SHORTS (4) ‘Professor Van Norden, Western philosophy is not racist’

 

A short analysis and summary of my essay.

Photo by the author. Source here.

‘Professor Van Norden, Western philosophy is not racist’

Detailed Summary and Analysis of Paul Austin Murphy’s Essay

Overview and Sectional Breakdown

Paul Austin Murphy’s essay, “Professor Van Norden, Western philosophy is not racist”, is a detailed counter-argument to Bryan Van Norden’s 2017 Aeon article, “Western philosophy is racist”. Murphy structures his response into seven distinct sections:

1. Professor Van Norden: Introduces Van Norden’s background and rhetorical tone.
2. ‘Western philosophy is racist!’: Examines the broader context of academic anti-racism and double standards.
3. Van Norden’s Political Thesis: Analyzes the underlying political objectives of Van Norden’s arguments.
4. Western Philosophy’s Racist Turn: Critiques Van Norden’s historical narrative regarding Immanuel Kant and G.E. Moore.
5. Orientalism/Occidentalism: Explores Edward Said’s influence and Van Norden’s treatment of Heidegger and Derrida.
6. Oriental Occidentalism: Discusses historical non-Western biases against the West.
7. Conclusion: Addresses academic departmental specialization and institutional politics.

Central Argument

Murphy’s core thesis is that Bryan Van Norden’s critique of Western philosophy is primarily a political intervention rather than a purely philosophical or historical analysis. Murphy contends that Van Norden uses rhetorical claims of “racism” and “xenophobia” to push what Van Norden himself calls a “multicultural manifesto.” According to Murphy, this effort aims to extend progressive ideological hegemony — already established in various humanities disciplines — into traditional Western philosophy departments.

Furthermore, Murphy argues that Van Norden’s account relies on anachronism and selective logic:

• It evaluates historical Western thinkers using 21st-century sociopolitical criteria while failing to subject non-Western philosophical traditions to identical critical scrutiny.
• It conflates institutional focus and academic specialization with racial prejudice, treating routine departmental boundaries as evidence of systemic bigotry.

Important Distinctions

1. Politics vs. Philosophy

Murphy draws a clear distinction between academic philosophy as an analytical discipline and political activism aimed at demographic or institutional representation. He argues that the widespread post-modern principle that “everything is political” serves as a self-fulfilling justification for activists to politicize academic subjects. In Murphy’s view, this conflation has led to the “dumbing-down” and ideological capture of university departments, turning intellectual disputes into moralized debates over political purity.

2. Negative Exclusion vs. Positive Orientalism

In examining how non-Western thought is treated, Murphy highlights a double bind in Van Norden’s framework:

• Negative Exclusion: Dismissing non-Western traditions as non-philosophical is labeled by Van Norden as racist or xenophobic.
• Positive Orientalism: Approaching non-Western traditions as distinct, valuable, or inherently alternative ways of thinking (as seen in some readings of Heidegger or Derrida) is criticized by Van Norden as patronizing “noble savage” thinking.

Murphy notes that under this framework, Western thinkers cannot acknowledge non-Western thought as fundamentally different without being accused of exoticizing it, nor can they treat philosophy as a specific Greek/European historical development without being accused of exclusion.

3. Orientalism vs. Occidentalism

While Van Norden draws heavily on Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism (Western stereotyping of the East), Murphy introduces the counterpart concept of Occidentalism (non-Western stereotyping of the West). Murphy points out that insularity, ethnocentrism, and anti-foreign bias have historically existed in non-Western societies — such as imperial China’s long-standing view of Westerners as “barbarians” — centuries before modern Western imperialism. Murphy argues that ignoring non-Western Occidentalism while framing all Western insularity as uniquely problematic creates an unbalanced, one-sided narrative.

