pragmatism - sep.docx
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Pragmatism was a philosophical tradition that originated in the United States
around 1870. The most important of the classical pragmatists were Charles
Sanders Peirce (18391914), William James (18421910) and John Dewey
(18591952). The influence of pragmatism declined during the first two thirds of
the twentieth century, but it has undergone a revival since the 1970s withphilosophers being increasingly willing to use the writings and ideas of the
classical pragmatists, and also a number of thinkers, such as Richard Rorty,
Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom developing philosophical views that
represent later stages of the pragmatist tradition. The core of pragmatism was the
pragmatist maxim, a rule for clarifying the contents of hypotheses by tracing
their practical consequences. In the work of Peirce and James, the most
influential application of the pragmatist maxim was to the concept of truth. But
the pragmatists have also tended to share a distinctive epistemological outlook, a
fallibilist anti-Cartesian approach to the norms that govern inquiry.
For much of the twentieth century, pragmatism was largely in eclipse. Few
philosophers were familiar with the works of classical pragmatists such as
Charles Sanders Piece and William James, and pragmatist ideas were not at the
centre of debate. John Dewey, who had been a dominant philosophical figure in
the 1920s was no longer a central figure. Analytical philosophers and their
students had a central role in philosophy. It was not until the 1970s that interest
in the writings of the Pragmatists became widespread and pragmatist ideas were
recognized as able to make a major contribution to philosophy.
Most of this entry is devoted to the ideas of the classical pragmatists, Peirce,
James, and Dewey. But towards the end of the entry we shall explore what are
sometimes called the new pragmatists. These are philosophers who revitalized
pragmatism, developing ideas that evidently belonged to the pragmatist tradition.
As well as the figures mentioned above, these include Philip Kitcher, Huw Price,
and others (Misak 2007, Malachowski 2010. There has also been a growing
interest in the connections between pragmatism and idealism: (Margolis 2010,
Stern 2009, chapters 710).
1. Pragmatism and pragmatism 2. The pragmatist maxim 3. Pragmatist theories of truth
o 3.1 Peirce on truth and realityo 3.2 James on truth
4. The pragmatist tradition
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o 4.1 Skepticism and fallibilismo 4.2 Inquiryo 4.3 The pragmatist conception of experienceo 4.4 Representations
5. Other pragmatists
6. Conclusion Bibliography
o Primary texts of the classical pragmatistso Collections of papers by classic and contemporary pragmatists.o Other references and supplementary reading
Academic Tools Other Internet Resources Related Entries
1. Pragmatism and pragmatism
When William James published a series of lectures on Pragmatism: A New
Name for an Old way of Thinking in 1907, he began by identifying The Present
Dilemma in Philosophy (1907: 9ff), a fundamental and apparently irresoluble
clash between two ways of thinking about things. He promised that pragmatism
would show us the way to overcome this dilemma and, having thus shown us its
importance, he proceeded, in the second lecture, to explain What PragmatismMeans.
James's dilemma is a familiar one: it is a form of the question of how we can
reconcile the claims of science, on the one hand, with those of religion and
morality on the other. James introduces it by observing that the history of
philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments,
between the tough minded and the tender minded. The tough minded have an
empiricist commitment to experience and going by the facts, while the tender-
minded have more of a taste for a priori principles which appeal to the mind. The
tender minded tend to be idealistic, optimistic and religious, while the tough
minded are normally materialist, pessimistic and irreligious. The tender-minded
are free-willist and dogmatic; the tough minded are fatalistic and sceptical.
By the early twentieth century, never were so many men of a decidedly
empiricist proclivity: our children are almost born scientific (1907: 14f).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#SkeFalhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#SkeFalhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Inqhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Inqhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraConExphttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraConExphttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Rephttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Rephttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#OthPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#OthPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Conhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Conhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Bibhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Bibhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PriTexClaPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PriTexClaPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#ColPapClaConPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#ColPapClaConPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#OthRefSupReahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#OthRefSupReahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Acahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Acahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Othhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Othhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Relhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Relhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Relhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Othhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Acahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#OthRefSupReahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#ColPapClaConPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PriTexClaPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Bibhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Conhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#OthPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Rephttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraConExphttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Inqhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#SkeFal -
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But this has not weakened religious belief. People need a philosophy that is both
empiricist in its adherence to facts yet finds room for religious belief. But all that
is on offer is an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough and a religious
philosophy that is not empirical enough for your purpose (1907: 15f). The
challenge is to show how to reconcile the scientific loyalty to facts with the oldconfidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the
religious or of the romantic type. We must reconcile empiricist epistemic
responsibility with moral and religious optimism. Pragmatism is presented as the
mediating philosophy that enables us to overcome the distinction between the
tender-minded and the tough-minded: we need to show how adherence to tough-
minded epistemic standards does not prevent our adopting the kind of worldview
to which the tender-minded aspire. Once we use what he introduced as the
pragmatic method to clarify our understanding of truth, of free will, or of
religious belief the disputeswhich we despaired of settling intellectuallybegin to dissolve. For James, then, Pragmatism is important because it offers a
way of overcoming the dilemma, a way of seeing that, for example, science,
morality and religion are not in competition.
William James thus presented pragmatism as a method for settling metaphysical
disputes that might otherwise be interminable. (1907: 28) Unless some practical
difference would follow from one or the other side's being correct, the dispute is
idle.
[T]he tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, isthat there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible
difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object,
then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the
object may involvewhat sensations we are to expect from it, and what
reactions we must prepare. (1907: 29)
The lectures explained this with a memorable illustration of pragmatism in
action. This shows how the maxim enables us to defuse an apparently insoluble
(albeit trivial) dispute. On a visit to the mountains, his friends engage in aferocious metaphysical dispute about a squirrel that was hanging on to one side
of a tree trunk while a human observer was standing on the other side:
This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the
tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite
direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a
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glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this:Does
the man go round the squirrel or not?(1907: 27f)
James proposed to solve the problem by pointing out that which answer is correct
depends on what you practically mean by going round. If you mean passing
from north of him to east, then south, then west, then the answer to the question
is yes. If, on the other hand, you mean first in front of him, then to his right,
then behind him, and then to his left, before returning to being in front of him
again, then the answer is no. Pragmatic clarification disambiguates the
question, and once that is done, all dispute comes to an end. The pragmatic
method promises to eliminate all apparently irresoluble metaphysical disputes.
