If one says, as I did in 'The Contingency of Language', that truth is not 'out there', one will be suspected of relativism and irrationalism. If one suggests, as I then did in 'The Contingency of Selfhood', that we no longer need a distinction between morality and prudence, one may seem to be encouraging immorality.[*] By way of defence, I shall argue here that these distinctions between absolutism and relativism, rationality and irrationality, morality and expediency, are obsolete and clumsy tools - remnants of a vocabulary which we should try to replace. But, as I suggested earlier, 'argument' is not the right word. For on my account of intellectual progress as the literalisation of selected metaphors, rebutting objections to one's redescriptions of some things will be largely a matter of redescribing other things, trying to outflank the objections by enlarging the scope of one's favourite metaphors. So my strategy will be to try to make the vocabulary in which these objections are phrased look bad, thereby changing the subject, rather than granting the objector his choice of weapons and terrain by meeting his criticisms head-on.

LRB 24 July 1986 | PDF Download