Richard Rorty, the best known of the American postmodernists, generalizes the point to antirealism. As Kant had said two centuries ago, we can say absolutely nothing about the noumena, about what is really real. Rorty’s anti-realism is the exact same point: To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we have discovered that, out there, there is no truth. It is to say that our purposes would be served best by ceasing to see truth as a deep matter, as a topic of philosophical interest, or ‘true’ as a term which repays ‘analysis.’ ‘The
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