I am about to construct a typology of two kinds of persons and I am about to be somewhat unfairer to one of them than to the other. I have written seriously elsewhere about the reason the position I am about to caricature has its serious defenders and I am not in this essay going to repeat what I said there.

The two dispositions I will call the Realist and the Pragmatist. The Realist of my acquaintance, and I am thinking here of a particular kind of person one meets often in Doha, in university classes, in the comments under any article about gender or art or epistemology, is committed to two propositions. First, that there is a single Way Things Really Are, and that the function of language is to track this way as accurately as possible. Second, that this ‘way things are’ carries authority over how one ought to think, speak and live, in such a way that to reorganise one’s language and one’s practice without first checking with the way things are is a kind of impertinence. The Realist is a person for whom the world has a script and the task of human life is merely to learn one’s lines.

It is not enough, for the Realist, that the world causally pushes against her. She needs there to be something further, something called the truth about the world, distinct from the world’s pushing, that authorises her commitments and her values. When pressed on why she believes what she believes, her instinct is to defer upward, to the higher authority that issued the relevant command. This produces a recognisable conversational style in which certain phrases recur formulaically. Facts don’t care about your feelings. The fact of the matter is. That’s just how it is. Reason demands. Nature intends. Boys will be boys. A real X does Y. These are not descriptive phrases at all and rather signify the speaker as someone who is on the side of the higher authority, and signify the interlocutor as someone who is, by implication, on the side of ‘mere’ preference. Once this side-taking has been done the actual question can usually be dropped.

The higher authorities the Realist appeals to are various and the choice of authority tells you a great deal about the Realist in question. There are scientific Realists, for whom the higher authority is The Science, a thing one can be on the side of by, for example, retweeting the relevant articles without reading them. There are religious Realists, for whom the higher authority is God, in whose preferences the Realist has, by happy coincidence, considerable confidence. There are traditionalist Realists, for whom the higher authority is The Way Things Have Always Been Done, with the qualifier always indexed to whichever decade the Realist remembers fondly. There are biological Realists, for whom the authority is human nature, which turns out somehow to legitimate the practices the Realist already favoured. The Realist locates the authority outside herself, prostrates to it and professes humility before it, and then turns out to know with surprising specificity what the authority requires.

The Realist is fallibilist, in principle, about her own access to the authority. She admits that she might be wrong about any particular thing. What she does not admit is the possibility that the authority might be a fiction her culture has produced for purposes that have nothing to do with her getting things right (‘getting things right’ is her principle epistemological project, as opposed to the humanist project of ‘getting things commensurate with our shared goals’). The authority is nonetheless supreme even when her grip on it is shaky. Future inquiry, divine revelation, the verdict of history, the eventual triumph of common sense - something will, in the long run, vindicate it even if no individual Realist gets every detail correct. And once it is vindicated, things will go well. The truth shall set us free. The Realist is, in this respect, an optimist, and the form of her optimism is the form of a future in which her current commitments turn out to have been correct all along.

She admires Tolstoy’s Old Prince Bolkonsky for his rigour and she admires Eliot’s Casaubon for his dedication to the Key to All Mythologies, which she does not quite notice is a joke at Casaubon’s expense. She admires Dickens’s Gradgrind for his commitment to Facts, Sir, Facts. She admires Brontë’s St John Rivers for his refusal to compromise principle for the sake of mere human happiness. The Realist is drawn to figures who would rather be right than be loved, and who frequently end the novel having achieved neither. That the novelists are usually criticising these figures rather than endorsing them is a subtlety the Realist misses.

She is suspicious of contingency. She prefers to believe that everything happens for a reason, that there are no genuine accidents, that the patterns she perceives in things are patterns in the things rather than patterns she has imposed on them. When she encounters a problem, her instinct is to adapt the problem to her existing conception of the world rather than to revise the conception. When she encounters a new way of speaking - a pronoun she has not used before, a category she has not previously distinguished, a claim about her own culture she has not previously had to consider - her response is not to ask whether the new way of speaking might be useful but whether it conforms to How Things Really Are. Since How Things Really Are tends to coincide with How Things Were Already Spoken Of in her childhood, the new way of speaking usually fails the test. She is, in this sense, structurally hostile to language reform, not because she has thought carefully about the proposed reforms but because the act of proposing them strikes her as impudent. One does not vote on Reality.

She regards me, the Pragmatist, as deluded and naively anthropocentric. I will own the second of these. I am indeed anthropocentric, in the limited sense that I think the only relevant participants in the conversation about how to organise human life are the humans (and the other animals capable of suffering) actually doing the living. There is no further party at the table whose preferences I am obliged to consult. The Realist finds this prospect intolerable. She wants there to be someone in charge who is not us. The Pragmatist suspects that there is no one in charge, and that the work of arranging things is therefore ours to do, and is moreover ours to redo whenever it turns out we have arranged them badly. The Realist hears this as a counsel of despair. The Pragmatist experiences it as an immense relief.

