Anthropological Realism: Ethics for a Global World 1527586189, 9781527586185

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Anthropological Realism

Anthropological Realism: Ethics for a Global World By

Stephen J. A. Ward and Clifford G. Christians

Anthropological Realism: Ethics for a Global World By Stephen J. A. Ward and Clifford G. Christians This book first published 2024 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2024 by Stephen J. A. Ward and Clifford G. Christians All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-8618-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-8618-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgement ................................................................ vii Preface .................................................................................. viii Stephen J. A. Ward Chapter One .............................................................................1 Reconceiving Meta-Ethics Stephen J. A. Ward Chapter Two ...........................................................................80 Realism Moderne: Worlds of Worldmaking Stephen J. A. Ward Chapter Three .......................................................................128 Anthropological Realism Stephen J. A. Ward Chapter Four ........................................................................169 Philosophy of the Human Clifford G. Christians Chapter Five .........................................................................210 The Ethic of Anthropological Realism Clifford G. Christians Chapter Six ...........................................................................270 Anthropological Realism and the Philosophy of Language Clifford G. Christians

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Chapter Seven ......................................................................335 Philosophical Animals: Humans in Nature Stephen J. A. Ward Epilogue ...............................................................................385 Ethics for a Global World Stephen J. A. Ward References ............................................................................389 Index.....................................................................................421

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The authors acknowledge the competent assistance of Research Scholar, Dr. Ran Ju, whose work, in Aristotle’s terms, was essential in both intellectual content and literary form.

PREFACE STEPHEN J. A. WARD Some time ago, Professor Christians and I found ourselves converging on a common perspective about the state of media ethics as both a discipline and as a guide for practice. As a discipline, media ethics tended to lack a strong theoretical basis and interest, and therefore studies, articles, and books could be conceptually weak or unoriginal. Authors borrowed a principle or idea from ethical theory, such as Mill’s general happiness principle or Kant’s categorical imperative, and applied it to an issue. The principle was not challenged or reformulated. The writing did not indicate an awareness of the criticisms of the principle in philosophy, ethics, and elsewhere. At other times, simplistic presentations of complex ethical views were quickly presented and placed into rivalry: teleology versus deontology, Kant’s duty ethics versus Mill’s utilitarianism, or virtue theory versus consequentialism. That these dualisms might be questionable was not discussed. For example, it was not noted that Kant did not discount entirely the pursuit of happiness, and his deontology contained large dollops of stoic virtue theory; or, that John Rawls, often quoted as the modern deontologist par excellence, said a deontological ethic that did not consider the consequences of its adoption was irrational. Although principles of justice are primary, a full and proper ethic must find a “congruence” between justice and the good, between duty and good consequences. 1 At its worst, this ethics lite approach made the history of moral theory a Madame Tussaud museum of stock figures. Of

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course, there were (and are) excellent works that showed theoretical depth and insight but they were too few in number. A second source of concern was the parochialism of morality in society, both in our thinking and in our practices. Moral parochialism—the view that we ought to make our local and national values primary in life and in theory—seemed increasingly out of place in a global world. Moral globalism—the view that global values and principles of humanity should be primary—needed to become the theoretical basis for a global ethics. It should ground ethical thought in many domains such as in media and communications. We were also disenchanted with the state of moral theory per se. Progress in moral theory was being prevented by unproductive dualisms which, like the trench warfare of the First World War, saw little gain or retreat but a continual conflict over the same patch of ground. Moral theory textbooks chopped up the terrain into realism versus anti-realism, cognitivism versus non-cognitivism, absolutism versus relativism, discovery versus invention, and consequentialism versus nonconsequentialism. Yet it seemed to us that better, more inclusive positions lie somewhere between the poles of these opposing theories where, for example, emotion and cognition are both part of moral experience, not dualistic rivals; or the fact that morality is a human invention does not make it less real than things discovered in nature. We were encouraged by the appearance of new hybrid forms of ethical and philosophical thinking. Over the course of the last decade or so, Professor Christians and I, along with others, set out to address these concerns. With regard to the first concern, we wrote more about the theory behind media ethics and encouraged others to do so, while including theory in teaching. With regard to the second concern, both of us and a cohort of forward-looking academic colleagues and media practitioners around the world began holding conferences

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and workshops at the turn of the present century to discuss how to construct a global media ethics. At first, the idea of a global media ethics struck some as either impossible or a conceptual contradiction, given the parochial nature of media work. But then serious issues surrounding global media arose. Misinformation and toxic, intolerant discourse began to taint social media and global public channels of information. The trends continue to threaten democracies and egalitarian societies. Consequently, the notion of global media ethics became accepted and has evolved into a recognized discipline. 2 What about dualistic media theory? The result is this book. We create a theory called anthropological realism that attempts to escape the tired ruts of thinking that have coalesced into dualisms. We bring together ideas that once were seen as opposites. The book begins with the problem of moral dualism. It surveys the history of moral theory because how we understand this history is crucial to reform. Then, the book presents hybridic, holistic, and integrative ways of thinking about moral value. Anthropological realism is a philosophy of the human in full, where history, language, interpretation, and the construction of meaning define moral globalism. Therefore, the book is not unrelated to our other concerns. We believe that anthropological realism is a theory that can undergird humane global ethics amid the turmoil of a plural and interconnected world.

A Caveat A concluding note on how we wrote the book. No two scholars agree on everything. Given the diversity of thought in ethics, Professor Christians and I have been fortunate in sharing key moral positions. This allowed us to write each chapter separately, utilizing our expertise in different areas of ethics. Then we shared our work and discussed needed improvements and clarifications. We also placed our name on the chapters we wrote, for two reasons. One, if readers agree or disagree with a

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point in a chapter, they know to whom the claim should be attributed. Second, the naming of chapter authors helped us get around one difficulty in writing the book. The problem appeared after I had written Chapter Seven, where the idea of transcendence and naturalism is discussed. To be frank, my naturalism is robust. I dislike transcendent forms of thought whether in religion, spiritualism, Platonism, or elsewhere. Professor Christians agrees with the overall thrust of naturalism but believes there is, and there should be, room for nuanced forms of theology that do not take the deistic form of postulating a remote, transcendent deity. Such a spirituality might be compatible with my naturalism. I suspect there is common ground between our views, but we did not feel that this book was the place for sorting it out. Therefore, the reader should be aware that Chapter Seven’s strong skepticism about transcendent thinking is an expression of my imperfectionism. 3 Otherwise, we are in full agreement on the book’s text.

Notes 1. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 513. 2. For a comprehensive survey of global media ethics, see Ward, Handbook of Global Media Ethics. 3. Ward, “Imperfectionism: The Meanings of Life,” Chapter 12, The Project of Moral Globalism.

CHAPTER ONE RECONCEIVING META-ETHICS STEPHEN J. A. WARD Moral philosophy cannot avoid taking sides and would-be neutral philosophers merely take sides surreptitiously. —Iris Murdoch 1

If one were able to climb a ladder and look down on the state of philosophizing about ethics, or meta-ethics, it would be hard not to conclude that the competition between basic positions is at a stalemate. Meta-ethics is bogged down in philosophical trench warfare between various positions on the meaning, knowledge, and evidence for moral claims and theories. New positions add subtleties or novel arguments for the basic rivalries without changing the overall landscape. The landscape has been, for some time, divided into conceptual dualisms such as reason and emotion, absolutism and relativism, objectivity and subjectivity, and truth and mediated belief. Only in recent years have there been important and pioneering attempts to overcome these dualisms and to see ethics in a more holistic manner, more attuned to how people actually discuss morality and do ethics in everyday situations. This book focuses on what can be regarded as the fundamental rivalry in meta-ethics, so fundamental that it contains other rivalries. It is the rivalry between realism and antirealism. We propose a hybrid position, anthropological realism, that combines the insights of both camps. The exposition of our position begins in Chapter Three, after a historical re-

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view of the rivalry and main positions. In developing anthropological realism, we think holistically to avoid dualisms. We bring together ideas often thought to be separate in ethics, such as constructing and discovering moral value, reason and emotion, fact and value, and the local and the global. The previous sentence may sound odd or even contradictory. How can construction and discovery go together? Or, how can reason and emotion work together? Are not fact and value completely different things, often in opposition? If it sounds odd it is because we have inherited through Western culture centuries of dualistic thinking in philosophy, religion, ethics, and science. We have trouble bringing together certain concepts. The future of ethics, and meta-ethics, is to think more radically, to escape the old ruts and habits of thought. We should explore the rich intellectual ground between the polarities. In the next two chapters, we prepare the ground for anthropological realism. In this chapter, we explain our view of ethics, describe the senses of realism and anti-realism, and sketch the history of the rivalry from Greek antiquity to the end of the nineteenth century. In the next chapter, we focus on twentieth century positions, especially those that attempt a hybrid realism in ontology, epistemology, and morality.

Value of Philosophy and Meta Thinking Before we begin, it behooves us to indicate why relatively abstract disputes in meta-ethics and philosophy are important for the practical ethical issues which confront our global world. The simple answer is because beliefs influence our conduct, and our ethical beliefs are particularly influential. Yet, we can say more than this in favor of meta-ethics. Meta thinking in general, especially in philosophy, is valuable because it can identify errors, limitations in thinking, and questionable premises. It can suggest options not yet ex-

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plored. Our ethical beliefs and actions are based implicitly or explicitly on philosophical presumptions about what constitutes knowledge, and how we know it. It is based on assumptions about truth, the relativity of values, and whether moral belief can be rationally justified. To have defensible beliefs about ethics and to make informed ethical decisions, that is, to approach ethics rationally, presumes an understanding of what we are doing and why. This requires meta-ethics, or philosophy of ethics. One does not have to be a philosopher to act on philosophical presumptions or ideas. Philosophical ideas are embedded in our ethical decisions in life. Ideas penetrate into our daily lives and judgments. The assumptions influence us, even if our assumptions are implicit. In making ethical judgments, or in disagreeing with someone on what actions to take, you are doing philosophy, if only in the minimalist sense of working implicitly from philosophical assumptions. These assumptions, once brought to the surface, can be evaluated. We may come to see some of them as misleading or based on flimsy evidence, bias, or social indoctrination. Critical reflection on ethics is important for democratic society where individuals and groups seek to test beliefs and create better ethical practices, rather than passively accept a “customary morality” of existing mores. 2 Philosophical reflection is all but inevitable in democratic society because, sooner or later, people will ask us to justify our moral beliefs and practices. At this point, we must ascend what can be called the ladder of justification. For every reason we give, we may be asked to give a more general reason for that reason, and then a more general reason for that reason. We climb step-by-step until we reach abstract philosophical principles. Sometimes, we end in a philosophical fog. We realize our conceptions are unclear, and therefore we lose some confidence in judgments that contain these concepts. We may

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not know what we think we know. Socrates was a master of inducing philosophical fog to persuade people to reflect on their beliefs. Consider an example from a domain outside meta-ethics, something as practical as journalism. Our judgments about journalism practice face the same inescapability of philosophy and the ladder of justification. Imagine that I judge that a news report on government corruption, which embarrasses its leaders, is good because the report accurately informs the public, and keeps officials accountable. Both informing the public and official accountability are standards. But why, you may ask, are they so important? Well, I reply, because accuracy falls under the more general standard of truth-telling in public communications. And because citizens need truthful reports to make decisions and to judge their government. But you persist. Why are informed citizens important? I reply with a more general reason: Because it aids democracy. But why aim at democracy? And so on. By climbing the ladder of justification, I realize that my judgments are grounded in general social and political values. Change those philosophical assumptions, for example, presume an authoritarian view of media as state mouthpieces, and you will not judge the report to be good. You may consider the report dangerous because it undermines confidence in the state. There is, then, no such thing as a stand-alone practical ethics without an embedded philosophy. There is no practical ethics that is encapsulated and separate from the rest of what we know and believe philosophically. Another reason for philosophy is the critique of social, political, and religious ideologies. Ideologies are systems of ideas that attempt to make sense of the things around us and guide group actions. Ideologies also contain philosophical assumptions on knowledge, reality, value, and human flourishing. We not only say something is true. We think about what

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notion of truth we are using. We not only say that some belief is well-evidenced; we also think about what evidence means. Philosophy is meta-reflection on our ideology, and the ideology of others. Philosophy is the most general, and least restrained, meta exercise, taking all of life and experience as its domain. Philosophy is willing to ask questions about almost anything, and to follow out ideas into the hinterland of our minds where our most basic thoughts reside. Philosophical presumptions act like the bed of a river. They channel the rest of our thoughts in definite directions as a riverbed channels the water flowing through it. Not surprisingly, this flow of ideas affects our decisions and actions. In addition, our ideas can affect our general mood or emotional perspective on life and society. For example, our thinking may arrive at nihilism: the conclusion that there is nothing of great value in the world, or that our existence is arbitrary and without reason. I may conclude coolly and logically that nihilism follows from facts about the world. Yet, another person may find nihilism threatening or emotionally disturbing. The belief may cause depression, or justify unethical actions, or lead to suicide. Humans also can need or crave certain ideas as much as they need certain bodily comforts or emotional support. For some people, certain ideas, for example, that God exists or that the soul survives the death of the body, is a deep psychological need. If beliefs have such impact, how can we bring them to consciousness for further examination? As Jean-François Lyotard said, to ask, “Why philosophize?” is to ask a philosophical question. It is the fate of humans to philosophize because of the creatures we are—with consciousness, desire, language, and a critical ability to question what is and to wonder what might be. Philosophy’s mission is to recall humans back to their inherent capacity to philosophize, and to ask questions that “irritate everybody.” 3 Far from being detached or unnatural, thinking philosophically

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about oneself and life is as natural as any human activity. In a social context, this critical thinking is crucial for intelligent responses to ever new problems and conditions. As Alasdair MacIntyre wrote, a central task of the moral philosopher is “to articulate the convictions of the society in which he or she lives so that these convictions become available for rational scrutiny.” 4 John Dewey thought that philosophy could overcome its historical “craving” for theoretical, infallible truths and become a socially engaged, but fallible, form of inquiry into our most serious problems. Ethics ceases to be a philosopher’s quest for the one supreme moral principle. It becomes the common quest of groups for the intelligent and sensitive solution of human problems. As realist philosopher John Searle has written: I actually think that philosophical theories make a tremendous difference to every aspect of our lives. In my observation, the rejection of realism…is an essential component of the attacks on epistemic objectivity, rationality, truth, and intelligence in contemporary intellectual life.5

These points reflect one way of looking at meta-ethics and other meta activities. It is a top-down perspective. We think about how philosophical generalities seep down to the more concrete level of praxis. There is also a bottom-up perspective of how praxis affects ideas, more popular among the social sciences. In this view, what is primary are the economic and cultural structures of a society. They cause groups to construct ideologies that explain or attempt to validate social practices, social classes, and political systems. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, this bottom-up perspective has given ideology a negative connotation due to the social criticism of Marxists, communists, Nietzscheans, Freudians, postmoderns, and many others. In Freud and Philosophy, Paul Ricoeur called this interpretative approach to texts and ideas the “her-

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meneutics of suspicion.” Ideas and ideals are revealed as tools of hegemony or social control. They rationalize illegitimate power, unjust social hierarchies, and other forces below the surface of society.6 Marx, for instance, portrayed art and philosophy as the “superstructure” of a ship that sits on the material base of the vessel. In society, the material base is the means of economic production that shapes social classes and values. Although Marx was careful not to crudely reduce ideas to material activities, subsequent Marxists often turned this metaphor into a reductionist philosophy of culture. However, they made one exception: the true ideology of Marxism. This book adopts a hybrid approach to this issue. It rejects reductionist explanations of ideas, values, and ideologies to physical or social elements. Instead, it posits a holistic web of interactions among all levels of society. The lines of influence run from the bottom up, and from the top down, and in many other directions. Analysis of the level of ideology or meta thinking requires a multi-disciplinary investigation by cultural anthropologists, social psychologists, sociologists, evolutionary psychologists, neuro-scientists, historians, philosophers, and many others. The aim is not to reduce ideas to a primal need or a subconscious force but, rather, to show how ideology and praxis work together in complex ways. In ethics, and elsewhere, what this concern with ideology amounts to is an attempt to grasp the worldview of ourselves or some group so as to bring it forward for discussion, improvement, or critique. William James summed this up in “Pragmatism,” his 1906 and 1907 lectures at Columbia University, where he begins with the fact that “everyone has a philosophy.” He then tells his audience that “the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds.”7 James would go on to say revealing things about how people’s worldviews and personalities prompt them to endorse certain

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varieties of religious experience, such as asceticism, or to embrace a hard-nosed empiricism that, like Mr. Gradgrind in Dickens’ Hard Times, wants, and only wants, “facts, facts, facts.” Despite the efficacy of ideas and the need to reflect upon them, there remains in Western culture a persistent and widespread belief that meta exercises, especially philosophy, are not practically or socially important. It is important to recognize the roots of this attitude in history. It is understandable why this negative opinion of philosophy exists. Our current social trends and our cultural history encourage it. Today, we live in societies where there is much less stress on the humanities, and where many people believe that views about life and value are too subjective to admit rational inquiry. Late-modern scientific culture put its faith in techno-rationality and instrumental value. Techno-rationality increasingly organizes higher education according to programs with quantifiable practical impact in the short-term, such as the current employment needs of the market. Also, today people feel lost within large bureaucracies and corporate conglomerates in alienating societies of strangers. In a materialistic, consumer-driven, entertainment-focused society, the value of philosophical reflection and critique is doubted. At the same time, engagement with philosophical ideas and the large issues of life is divided between two groups that have little connection with each other. Popular culture is redolent with superficial trends on how to be happy, occult ideas of reaching a higher order, and whatever catches the short attention span of consumers in a media-created world. The more rigorous engagement with philosophy has shrunk to become the province of professional thinkers in university philosophy departments. We can hardly blame the public for being skeptical about the value of philosophy when a substantial number of academics, including philosophers, are happy to

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pursue their inquiries autonomously, far from the marketplace of ideas where public opinion and politics are formed. To make matters worse, philosophy is often taught in a manner that fails to explain why long-dead thinkers were so interested in certain problems, or in what ways their social context relates to our times. The relatively recent professionalism and academic seclusion of the art of philosophy, as humanistic inquiry, adds to the separation of philosophy from the lifeworld. Historically, the separation of philosophy from daily popular culture is only one expression of a larger Western trend since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Western modernity, especially in the second half of the 1800s, set out to place science, morality, philosophy, and the arts in autonomous and separate domains run by specialists or experts. For example, the separation of artistic activity began in the late eighteenth century. What resulted was an abstract philosophy of Art (art as an essence with a capital A), an allegedly superior set of fine arts beloved by elites and a rising class of avant-garde artists who worked autonomously, and often in opposition, to mainstream culture. The separation of philosophy is one consequence of the creation of Western cultural hierarchies, or a distinction between highbrow and lowbrow activities.8 Hierarchies of knowing or superior activities left a vacuum in everyday life. Public discourse on culture, politics, and life was shaped less and less by informed, reasonable, and inventive interlocutors. Ideas about life, morality, and the world were increasingly found in the writings of propagandists, irrationalists, pseudo-scientists, occultists, media celebrities, and extremists. Today, these forces are empowered by the global media creating a crisis for democracies. Although strong skepticism about philosophy or metaethics is historically understandable, this does not mean that it is valid, or necessary. It is a specific, historically situated atti-

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tude. It is possible to think of thinking in philosophy and other domains as neither useless nor irredeemably abstract. Such expertise should be more engaged in public discourse as part of a larger project to protect reasonable, egalitarian societies and detox their public channels of communication. The ethical task of our era is to construct a global ethics for a media-shaped and media-saturated world. Global ethics needs a credible philosophy of universal principles. But realism’s treatment of universals tends to be abstract and rationalistic. Universals are treated as the abstract deliverances of reason (or some other authority) apart from context and history. Not only is this a dubious approach to universals, it also has dubious consequences. Transcendent absolutes—or what are claimed to be absolutes—are imposed top-down on diverse human experiences. In the wrong hands, such impositions become a form of class or cultural imperialism. On the other hand, anti-realist positions, when pressed, tend to become a relativism that is skeptical of any talk of global principles. There are no better or worse moral viewpoints. The latter view seems to entail a social passivity that sees no option but to ‘go with the flow’ in society. There is no basis for legitimate critique. This book formulates a hybrid moral realism that combines insights from both sides of the dualistic line. Anthropological realism combines realism and constructionism—positions usually thought to be rivals. It embraces pluralism but rejects extreme relativism. It challenges the strict division of discovery or invention; and of fact or value. We reject the view that a moral claim either refers to a moral fact independent of mind (and human nature) or it is nothing but a subjective feeling or bias. We affirm a set of universals but we locate them here on earth, in human nature, in communication, and we eschew cultural imperialism. We combine the local and the universal. In sum, we reframe the issues, skate around (or be-

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tween) dualisms, and respond to cultural pluralism. One way that philosophy makes progress is to not accept the problem space created by previous philosophies. In this book, we do not accept a dualistic problem space as a starting point for inquiry. The book combines Christians’ seminal work on universals and Ward’s work on inventing ethics as a centuries-old human “ethical project” based on evolving human experience and society.9 Morality is grounded in a conception of the human, as a world-directed agent and cultural being, within history. The result is a realism of human moral experience, of facts expressive of human existence in the round. It is not a realism about a realm of human-independent moral facts. Anthropological realism is a moral globalism for a global human world.

Section One: The Project of Ethics Practice and Theory Ethics as a social practice can be described factually or evaluated normatively. Around the world, societies and cultures act in accordance with mores, norms, and laws. Societies have a normative sphere that regulates conduct and makes human interaction and cooperation possible. The sphere contains legal norms, aesthetic norms, religious norms, and norms of custom, ethnic tradition and etiquette. Evolutionists have argued that early human bands in prehistory developed unwritten norms for group-wide behavior, as a necessary part of surviving in a hostile environment.10 The earliest written codes of norms have been found in the first human civilizations in such places as Mesopotamia, Egypt and China about the third millennium BC. These codes blur our modern distinctions between legal, ethical, religious and customary. There has always been considerable overlap between precepts that are legal, ethical or based on etiquette. However, over

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centuries, ethics arose as a distinct area of the normative sphere with its own institutions, its own ways of teaching, and its own way of enforcing moral precepts. The history of morality, then, can be seen as a project of societies or groups, the project of sustaining a coherent and endorsed set of rules for social cooperation over time and amid fluctuations in external conditions. In this sense, we can speak of the “moralities” in the world. “Morality” refers to the entire set of moralities, the way that a collective noun such as “language” refers to the many languages of mankind. We can also study such moralities objectively and factually, noting their rules, how the rules evolved, how the rules structure behavior and social relations, how societies spin out ideologies or myths to explain and justify the morality. We can also study how, within societies, groups exist with their own sub-moralities which may disagree with or challenge a common or society-wide morality imposed, for example, by a majority group. Many people study morality and culture in this manner, from cultural anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists to ethicists, students of cultural studies, historians, sociologists and students of comparative religion. Typically, their stance is that of the disengaged observer trying to understand the nature of morality the way a scientific approach attempts to study the nature of some natural phenomenon. It is a second-order study of ordinary people engaged in first-order morality—the making of ethical judgments and acting according to norms. There need not be any evaluation of the morality. However, we can also approach ethics from an evaluative stance. We do meta-ethics for normative purposes—to critique and improve our norms, to detect ‘blind spots’ in our moral consciousness. We are engaged in both doing and reforming ethics. We are not satisfied with a detached description of the facts about moralities. We ask a normative question: Of all these moralities, which one should we embrace

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and promote? Critical, normative ethics is practical in overall intent, but theoretical in understanding. Such are our reasons for taking meta thinking and metaethics seriously in theory and practice. We now turn to a more detailed account of practical (or applied) ethics and philosophical (or meta-) ethics.11 Applied Ethics12 Applied ethics is thinking that hovers close to the everyday world of actual ethical decisions and dilemmas. It is situated, prompted by actual moral problems or experiences in a certain place or time. Applied ethics asks what should I (or we) do in situation y? What is the morally best thing to do? For example, if I stumble upon a wallet on my walk to work, I think to myself, morally, I ought to return the wallet to the owner. It is the right thing to do. Notoriously, morality contains situations and issues where the morally right course of action is not as clear as in this example. What is the right conduct is anything but clear for complex issues such as abortion, the death penalty, whether promises can be broken, what justice requires in society, and the duty that co-nationals owe to distressed foreign countries. I may ask: Did I do the wrong thing when I refused to give money to famine relief? Or: Is euthanasia morally justifiable if the dying person is in extreme pain? Applied ethics presumes that the interlocutors have an interest in being moral. When people seek resources for thinking about the situation, it typically begins with principles within pre-existing moral codes. For example, we may argue for the right to express offensive views in public based on the principle of freedom of expression. Or, we may criticize a discriminatory practice because it violates the principle of equality before the law. In addition, people may argue on the basis of ideas found in applied moral theories such as utilitari-

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anism, cosmopolitanism,13 contractarianism,14 communitarianism,15 and the various forms of religious ethics from Christian morality to Buddhism. Applied theories typically deal with one of the three great themes of ethics: What is good and what the good life consists in; what is right (or what justice requires); and what the moral virtues are. We encounter theories that think the pursuit of the good is primary, such as utilitarianism (what produces the most utility) or consequentialism (what, overall, has the best consequences). We encounter theories that think the pursuit of what is right and dutiful is primary, such as Immanuel Kant’s ethics of moral duty.16 Also, we encounter theories that take the virtuous life as primary, resulting in many kinds of virtue ethics.17 Applied theories attempt to create consistent moral systems consisting of principles, precepts, and protocols. They seek to answer moral questions in ways that appear persuasive, do not violate basic moral intuitions and ring ‘true’ given our experience of the world. For example, any applied theory which entailed that the murder of citizens or the torture of children for degraded pleasure is permissible would rightly cause us to question the theory. Applied theories such as utilitarianism, communitarian ethics, or Christian ethics take up positions on a range of large issues such as animal rights, our obligations to future generations, a just immigration policy, and the responsibilities of citizens to others during a pandemic. This application of theory to concrete problems is crucial for applied ethics. We need to see how moral positions work in practice. Values such as friendship or happiness can be so abstract that we need to see how people apply these values. After all, both the Quakers and the mafia agree on the value of friendship.18 Take utilitarianism as an example of an applied theory.19 Classical forms of the theory, as in John Stuart Mill, say that

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society should seek, in any situation, the greatest amount of happiness (or utility) for all. Utility can be the amount of pleasure an action produces, or it can be something less tangible such as the enjoyment of self-respect or esteem felt when a discriminatory policy is no longer applied to an oppressed minority. Utilitarians take a wide array of positions on the moral issues of the day. They may support freedom of speech because it enhances overall utility, or support justice because it creates a more stable, peaceful society. In calculating the expected utilities, utilitarianism tends to be impartial. It does not matter whether the persons involved are of a certain gender, race, or nationality. Each person’s utility or pleasure counts equally. Some versions of the theory, such as egoistic utilitarianism, are prepared to count as a person’s utility whatever they happen to prefer, even if the preference is based on impulse, or may cause them harm in the long run. The strategy of counting expected utilities has proven to be, over the decades, a controversial matter. A typical complaint is that utilitarianism entails that the rights of a minority can be sacrificed to the rights of the majority. If repression of gay or trans individuals would please the majority of citizens, don’t utilitarians have to agree? Utilitarians, of course, have rejoinders to these criticisms. Much of utilitarianism’s history has consisted in alterations in the theory’s formulation to escape counter-intuitive results. An important component of applied ethics are professional codes of ethics. They are frameworks of principles meant to guide professional and institutional practice. There are codes for physicians, nurses, accountants, journalists, and so on. ‘Framework ethics’ asks about the validity, coherence, and adequacy of a given framework. For example, in journalism, we can question whether a professional code of ethics originating decades ago is adequate for journalism today where citizen journalists are numerous. Or we can question a specif-

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ic principle such as the doctrine that reporters should be objective, in the sense of reporting only facts in an unbiased manner. In medicine, we can discuss how much information a doctor should provide seriously ill patients about their disease. How should a health organization deal with botched breast cancer tests? What is informed consent in a business contract? If a financial adviser owns stock in a company, should he promote that company to clients? Meta-Ethics Meta-ethics is theorizing about the activity of applied ethics. It includes (a) meaning: the meaning of ethical concepts and statements such as x is right or y is morally good. In applied ethics, we ask what actions and kinds of things are actually good or right. Meta-ethics asks: What do we mean by good or right? (b) the psychological-neural base: How do human minds and brains apprehend moral values and make moral judgments? (c) available evidence: What kinds of evidence, logical or empirical, support ethical statements? (d) moral reasoning and discourse: How do we reason and seek to persuade when we discuss moral issues? (e) embedded metaethics: What type of meta-ethical positions do the leading theories of applied ethics presume? What meta-ethics is embedded in common sense moral thinking, or in utilitarianism, consequentialism, and other theories? (f) aims and uses of morality: What are the aims and social purpose(s) of ethics? What is the natural and social history of morality? Do moral systems, today or across time, share common principles? If so, why? There have been times in the philosophical study of ethics when theorists defined meta-ethics more narrowly than described in the previous paragraph. In the previous century, analytical philosophers such as George E. Moore sought to

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reduce the philosophy of ethics to the a priori analysis of moral concepts such as good. Analytic philosophy tended to dualistically separate empirical and conceptual questions. What was empirical and factual belonged to the kingdom of science. The rest of inquiry, where valid, was lumped under conceptual analysis as in logic, the formal sciences, and analytical philosophy. The implication was that ethics should concern itself only with definitions and analysis of concepts, not attempt to defend applied ethical positions or provide guidance on realworld normative questions.20 Today, this dualism of empirical and analytical inquiry has largely crumbled, replaced by multi-disciplinary research where philosophers, ethicists, neuro-scientists, linguists, computer scientists, evolutionary psychologists, historians, and sociologists study ethical questions. This means that we need a broader categorization scheme for meta-ethics. Inquirers have provided new and significant knowledge about the biological, psychological, and social aspects of humans when they engage in morality. Does this mean that a historian or anthropologist who studies the moral codes of cultures is doing meta-ethics? Yes and no. They are doing meta-ethics defined, generally, as the study of the activity of ethics. But they are not (typically or primarily) studying that activity for normative purposes—to develop ethical theories on how we should morally reason, what principles are best for our ethics project and so on. Meta-ethics proper is the study of normative moral activity for normative purposes. We have given logical reasons for doing meta-ethics. But, psychologically, why are we, as individuals, prompted to engage in meta-ethics? One trigger for ethical thought are the problems of everyday experience. We encounter difficult moral questions. In hesitation, we step back and think about our dilemma. At this point, it often happens that the line be-

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tween applied and philosophical ethics blurs. For example, as the utilitarian develops her applied positions on controversial issues, she can scarcely avoid engaging in meta-ethics. She will be asked how she defines the concept of happiness, whether she regards ethical statements as describing a moral fact, whether her system constitutes objective grounds for decision-making, and so on. There begins, in her mind, a moving back and forth between her practical intuitions of what kinds of things are good and her philosophical assumptions about goodness, happiness, and moral knowledge. As John Rawls pointed out with regard to theories of justice, ethical thinking seeks a well-balanced equilibrium between principles, precepts, rules, and our concrete intuitions about what is moral in particular cases.21 Ethical thinking never gets totally outside of some metaethical presumptions. We depend on some meta-ethical concepts to describe the nature of meta-ethics. Creating a scheme for meta-ethics is an instance of persuasive definition. We propose that people should conceive of an issue in a certain way which we believe is helpful given some notion of what ethics is. What we present in this book, openly and nonapologetically, is a critical, liberal, and rational proposal on how to think about ethics. There is much meta-ethics contained in the phrase “critical, liberal, and rational.” We rely on meta-ethics to develop meta-ethics. This is not circular in some logically offensive way. It is simply the recognition that we are always thinking from some conceptual scheme. Later, we will describe this by using the metaphor of sailing in a boat while improving the vessel, plank by plank, as we go along. Finally, meta-ethics is not detachable from the applied projects of ethics. As a project, ethics is inherently practical. It is the analysis, evaluation and promotion of correct conduct and virtuous character in light of the best available principles. Eth-

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ics asks how we should live in goodness and in right relation with each other, a task that may require us to forego personal benefits, to carry out duties, or to endure persecution. All of this occurs as time goes by and the world changes, calling for amendments to our project. Ethics evolves over time. This temporal dimension is intrinsic to ethics. We constantly reinterpret and balance principles so as to respond to new problems, new facts, new technology, and new social conditions. Even the boundaries of ethics change. In our time, ethics has come to include such issues as animal cruelty, violence against women, pollution of the environment and the rights of gay and trans-gendered individuals. Ethical reflection is situated normative reason in social practice. Ethics is the nevercompleted, always open-ended project of inventing and critiquing norms that guide interaction, define roles, and justify institutions. Ethics at its best is reÀective engagement with major problems, in light of where we have been and where we hope to be tomorrow.

Section Two: Mapping Realisms Ontological Realism Realism is a general view about the great philosophical themes of truth and language; what exists (ontology), and how we know it (epistemology and inquiry). Realism is synthetic. It is not a set of separate views about truth, existence and meaning. Instead, it brings these views together to express a view of human reality. There are many technical formulations of realism. It is better to start with an initial and accessible description of what it means to be a realist, and from that, what it means to be an anti-realist. In the simplest of terms, a realist is someone who believes there is a reality beyond our subjective experiencing. Realists believe in a real world, defined as an external world

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which exists apart from the human representation of it. Inquiry is the organized pursuit of knowledge about this world as a whole, or part thereof. Knowledge, for the realist, is an achievement, a form of cognitive success when our ideas match or correspond with the objects. At this point, our ideas can be said to be objective, or true to the object. To achieve objective knowledge is to achieve truth. Falsehood occurs when, for whatever reasons, we have a belief that does not accurately correspond to the nature of the object. Or our beliefs are questionable because they are opinions formulated with insufficient rigor and evidence. The causes of error are multiple—faulty logic, insufficient facts, biasing methodology, subjective feelings, and needs. The theory that knowledge is ‘absolute’ is a form of realism. It asserts that a statement either perfectly represents the objects as it exists in itself, or it does not; its truth does not depend upon, or is not relative to, the context of belief formation such as one’s society, historical situation, personal experience, and so on. It is important to note the generality of realism as so far presented. Nothing specific has been said (yet) about what reality is like, what kinds of objects are real and warrant inquiry, or what kinds of knowledge exist. There is no long list of truths. At this stage, realism is a schema for understanding human knowledge which can be filled in according to one’s ontological and epistemological preferences. The schema can be filled in with beliefs the way that a sketch can be filled in with detail and color. The objects that a realist recognizes as existing could be abstract entities like numbers or sets; the common sense objects of perception such as furniture; spiritual entities; or the constituents of matter according to science. Further, the schema allows for different theories about how to inquire—what constitutes evidence and good method. Because realism is primarily concerned about knowledge of what exists, we can call it “ontological realism” to distin-

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guish it from more specific variants. We can also call it “global realism” because of its sweeping assertions about the world as a whole and our attempt to know it. Global realism rejects a strong skepticism about an external world, the view that the external world is an illusion, or a solipsism which holds that I am the only real existent. Philosophical realism is a sophisticated formulation of the common sense belief in the external world. In addition to global realism, there are local realisms which affirm the existence of certain types of objects or facts. Local anti-realisms disaffirm the existence of certain types of objects. In the early 1900s, Albert Einstein and other scientists debated whether atoms existed. Einstein was a local realist about atoms. He believed in the existence of atoms. His debaters, the atom-deniers, were local anti-realists. Throughout the Western history of ideas, there have been many disagreements about alleged (externally existing) objects and forces: God, angels, ghosts, devils, ether, occult spirits, the subconscious, and multiple personalities. One can be a local realist regarding the subconscious but doubt the reality of ghosts. As we will see, moral realism is a local realism about moral facts. To summarize, ontological realism, global and local, is defined by several features: Externality as Mind-Independence Searle defined global ontological realism as the thesis that “The world (or alternatively, reality or the universe) exists independently of our representations of it.” Or, “Realism is the view that there is a way that things are that is logically independent of all human representations.”22 A second formulation is provided by William Alston: “For the realist, there exists an independent, external world containing an immense

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number of objects, properties, relations, facts, and law-like behavior which await correct description.”23 The general belief in an external world is consistent with various beliefs about the nature of that world, such as materialism, idealism, and scientism about the nature and evolution of the natural world. These “isms” make substantive assertions about the nature and order of the world. Global realism is not committed necessarily to one of these “isms” or one substantive view. What theory of truth best suits realism, and what substantive beliefs about reality should be associated with it, is an additional step, a matter for philosophical and scientific argument.24 Experience and reality The realist depends on, or requires, a distinction between experience and nature. Metaphysically, this distinction is often developed into a distinction between appearance and reality, between our psychological experience of the world and how that world really is. Without that gap between mind and world, there would be no distinction between the real and the unreal, the world and our many ways of experiencing it. Knowledge as discernment of reality For realism, truth is knowledge of (or true propositions about) reality. It is reality discernment. A true proposition is a fact. A fact is what is the case. Knowledge is objective and non-relative. It is an open question to what extent (and how) truth and knowledge are achievable by humans but, where achieved, it is objective knowledge of reality. The aim of inquiry is to discover, describe, and explain external reality; to produce true and objective propositions about it. The realist agrees that the mind is active in inquiry and conceptualization

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mediates cognition. But the realist denies that mental activity, such as conceptualization, constitutes or alters the nature of what is real. Human minds do not create or construct reality. Belief is relative to conceptual scheme but reality is not relative to conceptual scheme. Truth as fitness Most forms of ontological realism hold that truth is a “fit” between a belief or a statement and the world. Some realists like Searle adopt a correspondence theory of truth. Others, like Alston, avoid a correspondence theory.25 Still others propose a realism that is pragmatic, allowing for a variety of conceptual schemes.26 As we will see, the history of philosophy is populated by substantive theories of realism—views that go beyond a general commitment to global realism to state in more specific terms what the nature of reality is, and what kinds of things exist. They articulate what criteria distinguish truth from falsehood, well-evidenced belief from sheer opinion, and science from pseudo-science.27 The most influential types of theories, historically, have been (a) transcendental realism: the belief that what is real transcends ordinary experience and is often endowed with the qualities of being superior, perfect, or unchanging. There is a reality behind the appearances. It may be a spiritual world of gods or forces. It may be transcendent laws of history which are directing human society and the world towards some end, often described in utopian terms. It may be a realm of perfect Platonic forms grasped by intellect; (b) immanent realism: the world lacks a transcendent sphere. The world exists and its laws, objects, and forces are immanent in an empirical, natural system that may challenge the powers of human understanding but are not transcendent. One version is naturalism, which holds that the mind, our ideas,

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and meanings are part of the natural order, having evolved over ions of time. Another is philosophical materialism, the view that everything that exists is organized matter under the laws of nature. Yet another version is scientific realism which contends that science decides what is real and what exists, how it exists, and what we must presume to exist to make sense of scientific theories. Scientific realism holds that our best scientific theories (especially the natural sciences) achieve knowledge of reality in itself and describe natural processes as they exist apart from the human mind. A slightly less robust version of scientific realism holds that while scientific theories may not be perfect and will evolve, nevertheless the sciences are converging on truth. At the very least, the sciences are our best indicator of the way reality is. Ian Hacking summarizes scientific realism as such: The entities, states and processes described by correct theories really do exist. Protons, photons, fields of force, and black holes are as real as toe-nails, turbines, eddies in a stream, and volcanos….Theories about the structure of molecules that carry genetic codes are either false or true, and…genuinely correct theory would be a true one….Even when our theories are not exactly correct, we often get closer to the truth. Our aim is to discover the inner constitution of things and at knowing what inhabits the most distant reaches of the universe. There is no need to be too modest. We have already found out a good deal.28

For the ordinary person, the everyday world is understood by a common sense realism. The world as we regularly understand it, through perception, emotion, and logical thinking is the real world even if it is imperfect and our beliefs often amount to no more than opinion or practical assumptions that allow us to get things done. Some forms of common sense realism argue that the world of perception and ordinary expe-

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rience is as real, if not more, than the theoretical entities of physics and their sciences. Common sense realism is the default presumption of most people before they philosophize. One can combine forms of realism. In the hands of philosophers, common sense realism has been developed into naïve realism or direct realism, which is the idea that perception provides us with a direct awareness of objects. Also, common sense realism can become an important methodological principle. For example, thinkers may start with common sense realism as an anchor for their ship of inquiry. Common sense realism is the starting point for all thinking about the world. Theorizing and appeals to entities beyond perception help us to explain experiences, illuminate the patterns in the data, and save the appearances. In philosophy, phenomenalism, the view that physical objects are reducible to patterns of sensations or appearances, and physicalism, the view that physical objects cannot be so reduced, are both committed to making our perceptual life the starting point for thinking about ourselves and the world.29 The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid argued that the primary principles of philosophy are common sense beliefs in the existence of the world and our perceptions of it. These beliefs are more evident and plausible than the skepticism which doubts them.30 One can combine common sense realism and scientific realism, arguing that the world consists of both the entities of common experience and the theoretical entities required for science to be true or understandable. One can be a local realist about the phenomenal world and an anti-realist about scientific entities. For example, instrumentalism in philosophy of science holds that theoretical concepts in science do not refer to independently existing, unperceived objects. The concepts are mental tools that help us explain and predict patterns among phenomena.31 Theories are heuristic devices.

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Common sense is a set of commonly accepted beliefs which forms much of the cognitive basis for our everyday interactions. Usually the beliefs are about ordinary experience such as a confidence in perception (“seeing is believing”), a facility in doing practical things, and assumptions about what people are like. John is hot-headed, Mary is cool and detached. Talk of common sense, however, needs to be used with caution. To call something a matter of common sense does not imply that the belief should be automatically accepted without question. It does not entail that common sense beliefs are true, even if widely accepted. Common sense is often false or lags behind science. As noted earlier, our knowledge is a tapestry of different levels of belief. Common sense beliefs often are based on implicit and ‘higher’ philosophical presumptions. Common sense is not limited to ordinary experience and observation. In any era, common sense includes religious, theoretical, and scientific beliefs that have made their way into popular culture. Furthermore, common sense can distort theoretical beliefs. Complex ideas become simplistic slogans for the intellectually lazy. How many people refer to “e=mc2” without knowing what it means or why it is important? How many popular online discussions of Darwin thoroughly distort his theory of natural selection and the phrase “the survival of the fittest”? How many people refer to Einstein’s theory of relativity as a basis for their moral relativism but lack any decent knowledge of Einstein’s theory. How many people think it is common sense that women cannot, or should not, be front-line soldiers; that homosexuals necessarily prey on young boys; or, that it is natural for the ‘man’ to rule over the family. Plenty of people, every day, in almost every culture. Thus, to declare some belief to be a matter of common sense does not excuse you from providing reasons for its validity.

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Anti-Realisms A simple way to think about anti-realism is to put a negation sign before the basic beliefs of realism. Ontological antirealism is global if it denies or doubts the realist’s core belief in a mind-independent reality. Searle defines global antirealism as the view that all things are “constituted by our representations, and could not have existed independently of representations.”32 Local anti-realisms deny or doubt the existence of certain kinds of things, such as dark matter, mental telepathy, or moral facts in nature. However, anti-realists do more than deny what realists assert. They provide alternate explanations of the phenomenon in question, such as providing a sociological analysis of why groups of people have believed in witches, or how we make moral judgments without the help of external moral facts. Anti-realists have also explored the limits of the human mind, and the role of mental constructions in belief formation. Anti-realist investigations can show how we are misled by certain beliefs. Strong global anti-realism may seem an extravagant or obviously false belief: that the external world does not exist. Similarly, we may not be sure what to say when confronted with the view that we do perceive the world. It is a complete seeming or illusion. Sometimes, global anti-realists add the qualification: the perceived world exists but it is a second-rate reality. There is a higher reality. In this form, global antirealism is close to transcendent realism. One might query: Does anyone truly hold such positions? The answer is yes. For centuries. As discussed below, mystics, metaphysicians, idealists, spiritualists and occultists, solipsists, and ‘rational’ philosophers like George Berkeley and Arthur Schopenhauer have expressed anti-realist sentiments. Solipsism in Western philosophy goes as far back as the Greek presocratic sophist and orator Gorgias (c. 483–375 BC)

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who, in his treatise On What Is Not, argues that nothing exists. Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it. Even if something could be known about it, knowledge about it cannot be communicated to others.33 As this sequence of assertions suggests, Gorgias and others like him had motivations for making such bold assertions. One was skeptical in aim: to weaken realist confidence in objective knowledge or common sense faith in prevailing thought. This was, presumably, the first step toward constructing the true philosophy of the world. Or such statements prepare the reader to seek a higher reality known through special experiences or modes of thinking. Today, many philosophers and psychologists see solipsism, if endorsed literally and seriously, as a sign that something has gone wrong. Psychologically, solipsism may be the attitude of a psychotic or a person detached from reality. In philosophy, if your theorizing leads to solipsism, this is generally regarded as a sign that your thinking is in error. Solipsism is a reductio ad absurdum of your position. Local anti-realisms are typically more plausible and interesting than global antirealisms. We regularly question the existence of certain things, and the epistemic manner of knowing them, without making sweeping skeptical claims about all of reality. Local anti-realists can agree that there are at least some mindindependent objects and a subset of our beliefs are true cognitions about the world, such as well-evidenced scientific theories. Anti-realism becomes the more plausible theory that in certain domains, such as physics or morality, certain types of objects do not exist. Local anti-realism also appears in epistemology and philosophies of science. It is “constructionism” or “social constructionism” Constructionism uses psychology, social relativism, and epistemology to cast doubt on the realist’s view that humans

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can know what the world is like, in itself. Even if such a world exists, its objective nature eludes us. Humans can only know the world through the mediation of concepts, perceptions, theories, belief systems, and social ideologies. The ubiquitous activity of the mind in perceiving and acting in the world cannot be overcome so that we see the world directly as it is. Belief about the world is necessarily through the lens of some conceptual mediation. Constructionism contains the thesis of conceptual relativity: knowledge of the world is relative to some conceptual scheme. At best, we can study the ways in which the mind creates ideas and beliefs, and the role of culture, practices, and society in that process. Rather than assert that a belief is absolute or objectively true of the world in itself, we settle for a more modest claim: we have beliefs that are, given our methods of inquiry, probable and wellevidenced, yet fallible when it comes to truth. Constructionism tends to separate truth and justification. It separates not to adopt the realist’s preference for truth, as superior to justified belief. Rather the opposite: the constructionist prefers to talk about justification or evidence for beliefs or “knowledge claims.” The latter phrase says much: the focus will be on the different ways that people claim (or allege) to have truth or knowledge, when in fact it is only a claim based on their perspective—their conceptual schemes and practices. This suggests a deflationary account of truth, with relativist leanings. Modern constructionism contains three main beliefs: (1) Mediated awareness of the world: This perspective goes back to the Kantian view that we have no unmediated contact (or access) to the way objects are in themselves. (2) The active intellect: Our knowledge is not only mediated but we, as thinkers, actively construct a view of the world. Historically, this is not new, but modernists draw strong conclusions from it, much stronger than we find in Aristotle, Aquinas, and other

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thinkers from the past. (3) Conceptual relativity: The most important form of mediation are conceptual schemes. Our ontology, or what we think exists, is relative to the conceptual scheme(s) we employ to know the world. It is important to note that constructionism does not entail anti-realism. Why not hold that some of our interpretations, carefully tested, are true and fit the object? Historically, realist philosophers have acknowledged, even emphasized, that humans use ideas and values to understand the world. In De Anima, Aristotle, in three famous chapters on the intellect, begins by making the intellect a potentiality—a tablet on which nothing is written—which becomes actual with activity, that is, when the intellect thinks about objects. Later, he divides the intellect into an active and a passive part. He controversially asserts that the active intellect decides is an immaterial part of the soul since it acts on its own, for example, placing objects in categories, without the help of a sense organ, such as visual perception. While the senses provide an image of an object, the intellect how to think about it. The meaning and import of Aristotle’s notion of active intellect has been entangled in religious and philosophical disputes over whether Aristotle is really claiming that the active intellect is the immortal part of the soul.34 Thomas Aquinas, centuries later, also gave the active intellect an important place in his epistemology. Following Aristotle, Aquinas says the active intellect abstracts a concept (or a form, a species) from an image (phantasm) received from the senses. In the early modern period, John Locke and the British empiricists went to elaborate lengths to explain knowledge as ideas derived from sense intuitions. The mind follows laws of the association of ideas to link cause and effect and to anticipate future experience. The empiricists’ rejection of innate ideas in the mind is well-known. What is less well-known is how they populated the mind with innate mental dispositions

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or powers to combine ideas in various ways. Kant took the idea of an organizing mind to a new philosophical level, combining empiricism and rationalism. He postulated an innate conceptual scheme for structuring sense intuitions so that we experience the world as an ordered domain. From Locke in the seventeenth century to Mill in the nineteenth century, realist philosophers thought that, at least in many cases, our concepts captured objective properties and natural kinds such as biological species, molecules, and stars. Nature created natural kinds, not humans. Mill wrote: “The differences (between natural kinds) are made by nature;…while the recognition of those differences as grounds of classification and of naming is…the act of man.”35 Dueling Intuitions One reason for the persistence of the realist and anti-realist debate is that each side points to what they regard as obviously true intuitions about how we experience the world, know it, and act within it. Another reason is psychological: realism plays such a central role in mental development and practical activity that we seem bound to return to the viewpoint. Denying realism seems foolhardy. The result is a back and forth between positions that, despite their theoretical sophistication, are grounded in dueling intuitions. The trouble is this: For every apparently clear intuition in favor of realism, there is a counter-balancing and apparently clear intuition in favor of anti-realism. People who adhere to common sense or scientific realism tend to think it intuitively obvious that external objects exist independently of minds, and that we can have truthful cognition of at least some of them. How could anyone think that mental activity, such as perceiving or conceptualizing, determines what is real and beyond the mind? Do not the planets and stars exist inde-

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pendently of how we think about them? Have they not existed long before humans? Did Mount Everest not exist long before human conceptualization? Are facts about the mountain, for example, its size and height, merely a human invention or construction? Surely not. Realists also appeal to what we presume in living and in being practical. Everyone, including the anti-realist, is a practical realist every day, from the moment they get out of bed (a bed that is real and extra-mental). Even the anti-realist in New York knows that he lives in a real city; that he has a real, independently existing car in his garage; that his office exists independently in Manhattan; that there is an objectively existing highway that will take him to work, and that the capital of the State of New York is Albany. Throughout the day, humans, not just anti-realists, rely on a plethora of facts and distinctions between what is true and false, objective and subjective.36 The realist can also turn to examples drawn from science. It seems clear that we have objective scientific knowledge of at least some processes in nature, for example, the nature of electricity, the rotation of the planets in our galaxy, and the chemical composition of water. Moreover, we use objective, scientific knowledge in many activities, such as the medical facts that guide emergency surgery. Many of us think the surface geography of our country, its topography, is objectively known, mapped with some precision. It may not be 100% correct but it is quite close to being true to the object (the shape of the land), even if it uses concepts and representations. This knowledge guides travelers, including the landing of airplanes every day. We are realists about such knowledge. Few people in the United States getting on an airplane would agree that the geographical information guiding the pilots is true but only in a relative sense—true given the way these particular pilots and geographers happen to think about that information.

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It seems crazy to say that such data are only true relative to one conceptual scheme called “geography of the United States as understood in the United States” and false in some other scheme, say the “geography of the United States as understood in Israel.” The same realism applies to the laws of nature that guide aviation. There are no skeptics of the reality of the laws of aerodynamics when flying at 36,000 feet. Such laws are not relative to whomever thinks about them. Take another example from the history of physics. When Isaac Newton formulated the laws of motion and gravity in Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), he thought he had discovered, despite his use of abstract calculations and equations, substantive laws that actually existed in nature, in a mind-independent fashion. He had arrived at scientific beliefs true to the object—nature. He was describing the actual, independent, physical architecture of the universe. For Newton, the truth of his theories was determined by the world, not by a conceptual scheme, a social construction, an ideology, or some other mental construction. This was also how his admiring contemporaries regarded his work. Today, media portrayals and movies about scientific geniuses, such as Alan Turing, John Nash, or Albert Einstein, continue to depict them as discovering objective knowledge about reality. For leading physicists, physics aims at a convergence of knowledge on a theory of everything. Science will ultimately reveal the ultimate and unique structure of the universe. This amounts to what Stephen Hawking described as “reading the mind of God.” Hawking also stated: “The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe.”37 These scientists share with medieval philosophers the view that knowledge maps the world as it exists. On the anti-realist side, a different set of intuitions reigns supreme. Even if there is an external world, we cannot truly know the world as it exists. All we know are our interpreta-

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tions of things via plural and sometimes conflicting conceptual schemes. These anti-realists point to the fact that, since Newton, other forms of physics have emerged. For example, Einstein interpreted gravity not as a downward force but as part of the “fabric” of space itself, the space-time continuum, which is disturbed when large objects move about it. Gravity as it exists in itself, the anti-realist concludes, is unknowable. It is a matter of conceptual scheme. Physicist Paul Feyerabend once argued38 for a view of science that many see as antirealist. He questioned the rationalist’s demand for firm truth of reality through one scientific method. He stressed the anarchic and plural epistemology of science over time. In philosophy of mind and psychology, it has become customary to see the mind as interpreting the world indirectly. Incoming stimuli are conceptualized and organized into thoughts and experiences by the brain. But this only begs once again the question that philosophers ask: If all contact with reality is mediated, how can we ever know that we have truths about the world itself? Epistemically, it does not change matters very much to talk about representation by the brain rather than the mind. This constructionist way of thinking is always skating near the edge of relativism or solipsism. If all that I know is what I represent mentally, how do I know that this view of the mind-world relationship is true? Is it not just another conceptual scheme? The obviousness of the anti-realist intuitions can lead us into the thickets of a global relativism. Consider this statement by British philosopher Michael Luntley: Let us suppose there exists a book that contains the answer to everything….Let us call it the Cosmic Register. If there is such a thing as objective truth, truth independent of judgment, then we can think of the truth as what is recorded in this cosmic register….There is no cosmic register. The only registers are human creations for which there is no external

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standard. In place of the objective truth of the cosmic register, we would then have merely the local standards of truth presupposed by our different theories, religions, and worldviews. Truth would not then be objective.39

Luntley is using a metaphor to characterize absolute realism. As we will see in the next chapter, pragmatist Hilary Putnam called the idea of a settled metaphysical reality awaiting description—Luntley’s cosmic register—“absolute realism” against which he pitted his “internal realism.” The tough question is this: Can we talk about truth if there are only “local standards of truth.” For the realist, truth according to local standards is no truth at all. It is relative opinion. You can hear the same strong, over-reaching conclusions in the writings of otherwise great scientific thinkers, such as physicist John Wheeler, who helped develop the theory of nuclear fission. He seemed to think that global external realism was inconsistent with physics: No phenomenon is a physical phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon. The universe does not exist “out there” independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense, this is a participatory universe. Physics is no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, fields of force, into geometry, or even into time and space. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself.40

Wheeler seems to confuse ontological and epistemic questions. The realist can ask Wheeler: Do you literally believe that no phenomenon exists until we observe it? Is not the universe billions of years old? Who observed the world before humans? Mars, Jupiter, and the stars do not exist apart from us? The laws of gravity would not exist without our involvement?

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To be charitable, Wheeler might mean that what we know about the universe is due to our constructive mental activity, where many world theories are possible. This is an epistemic position. Or he might be referencing the view in physics that, in some scientific experiments, the presence of an observer has an effect on what is observed. Maybe. Wheeler does not question the independent reality of the world after all, only the limitations of human inquiry. But that is not what he says. He clearly draws, incautiously, strong ontological conclusions from epistemic considerations. This is where the rival intuitions leave us. They induce an intellectual stalemate. Our minds are paralyzed like Buridan’s Ass caught between two general views of knowledge supported by their own set of facts, intuitions, and arguments. Like a shuttle cock, our mind wearily travels from one side of the debate and then back to the other. We need to get off this swinging pendulum of thought. Realism: Psychological Origins Realism is most people’s defunct ontological view—except perhaps the committed solipsist, the mystic in an ecstatic state, or the psychotic. We were born to become realists— global and local. The origin of realism is found in our psychological development as children and, then, in the development of a common sense realism as we become adults in society. We are realists in everyday life long before we are realists in philosophy. As infants, we begin, naturally, as inarticulate solipsists (or non-realists), and become realists.41 The capacity to be a realist—the capacity to know and deal with the real, external world—is a crucial moment in the cognitive and emotional development of infants. The infant learns that external objects exist apart from its sensations of them. The smiling, loving

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face of a hovering parent actually belongs to an external object that continues to exist when not perceived. Language begins with pointing at and eventually naming these ambient, perceptible, objects. The infant learns about the externality and independence of the world when it realizes that there is something outside the boundary of its body that resists its will, or delays the satisfaction of its impulses. Crying for food does not always bring an instant response. When a child stumbles over objects in its path, and feels pain or frustration, the child begins to comprehend what an external world means. These experiences signal a world that is beyond its will and its intentions. Yet this world can also be experienced as a resource, not an obstacle, helping the child realize its goals. From the start, the infant, and then the child, is an impulsive organism directed outward to the world. As Dewey said, desire and impulse directed at the world are the “forward urge of living creatures.” The psychology of humans is a history of the development of ways of living, modifying, channeling, unifying, and expressing those urges. It is said that desires are the basic elements of human psychology. This is half true. The other half is this: we wish to do something with our desires in the external world. Internal and external seek a linkage. Engagement with the world is imperative. Even hermits must eat and seek shelter. Dewey, a student of child behavior, sagaciously noted that the adult’s holistic engagement with the world is presaged in the movement of the infant. The infant’s desirous nature turns the infant as a whole organism toward engagement with the world. Dewey writes: “Every experience, of slight or tremendous import, begins with an impulsion;… the turning toward light of the body as a whole, like the heliotropism of plants.”42 The infant’s direction towards the world is not a conscious striving. It is not yet selflove or egoism. It is organism-environment interaction as its

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most primordial and biological. Only later, as the individual grows, do intellect and other faculties make the desiring conscious and better organized. Humans, Dewey says, “proceed from need.”43 As the human develops psychologically, its impulses are directed to more precise goals; desired goods become values and are ranked roughly in importance. Human life is a doing directed by mind and experience, so we are not flailing about arbitrarily. However, no matter how sophisticated our thinking becomes, a desirous engagement with the world usually remains constant. What begins as a set of relatively inchoate or objectless impulses in the infant gradually becomes stable habits, learned skills, concepts, and patterns of living that are rational and valuable insofar as they are instrumental means to valued ends. The ends range from satisfying biological needs to expressing oneself in a work of art. Our evolved mind is disposed to cognitively objectify experience, to see it as experience of an external world. The species would never have survived without the capacity to objectify the objects, threats, and resources, and then describe them through language and other communicative vehicles. To form the notion of external objects is a crucial cognitive and emotive step to becoming a common sense realist in everyday life. Objectification depends on a learned distinction between my (internal) experiences and external objects. The world both causes the experiences and is represented in my mind. Given the distinction between my experience and the external world, humans quickly sort out things as real or unreal—a basic, everyday ontology. The unreal takes two forms: (a) unreal objects: I learn that some objects are caused only by my mind and do not exist in the external world, for example, imaginations, dreams, and hallucinations. I learn that some of these unreal objects are implanted in my mind by other people or society, for example, witches and Santa Claus; and (b) un-

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real or false facts and explanations about objects, for example, believing that epilepsy is caused by the devil inhabiting a person’s body. As we grow older, to be a realist takes on additional meanings. Realism comes to mean being realistic and is used to describe agency—how efficient and rational we are in achieving goals. To be realistic is to have a firm grasp on existing conditions and to take that into account when planning actions. We call people “unrealistic” if they pursue unachievable goals or use methods that ignore realities—facts about the world, including obstacles. In extreme cases, some people become delusional or, as we say, “totally out of touch” with reality. A delusion is not just a false belief. It is a false belief that resists worldly counter-evidence and usually has a detrimental effect on the believer’s life. I may be deluded into thinking, perhaps caused by paranoia, that my friendly neighbor is a Satanist who wants to kill me. We also distinguish between realists and idealists, between those who prefer to guide their actions by what exists, and those who guide their actions by ideals, or what ought to be. Some political scientists are advocates of realpolitik and propose policies based on assumptions about the competitive and self-interested motives of people and nations. This natural propensity to be realists does not prove the case for philosophical realism but it helps to explain the steady attraction of realism in our thinking and in our lives. We should resist the temptation to dismiss the whole topic of realism and anti-realism as irresolvable or meaningless. The debate over realism is important. It involves profound questions about the relationship of mind and world, experience and reality, fact and non-fact, conceptualization and objective knowledge. Even if we ignore philosophical writings, we, in our ordinary lives, will perforce take some implicit or explicit position on our knowledge of reality. Which view we

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adopt matters. For example, some anti-realism positions, such as the idea that knowledge is socially constructed, are used to question the very idea of rationality, of science, and the idea of defensible ethical values, ending in a corrosive relativism where any belief is as rational or true as another. Sometimes, objective knowledge and criteria of rationality are portrayed as only a matter of social consensus or cultural power, while ethical beliefs are demoted to subjective feelings. This antirealism says our best attempts to know the world are not only flawed and limited. It says they are arbitrary or even irrational. Since many of the debaters are intelligent, often learned, individuals, it is reasonable to assume that the persistence of disagreement is due, in part, to the fact that both realists and anti-realists are pointing to valid but different aspects about how we know the world. The challenge, we believe, is philosophical. We need a hybrid conceptual scheme that acknowledges these intuitions and partial truths but places them within a non-dualistic overarching perspective.

Section Three: Realism in Meta-Ethics Local Moral Realism The discussion of ontological and epistemic realism and anti-realisms leads to realism and anti-realism in ethics. Realism in ethics is a local realism. At its most general level, it is the belief there exists in the world an independent realm of moral objects or moral facts, which are not relative to mental construction or cultural ideology. Moral truth is achieved when our moral judgments correctly describe the objects or facts in the moral domain. Moral truth is moral knowledge, where moral belief fits the objective moral facts. Moral judgment occurs when we correctly identify the moral truths in a situation, or correctly apply objective moral judgments to a

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situation. Because moral facts exist apart from our personal desires or cultural biases, moral statements can be true or false, correct or incorrect, clear or confused. Moral statements, such as “torture is morally wrong in any situation,” are like empirical, factual descriptions of objects. The only difference is that, while the former describes perceived objects and natural phenomena, the later describe moral features, qualities, and facts. Also, like all serious inquiry, moral knowledge comes only after careful thinking. Most moral realisms agree with this general characterization of moral knowledge and the world. Where they differ is what they take the moral facts to be, how we know them, and how those facts came to be. Moral anti-realism disagrees with this general characterization of moral belief. It does not regard moral statements as descriptions of external facts. Anti-realists tend to argue that moral statements cannot be true or false, in the sense of correspondence with moral fact. The overall tendency of antirealisms is to explain morality as a social practice of rules and agreements. The rules and norms are not based on an unchanging moral reality outside the human realm. Antirealisms look at moral beliefs as the product of human psychology, social contracts, or cultural value systems. Since these rules can change from culture to culture, or from one historical era to another, anti-realisms are skeptical of claims about absolute universals and unchanging principles, while taking relativism and pluralism of belief seriously. How these ideas of realism and anti-realism appear in meta-ethics can be shown by examining some of the leading meta-ethical theories. Philosophical ethics begins with the analysis of ethical language. What are we saying when we say that something is right, cruel or shameful? What does “ought” or “wrong” mean? What sort of statement is “Torture is intolerable”? The main rival theories are forms of descriptivism or non-

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descriptivism. When we make ethical statements, such as “John has a duty to keep his promise,” “Reducing harm is the greatest good,” “Ethical people are honest, truthful and kind” are we attempting to describe something about people in general? If I say “the door is closed” I describe the door, ascribing an external feature to an object. Is this what we are doing when we say, “Mary is good”? Are we describing Mary by ascribing a property to her? If we say “To cause unnecessary pain to anyone is bad” are we stating (or describing) a fact about the world, perhaps a special kind of fact—a moral fact? Or, if this view of ethical statements strikes us as improbable, should we go to the other extreme and say that, when we make ethical statements, we are not describing anything at all? Meta-ethical theories can be categorized depending on how they answer these questions. A theory is descriptive if it contends that ethical statements do describe actions or objects in some manner, and they are true when their descriptions are correct. A theory is non-descriptive if it denies this view and attributes some other function to ethical language. Now, we have portrayed moral realism as taking moral claims literally, as claims that “purport to describe the moral properties of people, actions, and institutions.”44 Thus, descriptivism tends to be realistic. Non-descriptivism leans towards anti-realism. Our decision to be descriptivist or non-descriptivist will affect whether we believe ethics is factual or non-factual, true or false, objective or subjective. For descriptivists, if ethical statements do not describe, they cannot be true or false. There must be a moral property or fact corresponding to “good,” “right” or “duty” that determines whether the ethical statement is true or false. My ethical statement can only be true if it correctly corresponds to the way the world is, in the same way that my statement about the size of the moon is only true if it corresponds to the way the moon is. Otherwise, ethical statements express subjective feelings or relative opinions.

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This view is sometimes called “moral realism” because it believes that ethical statements describe what is real. Descriptivism can take many forms. One view is that terms like “good” refer to natural things such as pleasure, the satisfaction of my preferences, or the maximization of utility. If goodness is pleasure, then to say that an action is good is to say it creates pleasure. It is factual and descriptive. I describe an objective feature of that action. Another view is that ethical terms such as “morally good” refer to a special moral property of “goodness” that is indefinable and therefore not reducible to natural properties such as pleasure.45 Despite their differences, all descriptivists argue that it is clear that ethical judgments describe things if we look at what we normally say. When I say that John is honest, I ascribe the property of honesty to him. The statement is true or false depending on whether John has that property or not, apart from how I feel about it. When I say an action is wrong I am saying it has certain properties, such as causing harmful consequences, that make it wrong. When I say Mary is a good person I ground my judgment in objective features of Mary such as her kindness to strangers. Descriptivists and realists see ethical statements as similar to empirical and scientific judgements. To say, “Mary is a good person” is to describe her in a way similar to “My Honda is a good car.” To say, “x is right” is similar in form to “x is red.” Both ethical and empirical judgements are true by virtue of objective properties in the world. We also say things like, “It is just a fact that torturing babies for perverse pleasure is wrong.” We say that helping Mary in distress is really good. This suggests that we are describing something. Moreover, if an ethical disagreement is not over a property or fact, then what is it about? If ethics is only about expressing our feelings, then how can we rationally discuss differences in feelings and attitudes? Why debate at all in ethics, why reason and inquire, if we do not think it will

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get us closer to the truth? There must be something we can be right or wrong about. For realists, there are correct answers in ethics and discussion is to “discover what these objective facts are.”46 Non-descriptivism rejects this descriptive-realist way of understanding ethical language. It holds that ethical statements are not made true by externally independent real things because ethical language is not descriptive, or not primarily descriptive. On this view, descriptivists are mistaken about how ethical language functions. The strongest version of nondescriptivism argues that you are simply in error if you think ethical statements describe anything.47 The truth is that ethical language does not seek to describe or represent the world at all. What is the function of ethical language then? One influential view is that the function of ethical language is to express our moral emotions or feelings about some person or some action. We project our values, emotions, and practical attitudes onto actions and objects. There are two main non-descriptive theories. The primary function of ethical language is (1) to express approval or disapproval of some action. This is called expressivism. Or (2) it is to prescribe or forbid some action, not to describe it. This is prescriptivism. For (1) and (2) ethical language cannot be literally true or false, in the realist sense of corresponding to some external fact or property. Instead, the purpose of ethical language is to guide conduct by indicating what we approve of and commend it to others, so as to influence their behavior. Expressivism holds that ethical judgments such as “x is good” express my positive feelings toward and my approval of x, while “x is bad” expresses my negative feelings and disapproval.48 Prescriptivism holds that ethical judgments are not descriptions in the indicative form, “x is P,” but prescriptions in the imperative form, “Do x.” Ethical statements are value judgments that typically take the form of imperatives or

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commands, such as “Do not murder.” In making an ethical statement, I am not expressing my attitude toward an action. I am prescribing. I am saying that you ought to do some action, or not do it. Richard M. Hare, who developed prescriptivism as a theory, argued that a descriptive sentence such as “the door is shut” tells us something is the case. It differs from the imperative, “Shut the door,” which is not used to tell someone what is the case. It is used to tell someone “to make something the case.”49 On Hare’s view, ethics consists of our most basic and universal prescriptions. These forms of non-descriptivism depend on a distinction between the descriptive and the ethical meaning of a statement. It is the latter that makes ethical language distinct. Charles Stevenson was one of the first to argue for the view that words, especially moral words, have an “emotive” sense in addition to a descriptive sense. The emotive power of a word was its causal ability to “evoke or directly express attitudes, as distinct from describing them.”50 This is the ethical meaning of a sentence. In this view, ethical statements such as “Mary is good” or “Do not kill,” have a factual element. When I say, “Mary is a good person,” I can be describing her on one level. If asked why I think she is good, I can describe several of her features, such as her kindness, her honesty, and so forth. To condemn killing presupposes the capacity to identify actions as instances, given a number of factual considerations. But, for non-descriptivists, simply naming these features does not make the sentence an ethical assertion. It only becomes an ethical assertion when I emotively respond to the actions or features in question. I condemn or commend such features to others. This response constitutes the emotive sense of moral language. The challenge for non-descriptivists is to show how the expression of feelings or attitudes, or the issuing of prescriptions, can have a rational and objective basis. If I say, “I hate x” or “do x” and you reply, “but I love x,” or

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“do not do x,” what is left for ethics to discuss if this is only an expression of feeling? Asking about the meaning of ethical language leads to epistemological questions about how to justify ethical statements. Traditionally, there have been six main justifications: feeling or sentiment, moral facts, metaphysics, tradition, direct intuition, or rationality. We have already discussed the first two justifications. What about the other options? I can ground my beliefs metaphysically by appealing to some source of authority that transcends the world and is beyond natural human faculties. Appeal to religion is one metaphysical approach. To justify my ethical beliefs I may cite the authority of the commands of God. Also, I can ground my beliefs on social customs and traditions. What is right or wrong is what the tradition of my family, ethnic group, or culture says is right or wrong. Traditional values have served my community for many years and therefore deserve respect. Without traditional values, individuals act in selfish ways against the common good. Finally, I can ground my beliefs on rationality and experience. This option is sometimes called “naturalism.” It regards ethics as grounded in natural human experiences, capacities, needs (individual and social) and the evolution of such capacities in the human species. It does not ground ethics on a transcendent authority, and it subjects cultural traditions to the test of human experience. An ethical belief is valid or true because one can provide reasons from logic and experience. It is possible that ethical beliefs could find support from two or all three approaches. My rational belief in the principle of equal respect for all humans may be supported by my community’s traditions and by my religion. Naturalistic theories stress either direct or indirect methods of knowing or validating ethical beliefs. Direct theories refer back to the prior mention of intuitions. Direct theories often

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claim that humans can intuit or directly apprehend the goodness or badness of actions or properties, or intuit the correctness of moral principles. Principles such as “torturing is wrong” do not need a long argument to be shown true. They are not inferences from other things I know.51 Who doesn’t intuit that debilitating pain is bad? One knows that one should keep one’s promise to Tom by reflecting on what is involved in the act of promising. These moral truths are self-evident. The philosophical formulation of this view is called intuitionism and it has been put forward in different forms by major ethicists such as Henry Sidgwick, G. E. Moore, and W. D. Ross. Intuitions are “non-inferential cognitions” that is, they are not inferred from, or justified by reference to, other beliefs and judgments.52 They are self-evident to “an intelligent and unbiased mind.”53 Intuition is usually a form of descriptivism and realism. Ross thought that, through intuition, we see that we have a number of basic duties by simply reflecting on the type of action in question. I intuit duties of fidelity (honesty and promise keeping) justice, gratitude, beneficence, selfimprovement, and non-injury.54 Some moralists argue that if we encounter a gang beating up an elderly person in the street we intuit that action as wrong. Immediately. Skeptics about intuitionism argue that intuitions depend on background assumptions and learning. For example, someone might claim that if I walk around a corner and suddenly see a group of teenagers setting fire to a cat, I intuit immediately (and innately?) the wrongness of the act. Yet, this ignores an inconvenient fact: cat-burning was a common entertainment or activity in Western Europe until the nineteenth century. It may be argued more generally that all or most of our oral intuitions are learned, cultural dispositions. Other critics argue that to say, “I intuit that x is wrong” tells us no more than “x is wrong.” The upshot is that we need to reason about our intuitions.55

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Indirect theories deny that there are direct ways of justifying what we say since everything we know is indirectly apprehended through a process of interpretation and reasoning. This view acknowledges the activity of the human mind in moral judgment and, thus, appears to be constructivist, as defined earlier. However, the indirect ethicist can be a realist and not a constructivist by claiming that, in the end, the proper use of that mental activity can, and does, arrive at moral knowledge. Yet another possibility is to argue that humans know ethical beliefs by using both direct and indirect methods of justification, for example, some combination of intuitions and forms of reasoning. Some indirect ethicists are holists. They believe that an ethical conclusion follows from balancing a wide variety of factors such as intuitions about what is good or right, facts about humans and the situation in question, expected consequences, our basic values and emotions, and the weighing of conflicting general principles. Other indirect ethicists are monists who think that the process of justification is simpler and clearer than the holistic process. Monists think that all of our ethical conclusions can be inferred in a fairly direct fashion from one supreme principle. Utilitarianism is monistic in spirit because to decide if an act is right or wrong, we calculate whether the act produces the greatest amount of utility. We see if the act follows as a deduction from the principle of utility. For example, I could argue on simple utilitarian grounds that journalists should publish damaging reports on corrupt politicians because the harm caused is outweighed by the overall good of exposing bad acts, giving a voice to the less powerful, and by keeping politicians mindful of their public duties. Publication of harmful reports, where supported by evidence, follows quite directly by a calculus of utility. Other philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, put forward a more complex view whereby we know a judgment is obligato-

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ry or right by testing it with a number of rational procedures. One test is whether I could will my maxim of action to be a universal principle for all people in similar circumstances. Another test is whether the maxim is consistent with the moral law which is Kant’s categorical imperative. One formulation of that principle forbids treating anyone merely as a means to an end. Another form of indirect theory is based on fair human agreements. We come to know what we ought to do by considering whether the act can be justified by principles to which all interested parties could fairly and reasonably agree. This is usually a form of non-descriptivism and tends towards holistic reasoning. Ethical judgments do not describe ethical facts. They express norms that we agree should govern our interactions. In this sense, the view sounds more like a form of prescriptivism. One such view is contract theory, or contractualism, which thinks that what is right, obligatory, or wrong in any domain of society is determined by principles that define a reasonable cooperative framework. An action is right or wrong “if the act accords with, or violates principles that are, or would be, the object of a suitable agreement between equals.”56 In other words, an ethical principle is justified if it can be derived from a hypothetical (or other) contract which meets certain conditions such as equal and fair participation by all participants. In modern ethical theory, ethics as fair agreement has acquired a strong social meaning in writers such as John Rawls, Thomas Scanlon, and Jürgen Habermas. Impartial reasoning means we are able to justify to others our norms, our policies, and our reasons for acting. Justification is an open and fair dialogue among all parties about the impact of a norm on their interests, from their distinctive positions in the world. For Scanlon, I have to argue in terms that people, with similar moral motivations, “could not reasonably reject.”55 We con-

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struct our ethics through a process of deliberation. Hence, ethical judgments as agreed-upon rules are better referred to as reasonable, fair, and useful rather than literally true or false.56 Contract theorists are often seen as anti-realists because the rules of agreement are not true or false because they refer to an independent realm of objects in nature. They are human inventions or constructions. They are practical prescriptions or proposals on how to act which may be useful or not, efficient or not, fair or unfair; but not literally true or false in the sense of a correspondence to external objects. However, the rules, agreements and moral roles are hardly unreal or an illusion. They are social facts, created by humans but real. Therefore, one can argue that contractualism can also be seen as a realism—a social realism which refers to facts about moral rules and behavior. Objectivity and Relativism These theories of meaning and justification have implications for two of the most difficult and enduring questions. Is ethics objective or subjective? Is ethics absolute or relative? In a famous passage, Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, describes how Darius the Great, King of Persia, encountered Greeks who cremated their dead fathers and Callatiae Indians who were said to eat them. The Greeks were appalled at the practice of eating parents; the Indians were appalled at the burning of their bodies.57 Plato began Western philosophy by responding to relativism. He gave himself the task of showing that objective knowledge about society and human nature was possible and should replace the shifting, relative opinions of most people. Today’s ethical relativism is more often described as cultural relativism, originating in studies of differing cultures by anthropologists and sociologists.

