Schools of philosophical thought emerge, receive labels, and are superseded by the next trend in philosophy. In some cases, labels are applied only after significant activity has ceased. In the case of postmodernism, thinkers who have been classified as postmodern have sometimes resisted the label while others have embraced it and used it to further their intellectual pursuits. There is a certain irony in applying a label such as postmodernism to this particular philosophical approach since postmodernism itself challenges the use of text and of labels. When Richard Rorty died, many of his obituaries labeled him a postmodernist and his intellectual approach favored the postmodernist approach. This research considers Rorty's work in light of postmodernism, and considers-as all philosophy is eventually considered-this approach from a subjective and individual viewpoint.
In order to analyze Rorty or any other postmodernist thinker, it is necessary to consider the postmodernist approach itself. Postmodernism challenges ideas about ideas. It looks not so much at what we think we know, but why we think we know it. Postmodernism is concerned with the "text" of knowledge. Taken in this context, "text" is not only the words and language used to describe ideas, but also the context for any idea. A geographer's text is landscape. A physicist's text is the lab. The text of a scholar is usually some type of written text. Often, what is presented as fact, or objective reality, is the truth as it has been discerned by a particular group or subgroup and distilled into a text. For Western civilization, that has traditionally meant that educated and relatively wealthy white males defined truth. Postmodernists challenged this approach and thus challenged the foundations on which basic "truths" were based. Religion and speculative theories proved even attractive and fertile targets for postmodern criticism (Lemke, 1994). <...