 That any vocabulary is optional and mutable is the basic conviction behind Rorty’s attack on representationalist epistemology carried out in PMN. It informs, for instance, the genealogy (chapter one) and deconstruction (chapter two) of the concept of mind offered in the book’s first part, “Our Glassy Essence.” This historicist conviction, however, is not itself a central theme of PMN, and it emerges for explicit discussion only in the final section of the book, “Philosophy,” which is the shortest and in some ways least developed of its three parts. The argumentative core of PMN is found in its second part, “Mirroring.” Here Rorty develops and extends a diverse lot of arguments – notably from Wilfrid Sellars, Willard van Orman Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Donald Davidson – into a general critique of the defining project of modern epistemology, viz., the conceptions of mind, of knowledge and of philosophy bequeathed by the 17th and 18th centuries. Rorty’s key claim is that “the Kantian picture of concepts and intuitions getting together to produce knowledge is needed to give sense to the idea of ‘theory of knowledge’ as a specifically philosophical discipline, distinct from psychology” (PMN, 168). According to Rorty,