THE METAPHILOSOPHICAL CULTURE OF Richard rorty

M. Vincent babu OFM CAP

Richard Rorty has compiled the essays of many philosophical writers under
the title The linguistic Turn.

He has put together different writings of various

linguistic philosophers around the topics Language, meaning and truth He applied
analytic methods to the age-old unsolved basic philosophical problems like mind and
its nature, language and reality. He dreamt of a metaphilosophical culture as the
future of philosophy.
Every philosophical rebel has tried to be presuppositionless, but none has
succeeded1. They, according to him, have not produced any knowledge instead
have only brought opinions. This is due to the difficulty in finding apt method. The
choice of the method is difficult because the nature of their subject matter and also
the nature of human knowledge are unknown. 2

For him the real problem is

something else and we have to make a total shift. The real questions of philosophy
according to him are the questions of language. He believed having diagnosed the
real cause. The answer, he thought of having brought, lies in the method by
reforming the language. He states in his introduction to The linguistic turn,
The purpose of the present volume is to provide materials for reflection on
the most recent philosophical revolution, that of linguistic philosophy, I shall
mean by linguistic philosophy the view that philosophical problems are

Richard M. Rorty, Linguistic turn p.1.

Ibid.

problems which may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language,

or by understanding more about the language we presently use.3
He also attempted to replace the opinions by knowledge just like many
other revolutionary philosophers. Has he succeeded in his attempt? It would be
premature on my part to say anything without having made an exhaustive study of all
his writings. But only thing I can say for certain is that he seems to have changed
his own opinions in the course of time. He self-contradicts himself when he rereads
his own book after twenty-five years of time saying,
The slogan that the problems of philosophy are problems of language now
strikes me as confused, for two reasons. The first is that I am no longer
inclined to view the problems of philosophy as naming a natural kindno
longer inclined to think of philosophy as (in the words I quoted from Stuart
Hampshire at the end of my 1965 essay) one of mans recognizable
activities. The second is that I am no longer inclined to think that there is
such a thing as language in any sense which makes it possible to speak of
problems of language.4
I am not a qualified specialist of Richard M. Rorty to make neither a serious
discussion on whether he has really failed in his attempt to bring the so called
revolutionary linguistic reformations nor to bring out the reasons for his failures if he
has really failed. I admit that it would be unjust on my part to make any major
criticisms on this subject. It is true that my knowledge about this subject is very
limited but that does not silence the naturally emerging questions as I read his
linguistic turn. My questions might have already found their answers in different
occasions which I ignore. Yet I prefer not to suppress my first reactions after having
begun to read The linguistic turn.

Ibid., p. 3.

Ibid., P. 371.

The search for a neutral stand point or losing our natural stand point!
I would like to stop a while on his starting point of his enquiry in his linguistic
turn. I think there is a serious flaw. He begins with his desire to look for a neutral
stand point. I do not find his ideas neutral instead, extreme and provocative ones. He
starts saying that all his predecessors have failed. He pushes to the extreme by
stating that
Attempts to substitute knowledge for opinion are constantly thwarted by the
fact that what counts as philosophical knowledge seems itself to be a matter
of opinion..

philosophy, though fated to fail in its quest for knowledge, is

nevertheless not a matter of opinion.5
All the philosophical concepts seem to be mere opinions. As a result, Rorty
concludes that opinions can lead us only to a cul-de-sac. He sees no future in
philosophy.

Despite desiring to be presuppositionless, he presupposes that

philosophy is fated to fail. When declaring the end of philosophy, he questions a

very specific notion of philosophy. He suggests something like an end of philosophy
and dreams of a post philosophical culture by means of a metaphilosophical
approach. We read at the end of his long introduction saying, It might be that we
would end by answering the question Has philosophy come to an end? with a

Ibid., p. 2.

resounding Yes, and that we would come to look upon a post-philosophical culture
as just as possible, and just as desirable, as a post-religious culture.6
philosophy as discipline in which knowledge is sought but only opinion can
be had. If one grants that the arts do not seek knowledge, and that science not only
seeks but finds it. 7

Philosophy does not make progress whereas, empirical

sciences make progress. Rorty would accept the progressive nature of philosophy in
as much as we take the meaning of the word progress as just a change of views 8.
Philosophy is seen as a history of long quarrel between philosophers over the same
issues without success. According to him the salvation is brought by linguistic turn.
He would even use the new terminology to divide history of philosophy under the
criteria of pre-linguistic philosophers and linguistic philosophers9. As Bergmann puts
the distinction as Ordinary Language Philosophers(OLP) and Ideal Language
Philosophers(ILP)10. An end of philosophy would mean an end of OLP.
According to me, Rortys intention to make philosophy to be like empirical
science would be the first error. He goes along with the idea of Carnap and Ayer to
reduce philosophy in to a department of logic11. Logic is a science of correct thinking
and correct speaking. Philosophy a love of wisdom and knowledge is reduced to a
subdivision of logic.

