NOTE: For general discuss: What do you think of Rorty’s criticism of Searle? E-mail your answers to me & we can discuss them in class.

 

 

JOHN SEARLE ON REALISM AND RELATIVISM

 

Richard Rorty 1994. John Searle on realism & relativism. Reprinted in Richard Rorty 1998. Truth & Progress. Cambridge Univ. Press. NY.

 

As North Americans use the term, “academic freedom” names some com­plicated local folkways that have developed in the course of this century, largely as a result of battles fought by the Canadian and American Associa­tions of University Professors. These customs and traditions insulate colleges and universities from politics and from public opinion. In particular, they insulate teachers from pressure exerted by the public bodies or private boards that pay their wages.

One way to justify such customs is to start from the premise that the search for objective truth is something quite distinct from politics, and indeed dis­tinct from almost all other cultural activities. So, the argument goes, if politics or passion intrudes on that search, the purposes of colleges and uni­versities — the accumulation of knowledge — will not be served. In particular, if universities are politicized, they will no longer be worthy of trust, just as doctors who care more for their fees than for their patients, or judges who care more about popularity than about justice, are no longer worthy of trust. A politicized university will be likely to produce merely opinion rather than knowledge.

A number of contemporary philosophers, including myself, do their best to complicate the traditional distinctions between the objective and the sub­jective, reason and passion, knowledge and opinion, science and politics. We offer contentious reinterpretations of these distinctions, draw them in nontraditional ways. For example, we deny that the search for objective truth is a search for correspondence to reality and urge that it be seen in­stead as a search for the widest possible intersubjective agreement. So we are often accused of endangering the traditions and practices that people have in mind when they speak of “academic freedom “ or “scientific integrity” or “scholarly standards.”

This charge assumes that the relation between a belief about the nature of truth and certain social practices is presuppositional. A practice presup­poses a belief only if dropping the belief constitutes a good reason for al­tering the practice. For example, the belief that surgeons do not perform operations merely to make money for themselves or their hospitals, but do so only if there is a good chance the operation will benefit the patient, is pre­supposed by current practices of financing health care. The belief that many diseases are caused by bacteria and viruses, and that few can be cured by acupuncture, is presupposed by current practices of disbursing public funds for medical research.

The question of whether academic freedom rests on philosophical pre­suppositions raises the general question of whether any social practice has philosophical, as well as empirical, presuppositions. Beliefs about surgeons’ motives and about the causes and cures of diseases are empirical presup­positions. Although the empirical-philosophical distinction is itself pretty fuzzy, it is generally agreed that a belief is on the empirical end of the spectrum to the extent that we are clear about what would falsify it. In the med­ical examples I have used, we are clear about this. Various specific revela­tions about the success rate of acupuncture, or about the secret protocols of the American College of Surgeons, could have an immediate, devastat­ing effect on current practices. But when it comes to a philosophical be­lief like “The truth of a sentence consists in its correspondence to reality” or Ethical judgments are claims to knowledge rather than mere expres­sions of feeling” nobody is very clear about what it would take to make us believe or disbelieve it. Nobody is sure what counts for or against such propositions.

The reasons for this are the same as the reasons why it is unclear whether, if we stopped believing these propositions, we should need to change our practices. Philosophical views are just not tied very closely either to obser­vation and experiment or to practice. This is why they are sometimes dis­missed as merely philosophical, where “merely” suggests that views on these subjects are optional — that most people, for most purposes, can get along without any. But precisely to the extent that such views are in fact optional, social practices do not have philosophical presuppositions. The philosophi­cal propositions said to be presuppositional turn out to be rhetorical orna­ments of practice rather than foundations of practice. This is because we have much more confidence in the practice in question than in any of its possible philosophical justifications.

