Reading Rorty's "Ironist Philosophers" as Post-Ironists

Abstract

Richard Rorty believes that each of us has a relatively stable, vocabu lary in terms of which w describe (for both ourselves and others) our mos basic beliefs and, more generally, tell our life's story (1989, 73). The terms of such a vocabulary would make up a kind of personal metanarrative. However, the truth or efficacy of much of the language in terms of which such personal metanarratives have traditionally been expressed has been called into question by those philosophers Rorty labels ironist theorists.1 In Rorty's ideal society even the liberal democratic intellectuals, who would also be ironists, would have to cope with nagging doubts arising from their philosophically reflective aware ness of the general collapse of effective socially unifying metanarrative expres sions of traditional values and, given the public nature of language, with the impact of this collapse on their own lives. Thus, the ironist intellectual's final vocabulary would be especially troubled. I will focus on two specific parts of Rorty's description of ironist theorists: his ascription to them of ironist doubt and his claim that they have final vocabu laries. In the context of a redescription of the aspects of ironist theory that are relevant to these two issues, I will argue that, for the most part, those Rorty calls ironist theorists are not plagued by ironic philosophical doubt about the validity of their beliefs and, furthermore, do not have ultimate, or inescapably final, vocabularies by means of which they express their most basic beliefs. My rede scription of these aspects of ironist theory will show, in this regard, that it is not incompatible with a public philosophy of socially liberal democracy, but rather that it facilitates dialogue in a democracy. The key to my claims that ironist theorists are not ironists in Rorty's sense and that they do not have final vocabularies is to be found in a partial redescrip tion of the ironist philosopher's understanding of, and relation to, language. For present purposes, I will, as Rorty has, lump together six or seven philosophical writers as being representative of ironist theory (see note 1). Most of the work of most of these writers reflects, to some degree, the following characteristics: holism, a privileging of the individual as resistant to reduction to descriptions of larger groups (entailing a kind of subjective relativism), the primacy of lived