Lexicon of Arguments

 

I 16ff
Mirror: Language is a tool and not a mirror (Rorty like Wittgenstein).
I 206
Language: the particularity of the language is not that it "changes the quality of our experience" or "opens new perspectives to the consciousness". Its acquisition rather gives us access to a community whose members justify their assertions before each other.
>Language community, >Community, >Justification.
I 228
Rorty: we can pursue Quine’s goals without useing his resources: we admit that the world can be fully described in a truth-functional language, but at the same time we also admit that parts of it can be described in an intensional language as well.
>Truth functions, Intensions.
If we were not able to refer to intentions, we would still be able to describe any section of the world.
- - -
III 25
Vocabularies: the world does not prefer one vocabulary over others. Newton’s vocabulary makes it easier for us to describe the world than that of Aristotle, but it does not prefer it! The human self is created by vocabularies.
>Vocabulary, >Self, >World.
III 41
Rorty’s thesis: seeing the history of the language and thus of the arts, sciences and the history of morality as a metaphor is to abolish the image in which consciousness or language are always better suited for purposes that God or nature have imposed. Consciousness just happened in evolution, it’s not something at which the whole process was aimed.
>Teleology, >Consciousness.
III 156
Language: people want to be described in their own terms.
III 190
Language/noise/sound/Heidegger/Rorty: for him, philosophical truth depended on the choice of phonemes, the sound of the words themselves.
>Phonemes, >Language/Heidegger, >Truth/Heidegger, >Heidegger.
III 197
Primordial words/RortyVsHeidegger: such words would be completely useless for people who do not share Heidegger’s associations.
III 190
Writing/speech/DerridaVsHeidegger/Rorty: Derrida puts Heidegger upside down: insists on the "priority of the written word".
Writing instead of sounds - Thought should become poet-like. "The language speaks".
>Writing, >Derrida