So James offers his pragmatism as a technique for clarifying concepts and
hypotheses. He proposed that if we do this, metaphysical disputes that appear to
be irresoluble will be dissolved. When philosophers suppose that free will and
determinism are in conflict, James responds that once we compare the practical
consequences of determinism being true with the practical consequences of our
possessing freedom of the will, we find that there is no conflict.
As James admitted, he explained the pragmatic method through examples rather
than by giving a detailed analysis of what it involves. He did very little to explain
exactly what practical consequences are. He made no claim to originality:
Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist
attitude, although he acknowledged that it did so in a more radical and in a lessobjectionable form than it has ever yet assumed (1907: 31). It shared with other
forms of empiricism an anti-intellectualist tendency (ibid), and it recognized
that theories (and presumably concepts) should be viewed as instruments, not
answers to enigmas. We identify the practical consequences of a theory,
concept or hypothesis by describing its role as an instrument in thought, in
inquiry and in practical deliberation.
James also admitted that he was not the first to defend the principle of
pragmatism. (1907: 29). The principle of pragmatism was the principle ofPeirce his friend and colleague of many years. Published in 1878 in a paper
called How to Make our Ideas Clear (EP2: 124141), it lay entirely unnoticed
by anyone for twenty years until James defended it before the Philosophical
Union in the University of California in 1898. If we want a detailed formulation
of pragmatism, we must go back to Peirce's original formulation, although we
must also be mindful that the differences between the pragmatisms of Peirce and
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James may be greater than James acknowledged. And although the principle of
Peirce was published in 1878, it didn't introduce the word pragmatism; it was
only after James's 1898 address that pragmatism was used publicly in
philosophy; and it was only after James's defence of pragmatism that it became
famous.
Pragmatism had been born in the discussions at a metaphysical club in Harvard
around 1870 (see Menand 1998). Peirce and James participated in these
discussions along with some other philosophers and philosophically inclined
lawyers. As we have already noted, Peirce developed these ideas in his
publications from the 1870s. And James's lectures in 1898 and later represented
the next stages in the development of pragmatism. Both James and Peirce used
pragmatism as the name of a method, principle, or maxim for clarifying
concepts and hypotheses and for identifying empty disputes. As we shall see
there were differences in how they understood the method and in their views of
how it was to be applied.
Later thinkers, for example John Dewey and C.I.Lewis, developed pragmatism
further. Although they continued to refer back to Peirce's 1878 paper as the
source of pragmatism, and they continued to regard concepts and hypotheses as
functioning as instruments, they did not always think of pragmatism as
denoting the principle of Peirce. Dewey once described pragmatism as the
systematic exploration of what he called the logic and ethics of scientific
inquiry. (LW: 15.24) Both Peirce and James combined their pragmatism with adistinctive epistemological outlook, one which rejected the Cartesian focus upon
the importance of defeating skepticism while endorsing the fallibilist view that
any of our beliefs and methods could, in principle, turn out to be flawed. This
was tied to the study of the normative standards we should adopt when carrying
out inquiries, when trying to find things out. Inquiry is an activity, and this sort of
approach, in Dewey's hands, led to a rejection of there being a sharp dichotomy
between theoretical judgments and practical judgments. Thus while Peirce and
James used pragmatism in anarrowsense, as referring to Peirce's principle,
others may have used it in a widesense as standing for a particular approach tounderstanding inquiry and the normative standards that govern it. Sections 2 and
3 will be concerned, primarily, with pragmatism in the narrow sense. Then, in
section 4, we shall explore some of the views that are associated with pragmatism
in the wider sense.
2. The pragmatist maxim
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As we have seen, the pragmatist maxim is a distinctive rule or method for
becoming reflectively clear about the contents of concepts and hypotheses: we
clarify a hypothesis by identifying its practical consequences. This raises some
questions. First: what, exactly is the content of this maxim? What sort of thing
does it recognize as a practical consequence of some theory or claim? Second,what use does such a maxim have? Why do we need it? And third, what reason is
there for thinking that the pragmatist maxim is correct? In this section, I shall
examine Peirce's answers to some of these questions but, as we proceed, we shall
also compare Peirce's answers to these questions with those offered by James.
(See Hookway: 2012 passim)
We can begin with Peirce's canonical statement of his maxim in How to Make
our Ideas Clear.
Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we
conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those
effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (EP1: 132)
William James cited this passage when introducing pragmatism in his 1906
lectures, and Peirce repeated it in his writings from after 1900.
For all his loyalty to it, Peirce acknowledged that this formulation was vague: it
does not explain how we should understand practical consequences. We shall
seek clarity by looking at one of Peirce's illustrative applications of his maxim,
by noting some of his later reformulations, and by identifying the uses to which it
was put in his writings.
Peirce's first illustrative example (the simplest one possible (EP1: 132) urges
that what we mean by calling something hardis that it will not be scratched by
many other substances. I can use the concepthardin contexts when I am
wondering what to do. Unless there are cases where something's being hard
makes a difference to what we experience and what it is rational for us to do, the
concept is empty. The principle has a verificationist character: our idea of
anything isour idea of its sensible effects (EP1: 132) but the use of the phrase
practical consequences suggests that these are to be understood as having
implications for what we will or should do. This is clear from his later
formulations, for example:
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The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general
modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible different
circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol.
(EP2: 346).
We become clearer about the concept hard, for example, by identifying how
there can be conceivable circumstances in which we have desires that would call
for different patterns of action if some object were hard from those it would call
for if the object were not hard. If I want to break a window by throwing
something through it, then I need an object which is hard, not one which is soft.
It is important that, as Peirce hints here, the consequences we are concerned with
aregeneralones: we are to look for the laws that govern the behaviour of hard
things and for laws that show how such modes of behaviour on the part of things
can make a difference to what it is rational for us to do.
James never worked out his understanding of practical consequences as fully as
Peirce did, and he does not share Peirce's restriction of these consequences to
those that affect intellectual purport or to general patterns of behaviour.
