The way the world is - the quest for certainty

...the function of philosophy is to mediate between old ways of speaking, developed to accomplish earlier tasks, with new ways of speaking, developed in response to new demands...Plato and Aristotle were wrong in thinking that humankind’s most distinctive and praiseworthy capacity is to know things as they really are - to penetrate behind appearance to reality... knowledge as accurate representation of the reality underlying appearances and science as revealing more and more of the previously hidden nature of the world... or reason, either as a faculty for penetrating through appearances to reality or as a set of truths which lie deep within each of us, waiting for argument to bring them to light.

...[to] abandon... the traditional philosophical project of finding something stable which will serve as a criterion for judging the transitory products of our transitory needs and interests

...the vocabulary which centres around these traditional distinctions [ appearance-reality, matter-mind, made-found, sensible-intellectual etc] has become an obstacle to our social hopes. [Pragmatists]...want to replace the appearance-reality distinction by that between descriptions of the world and of ourselves which are less useful and those which are more useful...the vocabulary of Greek metaphysics and Christian theology was a useful one for our ancestors’ purposes, but we have different purposes, which will be better served by employing a different vocabulary.

...we describe [things] because of our needs and interests...all descriptions we give to things are descriptions suited to our purposes...so the question ‘are we describing it as it really is?’ seems one we need to never ask. All we need to know is whether some competing description might be more useful for some of our purposes.

...to describe how human inquiry looks from a pragmatist point of view-how it looks once one stops describing it as an attempt to correspond to the intrinsic nature of reality, and start describing it as an attempt to serve transitory purposes and solve transitory problems...

... [a general programme] of replacing Greek and Kantian dualisms between permanent structure and transitory content with the distinction between the past and the future ... a way of replacing the task of justifying past custom and tradition by reference to unchanging structure with the task of replacing an unsatisfactory present with a more satisfactory future, thus replacing certainty with hope.

Notes from “Philosophy and social hope” Richard Rorty [Penguin, 1999]