American Pragmatism

An Introduction

Albert R. Spencer

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509524723, 9781509524716
• eBook ISBN: 9781509524754
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this comprehensive introduction, Albert Spencer presents a new story of the origins and development of American pragmatism, from its emergence through the interaction of European and Indigenous American cultures to its contemporary status as a diverse, vibrant, and contested global philosophy.

Spencer explores the intellectual legacies of American pragmatism's founders, Peirce and James, but also those of newly canonical figures such as Addams, Anzaldúa, Cordova, DuBois, and others crucial to its development. He presents the diversity of pragmatisms, old and new, by weaving together familiar and unfamiliar authors through shared themes, such as fallibilism, meliorism, pluralism, verification, and hope. Throughout, Spencer reveals American pragmatism's engagement with the consequences of US political hegemony, as versions of pragmatism arise in response to both the tragic legacies and the complicated benefits of colonialism.

American Pragmatism is an indispensable guide for undergraduate students taking courses in pragmatism or American philosophy, for scholars wishing to develop their understanding of this thriving philosophical tradition, or for curious readers interested in the genealogy of American thought.

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Fallibilism and the Classical Pragmatists

Pragmatism begins conventionally with the friendship between Charles Sanders Peirce and William James and with their overlapping critiques of modern philosophy. Both men benefited from unique and privileged upbringings, which placed them in a position to critique nineteenth-century philosophy and to assimilate the American experience into their responses. Peirce was the son of Benjamin Peirce, an eminent research mathematician who taught at Harvard University for nearly fifty years and, while he inherited his father’s talent for mathematics, science, and logic, he did not inherit his father’s steadfastness. From an early age, Peirce suffered from a variety of medical, personal, and social problems that routinely disrupted his life work. As a result, Peirce never published a single comprehensive summary of his mature thought, but it is possible to get glimpses of a profound and systematic philosophy from his published articles and unpublished manuscripts.

James was the son of Henry James Sr., a wealthy businessman and theologian who spared no expense to see that his son enjoyed the finest education and was exposed to the best cultural experiences. James’s intellect, much like Peirce’s, thrived under these conditions, but early physical ailments plagued him too and often resulted in bouts of depression. Unlike Peirce, James developed more constructive means of coping with his maladies and, if anything, his melancholy often produced his most valuable insights. In fact it can be argued that his youthful listlessness led to the formative experiences that inspired him to become a psychologist and philosopher rather than pursuing a more conventional career as a physician, as he originally intended. Furthermore, James possessed the necessary temperament not only to spend his entire career at Harvard but to write voluminously, including several philosophical masterpieces. Thus, in interpreting James, the challenge is to appreciate how his thought matured throughout his life.

Hence this chapter will examine Peirce’s development of the pragmatic maxim as an alternative to the foundationalism of René Descartes, then William James’s development of radical empiricism as an alternative to the skepticism of David Hume. It will then contrast Peirce’s and James’s rival forms of pragmatism and highlight how this rift cuts across pragmatism throughout the twentieth century and remains a point of contention. Finally, the chapter will discuss the contributions of the two philosophers’ friend and colleague Josiah Royce and how his philosophy of loyalty functions as a foil and extension of their pragmatisms. These concepts represent the theme of fallibilism—the idea that even the best supported claim is conditional upon, and subject to revision in the light of, future evidence and experience. Fallibilism not only serves as a unifying theme among the classical pragmatists but grounds pragmatism’s general theory of knowledge and its unique contribution as a critique and as an alternative to modern philosophy.

