Abstract

My objective in this paper is to defend the possibility of epistemological justification against Richard Rorty’s pragmatic, “postphilosophical critique of traditional philosophy.” By epistemological justification I mean the establishment of reasons for holding beliefs extralinguistically true. My inclination is to understand truth and justification in a Davidsonian holistic coherentist way, as opposed to the traditional correspondist way. But for my present purpose the coherentist/correspondist issue is deferrable. I am, nonetheless, concerned with objective epistemic justification, as opposed to “subjective” justification or warrantedness. I shall proceed by discussing justification and Rorty’s challenge to it, and then attribute to Rorty a conception of imagination which I think undermines that challenge.