According to pragmatism, beliefs serve their purpose in different contexts, and there is simply no cognitive project that corresponds to "knowing how things are" or "knowing what reality is really like." Our ape pragmatists would likely concur, but they might also say that there is no such project as "knowing how to fly to the moon" or "knowing where babies come from" either. Let us postulate that apes are cognitively closed to the facts of rocket design and biology as we know them-that is, try as he or she might, no ape scientist will ever have the requisite cognitive abilities to bring the relevant data into view, much less make theoretical sense of them. To this community of pragmatists, such facts simply do not exist. It seems clear that if there could exist worldviews which supersede our own in this way, then what passes for "truth" in our discourse could not be the final measure of what is true.
The only means Rorty has found to resist this slide into ever-widening contexts of knowledge is to follow Davidson in claiming that we could translate any language into our own, and therefore incorporate any "truths" that more advanced language users might articulate. Davidson's reasoning is actually circular here, because the only reason why we could translate any language is that translatability is his criterion for picking out a language in the first place. This simply begs the question at issue.
Davidson's claims about translatability also seem to rely on a kind of verificationist fallacy: he mistakes the way we pick out language use in the world for what language is in itself. The fact that in order to ascribe language to another creature we must first translate his language into our own is simply irrelevant to the question of whether or not this creature is actually a language user, has a mind, or is communicating with his own kind. The error here tracks that of behaviorism-which cast a stultifying shadow over the sciences of mind for most of the twentieth century. That we may be constrained to pick out mentality in others by their behavior and verbal utterance does not mean that such outward signs constitute what mind is in itself.
According to Rorty and Davidson, there is no language game that human beings could not, in principle, play. The spectrum of possible minds, points of view, "true" descriptions of the world is therefore continuous. All possible languages are commensurable; all cognitive horizons can be ultimately fused. Whether or not this is true is not really the point. The point is that it amounts to a realistic claim about the nature of language and cognition.
It seems that there are two possible forms of retort to pragmatism: in the first place we could seek to demonstrate that it is not pragmatic, and specifically that it is not as pragmatic as realism. The approach here would be to show that it serves neither our ends of fashioning a coherent picture of the world nor other ends to which we might be purposed. It may be, for instance, that talking about truth and knowledge in terms of human "solidarity," as Rorty does, could ultimately subvert the very solidarity at issue. While I believe that a pragmatic case against pragmatism can be made, I have not made it here (B. Williams, in "Auto-da-Fe," New York Review of Books, April 28, 1983, has taken a stab at it). Instead, I have attempted to show that pragmatism is covertly realistic, arguing that in the act of distancing himself from the sins of realism, the prag-matist commits them with both hands. The pragmatist seems to be tacitly saying that he has surveyed the breadth and depth of all possible acts of cognition (not just his own, and not just those that are human) and found both that all knowledge is discursive and that all spheres of discourse can be potentially fused. Pragmatism, therefore, amounts to the assertion that any epistemic context wider than our own can be ruled out in principle. While I find these claims incredible, the more important point is that a pragmatist can believe otherwise only as a realist.
As a final note, I would like to point out that both pragmatic and realistic objections to pragmatism can be made to converge. Let us first reduce pragmatism and realism to their core theses (P and R respectively):
P: All statements about the world are "true" only by virtue of being justified in a sphere of discourse.
R: Certain statements about the world are true, whether or not they can be justified-and many justified statements happen to be false.
There appear to be two routes over the precipice for the pragmatist-and both can be reached when we press the question "What if P seems wrong to everybody and R seems right?" After all, the pragmatist must admit the possibility that we might live in a world where P will fail to be justified (that is, pragmatism itself may prove to be unpragmatic), which raises the question of whether or not P applies to itself. If P applies to itself, and is not justified, then it would seem that pragmatism self-destructs the moment it loses its subscribers. The pragmatist cannot resist this line by saying that P does not apply to itself, for then he will have falsified P and endorsed R; nor can he say that it is a necessary truth that P will always be justified.
Another logical peril emerges for the pragmatist the moment R becomes justified. According to P, if R is justified, it is "true"-but R cannot remain true by virtue of being justified. If the pragmatist attempts to resist the revaluation of "true" that R itself urges upon us, by saying that R cannot be really true (in the sense that it corresponds to reality as it is), this would be tantamount to saying that P itself is true realistically. Hence, he will fall into contradiction with his thesis once again. This is a rock and a hard place that the pragmatist cannot even be intelligibly accused of standing between-for they are, after all, the same place. It is, therefore, upon the very rock of realism-or beneath it-that we should seek the pragmatist out.
24 This is often called, erroneously, the "naturalistic fallacy." The naturalistic fallacy, due to G. E. Moore, is a fallacy of another sort. Moore claimed that our judgments of goodness cannot be reduced to other properties like happiness. He would undoubtedly argue that I have committed the naturalistic fallacy in defining ethics in terms of human happiness. Moore felt that his "open question argument" was decisive here: it would seem, for instance, that we can always coherently ask of any state of happiness, "Is this form of happiness itself good?" The fact that the question still makes sense suggests that happiness and goodness cannot be the same. I would argue, however, that what we are really asking in such a case is "Is this form of happiness conducive to (or obstructive of) some higher happiness?" This question is also coherent, and keeps our notion of what is good linked to the experience of sentient beings.
