In the introduction to the 30th Anniversary edition, Michael Williams writes: “Rorty’s book is a visionary work that challenges us to rethink our understanding of the philosophical enterprise. It is the single greatest influence on the revival of American Pragmatism.”
The central argument of the book: “we understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation” (p. 170).
Part I: Our Glassy Essence
(chapters 1 & 2)
The “glassy essence” (a quote from Shakespeare) is the intellectual soul – that is, the essential part of humans that reflects or mirrors truth/reality. Against a background of Platonic ideals and Aristotelian hylomorphism (the inner self knows an object by literally sharing the form of that object, not by “being aware” of it), Descartes develops the completely new idea of the mind as the location of our glassy essence. According to Rorty, Descartes “created” the mind. Previous to him, philosophers had not conceived of the mind/body split the way he outlined it, especially the way he described the mental as having a more direct connection to truth (where “truth” is taken to be what one could know for sure).
Part II: Mirroring
(chapters 3 – 6)
The Cartesian concept of consciousness (“the mental”) led to the “epistemological turn” in philosophy, developed by Locke and later, Kant. According to Rorty, Locke makes a fundamental mistake with his “idea idea,” which is to confuse the workings of the mind with the grounding of our claims to knowledge (Rorty later makes the same argument against those philosophers that would find a basis for epistemology in modern psychophysiology). That is, knowing how our brains/minds process sensory stimuli is not the same as knowing that the ideas we have of those stimuli are justified. Furthermore, it does not tell us anything helpful about the way ideas or concepts function in society, which is a central concern of Rorty’s.
In an era that was seeking to demarcate the role of philosophy from the role of science, Kant solidified the project of philosophy as epistemology. That is, whereas previous eras saw philosophy as the “Queen” of the sciences (i.e., metaphysics), in the developing modern era, Kant repositioned philosophy as the foundational discipline. Philosophy would no longer concern itself with the “universal and least material,” but with the question: how is our knowledge possible? Crucial here is the concept of knowledge as accurate representation of reality, with an increasing quest for certainty, structure and rigor.
The Kantian project of analytic certainty has influenced every major philosophical movement since his time, with each one claiming to have found the best way of addressing the fundamental epistemological questions raised by Cartesian dualism. Analytic philosophy is founded on two Kantian distinctions regarding our concepts: 1) between the analytic (true in virtue of meaning alone) and the synthetic (true in virtue of meaning + how the world is), and 2) between the “given” and our contribution (also called the language/fact distinction). With the “linguistic turn” in the 20th century, these questions and distinctions become the province of the philosophy of language. That is, the project of analytic certainty gets transferred onto the project of explaining how (or whether) our language accurately mirrors reality.
Rorty critiques this entire project, claiming that it is time for philosophy to move beyond conceiving itself as epistemology in the analytic sense. He proposes one of the central concepts of his book: Epistemological Behaviorism, which, briefly put, is a “conception of philosophy which has nothing to do with the quest for certainty” (p. 171), but rather, is based in conversational justification. He bases this argument in a reading of Quine and Sellars, two 20th century philosophers of language, who raise behaviorist questions about the representational view. Quine claims that there are no analytic truths, because any claim to justification is based in an entire network of assumptions that cannot be separated from one another, and Sellars grounds all justification in linguistic awareness, and thus eliminates “the given.” In other words, what is considered rational, justified, or even “true” is based in “what society lets us say” (p. 174), rather than in any claim to privileged representation (accurate mirroring of reality). Rorty states clearly: “there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence” (p. 178).
Rorty then spends a chapter critiquing psychological epistemology, which is a more extended discussion of the Descartes/Locke concept of mental entities (Lockean “ideas”) and its relation to equally problematic modern philosophical conceptions of psychological processes. He notes that “the notion of psychological states as inner representations is unobjectionable but fairly uninteresting” (p. 242) but warns of a tendency in a psychologically oriented philosophy to articulate a new mental/physical split on the line between the abstract and the concrete. He notes that there are no direct links between psychology and epistemology.
Chapter 6 addresses philosophy of language, which has been in many ways the modern articulation of the Kantian project (that is, how does language “hook on” to reality?). Drawing on 20th c. philosopher Davidson, Rorty lays out a non-analytic project, where “the question of ‘how language works’ has no special connection with the question of ‘how knowledge works’” (p. 259). Philosophy of language can examine (a la Wittgenstein) the language games of a society, rather than attempting to find a privileged mirror in the use of words. An important point: we need historical examination of how language has been used, and what society has deemed to be true, rational, but there is no “Truth” standing behind all of these historical true uses.
Part III: Philosophy
(chapters 7 & 8)
From Epistemology to Hermeneutics argues that philosophy should let go of epistemology because the project of finding common ground for rationality is impossible. Some have looked for common ground outside of us (Plato/Aristotle and modern positivists) and some have looked inside of us (Descartes and following) and some have looked to language, but Rorty draws on Dewey, Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars and Davidson to suggest that a more fruitful path is to take a hermeneutical approach. He specifically lifts up Kuhn and the distinction between normal and abnormal/revolutionary discourse, and pictures hermeneutics as making space for abnormal discourse at the same time that it provides an opportunity for conversation across different normal discourses.
Clearly Rorty could be read as a interpretivist or even post-modernist, but although he notes that he views all discourse as value-based, he also says he is trying to move our thinking beyond the subjective/objective split, which he views as another reading of Cartesian dualism. He is truly a pragmatist, interested in how meaning is made in actual societal dialogue and language use, willing to concede certain epistemological claims to science (as long as those claims are not seen as more “real”), but hoping for a conversation that is a “continuous cultural dialogue in which the arts and sciences, knowledge and imagination, would be given free play” (from the afterward by David Bromwich, p. 429) and no one discourse would be privileged.
Finally, Rorty’s last chapter (Philosophy without Mirrors) lifts up the idea of philosophy as edification, by which he means that the philosopher is to play a Socratic role of questioning, challenging and helping society find “new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking” (p. 360). He is particularly interested in opening up discourse “to take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings” (p. 360). He cites Gadamer’s critique of objectivity, saying that it “is the attempt to prevent education from being reduced to instruction in the results of normal inquiry” (p. 363). Finally, he ends with this thought: “The only point on which I would insist is that philosophers’ moral concern should be with continuing the conversation of the West, rather than with insisting upon a place for the traditional problems of modern philosophy within that conversation” (p. 394).
APA citation for the volume we consulted:Rorty, R. (1979/2009). Philosophy and the mirror of nature (30th
anniv. ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
