As a first illustration of the convergence between analytic and Continental philosophy, I want to show how these two slogans ['Everything is a social construction' and 'All awareness is a linguistic affair'] come to much the same thing. Both are ways of saying that we shall never be able to step outside of language, never be able to grasp reality unmediated by a linguistic description. So both are ways of saying that we should be suspicious of the Greek distinction between appearance and reality, and that we should try to replace it with something like the distinction between 'less useful description of the world' and 'more useful description of the world'. To say that everything is a social construction is to say that our linguistic practices are so bound up with our other social practices that our descriptions of nature, as well as of ourselves, will always be a function of our social needs. To say that all awareness is a linguistic affair is to say that we have no knowledge of the kind which Bertrand Russell working in the tradition of British empiricism, called 'knowledge by acquaintance'. All our knowledge is of the sort which Russell called 'knowledge by description'. If you put the two slogans together, you get the claim that all our knowledge is under descriptions suited to our current social purposes.1
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Richard Rorty,
"A World without Substances or Essences,"
in Philosophy and Social Hope
(London: Penguin Books, 1999),
48.
