Ironism

I shall define an "ironist" as someone who fulfills three conditions: (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 phased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as the 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. Ironist who are inclined to philosophize she the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one's way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old. ~ Page 73

It is "final" in the sense that it doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argument recourse. Those words are as far as we can go with language; beyond them there is only helpless passivity or a resort to force. A small part of the final vocabulary is made up of thin, flexible, and ubiquitous terms such as "true," "good," "right," and "beautiful." The larger part contains thicker, more rigid and more parochial terms, for example, "Christ," "England," "professional standards," "decency," "kindness," "the Revolution," "the Church," "progressive," "rigorous," "creative." The more parochial terms do most of the work. ~ Page 73