The other, not the self, should be the center of whatever “communication” might mean. An episode from the life of William James captures the problem well. He had been given charge of a turtle’s heart for a popular lecture on physiology by one of his Harvard Medical School professors. The lecturer was demonstrating that the heart would pulsate when certain of its nerves were stimulated, and the pulsations were projected onto a screen in the front of Sanders Theatre. Halfway through the lecture, James realized the heart was not responding, so he took it upon himself, in a sudden and almost automatic response to the emergency, to make the proper motions on the screen by manipulating his forefinger such that the audience would not fail to gain a true understanding of the heart’s physiology. Writing many years later—in a final essay on psychical research that was centrally about the balance of fraud and faith in what we can know—James admits that such simulation could be disdained as shameless cheating.2 Had he acted otherwise, however, the audience would have been cheated of an understanding of physiology. His forefinger had performed humbug in the service of understanding. Confessing his prestidigitation or the demise of the heart would have offered only a secondary truth: the flaws of the apparatus rather than its capacity to project truth. All our knowledge, he suggests, may rest on strategically concealed frauds—or rather, what would be considered frauds by those who still hold to a copy theory of knowledge. The criterion for knowing should not be accurate duplication of the world, but the ability to make our way through with the best aids we can get. (Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication)