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• If we are operating as Homo sapiens, then let's recognize this and embrace it rather than pretend it is something that has no bearing on our moral intuitions and explicit arguments, whether from pure reason or empirical observation. The fact that our views are fashioned from a point of view need not ipso facto undermine them, but it should reorient our view of what they can and can't accomplish. A human cannot pretend to disinterestedly observe that there exists intrinsic moral value in animals when he does in fact have an interest, and of course, taking into account our own interests is rational to do if we seek the mind-independent " truth. " However, when we do take our place in the world into account, which is verified through far more direct empirical observation than through moral arguments, then we find that the initial arguments are not rational per se, but expected as effects of (brute, non-cognitive) causes which we can identify. • All of moral theory and epistemic positions are arrived at through pragmatic arguments, contrary to those holding positions within the domains of philosophy who would say that they arrived at (some of) their conclusions because the conclusive propositions are true. If they then say that they adopted their positions operating on the pragmatic ethic of comparing arguments and taking the one with the most agreeable content, then they lose the initial proposition of saying they arrived at their position because it is argumentatively supported (in a non-pragmatic way). Now, one could argue that what counts as substantiating evidence for some claim will only count insofar as it is useful to substantiating that claim, and then say that even my argument is pragmatic—but that's exactly what I am arguing for!! The pragmatist is far more consistent and it is the one with reasons stemming from ontology or logic who is undermining his own view. • Now, it follows that if we are agreed that even logic is employed pragmatically as a constraint on what we ought and ought not to accept, then we need not have any beliefs in the objective truths of logic or any other fundamental notions. And more than this, the idea that all " truth " is conditional and subject to revision is just the pragmatic notion I am arguing for and some hold this view of truth without recognizing that it universalizes their position on everything, making it all pragmatic. I don't believe that the law of excluded middle is to be accepted because it is well-supported by arguments, but because it is a semantic description of the world that is almost universally supported by what we observe (however, quantum physics might undermine it). • More interestingly, as Rorty points out, a necessary condition of rationality involves specifying in advance the criteria for what is to be accepted, i.e. what justifies our beliefs. To do this, we must come up with a standard of what counts as a justified belief. Now, philosophers will wave their hand at the skeptic for having too high a standard for justification and they will demand that the skeptic support his standard with rational arguments. When it is asked in return how the " non-skeptic " justifies his more humble standard, he can give no argument amounting to anything other than the idea that his standard has some hope of our attaining it! But that is pragmatism par excellence and exposes the fact of our animal nature—we are no more rational than the chimp or the butterfly since what counts as rational for us is what produces fruitful results. But to equate human rationality with this lower, animal form of it, is contrary to our humanist intuitions of rationality which is that we can specify what counts as justified in advance. That is the paradox of thorough-going pragmatism and it is the problem I take to need some answering (although I as of yet have not found a way to do so). If we have no standard in advance by which to judge our progress, then such a standard is itself ever in development and that makes us, essentially at least, no more rational than animals. The fact that we have language and logical relations just produces an illusion of rationality which is never delivered in actual fact.