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Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

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This book is one of Rorty's ealier works, and, thus, he is still more "analytic" in his approach. The basic purposes of the book are (1) why it is wrong to speak of coming to a knoweldge of the truth by means of our glassy essence *mirroring* reality and (2) how can we continue philosophy after we have gotten rid of the post-Cartesian epistemological binary opposition.

Rorty makes repeated attacks on the correspondence theory of truth. Furthermore, he ties in his anti-essentialism into this in such a way that if you stand with him in denying the naive realist epistemology, you will begin be unable to see why people speak of "essence" or the ding-an-sich vs. it's representation. Rorty does not wish to make us into individualistic relativists who believe that however it is that we are appeared to defines what is true. Rather, he wants us to forget about the whole search for objective ahistorical truth--"Truth" that transcends our contingency. Also, Rorty engages in a tireless critique of the ocular metaphor that has pervaded Western philosophy from the beginning.
So, truth becomes, ceteris paribus, what our peers will let us get away with saying. This seems at least half-Wittgensteinian (of course, depending on how you interpret LW). In the process of deconstructing Western philosophy as the search for transcendental truth, Rorty uses, most notably, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey.

Rorty's answer to the second issue dealt with in the book is that philosophers should try to "continue a conversation." Forget about metaphysics and all other metanarratives. We must guide ourselves by "our lights". Philosophy is more about settling disputes peaceably (thus inscreasing solidarity) and enjoying ourselves. Philosophy is just another language game, like science, poetry, etc. There is nothing that puts the philosopher in access to more basic or fundamental knowledge and truth. Rather, he is just good at playing a particular language game.

Personally, despite Rorty's claims otherwise, I see this all as just another form of social relativism. If a society achieves solidarity on an issue, there really isn't much one can say against it from a Rortian view, if we were a part of that society. But, as Westerners, we might have a lot of things to say. This is all connected with what is later developed by Rorty into Ethnocentrism. Basically, because we can't get out of our own bodies, and transcend ourselves, all we can do is speak from where we are. And, this "where we are" is just a contingent, situated whatever that will no longer be in but a little while.

In this influential book, Rorty argues that the history of Western philosophy over the past few hundred years reveals a quest for immutable foundations for knowledge that has finally been shown to have been futile and wrongheaded. Rorty believes that a number of 20th Century philosophers (but most prominently Ludwig Wittgenstein) have demonstrated that all knowledge consists of nothing more than the beliefs of a particular speech community, as embodied in linguistic rules used by that community, and that it is impossible to go outside the closed circle of one's speech community to acquire or validate knowledge.

The most compelling critique of Rorty's thesis that I have read is contained in a little-known but highly enlightening and learned book by Peter Munz entitled "Our Knowledge of the Growth of Knowledge." Munz is a historian and philosopher who has the apparently unique distinction, at least among living scholars, of having been a student of both Karl Popper and Wittgenstein (in the 1940's). Munz acknowledges in his 1985 book that Rorty's book offers "the most sustained and reasoned defense of closed circles" yet written. Munz contends, however, that a careful reading of the book reveals that Rorty has implicitly treated Wittgenstein's own intellectual biography -- i.e., Wittgenstein's move from the "picture theory of meaning" of the "Tractatus" to the closed circle philosophy of his "Philosophical Investigations" -- as representative of the history of philosophy in the last four centuries. Rorty's use of this particular paradigm for his history is misguided, Munz says, because, among other things:

1) "Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus,' far from being symptomatic of mirror philosophy, is the only mirror philosophy ever put forward." Descartes and Kant, who are presented as the "two great anti-heroes" in Rorty's account, were not "mirror philososphers at all," according to Munz. Indeed, Munz says, one of Kant's central tenets was that our minds distort the ultimate reality (the "thing in itself") and therefore preclude any "mirroring" of that reality; and

2) Because there are many possible alternatives to the picture theory of meaning, the proper rejection of that theory cannot prove the validity of the closed circle theory of knowledge. In embracing the closed circle, Wittgenstein (and Rorty) are postulating a false dichotomy. Moreover, Wittgenstein's modest attempt to demonstrate the validity of the closed circle philosophy is circular. (Ernest Gellner's scholarly but witty 1974 book, "Legitimation and Belief," offers similar criticisms of Wittgenstein's position.)