So that is the Realist. Now the Pragmatist, who I am going to be considerably more flattering about, with the understanding already conceded that this is what I am doing.

The Pragmatist begins from the observation that human beings are language-using social animals who have to live with one another, and that the practices of speaking, classifying, valuing and arguing are tools they have developed for the purpose of doing so. She does not deny that there is a world that pushes back against these tools (try walking into a wall and see what happens) but she denies that the world dictates which tools to use, in which contexts, for which purposes. The choice of tools is up to us. The world supplies constraints. We supply the rest.

She is moved, accordingly, by the question what would make life better rather than by the question what corresponds to reality. When asked what should be done, she thinks about consequences for the parties involved (happiness, suffering, freedom, dignity, recognition) rather than about what action best mirrors the underlying nature of things. She suspects that the underlying nature of things is largely a useful fiction her culture has produced, in much the way her culture also produced several other things, and that the function of the useful fiction is to immunise certain preferences against revision. She would rather have the preferences out in the open where they can be argued about. I want this and here is why is, to her, a more honest opening move than the nature of things requires that we have this.

She is anthropocentric, as noted, and she is unembarrassed about it. The Realist’s accusation of anthropocentrism is actually the accusation that the Pragmatist refuses to prostrate herself before something non-human. The Pragmatist’s reply is that she has not, in her life, met any non-human authorities, and that the various candidates the Realist has put forward - God, Reason, Nature, The Truth - have all turned out to be ventriloquised by the human beings who claim to speak for them. The Pragmatist would rather argue with the human beings directly than with their puppets.

She has favourite figures too. She likes Hans Castorp, who hears Settembrini’s enlightenment and Naphta’s reaction in extended detail and accepts neither, and who descends from the mountain into the war in full awareness that none of the systematic accounts he has been offered are adequate, and goes anyway. She likes Settembrini himself, who knows that his enlightenment humanism is not metaphysically grounded and who holds it as a chosen project that he values for what it does for human life rather than for what it claims to track in the structure of being. She likes Don Quixote, in the second part of the novel, where Cervantes makes increasingly clear that Quixote knows the chivalric world is a fiction and chooses it as a way of being a particular kind of person in a world that has stopped permitting that kind of person to exist. She likes Mr Stevens, in The Remains of the Day, who has spent a life in service to an idea of dignified service that the novel slowly reveals to him as a construction, and who does not abandon the construction at the end but reaffirms it consciously, in the recognition that the construction is what he has to work with and is therefore what he will work with. The Pragmatist is drawn to figures who know that the frameworks they are living inside are human constructions, who choose those frameworks anyway, and who hold them in the affirmative mode of I have decided to live this way rather than in the supplicant mode of I have been told this is how things are.

She regards what the Realist calls the love of truth as, more often than not, the love of being on the side of the authority, which is to say, the love of being beyond reproach by virtue of one’s allegiance, rather than by virtue of any particular thing one has thought or done. She suspects that this love is the love of chains; it offers the comfort of having been told what to do, and it transfers the responsibility for one’s commitments upward, where it cannot be argued with by anyone in the room. The Pragmatist would rather carry the responsibility herself, in the room, where it can be argued with. This is, I should say, more burdensome than it sounds. It involves having to defend one’s preferences as preferences, in one’s own voice, without being able to retreat behind the skirts of any higher authority.

Her preferred mode of persuasion is the invitation. Try looking at it this way is her characteristic offer, this belief or action will end up hurting these people, in contrast to the Realist’s this way is the way because it represents Reality. The invitation can be declined. The Realist’s claim cannot, except by leaving the room, which is in fact what people often end up doing. The Pragmatist’s invitation has, in my experience, a much higher conversion rate than the Realist’s claim, partly because it does not require the interlocutor to admit error before changing her mind. One can accept an invitation without conceding that one was previously wrong to have been somewhere else. This is a small piece of conversational generosity that the Realist’s vocabulary does not contain.

I find myself, as I think the reader has by now gathered, in the second group. The honest version of what I am doing is this: I have spent a great deal of my professional life around people of both temperaments, and I find one of them more pleasant company, more honest about what they are doing, and more useful to think with, than the other. The Pragmatist will tell you, when pressed, that she is making it up as she goes along and is open to suggestions. The Realist will tell you, when pressed, that she is in possession of the script and you are welcome to read along. I know which of these I would rather have dinner with. I also know which I would rather be. The two facts are, I suspect, the same fact.