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  As I have said, such criticisms can be offered in a rationalistic framework. Then one will merely be pointing out that this particular allegedly rational justification of a conclusion does not in fact work, while assuming that such things are certainly possible. The same applies when the target is gradually broadened. Even someone who is doubtful about the claim to rationality in an entire domain of thought can continue to accord validity to the claim more generally and can even rely on it in the course of his criticism. But I want also to discuss the problem posed by the broadest type of attack: by the position that no faculty of such universal application and validity could be found within us to test and support our judgments.

  I shall argue that while it is certainly possible in many cases to discredit appeals to the objectivity of reason by showing that their true sources lie elsewhere—in wishes, prejudices, contingent and local habits, unexamined assumptions, social or linguistic conventions, involuntary human responses, and so on—interpretations of this “perspectival” or “parochial” kind will inevitably run out sooner or later. Whether one challenges the rational credentials of a particular judgment or of a whole realm of discourse, one has to rely at some level on judgments and methods of argument which one believes are not themselves subject to the same challenge: which exemplify, even when they err, something more fundamental, and which can be corrected only by further procedures of the same kind.

  Yet it is obscure how that is possible: Both the existence and the nonexistence of reason present problems of intelligibility. To be rational we have to take responsibility for our thoughts while denying that they are just expressions of our point of view. The difficulty is to form a conception of ourselves that makes sense of this claim.

  1. In general, I’ll use the term “subjectivism” rather than “skepticism,” to avoid confusion with the kind of epistemological skepticism that actually relies on the objectivity of reason, rather than challenging it.

  2. See, for example, Philippa Foot, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives” (1972), reprinted in her collection Virtues and Vices (Blackwell, 1978), and Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1985).

  3. I discuss this triangle in The View from Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 68–9.

  2

  WHY WE CAN’T UNDERSTAND THOUGHT FROM THE OUTSIDE

  I

  Because of the way in which doubts about reason are raised, the issue is connected with the limits we encounter in trying to understand ourselves from the outside.

  Typically, in challenging an appeal to reason not as an error of reasoning but as a rationalization, we point out that conviction is due to some source other than argument that there is no reason to accept: something that produces conviction in this case without justifying. In other words, we are in the mode of psychological explanation; once we recognize the cause, we see that alternative responses would be equally eligible, or perhaps superior.

  In offering such a diagnosis to someone else, we provide an explanation of his beliefs, attitudes, conduct, or whatever in terms that he may or may not be able to accept. If he accepts the explanation, then he may find it necessary to give up the conviction, or he may retain it but withdraw his former interpretation of it—deciding, for example, that it is a conventional judgment that can legitimately express a particular and nonuniversal point of view. What we have offered him is an external view of himself, or at least of some of his judgments and attitudes.

  We can also apply this sort of criticism to particular regions of judgment of our own which we have assumed to be based on reasoning whose validity is unqualified or universal. Sometimes we may conclude that, after all, that is not so. It is not unusual in this way to come to believe that some of our moral or political convictions are more personally or socially subjective in origin than we had thought. Whether or not it leads to revision of those convictions, it is an important form of self-awareness.

  However, the pursuit of self-awareness breaks down if we try to extend this kind of external psychological criticism of ourselves to the limit—which must happen if we entertain the possibility that nothing in human thought really qualifies as reason in the strong sense I wish to defend. For we are then supposed to consider the completely general possibility that there are contingent and local explanations of the sources of all our convictions, explanations that do not provide justifications as strong as reason would provide, if there were such a thing. And the question is, what kind of thought is this? It purports to be a view of ourselves from outside, as creatures subject to various psychological influences and prey to certain habits, but what are we supposed to be relying on in ourselves to form that view?

  Suppose, to take an extreme example, we are asked to believe that our logical and mathematical and empirical reasoning manifest historically contingent and culturally local habits of thought and have no wider validity than that. This appears on the one hand to be a thought about how things really are, and on the other hand to deny that we are capable of” such thoughts. Any claim as radical and universal as that would have to be supported by a powerful argument, but the claim itself seems to leave us without the capacity for such arguments.

  Or is the judgment supposed to apply to itself? I believe that would leave us without the possibility of thinking anything at all. Claims to the effect that a type of judgment expresses a local point of view are inherently objective in intent: They suggest a picture of the true sources of those judgments which places them in an unconditional context. The judgment of relativity or conditionality cannot be applied to the judgment of relativity itself. To put it schematically, the claim “Everything is subjective” must be nonsense, for it would itself have to be either subjective or objective. But it can’t be objective, since in that case it would be false if true. And it can’t be subjective, because then it would not rule out any objective claim, including the claim that it is objectively false. There may be some subjectivists, perhaps styling themselves as pragmatists, who present subjectivism as applying even to itself. But then it does not call for a reply, since it is just a report of what the subjectivist finds it agreeable to say. If he also invites us to join him, we need not offer any reason for declining, since he has offered us no reason to accept.

