COLERIDGE: THE LANGUAGE OF THE BIBLE

If, as previous chapters may suggest, it is possible to use the Kuhnian notion of paradigms as operating not merely in scientific discourse, but in areas like religion as well, we may suspect that such paradigms are also closely associated with theories of language. Richard Rorty has ingeniously suggested that the history of philosophy may best be understood as a series of ‘turns’ in which ‘a new set of problems emerges and the old ones begin to fade away’. The latest of these, he argues, is the ‘linguistic turn’:

In view of what we have seen in previous chapters, the idea that we live in a period where we tend to see both things and ideas primarily in terms of words is obviously persuasive – though, as we shall see in the next chapter, not necessarily persuasive in the way that Rorty believes it to be. Indeed, it is difficult to see how any theory of narrative structure can stand independently from how we think language arose and how it functions in our present understanding of the world.

The prime example of this can be seen if we try asking the question why this interest in words only really arises in the eighteenth century.