 Rorty’s enduring attitude to relativism and subjectivism is that both are products of the representationalist paradigm. Though the theme is explicit in PMN and CP (“Pragmatism, Relativism, Irrationalism”), it is with Rorty’s later and further appropriation of Davidson that his criticism of the idea of knowledge as representation becomes fully elaborated (ORT, “Introduction” and Part II). Drawing on Davidson’s criticism of the scheme-content distinction (“On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”) and of the correspondence theory of truth (“The Structure and Content of Truth”), Rorty is able to back up his rejection of any philosophical position or project which attempts to draw a general line between what is made and what is found, what is subjective and what is objective, what is mere appearance and what is real. Rorty’s position is not that these conceptual contrasts never have application, but that such application is always context and interest bound and that there is, as in the case of the related notion of truth, nothing to be said about them in general. Rorty’s commitment to the conversationalist view of knowledge must therefore be distinguished from subjectivism or relativism, which, Rorty argues, presuppose the very distinctions he seeks to reject. Equally, Rorty’s epistemological behaviorism must not be confused with an idealism that asserts a primacy of thought or language with respect to the unmediated world, since this, too, is a position that is undercut by Rorty’s Davidsonian position. In light of the view of truth and of meaning that Rorty appropriates from Davidson, his conversationalism is not a matter of giving priority to the subjective over the objective, or to mind’s power over world’s constraint. Rather it is the other side of his anti-representationalism, which denies that we are related to the world in anything other than causal terms. Differently put, Rorty argues that we can give no useful content to the notion that the world, by its very nature, rationally constrains choices of vocabulary with which to cope with it (TP, “The Very Idea of Human Answerability to the World: John McDowell’s Version of Empiricism”). ﻿This has implications for Rorty’s view of the contribution of philosophy to intellectual progress: “what matters in the end are changes in the vocabulary rather than changes in belief, changes in truth-value candidates rather than assignments of truth-value” (CIS, 47-48). As Rorty reads philosophy, its significant achievements are not discoveries of the truth or falsehood of certain propositions, but innovations in our descriptive capacities – changes in what we are able to say and think.