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willowApr 8, 2024

rorty might be my favorite lib

richard rorty, contingency, irony, and solidarity

willow @dreary.dev

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richard rorty, contingency, irony, and solidarity

introduction, xv
For liberal ironists, there is no answer to the question "Why not be cruel?" - no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible. Nor is there an answer to the question "How do you decide when to struggle against injustice and when to devote yourself to private projects of self-creation?" This question strikes liberal ironists as just as hopeless as the questions "Is it right to deliver n innocents over to be tonured to save the lives of m x n other innocents? If so, what are the correct values of n and m?" or the question "When may one favor members of one's family, or one's community, over other, randomly chosen, human beings?" Anybody who thinks that there are well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question - algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas of this sort - is still, in his heart, a theologian or a metaphysician. He believes in an order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities

9
metaphorical" is bound to be inconclusive and question-begging. For such use is, after all, the paridigm of coherent, meaningful, literal, speech. Such arguments are always parasitic upon, and abbreviations for, claims that a better vocabulary is available. Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things

rorty, contingency, irony, and solidarity, pg. 18
Uttering a sentence without a fixed place in a language game is, as the positivists rightly have said, to utter something which is neither true or false - something which is not, in Ian Hacking's terms, a "truth-value candidate." This is because it is a sentence which one cannot confirm or disconfirm, argue for or against. One can only savor it or spit it out. But this is not to say that it may not, in time, become a truth-value candidate. If it is savored rather than spat out, the sentence may be repeated, caught up, bandied about. Then it will gradually require a habitual use, a familiar place in the language game. It will thereby have ceased to be a metaphor - or, if you like, it will have become what most sentences of our language are, a dead metaphor. It will be just one more, literally true or literally false, sentence of the language.

friedrich nietzsche, on truth and lies in a nonmoral sense
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

January 18, 2025 at 1:04 PM