Rescuing Dewey

Rescuing Dewey

Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism

Peter T. Manicas

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Manicas, Peter T.Rescuing Dewey : essays in pragmatic naturalism / Peter T. Manicas.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2515-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)ISBN-10: 0-7391-2515-X (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Dewey, John, 1859-1952. I. Title. B945.D44M27 2008191dc22 2008018082

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vAcknowledgements vii

Introduction xi

PART I PRAGMATISM AND SCIENCE

1 Pragmatic Philosophy of Science and the Charge of Scientism 3

2 John Dewey and American Psychology 35

3 John Dewey and American Social Science 63

4 Culture and Nature 81

PART II NOT ANOTHER EPISTEMOLOGY

5 Naturalism and Subjectivism: Philosophy for the Future? 1016 Naturalizing Epistemology: Reconstructing Philosophy 119

PART III DEMOCRACY

7 American Democracy: A New Spirit in the World 143

8 John Dewey: Anarchism and the Political State 187

9 Philosophy and Politics: A Historical Approach to Marx and Dewey 211

10 John Dewey and the Problem of Justice 237

11 Liberalisms Discontent: America in Search of a Past That Never Was 251

Contents

PART IV WHY NOT DEWEY?

12 The Evasion of Philosophy 273

13 Democratic Hope 283

14 Analytic Pragmatism 287

15 Postmodern Pragmatism 295

Bibliography 305

Index 315

About the Author 323

vi Contents

vii

The original place and time of presentation and/or publication is indicated be-low. I am grateful to each of the editors and publishers for their permission toreprint.

Chapter 1, Pragmatic Philosophy of Science and the Charge of Scientism,was read as part of an invited panel, American Philosophical Association,Boston, December 1986, and appeared in The Transactions of the Charles S.Peirce Society, Vol. XXIV, No. 4 (Spring 1988), pp. 179222.

Chapter 2, John Dewey and American Psychology, Journal for the Theoryof Social Behavior, Vol. 32, No. 3 (September 2002), pp. 26794.

Chapter 3, John Dewey and American Social Science, in Larry Hickman (ed.),Reading Dewey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 4362.

Chapter 4, Culture and Nature, was the Patrick Romanell Lecture, Ameri-can Philosophical Association, Portland, March 27, 1992, published in Pro-ceedings of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 66, No. 3 (1992),pp. 5976.

Chapter 5, Naturalism and Subjectivism, read at the conference, The Futureof Realism in the American Tradition of Pragmatic Naturalism, University ofBuffalo, October 2022, 2000. The essay appeared in John Shook, (ed.),Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books,2003), pp. 79106.

Acknowledgements

Chapter 6, Naturalizing Epistemology: Reconstructing Philosophy, in JohnJ. Stuhr (ed.), Philosophy and the Reconstruction of Culture: Pragmatic Es-says after John Dewey (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 15174.

Chapter 7, American Democracy: A New Spirit in the World, Chapter 13 ofWar and Democracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 33878.

Chapter 8, John Dewey: Anarchism and the Political State, read at the an-nual meetings of the Society for the Advancement of Philosophy, VillanovaUniversity, Spring 1980, and appearing in Transactions of the Charles S.Peirce Society, Vol. 18 (Spring 1982), pp. 13358. Reprinted in J. E. Tiles(ed.), John Dewey: Critical Assessments, Vol. II (London and New York:Routledge, 1992), pp. 40729.

Chapter 9, Philosophy and Politics: A Historical Approach to Marx andDewey, originally, Deweys Critique of Marxism, Society for the Ad-vancement of American Philosophy, American Philosophical Association,Eastern Division, New York, December 28, l984, and appeared in W. J. Gavin(ed.), Context over Foundation: Dewey and Marx (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1988),pp. 14775.

Chapter 10, John Dewey and the Problem of Justice, Journal of Value In-quiry, Vol. 15 (1981), pp. 27991. Reprinted in J. E. Tiles (ed.), John Dewey:Critical Assessments, Vol. III (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 40729.

Chapter 11, Liberalisms Discontent: America in Search for a Past ThatNever Was, read at a panel discussion Midwest Political Science Associa-tion, Chicago, April 1998.

Chapter 12, The Evasion of Philosophy, Review of Cornel West, The Amer-ican Evasion of Philosophy, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society,Vol. XXVl, No. 3 (Summer 1990), pp. 37384.

Chapter 13, Democratic Hope, Review of Robert B. Westbrook, Demo-cratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth, in Perspectives on Poli-tics, American Political Science Association, Vol. 4, No. 2 (June 2006), pp. 37375.

Chapter 14, Analytic Pragmatism, Review of Mathew Festenstein, Prag-matism and Political Theory: From Dewey to Rorty (Chicago: University of

viii Acknowledgements

Chicago Press, 1997), Transactions of the Charles Peirce Society, Vol.XXXV, No. 1 (Winter 1999), pp. 20314.

Chapter 15, Postmodern Pragmatism, Review of Baert, Philosophy of theSocial Sciences: Towards Pragmatism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), forth-coming in Journal of Critical Realism.

Acknowledgements ix

xi

There may be no philosopher who has provoked more books and articles thanJohn Dewey, who, of course, may also have set a record in producing booksand articles. (The Collected Works, now complete, number some thirty-sevenvolumes.) One wonders if anyone has read all of it. Indeed, one strategy, per-haps too frequently adopted, is to ignore all the critical literature and try tostick to his published textssometimes, not even to all of them! Nor, it maybe supposed, is any philosopher less in need of rescuing. He has been thesubject of several biographies, including two excellent recent biographies andhis name continues to reappear in all sorts of contexts. Moreover, Deweysmany critics ranged pretty much across the philosophical spectrum and, to besure, there were plenty of sympathetic philosophers who responded to thesecritics. But the guiding idea in this volume is not to try to rescue Dewey fromhis critics (although that is sometimes also a consequence), but to rescueDewey from his friends.

The friends that he needs rescuing from fall into two main groups. On theone hand, there are those who either play down or ignore the implications ofDeweys naturalism. For these philosophers, his version of pragmatism brokenew ground precisely because it overcame the fundamental impasses of tradi-tional metaphysics. Viewed from the perspective of academic philosophy,these philosophers have labored hard to preserve and extend Deweys prag-matism as an original and distinct American philosophy. While still marginalin the academy, they have made many important contributions. Prominent inthis group are philosophers who speak of Deweys metaphysics of experi-ence.1 For these philosophers, Jamess radical empiricism is often taken asDeweys point of departure. These philosophers see rightly that Dewey re-jected atomistic empiricist versions of experience and that, for him, experience

Introduction

was rich and informing, and included not only relations of all sorts, but bothdoings and sufferings. But as Tiles has recently remarked, while Deweyinsisted that in his Experience and Nature, he sought to provide an empiricalnaturalism or a naturalistic empiricism, he saw also that many philosopherswould find these expressions to be oxymoronic, like talking of a roundsquare.

These philosophers take seriously the problem set out by Kant and hold,not without reason, that Dewey is suspicious of metaphysics in Kants sense:claims about that which is not in experience. The problem here, as Ralph Bar-ton Perry saw, was the slip into philosophical idealism. He argued: It wouldappear that while Dewey . . . rescues reality from dependence on intellect, heis satisfied to leave it in the grasp of more universal experience which is amatter of functions and habits, of active adjustments and re-adjustments, ofcoordinations and activities, rather than of states of consciousness (Perry,1955: 315). Some defenders of Dewey would, I think, also be satisfied. Perrywas not, of course, since he persisted that a thoroughgoing realism must as-sert independence not only of thought, but any variety whatsoever of experi-ence, whether it be perception, feeling, or even the instinctive response of theorganism to its environment (315).2

There was something radical and important about insisting on the rejectionof a subject/object dichotomy but on the usual terms, if existence is re-stricted to what can be experienced, it is hard to see how idealism is to beavoided. There is an alternative, a form of critical realism, which makesKants thing-in-itself knowable. That is, the causes of our experience cannotthemselves be in experience. There is a real tension in Dewey on this, a ten-sion examined in several of the papers in this volume. On the present view,the critical point is that, for Dewey, contrary to modern epistemology, theproblem of the external world was not a problemfor good reason; but evenso, there remained not only the question of the causal role of an independentlyexisting nature, but as part of this, the causal role of the theoretical entities ofscience. For the whole of Deweys long life, positivism was surely the un-challenged view on such matters (Manicas, 1989), and while recent pragmaticphilosophies of science were not particularly influenced by Dewey, they havehelped to promote the idea that Dewey could be enlisted in their cause. Thus,pragmatic philosophy of science rejects realism as an untenable and un-necessary metaphysical commitment. But this seems inconsistent with the ac-tual practices of the successful sciences (Manicas, 2006). Thus, while it mayseem obvious, we can only explain the rusting of iron if we have a theory thatpostulates the independent existence of Fe and which details the processcalled oxidation.

xii Introduction

Similarly, while it is clear that Dewey was a powerful advocate of themethod of intelligence, and that plainly, the practices of the sciences werepertinent to seeing what was involved in this, these philosophers have tendedto be uncritical of what might somewhat anachronistically be called Deweysphilosophy of science. Partly because Dewey wrote no explicit philosophy ofscience and partly because these philosophers have been rightly suspicious ofVienna-inspired Anglo-American philosophy of science, they have paid al-most no attention to Deweys originalbut confusingtheory of science, in-cluding his vision of its role and relation in society. This is an important la-cunae from the present point of view. Dewey is rightly associated withscience and scientific method, but neither idea can be taken for granted.For example, as Dewey made clear: the social sciences need to function in ademocratic society, but as he insisted, the prime condition of a democrati-cally organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which does not yetexist (Dewey, 1954: 166; my emphasis). Quest for Certainty (1929) is hardlythe key text for getting a handle on Deweys theory of science. As it turns out,Experience and Nature (1934), Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), andmany disparate essays are both far richer and much more clearly provide themain outlines of his distinctive views on the critical issues in philosophy ofscience.

