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Patriotism and Nationalism: A Question of Epistemology?

Dr Edmond Wright


Introduction

In the face of the greatest terrorist act of all history, it is time to take a serious philosophical look at patriotism and nationalism. Philosophers are being currently accused of the irrelevance of their deliberations, as lost in an analytical scholasticism. The present philosophical argument sets out a radical view of communality, familial and national, which at least has the merit of being novel, as well as being able to claim some current support from neurophysiology.

The two dominant positions on patriotism and nationalism that have structured debate over the past two decades have been the modernist case and that of the primordialists and ethno-symbolists. Since so many articles in the journals have already adequately summarized them, and the major figures in the debate have already refined their views, only a brief outline is necessary for the coming argument.

For the modernist, nationhood is the product of an invented ideology, one that has been developed to serve the needs of growing industrial states that required a literate and technically competent population, an organization bureaucratically centralized, and an economic and military power which could be readily expanded and deployed inside and outside its borders. 'Invention' is here used in a disparaging sense, as of Plato's 'noble lie', a modern myth to replace the apparent failure of the old religious bonds to provide the desired solidarity. The case in its many varieties is a historically causal one, the outcome of the rationalizing of the needs of emergent capitalist states in a world where ease of communication produced increasingly rapid and more extensive control.

For the primordialist and the ethno-symbolist, on the other hand, the nation has deeper origins, psychological, sociobiological or anthropological. They point to the ethnic group the members of which have a sense of a common history, culture and often territory. The truth of that history is likely to be to some extent fictitious but it nevertheless provides the core of group loyalties. The emotional links originally based on kinship ties become extended to the wider group. It is these cultural givens that the later developments on which the modernists concentrate have made use of, but which pre-existed those developments. Much is made of the ceremonies, rituals, symbols and myths which, far from being parts of a 'noble lie' promulgated by an elite or a powerful class, form real constituents of the individual identities of the group's members. These symbolic acts reflect the need of the national group to achieve, maintain and protect its political independence.

There are central issues here which require philosophical exploration but which neither side has fully examined. They revolve around the relation of the individual to society, identity to collectivity, and particularly around perception, language and the theory of knowledge itself. This has been recognized: national forms of life, according to Avishai Margalit, are 'parasitic upon human beings' basic need to express themselves' (Margalit 1997: 84). Political scientists have held themselves away from such inquiry, perhaps because it savours of the crossing of disciplinary boundaries. How often in current discussions one notices a distaste for any search for general theories of nation, ethnicity, nationality or nationalism. From Anthony Smith's warnings that, because of the complexity of the empirical issues, there is no possibility of supporting sweeping generalizations in this field (Smith 1994: 392) to Ernest Gellner's assertion that there cannot be a general explanation of nationalism, only particular answers (Gellner 1997: 95) there have been numerous such shyings away from abstraction. These are understandable caveats if one confines the scope to historical nationalism as such, but one cannot rule out the possibility that a philosophical investigation might contribute towards the comprehension of what is happening at present both academically in the world of theory and politically in the world at large. One recent philosophical study (Gilbert 1998) limits itself to undermining the arguments of a wide variety of nationalist projects, which it does with exceptional clarity and thoroughness, but, in spite of raising key issues, not only eschews commitment to a general theory, but also openly refrains from recommending anything positive. In the academic debate it is recognized that major philosophical dilemmas lie beneath such a topic as the individual and society, so there is a disinclination to pursue them in the discourse. They are 'conundrums' the consideration of which is best left aside. Nevertheless, this absence leaves unmistakable deformations and lacunae in the texts that allow positions to be maintained that are not philosophically secure.

Yet political philosophers of the past have not scrupled to start out with arguments founded on a theory of human nature. Hobbes, notably, began with the 'motion of bodies', building up to a materialist theory of human motivation (Hobbes 1962 [1651]), Montesquieu with 'the attraction of pleasure' (Montesquieu 1989 [1748]: I, i). One can, indeed, argue that no one can engage in social and political science without some underlying assumptions about the human organism, its collective behaviour, its sensory experiences and its powers of knowing, even if those assumptions are only implicit. So it is not a straying over the disciplinary boundary of social theory if one begins an argument about nationalism and epistemology with a discussion of sensing and its relation to perception, and, you will further discover, ranges into the apparently remote region of narrative theory. If the following argument is correct, advance in the theory of patriotism and nationalism has been impeded precisely because epistemological questions have been neglected.

We ask therefore have a right to ask the social theorist for patience in exploring the tenets of a philosophy unfamiliar to him or her. The early part of the article requires the reader to be flexible enough to move laterally into epistemological questions and be prepared to consider their implications. He or she might also possibly find it exciting, in which case patience will not be required. Anyone who feels that they would like to see key objections met from the philosophy of perception is referred to the literature (Wright, 1990, 1992, 1999; Wright (ed.), 1993; Maund, 1995; Lowe, 1996) but the purpose here is to pursue what may be deduced if the theory can be maintained.

The present aim is to present a theory deriving from a materialist 'naturalized epistemology', to follow out its implications in order to ask the political scientist to entertain what the consequences would be for the discipline should the claim be scientifically substantiated. A naturalized epistemology is one that endeavours to come to know about the origins of knowing itself considered as something naturally, that is, materially evolved, and to provide a sufficient justification for the truth of knowledge gained in this way. In addition, theories are to be assessed not merely by the coherence of their arguments and their empirical support, but by the scope of their explanatory power. In the last century objections were made against such a claim (Putnam 1982: 229-47), but answers have been made elsewhere to which the reader is referred (Hooker 1995: 310-26; Wright 1999). Part of this argument therefore will be to show how, if this theory were to provide a closer approximation than we already have to the character of human knowing, then a wide range of problems in the field of patriotism and nationalism may be seen in a new light.

There are three sections. In (I), a concept is explained that was first proposed at the beginning of the last century (Sellars, 1932), but which is now being given a new lease of life in neurophysiology (Palmer, 1999): it is the sensory fields are best regarded as mere evidence, not as carriers of information. It is not a difficult notion to grasp, but its consequences are fundamental, for it implies that, given that each person not only has slightly different sensory evidence because of his or her history and biological perspective, but also because he or she will have different interpretations of that evidence. In (II), these implications are followed out with respect to human communication and its place in evolution, for there is a problem of how human beings achieve co-ordination of their different takes on the world. In (III), a consequence of (II) is argued for, a recognition of the operation of a mutual 'blind faith' that is required for language to work, and, out of this, the need to turn that 'blind faith' into an open postulate. It is here that the consequences for the concept of a nation are followed through. I have elsewhere already pursued the scope of the theory in other directions, but the need to address the question of patriotism and nationalism now seems to me to be urgent. The theory may be utterly mistaken, but its novel and radical nature demands a hearing.

There are two massive prejudices to dislodge, either of which would lead some readers into immediate unthinking rejection of what is put forward here. The philosophy of perception upon which the argument is based could at a first glance seem to be a harking back to what was called Sense-Datum Theory, because it includes the claim that sensory experiences are internal to the brain. Any undergraduate worth his salt these days knows how to refute Sense-Datum Theory. In addition, that theory, with its apparent subjectivist slant, dangerously opened the way to idealism or dualism - worse, relativism, even solipsism - and tied itself into knots of inconsistency trying to justify a base in objective knowledge. Martin Hollis, for example, quotes Peter Strawson, in saying,

there are, because there have to be, percepts and concepts shared by all who can understand each other, together with judgements all would make and rules of judgement which all subscribe to. If understanding is to be possible, there must be. in Strawson's phrase, "a massive central core of human thinking which has no history" (Hollis, 1982, 75)

The theory below shows how that assertion has to be held to, in an entirely new and dialectical way. The second heavy prejudice is against the introduction of a fictive element into human thought. Terry Eagleton is typical of those who warn against 'the mythification of thought', believing that it inevitably leads to fascism (Eagleton, 1991, 186). But there is a distinction to be made below which reveals that it could rather be said that it is an overly secure view of objective thought that leads to fascism.

A further point about the scope being a significant feature of the argument. If a social theorist, impatient of what seems to be a lengthy detour into the philosophy of mind, complains that all this would be better given to a purely philosophical audience, then he or she is putting an unthinking block on the argument. The perception argument has already been amply aired in philosophical and neurophysiological books and journals as a contribution to the philosophy of mind, but that is not the point at issue here. The argument, which is certainly sustains a radical philosophy, requires the assessment by social theorists who are best able to see the scope of what is being claimed, particularly as it has such an immediate relation to the vexed and topical questions of patriotism and nationalism. People commonly pay lip-service to the idea of the crossing of interdisciplinary boundaries, and here is one that needs to be crossed: cross it.

I The sensory as bare evidence

I.1 Sensory evidence

It was a social theorist, Ludwig Feuerbach, who particularly insisted that a proper place should be given to the quality of sensory experience, the 'raw feel', as distinct from the notion of quantity, the singling out of entities, in the theory of knowledge (Feuerbach 1903-10: Vol. III, 38).

In the December 1999 issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences a paper puts forward an unusual neurophysiological claim about the nature of human sensing (Palmer 1999), arguing for the possibility of what is called 'structural isomorphism' (Greek: iso-, 'same'; -morph, 'form') between the input to any sensory organ and the brain's inner response to it. The claim is as follows: that the only similarity between the incoming source of sensory excitation and the presentation that is the sensory experience of the animal organism is in the form of a ratio of proportional intensity. To quote the first philosopher to make this claim, Roy Wood Sellars: : 'sensuous contents are not like what controls their rise' (Sellars 1919, 414; his italics).
To give an example: snakes commonly have two small pits just below their eyes which are responsive to infra-red light, that is, they pick up a field of intensities provided by the heat in the space before them (and 'heat' here only means what it does to the physicists, namely, the kinetic energy of molecular translation, rotation and vibration), enabling the snake to experience a corresponding internal field of intensities. Now it is plain that this sensory field that the snake experiences in its brain is not itself hot; there might be something burning in front of the snake, but there is nothing of a burning temperature inside the snake's head where it experiences the sensory field, no molecules in a high-energy state. In other words, the only correspondence between the infra-red ray input and the presentation in the snake's brain is in the proportion of intensities over the field. In exactly the same way there is no pictorial similarity between your experience of blue and the electromagnetic waves that arrive at your eyes. The same is true of seeing on TV a sequence that has been taken by an infra-red camera at night (as recently in the Macedonian conflict): you see the warm and hot regions as shades of green light, but there is no correspondence of that greenness with the heat it represents other than a structural isomorphism, a pattern of intensities. The experience of light is an internal affair of the brain; the intensity and distribution of its variations will correspond in a complex and not necessarily direct way[i] to the intensities that arrive at your retinas, but that will be the only correspondence. Just as for the snake, the sensory presentation in the brain is not itself a matter of infra-red electromagnetic waves, so the visual presentation in the brain is not a matter of light-waves. This, interestingly, was part of what Hobbes maintained, that all sensory experience was 'perpetually generated within us', and if we ask 'by what sense do we take notice of sense?', Hobbes would answer, 'by sense itself' (Hobbes 1839 [1655]: 389), as it is a direct experience. In fact, it quite commonly occurs without the open-eye stimulus altogether, as in dreams and other mental imagery - or even from simply rubbing the eyes vigorously.
This is not the old 'Sense-Datum' Theory, which used to claim a pictorial similarity between the internal experience and an external coloured objectified world, and thus laid themselves open to a vicious regress argument, for one could ask 'Who is looking at the inner screen?' and force the answer a homunculus with eyes of his own, and his own 'inner screen'...ad inf. This is a very old objection indeed, first voiced by Herman Lotze in 1884 (Lotze, 1884, 492-3; still used confidently by Daniel Dennett (1992, 28) and Michael Tye (1992, 159)). But there are no light-waves inside a brain; the experience is a direct neural sensing - no inner 'eyes' would be any use, for eyes are only equipped to pick up light-waves. For the up-to-date defence of inner sensings, see Wright, 1990, 1996; Zeki, 1993, 1999; Maund 1995; Alroy 1995).

I.2 The non-epistemic

A key consequence for knowledge here is that, if the sensory field merely matches ranges of intensity, it does not carry any knowledge, any more than the rays that arrived at the sensory organ are carriers of knowledge, a view strongly resisted up to now by many philosophers. On the contrary, it is merely indirect evidence, evidence from which knowledge could perhaps be derived, but it is not knowledge itself. Just as one might derive from the state of the rings of a tree trunk the knowledge that a particular winter was a dry one, this does not make the rings anything more than evidence that can be interpreted. They are not actually bearers of knowledge. There is no knowledge in a footprint, even though Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse might be able to deduce the recent presence of an old man with a limp. To use a term of philosophical art, the sensory evidence is 'non-epistemic', knowledge-less, a part of existence as blank of information as the light-rays themselves. That most intimate part of our existence, our sensory experiences, are basically as non-mental as the electromagnetic waves that arrive at the eyes, in no way conscious in themselves, and, therefore, in some way material. One can now make sense of Gregory Harding's claim, that a place for qualia must be found in 'a richer conception of the physical' (Harding 1991, 302). They are a brute part of nature, quite involuntary. Sensory fields do not mark out 'objects', 'persons', selves', or 'properties'. It is again Sellars who was the first to notice this fact:

There are two distinguishable elements in perception: the affirmation of a physical thing, and the awareness of the complex content which is somehow identified with it (his italics)

and he added that 'commonsense sees them as fused'(Sellars, 1919, 409), as do many philosophers. The 'affirming' and 'identifying' he speaks of is performed by the motivations of pain and pleasure, which enforce the criteria whereby to place boundaries on the varying distribution, however vague they make those boundaries. A child touches something painfully hot like a kettle, and immediately some sensory feature or features of the current display are placed in memory marked so that when they recur they evoke fear and aversion (memories, as Piaget would point out, to be updated and refined on further encounters with that region of the real; 1970, 15).

The sensory in itself is thus devoid of information, just as the tree-rings are. It is no more than an elaborately evolved version of what H. P. Grice has called a 'natural sign' (Grice 1957); he gave the example of measles spots, which can be easily seen to be evidence, not information. This applies also to the sensory experiences of pain and pleasure, which do not of themselves convey knowledge. A new-born child may feel a pain in what we would call its 'foot', but the child has no knowledge of any such 'thing' as 'a foot', experiencing only a certain intensity in a portion of the body-image field, not yet categorized.[ii] Only when in an organism pain and pleasure are linked with the sensory fields such that to parts of those fields are placed in memory and there marked with fear or desire can any learning begin (see Ramachandran on the body-image and its peculiarities, 1998).
Often normal persons find themselves faced with the non-epistemic. Take Josiah Royce's example: Without moving your eyes, try to recognize what is to the left and right of you; you will easily discover that all round the periphery of your vision is an undoubtedly sensed region which is outside your ability to recognize anything securely. One objection that has been voiced from the Belief theorists is that such areas are ones of 'faint belief', but that assumes that the external regions to which they are proportionately varying have already been inspected and identified, which is not in the least necessary. As Royce put it long ago when he proposed and, with a keen discernment, explored this very experiment, 'the boundaries of our consciousness are crowded with unknown impressions - unknown, because not attended to' (Royce, 309-310; see also Helmholtz, 1901, 255). Another common occurrence is that of waking after sleeping in a strange room, when one can recognize nothing at all - say, you are lying at 90 degrees to the vertical, perhaps one of your eyes is half covered by a sheet, and fragments of some hypnopompic vision still flutter over the visual field (this is vivid mental imagery often experienced just before waking, which is often completely 'abstract' in the painter's sense, not recognizable as 'an object' or 'objects' at all) - so it may be some moments before any perception takes hold
Another thing to do: open the right eye, close the left; then open the left and close the right. The world appears apparently the same from the point of view of the objects seen, but, of course, you know well that the picture differs: for example, of my pen in front of me, the right eye can see a bit of the lettering on the side, my left eye cannot. But this means that every point of my right eye's field is different from that of my left, even though I see what I call the 'same objects'. It is in fact this difference at every point that allows my brain to construct the 3-D stereoscopic space I sense with both eyes open. But this overall difference between the two fields is not accounted for in any of the object-language I might use (the reference to the pen's lettering is just a rough-and-ready way of becoming aware of what is going on). This difference is a proof of the non-epistemic state of the field, for there is no way as an ordinary human observer that one could know about it fully. Michael Tye just denies the difference (Tye, 2000, 77) on the ground that one wouldn't notice it, not realizing that it is exactly our not noticing it that is a proof of the non-epistemic state. Just as one could not, as an ordinary televiewer, account for all the phosphor cells on a TV screen at the moment of viewing, however clear the picture as regards objects and persons seen on it, the overall effect of those cells is still active upon your seeing: so for the difference between the two distinctly differing registrations of our two eyes. Only some neurophysiologist of the future who studies the visual cortex might be able to give a point-by-point account of the non-epistemic differences of the two visual fields as he explains how the stereoscopic space is produced. I have called this the 'field-determinate' description (like that of overall states of all the phosphor cells on the TV screen), as distinct from the 'object-determinate' description (the 'lettering on the pen').[iii]
The non-epistemic is thus plainly there before you, mere evidence, unrelated to any thing. There are many other examples.[iv] Indeed, I often think of those philosophers who deny it as being like the Jesuits who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. For example, Richard Rorty (1980), Donald Davidson (1989), Gilbert Harman (1993), Hilary Putnam (1993), John MacDowell (1994), Barry Stroud (2000) all refuse to accept the notion of a level of pure sensation from which interpretations are made. But they have only to rub their eyes vigorously to experience a 'knowledge-less' field (I see rapidly changing whorls of gold and grey): no doubt some opthalmologist of the future could explain how the pressure of a particular knuckle produced those whorls in some part of the field (for they are certainly evidence of it), but at the moment no one can interpret that evidence as to what they correspond to in intensities of external pressure.

Furthermore, it is empirically possible for a random mutation in a species to occur producing an organism in which there is no neural link between the pain/pleasure experiences and the other sensory experiences. In this case, the organism would have all these experiences without any opportunity of gaining any knowledge, and would no doubt soon die. Again, in those brain-damaged people called 'agnosics', who can see perfectly well but cannot recognize anything because the connection between the motivation module and the sensory fields has broken down, the sensory exists merely as uninterpreted evidence. They can 'hear and see, but cannot listen and look', as Beate Hermelin says of the autistic child (Hermelin, 1976, 137). It must also be true of the newly-born child.

Thus, sensory fields could exist without a learning mind, that is, strictly speaking, without a mind at all: a mind, even in the lower animals, only comes into being when the pain/pleasure system begins to embed portions of the sensory fields into memory marked with fear or desire. This is a central claim, that this constitutes the essence of what a mind is (Wright, 1985). For those fortunate animals that do begin to learn from pains and pleasures, those portions of the fields do constitute a first 'singling out' as a guide to adaptive action, but whether that particular unifying of sensory criteria will continue to be satisfactory as such a guide only further action can decide (for neurophysiological support here see Edelman 1989).

I.3 The projection of objecthood

So the non-epistemic is not some magical chimera, but something that has evolved of immense use, precisely because it facilitates constant adjustment of the 'projected objects' in the face of the challenges of the real. One old empiricist drew very close to what is argued here:

It has long been observed that we only see what interests us ... The satisfaction of desire is what both impels and quiets mental movement

from which he concluded that this 'discredits the old idea that the senses directly apprehend - or mirror - external things' (George Henry Lewes, 1874: Vol. 2,121-2).[v] That 'impelling' and 'quietening' he speaks of can apply to the mental action of recategorizing, in the face of the motivated feedback, what was up to then regarded as 'an object'. The best way of thinking of 'an object' is that it is memory's current guide to action with regard to the sensory evidence. Yet Richard Rorty appears to believe that all empiricists who adopt the view of the senses as internal are committed to a 'mirror' theory; hence the title of his book, Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature (Rorty, 1980). It is understandable that at that time he should have made this attack, for most of the old Sense-Datum theorists did believe that pictures of objects as already sorted units in nature were somehow in the mind, and Thomas Nagel still seems to believe (Nagel, 2001, 26).

In a step back from the argument, note what is implied here. If in this theory the sensory fields can exist without a mind, that is, without consciousness or will or perception, they are clearly material, a part of brute nature. It is not been sufficiently stressed how involuntary they are. No idealism or dualism can be based on this theory. It is worth repeating Harding's warning above that 'there has to be a richer conception of the physical.' One of the fears of many philosophers has been that admitting to internal sensory fields opens the way to all kinds of occult assertions about the mind. This accusation is usually hinted at in phrases such as 'a mystery' (McDowell, 1994, 138) or 'difficult to understand' (Stroud, 2000, 105, which is as much as to say that an internal field cannot exist because these philosophers do not understand it. Some are openly offensive, referring to those who entertain the possibility as 'qualia freaks' (Tye, 2000, 4). What is common to all these philosophers is that they start out with the notion of objects being given; McDowell even says that there cannot be an internal field because it would block our access to 'something in particular' (McDowell 1994, 17).

