Rorty's Pragmatism and Gadamer's Hermeneutics

Abstract

SINCE ITS PUBLICATION in 1979, Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature has generated a great deal of discussion and debate. In this book, Rorty attacks wholesale not only the idea of mind, the representation theory of knowledge, and the correspondence theory of truth, but (if that were not enough) also the long-reigning understanding of philosophy itself as, in some sense, a foundationalist enterprise. In brief, Rorty argues that since knowledge involves neither accurate nor privileged representations, the idea of the mind is a fiction. And if there is no such thing as a mind, then the notion of philosophy as the foundational discipline which adjudicates disputes about the mind and prescribes the correct or appropriate epistemological methods can and must be abandoned. Philosophy must, in Rorty's words, be therapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than systematic (1979:5). It must give up entirely the whole business of epistemology and become instead a form of hermeneutics.