La dissolution langagière de la réalité : R. Rorty et le défi herméneutique

Abstract

The work that we propose to do in our thesis is located in the extension of this work which will have made it possible to introduce a major problem arising from the reflections around the kantianism and then from pragmatism. The Kantian project and other essentialist philosophies being to offer a well-defined epistemological framework for the validation of all scientific and political discourse will generate against it the anti-foundationalist criticism of Rorty among the most acerbic. This direct confrontation and this opposition to the kantianism will open the way to the reflection of this thesis which questions the claims of Rortyan hermeneutics which intends to dissolve our reality in the incommensurable of discourse. Hermeneutics is, in fact, part of these numerous attempts which tend to discredit reason inherited from the Enlightenment while favoring the emergence of new gnoseological and epistemological orientations. This revolution is taking place around language which, far from representing an additional foundation, nevertheless constitutes an essential link in the programmed destructuring of our knowledge and the reorientation of our centers of social and cultural interest. It is the idea that Rorty develops that lets us understand that language replaces the mind –the theory of knowledge –which has served until now as an interface with reality. Hence we wonder if hermeneutics does not turn out to be a deaf threat to the real osmosis of societies and the objectivity of our reasoning. Our problematic will therefore first question the foundations of the hermeneutics then the question of knowing if the language conceived as a substitute for the commensurable or for the foundationalism is not overvalued or overused before ultimately extracting the probable legacy of such a theory. The 317 pages will therefore be used to analyze in turn in three distinct parts, the foundations of Rorty‘s hermeneutics, and the consequences of the linguistic turn for conversation, truth and science in general, to end with the added value of the latter. We will use for this the historical-critical method with a view to making as much manifest as possible the flaws of hermeneutics, in Rorty‘s thought particularly, who lapsed into relativism and debunked scientific absolutes and philosophy at the same time. Indeed the liberal culture defended by hermeneutics presents itself as the avatar of a monadic projection of being and of the societies as we end up in a fragmentation of being and societies and in a reckless disappearance of objectivity.