For, a believer who is (unlike a child or a psychotic) a fully fledged member of her community will always be able to produce justification for most of her beliefs - justification which meets the demands of that community. There is, however, no reason to think that the beliefs she is best able to justify are those which are most likely to be true, nor that those she is least able to justify are those which are most likely to be false. The fact that most beliefs are justified is, like the fact that most beliefs are true, merely one more consequence of the holistic character of belief-ascription. That, in turn, is a consequence of the fact that beliefs which are expressed as meaningful sentences necessarily have lots of predictable inferential connections with lots of other meaningful sentences. We cannot, no matter how hard we try, continue to hold a belief which we have tried, and conspicuously failed, to weave together with our other beliefs into a justificatory web. No matter how much I want to believe an unjustifiable belief, I cannot will myself into doing so. The best I can do is distract my own attention from the question of why I hold certain beliefs. For most matters of common concern , however, my community will insist that I attend to this question. So such distraction is only feasible for private obsessions, such as my conviction that some day my lucky number will win the jackpot.

[...] There would only be a 'higher' aim of inquiry called 'truth' if there were such a thing as ultimate justification--justification before God, or before the tribunal of reason, as opposed to any merely finite human audience.

[...] For pragmatists, there is no such thing as a nonrelational feature of X, any more than there is such a thing as the intrinsic nature, the essence, of X. So there can be no such thing as a description which matches the way X really is, apart from its relation to human needs or consciousness or language. Once the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goes, so does the distinction between reality and appearance, and so do worries about whether there are barriers between us and the world.

I conclude that, whatever sorts of things may have intrinsic natures, numbers do not - that it simply does not pay to be an essentialist about numbers. We antiessentialists would like to convince you that it also does not pay to be essentialist about tables, stars, electrons, human beings, academic disciplines, social institutions, or anything else. We suggest that you think of all such objects as resembling numbers in the following respect: there is nothing to be known about them except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other objects. Everything that can serve as the term of a relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations. The system of natural numbers is a good model of the universe because in that system it is obvious, and obviously harmless, that there are no terms of relations which are not simply clusters of further relations.

We antiessentialists [...] cannot afford to sneer at any human project, any chosen form of human life. In particular, we should not allow ourselves to say what I have just said: that by taking this view of physical science we seem to see ourselves as more than human. For an antiessentialist cannot invoke the appearance-reality distinction. We cannot say that our opponents' way of looking at physics gets physics wrong, mistakes its intrinsic nature, substitutes an accidental and inessential use of it for what it is in itself. In our view, physical science no more has an intrinsic nature than does the number 17. Like 17, it is capable of being described in an infinity of ways, and none of these ways is the 'inside' way. Seeing ourselves as participating in the divine life by describing ourselves under the aspect of eternity is not an illusion or a confusion; it is just one more attempt to satisfy one more human need. Seeing ourself as at last in touch, through physical science, with the ultimate nature of reality, is also not an illusion or a confusion; it is one more human project which may, like all human projects, eclipse the possibility of other, more desirable but incompatible projects.

[...]

What about the Sartrean proposition that 'human beings are what they make themselves', which I have just put forward as antiessentialist doctrine? Is that proposition true? Well, it is true in the same way that Peano's axioms for arithmetic are true. These axioms sum up the implications of the use of a certain vocabulary, the vocabulary of numbers. But suppose you have no interest in using that vocabulary. Suppose that you are willing to forgo the advantages of counting and calculating, and, perhaps because of a morbid fear of technology, are willing and eager to speak a language in which no mention of the number 17 occurs. For you, those axioms are not candidates for truth - they have no relevance to your projects.