Significant Examples and Case Studies

• Immanuel Kant and “Whig History”: Van Norden holds Immanuel Kant and his 19th-century defenders responsible for a racist turn in Western philosophy that excluded non-white traditions. Murphy responds by framing this argument as a classic example of “Whig history” — a biased historical method characterized by present-mindedness, teleology, and moral judgment. Murphy argues that penalizing an 18th-century thinker for failing to adhere to 21st-century concepts of race and anthropology is anachronistic.
• G.E. Moore’s Comment on Vedanta: To demonstrate modern institutional racism, Van Norden highlights a single off-the-cuff remark by English philosopher G.E. Moore during a meeting of the Aristotelian Society, where Moore joked that whatever Indian philosopher Surendra Nath Dasgupta said about Vedanta epistemology was “absolutely false.” Murphy counters that a single, casual exchange regarding one specific philosopher does not constitute a systematic rejection of Indian philosophy, noting that Moore never wrote on or claimed expertise in Eastern thought.
• Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida: Van Norden criticizes Heidegger for stating that philosophy is uniquely Greek in nature, and Derrida for remarking during a 2001 visit to China that China possessed “thought” rather than “philosophy.” Murphy points out the irony that even thinkers like Derrida — celebrated for focusing on the “Other” and deconstructing Western metaphysics — are categorized by Van Norden as engaging in positive Orientalism.
• Departmental Specialization: Addressing Van Norden’s example of a US Midwest philosophy professor who told a student, “This is the intellectual tradition we work in. Take it or leave it,” Murphy compares philosophy departments to other specialized academic faculties (such as Russian Studies, Black Studies, or Subaltern Studies). He argues that every academic department must maintain specific focuses and boundaries, and that declining to expand a department’s scope to include unrelated fields reflects administrative specialization rather than “thinly veiled racism.”

Conclusion of the Essay

Murphy concludes that multicultural and post-colonial frameworks already dominate a large portion of modern university humanities faculties. He asserts that Van Norden’s call for greater inclusion is not merely a request for open-mindedness, but a push to enforce ideological uniformism across the remaining traditional analytic and Western philosophy departments.

— By Gemini

Original essay here: https://medium.com/@paulaustinmurphy2000/professor-van-norden-western-philosophy-is-not-racist-fb3cbf30c39

Science Oppresses: Science Liberates

 

Does science oppress people? Does it liberate them? Many Western academics think the former. Many in the Third World think the latter.

Photo by the author. Source here.

Meera Nanda on Science as Liberation

In terms of what Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom call the “Third World” and much else, we can ask if science causes (or creates) oppression or does it bring about liberation? (There are many other binaries which could have been chosen here.) Many academics and theorists in the Western world (from Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard to Rupert Sheldrake) think it causes specific political hegemonies and helps embed political power. Yet many people in the Third World believe it brings about liberation.

In their book Why Truth Matters, the philosophers Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom (henceforth “B & S”) focus on the case of Meera Nanda when they write:

“Science for her was a liberation from the traditions and narrow opportunities available to most provincial women. When she moved to the USA and went for a second PhD, in philosophy of science, she was shocked to find herself ‘drowning in platitudes about cultivating the ‘alternative sciences’ of women, non-Western peoples. and other ‘victims’ of the modern age’.”

Meera Nanda (who’s an Indian historian and philosopher of science) sees science (or the scientific mind) as a means of liberation. Many Western academics and theorists see it as a creator of non-Western, as well as some Western, victims. Some of them believe that women and non-Western cultures have their own sciences (in the plural) too.

Let Nanda speak for herself. Her own introduction for The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science is ideal for getting at these issues:

“I am currently interested in the cultural history of science in India, from its early beginnings to the present. During my stay at MPIWG, I hope to work on my new book project, which critically examines the various strategies for harmonization (or ‘hybridization,’ to use a postcolonial term) of scientific theories (from Copernican astronomy and Darwin’s theory of evolution to quantum physics) with spiritualist-idealist strains of Hinduism. My objective is to show how this kind of hybridization covers up contradictions and turns modern science into a source of legitimation for Hinduism and Hindu nationalism.”

Now take the case of the biologist and paranormal researcher Rupert Sheldrake. He does believe that there are non-Western sciences (if not, specifically, women’s science). For example, he writes:

“In almost every other sphere of human life, there is not one but many points of view. […] Only in the realm of science can we still find the old ethos of monopoly, universality and absolute authority that used to be claimed by the Roman Catholic Church.”

Then Sheldrake is more specific:

“There are many medical systems, including osteopathy, acupuncture, naturpathy and homeopathy, but only one kind, mechanistic medicine, is labelled ‘scientific’ […].”

