Richard Rorty

In a recent polemic against Derrida, John Searle said that the present was a sort of ‘golden age of the philosophy of language’. This is certainly true. It is an era of system-building, in which dozens of immensely complex structures are being constructed. The older rhetoric of analytic philosophy, which decried system-building, big fat books (as opposed to thin, stiletto-like journal articles), and the development of philosophical ‘schools’, has been put aside. Nobody now talks about ‘teamwork’ or ‘bite-size problems’. Rather, every few years the problematic of philosophy of language is altered by the intrusion of yet another brilliantly original account of meaning and reference, one which starts off by denying a premise which had previously been assumed to be part of the rules of the game. Philosophy of language nowadays is an area in which a lot of extremely bright people, inspired by the challenge of friendly competition with equals, are busy creating schools – bodies of students prepared to defend the ‘central insight’ of their teacher by marvellously detailed accounts of modal contexts, conditionals, indexicals, and so on. No area of analytic philosophy demands, or gets, more concentrated intelligence. None generates more intellectual excitement.–

In theory, it is the highest virtue of the philosopher to be constantly receptive to criticism, always willing to abandon his own views upon hearing a better argument. In practice, students tend to become exasperated when an important philosopher changes his mind. It suits their doxographic purposes best to use the philosopher’s name to denote the monolithic set of doctrines which initially made him famous. Bertrand Russell is an example of an important and influential philosopher who changed his mind several times and thereby induced exasperation. Hilary Putnam is another. Just when people have finished writing a devastating critique of Putnam, they discover that Putnam has written a similar critique of his own previous views. This refusal to serve as an unmoving target has sometimes led to attempts to dismiss him as a reed shaken by every new wind of doctrine. But such attempts fail, for Putnam is one of the most vigorous and thoughtful representatives of the second generation of analytic philosophers.

About two hundred years ago, the idea that A truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe. The French Revolution had shown that the whole vocabulary of social relations, and the whole spectrum of social institutions, could be replaced almost overnight. This inspired a new sort of politics – revolutionary, utopian politics, the sort of political thought which sets aside questions about both the will of God and the nature of man and dreams of creating a new kind of human being. Simultaneously, the Romantic poets were showing what can happen when art is no longer thought of as imitation, but rather as self-creation. These poets made it plausible for art to claim the place in culture traditionally held by religion and philosophy, the place which the Enlightenment had claimed for science.

As I was starting to write this I came across a poem by Philip Larkin, the last part of which reads:

And once you have walked the length of your mind, what You command is as clear as a lading-list. Anything else must not, for you, be thought To exist.

And what’s the profit? Only that, in time We half-identify the blind impress All our behavings bear, may trace it home. But to...