They often look at the problem from the other end, saying that it is 'counterintuitive' to think of colours not being in things (Tye, 2000, 101) or that it is ludicrous to think of trees in a forest 'falling without sound' (Hacker, 1987, 3). I have never found the former 'counterintuitive' when I discovered that left eye saw 'red' differently from my right (my hands look much paler to my right eye); nor the latter since I went to the Science Museum with my young son. There was a wheel there that one could turn which produce higher and higher frequencies the more one turned it clockwise. I ceased to hear anything when the pointer reached 14 kilohertz; my son assured me he went on hearing up to nearly 20 kH. Further still and neither of us heard anything, though no doubt a bat could have done. 'Sound'-waves, whatever their frequency, are active in the world, but only produce sensory sound, a structurally isomorphic field, when an organism capable of selecting certain frequencies is present. As regards the 'tree-falling-in the-forest' point, one can fitly ask Peter Hacker (and mutatis mutandis Michael Tye about 'light'-waves) what the magical difference is between pressure-waves in the air at 30 kH and 10 kH, other than their frequency, when no one is present, for one can be sure that a falling tree produces a whole range of waves, probably beyond those even a bat can hear.

The sensory fields are continua : there are, strictly speaking no discrete portions in it at all - only 'nodules' and 'lumps' of varying 'viscosity' and 'integrity', of constantly varying spatial, temporal and qualitative extension. Pain and pleasure enforce the attempt to make discrete of what goes into memory, a rough choice though it be. One of Kant's most well-known dicta is supported by this theory: 'Thoughts without content are empty: intuitions without content are blind' (CPR, B75), in that concepts unrelated to sensory intake do not refer to the world at all; and sensory intake alone ('intuition' is Kant's word for it) without intentional singling cannot gain any knowledge of the world. Kant would have been happy to use the example of the mutation lacking the link between its motivational and sensory systems - it might have brilliantly detailed sensory fields, but without that link it would be metaphorically 'blind', that is, sensorily active but unable to handle the evidence.
It is from Piaget we learn that the memories so implanted and marked with fear or desire are always open to refinement by feedback as new criteria come into play from more frequent encounters with what initiated the memories in the first place, a process that Piaget terms 'assimilation' and 'accommodation', an embedding of the new percept/concept together with later adjustments of it to improve action (Piaget 1977). The surprising implication is that we do not see 'things' at all (Gregory 1993: 234-6, 259): it is rather that we are making learned and continuously adjustable categorizations from the sensory fields.
Thus it can be said that all 'entities' are constructed, a view still strongly opposed. Ian Hacking's scornful assertion in The Social Construction of What? that it is self-evidently ridiculous to claim that a baseball is socially constructed (Hacking 1999: 29) is now revealed to be a half-truth: the objectivity of the baseball in actual question represents a hopeful convergence of human understanding, and is therefore socially constructed; what is not constructed is the brute existence out of which that objectivity is being tentatively maintained - mutually. Nietzsche said that no living beings would have survived had they not been prepared 'to affirm rather than suspend judgement, to err and make up things rather than to wait' (Nietzsche 1974 [1887]: 172; his italics).

If structural isomorphism does capture a characteristic feature of sensory experience, then there is a third important consequence for the theory of knowledge. Each separate organism has its own inner presentations from which it makes its own intentional selections. To quote Sellars again:

The physical existent is not an object in its own right. It is made an object by the selective activity of the percipient organism. (Sellars, 1919; his italics)

Strictly speaking, following Gregory, he should not have even used the term 'the physical existent', for the singularity is just what is bestowed by that selective activity upon an ever-changing continuum. There is therefore an inescapable difference for each organism at the sensory level, and an inescapable difference at the perceptual level. Here is an analogy for the sensory difference: passing a TV shop you may see in the window the 'same programme' on twenty screens, but the reception and display is different for each - as are sensory experiences for each human being (my young son heard much higher frequencies of sound than I did; my two eyes even see different colours). And for the perceptual difference: what I notice on those screens (say, a mountain the shape of which reminds me of a resting seal, a shape that includes much of the foothills), and what you notice (say, snow at the higher levels that looks beautiful in the alpenglow, a view that ignores those foothills and lower slopes), are also quite different, though we both call 'it' "the mountain". It is not only in the case of rainbows that each person sees his or her own.

II Human communication

II.1 The narrative structure of communication

If this is how an advanced animal learns to adapt itself to natural contingencies, that is, by a kind of feedback spurred initially by pain and pleasure and subsequently also by memory's fears and desires, can that learning be transmitted to other members of the same species? Indeed it can, by chance conditioning or by imitative behaviour, but it is obvious that where a direct communication can take place, the rate at which the presumed adaptive advantage, the 'accommodation', can be made general is markedly increased.

This now makes clear the challenge that language was to solve : one ur-human discovers that it has a better percept/concept than another and is faced with the problem of communicating the hopeful improvement. What has to happen is that the memory-singling that it has made from its sensory fields is somehow to be used to upgrade another's, that is, a revision of the criteria in the 'hearer' has to take place, moving his or her 'percept-region' about on the continuum of the sensory field, a kind of gestalt-switch. It may be that in philosophy it is best to 'begin with the experience of art, which is not necessarily linguistic' but deals in metamorphosis (Ricoeur 1981: 117).

Given this approach, it is not out of place to turn to the pattern of the Joke and the Story to display the means by which this revision is done, for they both have the character of all narration, that is, in producing the transformation of a well-embedded percept/concept. If philosophy is faced with 'conundrums', as is so often unthinkingly said, it is perhaps wise to examine what a conundrum actually is. The central pattern common to jokes and stories can be seen in such a conundrum, a child's riddle:

Where do policemen live?
Letsby Avenue.
(Ahlberg and Ahlberg 1982: 56)

This provides an opportunity to illustrate what was indicated in the previous section, how the sensory evidence, once interpreted, can be subjected to further interpretations. A joke has five basic elements (Suls 1983):

1. a sensory region over which interpretations can be put in play ('Letsby Avenue');
2. a first contextual memory-clue or clues to the intentional perspective that gives that first interpretation ('Where do policemen live?');
3. the first interpretation of that region (the name of a road);
4. a second contextual memory-clue to the intentional perspective that gives the second interpretation (here it is 'policemen')
5. the second interpretation of that region (the phrase traditionally accorded to arresting policemen, 'Let's be 'avin' you!').

Strictly speaking, the sensory region (1) should not be given in the spellings relevant here, but really should be heard.
A key point to note from the Policemen joke is as follows: these two interpretations completely change the boundaries of what is to constitute 'an entity' - for 'Letsby Avenue' it is two entities selected from the sensory continuum; for 'Let's be 'avin' you!', it is five (two of them elided). There is a particular significance here for the theory of knowledge: two persons engaged in communication may believe that they are sharing exactly the same understanding of the boundaries of 'the entity' they are referring to, of its singularity, since the co-operative action with that portion of the real has not delivered any signs of cross-purposes, but if perception is the indirect affair that is here proposed, a perfect overlap can never be arrived at, not even in the boundaries of 'the' entity. Those who have been influenced by Wittgenstein's discussion of the 'Duck-Rabbit' may have been tempted to think that because all of the duck's head changes into all of the rabbit's this is general for all such gestalt-switches, which is far from being the case - in a child's puzzle-picture all of the cat may change into part of the leaves and the edge of a trunk. As a sixth-century Indian Buddhist philosopher, Dignaga, sensibly said, 'Even "this" may be a case of mistaken identity' (Matilal 1986, 332). Even the whole joke is not what it seems, for the psychoanalyst would note the suggestion of the fear of superego authority in "Let's be 'avin' you!", one that unconsciously disturbs the hearer of the joke.

But the scope is even wider. The pattern is that of all narratives, for the structure detected in the Joke appears in all stories without exception. Here is a brief story, one of Aesop's fables:

There was once a blind man, who, when any living creature was put into his hands, could tell what it was by feeling it, But one time, when someone handed him a wolf-cub, he could not make up his mind. "I don't know," he said after feeling it, "whether it is the young of a wolf or a fox or some such other animal. But I do know this much, that it is no fit company for a flock of sheep." (Aesop 1954 [c. 450 B.C.]: 187)

All the five elements of the joke structure are present. In fact the structure can be detected twice, once in the course of the narrative itself and once in the subject-matter. In the surface story, what is to be transformed (1) is the blind man's power of judgement as evidenced in his behaviour. What has been established is his skill in identification in spite of his disability. But he is subjected to a difficult test, and the expectation on the part of the onlookers from their past experience (2) is that he is going to fail it, fail to reach the supposed expertise of the sighted (3). Stories are all to do with expectations founded on past assumptions. But the second clue, the words of the blind man himself (4), show that, as far as really relevant action in the future is concerned, he is not to be defeated (5) although it was expected that he might . So all five of the key features are present. In this particular story the narrative structure is doubled because this story is about recognition itself, for the blind man, although his access to the world was limited, the subjective difference in sensory access between one person and another being extreme, was nevertheless able to give precise instructions to the sighted on how a part of the world was to be treated in action. By examining with his hands what was to him at first non-epistemic, merely evidence of the structurally isomorphic tactile field, he was able to arrive at a socially valuable epistemic categorization. He interpreted evidence. It is also shows how communication can take place even though sensory overlap is profoundly limited. So it is really only a noticeable example of what is always the case.

The claim here is that the Word, the Trope, and the Statement themselves, the building-blocks of all communication, are of this form, a view that bears out the opinion of Calvin Schrag, the American philosopher of rhetoric, that 'Narrative is the linchpin of discourse' (Schrag 1997: 41). An expectation is presented as established in order that, by the provision of a 'Second Clue' (to a more appropriate intentional response), a new interpretation can be shifted about upon the world, changing the 'objective' nature of some part of it.
What now emerges is that, in order for the speaker, who is armed with the new interpretation, to effect in the hearer a change in concept both must think that they are picking out exactly the same thing from their separate experiences. Just as in the Joke and the Story, then the speaker, once this needful situation has been set up, produces a clue to a new intentional context, and this effects the change in the concept of the hearers, shifting it upon their sensory fields and in their memory of them. They must, as Wilhelm von Humboldt insisted (1971 [1836]: 36), make their own checks upon their own sensory real in order to test out that shift, which as you will see from the Joke and Story examples, was precisely what had to happen for the transformation to be appreciated.

As regards the Trope, in the use of even a simple metaphor, say, 'cloudy' for pressed English apple juice, no one has to explain in words at length the similarities between vaporous air and a liquid containing particles in suspension (indeed, to try and spell out the 'ground' of this metaphor would take quite a lot of small print and still fail to capture the sensory similarity); no, the metaphor works because the hearers hearing this for the first time in the second unexpected context of liquids (having only heard it of vapour before) could make immediate Humboldtian appeal to their unverbalized sensory memories.[vi]

II.2 Co-ordination achieved by a mutual hypothesis

Now from the conclusions of Part I, for which, recall, it is not beyond the bounds of scientific possibility that neuroscience will find confirmation (and it is worth while reading the neurophysiologist to find out how near [Edelman, 1989]), the two agents can never bring their individual sensory fields or their intentional selections from those fields perfectly into line. This situation is thus an unusual one: though both think that they have focused on the 'same entity', all they are actually doing is bringing two numerically separate selections from the brute real into a rough co-ordination, one sufficient to guide their actions in the current circumstance, but the key additional point to note is that this very mistaken thought is what enables them to produce that rough co-ordination in the first place. It matches exactly the first move in a joke where it appears for the moment that both the joker and his hearer share the same understanding of a part of the world.

