 Attacking the idea that we must acknowledge the world’s normative constraint on our belief-systems if we are to be rational subjects, Rorty has drawn a great deal of criticism that takes science, particularly natural science, as its chief reference point. Two general kinds of criticisms are often raised. The first insists that science consists precisely in the effort to learn the truth about how things are by methodically allowing us to be constrained in our beliefs by the world. On this view, Rorty is simply denying the very idea of science. The other kind of criticism seeks to be internal: if Rorty’s view of science were to prevail, scientists would no longer be motivated to carry on as they are; science would cease to be the useful sort of thing that Rorty also thinks it is (see, e.g., Bernard Williams, “Auto da Fe” in Malachowski, 1990). However, Rorty’s view of science is more complicated than he himself sometimes implies. He says: “I tend to view natural science as in the business of controlling and predicting things, and as largely useless for philosophical purposes” (“Reply to Hartshorne,” Saatkamp, 32). Yet he spends a good deal of time drawing an alternative picture of the intellectual virtues that good science embodies (ORT, Part I). This is a picture which eschews the notion that science succeeds, when it does, in virtue of being in touch with reality in a special way, the sort of way that epistemologists, when successful, can clarify. It is in this sense specifically that Rorty disavows science as philosophically significant. Good science may nevertheless be a model of rationality, in Rorty’s view, exactly in so far as scientific practice has succeeded in establishing institutions conducive to the democratic exchange of views.