I think that Rorty's image of the mirror says that the mind is not like a mirror which passively and accurately reflects and represents the outer world. Unlike a mirror, the mind is working, doing, constructing. We don't know how the mechanisms of the mind work and therefore it is not appropriate to ask how our understanding corresponds to an external reality. This is an impossible question because we have no access to such an 'external reality' against which to measure our representations, and such an external reality perhaps does not exist except in a conceptual sense.
Have I understood Rorty's mirror image correctly and if so, does this basically agree with / derive from Kant?
Thank you,
Charles
Answer Charles,
I must admit that I'm not a Rorty expert but your synopsis seems on point
As for Kant, he would agree that we can't access the world in-itself or the "noumenal" world directly. However, Kant wouldn't and didn't go so far as to claim that the noumenal world doesn't exist...only that our knowledge of it is limited.
Kant didn't reject empirical knowledge but worked very hard to justify it (with integration of the a priori intuition and categories of the understanding that when synthesized, yielded genuine knowledge). Kant, in other words, still stood behind a version of the correspondence theory of truth.
Even though the mind plays a creative role in producing knowledge, that knowledge was firmly based upon intuition of the external world (hence Kant's homage to David Hume and Locke).