Sometimes he writes as if the practical consequences of a proposition can simply
be effects upon the believer: if religious belief makes me feel better, then that can
contribute to the pragmatic clarification of God exists. It is connected to these
differences that James looks upon Peirce's principle as a method formetaphysics:
he hopes that the attempt to clarify metaphysical hypotheses will reveal that some
propositions are empty or, more important, that, as in the squirrel example, someapparent disagreements are unreal.
Peirce sees uses for his maxim which extend beyond those that James had in
mind. He insisted that it was a logicalprinciple and it was defended as an
important component of the method of science, his favoured method for carrying
out inquiries. This is reflected in the applications of the maxim that we find in his
writings. First, he used it to clarify hard concepts that had a role in scientific
reasoning: concepts likeprobability, truth, and reality. We shall discuss his view
of truth below. It also had a role in scientific testing. The pragmatist clarificationof a scientific hypothesis, for example, provides us with just the information we
need for testing it empirically. Pragmatism, described by Peirce as a laboratory
philosophy, shows us how we test theories by carrying out experiments
(performing rational actions) in the expectation that if the hypothesis is not true,
then the experiment will fail to have some predetermined sensible effect. In later
work, Peirce insisted that the maxim revealed allthe information that was need
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for theory testing and evaluation (EP2: 226ff). The pragmatist clarification
revealed all the information we would need for testing hypotheses and theories
empirically.
Peirce's description of his maxim as a logical principle is reflected in passages
where he presents it as a development of a distinction that had been a staple of
traditional logic texts, the distinction, familiar to readers of Descartes, between
ideas that are clearand ideas that distinct(EP1: 126f). As Peirce described
contemporary versions of this distinction, the highest grade of clarity,
distinctness is obtained when we can analyze a concept (for example) into its
elements by providing a verbal definition. Peirce complained that nothing new is
ever learned by analyzing definitions, and we can learn from a definition only if
we already have a really clear understanding of the defining terms. He announced
that a higher grade of perspicuity was possible, one that supplemented the
verbal definition with a detailed description of how the concept is employed in
practice. This was provided by applying the pragmatist maxim.
As well as treating the pragmatist maxim as part of a constructive account of the
norms that govern inquiry, Peirce, like James, gave it a negative role. The maxim
is used as a tool for criticism, demonstrating the emptiness of a priori
ontological metaphysics. In section 3.1 we shall see how the pragmatic
clarification of realitycould be used to undermine the flawed nominalistic
conception of reality that led to the copy theory of truth, to Cartesian strategies
in epistemology and the Kantian assumption that we can possess the concept of athing in itself. Such applications reflect Peirce's concern with logic: he uses the
maxim to criticize concepts whose use can be an impediment to effective inquiry.
A more vivid non-logical example of using the concept to undermine spurious
metaphysical ideas was in showing that the Catholic understanding of
transubstantiation was empty and incoherent (EP1: 131f). All we can mean
by wineis something that has certain distinctive effects upon the senses, and to
talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in
reality blood, is senseless jargon.
Why should the pragmatist maxim be accepted? Here another difference between
James and Peirce emerges. James made no concerted attempt to show or prove
that the principle of pragmatism was correct. In his lectures, he put it into
practice, solving problems about squirrels, telling us the meaning of truth,
explaining how we can understand propositions about human freedom or about
religious matters. But in the end, inspired by these applications, we are
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encouraged to adopt the maxim and see how well things work out when we do
so.
Since Peirce presented the maxim as part of the method of science, as a logical
or, perhaps better, methodological principle, he thought that it was important to
argue for it. Indeed, after 1900, he devoted much of his energy to showing that
the maxim could receive a mathematical proof. He used several strategies for
this. In 1878, he relied upon the idea that beliefs are habits of action: when we
form a belief, we acquire a disposition to act in some distinctive way. Applying
the pragmatist maxim to the clarification of a proposition, he argued, involved
describing the habits of action we would acquire if we believed it (EP1: 127f). In
the lectures on pragmatism which he delivered at Harvard in 1903, he adopted a
different strategy. He offered a detailed account of the cognitive activities we
carried out when we used the method of science: these consisted in the three
kinds of inference, inductive, deductive and abductive. His strategy then was to
argue that the pragmatist clarifications brought to the surface all the information
that was required for responsible abductive reasoning, and that our use of
inductive and deductive arguments made no use of conceptual resources that
could show that pragmatism was mistaken. (EP2: 225241; Hookway 2005)
None of these arguments fully satisfied him, and the task of fine tuning these
arguments and seeking for alternatives was his major philosophical concern of
the last ten years of his life. Although he remained optimistic of success in this,
he was never satisfied with his results.
3. Pragmatist theories of truth
These differences in motivation become clearest when we consider how both
Peirce and James applied their pragmatist maxims to the clarification of the
concept of truth. Peirce's account of truth is presented as a means to
understanding a concept that was important for the method of
science: reality(3.1); while James was ready to use his account to defend the
pluralist view that there can be different kinds of truths (3.2).
3.1 Peirce on truth and reality
The final section of How to Make our Ideas Clear promises to approach the
subject of logic by considering a fundamental logical conception,reality. It
possesses a form of unreflective clarity: every child uses it with perfect
confidence, never dreaming that he does not understand it. An abstract definition
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is also readily forthcoming: we may define the real as that whose characters are
independent of what anybody may think them to be. But, he announces, we shall
need to apply the pragmatic maxim if our idea of reality is to be perfectly clear.
It is at this stage that the concept of truthenters the discussion: Peirce's strategy
for clarifying the concept of reality is, first, to give an account of truth, and, then,to observe that the object represented in [a true proposition] is the real. So we
have to turn to his remarks about truth to see how the kind of mind-independence
captured in the abstract definition of reality is to be understood from a pragmatist
perspective.
Peirce's motivations are evident when he says that the ideas of truth and
falsehood, in their full development, appertain exclusively to the scientific (in a
later revision he altered this to experiential) method of settling opinion. This
reflects a law which is evident from scientific experience: when different people
use different methods to identify, for example, the velocity of light, we find that
all tend to arrive at the same result:
So with all scientific research. Different minds may set out with the most
antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force
outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion. This activity of thought by
which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a foreordained goal, is like the
operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of
other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape
the predestinate opinion. (EP1: 138)
In the 1878 paper, his pragmatic clarification is quite tersely expressed:
The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is
what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.