Note, therefore, the paradox that arises from this dramatic performance of the coinciding of each person's 'object' with that of another. Every informative statement is of this form: the two in dialogue begin by getting a rough and partial superimposition of their percepts by acting as if they already had a perfect one, as if there were a single entity that provided an unquestionable referent for both of them. They have to act out the hypothetical notion that 'everything is what it is and not another thing', as implied by the so-called 'Laws of Thought'. The next step is to deny that very hypothesis, because the speaker provides the 'Second Clue' to another intentional perspective that alters the 'entity', which amounts to a common admission that they did not in fact have a perfect superimposition of their concepts. They performed what is thus an imagined act, like an act of faith. Discrimination of 'entities' in the world is an intersubjective activity which rides on current pragmatic success as judged by the parties involved. It is clearly necessary as a part of our method of achieving an overlap of our separate selections from the real that we behave as if it were not a mere overlap but a pure coinciding. It is really a case of a pair of guesses, but we are behave as if it is not. This applies to all 'referents' selected in the process of communication, and, consequently, the identities of both group and individual are thus to a degree 'invented'. A transformation of an existing agreement must be central to any communication, for we only talk about the problematic.

To illustrate. If A says to B, 'You know the Lawson's cypresses that C planted all round your house?' - 'Yes,' says B, both imagining a perfect co-ordination, a 'co-reference', on one set of entities. 'Well,' says A, 'they have all been chopped down and destroyed'; this is the second clue effecting a transformation of the percept/concept. Through the mnemonics of language, B has now gained an improvement in knowledge over his/her original understanding, one that affects B, but both the agents entered into the performance that a single set of referents had been selected by both of them 'in 'common'. B has now a different understanding of a part of the external world. Communication has been made, precisely because the two partners in the dialogue had different conceptions of the world before them. The pattern was therefore precisely that of the Joke and the Story, a presumed match of understanding about a portion of the real which became exposed to a transformation of intentional perspective by provision of a 'second clue', a pattern that has therefore a narrative structure. To put it another way, that of the linguists, persons in dialogue have to project an imagined synchronic perfection of language in order to effect a diachronic correction of the Hearer by the Speaker. To use a story to illustrate the narrative nature of the Statement: the story of the Cretan Liar is a parable about communication, for in order to communicate at all, one has to change the language, that is, start with a presumed referential certainty (the 'logical subject' of the statement in question; 'You know those Lawson's cypresses...') only to subvert it with a new interpretation (the 'logical predicate': '...have been cut down'[vii]) - so, strictly speaking, every informative statement is a lie since it does not correspond to what the language previously characterized as true. Linguists have sometimes referred to one's own understanding of the language as one's 'idiolect': here the view is that communication can only take place precisely because each person does have their own idiolect, which they can use to try to correct that of another. We can never finally do it, of course, since the indirect evidence we are each working on is different from everyone else's, plus the fact that, since it is evidence, it can never become perfect information.

II.3 A multiple proof

It is such mutual correction, even so, that, a fortiori, convinces both participants that the other has access to the external world that produces sensory fields for all, and by that simple token, provides a multiple proof of all the following:

(I) that the external continuum exists as real, but quite distinct from the tentative objective 'reality' that is being selected from it by this co-ordination process, that is, existence and objectivity never coincide;
(II) that an individual subject's sensory fields exist as a brute part of the real beyond its voluntary choice, because of the other being able to effect such an intimate correction of it beyond the will of the self (which is in itself a disproof of the accusation of solipsism);
(III) that the other must have his/her own sensory evidence to produce that correction;
(IV) that the other must exist as a corrector within the social language-group that has created the possibility of such correction;
(V) that the adjustment cannot begin until the imagined perfect coincidence of reference is performed (i.e. an impossible hypothesis dramatically maintained);
(VI) that the correction is brought about by the provision of a contextual 'second clue' that brings about the change in intentional perspective;
(VII) that, as well as the singling out of 'objects' and 'properties' from the continuum, that of 'selves', both one's own and that of others, and that of 'social groups', is effected, maintained and refined by this very process.

This is therefore very far from a thoroughgoing scepticism. We can be certain of the real at the very moment we are questioning human objectification, in which we can now see each entity as no more than a viable attempt at an impossible perfect coinciding of each person's understanding with that of others. It is worth emphasizing that sensing in all its forms is real existence even when it presents imagery or a dream or a hallucination (just as the TV screen remains real without regard as to whether it is presenting a 'live broadcast' or interference patterns or a video or a cartoon or a computerized scene. About the external real, science has of course been able to tell us more, but that the scientific access to it has to go through the sensory, has to employ the same narrative structure, does not deprive it of credibility. Entities as perfect singularities remain as the imagined convergence of our separate selections. As Josiah Royce put it, 'in the end we conceive these common objects abstractly, as independent of all knowing processes whatever' (Royce, 1959 [1899] I, 73). We only achieve what the psychologist Stevan Harnad calls a 'convergence of approximations' (Harnad, 1987, 537).

A further trap for the agents involved in this co-ordination game arises from the fact that each does undoubtedly select a single perspective on the real via his or her sensory fields to which he or she accords 'reality'. What is clearly not the case is that each one's 'single' choice is the same as another's 'single' choice.[viii] Since the outcome of mutual action seems to confirm that the superimposition is complete at all points, qualitative, quantitative, spatial and temporal, a jump is confidently made from the imagined pure co-ordination that was methodologically necessary (to produce the requisite homing-in on the fuzzy region under examination) to an actual pure co-ordination. This is of course immensely reassuring since the tricky challenge of nature that had aroused concern appears to be met, and human words appear to fit to the world more than adequately. See the temptation: I am staring at a single portion of the real that I have selected with the help of others, and, on top of that, I am behaving unconsciously but necessarily as if it is the same portion as that of my interlocutor - so the result is that the fact that it can never be 'the same' I wish to disguise from myself - such fundamental uncertainty, such an admission of inescapable risk, is too uncomfortable to be accepted.

This is what the word 'same' really means, that it marks out on the real a partly shared intention with someone else that has been apparently confirmed to date. 'Same' is really a word that confirms a trust in the sharing of intentions, because all our mutual experience with 'the entity' so far has produced no unexpected surprises. It was in wrestling with Wittgenstein's arguments about 'same' that I came to this conclusion, realizing that he had made the mistake of equating common agreement with common judgements (Wright, 1977), but, as the psycholinguist Ragnar Rommetveit has proved, people working on very different sets of criteria can readily agree that they have isolated the 'same referent' (Rommetveit, 1974, 1978).

II.4 Answering the Objectivist's objections

Some have thought that admitting to internal sensory fields opens the door to accusations of solipsism. This was Kant's error, that of thinking that, 'if only phenomena can be given, only phenomena can be known' (Sellars, 1919, 412). However, as we have noted above (p. 000, II), if all sensory experience is only evidence involuntarily acquired, our interpretations of it, including that of our own selfhood, may be corrected by an outside agency. From the point of view of this theory therefore, there can be no 'solus-ipse', no unchangeable single self that is detachedly observing the evidence; that self can be radically changed by an agency outside itself, as stories make blatantly obvious. Our bodies provide evidence that others can interpret. If the sensory experiences are basically non-mental, non-human, able to exist apart from epistemic consciousness, there is no possibility of accusing this theory of implying any form of solipsism. There are many philosophers today who still hold to the impossibility of establishing the existence of the external real in any theory that holds to internal sensory presentations: as Anthony O'Hear puts it, 'if we take experience to be the stuff of the world, the route to the world is forever closed' (O'Hear 1985: 34). He is echoed by John McDowell: 'a bare presence cannot be the ground for anything' (McDowell, 1994, 18); Hilary Putnam, with his 'Brain-in-a-Vat' argument (Putnam, 1981, 5-6) tries to prove that we would be confined by an internal sensory field. But this theory does not claim that sensory experience is 'the stuff of the world', but rather that it is just part of the same stuff. Charles Taylor has warned against 'the baleful influence of the epistemological tradition for which all knowledge is constructed from the impressions imprinted on the individual subject' (Taylor 1971: 32). Eighteenth-century empiricists are partly to blame because of their calling sensory experience 'ideas' and 'appearances', but even Descartes had to admit that all the 'images of things' were formed out of 'certain real colours' (Descartes, Meditation I ; my italics).

Nevertheless, to doubt objectivity looks not only relativist, but treacherous, even mad, for it appears to undermine the naïve faith. As a consequence many philosophers, from David Hume onwards, have been led into a refusal to accept such a risk. So therefore to insist, as for example, with David Wiggins, that 'the object is there anyway' (Wiggins 1986: 180), is no more than to encourage us to join with him in the unreflective 'faith' that sustains language. And who could complain about that at the level of ordinary speech? - which could not proceed without that initial act of trust. So he is not speaking as a philosopher, as one who should be examining the basis of dialogic communication: he is still at the level of the ordinary speaker without knowing it. It is just the same mistake when he says that all our separate vaguenesses about an object 'match exactly' (Wiggins 1986: 175). This is actually empirically false, for what is hidden from mutual understanding is undoubtedly different for each participant, but we have to behave as if it is not, and this last is really what he is telling us to do, to engage in this 'naïve and unreflecting faith' as the psycholinguist Ragnar Rommetveit has called it (1978: 31). Wiggins does not see that to say that one person's vagueness is the same as another's is equivalent to saying we must neglect all that we separately consider negligible, and this is plainly an exhortation to take the supposed 'singularity' of 'the entity' for granted. But there is no doubt that we cannot possibly know beforehand that what is 'negligible' for you is 'negligible' for me; tomorrow we may find it was not. We cannot insure against a dialectical transformation. This is what all jokes and stories are about. If this theory is correct, it has provided an putative explanation of what dialectics really is. This ambiguity is betrayed in the common phrase 'to all intents and purposes': when we say 'we shall treat something as something else to all intents and purposes', we know it actually means the opposite of that, that there is a certain doubt about the equivalence, but it will do for the time being. And this is precisely what we do for any objective entity or property - the co-ordination of this pair of differing guesses (that actually produces 'it' by treating the two as a single certainty) will work for the time being. It is like using money, which we tend to think of as having a fixed value, but yet knowing how to bargain (and thus alter its value), instead of, like a miser, fetishizing it.

