Recovering Integrity Moral Thought in American Pragmatism

Recovering Integrity
American Philosophy
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Titles in the Series
Recovering Integrity: Moral Thought in American Pragmatism, by Stuart Rosenbaum

Moral Thought in American Pragmatism
Stuart Rosenbaum
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For My Children: Melissa, Michael, Sarah, and David
Contents
Recovering Integrity: Preface ix
1 Cases and Integrity 1

2 Integrity and Pragmatism 17
3 Relativism? 47
4 Intellectual Integrity 71
5 Personal Integrity 87
6 Integrity and Environment 111
7 Integrity and Reality 127
Bibliography 157
Index 163
vii
Preface
In The Lion King, the Disney film, there appears a scene in which Rafiki, the
sage, whaps Simba over the head with his “stick” and says, “The question is,
who are you?” Simba on the occasion in question is trying to make his way
back from his adolescent wanderings to his rightful position as king of the
pride.
Rafiki’s question to Simba is one for each of us: Who am I? But the
question is not simply for individuals; it is also for communities of all kinds,
sports teams, churches, political parties and other social organizations. Each
of us as the individuals we are, and as the communities we are, must answer
this question. Answers to the question do not come easily, and everything we
do or say is a partial answer. In an obvious way, this question is the heart of
our moral lives. And answering this question is only partly up to us as
individuals. Other people or communities are usually significant in our an-
swers to this question.
When I attended a high school reunion a few years ago, I re-met a woman
who had been my next-door neighbor when we were in junior high school.
Karla specialized in genealogy and turned up some cousins I had suspected
existed but had never found. After initial conversations with them online, I
made my way to Salt Lake City to meet two of those cousins. (Because my
grandfather was important to me, I wanted to meet these people—like me
they are his grandchildren—in person.) Part of the satisfaction of that experi-
ence was the satisfaction of recognition; because of similarities of character
and personality, I recognized the genetic connection between those cousins
and me. Understanding our genealogies is important to our understanding of
ix
x Recovering Integrity
who we are, and this is true of every dimension of our lives, the professional
as well as the personal.
At a recent meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American
Philosophy (SAAP) meeting in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I heard a presenta-
tion by David Leary on the intimate relationship between William James and
Arthur Schopenhauer. I had suspected a more elaborate relationship than I
knew, but Leary’s presentation of detail and subtlety was magnificent, and I
came as a result to understand more fully who James was. Leary’s elabora-
tion of the genealogical connection between James and Schopenhauer illumi-
nated my understanding of James—whom I can say I’ve come to love.
The upshot of these two experiences, one personal and one professional—
is that I understand myself better than I had done previously. I believe some-
thing similar is true of all of my colleagues in philosophy as well as of all my
colleagues in humanity. Genealogies help us understand who we are. Two
kinds of genealogies are important. The first sort of genealogy is an account
of our past, a direct account of where we came from, of what contributed to
our “formation;” the biological genealogies one uncovers at ancestry.com are
of this sort. The second sort of genealogy exposes previously unsuspected
connections with others, other persons or other ideas or other traditions; one
discovers thereby unexpected and enlightening intimacies of relationship.
The task of this volume is to expose connections of the second sort. The
“working theory of morals” Dewey seeks in his Ethics has this connection
with the idea of integrity that is most prominent in non-philosophical conver-
sations about morals. To appreciate this connection is to see structural simi-
larity between Dewey’s understanding of a morally good life and a life of
integrity.
Philosophical problems with the idea of integrity parallel philosophical
problems with Dewey’s idea of the reflective life as described in his Ethics.
No absolute answers are possible to questions about whether what one does
is right or wrong, whether one’s aims or goals are good or bad. Dewey’s
ethics, culminating in his ideal of reflective living and eventuating, as I argue
here, in the contemporary idea of integrity, answers none of the questions of
traditional Western moral philosophy. Instead, Dewey’s ethics, along with
the entire tradition of pragmatist thought about value, brings a different kind
of focus not only to issues about morality but also to all issues of traditional
philosophical concern. Morality, society, science, and religion, in their philo-
sophical dimensions, become inseparable from the humanity that symbioti-
cally empowers them. This pragmatist perspective, instead of diminishing us
as humans, ennobles us through reminding us that our responsibilities as
intelligent and purposive creatures are deeper and more extensive than our
traditional philosophies acknowledge. We humans are not merely spectators
or discoverers of independent realities; we are co-creators of our worlds,
Recovering Integrity xi
including our moral, social, scientific and religious worlds. Our integrity
requires our admitting and accepting these responsibilities.
Such is the thesis of this book.
I am grateful to many friends and colleagues who have, usually unwit-
tingly, made possible, for good or ill, the perspectives expressed in these
pages. I should mention especially Duane Cady, Bill Dean, Keith Lovin and
Skip Londos who have been more than faithful friends and critics; Betsy
Vardaman has regularly reminded me of the vitality of poetry. And members
of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy and the South-
western Philosophical Society have been helpful in many ways.
Chapter 3 on relativism appeared previously in substantially similar form
in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, and I am grateful for
permission to reprint most of that chapter herein.
Chapter One
Cases and Integrity
JOE WILSON’S OUTBURST
On September 8, 2009, as President Obama addressed a session of the Con-

gress on the issue of health care legislation, South Carolina Representative
Joe Wilson yelled out: “You lie!” The controversy that followed his outburst
enveloped the country. Mr. Wilson did apologize in a phone call to Mr.
Obama and characterized his outburst as “spontaneous.”
The question whether Wilson’s outburst was racist surfaced repeatedly in
media outlets. Maureen Dowd, a columnist for the New York Times, heard as
the subtext of Wilson’s outburst an unspoken word; she heard “You lie,
boy.” 1 In Dowd’s perception, a natural explanation for his outburst was
Wilson’s racism. Former President Jimmy Carter, a fellow Southerner, also
weighed in to explain Wilson’s outburst as an expression of racism. 2 Political
pundits left and right weighed in with opinions in the “blogosphere;” virtual-
ly everybody in the country had an opinion about whether or not Joe Wilson
was a racist and what motivated his outburst.
All but a few Americans now agree that racism is morally wrong and that
to be a racist is to have a defective moral character. A vast majority of
Americans now agree that slavery was immoral and regret that a civil war
was the means required to overcome that immoral institution. The immoral-
ity of racism and of the long American history of owning slaves is accepted
among Americans of all social and income levels and political tendency. And
returning to his outburst with this large moral consensus as background, Joe
Wilson’s family and friends unanimously testified that he is no racist.
David Brooks, another New York Times columnist, commented on Sep-
tember 18, 2009:
1
2 Chapter 1
[We] live in a nation in which some people see every conflict through the
prism of race. Over the past few days, many people, from Jimmy Carter on
down, have argued that the hostility to President Obama is driven by racism.
Some have argued that tea party slogans like “I Want My Country Back” are
code words for white supremacy. Others say incivility on Capitol Hill is mag-
nified by Obama’s dark skin.
Well, I don’t have a machine for peering into the souls of Obama’s critics, so I
can’t measure how much racism is in there. But my impression is that race is
largely beside the point. There are other, equally important strains in American
history that are far more germane to the current conflicts. 3
In Brooks’s view, understanding the complexities that motivate much current

political discord requires moving from racism to more salient strains in
American history—for example, the strain of discord between the Hamilton-
ian and Jeffersonian strands of political tradition. 4
Columnists, politicians and Americans of diverse cultural traditions came
into open conflict about the meaning of Joe Wilson’s outburst. But where is
the moral issue in this controversy—especially about racism? As David
Brooks remarks, none of us has a machine for peering into the souls of
Obama’s critics, and consequently none of us is able to make a competent
judgment about how much racism is in there. So perhaps a reasonable ap-
proach is simply to be content with our knowledge that racism is and always
has been morally wrong and that our messy American history is the unfortu-
nate means by which Americans came to acknowledge this moral truth.
Can, or should, acute observers, thinkers, commentators or philosophers
be content with simple moral platitudes about racism? Or should these con-
cerned individuals be more subtly involved with the issue of racism in
American life? Are the moral dimensions of racism straightforward in a way
all thoughtful people should accommodate? What moral subtleties might
motivate further thoughtful or philosophical concern? Consider again Joe
Wilson’s outburst.
A plausible narrative, one that might appear in more or less subtle ver-
sions, suggests that Joe Wilson’s outburst might indeed have been racist in
spite of our lack of a machine for peering into people’s souls. Major strands
of this narrative begin two or three centuries ago and progress to the present
controversy.
Consider the skeletal structure of this narrative about racism. Some di-
mensions of this narrative must include the difficulties of producing a Con-
stitution around which states might come into political unity as the United
States of America; it must also include the moral, social and political strug-
gles resulting in a civil war; the impressive literary contributions of Frederick
Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe; the life and work and struggle of
W.E.B. Dubois during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; the
civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century and the contributions of
Cases and Integrity 3
Martin Luther King, Jr.; the civil rights legislation passed in 1965, along with
resulting political turmoil; the judgment of Lyndon Baines Johnson that pas-
sage of that legislation would alienate the American south from the demo-
cratic party for at least a generation—a prediction that has indeed come to
pass; the killing in Alabama of the black teenager, Emmett Till; the political
strategy of George H.W. Bush’s 1988 Presidential campaign against Massa-
chusetts Governor Michael Dukakis using “Willie Horton attack ads” along
with other historical dimensions of American culture that percolate around
race relations. Many more strands of this narrative suggest themselves to
even the simplest efforts to augment our historical understanding about race
in American life. Are these facts, along with many others, relevant to making
wise judgments about Joe Wilson’s outburst? Are such facts relevant to the
moral judgments and accusations that surface when controversies about race
erupt into public view?
This narrative, embellished in sufficient detail, might yield grounds for a
considered judgment that Joe Wilson’s outburst was indeed racist, and this in
spite of our lack of a machine for peering into people’s souls, and also in
spite of Joe Wilson’s sincere testimony and that of his friends and family that
he is not a racist. But how might such a narrative yield a reasonable judgment
contradicting the sincere testimony of Wilson himself as well as that of his
friends and family? Must we see Maureen Dowd and Jimmy Carter as politi-
cally, morally or rhetorically irresponsible because they like David Brooks
have no machine for peering into people’s souls? Can we make such judg-
ments and if so how might we do so?
One might add to the imagined historical narrative results of recent re-
search in psychology. Malcolm Gladwell reports in Blink results of research
supporting the idea that racism is a subconscious part of many individuals
who never behave in racist ways. 5 When opportunities of circumstance
present themselves, such subconscious reactions may produce unanticipated
racist behaviors. I discuss this research in more detail in a later chapter. The
research is worth remarking here because it offers a different kind of support
for the tentative judgment that Joe Wilson’s outburst—perhaps precisely
because of its spontaneity—was racist.
WHO ARE WE?
Humans are not simply biological units having minds and intentions; we are
also creatures of time, circumstance, culture and history. Who we are, in all
the particularities that envelop us and set us in our individuality on our own
stage in history, is only partly under our control and only partly accessible to
our awareness. Acknowledging this fact requires acknowledging that, no
matter how good our intentions we may not know our own motivations. Each
4 Chapter 1
of us has submerged dimensions of character and personality that motivate

our actions; parts of our selves are opaque even to ourselves. This fact we
sometimes vaguely, perhaps uncomfortably, acknowledge. Much work in
psychology and sociology confirms this way of thinking about humans; Sig-
mund Freud and G.H. Mead are some of those who have persuaded us of this
partial hiddeness of ourselves. 6 (When I illustrate this “de-centering” of the
self along with the self’s opaqueness to itself in my classes, I show a clip
from the old TV show, Herman’s Head, which makes explicitly the point
that individual behavior frequently results from different, competing under-
currents in individual psyches.)
This point of our partial hiddenness to ourselves, common coin in
psychology and sociology, is acknowledged in many ways in popular culture,
in literature and in religion. This question “who are you?” comes again and
again to characters in history and literature, and stories of their lives are
largely efforts to answer their question about themselves. Some examples:
In the Gospels of the New Testament this question comes to Jesus’s
Apostles. At the last supper, for example, Jesus says to Peter that Peter will
deny him three times “before the cock crows,” and Peter rejects Jesus’s
embarrassing prediction. In fact, the prediction comes true and Peter must
face up to this inadequacy in himself that he did not anticipate. Peter did not
know, did not have access to, the contents of his own heart, and he learned
who he was only by confronting his own behavior. One might see Joe Wil-
son’s outburst, admittedly spontaneous, as likewise illustrating that, like Pe-
ter, Joe Wilson might not have had access to the contents of his own heart.
On the same occasion, Jesus also told his disciples that before the night
was over one of them would betray him. The disciples then murmured among
themselves trying to figure out who among them might be capable of such
treachery; their murmuring was in fact their own tacit acknowledgment that,
whatever their best intentions, each of them was indeed capable of such
betrayal. Their question for themselves was, “Am I capable of such dishon-
or?” The disciples explicitly acknowledged, as did Peter after the fact of his
betrayal, that perhaps they did not know the contents of their own hearts, did
not know who they were and could not be sure of their own behavior.
Similar examples are ubiquitous in human life and literature, but for now,
consider the question why one should think such issues as whether or not Joe
Wilson is really a racist has any relevance to moral philosophy. Admittedly,
the issue of previous paragraphs that applies to each one of us is the issue,
who am I? Why should this issue—call it the issue of our individuality,
character, personality or even (following Leibniz) haecceity—be thought rel-
evant to moral philosophy? This question arises only because of the strong
inertia of tradition in moral philosophy that does not address this question at
all.
To see this issue of personality or character or individual identity as of

philosophical significance is to shift attention away from moral philosophy
as an Enlightenment phenomenon; moral philosophy, in order to encompass
questions like that of racism in contemporary culture, must become a larger
enterprise that addresses significant issues of value that shape our human
world. To remain committed to philosophical projects of Enlightenment mo-
ral theory, in contrast with a larger view that respects mysteries of personal-
ity and character, makes of it an anachronistic addendum to Enlightenment
intellectual culture. In the twenty-first century, moral philosophy may be-
come an enterprise concerned to understand and ameliorate the value tradi-
tions that pervade our contemporary world. No longer need philosophers
remain docilely committed to the project of protecting moral and religious
value from the onslaught of seventeenth and eighteenth century materialistic
mechanism. (More on this theme in a later chapter.)
To continue to seek justification for thinking of one particular conception
of right action as universal and necessary, as the correct way of conceiving
right action is, in this larger pragmatist way of thinking, to remain an anach-
ronistic addendum to a bygone intellectual world. 7 We now know that we
need to recover philosophy from its Enlightenment captivity, and that we
need to turn our energies from anachronistic concerns to concerns of vital
significance to our contemporary world. 8 Issues relevantly like the issue
whether or not we are, in some corner of our selves and perhaps unknown to
our selves, racists in our hearts are issues of profound moral significance to
the personal and social worlds we inhabit. Moral philosophy must respect the
issues about racism raised in these brief paragraphs as issues of moral philos-
ophy. Many similar issues are of equal moral significance in our contempo-
rary world. Consider a remark of William James that reinforces this expan-
sive and contemporary way of thinking about issues of moral philosophy.
William James’s most focused thought about morality appears in “The
Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” wherein he expresses distinctive
views and (perhaps unintentionally) poses serious problems for scholarly
interpretation of his moral philosophy. In one especially telling and expan-
sive remark James issues his conception of moral philosophers as “states-
men” whose primary tools are “novels and dramas of the deeper sort, . . .
sermons, . . .books on statecraft and philanthropy and social and economic
reform.” Apart from customary problems of interpreting James’s moral phi-
losophy, this remark at least marks a departure from the tradition of moral
philosophy that makes it an addendum to Enlightenment moral thought. In
this expansive and altered conception of the work of moral philosophy,
James embraces a larger and more contemporary conception of its proper
work. And as becomes apparent in the following pages, Dewey too embraces
this larger conception of moral philosophy.
6 Chapter 1
The idea of justifying some particular account of the foundations of moral

value so as to legitimate it against scientific attack is far removed from the
conception of moral philosophers as needing the wider range of tools James
sees as central to moral philosophy. James’s view is open to the more expan-
sive conception of moral philosophy that emerges from the thought about
racism in preceding paragraphs.
SIMON BLACKBURN’S DINNER PARTY
A few years ago, Simon Blackburn published an essay, “Religion and Re-
spect,” 9 in which he explains his reluctance to engage in religious ceremo-
nies that might compromise his own convictions. Blackburn begins with a
report of his experience at a dinner party hosted by a Jewish colleague; the
Jewish colleague invited him to participate in a modest religious ceremony.
Blackburn “demurred,” saying he was “uncomfortable doing something that
might be the expression of some belief” he did not hold. Blackburn acknowl-
edged that after his refusal to enter into the ceremony of his Jewish colleague
“the evening was strained.” A few paragraphs later, Blackburn explains,
We can respect, in the minimal sense of tolerating, those who hold false
beliefs. We can pass by on the other side. We need not be concerned to change
them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them.
But once we are convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational,
we cannot respect in any thicker sense those who hold it—not on account of
their holding it. We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not
that one. We would prefer them to change their minds. 10
In Blackburn’s view, respect for irrationality or false belief is disreputable;

such respect expresses a significant character flaw, a lack of intellectual
integrity. Blackburn puts this moral judgment about his Jewish colleague
(and about religious others) a few paragraphs later:
Far from being a sign of sincerity, passionate conviction in these shadowy

regions is a sign of weakness, of a secretly known infirmity of representational
confidence. If we sympathize with the doughty Victorian W.K. Clifford, we
will see it as a sign of something worse: a dereliction of cognitive duty, or a
crime against the ethics of belief, and hence, eventually, a crime against hu-
manity. 11
The demands of intellectual integrity—including the demand that in matters

of great significance to humanity, especially religious belief and practice—
require that we refuse to compromise the rational convictions humanity has
won through the last three centuries of scientific and philosophical progress.
W.K. Clifford is the nineteenth century hero of British philosophy whom

Blackburn believes to have captured these straightforward requirements of
intellectual integrity. As Clifford puts this intellectual requirement, “It is
wrong, always, everywhere and for anyone to believe anything upon insuffi-
cient evidence.” 12
Many questions become pressing in this context, some of which become
the focus of the later chapter on intellectual integrity. For now, notice Black-
burn’s—and Clifford’s, according to dominant interpretations of his view—
assumption that there is no difference between intellectual integrity and a
commitment to following the rules of evidence —or following the best ac-
count we can give of those rules—captured in our best science and episte-
mology. This particular assumption about what intellectual integrity is, one
widely shared, founders on a pragmatist understanding of science and cogni-
tion. Making the case that Blackburn’s assumption about intellectual integ-
rity—along with his assuming the absence of integrity in those who deferen-
tially follow their own religious traditions—is anachronistic is the goal of
that later chapter.
The central question in Blackburn’s moral dilemma at the dinner with his
Jewish colleague is, what does intellectual integrity require of us? This ques-
tion invites the large treatment of the idea of integrity wherein it achieves its
fullest potential only within the intellectual traditions of pragmatism. Of
some interest, however, are parts of Blackburn’s essay having overtones I
suspect he does not consciously intend; a few words about those overtones.
First overtone: In the second paragraph of his essay, in referring to his
regret that so many people hold irrational beliefs, Blackburn remarks, “I
lament and regret the holding of such beliefs, and I deplore the features of
humanity that make them so common.” 13 Notice the amphiboly in this sen-
tence, the issue of the antecedent of the pronoun “them” that comes near the
end of the sentence. Two possibilities present themselves. The first is that the
proper antecedent is “such beliefs,” yielding the result that Blackburn regrets
that such beliefs are so common, or widely held. (This account is of course
the natural, and charitable, interpretation of Blackburn’s words.) But the
second possibility is that the antecedent of “them” is “humanity,” and the
result of this resolution of the grammatical ambiguity is Blackburn’s regret-
ting that humanity are so common, or pedestrian. This latter resolution
squares Blackburn into an elitist stance in which he regrets that his fellow
humans are so common—intimating that he, along with Clifford and other
scientific and philosophical cognoscenti, are patrician or aristocratic. And of
course, the two different ways of removing the amphiboly require ambiguity
in the term “common.” I do not intend to make any “philosophical hay” of
this amphiboly/ambiguity, but I do think it an interesting infelicity to appear
in Blackburn’s otherwise impeccable essay. (This second possibility does
raise the issue of elitism and the not unusual charge that philosophers are
8 Chapter 1
intellectual—even imperialistic—elitists, a charge perhaps not incoherent

with Blackburn’s somewhat proprietary attitude about the content of rational
belief.)
Second overtone: In his fourth paragraph, Blackburn expresses his episte-
mological as well as his liberal political perspective as follows:
them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence
them. 14
Notice the metaphor in Blackburn’s second sentence; he makes covert refer-

ence to the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Good Samaritan, however,
was the passerby who did not pass by on the other side, and the parable’s
point is that the Good Samaritan is the proper exemplar by contrast with
those who did pass by on the other side. Of course, the relevant situations are
different. The man who had been abused by thieves in the parable had needs
different from the intellectual need of Blackburn’s Jewish colleague. The
Jewish colleague, in Blackburn’s understanding, had been (only) cognitively
abused by his religious tradition but the colleague had (at least in Black-
burn’s view) irresponsibly consented to his own abuse by that tradition.
Nevertheless, this second overtone I believe is important.
How ought one to deal with those one believes lack intellectual integrity?
On Blackburn’s view, one may consent in the sense of tolerating those who
are religiously—and I suppose one should include morally, politically or
otherwise—benighted, but one must not engage with them in any way that
might sully one’s own integrity. In a liberal society, some things are properly
beyond resolution into a public and uniform result mutually agreeable to all
who benefit from that society. Some things are private and must be tolerated
for the good of the liberal community wherein significant cultural, ethnic and
religious diversity is beneficial to the whole. 15
Blackburn’s intellectual purity and his liberal political views are common
coin in the intellectual worlds of science and philosophy. Nevertheless, re-
specting the idea of integrity in its symbiotic harmony with the pragmatist
tradition of thought yields a different understanding of integrity, one that
tends toward goals different from and more ecumenical than those that moti-
vate Blackburn.
DANIEL HANDA’S VENGEANCE
In a controversial essay, “Vengeance is Ours,” Jared Diamond recounts a

tribal conflict lasting many generations in the Highlands of New Guinea. 16
The Handa clan and the Ombal clan engaged in a series of battles resulting in
the killing and maiming of many individuals of both clans. The instigating
event for the generations-long enmity between the clans was a long bygone
raid by a pig belonging to one clan on the garden of a family of the other
clan. (Pigs are highly valued animals because they are a rare source of pro-
tein in the Highlands.)
Diamond gives extensive account of the enmity between the clans, espe-
cially through the account of Daniel, a member of the Handa clan who,
because of his family relationships, acquired the moral responsibility to
avenge the death of his Uncle Soll who was killed in battle with the Ombal
clan. The story of Daniel’s success in avenging the death of his uncle is a
variation on similar stories that had been repeated again and again during the
generations since the original offense.
In Diamond’s account, the conflict demonstrates a natural tendency in
human nature that is frequently displaced by institutions of punishment typi-
cal in nation-states. Confirming Diamond’s idea that this natural tendency of
human nature is displaced in nation states is the fact that in Western democ-
racies, the institutions of punishment, along with their accompanying legal
and enforcement institutions bring legal and even moral censure against indi-
vidual, “vigilante” efforts to exact vengeance. “Vigilante justice” is, in this
more recent state-oriented perspective on political institutions, not justice.
Seeking redress individually for an offence against one’s self or one’s family
has become legally and morally unacceptable.
Diamond also recounts the family story of his father-in-law who resisted
this natural human tendency to seek vengeance and left redress of his grie-
vous personal injury to the state. (During the Second World War a Polish
man had murdered his mother, his sister and her female daughter.) The state
held the guilty man for a year and released him, yielding only deep distress
for Diamond’s father-in-law; and Diamond’s father-in-law regretted to his
dying day his own failure to exact proper revenge against the man who had
murdered his family.
In Diamond’s view the thirst for vengeance is a natural human instinct,
but one largely displaced by state-administered institutions of justice. The
transition from institutions of tribal culture to institutions of nation states
wherein the need to exact vengeance personally is replaced by “impersonal”
institutions of justice is, in Diamond’s view, moral progress. The moral
progress in question is a function of the revised institutions’ provision of
significantly greater opportunity for satisfying lives. Occasionally, institu-
tions of justice in nation states “misfire” and yield unfortunate results, as in
the case of Diamond’s father-in-law—and for example in the case of inno-
cent people sentenced to death or imprisonment for crimes they did not
commit. The fact that such institutions are occasionally mistaken does not
mean they are not moral progress over institutions of tribal culture. How may
we think of these different institutional arrangements for achieving justice as
10 Chapter 1
morally comparable, and of one such arrangement as superior or inferior to

another?
A natural way of understanding Diamond’s account of Daniel’s motiva-
tion is that Daniel saw himself as morally required to avenge the death of his
uncle, and the only way Daniel could satisfy this requirement was by killing
the appropriate member of the Ombal clan. Daniel had no choice, morally
speaking; his moral integrity required that he exact vengeance for the crime
against his family. Diamond’s father-in-law, in contrast, did have a choice
because he was a citizen of a nation state with institutions of justice that
relieved him of the personal necessity to exact vengeance. These alternative
institutions—of tribal and nation state cultures—yield different understand-
ings of what moral integrity requires of individuals living under them. In
Diamond’s account, one sees these alternatives and their moral differences,
and one sees as well how these moral differences differently affect the lives
of individuals.
These moral differences between tribal culture and nation state culture
suggest a need for standards of moral comparison among different cultures or
social groups. One may acknowledge in advance that individual integrity is a
function of the various relationships that define individuals in their relation
to the culture or group that nurtures them to maturity, as it does in the cases
Diamond considers. One needs, however, standards of comparison that en-
able judgments of moral superiority and inferiority among different cultural
and social groups. John Dewey provides such standards of comparison, a
way to measure the comparative worth of forms of social life; they are
the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by all its members, and
the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups. An undesir-
able society, in other words, is one which internally and externally sets up
barriers to free intercourse and communication. 17
The standards Dewey appeals to are the extent of shared interests and the
fullness and freedom of interaction with other groups. In the case of the tribal
culture that morally required of Daniel that he kill a neighboring clan mem-
ber, the moral problem, in Dewey’s account of comparative worth, is failure
of free and full communication of Daniel’s clan with other, differently con-
stituted social groups. (Notice that Dewey’s standard here is better seen as a
“meta-standard,” since it has no moral content of its own apart from the
actual moral standards of the actual communities who live in accord with the
content of their own moral standards. One might say, or one should acknowl-
edge, that morality has no content other than the moralities of the commu-
nities that constitute the human world, including the potentials of those com-
munities for moral change.)
Diamond’s recounting of Daniel’s story implicitly acknowledges

Dewey’s account of comparative worth among the moral practices of various
social groups:
Daniel seemed to recognize . . . that, despite his former passionate waging of

war against Ombals, the Western state system of adjudicating disputes is pref-
erable. . . [As] more New Guineans were exposed to the benefits of state-
administered justice, they saw that they were better off living without the
constant fear of being killed, though, of course, no tribe could ever have
followed that course of peaceful dispute adjudication unilaterally. 18
The moral lesson in Diamond’s historical narrative, along with the moral
analysis Dewey offers, is that the content of integrity—the content of felt
moral requirement—may change for the better, and also that full and free
communication and interaction among different social groups yield changes,
also frequently for the better.
PRELIMINARY RESULTS
Integrity as a moral idea opens toward issues that get little attention in the
worlds of Enlightenment style moral philosophy. 19 Probably the reason for
this lacuna in contemporary progeny of Enlightenment philosophy is the
ubiquitous and almost obsessive concern of philosophers to justify or to
legitimate moral value in the face of various challenges that have appeared
threatening, including the various emotivist, reductionist, positivist and
scientistic perspectives that continue to bloom unchecked in our post-En-
lightenment intellectual world. 20 Nevertheless, the three moral situations
elaborated above argue for the larger conception of moral philosophy toward
which the idea of integrity opens. Some results about that larger conception
follow.
First result: Moral philosophy becomes no longer the project of justifying
values or of justifying actions, policies or practices by reference to some
foundational principle or principles or an Aristotelian-style telos. Moral phi-
losophy is the battery of projects involved in understanding who we are so
that we might more fully realize ideals that move us personally and commu-
nally toward better futures. As the section above on racism suggests,
Americans largely agree that racism is immoral—that a racist character is
morally defective and that our racist history is regrettable. An understanding
that illuminates who we are in terms of the slavery and the racist traditions of
our shared history might enable answers to the questions, am I racist and if so
how am I racist and how may I overcome those parts of myself that bind me,
perhaps unconsciously, to an immoral American past? Not only does Joe
Wilson need this kind of openness about his personal history but so also do
12 Chapter 1
all Americans. Race difference and individual reactions to it are deeply em-
bedded in the human past, and that past more or less subtly infuses all our
characters. Apart from the openness and thought that let us intentionally ask
ourselves, as do Jesus’s apostles, about our own moral characters, we are
condemned to move in a moral darkness we might otherwise dispel. Some
lines from Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” make just this point.
In the narrative of the poem, Frost meets his neighbor in the spring to set
the wall between their properties into proper order after a winter has toppled
some of its stones. Frost wonders about the point of the fence in the poem,
but his neighbor will not go beyond his father’s saying, “Good fences make
good neighbors.” Frost comments,
I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me
Not of woods only and the shade of trees. 21
What Frost sees is that his neighbor needs light instead of darkness, needs an
understanding of who he is and how his past has yielded one who moves
confident and unseeing in darkness, unaware of his own tradition-bound
ways of thinking and living. To shed light into the darkness in which the
neighbor moves requires enlightening his past and enabling him to see how it
has hemmed him into the kind of darkness Frost exposes for his readers.
Jesus’s disciples are aware of this need in themselves. And Joe Wilson, in
spite of his and his family’s sincere testimony about his character, may have
that same need. The need is a simple human need, one that because of our
common humanity all should recognize. And this need enables us to under-
stand why we need William James’s understanding of what moral philosophy
is and of the expansive tasks of moral philosophers. To take seriously these
larger tasks of moral philosophy is to step away from the anachronistic
addendum to Enlightenment thought that moral philosophy has largely re-
mained. Moral philosophy may now, as in James and Dewey’s thought,
recover itself for the contemporary human world, and it may also enlist all
the intellectual resources available in literature, art and the human sciences.
Second result: Moral philosophy too, in the more expansive thought en-
couraged by the idea of integrity, enables looking beyond the idea of justified
belief for our intellectual integrity. When Simon Blackburn bristles at his
Jewish colleague’s invitation to participate in a religious ceremony, he does
so in order to protect his own integrity against the imminent threat he sees
posed by a practice he believes founded on irrationality and falsehood.
When, however, belief becomes an integral part of human life in the way
love, hope and fear are integral parts of human life then beliefs no longer
need epistemological isolation from the rest of life. In the pragmatist tradi-
tion, beliefs are habits of action; they are dispositions, tendencies and even
submerged dimensions of our ways of being human; they have no rational
autonomy from other dimensions of our lives. Charles Sanders Peirce late in
the nineteenth century 22 canonized this pragmatist idea that fully integrates
belief into human life.
In Peirce’s view, belief needs neither rational legitimation nor rational
protection against the modes of unreason that permeate ordinary life. Episte-
mology in Peirce and in pragmatism generally loses its defining rationale to
provide principles of evidence that guarantee or make highly likely reason-
able belief. This traditional concern of epistemology becomes in pragma-
tism’s understanding of belief and knowledge one more anachronistic adden-
dum to the culture of Enlightenment philosophy. In this particular respect,
and because of pragmatism’s careful attention to the phenomenology of hu-
man life—witnessed here by Peirce’s account of belief—Enlightenment epis-
temology must join Enlightenment moral philosophy. Rational belief, belief
that is evidentially pure, becomes in the pragmatist tradition another antiqui-
ty of Enlightenment culture. Thinkers like Simon Blackburn, and they are
legion, one may think of as intellectual archeologists affectionately tending
and embracing out-worn understandings of knowledge and morality. 23 More
specifically, Blackburn and fellow admirers of Enlightenment culture need a
contemporary understanding of the idea of integrity, one encouraged by the
intellectual tradition of pragmatism.
Intellectual integrity is not separable from integrity at large, the integrity
of individuals, of their communities and of the incipient communities that
become possible through their actions and beliefs. Ideological purity, one
form of which is the concern to have beliefs certified by rational principles of
evidence, must yield to fruitful possibilities for individual growth and com-
munity solidarity. Ideological purity in whatever form it may appear must
yield to the demands of integrity.
Third result: Integrity has no ontological foundation; it is a gift of grace.
John Dewey uses this precise expression, “a gift of grace,” only once or
twice in his very-large corpus. 24 Whenever Dewey speaks explicitly about
the moral substance of the idea of democracy, however, what he does say
makes clear that the moral content of the idea of democracy, in definitive
contrast to Enlightenment-style theories of morality and to Aristotelian-style
virtue ethics, has no ontological foundation. 25 And the general idea Dewey
customarily expresses about the moral content of democracy, the expression
“a gift of grace” appropriately captures. This paragraph from “Creative De-
mocracy, The Task Before Us” is relevant:
At all events this is what I mean when I say that we now have to re-create by
deliberate and determined endeavor the kind of democracy which in its origin
one hundred and fifty years ago was largely the product of a fortunate combi-
14 Chapter 1
nation of men and circumstances. We have lived for a long time upon the
heritage that came to us from the happy conjunction of men and events in an
earlier day. The present state of the world is more than a reminder that we have
now to put forth every energy of our own to prove worthy of our heritage. It is
a challenge to do for the critical and complex conditions of today what the men
of an earlier day did for simpler conditions. 26
The tension between the idea that our values have historical roots and the
idea that they must have ontological foundations—God, human nature, rea-
son or the human telos, etc.—is palpable. Many people say, and many others
think, that without God there is no reason to be moral; this fact expresses the
conventional philosophical idea that morality must have an ontological foun-
dation. In Dewey, and in pragmatist thought generally, this particular emper-
or has no clothes. Pragmatists accept that humans are creatures of biology,
time and circumstance not only in their physical features but also in every
dimension of character and personality, including their moral dispositions.
The example above about Daniel Handa and his moral responsibility to
exact vengeance by killing a member of the Ombal clan is a palpable remin-
der of this simple fact about humanity. All Daniel and his clan needed to see
the wisdom of an alternative way of settling tribal disputes was vivid repre-
sentation of a viable alternative. No presentation of the demands of Pure
Practical Reason or of the commands of God or of the egoistic essence of
human nature or of reason itself could have had the same desirable results as
the simple presentation of viable alternate means for settling tribal disputes.
The virtue of the legal institutions of nation states for settling disputes was
obvious to Daniel, to his clan members and to other clans. The moral content
of the institutions of human culture is a complex function of historical and
cultural developments in the various ecological settings of those cultures.
SUMMARY OF PRELIMINARY RESULTS
Three situation contexts have framed this discussion of morality as integrity:

The putative racism that might still characterize American society and was
likely implicit in Joe Wilson’s outburst during President Obama’s address;
the epistemological purity, mistaken for integrity, that was evident in Simon
Blackburn’s response at the dinner party with his Jewish colleague; and the
historical roots of comparative judgments among alternative institutions
manifest in the Handa clan’s willingness to abandon traditional moral re-
quirements of their own culture. These three situations bring to the forefront
of thought about morality questions about who we are; about how we might
more appropriately understand the idea of integrity; and about how to think
constructively about integrity as a gift of grace that might significantly shape
thought and behavior.
NOTES
1. Maureen Dowd, “Boy Oh Boy,” New York Times, September 12, 2009, http://www.
nytimes.com/2009/09/13/opinion/13dowd.html?ex=1252987200&en=294d3085ac11979c&ei=
5087%0A (accessed September 20, 2014).
2. Jimmy Orr, “Jimmy Carter: Racism behind Joe Wilson Outburst,” The Christian Science
Monitor (Boston), September 16, 2009, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/The-Vote/
2009/0916/jimmy-carter-racism-behind-joe-wilson-outburst (accessed September 20, 2014).
3. David Brooks, “No, It’s Not about Race,” New York Times, September 17, 2009, http://
www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/opinion/18brooks.html (accessed September 20, 2014). This es-
say has appeared in a collection of essays about the philosophy of religion and has received a
good bit of attention in “the blogosphere.”
4. Interestingly, another column by David Brooks expresses a view in significant tension
with the skepticism he avows as a result of our lack of a machine for peering into people’s
souls. Brooks’s editorial sees great significance in the “hidden” parts of our souls for our
actions and beliefs:This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights.
First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most
impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions
assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form
relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out
of relationships. “Social Science Palooza II,” New York Times, March 8, 2011, http://www.
nytimes.com/2011/03/18/opinion/18brooks.html (accessed September 20, 2014).
Part of the point of this later column by Brooks is the importance of the parts of our selves
to which we have little, if any, conscious access.
5. Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (New York: Back Bay Books, 2005). For similar perspectives
expressed by a Nobel Prize winning researcher in psychology, see also Daniel Kahneman,
Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
6. George Herbert Mead writes, “The unity and structure of the complete self reflects the
unity and structure of the social process as a whole; and each of the elementary selves of which
it is composed reflects the unity and structure of one of the various aspects of that process in
which the individual is implicated. In other words, the various elementary selves which consti-
tute, or are organized into, a complete self are the various aspects of the structure of that
complete self answering to the various aspects of the structure of the social process as a whole;
the structure of the complete self is thus a reflection of the complete social process.” Mind, Self
and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1934), 144. Richard Rorty, “Freud and Moral
Reflection,” in Pragmatism’s Freud, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins, 1986), 1–27.
7. A recent expression of what I here call the Enlightenment mentality about moral philos-
ophy appears in the two-volume tome by Derek Parfit, in which Parfit defends the British
utilitarian tradition as the “correct” or “best” understanding of the nature of moral value. On
What Matters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See especially Samuel Free-
man’s “Why Be Good?” review of On What Matters, by Derek Parfit, New York Review of
Books, April 2012.
8. I am quite sure I seem to many readers to be begging questions right and left. I do
confess to taking for granted the large pragmatist perspective about moral philosophy I de-
fended in my earlier Pragmatism and the Reflective Life (New York: Lexington Books, 2009).
Also motivating these remarks are specific works of John Dewey that were definitive of my
treatment of these issues in that earlier work, especially The Quest for Certainty, Dewey’s 1929
Gifford lectures. See John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953, vol. 4: 1929,
The Quest for Certainty, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1988).
9. Blackburn, Simon, “Religion and Resspect,” in Antony, Louise M., Ed., Philosophers
without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007).
10. Blackburn,180.
11. Blackburn, 181.
16 Chapter 1
12. W. K. Clifford’s essay, “The Ethics of Belief,” is widely anthologized and this quotation
is one of the most famous from nineteenth century philosophy. The Ethics of Belief and Other
Essays (New York: Prometheus Books, 2010).
13. Blackburn, 179.
14. Blackburn, 180.
15. Blackburn’s sense that some things are not to be respected but may be tolerated for the
sake of larger social goods is a classical component of liberalism; one finds it in John Stuart
Mill and more recently in Richard Rorty’s defense of the distinction between the properly
public parts of social life and the properly private parts of social life, the parts that should not
come into “the public square.” See, for example, Richard Rorty, “Religion as a Conversation-
stopper,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 168–174.
16. Jared Diamond, “Vengeance Is Ours,” The New Yorker, April 28, 2008.
17. John Dewey, The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 9, Democracy and
Education 1916, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,
1985), 105.
18. Diamond, “Vengeance is Ours,” 7.
19. For a condensed account of standard concerns of Enlightenment style moral philosophy,
see chapter 3 of my Pragmatism and the Reflective Life (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books,
2009).
20. One example appears in Edward Wilson’s Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New
York: Vintage Books, 1999); the general tendency, however, is ubiquitous.
21. Edward Connery Lathem, ed., The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1969), 33–34.
22. See, for example, Charles Sanders Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in Pragma-
tism: The Classic Writings, ed. H. S. Thayer (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), 79–100.
23. This judgment sounds harsh even as I write it, and I am almost inclined to question its
propriety. But I persist. Perhaps another example can clear me of the charge of being uncharita-
ble toward Blackburn: R.G. Collingwood was an Oxford philosopher who, unlike his Oxford
philosophy colleagues, did extensive work of his own on the Roman history of Britain; those
familiar with Collingwood’s philosophical work should recognize the possibility for a similar
charge to be made against him. The charge would be that Collingwood’s historical and archeo-
logical work gave substantial form to his philosophical work. Although I appreciate Colling-
wood’s philosophy, I realize also that many philosophers would believe that his historical
interests significantly undermined the substance of his philosophical work.
24. One occurrence is in the 1939 volume Freedom and Culture. See John Dewey, The
Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953, vol. 13: 1938-1939, Experience and Education, Free-
dom and Culture, Theory of Valuation, and Essays, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 186.
25. I discuss these ontological foundations of traditional theories of ethics extensively in
chapter three of Pragmatism and the Reflective Life (New York: Lexington Books, 2009).
26. John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953, vol. 14: 1939–1941, Essays,
Reviews, and Miscellany, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1991), 225.
Chapter Two
Integrity and Pragmatism
The three situations described in the previous chapter can contextualize the
effort to give account of integrity as a moral ideal. Such situations do not
enable a conceptual analysis of integrity; necessary and sufficient conditions
are rarely if ever available for any idea. But as contextualizing an account of
integrity, these situations show that (1) discovering who one is can be a
normal (and normative) part of human life and that realizing goals and ends
is also a normal (and normative) part of human life; (2) making judgments
about different others requires caution and must avoid applying one’s own
standards as though they are absolute and obvious; and (3) comparing stan-
dards of behavior must respect the different traditions and practices that
enable social cohesion and meaningful individual lives.
These three parameters contextualize thought about integrity as a moral
ideal. How do those parameters enable integrity to take a more central role in
thought about morality?
INTEGRITY, STANDARDS AND PHILOSOPHY
Integrity is central in ordinary thought about morality. Corporate or govern-

mental statements of values targeting a public or clientele use that idea to
express basic ethical commitments. As an idea important to moral philoso-
phy, however, integrity is ignored or is distantly second to ideas of duty,
right, good or virtue. The reason for this customary inattention to the idea of
integrity on the part of moral philosophers I address later. At this point,
however, I stress what I noted parenthetically in the previous chapter, viz.,
that comparisons of operative standards require no “absolute content” for
morality. Here again is Dewey’s account of how operative standards are
17
18 Chapter 2
comparable. One measures the comparative worth of different standards in

terms of
Moral standards, indeed standards of any kind, may be compared apart from
any specific content of the standards being compared. So long as the stan-
dards being compared fall on recognizably similar classes of cases, their
relative effectiveness in dealing with those cases may be obvious.
Anthropologists and sociologists, and social scientists generally, are well
aware of this comparability of various kinds of standards across different
communities and societies. When Jared Diamond and Napoleon Chagnon
observe tribal cultures they become aware of differences and similarities.
Comparisons of moral practices are important to their scientific inquiries. In
the case of Daniel Handa in Diamond’s account, his integrity required the
killing or maiming of an appropriate member of the Ombal tribe. In Chag-
non’s accounts of Yanomamo tribes, moral responsibilities of male members
included killing male members of other tribes and dominating to the extent
possible local supplies of food and women. Similar examples of moral prac-
tices different from those currently prominent in the contemporary Western
world appear in cultural histories of the West. 2
In their professional lives, moral philosophers attend little, if at all, to the
diversities of moral practice evident to anthropologists and historians. Such
diversity they believe may be interesting for scientific purposes, but for their
own professional purposes philosophers believe such diversity is irrelevant.
For philosophical purposes, one must discern the conceptual content of basic
ideas of morality. In so far as Amazonian tribes or Malaysian Highlands
tribes do not engage in conceptual investigations, they are, in conventional
philosophical understanding, incompetent to resolve basic conflicts about
what is good, right or morally permissible. For conventional philosophical
purposes, the gap between moral theory and moral facts—the former a con-
ceptual enterprise and the latter a scientific enterprise—is rigid. Western
philosophers typically see themselves as blessed with a rich philosophical
heritage enabling them to rise above the worlds of science and history. West-
ern philosophers carry out their conceptual researches independently of sci-
ence and history, and they see no need for knowledge of those worlds.
This autonomy of philosophical inquiry from the worlds of fact and sci-
ence, captured in the idea that it is pure conceptual inquiry, segregates West-
ern philosophy not only from science, but also from literature and history. In
the words of Stanley Fish, “Philosophy does not travel.” 3 Philosophy as
Integrity and Pragmatism 19
autonomous conceptual inquiry makes no contact with the larger world of

human culture, the world in which lives are lived, choices are made and
destinies are shaped. Philosophy has become a faint shadow of its original
embodiment in Plato’s dialogues.
Plato’s dialogues are also conceptual inquiries, and Socrates is constantly
urging his interlocutors to be more thoughtful about the ideas behind their
actions. Piety, courage, justice, knowledge and other ideas motivate human
action, and Socrates is aware that humans frequently mangle the content of
those ideas, as one sees again and again throughout Plato’s dialogues. In
consequence of his central emphasis on conceptual clarity, along with his
continuing prominence in the Western world, the inertia among philosophers
of Plato’s search for conceptual clarity is not surprising. Still, the Western
world has changed dramatically in the 2500 years since Plato lived and
worked; in particular, our conception of our humanity, our idea of what it
means to be human, has changed decisively. In some crucial intellectual
ways, we are no longer Platonists.
About the middle of the nineteenth century, the idea that our human
intellectual skill, expressed most prominently in Western philosophy, is onto-
logically distinctive of humanity began to fade into the background of West-
ern culture. After Darwin, the Platonist idea that our intellect is unique in the
animal world, and that it is uniquely definitive of our essence or nature,
began to subside from its former dominance. In the approximately century
and a half since Darwin, our understanding of humanity as integrally part of,
as continuous with our larger biological world, has gained momentum; it has
not become dominant in popular understandings of the human world, but it
has gained traction, especially in the intellectual world of the academy.
In spite of its increasing traction in our contemporary intellectual world,
the idea that humans are not ontologically unique remains difficult to assimi-
late in our popular and tradition-fed philosophical worlds. Our religions and
our moralities, in particular, remain loci of controversy, and their transcen-
dental ontological roots—God as creator, divine command morality and priv-
ileged revelation of truth from higher powers are some examples—remain as
popular as they were before Darwin, and this popularity remains in many
parts of the academic world as well.
The tradition of American pragmatism is an effort to bring to the center of
the philosophical world the Darwinian idea that humanity is continuous with
the biological world from which it emerges. In pragmatism, humanity is not
ontologically different from other parts of the biological world, but is contin-
uous with that world. Humans are unique in the biological world as animals.
Just how unique humans are biologically remains an issue for scientific in-
quiry. Are dolphins, whales or perhaps non-human primates as intelligent or
as emotionally sensitive as humans? Do other animals have aesthetic or
moral sensibilities? What precisely are the most salient differences between
20 Chapter 2
humans and other animal species? These scientific questions are natural and
compelling in the intellectual worlds of science and philosophy that come to
birth in the aftermath of Darwin’s reorientation of intellectual culture.
In pragmatism, philosophical issues find a different kind of cultural pur-
chase in the post-Darwinian intellectual world. When Dewey, for example,
seeks a “working theory of morality,” he is seeking a post-Darwinian way of
thinking about morality without the pretense of ontological foundations that
deny humanity’s continuity with a larger biological world. And when Dewey
conceives of God as “the unity of all ideal ends,” he again opposes the
pretense that humanity is ontologically unique in the natural world or that
God is “the Being than which no greater can be conceived.” And these post-
Darwinian intellectual perspectives Dewey sees as necessary to recover phi-
losophy from its Platonist and Enlightenment captivity, a captivity in which
essences imprison humanity and separate it from its natural home in a larger
biological world.
The idea implicit in Dewey’s—and also but not quite so obviously in
James’s—thinking about morality is the idea of integrity. Integrity is an idea
appropriate for achieving a working theory of morality precisely because it
does not invite essences into thought about morality; integrity can mark any
character in any biological or cultural environment precisely because it has
no moral content of its own, no essence or ontology of its own, apart from the
cultures, societies and psyches that may realize it. In addition, the content of
integrity as it may be realized in individual lives can change across space and
time. This openness to change of content in the idea of integrity enables it to
evade the essentialist perspectives embedded in traditional theories of moral-
ity.
Deontological, consequentialist and virtue theories of morality (along
with most contract theories) require essences or ontological foundations to
justify them as superior to competing moral theories. Those that resist es-
sences or ontological foundations are fated to remain in the limbo of “intui-
tion-matching” to decide their fate as justified or not, as superior or not. 4 But
what is integrity conceived as a fundamental, even “universal” moral idea
that does not require ontological foundations or dominating intuitions?
INTEGRITY, THE BASIC IDEA
Integrity has three parts: autonomy, community, and motivating ideals. Each
of these parts of integrity may be realized more or less fully in any individual
in any community, no matter its location in space and time.
Autonomy is moral independence, an ability to make one’s own judg-
ments and decisions and to choose one’s future, fate or destiny. Acquiring
autonomy is part of any normal maturing process, and individuals mature at
different rates in different communities and environments. And of course

autonomy is not utter independence of nurturing communities; indeed it de-
pends on them.
Community as part of the idea of integrity is the nurturing and supporting
context, the moral incubator as it were, of the maturing individuals who
eventually attain the autonomy that is their relative independence of their
communities. Community is the vital context for individual development and
comes in many dimensions depending on location in space and time. Yano-
mamo communities differ from Hindi communities; nomadic tribes differ
from native Alaskans in community structures and expectations. Family
communities are different from religious communities; hunting communities
differ from farming communities, and so on for all the different human
communities in the widely diverse ecological contexts in which humans have
survived or thrived. Individuals customarily get nurture from a variety of
communities, and the specific varieties available depend on ecological, social
and cultural context.
Ideals come in two versions, ideals of nurturing communities and ideals
of individual development. Communities have basic expectations of the indi-
viduals who come to maturity among them—vague ideals indicating funda-
mental expectations that individuals may, indeed must, satisfy within vague
parameters. Men have typical family responsibilities in Western cultures,
along with typical responsibilities to achieve social and economic indepen-
dence. In some matriarchal cultures, men take on different cultural and famil-
ial roles. For any individual in any culture, satisfying typical community
expectations is fundamentally important, and individuals succeed in respect-
ing these vague community ideals in different ways and to different degrees.
Each individual has also ideals of individual development. Given any
cultural or social context, individuals acquire specific aspirations for their
own development. Such individual aspirations, call them idiomatic ideals,
may or may not be realized depending on many factors, and they may be
realized to varying degrees depending on individual characteristics such as
inborn talent or lack thereof, determination or defect of character or personal-
ity, imaginative vision and creativity or lack thereof and so on for any num-
ber and variety of contingencies that may enable or disable individual pros-
pects for realizing idiomatic hopes and dreams.
These three dimensions of integrity appear to greater or less degree in
every individual in every human community; they are fundamental dimen-
sions of morality in the human world. Dewey’s working theory of morality is
implicitly a theory that works in every human context, as does the idea of
integrity. 5 Examples of how integrity works appear in the three situations
narrated in the previous chapter, and more examples appear in chapters that
follow. Chapter 5 in particular on personal integrity develops the idea of
integrity as independent of traditional philosophical theories of morality. For
22 Chapter 2
the present, however, I offer other observations about integrity as a way of

contextualizing its difference from traditional philosophical theories of mo-
rality.
INTEGRITY AND PHILOSOPHY
Since philosophical perspectives about the primary ideas of morality—con-

sequentialist, Kantian or virtue theories—compete, one must adjudicate
among them. Western moral philosophy is rooted in the need to adjudicate
among competing moral perspectives, to justify one perspective in prefer-
ence to others. This need to adjudicate assumes there is a way to adjudicate
correctly and that apart from correct adjudication among competing moral
perspectives, morality itself might be suspect. And if basic moral ideas lack
legitimate justification as correct and applicable to daily life, moral relati-
vism appears the only alternative.
What has driven the need to adjudicate, and has empowered the idea that
there is a way to adjudicate correctly, is Western culture’s inheritance from
Plato. In philosophy, that Platonist inheritance appears as the need to find
rational justification for views not only about morality but also about science,
religion and politics. And along with that need to find rational justification
comes also the idea that the only alternative to rationally justifying one moral
perspective as correct is relativism, the idea that anybody’s idea of what’s
right or wrong, good or bad, is as good as anybody else’s. Philosophers in
particular, and because of this Platonist inheritance, customarily spend their
professional lives seeking to justify a favored account of the basic ideas of
morality, and when it raises its head as a possibility philosophers seek also to
defeat relativism. 6
The idea of integrity has figured almost not at all in philosophers’ efforts
to justify their favored accounts of morality. The idea of integrity is virtually
absent from philosophical conversation about morality, since such conversa-
tion revolves around issues of justification; such conversation is focused
rather on the classical alternatives of utilitarianism, Kantian-style deontology
or some variety of virtue ethics that derives from Aristotle or St. Thomas. In
none of these classical alternatives does the idea of integrity play any distinc-
tive role.
Part of the reason for this particular absence in philosophical morality,
despite the central role of integrity in ordinary thought, is the fact that integ-
rity does not lend itself to the agendas of justification that dominate philoso-
phers’ lives. Also relevant is the fact that integrity lacks the conceptual
precision that seems available for consequentialist or deontological views. A
significant virtue of those standard menu items on philosophers’ agendas is
also that they lend themselves to exact application in daily life.
Utilitarians, for example, seek to achieve in their personal actions the

rigor demanded by their theory. Peter Singer and Alasdair Norcross, commit-
ted utilitarians, not only write persuasively about morality from a utilitarian
perspective but also live principled lives in accord with their utilitarian con-
victions. And many philosophers seek in their personal lives to live in accord
with the demands of duty that derive from their deontological moral commit-
ments. (The Kantian idea that morality is uniquely categorical in its de-
mands—that it is a function of reason alone and is unrelated to any affective
dimensions of living—is also ubiquitous among philosophers.)
Integrity, by contrast, does not lend itself to the analysis and justification
philosophers find fundamental to their professional projects, and it appears
also not to lend itself to precise application in daily life. Nevertheless integ-
rity is perhaps the central idea of morality outside of philosophy. Many who
are serious about what they do and what they might become seek to live a life
of integrity. But no conceptual precision attends the idea of integrity. What
philosophers typically seek as principled foundations for moral living makes
little or no reference to the idea of integrity. No moral theory offers guidance
for living a life of integrity apart from simply following a favored theory.
Such uses as are made of the idea of integrity are peripheral to the primary
concerns of moral theorists.
One current, though peripheral use of integrity is to challenge standard
theories of morality. Bernard Williams, for example, suggests that utilitarian-
ism requires violating one’s own personal integrity. 7 Williams’ objection has
elicited responses intended to justify the compatibility of utilitarianism and
integrity. 8 Others have argued that integrity conflicts with deontological ac-
counts of morality. (For an account of these uses of the idea of integrity,
readers may consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “In-
tegrity;” this entry is a thorough account of the significance of the idea of
integrity and its typical uses within philosophy. 9 )
In their account in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Cox, La
Caze and Levine suggest that integrity is a “complex and thick virtue term”
that conveys how one might defeat the claim that someone is a person of
integrity but still does not yield to efforts at precise analysis. The intimation
of their essay is that integrity is conceptually accessible only in more limited
a way than usually motivates philosophical interest. Cox, et al. do see integ-
rity as an important moral idea, but they see it as an elusive idea within the
usual parameters of philosophical analysis; its “complexity and thickness” as
a virtue is undoubtedly responsible for its evasiveness as a target of analyti-
cal effort.
The palpable fact of the matter is that no theories of the nature of integrity
provide significant focus for philosophical effort, and this in spite of the fact
that integrity is the heart of morality for most people. This book elaborates an
understanding of morality in which the idea of integrity is central. Goodness,
24 Chapter 2
rightness and virtue become secondary to and dependent for their interpreta-
tion on the idea of integrity. In this way, this book seeks to displace from
their central position in moral thought those concepts of morality that have
dominated philosophical conversation at least since the Enlightenment.
One result of this shift in focus from standard, traditionally prominent
theories of morality is a displacement from the center of philosophical inter-
est of the project of justifying one particular account of morality in prefer-
ence to others. The conceptual activity of justification, now dominant in
philosophical venues, must become at best secondary in philosophical
thought about morality. Explaining how and why this displacement must
occur in order to give satisfactory account of moral living is the central task
of this book. Put differently, this book is a partial effort, as John Dewey puts
it, to “recover philosophy” from its Enlightenment captivity. 10
This central task needs preliminary commentary because of the domi-
nance of the idea of philosophy as nothing other than making more precise
what is less precise and justifying one perspective in preference to others.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy essay on integrity mentioned
above, for example, focuses on getting conceptual precision into the idea of
integrity. Integrity might be, for example “self-integration,” or “being true to
one’s commitments,” or “proper regard for one’s own judgment,” or “having
a sure grasp on one’s moral obligations,” or “a virtue, but not one that is
reducible to the workings of a single moral capacity” and one that is known
primarily by contrast with qualities of character that do not cohere with it.
These different ideas of integrity have different uses, but the principal result
of the discussion Cox, et al. offer is to reinforce the prevalent idea among
philosophers that integrity is painfully vague and ambiguous. And this prin-
cipal result leads to a vigorous skepticism about the possibility of precision
in thought about the idea of integrity, to say nothing of skepticism about the
idea that integrity might be useful in efforts to understand the moral life. (I
note that Cox, et al. do not themselves embrace this skepticism that seems a
natural result of their discussion.)
These deficiencies in our thought about integrity, again from the perspec-
tive of the dominant philosophical tradition, do not undermine its usefulness
in our moral lives. Integrity in its complexity and thickness—recalling Cox,
et al.’s remark—is as fruitful, inclusive and promising an idea as is available
for moral use, one that may open humans and their communities to signifi-
cant understanding and progress.
Just as some thinkers believe utilitarianism or Kantianism are worth seek-
ing to implement in their daily lives, 11 in a similar way the idea of integrity
offers possibilities for improving daily life. Understanding those possibilities
requires understanding integrity so as to illuminate its positive implications
for daily living, as the account of Cox et al. does not.
PRAGMATISM AND INTEGRITY
Much has been written in recent years about pragmatism and the classical
pragmatists, William James and John Dewey. In addition, some “neo-prag-
matists” have become prominent in global intellectual culture; Richard
Rorty, Richard Bernstein and Hilary Putnam are probably most prominent
among these figures, and along with others like Jeffrey Stout, John McDer-
mott and Cornel West they have written out of background commitments to
American pragmatism. 12
Disagreement about what exactly pragmatism is continues. Nevertheless,
some continuity of commitment is evident among pragmatists. For example,
wide agreement attends the ideas that pragmatists are naturalistic, that they
take Darwinian perspectives seriously, and that science is the most important
intellectual instrument to appear in recent Western culture. This wide agree-
ment about naturalistic tendencies in pragmatism usually does not acknowl-
edge the intense moral idealism that motivated classical pragmatists and still
characterizes neo-pragmatists.
Although many thinkers believe that pragmatism does have a distinctive
moral perspective, many find nothing idealistic in that perspective. 13 Further-
more, few scholarly efforts to understand the moral thought of classical
pragmatists acknowledge their intense idealism. But that moral idealism of
classical pragmatists offers a spirit of fellowship that can embrace those of us
in the contemporary world and hold us in harmony with James and Dewey,
and also with their own idealistic predecessors.
Not only are William James and John Dewey radical idealists but so also
are predecessors they held in high regard. James quotes frequently from the
poetry of Walt Whitman, and from its most idealistic expressions. Whitman’s
“To You” appears in its entirety at the outset of chapter 8 of James’s Prag-
matism, and some inspirational lines from “Song of Myself” appear near the
end of his Varieties of Religious Experience. The point of his use of Whit-
man’s poetry is to embrace the intense idealism James himself found in it.
Literature and poetry were important to James because they gave voice to his
own idealism. A similar point holds for John Dewey.
Dewey’s 1934 Art as Experience signals the definitive role of art as the
backbone of his thought. The centrality of what he calls “consummatory
experience” in all of Dewey’s thought is comprehensively evident in this
expansive work and is foreshadowed in his 1925 Experience and Nature,
especially in its last chapter. 14 The idea of consummatory experience, con-
sidered as the center of Dewey’s thought, points again toward those expres-
sions of human life that capture the highest aspirations of which humanity is
capable, toward those expressions that unite communities and that enable
individuals to grow toward their fullest maturity.
26 Chapter 2
Near the end of chapter 2 of Art as Experience, Dewey recalls the famous
lines from Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn:” “Beauty is truth and truth beau-
ty—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” 15 In Dewey’s
view, these lines capture what should be most basic in thought about human
life, the unity of our intellectual and emotional lives, a unity that transforms
the search for truth into the search for wisdom. Bringing unity to our intellec-
tual and affective lives in the search for wisdom enables a unitary human
response to opportunities of our ecological and cultural settings, a response
that incorporates idealistic aspirations toward greater self-realization and
greater harmony within and among human communities. This unified re-
sponse to opportunities for realizing ideals is the common aspiration toward
greater integrity. But the integrity of this possible response to real opportu-
nities of our human worlds becomes possible only as various incipient integ-
rities elaborate those idealistic strands evident in our shared traditions.
The vagueness of these paragraphs—similar to the sort too typical of
much of Dewey’s writing though happily not of James’s—is dispelled in
later chapters on various dimensions of the idea of integrity. Our personal
relationships are illuminated by thinking concretely in terms of our personal
integrity; similarly illuminated are our family relationships, our community
relationships and other morally significant relationships within our environ-
mental settings. Each of these moral dimensions of life can be understood
within the pragmatist tradition elaborated around the idea of integrity.
Both James and Dewey struggle to bring their philosophies into coher-
ence with their moral, even Christian, ideals. 16 Their struggles, however,
yield identifiably different philosophical results; James becomes a radical
empiricist pluralist and Dewey becomes the philosopher of democracy. A
partial account of these differences between James and Dewey appears in the
following pages.
Although James and Dewey share the democratic idealism evident in
their work, they diverge in their expressions of that idealism; although they
have much in common, their shared idealism moves them in different philo-
sophical directions. Their philosophical perspectives—moral, epistemolog-
ical and metaphysical—invite different accounts.
Dewey is the philosopher of democracy, and his commitment to democra-
cy as an ideal of human life motivates virtually all of his philosophical views.
Other ideas central in Dewey’s thought are integral to his democratic ideal-
ism, as are the ideas of consummatory experience, reflective living and natu-
ral piety. All of Dewey’s philosophical effort centers about his commitment
to democracy as a moral ideal. 17
William James is equally committed to the idealism he finds in democra-
cy. In James, however, the commitment to democracy originates in and sup-
ports a different philosophical tendency. James brings together in his own
thought values of Enlightenment philosophy and science that previously had

been disparate.
Psychology, for example, a factual, scientific inquiry, becomes in James’s
thought the stable keel of his morality, metaphysics and epistemology. Basic
commitments of James’s early work on psychology continue into his later
work and infuse it with unusual creativity. James’s metaphysics of pure
experience and his radical empiricism are adventuresome in ways that make
Dewey’s views in comparison appear stolid. And the daring spirit of James’s
radical empiricism is prominent in this book, and partly because it coheres in
unexpected ways with Dewey’s stolid-seeming naturalism. James’s meta-
physics anticipates important developments during the century of science
that follows his death. The hopeful creativity in James’s last set of lectures—
his Hibbert Lectures delivered in Oxford and published as A Pluralistic Uni-
verse—is oddly coherent with developments in the world of twentieth centu-
ry science.
One goal in the chapters that follow is to bring together James’s meta-
physics of pure experience with Dewey’s pragmatist naturalism. The intel-
lectual means by which this joining of different pragmatist perspectives is
accomplished is the idea of integrity. Integrity becomes a “hidden harmony”
embodying the intellectual spirit of these classical pragmatists, and it be-
comes so in a way that gives the idea of integrity clearer focus. Seen through
the lens of pragmatism, integrity becomes a substantial ideal and brings
coherence to disparate-seeming perspectives of James and Dewey.
Whether one begins with James or with Dewey, pragmatism yields an
intellectually substantial understanding of integrity, one that enables it to
take center stage in thinking about moral living. Integrity—in combination
with other ideas basic in Dewey’s thought, including democracy and reflec-
tive living—yields, in Dewey’s language, a “working theory of morals.” 18
Moral relationships pervade our lives in many different ways at many differ-
ent levels; our ecological environments are morally significant; our social
and economic environments are morally significant; our familial environ-
ments also, and perhaps strange to say, even our psychological environments
enable (and also disable) individuals toward more constructive futures. These
various individual environments are not independent of one another, for they
are interwoven in myriad ways.
That all these dimensions of our lives are of intimate personal signifi-
cance is a clue that we should make central in moral thought the integrity that
illuminates these many dimensions of moral living. Only thus may we arrive
at a kind of moral thinking that respects these dimensions of moral signifi-
cance, and only thus may we arrive at a working theory of morals. The idea
of integrity, focused through the lens of pragmatism, enables a cohesive way
of thinking about the many and diverse moral dimensions of life.
28 Chapter 2
These claims are large, and the burden of the pages to follow is to make
them if not secure then at least plausible. I begin with a large-scale account of
the basic difference between pragmatism and dominant Western modes of
thought not just about morals but about all issues philosophical; pragmatist
perspectives are ganz incommensurable with “Platonist” modes of thought.
No critique from either perspective can damage the other. (This story is in
some ways an old one, but perhaps this retelling may give it new energy.)
The last task of this chapter is further elaboration of the idea of integrity as it
emerges in pragmatism.
PRAGMATISM AND PLATONISM
Platonism
Alfred North Whitehead famously commented that all of Western philosophy

is a series of footnotes to Plato. Whitehead’s comment is deeply insightful.
Even perspectives that appear philosophically opposed to Platonism are sig-
nificantly Platonist in their opposition. Consider for example what appears an
extreme example of opposition to Platonism, the empiricism of David Hume.
Hume’s empiricism produces pervasive skepticism about the possibility
of knowledge. But what fundamentally enables Hume’s skepticism is his
conviction that he knows what knowledge is and how it is achieved. Hume is
committed, in short, to a theory about the nature of knowledge and its origin
in sense impressions. Hume’s theoretical commitments are Platonist in the
sense that he believes that success in the world of experience requires prior
understanding of theory; knowing what knowledge is and how it originates
enables him to judge not only that he does not have knowledge but that
neither does anybody else. 19 Hume’s Platonism is (at least partly) his com-
mitment to the idea that a correct understanding of theory precedes proper
practice. And in Hume’s case, his understanding of the nature of knowledge
makes factual knowledge impossible. 20
What Whitehead conveyed by his comment is that all of Western philoso-
phy is committed to getting theory right as a condition of successfully func-
tioning with the idea the theory elaborates. In Plato’s Euthyphro, for exam-
ple, Euthyphro’s error lies in his not understanding intellectually and theoret-
ically the nature of piety (or holiness or right action) before he tries to do
what is pious, holy or right—in Euthyphro’s case the action in question was
prosecuting his father for murder. In Socrates’ eyes, Euthyphro was be-
nighted precisely because he did not understand the nature of the idea he
intended his action to exemplify. Similar points may be made about each of
Plato’s dialogues; each may be read as an indictment of anyone who might
seek to do something before understanding properly (theoretically) the con-
tent of the relevant idea. Whitehead saw that this Platonist idea that proper
understanding must precede proper action or practice is the dominant West-

ern idea about what philosophy is and should be. Hume embodies this Pla-
tonist commitment and in virtue of it is a skeptic.
Anti-skeptics such as Thomas Reid, Roderick Chisholm and Alvin Plan-
tinga are nevertheless equally Platonist in this dimension of their philosophi-
cal work; they share the Platonist assumption that getting the theory right is
the essential condition of getting the action, judgment or practice right. And
this Platonist perspective about philosophy dominates other areas of philo-
sophical inquiry just as much as it does epistemology.
In ethics, the philosophical project is to understand the nature of right
action, the nature of the good, of duty or of the proper end/telos of human
life. In aesthetics, the philosophical project is to understand the nature of
beauty. In each of these areas of philosophical inquiry, the point of getting
the theory right is to get the action, the judgment or the practice right. And
the doing, judging or practicing cannot be done properly in the absence of
prior and proper understanding of the content of the relevant theory. 21 Again,
Whitehead’s remark was incisive.
Pragmatism
Pragmatism turns Platonism on its head: good action or good practice pre-
cedes theory.
This philosophical perspective that good theory arises out of good prac-
tice or good action may have become possible only in the different cultural
context of the American scene. From its beginnings early in the seventeenth
century, American culture was a mixture of colonial, European roots and a
variety of native cultural roots. Perhaps the primary difference between those
different cultures was their different understandings of the role of humans in
their larger geographical and ecological environments.
The colonists were European. Part of their being European was their
implicit conception of themselves as Platonists in the sense intended by
Whitehead. The colonists believed, for the most part, that they had correct
ways of understanding their role in the world. The colonists had, they be-
lieved (as did Hume), correct theory; their understanding philosophically and
theologically of themselves and their mission they believed to be correct.
And following that correct understanding of who they were, they knew what
they needed to do, what actions were correct and what ways of life they must
pursue. Documents from the American colonies of the seventeenth century,
whether religious, political or commercial, reveal again and again the colo-
nists’ European and Platonist understanding of themselves and their mis-
sion. 22
But the American context into which the colonists had transplanted them-
selves was the scene of a variety of thriving native cultures that had different
30 Chapter 2
understandings of who humans were and what their role was in the ecologi-
cal spaces they inhabited. In particular, American natives were not Platonists.
The story of the mixing of the colonists’ Platonist culture with the na-
tives’ different conception of themselves and their cultures is subtle and
difficult to understand historically. And again, historians and even philoso-
phers are helpful in efforts to understand this mixing of cultures. 23 The point
here is that the colonists set themselves down in a foreign land in which the
culture of Platonism, along with its attendant conceptions of self and society,
did not exist. And they set themselves the task of making their way in a new
land having a culture that did not bend easily to their colonial, Platonist will.
The historical mixing of cultures and the slow development of an eclectic
resultant culture took two centuries of development in thought, politics and
commerce. (Scott Pratt details some of the most significant of these develop-
ments in his previously cited Native Pragmatism.) The point here is that the
Platonist tendencies of the colonists did not find in the American context a
congenial home for further growth; those Platonist tendencies encountered
instead stiff resistance. 24
Apart from the question how the American context yielded an alternative
to the Platonism of European culture, the issue that still gnaws at European
(Platonist) intellectuals is the genuineness of pragmatism as an alternative to
the Platonism of European culture. Perhaps pragmatism is just another guise
for the relativism Plato definitively defeated two millennia ago. 25 Is pragma-
tism merely a debased relativism that sees all truth and value through the lens
of individual or group self-interest? (As Gordon Gekko puts it in the film
Wall Street, “Greed is good.”) Chapter three to follow, “Relativism,” goes at
this issue in detail, but here it suffices to say that pragmatism differs from the
despised relativism in that it sees theorizing of any kind as a particular mode
of practice. Practice is prior to theory. Theorizing can be done well or badly,
and can have superior or inferior results.
For examples of theorizing having superior results, think of Einstein’s
relativity or Heisenberg’s quantum indeterminacy; for examples of inferior
results, think of cold fusion, creation science or phrenology. For pragmatism,
no measures of adequacy or correctness of theory are available than success-
ful results. Still, most philosophers insist on asking, “but isn’t this relativism
and isn’t it vulnerable to the same definitive critique Plato and others have
repeatedly given us?”
The answer to this question is NO! In pragmatism practice is autono-
mous; theory is a function of practice. Again, pragmatism turns Platonism on
its head. Other Western thinkers have tried ineffectively to undermine the
deeply engrained Platonism of European culture. Jean Paul Sartre, for exam-
ple, famously said, “Existence precedes essence,” but Sartre did not deny
essence altogether by making all success a function of practices that neither
depend on nor yield any essence. For pragmatists, there are no essences, for
such abstract particulars as the European, Platonist tradition requires can-

not emerge from any human practice.
Humans are human, a tautology perhaps, but one nevertheless conveying
the idea that humans have no access to a transcendent realm of “essence
reality,” whether that “reality” be cast as logic or mathematics or philosophy
or theology. Practices, traditions, histories, stories and arts are the human
modes of engaging our world and our only means of making of ourselves
something good, great or worthy of respect.
“Strawman” representations of pragmatism are ubiquitous. Such repre-
sentations are irrelevant to evaluating pragmatism in any of its guises. The
basic question to address in evaluating pragmatism is the question of its
adequacy to the largest conceptions of the human scene. Who are we as
humans? What are our communities, and what holds them in solidarity as
communities? How do our communities change? Answers to these questions
may come in either a Platonist mode or a pragmatist mode.
Platonists answer these questions in characteristic ways. We might be, for
example, children of God, and our communities our rough efforts to put into
practice our efforts to be obedient to the God of whom we are children. Think
of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and John Winthrop; think of the Westboro
Baptist Church and Fred Phelps; think of John Paul II; think of Osama Bin
Laden, and so on.
Pragmatists too answer these questions in characteristic ways. We are, for
example highly sophisticated animals as Darwinian evolution suggests, and
our communities are our efforts to deal effectively and intelligently with our
environments and to enable human solidarity, continuity and better futures.
These two perspectives about who we are as humans and human commu-
nities cannot be mediated so as to justify either perspective as preferable to
the other. Platonists cannot “defeat” pragmatists. Pragmatists cannot “defeat”
Platonists. The longer story of this incommensurability of perspectives ap-
pears in the next chapter on relativism. Consider briefly one more difference
between Platonists and pragmatists.
ATTITUDES, PLATONIST AND PRAGMATIST
Platonists want to get things right, to do what is correct and to believe what is
true. Pragmatists want to make things better, and also to do what is correct
and to believe what is true. The difference is subtle in expression, but vast in
result and practice. These Platonists and pragmatists—stereotypes if you
will, or even caricatures 26 —differ not only in belief but also in attitude,
character and likely personality.
The concept of true belief, for example, is vastly different for Platonists
and pragmatists. For a Platonist attitude, the world, reality and truth are
32 Chapter 2
“fixed” independently of human engagement; humans are a kind of epiphe-

nomenon coughed up by the workings of a reality that goes its way in indif-
ference to the humanity that somehow emerges from those workings. Resul-
tant attitudes are various, but all respect that Platonist idea of the fixity of
reality.
Bertrand Russell, for example, in his popular essay, “A Free Man’s Wor-
ship,” embraces his independence in thought as he watches reality roll along
on its relentless way toward his and our destruction; our independence is our
knowledge of our insignificance. And Albert Camus in The Stranger approx-
imates a similarly motivated attitude of resignation in face of the relentless
crushing reality that signals human inconsequence.
Others, in the language of W.B. Yeats, “rage against the dying of the
light” in other ways. European modern philosophers, beginning with Des-
cartes, sought to find ways to make “fixed reality” dependent on the human
world, and thus to preserve in a new way the foundational significance of
humanity in a natural world that promised otherwise to crush humanity into
insignificance. (Descartes’s thought in a nutshell: If knowledge of the world
of fact depends entirely on the mutual cooperation of selves and God, then
knowledge of fact can never undermine the reality and significance of selves
and God.) And contemporary creationists and Intelligent Design theorists
seek to use the tools of science against what they see as its nihilist-seeming
conclusions about humanity.
All of these attitudes and many others as well are Platonist in their accep-
tance of the idea of reality as fixed and independent of human contribution.
Humanity remains a natural phenomenon to be struggled over conceptual-
ly—significant or insignificant, children of God or language-using apes, free
or determined? And the philosophical, theological questions in terms of
which this struggle continues take myriad guises. (The last chapter herein
elaborates in detail one of the scientific guises such questions take; science
developments during the twentieth century bring unique focus to this contro-
versy between Platonism and pragmatism.) All these questions, and the ways
of seeing that motivate them, derive from efforts to get things right, to
understand the fixed and independent reality in which humanity is somehow
embedded and to understand how humanity is therein embedded.
For pragmatists, still a small minority in the intellectual world of the
West, the goal of intelligence is to make things better. Finding a way to make
things better is different from knowing a fixity or doing battle with an alleged
fixity. In particular, none of the limitations that constrain Platonist conversa-
tion have any role in pragmatist thought.
No fixed realities necessitate finding a locus for human significance.
Modern philosophy and Newtonian science, for example, do not set the agen-
da for pragmatist philosophers in the way they set the agenda for Platonist
philosophers. The content of all ideas varies in accord with ongoing intelli-
gent inquiry. When John Dewey seeks a working theory of morals, he is

seeking a way of thinking about living well and properly that is commensu-
rate with contexts of life in our contemporary world. 27 And Dewey’s account
of reflective living does not seek an inviolate principle of correct action that
must be followed by all, nor does he seek an account of The Good that must
be the goal of all human endeavor. In addition, no conception of the natural
world that contextualizes humanity is immune from intelligent efforts at
finding better conceptions of it. Intelligent inquiry into how best to conceive
our natural world is not immune from, indeed it depends upon, active human
creativity. The “gap” usually conceived to divide “facts” from values, affec-
tions and emotions does not exist for pragmatists. Human creativity is as
constitutive in science as it is in all of the arts—painting, music, fiction and
poetry. This dimension of pragmatism is difficult for contemporary intellec-
tuals to understand much less assimilate into conceptions of themselves and
their world, for we are one and all creatures of particular cultures. And the
culture of Platonism is deep and ubiquitous in the Western world.
This book is in many ways both a protest against our Western Platonism
and an endorsement of a pragmatist understanding of humans and their
worlds. This large task cannot be accomplished by one book or by many, in
one lifetime or in many, but increasing pressures that undermine the perva-
sive Platonism of Western culture will continue to move humanity into a
more graceful relationship with our encompassing natural world. Each chap-
ter that follows takes on this task in some specific way. For the present,
however, here is one more preliminary in Dewey’s idea of natural piety.
NATURAL PIETY
In “Religion versus the Religious,” lecture 1 of his Terry Lectures published

as A Common Faith, Dewey explains the idea of natural piety:
The essentially unreligious attitude is that which attributes human achievement

and purpose to man in isolation from the world of physical nature and his
fellows. Our successes are dependent upon the cooperation of nature. The
sense of the dignity of human nature is as religious as is the sense of awe and
reverence when it rests upon a sense of human nature as a cooperating part of a
larger whole. Natural piety is not of necessity either a fatalistic acquiescence in
natural happenings or a romantic idealization of the world. It may rest upon a
just sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts, while it also recognizes
that we are parts that are marked by intelligence and purpose, having the
capacity to strive by their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with
what is humanly desirable. Such piety is an inherent constituent of a just
perspective in life. 28
34 Chapter 2
The term “integrity” does not appear in this quotation. How does the idea of
integrity emerge from this account of natural piety?
The key idea in this passage that gives it moral weight is the idea that
humans are integral parts of their natural world and that thinking adequately
about value depends upon embracing that idea. Another way of putting this
point is to say that Dewey presumes that humanity is continuous with the
natural world, a point he makes again and again throughout his work. This
acceptance of human continuity with the natural world yields, in Dewey’s
thought and in pragmatism generally, a way of thinking about value that
takes vitality from the many dimensions of continuity among humans and
their various moral communities. Humans are continuous with their various
natural worlds; they are integral parts of those worlds; and their integrity is
their appropriating and living “a just sense of nature as the whole of which
we are parts” marked by intelligence and purpose and having the capacity to
bring greater consonance to the various wholes of which we are part. Our
natural world is one of our moral communities. Notice that this passage does
not pretend any conceptual analysis of the ideas of natural piety or integrity
or goodness or justice. The passage nevertheless yields a substantial way of
thinking about all of these central ideas of morality. This feature of the
passage makes it at least a partial realization of the working theory of moral-
ity Dewey seeks. (Dewey is acutely aware that Enlightenment-style theories
of morality do not “work” in the way he hopes that philosophical thought
about value might begin to work. 29 )
CAUTIONARY REMARKS
The ideas of continuity and integrity are symbiotic dimensions of the thought
that humans are thoroughly parts of their natural world. 30 To speak of hu-
mans as “parts of their natural world,” however, yields for many philoso-
phers a mistaken impression about the pragmatist understanding of value.
Continuity and integrity are useful ideas not because they provide a rhetori-
cally gentle way of embracing a “materialist” account of humans and their
world or associated “reductionist” ways of thinking about value. This mistak-
en impression has yielded a (Platonist) caricature of pragmatism and of its
classical proponents, including Dewey and James. 31 No reductionist meta-
physical perspectives—customary misappropriations of pragmatism—come
naturally out of pragmatism in any of its classical or neo-pragmatist expres-
sions. (Parenthetically I note that the idea of the physical need not incorpo-
rate the same reductionist thought as does the idea of the material; the idea of
the physical has changed dramatically since the Enlightenment, especially in
light of twentieth century revisions in the content of physical science. More
on this theme in the last chapter.)
This claim that pragmatists are not materialists, reductionists or relativists

may be confirmed even by casual reading of James and Dewey. Prominent
secondary sources focused on these classical thinkers also reject this standard
misunderstanding of their thought. Both James and Dewey were frequently
frustrated by this common misappropriation of their thought, epitomized for
example by the caustic reactions of some of their influential contemporaries;
Bertrand Russell is an example of this recalcitrant philosophical mentality, as
are many others—most, fortunately, lacking Russell’s brazenness—and in-
cluding in the contemporary world Paul Boghossian as well as other com-
mentators. 32
Another misunderstanding that may arise from the claim that continuity
and integrity are ways of thinking of humans as integral parts of their natural
world is its intimation that humans’ natural world is a unitary thing. In fact,
however, and for both James and Dewey, the natural world is not a unitary
item; rather it is encompassing environments of different kinds of which
unitary account is unlikely to become available. The physical world of many
dimensions—ecological, biological, psychological, cultural, chemical, so-
cial, political, etc.— constitutes the many encompassing environments that
not only limit but also expand toward human futures; these many environ-
ments are what we nonchalantly refer to as “the natural world.” The pluralis-
tic dimensions of the worlds that contextualize human lives offer diverse
opportunities for growth and development, opportunities individual, familial,
communal, social and ecological. These opportunities I open up more elab-
orately in their harmony with the idea of integrity in the last three chapters of
this book.
These cautionary remarks remind us that while pragmatists see humans as
thoroughly embedded in their natural world, their idea of what is natural
conveys no ontological perspective. In emphasizing the plurality of worlds
that encompass humans and open their futures, the continuity and integrity
that motivate this book immerse humans in the phenomenology of their
everyday lives, a phenomenology that lives not only in the textures of human
relationships but in myriad intellectual and artistic pursuits, from science and
mathematics to art, poetry and music.
The continuity of humanity with nature, as that idea is understood in
James and Dewey, encourages an idea of morality wherein integrity is cen-
tral. The morality of integrity, in spite of frequent use of the idea of integrity
among those who are not philosophers, needs elaboration toward its encom-
passing implications for daily living. This elaboration, when rooted in prag-
matism’s intellectual traditions, yields perspectives about how to understand
the tasks of living and about how to address specific moral issues. Natural
piety, however, needs supplementation to elaborate the idea of integrity to-
ward an encompassing working theory of morals.
36 Chapter 2
GROWTH
Natural piety embodies the idea of humans as morally integrated into their
natural worlds, and it points toward human value within and responsibility
toward the environment. But morality is usually considered a phenomenon of
the human world alone, and traditional moral theories focus more specifical-
ly on the ideas of right, duty, obligation and justice among others since these
are supposed (by Platonists) to control, at least normatively, human relation-
ships. And traditional moral theories—whether of the deontological, conse-
quentialist or virtue varieties—have sought normative necessities to control
all human behavior. Pragmatists shun this search for conceptual universals
focused exclusively on human relationships, and in their efforts to under-
stand morality turn instead toward the human condition in all of its dimen-
sions. In this way, pragmatists are more like intellectual anthropologists than
they are like philosophers seeking conceptual universals that might be im-
posed by philosopher-kings. (Those philosopher kings are a bit too much like
authoritarian deities or religious dogmatists to please pragmatists. Instead of
trying to control our humanity in one or another authoritarian way, pragma-
tists incline instead to celebrate and seek constructive ways to elaborate it.)
In their turn toward the human condition, pragmatists follow Dewey in
seeking a working theory of morals, a way of understanding morality within
the human contexts that sustain it as a fully human enterprise. Dewey’s 1932
Ethics (LW 7) is a systematic effort to give voice to a working theory.
(Dewey wrote this book with James H. Tufts originally in 1908 and later they
revised it into the 1932 edition. Tufts was responsible for Parts I and III, and
Dewey was responsible for Part II, titled A Theory of the Moral Life and
available as a single volume on its own. Dewey and Tufts mutually agreed
about the content of the entire volume and parts I and III illuminate Dewey’s
views about many particulars of the human moral and social world.)
The last chapter of Part II of his Ethics gives Dewey’s account of “The
Moral Self.” As one might expect, given Dewey’s rejection of authorities
traditionally relied upon to control human life, actions or goals—God, Rea-
son, Human Nature, etc.—his account of morality is recognizably and
thoroughly “existentialist.” (Dewey writes with none of the fluid anger of the
great existentialists, but the content of his moral thought radiates an optimis-
tic hope unlimited by “essences” that should be palpable to those familiar
with classical existentialist thought.) 33
Much in Dewey’s chapter 15 is provocative, partly because it is his culmi-
nating effort to explain how experience within the human world can serve as
its own moral guide, and partly because it takes for granted his persistent
rejection of external authorities for control of human life and action. Both of
these typically pragmatist perspectives are provocations for those (Platonists)
who seek conceptual necessity in their moral theories. Turning away from
authorities external to experience, Dewey embraces growth as the heart of

moral living, the heart of the reflective life.
“The self” is not a substance, but is rather an active organism behaving
out of more and less established habits and dispositions that feed back into a
renewal of some habits and dispositions and into an undermining and revis-
ing of others. Against a background of on-going, relative stability, change
comes every day to every self; each individual is constantly in process of
confirmation, renewal and alteration of more and less stable dispositions and
habits. A substantial soul or mind does not yield an individual identity;
rather, one’s identity is in more or less flux and stability relative to one’s
various environments. 34 Sometimes one’s family and work environments are
stable and conform to one’s expectations and behavior, and perhaps simulta-
neously, one’s religious environment may be in flux—one might, for exam-
ple, be trying to choose between Islam and Buddhism, or between Congrega-
tionalism and Catholicism. At such times, one relies on the habitually stable
parts of one’s moral environment while one is focused on growing in one’s
religious life through deciding between religions or denominations. Any
number of scenarios might be sketched representing this characteristic
change in selfhood, one that might be a focus of moral intensity at any stage
of youth or maturity.
In Dewey’s account, these kinds of growth opportunities are the crux of
morality, and such growth opportunities, as well as individuals’ responses to
them, are the heart of the matter in good and great fiction; such opportunities,
their risks, rewards and possibilities, along with individuals’ responses to
them, are the stuff of life and naturally become the center of great art. I think,
for example, of Robert Browning’s “The Statue and the Bust” or “The Gram-
marian’s Funeral;” of John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” or “Ode on
Melancholy;” of W.B. Yeats “Sailing to Byzantium;” of Dylan Thomas’s
“Fern Hill.” John Steinbeck’s novels, especially The Grapes of Wrath, along
with John Irving’s Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp are
also examples of possibilities for growth that constitute opportunities for
developing selfhood beyond what it has been.
For pragmatists the point of the moral life is to grow beyond what one has
been into a different creature, one who knows who it is because of its conti-
nuity with its past and its openness toward possibilities for further growth.
Here is Dewey’s way of putting this point:
[At] each point there is a distinction between an old, an accomplished self, and
a new and moving self, between the static and the dynamic self. The former
aspect is constituted by habits already formed. Habit gives facility, and there is
always a tendency to rest on our oars, to fall back on what we have already
achieved. For that is the easy course; we are at home and feel comfortable in
lines of action that run in the tracks of habits already established and mastered.
Hence, the old, the habitual self, is likely to be treated as if it were the self; as
38 Chapter 2
if new conditions and new demands were something foreign and hostile. We
become uneasy at the idea of initiating new courses; we are repelled by the
difficulties that attend entering upon them; we dodge assuming a new respon-
sibility. We tend to favor the old self and to make its perpetuation the standard
of our valuations and the end of our conduct. In this way, we withdraw from
actual conditions and their requirements and opportunities; we contract and
harden the self.
The growing, enlarging, liberated self, on the other hand, goes forth to
meet new demands and occasions, and readapts and remakes itself in the
process. It welcomes untried situations. The necessity for choice between the
interests of the old and of the forming, moving, self is recurrent. It is found at
every stage of civilization and every period of life. The civilized man meets it
as well as the savage; the dweller in the slums as well as the person in cultivat-
ed surroundings; the “good” person as well as the “bad.” For everywhere there
is an opportunity and a need to go beyond what one has been, beyond “him-
self,” if the self is identified with the body of desires, affections, and habits
which has been potent in the past. Indeed, we may say that the good person is
precisely the one who is most conscious of the alternative, and is the most
concerned to find openings for the newly forming or growing self; since no
matter how “good” he has been, he becomes “bad” (even though acting upon a
relatively high plane of attainment) as soon as he fails to respond to the
demand for growth. Any other basis for judging the moral status of the self is
conventional. In reality, direction of movement, not the plane of attainment
and rest, determines moral quality. 35
This lengthy quotation makes Dewey’s point—and the point of pragmatist

moral thought generally—that there are no fixities that ought to control mo-
ral living, and that one’s individuality, in the absence of such fixities, must
find its own way into a future of integrity. A future of integrity is a future
lived in faithfulness to one’s constituting communities, in faithfulness to
one’s own and one’s community’s ideals and in creative independence of
those communities’ standards and expectations. A life of integrity, in sum
and in the terminology of my earlier book, is a reflective life. 36 This tension
between one’s faithfulness and one’s creative independence is the tension in
response to which one achieves selfhood. As Robert Browning puts this same
point, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?”
A QUALIFICATION OF DEWEY’S GROWTH CRITERION
Dewey’s emphasis on the need for growth, for moving creatively into a
future that realizes more fully one’s ideals and aspirations, is appropriate.
Individuality, however—and perhaps one should say brute, primal or genetic
individuality—in responding to the need for growth needs more explicit
recognition than Dewey gives it in this passage. (I note that he does give it
significant attention in Individualism, Old and New, a 1930 publication. 37 )
Primal individuality needs more explicit attention because in many cases, it

sets parameters within which one must live and grow, limits and possibilities
that are unique to particular individuals. Examples are ubiquitous.
Mozart and Beethoven were musicians, fundamentally talented beyond
the rest of humanity; they were “gifted” as we say. Others are gifted in
different ways; Shakespeare and Keats were poets of the highest caliber. Kurt
Godel and W.H. Hardy were talented mathematicians, gifted or genetically
endowed in ways vast majorities of others are not gifted. Such primal, genet-
ic gifts are unusual among humans, and apart from opportunities for discov-
ery of such gifts, individuals must make their ways into otherwise murky
futures.
The gifted individuals just mentioned came to maturity in circumstances
in which their unique gifts might be discovered, focused and developed.
Apart from opportunities for discovery, such individuals and their gifts might
languish undiscovered and undeveloped, sometimes to the detriment of the
entire human community. (What would a world without Shakespeare’s poet-
ry or Beethoven’s music be? Impoverished!)
Apart from social or familial contexts that enable discovery and develop-
ment of primal gifts, individuals who have such gifts must languish, and their
communities in consequence must be deprived of their contributions. Some
contemporary examples:
Jackie Evancho has appeared recently on Public Television as an eleven-
year-old singer exhibiting the talent ordinarily available only to artists who
have trained for thirty years. Evancho’s parents included her in an excursion
to see the film version of Phantom of the Opera. Evancho was enchanted by
the music and would not stop singing it. Evancho’s mother became vaguely
aware that she was hearing unusual vocal talent coming from her own daugh-
ter and apparently sought professional advice. At the age of ten, Jackie Evan-
cho won the America’s Got Talent television show contest. Evancho’s un-
usual vocal endowment came to light almost accidentally and is “native” in
just the way Mozart’s musical skills were in some way gifts beyond his own
ability to choose. Such endowments must be discovered, and their discovery
requires favorable social and/or familial contexts. Other examples of this sort
of primal or genetic endowment are readily available.
Misty Copeland is a black soloist ballerina with the American Ballet
Theatre. Copeland’s story of discovery of her native talent is as impressive as
is Evancho’s. (Google her to get the story.) And Kate Tempest is a remark-
able young British poet whose poetic performances have gained her interna-
tional fame. (Again, google her to get her story.)
This qualification of Dewey’s account of growth as the point of the moral
life is simply that frequently the ideal of growth must respect limits of indi-
viduality, limits that must be discovered and exploited by those who have
them. Each of the individuals mentioned above benefitted from fortunate
40 Chapter 2
circumstances of family or community that enabled their constructive devel-

