The Continuum Companion to Pragmatism

Sami Pihlström, Sami Pihlström

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441114945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

The Continuum Companion to Pragmatism offers the definitive guide to a key area of contemporary philosophy. The book covers all the fundamental questions asked by pragmatism - areas that have continued to attract interest historically as well as topics that have emerged more recently as active areas of research. Twelve specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts reveal where important work continues to be done in the area and, most valuably, the exciting new directions the field is taking. The Companion explores issues pertaining to aesthetics, economics, education, ethics, history, law, metaphysics, politics, race, religion, science and technology, language, and social theory. Featuring a series of indispensable research tools, including an A to Z of key terms and concepts, a chronology, a detailed list of resources and a fully annotated bibliography, this is the essential reference tool for anyone working in contemporary pragmatism or modern American philosophy more generally.

1 Introduction

Sami Pihlström

If there is a leading idea running through this introductory chapter and the other editorial materials, it is the following. Pragmatism—and its key method, the so-called pragmatic method—offers us not just a theoretical perspective on science and inquiry, but more generally ways of being in the world, of knowing the reality we inhabit, of being in touch with and categorizing what goes on around us. It is not a single way of knowing, or a single categorial framework, but a meta-framework for explicating and assessing the different systems we employ for categorizing reality.

This will become especially clear below when we discuss the pragmatic method in the chapter “Research Methods and Problems”; I will interpret that method as an ethically loaded, yet metaphysically relevant, method of “knowing reality” pluralistically and non-reductively, considering all the perspectives and standpoints that might be significant for the matter at issue—letting different voices be heard. First, however, we will start by asking whether there is a definition of pragmatism. This brief discussion of the very meaning of pragmatism will then be followed by historical and “geographical” discussions of the different phases and traditions of pragmatism—most of which will, obviously, be more substantially commented on in the individual chapters.¹

What is Pragmatism?

I find it important to note—and I believe the essays collected in this volume make it clear—that there is no essence of pragmatism, no key doctrine or thesis that all pragmatists accept.² Rather, there are important, even vital, tensions in the pragmatist tradition, different pragmatists defending very different, often conflicting views (cf. the chapter “Research Methods and Problems,” for more detailed examples). Historically, it is often a crucial question whether to identify a particular thinker as a pragmatist or not: there are “core” pragmatists (e.g., Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, Addams . . . ), and there are philosophers with pragmatist tendencies and inclinations somewhat farther away from the core group (e.g., Kant, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine, Sellars, Brandom . . . ). In many cases it is difficult to determine whether a given thinker should be classified as a pragmatist.

The fact that it is often an open issue whether a particular philosopher is a pragmatist or not is a sign of the vitality of the pragmatist tradition: pragmatism is not a closed affair but a truly living philosophical orientation, and historical interpretations of certain philosophers as pragmatists (or as non-pragmatists) contribute to the continuous shaping and restructuring of the tradition, thus keeping it alive by retelling its “narrative.”³ This is still very vague, however. No clear criteria for being a pragmatist have been given here.

One major characteristic of pragmatist thought is that pragmatists turn their attention to human practices and habits. Philosophical views and concepts are examined in such practical, experiential terms. However, this is not to say that practice is “prior to” theory; rather, no sharp dichotomy between theory and practice is presupposed in the first place. Even the most theoretical scientific or philosophical matters are examined in the light of their potential connections with human practical action.

We will see below that it is problematic, to say the least, to include some particular thinkers—say, someone like W. V. Quine—in the pragmatist tradition. (To a lesser extent, this is the case with Richard Rorty as well, who has been claimed by several historically oriented pragmatism scholars to seriously distort pragmatist classics.) The reception of Quine’s and Rorty’s thought has, however, to a great extent shaped the way we look at the pragmatist tradition today, because it is a tradition we inevitably view from a perspective partly defined by the neo-pragmatist ideas of Putnam and Rorty, which would probably be very different had there been no Quinean influence in their background. One may, then, as well include Quine in the pragmatist tradition, just as one should include Rorty, whom a number of influential scholars also (with good reason) see as betraying some of the central commitments of that tradition, for example, the very conception of philosophy as inquiry that Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, insisted on. In any case, neither Quine nor Rorty should be excluded from the pragmatists’ camp for the wrong reasons. One wrong reason would be the assumption that there is a single true essence of pragmatism that could be appealed to in classifying individual thinkers to those “in” and those “out.”

