Having set up language as having this power to reshape everything—to the point of creating new human beings—Rorty now comes back to earth to explain the basis of his argument:
I begin, in this first chapter, with the philosophy of language because I want to spell out the consequences of my claims that only sentences can be true, and that human beings make truths by making languages in which to phrase sentences. I shall concentrate on the work of Davidson because he is the philosopher who has done most to explore these consequences.
It’s Donald Davidson who Rorty is talking about, and he will rely on him quite a bit in this book. This entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an excellent overview of his work, if you’re interested. The part that is most relevant to what Rorty will be discussing is this:
It is sentences, and not words, that are thus the primary focus for a Davidsonian theory of meaning. Developing a theory for a language is a matter of developing a systematic account of the finite structure of the language that enables the user of the theory to understand any and every sentence of the language.
But before Rorty dives into Davidson, he gives us this wonderful footnote:
I should remark that Davidson cannot be held responsible for the interpretation I am putting on his views, nor for the further views I extrapolate from his.
Indeed, this is a footnote Rorty should give to every quote, because he extrapolates and reduces freely. I do the same, so keep in mind that there’s so much more behind the thoughts breezily shared in this overview.
Rorty believes that there are huge consequences that derive from Davidson’s concept that sentences are the way we form meaning. He does this via a sleight of hand trick where a discussion of words and sentences shifts into a theory of human beliefs and desires:
The traditional view is that there is a core self which can look at, decide among, use, and express itself by means of, such beliefs and desires. Further, these beliefs and desires are criticizable not simply by reference to their ability to cohere with one another, but by reference to something exterior to the network within which they are strands. Beliefs are, on this account, criticizable because they fail to correspond to reality. Desires are criticizable because they fail to correspond to the essential nature of the human self – because they are “irrational” or “unnatural.” So we have a picture of the essential core of the self on one side of this network of beliefs and desires, and reality on the other side. In this picture, the network is the product of an interaction between the two, alternately expressing the one and representing the other.
Wait, what? What does this network have to do with words and sentences? Rorty is making an analogy. Just like you can’t pick apart the words in a sentence and assign them separate meaning outside of the context of a sentence, Rorty argues that, so too, you can’t pick apart the elements of a human being, a person’s beliefs and desires, without looking at the whole network of experience that gives rise to those elements. (Likewise, you can’t separate the mind and body, but that’s getting more to my core philosophy than Rorty’s.)
Rorty can do this, because there was an effort in 20th century philosophy to transfer all of the thorny issues of consciousness onto language, to get away from Descartes’ subject/object dualism and make the issue about language instead. But Rorty points out, this doesn’t solve the problem, it just transfers it:
Idealist theories of knowledge and Romantic notions of the imagination can, alas, easily be transposed from the jargon of “consciousness” into that of “language.” Realistic and moralistic reactions to such theories can be transposed equally easily. So the seesaw battles between romanticism and moralism, and between idealism and realism, will continue as long as one thinks there is a hope of making sense of the question of whether a given language is “adequate” to a task – either the task of properly expressing the nature of the human species, or the task of properly representing the structure of nonhuman reality.
He adds in the next sentence: “We need to get off the seesaw.” Rorty believes that Davidson’s approach helps us do that, because it helps us avoid all of the completely ridiculous philosophy of language debates that arise when you believe that language is capable of being perfected and providing complete clarity and meaning in all contexts:
Davidson resembles Wittgenstein. Both philosophers treat alternative vocabularies as more like alternative tools than like bits of a jigsaw puzzle. To treat them as pieces of a puzzle is to assume that all vocabularies are dispensable, or reducible to other vocabularies, or capable of being united with all other vocabularies in one grand unified super vocabulary. If we avoid this assumption, we shall not be inclined to ask questions like “What is the place of consciousness in a world of molecules?” “Are colors more mind-dependent than weights?” “What is the place of value in a world of fact?” “What is the place of intentionality in a world of causation?” “What is the relation between the solid table of common sense and the unsolid table of microphysics?” or “What is the relation of language to thought?” We should not try to answer such questions, for doing so leads either to the evident failures of reductionism or to the short-lived successes of expansionism. We should restrict ourselves to questions like “Does our use of these words get in the way of our use of those other words?” This is a question about whether our use of tools is inefficient, not a question about whether our beliefs are contradictory.
If words are expressions of innate belief and knowledge, they take on this authority that sets up all of those koan-like debates that Rorty exposes in that paragraph. He mentions Ludwig Wittgenstein, because he too wanted to dispense with all of the ridiculous posing in philosophy, to stop pretending all riddles could be solved. Words are tools and if they aren’t working to bring us towards understanding, we need to question if we are using them in the most efficient manner.
For Rorty, the answer is to stop having these arguments between incompatible sets of vocabulary and jargon, not only because those debates never lead anywhere, but because the invention of new vocabularies opens up the world:
Revolutionary achievements in the arts, in the sciences, and in moral and political thought typically occur when somebody realizes that two or more of our vocabularies are interfering with each other, and proceeds to invent a new vocabulary to replace both.
And this process of finding a new vocabulary is not a process of fitting pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle or splitting differences, it usually involves discovering something entirely new:
To come up with such a vocabulary is more like discarding the lever and the chock because one has envisaged the pully, or like discarding gesso and tempera because one has now figured out how to size canvas properly.
I’m going to stop here, because I think this pretty well covers Davidson’s contribution to Rorty’s theory. I want to close with a thought about the practicality of Rorty’s ideas.
Since Rorty wrote this in the late 1980s, the work world has become ever more dependent on language interpretation. Most of what people do every day in their jobs today has something to do with transfering information compiled and specifically related to one group and making it apply to others. We hold meetings, we share documents, we review each others’ work, all in an effort to come to a consensus and to put everything into a form that others can understand it.
I don’t think people realize that their default setting when going about their work is either the jigsaw approach that Rorty just mentioned or some level of that seesaw exasperation he referred to earlier. We constantly come up against alternate ways of seeing things and different forms of expression and end up wasting our times in debates about concepts that seem to be in conflict with another, but are only so on a superficial level, or in attempts to make completely different forms of expression seem compatible.
Rorty argues here that, when confronted with these kinds of conflicts, we should be thinking of ways to dissolve the conflicts by redescribing them, finding a completely new way of looking at the situation rather than accepting the premises that created the conflict.
His theory may seem like a tedious discussion of semantics, but it’s actually a very practical look at the way we spend—and waste—much of our time these days.
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