In his very engagingly written, clear, and interesting book Winning Arguments, Stanley Fish beats up on poor old George Orwell. In his essay, “Politics and the English Language”, Orwell had argued that if we let words do our thinking for us then this will result in bad political consequences, such as fascism, because we will let random words dictate our thoughts rather than choosing our words based on our understanding of reality.
Orwell tells us not to allow words that bubble up in our thoughts to lead us around. Rather we are “to think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you… hunt around until you find the exact words that seem to fit.” Orwell advises that “it is better to put off using words as long as possible,” so as to think “through pictures.” That way we can be clear on the facts rather than just being led about by the words we might have heard and that happen to be suggested in our thoughts and writing what is vague, meaningless, and ugly. But this is at odds with Fish’s view of reality:
[Orwell’s] advice makes sense only if the “thing” it is the job of words to match has a “wordless” reality to which we can have nonverbal access. Those who believe that we live in a rhetorical world will say that thinking wordlessly is something that can’t be done because the objects of thought–natural phenomena, political policies, urban landscapes, historical periods– become available for our attention only when the system of differences that constitute a language makes it possible to point to them, a pointing that could not have been performed independently of that system. Historians talk easily about things like the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Romantic period, and the Modern period. But the men and women who lived during those times (which were not “times” to them, just the days of their lives) did not identify themselves as Medieval or Renaissance or Modern. Those categories– and the “realities” they name–emerged only after scholars had carved up history at the joints, joints that were not there before the carving up; they are produced by words, not by brute fact.
Winning Arguments, Chapter 1.
Fish holds a view common in some circles, somewhat similar to the old idealist view, that we can’t access the way reality is, but only how our human interpretations have carved it up with words. Where the idealists said we can’t get beyond the sensations and ideas we experience to some independent reality, the social constructivists, those who believe we live in a “rhetorical world”, say we cannot get beyond the way our words divide up reality to the way it is really divided up.
It’s difficult to see how we could make any headway in the debate between the realist and the social constructivist, just as it was between the realist and the idealist. The realist will say, while being surprised she has to say it, that it seems all too obvious that all sorts of things, such as the sun and the moon and the earth, are not created by our minds, and that our words for them seem to get the job done in referring to them. Then the social constructivist will insist that what has just been said is just our way of describing our experience. It is not getting to the true divisions in reality between independent things, natural kinds, if there are such things. At that point there appears to be a stalemate.
For my part, even as I am sympathetic to the idea that we do not know all there is to know about ultimate reality, and even as I at one point tried entertaining a view like Fish’s in an effort to think through the merits of different rival philosophies, I just find it so hard to believe that there isn’t a “‘wordless’ reality to which we can have nonverbal access.” It is such an obvious example it even feels faintly embarrassing to offer it, but babies and cats respond to stimuli even though they don’t have language. That would seem to suggest that there are wordless experiences that beings can have to which they have nonverbal access.
I suppose Fish would have to say that we can only make these sorts of claims as language-using adults, and if we do make these claims as realists then this presupposes that we can see wordlessly that babies and cats really do this in reality, not just from our perspective within a rhetorical world. Stalemate again.
It must just come down to what you can actually manage to believe. I just do believe that human beings came to exist after things like the earth and the sun and the moon, and that this statement does accurately represent our reality as far as we can tell. It seems incredible that we couldn’t say that the statement does in fact describe our situation. How would we have gotten here in the first place, to have words to use, if not for the sun and the earth existing?
Saying these things which seem so obvious from the realist perspective over and over won’t convince Fish, who will just see so much question-begging. But maybe, at the very least, it goes some way toward suggesting why myself and others find his view incredible. Or perhaps it accomplishes nothing, since realist expressions of disbelief have always accompanied statements of idealist and social constructivist positions.
I would also make a phenomenological argument, in the narrow sense of the word, where “phenomenology” just means how things appear to me. The way that I experience writing is just as Orwell says, casting about for the right words to match a sense of meaning that is independent of those words. Maybe that marks me as old-fashioned, but I suspect many people feel this way when they write.
One thing I will say for Fish and his ally Richard Rorty is that they wrote clearly in explaining their views unlike many who agreed with them. Others in their camp often produced nigh on impenetrable texts arguing for or at least discussing the social constructivist view. Perhaps that Fish and Rorty wrote clearly while rejecting Orwell’s realism is a far more interesting challenge to Orwell’s thesis that a realist method is necessary for clear thinking than the mind-boggling social constructivist view itself.
Not Entirely Pyrrhonian 