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

by Richard Rorty

The pragmatic approach to knowledge suggested by epistemological behaviorism will construe the line between discourses which can be rendered commensurable and those which cannot as merely that between “normal” and “abnormal” discourse—a distinction which generalizes Kuhn’s distinction between “normal” and “revolutionary” science. “Normal” science is the practice of solving problems against the background of a consensus about what counts as a good explanation of the phenomena and about what it would take for a problem to be solved. “Revolutionary” science is the introduction of a new “paradigm” of explanation, and thus of a new set of problems. Normal science is as close as real life comes to the epistemologist’s notion of what it is to be rational. Everybody agrees on how to evaluate everything everybody else says. More generally, normal discourse is that which is conducted within an agreed-upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution, what counts as answering a question, what counts as having a good argument for that answer or a good criticism of it. Abnormal discourse is what happens when someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of these conventions or who sets them aside. ’Eπιστήμη is the product of normal discourse—the sort of statement which can be agreed to be true by all participants whom the other participants count as “rational.” The product of abnormal discourse can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution, and there is n...

December 6, 2020. Page 321.