Richard Rorty

People who write good books, songs and stuff →Go uptown Writers Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

If you fancy yourself lining up against wokeness and snowflake culture, and think it all boils down to postmodernism, then before turning in for your dogmatic slumbers, you need to spend a bit of time with the late, great, Richard Rorty.

It doesn’t.

“We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.

Truth cannot be out there — cannot exist independently of the human mind — because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own, unaided by the describing activities of humans, cannot.”

- Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings do that.

His great works:

• Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
• Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
• Philosophy and Social Hope
• “The Contingency of Language”, London Review of Books, 17 April 1986

Start with the last: it’s the most accessible.

See also

• Truth
• Post-modernism
• Relativism