opment of native talents. The opposite side of that same coin is also signifi-
cant.
Just as some benefit from fortunate personal endowments that may be
discovered and exploited, others suffer from unfortunate personal endow-
ments that may also be discovered and engaged toward the individual growth
that is the goal of the moral life. Some individuals are born with genetic
inhibitions to normal lives and accomplishments; these may be born with
tendencies to diabetes, dementia, cancer, schizophrenia or other inhibiting
conditions. Such conditions may be engaged more and less constructively,
and like the more positive native endowments, such negative endowments
normally require supportive communities to meet them constructively.
Dewey correctly sees that growth is the point of the moral life. Dewey’s
failure to emphasize sufficiently the native endowment component of indi-
viduality makes his account of morality as growth appear more limited than
it should. And just as community and family support are essential to any
individual achievement, such community involvement can be as “negative”
as it is frequently “positive.” Communities do not always enable or support
constructive engagement of individuals’ life conditions. Sometimes commu-
nities restrict individual possibilities for development; sometimes commu-
nities constrain and limit possibilities for growth and development toward the
morally better individuals each of us might become.
Recall Joe Wilson from the previous chapter. Like the individuals men-
tioned just above, the gifted as well as the more normally endowed, Joe
Wilson has an individuality that is conditioned, nurtured, sustained and limit-
ed by his various social and familial communities. And like those other
individuals, Joe Wilson must discover and find nurture for his own native
gifts. And like those others, Wilson may be limited as well as nurtured by his
various communities. And as I suggested in that previous chapter, Joe Wil-
son may well be, in spite of his own best intentions, a racist. Some dimen-
sions of one’s possibilities for moral growth must be discovered, and this is
so precisely because such possibilities are given partly in one’s genetic con-
stitution; they are, when beneficial, gifts, and when detrimental they are
unfortunate limitations to growth possibilities.
In Joe Wilson’s case, his communities may have engendered or rein-
forced what is likely a native tendency in all of us to xenophobia, a wariness
or fear of differently appearing others. The racism that is likely a product of
xenophobic instincts might have been reinforced in Wilson’s nurturing com-
munities, yielding plausibility to the claim that, in spite of his own conscious
aversion to the idea of racism, Wilson is a racist.
For all of these native tendencies, one must discover them and depend on
the nurture of communities for developing, honing and refining those that are
constructive; likewise one must discover one’s native limitations and depend
on such communities for engaging those limitations constructively. Dewey’s

emphasis on growth as the point of the moral life these remarks modify only
modestly; they do however exhibit the interdependence between individuals
and their communities that is a basic fact of life for everybody, the fortunate-
ly as well as the unfortunately endowed. I explore these ideas again in chap-
ter 5 on personal integrity.
BEYOND CAUTION
The ideas of natural piety and growth, as they are central in Dewey’s thought
about morality, open readily into thought about integrity as a comprehensive
ideal of moral living. In William James’s thought, however, that ideal of
moral living opens toward even more extensive possibility than it does in
Dewey’s thought. This greater extensiveness of integrity as a moral ideal in
James is due to James’s greater openness to specific metaphysical possibil-
ities than one finds in Dewey. One does find in Dewey a willingness to
follow the worlds of science and experience wherever they may lead; the
tools of scientific thinking, rooted in the aesthetic dimensions of life, yield as
yet unfathomed possibilities for the improvement of human life. In James,
however, this commitment to the richness of the worlds of science and art
and their possibilities for human futures extends beyond what most philoso-
phers, including Dewey, think of as the natural world; it extends to worlds
beyond time, space and matter, to realities that are elusive within convention-
al modes of scientific thought.
The point of broaching this metaphysically adventuresome perspective
that I find in James’s life and work is that James sees the idea of integrity as
having, in addition to its moral, social and ecological aspects, unsuspected
physical dimensions. Integrity may involve, in James’s view, accepting re-
sponsibility humans have seldom dreamed they might have, the responsibil-
ity of being co-creators of reality itself. (The apparent incoherence of this
view for most of us results, I believe, from engrained predispositions inherit-
ed from an Enlightenment and Platonist ideology that envelops the contem-
porary world.)
Whether or not this scientific constructivism is ultimately plausible, and
whether or not the interpretation of James it rests on is defensible, the view
does enable a thoroughly comprehensive account of the idea of integrity as
the central idea of morality. And that account in its fullest comprehensive-
ness is not available apart from the intellectual context of the pragmatist
tradition. James’s thought in particular enables taking the idea of integrity
beyond the content enabled by the ideas of growth and natural piety. The
integrity that naturally affiliates with natural piety, and especially as ex-
pressed by Dewey, does not go beyond what we think of as the natural world.
42 Chapter 2
The idea of integrity that naturally affiliates with James’s radical empiricism
is even more aggressive and sees even the content of physical reality subject
to human creativity.
THE PROJECTS
These introductory remarks may give plausibility to the idea that integrity
needs more deliberate attention as a central idea of moral philosophy; these
remarks also open into the projects that become matter for the chapters to
follow.
Chapter 3: Integrity seen as having variable content and as rooted in
particular cultural traditions and histories, as it is here, invites the charge that
it is an expression of relativism. Relativism has been, since Plato, untenable,
and for fundamentally the same reason Plato rejected it: relativism is “self-
referentially incoherent,” or self-defeating and hence not viable. Anyone
properly charged with relativism is, by that fact alone, defeated. Showing
that making the idea of integrity central to morality does not entangle one in
relativism—not even covertly or implicitly—is the project of chapter 3.
Chapter 4: The idea of intellectual integrity comes nicely into focus in the
contrast between the views about justified belief offered by W.K. Clifford
and William James. This focal perspective is evident in Simon Blackburn’s
mention of Clifford in partial justification of his response to his Jewish
colleague’s invitation to participate in a minor religious ceremony. Clifford’s
essay, and James’s as well, about belief point specifically toward the idea of
integrity of belief in ways that undermine traditional appropriations of their
views as “evidentialist” and “fideist.” The goal of having reasonable or ra-
tional beliefs must be replaced by the goal of having integrity of belief,
integrity of intellectual character. Clifford and James, in spite of their usual
appropriations by philosophers and some misleading remarks each makes,
are implicitly sympathetic to this different, pragmatist appropriation of their
work. Making this case is the project of chapter 4.
Chapter 5: The idea of integrity, unlike traditional or Enlightenment style
theories of morality, enables moral respect for dimensions of individual life
that otherwise languish from inattention. Not only are our relationships to our
fellow humans or “what we owe each other” morally significant, but so too
are our individual efforts to achieve meaningful lives. Meaning, significance
or usefulness in some larger or smaller context is central to our individual
self-understanding, and giving some specific content to our self-understand-
ing is crucial to who we are, to our self-concept and to our reach toward
becoming more than we are. Our personal integrity is a more expansive idea
than is realized in any traditional Western understandings of the content of
morality. These personal issues are the focus of chapter 5.
Chapter 6: Not only is our personal integrity of vital concern to each of

us, but so too is the integrity of our various communities, social, ecological
and geographical. Natural piety as described by Dewey earlier is a realization
that moral communities result from our thriving in specific natural environ-
ments; the biological and sociobiological symbiosis that is human rootedness
in specific ecological niches of the natural world is of moral significance.
Not only are humans morally significant to and responsible for themselves
and one another in social communities, we are also morally significant to and
responsible for the environmental communities that sustain us and enable our
futures.
Chapter 7: The idea of integrity in William James’s tentative, pan-psych-
ist metaphysical speculation becomes more adventuresome a project morally
speaking than is imagined in the most expansive extension of natural piety.
In his later works, especially in some chapters of Pragmatism and A Pluralis-
tic Universe, James embraces, however tentatively, the ideas that God is
finite and that humans are co-creators of reality. Apart from particular items
of scientific progress during the twentieth century that were unknown to him,
James was already embracing on metaphysical grounds a scope of creativity
that extended into the physical world. This uniquely puzzling part of James’s
philosophy is unconventional in the extreme. From a perspective more than a
century after his death, however, one finds significant scientific support for
ideas that resonate with James’s unconventional metaphysical views. In the
context of James’s metaphysics of pure experience and radical empiricism,
the idea of integrity enables a more adventuresome account of human integ-
rity than is imagined in Enlightenment moral philosophy or even in Dewey’s
working theory of morals. The task of chapter 7 is to elaborate James’s view
and some scientific possibilities—unknown to James but coherent with his
later ambitious works—of this more deeply engaged understanding of integ-
rity.
The modest-seeming task of the next chapter is to turn aside erroneous
charges against pragmatists that they, perhaps unwittingly, embrace relati-
vism.
NOTES
Education, 1916, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,
1985), 105.
2. For an interesting account of much diversity of moral practice and conviction in the
Western world, see Crane Brinton, A History of Western Morals (New York: Paragon House,
1959).
3. Stanley Fish, “Does Philosophy Matter?” New York Times, August 1, 2011.
4. For an account of this “intuition-matching” phenomenon, see Samuel Freeman’s “Why
Be Good?” review of On What Matters, by Derek Parfit, New York Review of Books, April
2012.
44 Chapter 2
5. I develop this idea of integrity in another context as the idea of the reflective life, making
use of Dewey’s expression as his way of capturing the idea of a working theory of morality.
See Pragmatism and the Reflective Life (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009); see especially
chapters 3 and 4 of that book.
6. For an historical account of this dominant proclivity in Western philosophy that I call
here our inheritance from Platonism, see for example George W. Harris, Reason’s Grief: An
Essay on Tragedy and Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See especially
“Monism: An Epitaph,” 110–150.
7. Bernard Williams, “Integrity,” in Utilitarianism: For and Against, ed. J. J. C. Smart and
Bernard Williams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 108–117.
8. Works responding to Williams’ argument include Elizabeth Ashford, “Utilitarianism,
Integrity and Impartiality,” Journal of Philosophy 97, no. 8 (2000), 421–439; Spencer Carr,
“The Integrity of a Utilitarian,” Ethics 86, no. 3 (1976): 241–46; Eric Moore, “Objective
Consequentialism, Right Actions, and Good People,” Philosophical Studies 133, no.1 (2007):
83–94; Samuel Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1993).
9. Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, and Michael Levine, “Integrity,” The Stanford Ency-
clopedia of Philosophy (August 10, 2008), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/fall2008/entries/integrity/ (accessed on September 27, 2014). See also their book:
Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, and Michael P. Levine, Integrity and the Fragile Self
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
10. See John Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” The Middle Works of John
Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 10, Journal Articles, Essays, and Miscellany Published in the
1916–1917 Period, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,
2008), 3–48.
11. I have already mentioned some utilitarians, Peter Singer and Alastair Norcross, who
seek to live lives fully respectful of their moral commitment to the principle of utility. The
feed-through from their utilitarianism to their daily lives is direct and as complete as they can
make it; they are vegetarians and they make no use of animal products to the extent they are
able to avoid them, shunning leather shoes for example.
12. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1979) and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1989); Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Boston, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992); Cornel West, The American Invasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism
(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); John J. McDermott, Streams of Experience:
Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture (Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1986); John J. McDermott, The Drama of Possibility: Experience as
Philosophy of Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); Scott L. Pratt, Native
Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 2002); Larry Hickman, John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1990); Stuart Rosenbaum, Pragmatism and the Reflective Life (Lan-
ham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009). See also Robert Brandom, Perspectives on Pragmatism
(Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn
(New York: Polity, 2010); Cheryl Misak, Truth, Politics, and Morality (New York: Routledge,
2000).
13. I think in particular of Gregory Pappas’s recent book, John Dewey’s Ethics (Blooming-
ton, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), wherein Pappas expresses what he conceives to be
Dewey’s distinctive moral perspective; Pappas seeks in this book to understand how to articu-
late what Dewey might have understood the projects of moral philosophy to include and to
bring some unitary understanding to Dewey’s way of thinking about morality. Todd Lekan’s
Making Morality (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003) is equally interested in
understanding what pragmatist thought about morality looks like, but neither of these—and I
believe they are representative—exploits what I see as the intense idealism of the classical
pragmatists.
14. John Dewey, Art as Experience, printed in The Later Works of John Dewey: 1925–1953,
vol.10, Art as Experience, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1989; and John Dewey, Experience and Nature printed in The Later Works of John
Dewey: 1925–1953, vol. 1, Experience and Nature, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2008).
15. See previous note. For a secondary account that emphasizes this aspect of Dewey’s
philosophical work, see Thomas M. Alexander, John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience &
Nature: The Horizons of Feeling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).
16. Neither James nor Dewey was content with creedal formulations of Christianity, so this
attribution of Christian ideals may seem misplaced; however, given their mutual high regard
for the Christian ideals that coursed through their birth families and communities, I believe it
proper to think of their radical idealism as distinctively Christian in its content. For a specific
account of Dewey’s moral ideals as Christian, see Pragmatism and the Reflective Life (Lan-
ham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), chapter 8.
17. For elaboration of this idea see Pragmatism and the Reflective Life, chapter 4.
18. John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 7: 1932, Ethics, ed. Jo
Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 176.
19. Roderick Chisholm makes this same point about skepticism. In Chisholm’s view, skepti-
cism is enabled by an a priori commitment to a particular view about the nature of knowledge.
Chisholm’s alternative to any such skepticism-producing understanding of the nature of knowl-
edge is to begin one’s inquiry with the presumption that one does indeed have the knowledge in
question and from that starting point construct one’s theory about how one has that knowledge.
See Roderick Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966),
56–69.
20. Roderick Chisholm’s makes this same point about Hume in the previously cited chapter
from Theory of Knowledge.
21. Chapter 3 of my earlier Pragmatism and the Reflective Life (New York: Lexington
Books, 2009) elaborates this point in some detail with reference to some contemporary theories
of morality.
22. A significant number of histories, cultural, political and philosophical, reveal this gener-
al fact about the colonists. Some of the best work of this kind is due to Perry Miller, a mid-
twentieth century American historian. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1956). See also Perry Miller, Edwards (New York: William
Sloane Associates, 1963) and The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil
War (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963). See also Paul K. Conkin, Puritans and
Pragmatists (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2005).
23. See items listed in the previous note and also Scott L. Pratt’s Native Pragmatism :
Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
2002). The phenomenon of the Ghost Dance that occurred during a particularly stressful part of
the nineteenth century for Native American cultures is an interesting exhibit of those native
cultures seeking to assimilate themselves to colonial cultures.
24. Roger Williams found his way to the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1633 and was, by
some quirk of character, immediately attracted to Native American culture; his life may be one
long experiment into how to invigorate native culture in the context of a domineering and
repressive (and Platonist) colonial culture. Williams himself became as resistant to colonial
culture as were the natives who themselves resisted, sometimes with recourse to war. For a
narrative historical account of Williams’s life, see Joe Barnhart and Linda Krager, Trust and
Treachery (Macon, GA: Smith and Helwys, 1996).
25. Plato famously takes pains in various parts of his corpus to exhibit the obvious defects of
the relativism that appears in many of his antagonists, including Protagoras and the sophists
generally who claimed “man is the measure of all things.”
26. I am usually reluctant to engage in caricatures or stereotypes, but this one I believe to be
useful, in much the way Alasdair McIntyre believed useful, in his 1981 work After Virtue, the
stereotypes of “the therapist, the manager and the bureaucrat.” After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). And I believe others too thought those stereotypes
46 Chapter 2
useful. In the idiom of Platonist and pragmatist I use here, McIntyre appears a vigorous though
reluctant Platonist.
27. For an account of Dewey’s understanding of the reflective life, see my earlier Pragma-
tism and the Reflective Life and in particular chapter 4 of that volume.
28. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934), 25–26.
See also John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 9: 1933–1934, Essays,
Reviews, Miscellany, and A Common Faith, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1989), 18.
29. Confirmation of this claim is ubiquitous in Dewey’s works.
30. For confirmation of this claim, many of Dewey’s works suffice. See for example The
Quest for Certainty, printed in John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol.
4: 1929, The Quest for Certainty, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1988); see also Ethics, printed in John Dewey, The Later Works of John
Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 7: 1932, Ethics (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,
1989).
31. For this understanding of James, see Roger Ward, Conversion in American Philosophy
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 89–119.
32. James’s offence at this common misappropriation is noted by Linda Simon in Genuine
Reality: A Life of William James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). See especially
372–373.
33. I am thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism, wherein Sartre em-
braces the claim that existence precedes essence. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2007).
34. Robert Browning says, “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven
for?” One cannot think about this line without seeing that nothing about who one is is fixed or
unalterable; one reaches (metaphorically) only to exceed (metaphorically) one’s (metaphorical)
grasp, to become more than one is. Nothing about one’s “identity” is fixed; each of us is
constantly growing into who and what we are to become, perhaps largely as a result of our own
creativity and effort. “Andrea del Sarto,” Men and Women, and Other Poems, ed. Colin Gra-
ham (London: J.M. Dent, 2000).
35. The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953, Volume 7: 1932, Ethics, Edited by Jo Ann
Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 307. My apologies for the
length of this quotation; it does capture perhaps the central idea at work in Dewey’s under-
standing of the moral self, of reflective living and of genuine integrity at the level of personal
life. Who one is is and should be in process of development toward a better future, no matter
one’s age or stage of life.
36. This idea of integrity as it appears here coheres with the idea of the reflective life as I
gave account of it in Pragmatism and the Reflective Life (New York: Lexington Books, 2009).
See chapter 4, “The Reflective Life,” especially 63–71.
37. John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 5: 1929–1930, Essays,
The Sources of a Scientific Education, Individualism, Old and New, and Construction and
Criticism, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988). See
also my Pragmatism and the Reflective Life, 78–79.
Chapter Three
Relativism?
As the basic idea of morality, integrity yields different content in different

times and places. In Jared Diamond’s narrative of the Handa and Ombal
tribes, their understanding of the content of integrity changed dramatically
within the span of one lifetime; Daniel’s integrity—before vivid representa-
tion of advantages in nation state institutions of justice—required that he
personally avenge his uncle’s death. The content of the idea of integrity
varies, as is obvious in cultural difference across time and space.
This fact about the content of integrity suggests to philosophers moral
relativism, the relativity of value to context or the subjectivity of values to
individuals. Moral relativism, in fact all kinds of relativism including cogni-
tive, scientific and metaphysical, we know to be untenable. Plato exhibits this
result repeatedly throughout his corpus, as do Aristotle and many others
throughout Western philosophy. Does the fact that integrity varies with time
and place mean that it succumbs to Plato’s standard critique of moral relati-
vism?
More broadly put, does pragmatism’s expansive commitment to respect-
ing the many and various normative particularities that divide communities
across time and geography mean that pragmatism is committed to relativism?
And hence that pragmatism is, following the trajectory of Plato’s critique,
incoherent and untenable?
Begin with William James’s “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth.” 1
James believes that only a pragmatist can give “the particular go” of the idea
of truth, and his effort to give the particular go of it in this essay turns
repeatedly to the idea of expediency of belief, a decidedly disadvantageous
recourse for conversing congenially with other philosophers about truth. This
recourse is disadvantageous because the account James offers appears to
collapse into the sort of relativism philosophers claim is incoherent. After
47
48 Chapter 3
seeking the plausibility in James’s account of truth, I consider a contempo-

rary critique of pragmatist understandings of truth leveled by Paul Boghos-
sian and bring John Dewey into conversation with Boghossian in order to
turn aside his critique; I close with comments about recent developments in
mathematics and science that reinforce the Dewey-style rejoinder to Boghos-
sian’s Plato-style critique of pragmatism and that give additional plausibility
to James’s account of truth. The net result of this discussion is to exonerate
pragmatism of the charge of relativism.
WILLIAM JAMES ON TRUTH
James’s account of truth incorporates the innocuous idea of agreement with

reality, an idea that normally appears in one guise or another in philosophical
accounts of truth.
To “agree” in the widest sense with a reality, can only mean to be guided
either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such working
touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if
we disagreed. Better either intellectually or practically! 2
James’s understanding of agreement here is thoroughly practice-oriented,

even though he says in that last sentence “intellectually or practically;” his
explication of the agreement involved in understanding the idea of truth is
fully oriented toward the particular. The need to acknowledge the truth that
Barack Obama won reelection to the Presidency in 2012 is to be guided
straight up to it or into its surroundings, etc. And likewise for any truth we do
or must acknowledge: when we are appropriately situated in our particular
worlds we must, as a matter of normal practice, accept its veracity. James
continues in this same practice-oriented way:
Agreement thus turns out to be essentially an affair of leading—leading that is

useful because it is into quarters that contain objects that are important. True
ideas lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up
to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing
human intercourse. They lead away from excentricity and isolation, from
foiled and barren thinking. The untrammeled flowing of the leading process,
its general freedom from clash and contradiction, passes for its indirect verifi-
cation; but all roads lead to Rome, and in the end and eventually, all true
processes must lead to the face of directly verifying sensible experiences
somewhere, which somebody’s ideas have copied. 3
The practice orientation is palpable in these remarks; in fact, in just the next
paragraph, James notes that pragmatists understand the relevant sense of
agreement “altogether practically.”
Relativism? 49
James struggles to capture the ideas of truth and agreement in a way that
might make them palatable to those he calls absolutist philosophers. The idea
of fixity in absolutist thought—not just about truth but about all ideas of
philosophical interest—is the intransigent inertia of Western and Enlighten-
ment traditions of philosophy James is trying to overcome. James is trying to
say what truth is or how we might to understand the idea of truth so as to
avoid the rigid commitment of absolutist philosophy to fixity. One might add
that, had James been aware of the contemporary version of absolutism’s rigid
commitment to fixity in the form of analytic philosophy, he might have
formulated his critique and account differently. This effort to avoid the fixity
of absolutist thought is what motivates James’s use of the idea of expedien-
cy:
‘The true,’ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our
thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.
Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the
whole of course; for what meets expediently all the experience in sight won’t
necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily. Experience, as
we know, has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formu-
las. 4
Again, notice that expediency is James’s summary term for the practice-
oriented account of truth he wants to express. James’s primary goal is to
make of truth a human idea, an idea that lives in human communities, that
waxes and wanes in those communities and in just the way all ideas live,
sometimes thriving and sometimes languishing, in those communities. 5 Talk
about expediency is one way James tries to uncover normativity in the idea
of truth, that feature of the idea that makes believing what is true a desidera-
tum, another way of bringing the idea of truth into the human world of
change and development. As Emerson puts this idea: “There are no fixities in
nature.” 6
James’s determination to bring truth fully into the human world reaches
its apex in his comparison of it to other ideas that all admit are fully part of
the human world.
Our account of truth is an account of truths in the plural, of processes of

leading, realized in rebus, and having only this quality in common, that they
pay. They pay by guiding us into or towards some part of a system that dips at
numerous points into sense-percepts, which we may copy mentally or not, but
with which at any rate we are now in the kind of commerce vaguely designated
as verification. Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification-pro-
cesses, just as health, wealth, strength, etc., are names for other processes
connected with life, and also pursued because it pays to pursue them. Truth is
made, just as health, wealth and strength are made, in the course of experi-
ence. 7
50 Chapter 3
Again, James presents the idea that truth pays, another way of talking about
its expediency. Here however, James puts the idea of truth into parallel
formation with the ideas of health, wealth and strength, ideas palpably rooted
in the human world. The variable content of the ideas of health, wealth and
strength and their realization in rebus are uncontroversial; they are particular
human goals and ideals that are realized differently in different cultural con-
texts. So it is also James insists with the idea of truth.
(I note parenthetically that James’s attitude toward the idea of truth is not
quite so straightforward as I have represented it here—or as it seems in this
essay that has focused my account. Several secondary sources make clear
James’s ambivalence about the thoroughly pragmatist account of truth he
offers in this particular essay in Pragmatism. Michael Slater, in particular,
offers an account of James’s own ambivalence about the fullness of his
commitment to the idea of expediency that is so prominent in the account of
truth in this essay. 8 )
But perhaps James’s use of the word “made” in connection with truth is
too aggressive a strategy for bringing truth fully into the human world. Sure-
ly we discover truth and do not create it? In his italicizing of the word
“made” James appears to fall clumsily into the trap set by those whose
prevailing dichotomy is “Truth—discovered or created!” James’s determina-
tion to bring truth fully into the human world, along with his metaphors and
uses of expediency, appears to leave him vulnerable to the charge of relati-
vism. And relativism, as Plato demonstrates, is incoherent. To probe this
thought and its accompanying charge of relativism, consider the contempo-
rary critique of pragmatism and its putative “constructivism” leveled by Paul
Boghossian in Fear of Knowledge. 9
A PLATONIST ATTACK AND A PRAGMATIST REPLY
The admission that the content of integrity varies with time and circum-
stance, along with the pragmatist understanding of truth as a thoroughly
human idea, motivates the charge that pragmatism is inseparable from relati-
vism. And its apparent commitment to relativism, no matter how well inten-
tioned, exposes pragmatism to decisive critique.
In the larger worlds of human studies—literary studies, anthropology,
sociology, psychology and others—the idea of human roots for all phenome-
na of human life, including its intellectual dimensions, is common coin.
Many who pursue such larger human studies are known as “social constructi-
vists.” Social constructivists vaguely hold that all beliefs are functions of
local ways of engaging the worlds about which beliefs are held; such beliefs
are constructed; they are produced or enabled by traditions of thought that
precede them. Truth, on this view, is socially constructed and varies in con-
Relativism? 51
tent by virtue of the social conditions for its construction. Philosophers gen-
erally are unsympathetic to perspectives allied with social constructivism
because they think it inseparable from relativism and subject to definitive
critique, including Plato’s definitive “self-referential incoherence” charge.
Paul Boghossian brings Plato-style artillery to bear against social con-
structivists and pragmatists. The pragmatists Boghossian targets in Fear of
Knowledge are Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, contemporary philoso-
phers who count themselves intellectual heirs of James and Dewey. In Bo-
ghossian’s view, pragmatists supply philosophical foundations for social
constructivism partly because of their flexibility about the idea of truth. Both
Rorty and Putnam are flexible also about the content of basic ideas of moral-
ity, providing yet another aspect of their pragmatism that tarnishes them with
the charge of relativism. 10
In Boghossian’s account, social constructivism holds that reality itself is
relative to culture. In the particular example he chooses, archeologists be-
lieve that Native Americans crossed a land bridge into the Americas from
Asia; in opposition a prominent Lakota spokesman asserts that Native
Americans are descendants of the Buffalo people who came from inside the
earth. 11 But surely one is entitled on scientific grounds to believe the Lakota
are wrong about how they got to America and the archeologists are right; and
to say that truth or reality is relative to culture—that, for example, the Lako-
ta’s belief is as good as the archeologists belief—is unacceptable. The arche-
ologists are right. The Lakota are wrong. Boghossian believes that social
constructivists cannot consistently get this straightforward result. Boghossian
consequently characterizes the view of “fact-construction … [as] such a bi-
zarre view that it is hard to believe that anyone actually endorses it,” and he
provides evidence that it is a bizarre view along with an example of a famous
constructivist who does hold it:
Fact-constructivism would seem to run into an obvious problem. The world

did not begin with us humans; many facts about it obtained before we did.
How then could we have constructed them? For example, according to our best
theory of the world, there were mountains on earth well before there were
humans. How, then, could we be said to have constructed the fact that there are
mountains on earth?
One famous constructivist, the French sociologist Bruno Latour, seems to have
decided just to bite the bullet on this point. When French scientists working on
the mummy of Ramses II. . . concluded that Ramses probably died of tubercu-
losis, Latour denied that this was possible. … Latour noted that just as it would
be an anachronism to say that Ramses died from machine-gun fire so it would
be an anachronism to say that he died of tuberculosis. As he boldly put it:
“Before Koch, the bacillus had no real existence.” 12
52 Chapter 3
Boghossian cites Putnam and Rorty in defense of Latour’s view that reality
and truth are relative to culture, a view he finds bizarre. Boghossian con-
cludes his third chapter with three objections he finds decisive against social
constructivists and also against their philosopher supporters. The last of Bo-
ghossian’s definitive objections is recognizably a version of Plato’s well-
known critique: “Social constructivism about facts looks to be in direct viola-
tion of the Law of Non-contradiction.” 13
Boghossian devotes Fear of Knowledge to the defeat of global relativism
in its prominent guises, and he gives special attention to the philosophical
error he finds in contemporary pragmatists. But the contemporary pragma-
tists he attacks, Putnam and Rorty, are not relativists, in spite of the claims
they make that Boghossian finds susceptible to his critique of constructivism
and pragmatism. 14 Instead of defending specific claims of Putnam and Rorty
against Boghossian’s critique, I exhibit here pragmatism’s general immunity
to the charge of relativism by returning to the work of John Dewey. 15
Begin with the “obvious problem” Boghossian mentions in the quotation
cited just above, the apparent difficulty that the world did not begin with
humans and that many facts about it obtained long before we did; there were
mountains, dinosaurs and various other realities whose existences were facts
long before humans were around to grace those facts with cultural consent.
Dewey explains why this—at least to Boghossian’s eye—obvious problem is
not a problem, and he does so a century before Boghossian is troubled by it:
Take … knowledge of a past event. It is absurd to suppose that knowledge

makes a difference to the final or appropriate content of knowledge, to the
subject matter which fulfils the requirements of knowing. In this case, it would
get in its own way and trip itself up in endless regress. [Editorial comment:
Notice that Dewey here acknowledges the correctness of Boghossian’s centu-
ry-later critique of the relativistic view about knowledge that Dewey himself
rejects.] But it seems the very superstition of intellectualism to suppose that
this fact about knowledge can decide what is the nature of that reference to the
past which, when rightly made, is final. No doctrine about knowledge can
hinder the belief—if there be sufficient specific evidence for it—that what we
know as past may be something which has irretrievably undergone just the
difference which knowledge makes. 16
Dewey here embraces the particular items of factual knowledge that seem to
Boghossian a special difficulty for constructivists and pragmatists. Dewey is
able—almost nonchalantly even—to sidestep the critique that Boghossian
finds decisive precisely because he sees such items of knowledge as indepen-
dent of the issue about the nature of knowledge that focuses Boghossian’s
effort. Two relevant ways of representing the nature of knowledge about the
past offer themselves, one the “classical” (in Boghossian’s representation) or
Relativism? 53
“intellectualist” (in Dewey’s representation) account that Boghossian accepts

and the other the pragmatist account Dewey accepts.
The intellectualism Dewey rejects pretends to “decide what is the nature
of that reference to the past which, when rightly made, is final.” Thus hu-
mans required a good bit of time to discover that there had been, temporally
preceding them, dinosaurs and many other realities. Boghossian’s intellectu-
alism, expressed in his belief that there is an “obvious problem” for pragma-
tists in the fact that dinosaurs preceded humans, begs the question about the
nature of the knowledge that dinosaurs existed before humans. A pragmatist
account of knowledge differs from Boghossian’s classical account of the
nature of knowledge but fully agrees about such factual details as the exis-
tence of dinosaurs—or the falsity of Aristotelian cosmology, the falsity of the
Impetus theory of projectile motion, the ubiquity of trilobites in the ancient
seas, and so on.
To think that the existence of dinosaurs is any problem for a pragmatist
understanding of knowledge or reality assumes in a question-begging way
that knowledge, belief, facts and truth are essentially as Boghossian repre-
sents them in what he calls “the classical picture.” 17 Pragmatists do not
accept the classical picture, according to which knowledge is true, justified
belief—or some variation of that formula such as indefeasible, true, justified
belief, or the proper function of our cognitive faculties, etc. The problem for
this classical picture, according to Dewey, is its embrace of what he calls
“the spectator theory” of knowledge.
A spectator theory of knowledge conceives knowledge as a relation be-
tween a relatively passive spectator and reality itself. The cognitive problem
for spectator theories is to discover the correct way to make contact eviden-
tially between the reality to be known and the psychological state of belief.
Since spectator theories generally have this “contact problem” between belief
and reality, epistemology becomes primarily the theory of justification; jus-
tification is, for spectator theories, the critical theoretical issue of epistemolo-
gy, and epistemology has in recent years become the various theoretical
projects of justification that seek to make contact between our beliefs and
reality. From a pragmatist perspective, spectator theories are variously prob-
lematic, but for present purposes the significant disadvantage is the passivity
spectator theories impose on knowers. 18 (Other disadvantages attend this one
but need not here delay our progress.)
Pragmatists do not believe that knowledge is true, justified belief, nor do
they believe that it is some further, more subtle qualification of that idea.
Add indefeasibility or substitute an externalist idea of justification or make
whatever modification to that classical picture you like; there remains still
some variation of the classical picture.
Pragmatists think that knowledge is an outcome of successful inquiry.
Knowing is a process, one of the most common through which humans
54 Chapter 3
engage their environments, and one that results in the products we call
knowledge. To know that there were dinosaurs before there were humans,
and for it to be a fact that there were dinosaurs before there were humans, is
for dinosaurs existing before humans to be an outcome of successful inquiry
about the past. In Dewey’s words, “what we know as past may be something
which has irretrievably undergone just the difference which knowledge
makes” and this is surely true of the fact that dinosaurs pre-existed humans.
Knowing that dinosaurs pre-existed humans does not require any particular
understanding of the nature of that knowledge about the past.
This pragmatist account of knowledge is not a spectator theory of knowl-
edge. In the pragmatist understanding, knowledge results not from finding a
way to make contact with an independent reality by means of a theory of
justification but by engaging in inquiry and achieving an outcome, a cogni-
tive reward for one’s labors. Knowledge results from directed activity, activ-
ity oriented toward the resolution of doubt or the clarifying of one or another
issue that becomes cognitively interesting.
One cannot show how relativism is involved in this pragmatist account of
knowledge as an outcome of inquiry without begging the question about the
nature of knowledge. And Boghossian surely does beg that question in his
assumption of classical views about the nature of belief, knowledge, fact and
truth. Dewey, in the passage quoted above, points explicitly to the possibility
of the question-begging presumption evident in Boghossian’s treatment of
knowledge and in his charge of relativism against pragmatists—and against
constructivists too for that matter.
Having noted that Dewey rejects Boghossian’s classical picture of knowl-
edge, I need not reiterate that their disagreement about what knowledge is
does not require any disagreement whatever about the content of knowledge,
issues about whether or not dinosaurs existed or Newton’s laws still hold,
etc. Another quotation from Dewey is helpful:
Now arguments against pragmatism . . . assume that to hold that knowledge

makes a difference in existences is equivalent to holding that it makes a differ-
ence in the object to be known, thus defeating its own purpose; witness that the
reality which is the appropriate object of knowledge in a given case may be
precisely a reality in which knowing has succeeded in making the needed
difference. This question is not one to be settled by manipulation of the con-
cept of knowledge, nor by dialectic discussion of its essence or nature. It is a
question of facts, a question of what knowing exists as in the scheme of
existence. If things undergo change without thereby ceasing to be real, there
can be no formal bar to knowing being one specific kind of change in things,
nor to its test being found in the successful carrying into effect of the kind of
change intended. 19
Relativism? 55
Dewey makes explicit here that he is not interested in issues about the proper
analysis of the concept of knowledge; the issue for him is what knowing is
“in the scheme of existence.” In the scheme of existence, knowing is an
activity, a practice that yields a result, knowledge; and of course since know-
ing is an ongoing activity it yields different results at different times, differ-
ent knowledges. Does this admission make Dewey or any pragmatist a rela-
tivist? Only if one accepts what Boghossian along with myriad other philoso-
phers see as the essence of knowledge, one or another variation of the classi-
cal picture. If one does not accept what Boghossian and these other philoso-
phers think of as essential to knowledge, then one does not get relativism—
unless of course one is willing to beg the question against those who do not
accept their classical picture of what is essential to knowledge. One more
Dewey quotation from the same essay shows his attitude toward those phi-
losophers who hover about the classical picture of knowledge:
It is this question of the relation to one another of different successive states of

things which the pragmatic method substitutes for the epistemological inquiry
of how one sort of existence, purely mental, . . . can get beyond itself and have
valid reference to a totally different kind of existence—spatial and extended;
and how it can receive impressions from the latter, etc.—all the questions
which constitute that species of confirmed intellectual lockjaw called episte-
mology. 20
Dewey’s language here is as abusive as he allows himself, but it indicates his

frustration with a tradition of thought about knowledge rooted in what he
sees as an outdated, even antiquated, Enlightenment intellectual culture. 21
And he would be as frustrated with Boghossian’s effort to turn pragmatists
into relativists as he was with contemporaries who misunderstood the entire
tradition of pragmatism. (William James was as frustrated with these thinkers
as was Dewey. 22 ) To turn pragmatists into relativists is uncharitably to beg
the question against them by assuming that the classical picture Boghossian
accepts is the right way to understand the nature of knowledge. Pragmatists
reject the classical picture. The real issue, in Dewey’s words, is “what knowl-
edge exists as.”
Knowledge exists as a product of inquiry, as a result of the myriad tech-
niques of knowing as a human practice. Human communities are different;
some are better at some strategies of knowing than are other communities.
Furthermore, different communities have different needs and interests that
motivate different techniques of inquiry. To think that some account of the
essence of knowledge in accord with the classical picture enables philoso-
phers to finesse these differences among human communities is to turn one’s
intellectual back on, in Dewey’s words, what knowledge exists as. To ac-
knowledge what knowledge exists as is to acknowledge that no account of
the nature of knowledge can enable a resolution of the issue between contem-
56 Chapter 3
porary archeologists and the Lakota people about the Lakota’s origin; no
such account can show that the Lakota are ignorant or benighted or inferior
to those well educated in the practices of Western science or philosophy.
This is the point Rorty and Putnam, and even Bruno Latour, try to express in
their more and less sophisticated ways. Knowing is a human practice, and
different communities engage in that practice differently in roughly the same
way they differently engage in the practices of providing themselves shelter
and food. To acknowledge this fact is not to accept relativism; it is simply to
acknowledge the priority of practice to theory and to acknowledge also that
the practices that make sense or are productive in one environment may not
make sense or be productive in others.
Thinking about practice as prior to theory should turn aside the tendency
to turn pragmatists into relativists; and thinking of knowledge as an outcome
of successful inquiry—what knowledge exists as—should dispel the idea that
theory in the form of epistemic principles and principles of reasoning, them-
selves true or false and present to awareness or not, must be a foundation for
every practice from which knowledge results. One must note, however, that
Dewey’s practice-oriented understanding of knowledge need not deny that
principles precede inquiries; he does, however, see any principles preceding
inquiry as themselves the outcome of prior inquiries and as themselves true
or false in just the way as is any outcome of inquiry. Principles are fine for
pragmatists; they do not result, however, from intuiting essences or analyzing
concepts or discovering conceptual contents; they do result from human
practices of knowing; and they are fallible and subject to revision in the
course of on-going experience. Theories are not foundations—logically, on-
tologically or metaphysically—for practices.
If epistemologists are not persuaded by Dewey’s understanding of knowl-
edge as an outcome of inquiry, perhaps turning attention to a psychological
(genealogical) question might be useful: Why would a man as intelligent as
Bruno Latour opine that since tuberculosis was discovered only in 1882,
Ramses II could not have died of it? Similar genealogical questions suggest
themselves. Philosophers typically are not interested in these questions —at
least in the analytic philosophical world in which Boghossian works.
Philosophers lack interest in such questions because they are genealogical
questions that are answered by means of explanations; since they seek expla-
nations, they are not regarded as philosophical questions, but rather as scien-
tific questions. Philosophers typically pursue questions of justification—not
of explanation. Thus Boghossian tells us that global relativism about facts is
not defensible or justifiable, and that epistemic relativism also is not defen-
sible or justifiable. Boghossian assumes, along with most philosophers, that
justification proceeds in accord with principles that are true or false absolute-
ly and that the business of philosophers is to get the essence of justification
right so that they can be confident when following its essential principles that
Relativism? 57
they acquire genuinely justified belief. But pragmatists are interested in these
questions of explanation or genealogy, and pragmatists further think that
Boghossian’s presumption about the essence of knowledge or justification—
understood among analytic philosophers as the effort to capture the analysis
of the idea in question—is as much subject to scientific inquiry, to explanato-
ry and genealogical account, as is the issue of what caused Ramses II’s death.
(An aside: We probably should cut Bruno Latour some slack and be a little
more tolerant of his effort to express a kind of naïve pragmatism. Any prag-
matist would as able as Boghossian to show Latour the error in his claim
about Ramses II’s death. In Dewey’s way of thinking about knowledge,
opinion about Ramses II’s death would not, before Koch, have “irretrievably
undergone” just the change that knowledge makes; now, however, it has
(presumably) irretrievably undergone that change. And one might suggest
that Latour surely would not be equally intransigent in denying that tubercu-
losis caused the death of John Keats in the early nineteenth century, or even
the death of Jonathan Edwards’s daughter in the early eighteenth century.)
To focus on explanation and genealogy allows considerations about con-
text to come to the fore in a way philosophers typically insist is not relevant;
philosophers typically insist that context is irrelevant to the nature of belief,
truth, knowledge and justification. Pragmatists insist, to the contrary, that
humans are creatures of time, ecology, history and culture. To see humans as
such creatures, as do pragmatists, is to deprive them of any ability to
transcend time, ecology, history and culture. Another way of expressing this
idea is to say that pragmatists take Darwin seriously: humans are animals.
To see humans as animals is to see them as the particular and uniquely
skilled creatures they are, to see them as having evolved in accord with the
increasingly sophisticated accounts given of human evolution in contempo-
rary biology. To see humans in this biological, evolutionary way is to see
them as bereft of any ability that transcends their biological origins. The
ability to know reality itself—the kind of noumenal reality that even Kant,
and even before Darwin, was too modest to claim humans might achieve—
transcends humanity’s biological origins. To think that theory is prior to
practice—the real issue between the pragmatists and the Boghossians/Platon-
ists—is to cling to metaphysical presumption in the face of biological and
cultural fact. One symptom of such presumption is the effort to get “the
analysis” of some concept—knowledge, truth, belief, etc.—definitively
right—or to assume that the basic outline of the analysis (e.g., “the classical
picture”) is well in hand.
Pragmatists, along with Kant and Darwin, refuse to pretend that humans
have skills enabling transcendence of their biological origins. Part of their
refusal is pragmatists’ circumspection and modesty by contrast with analytic
philosophers’ unwillingness to renounce essences—essences like those Plato
doggedly pursued (notably without success) through all of his dialogues. 23
58 Chapter 3
And along with this refusal naturally goes a refusal to be cowed by bogus
charges of relativism such as those leveled by Boghossian against Rorty and
Putnam. Human cognitive skill is honed in different ways in different con-
texts of inquiry, and the results achieved in those contexts of inquiry are
knowledge—and the content of knowledge changes across time; some items
of knowledge have not, in Dewey’s language, “irretrievably undergone” the
difference knowledge makes in the human environment. To pretend other-
wise—for example by seeking the analysis of knowledge or justification—is
to cling to the hope that humanity is more than an outcome of biological
development, and that somehow earnest intellectual effort might make con-
tact with fixed reality itself by, for example, achieving the correct analysis of
knowledge or justification. Pragmatists join Kant and Darwin in their modest
circumspection about human cognitive possibility. But pragmatists do insist
that inquiry matters and that individuals have responsibilities to engage their
world cognitively.
Boghossian and his sympathizers do not see how radically alternative to
their understandings of knowledge, truth and belief are views of pragmatists
about those things. The metaphor of ships passing in the night is probably
appropriate. I make one more effort to be explicit about how radically diver-
gent these perspectives are about relevant ideas. When Boghossian makes his
case against “Rorty’s postmodernist brand of global relativism,” he presents
the following argument:
The global relativist maintains that there could be no facts of the form
12. There have been dinosaurs but only facts of the form
13. According to a theory that we accept, there have been dinosaurs.
Well and good. But are we now supposed to think that there are absolute facts
of this latter form, facts about which theories we accept. 24
I need not trouble to extend Boghossian’s argument further. Dewey does not
maintain, nor does Rorty or Putnam or any other pragmatist, that there could
be no facts of the former form; they also neither maintain nor accept Boghos-
sian’s representation of their view in 13. Dewey and Rorty and Putnam
understand the knowing of those facts differently from the way Boghossian
conceives as the only way such facts could be known. Another quotation
from Dewey may be helpful:
There is no kind of inquiry which has a monopoly of the honorable title of

knowledge. The engineer, the artist, the historian, the man of affairs attain
knowledge in the degree they employ methods that enable them to solve the
problems which develop in the subject-matter they are concerned with. As
philosophy framed upon the pattern of experimental inquiry does away with
all wholesale skepticism, so it eliminates all invidious monopolies of the idea
of science. By their fruits we shall know them. 25
Relativism? 59
Boghossian is burning straw men, successfully to be sure, but while he sets

his flames, the real people he wants to torch have eluded him. Boghossian’s
critique of “global relativism” is perfect; his assignment of it to specific
thinkers is mistaken, as is his view that saying anything about knowledge,
belief or truth commits one to some version of the classical, theoretical
understanding of such things. In pragmatism, practice precedes theory; theo-
ry and its results are a function of practices that have roots in human commu-
nities. And such practices, of course, may be put into explanatory, genealog-
ical contexts that illuminate their propriety in the human contexts they occu-
py, and also their malleability in the service of making those practices more
effective in serving the human goals that motivate them.
Notice the expression Boghossian uses in the last sentence of the above
quotation. In pushing “the global relativist”—and presumably including the
social constructivist and the pragmatist 26 —from “There have been dino-
saurs” to “According to a theory we accept, there have been dinosaurs”
Boghossian uses the expression “absolute facts.” That the idea of absolute
fact lurks in the background of his critique demonstrates precisely the ques-
tion-begging strategy he embraces: “Absolutism or relativism, which will it
be?” The strategy is either question begging or false dichotomy; either fallacy
label captures his strategy, especially in the face of Dewey’s insistence on a
third way that is fully consistent with the factual claim that there have been
dinosaurs. The imposition Boghossian insists on is what makes his argument
an attack on a straw man. But returning to the expression “absolute fact,” one
cannot miss the metaphysical commitment that underlies it: The world of
reality, truth and knowledge is independent of human engagement and inter-
course, and human cognitive responsibility is limited to finding a way to
make epistemic contact with that independent reality. Pragmatists reject this
metaphysical picture as embodying the spectator theory of knowledge or, as
Rorty puts it, the idea of the mind as a “mirror of nature.” 27 The pragmatist
picture of knowledge as a result of inquiry is not coherent with the idea of
knowledge that motivates the false dichotomy; that dichotomy assumes that
humanity has some intellectual capability that might enable transcendence of
the natural world. This idea of transcendence of the natural world is ubiqui-
tous in our Western, European worlds, especially the worlds of logic and
mathematics, and physics too for that matter. How do our logicians, mathe-
maticians and philosophers argue for the Platonism they frequently embrace?
And how do pragmatists turn aside mathematicians’ Platonist longing for
absolute fixity?
60 Chapter 3
PLATONISM OR PRAGMATISM AGAIN
Alfred North Whitehead famously remarked that all of Western philosophy is

a series of footnotes to Plato. Whitehead’s remark is astute and perceptive.
Exceptions to his observation are rare and begin appearing in the nineteenth
century and come to a crescendo, at least on the American scene, with John
Dewey’s work in the first half of the twentieth century. The previous section
on relativism marks the stark contrast between Boghossian’s “Platonism”
and Dewey’s (and Putnam’s and Rorty’s) pragmatism. The stark contrast
appears between Boghossian’s commitment to the classical picture of knowl-
edge and Dewey’s commitment to an experimentalist picture of knowing,
knowing as a human practice of engaged inquiry that appears differently in
different contexts. This contrast appears with great regularity in every area of
philosophical inquiry, and Dewey’s thirty-seven volume corpus is largely
consumed by his efforts to provide a large-scale philosophical alternative to
the Platonism that is ubiquitous in philosophy, science, logic and mathemat-
ics. And although philosophy is one locus of footnotes to Plato—witness
Boghossian’s treatment of knowledge—others are science, logic and mathe-
matics. Consider now logic and mathematics. 28
Mathematicians are notoriously Platonists. Rebecca Goldstein belabors
the point about Kurt Gödel in Incompleteness that he is a Platonist. 29 Mathe-
matical Platonists believe the objects of their study, numbers and relations
among them, are abstract realities they are able to discern and about which
they make discoveries. The numerical and logical objects of their intellectual
efforts are existing realities they are able—as a result of intellectual effort
sometimes signaling genius—to elaborate into significant discoveries about
that independent reality. Goldstein quotes from G.H. Hardy’s A Mathemati-
cian’s Apology to this effect:
I believe that mathematical reality lies outside of us, that our function is to
discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we
describe grandiloquently as our “creations,” are simply our notes of our obser-
vations. This view has been held, in one form or another, by many philoso-
phers of high reputation from Plato onwards, and I shall use the language
which is natural to a man who holds it. 30
Kurt Gödel shared Hardy’s conviction that the foundations of mathematics

are realities that one discovers and that, in the most basic ways, simple truths
of mathematics are objects of intuition in roughly the way simple truths
about physical objects are objects of perception. (This analogy loses some of
its force when physical objects become no longer objects of direct perception
but rather something like collections of sense-data or organized collections of
molecules; when physical objects become derivative in some such way, the
directness of perceptual access to them becomes problematic.)
Relativism? 61
In Gödel’s understanding of what his incompleteness proofs accom-

plished, he had reinforced the Platonist perspective about the nature of math-
ematical knowledge. 31 The effort to reduce the idea of real mathematical
truth to the axioms, syntax and transformational rules of a formal deductive
system Gödel proved must be unsuccessful; there are and must be truths of
arithmetic that are not provable in any such system. Arithmetical truth for-
ever eludes capture by the reductive strategies of such systems; the intuitions
of basic truths that lay at the foundation of mathematics and all of the rela-
tionships of those basic truths are not reducible to syntactical relationships of
formal systems.
Gödel’s result was a shock to the leading reductivists of the intellectual
world of the mid-twentieth century, including especially the logical positi-
vists centered at that time in Vienna—and in Goldstein’s account, most espe-
cially to David Hilbert. 32 Hilbert was dogmatically committed to the idea
that arithmetic revealed nothing about reality itself; all of mathematics was in
his view reducible to symbols, syntax and deductive rules that eliminated the
idea that mathematics expressed the logically necessary part of reality. Gödel
proved Hilbert, and logical positivists generally, wrong. Mathematics would
forever elude reductionist effort. As Goldstein puts this point:
When the formal system of arithmetic is endowed with the usual meanings,
involving the natural numbers and their properties, its axioms are seen to be
clearly true and thus must be consistent since true statements can’t have false
consequences. It isn’t that the consistency of arithmetic was really in doubt—
that is, if one really does believe in numbers. The question concerns how
consistency can be proved—an important question from any metamathemati-
cal point of view, an urgent question for all but the Platonist. 33
Gödel remained a Platonist throughout his strange career, and he always

believed that his work on the foundations of mathematics made evident the
truth of Platonism. Gödel’s own predisposition toward the realistic interpre-
tation of mathematical truth and its basis in intuitive perceptions of basic
truths is widely shared among mathematicians, and also among logicians; it
is shared generally among practitioners of the a priori arts, and shared equal-
ly among philosophers as also practitioners of those arts. These a priori arts
provide the strongest human motive for the continuing inertia of Platonism.
Pragmatism is the only significant alternative, the only significant challenge
to the continuing inertia of Platonism.
John Dewey presents the pragmatist alternative in full awareness of the
compelling appeal of Platonism, especially among mathematicians and logi-
cians. Dewey’s alternative is as stark a contrast to the Platonism of Hardy
and Gödel as is his understanding of knowledge a stark contrast to the abso-
lutism of the classical theory of knowledge.
62 Chapter 3
DEWEY’S GENEALOGY OF MATHEMATICS
Dewey’s critique of Hardy and Gödel’s Platonism coheres with his critique
of the spectator theory of knowledge. As knowing is an outcome of human
practices, mathematics is an outcome of human practices that is symbolically
abstracted from those practices, much as epistemology is abstracted from
concrete instances of knowing. The genealogy of mathematics Dewey offers
sees it as a development symbolically of rudimentary ways of meeting basic
human needs, the needs, for example, of trading, measuring and comparing
particular objects of human interest. Generalizing from the ad hoc use of
symbols to accomplish such concrete social goals yields geometry and math-
ematics; abstracting from such concrete, particular goals and focusing on
relationships among the symbols themselves brought the possibility of intel-
lectual and aesthetic interest in relations among those symbols. This aesthet-
ic, intellectual interest led to thought about relations among the symbols that
eventuated in the abstract thought we know as logic and mathematics. Thus
Euclid, for example, systematized geometry into a formal deductive system
having axioms, theorems and deductive rules. The elegance of such formal
systems, along with their reliable applicability to concrete problems, gives
them the appearance of independence from all application. And the deductive
strategies employed to elaborate those systems also gives them the appear-
ance of independence of all application.
Dewey’s account of mathematics begins with human social needs but
moves quickly to abstract intellectual—mathematical—interests:
[Special] symbols were devised that were emancipated from the load of irrele-
vancy carried by words developed for social rather than for intellectual pur-
poses. . . . This liberation from accidental accretions changed clumsy and
ambiguous instruments of thought into sharp and precise tools. 34
Such abstract, intellectual interests
were freed from connection with any particular existential application and use.
This happened when operations made possible by symbols were performed
exclusively with reference to facilitating and directing other operations also
symbolic in nature. 35
Dewey’s emphasis on genealogy in his account of mathematics—and of

geometry and logic—accommodates his conviction that the human world is a
natural world. And this natural world is a world in which all things human,
from the humblest creations of human ingenuity—arrowheads and spears, for
example—are qualitatively continuous with the most sophisticated and ele-
gant human creations—symphonies and formal mathematical systems, for
example. Is qualitative continuity among such diverse productions of human
Relativism? 63
creativity a plausible possibility? Dewey’s pragmatist answer is affirmative.

