The Mirror of Nature

Rorty traces the mirror metaphor to Descartes and Locke: the seventeenth-century decision to make the inner theatre of the mind philosophically primary and to construe knowledge as the accurate representation of outer reality by inner ideas. Kant deepened the picture by making the mind the active organiser of experience, but retained the image of the mind as a faculty whose operations could be catalogued and whose representational capacities could be grounded. The result was what Rorty calls "epistemology-centred philosophy": philosophy as the discipline that stands in judgment over all other cognitive claims, policing their representational accuracy.

The mirror metaphor dissolves when we ask what it would mean to step outside our system of representations and check them against reality itself. No such God's-eye view is available. What we call knowledge is not representation-that-accurately-mirrors-reality but a set of beliefs that prove useful and well-supported within our current practices of inquiry — beliefs we are prepared to defend in conversation and act on in practice. Truth is not a property that beliefs acquire by mirroring the world but a word of commendation for beliefs that survive critical scrutiny.

Rorty's three heroes — Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey — are united by their rejection of the mirror metaphor, though they diagnose the problem differently and draw different conclusions. Wittgenstein shows that philosophical problems arise from the bewitchment of intelligence by language, not from genuine puzzles about representation. Heidegger shows that the Cartesian subject is a late and derivative construction within a prior horizon of practical engagement with the world. Dewey shows that inquiry is a form of problem-solving within a biological and social environment, not a process of mirroring.

The mirror of nature as a metaphor for the mind is traced in Part I of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Rorty's genealogy draws heavily on Sellars's critique of the Myth of the Given and Quine's critique of the analytic–synthetic distinction.