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

by Richard Rorty

Once both the inner representations needed in psychological explanation and the word-world relations needed by semantics to produce a theory of meaning for natural languages are seen as irrelevant to issues of justification, we can see the abandonment of the search for privileged representations as the abandonment of the goal of a “theory of knowledge.” The urge toward such a theory in the seventeenth century was a product of the change from one paradigm of understanding nature to another, as well as of the change from a religious to a secular culture. Philosophy as a discipline capable of giving us a “right method of seeking truth” depends upon finding some permanent neutral framework of all possible inquiry, an understanding of which will enable us to see, for example, why neither Aristotle nor Bellarmine was justified in believing what he believed. The mind as Mirror of Nature was the Cartesian tradition’s response to the need for such a framework. If there are no privileged representations in this mirror, then it will no longer answer to the need for a touchstone for choice between justified and unjustified claims upon our belief. Unless some other such framework can be found, the abandonment of the image of the Mirror leads us to abandon the notion of philosophy as a discipline which adjudicates the claims of science and religion, mathematics and poetry, reason and sentiment, allocating an appropriate place to each.

November 16, 2020. Page 212.