Rorty characterizes pragmatism as fundamentally anti-representationalist (Cheryl Misak strongly disagrees and considers Rorty to be a false heir of the tradition)
Representationalism is an ideology - that the meaning of thoughts/talk should be principally understood in terms of representational relations the thinkings/sayings stand in to what they (purport to) represent.
It’s a crippling ideology that must be rejected wholesale, no hope of redemption.
It’s synonymous with modern philosophy, so that must be jettisoned too.
Two sides of Wittgenstein:
Tractatus = representationalism (but providing the model for moving beyond it w/r/t logical vocabulary)
Logical tradition from Frege/Russell, operative paradigm of formal calculi for artificial symbolic languages.
Possible world semantics best distillation of its representational approach to meaning
Investigations = anti-representationalism.
Anthropological tradition focuses on natural languages, in tradition of Dewey. Rorty claims Heidegger also in this tradition, which both sides (pragmatists and Heidegger allies) don’t like. Focus is not on meaning but on use.
Arguments:
(Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) - representational in semantics leads to an unproductive oscillation in epistemology between skepticism and foundationalism
Pragmatism about norms
antiauthoritarianism argument (completing the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment)