Abstract
Since the publication of his 1979 work Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty has led the charge against the correspondence theory of truth that underlies Ovid's critique.2 This theory holds that statements are true insofar as they correspond to something objective outside of themselves; Rorty, however, argues that true statements are instead historically contingent products of agreement among members of linguistic communities. If, like Rorty, we lose our willingness to commit ourselves to our words about the past due to our embrace of the linguistic turn, then not only will our narratives of the past lose their distinctive characteristic, but they will also lose their power to persuade-for this power, given how historical narrative is currently constituted, depends upon the act of justification that the typical gesture towards metaphysics makes possible.