Abstract

The following article is only in part a review of Rorty’s “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”. First I sketch the development of the two leading metaphors, which Rorty considers as being central for epistemology, namely the mirror of nature and the eye of the mind. Then I try to bring out the antirealist implications of Rorty’s socalled “epistemological behaviorism” and to make sense of his slogan that truth is merely warranted assertability which in my view seems not to be in line with his favouring truth-conditional semantics. Thirdly I point to some possible consequences for the social sciences of using the antirealist “criteria!” semantics of the later Wittgen stein, one of Rorty’s heroes.