Critically assess what, according to Richard Rorty, the pragmatist Essay

Critically assess what, according to Richard Rorty, the pragmatist says about truth - Essay Example In epistemology he opposes 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 â€Å"epistemological behaviorism,† Rorty holds that no statement is epistemologically more basic than any other, and no statement is ever justified â€Å"finally† but only relative to some circumscribed and contextually determined set of additional statements. In the philosophy of language Rorty rejects the idea that sentences or beliefs are â€Å"true† or â€Å"false† in any interesting sense other than being useful or successful within a broad social practice. He also opposes representationism, the view that the main function of language is to represent or picture pieces of an objectively existing reality. Finally, in metaphysics he rejects both realism and antirealism, or idealism, as products of mistaken representationalist assumptions about language. Richard Rorty was born in 1931 in New York City. He graduated from the Chicago of Rudolf Carnap in 1949, and has taught at Princeton, as well as the University of Virginia and Stanford. But he left the cautious world of analytical philosophy to go over to the enemy, thereby perfectly fitting the bill as lord of the dance to the subversives. He is also an example of a phenomenon common in France and Germany, but which exported to America better than to England, namely the public intellectual. In his case, it is a family tradition. Rorty, an only child, is the grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the founders of Americas social gospel movement, and both his parents were writers and active Trotskyites. "My parents were part of the anti-Stalinist left which centered on John Dewey," Rorty has said. Despite his own hostility to Marxism, he continues to place himself "wholeheartedly on the