Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is a 1979 work of philosophy by American philosopher Richard Rorty. Concerned primarily with epistemology—that is, what an individual can “know” and “do,” the book challenges a belief shared by many other contemporary philosophers that human forms of knowledge are able to represent, or “mirror,” nature. Rorty traces back this belief, which he calls “correspondence theory,” to its roots in the philosophy of Descartes, and contends that knowledge is merely a set of metaphors that we honor by ascribing positive truth value. In Rorty’s system, truth is not an object that can be obtained or held, but a designation that stems from the consensual nature of our reality. The book had far-reaching consequences in the humanities and sciences and established Rorty as one of the foremost philosophers of the twentieth century.

Rorty argues that modern epistemology is problematic in two ways. First, it applies a false claim that we can obtain final definitions, or “vocabularies,” to explain what is real. Second, this claim stems from an irresponsible and self-serving motivation: the pressure to affirm the ultimate goal of Cartesian philosophy, which is to methodologically determine the basic elements and forces that make up the world. Rorty contends that, though this kind of empirical interrogation has many useful applications, its implication that there is an “end” to science, where we might one day have everything totally figured out, is false. In the same light, he rejects the notion that humanity is automatically on a track of progress, for there is no ultimate guidepost for our very understanding of what constitutes “progress.” Rorty seeks to question and undermine branches of knowledge that work, often unconsciously, to preserve themselves rather than improve their understanding of what constitutes good human activity or life.

Next, Rorty rejects an argument first made by Immanuel Kant, that pictures, concepts, and other ways of transmitting metaphorical knowledge hold up a mirror to nature. Here, he suggests that all forms of knowledge are actually self-serving and suspect (though he does not deny their usefulness). A good philosopher should always acknowledge that what is “given” to the mind is contingent on the mind itself. Thus, the purpose of philosophy should not be to obtain a map of reality, but to look pragmatically on the fruits of our knowledge-making, and constantly favor what is better for us to believe. Rorty cites several post-epistemological works, Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” and Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” to bolster his argument about this distinction. Both authors agree with the notion that knowledge follows from our social justification of belief. This view is liberating, since it justifies an immediate and urgent connection between knowledge and social justice.



In the final part of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty refers to Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which Kuhn coins the term “normal science” in reference to the fact that knowledge is normatively constructed and sustained. He then coins his own term, “normative discourse,” an even more general category that can be applied to any knowledge-making activity. In this view, discourse proceeds according to the “givens” of the paradigm of its historical moment and is thus always contingent and on the verge of obsolescence. Its opposite, “abnormal discourse,” lives outside of the normative realm, and thus tends to be less far-reaching and powerful. Rorty names Kant, Locke, and Descartes as philosophers who produced normal discourse, and Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey as philosophers who produced abnormal discourse.

Rorty’s thinking is often construed as dangerously relativist and an attack on the institutions and paradigms, which have produced knowledge that has led to greatly improved human flourishing over the past several centuries. However, Rorty never claims that all knowledge is on an equal footing; he highly prizes knowledge that stresses the limits of what is understood and is highly rigorous at the same time. In the contemporary era, moral relativism, or the tendency to view human behaviors as immune from absolute judgments, is a vein of thinking often misattributed to Rorty. He is frequently impugned by analytic philosophers who stress the belief that knowledge can model or mirror nature. The disagreement on the distinction between what humans perceive and what exists, in itself, in the world, is traceable back to Greek philosophers, including Plato and his work Allegory of the Cave. Nonetheless, Rorty has become a key figure in discourse about postmodernism, legal theory, civics, literary analysis, and the future of the humanities and social sciences.