Richard Rorty died yesterday. I had the privilege of seeing him debate Dualism at Stanford, and since then he has been one of my favorite philosophers. That said, I always struggled to completely grasp the consequences of the philosophical framework in which he worked.

To grossly oversimplify Rorty’s thoughts on linguistic meaning, he believed that the statements that people make do not correspond to facts about the world. Sentences have no higher veracity than the fact that they are expressions of the speaker’s beliefs.

I’m sure Rorty’s position is tough to stomach for most readers, but lets run with it for a second. Because words are just words, the notion of making progress in the world can be defined as doing things that make people use new words. Simply inventing words like “rebaflamousus” is rather pointless because no one else uses that word, but inventing a word like “Google” is terrific progress because many other people use that word along side the inventors.

In that context, I think the Web2.0 space is very exciting. Lots of new words are creeping out into mainstream society (RSS, Wiki, Blog, etc). It’s a simple and fun way to think about what all the contributors in Web2.0 are doing, regardless of whether you agree with Rorty’s stance on linguistic meaning or not.

And, to any philosophy scholars, I apologize in advance if I’m totally brutalizing Rorty’s philosophy; I just thought this was a fun thread of thought. RIP Rorty.