Gödel’s Platonist answer is negative. How might one mediate or resolve this
sharp disagreement?
This question of mediation or resolution between such incompatible per-
spectives about the nature of logic and mathematics is impossible to answer
without begging the very question at issue between Dewey and Gödel. Gödel
probably saw in his incompleteness theorems confirmation of his mathemati-
cal intuitions and his Platonism. Dewey surely saw in all developments of
intellectual technique, whether in mathematics or music, an intensification of
interest in symbolic operations for their own sake, an interest he saw as a
natural development of human interest and aesthetic sensibility. Dewey even
designated perspectives like Gödel’s as embodying a special kind of fallacy:
Independence from any specified application is readily taken to be equivalent

to independence from application as such; it is as if specialists, engaged in
perfecting tools and having no concern with their use and so interested in the
operation of perfecting that they carry results beyond any existing possibilities
of use, were to argue that therefore they are dealing with an independent realm
having no connection with tools or utilities. This fallacy is especially easy to
fall into on the part of intellectual specialists. It played its part in the genera-
tion of a priori rationalism. It is the origin of that idolatrous attitude toward
universals so often recurring in the history of thought. 36
Once one is committed, as is Dewey, to understanding every human phenom-

enon, no matter how sophisticated, as an expression of human biological
aptitudes that find expression in distinctively different ways in different cul-
tural circumstances, then one becomes able to explain and understand those
human phenomena, at least in principle. (And from this genealogical per-
spective, Godel’s predisposition toward Platonism is naturally explained by
his immersion in mathematics from a very young age; he became immersed
in the symbolic interactions that constitute number theory well before he
might have been exposed to Dewey-style genealogical explanations of those
symbolic interactions. In a similar, precocious way, Mozart composed his
first symphony at the age of eight. And in Dewey’s view Godel’s accom-
plishments were no more ontologically significant than were Mozart’s.)
Furthermore, once one is committed, as is Gödel, to the idea that one
simply sees number reality itself and does so transcendently of human natu-
ral or biological circumstances, then one becomes incapacitated for appre-
ciating any genuinely explanatory account of one’s apparently transcendent
intuition.
To be, as it were, primally or intuitively justified as Gödel believed him-
self to be is to become disabled to understand that what one is primally or
intuitively justified about is a product of natural human biological and cultu-
64 Chapter 3
ral processes. Between these disparate perspectives about the nature of math-
ematics no mediation is possible.
Justification has its own sources and rhythms when taken as an irredu-
cibly normative idea; it generates and protects its own theoretical autonomy
from encroachment by other human theoretical enterprises. And explanation,
including genealogy, is a scientific enterprise of many dimensions that seeks
understanding of all phenomena, including human phenomena; it recognizes
no exceptions to its scope, not even for those phenomena traditionally of-
fered immunity as a priori. Gödel’s intuitions of self-evidence and Dewey’s
genealogical explanations are ships passing in the night; one must choose to
be a passenger on one or the other, and one cannot travel both directions. One
must, like Dewey and the pragmatists, cast one’s lot with humanity or one
must, like Gödel and the Platonists, cast one’s lot with the aliens who happen
to find that they are resident among humanity.
ONE WORD MORE: PARADOXES
The early years of the twentieth century saw difficulties in the theory of logic
and in the philosophy of language posed by paradoxes of set theory and
paradoxes of linguistic meaning. A basic way of capturing one of these
paradoxes is to note that the sentence, “this sentence is false,” is true just in
case it is false; the sentence, however, like all declarative sentences is a
legitimate substitution instance of the general schema: For any sentence “p,”
“p” is true if and only if p. Thus, “Reagan is a republican” is true if and only
if Reagan is a republican; “There are six kinds of quarks” is true if and only if
there are six kinds of quarks; and so on for any declarative sentence. “This
sentence is false” is true if and only if this sentence is false, however, is true
if and only if it is also false. The sentence is, one might say, self-referentially
incoherent.
Nobody should be troubled by this result. Unless they hold—as did Ber-
trand Russell and Kurt Gödel—that declarative sentences are meaningful just
in case they express propositions that are either true or false. For this theory
of linguistic meaning, propositions as abstract particulars are ontological
requirements for the meaningfulness of declarative sentences. Since “This
sentence is false” is meaningful, it shows that there can be no abstract partic-
ular, the proposition that this sentence is false, whose truth or falsity is
required for its meaningfulness—for the sentence is true if false and false if
true, and is thus incoherent. Thus, propositions are not required for assertions
in a language to be meaningful. Linguistic meaning requires no supporting
ontology. This result is precisely what pragmatists expect, and it is why
they—along with Wittgenstein—are untroubled by logical paradoxes: prag-
matists account for linguistic meaning not by means of a theory of meaning
Relativism? 65
but in terms of the human practices that yield complex and interesting forms
of human social engagement, including uses of language as instruments of
such engagement.
SUMMARY REMARKS
Relativism is a threat only if one assumes question-begging strategies of

argument like “discovered or created,” “absolute or relative;” or one assumes
that humans are “spectators” who must find a way to make contact with the
real world. These assumptions are part of the intellectual heritage of the West
and have become “natural” presumptions about the human situation. That
such assumptions have great inertia in Western intellectual culture and were
engendered by Plato and by the Enlightenment concern to keep science from
reducing humanity to valueless machines is no justification for refusing to
consider more fruitful and interesting ways to understand the human situa-
tion. Such alternative fruitful and interesting ways to understand humanity
begin appearing in the post-Darwin world of the nineteenth century and find
distinctive expression in the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey.
Pragmatist alternatives to these Platonist and Enlightenment inspired
ways of thinking about the human situation bring humanity fully into the
natural world and see that traditional philosophical problems can be ad-
dressed differently and fruitfully in a new post-Platonist and post-Enlighten-
ment world. Seeing every dimension of normative thought about knowledge
or morality as a function of concrete human practices and elaborations of
those practices enables thought about knowledge and morality to become,
finally, instruments of amelioration in the human world. No longer need
thought about knowledge and morality be dominated by concerns of Greek
and Enlightenment intellectual culture; such thought may instead be liberated
for generous service of the human community. This goal is pragmatism’s,
and it finds its fullest expression in the work of William James and John
Dewey.
Bringing integrity to the fore of moral philosophy enables this humaniz-
ing of thought about morality. The next chapter takes on this task of human-
izing thought about belief in terms of the idea of intellectual integrity.
APPENDIX: PRAGMATIST STANDARDS
The claim of this chapter has been that pragmatism is immune from critique
as a version of relativism. The standards that emerge from traditions and
practices gain inertia as they enable continuing success of the practices in
which they are employed, but are themselves malleable; the serviceability of
such emergent standards depends on their continuing success. But this “con-
66 Chapter 3
tingency” of such emergent standards does not yield any case for thinking of
them as “relative” so as to expose them to question-begging critique as “self-
referentially incoherent.” Nevertheless, one wants an account of competing
standards that emerge in competing practices so as to enable judgments of
better or worse about those competing standards.
Competing standards invite comparison. How do pragmatists respond to
the invitation?
Among standards for behavior, some are better and some are worse.
Among standards of practice, some are better and some are worse. In chapter
1, the case of Daniel of the Ombal clan prominently displayed the emergence
of a standard of behavior and practice better than the one that had dominated
clan interactions for generations. And the betterness in question appeared a
simple matter of preference resulting from comparison of practices and be-
haviors.
The idea of a conflict resolution practice that did not require periodic
killing or maiming of one’s relatives and clansmen appealed to warring clans
simply because it promised a more stable social order with no sacrifice of
individual or clan integrity. And as mentioned there, John Dewey gives voice
to a general way of expressing the relevant comparison strategies. As Dewey
puts the comparison technique, one measures the comparative worth of prac-
tices, traditions and forms of social life by noting
able society, in order words, is one which internally and externally sets up
Comparison of this kind is natural for individuals and societies, for they are
continuously in search of ways to better themselves and to address their
needs. And in Jared Diamond’s example of the Handa-Ombal clans dispute, a
natural tendency toward such comparison was obvious. And alternatives that
offer improvement inspire imaginations toward seeing and grasping the per-
sonal or social significance in alternative practices.
Daniel was able to see, as were his fellow clansmen, along with members
of other Highland clans, the wisdom of a conflict resolution practice that did
not require regular and unpredictable quests for vengeance or periodic sacri-
fice of loved ones to the vengeance-lust of others. And in Diamond’s ac-
count, virtually all the Highland clans converted from a “Hatfield-McCoy”
mentality about vengeance to a nation-state mentality that transformed the
moral need for vengeance into the moral need for justice, along with its
supporting institutions and practices. Diamond’s account yields a clear appli-
cation of Dewey’s standards for the comparative worth of different moral
practices. Perceptions of difference along with the creativity of our imagina-
Relativism? 67
tions yield possibilities of ongoing betterment. “Relativism” is not involved;

what is at stake is the integrity of practices and possibilities for their better-
ment.
The requirement for integrity is constant, a psychological and sociologi-
cal—perhaps even biological—need. But cultures realize that need in differ-
ent, and sometimes very different, ways. Judgments of comparative worth
among ways of realizing roughly similar goals are natural and readily avail-
able in the absence of Western rationalist, or Platonist, strategies.
Why does one naturally judge North Koreans deprived? Are North Kore-
ans subject to an “irrational” regime that turns them into subjects rather than
citizens? One might say such things, of course, but capturing the inferior
quality of culture and stature of rule to which they are subject needs nothing
quite so presumptuous or imperialistic—and notice too that no astute politi-
cians make such claims; all that is required to legitimate the judgment of
inferiority is simple comparison of the conditions under which they live as
compared to the conditions under which live their relatives in South Korea.
And one might observe as well that, given a choice as were the Handa and
Ombal clans, North Koreans would very likely change their living conditions
to approximate those of their South Korean relatives.
These kinds of situations that encourage comparison of practices and
standards for behavior are ubiquitous throughout the natural world. Different
environments yield different practices that require a similar integrity of indi-
viduals and groups to ensure the vitality or even viability of the whole. Thus
integrity does have different content in different cultural locations. Again,
this fact about the variability of the content of integrity across time and place
does not diminish its vitality as of foundational moral significance. For “ab-
solute standards” require of humanity that it be more than human. Pragma-
tists embrace and welcome their full humanity.
NOTES
1. William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 95–114.

2. William James, Pragmatism, 102.
5. The idea of a “meme,” appearing in Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene approximates
the sense of relative fixity and malleability James is struggling toward in this essay. The fact
that memes, in Dawkins’s account, have cultural roots and also thrive and die emphasizes their
compatibility with James’s thinking here.
6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Circles," in Pragmatism and Religion, ed. Stuart Rosenbaum
(Champaign, IL: Illinois University Press, 2003), 40.
8. Michael R. Slater, William James on Ethics and Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2009). See especially 183–187. I do agree with Slater that “James’s attempt to
combine a weak version of metaphysical realism with a commitment to humanism is one of the
most important and neglected features of his pragmatic theory of truth, and is arguably one of
68 Chapter 3
the more innovative philosophical positions developed in the twentieth century” (215). James’s
account of truth is an on-going problem for interpreters of his thought. In addition to Slater, see
especially Hilary Putnam, "James's Theory of Truth," in The Cambridge Companion to William
James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 166–185;
David Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 215–223. Although I do agree about the innovative (and problematic)
character of James’s struggles with the idea of truth, I believe that bringing those struggles into
a more contemporary scientific context opens possibilities for understanding and interpreting
those struggles in an unusual and fruitful way that James himself could not have seen at the
beginning of the twentieth century. More of these possibilities in the last chapter.
9. Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007).
10. This flexibility as I have called it is evident in many of their writings. See for example
Richard Rorty, "Ethics without Principles," in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Pen-
guin Books, 1999), 72–90. See also Hilary Putnam, "How Not to Solve Moral Problems," in
Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 179–192 and
Hilary Putnam, Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
11. Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge, 1.
12. Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge, 26.
13. Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge, 40. One must read the text itself to get a feel for
Boghossian’s carefully patient explication and refutation of the error of these thinkers; their
landing in violation of the law of non-contradiction is, he feels, their just dessert. The entirety
of Boghossian’s chapter 4 is a careful explication and refutation of Rorty’s apparent defense of
global relativism.
14. I suppose I should be cautious here. Rorty says he embraces atheism and perhaps also
relativism, and he certainly can appear to careful readings to be committed to relativism. For
my current purposes, I need only claim that Rorty need not embrace relativism—or atheism for
that matter. (On the issue of atheism, see “Ecumenism,” the last chapter of my Pragmatism and
the Reflective Life (New York: Lexington Books, 2009), wherein I point out the tension be-
tween Rorty’s embrace of atheism and his commitment to pragmatism.)
15. I note that I find Dewey circumspect and comprehensive in defending his philosophical
views in a way that Rorty sometimes appears by contrast, especially to unsympathetic readers,
rash and excessive.
16. John Dewey, "The Practical Character of Reality," in Pragmatism: The Classic Writ-
ings, ed. H. S. Thayer (Indianapolis: Hackett , 1982), 276. This essay originally appeared in
Essays, Philosophical and Psychological in Honor of William James (New York: Longmans,
Green, and Co., 1908); it appears in John Dewey, The Middle Works of John Dewey,
1899–1924, vol. 4: 1907–1909, Essays, Moral Principles in Education, ed. Jo Ann Boydston
(Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 125–142. For the passage that
explicitly makes the critique Dewey acknowledges is possible, see Boghossian, Fear of Knowl-
edge, 54–56.
17. Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge, 10–16. The classical picture sees knowledge as ap-
proximately true, Justified belief.
18. See John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” The Early Works of John
Dewey, 1882–1898, vol. 5: 1895–1898, Essays. This essay appeared originally in Psychologi-
cal Review 3 (1896): 357–370.
19. Dewey, “Practical Character of Reality,” 276.
20. Dewey, “Practical Character of Reality,” 286. Dewey is as even-tempered and kind a
character as one might find in the academic world of philosophy, and when he uses this kind of
language one can be sure of his frustration with the way his words are being twisted. I think
Putnam and Rorty are entitled to the same sort of frustration at the way Boghossian treats their
words; but again, as I have already admitted, their struggles to express their pragmatist commit-
ments almost invite the kind of misunderstanding evident in Boghossian’s treatment.
21. One cannot appreciate or even take seriously Dewey’s genealogical perspective about
Enlightenment intellectual culture without serious study of some of his central works. I com-
mend his Gifford Lectures: John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 4:
Relativism? 69
1929, The Quest for Certainty, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Univer-
sity Press).
22. For an account of James’s frustration, see Linda Simon, Genuine Reality: A Life of
William James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 372–373.
23. If the idea of essences seems too metaphysically cumbersome to some of these philoso-
phers, an adequate replacement (though equally unseemly from the perspective of pragmatism)
is the idea of “the analysis of” the same ideas—knowledge, truth, belief, value, right, good, and
so on for all of the ideas that seem philosophically interesting. Making all of these philosophi-
cally interesting ideas a function of human practices enables what Dewey thought of as the
recovery of philosophy for real human good. Those who are interested in Dewey’s practice-
oriented understanding of these ideas as a replacement for the theory-oriented understanding of
them that is dominant in current philosophy should look at a few of those thirty-seven volumes
that make up the corpus of his work; I recommend especially The Quest for Certainty (1929) in
Dewey, Later Works, vol. 4; Art as Experience (1934) in John Dewey, The Later Works of John
Dewey, vol. 10, Art as Experience, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press); and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938) in John Dewey, The Later Works of
John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 12, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbon-
dale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).
24. Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge, 47, 54.
25. Dewey, Later Works, vol. 4, 176. Parenthetically I add that I do not find either Rorty or
Putnam (or any others for that matter) quite as direct in addressing the problems of philosophy
from consistent perspectives of pragmatism as is Dewey.
26. I deplore the use of abstract particulars in philosophical prose; their use reinforces the
tendency toward abstraction that monopolizes philosophical thought. General terms are equally
effective rhetorically and do not reinforce that tendency. In the present case, “the global
relativist” becomes “global relativists;” “the social constructivist” becomes “social constructi-
vists;” and “the pragmatist” becomes “pragmatists.”
27. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979).
28. I am much indebted in the discussion that follows to Rebecca Goldstein’s work in her
recent book on Kurt Gödel titled Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2005) and also to Roger S. Jones’s Physics as Metaphor (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
29. This theme pervades Goldstein’s treatment of Gödel, and I think this emphasis gives her
treatment a clarity and accessibility that might otherwise be lacking; along with the historical
setting she provides for Gödel’s work, this emphasis is commendable. I recommend her book to
students of logic and mathematics.
30. Quoted in Goldstein, Incompleteness, 46. I note parenthetically that both Newton and
Leibniz are known as “inventors” of the calculus, an odd seeming concession to the idea that
not all of mathematics results from “discovery” of truths about pre-existing realities.
31. Rather than trying here to reproduce the main outlines of Goldstein’s treatment of Gödel
and his proof, I simply defer to her treatment and commend a reading of her book. My
treatment here intends to cast doubt on the Platonism Gödel embraces, as well as Goldstein’s
apparent support of his Platonist conviction.
32. Goldstein, Incompleteness; see especially 140–145.
33. Goldstein, Incompleteness, 163.
34. Dewey, Quest for Certainty, 122.
1985), 105.
Chapter Four
Intellectual Integrity
Begin by recalling Simon Blackburn’s dinner experience with his Jewish

colleague. (Chapter 1) Blackburn refused to participate in a small ceremony
preceding the dinner—a Jewish ceremony presumably—because he held
none of the irrational beliefs that were foundations for the ceremony; he
believed his integrity was in jeopardy. Here are some questions Blackburn’s
action poses: Are rational standards of evidence required to legitimate be-
liefs? Do some people have such rational standards and apply them? Do
others have those rational standards but fail to apply them—perhaps through
inattention or laziness or thoughtless habit? Do some people lack those ra-
tional standards? What source might yield such standards? May such stan-
dards become available to those who lack them? And supposing there are
such standards and that one may acquire them, how does one properly apply
them? Can one know correct evidential standards for belief and not apply
them? Generally these questions about the ethics of belief immerse us in all
the parallel problems we confront in moral philosophy.
Blackburn’s dining experience with his Jewish colleague raises all these
questions, and one must negotiate among them in as charitable a way as one
can given Blackburn’s description of the situation. What Blackburn’s de-
scription makes clear, however, is his belief that his Jewish colleague is
wrong to invite Blackburn to participate in a ceremony devoid of intellectual
integrity. And Blackburn believes that anybody properly educated into con-
temporary standards of science or philosophy should be able at least to
discern that absence of integrity. Presumably, Blackburn believes that his
Jewish colleague is benighted and lacks intellectual integrity. However one
describes Blackburn’s thought about the situation, one must understand his
philosophical conviction about the integrity—intellectual as well as moral—
that is at stake in that situation. Blackburn offers a clue about his idea of the
71
72 Chapter 4
proper way to explore these issues; he brings into his reflections about the
situation W.K. Clifford’s famous essay “The Ethics of Belief.” 1
In order to get at these issues of integrity, I consider both Clifford and
James’s classical contributions to the ethics of belief, arguing that both of
their efforts awkwardly straddle two worlds: one is the Enlightenment world
that seeks clear and fixed antecedent standards for behavior and belief; the
other is the post-Enlightenment world most vigorously represented philo-
sophically in the American tradition of pragmatism. These different worlds, I
suggest, motivate each of these thinkers toward different results about what
belief is and about how one responsibly confronts problems about differences
of belief. Blackburn’s conclusions about his Jewish colleague are motivated
too strongly by the Enlightenment component of these two ways to think
about belief and intellectual responsibility; the pragmatist component of Clif-
ford and James’s thought about belief is unfortunately subservient, in Black-
burn’s thought, to the Enlightenment component.
THE ETHICS OF BELIEF
William James’s 1896 essay, “The Will to Believe,” appears to have been
written as a direct response to Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief.” James knew
that Clifford got something badly wrong in his commitment to “evidentialist
purity,” but he too readily accommodated Clifford’s demand for normative
rigidity about standards for belief. And because of James’s straddling of
these two worlds—the world of the Enlightenment commitment to reason
and the world of his own pragmatism—his thought about the ethics of belief
is infected by his own ambivalence about “the nature of” belief. Begin with
Clifford’s stringent claim about standards for believing anything—“It is
wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insuf-
ficient evidence”—and James’s opposition to that claim.
James introduces the “Genuine Option” as a way of limiting the scope of
the absolutism in Clifford’s famous sentence. However, in his use of the
genuine option, James acquiesces too readily in Clifford’s demand for purity.
The genuine option in James’s account is at best a minor modification of the
demand that all belief be subject to absolute standards of evidence; only
when one has a genuine option, James insists, may one take proper exception
to Clifford’s demand for evidentialist rigor. In what are “normal” circum-
stances, James accepts Clifford’s demand as uncontroversial. When one can-
not decide on evidential grounds and yet faces a genuine option—i.e., one is
forced to choose about something one cares deeply about that will make a
momentous difference in one’s life—then one is permitted to believe as one
prefers; one does not in such circumstances, James says, violate epistemic
Intellectual Integrity 73
responsibilities, even as those responsibilities are expressed with such rhetor-

ical vigor by Clifford. 2
What is problematic in his response to Clifford is James’s concession of
the evidentialist requirement on matters of belief not involving a genuine
option. Central to this problematic response is the idea that belief is an object
of cognition or of cognitive intent; only as it is an object of some sort does
belief become evidentially difficult—and difficult so as to give impetus to
Clifford’s evidentialist absolutism. This concession to Clifford’s assumption
about belief, however, James should not make. And given James’s own
account of belief in his 1890 Principles of Psychology, James should have
been more circumspect about appearing to grant this concession. Here is part
of what James says about belief in that earlier work:
What characterizes both consent and belief is the cessation of theoretic

agitation, through the advent of an idea which is inwardly stable, and fills the
mind solidly to the exclusion of contradictory ideas. When this is the case,
motor effects are apt to follow. Hence the states of consent and belief, charac-
terized by repose on the purely intellectual side, are both intimately connected
with subsequent practical activity. This inward stability of the mind's content
is as characteristic of disbelief as of belief. But we shall presently see that we
never disbelieve anything except for the reason that we believe something else
which contradicts the first thing. Disbelief is thus an incidental complication to
belief, and need not be considered by itself.
The true opposites of belief , psychologically considered, are doubt and in-
quiry, not disbelief. In both these states the content of our mind is in unrest,
and the emotion engendered thereby is, like the emotion of belief itself, per-
fectly distinct, but perfectly indescribable in words. 3
In this passage, James fully respects belief as a psychological phenomenon,

and his doing so undermines the idea of belief as a “mental pointer” toward
an object, a pointer that must be regimented by evidence so that it properly
“hits” its target object. James’s account of belief in this portion of Principles
of Psychology stresses the empirical, psychological facts about belief, and his
account largely accommodates the classical pragmatist understanding of be-
lief that Charles Sanders Peirce expresses in his 1878 essay, “How to Make
Our Ideas Clear.” 4
BELIEF PRAGMATIST STYLE
In Peirce’s account of belief, belief is a habit of action. Understood as a habit

of action, and including all the other ideas that go with the idea of habit—
disposition, tendency and inclination, as well as others—belief becomes
thoroughly amenable to scientific and genealogical account; it moves human
intellectual faculties fully into the world of science; and it becomes thereby a
74 Chapter 4
part of the distinctiveness that accompanies each individual’s way of being in

the world. Each belief is thoroughly an expression of individual uniqueness;
each belief of any individual is psychologically different from the belief of
any other individual.
As expressions of individuality, beliefs are as idiomatic as are other ex-
pressions of individuality. Many people believe that God exists, and they do
so in idiomatic ways that mark the distinctiveness in their personal ways of
believing. Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman held their theistic beliefs differ-
ently from the way Jonathan Edwards, Henry James, Sr. or Roger Williams
held such beliefs; and Peter Gomes held his theistic belief differently from
the way Pope John Paul II held his theistic belief. About no two people may
one properly say that their theistic beliefs are identical—no more than one
might say about any two people that their fears, hopes or loves are identical.
To say about a large group of people—members, for example, of the Society
of Christian Philosophers—that they believe God exists is a shorthand way
of pointing toward what they roughly and vaguely have in common as a
matter of habit and practice and which they seek to reinforce in order to
enable greater closeness of community, although individually members of
that Society surely differ in the particular “content” of their theistic beliefs.
The individuality of beliefs in Peirce’s account means that beliefs are as
individual in their “content” as are individuals in their differing historical,
environmental, cultural, social, familial contexts—and also in all the ways
one might differently understand these various contexts. This surfeit of indi-
viduality in the idea of belief, given Peirce’s account of it, means that there
are no objects of belief that one might isolate and subject to epistemic scruti-
ny of the sort philosophers have typically required.
That beliefs become in this Peircean account a full expression of particu-
lar individuality should be no more surprising than are individuals’ idiomatic
ways of moving—some are endowed and trained to be dancers, some to be
runners, some to be swimmers, and so on—of making their livings—some
are farmers, some are fishermen, some are business people, some are artists,
and so on—of seeking entertainment, of relaxing, or eating and so on for all
the ways humans differently expresses themselves in response to their genet-
ic constitutions, their cultures and their histories.
Each of these ways humans differently engage their worlds is an expres-
sion of individuality, and the beliefs individuals hold are no less expressions
of their individuality. We obscure these idiomatic parts of our intellectual
endowment and development by our philosophical doctrine that there are
unique, ontological objects to which each human is related by its beliefs,
which objects are artificially supposed to be identical for each human expres-
sion, verbalization or affirmation of belief. The belief that God exists is not
an object to which all who hold that belief are related by their believing; that
belief is rather a vague, explanatory generalization that applies in qualitative-
ly different ways to all who hold “that belief.” Our customary ways of speak-
ing obscure from us these scientific facts about the individuality and commo-
nality that both separate and unite humanity.
Peirce’s account of belief brings us face to face with these facts about the
individuality of our intellectual characters. And William James, in Principles
of Psychology, shares Peirce’s scientific and psychologically appropriate
understanding of the human activity of believing. This sharing in Peirce’s
scientifically sensitive understanding of belief is James’s way of being fully
invested in the post-Enlightenment world his life and work are efforts to
enable. In the 1896 essay, his response to Clifford’s epistemologically funda-
mentalist account of the ethics of belief, James himself—and perhaps be-
cause of his fierce opposition to Clifford’s fundamentalism—falls back into
the world of Enlightenment philosophy. James there grants and seems even
to embrace Clifford’s Enlightenment thought about belief and evidence and
seeks to make religion an exception to that Enlightenment ideology. James’s
“backsliding” is not to be wondered at or condemned, however, because
James himself is continuing his struggles toward the pragmatist he is more
consistently to become in later works, including The Varieties of Religious
Experience, Pragmatism and A Pluralistic Universe. James himself is engag-
ing, as do all humans, toward becoming the mature self of his later years—in
his particular case, toward becoming the pragmatist who is more fully
present in those later works.
Misunderestimating Peirce and James
Philosophical misunderstandings of their account of belief dogs both Peirce

and James. Typical of these misunderstandings is the view that they are
proposing a dispositional analysis of the nature of belief. I quote (again) from
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, this time from Eric Schwitzgebel’s
essay “Belief:”
Traditional dispositional views of belief assert that for someone to believe

some proposition P is for that person to possess one or more particular behav-
ioral dispositions pertaining to P. Often cited is the disposition to assent to
utterances of P in the right sorts of circumstances (if one understands the
language, wishes to reveal one's true opinion, is not physically incapacitated,
etc.). Other relevant dispositions might include the disposition to exhibit sur-
prise should the falsity of P make itself evident, the disposition to assent to Q
if one is shown that P implies Q, and the disposition to depend on P's truth in
executing one's plans. Perhaps all such dispositions can be brought under a
single heading, which is, most generally, being disposed to act as though P is
the case. Such actions are normally taken to be at least pretty good prima facie
evidence of belief in P; the question is whether being disposed, over all, so to
act is tantamount to believing P, as the dispositionalist thinks, or whether it is
merely an outward sign of belief. 5
76 Chapter 4
To think that James or Peirce is proposing a dispositional analysis of belief

is, using George Bush’s malapropism, to misunderestimate them; as Schwitz-
gebel put it in reference to someone’s believing P, “the question is whether
being disposed, over all, so to act is tantamount to believing P.” Schwitzge-
bel’s concern is whether or not one might hope successfully to analyze the
concept of belief by reference to dispositions, tendencies or inclinations to do
things.
The answer to Schwitzgebel’s question is, of course, NO! And this result
follows easily from the earlier discussion pointing to the idiomatic character
of each individual belief, for example, the belief that God exists. The ques-
tion for Peirce—and for James as well—is not about the nature of belief, that
Enlightenment style philosophical question; the question for them is rather
the question of, as Dewey put it in the previous chapter with reference to the
nature of knowledge, what belief exists as in the human world. Just as Dewey
protested the “philosophical lockjaw” that is pervasive in the Enlightenment
style philosophical world, so Peirce and James in their pragmatist moods
protest that same philosophical lockjaw represented by an insistence on see-
ing analyses of concepts in all utterances about any philosophically interest-
ing idea. Peirce and James share in Dewey’s protest. Thinking of beliefs as
habits of action is not adopting any dispositional analysis of belief; it is rather
acknowledging what belief exists as in the post-Darwinian world of philoso-
phy. 6
Secondary accounts of James’s understanding of belief usually do not
press him into this Peircean mold; still, most of those accounts see his under-
standing of belief as psychologically astute in the way I have insisted is
required by that Peircean mold. As does Peirce’s account, implicitly if not
quite so explicitly as I have elaborated it, James’s account resists imposition
of any philosophical analysis of the nature of belief. But beyond this question
of the philosophical analysis of belief, James resists accommodation to any
unitary perspective about belief. James’s mature pragmatism is fully sympa-
thetic with the scientific account of belief rooted in Peirce’s remarks about
belief. 7
CLIFFORD’S AMBIVALENCE
Clifford’s 1877 “The Ethics of Belief” is the bête noir of all philosopher
theists, and is so precisely because of its anti-theistic fundamentalism; it
provokes a response “in kind,” one frequently rooted in James’s 1896 essay.
The opposition of these philosophical perspectives usually ignores develop-
mental aspects of both James and Clifford that throw light on their opposi-
tion. 8 Here I point to dimensions of Clifford’s essay that conflict with the
Enlightenment style fundamentalism philosophers usually respond to either
positively or negatively; these dimensions of Clifford’s essay are almost

respectful of the understanding of belief rooted in Peirce and in James’s
mature pragmatism. Although Clifford was unlikely to have turned pragma-
tist in the mature later years he was denied, still the general attitude toward
science that remains implicit in his essay is one that might overlap the prag-
matist attitude toward science that is apparent in James’s 1890 Principles of
Psychology and comes more fully to fruition in James’s later works. Clifford
too is at least implicitly aware of the limitations of Enlightenment science
and philosophy.
Clifford’s implicit awareness of the limitations—call them “pragmatic” or
“practice” or “real world” limitations—of his demand for absolute evidential
rigor about belief become evident throughout his famous essay. Consider this
paragraph:
This sense of power [that is attached to a sense of knowledge] is the highest

and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief,
and has been fairly earned by investigation. For then we may justly feel that it
is common property, and holds good for others as well as for ourselves. Then
we may be glad, not that I have learned secrets by which I am safer and
stronger, but that we men have got mastery over more of the world; and we
shall be strong, not for ourselves but in the name of Man and his strength. But
if the belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence, the pleasure is a stolen
one. Not only does it deceive ourselves by giving us a sense of power which
we do not really possess, but it is sinful, because it is stolen in defiance of our
duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a
pestilence, which may shortly master our own body and then spread to the rest
of the town. What would be thought of one who, for the sake of a sweet fruit,
should deliberately run the risk of delivering a plague upon his family and his
neighbours? 9
This paragraph, as do many in Clifford’s essay, tacks between the Enlighten-

ment-style absolutism James finds objectionable and the understanding of
belief as habit of action expressed in pragmatism.
Belief must be “fairly earned;” it must not be “stolen” or “sinful;” and it
must yield health rather than “a plague” for one’s “family and . . . neigh-
bors.” Any belief fairly earned results from doubt overcome by inquiry, an
understanding completely coherent with the pragmatist idea of belief as habit
of action. Doubt interferes with action; it undermines one’s confidence about
what to do or how to be; and only inquiry—fair inquiry—enables a return of
confidence. One may, of course, do or be without confidence (or under
pressure of circumstance), and if one does so one evinces a lack of integrity
(unless one behaves under pressure of circumstance). Inquiry according to
the best standards of one’s community and one’s own creativity is, as Clif-
ford sees, fundamental to one’s own integrity and to the integrity of one’s
community. The idea that who one is and what kind of community one has is
78 Chapter 4
critically at stake in everything one does and believes is central to James and
Dewey’s understanding of morality, and this same idea is a strong “subtext”
of Clifford’s entire essay.
And Clifford’s very next paragraph emphasizes this same “pragmatist”
strand of his thought. Quality of individual character and quality of commu-
nity character are central to his concern in the essay. Credulity is a character
defect, an evidence of lack of integrity; it expresses the wrong kind of habit,
the sort of habit that brings ruin not only to the individual who has it, but also
to the community that nurtures and harbors that individual. There is no—or
perhaps little or perhaps the wrong kind of—integrity in such individuals or
communities.
One might read Clifford’s concern with character and community as
nothing more than his way of emphasizing the importance of his fundamen-
talism about belief or—in slightly gentler rhetoric—his evidentialist absolut-
ism. To read Clifford in this way is surely to beg the most important question
about his concerns in this essay. The important question is whether there are
post-Enlightenment dimensions of his thought that find expression in the
essay. Is Clifford a fundamentalist, anti-religious zealot or is he genuinely
concerned with integrity of character and community? To suppose there are
no dimensions of the latter sort to his thought—by reading him as exclusive-
ly a rigid evidentialist in the customary absolutist mold—is to beg the most
important question about Clifford’s own intellectual character. His essay
does appear, after all, almost twenty years after Darwin’s Origin of Species,
signaling that Clifford moved in intellectual venues that were quickly becom-
ing post-Enlightenment, venues moving toward philosophies for which hu-
mans are fully a part of their ecological, historical and cultural worlds. For
those intellectual venues, Enlightenment absolutism was quickly becoming
passé as pragmatist-style, practice-oriented and nature-centered philosophies
were moving to the fore.
Clifford and James both moved through the intersection of these two
intellectual worlds. James’s good fortune—and ours—was that his life and
work became as fully post-Enlightenment and as fully Darwinian and prag-
matist as one might hope. His foundational work in psychology buttressed
James’s philosophical transcendence of the Enlightenment. Clifford too, had
he been given more than his brief thirty-four years, might have moved more
fully along the post-Enlightenment path Peirce and James were pioneering.
But such psychological, historical speculation is beyond the scope of this
inquiry. Not beyond this inquiry, however, are the philosophical effects on
many contemporary intellectuals of the Enlightenment fundamentalism evi-
dent in Clifford’s much-cited essay. There remain Enlightenment-style abso-
lutists who do not share Clifford’s ambivalence about his evidentialist funda-
mentalism. Consider again Simon Blackburn’s dinner party.
BLACKBURN’S DINNER PARTY AGAIN
Here again are Blackburn’s comments about the dinner:
them, and in a liberal society we do not seek to suppress them or silence them.
But once we are convinced that a belief is false, or even just that it is irrational,
we cannot respect in any thicker sense those who hold it—not on account of
their holding it. We may respect them for all sorts of other qualities, but not
that one. We would prefer them to change their minds. 10
In Blackburn’s philosophical world, beliefs are items, objects, that are true or
false; they are supported by adequate evidence or not; one has fundamental
intellectual responsibilities to refrain from believing what is false or more
generally from believing anything inadequately supported by available evi-
dence; and one is intellectually virtuous or vicious, has or lacks integrity
depending on whether one meets one’s intellectual responsibilities.
The terms I have italicized in the previous paragraph suggest “places”
where lurk “philosophical pivots;” they are terms that divide incommensur-
able philosophical perspectives. In the previous chapter, for example, the
ideas of knowledge and truth point to the different philosophical worlds
inhabited by Boghossian and Dewey—and Rorty and Putnam for that matter.
In a similar way, the ideas of belief, truth, falsity, adequate evidence, intel-
lectual responsibility and integrity are, for Blackburn, direct descendents of
Clifford’s Enlightenment, evidentialist absolutism; his ideas of those things
are fundamentally different from the ideas of those things found in pragma-
tist thinkers.
Blackburn “knows” or “believes” that the traditions underlying his Jewish
colleague’s dinner ceremonies are irrational and are rooted in obvious false-
hoods that should be obvious even to minimally sophisticated intellectuals in
the contemporary world. Blackburn’s discomfort in the situation is motivated
by his knowledge of the colleague’s irrational belief; by his concern to be-
have with integrity in virtue of his own knowledge of the colleague’s irra-
tional belief; and by the adverse larger consequences that might follow from
his unprincipled acquiescence in cognitively benighted practices. So Black-
burn decides not to participate in the ceremony and endures a strained eve-
ning of principled refusal. And he no longer respects the Jewish colleague
with whom he dines. Blackburn chooses to “pass by on the other side.”
Suppose, counterfactually, that Blackburn had a pragmatist understanding
of belief; and suppose, also counterfactually, that he had a pragmatist under-
standing of those other ideas I referred to as “philosophical pivots.” The
pragmatist understanding of all those ideas would yield a very different situa-
tion at Blackburn’s dinner party. Focus now on the idea of belief. The En-
80 Chapter 4
lightenment understanding of belief, still current among contemporary and

analytic philosophers, sees it as a unique psychological state of affirmation
(or denial) that is more or less adequately evidenced, is true or false, and
which relates one to its intended object, a proposition. The pragmatist under-
standing of belief sees beliefs as habits of action, or more subtly as inclina-
tions, tendencies or dispositions toward behaviors of various kinds.
A preliminary to considering this counterfactual supposition about Black-
burn is noticing that a pragmatist understanding of belief sees no qualitative
distinction between moral responsibility and intellectual responsibility; these
“two” dimensions of one’s responsibility unite in one’s character, in one’s
habits, tendencies, dispositions and inclinations to do things. Individuals
must have integrity; and having integrity is partly bringing coherence or
cohesiveness to one’s character. No unique moral laws or characteristics take
as their special province one’s behavior; likewise, no unique principles of
evidence or epistemic characteristics take as their special province one’s
beliefs. Integrity of character is not following laws or principles either moral
or intellectual; it is having or aiming at having coherence or cohesiveness
among one’s habits, dispositions, tendencies and inclinations. I return to this
preliminary remark in greater detail in the next chapter on personal integrity.
For now, attend to another remark by Blackburn quoted earlier:
Far from being a sign of sincerity, passionate conviction in these shadowy

regions is a sign of weakness, of a secretly known infirmity of representational
confidence. If we sympathize with the doughty Victorian W.K. Clifford, we
will see it as a sign of something worse: a dereliction of cognitive duty, or a
crime against the ethics of belief, and hence, eventually, a crime against hu-
manity. 11
Blackburn believes that his Jewish colleague exhibits “a sign of weak-