  Objections of this kind are as old as the hills, but they seem to require constant repetition. Hilary Putnam once remarked perceptively on “the appeal which all incoherent ideas seem to have.” In spite of his perennial flirtation with subjectivism, Putnam himself has restated very forcefully the case for the incoherence of relativism.1 It is usually a good strategy to ask whether a general claim about truth or meaning applies to itself. Many theories, like logical positivism, can be eliminated immediately by this test. The familiar point that relativism is self-refuting remains valid in spite of its familiarity: We cannot criticize some of our own claims of reason without employing reason at some other point to formulate and support those criticisms. This may result in shrinkage of the domain of rationally defensible judgments, but not in its disappearance. The process of subjecting our putatively rational convictions to external diagnosis and criticism inevitably leaves some form of the first-order practice of reasoning in place to govern the process. The concept of subjectivity always demands an objective framework, within which the subject is located and his special perspective or set of responses described. We cannot leave the standpoint of justification completely, and it drives us to seek objective grounds.

  It is not just that in criticizing each part of our system of beliefs we must rely on the rest, whatever it may be. The thoughts that enter into such criticism must aspire to a universality that is lacking in the thoughts criticized. Some of these standards have to be discovered; others are simply those basic and inescapable forms of reasoning that enter into all possible criticism—even when some examples of them are among the objects of criticism: The serious attempt to identify what is subjective and particular, or relative and communal, in one’s outlook leads inevitably to the objective and universal. That is so whether the object of our scrutiny is ethics, or science, or even logic.

  Is this in the final analysis just a fact about how we think? Or can we affirm that the authority of reason is something independent, something of which the hierarchy of our thoughts is an appropriate reflection? I am convinced that the first alternative is unintelligible and that the second must be correct.

  The claim has two aspects. First, the outermost framework of all thoughts must be a conception of what is objectively the case—what is the case without subjective or relative qualification. Second, the task of bringing our thoughts within such a framework involves a reliance on some types of thought to regulate and constrain others, which identify general reasons and thereby advance objectivity. This introduces a hierarchy m which reason provides regulative methods and principles, and perception and intuition provide reason with the initial material to work on.

  We constantly move from appearance to reality in this way. For example, suppose you think you see a friend who died last year crossing the street in a foreign city. Logic tells you that he can’t be there if he’s dead and that several hypotheses would remove the inconsistency:

  (a) that you’ve mistaken someone else for him;

  (b) that you were misinformed about his death;

  (c) that you’ve seen a ghost.

  The choice among these hypotheses will depend on other evidence, further judgments of consistency, inconsistency, and probability—together with general beliefs about how nature works, which are themselves in turn the product of similar forms of reasoning. The aim is to locate your awkward experience in a world that makes sense not just from your own point of view.

  That suggests a familiar way of filling in the
domain of reason, but the abstractly described aim of the enterprise, to arrive at thoughts and beliefs that are objectively correct, leaves open various possibilities. The content of reason may be quite rich, including strong methods of empirical justification of belief and various kinds of practical reason and moral justification; or it may be very austere, limited to principles of logic and not much else. More or less of our thought may be about the objective framework, as opposed to being simply part of our perspective on the world. The actual content of rational justification depends on what emerges from the attempt to be self-critical and what we discover cannot be reconstrued as relative or subjective. We cannot expect these matters to be settled permanently, since it is always possible that someone will come up with a new hypothesis explaining the perspectival character of some hitherto unassailable form of reasoning—or, on the contrary, that someone will come up with a credible way to extend reasoning to a new domain, like aesthetics.

  One of the most radically austere ways of making the division is Kant’s: On the subjective side is the bulk of our forms of reasoning, applicable only to the world as it appears to us; on the other side is the pure idea of the Ding an sich, about whose objective nature our reason can tell us nothing—and that includes ourselves, as we are in ourselves.2 This is the model for all theories that the world, insofar as we can know anything about it, is our world. But even this view, which subjectivizes practically everything, preserves a nonsubjective frame in the idea that there is a way things are in themselves, and a way we are in ourselves, which together, even if we can have no knowledge of them, ultimately determine how things appear to us. I don’t propose to discuss Kant’s actual view; for example, I leave aside the mystery of why it should be possible to have a priori rational knowledge of the necessary properties of the phenomenal world, even if we suppose they are basically features of our own point of view, due to our nature and the conditions of the possibility of all human experience. Is it like knowing our own intentions? But the theory provides a limiting case of the division between perspectival and nonperspectival thought, with all contentful forms of reasoning falling on the perspectival side, and nothing but a pure idea of the way things are in themselves, of which we know nothing, on the nonperspectival side.