These philosophers also see American pragmatism and especially Deweyas creating an image of America which made him a critical player in whathas been termed the reformist left. These writers may acknowledgeDeweys vision of a democratic society, but hold that, for him, problems inAmerican society could be corrected using the institutions of constitutionaldemocracy: elect the right politicians and enact the right laws. Thus, he isseen as left-liberal who puts his trust in American exceptionalism: the historyof the United States was moving progressively toward a distinct American vi-sion. While it is true that Dewey rejected an insurrectionary politics and wasno fire-eating leftist, his analysis of the present was radical in the sense thatit went straight to the roots. This put his politics close to Marxs in criticalways. The interpretation of Dewey as a left-reformist is best articulated by thesecond group of Deweys friends.

Rorty and those who follow him constitute this second group of friendsfrom whom Dewey needs rescuing. Again, speaking from the point of viewof academic philosophy, these philosophers are typically Anglo-Americananalytic philosophers. While their style of philosophy has somewhat waned,it is fair to say that they continue to dominate academic philosophy in theUnited States, if less so in other places. A good deal of recent Dewey schol-arship falls into this mode.

Introduction xiii

Rorty, of course, is key here. Himself a well-established analytic philoso-pher, his discovery of Dewey led him to a more general attack on the claimsof philosophy. He was correct to insist that epistemology is a modern sub-discipline of philosophy generated by the problem of legitimating the claimsof the new science (Rorty, 1979). And given this understanding of the historyof Western philosophy, he was correct also to see strong parallels between Nietzsche, James, Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault. Thus, contemporarytextualism, the idea that there is nothing but texts parallels the idealist no-tion that there is nothing but ideas (Rorty, 1982: 139). But there is, he insists,a critical difference between current textualism and classical idealism. In re-pudiating the tradition, textualists rejected the framework that allow for epis-temology and ontology. Thus, unlike idealists (or naturalists or materialists)so-called postmodern writers reject the idea that what is important is notwhether what we believe is true, but what vocabulary we use. Finally, then,for Rorty, pragmatism joins postmodern thinking in repudiating metaphysicalargument between idealist/naturalists and the epistemological idea of truth ascorrespondence with reality. But if Dewey was committed to naturalism,there would seem to be no escaping ontological commitmentsincluding anaturalistic account of consciousness. Similarly, philosophical realistsasmost ordinary people, believe that true means correspondence with reality.But even if one assents that we can have no unmediated access to reality as itis itself, it does not follow that we cannot discriminate between true and false.Indeed, it is a scandal to think otherwise.

Rorty sees problems with postmodernist moves to escape traditional phi-losophy. But he sees also that Dewey does not exactly fit his larger picture. Inagreement with Santayana, Rorty insists that Deweys efforts at a naturalis-tic metaphysics betrays a recurrent flaw in Deweys work: his habit of an-nouncing a bold new positive program when all he offers, and all he needs tooffer, is criticism of the tradition (1982: 78). To be sure, Dewey does offera bold new positive programa naturalistic metaphysics with epistemol-ogy replaced by his version of logic (Sleeper, 1986). And he needed to dothis because he could not step out of history and argue, as Rorty does, thatknowledge and truth are pseudo problems that will go away once we abandonthe claims of philosophy. Indeed, it is quite one thing to try to convince usthat warranted assertability could replace truth, understood as certainty,and quite another to say that, for pragmatists, there are no constraints on in-quiry save conversational onesno wholesale constraints derived from thenature of objects, or the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraintsprovided by the remarks of our fellow-inquirers (1982: 165). Worse, theSocratic virtueswillingness to talk, to listen to other people, to weigh the consequences of actions on other peopleare simply moral virtues. . . .

xiv Introduction

The pragmatists tell us that the conversations which it is our moral duty to continue is merely our project, the Europeans intellectual form of life (1982:172).

As several of essays in both Part I and Part II try to make clear, there are,for Dewey, considerable constraints on inquiry, beginning with a taken-for-granted independently existing nature, our embeddedness in it, our historyand indeed, those ongoing institutional arrangements which often make im-possible the required conversation. Thus, the inquiry which produced mo-lecular chemistry as we now understand it very much depended both on thenature of the independently existing world and the practices which show that,as Peirce argued, there is a preferred mode of fixing belief about it. Similarly,our embeddedness in nature and history both enables and constrains us in ac-tion. Thus, for example, as Part III tries to show, there are good reasons to be-lieve that Dewey was fully aware that there were enormous obstacles to hav-ing the kind of knowledge that he thought was essential to a democraticsociety and a humane life.

The writer who is the inspiration for the main thrust of most of the essaysin this volume is Ralph W. Sleeper, my former colleague at Queens College.His wonderful The Necessity of Pragmatism (1986) provides a systematic ef-fort to respond to both sets of the friends of Dewey. The reader might noticehere that for many years four members of the Queens department had contin-uing conversation about Dewey and, more generally, about pragmatism.These include John J. McDermott, Jack B. Noone, and Eugene Fontinell. Ourconversations never lacked passion but never approached violence.

Because Deweys thought was both rich and provocative, it is hoped thatthe essays of this volume, written over a period of some twenty-five years,provide a contemporary refocusing of current problems, both philosophicaland political. The essays are easily organized under four main headings.

PART I: PRAGMATISM AND SCIENCE

David Hollinger has rightly argued that the critical role played by the prag-matists was to find and articulate a way of life consistent with what theyand contemporaries variously perceived as the implications of modern sci-ence (Hollinger, 1985: 93). Part I finds a deep irony in this. It is widely held,by friends and enemies, that the pragmatists succeeded. On this interpreta-tion, the pragmatists adopted an instrumentalist view of science in whichsuccessful prediction and control-vindicated inquiry. By subordinating all in-quiry to practical ends, they could show that a belief was warranted only in-sofar as it was scientific. Finally, they could then vindicate a culture whose

Introduction xv

social motor was science. But there is a deep irony in this: As Chapter 1,Pragmatic Philosophy of Science and the Charge of Scientism, tries toshow, this victory was pyrrhic: In this chapter, I argue that the foregoing in-terpretation is a stunning distortion and that the pragmatists failed utterly intheir quest to set a new course for a scientific civilization. Not only werethe forces at work resistant to their criticisms, but their fundamental insights,in a paradoxical inversion, became absorbed in distorted forms. This was es-pecially critical as regards psychology and the social sciencesas Chapters2 and 3 try to show.

By looking at the views of Peirce as well as James, we can see more clearlyDeweys distinctive and original response. Chapter 1 provides, as well, a gen-eral introduction to themes and issues taken up in subsequent chapters andparts of the volume. Thus, Chapter 2 turns to Deweys relation to the historyof American psychology and argues that contrary to much established opin-ion, not only did Dewey have no influence in the path taken, but that as earlyas 1896, he marked out a path which today offers considerable promise for agenuinely scientific psychology.

The key is a proper understanding of his much ignored and when noticed,misunderstood, ideas on logic, understood by him as the theory of inquiry. Itnot only points the way to a powerful conception of an ecological psychol-ogy, but as Part II argues, it is at the heart of Deweys rejection of traditionalepistemology.

It is striking here that his enemies, for example, Bertrand Russell, found itto be a confused mess and that most of his friends have paid no attention toit. Striking here also is the fact that the two most recent and otherwise veryuseful overall accounts of Dewey, Robert Westbrooks John Dewey andAmerican Democracy (1991) and Alan Ryans John Dewey and the High Tideof American Liberalism (1995), almost entirely ignore it. Ryan, surely a com-petent philosopher of science, refers to the Logic as vast and somewhat baf-fling (309). Following on the excellent work of Tom Burke (1994), Chapter2 develops the central role and key ideas of the Logic as the critical part ofthe misunderstanding of Deweys relation to psychology as a science. I con-clude by arguing that, versus the dominant Cartesian varieties associatedwith a good deal of what is termed cognitive science, the Logic providesexcellent philosophical ground for an ecological psychology. Thus, as Burkewrites, in contrast with a classical empiricist view of perception (involvingso-called sense data, sense impression, stimulations or nerve endings, irrita-tions of body surfaces, and so forth), ecological psychology emphasizes a dif-ferent array of theoretical concepts; one being the concept of invariants andanother the concept of affordances . . . (1994: 84). The pertinence of theseideas for a critical realist theory of science are picked up in Chapter 5.

xvi Introduction

Chapters 3 and 4 extend the argument to the social sciences. From the per-spective of naturalism, Dewey could easily respond to the fundamental prob-lems of the social sciences, but especially the series of invidious dualisms:subjectivism/objectivism, agency/structure, nature/culture, the idiographic,and the nomothetic. In this context, of special note, is his usually ignored ormisunderstood theory of meaning, a theory shared by his Chicago colleague,G. H. Mead. But while there is an independently existing external world, it isstriking that as social forms do not exist independently of the beliefs and ac-tions of situated agents, only a naturalism can escape the poles of subjec-tivism and materialism.