Morality and law, on the other hand, begin when controversy arises. We invent both when we can no longer just do what comes naturally, when routine is no longer good enough, or when habit and custom no longer suffice. These will no longer suffice when the individual's needs begin to clash with those of her family, or her family's with those of the neighbours', or when economic strain begins to split her community into warring classes, or when that community must come to terms with an alien community. On Dewey's account, the prudence-morality distinction is, like that between custom and law, a distinction of degree - the degree of need for conscious deliberation and explicit formulation of precepts - rather than a distinction of kind. For pragmatists like Dewey, there is no distinction of kind between what is useful and what is right. For, as Dewey said, 'Right is only an abstract name for the multitude of concrete demands in action which others impress upon us, and of which we are obliged, if we would live, to take some account.' [...]

[...] So it is best to think of moral progress as a matter of increasing sensitivity, increasing responsiveness to the needs of a larger and larger variety of people and things. Just as the pragmatists see scientific progress not as the gradual attenuation of a veil of appearance which hides the intrinsic nature of reality from us, but as the increasing ability to respond to the concerns of ever larger groups of people - in particular, the people who carry out ever more acute observations and perform ever more refined experiments - so they see moral progress as a matter of being able to respond to the needs of ever more inclusive groups of people.

[...] you cannot aim at 'doing what is right', because you will never know whether you have hit the mark. Long after you are dead, better informed and more sophisticated people may judge your action to have been a tragic mistake, just as they may judge your scientific beliefs as intelligible only by reference to an obsolete paradigm. But you can aim at ever more sensitivity to pain, and ever greater satisfaction of ever more various needs. Pragmatists think that the idea of something nonhuman luring us human beings on should be replaced with the idea of getting more and more human beings into our community - of taking the needs and interests and views of more and more diverse human beings into account. Justificatory ability is its own reward. There is no need to worry about whether we will also be rewarded with a sort of immaterial medal labelled 'Truth' or 'Moral Goodness' .

[...] To say that God wills us to welcome the stranger within our gates is to say that hospitality is one of the virtues upon which our community most prides itself. To say that respect for human rights demanded our intervention to save the Jews from the Nazis, or the Bosnian Muslims from the Serbs, is to say that a failure to intervene would make us uncomfortable with ourselves, in the way in which knowledge that our neighbours are hungry while we have plenty on the table ourselves makes us unable to continue eating. To speak of human rights is to explain our actions by identifying ourselves with a community of like-minded persons - those who find it natural to act in a certain way.

More specifically, we see both intellectual and moral progress not as a matter of getting closer to the True or the Good or the Right, but as an increase in imaginative power. We see imagination as the cutting edge of cultural evolution, the power which - given peace and prosperity - constantly operates so as to make the human future richer than the human past. Imagination is the source both of new scientific pictures of the physical universe and of new conceptions of possible communities. It is what Newton and Christ, Freud and Marx, had in common: the ability to redescribe the familiar in unfamiliar terms.

For Deweyans, the whole idea of 'authority' is suspect. We can still say, if we like, that the American legal system possesses a legitimate authority, and that we have an obligation to obey our country's laws. But we should not press either point. Dewey preferred to skip talk of 'authority', 'legitimacy' and 'obligation' and to talk instead about 'applied intelligence' and 'democracy'. He hoped we would stop using the juridical vocabulary which Kant made fashionable among philosophers, and start using metaphors drawn from town meetings rather than from tribunals. He wanted the first question of both politics and philosophy to be not, 'What is legitimate?' or, 'What is authoritative?' but, 'What can we get together and agree on?' This is the strand in Dewey's thought which Rawls, especially in his later writings, has picked up and developed.

Posner's vision of the function of American judges - his vision of their ability to travel back and forth between the present and the future and to try to fashion a moral unity out of our national history - fits nicely into Dewey's way of thinking. Nor is Posner's vision very different, I suspect, from that of most Americans who take an interest in what the courts, and especially the Supreme Court, are up to - at least those who are grateful for the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. For those who believe that the Civil Rights Movement, the movement which Brown initiated, was an enormous boost to our national self-respect and a reassuring instance of our continuing capacity for moral progress, the thought that the courts do not just apply rules, but make them, is no longer frightening. Nor is the Deweyan suggestion that it is a waste of effort to try to figure out just where, in Brown and in similar decisions, finding and applying old law stops and making new law begins.