Truth and falsehood for non-representationalists: Gorgias on the normativity of language

Abstract

Sophists and rhetoricians like Gorgias are often accused of disregarding truth and rationality: their speeches seem to aim only at effective persuasion, and be constrained by nothing but persuasiveness itself. In his extant texts Gorgias claims that language does not represent external objects or communicate internal states, but merely generates behavioural responses in people. It has been argued that this perspective erodes the possibility of rationally assessing speeches by making persuasiveness the only norm, and persuasive power the only virtue, of speech. Against this view, I show how Gorgias' texts support a robust normativity of language that goes well beyond persuasion while remaining nonrepresentational. Gorgias' claims that a speech can be persuasive and false, or true and unpersuasive, reveal pragmatic, epistemic, and agonistic constraints on the validity of speech that are neither representational nor reducible to sheer persuasiveness.The claim that truth is merely whatever our peers let us get away with saying has made Richard Rorty (1979,(175)(176) well known. The underlying suggestion is that the only judges of the correctness of our claims are the members of our human community of justification, and that no non-human reality ('objects themselves' or 'the nature of things') could or should play a part in its assessment. There is nothing more to truth than justification, since the distinction between truth-as-correspondence and truth-as-justification is not relevant in practice. Thus we might as well drop the former and uphold the latter.