PART II: NOT ANOTHER EPISTEMOLOGY

This part picks up another central theme raised in Chapter 1, the central po-sition in Deweys naturalism of his remarkable and much ignored Logic:The Theory of Inquiry (1938), which, as he insisted, was not another epis-temology. Chapter 5 considers the broader context of naturalism andsubjectivism, and seeks to locate Dewey in this context. Chapter 6 as-sumes the main thrust of the Logic, and considers critically some compet-ing efforts at naturalistic epistemology, including the work of Quine,Rescher, and Laudan.

Two problems stand out. First, all of the many varieties of contemporaryanalytic epistemology share in what can be termed an epistemological in-dividualism. This is a legacy of ruggedly antiecological individualistic tra-ditional epistemology, a legacy which, it is critical to emphasize, also pro-foundly affects a great deal of work in current cognitive psychology(Chapter 2).

Quine, whose version of naturalistic epistemology has nothing in com-mon with Deweys, despite suggestions to the contrary, gives an exemplarycharacterization of epistemological individualism: Thus:

This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled inputcertainpatterns of irradiation in certain frequencies, for instanceand in the fullness oftime the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional externalworld and its history (Quine, 1969: 77).

It is hardly clear how we get from patterns of irradiation to concepts, orwhether, finally, the output which is a description of the three-dimensionalexternal world can be established as true. The same problems arise for thosewho identify themselves as pursuing alternative epistemologies. Internal-ists and reliabilists like William Lycan and Alvin Goldman, but also

Introduction xvii

externalists and naturalists of various stripes, for example, Hilary Korn-blith and Philip Kitcher. On these views, the social is not denied; but it entersonly as regards either the explanation of false belief or the social organiza-tion of knowledgewith Robert K. Merton identified as having authoredthe most important twentieth century work. Remarkably, no attention ispaid to the important work in recent sociology of science, including herework by the so-called strong program, and work by Latour, Pickering, Hack-ing, and many others.

I said that there are two problems. Even we acknowledge the role of the so-cial in perception and understanding, it is hardly clear whether we can, fol-lowing Dewey, simply ignore the problem of Pyrhonian skepticism. Theproblem is not justifying the existence of an external world, or whether thatworld is structured in some fashion or other, but whether, given the natura-listic equivalence of the knowledge of different cultures, we can justifyclaims to even warranted belief while at the same time avoiding either circu-larity or dogmatism. Thus, can we say that when the Karam utters I see a kobity now he is wrong, that what he sees is really a cassowary?Quines version of naturalistic epistemology, as well as most traditional epis-temology, either assume that some privileged beliefs are true or they assumethat something vaguely identified as science yields truth. In Chapter 6, atleast in the spirit of Dewey, we consider three pragmatic approaches to theproblem of privileging the claims of science without circularity or dogma-tism. I suggest that instead of seeking to warrant pragmatically assertions ormethods, we take practices as our point of departure. This provides a far moreplausible, even if modest, outcome.

PART III: DEMOCRACY

There is perhaps no term so badly abused as democracy. Originally, ofcourse, it meant (literally) that the people rule. While not all those living inAthens were citizens, citizens actually met and made decisions, which af-fected them all. When the U.S. Constitution convinced the world that the peo-ple could be sovereign and still be entirely excluded from participation in decision-makingexactly as Madison made clear, liberal republics becamedemocracies.3 With this move, not only did capitalism become consistentwith democracy, it became the ideal arrangement! Peoples democraciesaccepted Aristotle dictumand Madisons, that if the demos who are poorachieved power, they would abolish private property as contrary to their in-terests. The peoples democracies could be one-party states as long as theymade the effort to realize the democratic value of equality. After all, as Mar-

xviii Introduction

shall Tito liked to point out, since the people did not rule in either the (nowgone) Yugoslavian state or in the United States, the difference was really onlyone party as against two!

The problem of democracy in the era of the modern nation-state was bril-liantly posed in the 1920s in a remarkable debate between Dewey and WalterLippmann who argued that in the United States, tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee best characterized our party system. The debate, considered in Chapter 7,remains of profound relevance especially given the nearly complete capitula-tion to the idea that there is no alternative to the liberal capitalist democra-cies of the advanced industrial societies. Dewey surely thought otherwise.

The occasion for this debate was World War I. But it is critical to noticethat the war changed the minds of both parties and that war remains the gen-erally unacknowledged problem for democracy in the modern world. Thatis, until the Great War, Deweys perception of American democracy waslargely uncritical and we cannot begin to understand him on the subject of de-mocracy until we locate his maturing ideas against the background of the warand of the writings of Walter Lippmann. Chapter 7 attempts an analytical/historical consideration of the conditions and content of this debate.

Briefly, Dewey fully grasped the power of Lippmanns brilliant critique,but he could not accept Lippmanns solution. Lippmann made two funda-mental moves. First, he insisted that the citizen cannot know what is happen-ing or what ought to happen, and even if they could, there is a structured in-capacity to constitute any sort of coherent public opinion. Only mysticaldemocrats could believe that the people had a will and that this wasevencould beactually realized.

But Lippmann was not threatened by this outcome, since he also insistedthat the critical question of government was not whether citizens actuallyparticipated, or whether it sought and realized the will of the people, butwhether it is producing a certain minimum of health, of decent housing, ofmaterial necessities, of education, of freedom, of pleasures, of beauty (1954:19697). Accordingly, the essence of popular government, notwithstandingtweedle-dum and tweedle-dee, is a choice between supporting the Ins whenthings are going well and supporting the Outs when they seem to be goingbadly (126).

The capacity to throw the bums out does give a minimum of accounta-bility and this should not be discounted,4 but Lippmanns criteria are emptyof rational content. If the citizen is to appraise the success or failure of aregime in power, then she has to make impossible counterfactual judgmentsand to find some way for these to congeal into a coherent majority vote. Lipp-mann gave a host of reasons why, under present institutional arrangements,this is impossible. But if so, there is simply no rational ground for applying

Introduction xix

Lippmanns criteria. What indeed is minimum of health or freedom andhow can one know if the Outs would have done better? Lippmann fell backon a thoroughly elitist version of his argument regarding science. Gradually. . . the more enlightened directing minds have called in experts who weretrained, or had trained themselves, to make parts of this Great Society intelli-gible to those who manage it (370). Though these enlightened directingminds knew that they needed help, they were slow to call in the social sci-entist (371). Lippmann hopes that the lesson has been learned. What isneeded, he opines, is presidential leadership responsive to the best of socialscientific knowledge!5

This is an unembarrassed technocratic solution to the problem of democ-racy. But, obviously, it assumes that experts can have the requisite knowl-edge, and it still confronts the problem of assessing counterfactuals. More-over, even assuming that experts make no mistakes, actions haveconsequences that generally cannot be undone. War is surely the most obvi-ous instance.

Perhaps the recent Bush dominance of American politics is the best andworst case for Lippmann. The capacity to throw the bums out is a test ofdemocracy, but we need to see clearly what democracy thus amounts to.Put aside the fact that mechanisms of opinion formation allow those withhuge sums of money to manipulate the opinions of citizens. Put aside also thatit is relatively easy to disenfranchise voters, that there are serious problemswith the electoral system, including the electoral college and the U.S. systemof representation. Put aside also that, as we more recently have discovered,with electronic voting, there is no way to know if the results of voting usingthe new electronic technologies are even truthful!6

In the midterm election of 2006, it seems clear enough that American vot-ers did repudiate at least some of the policies of President Bush and the Re-publican controlled Congress. But not only is there no way to weigh the rel-ative importance of the many policies adopted (and rejected) and to identifysome coherent alternatives, but these decisions and their consequences haveinalterably reshaped the world. While this is always the case, decisions arenot all equally monumental. The most obvious case is the war in Iraq wherethe consequences include the death of thousands, the waste of billions of dol-lars, a civil war, and likely the promotion of global terrorism. By January2007, it seemed that the clear message of the voter on the war in Iraq couldbe ignored. Indeed, confirming Lippmann on tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee,the leaders of the Democratic Party comfortably took positions remarkablysimilar to those of the sitting President! Moreover, there is already an argu-ment about which of the Presidents legacies will be more important: the war,the inattention to the environment, the attack on the division of powers and

xx Introduction

civil liberties, the huge deficit or the stunning decline in Americas standingin the world.