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The questions are difficult because they involve complex notions of knowledge, including what objectivity means. Two senses of objectivity have dominated the discussion. One sense is ontological objectivity. To be ontologically objective, a belief must correctly describe or correspond to the way the world is. It must refer to some actually existing object or state of affairs and it must truly ascribe certain properties to an object or state of affairs, such as size or mass. My belief that there is a flock of pink flamingos in my bedroom is not objective because it is due to my imagination or my dreaming. My belief that there is a bright yellow tree in my backyard is not objective because the tree is actually dark brown. Ontological objectivity is usually a thesis of realism. A second sense is epistemic objectivity or methodological objectivity. We may struggle to know what is true, or what corresponds to reality, but we can still understand objectivity as good methods and correct norms of inquiry. My beliefs are objective to the extent that they are formed and tested by rigorous methods that detect bias, reduce error, and test for evidence and logic. In science, a study that claims a group of genes in the brain are causally related to Parkinson’s disease is tested for plausibility and objectivity by studying the methods it used, and by seeing if it meets the standards of evidence. Objectivity in this methodological sense does not guarantee truth. In the end, the study may prove to be false or incomplete. Here, objectivity is defined in ways that take the activity of the human mind into account, and stress the proper, rigorous, and methodological employment of cognition. In this sense, epistemic objectivity is consistent with realism. However, as we will see, it is possible to define knowledge or truth in terms of this methodological employment, and forgo claims to know reality in itself. Some descriptivists argue that to adopt a non-descriptive view of good and right—that they do not describe at all—is to

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commit oneself to relativism. If good means what I or some group think is good, or what I or a group approves, then ethical norms are relative to how we think about them. Intuitionism appears to be committed to ontological objectivity because the agent intuits that some action is objectively right or wrong, and that judgment is not relative to culture or individual beliefs. The judgment is true absolutely, that is, apart from questions of its origin in a time period or culture. Opposed to absolutism, and its realist idea of objectivity, is relativism. The claim of relativism appears in varying strengths. Strong relativism holds that all beliefs are true or valid relative to a background theory or culture. Moreover, there are no impartial criteria to judge a background theory or culture as better than another. Strong relativists hold that any morality is as true or as justified as any other. Moderate relativists deny that there is any single true morality but also hold that some moralities are more true or more justified than others.60 For Plato and other realists, the relativism that needs to be opposed is “status” relativism, not “circumstantial” relativism.61 Circumstantial relativism says that what we ought to do depends on, and must be relativized to, the relevant circumstances of the action. This view is not highly controversial since it is only common sense to say that how we apply principles should take circumstances into account, and the facts on the ground can (and should) affect our moral judgments. For example, normally we ought not to slap people vigorously, but if someone groggy from sleeping pills must wake up or die, you may be obligated to slap the person, repeatedly. The form of relativism that is controversial is status relativism which says the justification (or validity status) for the principles themselves are relative to custom or society. There are no universally binding principles. There are no objective principles, where objective means justification not relative to society and binding for all societies.62 For circumstantial relativ-

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ism, the application of principles is relative to circumstances; for status relativism, their justification is relative to circumstances. The first assumption of ethical relativism, that cultures in different times and places have different values, seems true. Seventeenth-century England believed slavery was correct; twentieth-century England does not. Today, our culture would question female circumcision in tribal countries; other cultures would not. Our society places more value on individual freedom and egalitarian social structures than cultures that value a caste system, or a strict social hierarchy. Ethical differences also exist among groups within cultures. However, ethical relativism is not just the observation that different groups hold different ethical beliefs. Why not? Because non-relativists can agree that there is a plurality of ethical beliefs and systems. In fact, philosophers have known for centuries that ethical values differed among cultures but most of them did not conclude that relativism was true. One reason was a belief in a God who prescribed ethical norms, absolutely, even if some humans refused to accept them. But there were non-religious reasons. There are ways of explaining the differences in belief that are consistent with objectivity. The fact that you and I disagree whether the world is round or flat doesn’t mean there is no correct objective answer. The fact that people differ on the causes of climate change doesn’t mean there isn’t a correct view. The fact that there are different beliefs about any topic by itself proves nothing. Moreover, differences in practices and ethical beliefs may be variations on underlying objective principles embraced by all cultures. It may be that all cultures agree on general ethical values such as a respect for life, truth, and non-violence, but they differ on how they practice those values. Therefore, the relativist must show that there are substantial differences that are not due simply to a failure of knowledge or lack of facts,

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and can’t be reduced to variations of common principles. The relativist must justify her claim that there are no cross-cultural criteria for evaluating ethical beliefs. The relativist must also explain how relativism is consistent with the engaged stance of applied ethics. Relativism is the result of adopting the disengaged stance of philosophical ethics. The relativist steps back from ethics and observes the differences among ethical systems. Then he announces his skepticism about objective moral standards. The problem is whether he can maintain relativism when he returns to living and doing ethics in everyday life. Perhaps the relativists at work will have to argue for the correctness of a judgment or norm, or criticize someone’s actions. How can he hold that ethical beliefs are completely relative yet firmly criticize someone’s ethical actions, especially someone who belongs to another group? Another problem is whether relativism favors a noncritical traditionalism. If I think all ethical views are relative and no view is better than any other view, why bother to critically assess and improve ethics? What does “improve” mean if ethics is utterly subjective or relative? Why not just follow the norms that prevail in your culture? Finally, a strong relativism seems to undermine itself. If all beliefs are true only relative to a conceptual scheme or culture, is the belief in relativism also relative to some scheme or culture? And if there is no way to evaluate different schemes, why believe that relativism is true? Relativism is true for you but false for me. That is the end of the matter. Or is the strong relativist forced into the awkward position of having to say there is only one belief that is not relative: the truth of relativism? For centuries, objectivists and the relativists have portrayed the other as undesirable and even dangerous. Relativism is associated with nihilism and extreme skepticism, and a refusal to stand up to unethical practices in other cultures. People fear

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that relativism will leave us with no way to say what is actually right or wrong, or unable to justify our claim that Hitler or some other tyrant is or was objectively wrong. It is all a matter of opinion and perspective. Relativists reply that objectivism leads to dogmatism and absolutism. Judging other cultures smacks of cultural arrogance or intolerance. Relativism urges tolerance and dialogue, and this is more in line with liberal democratic thought.63

Section 4: The Pendulum of Debate The back-and-forth debate between realists and antirealists, armed with their theories, resembles the motion of a pendulum. At one point, some version of realism is the dominant theory in meta-ethics but then the cultural climate changes and a new form of anti-realism is ascendent, only to be challenged, in time, by a new realism. It is important to gain an overview of this pendulum operating in the history of ideas so we can see what the options are for escaping the back and forth and for constructing an alternate perspective. In the Beginning: Plato and the Sophists The rivalry between realism and anti-realism goes back to the beginning of philosophy. The first realists were the preSocratic natural philosophers such as Thales, Anaximander, Empedocles and Democritus, from the seventh to the fifth century BC.64 They sought to explain processes naturally through observation, mathematics, reason and hypotheses.65 They thought that the unifying principles of nature were material elements such as water, air, and fire, or atoms, or a universal matter that took on many forms. These philosophical constructions departed from religion and myth, which based

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their stories on revelations, oracles, and the weight of tradition. Plato, Aristotle and others developed a realist ontology (and epistemology) about human nature, knowledge, and the world which stressed the capacity of reason to grasp the truth about reality. Knowledge is a rationally secure state of mind about real things, while belief is a rationally insecure state of mind about objects that exist in a “twilight” zone— appearances that are neither wholly real nor wholly non-existent. This philosophical realism carried on in the Stoics with their imperative to “act according to nature” and then on to the supernatural ethics of Christian thinkers such as Augustine where reality reflects God’s will and his moral creation. The anti-realist tradition was represented by itinerant teachers of public skills and rhetoric called sophists. A series of sophists, from Protagoras to Thrasymachus, converged on Athens during the second half of the fifth century BC attracting large crowds to their orations. For a fee, the sophists provided a higher education in grammar, music, law, and human affairs. The sophist taught how to become a successful citizen by learning rhetoric and other ways of persuasion. The sophists did not challenge mores and practices. They advised individuals how to be successful given a society’s mores and practices. In Plato’s Protagoras, Protagoras tells Socrates that he teaches the management of personal and public affairs so that the student can “realize one’s maximum potential for success in political debate and action.”66 Morality was reduced to social mores or manners which do not reflect anything objective or independently real in nature. Mores or ethical beliefs could only be assessed in a pragmatic manner, according to their immediate usefulness for individuals or society. Moral statements were neither true nor false in some higher, metaphysical sense. There were no universal moral laws.

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Sophistic teaching was a strong relativism. The sophists pointed to the plurality of opinion on many topics—from beliefs about the gods to beliefs about society. This relativism fit the fifth-century Greek enlightenment, where regular contact with other cultures had made obvious the plurality of beliefsystems.67 Before the sophists, Xenophanes had said that the Thracian gods resembled the Thracians and that if cows and horses could draw they would depict their gods as cattle and horses. Protagoras’s statement that “man is the measure of all things” meant that truth was how the world appeared to each individual man or society. Necessary laws ruled nature, but variable conventions ordered human societies. “The laws of men are fixed by agreement, not by nature,” wrote the sophist Antiphon. Society was the shifting, every changing world of “techne” (or practical skill) and “nomos.” Plato, in his dialogues Georgias, Protagoras, Euthydemus, and Sophist, criticized sophists for charging fees, for seeking victory not truth in argument, and for teaching relative opinion rather than true knowledge. The debate between the realist Plato and the anti-realist sophists was an early form of the rivalry between realism and constructionism. The opening of Plato’s Republic displays the many conflicting views about justice and ethics in Athens and beyond Athens: relativism, contractualism, ‘might makes right,’ and the good as religious piety. To counter these views, Plato constructed an elaborate metaphysical view of man’s place in the cosmos where what was true, good and perfect defined a higher reality. What was good for man was grounded objectively in that higher reality, not in the imperfect realm of society. For Plato, goodness in the soul reflected goodness in nature. According to Plato’s three-part conception of the psyche, a well-ordered and virtuous human nature was a proper ordering of the three souls within humans—rational (or reason),

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emotive, and sensual. In a good or just man, reason is able to control and direct the other two parts of the soul. This order in the soul, this justice inherent in the person, reflected the harmonious, rational order of the world. Immorality or evil occurs when humans refuse to order their souls as intended by nature. The Plato–sophist confrontation is a defining moment in Western intellectual history. For the first time, theories of realism and anti-realism, objectivity and relativism, clash. Later, the Stoics in Greece and Rome developed realism as a theory of natural law which explained morality, virtue, and society. Human laws and conventions were valid if based on laws of nature laid down by a deity or by reason. The good life was a life of virtue, lived according to nature as discerned by reason. Realism was the dominant approach to meta-ethics across the long medieval era in the West. It became a religious or theological realism based on the Bible and other sacred texts. Metaphysics and natural theology attempted to discover the one true nature of a divine cosmos. Medieval scholastics believed the world was a divine artefact, its structure and content produced by divine will. The true theory is one that most accurately represents that structure. Augustine’s grand theology in City of God was a landmark intellectual event, combining Greek philosophy and Christian writings to provide a realist understanding of God and creation. Augustine would be followed by other Christian thinkers from Peter Abelard and Anselm of Canterbury to Aquinas. The debate among realists and skeptics of realism developed into a fierce quarrel among logicians during the medieval era. The debate was over the existence of universals. Realists held that when we say that two or more things have the same property or are the same kind of thing, for example, are red, are square, are men, or are just, they share an abstract property like redness or justice. Realists, such as the Neo-

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Platonists, went further to say that this property is a real and independently existing abstract object, not only a mental concept. The universal exists to the same degree as the concrete, individual things seen by the eye. Universals are known through the intellect—the mind’s eye, as it were. Anti-realists about universals, called “nominalists,” disagreed.68 Only particular things, like individual men or individual trees, exist in reality. The nominalists set about trying to conceptually reduce the universal to a ‘name’ for loose collections of particular things of which we note a similarity. Or, they argued that a general term like justice referred to a mental concept, not an independently existing abstract thing. The battle went back to antiquity when the nominalist Antisthenes says to Plato” “I can see the horse, Plato, but not horseness….I can see the horse. But I can’t see the universal.” Erasmus in the Middle Ages alleged that the realism dispute became so heated that philosophers “wrangle…till they take to abuse and spitting, and sometimes even with fisticuffs.”69 It is difficult for us to understand why the medieval debate became so emotional. Was this not just an arcane matter of logic? Hardly. An entire worldview or theology—such as Augustine’s view that divine illumination was consciousness of divine ideas about the absolute unity of the Trinity and of God’s creation—could stand or fall on the existence of universals. The argument was over the true nature of the world. Universals continued to vex philosophers and others into the modern era. In the seventeenth century, Locke, declared that most words are general terms which refer to particular things because “all things that exist being particulars.”70 Today, we continue to debate universals, as a concept, and we also question whether there are laws in morality or in nature that are universal, in the sense of applying in all contexts.

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Enlightenment, Idealism, and the World During the early modern period, the eighteenth century Enlightenment and the nineteenth century Romantic era, realism was central in foundational debates about the limits of knowledge and the proper methods of inquiry. Realism also entered debates about the authority of science and religion, and which human faculties were best suited to discerning reality, creating art, and supporting morality. The primary element in knowledge was reason for the rationalists; the senses for the empiricists; observation, quantitative measurement and mathematical calculation for the new experimental scientists; imagination and deep emotions for romantics. The search was on for a new “organon” or method of inquiry that would replace or improve Aristotelean and medieval theological methods. In the seventeenth century, Descartes sought a First Philosophy of absolute and certain truths in the Cogito which would ground less absolute and less certain beliefs in science and about the world. The basis of knowledge was the correct use of reason, with its capacity to produce clear and distinct ideas within the mind. Francis Bacon found a ground for knowledge in the empirical method of discovering facts unbiased by the “idols” of the mind. As the dominance of Christianity declined, and many new forms of alleged knowledge arose, philosophers had to make epistemology a major concern. Before making large claims about the world, thinkers needed to “critique” the instruments of knowledge, including the limits of language and common sense. These debates could hardly avoid the meta questions of realism and anti-realism. As in Greek antiquity and in medieval times, the terms of the debate were set by the prevailing systems of knowledge and changing cultural conditions. Thus, early modern realists and anti-realists debated the existence

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and nature of God, the soul, freedom, the self, and whether something lawfully material (for example, forces of nature) or lawfully mental or spiritual (for example, Hegel’s selfcreating Absolute Spirit) gave order to reality. The debate reflected the rise of science and a deterministic, materialistic worldview. We can roughly group many of the leading theories into two categories: scientific materialism and philosophical (and romantic) idealism, which sought to preserve a spiritual conception of the world. By the nineteenth century, modernity would emerge expressed in two macro trends: industrial capitalism in the economy and a populism in politics which agitated for democracy or greater liberties against the old monarchical order. Romanticism was a negative reaction to the disenchantment of nature by materialism. Romantics were alienated from the new society being created by rapacious capitalism. Commercial mass society was driven by the ideology of progress, what had utility, and what could be quantified and measured. Appalled by the brute facts of modernity, many philosophers and artists developed idealistic accounts of history, art, and the world. They stressed the importance of mind, ideas, ideals, and spiritual forces. Materialists were anti-realists about the mind as a spiritual entity or a Cartesian mental substance. They tended to reduce mind to brain or bodily states, or treat it as an epiphenomenon of bodily activity. In contrast, idealists stressed the superior reality of a world of ideas. Some were global anti-realists, doubting the independent reality of the material world. For example, in 1710, Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) attempted to counter strict materialism— everything that exists is material—by going to the other extreme, metaphysical idealism—everything is mental. He reduced the natural world as it appears to ideas and minds. His

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“immaterialism” or mental realism was based on the principle, “esse is percipi”, to be is to be perceived by a mind.71 Later, as noted earlier, Kant’s (1724-1804), transcendental idealism would combine realism and idealism (and empiricism and a priori philosophy) by making the external world a necessary postulation for experience but unknowable in itself. Kant was fighting an intellectual battle on several fronts. One, he was a skeptic, or anti-realist, about the many metaphysical systems of his era with their irresolvable quarrels about unobservable higher entities and absolute forces. He inquired into the limits of the mind, showing that the metaphysical systems were speculations that tried (unsuccessfully) to go beyond those limits. This was his influential “critical philosophy.” Two, in explaining the limits of the mind, Kant created an epistemology and psychology of how humans construct their sense of the world. In doing this, he wrote as an idealist and a constructivist. This was his “Copernican revolution” in philosophy: Study how the mind orders the world, not vice versa. Three, despite his constructionism, he wanted to preserve realist beliefs in God, freedom, and morality. He had to deal with the fact that scientists like Newton and Descartes before him had explained nature in purely physical and mechanical terms which appeared to leave little or no room for freedom or God. All of this did not auger well for his belief in the freedom of the individual or the reality of the moral law—a moral realism. Hence, his second critique of practical reason grounded moral realism on the capacity of the mind to recognize and revere a universal moral law, or categorical imperative, a law that humans give to themselves. Four, by reducing what we can validly claim to know about the world to the realm of empirical appearance, Kant believed he had limited (empirical or scientific) reason to allow room for belief in God, freedom and morality which existed in a noumenal world outside the laws of material deter-

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minism. Kant was trying to hold on to realism about natural knowledge—the external world exists—and realism about morality—freedom and morality exist. Kant brings together centuries of realist and constructivist thought into a new hybrid philosophy. It was an awesome task and, of course, not all of it was successful. It shows how difficult it had become to maintain realism in the modern world. Kant’s motivation for such deep inquiries was not only intellectual. He feared that theoretical and social trends were threatening the dignity of man, the possibility of morality, and the degradation of philosophy. Later idealists and romantics would look back to Kant for inspiration when defending the dignity of the human and of the human mind. We can sense Kant’s intensity in his copious handwritten notes on his copy of Alexander Baumgarden’s Metaphysics (1757)—a seminal work in eighteenth-century philosophy and aesthetics. Kant expressed his feelings about the trends around him. He states that philosophy has “authoritative dignity over human reason and all the crafts.” Philosophy is the practical knowledge of man; and everything else is knowledge of nature and a craft of reason. Then he exclaims: “O! It is to be regretted that we have let this sense (or philosophy) disappear. Without such a distinguishing title, this knowledge is not separated from others and there is no actual doctrine of philosophy.”72 Given Kant’s importance to the history of realism, it is worth delving further into his philosophical system. Kant’s epistemology combined elements of empiricism and rationalism to explain how the mind obtains knowledge of the world. All experience is rationally and conceptually interpreted experience. All experience of reality is mediated experience— mediated by conceptual schemes and the interpretations which are built upon those schemes. Kant claimed that the mind comes equipped with basic a priori categories and intuitions without which no experience would be possible. These cate-

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gories, such as space, time, and causality, interpret sense data and determine the structure of all experience. Nature, as it exists in itself, is an unknowable realm of “things-in-themselves.”73 The mind knows only a sequence of appearances. Science knows nature as a lawful system of appearances, filtered through a priori categories. Kant called these categories “a priori” or “transcendental,” because they do not derive from empirical experience. They belong to the structure of all minds. We do not directly experience these structural concepts. We cannot introspect them as an object before the mind. We can only notice (or experience) how they work to order experience. We start with the experience and work backwards to its necessary mental conditions. Kant’s philosophy makes the question whether he was a realist or anti-realist either difficult to answer, or not a sensible question to ask, given the hybrid nature of his thought. For instance, his Copernican revolution seems to favor antirealism because of its stress on the mind’s contribution to understanding the empirical world. Yet Kant was not a relativist or a sophist. He grounded ethical judgment in the lawful, objectively real structures of human reason. Through the exercise of ‘pure’ practical reason, humans recognized their objective duties. Humans give a universal moral law to themselves.74 In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant calls his philosophy a transcendental idealism. Transcendent structures of the mind, known a priori, create our sense of the world. He rejects “material idealism” which regards the existence of objects in space outside of us to be false, or impossible. He rejects Berkley’s material idealism which “declares space…to be merely imaginary.”75 However, he thinks Descartes’ “problematic idealism” is appropriate as a philosophical method since it makes no “decisive judgment” on any belief until sufficient proof is found. However, on another reading, Kant appears to

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be a realist. He maintains the existence of external objects as causes of our sensations76 and he defines truth in the traditional realist way as “agreement of knowledge with its object.” But he then asked, true to his critical philosophy, what the “criterion of truth” could be.77 For Kant, experience becomes objective knowledge (or truth) when we do two epistemic things: When we reason within the bounds of experience, properly applying categories to sensible intuitions; and, more particularly, when we order and test our judgments by observation, logic, and mathematical analysis. Ultimately, Kant escapes easy placement in the realist or constructionist camp, and presents us with one of the first, comprehensive attempts at a hybrid epistemology. We will encounter more recent hybrids in the next chapter. After Kant, idealism would be taken up by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). They stressed the importance of the will, ideas, and the ego in our construction of the world. They follow Kant in his Copernican turn towards the representational mind. At times, they stress the mental side of experience to such an extent that one wonders whether their philosophies entail solipsism. Or, they seem closer to Berkeley with his immaterialism than to Kant with his transcendental idealism. Ontologically, what are we to make of Schopenhauer’s dramatic introduction to his major work, The World as Will and Representation of 1818 and 1844.78 The book’s idealistic title is enough to cause us to pause. “The world is my representation,” he states, categorically. He continues: There is a subject-object dichotomy to all representational experience. It is certain and immediately known that “everything there is for cognition (for example, the whole world) is only an object in relation to a subject, an intuition of the beholder, is, in a word, representation.”79 What is the sense of “is” in “the world is my representation”? If it is a metaphysical claim, the whole

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world has become an idea or a mental thing. It is literally part of my mind or cognitive experience. Now, if this is true, is this not solipsism? One might reply that Schopenhauer talks a lot about the human body and its desires. So apparently the experiencing cognition is part of the natural world in which human bodies reside. Then the world is not, or not simplicter, only my representation. This seems to be a concession to realism. Perhaps he is not making a metaphysical claim at all. Perhaps he is making the Kantian epistemic and weaker claim that we only know the world through representations. But this is not how Schopenhauer states it, as in the passage just quoted. Moreover, Schopenhauer rejects a Kantian positing of a world in itself (a noumenal sphere), and declares all of my representations and cognitive activity to be “objectifications” of the will. This raises (once again) the question of the ontological status of the representations, the mind, and the will. To put it as simply as possible: Where is the mind, where are the representations? Where are we, as individuals, as embodied agents? Are we deluded in our common sense realism that we exist in nature? Are we stuck in a mental, solipsistic universe? Where is the will if not in our bodies and in a natural world which exists independently of our mind? Where are ideas if not in a mind supported by a brain in this natural world? Is all of this an illusion or a secondary form of knowing, to be replaced by some higher spiritual knowledge? It appears so. Let us keep reading in Schopenhauer’s book. Consider Book 3 where we find his Platonic theory of contemplation, including the dispassionate contemplation of beautiful art works. Schopenhauer argues that the highest form of knowledge is achieved when cognition becomes “pure,” relinquishing worldly desires and opinions to grasp by intellect the pure, eternal forms. In this pure philosophical contemplation, the subject “draws nature into himself, so that he feels it only as an accident of his being.” The same sort of

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state of contemplation of essences occurs when we experience art properly, or objectively. To fill out his point, Schopenhauer quotes Byron: “Are not the mountains, waves and skies, a part of me and of my soul, as I of them?” Schopenhauer argues that, at this point, one is “seized” by a higher consciousness that I as subject is all that is. He notes, approvingly, a passage from Hinduism. The Upanishads of the Verda describe the highest enlightened state as the realization that “I am all these creations taken together,” and “there is no other being besides me.” He dismisses Hegel and “others” who construct historical accounts of the course of the world—mere “constructions.” They fail to see that “becoming and arising are only seeming; the Ideas alone are permanent; time ideal.”80 So now we have an ahistorical idealism which casts doubt on the reality of our natural experience, or regards it as a second-rate reality. In fact, Schopenhauer goes further and embraces what Friedrich Nietzsche critically called a “pessimism” or a “Buddhistic negation of the will,” a disaffirmation of life.81 For Schopenhauer, great souls should heroically refuse to listen to a will that is the cause of our misery. Romantically, they should aesthetically “suffer the world” and seek higher, Platonic knowledge or art. At this point, we understand why realists and naturalists were wary of this form of nineteenth-century idealism, with its mix of romanticism and aestheticism. With this un-Kantian idealism, the hard, external world, so obdurate to our will, is always on the verge of disappearing into a mysticism or solipsism, or an ahistorical vision. Or it treats human experience as imperfect and second-class. Experience is only a seeming, as Schopenhauer states. This approach invites a retreat into a soft, spiritual fog of unsituated ego, or the reduction of reality to free-floating ideas or states of higher consciousness. Rather than make the ego or consciousness the starting point of philosophy, realists prefer to presume the existence of an exter-

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nal, natural world, and explain the mind and everything else as situated in that world. Idealism was an important philosophical and cultural development. The ideational metaphysics of Hegel and Schopenhauer would dominate the thinking and practice of philosophers, artists, composers and many others in the West. Romanticism in art, music, and letters would be drawn to it. Schopenhauer was the philosopher of the European salons of the nineteenth century, especially those in Germany and Austria. Friedrich Nietzsche, Arnold Schoenberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gustav Mahler, Wassily Kandinsky and numerous other thought leaders read Schopenhauer carefully and quoted him in their books or in their correspondence. Hegelians had such a grip on philosophy and Germanic higher education in particular that it sparked a revolt among empirical philosophers of science like Ernst Mach and logical positivists such as Rudolph Carnap by the turn of the twentieth century. One reason for the aggressive positivism of Carnap, Otto Neurath and A. J. Ayer was the persistence of the metaphysics of idealism as both a spiritual realism and an anti-realism (or skepticism) about the reality and value of common sense and empirical knowledge. Opposing idealism was the triad of realism, empiricism, and materialism. The Enlightenment of the first half of the eighteenth century saw a hopeful and confident application of reason and science to society and natural phenomena. In England, both mainstream and radical elements of the early Enlightenment sought to clear away the old traditions, from scholasticism and Catholicism to Protestant sectarianism.82 Newton’s Mathematical Principles was the paradigm of exact science, the fulfillment of Bacon’s Organon with its call for new knowledge through natural science and practical applications. Across Europe, scientific societies and sciences, such as chemistry, emerged. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond

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d’Alembert proudly collected the new learning into the Encyclopédie, printing pictures of farm machinery alongside analysis of Newtonian physics and the fine arts. However, late in the eighteenth century, this confidence was succumbing to worries over the bounds of reason and the implications of a Newtonian world. Kant’s limitation of science to sensible appearances demoralized Voltaire, who wrote that every substance is unknown because “we see appearances only; we are in a dream.”83 Moral Naturalism The spread of scientific philosophy did not crush belief in a rational ethics. Instead, some of the best minds of the age constructed ethics on presumed facts about human nature and on conjectures about the origin of society. Naturalistic morals found new principles in human sentiments, utilitarian facts, social contracts, and impartial judgment.84 Moral naturalism began with a psychological interpretation of ethical notions. Locke identified good and bad with our desire to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. Thomas Hobbes defined “good” and “right” as objects that psychologically attract or repel us, respectively. David Hume argued that emotion, not reason, sets the ends of action. Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism was empirical and reformist, reducing decisions to the calculation of pleasures and pains, the greatest good of the greatest number. But this approach begged large questions. If everyone acts according to their interests and sentiments, why should anyone act for the benefit of others? Is empathy and altruism a delusion? Are we really selfish egoists, when we remove the altruistic mask that we must wear in society? If so, is this an argument for strong central authority to restrain our selfinterested impulses?

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Conceptually, the problem of ethics could be phrased as a question: How do we get from the preferences of selfinterested individuals to the collective duties of morality? Hobbes’s answer was an authoritarian version of the social contract: It is in everyone’s interest to place power in the hands of a Leviathan to enforce contracts. Another response was to emphasize a counter-balancing sentiment of benevolence or sympathy. Marquis de Condorcet believed that nature endowed all people with “benevolence…and generous sensibility.” Hume said that, to judge another person as vicious, one must persuade others by appealing to common feelings of sympathy and antipathy towards certain actions, arguing from a “common point of view.” Vanity or ambition may at times overwhelm these feelings, “yet, being common to all men, [sympathy] can alone be the foundation of morals…(for) the humanity of one man is the humanity of everyone.”85 Before the French Revolution, Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, sought to answer a similar question: How is it possible that humans, who are self-interested and full of self-love, are “fit” for society? His answer was an ethical naturalism that placed feelings of sympathy, imagination, and impartial judgment as strong and natural sentiments of all humans. at the center of his moral system. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith departed from the teaching of his instructor in moral philosophy, Francis Hutcheson, who had argued that virtue consisted in benevolence and that benevolent actions are alone worthy of moral approval. Smith saw other virtues, such as the more demanding virtue of “selfcommand.” Also, mankind’s imperfection meant that humans must act from many other motivations. Smith noted that mankind’s self-love or self-regarding propensities are not always anti-social. In fact, they often lead people to enter into social relations. The self-regarding economic activities of individuals can help produce a more productive, wealthy society. In a

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famous passage, Smith noted, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love.” Many of our wants are supplied “by treaty, by barter, and by purchase.”86 For society to exist, however, there must be controls on self-love. Smith thought that people must be disposed to put themselves imaginatively in the place of others and to feel sympathy for them. “(Sympathy) is the source of our fellowfeeling of the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels.”87 But sympathy is not sufficient. In ethics, it is never enough to feel sorrow or joy. One must also judge whether someone’s actions display propriety or impropriety, given his or her situation. To judge of someone’s propriety, we must view the actions and their circumstances “at a certain distance from us.” We look on the actions from the perspective of an external, impartial judge. We do the same when we judge of our own actions. The actions are proper or improper to the degree that impartial spectators can agree or sympathize with them. If they agree, the actions appear as just and proper.88 Yet even the ability to feel sympathy and to judge impartially would not be sufficient control on individuals unless humans cared about the judgment of others and their conscience. Smith therefore argues that humans incline naturally to seek the approval of others and to be worthy of that approval.89 Hence, Smith’s moral philosophy holds that individuals are subject to two forms of restraint—the judgment of other people and the judgment of their own consciences, or the “man within.” The “impartial spectator” is the impartial judgment of conscience within the human “breast.”90 Impartiality, civility, and sentiment had political and social value for a growing

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public sphere. However, the appeal to society and sentiment gradually became problematic. By the mid-eighteenth century, in France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was challenging the restraints of sentiment and polite society. He claimed instead that society corrupted natural feelings. True sentiment had to be rediscovered beneath the false and contrived layers of feeling and manners of sophisticated society. After the failure of the French Revolution, questions of how to order a mass society became urgent and occupied major thinkers. To take just one example, Friedrich Schiller, influenced by Kant, wrestled with this problem in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man of 1795. Ostensibly about aesthetics, the real problem is how culture and art can help to create moral citizens and a stable, but free, society. Schiller chose as an epitaph for his book a phrase from Rousseau which posed the problem of the balance of reason and sentiment: “If it is reason that makes man, it is sentiment that guides him.” To conclude the chapter, we need to note one more feature of modern epistemology that created the problem space for philosophers, and influenced discussions of realism. It was (and is) the tendency, ever since Descartes, to pose the question of knowledge in terms of a subject-object dualism. Knowledge was a mental achievement of the subject of experience, starting with ideas, which presumably were in the head. Somehow, some of those ideas successfully corresponded to external objects. Knowledge was created. But how? Most people were sure the external world they perceived existed and they acted in it. But, philosophically, how could we justify this belief? The need for justification was due to the starting point: the subject-object dualism. If all we ever directly know are our ideas and experience, how does our mind, psychologically, come to construct the idea of an external object as referent of that idea? When do we know—how do we

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know?—that our ideas actually refer to real things and describe them in an objective manner? Also, how do we know that other minds exist? Philosophy seemed to leave us with a paradox or a mystery. A long line of philosophers attempted to explain the presumed gap between mental idea (or sense data) and external object. Descartes said God would not let us be generally deceived by our senses and ideas. Almost all major empirical philosophers of the era, such as Locke and Hume, worked out a genetic psychology of how the mind puts ideas and sense impressions together to arrive at the notion of external objects. Kant worked from within the same problem space. Thomas Reid thought common sense secured the external world. In the nineteenth century, Mill developed a phenomenal and positivist psychological theory. The mind constructed the perceived object as an association of actual and expected sensations. Matter was the “permanent possibility of sensation,” and the world was “the world of possible sensations succeeding one another according to laws.”91 But this was not the notion of a solid, external object held by most people, as realists, before they began to philosophize.

Conclusion We have arrived at the twentieth century where the realism and anti-realism debate would again change to reflect new knowledge and different cultural conditions. By the mid1900s, with the collapse of the project of logical positivism, there was a growth of epistemologies that stressed history, pluralism and cultural relativity. In the social sciences, there arose a contemporary form of constructionism called “social constructionism.” Of special interest for this book is the development of three specific kinds of theorizing: a nuanced relativism, an evolutionary approach to mind and morality, and

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hybrid epistemologies. In a Kantian mode, they sought to combine constructionism and realism.

Notes 1. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 76. 2. Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, 171-198. 3. Lyotard, Why Philosophize?, 13. 4. McIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?”, 3. 5. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 197. 6. See Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. On the limits of this approach, see Felski, The Limits of Critique. 7. James, “Pragmatism,” 17. 8. On the creation of cultural hierarchies, see Habermas, “Modernity: An Incomplete Project,” and Schaeffer, “Art of the Modern Age.” On the origins of the highbrow-lowbrow division in culture in America, see Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. 9. On ethics as a human project that seeks humane and just cooperation, with a long evolutionary history, see Ward’s The Fourth Morality, especially Vol. 2, Chapter 1, “Creating Ethics, Naturally.” 10. Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality. 11. For an overview of philosophical and applied ethics, see LaFollette, The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory. 12. LaFollette uses a three-fold category scheme of meta-ethics, normative ethics, and practical ethics. His normative and practical ethics is contained in our larger category of applied ethics, with normative ethics referring to theories of applied ethics. Brink divides ethics into meta-ethics and normative ethics in a sense close to the scheme in this book. LaFollette, Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory, 1-3; Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, 1-2. 13. See Appiah, Cosmopolitanism. 14. See Darwall, Contractarianism/Contractualism. 15. See Christians, “The Case for Communitarian Ethics.” 16. See Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. 17. On virtue and ethics, see MacIntyre, After Virtue.

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18. Lukes, Moral Relativism, 123. 19. On forms of consequentialism, such as utilitarianism, see Vallentyne, “Consequentialism,” and Frey, “Act-Utilitarianism.” Historically, the locus classicus is Mill’s “Utilitarianism.” 20. Interestingly, Moore, in Principia Ethica, after conceptually analyzing the concept of “the good,” proceeds to violate analytical restrictions on ethics by providing an extended discussion about the kinds of things in the world that are good and why. 21. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 8, 28, 45. 22. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 150, 155. 23. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth, 5-6. 24. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 183. 25. See Strawson, “Truth”;” Alston, A Realist Theory of Truth. 26. Putnam, “Two Philosophical Perspectives.” 27. In what follows, I emphasize realism with regard to the empirical world and the sciences of that world. I do not venture into realisms that have been developed in the formal sciences. This would take us too far afield, and it is not as relevant to the history of moral realism as more empirical forms of realism. Mathematical and logical realism believes that numbers, mathematical patterns, logical concepts, ideal geometric figures, and other abstract conceptions are real, and not only mental constructions. The formal realist believes that formal knowledge is achieved when the beliefs of the mathematician or logician ‘fit’ or express the nature of an independently existing formal entity. 28. Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 21. 29. See Quine, “Things and their Place in Theories.” 30. See Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. 31.On instrumentalism in general, and the instrumentalism of Berkeley and Mach, see Losee, A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, 164-170. 32. Searle, The Social Construction of Reality, 157. 33. Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 223. 34. Aristotle, De Anima, Book III, Chapters 4-6, 429a-430b, 201207. 35. Mill, A System of Logic, 136. 36. Bernard Williams calls this intuitive response to ontological anti-realism the “common sense party” of truth. Party followers are

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correct about basic, everyday truths. But anti-realists are legitimately skeptical about realism when it comes to complex matters such as historical events centuries ago. The anti-realists are right to keep us alert to the role of mental and social constructions. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, 5-6. 37. Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 10. 38. Feyerabend. Against Method. 39. Luntley, Reason, Truth, and Self, 25-26. 40. Brian, The Voice of Genius, 127. 41. By an “inarticulate” solipsist, I mean the infant lives in a world of his own experiences. The infant lacks the conceptual and linguistic capacities to objectify its experiences. An infant then is a nonrealist by nature but not by doctrine, like the adult non-realist. 42. Dewey, Art as Experience, 60. 43. Dewey, Art as Experience, 60-61, 266. 44. Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics, 7. 45. Moore, Principia Ethica, 21. 46. Smith, The Moral Problem, 9. 47. On this “error” theory, see Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. 48. Ayer says statements of value are not significant in a literal sense “but are simply expressions of emotion, which can be neither true nor false.” Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 103. 49. Hare, The Language of Morals, 5. 50. Stevenson, Ethics and Language, 33. 51. See Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism. 52. Audi, The Good in the Right, 5. 53. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 229. 54. Ross, The Right and the Good, 21. 55. Peter Singer says intuitions are likely derived from “discarded religious systems, from warped views of sex and bodily functions” or from customs once necessary for the survival of a group but no longer needed. Singer, “Sidgwick and Reflective Equilibrium,” 516. 56. Darwall, Contractarianism/Contractualism, 1. 57. Scanlon, What We Owe To Each Other, 5. 58. Habermas puts forward a “discourse morality” of equal respect and “solidaristic responsibility for everybody.” Habermas argues that, in ethics, we don’t project ourselves by imagination into the

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place of others. Instead, we participate in an actual dialogue with others, where all parties get to give their reasons. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, 33. 59. Herodotus, The Histories, Book Three, Chapter 38, Section 3, 185-86. 60. See Lukes, Moral Relativism, and Wong, Natural Moralities. 61. See the distinction between status and circumstantial relativism in Audi, Moral Value and Human Diversity, 25-26. 62. Audi, Moral Value and Human Diversity, 25. 63. See Ward for further arguments against the coherence of strong relativism in “Truth and Objectivity.” Also, see Christians, “Global Ethics and the Problem of Relativism.” 64. The objective turn of these natural philosophers can be difficult to appreciate because we have only fragments of their writings. Many natural philosophers lived on islands in the Aegean Sea and along the coast of Asia Minor. Some created schools and some wrote books; and some wore splendid clothes and drew large audiences to their talks. Stimulated by contact with Egypt, Persia, and Babylon, these philosophers were freethinkers who had no emperor to placate or sacred book to defend. See Boardman, Griffin, and Murray, eds., The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World, 126–41. 65. Kitto, The Greeks, 192. 66. Plato, “Protagoras,” 319a, 755. 67. Guthrie, The Fifth Century Enlightenment. 68. For an overview of the realist and anti-realist debate over universals, see Chapter 1 of Armstrong, Universals. French philosopher Roscellinus (c. 1050 – c. 1125) was an early, nominalist, followed by Peter Abelard and William of Ockham. 69. Armstrong, Universals, 6. 70. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Vol. 2, Book 3, Chapter III, “Of General Terms,” 14. 71. Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 247. 72. Baumgarten, Metaphysics, “Kant’s Handwritten Notes to the Metaphysics,” 51. 73. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B306-307, 360.

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74. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Part 1, Chapter 1, #7, 3238. 75. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B275, 326. 76. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B275, 326. 77. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A58, 197-198. 78. The first volume appeared in late 1818; the second volume (with a revised first volume) in 1844. 79. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, Book 1, 23-24. 80. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, Book 3, 204. 81. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 11. 82. Israel, in his Radical Enlightenment, argues that the early Enlightenment had a moderate stream represented by Locke and Newton and a radical stream represented by Spinoza. The moderates placed their philosophy within a Christian framework. Descartes saw the mechanical philosophy as supporting God’s rationality. Locke wrote The Reasonableness of Christianity in 1695. The radical branch could not be incorporated into Christian orthodoxy. In France, d’Holbach and La Mettrie espoused a brash materialism. Other thinkers stressed the wonders of a providential God. As Pope wrote in Essay on Man, “whatever is, is right.” 83. Kant’s motto for the Enlightenment was uplifting: “Sapere aude!” Have courage to use your own understanding, which is “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” But Voltaire opened his Philosophe Ignorant as follows: “Who are you? Where do you come from?....This is a question one must put to every creature in the universe but none of them gives us any answer.” Diderot ended his Interpretation of Nature with a strange prayer: “O God, I do know if you exist….Here I stand, as I am, a necessarily organized part of eternal and necessary matter…or perhaps your own creation.” Quoted in Hampson, The Enlightenment, 95–6. 84. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 248–65. 85. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section IX, 111. 86. Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), 119. 87. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), 3. 88. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 22.

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89. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 248. 90. Smith argued for a similar impartial voice in the marketplace, in the form of government, which should act as an impartial agent to stop unfair competition. 91. Quoted in Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, 32.

CHAPTER TWO REALISM MODERNE: WORLDS OF WORLDMAKING STEPHEN J. A. WARD Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be; subject to correction, but that goes without saying. —Willard V. Quine1

Realism in the twentieth century, especially after the Second World War, was confronted with new and culturally influential forms of constructionism, historicism, and relativism—a range of anti-realisms that were skeptical about traditional Western epistemology and moral theory. They were based on the idea that knowledge claims were relative to human activity, mental and social. Mediated knowledge meant there was no non-mediated knowledge of the world as it is. Global realism was false. The anti-realists took to heart Protagoras’s ancient maxim that “man is the measure of things,” only they altered it to read “society (groups, ideologies, practices, hierarchies, power) is the measure of all things,” or “all knowledge is shaped by its history and its historical era.” Charles Darwin planted the seed of looking at life from a historical and evolutionary perspective in the nineteenth century. The extension of this perspective beyond biology took firm root in the twentieth century. The antirealism attitudes created a problem not only for realist notions about truth, knowledge, fact, and objectivity but also notions of moral truth and moral fact. Moral realism was also false. The

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realist edifice of Western epistemology and science was challenged by the historical and social sciences, and philosophies of post-modernity and deconstruction. The critics took a dim view of large narratives about how Western culture was necessarily moving towards a great rational and progressive society, as in Hegel. Western philosophy and science as a whole were accused of imposing alleged universal notions of truth and value on other cultures, a cultural imperialism. For the anti-realists and post-moderns, there were many forms of knowledge, objectivity, and truth across the world’s many cultures. Also, the growing awareness of other cultures due to globalization in transport, media, and economy, seemed to make anti-realism, or cultural relativism, the most plausible view of knowledge and morality. There seemed to be no universal laws of morality, and no deterministic human nature. The growing number of areas where cultures could come into conflict, plus the emergence of global issues such as environmental deterioration, spoke against a philosophy that claimed to possess the absolute truth, or the one, true doctrine. Inquiry into knowledge came to be viewed as a matter of cultural politics, the use of culture to assert power. For many critics, Western realism formed an ideology in service to power—to global capitalism, super-powers, colonial governments, and military technology. Knowledge was the product of historical construction, and the politics of social class and power. The mood of relativism and skepticism seeped into almost every crevice of culture from ideas about art and morals to how people regarded religion; it influenced both the popular arts and the avant-garde. It was not the case that researchers in a university developed a theory called ‘social constructionism’ which was so clearly true and superior that it seeped down into everyday life, and spread like an intellectual contagion. As it usually occurs with trends in ideas, the ‘ground’ for a positive reception

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had been prepared for by social trends and historical events. A general feeling of skepticism was generated by two horrific world wars, fascism, and the Jewish Holocaust, followed by the mass murderers Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others, and the seeming madness of the Vietnam War. After such irrational slaughter, who could speak of rationality, truth, and (Western) mankind’s progress toward utopia? The West could no longer pride itself on being a superior culture following high values. The powerful language of morality had been used to stoke patriotism, militarism, and tribalism. In art, music, and everyday life, nihilism lurked, spoiling attempts to see the world “as it is” in a positive, meaningful way.2 Paradoxically, relativism occurred simultaneously with a century of great strides in scientific knowledge, and sciencebased technology. Humans apparently had ‘conquered’ nature and life through new technologies, inventions, and medicines. The human DNA was tracked by the Human Genome Project and technologies arose that could alter our genetic inheritance. Confidence in the verdicts of science and the potential of technology to solve problems remained in place across most of the twentieth century. For this book, the most important aspect of this cultural mood was the philosophical reaction to it. Two responses were primary. One, realists doubled down, conservatively, with defenses of the existing notions of truth, knowledge, and reason. Some portrayed relativists as corrosive to society. Philosophers and psychologists wrote tracts explaining why reason and truth were not only valid concepts but crucial to society, while attacking truth’s skeptics.3 Others wrote histories of truth and ‘guides’ to the debate in an effort to help “the perplexed.”4 Two, realists in the second half of the century sought a third way between the new constructionism and the old realism. Leading neo-pragmatists such as Hilary Putnam and Willard V.

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Quine5 developed theories that were intellectual hybrids, acknowledging both the role of construction in inquiry and the importance of retaining a belief in truth and objective justification. For example, in 1981, Putnam published Reason, Truth and History. The addition of “history” to the title was telling. At the same time, hybrid theories of morality arose such as nuanced forms of moral relativism,6 new evolutionary and neuropsychological theories of human morality,7 cosmopolitan theories of the human good,8 ethical discourse models, and contractual theories of justice.9 These authors sought to develop rational theories of human morality and inquiry, despite the evident fact of human activity, representation, and history. This chapter starts with the emergence of the realist-social constructionist confrontation in the early 1900s. It then examines the hybrid theories that followed. The inclusion of global theories of the human good allows a discussion of the development of global ethics. The work in global ethics paralleled practical projects to construct international organizations to prevent further wars and holocausts. Global ethics was a contemporary moral globalism—the view that ethics should be based on global moral principles. Moral globalism, in turn, raised afresh questions about moral realism. Are the proposed global norms true, objective, or real? This book belongs to both traditions— hybridism and global ethics. We offer a hybrid moral globalism.

Section 1: Logical and Social Construction The Turn to Logic In the late nineteenth century, empiricism and scientific realism began using logical and mathematical techniques to show how concepts and beliefs derive from perceptual experience. Logic, like mathematics, has existed from the first philosophers. Logic was first systematized by Aristotle. The Py-

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thagoreans believed the world had a mathematical order of ratios and harmonies. Both astrologers and astronomers used mathematics to chart the planets. Early modern physicists, such as Galileo, used a mathematical-empirical method to do natural science. Yet logic and mathematics, as formal disciplines, were not central to the philosophical empiricism of Locke, Hume, and other empiricists. They used psychology, history, and reflection to analyze sense experience. Empiricists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries theorized about how the mind takes incoming stimuli from the environment, forms mental ideas, and then arrives at judgments. Through this mental process, we have beliefs about external objects, their properties, and how they are related, as in relations of cause and effect. Therefore, method was important. Bacon, quite early, had warned that scientists must subject their facts to careful methods of observation and generalization, plus allow for publicly repeatable tests of their experiments. Only good method would eliminate mental biases and other causes for error. In the nineteenth century, empiricists, aware of the proliferating sciences, turned their attention to explaining how the mind creates scientific knowledge, and how we should see the relations among the sciences. This epistemology was called positivism, initially led by John Stuart Mill in England and Auguste Comte in France. By the mid-1800s, Comte, for example, developed a historical and epistemological system to explain how science was the final step in human mental development. He constructed an elaborate category scheme in which each science found a place. Positivism took over the empiricist’s problem space, of which the central question was psychological and genetic: How does knowledge derive naturalistically from sense experience? The question led to such classics as Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Hume’s A Treatise of Human

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Nature, and later, Kant’s three critiques on the limits of the mind. It was presumed (or hoped) that these studies would direct the normative evaluation of cognition, that is, which beliefs are true, justified or ought to be held; and what was science and what was not. Empirical positivism took seriously Kant’s limitation of empirical knowledge to sensory appearances. They formulated theories of science that abandoned metaphysics. Comte famously insisted that any statement that could not be verified directly by experience was not meaningful, and certainly not knowledge. By the second half of the nineteenth century, philosophically minded scientists like physicist Ernst Mach reduced science to the exact formulation of lawful regularities among the appearances, that is, what appears to our senses.10 Science cannot know a hidden, metaphysical reality behind the appearances. It cannot know the “nature” or “essence” of things. It can only mathematically calculate and discover the patterns in the data. Hence, mathematics and logic were important to the project of scientific empiricism. Positivism, or scientific empiricism, was not against construction. But, unlike relativists and constructionists, the positivists thought they could identify an objective method of construction that ended with scientific truth about reality. Knowledge was the product of correct mental construction.11 Through correct construction, we know that our beliefs are justified and true. Through correct construction we secure knowledge against skepticism and relativism. We are able to distinguish truth from falsehood, knowledge from opinion, science from pseudo-science. We also can see how scientific knowledge is progressing and where inquiry is needed. We see that some of those scientific beliefs are weak and may need to be abandoned. Such was the ambitious, almost heroic, project of scientific, constructionist epistemology in the nineteenth century. Phil-

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osophers would conceptually secure the foundations and unity of science, while scientists would work as crewmembers on the advancing ship of science, moving forward into unchartered waters. Unfortunately, the ship began taking on water early in its voyage. Positivists, and empiricists in general, disagreed on what the “given” in experience was—sensations or physical objects? If the given is physical objects, do we infer their existence? If we infer them, is this inference secure? Also, various proposed constructions (or reductions) were disputed, such as Hume’s reduction of the self to impressions, and causality to a regularity in impressions. Also disputed was Mill’s definition of physical objects as permanent possibilities of sensation. Empiricists also stumbled when trying to explain the epistemic link between perceptions of ordinary objects and belief in scientific unobservable (or theoretical) entities like gravity or atoms. For instance, at the turn of the twentieth century, the empirical evidence for atoms was meagre. Atoms seemed more like a postulation of theory, or an instrumentally useful fiction. Finally, empiricism had to come to grips with the formal part of knowledge. If all knowledge was based on experience, were mathematical and logical principles a species of empirical generalization? Mill thought so,12 but many—including Russell, Frege, Moore, Wittgenstein, Husserl and most mathematicians—rejected the view. If this knowledge, for example, our knowledge of the laws of logic or deductions in geometry, was not based on observation what sort of knowledge was it? The empiricists could not attribute it to a special source of a priori knowledge as in Kant and other idealisms. What was left? Was formal knowledge only linguistic convention or conceptual analysis—the way we link concepts or define words? Finally, there was the vexed and political question of the boundaries of science. Who should define what is or is not science?

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The positivists were foundationalists in epistemology, that is, knowledge is like a house. It needs solid foundations. Otherwise, what rises above the foundations is not secure. So epistemology was the search for foundational beliefs or experiences. By the mid-nineteenth century, the search was leading only to rival theories and quarreling. The ambitious program of empirically constructing knowledge began to resemble the unfinished Tower of Babel. To make matters worse, cracks in the foundations of the mathematical sciences appeared. Not practical problems in adding and multiplying, of course. Instead, problems in making formal science systematic in the ordering of its beliefs, that is, problems in formal construction. Mathematical foundationalism was deductive in spirit and went back at least to Euclid’s geometry. Theorists sought to show how formal knowledge, such as the theorems of number theory in arithmetic, or the laws of propositional logic, rested on a consistent and self-evident set of foundational axioms and definitions. One needs to use the methods of correct construction to show the link between axiom and theorem. The aim was to give such knowledge a deductively secure structure. This was the reverse image of the aim of empiricism—to give empirical knowledge an inductively secure structure. But in the mid-1800s, theorists found inconsistencies in the axioms and fundamental concepts of arithmetic and other basic formal sciences. Attempts to systematize logical knowledge presented major challenges. The Platonic dream of “exact knowledge”13 was in jeopardy. Both forms of correct construction (empirical and logical) were in doubt. The solution to the problems in both construction projects came from new and impressive work in the theory of mathematics and of logic from about the 1880s and onward.14 For example, Frege argued in The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) and Fundamental Laws of Arithmetic (1893-1903) that

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he could make the truths of arithmetic secure by deriving them from the laws of logic which presumably were epistemically fundamental and clear. In 1908, Peano and his Italian colleagues showed how the concepts of arithmetic and algebra could be constructed, via definition and analysis, from a few elementary logical ideas such as classes, class inclusion, and material implication; three primitive ideas—zero, number and the idea of the next number; and six elementary propositions. Between 1910 and 1913, Russell and Whitehead published Principia Mathematica. Based on logicism (mathematics is reducible to logic), the book developed and popularized symbolic logic and stimulated research in the foundations of mathematics. In generating these new theoretical systems, the authors invented new forms of definition, conceptual analysis, and calculus. The response among empiricists to this new work in the foundations of formal science was positive. A large number of empirical philosophers and logicians were excited by the possibility of using mathematical and logical techniques to reconstruct empirical belief and natural science. Thus arose the ideal of logical construction. Not in the formal sciences, where the idea was not new, but in empirical philosophy and in the empirical sciences. The logical constructionists thought that logic’s formality, clarity, and rigor were just what epistemology needed. It avoided the imprecision and vagueness of trying to philosophize with ordinary language and its vague concepts. Logical constructions would use logic to analyze language and science’s fundamental concepts. Some of them, such as Russell, Carnap, and the early Wittgenstein, even dreamed of creating an ideal, clear, logical language for empirical inquiry, and for constructing higher-order knowledge and science. The traditional epistemic notions of evidence and justification would be reconstructed as logical relations of derivation, definition, implication, and deduction. These logical relations would be

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firmer and more certain than relations provided by psychology or more informal methods of philosophizing. As Carnap said, the use of logic would make epistemology independent of “the contingencies of the real world.”15 The aim was a “rational reconstruction of the concepts of all fields of knowledge on the basis of concepts that refer to the immediately given.”16 Ironically, with Carnap and Russell, empiricism would be shaped by a rationalist’s love of certainty, formal analysis and clarity.17 Originally, this application of formal ideas and methods to epistemology was called “philosophical analysis.” The term would broaden to include linguistic and “ordinary language” analysis.18 Philosophy, in the early 1900s, would begin to divide into an “analytic” camp that restricted philosophy to logical analysis popular in Britain, America and other Englishspeaking Western nations, and an existential (and phenomenological) camp that talked about life and human experience. The latter was popular in Europe and was called Continental philosophy. Enter Logical Positivism Arising out of this turn to formal analysis was a forceful, often strident, defender of logical construction. It was logical positivism,19 comprised of empiricists, logicians, and anti-metaphysical scientists. Their ideas spread across the West by the middle of the twentieth century, greatly influencing philosophy of language and philosophy of science. After the First World War, about 1928, a group gathered around Moritz Schlick at the University of Vienna to form the Vienna Circle, the incubator of logical positivism.20 Its program, influenced by Wittgenstein, Russell, Frege, Mach and others, was published in 1929. Many of the members were scientists and mathematicians who knew little about classical philosophy and were devoutly anti-metaphysical. For about 30

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years (1930-1960), the movement virtually defined analytical philosophy. A journal was started; international conferences on the unity of science were held. The movement spread from Austria and Germany to England, Scandinavia, and the United States. The movement dissipated before the Second World War as leading figures died, took up positions at other universities, or decamped to England and the United States to escape Nazis’ suspicions of the movement. The logical positivists set out to do more than talk about the possibility of reconstructing knowledge. They wanted to actually do or complete the construction, and show what the system looked like. The early logical positivists, especially Neurath and Carnap, tended to issue their principles and views as dicta, full of confidence and swagger in their modernist philosophy. The key was to start with empiricism or positivism: the view that all knowledge begins with our sense experience, or observable facts. The group put forward its controversial empirical theory of (cognitive) meaning which followed Comte in arguing that a statement was cognitively meaningless unless one could point to observations and facts that would verify it. This had three huge implications: First, it meant that all of non-observational knowledge, as in scientific theory, must be shown to be, in some manner, based on (or reducible to) particular observations. It also implied that metaphysics, value judgments, religious beliefs, aesthetic judgments, and all of ethics were meaningless, because they cannot be verified by sense experience. Somehow, even the most abstract scientific concepts had to be defined in terms of experience through a long chain of deductions or definitions. This was Carnap’s great (but failed) project in The Logical Structure of the World of 1928. To substantiate their claims, the logical positivists helped themselves to uncompromising dualisms, especially the dualism of fact (cognitive and real) and value (emotional and subjective), reasoning and emotion, science and non-science. To

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explain formal knowledge, the group, influenced by their erroneous reading of the early Wittgenstein, argued that they were statements about language, not the world. They were a priori by not being empirical or synthetic. They were “tautologies” true in any world. In contrast, statements about observations were about the world. Therefore, the logical positivists, in the main, were global realists about the objects of sense experience and verified science, but they were local anti-realists about the alleged objects or facts of morality, religion, and metaphysics. Ultimately, logical positivism failed as a movement because of internal disagreement, criticism by non-positivists, and problems in the formulation of its key tenets. Critics asked whether the verification theory of meaning was itself fully verifiable. It appeared not. The logical positivists continued the disagreement as to whether the foundations of knowledge were the sensations of individuals or their perception of physical objects. The attempt to reduce theoretical concepts in science to experiences seemed impossible. As science became increasingly theoretical, how could Einstein relativity, sub-atomic particles, and then black holes and dark matter be defined by our individual sensations? Some of the thinkers who initially sought a logically clear factual language, such as Wittgenstein, moved on to other ways of thinking. Thinkers also chipped away at the fact-value dualism, noting how value judgments have a factual basis, and that belief in fact presumes a belief in epistemic norms. But norms were evaluative, value-laden statements. Other philosophers grew tired of the technical, abstract analysis of language and returned to making statements about the world and about morality. In ethics, by the 1970s, applied ethics about the world was again in vogue, best instanced in the popularity of Rawl’s great work, A Theory of Justice. Since at least the mid-1900s, announcements of the death of empiricism and logical empiricism were being made, often with undisguised glee. Dewey thought empiricism’s notion of

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experience was too narrow, its foundationalism unnecessary, and its dualisms a form of thinking to be overcome. Historian John Passmore said that, by the 1960s, logical positivism was as dead as any philosophy could be. In 1984, Putnam wrote a chapter called “After Empiricism” aimed at the views of Ayer. In 2002, he published a book on the “collapse” of the positivists’ fact-value dichotomy. In the meantime, a long train of continental philosophers, from Habermas to Foucault, steered clear of empiricism in the mode of Hume and Mill, or in the mode of the logical positivists. Yet, today, even though the project of logical empiricism is abandoned, their ideas and their epistemic dualisms still haunt culture. Here are the ideas that did not die: (1) the idea that facts can be scrubbed clean and become pure encapsulated facts; (2) the belief that there exists a strictly neutral method that, through numbers and machines, can eliminate the bias of the human inquirer; (3) and the belief in a strict division between observation and everything else that we know and cognize. In the meantime, (4) the fact-value dualism continued to be the default position of many people when they discussed morals. The collapse of the ideal of logical construction in philosophy was a significant historical moment in the Western history of ideas. It seemed to be a liberating moment, allowing other epistemologies to be created. For many others, it raised the question of whether any other epistemology that valued rationality and truth could be created. For example, in discussing objectivity, Robert Newell welcomed the “exorcism” of positivism from philosophy although he acknowledged that there is still “much plausibility” in the general features of Humean empiricism. He warned that we still need rational controls on argument through fact and logic.21

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Social Construction In the second half of the twentieth century, the vacuum left by the demise of logical positivism and a decline in philosophical analysis was filled by new forms of historicism, relativism, and constructivism. The theories developed mainly in epistemology, the social sciences, and the philosophy of science. Revolt against scientific realism cast doubt on the whole idea of realism, rationality, and ahistorical criteria for evaluating theories. Outside of academia, there was an anti-modern (or postmodern) rejection of modernism in textual analysis and in the arts. The intellectual and artistic mood was one of anti-realism, skepticism, and irony. The favorite targets were the belief in absolute foundations of knowledge and the belief in one uniquely correct view of objective reality—the Western scientific view. Theorists stressed the plurality of both conceptual and valuational schemes due to their historical and sociological origins. The approach was again genetic. But unlike the early empiricists or the logical positivists, revealing the origins or genesis of a belief was a reason to doubt its authority. These criticisms and cultural trends sparked sharp responses by realists, such as scientists, logicians, philosophical rationalists, and cultural conservatives. The rampant relativism, they argued, was undermining not only belief in science, but also belief in truth and reason in academia and in popular culture. Respect for the traditional fine arts and aesthetic standards was declining, as allegedly seen in degenerate jazz or strange, minimalist art. Some called it a “crisis” in Western culture and education, and a “closing” of the American (and Western) mind.22 The “culture wars” had begun. The fact that scientific and other forms of thinking have a history that is not incidental to their claims to knowledge was a theme of American pragmatic philosophers, such as William James, in the early 1900s. Pragmatism viewed ideas and

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concepts as tools to do things, embedded in history and society, and evaluated as much by their consequences as by their logic. This meant that pragmatism tended to be skeptical, or anti-realist, about the notion of a theoretical knowledge of the world in itself. In history, anti-realists pointed to Thomas Kuhn’s notion that scientific change was a “conversion” to a new set of beliefs.23 There were no absolute epistemic criteria for judging belief, not even in science. Better to study how the actual practice of seeking knowledge occurs in concrete social situations and disciplines. One inspiration for this ‘return to history’ was Friedrich Nietzsche. For instance, listen to Nietzsche, in 1889, scold philosophers for a non-historical approach to ideas: You ask me, which of the philosophers’ traits are idiosyncracies? For example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of becoming, their Egypticism. They think, they show their respect for a subject when they dehistoricize it…when they turn it into a mummy.24

In the late 1970s, sociologists put forward a relativistic sociology of knowledge that explained claims to knowledge by reference to social causes.25 Details about how scientific theory construction actually occurs were provided by the “social-studies-of-science approach” of Barry Barnes, David Bloor, and Steven Shapin, among others. Members of the Frankfurt school of sociology, influenced by Marxism, decried the influence of both Enlightenment ideas and mass culture. In the humanities, post-modernism reached critical mass in the mid-1900s.26 Post-modernism is difficult to characterize, since its ideas populated many fields from literary studies to architecture. It was a reaction against (a) modernism in art and (b) realism and Enlightenment views in science and philosophy. As noted earlier, post-modernists joined the growing chorus of voices which argued that scientific and philosophical claims about universal standards of reason and objective

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knowledge were Western-centric notions, a cultural arrogance that ignored other forms of rationality in other disciplines and in non-Western cultures. Also, post-colonial theorists claimed the West used allegedly universal epistemic norms and values to engage in cultural imperialism for political purposes, imposing Western values on non-Western cultures. Another postmodern strategy was to attack the Western realist dream of constructing a grand and rational narrative of the world and society. Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard questioned the ideas of detached truth and philosophical “metanarratives,” that is, large historical narratives that make sense of human experience. Amid these trends, something called “social constructionism” emerged in the 1980s, taking ideas from history and relativism, while employing heavily the idea of mediated cognition. It was both an epistemology about producing knowledge claims and a method for critically questioning or deconstructing questionable concepts. It claimed that all knowledge is theory-laden and those underlying theories expressed social and political values. In sum, all knowledge is socially constructed and historical. Social constructionism was especially popular in cultural studies and other parts of social science. It spread its ideas widely, from sociological critiques of science to feminist accounts of gender. The social constructionist approach was applied to many things: authorship, mental illness, the emotions, the concept of fact, the existence of quarks, the belief in human nature, and on to such topics as youth homelessness and to Zulu nationalism.27 The overall message in most cases was similar: What we call nature and the world, and what we regard as the truths of science and mathematics, are socially constructed ways of thinking often motivated by a desire for social control, power, and prestige. Social constructionism should not be confused with realists like philosopher John R. Searle who wrote about the construction of social reality but kept a distance from the stronger claims of social constructivism. Searle’s realism and

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respect for science is evident in The Construction of Social Reality. Social constructionism, as a philosophy, starts with a Kantian view of the limits of the cognizing mind, and its anti-realist implications. But then it quickly becomes a sociological inquiry. Instead of asking the philosophical question of whether my idea corresponds to reality, social scientists and others study claims to knowledge as a social phenomenon. How do groups identify and validate their claims? How do alleged knowledge claims reflect social biases, ideologies, or power? They ask who makes a claim to knowledge and why. To say we construct knowledge socially means we follow socially prescribed ways of thinking and inquiring, and these rules, practices, and norms shape what we believe. There is no stepping outside of all social systems of belief to confront reality in itself. Replace the Kantian notion of an ‘inner’ structure of consciousness as mediator with the ‘external’ structure of social processes and ideologies as mediator and you have modern social constructionism. Kant said we can know the world only through individual perceptual appearances; social constructionism says we can know the world only through socially constructed appearances. This sociological turn in epistemology has both positive elements and lurking problems. Positively, it opens up space for reflection and criticism of powerful, established belief. Negatively, this epistemic stance can lead to a broad skepticism or anti-realism about knowledge as a whole. We have only rival opinions in different societies. It can lead to a disrespect for rationality and science. The focus is on the social power of science, considered to be a negative thing. It ignores laudable aspects of science, such as its commitment to rigorous methods and facts. Another problem is that social constructionism seems to imply a strong relativism. It is evident that groups construct their inquiries and philosophies in different and rival ways. Yet,

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there appears to be no perspective from which we can objectively adjudicate differences among socially constructed systems. At this point, the self-corrupting nature of strong relativism resurfaces. One can ask: Is social constructionism a socially invented belief? If so, why do we give it more validity than other views? The spirit of social constructionism owes much to the ancient sophists, discussed in Chapter One. What has occurred is that the sophist’s relativism about social mores has been expanded to include knowledge of the world. The old dualisms of subject-object, and mind and world, have been reconstructed around a society-reality dualism. Rather than ask, how can I know that the idea in my mind refers to something real in the world, I now ask: how can I know that this socially inculcated belief refers to reality, or a fact in the world? The sophists did not go that far. They thought that relativism applied only to social rules and conventions, not to nature. There are ways to deny that social constructionism entails the broad anti-realism and strong relativism just mentioned. One strategy is to regard social processes as only one of many factors in the process of inquiry—factors that science should study. But we retain our confidence in rigorous scientific study in general. Moreover, one can hold that humans can become aware of their social biases and subject them to critique. Inquirers work ‘from within’ mediating systems of ideas but are not doomed to simply repeat them uncritically. Positively, social constructionism makes us aware of the role of society and culture in belief formation and in ethics. Moreover, social constructionism reminds us that our conceptions are historical and evolving, even in science. So we should question our basic ideas about nature, gender, race, certainty, and ethics. We should resist dogmatism and absolutism. One point of calling something a social construct is to prompt conceptual and social reform. We question prevailing

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ideas about a phenomenon and we suggest a better conception. To say x is a social construction is to say that our way of thinking about it is not inevitable.29 For example, Foucault’s indepth historical studies on mental illness and institutional imprisonment were intended to weaken dogmatic and harmful conceptions. Social constructionism reminds us that discriminatory (or racial) theories of gender and intelligence have claimed to be natural and scientific. The theories supported social hierarchies and power structures, such as the subjection of women. The recent “trans” movement, the choosing of one’s gender identity, shows how concepts we thought were firmly biological and unchangeable are open to question. The challenge is to maintain a grip on both the idea of knowledge as produced and historical, and the idea of valid, rational knowledge. Constructionists walk a thin line between saying that beliefs and methods are socially constructed within history, but not saying that anything goes in the formation of belief. In philosophy, thinkers reacted both positively and negatively to post-modernism and social constructionism. Neopragmatist Richard Rorty was sympathetic to the non-absolute and anti-universalism in these forms of anti-realism. Rorty himself attacked “Platonism”—a realism that believes in absolute, transcendent truth and sees objective knowledge as a “mirror” of nature.30 Rorty thought that what is rationally acceptable is decided by a culture or society and the main criterion is that the beliefs solved our common problems. Others, such as philosopher of science Ian Hacking, surveyed these movements with a fair but critical eye. He suggested that social construction philosophy could go too far and forget that it presumed at least a global realism. Where else did such constructions take place than in our physical interaction with an independent reality? Where did the materials for construction come from if not

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from reality? As Hacking pointedly asked of the social constructionist movement: “the social construction of what?”

Section 2: Hybrid Realisms Conceptual Pluralism At the turn of the twentieth century, William James conceived of truth as plural. There were many different truths about the world. James argued that (absolute) realism, once dominant in philosophy and science, was being undermined by modern philosophy and science. Doubt was caused by the increasing plurality of theories in science, from alternate geometries of space to different forms of physics. Many theories implied many different and rival truths about one and the same thing. In The Meaning of Truth, he writes: “Up to about 1850 almost everyone believed that sciences expressed truths that were exact copies of a definite code of non-human realities.” But now there are so many theories, hypotheses, and classifications “that the notion that even the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal transcript has dawned upon us.”31 For James, theories as a “human device” is shorthand for his pragmatic theory of truth. James rejected the idea that reality stands ready-made and complete and our intellects have only one task—describing this reality. Yet, he remains a realist about the existence of the external world and a believer in truths about the world. His pragmatism was what we call a hybrid epistemology, combining constructivism and realism. The mental constructions that James and other pragmatists underlined were mental activity in service to action, such as thinking about means and ends, solving problems, and carrying out complex chains of actions. Philosophers before James had acknowledged the activity of mind in thinking but the pragmatists stressed the activity of the embodied agent in a natural setting.

