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

by Richard Rorty

The question “What determines reference?” is ambiguous between a question about the best procedure for comparing large coherent sets of false beliefs (other epochs, cultures, etc.) with ours and a question about how to refute the skeptic. Debates about theories of reference get their concreteness from attempts to answer the first part of the question, and their philosophical interest from hints that they might somehow answer the second. But nothing can refute the skeptic—nothing can do what epistemology hoped to do. For we discover how language works only within the present theory of the rest of the world, and one cannot use a part of one’s present theory to underwrite the rest of it. Theory of reference is as hopeless as a “theory of transcendental constitution of the object” for this purpose.

December 2, 2020. Page 294.