Rorty's Deconstruction of Philosophy

Abstract

metaphysical principles nor do they require systematic epistemological views. Thus, they have no need for correspondence theories and equally feel no urge to devise any scheme for correlating cognitive processes with the external world. Truth to pragmatists is simply, "what is good for us to believe".29 It is a kind of consensus held by the members of a community, that is, an intersubjective agreement that may be subject to change as soon as better ideas and vocabularies emerge. The pragmatist conception puts both knowledge and truth in the same intellectual brace: making truth or knowledge a body of beliefs or self-descriptions which people hold about themselves at any point in time. Consequently, any inquiry into the nature of knowledge or truth necessarily leads the inquirer to a satisfactory account of how a group of people in any culture arrived at the beliefs they presently hold. An inquiry such as this, to pragmatists, must not be tied to any set of criteria for settling arguments or views. To do this will amount to rendering "the behaviour of others at least minimally reasonable by our lights".3o Pragmatists do not accept as objective, the rationality that attempts to make a culture intelligible based on external criteria. The pragmatist and antirepresentationalist point of view of Rorty which we have been examining so far, which is a consequent development of his epistemological behaviourism, is a critique of the epistemology that is based on the governing metaphors (vocabularies) and the use of the mind to grapple external objects in the world. Rorty Winter 2004 denies that the world, mind, and vocabularies can be correlated m causal terms. This antirepresentationalist position, subverts our normative conceptions of truth, rationality and science. Rorty posits that each of these has applications within specific contexts and should not be treated as universal. Rorty's position, which suggests that representationalism be dismissed mainly because it has proven to create pseudo-problems, is itself problematic. For instance, the assertion that history has shown every attempt at representation to be fruitless is too sweeping. One can argue that events from the ancients to our day show that exploring the correlation between mind and reality or between statement and non-linguistic items has been linked to some insights, if not empirically, at least intellectually. We now know more about knowing and knowledge than was ever the case before. We now have psychology and many other sub-disciplines of science, which investigate this correlation and have generated so many concepts that make us better informed. Therefore, it is difficult to grant in general that every attempt to relate reality and mind has or will necessarily lead to pseudo-problems. Moreover, the term pseudoproblem itself is a relative one. It is impossible to determine what to all philosophers and branches of philosophy constitute pseudo-problems without having some ideas about what real problems are. Therefore, representationalists argue, that antirepresentationalism should be justified on other grounds than fear of pseudo-problems. It is nonetheless important to realize, as Rorty would have us do, that every transcendental thought geared towards correlating mind or language and reality cannot always fruitfully yield coherence . .>\ny belief to the contrary is indeed an illusion. If Rorty's epistemological behaviourism and antirepresentationalism are placed together, both of which seek to pragmatically let us know that rationality should be dependent on societal conventions of encountering reality: it will not be surprising at all, that he is accused of relativism. Of course, the insights he provides in these themes, to the extent that they undermine universal rationality, warrant a charge of relativism. This charge naturally follows, when he makes the mind a product of a language game and treats language as a social contingence confmed to its cultural dynamics. Consequently, this enables him to be able to remove the a priori cover provided by mind and language, which sustains the notions of "foundation of knowledge" and "theory of representation". In other words, by arguing that, if we stop to perceive the mind as mirror and language as accurate representation, we will have no more need for necessary truths, he sounds like a