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The philosopher Richard Rorty held that the purpose of philosophy is not to find answers, but to keep the conversation going. In Wallace's writing, the same perspective is visible.
While Rorty is explicitly invoked in the title of a later short story--"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," taken from Rorty's 1979 book of the same name--Wallace also referred to Stanley Cavell at least once, and his influence on Wallace's work has gained increasing attention in the recent past. Wallace owned and annotated a number of Cavell's books, and his biographer D. T. Max notes that Wallace studied--briefly and somewhat unedifyingly--under Cavell at Harvard. Adam Kelly has noted the importance of Cavell's ideas on language for Wallace's exploration of sincerity in his work. Of particular relevance to our work here is Cavell's invocation of the role of reader in the process of textual production, and his extrapolation from this question to ask "when is writing done?," implicitly averring the constant reproduction by the reader of the process of interpretation. This question is central to Wallace's idea of the process of communication, and his implicit belief (via Wittgenstein) that good fiction should open rather than close, undermine rather than order. [...]
[...] Scholars have drawn attention to his links with Leibniz and James, with Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, with Cantor and deMan, as well as with Cavell [...]
While he tended to elide the "American" from his discussion of what it meant to be an American human being, Wallace was explicitly, exhaustingly conscious of writing from an American perspective, and repeatedly articulated his struggles with taking a perspective outside of his own. Lee Konstantinou comprehensively traces Wallace's engagement with media stimulation and the performative cosmopolitanism of a type of educated American, suggesting that Wallace's engagement with informational "discloses some of the most troubling aporia of [his] style. Wallace's inability to represent a genuine cosmopolitanism in ['The Suffering Channel'] is not simply an individual failure but is, for him, an indictment of the very 'view' that he understands himself to be inhabiting". The paralyzing consciousness of mediated perspective, then, positions Wallace as an uncomfortably but inescapably American author. Konstantinou points out, indeed that the critical tendency to read Wallace in light of his American-ness, even his most specifically local texts "[showcase] a longing for the international," but notes that this longing is unmet in "The Suffering Channel," trapped by its own self-focus. Konstantinou astutely notes that Wallace's internationalism is different from the globalism of De Lillo or Pynchon, and emerges from a desire to disrupt the myopic ethnocentricity of late-century America. [...]
citing "The World of David Foster Wallace" in Boundary 2, 40.3 (September 2013)
[...] "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," explicitly invokes Rortian philosophy, taking its title from Rorty's 1979 book of the same name. [...]
referring to the Oblivion piece about a man whose mother had a terrifying face due to plastic surgery
[...] "The Soul is Not a Smithy", in its invocation of Joyce's artistic credo, seems also to resist ideas of the capacity of literature to formulate and maintain a coherent identity. [...]
apparently the title is a reference to the end of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
[...] While Wallace may also have been referring to Pynchon, to Tennyson, More, or Lytton, or indeed to all simultaneously, the echoes of Keats throughout the text strongly suggest "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" as a--if not the--title source for the novel.
from stanza ten of the poem: "I saw pale kings and princes too"
[...] in a late interview about the philosophical preoccupations of his work, Wallace responded: if some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be," echoing Wittgenstein, who argued that philosophy should involve more than abstract phenomena, asking: "what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life." [...] In other words, the end of philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is not simply the pursuit of academic study, but the better ability to live in and consider the world. [...]
[...] The Vlad scenario also highlights what Rorty would regard as the misguided tendency to seek extrinsic (in this case divine) meaning in things that manifestly lack intentional significance [...]
In view of what Rortv sees as the incommensurability of different vocabularies, he is forced to view truth and knowledge as constructs of whatever vocabulary is seeking them (almost always collective rather than individual). A corollary of this view, however, is that each vocabulary phrases its own inescapable problems. This is a view Rorty clarifies in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, where he discusses the nature of truth as a property of statements, not of facts; for example, the color of an object is not true or false, but the statement that such an object is blue has the property of truth or falsehood. He argues further that language is made, not discovered, and as such, truth is a creation, not an extrinsic reality: "since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence on vocabularies and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths:*