- Length
- 424 pagesPrinceton University Press, thirtieth anniversary edition 2009
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
A book by an analytic philosopher arguing that analytic philosophy had spent seventy years working on a problem that was an artefact of a seventeenth-century metaphor. It made Rorty famous, cost him most of his colleagues, and put pragmatism back at the centre of the argument.
- Date
- 1979
- Author
- Richard Rorty
- Region
- Princeton, United States
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Genealogical — History of a concept used as a critique of it
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 338 years
Received as a betrayal by much of the profession it came from, and the single most widely read work of American philosophy of the late twentieth century.
What the book says
An argument that the central problem of modern philosophy was created by a metaphor and can be dissolved by dropping it. The metaphor is the mind as a mirror: an inner space containing representations, more or less accurate, of an outer world - so that knowledge becomes a matter of inspecting the representations to check their accuracy, and philosophy becomes the discipline that adjudicates such inspections for every other field. Rorty traces the picture's assembly. Descartes invents the inner space by grouping pains and beliefs together as contents of consciousness; Locke confuses causal explanation with justification, treating knowledge as an impression made on a passive receiver; Kant makes philosophy the tribunal that judges the claims of the sciences by fixing the a priori structure of representation. The middle of the book then argues that twentieth-century analytic philosophy inherited the picture intact, and that its own best work - Quine on the analytic and synthetic, Sellars on the myth of the given, Wittgenstein and Heidegger and Dewey independently - has dismantled it from inside. What remains is not a better theory of knowledge but the recognition that justification is a social practice of giving reasons to other people.
What it argues
That there is no such thing as accuracy of representation to be theorised, because there is no standpoint from which our representations and the world could be compared. Justification is not a relation between a belief and a piece of reality; it is a relation between a belief and other beliefs, conducted among people who ask each other for reasons - which makes epistemology a description of a social practice rather than a foundation for it. Rorty's positive proposal is deflationary and has annoyed people in both directions: philosophy stops being the discipline that grounds the others and becomes one voice in a continuing conversation, useful for making new descriptions available rather than for adjudicating old ones.
What it answered
Descartes, Locke and Kant as the builders of the picture, and the analytic philosophy that inherited it. The book's rhetorical strategy is what made it explosive: Rorty argues the destructive case almost entirely out of work by figures the profession revered - Quine, Sellars, Davidson, the later Wittgenstein - so the demolition arrives as a report on what analytic philosophy had already achieved without noticing. He then puts Dewey, Wittgenstein and Heidegger together as the three great destroyers of the tradition, which is the pairing his critics found least forgivable.
How it argues
By historical narrative in service of a therapeutic aim. Rorty holds that a picture cannot be refuted, only made to look optional, so the method is to show where it came from, what it was invented to do, and how philosophy would look without it. This is why the book is a history rather than a set of arguments, and why critics who answer it argument by argument tend to talk past it. The prose is fluent, allusive and unusually free of technical apparatus for a book of its subject.
The moment
Princeton in the 1970s, with Rorty inside the discipline's central institution and increasingly unable to see why its problems mattered. He had edited the standard collection on the linguistic turn a decade earlier. After the book he moved to the University of Virginia as a professor of humanities and then to Stanford in comparative literature, and spent the rest of his life writing about literature, politics and hope for a general readership.
How it travelled
Out of philosophy and into everything else. Within analytic philosophy the reaction was largely hostile and the book is often dismissed as a misreading of the figures it recruits; outside it, in literary studies, political theory, law and intellectual history, it was enormously influential and made Rorty one of the very few philosophers of his generation with a public readership. It also completed the pragmatist revival: James and Dewey re-entered the curriculum substantially because Rorty put them there.
The strongest objection
That the argument saws off the branch it stands on, and that Rorty knows this and accepts it too easily. If justification is only ever a social practice of giving reasons to the people around you, then the standards of that practice are whatever a community happens to accept - and Rorty's own history, which claims to show what actually happened to philosophy, is asking to be believed on grounds it has just said do not exist. His answer is that he is not offering a theory but a redescription, and that redescriptions are recommended rather than proved. That is consistent, and it makes the book unanswerable in a way that many readers find suspicious rather than convincing. The narrower objection, pressed by the philosophers he recruits, is that Quine, Sellars and Davidson did not think they were abolishing epistemology, and that Rorty's use of them is a takeover rather than a report.
Why read it
The first two parts, which contain the historical argument and are the reason the book mattered. It is long, and the third part on philosophy without mirrors is where readers most often disagree about what has been established. Read it after Descartes and with some Dewey; it is a book about other books and assumes you know roughly what happened.
- First printed
- 1979
- First in English
- 1979
- Digitised
- No
The thirtieth anniversary edition adds essays by Michael Williams and David Bromwich and Rorty's own late retrospective, written shortly before his death in 2007.
Written in English and translated widely. In copyright.
Where it stands
Live and disputed in the strong sense - the argument about whether epistemology has a subject matter is still running, and Rorty's position remains a live option rather than a historical one, held by few and answered by many.
On quoting this book
In copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Rorty's readings of Quine, Sellars and Davidson are accurate is the standing complaint from inside analytic philosophy, and Davidson in particular objected to what was made of him. Whether the position is relativism, and whether Rorty's denials of that charge succeed, has been argued for four decades. Whether the book is philosophy or intellectual history is itself disputed, and Rorty would have said the distinction is one of the things he was attacking.