The power of pragmatism

Knowledge production and social inquiry

Jane Wills, Robert Lake

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526134967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

This book makes the case for a pragmatist approach to the practice of social inquiry and knowledge production. Through diverse examples from multiple disciplines, contributors explore the power of pragmatism to inform a practice of inquiry that is democratic, community-centred, problem-oriented and experimental. Drawing from both classical and neo-pragmatist perspectives, the book advances a pragmatist sensibility in which truth and knowledge are contingent rather than universal, made rather than found, provisional rather than dogmatic, subject to continuous experimentation rather than ultimate proof, and verified in their application in action rather than in the accuracy of their representation of an antecedent reality. The Power of Pragmatism offers a path forward for mobilizing the practice of inquiry and knowledge production on behalf of achieving what Dewey called a sense for the better kind of life to be led.

Part I

The power of pragmatism

1

Introduction: The power of pragmatism

Jane Wills and Robert W. Lake

In life we are accustomed to the fact that our most important decisions are often based on uncertainty. We take a punt, follow our nose or listen to our gut. We make decisions without knowing that things will work out. We accept a marriage proposal, blow the whistle on an employer or go out on strike in the hope that it will be for the best. We expect to reach our golden anniversary, receive vindication for our efforts and win collective gains, but we know it could all too easily end in divorce, persecution or unemployment. Even mundane decisions like going for a walk, buying a gift for a relative or accepting a lunch invitation make us vulnerable to unintended and unexpected consequences: one thing leads to another and unanticipated events can occur. Our greatest emotional triumphs and our most dismal failures come from putting our neck on the line. We navigate everyday life learning to expect and manage uncertainty.

When it comes to our approach to social research, however, such insights and practices tend to be lodged in the back of the mind. We deploy theoretical frameworks and abstract concepts to help us reduce the complexity of the world to manageable proportions. Even if we acknowledge that they are simplifications, we approach social inquiry with a predefined lexicon that allows us to find ‘gentrification’, ‘neoliberalism’, ‘planetary urbanism’, ‘settler colonialism’ or the ‘post-political’ (to highlight some of the most popular concepts in critical social inquiry today) because those are the things we expect to find. If we use large datasets and analytical models, we look for predictable patterns to find the universal causal processes behind complex activities such as voting choices, knife attacks or rates of obesity. In the search for certainty, not surprisingly, we simplify social life and find evidence that supports our established ideas. Academics pursuing the normal science of social inquiry all too often produce concepts that allow us to see certain things while ignoring others, and, in a circular and self-reinforcing process, the resulting research reproduces prevailing ideas or generates new ones that feed the cycle anew.

Relinquishing what John Dewey (1929) called ‘the quest for certainty’ has proved extremely difficult in both physical and social research. Predictable causal relationships might appear clear in a laboratory setting, but even there we are likely to ignore the role of confounding factors and the likelihood of unintended consequences. The invention of DDT promised the eradication of mosquito-borne diseases but instead produced a carcinogenic legacy of global environmental contamination. The miracle invention of antibiotics that fight deadly bacteria stimulated new strains of highly resistant ‘superbugs’ and destroyed the microbiota of the human gut that support good immunity. The laws of economic science that allow markets to flourish also produce income inequality, negative environmental externalities and uneven development. These are just a few examples in a long list of unanticipated consequences of science that are coming home to roost in the Anthropocene (Mitchell, 2002; Polanyi, 1920 [2018], 1944 [2001]). In both the natural and social sciences, belief in certainty has sometimes produced deadly effects.

This book aims to make the case for pragmatism as an approach to social inquiry in which the absence of certainty is an asset rather than a liability for the process of knowledge production in the social world. A practice of social inquiry informed by pragmatism, we argue, leaves open the possibility for the unexpected, the potential joy of one thing leading to an (unexpected) other. It offers an opportunity, as Richard Rorty (1979 [2009], 370) suggests, “to keep space open for the sense of wonder… that there is something new under the sun… something which (at least for the moment) cannot be explained”. Pragmatism, Rorty continues, “is not a ‘method for attaining truth’” but, rather, “is supposed to be abnormal, to take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings” (1979 [2009], 357, 360, emphasis in the original). In so doing, a pragmatist approach to social inquiry enlarges the possibility of creating new knowledge in the world.

