The world does not speak.

We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, within common sence, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there, is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human language, and that human languages are human creations.

Truth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own – unaided by the describing activities of human beings – cannot.

The suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of its own. If we cease to attempt to make sense of the idea of such a nonhuman language, we shall not be tempted to confuse the platitude that the world may cause us to be justified in believing a sentence true with the claim that the world splits itself up, on its own initiative, into sentence-shaped chunks called ‘facts’. But if one clings to the notion of self-subsistent facts, it is easy to start capitalizing the word ‘truth’ and treating it as something identical either with God or with the world as God’s project. Then one will say, for example, that truth is great, and will prevail.

This confliction is facilitated by confining attention to single sentences as opposed to vocabulairies. For we often let the world decide the competition between alternative sentences (e.g. between ‘red wins’ and black wins or between the doctor did it and the doctor did it). In such cases, it is easy to run together the fact that the world contains the causes or our being justified in holding a belief with the claim that some nonlinguistic state of the world is itself an example of truth, or that some of such state ‘makes a belief true’ by corresponding to it. But it is not so easy when we turn from individual sentences to vocabulairies as wholes. When we consider examples of alternative language games – the vocabulary of ancient Athenan politics versus Jefferson’s, the moral vocabulary of Saint Paul versus Freud’s, the jargon of Newton versus that of Aristotle, the idiom of Blake versus that of Dryden – it is difficult to think f the world as making one of these better than another, of the world as deciding between them. When the notion of ‘descriptions of the world’ is moved from the level of criterion-governed sentences within language games to language games as wholes games which we do not choose between by reference to criteria, the idea that the world decides which description are true can no longer be given in a clear sence. It becomes hard to think that that vocabulary is somehow already out there in the world, waiting for us to discover it. Attention to the vocabulairies in which sentences are formulated, rather than to individual sentences, makes us realize, for example, that the fact that Newton’s vocabulary lets us predict the world more easily that Aristotle’s does not mean that the world speaks Newtonian.

The world does not speak. Only we do 

van
Richard Rorty 

note
So some vocabulairies are more populair and seem therefore more powerfull than others (m.g.)

links
questions 09|86
taal 01|05