{"agent_id":"rorty","agent_name":"Richard Rorty","slug":"anti-representationalism","label":"Anti-representationalism: is the entire mirror-of-nature picture of mind and knowledge dispensable?","topic":"Anti-representationalism","question":"Is the entire mirror-of-nature picture of mind and knowledge dispensable?","position":"The mind-as-mirror picture, on which knowledge consists in accurate representations of antecedent reality and philosophy is the tribunal that adjudicates accuracy, is a contingent product of a specific historical sequence (Descartes, Locke, Kant) and can be set aside rather than refuted. The convergent internal critiques of Sellars (the myth of the given), Quine (the analytic/synthetic and reductionist dogmas), Wittgenstein (philosophical pictures that hold us captive), and Davidson (the scheme/content distinction) together dissolve the foundationalist epistemological project. What remains is not a new epistemology but a culture in which *edifying* philosophy in the Wittgenstein/Heidegger/Dewey mode replaces the foundationalist mission. *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* makes the historical-deconstructive case; Part III of that book sketches what philosophy without mirrors looks like.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The mind-as-mirror picture, on which knowledge consists in accurate representations of antecedent reality and philosophy is the tribunal that adjudicates accuracy, is a contingent product of a specific historical sequence (Descartes, Locke, Kant) and can be set aside rather than refuted.","n":[1]},{"t":"The convergent internal critiques of Sellars (the myth of the given), Quine (the analytic/synthetic and reductionist dogmas), Wittgenstein (philosophical pictures that hold us captive), and Davidson (the scheme/content distinction) together dissolve the foundationalist epistemological project.","n":[2]}],[{"t":"What remains is not a new epistemology but a culture in which *edifying* philosophy in the Wittgenstein/Heidegger/Dewey mode replaces the foundationalist mission. *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* makes the historical-deconstructive case; Part III of that book sketches what philosophy without mirrors looks like.","n":[3,4]}]],"texts":"*Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* (1979), the entire book and especially Parts I-II; *Consequences of Pragmatism* (1982) 'Keeping Philosophy Pure: An Essay on Wittgenstein' and 'Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey'; *Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth* (PP Vol 1, 1991) Introduction on antirepresentationalism; the Frege-Tarski-Sellars-Quine engagement throughout the early papers in *Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy* (Leach and Tartaglia eds., 2014). Reception: Robert Brandom's 'Vocabularies of Pragmatism' and *Making It Explicit* (1994) — the inferentialist extension that takes Rorty's anti-representationalism in a more systematic direction; Richard Bernstein's *Beyond Objectivism and Relativism* (1983) — the friendly pragmatist-tradition reading; John McDowell's *Mind and World* (1994); the analytic-philosophy charge that Rorty 'has no positive epistemology to put in its place'; the *PMN qualifier* itself ('I do not know whether we are in fact at the end of an era... There is no danger of philosophy's coming to an end') which sympathetic interpreters like Brandom occasionally elide.","works":["*Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* (1979), the entire book and especially Parts I-II","*Consequences of Pragmatism* (1982) 'Keeping Philosophy Pure: An Essay on Wittgenstein' and 'Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey'","*Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth* (PP Vol 1, 1991) Introduction on antirepresentationalism","the Frege-Tarski-Sellars-Quine engagement throughout the early papers in *Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy* (Leach and Tartaglia eds., 2014)"],"reception":"Robert Brandom's 'Vocabularies of Pragmatism' and *Making It Explicit* (1994) — the inferentialist extension that takes Rorty's anti-representationalism in a more systematic direction; Richard Bernstein's *Beyond Objectivism and Relativism* (1983) — the friendly pragmatist-tradition reading; John McDowell's *Mind and World* (1994); the analytic-philosophy charge that Rorty 'has no positive epistemology to put in its place'; the *PMN qualifier* itself ('I do not know whether we are in fact at the end of an era... There is no danger of philosophy's coming to an end') which sympathetic interpreters like Brandom occasionally elide.","status":"The dominant scholarly assessment of *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* (1979) is that it is one of the most important books in twentieth-century American philosophy, even by readers who think it is wrong. Brandom's inferentialist extension takes the anti-representationalist project in a more systematic direction. Bernstein places Rorty in the pragmatist tradition (Peirce-James- Dewey-Mead) and reads PMN as the contemporary completion of that tradition's rejection of foundationalism. McDowell's *Mind and World* is the most serious recent attempt to recover an *openness-to-the-world* condition that Rorty's account dissolves. The recurrent charge from analytic philosophy is that PMN does not provide a positive epistemology to replace the foundationalist one. The charge misses what PMN is doing: the point is to make a non-representationalist culture imaginable, not to construct a new theoretical apparatus.","era":"1931-2007","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature","page":"pp. 177–179","canonical":"","quote":"The historical roots of the Aristotle-Locke analogy of knowledge to perception are beyond the scope of this book, but we can at least take from Heidegger the idea that the desire for an \"epistemology\" is simply the most recent product of the dialectical development of an originally chosen set of metaphors.","label":"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 177–179"},{"n":2,"work":"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature","page":"pp. 224–225","canonical":"","quote":"In the previous chapter I said that the epistemological tradition confused the causal process of acquiring knowledge with questions concerning its justification. In this chapter I have presented Sellars's criticism of the Myth of the Given and Quine's criticism of the notion of truth by virtue of meaning as two detailed developments of this more general criticism.","label":"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 224–225"},{"n":3,"work":"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature","page":"p. 26","canonical":"","quote":"In chapter eight I use some ideas drawn from Gadamer and Sartre to develop a contrast between \"systematic\" and \"edifying\" philosophy, and to show how \"abnormal\" philosophy which does not conform to the traditional Cartesian- Kantian matrix is related to \"normal\" philosophy.","label":"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 26"},{"n":4,"work":"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature","page":"pp. 20–21","canonical":"","quote":"Each of the three, in his later work, broke free of the Kantian conception of philosophy as foundational, and spent his time warning us against those very temptations to which he himself had once succumbed.","label":"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 20–21"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"truth-without-correspondence","label":"Truth without correspondence: is truth anything more than the compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way?"},{"slug":"triple-contingency","label":"Triple contingency: are language, selfhood, and liberal community contingent all the way down?"},{"slug":"liberal-ironism-the-private-public-split-and-ethnocentric-li","label":"Liberal ironism, the private/public split, and ethnocentric liberalism: is the liberal ironist a defensible synthesis or an evasion of the political?"},{"slug":"philosophy-as-cultural-politics","label":"Philosophy as cultural politics: is philosophy as a foundationalist discipline finished, while edifying philosophy continues?"},{"slug":"continental-engagement-and-strong-textualism","label":"Continental engagement and strong textualism: are pragmatist appropriations of Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault legitimate or domesticating?"}]}