That is the way I would explain reality. (EP1: 139)
Peirce had presented this way of thinking about realityseven years earlier when
he described it as the realist conception of reality (EP1:889). In doing this, he
contrasts it with another nominalist conception of reality, which he thinks is
flawed, but which many earlier philosophers had accepted. In a review of a new
edition of the writings of Berkeleya philosopher who, according to Peirce, was
in the grip of this misleading picturePeirce asks where the real is to be found,
observing that there must be such a real because we find that our opinions (the
only things of which we are immediately aware) are constrained. While
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acknowledging that there is nothing immediately present to us but thoughts, he
continues:
These thoughts, however, have been caused by sensations, and those sensations
are constrained by something out of the mind. This thing out of the mind, which
directly influences sensation, and through sensation thought, because it isout of
the mind, is independent of how we think it, and is, in short, the real. (EP1: 88)
We can then think of the real only as the cause of the (singular) sensations which,
in turn, provide our sole evidence for beliefs about the external world, and this
naturally leads to both nominalism about universals and skepticism about
empirical knowledge. Peirce's pragmatist clarification of truth offers an
alternative conceptualization of being constrained by reality. It is explained in
terms of this fated agreement of convergence through the process of inquiry
rather than in terms of an independent cause of our sensations. Although the
nominalist theory is not clearly worked out here, it is clearly related to the
intellectualist or copy theory of truth attacked by other pragmatists. It
articulates a metaphysical picture that all pragmatists tried to combat. See (Misak
2007, 69f) where Cheryl Misak emphasises that Peirce does not offer a
traditional analysis of truth. Rather, he provides an account of some of the
relations between the concepts of truth, belief, and inquiry, She describes this as
a naturalistic understanding of truth, and calls it an anthropological account of
how the concept is used.
3.2 James on truth
Claims about truth had a much more central role in James's work and he was
even prepared to claim that pragmatism wasa theory of truth. And his writings
on this topic rapidly became notorious. They are characteristically lively, offering
contrasting formulations, engaging slogans, and intriguing claims which often
seem to fly in the face of common sense. We can best summarize his view
through his own words:
The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief,
and good, too, for definite assignable reasons. (1907: 42)
The true, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking,
just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.Expedient in
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almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole, of course.
(1907: 106)
Other formulations fill this out by giving a central role to experience:
Ideas become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory
relations with other parts of our experience. (1907: 34)
Any idea upon which we can ride ; any idea that will carry us prosperously
from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things
satisfactorily, working securely, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so
far forth, true instrumentally. (1907: 34)
This might be taken to suggest that beliefs are made true by the fact that they
enable us to make accurate predictions of the future run of experience, but otherpassages suggest that the goodness of belief can take other forms. James
assures us that it can contribute to the truth of a theological proposition that it has
a value for concrete life (1907: 40); and this can occurbecause the idea of God
possesses a majesty which can yield religious comfort to a most respectable
class of minds (1907: 40). This suggests that a belief can be made true by the
fact that holding it contributes to our happiness and fulfilment.
The kind of passages just noted may lend support to Bertrand Russell's famous
objection that James is committed to the truth of Santa Claus exists (Russell1949: 772). This is unfair; at best, James is committed to the claim that the
happiness that belief in Santa Claus provides is truth-relevant. James could say
that the belief was good for so much but it would only be wholly true if it did
not clash with other vital benefits. It is easy to see that, unless it is somehow
insulated from the broader effects of acting upon it, belief in Santa Claus could
lead to a host of experiential surprises and disappointments.
4. The pragmatist tradition
So far, we have concentrated on the pragmatist maxim, the rule for clarifying
ideas that, for both Peirce and James, was the core of pragmatism. When we
think of pragmatism as a philosophical traditionrather than as a maxim or
principle, we can identify a set of philosophical views and attitudes which are
characteristic of pragmatism, and which can lead us to identify as pragmatists
many philosophers who are somewhat sceptical about the maxim and its
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applications. Some of these views maybe closely related to the maxim and its
defence, but we shall now explore them rather as distinctive characteristics of the
pragmatist tradition. The first of the themes that we shall consider is
epistemological, and it picks up on Hilary Putnam's claim that one mark of
pragmatism is the combination of anti-skepticism and fallibilism.
Like some other philosophers, the pragmatists saw themselves as providing a
return to common sense and the facts of experience and, thus, as rejecting a
flawed philosophical heritage which had distorted the work of earlier thinkers.
The errors to be overcome include Cartesianism, Nominalism, and the copy
theory of truth: these errors are all related.
4.1 Skepticism and fallibilism
The roots of the anti-sceptical strain can be found in an early paper of Peirce's,Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (EP1: 2830). He identifies
Cartesianism as aphilosophical pathology that lost sight of the insights that
were both fundamental to scholastic thought and also more suited than
Cartesianism to the philosophical needs of his own time. The paper begins by
identifying four characteristics of the sort of modern philosophy that is
exemplified by Descartes' writings. In each case, Descartes self-consciously
made a break with the scholastic tradition, and, in each case, the outlook that he
rejected turns out to be the outlook of the successful sciences and to provide the
perspective required for contemporary philosophy. The first, and most important,of these characteristics was the method of doubt: [Cartesianism] teaches that
philosophy must begin with universal doubt. We are to try to doubt propositions
and we should retain them only if they are absolutely certain and we are unable
to doubt them. The test of certainty, as Peirce next points out, lies in the
individual consciousness: trial through doubt is something that everyone must do
for him or her self. And the examination of our beliefs is guided by reflection on
hypothetical possibilities: we cannot trust our perceptual beliefs, for example,
because we cannot rule out the possibility that they are produced by a dream or
by wicked scientists manipulating our brains. (See Hookway 2012, chapters 2,3.)
The initial pragmatist response to this strategy has several strands. It is a strategy
that we cannot carry out effectively, and there is no reason to adopt it anyway.
