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 foundational 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.