Indeed, the main argument for self-determination is precisely that if inter-dependent persons must live with decisions that affect them all they musthave a hand in making them.7 But Dewey went further. For him, the problemof democracy and social science were intimately connected. Lippmann andthe technocrats failed to realize that experts could indeed provide infor-mation, but policy needs also a clear idea of the present situation of personsand of goals to be pursued. That is, generating coherent policy that affects thelives of interdependent individuals requires the direct participation of theseindividuals. Lippmann earlier had it right: The scientific spirit is the disci-pline of democracy, the escape from drift, the outlook of the free man (1961:151). But this requires not experts but a democratic social science. As Deweyinsisted, what is required is the perfecting of the means and ways of com-municating meanings so that genuinely shared interest in the consequences ofinterdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct ac-tion (1954: 155). A public which satisfied this goal would still make mis-takes and would still suffer the consequences of these; but they would be, atleast, their mistakes.

Dewey recognized full well that the conditions for realizing a democraticsocial science that could constitute a public required radical change in exist-ing institutions. And this was not merely a change in our electoral politicsimportant as these may be, but a change that acknowledged that in capital-ism, decisions of major social importance are legitimately made by personsentirely unaccountable to the electorate. If democracy means that personshave a say in determining the conditions of their everyday lives, then de-mocracy required some form of socialism. Dewey was never clear abouthow socialism was to be institutionalized, and there is evidence that he be-lieved, wrongly on my view of the matter, that the difference and choice be-tween a socialism that is public and one that is capitalist regarded a choicebetween markets versus planning.8 But however that may be, the problem ofrealizing democracy pushed him to what is easily read as an anarchist vi-sion!9 Chapter 8 considers this by looking carefully at what Dewey actuallysaid against the background of actual anarchist thought. Yet, at the sametime, Alan Ryan observes rightly: He was not a fire-eating leftist, and neverbecame one (1995: 117).

Unfortunately, not only was anarchism a dirty word by the time Deweywrote The Public and Its ProblemsSacco and Vanzetti were executed in1921 for their beliefs even though the charges against them were unproven, butthe leftism of the day was inevitably connected to Bolshevism and a version of Marx which was rooted in Engels (Manicas, 2000) and in the 2nd

Introduction xxi

International, and, subsequently, with what became the standard, but also con-testable version of Lenin (Lewin, 2005). Indeed, it is absolutely crucial to no-tice that Dewey had read little of Marx and that his anticommunism wassquarely directed at the Stalinism that had solidified in the 1930s. Similarly, avery different reading of Marx became possible only in the 1930s with thepublication for the first time of the early writings of Marx (in German), thecomplete German Ideology and The Grundrisse. Chapter 9 offers an historicalreading of Marx and Dewey and shows that understanding Dewey requiresposing his thought against the Stalinist version of Marxism/Leninism.Dewey had no patience with the pseudoscience of a vulgar dialectical or his-torical materialismmostly for good reasons, even if this leaves open thequestion of whether as Chapter 9 argues, some other version of Marx was eas-ily compatible with Dewey and whether some patent shortcomings in Deweysanalysis might be filled with some pertinent Marx. It is acknowledged by anumber of important writers that Dewey and Marx shared fundamental philo-sophical premises, but it is not always noticed that they also shared in their vi-sion of a good society and in thinking that a gradualist politics need not beantirevolutionary (Chapter 9).10 The point, more generally, is that Dewey triedto find a politics between liberals who insisted on parliamentary means butwho saw no need for radical change in the existing social structure, and thescientistic, eschatological and insurrectionary versions of the Marxists. Theproblem remainsassuring the continuing relevance of Dewey.

Finally, then, Dewey would insist that a politics without vision is merelyunprincipled opportunism. But Deweys vision of democracy is not merely anabstraction. As a practice and a process in which action is informed by arecognition of our inevitable interdependencies, it is a realizable ideal. AsRousseau, Marx, and Dewey saw, interdependency is inevitable, and interde-pendency does establish the conditions of injustice and tyranny. But democ-racy is its only solution. There are no assurances, to be sure, but as EmmaGoldman observed The night cannot last forever.

The final two chapters of Part III consider Deweys political theory in con-trast to three more recent and influential interventions. The publication ofJohn Rawlss A Theory of Justice (1971) generated a veritable industry. Forthe first time in a very long time, here was a philosopher doing normative po-litical theory. Rawls articulated a liberal theory which had a New Deal lookabout it, progressive without being radical. It was quickly responded to byRawlss Harvard colleague Robert Nozik. His book, Anarchy, State andUtopia (1974) was a criticism of Rawls from the Libertarian Right. It earnedhim a cover in the New York Times Magazine.

It is critical to notice that neither Rawls nor Nozick had much to say aboutdemocracy. Rawls assumed some form of representative regime and (with

xxii Introduction

J. S. Mill) even defended plural voting. While democracy is not indexed inRawlss book, Nozick surely went further. After acknowledging that democ-racy is the idea that people have a right to a say in the decisions that impor-tantly affect their lives, Nozick asserted, remarkably: After we excludefrom consideration the decisions which others have a right to make and theactions which would aggress against me, steal from me, and so on, . . . it isnot clear that there are any decisions remaining about which even to raise thequestion (1974: 270). For both, accordingly, justice was the key concept.

Dewey is quite the opposite. As argued in Chapter 10, if one surveys thevoluminous writings of Dewey, the first thing that one notices is the relativeinattention paid by Dewey to the problem of justice. Altogether, there are per-haps not more than a dozen pages of sustained discussions devoted explicitlyto the topic. These discussions are little gems, and they offer what are, I think,fatal criticisms of the liberal theories of both Rawls and Nozick. This, too, isgenerally ignored.

Dewey, always concrete and historical, recognized that what we call lib-eral democracy emerged at a specific time and place in world history, that itdid not have democracy as one of its goals, and that while it celebrated theautonomous individuala prerequisite for the ideology of market capitalism,it offered a false picture of individuals and their relations. Not only were per-sons social beings, deeply interdependent and encumbered (to borrow aterm from Sandel), but the control of the social environment which is fur-nished by the institution of property makes the idea of equal freedom in lib-eral democracies a pure absurdity (Dewey, 1954: 271).

It is not that Dewey did not care about justice. Rather, he insisted that de-mocracy was the primary problem and that because the fundamental assump-tions of associated life were misconceived by liberal theories, it disvalued de-mocracy. Liberal theory thus shares with Lippmann the idea thatparticipation was not an issue and that as long as the quality of everydaylife was as good as could be expected, all was well enough. For liberal the-ory, securing political and civil rights, some measure of opportunity for all,unimpeded markets and private property was all that democracy demanded.It is striking that when, in 1928, Dewey traveled to the New Soviet Union, he observed: I was certainly not prepared for what I saw; it came as a shock (LW, Vol. 3: 217). For him, the experiment had two goals. First,there was what had concerned Lippmannsecurity against want and illness,and for health, recreation and a degree of material ease. The other was thefamiliar democratic ideals, familiar in words at leastof liberty, equalityand brotherhood. The hope was that both will be more completely realizedin a social regime based on voluntary cooperation, on conjoint workers con-trol and management of industry, with an accompanying abolition of private

Introduction xxiii

property as a fixed institution (LW, Vol. 3: 244). Dewey soon enough cameto see that the experiment which, under the prevailing conditions, could nothave succeeded, had turned to disaster (Manicas, 1989, Chapter 11). Sincethen we have been left with the idea, inherited from Wilson and currently pur-sued by Bush, that making the world safe for democracy really means mak-ing the world safe for liberal capitalism.

Apart from Marxist criticisms of liberal theory, there is a currently fash-ionable critique of rights-based liberalism often termed, republican-communitarianism. It is clear enough that Rawls and Nozick (along withFlathman, Dworkin, Feinberg, Gewirth, Sen, and many others) are, despitedifferences, rights-based liberals. The other side is a much less clear groupand might include any number of diverse writers who have criticized liberalphilosophy and promoted some version or other of community, includingDewey, Hannah Arendt, Robert Paul Wolff, Charles Taylor, Roberto Man-giabera Unger, Michael Walzer, Carol Gould, Hannah Pitkin, Amitai Etzioni,and some others. The relation to democracy of these writers is also very di-verse. But republican-communitarism is well represented by MichaelSandels, Democracys Discontent: American in Search of a Public Philoso-phy (1996), discussed in Chapter 11. Of particular interest here is Sandels ef-fort to link his views to those of Dewey.

There are two related features of Sandels position. First, he claims tohave a version of self-rule and secondthe heart of his critique of liberalismthe real problem of government is not securing liberal justiceas defined by either Rawls or Nozick, but the cultivation of civic virtue.To be a citizen requires a sense of belonging, the existence of a moralbond with the community whose fate is at stake. On this view, govern-ments have legitimate concerns with soulcraft, what he elsewhere callsthe formative project.

