Thank you very much for this piece. I felt a good arc or through-line in your ordering of the issues, the discussion was clear and focused, and your piece benefited from bringing in a wide variety of philosophers—and physicists.

Your piece was exciting to read for the way it frames an issue I’m hopefully making progress on addressing: “Rorty… wanted to create the philosophical means to counteract… conflict.” As if illustrating creating such means, you discussed Hitler and Chippendale furniture. A lot of “truth” lies in between. I don’t see how to achieve Rorty’s goal—either through broad concepts like “conversation” or Rée’s “different conceptions”—or through a specific case-by-case analysis in which each case is prima facie unique, possibly requiring different “philosophical means” needing to be tooled each time. For the concept of truth as practiced to work like Rorty wants, I think it needs more of a universal practical theory. (We can locate Hitler at the North Pole and Chippendale furniture at the South Pole, but saying other cases lie somewhere in between doesn’t offer much.) Perhaps Michael Dummett pointed the right way—to consult a game’s rules about what constitutes “winning” falls short if you don’t understand what “winning” means in games generally.