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Ideas, ideals, conceptions, hypotheses—all of these things were mental tools, or instruments, for practical, purposeful attitudes and actions. In this section, we look at a number of these hybrid realisms. The pragmatism of James and the instrumentalism of Dewey were developed in the work of Willard V. Quine and his pragmatist colleague at Harvard University, Hilary Putnam. Quine combined a constructivism in epistemology with a realist commitment to the world as understood by science. Science is the arbiter of ontological disputes about what exists and how it exists. Epistemology tells us which scientific theories are true. Quine saw epistemology as “naturalized.” We use natural (scientific) knowledge of the world to develop our epistemology and to explain how we come to have scientific knowledge. Epistemology is a chapter of scientific psychology, explaining how humans develop scientific theories from a meager input of stimuli on sense receptors. Conceptual schemes play a large part in the transition from sensations to theories. Quine regarded ontology as part of, and continuous with, the scientific enterprise. Ontology is not a grand metaphysical description of the world or a higher reality. It is, rather, the more modest enterprise of saying what objects we need to assume as existing to make sense of our scientific theories. What is real is what must be posited as existing, or what is entailed by our best theories. It is a choice of ontological scheme. Unlike traditional realism, Quine’s ontology underlines the ever-lurking possibility of indeterminacy and uncertainty in both the choice of ontology and our best scientific theory. It is possible that our evidence, logic, and evidentiary standards will not clearly pick out one theory or one conceptual scheme as uniquely true or the best. It is possible that several physical theories are all consistent with current empirical evidence and logical standards. Similarly, one and the same theory may be compatible with more than one ontology. Quine calls this the

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indeterminacy of fact.32 What is true is not clearly determined by the available facts. This line of thought leads to Quine’s theory of ontological relativity. There are two senses of relativity at work in this doctrine. One is that ontology is relative to a conceptual scheme. For example, physical objects may be explained by a phenomenalistic scheme in which objects are collections of sense data. Abstract entities, like properties, universals or numbers are explained through nominalism in logic. However, we may choose to aver the combination of phenomenalism and nominalism and, instead, choose the conceptual schemes of physicalism and realism. We posit a world of external objects not reducible to phenomenal sense data, and a realism that thinks of abstract features as universals. Or, we could adopt a mentalism for abstract objects that considers them to be mental ideas. The second sense of relativity is that we understand one ontology in terms of another. We may explain physical objects by reducing them to the language of another ontology, the language of phenomenalism. We may explain mental traits as behavioral dispositions to act in certain ways given certain stimuli. In Quine’s terms, it is a choice of theoretical language. Hence, the name of his first major work is not Idea and Object but Word and Object. The question arises as to what rational criterion to use to choose conceptual schemes. How choose a philosophical ontology? How choose a scientific theory? How choose an epistemology? Quine’s answer is the same in all cases. It is pragmatic: whatever work’s best for your theorizing about the world. It is impossible to check if the ideas in our mind accurately refer to the things in themselves. But we can evaluate how well our theories and conceptual schemes (or languages) advance inquiry, solve problems, or resolve paradoxes. Our choice of any theory or language is governed by a cluster of epistemic criteria: Logical consistency, empirical observation

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and prediction, economy of terms, elegance in explanation, the solving of problems, and compatibility with existing knowledge. The idea of directly comparing idea and object is replaced by testing the idea with a range of criteria internal to our epistemology. Given Quine’s pragmatism, we might be tempted to think he is dropping realism. Things are not that simple. Quine also says, in a strong realist tone, that science tells us the truth about the world, and we use these scientific truths to explain how we come to have concepts. Moreover, our success in arriving at truths about the mind and the world shapes the epistemic criteria we should support. For example, Quine notes that the truths of psychology and other sciences tell us that much of our thinking is theoretical, full of hypotheses, abstract notions, and so on. Therefore, we need to adopt a holistic approach to epistemic criteria. This rules out a phenomenalism or a positivism which thinks that knowledge is a direct empirical relationship between our sensations and an external world. It rules out the simplistic notion that truth is some uninterpreted correspondence of belief and observational fact. Indeed, Quine thinks that evidence is empirical, but our evaluation of beliefs is broader than empirical observation. Quine’s naturalism rejects a search for the foundational principles of a “First Philosophy” such as Cartesian clear and distinct cognitions which cannot be doubted. Quine is neither an empirical nor a Cartesian foundationalist. He thinks that epistemology is part of science. It uses scientific knowledge to show how we construct our worldviews from empirical stimuli, and in return, how the conceptual schemes we produce come to affect how we understand those stimuli, or the “fact of the matter.” There is no thought of having to justify science from scratch in some philosophical manner before we can use such knowledge. In Quine’s philosophy, mental activity and scientific

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knowledge (or truth) co-exist and work together. Construction and discovery, epistemological critique and the pursuit of truth go hand in hand. The idea that mental construction entails a pervasive skepticism or relativism about knowledge or science is wrong. Recall the quote from Quine that started this chapter: “Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be; subject to correction, but that goes without saying.”33 This is conceptual relativism within a scientific realism perspective. Quine’s philosophy is a hybrid epistemology through and through. He reminds us that we are already launched on the ship of inquiry when we take up some issue or problem. The planks of our ship are our existing beliefs and conceptual schemes, especially our scientific beliefs. Then we use these resources to examine and critique particular beliefs (particular planks) but we cannot put all of our beliefs in doubt at the same time, a la Cartesian radical doubt.34 The key, Quine thought, was to stop thinking of science and knowledge according to the long-standing, static metaphor of a house that needs unmoving and certain foundations. Rather, think of it as a moving ship. Quine explains this naturalist view by saying that, within ongoing inquiry, epistemology and ontology enjoy a subtle relationship that Quine calls “reciprocal containment.”35 We can say, at one and the same time, that, ontologically, we have truths about reality and that, epistemically, we know these truths because they are justified by our best evidentiary standards. Our ontology informs our epistemology, and our epistemology shapes what we believe is true. The idea that we cannot say both of these statements at the same time is due to an incorrect view of the relationship of ontology and epistemology, and the search for epistemic certainty. That is, we must first epistemically prove some beliefs to be true and certain. Then we can discuss their ontological implications. Quine thinks we should do epistemology and ontology at the same time, so to

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speak. Ontology focuses on what exists which is a question of truth. Epistemology focuses on warranted belief—how we know what exists, which is a question of method and evidence. Epistemology, for Quine, is a chapter of empirical psychology. It is the naturalistic, scientific, story of how humans come to know things. We start from and employ our scientific ontology of the nature of the world and how humans, as a part of that world, know it. More specifically, epistemology is contained in ontology in three ways: (1) Epistemology assumes a global realism and a scientific realism: it assumes the existence of the external world and a scientific view of the real objects in that world. (2) Our epistemic contact points with the world are our sensory receptors and our physical bodies. The receptors and our bodies are themselves physical objects in the external world, and studied by science. And (3) our epistemic belief in empirical evidence—the facts of the senses—is based on scientific truths about how we, as external bodies, interact with other bodies. And those truths depend on the progress of empirical science. Quine states: “There is thus reciprocal containment, though containment in different senses: epistemology in the natural sciences and natural sciences in epistemology.”36 Roger Gibson notes that Quine fully acknowledged the “circularity” of reciprocal containment. But he thought the circularity is something to be explained. It is not something that can be explained away or reduced to some other relationship.37 In the end, is Quine a realist or not? He is a highly sophisticated, hybrid realist grounded in scientific methodology. His view clearly recognizes the constructive role of the mind. Quine’s philosophy is an example of two things: First, how constructivism does not entail anti-realism. Second, how the traditional dualism of realism and anti-realism fails to capture a Quinian approach which combines, together and at the same time, ontology and epistemology, truth and conceptual construction, foundational

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truths and the evolution of inquiry. At some point, one may ask: Should we stop trying to call Quine’s hybrid approach a realism or an anti-realism, and give it another name? Putnam and Pragmatic Realism Hilary Putnam (1926-2016) was a neo-pragmatist reformer of realism, and he inveighed against dualisms as much as Dewey. He initially called his viewpoint “internal realism” because it defined realism as a result of how our internal conceptual schemes choose what to count as real, true, and evidenced. In this regard, he is in the long tradition of Kantian constructivism. Later, he thought the term “internal” was misleading, suggesting that he was an idealist or subjectivist who thought reality was actually constructed by mental operations or that he was a skeptic about truth and the existence of the external world. Putnam was a naturalist like Quine who took the pragmatic link between human agent and external objects as a primary starting point for philosophizing. Thus, Putnam later called his viewpoint “pragmatic realism”38 and attempted to avoid criticisms of internal realism. Also like Quine, Putnam does not fall easily into the realist or anti-realist camp, as traditionally conceived. Putnam sparked debate when he proposed “internal realism” in the 1980s as an alternate to what he called “absolute” or “metaphysical” realism. He claimed that metaphysical realism was not just false but it had a negative influence on how people understood other issues in philosophy. He defined metaphysical realism as such: On this perspective, the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of “the way the world is.” Truth involves some sort of correspondence relation between words or thought-signs and external things or sets of things.” I shall call

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this perspective the externalist perspective, because its favorite point of view is a God’s Eye point of view.39

This is essentially James’s view. But Putnam adds the idea of God’s point of view, as a suggestive metaphor. To adopt metaphysical realism is as if we were God. In the metaphor, it is imagined that God can know objects as they are in themselves. From her external perspective, God can see if an idea corresponds to an object as it really exists. This perspective is not available to mere mortals for reasons already discussed: the Kantian-inspired view that all knowledge of objects is mediated by the mind and its ideas. Putnam writes: “The whole content of Realism lies in the claim that it makes sense to think of a God’s Eye View (or better a view from nowhere).”40 By “Realism,” Putnam means metaphysical realism. Putnam expressed his embrace of conceptual mediation in epistemology in a number of strong and controversial statements in several major works. Here are a few: “It is characteristic of this view (internal realism) to show that what objects does the world consist of? is a question that only makes sense to ask within a theory or description.”41 “‘Objects’ do not exist independently of conceptual schemes.”42 “What we cannot say...is what the facts are independent of all conceptual choices.”43 Truth in Putnam becomes an epistemological notion. We accept as true (or we should accept as true) only those beliefs that have rational or warranted assertability, according to our best epistemological criteria. The traditional realists will have none of this. Truth is not justification. Putnam explains truth as a product of our practices of rational evidence and justification. This implies that what we count as true can change as our knowledge or epistemic norms alter and it is possible, as Quine argued, for different beliefs about objects to have equal evidential force at any given time. For critics, Putnam’s realism entailed a facile relativism about truth and a form of anti-realism about knowledge. Alston

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said it was implausible epistemic realism. Truth was not justification.44 Alston and others repeated the realist intuitions of Chapter One: A fact is a fact, an independent state of affairs. It doesn’t await construction or recognition by humans. Alston also reiterates the old challenge of realists to relativists: “Snow is white is true if in fact snow is white.”45 Putnam replied to his critics in a number of ways. He said his appeal to strong epistemic criteria for belief evaluation clearly shows he does not believe that all beliefs are equal, like the extreme relativist. He noted that knowledge needs “experiential inputs” from the world which restrain conceptualization, even if the inputs “are shaped in some way by our concepts.”46 He ridiculed the idea that his philosophy entails that we can believe whatever we wish about the world. Putnam said that he was, after all, a pragmatist. Pragmatism holds that there are consequences for accepting or rejecting a belief. You can adopt a scheme which tells you that humans can fly, he said; but when you throw yourself out of the window, you learn the hard way that it is wrong. Putnam also had his own version of ontological relativity.47 What objects we presume to exist is relative to conceptual schemes. Often, he uses examples from mathematics and abstract ontology. In geometry, he notes that we can think of “points” as fundamental entities, or as logical constructions out of lines. He also uses ideas from mereology—the theory of how parts and wholes interact—to show that how many objects are in a room is a matter of which conceptual scheme you adopt. Putnam imagines someone, let’s call him John, who thinks there are five objects in his study – a chair, table, lamp, notebook and pen. Are there other ways to count the objects in the room? Yes. Consider objects called “mereological sums”—objects that are the sum of two or more objects or the parts of objects. For example, we could think of John’s nose, chair, and lamp as forming a new, mereological object in his study. There

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are now six objects in the room. If such “sums” are objects, then the number of objects in Putnam’s room is not a simple matter of fact. It depends on how you count them. Putnam concludes: “According to me, how many objects there are in the world (and even whether certain objects...exist at all as individual ‘particulars’) is relative to the choice of a conceptual scheme.”48 In a later work, he says: “In my picture, objects are theory-dependent in the sense that theories with incompatible ontologies can both be right.”49 If the example of mereological sums seems abstract, we can consider more substantial ones from the history of philosophy. Aristotle divided up the world into basic individuals that are primary substances identical through change. In contrast, Whitehead considered basic individuals to be momentary events. Aristotle’s substances are a society of “actual occasions” connected by spatial, temporal, and casual relations. Actual occasions are the “final real things of which the world is made up.”50 The same choice of conceptual scheme confronts the ontology of properties and general features. The nominalist takes “blue” to refer to the sum of exemplifications of blue, while the logical realist takes “blue” to refer to a universal, abstract property instantiated by particular objects, the way triangularity is instantiated by actual triangles. Pluralism and Worldmaking Perhaps no contemporary philosopher has surpassed Nelson Goodman in elegantly developing the idea of conceptual pluralism and then drawing out very strong implications, all of which speak against realism as traditionally conceived. Goodman thinks our conceptual schemes create many possible ‘worlds’ in philosophy, art, and science. In Ways of Worldmaking, Goodman develops a constructivist philosophy of cognition, science, and art. Its central idea is that, contrary to

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traditional realism, both in common sense and in theory, there is no unique “real world” that preexists and is independent of mental activity and symbolic thinking. We, literally, make “worlds” as symbolic systems, then we live in them. Moreover, describing the world factually and truthfully is only one way we engage the world. In art, we use depiction, analogy, metaphor and other forms of symbolic language. We are engaged in expressing ideas and experiences. The aim is not to reach a propositional correspondence of thought and object. We ‘make worlds’ in many ways. Goodman maintains that there many worldviews or “versions,” sometimes conflicting with each other. There is a difference, nonetheless, between right and wrong versions. The difference is determined by “considerations of rightness” that is not a matter of correspondence with a world independent of all versions but includes the sort of criteria supported by Quine and Putnam—coherence, fitness, and so on.51 Conceptual relativity implies a choice among a plurality of conceptual schemes. Hence, as Quine and Putnam argue, if an ontology is relative to a conceptual scheme, we have a choice of ontologies. But does this mean, literally, that there are many worlds? Isn’t there one external world in which we live, and which stands behind our many belief systems? Goodman counters that this ‘one world’ cannot be described without using a conceptual scheme. If I insist that you tell me how it (world) is apart from all frames, what can you say? We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described. Our universe consists, so to speak, of these ways rather than of a world or of worlds.52

Why is Goodman confident of this position? It is, once again, the Kantian mediation idea. “We cannot test a version (of the world) by comparing it with a world undescribed, undepicted, unperceived,” Goodman says. We may speak of ‘‘the

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world’’ as an overlap of frames of depiction and description but the idea of an underlying world beyond such descriptions and depiction is “perhaps on the whole a world well lost.”53 Goodman also says that pluralists like him accept the full value of science as a way of ‘making’ the world. The pluralist’s typical opponent is not the realist scientist. The typical opponent is the “monopolistic materialist or physicalist who maintains that one system, physics, is preeminent and all-inclusive, such that every other version must eventually be reduced to it or rejected as false or meaningless.” This is, one should note, a different opponent than the one that vexed Putnam—the metaphysical realist. Goodman is rejecting, among other things, the constructionist (or reductionist) project of the logical positivists with their talk of “unity in science” by reduction to physics. Goodman states that the likelihood of accomplishing this reducibility is “negligible, and even the claim is nebulous since physics itself is fragmentary and unstable and the kinds and consequences of reduction envisaged are vague (How do you go about reducing Constable’s or James Joyce’s worldview to physics?).”54 Goodman’s pluralism is a distinctly modern (or post-modern) doctrine. We are left with a plurality of world descriptions. We cannot describe or intelligibly talk about the world as it is apart from worldmaking. This may have been implicit in ancient relativism but it was by no means explicit. Moreover, ancient and early modern realism were not pluralist. Truth about the world was the truth of one comprehensive philosophical system about one comprehensive reality. Objective objects were real and not relative to mental systems. They were not the instrumental or pragmatic “posits” of theory, or a choice among many posits.55 Moreover, the difference between ontologies was not that of translating one scheme into another. It was a difference between stand-alone philosophical views. Even

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Kant was no pluralist. There was only one universal and innate system of categories. Philosopher Michael Lynch has added his voice to the pluralistic approach to truth and realism, extending the work of James, Quine, Putnam, Goodman, and others. He talks about how we need a philosophical theory of pluralistic truth, or “truth in context.” Like Putnam, he believes that philosophy needs to leave behind centuries of thinking based on “absolute realism” yet retain the idea of truth, rationality, and the epistemic idea that some beliefs are better than others. Lynch follows his prior and fellow pluralists in describing absolute realism as the view that objective truths take us beyond appearances, misconceptions, and prejudices to “the real nature of the world,” to make contact with “absolute truths.”56 If truth is to be a meaningful concept, it has to be explained as truth arising from contexts—contexts of conceptual schemes, contexts of on-going inquiry, and so on. Lynch begins with pluralism as the idea that the world may be physically one thing but there is “more than one true story of the world” and we can have “incompatible, but equally acceptable, accounts of some subject matter.” There are no absolute facts. There is, instead, a diversity of truths. Minimalist and Absolutist Realism William Alston has replied to anti-realism in a different manner. Like Searle, he seeks a minimalist theory of realism that does not go far beyond the basic belief in a mind-independent reality, as found in common sense. He develops a “minimal” realist conception of truth that defines truth in uncomplicated terms. Truth is what is the case. A proposition is true if the world is the way it says it is, otherwise, it is false. This is minimalist in two ways. It separates truth from a complex dependence on epistemic notions such as ideal rational acceptability

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and justification. Truth is a simple, or minimal, concept. A true proposition, gold is malleable, is true if and only if it is the case that gold is malleable—not whether the belief is justified by the evidence or because the belief satisfies epistemic norms.57 The concept of truth is not the concept of justified belief. He thinks that constructivist and epistemic conceptions of truth cannot shake the “strong intuitive plausibility” of the realist conception. It is “overwhelmingly obvious” that the realist conception is the one we express with “true.”58 Also, his conception of truth is minimalist in not using the complicated explanations that have traditionally accompanied the correspondence theory of truth. Correspondence theorists, such as Russell, logical positivists, and Wittgenstein in his Tractatus, explained correspondence by developing complex theories of how the symbols of statements, and the component concepts of propositions, mirror the structure of corresponding facts in the world. Alston thinks none of this is necessary to define truth. Alston also incorporates conceptual relativity into realism, but without adopting Putnam’s internal realism. Like Searle, he thinks humans create representations of reality but what exists (and is true) is a separate ontological matter. Alston says a realist need not contend that all of reality is mind-independent. He only needs to claim that some of reality is mind-independent.59 However, in fact, Alston does think that “large stretches” of reality consist of things that are mind-independent. In A Sensible Metaphysical Realism, Alston provides a list of things that are mind-independent: familiar large objects in our physical environment such as animals and vegetables; water, earth, sugar, and snow; and unperceivable entities recognized by scientific theories such as electrons and quanta of energy. Realism, Alston thinks, is, first and foremost, a familiar, common sense belief. Therefore, he rejects Rorty’s assertion60 that realism necessarily holds that reality is inaccessible and could be completely

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different from what we think it is like. Alston thinks realists can hold that a good deal of objective knowledge of the world is within our grasp. Why burden realism with an “inaccessibility clause”?61 Alston also rejects the claim that realism is an absolute realism. He points to Searle and others who have claimed that realism is consistent with the idea that the world can be divided into objects in different and incompatible ways. Realists can think of these divisions as based on something that exists and is what it is independently of our choice of those divisions. Reality provides the “raw materials” for our conceptualizing of objects.62 Some anti-realists complain that the idea of things in themselves, or of the world as a necessary background presumption, is “empty” (or not illuminating) because it does not say much about reality. Moreover, whatever we mean by “world” is, as Goodman argued, reducible to our set of beliefs about objects, as known via conceptual schemes. The idea of “the world as it is” is simply shorthand for our beliefs about it. If we try to go beyond such beliefs to some conception of the world prior to any description of it, then we have something that is completely unspecified and unspecifiable. So in neither case, does our notion of a mind-independent world appear to do any serious philosophical work.63 To respond to the criticism, Bernard Williams set out to clarify the idea of knowing “the way the world is, in itself” because he believed that the idea of mind-independent knowledge is crucial to science.64 Williams contends that science needs a realistic account of how its theories converge on the right answer about the world, and why this convergence is different from an agreement on moral claims.65 Williams says scientific convergence needs to be defined as arriving at a knowledge of how things are. This requires an explanation of things as they appear and things as they are in themselves or “already there.”

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Williams offers a way to understand the difference between the world as it is and the world as it seems to us. We begin by thinking not what our beliefs are about, but how they represent the world. Some beliefs, such as beliefs in physics or beliefs about the physical properties of objects, strike us as representations that have little to do with us and our particular perspective; while other beliefs, such as thinking my friend is funny, my interpretation of Mona Lisa’s smile, or my hope that the Toronto Maple Leafs will win the Stanley Cup in hockey, are more subjective and influenced by desires and perspective. Williams says we arrive at the idea of things in themselves by selecting a class of beliefs that represent the world “to the maximum degree independent of our perspective and its peculiarities.”66 The resultant picture is of an “absolute conception of the world,” the world according to beliefs least dependent on particular perspectives. These representations can then be contrasted with “other, perspectival, representations” of things. The world as it seems to us means the world as it seems peculiarly to us. The world as it is in itself means a conception of the world that might be arrived at by any investigators, even if they were very different from us.67 Science uses a method that allows us to identify those sorts of belief that are not involved in “worldmaking,” as Goodman terms it, but are involved in describing the world already made, as it were. Williams calls this knowledge the absolute conception of the world. In Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry, Williams elaborated on these ideas. He defended objectivity in science as the seeking of absolute conceptions about things. Different human perspectives on the world result from an interaction between human beings, as part of the world, with the rest of the world, which exists independently of human interaction. This is a naturalistic starting point which Dewey, Quine, and others would endorse. Although humans cannot apprehend the world except by some representation, they can reduce the limitations or bias-

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es of their viewpoint. Inquirers should attempt to come as closely as possible to the absolute conception—a conception of what exists “anyway,” independent of the human point of view. Science has many ways of testing our beliefs for objectivity about the world, such as requiring alternate beliefs to be taken into consideration, using precise forms of measurement, by allowing others to perform your experiment for themselves, by checking for the empirical predictions that follow from your theory, and, as Popper said, trying to disconfirm one’s favorite hypothesis. The result is a hybrid epistemology where history and conceptual mediation is compatible with realism—with discovering the truth about the world. This is not a robust defense of realism that would satisfy traditional realists. They think realism is about the relation of a representation and an object, not a relation between kinds of representation. Amartya Sen, in The Idea of Justice, argues that objectivity can include perspective.68 He calls it “position-dependent” objectivity. Using scientific knowledge we can explain differences in perspectives, for example why some people are colorblind and cannot see that grass is green, or that explain why the size of the moon can look different (larger or smaller) from different locations on the earth. In fact, if we fix the perspective for looking at the moon, we can say many objective things about what perceivers would see from that position, and why. It is not clear whether Williams would consider position-dependent objectivity as part of his absolute conception of the world.

Section 3: New Naturalisms—Evolutionary Ethics and Development Kitcher’s Ethical Project At least one other kind of ethical theory is relevant to our project of creating a hybrid anthropological realism: contem-

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porary forms of naturalism. In one form, they are theories that explain ethics through an evolutionary perspective; in another form, they define the human good through realist theories about human development. Philip Kitcher’s secular humanism provides a thoughtful example of evolutionary accounts of morality. He describes morality as the “ethical project” of society. Kitcher’s approach to naturalistic ethics is not the naturalism that explains moral concepts in terms of natural (or bodily) pleasures and pains experienced by individuals. Nor does he reduce ethics to individual emotional reactions to things. Nor does he misapply Darwinian ideas, attempting to reduce morality to reproductive success. Kitcher’s evolutionary naturalism is broad, humanistic, and non-reductionist. He understands morality as a social phenomenon, the attempt to agree on a normative guidance system for society in a way that overcomes conflicting interests and secures enough altruism to balance the egoistic traits of humans. His moral philosophy is a sort of evolutionary contractualism. Morality is an agreement on the rules that make possible fair relationships and cooperation in society, while helping groups solve problems under difficult conditions. This contractual perspective is evolutionary because it is based on an historical account of how morality evolved from early human bands in prehistory before the first civilizations of the third millennium BC. The evolutionary naturalist explains how the key features of morality as a social practice came into existence, such as the human sense that moral rules have a special importance and constitute ‘duties,’ the existence of a moral conscience, and the development of pro-social traits such as empathy. For Kitcher, the central factor in the development of morality across history is the need of groups to govern themselves so that all (or most) members honor norms that enable the group to survive, develop, and perhaps flourish. This is the ethical

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project. Morality is this project stretched over centuries. It is a project that is “permanently unfinished.”69 It is unfinished because social conditions are constantly changing, new problems need changes to existing rules, and emerging subgroups of society will demand changes to rules they consider discriminatory or morally wrong, such as slavery or laws against sexual orientation. Kitcher thinks morality’s evolution has been driven forward by one inevitable social problem—the insufficient amount of altruism in any group and the need for ways to strengthen altruism. The forces against the ethical project are the familiar Darwinian traits of egoism and selfishness. Morality struggles with individuals who ‘cheat’ on the rules for their own benefit; with impulses to promote one’s own interests at the expense of others; and individuals who are aggressive and wish to dominant others. Friction within groups in early human history led to “altruism failures.” Defectors from group-based rules threatened the social fabric. Peacekeeping among individuals, like UN peacekeeping today, was a tiring, costly exercise. Maintaining cooperation was energy-consuming. It decreased the fitness of the group. Thus, early human groups stressed the need for all members to conform to rules which insured not only in-group harmony but allowed the groups to respond to a perilous environment and the threat of rival groups. Ethics began as a way to reduce or overcome the problems of living fairly together and solving real-world problems. It began as a “form of social technology.”70 Two other aspects of Kitcher’s work warrant mentioning: He is not advocating a customary morality of simply accepting existing rules. He is a liberal secularist who has a rather detailed theory of how projects are intelligently altered and changed, staying consistent with a tradition’s best moral standards but also critiquing certain beliefs and practices through science, moral reflection, and so on. The ethical project is changed by

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what Mill called new “experiments of living.”71 Kitcher is also a secular humanist who believes that moral reflection is enhanced by being open to the insights of art, of music, of great novels, and also the lessons of ordinary experience. Often, moral change comes about not from ‘above,’ through the theoretical analysis of moral principles and applications by philosophers, but from ‘below’ by moral pioneers—activists, emerging groups with different values, and by far-sighted moral leaders whose actions eventually move society forward. For Kitcher, morality is not compared to an external standard outside the flow of human history, such as a transcendent God or a future worldly utopia apparently on the horizon. Moral progress and chance occur within human experience through naturalistic and humanistic discourse, dialogue, and social actions which take the existing ethical project as their starting point. The history of the ethical projects in various cultures, then, is virtually the history of how societies manage to secure enough cooperation and rule-following for the good of all. Similarly, Allan Gibbard has argued that, for early humans (and also for humans today), “normative governance” was a “working out in community” of what to do, and what to think. This languagesupported “shared evaluation” would be fitness-enhancing in a species with a social life.72 Therefore, the moral critic or reformer is like the scientist in that he is also already launched on a project which is improved as it goes along. For Kitcher, there is a dignity to being part of this ethical project but there is no reward in heaven. He writes: My version of secularism places humanity at the center of value. It does not need a detour through some dim and remote transcendent….My naturalism conceives us as both creators and loci of value; our work of creation prompted by the exigencies of the human predicament. Out of that work, carried forward in the ethical project, has come nothing less than a transformation of human existence, through the forging of

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connections among people and through the expansion of the possibilities of human lives….That, I suggest, is the dignity of values enough.73

Kitcher is a secular moral realist who thinks of morality as a natural fact, a self-adjusting practice with standards and methods of critique internal to specific projects. Kitcher takes morality to be a social fact, that is, created by humans for society. As Searle argued, social facts exist only because humans exist, but they are as real and as robust as anything that humans produce—from screwdrivers and the institution of money to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Moral statements about particular rights or wrongs refer to an external and real system of rules crucial to social existence and, hence, ground an evolutionary moral realism. Morality and Capacity Development Another form of naturalism explains moral concepts and goals in terms of theories of the human good derived from attempts to develop peoples and nations struggling to overcome poverty and other inequities. The experience of agencies in the field of human development, such as agencies associated with UN projects, has stimulated thinking around the development of essential human capabilities.74 Reference to the development of human and social capabilities is one way to define the idea of the human good in a way that is naturalistic and compatible with both realism and humanism. The good is human development. Development theory is an expansionist theory of the good, since good is defined in a way that is not narrowed to subjective desires or pleasures. It includes reflection on what practical attempts to develop human communities tell us about humans and ethics. Developmental theory includes freedom, and it may even make freedom a central element of the good life. But theories also tend to

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stress the importance of developing many other human capacities. A good example of the capacities approach is Martha C. Nussbaum’s Creating Capabilities. Nussbaum contends that past theories of development, based on such measurements as Gross Domestic Product, ignore opportunity, equality, and dignity. Her capabilities approach measures development by employing a set of ten “central capacities.” The capacities range from being able to live a life of normal length and bodily security, to being able to use one’s senses and imagination, and to have control over one’s environment. Nussbaum is alert to objections to her capacities approach. She asks: “We live in a highly diverse world. Doesn’t this way of proceeding smack of imperialism”?75 She rejects the charge that human rights and capacity theory are only Western ideas and that she is being dogmatic. Her theory is a result of “critical normative argument” which is set forth “to be criticized, rebutted, engaged” and open to revision.76 Nussbaum says she has intentionally described the items on her list in a “somewhat abstract and general way” to allow citizens, legislatures and courts to specify how such abstract principles are to be “realized” in a constitution or any other foundational political document. Within certain parameters—the parameters of not violating human rights and not working against the development of central capacities—it is “perfectly appropriate” that different nations should realize the capacities differently, taking their histories and special circumstances into account. As an example she says a free speech right that suits Germany (for example, a ban on anti-Semitic speech) would be too restrictive under the First Amendment provisions of the United States constitution. There are different and legitimate ways for countries to interpret the meaning of freedom of speech. Protections of freedom of speech can be realized in

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many ways, although there are some approaches that are “unacceptably repressive”. Amartya Sen also takes a capacities approach to ethics and economics. The good is freedom to develop one’s basic capacities as a rational human being. Human welfare is to be measured by capacities and not states of consciousness since the states are too subjective, varying widely among individuals and cultures. The capability of a person is an active concept. Wellbeing is not the “having” of experiences but rather the ability of a person to “do valuable acts or reach valuable states of being.” Living is “a combination of various ‘doings and beings’ with quality of life to be assessed in terms of the capability to achieve valuable functionings.” Some functionings are simple and valued by all, such as being adequately nourished or in good health. Others are widely shared but complex, such as self-respect. The capability approach does not claim that personal utilities, such as pleasure or getting what one desires, are not part of the good. However, such factors are not “the measure of all values.” The capability approach differs from utilitybased approaches in regarding “the state of being happy as one among several objects of value.”77 It remains to end this discussion of realism moderne by noting that the problems that many of the thinkers above are wrestling with, for example, construction plus realism, internal conceptual schemes and truth, are problems addressed by recent, nuanced forms of pluralistic relativism. These writings can be another source of insight for those who wish to pursue the hybrid path in theory making. For example, David Wong’s Natural Morality: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism, is one of the best examples of recent and encouraging work, bringing relativism and realism together. Wong wisely will not settle for a simplistic, sweeping relativism which allows for infinitely many and equal forms of morality. Wong says this relativism is “a substitute for confronting hard questions.”78 Neither will

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Wong go to the opposite extreme and defend a form of moral “absolutism” or moral “universalism” which he defines as the view that “there is a single true morality for all societies and times.”79 Wong seeks a hybrid or middle position which recognizes the plurality of valid moralities but does not believe there is an indefinite or infinite number of true moralities. It is not true that any morality is as good as any other. Wong believes morality is an idealized set of norms taken from, or abstracted from, a society where they regulate conflicts of interest between persons and within the mental economy of a single person. Moralities differ according to their content (their list of norms), how they rank the norms as to importance, and what criteria determine what counts as a genuine or adequate morality. Some of these criteria, such as how the morality deals with fundamental rights, may be universally valid across all kinds of societies because they deal with norms that deal with common problems, such as problems of conflict resolution. But the generality of these norms means they may not be sufficient for deciding what to do in a specific situation in a specific society. Hence, there will also be society-relative local norms (or local morality), such as particular preferences for certain types of virtue, or certain ways of living together in families. The local criteria are not deduced from the universal criteria. The rules of a valid morality, then, must satisfy two sets of criteria: universal criteria and local criteria.

Conclusion Whether or not Wong successfully establishes his theory of pluralistic relativism, his work shows the potential for new positions in morality and in moral realism. In the rest of this book, we set out to propose one such position, drawing on the stimulating ideas of the hybrid thinkers who in the late twentieth century began to rethink the whole notion of meta-ethics and

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realism. We begin in the next chapter with an overview of anthropological realism.

Notes 1. Quine, Word and Object, 25. 2. On the far-reaching moral, artistic, and other effects of the world wars and other twentieth century disasters, see Ward, The Fourth Morality, Vol. 1. 3. Among the defenses, see Frankfurth’s On Truth and his popular (and amusing) On Bullshit; Lynch’s In Praise of Reason. For examples of the debates, see Rorty and Engel, What’s the Use of Truth? and Prado, Searle and Foucault on Truth. On analysis of reason and truth, see Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason, Vattimo, A Farewell to Truth, and Williams, Truth and Truthfulness. In psychology, see Pinker’s stout defense of rationality, science, and Enlightenment values in Enlightenment Now and Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. 4. See Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide of the Perplexed; and Blackburn, Truth: A Guide. On conceptions of truth in Western history, see Künne, Conceptions of Truth. 5. See Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays; Putnam, Realism, Truth and History, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays and Ethics Without Ontology; Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. 6. Wong, Natural Moralities. 7. Kitcher, The Ethical Project and Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism. 8. See Martha Nussbaum’s Creating Capabilities. 9. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other; and Rawls, Political Liberalism. 10. See Mach, The Analysis of Sensations. 11. On the history of correct epistemic construction, see Chapter Four, “Objectivity as Correct Construction,” in Ward, Objectively Engaged Journalism. 12. See Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. 13. See Sigmund, Exact Thinking in Demented Times.

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14. For a summary of the emergence of mathematical formalism and formal logic, see Putnam, “Peirce the Logician.” 15. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, Preface to the second edition, vi. Russell’s attraction to formal thinking was a Cartesian quest. He came to philosophy, like Descartes, through a desire to find knowledge, not questionable current belief. His idea was to seek “indubitable truth” in mathematics and was “profoundly dissatisfied” with Mill’s Logic and its view of mathematics as based on generalizations from experience. See Russell, Logical Atomism, 31. Putnam called this “craving for objectivity.” Putnam, “The Craving for Objectivity,” 120. 16. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, Preface to the second edition, vi-vii. 17. For the role of logic in philosophy from the empiricist’s viewpoint, see Schlick, “The Turning Point in Philosophy.” 18. By the early 1900s at Oxford, Russell represented a love of logicbased analysis directed in large part at the concepts of science. Also at Oxford, John Austin came to lead a movement called “ordinary language philosophy” which looked at how we use words in everyday situations. At Cambridge, philosophers John Wisdom and Susan Stebbing were part of the Cambridge “common sense” school. 19. The term “logical positivism” came mainly from an article of the same name published by Blumberg and Feigl in the Journal of Philosophy in 1931. Schlick called it “consistent empiricism” and Carnap preferred “logical empiricism.” It was also called neo-positivism. 20. For a laudatory, yet still useful history, see Kraft, The Vienna Circle. Some of the members were Carnap, Waismann, Feigl, Neurath, and Godel. It worked with the Society of Empirical Philosophy at Berlin led by Reichenbach, Kraus, and Grelling. Its main publication was the journal Erkenntnis (1930) which was renamed The Journal of Unified Science (1939-40), edited by Reichenbach and Carnap. A. J. Ayer was the most notable English logical positivist. Other leading thinkers, such as Popper, and pragmatists such as Peirce and James, did not join the movement but were part of a larger international conversation on scientific empiricism. 21. Newell, Objectivity, Empiricism and Truth, 1-2. 22. Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind.

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23. However, Kuhn was not saying that science was irrational or like religion, but rather that, at some point, one decided there are good reasons to ‘convert’ to a much different set of ideas. 24. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, 45. 25. See Barnes and Bloor, “Relativism, Rationalism and the Sociology of Knowledge.” 26. See Connor, Postmodernist Culture. 27. See, for example, Woodsmansee and Jaszi, The Construction of Authorship; Harré, The Social Construction of Emotions; Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts; Golan, Inventing Shaka: Using History in the Construction of Zulu Nationalism. 28. See, for example, Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the AirPump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. 29. Hacking, The Social Construction of What? 6. 30. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. 31. James, “The Meaning of Truth,” 457. 32. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, 54-55. 33. Quine, Word and Object, 25. 34. Quine states that before doubt, skepticism, or talk of delusions in philosophy can get started, we first have to posit external or independently existing “bodies” that are not reducible to the “immediate given.” Quine, “The Nature of Natural Knowledge,” 67. 35. On this relationship, see Gibson, “Translation, Physics and the Facts of the Matter,” 147. 36. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” 83. 37. Gibson, “Translation, Physics and the Facts of the Matter, 148. 38. See Sosa, “Putnam’s Pragmatic Realism.” 39. Putnam, “Two Philosophical Perspectives,” 49. 40. Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, 23. 41. Putnam, “Two Philosophical Perspectives,” 49. 42. Putnam, “Two Philosophical Perspectives,” 52. 43. Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism, 33. 44. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth, 162, 188-230. 45. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth, 163.. 46. Putnam, “Two Philosophical Perspectives,” 54. 47. Putnam avoids Quine’s term “ontological relativity” mainly because he disagrees with Quine’s theory of indeterminacy of meaning.

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48. Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism, 32. 49. Putnam, “A Defense of Internal Realism,” 40. 50. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 23. 51. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 3-5. 52. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 3. 53. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 4. 54. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 4-5. 55. Instrumentalism in theory of science goes back centuries, as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries debate over Copernicus’s new theory of planetary motion. Theologians and others warned Copernicus (and then Galileo) that they should regard the theory as only a convenient mathematical model for predicting the position of the planets not the physical truth about the world. The model helped to ‘save the appearances’ but was not the truth about reality. “Physical truth” refers to the idea of there being one, absolute theory that spoke the truth of an external and independent world, that is, traditional realism. However, neither Copernicus nor Galileo regarded the Copernican system as only instrumental. The model was physically true, and the correct explanation, because it was an elegant theory for prediction and the discussion of observable objects. This is a significant, early attempt to bring together a realist notion of scientific truth and constructivist notion of method. See Losee, A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, 44-45. But early scientific instrumentalists did not go so far, as with Goodman, to doubt the very idea of a world existing by itself. 56. Lynch, Truth in Context, 9, italics in text. 57. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth, 5-8. 58. Alston, A Realist Conception of Truth, 5. 59. Alson, A Sensible Metaphysical Realism, 98. 60. Rorty, “The World Well Lost,” 14. 61. Alston, A Sensible Metaphysical Realism, 100. 62. Alston, A Sensible Metaphysical Realism, 103-104. 63. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 138. 64. See Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. 65. Williams says that the convergence of belief could occur in ethics but it would not be a realistic convergence based on the ways things are. It would be an agreement on moral principles. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 136.

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66. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 138-139. 67. On the debate between Williams and Putnam on whether science aspires to an absolute conception of the world, see Blackburn, “The Absolute Conception: Putnam vs. Williams.” 68. Sen, The Idea of Justice, 157. 69. Kitcher, The Ethical Project, 2. 70. Kitcher, Life After Faith, 42. 71. Mill, On Liberty and the Subjection of Women, 65. 72. Gibbard, Wise Choice, Apt Feelings, 72. 73. Kitcher, Life After Faith, 59. 74. There is a third kind of thinking that will be addressed in Chapters Four and Six. It’s a sort of new humanism. It is found in the way that continental philosophers such as Ricoeur, phenomenologists, and philosophers of language have theorized about the human as a historical, culture-defined, meaning-creation being that must be understood not only through biology or neuro-psychology but through the wholeness of being a human. 75. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 101. 76. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 108. 77. Sen, “Capability and Well-Being,” 30. 78. Wong, Natural Moralities, xii. 79. Wong, Natural Moralities, xii.

CHAPTER THREE ANTHROPOLOGICAL REALISM STEPHEN J. A. WARD Our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct. —John Locke 1

Over the past two chapters, we obtained a historical overview of the trajectory of the contest between realism and antirealism. The survey is broad, covering many thinkers and centuries. But it is nonetheless selective, necessarily, given the length of time under study. We have selected theories and thinkers using two criteria: (a) realists and non-realists who not only put forward a new theory but whose writings constituted a crucial moment in the debate, and (b) contemporary views that suggest interesting and productive ways to rethink metaethics and realism—ways that attempt to steer clear of the stalemates and dualisms of the past. Criterion (b) played its largest role in Chapter Two. The most suggestive idea is the possibility of a hybrid conception of realism in philosophy with regard to epistemology and ontology. We discussed examples in the work of Quine and Putnam, and in the provocative irrealism of Goodman. The hybrid approach brings together elements of constructionism and realism. This hybrid realism can be extended to thinking about moral realism. Beyond questions of hybridity and epistemology, there are substantive questions for ethics. What hybrid epistemology gives you is a methodological approach to

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questions of truth, reality, evidence, discovery and invention. But ethics is more than a method or an epistemology. A plausible ethical theory has to have something to say about the meta-ethical questions of what the function of ethics is and what we are doing when we make ethical statements. Here, we find Kitcher and other evolutionary ethicists helpful in seeing ethics from a naturalistic and functional perspective—ethics as a project that has certain crucial functions for life in society, especially the attempt to promote fair and humane social cooperation. But even if we agree to adopt a functionalist approach to the role of ethics, there is still one other important area: What should the basic values of a naturalistic, humanistic ethics actually be? What are the substantive principles, values, and ideals that should guide our ethical project? Here is where we find useful theorizing in the works of Nussbaum and other cosmopolitan thinkers who define the basic values in terms of human development, and in terms of the freedom and dignity that comes from being able to exercise one’s fundamental capacities. This is what we ‘take’ theoretically from the first two chapters. But this is not the end of it, by any means. In the chapters to come, especially Chapters Four and Five, we draw inspiration from a wide range of thinkers from Vico to Gadamer. We develop a philosophy of the whole human. These reflections will lead to our moral globalism. The function of ethics is to promote these values for humanity. In summary, (1) hybrid epistemology, (2) a functionalist approach to ethics, and (3) a substantive moral globalism provide the form and the content of anthropological realism. Ethics, for anthropological realism, is about fair cooperation in pursuit of fundamental, humane values. The pursuit has two linked aspects: Encountering basic values and deliberating in light of those encounters. Deliberation is open, equal discourse on the terms by which we live together morally. Encountering is the encounter with moral values in one’s experience. Neither

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deliberation nor encountering can exist without each other. Deliberation is the seeking of cooperative agreements. It is a moral contractarianism steeped in humane experience. Not every contract is moral. Reasoning about rules must meet the moral standard of impartial discourse motivated by the good of the whole. Discussion must be open to all relevant parties, democratic in spirit, and guided by informed, rigorous reasoning based on logic, fact, value, and respect for the plurality of views. If not, the reasoning is some form of egotistical, prudential, tribal, capitalistic, or purely legal thinking which may or may not be consistent with morality. It may be nothing more than the ability of a dominant group to impose their will on the less powerful. So moral values play a central role in assessing how and what agreements are reached. Moreover, we do not contract in some abstract way. We contract with some ends in view and given some basic values, such as human rights, avoiding harm, enjoying political liberties, seeking trustworthy relationships, and so on. This is where our encounters come in. In these encounters, we experience moral goodness and rightness, and we experience things we consider evil and immoral. The task of genuine moral thinking is to find a way to express our moral encounters in language, in norms, in practices, and in projects. Given this basis in encountered values, moral discourse can proceed and have direction. In assessing ethical norms, decisions, or meta-ethical theories, anthropological realism pays attention to the broad consequences, both theoretical and practical. One question is aways operating in the background: How do these commitments and ideas help humanity address its urgent and global problems? The underlying assumption is not only that ethics matters but metaethics matters. How we think about ethics affects the values, attitudes and practices we adopt in the world. Although ethics contains theoretical concepts and propositions, we do not see ethics as a system of abstract propositions which we, rationalistically,

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apply to cases. Ethical values have their proper origin in the experiences of humankind. Theory serves life. This chapter provides a summary of anthropological realism. The full implications of this position are developed in the remainder of the book. This chapter is a conceptual bridge between the first two historical chapters and the chapters to come. It outlines the basic epistemological and valuational positions of anthropological realism. Early on, the focus is epistemic and on hybrid realism. This is a crucial and potentially controversial part of our theory so we discuss it at length before pushing on to what this means for our conception of morality. We propose an integrated, hybrid naturalism called “constructive realism.” Then, the chapter examines the function of ethics and its language. It concludes by broadening the discussion even further by arguing for imperfectionism and hope as essential elements in our ethical project. What follows Chapter Three are chapters of two kinds. There are chapters on the substantive values of anthropological realism. The list includes cultural pluralism, humans as cultural beings, the ubiquity of interpretive schemes (or hermeneutics) that probe for meaning and value, and the inescapable historicity of those schemes and of culture. There are also chapters that concern anthropological realism’s view of specific and emerging topics. One topic is the current effort to construct a global ethics in media, in communication, and elsewhere. Another topic is the relationship of morality and scientific naturalism.

Section 1: Anthropological Realism as a Hybrid Realism Basic Features: A Summary The epistemology of anthropological realism is a hybrid, as discussed in Chapter Two. Anthropological realism is psycho-

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logically constructionist, acknowledging the activity of all inquirers and the necessity to interpret the world by constructing conceptual schemes. Moreover, this constructing is always historical and socially situated. Anthropological realism is epistemically pluralist about truth and rational warrant. There can be many conceptual schemes or explanations for a phenomenon resulting in a range of different truths and perspectives. Moreover, it is possible, as Quine stressed, for two or more theories to agree with all current factual evidence. Facts can underdetermine theoretical choice. Anthropological realism is conceptually relativistic: What we think exists or what is a fact is relative to some conceptual scheme, often operating in the background. Thus, part of inquiring is a choice of the best conceptual scheme, where what is best includes a plurality of cognitive and moral norms. Anthropological realism is naturalistic and realistic about the existence of an external world and how we know it. It maintains the realistic notions of truth, justification, the real, and well-evidenced belief. Moreover, given some basis for rational comparison, such as a set of cognitive norms, we can judge some beliefs as better than others. Similarly, given a set of basic values and moral commitments, we can judge that some moral claims are valid and more valid than others. Realism is not seeing things from God’s absolute point of view. Nor is it about asserting that there is only one way the world is and that we have the uniquely correct description of that world. Truth is what our best available forms of knowledge teach us, and what satisfies our best available cognitive and moral norms. Holism and Wide Experience Let us go deeper into experience and epistemology. We are not devoid of guidance when figuring out what beliefs fit the world best. We have many rigorous criteria and methods of

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inquiry across the humanities and the sciences, and such knowledge often passes the test of practice. There may be some truths that we are, as humans, unable to discern or will never know. But this only underlines the importance of knowing as much as we can—truths worth knowing within the limits of the human mind. Truth is a property of beliefs that cohere or fit with the world. Being true to the object is both being truthful and being objective. The determination of true beliefs is too dynamic a process to be captured by the image of single beliefs paired, individually, with their own separate fact—a copying, imitating, or corresponding (through concepts, symbols, terms) to the way the world is. This is why philosophers’ favorite examples of true belief, “the cat is on the mat” or “snow is white,” can be misleading. It treats beliefs as static, atomic propositions. Our beliefs tend to combine into wholistic structures, such as an interpretation or a theory. Like the stones in a garden arch, they support each other and the overall structure. Then the entire set of beliefs (or a significant portion of them) imply something about the world. Where the implication fails, for example, not born out by future observation, we usually have a choice as to which of the beliefs is to blame and needs to be altered. As Quine said, our man-made fabric of beliefs meets experience as a “corporate body.” It is meaningless to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement especially if the statement is “at all remote” from sense experience. 2 The empirical content of the notion of a black hole in space, for example, is the sum total of empirical evidence of the many statements that cohere to form the theory. Why is holism so ubiquitous in thinking and evaluating? One reason is that our experience of the world is wide, not narrow; entangled, not encapsulated. We do not construct and revise our beliefs in a tidy, positivist fashion, adding one atomic belief onto another. We do not construct belief systems the way

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we build objects using a Lego kit—adding one uniform piece to another uniform piece in a uniform manner. We experience the world in all its richness and complexity, and then try to sort out the elements from the experiential gestalt. Lots of pieces don’t fit together so we are forced to balance and weigh conflicting beliefs and values. It is messy. It is human. To experience the world widely means our experiential stream is rich with meanings, cognitions, and elements like observations, feelings, and musings. What we call the “present experience” extends to other occurring experiences; it extends backward to past experiences, and forward to anticipated experiences. A wide cognition is a cognition that brings together a plurality of capacities to produce the temporally extended experiences for an agent. Imagine how an accomplished violinist experiences and interprets a difficult score in concert. The cognition of the violinist exhibits a collaboration and convergence of capacities, faculties, and physical skills. There is the feel of the violin strings on her fingers; the ‘body memory’ of her muscles so she can perform difficult passages; her awareness of the sound in the hall, and the mood of the crowd; the unpleasant heat of the spotlight on her forehead; the nervousness as she approaches the piece’s most difficult section; not to mention her interaction with the accompanying orchestra and ever-present conductor. This is wide experience, with rich and wide cognitions. If experience is wide and holistic, so are cognition and rationality. But, if things are so intertwined, how do we know that anything is real, true, or valuable? By applying criteria of evaluation that themselves have been derived from past experience and have led to successful ways of thinking. Take cognitive norms, or standards, as an example. We do not normally evaluate individual beliefs by using one standard, for example, observability. There are so many different beliefs it is hopeless to employ one standard to all cases. Certainly, observability is

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insufficient for any reasonably complex scientific theory. What we do, where we are rational, is evaluate items of belief relative to our conceptual systems and we evaluate conceptual systems by cognitive norms. Here is a partial list: logical consistency among beliefs (for example, no contradictions); coherence, for example, new beliefs cohere with existing beliefs; economy or simplicity of conceptual scheme; empirical and predictive power; agreement with facts; theoretical elegance; deductive power; self-evidence, or based on intuitively clear ideas; able to unify old and new phenomena under laws and concepts; able to explain new or strange phenomena; the reliability of beliefs in the past; useful for solving practical problems and producing new technology. The concepts of truth—truthful belief, fact, objectivity, methodology, meaning, and what is rationally warranted by the evidence—form a semantic circle. We explain one term by another term. What is true is a fact; a fact is what is true. What is true is what has sufficient evidence or is rationally acceptable. What is rationally acceptable leads us to the truth. What is objective is what is true. What is true is what is objective. Also, facts and norms live together cheek by jowl. We cannot say whether x is a fact without some conception of what we rationally ought to believe. A fact is what satisfies our cognitive (and other) norms and values. As Putnam asserts: “A being with no values would have no facts either.” 3 Further, the rational and the good influence each other. The very definition of practical rationality—“intelligent means to appropriate goals” 4—entails the need to evaluate the means and ends given some set of values and norms. Too often, we erroneously presume the sovereignty of reason over goodness. During the Enlightenment, rationalists said reason was the sole adjudicator of truth and we should, as Kant suggested, put our existing beliefs on trial before the bar of reason. By the twentieth century, a new form of rationalism—logical positivism—

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was reducing value judgments and emotions to cognitively meaningless subjective responses. But, we can ask in reply, what is the good of being rational? The justification for adopting a rational stance, or accepting a rational scheme, such as a scientific method, stands or falls with its contribution to intelligent and valuable action, that is, a contribution to the human good. In novels and in thought experiments, we see that our commitment to rationality is bound up with ideas about the good life. Take Huxley’s novel, Brave New World. The idea of a society where the populace is kept docile yet “happy” by the drug soma offends our values of free and rational persons, where happiness is not reducible to pleasurable states of mind. It does not fit our idea of “human cognitive flourishing.” 5 Through such narratives, we realize what Iris Murdoch called the “sovereignty of good”—the role of our concept of the good in evaluating ideas of rationality and evaluating ways of being. 6 Putnam summarizes the holism of rationality, truth, goodness, and worldviews: The choice of a conceptual scheme necessarily reflects value judgments, and the choice of a conceptual scheme is what cognitive rationality means….One cannot choose a system that just “copies” the facts, because no conceptual scheme is a mere “copy” of the world. The notion of truth itself depends on our standards of rational acceptability, and these in turn rest on and presuppose our values….Theory of truth presupposes a theory of rationality which in turn presupposes our theory of the good. Theories of the good…are themselves dependent on assumptions about human nature, about society, about the universe. It has been necessary to revise our theory of good (such as it is) again and again as our knowledge has increased and our world-view has changed….There is no such thing as a “foundation.”7

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Constructive Realism Anthropological realism’s epistemology is what we call constructive realism. It incorporates the vital activity of the mind into a hybrid view of factual and moral knowing, while maintaining the concepts of truth, evidence, objectivity, and better or worse beliefs. To make this possible, constructive realism must re-align and redefine concepts, but that goes for any serious reform of theory. Constructive realism is our third way between strong social constructionism and traditional realism, in the wake of the failed project of logical constructionism. Why it is crucial to society and morality to maintain these concepts will be discussed shortly. First, we need to get clear on the debate. What is really at issue between constructionists and realists? We saw how the idea of construction has played a large part in philosophy from the first social constructionists, the Greek sophists, and the psychological constructionists of the seventeenth and eighteenth century—British empiricists such as Locke and Hume and on to the positivists. Also, as noted, realist philosophers from Aristotle, Aquinas, and Bacon to John Stuart Mill developed epistemologies that stressed the activity of the mind in pursuit of knowledge. Quine used science to explain how the mind, from a relative meager input of stimuli, constructs science. Therefore, the issue is not constructionism versus non-constructionism, carte blanch. That is too simple an opposition. After all, both realists and empiricists have embraced construction in their philosophies. Nor is the dispute best portrayed as a strict dualism between two models of the mind: the mind as a passive recipient of objective, worldly data, a tabula rasa, versus the mind as a highly active and subjective interpreter of the world. After all, realists and empiricists have assumed that the mind is active. The issue is over what sorts of constructions they think are possible. Strong social constructionism either

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asserts or implies that there are only the varying constructions of varying societies which we imbibe, and there is no higher view from which to evaluate them. It is essentially a social relativism about knowledge or truth. In this view, society constructs views, ideologies, and value systems for political and other purposes. These constructions shape what individuals learn, feel, believe, and value. Unfortunately, the implication of this particular constructionist attitude—even if its proponents do not state it—is that the shaping of belief is done in a deterministic fashion. There is little room in these discussions for individual creativity, free thought, or some explanation of dissident theorizing and why it might be better than the status quo. Science is modelled along the same lines. Scientists imbibe what their scientific society teaches. They make claims to knowledge by virtue of the norms of their practice. The fact of deep revolutions within disciplines created by individuals, not groups, is often not thoroughly considered. It is easy to ‘soft peddle’ social constructionism’s strong implications. Perhaps adherents want to say they are only focusing on social shaping as an influencing factor but they are not returning to an eighteenth century materialism and determinism of mind where society replaces the role of material things. If this is the position, then it is hard to see what all the fuss is about. The idea of society as an influence on mind is obvious and not problematic. The fuss is due to the fact that many social constructionist writings have gone beyond “influence” to something very close to “determines.” Knowledge is treated as a socially determined product. For example, notions of rationality, objectivity and truth are said to be determined by Western society. If we take this position seriously, the end result cannot be anything other than a reduction of notions of knowledge and truth to the exercise of unjust power—the utter rejection of the ideas of knowledge and truth. Michel Foucault writes: “All knowledge rests upon injustice; there is no right, not even in

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the act of knowing, to truth or a foundation for truth; and the instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind).”8 As Richard Wolin has stated, this post-modern attitude, so popular among thinkers in the second-half of the twentieth century, is the intellect giving in to the “seduction of unreason.”9 Over and against this position are traditional forms of philosophical constructionism from Bacon to Carnap. These adherents believe a logical or rational constructionism is possible and can lead to truth and knowledge as traditionally conceived. Constructivist realists and the philosophical constructionists both believe in the possibility and reality of rational mental construction in knowing. The issue is: How can we be active in constructing our views of the world in an objective manner? How can our constructing stay reality-based and ‘true to the world’? Rather than sit back in our philosophical armchairs and dispute the existence of freedom, determinism, the existence of the world, the existence of other minds, and the possibility of being entirely deceived, constructive realists focus attention on more pragmatic matters of how we can do good inquiry, and how we should practice rationality and truth-seeking in our disciplines, and how to teach it. It is difficult to see how one can successfully maintain, rationally and logically, a thorough-going social constructionism that questions (explicitly or implicitly) the possibility and reality of rational construction—a construction that results in accurate beliefs about the world. As suggested earlier in the book, to play the skeptic and deny the possibility of rational construction is to undermine all inquiry, including the skeptic’s own attempt to state a defensible position. It is to undermine all rational attempts to justify much-needed reforms as better because there really is no such thing as better, objectively understood. The skeptic would have to deny the reality of many paradigmatic examples of good thinking that get us closer to the

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truth about the world. Also, if there is no way to evaluate schemes and normative systems, then the implication is that we can believe whatever we like—what suits our interests, our politics, or what is convenient to believe. We are getting sucked into the bog of misinformation and disinformation so readily believed by millions on social media every day. Most of all, this view simply denies the most obvious fact of experience: how the world is not only external to me, but makes its presence known by obstructing me, frustrating me, harming me, helping me. Wishful thinking is punished by reality at every turn. Similarly, there is the plain biological fact that organisms need (and have) a fairly good ability to discern fact from fiction, or friend from foe, to survive in any ecological system. Why do our inductions on experience capture objective regularities in nature? Darwin comes to the rescue. Successful ways of inducing in evolution led to reproductive success and hence became species-wide. “Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing their kind,” Quine said wittily.10 There is more going on in learning and experience than social pressures. We have survived as a species because we could get most of our beliefs to fit the world, most of the time. Constructive realists are constructivists who believe there are objective ways to create and test ideas against the world. Strong social constructionists do not believe in rational and objective constructions, or they have trouble explaining why some constructions are true and objective, and others are not. For anthropological realism, the goal of inquiry is to reach well-evidenced and/or pragmatically valuable beliefs that make no claim to eternal or absolute truth from God’s viewpoint. Constructivist realism sees inquiry as occurring in social and cultural fields but it does not reduce ideation and evaluation to indoctrination in ideologies by groups and societies. Nor does

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constructivist realism believe in the fantasy utopian project of reducing all knowledge to one set of statements (for example, observations, plus some logic) or the utopian goal of creating a unity of science by reducing all sciences to physics. There are irreducibly plural ways to construct beliefs and knowledge. The unity of rational inquiry is a matter of attitude and commitment: a common endorsement of critical, rational openness to ideas and a willingness to test and scrutinize beliefs against wide experience. Discerning reality is a fallible and imperfect project but still admirable and essential. Four Notions to Jettison There are four questionable notions at work when people use constructionism to deflate notions of truth or objectivity. One is the idea of mediation as an “interface” between me and the world. Putnam, in “Sense, Nonsense and the Senses,” argued that the problems that people have in combining constructivism and realism is due to an old idea, discussed in Chapter Two: My ideas are a sort of interfering screen between me and the objects we see, handle, and use every day. As seen, it began with Kant’s conceptual scheme for organizing intuitions. One problem with this view is this: How would you know that the ideas are an interface in the first place? How could you know this if you were a subject (an inner eye) limited to viewing things behind the veil of ideas? You couldn’t. All you would have is an immediate experience of something given— sense data, or abstractions called ideas. You might be a ‘brain in a vat.’ But you are not a brain in a vat. To maintain a firm skepticism about the external reference of our sensations and ideas you would have to ignore all of your overt, worldly experiences as an agent—the bumping into things, the obdurate objects and people around you, plus physically touching and moving through the world. You would have

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to stop seeing yourself as a body. Here are some other experiences that fly in the face of this skepticism: I hit my head on the lamp getting out of my chair; I cut myself when shuffling paper at my desk; the cold winter air freezes my aging body; the robber holds me up and takes my wallet; the police officer forces me into jail for protesting a war; I walk briskly through a nature trail touching, seeing, smelling and physically contacting bushes which prick me. The child learns that there is an external reality when he trips over an object. A hockey player receives a devastating body check and suffers great pain. My toothache is unbearable until some externally existing thing, called a dentist, armed with his external objects, called tools, comes to my assistance. The airplane pilot uses sophisticated radar—presumably true to the surface of the earth—to land the plane on the tarmac. We know that humans process information in the mind (or brain) not because of introspection but because of naturalistic knowledge of how humans transact with the world. The fact that the brain starts with an inverted, two-dimensional image on the retina and ends with three-dimensional seeing was a discovery of natural inquiry. Studies of the eyes and the retina showed that our seeing involved plenty of processing. Around 300 BC, Herophilos identified the retina from dissections of cadaver eyes, while Euclid’s “Optics” speculated that our eyes emit rays that encounter objects and tell us their properties. In the seventeenth century, when the science of perception began to emerge, Descartes dissected bull’s eyes which he bought from a butcher. He was among many others who tried to follow the inward path of stimuli into the mind (or brain). In 1894, Santiago Ramón y Cajal published the first major work on the retinal neurons in The Retina of Vertebrates. This scientific study of brain processing was not intended to be a skeptical refutation of realism. It was not meant to undermine the common sense belief that we do interact fairly directly

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with objects, and our perceptual knowledge of the world is fairly reliable. For example, late at night I am driving through a dark wooded area during a snowstorm. My perceptual processing allows me to correctly predict the turns in the road (despite the darkness and snow) and to objectively determine the road’s course. Where the road turns to the left, my eyes tell me it is turning to the left. There is a ‘fit’ or an isomorphism between perceptual activities and external things. Nothing like that would be possible if knowledge of the world was reducible to viewing a screen of inward, introspective ideas and drawing shaky inferences on what was beyond the ideas. As agents we physically interact with the natural objects of the world and the meaning of our concepts is shown in the experiences of transaction. If you want to know the meaning of an external object just stub your toe on a rock, as Samuel Johnson suggested. If you want to know the meaning of moral goodness, try interacting with morally good persons and being inspired by their moral character. The familiar question: “But how do you know for certain that your ideas refer to external objects at all, or refer accurately to external objects?” is part an old skeptical game in philosophy that we should not try to play. Two misleading ideas converge: one, that we have no way of knowing that our ideas deal with external objects, accurately or not. Two, that we need certainty in such knowledge to save us from the skeptic. Both ideas should be rejected. With regard to the second question, we do not need to be saved from skepticism by searching for certainty. Radical skepticism needs more justification than the naturalistic beliefs it questions. Moreover, there is no certain knowledge in empirical affairs, so the demand for certainty cannot be met. Nor should we try to meet the demand. The mentalistic question about the external reference of ideas is also unanswerable. It won’t accept an answer based on our wide agency. Our entire everyday experience is testimony to our

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being agents in the world with relatively good capacities to discern the features of everyday things. What more evidence is required? The only way to deny these facts about human agents is to arbitrarily rule them all out of court, or reduce the transactions to sense impressions in my mind. But, as argued, this is ridiculous. Centuries ago, mentalistic philosophy locked the conscious, knowing person into the prison of his introspective mind. The world was, first and foremost, what was directly “given” to the mind, such as sense data. But this meant that the mind, despite such givens, was in a state of subjective uncertainty as to the real nature of the world. Like the people staring at the shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave, such people (if they existed) would be condemned to experience unreal appearances. But we are not so condemned. The entire model of the introspective mind which tries to construct the rest of reality is based on what Dewey called the spectator theory of mind. It has led only to paradoxes, dualisms, and futile debate about Cartesian deceivers—see the popularity of Matrix movies— and attempts to prove the existence of other minds. All of this problem space is swept away if we see inquiry and knowing as the embedded acts of an agent already in transaction with the world. The mind is already part of the world. It is not trying to peek out from behind a mediating screen. The mind processes information but it does not inwardly peer at the processing itself. We literally see the world, not inner impressions or images. The advice of anthropological realism is: Ignore this mentalistic problem space. Also, tied up with the mentalistic problem space is the flawed notion of a “given” in sense experience, such as thinking that what we directly see are individual sense data, and this is our only non-mediated or direct contact with the external world. For sense-data theories, my perceptual experience of a yellow ball and the ball itself is mediated by a third entity—my

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direct intuition of something called sense data. They are “special mind-dependent objects, distinct from ordinary material objects, present in cases of illusion and hallucination as well as vertical perception.”11 The sense-data theorist posits a special mental entity to explain perception. What I am aware of in sensing is not the external ball but a mediating sense-datum, the yellowness of the sense data. The yellowness is not a fact involving the physical ball itself. The rest of one’s contact with the world is also mediated—by theory, conceptual systems, and other mechanisms. The problem is that sense-data theories fail to adequately explain sensory experience, or it comes at a cost. One must posit mental entities that exist in a special ontological category—sense data that are neither subjective ideas in the mind nor objective properties in the object. To the contrary, we do not see sense data. We see colors and shapes as part of external objects. Our perceptual beliefs are part of a holistic system of beliefs, emotions, values, and theories. We do not experience the world through one narrow portal called sense observation or visual perception. We experience the world through wide experience. Emotions, for that matter, are as much a portal on the world as sensations. A fourth flaw in anti-realist constructionism is that we move too quickly from certain epistemic facts about our mind’s operations to ontological conclusions about what exists. The mistake is to think that what we know by virtue of a conceptual scheme exists by virtue of the conceptual scheme. There is no such entailment. One can perfectly well think of knowing through concepts and also hold that an external world exists apart from the concepts. The ontological realist’s view, which is correct, is that the world exists by virtue of having certain physical, social, or other properties, by virtue of their matter and form, and by virtue of their natural materials. To a degree, we can capture aspects of this world through conceptual

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schemes but we should not conflate what exists with ways of thinking. The existence of conceptual schemes no more entails the non-existence of an independent world than the discovery of the retinal image entailed that such processing made natural knowledge impossible. To maintain this balance of conceptual schemes and external world in our thinking, our starting point is crucial. If we start by looking for First Philosophy, or for a “given” viewed in the inner sanctum of the conscious mind, we will tend to lose that balance and end in relativism, solipsism, or failing to explain properly the process of knowledge in the world. One way to lose that balance is to over-stress the influence of social pressures until a determinism makes it impossible for us to claim to be rational creatures. As John Searle argued, any sort of deterministic view is fatal to being able to claim that one is rational. It also undermines the claim to rationality by the determinist himself. Our claim to be rational implies that we are free to evaluate our desires and reasons for acting. We are not under some internal compulsion or determinate external force that causes us to choose x rather than y. Searle notes that to say we are rational means we presume that there is a virtuous gap between our desires and beliefs and our capacity to evaluate these desires and beliefs. We should be able to evaluate the beliefs and desires we have.12 Otherwise, without a gap, we act irrationally, for example, the way a man acts when gripped by some obsession or addiction; or some cult is ‘brainwashed’ by ideology and the emotional attraction to a charismatic leader. We can only be said to be rational where the possibility of acting rationally or irrationally exists as a choice. Culture and Ideology Constructive realism does not doubt the influence of culture or society. To the contrary, it makes mankind’s cultural being

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central to identity and value. But it rejects the move that interprets that influence as a one-way deterministic street from ready-made society to a ready-to-be-manipulated mind. One famous form of this ‘move’ can be found in Marxist materialism. Marxism is associated with the view that the upper stratum of culture in capitalist societies—ideas, ideology, philosophies—are false ideologies. Among quite a number of writers, this materialism reduces culture to economic forces. Ideas and philosophies are rationalizations of capitalistic society. What really determines—with a capital D—human conduct and ideas are the material conditions of society, such as its means of production and the power of dominating classes. In his Critique of Political Economy of 1859, Marx sets forth his view of culture as ideology, which would be enormously influential for decades to come. An extract: The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which rise the legal and political super-structures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.13

Marx then says that a change in the economic foundations of society can transform the “immense superstructure”—the realm of ideas and culture. This sounds very deterministic. However, I do not believe that Marx held a simplistic, determinist view.14 Marx acknowledges that the human mind can become aware of the material forces shaping society, and evaluate them. Science, he says, can study social transformations, class conflict, and changes to the means of economic production. Also, men become conscious of this (class) conflict and

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fight it out. One does not sense in Marx the application, dogmatically, of a theory, as one finds in later orthodox Soviet art and culture writings, wrapped in the narrow tenets of Soviet Marxism. I believe that Marx was motivated to take a more nuanced approach by his own experience as a thinker. Marx had to believe that his ideas were not just another ideology, part of what he called the “fog formations in the brains of men,”15 or the “fetishism” of false ideas created by unjust capitalistic social structures. It must be possible for someone to reach a revealing perspective on a human being’s place in society, historically, and to use those insights to critique society and spark a revolution. Who might this be? Well, Marx and Marxists. They see the objectively real conditions of society. Marxism is not another fabricating ideology despite belonging to the realm of culture, the superstructure. Also, Engels made the important qualification that he and Marx never asserted that economic forms of production are the only determining factor. To be sure, Marxism teaches that the economic mode of production “ultimately” determines history. The economic situation is the “basis” for history. But that is compatible with saying that other elements of the superstructure—art, philosophy, the sciences—can, and do, influence our awareness of ourselves in history. In a letter, Engels writes: “There is an interaction of all of these elements, in which….the economic element finally asserts itself as necessary.”16 If such complexity did not exist, Engels says, a theory of history would be easy, like solving the solution of a basic mathematical equation. Raymond Williams described the complexity of Marist thought as such: “Reality is seen as a very complex field of movement, within which the economic forces finally reveal themselves as the organizing element.”17 These comments weaken the Marxist deterministic reading of the material basis and superstructure.

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This book thinks of the various elements of the social field—economic, political, moral, artistic, intellectual—as a web of holistic interactions. There is no deterministic derivation of all of culture from one of its elements. Not even the material conditions determine human thought and history. As our definition of humans as cultural beings documents in Chapter Four, there is no one-way, deterministic relationship between material facts and culture. Anthropological realism believes that the mind is active and influenced by society, experience, education, and culture. Nonetheless, under the right conditions, human inquiries can achieve well-evidenced beliefs that show, by all possible signs, that they reflect facts and the world, and are not the product of propaganda, ideology or bad method. Humans, in intersubjective discourse with others and transactions with nature, can refine, improve, and extend conceptual and belief systems. Rationality and objectivity are possible and actual. What society today needs is not speculative generalities about freedom and determinism but specific studies on how and when the mind gets things right and true, or wrong and false. We need historical and social psychological studies of why, in certain eras, entire societies or publics have become irrational, murderous, genocidal and horribly intolerant. What can society do to reduce such periodic outbursts of irrationality and false theorizing? What are the triggers, and what in human nature is prone to cause humans to indulge in ideas far from reality? Ward has called attention to how, across Western history, dominant groups and hegemonies have gained power and mounted pogroms against other groups by using ideologies and religious doctrine, while tapping into people’s innate tribalism. Ward calls this the “cultural politics of ethics”18 and the analysis of such phenomena “political epistemology.” The task of the anthropological realist is to resist the gravitational pull of two dueling and unproductive forces: a social

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constructionism that threatens to treat all beliefs as socially relative and eliminate a genuine concern with what is true or false; and a metaphysical realism which underestimates the role of mediation and pluralism in thought, and dogmatically presumes it has found the one, uniquely correct depiction of the world. The anthropological realist thinks good inquiry is part invention and part discovery, part construction and part responsiveness to the external world.

Section 2: Anthropological Realism and Ethics How does constructivist realism, as a hybrid epistemology, apply to morality and meta-ethics? Assume that our functional view of the role of morality is correct in its main thrust—that morality is a collective project to allow social cooperation and promote group cohesion. The first implication is that, as a human invention and a cultural device, morality in different societies can go well or badly. Therefore, an ethical view of this kind needs to say more about when a collective project is valid or invalid, moral or immoral, useful or damaging. We find ourselves looking at morality in a socio-ethical manner as normative systems that enforce cooperation and good behavior. From this perspective, we view moralities as an important feature of most human groups. Then, when we change our perspective and attempt to evaluate the moral system that is in place, we see that, historically, a culture’s morality may be immoral. Talk of immoral morality is not contradictory because we apply two different perspectives on morality: morality as a de facto set of rules (an empirical perspective) and the moral assessment of that system vis-à-vis some other set of moral values. This book embraces values that create a genuine moral system. A moral system is genuine only if it is based on the adoption of an impartial attitude that assesses the rules as to whether

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they promote the whole of the group in question and promote fair and humane communities. “Fair” and “humane” cover a lot of ground. Fair refers to the justice of the rules with respect to how the group shares its resources, allows all members equal standing before the law, and so on. It is about the nature of the relationships of citizens. “Humane” includes fairness as a value but it is broader. “Humane” literally means whatever is, or concerns, humans. But here it means something more specific: it means a love of humanity and its flourishing, and it implies a set of moral norms and ends that should be the defining part of any morality that seeks to be genuine. A moral system is not humane if it is simply a handy cultural tool for keeping others in conformity with unjust social structures. Therefore, when we speak of “the ethical project” we mean the never-ending, always challenging project of creating, maintaining and improving society from this moral perspective. “The ethical project” is used as an umbrella collective noun referring to the plurality of moral systems that are humane in their own ways, according to their own cultures. Cultures contain the many ethical projects of groups and sub-groups. Tensions within and between societies occur when their moralities, and their ethical projects, differ and conflict. For example, the ethical project of American blacks in the 1950s and 1960s was heavily invested in the civil rights movement. Both fairness and humane values were at the center of the movement, challenging the dominant morality, or ‘ethical project’ of an apartheid white-based, tyrannical society. We put ethical project in scare quotes to indicate that the white-based morality was not a genuine morality given the elements of racial hatred, white supremacy, and its willingness to support the harsh discrepancies between the lives of affluent whites and the struggling black population.

