Contemporary Texts

Richard Rorty: The Contingency of Language

In his famous work entitled Contingency, Irony and Solidarity , the contemporary American philosopher, Richard Rorty aims to develop and defend three main types of contingencies, those of language, selfhood and liberal community, against the rational and enlightenment model of other philosophers such as Plato and Kant. What underlies each of these contingencies is his general but at the same time, rather vague idea of contingency as a natural evolution which involves change. He was mainly influenced by the works of John Dewey, particularly his philosophy of pragmatism, Ludwig Wittgensteins emphasis on the centrality of language and Friedrich Nietzsches doubts about truth. He was also interested and influenced by the works of Heidegger, Derrida and Donald Davidson. This is because all of these philosophers have rejected and replaced traditional essentialist views of language, self and community with creations and constructions rooted in the subjectivity of the human mind. Rortys main aim was to argue against foundationalist concepts of knowledge in an attempt to redefine contemporary analytic philosophy. This attempt can be shown clearly in his works Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and most recently, his last work, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, particularly his first essay in his first chapter of the work, entitled The Contingency of Language. Here, Rorty moves philosophy away from understanding knowledge and mind as the natural subjects of philosophy toward an epistemological behaviorism that recognizes these concepts as historical terms. As he argues in the very first sentences of the essay, around two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe. Rorty first starts off by recognizing the role that language plays in how all inquiries, in particular, philosophical inquiry is shaped. He examines the ways in which philosophy has traditionally been viewed as a discipline and argues that some philosophers have remained faithful to the Enlightenment by continuing to identify themselves with the cause of science and by considering science as the paradigmatic human activity. They insist that natural science discovers truth rather than makes them. His image of philosophy takes shape in the modern period with Kants effort to define philosophy as a foundationa l discipline. Kant believed that philosophy is distinct from science as he believed that while science and other empirical disciplines can produce knowledge, it is really philosophy that asks what makes such knowledge possible. However, Rorty believed that Kant and Hegel like him only went half way in their refutation of the idea that truth is out there. For him, truth is more or less what can be framed within language. Rorty then goes on to distinguish between the claim the world is out there and the claim the truth is out there. The former claim for Rorty implies that the world is not the result of our own creation, but rather it is, alongside other things in space and time, the result of effects of causes which do not include human mental states. On the other hand, the latter claim implies that truths are human creations since sentences which form truths are the result of human languages. Therefore, when we say that the truth is not out there, we are implying that where there are no sentences there is also no truth since sentences are elements of human languages and since languages are human creations. However, Rorty also points out that the truth

cannot really be out there and exist independently of the human mind, since sentences cannot so exist or be out there. Only the world is out there, but the descriptions of the world are not. In this sense, only descriptions of the world can be said to be true or false. Hence, only phrases such as the world is round can be said to be true or false. The world on its own cannot be considered as true or false, hence phrases like world round cannot be said to be either true or false. By means of this distinction, Rorty wants to show that we view the world through our language. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold certain beliefs, but it cannot really tell us which language to use since the world does not speak, but only we do. Therefore, for Rorty, our engagement in a kind of inquiry, most particularly, philosophical inquiry is based on the language and vocabulary we choose to use. Moreover, our use of words to describe things, in this case the world, is independent of the thing itself. Therefore, without human proposition, truth and falsity is simply irrelevant. Rorty then argues that instead of seeking out accurate relationships between language and the world, we need to reexamine how we view language. In order to explain his notion of language further, Rorty draws on Donald Davidsons Wittgensteinian notion of language as an alternative tool and presents the metaphor of language-as-tool. Here, Rorty compares language to a tool. He argues that when a particular tool cannot complete a particular task effectively, we replace it with a new and better one which can indeed complete the task which the first tool could not. Similarly, when it comes to language, Rorty argues that there are cases where language does work for a specific purpose, but there are other cases in which it does not. In cases where language does not work, Rorty argues that we need to develop new language tools, ones which help us to cope with new problems and achieve purposes which the old language could not help us to achieve. Unlike Davidson, Rorty does not believe that words have no meanings apart from their places in a linguistic game. But on the contrary, he believes that meaning has to come from acquiring a place in the game that is communally recognized. Therefore a literal use of a particular language and meaning is one that follows well-understood rules. Like Nietzsche before him, Rorty believes that we should not focus our attention on discovering the truth about how things are, since he believes that there is really no such thing as absolute truth. He arrived to this conclusion from the belief that all our validity, as we have seen, is based on language and since all language is variable and without standard then there cannot be one truth that is constant amongst all people. He believes that it is difficult to have certain universal truths since there are so many different languages around the world, with different variations. As we have seen, for him, the only possible truths are those which have been created by science, language, culture and other human developed factors. Since truth is based on vocabulary and vocabulary is based on language which is constructed by men, then we can find no truth in nature, only in the words that we use to describe it. Instead of finding the truth, Rorty argues that we ought to focus our attention on social hopes and practical projects in the hope of achieving social solidarity. Moreover, Rorty believes that since there is no truth about life, the most we can do is to persuade various groups of people that the descriptions and vocabularies we employ are more interesting and useful than other available accounts.