In a culture that regards debates among philosophers with appropriate insouciance, purported philosophical foundations would suffer the same fate as has, in the two centuries since the Enlightenment, overtaken theo­logical foundations. As North American society has become more and more secular, the conviction has grown that a person’s religious beliefs, and per­haps even her lack of such beliefs, are irrelevant to her participation in most of our social practices. But it was not always that way. Article Six of the Con­stitution of the United States, which forbids religious tests for office, was hardly uncontroversial. The conservatives who had doubts about Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom were convinced that participation in many of our institutions and practices presupposed Christian belief. They had a plausible case. But Jefferson, we now say with the benefit of hindsight, had a better case.

One useful example of the change in the relation between religious and other social practices is the gradual shift in attitudes toward oath taking be­tween Jefferson’s time and our own. Taking oaths has always been integral to legal practice, but there has been considerable disagreement about what an oath is, what sort of people can take it, and what presuppositions taking it involves. At time beginning of our century the Encyclopedia Britannica still defined an oath as “an asseveration or promise made under non-human penalty or sanction.” The author of the relevant article offered dozens of in­stances of the relevance of belief in such sanctions — for example, Siamese Buddhists who made themselves eligible as witnesses in court by praying that, if they lied, they be punished by five hundred reincarnations as a beast and five hundred more as a hermaphrodite.

Nowadays most of us who are called upon to be witnesses in court, athe­ists and theists alike, solemnly and sincerely swear to tell the whole truth without giving much thought to the existence or nature of nonhuman penalties or sanctions. We atheists no longer even bother to distinguish be­tween swearing and affirming, although that distinction was of great con­cern to the British House of Commons when the atheist Charles Bradlaugh asked to be seated, and was written into British law in 1888 only after an­guished debate. No bailiff asks us about our religious beliefs before admin­istering the oath. The suggestion that she do so would be regarded by the court as an absurd waste of time. Truthfulness under oath is, by now, a mat­ter of our civic religion, our relation to our fellow citizens rather than our relation to a nonhuman power. The relation between belief in the existence of a certain kind of God and the practice of oath taking used to be presup­positional, but now it is not.

As I see it, it is with truth as it is with truth telling: philosophical debates about the nature of truth should become as irrelevant to academic practices as debates about the existence and forms of postmortem punishment are to present-day judicial practices. Just as we have much more confidence in our judicial system than we do in any account of the afterlife, or the workings of Divine Providence, so we have, or at least should have, much more confi­dence in our colleges and universities than we do in any philosophical view about the nature of truth or objectivity or rationality.

More specifically, I shall argue in what follows that philosophers who deny that there is any such thing as the correspondence of a belief to reality, and who thus seem to many nonphilosophers to have denied the existence of truth, are no more dangerous to the pursuit of truth than theologians who deny the existence of hellfire. Such theologians put neither morality nor Christianity in danger, and such philosophers endanger neither the univer­sity nor society. Those theologians did, however, change our sense of what Christianity is — of what it takes to be a good Christian. We now have a con­ception of Christianity that would have seemed perverse and outrageous to many of our eighteenth-century ancestors, though not to Jefferson. Analo­gously, these philosophers may gradually change our sense of what a uni­versity is and what its role in society is. We may wind up with a conception of the university and its social role that would have seemed outrageous to Wilhelm von Humboldt and to Nicholas Murray Butler, though not to John Dewey.

I view it as a mark of moral and intellectual progress that we are more feely prepared to judge institutions, traditions, and practices by the good they seem to be doing than by the philosophical or theological beliefs in­voked in their defense. More generally, I view it as a mark of such progress that we are coming to think of such beliefs as abbreviations of practices rather than as foundations for practices and that we are learning to see many different beliefs as equally good abbreviations for the same practice. My view of the nonpresuppositional relation of any given set of philosophical con­victions to academic freedom is of a piece with President Eisenhower’s famous dictum that the United States is firmly founded in religious belief and that it doesn’t matter which religion it is. I think that many different philo­sophical beliefs about the nature of truth and rationality can be invoked to defend the traditions and practices we call “academic freedom” and that in the short run, at least, it does not greatly matter which ones we pick.* [*Eisenhower might have added that any religion that is dubious about U.S. democratic insti­tutions must have something wrong with it. I should claim that any philosophy that is dubi­ous about the folkways we call “academic freedom” must have something wrong with it.]

