Neopragmatism: Rorty and the Contemporary Revival

Richard Rorty (1931–2007), trained originally in the analytic tradition and long a professor at Princeton before moving to the University of Virginia and later Stanford, triggered a broad late-twentieth-century revival of pragmatist themes with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). The book's central target is what Rorty calls the representationalist picture of mind, inherited from Descartes and given its modern epistemological form by Locke and Kant: the idea that the mind is essentially a mirror whose task is to represent an external reality with greater or lesser accuracy, and that philosophy's special, foundational role is to serve as a tribunal adjudicating the accuracy of such representations across all other fields of inquiry. Rorty argues that this entire picture, including its inherited vocabulary of "correspondence," "accurate representation," and philosophy as "first philosophy," should simply be abandoned rather than repaired.