ness, . . . a secretly known infirmity of representational confidence.” This
remark is Blackburn’s way of saying again that his colleague is cognitively
irresponsible, that he lacks “representational confidence” and is thus lacking
intellectual integrity. The idea of representational confidence is an idea that
could emerge only from an Enlightenment-derived understanding of belief,
for according to that understanding beliefs represent realities, propositions
that exist and are true or false. Representational failure is the failure of the
belief to represent the reality. And the confidence of which Blackburn speaks
is a function of the quality and quantity of evidence one has that one’s belief
in fact accords with the reality it intends. Preliminaries now aside, suppose
Blackburn were a pragmatist.
SIMON BLACKBURN AS PRAGMATIST
The hypothetical, pragmatist Blackburn sees that humans are clever, sophisti-
cated mammals; he too inhabits the post-Enlightenment world in which rea-
son and philosophy are not ultimate arbiters of proper belief or action. In the
pragmatist world, beliefs are habits, dispositions, tendencies and inclinations,
and they are as much a function of our biology and our cultures as are any
other human phenomena. Like all animals humans have genetic characters
that enable them in their ecological settings and become realized in different
ways in different environments.
Just as all human phenomena are available for scientific exploration and
explanation—modes of feeding, sheltering, warming, cooling and propagat-
ing, along with all the developments of arts and crafts that accompany these
modes of interacting with an environment—so too are beliefs. All human
phenomena, including intellectual phenomena, are susceptible to scientific
account; all are susceptible to explanatory strategies that enable an under-
standing of the humanity of which we are part. Why does anyone believe in
God? Why do people in different places and times believe in different gods?
Why do some people believe eating horses or dogs is immoral or disgusting?
Why do some people develop a fondness for reptiles or insects—either for
having them as pets or for ingesting them? Why are some people republicans
rather than democrats, or are alcoholics or gamblers or sociopaths, or . . . The
list of similar questions that may be asked about humanity is endless, and the
items to appear on that list depend on human interests. And pragmatists see
that list to include every single belief that any human has: Why does some
particular human hold some particular belief?
The question whether any particular human should hold any particular
belief might be answered in many ways. But the fundamental human cogni-
tive responsibility about beliefs is to understand their source and their useful-
ness—their productivity for the particular human or humans who hold them.
This particular responsibility about belief results from differences among
humans about their beliefs, and the understanding that comes from satisfying
that responsibility is a scientific understanding. Scientific understanding with
respect to anything, including belief, is important because it enables us with
respect to that thing; it helps us to handle the thing, to behave more produc-
tively with respect to it, perhaps even to change it so that it better accommo-
dates our needs, hopes and ideals. (Notice parenthetically that this way of
thinking about science is an inclusive way of thinking about science as in-
quiry; science becomes all of those intellectual strategies that enable us with
respect to something we care about—any mode of inquiry that helps us
handle something better than we might otherwise handle it.)
Beliefs come from somewhere. Finding out where beliefs come from is the
scientific, explanatory and genealogical task that pragmatist thought about
82 Chapter 4
belief brings to the fore of concern about it. The normative concerns about
belief that are dominant in philosophical conversation recede into the back-
ground and become a function of the entire context of human life and action
as well as of the desires, hopes and dreams that motivate individuals and
communities. 12 How might this way of thinking about belief alter Black-
burn’s concerns about his Jewish colleague? How might it alter Blackburn’s
concern for his colleague’s “infirmity of representational confidence?” How
might it alter Blackburn’s perception of his own intellectual integrity? And
how might it alter the awkwardness of the evening Blackburn had to endure
in the presence of his benighted colleague? The answers to these questions
are straightforward. And they suggest results different from those that result
from Blackburn’s Enlightenment-informed understanding of belief.
A pragmatist Blackburn will not be put off by his Jewish colleague’s
failure of Clifford-style evidentialist rigor; that sort of absolutism fades into
the Enlightenment context that is the historical foundation of current science
and philosophy. The dissension or discomfort or anxiety produced by the
Jewish colleague’s invitation to participate in a simple religious ceremony
becomes an occasion for curiosity, for inquiry into the practices and tradi-
tions that are foundations for the simple religious ceremony; they do not
become occasion for asserting an opposing ideology. Blackburn’s Jewish
colleague is formed by traditions and practices different from those tradi-
tions, presumably Anglican, in Blackburn’s own past and from which he has
presumably, and for ideological reasons, separated. Rather than seeing the
invitation as occasion for principled response, a pragmatist Blackburn sees
the invitation as an occasion for inquiry. The different practices of separate
traditions, along with the entire context of expectations integral to them,
needs inquiry and explanation. The integrity at stake in the situation is not a
function of the responsibility to behave in accord with what one knows to be
true or knows to be irrational by standards of evidence that are universal and
absolute—although how they might be so is palpably unspecifiable; the in-
tegrity at stake is rather a function of the need, unacknowledged by Black-
burn, to understand difference. Also at stake in the integrity a pragmatist
Blackburn aims at is the possibility of community beyond difference, com-
munity that does not discriminate against others because they have different
communities or traditions.
This pragmatist understanding of integrity and its inquiry-oriented way of
dealing with difference among communities and traditions is a strong back-
ground theme of Rebecca Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of
God. Goldstein brings focus, in a different and more fully existential way, to
the same issue Blackburn faced at his dinner party, and she responds to the
issue differently and more appropriately. The relationship between Cass
Selzer and Azarya in Goldstein’s novel is a relationship strikingly similar to
that between Blackburn and his Jewish colleague. In Goldstein’s account,
however, the relationship between Cass and Azarya is heavy with an existen-
tial significance missing from Blackburn’s relationship with his Jewish col-
league. In the context of what is at stake in the relationship between Cass and
Azarya, Blackburn’s ideological difference with his Jewish colleague looks
trivial, as does Blackburn’s principled response. 13
A pragmatist Blackburn’s integrity makes different demands on him in
the dinner situation. The difference between him and his colleague needs not
principled resistance or decision on his part, but rather inquiry to understand
it. For a pragmatist, anybody’s beliefs, including the Jewish colleague’s, are
habits, tendencies and dispositions, and as such they emerge from a complex
background of practices and traditions that shape individual identity. Beliefs
are not isolated parts of one’s intellectual character; they are fully part of
one’s individuality, of one’s way of being in the world, of who one is. To
think of beliefs as legitimate or not, or as subject to principles of evidence
that must be obeyed or not, or as subject to reason—reine vernunft in Gold-
stein’s Kantian reference—is to rob beliefs of their role in human lives. Our
beliefs are part and parcel of who we are as the particular individuals we are
and are to become. Difference of belief needs inquiry. No “principles of
evidence” require respect in order to avoid “cognitive damnation” or failure
of integrity.
In short, a pragmatist understanding of beliefs sees them not as objects we
must find ways evidentially to make contact with, but rather as parts of who
we are as the individuals we are and are to become. And the existential
dimension of this pragmatist way of thinking about belief is that beliefs are
as malleable—and as little so—as are any other dimensions of our individu-
ality. Just as one individual might come to maturity in New Orleans and
become a talented jazz musician, thinking of jazz as the ultimate expression
of musical skill, so one might come to maturity in a fundamentalist Jewish,
Christian or Mormon community thinking of their own particular expression
of religious belief as the ultimate expression of religious sensibility. And
likewise, just as a talented jazz musician might mature into an unlikely opera
lover, so a religious fundamentalist might mature into an unlikely atheist.
Such a maturing process is part and parcel of a pragmatist understanding of
beliefs and desires; beliefs and desires are existential realities not subject to
reine vernuft (again in Goldstein’s Kantian idiom). Who one is is a function
not only of one’s traditions and communities but also of one’s modes of
engaging the world, of one’s creativity or lack thereof, and of one’s native
constitution in all the subtle ways that constitution finds concrete expression
in one’s life.
A pragmatist Blackburn takes no offence at difference of belief. A prag-
matist Blackburn finds difference of belief an occasion for seeking under-
standing. The integrity in a pragmatist understanding of belief is partly see-
ing individuals as wholes, as characters having developed to their present
84 Chapter 4
state and in process of developing toward a hoped for better state. The devel-
opment in question for any individual must respect tradition and the commu-
nities that sustain tradition, and it must also move creatively into a future that
is in process in everything that individual does. Pragmatism’s existentialist
dimension is aggressive; it brings everything—including human reason—
fully into the human world. And where beliefs are concerned, representation-
al accuracy is not part of that developmental process —or is only trivially a
part of it (e.g., How old am I? Where was I born? Who is the current
President?).
The Enlightenment Blackburn, the one who takes offense at religious
ignorance against which he must take a principled stand, is different from the
pragmatist Blackburn whose integrity requires his understanding of religious
difference as well as his effort to overcome it.
What should a pragmatist Blackburn do in response to the invitation to
participate in a simple religious ceremony at a dinner hosted by his Jewish
colleague? His colleague, his colleague’s character, his colleague’s traditions
and his own understanding of those things are more important to him than
intellectual purity. The pragmatist Blackburn seeks understanding; he seeks
also coherence of human community with his colleague.
Concluding remarks: Intellectual integrity is of a piece with character
generally. For pragmatists, no special rules of evidence or rational principles
govern or ought to govern activities of believing. In so far as epistemology
sees believing as an activity that should be controlled by absolute normative
constraints—in the way a Kantian or a utilitarian thinks actions should be
controlled by absolute normative constraints—it (1) misunderstands what
belief exists as and (2) anachronistically imports the intellectual culture of
the Enlightenment into a contemporary world definitively shaped by differ-
ent intellectual cultures. Furthermore, since intellectual integrity is of a piece
with character generally, it falls into place as a dimension of personal integ-
rity. What is personal integrity?
NOTES
1. This 1877 essay is widely reproduced. See for example W. K. Clifford, The Ethics of
Belief and Other Essays (New York: Prometheus Books, 2010).
2. Roderick Chisholm captures the substance of James’s objection to Clifford in his effort
to formulate principles of evidence that respect the two different normative motivations that
motivate James, avoiding believing what is false and believing what is true. Chisholm sees that
no single principle—like Clifford’s oft-quoted sentence cited above—can capture the different
needs captured by James’s effort to legitimate belief in the absence of absolutely compelling
evidence. See Roderick Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1966), 56–69. I note that just as Clifford and James do not properly respect the pragmatist
strand of their own work, Chisholm too fails in the same respect. (But this is a complicated
issue, since Chisholm I think would be reluctant to acknowledge the “pragmatic” dimension of
his own epistemology.)
3. William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume III, vol. 10 of The Works of
William James, edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 914–915.
4. Charles Sanders Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in Pragmatism: The Classic
Writings, ed. H. S. Thayer (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), 79–100.
5. Eric Schwitzgebel, "Belief,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (November 21,
2010), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/belief/ (ac-
cessed on September 27, 2014).
6. Belief in this post-Darwinian world is highly complex, complex in ways that make
inappropriate or “ham-fisted” to raise conventional philosophical questions about it. David
Brooks, for example, mentions a few ways researchers in psychology are supplying evidence of
the complexity of belief. Beliefs about all kinds of things are, research indicates, affected by
many parts of human life normally thought irrelevant to legitimate belief, and certainly irrele-
vant to justified belief. Our moral judgments, for example, and many that we would be chal-
lenged to justify evidentially are sometimes decisively affected by what we have just eaten and
whether it is bitter or sweet. See David Brooks, "Social Science Palooza II," New York Times,
March 17, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/opinion/18brooks.html?nl=
todaysheadlines&emc= tha212 (accessed September 20, 2014).
7. For some important secondary discussions of James’s understanding of belief, see the
following sources: Richard Gale, The Divided Self of William James (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 62–71; Wesley Cooper, The Unity of William James's Thought (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 195–203; Gerald Myers, William James: His Life
and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 277–281.
8. A clear and useful exception to this claim is the essay by David Hollinger, "James,
Clifford, and the Scientific Conscience," in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed.
Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 69–83.
9. William K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” Lectures and Essays, ed. Leslie Stephen
and Frederick Pollock (London: MacMillan, 1886), quoted in William K. Clifford, “The Ethics
of Belief,” 5, https://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/Clifford_ethics.pdf.
10. Blackburn, “Religion and Respect,” in Antony, Louise M. (Ed), Philosophers without
Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),
180.
11. Blackburn, 180.
12. This way of thinking about the ethics of belief is a realistic, post-Darwin, and fully
human way of thinking about it; it accords fully with ways of thinking about normativity that
are generally present in pragmatists—especially James and Dewey—and their fellow travelers,
including Thomas Kuhn. In many other contemporary intellectuals, this way of thinking about
the ethics of belief is anathema; one example is Edward Wilson who, in Consilience, bemoans
the passing of logical positivism along with its Enlightenment ideology of science. See Edward
Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1999).
13. Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (New York: Vintage, 2010).
See especially 355–366 for explicit account of the kind of resolution coherent with a pragmatist
understanding of integrity. (I should probably say more specifically how Goldstein’s characters
and situation bring focus to the same issue Blackburn addresses, but I despair of doing so
without diverting attention from the context that motivates my discussion here.) I do recom-
mend the book highly.
Chapter Five
Personal Integrity
FOCUS, NOT PRECISION
Integrity is an unsatisfying idea if one is accustomed to having or seeking

precision. The discussion of integrity in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Phi-
losophy, mentioned earlier, makes this point, as does the book on integrity by
the authors of that essay. 1
The idea of integrity, however, seen from the perspective of pragmatism,
needs precision less than it needs focus. A working theory of morals, a way
of thinking about morality that sees it as fully part of the human world, needs
ways of thinking about integrity that give it the pivotal presence in human
life ordinarily attached to it. Some relevant focal points for the idea are
personal and psychological, and some are social and environmental or eco-
logical. Another focal point is physical and scientific and is subject matter for
the last chapter.
To bring focal clarity to the idea of integrity rather than the precision of
analysis philosophers habitually seek is a way, as Dewey expresses it, of
“recovering philosophy.” (Again, remember the effort put into grasping the
nature, the essence or the conceptual content of integrity on the part of
Damien Cox and his Australian colleagues mentioned in chapter 2 above.)
Pragmatists, following Dewey, seek a mode of intellectual practice that does
not depend on the anachronistic goals of that Platonist tradition.
To recur to the account of it that appears in chapter 2, integrity is reflec-
tive living as that idea is elaborated in Dewey’s 1932 Ethics. 2 In sum, and as
I elaborate it in Pragmatism and the Reflective Life, integrity involves three
things: one’s own autonomy or independence of judgment; one’s commit-
ment to the values and traditions of the communities that have contributed to
one’s formation; and finally one’s commitment to realizing one’s own idio-
87
88 Chapter 5
matic ideals and also to sustaining the ideals of one’s formative communities.
Integrity or reflective living has no moral content of its own; its moral con-
tent varies with social and ecological context. The concern about relativism
this fact raises for most philosophers is inappropriate; chapter 3 should alle-
viate any philosophical concerns about relativism that might be engendered
by this dimension of the idea of integrity.
Personal integrity is an idea that may be illuminated by finding instructive
foci for its realization in individual lives. And illuminating the idea of per-
sonal integrity also legitimates the most characteristic activities of moral
living, including making comparative judgments about the worth of different
kinds of life, or judgments about the success or failure of lives in different
cultural or environmental contexts, and also judgments about successes or
failures in one’s own life.
The idea of integrity enables comparative judgments about lives of all
kinds in many different cultures and contexts. Such comparative judgments
are the heart of moral living and thinking. Life as a Yanamamo warrior might
be more or less successful in its Amazon ecological context; life as a nomad-
ic tribesman in Central Asia or in Africa might again be more or less success-
ful in its context; life as an American slave might be more or less successful
in its context; and life as a Jew during the 1940s in Nazi Germany might
again be more or less successful in its context, as might be the life of a Nazi
soldier on the Eastern front in 1943. Personal integrity is available not just to
these individuals, but also to individuals in any environmental or cultural
context.
Genetic consistency yields in every environment humans having sophisti-
cated capacities both intellectual and social. 3 And the individuals who have
those sophisticated capacities come into families and communities of value
and possibility that await them expectantly; they are hope for those commu-
nities’ sustenance and their ability to meet challenges of the future. Any
community’s future is its children.
Communities need their children and invest in them all the care that might
enable those children to realize as bounteous a future as possible. Any Yano-
mamo warrior or nomadic tribesman might turn out to be a key to his com-
munity’s survival and prosperity, or might equally turn out to be a “deficit
item” who does not augment possibilities for survival or prosperity. The
same is true of any child, male or female, born into any community. Nobody
in any community can reliably predict just how any particular child might
contribute good or ill given the community’s traditions, goals and hopes.
For any individual in any community, biology is and is not destiny. Each
individual has unique genetic predispositions, capacities and abilities, some
realized and some not. Thomas Gray captures this poignant and personal
truth in his “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard:”
Personal Integrity 89
Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air. 4
Some contexts, some environments, enable and some disable native disposi-
tions, capacities or talents. Native individuality needs favorable community
and environmental conditions in order to realize its fullest possibilities.
These simple facts about developmental possibility hold for all individuals in
all environments and communities. These simple facts are biologically and
culturally universal, and they hold in the most sophisticated as well as the
most primitive environments, from the “heights” of European culture to the
“depths” of African or Amazonian tribal culture. (Joseph Conrad’s classic
The Heart of Darkness captures these simple biological universals, as does
also Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of an American Slave.) Any
individual in any community or environment might achieve success or fail-
ure, might grow in skill or wisdom or might instead stagnate.
Personal integrity requires growth, fulfillment of possibility. And given
fortunate conditions of family, community and environment, personal integ-
rity includes success. (The lines from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy” quoted above
are worth bearing in mind, however, for they resonate a basic truth.) Some
examples:
In the European world, examples are plentiful. W.A. Mozart, John Keats
and Kurt Godel are examples of uniquely gifted individuals who benefited
significantly from their communities and environments. Each of those indi-
viduals struggled in one way or another to realize a native gift, and each
found significant success in the cultural world of the West. Keats’s brief life,
for example, he dedicated to poetry, though he did not receive significant
recognition for his achievement during his lifetime; still, he chose to follow
poetry rather than the medicine he excelled at, and did so in spite of his
family’s expectation that he pursue the more conventional practice of medi-
cine. Keats achieved growth and success through his personal struggles, and
his brief life yielded a bounty of poetic beauty for successive generations.
And similar things are true of the works of Mozart and Gödel and many
others as well who have contributed to the Western intellectual and artistic
canon. But these examples are conventionally Western, as were the commu-
nities in which these individuals came to maturity. Other individuals in West-
ern culture do not conform so readily to easy judgments of success or failure.
(Again, remember Gray’s “Elegy.”) Consider an unlikely candidate.
Dexter is the lead character in a long-running American television series
of the same name. Dexter has an anti-social personality disorder; he loves
killing people. In fact Dexter is obsessed with killing people, and he lacks
emotional capacities of normal humans. Dexter was adopted while still a
small child by a middle-class couple, and his adopting father was a police
90 Chapter 5
official who noticed Dexter’s frequent killing of neighborhood pets. The

father initiated Dexter into a world of “permissible” and “responsible” killing
of human criminals and showed him how to be successful in managing his
anti-social personality disorder. Dexter ended up as a “blood-spatter special-
ist” for the Miami Police Department, a role in which he might successfully
manage his personality disorder, dispatch only the most egregious serial
killers and avoid detection by authorities. The series is highly successful and
Dexter’s character is much admired by a large sector of the American public.
How should one, how can one, morally evaluate Dexter and his character,
and also his family and the other communities that make possible his man-
agement of his native dispositions?
Parenthetically, one must admit that traditional, Enlightenment-style mo-
ral theories make little contribution to this project of evaluation. And one
must admit also that such theories do no better with the cases of Mozart,
Keats or Godel. Still, in all these cases—and in all others as well—such
evaluative judgments are as natural a part of the human moral world as are,
for example, emotional bonds among family members. Moral communities
make such judgments. 5 The range of individuals about whom communities
and individuals make such judgments is very broad indeed, and more admir-
able as well as more defective exemplars differ for different individuals and
communities; think of Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Manson, Charles Manson,
John Wayne, John Wayne Gacey, Brittney Spears, Lena Horne, Louis Arm-
strong, Leonard Bernstein, Hoagie Carmichael, Brooks Robinson, David Or-
tiz and others too numerous to mention. All these individuals are successes or
failures; they achieve growth or they do not; and each is subject to judgments
of moral evaluation, their own as well as those of others. These evaluative
judgments are simple and natural parts of daily living for every person on the
planet. Is anything lost or is something gained for the world of moral thought
or moral theory by making integrity, growth and success or failure central to
morality itself, by seeking in Dewey’s words “a working theory of moral-
ity?”
And such judgments are natural too for individuals in cultures quite dif-
ferent from the American or Western European individuals and cultures men-
tioned above. The Dali Lama, perhaps, or Osama Bin Laden or a Yanamamo
tribe member, man or woman, or a Hindu holy man or Gandhi or Admiral
Yamamoto or the Daniel of the Malaysian Highlands Handa tribe discussed
in chapter 1—all these individuals make and are subject to the same kinds of
moral evaluation, growth and success or failure. A working theory of moral-
ity respects these moral judgments.
WHY NOT GROWTH?
Putting growth and success or failure at the heart of integrity conceived as

the central idea of morality departs dramatically from prevalent modes of
thinking about morality. Integrity thus conceived, for example, says nothing
about the alleged absolute universality and impartiality of morality. Pragma-
tist thought about morality rejects all Enlightenment-inspired understandings
of what morality fundamentally is. Pragmatists feel no need to secure moral
value and human worth in the face of Enlightenment or reductionist science,
for their ways of conceiving what science is and what it can accomplish do
not conflict with moral value or human worth. “Rationally” securing values
against what appear antagonistic results of science is no longer a pressing or
appealing intellectual project. 6 Nonetheless, more can be said by way of
turning aside likely philosophical reactions to pragmatism’s resort to integ-
rity and growth in its turn toward a working theory of morality.
Begin with the idea that morality is universal and impartial. Here is how
Hugh LaFollette puts this requirement:
Morality, as typically conceived, requires impartiality. The principle of impar-

tiality (or the equal consideration of interests) specifies that we must treat all
humans (creatures?) alike unless there is some general and morally relevant
difference between them which justifies a difference in treatment. This princi-
ple is central to traditional ethical theory. According to J.L. Mackie, it is “in
some sense beyond dispute” (1977: 83). The principle of impartiality does
permit treating different people differently, but any difference in treatment
must be justified by general features of the circumstances, so that others in like
circumstances should act similarly (Singer 1971; Frankena 1973; Hare 1963).
Specifically, impartiality forbids any deviation in one’s moral duties because
of one’s “variable inclinations” (Gewirth 1978: 24) or “generic differences
between persons” (Mackie 1977: 97). Put differently, “the class of persons
alleged to be an exception to the rule cannot be a unit class” (Singer 1971: 87).
Thus, a teacher should give equal grades to students who perform equally;
unequal grades are justified only if there is some general and relevant reason
which justifies that difference. For example, it is legitimate to give a better
grade to a student who does superior work; it is illegitimate to give her a better
grade because she is pretty, wears pink, or is named “Molly.” 7
The idea that morality must be universal and impartial as urged by the philos-
ophers LaFollette cites is a remnant of the Enlightenment need to secure
moral value and human worth rationally against the results of science. When
morality is no longer threatened by materialistic and mechanistic science, as
it no longer is, then one may simply observe that morality is in some ways
biologically and culturally universal and in some ways not. For example, the
“obvious” moral offence of killing fellow humans is not obvious in all, or
perhaps in any, cultures. In the face of this obvious fact, what might legiti-
92 Chapter 5
mate the claim that murder or killing innocent humans is “universally and
impartially” wrong? Consider the murderous Yanamamo tribes Napoleon
Chagnon describes in his work; 8 consider the idea of “holy war” some Mus-
lims urge their fellows to direct against Americans; consider the many centu-
ries of murderous military imperialism wrought by many European countries
on native peoples; consider the much admired behavior of the television
character, Dexter, mentioned earlier; and consider the mass killings of inno-
cents wrought more and more frequently in the American world, as well as
the 1994 genocide in Rwanda perpetrated by Tutsis against Hutus. This
listing of moral offenses can be augmented indefinitely by appeal to human
history and the likely human future. No universality or impartiality of moral-
ity stands in the way of human nature and its excess of moral offense against
the most obvious moral rules bequeathed by moral theories of the Enlighten-
ment.
A working theory of morality needs greater relevance to the human world
and greater respect for moral realities. The idea of integrity, along with the
ideas of growth and success or failure, enables that relevance and respect.
For a simple example, recall Daniel of the Handa clan mentioned in chapter
1.
Daniel’s integrity required him to kill a member of the Ombal clan in
order to avenge the death of his uncle. Daniel succeeded in permanently
crippling the relevant individual, a result he deemed satisfactory for meeting
his moral requirement. The primary consequence of his success was that he
became himself a target for vengeance by an individual of the Ombal clan,
and his life must thenceforth be spent in constant vigilance against murder-
ous attack on his own person. The universality and impartiality of Enlighten-
ment moral philosophy are “fifth wheels on the coach” here; they are not
relevant to the moral issues at stake in this context; and they provide no
encouragement to reflect about the impact of the general practice of seeking
individual, tribal vengeance on the lives and possibilities of the individuals
who must live in such a moral environment. A working theory of morality
offers real alternatives rather than intellectual nostrums.
As Jared Diamond reports, simple conversation about nation-state institu-
tions of justice evinced the Highlands tribes’ understanding of that alterna-
tive way to exact vengeance, and they saw also that the alternative simultane-
ously opened exciting possibilities for a way of life that did not require
personal suffering and truncated life prospects for male members of the
clans. Growth, moral progress and success were straightforward results of
altering the content of the idea of integrity for those Highland tribes. Some
skeptics might point out that, examples like the Highland tribes to the
contrary, the idea of growth has no moral content of its own, and hence that it
lies open to morally offensive interpretations.
Somebody—perhaps like Dexter, but less “principled”—who enjoys and

is skillful at killing innocent people might resolve to “grow” by killing in-
creasing numbers of innocents in each successive year of his life. How might
the idea of “growth” as the point of moral development rule out such a
morally odious resolution, or many similar ones easily imagined? (Readers
should look back again at the lengthy quotation from Dewey mentioned in
chapter 2 instancing growth as the point of morality and the briefer quotation
in chapter one about comparative evaluations of moral standards. The appen-
dix to chapter 3 offers a fuller treatment of this issue about standards.)
A working theory of morality as Dewey and pragmatists generally con-
ceive it provides alternatives to practices and behaviors detrimental to com-
munity and individual sustenance and growth. But the issue here is how to
rule out on moral grounds odious practices and behaviors that appear—
though they are admittedly only theoretically possible and probably patho-
logical—to satisfy the growth and success standard? The only answer prag-
matists, or anybody, can give to this question is that responsibility for the
human community remains within the human community. One does not “rule
out” possibilities; one works to prevent their realization.
As Dexter, the popular television character, managed to control his obses-
sion with killing humans through the helpful efforts of his adopting father, so
every individual depends in myriad ways on a family and/or communities of
others who may be instrumental in shaping that individual’s habits of behav-
ior and patterns of response in typical situations. And families or commu-
nities that remain obstinate in the face of more constructive alternatives that
might conduce to greater growth and success are better regarded as victims
or ill informed than as theoretically benighted. Examples of this unconstruc-
tive way of life come easily to mind; consider for example, the Westboro
Baptist Church in Kansas.
The Westboro Baptist Church is adamantly opposed on Biblical grounds
to homosexual relationships of any kind, and in particular to gay marriage.
(The relevant website is www.godhatesfags.com.) The youth of that Westbo-
ro religious community will perpetuate the values of their community unless
other communities important to their growth and development support other,
less venomous values. One might imagine school communities, sports teams,
scouting organizations or peers from other religious groups counteracting or
balancing the unproductive virulence and venom of the Westboro Baptist
Church community. No alternatives to these “real world” possibilities enable
the needed moral change. Human communities are responsible for their hu-
man charges.
The Westboro Baptist Church youth may become moral casualties of the
Westboro ideology; or they may through the good offices of other institu-
tions escape their ignorant condition. Or those youth may through their own
creativity and investigation discover other more constructive ways to engage
94 Chapter 5
their gendered worlds. No other ways are possible. In particular, Enlighten-

ment-style moral theories have no effect. Recall here Dewey’s account of the
measure of goodness for standards of community practice and individual
behavior, standards for the integrity of individuals and communities; they are
The key to constructive address of the moral responsibilities of human com-

munities is, in Dewey’s and in pragmatists’ view generally, the fullness and
freedom of interaction with other communities. In so far as the Westboro
Baptist Church impedes such fullness and freedom of interaction, it impedes
the moral stature and growth of its youth. So it is with any community;
constructive growth and success—pathologies like Dexter’s aside—depend
upon fullness and freedom of interaction with other communities. Such full-
ness and freedom of interaction does not “rule out” pathologies or inappro-
priate individual responses to provocative or volatile situations, but it does
support alternative responses and tempers the likelihood of more volatile
responses.
Pragmatism, in its commitment to integrity and growth, offers a large
“existentialist” and practice-oriented alternative to Enlightenment-style mo-
ral theories. And it insists on, again as Dewey puts it, a working theory of
morality. And again, a working theory of morality needs focus more than
conceptual precision. The relevant focus may come not only through the
ideas of integrity and growth but also through the idea of reflective living in
accord with Dewey’s sketch of reflective living in his Ethics. 10 A reflective
life, as Dewey conceives it is a life of integrity.
Personal integrity, seen through the lens of Dewey’s idea of the reflective
life, is not possible apart from individuals, communities and the values that
sustain and enable individuals. Consider now what appears in conventional
perspective an extreme violation of personal integrity that is not uncommon
in the contemporary American world; indeed it appears in increasing num-
bers with each passing year: suicide.
SUICIDE
Jonathan Franzen writes in The New Yorker of the suicide of his close friend,
David Foster Wallace. 11 In Franzen’s account,
[Wallace] was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is
simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill. The depressed person then
killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved

most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed. Betrayed
not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his
suicide took the person away from us and made him into a very public legend.
Franzen’s account recalled for me the suicide many years ago of a close
friend, and I have never forgotten the anger that overwhelmed me on learning
of his death. (I cursed aloud at the end of a large open hallway at the world’s
largest Baptist University!) I have for almost thirty years felt deprived of a
crucial friendship and felt anger at the self-absorption that ended his life.
Hardy was depressed as was Franzen’s friend.
Perhaps making for a worse suicide scenario in the case of my own friend
was his becoming a budding expert on Kant’s philosophy who had recently
published with a major university press a book on Kant’s moral theory. Kant
is well known to be intractably opposed to suicide on moral grounds, and
Hardy was well acquainted with the duty-oriented nature of Kant’s opposi-
tion to suicide. Hardy knew, even in his depression, that Kant’s moral theory
required him to continue living from a motive of duty alone. And Hardy
knew also that he was in a rare position compared to the rest of humanity; he
was one who actually had the opportunity to preserve his life under the only
circumstances in which, given Kant’s view, that action would have genuine
moral worth. Most people, in Kant’s view, preserve their lives out of motives
that make their action morally insignificant.
Only when one preserves one’s life out of the sole motive of following
duty for duty’s sake does one, in Kant’s view, do anything morally worth-
while. Serious depression that brings one to the brink of suicide, according to
Kant, enables one to achieve moral worth in the simple refusal to kill oneself.
Of course psychiatrists and therapists who deal with severely depressed pa-
tients usually do not encourage those patients to persevere toward Kantian
moral distinction.
Therapists and psychiatrists who deal with severely depressed patients get
them on anti-depressant drugs as quickly as possible. (And in a Kantian
moral world, this therapeutic response is deliberate frustration of a rare pos-
sibility for achieving moral worth.) Fortunately, a large and diverse tradition
of moral thought about suicide yields many alternatives to Kantian under-
standings of what morality is and of the issue of suicide. 12
In the contemporary world, the view that suicide results from pathology is
dominant. A minority view is that suicide is not an unacceptable, and is
perhaps even a reasonable, way to avoid the unpleasant problems of living
into the future. Neither of these views is wholly right or wholly wrong, and
seeing them, as well as issues about suicide, in more satisfying perspective
requires bringing forward the idea of integrity in its symbiotic relation with a
96 Chapter 5
pragmatist understanding of selfhood and morality. Consider, from this prag-

matist perspective, how one might reconsider the issue of suicide.
SUICIDE AS PATHOLOGY
Jonathan Franzen saw his friend, David Foster Wallace as mentally ill, and in
Franzen’s account Wallace had been on an anti-depressant for many years.
Wallace left off his medication, however, more than a year before his suicide
out of concern that he might be sacrificing important satisfactions or inten-
sity of experience by continuing his medicated state. Franzen gives no de-
tailed account of his friend’s response to discontinuing his medication, but
the ultimate outcome was Wallace’s suicide. In the case of my own friend,
significant pharmacological progress taken for granted in the last quarter of
the last century had not yet occurred, and his untreated depression intensified
for two years, culminating in his suicide. (I had a phone conversation with
Hardy two days before his death, and I knew because of the content—I
should say lack of content—of the conversation that Hardy was deeply de-
pressed. As I put it to myself at the time, “Hardy was not himself.”)
To know and love someone who is or might be suicidal is to know that
whatever psychological state leads to an effort to take one’s life is pathologi-
cal. Whatever drugs might minimize that intensity of pathology are important
contributions to the care of those we love.
How might the ideas of integrity and pragmatism be useful in thinking
about these situations? Pragmatism provides an account of “the self,” i.e., an
account of who one is, that makes sense of natural concerns in these situa-
tions. And the idea of integrity enables an understanding of the personal
morality that typically motivates individuals in these situations. Begin with
pragmatism’s account of “the self.”
SELFHOOD IN PRAGMATISM
The preceding paragraph has “the self” in scare quotes because in pragmatist
thought the idea of a substantial self gives way to the idea of a developmen-
tal, composite self. Philosophers’ concerns to understand the nature of per-
sonal identity—the essence, as it were, of personal identity—change dramati-
cally in the face of Darwinian biology and subsequent developments in social
science. Plato’s souls, Aristotle’s natural kinds and Descartes’ minds become
anachronisms in the science that follows Darwin, Freud, William James,
G.H. Mead, and John Dewey.
A pragmatist account of selfhood takes into account every dimension of
scientific thought that might illuminate who we are and how we become who
we are. The resultant scientific understandings of what it is to be and to
become the persons we are incorporates, within limits, the idea of our per-
sonal malleability. Like trees or flowers, or many of the fauna of our earthly
world, humans may grow in diverse ways; and unlike these flora and fauna,
humans may contribute creatively to their own development.
Begin with a basic commitment of social science, nicely expressed by
G.H. Mead in Mind, Self and Society:
The unity and structure of the complete self reflects the unity and structure of
the social process as a whole; and each of the elementary selves of which it is
composed reflects the unity and structure of one of the various aspects of that
process in which the individual is implicated. In other words, the various
elementary selves which constitute, or are organized into, a complete self are
the various aspects of the structure of that complete self answering to the
various aspects of the structure of the social process as a whole; the structure
of the complete self is thus a reflection of the complete social process. 13
In Mead’s account, a self is a composite of the various social realities that

envelop the humans who participate in them. When I am with my children,
for example, I function as a parent as that role has come through all the social
worlds that contribute to my beliefs and tendencies and dispositions respect-
ing that role. My own parents are crucial, of course—the keel as it were—in
my understanding of the content of that role. But that role is only one of the
many that are my self.
Another social role I have is that of professor. I have frequently—and
probably in a misplaced attempt at humor—characterized professors as wind-
up talking toys. Give me a classroom, a group of silent students and a topic,
and I can go on until they are all asleep. In this respect, I am probably typical.
(I do note in self-defense that I have pedagogical strategies for avoiding that
caricature.) In this professorial role, I suspect I am typical; in fact, I think in
the beginnings of our careers most professors condition themselves to satisfy
this expectation; the expectation is a given of the social role we seek to fill.
How do my parental and my professorial roles interact as aspects of the
“same self?” Mead’s answer, one typical of social scientists, is that those
roles take on a specific kind of priority ordering and composite structuring
within the demand that they relate constructively to one another in my per-
sonal and social worlds. And one must remember that these are only two of
the many social roles that come together into an ordering that eventuates in
“who I am.”
Mead’s social account of the content of selves is part of a pragmatist
understanding of selfhood; it is only part rather than the entirety of that
pragmatist understanding because there are ways of getting at who I am that
are scientifically independent of Mead’s social role account. Complementary
biological and psychological accounts also have merit.
98 Chapter 5
Biological and psychological accounts of our individuality are difficult to

distinguish cleanly, and the disciplines of biology and psychology overlap in
their investigations of human nature. Evolution seems primarily a focus of
biological concern, and beliefs, attitudes, dispositions and tendencies—
”mental” phenomena generally—seem primarily a focus of psychological
concern. Sociobiology is in some ways the science discipline that takes the
intersection of these sciences as its area of concern. 14
When Malcolm Gladwell writes in Blink about results of pervasive re-
search in psychology, he evidences, perhaps unintentionally, their overlap
with results, issues and research in biology and sociobiology. 15 One example
he uses is the Implicit Attitude Test, the IAT, administered for years to
students and others at Harvard University. (Gladwell invites readers them-
selves to take the computerized version of the test at
www.implicit.harvard.edu.) The test is unsettling—Gladwell calls it
“creepy”—because it yields results that conflict with our explicit judgments
about ourselves. Eighty percent of test takers, for example, who explicitly
declare themselves believers in racial equality produce test results that show
them to be racists; their unconscious attitudes conflict with their conscious
attitudes. (Recalling our earlier discussion of Joe Wilson’s outburst, the IAT
seems to provide significant evidence that Wilson, in spite of his sincere
denials, may indeed be the racist Maureen Dowd and Jimmy Carter judged
him to be.) Racism is not a simple issue, as the IAT makes clear. 16 Other
dimensions of the research Gladwell reports are equally relevant to questions
about who we are. Humans are in significant ways opaque to themselves;
their own attitudes, motivations, desires and beliefs must be targets of in-
quiry in the same way as are the attitudes, motivations, desires and beliefs of
others.
This general point about our selfhood—that we are significantly opaque
to ourselves in ways that should encourage our inquiry about ourselves—
appears repeatedly in science disciplines that focus in various ways on hu-
manity.
A reinforcing example of this same point appears in Richard Rorty’s
treatment of the significance of Freud’s account of the disunity of the self. In
“Freud and Moral Reflection,” Rorty exploits what he calls Freud’s “de-
centering” of the self on behalf of the idea that selfhood is neither unitary nor
substantial, but is rather diffuse and divided in a way that makes attaining
what we think of as selfhood a project requiring effort, inquiry and determi-
nation. Selfhood is not something given antecedent to experience as it ap-
pears in the pre-scientific thought of Plato and Aristotle or in the Enlighten-
ment science of Descartes and Kant—and in much Christian theology as
well—but is rather a task. The achievement of selfhood becomes in Rorty,
following Freud, a life-project, a work of more or less creative endeavor
toward goals to some extent chosen by individuals and to some extent given
to them by their biology and their social settings.
A simple example of the way selfhood is partially given in one’s biology
and social settings appears in biographies of historical characters. Bobby
Fischer, the chess prodigy, acquired through some quirk of his biological
make-up, an astonishing skill that he only partly controlled; his individual
responsibility, upon discovering his talent, could only be to develop it, to test
it against others and to find its limits. And Mozart, the musical genius who
composed his first symphony at age eight, faced similar alternatives. John
Keats produced transcendent poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth centu-
ry and was dead at the age of twenty-five. More recently, Jackie Evancho has
appeared as a ten-year old opera-style singer whose performances rival those
of performers who have trained for thirty years and are at the peak of their
careers; Evanco, too, owes her phenomenal talent to a quirk of biological
fate. All of these people are gifted in ways that transcend their own efforts,
and in ways that make them responsible to their gifts.
Even such uniquely gifted individuals must make choices that bring them
face to face with their own developmental possibilities. 17 Most of us, perhaps
fortunately, do not possess such distinctive gifts, and hence must labor more
strenuously toward a vision of self less distinctively suggested by our biolog-
ical or social circumstances. In spite of our biological gifts, the project of
constituting ourselves is an almost universal task among humans, and the
idea that becoming the distinctive self we might become is a task is integral
to pragmatist understandings of our humanity. Classical and Enlightenment
understandings of “the self” as a substance—for example in Leibniz’s ac-
count as an haecciety or in Kant’s account as a transcendental unity of
apperception—have become scientifically untenable, and philosophers must
turn their efforts in different directions. 18 A pragmatist understanding of
selfhood as developmental—as an achievement of inquiry, choice and deter-
mination, or a life project—is viable in the context of scientific developments
during the twentieth and early twenty-first century. (I consider some of these
developments in detail in the last chapter.) John Dewey, as he so often does,
hits this particular nail forcefully on its head:
We arrive at true conceptions of motivation and interest only by the recogni-

tion that selfhood (except as it has encased itself in a shell of routine) is in
process of making, and that any self is capable of including within itself a
number of inconsistent selves, of unharmonized dispositions . . . Inconsisten-
cies and shiftings in character are the commonest things in experience. Only
the hold of a traditional conception of the singleness and simplicity of soul and
self-blinds us to perceiving what they mean: the relative fluidity and diversity
of the constituents of selfhood. There is no one ready-made self behind activ-
ities. There are complex, unstable, opposing attitudes, habits, impulses which
gradually come to terms with one another, and assume a certain consistency of
100 Chapter 5
configuration, even though only by means of a distribution of inconsistencies

which keeps them in water-tight compartments, giving them separate turns or
tricks in action. 19
Developments in biology, sociology, psychology and neuroscience, if they

do not confirm Dewey’s account of selfhood—in this instance from his 1916
Human Nature and Conduct—are coherent with it; those developments are
not coherent with classical or Enlightenment understandings of self as sub-
stance.
One last, parenthetical remark about this pragmatist understanding of
selfhood: Popular culture has almost captured the relevant idea of selfhood in
a now bygone but popular television series, Herman’s Head. (Google it to
find YouTube clips from the series.) Herman is the central character who is
regularly confronted with dicey situations in which he must act. In these
situations, the scene shifts to a “room” inside his head where four characters
converse about what Herman should do in the situation. Inside Herman’s
head are Genius, Angel, Wimp and Animal, each representing a different
claim on Herman’s behavior and one “winning” the contest to control Her-
man’s action on the occasion in question. The staged representation of choice
situations in Herman’s Head visually approximates a pragmatist idea of self-
hood as developmental and compositely structured. Students can “relate to
it.”
SUICIDE AND INTEGRITY
Jonathan Franzen’s friend, David and my friend, Hardy chose to kill them-
selves. In 2007, according to statistics of the National Institute of Mental
Health, almost 35,000 American chose to take their own lives. 20 According
to the NIMH, suicide is a significant mental health problem; all suicides, in
their view, are pathological. But consider again Franzen’s account of his
friend.
David Foster Wallace was evidently a gifted individual who had the love
of many people. Difficult though it may be, one must—as Franzen has evi-
dently done—seek to empathize with and understand the motives and actions
of those one loves. In Franzen’s account, Wallace left off his long-term use
of Nardil out of concern that his medication might be diminishing his experi-
ence, perhaps in emotional intensity or heightened sensitivity or in some
dimension that might undermine his aspirations for his life or work. Wallace
had his reasons for abandoning the medication he had been on for many
years, reasons even Franzen might respect. The lesson of the situation is that
even a pathology that might eventuate in one’s death one might choose to
risk, and that risk can make sense in light of one’s own goals and values.
One can understand and sympathize with Wallace’s motivation in leaving

off his antidepressant. The pathology that led to Wallace’s death one must
surely regret. But one can also respect Wallace for his struggles within his
biological and social limitations. In light of his own goals, hopes and values,
Wallace’s risk-taking in the face of a possible terminal pathology might be a
courageous effort to become more of what he hoped he might become. (I
speak in ignorance of the real Wallace, since I did not know him personally. I
am, however enabling a plausible subtext in Franzen’s account of his friend.)
And I can also, though with greater difficulty, come to a similar account
of the motives and actions of my friend Hardy. I can, in retrospect and as a
result of conversations with him in the months preceding his death, see a
motivating rationale in his choice and action. Pathology, yes, and deep de-
pression I knew in Hardy, but also I knew him to be a moral idealist even in
the depth of his depression. (I was always suspicious of Kant’s moral philos-
ophy, and Hardy and I had many conversations about issues of moral philos-
ophy.) I might even express—given what I did know of Hardy and his strug-
gles—a noble rationale for his action in taking his life. To me, of course, that
rationale springs from and is integral to the pathology that killed Hardy, and I
wish almost desperately that Hardy might have gotten access to the antide-
pressants that came later and might have saved his life. Nonetheless, there is
a way of seeing Hardy’s action, as there is a way of seeing Franzen’s David’s
action, as internally motivated toward goals idealistic or even noble. And a
similar judgment might also be plausible in very many of those almost
35,000 cases of suicide that occurred in the year 2007.
One must know details and particulars and individuals, and apart from
such knowing, blanket judgments are unhelpful and misleading. Personal
integrity is not incoherent with pathologies that may lead to taking one’s own
life. Taking one’s own life is not incoherent with being a person of integrity.
And this fact remains consistent with thinking of suicide as almost universal-
ly a result of mental illness, a result of pathology. If one has an illness, then
one must cope with that illness, whether “physical” or “psychological” as
best one can.
For mental illnesses, one is as dependent on available means as are those
stricken with physical illnesses. John Keats did not have access to medica-
tions that might have controlled or cured his consumption; today such medi-
cations are readily available, at least in the Western world. My friend Hardy
did not have access to the antidepressants that might have saved his life. Each
of these people did their best within the limits of resources available to them.
That Hardy died by his own hand is no more a mark against his personal
integrity than is the fact that John Keats died of consumption at the age of
twenty-five in the early eighteenth century.
Only within the circle of goals, ideals, values and hopes as these are
present within one’s own life can one choose and act, and even so one is
102 Chapter 5
limited by conditions of one’s social and cultural context. When one does
one’s best, as I know Hardy did and I suspect Franzen’s David did, then one
does choose and act with integrity.
Does this mean that Integrity is doing one’s best given one’s values and
the conditions within one’s social and cultural context? Well, yes; but this
claim must not posture as an analysis of the idea of integrity, an account of
logically necessary and sufficient conditions for anyone’s having integrity.
This account of integrity is, as John Dewey might put it, an account of what
integrity exists as, 21 it provides focus for the idea of integrity; the account is
true in the sense of truth that both William James and John Dewey struggle to
express throughout their philosophical work. The claim also must not posture
as an universal account of the content of integrity; it does, however, show
what it is; it is, as William James says, “a picture with an atmosphere and a
background” that enlightens us about the idea of integrity, especially given
our concern to understand the fact that those we love occasionally take their
own lives. A further, related issue needs consideration.
SUICIDE BOMBERS
Surely there can be no integrity in the suicide bombers who seek to kill as
many others as they can? Suicide bombers usually serve a sectarian ideology;
in the contemporary world many suicide bombers are Muslims seeking to
injure citizens of Western democracies. Americans, in that radical Muslim
view, are infidels who deserve no mercy and should be killed. And some
American Christians serve a similar strain of sectarian rigidity, though they
have not yet begun systematic efforts to kill their opponents; they do, howev-
er—recall Kansas’s infamous Westboro Baptist Church—seek to inflict
whatever pain they believe is legally defensible on those who oppose, even if
only implicitly, their sectarian ideology. The most radical of such sectarian
ideologues are rigidly committed to killing their opponents whenever they
have opportunity. (Though he was not a suicide bomber, Timothy McVeigh
was committed to a similarly rigid ideology that motivated his killing of
hundreds of innocent people in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building
in Oklahoma City.)
Having said just above, however, that integrity is doing one’s best given
one’s values and the conditions within one’s social and cultural context,
perhaps the fact of suicide bombers may appear as a “counterexample” to
that account of the idea of integrity? Many think there can be no integrity in
those who aim to kill as many innocent people as they can through their own
suicide. Such in fact is an explicit claim of Cox, La Caze and Levine in
Integrity and the Fragile Self:
The most important example of the character living without integrity is the
political fanatic—say a suicide bomber prepared to die and also kill on a
massive scale for the sake of a political cause. The suicide bomber may suffer
a remarkable degree of self-deception, but this is not the primary character trait
that defeats their [sic] integrity. Fanatical zeal is itself a defeater of integrity
because it represents a profound failure to take one’s life and the lives of
others seriously. Within the mind of the suicide bomber lurks a dreadful trivi-
ality—a terrible failure to take life seriously. 22
In Cox, et al.’s account of integrity, suicide bombers are precisely why—