A distinguished fellow philosopher, John Searle, sharply disagrees with me on this point. Outside of philosophy, Searle and I agree on a great deal. We are equally suspicious of the mannered posturing and resentful self-righteousness of the academic Left in the United States. We are equally sus­picious of attempts to require courses that will shape students’ sociopolitical attitudes, the sort of courses students at Berkeley now refer to as “compul­sory chapel.” We are equally nostalgic for the days when leftist professors concerned themselves with issues in real politics (such as the availability of health care to the poor or the need for strong labor unions) rather than with academic politics. But Searle and I disagree over the relevance of our professional specialty — philosophy — to the phenomena we both dislike.

In an article entitled “Rationality and Realism: What Is at Stake?” Searle describes what he calls “the Western Rationalistic Tradition” and says that it is under attack from such philosophers as Thomas Kuhn, Jacques Derrida, and myself (Daedelus 122, no.4 (Fall 1992), 55—84).

  Searle goes on to say that

 

the biggest single consequence of the rejection of the Western Rationalistic Tradition is that it makes possible an abandonment of traditional standards of objectivity, truth, and rationality, and opens the way for an educational agenda one of whose primary purposes is to achieve social and political transforma­tion.

 

Searle lists a number of philosophical positions that he regards as central to the Western Rationalistic Tradition, but I shall discuss only two: the claim that, in Searle’s words, “knowledge is typically of a mind-independent real­ity” and the claim that knowledge is expressed in “propositions which are true because they accurately represent that reality.” I disagree with both claims. I agree with Kuhn that we should

 

deny all meaning to claims that successive scientific beliefs become more and more probable or better and better approximations to the truth and simulta­neously suggest that the subject of truth claims cannot be a relation between beliefs and a putatively mind-independent or ‘external’ world.

 

I agree with Hilary Putnam that

 

 elements of what we call ‘language’ or ‘mind’ penetrate so deeply into what we call

‘reality’ that the very project of representing ourselves as being ‘mappers’ of something “languuge-independent” is fatally compromised from the start. Like Relativism, Real­ism

impossible attempt to view the world from Nowhere.

 

Kuhn, Putnam, Derrida, and I would all, I think, agree with Donald David­son that

 

it is futile either to reject or to accept the idea that the real and the true are “independent of our beliefs.” The only evident positive sense we can make of this phrase, the only use that derives from the intentions of those who prize it, derives from the idea of correspondence, and this is an idea without content. [6 Donald Davidson, “The Structure and Content of Truth,” Journal of Philosophy 87, no. 6 (1990), 305.]

 

The detailed arguments that go on among philosophers like Davidson, Putnam, Derrida, Kuhn, and myself — philosophers who think that “corre­spondence to reality” is a term without content — and philosophers like Searle are as baffling to nonspecialists as are those among theologians who debate transubstantiation or who ask whether it is worse to be reincarnated as a hermaphrodite or as a beast. The technical, nit—picking character of both sets of arguments is itself a reason for suspecting that the issues we de­bate are not very closely tied in with our social practices.

If what Searle calls “traditional standards of objectivity, truth and ratio­nality” are simply the normal practices of the academy — or, to give Searle the benefit of the doubt, those practices as they were before people like Kuhn, Derrida, and me began to muddy the waters — then I see no more rea­son to think that abandoning a belief in correspondence will make one a less honest scholar than to think that abandoning a belief in God will make one a less honest witness. The loyalty of philosophers on both sides of the argument about the nature of truth to these “traditional standards” is much greater than their attachment to the significance, or the insignificance, of the idea of “correspondence.”

. . .

