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Acting In An Antifoundational World: Conversation, Poetic Redescription, And Solidarity, Hem Paudel

All Theses

This thesis examines a central question that human beings face in an antifoundational world: If discourse communities create not only vocabularies but competing ways of seeing, how might we in general and professional communicators in particular act in a reasonable way? It suggests answers to this question by discussing Rorty's theory of language and truth. Rorty sets aside the foundationalist notion of metaphysical certainty with consensus beliefs achieved through conversation, which determines the utility of those beliefs to the community. Thus, Rorty changes the focus from what is right to what is helpful and changes the focus from what can …