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processes of reason, suggesting how inappropriate are the mind/body and subject/object dualisms that have dominated the philosophic tradition. Rather than taking lived experience as a starting point, as suggested by the midrash of Abraham, the Western philosophical tradition takes an approach to the problem of knowledge much like that of the midrash of the child. In Plato's Meno, for example, Socrates argues that all learning and all teaching is only remembering: "since [the soul] is immortal. . . .we need not be surprised if it can recall the knowledge of virtue or anything else which ... it once possessed."35 But in rash in depth in my forthcoming Legal Power and Narrative Meaning, supra note 4, at 22-23. " One way to understand the story of the sacrifice of Issac, Genesis 22:1-13, is in terms of the practice of child sacrifice prevalent in biblical times. See 2 Kings 23:10; Judges 11:30-40. In this view, Abraham's major revelation was the substitution of the ram for his son, of animal sacrifice for human sacrifice. See Genesis 22:13-14. 32 See Exodus 20:2-5. See, e.g., Leviticus 19:18 ("Love thy neighbor as thyself"). 4 See Ricoeur, The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling, in ON METAPHOR 141, 142 (S. Sacks ed. 1979) ("[Tjhe question is whether the functioning of metaphorical sense does not put to the test and even hold at bay this very dichotomy."). " PLATO, Meno, in THE COLLECTED DIALOGUES OF PLATO 364 (E. Hamilton 19891 1118 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LAW REVIEW Platonic thought, knowledge is purely transcendental, mathematics and geometry are the purest forms of knowledge, 6 and the body and the senses are obstructions to the attainment of real knowledge." From Plato to Kant (to make a particularly breath-taking leap), the central concern of epistemology has been the intellect and its relation to the external world.3 s For Richard Rorty, this very concern is the problem.39 He characterizes the objectivist tradition of philosophy as focused on the problem of how the mind represents what is understood to be a determinate world. To know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind; so to understand the possibility and nature of knowledge is to understand the way in which the mind is able to construct such representations. Philosophy's central concern is to be a general theory of representation, a theory which will divide culture up into the areas which represent reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent it at all (despite their pretense of doing so).4 & H. Cairns ed. 1963); see also PLATO, The Republic, in id. at 747-50 (the allegory of the cave). "I See PLATO, The Republic, in id. at 754-57; see also PLATO, Meno, in id. at 365-70 (illustrating recollection with the slave boy solving a geometry problem). 11 See, e.g., PLATO, Phaedo, in id. at 49 ("[t]he body intrudes. . . into our investigations, interrupting, disturbing, distracting, and preventing us from getting a glimpse of the truth."). Steve Fuller takes an extreme version of this view. Although he assumes a single correct description of "reality," he concludes that human cognitive capacities are ineradicably fallible and that our ability to achieve "truth" is dependent upon "welcomed encounter with error." Fuller, supra note 2, at 558 (emphasis deleted). 3 "Before Kant it is perhaps impossible to find any philosopher who did not have a correspondence theory of truth." H. PUTNAM, REASON, TRUTH AND HISTORY 56 (1981). Of course, by making this leap from Plato to Kant (and, shortly, to Rorty), I mean only to keep this essay to manageable length not to imply that nothing important occurred in between. Rorty's work builds on insights from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Dewey, and Wittgenstein; to focus on his work is a useful, if necessarily incomplete, way to talk about these issues. " He identifies it as "the original sin of epistemology." R. RORTY, PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE 60 n.32 (1979) [hereinafter R. RORTY, PHILOSOPHY]. Rorty uses the term "epistemology" in a univocal sense: for reasons suggested below, he treats all epistemological inquiry as mistakenly dependent on the objectivist assumptions suggested by the mind as mirror metaphor. See infra text accompanying note 47. He does, however, refer to Quine's request to let epistemology "be psychology" as the "new epistemology." R. RORTY, PHILOSOPHY, supra, at 220. Joan Williams premises much of her discussion of critical legal studies on the development of a "new epistemology," although her use of this term includes approaches to