For reasons having to do with my own exposure to ideas and works of Richard Rorty, it's become inescapable that I should eventually say my piece about the guy and his metaphilosophy.
This isn't because I consider him an important philosopher. I don't intend this as an insult. Rorty himself would probably have been pleased to be recognized as something other than a philosopher, in the same way antivenin, were it suitably opinionated, would be pleased to be seen as something completely apart from venom yet complementary to it, namely, as the thing that neutralizes its opposite.
But Rorty has been significant in raising metaphilosophical questions about what it means to do philosophy and whether philosophy is a worthwhile occupation.
I feel as though I'll never be motivated to become a great, or even passable, Rorty scholar, and in my lack of deep interest I seem to mirror Rorty's self-distancing from philosophy once he discovered how inessential or beside-the-point an activity it was.
The reasons for my uninterest, I want to say, are two:
(1) I don't find Rorty useful pragmatically, which may be to say that I don't agree with his variety of pragmatism, which I've heard described as "linguistic." So often the philosophical foundations and modes of expression that he decries continue to strike me as neither here nor there in practical terms. His linguistic pragmatism makes a linguistic turn of its own (the first having been the focus of analytic philosophy on language), in seeing language use as a central pragmatic consideration. I think it always was one practical consideration among others, as Austin made explicit but which lurks beneath the surface of nearly every Platonic dialogue. In the ethical scheme of things, language has always been a consideration, just not the most self-consciously pressing one.
(2) I've provisionally arrived at a quietist attitude of my own, and it's not Rorty's. Rorty's is (something like) that we should quiet our furious pursuit of Truth, because it is damaging to the more important condition of political comity in the quest for social justice. That is, high-aspiration philosophy as quasi-science should be abandoned for pragmatic reasons, because it sows dischord and tribal dichotomies.
The initial problem with this, for me, is that abandoning the question of truth doesn't seem to lead to pragmatic advantage. Truth is just another problematic that philosophy can raise without burning anyone at the stake, and philosophers can debate it in a civil (or at least a mock-invective) manner. Whither Socrates?
There will be a lot to say about the orthogonality of linguistic pragmatism to the legitimacy of philosophical topics, but the main point for present purposes is that the quietism Rorty advocates serves the pragmatic aims he discusses (though BTW I do consider him a philosophical skeptic and his opposition to truth-seeking "foundational" for him, for lack of a better word), whereas the quietism I've come to embrace is less about practicality and more about the inescapability of certain tendencies most of us humans seem to share.
It will still be of some interest whether there is free will, for instance, but regardless of whether there is or isn't, after all the careful definitions and epistemological parsing is done, we poor players will continue to act and feel as though we're making decisions.
Ditto for various other philosophical bones of contention. It's not that the foundational questions behind those controversies suddenly become uninteresting—and, as I've mentioned, I don't believe they become anti-pragmatic—it's just that we can, even as we indulge in theoretical speculation, recognize that our own lived experience and that of most people is going to treat the philosophical outcomes of many of the Big Questions as irrelevant to, or separate from, how we live and how we feel inside our own skins.
I'll just assert the following, for the sake of future discussion: we may be discoverers of reality and makers of strong theories, but we're also, to great extent, creatures who act and think as we do because we can't do otherwise.