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

1 2

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.

3 4

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.

6 7 8 9

Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p.2. Ibid. Ibid., p.10. Ibid., p.9 Ibid., p.5.

10 11

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 13 14 15

Ibid., p.12. Ibid., p.9 Ibid., p.5. 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.