In an earlier Rorty installment I said, among other things, that "He wants to substitute rhetoric for argument but without quite giving up argument. So he ends up giving shoddy arguments . . . ." You think I'm being unfair, don't you? Well, let's see. Here is a passage from Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge UP 1989, p. 5:
Truth cannot be out there — cannot exist independently of the human mind — because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own, — unaided by the describing activities of human beings — cannot.
1. Only sentences can be true or false.
2. "Sentences are elements of human languages. . . ."
3. "Human languages are human creations. . . ."
Therefore
4. Sentences are human creations. (From 2, 3)
Therefore
5. Only human creations can be true or false. (From 1, 4)
6. Human creations "cannot exist independently of the human mind."
Therefore
7. Truth and falsity cannot exist independently of the human mind.
Therefore
8. "Truth cannot be out there."
This argument is dubious because premise (1) is dubious. The primary vehicles of the truth-values cannot be sentences. A written sentence is just a collection of physical marks on paper or in some other medium, and no collection of physical items can, just by itself, have meaning, let alone a truth-value. The same goes for an utterance of a sentence. An utterance is a fleeting physical phenomenon and so cannot possibly be either true or false in the primary sense. It is not the fleetingness, but the physicality that is the problem. Noises emanating from the vocal cords can no more be true or false than can the rattling of a rattlesnake. The same goes for inscriptions, even those that are carved in stone. The problem is simply that physical phenomena lack intrinsic representational power. No physical phenomenon is intrinsically of or about anything; no such phenomenon has non-derivative intentionality. Hence no physical phenomenon is non-derivatively meaningful, whence it follows that no such phenomenon can be non-derivatively true or false. A mind (a possessor of non-derivative intentionality) may interpret a rattling sound as signifying the presence of a dangerous critter, but the rattling itself can do no such thing. Similarly, a mind can interpret an inscription as meaning such-and-such, but the sentence itself, qua physical phenomenon, cannot mean anything.
The meaningfulness of sentence-tokens is derived, not original. In Turkish, 'Seni seviyorum' means what 'I love you' means in English. But 'Seni seviyorum' has this meaning not in itself, not in virtue of its spatial and geometric and physical properties, but only in virtue of the fact that speakers of Turkish use it to express their meaning. And the same goes for 'I love you.' It has the meaning it has only in virtue of the fact that speakers of English use it to express their meaning. As John Searle puts it, "Linguistic meaning is a real form of intentionality, but it is not intrinsic [original] intentionality. It is derived from the intrinsic intentionality of the users of the language." Linguistic meaning and reference is parasitic upon mental meaning and reference.
So it cannot be (declarative) sentences qua physical phenomena that are either true or false, it must be sentences interpreted by minds to mean this or that. This fact by itself, however, does not suffice to show that truth is "out there," i.e., independent of the human mind. For one could maintain the truth and falsity are properties of contents of acts of judging, and that these judgmental contents exist only as the accusatives of acts of judging.
But when I judge that a is F, and my judgment is true, then the item denoted by 'a' in reality possesses the attribute expressed by 'F.' My judgment that the thing coming toward me is a coyote is true only if in fact, "out there," there is something coming toward me and the thing in question exemplifies the property of being a coyote. So even if the truth-bearer is in the mind, the truth-maker, that which makes the truth-bearer true, cannot be in the mind.
To cop a line from the Tractarian Wittgenstein, Die Welt is die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge. "The world is the totality of facts, not of things," where these facts are what make truth-bearers true. Of course, Rorty will strenuously oppose this realism about truth. He will insist that there are no facts in themselves to which any of our sentences correspond.
And yet he tells us that the world is "out there." Well then, what is this world that is "out there" beyond language and mind? Is it undifferentiated mush, a sort of materia prima to be informed as we wish? Then it is a world well lost. Does it instead possess an intrinsic structure? Then, even if propositional truth is in the mind, there must be in the world proposition-like entities, truth-making facts or states of affairs. But then there is a clear sense in which, contra Rorty, truth is "out there." Propositional truth needs grounding in ontic truth, the truth of things. Hence the scholastic tag, ens et verum convertuntur. This convertibility of being and truth is the ground of the world's intrinsic intelligibility. But accepting as he does the death of God, which Nietzsche realized was also the death of truth, Rorty must acquiesce in the death of intrinsic intelligibility. The world gets reduced to a brute meaningless surd on which play out his incommensurable conversations, conversations unto no end, conversations for their own sake. "We are not conversing because we have a goal, but because Socratic conversation is an activity which is its own end." (Ibid., p. 172)