. There is no universal truth for Rorty, and we should be weary of any discipline, especially philosophy, that attempts to provide a theory of knowledge to ground science, art, politics, or morality. Thus, Rorty's pragmatism is informed by an antirepresentationalism, antifoundationalism, and anti-essentialism, which is captured in all his work from the Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), through his Philosophical Papers, volumes one (1991), two (1991), and three (1998), to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).

Rorty is not alone in his rejection of knowledge as representation, and in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he discusses who he feels are the three most important philosophers—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and James Dewey—that also realized that the mind was not merely a mirror of nature. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey recognized that language is contingent. Thus, the vocabulary employed by philosophers during the Enlightenment is specific to their own time and place, and we therefore need to invent a new vocabulary to describe our own historical experiences. This is another critical theme that informs much of Rorty's writings as he hopes that hermeneutics, especially conversation, will provide the space for social justification and, possibly, agreement. In particular, Rorty is indebted to Wittgenstein for understanding language as a tool, not a mirror; to Heidegger for the historicist notion that there is no knowing subject that is the source of truth; and especially to Dewey for conceiving of knowledge as social practice. Rorty describes Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey as “edifying” philosophers who engaged in “abnormal discourse” and were “reactive” and “destructive” rather than “systematic.” Their philosophies offer parodies instead of arguments and aim at “continuing a conversation rather than discovering a truth.” This is critical, for Rorty himself provides what could be characterized as an edifying philosophy, which hopes to disrupt the reader into questioning his or her taken-for-granted attitudes and through this practice of questioning become new human beings.

Rorty perhaps best articulates what he means by pragmatism in an essay from Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) titled “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism.” Rorty describes three characteristics of pragmatism, including its anti-essentialist understanding of truth, language, and knowledge; its rejection of the distinction between morality and science; and its belief in contingency. This last point, according to Rorty, is the most important because it means that no constraints exist in our attempts to understand the social world and ourselves except those we encounter with our conversational partners. However, conversational constraints, Rorty informs us, cannot be anticipated. Therefore, we are never precisely certain when we have reached the truth, or even if in conversation we have come closer to the truth. Instead, we have to accept the contingent nature of conversation as having no beginning and no end and that success in conversation means continuing to converse. Although Rorty's notion of conversation sounds similar to Jürgen Habermas's ideal speech situation, Rorty reminds us that Habermas qualifies his conversation as one that is “undistorted.” According to Rorty, Habermas treads into a transcendental realm by delineating principles of what constitutes undistorted conversation. For Rorty, these principles will not do because as a pragmatist he believes only those engaged in conversation have the capacity to agree on what undistorted means according to their own criteria. Rorty admits that this understanding [Page 656]of conversation is ethnocentric but believes that we can attempt to justify our beliefs only to those who already share them.

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