 

We who agree with Davidson think that the whole project of distinguishing between what exists in itself and what exists in relation to human minds — the project shared by Aristo­tle, Locke, Kant, and Searle — is no longer worth  pursuing.10  This project, like the project of underwriting the sanctity of the Eucharist, once looked interesting, promising, and potentially useful. But it did not pan out. It has turned out to be a dead end. [10For Searle’s clearest statement of this distinction, see his Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.:     MIT Press, 1992), 211: ”... it is essential to understand the distinction between features of the world that are intrinsic and features that are observer relative. The expressions ‘mass,’ ‘gravitational attraction,’ and ‘molecule name features of the world that are in­trinsic. If all observers and users cease to exist, the world still contains mass, gravitational attraction, and molecules. But expressions such as ‘nice day for a picnic’ . . . name objects by specifying some feature that has been assigned to them, some feature that is relative to observers and users.” //   F or pragmatists like me, the feature of being a molecule is just as much or as little “rel­ative to observers and users” as the suitability of a day for a picnic. So we are not sure whether, as Searle goes on to say, ‘if there had never been any users or observers, there would be no such features as being a nice day for a picnic.” We see no useful purpose served by this attempt to distinguish intrinsic from observer-relative features of reality. “Essential,” we ask Searle, “for what?”]

Another semitechnical point I wish to make concerns an ambiguity lurk­ing in the notion of “accurate representation.” Searle says, you recall, that the Western Rationalistic Tradition holds that knowledge is expressed in “propositions that are true because they accurately represent that [mind-independent] reality.” We Davidsonians want to distinguish between two senses of the phrase “represent accurately.” In the nonphilosophical sense, to ask a witness if she has accurately represented a situation is to ask about her truthfulness or her carefulness. When we say that good historians accu­rately represent what they find in the archives, we mean that they look hard for relevant documents, do not discard documents tending to discredit the historical thesis they are propounding, do not misleadingly quote passages out of context, tell the same historical story among themselves that they tell us, and so on. To assume that a historian accurately represents the facts as she knows them is to assume that she behaves in the way in which good, hon­est historians behave. It is not to assume anything about the reality of past events, or about the truth conditions of statements concerning such events, or about the necessarily hermeneutical character of the Geisteswissenschaften, or about any other philosophical topic.

But when philosophers discuss the question of whether knowledge con­sists in accuracy of representation, they are not concerned with honesty or carefulness. The question at issue between representationalists like Searle and antirepresentationalists like me is merely this: Can we pair off parts of the world with parts of beliefs or sentences, so as to be able to say that the relations between the latter match the relations between the former? Can true beliefs or sentences be treated on the model of realistic portraiture? Obviously some sentences can, at least prima facie, be so treated — for ex­ample, “The cat is on the mat.”12    [12 See the cat. See the “cat.” See the mat. See the “mat.” See the isomorphism between the sentence and the fact? No? You are worried by ‘on” and “is”? So was Wittgenstein. Eventu­ally these worries drove him to the view that using sentences was more like making moves in a game than like flashing pictures on a screen.] There are many other cases, such as the sentence “Neutrinos have no mass” or “The pursuit of scholarly truth requires academic freedom,” to which the notion of “parts of the world” has no evident application. We philosophers haggle endlessly about whether the notions of “correspondence” and “representation” can be extended to these harder cases. When we are tired of haggling about that, we start haggling over whether there is any criterion for whether a belief accurately represents reality other than its coherence with the rest of our beliefs, and if not, whether we should distinguish between the criterion of true belief and the nature of true belief.

Searle’s claim that the correspondence theory of truth has moral or so­cial importance runs together the philosophical and nonphilosophical senses of “accurate representation.” If we antirepresentationalists and anti­correspondentists ever win our argument with Searle, that will give histori­ans and physicists no reason to behave differently than they presently do. Nor, I suspect, will their morale or their efficiency improve if Searle and his fellow representationalists should win. Honesty, care, truthfulness, and other moral and social virtues are just not that closely connected to what we phi­losophy professors eventually decide to be the least problematic way of de­scribing the relationship between human inquiry and the rest of the universe.