Sandel is quite right, of course, to say that Dewey was a critic of liberal in-dividualism, but Dewey called for radical version of the alternative, not as inSandel, a reactionary version of encumbered selves who, like Robert E.Lee, concluded that his obligation to Virginia (and to the institution of slav-ery) was not merely of sentimental import, but had moral force (Sandel,1996: 15). For Dewey, community was essential, but for him, in contrast toSandel, it was grounded on recognition of interdependence not on blood,habit, religion, or language. Similarly, Sandel seeks to capture the essentialingredient of democracy by speaking of self-rule, but in sharp contrast toDewey, there is simply no attention paid to what this means institutionally.One wishes that he had read Lippmann, or more lately, Robert Dahl. This absence is explained, in part at least, by his distorted view of American his-torya history that, as noted, was well understood by Dewey and Lippmann.

xxiv Introduction

Worse, perhaps, for Dewey, in contrast to Sandel, the problem of Americandemocracy was not moral but institutional and structural: In conditions ofalienation, publics cannot exist.

PART IV: WHY NOT DEWEY?

The problem of American democracy is well understood by Cornel West inhis important The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989), discussed inChapter 12. In the spirit of Rorty, he wishes that Dewey had been a moreconsistent historicist pragmatist, instead as I would have it, a more consis-tent naturalist, exactly in Marxs sense. West, sympathetic to Marxian ideas,sees the radical and unfinished character of Deweys emancipatory project.While one may have some misgivings about both his account of Emerson andhis efforts at tapping American cultural materials, his critical reflections onthe failure of Deweys project are especially provocative and suggest the deepreasons for what remains an unsolved dilemma: How to be both radical andcommitted to democratic processes.

A useful comparison to Wests book is Robert Westbrooks DemocraticHope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (2005), discussed in Chapter 13.On his version, Dewey neither evaded nor transformed philosophy. Ratherhe holds that Dewey should be read as offering an epistemological defense ofdemocracy, something which he recognizes Dewey did not do. For West-brook, the argument has been filled in by the recent pragmatisms of Putnamand Misak. But the project is both alien to Dewey and, in contrast to his wellinformed book (1991), ignores the arguments that Dewey actually did make(see above).

Westbrook admits that he gave Deweys logic short shrift and he en-dorses Kloppenbergs view that Dewey was taking the challenge of con-structing a democratic political culture on the quicksand of instrumentalistlogic (2005: 177). This is half-right: the Logic was the ground of his visionof a democratic culture, but one needs to overcome a good deal of the philo-sophical tradition before one can see that it can hardly be characterized asquicksand.

Similarly, Westbrooks suggestion that Dewey never leaves the populismof late nineteenth-century producer-republicanism is a fairly typical criti-cism that fails to account for the changes in his views following the GreatWar. While Deweys socialism contradicted all actually existing socialisms,it was fully consistent with Marxs idea that producers in capitalist societyare alienated, that neither wage workers nor independent producers on theJeffersonian model, are capable of what Marx termed, free production.

Introduction xxv

Again, one must see that Deweys critique was not nostalgic, but radical injust the ways that Marx would have endorsed.

The temptation to assist Dewey by constructing arguments which helacked is the central task of Festensteins Pragmatism and Political Theory(1997), discussed in Chapter 14. Like Westbrook, Festenstein writes solidlywithin the tradition of Anglo-American analytic philosophy and, viewedthrough these lens, he finds fatal problems in Deweys naturalistic ethicalframework (62, 99, 145). He concludes that Dewey had a scientistic hope fora physics of problem-solving (45) and that his empirical theory of valuationseems to rest on the possibility of a prior science of problems and their reso-lution, which does not exist (44). But inquiry, as Dewey understood it, wasnot some prior science of problem solving. It was the only defensible wayto address all problems, scientific and otherwise. Dewey did not, of course,embrace the prevailing fact/value dichotomy and he often spoke of allegedscientific social inquiry. The following text neatly sums up a theme whichhe pursued throughout his long life.

The sociologist, like the psychologist, often presents himself as a camp followerof genuine science and philosophy, picking up scraps here and there and piecingthem together in somewhat aimless fashion. . . . But social ethics is the changefrom inquiring into the nature of value in general to an inquiry of the particularvalues which ought to be realized in the life of everyone, and of the conditionswhich shall render possible this realization (Early Works, Vol. 5: 23).

Chapter 15, the final chapter, rejoins the question of Dewey and social sci-ence and argues that the currently fashonable postmodern reading of prag-matic social science will not do. So why not Dewey?

NOTES

1. As Sleeper (1986) remarks, we need to resist the almost universal habit oftaking for granted that experience is the subject matter of [Deweys] metaphysics(1986: 6).

2. Perrys version of direct realism is, to be sure, untenable. See Shook, DeweysEmpirical Theory of Knowledge and Reality. But see Roy Wood Sellars Material-ism and Human Knowing, in R. W. Sellars, V. J. McGill, and Marvin Farber (eds.),Philosophy for the Future (New York: Macmillan, 1949).

3. See my War and Democracy, especially Parts I and III. Lippmann and Deweywell understood the consequences of this shift in the meaning of democracy. Lipp-mann wrote: the fiction that the United States is a democracy owes to the victory ofThomas Jefferson. . . . It is a fair guess that if everyone had always regarded the Con-stitution as did the authors of it, the Constitution would have been violently over-

xxvi Introduction

thrown, because loyalty to the Constitution and loyalty to democracy would haveseemed incompatible (Lippmann, 1954: 284). Dewey, who was never a mysticaldemocrat, offered similar sentiments.

4. Most Americans believe, it seems, that one has a democracy if there are freeelections, but free elections require political and civil liberties and it is these, not freeelections that mark the important difference between tyrannies and non-tyrannies. For this reason, as well, liberalism is often confused with democracy. SeePart IV.

5. Rorty remarks: Even someone like myself, whose admiration for John Deweyis almost unlimited, cannot take seriously his defense of participatory democracyagainst Walter Lippmans insistence on the need for expertise (1998: 104). CompareWestbrooks very useful Epilogue (1991) and his later account in Democratic Hope(Chapter 14 below) which seems, at least, to capitulate to a Rortyean problematic.

6. While they have been under attack by the Bush regime, political and civil lib-erties are not yet utterly compromised. People can still inquire, speak out, and orga-nize, even if this has little effect on policy. Accordingly, if democracy in the UnitedStates (as elsewhere) is profoundly constrained, the United States is not a tyranny.

7. There is, of course, absolutely no democracy as regards what is hypocriticallycalled the community of nations. See Deweys remarkable and much misunder-stood efforts in the campaign to outlaw war (Chapter 8).

8. It is easy enough to show that centralized planning, Soviet style, cannot be the-oretically sustained and is disastrous practically. As Mandel, for example, sees, onemust assume the whole of general equilibrium theory. But there are fatal objections tothis theoryas argued by Hayekians among many others. There are variant forms ofmarket socialism, but surely a vision to be pursued was laid out in the much ignoredessay by Diane Elson, Market Socialism or Socialism of the Market (1988).

9. Once we are clear about misconceptions of anarchist politics including the ideathat anarchists were terrorists and utopian in the worst sense, there is nothing prepos-terous about seeing Dewey as an anarchist. At the time of the Pullman strike, he wroteto Alice Dewey that he had realized how anarchistic (to use the current term here)our ideas and especially feelings are (quoted by Westbrook, Democratic Hope: 86).See also Hooks extremely useful account of the Marxian theory of the state. Hook(1933) distinguishes society, government, and state, and argues that where thegovernment represents the needs and interests of the entire community, it does notneed [the state] special and coercive force behind it (214). Hence, for Marxists, if de-mocracy is to prevail, the state must be smashed. Indeed, Lenins State and Revo-lution (1905) is an anarchist tract and a proper reading of What Is to be Done andof the period from the October Revolution to Lenins death, shows that while Leninmade many mistakes, including, for example, destroying the Constituent Assembly,he never wavered in his defense of the soviets, the most democratic of the institutionsin the evolving USSR (Lewin, 2005).

10. During the much-misunderstood period following the abdication of the Kaiser,the revolutionary goals of Social Democracy, as understood by Marx, Engels and therevisionists were betrayed by SPD leadership. After this betrayal, with the help ofBolshevik revolutionary practice, Social Democracy was redefined as consistent with

Introduction xxvii

a capitalism with a human face. Similarly, the highly restricted choices of the Bolsheviks in Russia generated a very distorted view of socialism. See Manicas, Warand Democracy (1989), Chapters 11 and 12. In both the German and Soviet case, thecritical question is: could it have been otherwise? As Hook insisted, following both Marx and Engels, to be a socialist, one had to be a democrat. In our Orwellianworld, the meanings of anarchism, socialism, and democracy are thoroughlycorrupted.

xxviii Introduction

Part One

PRAGMATISM AND SCIENCE

3INTRODUCTION

By the turn of the century, it was clear to William James, Thorstein Veblen,and John Dewey that science was giving its tone to modern culture. But forthem, the consequences were more than uncertain. The most well known ad-vocates of science, Spencer, Clifford, Huxley, and others, were not only de-fending agnosticism and positivism, but a view in which science was to be immunized from the biases and interests of human communities. James,Veblen, and Dewey were anything but enthusiastic about the situation as theysaw it. Indeed, Jamess criticisms hinged on ideas about the foundations ofscience which were completely novel, and Veblen and Dewey were clearestin seeing that science was being shaped by changes in industry and in theeconomic organization of society. Science, pretender to transcendent au-thority, was becoming industrialized, technocratic.

