And Rorty Came Bubbling Up

An old friend brought up Nietzsche, the silver fox of a philosopher (or man-on-the-street) mumbled something about Chomsky, and something at work this week made me think of Richard Rorty.

What do I understand about philosophy? Next to nothing. And yet I sometimes dabble, choosing this person or that primarily on the way that he/she shuffles words.

Anyway, I dug up the Rorty text that I was thinking of and will jot down just a couple of passages I highlighted long long ago.

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From Rorty's introduction to Essays on Heidegger and Others:

Consider sentences as strings of marks and noises emitted by organisms, strings capable of being paired off with the strings we ourselves utter (in the way we call "translating"). Consider beliefs, desires, and intentions -- sentential attitudes generally -- as entities posited to help predict the behavior of these organisms. Now think of those organisms as gradually evolving as a result of producing longer and more complicated strings, strings which enable them to do things they had been unable to do with the aid of shorter and simpler strings. Now think of us as examples of such highly evolved organisms, of our highest hopes and deepest fears as made possible by, among other things, our ability to produce the peculiar strings we do. Then think of the four sentences that precede this one as further examples of such strings. Penultimately, think of the five sentences that precede this one as a sketch for a redesigned house of Being, a new dwelling for us shepherds of Being. Finally, think of the last six sentences as yet another example of the play of signifiers, one more example of the way in which meaning is endlessly alterable through the recontextualization of signs.

And from "Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?":

     Nominalists see language as just human beings using marks and noises to get what they want. One of the things we want to do with language is to get food, another is to get sex, another is to understand the origin of the universe. Another is to enhance our sense of human solidarity, and still another may be to create oneself by developing one's own private, autonomous, philosophical language.