Thus, there is no sense in responding with a simple “yes” or “no” to the question of whether Quine, Rorty, or someone else “really” is a pragmatist. The pragmatist tradition, like any philosophical tradition, is dynamically evolving, living, and changing, not fixed once and for all; therefore, placing a thinker like Quine or Rorty in that tradition, or in a place within the tradition having somewhat problematic relations to other thinkers included in it, always transforms the tradition, keeping it alive by keeping alive the ongoing critical discussion of what our (pragmatic?) criteria for calling someone a pragmatist actually are. If it were totally clear who is and is not a pragmatist, pragmatism would hardly be the truly interesting philosophical framework it nowadays still—or once again—is.

Nor can we say that any of the pragmatists we will preliminarily examine in this introduction has finally settled any of the philosophical problems they have been preoccupied with. Pragmatism, indeed, lives from its genuine philosophical problems. Its depth lies precisely in its not having provided any final, ultimate theory about anything. Pragmatists are not unified in the sense of accepting any common doctrine, let alone unquestioned dogma taken for granted. They are, rather, unified in the extremely open-ended and vague sense of having to face certain philosophical problems in their distinctive ways. I believe we should agree with Robert Talisse and Scott Aikin when they write: “The resistance of pragmatism to precise definition is a mark of its vitality, an indication that it is a living philosophy rather than a historical relic. This means that questions concerning its principal contentions, major themes, and central arguments are still open questions, questions that pragmatists are still working through. Pragmatism, whatever it is, is still working itself out, still trying to figure out what it is.” (Talisse and Aikin, 2008, p. 3, original emphases.) The present book shares their antiessentialism (though not all of their detailed views).

Both the following historical excursion to major pragmatists and their controversies and the examination of pragmatist methodology in selected areas of inquiry in the chapter on research methods and problems should be read in this spirit of open-endedness. This introduction will not tell you the final truth about the essence of pragmatism, because there is no such final truth to be told.

Some Main Stages in the History of Pragmatism

No philosophical or scientific movement can be understood without knowing something about its development.⁴ We may summarize the main stages of the development of pragmatism in the United States and elsewhere as follows: (1) the beginnings, or the prehistory of pragmatism (R. W. Emerson and the other American transcendentalists), the Metaphysical Club, and other early developments (1860–1870s); (2) the discussions, mainly by Charles S. Peirce, William James, and F. C. S. Schiller, on what pragmatism is (1880s–1910s), coinciding with the flourishing period of (Jamesian) pragmatism in the early 1900s and its critical dialogue with Hegelian idealism (represented by Josiah Royce, among others) and other influential currents of thought; (3) the social and political turn of pragmatism in John Dewey and G. H. Mead, in particular (1910s–1940s); (4) the relations between pragmatism and logical empiricism, or early analytic philosophy (Rudolf Carnap, W. V. Quine, Nelson Goodman, Morton White, Wilfrid Sellars), and the simultaneous decades of eclipse of classical pragmatism (1950s–1970s); (5) the rise of neo-pragmatism in Richard Rorty’s and Hilary Putnam’s works (1980s–1990s), with interesting connections to (post-)analytic philosophers like John McDowell and Robert B. Brandom; (6) the widening international scope of contemporary pragmatism scholarship (2000s).

