A Little History of Philosophy (Little Histories)

by Nigel Warburton

He declared that ‘truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with’ and that no period of history gets reality more nearly right than any other. When people describe the world, Rorty believed, they are like literary critics giving an interpretation of a Shakespeare play: there's no single ‘correct’ way of reading it that we should all agree on. Different people at different times interpret the text differently. Rorty simply rejected the idea that any one view is correct for all time. Or at least that's my interpretation of his work. Rorty presumably believed that there was no correct interpretation of it in the same way that there's no ‘right’ answer about whether the hunter was circling the squirrel as it scrambled round the tree.