Summary
In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty argues that the history of philosophy is the history of the quest to make sense of the claim that the mind has knowledge of an objective reality, and thus to give philosophy the ability to judge other aspects of culture as being in or out of touch with this reality. He dubs this idea "representationalism" and refers to it using the metaphor of the "mirror of nature", hence the title of the book.
In the introduction, Rorty claims that Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and John Dewey are the three most important philosophers of the 20th century; Wittgenstein for his diagnosis of philosophy as a set of linguistic confusions, Heidegger for his historical deconstruction of such confusions, and Dewey for his hopeful prognosis of a post-metaphysical culture. In continuing this quietist and historicist tradition, the book is therapeutic rather than constructive in nature. However, Rorty aims to carry out his therapy by using the arguments of such systematic philosophers as W. V. O. Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, Thomas Kuhn, and Donald Davidson in order to undermine our philosophical intuitions about the mind (mirror), knowledge (mirroring), and philosophy itself (the study of mirroring), and thus to undermine the representationalist picture of the "mirror of nature".
In Part One, titled "Our Glassy Essence", Rorty examines the philosophical notion of the mind as an immaterial, non-spatial entity which is somehow able to have knowledge of things. He first sets out to dissolve the intuition that there is a "mark of the mental" which can be used to categorise things a priori as being either mental or physical. After having shown that the traditional candidates for marks of the mental, namely non-spatiality, intentionality, and phenomenality, fail to justify dualistic intuitions, Rorty declares the mind–body problem to have been dissolved. He then examines the history of the mind from Aristotle to Descartes in order to demonstrate its historical contingency, which he hopes will dissuade future generations from attempting to resurrect the mind–body problem, before presenting his social-linguistic account of incorrigibility about the mental through his "Antipodeans" thought experiment.
In Part Two, titled "Mirroring", Rorty examines the philosophical notion of knowledge as the possession of accurate representations of an objective reality. He first examines the history of this idea, claiming that philosophy only became concerned with a "theory of knowledge" when Locke and Kant confused psychological processes with normative justification. Rorty then argues that Quine's critique of the analytic–synthetic distinction and Sellars's critique of the Myth of the Given both undermine what he calls the "idea" idea, which is the idea that there exist mental intermediaries which serve to represent reality. The rejection of the "idea" idea leads to a position which Rorty calls "epistemological behaviorism", which states that knowledge and justification are social-linguistic practices rather than a matter of representing reality. Rorty also addresses recent attempts by philosophers such as Quine and Jerry Fodor to replace epistemology with psychology, and by Michael Dummett and Hilary Putnam to replace it with philosophy of language, arguing that these attempts ultimately fail in giving sense to representationalism.
In Part Three, titled "Philosophy", Rorty discusses what philosophy could look like after giving up representationalism. He claims that philosophy has traditionally sought commensuration, or the grounding of everything on a single, ahistorical foundation, but Kuhn has shown that different paradigms are incommensurable, meaning that no such foundation exists and paradigms are historically contingent. Rorty instead opts for conversation or hermeneutics, which is where knowledge and truth are reached through open-ended dialogue. This also means redefining objectivity as intersubjective consensus rather than as correspondence to the world. The point of inquiry without mirrors, according to Rorty, is to find better ways of coping with one's environment rather than to represent an objective reality, in much the same way a Kuhnian scientist seeks to find a more coherent picture of the world rather than to accumulate facts in a linear fashion.
Reception
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was seen to be somewhat controversial upon its publication. It had its greatest success outside analytic philosophy, despite its reliance on arguments by Quine and Sellars, and was widely influential in the humanities.
In the decades since its publication, it has seen more appreciation within analytic circles. For example, John McDowell, in the preface to his book Mind and World (1994), states that the initial sketches of the ideas propounded in this work were made "during the winter of 1985–6, in an attempt to get under control my usual excited reaction to a reading—my third or fourth—of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature." He added that it was "obvious that Rorty's work is in any case central for the way I define my stance here". [3]
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