"I think that the view that epistemology, or some suitable successor-discipline, is necessary to culture confuses two roles which the philosopher might play. The first is that of the informed dilettante, the polypragmatic, Socratic intermediary between various discourses. In his salon, so to speak, hermetic thinkers are charmed out of their self-enclose practices. Disagreements between disciplines and discourses are compromised or transcended in the course of the conversation. The second role is that of the cultural overseer who knows everyone’s common ground – the Platonic philosopher-king who knows what everybody else is really doing whether they know it or not, because he knows about the ultimate context (the Forms, the Mind, Language) within which they are doing it. The first role is appropriate to hermeneutics, the second to epistemology. Hermeneutics sees the relation between various discourses as those of strands in a possible conversation, a conversation which presupposes no disciplinary matrix which unites the speakers, but where the hope of agreement is never lost so long as the conversation lasts. This hope is not a hope for the discovery of antecedently existing common ground, but simply hope for agreement, or, at least, exciting and fruitful disagreement. Epistemology sees the hope of agreement as a token of the existence of common ground which, perhaps unbeknown to the speakers, unites them in common rationality. For hermeneutics, to be rational is to be willing to refrain from epistemology – from thinking that there is a special set of terms in which all contributions to the conversation should be put – and to be willing to pick up the jargon of the interlocutor rather than translating it into one’s own. For epistemology, to be rational is to find the proper set of terms into which all the contributions should be translated if agreement is to become possible. For epistemology, conversation is implicit inquiry. For hermeneutics, inquiry is routine conversation. Epistemology views the participants as united in what Oakeshott call a universitas – a group united by mutual interests in achieving a common end. Hermeneutics views them as united in what he calls a societas  - persons whose paths in life have fallen together, united by civility rather than by a common goal, much less by a common ground.  […] The usual way of treating the relation between hermeneutics and epistemology is to suggest that they should divide up culture between them – with epistemology taking care of the serious and important “cognitive part” (the part in which we meet our obligations to rationality) and hermeneutics charged with everything else. […] The idea of commensurability is built into the notion of “genuine cognition,” so that what is “only a matter of taste" or “of opinion” need not fall within epistemology’s charge, and conversely, what epistemology cannot render commensurable is stigmatized as merely “subjective.”
            The pragmatic approach to knowledge suggested by epistemological behaviorism will construe a line between discourses which can be rendered commensurable and those which cannot as merely that between “normal” and “abnormal” discourse […]. “Normal” science is the practice of solving problems against the background of a consensus about what counts as a good explanation of the phenomena and about what it would take for a problem to be solved. “Revolutionary” science is the introduction of a new “paradigm” of explanation, and thus of a new set of problems. Normal science is as close as real life comes to the epistemologist’s notion of what it is to be rational. Everybody agrees on how to evaluate everything everybody else says. […] Abnormal discourse is what happens when someone joins in the discourse who is ignorant of these conventions or who sets them aside. […] The product of abnormal discourse can be anything from nonsense to intellectual revolution, and there is no discipline which describes it, any more than there is a discipline devoted to the study of the unpredictable, or of “creativity.”

Rorty, Richard. (1979). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 318

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