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versationalism to go for its predecessor with mockery and satire–
which Kierkegaard used on Hegel and which Rorty praises the later
Wittgenstein for using on epistemology.
If
one were to raise the ob–
jection of inconsistency to Rorty, he might reply that he is not to be
intimidated by that epistemological fetish. But even conversation
must submit to some constraints if it is to be more than disconnected
interior monologue . Rorty , furthermore, is not as antinomian as he
seems. So it is more likely that he would reply that his is an
argumen–
tum ad hominem,
undermining the assumptions of epistemology with
forms of reasoning epistemologists accept.
The main line of argument in
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
is that epistemology, conceived as the nonempirical science of the
mind's activity of representing nature to itself, is open to fatal objec–
tions. In the book's first part, in which a thickly woven hedge of up–
to-date controversy in the (analytic) philosophy of mind may impede
the forward progress of the general reader, the conclusion is drawn
that the mind-body distinction is historically unstable and is con–
tinually being redrawn as different philosophical interests occupy its
drawers. But that distinction is not necessary to or presupposed by
epistemology and is at most loosely related to it in various ways . All
epistemology needs is that there should be things that have beliefs
and that an important property of some of these beliefs is truth,
understood as a relation between the beliefs that possess it and the
world outside them. The beliefs do not have to be conceived as
abstract propositions or their believers as inscrutable Cartesian con–
sciousnesses. Epistemology is an entirely intelligible activity for
materialists. So this part of the argument is beside the point.
Although Rorty does not go in much for the satire he in princi–
ple regards as appropriate, he allows himself a fair measure of
rhetoric. His critique of what he mistakenly believes to be the men–
talistic presuppositions of epistemology, with its persistent references
to
mirroring
(as in the book's title), to
representation,
to
"man's glassy
essence"
(the title of part one) is calculated to saddle all epistemology
with the indefensible and literally pictorial account of belief given by
Locke and his eighteenth-century successors. But epistemology can
survive, and has for quite a long time survived, the replacement of
pictures in the mind's eye by less naive conceptions of belief, such as
dispositions to utter sentences and, in suitably practical cases, to act
in certain ways.
At the heart of Rorty's attacks on the idea that the truth of
beliefs is ever determined by the world outside them is a familiar