  This seems to me to be too minimal an objective frame even to support the alleged phenomenal certainties of transcendental idealism. But I believe that if we separate the idea of reason from the idea that its results must carry absolute certainty, emphasizing instead its aspiration to universality, then it is possible to withhold any relativizirig or subjectivizirig qualification from much more of reason than Kant thinks. In spite of the abandonment of certainty and other obvious differences, the conception of the authority of human reason that I want to defend is very like that of Descartes.

  II

  I would explain the point of Descartes’s cogito this way.3 It reveals a limit to the kind of self-criticism that begins when one looks at oneself from the outside and considers the ways in which one’s convictions might have been produced by causes which fail to justify or validate them. What is revealed in this process of progressively destructive criticism is the unavoidability of reliance on a faculty that generates and understands all the skeptical possibilities. Epistemological skepticism, like selective relativism, is not possible without implicit reliance on the capacity for rational thought: It proceeds by the rational identification of logical possibilities compatible with the evidence, between which reason does not permit us to choose. Thus the skeptic gradually reaches a conception of himself as located in a world whose relation to him he cannot penetrate. But skepticism that is the product of an argument cannot be total. In the cogito the reliance on reason is made explicit, revealing a limit to this type of doubt. The true philosophical point consists not in Descartes’ conclusion that he exists (a result much more limited than he subsequently relies on), nor even in the discovery of something absolutely certain. Rather, the point is that Descartes reveals that there are some thoughts which we cannot get outside of. I think he was right—though I also think he might have upheld the principle more consistently than he did.

  To get outside of ourselves at all, in the way that permits some judgments to be reclassified as mere appearances, there must be others that we think straight. Eventually this process takes us to a level of reasoning where, while it is possible to think that some of the thoughts might be mistaken, their correction can only be particular, and not a general rejection of this form of thought altogether as an illusion or a set of parochial responses. Insofar as it depends on taking the external view of oneself, the discrediting of universal claims of reason as merely subjective or relative has inescapable built-in limits, since that external view does not itself admit of a still moreexternal view, and so on ad infinitum. There are some types of thoughts that we cannot avoid simply hainng—that it is strictly impossible to consider merely from the outside, because they enter inevitably and directly into any process of” considering ourselves from the outside, allowing us to construct the conception of a world in which, as a matter of objective fact, we and our subjective impressions are contained.

  And once the existence of a single thought that we cannot get outside of is recognized, it becomes clear that the number and variety of such thoughts may be considerable. It isn’t only “I exist” that keeps bouncing back at us in response to every effort to doubt it: Something similar is true of other thoughts which, even if they do not always carry the same certainty, still resist being undermined by considerations of the contingency of our makeup, the possibility of deception, and so forth. Simple logical and mathematical thoughts, for example, form part of the framework within which anything would have to be located that one might come up with to undermine or qualify them—and thoughts of the same type inevitably have to play a role in the undermining arguments themselves. There is no standpoint we can occupy from which it is possible to regard all thoughts of these kinds as mere psychological manifestations, without actually thinking some of them. Though it is less obvious, I believe something similar is true of practical reasoning, including moral reasoning: If one tries to occupy a standpoint entirely outside of it, one will fail.

  Thought always leads us back to the employment of unconditional reason if we try to challenge it globally, because one can’t criticize something with nothing; and one can’t criticize the more fundamental with the less fundamental. Logic cannot be displaced by anthropology. Arithmetic cannot be displaced by sociology, or by biology. Neither can ethics, in my view. I believe that once the category of thoughts that we cannot get outside of is recognized, the range of examples turns out to be quite wide.

  Having the cultural influences on our arithmetical or moral convictions pointed out to us may lead us to reexamine them, but the examination must proceed by first-order arithmetical or ethical reasoning: It cannot simply leave those domains behind, substituting cultural anthropology instead. That is, we must ask whether the proposed “external” explanations make it reasonable to withdraw our assent from any of these propositions or to qualify it in some way. The same thing is true whether the external standpoint is supposed to persuade us to withdraw a first-order judgment, or to recognize its subjective character (or the subjective character of the whole domain) without changing its content. These are questions within arithmetic or ethics, questions about the arithmetical or ethical relevance of the arguments.

  To take some crude but familiar examples, the only response possible to the charge that a morality of individual rights is nothing but a load of bourgeois ideology, or an instrument of male domination, or that the requirement to love your neighbor is really an expression of fear, hatred, and resentment of your neighbor, is to consider again, in light of these suggestions, whether the reasons for respecting individual rights or caring about others can be sustained, or whether they disguise something that is not a reason at all. And this is a new moral question. One cannot just exit from the domain of moral reflection: It is simply there. All one can do is to proceed with it in light of whatever new historical or psychological evidence may be offered. It’s the same everywhere. Challenges to the objectivity of science can be met only by further scientific reasoning, challenges to the objectivity of history by history, and so forth.