Richard Rorty
in full Richard McKay Rorty
born Oct. 4, 1931, New York, N.Y., U.S.
died June 8, 2007, Palo Alto, Calif.
American pragmatist philosopher and public intellectual
noted for his wide-ranging critique of the modern conception
of philosophy as a quasi-scientific enterprise aimed at
reaching certainty and objective truth. In politics he
argued against programs of both the left and the right in
favour of what he described as a meliorative and reformist
“bourgeois liberalism.”
The son of nonacademic leftist intellectuals who broke
with the American Communist Party in the early 1930s, Rorty
attended the University of Chicago and Yale University,
where he obtained a Ph.D. in 1956. Following two years in
the army, he taught philosophy at Wellesley College
(1958–61) and Princeton University (1961–82) before
accepting a position in the department of humanities at the
University of Virginia. From 1998 until his retirement in
2005, Rorty taught comparative literature at Stanford
University.
Rorty’s views are somewhat easier to characterize in
negative than in positive terms. In epistemology he opposed
foundationalism, the view that all knowledge can be
grounded, or justified, in a set of basic statements that do
not themselves require justification. According to his
“epistemological behaviourism,” Rorty held that no statement
is epistemologically more basic than any other, and no
statement is ever justified “finally” but only relative to
some circumscribed and contextually determined set of
additional statements. In the philosophy of language, Rorty
rejected the idea that sentences or beliefs are “true” or
“false” in any interesting sense other than being useful or
successful within a broad social practice. He also opposed
representationism, the view that the main function of
language is to represent or picture pieces of an objectively
existing reality. Finally, in metaphysics he rejected both
realism and antirealism, or idealism, as products of
mistaken representationalist assumptions about language.
Because Rorty did not believe in certainty or absolute
truth, he did not advocate the philosophical pursuit of such
things. Instead, he believed that the role of philosophy is
to conduct an intellectual “conversation” between
contrasting but equally valid forms of intellectual
inquiry—including science, literature, politics, religion,
and many others—with the aim of achieving mutual
understanding and resolving conflicts. This general view is
reflected in Rorty’s political works, which consistently
defend traditional left-liberalism and criticize newer forms
of “cultural leftism” as well as more conservative
positions.
Rorty defended himself against charges of relativism and
subjectivism by claiming that he rejected the crucial
distinctions these doctrines presuppose. Nevertheless, some
critics have contended that his views lead ultimately to
relativist or subjectivist conclusions, whether or not Rorty
wished to characterize them in those terms. Others have
challenged Rorty’s interpretation of earlier American
pragmatist philosophers and suggested that Rorty’s own
philosophy is not a genuine form of pragmatism.
Rorty’s publications include Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).
Brian Duignan