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Created Social Facts Anthropological realism applied to morality helps us to construct an ontology of ethics that is naturalistic, social, and historical. Suppose we ask ourselves: What sort of thing is ethics? How does it fit into a natural world, or a world of culture? What sorts of statements does it make and why? Constructive realism begins by making two observations. First, one of the things that make ethics possible is “collective intentionality.”19 And, collective intentionality makes possible social reality consisting of social facts. Moral systems belong to social reality and they are one form of social fact. Intentionality refers to the constant direction of individual humans towards the world in thought, act, and intention.20 Collective intentionality is the ability of humans to combine their intentions to (1) achieve common goals, and (2) to agree on common rules, social roles, or practices. Collective intentionality makes possible group living, group projects, and, ultimately, ethics. Examples of conduct based on collective intentionality include rowing a boat together, building a concert hall, or playing trumpet in a college marching band. What is crucial is a sense of doing something together, through agreed-upon roles, functions, and rewards. Almost everything that humans make, called artefacts, are social facts. Social reality consists of agriculture; the transmission of knowledge through language; buildings, towns, institutions, and roads; trade agreements; rules and norms; wars; and social roles. Examples of social objects and properties are: “x is a form of money,” “the authority of an official to marry a couple,” “x owns property y,” “the red light signals that a goal has been scored,” “y is a driver’s license,” “s is the office of the public prosecutor,” and “x is a screwdriver.” None of these things—money, marriage, property, hockey goal lights, prosecutors, screwdrivers—occur naturally in the

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physical world, like trees or sunsets. They exist in society. All instances of these social objects are physical things. But the social object, as a type, cannot be defined physically. For instance, all instances of money are physical but money, as a kind, cannot be defined physically. Money takes endless material forms. Wampum, coins, pieces of paper, and transactions in a bank’s computer, are accepted as forms of money (or money transactions). Money can only be defined functionally. Money is whatever fulfills a function specified not by nature but by society. In our society, money functions as an agreedupon medium of exchange within the complicated social institution of finance. Certain things count as money. Other things do not. Similarly, every police officer is a physical being but being a police officer is not defined by biological or physiological facts about officers. What counts is whether the person is a legitimate occupant of a certain role, recognized by society and its law-enforcement institutions. What makes anyone a teacher or an official able to marry a couple is not due to physical, chemical, or biological facts but due to the fact that such people fit a role, having passed certain tests. Humans create social reality by imposing meanings, roles, and functions on things. Similarly, moralities or moral systems are social facts of social reality, and the nature of morality cannot be reduced to a common physical property. Like the screwdriver or the police officer, the kind of thing that morality is can only be captured at the level of social roles and social functions. In a sense, morality is whatever fulfills the normative functions of guiding conduct and promoting social cohesion and cooperation. Some important, if seemingly odd, conclusions follow from this analysis. Odd because the concept of created social facts is a concept of hybrid thinking, rejecting any simple dualism between physical (natural) facts and subjective unnatural inventions. With the concept of a created social fact, the two

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categories of invention (or creation) and fact, and the two categories of the objective and the subjective, merge. With social objects, we have things that appear to be subjective or objective, depending on your frame of reference. Or, they are neither objective or subjective, and we need a third category for them. The traditional distinction between objective and subjective things is this: Things are ontologically objective if they exist independently of any human mind, such as mountains and planets. Similarly, we say that such objects have “intrinsic” or objective properties, such as the composition of the soil on a planet or the height of a mountain. These are facts, independent of how anyone thinks about them. Searle calls them “brute facts.”21 In contrast, things are ontologically subjective if they only exist relative to human minds. They are not mind independent. People disagree on examples of subjective entities. However, stock examples are dreams, hallucinations, non-existent objects such as Santa Claus or the ether, and the so-called “secondary (subjective) properties” of things such as colors or tastes. For some people, what things are good or right is also subjective, on the assumption that values are relative to opinion. How do social objects fit into this conceptual scheme? Ambivalently. They are, almost by definition, ontologically subjective. Searle calls them “observer-relative” objects.22 Social objects exist because observers (or human minds) exist. Yet are they not also an objective fact? Once humans have brought social objects into existence, the objects acquire at least some degree of ontological objectivity. Is not a screwdriver an objectively existing object? Can we not say many objective things about a screwdriver? Social objects exist in society; they are observed by many minds; they are not the objects of dreams. They serve concrete functions. They can be described, rationally discussed, and improved; they play a part in daily life and institutions. They are a social fact. I think of them as belonging

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to a third category of existence which I call “humanly created objectivity.” Perhaps we can call such objects “created fact.” We can extend the reference of created facts to the cultural domain. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is as much a created fact as is money or personal property. Ethics as a whole, and its elements, have ontologically subjective features as human creations. Yet, like the role of teacher or the function of money, ethical roles and objects have a humanly created objectivity. Norms and values exist in society; are observed in action and discussed by many minds. They play a part in daily life and institutions. What more is needed to speak of ethics as real and important? Therefore, anthropological realism, by embracing a functional, hybrid perspective, has a plausible story to tell about the psychology, ontology, and historical development of ethics that can fit well with historical and evolutionary studies of humans and society. Ward, for example, has developed a historical scheme which traces how three kinds of cooperative, functional moralities have existed in human society since we were huntergatherers. All are kinds of parochial attachment to larger and larger groups—kin, group, society. This allows us to understand moral globalism as a “fourth morality” aimed at the widest, non-parochial group of all—humanity.23 Functional, social analysis helps to remove the mystery surrounding how things can be invented and objective at the same time. Moral Utterances The adoption of a functional approach to morality as a social project leads to a functional analysis of moral statements and utterances—long the domain of conceptual disputes in metaethics. The idea is simple, although developing the idea properly is not. Every inch of the territory to be covered is controversial. We cannot stop and produce a full account here, but we can

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give the reader a sense of what we believe. The idea is this: If the function (or at least the main function) of morality is to serve a function for human society, then the main function of moral utterances is rhetorical and imperative. That is, we make moral utterances to persuade others (and ourselves) to adopt or maintain certain basic values that are proposed as guidelines for fair social cooperation. The basic ‘grammar’ of the utterances is similar to the imperative mood where we urge others to do something or not to do something. We should seek to make our proposals rationally cogent using the holistic process of forming well-evidenced beliefs explained above. We face a momentous moral choice: to adopt the moral responsibility of discoursing and debating in ways that are inclusive, plural, and respective; or to reject the responsibility and to try to persuade using whatever manipulative methods are available. In morality, the value judgments that we arrive at are moral value judgments, not aesthetic value judgments, not legal value judgments, and not the value judgments of etiquette. Many norms are non-moral. For example, the professions have technical standards of competent practice, such as the skill of a surgeon. Moral evaluation works from prototypes of morally good or evil things. From these prototypes, we judge how close examples are to the paradigm. We identify a core of paradigmatic objects or actions. They form our everyday conceptions of morality. However, there will also be hard cases where we are not sure whether something belongs to one category or another. The prototypes are not absolutes. The prototypes can change. In morality, we are not describing external moral facts which exist in nature. No such facts exist. Moral utterances obviously rely on the perception and description of aspects of things, but the moral evaluation is not just another description of the object. It is an evaluation and an imperative utterance. So if moral utterances can be said to be true, rational, or

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evidenced, it is not in the traditional realist sense of describing independent moral facts. We judge whether some proposed action or some norm is functionally valid from a moral viewpoint. The appraisal is pragmatic. We ask: Do these norms fulfill the functions of morality—the promotion of fair and humane societies and human flourishing? For specific actions, we ask: What are the practical aims of the action in question? Is the moral rule or practice useful or not useful? Is it impartial or biased, realistic or utopian, reasonable or unreasonable, consistent or inconsistent? Moral universals, for example, do not kill, are not truths about some mind-independent fact. They are rules of conduct so important to well-ordered society, and so aligned to our values, that we make them basic moral rules. Ethical norms, then, are not true or rational in the sense of correspondence to moral fact. They are true or rational if they promote humane morality. One can say a moral action is right or a moral belief is true in the sense that such actions and beliefs can be said to promote certain valued ends. Moral utterances are no more true or false than the rules for making a cake are true or false. At best, we can say that it is true that the recipe rules are useful and lead to valued ends. Anthropological realism also rejects a non-cognitivism that reduces ethics to emotional reactions. In reflective moral judgments, our main intention is not to “project” our emotions or feelings on to other objects or people. Nor are we simply emoting or ranting. Rather, we are engaged with moral rhetoric. We are trying to persuade others (including ourselves) to act in certain ways. When we affirm an ethical principle, we “make it public, or communicate hoping to coordinate our avowals with others.” We thereby give direction to our “joint practical lives and choices.”24 Ethics are the “practical stances that we need to take up, to express each other, and to discuss and negotiate.”25 The form of moral statements is not that of a description of a fact. It is closer to everyday imperatives to do something. To

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take a simple example, the umpire stops the baseball game and orders the ground crew to quickly cover the ground as a rainstorm starts. His pragmatic, normative imperatives are based on facts but their aim is not to express a fact—that it is raining. His expressions spark actions that protect the ground from getting wet, so the game can resume safely and quickly after the storm. His expression “Cover the ground right away” functions to ensure that the game is played well and is completed. We could transform his imperative into a descriptive-looking statement: “It is good to cover the ground when it rains” but it masks its real form as a functional expression. Moral expressions are similar to the umpire’s instructions. They are functional expressions that seek practical effect in the moral ballpark of life.

Section 3: Imperfectionism and Hope Perfectionism and Imperfectionism Finally, anthropological realism leads us to imperfectionism as a way of viewing life, including the aims of thinking and moralizing.26 Two attitudes, perfectionism and imperfectionism, have been in tension across Western history. The core of imperfectionism is not to expect perfect or utopian results from anything worldly, and to accept (or be able to live with) such facts as: the finitude of life; the possibility that there is no afterlife in a perfect heaven; that in the end, justice on earth may not win out and evil avenged; the fact that human history does not seem headed towards a utopia on earth (let alone a millennium); the fact that there may be no grand order to the cosmos behind the appearances; the fact that absolute, timeless knowledge—hence perfect knowledge—evades the human mind; and the fact that human conduct and morality are an imperfect affair. To the perfectionist, this imperfect life on earth seems to be a lower base existence compared with transcendent,

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higher realms. For the imperfectionist, this is the only life that humans have and the key is to live as best as possible within our finitude. To appeal to some transcendent order is to attempt to evade the realities of human life. It can become a mental craving for escape to another realm of existence, experienced in ecstatic states. The perfectionist thinks all things on earth are to be evaluated by standards or things that are perfect, such as Plato’s perfect forms. There must be perfect standards, a perfect order to the world or perfect forms of knowledge, or there is nothing but relativism and nihilism. Even matters of art are judged by using a perfect paradigm, such as the presumed perfection of proportionate classical art—timeless beauty. Anthropological realism is a form of imperfectionism. It sees worth in things imperfect, limited, and historically evolving. Morality is morality within contingency. It regards morality as always uncompleted and always imperfect, yet immensely important. Morality does not require absolute moral knowledge. The authority of ethics is social. It is based on something valuable but imperfect: what we, as a group or as a humanity, can rationally come to believe and to affirm given our limited resources, brain power, and situated perspective. Why should moralists talk about perfectionism? Is it not just a personality style? It is partly a personality style, but it is more than that. It is an attitude that profoundly affects how we think about things, how we value, what we disvalue, and what we are willing to do to implement values. It affects politics, including cultural politics—using morality or other parts of culture (for example, music, religion) to exert power. Both perfectionism and imperfectionism can go off the rails, if taken to extremes. Imperfectionism can lead to nihilism, decadence, a wallowing in pleasures, a need for mind-numbing drugs, or a love of evil—the dark side of life. Perfectionism can lead to the support of authoritarian social structures and leaders. Perfectionism

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may adopt the dangerous notion that there are absolute truths that must be imposed by (allegedly) morally perfect leaders or supermen. The desire for a pure or perfect society has been used by tyrants to support murderous political utopian schemes— including the idea of a perfect race—from the medieval crusades with their idea of a superior Christian race to the ‘eternal’ Third Reich of Hitler, where humans were to be perfected. The desire for conformity to a ‘perfect’ and absolute moral law or an absolute ideology rationalized the Inquisition’s burning of heretics at the stake and Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s. Perfectionism is much more than a healthy desire to improve ourselves or to pursue realistic ideals. It encourages the authoritarian, intolerant attitude that non-conforming lifestyles or moral views are the distorted, contaminating work of deviants. This runs against the need for a morality of compassion, understanding, and forgiveness based on the recognition that we are all imperfect. Perfectionism can be one of the factors that cause people to slide down the slippery psychological pole into a dark nihilism. If world events or events in one’s life suggest that there is no perfect, underlying order to the world, life may feel meaningless, absurd, or contingent. In such a climate of nihilism or meaninglessness, morality struggles since morality needs the belief that humanity is not totally evil and that life has at least some meanings for humans. For example, by 1950, after two world wars, nihilism seeped into Western culture. This was the very source of existential philosophy. Perfectionism was embodied in the attitudes of a self-righteous and rigid social hierarchy. Elites—aristocrats, bishops, poets, churches, and Oxford dons—took it for granted that Western society was superior in values and that they were the proper adjudicators of what was good and right for the rest of lower society. When the wars revealed the hollowness of such a moral and social view, condemning millions of ordinary people to meaningless death in

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war and holocaust, the fall of elite perfectionism left a great value vacuum in Western culture. Perfectionists believe that life must be perfect in some sense (or at least perfect in the final tally) or life is meaningless. There is no in-between. No degrees of meaningfulness in a variety of projects and experiences. So when the wars and the Holocaust dashed perfectionist expectations and philosophies, nihilism, meaninglessness, and views of life as irrational arose. Dashed expectations led to the questioning of the very possibility of morality. In contrast, imperfectionism does not recoil from perfectionism to the opposite extreme, nihilism or irrationalism. It thinks that the life of an individual or a group can have significant (but not perfect) meaning and we can take meaning from different domains of life. Life can have significant but not absolute meaningfulness. Pragmatism has been a major voice for imperfectionism in recent philosophy, from Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey to Hilary Putnam, Willard V. Quine, and Richard Rorty.27 Pragmatists adhered to holism and pluralism. They rejected the need—or craving—for certainty. This led to an imperfectionist epistemology containing the ideas of fallibilism and experimentalism. Fallibilism is the view that there are no “metaphysical guarantees to be had; that even our most firmlyheld beliefs will never need revision.”28 Fallibilism is not extreme skepticism. It does not require us to doubt everything. It only requires us to be ready to doubt any particular belief—if good reason to do so arises. Objectivity is not the discernment of absolute truths but the evaluation of fallible interpretations and claims. Humans are imperfect inquirers. The complexity of the world resists perfect results. Moreover, the cognitive capacity of humans is flawed by bias and other infelicities. Fallibilism regards beliefs as hypotheses on the best way to understand a phenomenon or proposals on the best way to regulate conduct. Fallibilism encourages us to be experimentalists and

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pioneers. If beliefs are fallible, they can be improved by new experiences and discourse with others. We are psychologically open to new ideas. Experimentalism supports the widest possible exploration, and the freedom to do so. Perfectionists see disagreement or uncertainty as negative signs, indicating some weakness in ethics. Experimentalism takes a contrary position: emergence, disagreement and uncertainty are part of inquiry and ethics. The pragmatic philosophical mind is naturalistic, social, imperfectionist, and open to the future, attuned to contingency. It is suspicious of both absolutism and subjectivism. Why Propose? One area where an imperfectionist attitude is valuable is in proposing changes to morality in an open manner in a plural world. Imperfectionism encourages a notion of ethical discourse as affirming and endorsing proposals. It is not an empirical claim that all people, in fact, treat their ethical statements as proposals. It is a philosophical, evaluative thesis. It says that this is a good way to think about ethical utterances and to put ideas forward because it makes room for changes to, and critique of, our humane ethical projects. We can make proposals about principle, policies, practices, methods, education, and many other matters of interest in ethics. For example, to say that “people should keep their promises” is to propose that promise-keeping be affirmed and honored as a moral principle for the regulation of conduct. We might also make diagnostic proposals on what moral problems should be addressed, for example, addressing discrimination against certain ethnic groups in national media. We can make methodological proposals about how proposals are to be discussed and adjudicated, such as suggesting certain studies or tests that could be made, or who (and how) various groups will be part of the discussion. At times, moral proposals may become radical, viewing existing

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practices as unjust and suggesting new principles and practices. Why propose? Why not just assert? Proposal encourages an open, and non-authoritarian approach to moral issues. It indicates that one expresses moral principles in social situations, for others to consider. In many discussions, this is a helpful attitude to take. Ethics should be the result of dialogue and the sharing of perspectives about alternate proposals. If so, then how we regard our moral judgments and how we portray them to others are crucial. To put forward a judgment as a proposal signals that one is not adopting an authoritarian approach to morals where one expects to be obeyed. To propose, rather than assert, helps us to avoid preaching. Proposing helps us to avoid regarding ethical judgments as absolute and unquestionable, where dialogue is neither needed nor wanted. In a plural, global world, we need to regard ethics as open-ended discourse across differences by using terms like “proposal” and “what is reasonable.” The latter term indicates that I believe my judgment has rational weight but is open to question. I acknowledge the need to give reasons that others “could not reasonably reject.”29 “Proposal” commits me to explaining my judgment, giving grounds where needed, and viewing things from other perspectives. The idea of proposing highlights the evolutionary nature of ethics. The idea of static moral truth does not. The idea of proposing also underlines that ethics is not just about agreement or consensus (as ideal goals) but also about the inevitability of disagreement and dissent. We need to understand why people disagree as much as why they agree. What is at stake when agreement or disagreement occurs are (a) different and rival principles, precepts, protocols that flow from the principles; (b) different views as to what should be done ethically in specific situations; or (c) different proposals for moral change or amendments to an ethical code. It is incorrect to think of dissent or disagreement as necessarily a failure in the ethical project.

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Dissent through counter-proposal keeps the ethics project evolving and changing, and it encourages us to be self-conscious about our premises. A society of any reasonable complexity and plurality will have sub-cultures and alternate forms of living. It will have its share of decadents, individualists, and moral anarchists that criticize mainstream mores as shallow, hypocritical, or in service to the powerful. The dynamism of culture today means that dissenting groups challenge the moral status quo. These groups propose alternate moralities. They invent ethics. For example, the gay, queer, lesbian and trans movements of today have radically challenged ideas and norms relating to personal identity, gender, and sexuality. Also, the growth of global media has led to an emergent morality called “global media ethics.”30 Traditional principles of journalistic neutrality and parochial nationalism are challenged. The Need for Hope The imperfectionist deals realistically with the limits of life. She can do without the reassuring notions of perfectionism. But there is one attitude that a moral imperfectionist cannot do without. For morality to be an effective force for humane society, there must be some degree (or flicker) of hope. Not hope for a utopia or a heaven; but hope that society or our own lives can be improved. As Albert Camus stressed, in a contingent world without transcendent meaning, it is a duty of intellectuals, writers, and others who benefit from current society to write in ways that give the oppressed some hope for change. That is why nihilism is a problem, because it weakens hope. It weakens morality. Camus wrote that artists and intellectuals are badly needed to give voice to the “legions of persecuted” people suffering around the world. It is a time in human history when artists

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should not take refuge in the ivory tower or the “social church,” or adopt “the comfortable role of witness” when there are plenty of opportunities for action. For all of these evasive responses, Camus has only one accusatory phrase, it is “the act of resignation.” The artist today should not write only about negative things, such as “deserts and selfish love,” but balance humanism and nihilism. Artists should give hope to those who are running out of hope. Camus stands against writers who make a career announcing that the world “is hurtling toward its doom.” If the world is going badly, we can blame “apocalyptic modes of thought” and angry, negative artists. “I have no sympathy at all for that of the poéte maudi,”31 he states, firmly. Camus’s morality is a morality without evasion, without evasion of our finitude. Hope is not dreaming about other worlds. Hope is about finding concrete ways to reduce problems and open up possibilities hitherto unimagined or untried. The main question for ethics is not what metaphysical propositions I can discover, what rules please the gods, or what can I know morally that is certain or a priori. The main question is ‘What ethics shall we invent’? What can we hope for? The moral philosopher’s role is not to construct castles in the air or pretentiously utter absolute thoughts. Her role is to help with the fair coordination of conflicting interests, to facilitate discussion on the project of living together. My view is close to the neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty who said, the aim is to keep the “conversation” going forward towards greater solidarity and community.32 Toward hope. The dialogue of the many replaces the monologue of the sage or prophet.33 Rorty once stated: “Most of what I have written in the last decade consists of attempts to tie in my social hopes—hopes for a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society—with my antagonism towards Platonism.34

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“Platonism” refers not to the dialogues of Plato but to a set of dichotomies that Dewey called a “brood and nest of dualisms”: reality versus appearance, reasons versus passion, intellect versus feeling, and spirit versus matter. Pragmatism, Rorty says, shows us how to do without the appearance-reality dualism and its absolute epistemology. The ultimate goal is practical: greater human happiness. The most praiseworthy human trait is the “ability to trust and to cooperate with other people” and to work together “to improve the future.”36 We should replace the intellectual search for perfect knowledge with imperfect, pragmatic work—a fusion of intellectual and social engagement. This changes almost everything. Maintaining a reflective moral project is as precarious as it is vital. We must fend off the opposing forces of irrationality, mindless conformity, stupidity, and evil. Morality is forever needed and forever contested. With every new opportunity for good there is a corresponding new opportunity for evil. Every age requires a renewed, deep questioning of its conduct and social system, and the norms that govern it. Imperfectionists believe the sphere of morality is no less important because it is an imperfect human invention. Social order is possible, democratically, without the heavy hand of monarchy, dictators, infallible popes, or a crowd-pacifying belief in a God who will make all things right, in the end. Psychologically, imperfectionism is acutely aware of the good and bad sides of humans. Imperfectionists ponder the problem of evil and suffering without false consolation from perfectionist philosophy or theology. In art, imperfectionists express what is not captured by perfectionist concepts. They do not heed the siren of perfect beauty. They see significance in the obscene and comic, the lewd and the homily. Nothing human is below its consideration. All is part of existence. There is a nobility to rude life, when left unpolished by perfectionism.

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At the center of imperfectionism is a decision to know, love, and create within the limitations of life, and to be part of a natural, cooperating humane community.

Notes 1. Locke, An Essay on Human Understanding, Vol. 1, 31. 2. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” 42-43. 3. Putnam,” Reason, Truth and History, 201. 4. Rescher, Rationality, 2. 5. Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, 134. 6. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, especially Chapter 3. 7. Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, 212, 215. 8. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 95. 9. See Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason. 10. Quine, “Natural Kinds,” 126. 11. Papineau, The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience, 28. On sense datum theory, see Ayer, “Has Austin Refuted the Sense-Datum Theory?” and Robinson, Perception. 12. Searle, Rationality in Action, 50. 13. Marx, A Critique of Political Economy, 11. 14. Marxists have attempted to make Marx’s scattered comments on culture and art look more unified or systematic than they really are. In 1968, for example, official Soviet scholars published the comments into two large volumes called On Art and Literature, published in Berlin in 1968. But the volumes do not amount to a systematic theory. See Werckmeister, Marx on Ideology and Art, 501. 15. Marx, On the German Ideology, III. 16. Cited in Williams, Culture and Society, 350. 17. Williams, Culture and Society, 351. 18. Ward, The Project of Moral Globalism, Chapter 5. 19. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 42. 20. Philosophers such as Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl use “intentionality” in a narrower sense, to refer to how mental acts are always directed at some object. I use intentionality to refer to not only mental acts, but actions done with intention. See Richard E. Aquila,

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Intentionality: A Study of Mental Acts. 21. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 34-35. 22. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 9. 23. Ward, “Creating Ethics, Naturally,” in Rebirth of Humane Morality, Chapter 1. 24. Blackburn, Ruling Passions, 68-69. 25. Blackburn, “Relativism,” 39. 26. For a detailed exposition of the tension between the attitudes of perfectionism and imperfectionism, see Ward, The Project of Moral Globalism, Chapter 12. 27. For a review of this philosophical tradition, see Albrecht, Reconstructing Individualism. 28. Putnam, Pragmatism, 21. 29. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, 5. 30. See Ward, Global Journalism Ethics. 31. Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, 351. 32. See Rorty, “The Contingency of Community.” 33. Rorty, Preface for Philosophy and Social Hope, xii. 34. Rorty, Preface for Philosophy and Social Hope, xiii.

CHAPTER FOUR PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN CLIFFORD G. CHRISTIANS Only human beings give water to strangers.—African Proverb

Chapters One to Three provide an intellectual framework for the ethics of the human of this chapter, refined further as an anthropological ethics of normative ideals in Chapter Five. As developed in Chapters One and Two, anthropological realism reformulates meta-ethics as holistic thinking about what it means to be human. The first chapter makes it clear from intellectual history that conceptual dualisms over the centuries, such as absolutism and relativism, objectivity and subjectivity, truth and belief have typically resulted in stalemates and precluded scholarly innovation. These philosophical impasses can be thought of as seemingly unresolvable sets of dualities or “antinomies of reason” to borrow a phrase from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Ethics is either a realism of objective moral facts or an anti-realism of subjective human constructions; either a matter of discovery or of intention; either grounded in abstract reason or grounded in our emotions. A hybrid position, anthropological realism, is shown in Chapter Three to overcome dichotomies by combining insights holistically from both camps, particularly from the fundamental rivalry in meta-ethics between realism and anti-realism. Moreover, Chapter Two identifies promising philosophical attempts in the twentieth century to establish hybrid realisms that were not trapped in dualisms and articulate a third way in ontology and epistemology.

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Chapter Three orients anthropological realism into anthropological ethics, so that our thinking about morality is existentially holistic in character, grounded in everyday discourse about ethics rather than in abstract propositions. Constructive realism is presented as the rationale for the anthropological ethics of this chapter and the next. Constructive realism as an integrated naturalism is a serious reform of realism theory. It is an alternative perspective between social constructionism and traditional realism, in the wake of logical constructionism as a failed scholasticism. With its hybrid view of factual and moral knowing, a one-way deterministic relationship between material facts and culture is inconceivable. Our philosophy of the human has the conceptual resources to ground ethics in an anthropology of the whole human—in lived experience and in the cultural agency of being human. Thus, morality is a collective project to allow social cooperation and promote group cohesion. The chapter begins with an examination of the nomenclature regarding the human, from “human” to “human nature” to “humanity” to “humane.” The major theories of humanness are then outlined, from which we choose the definition of the human as cultural being. The goal is to avoid misunderstandings of what we mean by the philosophy of the human and its implications. As developed in Chapter Three, humane requires special attention, with promoting fair and humane societies the centerpiece of global ethics. The justification for our use of terms and consideration of theories emerges as the ideas of the chapter develop. The chapter then explains what we consider to be the distinctive aspects of being human. Our philosophy emphasizes the cultural and historical nature of human beings, and the intrinsic importance of our symbolic and interpretive capacities, implying as these concepts do that morality is both a human invention and a cultural project. This leads to the importance of

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a dialogic social philosophy that sees humans-in-relation as the key to understanding ethics. From this perspective of humans in intersubjective discourse, we can identify universals and avoid binary views that privilege one capacity or aspect of human beings, such as formal rationality. With this anthropology of the human in place, we can move theoretically to ethics or what might be called “normative anthropology”—the development of an ethics of the human as a complex of normative ideals.

Definition of Terms The philosophy of the human recognizes that there are human beings in this world—like and including ourselves—with similarities and differences among themselves and in relation to other things that are worth investigation. The presumption is that it makes sense to speak of a human reality, and philosophy is capable of contributing to its comprehension. Philosophers such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant took this presumption to be satisfied. Thus, Hume wrote a Treatise of Human Nature and Kant an Anthropology. In the twentieth century, Ernst Cassirer summarized his philosophy of symbolic forms as an Essay on Man, and Michael Landman refers to this tradition as Philosophical Anthropology. Reinhold Niebuhr’s masterful twovolume The Nature and Destiny of Man makes this presumption of human reality also, as do Howard Kainz’s The Philosophy of Human Nature and Michael Ruse’s The Philosophy of Human Evolution in contemporary terms. The philosophy of the human as an intellectual idea develops a meaningful and significant account of what it is to be a human being and to live a human life. What is considered are the various ways of construing human reality. In dealing with the question of what characteristics are both common and unique to human beings as such, one answer has

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been focused on an essence of some sort. Inquiry has been confined to human nature. In this prominent view, essences are considered determinative of the entity called humankind. This is the sort of essence that metaphysicians regard as the fundamental character of any basic kind of thing. The dualism that results from the essential human nature position has been contentious and largely unproductive. Existentialists in the Marxist tradition, for example, are highly critical of a fixed and immutable essence. Søren Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript represents the phenomenological claim that the truth of our humanity should be conceived in terms of subjectivity rather than a set of objective characteristics or general capacities that are determinative of actual human reality.1 As clarified in Chapter Three, this approach represents a wrong-headed perfectionism, with its dangerous tendencies toward authoritarian moral laws and absolute ideologies. To think philosophically about human existence is not to inquire into the defining or essential features of human substance, physical or mental. Notions of antecedently fixed human nature are hypostatizations that require analysis and interpretation from the outset. This is not to say, however, that human reality is to be understood exclusively or even primarily in terms of human experience, phenomenologically conceived. In terms of hybrid realism, such experience must be interpreted in relation to the findings of a variety of non-phenomenological modes of inquiry, of which the various human sciences—biological as well as social—are instances. Such empirical-theoretical perspectives upon human life, together with those complementary forms of inquiry concerned with the understanding of a wide range of human endeavors, from the artistic to the political to the technological, constitute an essential and indispensable broadening and enrichment of the means through which humanity is to be apprehended.2 As true of this book as a whole, the

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social domain is a web of holistic interactions, with no deterministic derivation of culture from one of its properties. The philosophy of the human illuminates not some sort of substantial entity; rather the reality with which it deals has the fundamental character of a complex of coherent dimensions. In explicating the definitive character of human reality, the processes and activities constitutive of human existence are determinative of it. This philosophy of the human reflects Quine’s naturalism, explained in Chapter Two, that ontology and epistemology exist in a subtle relationship called “reciprocal containment,” which means together and at the same time they constitute what humans believe to be true.3

Section 1: Philosophy of the Human: Major Theories As the philosophy of the human specifies the necessary and sufficient conditions of human existence, four major theories have developed over intellectual history. They are summarized here in comparative terms, in order to present our definition of the human as cultural being. This theory we consider the most appropriate for grounding media ethics in a global world. Biological Organisms Humans as biological organisms is a prominent and pervasive definition in the philosophical literature. The analysis focuses on the continuity of human life with other life forms, those ranging from the simplest organisms to the complex systems of human agency. The German philosopher Hans Jonas in his seminal work The Phenomenon of Life centers the consciousness of living organisms on communicative action. Animistic reality is understood as a “continuity of life forms,”4 and the continuity of

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organic forms is significantly a matter of organizing information and ultimately of meaning. [I]nformation flow, not energy per se, is the prime mover of life....Molecular information flowing in circles brings forth the organization we call “organism” and maintains it against the ever-present disorganizing pressures in the physical universe. So viewed, the information circle becomes the unit of life.5

In the inter-relationship of experience and consciousness, the common premise is that living requires participation in the organic domain. In the case of humans, the processes entail “consciousness transcending itself into the lived body and into the community.” But all life processes, “even the simplicities of metabolism,” involve a degree of distinctiveness to be achieved by the life form in question, a particularity that can be considered as “the measure of its independence from its own material contents.” This “differentiation of the modes of participation, from inanimate material to animate nature, to the specific modes of human existence,” is inherently communicative.6 The preservation of distinctive forms occurs as activity patterns are traced through time and etched across space, within one or another common medium for behavior or experience that constitutes an organismic environment or a human world. Thus, “communication is adaptive in its origins and creative in its human expressions.”7 Animal life operates within a repertoire of organic potencies. “The mobile animal, guided by often highly proficient, instinctually-directed senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, manifests” elementary but “dynamic relations within space and time.”8 “The animal’s capabilities to extend the imperatives of instinctual need across physical space and to preserve the stirrings of need through temporal distance or duration, make the communication of a still-nascent, inner identity

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with external objects and living things a more actively motivated process than with plant life.”9 It is typical to consider these life processes as traits solely of human communication, but current research suggests that many animals also employ what might be called “functional semantics.”10 Animal existence involves a “primitive representational form in which both ‘what is the case’”—that is, symbolic or representational displacement of an environmental circumstance, “and ‘what to do about it’”—that is, productivity in the form of instructions about how to act in the case in question “are transmitted simultaneously.” Communicative processes “can be used either to reflect states of affairs or to produce them.”11 The common element—manifested as a trait in the case of plants and animals, and as a vital faculty within human existence—can be usefully thought of as “impressibility.”12 In forms of life that respond to their environment reactively, the idea of impressibility should be understood as metabolic processes and instinct-guided behaviors. In humans, impressibility becomes the basis for “the ability of agents to impress their meanings, values, and projects on the world through communication. Impressibility, as communication, is both receptive and productive. Agents are simultaneously responding to the world, while also acting in relation to the world.”13 A form of transactional response and initiative that is distinctively human is “situated creativity,” in which human innovativeness transforms “unreflected routine” into “acts of creativity.”14 As elaborated in Chapter Two, for Philip Kitcher, this transformation requires openness to the creative ingenuity of art, music, great novels, and ordinary human experience. Based on the premise that “[a]ll action is embedded in anthropological structures of communication,” Jonas asserts that “creativity is

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more than merely one of the necessities for the survival of an organism.” It is, in human life, “the liberation of the capacity for new actions.”15 Human communication marks a distinctive threshold of what Woodward calls “ontological advance in the development of impressibility as perception, knowledge, action, and relation.”16 “Simple and complex forms of inter-personal and intergroup coordination” derive from “innate communicative capacities connected with the human species’ large brain and the organic requirements for sociality imposed by this endowment.”17 Human life has then achieved a level at which “a life informed by convention is natural for human beings in much the same way that perception, nutrition, growth and reproduction are natural.”18 When humans are understood as living organisms within the biosphere, the philosophical foundation for human action is the reverence of terrestrial life, for the organic whole within which human artifice is situated. In Jonas’ perspective, purpose is embedded de facto in animate nature, and its purposiveness is “evident in bringing forth life. Natural reality evinces at least one determinative purpose—life itself.”19 Thus Jonas concludes: “Showing the immanence of purpose in nature,...with the gaining of this premise, the decisive battle for ethical theory has already been won.”20 The alleged chasm between “is” and “ought” has been bridged in principle. Axiology has been situated in ontology. Purpose as such has its own accreditation within organic being and therefore entails responsible action for its own sake. Human responsibility for organic life contributes the possibility of intrinsic imperatives to our social framework. It demonstrates the legitimacy of concluding that responsibility for human beings can be primordial and irrespective of roles or contracts.

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Rational Agents In the philosophy of the human that defines humans as rational beings, the moral reasoning process begins with the individual, specifically the autonomous moral actor who is considered culpable for choices made. This philosophical perspective centers on the uniqueness of the rational faculties in the human species. “Since Parmenides, Greek philosophy assumed the identity of being and reason.”21 Nous, the capacity for thought and reason, is a universal and immortal principle. Plato and Aristotle shared a common rationalism as identifying our essential humanness, and a common dualism of mind and body. “In the thought of Aristotle only the active nous is immortal; and for Plato the immutability of ideas is regarded as proof of the immortality of the spirit (nous).”22 In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, sensation or perception “seems to be common even to the horse, the ox, and every animal.” What is distinctive to human beings among living creatures is “an active life of the soul (psyche) that follows a rational principle.”23 The Greeks first established rationalist ethics. Once we become confident of reason, we dare “to disobey divine or traditional regulations” and instead we follow the dictates of rationality. The philosophy of the human in this tradition emphasizes the principle that we ought to “do the good which stands the test of reason.”24 Rene Descartes portrayed human subjects as “interiorized mental substances.”25 Human practices are subject to inspection and sociological analysis, but human minds are private, metaphysical, and abiding.26 He sought absolute and certain truth in the cogitio; the essence of the self is res cogitans, a thinking substance, cogito ergo sum. Genuine knowledge is testable and objectively true. It is cognitively precise as in mathematics, built in linear fashion from a neutral, non-

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contingent starting point.27 Descartes wrote Meditations II while in seclusion in the Netherlands, keeping his address secret and interrupted briefly only by his daughter’s death. The Thirty Years War, with its devastation and brutality, threatened Descartes’ Paris, but he limited his interests to mathematical knowledge, his behavior reflecting his mentality. The human species is rational in essence. What was called “thought” in the eighteenth century was no longer the Platonic conception of ideas or Aristotle’s integrative logos; rather, rationality was understood as analytic calculation that divides natural reality into quantitative particles that are to be mastered technically. Descartes described this method of reasoning in his Rules for the Direction of Mind: Reduce complex and obscure propositions step by step to simpler ones, and then try to advance by the same gradual process from the…very simplest to the knowledge of all the rest….We should not examine what follows, but refrain from a useless task.28

Descartes contended, in effect, that we can demonstrate the truth only of what we can measure. The realm of spirit was beyond such measurement, a matter of faith and intuition, not truth. The physical became the legitimate domain of knowledge. Truth was understood in scientific terms and rational calculation was accepted as the ideology by which modernity ought to live. “The entire eighteenth century fell under the spell of Cartesian rationalism” and its dominance “is bound up with the successful development of the science of mathematics.”29 In his Rules for the Direction of Mind, Descartes expressed his delight “at the certitude” of mathematics, and the “guiding spirit” of his entire work was to erect a philosophy of nature and a picture of the human person “on a mathematical foundation.”30 The scientific successes of the seventeenth century in astron-

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omy and physics became the structural model for the “human as rational being” tradition. The cosmos was seen to mirror in its quantitative character the explicitly rational nature of human thought.31 The physical sciences suggested to the Enlightenment mind that even as the atom is the fundamental building block of all matter, discrete individuals are the essential unit of society. The astrophysical worldview of the seventeenth century Age of Science provided an analogue for humans as irreducible, self-sufficient entities. The cosmos was understood to mirror in its mathematical and quantitative character the explicitly rational character of human thought. Thus, the eighteenth century carries over Newtonian science and Cartesian mathematics into its concept of human nature as defined by the quantitative judgment we call “calculation.”32 The world is thought to contain clear and distinct facts and properties that are true if they correspond to reality. Rational choice becomes the foundation of deontological and utilitarian ethics. As the eighteenth century developed around Cartesian rationality, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)—schooled in Descartes, mathematics, and Newtonian science—lectured in his early career at the University of Königsberg on mathematics, logic and physics. His first major book, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens explained the structure of the universe in terms of Newton’s cosmology. In the Critique of Pure Reason and the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant designed ethics in terms of human rationality. He presumed society had a fundamental moral structure embedded in human nature as basic as atoms in physics, with the moral law the analog of the unchanging law of gravity. Through the mental calculus of universalizing propositions, imperatives emerge unconditioned by circumstances. Ethical principles are derived from the structure of reason abstracted from human life. Moral absolutes are identified in the rational way syllogisms are divided into valid and invalid. Set within the context of the history of ideas

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in Chapter One, Kant is given historic importance for presenting philosophers with one of the first comprehensive hybrid epistemologies. In John Stuart Mill, autonomous individuality is the supreme principle. Mill’s Utilitarianism is grounded in the inductive reasoning of his System of Logic so that a single formalistic principle constitutes moral judgments. Based on Auguste Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive, for Mill social research is neutral, speaking to questions of means only.33 Following Comte, Mill argued in A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive that instead of the primitive tools of theology and philosophy, social science should be ordered on statistical precision, on the sophisticated procedures of induction and logic. Ends are extraneous to its structure and rationale. Mill’s utilitarian ethics is likewise based on his neutral scientific methodology that presumes rational individuals. Utilitarianism is grounded in a system of inductive reasoning that renders ethics inescapably into formalistic structures. Mill considered utility alone to be the final appeal on all ethical questions.34 His commitment to humans as rational agents produces a constricted definition of what counts as morality. Instead of prizing care and reciprocity, for example, moral understanding becomes abstracted and prescriptivist. The rational calculation of individuated selves has priority over the existential domain of the good. As Alasdair MacIntyre summarizes in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, at the time when science introduced the laws of physics to explain nature, philosophers constructed principles to explain human behavior, contending that morality ought to be justified in terms of rational standards. Notably Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill in the Enlightenment Project were committed to constructing an ethics that moves from premises about human nature “to conclusions about the authority of moral rules and precepts.”35 Contrary to this absolutism, in

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anthropological ethics humans in inter-subjective discourse refer to and extend moral systems that are always incomplete and historically evolving. Social Beings in the World Aristotle’s ethics is rooted in a vision of human life that is fundamentally social and political. As Aristotle observes in his Politics, “the human being is by nature an animal intended to live in a polis.”36 He states it this way in his Nicomachean Ethics: “The human being is meant for political association.”37 While moral action is finally a personal matter, Aristotle locates moral judgment in the context of our situatedness in communities. The responsible life includes both self-reflection and involvement in the public arena. Humans as social beings in Aristotle’s tradition is an essentialist paradigm. The concept of an essential human nature is presumed. Even as the tradition develops and insists on imagination, wisdom, and moral discernment, the notion of essence is central.38 Existentialism, whose central figure is Martin Heidegger, contradicted this essentialism.39 From his early classic Being and Time in 1927 through his last major book in 1958 (What Is Philosophy?), the presupposition and preoccupation of philosophical inquiry was existential Being. As the successor of Husserl at the University of Freiburg, he pursued his existentialist agenda through a phenomenological method. And in his transformation, humans are defined as “beings in the world.” In contrast to the political animal of Aristotle, this existential redefinition “does not conceive of human beings as existing in relation to a reality that transcends and in certain respects constitutes them as those they are, in various specific, contingent, and differing ways.”40 In contemporary philosophy one of the current definitions of the human is “in the world,” in particular, “humans in the social situation.” In existentialism,

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in pragmatism, and in Lebensphilosophie this theme is found recurrently as a primary given.41 In Heidegger’s existentialism, human beingness can be properly known only in its concreteness.42 Heidegger called human being Dasein (literally “therebeing”) to indicate that intentional existence distinguishes people from other organic entities. Humans alone are the beings to whom all material things and organic entities can reveal themselves as meaningful. The human species actualizes the presence of Being, and Being can show itself only through humanity. Phenomena disclose their is-ness through the human opening. The human species is “the clearing of Being.” Humans are in the peculiar position of raising the problem of Being through their unique self-consciousness. Human beingness is not a static essence, but a situated existent receiving and expressing the significance of things. There is no subject-object dichotomy; “the disclosure of things and the one to whom they are disclosed are co-original.”43 As Zuidema puts it regarding Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole, “The thesis (namely, being-in-the-world belonging to the essence of Dasein) is primordial and elementary.” For Heidegger, “all our ideas are projections in which man-in-the-world transcends the world and himself. Man-in-the-world is the idea which is foundational to all existential ontology and existential activity.”44 Heidegger’s being is defined by mortality. Rather than homo faber (humans as tool makers to meet basic needs such as food and shelter), humans build a world in their struggle to overpower death. “We now call mortals mortal—not because their earthly life comes to an end, but because they are capable of death as death….Living beings must first become mortals.”45 “Being can only presence itself through death.”46 For Heidegger’s philosophy of the human, our being-in-theworld is the “foundational dogma based on itself, and unsupported by anything outside of itself. It is an a priori which is

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considered to be beyond the pale of philosophical discussion,” because for Heidegger such discussion is “made possible only through the fact that humans” are social beings in the world. “Philosophizing is intrinsically bound to our being-in-theworld.”47 Within this definition of humans as social beings, philosophers in the Marxist tradition recognize that individuals are incorporated into the social structures they consider to be the real agents for making ourselves and providing ourselves with whatever determinate natures we may have. Adam Schaff writes, for example, that “the individual is in a quite specific sense a function of social relations and social conditions,” who “thinks and consciously transforms the world” only as “a part of society.”48 In Marx’s social philosophy, the social organism is greater than the sum of its parts. Society is not a conglomerate of atomistic individuals as in Locke, and “'social organism” is an alternative to the contractual notions of society. In Marx’s collectivism, what is real to society’s members is only what is real to the whole.49 This organicist model conceives of society as a complex organism. Collectivism as a holistic paradigm integrates human beings into the social organism, with the latter being the integrating norm. According to this view, originating with Hegel, what is real to society’s members can only be real in relation to the whole. For Marx’s Sixth Thesis of Feuerbach, our humanity does not consist of metaphysical or natural traits inherent in each of us, but rather it is an ensemble of social relations that are historically contingent and variable. Louis Althusser takes “the rejection of the essence of man” to be the “theoretical basis” and point of departure for the Marxist theory of the human. Althusser sees for Marx’s mature thought the idea of “different levels of human practice” that are specifically articulated and unified in particular human societies. Althusser maintains that “it is impossible to know anything about men except on the

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absolute precondition that the philosophical myth of man is reduced to ashes.”50 Through the concept “alienation,” Marx and his legacy developed a critical perspective on the idea of humans as social beings. For Marx, labor is the defining feature of the human race, material conditions being his point of departure.51 In his early work, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx introduced the concept of alienation in which workers are alienated from their labor, estranged from the labor process which erodes their dignity, alienated from each other as workers, and from their identity as homo faber (Marx, 1844/1964). A working-class revolt is necessary for alienation to be overcome.52 Rather than explanations keyed to our biological or rational nature, philosophers who define humans as social beings in the world recognize the constitutive role of socially structured forms of human experience and action. In this definition, as members of this or that particular society, human beings are “producers as well as products of the conditions of their existence, beings whose activity is informed by consciousness and yet whose consciousness is informed by social formations, and creatures whose lives are inextricably bound up with ensembles of social relations.”53 Cultural Beings In the philosophy-of-the-human tradition, cultural being is the definition that inspires this book. In this understanding of human existence, we know ourselves through our symbolic expressions. No inherent principle defines our metaphysical essence, nor is an inborn faculty or instinct ascertained by empirical observation. We cannot look through language to determine what really occurred but live at those points where meaning is created in language. Symbols are not copies of a reality

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that is independent of the human mind. Language does not merely reflect reality from the outside; recomposing events into a narrative ensures that humans can comprehend reality at all. In formal terms, “humans are language-using and culture-incorporating creatures whose form of experience, conduct and interaction take shape in linguistically and culturally structured environments, and are conditioned by the various meanings they bear.”54 Language is the matrix of humanity, and therefore, since it is inescapably communal, language is the public agency through which human identity is realized. Rather than one-dimensional definitions of the human species, the cultural character of our humanness illuminates the unity-in-multiplicity of human existence. The social and personal dimensions of language are woven into a unified whole. Language is not a vehicle of private meaning and subjectivism as the epistemology of rational individualism assumes, but belongs to the community where it is nurtured in collective action and reflection. As we reduce lingual luxuriance to construct a livable environment, we impose organization in all areas to serve human purposes. As the alphabet organizes the complex world of sound into its phonemic parts, humans as cultural beings find specific lingual formations to endow their existence with order by preserving what they consider the most important. Humans are the one living species constituted by language; therefore, humans are fundamentally cultural beings. As creators, distributors and users of culture, humans live in a world of their own making. Culture is the result of human communicative ability. It is the distinctive human environment, the human lifeworld and heritage in time and place. Culture is a set of practices, a mode of activity, and a process of creative imagination by which humans construct their environment. Realities called cultures are inherited and built from symbols that intermix our thoughts with sentiment, action, and identity. In Ernst

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Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, symbols participate in the meaning of what they symbolize; they share in the significance of that to which they point. In addition, they illuminate their referents so as to make them transparent; they permit us to express levels of reality that otherwise remain hidden. Because the symbolic realm is intrinsic to the human species, humans alone of living creatures possess the creative mind, the irrevocable capacity to reconstruct the world typically called “culture.” Language is sine qua non in cultural formation and thus the domain of human understanding. Cassirer summarized his four volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in his monograph An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture, and his typology puts the categories of this chapter into an historical context. Cassirer identified our unique capacity to generate symbolic structures as a radical alternative both to the essentialist biological being of various forms of evolutionary naturalism and to the animale rationale of Descartes.55 Arguing that the issues are fundamentally anthropological rather than epistemological per se, Cassirer’s creative being is developed against a reductionism of disciplined thinking on one hand, and a naturalistic neurophysiology on the other. With the definition of humans as animale symbolicum, Cassirer redefined the long-standing and calcified differences among human symbolic systems. Music, art, myth, mathematics, religious language, history, and science are symbolic formations that do not differ in kind.56 As Donald P. Verene puts it, “Myth does not differ from science as a form of knowledge….They share the same categories (which they also share with every other symbolic form) but they differ in the interpretation and employment of these categories.”57 Symbols are the mechanism through which the mind, forms of knowledge, and the material world interact. In Cassirer’s realist terms, human language has ontologically subjective

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features: “The symbolic process is like a single stream of life and thought which flows through consciousness and which by this flowing movement produces the diversity and cohesion, the richness, the continuity, and constancy, of consciousness.”58 This definition of symbolic action operates with an integrated but cone-shaped paradigm of ever-broadening categories: symbol, communicative capacity, human species, and culture. Culture is the habitat in which symbols are born and communication is the connective tissue in culture building; yet symbols precede culture. In the symbolic theory of language, if cultures are sets of symbols that orient life and provide it significance, then cultural patterns are inherently normative. Assuming that culture is the container of our symbolic capacity, the constituent units of such containers are a society’s values. As ordering relations for organizing reality, values direct the ends of societal practice and provide implicit standards for selecting courses of action. Communities are knit together linguistically, and because the lingual domain is not neutral but value laden our social bonds are moral claims. As developed systematically in the next chapter, anthropological ethics results from open-ended discourse about alternative proposals for humane living. The theory of humans as cultural beings presumes and emphasizes the human being’s moral character. Morality is entailed by our communal personhood. The interdependence of persons is constitutive of human life, and thus the development of my own and others’ being is obligatory. Because humans live inescapably and permanently in relation with others, social relations cannot be reduced to neutral functions or roles. Given the primacy of our relational reality, unless humans use their freedom to help others flourish, they deny their own well-being. Moral systems are genuine only if they promote fundamental human values. The concept of humans as cultural beings presumes that facts and values are inter-mixed rather than

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dichotomous. Through dialogic encounter humans create life together and nurture one another’s moral obligation to it. They have inescapable claims on one another that cannot be renounced without costing them their own humanity. Our obligation to sustain one another defines our existence. We live out our values in a community setting where the moral life is experienced and a moral vocabulary articulated. Thereby humans acknowledge “the necessarily social origin of any and all of their conceptions of the good and so of themselves.”59 Moral frameworks are as fundamental for orienting us in social space as the need to “establish our bearings in physical space….We can no more imagine a human life that fails to address the matter of its bearings in moral space than we can imagine one in which developing a sense of up and down, right and left is regarded as an optional human task.”60 Communities are woven together by narratives that invigorate their common understanding of good and evil, happiness and reward, the meaning of life and death. Recovering and refashioning moral discourse help to amplify our deepest humanness. Moral agents need a context of cultural meanings and community ties for assessing what is valuable.61 What is worth preserving as a good can be ascertained only within specific social situations where human identity is nurtured. Instead of constructing a conceptually abstract foundation for morality, the moral order is positioned fundamentally in the creaturely and corporeal, as developed in Chapter Five. Summary of Definitions This overview of the philosophical definitions of human being carries within it references to the strengths and weaknesses of the four theories. Without providing a full assessment of these definitions, we consider the cultural the most productive

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for a moral philosophy not trapped in the realism anti-realism dichotomy. Since Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and Essay on Man, rational being has been considered reductionist, accounting for cognition but not a human holism of emotions, will, and techne. In the current de-Westernizing of communication studies, rational being is critiqued as parochial for a global age. Philosophers committed to the definition of “social beings in the world” debate among themselves the fundamental issue whether situated existence requires realization. Given the complex circumstances involved in one’s being in particular situations, and presuming identity is not determined by such circumstances, what relational stances does this definition entail? In Heidegger’s state of fallenness, for example, where is resistance? Are humans-in-the-world assailed by their beingness? Is there distancing from our social situatedness without transcendence? What is the alternative to the illusion of false security within it?62 Holstein and Gubrium see the challenge for social constructionist research to be that of generating a critical consciousness while insisting on neutrality.63 Perhaps, Marx-inspired thinkers, such as Ernst Bloch’s students, can establish the critical pertinence of this theory of the human.64 Because the symbolic realm is considered intrinsic to the human species, the definition of humans as cultural beings is particularly significant for communications study.65 James Carey, for example, titles his book Communication as Culture with its lead chapter called “A Cultural Approach to Communication.” Humans alone of living creatures possess the creative mind, the irrevocable ability to reconstruct and interpret. From this perspective, communication is the symbolic process expressing human creativity and grounding cultural formation. Symbol is the basic unit that carries meaning, thus anchors the communicative capacity, which in turn is central to our humanity since

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humans are culture builders. Communication is the catalytic agent, the driving force in cultural formation, and its most explicit expressions are symbolic creations such as the dramatic arts, discourse, literature, electronic entertainment, and digital networks.

Section 2: Properties of Human Existence When the philosophy of the human is understood in cultural terms, three properties of human existence are entailed by this definition: historicality, the dialogic, and interpretation. These three concepts are the building blocks of an anthropological communication ethics. While the biological model of human reality continues to develop productively, it is not as philosophically rich as the cultural definition in its projecting these three trajectories for an anthropological ethics of the human. Historicality The cultural perspective understands humanity as being embedded in some context. Philosophical reflection centers on the historical character of human life generally, which must be given priority in any account of what human reality involves. Historically constructed forms of human experience play a constitutive role in human thinking and social practice. Historical phenomena express human cognition and values, requiring a sympathetic grasp of their meaning in a social context. The varied forms of human existence have come to be what they are through historical developments expressed in society and culture. In Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, humanity has no static nature in itself, only history.66 Ortega echoes this idea when he said that we have no human essence but rather a history. This philosophy of the human applied to morality enables an ontology of ethics that is historical, social, and naturalistic.

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Assuming that historicality is a cardinal feature of human existence, it needs philosophical clarification on a number of important levels, in particular with regard to its structure, aspects, and the conditions of its possibility. Eschewing extreme relativism, as they do, the intellectual trajectory from Wilhelm Dilthey’s Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung in 1906 to Gadamer’s Truth and Method in 1989 is of particular relevance philosophically.67 For Wilhelm Dilthey, influential successor to Hegel at Berlin, Erlebnis (lived experience) is the ultimate basis of knowledge. For Dilthey (1958), lived experience is an everflowing stream, and, therefore, the relations of life are historical in nature. In his perspective, human consciousness and expression are determined by history: “Life contains as the first categorical definition, fundamental to all others, being in time (Zeitlichkeit).”68 Dilthey defined the problem of understanding as recovering a consciousness of the human race’s historicality (Geschichtlichkeit). Human experience he saw as intrinsically chronological, and therefore our understanding of the human domain must also be commensurately temporal. For Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl Jaspers’ successor at Heidelberg (1949-1968), “Understanding is essentially an affective-historical relation” in which the accumulated history of meanings is a constituent element in our own interpretation..69 Taking a cue from Dilthey’s concern to make history central, but radicalizing that notion, the world itself is seen as essentially historical. For Gadamer's constructive realism, history is the medium within which people dwell, a precondition of all thought including critical reflection.70 That which appears to us in our understanding is gained from this pregiven interpretive context, but interpretive conclusions are not ontological claims. For Gadamer, humanity’s finitude is determined by our historical consciousness. “The idea of an absolute reason is not a possibility for historical humanity.” Epistemology exists for us

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only in concrete historical terms—that is, “reason is not its own master but remains completely dependent on the given circumstances within which it operates.”71 In morality, rational schemes are not sovereign over goodness. For Gadamer, the historical realities of society and culture have predeterminate influence on lived experience, though they are not determining. “History does not belong to us; we belong to it….The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life.”72 Instead of anti-realism's direct knowledge of autonomous entities, subjectivity is our existential awareness of belongingness in the collective world of public discourse. Rather than separating human agents from the representational domain, words derive their meaning from the historical context humans themselves symbolize. Therefore, the authority of ethics is social; morality represents what humanity believes and affirms from its situated perspective. Dialogic Social Philosophy Within the definition of humans-as-cultural-beings, the phenomenon of human intersubjectivity is philosophically interesting.73 Human expressions make impressions that unfold into further expressions, and intentions are registered in actions that respond, to which further intentions take shape and issue in other expressions and actions. Only by overcoming the traditional dualisms between thinking and agency, mind and body, reason and will, can we conceive of being as the mutuality of interpersonal relations. This dialogic process occurs on a number of levels and in a variety of ways, all involving and conditioned, to one degree or another, by symbols, conventions, and institutions. The dialogic perspective involves talking among ourselves about our mutual responsibilities, motivated by the good of the whole. Persons are not simply being open to the

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Other’s perspective. From the perspective of anthropological realism, the goal of inquiry is discovering good reasons for acting together. Active listening and contributing are crucial for uncovering non-idiosyncratic meanings. The integrating norm is not the social whole or individual rights, but humans-in-relation. Personal identity is reoriented rather than rejected; as a result, power in social relations is understood as the empowerment of mutuality. Gadamer investigates the nature of dialogic interpretation, not as an epistemological question per se, but as an ontological query about human consciousness. In epistemology based on essentialist human nature, all meaningful acts are deterministical derivations from a singular foundation. However, when the lingual interpretation of ourselves and our experiences constitutes who we are, human action regarding identity and values is dialogic. Our experience is then understood largely in terms of rhythm with other non-individuated actors. Selfhood only exists within “webs of interlocution” and all self-interpretation implicitly or explicitly “acknowledges the necessarily social origin of any and all of their conceptions of the good and so of themselves.”74 The essence of understanding is not individualistic rationality, but interactive dialogue through which humans engage each other’s cultures and make collaborative activity possible. Communication is no longer seen as a bridge between two social entities that exist as political or economic agents outside it. Communication is the medium of human existence as intersubjectivity, that is, as our mode of belonging together with others in a community. Human existence is “a living process in which a community of life is lived out.”75 The dialogical nature of language questions the idea of the one right view. “The multiplicity of languages makes the infinite possibility of the human experience of the world undeniable.” This multiplicity of worldviews does not, however, imply anti-realism. Instead it demonstrates that “our verbal experience

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of the world has the capacity to embrace the most varied relationships of life.”76 In Paul Ricoeur's The Rule of Metaphor, the linguistic imagination generates a surplus of meaning through metaphor. As elaborated in Chapter Six on the philosophy of language, Ricoeur understands discourse in terms of plentitude; that is, language extends and reorients the original without abandoning it. As Ricoeur's Fallible Man puts it regarding human existence, “the unity of destination and the differences of destinies are to be understood through each other.”77 Human identity is constituted through the social realm. We are born into a sociocultural universe where values, moral commitments, and existential meanings are negotiated dialogically. Fulfillment is never achieved in isolation, but only through the human bonding that results from our constructing and maintaining fair and humane communities. Taylor summarizes the social bondedness of dialogic theory as follows: We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity through…rich modes of expression we learn through exchange with others. My discovering my own identity doesn’t mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue partly overt, partly internal, with others. My own identity crucially depends on my dialogical relations with others….In cultures of authenticity, relationships are seen as the key loci of selfdiscovery and self affirmation.78

Moral agents need a context of social commitments for assessing what is valuable. What is worth preserving as a good can only be ascertained within specific lingual situations where human identity is being nurtured. We are primarily persons in dialogic relation and derivatively thinkers withdrawn from action. With human action as dialogic, all moral matters arise from and are resolved in community. Through dialogic encounter, humans have inescapable claims on one another that cannot

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be renounced without denying their own humanity. As established in Chapter Five, instead of overriding principles such as the greatest balance of good over evil, the moral order is positioned intersubjectively. Dialogic social philosophy treats morality not as an impersonal action-guiding code for individuals, but rather as a shared process of discovery and interpretation in which individuals continually and thoughtfully come to their conclusions in light of what others have said and done.79 A global communication ethics that works itself in and through dialogic theory is the most sophisticated normative model at present. A normative dialogic paradigm is a decisive alternative to formalist ethics, where all expressions are monologic, though scattered actions may be coordinated with others. When humans are understood as dialogic beings, morality is grounded in intersubjectivity. Following the humans-in-relation idea, the “wellspring of ethical behavior” is in the “human affective response.”80 Reciprocal care and understanding, not formal reasoning first of all, are the bases for moral discourse. Ethics is located in the common values intrinsic to a community’s ongoing identity formation, rather than in static rational prescriptions. In the theory of humans as rational beings, rational processes create basic norms that sovereign individuals must follow to be moral. An apparatus of neutral standards is constructed. Rather than uncritically assume this formalism, we can make substantial progress in an ethics of the human with a different conceptual foundation. The individuality of the rational-being tradition is reversed from independence to interdependence. For a substantive moral globalism to be legitimate intellectually and possible practically, dialogic social philosophy is the only alternative. The social bondedness of the philosophy of the human as cultural being enables us to establish a credible ethics that reflects the cultural diversity and complexity of the globe and to act on them with integrity. In these terms,

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the public sphere is a pluralism of communities which retain their identities, and this notion can be extended to the idea of a global community of both diversity and the natural sentiments of the human species. What is worth preserving as a good cannot be determined in isolation; it can only be ascertained within specific social situations where human identity is nurtured. The normative functions of language originate in the lived experience of humankind, and in this domain the concepts of the good interact with our everyday discourse. Therefore, the domain of the good is not metaphysically extrinsic but socially derived. Interpretation Our symbolic, linguistic nature means that interpretation is the key to understanding humans, their capacities, the meaning of life and ethics. Embedded in an existing cultural world, for dialogic humans the sense of being is necessarily historical. Humans-in-relation imperfectly and with finitude seek to understand themselves after centuries of accumulated meanings. Our world orientation is primordially given and we never get outside an evolving interpretation of our humanness. In the ontological perspective of this book, a non-interpretive, pure understanding of human reality is an illusion. In the philosophical anthropology that defines humans as cultural beings, interpretation is, therefore, ubiquitous and for two reasons: First, interpreting is all but synonymous with conceptualization and cognition. Second, we have no direct, cognitive contact with reality. We make cognitive contact with the world but it is never unmediated. Contact occurs through the mental representation and interpretation of embodied agents pursuing purposes in concrete contexts. [Human] behavior consists of responses to a world…that are mediated by our interpretations of stimuli and many other things.81

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The theories that humans construct about themselves are interpretations of the world in which they are situated. Because of the linguisticality of all experience, we understand ourselves as subjects and the world in which we live, only through the objectifications of meanings that symbols represent within that world.82 The philosophical treatment of human life and affairs is fundamentally a matter of invention and discovery rather than of scientific demonstration or uniquely correct depictions. In the philosophy of the human in the West, classical Greece established the process of interpretation as foundational to human life, and in that sense, as an intellectual problem. Aristotle found interpretation (hermeneia) worthy of a major treatise, that is, the famous Peri hermeneias, “On Interpretation,” in the Organon. In Aristotle's attempt to delineate the conditions through which understanding occurs, he identified a human ability to interpret languages, to fill linguistic expressions with meaning. The art of interpretation (hermenia) is central to moral action in the Nicomachean Ethics. Plato had already established in the Phaedrus that messages must be inscribed on the soul to be meaningful, therefore hinting at a distinction between expression and interpretation. In the Ion, Plato concerns himself with the interpretive process, namely, the role interpretation plays in understanding. Interpretation and its cognates also appear in the classical Greek literature of Plutarch's De Tranquillitate Animi, Epicurus' Epicuro Opere, and Xenophon's Memorabilia I-IV. Paul Ricoeur reconstructs that intellectual history in contemporary terms.83 His Interpretation Theory and The Conflict of Interpretations are explicit about the interpretive modality. Interpretation is not inquiry for the sake of epistemic certainty, but dialogue with human existence past and present. One’s selfbeing is always understood within a community of interacting beings. “The subject that interprets himself while interpreting signs is no longer the cogito; rather he is a being who discovers

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by the exegesis of his own life, that he is placed in being before he places and possesses himself;” our manner of existence “remains from start to finish a being-interpreted.”84 We cannot assume that we possess direct knowledge of our self nor that the self is autonomous, since self-understanding is an interpretation of our cultural situatedness. We understand ourselves as subjects, and the world in which we live, only through an interpretation of symbolic meanings within that world. We cannot step outside language to determine what something really is or means but must intervene at the level of the lingual world native to us. For Ricoeur's hybrid realism, whatever is intelligible is accessible to us in and through language, and all deployments of language require interpretation. As Heidegger puts it, “All language… interprets. It is an interpretation at one and the same time of a reality and of the one who speaks about this reality.”85 “The facts never speak for themselves. They must be selected, marshaled, linked together and given a voice.”86 The thick notion of interpretation replaces the thinness of the technical, statistically precise instrumentalism originating in Descartes. Interpretation opens up public life in all its dynamic dimensions. It means taking seriously lives that are loaded with multiple interpretations and grounded in cultural intricacy and paradox. “Interpretation is a complex and holistic activity.” The materials we have for interpretation “are typically multidimensional—beliefs, theories, views, and perceptions.”87 Our interpretations are ever-evolving and interpretation as a dialogue on human existence is never fully clear to us. But this imperfectionism does not mean open-ended improbability.88 “Interpretations can be better or worse,…well-evidenced or not,…far-fetched or false.”89 The idea of interpretive sufficiency grounds a basic method of social scientific research.90 For more than a decade, David Altheide and colleagues have developed criteria for interpretive

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validity in qualitative research, calling their early model “analytic realism”91 and their later approach “ethnographic content analysis.”92 As an alternative to quantitative methods, Altheide's realism involves sustained inquiry of narratives, documents, and events by a reflexive interaction process. Normative interpretation builds on literary, historical and ethnographic interpretations. Normative interpretation inquires into the values and purposes of the practices that these domains represent. It asks for the paradigmatic examples of norms that communities follow and their reflections upon them. Normative interpretation in ethics is holistic, recognizing as it does that the “meaning of many ethical concepts…such as goodness or duty is multidimensional.” “Norms and knowledge” from a range of practices and beliefs are given “reflective equilibrium” by appealing to a web of inter-related facts and beliefs about the world. And “ethical thinking is holistic in seeking to integrate a plurality of values into a moral way of life.”93 Holistic normative interpretation is made explicit for the ethic of anthropological realism in Chapter Five.

Conclusion As we reconfigure meta-ethics in terms of anthropological realism, our cognitive presumption will be human-centric as it is in all the theories of the human articulated in this chapter. To develop a credible ethics of the human in Chapter Five that carries forward the cultural definition of being, the exceptionalism of human entities is the overarching philosophical commitment.94 In other words, anthropocentrism is the issue, that is, the theorizing of hybrid realism that interprets or regards the world in terms of human values and human experience. Anthropocentrism is the belief that human properties such as rationality, self-consciousness, and the ability to communicate through symbols are the basis for humans to be treated morally. The

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philosophy of the human as subject matter presumes the special status of the human species, and therefore, a basic entitlement of all species members that is a non-contingent implication of one's status as human.95 The influence of Peter Singer's work in bioethics has made the anthropocentrism issue inescapable for professional ethics, his book of essays over three decades, Unsanctifying Human Life, by its very title opposing human-centeredness. Of central importance for Singer from an ethical perspective is a living entity's interests and capacities. Based on the principle of equal consideration, Singer argues in “All Animals Are Equal” against the conventional assumption that humans “are justified in overriding the interests of nonhuman animals when they conflict with their own. This is speciesism, that is, species-selfishness akin to racism.”96 Singer's animal rights utilitarianism begins with Jeremy Bentham. The question for Singer is not whether beings can reason, but whether they can suffer when harmed, and if so they deserve to have that interest taken into account.97 Robert Pepperell’s The Posthuman Manifesto centers on its radical opposition to anthropocentrism. With the same meaning, Peter Singer’s work in bioethics is labeled “Unsanctifying Human Life” and Pepperell’s rhetoric is “posthumanism.” “The posthuman is a coming stage of human evolution, where we move beyond the confines of the body through the use of new biological and digital technologies to become radically enhanced beings” beyond our known humanity.98 In the definition of the World Transhumanist Association, “an entity whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of unaugmented humans is to be best thought of as constituting a new kind of being.” Pepperell’s essay is not developed in terms of ethical theory as is Singer’s, but it is likewise committed to homo sapiens in a constant state of becoming. According to Pepperell, the posthuman era became possible once we admitted that “humans

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are no longer the most important thing in the universe” (Postulate 1.1). Technological progress is geared toward the transformation of the human species and it’s an irreversible reality (Postulate 1.2). As Pepperell summarizes in the Preface to a new edition: “The word ‘posthuman’ marks the end of that period of social development known as humanism, and so in this sense it means ‘after humanism.’ The term refers to the general convergence of biology and technology to the point where they are increasingly becoming indistinguishable.”99 “In this electronic world, one’s physical attributes will be less significant than one’s virtual presence or ‘telepresence.’ In the telepresent environments it will be difficult to determine where a person ‘is’ or what distinguishes persons from the technological form they take.”100 In contrast to the anthropocentric understanding of humanity as distinct from but interactive with the natural world, the posthuman entity chooses “to lose part of his or her being in an emerging technological whole” (Postulate 8.8). The posthuman condition involves the “gradual overturning of a human-centered world,” demolishing old categories and giving room for new forms of technological being.101 In these speculative generalities, life is being redefined as a “data processing entity;” human life is “reconfigured into a potential source of energy for a technological apparatus.”102 This imagined community of near perfection is a utopian view of species evolution that uncritically presumes technological determinism. A new mentalistic being, created by the total integration of the human and technology, has its epistemological home in an anti-realist utopian mind, not in well-evidenced natural properties or history. For Robert Heeger’s “Dignity Only for Humans? A Controversy,” “the concept of dignity does not rule out moral obligations to non-human living beings, for dignity does not cover the whole of morality.”103 In Manfred Stanley’s terms, “Human dignity does not rest on moral merit or subjective definitions of

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self-interest. It rests on the fact that we are, in this fundamental way that is beyond our intention, human….To assert dignity is to both acknowledge the factuality of human creative agency and to accept responsibility for its use.”104 Contradicting the human-nonhuman dualism of Peter Singer, Peter Schaber argues for species differentiation.105 He is correct that “the inherent value of a being should be respected, preserved or promoted.”106 “The inherent value of a living being is preserved when this being is capable of developing into a typical representative of the species it belongs to.”107 The philosophy of the human rejects the presumption of technological determinism in the human-machine symbiosis, the harm motif in the utilitarian framework as definitive, and appeals to utopianism. In its critique of the transhuman era, the philosophy of humans as cultural beings is robust enough to provide the conceptual basis in the next chapter for developing a distinctive ethics of the human without carrying forward philosophically unacceptable dualisms and intellectually indefensible idealisms. With historicality, dialogic communication, and interpretation, the common and distinctive properties of human existence, moral realism can be developed thematically into an anthropological ethics of normative ideals.

Notes 1. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 109. 2. See Schacht, “Philosophical Anthropology: What, Why, and How,” 155-176. 3. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. 4. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 59ff. 5. Lowenstein, The Touchstone of Life, xv-xvi; quoted in Woodward, “A Philosophically Based Inquiry Into the Nature of Communicating Humans,” 6. 6. Cooper, Action Into Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Technology, 14.