Peirce begins his response by claiming that any attempt to adopt the method of
doubt will be an exercise in self-deception because we possess a variety of
certainties which it does not occur to uscanbe questioned. What is produced
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will not be a real doubt and these beliefs will lurk in the background,
influencing our reflection when we are supposed to be suspending judgment in
them. Peirce urges that we should not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we
do not doubt in our hearts. We should doubt propositions only if we have a real
reason to do so. It is necessary to separate some different threads here.
First, there is something unnatural about the Cartesian strategy. Inquiries
normally occur within a context: we address particular issues, relying on a body
of background certainties that it does not occur to us to question. The Cartesian
suggestion that we should begin by trying to doubt everything appears to be an
attempt to step outside this context, relying upon no beliefs that we have not
ratified though reflective inquiry. Sometimes we may have to question some of
our assumptions, but our practice is not to do so unless there is a positive reason
for this. Second, the Cartesian strategy requires us to reflect upon each of our
beliefs and ask what reason we have for holding itthe sceptical challenges are
then used to question the adequacy of these reasons. This is at odds with our
normal practice. Many of our familiar certainties are such that we cannot offer
any concrete reason for believing them, certainly not one that is wholly
convincing. We tend to treat our established beliefs as innocent until proved
guilty. We need reasons for our beliefs when we propose to change them, or
when they have been challenged. It is doubt that needs a reason, and we trust our
everyday beliefs until given a positive reason for doubting them. The mere lack
of a conclusive reason for belief does not itself provide us with a reason for
doubt. The Cartesian strategy adopts an unorthodox, revisionary understanding
of reason for beliefand reason for doubt.
Descartes, of course, might have conceded this, but responded that the revision is
required because, once we allow error to enter our corpus of beliefs, we may be
unable to escape from its damaging effects. His was a time of controversy about
how we should go about fixing our opinions, and he was sensitive to the number
of false beliefs he had acquired from his teachers. The pragmatist response here
is to question some of his assumptions about how we reason and form our
beliefs. First, Descartes' picture is too individualist and to make singleindividuals absolute judges of truth is most pernicious:
In sciences in which men come to agreement, when a theory has been broached,
it is considered to be on probation until this agreement has been reached. After it
is reached, the question of certainty becomes an idle one, because there will be
no one left who doubts it. We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the
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ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for
the communityof philosophers. (EP1: 29)
Peirce also questions Descartes' understanding of reasoning, suggesting that he
holds that we must rely on a single thread of inference that is no stronger than
its weakest link:
Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to
proceed only from tangible premises which can be subjected to careful scrutiny,
and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the
conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no
stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender,
provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected. (EP1: 29)
Where the Cartesian begins from the concern that unless we begin from premisesof which we can be absolutely certain we may never reach the truth, the
pragmatist emphasises that, when we do go wrong, further discussion and
investigation can hope to identify and eliminate errors. The possibility of error
provides us with reason to be contrite fallibilists, aware that any of our opinions
may, for all we know, require revision in the future, but it does not provide us
with any reason for skepticism. The focus of epistemological inquiry should not
be on showing how we can possess absolute certainty; instead, we need to
understand how we can possess methods of inquiry that contribute to our making
fallible progress. Inquiry is a community activity, and the method of science hasa self-correcting character. Such are the checks and balances that we can be
confident in our cognitive activities.
William James makes similar observations. In The Will to Believe, he reminds
us that we have two cognitive desiderata: we want to obtain truth; and we want to
avoid error (James 1897: 30). The harder we try to avoid error, the more likely it
is that we will miss out on truths; and the more strenuous we are in searching for
truths, the more likely we are to let in errors. The method of doubt may make
sense in the special case where an enormous weight is given to avoiding error,even if that means loss of truth. Once we recognize that we are making a
practical decision about the relative importance of two goods, the Cartesian
strategy no longer appears to be the only rational one. What reason is there to
give primary weight to reducing the risk of error?
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In his lectures on Pragmatism, James defends a kind of epistemic conservativism
that accords with the idea that we do not needreasons for our beliefs when there
are no challenges to them to be defeated. He describes how, in the normal case,
we have an established body of views and opinions, and issues about what to
believe arise when a new experience puts them under strain. We will accept anew opinion when it preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of
modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but
conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. Thus a true idea
marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to a show a minimum of jolt, a
maximum of continuity. (1907: 345) Once again, our beliefs possess a kind of
inertia: we need positive reasons to disturb them; but in order to preserve them,
all that is required is that we have no reason to abandon them.
James's remarks lead on to the views defended by Dewey in The Quest for
Certainty. In developing his views about truth, James saw his antagonist as the
rationalist or intellectualist. The rationalist seeks substantive a priori knowledge
of the nature of truth or of reality, knowledge that is cut off from the exigencies
of practice. The traditional distinction betweenknowledgeand opinionsuggested
that opinion, the useful guide to conduct and practice, is second rate when
compared with the secure certainties provided by the philosophers. Rational
certainties are supposedly risk-free: untainted by the contingencies of experience,
such knowledge is testament to our capacity to grasp the necessary structure of
the world. The desire for certainty is part of a perspective that gives little weight
to the needs of practice. For the rationalist, the operation of inquiry excludes any
element of practical activity that enters into the construction of the object
known. For the pragmatist, the needs of practice are allowed to contribute to the
constitution of objects.
4.2 Inquiry
As has already been suggested, pragmatist accounts of the normative standards
we should follow in arriving at beliefs about the world are cast in terms of how
we can carry out inquiries in a disciplined, self-controlled way. They provide richaccounts of the capacities we must possess in order to inquire well and the rules,
or guiding principles, that we should adopt. A canonical statement of this is
found in Peirce's classic paper The Fixation of Belief. Inquiry is a struggle to
replace doubt with settled belief and Peirce argues that the only method of
inquiry that can make sense of the fact that we are disturbed by inconsistent
beliefs and that we should reflect upon which methods are correctis the Method
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of Science. The method of science is an experimental method, and the
application of the pragmatist maxim reveals how hypotheses can be subject to
experimental test. A knower is an agent, who obtains empirical support for her
beliefs by making experimental interventions in her surroundings and learning
from the experiences that her actions elicit. Peirce's writings provide asophisticated and historically informed account of just how the method of science
can work (see Levi 2012).