David Hollinger has rightly argued that the critical role played by the prag-matists in American culture was to find and articulate a way of life consistentwith what they and their contemporaries variously perceived as the implicationsof modern science (Hollinger, 1985: 93).l It is widely held, by friends and ene-mies, that they succeeded. On this interpretation, the pragmatists adopted a viewof science in which successful prediction and control vindicated inquiry. By sub-ordinating all inquiry to practical ends, they could show that a belief was war-ranted only insofar as it was scientific. Finally, they could then vindicate a cul-ture whose social motor was science.2 In what follows, I suggest that theforegoing interpretation is a stunning distortion and that the pragmatists failedutterly in their quest to set a new course for a scientific civilization. Not onlywere the forces at work resistant to their criticisms, but their fundamental in-sights, in a paradoxical inversion, became absorbed in distorted forms.

Chapter One

Pragmatic Philosophy of Science and the Charge of Scientism

But they were not entirely blameless. The problem is not merely that thelanguage they employed, including, of course, the term pragmatism itself,made it easy to misunderstand their viewsalthough this was certainly true.3Rather the problem was deeper. In particular, it regarded pragmatist views ofthe nature of philosophy and its relation to science. While the pragmatistswere correct in seeing themselves as innovators, and while, finally, they maywell have agreed on less than they disagreed, they did not wholly escape pre-vailing antimetaphysical attitudes. Indeed, the nature of their commitment toexperience made it easy to distort the nature of their commitment to practice.If I am correct, the deep problem in pragmatist thought is the turn away fromthe epistemological question, explicitly taken by Dewey. The troubles be-gin with Peirces verificationism and are enormously exacerbated by Jamessshift from the philosophy of his Principles to his radical empiricism. The dif-ficulties in getting a handle on Deweys philosophy can hardly be overstated.My treatment, which relies heavily on R. W. Sleepers recent and importantstudy (1986), is but a sketch. In Sleepers useful terms, if I am correct,Deweys logic of experience and metaphysics of existence made his nat-uralism precarious and incomplete, a feature of his philosophy noticed, forexample, by Woodbridge and Santayana. For me, his logic of experienceneeded what his metaphysics of existence would not allow, an indirect real-ism which affirmed that there is a causally efficacious nonexperienceableworld sufficiently structured to be inferentially knowable. Peirce struggledwith the idea, and surely in Principles, James had held to such a view. But forreasons that I try to make clear, James and then Dewey supposed that it couldbe dispensed with. Spurred on by an emerging consensus over the nature ofscience, Peirces doubt-belief theory of inquiry allowed Dewey to dissolveboth the problem of the external world and the mind/body problem. Forhim, there was no problem of knowledge (berhaupt), even if there were par-ticular and concrete questions which cried for resolution, questions whichpersistent inquiry could answer. This meant, on Deweys view, how might themethods of science be turned to human use? Yet, if as a consequence of theturn away from the epistemological legacy of modern philosophy, the idea ofscience which he assumed had positivist elements, then it became easy to seepragmatism as a technocratic philosophy.4 The story I have suggested is com-plicated, of course, and this essay must be considered but a sketch.

PEIRCES PRAGMATISM

As everyone knows, what came to be called pragmatism was first set outby Peirce in two remarkable essays published in Popular Science Monthly in

4 Chapter One

18771878. In the first, The Fixation of Belief, he put forward his genuinelyoriginal doubt-belief theory of inquiry, what I shall take to be the core ofpragmatism.5 Insisting that that sole object of inquiry is the settlement ofopinionnot as the tradition had held, the securing of truth, and that beliefis of the nature of a habit, he offered that of the possible modes of fixing be-lief, while all do have their merits, the method of science had, finally, to bethe one we must chose. Unlike tenacity, but like authority, it is consistentwith the fact that humans are social beings. On the other hand, while themethod of science can give us a clear logical conscience, as with all that wecherish, it costs us dear. The other methods, indeed, are psychologicallysatisfying and easy. The a priori method, e.g., allows the action of naturalpreferences to be unimpeded and under their influences lets people con-versing together and regarding matters in different lights, gradually developbeliefs in harmony with natural causes (Peirce, 1950: 105)Peirces versionof philosophy as conversation. Similarly, the method of authority is not onlypropelled by our natural feelings of sympathy and fellowship, but, strikinga skeptical note, if for the mass of mankind it is their highest impulse to beintellectual slaves, then slaves they ought to remain.6 Nevertheless, as withthe mate one has selected, one must work and fight for the method of sci-ence, never complaining that there are blows to take, hoping that there maybe as many and as hard to give . . . (112). Why this effort? Exactly becausethe method of science alone presents any distinction of a right and a wrongway (1089). Its fundamental hypothesis is that

there are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinionsabout them; these realities affect our senses according to regular laws, and,though our sensations are as different as our relations to objects, yet, by takingadvantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how thingsreally are . . . (l078).

I want to emphasize that (1) for Peirce, the doubt-belief theory rules out thequestion of the existence of an external world as a skeptical question, evenif versions of realism and idealism remained open questions. That is, nei-ther solipsism nor the problem of other minds can be taken seriously. Peircecannot prove that there is something which affects or might affect every[one], but upon which our thinking has no effect. Yet there is no reasonthat a genuine doubt should arise in the practice of the method; indeed, no-body . . . can really doubt there are realities, or, if he did, doubt would not bea source of dissatisfaction (Peirce, 1950: 108). (2) We can know how thingsreally are even if the effects of reality on us are necessarily as various asare individual conditions. We can because we can assume that there are reg-ular laws involved in our transacting with real things. As Peirce later

Pragmatic Philosophy of Science and the Charge of Scientism 5

makes clear, this guarantees that given infinite time, there will be agreementon the part of all inquirers. Finally (3), not only does everybody use themethod, hesitating only when he does not know when to apply it, but sci-entific investigation has had the most wonderful triumphs in the way of set-tling opinion (108). More generally, then, I am suggesting that the doubt-belief theory is a psychosocialand thus scientifictheory of belief, but thatPeirce aims to provide a philosophical defense of a particular method of fix-ing belief, the scientific method, the foundations for which are in commonsense. To put the matter briefly (if cryptically), Peirce recasts the epistemo-logical problem by accepting the Kantian insulation against skepticism,but by rejecting Kants transcendental move.7

This enormously rich beginning was followed by How to Make Our IdeasClear, the essay which contains Peirces famous pragmatic maxim. Usu-ally read as the earliestand clearest!expression of the operationalisttheory of meaning, the essay addressed a problem which a host of writers hadbegun to address: the distinctive character of the terms of science. Peirce, andof course, James and Dewey, began their inquiries at just the time that a hostof philosopher/physicists were producing books and articles in what wewould now call the philosophy of science. These included G. R. Kirchoff,Wilhelm Ostwald, Ludwig Boltzmann, Hermann Helmholtz, his pupil, Hein-rich Hertz, Ernst Mach, W. K. Clifford and his student, Karl Pearson, HenriPoincar, and Pierre Duhem. These men all spoke with enormous authorityexactly because, by then, science was rapidly becoming an evident force inthe daily lives of people. Moreover, all of these men have been called posi-tivists in that, following Kant, they held, first, that scientific explanationmust eschew appeal to what in principle is beyond experience, that to do sotakes one into metaphysics, and second, following Berkeley and Hume, thatlaws of nature, are but empirical invariances.8 This thesis was related to thefirst, and, as we shall see, it was a critical one.

In his Analytic Mechanics, then, Kirchoff had said that we understand theeffect of force, but do not understand what force is. Peirce found this self-contradictory: the idea which the word force excites in our minds has noother function than to affect our actions, and these actions can have no refer-ence to force otherwise than through its effects (Peirce, 1950: 129). It surelyseems here that, as Ostwald and Mach argued, force is not some mysteriouspower but is nothing other than its sensible effects. Peirce illustrated hisfamous principle by asking if one could say of a diamond that had been crys-talized in the midst of a cushion of cotton and had remained there until it wasburned up, whether it was really hard? He responded confidently the ques-tion of what would occur under circumstances which do not actually arise isnot a question of fact, but only of the most perspicuous arrangement of them.