Yet the mistake is very easy to make, since the performance of a pure co-ordination essential to the making of a statement to another, implies a perfection of understanding, and thus a coinciding of intentions. However, because of this, it unfortunately appears to point to a final coinciding of all desires and fears, a kind of imaginary final bliss as the endpoint of all communication, as if communication were to become a perfect communing or, in Lacanian terms, as if the agreements of law led to an apotheosis of jouissance. But, as will be seen below, this is quite the wrong sort of faith.

In case this point is still not clear, for it has to overcome perhaps the most basic of naïve prejudices, a prejudice that nevertheless we have to perform, consider what was asked of me in a recent seminar by an opposing philosopher, Professor Kei Chiba of Hokkaido University.[ix] He asked me, "Are you saying then that the very word 'provisional' is itself provisional?" Instead of trying to answer such a question, notice rather what it implies: if I had answered 'No', I would have seemed to be denying my own argument about the endless corrigibility of language; if I had said 'Yes', I would have been undermining the naïve faith of language that was maintaining our very discussion at the time - presenting myself thus as 'relativistic', 'treacherous', etc.;. What he did not see was the implication of my answering 'Yes', namely, that we had to project imaginatively a perfect synchronic agreement about the meaning of the word 'provisional' in order to carry on talking at all in that seminar, that is, at the level of the ordinary speaker, to achieve the diachronic movement that is the purpose of speech, one that might indeed alter the meaning of 'provisional'. After all, should this theory be correct, 'provisional' as a word takes on a whole new and fundamental parameter of meaning and application. His question gained its apparent strength of challenge, not from its surface accusation of logical inconsistency, but from its unconscious implication that I was withdrawing from the basic 'faith' of our current conversation. It would unconsciously have suggested that I was distrusting, not only him, but everyone else present at the seminar - and, further, because of the temptation to carry the trust to that imaginary final bliss, as if I was despairing of the whole human social venture of which we were a part, surely, the most extreme of heresies. But hatred of heretics in the past must have been fuelled precisely by such an unconscious suspicion.

There are of course some words that we sometimes treat as if they are rigid in meaning while never expecting them to change: those are the words and symbols of pure logic and pure mathematics. Notice the word 'pure': they are clean of the impurities of desire and fear precisely because we are playing with them knowing that we are never going to apply them to the world, which means that we shall get no unpleasant surprises with them concerning our desires and fears. Within their boundaries the rule is that we shall never use them to refer to the real. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that, as soon as we try to refer while still believing ourselves in the realm of the pure non-referring, paradoxes result. Zeno's paradoxes, for example, all depend on the impossible reference to something so small that no mutual agreement about that portion as a part of the real could ever be reached (this point was made in 1836 by Alexander Bryan Johnson (Johnson 1968: 156). The paradox in Gödel's Proof of the Inconsistency of Mathematics arises because it contains an illicit attempt to refer, namely, in making numbers refer to other numbers. Treating numbers as never referring makes them of course the most fictive of all uses of language: ordinary words may only refer by virtue of our mutual idealization, but at least they retain a current tenuous hold on the real. In pure mathematics the logos becomes pure mythos. But if we are in the real world, counting apples, say, it is as Aristotle put it, what counts as six apples for the seller may count as such for the buyer.

Our categorizations of the world are always provisional, since it is the knowledgeless evidence that they apply to, not to any given singularities. That false security of actually believing in a pure objectivity of whatever it is we have selected is a superstitious complacency born of a narcissistic fear. It perhaps needs some courage to face the fact that the references we achieve by means of language remain forever only viable. There are no logically timeless 'referents' as such, though we have to behave as if there are in order to talk at all. To think otherwise would be to believe that evidence could turn into information, that a tree-ring was like a written symbol. Language was evolved to change concepts, not to preserve them forever. After all, if we agreed about everything, we should never have cause to speak, just as, if we differed about everything, we could never speak to each other. This is Wilhelm Dilthey's thought:

Interpretation would be impossible if the life-expressions were totally alien. It would be unnecessary if there were nothing strange about them. (Dilthey, 1913-67, 7: 225)

There is only ever a viable co-reference, and this is the core advantage of language, allowing us to pass on to others our mutual discoveries. Sir Alan Gardiner, a linguist who was a critic of Saussure, asserted, against Saussure's claim that word and concept were like two sides of a single piece of paper (Saussure, 1977, 113), that a living ox before two French-speaking observers did make its own new, if infinitesimal, contribution to the concept of the French word boeuf, which is as much as to say that the synchronic agreements of language are always open to the contingencies of existence. Saussure's two sides of the same piece of paper is only an indirect metaphor for Rommetveit's notion of 'unreflecting faith' involved in setting up the possibility of mutual correction that is the motive of every statement. Saussure himself never resolved what he recognized as a contradiction between the synchronic perfection and the diachronic development (Saussure, 1977, 91). The present theory offers a solution.

III Two kinds of faith

III.1 The 'blind faith'

Though the mould of language does impress the clay of the sensory right down to the impressing of the very notion of self, the clay remains as evidence irreducibly outside knowledge, evidence that can at any time subvert the faith of that knowledge. There is a continuum that exists in virtue of which our statements are accorded pragmatic truth, an achievement that works because of our common imaginary faith in a perfect but entirely unachievable 'truth'. What do not exist outside us are entities in perfect singleness upon which each agent is endeavouring to focus, and that includes the agents themselves. Whether in fact what does exist outside us is a flux, or a mass of discrete entities, or a mixture of the two we have little idea (consider the physicists' arguments over 'wave' and 'particle'), but that is quite irrelevant, for the language trick - and I do mean a trick because of its having the structure of a joke - will work whichever of these three it is. The flux presents itself to us as in constant change in the sensory fields, the transient fuzzy nodules of which become the temporary lodgements of hopeful epistemic convergences. Hence the need for a 'daily plebiscite' (Renan 1931 [1882]: 203) about every-thing and every-one.

To accept that all concepts are viable and that the group is maintaining the co-reference of them by this species of blind faith is not easy to recognize or accept. Fearing for the security of our concepts, in particular our self-concept and the group concept bound up with it, leads, as we have seen, to rigidifying the blind faith into an unshakeable conviction of a final truth of our identifications. certainly the currently accepted 'facts', 'objects' and 'selves' exert a kind of hallowed respect, and this is justifiable, but only for the reason that they represent the hopes of those of the past. It is no disrespect. however, to correct those hopes when they are misplaced, which is exactly what language has evolved to facilitate, if not guarantee.

There is an unusual question here. If language has evolved in this way, no one is consciously aware of this mutual 'assumption'. Strictly speaking it is not an assumption, but a natural performance. Analysis of the situation shows the two agents in dialogue behaving as if it they had impossibly exchanged bodies with the result that 'a referent' appears exactly the same for both of them. The sociologist Alfred Schutz was the first to put forward this notion, calling it the 'interchangeability of standpoints' (Schutz 1962: 3-47), an 'idealization of reciprocity', a philosophical insight worthy of being regarded as one of the most important of the twentieth century, in particular because it is so strongly resisted. Rommetveit independently reached the same conclusion as Schutz about the mutual hypothesis of singularity (Rommetveit 1974), and deserves the same commendation. Neither of them related it to the Joke and the Story in which the 'presumed common understanding', as we saw above, makes up the first move.

There is an important point to note here. The subjects themselves are not in possession of the theory we are now entertaining, so behaving as if 'a single object' is in front of them without knowing that they are so behaving, they immediately and certainly believe that 'it' is the 'same object' for their interlocutor. For them there is no 'as if'. Thus they are continually faced with shocks, pleasant and unpleasant, when a correction works upon them or brute contingency breaks in upon their assurance. Nevertheless, the overall false conviction is not disturbed, the reason being precisely that the mutual performance of perfect objectivity has to be resumed with every utterance; otherwise we could not talk at all, for we would fail to get our separate perspectives in any kind of rough co-ordination. The continuing agreement in co-operative action with that part of the real leads them to equate its historical, temporary, only viable objectivity with the real, but this is to try vainly to turn hope and faith into logical certitude. It is profoundly unsettling to think of objective 'reality' as shot through with doubt: better, it seems, to hold to a 'security' that our partner in dialogue also appears to want to uphold, especially when our own identity and his or hers would be rendered precarious. What is comfortingly forgotten is that the real is full of surprises, and some of those surprises can arise unbidden from within us. How valuable it is, then, that we are unconsciously drawn to stories, which are all about those surprises. And a good story leaves us with the basic faith of our common dramatic performance restored.

Note also another implication: if someone now protests 'Don't tell me that that table in front of you isn't the same table that's in front of me!', one can answer as we did to David Wiggins and Professor Chiba: 'But what you have just said is no more than an exhortation to me to keep up the common faith that our numerically separate referents are to be treated as one. The sense of shock and bewilderment you feel, even one of betrayal, arises from my seeming in this questioning of perfect objectivity to have withdrawn my faith in you.' So those philosophers, McDowell, Stroud and others, who believe that objects, persons and particulars exist in logical singularity out in the real are guilty of an even greater prejudice that this theory has been accused of and has been able to dismiss.

It may now be seen that the theory provides an explanation for Anthony Giddens' 'duality of structure' (Giddens 1977: 121), for it allows the single agent's performance of the social to be stubbornly distinct from that of all others even at the moments of apparent - imagined - 'total' agreement, providing the source of the innovation that can correct the received opinion, the very language itself.

It is not uncommon in the literature on nationalism to find indirect acknowledgements of the 'as if'. Here is an example from Roger Scruton, writing on the family tie, that he correctly sees as an analogy for the national one:

a transcendent bond that exists, as it were, "objectively" outside the sphere of individual choice (Scruton 1980: 33; my italics).

Note here the indirect cancellation of absolute faith and an acknowledgement of the 'as if' in that almost unnoticed phrase, 'as it were', and also in the inverted commas that he could not help putting around 'objectively'. But Scruton wants the faith to be a given tie limiting freedom; he is privileging the tradition beyond the acts of personal trust that constitute it.

