Richard Rorty, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The core of the argument is this: once you give up what I called tertia — those intermediate items, conceptual frameworks, intended interpretations, that are supposed to stand between the mind and the world and mediate our contact with it — you give up the very machinery that makes representation a coherent notion.1 And once representation goes, the whole picture that generated both the skeptic's nightmare and the foundationalist's dream goes with it.
The Cartesian picture, which became the basis for what we call "modern" epistemology, places representations in the mind, and then posts an Inner Eye to survey them, hoping to find some mark that testifies to their fidelity.2 That is the picture I want to dissolve. In Descartes's model, the mind does not become the object it knows — it inspects a copy of it, a retinal image writ large, and then asks whether the copy is accurate.
Skepticism in that mode becomes a perfectly definite professional question: how do we know that what the Eye of the Mind sees is a mirror rather than a veil?3 The question sounds deep because the picture that generates it feels inevitable. But the picture is optional — as optional as the Aristotelian hylomorphic model it replaced, in which intellect and object were not related as image to original but as form instantiated in two places at once.4
Davidson's argument against the scheme/content dualism is what clinches it for me. The tertia — conceptual frameworks, intended interpretations — are non-causally related to what they organize or intend; they vary independently of the rest of the universe, just as the skeptic's relations of correspondence do.5 But if we have no such items, we have nothing suitable to serve as representations, and the question whether our beliefs represent the world accurately simply cannot be posed.
What we are left with is beliefs seen from the outside, as causal interactions with the environment, or from the inside, as rules for action — and no third standpoint that somehow combines the two.6 The realist at this point accuses the antiessentialist of linguistic idealism, of treating inquiry as nothing but the rearrangement of mental representations into pleasing patterns, as if there were nothing for them to represent.7
But that charge misses the position. The antiessentialist — the pragmatist — believes as firmly as any realist that there are objects causally independent of human beliefs and desires. What she denies is that representation is a useful notion for describing our relation to those objects. If we have relations of justification between our beliefs, and relations of causation between those beliefs and the rest of the universe, those are all the mind-world relations we need.8
Representation is, on this view, a fifth wheel. The confusion that sustains the representationalist picture runs deep in the tradition. It conflates two things: the psychological notion of representation, which oscillates between pictures and propositions, between retinal images and beliefs, and the epistemological notion of representation as what justifies our claims.9
Only propositions serve as premises in arguments; only images are "unmediated" in the empiricist sense. The tradition ran them together, and the result was the myth of the given — the idea that somewhere in the chain from world to mind there is a point of pure, uninterpreted contact that could anchor the whole edifice. Once Sellars dismantled that myth, and Quine dissolved the analytic/synthetic distinction that was supposed to separate the contribution of language from the contribution of the world, the representationalist picture had no foundations left to stand on.
once we give up tertia, we give up (or trivialize) the notions of representation and correspondence, and thereby give up the possibility of formulating epistemological skepticism.Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 142
In Descartes's conception—the one which became the basis for 'modern' epistemology—it is representations which are in the 'mind.' The Inner Eye surveys these representations hoping to find some mark which will testify to their fidelity.Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 59–60
skepticism in the manner of Descartes's First Meditations was a perfectly definite, precise, 'professional' question: How do we know that anything which is mental represents anything which is not mental? How do we know whether what the Eye of the Mind sees is a mirror (even a distorted mirror—an enchanted glass) or a veil?Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 59–60
if we see that the two models—the hylomorphic and the representative—are equally optional, perhaps we can see the inferences to mind-body dualism which stem from each as just as optional.Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 59–60
A common feature of all the forms of this dualism which Davidson lists is that the relations between the two sides of the dualism are non-causal. Such tertia as a 'conceptual framework' or an 'intended interpretation' are non-causally related to the things which they organize or intend.Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 142
To abjure tertia is to abjure the possibility of a third way of seeing them — one which somehow combines the outside view and the inside view, the descriptive and the normative attitudes.Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 142
The realist rejoins that the antiessentialist must be saying that objects are unknowable as they are in themselves — that she must, therefore, be some newfangled kind of transcendental idealist.Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, pp. 104–105
If we have relations of justification between our beliefs and desires, and relations of causation between those and the rest of the universe, those are all the mind-world or language-world relations we need. Representation is, on her view, a fifth wheel.Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, pp. 104–105
The notion of 'representation,' as it is employed by psychologists, is ambiguous as between, roughly, pictures and propositions—between, for example, retinal images (or their counterparts somewhere deep in the visual cortex) and beliefs such as 'That's red and rectangular.' Only the latter serve as premises, but only the former are 'unmediated.'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 266–267