Ibid., p. 34.

Ibid., p.2.

Ibid.

Ibid., p.10.

10

Ibid., p.9

11

Ibid., p.5.

All

philosophical

questions

are

linguistic

questions

12

Prelinguistic

philosophers have failed to adapt the method. He quotes wittgensteins words to tell
that only through this safest method we can avoid all such absurdities. Much of the
paradox, absurdity, and opacity of prelinguistic philosophy stems from failure to
distinguish between speaking and speaking about speaking. Such failure, or
confusion, is harder to avoid than one may think. The method is the safest way of
avoiding it.13 Rorty believes that only a linguistic turn can come to rescue.
To emphasise that philosophical propositions are not to deal with descriptions
of any behaviour of physical or mental objects he brings the words of Ayer. The
propositions of philosophy are not factual, but linguistic in characterthat is, they do
not describe the behaviour of physical, or even mental, objects; they express
definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions.14 The work of philosophy is
just to define objects like the empirical sciences. This quotation from Ayer is brought
to purify philosophy from metaphysical terms.
Rorty thought that speaking in linguistic terms instead of terms of experience
and consciousness would help linguistic philosophers to overcome pseudo-problems
of philosophy like mind body dualism, the proofs for the existence of God and etc. 15
He concludes that philosophy started in the ancient Greece with the difference
between what appears and what is, and attained its limits with the representational

12

Ibid., p.12.

13

Ibid., p.9

14

Ibid., p.5.

15

Ibid., p. 9-10.

theory of knowledge and language, that attempted to establish a bridge between

what appears and what is.
According to me Rorty is committing an error to limit philosophy to linguistic
nature. The Truth is questioned. There are truths. Truths depend upon linguistic
terms. In other words truth is manmade. He himself admits in his another book
Contingency, irony, and solidarity,
"To drop the idea of languages as representations, and to be thoroughly
Wittgensteinian in our approach to language, would be to de-divinize the
world. Only if we do that can we fully accept the argument I offered earlier
the argument that since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are
dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are
made by human beings, so are truths"16
Rortys claim that truths are manmade sends us back to another claim that
vocabularies are also manmade. Propositions of truths depend upon vocabulary and
not upon the reality. According to me vocabularies can change as we approach more
closer to Truth or truths whereas the truth will remain the same. Our vocabularies
and understanding of truth can constantly get purified as we get nearer to truth.
Here I would like to ask this question: Is the problem of truth existential or
representational? In other words whether the truth of something depends on my
understanding and my enounced statement about it or the truth depends on the
totality of how that something is in itself. I think that my concept of the truth about
something can be conditioned by the means of my knowing that something. Here the
language is a means through which I express my knowledge and my understanding.
16

Richard M. Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1989., p. 21.

A language is a human product belonging to particular human culture through which

its human experience and human understanding are expressed. A proposition is an
enounced statement about something that needs not necessarily to be true. To
verify the truth of a proposition we need first to verify the means through which the
particular truth is attained, and then to have recourse to logic and finally we need to
see if the truth of the proposition represents really the something that it enounces. In
my view the truths of the propositions are representational and the truths of the
subject of the propositions are existential.
Rorty holds that truths are manmade. Thus for him the propositions of truths
depend upon vocabulary and not upon the reality. This is why I think that Rorty while
looking for a neutral stand point loses our natural stand point of truth. He looks for
truth in language than in reality in itself. It is not just an attempt argue against
metaphysics or dreaming a metaphilosophical culture rather it is an attempt where
Rorty loses our natural stand point of truth.

M. Vincent babu OFM CAP

Richard M. Rorty, Linguistic turn(ed.), University of Chicago Press, Chicago,1967
Richard M. Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989.