Rorty and Reference

Jamie Smith (Who’s Afraid of Relativism?) defends Richard Rorty against the charge that he leaves behind an antirealism that implies we cannot refer to the world, perhaps an antirealism that denies the existence of extra-linguistic things.

In Smith’s summary, “realist critics confuse having a theory of reference and granting a kind of ontological weight to things. That is, they think that having a theory of reference is the necssary condition for affirming that there are extra-paradigm ‘things.’ So they assume that if one rejects representations and correspondence, one is giving up on the metaphysical furniture of the universe.” 

Yet Rorty insists that it is not valid to infer “there are no theory-independent things” from the premise that “one cannot give a theory-independent description of a thing.” Acknowledging “the social and communal conditions of knowledge – that our knowledge is relative to our social context – does not entail that everything is just ‘made up’” (87).