Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Arthur Dent, Screwtape and the mysteries of story-telling
- 1 Postmodernism, grand narratives and just-so stories
- 2 Newton and Kissinger: Science as irony?
- 3 Learning to say ‘I’: Literature and subjectivity
- 4 Reconstructing religion: Fragmentation, typology and symbolism
- 5 The ache in the missing limb: Language, truth and presence
- 6 Twentieth-century fundamentalisms: Theology, truth and irony
- 7 Science and religion: Language, metaphor and consilience
- Concluding conversational postscript: The tomb of Napoleon
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Twentieth-century fundamentalisms: Theology, truth and irony
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Arthur Dent, Screwtape and the mysteries of story-telling
- 1 Postmodernism, grand narratives and just-so stories
- 2 Newton and Kissinger: Science as irony?
- 3 Learning to say ‘I’: Literature and subjectivity
- 4 Reconstructing religion: Fragmentation, typology and symbolism
- 5 The ache in the missing limb: Language, truth and presence
- 6 Twentieth-century fundamentalisms: Theology, truth and irony
- 7 Science and religion: Language, metaphor and consilience
- Concluding conversational postscript: The tomb of Napoleon
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
RORTY: LANGUAGE AND REALITY
The relationship between words and things has always been problematic. Even if the most simple-minded attempt at translation quickly dispels any naive realist illusions that words stand simply for things, actions or thoughts, with a one-to-one correspondence between one language and another, the precise function of language in describing our material and mental experience was, and still is, deeply mysterious. Though, contrary to popular mythology, it seems that Eskimo languages have no more words for snow than English, there are huge variations in the ways various languages describe the world. As we all know, French has two words for knowledge where English has only one; according to Benjamin Lee Whorf, Hopi Indians have different verbs for motion towards and away from the observer; the Japanese have different vocabularies for men and for women. Until recently, however, few scholars were tempted to sever completely the Gordian knot tying words to the world, and argue that there is no necessary relation at all between our material surroundings and the stories we tell ourselves about them. Only with the advent of postmodernism has there appeared what we might call ‘a linguistics of absence’, rather than presence, and the idea of a theology and even a science based not on observation of phenomena, but simply on other, previous, stories about the world.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Narrative, Religion and ScienceFundamentalism versus Irony, 1700–1999, pp. 195 - 224Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002