While the body of thought and practice known as pragmatism has been in existence for more than a hundred years (Menand, 1997, 2011; Morris, 1970), its popularity has ebbed and flowed with changing academic fashions and it was largely eclipsed by the ascendancy of analytical philosophy in the twentieth century. Yet there is strong and mounting evidence that pragmatism is again becoming more widely recognised as a promising orientation for social research (Baert, 2005; Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Dickstein, 1998; Morgan, 2014; Rogers, 2009). By advocating for the wider adoption of pragmatic ideas in social and spatial research, The power of pragmatism offers a possible avenue of escape from the pitfalls and contradictions of prevailing modes of inquiry while cohering with multiple sources of emerging thought and practice. As we discuss further, below, a pragmatist approach to social inquiry offers scope to incorporate parallel and related arguments from intellectual antecedents and companions such as Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein and from subsequent social theorists such as Bourdieu, Foucault and Latour who have been influenced by pragmatism or share its convictions (Bernstein, 1992, 2010; Harman, 2014; Mouffe, 1996; Purcell, 2017; Rorty, 1979 [2009], 1989).

A resurgent pragmatism also connects to nascent efforts to develop practice-oriented approaches to the conduct of social research, such as phronetic inquiry (Flyvbjerg, 2001), actor–network theory (Latour, 2005) and non-representational theory (Masumi, 2015; Thrift, 2008). Active experiments to adopt research approaches and methods based on collaboration beyond the academy, such as participatory action research (PAR), citizen science and the practice of co-production, also present strong affinities with pragmatic social research (Fischer, 2009; Kindon et al., 2007; Jasanoff, 2012; Pestoff et al., 2012; Whyte, 1991). In their alignment with pragmatism, these approaches recognise the futility of what Dewey (1916 [2004]) called ‘the spectator theory of knowledge’, in which the thinker or researcher stands at an objective distance outside the culture or community of which they are part and in which knowledge constitutes a representation of that separately existing, antecedent reality. Social researchers aligned with pragmatism acknowledge the full import of the crisis of representation, the end of the ‘God-trick’ and the need to embrace uncertainty in the production of knowledge. While the allure of foundational certainty remains strong when rewarded by conventional practices of obtaining grant funding, publishing a journal article or presenting a conference paper, pragmatism provides a way out of the conundrum of searching for the lifeboat of apparent foundations even as we know they cannot exist.

With a commitment to problem-solving and a perspective extending beyond the academy, pragmatism promotes the social value of social research. Its feet are firmly planted in ‘the field’, in tackling the problems of everyday life and incorporating broad public scrutiny to decide what is the right thing to do. Rather than taking its cue from existing theory, academic debate or prevailing intellectual concerns, pragmatic inquiry reorients the focus of research to working with a particular social group or community. Such research is designed to be useful: in the language of pragmatism, it is about working with publics around their problems through community-based inquiry and, in the process, further building the collective capacity to act. Akin to an anthropologist practising ethnography, a pragmatist researcher starts by listening to the beliefs, or ‘truths’, that exist in a community and tries to understand the work they are doing for variously situated community members. Comprehending such truths is further aided by a genealogical – that is, geo-historical – appreciation of the particular development of that community, its economy, institutionalised practices and related processes of identity-formation. If community members express an appetite to move forward over a particular concern or problem, the researcher might then work with the community to facilitate inquiry into the situation and to collectively develop the ideas and associated practices needed to produce a desired change. This means shedding a priori expectations of what comprises a ‘social problem’ and instead working with people to define what, from their perspective, constitutes an issue, problem or priority, which may look very different from the long list of public policy issues that regularly feature as recognised public concerns.

