Conclusion

From the earliest days of the pragmatist revival, Richard Rorty occupied an ambiguous position in the community of scholars interested in pragmatism. The fame he won for himself with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Consequences of Pragmatism he gave back to pragmatism a hundredfold—to John Dewey in particular—always insisting that his own philosophy was merely a restatement in more contemporary philosophical terms of Dewey's own. On the other hand, many scholars of pragmatism claimed he was giving the tradition a bad name. They charged him with misrepresenting its core ideas and associating it with a kind of loose relativism much at odds with the seriousness with which the classical pragmatists regarded the enterprise of inquiry.

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