The claim about a lack of close connection that I have just made is not put forward as a philosophical truth about the necessary, ahistorical relation of philosophy to the rest of culture. It is simply a sociological truth about the lack of interest that most people, intellectuals as well as nonintellectuals, currently have in philosophy. It is like the truth that the adoption of the ethics of love suggested by St. Paul does not depend upon the Orthodox, as opposed to the Arian, position on the relation between the First and Sec­ond Persons of the Trinity. That is a sociological truth about contemporary Christians, not an ahistorical truth about the relation between ethics and theology. Things were otherwise in the days when not only your physical safety but your choice of which charioteers to cheer for in the hippodrome depended upon your theological allegiances.

If Searle has his way — if he succeeds in persuading us (or even in per­suading funding agencies) that the relation between the Western Rational­istic Tradition and current academic practices is in fact presuppositional, and that refuting Kuhn, Derrida, and me is an urgent social need — then the academy will divide up into those who cheer for the representationalist philosophical team and those who (selflessly sacrificing grants for the sake of philosophical correctness) cheer for their opponents. Scholars and sci­entists will go around asking each other, and being asked by grant givers, “Which side are you on?”

I think that would be unfortunate, if only because it would be a waste of people’s time and emotional energy. It would be better to distinguish the ethics of the academy — the customs and practices that help to determine the attitude of students to books, faculty to students, administrators to fac­ulty and donors, and so on — from the private theological or philosophical convictions of any of the persons involved. To help keep the academy free and depoliticized, we should, for example, make sure that professors do not mock the beliefs of their fundamentalist students, that donors do not des­ignate particular persons to fill the chairs they endow, and that a scholar’s conclusions about controversial issues within her field, or about political or philosophical matters, continue to be irrelevant to her membership in the university. But we should not worry about whether true sentences accurately represent mind-independent reality.

 

So far I have argued that philosophy does not make much difference to our practices and that it should not he allowed to do so. But this may seem a strange position for somebody who calls himself a pragmatist. We pragmatists say that every difference must make a difference to practice. We think that it is important to argue that the Western Rationalistic Tradition, as Searle defines it, is wrong. We insist on trying to develop another, better tra­dition. So how can we, without dishonesty, say that philosophical contro­versies do not matter all that much?

We pragmatists can make our position consistent, I think, by saying that although they don’t matter much in the short run, they may well matter in the long run. The Christian who believes that God will punish him with hell­fire if he lies under oath will, in the short run, do the same thing as the athe­ist who believes that he will be unable to live with himself if he betrays the social compact by committing perjury. But in the long run it may make a lot of difference whether a society is regulated by its members’ fear of nonhu­man sanctions or by secular sentiments of pride, loyalty, and solidarity. The physicist who describes himself as uncovering the absolute, intrinsic, in-itself character of reality and his colleague who describes herself as assembling better instruments for prediction and control of the environment will, in their race to solve the currently salient problems, do much the same things. But in the long run physicists whose rhetoric is pragmatist rather than West­ern Rationalistic might be better citizens of a better academic community.

Deep emotional needs are fulfilled by the Western Rationalistic Tradition, but not all such needs should be fulfilled. Deep emotional needs were ful­filled by belief in nonhuman judges and nonhuman sanctions. These were the needs Dostoyevsky evinced when he said that if God did not exist, every­thing would be permitted. But these needs should be, and to some extent have been, sublimated or replaced rather than gratified. I have pressed the analogies between theological and philosophical belief because I see the West­ern Rationalistic Tradition as a secularized version of the Western Monothe­ist tradition — as the latest twist on what Heidegger calls “onto—theology.” We pragmatists take the same dim view of Absolute Truth and of Reality as It Is in Itself as the Enlightenment took of Divine Wrath and Divine Judgment.

John Dewey once quoted G. K. Chesterton’s remark that “pragmatism is a matter of human needs and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.”13  [13. John Dewey, “A Short Catechism Concerning Truth,” The Midd1e Works of John Dewey 6, p. 11. [Chesterton was a Catholic apologist.]] Chesterton had a point, and Dewey granted it. Dewey was quite aware of what he called “a supposed necessity of the ‘human mind’ to believe in certain absolute truths.” But he thought that this necessity had existed only in an earlier stage of human history, a stage we might now move beyond. He thought that we had reached a point at which it might be possible, and helpful, to wrench ourselves free of it. He recognized that his suggestion was counterintuitive and would meet the kind of opposition Searle mounts. But he thought that time long—run good done by getting rid of outdated needs would outweigh the temporary dis­turbance caused by attempts to change our philosophical intuitions.