Signs of a resurgent pragmatism have been apparent since Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein and other ‘neo-pragmatist’ philosophers published their accounts of the power of pragmatism in the 1980s (Bernstein, 1989, 1992, 2010; Rorty, 1979 [2009], 1989; Unger, 2007). The neo-pragmatist perspective has selectively diffused into various areas of social research, such as social psychology (Shibutani, 2017), sociology (Joas, 1993; Shalin, 1986), political science (Bohman, 1999a, 1999b; Festenstein, 1997), public administration (Ansell, 2011; Dieleman, 2014; Shields, 2003, 2008), medical social science (Tolletsen, 2000), human geography (Bridge, 2005; Harney et al., 2016; Wood and Smith, 2008), urban studies (Lake, 2016, 2017), planning theory (Healey, 2009; Hoch, 1984), business studies (Wicks and Freeman, 1998) and economics (Nelson, 2003). Perhaps not surprisingly, take-up has been greatest in the humanities and applied arts, such as law (Posner, 2003), education (Biesta, 2015), history (Kloppenberg, 1998), literature (Mitchell, 1982), theology (West, 1989) and philosophy (Misak, 2002), where the quest for certainty was already much less secure. The contributions in The power of pragmatism attempt to build on this ongoing work to further explore its implications for the practice of social inquiry.

In suggesting that pragmatism can be applied across the social sciences to diverse fields of research, The power of pragmatism advocates the adoption of a pragmatic approach that can advance the practice of social inquiry while enhancing the public impact of the work that is done. Adopting pragmatism, however, involves major changes in the practice of social science, with significant implications for the ontological status and substantive content of the knowledge produced, as well as for our academic subjectivity and public identity as ‘researchers’. This book seeks to elucidate those changes and to address some of the challenges impeding their realisation.

In the remainder of this introduction, we set out the historical development of the pragmatist tradition and its core ideas, before exploring its application to social research, past and present. We then make a strong case for pragmatic social research, outline its key components and highlight its implications for research practice and outcomes. In the penultimate section, we address some of the long-standing concerns about pragmatism in order to provide critical context to the chapters that follow.

The pragmatic tradition of thought

The pragmatic tradition of philosophy developed in the years just after the American Civil War when a group of friends living in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1870s met to talk about ideas. They sought an explanation for, and an alternative to, the chaotic upheaval and violence of civil war, in which, they thought, the vehement adherence to incommensurable convictions had led to incomprehensible barbarity and destruction. The key protagonists were Nicholas St John Green (1830–76), Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr (1841–1914), William James (1842–1910), Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and Chauncey Wright (1830–75) (Menand, 2011; Mills, 1943 [1964]). They called themselves the Metaphysical Club and exchanged ideas about philosophy, science and law, eventually advocating a new approach to understanding ideas. As Brandom (2009, 31) puts it, they came to believe that society

needed … a different attitude toward our beliefs: a less ideologically confident, more tentative and critical attitude, one that would treat them as the always-provisional results of inquiry to date, as subject to experimental test and revision in the light of new evidence and experience, and as permanently liable to obsolescence due to altered circumstances, shifting contexts, or changes of interests.

The early pragmatists were resolutely anti-foundationalist, rejecting the grounding of truth on a priori principles – human nature, natural law, divine will or similar premises that were themselves without foundation – and the pragmatists understood any such ‘truth’ to be arbitrary, socially constructed and unverifiable. Rather than searching for metaphysical or immutable truths, pragmatists held that ideas are practical tools and can be best understood in relation to their consequences. Ideas matter not because of their correspondence to an antecedent reality but because of what they allow people to do and to get done in the world. From an ecological and historicist perspective, ideas were understood to be products of particular circumstances and were dependent upon their utility.

Fusing the consequentialist spirit of Bentham’s utilitarianism with the new Darwinian science, Peirce was particularly important in arguing that the value of ideas could be understood in relation to their effects, and he first published the term ‘pragmatism’ in a paper in 1878 (Mills, 1943 [1964]). Pragmatism, according to Peirce, sought “to lay down a method of determining the meaning of intellectual concepts, that is, of those upon which reasoning may turn”. In what has become known as the ‘pragmatic maxim’, Peirce argued that “[i]n order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception ...