Richard Rorty told the twentieth century something it did not want to hear: that there is no final vocabulary, no last word, no floor beneath our descriptions of the world. He called the person who understands this an ironist, and he argued that such a person could still care about cruelty, still stand with the humiliated, still build a decent society — not on a foundation, because there is none, but on a refusal. His critics replied that he had talked himself out of the right to object to anything. If every description can be replaced, they said, then so can the description under which torture is wrong. Rorty spent the rest of his life failing to answer that objection, and his followers, taking his conclusions without his conscience, turned his irony into a shrug.

This book argues that Rorty was right, and right for a reason he never found.

Irony, it turns out, is not a literary attitude or a fashionable weariness. It is a piece of machinery. It is what any thinking system — a mind, a science, a civilization, a machine — must do in order to change the frame it is thinking inside. Remove it and the system does not become more serious; it becomes unreachable, incapable of learning anything that its own assumptions do not already permit. The dogmatist is not stubborn. The dogmatist is a device with a broken part. And the cynic, who imagines himself the ironist's more advanced cousin, has in fact destroyed the very structure that made irony possible.

Moving from the philosophy of language to the architecture of prediction, from Socrates to the strange machines now learning to speak, Boris Kriger shows why irony is a necessary condition of intelligence, why an artificial system that cannot hold two frames at once is not a superintelligence but an idolater, and why there is exactly one thing in human experience that cannot be redescribed away.