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Help Regarding Rorty

I've been reading a lot of Rorty recently, and throughout his work he expresses himself as being anti-epistemology (*Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature*) and anti-metaphysics ("On Analytic and Conversational Philosophy"). He seems to be pretty explicit in his attack against these two fields, but what I am having trouble understanding are the exact details for his attacks. Why does he seem to deem M&E as being outdated? What should we replace them with? What would he have thought of fields such as Social Epistemology and Social Ontology, or new developments in philosophy like OOO or assemblage theory? 

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For the record, I have not yet completed *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature*, and perhaps he answers some of my questions in a clear manner later on in the book. If so I apologize, but I want to make sure that I am understanding Rorty clearly as he lays out his argument in the first two chapters of his book. 

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Thank you, all.
gpt
Rorty thinks epistemology is a dead end because, as he sees it, distinctly epistemological questions only arise when we adopt a certain view of this thing called the mind and its relation to the world. As far as Rorty is concerned, the picture is quite simple: causal stimuli produce in us certain propositional attitudes. Those beliefs can be used as reasons when justifying other beliefs to members in our community. There is a radical distinction between the *causation* of propositional attitudes and the *justification* of beliefs with other beliefs. This is basically the most fundamental distinction in Rorty and it does *a lot* of work for him. "Epistemological" questions only arise when we start to think that knowledge has something to do with our minds producing beliefs in the "right" way, a prejudice that, according to Rorty, underlies Locke's philosophy and Kant's notion of the transcendental. Rorty thinks that when we see the distinction between causation and justification clearly, the ground for these investigations will be taken away.

There's a section in PMN on Fodor where he shows how we can (and should) avoid reading cognitive science as a new iteration of transcendental philosophy. 

You might also want to read one of his early papers, *the world well lost*, for a very succinct presentation of his view. Also, all his essays on Davidson are relevant. Definitely read *Robert Brandom on Social practices and Representations*, *The Very Idea of Human Answerability* and *Antiskeptical Weapons* in his collection *Truth and Progress*.