In much of Sheldrake’s writings, religion and “spirituality” hover in the background. So it’s not a surprise that he believes the following about the future:

“As the sciences free themselves from the constrictions of materialism, many new possibilities arise. And many of them raise new possibilities for dialogues with religious traditions.”

Sheldrake believes that Western science creates victims. He sees himself as the main victim (or “heretic”). Other victims are paranormal researchers, practitioners and theorists of alternative medicine, and “ordinary people” (i.e., because science is “elitist and undemocratic”).

It must be said that you don’t need to take science to be a Platonic form (i.e., Science) to have a problem with this relativism and postmodern scepticism. Just as the philosopher David Chalmers doesn’t believe that the word ‘peace’ can have as its meaning ‘ham sandwich’, so anything does not go when it comes to the word ‘science’.

Sheldrake is just my own example, whom I highlight because he isn’t the usual suspect — a postmodern theorist.

B & S highlight all this in an explicitly political way when they conclude in the following way:

“The situation she confronted was rich in ironies: benevolent ‘friends’ of Third World people helping the reactionary, the rich and the powerful fasten the chains more firmly on women, lower castes, and secularists in India. Intellectuals, ‘in their despair over the world they find themselves in, have helped deliver the people they profess to love-the non-Western masses, the presumed victims of ‘Western science’ and modernity-to the growing forces of hatred, fascism, and religious fanaticism.”

Of course, we need to be given more details on B & S’s political thesis above. Specifically, on exactly how Western intellectuals help the reactionary, the rich and the powerful fasten the chains on women and the poor. As it is, B & S do provide their readers with lots of details elsewhere. But what we do know, even only from this short passage, is that Western science is deemed, by many Western academics and theorists, to actually help the reactionary, the rich and the powerful of the Third World to chain women and the poor to their roles. Yet, as we’ve just seen, Meera Nanda takes the exact opposite position: the embrace of science is the embrace of liberation.

Western Intellectuals and the Third World

B & S wonder why

“[f]or some reason Western intellectuals, and many non-Western too, have decided that people in the Third World do not want or like freedom or change […].”

What if some Third World people don’t like freedom or change, at least not the Western versions of these things? Do B & S simply assume that they do?

To generalise, think here about the “neo-conservative” assumption that all Third World peoples (at least those the neo-cons deemed to live under oppressive regimes) do want (Western?) freedom and change. [See here.] Now think about those academics and theorists who think the opposite. Of course, it all depends on specifics. Some Third World people do want freedom and change; others don’t. Again, it depends on how freedom and change are fleshed out.

The passage continues:

“[T]hat ‘authentic’ Third World people prefer ancient communal ties and oneness with the earth.”

Here too, some Third World people do prefer communal ties and oneness with the earth. Others don’t. Or, rather, some may prefer communal ties, but not care too much about oneness with the earth. Or they may prefer oneness with the earth, but not care too much about communal ties.

Many academics and theorists in the West do believe that many — or even most — Third World people prefer communal ties and oneness with the earth. Whether that’s a romantic view or not is another issue.

B & S then become way more rhetorical about Western intellectuals. They inform their readers that such theorists

“tell [people in the Third World] to be what they were born, and stay what they were born, on pain of being accused of inauthenticity and mental colonization”.

It can be doubted that these Westerners have ever been so explicit that they literally tell Third World people to be what they were born. However, that doesn’t stop them from being inexplicit about these matters. And it doesn’t stop elites in the Third World (or those who’ve been educated in the West) from adopting these attitudes. (They often have.) What’s more, Third World elites, either newly in the West or at home, have certainly accused people in their own communities of inauthenticity or mental colonisation.

Now let’s place all this in an historical and philosophical context, as B & S do. The best way of doing so is to focus on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of a language game.

Wittgenstein’s Language Games and Kuhn’s Paradigms

Firstly, take the idea that non-Western cultures can be judged by scientific standards and values. Now take the alternative idea that other cultures may have their own “sciences” in the plural. This is how Wittgenstein has both helped and hindered here:

“The form of life is the frame of reference we learn to work within when trained in the language of our community; learning that language is thus learning the outlook, assumptions, and practices with which that language is inseparably bound and from which its expressions get their meaning.”