Dewey's conception of inquiry, found in hisLogic: the Theory of Inquiryis richer
and more radical (ED2: 16979). He sees inquiry as beginning with a problem;
we are involved in an indeterminate situation. And inquiry aims for the
controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is
so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the
elements of the original situation into a unified whole. (ED2: 171) As John E
Smith has put it, Peirce aimed at fixing belief, whereas Dewey aimed at
fixing the situation. (1978:98) It is important here that it is the situation that
is objectivelyindeterminate, and it is the situation that is transformed during the
course of the inquiry; Dewey is rejecting the common assumptions that all that
change are our beliefs about the situation, and that describing the situation as
problematic or indeterminate is simply a way of saying that wedo not have a
clear grasp of it. We begin in a situation where we don't know our way around,
and inquiry comes to an end when we do. The pattern of inquiry that he
describes is common to practical problem solving, common sense investigations
of our surroundings, scientific inquiry, the information gathering of animals and
so on. Dewey recognizes that when we first face a problem, our first task is to
understand our problem through describing its elements and identifying their
relations. Identifying a concrete question that we need to answer is a sign that we
are already making progress. And the logical forms we use in the course of
inquiry are understood as ideal instruments, tools that help us to transform things
and resolve our problem. The continuities he finds between different kinds of
inquiry is evidence of his naturalism and of his recognition that forms of
scientific investigation can guide us in all areas of our lives. All the pragmatists,
but most of all Dewey, challenge the sharp dichotomy that other philosophers
draw between theoretical beliefs and practical deliberations. In some sense, all
inquiry is practical, concerned with transforming and evaluating the features of
the situations in which we find ourselves.
Dewey's work developed these ideas about inquiry. Shared inquiry directed at
resolving social and political problems or indeterminacies was central to his
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conception of the good life and to his account of the democractic ideal. Others,
closer to Peirce than to Dewey, identify scientific inquiry as the model of
democratic problem solving (see Bernstein 2010: chapter three, Talisse 2008,
Misak 1999, Westbrook 1991.
4.3 The pragmatist conception of experience
As is evident from the pragmatist maxim, pragmatism is a form of empiricism.
Our ability to think about external things and to steadily improve our
understanding of them rests upon our experience. However, the pragmatists all
adopted accounts of experience and perception that were radically different from
the views of most earlier modern philosophers such as David Hume and
Descartes (see, for example, Smith 1978: chapter three). The established view
linked experience to what is sometimes called the given: we are the passive
recipients of atomistic, determinate and singular sensory contents, the kinds of
things that are sometimes called sense data. Experience provides the material for
knowledge and conceptualization, but it does not itself have a content that is
informed by concepts, practical needs, or anything else non-sensory. Our only
contact with the external world is through receiving such experiences that, we
suppose, are caused by external things; but since these sensory inputs are our
only source of knowledge of the external world, we have no direct sensory
awareness of external things. It is no surprise that this way of thinking about
experience can easily lead to skepticism about the external world.
In different ways, Peirce, James, and Dewey all argued that experience is far
richer than the tradition had supposed, and that earlier philosophers were
mistaken in their belief that we could identify experiences or sense data as
separable constituents of cognition. We can begin with James's radical
empiricism, of which he said that the establishment of the pragmatist theory of
truth [was] a step of first-rate importance in making [it] prevail (1909: 6f). The
connection with pragmatism is evident from the fundamental postulate of
radical empiricism: the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers
shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. But this requires thatexperience be far richer than earlier philosophers had supposed. First, he
announced that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive,
are just as much matters of direct experience, neither more nor less so, than the
things themselves. And, second, he concludes that the parts of experience are
held together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of
experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous
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trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated
or continuous structure.
This suggestion is echoed in Peirce's account of perception. He too emphasizes
the continuous character of perceptual experience, and also adds that we directly
perceive external things as external, as other, that we can perceive necessary
connections between events, and that experience contains elements of generality.
As with James, this is supported by a phenomenological account of our
experience, and, again as with James, it is supported by a system of pragmatist
metaphysics, a general account of the sorts of things and features that the
universe contains.
Dewey's account of experience contributes an additional twist. Like Peirce, he
thought that experience was full of inference. Experience is a process through
which we interact with our surroundings, obtaining information that helps us to
meet our needs. What we experience is shaped by our habits of expectation and
there is no basis for extracting from this complex process the kind of thin given
beloved of sense datum theorists. We experience all sorts of objects, events and
processes, and we should not follow philosophers who seek to impose a
distinction between the thin uninterpreted data of experience and the inferential
processes which lead us to interpret what we experience as books, people and so
on. The dichotomy between the passive given of experience and the rich results
of our active conceptualization is not supported by our experience. It is yet
another of the philosophers distortions.
4.4 Representations
Having discussed pragmatist emphases upon the activity of inquiry and the
richness of experience, we should turn to their views about the nature of thought.
It has been common for philosophers to assume that the content of a thought,
judgment, or other mental state is a kind of intrinsic property that it possesses.
Perhaps it offers a picture or idea of some state of affairs, and we can identify
this content simply by reflecting upon the thought itself. All pragmatists haverejected this idea, and all have held that the content of a thought or judgment is a
matter of the role it fills in our activities of inquiry. The content of a thought or
belief is to be explained by reference to what we do with it or how we interpret it.
I shall illustrate this by considering three particular pragmatist views.
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First, all of the classic pragmatists identified beliefs and other mental states
as habits. According to Peirce, our beliefs Guide our desires and shape our
actions (EP1: 114). The content of a belief is not determined by its intrinsic
phenomenal character; rather, it is determined by its role in determining our
actions. This was reflected in Peirce's formulations of his pragmatist maxim. Inorder to be clear about the content of a concept or hypothesis, we must reflect
upon its role in determining what we should do in the light of our desires and our
background knowledge. In Robert Brandom's happy form of words, the
philosopher makes explicit aspects of our practice that are implicit in our habits
and dispositions. The role of tacit habits of reasoning and acting in fixing our
beliefs and guiding our actions is a theme that recurs in the work of all of the
pragmatists.
