Peirce, James, and a Pragmatic Philosophy of Religion

John W. Woell

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781472524133
• eBook ISBN:
  9781441111203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this book, John W. Woell shows us how contemporary readings of American Pragmatism founded on mistakenly used categories of the Analytic tradition have led to misreadings of Peirce and James. By focusing on terms drawn largely from Descartes and Kant, contemporary debates between metaphysical realists, antirealists, Realists and Nonrealists, have, argues Woell, failed to shed great light on pragmatism in general and a pragmatic philosophy of religion in particular.

Woell contends that paying close attention to the internal relationships among inquiry, belief, and their objects in the respective works of Peirce and James provides a means for fully appreciating pragmatism's richness as a resource for philosophy of religion. By taking account of a pragmatic point of view in philosophy of religion, this book incites a more productive discussion of the metaphysical status of religious objects and of the epistemic status of religious belief.

Chapter 1

Realisms, Antirealisms, Nonrealisms, and Pragmatisms

The accolades that Richard Rorty has garnered are a mark of both his originality and his boldness. His originality can be seen not only through a perusal of his own works, but through the amount of criticism that has been directed at his claims and the variety of quarters from which this criticism has come. Rorty has forced philosophers to reconsider many dearly held opinions and, at times, to justify their own existence as academic professionals. In fact, in his bolder moments, Rorty recommends that the notion that there is a discipline called “Philosophy,” that philosophy is a “natural kind,” ought to be abandoned in favor of thinking of philosophy as a literary enterprise that tells the various stories of certain problems and lines of thought through revisionist “intellectual histories.”¹ When this prescription for philosophy in general, or philosophy departments in particular, is coupled with his unique views on traditional philosophical problems, it is little wonder that he has spurred so much debate.

Perhaps furthering the controversy surrounding Rorty is the fact that he seems entirely unfazed by the criticisms leveled at him. Hilary Putnam remarks that Rorty is not merely dismissive of a philosophical controversy that the discipline has taken seriously in the past but that “he scorns the controversy” once he has diagnosed it as arising from a philosophical picture that we ought to reject.¹ It often seems as if Rorty simply finds the problems with which philosophy deals to be uninteresting; thus, criticisms of his position fall on largely deaf ears. It is perhaps because of this mood of indifference toward not only the work of other philosophers who would continue to think of philosophy as a discipline that works on a set of problems, but also toward criticisms of his own work that James Conant, for one, sees the content of many of his replies to critics as “content which could be most economically expressed simply through a shrug of the shoulders.”² Although it seems odd for someone who has engendered so much controversy to be indifferent to the very storm that surrounds him, this seemed to be Rorty’s attitude.

Because Rorty willingly admits that his use of other philosophers’ opinions is “revisionist,” it becomes increasingly difficult to find a criticism that will stick. That is, one cannot simply call into question the accuracy of his interpretation of, for example, William James’s “The Will to Believe” because Rorty revels in what he sees as the impossibility of gauging such “accuracy.” Furthermore, Rorty’s tendency to respond with what would best be expressed with a shrug of the shoulders has allowed debates that may have begun around his work to continue despite his lack of interest in the issue at hand. In spite of—or perhaps because of—these difficulties with criticizing Rorty’s own views and his readings of other philosophers, the enterprise has continued. Critics fire from all quarters, and, whether Rorty responds or not, the debates continue. Rorty even manages to serve as the focus of debates he did not originate.

The Confines of Rortian Pragmatism

By the time Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Consequences of Pragmatism were published in 1979 and 1982 respectively, Michael Dummett’s notion of “anti-realism” had been kicking around philosophy departments for fifteen years.³ Likewise, philosophers had been doing work on pragmatism and in the pragmatic vein continuously since James had coined the term.⁴ However, by combining Dummett’s notion with his own reading of the early American pragmatists, Rorty managed to bring American pragmatism to the forefront among the analytic philosophers who had been in ascendancy since the linguistic turn. In doing so, a problem that had previously been relegated to the background came to the fore.⁵ Lines were drawn, encampments set up, and the battle was on.

Rorty’s suggestion in these works (and since) is that early American pragmatism, specifically that of William James and John Dewey, rejects the notion that our discourse entails being answerable to the world.⁶ That is, neither James nor Dewey were committed to the notion that our claims have something to do with “the facts of the matter” nor were they interested in finding criteria that would help to evaluate the accuracy of these claims in light of “the facts of the matter.” Human discourse is answerable to nothing but itself.