As ever with Wittgenstein, this passage has been interpreted in multiple ways by multiple people. Having just said that, it’s much clearer than many other passages by him. In fact, it’s so clear that interpretation is surely at a minimum here, and simple agreement or disagreement with it is at a maximum.

Thomas Kuhn interpreted this passage (or passages like it) when he stated that “the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds”.

So just as we have many interpretations of Wittgenstein, so we now have many interpretations of Kuhn’s Wittgensteinian passage. Yet Kuhn was actually talking about science. That didn’t stop philosophers and theorists applying his ideas to almost everything under the sun.

Let’s apply it to science itself.

Don’t Wittgenstein's words above have the consequence that what is science depends on the language game it’s embedded in? More linguistically, is it the case that what the word “science” means is dependent on the language game it’s embedded in? Thus, there may well be women’s science, Māori science, Nazi science, Marxist science, and so on. Rupert Sheldrake (mentioned earlier) certainly thinks so. (He wouldn’t include “fascist science” in his own personal list of sciences.)

B & S comment on this. However, rather than talking about sciences in the plural, they talk about “knowledges” in the plural. They write:

“It is just very easy to employ this kind of argument in order to demonstrate that the ‘knowledges’ produced by indigenous people are every bit as valid, ‘in their own way’, as the knowledge produced by Western science.”

Of course, this passage (at least when taken on its own) isn’t that helpful because B & S need to explain the word ‘valid’ and the phrase ‘in their own way’. For a start, if we go down the relativist road, these so-called knowledges may be valid according to these cultures, but still not be examples of science.

Peter Winch as Extreme Wittgensteinian

Science and relativism have just been mentioned, and B & S conclude by noting where they believe all this leads:

“The threat is, rather, relativism. Put simply, if the scientific form of life runs up against an alternative, incommensurate form of life, perhaps one rooted in religious commitment, then there is no further justification that a scientist can offer for the primacy of scientific truth other than the fact it is truth in terms of the standards and conventions of science.”

The Wittgensteinian philosopher Peter Winch agrees that scientific forms of life run up against alien alternatives, and thus there is no further justification for science. In his own words, at least according to B & S,

“there is therefore little point in trying to understand the beliefs of a culture which is radically alien to the Western scientific tradition”.

(Think here of Wittgenstein writing: “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”)

Peter Winch seems to have gone further than Wittgenstein on all this. (Alternatively, perhaps his examples are simply more straightforward and political.) According to B & S:

“[O]ne would just run slap bang into a fundamental incommensurability.”

What Winch says is probably correct. But what has his position to do with facts and truths? Is it a fact, for example, that possessing the heads of one’s enemies means possessing their spirits too? Is it true that “Jews use Muslim blood for rituals”, as many people in some Muslim cultures believe? Perhaps those latter Muslim cultures aren’t “radically alien” enough for Winch’s position; so we can treat them differently to the cultures of head hunters. But where is the line drawn between a radically alien culture and simply a different culture? Moreover, does that line, if it exists at all, matter in this debate about facts and truths?

In any case, exactly why can’t we understand the beliefs of a culture which is radically alien to our own? Isn’t this what anthropologists do? Moreover, much has been written about alien cultures by historians, anthropologists, philosophers, scientists, etc. Surely this constitutes at least some degree of understanding.

More to the point, isn’t there a conflation here between understanding a culture and agreeing with its beliefs? And how does all this impact on the issue of trans-cultural agreement or disagreement?

How Philosophers of Reference Saved the World from Relativism

 

When Kuhn and others questioned realism in science, the “tool” of reference was used to argue that the world is not well lost.

The following passage expresses what was at stake after Thomas Kuhn’s own “revolution”:

“[W]e need an alternative account of meaning which allows that people holding competing or successive theories may still be talking about the same thing.”

Partly as a reaction to what many took to be “Kuhnian relativism”, some philosophers wanted to find a means of fighting back. They did so by focusing on reference.

Meaning always (or often) goes alongside reference in this tradition. But “what then is the constant in meaning?” According to the historian and philosopher of science Ian Hacking, Hilary Putnam “makes everything turn on reference and extension”.

The most obvious thing to say here is that these philosophers were attempting to securely tie names, words and terms to the world.

Fregean Sense

Long before Kuhn and Putnam, Gottlob Frege “thought that a word has a standard sense, which is what makes a scientific tradition possible”. What is that sense? —

“The sense is what is shared by all communicators, and may be passed down from generation to generation of students.”

It will be shown that Hilary Putnam’s “stereotype” (to be discussed in a moment) shares a family resemblance to Frege’s sense. (They’re still very different notions.) Still, what is important here is that Frege

“taught us that an expression should have a definite fixed sense, which we apprehend, and which enables us to pick out the reference”.

In other words, the route a word/term takes to a thing goes via this fixed sense.

Hacking’s Own Position on Reference

Sometimes it’s difficult to decipher if Hacking is putting his own view or that of someone else (e.g., Putnam). In this case, he puts the case for the permanence of reference in the following way:

“If we do have a genuine natural kind term, the reference of the term will remain the same, even though stereotypical opinions of the kind may change. Thus the fundamental principle of identity for a term shifts from Fregeian sense to Putnamian reference.”

We’re told that the reference (miraculously?) remains the same even though what are deemed to be its stereotypical properties change. The claim here isn’t that the reference can be “found” without relying on its stereotypical properties, only that such properties change. The obvious question now is:

If the stereotypical properties are always changing, how do we know we have the same reference?

The Putnamian position is that we get at the reference via his version of “Fregean sense”. The Fregean sense “may change”, while the reference, qua reference, doesn’t. However, does that really answer the question (in bold) above?

To be clear. Hacking accepts the importance of reference for science. However, he tells his readers that “[a]nybody who thinks that reference works by a causal and historical connection to the thing named ought to reflect on the following example”. Hacking then gives a complex historical example in which the notion of “causal and historical connection to the thing named” doesn’t work, but Hacking’s own entity realism does.

So this isn’t an attack on reference. It’s an attack on a particular account of reference.

Hacking on Acid

Hacking provides a concrete example of possible incommensurability as it relates to the word ‘acid’:

“The incommensurabilist would say that we mean something different by the word ‘acid’ than did Lavoisier or Dalton around 1800. Our theories about acids have changed substantially [ ].”

Of course, this is very difficult for the layperson to grasp because he’d need to have both historical knowledge and a knowledge of chemistry. It would work very differently if, say, Hacking gave as an example the word ‘cat’ or ‘brick’. Yet even the layperson would probably accept the clause “our theories about acids have changed substantially”.

In any case, Hacking continues:

“[ ] Putnam says, we are still talking about the same kind of stuff as those pioneers of the new chemistry.”

Intuitively, and simply, this seems feasible. It could be a case of people saying different things about the same stuff. Even contemporary persons could be saying different things about the same stuff.

This position posits a kind of strong distinction between the stuff itself and what we say about it. Can that distinction be maintained? Wouldn’t it assume that firstly we have uncontaminated stuff, and, later, our sayings about it? What if that stuff is always contaminated with sayings or theories? That may be the case. Yet the same stuff would still underpin all these different sayings and theories.

Reference and extension are means to hold on to that same stuff.

Putnam’s Stereotypes

According to Hacking, Putnam justified his position in terms of what he called a “stereotype”:

“Certainly there is an important cluster of properties and in the professional stereotype for acids: acids are substances that in a water solution taste sour, and change the colour of indicators such as litmus paper. They react with many metals to form hydrogen, and react with bases to form salts.”

That’s a decent number of properties we can use to identify acids. Is this a roundabout way of saying that everyone in the know will experience a sour taste, experience a litmus paper changing to a certain colour, etc. regardless of whether they lived in 1800 or 2020? This would mean that any disagreements about acids must occur elsewhere — beyond these specific properties. It seems that the differences in theory account for these differences.

Hacking mentions theory in the following:

“Lavoisier and Dalton would agree completely with this stereotype. Lavoisier happened to have a false theory about such substances, for he thought every acid had oxygen in it.”

So we have different theorists all experiencing a water solution tasting sour, indicators such as litmus paper changing colour, stuff reacting with many metals to form hydrogen, and the stuff reacting with bases to form salts. Over and above all that, we have theory too.

(Just to get this point across, let’s take Putnam’s other example of the word ‘water’. Putnam “gives us colourless, transparent, tasteless, thirst-quenching, etc [as] part of the stereotype for ‘water’”.)

