ABSTRACT
Rorty considers Chapter 4 of PMN to be the most important part of his book; he says this in the Introduction (10), and he has repeated it in interviews ever since. It sees Rorty playing the role in which he is most comfortable, that of the metaphilosopher surveying developments within the subject, and drawing the wide-scale conclusions overlooked by constructive philosophers preoccupied with details. In this case, the conclusion is that the twentieth-century analytic movement in philosophy developed in such a way as to completely undermine itself; as he later put it: ‘I think that analytic philosophy culminates in Quine, the later Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson – which is to say that it transcends and cancels itself’ (Rorty 1982: xviii). In this chapter, the emphasis is on Wilfrid Sellars and W.V.O. Quine, two figures widely regarded – especially by Rorty’s generation – as the greatest American philosophers of the last century. Rorty’s idea is that the combination of Sellars’s attack on the ‘Myth of the Given’ and Quine’s attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction collapsed the two Kantian distinctions which analytic philosophy depended upon. Moreover, though they did not realise it, Sellars and Quine were using ‘the same argument’ (170), one which
weighs equally against representationalism, objective truth, and any conception of philosophy as what Dewey called the ‘quest for certainty’ (166, 171). This common message drawn from Sellars and Quine is the lynch-pin of PMN‘s destructive case, and Rorty has boiled down and reshaped it so much since then that it has effectively become his own. No wonder, then, that he sets great store by this chapter.
