Richard Rorty Quotes on Truth
Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) gave late-twentieth-century pragmatism its most influential anti-foundationalist statement. The mirror metaphor — the idea that the mind's task is to mirror the natural order, and that knowledge consists in accurate representation — Rorty argued to be an inheritance from Greek and Cartesian philosophy that has organized the entire epistemological project but that has no intelligible content once the metaphor is removed. The constructive Rorty of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) recommends ironist liberalism: a public commitment to reducing cruelty combined with a private recognition of the contingency of one's own final vocabulary, freed from any expectation that philosophy will supply the universal foundation the Western tradition has always sought.
Quotes
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Attributed to Richard Rorty:
“Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.”
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Attributed to Richard Rorty:
“There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.”
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Attributed to Richard Rorty:
“A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.”
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Attributed to Richard Rorty:
“The world does not speak. Only we do.”
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“On James's view, "true" resembles "good" or "rational" in being a normative notion, a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit with other sentences which are doing so.”
Introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) -
“As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ”
Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).