Many of us are familiar with the four previous collections of Rorty’s essays. This book completes the set and is unique in that it contains Rorty’s first published articles in the 1960s and early 1970s. Treated merely as a stepping stone to the Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the collection has historical interest. But this is not its only virtue. One can already see a developing interest in metaphilosophy. The book contains 16 essays, along with a useful introduction by the editors. In what follows, I will rehearse four articles that I take to be the strongest or most influential.

Rorty’s first published article, entitled “Pragmatism, Categories, and Language,” is both historical and syncretic. His aim is to show that Peirce anticipates logical positivism, and even repudiates it in advance. In this way, Peirce is quite close to the later Wittgenstein. The analysis depends upon Peirce’s notoriously obscure concept of thirdness. What is this concept? According to Peirce, thirds are whatever cannot be reduced to entities with sharp edges. Examples include “intelligence, intention, signs…meaning, rules and habits” (18). Rorty’s illustrative example is ‘giving’ – meaning is distorted when I translate ‘giving’ in a sentence like, ‘I give a present’ to ‘I thrust a present toward you and you take it.’ Rorty connects Peirce’s notion of thirdness to the then current antireductionist argument that there is a difference between the meaning of something like a word and the reasons given when employing it in a particular case. Peirce’s main argument against reductionism, however, is akin to the one employed by Wittgenstein, which is that it generates an infinite regress. Wittgenstein uses this argument in the context of the vagueness of linguistic rules; Peirce uses it against Cartesian intuitionism. For Peirce, the appeal to an intuition demands a superintuition to judge the original, and so on ad infinitum. What is especially remarkable in this first work is Rorty’s defense and elucidation of Peirce. He was to become Rorty’s least favourite pragmatist.

One of the most influential articles in the collection is “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy and Categories,” which radicalizes the Identity Theory proposed by J.J.C. Smart. Instead of identifying sensations with physical states, Rorty proposes eliminating sensations altogether. This position was eventually christened ‘eliminative materialism.’ Rorty’s argument depends upon an extended analogy between demons and sensations. Just as modern science has led us to deny that demons are responsible for illness, so too may science eventually lead us to deny that sensations are real. They will no longer have either an explanatory or reporting purpose. Rorty defends this claim against a series of objections, such as that there is an important difference between the private nature of sensation reports and the public nature of brain processes. Rorty’s strategy is Wittgensteinean, namely to emphasize that first-person reports of sensations must “conform to public criteria or else be disallowed” (125). As Rorty remarks, we do not often question a person’s ability to use a term like ‘pain’ correctly, but once we do, we see that first-person reports are interrelated with our way of conceptualizing pain in the public community.

One of the strongest papers in the collection is “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental.” Rorty, echoing Sellars, defines the incorrigibility of mental events to mean that “certain knowledge claims about them cannot be overridden” (161). To begin, Rorty distinguishes between mental phenomena that count as events and those that do not. For Rorty, thoughts and sensations constitute mental events. It is important to note that other mental entities, like beliefs, desires, and intentions, do not qualify. These mental features can be superseded by our behaviour; although Rorty qualifies that they are indeed near-corrigible. What, then, do thoughts and sensations have in common? And furthermore, what distinguishes them from anything physical? In short, privacy. But citing Ayer, there are at least four senses of privacy—incommunicability, special access, unsharability, and incorrigibility. In making the case for incorrigibility, Rorty emphasizes that all that is meant is that there is “no assured way to go about correcting them if they should be in error” (165). So, Rorty’s conclusion is the now familiar Wittgensteinean appeal to family resemblance. Mental features and events range from near to strict incorrigibility and so there is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions to demarcate them.

“Strawson’s Objectivity Argument” is the longest piece in the collection and is Rorty’s most sustained analysis of Kant. Although Rorty admits that Strawson’s version of the Transcendental Deduction is improved, he thinks that the argument remains wedded to Kant’s notion of intuitions. By intuitions, Rorty means “the notion of something which we are aware of without being aware of it under any description” (237). This is a problem and Rorty’s strategy is to emphasize the interdependence of objects and thoughts about objects. As Rorty puts it, “particularity requires objectivity” (250). Rorty’s thus shifts the burden of proof to skeptics, who must now be able to formulate their worries in the context of this interdependence. In the essay’s last section, Rorty contextualizes Kant’s objectivity argument as a midway point between Descartes and the later Wittgenstein. Kant, like Wittgenstein, understands that all knowledge is discursive, not intuitive. The difference is that Kant thinks of concepts as representational. For Wittgenstein, by contrast, having a concept is just being able to use it.

In his later career, Rorty was criticized by, among others, Hilary Putnam, who claimed that Rorty retained a “Carnapian tone of voice.”^{Footnote 1} By this, Putnam meant that Rorty dismissed philosophical controversies with blithe contempt. This characteristic is not on display here. In these early papers, one can see Rorty the analyst plying his trade, working away at a set of puzzles occupied by like-minded analytic philosophers. Interestingly, there is no attention paid to either Dewey or Davidson, two figures who become Rorty’s philosophical inspiration. Nevertheless, the collection is a pleasant introduction to Rorty’s early engagement with Cartesian skepticism, representationalism, and metaphilosophy. These engagements are crucial to understanding the direction of Rorty’s later work.