Rhizome 3/20/16:
“I shall define an “ironist” as someone who fulfills three conditions: (i) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old.” -Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Kindle Locations 1050-1054). Kindle Edition.
Rorty bases this on a point he makes early in the book: that true or false is strictly a product of the language we use to deal with the world and cannot be said to actually exist in that world. And that being the case, the best we can do is seek out new ways of talking about reality. And this includes the language of science and mathematics which must work under the same agenda. To do otherwise is as Rorty points out:
“The suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own.” –Ibid (different page
What Rorty is reacting to reminds me of a point brought to my attention by a respected peer (I believe it was David McDivitt (that in older days it was believed that objects were the language of God and that by truly (think true: the product of language (knowing the object as is, one has managed to hear the voice of God.
And as they will tell you in any creative writing class: the idea is to show rather than tell. And what I’m starting to recognize and be impressed by is Rorty’s willingness to do exactly that. He’s just a really good writer out to do as he says: change the way we talk about things. Of course, I note this with the bias of one who considers themselves more of a writer writing about their experience with philosophy. And I can see it in the way he carefully chooses his words. I would note:
“I am saying that Kuhn, Davidson, Wittgenstein, and Dewey provide us with redescriptions of familiar phenomena which, taken together, buttress Berlin’s way of describing alternative political institutions and theories.”
Now this may not mean much to someone not wanting to be a writer, but I can’t help but note his use of the term “buttress”. This seems an equal (if not superior way (to get across what I mean when I say “prop up”. But it is about more than finding better or new words, it extends into the issue of how meaning is conveyed. I would especially note Rorty’s use of the word “Gerrymander” in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. It is not just a novel term. It is a term that should be added as an informal logical fallacy that any of us could too easily fall into. I mean in the process of developing our systems, it would be all too tempting to force incompatible realities into a form that doesn’t threaten our systems.
Take, for instance, Sarte’s response in defense of his statement that we all choose our world when critics asked him if it was the same for babies. And instead of admitting that (a strategy that was easily available to him (they were right in that his point mainly applied to those who had grown to the point of consciousness-for-itself, he chose rather to maintain the consistency of his system through what amounted to an ideological dance. He basically gerrymandered.
But it is a temptation we’re all prone to as we develop our systems.