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It is rare for a philosophical idea to command widespread acceptance in the broader intellectual community of the academy; philosophy, by its nature, tends towards claims of a scope and generality that invite controversy.
Over the past twenty years or so, however, a remarkable consensus has formed—in the human and social sciences, even if not in the natural sciences—around a thesis about the nature of human knowledge. It is the thesis that knowledge is socially constructed.
Although the terminology of social construction is relatively recent, the underlying ideas, as we shall see, engage long‐standing issues about the relation between mind and reality, issues that first attracted me to philosophy itself.
If this book appears to pay disproportionate attention to the work of Richard Rorty that is not only because of Rorty's huge influence on contemporary constructivist views, but also because, as a first‐year graduate student at Princeton in 1979, I first came to appreciate the power of these views in a seminar of his. Although they clashed with the strongly objectivist tendencies I had brought to graduate school from my undergraduate education in physics, I found the arguments for at least some constructivist theses—the ones concerning rational belief—disquieting, and thought that academic philosophy had been too quick to dismiss them. I have always been grateful to Rorty for having made me see the need to engage these ideas.
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