Nevertheless, from Scruton's remark something can be derived. You will recall the seven anti-sceptical features of the correction process (p.000). They showed (I) that it was consistent to hold that nothing objective was secure and yet every-'thing' identified was certainly constructed out of an undoubted real, that we can be sure of existence even though we are unsure of objectivity. But they also showed that we can be sure, not only (II) that our sensory fields exist as evidence, and (III) that another agent in the communication game had their own sensory fields, but also that (IV) the other must exist as a possible adjuster of our percepts and concepts, in which we with the other constitute an existing social unit. Now note the radical nature of this assertion: individual things, selves and other persons do not exist as logical singularities, since the real evidence can never turn into information, but the actual game of projecting them does exist. It is like watching a play: what is in the play does not exist, but the play as a play does exist. Our human play floats through the real as a real aspect of human behaviour, though it favours neither the current state of the tradition nor the current personal interpretations of it. It is normatively neutral, not guaranteeing any progress of any kind. Thus Hegel was right in detecting the dialectical nature of thought, but wrong in believing in its inevitable progress towards the 'Absolute'. Scruton is also right to say that 'a transcendent bond that exists, as it were, "objectively" outside the sphere of individual choice', but it is not a normative bond of any kind. It is only a 'bond' in the metaphorical sense that we could not be human without it; it is not any kind of given ethical tie. Reason is not the moral guide that the Enlightenment thought it was: it is only a necessary precondition of being human. Reason's 'Laws of Thought' - 'A is A', 'A is either B or not-B', and 'A is B and A is not B cannot both be true' - can now be seen as just a codifying of Schutz's 'idealization of reciprocity', the essential first move in communication, that which hopefully leads to some convergence if perspective. Twentieth-century philosophy's 'referents', 'sets', the 'existential quantifier', 'rigid designation', etc. are no more than tools as together we work together on the continuum. Rationality is best looked on as our system for attempting, endlessly, to match intentions, while mutually knowing that we never shall.

This hidden mutual faith, then, needs a closer look. If this theory is correct, what Rommetveit called the 'naïve and unreflecting faith' is essential to all language, and therefore all that is human. Communication apparently displays a need to trust other members of the group, but it is questionable whether at this level it is describable as 'altruistic', for how could something evolved be normative? The performance requires this initial trust that enables sensory and intentional correction to go through, but it is a trust that is so second-nature that it is entered into without thought. Here we can now see why Hollis and Strawson believe that, 'if understanding is to be possible . . . there must be a massive central core of human thinking that has no history.' They, like Wiggins, are exhorting us, quite correctly, to maintain the common projection that most of our acts of referring pick out secure singularities. But they are making the same mistake as Professor Chiba, however, in not seeing the necessary mutual faith that is part of our method for getting a partial coinciding of our separate perspectives, which is indeed to understand each other. We have to see our reference to things and persons as 'timelessly true', that is, 'having no history'; otherwise we could never get our differing views of the real into some sort of common harness. This is what that 'core', that sharing of understanding Hollis is bearing witness to really is - an effect of our social hope.

It is strange enough that we are imagining the perfection of the objective world together out of the brute real that confronts us, but that it is supported by a trust in the imaginative game is even stranger. We have just seen that the perfect objective world, is both a logically timeless, transcendental structure, as Royce said, and also a structure with a real aspect as that which works its way through the real as an essential part of the repetitive structure of human communicative behaviour. This is consonant with each identification made within it remaining always contestable. To the surprise of some logicians, one can say that we actually live in a 'possible world', an 'objective reality' held tentatively in place on the brute evidence of the undoubted real. And the very 'holding in place' of this only viable objectivity is real! No wonder that God has been thought of as the 'Word', the founder of all the 'natural' divisions between us (Mazzini 1907: 52), that it is believed that 'a spiritual ... affinity' binds the social (Geertz 1996: 42).

III.2 Faith as consciously postulated

But how could a naturalized epistemology sustain such an enhancement into 'spiritual', thus religious and ethical, parameters? The theory presents the members of the group as being ignorant of the 'hypothetical' nature of their co-operative action. This ignorance would not matter very much if communication were guaranteed always to provide an improvement that benefited everyone equally, but, being an evolutionary development, it can do no such thing.[x] The performance, successful as it has been in speeding up the rate of adaptation in the human species, does not operate to produce some kind of inevitable moral progress in which everyone is equally advantaged: if the performance is working basically at a tacit level, one cannot gauge moral worth by it. At this primitive stage the communication is hardly doing more than earlier evolutionary patterns ensured, that is, no more than a coping with the local contingencies of some evolutionary niche, and there is no security, no normativity, in that. It would be to fall into a kind of Social Darwinism to think it. What one is faced with is a human group that is behaving in communicative ways that depend on an apparent coinciding of differing referents that apes the character of what we might call a genuine human trust. Desire and fear, indeed, a wide range of emotion will be tied into that behaviour, but there will be no morality. After all, liars are unconsciously aware that there is a blind faith to undermine, even though they remain just as blind about the supposed security of even what they say (read literature for liars who in their lies betray a truth unknowingly).

It has already been argued that group solidarity is 'brute' in a double sense, a chance, natural, social-animal happening, and that any individual's private calculation is just as 'brute' in exactly the same way. The conclusion is bleak but morally inescapable, but the mechanical 'trust' ironically points to the only ethical possibility: it has produced the chance of an impossible process of an endless pursuit of justice and happiness that can only be maintained by a publicly conscious, mutual act of play. Morality only enters into the equation when a subject begins to get a glimmer of what is going on, when the tacit automatic trust begins to turn into an active postulate of faith, which was Josiah Royce's recommendation (Royce 1959 [1899] II, 63; see also F. C. S. Schiller, 1902, 102-5). This is the way in which a 'mythification of thought', despite Terry Eagleton's fears, can have a moral foundation.

But what is that postulate to be of? Not a perfect agreement that will inevitably lead to justice and happiness for both individual and group. That would be the 'imaginary final bliss' that hovers as an illusion of consummation over the communication process, that tempting vision of law turned jouissance. It is rather a postulate that never expects the perfection it postulates to be finally realized. This is not what the evolved 'trust' finally aims at, if it could be said to aim finally at anything other than what a drug addict craves. But this is, as we have seen, just how language works: the fact that evidence never turns into pure information is what determined the co-ordination process in the first place. One way of saying it is that we have to behave as if evidence will turn into information, while knowing perfectly well that it never can. A footprint can never become a statement.

It has been argued that, although we pick up the social rules that guide our community in the very shaping of our individuality, we cannot act as moral beings until we become 'self-reflective', until there' is a 'personal resonance' which is not merely a 'self-fulfilment', but a 'situated freedom' (Taylor 1989: 510, 515). Such an oxymoron as 'situated freedom' seems to have an explanation under the present hypothesis. When in the statements of language we accept a correction from another subject, we hopefully acknowledge that before the correction we had to a degree been 'determined', since our willed actions concealed a self-defeating misunderstanding of a concept, of a 'term'. When we are ourselves the corrector, we seem to have discovered a new authority and a new freedom simultaneously. This theory thus has an explanation for the relationship of 'free will' and 'determinism': there can be no pure 'free will' because the self is never single, holding its 'singularity' only by virtue of its joining in the social language game; but neither can there be a pure determinism, since all our 'terms' are but viable, never to blend magically with the evidence. In both positions in a communication, Speaker or Hearer, we have to hold to the 'tradition' of language in order to effect its transformation, that is, to use the linguist's terms again, to play at being changelessly synchronic (to create 'authority') in order to be dynamically diachronic (to allow for 'freedom'), all this without privileging either. It is not to play to believe that a current established 'authority' or a current impulse of desire or fear is a given 'reality'.

But let us take the darker side of the case, since it is now clear that the practical success of either that 'authority' or that 'freedom' is not entailed. Suppose an subject, deeply socialized to the point that its motivations have made a self closely linked by faith and loyalty to the patterns of behaviour in its society, discovers a new interpretation already implicit in its behaviour which contradicts its other most strongly held commitments. If some reconciliation can be made, the outcome would have a comic character, the sufferer being able to laugh at his own 'self-deception', for this is what self-deception really is. If not, it would be a tragic situation, the self torn inwardly by rival interpretations of itself, neither of which yield to adjustment, which, indeed, may point to outcomes in action utterly incompatible with each other. If the hoped-for advance in knowledge does have the structure of the Joke and the Story, it should be no surprise that, with comedy, tragedy is an empirical possibility, and that we can look to literature to find its demonstration. Othello is a good example of someone committed to the nation of Venice to the point where his identification with it becomes so extreme that he takes the threat of his wife's adultery as a moment in which he must adhere with like extremity to the courtly honour code of his time, taken to be definitive of a Venetian gentleman's identity. He did not even become fully self-aware of the cause of his predicament, only finally of the effects of the ambiguity that divided him. All his experience was subject to a doubled categorization. Here is a further proof of the knowledge-less condition of bodily experience, for only such experience could accept two apparently equally valuable but opposing categorizations at the same time. In the extreme cases of tragedy no resolution is possible: one would have to brainwash the person to erase the rival intentions. The risk is greater than we would like to admit. This example also makes clear the generality of the present theory, for it appears to apply equally to the family as to the nation, that is, whoever we love. Those who really engage in the trust of love, after all, are well aware that real contingencies in those beloved may shock them with challenges to that love: but a proper trust accepted that risk beforehand. As Emmanuel Levinas recommends, we must confront alterity in all its terrifying strangeness (Levinas, 1994, 37-58).

III.3 National faith and national superstition

Such unhappy identification can take other forms. Identities under threat, such as those of the Germans in 1933, or the Talibans in 2001, unable to accept the threat of risk, to take up the blank postulate of real faith, endeavour to turn the Schutzian 'idealization of reciprocity', which is present within every concept, into a superstitious certainty. This turns their group into a guarantor of security, beyond the mutual correction that the faith exists to allow. The authority of received knowledge is transformed into an authoritarian conviction, driven by a motivation that is permitted a rabid satisfaction. It shores itself up by intensifying the epistemic boundaries of the group, ethnic and territorial, sustaining the comfort of a safe identity through oppressing those outside the national and cultural boundaries (Zizek 1989: 175-8).

One can put it in psychoanalytical terms. If communication demands this constant renewal of the idealization of reciprocity, that is, the treating of a fuzzy part of the real with all its spatio-temporal and qualitative contingencies as if it were not contingent at all but timelessly singular for all concerned, there is the temptation to refuse to acknowledge those contingencies. One is led to imagine that all one's concerns are wholly shared by one's partners in dialogue, which is, in Freudian terms, to ignore castration, which is to be blind to the risk in any law or word applied intersubjectively to the real.

One may find here the explanation of the difference between liberal and illiberal nationalisms (Kymlicka 1997: 63). It is therefore in part correct with the modernists in the Nationalism debate to fear the 'invention' turning into superstitious illusion (Miller 1995: 32) but mistaken to think on that count that non-superstitious mythical imagining is not a part of all community. The evolutionary advantage of the performance of perfect agreement is to allow correction of that agreement; this calls for nations that are able sometimes to experience shame as definitive of their identity (Anderson 1999), which is essentially the same point as that of Levinas. Too often two groups of the superstitious appear: those who are so psychologically insecure they must take the myths, rituals and ceremonies as if they were representative of a final truth; and those in power who are cynically prepared to capitalize upon this pathological excess, superstitiously sure of their own intentions. The fascist treats the logical timelessness of the faith as it were real, so that it becomes a narcotic at once stimulating and stupefying: but there is no narrative in extreme nationalism (Jacobs and P. Smith 1997: 68-9) since it eschews irony in self-reflection both at personal and national level (Connolly, 1992: 141). But there is also the Stalinist distortion, in which neither the cynical elite nor the cowed populace believe the myth, but both go through the motions of its non-corrigible performance, both endeavouring to withdraw from the responsibility of playing within the symbolic law.

