I've recently come to embrace the proposal that we should decouple the normative constraints distinguishing fiction vs truth from the normative constraints distinguishing useful vs useless. In other words, if something is useful, why label it as true or false? bsky.app/profile/iron...

Fruitfulness: Science, Metaphor, and the Puzzle of Promise by Chris Haufe 'The rationality of use is subject to a different set of normative constraints than those governing the rationality of belief.' This might be the best expression of Pragmatism I've ever heard. #Pragmatism #Utility #Truth

The liberal ironist just wants our chances of being kind, of avoiding the humiliation of others, to be expanded by redescription. CIS p.91 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Humiliation

'Ethically Charged Machines: Rethinking Artificial Intelligence through Tiantai Buddhism and New Materialism' by J.D.A. Kumara Wow! Tiantai Buddhism is now a solution to AI Ethics and AI Alignment because it breaks down the sentient/insentient dualism. www.nepjol.info/index.php/dj...

The metaphysician thinks that there is a connection between redescription and power, and that the right redescription can make us free. The ironist offers no similar assurance. CIS p.90 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Redescription

There is something potentially very cruel about the claim that the language they speak is up for grabs. For the best way to cause people long-lasting pain is to humiliate them by making the things that seemed most important to them look futile, obsolete, and powerless. CIS p.89 #Rorty #Redescription

An appeal to real essence is the antithesis of ironism. CIS p.88 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Irony

Solidarity with all possible vocabularies seems impossible. CIS p.88 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Solidarity

Metaphysics—in the sense of a search for theories which will get at real essence—tries to make sense of the claim that human beings are something more than centerless webs of beliefs and desires. CIS p.88 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Vocabulary

I cannot imagine a culture whose public rhetoric is ironist, which socialized its youth in such a way as to make them continually dubious about their own process of socialization. Irony seems inherently a private matter. CIS p.87 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Irony

If we take care of political freedom, truth and goodness will take care of themselves. CIS p.84 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Freedom

Explanation of Hume's Law: You can't derive an ought from an is because is derives from ought, ie our ontologies derive from our teleologies (purposes). Just ask any information science ontologist. #Philosophy #Ontology #InformationScience #LibraryScience en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontolog...

The rise of literary criticism to preeminence within the high culture of the democracies—its gradual…assumption of the cultural role once claimed (successively) by religion, science, and philosophy—has paralleled the rise in the proportion of ironists to metaphysicians. CIS p.82 #Rorty #Criticism

One of the easiest ways to express the difference between "analytic" and "Continental" philosophy is to say that the former sort trades in propositions and the latter in proper names. CIS p.81 #Pragmatism #Rorty #AnalyticVsContinental

The task of enlarging the canon takes the place, for the ironist, of the attempt by moral philosophers to bring commonly accepted moral intuitions about particular cases into equilibrium with commonly accepted general moral principles. CIS p.81 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Criticism

The ideal citizen will take for granted that it is the revolutionary artist and the revolutionary scientist, not the academic artist or the normal scientist, who most clearly exemplifies the virtues which she hopes her society will itself embody. CIS p.61 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Liberalism

Ironists hope that critics can redescribe authors who are prima facie antithetical in ways which will enlarge the canon, and will give us a set of classical texts as rich and diverse as possible. CIS p.81 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Criticism

I want to see common purposes against the background of an increasing sense of the radical diversity of private purposes, the radically poetic character of individual lives, and the merely poetic foundations of the "we-consciousness" which lies behind our institutions. CIS p.67 #Rorty #Poetry

Ironists hope critics will help them continue to admire books which are prima facie antithetical by performing some sort of synthesis. We would like to be able to admire both Blake & Arnold, Nietzsche & Mill, Marx & Baudelaire, Trotsky & Eliot, Nabokov & Orwell. CIS p.81 #Rorty #Criticism

Ironists are afraid that they will get stuck in the vocabulary in which they were brought up if they only know the people in their own neighborhood, so they try to get acquainted with strange people, strange families, and strange communities. CIS p.80 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Vocabulary

Nothing can serve as a criticism of a person save another person, or of a culture save an alternative culture—for persons and cultures are, for us, incarnated vocabularies. CIS p.80 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Criticism

The opposite of irony is common sense. For that is the watchword of those who unselfconsciously describe everything important in terms of the final vocabulary to which they and those around them are habituated. CIS p.74 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Irony

Since there is nothing beyond vocabularies which serves as a criterion of choice between them, criticism is a matter of looking on this picture and on that, not of comparing both pictures with the original. CIS p.80 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Criticism

I don't often use this one anymore, but this post deserves it: ROTFLMFAO*! * For those who don't like swearing: ROTFLMAO!

The ironist thinks of final vocabularies as poetic achievements rather than as fruits of diligent inquiry according to antecedently formulated criteria. CIS p.77 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Irony

For us ironists, nothing can serve as a criticism of a final vocabulary save another such vocabulary; there is no answer to a redescription save a re-re-redescription. CIS p.80 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Criticism

The ironist's description of what she is doing when she looks for a better final vocabulary than the one she is currently using is dominated by metaphors of making rather than finding, of diversification and novelty rather than convergence to the antecedently present. CIS p.77 #Rorty #Irony

A final vocabulary is "final" in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse. Those words are as far as he can go with language; beyond them there is only helpless passivity or a resort to force. CIS p.73 #Rorty #Vocabulary

We thank with brief thanksgiving Whatever gods may be That no life lives for ever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea. (Quoting Swinburne) The Fire of Life in The Rorty Reader p.521 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Holidays

Habermas criticizes both me and Castoriadis for indulging in Lebenphilosophie; this charge means, roughly, that we both want to poeticize rather than rationalize. CIS p.66 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Poetry

My "poeticized" culture is one which has given up the attempt to unite one's private ways of dealing with one's finitude and one's sense of obligation to other human beings. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.68 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Poetry

To see one's language, one's conscience, one's morality, and one's highest hopes as contingent products, as literalizations of what once were accidentally produced metaphors, is to adopt a self-identity which suits one for citizenship in such an ideally liberal state. CIS p.61 #Rorty #Hope

A liberal society is one whose hero is the strong poet & the revolutionary [P & R] because it recognizes that it is what it is, has the morality it has, not because it approximates the will of God or the nature of man but because certain [Ps & Rs] of the past spoke as they did. CIS p.61 #Liberalism

An ideal liberal society is one which has no purpose except freedom, no goal except a willingness to see how free and open encounters of present linguistic practices with suggestions for new practices go and to abide by the outcome. CIS p.60 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Liberalism

Happy World Philosophy Day to all who celebrate! And to those who celebrate the importance of critical thinking about fundamental concepts, eg, rationality, meaning, inspiration, but shun the label 'philosophy'... Happy Critical Thinking Day! www.unesco.org/en/days/phil...

A liberal society is one whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution, by the free and open encounters of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions for new practices. CIS p.59 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Liberalism

We cannot see Christianity or Newtonianism or the Romantic movement or political liberalism as a tool while we are still in the course of figuring out how to use it. For there are as yet no clearly formulatable ends to which it is a means. CIS p.55 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Vocabulary

Pretty much what I was expecting.

We should see allegiance to social institutions as no more matters for justification by reference to familiar, commonly accepted premises—but also as no more arbitrary—than choices of friends or heroes. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.54 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Relativism

A poeticized culture would be a culture which, precisely by appreciating that all touchstones are merely cultural artifacts, would take as its goal the creation of ever more various and multicolored artifacts. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Poetry

A poeticized culture would be one which would not insist we find the real wall behind the painted ones, the real touchstones of truth as opposed to touchstones which are merely cultural artifacts. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Poetry

An ideally liberal polity would be one whose culture hero is Bloom's "strong poet" rather than the warrior, the priest, the sage, or the truth-seeking, "logical," "objective" scientist. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Liberalism

Freud makes it possible for us to see science and poetry, genius and psychosis—and, most importantly, morality and prudence—not as products of distinct faculties but as alternative modes of adaptation. 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity' p.33 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Adaptation

We need to substitute the hope that chances for fulfillment of idiosyncratic fantasies will be equalized for the hope that everyone will replace "passion" or fantasy with "reason." Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Liberalism

Just as even the strongest poet is parasitic on her precursors, just as even she can give birth only to a small part of herself, so she is dependent on the kindness of all those strangers out there in the future. CIS p.41 #Pragmatism #Rorty #StrongPoet

The liberal societies of our century have produced more and more people who are able to recognize the contingency of the vocabulary in which they state their highest hopes—the contingency of their own consciences—and yet have remained faithful to those consciences. CIS p.46 #Rorty #Contingency

It is central to the idea of a liberal society that, in respect to words as opposed to deeds, persuasion as opposed to force, anything goes… A liberal society is one which is content to call "true" whatever the upshot of such encounters turns out to be. CIS p.51 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Liberalism

Gall’s Law of Problem Conservation: Problems cannot be created or destroyed; only reframed and reranked. An essay on this law: ironick.medium.com/galls-law-of... #Philosophy #Pragmatism #Buddhism #Rorty #Dewey

We need a redescription of liberalism as the hope that culture as a whole can be "poeticized" rather than as the Enlightenment hope that it can be "rationalized" or "scientized." Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity p.53 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Liberalism

The vocabulary I propose, one which revolves around notions of metaphor and self-creation rather than around notions of truth, rationality, and moral obligation, is better suited to the preservation and progress of democratic societies. CIS p.44 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Metaphor