25 S. Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York: Viking, 2002), 53-54.
26 J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 24.
27 Cited in O. Friedrich, The End of the World: A History (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1982), 61.
28 The role of Christian dogma in turning sexual neurosis into a principle of cultural oppression need hardly be elaborated upon. Perhaps the most shocking disclosures in recent years (coming amid thousands of reports about pedophile priests in the United States) were those that surrounded a group of nuns that ran orphanages throughout Ireland during the 1950s and 1960s. The incongruously named Sisters of Mercy tortured children as young as eleven months (flogging and scalding them, as well as subjecting them to astonishing acts of psychological cruelty) for "the sins of their parents" (i.e., the sin of their own illegitimacy). In the service of ancient ideas about female sexuality, original sin, virgin births, etc., thousands of these infants were forcibly removed from the care of their unwed mothers and sent overseas for adoption.
29 Reports of honor killings have been steadily trickling out of Muslim countries for years. For a recent example, see N. Banerjee, "Rape (and Silence about It) Haunts Baghdad," New,' York Times, July 16, 2003. The UNICEF Web site posts the following statistics:
In 1997, some 300 women were estimated to have been killed in the name of "honour" in one province of Pakistan alone. According to 1999 estimates, more than two-thirds of all murders in Gaza strip and West bank were most likely "honour" killings. In Jordan there are an average of 23 such murders per year.
 
; Thirty-six "honour" crimes were reported in Lebanon between 1996 and 1998, mainly in small cities and villages. Reports indicate that offenders are often under 18 and that in their communities they are sometimes treated as heroes. In Yemen as many as 400 "honour" killings took place in 1997. In Egypt there were 52 reported "honour" crimes in 1997.
30 In the Buddhist tradition, which has approached the cultivation of these states most systematically, love and compassion are cultivated alongside equanimity and sympathetic joy (that is, joy in the happiness of others). Each state is believed to balance the others.
31 It seems reasonably clear that not all people are equally endowed with ethical intelligence. In particular, not all people are equally adept at discerning the link between their intentions toward others and their own happiness. While it may seem undemocratic to posit a hierarchy of moral knowledge, we know that knowledge cannot be equally distributed in the world. This is not to say that one must master a wide body of facts to be moral. Morality may be more like chess than like medicine-there may be very few facts to understand, but it can still be remarkably difficult to use what one has learned impeccably. To assert that there should be no "experts" in morals-as both Kantians and anti-Kantians tend to do-is, on my account, rather like saying that there should be no experts in chess, perhaps adducing as one's evidence that every party to our discourse can plainly see how to move the pieces. We need no experts to tell us how the matter stands; nor do we need experts to tell us that cruelty is wrong. But we do need experts to tell us what the best move is from any given position; and there is little doubt that we will need experts to tell us that loving all people, without distinction, makes one happier than feeling preferential love for one's intimates (if this is indeed the case).
Why should we think that living a profoundly ethical life would be any more common an attainment than playing brilliant chess? Why should penetrating insight into the logical relations among one's ethical beliefs be any easier to come by than penetrating insight into any other logical framework? As in any field, some cherished intuitions may prove irreconcilable with some others, and the search for coherence will force itself upon us as a practical necessity. Not everyone can play championship chess, and not everyone can figure out how to live so as to be as happy as possible. We can offer heuristics for playing winning chess, of course (secure the middle of the board, keep good pawn structure, etc.); and we can offer heuristics for bringing ethical truths to light (Kant's categorical imperative, Rawls' "original position," etc.). The fact that not every last one of us sees the point of them does not cast doubt upon their usefulness. There is no doubt that the relations among our ethical precepts and intuitions admit of deeper insights, requiring greater and greater intellectual capacities on the part of all of us to comprehend and, comprehending, to be inspired to practice. Here, I think, the greatest difference among persons is to be found (along with the greatest difference between the ethical and the epistemic spheres), since any insight into ethical normativity must lay claim to our emotions in order to become effective. Once he has understood that pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, not even the most libertine geometer will feel tempted to compute a circle's area using another measure. When a person sees that it is generally wrong to lie, however, this normative ground, once conquered, must be secured by feeling. He must feel that lying is beneath him-that it is tending to lead him away from happiness-and such a conversion of moral sentiments seems to require more than mere conceptual understanding. But then, so do certain kinds of reasoning. See A. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994).
Put this way, it is easy to see that two people who both have learned that lying is not conducive to happiness may differ considerably in the depth to which they feel this proposition to be true, and therefore in the degree to which they feel obliged to conform to it in their actions. Instances of discrepancy between belief and action in the moral sphere are legion: it is one thing to think it "wrong" that people are starving elsewhere in the world; it is another to find this as intolerable as one would if these people were one's friends. There may, in fact, be no ethical justification for all of us fortunate people to carry on with our business while other people starve (see P. Unger, Living High & Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996]). It may be that a clear view of the matter-that is, a clear view of the dynamics of our own happiness-would oblige us to work tirelessly to alleviate the hunger of every last stranger as though it were our own. On this account, how could one go to the movies and remain ethical? One couldn't. One would simply be taking a vacation from one's ethics.