If in the Nationalism discussion we are not 'not to underestimate the importance of aesthetic considerations' (A. Smith 1991: 162), the way to engage with symbolic acts is to perform them with all the seriousness of children who know how to play well, that is, with a grave concentration that at no point falls into belief and which thus facilitates the transformation. The extreme nationalist is like the child who cannot play well, who, if in the Star Trek game of 'the Federation versus the Dominion' he is 'killed with a faser', bursts into tears and wants to withdraw from the game or start it again. There are unconscious meanings in all games, for the real is tied up in them, as the psychoanalyst is well aware (Winnicott, 1980), but the good child-player is courageous enough to experience them vicariously. Clifford Geertz reports that in Bali during the Rangda plays (the 'Rangda' is a mythical warlock), some of those chosen to act the 'Rangda' have been known to run amok and 'hold whole villages in terror' (Geertz 1975: 115). When the Talibans destroyed the Buddha statues, Jean Baudrillard said that it was not so much that they objected to another religion: they were unconsciously also driven by the fear that after all God was really nothing but an imaginative creation, no more than an 'image'.

Pascal recommended to the unbeliever that it would be wise to perform the pious rites and ceremonies in the hope that religious belief would come (Pascal 1947 [1670]: 65-9): what the theory of this article recommends is that we perform the rites and ceremonies, both national and religious, while remaining perfectly aware that belief will never come. That this is not the Stalinist double-deception is shown by the fact that the purpose of the performance is not to rigidify the myth or overawe the populace but to facilitate its adaptive change through all being aware that they are playing. This the way to interpret Tertullian's dictum, Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est; ...certum est, quia impossibile (It is to be believed, just because it is absurd; ...it is certain, because it is impossible' De Carne Christi, v). It echoes the poet Alice Meynell's conviction that true religion was nothing but 'the Way' and never 'the Goal' (Meynell 1923: 64). This matches the earlier conclusion that the 'brute' quality of both individual and group can only be escaped through the entrance into the moral play, with the open-eyed awareness that nothing 'natural', bodily or social, can either warrant or produce the longed-for ideal. There are many religious persons in many faiths who will wisely laugh when it is put to them that they behave well solely to earn the rewards of heaven and to avoid the pains of hell. To be human is to be as a little child - when playing.

This national faith is thus not historically primordial but epistemologically immediate. There has always been an 'invention' and thus one cannot reject it on the ground that there is always a reaching back into the ethnic past (Hutchinson 1994: 26). What has caused confusion is the fact that the present faith makes use of the past identity of the group. Of course, we 'feel as if they [the imagined histories] had always existed' (Billig 1995: 25), but this is hardly surprising since the mutual performance accords logical timelessness to the meaning of all words by which we refer to any 'entities', which includes ourselves, our group and its homeland. Nations are groups of people 'who share stories about the world' (Clark 1996: 68), and those stories are records of past hope. Since the mutual game of the nation does itself have a history and a traditional territorial place, how easy it is to enhance that past 'rootedness' (to the point of its being a 'golden age') with the actuality of the present transcendent faith, and equally with its future utopian projections. However, Herder was right to say myths are not delusions, and, anticipating Piaget, that language was matter of assimilation and reappraisal, out of which conflict strengthened collectivities (Herder 1969: 27, 23). One can also see why Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau were led to propound theories of a 'social contract', for the faith has been there from the beginning of human speech, existing as an essential for selves to come into being - they did not precede it. One can here concede to the conservative view that society is not a temporary contract: it is an inescapable, evolved structure of co-operation, but it does not of itself bless either (for the right wing) public solidarity, or (for the left) private insight. Progress is not to be ensured with either nostrum: a pure authority is not with authorities or tyrants, nor a pure freedom with revolutionaries or criminals. A genuine faith is one that accepts the inevitability of risk, social and individual. The only way to deal with the salutary shocks and unequivocal terrors of the contingency of the real is to be brave enough to accept that, since, narrative that has made you - by those who knew how to exist in a story - you too must face the risk of comedy and tragedy. Should this theory turn out to be right, it would be better if we all knew it.

So, if it should be the case that a tacit form of 'faith' is the basis of human speech, sociation and identity, this still provides no certain deliverance for either group or individual. If there is no pure truth, there is no pure deceit: knowledge remains a co-operative venture with no unchangeable national or personal identity to be relied upon. Nevertheless, it would be wise to enact the faith knowingly, that is, in all dramatic seriousness project the perfect coincidence of our wills and world while remaining ready for the shocks from the real in ourselves, in the other, and in nature at large. This drama is myth as 'a lived reality' in the anthropologist Victor Turner's view, wherein we 'grow through anti-structure and conserve through structure' (Turner 1974: 298), that is, we conserve through the synchronic of language and grow through its diachronic, but without any guarantee of progress. From the point of view of this theory, ideology can be seen as an essential part of communality. The existing 'structure', 'tradition', the synchrony, does have a real aspect just as a theatrical play has a real aspect, but our adhering to the tradition remains as that of involved actors joined in the postulation of an ever-receding point of hope. One corollary here is that no government can ever be equivalent to the nation. The maintenance of tradition that Hans-Georg Gadamer has insisted upon (Gadamer 1975: 245) expresses the need to uphold the 'naïve and unreflecting' faith, but he also claimed that 'an element of rule-free genius [is] always at work' (ibid., 166) - even though you will see from the point of view of this theory that that word 'genius' is overly optimistic. Like Scruton, he was trying to take the normative as given in the evolved 'trust' of the idealization of reciprocity, when the reciprocity can never be the same on both sides. At least, with this new stance we will be withheld from attributing occult 'evil' to those whose inward fears have made them literalize into consciousness either, on the right, the traditional 'authority' of the imagined convergence or, on the left, the 'freedom' of the bodily drive. If the faith is not to be in any finality, the social solidarity it produces will then be permeable, not only between members of the same family and the same nation but across nations, as Mazzini wished,[xi] and the solidarity of the identity of each ego within those nations will be just as permeable. How else can we make sense of the phrase 'the brotherhood of man' if we do accept the risk of the Levinasian 'alterity'?

Therefore, there is support here for the ethno-symbolist in the debate on nationalism, for, in spite of Max Weber's pessimism regarding a 'disenchanted' objective world, by the present argument the objective world has never ceased to be 'enchanted', the reason being that it is by mutual acts of imagination that we maintain it. As has just been noted, we live in an only 'possible world' constructed out of a dangerous real. Myths, with their own narratives, have performed what we are performing. The arts - drama, music, dance, painting, sculpture - have all enacted the transformations at the centre of knowing. Of course, it may be right in the wake of Plato for the modernist Ernest Gellner to suspect the 'inventions' of those who have cynically manipulated the myth from Numa Pompilius onwards, but wrong to regard it as something of itself suspicious and superfluous. Classical modernists have no conception of nations as logically timeless in the social performance; hence, it is easy for them to mock at the idea of nations invented as existing before time. But the only 'noble lie' is to be one in which all are in on the secret, not as a lie to be encouraged for selfish reasons by a cynically non-believing elite in order to keep the superstitious plebeians in their place (Spinoza 1958 [1670]: Ch. 5; Scruton 1980: 139). It implies that we should therefore retain symbolic foci of our social groupings, as long as we take them only as real in so far as the communal dramatic projection of them is itself a real and needful act. To put it another way, it is vital that we act together on the supposition of a utopian hope without ever believing it achievable. The Chinese used to use actors in their religious rituals in order to get a better performance, but that was the right thing to do for the wrong reason. Still, if we use a monarch for our symbolic focus, it would be as well if she were an accomplished actress, since that is what we all have to be. It is significant that a newspaper reporter was once condemned for calling the Queen a good actress, a condemnation which reveals the depth of the refusal to acknowledge the symbolic nature of her role. It is unsurprising, then, that writers on the nation have detected the operation of the imagination in its construction. For John Breuilly, who has written of the narrative explanation nationhood as a 'non-account', asks Benedict Anderson for a theorization of it (Breuilly 1996: 156) - here is a possible one.

So the scope of the theory is very wide. Should the implications be as we have seen, we have clarifications of the nature of perception, knowledge, language and its figures, narrative (embracing comedy and tragedy), the relation of structure and agency in social theory, love, patriotism, religion, authority and freedom. The reaction of one philosopher on taking this in was 'It can't be that simple.'[xii] It was at that moment that I gained some confidence in the theory, for it brought home to me precisely why it has escaped notice so long: if, in order to obtain a rough co-reference, we have to behave as if we already have a perfect one, to bring to everyone's notice this hidden ploy is deeply disturbing, since it implies a risk in everything we have identified and so looks like the most extreme scepticism. On the contrary, what it points to is the need for a faith that accepts risk.

Conclusion

The foregoing has been an explanation of the cause of the solidarity that primordialists attest to, indeed, solidarity of any kind. The 'story' here began with a scientific possibility. Its conclusion has been reached through finding that, if that possibility were the case, what was implied, as part of the scope of the theory, was that the structure of narrative would be therefore built into both the theory of the nation and that of the person. It relies on the play nature of epistemology, which in turn is based on the fundamental distinction between knowledge-less sensory experience and the motivated perceptual system that sustains all learning. In finding a kind of involuntary mutual 'hypothesis' as the method produced through the evolution of both mind and communication, the recommendation has been to bring this into the open, to make the 'lie' noble by everyone knowingly telling it.

The step from the evolved to the normative was that of turning the unthought reliance on the blind faith into a deliberate performance of it as an open but unrealizable postulate, as Royce insisted, that is, all members of the group aware of its being based on a faith without a final goal, a faith, as Meynell put it, purely in 'the Way'. It also could be said to match Kierkegaard's move from the 'ethical' to the 'religious' (see Slavoj Zizek on this move, Zizek 1999, 211-12, 321-2). This public decision to enact a hypothesis, literally to perform a myth with the aim of continually narrating it differently, requires both courage and dramatic imagination. It is the only way to keep law and freedom together, by acknowledging that they will never converge. It is neither a complacent reiteration of what has already been elicited from the real nor an impatient dismissal of past tradition, for both of those condemn themselves to be lost in a pure pretence. It also implies that, if the abstract yet real play which is on its way through time is supported by this second kind of faith, then there is a sense in which the efforts of all those who die, their 'spirit', does not cease to have an influence upon human life. They can no longer use what is happening now as evidence any more, but their contribution is still active, in a sense 'immortal', as it works in those they have loved, indeed, with all those with whom they have spoken.