The second illustration concerns a passage in which James defended his account
of truth by urging that it was the concept used in successful science. He identified
the traditional view that, for early scientists, the clearness, beauty and
simplification provided by their theories led them to think that they had
deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the Almighty. By contrast,
contemporary scientists held that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality,
but that any of them may from some point of view be useful . A scientific
theory was to be understood as an instrument: it is designed to achieve a
purposeto facilitate action or increase understanding (James 1907: 33). For
James and Dewey, this holds of all our concepts and theories: we treat them as
instruments, as artefacts to be judged by how well they achieve their intended
purpose. The content of a theory or concept is determined by what we should do
with it.
The third illustration comes from Peirce's general theory of signs, which offers an
account of the contents of thoughts as well as of public signs and language.
Peirce insisted that the sign-relation was triadic: a sign or thought is about some
object because it is understood, in subsequent thought, as a sign of that object.
The subsequent thought is its interpretant. In understanding or interpreting a
sign, we will probably draw inferences from it, or undertake actions that arerational in the light of the sign and the other information we possess.
Interpretation is generally a goal directed activity. In such cases, our action or the
conclusion of our inference is the interpretant; interpretation is not primarily a
matter of intellectual recognition of what a sign means. The theory is complex
and I will not explore it further here, beyond emphasizing, once again, that the
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content of a thought is determined by the ways in which we can use it in
inference and the planning of action.
5. Other pragmatists
It would be wrong to conclude that pragmatism was restricted to the United
States or that the only important pragmatist thinkers were Peirce, James and
Dewey. As is documented by Thayer, there were pragmatists in Oxford, in
France and, especially, in Italy in the early years of the twentieth century (Thayer
1968, part III, Baldwin 2003: 889). Moreover we can mention several other
important American pragmatists, for example Josiah Royce. Commonly thought
to be an idealist opponent of James and a critic of pragmatism, Royce
increasingly came to be influenced by Peirce's work on signs and on the
community of inquirers and was acknowledged as a fellow pragmatist by Peirce
himself. C.I.Lewis, the teacher of Quine and of several generations of Harvard
philosophers developed a philosophy that was a sort of pragmatist Kantianism.
Murray Murphey has identified him as the last great pragmatist (Murphey
2005). In books such asMind and the World Order(1929), he defended a
pragmatist conception of the a priori, holding that our choices of laws of logic
and systems of classification were to be determined by pragmatic criteria (Lewis
1923, 1929; Murphey 2005: chapters four and five). Of comparable importance
was George Herbert Mead (see Mead 1934). Close to Dewey, Mead contributed
to the social sciences, developing pragmatist perspectives upon the relations
between the self and the community.
Dewey's longevity meant that pragmatism remained a philosophical force in the
United States well into the twentieth century. The influx of philosophers from
Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940slogical empiricists, members of the
Frankfurt School, and othersled to Pragmatist ideas becoming marginalized in
the mid-century by providing new and exciting ideas when the pragmatist
tradition may have begun to grow stale. Even then it retained some force. The
work of Frank Ramsey at Cambridge (Ramsey 1926) in the 1920s developed
Peirce's views on statistical reasoning and on inquiry in ways that provided fertileresearch programmes through much of the century, for example in the work of
Isaac Levi at Columbia (Levi 1999). As Russell Goodman has documented
(2002), Wittgenstein's later thought acquired a pragmatist flavour though his
reading of James's Varieties of Religious Experience(1902). And there was
always a relatively small but lively group of scholars who strove to maintain the
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values of what was championed as a distinctive American philosophical tradition
even when this tradition was largely ignored by the philosophical establishment.
In the last few decades of the twentieth century, scholarly work on pragmatist
philosophy increased in both quantity and quality, making possible an
appreciation of the sophistication of the pragmatist philosophers and enabling
readers to escape from the of familiar caricatures of the position. Lacking the
space to discuss all aspects of these developments, I shall comment on just two or
three leading philosophers who have allowed their reading of the pragmatists to
shape their conception of philosophy (Misak (ed) 1999 passim; Haack 1993).
Richard Rorty has described his philosophy as pragmatist on a number of
occasions. Where Peirce and Deweyand even perhaps Jameswere engaged
in working out systematic philosophical visions, Rorty treated pragmatism as
something more negative. What pragmatists teach us about truth, he tells us, is
that there is nothing very systematic or constructive to say about truth at all. In
particular, this concept does not capture any systematic or metaphysical relation
between our beliefs and utterances, on the one hand, and reality on the other. We
can describe what we do with the word true: we use it to express our
endorsement of beliefs and sentences, and sometimes we might find it useful to
express our fallibility by saying that some of our beliefs may not be true. But,
beyond talking about the rather trivial formal properties of the concept, there is
nothing more to be said. He also uses what he describes as a pragmatist
principle to show that the truth cannot be our aim when we inquire. Thisprinciple holds that we can only adopt something as an aim when we are able to
recognize that it has been achieved: it must thus make a practical difference
whether a proposition is true or not. And since we are fallible, we are never in a
position to recognize that one of our beliefs is actually trueall we can
recognize is that it meets standards of acceptance that are endorsed, for the time
being, in our community (Rorty 1991a: chapter one; 2000; Davidson 2005: 7;
Hookway 2007). The consequentialist character of pragmatist ideas is also
reflected in his account of how we can criticize and revise our view of the world.
We should be free to propose new vocabulariessystems of classification anddescription. We do not test these vocabularies by seeing whether they enable us
to discover truthsor by showing that they can be read off the nature of reality.
Instead, we evaluate them by seeing how they enable us to achieve our goals and
formulate better and more satisfying goals (Rorty 1995).
