the Constitution itself. Therefore he concludes the Constitution must be looked into by the court, "and if they can open it at all, what part of it are they forbidden to read or to obey?"
Having stated the basic structure of Marshall's argument for the doctrine of judicial review, we can now explore the doctrine from the viewpoints of three philosophers with extremely diverse ideas: Richard Rorhy, B.F. Skinner, and Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau is the most overtly political thinker of the trio; Skinner is essentially a behaviorist and Rorhy an epistemologist, and these different specialties affect not only what they would think about the doctrine of judicial review, but also the ways in which they would think about it.
In his essay, "Method, Social Science, and Social Hope," Rorhy contends that it is a mistake to think that there is any absolute, objective reality which is best "represented by representations which are not merely ours but its own, as it looks to itself, as it would describe itself if it could." He says it is true that a Galilean value-free vocabulary works very well for the purposes of scientific inquiry, but that does not mean that it corresponds to reality or in any way represents "Nature's Own" language. Similarly, he notes that there is no transcendent epistemological reason why the vocabulary of liberal democracy has worked so well either. Galileo and the framers of the Constitution just happened to hit on very useful jargons for the practice of science and politics. Thus, breakthroughs (whether scientific or political) are not so much a matter of discovering revolutionary new ideas, but of discovering the right jargon in which to express those ideas.
the point here is that there is nothing inherently sacred about the language or substance of the Constitution or of the decisions of the judges who interpret it for society. Just as the scientist uses a reductionistic Galilean vocabulary as an instru...