Munz also points out other problems with Rorty's closed circle philosophy, including: Rorty's implicit adherence to the longstanding view that knowledge must be "justified" in order to be valid; his inability to distinguish various kinds of knowledge from one another (e.g., witchcraft from modern physics) according to their respective explanatory power, or to account for (or even recognize) progress in human knowledge; and his complete failure to even consider the nature of human knowledge from a biological and evolutionary/adaptive standpoint (as the later Karl Popper did). See also Gellner's short and rather humorous critique of Rorty's cognitive relativism in "Debating the State of Philosophy" (Niznik & Sanders, eds.), pp. 79-84.

...for any philosophy student or grad student. I say this not because I think the book is the final word or the solution to every philosophical problem, but because it is a classic of philosophical writing. Rorty writes well, and what he writes is interesting. The writing is precise when it deals with technical or thorny issues and masterfully clear when expositing over large swathes of our philosophical history. Every philosophy student should be asked to read Rorty and Bertrand Russell to see that prose stylists can write technical philosophy.

The range of the book is sweeping, bringing in so many of the heroes of analytic philosophy, but placing them in a synthetic account that gives a real thrust and continuity to their work. Whether that story is correct or not is open to quibbling (see the other reviews for many of those quibbles) but it is nice to read an actual work of philosophy that sketches out the broad concerns and overall landscape, and shows us our path through that landscape, rather than just the technical tidbits.

That said, you should already know much of what is in this book. You need to have a familiarity with Quine and Wittgenstein, as well as Kuhn and Feyerabend, and Locke, and... If you have never encountered the philosophy of language or philosophy of mind before, then this book is going to be confusing and meaningless--it is an actual philosophy book, and aimed at philosophers. Don't read it expecting an introduction to the people discussed; read it if you want to see what kind of work can be done with the tools of our analytic tradition. But it shows that the analytic tradition doesn't just have to dissolve long-standing errors and misconceptions, like Wittgenstein thought--but technical, cold, dry and humorless analytic philosophy can be used to discuss our condition as Human Beings that know, think and care as well, and much less confusedly and obtusely, as can the continental philosophy tradition.

I read this book cover to cover back in 1979 when it first came out. I was 21 and an upper-level philosophy undergrad at the University of Houston. Bredo Johnsen led a seminar in which we discussed the book, some of whose arguments were already legendary from the world of "samizdat" philosophy publishing and academic gossip.

I was deciding at the time that I liked philosophy and wanted to do it for a living if somehow I could, but I didn't really like the way that the American mainstream was heading. This was the time of Kripke and Putnam version 4.0, metaphysical realists who backed up their essentialism with logical proofs--though Putnam was already showing signs that he was about to switch to a new operating system. The philosophers I had liked best in my undergrad studies had been the ancient Skeptics, the pragmatists (neo- and paleo-), and the later Wittgenstein. Those figures presented what seemed to me understandable, stylish, ingenious, and above all practically helpful ways of thinking about knowledge, humanity, and morality. But neo-medievalists like Kripke were fighting those ideas as hard as they could, providing backup to all the sticks-in-the-mud who had never liked that all arty Quine and Goodman stuff anyway. American philosophy was going to stay logical and technically difficult; it would remain a professional field separate from--and, by and large, of little importance to--other kinds of inquiry.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature disturbed the peace of the cloister. It dealt with all the formidable logical issues in a way nobody expected: namely, historically. It showed how much of the difficult logical reasoning in the philosophy journals was careful reinvention of . . . well, I almost said reinvention of the wheel, but that's not the right metaphor. The wheel is actually good for something. (I'm kidding! A little. Sort-of.)

