Yong paper for ETS 2002 - all rights reserved - p. 6
access the truth, to accurately re-present reality in words. But what if all our efforts to check our words
with reality in itself fails since reality is linguistically engaged? What if all our endeavors to confirm the
truth of our words leads only to other words rather than to reality itself? How will philosophers recognize
solutions to their debates or successes regarding their reflections and hypotheses if all criteria is
linguistically formulated, and all appeals to reality are linguistically mediated?
12
If this is the case, then
the Philosophic quest has, for the most part, been wasting its time attempting to get to reality or truth
behind or beyond language. So how does Rorty accomplish this deconstruction of the Philosophic
tradition? He realizes that he is in a catch-22. To undermine the tradition, he needs to engage Philosophy
on its own terms and find it wanting. Yet to do so is to be constrained by the tradition`s terms and
categories, and in that sense to perpetuate its discourse.
13
Rorty`s solution in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) is to re-tell the history of
Philosophy as built upon the mistaken quest for truth and reality behind language. As such, Philosophy is
a provincial Western construction dominated first by ontotheological speculation and then by scientism,
and followed consequentially by foundationalisms and dualisms of all kinds. Our Philosophical problems
are therefore of our own making, mostly the result of our having simply changed the subject since we
presented ourselves with insoluble questions. Philosophy should therefore be revisioned as one genre of
discourse interconnected with other genres (the sciences included
14
) in the human conversation, and as
serving primarily private functions of self-making and self-expression--what Rorty calls post-
Philosophical philosophy--rather than the realm of public interests. Given the lack of finality and closure
to philosophical conversation, then, we need to embrace the pluralism and historical conditionedness of
12
This valid Peircean point is one of the primary theses of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature which
Rorty saw as following from the difficulties that the linguistic turn in philosophy generated; see Rorty`s
Metaphilosophical Difficulties of Linguistic Philosophy, in Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in
Philosophical Method (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), 1-39.
13
Recognition of this dilemma pervades Rorty`s corpus; see, e.g., Essays on Heidegger and Others, 94-95.
14
For Rorty`s redescriptions of philosophy, literature, and science in a nutshell, see Texts and Lumps in
Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 78-92, where he urges that philosophical ideas and doctrines need to be assessed
in ways similar to the analysis of lumps by scientists and the analysis of texts by literary critics in order to be worth
their philosophical salt!