philosophy that Rorty would not call epistemology at all. See Williams, supra note 22, at 430. I use the term "epistemology" in a theory-neutral sense to denote the study of how humans achieve knowledge. ,0 R. RORTY, PHILOSOPHY, supra note 39, at 3; see also id. at 12 ("The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations."). [Vol. 137:1105 TRANSCENDENTAL NONSENSE This is the familiar "correspondence" view of meaning and rationality, what Hilary Putnam calls the perspective of metaphysical realism. On this perspective, the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of 'the way the world is'. Truth involves some kind of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things and sets of things.41 All epistemology, in Rorty's view, is a mistaken -quest forever led astray by the correspondence theory and its assumption that language is capable of "mirroring" objective states of affairs in the world. Rorty rejects the idea of objective, mind-independent truth for three reasons. First, he sees language not as "a medium" such as a mirror "in which we form pictures of reality, but . . .[as] part of the behavior of human beings." '42 To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be out there cannot exist independent of the human mind because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.4" Second, Rorty sees no way to gain access to the world without language, no way to describe what language does or how well it does it without using language, no "way of breaking out of language in order to compare it with something else."' 4 Third, he rejects the notion of "mind" as a meaningful construct. For Rorty, there is only the purely physiological interaction between humans and their environment. In Rorty's view, the "problem" of mind is simply a question of the relative paucity of our current knowledge of neurophysiology; as we increase our knowledge of neural processes, we should be able to speak directly about them and dispense with the intentionalist model of mind. 41 H. PUTNAM, supra note 38, at 49. 42 R. RORTY, CONSEQUENCES, supra note 5, at xviii. 4 R. RORTY, CONTINGENCY, supra note 6, at 5. 4' R. RORTY, CONSEQUENCES, supra note 5, at xix. In taking both these positions, Rorty is most directly influenced by Wittgenstein. See L. WITTGENSTEIN, PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS § 241, at 88e (G. Anscombe trans. 1953) ("It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life."). 1989] 1120 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LAW REVIEW As an illustration, Rorty conjures up a hypothetical extraterrestrial culture he calls the Antipodeans, who can dispense entirely with intentionalist concepts such as "pain" in favor of direct talk about the state of their nerves. Instead of "ouch," Antipodeans say "It's my C-fibers again you know the ones that go off everytime you get burned."" In this view, "pain" is not something that occurs in the "mind." It is just the way that our culture happens to express the experience.46 Rorty does not attempt to solve the mind-body problem. He uses, instead, a strategy that lawyers might call confession and avoidance. Rorty is not suggesting that we notice only the body and relegate the mind to future advances in science. Instead, he is suggesting that we stop worrying about the problem because nothing turns on it. He treats "ouch" and "it's my C-fibers" as the same thing. [T]he claim (common to Wittgenstein and Dewey) [is] that to think of knowledge which presents a "problem," and about which we ought to have a "theory," is a product of viewing knowledge as an assemblage of representations ... The moral to be drawn is that if this way of thinking about knowledge is optional, then so is epistemology.4 For Rorty, therefore, this quest is no less mistaken when undertaken by epistemology's successor disciplines psychology and linguistics.4" Much about Rorty's argument against objectivist epistemology is persuasive. It says nothing, however, of how humans achieve and transmit knowledge. Rorty rejects the view that epistemic justification is a matter of a proposition's relationship with an objective state of affairs in the world. Instead, he takes a social coherence view: Epistemic justification is just a matter of a proposition's acceptance by a social group. "It is merely to say that nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept, and that there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence." 49 Thus, Rorty rejects the possibility of ultimate foundations for knowledge, in favor of what I described in Part I as a purely relativist

Transcendental Nonsense, Metaphoric Reasoning, and the Cognitive Stakes for Law