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7. Woodward, “A Philosophically Based Inquiry Into the Nature of Communicating Humans,” 7. 8. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 67. 9. Woodward, “A Philosophically Based Inquiry Intro the Nature of Communicating Humans,” 8. 10. Oller and Griebel, Evolution of Communication Systems, 5. 11. Millikan, “On Reading Signs,” 17; see Macmurray, Persons in Relation. 12. Woodward, “Design/communication as Mutual-Personal Creative Action,” 155. 13. Woodward, “A Philosophically Based Inquiry Into the Nature of Communicating Humans,” 7. 14.Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 133, 129. 15.Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 133. 16. Woodward, “A Philosophically Based Inquiry Into the Nature of Communicating Humans,” 9. 17. Garnham, Emancipation, Media, and Modernity, 2-3. 18. Wallace, Virtues and Vices, 34; quoted in Woodward, “A Philosophically Based Inquiry Into the Nature of Communicating Humans,” 9. 19. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 74. 20. Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility, 78. 21. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1, 6. 22. Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. 1, 7. 23. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a4; see 1098a6. 24. Landman, Philosophical Anthropology, 110. 25. Landman, Philosophical Anthropology, 110. 26. Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity, 11-13. 27. The Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle in his The Concept of the Mind rejected Descartes on the ground that his dualism of mind and matter was a category mistake that confused the discourse concerning minds with the logic of discourse pertaining to physical bodies. 28. Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 163, 172. 29. Levi, Philosophy and the Modern World, 34. 30. Levi, Philosophy and the Modern World, 34. 31. Levi, Philosophy and the Modern World, 34-35. 32. Between the rationalist, scientific philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the mature positivism of Russell and

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Carnap are two explicit paths noted in this Chapter 4 but not developed and analyzed: a) Hume’s shift in causal inference from the necessary connection of things to the connection of ideas in the mind, and b) the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry in the first half of the nineteenth century. These intellectual traditions are important to the philosophy of language of Chapter 6, but not directly pertinent to the theory of humans as rational beings. See Christians, “The Problem of Communitas in Western Moral Philosophy,” Chapter 2. 33. In his Utilitarianism, Mill credits Comte for his use of the inverse deductive or historical method: “This was an idea entirely new to me when I found it in Comte; and but for him I might not soon (if ever) have arrived at it.” Mill published two essays on Comte’s influence in the Westminster Review which were reprinted as Auguste Comte and Positivism. 34. Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter 1. 35. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 52. 36. Aristotle, Politics, 123a. 37. Aristotle, Politics, 1097b. 38. For an analysis of the Aristotelian tradition on the essence issue in historical terms, see Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 39. Heidegger has been critiqued and condemned for his commitment to German national socialism prior to and during World War II in Lyotard, Heidegger and the Jews, and in Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy. As Rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933-34 and as a prominent intellectual during the war years, he refused to condemn Nazism and offered no apology before his death in 1976 at age 87. Working with his ideas in terms of their importance in intellectual history does not mean excusing this grotesque failure. As Ettinger elaborates in her Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, the smaller scale controversy over his four-year affair with Hannah Arendt also complicates an assessment of his philosophy. 40. Schacht, “Philosophical Anthropology: What, Why and How,” 161. 41. See Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. 42. The early Sartre in his Existentialism and Humanism insists that we “exist first and define ourselves afterward,” acquiring the only sort of determinate “essence” we have in the course of doing so

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through our choices and projects. He rejects the attribution of any such “essence” to human beings generally, on the ground that it is precluded by the character of human existence. There is a corresponding though not identical idea in the thought of Karl Jaspers. Heidegger’s contention in Being and Time that “the essence of Dasein lies in Existenz” reflects Kierkegaard, as does Jaspers’ conception of “myself as Existenz” which cannot be reduced to something more basic nor explained in terms of something outside itself. 43. Hood, “The Aristotelian Versus the Heideggerian Approach to the Problem of Technology,” 353. 44. Zuidema, “Man in Contemporary Philosophy,” 129. 45. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 179. 46. Fry, RUA TV? Heidegger and the Televisual,” 88. 47. Zuidema, “Man in Contemporary Philosophy,” 130. 48. Schaff, Marxism and the Human Individual, 100. 49. Christians, “Ubuntu and Communitarianism in Media Ethics,” 244-245; see Schutte, A Philosophy for Africa. 50. Althusser, For Marx, 229. 51. Marx agreed with the British economists, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, that labor is the source of wealth rather than land or precious metals. But he opposed their abstract economism. Marx and Engels in The German Ideology inverted Hegel’s idealist dialectic into a materialist theory of history, and also rejected the formalized notions of the human that dominated Enlightenment thought. 52. Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 represents the philosophical Marx, at the age of 26, rooted in Hegel and Feuerbach, more than a decade before the political economic Marx of the 1857-1858 Grundruisse der Kritik de Politischen Okonomie and of the 1867 Das Kapital The mature concept of alienation in 1844 is assumed by Marx’s later work, though not stated with the same completeness. 53. Schacht, “Philosophical Anthropology: What, Why and How,” 165. 54. Schacht, “Philosophical Anthropology: What, Why and How,” 173. 55. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment is Cassirer’s classic study of the Eighteenth Century West, analyzing it as a process of transforming the ideas of previous centuries rather than a set of doctrines.

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Cultural being is explained as an alternative paradigm to the West's prevailing Enlightenment rationality. 56. For a systematic treatment of the cultural sciences that emerge from Cassirer’s theory of symbolic forms, see his The Logic of the Humanities. 57. Verene, “Metaphysical Narration, Science, and Symbolic Form,” 118. 58. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 3, 202. 59. Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, 106. 60. Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, 112-113. 61. Carole Pateman’s The Problem of Political Obligation and her The Disorder of Women develop the idea of humans as moral beings; humans as socio-political entities are not to be understood primarily in terms of contracts. Making promises is one of the basic ways in which consenting human beings “create their own social relationships.” We assume an obligation by making a promise. When individuals promise, they are obligated to act accordingly. However, promises are made not primarily to authorities through political contracts, but to fellow citizens. 62. For the connections and disconnections between Heidegger and Cassirer on these questions, see Crowe’s “Between Termini: Heidegger, Cassirer and Two Terms of Transcendental Method” and Schalow’s “Thinking at Cross Purposes with Kant: Reason, Finitude and Truth in the Cassirer-Heidegger Debate.” In his essay, “Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.” Cassirer claims to have done justice to Heidegger’s “radical human finitude,” 10-11. 63. See Holstein and Gubrium, “The Constructionist Analysis of Interpretive Practice.” 64. See Bloch, The Principle of Hope. 65. Thomas Discenna in his “The Culture Industries,” while demonstrating the importance of Cassirer for rhetorical and communication theory, takes note of Cassirer’s influence on a wide range of scholars in the humanities: Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Suzanne Langer, Gadamer, Bakhtin, Bourdieu, Merleau-Ponty, and Habermas. 66. See Kiblansky and Paton, Philosophy and History. 67. The historicity of knowledge from Dilthey to Gadamer is distinct from the relativistic historicism initiated by Lacan and Foucault. In the extreme relativism of their historicism, all interpretations must

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be understood within their own social and cultural context. The texts, signs, and artifacts that exist in the present, and the extant decoding conventions, constitute an epoch's knowledge system. Chapter 6 examines in detail the philosophical issues in this version of historicism. 68. Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6, 192. 69. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 266. 70. Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness.” 71. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 276. 72. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 276. 73. Seyla Benhabib also finds intersubjectivity to be a core concept; she develops her understanding of it in terms of universals in ethics in her Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. Her Claims of Culture understands the intersubjectivity issue similarly to the theory of cultural being of this chapter. 74. Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Conservatives, 112. 75. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 404 76. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 448. 77. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 138. 78. Taylor et al., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, 32, 34, 36. 79. Daryl Koehn’s Rethinking Feminist Ethics supports the emphasis in feminist ethics on a relational order. In her view, however, a feminist ethics based on care and nurturance is not radically reciprocal, since the one-cared-for depends on the one-caring. She argues for a dialogic ethics that makes feminist ethics more credible intellectually and more viable in practical application. 80. Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, 2. 81. Ward, The Invention of Journalism Ethics, 45. 82. See Ward, Radical Media Ethics: A Global Approach, 47. 83. Ricoeur was the chair of general philosophy at the Sorbonne (1956-1967) and on the faculty of the University of Paris at Nanterre (1967-1980). From 1967-1992, he also served as the successor to Paul Tillich at the University of Chicago. 84. Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 11.

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85. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 89. 86. Barzun and Graff, The Modern Researcher, xii. 87. Ward, The Invention of Journalism Ethics, 45-46. 88. Ward, The Invention of Journalism Ethics, 35-36, 66-67. 89. Ward, Ethics and the Media: An Introduction, 153. 90. See Christians, “The Changing News Paradigm from Objectivity to Interpretive Sufficiency.” 91. See Altheide and Johnson, “Criteria for Assessing Interpretive Validity in Qualitative Research;” and “Reflections on Interpretive Adequacy in Qualitative Research.” 92. See Altheide and Schneider, “Ethnographic Content Analysis.” 93. Ward, Radical Media Ethics: A Global Approach, 76. 94. Attacks on the privileged ontological status of humans is a common motif in contemporary literature. As Schrag summarizes in his The Self After Postmodernity, “The ‘death of the human’ motif has taken on “a variety of formulations, to wit…the ‘death of the author,’ ‘the deconstruction of the subject,’ ‘the displacement of the ego,’ ‘the dissolution of self-identity,’ and at times a combination of the above,” 2. 95. The Changing Face of Alterity by Gunkel, Filho, and Mersch is an encyclopedia of reflections on human exceptionalism in ethics. The book’s essays provide a range of different responses to this challenge, ranging from arguments for human-centeredness to proposals for a posthuman theory and practice of communication that assumes symmetry between human relationships with things and the interpersonal. 96. Kuhse, Unsanctifying Human Life: Essays on Ethics, 3. 97. See Gunkel, Filho, and Mersch, The Changing Face of Alterity, Chapter 10. Martha Nussbaum deals with the speciesism issue in her Frontiers of Justice where a theoretical frontier that needs resolution is humanity’s place in the natural world. Her frame of reference is the social contract tradition as developed by John Rawls. In her capabilities approach, worth and respect are not limited to humanity with the rest of nature a set of tools. “With the biologist Aristotle,” she writes, “there is something wonderful and wonder-inspiring in all the complex forms of life in nature.” In her approach advancing this perspective, “the functions of life are not to be impeded,” and “the dignity of living organisms are not to the violated” by “blighting

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the valuable natural powers…relevant to that species,” 347-348, 351. Chapter 3 presents Nussbaum's development theory as a promising form of naturalism, but in Frontiers of Justice Nussbaum’s framework is too narrow to resolve singularly the anthropocentric question. In Frontiers of Justice, she allows Singer's human-nonhuman dualism to establish the debate agenda, with an impasse the result. 98. Campbell, “Postcyborg Ethics: A New Way to Speak of Technology,” 280. 99. Pepperell, The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain, iv. 100. Pepperell, The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain, 4. 101. Pepperell, The Post-Human Manifesto, 176. 102. Mejia, “Posthuman, Postrights?” 15-16. 103. Heeger, “Dignity Only for Humans? A Controversy,” 545. 104. Stanley, The Technological Conscience: Survival and Dignity in the Age of Expertise, 69-70. 105. Rather than allow the human-nonhuman dualism to establish the agenda, Floridi’s The Fourth Revolution argues for a fourth revolution after Copernicus, Darwin and Freud in which the infosphere is based on the integrated ontology of natural, human and technological realities. 106. Schaber, “Dignity Only for Humans?” 550. 107. Schaber, “Dignity Only for Humans?” 548.

CHAPTER FIVE THE ETHIC OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL REALISM CLIFFORD G. CHRISTIANS Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness. —Immanuel Kant1

With a philosophy of the human established, we can move theoretically to develop an ethics of the human or what might be called “normative anthropology.” The common and distinctive aspects of human existence provide an intellectual warrant for an ethics of the human. The philosophy of the human recognizes that human beings have similarities and differences among themselves that merit investigation. The ontological presumption is that speaking of a human reality makes sense, and this cognitive foundation is the framework for the new ethics paradigm developed below. The approach to moral realism in this chapter is anthropological, that is, moral realism gives priority to the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a member of the human species. As developed in Chapter Four, the ethic of anthropological realism situates morality fundamentally in human existence rather than in abstract conceptions of the good. To think philosophically about human existence is not to define features of human essence, physical or mental, with the presumption that human nature is fixed antecedently. Rather, explicating the composition of the human condition illuminates the character

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of an integrated reality of multiple dimensions: lingual forms, organizational systematization, communal and personal actions that constitute human existence. The ethicist’s primary obligation is getting inside the multiple ways humans arbitrate their presence in the world. Therefore, the character and functions of human existence is the centerpiece of a systematic morality. The ethic of anthropological realism grounds its perspective in the cultural agency of holistic humans in their lived experience as existentially intersubjective, rather than in the reductionism of individuated rationality. This chapter amplifies the argument of Chapter Three, for a radically different model than the ethical systems of rational choice centered on virtue, deontology, or consequences. It demonstrates how to retheorize ethics so that descriptive, normative and meta-ethics are integrated in naturalistic and functional terms. Instead of centripetal tightness in each domain, with intermittent contact among them, the ethic of normative ideals is a unity of interactive norms and everyday activities. As elaborated in the previous chapter, a cultural definition escapes the static view of rational being, while establishing our humanness in common and, therefore, universal terms. In the dynamic ethic of anthropological realism, we articulate moral practices and values to the normative principles they imply, and such normative claims to the foundational issues in moral philosophy on which they are based. An anthropological understanding of moral realism is opposed to the epistemological and metaphysical perspectives that have dominated moral realism. In the epistemological approach to moral realism, moral propositions are justified as true by systematic reasoning.2 In the metaphysical approach to moral realism, an ultimate reality is presumed to exist independently of the mental.3 Neither epistemological nor metaphysical perspectives on moral realism is an adequate substitute for anthropological moral realism. As clarified in Chapter Two, the epistemological version has generally assimilated

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moral realism into the intellectual impasses over the subjectobject dichotomy. Metaphysical moral realism typically presumes a prescriptivist understanding of the moral domain, that is, an ethics of formulae and maxims. In contrast to both, anthropological moral realism is humancentered in looking for universal values in human experience. From this homo sapiens perspective, a conception of the good as an abstract imperative—largely true of both the epistemological and metaphysical traditions—does not square with the actual moral experiences of our lifeworld existence. In thus freeing the concept of moral realism from metaphysical and epistemological debates, the anthropological realism of Chapter Three demonstrates that universalism and particularism are simultaneously possible. Anthropological realism is the intellectual framework for what Ward elsewhere calls “normative universals.” With normative universals, we move from “facts” about being human— the primordial experiences of human existence—to affirm them as the basis for ethics. “Universals are to be understood as normatively justified affirmations of basic values and action guiding principles.”4 When the ethics of the human is done from the perspective of anthropological realism, the philosophical foundation of media ethics are the universal features, conditions, and capacities of human existence. This humanistic grounding is developed as an ethic of normative ideals in the sections following.

Normative Ideals In the symbolic theory of language, cultures are symbolic composites that make life meaningful; therefore cultural patterns are intrinsically normative. Through the dialogic relation that language makes possible, humans create life together and nurture one another’s moral obligation to it. Because humans are cognitively interconnected with others, social relations are normative. Human relationships should not be reduced to neutral functions.

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Given the primacy of our relational reality, humans do not flourish in isolation; human well-being is intra- and inter-relational. As argued in Chapter Four, the interpretive modality is a distinctive property of the human species. Because “facts and values are inseparable characteristics of the world as it is comprehended by humans,” literary, historical and ethnographic interpretations are the forms in which knowledge is produced.5 Normative interpretation builds on these interpretations, reflecting the values and purposes that these domains of meaning represent. Morality is not an impersonal action-guiding code, but rather a shared process of discovery and interpretation in light of what others have said and done. We live out our values in a community setting where the moral life is experienced and a moral vocabulary articulated. Normative ideals are constructed from paradigmatic examples of norms that human beings follow and their reflections on them. The domain of the good is not extrinsic, but what is worth preserving as a good is derived within the normative structure of the social world. In Casteñada’s terms, once we recognize that all human concepts “have a normative dimension,” we will understand that human agency “cannot reach a pure non-normative core.”6 In his Morality of Pluralism, John Kekes argues correctly that “the goodness of life” depends on both “the personal satisfaction it provides to the agent” and “on the moral merit it possesses.” Lives can be called good, only if they are “both personally satisfying and morally meritorious.”7 As normative ideals are identified in the ethic of anthropological realism, the demand for the “morally meritorious” is satisfied. History as Normed Process In the perspective of hybrid anthropological realism, normed phenomena are embedded within culture and history. This intellectual strategy shifts transcendental criteria from a vertical

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hierarchy to the horizon of community, world, and being.8 In this view, cultures are sets of symbols that organize human existence and are therefore ipso facto evaluative. “Norms and values are not something a culture has, but something it is.”8 Societies are embodiments of institutions, practices, and structures recognized internally as legitimate. Indeed, society is inconceivable without allegiance to a web of ordering relations. As Charles Taylor insists, cultures that do not identify and defend their normative base go out of existence: Societies destroy themselves when they violate the conditions of legitimacy which they themselves tend to posit and inculcate. The family of conceptions of the good life, the notions of what it is to be human…define the terms in which institutions, practices, disciplines and structures will be recognized as legitimate or marked out as illegitimate.10

Taylor is correct. When we “cease to believe in the norms governing our social life,…we are threatened with a kind of anomie” resulting from a “crisis of allegiance to our society.”11 Such a framing of our human identity can be rooted only in an ethics of universal solidarity, one grounded in our being as humans and therefore not restricted to the generations now living. Thus the ethic of anthropological realism aims at articulating a nonrelativistic ethics in which “humans have certain inescapable claims on one another which cannot be renounced at the cost of their humanity.”12 We examine the interpretive modality at work across the demographic spectrum by focusing on people’s everyday occurrences. Kwame Anthony Appiah understands human identity in these terms, here inflected to Africa: “We will only solve our problems if we see them as human problems arising out of a special situation.”13 The idea of universal commonality in human existence is transparent on multiple levels. All healthy humans begin uttering novel sentences with similar complexity when approximately

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two years old. Sigmund Freud contends in his Totem and Taboo that social orders without exception establish taboo boundaries even as they lift up motivational ideals for emulation. Aristotle proved that the law of noncontradiction is a universal condition of intelligence, precluding everywhere the proverbial square circle and married bachelor. Given our generic human existence in a common universe, we can at least speak of universal category areas, such as basic beliefs: “beliefs in one’s own existence, belief in a real world external to one’s consciousness,” belief in moral realities “that I cannot push around but must reckon with in the final analysis.”14 Life itself is an overriding value in the human race. In conflicts with freedom or justice across cultures, life would typically take precedence; that is, the only justification for taking a life would be to preserve other lives. And history teaches us that societies agree on the necessity of imposing limits. From the immense variety of social values, humans recognize that limits “exclude harmful possibilities, help to resolve conflicts among beneficial possibilities, and protect people in their endeavors to make a good life for themselves.”15 The issues center on one’s philosophy of culture. The ethic of normative ideals advocates a cultural history with an anthropological bearing, a philosophy of culture centered on humans as interpretive beings. But Chapter Three recognizes that a theory of culture privileging the human rests on unresolved arguments. If, for example, humans maintain one another fundamentally in culture, how is it logically possible for those who themselves are constituted by culture to explain fully the process by which they are enabled to do the explaining? It is an old dilemma in new clothes: Can a theory of something contain itself? As semiotics has taught us, there is no dualism of language and human beings because one is ultimately inextricable from the other, the first but a manifestation of the second. While engaging in language, we construct a vision of life. As

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we comprehend culture and its catalytic agent, communication, we therefore make ontological claims about human being. But this very conundrum contends for history as a normed process. To establish an ethic of anthropological realism is necessarily to articulate an understanding of humanity’s character. And any such attributions carry with them our moral complicity, since ontological beingness is conditioned by our language concerning it. Culture encapsulates what humanity values; but when undeveloped, that assertion remains an equivocation. All humans create life under the presumption of responsibility for those conceived. As a sign of our distinctive humanness, we generate symbolic patterns along the boundaries between moral norms and actual behavior, the deepest self and our collective roles, the intentional and the inevitable.16 In constructing such boundaries, humans establish normative ideals to orient their cultures and guide decision-making behavior. As normative interpretation clarifies the norms embedded in history and culture, the distinction between primary and secondary values becomes a typical typology. Kekes distinguishes the two this way: “It seems reasonable to suppose that some benefits and harms are, under normal circumstances, universally human. Let us call the resulting values, ‘primary.’” All reasonable human beings normally regard as benefits “our basic psychological needs, to be loved, or to live in a society in which our endeavors are respected.” Normally “reasonable human beings” regard torture, humiliation and exploitation “as harms.”17 “Secondary values vary with persons, societies, traditions, and historical periods.” Included in this category are an …extensive range of values deriving from the social roles we have (for example, being a parent, spouse, colleague), the way we earn a living (for example, being a physician, teacher, miner, politician), the personal aspirations we cherish (for example, being creative, influential, well-liked,

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knowledgeable, ambitious), the preferences we develop (for example, for aesthetic enjoyment, for certain kinds of food, hobbies, physical exercise, literature) and so forth.18

As social history is reviewed, normative interpretation also distinguishes between what Kekes calls “deep and variable conventions.” “Deep conventions protect the minimum requirements of all good lives….The values protected by deep conventions have a context-independent justification, while values protected by variable conventions may be legitimately prized in some contexts but not in others.”19 Normative interpretation concludes that to be morally acceptable “there must be some deep conventions. What makes them deep is their protecting the minimum requirements of all good lives. The protection is provided by setting limits that are the most basic and serious limits recognized in that tradition.”20 Moral Imagination In the ethic of anthropological realism, two conditions must be met for normative ideals to be constructed. As explained above, one condition is that history must make available a “sufficiently rich supply of possibilities” from which some may be “selected as choiceworthy.”21 The second condition is a developed imagination to enable ethicists to gain the proper notion of what aspects of human existence are ideals worthy of imitation. The moral imagination is the mental exploration of the possibilities for sustainable human existence. The moral imagination provides an imaginative grasp of what primary values may become constituents of a conception of meaningful living and how it can be realized. The imagination is moral when “one central concern of the agents engaged in it is with evaluating the possibilities they envisage as good or evil.”22 In David Bromwich’s elaboration, “Morals denote the realm of duties and obligations, of compulsory and optional approvals and

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regrets. Imagination applies to things or people as they are not now, or not yet, or are not any more, or to a state of the world as it never could have been, but is interesting to reflect on.”23 Instead of the individualistic rationalism of static inflexibility, the pathway of the moral imagination to normative ideals is exploration and critique. In Lionel Trilling’s well-known words, “The moral imagination reveals to us the complexity, the difficulty, and the interests of life in society, and best instructs us in our human variety….It is the human activity which takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, complexity, difficulty—and possibility.”24 David Bromwich puts the necessity of the moral imagination in negative terms: “Behind the complacency with which we abridge our knowledge lies a force in human nature as pervasive as habit: namely, the force of inhibition, of willful imperceptiveness and self-censorship; a benign-seeming, coercive instinct that aims to bring uniformity to experience and to leave us comfortable and free of doubts.”25 “Reasonable people will share primary values because their common humanity renders some things beneficial and others harmful.” But the ways in which primary values are realized differ across both time and space; therefore, primary values require meticulous critique of their corresponding benefits and harms. “The existence of a stable social order, for example, is a universal requirement of all good lives.” Moreover, “it is reasonable to regard as immoral slavery, child prostitution, female circumcision, vendettas, and trials by torture. But how a stable social order is understood and maintained vary from context to context.”27 The forms and ways in which primary values are lived out and their opposites avoided are significant motifs for developing the moral imagination as a trajectory to normative ideals. In order to appreciate fully a dynamic understanding of norms, the ethic of normative ideals as an unified system must be distinguished from the ethics of propositional knowledge.

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Contrasting it with formal systems enables us to understand the nature of normative theorizing. Typically, ethics has been preoccupied with didactic methods and a narrow adherence to logical analysis of concepts, leaving little room for originality. Reasoning in ethics becomes similar to deductive logic: first and independently the norms are developed as propositions, and then secondarily they are applied to specific cases and specialized domains. Norms are considered “archetypes or models which serve as templates for guiding performance.”28 Nel Noddings calls for an ethics at odds with such rule-based scholasticism. An ethics of moral reasoning that “arranges principles hierarchically and derives conclusions logically” is “peripheral to or even alien to, many problems of moral action….Moral decisions are, after all, made in real situations: they are qualitatively different from the solution of geometry problems.”29 The calcified morality of rules and procedures leaves the character of and the rationale for normative ethics untouched. An ethics of abstraction tends to foster “complacent self-regard.” The impetus in the moral imagination is the opposite since “it calls me to act in accord with my own constitution….Every action becomes a matter also of duties toward myself.”30 The penchant to reflect on norms with highly abstract deductivist procedures obscures their profoundly concrete character.31 History as a normed process and the moral imagination recast the issues away from the perplexities and confusions which presume that norms are first certified rationally and then effected mechanically. Frederick Will uses the term “ampliative” to describe the process of amplification, construction, analysis and discernment involved in normative interpretation.32 An ethic of normative ideals unified around anthropological realism has a new intellectual foundation as detailed in Chapters One to Four.

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Necessary Conditions of Human Well-being In the ethic of anthropological realism, the moral imagination explores the character of human reality in its history and conditions of existence. The multiplex dynamics of inter-subjective lived experience are the presumption of moral realism, and the moral imagination seeks the possibilities that humans consider valuable in making life good. In establishing normative ideals, the ethic of anthropological realism discovers what concepts of the good life exist and why humans are committed to them. The exploratory function of the moral imagination contributes to the ethicist’s growth in breadth. “The scope of the moral imagination enlarges” the possible ways of living that are known from different traditions. “Through the development of a historical perspective, an understanding of other cultures, and immersion in literature, especially novels, plays, and biographies,” humans as cultural beings “come to appreciate by contrast and comparison” the range of primary values and deep conventions that constitute human agency.33 As normative interpretation reflects the range of possibilities humans value—derived from history, ethnography and literature—the necessary conditions of human well-being become overriding. The ethic of anthropological realism develops these overriding conditions into normative ideals. The ethic of anthropological realism is a composite of normative ideals, systematically constructed from deep conventions by the moral imagination. Normative interpretation recognizes that moral concepts such as primary values are multidimensional and deep conventions require reflective equilibrium in order that the plurality of values they represent can be integrated into moral ideals. The systematic development of the ethic of normative ideals argues for three necessary conditions of human well-being: the common good, cultural pluralism, and wisdom. The normative

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interpretation of history, and philosophical reflection on the necessary and sufficient conditions of membership in the human species, teach us that the primary value of social stability requires the common good, that the survival of identifiable communities is non-negotiable, and that wisdom enables intersubjective humans with the reflective knowledge needed for eudaimonia. The common good, cultural pluralism, and wisdom as normative ideals are the constituents of a human existence of identity and continuity. These moral propositions of a good life and the values on whose realization good lives depend are coherent with the functionality of human existence. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition understands human existence in the same terms as does anthropological realism.34 Her framework of analysis is not a society of individuals aggregated into a social unit, but humans living in dialogical relationship. Arendt argues that everyone shares a common origin and, therefore, all are equal in identity. What she calls the vita activa is the common life of association that is true of all societies, since the associational is primordial to humanity’s being. In the associational domain, relationships are non-hierarchical: “All are the same in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”35 The common world “transcends our life-span into the past and will outlast our brief sojourn in it. It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us.”36 With the vita activa concept, Arendt emphasizes the implicit role of cultural factors for society’s well-being. Public vitality is possible when humans are associated with one another by approval, agreement, and respect. Vita activa, where in principle all are given what they are owed, is the necessary condition for the rise of a political domain of diverse and independent equals. Economics are fair when the physiological need for survival is rooted in humanity’s common origin and, therefore,

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equality. In this arena of human existence, given definition by humanity’s intrinsic worthiness, the normative ideals of common good, cultural pluralism, and wisdom find their identity and exercise.

Section 1: Philosophical Common Good as Normative Ideal Social cohesion is a priority of human existence. The wellbeing of a stable social order is as pressing to the human race as are the satisfactions of basic physiological and psychological needs.37 The common good is the major concept for understanding and implementing social cohesion. While democratic societies have been preoccupied with the concept, philosophers have considered the common good essential for all forms of public life—developed as well as developing, post-colonial and emerging nations, tribes and territories. A review of intellectual history will establish the centrality of this idea for human wellbeing and form the rationale for developing the common good as a normative ideal, denying the sovereignty of reason over goodness. The Common Good Across History and Geography The common good is an important notion in Western political philosophy. Aristotle’s “common interest” is the basis for distinguishing defensible constitutions in the people’s interest from illegitimate ones at the rulers’ behest.38 For Cicero, an identifiable social entity, in principle, is not an ad hoc collection of individuals but a “partnership for the common good.”39 Thomas Aquinas in his historic Summa Theologiae insists on the common good as “the end of law and government.”40 In a similar vein, for Locke, “the good of the people” along with peace and safety are the ends of political society.41 Rousseau

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understands “the common good” as the object of the general will and the end of the state, in contrast to “particular wills.”42 In Habermas, discourse in the public sphere must be oriented “toward mutual understanding” while allowing participants “the communicative freedom to take positions on validity claims.”43 The common good is likewise prominent in non-Western moral and political thought. Contemporary Islam uses the notion of the common good when discussing Islamic conceptions of tolerance, equality, and citizenship. For many modern thinkers, these universal ideas supersede the textual specifics of the Qur’an when they are seen to serve the common good. Confucian philosophy gives distinctive importance to the common good in emphasizing the dependence of individual flourishing on the group’s flourishing. In Akan moral thought, the common good is essential for human beings as such. Justice, dignity, respect, peace are considered intrinsic to human fulfillment. In fact, the common good with its core of shared values is the presupposition of African social morality in general.44 In publications of the Jacques Maritain Institute for Latin America and the Caribbean, the common good matters for social reform. It means in politics and economics, considering other people not as “mere tools” but as “unique living beings whom I must respect.” The common good in the Maritain region “does not lead necessarily to softer decisions, but to other decisions.”45 Regarding the classic summary of Buddhist ethics—intend no harm, intend to be of benefit—in order to maximize their potential, “humans should do everything they can to open their hearts to be of benefit, applying steady, continuous effort.”46 In Buddhist terms, despite superficial differences, people are alike. By engaging in positive actions for others, people nourish their own positive qualities, creating the conditions for them to grow quickly and well.47 Based on Jewish philosophy, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks seeks to restore trust and civility through the

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common good. The rise of the victimhood mentality and fear of the future indicate a loss of shared morality and a toxic public discourse.48 He argues in Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times that if the common good is understood and acted upon, society will advance from its elevated self-interest to social reintegration.49 The common good preoccupies the sociopolitical theories of Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor and Carole Pateman. Contrary to the individual autonomy of democratic liberalism, from their perspective the common good is the axis around which public life revolves. For Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, ignoring the goods held in common leads to instrumental rationality—citizens determining the various goods available in terms of one’s own wants and desires. For Taylor’s Sources of the Self, the human preoccupation with life’s worth and meaning is best understood as situating ourselves in relation to moral goods in common rather than to political institutions per se. For Carole Pateman’s The Problem of Political Obligation, civic associations in any meaningful sense are only possible through active participation in articulating the common good and mutuality in implementing it. These theorists are notable for establishing goods instead of rights as the meaning center of the common good.50 For John Rawls, in contrast, individual autonomy is the first principle. “Each person has an equal right to the most extensive total system of basic liberties compatible with similar liberty for all.”51 From his perspective, in public life all participants have their own private interests and advance these interests in various action forums. Their motivations do not extend beyond their own independence. The overall process is a form of bargaining, where factions trade concessions with others in order to maximize their individual rights. Consistent with Locke, Mill and Adam Smith, individual liberties have priority in the public domain. We are constituted as selves antecedently, that is, in

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advance of our engagement with others. A robust public life is a possible aim of individuated selves but is “not an ingredient of their identity.”52 “Choices about what activities to pursue and what associations to form” are private. Options for public involvement are personal in the relevant sense that no one is “required to consult with anyone in making these choices” and no one “reaches a decision through any form of shared deliberation.”53 For Sandel, Taylor, and Pateman, however, this conception of persons relegates our sense of identity to non-public social relations. Public goods are then only a potential goal but not an ingredient of our human identity. By ignoring the importance of goods held in common, public life becomes merely an administrative arrangement among distinctive individuals, rather than the home of constitutive attachments. Public decisionmaking is thus understood as individuated rationality. However, the ethic of anthropological realism argues, if our conceptions of the good are contingent upon personal preferences, they have no more validity than any others. The individualized conception of persons leads to moral skepticism. Appeals to asocial and ahistorical rights tends to justify self-interest. This formulation confuses an aggregate of individual rights with the common good. The good is mistakenly presumed to equal the desirable. Because persons appear to seek rights, this quest of particular persons is considered good, and a general doctrine of rights is the common good itself. But Sandel, Taylor and Pateman argue that claims to individual rights ought not exist independently of publicly shared conceptions of the good. “The good is always primary to the right….The good is what, in its articulation, gives the point of the rules which define the right.”54 For these theorists of the common good, a commitment to the common good matters because of the non-negotiable character of social relationships. According to the philosophical

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conception of the common good, members of a public community stand in a social relationship with one another that expects them to maintain mutual interests and responsibilities. “This relationship is not as intimate as the relationship among family members or the members of a” synagogue, church, mosque or temple. “But it is a genuine social relationship nonetheless, and it requires members not only to act in certain ways, but also to give one another’s interests a certain status in their practical reasoning.”55 In realist terms, the interests attached to this status are apprehended as prior to the various considerations that make up human identity as private individuals. For Sandel, Taylor, and Pateman, when the public face various questions about policy or social responsibility, they can be said to resolve these questions by appealing to the common good as the normative standard.56 From this conception of the common good as humans-inrelation, the ethic of anthropological realism emphasizes our universal humanity. The language of our common worthiness is, therefore, fundamental to reconstructing lived reality. Josephides and Hall put the transnational character of human existence in cosmopolitan terms. They recognize that the idea of cosmopolitanism is typically understood as a political-global network, but their research shows that “historically it developed out of a philosophical investigation into what is a human being.”57 For Josephides and Hall, cosmopolitanism speaks ontologically to “the concerns arising from existentialism and the entailment of being human.”58 Their We the Cosmopolitans seeks “to rediscover the philosophical anthropology tradition and use this as a key to re-describe certain kinds of social anthropological problems.”59 This is the approach of the ethic of anthropological realism. Instead of the “political form of the early modern European period, which integrated the order of nature and the order of society,” Josephides and Hall stress the “moral and humanistic modalities that presume all humans are

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somehow akin.”60 Their We the Cosmopolitans, with variations, defines “cosmopolitanism as an existential condition and moral quality that addresses what is fundamentally human about the person….This social relationship of politƝs extends to others the intimate relationships and proprietary feelings humans have…of being at home in the world.”61 In the philosophy of the common good of this chapter, the common good transnationally is ontological, constitutive of our humanness. This version of global humanity is not instrumental but moral. The crux of the realist idea of global humanity is that “each human being has equal moral worth and that equal worth generates certain moral responsibilities that have universal scope.”62 Theoretical Structure of the Common Good as Normative Ideal In the ethic of anthropological realism, the common good as a normative ideal is theorized in a distinctive manner. Relational obligation is the moral core. Members of a public community, because of their social relations, have an obligation to care about their common affairs.63 Mutuality and solidarity are primary values. Mutuality means a reciprocal relation between interdependent entities. In privatized versions of the common good, individual autonomy is absolute; the human bonding of solidarity is the opposite. In the philosophical version of the common good, mutuality and solidarity serve as properties of relational obligation. Relational Obligation Relational obligation is based on communal relationships. The character of the communal relationship determines the directness and immediacy of required interactions. For human beings, “special responsibilities exist as a necessary and funda-

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mental component of relationships;” acting on these responsibilities “fulfills a moral duty.”44 This concept of relational obligation is the domain of morality that makes the best sense of the various types of interpersonal obligations. Moral duties as a special class of relational duties have three features: First, they are directed obligations which are owed to another party in particular. To be subject to an obligation of this kind is to stand in a normative relation to another person. Second, the individual to whom a relational obligation is directed may be understood to have a claim to the agent’s compliance, one that is held against the agent by the person to whom the obligation is owed. Third, relational obligations are registered within deliberations as presumptive constraints on agency, rather than as considerations that that are to be set in a balance of pro and contra reasons.65 The relational obligations of moral realism are considerations that function as presumptively decisive constraints on what we do. Relational obligation is not to be discounted unilaterally in reflecting on what ought to be done. Relational obligations as normative considerations “are not merely reasons that count in favor of options” that are open to public communities. They “do not outweigh reasons for action, but exclude them from deliberative consideration from the start.”66 In the ethic of anthropological realism, relational obligation is implemented in terms of the common good as a normative ideal. Therefore, relational obligation assumes a non-voluntarist position in moral decision-making. “Voluntarists hold that special responsibilities only arise as a consequence of voluntarily entered agreements (that is, contractual obligations). Non-voluntarists, by contrast, hold that special responsibilities are not restricted to relationships of an exclusively voluntary nature” but that “we can be held responsible to persons with whom we share communal bonds or familial ties.”67 Samuel Scheffler examines the impracticality of the voluntarist’s position.68 The

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voluntarist’s assertion, “that all responsibilities should only rise out of voluntary consent, fails to consider that to a large extent, the significance of our social relations is not fully under our control.”69 Though the issues are complex, when relational obligation is premised on human intersubjectivity as necessary and fundamental, a realist non-volunteerism responds most directly to the relevant claims of moral philosophy. Relational obligation differs from substantive responsibility. “Relational responsibilities grow out of relationships and their complex intertwining….Substantive responsibility is an obligation derived from principles.”70 The substantive account of responsibility derives its force from claims made about the formal properties of relationships. The emphasis on such properties, “I shall call the substantive account of responsibility. It matches the kind of rational deduction about duties that derive from substantive principles of justice.”71 Margaret Walker labels these two approaches the theoretical-juridical and the expressive-collaborative model. The former elucidates moral principles following standard deductive rules of philosophical practice. The latter differs conceptually: “The fact of being alive and the nature of human vulnerability places one in relationships and thus already in the midst of relationships that produce responsibilities.”72 Joan C. Tronto argues that “responsibility understood relationally provides a stronger basis for and gives more content and meaning to claims about what various people around the globe owe each other.”73 Drawing on feminist thinkers among others she claims that the responsibilities will vary, “not because there is a substantive moral principle that describes their value. Rather they vary with the depth of the relationship that exists.”74 In the similar realist terms of Iris Young, everyone involved in social action has a level of responsibility; but “different conditions of power, privilege, interest, and capacities for collective action might make some more responsible.”75

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Civic engagement is the content of relational obligation in public communities. Civic engagement is involvement in activities related to community, directed by duties that inhere in intra-relationships. The standard definition is relevant at this point: “Civic engagement means active participation in the public life of a community in an informed, committed and constructive manner with a focus on the common good.”76 In A Roadmap to Civic Engagement the relational obligations of civic engagement are illustrated: Civic participation consists of behaviors, attitudes and actions that reflect concerned and active membership in a community. This includes the more traditional electoral citizenship activity, such as voting, serving on non-profit boards or school boards, as well as less traditional forms of political participation, such as community organizing and social activism. It includes participation in small neighborhood efforts and the larger national and international movements.77

Members of cities, states, provinces, nations, territories or tribal lands fulfill their relational obligations when they are engaged and open to ideas and perspectives different from their own. Typically in the common good literature, all participants in the public arena are considered equal. In the ethic of anthropological realism where the communal common good is the normative ideal, the social relationship of community members is stronger than equality. Participants in public communities presume equality but fulfill their civic engagement by embodying mutuality and solidarity as primary values. Their interactive relationship requires members to cooperate with each other in ways that represent these primary values. The nature of social interaction mandates members to set their private interests aside in order to focus on their common interests following mutuality and solidarity as social ideals.

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Mutuality Mutuality is a positive, interactive relationship between people. Reciprocity and cooperation are typical cognates of mutuality. There is an inherent sense of give-and-take or respect when relationships are mutual. The varieties of mutuality come from the original definition: “given and taken in a reciprocal way.” The word mutuality describes the quality of two-way relationships, with overtones of benefit distributed among the different participants. For the ethic of anthropological realism, mutuality’s meaning is rooted in the relational character of the communal common good. Because fulfillment as persons is never achieved in isolation but only in relation, mutuality inheres in human beingness. When members of a society assess issues for action, mutuality means they consciously hold in tension the differences between their own perspective and that of others. They establish an interactive pattern in which both sides are open to changes in their interactions. There is cooperative balance in the relationship; there is no sense of one party being the provider and the other the recipient. All active members of public communities perform both roles. When members of public communities do their parts in a social activity that represents their common interests they realize a form of mutuality: participants work for the interests of others in the same way that others work for their interests. Martin Luther King’s observation is relevant to mutual participation in public events: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”78 Relationships are not merely functions that serve a higher good. The mutuality model accepts interdependence as a matter of fact. The relational reality must be understood ontologically, as a category of human existence. In order to maintain their existence, humans are committed to constitutive ambience with

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the others with whom they are interconnected. For the Scottish philosopher, John Macmurray, persons are distinguished from non-persons by their consciousness of intentional action, but it is consciousness of others and not primarily self-awareness. There is no sheer individuated being; the relational is indigenous to our humanness. Therefore, our being is either coming into mutuality or betraying it; no neutral territory exists between static integers.79 Thus mutuality differs qualitatively from the social contracts of individuals seeking their own selfrealization. Intersubjective mutuality, in its deepest sense, “means an interest in, an attunement to and responsiveness to the subjective, inner experience of others, both at a cognitive and affective level.”80 In its broadest sense, mutuality seeks open ways of engaging with the worldwide community.81 Solidarity Solidarity as a primary value refers to a unifying bond of agreement among community members around a common goal.82 Solidarity is identification with a group in which the group’s well-being is central and constitutive. Solidarity exists among people socially involved when they are committed to accept the outcome of a process of collective decision-making. As a concept, solidarity is both descriptive and normative. “Solidarity may be used to describe and explain the normal order and normative integration in societies or communities, as opposed to chaos and conflict, and as opposed to order based on coercion or maximization of self-interest.”83 According to Rousseau’s Social Contract, a public of solidarity is “a form of association that will defend and protect the person and goods of each associate with the full common force.”84 Members of those communities are united by a solidaristic force of us together that is focused on their common interests first of all rather than giving priority to attacks on themselves individually. The salience of the solidarity concept

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so understood is an ongoing concern. Immediate gratification and long term gain typically create more motivation. Solidarity requires a commitment to shared norms or values of cooperation. Solidarity is thus precarious and needs the common good as a normative ideal.85 Solidarity rules out the aggregative view. Individualized aggregations make no indispensable reference to the requirements of a social relationship. Citizens will have various private interests in addition to their common interests: “The private interests may be more important from the standpoint of their egoistic rationality than the interests that belong to the special class of common interests.”86 In the ethic of anthropological realism, solidarity counters the atomism and fragmentation that are understood as deficiencies in technological societies. Where the common good is a normative ideal, people are implicated in their identity with the interests and good of others. Individual accounts of value and the pursuit of self-interest are replaced by motivation, communal-consciousness, and action through identification with the public. Solidarity is pertinent to small communities, combative political movements, or to entire societies, even the whole of humanity. For the communal approach to the common good, solidarity of the entire humanity is not a matter of political universalism, but a matter of humanitarian global solidarity. Humanitarian solidarity is based on the notion of the unity of all humanity. Humane solidarity recognizes everyone’s well-being as the sole criterion for human rights. The normative ideal is for the entire humankind to unite around their interests in common, such as medical battles with epidemics, to correct climate change, and to challenge genocides. International solidarity in the moral imagination is best understood as “incremental solidarity” where, much like Durkheim’s definition of organic solidarity, the common good as a normative ideal is considered an aim of aspiration.87 “It is not

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easy for the solidarity of humanity, or even incremental solidarity, to materialize. Most individuals rather identify with race, class, religion or gender than with humanity. Additionally, individualism can create additional barriers to the materialization of humane solidarity.”88 Immigration issues are gaining support from across the planet as an indication that incremental solidarity is realizable.89 Summary Relational obligation as moral core, with mutuality and solidarity as primary values, are a philosophical common good that differs fundamentally from notions of the good that play a prominent role in welfare economics and welfare consequentialist accounts of public morality. Among the notions in the welfare model, we can include: “the sum of pleasure over pain, total satisfaction of rational desire, and aggregate welfare adjusted for distributive considerations.”90 Unlike the communal common good, these notions make no fundamental reference to the requirements of social relationships. The independent character of these standards allows only for goodness that has a consequentialist character. Agents perform the actions that satisfy the requirements of a relationship only when doing so results in the greatest sum of pleasure over pain.91 In this perspective, the best public policy option is always the one that can be expected to maximize aggregate welfare. The social welfare function is a technique that “assumes the overall welfare of any individual’s life can be represented by a number.”92 The public good is determined by a cost-benefit analysis of the right amount for social well-being. The contractualism of welfare mechanics erects social organizations without a supporting social morality. The institutions of welfare economics face the self-inflicted erosion of their socio-moral premises.93 Utilitarian welfare economics has maintained that it can dispense with

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socio-moral intentions altogether, trusting the invisible hand to convert egoism into the common good.94 Conversely, the common good as a normative ideal of relational obligation, mutuality and solidarity is the motivational premise for orientation toward the public good. In Münkler and Fischer’s terms, a commitment to civic engagement is the socio-moral resource required for societal actions regarding the common good. The communal common good as a normative ideal “tells us how much and what sort of public spirit we are meant to summon;” moreover, the presence of public spirit “constitutes the provisional premise for action oriented toward the ideal of the common good.”95

Section 2: Cultural Pluralism as Normative Ideal As explained so far, the ethic of anthropological realism is a morality of normative ideals. The common good was introduced as the first of these three normative ideals, and cultural pluralism is the second. Multiple ethnic cultures are the reference point. Rather than assimilate subcultures “into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity,” the ethic of anthropological realism is an intellectual strategy that is cross-cultural, gender inclusive and ethnically diverse.96 In the philosophy of the human of Chapter Four, cultural being is the definitional centerpiece of this book. Communication is the symbolic process that creates meaning, and, therefore, the catalyst for cultural formation. The human species is not one-dimensional; the cultural character of human being requires multiplicity, that is, the unity-inpluralism that this section represents. Definition Pluralism is the theory that reality, in this case, social reality, is composed of a multiple number of variegated entities. Pluralism considers the viability of people-groups constituted by

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history and geography to be non-negotiable. Pluralism is the conviction that all identifiable communities that are pro-culture should be allowed to survive. In Randolph Bourne’s classic description, pluralism refers to the richly woven fabric of native cultures—a federation of various races in contrast to the melting-pot assimilation of civic religion. A composite of ethnic, racial, religious, and lingual clusters thriving in a single nation state is one illustration of cultural pluralism.97 Where cultural pluralism is a normative ideal, pluralist societies are those in which members of diverse social, ethnic, and racial groups maintain their traditional cultures or special interests within the framework of a common civilization. Diana Eck, Harvard’s Director of The Pluralism Project, writes: Pluralism is not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity. Diversity is a given, but pluralism is not a given; it is an achievement. Diversity can and has meant the creation of ghettoes with little traffic between or among them….Pluralism is not simply relativism, but makes room for real and different cultural commitments. In the public square of a pluralist society, commitments are not ignored, but invited in. Pluralism is a process of creating a society through critical and self-critical encounters with one another, acknowledging rather than hiding our deep differences.98

This chapter elaborates on cultural pluralism under the most demanding conditions. For Zygmunt Bauman, liquid modernity is precarious, today’s networked society one of constant uncertainty. Customs and routines are ended swiftly, but, in Bauman’s view, the skills to start anew are marginal or unknown.99 In Grant Kien’s Global Technography, today’s cyberspace compresses history into the momentary and eviscerates spatial limits, so our “selfhood can be equally described as existing everywhere always and nowhere never.”100 Given the mobility of instantaneous new media technologies, the very

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conditions of pluralism are disrupted: “We need structures of time and a sense of distance to avoid solipsism and to understand ourselves as belonging in the world.”101 Fidele Vlavo points to the irony that the massive abundance of cyber technology, “with its visions of global mobilization” actually “deny or minimize the importance of local populations and their distinctive struggles.”102 For Harris Breslow and Aris Mousouzanis, the internet removes people from their home base experience “in favor of an endless series of recombinant groups” around single issues that traverse local and national borders. Digital networks across various terrains mean fluidity at the transitional “point of contact” and therefore “the loss of integrity essential to the identity” of people groups.103 Cultural pluralism is an extension of the core argument in this book, that human life is fundamentally interactive based on the intrinsic worthiness of all members of the human species. As a normative ideal, the content of cultural pluralism is structured by two propositions: 1) diversity, in moral realism terms, is the point of departure understood to be real rather than apparent; and 2) cultural pluralism’s constituent norm is nonviolence as a prima facie duty. These two propositions are especially relevant for understanding pluralism philosophically. As they are developed below, they will be shown to respond to the difficult conditions posed by the debilitating uncertainties of liquid modernity. Diversity as Realism The epistemological status of diversity represents an intellectual challenge in constructing a theory of cultural pluralism. In systematically and rigorously accounting for diversity, the ethics of anthropological realism avoids relativism. But as we work on cultural pluralism as a normative ideal, we do so in an educational world where moral claims are presumed to have no

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credibility outside the societies in which they are constituted. As Kekes puts it, “The conflicts are so numerous, so varied, permeate so many different areas of our lives; the arguments about them so hopelessly inconclusive, carry so little conviction, that the fact of a basic shift to relativism is undeniable.”104 Franz Boas’ The Mind of Primitive Man is a landmark book promoting this conceptual change. He properly recognized that scientific methods require an immersion in native languages and local cultures in order to understand them on their own terms. With geographical space a vast universe of differences, cultural diversity has moved with Boas’ ethnography from an unconscious ethnocentricity toward relativity. Cultural relativism is attractive and ordinarily presumed within the people-group variations of human life. Diversities in language and culture are communication’s global vision, with media research culturally specific and comparative. Media technologies are globalizing rapidly, but local identities are asserting themselves at the same time. Of the world’s polychromatic cultures, each has a distinctive beauty. Indigenous languages and ethnic groups have come into their own, with ethnic self-consciousness now considered essential to cultural vitality. Cultural relativity is a natural habitat for communications’ study and practice. However, diversity in culture is not a plausible argument for moral relativism. Affirmations of cultural diversity should not be understood as philosophical relativism. In the passion for diversity, for the local, cultural relativity typically slides into philosophical relativism. Cultural relativity becomes what James Cook calls, “a philosophical doctrine about the nature of morality.”105 But cultural pluralism as a normative ideal does not confuse cultural diversity with moral relativism. Cultural and moral relativism are distinct categories, and it is a logical fallacy to conflate them. The demands of cultural diversity

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cannot become moral relativism without making a category mistake.106 The constructive realism of Chapter Two sets the issues in appropriate perspective, disagreeing as it does with extreme relativists that any value is as good as any other. Extreme moral relativism asserts that all moral beliefs and moral criteria are relative to the person or society who holds them and that there is no higher ground upon which to assess differences in moral belief and between conflicting moral criteria. As a consequence, all moral beliefs or moral systems are equally valid, since all are equally subjective and relative.107

This is a strong anti-realism that, if true, defeats the very possibility of an ethic where cultural pluralism is normative. Anti-realism denies the validity of an intellectual apparatus for ethics and therefore the reality of norms for social institutions. Anti-realism builds on the relativistic worldview rather than resists it. In this view, moral properties do not exist independently of the mind. Anti-realism presumes that since moral values are socially constructed and therefore plural, no moral principles can be cross-cultural.108 In the perspective of anthropological realism, pluralism includes the belief that there are universal values that restrain the range of acceptable moral systems.109 Moral realism defends a domain of right and wrong that can and should be acted upon. Cultural pluralism as realism insists on diverse applications, but this is not a laissez-faire approach to morality. While recognizing differences among the world’s customs and policies, pluralism means that moral judgments can be made about ongoing affairs and historical events, such as the Holocaust, Rwandan genocide, Bashar al-Assad’s brutality in Syria, and Vladimir Putin’s destruction of Ukraine. If moral action is thought to depend on a society’s norms, the result is conformity to the status quo without guiding principles for moral reform.

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Plato’s allegory of the cave in his Republic teaches us not to confuse the fire with the sun. For orienting ethnocentric research, cultural diversity has been indispensable; but for diversity as realism, it is overwrought, misused, and erroneous. In this form of realism, reality is independent of our conceptual schemes, our beliefs and our empirical observations. “Entities exist in their own terms; humans do not invent them but discover their properties.”110 In this sense, moral realism gives priority to the necessary and sufficient conditions of being a member of the human species. A living world that exists as a given totality forms the presupposition of historical existence. Human creative ability works within the limits of an established natural order. The material world, mathematical numbers, and moral categories are independent of the human mind. For realists, the external world contains a vast number of objects and properties that need to be described to recognize their existence. The electro-magnetic spectrum existed for centuries before anyone discovered it and exists today whether or not anyone understands it. Diversity as a necessary component of cultural pluralism has no validity within relativism. Realism was established in Chapters One and Two as the antidote to relativism. If intercultural and intra-cultural diversity is relative, the result is fragmentation, not cultural pluralism as a normative ideal. Nonviolence As Integrating Principle Cultural pluralism with diversity its centerpiece is a multilevel interpretive process that requires an ethical principle to give the process coherence and boundaries. That integrating norm is nonviolence. In moral realism, cross-cultural principles are necessary among conflicting narratives as societies seek a healthy existence. Intercultural communication in representing diversity will be relativistic and fail at pluralism unless its

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knowledge production is grounded in the principle of nonviolence.111 Without principles, diversity does not become pluralistic. Diversity by itself leads to isolation and defensiveness. Cultural pluralism as a normative ideal is developed below with nonviolence its moral philosophy, cultural diversity the master value, and dialogic communication the articulation. The publication by UNESCO of the MacBride Report in 1980, Many Voices, One World: Towards a New More Just and More Efficient World Information and Communication Order was a historic event for cross-cultural communication. Its recommendations established the debates ever since over the possibilities for democratic politics through the convergence of information systems, and free trade in communication products and services under the aegis of the World Trade Organization. Expanding efforts during the 1980s culminated in an aggressive, multi-language approach to international affairs into the twenty-first century. MacBride made it definitive that the fundamental issue is not globalization per se, but multiculturalism in the context of globalization. In these terms, Stephen Ward reflects Many Voices, One World: “Our world is connected electronically like never before, yet this grid of connections coexists with a collision of cultures. Of primary importance is the fact that this media-connected world brings together a plurality of different religions, traditions, ethnic groups, values, and organizations with varying political agendas.”112 As world thinking takes shape, ethnicity must be integrated into the analysis.113 Nonviolence as the cohering principle of cultural pluralism meets the Many Voices, One World challenge. Johan Galtung has developed and applied the principle of nonviolence systematically. He is concerned first of all with positive peace: the creative, nonviolent resolution of cultural, social, and political conflicts.114 Instead of a dichotomy of good and evil in a zerosum game, he focuses on the various ways conflicts can be resolved without violence. In his definition, cultural violence

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refers to the symbolic sphere, “religion and ideology, language and art, empirical and formal science (logic, mathematics)— that can be used to justify or to legitimize physical or structural violence.”115 The nonviolence principle of this chapter embraces his emphasis on nonviolent resolution and contributes to it an agenda of breadth and significance. Nonviolence emphasizes nonviolent means, rather than adopting noble ends and then calculating whatever means are effective in achieving them. Theorists of nonviolence insist, from a moral perspective, that nonviolent strategies be identified and then only such ends be pursued as arise out of them. Nonviolence grounded in language, culture, and communal interaction is a counter-scenario.116 Anthropological realism establishes its legitimacy as a moral norm, in contrast to those appeals to peace-making rooted in social contract theory and its liberal self.117 As Robert Holmes argues in defending a normative version of “principled nonviolence:” “It is necessary and sufficient for the final justification of non-violence that it be justified from the moral point of view.”118 Nonviolence is a way of life and within that existential context, the principle “one ought always to act nonviolently” is a prima facie duty. Prima facie duties carry the presumption in favor of doing them. A prima facie duty is obligatory unless stronger moral considerations override. The duty to always act nonviolently is prima facie; it is “upon first view” and “selfevident” that it ought to be done. In W. D. Ross’s The Right and the Good, the prima facie duty of non-injury is the duty not to harm others either physically or psychologically, that is, to avoid harming their health, security, or happiness. Non-injury normally over-rides other prima facie duties and in these terms principled nonviolence is a priority rule when all things are considered.119 Duty is not obedience to a legality such as “always act nonviolently,” but a dialogic seeking within a language community, through responsive relationships, for a responsible

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fit within the total “circumambience of life.”120 Nonviolence expressed through dialogic interaction is the appropriate scenario for intercultural communication. Pluralism requires communicative dialogue to reveal both common understandings and real differences.121 The vitality of principled nonviolence as a way of life is the context and ground of meaning for communication within and between pluralistic entities. As its fundamental home is human existence, the vitality of nonviolence as a way of life is the context and its ground of meaning. The guideline of nonviolence promotes the mutual understanding and collaboration that enables a society to be multicultural.122 The principal concern of moral relativists is to “dissuade the people of the world from thinking themselves superior to others.” The principle of nonviolence meets that aim, closing “the door to indiscriminate interference” in other cultures.123 Cultural Pluralism as a Normative Ideal With diversity front and center, and nonviolence the integrating norm, cultural pluralism is a normative ideal. Three features of being the normative ideal are illustrative. First, nonviolence as a philosophy of life revolutionizes the tolerance standard for intercultural communication. Tolerance is the typical appeal in political and social relations and correctly critiqued by The Pluralism Project: Pluralism is not just tolerance, but the active seeking of understanding across lines of difference. Tolerance is too thin a foundation for a world of difference and proximity. It does nothing to remove our ignorance of one another, and leaves in place the stereotypes, the half-truths, the fears that underline old patterns of division. Pluralism does not require us to leave our identities and our commitments behind, for it is the

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encounter of commitments. It means holding our deepest differences not in isolation, but in relationship to one another.124

Nonviolence as a philosophy of life is the richest framework for apprehending transcultural relationships in pluralist terms. Second, when cultural pluralism is the normative ideal, the “intend no harm” mandate of consequentialism is transformed to prioritize psychological violence. The ethical principle “one ought always to act nonviolently” certainly precludes physical violence as does the harm principle in utilitarianism. But nonviolence as a way of life shifts the emphasis to mental harm as a wide-ranging violence to “facts, the truth, the author’s intentions, the memory of the deceased and to persons including oneself. In each case, something having value, integrity, dignity, sacredness or generally some claim to respect is treated in a manner contemptuous of that claim.” It is possible for us “to insult, humiliate, degrade, demean, and oppress people, treat them unkindly, unfairly, and unjustly, and cause them untold harm without resorting to physical violence against them.”125 Gandhi’s version of principled nonviolence clearly intends the identical breadth: “Under violence I include corruption, falsehood, hypocrisy, deceit, and the like.”126 Third, pluralism as moral realism differs essentially from monism on the one hand and relativism on the other. Cultural pluralism as a normative ideal expands possibilities and, therefore, enriches diversity without leading to the chaos of relativism. The principle, “one ought always to act non-violently” is understood as a prima facie duty rather than an absolute, decentralized, formal law, a mathematical theorem in Enlightenment terms. It thereby avoids the distributive fallacy of monism. Freed from the unproductive monism and moral relativism debate, cultural pluralism advances intercultural communication by enlarging the conceptions of the meaning of life. Anthropological realism affirms the multiplicity of basic values and the

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plurality of their possible rankings in human flourishing. The ethic of anthropological realism is pluralistic in acknowledging the many ways in which diversity can be realized, thereby fostering understanding among diverse publics that define good lives in different ways. Summary Cultural pluralism as a normative ideal, ensures that “the satisfactions that make a life good are not enjoyed at the expense of other people. We need to recognize that lives are made good not just by the realization of satisfying possibilities but also by conformity to moral limits.”127 That normative standard is nonviolence, meaning that one’s own culture in both means and ends is peaceful, and reconciliatory toward the diversity of cultures. To place this controlling norm in technical language, note the formal criterion: The principle of nonviolence is developed legitimately, if and only if it comports well with cultural continuity. Nonviolence as a claim of moral realism avoids the arbitrariness of relativism. For cultural pluralism to serve as a normative ideal, nonviolence as a prima facie duty gives the direction by which theorizing and application ought to be made. What matters in the diversity of cultural pluralism is not merely how humans are alike but also how they differ. Cultural differences matter to pluralism, contrary to the various absolutist alternatives seeking a single pattern to which societies ought to conform. Nonviolence as the integrating norm of cultural pluralism reflects the intrinsic worthiness of the human condition, thereby promoting the viability of diverse people groups. The nonviolence of peaceful means plays a central role in cultural formation because it enables humans to identify the morally appropriate possibilities and limits, and to distinguish them from those that are wrong. Human cultures are constituted by

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language; the dialogic character of language is a feature of homo sapiens and therefore applies to all cultures on earth. In the ethic of anthropological realism, human existence is understood as fundamentally intersubjective, and thereby ourselves in inter- and intra-relation carry moral obligations. Therefore, human beings rooted in a culture are simultaneously transcultural.128

Section 3: Hermeneutics of Wisdom as a Normative Ideal As developed in Chapter Four and elaborated in Chapter Six, humans are interpretive beings.129 Wisdom is an interpretive process, not a singular moment of keen insight. Hermeneutics is a study of interpretive phenomena, therefore, the ethic of anthropological realism presents wisdom as a normative ideal in hermeneutical terms. Philosophical hermeneutics pursues a fundamental question crucial to transforming a society, that is, how do humans as cultural beings interpret the world around them, and do their interpretations affect their manner of thinking and acting? Instead of the subject–object dualism in which an individuated subject offers propositions of sagacity, wisdom as a normative ideal demonstrates the revelatory character of human understanding and the human ability to act with discernment. To clarify this summary, in the ethic of anthropological realism, hermeneutics establishes the framework for understanding wisdom as an interpretive process. Three features of wisdom are elaborated as an interpretive enterprise in multiple phases: creativity, judgment, erudition. These properties define moral wisdom as the critical link between human affairs and eudaimonia. This three-phase model of the wisdom hermeneutic makes possible the reflective understanding necessary for living good lives. This hermeneutic account presents wisdom as the third normative ideal in the ethic of anthropological realism.

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Hermeneutics Wisdom as a normative ideal in the ethic of anthropological realism is a human interpretive activity with multiple phases. “Only human beings possess what moral wisdom presupposes;” therefore, “a reasonable conception of a good human life must depend on characteristics shared by human beings.”130 Wisdom theory, by definition, represents humanity as a whole and simultaneously entails varying social contexts. Since wisdom is configured of three intellectual activities that are complicated and interrelated, the guidance of philosophical hermeneutics is necessary for giving moral wisdom depth and coherence. In Gadamer’s Truth and Method, hermeneutics is an investigation into the way language articulates being. For him, hermeneutics does not examine epistemological questions per se, but consistent with wisdom’s focus, it analyzes the manner in which language organizes human life. Hermeneutics is not preoccupied with the certainty of knowledge, but with knowledge as an inquiry into the meaning of existence. In Gadamer, hermeneutics is an investigation into the nature and structure of understanding and interpretation (again, not as epistemological questions but as the ontological mode of existence definitive of human life). Subjectivity is no longer to be understood as Cartesian consciousness, but as a moment of that structure of meaning and interpretation that is human existence.131 Philosophical hermeneutics in the Gadamer tradition is fitting, given its resonance with anthropological realism and with wisdom as an interpretive process. Contemporary hermeneutics begins with the idea of relationship, with the assumption that existence, understanding and meaning are based on a prior belongingness that can never become totally available to our awareness. That is, before any conceptual or categorical understanding is possible, there is

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always a participation that constitutes the possibility of all comprehension because it is constitutive of meaning itself. Given that language recapitulates, symbols create what we view as reality.132 Hermeneutics establishes meaning as the very structure of humans belonging in the world, with language an active event embodying meaningfulness. One concept from hermeneutics is of particular relevance for understanding moral realism as developed here in terms of wisdom: retroduction from the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce. In Peirce’s typology, scientific theories are inductive or deductive. In deductive reasoning, if the original assertion is true, the conclusion is true by logical necessity or syllogism. Mathematics is deductive in that the conclusions are self-evidentiary, contained within the premises. In inductive reasoning, generalizations are restricted to the researched data through the standards of internal and external validity.133 For Peirce, retroduction is distinct from both of them. Moral realism’s retroduction is interactive in character. It typically begins as insight and operates from there in the interactive modality. We interpret discourse in the light of its several parts and any particular part in terms of the whole. All interpretive activity proceeds by way of a dialectic between presumptions and validation. We confirm an interpretation by vindicating it against competing interpretations. Despite intellectual conflicts, we can find criteria, such as comprehensiveness, for determining which interpretation is more likely.134 Chapters One to Three have reviewed the retroductive process from the antirealist / realist debate to moral realism to anthropological realism. In the ethic of anthropological realism, hermeneutical wisdom is a synthesis of creativity, judgment and erudition, with these properties necessary for moral wisdom as a normative ideal.

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Properties of Wisdom Creativity The hermeneutics of wisdom is modeled as an interactive sequence of actions. One property of the sequence is creativity. “Wisdom involves creativity in that the wise solution may be far from obvious.”135 Wisdom creativity means an openness to novel experiences, a willingness to try out new ideas, a curiosity about the world in which we live. Creativity sees life’s problems in new ways and includes analytical skill to recognize which ideas are worth pursuing and which are not. As true of anthropological realism, Raymond Williams identifies the creative consciousness that lies at the heart of the human condition. As argued in the previous chapter, humans-as-cultural-beings is the most sophisticated understanding of the human species. Williams carries forward this philosophy of the human in his basing creativity on cultural formation: “In the distinctly human world, culture is a kind of creation….Particular cultures carry particular versions of reality, which they can be said to create, in the sense that cultures create their own worlds which their bearers ordinarily experience.”136 The cross-cultural research of Yong et al. likewise anchors creativity in culture: “Creativity as a key product of human culture and a tool for enriching culture has an extremely intimate but complex relation with culture. In a sense, creativity is inherent to culture. Nobody can live well and be creative without the involvement of culture.”137 Therefore, learning from nonnative cultures is an effective arena for inspiring creativity as a phase in wisdom as an interpretive process. Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics speaks of creativity in similar appeals to cultural language with his idea, the “radical creativity of tradition.”138 “Radical creativity” is necessary because there are multiple traditions that coalesce in a given

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historical situation. These traditions of ideas, values, meaning, and perspectives on life form a dialogue with the present moment, out of which emerges new insight, challenges, and change. Humans are not victims of their own existence, but engage the latter through their aesthetic consciousness central to interpretation. Cognitive approaches to creativity have identified a set of high-level and basic-level relevant abilities relevant to creativity. Distinct from high-level abilities such as those of Mozart, Einstein, Da Vinci and Heisenberg, are basic-level “insight abilities and divergent thinking skills…. Insight abilities involve restructuring the nature of a problem or the elements that contribute to a problem’s solution. Insight abilities may consist of noticing relevant new information, comparing disparate information, and finding relevant conclusions.”139 Divergent thinking is a basic-level problem-solving strategy that is relevant to creativity, though people vary in their use of it. Many people create multiple and disparate ideas when responding to problems, whereas others can only name a few obvious ideas. In fact, “to the detriment of creativity, most people are relatively risk-averse. They prefer ideas that are fairly well accepted.”140 “Wise thinking must be creative because to be wisdom, by definition, it must generate not only novel solutions, but those involving a balance of interests in the larger context. Therefore, “a solution can be creative—as in solving a mathematical proof—but have no particular characteristics of wisdom. The proof involves no balancing of social “interests and no search for a common good. It is simply an intellectual problem involving creative thinking.”141 Creative work occurs in numerous domains including visual arts, music, writing, advertising, science, mathematics, and teaching. But this is domain specific and not wisdom creativity directed to human existence. Wisdom creativity means an “openness to new experiences…a

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willingness to try out new ideas, to explore, to be curious about…the world in which we live.”142 The wise know how to deal with the vicissitudes of life.143 Judgment For the wisdom hermeneutic as an interpretive process, judgment is a second phase, one that works interactively with creativity. Wise people use sound judgment; it is the quality of discernment. For Anna Craft, “wisdom involves making wellinformed, thoughtful, and appropriate judgments leading to sound courses of action with regard” to the human consequences.144 In Kekes’ summary, “The judgment associated with wisdom evaluates both means and ends on the basis of their likely contribution to making life better rather than worse.”145 In the hermeneutics of wisdom, those who use good judgment in problem-solving are not thereby wise. City managers who resolve a traffic problem or an electrician who makes the right decisions to correct a power outage are experts in their employment responsibilities. Social wellbeing is the focus of wisdom. The end of judgment as a sequence in the wisdom process is improving the circumstances of the human condition. The judging action in wisdom is the capacity to discern what is best in particular situations to make life better. The judgment process in wisdom evaluates what is true or right from the perspective of life as a whole. Edward H.Spence understands judgment as a constituent of wisdom in these expansive terms: What wisdom requires is that we learn the husbandry of information. How to reflect upon it, how to understand it, how to control it so that it does not control us, how to judge its implications so we can foresee the consequences, whether they are good or bad? As a higher type of knowledge (knowing how to understand and use information upon reflection and with good

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judgment for the benefit of oneself and society) wisdom can provide practical know-how for applying information that improves our lives and those of others.146

When judgment is seen as a property of wisdom, the wise person knows how to live productively in a variety of circumstances. The kind of reflective knowledge represented by the judgment phase of wisdom is “knowledge of the conditions to which the many different forms of good lives must conform. If there are many good lives…then judgment is an indispensable constituent of wisdom. For it is through judgment that reasonable choices are made among various conceptions” of what a good life should be.147 Erudition In hermeneutical wisdom, the properties of creativity and judgment are synchronized by erudition. In this action sequence of interacting phases, erudition is at once a necessary condition of creativity and judgment, and also a component on its own terms that presumes creativity and judgment. Wisdom requires that wise persons are knowledgeable of the important issues in life. They know what intrinsically matters to the human condition. Both the theoretical and practical aspects of wisdom involve erudition of this kind. In the hermeneutics of wisdom, the property of erudition is ontological. Researchers at the Berlin Max-Planck Institute and Bremen International University define wisdom “as an expert knowledge system about fundamental problems related to the meaning and conduct of life, such that appropriate courses of action are then determined which take account of multiple perspectives.” This research group identifies various criteria for labeling actions “wise”: “Rich factual knowledge of the course of human life. Rich procedural knowledge of the possibilities for engaging life’s problems. Understanding of multiple contexts of life and

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inter-relationships concurrently” and over the life span.148 In contrast to Piaget-based research that associates wisdom with aging, these researchers conclude that erudition can be taught and learned toward a social interdependence perspective rather than as egocentric expertise. Both historical studies and psychodynamic research confirm the importance of erudite knowledge as a component of wisdom. Several conclusions from these analyses have priority: First, without erudition, recognizing problems and understanding their nature is difficult. Second, erudition prevents persons from merely rediscovering old ideas. Third, tolerance generally results from an understanding of wider socio-cultural values.149 Ontological erudition is based on both the informal knowledge of stories and events of everyday life and on the formal knowledge of books and essays. In knowledge formation from the latter, the wisdom literature plays a central role. In intellectual history, the term “wisdom literature” was first used to characterize the biblical books (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job) and two works from the Apocrypha—Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) and the Wisdom of Solomon—that use the word “wisdom” and explain its meaning. However, today we speak of the international character of wisdom literature beyond the Israelite version.150 W. G. Lambert’s Babylonian Wisdom Literature introduces a “group of texts which correspond in subject matter with the Hebrew Wisdom books:” the Instructions of Shuruppak “and a collection of 160 moral exhortations called the Counsels of Wisdom.” In M. Litchtheim’s Ancient Egyptian Literature, wisdom literature stretches from the Instruction of Prince Hardjedef in 2450 BC to the Instruction of Amenomope in 1100 BC. Richard J. Clifford’s The Wisdom Literature claims for the modern era: “Hundreds of books and magazine articles deal with wisdom topics such as handling relationships, managing a family and household, learning to bear with equanimity life’s pains and uncertainties, and so forth.”151

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In his book, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Harold Bloom supports and illustrates the universality of wisdom literature. He asserts that “all of the world’s cultures—Asian, African, Middle Eastern, European/Western Hemisphere—have fostered wisdom writing.” This preeminent literary critic declared after writing this book, that henceforth he will only read and teach “books of aesthetic splendor, intellectual power and wisdom.”152 From the Hebrew writers through the twentieth century, Bloom provides an expansive understanding of wisdom literature. He takes special note of Homer, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Montaigne and Francis Bacon, Augustine, Emerson, Nietzsche and Proust. All of them use the poetic form and moral aphorism of wisdom literature. Bloom observes that the dialogues of Plato, “at their best are unique dramatic poems unmatched in literary history. Samuel Johnson the literary critic and Goethe the poet are wisdom writers using moral aphorisms although they diverge in their intellectual framework.”153 Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents Bloom regards as “inescapable, immense, almost incalculable.”154 Together these writers across history discover and transmit erudite knowledge about life’s relationships and the adversities that disrupt them. Wisdom requires that we define problems, formulate strategies to confront them, and allocate resources to solve dilemmas. These cognitive processes are prominent in other types of thinking, but in wisdom they are used to achieve ends that yield publicly held goods. Wisdom literature provides a learning base for understanding and acting upon a good life worth living. Wisdom literature contributes to the conception and attainment of what a good life should be. Moral Wisdom as a Normative Ideal In the ethic of anthropological realism, the wisdom hermeneutic is a synthesis of creativity, judgment and erudition.