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Hilary Putnam denies that he is a pragmatist because he does not think that a
pragmatist account of truth can be sustained. Indeed, he shows little sympathy for
the pragmatist maxim. However he has written extensively on James, Peirce, and
Deweyoften in collaboration with Ruth Anna Putnamand he has provided
insightful accounts of what is distinctive about pragmatism and about what canbe learned from it (See Putnam 1994a). He has identified four characteristics of
pragmatism: the rejection of skepticism; the willingness to embrace fallibilism;
the rejection of sharp dichotomies such as those between fact and value, thought
and experience, mind and body, analytic and synthetic etc; and what he calls the
primacy of practice (1994c). He appears to count as a pragmatist in the wider
sense but not as a pragmatist in the narrow sense that requires acceptance of the
pragmatist maxim. With the turn of the twenty first century, he has made
ambitious claims for the prospects of a pragmatist epistemology. After surveying
the apparent failures of the original enlightenment project, and attributing them tothe fact that enlightenment philosophers were unable to overcome the
fundamental dichotomies mentioned above, he expresses the hope that the future
might contain a pragmatist enlightenment (Putnam 2004: 89108). The rich
understanding of experience and science offered by pragmatists may show how
to find an objective basis for the evaluation and criticism of institutions and
practices. He is particularly struck by the suggestion that pragmatist
epistemology, by emphasizing the communal character of inquiry and the need to
take account of the experiences and contributions of other inquirers, provides a
basis for a defence of democratic values (1993: 1180202). This may be related
to Rorty's suggestion that pragmatists insist upon the priority of democracy over
philosophy (Rorty 1991b).
Another symptom of a pragmatist revival is found in the work of Robert
Brandom, in books such asMaking it Explicit, andArticulating
Reasons.Brandom's philosophical interests are rather different from those of the
classical pragmatists. Indeed, the classical pragmatists, of whom he is quite
critical, do not evidently influence his work. It owes more to philosophers such
as Wilfrid Sellars and Quine and his teacher Richard Rorty. His concerns are
mostly with semantics and the philosophy of language, developing a version of
inferential role semantics in order to construct accounts of our use of words like
true and refers to which are liberated from the representationalist idea that
the function of thought and language is to provide a transcript of reality. The
connection to pragmatism is that his approach to language is focused upon what
we dowith language, with our practices of making assertions and of challenging
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or evaluating the assertions of others. He joins the pragmatists in denying
that truthis a substantial metaphysical property that can be possessed by some
propositions and not by others, and in focusing upon how this kind of discourse
has a role in our practices, upon how truth or reference makes a difference in
practice.
6. Conclusion
During the last quarter of the twentieth century, more philosophers became ready
to describe themselves as pragmatists, leading to new ways of articulating
pragmatism and original ways in which philosophy can be shaped by pragmatist
ideas. These new pragmatists include Huw Price (2013), Robert Brandom and
Philip Kitcher. Their understanding of pragmatism is not always the same, but
we shall describe some of the most important developments. (See Bacon 2012,
chapters 6, 7).
First, what features do we look for in deciding whether a philosopher is a
pragmatist? Most pragmatists embrace a form of naturalism, employing a
methodology which uses the method of science and is open to exploring the
different kinds of methods that are employed in different sciences. Although they
are ready to move away from the views of the classical pragmatists, they will
often be exploiting particular examples of pragmatic clarifications from Peirce,
James, and Dewey. A good example of this is provided by Cheryl Misak's use of
what she calls Peirce's naturalist account of truth (Misak 2007: 69f). She insiststhat Peirce did not want to define pragmatism. Rather it is the heart of
pragmatism that Peirce does not offer a transcendental account of truth or a
philosophical analysis'. Rather than trying to identify the essence of truth, she
claims, pragmatists try to describe the role of the concept in our practices. Thus
Peirce's account of truth examines the relations between the concept of truth and
notions such as belief, assertion, and inquiry. Her approach is thus naturalistic
because it is a sort of anthropological investigation; and the result of the
investigation is neither a necessary truth nor something that is established a
priori.
This adoption of pragmatism is accompanied by a rejection of a priori
metaphysics and of intellectualist accounts of thought. Peirce grounds this on his
pragmatic maxim, a logical rule that shows the emptiness of concepts which
have no practical consequences. This rejection of a a priori metaphysics is shared
with Price, Brandom and other philosophers who embrace new forms of
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pragmatism. In similar vein, Kitcher's On the Role of Correspondence Truth
(2012: chapter 4) provides a clarification of truth which builds on William
James's view that true propositions are ones that enable us to function well, that
function successfully as instruments.
We have examined pragmatism in the narrow sense (the pragmatist maxim as a
rule for clarifying concepts and hypotheses) and pragmatism in a wider sense.
The latter involves a range of approaches to problems in epistemology,
metaphysics and many other areas of philosophy that tend to display a broad
common pattern. When pragmatism began, in the work of Peirce and James,
pragmatism in the narrow sense was most important; while more recent
manifestations of pragmatism have tended to give most weight to pragmatism in
the wider sense. Many recent pragmatists are doubtful that a defensible form of
the maxim can be found. However the connections between the two are clear.
The pragmatist maxim was first developed in the context of a fallibilist, broadly
empiricist approach to the study of inquiry, and it is this approach to inquiry that
is central to pragmatism in the wider sense.
Brandom's influential views introduce some different ideas. He focuses on the
normative regulation of our practices, especially the practices involved in
reasoning and cognitive activities. Rather than being influenced by the classical
pragmatists, Brandom's work shows the influence of his teacher Wilfrid Sellars
and also his reading of Kant and some of the writings of Hegel. Rationality
involves possessing the ability to recognize the force of reasons. The requiredconnection with agency is manifested in the ways in which reasoning and
deliberation are active activities ; and we can take responsibility for how well we
deliberate and reason. In works likeMaking it Explicit(1994) he develops a
systematic system of normative pragmatics which examines the rules that should
guide the exercise of linguistic practices. His defence of naturalism resembles the
anthropological approach of Misak: we understand our concepts by showing how
they are used in our practices. Brandom also emphasises the importance of the
fact that we can adopt different vocabularies, adopting different ways of
describing and reasoning in different contexts (seeBetween Saying and Doing:Towards an Analytic Pragmatism, 2010). This is reflected in Brandom's distinct
kind of naturalism. As well as forging a vocabulary for evaluating our reasons
and participating in communal reasoning and discussion, he explores how one
vocabulary can be understood as grounded in others, for example in the
vocabulary of fundamental science. This does not conflict with our using other
vocabularies,for different purposes. He follows Rorty in rejecting the aspiration
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to provide accurate representations of our surroundings. Ways of talking are not
to be evaluated in terms of whether they accurately describe our surroundings;
rather, they are evaluated by the by the virtues of the practices that are involved
in our use of them.