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Two-Pronged Anti-Representationalism
Two language games reject representationalism — the view that there is a way the world is, independently of any vocabulary or experience of it, and that thought mirrors that way accurately. Whitehead rejects it from the side of being. Rorty rejects it from the side of language. They are not typically read together — Whitehead lives in process metaphysics and the continental revival; Rorty in pragmatism and post-analytic philosophy. From SPLectrum’s vantage on this subject, the two are seen as two halves of a whole. P0 — being implies language — names that whole: the two rejections address the two co-implicated sides of what P0 articulates.
Whitehead: refusing the bifurcation of nature
The diagnostic move is in Science and the Modern World (1925). The bifurcation of nature names the split, inherited from Galileo and Descartes, between the nature physics measures and the nature we experience. For modern thought the first is real; the second is derivative. Whitehead refuses the split.
What he builds in its place is the philosophy of organism — a speculative metaphysics in which the split never opens because relations are constitutive of what anything is. The apparatus of Process and Reality (1929) — actual entities, prehension, concrescence — is built so that nothing stands outside its relations. There is no primary substrate of mind-independent qualities for science to mirror; there are only actual occasions, each one constituted by how it takes account of others.
Whitehead’s metaphysics stays on the being side, and staying there has a cost. An account of what is needs an organising principle. Whitehead’s God is that principle — the primordial ordering of all possibilities, from which each actual occasion receives its initial aim. The God-view is structural to the metaphysical project, not a contingent residue. Whitehead refuses the bifurcation; his system retains a view from outside.
Rorty: setting aside the mirror
The diagnostic move is in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). The picture of mind as a mirror of nature — the picture that has held Western philosophy captive since Descartes — is not a theory to be refuted but a framework to be set aside. No vocabulary occupies a privileged outside position from which it reports the world as it really is. Truth is not correspondence but something closer to solidarity — what holds up under continued conversation among people who take each other seriously.
The pragmatist inheritance — James, Dewey, the later Wittgenstein — carries this further. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) develops the position: vocabularies are tools, not pictures; final vocabularies are contingent — shaped by history and circumstance, not by access to the way things really are. The philosophical task is not to find the right vocabulary but to keep the conversation going.
With the switch to language, the God-view drops out. No metaphysical totality is being claimed, so none needs organising. Rorty’s pluralism is a pluralism of vocabularies among speakers. Objects are what we talk about, not what speaks.
Two halves of a whole
Each rejection works within its own language game. Whitehead refuses the bifurcation and builds a relational metaphysics; his system carries a God-as-organiser and stays on the being side. Rorty sets aside the mirror and switches to language; his pragmatism stays with human conversation.
From here, the two are seen together as two halves of what P0 names. Being implies language — the two rejections are not parallel attacks on a single target but moves on the two co-implicated sides of one foundational structure.