Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

Like William James in The Meaning of Truth, having thrown over the academic philosophy of his day, Rorty made it his mature ambition to abolish the value most cherished by philosophers. He called that value “Truth with a capital T.” His more-or-less Nietzschean variations on the theme were a spur to controversies with Hilary Putnam, John Searle, and others who wanted to preserve a sharper line between the natural and the moral sciences. Whether Rorty had the best of these disputes must be decided by judges better qualified than I. But his aim was easily misunderstood; it was not to deny the existence of a determinable “fact of the matter”—the answer, for example, to the question how many atoms are in carbon dioxide, or how many people were killed at Lidice or at My Lai and by whom? His pragmatism (which opponents called relativism) issued rather from an understanding that scientists, like poets, absorb the parts of the world they care for, and shape the result for human use. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he mentions Thomas Kuhn as one of “the heroes of this book” alongside Dewey, Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, and Wilfrid Sellars; and it was from Kuhn above all that he derived his belief that no world, of nature or of art, is ever seen just as it is. It is always seen under a description.

December 9, 2020. Page 428. Is this not Kantian?