Maybe "hostile" is a little strong. To speak just for myself, I never found anything helpful to me in anything I read by Rorty. And I guess that's why I didn't bother reading very much of what he wrote. I've only got so much time, you know? But if some people do seem hostile towards Rorty's writings, I can't said I wouldn't understand the sentiment. I found a lot of what Rorty wrote kind of hostile, not to mention a bit holier-than-thou.

Recent epistemology has made a lot of the distinction between justification and something else that goes by the name warrant or entitlement , though some philosophers use "warrant" as an umbrella notion that covers both justification and entitlement. And of course the distinction gets drawn in different ways. But the basic idea is that being justified in some sense involves being able to appreciate that justification, which will, in central cases, take the form of an argument: If my belief that p is justified, then what justifies it must be something I know or at least could know. In that sense, justification, as philosophers in the tradition I'm exploring use the term, is more an "internalist" notion. An agent's being entitled to a belief, on the other hand, need not involve h'er appreciating the nature of that entitlement: I could be entitled to a belief that p even though I have no idea what it is that entitles me to that belief. And so entitlement is more of an "externalist"...

It's hard to be sure what "rationality is normative" means, but I think I know what someone who would write that would mean. (That is: what they meant, whatever it is their words meant.) The word "rationality" is an abstract noun, formed from the adjective, "rational". So we ought really look at that adjective. So we say things like, "It is rational to do X", or "Doing X is (or would be) rational", and the like. To say that these are "normative" statements is to contrast them with merely "descriptive" statements: They are normative in the sense that they say, in some sense, what one ought to do. Now exactly how claims about rationality are related to claims about what one ought to do---that's the really hard question.

Here's a simple-minded answer to this question, but I'm not sure that doesn't mean it's right. Consider the question whether women should have rights equal to men's. Two centuries ago, this would not widely have been accepted, whereas nowadays it is, at least in Western cultures. So what reason do we have to believe that our understanding of this particular moral question is better than that of our ancestors? That seems just to be the question what reason I have to think I'm right and they were wrong. But that, in turn, just seems to be the question what reason I have to believe that women should have rights equal to men's, and I take myself to have plenty of reason to believe that. I think if you asked what reason we have to believe that our understanding of the nature of the physical world is better now than it was 200 years ago, I'd have to give pretty much the same answer.

Here's a more general question, and one of substantial recent interest: Does the fact that there are other people who disagree with me, by itself, give me reason to doubt my own beliefs? The interest of the question, to me, derives from the fact that there are arguments, founded upon very general and widely held epistemological premises, that would lead to the conclusion that it should. However, that conclusion, it seems to me, is pretty clearly untenable: There is very little I believe with which someone, somewhere, does not disagree, and many of my most deeply held beliefs (the fundamental equality of all people, for example) are ones with which many people vehemently disagree. As regards religion, I am generally in agreement with Oliver's remarks. I would add that one's attitude towards this question also depends upon how one regards religion itself, in particular, the extent to which one thinks cognitive attitudes, like belief, are fundamental to a religious life---the point being, of course,...

Yes to the first one, but no to the second one, and I think no to the second one even for science. What makes science, and philosophy, harder now, in a sense, is that they are both so highly specialized. Let me use an example from mathematical logic. Fifty years ago, you could pretty much become an expert in mathematical logic by reading and understanding one book, Stephen Kleene's Introduction to Meta-mathematics . I'm not, of course, saying that doing that on one's own was easy. The central results were not understood them as profoundly as they are today. Nonetheless, the contrast with today is clear. It's not so much that there's not much left to discover. It's that, to do any serious work, there is so much that has been discovered and so that one has to know.

Linguistics is a branch of empirical science. The central questions in linguistics concern how human beings manage to speak and comprehend language. Philosophy of language is a branch of, well, philosophy. Empirical results are relevant to it, but its questions are not necessarily empirical in character.

The idea that there is a hierarchy of statements, each saying something about the level below, but none of the lower ones saying anything about the higher ones, is central to formal work on truth. It originates where such work originates, with Alfred Tarski's great paper "The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages". In Tarski's work, it doesn't take quite the form you mention. You suggestion regarding (3), in particular, sounds more like the form the hierarchy takes in Saul Kripke's treatment in "Outline of a Theory of Truth". On such treatments, the hierarchy certainly does not end with (3): There are also statements about statements about statements about statements, and so forth; and the hierarchy does not even end with all the finite levels.

It is an empirical question to what extent one's capacity for thought depends upon one's ability to speak various languages. See the entry on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on wikipedia . Regarding your other remarks: (i) It's not obvious that you needed English to learn French, since native French speakers did not; (ii) Even if you did, it is not obvious that you learned to speak French entirely by learning how to translate French into English. That said, an argument of the form you mention figures prominently in Jerry Fodor's The Language of Thought , with English replaced by the language of thought. The (extremely radical) conclusion of the argument is that all concepts are innate. Suffice it to say that even Fodor no longer accepts the argument.

No, I don't see any mistake---other than that you dismiss the problem simply on the ground that there is self-reference. Self-reference isn't always a problem. In fact, some times it's essential. Consider this phrase: (*) yields a sentence when preceded by its own quotation This is a perfectly sensible verb phrase, and some phrases yield a sentence when preceded by their own quotations---e.g., "is a sentence" does so---whereas some others---e.g., "Bill is"---do not. As it happens, (*) too does so. That is, (**) "yields a sentence when preceded by its own quotation" yields a sentence when preceded by its own quotation There's self-reference there, too, but what (**) says is true, and I'm not sure how else you'd propose to report that truth. Or should we just not report it? or try very hard not to think about it? or what? Now, among the phrases that do yield a sentence when preceded by their own quotation, some yield true sentences---e.g., "contains three words" does---and some do...