As Dewey saw it, the need to distinguish between the pursuit of truth “for its own sake” and the pursuit of what Bacon called “the improvement of man’s estate” arose out of particular social conditions.14 [14 See, on this point, the opening chapters of Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty, in The Later works (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), vol. 4.] These conditions prevailed in ancient Greece and made it useful to draw certain distinctions that became, in the course of time, part of our common sense. These in­cluded, for example, the distinctions between theory and practice, mind and body, objective and subjective, morality and prudence, and all the oth­ers Derrida groups together as “the binary oppositions of Western meta­physics.”

Dewey was happy to admit that these distinctions had, in their time, served us well. In their time, they were neither confusions nor repressive de­vices nor mystifications. On the contrary, they were instruments that Greek thinkers used to change social conditions, often for the better. But over a couple of millennia, these instruments outlived their usefulness. Dewey thought that, just as many Christians had outgrown the need to ask whether the sentences of the Creed correspond to objective reality, so civilization as a whole might outgrow the supposed necessity to believe in absolute truths.

Dewey learned from Hegel to historicize everything, including Hegel’s own picturesque but outdated story of the union of subject and object at the end of History. Like Marx, Dewey dropped Hegel’s notion of Absolute Spirit, but kept his insight that ideas and movements that had begun as instruments of emancipation (Greek metaphysics, Christianity, the rise of the bour­geoisie, the Hegelian System) had typically, over the course of time, turned into instruments of repression — into parts of what Dewey called “the crust of convention.” Dewey thought that the idea of “absolute truth” was such an idea and that time pragmatic theory of truth was “trite in the pragmatic sense of truth: it works, it clears up difficulties, removes obscurities, puts individ­uals into more experimental, less dogmatic, and less arbitrarily skeptical re­lations to life.” “The pragmatist,” he continued, “is quite content to have the truth of his theory consist in its working in these various ways, and to leave to the intellectualist the proud possession of [truth as] an unanalyzable, un­verifiable, unworking property.”

Dewey said that Chesterton’s remark “has revealed that the chief objec­tion of absolutists to the pragmatic doctrine of the personal (or ‘subjective’) factor in belief is that the pragmatist has spilled the personal milk in the ab­solutist’s cocoanut [sic].”16 His point was that Chesterton had implicitly admitted that the best, and perhaps the only, argument for the absolutist view of truth was that it satisfied a human need. Dewey saw that need as one we could outgrow. Just as the child outgrows the need for parental care and the need to believe in parental omnipotence and benevolence, so we may in time outgrow the need to believe in divinities that concern themselves with our happiness and in the possibility of allying ourselves with a nonhu­man power called the Intrinsic Nature of Reality . . ..            [16Ibid., 11. Robert Westbrook (John Dewey and American Democracy [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni­versity Press, 1991], 137—8) cites this passage and points out that it applies to Bertrand Rus­sell’s criticisms of pragmatism as well as to Chesterton’s. Pragmatism’s radicalism and originality are nicely instanced by its ability to question a presupposition common to Chesterton and Russell, writers who had very little else in common.]

Dewey was quite aware, however, that the good work still being done by old distinctions would have to be taken over by new distinctions. He was also quite aware of what Berkeley called the need to “speak with the vulgar and think with the learned,” to apply different strokes to different folks. So his writings are a sometimes-confusing mixture of invocations of familiar dis­tinctions with counterintuitive philosophical reinterpretations of those dis­tinctions. His reformulations were often, at least to the vulgar, merely be­wildering. . . .

