ontology is superior or inferior to either ordinary human experience or the refined ontology of philosophical discourse. The real point is to demonstrate that the essential, fundamental characteristic of human articulations of mental states is that, even at their most detailed and insightful, they can readily be exposed as ambiguous. This idea (if one may so phrase it) is in the background of Rorty's reference to "the general problem about alternative descriptions," or the difficulty of finding a "general criterion for deciding when two things are 'really' the same thing described in two different ways" (272). What he describes as the "tension" in this general proble
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