32 60 Minutes, Sept. 26, 2002.
33 That these men are being held indefinitely, without access to legal counsel, should be genuinely troubling to us, however. See R. Dworkin, "Terror and the Attack on Civil Liberties," New York Review of Books, Nov. 6, 2003, pp. 37-41, for a fine analysis of the legal and ethical issues here.
34 It seems to me that we can stop this inquisitorial slide by recourse to the "perfect weapon" argument presented in chapter 4. There is a difference, after all, between intending to inflict suffering on an innocent person and inflicting it by accident. To include a suspected terrorist's family among the instruments of torture would be a flagrant violation of this principle.
35 Quoted in Glover, Humanity, 55.
36 I suspect that if our media did not censor the more disturbing images of war, our moral sentiments would receive a correction on two fronts: first, we would be more motivated by the horrors visited upon us by our enemies: seeing Daniel Pearl decapitated, for instance, would have surely provoked a level of national outrage that did not arise in the absence of such imagery. Second, if we did not conceal the horrible reality of collateral damage from ourselves, we would be far less likely to support the dropping of "dumb" bombs, or even "smart" ones. While our newspapers and newscasts would be horrible to look at, I believe we would feel both greater urgency and greater restraint in our war on terrorism.
37 See J. D. Greene et al., "An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment," Science 293 (Sept. 14, 2001): 2105-8; and J. D. Greene, "From Neural 'Is' to Moral 'Ought': What Are the Moral Implications of Neuroscientific Moral Psychology?" Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4 (2003): 846-49.
38 For an illuminating account of the use of "coercion" by U.S. and Israeli interrogators, see M. Bowden, "The Dark Art of Interrogation," Atlantic Monthly, March 2003, pp. 51-77.
39 Many flavors of pacifism can be found in the philosophical literature. I am considering here what is often called "absolute" pacifism-that is, the belief that violence is never morally acceptable, whether in self-defense or on behalf of others. This is the sort of pacifism that Gandhi practiced, and it is the only form that seems to carry with it pretensions of moral impregnability.
40 Am I saying that overt opposition to a wrong is the ethical standard? Yes, when the stakes are high, I think that it is. One can always make the argument that covert resistance in particularly dangerous situations-where open opposition would be to forfeit one's life-is the best possible course. Those remarkable men and women who hid Jews in their basements or ferried them to safety during World War II provide the textbook example of this. Surely they did more good by living and helping others in secret than by openly protesting the Nazis and dying on principle. But this was their situation only because so few people were willing to offer open opposition in the first place. If more had, there would have been Nazis hiding in basements, writing journals to the God that had forsaken them, not innocent little girls bound for Auschwitz. Thus, as a categorical imperative, confrontation with evil seems the best imperative we've got. What form this confrontation takes, of course, is open to debate. But simply making room for human evil, or sidestepping it, doesn't seem an ethically auspicious option.
41 G. Orwell, "Reflections on Gandhi," in The Oxford Book of Essays, ed. J. Gross (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1949), 506.
/>
Chapter 7 Experiments in Consciousness
1 I am not suggesting that thoughts themselves are not equivalent to certain states of the brain. In conventional terms, however, there is a rather large difference between taking a drug and taking on a new idea. That both have the power to alter our perception is one of the more fascinating facts about the human mind.
2 While this literature is too wide to cite here, numerous examples of such texts can be found in my bibliography.
3 What happens after death is surely a mystery, as is the relationship between consciousness and the physical world, but there is no longer any doubt whether the character of our minds is dependent upon the functioning of our brains-and dependent in ways that are profoundly counterintuitive. Consider one of the common features of the near-death experience: the nearly dying seem regularly to encounter their loved ones who have gone before them into the next world. See A. Kellehear, Experiences Near Death: Beyond Medicine and Religion (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996). We know, however, that recognizing a person's face requires an intact fusiform cortex, primarily in the right hemisphere. Damage to this area of the brain definitely robs the mind of its powers of facial recognition (among other things), a condition we call prosopagnosia. People with this condition have nothing wrong with their primary vision. They can see color and shape perfectly well. They can recognize almost everything in their environment, but they cannot distinguish between the faces of even their closest friends and family members. Are we to imagine in such cases that a person possesses an intact soul, somewhere behind the mind, that retains his ability to recognize his loved ones? It would seem so. Indeed, unless the soul retains all of the normal cognitive and perceptual capacities of the healthy brain, heaven would be populated by beings suffering from all manner of neurological deficit. But then, what are we to think of the condition of the neurologically impaired while alive? Does a person suffering from aphasia have a soul that can speak, read, and think flawlessly? Does a person whose motor skills have been degraded by cerebellar ataxia have a soul with preserved hand-eye coordination? This is rather like believing that inside every wrecked car lurks a new car just waiting to get out.