Language and Truth

The readings for this week seem to revolve around language and human intellect. These writers seem to be concerned with the human experience and whether or not it is grounded in reality or if it is something that is made up. This at first seems difficult to distinguish because knowledge seems to imply that there is a certain truth and reality. However, is this necessarily the case? I think that maybe the writers for this week are tackling these themes in their works.

Immanuel Kant in Critique of Pure Reason discusses phenomena and noumena. He writes, “Now one would think that the concept of appearances, as limited by the Transcendental Aesthetic, provides us already by itself with objective reality of noumena and justifies the division of objects into phenomena and noumena, and hence also the division of the world into a world of sense and a world of understanding,” (312). If phenomena are appearances that make up our experiences, then noumena are the things themselves, which make up reality. What Kant is trying to argue in this excerpt is how we can really know that something is based in reality. Humans can only really know what they experience and what they understand through the use of judgment.

In a similar vein, Friedrich Nietzsche writes about the origin of truth and intellect. How can we know something is the truth? Is truth only arbitrary because it comes from the experience of humans? Nietzsche makes connections between truth and the origin of language. He seems to claim that our assignment of gender to words and our assignment of metaphors is completely arbitrary. “Thus the genesis of language does not proceed logically in any case, and all the material within and with which the man of truth, the scientist, and the philosopher later work and build, if not derived from never-never land, is at least not derived from the essence of things.” He seems concerned with the fact that there is not logic to the origin of language. Because of this, can any language be used to communicate pure logic? Later on he seems to be saying that truth is constructed by man and thus, the truth is always limited in its validity. If this is what he claims, can there be any real truth or any one truth?

Philosophy from the Greeks seemed to also be concerned with this idea of finding the truth. However, it is even worth going after? If our language is unreliable, then how can we use language to find the truth or come to a definition of the truth through logic or even dialectic.

How does this connect to rhetoric? I think perhaps that this is the sort of gray area where rhetoric flourishes. There is no one particularly means of persuasion just as there is no one truth or even one way of getting to a particular truth. Yes, all truth is relative, but so is rhetoric. Aristotle does lay our varies means of persuasion based on personality and types of people. Why should rhetoric be separate from morality? I would think that rhetoric that uses a truth that appeals to a certain audience would be more successful than a sophistic demonstration of rhetoric.