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Moral wisdom as a normative ideal is rooted in these inter-acting modalities. Moral wisdom, as a normative ideal in the ethic of anthropological realism, is a distinctive type of wisdom.155 It does not provide “synoptic knowledge about the general structure of reality,” but it concerns “what human beings should do to live a good life….Moral wisdom involves practically oriented knowledge, but the practice is guided by morality and morality conceived of in terms of good and evil as they bear on human efforts to live a good life.”156 Moral wisdom, pursued by choosing both means and ends, is informed by an understanding of what is morally acceptable. Moral wisdom as a theory involves ontological erudition, and its practical dimension incorporates hermeneutical creativity and judgment. “We can say, therefore, that people have moral wisdom if they regularly and predictably act wisely in their appropriate situations and if so acting is an enduring pattern in their lives.”157 In summary, moral wisdom applies good and evil to our understanding of both the means and ends that constitute meaningful living. In the ethic of anthropological realism, moral wisdom as a normative ideal has two components, eudaimonia and moral depth. While both eudaimonia and moral depth are based on the synchronicity of creativity, judgment, and erudition, eudaimonia is primarily rooted in creativity and judgment, and moral depth in erudition. Eudaimonia Eudaimonia has a long tradition in philosophy. Typically translated as “happiness” or “wellbeing,” other terms are common: “human flourishing,” “prosperity,” “good life” and “blessedness.” A life of eudaimonia means “living well,” “faring well,” and sometimes “the best life for human beings.” In the Aristotelian legacy, eudaimonia is a life of “productive selfactualization.” Consistently in intellectual history, eudaimonism

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has essential value and, therefore, it is normative irrespective of the conflicts and dilemmas encountered in everyday affairs. Eudaimonia ought to be understood in terms of moral realism. The realism of primary values and harms is based on human existence. Therefore, the primary values of moral wisdom are independent of what anyone believes about them. Their existence is anthropomorphic because what is beneficial or harmful depends on the character of human being, and not on values external to it. Propositions and beliefs about human wellbeing are true or false, but their truth or falsehood depends on the ontological nature of the human condition. In the ethic of anthropological realism, the primary values of good lives are constituted by their anthropocentric status. In eudaimonia, the goods whose enjoyments make human life flourish, and the evils which prevent wellbeing, are interpreted anthropocentrically as benefits and harms for human beings. Moral wisdom regarding eudaimonia presumes the ability to evaluate situations in light of erudition regarding goods and evils and to judge well in situations where evaluation is complicated. Knowing how to live well includes knowing the morally right thing to do in specific situations and knowing how to act on it. As described above, the exercise of moral wisdom presupposes that the concept of moral goodness is known. Since classical Greece, morality has been central to eudaimonia; in Aristotle’s dictum, eudaimonia is constituted by rational activity in accordance with virtue. John Kekes’ Moral Wisdom and Good Lives contends that the first step in understanding eudaimonic good is to identify primary values that undergird human wellbeing. “Primary values are based on benefits and harms that must count as such for all reasonable conceptions of a good life.” The idea encapsulated in these primary values is anthropological realism; that is, the philosophy of the human “dictates that some things will normally benefit all human beings, and similarly that some

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things will normally harm everyone. These universally human benefits and harms are primary goods and primary evils.”158 From the reality of the human condition, we conclude that it is good for all human beings to have the capacity to satisfy their physiological and psychological needs. “These may be called ‘the goods of the self.’ It is also good for everyone to be able to establish close personal relationships” with other people, that is, “to enjoy ‘the goods of intimacy.’” Likewise, it is good to live in societies where “the enjoyment of these goods is not only possible but also welcome, thus to have ‘the goods of social order.’”159 Human lives are better if they possess the primary goods of selfhood, intimacy, and social order, and worse if they do not. These primary goods are necessary requirements of eudaimonia. They are a necessary condition because they are required to satisfy the needs of all human beings as human entities. In eudaimonia, persons must appreciate the value of living well in a variety of circumstances. “One need not succeed at living well to be wise, but one must be the sort of person who has a general appreciation of the true value of living well.”160 In eudainmonia, persons live as consistently as possible with what they know. Some situations require tolerance. Wise people behave appropriately. Sometimes showing emotions is best; other occasions require equanimity. Eudaimonia means dealing thoughtfully with life. Creativity, judgment, and erudition synchronized teach people to learn from their circumstances and revise their thinking and actions accordingly. In living eudaimonically, wise people occasionally fail to live well but they do the best their circumstances permit. They seek to live well because they are committed to the primary values that undergird eudaimonia. Wisdom is conceptually distinct in clarifying why eudaimonia is the aim of human existence.

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Moral Depth In the three-phase model of hermeneutic wisdom, ontological erudition is the basis on which moral wisdom as a normative ideal can develop depth and maturity. For Kekes, moral depth is the safeguard against persistent adversities. When moral wisdom as normative ideal has depth, humans are prepared to cope with “the adversities inherent in the human condition that render the achievement to good lives deeply problematic.”161 Contingency, conflict and evil are adversities that complicate human attempts to live good lives. “Contingency, conflict and evil are permanent adversities, and no efforts of ours can eliminate them. Good lives require that we come to terms with them.”162 It is through moral depth beyond eudaimonism that we may accomplish this. “Contingency may be understood anthropologically as the morally significant truth that no matter how virtuously we try to live a good life, life is contingent. Goodness may lead to suffering, moral growth need not be rewarded, and people come to underserved harm….Crimes, accidents, and disease befall us regardless of our merit. Living a reasonable and decent life is of no avail against the contingency of nature.”163 Likewise, values we cherish may conflict with each other. Commitment to a profession often contradicts leisure and freedom. Frequently we are required to choose between the lesser of evils. Herman Wasserman’s Ethics of Engagement documents conflict as the key issue in local and world affairs. Evil is another permanent adversity we must face. The extent to which we cannot control the obstacles of evil and wickedness, is an indication the wise person’s zeal for existential goodness is not sufficient for achieving it. “We cannot change the fact that we are subject to permanent adversities, but we can cultivate a reasonable attitude toward them. This attitude is moral depth, and it may alleviate our sense of hopelessness.” To be reflective entails moral depth “because we cannot be reflective

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without some understanding of the human condition. But our possession of it may only be embryonic or it may become a significant force in our character. If it becomes such a force, we have ground for reasonable hope.”164 The nature of moral depth is a complicated question, but we can agree on its opposites, such as shallowness and superficiality. An approximate cognate of it is profundity. In the hermeneutic of wisdom, erudition is moral depth’s primary knowledge base. In moral depth we find coherence among apparently unrelated phenomena. Wise people of moral depth penetrate below the surface and understand the reality which the appearances manifest. Moral depth is the issue elaborated by ontological erudition. The subject matter of moral depth is a cognitive understanding of human existence. Moral depth comes from an enlarged view of the conditions we face as inferred from the ontology of human beingness. It is to construct a theory that leads to a possible understanding of the reality of which the appearances are manifestations. Those with moral depth have a perspective that helps the community understand what was previously problematic.

Conclusion Working with the hermeneutics of wisdom requires the philosophical mind. Wisdom as a synthesis of creativity, judgment, and erudition is not an epistemological phenomenon first of all, but a venue for understanding how to live. The intellectual character of and rationale for this ontological theory cannot be addressed scholastically but with a philosophical mentality that recognizes moral realism as basic to human life. For the life of the mind, the meaning and purpose of human existence becomes the context in which academic and professional decisions are made and cases resolved. For the ethic of anthropological realism, understanding is not simply a theoretical process, but in ontological terms new understanding means to

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expand our existential horizon and deepen our humanity, not only to see more but to see differently.165 The ethic of normative ideals invokes the ultimate questions about the nature and meaning of human existence in the world. Anthropological ethics with its lifeworld orientation and homo sapiens expanse, supports the philosophical mind to the maximum. The ethic of anthropological realism presented here integrates descriptive ethics, normative ethics, and meta-ethics of Chapter One into a coherent theory of moral realism and the philosophical concept of humans as cultural beings. Chapter Two rewrites the realism/anti-realism debate into new terms around a hybrid philosophical anthropology. Chapter Three develops a cross-cultural hybrid realism out of holistic human values. Chapters Four and Five meet Ward’s criterion of “radical conceptual reform” in which “new ideas are brought together into a comprehensive perspective that explains what responsibility means” in international and cross-cultural terms. “Ethics problems cannot be properly addressed by minor reformulations of existing precepts. It is time to be philosophically radical, to rethink global media ethics from the ground up.”166 The chapters that follow clarify the rationale for and implications of the ethic of anthropological realism, defined by the good of the whole in everyday discourse. Chapter Six extends anthropological realism into the larger contexts of semiotics, semantics, and hermeneutics in the philosophy of language. It demonstrates how anthropological realism responds to the major intellectual issues, historical and contemporary, without conceptual dualisms and eschewing determinism. It establishes the conditions of knowledge in ontological human existence, as distinct from deductive ethical categories based on metaphysical abstractions. Taking these philosophical debates seriously, Chapter Seven reconceives of meta-ethics for a global world in naturalistic terms that are grounded in a conception of holistic humans as cosmopolitan agents within history.

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Notes 1. Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, 2015 (1788). 2. The epistemological version involves intellectual disputes over the nature of truth and the essence of an external world, though ShaferLandau’s Moral Realism: A Defense develops a credible argument for this kind of moral realism. 3. In his Realist Conception of Truth and his Sensible Metaphysical Realism, Alston offers a well-known attempt to vindicate metaphysical moral realism. As developed in depth in Chapter Two, Hilary Putnam is an influential critic of metaphysical realism, particularly its supernaturalist version inspired by Leibniz, in which kinds and substances exist as they do ultimately by virtue of action originating outside natural reality; see Putnam’s Reason, Truth and History. 4. Ward, Global Journalism Ethics, 176. 5. Peitrzyk-Reeves, “Normative Political Theory,” 174. 6. Casteñada, “Ought, Reasons, Motivations and the Unity of the Social Sciences,” 16. 7. Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism, 9. 8. Alasdair MacIntyre in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? argues for a similar understanding of history as a normed process, summarized as “embodied rational inquiry,” 6-9. 9. McDonald, The Normative Basis of Culture, 3. 10. Taylor, “Growth, Legitimacy and the Modern Identity,” 111. 11. Taylor, “Growth, Legitimacy and the Modern Identity,” 120. 12. Peukert, “Universal Solidarity as the Goal of Communication,” 11. 13. Appiah, In My Father’s House, 16. 14. A. Holmes, Contours of a Worldview, 48. 15. Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism, 15, 19. 16. See Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order, 71-75. 17. Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism, 18. 18. Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism, 18. 19. Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism, 31. 20. Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism, 34. 21. Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism, 28. 22. Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism, 101. 23. Bromvich, Moral Imagination, 3.

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24. Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, vii-viii. 25. Bromvich, Moral Imagination, 21. 26. Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism, 19. 27. Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism, 19, 33. 28. Will, Beyond Deduction, 9. 29. Noddings, Caring, 2-3. 30. Bromwich, Moral Imagination, 26. 31. Equating truth with methodologically certified knowledge is modern Cartesianism, whereas truth in harmony with experiencedand-contextual immersion is not dogmatic certainty, but that which we have good reason to affirm. 32. Will, Beyond Deduction. 33. Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism, 106. 34. Hannah Arendt (1906-1957) wrote her Ph.D. dissertation under the philosopher Karl Jaspers on Augustine’s concept of love: Love and Saint Augustine (1929/1996). For Augustine, caritas is fundamental because humans all share a common origin and are therefore equals. Troup’s Augustine for Philosophers documents Augustine’s prominence in the work of continental philosophers who shaped the philosophy of communication: Arendt, Camus, Ellul, Gadamer, Heidegger, Husserl, Lyotard and Ricouer. 35. Arendt, The Human Condition, 8. 36. Arendt, The Human Condition, 55. 37. Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism, 33. 38. Aristotle, Politics, Book. III, Chapters. 6-7, 90-93. 39. Ciceronis, De Res Publica, Chapter 1, art. 25, 44-45. 40. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Vol. 28, Question 92, art. 1, 41-45. 41. Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapter 9, para. 1131, 13; Chapter 13, para. 158, 91. 42. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Political Writings, Book. 11, Chapter 1, 57. 43. Habermas, Justification and Application, 66. 44. See Gyekye, “African Ethics,” sect. 7. 45. Dherse, “Why the Common Good Matters,” 277. 46. Gyatso, Joyful Path of Good Fortune, 383. 47. Stocking, “Buddhist Moral Ethics,” 408. 48. See Sacks, Morality, 196-205.

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49. With his Ph.D. from Cambridge under Bernard Williams, Sacks was the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth of Nations from 1991 to 2013, and the 2016 recipient of the Templeton Prize. 50. As Münkler and Fischer verify, in English, a range of cognates is used with “common good,” sometimes interchangeably as “public good,” “public interest,” “common interest,” and “commonwealth.” The German Gemeinwohl (common good) is distinguished from öffentliches interesse (public interest, mainly appearing in juridical discourse). The common good of this chapter is Gemeinwohl, its philosophical usage distinct from legal, nation-state denotations. 51. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 302. 52. Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, 49-52. 53. Hussain, “The Common Good,” 11. 54. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 89. 55. Hussain, “The Common Good,” 7. 56. For a full account of social relationships as the basis of the common good, see Rousseau, The Social Contract; Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right; and Walzer, Spheres of Justice. 57. Josephides and Hall, We the Cosmopolitans, 2. 58. Josephides and Hall, We the Cosmopolitans, xvii. 59. Josephides and Hall, We the Cosmopolitans, xvii. 60. Josephides and Hall, We the Cosmopolitans, 4. 61. Josephides and Hall, We the Cosmopolitans, 4. 62. Brock and Brighouse, The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, 4. 63. Relational forms of normativity have always been prominent in philosophy. In Books VIII and IX of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle considered varieties of friendship and partnerships. JudeoChristian ethics appeals to relational morality through the concept of neighbors. In Chapter 5 of Mills’ Utilitarianism, he recognized relational duties as exceptions to the requirement of impartiality in justice. Sidgwick devoted Chapter 4 of Book III in his Methods of Ethics to discuss the “duties of kindness that we owe towards parents, spouses and children, and neighbors and fellow-country-men.” 64. Farmer, “Relational Obligations,” 39. 65. Wallace, “Moral Obligation,” 53-54. 66. Wallace, “Moral Obligation,” 52.

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67. Farmer, “Relational Obligations,” 40. 68. See Scheffler, “Relationships and Obligations,” 189-209. 69. Farmer, “Relational Obligations,” 41. 70. Tronto, “Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities,” 203. 71. Tronto, “Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities,” 305. 72. Walker, Moral Understandings, 84. 73. Tronto “Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities,” 304. 74. Tronto, “Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities,” 306. 75. Young, “Responsibility and Global Justice,” 126. 76. Robinson and Gottlieb, “Civic Responsibility and Service Learning,” 3. 77. Fletch and Springsteen, A Roadmap to Civic Engagement, iii. 78. King, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” https:ww.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html 79. See Macmurray, The Form of the Personal. 80. Jordan, “The Meaning of Mutuality,” 2. 81. Rose and Wadham-Smith, “Mutuality, Trust and Cultural Relations,” 15. 82. The classic treatment of solidarity is Émile Durkheim’s in his Division of Labor in Society where he distinguished between the mechanical solidarity of traditional communities and the organic solidarity of modern societies. For Laitinen and Pessi’s Solidarity, “The Durkheimian distinction made it possible both to acknowledge that traditional social ties were eroding thanks to industrialization, urbanization and individualization, and to see a different basis for social life emerging, consistent with these processes,” 3. 83. Laitinen and Pessi, Solidarity, 2. 84. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Political Writings, 49. 85. See Frega, “Solidarity as Social Involvement.” 86. Hussain, “The Common Good,” 9. 87. See Kolenda, “Incremental Solidarity.” 88. Latinen and Pessi, Solidarity, 24. 89. Instead of “incremental solidarity,” Laitinen and Pessi in their Solidarity prefer a different form of relational obligation for international solidarity. They distinguish thin universal mutual respect from the thicker relations of public communities where moral duties are not seen as monadic but dyadic, 19. 90. Hussain, “The Common Good,” 2.

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91. See Hussain, “The Common Good,” 2. 92. Semple, “Welfare Consequentialism and Social Policy,” 2. 93. For further analysis of the errors of welfare economics, see Amartya Sen, “Personal Utilities and Public Judgments: Or What’s Wrong with Welfare Economics.” 94. See Münkler and Fischer, “Common Good and Civic Spirit In the Welfare State,” 429-431. 95. Münkler and Fischer, “Common Good and Civic Spirit in the Welfare State,” 416, 429. 96. Bourne, “Transactional America,” 278. Cultural diversity has been important since David Hume recognized that the discovery of other cultures with little or nothing in common contradicted the assumption that one good life could be identified (Treatise of Human Nature 1739 and Enquiries 1748). Kant’s universalizability principle disputed Hume’s empirical moral sentiments, but neither alternative proved persuasive either in scientific or philosophical debates over the nature of cultural pluralism. 97. See Bourne, “Transnational America.” 98. Eck, The Pluralism Project. https://pluralism.org/mission-andhistory. 99. See Bauman, Liquid Life. 100. Kien, Global Technology, 141. 101. Kien, Global Technology, 125. 102. Breslow and Mousoutzanis, Cybercultures, viii. 103. Breslow and Mousoutzanis, Cybercultures, 104, xvi. 104. Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism, 5. 105. Cook, Morality and Cultural Differences, 3. 106. See E. F. Paul, Miller, and J. Paul, Cultural Pluralism and Moral Knowledge. 107. Christians and Ward, “Anthropological Realism for Global Media Ethics,” 78. 108. Christians and Ward, “Anthropological Realism for Global Media Ethics,” 72-73. 109. In Habermas’ Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, having diverse communities judged by cross-cultural norms is the intellectual strategy of his discourse ethics. Habermas argues that the principle of universalization acts as a rule of argumentation and is implicitly presumed by human discourse, 86-94. Habermas presupposes

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that communication is fundamental to all societies and that the basic characteristics of communication are therefore universal. For him, denying this fact involves a “performative contradiction”—one cannot take that position without contradicting the rules one has tacitly accepted by participating in a discourse. 110. Christians and Ward, “Anthropological Realism for Global Media Ethics,” 73. 111. In Martin Luther King, Jr.’s terms, “The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.” https:// kinginstitute.stanford.edu/publications/autobiography-martin-luther -king-jr/chapter-12-pilgrimage-nonviolence. 112. Ward, “Philosophical Foundations for Global Media Ethics,” 5. 113. MacBride’s reassertion of local identities occurred in the context of the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) debates; see Traber and Nordenstreng, Few Voices, Many Worlds. 114. For example, Galtung, Conflict Transformation By Peaceful Means and Transcend and Transform. 115. Galtung, “Cultural Violence,” 1. 116. In King’s “Sermon on Gandhi,” “The aftermath of non-violence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle’s over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor.” 117. For Habermas, the communication between a speaker and a listener is constituted by the existence of validity claims such as normative rightness. By normative rightness, Habermas means the moral rightness of the intended social relationship. As Habermas describes it in The Theory of Communicative Action, “The speech act is right in terms of a given normative context or the normative context that it satisfied is itself legitimate,” 137. Communicative rationality in which speakers and hearers are in agreement includes the right treatment they owe each other interpersonally. Between ethnic entities, between valid people groups, intercultural communication’s normative rightness principle is nonviolence. 118. R. Holmes, The Ethics of Nonviolence, 172. As Christians explains in Communication Ethics and Global Justice in the Digital Era, principled nonviolence as a moral philosophy and expressed as

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an ethical maxim is the definition supported by Lzo Tzu, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., 240-249. 119. See Ross, The Right and the Good. 120. Niebuhr, The Responsible Self, 153. 122. The nonviolent agenda can be implemented through organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). ADL is an example of nongovernmental entities that oppose all forms of bigotry through information, education and public advocacy, www.adl.org. 123. Cook, Morality and Cultural Differences, 165. Multiculturalism has negative connotations for some social theorists. For Bromwich’s Moral Imagination, the notion of cultural identity involves bureaucratization, and with that comes “official subsidy and supervision, and thereby an additional check on individual thought and action,” xvii; see 40-69. However, philosophical accounts of multiculturalism have been influential in public life. Will Kymlicka reminds us in her “Testing the Liberal Multiculturalist Hypothesis,” that Charles Taylor’s essay, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition” was “translated into numerous languages and cited in discussions of multiculturalism not only in Paris and Tokyo, but also in the highlands of Bolivia,” 257. 124. Eck, The Pluralism Project. http://pluralism.org/mission-andhistory. 125. R. Holmes, The Ethics of Nonviolence, 154, 173. 126. Gandhi, Non-violent Resistance, 294. 127. Kekes, Pluralism in Philosophy, 204. 128. See Kien, The Digital Story. 129. As Ward in his Radical Media Ethics summarizes twenty-first century news media, “Journalism is shot through with interpretation. Practitioners interpret events and publish reports. Journalists also interpret, implicitly or explicitly, what they are doing and the point of their work, 61. 130. Kekes, Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, 18. 131. Grossberg and Christians, “Hermeneutics and the Study of Communications,” 57-81. 132. See Christians, “Hermeneutics and Philosophical Reflection,” 157-158. 133. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce.

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134. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce. 135. Sternberg, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized, 152. 136. Williams, “The Creative Mind,” 18. 137. Yong, Zhang, Zhou, Gu, and Yuan, “How Does Culture Shape Creativity,” 5. 138. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, xvi. 139. Lubart, “Creativity,” 301. 140. Lubart, “Creativity,” 303. 141. Sternberg, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized, 158. 142. Lubart, “Creativity,” 305. 143. The British educator, Anna Craft, in her “Fostering Creativity with Wisdom” argues that the increasing interest in creativity is occurring “in many parts of the world, with direct reference to the value framework of Western individualism, driven by the capitalist, globalized marketplace.” As an alternative, she refers to the GoodWork Project in her argument for integrating creativity and wisdom in educational policy and curricula. “Studies by the research group at Harvard University working in conjunction with researchers at Claremont and Stanford, suggest a decreasing tendency to prioritize the common good perspective among ambitious young people seeking to excel in the three professions studied (journalism, science, and acting). Calling their initial work “humane creativity” for their wisdom-related framework, these researchers “note that common threads across all three professions were the propensity to cut corners and bend rules, to see oneself as operating alone rather than part of a community…which provided a set of reference points to inform their actions,” 339, 343. 144. Craft, “Fostering Creativity With Wisdom,” 158. 145. Kekes, Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, 5. 146. Spence, “Promoting the Human Good,” 353. 147. Kekes, Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, 26. 148. Craft, “Fostering Creativity with Wisdom,” 342. 149. See Lubart, “Creativity,” 307. 150. Mussard, “Wisdom Literature and the Quest for Wisdom,” 3. 151. Clifford, The Wisdom Literature, 19; see Mussard, “Wisdom Literature and the Quest for Wisdom,” 3, 6-7. 152. Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found, 1.

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153. Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found, 157. 154. Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found, 222. 155. Aristotle distinguishes between philosophical wisdom and practical wisdom (between sophia and phronesis). In his Metaphysics, philosophical wisdom concerns truth while practical wisdom concerns action, 993b20-21. Wisdom is neither Aristotelian sophia or phronesis although it includes aspects of each. In Kekes’ Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, “Moral wisdom is like philosophical wisdom in seeking knowledge of first principles, but the principles are only those that bear on living a good life. This is what makes moral wisdom moral. Furthermore, because living a good life requires action, and the contexts of actions are always changing, moral wisdom is practically and contingently oriented, while philosophical wisdom is not,” 17. 156. Kekes, Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, 1. 157. Kekes, Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, 6. 158. Kekes, Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, 19. 159. Kekes, Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, 21. 160. Ryan, “What Is Wisdom,” 135. 161. Kekes, Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, 3. 162. Kekes, Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, 51. 163. Kekes, Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, 53. 164. Kekes, Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, 165, 168. 165. Dryden, A Hermeneutic of Wisdom, 3.

CHAPTER SIX ANTHROPOLOGICAL REALISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE CLIFFORD G. CHRISTIANS Individual nonconformity achieves little when disconnected from any broader communal purpose. —Eugene McCarraher1

Philosophical reflection on language has been long and productive in the history of ideas. The philosophy of language as inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of this central human phenomenon reaches across the continents and extends to the earliest known human history. With language the distinctive feature of human existence, theorizing about language involves and elaborates on the basic status of anthropological realism. Considering language to be a system of signs and symbols, scholars of language over the centuries judge the symbolic process to be primordial to the human species. The human ontological condition is to participate in the signification systems through which we make sense of the world. Language is analyzed as a philosophical problem in relation to human properties. Language embodies the sole means for living out the human relationships that establish the moral order. Philosophical concepts regarding reality are formed in symbol making, thus defining human understanding without individual-social and subject-object dichotomies. The contrived realism of identifying the essence of human nature is rejected by the dominant philosophers of language as a scholasticism that is not adequate

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for human complexity. Through the conceptual apparatus of language, scholars of language make reality intelligible for human existence. This chapter’s excursus on the philosophy of language presents the alternative form of knowledge that characterizes the humanities, and in doing so, it defends the hybrid realism of this book. In developing the humanities paradigm, language theorists turn to hermeneutics for establishing its epistemological character. By emphasizing both discovery and invention rather than routine procedures, the aim is authentic discourse rather than superficial appraisal. Understanding results from interactive agency, instead of through an anti-realist construction of consciousness. Semiotics in the philosophy of language replaces dyadic methodologies with triadic linguistic expressions. Reasoning is not limited to social scientific induction and philosophical deduction that have characterized the debates over realism. Retroduction is included to account for worldviews, conceptions, and pre-theoretical givens embedded in linguistic usage. In the interpretive theory of semiotics, fundamental questions no longer reduce to empirical phenomena. Humanities-based inquiry provides philosophical justification for the larger horizon of realist knowledge systems in Chapters One to Three. Along with this book, the scholars of language affirm philosophical anthropology as the intellectual home of global ethics. Hermeneutical realism answers the questions regarding normativity’s justification and character. In this philosophy-oflanguage tradition, our very being constitutes an obligatory claim on homo sapiens to respect life. Morality is the realm within which to understand humanness. There is no dualism in this definition since cognition and morality are both rooted in community life and do not represent fixed external categories. Thus the dynamic, interactive normativity of Chapter Five replaces the principalism of static rules, justified by metaphysics or presumed by self-proclaimed autonomous reason. The philosophy

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of language develops a non-foundational perspective on normativity that avoids the thinness of neutrality which presupposes independence from idealism and naturalism.

International Overview The oldest Vedic Sanskrit text, the Rig Veda, begins with effusive tributes to the power of speech [9ƗN] and the goddess of speech [Vagambhrni]. Early medieval Indian philosophy featured a prominent linguistic debate between the 0LPƗP࡝VƗ school of Sanskrit who tended toward conventionalism and the holistic [VSKRWփ D], and the Grammarian school who contended that phonetic utterance and meaning form an indivisible whole which is identical with the Brahman’s ultimate ground of existence [Sabda-Brahman]. Ancient Indian philosophers of language debated vigorously about the lingual character of poetry and drama, dance and music, and about sacred hymns on ultimate reality. They showed no interest in the rhetoric of persuasion, but they did explore the meaning of aesthetic pleasure [da bliss] in written language as well as in everyday colloquial speech. Theories of language are a key part of Classical Chinese thought. Chinese thinkers view language pragmatically; they are sensitive to the context-dependence of language. Disputes over language shape their discussions of psychology, politics, and the good life. They rarely reflect on free-standing utterances detached from the social context. In the Analects, there is no claim that words signify an external reality. In fact, throughout its history, China’s philosophers have featured language’s social role over descriptive fact-finding. Ontology is an emphasis in classical China.2 A typical phrase is translated “being becoming.” The definition of humans is onto-linguistic, that is, humans are entities who exist in a common lingual world.3 Situating language in social interdependence (instead of in a referential theory of language and objects), the scholars

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of language in classical China affirm this book’s turn to philosophical anthropology as the home of normative ideals. Confucius regarded ren [humanity] as the key to correct interpretation of everyday existence. Translated into English as humaneness, ren is a characteristic of the human species; ren designates a person’s constitutive humanness. Ren does not mean individual attainment—such as generosity or compassion—but refers to the manifestation of being human. He [harmony] as verb and noun is a concept primordial to Confucianism. In antiquity before Confucius, he refers to music. Its original meaning is “the rhythmic interplay of various sounds, either in nature or between human beings, that is musical to the human ear; the prototype of he is found in music.” In the earliest Confucian texts, he “mostly has to do with sounds and how sounds interact with one another… expressions like ‘the he has five sounds’ in Zou Chuan does not mean merely the mutual response of sounds, but the harmonious interplay of these sounds.”4 In the Analects, Confucius makes he the criterion for the good person: “The good person (junzi) harmonizes but does not seek sameness, whereas the petty person seeks sameness but does not harmonize.”5 Xunzi is one of three great philosophers following Confucius. For him, all humans respond to a similar range of natural distinctions. The eyes distinguish the same bands of colors, the ears the same discriminations of pitch. The shared nature of the species underwrites the possibility of language creating community. Xunzi makes no appeal to the nature of the cosmos, but ontologically centers on what is possible for humans in achieving their natural goals. Conceptions of language, illustrated with Confucius and Xunzi, are coextensive with conceptions of human beingness. Language is analyzed as a philosophical problem in relation to human viability. In the Zulu and Xhosa languages, traditional African communalism is defined as umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu [“a person

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is a person through other persons” or “I am because of others.”]6 According to Zulu and Xhosa thinkers, “there is no dualism in this definition because both rationality and morality are acquired from community life and do not follow from external categories or fixed ideologies.”7 Post-colonial philosophy of language, as practiced in the Southern part of the continent (Malawi, Zimbabwe, and South Africa) carried forward this communalism, claiming it as the way of life of the Bantu people. “The attitudes, sentiments, and dispositions...of persons are formed by virtue of their belonging to a community.”8 The commitment in African philosophies of language to humans as communal beings avoids opposition between individualism and collectivism by its unity-in-multiplicity idea; that is, selfhood cannot be known without necessarily conceiving of interdependence with others. At the end of his comparative analysis of the concept of person among the Akan of Ghana, the Igbo and the Yoruba of Nigeria, Olatunji Oyeschile located the distinctive and intimate relationship of communalism within the concept of kinship.9 Grivas Muchineripi Kayange, Malawi Professor of Philosophy, in “The Chewa Concept of Truth,” argues that in the Chichewa language truth depends on the relation between statements and the idea of community.10 Through teaching the stories of tradition and widely practiced rituals, a community’s members are active rather than passive. Truth’s boundaries and conceptual core are grounded in interactive relations, and the idea has a universal orientation because of the communal nature of human beings as a whole.11 Western Perspective Against the background of these multiple traditions internationally, this chapter develops the philosophy of language in the Occidental trajectory. In the West, inquiry into language

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originates with fifth century Greece. The process of interpretation was established as foundational to human life, and therefore an intellectual problem. Plato developed the art of interpretation in the Phaedrus, and in the Sophist he discusses the possibility of intelligible talk about the non-existent. Plato’s dialogue, Cratylus, is the first general discussion of the role of convention in language, with language a vehicle for framing and communicating knowledge. Aristotle concerned himself with logic and with categories such as genus and species. He thought that the meaning of predicates was established by abstracting the similarities between various individual entities.12 The Stoic School of Hellenistic Philosophers in Athens (in the early third century BC) made important contributions to the idea of grammar, distinguishing five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, appellatives (names or epithets), conjunctions and articles. They also developed a sophisticated concept of the OHNWyQ (the meaning of signs) associated with language’s signs but distinct from the sign itself. The OHNWi as sentences are propositions; for the Stoics, only propositions could be called true or false. In the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, multiple noteworthy philosophers of language existed. Peter Abelard anticipated the modern idea of reference. William of Ockham’s Summa Logicae considered scholastic logic to be a science of language. The phenomena of vagueness and ambiguity were given careful analysis. Scholastics in this era were interested in categoretic terms such as or, and, not, of, and every. They began a linguistic-philosophical classification that they called meta-language, and identified the precursors to emic and phonetic. The Renaissance—the late Medieval period in Europe of artistic rebirth and the rediscovery of classical philosophy— was influenced by the discovery of Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs and saw in the philosophy of language a clarifying way forward.

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The Enlightenment moved language from its academic home in philology into the forefront of society and human life. Enlightenment thinkers first recognized that language is the catalytic agent in the history of civilization. John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding established the Enlightenment’s dominant position. In his Book III (“On Words”), external signs, words, our languages do not constitute internal thought but are mere messengers of it. Thinking belongs to my private world accessible only to myself, and language is an instrument enabling society to function. Locke had a vision of mental life as individual, asocial, ahistorical, and language as the opposite—public, social and historical. Locke understood with the Enlightenment that language makes possible the existence of society, but he created an individual-society dualism that only a holistic understanding of language has been able to resolve. Giambattista Vico was a Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Naples in Italy for 42 years during the Enlightenment century. In his major books, New Science and Study Methods of Our Times, Vico contended against Descartes that philosophy ought to be anchored in language, rather than in mathematics. Mathematics is a form of knowing for the natural order, but we know our own human domain by understanding language as the central human activity. For Vico, the mind coheres in imaging, rather than in mathematical linearity. The mind does not begin with an abstract metaphysics, but with poetic wisdom that imagines reality holistically while experiencing it subjectively. Jean Jacques Rousseau recognized that the deepest root of the Enlightenment was individual autonomy. He understood that the universal problem of the philosophy of language is integrating human freedom with the moral order, and contended that individual autonomy is no solution for addressing it. He developed his argument in his books, Essay on the Origin of

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Language, Discourse on Inequality, and The Social Contract. For Rousseau, writing is a fundamental element in building a civilization, but in using the reductionistic alphabet, words are changed from expressiveness to exactitude. Mediated languages are not neutral. Historical records change the way we experience the world. Human archives do not merely increase knowledge, but transform what we think is reality. The eighteenth century Enlightenment established humans as lingual beings, with the Counter-Enlightenment of Vico and Rousseau developing a realist philosophy of language relevant until today. The philosophy of language played a central role in Western philosophy in the late nineteenth century, notably with Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and in Europe’s English-speaking world. The foundational work giving scientific rigor to the study of language was Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique Générale published posthumously in 1916. Saussure demonstrated that spoken language is based on phonemes that are not individually definable, but exist among multiple signs, with the language system as a whole taking priority.13 In the twentieth century, language has been a central theme within diverse traditions of philosophy. Language came to be a philosophical focus, not because it represents individual acts of rational expression, but because it was seen as the common agency through which humans comprehend the world and undertake public responsibilities. In his 1975 book, Why Does Language Matter in Philosophy, Ian Hacking concludes that “the immense consciousness of language is at play…in every philosophical tradition with a major presence.”14 The linguistic turn is the signature label for this reconception of the nature of philosophy.15 An important source was Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in which philosophy is not a metaphysical inquiry into the essential features of reality, but ought

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to be understood as a “conceptual discipline which elucidates the complex inter-relationships among concepts embodied in established linguistic usage.”16 Richard Rorty’s The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method with Two Retrospective Essays represents the historical and conceptual range of the linguistic philosophy movement, with the overall theme of how philosophy can adopt a non-foundational perspective on normativity. Analytic philosophy, in its preoccupation with meaning, semantics, and sentences, has given depth to the linguistic turn while elaborating on its strengths and weaknesses. Conclusions Philosophers of language from antiquity to the present have produced ground-breaking work on representation, meaning, universals, and metaphor. In the philosophy of language tradition, language and society are interactive modes of human existence, not dualisms that need to be specified formally. Instead of separating human agents from the representational domain, words derive their meaning from the historical context that humans themselves create. The ontological commitment of the philosophers of language has avoided stalemates between absolutism and relativism. Beyond its preoccupation in Chinese thought, philosophers of language across history and geography are anthropological. Their studies of language give priority to the characteristics that are common and unique to human beings. The prevailing view over the centuries—and in the Counter-Enlightenment of Vico and Rousseau—is an ontological realism of human existence. In the primordial experience of beingness, human complexity is affirmed, rather than limited to the rational ability to recognize unconditional a prioris. Humans establish the differences and similarities of their worldviews through the self-reflexivity of language.17

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This overview of the philosophers of language strengthens our understanding of universals, as distinct from a deductive system based on metaphysical abstractions. They brought synchronicity to the universal and particular, and thereby laid the basis for a transnational perspective. The international flows of human existence establish the parameters, rather than the borders of nation-states or cultural features and taboos. They did not define universalism wrongly in terms of monism versus culturalism. They showed us how to conceive of universal values, yet simultaneously acknowledge the dynamism of everyday interpretation. These enduring issues from the philosophy of language— communalism, understanding, ontology, and universals without dichotomies—are elaborated and defined further in the three major sections of this chapter: semiotics, philosophical hermeneutics, and linguistic semantics. The concepts of meaning, interpretation, and truth in the paragraphs following clarify the rationale for the ethic of anthropological realism. The larger context of the philosophy of language extends anthropological realism into the fundamental areas of linguisticality.

Section 1: Semiotics Philosophers of language inquire into the nature of meaning, and seek to explain the origins of meaning, and how meanings can be known through signs and symbols. For philosophers of language, there are two fundamental questions: What is the idea of language in general? And what are the properties of human languages? Semiotics uncovers the multiple networks of relationships, implicit and explicit, within specific discourses. Lingual signs can communicate through any of the senses: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or taste. It is the human ontological condition to inhabit the sign systems through which we make sense of ourselves, others, and the world.18 As Jacqueline Martinez summarizes: “Existence is fundamentally inter-

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subjective and semiotic. As human beings, we are simply and profoundly connected by our mutual location and particpation within sign systems.”19 Theories of Meaning A philosophical theory of meaning should explain how it is possible for human beings to produce and understand a meaningful utterance effortlessly. Three theories of meaning have emerged to specify the characteristic terms of meaning and the linguistic status of these terms: ideational, propositional, and referential. Ideational. The linguistic theory of meaning originating with the British empiricist tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, claims that meanings are mental constructs resulting from linguistic signs.20 John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690 is the primary classic of systematic empiricism. His Book III “On Words” starts from the key assumption that thoughts are private, hidden in the mind. There are essentially two distinct orders: the private individual world of experience and the public world of language—the one mental and the other semiotic. Thought concerns ideas that derive from sensation, whereas language deals in words that are produced by historical custom.21 The Lockean problem of language is ensuring the uniqueness of my thoughts to another’s mind without distortion. As Locke says in Book III, Chapter 2, “To make words serviceable to the end of communication, it is necessary that they excite in the hearer exactly the same idea they stand for in the mind of the speaker. Without this, we fill one another’s heads with noise and sounds, but convey not our thoughts, and lay not before another our ideas, which is the end of discourse

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and language.”22 Locke rejected the possibility that meanings were properties of things in either the natural or human world: “A man cannot make his words, the signs either of qualities in things, or of conceptions in the mind of another.”23 Thus, by Locke’s own account of meaning, because words signify only the speaker’s cognition, no one can fully know anyone else’s ideas.24 Locke argues for his semiotic principle of individuated meaning in terms of his fundamental social principle that individual liberty is unimpeachable.25 Propositional Propositions are typically defined as “what is asserted” when sentences (indicative or declarative) assert something as true or false. When sentences are true/false, it is because the propositions they express are true/false. Propositions or propositional content also applies to what is expressed by the subordinate clauses of complex sentences, which are separated from the sentences of which they are a part; they can stand alone as indicative statements, often called “propositional signs.” The propositional theory of linguistic meaning is not tied to any particular natural language, thus it is language independent: “Most proposition theorists hold that propositions have internal structure; they are composed of abstract conceptual parts. ‘Concept’ is the term used to mean an abstract constituent of a larger abstract proposition.”26 Propositions express abstract entities rather than designate them, as in referential theory. Bertrand Russell’s intentional interpretation of propositions is the most sophisticated version of the propositional theory of meaning. In The Principles of Mathematics, he defines the main features of propositions in realist terms: 1) initially they are true or false; 2) as objects of thinking, they have being; and 3) they are entities regardless of whether anyone considers them to be such. In Russell’s opinion, each linguistic expression

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designates something in the objective world. In his “On Denoting,” Russell calls the relation between concepts and their exemplifications “denotation”: on the basis of the grammatical structure of language one can denote the kinds of objects that exist in reality. Objects are the meanings of proper names, and properties and relations are the meanings of predicates. In Soames’ summary in his Philosophy of Language, Russellian propositions contain the things they are about, plus the properties and relations predicated of them.27 Russell says, “every word occurring in a sentence must have some meaning.…The correctness of our philosophical analysis of a proposition may therefore be usefully checked by the exercise of each word in the sentence expressing the proposition.”28 However, even if Russell is right about some uses of descriptions, he has ignored a common case in which a description is used referentially, merely to indicate a specific person or thing. The sentence “Pegasus (in Greek mythology a winged horse) does not exist” is true. Pegasus has a meaning and meanings are terms, but in Russell’s theory something cannot be a term unless it exists. Regarding the problem of names which do not refer to an object, Russell responds unsatisfactorily that many nonexistent terms have being but not existence.29 “Russell’s theory of meaning ignores the fact that most descriptions are context bound and denote only within a circumscribed local setting.”30 Referential Reference theories of linguistic meaning consider meaning to be equivalent to those entities in the world that are actually connected to signs. Linguistic expressions are symbols that represent things in reality; the noun “cat” refers to cats, as do the French chat and the German Katze. Referential theory “would explain the significance of all expressions in terms of their

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having been conventionally associated with…states of affairs in the world, and it would explain a human being’s understanding of a sentence in terms of that person’s knowing what the sentence’s component words refer to.”31 Gottlob Frege advocated a formalized reference theory based on logic and mathematical proof procedures. In his classic, “Function and Concept” (1891), Frege uses the idea of function to develop a semiotics of formal language. Distinguishing functions from expressions that designate them, he develops categories such as “functions designated by predicate expressions, functions designated by truth-functional connectives, and functions designated by the quantifiers ‘for all x’ and ‘for some x.’”32 His “On Sense and Reference” extends his procedural formulae with a two-tiered theory of meaning. The first tier consists of the sense (Sinn) of linguistic expressions. The second tier he labels Bedeutengen (referents), the objects to which expressions refer. Senses are real, but are neither functions nor objects. They do not have an independent self-subsistent mode of being as identifiable entities.33 Only in the context of human language do referents have meaning. Frege laid the groundwork for the systematic study of the compositional principles of syntactic structures. And in specifying the basic features of how language represents the world, Frege provided the starting point for the use of mathematical logic and procedures in the philosophy of language. Verificationist theories of meaning became the most prominent referential theory after Frege, associated generally with logical positivism. In its standard formulation, the meaning of a sentence is its method of verification or falsification. While incorporating the canons of empirical methodology, verifiability is a referential theory by its presumptions. Linguistic expressions are meaningful if and only if their referents are scientifically or mathematically verified. “The positivists never achieved a formulation of the verification principle that satisfied even

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themselves….Every precise formation proved to be too strong or too weak in one respect or another.”34 Moreover, the theory applies directly to what positivism calls fact-stating language, but fact-stating is only one kind of grammatical language. “We also ask questions, give orders, write poems, tell jokes, perform ceremonies, and so on.”35 An adequate theory of meaning should apply to all meaningful uses of language, but verification principles by their self-definition cannot cover such uses.36 Problem of Meaning—Quine The problem of meaning, identified by Willard Quine as the indeterminancy of translation, is a comprehensive attack on the three standard philosophical views about meaning. Quine denies that the analytic-synthetic basis of the three theories of meaning, summarized above, is determinate. For him, the analytic-synthetic distinction “does not resemble the red-orange distinction. It resembles rather the witch-nonwitch distinction, which fails to distinguish anything since there are no witches.37 In Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” “questions of meaning concern analyticity, synonymy, and entailment. Questions of fact concern the way the world is.”38 There is no firm boundary between fact and meaning. “That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith.”39 Quine agrees that there are “such things as accepting a sentence (as true), desiring a sentence (to be true), thinking a sentence (true),”40 but he denies that linguistic expressions have meaning because of analytic truths, as the semiotic theorists claim. He argues that adequate accounts of translation, sentential attitudes, introspection, ambiguity, and so forth, are not explicated by the alleged analytic-synthetic distinction. For Quine’s alternative philosophy of language, the centerpiece is semantic holism.41

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Peirce’s Triadic Semiosis Charles Sanders Peirce (1859-1914) transformed semiotics and established its boundaries for the twentieth century. He replaced the dyadic character of the three theories of meaning with the triadic sign relation; linguistic expressions that are considered inert entities (linear) become a systemic process called semiosis. Reasoning is not limited to induction and deduction, but abduction is added to account for human creativity; and mathematical logic is understood in pragmatic terms. Peirce’s systemic theory of signs was central to the emergence of tensive semiotics, that is, accounting for the emotive dimensions of meaning. “Rather than presenting semantic concepts as something fixed, an end product,” the tensive structure “accounts for the dynamic process whereby meaning (l’intelligible) emerges from sensations and perception (le sensible).”42 While ‘infinite semiosis’ is not Peirce’s term, his interpreters typically use this characterization to describe Peirce’s neverending signification process of representation, generation, and interpretation in knowledge production.43 Another component of Peirce’s semiosis is “his early awareness that deduction and induction do not exhaust the field of reasoning; a logical account of inquiry must also accommodate the invention and discovery of ideas or hypotheses, a form of inference that Peirce names ‘abduction.’”44 Peirce argues against the prevailing semiotics that treats the correspondence of signs with external facts as a sufficient account of truth. In human cognition, when we are confronted with facts contrary to our expectations, an explanation is thus required: “A hypothesis then has to be adopted, which is likely in itself, and renders the facts likely. The step of adopting a hypothesis as being suggested by the facts is what I call abduction.”45 The classic formulation of abductive reasoning is in Peirce’s Harvard lecture of 1903: “The surprising fact, C, is observed. But if A were

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true, C would be a matter of course. Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.”46 Abductive reasoning yields plausible conclusions but does not verify them as do mathematical deduction and scientific induction. In abduction, a discursive explanation is competent if it gives an adequate explanation of the relevant circumstances. In Peirce’s terms, “Facts cannot be explained by a hypothesis more extraordinary than these facts themselves; and of the various hypotheses the least extraordinary must be adopted.”47 In referring to the overall context of human inquiry, Peirce called pragmatism “the logic of induction,” claiming that the pragmatic modality provides the necessary and sufficient procedural rules for abduction as an epistemological system. As Peirce states it in his “Pragmatism as the Logic of Induction:” “Consider what effects might conceivably have practical bearings;…then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”48 The meaning of linguistic expressions is determined by the consequences of their application. Peirce equates the meaning of conceptions with the conceivable practical implications of their possible effects. Abduction’s purpose is to shape information consent and advance inquiry.49 The power of abductive reasoning is determined by the degree to which our abductions are successful or have been in the past. The history of ideas provides us with multiple examples of intelligent abductive conclusions and productive hypotheses. Received conclusions and canonical texts are incorporated at various points into the retroductive process.50 With the logic of abduction, Peirce adds substantially to innovation and discovery; and the idea of discovery systematized in abduction is the justification for moving from ethical principles to the concept of normative ideals in the ethic of anthropological realism. Creativity, judgment, and historicity are the properties of reasoning necessary for normative formation. Abductive reasoning “examines all of the norms which guide us

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in formulating new hypotheses and deciding which of them to take seriously.”51 The reconstructions of semiosis are evaluated by “credibility amongst peers in terms of richness of implications, of the capacity to generate connections among disparate elements, of freshness of insights and scope.”52 Peirce’s elaborations of abduction are most extensive in his work on metaphor as a discursive sign. “The metaphorical signifying process…is a structural-semantic horizon where the content of the metaphorical sign is emphasized and described as a structural relationship within a system of cultural entities and semantic markers” that “form an open or dynamic series of interpretants.”53 In the unlimited sign-exchange process of semiosis, metaphor as a new relation-of-meaning enhances creative imagination and visualization of the whole.54 The role of metaphors is the expansion of thought. The metaphor fills out a lexicon by delivering names to new experiences and ideas. “Metaphors, for Peirce, are distinct from analogies; in the growth of thought analogies are effective primarily for science and metaphors primarily (not exclusively) for art.”55 Peirce sees art as an alternative way of approaching the world, a form of knowledge that he defended against his contemporary logicians: “Bad poetry is false, I grant; but nothing is truer than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for.”56 A metaphor grows to symbolicity, “but its terms have had their conventions altered by association with the metaphor and its referent. Thus, for example, ‘bright’ is now synonymous with ‘intelligent’ in some cases.”57 In “Evolutionary Love,” Peirce describes the activity of artistic or aesthetic abduction: “It is not by dealing out cold justice to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow, but by cherishing and tending them as I would my garden.”58

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When Peirce defined metaphors as iconic signs, he did so as a realist. In fact, for Peirce, an all-encompassing realism is at work: “A potential qualitative mode of being, a factual mode of being, and finally, a law-like mode of being are admitted to being real; consequently then, their being is the case independently of what anyone happens to think, wish or feel.”59 “The conclusion of abduction, which contains the hypothesis, is not in the indicative, but in the interrogative mood;” however, abduction “advances the hypothesis not as…a mere idea, but as an idea worth investigating in order to determine its truth.”60 The metaphorical dialectic is not an isolated form of reasoning, but is embedded within the larger horizon of inquiry. “The real force of metaphor is to add something new, something possible,” but simultaneously “the metaphor has a cognitive function recognizing or introducing order within the encyclopedic universe....The metaphor is a cognitive mechanism with the process of abduction that can represent the dynamics of the real and in the end the very truth.”61 Even the most imaginative metaphors emanate from real possibilities; analogies cannot be invented, they can only be discovered. Summary Within Eco’s Framework Umberto Eco (1932-2016)—philosopher, historian and novelist—represents the major contributions to the philosophy of language described above. Professor of Semiotics in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Bologna (primarily),62 his interpretive semiotics summarizes the semiotic legacy since Saussure.63 Eco’s establishing the philosophical character of semiotics, its centrality to cultural critique, and its constituency in human language are of on-going importance in clarifying the hybridity of anthropological realism. Eco’s semiotics as a philosophical enterprise is an alternative to

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constructions of knowledge centered on mathematics, logic, and empirical data. Ugo Volli’s “The Origins of Umberto Eco’s Semio-Philosophical Project” demonstrates that, for Eco, studies in the functioning of signs ought to be philosophical research. Philosophical concepts regarding reality and idea formation take shape in signification.64 Saussure’s union of signifier and signified as fundamentally a linguistic claim tends to reduce to textuality. On the other hand, “In the premises of the concept of sign, redefining it according to Peirce’s analysis from a philosophical point of view,” Eco’s theory of concept formation “becomes close to ontology.”65 In explaining what it means to mean something, semiotics for Eco is best understood “as a way of doing philosophy, that is, of producing a theory of the structure of reality, of its meaning, or the conditions of its knowledge.”66 The disciplinary position of sign production is not social science but the philosophy of language.67 Thus sign production in semiotics as a philosophical vocation complicates the consideration of real objects. As the “first logical interpretant of the phenomena that suggest them,”68 the question no longer reduces to the way empirical phenomena operate. Notions such as “universal structure” and “absence” and “formal systems” have a legitimate place in the organization of reality. If so, asks Eco, exactly what is their place? Are they necessary for the foundation of knowledge regarding what are classified as social facts? All systematic semiotics needs hypotheses, axioms, products and theory—their status and conceptualizations are philosophical in character. Eco’s Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language has the concept of encyclopedia as its theoretical center. Encyclopedia “can be succinctly defined as the overarching horizon of knowledge to which we all make reference in order to make sense of and to interpret any kind of text.…Each of us is familiar with a fairly limited section but which in its totality is the

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sum total of all human knowledge.”69 Consistent with the definition of humans as cultural beings in Chapter Four, sign systems for Eco “entail culture-specific classifications of the world which influence the way people think, behave, and act as well as their perceptions of ‘natural-ness.’”70 In his Introduction to A Theory of Semiotics, Eco identifies the need for a general semiotic theory based on his claims that “the whole of culture must be studied as a semiotic phenomenon” and that “all aspects of culture can be studied as the contents of a semiotic activity.”71 Semiotics, which investigates all cultural processes, examines them in terms of their “underlying structure or signification system.”72 As a cultural critic, Eco develops the theme of aesthetics with wide-ranging research on contemporary experimental art and the mass culture industry. To these topics Eco adds architectural images and then literature.73 In his analysis of aesthetic texts, such as those of informal painting, aleatory music, and Joyce’s poetics, Eco’s essays focus on the formation of culture as a matrix of thought. In Kant and the Platypus, he examined the relationship between reality and visual language, focusing on the question of perception in the meaning-making of visual semiotics.74 Eco addresses the universal modality of the preceding Chapters One to Five, as a key theme in semiotics, giving it a conceptual basis without debilitating dualisms. The process of signification is primordial to the human species. From his work on semiotic theorizing it is obvious “that sign systems the world over are constructed with the same innate semiotic tendencies as Peirce emphasized” (iconicity, indexicality, interpretants).75 In Eco’s functionalist terms: “Once society exists, every function is automatically transformed into a sign of that function.”76 Eco’s theory of abduction, as with Peirce, analyzes the abductive reasoning process within the larger horizon of knowledge systems and provides a philosophical justification for this kind

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of reasoning. Justifying abduction is the idea that meaningful language is itself abductive (“meta-abduction” he labels it). Humans reason abductively as if abduction were a valid form of reasoning. In meta-abduction, it is non-controversial that the world of experience is the same as our first-level abduction. In other words, Eco, following Peirce, sees metaphor as structural to the process of understanding in all known languages. The potentiality of metaphor in human sign systems has instantiated human being.77

Section 2: Philosophical Hermeneutics The trajectory of semiotics in the philosophy of language centers on meaning. Another composite of ideas in the philosophy of language, philosophical hermeneutics, is organized around interpretation. Hermeneutics studies the interpretive process. Hermeneutics as the theory and practice of interpretation (Greek hermenia [noun], hermeneuein [verb])78 investigates “the ways in which we select and marshal evidence, and the types of understanding that we bring to bear on evidence,…such as the artefacts of our human existence.”79 Presuming that hermeneutics is a pervasive condition of human well-being, hermeneutics explicates this fundamental phenomenon and assesses its significance. Greek philosophy in the classical period separated the interpretive process from linguistic expressions as a whole, identifying hermenia as an isolatable element within the epistemological domain. For Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics, hermeneia (in this case, knowledge governing moral action) belongs to the higher operations of the mind but is not theoretical knowledge (episteme); nor is it practical skill (techne) since it concerns more than utility. In Plato’s Ion, regarding Ion of Ephesus, the young poet claiming merely to recite Homer, Plato calls poets “spokesmen (hermenes) of the gods” and the rhapsodists who cite Homeric poems are labeled “spokesmen

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for spokesmen (hermeneon hermenes)80 Both uses of language—the poet’s creation and the rhapsodist’s recital—are interpretive in nature. Greek thinkers understood the proportions and substance of the hermeneutical task, so that with hermeneutike techne (the hermeneutical art) in Plato the faint outline of a theoretical enterprise emerges.81 The next major phase occurred around the BC-AD watershed. Often called traditional hermeneutics, patterns developed early in the Christian era prevailed generally through the eighteenth century.82 The canonical authority of the Old Testament needed vindication for both Jews and Christians. Debates occurred on numerous levels, but finally revolved around problems of translation. Rabbinic casuistry, Qumranian eschatological exegesis, Alexandrian and Antiochian schools—all assumed different approaches to the Old Testament’s authority in a New Testament era.83 These disputations gave hermeneutics a definite character: it emphasized authoritative literature, the sacred especially; and interest narrowed to the exegesis of written texts, to lexicography rather than to the theory of interpretive understanding. Nineteenth Century Reformation For the philosophy of language, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) sought to establish general hermeneutics as the art of understanding.84 In the process, he provided a major redirection of the field by reformulating the hermeneutical enterprise. His work freed hermeneutics from its medieval preoccupation with sacred texts and he returned it to the early Greek discovery of interpretive consciousness. He shared Hellenic Greek discontent with less specific terms such as speech, grammar, expression, and explanation, viewing interpretation as more than a grammatical matter. It was for him basically a psychological moment in which hearers or readers experience the mental life

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from which linguistic expressions arise. But in emphasizing the idea of “intuitive grasp” Schleiermacher was overwhelmingly psychologistic. The hermeneutic goal for him was the reconstruction of the author’s mental experience. Yet Schleiermacher’s scholarship marks a turning point in hermeneutical development. Hermeneutics emerges from its parentage in classical philology and biblical exegesis. His Hermeneutik pointed the theory of interpretation in a new scholarly direction, toward becoming a coherent sub-discipline of the philosophy of language. Not until the gifted philosopher, Wilhelm Dilthey, as the nineteenth century closed, did Schleiermacher’s work advance significantly.85 The Problem of Historicism Under Schleiermacher’s influence, Dilthey observes, hermeneutics had penetrated to an “analysis of understanding (Verstehen) as the sure point of departure for working out the (hermeneutical) rules.”86 Verstehen became, for Dilthey, the important issue to be pursued and much of his career revolved around treating this notion philosophically. He rejected the idea that understanding is a matter of subjective or mystical intuition (Gemut). Dilthey put Verstehen into the framework of Erlebnis (“lived experience”); Verstehen for him was subject to the epistemological controls of evidence, logic, and demonstration. As the problem of understanding became defined, Dilthey realized that experience has an inner temporality that is not imposed extrinsically. With that insight, he extracted himself from Schleiermacher’s tendency to psychologize. Dilthey considered historicality (Geschichtlichkeit) as the affirmation of the temporality of human experience. To bring epistemological sophistication to the concept Verstehen, Dilthey turned to those academic disciplines that formally concerned Erlebnis (history, art, literature, political

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science, economics, and law). He reasoned that if concrete historical experience was the basic reality, that must be true of the Geisteswissenschaften also. Over against the natural sciences, Dilthey emphasized this fundamentally different way of human knowing, “understanding:” “We explain nature, we understand the life of the soul.”87 Thus Dilthey viewed the systematic study of Verstehen as the core matter for all the Geisteswissenschaften. In formulating a truly humanistic methodology for the humanities, Dilthey turned to hermeneutics for establishing its epistemological character and limits. Dilthey’s critics raised the problem of historicism. Wilhelm Windelband, his student Heinrich Rickert, and Edmund Husserl formulated their critiques in different terms, but their central concern was historical relativism. For the neo-Kantians Windelband and Rickert, Dilthey’s historicism reduced normative philosophical questions to matters of empirical, historical fact, thereby leading to relativism and skepticism. Dilthey, Windelband, and Rickert agreed there is a class of disciplines (Geisteswischenshaften) distinct from the natural sciences and that they are capable of objective knowledge. They agreed that philosophy ought to explicate the conditions of validity in these disciplines. But in also agreeing that the relationship between philosophy and the historical disciplines ought to be founded on a new basis, they clashed on a variety of fundamental issues: Dilthey’s regarding psychological matters as fundamental to the human sciences; the difference between philosophy which aims toward general laws and the ideographic history that portrays individuals in unique and unrepeatable circumstances; and the nature of the boundaries between life and knowledge.88 In response, Dilthey rejected the concept of psychologism, focusing instead on the centrality of inner experience, that is, the totality of psychic life. He rejected the nomothetic-ideographic distinction on the grounds that the human sciences do not isolate individuals from overall regularities.89 On the

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relation between life and knowledge, the question is whether the whole human being in everyday life is addressed, or whether artificially constructed models or particulars are the focus.90 As Katherina Kinzel concludes: “While Dilthey thinks that philosophy needs to be informed by history and psychology, he does not claim that all normative issues reduce to matters of historical or psychological fact. Therefore, it is not immediately apparent what precisely about Dilthey’s philosophy motivates the problem of historicism as relative.”91 Husserl later questions Dilthey’s reductionism to history. He characterizes Dilthey as understanding philosophy as an expression of historicist worldviews, as the creator of worldviews. In his “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” Husserl contends that Dilthey’s historicism fails to recognize the boundary between empirical history and normative validity: “By violating this boundary, it reduces philosophical systems to expressions of their time and age, eroding the scientific aspiration of philosophy.”92 Dilthey responds that his hermeneutics does not historicize philosophical thought; philosophy does have a timeless essence, but must be balanced with the historically contextual. Philosophy is a historical product in the sense that it expresses its age.93 The function of philosophy is to conceptually clarify and justify the pre-theoretical worldviews that are grounded in life itself. For Dilthey, what distinguishes philosophical expressions from religion and poetry is that philosophy proceeds conceptually to articulate worldviews in a united and rationally justified manner; therefore, philosophy has an ahistorical essence. While debates over the problem of historicism continue until today, with a plurality of meanings and often without negative connotations, Dilthey’s hermeneutical appeal to life-world consciousness94 has been secured as a fundamental component of interpretativeness.95 Dilthey’s preoccupation with classificatory matters prevented him from fully demonstrating the richness

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and scope of history for the theory of understanding, but he renewed philosophical hermeneutics and advanced it epistemologically.96 Hermeneutics as the Interpretation of Existence Martin Heidegger combined phenomenology with the hermeneutics of Wilhelm Dilthey, contending that coexistence is the basic ontological condition of being human. To develop the field of hermeneutics and the theory of interpretation for the continental philosophy of language, he eschewed terms like consciousness, ego, and human nature as scholastic essentialism and thus inadequate for an in-depth account of being. He concentrated instead holistically on Being-in-the-World (Dasein), with language the central concept for understanding Dasein existentially without subject-object and individual-social dichotomies. For Heidegger, the most dramatic feature of language is its projectivity, the idea that humans are thrown into the world from the beginning prior to a comprehension of the world. In his Being and Time, only upon naming—called the “articulation of intelligibility”—does one have access to Dasein. The idea of direct human agency, with its presumptions of causing and imposing, is too unsophisticated to account for human existence. Heidegger’s philosophy of language defines agency in contextual terms—nurturing, inducing something to come forth, but always in the “letting/letting it happen” modality. His interpretive knowledge replaces the thinness of neutrality and various versions of technological determinism. Claims to static absolute truth is a “repression of our temporality; the claim to infinite truth results from the negation of finitude. But it belongs to finitude that it remains finite, especially when the claim to infinitude is made.”97

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Philosophical hermeneutics with Heidegger begins with the notion of relationship, insisting as he does that existence, understanding and meaning are based on a prior relationship of human belongingness. Subjectivity is no longer to be understood as Cartesian isolated consciousness, but is a moment of the structure of meaning and interpretation that is human existence. Understanding is mediated through a process of interpretation. The world is always and already meaningful. It is not the creation of human subjectivity projected onto a meaningless reality. Subjectivity is redefined as being-interpreted. Understanding is an event of language rather than a construction of consciousness. Gadamer and the Hermeneutic Universe Hans-Georg Gadamer expanded on Heidegger’s existentialism, and in Truth and Method proposed a complete hermeneutics for the philosophy of language.98 Language for him is the medium in which substantive understanding and communal agreement take place. The quest for understanding through language is not merely a methodological problem but a fundamental characteristic of human existence.99 For Gadamer, human life is linguistically constituted, that is, a meaningful world cannot exist apart from language. The world is meaningful because it is presented to us in lingual interaction. Gadamer foregrounds the dialectical character of language with understanding an enactment process. Linguistic signs are “not a movement from potency to act but a movement from act to act, and thus there is no sign without the word and text that carries us.”100 Linguistic expression is not a lens through which we see truth, but the dynamic that enfolds our very being. Understanding is linguistic, because language embodies the sole means for living out the human relationships that comprise the human order. What is said in language constitutes the common world in which we

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live. Thus the aphorism reflecting Gadamer: “Beingness is understood in language.” Understanding, when linguistically formed, must engage the whole of language for the entire being to arrive that language brings to expression. Gadamer’s hermeneutics is ontological in that it is rooted in our interpretive mode of being. We do not understand through an artificial method above the object of knowing, but we understand in and through the phenomena in which we are immersed.101 We understand the meaningful world of our existence, “having interpreted it already, as a kind of virtual embodiment of the world that captures us and grasps hold of us in order to reveal itself.…We understand the world because language places us in a position of belonging to it.”102 Understanding is first-of-all self-encounter, not epistemology plus application. The lingual sign is not a movement from potency to act (sight to world) but a movement from act to act (understanding in saying), and thus there is no sight without the word and text that carries us.”103 We do not think apart from language and history. The language that makes thought possible has a historical context. Gadamer says, What has come down to us by way of verbal tradition is not left over but given to us, told us—whether through direct retelling, in which myth, legend, and custom have their life, or through written tradition, whose signs are immediately clear to every reader who can read them. We are always affected by history. It determines in advance both what seems to us worth inquiring about and what will appear as an object of investigation.104

In other words, language embeds human consciousness in tradition: “Understanding is the concretion of historically affected consciousness.”105 As Grondin concludes, “Historically affected consciousness is subtly ambiguous. On the one hand, it

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means that present-day consciousness is itself shaped—indeed constituted—by history. On the other hand, the concept suggests that becoming conscious of being so effected is a task always to be undertaken.”106 In the third part of Truth and Method, Gadamer examines the implications of the theological phrase verbum interius for philosophical hermeneutics. The verbum interius was developed by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas who invoked the “procession of the inner word” as the heart of Trinitarian-Incarnation theology. As Gadamer puts it, “I myself relied on Augustine’s teaching of the inner word.”107 For Gadamer, that God is embodied in flesh without loss of divinity is “strangely different from the embodiment of the Greek gods,”108 and thereby challenges the Western tendency to sever truth and word from history and culture.109 Gadamer argues that most of the history of philosophy, with the exception of Trinitarian theory, has to some degree or another taught that word and concept are separate. “Thus the word in this common thinking” is considered “an instrument which guides our way to knowledge but itself does not show or speak truth.”110 In Gadamer’s reading of church history, the verbum interius “when taken to its conclusion, means that there is no act of intellect divorced from the world,” and that the word is a “living realization” of the concept.111 The verbum interius is knowledge that does not appear as mastery of an idea, but an immersion in that idea. In Jean Grondin’s personal terms, “In a formulaic and unsophisticated way, I asked Gadamer to explain more exactly what the universal aspect of hermeneutics consisted in. After everything I had read, I was prepared for a long and rather vague answer. He thought the matter over and answered concisely and conclusively, thus, ‘in the verbum interius.’”112 Truth and Method’s last section is the “Universal Aspect of Hermeneutics.” What is at issue is the universality of a dimension of human existence, not Gadamer’s philosophy. The claim

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that language and understanding are universal means that they constitute the human universe, that is the totality in which we live as finite beings.”113 Our experience of the world universally is realized by the verbal dialectic of question and answer. “We are trying to keep in mind the indissoluble unity of thought and language; we encounter it in the hermeneutical phenomenon, namely as the unity of understanding and interpretation.”114 “The universality of language consists not in creating what is to be said but rather in that understanding can always be sought through…dialogue from which every expression receives its life.…For this reason philosophical hermeneutics recognizes no principle higher than dialogue.”115 Ricoeur’s Reconstructive Hermeneutics Paul Ricoeur advances philosophical hermeneutics on two fronts and is definitive on a third. He gives depth and clarity to the issue of temporality, and is multifaceted on selfhood. In addition, with particular relevance to normative ideals in Chapter Five, his hermeneutics of moral realism answers the question of normativity’s source, and deals with the larger philosophical issues of normativity’s justification and character in the era of Heisenberg’s uncertainty. Ricoeur describes his reconstructive hermeneutics and the philosophy-of-language tradition he represents as philosophical anthropology.116 For William Schweiker, “Ricoeur’s legacy is to inspire others to undertake the unending labor of interpretation, without false dreams of a complete account of the human project and yet emboldened by the dignity and complexity of our mortal being.”117 In Ricoeur’s own summary, his hermeneutics reveals our choices “in how to push the rock of Sisyphus up again, restore the ontological ground that methodology has eroded away.”118 The concept of temporality is central to Ricoeur’s hermeneutic interpretation. He posits a narrative framework in his

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Time and Narrative with its richness in portraying temporal signification, as an antidote to the false dilemma of considering time either in cosmic or phenomenological terms. Ricoeur inaugurates his three-volume treatise119 as follows: “The world unfolded by every narrative work is always a temporal world. Or, as will often be repeated in the course of this study: time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal existence.”120 The threefold mimesis of Time and Narrative universalizes Aristotle’s mimesis in his Poetics.121 Mimesis (the mimetic function) “is applicable not solely to tragic plots, as in Aristotle, but to the whole narrative province and especially to its two major branches of primary interest to Ricoeur: fictional narrative and historical narrative.”122 Narration, written and oral, combines history and fiction in the construction of life stories. Ricoeur, therefore, insists that a philosophical model for understanding human existence must employ a composite temporal framework. Philosophy can examine the difficult recursive loop back to the particular, only after establishing generalizations that are holistically credible, arguing as he does against historiographic semiology, such as Dilthey’s, that positions narrative logic prior to human action. Philosophical hermeneutics from Schleiermacher through Gadamer has agreed on the intersubjective relational self, finding an intellectual path between the rational cogito of Descartes and the skeptical anti-cogito of Nietzsche.123 Likewise, selfhood is an issue throughout Ricoeur’s corpus, with multi-leveled exploration of human beings as willing actors from his early Freud and Philosophy to Fallible Man and Oneself as Another,124 until his last lectures. He challenged Heidegger’s view that Being is accessible through Dasein which understands the self through its own possibilities. He argued instead that the meaning of Being is always mediated through an ongoing

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process of interpretation. “The self does not know itself immediately, but only indirectly by the detour of the cultural signs of all sorts which are articulated on the symbolic mediations which always already articulate actions.”125 The self-knowledge gained through the hermeneutical process is “thereby always on the way to ontology.”126 Going beyond the epistemological subject, identity is composed of two levels: idem (self-same) and ipse (collective). The self’s idem-identity gives the self its sapio-temoral sameness; the dynamic ipse-identity gives selfhood its ability for change.127 Our idem-identity is never transparently our own. It is embedded in relations with others (ipse) and we do not have final control over those relational contexts. For Ricoeur, otherness is the heart of selfhood, while he resists both “alienating distance” and “participatory belonging.”128 In the tenth study of Oneself as Another, “What Ontology in View?,” he develops the thesis that alterity is polysemic, not unilateral as in Levinas. In Ricoeur’s summary of alterity across and within intersubjectivity, “Man is this plural and collective unity in which the unity of destination and the difference of destinies are to be understood through each other.”129 In addition to clarifying the concepts of temporality and selfhood for philosophical hermeneutics, Ricoeur is conclusive on normativity. For Ricoeur, the moral life is teleological: “A definition of the ethical perspective is aiming at the good life with and for others in just institutions.”130 Human existence to be morally acceptable must pass through the well-being of others and distinguish model institutions from oppressive ones. “The freedom to pursue various life plans thereby unfolds within obligatory relations to others and within institutions subject to the strictures of justice.”131 Ricoeur’s preoccupation is the source of moral obligation. He understands the connection between our humanity and obligation through an interpretation of what it means to be agents

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even when our relations are asymmetrical in power. Our very being issues an obligatory claim on our humanity to respect and enhance life. The realm of the moral life is the medium through which to understand being human. Beingness is obligatory; we obligate through promise-making and thus discover the meaning of being agents. The source of obligation is at the conjunction of the power to act and the promissory form of self-relation to others. For Ricoeur, obligation makes us human while avoiding a reduction of obligation to autonomy. Seeking the good life with and for others within just institutions becomes the living interpretation of being human.132 The moral life is the hermeneutic of meaning of our active selfhood. This is a “Ricoeurian reformulation of Kant’s dictate that the moral life is about making oneself ‘worthy to be happy.’”133 Obligation as normativity’s source entails the idea of attestation, that is, “the assurance of being oneself in acting and suffering.”134 To attest to oneself in its intersubjective dimension is to believe in one’s ability to act responsibly to others. Our indebtedness to others includes the duty to engender self-esteem which arises from a primitive reciprocity of benevolence. Thus attestation of oneself is not an empty affirmation, but indicates something fundamental about human agency, without the pretense of the will-to-power in idealism. Believing in our capacity to be conciliatory replaces indignation with “reflective equilibrium,” while being suspicious of finalities. Ricoeur’s anthropology reflects the moral realism of philosophical hermeneutics as a whole: “Fallible creatures who work evil and yet can be responsible before the demands of justice, incomplete beings who face death and yet can exceed our timeliness through imagination and hope, speaking beings who can promise to abide within the bonds of fidelity, such creatures can and do encounter...the structures of lived reality even while the meaning of being human demands continual interpretation and assessment.”135

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Section 3: Linguistic Semantics and Truth In linguistic semantics, philosophers of language investigate how language and meaning relate to truth and the world; they study the cognitive structure of meaning. The task of semantic theory is to categorize lingual expressions in a systematic fashion in order to demonstrate how the truth properties of sentences are constructed from their components. To know a sentence’s meaning is to know the conditions under which the sentence is actually true. Semantics is commonly divided into the study of formally specified languages in the abstract, and written and spoken natural languages. Semantic statements provide recursive accounts of the ways in which progressively more complex discourses depend on the interpretations assigned to their elements. Tarski’s Semantic Conception of Truth Alfred Tarski developed the semantic theory of truth beginning in the 1930s.136 The theory has two dimensions. First, it is a formal construction of truth rooted in set theory and the concept of satisfaction in mathematical logic. Truth is to be defined as a special case of satisfaction relations. The meaningful lexical components of sentences that satisfy the simplest sentence functions define satisfaction. Discourse formulas are satisfied or not, depending on the manner in which the free variables are interpreted in formally given domains. Second, Tarski’s semantics elaborates the philosophical notion of truth, principally that of Aristotle. In Tarski’s words, “We should like our definition to adhere to the classical Aristotelian conception of truth expressed in the well-known words of his Metaphysics: ‘To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is or of what is not that it is not, is true.’”137 In contemporary terms, the truth of a sentence consists