Fallibilism, Epistemology, and Scientific Inquiry

As discussed in the previous chapter, Emerson’s request that each individual and each generation trust their own experience when constructing their original relation to nature anticipates fallibilism. Of all the themes discussed in this introduction, we shall see that fallibilism emerges as the most essential and unifying one. According to Emerson, we should be suspicious of tradition because all accounts of nature, scientific or religious, are fallible. No one sees reality in its entirety, no one can communicate one’s insights without error, and, even if one could, we may fail to understand or to apply those past insights properly. More importantly, experience is in a constant state of flux; thus even the best concepts and methods must be adapted to present circumstances. However, the fact of fallibility does not legitimate the common caricature according to which the pragmatists are total relativists who believe that truth does not exist or is just personal advantage and that all claims are equally valid. Rather the pragmatists believe that “fallibility is an irreducible dimension of the human condition: empirical belief can never be certain, exact, absolute, final. The abandoned ‘quest for certainty’ is replaced by piecemeal, multi-directional efforts to verify and warrant beliefs. The possibility of belief revision is never erased” (Stuhr 2000: 3).

While the pragmatists certainly inherit an idea of fallibilism from Emerson, scholars also assert that it is further informed by other sources. In The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand (2001) insists that it emerges as a consequence of the Civil War. Many Americans blamed the war on polarized and intractable beliefs about slavery and worried that “certitude leads to violence” (2001: 61). Meanwhile, Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, published in 1859, revolutionized biology and intellectual thought by dispelling not only prior religious and scientific beliefs about the origins and diversification of species, but—as we shall see Dewey explaining (in the next chapter)—the deeper ontological assumption, which goes back to Aristotle, that natural beings have a static essence and that beings or processes have a fixed purpose or ultimate goal. Nicholas Rescher (1998) argues that Peirce’s fallibilism is informed by his experience as a laboratory scientist; thus it does not insist “on the falsity of our scientific claims but rather on their tentativity as inevitable estimates: it does not hold that knowledge is unavailable here, but rather that it is always provisional.” Still others, for example Douglas Anderson (2008), locate pragmatism’s commitment to fallibilism in Peirce’s assertion that chance is a fundamental part of the cosmos—an assertion in contrast with the absolutist ontologies articulated by Kant and Hegel that dominated contemporary philosophical discussions.

While we need not reduce pragmatism’s commitment to fallibilism to a single historical source, this commitment is essential to the philosophies of both Peirce and James and develops through their friendship, overlapping critiques of modern philosophy. Historically, epistemology—that is, the theory of knowledge—has been a central part of philosophy. From classical antiquity on, many philosophical masterpieces and careers have focused on such questions as: What is knowledge? How do we know whether a claim is true? Should we prefer arguments or evidence in support of our knowledge? Is knowledge universally true at all times and in all places for everyone, or is it relative to cultural and historical contexts? What is the difference between facts and opinions? Are there differences between scientific, moral, and aesthetic knowledge? Are there any limits to what can be known and, if so, what are they? While these issues and questions are addressed by philosophers in all ages and cultures, they become critically important in the era of modern philosophy, as European culture transitioned from dependence on religious authority and superstition to secular politics and scientific inquiry. Philosophers hoped to settle disputes and create better societies based on rationality, cooperation, and scientific knowledge, thus determining the criterion for knowledge; and the best method for discovering it was crucial.

Inspired by mathematics, René Descartes (1596–1650) insisted upon seeking a set of basic axioms that could be deduced through a method of doubt. If any belief could be doubted, it should be dismissed, until only indubitable beliefs remained. These were innate ideas and would function as a stable and objective foundation for all other knowledge, since they could be determined through rational investigation, independently of experience. Unfortunately, each of Descartes’ innate ideas (God, infinity, and substance) has been challenged; and his emphasis on rationality further entrenched the dualism between the mind and the body. Conversely, John Locke (1632–1704) would return to Aristotle’s preference for evidence over reason by reviving the concept of tabula rasa. Rather than possessing innate ideas, we are born as blank slates and acquire knowledge through our senses, which are the source of our experience. Eventually, David Hume (1711–1776) advanced Locke’s empiricism to several perplexing conclusions. If all knowledge is obtained through the senses, then we do not have direct experience of several concepts we take for granted—such as causality, the self, and induction.