they are “the most important” reason—one must not conceive of integrity as
doing one’s best given one’s values and one’s social and cultural conditions.
And are those authors right that one should not allow suicide bombers as
persons of integrity?
No. One must attend to subtleties.
Cox, et al.’s claim about suicide bombers—that they are exemplars of
living without integrity—requires a substantive understanding of the content,
the essence of morality itself, and because of their understanding of that
content they cannot acknowledge integrity in those who violate it. But in a
pragmatist understanding of morality, morality has no content of its own
apart from the individuals and communities who have and act on their values
to achieve harmonious lives and better futures. The facts of “the human
condition,” acknowledged by pragmatists, are that we are biological and
social animals who depend in every detail of our constitutions on the natural
settings in which we come to maturity. (The discussions above focused
around the thought of G.H. Mead, Freud, Rorty and Dewey make this point.)
The moral content of democracy as expressed in Dewey’s work is almost
universal in the Western world and is a given of much Western thought about
morality; 23 and although most philosophers—including Cox, et al.—do not
acknowledge the historical, cultural and biological settings that enable spe-
cific understandings of the content of morality, pragmatists do acknowledge
those settings. Dewey speaks frankly of the moral content of democracy as “a
gift of grace.” But such gifts are always local, always particular, always to be
accepted with gratitude and, especially as concerns the moral content of
democracy, to be shared widely. To pretend that such local and fruitful gifts
are absolute universals implanted in every soul or self is a symptom of
sectarian presumption that continues to course through post-Enlightenment
philosophy.
To think of integrity as impossible for a suicide bomber—as do Cox, et
al.—is a symptom of cultural and moral presumption and perhaps of imperi-
alism; it is to believe along with W.K. Clifford and Simon Blackburn (and
most philosophers) that there are specific and obvious moral truths that re-
quire only minimal thought and experience to know. Pragmatists do not share
this immodest presumption of moral rectitude evident in the words of Cox et
104 Chapter 5
al and in those of Clifford, Blackburn and others; they do however believe in

and embrace the moral content of democracy. That idea of moral democracy
as it appears in Dewey’s work has no rational or intuitive superiority over
other moral perspectives; it is rather a gift of grace or (in less theological
terminology) a fortuitous historical contingency.
For pragmatists, sharing the gift of grace that is the moral content of
democracy requires strategies other than those of rational or cultural imperi-
alism. 24 That sharing requires, for example, the use of strategies that ac-
knowledge “where people are coming from.” Suicide bombers we of course
regard as morally stunted in comparison with those who benefit from and
live by the understanding of morality captured in Dewey’s account of democ-
racy, and we are “justified” in so regarding them because that is who we are.
And we are such, again in Dewey’s account, by virtue of our gift of grace.
That gift is ours to use well or poorly, to squander or to share, or to treat
in all the ways anyone might respond to a gift. If, instead of seeing suicide
bombers as self-deceived or victims of fanatical zeal or dreadful trivialities,
one might see them as deprived of privileges or gifts, then one might begin to
engage those individuals, their societies and cultures in constructive ways
that might change them—and perhaps change us too. This strategy or battery
of strategies spring from deep commitments to sharing with others who are
deprived of what we know is good, and to sharing what we believe has
conduced to our own goodness and good fortune.
And parenthetically we must admit that the goodness that is the gift of
grace rooted in our own history we have frequently neither understood nor
used well. We have been imperialists in many ways; we have fought with one
another over slavery; we have exterminated millions of Native Americans;
we have brutalized our environment; we have exploited countless other na-
tions and individuals out of a presumption of Anglo-Saxon genetic superior-
ity; and we have postured as a “city on a hill” chosen by God as His people to
subdue the earth and all its inhabitants. We have frequently behaved like
spoiled children who do not appreciate a precious gift. How might we do
better?
We can do better in myriad ways, but in the present instance, if we can
see suicide bombers as deprived in specific ways we might ameliorate, then
we might be able to change their understanding of what personal integrity
requires of them. We saw in chapter 1 a clear example of this change in Jared
Diamond’s account of tribal conflict in the Highlands of New Guinea.
In Diamond’s account, Daniel of the Handa clan had the responsibility to
kill the member of the Ombal clan who had killed his Uncle. Daniel fulfilled
his responsibility as part of the generations-long feud between the two clans,
and thereby maintained his own integrity. And as Diamond points out, when
a nation-state way of administering justice became known to the feuding
clans, they became able to settle their disputes in a way that gave them more
stability and possibility in their personal lives. The content of their under-
standing of personal integrity changed dramatically within the span of a
single lifetime.
In just the way the Handa and the Ombal clans were deprived, one may
think of suicide bombers also as deprived. Suicide bombers need alterna-
tives; in some cases, however, they have no alternatives. In 2001, USA Today
ran a story about how small children are trained to become suicide bombers
in Gaza City.
According to Jack Kelly, small children in Gaza City are systematically
schooled toward becoming suicide bombers. The children are indoctrinated
into the belief that their highest goal in life is to become a suicide bomber, to
kill Zionists, whom they call “sons of pigs and monkeys.” All the classmates
are narrowly focused on becoming human bombs, and they know—so they
are taught anyway—that many virgins await them in paradise when they
become holy martyrs. In Kelly’s account, a member of the Israeli secret
service points out that the education of suicide bombers must and does begin
very early in Hamas controlled regions. When the children reach maturity,
they want nothing more than to find a way to serve Allah by sacrificing their
own lives. 25
When children are deprived in the ways these Palestinian children are
deprived, they have no alternatives, and describing them in the way Cox, et
al. suggest is at best question-begging; at worst it is moral presumption and
imperialism. How might one think of these deprived and cloistered children
as self-deceived, fanatically zealous or committed to a dreadful triviality?
Surely they are better conceived as deprived in just the way the Handa and
Ombal clans, in Diamond’s account, are deprived. Not having access to
alternatives or being deprived of access to alternatives is not thereby to be
morally culpable for one’s commitments. I quote again Dewey’s account of
standards of comparison among social groups:
Dewey’s account covers the educational situation of innocent youth trained

to become suicide bombers.
One natural and important implication of these paragraphs is that who one
is, along with the idea of what one’s integrity requires, is a function not only
of one’s individuality but also of one’s communities, one’s peers and men-
tors. This notion of composite responsibility for one’s identity and integrity
is coherent with a pragmatist understanding of selfhood; it is incoherent with
106 Chapter 5
ideas of selfhood and morality that are theoretical constructs of Western

philosophy.
To be suicidal is not to lack integrity. Even to be suicidal and intent on
killing others along with oneself is not to lack integrity. To have integrity is
to have an obvious kind of coherence within oneself, a coherence that is on
display in all of one’s choices and actions.
This coherence within oneself is one’s autonomy and the creativity inte-
gral to it. And that coherence includes a gracious respect for one’s commu-
nities, along with a commitment to those communities’ ideals as well as to
one’s own ideals. As one’s autonomy may occasionally yield disrespect for
one’s communities—some, for example, sometimes kill in anger; some com-
munities are capable of discouraging individual autonomy—some commu-
nities, for example, breed suicide bombers. Being a person of integrity is
doing one’s best given one’s values and the social and cultural conditions of
one’s environment.
INTEGRITY AND THE REFLECTIVE LIFE
Having integrity is seeking to realize within one’s limited purview the reflec-
tive life as one engages possibilities for one’s future. In the account of my
earlier Pragmatism and the Reflective Life, reflective living is having autono-
my, respecting the communities large and small that have made one possible,
and living toward ideal ends both communal and personal. This account of
moral living is Dewey’s “working theory” of morality, and it captures
Dewey’s understanding of the moral value of democracy: democracy makes
possible reflective living for more people than any other moral ideal in hu-
man history.
In that earlier account of reflective living, no conceptual necessities cap-
ture the idea but instead biological, social and cultural realities serve as its
foundation; likewise, in the account of integrity given here no conceptual
necessities support or arise out of the idea of integrity. Integrity is one’s
engaged and creative grappling with who one is—as one is the fruit of one’s
biology and family and community circumstances—in order to become who
one might more ideally be. Such an account of integrity is, again in Dewey’s
words, an account aiming at what integrity “exists as.” What integrity exists
as is our character and its expression in all our actions; it is an expression of
our biology, our psychology and all of the communities that cohere and
contend as we engage the worlds of our daily lives.
One of the most significant of the communities that sustain us toward our
social and individual futures is our environmental community. Consider next
the integrity of our relationships as members of that community.
NOTES
1. An excellent example of this literature appears in Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, and
Michael P. Levine, Integrity and the Fragile Self (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Please see also
Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, and Michael Levine, “Integrity,” The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy (August 10, 2008), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
fall2008/entries/ integrity/ (accessed September 27, 2014); their extensive bibliography is use-
ful.
2. John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953; vol. 7: 1932, Ethics, ed. Jo
Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989). See especially part 2
of this work and my monograph Pragmatism and the Reflective Life (Lanham, MD, Lexington
Books, 2009).
3. Edward O. Wilson’s works on biology and sociobiology illuminate this point. See, for
example, On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978) and Consilience:
The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage Books, 1999).
4. Quiller-Couch, Arthur Thomas, Sir. The Oxford Book of English Verse. Oxford: Claren-
don, 1919, [c1901].
5. For a more extensive account of how traditional, Enlightenment-derived moral theories
miss the mark in not enabling or sustaining these kinds of moral judgment, see my earlier
Pragmatism and the Reflective Life (New York: Lexington Books, 2009), especially chapter 3
and more especially 41–42 and 56–59.
6. Dewey makes this point again and again throughout his corpus. See, for example, The
Quest for Certainty (1929) in John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 4:
1929, The Quest for Certainty, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Univer-
sity Press, 1988); Art as Experience (1934) in John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey,
vol. 10, Art as Experience, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University
Press); and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938) in John Dewey, The Later Works of John
Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 12, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale,
IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). And more recently his pragmatist views have
been reinforced by the “historicization” of science by the work of Thomas Kuhn. See especially
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1962).
7. Hugh Lafollette, Morality and Personal Relationships (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 195. I
add here parenthetically that the idea one must have some “general and relevant reason” to
justify a difference of treatment of students is painfully vague and difficult in particular situa-
tions. Suppose one has an earnest student who happens to have dyslexia or dyscalculia but
converses and reads discursive prose very well; such a situation requires judgment about
particulars rather than a “general and relevant” reason. General and relevant reasons are not
available apart from judgments about particulars of individuals’ situations. I once had a student
who wrote wonderful poetry and excelled in creative endeavors; she had unfortunately failed
her required basic math course three times and was allowed to take a logic course, mine, instead
of taking the math course a fourth time; I made sure she passed her logic course. Is my behavior
comparable to giving her a better grade “because she is pretty, wears pink, or is named
‘Molly’?” Those examples in my view are question begging, loaded to yield LaFollette’s
general point.
8. Napoleon Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yano-
mamo and the Anthropologists (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014).
1985), 105.
10. John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 7, Ethics 1932, ed. Jo
Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989). See in particular Part
2, Section 1 of that work. For a secondary account that gives the idea of the reflective life a
central place in moral thought, see my Pragmatism and the Reflective Life (New York: Lexing-
ton Books, 2009), especially chapter 4, “The Reflective Life.”
108 Chapter 5
11. Jonathan Franzen, “Farther Away: ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ David Foster Wallace, and the
Island of Solitude,” The New Yorker 87, no. 9 (April 18, 2011), http://www.newyorker.com/
magazine/ 2011/04/18/farther-away-2.
12. See, for example, Michael Cholbi, “Suicide,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
(July 29, 2008), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/suicide/ (accessed Septem-
ber 27, 2014).
13. Laura Desfor Edles and Scott Appelrouth, Sociological Theory in the Classical Era:
Text and Readings, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2010), 396. The quotation
appeared originally in G. H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1967).
14. See, for example, Wilson, On Human Nature. Ruse addresses these issues in many of his
works, and all deserve careful attention. Altruistic behavior issues from a disposition to behave
in the interest of another rather in one’s own interest, and given traditional ways of thinking
about human behavior, altruism should be biologically, psychologically and philosophically
impossible. One project of sociobiology is to explain the possibility of altruistic behavior.
15. Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (New York: Back Bay Books, 2005). Blink was on the New
York Times bestseller list for many months; however, it is not a scholarly book because it does
not present normal footnotes or bibliography. Gladwell does provide in a notes section at the
back of the book the main sources behind the content of each chapter, so that interested readers
may follow up on his presentations of research. I find Gladwell’s prose presentation compelling
because it puts one into direct contact with the important results of a wide variety of relevant
research. The absence of “normal” scholarly apparatus strikes me as a virtue of Gladwell’s
presentation; it enhances accessibility, a significant virtue in non-fiction books.
16. In our Capital Punishment collection (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011), Robert
Baird and I include an essay reporting different psychological research that confirms Glad-
well’s general point that our attitudes are significantly opaque to our conscious selves. Jennifer
Eberhardt et al., “Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Pre-
dicts Capital-sentencing Outcomes,” in The Death Penalty: Debating the Moral, Legal, and
Political Issues, ed. Robert Baird and Stuart Rosenbaum (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Press,
2011), 339–346.
17. I mention again Rebecca Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (New
York: Vintage, 2010); its central character has an equally impressive gift of mathematical
genius. Goldstein’s treatment of her character, Azariya, makes clear that such gifted individuals
must nonetheless make life changing choices that may alter their selfhood around other prior-
ities than those they are compelled toward by their gift.
18. What precisely those directions might be is somewhat vague; the classical pragmatists,
James and Dewey, along with their neo-pragmatist cohorts including Rorty, Putnam, Cornel
West and John McDermott, are already pointing toward important kinds of constructive pos-
sibilities. Their mutual agreement is that any beginning point for a constructive philosophy
must acknowledge the rootedness of humanity in every detail in the earth-bound environment
that sustains and nurtures it. To make of selfhood a developmental phenomenon is basic to
acquiring the understanding of who we are that is available in the sciences.
19. John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899—1924, Volume 14, Human Nature and Conduct,
1922, Edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988),
96.
20. For a breakdown of the statistics, see National Institute of Mental Health, “Statistics,”
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/statistics/index.shtml (accessed September 27, 2014).
21. In chapter 3 above on relativism, a quotation appears from Dewey emphasizing his
intent in thinking about knowledge to focus on “what knowing exists as;” here I extend his idea
to include the need to focus on a similar dimension of the idea of integrity—conceptual
niceties, as Dewey might also say, may “go to their own place” or “be hanged.”
22. Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, and Michael P. Levine, Integrity and the Fragile Self
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 72. See also the larger context of their claim, 68–72.
23. See again Dewey’s 1939 essay, “Creative Democracy, the Task before Us,” especially
paragraph 8, which appears in John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol.
14: 1939–1941, Essays, Reviews, and Miscellany, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1989).
24. The early work of John Rawls sought, unsuccessfully, to show how his two principles of
justice—those he saw as underlying the moral institutions of democracy—were rooted in the
natural dispositions of all rational creatures. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (New York:
Belknap Press, 1999). Rawls’s later work, in particular Political Liberalism (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1995), backed away from those universalistic—and in the language
adopted here—imperialistic strategies.
25. Jack Kelley, “Devotion, Desire Drive Youths to ‘Martyrdom,’” USA Today (McLean,
VA), July 5, 2001.
1985), 88–89.
Chapter Six
Integrity and Environment
In addition to their social communities, humans are members of ecological

communities; they are intelligent, language-using mammals that are clever,
creative and capable of imagining and effecting large changes for better or
worse. One traditional way of thinking about the normative or value-laden
relationship between humans and their ecological communities is that we are
stewards of those communities, that we have responsibility for the prudent
management of our environment for ourselves and for future generations.
This stewardship idea is theological and derives from the Christian idea that
humans are the pinnacle of Creation and must care for it properly in order to
fulfill responsibilities as overseers of that creation. In so far as one sympa-
thizes with a theological understanding of value, one may find this steward-
ship account plausible. Other ways of conceiving the value relationship be-
tween humans and their ecological environments are available. Recall again
the idea of natural piety mentioned earlier as an important source of the idea
of integrity.
NATURAL PIETY
Natural piety is an ideal of character. As an ideal of character, natural piety

like all ideals needs focal embodiment. Thinking of natural piety in the way
philosophers usually think of ideals brings the problem of understanding its
conceptual content so that one may properly apply that content. But pragma-
tists do not approach ideals in this typical way that seeks analysis of concep-
tual content. For pragmatists, the human world, including its substantive and
tradition-rooted values, is the source of all ideals. Ideals of behavior and
ideals of character find rooted embodiment within human culture, society
and personality. Here is Dewey’s account again:
111
112 Chapter 6
Natural piety is not of necessity either a fatalistic acquiescence in natural

happenings nor a romantic idealization of the world. It may rest upon a just
sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts, while it also recognizes
that we are parts that are marked by intelligence and purpose, having the
capacity to strive by their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with
what is humanly desirable. Such piety is an inherent constituent of a just
perspective in life. (LW9: 18)
For a central strand of pragmatist thought, the quality of character Dewey

describes is definitively ideal. What are the foundations of natural piety?
How is it embodied culturally in ways that empower it as an ideal of charac-
ter?
These questions are philosophical questions, questions naturally moti-
vated by thinking about ideals. For pragmatists, these questions are answered
by finding a focus for the ideal along with ways to express it in daily life.
Begin by contrasting natural piety with another ideal of character. Ber-
trand Russell captures in his 1902 “A Free Man’s Worship” one prominent
alternative, that of defiance in the face of a hostile universe:
Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom
falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipo-
tent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned today to lose his
dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only
to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day;
disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that
his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a
mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant
of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his
condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that
his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious
power. 1
Russell’s Promethean attitude of defiance has roots in his Enlightenment

ideology of science and reason. In Russell’s intellectual world, we know or
should know that human insignificance is the truth perched atop our rapidly
accumulating scientific knowledge, and our defiance in the face of an uncar-
ing, mechanistic universe is the only attitude adequate to the raw realities of
the human condition. How might one account for this difference in attitude
between Dewey and Russell about the human condition?
Russell’s 1902 essay, although not part of his technical philosophy, cap-
tures an attitude coherent with that philosophy. And one may say the same of
Dewey’s idea of natural piety. Russell and Dewey are philosophers of ap-
proximately the same generation whose intellectual and political relation-
ships are interesting mirrors of their difference in attitude, character, person-
ality and intellectual culture. To find an explanation for their difference in
Integrity and Environment 113
attitude and what that difference might mean for the contemporary philo-
sophical world, consider a similar difference that likewise needs explanation.
NATIVE AND COLONIAL ATTITUDES
In Native Pragmatism, Scott Pratt has provided an elegant intellectual history

showing that prominent themes of classical pragmatism are rooted in Native
American traditions of thought. The themes in question—interaction, plural-
ism, community and growth—are integral to Native American attitudes and
find expression in classical pragmatism; opposing themes—progress, white
Christian cultural superiority, among others—are integral to a typical coloni-
al attitude. The colonial attitude finds expression in many documents of early
American history, including works of literature as well as treatises on theolo-
gy, politics and morality. 2 The attitudes Pratt identifies as Native and coloni-
al exhibit a contrast strikingly similar to the difference in attitude between
Dewey and Russell. The resemblance becomes evident repeatedly in Pratt’s
account of differences between colonial and Native habits and attitudes.
What follows is one incident that captures the relevant difference.
Pratt reports an account by Benjamin Franklin of an exchange between a
Swedish minister of the Gospel and a member of a group of Susquehanna
Indians who receive politely the minister’s testimony about his Christian
faith. In Franklin’s account,
[A] Swedish minister, perhaps during the Great Awakening, . . . gathered a

group of Susquehanna Indians to give a sermon and acquaint “them with the
principal historical Facts on which our Religion is founded, such as the Fall of
our first Parents by Eating an Apple, the Coming of Christ, . . . &c.” When he
was done, a speaker of the group stood and thanked the preacher for telling
them “those things which you have heard from your Mothers. In return,” he
said, “I will tell you some of those we have heard from ours” . . . The speaker
then told the preacher the story of the origin of corn, beans, and tobacco. When
the speaker was finished “[t]he good Missionary, disgusted with this idle Tale,
said, what I delivered to you were sacred Truths; but what you tell me is mere
Fable, Fiction & Falsehood.” The speaker, offended by the missionary’s out-
burst, replied, “my brother, it seems your Friends have not well instructed you
in the Rules of common Civility. You saw that we who understand and prac-
tice those Rules, believed all your stories; why do you refuse to believe
ours?” 3
The colonial attitude, in Pratt’s account, appears in the behavior of the minis-
ter, and it lives in the idea of the correctness of the colonists’ religious and
moral traditions in contrast to the error of religious and moral traditions
among Native Americans. American history is largely a story of the conquest
of the Native attitude by the colonial attitude and is exemplified repeatedly in
114 Chapter 6
the history of events—for prominent example, the removal of the Cherokees

from Georgia to Oklahoma in the 1830s—that subject Native Americans and
their cultures to the “manifest destiny” of white Christians. 4
The contrast between Dewey’s natural piety and Russell’s hostile defi-
ance mirrors the contrast between the Native and the colonial attitudes. And
as one sees the colonists’ attitude living in their idea of the correctness of
their account of religious and moral culture, one sees also Russell’s attitude
living in the idea of the correctness of his account of the content of science
and philosophy.
In Russell’s view, the world is hostile to humanity. The ceaseless march
of the material world in accord with mechanistic laws of nature grind human-
ity into insignificance, no matter its moral aspirations or religious hopes.
Hostile defiance is the natural ally of a keen scientific or philosophical mind
that knows this truth about the natural world. But Dewey has somehow
missed the propriety of attitude that Russell finds natural to perceptive
minds.
Natural piety is Dewey’s analogue of what Pratt calls the Native attitude,
and it bears the same kind of relation to Russell’s attitude as the Native
attitude bears to the colonial attitude. The contrast in attitude between Dewey
and Russell appears in, and is symptomatic of their different understandings
of many basic ideas prominent in Western philosophy. The themes Pratt
finds prominent in his account of the Native attitude—interaction, pluralism,
community and growth—find significant expression in Dewey’s philosophy
and are integral to Dewey’s idea of natural piety. These same themes are
inconsequential in Russell’s thought.
For Russell, reality requires accommodation. The human project is to
know reality through finding appropriate epistemic norms and following
them. Accommodating the reality thus discovered is the proper attitudinal
response. And Russell’s most sophisticated thought about science and philos-
ophy yields a reality in which human insignificance is an obvious result,
yielding also the pointlessness of morality and religion. Part of Russell’s
natural-seeming presumption is that we humans are discoverers of what al-
ready is independent of our discovery efforts. Just as Columbus discovers
America or I discover a Franklin in my wallet or Buck Showalter discovers a
weakness in the Red Sox defense, so in Russell’s view we discover the nature
of reality and must behave appropriately to that discovery. Dewey early in
his career characterizes Russell’s natural presumption as incorporating a
“spectator theory” of knowledge and finds significant fault in it. (For an
account of Dewey’s view about knowledge and how it differs from Russell’s
and “the spectator theory” or what Boghossian calls “the classical picture” of
knowledge, see chapter 3.)
In Dewey’s philosophy—and in the attitude of natural piety that emerges
from it—humans engage their world to produce results. The ways humans
engage are as myriad as are the results they produce. We are parts of the
natural world marked by creativity and intelligence, and thus we do things.
We are complex, active, intelligent creatures who have many goals, simple
and complex, that yield many results, simple and complex.
The contrast between natural piety and hostile defiance is rooted in differ-
ent understandings of what humanity is. In Dewey, humans are those parts of
the natural world marked by intelligence and purpose who may engage their
world on behalf of better futures; in Russell, humans are those parts of the
natural world who know truths, and in their knowing of those truths must
grasp their own insignificance. Our human fates—our living or dying, early
or late, with or without suffering— in Russell’s understanding matter not at
all.
Although there are differences between the attitude of natural piety and
the Native attitude Pratt describes, those attitudes have a strong family re-
semblance. And Franklin’s report of the encounter between the Swedish
missionary and the Susquehanna Indians mirrors the contrast between Dewey
and Russell. On the Russell/Swedish Missionary side of both contrasts is the
same understanding of the human role in the natural world; for both we gain
knowledge of the truth, and it must control our behavior, habits and attitudes.
Russell’s materialistic and mechanistic science yields hostile defiance; the
Swedish missionary’s revelation of Truth through the Christian story yields
contempt for or indifference toward other stories and traditions. The behav-
ioral consequences of the Russell/Swedish missionary understanding of their
own stories and traditions are starkly required by absolutely trustworthy and
Truth-revealing methods of science or revelation. What one discovers, what
one knows to be true, one must accommodate.
A similar attitudinal difference appears in the earlier chapter on belief.
Simon Blackburn is miffed that his Jewish colleague might impose on his
integrity by requesting him to participate in a simple religious ceremony at
dinner. And Blackburn appears offended that some benighted individuals
might continue religious practices that are an offense to scientific method
and established knowledge. In Blackburn’s view, what we know must control
our behavior, habits and attitudes. Religious practices may be indulged in by
the weaker intellects among us, but the more knowledgeable among us can
tolerate them only insofar as they refuse any pretense to “cognitive content”
in their practices.
The contrast between these perspectives is stark. The native attitude of
respect for others’ traditions, no matter how different from their own, is
absent from Russell, from the Swedish missionary and from Simon Black-
burn. When one sees humans as “cognitive vessels,” properly filled with the
truth of science or revelation, one is disabled for receiving and benefitting
from the Native attitude or an attitude of natural piety. This particular disabil-
ity is a natural consequence of subjection to “the spectator theory” of knowl-
116 Chapter 6
edge, the idea that humans are cognitive vessels to be filled appropriately—
with science and/or philosophy and/or revelation—and normatively required
to behave accordingly. 5 So the Swedish missionary is disgusted by the Sus-
quehanna’s traditional stories; Simon Blackburn finds his colleague’s relig-
ious credulity a straightforward violation of intellectual integrity; and Russell
sees that the only appropriate response to the world science reveals is hostile
defiance. These ideologically freighted perspectives are unforgiving and un-
yielding toward other perspectives.
Only natural piety or the Native attitude in one or another of its guises
may bear the fruit of respect for alterative traditions and perspectives. And
they may bear this fruit largely because they see humans as animals unique in
the biological world, unique in having particular characteristics and capac-
ities with which to engage their various environments. We are those parts of
our world marked by intelligence and purpose and thus we engage our envi-
ronment differently from other parts of our world; we may strive by their aid
to bring about humanly desirable conditions. As intelligent and purposeful,
humans must engage and respect differences between themselves and other
parts of the natural world.
In Scott Pratt’s account of the Native attitude as it typically appears
among Native inhabitants of early America, it rests on stories and traditions
embodying proper behavior toward different others, even when those others
are threatening. 6 In the cannibal stories of Native tradition, much like the
fairy tales of European folk literature, one finds guidance for behavior in the
face of even the most difficult circumstances. As Western children find guid-
ance for dealing with grievous threats in, for example, the story of the three
little pigs, so Native American children find guidance for dealing with threat-
ening strangers in the cannibal stories. (What kind of house should one build
when wolves are a constant threat? What should one do when a giant, hungry
cannibal appears at one’s door?) These plot situations are metaphors for not
untypical, real-life situations. One learns from these stories, and one grows
into who one is partly through the stories’ contributions to one’s psyche.
SOURCES OF NATURAL PIETY
But the issue here is environmental integrity or perhaps our human relation to
our environment such that natural piety might become a primary virtue in
preference to alternatives such as hostile defiance or proprietary stewardship.
How does the ideal of natural piety become “rooted” or “grounded” so as to
become an ideal of humans’ relationship to their environment, an ideal
Dewey obviously respects? Russell’s hostile defiance is rooted in his under-
standing of science and its results; the stewardship idea is rooted in the
theological concept of a human-centric natural world, a world created by
God for the specific benefit and use of humanity. These ontological or meta-
physical roots that suffice for Russell and his kind, along with the alternative
metaphysical roots that suffice for some Christian theologians are unavail-
able to Dewey and pragmatists generally because they reject the idea that
values need ontological support.
Sources of natural piety must be similar to those that yield the native
attitude. In Scott Pratt’s account of the native attitude, native values and
understandings of the human world come through stories that empower
young psyches and orient them toward respecting others, their communities
and their sustaining world. (The recent film, Avatar, approximates for our
contemporary world, though in a pretty heavy-handed way, the distinction
between a colonial attitude and a native attitude.) Stories like the cannibal
stories, the classical fairy tales and Jesus’s parables orient human psyches
toward natural piety. (For Russell and others, scientific knowledge comes
first and requires hostile defiance; for theologians and others, theological
knowledge comes first and requires stewardship. Again, in Dewey and in
pragmatism generally knowledge is not a fixed item that requires any partic-
ular attitudinal response.) What stories might engender the attitude of natural
piety as Dewey expresses it?
Many such stories appear in the American context. A prominent example
is Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax. The Lorax “speaks for the trees” and for the other
flora and fauna of the natural world who are or might be threatened by
human “progress.” The story of the Lorax is the story of human responsibil-
ity to sustain those parts of the world that are helpless in the face of human
exploitation. One point of the story is that the creatures and environments we
value in the natural world depend on human support. The role of the Lorax is
to make obvious some ways humanity threatens but might yet benefit or
sustain dependent parts of the natural world. Whether the story successfully
enables the virtue of natural piety is perhaps an issue. Does the story impart a
“just sense of nature as a whole of which we are parts . . . marked by
intelligence and purpose,” and does it enable a disposition to “bring condi-
tions into greater consonance with what is humanly desirable?” The question
does not have an easy answer.
One reason that question has no easy answer is that it confronts attitudes
engendered in the same way Russell’s attitude of hostile defiance is engen-
dered—through commitment to a particular ideology that endorses attitudes
and behaviors incompatible with an attitude of natural piety. Another exam-
ple attitude derives from Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom, a sta-
ple of American business education that argues for a libertarian economic
ideology in which there is no role for natural piety beyond the minimal way it
might overlap with self-interest. 7 Friedman’s economic perspective is prob-
ably dominant among business people who seek to advance their own and
perhaps their shareholders’ economic interests. Especially in the Western
118 Chapter 6
world ideologies capture character and drive behaviors, a natural conse-

quence of which is the languishing of ideals like natural piety that boast no
ideological source. Opposition between analogues of the Native attitude and
the Colonial attitude remains vigorous in the contemporary world. But return
more specifically to the question of the source of the virtue of natural piety.
Bertrand Russell, Simon Blackburn and C.S. Lewis along with many
others argue discursively toward establishing the truth of their ideological
perspectives. Dr. Seuss presents simply a narrative account of a particular
character, the Lorax, designed to evince a specific value perspective about
the natural world and its non-human residents. And the Native American
cannibal stories similarly evince a specific value perspective toward different
others, as do also many of the fairy tale narratives prominent in Western
culture. These stories do not argue discursively for any specific conclusion;
they are designed rather to shape impressionable psyches toward responsible
behavior toward a larger environment.
A general way of putting this contrast is to note that stories affect psyches
differently from the way discursive argumentation affects them. The psycho-
logical power of a story is different in intent and effect from the logical
power and coercive intent of an argument. A story is able to shape a psyche;
an argument seeks to coerce a psyche. Arguments lack the power to shape a
psyche. Stories lack the coercive intent of argumentation.
A parenthetical comment about a classic of environmental ethics: Holmes
Rolston’s Environmental Ethics seeks to bring ecological settings into the
ambit of traditional ethical thought. 8 Making use of carefully chosen intui-
tions about the natural world and human dependence on it, Rolston argues
that parts of the natural world not previously considered morally significant
are indeed deeply significant. And that moral significance Rolston believes
must rationally compel respect and behavior in just the way others think the
principle of utility or the categorical imperative should compel respect and
behavior. Rolston’s perspective about intrinsic value in the natural world has
unfortunately not become widely respected in the philosophical world. An-
other way of putting this point is to say that Rolston’s effort at discursive
argument designed to include our natural environment within the ambit of
traditional moral theory lacks persuasive—or coercive—power. The reasons
or causes for the failure of Rolston’s effort matter not so much as does the
fact of its failure. 9 Rolston’s languishing argumentative effort may encour-
age greater respect for the value-shaping power of stories. The Lorax is a
better speaker for the environment than is Holmes Rolston.
Stories shape psyches. As Dewey saw in Art as Experience, “In the end,
there are but two philosophies; one is that of Shakespeare and Keats.” 10 And
as William James saw, our Earth and all of its contents, human as well as
non-human, have powerful moral significance; and James’s concession to the
power of literary and poetic expression appears in his repeated quotation of
Whitman. James knew the power of narrative and poetry, and of art general-
ly. 11
And many other poetic and literary expressions shape or reinforce mutual
support and unity among human and natural worlds. Coercive argument is
decidedly ineffectual in bringing forward the natural piety required for our
integrity within our environment. Many other literary and poetic expressions
have power similar to that of Dr. Suess’s The Lorax. 12
Mary Oliver’s Pulitzer Prize winning volume of poetry American Primi-
tive, is an exemplary instance, as are many of her volumes of poetry. 13 I
would love to quote her poem, “May,” in its entirety, but since it along with
others of her works are readily available I here simply commend her works
for their ample expression of the attitude of natural piety. In her poem, the
bees and I gather spiritual honey from the flowers; we, the bees and I, are
together embedded in a spiritual reality that is the world of our physical
bodies and their environment. William James’s attitude toward what we dul-
ly call “the physical world” reverberates fully in Oliver’s reverent respect for
ourselves, our fellow creatures and our common environment. 14 And the idea
of natural piety in Dewey’s Terry Lectures seeks to capture discursively
Oliver’s poetic expression of the role of humanity in our physical/spiritual
world. 15 The integrity of our environment, an environment in which we are
embedded as creatures having intelligence and purpose, requires our compre-
hension of our role in the spirituality that is our world. Another expression of
the same realization appears in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses in
a dream of protagonist John Grady Cole.
That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains
had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers
ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among
the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where
their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young
colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen
that hung in the sun like powered gold and they ran he and the horses out along
the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and
they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them
like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved
all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were
none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance
which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised. 16
McCarthy offers yet another poetic expression of the idea of natural piety
about which little need or can be said. McCarthy and Oliver are among many
who are attuned to and express distinctively the harmony of natural piety that
Dewey and James see in humanity’s rootedness along with other creatures in
120 Chapter 6
our common spiritual world. All are part of the “resonance which is the
world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.”
Natural piety as an ideal of character brings humanity back to the natural
world, a world of depth and significance not usually visible through the
lenses of Enlightenment science or Christian theology. The natural world,
seen through the works of James, Dewey, Whitman, Emerson, Robert Frost,
Mary Oliver, Cormac McCarthy and many others, is spiritual, is aesthetically
and morally significant. Seeing its spiritual significance requires removing
the ideological lenses of science and theology that dim our faculties.
Removing those ideological lenses opens also other possibilities; one is
the possibility of seeing continuity in the natural world even beyond our
earthly environment, of seeing ourselves and our earthly environment in the
larger context of the universe as a whole. We might see ourselves along with
our fellow creatures in an even larger spiritual context than that of our good
earth, that even of our universe itself. This vision was the one that drove
William James and that simmered in his radical empiricism, his idea of pure
experience and also in his ghost hunting as well as in the strange-seeming
notion of “pan-psychism.”
APPENDIX: THE PROBLEM OF INDUCTION
The problem of induction is another of the issues that emerge from the
concern of Enlightenment philosophy with epistemology. Concern about the
principle of induction continues among epistemologists, and no satisfactory
justification for reliance on induction has yet appeared. Classical empiricists
were of one mind that induction could not be justified, and most “reduced”
induction to habits of expectation engendered by regularities of experience. 17
Such regularities of expectation, however, those empiricists saw were not
proper justification. And controversy about how properly to regard what
seems an inevitable tendency to believe in induction continues unabated into
the present. 18 The problem continues to be that no theoretical account of that
natural human expectation “justifies” inferences based on it. New ways of
formulating the problem have emerged in recent years, and the context of
conversation about how to engage those new formulations has changed, but
the basic issue remains unresolved. 19 For his directness and efficiency of
expression, I use here Bertrand Russell’s formulation of the issue in his early
twentieth century volume, The Problems of Philosophy. Here is Russell:
Experience might conceivably confirm the inductive principle as regards the

cases that have been already examined; but as regards unexamined cases, it is
the inductive principle alone that can justify any inference from what has been
examined to what has not been examined. All arguments which, on the basis of
experience, argue as to the future or the unexperienced parts of the past or
present, assume the inductive principle; hence we can never use experience to
prove the inductive principle without begging the question. Thus we must
either accept the inductive principle on the ground of its intrinsic evidence, or
forgo all justification of our expectations about the future. If the principle is
unsound, we have no reason to expect the sun to rise to-morrow, to expect
bread to be more nourishing than a stone, or to expect that if we throw our-
selves off the roof we shall fall. When we see what looks like our best friend
approaching us, we shall have no reason to suppose that his body is not
inhabited by the mind of our worst enemy or of some total stranger. All our
conduct is based upon associations which have worked in the past, and which
we therefore regard as likely to work in the future; and this likelihood is
dependent for its validity upon the inductive principle. 20
Notice Russell’s insistence that all beliefs about the future depend upon the
principle of induction. One cannot have a justified belief about anything not
experienced unless one has justification for the principle of induction upon
which such justification depends. No such belief, in Russell’s view—and in
that of many others—may properly count as justified or as knowledge unless
the principle upon which it depends is justified. I have italicized these refer-
ences to the principle of induction to emphasize the conception of knowledge
implicit in Russell’s and in customary discussions of the problem of induc-
tion.
In all such discussions, of which Russell’s is typical, knowledge is a
result of properly understanding concepts or applying principles in order to
legitimate a result of inquiry as knowledge. But why does considering a good
result of careful inquiry knowledge need justification of a principle an inquir-
er need never consider in carrying out the inquiry? If one wonders why
honey bees throughout the American states are dying off in extraordinary
numbers—to the detriment of agricultural pollination and honey produc-
tion—one carries out an inquiry to discover what might be adversely affect-
ing the bee population. In any such inquiry, the principle of induction is
irrelevant, in spite of the fact that according to Russell and others, apart from
that principle one cannot arrive at a properly justified result of any inquiry. In
the face of these facts about inquiry, what might motivate intellectual effort
designed to “legitimate” the principle of induction? Nothing other than the
inertia of Enlightenment intellectual culture.
The concept of knowledge focused the account in chapter 3 of the differ-
ence between the pragmatist and the “classical” understandings of knowl-
edge. The classical understanding, presented and assumed as uncontroversial
in Paul Boghossian’s attack on pragmatist accounts of knowledge, is the
problematic issue from the perspective of pragmatists. Boghossian’s ques-
tion-begging strategy of argument Dewey himself foresaw in writing his
1908 essay, “A Practical Conception of Philosophy.” As Dewey put his point
in that essay, the issue for philosophers is what knowledge exists as rather
122 Chapter 6
than what any culturally motivated ideology thinks knowledge must be. The
same point must be made in connection with the principle of induction;
philosophical concern about it arises out of the same cultural context and is
motivated by the same ideology. The idea that justified factual knowledge
requires justification for the principle of induction emerges from that same
Enlightenment intellectual culture. Philosophers working in the wake of that
powerful intellectual culture remain committed to its basic understandings of
most philosophically interesting ideas. And such philosophers continue their
Enlightenment intellectual commitments relatively untouched by conflicting
cultural developments in their own Western intellectual world or in the very
different cultures that have developed in non-Western parts of the world.
Perhaps an analogy with another part of Western intellectual culture, science,
can illuminate the problem of choosing between Enlightenment intellectual
culture and its American pragmatist alternative.
In 1887, the Michelson-Morley experiment failed to find differential
speeds for light moving in different directions through its presumed medium
of travel, the ether. Similar experiments had been carried out earlier and were
also carried out later. The failure of the experiment to detect differential
speeds of light through the ether posed a daunting puzzle for physicists at the
end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since
light is a wave, and ether its medium of travel, that experiment or another
more subtly conceived must yield a measure of differential speed in different
directions. But no experimental effort yielded the expected result. (For fur-
ther discussion of this experimental result, see chapter 7.)
Only in 1905 did this puzzle dissolve in the creative hands of Einstein; his
dissolution rested on a conceptual innovation. Light was henceforth to be
conceived as having the same speed in all frames of reference, moving or
not, and as needing no medium for its transmission such as the ether was
conceived to be. Einstein’s response to the Michaelson-Morley conundrum
was a conceptual innovation, a re-conception of the nature of light incompat-
ible with “classical,” Newtonian physics. One might continue to pay “lip
service” to classical conceptions of physics, to make use of them where they
still worked, but those classical conceptions were no longer intellectually
viable. (Similarly, one continues to make use of expressions rooted in the
Aristotelian physics that no one any longer believes, as in “The sun rises in
the east.”)
John Dewey’s 1908 essay, cited extensively in chapter 3 above, suggests
a conceptual innovation similar to Einstein’s, and again in the face of a
regnant philosophical culture that could find no way out of its own conun-
drums. Instead of the “classical” picture of knowledge that has been domi-
nant at least since Descartes, Dewey suggests recovering philosophy through
acknowledging “what knowledge exists as” and also what inquiry exists as.
Dewey’s suggestion is as much a conceptual innovation as is Einstein’s, and
it faces as much skepticism as did Einstein’s conceptual innovation, and even

more. Einstein denied the ether; Dewey denied the classical picture of knowl-
edge and the principle of induction it included. Einstein saw the speed of
light as uniform in every frame of reference; Dewey saw knowledge as a
successful result of careful inquiry that did not depend on justifying the
principle of induction. In each case, “classical” conceptions of reality were
upended and replaced. Apparent differences between Einstein’s replacement
of classical physics and Dewey’s replacement of Enlightenment philosophy
may be instructive.
One might think that Einstein’s conceptual innovation was subject to
empirical testing, whereas Dewey’s conceptual innovation was not. And cer-
tainly Einstein’s innovation was subjected successfully to empirical testing;
Arthur Eddington’s 1919 observations of the altered path of starlight during a
solar eclipse properly confirmed predictions based on Einstein’s conceptual
innovation. By contrast, one might think, empirical testing of Dewey’s con-
ceptual innovation was unavailable. No expedition of the sort Eddington
undertook might conceivably result in empirical confirmation of Dewey’s
innovation. But why not?
Classical physics was conceptually committed to fundamental under-
standings of the physical world in which conundrums about the behavior of
light were deeply rooted. Enlightenment philosophy was conceptually com-
mitted to fundamental understandings of knowledge and justification in
which conundrums about the possibility of knowledge and justification were
deeply rooted. Dramatic conceptual change was required to eliminate conun-
drums about the behavior of light that would have persisted unabated apart
from Einstein’s conceptual creativity. Similarly, dramatic conceptual change
was required to eliminate conundrums about the possibility of knowledge
that remained for Bertrand Russell in his 1902 volume and that linger still for
contemporary philosophers intent upon the principle of induction and the
possibility of knowledge; these too persist unabated apart from Dewey’s
conceptual creativity. But what “experimental evidence” might “confirm”
Dewey’s conceptual creativity?
No scientists, regardless of how technical and subtle their modes of in-
quiry, doubts any result of inquiry on the ground that they have no justifica-
tion for their reliance on the principle of induction. Why is this fact not
experimental evidence for the falsity of the claim that all factual inquiry rests
upon the principle of induction? And this evidence finds reinforcement in the
fact that all efforts to “justify” the principle of induction have continued to
fail from the time of Hume to the present. This failure is analogous to the
failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment. And Dewey’s conceptual inno-
vations about knowledge and inquiry are analogous to Einstein’s conceptual
innovations about the behavior of light. Einstein denied the ether. Dewey
denied the principle of induction.
124 Chapter 6
Another relevant observation about the principle of induction from the

perspective of pragmatism hinges on a pragmatist understanding of belief. In
pragmatism, beliefs are habits, inclinations, dispositions and tendencies to do
things. Believing that God exists or that I might miss my plane is having a
specific battery of habits, inclinations, etc. to do specific things. That humans
have a wide variety of beliefs they are able to formulate and attempt to justify
is a function of natural human behavioral skills, some of which they share
with other species and some of which they do not—language use, musical
composition, conceiving their worlds scientifically, composing poetry, and
so on.
Accepting that one is a member of the animal kingdom, having as do
other members of that kingdom specific and unique biological skills, means
also accepting one’s commonality with other members of that animal king-
dom. One part of recognizing one’s commonality with other species is ac-
knowledging one’s dependence on the same natural world of which all are
part. Humans have habits, inclinations, dispositions and tendencies of behav-
ior they share generally with other Earthly species. One of those beliefs we
share with other species is that we have a future into which we can plan and
for which we can provide. All animals believe that we have futures into
which we can live until the moment of our death; we humans likely differ
from most other species in knowing that we will die and in being able to
imagine our own deaths. Our similarity with other species is partly our be-
lieving, indeed our knowing, that we have futures for which we may plan. To
deny that we are “justified” in having that belief is to impose on us an
ideology about belief that we do not share with our fellow creatures. Ac-
knowledging the larger animal kingdom of which we are members encour-
ages our acknowledgement that we, like other species, share many funda-
mental beliefs about our common world, including the belief that we have
relatively stable, though biologically limited, futures for which we may plan.
(Recall again Dewey’s account of the comparative worth of standards of
behavior—see again the appendix to chapter 3—that includes the fullness
and freedom of communication with other communities; in the present case I
include communities within the larger animal kingdom.) 21
The bottom line for the problem of induction is twofold: (1) it is the
product of a limited intellectual culture intractably committed to a specific
ideology about belief and justification; and (2) the problem of induction and
its conceptualization of belief denies our humanity, our continuity with the
larger animal kingdom.
NOTES
1. This is the last paragraph of the essay. The essay is peppered throughout with references
to the “hostile universe” that “tramples” humanity and its creations; it is widely available in
various collections and online at several sites.
2. Scott L. Pratt, Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002). Pratt gives numerous examples as well as
explications of important works exhibiting each of these attitudes.
3. Pratt, Native Pragmatism, 211.
4. This story of conquest is told again and again in ways that illuminate what it means to be
an American. See, for example, Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian
History of the American West (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1970).
5. Contemporary versions of the Colonial attitude and Russell’s attitude of defiance are
ubiquitous, especially throughout the philosophical world. An example appears in Alvin Plan-
tinga’s work defending Christian exclusivism; see especially his Warranted Christian Belief
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For critique of Plantinga’s perspective, see Stuart
Rosenbaum, “Must Religion Be a Conversation-Stopper?” Harvard Theological Review 102,
no. 4 (2009): 393–409.
6. See Pratt, “Welcoming the Cannibals,” 107–132.
7. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1962).
8. Holmes Rolston, Environmental Ethics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
9. In fact, I find Rolston’s intuitions and his theorizing remarkably plausible in comparison
with many items of contemporary moral theory. Nonetheless, his arguments and intuitions do
not engender the kind of moral respect for the environment Rolston surely intended, a regret-
table fact that probably speaks in favor of the alternative of natural piety and the stories that
occasion it.
10. John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 10: 1934, Art as Experi-
ence, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 40.
11. James’s last essay in Pragmatism begins with Whitman’s poem, “To You,” and one
might think of most of James’s philosophical effort as designed to bring his reader around to
his perspective rather than providing coercive argument to enforce his perspective; James, one
might say, narrated his own psyche through his lectures and saw his lectures as engagements
with his audience rather than as argument designed to support a conclusion.
12. For more extensive discussion of The Lorax as an important value locus for environmen-
tal ethics, see my "Justice, the Lorax and the Environment," Southwest Philosophy Review 30,
no. 1 (2014): 151–159.
13. Mary Oliver, American Primitive (New York, Back Bay Books, 1978), 53.
14. See William James’s Hibbert Lectures published as A Pluralistic Universe (Rockville,
MD: Arc Manor, 2008).
15. I’m not sure Dewey would be fully “onboard” with this idea of our physical universe as
spiritual; however, some commentators on Dewey would fully approve at least of seeing a
spiritual dimension in Dewey’s understanding of our common world. See for example Victor
Kestenbaum, The Grace and the Severity of the Ideal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002).
16. Cormac McCarthy, The Border Trilogy, vol. 1, All the Pretty Horses (New York: Vin-
tage International, 1992), 161–162.
17. See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1888), 155–172.
18. See John Vickers, “The Problem of Induction,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philoso-
phy (March 14, 2014), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/ (accessed Septem-
ber 27, 2014).
19. In addition to the Stanford Encyclopedia entry mentioned in the previous note, see
Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955).
See also the voluminous literature that followed in its wake.
20. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (London: Galaxy Books, 1902), 69.
126 Chapter 6
21. Michael Ruse quotes James Lovelock, a member of Britain’s Royal Society, as follows:
“It may be that the destiny of mankind is to become tamed, so that the fierce, destructive, and
greedy forces of tribalism and nationalism are fused into a compulsive urge to belong to the
commonwealth of all creatures which constitutes Gaia.” J. E. Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at
Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), quoted in Michael Ruse, The Gaia
Hypothesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 24. The spirit of the quotation
captures the idea of commonality within the animal kingdom I intend here. See also in the same
spirit Ruse’s quotation of Mary Midgley, “The Unity of Life,” The Essential Mary Midgley, ed.
David Midgely and James Lovelock (London: Routledge, 2005), 374, quoted in Ruse, Gaia
Hypothesis, 39. Midgley hopes humanity can acknowledge it is part of a larger whole much
greater than itself, or as I put it here, part of the larger animal kingdom of our earthly world.
Chapter Seven
Integrity and Reality
The idea that integrity might have anything to do with reality appears
strange. Reality, we think, is what it is and humans are a part of it needing
explanation of their existence and capacities in terms of the particular real-
ities that yield humans and their capacities. And if integrity is a significant
part of the human world, then it too needs explanation as the particular part
of the human world it is. But the theme of this book is that integrity can be a
pervasive dimension of humanity in all of its engagements in all of its
worlds, psychological, social and cultural, environmental and even physical.
Both James and Dewey saw their world with an optimism and hope in
which genuine ideals might be realized. For both James and Dewey, the
limitations of Enlightenment science and philosophy required, as a minimal
condition of realizing genuine ideals, transcending those limited versions of
science (as reductionist) and philosophy (as intellectualist). And in James’s
liberated thought about science and philosophy, real possibility beckoned
toward a world of larger human adventure rather than the “pinched” world of
compressed possibility that suppressed the human spirit—as it did for exam-
ple in the thought of Bertrand Russell. Previous chapters have shown how the
idea of integrity, implicit in the thought of classical pragmatists, expands into
a world of larger human adventure, hope and possibility. Here finally appear
possibilities for intellectual and human adventure through a different entry-
way into the heretofore Enlightenment-guarded worlds of science and philos-
ophy. Openness to these possibilities needs a spirit of adventure and a will-
ingness to see without the blinders of constraining ideology.
William James especially approached his philosophical and scientific
tasks in the spirit of adventure, and he was willing to hope and to see pos-
sibility where others saw material only for a reductionist science or an intel-
lectualist philosophy. Many scholars are willing to acknowledge this persis-
127
128 Chapter 7
tent optimism and hopefulness in James’s thought; here for example is a