We may, before studying these stages in turn, begin with a preliminary question regarding the integrity of pragmatism. Arguably, one can adopt at least four different, though perhaps overlapping, attitudes to what is labeled “the pragmatist tradition” (cf. also Pihlström, 2003, 2008a). First, some scholars have claimed that only Peirce’s own method, which he later famously re-baptized as “pragmaticism”, is a piece of solid philosophy and that all subsequent formulations of pragmatism were, and continue to be, distortions or misunderstandings of Peirce’s original views. This, however, is a one-sided and dogmatic view. In serious pragmatism scholarship, there is no denying the fact that James and Dewey, too, produced original philosophical systems, even though they were indebted to Peirce in many ways and probably did to some extent misunderstand or misapply some of Peirce’s ideas. Secondly, several philosophers have insisted on the primacy of Peirce’s version of pragmatism while admitting that there are interesting non-Peircean developments to be found within the tradition. In contrast to the first group of scholars, for whom there is only one true pragmatism, these philosophers maintain that there are “two pragmatisms”: Peirce’s original realist views have gradually been transformed, via James’s, Dewey’s and others’ works, to something totally different, namely, Rorty’s antirealist and relativist neo-pragmatism.⁵ The “two pragmatisms” picture also assumes a dichotomy between Peircean pragmatism, on the one hand, and all later, inferior pragmatist systems, on the other. Thirdly, one may insist on the continuity of certain pragmatist themes in all the classics of the movement, especially Peirce, James, and Dewey (as well as Royce, Schiller, Mead, and Lewis), such as experience, purposiveness, human interests, continuity, creativity, growth, habits, dynamic action, non-reductive naturalism, and so on.⁶ Those adopting this approach usually insist, however, that neo-pragmatists like Rorty almost entirely distort original pragmatism. This third group nevertheless finds more unity in the pragmatist tradition than the first two.

Finally, there is the fourth attitude, adopted by the present author and informing this volume—though of course not necessarily all of its individual contributions by different authors. The one maintaining this attitude is prepared to admit that even Rorty’s neo-pragmatism is part of the extremely heterogeneous tradition we call pragmatism (cf. Pihlström, 1996, 1998, 2003, 2008b, 2009a). There are both unity and enormous differences among the pragmatists—within this one and the same dynamically developing tradition whose amorphousness is a sign of its philosophical strength and vitality rather than of distortion or corruption. It is compatible with this attitude, emphasizing both the unity and the differences-in-unity of the pragmatist tradition, to attack, say, Rorty’s (mis)readings of the classical pragmatists. Moreover, this fourth position acknowledges that pragmatism—as well as, possibly, any other philosophical tradition—is to a great extent constituted by the open question regarding who is to be classified as a pragmatist, and on which criteria. Thus, it may be advisable to leave the exact status of pragmatism open, to look and see what kinds of different philosophies and philosophers (as well as nonphilosophers) are discussed under the rubric “pragmatism”, and to try to develop philosophical reasons for considering or for refusing to consider some particular line of thought a form of pragmatism. The nature of pragmatism will therefore be continuously open to debate.

The viability of these suggestions cannot be demonstrated in this introduction, or even this entire volume. The sheer number of different perspectives offered by this Companion demonstrates, however, that the boundaries of the pragmatist tradition will be kept open in what follows.

The prehistory of pragmatism

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s naturalism, perspectivism, and general antidogmatism are important precursors of pragmatism. Emerson is usually described as a “transcendentalist,” and pragmatism should, therefore, be understood as continuing some of the threads of American transcendentalism. (The same idea is sometimes expressed by saying that Emerson and other transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau were “proto-pragmatists.”)⁷

It was, however, only in the Metaphysical Club of the 1870s that pragmatism, properly speaking, was initiated. Charles Peirce played a crucial role in this development, but so did William James and especially the more “positivistically” oriented participant of the Club’s meetings, Chauncey Wright. All these thinkers took seriously the emerging Darwinian paradigm—to the extent that pragmatism might be described as a philosophical synthesis of Darwin and Kant. As Kant had argued a century earlier, we structure the reality that is the object of our inquiry and experience. However—and here comes the Darwinian perspective—the way this structuring takes place is constantly open to change instead of being fixed and predetermined. Our world-structuring is a habitual process instead of being mentalistically reducible to a set of fixed categories of the human mind. In this emerging synthesis—which is still emerging, two centuries after Kant’s great works and a century and a half after Darwin’s—the transcendentalists, especially Emerson and Thoreau, played an important role, even though pragmatism itself was developed by Peirce and James.

