I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.

He also emphasized the reasons why the interpretation of culture as conversation(Bernstein:1971) constitutes the crucial concept of a "postphilosophical" culture determined to abandon representationalist accounts of traditional epistemology incorporating American pragmatist naturalism that considers the natural sciences as an advance towards liberalism. Against this approach Rorty advocated for a novel form of American pragmatism sometimes called neopragmatism in which scientific and philosophical methods form merely a set of contingent "vocabularies" which people abandon or adopt over time according to social conventions and usefulness.