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

by Richard Rorty

By “commensurable” I mean able to be brought under a set of rules which will tell us how rational agreement can be reached on what would settle the issue on every point where statements seem to conflict.1 These rules tell us how to construct an ideal situation, in which all residual disagreements will be seen to be “noncognitive” or merely verbal, or else merely temporary—capable of being resolved by doing something further. What matters is that there should be agreement about what would have to be done if a resolution were to be achieved. In the meantime, the interlocutors can agree to differ—being satisfied of each other’s rationality the while. The dominating notion of epistemology is that to be rational, to be fully human, to do what we ought, we need to be able to find agreement with other human beings. To construct an epistemology is to find the maximum amount of common ground with others. The assumption that an epistemology can be constructed is the assumption that such common ground exists. Sometimes this common ground has been imagined to lie outside us—for example, in the realm of Being as opposed to that of Becoming, in the Forms which both guide inquiry and are its goal. Sometimes it has been imagined to lie within us, as in the seventeenth century’s notion that by understanding our own minds we should be able to understand the right method for finding truth. Within analytic philosophy, it has often been imagined to lie in language, which was supposed to supply...

December 6, 2020. Page 317.