The more serious question, however, is, as I said earlier, the one about presuppositions. I can go some way with Searle on this question. Thus, I agree with him when he makes the Wittgensteinian point that

 

for those of us brought up in our civilization, especially the scientific por­tions of our civilization, the principles that I have just presented as those of the Western Rationalistic Tradition do not function as a theory. Rather, they function as part of the taken-for-granted background of our practices. The conditions of intelligibility of our practices, linguistic and otherwise, cannot themselves be demonstrated as truths within those practices. To suppose they could was the endemic mistake of foundationalist metaphysics.22 [22 Searle, Rationality and Realism,” 8o.]

 

I break off from Searle only at the point where he suggests that our practices would somehow become unintelligible if we described what we are doing in different ways — and in particular if we described them in the nonrealist, nonrepresentationalist terms commended by philosophers like Davidson and Derrida.

Searle and I recognize that certain propositions are intuitively obvious, indemonstrable, and taken for granted. But whereas he thinks that they cannot be questioned without the practices themselves (or, at least, their “in­telligibility”) being questioned, I see them as optional glosses on those prac­tices. Whereas he sees conditions of intelligibility, presuppositions, I see rhetorical flourishes designed to make practitioners feel they are being true to something big and strong: the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. On my view, the comfort derived from this feeling is, at this stage in the maturation of West­ern humanity, as unnecessary and as potentially dangerous as the comfort derived from the conviction that one is obeying the Will of God.

It is unnecessary and dangerous because our maturation has consisted in the gradual realization that, if we can rely on one another, we need not rely on anything else. In religious terms, this is the Feuerbachian thesis that God is just a projection of the best, and sometimes the worst, of humanity. In philosophical terms, it is time thesis that anything that talk of objectivity can do to make our practices intelligible can he done equally well by talk of intersubjectivity. In political terms, it is the thesis that if we can just keep democracy and reciprocal tolerance alive, everything else can be settled by muddling through to some reasonable sort of compromise.

To adopt these various theses, it helps to reflect that nothing in your prac­tices requires you to distinguish an intrinsic from an extrinsic feature of reality.23  [ 23 But you can still happily agree with common sense that there were dinosaurs and moun­tains long before anybody described them as dinosaurs and mountains, that thinking doesn’t make it so, and that bank accounts and gender roles are social constructions in a sense in which giraffes are not. There would have been no bank accounts or gender roles had there been no human societies, whereas there would have been giraffes. But that is not to say that giraffes are part of Reality as It Is in Itself, apart from human needs and inter­ests. In a wider sense of “social construction,” everything, including giraffes and molecules, us socially constructed, for no vocabulary (e.g., that of zoology or physics) cuts reality at the joints. Reality has no joints. It just has descriptions — some more socially useful than others.] If you give up the intrinsic—extrinsic distinction, the distinction between what things are like apart from human needs and interests and what they are like in relation to those needs and interests, you can also give up the idea that there is a great big difference between seeking human happi­ness and seeking scholarly or scientific truth. For now you will think of the latter search not as attempting to represent the intrinsic features of reality, without regard to human needs, but as finding descriptions of reality that satisfy particular human needs — those your fellow scientists and scholars have agreed need to be satisfied. The difference between bad subjectivity and sound scholarship will now be glossed as that between the satisfaction of private, idiosyncratic, and perhaps secret needs and the satisfaction of needs that are widely shared, well publicized, and freely debated.

This substitution objectivity-as-intersubjectivity for objectivity-as-accurate-representation is the key pragmatic move, the one that lets pragmatists feel they can have moral seriousness without “realist” seriousness. For moral se­riousness is a matter of taking other human beings seriously, and not taking anything else with equal seriousness. It turns out, pragmatists say, that we can take each other very seriously indeed without taking the intrinsic nature of reality seriously at all. We will not change our practices — either political or academic — merely because we have ceased to concern ourselves with epis­temology or because we have adopted nonrepresentationalist philosophies of language and mind. But we may change our attitudes toward these prac­tices, our sense of why it is important to carry them out. Our new sense of what we are doing will be itself as indemonstrable, and as intuitive, as was the Western Rationalistic Tradition. But pragmatists think it will be better, not just because it will free philosophers from perpetual oscillation between skepticism and dogmatism, but because it will take away a few more excuses for fanaticism and intolerance.