I gave the impression in my last essay that I was done explaining Davidson’s core theory. Not only is that not the case, the most difficult part lies ahead, so my apologies. I’m about to deal with a very thorny issue in communications theory—one where Rorty’s theory is quite controversial—and to fully grasp it, you have to let go of the default ways you think about they ways we talk, read and write.
Here’s how Rorty, via Davidson, describes it: We bring many assumptions into our talk and writing. We ask questions like “are we using the right language?” “Is the way we are communicating clear, does it make sense?”
But we also ask philosophical questions without realizing they are philosophical, such as “do the words I’m using fit reality?” “Am I being faithful to my true nature?” And perhaps the oddest question: “do these words fit into ‘our language,’’? as if any culture in any time or place had a unified, accepted vocabulary that integrates all previous attempts at a common vocabulary, making the present form a perfection.
All of these assumptions require us to believe that there are meanings, which it is the task of language to express, and there are non-linguistic things called facts that language needs to represent. If you accept these premises, then language becomes a medium that sits in between the individual and reality, and the fixed task of language is to efficiently mediate the differences. This is not only the default view of language, it’s also the most widely accepted theory in communications theory.
Davidson and Rorty believe that this is nonsense, that there is not a single purpose for language. Furthermore, Rorty believes—and I assume too does Davidson—that there is no medium. No fixed reality exists, nor is there a fixed human nature, so it’s impossible to find a way to integrate the two.
So what is the purpose of language if that’s the case? Davidson proposes something he calls a “passing theory” about understanding. He explains it several different ways. For example, you can hear a malapropism—a phrase someone mangles—and still get what the person is talking about. Former New York Yankees catcher and manager Yogi Berra was famous for them. He’d regularly say this like “it gets late around here early” or “no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” You don’t need to properly convey meaning to be widely understood.
Davidson also uses a thought experiment that involves someone parachuting into an unknown culture and two people finding a way to converse with one another. But I prefer to use my own analogy to make Davidson’s point—and I’m going to return to a subject I’ve written about extensively of late, the movie “Drive My Car,” to make my point.
The 2021 Japanese film was about many things, but central to its story was a production of Anton Chekhov’s play “Uncle Vanya,” performed in Japan, using six different languages in the production. The protagonist of the story, Kafuku, has an unusual attachment to the play and gravitates towards achieving difficult things, but I also believe on a philosophical level, he must agree with Davidson about language.
Once you get past the matter of adapting a Russian play into Japanese, you see that the power of “Uncle Vanya” doesn’t lie in the power of its particular words or a central meaning that Chekhov brought to the piece. Kafuku admires the play for its ability to pull out unique shades of meaning from performers and the people who watch it.
So he obliterates language altogether. Playgoers can still follow the lines via superscript above the stage, but in a sense, it’s beside the point. Kafuku directs his actors to surrender to their fellow cast mates and, most of all, allow the text to speak to and through them, not try to act in a traditional sense, but just react to what other performers and the words are saying, as the performer understands them.
You never really understand why Kafuku takes this approach until you see it come together in the climax of the film. (I wrote in depth about this scene elsewhere, and you can read it here.) In execution, the seamless blend of languages is thrilling, deepening the theme of disconnection, but also creating an odd sense of unity between the performers. It’s all punctuated by an astounding performance of Sonya’s monologue, one of the most famous text’s of the stage, in Korean sign language, a performance that has to be seen to be fully appreciated and understood.
The need for language to be experienced, first hand, in context, is the ultimate point of Rorty/Davidson/Chekhov/Kafuku. Each act of trying to reach another person, whether in something simple like a conversation or elaborate like a play or poem, is an attempt to cope with a difficulty. This difficulty is not an act of getting out what’s in your head or your heart, or accurately describing the subject. Rather, it’s about finding some of those fleeting moments of understanding.
By embracing this understanding of language, Rorty says that naturalize the mind and language:
Davidson’s account of linguistic communication dispenses with the picture of language as a third thing intervening between self and reality, and of different languages as barriers between persons or cultures. To say that one’s previous language was inappropriate for dealing with some segment of the world (for example, the starry heavens above, or the raging passions within) is just to say that one is now, having learned a new language, able to handle that segment more easily.
There’s no end point to this, no perfect expression of any idea—or to expand on Kafuku’s belief, no perfect performance of “Uncle Vanya.”
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