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in its correspondence to reality. “The definition of truth must imply this equivalence: The sentence ‘snow is white’ is true if, and only if, snow is white.”138 Tarski was particularly concerned to overcome the semantic paradoxes regarding truth in natural languages, such as the Liar Paradox. In the ancient version attributed to Epimendes, a Cretan says, “I am lying now.” If he is actually lying, this sentence is true, but if he is not lying, the sentence is false. Hence, there is a contradiction, with The Liar’s Paradox employing a linguistic expression that asserts its own falsity. This is a self-referential use of a semantic concept, that in this case is a falsehood. For Tarski, the only solution is to eliminate self-referentiality. And to banish self-referentiality without circularity, the concept “true” must belong to another language, that is, a metalanguage. Such a language must have a well-defined set of elementary expressions, a mathematical set of formulas and a logical basis. Tarski considered his formalized truth definition to answer a central problem in epistemology, that of self-referentiality. According to Donald Davidson,139 replacing the idea of sentence verification with that of the sentence’s truth condition is a superior theory of meaning. His main argument is that compositionality is needed to account for our understanding of lingual expressions, and a sentence’s truth properties are its most explicitly compositional feature.140 Tarski’s semantic theory is important in the philosophy of language for clarifying the fundamental issues of referentiality. Several important philosophers have changed their views under Tarski’s influence, namely Kaimier Ajdukiewicz, Rudolf Carnap, and Karl Popper.141 And a host of philosophers of language have adopted his semantic theory or improved its specifics. However, of major importance to Chapters One to Three of this book, Tarski’s linguistic semantics is trapped in the realist anti-realist debates. Tarski is at odds with the cultural being of

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semiotics and of philosophical hermeneutics in declaring that his truth-definition is neutral, independent of ontological or epistemological views such as idealism or naturalism, and requiring no commitment to consequences. While that philosophical neutrality is an antidote to epistemological foundationalism, it engenders the semantic realism/semantic anti-realism polarity. For example, semantic anti-realists such as Michael Dummet reject Davidson’s [the Vienna Circle’s] realism. The controversy revolves around the relationship of truth conditions and assertability conditions. Anti-realists claim that since assertability is governed by intuitionist logic, there are no sufficient and necessary conditions for asserting any mathematical sentence; whether sentences are true is unprovable. However, for realists the meaning of sentences is given by their truth conditions. Since the incompleteness theorem concerns more general epistemological forms of realism, the relation between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge is unresolved. Truth-Definition in Natural Languages Tarski was skeptical about successfully providing a truthdefinition for ordinary languages. Natural languages are closed, limited to describing the semantic characteristics of truth within the sentence’s own elements. Tarski’s semantic theory of truth is only credible with a formal language. In Donald Davidson’s “Semantics for Natural Language”142 by contrast, Tarski-style rules can be utilized to describe the semantic structure of languages already in use. His methodological goal was to identify the logical forms of natural language sentences from which the truth properties of those sentences could be derived from their semantically relevant parts. To replace the way truth is defined within an artificial system of formal logic, Davidson considered a theory of grammar to be necessary, and such theories have been supported independently. He contended that

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the systematic knowledge of truth in this form would yield a theory of meaning, meaning understood as the condition under which lingual expressions are true or false. His strategy was to embrace Quine’s rejection of analyticity, synonymy, and ordinary notions of meaning,143 substituting a systematic interpretation of truth in natural languages instead. In order to avoid mathematical logic in his analysis and understanding of natural languages, Davidson treated truth as a primitive, rather than a formally defined concept. While Paul Grice’s “Logic and Conversation” is skeptical about any meaningful conflict between logic and natural languages,144 Davidson’s particular theory to reconcile them faces the objections that it cannot explain expressions that depend on context (such as pronouns), and truth and falsehood are not determined by a sentence’s component clauses. Linguistic philosophy (also known as ordinary language philosophy) responded radically to the essentialism of truth-conditioned theories applied to human languages. Instead of presuming the idea that all entities have intrinsic properties discernible by reason, this philosophical movement contended that the significance of concepts is revealed by linguistic practice. The principal goal is an in-depth analysis of concepts rather than constructing a metaphysical system. The model semantic theory of abstract logical connectives does not capture the meanings of their natural language counterparts. Instead of formal theories of truth as theories of meaning based on representative entities, the meaning of truth is known by the different ways truthfulness actually functions in ordinary language. Though heavily influenced by Wittgenstein at Cambridge,145 ordinary language philosophy was largely developed at Oxford in the 1940s by J. L. Austin and colleagues.146 The later Wittgenstein repudiated the notion of ideal languages. Constructing them achieves nothing of philosophical interest. No inerrant foundation of meaning exists that a formal language can make

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transparent. And in statements that resonate with oral-languagephilosophy generally, Wittgenstein asserts: “Philosophy can in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.…What we do is try to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”147 And in his Tractatus, “All philosophy is a critique of language.”148 For Austin, language is a complex instrument with a long history that requires diligent philosophical scrutiny. “Language has evolved over many generations and the distinctions made within it, and the connections marked by it, have stood up to the long test of time of the survival of the fittest. They are ...more subtle than any you or I are likely to think up in our armchairs in an afternoon.…We are looking not merely at words, but also at the realities we use the words to talk about; we are using a sharpened awareness of, though not the final arbiter of, the phenomena. For this reason, it might be best to call this way of doing philosophy “linguistic phenomenology.”149

In Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, every linguistic practice does something with words and signs, challenging a metaphysics of language that posits denotative assertion as the essence of language and meaning. In his approach to philosophy-of-language questions, he connected those questions with the relevant claims or judgments that language-users ordinarily make, in a sufficient variety of circumstances. In his argument, failure to exploit fully the resources of ordinary language makes philosophers susceptible to seemingly forced choices and unacceptable dualisms. Austin made a number of important contributions in various areas of philosophy, such as scholarship on knowledge, oral language, action, freedom, and truth. His work on truth has played an important role in understanding the extent to which meaning is known by the sentence’s truth conditions. Austin’s essay, “Truth,” includes his distinctive

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claim about truth: “The relation between statements and facts that underwrites the truth or falsity of statements is itself underwritten by relations between sentences and types of fact, and between episodes of stating and particular facts.”150 Austin makes clear that he uses “facts” with etymological precedent to speak of particulars. Whatever combines with the facts to determine particular truth-values varies with each occasion. “The question of truth and falsehood does not turn only on what a sentence is, nor yet on what it means, but on the circumstances in which it is uttered.151 The inherited categories and distinctions embedded in ordinary language are the best guide to philosophical truth.152 Ordinary language philosophy has been charged with reducing philosophy to self-contained verbal disputes, preventing it from engagement with the material world. In another critique, ordinary concepts were said to lack the kind of structure that typically counted as systematized knowledge. Attacks also centered on the use of paradigm-case arguments in ordinary language. Such case studies were typically designed to refute skepticism. Variations on the paradigm-case arguments have been developed to prove that human beings know that they have free will, that the past is real, that induction and deduction are cogent ways of reasoning. Another objection is that the paradigm case arguments over-define reality, in the sense that they can be applied to prove that certain things exist which do not. While each of the objections has been addressed specifically, the overall response is apropos for our philosophy-of-language purposes—these objections are all rooted in semantic models of formal logic. Anita Avramides takes note of the tendency in intellectual history to confine ordinary language to a particular episode in the history of philosophy. She correctly “demonstrates the continued relevance of this work in philosophy. The question, what is the business of philosophy, is itself an important philosophical

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question.”153 At the heart of this movement lies the perennial issue of how we should proceed in philosophy—what are its conceptual boundaries, its method, the validity of its traditions? Thus, the demand of ordinary language philosophy to center always on the linguistic phenomena is of ongoing merit. Of particular relevance to this book, ordinary language philosophy contributes to the holism trajectory in the philosophy of language. It thus contradicts deflationary theories of truth that contend truth is a non-explanatory notion or in Strawson’s strong form, claiming that a statement is true simply amounts to endorsing the statement itself. Normative ideals in Chapter Five are the opposite of reductionist deflationism, identifying as they do the truth properties of the common good, cultural diversity, and wisdom. In refusing to define truth predicates out of existence, ordinary language resists the fallacy of interpreting semantic coherence as truth deflationism. Illocutionary Acts, Truth, and Moral Realism The role of truth is a central issue in John D. Searle’s theory of illocutionary acts. While it is typical in the philosophy of language to describe sentences as true or false, for Searle, sentences are not the bearers of truth. To say that a sentence is true ascribes properties of the semantic element to the syntactic sentence. Illocutionary acts, and not words or sentences, are the fundamental unit of linguistic expression. It is “the assertive class of speech acts, such as assertion, description and characterization which can be said to be true or false.” The statement made in the act of stating “is true or false, not the act of stating itself.”154 Truth is a constitutive norm of assertion. Searle rejects the mistaken dualism between a statement and truth, that is, the commitment to truth considered external to the act of stating. “There are not two things, the statement and then the commitment to truth.…It is a constitutive rule of statement-

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making that a statement is a commitment to truth. Every proposition sets a truth condition, and when the condition is satisfied, it is true.”155 The illocutionary significance of the concept of truth can be summarized by the idea of asymmetry. Truth plays a “more basic role in describing the relationship between language and reality than other terms of assessment.…The other illocutionary forms presuppose the true-false forms, but the true-false forms do not presuppose the other forms.”156 Truth differs from the other terms of speech act assessment “because the fundamental linguistic relation is representation, in the sense that propositional content sets truth conditions, and in so doing represents the state of affairs expressed by those truth conditions.”157 Thus the defining role of truth in the theory of illocutions requires a semantics of linguistic rule-systems according to which illocutionary acts are performed. Searle argues that language is a rule-governed activity, and his Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language describes semantic rules, propositions, and meaning that provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for performative acts. A complete account of assertion, for instance, would specify the conditions under which speakers intend to be subject to the relevant constitutive rules. In “The Structure of Illocutionary Acts,” Searle illustrates truth-conditions in terms of the illocutionary act of promising: I shall ask what conditions are necessary for the act of promising to have been successfully and non-defectively performed in the utterance of a given sentence. I shall attempt to answer this question by stating these conditions as a set of propositions such that the conjunction of the members of the set entails the proposition that a speaker made such a promise entails this conjunction.158

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A promise is not said to be true or false but kept or broken when the propositional content is true.159 Such speech acts as “promising” involve an implicit application of the concept of truth, as indicated by the predicate term of the utterance. The result is establishing truth criteria and truth qualifying procedures. In Searle’s terms, conventions are not adequate for this specification. Establishing the illocutionary significance of the concept of truth raises interesting philosophical questions about the normativity of truth. Given the complexities of the normative structure of linguistic expressions, Alston concludes that there are significant connections between performative assertions and truth, but generally “they have been minor and fairly obvious.”160 In his view, the most promising avenue for research is analyzing the semantics of truth-values that are explicitly expressed. The standard approach to moral realism, centered on normative facts that regulate illocutions is subject to anti-realist objections to moral facts. Therefore, Alston treats truthfulness as a constitutive norm of assertion, a strong normativity thesis in which the concept of truthfulness is isomorphic with the truth predicate. This means “taking responsibility for the truth of the propositions in question, as a necessary condition for illocutionary act performance.”161 The illocutionary role of truth and its normative modality support moral realism, in that the primary linguistic role of moral predicates (such as ought and ought not) is their reference to moral properties so that moral statements represent propositions that are true or false. In realist terms, the conceptual link between truth and assertion cannot be broken. Moral facts are indispensable to the non-causal explanation of performatives. This is the truth schema in Alston’s realist conception: “The truth of a proposition is dependent on what the proposition is about, which is usually something external to the proposition and its role in thought and discourse.”162 This is not

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a comprehensive account of truth’s properties, unlike correspondence theories with which it is associated. The moral realism entailed by illocution theory and truth’s normativity is not a commitment to metaphysical realism in which propositional content is independent of our thought and discourse. Moral realism in this form is an explicit alternative to semantic expressivism which denies that truth has substantial properties. Expressivists insist that truth is a purely formal concept, so that the character of truth discourse is limited to its expressive function. Moral language, according to expressivists, does not assert matters of fact, but rather expresses evaluative attitudes. Since there are no moral facts to represent, moral sentences do not have any truth conditions; that is, truth does not have an underlying nature or relation that can be analyzed philosophically or semantically. “Because moral words and concepts function non-descriptively, our use of them does not put us in any position to justifiably infer that there are moral facts.”163 Expressivists insist that the meaning of ethical claims is not constituted by propositions, but by the relevant non-cognitive mental states that they express. From the perspective of realist accounts of truth, an acceptable expressivism ought to supplement its negative metaphysical claims with an intellectually viable de-lineation of the truth concept in both ordinary and philosophical discourse.164 Whatever the explanatory merit of mental statism, the contribution of expressivists to the philosophy of language depends on theoretically plausible theses regarding moral judgments. Substantive Theory of Truth The preoccupation in linguistic semantics with truth has advanced the concept for the philosophy of language. Semantic theory demonstrates how the truth properties of lingual expressions are constructed systematically. However, the irresolution

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of ambiguities that occur periodically need attention for the concept of truth in this book to be theorized competently and applied satisfactorily. Tarski erroneously considered his truthdefinition to be neutral, and thus formalized “true” in terms of mathematical logic. Austin’s view that “true” is a semantic “dimension-word” is regularly ignored, with his theory of truth thus misinterpreted.165 The natural language philosophers were considered inconclusive regarding the idea of representation. Searle is critiqued for identifying locutionary meaning—abstracted from different speech acts—with what is true or false.166 The substantive theory of truth167 learns from linguistic semantics, but corrects its weaknesses by establishing four dimensions of the truth concept: representational knowledge, lingual discourse, universal validity claims, and authentic disclosure. First, substantive theory is explicit about truth as a form of representational knowledge. In semantic perspective, human expressions (oral and written) are representations; no understanding of reality exists outside the mediation of signs, symbols, and texts. Humans as cultural beings situate themselves in time and space by representing the symbolic meanings that constitute their existence. In other words, a society’s accumulated history of meanings is the representational context of one’s own representations. Therefore, truth as a normative concept is a complex socio-evolutionary construct that is simultaneously integrated and textured, both cognitively unified and semantically diverse. The moral dimension of truth in its general sense is a cultural practice of “governing what we do and want to do by a concern…for the well-being of certain sorts of beings.”168 Dialogue with our symbolically represented human existence past and present is our knowledge framework for interpreting the world. For Dietmar Mieth, truth in its representational form “is a human need in the sense that human beings do not wish to lose

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their relation to tangible reality....People owe it to each other to describe the reality about which they communicate with one another” in such a way that “they can maintain this duty reciprocally.”169 Habermas develops this idea as the concept of “communicative rationality.” His communicative rationality is not representation by means of abstract concepts; it is a normative action for which there are good reasons. In Sher and Wright’s pithy summary, “truth is the normative modality of cognitive acts” (not “of cognition;” italics added).170 “Rationality is understood to be a disposition of speaking and acting subjects that is expressed in modes of behavior for which there are good grounds.”171 This definition shifts the emphasis from the conceptual to the social. Understanding is arriving at agreement fundamental to the existence of culture. Habermas ties the meaning of speech acts to reason-giving, human language by definition involving claims that need a rationale. Speakers are intersubjectively bound to explain and justify themselves. Rather than requiring that speech acts be factually true regarding existing states of affairs, the truth predicate for Habermas is “representationally adequate,” that is, has justified acceptability under real-life conditions.172 Adequate representation of the domain of reality ought to be understood in terms of its implications for everyday practice. In this regard, Habermas’ communicative rationality is not a correspondence theory that relates propositions and the natural world metaphysically. As Richard Schantz argues, referential relationships between the thought expressed and the external world can be developed into a plausible form of correspondence without the subject-object dichotomy. “Correspondence does not require something as pretentious as a relation of structural isomorphism between statements and neutral facts, as early Wittgenstein (1922) and Russell (1912) once thought.”173 Representational correspondence is a network of interconnected sub-principles that is not physical but linguistic.174 For Habermas,

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rather than privileging external rules, his substantive theory of truth positions the moral order communally where human identity is constituted. Moral consciousness nurtured in communities of rationality and reciprocity is set effectively against the individualist utilitarianism that has dominated Western ethics since John Stuart Mill.175 Second, the substantive theory of truth is discursive in character. Substantive truth is to be understood as lingual discourse. In substantive theorizing, the quest for truth is linguistic. Hypotheses are formulated in lifeworld language, questions are asked and answered in everyday language, and knowledge is expressed in declarative form. Oral and written expressions are the vehicle through which the properties of substantive truth are discovered. Language is the modality within which the human species is reflective and reaches an understanding of which courses of action to pursue. In speech act terminology, to waive the truth presupposition is a performative self-contradiction; one cannot take that position without contradicting the discourse-rules that are tacitly accepted by participating in a discourse. The discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas and K. O. Apel is a sophisticated formulation of truth as a property of linguistic entities. In their theory of truth as narrative, moral norms are only valid if they are seen to be valid for all. Rather than making validity a result of individual conscience, as it was for Kant, tests need to be conducted in the practical discourse of those affected. Habermas explains the morally relevant truth-properties in terms of rules: nobody who could make a relevant contribution may be excluded, all participants are given an equal opportunity to make contributions, and participants must mean what they say.176 Habermas promoted the “discourse principle” that “only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse.”177 For a discursive account

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of truth, justification by “communicative rationality” serves as a truth predicate. The distinctive idea in discourse, for Apel, is the principle of argumentation that anyone who participates in an argument implicitly acknowledges potentially all claims of all members that are justified by rational argument.178 Such argumentation leads to agreed-on community-held norms. Everyone involved in argumentation should want mutual recognition and symmetrical situatedness to be the norms that would ideally regulate the narrative. Third, the substantive theory of truth is defined by universal validity claims. Substantive theory presupposes a set of beliefs about universally applicable standards for making moral judgments, these presuppositions having cross culturally valid moral content. For Habermas, to arrive at a shared understanding, speakers and hearers must agree on intersubjectively recognizable validity claims. Validity claims are assertions that the validity conditions of utterances are fulfilled. Universal validity claims for substantive theory are anthropological, in that all humans are moral beings. Morality is the recognition of an anthropological need for meaningful identity, reflected into the language of moral obligation. “Moral agents are persons who bear, and perceive their moral peers to bear, moral responsibility.”179 In substantive theory, universals are the bridging principle that makes intercultural agreement possible. In contrast to Kant’s isolated individuals who hypothetically assume the universal perspective, substantive truth’s universal scope ties universalization to social groups and to real conflicts that need resolution. There is considerable overlapping consensus across diverse cultures, though their interpretations regarding moral requirements vary dramatically among different cultures. As developed in Chapter Five of this book, moral diversity does not obscure the facilitation and enhancement of the common good. The multidimensions of language are able to accommodate the

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cultural-relativity versus unifying-principles problematic. Truth in substantive theory is both “univocal and imminent…with neither having priority over the other, and without ever claiming essentialism.”181 Fourth, the cognitive content of the substantive theory of truth is authentic disclosure, that is, disclosing the genuine underneath. Truth’s venerable definition is “the state of not being hidden; the state of being evident.” The Greek word for truth, aletheia, is variously translated as “unconcealedness,” “disclosure,” and “truth.” Substantive truth as uncovering the authentic means “to get at the core, the essence, the nub, the heart of the matter.”182 In Heidegger’s etymological analysis, the original meaning in Classical Greece was unconcealedness. In his elaboration, truth elucidates the ontological; it identifies the process of making reality intelligible for human existence. In Heidegger’s reading of the Republic and the Theatetus, Plato is seen as transforming the definition of truth from its originary “disclosure” to the “correct perception of things” (truth reduced to subject-object agreement).183 For Bonhoeffer, the disclosure idea is necessary so that penultimate issues do not gain ultimacy. He argues correctly that a truthful account is authentic regarding the discussants’ motives and the presuppositions of the context involved. For Nikolas Kompridis, in his essay “On World Disclosure: Heidegger, Habermas and Dewey,” truth means to unveil “the symbolically structured world within which we find ourselves; it refers to the disclosure of new horizons of meaning” and to opening up “previously hidden dimensions of meaning.”184 Jacques Ellul illustrates this definition of truth in his The Technological Society. His la technique goes beneath the surface to the issues underneath. The problem is not technological products per se, but la technique, the mystique of efficiency that underlies them. Regarding the truth of the matter, while constructing the technological order, moral purpose is sacrificed to maximizing technical ends. Thus

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Gunkel and Taylor’s summary: truth in the history of ideas “is an original unconcealing which correspondence derives as a secondary aspect and side effect.”185 The emphasis in heart-of-the-matter interpretation is on discovery rather than on routinized procedures. The aim in authentic disclosure is the multiple insights of retroduction rather than superficial appraisal. For interactive retroduction, situations are examined in light of their several parts, and their specific elements in light of the whole. Intellectual procedures are a dialectic between possibilities and verification, with the ethnographic and imaginary turned back onto each other. Authentic disclosure recovers the breadth of human agency in its interaction with animate and inanimate reality, reflecting the details of circumstances from the inside out. The Hutchins Commission signature, “truth in the context of meaning,” results from retroductively disclosing the symbolic world of human existence.

Conclusion The philosophy of language articulates and defends the constitutive view of linguistic expressions. In the constitutive understanding, as developed in Chapters Four and Five, language is the interpretive world through which Being is disclosed. Language does not simply describe; it constitutes meaning, and in so doing, it fundamentally shapes human experience. As a pervading condition of human well-being, the interpretive function of language clarifies the hybridity of moral realism. Charles Taylor’s The Linguistic Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity calls the constitutive approach a theory of linguistic holism, that is, a view of language “more multiform than has usually been supposed,” for it “makes possible new purposes, new levels of behavior,…and capacities for meaning-creation that go far beyond that of encoding and

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information.”186 This unity-in-multiplicity definition of human beings is the central feature of the ethic of normative ideals. The constitutive approach of this book’s hybrid realism contrasts with the instrumentalist view of the rational empiricist tradition that language is a tool to express pre-existing reality. However, since our lived experience is constructed, the questions raised are fundamental and not addressed by individualistic rationality: How do social groups struggle over definitions of what is real? What interpretations of meaning and value does public discourse represent? With ordinary language the common forum, how are important differences of outlook, ideological priorities, moral ideals, and philosophical orientation represented? In dealing with these basic questions of human existence, the philosophy of language argues for pluralism, the intercultural knowledge production that avoids the distributive fallacy of monism. In constitutive perspective, without leading to fragmentation, the principle of pluralism means understanding within divergence, and in which the relativity of cultural values does not mean moral relativism. Relativism’s “incommensurability of values across different cultures or subcultures is a selfrefuting theoretical view, as is the view that understanding across different value horizons is impossible.”187 Consistent with the constructive realism of Chapters One to Three, semantic otherness is polysemic and semiotics generates the conditions of knowledge across the history of civilization. Pluralism in the philosophy-of-language terms is an alternative to the Enlightenment West’s form of knowledge that precluded the concerns of earlier cultures and of non-Occidental peoples. While the philosophy of language presents a rationale for the ethic of normative ideals and contributes to the reconception of meta-ethics without forced choices, it does not resolve the issues of naturalism.188 Non-naturalism appears on the agenda periodically and the mathematical logic of formal

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models is critiqued in naturalist terms. But this book’s integrating theme, that morality is existentially grounded in everyday discourse, requires a philosophical defense of naturalistic immanence. Thus, the following chapter argues for a non-reductive naturalism compatible with anthropological realism, situating this paradigm in intellectual history and in philosophical reflection on humane decision-making in humanity’s finite lifetime.

Notes 1. McCarraher, The Enchantment of Mammon, 158. 2. Mou, “The Structure of Chinese Language as Ontological In-sights: A Collective-Noun Hypothesis,” 45-62. Hansen, “Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy, and Truth,” 491-519. 3. See Wagner, Language, Ontology and Political Philosophy in China. 4. Li, “The Confucian Ideal of Harmony,” 583-584. 5. Analects, 13.23. 6. Louw, “Ubuntu: An African Assessment of Religious Others,” 3442. 7. Prinsloo, “Ubuntu Culture and Participatory Management,” 43. 8. Ikeunobe, Philosophical Perspectives on Communalism and Morality in African Tradition, 54. 9. Oyeschile, “Morality and Its Rationale, The Yoruba Example,” 105. 10. Ghanian Kwasi Wiredu solidifies this conclusion from languages in general. He documents in his Cultural Universals and Particulars that the known human languages are equally complex in phonemic structure. All languages as systems include metaphor, analogue, deduction, and inference. For Wiredu, it is biologically true and conceptually important that all humans learn their native languages at the same age. Thus he concludes that the commonness of language across Homo sapiens speaks to the nature of humans generally. In Kayange’s detailed study of truth in the Chichewa language, Meaning and Truth in African Philosophy, he critiques Chewa’s idealism in Chapter 6. However, his characterization of idealism is an

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anachronistic fallacy; idealism is not a feature of Chewa indigeneity but configured by the Western subject-object dualism in epistemology. 11. See Chidammodzi and Kaphagawani, “Chewa Cultural Ideas and Systems of Thought As Determined from Proverbs.” 12. See Blackburn, “History of the Philosophy of Language.” 13. For Saussure, linguistic signs are constituted of two components: the signifier (physical objects, printed words, sounds, images) and the signified (a mental concept, the idea of a tree, for example). As Martin explains in his “Semiotics and the Media,” the basic ideas of Saussure’s signifier and signified were developed further by the French semiotician, Roland Barthes, who in the 1950s and 1960s explored the meaning of connotation, that is, when a signified becomes the signifier for another level of meaning. Consistent with the cultural definition of human being in Chapter Four, Barthes’ Mythologies examines cultural texts in the construction of meaning—advertising, a Charlie Chaplin film, women’s magazines—to exemplify mythologizing, the signification process by which a dominant value or ideology appears as the natural state of affairs. 14. Hacking, Why Does Language Matter in Philosophy?, 10. 15. The term “linguistic turn” was coined in 1960 by Gustav Bergmann, then of the Vienna Circle. Michael Drummet contends that the “linguistic turn” should be credited to Gottlob Frege’s The Foundations of Arithmetic (1844). 16. See Glock and Kalhat, “Linguistic Turn.” 17. See Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis. 18. Bronwen Martin, in his “Semiotics and the Media” explains that the leading French semiotician, Jacques Fontanille, contends that the ultimate goal of the semiotic enterprise is ideological: the discipline seeks to bring into question the fundamental value systems underlying our societies and to open a pathway toward a new humanism, 56. 19. Martinez, Communicative Sexualities: A Communicology of Sexual Experience, 72. 20. Although this view of meaning faces unanswered objections, some contemporary theories promote it as semantic internalism. 21. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding accomplished for epistemology what Isaac Newton did for the physical world—it

Anthropological Realism and the Philosophy of Language 323 captured the public mood. His Essay appeared in more editions during the eighteenth century Enlightenment than any other philosopher, including the works of Kant. 22. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III, Chapter 2; Book III, Chapter 1. 23. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book III, ii.2. 24. Martinich, The Philosophy of Language, 613-614. 25. See Peters, 6SHDNLQJ Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, Chapter 2. 26. Lycan, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction, 70. 27. See Soames, Philosophy of Language, 21. 28. Russell, Principles of Mathematics, art. 46. 29. Russell, Principles of Mathematics, art. 48. 30. Lycan, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction, 9. Samuel Leben’s Bertrand Russell and the Nature of Propositions presents a defense of Russell’s “multiple relations theory” as a theory of propositions. He revitalizes the “multiple relations theory” and argues that this version is a major contender in contemporary debates about propositions of meaning. Leben calls his reconstructions a “nopropositions theory of propositions.” 31. Lycan, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction, 3. In Strawson’s “On Referring,” the conventional English sentences that claim to state a fact about individual things or persons or events correspond to the conventional grammatical classification of subject and predicate. Some of the words spoken have a predominantly referring role, such as proper names and pronouns. 32. Soames, Philosophy of Language, 7. 33. Sense is an ontological category having its own special mode of being, constrained by language, but a phenomenon that is common to the human species. 34. Lycan, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction, 100. 35. Lycan, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction, 100. 36. In his Philosophical Investigations, Part I, Wittgenstein is an uncompromising critic of referential theory. Linguistic signs do not express relationships to abstract entities; linguistic activity is governed

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by rules and complex conventions. Piatelli-Palmarini and colleagues in their Of Minds and Language describe how Chomsky has also critiqued reference theories: “Human language appears to have no reference relation, in the sense stipulated in the study of formal systems, and presupposed—mistakenly I think—in contemporary theories of reference for language in philosophy and psychology, which takefor-granted some kind of word-object relation where the objects are extra mental….There need be no mind-independent entity to which these objects of thought bear some relation akin to reference, and apparently there is not in many simple cases (probably all),” 27. 37. Harmon, “Quine on Meaning and Existence,” 125. See Quine, From a Logical Point of View and Word and Object. 38. Martinich, Philosophy of Language, 32. 39. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” 37. 40. Harmon, “Quine on Meaning and Existence,” 125. 41. See Quine, From a Logical Point of View. 42. Martin, “Semiotics and the Media,” 72. 43. Sørenson, “The Concept of Metaphor According to the Philosophers C. S. Peirce and U. Eco,” 156. 44. Bergman, “Charles S. Peirce: Signs of Inquiry,” 412. 45. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, Vol. 2, 94-95. 46. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, Vol. 2, 231. Peirce uses both “abduction” and “retroduction” for his signification method. As Douglas Anderson observes in his “Peirce on Metaphor,” the meanings of “abduction’’ and “retroduction” are common to the reasoning process itself, that is, the quality of “leading back from,” 461. 47. Quoted in Sebeok, The Play of Musement, 31. Sørenson elaborates in his “The Concept of Metaphor According to the Philosophers C. S. Peirce and U. Eco:” “Although the metaphorical hypothesis does not have the same technical form as the scientific hypothesis,...it still must concern the same reality.” The scientific hypothesis and the metaphor “are both structurally and categorically related to the process of abduction,” 176. As Belucci puts it in his “Eco and Peirce on Abduction,” “Scientific inquiry is a dialectic between abduction and induction, which are the beginning and end of hypothetical thinking, and which are connected by the gateway of deduction,” para. 18.

Anthropological Realism and the Philosophy of Language 325 48. Peirce, Lecture VII of the 1903 Harvard Lectures on pragmatism, see parts III and IV; published in Collected Papers, Vol. 5, paras. 180-212. 49. William James regarded articles by Peirce such as “The Fixation of Belief” (1877) and especially “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878) as foundational to pragmatism. 50. In the 1901 article, “On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents,” Peirce describes scientific discovery in terms of three stages: first stage, by abduction suggesting hypotheses; the second stage, drawing deductive consequences of the hypotheses; the third stage is the induction of making experiments and testing predictions. 51. Bergman, “Charles S. Peirce: Signs of Inquiry,” 412. 52. Vander Linde, “Alternative Models of Knowledge Production,” 58. 53. Sørenson, “The Concepts of Metaphor According to the Philosophers C. S. Peirce and U. Eco,” 157. 54. Philosophers and literary theorists since Aristotle have observed a similarity between metaphors and similes, in that both express comparisons to something unexpected. Labeled the “Naive Simile Theory,” it has a taken-for-granted status in intellectual history, but, as Lycan observes in his Philosophy of Language, its literalism faces objections such as from Peirce’s relation-of-meaning semiosis, 196201. 56. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol. 1, para. 315. 57. Anderson, “Peirce on Metaphor,” 466. 58. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol. 6, para. 289. 59. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, Vol. 2, 179. 60. Bellucci, “Eco and Peirce on Abduction,” para. 18. 61. Sørenson, “The Concept of Metaphor According to the Philosophers C. S. Peirce and U. Eco,” 181. 62. Eco was the Secretary General of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. He co-founded the semiotics journal Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici. 63. In his Theory of Semiotics, Eco cites Saussure’s distinction between signifier/signified as useful, but criticizes it for not being

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properly developed; the signified, he contends, “was left half way between a mental image, a concept, and a psychological reality,” 1415. He claims to be indebted to Peirce’s theory as more comprehensive. 64. Volli, “The Origins of Umberto Eco’s Semio-Philosophical Project,” para. 12. 65. Volli, “The Origins of Umberto Eco’s Semio-Philosophical Project,” Abstract. 66. Volli, “The Origins of Umberto Eco’s Semio-Philosophical Project,” para. 26. 67. Eco characterizes some of his research as scientific. He writes in the Foreword to A Theory of Semiotics, “In the first part I have tried to propose a unified set of categories to extend the notion of signfunctions to various types of significant units—the whole attempt being governed by the principle of Ockham’s razor—which would seem to be a rather scientific procedure. In the second part, devoted to a theory of sign production, I felt obliged to proceed in an inverse direction….I was forced to adopt an anti-Ockhamistic principle. I believe that under the circumstances, this procedure is also a scientific one,” viii. Marcel Dansei responds correctly in his “Preface: Umberto Eco and Semiotics: An Enduring Legacy” that, for Eco, “semiotics can be considered to constitute a science in the etymological sense of the word (as an intellectual and practical activity).” All intellectual enterprises, scientific and philosophical, “need axioms in order for research to unfold systematically,” 1. 68. Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol. 5, para. 480. 69. Bianchi and Vassallo, “Introduction: Umberto Eco’s Interpretative Semiotics,” 7. 70. Dansei, “Preface: Umberto Eco and Semiotics: An Enduring Legacy,” 2. 71. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 22. 72. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 8. 73. Eco wrote his thesis at the University of Turin on the aesthetics of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, earning his Laurea degree in philosophy in 1954. After graduating, Eco worked for the state broadcasting station Radiotelevisione Italiana in Milan, producing cultural programming. In 1959 he published The Development of

Anthropological Realism and the Philosophy of Language 327 Medieval Aesthetics, a scholarly monograph building on his Aquinas studies. In 1962 he received his Libera Docenza degree in aesthetics. 74. As a novelist, Eco, in English, is best known for The Name of the Rose, a historical mystery combining semiotics with medieval studies and literary theory. Set in a fourteenth century monastery, Franciscan friar William of Baskerville investigates a series of murders at this monastery that is to host an important religious debate. Williams’ method is abductive in that his hypotheses are first set by abduction then developed by deduction and finally verified by induction. In Foucault’s Pendulum, his 1998 novel, three minor editors devise a plan to take over the world by a secret Order of the Knights Templar, and then become obsessed by it as real. Semiotics is embedded as the interpretive framework for aesthetic, stylistic and ideological values in the book’s narrative. 75. Dansei, “Preface: Umberto Ecco and Semiotics: An Enduring Legacy,” 2. 76. Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, 24. 77. See Belluci, “Eco and Peirce on Abduction,” para. 43. 78. The etymology of hermeneutics is disputed. Gerhard Ebeling, for instance, suggests that initially it was similar to the Latin sermo (to say) and to Latin verbum (word); see his “Hermeneutik” in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. 79. Scott-Baumann, “Reconstructive Hermeneutical Philosophy: Return Ticket to the Human Condition,” 712. 80. Plato, Ion, 534e-535a. 81. Plato, Politicus, 260D. 82. From the fourth century BC, the Stoics wondered to what degree Homeric literature remained aesthetically and morally binding. Finding it increasingly difficult to take mythology seriously—especially the caprice and immoralities of the gods—among Stoic writers of the first century AD, the allegorical mode of interpretation became the popular strategy for dealing with these reservations. In Legation to Gaius, a first century Stoic essay, the principles of interpretation are outlined. 83. Augustine’s preoccupation during the fifth century with biblical hermeneutics in De Doctrina Christiana indicates that the issues had not been resolved.

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84. In 1805 Schleiermacher first lectured at Halle on hermeneutics. Six addresses followed. Only two have been published, with Frederick Lucke in 1843 supplementing them with lecture notes and student notes. See the Sammtliche :HUNHQ Vol. 1, sect. 7. 85. See Grossberg and Christians, “Hermeneutics and the Study of Communication,” for specifics. 86. See Dilthey, Gesammelte :HUNHQ, 1924, 320. 87. Dilthey, “Introduction to the Human Sciences,” 144. 88. Windelband’s “Was ist Philosophie?” See Kinzel, “Historicism,” sect. 3. 89. Dilthey, “Introduction to the Human Sciences,” 50-51. Kant’s conception of reason is abstract because he isolates the intellect from life’s totality. As explained in Kinzel’s “Historicism,” “It makes sense that for neo-Kantians who upheld an ahistorical conception of reason and the idea that there is an absolute system of values, these aspects of Dilthey’s philosophy would qualify as psychologistic and historicist,” sect. 3. 90. See Dilthey, “Introduction to the Human Sciences.” 91. Kinzel, “Historicism,” sect. 3. 92. Kinzel, “Historicism,” sect. 4. 93. Dilthey, “The Essence of Philosophy,” 93. 94. Makkreel, “Husserl, Dilthey, and the Relation of Life-World to History,” 94. 95. Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism is directed to Hegel’s philosophy of history. Lacan’s and Foucault’s argument that each epoch has its own knowledge system within tradition is labeled “new historicism.” Post-structural immanentism rooted in the idea that culture is self-referential is developed primarily in Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetics and Logic. 96. For a comprehensive account of Dilthey’s contribution to hermeneutics, see Grondin, “Dilthey: On the Road to Hermeneutics,” in his Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 84-90. 97. Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 142. 98. Student of Heidegger, Gadamer succeeded Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg (1949-1968). 99. Gadamer directs language away from the Enlightenment’s conceptual abstractions verifiable from a neutral zone, to linguistic understanding where truth is fused with culture and history. Contrary

Anthropological Realism and the Philosophy of Language 329 to Romanticism’s reduction of language to aesthetic appreciation and creative genius, Gadamer recognizes the event of artwork that discloses truth to us within tradition. 100. Duggar, From Act to Act: Gadamer and Augustine on the Verbum Interius,” 20. 101. Zimmerman, Humanism and Religion: A Call for Renewal of Western Religion, 233-234. 102. Duggar, From Act to Act: Gadamer and Augustine on the Verbum Interius, 27-28. 103. Duggar, From Act to Act: Gadamer and Augustine on the Verbum Interius, 20. 104. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 391, 301. 105. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 391. 106. Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 113. As elaborated in John Arthos, The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, Habermas criticized Gadamer’s hermeneutics for not allowing an objective perspective. In response, Gadamer defended his hermeneutics as establishing truth within the history and culture presented in language rather than within “subjective thought,” 71-72. 107. Gadamer, “Towards a Phenomenology of Ritual and Language,” 107. 108. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 419. 109. Arthos, The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 2. 110. Duggar, From Act to Act: Gadamer and Augustine on the Verbum Interius, 10. 111. Duggar, From Act to Act: Gadamer and Augustine on the Verbum Interius, 10. See Arthos, The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics. 112. Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, xiii-xiv. 113. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 122. 114. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 114. 115. Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 124. 116. See Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of Phenomenology. 117. Schweiker, “Groundwork for the Hermeneutics of Morals: Paul Ricoeur and the Future of Ethics,” 498. 118. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 77. 119. In his Ricoeur on Time and Narrative, Dowling concludes: “The philosophical seriousness with which Ricoeur approaches this topic

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is owed to his sense of narrativity—a capacity to understand, tell, and live by and through stories—as a human universal,” Chapter 3. 120. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, 1, 3, 52. 121. Aristotle’s mimesis as “the imitation of an action,” in Ricoeur is the “domain of action” during the three stages of interpretation. 122. Nankov, “The Narrative of Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative,” 122. 123. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 23. 124. In his essay in Philosophy and Literature, C. S. Schreiner concludes that Ricoeur interconnects his own Continental tradition with analytic philosophy. In Oneself as Another, “Several chapters call upon Strawson, Searle, Austin, Davidson, and Grice, among others, in an effort to sketch out the semantic core of selfhood,” 137. But Ricoeur is finally dissatisfied in Oneself as Another because “analytic methods lead to a closed semanticism...incapable of accounting for human action as actually happening in the world,” 301. 125. Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity,” 81. 126. Schweiker, “Groundwork for the Hermeneutics of Morals: Paul Ricoeur and the Future of Ethics,” 482. 127. See Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting. 128. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 318. 129. Ricoeur, Fallible Man: Philosophy of the Will, 138. Scott-Baumann’s conclusion in her “Reconstructive Hermeneutical Philosophy” is apropos: Ricoeur’s hermeneutics “offers us courage to proceed with the human project by developing ways of writing, thinking and behaving that are provisional, affirmative and conciliatory, yet essentially questioning how to understand oneself through better understanding of the other,” 703. 130. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 180; see Ricoeur’s Reflections on the Just. 131. Schweiker, “Groundwork for the Hermeneutics of Morals: Paul Ricoeur and the Future of Ethics,” 483. 132. Schweiker appeals to being in his “Groundwork for the Hermeneutics of Morals: Paul Ricoeur and the Future of Ethics” and concludes: “In other works, I have called Ricoeur’s position ‘hermeneutical realism.’” See especially, William Schweiker, Responsibility and Christian Ethics (1995) and Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds (2004).

Anthropological Realism and the Philosophy of Language 331 133. Schweiker, “Groundwork for the Hermeneutics of Morals: Paul Ricoeur and the Future of Ethics,” 494. 134. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 29. Attestation is a crucial idea in Ricouer. Regarding Oneself as Another, Ricoeur wrote, “It is the password for this entire book,” 289, fn 82. 135. Schweiker, “Groundwork for the Hermeneutics of Morals: Paul Ricoeur and the Future of Ethics,” 498. 136. Tarski’s first monograph on the topic was published in 1933 in Warsaw, translated into German in 1935 and into English in 1956 as “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages.” See his Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics: Papers of 1923 to 1938. His essay “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics” was published in 1944. 137. Tarski, “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics,” 86. 138. Tarski, “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics,” 87. 139. Davidson, “Semantics for Natural Language,” 2001. 140. Lycan, Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction, 109-124. 141. Ajdukiewicz (rejected conventionalism), Carnap (replaced his commitment to logical syntax as the core of philosophy with semantics as foundational to philosophical analysis), and Popper (adopted scientific realism for the philosophy of science). To elaborate with Carnap: His Philosophy and Logical Syntax is based on Tarski while adding the distinction between logical and factual truth. In Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic, Carnap developed the concepts of intension and extension, using them as the framework for further scholarship on intensional logic and possibleworld semantics. 142. See also Davidson, “Truth and Meaning,” 304-323. 143. See Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” From a Logical Point of View, and Word and Object. 144. See Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” in Stainton, ed., Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language. 145. Anita Avramides’ “Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language Philosophy” develops the Wittgenstein-ordinary language philosophy in detail. She concludes that “it would be best simply to agree that the

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impact of the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy was coincident with the influence of original language philosophy...and that this can in part be attributed to the overarching ideas shared by both,” 735. 146. Austin was the most influential, with Gilbert Ryle and P. F. Strawson notable colleagues. Oswald Hanfling in his Philosophy and Ordinary Language suggests that, more than anyone else, Austin is regarded as “the archetypal ordinary language philosopher,” 26. 147. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 124, 116. 148. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 4.0031. 149. Austin, Philosophical Papers, 182. 150. Austin, “Truth,” 120-133. 151. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, 110-111. 152. In Austin’s examples, sentences with concepts such as marrying, naming, bequeathing, are neither true nor false, but rather are subject to assessment as happy or unhappy. However, it does not follow that truth is ignored. These sentences also involve other things being done, including statements that are assessable as true or false. More is involved in assessments than the requirements imposed by linguistic meaning regarding the facts. 153. Avramides, “Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language Philosophy,” 743. 154. Searle, “Illocutionary Acts and the Concept of Truth,” 33. 155. Searle, “Illocutionary Acts and the Concept of Truth,” 40. 156. Searle, “Illocutionary Acts and the Concept of Truth,” 35-36. 157. Searle, “Illocutionary Acts and the Concept of Truth,” 36. In The Construction of Social Reality, Searle understands facts to be the “conditions of the world that satisfy the truth conditions expressed by statements,” 211. 158. Searle, “The Structure of Illocutionary Acts,” 146-156. See Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. 159. Searle, “Illocutionary Acts and the Concept of Truth,” 35. 160. Alston, “Illocutionary Acts and Truth,” 16. 161. Alston, “Illocutionary Acts and Truth,” 29. 162. Alston, “Illocutionary Acts and Truth,” 10. 163. Laskowski, “Moral Realism, Speech Act Diversity, and Expressivism,” 784. 164. See Cuneo, Speech and Morality: On the Metaethical Implications of 6SHDNLQJ

Anthropological Realism and the Philosophy of Language 333 165. Al Zoubi, “On Searle On Austin On Truth,” 167. 166. Al Zoubi, “On Searle On Austin On Truth,” 165-180. 167. Gila Sher uses the same title, in her “On the Possibility of a Substantive Theory of Truth” in 1999 and “In Search of a Substantive Theory of Truth” in 2004. Her work is instructive, but it borrows its basic features from Tarski and correspondence theory, and is not compatible with the substantive theory of truth developed below. 168. Kettner, “Discourse Ethics: Apel, Habermas, and Beyond,” 304. 169. Mieth, “The Basic Norm of Truthfulness,” 89-90. 170. Sher and Wright, “Truth as a Normative Modality of Cognitive Acts,” 293. 171. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, 22. 172. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, 88. 173. Schantz, “Why Truth Is Not an Epistemic Concept,” 307. 174. Sher, “In Search of a Substantive Theory of Truth,” 36. 175. In Book VI (“On the Logic of the Moral Sciences”) of Mill’s A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive, inductive experimentalism is the scientific method for studying the phenomena that constitute social life. Scientific knowledge exists for its own sake as morally neutral, therefore presuming the means-ends dualism. 176. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 89. 177. Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 66. 178. Apel, 1980, 77; see Kettner, “Discourse Ethics: Apel, Habermas, and Beyond,” 300. 179. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action,” 38. 180. Kettner, “Discourse Ethics: Apel, Habermas, and Beyond,” 305. For Kettner, there is a “worldwide recognition of morally significant values which we abbreviate as human rights,” 306. As Kwame Anthony Appiah states it, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture, “we will only solve our problems if we see them as human problems arising out of a special situation,” 16. 181. Sher, “In Search of a Substantive Theory of Truth,” 7. 182. Pippert, Ethics of News: A Reporter’s Search for Truth, 11. 183. In Heidegger’s Poetry, Language and Thought works of art provide a symbolic frame that discloses the meaning of things in the world.

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184. Kompridis, “On World Disclosure: Heidegger, Habermas and Dewey,” 37. 185. Gunkel and Taylor, Heidegger and the Media, 90. See Christians, Media Ethics and Global Justice in the Digital Age, 159-173. 186. Taylor, The Linguistic Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity, Preface. 187. Kettner, “Discourse Ethics: Apel, Habermas, and Beyond,” 305. 188. See, for example, Hayim, “Naturalism and the Crisis of Rationalism in Habermas.”

CHAPTER SEVEN PHILOSOPHICAL ANIMALS: HUMANS IN NATURE STEPHEN J. A. WARD Instead of an intelligible world there are radiant nebulae separated by expanses of darkness….The highest form of reason borders on unreason. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty.1

Humans are beings in nature, spatially, biologically, socially, and philosophically. Spatially, we inhabit a relatively small planet in one of innumerable galaxies that constitute an infinite universe. Biologically, humans are marvelously adaptable to different ecologies, having evolved and proliferated until the species occupied most of the world. Humans have the largest geographical and ecological range of any terrestrial vertebrate. Among vertebrates, human biomass is exceeded only by that of our domesticates (for example, cattle) and is many times the biomass of all wild terrestrial vertebrate species combined.2 At the dawn of agriculture in the Neolithic era, about 12,000 years ago, the worldwide human population, plus their livestock and pets, was only 0.1 percent of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass. Today, it is about 98 percent.3 A large footprint. In evolutionary terms, we have evolved into a species with distinct traits that allowed Homo sapiens to create a “cognitive niche” in nature.4 However, “cognitive” does not mean our brains did all the work. Our brain, and the cognitions and

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emotions it supports, was (and is) only one part of the ‘mindbody-culture-nature’ complex. This is the great holistic natural setting for Homo sapiens. Culture has been crucial, in the wide sense of culture as language, symbolic representation, information transmission, cooperative norm-governed groups, shared practices, problem-solving, art, and morality. Culture made a powerful, cumulative human society possible—the only one on the planet. From 150,000 BC and onward, the pace of our evolution increased in speed and complexity. It was largely an evolution in culture: the “cognitive revolution” with the development of language by 70,000 BC, the “Neolithic revolution” of settlement and agriculture in the Fertile Crescent by 10,000 BC, and the first civilizations such as Mesopotamia and Egypt by the fourth millennium BC. From hunter-gatherer to city dweller within 10,000 years or more, an evolutionary blink of the eye. Robert Boyd states: “Everywhere else in nature, largescale cooperation is explained by kinship, but in humans, it is not.”5 Culture transformed our species mainly because it made high levels of unprecedented cooperation possible. It was “not by brains alone” that humans achieved their current status. Culture made us, as Boyd remarks, “a different kind of animal.”6 The driving force in Homo sapiens evolution was a circle of mutual influence, a circle of intertwining factors in the human environment. By 100,000 BC, new ecologies, new group rivalries, and population growth demanded new responses from Homo sapiens. They had to think harder, so to speak. New cognitive and social responses plus novel traits emerged. In return, the new traits altered the ecology to make life more sustainable. The evolution of Homo sapiens is a narrative about interacting natural forces “ratcheting up” the intensity and importance of cooperative culture.7 One result of ratcheting up was the development of humans as philosophical animals, or what we might call Homo

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philosophicus. Evolution in humankind created something unexpected. Something new came into nature: a self-conscious species with a distinctive interest in doing philosophy. Philosophy not as an academic discipline, but philosophy as the inescapable curiosity, insistent questioning about life, and, at its best, an epistemically responsible commitment to objective inquiry. Hunter-gatherer humans developed a symbolic mind capable of representing objects not present and for thinking up strategies in the mind to solve external problems. A practical rationality was born. Theoretical rationality would follow later. Then the symbolizing power of the mind turned back on itself. Representations were themselves represented. The symbolic mind symbolized itself. Self-consciousness was born and, with it, philosophical questions about the nature of nature, and the meaning of everything. The human mind was able to step back from the particular projects and practices of daily life to think about them as a whole. Within natural evolution, a creature called Homo sapiens developed a distinct capacity for, and interest in, questions of morality, aesthetics, science, the meaning of life, and the nature of the cosmos. Anthropological realism is one result of this evolution of moral experience, one theory among many. It is made possible because Professor Christians and I are part of the larger evolution of philosophical animals. Earlier, we stressed how morality should be a thoroughly human and non-transcendent phenomenon. Anthropological realism is anthropological—an attempt to lay down a theoretical approach to morality as an ethics for man as man. It is not an ethics for human beings as aspiring angels or as servants of the high gods on Olympus. It is not an ethics for creatures who crave to be relieved of their humanity and its limits, by positing the existence of another better realm beyond our natural context. Life is lived between two unknowns, birth and death, neither of which is experienced by us.8 It happens to us. As Heidegger states, we are ‘thrown’ into

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the world. We could add that we are also thrown out of the world when our body fails. Anthropological realism is an ethics of immanence and naturalism for a creature who lives as best it can, despite finitude and inescapable imperfection. Genuine morality, not the elitebased immoral ‘moralities’ that have plagued history, is an imminent, symbolic, historical, and encultured activity that seeks to transform the human sphere into a humane experience on this earth without appealing to transcendent entities or principles. Ethics is a project and, as a project, it is largely a matter of design. Or it is a design problem. How can we create societies that provide a stable basis for human social existence? The problem occurs a millennium after the first design problem of morality: How can groups of humans create and maintain morality? How can humans design their daily interactions so that they are both fair and acceptable to those who live under such a system? How did morality ever become an evolutionarily stable design for societies in the first place? In this chapter, we explore what it means to say that anthropological realism is immanent and naturalistic. We recommend a Deweyan, non-reductive, open-minded naturalism as a way of looking at philosophy and the world.

Section One: Philosophy and Immanence Homo Philosophicus We reveal our selves as Homo philosophicus primarily in three domains of activity: aesthetics, morality, and investigating nature theoretically. This trio of domains are not spiritual gifts that God or Prometheus gave to mankind. The trio is constituted by high-level, evolved capacities and rechanneled impulses, derived from natural evolution.

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Homo philosophicus is an aesthetic animal. Homo sapiens evolved as an aesthetic animal, beginning with innate preferences for certain colors, forms, sounds, rhythms, bodily appearances and the dance of sexual relations—much like the Bird of Paradise that dances before the female on the floor of the jungle. Our aesthetic nature developed into another unsuspected creation: a world of art and aesthetic expression for its own sake.9 We not only seek encounters with the clichéd examples of beauty: pleasantly colored and smelling objects, like the delicate rose; ordered objects such as the starry skies; natural events like sunsets; or beautiful faces and bodies. Our aesthetic impulse has complexified. For example, humans have become aesthetically attracted to well-ordered intellectual objects such as mathematical formulae. Humans came to seek aesthetic encounters with the asymmetrical, the dark, the ugly, the subversive, the difficult to comprehend, the indeterminate in meaning,10 and the seemingly disordered. So varied are our creative endeavors that a strict and universal definition of art is not possible. Moreover, our aesthetic norms mix with our ethical and political norms, often without notice. It is no coincidence that the modern idea of aesthetic taste as a subjective skill of the sensitive individual arose in the same era when individual rights and democracy came to threaten established monarchies.11 Homo philosophicus is a moral animal. We have moral sentiments and notions embedded in our very nature, and we can potentially live according to them, or not. One of our greatest normative problems is who to be and how to live within a finite lifetime. The other major problem is how to live with others. As philosophers Harry Frankfurt and Derek Parfit asked: What really matters to us?12 For most of our lives, we are driven forward by an impulse to go beyond what we are today. We want material goods. But we also want many other types of goods, including respect, rights, and a sense of our own identity. We

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are a being that is both a biological fact and an unsettled possibility. A being that wants to make or remake itself. This is why growing old can be melancholic. The time for remaking yourself is dwindling. Homo philosophicus is a cosmopolitan animal. We seek ideas and theories which explain our place in the cosmos and in society. Sources of this thinking are large worldviews from religion, science, or philosophy which attempt to explain the origin, evolution, and purpose of the world. We want to know about the world in part because it tells us things about ourselves, and the emergence of our consciousness. Moreover, our self-consciousness changes as the world alters and our view of the world evolves. The three domains are expressive of life. They strive to say, depict, show, explain, or reveal what it is to be human-in-nature: to be alive; to thrive, to struggle, to feel pain or pleasure; to comprehend and explain; to experience nihilism or meaning. The artist, the moralist, the philosopher, and the scientist reflect on humanity. They share the question of how to be human. They are being distinctly human by asking about being human. The activities of Homo philosophicus have, together, an essential cultural role. They enculturate the human, a creature who is capable of acting like a beast, of asserting the ancient dominance rituals of alpha male gorillas in their harem and troupe. Humans can give vent to their hard Darwinian impulses, beating their chests like enraged silverbacks. But what happens when the culture itself becomes conflicted and confused? Who tends to the strains and stresses of culture? Homo philosophicus does. One of the ‘jobs’ of philosophical animals is “philosophical plumbing,” to use a phrase from English philosopher Mary Midgley. When cultures are divided, perplexed, or going in the wrong direction, we need to dig up the cultural floor boards to critique the ideas and biases that are driving our society forward.13 Artists, moralists, scientists, and philosophers

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can be cultural plumbers using their own methods and means. They can help cultures repair themselves. Today, we live in an era when it is urgent to understand, respect, regain and defend the distinctiveness of the human, against the forces of dehumanization, irrational impulse, and media-induced thoughtlessness which degrade our species and its world.14 Saying what it is to be human, or to be Homo philosophicus, is no easy task. As noted, our humanity is neither a given—a simple fact—nor a fait accompli. It is a complex, latent capability. It is a potential seeking some form or “actuality”—to use terms from Aristotle. It is something to develop, achieve, maintain, and treasure. To betray our humanity almost always leads to pain, injustice, or what Kant called “radical evil.” We betray ourselves when we negate three determining features of the human being specified by Kant: A predisposition towards our “animality” so as to be a living being that survives and hopes to thrive; a predisposition towards our common humanity as both a living and a rational being; and a disposition towards being a person or responsible being. For Kant, we must stay true to these better features of our nature to avoid evil—to not become someone who enjoys causing harm.15 Inhuman people act as genocide leaders or accomplices of pogroms, as moral zombies deaf to the suffering of others, as animalistic predators on the vulnerable, or as organisms driven by sheer instinct or pathological, subconscious forces. Not all people or cultures are drawn equally to the difficult questions posed by Homo philosophicus. To be sure, we are philosophical animals, at least potentially. But we are philosophical animals that may settle for absolute answers provided by a cult or a dogmatic religion, relieving us of our struggle with the dark angels of our nature and the world. We may only ask the most important questions on our death bed: about soul, consciousness, love, and value. The questions of philosophy may unsettle us and we wish them away; we ignore them or

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mock them for their abstractness; we become born-again positivists who deride what can’t be observed or measured directly. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Given our material origins, self-consciousness is the most difficult-to-explain of all of our evolutionary acquirements. Yet it changed everything for us. Self-consciousness is a potential boon or burden for individuals. The boon is the capacity for new ideas. The burden is an awareness of our finitude.16 Finitude feeds the cosmopolitan search for larger understandings. It also feeds the craving for transcendent beliefs. This is the deep existential complexity from which truly human thought and creativity spring. And it springs naturally from our having emerged as a species in a natural ecology. To act as Homo philosophicus is a distinct competency—an adaptation—of a distinct species, Homo sapiens. Homo philosophicus is a holistic layer of thought, aesthetics, and self-consciousness built upon a biological sub-strata embedded in nature and culture. Homo philosophicus is the zone of the human. This is when humans are persons, a special animal. Morally, the goal is to make society, as much as possible, a kingdom of persons.17 The essential question for Homo philosophicus is: What does it mean for me—and for us—to be human today, given history and what the future may hold? Immanence and Transcendence Suppose someone wants to seriously do philosophy, as Homo philosophicus. They find themselves already thinking and acting in a world they don’t fully understand, and they mistrust the lore handed down to them by tradition. How can they start a process by which this world becomes more intelligible to them and withstands a reasonable skepticism? One way is to adopt a worldview. William James, who applied the idea of temperament to explain different religious views, applied it

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also to the choice of worldview. Differences in worldview are actually differences on “what life honestly and deeply means.”18 The difference between transcendental and immanent thinking is a Jamesian choice of worldview. The next step is to decide what sorts of causes and explanations will be treated as worth considering, even if we question the truth of specific explanations. We face the choice of thinking immanently or transcendentally. Will we seek intelligibility through immanent facts, objects, processes, and causes? Or, will we seek intelligibility through transcendent facts, objects, processes, causes and powers?19 Immanent or transcendent with respect to what? Immanent or transcendent with respect to the world in which we already find ourselves pre-philosophically living in and experiencing. A lived world. Natural. This living occurs within nature in all of its complexity and immensity. Immanence means inquiry by cognitions, observations, interpretations, theories, and discourse that remain within this world—that appeal only to things in nature to explain nature. Transcendentalism means inquiry that appeals to what is non-natural or supernatural. Immanence can be a property of the thinking of quite different philosophers. Pragmatist Richard Bernstein once called Spinoza and Hume, arch rationalist and arch empiricist, respectfully, “radical philosophers of immanence.” Bernstein raised philosophical eyebrows when he called Spinoza the “father of modern naturalism.” Despite their differences, Spinoza and Hume are “thisworldly” thinkers who “categorically reject any appeal to a transcendent God or transcendent principles to explain phenomena in this world.”20 Naturalists and immanent thinkers decide what the things in nature are relative to their non-scientific and scientific understandings of reality. What we think belongs in nature is relative to some perspective on reality—some mix of ontology, epistemology, and many other things. Immanently, we work from

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what we regard as our best examples of natural knowledge. Immanence is shot through with different forms of belief from different domains of experience—science, art, morality, and personal experience. Moreover, to think about our place in nature, immanently, is to think from an historical, situated perspective: Where we stand today. But this view changes over time. The view of nature in the Middle Ages cannot be simply restated in contemporary terms because the paradigms of thought are different. Reflect for a minute on how our view of the world has been transformed over the past century or so by Darwin, Einstein, Freud, and Marx; the physicists of quantum theory; the surrealists and abstractionists in art; the atonal pioneers in music; the architects of modernity; the poets and novelists of post-war nihilism and post-modernity; the archeologists and anthropologists who map the history of human life on earth; the scientists of genetics, DNA, and the brain; and the technologists whose inventions continue to shape how we experience reality. Also, reflect on how great and terrible events such as two world wars, the Jewish Holocaust, and tensions in today’s global world alter not only how we think but also feel about the world. Transcendent belief can take many forms: high gods (or God) in a perfect realm; eternal and perfect forms not fully substantiated in this imperfect world; or ‘iron’ transcendent laws of history that propel our natural world forward with a priori necessity, despite the contingency of history. Perhaps, as many believe, the world is headed, necessarily, towards a world conflict between supernatural forces of good and evil, followed by a millennium of peace. Transcendental thinking includes the religious and philosophical traditions of East and West, from Buddhism to Arthur Schopenhauer and beyond. The aim is higher consciousness of a higher reality beyond the senses and the passions of the body. Through meditation and right living, individuals believe they

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gain insight into absolute reality, while worldly experience is regarded as either an illusion or a mere appearance, or is absorbed into the absolute. Mysticism is transcendental through and through. Ecstatic mystics like Teresa of Avila have sought to commune with Christ and God. Metaphysics and mythology from antiquity is another source. The ancient Greeks had the concept of Fate or moira which governed all that occurred. Even the Olympic high gods had to respect this mysterious force, not to mention the bloodstained warriors at Troy in the Iliad. The Greek gods, from thundering Zeus and wise Athena to worldwide messenger Hermes, transform themselves into other beings and perform feats that violate all precepts of natural knowledge. In addition, the course of human history has been permeated by non-natural and special sources of knowledge: omens, strange portents, magic, secret books of knowledge, revelations by oracles, priests, occult mediums, shamans, and prophets. Humans have populated nature with spirits, sprites, ghosts, devils, angels—an entire cast of non-natural beings to enchant nature. What is common to transcendent thinking can be characterized psychologically: A deep, existential dissatisfaction with immanent explanations and the limitations of natural things. It is a desire to repair these limitations in nature by adding what is not in nature, what is beyond, above or behind nature; to believe in a higher realm that gives life ultimate meaning. One craves for something more to natural life than what nature can provide.21 In one form it is a type of perfectionism that rebels against the imperfections of life; in another form it is a longing for immortality or infinitude; in another form it is a need to think that there is ultimate justice in the world because some deity will hand out rewards and punishments to souls in the afterlife. These philosophical and moral desires have been the great motivators of Western philosophy and religion. The philosophical quarrel between immanence and transcendence is

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old. In creation stories and philosophical theories about the world, ancient writers chose between two options: order in the world is transcendent, imposed on chaos by a transcendent entity, such as a deity; or, order is immanent due to some natural principle or process. For example, order is said to have arisen from a divine division of a basic stuff into the many objects of the world; or, as with Democritus (460-370 BC), order is the result of interactions among atoms in an infinite void.22 A transcendent need for justice in the world is on display at the start of Plato’s Republic where Socrates valiantly tries to show that the just man is a happy man despite worldly evidence to the contrary. At the end of the dialogue, Plato resorts to transcendent myth to persuade readers—the Myth of Er, a tale of afterworld justice for the good and punishment for the evil. Centuries later, how different is Albert Camus’s immanent philosophy of living in absurdity, without the consolations of transcendent belief. Plato’s Skyhook23 The philosophical quarrel between transcendence and immanence begins in earnest with the greatest philosophers of ancient Greece: Plato, the transcendentalist of the immortal soul, of divine Reason, and perfect forms; and Aristotle, ever the naturalist with his deep interest in the world as it is, immersed in biology, physics, and scientific explanations based on immanent, natural causes. Plato’s transcendent account is found in his late dialogue, the Timaeus. He provides an elaborate depiction, at times rational and at times poetic, of the creation of the universe. He explains its order, goodness, and beauty. In the Timaeus, we see at work, Plato’s dualisms, established in earlier dialogues. The dualisms reflect themes in Pythagoras and Parmenides: the eternal and the becoming; ideal forms and imperfect

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instantiations; a divine soul and a corrupting body; philosophical (absolute) knowledge of transcendent objects and shifting, relative opinion about worldly appearances. Plato’s Timaeus portrays the universe as the product of a rational, purposive, and good agent, a deity or “demi-urge.” This divine craftsman looks to the perfect Forms existing in a transcendent, perfect world to create the imperfect objects of our world. The demi-urge imposes a formal, mathematical order on a preexistent chaos. The order is objective and teleological by superior conscious design. The universe is organized to realize the good. When Plato turns to reason—the rational part of the human soul—he sees it as the divine part of humans, their true self. Throughout life, reason yearns to recover the goodness, rationality, and beauty that was lost when it was placed in an imperfect body. The philosopher’s soul is broadened and deepened as it contemplates broad, deep, and transcendental things, immortal and divine.24 The immortal rational soul has been encased in a body which contained “those dreadful but necessary disturbances” such as strong desires for pleasure.25 Aristotle (384-322 BC) could not accept Plato’s transcendent theory of the world. Although Aristotle engaged in metaphysical thinking he did not look to gods, demi-urges, myth, or an eternal world of forms to explain the world. Aristotle preferred natural explanations based on observable and scientific facts about humans, society, and nature. He relentlessly sought science through rigorous logical analysis, combined with a close examination of the phenomenon and a critical review of leading opinions (endoxa) on the question at issue. He had a naturalistic and realist confidence that the human mind, properly utilized, can know the world objectively. Like Plato, Aristotle depended on the idea of form. Aristotle credited Plato, his teacher, for stressing formal explanation.26 But their conceptions of form would differ. Aristotle’s doctrine of “hylomorphism” asserted that objects are a combination of matter

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and form, and forms are tied tightly to the matter of objects to which they gave shape, and probably do not survive the death or destruction of the object. Aristotle would criticize Plato’s theory of Forms as too abstract and transcendent to account for change in the forms of objects. In ethics, Aristotle shared Plato’s teleological approach to happiness in terms of objective purposes established by the nature of humans.27 However, Aristotle did not think, as Plato did, that the ultimate end of life is for the rational soul to leave the body, recover its pure and divine nature, escape reincarnation, and reside in a perfect realm. For Aristotle, humans sought happiness on earth through a virtuous expression of their distinct rational capacities.28 Plato believed the world order needs a transcendent explanation. Aristotle is more circumspect. He posits a God but limits his role to keeping things in motion. God is eternal, and this means he is not involved with temporal, physical processes— including mankind. God only contemplates his own thoughts.29 For Plato, the overall cosmos is grand but our earthly world of becoming has limits and lacks, and those lacks disturb him. Plato’s rational perfectionism, as a craving for the beyond, is exhibited in his allegory of the soul in the Phaedrus.30 The soul is a chariot where reason—the charioteer—controls two winged horses, one potentially noble and moral, and another, potentially base and against reason. The chariot driver seeks to direct the chariot upward toward knowledge and full being. For what sort of knowledge does Plato search? Listen to this passage from the Phaedrus, where the immortal soul and the minds of gods are said to be “nourished” in heaven by “pure knowledge” of justice, self-control, and other things, as they really exist. They see the real: “Knowledge—not the knowledge that is close to change; that becomes different as it knows the different things which we consider real down here. No, it is the knowledge of what really is what it is.”31 This is the epitome of

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philosophical transcendental realism. Philosophy is an intellectual skyhook that lifts us up from our immersion in a messy, unbearable world and gives us access to another, better world. Aristotle was not inclined to use a philosophical skyhook. Aristotle’s natural philosophy does not contain a designer outside of nature. It is not a demi-urge but nature itself that acts purposively. Things have forms and they have teleological goals. The acorn does develop into an oak tree. But the causes of natural things are immanent in nature. As one commentator on Aristotelean philosophy says, crisply: “Aristotle’s teleology is local, not global: while it makes sense to ask Aristotle for a teleological explanation of this or that feature of the natural world, it makes little sense to ask him for a teleological explanation of the world as a whole.”32 The Enduring Quarrel We have focused on Plato and Aristotle to discuss the immanence-transcendence distinction because of their great influence on philosophy. It might help if we consider a few more examples of these two attitudes. Here is a random selection. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), official for the Renaissance Republic of Florence, was a proto-modern thinker. Some 35 years before Machiavelli was born, Cosimo de’ Medici took de facto control of the city and launched the Italian Renaissance. Throughout Machiavelli’s life, republican forces and the Medici fought for control of Florence, with power swinging back and forth. Florentine politics was a dangerous and brutal blood sport. Yet it strongly attracted Machiavelli. Machiavelli received a humanist education but he considered it useless for what he really loved: participation in the politics of Florence. He studied politics not from a book but from experience, as a diplomat for Florence at the Vatican, and in the French and Spanish courts. Machiavelli brought

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immanence, naturalism, and realism to political philosophy. There is little evidence that he was pious or interested in religious matters. He wrote serious works on republicanism, looking back to the Roman republic. But it was a slim volume called The Prince—a practical guide for new princes—that would make him notorious for centuries. His manual for political practice starts from the imperfections of humans and their city states. It seeks little consolation or guidance from things transcendental. The Prince was in the traditional medieval genre of “Mirror for Princes.” Writers would hold a metaphorical mirror to the prince to see if he satisfied the ideal and transcendent dictates of Christian morality. But The Prince was a radically different mirror. Machiavelli’s advice to a new prince was to maintain power by acting with cunning and not to shrink from brute force, broken promises, or deception to foil dangerous opponents. The ruler should be both a fox and a lion. A fox notices traps that lie ahead; and a lion can frighten the wolves at his door.33 The prince should appear to have all the virtues of being merciful, faithful, trustworthy and religious, but he should be ready to divert from those virtues, as needed.34 It sounded like Machiavelli was advising the ruler to act without any virtue and that personal ends justify any means. This is a long-standing misunderstanding. Machiavelli never said, in general, the ends justify any means in political decision-making. Instead, he talks about acting in exceptional ways under exceptional circumstances. He never said that any sort of political action or political regime is justified. He never said only power rules. To the contrary, he wants the prince to set up a Roman republic characterized by Roman virtues. He condemns politicians whose only aim is power, who kill their citizens, betray their friends, and lack mercy. Machiavelli says that by these means you can “acquire power but not glory.” The highest political goal is establishing and maintaining an

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independent, self-sufficient, and stable free state. As he says in The Prince: “As long as possible, he should not stray from the good, but he should know how to enter into evil when necessity commands.”35 Although he may not have realized it, Machiavelli is close to Aristotle in making life in a well-ordered polis the ideal.36 What made Machiavelli unpopular or controversial in his time was that he exposed the hypocrisy and collective lie of his times that the popes and the Medici were acting like good Christians and not manipulating the people. Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (1919-1987) experienced nihilism and evil as a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Levi, a chemist, went on to write poignantly about the transforming experience, to bear witness to the unspeakable tragedy of the Holocaust. He saw “men of refined culture, throw all this overboard, simplify and barbarize themselves, and survive.” The camp robbed him of any belief in transcendent justice. I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a non-believer I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my nonbelief. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice. Why were the moribund packed in cattle cars? Why were the children sent to the gas?37

However, his non-belief was tested. There was one moment when Levi, fearing immanent death, felt the need for transcendent help. Levi was tempted to pray. His description is worth quoting in full: I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death,...naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index

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card in hand, I was waiting to file past the “commission” that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instance I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? And from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it.38

This is a moving statement about what is left of morality and religion after the middle of the 1900s. In “A Free Man’s Worship,” Bertrand Russell eloquently summarized the place of modern man in his scientific world. His life is purposeless and void of meaning. He is a product of causes that had no “prevision of what they were achieving.” Our loves and beliefs are “the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.” It seems to be a cruel trick by God. Perhaps God, one day, grew weary of the angels’ constant praises, Russell muses, satirically. Would it not be more amusing, thought God, to have the undeserved worship of beings that he can torture with doubt and fear? Man was thus created. So, what are humans to do with this absurdity? Russell says stop worshipping a non-existent creator. Create a new philosophy of life that starts from this cruel joke we call human existence: “No philosophy which rejects (these truths) can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”39 Russell’s response to absurdity preceded the response of the twentieth century’s artist of absurdity, Albert Camus. Yet, other authors would not give up on transcendence and immorality. Spanish author and classicist Miguel de Unamuno

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(1864-1936) wrote that the philosophies that impress us are not a summary of the results of science, but those which express “the integral spiritual yearning of their authors.”40 What is this yearning? It is the yearning to overcome finitude, which creates a “tragic sense of life”—of seeking transcendence yet fearing one’s death. This tragic sense gets “no consolation from reason.” It finds support in religion. “Eternity, eternity!—that is the supreme desire!” Unamuno writes. “Nothing is real that is not eternal.”41 What is the goal of life then? More life, unending. “To be, to be forever, to be without ending! Thirst of being, thirst of being more!...to be forever! to be God!”42 In the late 1900s, the neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty rejected metaphysics and transcendental thinking for pragmatic, pluralistic social “conversation” going forward towards greater solidarity and community here on earth.43 It was a naturalistic hope compatible with our finitude, and imperfect. For Rorty, the dialogue of the many replaces the monologue of the sage or prophet. Hope is not dreaming about other worlds.44 The ultimate goal is practical: greater human happiness. The most praiseworthy human trait is the “ability to trust and to cooperate with other people” and to work together “to improve the future.”45 We should replace the intellectual search for perfect knowledge with imperfect, pragmatic work—a fusion of intellectual and social engagement. The challenge to ethics today is to construct a coherent philosophy of life and morality without transcendence, a structure that does not collapse into extreme relativism or nihilism once the transcendental foundations of thought are removed. The challenge is to show that Dmitri Karamazov in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is wrong when he asserts that without God and immortal life all things are permitted. There is no morality. Nietzsche, with his intuitive powers, knew at the end of the nineteenth century how the decline of God would devastate Western society. Then the twentieth century arrived with its

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wars and holocausts. Nihilism and irrationalism challenged what remained of traditional transcendentalism. Anthropological realism is among those immanent moralities that construct a philosophy of the human without the transcendent. The immanence that motivates anthropological realism is not a vertical looking upward but a humanistic, horizontal, forward-looking project. The main question for ethics is not what metaphysical propositions I can discover, what rules please the gods, or what can I know morally that is certain or a priori. The main question is ‘what humane, earthbound ethics shall we invent’? What shall we do, morally? The moral philosopher’s role is not to construct castles in the air or pretentiously utter ‘absolute’ thoughts. Her role is to help with the fair coordination of conflicting interests, to facilitate discussion on the project of living together.

