Language, Knowledge, and Meaning

1. Language, Knowledge, and Meaning Problem #1: Language and Truth “[A]ll vocabularies, even those which contain the words which we take most seriously, the ones most essential to our self-descriptions – are human creations, tools for the creation of such other human artifacts as poems, utopian societies, scientific theories, and future generations.” -Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, p. 53 Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

2. “When we are talking about the order and structure of the world, we are talking about the order of our grids.” -Alan W. Watts, Psychotherapy East and West Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

3. “grids” = Rorty’s “final vocabularies” “All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives…They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. I shall call these words a person’s “final vocabulary.” - Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, p. 73 Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

4. “I shall define an ‘ironist’ as someone who fulfills three conditions: (1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

5. (2) She realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

6. (3) Insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

7. Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old.” - Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, p. 73 Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

8. “I had always thought that we used language to describe the world—now I was seeing that this is not the case. To the contrary, it is through language that we create the world . . . And when we describe it, we create distinctions that govern our actions. To put it another way, we do not describe the world we see,but we see the world we describe.” -Joseph Jaworski, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership, p. 2 Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

9. “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors…” -Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

10. The glass through which we each see our world is ground by the metaphors which predispose us to see our selves and our circumstances in a certain way. Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

11. Metaphors & Facts “[T]he world does not provide us with any criterion of choice between alternative metaphors,…we can only compare languages or metaphors with one another, not with something beyond language called ‘fact’…” -Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidigger and Others, Philosophical Papers, p. 20 Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

12. Just the facts…? Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

13. “To make sense of the notion of languages corresponding to reality would be to think that we could get outside of our language long enough to compare it with reality. But to say, with Gadamer, that our experience is essentially linguistic is just to say that that cannot be done.” -Richard Rorty, “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching,” p. 525 Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

14. “[T]he fact that Newton's vocabulary lets us predict the world more easily than Aristotle's does not mean that the world speaks Newtonian. The world does not speak. Only we do.” • -Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity, p. 6 Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

15. If Rorty is right in saying that, “[T]rue assertions are simply successful moves in the social practise which Wittgenstein called a ‘language-game,’”* we arrive at our second problem: Problem #2: How are we to assign value to our claims about what is the case? *Richard Rorty, “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching,” p. 524 Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

16. “[T]here is a middle way between reliance on a God-surrogate and on one’s individual preferences – namely, reliance on the common sense of the community to which one belongs.” “[It] does not greatly matter what the core curriculum is as long as there is one – as long as each community defines itself by adopting one…What matters is that there be some things they all have read and can do, some common subject of conversation…To pick a core curriculum is, therefore, to pick a community – or, better, to decide what sort of community one would like to see come into being.” -Richard Rorty, “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching,” pp. 527 & 532-3 Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

17. A haunting question… The question that haunts Rorty’s postmodern pragmatism, however, is: How are we to give moral sense and existential depth to our choices among vocabularies, curricula, and communities? Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education

18. asked another way… Is irony a sufficient virtue upon which to found a sustainable sense of self and a sustaining sense of community? Prepared by Dr. Martin Barlosky, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa EDU 5210: Philosophical Perspectives on Education