the undesirability of having a ‘‘good conscience’’ about established ways of
acting and thinking. In other words, he points to the desirability of being
willing to question and challenge what is currently accepted as self-evident in
our ways of thinking and acting.
4 Useful Descriptions
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
Rorty’s pragmatism eschews any orientation towards a true theory of how
things are in favor of the creation of concepts that enable more useful
descriptions of the world. He abandons talk of truth and falsity in philosophy
in favor of talk about the degree to which a new vocabulary is interesting,
where ‘‘interesting’’ philosophy is usually ‘‘a contest between an entrenched
vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary
which vaguely promises great things’’ (Rorty 1989 , 9 ). He suggests that, since
ironists do not believe in the existence of aWnal vocabulary that philosophy
aims to discover, their self-descriptions will be ‘‘dominated by metaphors of
making rather thanWnding, of diversiWcation and novelty rather than con-
vergence to the antecedently present’’ (Rorty 1989 , 77 ). Deleuze and Guattari
exemplify this ironic attitude by endorsing Nietzsche’s characterization of
concepts as things that philosophers must ‘‘make and create’’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994 , 5 ). They agree with Marx and Rorty that the job of philosophers
is not to provide knowledge in the sense of correspondence with how things
are but to ‘‘help make the future diVerent from the past’’ (Rorty 1995 , 198 ). For
them as for Rorty, success or failure in philosophy is not measured by truth or
falsity but by the degree to which it serves this pragmatic aim. The adequacy or
inadequacy with which philosophy performs this task is only assessable in
terms of whether or not a given concept is interesting or useful for some
purpose. Philosophy can oVer guidelines for well formed as opposed toXimsy
concepts, but it cannot oVer criteria for judging the importance of concepts or
the events they express. The only criteria by which concepts may be assessed
are those of ‘‘the new, remarkable and interesting that replace the appearance
of truth and are more demanding than it is’’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994 , 111 ).
According to Rorty, philosophy helps to make the future diVerent from the
past by providing new means of description for social and political events and
134 paul patton