PD Smith

Richard Rorty

11 June 2007 | Rorty, Science & literature, Writing & Poetry | 4 comments

I was very sor­ry to hear this morn­ing of the death from can­cer of the philoso­pher Richard Rorty. Simon Black­burn has talked about Rorty’s “extra­or­di­nary gift for duck­ing and weav­ing and lay­ing smoke.” But as a research stu­dent I found his ideas both chal­leng­ing and lib­er­at­ing.

It’s true that many sci­en­tists found his phi­los­o­phy unac­cept­able. “The fact that Newton’s vocab­u­lary lets us pre­dict the world more eas­i­ly than Aristotle’s does not mean that the world speaks New­ton­ian”.

Today I too have real prob­lems with state­ments like that. But for some­one study­ing the rela­tions between sci­ence and lit­er­a­ture in the 1990s, the work of Rorty and oth­ers empha­sis­ing the key role played by lan­guage in our expe­ri­ence of the world offered a fas­ci­nat­ing way into the prob­lem.

In the end, he seemed to be say­ing that valu­able knowl­edge about the world was not just to be found in the sci­ences. The real ques­tion was not whether it was sci­ence or lit­er­a­ture (or reli­gion?) that could claim to have the most per­fect descrip­tion of the world. Rather that each con­tributes a dif­fer­ent under­stand­ing to the sum of knowl­edge. That was an insight I’m grate­ful for.

Appre­ci­a­tions: NYT, Wash­ing­ton Post, Wag­gish, Cos­mic Vari­ance

4 comments so far:

  1. LiteraryMinded | 11 June 2007

    ‘Rather that each con­tributes a dif­fer­ent under­stand­ing to the sum of knowl­edge.’

    And that is what phi­los­o­phy is all about. Whether it be through sci­ence, lit­er­a­ture, or indeed, reli­gion, it is healthy to con­stant­ly ques­tion and thus appre­ci­ate our rea­sons for being.

  2. PD Smith | 11 June 2007

    I couldn’t agree more…

  3. David Thorpe | 11 June 2007

    I believe as a writer that peo­ple under­stand the world by telling sto­ries about it. Sci­ence does this, so does reli­gion and literature/drama.

    I also believe that words are not enough, and that music, con­tem­pla­tion of nature, and non-ver­bal arts like art and dance can go deep­er.

    There is no per­fect descrip­tion of the world.

    It depends entire­ly on your point of view.

    A per­fect descrip­tion of the world for a fly or an ele­phant would be quite dif­fer­ent from that for a human.

    Per­haps if it exists it is the sum of all Leib­niz’ mon­ads.

  4. PD Smith | 11 June 2007

    Hi David — good to hear from you!

    Yes, I think Josephine would like the idea that music goes deep­er than words…