Rorty showed the origins of the modern mind-body, fact-value, and language/non-language distinctions in larger historical moral and political battles. He showed how pointless those distinctions were apart from those long-since-concluded struggles, and he reminded academic philosophers how those distinctions had already been thoroughly criticized by pragmatic and other historically-minded thinkers.

Rorty is criticized as a relativist and an "anti-realist," but this is precisely wrong. What he is above all is realistic--about where philosophical problems have come from and what we have to do to be rid of them.

PMN focuses our attention on the local, the contingent, and what changes and has changed over time; and by doing so it has become a book of long-lasting value. Twenty-five years and counting. That's short in philosophical terms, but I suspect that in the end the value of this book will be more enduring than that of most reasoning about eternal necessity.

Rorty is a (post-?)modern Dewey: clear, pragmatic and historical. His analysis of classical philosophical problems is somewhat Wittgensteinian in spirit, but lacks the enigmatic halo so characteristic in the writings of the latter. Strongly recommended for beginners and philosophy majors who are struggling to make sense of Locke, Hume, Kant and the representational approach in the philosophy of mind. Very effective if you understand philosophical problems better after they are presented to you in their original socio-historical context.

"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" is Richard Rorty's magnum opus, his manifesto for a new philosophy and a new philosophical language. Taking aim at some thousands of years of philosophical tradition, Rorty argues that the concept of representation ought to be given up entirely, and with it all epistemology and all metaphysics.

A big part of the book consists of a very in-depth discussion of the traditions in epistemology and metaphysics (including ontology), and where the idea of the point of epistemology comes from in the first place. Our intuitions of our minds as "Mirrors of Nature", reflecting the Real out there in whatever imperfect way it impresses itself upon us, are traced by Rorty to the Cartesian revolution in philosophy. The whole ensemble of philosophical thought from Descartes (but inspired already by Plato), via Locke, Spinoza, Kant all the way to Frege, Russell and the early Wittgenstein and modern "analytical philosophy" is to blame for this popular view, but Rorty launches a convincing and masterfully written attack on precisely this view. Epistemology, the 'linguistic turn', ontology, and so on, Rorty argues, have never given an adequate answer to what it means exactly to say that an idea or meaning "represents" reality, nor how we would know this; and, what's worse, the problem itself is really a non-problem, since we can simply do entirely without talk in terms of truth and representation, and we will be just as able to solve the problems confronting us in daily life.

Much of the book is particularly focused on attacking the concept that the linguistic turn in philosophy has provided or can provide us with a better 'foundation for truth' than earlier attempts (Kant, Hegel, etc.). This is a highly abstract and technical discussion, where Rorty relies strongly on the counter-tradition of Quine, Sellars, and the late Wittgenstein. Thorough knowledge of all these writers and the issues in philosophy of language are required to understand this, though if you do, it is very rewarding.

Rorty subsequently goes on from his conclusions on the redundancy of the linguistic turn to found on this a general "pragmatist" approach to philosophy. Working with Davidson's concept that a majority of things we know cannot be false (since our concepts of true and false rely on context), as well as Dewey's dictum that whatever is not a problem in reality cannot be a problem in philosophy, he passionately and intelligently shows that we can do without ANY foundation for truth at all. Moreover, this also entails that the special position of philosophy as guardian of 'truth' or 'rationality' or the 'a priori synthetic' or other ways to formulate the "permitted ways of talking" disappears entirely, hopefully ending these philosophers' self-delusions so carefully constructed since Kant. Instead, Rorty proposes that we see philosophy as just another way of talking about problems we face in life, similar to and equal with poetry, literature, but also the social and physical sciences.

