Philosophy After the Mirror of Nature: Rorty, Dewey, and Peirce on Pragmatism and Metaphor

Abstract

Richard Rorty's monumental work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, aimed to deconstruct the traditional metaphor of the mind as mirror. His method was to divide the history of philosophy into two parts. First, a period from Plato to Peirce includes all who think of consciousness as a detached mirror that collects private copies of nature. Second, another group, which overcomes this metaphor, includes, among others, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey. While brilliant, the study demarcated a limit on only one metaphor, calling for a new way of thinking through a new set of metaphors. And very little was done to articulate that next important metaphor to overcome the mirror. Yet these are already present in the very tradition Rorty used to overcome the mirror metaphor, namely, classical American philosophy, and notably James and Whitehead, but especially Peirce, whom Rorty dismissed as Cartesian and attached to the metaphor of the mirror of nature. In fact, it was Peirce who marked the way into a distinct set of metaphors that develop a specifically anti-Cartesian, antifoundationalist, and semeiotic conception of mind and world as "fluid."