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

by Richard Rorty

In what follows, I shall confine myself to discussing two radical ways of criticizing the Kantian foundations of analytic philosophy—Sellars’s behavioristic critique of “the whole framework of givenness” and Quine’s behavioristic approach to the necessary-contingent distinction. I shall present both as forms of holism. As long as knowledge is conceived of as accurate representing—as the Mirror of Nature—Quine’s and Sellars’s holistic doctrines sound pointlessly paradoxical, because such accuracy requires a theory of privileged representations, ones which are automatically and intrinsically accurate. So the response to Sellars on givenness and Quine on analyticity is often that they have “gone too far”—that they have allowed holism to sweep them off their feet and away from common sense. In order to defend Sellars and Quine, I shall be arguing that their holism is a product of their commitment to the thesis that justification is not a matter of a special relation between ideas (or words) and objects, but of conversation, of social practice.

November 29, 2020. Page 170.