For pragmatists knowledge is providing adequate examples for the accurate representation of our world. However, by 1960s, pragmatism influenced by structuralism proposed a new field of ‘neopragmatism’ developed by Richard Rorty. According to his views knowledge is about making sense of the world around us. Knowledge is about the ways we make sense of the world, the words we use to describe it and ourselves. In other words, knowledge is always socially constructed. There isn’t any “true” knowledge; there is just knowledge. And if you think about it, knowledge is all around us – a ‘mirror of nature’.
In his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty argues that we only become aware that there is something out there beyond what we sense. We gain knowledge about the world through language. Language allows us to make statements about the world, and those statements define what we think the world is like. What we understand as ‘knowledge’ is dependent upon the context in which we live. The meaning of words does not represent anything that exists in the physical world, but is instead shaped by society and culture.
