Reading Rorty can be hard, not because his ideas are especially difficult but because often they are, or at least seem on the face of it to be, quite straightforward and yet somehow wrong. But this is very unlikely: Rorty is not a thinker to get straightforward things wrong. We need, then, a plan for reading Rorty. The plan I will suggest finds Rorty engaging, at different points, in three fundamentally different sorts of discourse. In this regard Rorty’s reflections on truth in particular bear, we will see, a remarkable, and remarkably suggestive, similarity to Plato’s reflections on knowledge in his dialogue Theaetetus. This is a large and unprecedented claim, one that I can only begin to explicate. But even this mere sketch of a plan for reading Rorty is enough, I think, to show that reading Rorty as engaged at various points in the three sorts of discourse I outline will enable us to make good sense of claims that have seemed to many readers, even otherwise sympathetic ones, to be quite wrongheaded. With Danielle Macbeth.
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