Richard Rorty

"Final vocabulary" is a term coined by Richard Rorty and explicated in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. A "final vocabulary" is a set of communicative beliefs whose contingency is more or less ignored by the bearer. These beliefs can concern anything; it does not matter whether they are shared by the entire human race or are entirely unique. For an ironist, a "final vocabulary" is always suspect.

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 argument 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.

— Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.73

Abandoning representationalist accounts of knowledge and language, Rorty believed, would lead to a state of mind he referred to as "ironism", in which people are completely aware of the contingency of their placement in history and of their philosophical vocabulary. For Rorty, this brand of philosophy is always tied to the notion of "social hope", that without the representation accounts and without metaphors between the mind and the world, human society would be more peaceful. He also emphasized the reasons why the interpretation of culture as conversation(Bernstein:1971), would be the crucial concept of a "postphilosophical" culture that had been determined to abandon the representationalist account of the traditional epistemology, incorporating American pragmatist naturalism that considers the natural sciences as an advance towards liberalism. His best known books are Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).

Interesting in relationship to Obama:
Achieving Our Country

Main article: Achieving Our Country

In Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1997), Rorty differentiates between what he sees as the two sides of the Left, a cultural Left and a progressive Left. He criticizes the cultural Left, which is exemplified by post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault and postmodernists such as Jean-François Lyotard, for offering critiques of society, but no alternatives (or alternatives that are so vague and general as to be abdications). Although these intellectuals make insightful claims about the ills of society, Rorty suggests that they provide no alternatives and even occasionally deny the possibility of progress. On the other hand, the progressive Left, exemplified for Rorty by the pragmatist John Dewey, Whitman and James Baldwin, makes hope for a better future its priority. Without hope, Rorty argues, change is spiritually inconceivable and the cultural Left has begun to breed cynicism. Rorty sees the progressive Left as acting in the philosophical spirit of pragmatism.