comment by Thomas Alexander:
[James] was not saying that mere mental wishes, propositions held before the
mind’s eye, created reality. He was saying that our understanding of our pos-
sibilities for meaningful action and our aesthetic evaluation of them mattered.
From my most trivial movements to my most momentous life decisions, my
deeds actualize one of many possible worlds and genuinely write part of the
story of the universe as such. 1
A plausible account of Alexander’s meaning, given the content of this chap-

ter, is that James (and perhaps Alexander as well) sees a role for creativity in
our writing “the story of the universe as such.” Reality as such, the universe
itself, may be amenable to human creativity. Among the possibilities James
saw and was open to were his “wild beasts of the philosophic desert.”
WILLIAM JAMES’S WILD BEASTS
James’s wild beasts included primarily paranormal phenomena, and James

himself approached those paranormal phenomena in a spirit of open inquiry. 2
Generally, where “real scientists” were reluctant to risk reputations by in-
quiring into controversial claims—about mediums and séances to contact the
deceased for example—James entered freely into the controversy, joining
with a few unabashed colleagues in science and philosophy to inquire about
the legitimacy of such “wild beast” phenomena. And James never retreated
from his hope to open new possibilities for human adventure through scien-
tific and philosophical inquiry.
James concludes his Hibbert Lectures with a wish to move philosophy
beyond its intellectualistic past:
it is high time for the basis of discussion in these questions to be broadened

and thickened up. It is for that reason that I have brought in Fechner and
Bergson, and descriptive psychology and religious experiences, and have ven-
tured even to hint at psychical research and other wild beasts of the philosoph-
ic desert. . . It is as if the actual peculiarities of the world that is were entirely
irrelevant to the content of truth. But they cannot be irrelevant; and the philos-
ophy of the future must imitate the sciences in taking them more and more
elaborately into account. 3
In James’s broadening and thickening of philosophic discourse, science be-

comes a tool or a model for breaching the intellectualist walls that circum-
scribe philosophy. Fechner and Bergson become fellow workers in the thick-
ening and broadening that moves philosophy in the direction of science.
Integrity and Reality 129
But what is the direction of science James intends? Whatever that direc-
tion it must include his wild beasts of the philosophic desert. The ideology of
Enlightenment-style, rationalistic naturalism that pervades science excludes
James’s beasts and does not yield a productive direction in which to seek the
science James finds useful. A science that respects the wild beasts of the
philosophic desert abandons the materialism and mechanism that were essen-
tial to Enlightenment science. 4
In the more than a century since James wrote those lines, science has
expanded in ways unanticipated during his lifetime, and it has also moved
decisively away from the Enlightenment ideology of science that included
materialism and mechanism. In those intervening years of scientific change,
anything recognizable as materialism or mechanism became as foreign to
science as it would have been to natural philosophers of Aristotle’s time.
SCIENCE SINCE JAMES
William James was apparently unaware of Einstein’s 1905 response to the

failure of the Michelson-Morley experiment to detect variations in the speed
of light through the Ether. 5 James’s lack of awareness of this dramatic result
made his persistent embrace of those wild beasts of the philosophic desert
seem more adventuresome than it would appear a few decades later; Ein-
stein’s denial of the existence of the Ether as a medium for the transmission
of light and his theory of special relativity as an alternative changed the
world of physics forever. 6 And later in the twentieth century, not quite twen-
ty years after James’s death, Heisenberg’s indeterminacy result further con-
founded conventional understandings of the natural world. 7 These two re-
sults alone, along with their elaborations in twentieth century physics, under-
mine understandings of the natural world as a deterministic mechanism in
which humans are something like biochemical machines embedded in what
James called a “block universe.”
Einstein protested against the indeterminacy essential to “the Copenhagen
interpretation” of quantum mechanics in the 1935 paper he did with Podol-
sky and Rosen elaborating “the EPR paradox.” 8 Einstein’s attitude toward
quantum mechanics appears in his own memorable and oft-quoted words,
“God does not play dice with the universe.” The EPR paradox showed that
Quantum Mechanics must be committed to the idea of “non-locality” or
“entanglement” of particles, ideas that flew in the face of Einstein’s own
widely accepted result that the speed of light was an absolute limitation on
physical interactions of any kind. (More later on the ideas of non-locality and
entanglement.) The idea that “natural law” might be ultimately a matter of
probabilities and likelihoods of the sort Heisenberg embraced rather than the
universal, predictive style laws that had dominated scientific thought since
130 Chapter 7
Newton’s 1687 Principia was deeply unsettling to Einstein, as it was gener-

ally in the world of science. And from the perspective of later developments
in physics, Einstein’s protest may seem an almost reactionary response per-
haps rooted in a lingering Enlightenment understanding of science. (That
same ideology remains largely in force in the contemporary worlds of sci-
ence, about which I offer more commentary later.)
Later developments in twentieth century physics repeatedly confirmed
that the physical world could no longer be understood as anything like a
block universe of ultimate elements obeying strict laws and yielding reliable
predictions about those elements’ behavior. I offer more discussion later
about those repeatedly confirmed developments in physics. The rationale for
considering those developments here is their unexpected resonance with di-
mensions of what James thought of as his metaphysics. James’s ideas of
radical empiricism and pure experience are central parts of his metaphysical
perspective, and when these ideas are considered alongside ideas about the
physical world that have emerged from late twentieth century physics,
James’s metaphysics may seem an almost prescient account of an interesting,
scientific way of conceiving the world of contemporary physics. And
James’s suggestion that the wild beasts of the philosophic desert he found so
interesting might appear congenial to the world of science appears again to
suggest that James regarded his metaphysics as compatible with, parallel to
or supported by results of science. The largest point of what follows is that
James was right about his metaphysics being compatible with results of
science and that his wild beasts become as plausible as James might have
hoped within the context of contemporary physics. Begin with James’s meta-
physics.
JAMES’S METAPHYSICS
James’s metaphysics is one of the more vexed topics in James scholarship;

commentators are widely diverse in their reactions to James’s efforts to ex-
press and explain his views. The ideas of pure experience and radical empiri-
cism most commentators regard as the heart of James’s metaphysics, but how
these ideas are properly understood given James’s remarks about them fre-
quently confounds even the most earnest of scholars. 9 Here I simply read
James in what I regard as a plausible way, given my aim of seeing his
metaphysics within a supporting context of the century of science following
his death, a context that sustains and elaborates his interests in the wild beasts
of the philosophic desert.
A Pluralistic Universe and Essays in Radical Empiricism are keys to
James’s metaphysics; these texts embrace a congeries of perspectives that fit
loosely into a weltanschaaung congenial to the various perspectives James
seeks to hold together in his metaphysics. The perspectives for which James
is seeking coherence are these: (1) his decisive rejection of intellectualism in
which he is encouraged by Henri Bergson; (2) his panpsychism in which he
is encouraged by Gustav Fechner; (3) his pluralism, sustained partly by his
adverse reaction to the idealism dominant in his intellectual culture; (4) his
radical empiricism, also encouraged by his adverse reaction to absolute ideal-
ism and also by his respect for experience in all its textures and varieties; and
finally (5) his idea of pure experience, reinforced by that same respect for
experience but also (I believe) by his respect for the intellectual ambition of
the absolute idealists who sought to bring all of reality into a conceptual
unity they thought empiricist accounts must lack. How do these diverse and
difficult to interpret perspectives fit loosely together into a worldview that
might have significance beyond James’s own time and place, significance as
I argue here for a prominent perspective in science, physics in particular, at
the beginning of the twenty-first century? Consider each of these perspec-
tives in turn.
REJECTION OF INTELLECTUALISM
James’s rejection of intellectualism is a function of his large vision of what

philosophy might be, and a function also of his own intellectual character. In
his rejection, one sees who James is and what his vision includes. Two
aspects of James’s reservations about intellectualism stand out. First, James
finds the austere rationality of absolute idealism genuinely unsettling, and for
all the reasons he details in A Pluralistic Universe.
Idealists are monists; they think reality is, in a way that can be detailed
only in rational argument, ONE; that all difference is illusion; that all rela-
tions are “internal” and that these truths are grasped only by reason itself. A
Pluralistic Universe exhibits the mistakes of these idealistic doctrines
through James’s careful critique; see especially James’s chapters on “Monis-
tic Idealism,” “Hegel and his Method” and “Bergson and His Critique of
Intellectualism.” But beyond his direct—and rational—critique of absolute
idealism, James’s second reservation is that absolute idealism ignores the
larger and more significant realities that embed human life.
The world of affect James believed to be at least as significant for human
life and understanding of reality, and likely more significant, than the world
of reason. (Notice for example James’s frequent recourse to poetry and litera-
ture in the body of his philosophical work; Emerson, Whitman and Steven-
son are prominent examples.) Art, consequently, in all of its modes James
finds more important to genuine understanding of the human situation and
reality itself than the discursive reasoning that lead in his time to absolute
idealism. Yet art in all of its affective dimensions remains largely ignored by
132 Chapter 7
those earnest philosophers who seek rational understanding of humanity and

reality. Or if not ignored, art appears at best a diversion from the rational and
discursive work of philosophy. James’s respect for the human and even
ontological significance of art sets a gulf between him and most of his peers.
And most of those peers were wrestling with one or another version of
absolute idealism.
One might suggest parenthetically that a contemporary analogue of the
absolute idealism James found inadequate appears in large swaths of what we
know as analytic philosophy. The commitment to discursive rationality evi-
dent in much analytic philosophy is as vigorous as was the similar commit-
ment of James’s idealist colleagues. And just as James saw need for critique
of those absolutist colleagues along with a turn toward the worlds of art and
affect, he likewise would see similar need in the contemporary world of
philosophy, at least in that large part of it assuming a similar gulf between the
world of reason and the world of affect. In spite of James’s trenchant cri-
tique, intellectualism remains alive and well in the world of contemporary
philosophy.
Admitting affect and art into the otherwise discursive worlds of philoso-
phy moves philosophy at least a bit in the direction of those wild beasts of the
philosophic desert James felt needed nurture. When poetry, music and art
become as central to understandings of humanity and reality as are conclu-
sions derived from discursive technique, then emotional, affective worlds
become as important to self-understanding and to an understanding of reality
as discursively generated conclusions. And in James’s perspective, affect
yields even greater philosophical return than does discursion. And surely
affect has greater affinity with the wild beasts James has in mind—those that
might become subjects of psychical research—than does reason.
PANPSYCHISM
Panpsychism is one of those wild beasts James found attractive. The idea is
that spirit pervades everything, that everything is alive, that experience or
consciousness is characteristic of everything large or small, flora or fauna,
organic or inorganic. To our contemporary psyches, panpsychism appears
benighted, or perhaps more gently a remnant of bygone, primitive thinking
that has no place in our scientifically sophisticated world. Gustav Fechner
was the German thinker James found persuasive in favor of that bygone,
primitive perspective. But what about Fechner might sway so sophisticated a
thinker as James in favor of a view so primitive as panpsychism? Two things.
James finds Fechner’s panpsychism “thick” by contrast with the “thin”
perspectives of the rationalist and idealist thinkers of philosophy. Thickness,
in the relevant sense, incorporates affect as an indispensible part of an appro-
priate perspective on reality. Thinness, in the relevant sense, lops off all but
logically compelling argument in arriving at perspectives on reality. James
gives multiple examples of thinkers who stick to the thin world of logic and
discursive argumentation; these are primarily British absolute idealists, in-
cluding Caird, Haldane, Green and Taylor. Hegel too distinguished himself
as an absolute idealist who, unlike those British idealists James criticized,
happened to see human history as itself realizing the absolute. But Hegel too
suffered from the thinness of technique that infected the British absolute
idealists. Fechner’s thickness empowers his thought through its appeal to our
imagination. Absolute idealism drags us through thickets of discursive argu-
mentation, but it never brings us into worlds of vital engagement with our
families, our communities, our environments or ourselves. Philosophy as
discursive argumentation toward rationally certified conclusions must remain
thin and unappealing. The thickness of science, poetry and literature enables
their vitality of appeal to human psyches.
Fechner’s use of science is the second reason James finds his panpsy-
chism attractive. Fechner’s reasoning was entirely scientific rather than di-
alectical in the fashion of Hegel and other idealists James found unappealing.
Not just the thickness of his view, its poetry-like embrace of affect, but also
the quality of Fechner’s reasoning as scientific empowered his panpsychism
for James.
Hypotheses, and deductions from these, controlled by sense-observations and

analogies with what we know elsewhere, are to be thanked for all of science’s
results.
Fechner used no methods but these latter ones in arguing for his metaphysical
conclusions about reality. 10
James’s determination to bring philosophy back to human reality, to experi-

ence, affect and art enabled him to take seriously many phenomena—those
wild beasts of the philosophic desert, including panpsychism—verboten in
conventional intellectual worlds.
PLURALISM, RADICAL EMPIRICISM AND PURE EXPERIENCE
These ideas are the “big three,” the trinity, of James’s metaphysics, and they
are indeed troubling if one seeks thorough coherence among the constituents
of a thinker’s metaphysics. I take them up concurrently because I find them
interconnected so as to be virtually inaccessible singly.
Pluralism is significantly part of James’s continuing protest against idea-
listic monism; since pluralism is other than monism, indeed its “opposite
pole,” it stands as its brazen opposition, an effect that accords with James’s
134 Chapter 7
distinctive reaction against monism. James’s embrace of pluralism is thus

appropriate in different ways.
One way James’s pluralism is appropriate is in its capture of his opposi-
tion to a “block universe.” For idealist and rationalist monism, all relations
are “internal,” meaning that nothing exists simply as itself in its experienced
relationships; each thing that exists “drags along” the entirety of reality in its
“train.” For monism, every conceivable relationship of any thing is part of
that thing’s essence; nothing has its “own” identity apart from every other
part of reality. James’s pluralism is partly a protest against this “block uni-
verse” understanding of reality; in his view, things have their individuality as
they are experienced. Individual things have their integrity as things in their
“each form” rather than in their “all form;” their experienced and experience-
able relations are definitive of what they are, not their conceivable relations.
James’s pluralism is in this way an integral part of his protest against a
block universe, and it is also part of his protest against the very idea of a
universe in which human creativity is not a significant expression of the most
basic realities of the universe as a whole. Human creativity must be integral
to the structure of reality itself, must contribute to the “essence” of reality.
Reality itself, in James’s view, is in “process,” is progressing toward a future
open to incorporating into its most basic structures results of human creativ-
ity. 11
The human world is a world for which humans are significantly respon-
sible; we only partly “discover” reality, for we partly “create” reality, and
this in the most basic sense of reality. 12 This idea of human creative respon-
sibility for reality itself likely appears radically implausible to most thinkers.
Nonetheless, I believe James is serious and becomes in this way more radi-
cally “existentialist” than even the classic thinkers known as existentialists;
for those classical existentialists—Camus, for example, in for example The
Stranger—reality constrains human freedom to the sort of attitudinal re-
sponse, usually despair, that accommodates a brutal, already-there, discov-
ered reality in which humanity is inconsequential. (Recall, for another exam-
ple, the hostile defiance Bertrand Russell deemed uniquely appropriate to
“the human situation.”)
James’s radical empiricism supports this understanding of his pluralism in
that it makes experienced reality into reality simpliciter. And that reality
simpliciter is reality as experienced; in radical empiricism reality is as it
appears to us, and it has no “gaps,” no “betweens,” that need to be filled in by
relations that need further filling in by further relations and so on ad infini-
tum. 13 Radical empiricism is fully part of James’s pluralism; our experience
is entirely adequate in its representative function, and nothing significant is
left out of that experience. 14 But beyond its support of James’s pluralism, the
idea of radical empiricism also invests the world of affect with a significance
it lacks in traditional empiricism.
Radical empiricism opens the world of philosophy to the significance of

all modes of experience, not just those five sensory modalities that dominat-
ed the philosophical concerns of Locke, Berkeley, Hume and other classical
empiricists. Affect generally, along with its human expressions in art, music,
poetry and literature, becomes in radical empiricism relevant to serious phil-
osophical work.
Since all human experience is as equally of reality as is any other part,
science is no more incisive in its capture of reality than is any other mode of
art. All human activity is equally revelatory of what is, and all such activity is
potentially of equal significance; no particular mode of human activity is
naturally more relevant to getting the truth about the world. And in particu-
lar, science is not. As both James and John Dewey see, science is one useful
mode of human art, a way of getting a handle on our environment toward
specifically human goals. 15 All creativity is revelatory. Science as one mode
of creativity is revelatory, but is no more so than any other mode of creativ-
ity. Radical empiricism is partly James’s equalizer; he does not countenance
invidious struggles for priority among different modes of human creativity.
Another aspect of James’s equalizing comes through the idea of pure
experience. One dimension of that idea is that experience is simply experi-
ence, and no part of experience is, as it were, ontologically different from any
other part of it. All experiences are equally significant, equally pure. A strong
temptation among commentators is to understand pure experience as a spe-
cial kind of ontological “stuff” different from whatever the “stuff” of absolu-
tist monism might be and “closer” to the human world. James, however, is a
bit cagey about what “stuff” pure experience might be and what its ontologi-
cal status might be. In “Does Consciousness Exist?” James says this:
I myself spoke early in this article of a stuff of pure experience. I have now to
say that there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There
are as many stuffs as there are ‘natures’ in the things experienced. If you ask
what any one bit of pure experience is made of, the answer is always the same:
“It is made of that, of just what appears, of space, of intensity, of flatness,
brownness, heaviness, or what not.” 16
James’s determination to have a metaphysics, and to have it different from

any variety of idealistic monism, leads him to the idea of pure experience.
Yet he does not want to propagate the idea of some metaphysical entity of
unique historical kind, perhaps a bit like Leibniz’s monads but different in
some properly experiential way, whatever such “stuff” might look like.
James genuinely wants his metaphysics to be accessible in experience and
through the techniques of science; thus it must be nothing other than the stuff
of experience—tables, chairs, spoons, forks and sailing ships. James says just
after the above quotation, “Experience is only a collective name for all these
sensible natures.” 17
136 Chapter 7
What comes clear in James’s discussions of these matters is his overrid-

ing commitment to experience and its contents as of foundational importance
to philosophy, to his worldview and to his metaphysics. The relevant contrast
is, of course, with the discursive reason that powers the dialectical strategies
embodied in absolute idealism—and in the analytic philosophy of our own
time. Also implicit in James’s commitment to pure experience is his commit-
ment to the strategies and techniques of science. This same commitment was
evident in James’s admiration for Fechner’s panpsychism.
Although they are conceptually troublesome in ways careful readers find
frustrating, nevertheless, James’s ideas of pluralism, radical empiricism and
pure experience come together into a vaguely satisfying vision of what the
human world at large is and also of what humans might make of that world.
One further elaboration about James’s pluralism is desirable.
Since pluralism is an alternative to idealistic monism, it naturally suggests
that James is committed to a plurality of “basic substances,” unlike the single
substance of absolute idealism—Mind—or the dual substances of Cartesian-
ism—Mind and Matter. But what these basic plural substances might be
James provides no clue, and if anything he seems determined to maintain his
commitment apparently to a single “basic stuff,” pure experience, which he
unfortunately denies in the quotation provided just above is any kind of
“general stuff of which experience at large is made.” What then might
James’s pluralism be other than adamant resistance to idealistic monism and
the dialectical strategies that support it, along with his strong but again vague
commitment to experience and the arts that give experience its creative im-
pact in the world?
James’s answer to this question comes primarily in “Does Consciousness
Exist” and “A World of Pure Experience.” A brief answer to the question is
that James’s pluralism is a pluralism not of substances but of histories. Histo-
ries are individuating of all realities, and each history is different from every
other history. Histories are many, different and definitive of realities of all
kinds.
What makes an “objective” world different from a “subjective” world is
not any difference of substance, but rather a difference of “external rela-
tions,” a difference between the experiential relationships into which
“things” of the “objective world” enter as opposed to the experiential rela-
tionships into which “things” of the “subjective world” enter. The difference
between what is objective and what is subjective is a matter of the accidental,
“external,” historical relationships of those things we accord objective exis-
tence rather than subjective existence. 18 The pluralism James has in mind is a
pluralism of indefinite cardinality; the histories in question convey indefinite
varieties of “things,” both subjective and objective, and yet they differ not in
the “stuff” that constitutes them since they are all of the same “stuff;” rather
they differ in their histories.
Dreams, fantasies, visions, drug-induced adventures, engagements in

games of any sort, meditations, body-centered visceral reactions, and in gen-
eral any experience is OF the same “stuff,” pure experience, and differs only
in its external, accidental or intentional relations to other parts of experience.
The differentiating factor that sorts experiences as one or another of these
“kinds” is their historical relationships to other parts of experience. James’s
pluralism is a pluralism not of substances but rather of histories within pure
experience.
But what is the point of one more interesting philosophical idea? Why
should one take James seriously? Philosophers have frequently exhibited
fertile creativity in response to their intellectual contexts, and we have al-
ways been able to discern from an appropriate historical distance the ingenu-
ity of their responses to their contexts. We have been able to respect their
creativity, and we have been able eventually to transcend the need of their
contemporaries either to embrace their results or to engage those results
critically. From a contemporary perspective, we may see Descartes as induc-
ing a “Cartesian Anxiety,” and we may see Kant as delivering his culture
from the Humean skepticism that threatened to engulf it; in both of these
example cases, however, we no longer share the intellectual need that drove
Descartes’s or Kant’s intellectual creativity. What about James’s metaphys-
ics? Are we perhaps able from this century-long perspective on his life and
work to come to constructive or critical judgments about his creativity? This
question is more difficult in James’s case than in the case of other philoso-
phers like Descartes or Kant.
What makes James’s case more difficult is the commitment to reaching
his metaphysical results scientifically. One is entitled to wonder, given the
history of philosophy and its frequently strained relationships with science,
how any metaphysics might find roots in science. And also how philosophy
might retain any semblance of autonomy as a discipline if philosophers like
James avow their determination to embrace science and its results as their
metaphysics? Where is the philosophy in science? Or how is any result of
science to be metaphysical? These questions, along with others, surround
James’s metaphysics and envelop him and it in puzzlement or sometimes
incredulity. What are we to make of such philosophical views?
Some key issues that emerge in James’s discussion and give us troubles
are these: (1) what might “pure experience” be or how might we conceive it?
(2) What are we to make of an “unfinished” universe in which we ourselves
have a creative, constitutive role? And (3) related to both of those questions,
what are we to make of the “things” of our perceptual experience and their
relation to pure experience. Some developments in twentieth century physics
can help with these issues, but first a few words about James’s understanding
of science and some developments in twentieth century science.
138 Chapter 7
JAMES’S SCIENCE
James’s most telling comments about science appear in “Pragmatism and

Humanism.”
By amateurs in philosophy and professionals alike, the universe is represented

as a queer sort of petrified sphinx whose appeal to man consists in a monoto-
nous challenge to his divining powers. The Truth: what a perfect idol of the
rationalistic mind! 19
And a few pages later:
What we say about reality thus depends on the perspective into which we
throw it. The that of it is its own; but the what depends on the which; and the
which depends on us. Both the sensational and the relational parts of reality are
dumb: they say absolutely nothing about themselves. We it is who have to
speak for them. 20
And yet one more quotation, again a few pages later:
The import of the difference between pragmatism and rationalism is now in

sight throughout its whole extent. The essential contrast is that for rationalism
reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is
still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future. On the
one side the universe is absolutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing its
adventures. 21
A contemporary way of capturing the contrast James sees between rational-

ism and pragmatism makes use of the contrast between discovery and crea-
tion. Some anthropologists, for example, believe reality is “relative to” cul-
ture and is not discovered in the way one might discover a coral snake in
one’s garden but is rather created or constructed. These social scientists are
frequently called constructivists, and appear to believe—in an apparently
James-like fashion—that reality is a human creation rather than a pre-exis-
tent, fixed “stuff” that must be discovered and accommodated by appropriate
belief. (See the discussion in chapter 3 of this constructivist perspective.)
This contrast between reality as discovered or as in James’s words a
“petrified sphinx” on one side, and reality on the other side as an ongoing
unfolding that always includes results of human creativity is stark. Intellectu-
al historians have sometimes characterized the “reality as discovered” idea,
perhaps a bit grandiosely, as integral to “The Cartesian project” or “the
Enlightenment project.” The Cartesian project or the Enlightenment project
takes as its intellectual goal making cognitive contact with reality conceived
as already-there-to-be-known. Descartes’s Meditations (1641) yields a clear
example of this conception of reality, as do Newton’s Principia (1687),
Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1740) and Kant’s Critique of Pure

Reason (1787) along with many other classical sources too numerous to
mention. On-going philosophical controversy about knowledge at the begin-
ning of the twenty-first century remains largely committed to the explicit
goal of the Enlightenment project as conceived in these classical sources.
The conception of reality as presumably captured in our best scientific efforts
remains as it was conceived in those classical sources of Enlightenment
philosophy—or again with recourse to James’s rhetoric, reality as a petrified
sphinx. In James’s alternative view, “the trail of the human serpent is over
everything,” including the realities that result from our best scientific re-
search. 22
MORE TWENTIETH CENTURY DEVELOPMENTS
Developments in twentieth century science and philosophy have unsettled

our faith in the Enlightenment project. Although these developments have
been unsettling in many ways, probably one may affirm with some confi-
dence that the unsettling developments have not shaken a ubiquitous faith in
that project. Reality remains largely conceived as a fixed structure having
specific characteristics that must be discovered through experimentation, en-
gagement and creative use of scientific method. The need for engagement
and creativity in approaching that fixed structure does not conflict with the
idea that one must uncover a reality already independently there that may
otherwise remain hidden.
This faith in an Enlightenment conception of reality as fixed independent-
ly of human engagement has become as foundational in philosophy and
science as was, for example, the idea of teleological explanation during the
approximately two thousand year persistence of the Aristotelian world view.
As scientific explanation during those Aristotelian millennia just was teleo-
logical, so during the centuries since the Enlightenment, reality just is fixed
and waiting to be discovered by appropriate technique. William James
marches to a different drummer when he departs so dramatically from that
Enlightenment model of knowledge, truth and reality. Joining James in
marching to that different drummer are John Dewey and pragmatists general-
ly, and perhaps including more recently Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. 23
Some disparate developments in philosophy during the twentieth century
marked an effort, usually not self-conscious, to pull away from the Enlight-
enment model of reality as fixed independently of the human world. In
addition to the classical pragmatists early in the American century, one hears
also some lone voices within the British establishment, including R.G. Col-
lingwood and Ludwig Wittgenstein at mid-century, and perhaps also Iris
Murdoch. Also at mid-century come the American voices of Thomas Kuhn
140 Chapter 7
and W.V.O. Quine. These isolated mavericks were perhaps not as explicit in
their rejection of the Enlightenment model of reality and its accompanying
epistemological problematic as were James and Dewey, but nevertheless
they marked mild protests against the philosophical presumption of that En-
lightenment idea of fixity, or again in James’s distinctive rhetoric, the pet-
rified sphinx conception of reality. Within the philosophical establishment,
historically speaking, protest against the Enlightenment models of reality and
knowledge became muted after the clarion announcements by both James
and Dewey of their alternative understandings of reality, truth and knowl-
edge.
In the world of professional science, however, the pragmatist alternative
of James and Dewey rose in crescendo almost throughout the twentieth cen-
tury. As in philosophy however, large numbers of professional scientists
remain committed to that Enlightenment model of reality, truth and knowl-
edge. For a recent example, begin with a conflict among physicists that turns
on different ideas of reality, truth and knowledge.
STEPHEN HAWKING, LEONARD MLODINOW AND STEVEN

WEINBERG
In their recent The Grand Design, 24 Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodin-
ow admit the difficulty of sustaining the perspective that science yields ac-
counts of reality itself; they seem reconciled to the idea that science may
produce useful results that need not portend nor intimate the long-sought
“theory of everything,” or a comprehensive account of Reality itself. Haw-
king and Mlodinow’s alternative is “model-dependent realism.” In their
words,
Model-dependent realism short-circuits all this argument and discussion be-

tween the realist and anti-realist schools of thought. According to model-
dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether
it agrees with observation. If there are two models that both agree with obser-
vation, . . . then one cannot say that one is more real than another. One can use
whichever model is more convenient in the situation under consideration. 25
Their pragmatist understanding of theories in physics Hawking and Mlodin-

ow later make explicit:
It could be that the physicists’ traditional expectation of a single theory of

nature is untenable, and there exists no single formulation. It might be that to
describe the universe, we have to employ different theories in different situa-
tions. Each theory may have its own version of reality, but according to model-
dependent realism, that is acceptable so long as the theories agree in their
predictions whenever they overlap. 26
And later Hawking and Mlodinow explain their philosophy of science even
more directly:
We seem to be at a critical point in the history of science, in which we must

alter our conception of goals and of what makes a physical theory acceptable.
It appears that the fundamental numbers, and even the form, of the apparent
laws of nature are not demanded by logic or physical principle. The parameters
are free to take on many values and the laws to take on any form that leads to a
self-consistent mathematical theory, and they do take on different values and
different forms in different universes. That may not satisfy our human desire to
be special or to discover a neat package to contain all the laws of physics, but
it does seem to be the way of nature. 27
At this point in their presentation, Hawking and Mlodinow have become

highly flexible in their expectations about how physical theories might cap-
ture the realities they intend. The concepts embedded in physical theories and
their relationships may take any form that is mathematically consistent. No
concepts or account of the relations among those concepts is required by an
adequate theory of physical reality. Whatever works to yield an appropriate
understanding and, where possible, useful predictions signals successful sci-
ence. Hawking and Mlodinow are pragmatists in their philosophy of science.
In his review of Hawking and Mlodinow’s book, Steven Weinberg is
complimentary, but he is also critical, and especially of their pragmatist
account of results in science. 28 Here is Weinberg’s comment:
Hawking raises a striking and disturbing possibility that perhaps there is no

underlying theory, that all we will ever have is a number of approximate
theories, each valid under different circumstances, and agreeing with each
other where the circumstances overlap. Here the nice analogy with maps of the
earth breaks down. It is true that one cannot make a reliable map of the whole
earth’s spherical surface on a flat sheet of paper, but after all there is an earth,
not just a bunch of overlapping approximate maps. 29
Weinberg’s reaction to Hawking and Mlodinow’s analogy of the relation

between scientific theories and reality to the relation between maps of the
earth and the earth itself suggests that he remains committed to what I called
above the Enlightenment model of the relationship between science and real-
ity. And naturally enough, any pragmatist thinker would challenge Wein-
berg’s use of the map metaphor, as would also Hawking and Mlodinow: the
earth is not an appropriate analogue of reality itself, and the analogy has
limitations even though it may be useful as an illustration of how pragma-
tists, along with Hawking and Mlodinow, view the relation between physical
theories and reality. And Weinberg later admits he has no evidentially repu-
table response to the pragmatist view.
142 Chapter 7
Questions about the nature of reality have puzzled scientists and philosophers
for millennia. Like most people, I think that there is something real out there,
entirely independent of us and our models, as the earth is independent of our
maps. But this is because I can’t help believing in an objective reality, not
because I have good arguments for it. I am in no position to argue that Haw-
king’s antirealism is wrong. But I do insist that neither quantum mechanics nor
anything else in physics settles the question. 30
Weinberg’s “confession” that he has no good reason for believing in an

“objective reality” is appropriate, for that model of reality is one large part of
the common and largely unselfconscious inheritance bequeathed by the En-
lightenment; it is a cornerstone of our scientific and philosophical worldview
that finds expression throughout our intellectual culture and indeed in our
culture at large. But as Weinberg honestly confesses, he has no good reason
for his view that “objective reality” is “out there” independently of human
activity or creativity. And one might imagine that during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries similarly honest respondents might have confessed
their own inability to provide good evidence for their fundamental belief in
teleological explanation, one of their own cultural inheritances from the Aris-
totelian science that remained regnant in their day.
As James saw, most of us most of the time live lives of presumption, lives
infused with many beliefs that shape our worlds in definitive ways we are
frequently unable to articulate. During the millennia of Aristotelian science,
belief in teleological explanation was a bedrock of all life and thought. Dur-
ing the Enlightenment and centuries following it belief in an objective, mind-
independent reality—“objective reality” in Weinberg’s formulation—is
equally a bedrock foundation of thought. But James and the pragmatists,
along now with Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow and others, see the
culture-nourished, or at least “contingent” roots of these bedrock beliefs.
To see the culture-nourished roots of such beliefs is to know that, no
matter how unquestioned such beliefs may be, alternative beliefs may be
equally plausible, convincing or useful. And to know this unsettling fact
about culturally foundational beliefs, as do Hawking and Mlodinow, in effect
following James—and Dewey as well—is to know that, using James’s lan-
guage, though the that may be given, the what or which is up to us. And to
put James’s claim about science into another more current perspective one
may recall too Thomas Kuhn’s history-circumscribed understanding of sci-
ence as rooted in “paradigms” for which discursive efforts at justification
fail. 31
For this Kuhnian, historical perspective about the content of science,
there is little surprise in the millennia long commitment to Aristotelian
modes of explanation, and there is also little surprise in the post-Enlighten-
ment commitment to an independent, objective reality that is the cognitive
goal of human theorizing. All human activity, including the activity of sci-
ence, happens within parameters set by “local” ways of conceiving the world,
even when these local ways of conceiving may be spread across large swaths
of time and geography. Such local ways of conceiving, while they remain
local nevertheless contain such large phenomena as Aristotelian physics and
Enlightenment science. James’s understanding of science incorporates this
historically situated idea of it, as does also John Dewey’s understanding of it.
In James’s metaphysics, however, these facts about science and its roots in
history and paradigm-circumscribed thought have dramatic implications for
humanity.
SOME PHYSICS AND SOME METAPHYSICS
I am acutely aware that venturing into intellectual arenas beyond my custo-

mary domain of philosophy puts me on thin ice. However, augmenting
James’s perspective into the world of science beyond his own early twentieth
century perspective requires something of an adventuresome spirit in trying
to come to grips with conceptions of the physical world that have come into
focus since his death. The pragmatism that appears in Hawking and Mlodin-
ow’s The Grand Design barely scratches the surface of the potential reso-
nance between James’s metaphysics and scientific developments during the
twentieth century. My own probing into these scientific developments sug-
gests that, as in philosophy, the world of science yields, roughly speaking,
two sorts of thinker.
One sort of thinker seeks to produce results that elaborate or refine results
already achieved or to accommodate recalcitrant experimental data through
some theoretical innovation consistent with goals and results already ac-
cepted. In Thomas Kuhn’s way of looking at science, these thinkers are
workers within a “paradigm,” and are likely thoroughly committed to modes
of justification and analysis current for that particular paradigm. (This idea of
a paradigm is a vague idea much appropriated and little analyzed, much to
the disapproval of this first sort of scientific thinker.) The second sort of
thinker is more inclined to step back from the result-orientation of the first
sort in order to get historical perspective on the assumptions that motivate
activities within conceptual parameters of the paradigm.
The different attitudes are on one side those of doing the science and
getting the results, and on the other side understanding the assumptions,
along with their historical sources, that contextualize the doing and result
getting. One focal attitude derives from the need to have and acquire justifi-
cation, experimentally or conceptually, for one’s results. The other focal
attitude derives from the need to have and acquire explanation, historically or
genealogically, for basic assumptions that contextualize the activity of result
seeking.
144 Chapter 7
When we are talking philosophy, one can easily sort these different ap-
proaches to the discipline. Plato, for example, turns us toward justification.
Nietzsche turns us toward genealogy. In Euthyphro and Meno, Plato shows
us how to think in the mode of justification. In A Genealogy of Morals,
Nietzsche shows us how to think in the mode of genealogy. And all of
philosophy and all philosophers can be sorted into one or the other of these
two basic approaches to issues and perspectives within the discipline. One
might say much about these different approaches to issues and sources within
philosophy. 32 For the present, however, I need only point out that scientists
are as much liable to this sorting of their intellectual dispositions as are
philosophers.
Historians of science tend naturally, by virtue of their discipline, to seek
developmental understanding of science, and are sensitive to historical and
conceptual alternatives to current assumptions about the nature of scientific
inquiry. Physicists, too, like philosophers, tend to divide into those who, in
thinking about their discipline are more or less sensitive to its historical
development and those who focus rather on getting results and justifying
them. These two approaches to physics are of course not exclusive within the
individuals who practice physics, and individual physicists generally (as do
philosophers) fall on a continuum between the justification end and the ex-
planation/genealogy end. In the above controversy between Hawking and
Mlodinow on one side and Weinberg on the other, one sees that Hawking and
Mlodinow in their pragmatism tend toward the explanation/genealogy end of
that continuum, and that Weinberg in his realism tends rather toward the
justification end of that continuum.
These remarks about intellectual dispositions in practitioners of theoreti-
cal disciplines are prefatory to my confession that in what follows I have
attended primarily to historians of science and physicists with an intellectual
disposition toward the explanation or genealogy end of the justification/
explanation continuum. And I have focused in this way because I believe that
James’s interests in securing his metaphysical views scientifically may be
most fully illuminated in this way. Not only do developments within physics
itself during the twentieth century resonate with James’s metaphysical views,
but so also do developments within the history of science, along with con-
temporary physicists’ genealogical reflections about their discipline. Consid-
er first those promising developments during twentieth century physics that
appeared subsequent to James’s life and work.
TWENTIETH CENTURY PHYSICS, A BRIEF ACCOUNT
In 1905, Einstein responded to the failure of the Michelson-Morley experi-

ment with the theory of special relativity; his theory held that the speed of
light was constant in every frame of reference, moving or not. This result
Einstein suggested could explain the failure of the Michelson-Morley experi-
ment to detect any variation of the speed of light through the ether, its
presumed medium of travel as a wave. And in 1916, Einstein proposed his
general theory of relativity that made space and time conceptually interde-
pendent. Space-time was the new concept that bespoke the new understand-
ing of space and time as inseparable. 33
Previous to Einstein’s conceptual innovation in thought about space and
time, the Newtonian ideas of them had been operative since 1687. And in
1787, Kant made space and time separate forms of a priori intuition, thus
buttressing philosophically—interestingly as part of his effort to defeat Hu-
mean skepticism—Newton’s absolute and independent concepts of space and
time. Einstein’s replacement of Newtonian ideas of space and time was thus
also a displacement of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, along with its a
priori forms of intuition as they appeared in The Critique of Pure Reason.
Einstein’s conceptual innovation about space and time was followed
shortly by Heisenberg’s account of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg’s 1927
publication was once again a radical revision in the conceptual content of
Newtonian mechanics. For those objects known as electrons, Heisenberg
showed that they cannot be “canonical” objects in any sense countenanced by
Newtonian mechanics, for they do not have the properties all Newtonian
objects essentially have; to be precise, they do not have both determinate
position and determinate momentum, essential properties of all Newtonian
objects. Here is John Dewey’s way of putting Heisenberg’s result in Dewey’s
1929 Gifford lectures.
The logic of the matter is not complicated. [Heisenberg] showed that if we fix,
metrically, velocity, then there is a range of indeterminateness in the assign-
ment of position, and vice-versa. When one is fixed, the other is defined only
within a specified limit of probability. The element of indeterminateness is not
connected with defect in the method of observation but is intrinsic. The parti-
cle observed does not have fixed position or velocity, for it is changing all the
time because of interaction: specifically, in this case, interaction with the act of
observing, or more strictly, with the conditions under which an observation is
possible; for it is not the “mental” phase of observation which makes the
difference. Since either position or velocity may be fixed at choice, leaving the
element of indeterminacy on the other side, both of them are shown to be
conceptual in nature. That is, they belong to our intellectual apparatus for
dealing with antecedent existence, not to fixed properties of that existence. 34
Dewey here explicitly interprets Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics as forcing

the perspective about reality James had earlier expressed by saying, “The
that of it is its own; but the what depends on the which; and the which
depends on us.” 35 Our concepts of reality are our contributions to the consti-
146 Chapter 7
tution of our world, and those concepts change historically with the change in
our accounts of that world.
These two developments within physics have or should have altered dra-
matically our understanding not only of our world, but also our understand-
ing of reality itself, whatever we intend by that idea. Reality, in every sense
whether physical or metaphysical, changes through our various, active en-
gagements with our world. Our concepts of physical reality, in Dewey’s
words, “belong to our intellectual apparatus for dealing with antecedent exis-
tence.” The “that” does not give us the “what” or the “which;” what and
which are up to us. James did not live to see these dramatic revisions in the
what and the which that he somehow discerned must surely come, but he
would have been gratified, as was Dewey, by these developments in physics.
As did Dewey, James would have seen these developments as confirmation
of his pragmatist accounts of reality, truth and knowledge. But there is more.
Einstein’s theory of gravity or space-time is now experimentally con-
firmed and widely accepted, as is Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics. The two
theories are, however, incompatible and need reconciliation into a more fun-
damental theory that accommodates the fact that both are experimentally
confirmed and widely accepted. How to achieve such reconciliation is not
obvious; in fact, it appears physically impossible without some equally radi-
cal conceptual innovation in our understanding of physical reality. 36
And Einstein’s disaffection with quantum mechanics is well known; his
“God does not play dice with the universe” remark is a succinct expression of
his reservations about quantum mechanics. In 1935, along with his col-
leagues, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, Einstein published “Can Quan-
tum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?”
This well-known paper gave Einstein’s reason for thinking quantum mechan-
ics must be defective as a description of reality.
The reason Einstein found definitive against quantum mechanics was the
possibility he found embedded in that theory of faster than light connections
between different particles. But such faster than light connections are, by
Einstein’s own theory of relativity, impossible; thus quantum mechanics sim-
ply had to be mistaken. Niels Bohr responded to this “EPR paradox” by
suggesting that perhaps the “different particles” in Einstein’s argument were
not indeed different particles, but merely “aspects” of the same reality that
manifested on the occasion of observation. For Bohr and others, quantum
mechanics was too well confirmed to be doubted, and whatever conceptual
compromises the theory required would have to be made. Even conceptions
of reality were negotiable. For Einstein, on the contrary, the speed of light
was an absolute limit on interactions of particles, and violations of that limit
were impossible.
As luck would have it, almost fifty years later, experimental evidence
appeared that confirmed as real and genuine the “impossibility” Einstein
believed stood in the way of quantum mechanical conceptions of reality.