The Kantian background of pragmatism ought to be taken seriously, perhaps more seriously than many pragmatism scholars are willing to. After all, everything American has some connection, more or less remote, to something European. While pragmatism as a philosophical movement of course originated in the United States, it is, I believe, useful to examine some of its basic ideas in relation not only to British empiricism—another piece of pragmatism’s prehistory, given that James (1907, ch. 2) mentioned the classical British empiricists as precursors of the pragmatic methods—but also to its Kantian roots. Such examination may start from the observation that pragmatism is, among other things, an attempt to understand scientific (and nonscientific) rationality as a part of our human, inevitably ethically problematic existence. It adopts an agent’s perspective on our experience, thinking, and reason-use, reminding us that it is only through our practice-laden being-in-the-world (if such a phrase, made famous by Martin Heidegger, is allowed here) that we may fully appreciate our cognitive and rational capacities. Thought—or language, or the mind—is not a mirror of nature, as Rorty put it in the late 1970s, but arises out of our worldly engagements with our natural surroundings, being constantly in the service of human interests and needs.

This practical starting point not only makes pragmatism a most significant framework for contemporary discussions of rationality, knowledge, morality, and value, but also reconnects it with Kant’s critical project of understanding humanity’s relation to the world through the distinction (albeit not a pernicious dualism or dichotomy) between the perspectives of natural science and moral reasoning. Thus, the problem of how our scientific and ethical (or religious) perspectives on the world ought to be reconciled is, in an important way, both a Kantian problem and a pragmatist one. It was Kant who arranged our human experience of the world in terms of his three Critiques, attempting to answer the questions of what I can know, what I ought to do, and what I may hope—neatly summarized in his philosophical–anthropological question, “What is man?”. Famously, Kant maintained that we must limit the scope of knowledge in order to make room for faith. In a manner strikingly similar to the later pragmatists, he wished to make sense of both scientific experience, which is the basis of reliable, empirically testable theories of nature, and moral experience, which leads to ethically motivated actions (or at least ought to do so). Kant showed us how to make sense of our empirical cognitions of an objective world without giving up the objectivity (or at least rationally binding intersubjectivity) of ethical value judgments. Very much like Kant, pragmatists have insisted, and must insist, on viewing human beings in a double light, both as natural elements of the natural world and as free and autonomous agents—with agency arising from that very same nature.

If any even remotely Kantian position is labeled idealistic, in the transcendental or critical sense familiar from Kant’s First Critique, we should admit that there is a crucial idealistic element in pragmatism, too. This, however, is not to deny that there may be, and have been, realistic features in pragmatism as well. Insofar as pragmatists are, usually, naturalists, they are also realists about the laws and processes of the natural world; yet, this realism is maintained and developed within a more fundamental transcendental idealism (though most pragmatists would prefer to avoid such a Kantian expression) emphasizing the dependence of any categorization of the natural world on human constructive activities.

Even though many of the pragmatists’ central problems seem to be Kantian ones, in a sense to be specified below, there is reason to suspect that this fact has too often been forgotten in contemporary readings of pragmatism and interpretations of its history. While it is correct to note that pragmatists have been critical of the reason versus nature (or, analogously, morality versus science) distinctions that the Kantian transcendental system operates with, and while it is certainly important to bear in mind especially James’s and Dewey’s heavy criticisms of Kant and aprioristic philosophical methodology more generally, it is equally important to perceive that the pragmatists are asking the same...