Section Two: Pragmatic Naturalism Immanence and Naturalism Naturalism and immanence are closely related. We can think of naturalism as a form of immanence, a way of not appealing to the transcendental by referring only to natural properties. Or, one can think of immanence as defined by naturalism, a commitment to stay within the bounds of nature. Naturalism may strike some readers as an obvious or clear idea. However, naturalism has been defined in many ways. The result is disagreement on the contours of naturalism, or the preferred version. The discussion and disputes “seem chaotic with little agreement about the meaning of ‘naturalism,’” observed Bernstein.46 Naturalism has been defined as “ontological,” “methodological,” “reductive,” “scientific,” “liberal” and even “transcendental.”47 Putnam complained about the “extreme unclarity of the position and the host of problems it faces.”48 Barry Stroud has wondered whether there was anything more to

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naturalism than a “trendy label.”49 Putnam compared the need for today’s philosophers to declare that they are naturalists to the need for writers in post-revolutionary Russia to state that their view was “in agreement with Comrade Stalin’s.”50 Another problem is how inclusive or exclusive one’s notion of naturalism should be when asked to state exactly what naturalism is. Naturalists come under pressure to include more and more into their worldview, for example, mathematical objects or moral facts, until naturalism is so wide open that it lacks a definite meaning. On the other hand, naturalists come under pressure to exclude things like mind or persons, and anything that seems mysterious or spooky. Then they are accused of denying or distorting phenomena that need to be explained. As we argue, there is much more to naturalism than a babble of rival definitions, a trendy term, or required ideological conformity within philosophy. And the pressure to widen or narrow one’s conceptions is not a problem limited to naturalism but is a problem for any important conceptual scheme.51 To show that naturalism is an important approach for philosophy and moral theory, we lay out our conception of naturalism as pragmatic naturalism. It is a proposal for how to think about naturalism. It is not a pure analytical definition allegedly required by logic, if such definitions exist. Naturalism, like many ‘isms’ such as pragmatism, moral realism, formalism in art, Marxism, idealism, and post-modernism in architecture, is a theory. The ‘isms’ include abstract ideas. But many of these conceptions are also intended to guide crafts, arts, sciences, and philosophical reflection. They are tested in their application. Formalism in art calls for a certain approach to painting, and this approach is judged by the quality of the artworks so produced. Pragmatism calls for a certain approach to thinking philosophically and this approach is judged by the quality of the philosophical works so produced. We recommend our proposal in this spirit. We believe it offers a conception of naturalism

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which is clear in meaning, connects naturalism with deep philosophical concepts, and is compatible with anthropological realism. Despite the complex and sometimes erratic discussion of naturalism, it is possible to summarize the main ways that naturalism is conceived, as a preliminary step in this discussion. Joseph Rouse has usefully characterized naturalism by stating its three “core commitments” held by pragmatists and naturalists at the turn of the twentieth century. We state his three commitments, then add a fourth. Non-supernatural: No appeal to the supernatural or anything transcendent of the natural world. The pragmatists were critical of explanatory appeals to God or a transcendental (or ‘supernatural’) faculty of pure reason. However, it should be noted that the boundary between the natural and the supernatural is contested. The relevance of science: Naturalists regard “scientific understanding as relevant to all significant aspects of human life and only countenance ways of thinking and forms of life that are consistent with that understanding.”52 No First Philosophy: Naturalists reject the idea of a foundational first philosophy which is prior to or authoritative over scientific understanding.53 Evolutionary theory is a central form of thinking: Darwinian biology showed us how to think about humans and their traits as continuous with the rest of nature. These four commitments of modern naturalism have been interpreted and applied in several ways. Even if naturalists reject the supernatural, they may differ on the line between the natural and the supernatural. Even if they agree on the relevancy of scientific understanding, they may differ on the nature of scientific understanding. They could also disagree on their interpretations of Darwin. This leaves naturalists with the task

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of explicating what they mean by nature, science, evolution, and the supernatural. Historically, a tendency towards naturalism begins in antiquity with the naturalistic philosophies of the Ionian philosophers of the sixth century BC,54 although Aristotle is the first clear and systematic naturalist.55 Aristotle has two senses of “nature”—an internal and an external meaning.56 The internal refers to nature as the internal starting point of movement and rest.57 Animals and plants exist “by nature” by virtue of having “within” themselves a principle of motion or stationariness with respect to place, growth, or alteration. In contrast, products of craftsmanship or art such as a bed or a painting are given their shape from something external to it, that is, the craftsperson. Things with internal principles are substances in which natural properties reside. They have properties by virtue of what they are. For example, the property of fire to be carried upwards is a property “according to nature.” In the Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle introduces a third and somewhat different meaning of “nature” as referring to what is common to things, for example, some things are frightening to all human beings. Aristotle thinks it is self-evident that these objects and properties exist given the many natural things around us. Proof is not needed. Aristotle goes on to discuss how ‘nature’ is sometimes used to refer to what we would call its basic matter, for example a material substratum like wood which is the nature of one’s bed. Matter is also used to refer to an object’s shape or form. Or we say a growing thing is realizing its nature. Aristotle distinguished two ways in which a thing occurs “by nature”: what occurs in a given substance from its generation, for example, bipedalism in humans, and what develops if not impeded, for example, reason exists potentially in children. Furthermore, what is ‘by nature’ occurs regularly and uniformly. Fire does not sometimes move upward and sometimes not.58 Regularity explains what is common, for example, things that are present

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regularly in every individual of the human species. This is Aristotle’s essentialist philosophy of nature. Things are substances with essences that they naturally seek to realize or exhibit. Aristotelean naturalism came to be predominant in medieval Western thinking, especially after Aquinas. However, the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century led to a different naturalism. It was scientific naturalism. It claimed that science, especially the natural sciences, is the exclusive basis for our knowledge of the world. When it comes to describing nature, science is the measure of all things. Many thinkers disagreed with this view, but it was Kant who made the most famous challenge to scientific naturalism. Kant depicted humans as bifurcated beings. They are, on the one hand, natural creatures, whose bodies are subject to the rest of nature and scientific laws; yet, on the other hand, they are rational creatures. Our mind is free and rational. It deals not with brute fact but with normativity or what ought to be. The mind is engaged with the giving of reasons, a process that is governed by norms, logic, intentionality, meaning and purpose, not inanimate material processes. The quarrel between the scientific naturalists, or materialists, and the bifurcationists or dualists would rumble down the corridors of history to this day. Descartes made a controversial attempt to explain how humans could be both immaterial mind and extended body. Critics could not understand how humans, as non-extended minds, could possibly fit into nature. In the mid-twentieth century, Wilfred Sellars became wellknown for his depiction in “Philosophy and the Scientific Image” of this bifurcation in modern thinking. Philosophy’s aim, he said, was to understand things in the broadest sense. But that aim is thwarted by the existence of two incompatible “images” of “man-in-the-world.” There is the “manifest image” from everyday life where we encounter persons that are intentional, rational, and able to use concepts. Earlier, we called such beings

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persons and agents. There is also the “scientific image” of a world where we do not meet persons. Instead, we meet complex physical systems under law, where we posit explanatory scientific theories. Each image, he says, claims to be the one, true and complete image of man-in-the-world. But the two images are incompatible. For example, there are no persons in the world of the scientific image.59 Which is right? Ever since Sellars published the article about 60 years ago, much of philosophy has been a battle between thinkers who side with one of the images as primary. Recently, a mix of phenomenologists, existentialists, pragmatists, and liberal naturalists have sought to dull the dualism of images in Sellars’ paper and take seriously the contents of the manifest image, including persons and artworks. For his part, Sellars opts for the scientific image which he says is epistemologically and ontologically primary. We seem to have ended up in another dualistic dead-end, with a conceptual fissure running right through human knowledge of life and nature. However, Sellars finds an escape hatch from this dualistic prison at the end of the article. The manifest image cannot be “reconciled” with, or reconstructed within, the scientific scheme, but it can be “joined to it.” The conceptual framework of persons is a framework “in which we think of one another as sharing the community intensions which provide the ambience of principles and the standards... within which we live our own individual lives.” We join or enrich our scientific conceptual scheme with the language of intentions. This is not more ways of saying what is the case— which is the purview of science—but a relating of the scientific world to our purposes. Earlier in the paper, Sellars had said we need a “unified, synoptic, and stereoscopic vision of man-in the-world.”60 “Stereoscopic” means that we somehow have to keep our eyes focused on the truth implicit in both images. This is analogous to the way we physically reconcile data from our two eyes to see unified objects. Apparently, joining the

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languages of the two images, that is, enriching one with the other, is the way to get that stereoscopic effect in the world of concepts. Not many philosophers have found this argument or the analogy to vision persuasive, or clear. Didn’t Sellars just tell us the two languages are incompatible, irreconcilable? Full stop. If one tries to relate the scientific natural world to our intentional framework are we not saying that this intentional scheme is important and real? Is not the intentional world of persons as primary and valuable as the scientific world of material causation? Why all this cautious talk of “enriching” and “joining” but not reconciling? A tricky philosophical dance, indeed. Why not do what Dewey and other naturalists have done and simply acknowledge, up front, that our mind and its intentionality are natural aspects of ourselves. Then get on with the task of studying these natural intentional parts of ourselves, and creating a science of the embodied, naturally evolved mind. In the end, Sellars leaves us with the view that philosophy and science have two very different views of the world—a view rejected by pragmatic naturalists. With Sellars, we are still working from within a dualistic perspective of manifest and scientific images. Our modern anxieties about science and persons are not soothed, epistemically, by his escape hatch. It is, to use a phrase from ancient Greek drama, a deux ex machina—another skyhook. Talk of a magical “joining” of incompatible images is introduced artificially into a narrative that has gotten stuck. John McDowall, who coined the term “liberal naturalism,” uses Sellar’s discussion of the tension of nature and normativity as a starting point for his own naturalism. He says modern epistemology is “beset by distinctive anxieties”61 about how to find a place in nature for the mind, for meaning, and for the normativity of thought.62 The intentional realm of humans is a distinct kind of thing. But, one may worry, if we make intentionality and conceptualization a process that is sui generis, does this not

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raise the “threat of supernaturalism”?63 To understand why modernity contains a “distinctively panicky and obsessive” tone, McDowell suggests we reflect on why Aristotle or a medieval Aristotelian would have no particular problem explaining the relationship of mind and nature. They regarded the capacities that allow us to acquire knowledge to be “natural powers” and their exercise results in “natural states of affairs.” With the modern scientific conception of the world, mind and knowledge becomes mysterious, a phantom, and the knowing subject “threatens to withdraw from the world,” or can only be protected by a Cartesian dualism.64 McDowell suggests what I mentioned above: that we see the human capacity to reason, to use concepts, and to employ norms as a natural capacity of a naturally evolved creature. I will return to McDowell’s view shortly. As discussed earlier, naturalism played a large part not only in science but also in the moral theory of the Enlightenment and into the nineteenth century. Naturalism and pragmatism fell out of favor in philosophy with the rise of analytical philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. George Moore’s claim that naturalistic definitions of moral properties such as “good” was a “naturalistic fallacy” supported a neglect of both naturalistic moral theory and applied ethics. In the second-half of the twentieth century, naturalism was revived by Quine, Sellars, and others. Once again, it was a scientific naturalism that was prominent, and many theorists followed Quine and naturalized one topic after another. One of the boldest statements for contemporary scientific naturalism was sounded by Sellars: Speaking as a philosopher, I am quite prepared to say that the commonsense world of physical objects in Space and Time is unreal—that is, there are no such things. Or, to put it less paradoxically, that in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what it is that it is and of what is not that it is not.65

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By using the phrase, “speaking as a philosopher,” Sellars reveals, in his era, the divorce of what we say as philosophers and what we say as non-philosophers. The disconnect between philosophy and the lived world is complete. This enthusiasm for science did not lead only to philosophical naturalism. It also led to scientism, what McDowell called a “toxic by-product” of the advancement of science.66 Anything that seems to be outside the physicalist ontology of the natural (and biological) sciences, such as consciousness or meaning or what is morally right, must be conceptually reducible to physical concepts or eliminated from our worldview. However, in recent years, a less strident or more liberal naturalism has gained momentum as both anti-supernatural and as “non-scientistic”—it rejects scientism. Some forms of liberal naturalism argue that what needs to be brought back into our thinking is the manifest image of ordinary experience and the life-world. Liberal naturalism takes seriously things that are not part of the natural sciences, such as persons, artworks, purposeful agents, intentionality, and moral experiences which are paradigms of “nonscientific nonsupernatural entities.”67 Liberal naturalism, at least to this extent, is compatible with anthropological realism which makes the life-world and non-scientific entities part of nature and part of being human. Pragmatism: Regaining Significance The narrative of modern naturalism does not start with Quine or Sellars. It begins with a group of American pragmatists and self-described “naturalists” in the first half of the twentieth century such as James, Dewey, Ernst Nagel, and Sidney Hook. They were dissatisfied with ways of thinking philosophically inherited from the nineteenth century. In focus were transcendental and abstract forms of theorizing found in absolute idealism, formal logic, analytical philosophy, and transcendental

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theology. In their view, philosophy had drifted away from the world and found a home in transcendental entities, principles, and historical necessities. They wanted philosophy to be “this worldly,” practical and based on natural experience. Philosophy should be more closely allied with science and develop a pragmatic epistemology which stresses science’s emphasis on experience, hypothesis, prediction, and problem solving. But in no way did science replace philosophy, dictate what philosophers should believe, or demand the reduction of the mental. In this spirit, the naturalists set out to virtually redefine the entire conception and practice of philosophy and inquiry in general. They reconceptualized truth, evidence and experience. They regarded ideas as tools to be tested in experience. In so doing, they incurred many misunderstandings, such as that pragmatism leads to extreme relativism, denies the reality of truth, or is simply a reflection of a crude American capitalism which worships results. What the pragmatists were rebelling against was a transcendental view of truth and inquiry divorced from experience and practice, for example some neo-Hegelian absolute.68 As James said, pragmatism reminds philosophers that their “world formulas” should relate to human life and decision-making. Dewey, who wanted philosophy to tackle the most urgent issues of an era, made similar remarks: The problem of restoring integration and cooperation between man’s beliefs about the world in which he lives and the values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem of modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from that life.69

What did these pragmatic naturalists mean when they sought to connect philosophy with life? A disconnect is implied. What sort of disconnect? One disconnect is that philosophical inquiry is not asking the sorts of questions, or carrying out the sorts of

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studies, that are of great significance to a culture or to humanity. Another disconnect is that philosophers often ask questions in ways that preclude broad participation or general interest. There is nothing like a boring philosophical lecture to take the life out of what should otherwise be a fascinating topic. Broad interest and discussion can be hampered in many ways, such as academic specialization, technical jargon, or the division of a broad and interesting question into abstract slivers of the question. The natural human curiosity in philosophical questions— the questions that make us Homo philosophicus—loses interest in a philosophy divorced from the world. The pragmatic naturalists wanted to revive philosophy’s significance to culture, by practicing an accessible, public discourse. James’ engaging, personal lectures on broad topics like philosophy, psychology, and religion packed halls on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Pragmatic naturalism’s approach was not that different from the questioning of Socrates as he took up philosophical questions in the agora or in the symposium. But philosophical naturalists stressed the social nature of Socratic discussion. Philosophy should be part of inquiry as a “collective human project” where people aim to acquire knowledge and answer questions that matter to many, or to us all.70 Our time needs philosophy in this collective sense. We live in an era of information ‘fission’—the fragmentation of information into multiple disciplines and agendas. Philosophy’s role is to help culture wield these sources of knowledge into meaningful conceptions that make sense of the world and help us to respond to its gigantic problems. Pragmatic naturalism rejects the idea that we are at the end of philosophy—that new areas of knowledge will settle all philosophical perplexity, that psychology will replace epistemology, or neuroethics will replace philosophical ethics. Natural scientists do not get the final say in the meaning of life or of the world. They are not the only or final measure of what there is,

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if only because science changes, and because our knowledge extends beyond natural science. Given that inquiry happens in time, our conception of the natural world, and what is natural, “must remain indefinite.”71 What we start with provisionally is our best current experience and inquiry into nature ranging from perceptions and lived experience to the sciences and on to the humanities. Pragmatic naturalism is a two-level inquiry into what matters—a matter of natural knowledge and a matter of ethical reflection. Level 1: Inquiry is a collective human project aimed at addressing the questions that matter, naturalistically. Epistemology is the improvement of this inquiry. Level 2: Inquiry into the natural world is part of an even larger collective project called ethics which asks how the state of the world and our knowledge of it can be used to make lives, individually and collectively, worth living. Socrates asked: How should I live? Pragmatic naturalism asks: How should we live? Pragmatic naturalism, or philosophy naturalized, has several roles to play in this two-level exercise. One is the critical appraisal of fundamental ideas; another role is helping citizens self-educate themselves about the significance of current thinking, and the rich cultural resources for humanistic thinking in our history. One of the ethical tasks of philosophical naturalism has already been mentioned: to define and promote what is humane, what is part of our nature as philosophical animals. Dewey’s Pragmatic Naturalism72 The best place to seek insight into the commitments and challenges of naturalism is to consider America’s greatest pragmatic naturalist, John Dewey.73 Dewey’s life and thought at the turn of the twentieth century represent that of a restless, young

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America seeking to develop its own cultural institutions, science, and philosophy.74 For Dewey and the brash young pragmatists and naturalists, the whole notion of experience and nature had been covered over with a mystifying layer of neoKantian idealism with its talk of transcendental egos and the “spirit” in history or the British absolutism of F. H. Bradley— a special experience of ultimate reality. At the same time, Russell, Frege, and other analytical philosophers were seeking relief from idealism by founding philosophy on pure logic.75 Spencer’s Social Darwinism and Comte’s positivism were still powerful trends, but Spencer’s worrisome application of “the survival of the fittest” to society—as justifying the survival of the strongest (the wealthy, the ruthless, the powerful)—was an aberration of Darwin’s original meaning of fitness and selection. Meanwhile, Machian positivism—soon to be become known as logical positivism— tried to reduce our full-blooded experience of the world to a logical construction placed upon the myth of a given—uninterpreted sensations. It was difficult to find a non-transcendental philosophy that treated ordinary experience and human agency in the lived world with some respect and seriousness. Why not create a ‘this worldly’ naturalism, a pragmatism with a respect for (not adulation of) science, properly understood? Dewey (1859-1952) and his pragmatic colleagues set out to do just that: to philosophize by starting (and staying) with human experience in its full interaction with society and nature. Dewey sought a perspective that brought things together. Thus he was impressed as a student both by the new Darwinian biology76 and Hegel’s grand system of philosophy. At the core of all of Dewey’s thought is the biological (or ecological) idea of a living, organic-environmental interaction, or “transactions in a situation.” Humans and non-human animals share this embodiment in nature. This is Dewey’s naturalistic starting point. Philosophy is concerned with how the distinctive human

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embodiment, characterized by language, self-consciousness, meaning and purpose, arose from a prior biological and physical nature. Throughout his career, Dewey attempted to state more clearly the notion of experience beginning with experience as a process over time, not a momentary event. Early on, he said experience is something we “undergo” but not passively. It contains conflicts, a lack of integration, or a new problem which calls on us to be an agent who experiments with, and reconstructs, our experience. In other writings, he calls experience a matter of work, requiring force and energy. Experience is not some ignition of Cartesian thought inside the mind hidden inside the skull; an illuminating episode of an organism at rest; or a passively experienced stream of consciousness that occurs to us, unbidden. Nor is experience as the early empiricists defined it, merely the first stage or passage of sensations (or Humean “impressions”) into the inward theatre of the mind, which may or may not excite a motor response. One of Dewey’s first well-known publications was against the “reflex arc concept” of human experience then popular. It divided experience into three separate elements: sensation; the idea triggered by the sensation; and then motor activity. This segmentation of experience was far from the reality of lived experience. Dewey did not deny the reality of the three elements. But he insisted that all three elements could influence each other and mingle. There was no single, universal, linear passage from sensation to action. Moreover, Dewey imagines this process as occurring within a transaction between an organism and its environment, usually to address a problem or achieve a goal. Learning is experience. Learning is the entire organism in transaction with nature, for example, when it learns new habits. Learning is perception and performance. It is adaptation. It is, as Richard Brandom said, an “adaptive attunement to the environment.”77 It is more a knowing how than a knowing that.

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Experience is not only what happens in our minds. Experience is a doing. Dewey states: “Experience becomes an affair primarily of doing. The organism does not stand about, Micawber-like, waiting for something to turn up….The organism acts in accordance with its own structure, simple or complex, upon its surroundings.”78 “Experience” is this linkage between doing and what follows from doing. Experience is of nature as well as in nature, consisting of experiencing and what is experienced. One of Dewey’s best descriptions of what he means by experience is found in the early pages of Experience and Nature, where he quotes William James as saying experience was a “double-barreled word” referring both to what men do, suffer and strive for, and how men act, suffer, and strive. In short, how people act and are acted upon. The stress is on the “processes of experiencing.”79 Dewey writes: Experience denotes the planted field, the sowed seeds, the reaped harvests, the changes of night and day….It also denotes the one who plants and reaps, who works and rejoices, hopes, fears….[Experience contains] no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them in an unanalyzed totality. “Things” and “thoughts”...refer to products discriminated by reflection out of primary experience…. Life denotes a function, a comprehensive activity, in which organism and environment are included.80

Although there is a danger that these many explications of experience may confuse the reader, it is Dewey’s earnest attempt to get the reader to stop thinking in the dualistic, mentalistic, and transcendental terms of Western philosophy. Once we understand Dewey’s focus on organic-environment adaptation—in a species and in individuals—much of the rest of his philosophy follows. For Dewey, philosophy starts with the “embodied mind” in real, natural situations.81 Dewey’s stress

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on experience as an active, changing process also leads him to speak less about reason and knowledge as a fixed achievement, and more about self-correcting “inquiry.” Inquiry is a term that denotes continuous activity and intervention in nature, not the passive observations of a spectator. Much of our experience has little to do with, or cannot be identified with, propositional, intellectual knowledge, whether it is falling in love, a great meal at a fine restaurant, or the grief of losing a friend to cancer. Each experience has qualities which distinguishes it from others. While information or propositional knowledge may be part of the experience, it does not mean that experiences are knowledge affairs. Dewey’s concept of organic transactions also links up with other doctrines. It denotes that our beliefs are not certain. They amount to on-going situated work and inquiry that start from current conceptions and methods but are open to revising and relearning how to think about life and nature. Thus Dewey criticizes the quest for philosophical certainty and the spectator theory of knowledge, and embraces pragmatism’s fallibilism which rejects a Cartesian First Philosophy. Any one of our beliefs may turn out to be wrong. We are fallible. We therefore need to practice a moderate skepticism that questions individual beliefs but does not, a la Descartes, attempt to doubt all of my beliefs at the same time.82 Finally, Dewey rejects the idea that we can get outside our current situated thinking—to know reality from no perspective. He claims we cannot see the world sub specie aeternitatis, a claim which negates transcendental realism. Of central importance to Dewey is what he called his “naturalistic postulate.”83 It encourages us to think about the relationship of humans, nature, and other species in terms of both continuities and differences, that is, differences of degree in nature. When thinking of humans, we both acknowledge that their distinct capacities are more complex and different in nature

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than such capacities in other species, yet we also stress that this difference evolved from an earlier evolutionary period. Differences mounted up until they were distinct to the species. Dewey stresses four kinds of continuity: continuities within experience; continuities between the experience of humans and nonhuman animals; continuities between common sense and more articulate science; and continuities between experience and what occurs in nature.84 How this works itself out when we think of specific traits can be seen by considering two passages from Dewey where he discusses the “wonder” of human communication, and the uniqueness of humans as a cultural, social being. On communication, he writes: Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful. That things should be able to pass from the plane of external pushing and pulling to that of revealing themselves to man, and thereby to themselves; and that the fruit of communication should be participation, sharing, is a wonder by the side of which transubstantiation pales.85

Then Dewey brings in the human domain of society and culture. The following passage could serve as a philosophical statement for the anthropologists and evolutionists who explain the success of the human species as due to our invention of cumulative culture. Man, as Aristotle remarked, is a social animal. This fact introduces him into situations and originates problems and ways of solving them that have no precedent upon the organic biological level. For man is social in another sense than the bee or ant, since his activities are encompassed in an environment that is culturally transmitted, so that what man does and how he acts is determined not by organic structure and physical heredity alone but by the influence of cultural heredity, embedded

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in traditions, institutions, customs and the purposes and beliefs they both carry and inspire.86

Dewey virtually defines his naturalism with his view on the evolution of continuities and differences in nature. There is no breach of continuity between operations of inquiry and biological operations and physical operations. “Continuity”... means that rational operations grow out of organic activities, without being identical with that from which they emerge.87

This is Dewey’s statement of a naturalism that is not reductive. It is his notion that the mental supervenes on the physical. Mind, as Mark Johnson states, referencing Dewey, “emerges out of the strivings of certain highly developed organisms who have learned to inquire, communicate and coordinate their activities through the use of symbols.” This distinctive form of inquiry is the “mark of our species.”88 Kitcher underlines that Dewey is a “method naturalist” not a “content” naturalist. The latter is someone who attempts to do philosophy, or reform it, by looking into the new ideas or content of domains of natural science. A method naturalist, like Dewey, is more interested in incorporating into philosophy the fallibilistic, self-corrective practices of science.89 I am not sure about this claim. Dewey took much from the content of evolutionary biology when constructing his philosophy. But his emphasis on using science as a model for epistemology and inquiry is undoubted. McDowall’s call for a less restrictive “liberal naturalism”90 is an extension of Dewey’s naturalism. His liberal naturalism, in a Kantian spirit, refuses to reduce the realm of human freedom to that of lawful nature. Science, he says, led to clarity about the realm of law but not clarity about nature.91 To avoid regarding knowing and thinking as supernatural, McDowall says we should regard knowing and thinking as “aspects of our lives” where life is the “career of a living thing” and hence

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something natural. But these aspects of our lives require concepts that function in Sellars’ “space of reasons.” We really are rational animals. Our lives are patterned such that they only make sense if we include the work of reasons and justifications. “Thinking and knowing are part of our way of being animals,” McDowell states.92 We are not strangely bifurcated with a foothold in nature through our bodies and a mysterious separate involvement with an extra-natural realm of rational connections. “All we need is to stress that they are concepts of occurrences and states in our lives.”93 I agree with this statement except for the phrase “all we need.” Recognizing our mentality as natural is only the beginning of a philosophy of the embodied mind. Dewey’s non-reductive naturalism is open-minded in its admirable willingness to learn from new developments in the sciences, but with no desire to reduce philosophy to the sciences. As our learning continues, our sense of nature also changes, just as our sense of philosophy—or what philosophy needs to do in an era—also changes. Dewey would agree with Joseph Rouse’s statement that naturalism is a “historically situated philosophical project.”94 Historical projects should be open-minded about possible sources of knowledge. Who knows from where insight may come? Therefore, the liberal naturalism school and other thinkers promote a relaxed naturalism which is not married to some project of scientism or reductionist science. Instead, naturalism is married to the idea of self-correcting, on-going inquiry which is open to many kinds of insights and experiences, from aesthetic and moral experience to everyday encounters with the world. The “nonscientific” is not anti-scientific and it is not fake science. There are forms of experience in nature that may or may not be able to be fully articulated in scientific terms, but they are still part of being human. As Stroud writes, in calling for a more open-minded naturalism: “We must accept everything we find ourselves committed to in accounting for

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everything...(we) want to explain.” He adds: “We want to explain the thoughts, beliefs, knowledge, and evaluative attitudes that we think people have got.”95 Echoing Quine’s idea of ontology as what we need to explain things, Stroud advocates that, if we must admit the existence of mathematical truths, the existence of evaluative attitudes, and the reality of norms to make sense of life, so be it. Scientism and restrictive scientific naturalism work in the opposite direction: they restrict and adjust our ways of explaining to fit a pre-conceived ontology of just physical things. The naturalism of Dewey and of anthropological naturalism work in both directions at the same time: adjusting our ontology and epistemology as we go along in inquiry. What we think exists is influenced by what we think is well formed belief, epistemically; and what we think is good epistemic practice is influenced by the pragmatic and theoretical successes of certain kinds of thinking, various methods, and various norms of epistemic evaluation. Is there something circular about using science to critique science; to use the results of science to think about how we do science? We encountered this question earlier with Quine’s notion of reciprocal containment. Again, for relaxed naturalism, the answer is the same. Using science to critique science is considered viciously circular only if one is married to the belief that philosophy (and inquiry in general) needs foundations, a First Philosophy. But, why posit the mind as a tabula rasa as a starting point for inquiry, with no assumptions or presumptions? Why start from absolutely certain propositions? There are no such foundations and the structure of knowing is more like an evolving web of belief with mutually supporting links rather than a static house. We should recall Quine’s metaphor, borrowed from Otto Neurath, that inquiry is more like sailors already launched out to sea and who repair their vessel one plank at a time.96

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Dewey was aware of this worry about the circularity of naturalism among his reductivist scientific colleagues and absolutist philosophers. Here is how he answered their worry. To say that our knowledge of nature learns from the natural sciences, does not mean that the material of experienced things qua experienced must be translated into the terms of the material of the physical sciences; that view leads to a naturalism which denies distinctive significance to experience, thereby ending in the identification of naturalism with mechanistic materialism.97

If we look at history, Dewey says, we see how human knowledge had progressed from initial, inarticulate beliefs based on “gross experience” into more articulate scientific beliefs today. At the same time, we see how we can “frame a theory of experience by which we can tell how this development...into the highly refined consciousness of science has taken place.”98 This is the same attitude that Quine adopted in proposing that epistemology be naturalized. Rather than follow Rudolph Carnap and other positivists who sought to “rationally reconstruct” how we come to have science by imagining and applying logical procedures of thought, Quine simply asked: Why all this imaginative reconstruction? Why not just look scientifically how humans, as embedded in the world, actually develop scientific theory from a meagre sensory input. This approach makes sense, and it is not viciously circular, so long as one no longer dreams of First Philosophy. Sellars once complained that much of epistemology forces us to choose between two images of knowledge. One seems forced to choose between the picture of an elephant which rests on a tortoise (What supports the tortoise?) and the picture of a great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in its mouth (where does it begin?). Neither will do. For

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empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.99

Exactly. Naturalism plus fallibilism breaks the spell of these two images on the philosophical mind. Before we end this section, I register a couple of caveats about McDowell’s Kantian naturalism. First, in making human conceptual and reasoning powers sui generis it risks reducing the notion of the mental to Kantian-like examples of the mind—explicit judgments, logical truths, and propositions. This threatens to erect another dualism: between the mentality of humans and non-human animals. Since, presumably, animals can’t reason like Kantians (or educated humans), they lack mind or true mentality. There are no degrees of mind or different forms of mind. Just the human logical mind. This replaces Dewey’s continuities in nature with discontinuities. Also, McDowell does not speak in any detail as to how Homo sapiens progressively developed many types of mental capacities—not just propositional judgments but imaginings, aesthetic appreciation, our emotional capacities, and so on. McDowell is not like Dewey in actually referencing specific sciences and their ideas, and showing how they contribute to a philosophy of the human. He says thinking is embodied, but he does not seem very interested in exploring the nature and sciences of that mind, despite a great deal of interesting research in psychology and other disciplines. Rather he throws all of the sciences into one, monolithic bag called ‘modern science’ defined as a “realm of law.” But many philosophers of science today question whether there is one thing called modern science and whether all of the sciences can be defined as describing a realm of law, rather than a plurality of different disciplines and approaches. Talk of a realm of law in the world of quantum

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physics seems Newtonian and mechanistic, and thus not adequate to characterize science as a whole. Further, McDowell appears to think that once we have used Kant to naturalize the normative space—and save it from reduction—that is all that philosophy has to do. Our modern anxieties about the place of the normative in nature should fade away and we can carry on with other things. This is a form of Wittgenstein’s “quietism” where philosophy’s role is therapeutic —of relieving anxieties.100 There is, McDowell has said, “no need for a constructive philosophy” that studies the norms of reason.101 I disagree. The work of conceptually and philosophically placing mind in nature has only begun, and it can’t be left to the scientists alone or the laboratories of Artificial Intelligence. I much prefer the Deweyan approach of Kitcher, Peter Godfrey-Smith102 and Daniel Dennett103 who actually use evolutionary science and other disciplines to tell us something interesting about humans. We need constructive philosophy aplenty. Dewey’s naturalism of continuities within differences is a naturalism that fits into the project of anthropological realism. The latter is committed to thinking of ethics as one of the projects of Homo philosophicus: a being who is distinctive to the degree that it thinks morally, aesthetically and philosophically. A being who has the wonderous capacity to communicate and reveal. Those macro traits depend on the evolution of homo sapiens as a social and cultural animal. Here, we can think along the lines of Dewey: that humans are distinct creatures because of such traits. Normativity in its many guises—norms, logic, reason-giving—captures something extremely important about being human. But we do not advance our understanding of this normativity if we bifurcate humans into mind and body, each metaphysically different realms, such that humans have a leg in this world and another leg in another world. Rather we use historical and evolutionary thinking to study how our symbolic

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and rational capacities, our morality, and our aesthetics, evolved in humans in nature over ions of time. There are many ways to study humans as symbolic and cultural. One can study symbolic systems; one can study anthropology; one can study the neural underpinnings of thinking. Naturalism stands behind all of these approaches with its core commitments. Therefore, the project of anthropological realism stands shoulder to shoulder with naturalistic attempts to take seriously the human sphere of agency-in-the-world, of personhood. We should stop trying to reduce it to what it is not. Bernstein, in peering into the future of naturalism, argues persuasively that the current leaders of the movement such as Philip Kitcher, Huw Price,104 Joseph Rouse, and many others are “moving us closer to the spirit of Deweyan philosophical naturalism” that overcomes long-standing Western dualisms, a regaining of a non-reductive appreciation of the human agent, and a challenge to the view that nature and norm are fundamentally incompatible in nature and in theory. This is a pragmatic naturalism open to learning from new forms of inquiry. Dewey’s legacy of an open-minded and pluralistic naturalism is “very much alive today.”105

Conclusion: Why Naturalism is Deep Having discussed the sort of naturalism that is compatible with anthropological realism, we conclude by returning to a skeptical question raised at the start of this chapter: Stroud wondered if naturalism was simply a trendy label, that is, naturalism is not a deep doctrine. Stroud answers his own question: The idea of “nature,” or “natural” objects...or modes of investigation that are “naturalistic,” has been applied more widely...than probably any other notion in the whole history of human thought….What is usually at issue is not whether to be

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“naturalistic” or not, but rather what is and what is not to be included in one’s conception of “nature.” That is the real question, and that is what leads to deep disagreement.106

Naturalism is deep because it deals with a deep topic. Naturalism is a significant topic in philosophy because it touches on our idea of what nature is, and so much of our worldview hangs on that idea—our ethical, religious, scientific and common sense beliefs. They swim or sink together depending on how persuasive our answer to “What is nature?” may be. It may be asked whether the answer to this question can ever be completely settled by naturalistic means alone. It depends on how one defines “naturalistic means.” We have already suggested that our starting point in living as well as in thinking begins with our lived world prior to science. That such a world exists is not a foundational, absolute premise a la Descartes. Rather it is a practical presupposition which we must make to get started in naturalistic inquiry about the world. It is as basic as a belief in the external world. We cannot prove these two beliefs because nothing is more basic or evident and, as Aristotle stated, you cannot support the self-evident by what is less evident. The multiple roots of our belief or disbelief in naturalism— psychological, cultural, philosophical—explains why there are many definitions of the term and a somewhat chaotic discussion. The same could be said about any broad philosophical approach such as pragmatism, idealism, or analytical philosophy, for that matter. The correct response is not to abandon naturalism out of impatience at the state of discussion but to offer one’s own hopefully clear and well-thought out meaning of the term and to show how it can be used to guide further inquiry.

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Notes 1. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, 4. 2. Hill, Barton, and Hurtado, “The Emergence of Human Uniqueness,” 187. See also Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, 9. 3. MacCready, “An Ambivalent Luddite at a Technological Feast.” 4. Pinker, “The Cognitive Niche: Coevolution of Intelligence, Sociality, and Language.” 5. Boyd, A Different Kind of Animal, 3. 6. Boyd, A Different Kind of Animal, 9. 7. Boesch and Tomasello have called this the “rachet effect.” See Boesch and Tomasello, “Chimpanzee and Human Cultures,” 607. 8. The Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012), surrealist and symbolist, once said in a 2009 documentary, Te De Tàpies, that his painting and sculptures try to capture what it is to be human between birth and death. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVC4PVoqrDI 9. On the emergence of an innate aesthetic impulse in humans, see Høgh-Olsen, The Aesthetic Animal. 10. Marjorie Perloff argued in 1981 that modernism in AngloAmerican poetry contains a “poetics of indeterminacy” where the meaning and reference of words have no stable or clear meaning, a poetics she attributes to Arthur Rimbaud. We would add that indeterminacy is a major feature of contemporary, post-modern selfconsciousness, not just poetry. Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy, vii. 11. On the historical link between modern democracy and art theory, see Ferry, Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age. 12. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About; Parfit, On What Matters, Vol. 1. 13. Midgley’s “Philosophical Plumbing” was published online by Cambridge University Press on January 8, 2010. https://philpapers. org/archive/MIDPP.pdf 14. This point is considered in the previous chapter. 15. Kant, “Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason,” 6:18-27, 69-75.

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16. On the psychological and moral impact of our consciousness of finitude and fallibility, and the nature of reflection, see Ricoeur’s early work, Fallible Man. 17. I am reminding the reader of Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative as a commitment to a humane “kingdom of ends” where people are treated as ends and never as only a means. That is, they are treated as individuals who are persons. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:433, p. 41. 18. James, “The Present Dilemma in Philosophy,” 362. 19. It is also possible to seek intelligibility by combining natural and supernatural thinking, as we find in Aquinas’s ‘dual’ pathway to knowing God, reasoning from nature or believing through faith. 20. Bernstein, The Vicissitudes of Nature, 51. 21. Ward’s Cravings of the Mind examines these transcendental desires when they become extreme or a ‘craving’, and the terrible consequences for humanity such cravings have caused across history. 22. See Cartledge, Democritus. 23. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “skyhook” as “an imaginary contrivance for attachment to the sky; an imaginary means of suspension in the sky” whose first recorded use was in 1915. Bertrand Russell said that “through the infinity of the universe, the mind which contemplates it achieves some share in infinity.” Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 92. 24. Plato, “Timaeus,” 69d, 1271. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Alpha 6, 23-25. See Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1, 1094a1-1103a10, 63-90. 25. Plato, “Timaeus,” 69d, 1271. 26. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Alpha 6, 23-25. 27. See Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1, 1094a1-1103a10, 63-90. 28. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1,1097b2-21, 74. Whether Aristotle believed that the soul survived after death is a long controversy. He does not think the soul as a whole, as the form of a body, survives death, no more than the form of a horse survives its death. However, Aristotle muddied the waters at the end of De Anima when he briefly and obscurely suggests that there are two types of intellect and one of them might survive death. Aristotle, De Anima, Book III, Chapter Five, 204-205.

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29. Aristotle, Metaphysics, Lamba 7, 372-375. 30. Plato, Phaedrus, 246a-254e, 524-53, 506-556. 31. Plato, Phaedrus, 247d-e, 525. 32. “Aristotle” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/Aristotle/. 33. Machiavelli, The Prince, 58. 34. Machiavelli, The Prince, 59. 35. Machiavelli, The Prince, 60. 36. Machiavelli infrequently quotes Aristotle. He appears to disapprove of his political thinking. 37. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 130. 38. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 130-131. 39. Russell, A Free Man’s Worship, 1. 40. Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, 2. 41. Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, 36, 106, 39. 42. Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, 40. 43. See Rorty, “The Contingency of Community.” 44. Rorty, Preface for Philosophy and Social Hope, xii. 45. Rorty, Preface for Philosophy and Social Hope, xiii. 46. Bernstein, Pragmatic Naturalism, 3. 47. Intentionality and the Myths of the Given. 9. 48. Putnam, “The Content and Appeal of ‘Naturalism.’” 59. 49. Stroud, “The Charm of Naturalism,” 21. 50. Putnam, “The Content and Appeal of ‘Naturalism.’” 59. 51. Stroud, “The Charm of Naturalism,” 22. 52. Rouse, Articulating the World, 3. 53.The phrase “First Philosophy”and its association with Descartes’s aim to find absolutely certain knowledge upon which to ground science was made popular by Willard V. O. Quine. See, for example, Quine’s “Five Milestones of Empiricism,” 67. Quine defined naturalism as “abandonment of the goal of a first philosophy prior to natural science.” 54. I say “a tendency” because, despite their ground-breaking emphasis on underlying natural principles, the Ionians, from Anaximander to Anaximenes and Heraclitus, retained in their thinking religious and animistic concepts. See Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy.

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55. Many modern philosophers have claimed that their ethics is grounded in or inspired by Aristotle’s view of nature, from G. E. Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” in 1958 and Rosalind Hursthouse’s On Virtue Ethics in 1999 to Phillipa Foot’s Natural Goodness in 2001. 56. Chiaradonna and Farnia call this distinction a “technical” and a “general” sense, but I think internal-external captures better Aristotle’s meaning in Book 1 of “Physics.” Chiaradonna and Farina “Aristotle on (Second) Nature, Habit, and Character,” 7-8. 57. Aristotle, “Physics,” Book 2, Chapter One, 192b8-193b22, pp. 236-238. 58. Aristotle, “Physics,” Book 8, Chapter One, 1, 252a17-19, p. 358. 59. Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image,” 1, 5, 7, 19-21, 2, 32. 60. Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image,” 19. 61. McDowell, “Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind,” 91. 62. Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” 298-299. 63. McDowell, “Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind,” 93. 64. McDowell, “Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind,” 91-92. 65. Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” 303. 66. McDowell, “Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind,” 105. 67. Caro and Macarthur, The Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism, 1. 68. Kitcher, “Pragmatic Naturalism,” 16-17. 69. Dewey, “The Quest for Certainty,” 204. 70. Kitcher, “Pragmatic Naturalism,” 20-21. 71. Kitcher, “Pragmatic Naturalism,” 23. 72. Philip Kitcher argues that Dewey’s “pragmatic naturalism”—a view to which he subscribes—is a rich, “synoptic” or forward-looking perspective for philosophy, avoiding both restrictive scientism and the metaphysical postulation of transcendent entities or powers. Calling it “pragmatic naturalism” informs the reader that this is not a scientism but a naturalism that takes its inspiration from Dewey and the original pragmatists. See Kitcher, “From Naturalism to Pragmatic Naturalism,” xvi-xvii. 73. For an excellent overview of Dewey’s approach to philosophy, see Kitcher, “Dewey’s Conception of Philosophy.”

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74. On America’s development of its cultural institutions in this period, from opera and concert houses to art museums and music schools, see Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. 75. For a history of this era of philosophy, see chapters three to six in Passmore, A History of Philosophy. 76. Dewey was born in 1859, the publication date of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. 77. Brandom, Perspectives on Pragmatism, 6-7. 78. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 49. 79. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 8. Italics in Dewey’s text. 80. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 8-9. 81. Noted American philosopher of mind, Mark Johnson, has acknowledged that Dewey inspired his thinking about embodied mind and thinking with or through the body, as found in his naturalistic collection of essays, Embodied Mind, of 2017. 82. On fallibilism, see Putnam, Pragmatism, 21. 83. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 17. 84. Bernstein, Philosophical Naturalism, 19-20. 85. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 166. 86. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 49. 87. Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 26. 88. Johnson, Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason, 40-41. 89. Kitcher, “Deweyan Naturalism,” 68. 90. McDowell, “Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind,” 95. 91. McDowell, “Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind,” 94. 92. McDowell, “Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind,” 95. 93. McDowell, “Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind,” 95. 94. Rouse, Articulating the World, 6. 95. Stroud, “The Charm of Naturalism,” 3. 96. Quine, Word and Object, 3. 97. Dewey, “Nature in Experience,” 142-143. 98. Dewey, “Nature in Experience,” 143. 99. Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” 300. 100. McDowell, “Wittgenstein’s Quietism,” Common Knowledge, 15(3) (2009): 365-372. 101. McDowell, Mind and World, 94-95.

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102. Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. 103. See Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back. 104. Price advocates a “subject naturalism” which believes that science is relevant to philosophy in a certain way. That is, philosophy should start with what science tells us about ourselves (as subjects) as natural creatures. If the claims of philosophy conflict with this view, then philosophy needs to “give way.” See Price’s, “Naturalism without Representationalism,” 73. Besides the unfortunate use of “subject” to mark his position—Dewey would have worried that it is too close to the old subject-object dichotomy—Price’s idea of philosophy “giving way” makes it too subservient to science. Philosophy can and should challenge purported scientific knowledge, and construct alternate general conceptions of humans, knowledge, rationality, and so on. 105. Bernstein, Pragmatic Naturalism, 57. 106. Stroud, “The Charm of Naturalism,” 21-22.

EPILOGUE ETHICS FOR A GLOBAL WORLD STEPHEN J. A. WARD I am, at the time of mature reflection, what I have become. —Bernard Williams1

The future of democracy, where issues are debated by reasonable publics, is in doubt in many countries. The project of ethics, to create humane and just societies, is under threat from authoritarian regimes and powerful hierarchies. Given climate change and the world’s nuclear arsenal, the future of our species is not assured. We humans live in a technological global world, but we tend to think, morally, with the parochial mindset of prehistory humans. Our moralities—the norms we actually use to determine our conduct every day—are still biased toward our narrow self-interest, kin, tribe or nation. We too easily adopt an aggressive nationalism, a xenophobia, or a militant intolerance that separates us from them. We invent political ideologies to justify our subjugation of others. Yet, humans can be empathetic, kind, inventive, adaptable, and broad-minded. We can be the nicest or the nastiest of creatures. With our self-consciousness, conscience, and purpose, humans are the only truly moral beings on the planet. Only humans can be morally great or base. From evolution, we inherited an ambivalent human nature that can be good or bad. We inherited social traits such as empathy and cooperation; but also Darwinian traits such as anger and tribalism. The ques-

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tion at any time and in any situation is which traits will prevail. This ambivalence implies that ethics is about bringing out the better angels of our nature, while reducing the agitation of our darker side. Bringing out is a matter of moral and social design—a deliberate set of actions. Among the questions we face are: Can we design cultures, education, moralities, technology, and social spaces that trigger cooperation rather than aggression? Can we design intercultural spaces that encourage cross-border understanding rather than tribalism? Design requires theory. Moral theory faces the question: Upon what moral perspective and moral theory will such actions be based? These questions are complex because we have a new designer of culture and trigger of traits: global communication via the Internet and other technologies. Global media was once hailed as a democratizing force. We now endure a toxic world of misinformers, trolls, extremists and unreasonable publics. A central task of ethics is collective resistance against this communicative violence and the development of measures to promote egalitarian democracy and justice worldwide. This is why we wrote the book and called it anthropological realism. It rethinks moral theory so it aligns with moral globalism, and reclaims the humane from the deadening hand of post-modern reductions of the human. Anthropological realism is part of a collective ethical project designed to make the world morally global, not just technologically global. Anthropological realism is not concerned with theorizing that is abstract and remote from the world. Rather, like all valid moralities, it is an attempt to respond conceptually to a new world, a new moral ecology. No substantial moral reform and advancement will occur unless we get the theory right because good theory is at the bottom of progressive moral belief, and moral belief shapes our conduct.

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The book seeks to promote a philosophical reconstruction of ourselves as persons-in-relation and as philosophical animals. The reconstruction bears witness to the value of the reflective life, the artistic life, the spiritual life, the moral life, and of life itself. One bears witness to the global values of humanity. Having reaffirmed ourselves as thoroughly human, we show the meaning of that creed through creative, reflective, and moral engagement with the world. Why do philosophy and ethical thinking not die, in a scientific and materialistic age? Because, as discussed earlier, humans bear the burden of being self-conscious. They cannot avoid thinking about their existence in ways that necessarily transcend fact. We wish to know who we are, or should be, as well as what in fact we are as a physical entity. The sciences provide invaluable theories for philosophical thinking, but they never replace philosophy, which is the personal voice of the human self seeking to understand itself. When do we start to philosophize, authentically? When experience causes us to reflect, when experience causes us to doubt ourselves, or wonder about our current view of the world. Philosophy has passionate sources. It is not only wonder at the starry heavens above but also at the troubles below. It stems from sources that are tough, visceral, and disturbing, and which call on us to respond: social ruptures, revolutions, bewilderment at current trends, new moral problems, and dissatisfaction with oneself, including our finitude and death. Philosophy is art within the world of the intellect—a conceptual art that creates new portraits of ourselves and the world. Our best philosophers attempt to create a comprehensive portrait of the human being in their times. Philosophy can be carried on in multiple forms, in multiple places, and at many levels of abstraction and rigor. Philosophy crosses boundaries. In order to evaluate philosophical writing one must consider fact and logic. But, also, one can consider a

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number of other criteria, depending on the text. One might look at the depth and originality of the ideas; the courage of the thinking; the lucidity of the images and the words; the capacity to reveal what a philosophical idea actually means in experience; the ability to diagnose fundamental attitudes and assumptions; and the dignity of the discourse. In some contexts, there is the authority of the writer’s life and engagements, such as Albert Camus’s lifelong devotion to freedom and his involvement in the French Resistance, not to speak of Simone Weil’s dedication to understanding the humiliation of French factory workers in the middle of the twentieth century. So, we invite others to reclaim the human in their own manner, through their own forms of thinking and communication—in a poem, a musical composition, or a philosophical treatise. We hope anthropological realism will be of some assistance in these humane ventures.

Note 1. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 51.

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INDEX

A Abduction, 285-288, 290 Abelard, Peter, 58, 275 Absolute realism, 105 Absolute truth, 115 Absolutes, absolutism, 10, 169, 179-180, 278, 296 Abstract, 169, 188, 219, 281, 304 Active intellect, 292 Age of Science, 179 Ajdukiewicz, Kaimier, 305, 331 Akan moral thought, 223, 274 Alexandrian school, 292 Alston, William, 21, 23, 111113, 312 Altheide, David, 198-199 Althusser, Louis, 183 American pragmatism, 362365 Ampliative, 219 Analytic philosophy, 278 Anderson, Douglas, 324 Analytic-synthetic distinction, 284 Anselm of Canterbury, 58 Anthropocentrism, 199-201 Anthropological ethics, 169, 170, 181, 187, 202

Anthropological realism, ix, 128-132, 169, 170, 193, 199, 210-214, 225-226, 228, 231, 242, 244-246, 249, 254-255, 259, 279, 286, 321 Anti-Defamation League, 267 Antiochian school, 292 Antinomies of reason, 169 Anti-realism, anti-realists, 1, 27, 34, 80, 93, 192-193, 239, 305-306 Apel, Karl-Otto, 316 Apocrypha, 253 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 74, 214 Applied ethics, 13-14 Aquinas, Thomas, 29, 30, 222, 299, 326, 358 Arendt, Hannah, 204, 221222, 262 Articulation of intelligibility, 296 Aristotle, 29, 30, 83, 177178, 181, 197, 208, 215, 222, 255-256, 275, 291, 301, 304, 325, 347-349 Aristotle’s naturalism, 358 Audi, Robert, 76 Augustine, 58, 59, 254, 262, 299, 327

422 Austin, John L, 307-309, 314 Authentic disclosure, 318 Autonomous, 177 Avramides, Anita, 309 B Bacon, Francis, 60, 68, 254 Barthes, Roland, 322 Baudrillard, Jean, 95 Bauman, Zygmunt, 236 Belucci, Francesco, 324 Benevolence, 70, 71 Bentham, Jeremy, 69, 200 Berkeley, George, 27, 61-62, 280 Berlin Max-Planck Institute, 252 Bernstein, Richard, 343, 354 Biological organisms, 173176, 186 Bloom, Harold, 254 Boas, Franz, 238 Boch, Ernst, 189 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 318 Bourne, Randolph, 236 Boyd, Robert, 336 Brink, David., 74 Breslow, Harris, 237 Bromwich, David, 217-218 Buddhist ethics, 223 C Camus, Albert, 164-165, 165, 388 Carnap, Rudolf, 88-89, 90, 331 Capacity development, 119122

Index Carey, James, 189 Carnap, Rudolf, 305 Cassirer, Ernst, 171, 185, 189-190, 205 Chomsky, Noam, 324 Christians, Clifford G., ix, xi, 11, 266 Cicero, 222 Classical Greece, 197, 256, 275, 291-292, 318 Clifford, Richard, 253 Cognitive niche of humans, 335 Common sense realism, 24, 26 Common good, 221-235 Communication, communicative, 174-176, 189-190, 216, 240, 243, 266, 280 Communicative rationality, 315-317 Communists, 6 Comte, Auguste, 84, 186, 204 Conceptual pluralism, 99, 110 Conceptual relativity, 30, 109, 132 Condorcet, Marquis de, 70 Confucius,223 Consequences, consequentialism, 6, 16, 75, 211, 244, 286, 306 Constructive realism, 137141, 170, 329 Contract theory, 49, 242 Contractualism, 49, 183, 228, 234

Anthropological Realism: Ethics for a Global World Constructionism, 28-29, 73, 93 Cook, James, 238 Cosmopolitanism, 74, 226227 Counter-Enlightenment, 277278 Craft, Anna, 251 Craving for certainty, 161, 345, 380 Creative, creativity, 186, 246, 248-252, 257, 285-287 Culture, cultural, 185, 187, 189-190, 199, 214-215, 254, 279, 288, 290, 326 Culture and ideology, 146150 Cultural beings, 170, 183189, 192, 196, 202, 235, 246, 290, 305, 314 Cultural continuity, 245 Cultural imperialism, 10 Cultural pluralism, 235-246 D D’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 68-69 Dansei, Marcel, 326 Darwall, Stephen, 74 Darwin, Charles, 80, 209, 344 Darwinian and social traits, 385-386 Davidson, Donald, 305-307 Definitions of good and bad, 69 Deontology, deontological, 179, 211

423

Descartes, Rene, 60, 72, 73, 177-179, 186, 198, 247, 276, 297, 301, 358 Descriptivism, 40-44 Determinism, deterministic 170, 172, 202, 296 Dewey, John, 37-38, 91-92, 161, 318, 363 Dewey’s pragmatic, 365-377 Dialogic, 171, 188, 190, 194, 202, 221, 241-242, 246 Dialogic social philosophy, 192-196 Dichotomy, dichotomies, 169, 241, 279-280, 296 Diderot, Denis, 68, 78 Discernment of reality, 22 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 191, 293296, 301, 328 Discourse, discursive, 170, 196, 223-224, 279, 287, 304, 312, 315 Diversity, 236-240, 243, 317 Dostoevsky, 353 Dualism, dualisms, ix, 169, 202, 246, 276, 290, 307, 359 Dualism of positivism, 92 Dueling intuitions, 31-36 Dummet, Michael, 306, 322 Durkheim, Emile, 233, 265 E Ebeling, Gerhard, 327 Eck, Diana, 236 Eco, Umberto, 288-291 Einstein, Albert, 21, 33, 250, 344

424 Electro-magnetic spectrum, 240 Egyptian hieroglyphs, 275 Ellul, Jacques, 218 Embodied rational inquiry, 261 Emic, 275 Empirical, 172, 184, 283, 289, 295 Empiricism, 50, 280, 284, 329 Enlightenment, 60, 78, 276277, 320, 322, 328 Epicurus, 197 Epimendes, 305 Epistemic pluralism, 132 Epistemology, epistemological, 169, 173, 185, 191, 211, 247, 286, 291, 296, 302, 305-306 Epistemology naturalized, 100 Erudition, 246, 248, 252-254, 257 Essence, essentialist, 181182, 193 Ethical practice and theory, 11-14, 179 Ethical projects, 11, 115-119 Ethics, 195, 199, 210, 218, 259, 279 Ethics as fair agreement, 4950 Ethics as proposal, 162-164 Ethics as a social practice, 11 Ethnography, ethnographic, 199, 220 Eudaimonia, 221, 255-257

Index Evolution of culture, 336 Evolutionary ethics, 115-119 Experience and reality, 22 Expressivism, 44-45 Existential, existentialism, 180-181, 194 F Fallibilism, 161 Feminist thinkers, 229 Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas, 205 Fichte, Johann, 65 Finitude, 158, 159, 165, 191, 196, 206, 296, 338, 342, 387 First Philosophy, 60, 102, 146, 381 Fischer, Karsten, 235 Floridi, Luciano, 209 Framework ethics, 15, 16 Frankfurt School, 94 Frege, Gottlob, 87, 89, 283, 322 Freud, Sigmund, 209, 215, 254, 344 Freudians, 6 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 191, 247, 249, 297-300, 329 Galtung, Johan, 241 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 244, 267 “Given” in experience, 144 Global anti-realism, 2-28 Global ethics, 10, 83, 170 Global media, 386

Anthropological Realism: Ethics for a Global World Global media ethics, x, 10, 195 Global realism, 21, 22, 80 Global solidarity, 233 Global world, 173 Good and evil, 188, 213, 217, 241, 255-256 Gorgias, 27-28 Greek natural philosophers, 55-56, 77 Grice, Paul, 307 Grondin, Jean, 298-299 Group cohesion, 170 Gubrium, Jaber, 189 Gunkel, David, 319 H Habermas, Jürgen, 49, 223, 265-266, 315-317 Hacking, Ian, 24, 99, 277 Hall, Alexandra, 226 Hare, Richard, 45 Hawking Stephen, 33 Hebrew wisdom books, 253 Heeger, Robert, 201 Hegel, Georg, 81, 183, 205 Heidegger, Martin, 181-182, 189, 198, 204-205, 296297, 301, 318 Heisenberg's uncertainty, 300 Hermeneutics, 240, 247-259, 291-303, 327 Highbrow and lowbrow art, 74 Historicality, 190-192, 285 Historicism, 93, 293-296 History, historical, 170, 179, 186, 191, 213-217, 219,

425

222, 236, 261, 278, 286, 293, 298-299, 314, 319 Hobbes, Thomas, 69 Holocaust, 239 Holism, 133-136, 169, 284, 310 Holmes, Robert, 242 Holstein, James, 189 Homeric literature, 327 Hook, Sidney, 363 Hope, 164-167, 259 Hutcheson, Francis, 70 Human beings, 170, 171, 181, 188, 256-257, 274, 278, 283, 291 Human agency, 173 Human existence, 174, 191, 210, 214-215, 217, 221, 243, 246, 250, 257, 259, 279, 291, 296-297, 299, 302 Human nature, 170, 172, 218 Human uniqueness, 379 Human well-being, 220-222, 232, 255, 291, 319 Humane, 170, 194, 267 Humanity, 172, 234, 247, 321 Humanness, 170 Humans as Homo philosophicus, 337, 364 Humans-in-relation, 170, 196 Hume, David, 69, 70, 73, 86, 171, 204, 265, 289, 343 Husserl, Edmund, 294-295 Hutchins Commission, 319 Hybrid moral realism, 10, 169, 197, 213, 288, 320 Hybrid positions, 1, 99, 103, 131-132, 170, 180 Hypostatizations, 172

426 I Idealism, 60, 68, 321 Ideational theory of meaning, 280-281 Ideology, ideologies, 4-5, 146-150, 172, 178, 242 Igbo and Yoruba of Nigeria, 274 Illocutionary acts, 310-313 Imagination, 181 Immanent realism, 23 Immanence, 338-343 Immanence and transcendence, 354-362 Impressibility, 175-176 Incremental solidarity, 264 Independence, independent, 173, 195, 224, 234 Indeterminacy of fact, 101 Indeterminacy of translations, 284 Individuals, individualism, 180, 183, 185, 218, 224, 227, 268, 275-276, 281, 316 Individual rights, 193, 225 Intentionality, 168-169 Interpretation, interpretive, 170, 191, 195-199, 213, 215-216, 246-247, 251, 275, 279, 291, 300-301, 303, 319 Interpretation of existence, 296-297 Instrumentalism, 126, 198, 224, 227 Internal realism, 105

Index Intersubjective, intersubjectivity, 171, 192, 195 Intellectual history, 173, 222, 255, 321 Ion of Ephesus, 291 Islam, Islamic, 223 J Jacques Maritain Institute, 223 James, William, 7, 93, 99, 362, 364 Jaspers, Karl, 191, 205, 262, 328 Johnson, Samuel, 254 Jonas, Hans, 173-176 Josephides, Lisette, 226 Judeo-Christian ethics, 263 Judgment, 246, 248, 251-252, 257 K Kainz, Howard, 171 Kant, Immanuel, viii, 31, 4849, 62-65, 73, 169, 171, 179, 180, 210, 265, 303, 316, 322, 328, 358 Kayange, Grivas Muchineripi, 321 Kekes, John, 213, 216, 251, 256 Kierkegaard, Søren, 172, 277, 317 Kien, Grant, 236 King, Martin Luther, 231, 267 Kinzel, Katherina, 295, 328

Anthropological Realism: Ethics for a Global World Kitcher, Philip, 115-119, 175 Krompridis, Nikolas, 318 Kymlicka, Will, 267 L Ladder of justification, 3-4 LaFollette, Hugh., 74 Lambert, Wilfred, 253 Landman, Michael, 171 Liar's Paradox, 305 Liberal naturalism, 360 Levi, Primo, 351 Levine, Lawrence, 74 Litchtheim, Mariam, 253 Liquid modernity, 236-237 Local anti-realism, 27 Local moral realism, 40-42 Local realism, 21, 25 Locke, John, 30, 59, 69, 73, 128, 183, 222, 224, 276, 280-281 Logic, 83, 84 Logical construction, 83, 8586, 170 Logical fallacy, 238 Logical positivism, 89-91, 92 Luntley, Michael, 34 Lynch, Michael, 111 Lycan, William, 325 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 5, 95 M MacBride Report, 241 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 349 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 6, 74, 180 Macmurray, John, 232 Manifest image of man, 358

427

Martinez, Jacqueline, 279 Marx, Karl, 7, 146-148, 189, 205, 344 Marxists, Marxism, 6, 172, 183 Marx's alienation, 184 Mathematics, mathematical, 84, 87-88, 178, 250, 276, 283, 285, 289, 305, 320 McDowall, John, 360 Meaning, meaningful, 173, 185, 189, 193-194, 197, 224, 235, 243, 248, 252, 255, 278-279, 291, 295, 303, 307-308, 319 Meaning theories, 280-284 Mediated awareness, 29, 141 Medieval realism, 58 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 335 Meta-abduction, 291 Meta-ethics, 1, 16-19, 169, 211 Metaphor, 194, 278, 287-288, 291, 321, 324 Metaphysical realism, 105 Metaphysical, metaphysics, metaphysicians, 172, 177, 183, 196, 211, 251, 276277, 313 Meta thinking, 2 Mill, John Stuart, viii, 14, 31, 73, 84, 86, 118, 180, 204, 224 Mimesis, 301, 330 Mind-independence, 21-22 Minimalist realism, 111-113 Moore, George, 16-17, 361 Moral core, 227

428 Moral depth, 255, 258-259 Moral imagination, 217-219, 233 Moral realism, 43, 62, 75, 80, 202, 211, 228, 240, 248, 256, 261, 300, 310, 312, 380 Moral relativism, 121-122, 238, 243 Moral skepticism, 225 Moral systems, 187 Moral utterances, 155-158 Morality as factual or normative, 11-13, 192, 219 Morally meritorious, 213 Mousouzanis, Aris, 237 Münkler, Herfried, 235 Murdoch, Iris, 1 Mutuality, 227, 230-232 N Nagel, Ernst, 362 Narrative, narrative discourse, 185, 199, 300301, 330 Nash, John, 33 Natural languages, 306-310, 314 Naturalistic fallacy, 361 Naturalism, x, 46, 115, 170, 173, 186, 190, 211, 321, 343-344 Naturalism’s history, 357362 Naturalism’s main features, 356

Index Nelson, Goodman, 108-111 Neutral, neutrality, 177, 187, 212, 277, 296 Newton, Isaac, 33, 68, 179, 322 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 171 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 94, 254, 301 Nietzscheans, 6 Nihilism, 82, 160 Noddings, Nel 219 Nominalism, 58-59 Non-descriptivism, 40-44 Non-Euclidian geometry, 204 Nonviolence as principle, 240-243, 266 Normative, 195,199, 211212, 214, 217, 294-295, 300, 302-303 Normative ideals, 169, 202, 212-217, 220, 228, 246, 255, 286, 320 Nussbaum, Martha C., 120, 208-209 O Objectivity and Relativism, 50-55, 77, 161, 169, 177 Ockham's razor, 326 Ontology, ontological, 169, 173, 176, 182, 186, 190, 216, 247, 253, 259, 278, 298, 300, 306, 323 Ontological realism, 19-20 Ontological relativity, 101 Ordinary language philosophy, 307, 331 Organic being, 176

Anthropological Realism: Ethics for a Global World Ortega, José Daniel, 190 P Paradigm-case arguments, 309 Parmenides, 177 Parochialism, ix Particularism, 212 Pateman, Carole, 205, 224226 Peano, Giuseppe, 88 Pegasus in Greek mythology, 282 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 161, 248, 285-288, 291, 325 Pendulum of moral theory, 55 Pepperell, Robert, 200-201 Perfectionism and imperfectionism, 158-162, 172, 197 Performative acts, 311 Performative contradiction, 266, 315 Phenomenology, 172, 296, 301, 308 Philosophical anthropology, 196, 300 Philosophical ethics, 41 Philosophical impasses, 169 Philosophical reconstruction of ourselves, 387 Philosophical reflection, 3 Philosophical materialism, 24 Philosophy, 5-6, 277, 289, 294-295, 301, 308-309, 324 Phonetic, 275

429

Piatelli-Palmarini, Massimo, 324 Plato, 56, 57, 177, 197, 240, 275, 291, 293, 318 Plato’s idea of soul, 57 Plato’s skyhook, 23, 346-349 Plato and the Sophists, 56-59 Platonic forms, 23 Platonism, Platonic, xi, 178 Pluralism, 196, 220, 222, 320 Plutarch, 197 Politics of recognition, 267 Popper, Karl, 305, 330 Position-dependent objectivity, 115 Positivism, 84-85, 284 Post-colonial, 222 Posthumanism, 200-201, 208 Postmodernism, 6. 94 Pragmatism, 7, 182, 285, 325 Pragmatic naturalism, 354, 365-377 Pragmatic realism, 105 Praxis, 6 Prescriptivism, prescriptivist, 44-45, 212 Propositions 179, 218, 221, 275, 281, 312-313 Propositional theory of meaning, 280-282 Protagoras, 56, 57, 80 Psychological origins of realism, 36-39 Public domain, public sphere, 196, 223-224 Putnam, Hilary, 82-83, 105108, 161, 354

430 Q Quine, Willard V., 80, 83, 100-105, 161, 173, 284, 307, 361 R Rabbinic casuistry, 292 Radical creativity, 249 Rational, 177-178, 180, 185, 195, 278, 315 Rational agents, 177-181 Rational choice, 179, 211 Rationalist ethics, 177 Rationalists, 60 Rawls, John, xi, 49, 91, 208 Realism, 1, 39, 80, 169, 226, 237, 240, 281, 305 Realism moderne, 80 Realism of human experience, 11 Realists, 32-33, 82-83 Reasoning, 178, 222, 285286, 290 Reciprocal containment, 103104, 173 Referential theory of meaning, 280, 282-284 Reflective equilibrium, 199, 220, 303 Reid, Thomas., 25, 73 Relational obligation, 227231 Relativism, 81, 237-238, 244, 278, 294, 320 Renaissance, 275 Responsible, responsibility, 176, 216, 225, 242, 251, 277

Index Retroduction, 248, 284-288 Rickert, Heinrich, 294 Ricoeur, Paul, 6-7, 194, 197198, 207, 300-303, 329330, 380 Ricouer’s surplus of meaning, 194 Romanticism, 61 Rorty, Richard, 161, 278 353 Ross, William D, 47, 242 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 72, 222, 232, 276-278 Ruse, Michael, 171 Russell, Bertrand, 88, 89, 281-282, 315, 323, 352 Ryle, Gilbert, 203 S Sacks, Jonathan, 223, 263 Sandel, Michael, 224-226 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 204 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 277, 288-289, 322 Scanlon, Thomas, 49 Schaber, Peter, 202 Schaff, Adam, 183 Scheffler, Samuel, 228 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 292, 328 Schweiker, William, 300 Searle, John, 21, 23, 27, 119, 310-311, 314 Secular humanism, 116 Self-love, 71 Sellars, Wilfred, 358 Sellar’s images of man, 358 Semantics, 278, 284, 289, 304-313

Anthropological Realism: Ethics for a Global World Semiotics, 215, 279-291, 322 Sen, Amartya, 115, 121 Sense-data, 145 Schantz, Richard, 315 Schiller, Friedrich, 72 Schlick, Moritz, 89 Scholasticism, 170 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 27, 65-67, 344 Scientific image of man, 359 Scientific realism, 24, 93 Semantics, 304-319 Sher, Gila, 315, 333 Sidgwick, Henry, 47 Singer, Peter, 76, 200, 209 Sisyphus, 300 Skepticism about philosophy, 9-10, 81, 294 Smith, Adam, 70-71, 224 Smith, Michael, 76 Soames, Scott, 282 Social beings, 181-184 Social constructionism, 28, 93, 95-99 Social cooperation, 170 Social facts, 119 Social science, 180 Socrates, 4, 56 Solidarity, 227, 230, 232-234 Solipsism, 36 Sophists, 56-57 Speciesism, 200 Spence, Edward, 251 Spinoza, Baruch, 343 Stevenson, Charles, 45 Stoic school, 275, 327 Strawson, Peter, 75 Stroud, Barry, 354, 377-378

431

Subject-object dichotomy, 182, 246, 296, 306, 315, 322 Subjective, subjectivity, subjectivism, 172, 185, 201, 247, 276, 297 Substantive responsibility, 229 Substantive theory of truth, 313-319 Sympathy, 70-71 Symbol, symbolic, symbolism, 170, 171, 184, 186-187, 197, 199, 212, 214, 216, 235, 242, 279, 287, 314 Syntactic structures, 283 T Tarski, Alfred, 304-306, 314 Tarski's truth, 304-306 Taylor, Charles, 78, 194, 214, 224-226, 267, 319 Taylor, Paul, 319 Technology, technological, 170, 201-202, 236, 238, 296, 318 Thirty Years War, 178 Thrasymachus, 56 Tolerance, 243, 253, 257 Tomasello, Michael, 74 Transcendental, xi, 344 Transcendental idealism, 6265 Transcendental realism, 23 Trilling, Lionel, 218 Tronto, Joan, 229 True or false, 275, 281, 310312, 332

432 Truth, 178, 256, 262, 274, 279, 284, 288, 299, 304321 Truth and goodness, 135-136 Truth as fitness, 23 Truth as holistic, 132 Truth in context, 111 Turing, Alan, 33 U Unamuno, Miguel de, 352353 Understanding, 191, 252, 256, 283, 291-297, 319 Unity-in-multiplicity, 274, 320 Universal, universals, 10, 11, 59, 171, 179, 211, 214, 218, 226-227, 239, 254, 274, 278, 299-300, 314 Universal and the local, 1011 University of Bologna, 288 Upanishads, 67 Utilitarianism, 14-15, 179180, 234, 244, 316 V Values, 216-217, 227, 230, 239, 241, 253, 258 Verbum interius, 299 Verificationist theories of meaning, 283-284 Verstehen, 293-294 Vico, Giambattista, 276, 278 Vita activa, 221-222 Vlavo, Fidele, 237 Volli, Ugo 289

Index Voltaire, 69 Vrene, Donald, 186 W Walker, Margaret, 229 Ward, Stephen J. A., ix, xi, 11, 74, 123, 168, 241, 267, 380 Wasserman, Herman, 258 Waterfield, Robin, 75 Ways of worldmaking, 108 Welfare economics, 234-235 Wheeler, John, 35 Whitehead, Alfred N., 88 Wide experience, 133-134 Will, Frederick, 219 William of Baskerville, 327 William of Ockham, 275 Williams, Bernard, 113-115, 263, 385 Williams, Raymond, 249 Windelband, Wilhelm, 294 Wiredu, Kwasi, 321 Wisdom, 181, 221, 246-259, 269 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 86, 277, 307-308, 315 Wong, David, 121-122 Woodward, Wayne, 176 Worldview, 193, 278, 295 World Transhumanist Association, 200 Wright, Cory, 315 X Xenophanes, 57 Xenophon, 197

Anthropological Realism: Ethics for a Global World Y Yong, Shao, 249 Young, Iris, 229

Z Zuidema, Syste Ulbe, 182 Zulu and Xhosa thinkers, 273-274

433