Alain Aspect and his colleagues at the University of Paris proved experimen-
tally that photons did indeed “communicate” at speeds greater than the “ab-
solute limit” of the speed of light. And the Aspect experiment has been
performed many times in different laboratories and always with the same
result: photons do transcend the absolute speed limit mandated by Einstein’s
theory of relativity. The conceptual puzzle this result poses for our concept of
reality is daunting. Recall the title of the EPR paper: “Can Quantum-Me-
chanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” 37
Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen explicitly conceived themselves as object-
ing to a particular conception of physical reality. What is at stake customarily
in, so to say, “large” theories in physics—Aristotelian, Newtonian, Einstei-
nian or quantum mechanical—is an understanding of physical reality itself.
And different understandings of physical reality, as is obvious in these histor-
ical transitions and competitions, take their places on the stage of history and
wax and wane in their turn with the currents of thought that alternately
enable and undermine them. The critical questions that come in the wake of
repeated experimental confirmations of quantum mechanics are these: how
may we conceive physical reality? How should we conceive physical reality?
What conceptual alternatives enable a sensible approach to the idea of reality
as it appears on the stage of twentieth century physics? Historians of science
and genealogically sensitive physicists, along with others, suggest interesting
answers to these questions.
“PHYSICAL REALITY”
Reality conceived as physical in accord with our best scientific theories is at

best vague and indistinct. Historians of science and physicists of a philosoph-
ical disposition become acutely aware of the historical variability in the idea
of physical reality and also of the vagueness in efforts to communicate con-
cepts of reality. The twentieth century results and theories mentioned above
require understandings of reality quite different from the materialism and
mechanism characteristic of Newtonian physics. “Non-locality” and “entan-
glement” are terms used to characterize prominent features of reality con-
ceived in accord with quantum mechanics.
Particles are non-locally connected—as experimental results like the As-
pect experiment definitively require—when they are connected in ways that
confound explanation; they respond as though they are one rather than two,
as though they are connected in just the way parts of one’s body are con-
nected as parts of one whole. As one’s right hand need not find a way to
cause a response in one’s left hand—since they are typically working togeth-
er and mutually aware of their different dispositions and responses—so parti-
148 Chapter 7
cles normally thought independent behave as though they are connected with
the same oneness as are one’s hands as they carry out any typical task. And
any particles or objects thus non-locally connected are said also to be “entan-
gled.” What conception of reality accommodates the ideas of non-locality
and entanglement? Many historians and physicists respond to this question
by radically expanding or revising their understanding of reality. Among
those who believe that conceptions of reality are negotiable are David Bohm,
Roger S. Jones and Morris Berman.
University of Minnesota Physicist, Roger S. Jones argues that each cardi-
nal idea of physics—space, time, matter and number—is a metaphor that
arises out of the human need to bring order and productivity to our encounter
with nature. 38 These metaphors Jones admits to be useful in our intercourse
with the natural world, but he sees them as arising out of human need along
with the associated creative impulses that give shape and direction to that
need. The content of those metaphors he suggests varies across time and
culture. And Jones is disturbed that our human engagement with, using
James’s words, the that of our experience we typically mistake for discovery
of an antecedent reality independent of our own creative contributions. 39
Here are Jones’s words in protest against our ignorance of our own creative
participation in the natural world:
One of the greatest creative achievements of the human mind, modern science,
refuses to recognize the depths of its own creativity, and has now reached the
point in its development where that very refusal blocks its further growth.
Modern physics screams at us that there is no ultimate material reality and that
whatever it is we are describing, the human mind cannot be parted from it.
And yet we turn deaf ears to this profound cry. True, we don’t know how to
accommodate this idea: we don’t know how to modify or enlarge physics so as
to assimilate the mind which it has for so long exiled from its territory. But
that is a poor excuse. We are acting out of fear and ignoring the moral respon-
sibility inherent in our creative act. It is time to acknowledge and exercise our
own redemptive powers. And there are clues all around us—in psychology, in
philosophy, in the arts, and elsewhere. 40
Jones’s view is that the metaphors that control our understandings of the
physical world are one and all optional; the crux of the matter for our physi-
cal theories is their sources in human need and creativity. Few would deny
Jones’s view if his topics were art, music or poetry. Our dualistic culture,
however, insists on the distinction between science and the arts or human-
ities, so Jones’s voice like those of sympathetic others falls largely on deaf
ears. What is at stake, however, in these different perspectives is the content
of the idea of reality itself. Are we humans responsible—in any way—for the
content of reality?
Morris Berman, a historian of science, also believes humans are signifi-

cantly responsible for the content of reality, and he contrasts the current
majority opinion about reality as discovered with the pre-Enlightenment,
alchemical understanding of reality as a result of creative human participa-
tion with an amenable that—again using William James’s suggestive termi-
nology. 41 Berman agrees with Jones that reality is not a fixed item indepen-
dent of human participation, and he regrets the segregation of humanity from
reality embedded in our Enlightenment-inspired understanding of science.
Since the Enlightenment, humanity has, in Berman’s historical perspective,
become isolated from reality itself, and has become so precisely because of
conceptual innovations about science rooted in Enlightenment ideology. Hu-
mans are no longer creative participants in constituting reality, but have
instead themselves become biochemical objects for scientific study and on
their subjective side, rootless consumers. The dualism that became intellectu-
ally required in Descartes and canonical in Newton transformed humans into
objects of scientific study and epiphenomenal subjects for manipulation dur-
ing their productive years as consumers of commerce. Both Jones and Ber-
man believe the metaphors that circumscribe understanding of the physical
world significantly affect human psyches. But beyond Jones and Berman’s
insistence on the idea that science is a product of human creativity and that
our beliefs about it dramatically affect our understanding of who and what
we are as humans, David Bohm, another philosophically minded physicist,
expresses similar dissatisfaction with the Enlightenment model of reality and
also with the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics; in Bohm, however, this
dissatisfaction motivates a scientific view that is recognizably metaphysical
as well.
DAVID BOHM
In David Bohm’s view, quantum mechanics requires a revision in our under-

standing of reality itself; he believed we could not be satisfied simply accept-
ing experimental results without also having a conception of the reality that
might cohere with those results. 42 Bohm required a concept of reality that
enabled the experimental results of Alain Aspect’s confirmation of particle
entanglement and non-locality. Bohm achieved that concept of reality in his
idea of the quantum potential, or alternately expressed, the implicate order.
Bohm’s response to relevant experimental results, along with his philo-
sophical proclivities, enabled his reconceiving of physical reality, yielding a
conception many would regard as no more physical than metaphysical. In
Bohm’s view, the only conception of physical reality coherent with relevant
experimental results sees it as a whole (a “holomovement”) out of which
experiential reality emerges. The quantum potential is the underlying whole
150 Chapter 7
having an unsuspected unity that becomes evident only in experimental re-

sults like those of Aspect and his colleagues. The unity, or wholeness, of the
quantum potential is reality “itself,” while the things characteristic of our
material world emerge out of that underlying reality into experience. Bohm
proposes a large-scale conception of reality, again a conception evidently no
more physical than metaphysical that enables our understanding of experi-
mental results. The conception of reality Bohm produces, however, is highly
controversial and perhaps is so largely because of its mixing of physics and
metaphysics.
The relationship between the implicate order, the wholeness underlying
all things, and the explicate order, the world of experienced reality, is in
Bohm’s thought a relationship between a stable, “sub-experiential” world
and a relatively changeable experiential world, the world of everyday experi-
ence. This conceptualization of the relation between reality itself and reality
as experienced seemed to Bohm required by experimental results along with
conceptual changes already forced by developments in twentieth century
physics. And as Michael Talbot makes clear, Bohm’s way of conceptualizing
the relation between reality and experience is coherent with and supportive of
many wild beasts of the philosophic desert never imagined even by William
James. 43 Bohm’s conceptualization of reality is motivated by a desire to have
an understanding of the physical world coherent with well-established ex-
perimental results in full awareness that those results do not themselves
convey any such conceptualization; the idea of reality must be negotiated
into as adequate an account as we are able to produce within our own cultural
context. But it turns out that Bohm’s account of physical reality harmonizes
distinctly with James’s account of metaphysical reality. And since each of
these thinkers arrived at their conceptions of reality independently almost a
century apart, their conceptual harmony illuminates both of their views.
Parenthetically, I add that Bohm’s conception of reality produces a view
about the nature of science that accords fully with that of Hawking and
Mlodinow, and with that of James and Dewey as well. And of course Bohm
disagrees with Weinberg. Here is Bohm on science:
To give primary significance to the undefinable and immeasurable holomove-

ment implies that it has no meaning to talk of a fundamental theory, on which
all of physics could find a permanent basis, or to which all the phenomena of
physics could ultimately be reduced. Rather, each theory will abstract a certain
aspect that is relevant only in some limited context, which is indicated by some
appropriate measure. 44
What follows are explicit remarks about the harmony between James’s meta-
physics and Bohm’s physics.
JAMES AND BOHM
James’s pure experience is analogous to Bohm’s quantum potential, impli-

cate order or holomovement. Both are, conceptually speaking, a kind of
unitary stuff of or motivated by or underlying or unfolding into the experi-
enced things of everyday life—knives, forks, tables, houses, ships, Memorial
Hall, Emerson Hall, Paris, Woonsocket, etc. And James’s reluctance to think
of pure experience as different from those ordinary things seems motivated
by his confessed inability to give account of anything like a relation between
“two levels” of reality; in fact, James’s denial that consciousness exists he
sees to be required by the impossibility of accounting for any significant
relation between “dual aspects” of reality, and he wants himself not to get
involved in that impossible project. As James puts this resistance to dualism,
“Experience is only a collective name for all these sensible natures,” 45 a
palpable evasion of the obvious question of the relationship between the that
and the what of which “all these sensible natures” are manifestations.
James’s anti-dualistic instincts are exactly right, and fortunately Bohm an-
swers this question that James evades.
Bohm’s answer comes in the metaphor of the holograph. (Almost every-
body has seen and recalls the holograph of Princess Leia near the beginning
of Star Wars, the 1970s film about intergalactic wars.) Bohm conceives the
universe—all of reality actually—as a “holomovement” in which “things”
unfold, like a holograph emerges from manipulation of lasers, from the impli-
cate order into the explicate order. There is no “ontological” difference be-
tween the underlying implicate order and the experiential explicate order;
rather, there is a function of “unfolding” that brings “thingly order” and the
spatio-temporal ordering of experience. The “relationship” between the im-
plicate order and the explicate order is not a difference between things or
substances as these are understood within the historical contexts of physics
and philosophy. The difference is rather, recurring to the earlier account of
James’s pluralism, a matter of the histories of sequences of experience. In
this precise way, Bohm’s account of the relationship between the quantum
potential and the world of ordinary experience mirrors James’s account of the
relationship between pure experience and the things of ordinary experience.
And notice also James’s suggestion that experience is only a “collective
name” for particular experiences.
James’s use of the term “collective name” is suggestive though a bit
misleading. General terms are usually intimated by the idea of a collection.
In order to have a general term, however, one needs the plural of the singular
“experience,” as in “I had an experience (singular)” or “I had a series of
experiences (general/collective).” But experience as James is using it is nei-
ther singular nor general; it is rather what Quine has called a mass term, like
“water” or “green,” etc. A mass term designates a mass of undifferentiated
152 Chapter 7
stuff, like water. 46 James’s intention to use what he names a collective term
in the sense of what Quine calls a mass term, however, is evident in James’s
talk about pure experience.
James’s use of “experience” as a mass term is also fortunate in that it
enables the idea he intends, that individual objects of experience are not
different in their constitution from the that of which they are constituted.
Tables, chairs and other things of ordinary experience do not differ in the
“stuff” of which they are constituted, no more than do particular quantities of
water—glasses of water, bottles of water, etc.—differ in the stuff of which
they are constituted from the water (mass term here) that is divided into the
various quantities and containers that limit it. Again as James puts it: the that
is already there; the what and the which are up to us. And reiterating the point
already made, the relation between experience and the things of experience is
analogous to the relation in Bohm between an underlying implicit order and
an experiential explicit order. And as in James, the what is up to us, so in
Bohm too the what is also up to us. And Bohm’s openness to the wild beasts
of the philosophic desert James finds so fascinating appears just as strong as
it does in James. In Bohm, however, that openness comes through his con-
ceptual struggles with late twentieth century physics, while James’s comes
through the different route available to him at the outset of the twentieth
century.
Much more might be said about James and Bohm and the wild beasts that
intrigued the two of them. The central point here, however, is simply to take
note of the resonance between their views about reality and experience; to
note that their respective weltanschaaungen do not differ greatly; and to
notice as well their mutual commitment to science along with its openness to
a conceptual malleability that might include James’s wild beasts. 47
SUMMARY REMARKS
At the outset of the preceding chapter on environmental integrity appeared a

quotation from John Dewey about natural piety. Now it appears that the idea
of natural piety applies not just in the context of thought about the environ-
ment but also in the larger context of thought about the universe as a whole.
James’s concerns to escape the dualistic tendencies of philosophy led him to
a metaphysics that embedded humanity more deeply in the natural world
than was envisioned even in Dewey’s idea of natural piety. Perhaps one
should think of James’s thought about metaphysics and science as a natural
extension of Dewey’s thought about the role of humanity in the natural
world.
One might see Dewey’s genealogical approach to traditional issues in
philosophy as inspiring an a-metaphysical naturalistic philosophy. Carica-
tures of Dewey’s thought see him as something like a self-effacing positivist-

atheist, a badly mistaken caricature for those familiar with Dewey’s work.
But the naturalism pinned on Dewey is undoubtedly a good characterization
of his consistent perspective, even though there is nothing scientistic about
his naturalism; no ideology about what the correct content of a scientific
perspective must contain appears in any of Dewey’s work. That having been
said, however, one must admit also that where Dewey is open about possibil-
ities for the content of science, James pushes toward an account of the con-
tent of science that is amenable to his much-revered paranormal phenomena,
those infamous wild beasts of the philosophic desert. Both of these classical
pragmatists would gladly embrace the experiential contents of a Bohmian
holographic universe, along with the amalgamation of physics and metaphys-
ics it requires. From the perspective of this book, the definitive characteristic
of such a composite science-and-philosophy perspective is its reintegration
of humanity into the natural world.
Natural piety, in Dewey’s account, becomes at James’s urging a way of
taking responsibility not just for our environment and its earthly home, but
also for the content of reality itself. James’s panpsychism, expressed in his
admiration of Gustav Fechner and the science that enabled Fechner’s
views—along undoubtedly with Henry James Sr.’s Swedenborgian influ-
ence—may become at the beginning of the twenty-first century a construc-
tive, perhaps even ennobling, perspective. Enabling James’s panpsychism,
however, requires a James-like determination to resist dualistic philosophy
and science, along with its Enlightenment-inspired conception of reality, and
to seek instead the integrity that is being-human-in-our-universe, along with
its attendant moral, social, environmental and scientific/metaphysical respon-
sibilities.
NOTES
1. Thomas M. Alexander, The Human Eros: Eco-Ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 169. I acknowledge the vagueness in Alexan-
der’s remark; however, it surely embraces James’s idea of the significance of individual crea-
tivity in “constituting” the universe. (“Constituting” is between quotation marks there because
of the need to spell out the various kinds of creativity it might be acknowledging in James’s
philosophy.)
2. A good account of James’s interest in these paranormal phenomena appears in Deborah
Blum’s Ghost Hunters (New York: Penguin Books, 2007). See also William James, A Pluralis-
tic Universe (Rockville, MD: Arc Manor, 2008), 112–133, especially “The Continuity of Expe-
rience” and “Conclusions.”
3. James, William, A Pluralistic Universe (Rockville, MD: Arc Manor, 2008), 133.
4. The idea of reality in James’s thought is difficult. Here I take James at those words that
appear primarily in his Hibbert Lectures from which I take the quotation at the outset of this
chapter. For samples of the more scholarly and careful treatments I here evade, see for exam-
ple, Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1986), 307–343; Wesley Cooper, The Unity of William James’s Thought (Nashville, TN:
154 Chapter 7
Vanderbilt University Press, 2002), 168–187; Richard Gale, The Divided Self of William James
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1999), 273–332; David Lamberth, William James
and the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially
9–60. The interpretation of James’s metaphysics I embrace here seems to mesh thoroughly with
these developments in twentieth century physics that I elaborate here; I elaborate that interpre-
tation herein as best I can without entering the scholarly controversy that appears in these
sources and many others. I do note that most of these interpreters of James are not sympathetic
to the perspective I here embrace. Wesley Cooper, for example, says this: “The reader will
notice that I have ignored James’s lifelong interest in paranormal phenomena, which turned out
to be, I believe, a blind alley.” William James’s Thought, 35.
5. James mentions Ether-waves in his 1905 essay “A World of Pure Experience,” in Essays
in Radical Empiricism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 36.
6. For an accessible account of the Michelson-Morley experiment and Einstein’s response
to it, see Hans Reichenbach’s From Copernicus to Einstein (New York: Philosophical Library,
1942).
7. Indeterminacy and its implications for problems of Enlightenment philosophy are ex-
plained in John Dewey’s Gifford Lectures, published in 1929, just two years after Heisenberg
published his account in 1927. See John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953,
vol. 4: 1929, The Quest for Certainty, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1988). For further explication of indeterminacy and its theoretical signifi-
cance, see Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1981).
8. See A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of
Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New
Jersey, http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~stief101/epr_latex.pdf. (accessed September 27, 2014).
9. Even a brief listing of efforts to interpret James’s views about pure experience and
radical empiricism yields a wide variety of reactions, including dismissal, incredulity and
confusion. Again, these reactions are elicited even from the most sincere and careful of inter-
preters. See the brief listing of efforts mentioned in footnote 1.
10. James, Pluralistic Universe, 61.
11. William James, "Pragmatism and Humanism," in Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1975), 115–129.
12. My primary sources for these claims are James’s Pluralistic Universe, especially its last
chapter, “Conclusions,” and his Essays in Radical Empiricism, especially “Does Consciousness
Exist” and “A World of Pure Experience,” along with the concluding chapter of Pragmatism,
“Pragmatism and Religion.” A Pluralistic Universe (Rockville, MD: Arc Manor, 2008).
13. For an elaboration of this problem, see William James, “Monistic Idealism,” A Pluralis-
tic Universe (Rockville, MD: Arc Manor, 2008).
14. For a technically proficient discussion of James’s idea of radical empiricism, along with
its myriad conceptual difficulties, see Lamberth’s Metaphysics of Experience, 9–60. Most
secondary sources on James also give useful attention to this idea. (I add parenthetically that I
find most of these sources unsatisfying, largely because their focus on James’s conceptual
intent and conceptual difficulties in the idea of radical empiricism tends to obscure the vision
James himself was trying to capture. I hope here to finesse those conceptual difficulties by
focusing more deliberately on James’s vision.)
15. This idea in James is clear in his efforts to explain what he means in his efforts to give
account of the idea of truth as an outcome of human activity directed toward some specific
goal; see for example William James, "Pragmatism's Conception of Truth," in Pragmatism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 95–113. This idea of science is ubiquitous
in Dewey, but see for example Dewey’s Art as Experience, in John Dewey, The Later Works of
John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 10: 1934, Art as Experience, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale,
IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 80.
16. William James, "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" in Essays in Radical Empiricism (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 14.
17. James, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” 15.
18. James writes, “The two worlds differ, not by the presence or absence of extension, but
by the relations of the extensions which in both worlds exist.” “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?”
17.
19. The Works of William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1975, 115.
20. James, “Pragmatism and Humanism,” 118.
21. James, “Pragmatism and Humanism,” 123.
22. From William James, “What Pragmatism Means,” Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1975), 37.
23. Rorty and Putnam are different characters intellectually, and they carried on for awhile
disputes about their philosophical differences. Their common commitment to basic dimensions
of pragmatism, however, was palpable to those familiar with their work. Each had something
like a “conversion” from regnant modes of analytic philosophy to more historical and genea-
logical perspectives familiar in the works of classical pragmatists. In 1979, Rorty’s Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979) marked his turn
from analytic methods of philosophy, and Putnam’s Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), marked his turn.
24. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam
Books, 2010).
25. Hawking and Mlodinow, Grand Design, 46.
26. Hawking and Mlodinow, Grand Design, 117. I note that Hawking and Mlodinow do not
characterize their philosophy of science as “pragmatist,” but that characterization is an obvious
and a natural one for those familiar with that tradition’s thought about science.
27. Hawking and Mlodinow, Grand Design, 144.
28. Steven Weinberg, "The Universes We Still Don't Know," review of The Grand Design,
by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The New York Review of Books 58, no. 2 (Febru-
ary 10, 2011): 31–34.
29. Weinberg, “Universes,” 32.
30. Weinberg, “Universes,” 32.
31. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1962).
32. For some reflective comments about the significance of these different perspectives
within philosophy, see my earlier Pragmatism and the Reflective Life (New York: Lexington
Books, 2010).
33. For explicit, accessible account of Einstein’s results, interested readers may consult
Reichenbach, From Copernicus to Einstein.
34. See The Quest for Certainty in Dewey, Later Works, vol. 4, 162.
35. See 16n above.
36. For an account of gravity and space-time that conflicts with Einstein’s account in ways
that might, according to its author, Julian Barbour, relieve the conflict with quantum mechan-
ics, see Zeeya Merali, “Gravity off the Grid,” Discover, March 2012, 44–51.
37. For a philosophically sophisticated account of this issue, along with a defense of the
quantum mechanical result, see Tim Maudlin’s “Why Be Humean?” in The Metaphysics Within
Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 53–61. I note that Maudlin denominates as
“materialism” any view that embraces the results of physical theory as real. I believe this use of
the term “materialism” is inappropriate, since I believe the term draws its rhetorical power from
Newtonian physics. Contemporary physics seems no longer materialistic in the way Newtonian
physics was significantly materialistic—and mechanistic as well.
38. Roger S. Jones, Physics as Metaphor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1982).
39. John Dewey’s term for this particular strategy of thought—taking what is a product of
inquiry to be already given antecedently to inquiry—is “the philosophic fallacy.” See John
Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 1, Experience and Nature, ed. Jo
Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988).
40. Jones, Physics as Metaphor, 208.
156 Chapter 7
41. Morris Berman, Reenchantment of the World. Berman’s book is an engaging presenta-
tion of the history of science that documents conceptual changes that dramatically affect both
physical and human reality. And his view is that both of these realities, the physical and the
human, are functions of creative engagement with the world that sometimes have deleterious
effects, as he well documents.
42. David Bohm’s most accessible work about these issues is Wholeness and the Implicate
Order (New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), first published in 1980. My account of Bohm’s
view is indebted in addition to a remarkable work by Michael Talbot, The Holographic Uni-
verse (New York: Harper Collins, 1991). In addition to clear accessible explanations of quan-
tum mechanics, Talbot ventures into those wild beasts of the philosophic desert that so in-
trigued William James. In fact, Talbot’s accounts of those wild beasts go far beyond any
accounts James might have had access to early in the twentieth century. And Talbot insists too
on supportive coherence between Bohm’s account of physical reality and those paranormal
wild beasts that fascinated James. I note in addition that many of Bohm’s discussions in
Wholeness mirror or resonate strongly with some of James’s modes of expression in, e.g., A
Pluralistic Universe and other sources.
43. See againTalbot, The Holographic Universe, especially parts II and III detailing many of
the “wild beasts” William James was interested in, along with their coherence and support of
Bohm’s understanding of reality.
44. Bohm, Wholeness, 191.
45. James, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” 15.
46. W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964).
47. I note again that James’s A Pluralistic Universe is probably the best place in his corpus
to witness these commitments. And Bohm’s scientific perspective is well-represented in Mi-
chael Talbot’s discussion—The Holographic Universe—of his reaction to quantum mechanics
and its implications for James’s wild beasts. See again note 39. I remark in addition about
Bohm’s “family resemblance” to James that Bohm begins his Wholeness and the Implicate
Order with intellectual concerns that are strikingly similar to intellectual concerns central to
James’s later work. See in particular the second page of Bohm’s introduction where he men-
tions both Zeno’s paradoxes—these occupy a central place in James’s argument against abso-
lute idealism in his Hibbert Lectures in Oxford published in 1908 as A Pluralistic Universe—
and uses the expression “stream of consciousness” that is central to James’s description of
human mentality in virtually all of his philosophical work.
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1989.
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guin Books, 1999.
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Index
36 Arguments for the Existence of God. See 79, 80

Goldstein, Rebecca Bergson, Henri, 128, 130
Berkeley, George, 135
absolutism, 49, 59 Bernstein, Leonard, 90
Africa, 88 Bernstein, Richard, 25
Alabama, killing in, 2 Blackburn, Simon, 7, 8, 14, 78, 79, 118;
Alexander, Thomas M., 127–128 and belief, 6, 7, 8, 42, 71, 72, 79, 80,
All the Pretty Horses. See McCarthy, 81; dinner party of, 6, 79; and integrity,
Cormac 7, 8, 12–13, 71, 80, 103, 115; as a
the Amazon, 88 pragmatist, 79–80, 81, 81–83, 83–84
America, 51, 114, 116 Blink, 3, 98
Americans: and Dexter, love of, 89; history Boghossian, Paul, 56, 79, 114; Fear of
of, 1, 2, 11, 113; “holy war” against, 91, Knowledge: Against Relativism and
102; racism, opinions on, 1, 2, 11; Constructivism, 50, 51–52; and
suicide statistics for, 100 pragmatism, 35, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54,
American Catholic Philosophical 55, 56, 57–58, 58, 59, 121; social
Quarterly, xi constructivism, critique of, 51, 52,
American Primitive, 119 52–53, 55, 59
Anglo-Saxon, genetic superiority, Bohm, David, 147, 149–151, 152
presumption of, 104 Brooks, David, 1–2, 3
Apostles, 4, 11 Bush, George H.W., 2
Aristotle, 22, 47, 98
Armstrong, Louis, 90 Cady, Duane, xi
Asia, land bridge from, 51 Caird, Edward (??), 132
Aspect, Alain, 146, 147, 149 Camus, Albert, 32, 134
Avatar, 117 Capitalism and Freedom. See Friedman,
Milton
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 39 Carmichael, Hoagie, 90
belief: as action, habit of, 73, 76, 77, 79; Carter, Jimmy, 1, 2, 3, 98
ethics of, 6, 71, 72, 75, 80; evidence as Cartesianism, 136. See also Descartes,
necessary to, 7, 12–13, 72, 73, 75, 77, Rene
163
164 Index
Catholicism, 37 and Nature, 25; on growth, 37–38, 38,

Caze, Marguerite La, 23 39, 40, 93; Human Nature and
Chagnon, Napoleon, 18, 91 Conduct, 100; Individualism, Old and
Cherokees, 113 New, 38; and integrity, x, 25–26, 35, 87,
Chisholm, Roderick, 29 102, 106; and knowledge, 53, 55–56,
Christ, 113. See also Jesus 57, 58, 60, 76, 121, 122, 139; and the
Cider House Rules. See Irving, John genealogy of mathematics, 62–63, 64;
civil rights legislation, 2 lectures of, 15n8, 33, 68n21, 119, 145,
Clifford, W.K., 7, 78, 82, 103; absolutism 154n7; on morality, x, 5, 10–11, 11, 17,
of, 72–73, 77, 78, 79, 82; and belief, 6, 20, 21, 27, 32, 35, 36, 77; on natural
7, 42, 71, 72, 75, 76–77, 77, 78, 80; on piety, 33, 41, 43, 111–112, 114, 117,
integrity, intellectual, 7 152, 153; and pragmatism, 14, 25, 27,
Cole, John Grady, 119 54–55, 61; and reality, 139–140, 146,
Collingwood, R.G., 139 150; rejection of authorities, 36; and
Colonists, 29; Native Americans, and Russell, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116; and
cultural differences with,, 29–30, science, 128–145, 135, 142, 152; on
113–114 selfhood, 37, 93–94, 99–100; on social
Columbus, Christopher, 114 groups, 10, 11, 105, 124
A Common Faith. See under Dewey, John,
33 Dexter, 89, 91, 93, 94
community, 31, 103, 106; effects on Diamond, Jared, 9, 10, 11; on nation states,
individuality, 20, 21, 40, 88, 89, 89–90, 9, 9–10, 14, 47, 66, 92, 104; on the New
93, 106; morality in, 10, 43, 89–90, 93, Guinea clans, 8–9, 10, 18, 47, 66, 92,
94; as a part of integrity, 20, 21, 87, 104, 105
111; variation and diversity in, 8, 18, Disciples. See Apostles
55, 82, 124 Disney, ix
Congregationalism, 37 Douglass, Frederick, 2, 89
Congress, 1 Dowd, Maureen, 1, 3, 98
Conrad, Joseph, 89 Dr. Seuss, 117, 118, 119
Constitution, the, 2 Dubois, W.E.B., 2
Copeland, Misty, 39 Dukakis, Michael, 2
Cox, Damian, 87, 103, 105; on integrity,
23, 24, 102, 103 Eddington, Arthur, 123
Edwards, Jonathan, 56, 74
the Dali Lama, 90 Einstein, Albert, 146, 147; conceptual
Darwin, Charles, 19, 57, 65, 78, 96 innovation of, 122–123, 145; relativity,
Dean, Bill, xi general theory of, 30, 129–130, 144,
democracies, Western, 9 146
democracy, idea of, 13 “Elegy Written in a Country Church-
Descartes, Rene, 32, 96, 98, 122, 137, 138, Yard.”. See Gray, Thomas
149 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 49, 74, 120, 131
Dewey, John, 24, 26, 27, 66, 123, 127, Enlightenment, 5, 11, 12, 13
154n7; Art as Experience, 25–26, 118, Environmental Ethics. See Rolston,
158; and Boghossian, 34–35, 47, 51, Holmes
52–53, 54, 59; A Common Faith, 33 Essays in Radical Empiricism. See under
James, William
continuity with nature, 34, 35, 62; Euclid, 62
democracy and, 13, 26, 27, 103–104, Euthyphro, 28, 144
106; Ethics, x, 36, 87, 94; Experience Evancho, Jackie, 39, 99
Index 165
Experience and Nature. See under Dewey, Hilbert, David 61

John Hindi communities, 21
history, identity derived from, 3
Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism Horne, Lena, 90
and Constructivism. See Boghossian, Horton, Willie, 2
Paul Human Nature and Conduct. See under
Fechner, Gustav, 128, 130, 132–133 Dewey, John
Fischer, Bobby, 99 human phenomena, 63, 64, 81
Fish, Stanley, 18 Hume, David, 28, 29, 123, 135, 138
Franklin, Benjamin, 113, 114, 115 Humean skepticism, 137, 145
Franzen, Jonathan, 100, 101; friend’s Hutus, 91
suicide, reaction to, 94–95, 96, 100, 101
Freud, Sigmund, 3, 96, 98, 103 idealists, 131
Friedman, Milton, 117 Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of
Frost, Robert, 11–12, 120 Kurt Gödel. See under Gödel, Kurt: and
mathematics
Gacey, John Wayne, 90 Individualism, Old and New. See under
Gandhi, Mahatma, 90 Dewey, John
Gaza City, 105 individuality, 5
Geisel, Theodor Seuss. See Dr. Seuss integrity, x, 8, 11, 12–13, 14; absence of, 7,
Gekko, Gordon, 30 71; adventure in, 127; autonomy as part
genealogies, ix; biological, ix–x; of of, 20–21, 87; intellectual, 6–7, 8, 13;
relationship, ix–x morality in, x, 10, 11, 38
A Genealogy of Morals. See Nietzsche, Irving, John, 37
Friedrich
Gladwell, Malcolm, 3 James, William, x, 75, 118–119, 127, 151;
Gödel, Kurt, 39, 61, 63–64, 64, 89, 90; and belief and, 72–73, 76, 142; Bohm,
mathematics, 60, 60–61, 61 comparison to, 150–151, 152; co-
Goldstein, Rebecca, 60, 61, 82–83 creation of reality, discussion of, 41, 42,
Gomes, Peter, 74 43, 128; Dewey and, 25, 26–27, 35, 55,
Good Samaritan, the, 8 77, 119–120, 145–146, 152–153;
Gospels, 4 Essays in Radical Empiricism, 130;
The Grand Design,. See also Hawking, Hibbert Lectures of, 27, 128; integrity,
Stephen; Mlodinow, Leonard 140, 143 41–42, 102; integrity, intellectual, 42;
The Grapes of Wrath. See Steinbeck, John Moral philosophy and, 5, 12; and
Gray, Thomas, 88, 89 panpsychism, 131, 132, 133, 136, 153;
philosophic desert of, 128, 129, 130,
Emerson Hall, 151 150; on pluralism, 136; A Pluralistic
Universe, 27, 43, 75, 130, 131;
Handa, Daniel 8–9, 11, 66, 90, 92; tribal pragmatism and, 25, 43, 47, 50, 65, 72,
culture, affected by, 10, 14 75, 76, 77, 138, 143; Principles of
Hardy, Thomas, 95, 96, 100, 101 Psychology, 73, 75, 76; reality and,
Hardy, W.H., 39, 60, 61, 62 47–49, 131–132, 133, 134, 138, 140,
Hawking, Stephen, 140–142, 142, 143, 151, 152, 153; reason and, 72, 131–132,
144, 150 136; on truth, 47–49, 49, 50, 139; wild
The Heart of Darkness. See Conrad, Joseph beasts of, 128, 128–129, 150, 152
Hegel, G.F.W., 131, 132–133 Jesus, 4, 12, 117
Heisenberg, Werner, 30, 129, 145, 146 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 3
Herman’s Head, 3 Jones, Roger S., 148, 148–149
166 Index
justice, state institutions of, 9, 11, 47, 92 McVeigh, Timothy, 102

Mead, G.H., 96, 103; Mind, Self, and
Kant, Immanuel, 57, 98, 99; Critique of Society , 97; on self, 97
Pure Reason, 138, 145; Humean Meditations. See Descartes, Rene
skepticism and, 137, 145; moral Michelson-Morley experiment, 120, 122,
philosophy of, 22, 95, 101; pragmatists 129, 144–145
and, 57; on Reason, 23 Mind, Self, and Society. See under Mead,
Kantian, 22, 23, 83, 84 G.H.
Kantianism, 24 Mlodinow, Leonard, 140, 141, 142, 144,
Keats, John, 37, 57, 90, 99, 101; Dewey 150; Enlightenment model of, 139–140,
and, 118; genetic gifts of, 39; “Ode on a 141, 149
Grecian Urn”, 26; “Ode on monism, 133–134, 135, 136
Melancholy”, 37; poetry of, 89 Monroe, Marilyn, 90
Kelly, Jack, 105 morality, x, 91
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 3 Mozart, Wolfgang, 39, 63, 89, 90, 99
kingdom, animal, 124 Muslims, 102
knowledge, 57, 77; Boghossian and, 51,
52–55; Blackburn and, 13, 79; classical Narrative of the Life of an American Slave.
picture of, 53, 54, 55, 122; Dewey and, See Douglass, Frederick
52, 53–55, 55, 56, 58, 59, 121, 122, National Institute of Mental Health, 104
123; Enlightenment and, 13, 55, 65, naturalism, 27, 129, 153
123, 139–140; Hume and, 28; Nazi Germany, 88
Platonism and, 61; relativism and, 54, New Guinea, Highlands of, 8, 18, 66, 90,
55, 55–56, 58, 59, 60; Russell and, 112, 92, 104
117, 121; spectator theory of, 53, 54, Newton, Isaac, 54, 130, 138, 145, 149
59, 62, 114, 115 Newtonian physics, 122, 147
Koch, Robert, 51, 57 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 144
Korea, North and South, 67 Norcross, Alasdair, 23
Kuhn, Thomas, 139, 142, 143 North and South Korea. See Korea, North
Kuhnian perspective, 142 and South
Laden, Osama Bin, 31, 90 Obama, Barack, 1, 2, 14, 48

LaFollette, Hugh, 91 Oliver, Mary, 119, 119–120
Lakota tribe, 51, 56 Ontology, 20, 64
language, paradoxes of, 64–65 Origin of Species. See Darwin, Charles
Latour, Bruno, 51–52, 56–57
Law of Non-contradiction, 52 Palestinians, 105
Leary, David, x Paris, France, 147, 151
Leibniz, Gottfried, 4, 99, 135 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78;
Levine, Michael, 23, 102 beliefs and, 74, 75, 76; pragmatism and,
Lewis, C.S., 118 13, 73
The Lion King , ix Peircean mold, 74, 76
Locke, John, 135 Peter, the Disciple, 4
The Lorax. See Dr. Seuss Phantom of the Opera, 39
Phelps, Fred, 31
Malaysian Highlands, 18, 90 Plato, 19, 22, 28, 30, 42, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52,
Massachusetts Bay Colony, 31 57, 60, 65, 96, 98, 144
McCarthy, Cormac, 119, 119–120 Platonism, 28, 61, 62, 63; and pragmatism,
McDermott, John 25 29, 30, 32, 33, 59–60, 61; Platonists,
Index 167
19, 22, 28–29, 29, 30, 32, 36, 41, 60, psyche, as influenced by stories, 3–4, 116,
61, 63, 67; and pragmatists, 20, 28, 30, 117, 118, 133, 149
31, 32, 34, 59, 64, 65, 87 psychology, and self, 3–4
pluralism, 114, 131, 133, 134, 136–137, Putnam, Hilary, 25, 55, 79, 139;
151 Boghossian and, 51, 52, 57, 58, 60
Podolsky, Boris, 146, 147
pragmatism, 7, 13, 25, 27, 28, 47, 113, quantum mechanics, 129, 142, 145, 146,
144; and belief, 13, 76, 77, 124; 147, 149
Boghossian and, 51, 52, 57, 59, 60; Quine, W.V.O., 139, 151–152
Darwinism and, 19–20, 25;
Enlightenment philosophy and, 13, 72, race, in America, 2, 11
77; humans and, 30, 31, 34; integrity racism, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 11, 14, 40, 98
and, 7, 27, 34, 50, 87, 94, 96, 106; of Ramses II, 51, 56, 57
John Dewey and, 20, 25, 48, 54, 55, 60, rationalism, 63, 138
94, 117; and Platonism, 29, 30, 32, 33, reality, 31, 80; accommodation and, 114;
59–60, 61; relativism, 47, 50, 51, 65; of creativity and, 41, 42, 43, 128; as an
William James, 43, 47, 50, 65, 72, 75, Enlightenment project, 138–140; fixed,
76, 77, 138, 143 31–32, 139; James and, 131–132, 133,
pragmatists, 14, 26, 30, 56, 57, 64, 66, 104; 134, 138, 151, 152, 153; independent,
belief and, 12–13, 42, 72, 73, 75, 76, 54, 59, 60, 142; integrity and, 127;
77, 79–80, 81, 84, 124; Boghossian mathematics and, 61, 63; physical, 141,
and, 53, 58, 59, 121; and Charles 145–147, 149–150; relativity to culture
Sanders Pierce, 13; Enlightenment and, and, 51, 52, 138; science and, 135, 140,
5, 13, 65, 84, 122, 139; Hawking and 141–142, 145–149; spectator theory of
Mlodinow and, 140, 141, 142; humans knowledge and, 53, 54
and, 31, 34, 35, 36, 57–58; integrity reason, and Enlightenment, 83, 112
and, 7, 8, 12, 26, 27, 41, 78, 82, 84, 91, reductionists, 35
103, 127; John Dewey and, x, 14, 25, Reid, Thomas, 29
27, 33, 35, 36, 38, 41, 55, 61, 63, 87, relativism: and the human situation, 65;
111–112; knowledge and, 52, 53–54, critique of pragmatism, 50, 51, 52, 54,
55, 56, 59, 121; morality, 14, 25, 36, 37, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60; global, 56, 59;
38, 41, 91, 93, 103–104; Platonists, 20, integrity as expression of, 42, 47, 66;
28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 59, 61, 64, 65, 87; and John Dewey, 51, 52, 55, 59, 60; and
relativism and, 43, 50, 51, 52, 55; knowledge, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60; moral,
selfhood and, 96, 97, 99, 100, 105; 22, 42, 47, 51, 88; and New Guinea
Simon Blackburn and, 7, 8, 12–13, 80, clans, 66; Platonist account of, 22, 30,
81, 82–84; William James and, 25, 27, 31, 60; as practice, 30, 56, 59, 65, 66;
35, 41, 47, 48, 50, 73, 75, 146 pragmatism and, 30, 50, 51, 60, 65; and
Pratt, Scott, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117; William James, 47–48, 50, 51
Native Pragmatism, 30, 113 relativity, 30, 47, 129, 144, 146
Principia. See Newton, Isaac religion, x, 4, 22, 75, 114
principle of impartiality, 91 respect : of beliefs, 83, 84; false beliefs
principle of induction, 120–121, 123–124 and, 6, 8, 79; integrity and, 42, 92;
principles of evidence, 13–2, 80, 83 natural piety and, 115–116, 119
principles of reasoning, 56 revelation, of truth, 19, 115
problems, x, 5, 58, 62, 65, 71, 72, 95 Robinson, Brooks, 90
The Problems of Philosophy. See under Rolston, Holmes, 118
Russell, Bertrand romantic idealization and natural piety, 33,
112
168 Index
Rorty, Richard, 55, 139; Boghossian’s scientists, 18, 51, 97, 123, 128, 138, 140,
criticism of, 51, 57–58, 58; discussion 142, 144; and philosophers, 142, 144;
of Freud on the “self”, 98; pragmatism Enlightenment model, 140; frequently
and, 25, 51, 59, 60 called constructivists, 138; and
Rosen, Nathan, 129, 146, 147 principle of induction, 123; social, 18,
rules, 7, 61, 62, 84, 91, 112 97, 138
Russell, Bertrand, 32, 35; hostile defiance self as substance, 99, 100
of, 112, 114, 115, 116–117, 134; selfhood: achievement of, 38, 98; change
natural piety, 114, 115, 117; Pratt, Scott in, 37; Dewey’s account of, 100;
in contrast to, 113, 115, 117; The pragmatist understanding of, 95, 97, 99,
Problems of Philosophy, 120; reality, 100
nature of, 114 Selzer, Cass, 82
sense of nature, 33, 34, 112, 117
Sartre, Jean Paul, 30 Seuss, Dr., 117, 118
Schopenhauer, Arthur, x Shakespeare, William, 39, 118
Schwitzgebel, Eric, 75–76 Showalter, Buck, 114
science: Aristotelian, 142; Bertrand Simba, ix
Russell’s views on, 112, 114, 115, 116; Singer, Peter, 23
Enlightenment, 91, 120, 127, 129; skepticism, 24; Humean, 28, 137, 145
Gutstav Fechner’s use of, 133; Slater, Michael, 50
Hawking and Mlodinow on, 140, 141, slavery in America, 1, 11, 104
142; historians of, 144, 147, 149; and Society for the Advancement of American
humanity, 65, 98; the idea of, according Philosophy (SAAP), x
to Dewey, 58; importance of, to Socrates, 19, 28
pragmatism, 25; as inquiry, 81; and space and time, Einstein’s conception of,
morality, 91; and natural piety, 120; 145, 146
Newtonian, 32, 150; and philosophy, 8, Spears, Brittney, 90
76, 115, 128, 139; physical, 34; speed of light, 122, 129, 144, 146
possible content of, according to standards, 17, 65; of behavior, 67, 72, 87;
Dewey, 152; rational justification for, moral, 10, 18, 93
22; reality, account of, 140; role of Star Wars, 151
metaphysics in, 137; rooted in Steinbeck, John, 37
Enlightenment ideology, 149; social, Stout, Jeffrey, 25
96, 97; of Thomas Kuhn, 142, 143; Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 2
tools of, 32; in the twentieth century, substances, plural, 136, 137, 151
27, 32, 34, 130, 137, 139; and William suicide, 94, 96, 100; and Kant, 95; of
James, 128, 128–129, 131, 138, 142, Wallace, David Foster, 94, 96
143, 153; world of, 41 suicide bombers, 102; as deprived of gifts,
scientific: belief, 73, 76, 81; 104, 105; integrity and, 102–103, 103,
constructivism, 41; inquiries, 18, 19, 104, 105, 106
27, 56, 144; method, 115, 139; Susquehanna Indians, 113, 115; stories of,
questions, 19–20, 27, 57, 144; theories 115
and reality, 141, 147; thinking, rooted
in aesthetic dimensions, 41; thought of Talbot, Michael, 150
Plato and Aristotle, 98; twentieth telos, 11, 14, 29
century, progress during the, 43; Tempest, Kate, 39
understanding, 81, 96; way of theistic beliefs, 74
conceiving the world, 130 Thoreau, Henry David, 74
Index 169
traditions, 82; Native American, 113; of weltanschaaungen, 152

pragmatists, 7, 8, 13, 19, 26, 35, 55, 72; Westboro Baptist Church, 31, 93, 94, 102
respect for alternative, 116 Whitehead, Alfred North, 28, 29, 60
tribal culture, morality in, 9, 10, 18 Whitman, Walt, 25, 74, 118, 120, 131
truth, 52, 60–61, 115, 138; Platonism and, Williams, Bernard, 23
31, 61; William James and, 47–48, 49, Williams, Roger, 74
50, 102 Wilson, Joe,: individuality of, 40; moral
tuberculosis, 51, 56 philosophy and, 4, 11, 12; President
Tufts, James H., 36 Obama and, 1, 14; racism and,
discussion of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 11, 14, 98
USA Today, 105 Winthrop, John, 31
utilitarian, 23, 84 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 64, 139
utilitarianism, 22, 23, 24 The World According to Garp. See Irving,
utilitarians, 23 John
Wallace, David Foster, 94, 96, 100–101 xenophobia, 40

Wayne, John, 90
Weinberg, Steven, 140, 141, 142, 144, 150 Yanomamo, 18, 21, 88, 90, 91
weltanschaaung, 130 Yeats, W.B., 32, 37

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Recovering Integrity

Titles in the Series

Recovering Integrity: Moral Thought in American Pragmatism, by Stuart Rosenbaum

Moral Thought in American Pragmatism

Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB

Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Printed in the United States of America

Recovering Integrity: Preface ix

1 Cases and Integrity 1

Cases and Integrity

JOE WILSON’S OUTBURST

On September 8, 2009, as President Obama addressed a session of the Con-

In Brooks’s view, understanding the complexities that motivate much current

WHO ARE WE?

of us has submerged dimensions of character and personality that motivate

To see this issue of personality or character or individual identity as of

The idea of justifying some particular account of the foundations of moral

SIMON BLACKBURN’S DINNER PARTY

In Blackburn’s view, respect for irrationality or false belief is disreputable;

Far from being a sign of sincerity, passionate conviction in these shadowy

The demands of intellectual integrity—including the demand that in matters

W.K. Clifford is the nineteenth century hero of British philosophy whom

intellectual—even imperialistic—elitists, a charge perhaps not incoherent

Notice the metaphor in Blackburn’s second sentence; he makes covert refer-

DANIEL HANDA’S VENGEANCE

In a controversial essay, “Vengeance is Ours,” Jared Diamond recounts a

morally comparable, and of one such arrangement as superior or inferior to

Diamond’s recounting of Daniel’s story implicitly acknowledges

Daniel seemed to recognize . . . that, despite his former passionate waging of

SUMMARY OF PRELIMINARY RESULTS

Three situation contexts have framed this discussion of morality as integrity:

Integrity and Pragmatism

INTEGRITY, STANDARDS AND PHILOSOPHY

Integrity is central in ordinary thought about morality. Corporate or govern-

comparable. One measures the comparative worth of different standards in

autonomous conceptual inquiry makes no contact with the larger world of

INTEGRITY, THE BASIC IDEA

different rates in different communities and environments. And of course

the present, however, I offer other observations about integrity as a way of

INTEGRITY AND PHILOSOPHY

Since philosophical perspectives about the primary ideas of morality—con-

Utilitarians, for example, seek to achieve in their personal actions the

PRAGMATISM AND INTEGRITY

thought values of Enlightenment philosophy and science that previously had

PRAGMATISM AND PLATONISM

Alfred North Whitehead famously commented that all of Western philosophy

understanding must precede proper action or practice is the dominant West-

such abstract particulars as the European, Platonist tradition requires can-

ATTITUDES, PLATONIST AND PRAGMATIST

“fixed” independently of human engagement; humans are a kind of epiphe-

gent inquiry. When John Dewey seeks a working theory of morals, he is

In “Religion versus the Religious,” lecture 1 of his Terry Lectures published

The essentially unreligious attitude is that which attributes human achievement

This claim that pragmatists are not materialists, reductionists or relativists

authorities external to experience, Dewey embraces growth as the heart of

This lengthy quotation makes Dewey’s point—and the point of pragmatist

A QUALIFICATION OF DEWEY’S GROWTH CRITERION

Primal individuality needs more explicit attention because in many cases, it

circumstances of family or community that enabled their constructive devel-

on such communities for engaging those limitations constructively. Dewey’s

Chapter 6: Not only is our personal integrity of vital concern to each of

As the basic idea of morality, integrity yields different content in different