One question readers may ask here is whether or not all these properties (or stereotypes) really are theory-free. After all, we’re taking about hydrogen, oxygen, litmus paper, salt, etc. here. Perhaps that doesn’t matter in this specific context.

Hacking concludes with a entity-realist statement: “But there is no doubt that Lavoisier and Davy were talking about the same stuff.”

Davy is mentioned here because in 1810 he showed that Lavoisier’s theory “was a mistake”. That is because “muriatic acid is just HC1, what we now call hydrochloric acid”. Here again we’re shown that theory rides piggyback on these stereotypical properties of the stuff. Indeed, the new term “hydrochloric acid” does so too.

These general points are made again by Hacking we he states that

“the philosopher of naming must ask if Lavoisier meant Brønsted-Lowry acids or Lewis acids when he spoke of acids.”

Here’s the crunch: “Obviously he meant neither.”

That means that there is a distinction to be made, again, between stereotypical properties and theories. Can we now say that Brønsted-Lowry acids and Lewis acids are theory-laden, but stereotypical properties aren’t? (The philosopher Russell Hanson, way back in the 1960s, would have certainly said, ‘No, we can’t.”)

Bas van Fraaseen’s Electron

A much-better known case of naming is the electron. Hacking writes:

“[Bas van Fraassen] does tease the realist, who is confident that there are electrons: ‘Whose electron did Millikan observe; Lorenz’s, Rutherford’s, Bohr’s or Schrodinger’s?’”

On our theme of theories, isn’t the Dutch-American philosopher Bas van Fraassen referring to the different theories of the electron, not to the electron itself? After all, don’t we have the phrase “different theories of the electron”, not “different theories of the banana”. That said, what the hell is this theory-free electron? There’s nothing more theory-laden than the electron, surely. Tell me, what is the electron without theory? It was born with theories attached to it. It has never been free of theory. The realist, or Putnam, may concede all this. But that still leaves stereotypical properties which run free of theory… Or do they?

Now take the (entity) realist’s “obvious reply”, at least as expressed by Hacking:

“Millikan measured the charge of the electron. Lorentz, Rutherford, Bohr, Schrodinger and Millikan were all talking about electrons. They had different theories about electrons. Different stereotypes of electrons have been in vogue but it is the reference that fixes the sameness of what we are talking about.”

It’s not just that theories about any given x change, so too do the stereotypical properties. Hacking is saying that we have something, “the reference” (or the electron), which is free of not only theory, but also any fixed set of stereotypical properties. Isn’t it this position that really irks the anti-realist or instrumentalist? What can we say about the reference without any stereotypical properties or theory? Perhaps, then, Hacking isn’t arguing that we do have the reference (or electron) without any stereotypical properties. It’s just that such properties can change. That is, they can be “in vogue” this week, and out of vogue next week.

We can now take a slightly different approach to the importance of reference — one that doesn’t actually focus on scientific terms.

Donnellan’s Causal Theory of Reference

The philosopher Keith Donnellan attempted to save philosophical realism via reference. In other words, if we can have a causal theory of reference which excludes names like ‘Santa’, then we can distinguish real propositions like “Lady Gaga will come tonight” from “Zeus is angry with us”.

Donnellan argued that proper names shouldn’t rely on being tied to “descriptive content”. Metaphorically, he believed that this would give individual minds too much power, and direct causal reference less power.

Associating descriptive content with proper names has been deemed to be idealist by some philosophers too. (“Subjective” or “mentalist” is a better term in this context.) A causal connection to Lady Gaga (or the ‘Lady Gaga’ relation to Lady Gaga) is concrete. The descriptive content “The rubbish [or great] singer in Hollywood” is subjective, or at least dependent on an individual mind (or on individual minds in the plural). Similarly, the definite description that readers personally tie to the name ‘Santa’ may be very different to the ones other people tie to that name.

So what would secure us identity of reference here when it comes to the names ‘Santa’ and ‘Lady Gaga’?

Donnellan’s causal theory of reference (which excludes Santa) is the realist’s way of avoiding not just idealism (or, better, subjectivity), but also relativism.

Conventions, conceptual schemes, identifying descriptions, etc. were deemed to be subjective by Donnellan. Causal processes, on the other hand, are deemed to impose themselves on us. In other words, they tie us firmly to the world.