Indeed, one of the criticisms often made of Rorty is that he ignores the way in which the natural sciences 'work', and that this proves that it must in some way be 'in contact with reality'. Similarly, many people have felt threatened that if we do away with truth 'out there' and representation entirely, there will be no basis on which to decide what is true and what is not, and how we will separate the scientific from the every-day. Rorty is fortunately aware of these issues and counters them, stating that there is in fact no practical difference between saying that "science works because it's true" and "science is true because it works". The latter is just a more practical way of saying it, since truth is whatever we feel is warrantedly assertible at any time, given what we think works. Rorty therefore wants to do away with the special status of science as such as well, seeing no reason to see physical sciences as more "real" than social ones, nor sciences altogether as an a priori more "real" description of the world than any other (though it may of course well be a more practical way to talk about things for all sorts of purposes). This is especially interesting since a lot of people who feel called upon to defend the importance of Truth tend to view the physical sciences as paradigmatic, and this is also the case with the tradition of analytical philosophy, which tries to model philosophy after those sciences. Rorty himself started off as one of those, but halfway an already succesful academic career, he changed his mind entirely.

Overall, Rorty's attack on 'realism' of various kinds in philosophy of science as well as epistemology, metaphysics, and all a priori talk in general is as powerful as it is intelligent, and fans of the late Wittgenstein (like me) will feel that peculiar sensation of a suffocating cloud of ancient philosophical problems and dualisms being finally lifted, letting fresh air and sunlight in. Dissolving problems rather than solving them is Rorty's purpose, and he succeeds admirably.

The book is at a high level of abstraction, assumes thorough knowledge with at least 20th century philosophical writing as well as a reasonably strong knowledge of the history of philosophy, and is certainly not easy reading. Nevertheless, Rorty is in my view one of the most revolutionary philosophers of the 20th Century, together with Wittgenstein, and since this book is his primary formulation of his views, it is a must read.

Published in 1981 Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN) has become something of a classic in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. As someone who had, until that point, largely worked within the analytic tradition Rorty's criticism of many of the tenants of Anglo-American philosophy was seen by some commentators as near heretical.

PMN is a wide-ranging and meticulously referenced commentary on mid-twentieth century analytic philosophy. Though Rorty discusses a range of inter-related issues with great alacrity, his criticism is primarily focused on epistemology. In particular, Rorty is critical of what is often referred to as representational - the contention that we do not have direct access to reality, but, only to indirect representations of that reality in our minds. According to Rorty this view has been detrimental by causing philosophers to seek out criteria for assessing and improving these representations. He contends that this search for transcendental objective knowledge is misguided. Instead Rorty argues for a deflationary, or what he calls an edifying or conversational approach wherein truth/knowledge is limited to specific social groups or language games - as he pithily remarks truth is what your friends will let you get away with. As a result of PMN, Rorty has been criticized by many within the Anglo-American tradition as a relativist. While it is clear that, at least in a broad ontological sense, he is a relativist much of this criticism seems overstated. While I disagree with some of his key presuppositions (e.g. physicalism), his position given this worldview seems quite consistent. Indeed, theistic commentators have often remarked that in a physicalist/atheistic worldview notions of objective truth or knowledge are illusory.

Although PMN is a worthwhile read, potential readers are advised that it is nuanced and sophisticated discussion - part of an internecine debate amongst academic philosophers. If one is not well versed in the Modern Western tradition (Descartes, Locke, Kant, ETC.), let alone more recent commentators such as Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellers, Putnam, the discussion will likely be incomprehensible. Overall, a good book by a broad and interesting thinker. Recommended for students of modern analytic philosophy

Let's be honest, the latter half of the 20th century has produced only a handful of important works of philosophy. This is certainly one of them. For those of us who were students of philosophy in the early eighties, toiling away in the less-than-abundant vineyards of the analytical tradition, this book came as a revelation and a liberation.

