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

by Richard Rorty

Actually, however, this clamor about “idealism” is a red herring. It is one thing to say (absurdly) that we make objects by using words and something quite different to say that we do not know how to find a way of describing an enduring matrix of past and future inquiry into nature except in our own terms—thereby begging the question against “alternative conceptual schemes.” Almost no one wishes to say the former. To say the latter is, when disjoined from scary rhetoric about “losing touch with the world,” just a way of saying that our present views about nature are our only guide in talking about the relation between nature and our words. To say that we have to assign referents to terms and truth-values to sentences in the light of our best notions of what there is in the world is a platitude. To say that truth and reference are “relative to a conceptual scheme” sounds as if it were saying something more than this, but it is not, as long as “our conceptual scheme” is taken as simply a reference to what we believe now—the collection of views which make up our present-day culture. This is all that any argument offered by Quine, Sellars, Kuhn, or Feyerabend would license one to mean by “conceptual scheme.” However, Putnam, having cleared up part of the confusion created by Feyerabend’s talk of meaning-change, unfortunately proceeded to treat the difference between Feyerabend and himself not as a difference between taking the notion of “meaning” seriously and abandoning it, b...

December 2, 2020. Page 277.