At the turn of the nineteenth century European philosophy was caught between Descartes’ foundationalism, which led to dualism, and Hume’s empiricism, which led to skepticism. Should philosophy continue the search for indubitable foundational principles, or should it content itself with probing the limits of human reason? Most philosophers of the time would develop various forms of idealism in response. Idealism proposes that our knowledge consists of mental representations of the world rather than being a direct experience of it. While Vedanta and Plato serve as ancient examples of idealism, modern idealisms avoided the temptation to ground knowledge in supernatural postulates, such as Brahman or the Forms, and attempted instead to find the structures common to experience that make our claims intelligible. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argued that the categories of time and space function as necessary structures of our experience; and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) proposed the thesis that knowledge emerges over time through dialectics—the historical process of rational discourse. I shall return to Descartes and Hume shortly, to show how Peirce and James raised specific critiques of their ideas, and our examination of Royce will be the first to highlight the influence of idealism on the development of pragmatism. In the nineteenth century the rate of scientific progress was increasing rapidly, deepening human understanding and demonstrating the power of the scientific method to investigate phenomena. While revolutionary theories were proposed in all major fields, none was more radical than Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) suggestion that the diversification of species resulted from changes in the population of organisms that were due to pressure exercised by the laws of natural selection over vast spans of time. Even if philosophers had questions about the nature of knowledge that remained unsettled, scientists were beginning to find answers to perennial questions about the natural world.

Thus pragmatism emerged at the crossroad between two axes: the philosophical tension between foundationalism and skepticism; and the disciplinary tension between philosophy and science as types of epistemic inquiry. Several of pragmatism’s founders were experimental scientists. Peirce earned a BSc in chemistry from Harvard in 1863, served as a geographer for the US Coast and Geodetic Survey for several decades (1859–1891), and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1877. James accompanied Louis Agassiz’s expedition to Brazil and along the Amazon (1861–1865), earned an MD from the Harvard Medical School in 1869, and was president of the American Psychological Association in 1894—as was Dewey five years later, in 1899, and then Josiah Royce in 1901. Thus a deep respect for the scientific method is at the heart of pragmatism and informs its fallibilism, which in turn serves as a response to the dilemma of choosing between foundationalism and skepticism. The pragmatists recognized that the power of the scientific method lies not in its ability to uncover indubitable truths about the world but in its ability to falsify hypotheses and replace them with new ones, which better explain, predict, and control the natural phenomena.

A recent example of fallibilism in science is the reclassification of Pluto as a dwarf planet. Since prehistory, humans have observed and recorded the behavior of the objects in the night sky and, while the procession of the majority of them remains “fixed,” a handful—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—appear to move in less regular patterns. The ancient Greeks named these objects “planets” (πλανῆται, a noun derived from the verb πλανάω, πλανᾶν, “wander”) because they were the only visible celestial objects in the sky that behaved in this manner. With the invention of the telescope at the beginning of the seventeenth century, new evidence stretched the application of the descriptor “planet.” Galileo discovered that the Earth was a fellow planet rather than the center of the universe and that some planets, such as Jupiter, had their own satellites. In time, the other outer planets were discovered (Uranus in 1781 and Neptune in 1846). When Pluto was discovered in 1930, the number of wanderers stabilized for several generations until further discoveries with regard to its mass and orbit troubled Pluto’s status and eventually the definition of a planet.

Then in 1992, a second trans-Neptunian object was discovered in the Kuiper Belt—the region inhabited by Pluto; and this inspired astronomers to begin scanning the region for other large objects. More were quickly discovered. Several are nearly the mass of Pluto, such as Sedna and Haumea (discovered in 2003 and 2004 respectively); some also possess their own moons, such as Quaoar and Makemake (discovered in 2002 and 2005 respectively); and one—Eris, discovered in 2005— is more massive. These discoveries provoked a crisis: does the solar system contain fourteen planets (or probably more), or do we need to change our definition of a planet in light of the new evidence?

