Rorty & Linguistical Cynicism

While discussing philosophy with a Rorty fan, I came across this very interesting excerpt: 

In Rorty's view, both Dewey's pragmatism and Darwinism encourage us to see vocabularies as tools, to be assessed in terms of the particular purposes they may serve. Our vocabularies, Rorty suggests, "have no more of a representational relation to an intrinsic nature of things than does the anteater's snout or the bowerbird's skill at weaving." (TP 48)

Pragmatic evaluation of various linguistically infused practices requires a degree of specificity. From Rorty's perspective, to suggest that we might evaluate vocabularies with respect to their ability to uncover the truth, would be like claiming to evaluate tools for their ability to help us get what we want—full stop. Is the hammer or the saw or the scissors better—in general? Questions about usefulness can only be answered, Rorty points out, once we give substance to our purposes.

Rorty's pragmatist appropriation of Darwin also defuses the significance of reduction. He rejects as representationalist the sort of naturalism that implies a program of nomological or conceptual reduction to terms at home in a basic science. Rorty's naturalism echoes Nietzsche's perspectivism; a descriptive vocabulary is useful insofar as the patterns it highlights are usefully attended to by creatures with needs and interests like ours. Darwinian naturalism, for Rorty, implies that there is no one privileged vocabulary whose purpose it is to serve as a critical touchstone for our various descriptive practices.

For Rorty, then, any vocabulary, even that of evolutionary explanation, is a tool for a purpose, and therefore subject to teleological assessment. Typically, Rorty justifies his own commitment to Darwinian naturalism by suggesting that this vocabulary is suited to further the secularization and democratization of society that Rorty thinks we should aim for. 

Stanford Encyclopedia's article on Rorty.

Rorty. Relaxin'.

Rorty understands language in a very cynical way -- which is not a bad way at all of understanding language. 

I believe it is actually the case that people have always understood the potential for language to be abused. What is a lie, after all, if not an abuse of language? But Rorty's cynicism is deeper than this. It views all language as pragmatic in essence, and thus never actually is entirely honest. 

Perhaps I am being too hard on him, and my interpretation is not entirely correct, but that is not something to be bogged down in when this idea alone is quite interesting.

If the language we use to discuss ideas is ultimately for specific purposes, and not meant to be precise presentations of our real perception of how the world is and what our ideas are, we have to treat the way that anyone talks to us skeptically. We become a part of anyone's agenda when we assent to the way that they are using language. 

Rorty is not wrong in viewing language as behaving this way. 

I think that, especially in modernity, language has begun to mean this. Our justifications for the Iraq war can be seen as a large ruse to profit off of the highly lucrative oil trade and to serve other geopolitical interests. 

When we see the way that all political groups can shift back and forth on things like free speech and property rights when it suits them, we see that hypocrisy can seem almost unconscious and natural. Thus all of the words & ideals previously presented seem like a bunch of hot air, and to have originally only been uttered to serve a single purpose, and to not really be about the ideas in themselves. 

But I think that people tend to believe what they are saying, even if they renege on these words later, and that there are many people who are incredibly sincere in their beliefs and do not yield. The religious, in particular, have an inclination to uphold their precise descriptions of reality, and all that the Saints wrote and martyrs confessed. 

I think that Rorty's assessment is particularly poignant due to the circumstances in which we 20th & 21st century people live: our governments are "democracies" that consist of oligarchs manufacturing consent via the media, who are always engaged in employing ideas and symbolism to manipulate people. Many of these people are not even necessarily very political or philosophical by nature, but are told that it is their duty to be as such. 

Because the populace is not particularly invested in their own narratives, the elites who rule via the manufacturing of consent are blessed by their fickleness.

You can also see the elites benefiting from the cynical use of language in the marketplace. Advertisements are themselves a form of propagandizing in practice. You can see it also cynically employed in law as well, where great efforts are gone to to follow the 'letter of the law' and the very meaning of language becomes distorted. 

Western liberal democracies have cynical views of language because they are ruled by merchants & lawyers who view language as pragmatic tools. Rorty was undoubtedly able to make this conclusion, and it affected the very way that he views language. 

But I think that, in a society more grounded in tradition & language, we would not be having cynical views about language, but rather cynical views about humans, and we would be talking about hypocrisy and not gutting human communications.