 In retrospect, the hostility may appear excessive, but understandable. As we have seen in connection with Rorty’s attitude to science, it is particularly Rorty’s treatment of truth and knowledge that drew fire from philosophers. While a great variety of philosophers have criticized Rorty on this general score in a great variety of ways, a common concern stands out; Rorty’s conversationalist view of truth and knowledge leaves us entirely unable to account for the notion that a reasonable view of how things are is a view suitably constrained by how the world actually is. This criticism is levelled against Rorty not only from the standpoint of metaphysical and scientific realist views of the sort that Rorty hoped would soon be extinct. It is expressed also by thinkers who respect Rorty’s dialectical acumen, who have some sympathy with Rorty’s historicist view of intellectual progress, and who find persuasive his critique of Kantian and Platonist features of modern philosophy. John McDowell (McDowell, 1994), for instance, claims that Rorty’s view of the relation between agent and world as merely causal runs afoul of the notion that our very concept of a creature with beliefs involves the idea of a rational constraint of the world on our epistemic states. Pascal Engel, in his exchange with Rorty on the notion of truth (Rorty and Engel, 2007), takes Rorty to task for giving up the very notion that undergirds rational argument and conviction, without which it is hard to see what the remit of philosophy might possibly be.