Rorty’s Linguistic Turn: Why (More Than) Language Matters to Philosophy

Abstract

The linguistic turn is a central aspect of Richard Rorty’s philosophy, informing his early critiques of foundationalism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and subsequent critiques of authoritarianism in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. It is argued that we should interpret the linguistic turn as a methodological suggestion for how philosophy can take a non-foundational perspective on normativity. It is then argued that although Rorty did not succeed in explicating normativity without foundations (or authority without authoritarianism), we should take seriously the ambition motivating his project. But taking that ambition seriously may require reconsidering the linguistic turn. The linguistic turn was one of the most significant sea-changes in twentiethcentury philosophy. At the heart of this dramatic change in philosophy’s theoretical and practical self-images was a general departure from certain important ideas formulated in seventeenth-century philosophy (such as those of mind, idea, and experience) in favor of a rather different set of objects of philosophical scrutiny characteristic of twentieth-century philosophy (such as words, sentences, and meanings). Ian Hacking, in his helpful 1975 book Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, confidently stated that, “It is a manifest fact that immense consciousness of language is at present time characteristic of every main stream in Western philosophy” (1975, 10). The decades since Hacking’s remark have only confirmed the accuracy of his proclamation: the ushering in of the era of language has been at play in every philosophical tradition with a major presence. It is evident in phenomenology as that tradition moved from the analysis of consciousness central for Husserl and Heidegger to the high textualism of Derrida. It is evident in critical theory as that tradition moved from the materialism of Horkheimer and Adorno to the discourse ethics of Habermas. It is evident in the shift in analytic philosophy from talk of observation reports and sense data to talk of meaning, metaphor, semantics, and sentences. It is also evident in pragmatist philosophy as that tradition shifted from an exploration of the work of experience in our practices to an examination of the extent to which