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) formally defined a planet for the first time as a result of these findings; and in 2006 it reclassified Pluto, the asteroid Ceres, and the other newly discovered objects as “dwarf planets.” The public outcry was enormous and has continued for a decade, because many felt that the demotion of Pluto was an insult and some even considered it to indicate the unreliability of science as an institution. Few appreciated the exciting implications of this announcement. Before 2006 we believed we lived in a solar system with only a handful of neighboring worlds. Now we know we have dozens, possibly hundreds of neighbors waiting to be explored! In fact, during the revision of this book, the IAU announced the discovery of two new trans-Neptunian objects: FarOut (11/2018 @ 120AU) and FarFarOut (2/2019 @ 140AU). Both were discovered while searching for the postulated Planet Nine, an object estimated to be the mass of Neptune, which may still lurk in the farthest reaches of the solar system. Thus we did not lose a planet; we gained a deeper understanding of star systems, our own and others. This reclassification demonstrates how our scientific knowledge is conditional and always open to revision when confronted with enough evidence.

Scientific knowledge is never “certain,” “indubitable,” or “foundational” in the Cartesian sense; rather it is practical, tentative, and always subject to revision in the light of future experience, evidence, or experimentation. It is fallible but pragmatic. Skepticism retreats in the face of the technological benefits provided by this provisional knowledge. While it may be impossible to verify causality or the reliability of induction through our sense experience, it is difficult to deny the advantages of an internal combustion engine over a steam engine, of a telegraph over semaphore flags, or of penicillin over folk remedies. Most importantly, fallibilism enables progress without reducing it to a single goal or metric. Since we can never have certainty, fallibilism implies continual, possibly perpetual expansion, improvement, and refinement of knowledge. As we shall see, this openness to growth supports most of the themes I will explore in subsequent chapters, specifically amelioration, pluralism, and hope, as well as the pragmatists’ general (although not exclusive) preference for progressive politics. Now that fallibilism has been defined and related to its historical context, let us see how Peirce and James developed it through their respective critique of Descartes and Hume.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) and the Pragmatic Maxim

As mentioned from the outset, Peirce’s personal problems and lack of professionalism prevented him from writing a single summative work. However, he was incredibly prolific and, even though most of his work remains unpublished, there are glimpses of an intricate systematic philosophy between the lines of his more popular articles. Of crucial importance are three early essays: “Some Consequences of the Four Incapacities” (1868), “The Fixation of Belief” (1877), and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878). In these articles Peirce presents his criticisms of Descartes and articulates the basic notions he develops throughout his work: inquiry, habit, vagueness, and the pragmatic maxim. With these basic notions in hand, I will turn to his deep epistemological and metaphysical ideas, specifically his understanding of final opinion and his objective idealism.

Peirce begins “Some Consequences of the Four Incapacities” with a discussion of how Descartes’ epistemology replaced the epistemology of the previous epoch: the work of the scholastics, which was heavily influenced by medieval Christian theology. This point of departure primes us as to Peirce’s own ambitions. He intends to make a replacement similar to Descartes’: just as Descartes needed to replace the medieval worldview to support the science of the Renaissance, Peirce needs to replace modern epistemology to support contemporary science. Yet, rather than focusing on the philosophers of the previous generation (Kant and Hegel), he aims for a deeper revision, which questions the basic assumptions of modernity. He argues that Descartes made four key replacements that modified scholastic thought: (1) the replacement of dogma with “universal doubt”; (2) the replacement of religious authority with “individual consciousness” as the arbiter of certainty; (3) the replacement of “multiform argumentation” with the method of a “single thread of inference depending often upon inconspicuous premises”; and (4) t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Preface
• An Introduction to American Pragmatism
• 1 Fallibilism and the Classical Pragmatists
• 2 Meliorism and the Chicago Pragmatists
• 3 Pluralism and the Harvard Pragmatists
• 4 Verification and the Analytic Pragmatists
• 5 Hope and the Contemporary Pragmatists
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement