Concepts shown in the book are involving certain terms which Rorty invents or re-defines in a novel manner.

Contingency

All language (therefore opinions, upon which we act) is contingent - it means that by pure luck / random situation which we are born into, our understanding of various words and values will vary. Someone might be born in Christian family, someone grew in foster home, someone spent half life in Russian gulag - each of us will end up with different notions what is life, god, responsibilities, society, etc.

So everybody owns their unique1 understanding of the world through language. This is what he calls contingent final vocabulary.

Irony

An idealized human, who is capable of entering a dialogue with others is called by Rorty an ironist. Such person (she) is defined by three qualities:

(1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that arguments phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power, not herself.

Liberal ironist - is an ironist who does not use violence when incompatible final vocabularies clash.

Solidarity

Cruelty is easier when we exclude the other using we-statements in our moral language. Opposing we-them leads to considering others as less-than-us (less-than-human? dehumanization). So author urges us to expand the definition of We. (think! read! be the ironist!)

Footnotes

  1. unique? maybe not necessarily, but surely inherited and evolving