The End of Faith (36 page)

Thomas Nagel, an eloquent opponent of pragmatism, offers us, in The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), 30, three propositions that he feels can be adequately
accounted for only by realism:

1. There are many truths about the world that we will never know and have no way of
finding out. 2. Some of our beliefs are false and will never be discovered to be so. 3. If
a belief is true, it would be true even if no one believed it.

While a pragmatist like Rorty will concede that this manner of speak- ing is intelligible,
he will maintain that it is just thata manner of speakingand he will shuttle all statements of this kind into his prag- matism by reading words
like “true” in a purely discursive sense and then pirouette to his basic thesis: “We can
talk like this, of course, but to know the nature of anything is merely to know the
history of the way it has been talked about.” The pragmatist attempts to conserve our
realistic intuitions by conceding that if one is going to play certain language games
correctly and use words like “true” so as to be understood, one will, of course, grant
one's assent to statements like “There were moun- tains around before there was anyone to
talk about mountains”but he will never hesitate to add that the “truth” of such a
statement is just a matter of our common agreement.

22 J. Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. M. Cooke (Cam- bridge: MIT Press, 1998), 357.

23 To set all the relevant features of the pragmatic construal of knowledge

before us, it will be useful to briefly consider the work of Donald David- son. Davidson
has been very influential in philosophical circles, and his views on mind and meaning now
appear to underwrite Rorty's pragma- tism. Davidson asserts, in an undated manuscript
titled “The Myth of the Subjective,” that any view of the world, along with its concepts
and truth claims, must be translatable into any other:

Of course there are contrasts from epoch to epoch, from culture to culture, and person to
person of kinds we all recognize and struggle with; but these are contrasts which with
sympathy and effort we can explain and understand. Trouble comes when we try to embrace
the idea that there might be more comprehensive differences, for this seems (absurdly) to
ask us to take up a stance outside our own ways of thought.

In my opinion, we do not understand the idea of such a really for- eign scheme. We know
what states of mind are like, and how they are correctly identified; they are just those
states whose contents can be discovered in well-known ways. If other people or creatures
are in states not discoverable by these methods, it cannot be because our methods fail us,
but because those states are not correctly called states of mindthey are not beliefs,
desires, wishes, or intentions.

Perhaps the first thing a realist will want to say in response to these ideas is that we
need not (“absurdly”) take a stance outside our own to make sense of the claim that
radically different views of the universe might exist. As T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), points out, a community of pragmatists with the mental
age of nine would simply be wrong to think that “truth” is just a matter of justification among themselves, and they would
be right to think that other human beings understand facts about the world that they will
never be able to translate into their discourse. Who is to say that our own view of the
world might not appear similarly delimited from some other vantage point?

Davidson's doctrine of translatability comes bundled with what he calls his “principle of
charity”: all language users must be endowed with mostly true beliefs, for beliefs can be
recognized as beliefs only against a background of massive agreement. All interlocutors, therefore, must be
deemed by us to be basically rationalfor the moment we imagine con- fronting a mind
stocked stem to stern with false beliefs, we realize that we would see no basis to call it a “mind” in the first place.
Davidson's

NOTE TO PAGE l8l 28l

view here amounts to a curious inversion of Wittgenstein's famous line “If a lion could
talk, we would not understand him.” For Davidson, if we cannot understand him, he cannot be talking.

Davidson's conclusions here appear rather incredible. What if a speaker and an interpreter
have mutually intelligible and false canons of belief? Whether or not a given community's beliefs about reality are mutually
translatable need have nothing to do with whether or not they are true. Mutual intelligibility may signify nothing more than homology of error; my errors may be
enough like your own to pass for “truth” in your dis- course. We need only imagine the
communities of gorillas and chim- panzees getting their most precocious, language-trained
members together to test this: each might fail to recognize the utterances of the other
(perhaps they were taught incompatible forms of sign language) and conclude that the other
is not a language user at all. In this case, these ape translators would both be wrong.
If, on the other hand, they were to suc- cessfully converse and agreed with Rorty that
“truth” is just a matter of what prevails in their discourse, they would likewise be
wrongbecause the men and women watching their interaction would be acquainted with a
variety of truths that they could not possibly be made to understand.

According to pragmatism, beliefs serve their purpose in different con- texts, and there is
simply no cognitive project that corresponds to “know- ing 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 themthat 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 super- sede 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-widen- ing 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 ver- ificationist
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 lan- guage 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 behaviorismwhich 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 con- tinuous. All possible languages are commensurable; all
cognitive hori- zons 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 sol- idarity 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-FŽ,” 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 tac-
itly 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 dis- course 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 real-

NOTES TO PAGE 185 283

istic 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 justifiedand
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 can- not 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 betweenfor they are, after all, the same place. It is, therefore, upon the very rock of realismor beneath itthat we should seek the
pragmatist out.

24 This is often called, erroneously, the “naturalistic fallacy.” The naturalis- tic 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 hap- piness, “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: Cow-

ard, 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 ser- vice 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.