Epistemology

Consequences of Pragmatism

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Richard Rorty

1982

Consequences of Pragmatism collects Rorty's essays from the 1970s and early 1980s that develop the pragmatist challenge to analytic philosophy in more focused, polemical form. The title announces a programme: the essays aim to show what follows if we take seriously the pragmatist critique of Plato's idea that the aim of inquiry is to make contact with something non-human — with Truth, Reality, or Nature itself. The essays range across philosophy of language, theory of knowledge, philosophy of science, and the relationship between philosophy and literature, but the central target is always the same: the correspondence theory of truth and the foundationalist picture of knowledge that goes with it. Rorty argues that truth is not a property of sentences that they acquire by accurately picturing the world but simply a word of commendation for beliefs that prove useful and well-supported within our current practices of inquiry.