No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Irony is nothing new to philosophy; quite the contrary, it is as familiar as the figure of Socrates. Yet when, for example, Socrates asks Euthyphro to teach him about piety because of Euthyphro's obvious knowledge of the subject, Socrates‘ irony has little philosophical significance. Socrates says something contrary to what he means, and Euthyphro in his arrogance takes the statement literally. Plato uses Socratic irony to dramatic affect by allowing the events of the drama to unfold in such a way that it becomes clear that Socrates’ literal praise of Euthyphro’s knowledge is incongruous with the results of the discussion taking place, although Euthyphro is hardly aware of the incongruity. The significance of this literary technique is that the reader be made conscious of the possibility of his own arrogance and the hindrance this would create to true philosophical understanding. As important as this use of irony is to Plato's Socratic dialogues, the irony is not the philosophical thesis.
1 Gregory Vlastos seems to disagree with this claim in Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cornell University Press, 1991). Vlastos claims that Socrates allows his ironic statements to remain misunderstood so that Socrates deceives without intending to deceive. The philosophical significance of this deception caused by Socrates‘ ironic statements is supposedly that Socrates is allowing his interlocutor to reach the truth autonomously, on his own; whereas, if Socrates dispelled the deception caused by the ironic statements he would be simply telling the interlocutor what to believe. But Vlastos‘ explanation does not make the irony philosophically significant but only explains why Socrates allows his irony to deceive once it has deceived, once it has not been recognized for what it is.Google Scholar
2 Rorty makes it clear that his ironist position represents a philosophical position of a different, more radical kind than Socrates’: The question ‘What is x?‘ is now asked in such a way that it cannot be answered simply by producing paradigm cases of x-hood. So one may demand a definition, an essence.
To make such Socratic demands is not yet, of course, to become an ironist in the sense in which I am using the term. It is only to become a ‘metaphysician‘, in a sense which I am adopting from Heidegger.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity(Cambridge University Press, 1989), 74. All further references to this work will be cited in the text as C.I.S. followed by the number of the page cited.
3 It seems to me that one should doubt that this can be in any sense an appropriate characterization of liberalism, even for Rorty. First, this characterization does not point to a difference which would distinguish liberals from conservatives. Couldn't a conservative equally well admit that cruelty is the worst thing we do? The difference between the liberal and the conservative is not a disagreement concerning that sentiment but a disagreement over how society should be structured to reflect best this sentiment. Second, it is not even clear that a liberal in the tradition of; Locke, Kant, and Mill need adopt this slogan. Such a liberal might rea-; sonably find some cruelty acceptable if it involves the consent of the vici tim such as in sado-masochistic sex. But perhaps by ‘cruelty‘ Rorty I means suffering inflicted without consent, but that is not what he says.
Rorty here appears to be attempting a ‘poetic’ redescription of liberal-: ism which is such that no one would want to be a non-liberal. Again, if [ so, he does not tell us that. He writes as if his characterization is uncontroversial, old-hat. Nonetheless, Rorty's concerns with liberalism are primarily those of elaborating a social and political view that draws the bounds of government and social coercion in such a way that human autonomy and individuality can flourish and be tolerated. For example, Rorty says: “The social glue holding together the ideal liberal society... consists of little more than a consensus that the point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities, and that goal requires, besides peace and wealth, the standard “bourgeois freedoms” (C.I.S., 84, emphasis added),’ In this respect, he is firmly in the tradition of Western liberalism–despite some of his rhetoric–and I will assume this for the rest of this essay.
4 Rorty actually says that ‘truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences’ (C.I.S., 7), but of course he is not committed to an ontology of properties. So, I will understand his claim to be shorthand for a claim about the predicate ‘is true’.
5 For example, see Jon, Barwise and John, Etchemendy, The Liar (Oxford University Press, 1987), esp., 9–16, where they argue that sentences will be inadequate vehicles for truth.Google Scholar
6 Rorty might well suggest that the dinosaur interpretation illustrates a typical kind of move made by traditional philosophers when they encounter ‘pragmatic’ interpretations of truth–they attack a straw man called the ‘relativist’. In ‘Pragmatism; Relativism, and I nationalism’, Rorty writes:
If there were any relativists, they would, of course, be easy to refute. One would merely use some variant of the self-referential arguments Socrates used against Protagoras. But such neat little dialectical strategies only work against lightly-sketched fictional characters... Disillusioned, or whimsical, Platonists and Kantians occasionally play at being one or another of these characters. But when they do they are never offering relativism or scepticism or nihilism as a serious suggestion about how we might do things differently. These positions are adopted to make philosophical points–that is, moves in a game played with fictitious opponents, rather than fellow-participants in a common project (Consequences of Pragmatism, University of Minnesota Press, 1982: 160–175, at 167).
The realist or representationalist views truth, according to Rorty, in such a way that he can only understand Rorty as saying something absurd; his question-begging point of view prevents him from understanding that Rorty is making a serious suggestion about how we can see truth differently. It is curious that, in this paper, Rorty defends himself against the charge of vicious relativism by making a distinction between relativism with regard to philosophical theories and real theories. It is difficult to understand how someone who has a holistic understanding of theories, beliefs, and desires can make this distinction clearly enough for it to do the work Rorty needs it to do. Isn't it one of the dogmas of empiricism that such a distinction can be made in a philosophically fruitful way?
7 One may smell more than a hint of the dinosaur argument in the revised version of the argument with this conclusion. If so, that is fine. My point will be that if one is to take Rorty's claim about truth literally, then he must mean his conclusion in one of these two senses. There is not a third sense. The dinosaur argument erred by suggesting one reading was the only possibility
8 Rorty, ‘Introduction: Anti-representationalism, Ethnocentrism, and Liberalism’ in Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge University Press, 1991): 1–17, at 5.
9 Rorty also has the independent problem of explaining how this distinction is compatible with his claim in Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979) that the scheme-content distinction is bogus and responsible for many of the epistemological ills of philosophy. Isn't his distinction just another way of putting the schemecontent distinction?
10 Rorty's manouevre is represented nicely by one of the characters in Imre Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations (Cambridge University Press, 1976), 91, in the following exchange:
Sigma: I think your views are paradoxical!
Pi: If you mean by paradoxical ‘an opinion not generally received’, and possibly inconsistent with some of your engrained naive ideas, never mind: you only have to replace your ideas with the paradoxical ones. This may be a way to ‘solve’ paradoxes.
11 Paul, Feyerbend, Against Method, Rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1988), 16–17.Google Scholar
12 I must beg the patience of the reader who does not feel the force of this question. I will explicitly argue that the worry expressed by this question is genuine.
13 Michael, Williams, Unnatural Doubts (London: Blackwell, 1992), 363.Google Scholar
14 Oswald, Spengler, The Decline of The West, Abridged edition, trans., Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1962, originally published in German in 1922), 395.Google Scholar
15 In ‘Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism’ Rorty seems to worry about this possibility: “What if ‘we’ is the Orwellian state? When tyrants employ Lenin's blood-curdling sense of ‘objective’ to describe their lies as ‘objectively true’, what is to prevent them from citing Peirce in Lenin's defence?” (op. cit., p. 173). What I am asking is: why should he not use Rorty's ironist philosophy in his defense? Rorty, in this paper, seems to admit that he cannot answer this objection: ‘I have not answered the deep criticism of pragmatism which I mentioned a few minutes ago... ’ (174).
16 George Orwell, 1984, originally published in 1949 (Signet Classic Edition), 251.Google Scholar
17 Rorty, ‘Introduction’, Philosophical Papers Vol. 1, op. cit., 16.Google Scholar