Page 29 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
work of Richard Rorty (b. 1931), where it is argued that nothing
carries meaning as a result of its intrinsic nature. To say that there
is a world out there cannot coincide with saying that there is a
truth out there. The world in and by itself is neither true nor false;
only sentences can be true or false. If truth is a property of
sentences, it follows that truth is not a metaphysical given.
Sentences are fundamentally human inventions and depend on
vocabularies, i.e. artificial constructs in the process of constant
making, unmaking and remaking. The human self, too, is the
product of certain vocabularies and of their cultural usages. Rorty
has little faith in the idea of linguistic evolution or in the notion
that there is a fixed task for language to execute. Language is
about the ongoing creation of new vocabularies which do not
correspond to the discovery of truer realities, but rather to the
realization that reality has to be incessantly redescribed as a result
of contingent mutations. These are produced by the ensemble of
disciplines (philosophy, literary studies, science, etc.) which consti-
tute a culture (Rorty 1989).
Let us now move to the field of Linguistics. The study of
language as a system as carried out by this discipline comprises
five main areas: grammar; syntax; hermeneutics; pragmatics;
semantics. Grammar deals with the rules concerning the ways in
which words can be put together for the purpose of constructing
sentences. Syntax focuses on the logical principles underlying the
grammatical arrangement of words or grammatical rules. Both
grammar and syntax are concerned with the structural features of
language. Grammar defines words as parts of speech (e.g. nouns,
verbs, adjectives, adverbs) while syntax defines words or clusters
of words according to the roles they play within sentences (e.g.
subject, object, predicate). Hermeneutics deals with theories of
interpretation. 5 Pragmatics and Semantics examine the nature and
genesis of meaning. In pragmatics, the focus is on the relationship
between language and ourselves, that is, on the ways in which we
are able to invest certain words or sentences with meanings.
Semantics concentrates on the relationship between language and
the world, namely the ways in which words relate to the objects or
facts they refer to.
The main models used in the study of language are the prescrip-

5 IV These theories are discussed in Part I, Chapter 5, 'Reading'.

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