Editing Postmodern philosophy (section)

===Richard Rorty===
In the United States, a well-known pragmatist and self-proclaimed postmodernist was [[Richard Rorty]].  An analytic philosopher, Rorty believed that combining [[Willard Van Orman Quine]]'s criticism of the [[analytic-synthetic distinction]] with [[Wilfrid Sellars]]'s critique of the "[[Myth of the Given]]" allowed for an abandonment of the view of the thought or language as a mirror of a reality or an external world.  Further, drawing upon [[Donald Davidson (philosopher)|Donald Davidson]]'s criticism of the dualism between conceptual scheme and empirical content, he challenges the sense of questioning whether our particular concepts are related to the world in an appropriate way, whether we can justify our ways of describing the world as compared with other ways.  He argued that truth was not about getting it right or representing reality, but was part of a social practice and language was what served our purposes in a particular time; ancient languages are sometimes untranslatable into modern ones because they possess a different vocabulary and are unuseful today.  Donald Davidson is not usually considered a postmodernist, although he and Rorty have both acknowledged that there are few differences between their philosophies.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/rorty.html|title=An interview with Rorty|website=unc.edu|access-date=7 April 2018}}</ref><ref>Davidson, D., 1986, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," Truth And Interpretation, Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, afterwords.</ref>