 This way of stating the lesson, however, appears to leave open the possibility that certain philosophical problems eventually may legitimately be taken seriously – that is, at face value in the sense that they require constructive solutions – provided the assumptions which sustain their formulation stand up to proper critical scrutiny. Taken this way, the attitude Rorty here expresses would be more or less the same as that of all those philosophers who have diagnosed their predecessors’ work as mixtures of pseudo-questions and genuine problems dimly glimpsed, problems which now, with the proper frame of questioning fully clarified, may be productively addressed. But the full force of the lesson Rorty learned emerges only with the view that this notion of proper critical scrutiny is questionable. For Rorty, to legitimate the assumptions on which a philosophical problem is based would be to establish that the terms we require to pose that problem are really mandatory, that the vocabulary in which we encounter the problem is in principle inescapable. But Rorty’s construal of the linguistic turn, as well as his proposals for eliminating the vocabulary of the mental, are really at odds with the idea that we might hope to construct a definitive vocabulary for philosophy. Even in his early days, Rorty’s approach to philosophy is shaped by the historicist conviction that no vocabulary is inescapable in principle. This means that progress in philosophy is gained less from constructive solutions to problems than through therapeutic dissolution of their causes, that is, through the invention of new vocabularies achieved by the launch of new and fruitful metaphors (“Introduction” in PMN; “Unfamiliar Noises: Hesse and Davidson on Metaphor” in ORT).