Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Richard Rorty |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Philosophy |
| Published | 1989 (Cambridge University Press) |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 201 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 18290785 |
| 401 19 | |
| LC Class | P106 .R586 1989 |
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is a 1989 book by the American philosopher Richard Rorty, based on two sets of lectures he gave at University College, London and at Trinity College, Cambridge. In contrast to his earlier work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty mostly abandons attempts to explain his theories in analytical terms and instead creates an alternate conceptual schema to that of the "Platonists" he rejects. In this schema "truth" (as the term is used conventionally) is considered unintelligible and meaningless.
The book is divided into three parts—"Contingency", "Ironism and Theory" and "Cruelty and Solidarity".
Here, Rorty argues that all language is contingent. This is because only descriptions of the world can be true or false, and descriptions are made by humans who must also make truth or falsity: truth or falsity is thus not determined by any intrinsic property of the world being described. Instead they purely belong to the human realm of description and language. For example, a factual case of green grass is not true or false, in and by itself, but that grass is green may be true. I can say that that grass is green and you could agree with this statement (which for Rorty makes the statement true), but our use of the words to describe grass is distinct and independent of the grass itself.
Apart from human expression in language, notions of truth or falsity are simply irrelevant, or maybe inexistant or nonsensical. Rorty consequently argues that all discussion of language in relation to reality should be abandoned, and that one should instead discuss vocabularies in relation to other vocabularies. In coherence with this view, he thus states that he will not exactly be making "arguments" in this book, because arguments, as expression mostly within the domain of a given vocabulary, preclude novelty.
Rorty proposes that each of us has a set of beliefs whose contingency we more or less ignore, which he dubs our "final vocabulary". One of the strong poet's greatest fears, according to Rorty, is that he will discover that he has been operating within someone else's final vocabulary all along; that he has not "self-created". It is his goal, therefore, to recontextualize the past that led to his historically contingent self, so that the past that defines him will be created by him, rather than creating him.
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