American neo-pragmatist. He criticized the "Mirror of Nature" illusion, arguing language is not a mirror reflecting objective reality but a tool, and philosophy must transform into a conversational forum.
A Princeton-trained analytic philosopher who became the most prominent American advocate of pragmatism in the late twentieth century. Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) was a bombshell: it argued that the entire Western epistemological tradition—from Descartes through Kant to analytic philosophy—was based on a mistake: the idea that the mind mirrors reality. After Princeton, Rorty held positions at Virginia and Stanford, becoming a public intellectual who wrote for broad audiences. He championed a "post-philosophical culture" in which philosophy gives up its privileged role as the tribunal of knowledge.
Rorty argued that philosophy should abandon the quest for foundations. The "mirror of nature" metaphor—the idea that knowledge is accurate representation of an external reality—should be shattered. There is no standpoint outside our practices from which to judge whether our beliefs correspond to reality. What we call truth is not a relation to reality but what our peers let us get away with saying. Rorty combined Wittgenstein's therapeutic approach to philosophy, Dewey's pragmatism, and Heidegger's critique of metaphysics into a vision of "liberal ironism": the ironist recognizes the contingency of her own deepest commitments, while the liberal works to reduce suffering. The goal of intellectual life is not Truth but solidarity—expanding the circle of those we recognize as "us." Philosophy should become cultural politics: redescribing ourselves in new vocabularies that create new possibilities for action and solidarity.
"Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—cannot be something toward which we have obligations. Truth is made by human beings, not found. The desire to have one's vocabulary hold center stage is one of the chief motives behind philosophy."
Rorty reminds us that formulas and cold logical axioms have never comforted a grieving heart or healed a wounded relationship. We do not need a grand theory of everything to live well. Can you stop seeking a "perfect logic" for your life, and instead find peace in simply talking, creating art, and sharing empathy with those around you?
Quine argued that our web of belief is underdetermined by experience, but still believed that the web could be evaluated by pragmatic and empirical criteria. Rorty radicalized this: even the notion of "web of belief" is a vocabulary we have adopted, not a discovery about the nature of mind. There is no fact of the matter about what counts as "better" evidence beyond what our community of language-users accepts.
Is there a realist constraint that our best theories must answer to, even if we cannot step outside our conceptual schemes to check, or is the very notion of a reality beyond our vocabularies a misleading remnant of the mirror-of-nature tradition?
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