At a recent conference on social theory it was out to me by the sociologist Dick Pels, who fully understood the implications of the argument, that, in putting this idea forward, I had 'a hard sell'. The two prejudices I mentioned at the beginning, the fear of relativism and that of the fictive, are very powerful, since they reflect the complacency of all of us in the face of the consoling 'reality' of things and persons. Theodor Adorno acknowledged the link between the two prejudices at the same time as getting close to Schutz and Rommetveit's 'idealization of reciprocity':

The un-naïve thinker knows how far he remains from the object of his thinking, and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely. This brings us to the point of clowning. (Adorno, 1973, 14; my italics)

'To talk as if he had it entirely' is to idealize 'the object' in Schutz and Rommetveit's manner. The first prejudice was to turn that 'idealization of reciprocity' over a fuzzy portion of the real into a perfect object, exactly the same for both of us. The 'clowning' comes in because of our behaving with our partner in dialogue with a strictly non-matching pair of guesses as if they were perfectly coincident, which is to treat a fiction of exact superimposition as a real one. Of the third prejudice, that of finding it 'counterintuitive' (Tye, 2000, 101) to believe that sensory features are made in the brain and do not directly belong to those selections of ours, the 'objects' and 'persons' about us, one can now understand that it is actually a form of the first prejudice, that of wishing to hold on to the 'common object': it is not a wise objectivity at all, but a fear of the risk of faith. It arises precisely because those philosophers unconsciously fear a challenge to the existing faith. They feel it inwardly both as a doubt of themselves from the proponents of the theory and also as a suspicion of those proponents as betraying the faith of the talk they are having with them. In either case it is a failure to accept the risk of being human, since the key criterion of being human is to be able to speak to another. But that inescapably involves a re-ordering of their concepts and percepts even of themselves.

The over-earnest rationalist has already rejected this idea of performing as regards religion, the family and nationhood: 'without belief in the reality of its object, myth would lose its ground' (Cassirer 1944; for others with the same fear and someone without it, see the endnote).[xiii] The objection sounds credible: 'How can all life be a pretence?' But they are already doing what they reject, for, through the very act of speech, in mutually projecting the certainty of our knowledge of all things and persons, they are already performing that trust-without-a-final-reward, that 'myth without its ground'. It is also what any sensible child playing seriously can do. This philosophy is not so radical as it may appear to be. In addition, any who are tempted to say with Plato, Spinoza and Scruton that the 'common people' could never swallow such aesthetic subtleties, but are better pacified by encouraging them into superstition, are not only forgetting the readiness of the common people to join in play and ritual, but also are falling into the convenient elitist error of believing that the truth lies with the 'educated', the 'cultured' and the existing 'authority'. The 'authorities' is an insidiously misleading metonym, for real authority is founded on faith-as-postulate, a genuine trust in others that allows for alterity to surface unexpectedly without immediate apportion of blame. Authority is a baton to be endlessly passed on. If laws were perfect, everyone in parliament would be a criminal for wanting to change them.

If language is essentially a corrective system, anyone has the right to offer his or her possible correction into the process of inescapable negotiation. This democratic theory allows for authoritative adjustments of the truth from anybody, any body. As Sextus Empiricus, an early sceptic, put it:

Truth is a rare thing, and on this account it is possible for one man to be wiser than the majority. (Sextus Empiricus, 1955, I, 179)

Any rhetorical system of communication which, out of fear of risk, places a fundamental block on such correction is absolutist and self-defeating. Note that the present theory has a justifiable argumentum ad hominem here, for it implies an indictment of objectivists on the ground of their unconscious motivation: in wanting to believe in a rigid permanency of things, others and selves, they are turning the practical need to idealize those entities as perfectly, synchronically, common and single into a superstitious conviction that they are so, one born of a narcissistic dread of engaging with the inevitable risk of our narrative traffic with the real, particularly that part of it into which and from which we project our own identities. There is a perceptible inconsistency in their stance, for, at the same time, they are not willing to see that objectivity depends on the risk of trusting someone else, and yet very ready to use the hidden rhetorical accusation of untrustworthiness in those who oppose them.

There is no denial here of the darker implications of this theory, for it regards tragedy as always empirically possible. It therefore asks for a special form of courage. To quote Thomas Hardy, fascinated by irony all his life:

. . . if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look
at the Worst ('In Tenebris, II, l.14)

That courage can only be buoyed up by the frank acceptance that the second kind of faith is the only defence against the opiate of narcissistic superstition, whether that of the rebel or the tyrant. The extreme left and extreme right make the same mistake: if the former can be accused of anarchic relativism, the latter can be equally so, of objectivist relativism (a phrase that to the objectivist must seem to be a paradox). What Slavoj Zizek has called 'the obscene superego' is at work in both (Zizek, 1991, 141-53), a release of jouissance that gives itself a risk-free objective law to countenance its destructive libidinous acts, at its highest in the death-wish. The suicidal hijackers of the airliners who destroyed the World Trade Center, the football hooligan, the nail-bomber who chooses Pakistanis, blacks and homosexuals as his victims, the vigilante who hurls bricks through the windows of the paedophile (and the windows of the paediatrician), the extreme nationalist in Northern Ireland who throws blast-bombs at six-year-old Catholics, those who commanded the massacres in Phnom Penh, Santiago's stadium, Srebrenica, Kigali, Dili, and Sabra/Shatila, the Hindu who demolishes the mosque, the Taliban Muslims who ordered the destruction of the Buddha statues, the Palestinian suicide-bomber, the Israeli Jew who calls for the ethnic cleansing of all 'Zion' in the name of 'security', the anti-Semite, - are all superstitious. They are fearful of the risk of identity. It is not, as is often facilely said, that they are insecure - it is rather that they are too secure, blinded by their jouissance. The great error has been superstition all along and we have not seen it. In a letter to The Times recently on the subject of children taking amulets, soft toys and astrological trinkets into examinations, the writer recounted how, forty years before, her headmistress, having found a pupil doing just that, had called all examinees into assembly in order to give them an admonitory sermon on superstition. It is a tiny but significant clue that few headteachers today, if any, would dream of doing such a thing. The presence of astrology columns in the newspapers is actually a dire symptom. Similarly for the encouragement by a 'patriotic' tabloid this year to its readers to kiss a photograph of Michael Owen's boots in order to ensure England's win in the next World Cup match, a good example of what may be fitly called the treasonous form of nationalism.

We have to act the myth, not allow it to act upon us. Hitler, it needs to be said, has given myth a bad name, because his was a pure superstition, not a postulate of impossible hope that accepts the risk of trusting other people and one's current self-image. There is a deadening embarrassment about many people's attitude to patriotism: fearing the superstitious forms, they, in spite of reassuring us how patriotic they are (common among politicians of all parties today), behave awkwardly when called upon to display it. They are like amateur actors without a good director, embarrassed at the fear of making fools of themselves, not knowing where to put their hands (to do something sensible with them). It is literally because they are resisting acting in the dramatic sense. Those who have tried to banish the myth, cannot succeed; the old-rationalist endeavour to suppress or ignore it only produces corrupt forms like fascism because the poetic nature of our living will not go away. Provide the vulnerable children in our schools with no myth to act and you find them not merely with amulets, but with Mohican haircuts, tattoos, and rings through the nose, encouraged by a commercial media that are quick to capitalize on superstition, so that they become all the more ready to be animal-rights terrorists at one end of the political spectrum or members of the BNP at the other. The myth, whether patriotic commitment or religious belief, must be entered into openly as a performance, with no one fooled.

Evidence is not information, the existent is not the objective, the continuum is not quantifiable (see the paradoxes in quantum theory) : knowledge is merely our hopeful projection upon the existent, our current assessment of the evidence as indicating what we should do in the future and have done in the past. As Roy Wood Sellars put it, 'being is one thing and knowledge is quite another sort of thing' (Sellars, 1919, 407). The solution is to import the aesthetic into the ethical, which, besides providing a protection against paralysing the narrative of human life, enables and demands a full recognition of the place of tragedy and comedy, a common courageous acceptance of the risk of play. This is what a true faith in a nation and the identities within it has always been and still is, and, if we work in the spirit of Mazzini, we could then carry that performance to the level of the comity of nations.

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[Word count, including references and endnotes: 20,086]

[i] For there are many automatic refinements (sharpening of colour-contrasts, narrowing of transition regions ('edge'-enhancers, etc.)).
[ii] They can be used to extract knowledge in the manner of an ordinary sensory input; there is C. B. Martin's story of the valet who used to test the water of his master's bath by dipping his elbow in it (personal communication). Barry Stroud has tried to deny that colour is a sensation on the ground that pain, a sensation, cannot be used to derive knowledge about the external (Stroud, 2000, 98-100); Martin has here provided a counter-example.
[iii] See Wright, 1990, 71-2.
[iv] For further empirical proof of the non-epistemic see Wright, 1983,57-62, 1996, 24-8; Mundle, 1971; Perkins, 1983.
[v] Two psychologists have claimed to have produced an empirical disproof of direct realism (Smythies and Ramachandran 1997). See also Ramachandran 1998.
[vi] This is how Gadamer's 'fusion of horizons' comes about (Gadamer 1975 [1960]: 273). The acceptance of a rule must finally be tested out by the private judgement, which can never be final. This is a conclusion that contradicts Wittgenstein's assertion that agreement in definitions is also agreement in judgements (Wittgenstein 1967: 88e).
[vii] The logical subject and the logical predicate are not always the grammatical subject and predicate. If the Hearer had asked 'What has been cut down', that would have been the logical subject in question, and 'The Lawson's cypresses' would have been the logical predicate.
[viii] See the research done by the psycholinguist Ragnar Rommetveit and his group (1974, 1978), which demonstrates that apparently the 'same' entity can be selected by persons with markedly different sets of criteria of selection.
[ix] In a seminar in the Philosophy Faculty, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, September, 2000,.
[x] For an extended account of this evolution, see Wright, 1992; and of the origin of language, Wright, 1976.
[xi] See Jacobs and Smith 1997: 67.
[xii] Peter Hare, Head of the Philosophy Department at SUNY at Buffalo, in conversation.
[xiii] See also Edward Caird, attacking Comte: 'a worship of fictions, confessed as such is impossible' (Caird 1885: 167); and Claude Lévi-Strauss: 'if religion becomes aesthetic play, it becomes idle play' (Lévi-Strauss 1968: 82). One theologian, however, believes it perfectly possible (Cupitt 1980).


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