EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PRAGMATISM AND AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY COPYRIGHT © 2009 ASSOCIAZIONE PRAGMA ISSN: 2036-4091 2013, V, 2 24 Olivier Tinland * The Pragmatist Skepsis as a Social Practice. Skepticism, Irony and Cultural Politics in Rorty’s Philosophy Abstract. In this paper, I address the issue of the consistency of Richard Rorty’s multi-layered approach of skepticism, examining three successive steps of this approach: the genealogical critique of theoretical skepticism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the surprising revival of a skeptical outlook in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and the promising sketch of a pragmatist skepsis emancipated from skepticism in the last works dedicated to the restatement of philosophy as “cultural politics”. According to some critical readers of Rorty, there is a tension, if not a contradiction, between Rorty’s early dismissal of the skeptical stance in the name of pragmatism and the return of a “neo-Humean” stance in his political writings of the 1980’s. The aim of this paper is to show that there is no such contradiction between these two orientations, provided one keeps in mind that according to Rorty, philosophy is about creating, strengthening and undermining various descriptions of human culture. Rorty’s pragmatist redescriptions include “conceptual characters” which have to be regarded as philosophical tools fulilling speciic tasks: from this perspective, the liberal ironist is not to be considered as the inal word of Rorty on political philosophy, but rather as a transitory igure which allows the author of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity to address the speciic problem of the relation between philosophy and politics in a liberal (anti-foundational) society. Therefore, liberal ironism is not a naive commitment to skepticism which is inconsistent with the fallibilistic claims of pragmatism: the best way of understanding it is to view it from the perspective of Rorty’s last works, i.e. from the perspective of “cultural politics”, and to compare it to other philosophical igures fulilling different tasks, such as the “prophetic feminist”. One of the most underrated problems of philosophy is whether philosophical vocabularies – and thereby the sets of problems articulated in such vocabularies – are perishable products, whether they have a date of expiration written on their back. It is one thing to talk deliberately in an old-fashioned way, using outdated notions for the sake of elegance or nostalgia; it is another to appeal to words or topics one thinks to be perfectly up-to-date, though they turn out, after closer examination, to be no longer valid. Richard Rorty has been one of the main philosophers focusing on that speciic – and quite unusual – kind of problem. One of his main Darwinian-Kuhnian 1 claims is that philosophical (as well as artistic, scientiic, political…) vocabularies evolve constantly, going through “revolutionary” phases and more or less massive changes of paradigms, so that one have to be aware of such conceptual (r)evolutions before entering philosophical debates (unlike the “intuitive realists” who seem to believe * University Paul Valéry [olivier.tinland@univ-montp3.fr] 1 On Rorty’s use of Kuhn in a Darwinian pragmatist view of human culture, see Rorty (1979: 322-333) and Rorty (1999, ch. 12).