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pletely safe and that the children can be brought along. On the other
hand, he announces his solidarity with dervishes like Foucault and
Derrida who would vehemently reject the spirit of Rorty's unman–
ageably vague remark about the rate of change of beliefs (how does
one count beliefs?) In its Deweyan, American version his proposal is
edifying and progressive; in its French version it is something much
rougher and wilder.
One can suspect that the Frenchmen have taken his proposal
seriously while he is just playing with it. He wants philosophy to be
assimilated to cultural criticism, as exemplified by T. S. Eliot and
Edmund Wilson. But why stop with fuddy-duddies like that? Eliot
was a theologian; Wilson accorded a positivistic place of honor to
science; they respectively succumbed to the two great intellectual er–
rors for which, according to Rorty, epistemology is responsible.
The rhetoric of Rorty's notion of the epistemologist's method
and of the claim to authority he makes for the results of its applica–
tion should be dispelled. His picture of a self-appointed elite, claim- .
ing a special authority because of the use of a special method sug–
gests a kind of ancient Egyptian priesthood practicing secret rites
and emerging with oracular judgements from the obscure depths of
their temples. In fact, epistemologists set themselves to the task of
making explicit the assumptions and logical relationships of the
bodies of thought they examine. They do not merely describe what
they investigate - the professed activity of the later Wittgenstein.
Nor do they dogmatically promulgate brand new rules of thought of
their own manufacture. They attempt to assess beliefs by attentive
consideration of their conformity with what almost everyone accepts
most of the time and after reflection, particularly in fields that are of
close practical concern. Anyone with time and the taste for it can
learn how the thing is done. The results and the path to them are
open to view . To return to an earlier comparison, epistemologists
are not Egyptian priests but football referees who apply and inter–
pret rules which the players they judge know perfectly well, even if
they cannot state them properly and, in the heat of the game, may
find it hard to abide by.
Confronted by the showy effusions of Foucault and Derrida,
one wonders what they would make of a lawyer who represented
them, or a surgeon who explained how he was about to operate on
them, or an accountant who explained their tax returns in the in–
tellectual style they employ. The theorization of these French phi–
losophers, including its heavy political constituent, is frivolous be-