Richard Rorty is not exactly an obscure figure; and although his time of maximum exposure is probably a decade past, "Rortian" ideas still inform much of the educated world's understanding of philosophy and its relation to other fields of inquiry and culture. *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* is interesting today, perhaps *in spite* of the Rorty fad, because it contains much which will surprise the person with a casual acquaintance with such tropes. This is not the work of a social-democratic Nowhere Man attempting to resurrect dead cultural and political standpoints, but someone with a lively understanding of *la conjoncture* in analytic philosophy: the book successfully and elegantly engages with analytic programs that were most contemporary at the time of its writing, and remain influential even today.

In this it notably builds on Rorty's period of "normal science", the essays in philosophy of mind he wrote during the '60s (which helped establish the position of "eliminative materialism"). Here Rorty reassesses this work in light of what has since come to seem like an inescapable revolution in analytic philosophy, the metaphysical conclusions derived from modal logic by Kripke and others. Rorty's treatment of Kripkeanism is one of the most exciting parts of the book, but there is some competition from his charitable and capable assessment of Fodor's philosophy of psychology and its consequences for our philosophical practice generally. Rorty is also a talented expositor of Donald Davidson, who figures as an ally in this book for pursuing a "pure" research program with fewer "metaphysical" consequences than the work of Putnam: Davidsonianism, like much else, receives a relatively effortless yet suitably careful treatment, making this a suitable work for someone who wants to learn more about the general layout of analytic philosophy.

Someone familiar with the book, or with thumbnail sketches of Rorty, might object to this assessment: surely the point of the book is its sweeping pragmatist metaphilosophy, vindicating "antifoundationalist" positions on everything from phenomenal consciousness to human rights. Well, as mentioned in the book much of this ground was already covered by others (Dewey's *The Quest For Certainty* is an especially notable precursor), and in my opinion the concluding argument that philosophy ought to move from technical work to an Oakeshottean "conversation" about what is important to us as a culture is somewhat of a comedown after the able and exciting argumentation of the rest of the book. This section presages much of the way Rorty would continue on, but there is really no reason at all to throw bad money after good; a suitable understanding of this fine book should relieve you of the need to "advance" to Rorty's tiresome cultural politics.

Rorty can write well, and his ideas seem exciting, so he's become really popular. No wonder, as he's writing in the analytic tradition which has seen a complete absence of philosophical creativity for many years. But to somebody well versed in European philosophy, this book should be viewed as sham and sophistry. Rorty's epistemology is nothing more than the standard old phenomenalism of Ayer or the Vienna Circle. He clearly does not understand Heidegger, Derrida or any of the other philosophers he claims to introduce into the analytic tradition, as they recognised this "naturalistic" materialism to have been dead since Hegel, if not Kant! Rorty's just an analytic philosopher who is understandably bored with the stagnant nature of the tradition he's working in, but in fact accepts its underlying principles. The only difference between Rorty and old Carnap is that Carnap (& the analytic, positivist type) says, 'Phenomenalism/materialism/scientism is right, so let's spend the rest of our careers writing incredibly pointless, tedious and repetitive books on analytic linguistic philosophy', while Rorty says, 'Phenomenalism/materialism/scientism (& a bit of Quine-like pseduo-pragmatism) is right, but because analytic lingustic philosophy is so boring, I'd rather have some fun reading people like Heidegger and Derrida - because even though I don't understand them, they're more fun than Carnap and Russell'. Epistemologically, this book has NO new insights at all, just old ideas covered up by including quotes from Shakespeare, pointless little analogies about the Antipodeans which sound clever (Rorty's bizarre Freudian and behaviourist synthesis in psychology is also 100 years out of date! Has he read Jung? Laing? Grof? We can't describe the unconscious and all psychology in neurophysiological terms at all, that was just Ryle's and Freud's worst pipedreams), and declamatory, apparently iconoclastic chapter titles like "The Invention of the Mind". Be warned; it's all too easy to think he's saying something new and important, when plainly, if you just read between the lines and get at what he's actually saying, he is not.