6 Chapter One

We know that Peirce came to see that his initial attempt to reconcile realismand phenomenalism, the characteristic drift of positivist philosophies of sci-ence, founded on the assumption that nothing is possible which is not actualor will not become actual. The issue was not merely whether unscratched dia-monds are hard, but more generally, there was the question of that Realitywhich he had posited as so essential to the method of science. When Peirce ap-plied his principle to the meaning of the real, he was led, as everyone knows,to assert that the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all whoinvestigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in thisopinion is the real (133). Against himself, he asked whether this was consis-tent with the definition given in his fixation essay? Did it not, in idealist fash-ion, make the characters of the real depend upon what is ultimately thoughtabout them. He answered that reality is independent, not necessarily ofthought in general, but only of what you or I or any finite number of men maythink about it (133). Murray Murphey was surely correct to conclude:

In Peirces system, the infinite future plays the part of the philosophers stone;it transforms possibility into actuality without compromising either the inex-haustibility of the possible or the limitations of the actual. On the one hand, thereal must be a permanent and inexhaustible possibility of sensation; on the other,it must be wholly cognized (1961: 16970).

But if the real is to provide a constraint on current belief adequate for epis-temic purposes, will this do?

In The Monist of 1905, he returned to these problems. In the first of two es-says, he made clear that instead of merely jeering at metaphysics, like otherprope-positivists, the pragmaticist extracts from it a precious essence, whichwill serve to give life to cosmology and physics (Peirce, 1950: 192). Thisprecious essence was his scholastic realismand precious it indeed was.

But if pragmatism was prope-positivist, what did this mean? He beganthe essay with an anecdote about an experimentalist. He wrote:

If you talk to him as Mr. Balfour talked not long ago to the British Associationsaying that the physicist . . . seeks something deeper than the laws connectingpossible objects of experience, that his object is physical reality unrevealedin experiments, and that the existence of such non-experienceable reality is theunalterable faith of science . . . you will find the experimentalist mind to becolor-blind (182).

Although the phrase, unrevealed in experiments, is more problematic thanmay appear, this could have been written by Ostwald or Mach, Poincar orPearson: Science aims at discovering laws which connect possible objects of

Pragmatic Philosophy of Science and the Charge of Scientism 7

experience, where this means, laws of invariance between phenomena. But inthat same essay, Peirce was as emphatic about his scholastic realism as he wasemphatic about what for him was the real novelty of the new pragmatic the-ory: its recognition of an inseparable connection between rational cognitionand rational purpose, the connection which James will be so pleased to develop.

Whatever Peirce intended by his scholastic realism, it is clear enough to see that it is inconsistent with all the positivisms, Comtes, Mills, Machs, or later Vienna varieties. While for Peirce, there was no nonexperienceable realityin this he agreed with Kant and the positivists, there are real ob-jects that are general, among the number being the modes of determination ofexistent singulars. The article of 1878 had either glossed over this point asunsuited to the public there addressed or, he noted, perhaps the author wavered in his own mind (215). In that essay, he had written: it would bemerely a question of nomenclature whether that diamond should be said tohave been hard or not. This is, he now writes, no doubt true, except for theabominable falsehood in the word merely, implying that symbols are un-real. Nomenclature involves classification, he continued, and classifica-tion is true or false. Thus, the generals to which it refers are either reals . . . or figments (215). In this case, the generals are real: There are dia-monds and anything which is really a diamond is really hard because beinghard is an inseparable property of at least some of those other propertieswhich make a diamond what it really is. It must be hard. He wrote:

Being a diamond, it was a mass of pure carbon, in the form of a more or lesstransparent crystal . . . it could be found to be insoluble, very highly refractive,showing under radium rays . . . a peculiar bluish phosphorescence, having ashigh a specific gravity as realgar . . . and giving off during its combustion lessheat than any other form of carbon would have done. From some of these prop-erties hardness is believed to be inseparable. For like it they bespeak the highpolemerization of the molecule (219).

The point must not be missed. On positivist versions, laws of nature areconstrued as universal conditionals of the form (x) (Fx Gx) where is suitably interpreted. That is, a law is construed as a contingent rela-tionship between the extensions of its terms, all Fs are Gs. But onPeirces view of the matter, a law expresses a nomic relationship betweenproperties, between F-ness and G-ness, properties to which we refer withcorresponding abstract terms.9 The reality of the diamond is expressed inthe truth of general conditional propositions, but these are not construedin a Humean fashion, for as Peirce saw (and Kant before him), on such aview, science is not possible.

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In an unpublished manuscript, Laws of Nature and Hume (1901),Peirces criticism of Hume (and the Humeans) is decisive. He writes:

. . . we do not say that the alternation of day and night is necessary, because itdepends upon the circumstance that the earth continually rotates. But we do saythat by virtue of gravity every body near the surface of the earth must be con-tinually receiving a component downward acceleration. . . . Nor do Hume or hisfollowers dream of denying that. But what they mean when they say there is notnecessity in gravitation is that every event which gravitation formulates isin reality totally independent of every other; just as Hume supposes the differ-ent instances of induction to be independent evidences. One stones fallinghas no real connection with anothers fall. . . . The objection to Humes concep-tion of a Law of Nature is that it supposes the universe to be utterly unintelligi-ble, while, in truth, the only warrant for any hypothesis must be that it rendersphenomena intelligible (Peirce, 1950: 310).

Abduction leads us to conclude that gravity is a structural property of all bod-ies; hence, d 1/2 at2 is a law. It is a contingent fact that the world is con-stituted such that gravity is true of all bodies and it is a contingent fact thatsome particular body be near the earth, but if the theory is true, then that bodymust be continually receiving a component downward acceleration; in free-fall, it must fall as 1/2 at.2 Science needs real connectedness; but such con-nectedness is not the product of constitutive features of the mind, as Kant hadit. Connectedness is in the mind-independent world. It is thus that for Peirce,there are objective possibilities, unactualized, but real.

Plainly, I cannot here do any sort of justice to Peirces complicated andingenious philosophy of science. Murray Murphey has, I think, caught itsmost fundamental premises in his account of the material aspects ofFirstness, Secondness and Thirdness. Briefly, Firstness and Secondness in-volve, critically, a psychological theory of perception. The phenomenalsuchness of a percept, Firstness is a product of unconscious inferences ofneural stimulias Helmholtz had argued. Secondness is the stubbornnessor compulsory character of sensation. Thirdness, then, is lawfulness. AsPeirce wrote:

Whatever is subject to law is capable of representation by a sign of which thatlaw is the meaning, and whatever is subject to law is itself a sign of the law towhich it is subject. It is in this sense that Thirdness is at once the category of lawand of rationality and intelligibility (Quoted by Flower and Murphey, 1977:604).

Since the pragmatic theory of meaning holds that what a thing means is sim-ply what habits it involves, and since habits are themselves analyzable as

Pragmatic Philosophy of Science and the Charge of Scientism 9

conditionals supporting expectationsrealistically understoodwe can seehow critical is Peirces anti-Humean concept of law.

There are all sorts of questions that might be asked here, not leastwhether, in whole or in part, Peirces philosophy of science can be sus-tained? I forego the temptation to engage this question. Instead, I merelyemphasize that Peirce packed a great deal of empirical science into his the-ory of knowledge and that because all of the usual categories, positivist,realist, idealist, fit his thought, none of them did. He did deny with the pos-itivist that there was a nonexperienceable reality, a consequence of hisingenious, if unsuccessful, effort to combine realism and phenomenalism.No doubt this fostered confusion. Moreover, like them, he offered a verifi-cationist theory of meaning, but unlike them, he tied this to a psycho-social theory of belief and a strong version of lawfulness, a version whichwas undergirded by his scholastic realism. His conditionals were not ex-hausted by the material conditionals of later verificationist theories. ForPeirce, Thirdness was a critical ontological category guaranteeing hissemiotic. The ideologists of scientific method liked the operationistpart of the story and at least in part because so much of Peirces work wasunpublished, the very complicated metaphysics that sustained it was ig-nored. Aided and abetted by the loose language of Jamess Pragmatism,the former came to fit neatly into the Weltanschauung of the times, initiat-ing the myth of Peirce, the seminal American pragmatist cum positivist.James and Dewey each found different things in Peirce, but it is fair to saythat they both liked what Peirce saw to be the genuine novelty of prag-matism, namely, the inseparable connection between rational cognitionand rational purpose. Although James had arrived at a similar notion atabout the same time as Peirce, it found its most developed expression inJamess Principles of Psychology (1890).10

JAMESS PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Jamess Principles is perhaps one of the two or three greatest books in the his-tory of psychology. Yet contrary to the conventional wisdom, it had practi-cally no influence on the development of American psychology. It would takeanother essay to begin to show this, but since the problem is germane to thepresent argument, something needs to be said. (For a fuller account, seeChapter 2.)

We can notice, first, that Principles was published when the subject matterand method of psychology as a science were still very much unsettled (Man-icas, 1987, Chapter 9). For example, was psychology concerned with the

10 Chapter One

laws of the mind (as in Mill, Bain, the later Wundt)? Or with giving a neu-rophysiological account of the phenomenon of mind, including the physiol-ogy of sensation and the genesis of reasoning (as for example, in Helmholtzor Spencer)? What was its relation to logic (as in Venn or Lotze)? Or per-haps the task of psychology was practical, in behavior? Was its concernthe generalized, normal human adult mind or the psychology of individualdifferences? And finally, what of its methods? Was introspection part of ex-perimental psychology, independent of it, or to be completely rejected?

James offered, modestly and misleadingly, that the originality of his Prin-ciples consisted in its strictly positivist point of view (James, 1981, Vol. 1:6). It is important first to see what James did not mean by this.

He was clear that the results of scientific inquiry were in no way the imme-diate results of experience nor were scientific objects restricted to what isfound in experience. Thus, the essence of things for science is not to be whatthey seem, but to be atoms and molecules moving to and from each other ac-cording to strange laws. . . . What we experience, what comes before us, is achaos of fragmentary impressions interrupting each other; what we think is anabstract system of hypothetical data and laws (1981, Vol. 2: 123031).

Plainly, we do something with what comes before us. But there are twoaspects of this. There is first what we all do if we are to have coherent expe-rience, if we are to convert the chaos of fragmentary impressions to a graspof the habitudes of concrete things. The grasp of these, the proximate lawsof nature, for example, that heat melts ice and salt preserves meat, form anenormous part of human wisdom. These empirical truths are practical.Indeed, they are indispensable to the continued reproduction of human com-munities. In Jamess view, getting an understanding of how we come to havesuch knowledge was the first problem for a scientific psychology. But thereis, as well, what as scientists we do: The effort to explain these proximatelaws by means of theories that, for example, speak of polemerization or grav-itation. For James, such theories have an entirely different aim and ground.The popular notion that Science is forced on the mind ab extra, and thatour interests have nothing to do with its constructions, is utterly absurd. ButJames emphatically denied that the interest, which generates science ispractical. Picking up a theme he had advanced in The Sentiment of Ratio-nality, he insisted that the craving to believe that the things of the world be-long to kinds which are related by an inward rationality together, is the par-ent of Science as well as of sentimental philosophy. Moreover, the originalinvestigator always preserves a healthy sense of how plastic the materials arein his hands (1260).

Scientific inquiry might yield technologies, but James was clear that thiswas neither its motivation nor its vindicationa point that Veblen put to such

Pragmatic Philosophy of Science and the Charge of Scientism 11

good work in his The Place of Science in Modern Civilization. In contrastto the proximate laws of nature, scientific theories are abstract systems oflaws. They have to harmonize with the proximate laws of nature, yet theyare tested not in the course of everyday experience, but in artificial experi-ments in the laboratory. James seems to see that, in order to set up an ex-periment, we need to conjecture that there is some unobservable mecha-nism whose processes have predicted effects. We contrive the experiment,then, so as to eliminate conditions that, in uncontrolled common experience,would interfere with its uncomplicated operation. That is, experience, inBaconian fashion, does not engender the inner relations. Rather, in ex-perimentation, we generate experiences that give us evidence of the realitypostulated by the theory.11

Accordingly, what is pertinent to defining success will differ as well. Prac-tical purposes offer practical tests; the interests of theoretic rationality, theconstructions which bring a strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, the livelyrelief which comes with rational comprehension, answer to the aestheticPrinciple of Ease (James, 1978: 35), what Veblen termed, the test of dra-matic consistency.

In Principles, Jamess selected example is a long text from HelmholtzsDie Efhaltung der Kraft. Helmholtz had it right: Theoretical science tries todiscover the unknown causes of processes from their visible effects; tries tounderstand them by the law of causality. . . . The ultimate goal of theoreticalphysics is to find the last unchanging causes of the processes of nature(1981, Vol. 2: 1261).12

To be sure, James gave this a novel twist: What makes the assumption [ofunchanging causes] scientific and not merely poetic, what makes aHelmholtz and his kin discoverers, is that the things of Nature turn out to actas if they were of the kind assumed (1261). Over metaphysics, aesthetics,and moral philosophy, science has an advantage:

Though natures materials lend themselves slowly and discouragingly to ourtranslation of them into ethical forms; but more readily into aesthetic forms; totranslation into scientific forms they lend themselves with relative ease andcompleteness. The translation, it is true, will probably never be ended. The per-ceptive order does not give way, nor the right conceptive substitute for it ariseat our bare word of command. It is often a deadly fight (1981, Vol. 2: 1236).

This is perhaps the basis of Jamess most profound ethical claim, repeated inmany different formulations, that the inmost nature of . . . reality is congenialto powers which [we] possess. Moreover, saying that the translation . . . willprobably never be ended suggests that James would reject, as I think he should,the Peircean notion that in the end, there will be some one true description that

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is the product of persistent inquiry. Indeed, this would seem to be the case, aswell, as regards ethical and aesthetic matters. Yet, the belief that there are atomsand molecules moving to and from each other according to strange laws is a be-lief about the nature of a hidden reality. Indeed, in his notes for the 1879 TheSentiment of Rationality, there is a brilliant argument for the pragmatic perti-nence of the idea of a nonexperienceable reality. James says:

The principle of pragmatism which allows for all assumptions to be of iden-tical value so long as they equally save the appearances will of course be satis-fied by this empiricist explanation . . . [viz., as according to Mill, that no mys-terious outness needs to be postulated]. But common sense is not assuaged.She says, yes, I get all the particulars, am cheated out of none of my expecta-tions. And yet the principle of intelligibility is gone. Real outness makes every-thing simple as the day, but the troops of ideas marching and falling perpetuallyinto order, which you now ask me to adopt, have no reason in themtheirwhole existence is de facto and not de jure (James, 1978: 374).

Nevertheless, if British phenomenalism did not suffice, neither could he ac-cept a more beyond the actual as it functioned in Spencer and Kant. Ap-pealing to Peirces arguments, he first notes that most scientific readers ofSpencer wholly fail to catch the destructive import of his theory. . . . They arewilling to believe with the Master that the deepest reality is the absolutely ir-rational, because that reality is unknowable, but few of them ultimately real-ize that the knowable of their philosophy forms a world of Chance pure andsimple (1978: 369). Spencers unknowable cannot function to give order,since to do this it must be known to have properties which could explain theorderliness of experience. It was thus that the plus ultra in many philoso-phiesin Mr. Spencers and in Kants, e.g., the noumenon is a dog in themanger, it does nothing for us itself but merely stands and blasts with itsbreath the actual (371).

James was haunted by the apparent intractability of making sense of a re-lation between outer and inner, between mental facts and facts in theworld independent of mind. At this point at least, none of the inherited formsof phenomenalism would suffice. Moreover, so as to be clear, they did notsuffice not because, or only because, of flaws in the associationist treatmentof the connectedness of experience, but because the troops of ideas . . . haveno reason in them. James agreed here with Peirce that the real could not bereduced to the actual: There are still other forces at work in the mind whichlead it to suppose something over and above the mere actuality of things.These include the sense of futurity, the power of expectation and our moraljudgments, which also involve [. . .] the notion of something related to theinstant representation and yet lying beyond its mere actuality (36970).

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The Sentiment of Rationality is important in another way. In holdingthat conceptions, kinds are teleological instruments, serving the needsof theoretic rationality, he hinted at an utterly novel solution to someage-old problems, problems given a full-blown naturalistic treatment inPrinciples in the chapters on conception (7), reasoning (22), and necessarytruths (28).

On this view, classification, judging, and predicating presuppose a ratherintricate system of necessary and immutable ideal truths of comparison. Theempiricists are wrong in supposing that necessary truths are merely the re-sult of experience or as Spencer had it, of mere paths of frequent associ-ation which outer stimuli . . . ploughed into the brain. But the a priorists arealso wrong since the eternal verities which our mind lays hold of do notnecessarily themselves lay hold on extra-mental being, nor have they, as Kantpretended later, a legislating character even for all possible experience.Rooted in the inner forces which make the brain grow, and therefore nottranscendental, they can be given a wholly naturalistic explanation. More-over, psychology shows that classification is functional in the sense that es-sential attributes are nothing more than abstracted properties which serve in-ference. While universals need not be grounded in reality, if we are tothink at all, they are nevertheless indispensable.

It is not surprising, accordingly, that if Mill et al. begin with a clear nom-inalist note, they are sure to end with a grating rattle which sounds very likeuniversalia in re, if not ante rem (James, 1978: 49). As Peirce had alreadyinsisted, if particulars are wholly independent, inference is impossible. Buton Jamess view, Peirces generals did not need to have ontological status,either ante rem or in re. The only meaning of essence is teleological . . . clas-sification and conception are purely teleological weapons of the mind (1981,II: 961).

Yet it is critical to see also that Jamess pragmatic account presupposesas he seesthat there are relatively enduring things, that the world whichis independent of mind is not Heraclitean: This world might be a world inwhich all things differed, and in which what properties there were were ulti-mate and had not farther predicates. Fortunately, our world plays right intologics hands. Some of the things . . . are of the same kind as other things;some of them remain always of the kind which they once were; and some ofthe properties of them cohere indissolubly and are always found together(1981, II: 124647). That is, as Peirce had insisted, the objects of the ex-ternal world have some character or other, even though they need not beself-identifying to be cognized. If they are not self-identifying, however, thew