The person who adheres to these notions regarding discourse becomes an “ironist” because he or she recognizes “that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed,” and he or she renounces “the attempt to formulate criteria of choice between final vocabularies,” vocabularies that we use to justify our actions but that cannot themselves be justified through any non-circular argument.⁷ Talk about truth therefore ought to be replaced with talk about justification, which amounts to no more than what my audience will let me get away with.⁸ The result is the replacement of “objectivity” with “solidarity,” the imagining of the largest possible audience to which we could defend our claims. Rather than seeing this loss of objectivity as the lamentable first step toward complete relativism and nihilism, Rorty argues that it should lead us to a liberal politics that recognizes that “cruelty is the worst thing [we] do.”⁹ The futility of both metaphysical and epistemological enterprises conceived of as providing some insight into our relationship to “the way things are” pushes one necessarily into pragmatism. Pragmatism, according to Rorty, holds that the only means for the assessment of claims is the analysis of the way in which those claims function within discourse itself. Such an evaluation of claims is, in general, not a matter of understanding the relationships between concepts and a world beyond them; rather, it is a process of relating concepts and claims to each other and being able to defend one’s claims to larger and more diverse audiences.¹⁰ Discourse is both self-referential and self-justifying.¹¹

Because Rorty has made these claims not only for his own position, but also for pragmatism more generally, many authors interested in American pragmatism have found Rorty’s discussions of the relationship between human discourse and the non-human world to be a useful lens through which to view the work of the early American pragmatists. Taking this as a starting point has served to focus discussion on the metaphysical pictures (if any) offered by Peirce, James, and Dewey, which has led eventually and ineluctably to attempts to fit the early American pragmatists into the current rubric of categories with which much analytic philosophy operates. One way of doing this is to look at how the pragmatists deal with metaphysics and epistemology and then use these perspectives to answer the closely related questions, “Is early American pragmatism metaphysically realist or antirealist?” and “Is early American pragmatism Realist or Nonrealist with regard to truth?”¹² However, these questions, and the terminological baggage packed within them, are not as easily answered as one might hope; nor has any sort of consensus regarding their respective answers been reached. In spite of this difficulty and lack of consensus, these questions persist.¹³

At the Looking-Glass

The introduction of the technical nomenclature “metaphysical realism,” “metaphysical antirealism,” “Realism with regard to truth,” and “Nonrealism with regard to truth” as a sort of lens through which to view early American pragmatism has served to focus the discussion regarding early American pragmatism’s relationship to contemporary philosophy. However, because there are difficulties with these terms, some clarity regarding their meanings needs to be introduced before we can understand how they have been used to read Peirce and James in particular. My intent here is to rein in both my own use of the terms thus far and the numerous philosophical positions denoted by these terms, such that some clarity regarding their application to early American pragmatism can be achieved. That is, we will be looking at the looking-glass used for philosophical reflection on the work of the pragmatists themselves.

Realism in general

Crispin Wright notes in Realism, Meaning, and Truth that use of the term “realism” has its own history. Originally used to formulate a position opposed to idealism, the term has since come to mean something significantly more complicated through the debate with antirealists, philosophers who espouse neither realism nor idealism. Wright notes in his “Introduction” that realism holds two central doctrines. First, there is an objective world “almost entirely not of our making, possessing a host of occasional features which may pass altogether unnoticed by human consciousness and whose innermost nomological secrets may remain forever hidden from us.”¹⁴ Second, in spite of this essential feature of the world, human beings are “by and large and in favorable circumstances, capable of acquiring knowledge of the world and of understanding it.”¹⁵ These two tenets of realism are generally formulated with particular enemies in mind. The first tenet is an obvious response to idealism, which, stated generally, holds that there can be no world independent of our cognitive capacities and modes of investigation. Rather, the world is much as we conceive of it because our cognitive capacities and modes of investigation help make the world what it is. The second tenet is an obvious response to skepticism, which, again stated generally, holds that although—or in some instances because—there is a world independent of human conceptions of it, there is no “adequate warrant for regarding our routine investigative practices as apt to issue in knowledge of or reasonable belief about the world.”¹⁶ Perhaps if idealism and radical skepticism had remained fashionable in philosophical circles, these tenets would suffice to describe the position now referred to as “realism.” However, as Wright capably notes, the enemy is no longer the idealist or the skeptic.¹⁷

The new enemy of realism, at least since Michael Dummett coined the term, is the “anti-realist,” who differs from the idealist in two specific ways. First, according to Wright, the contemporary antirealist attempts to avoid the type of general, overarching formulations regarding either his or her own position or that of the realist. This may be seen as simply a matter of style, but it has substantive consequences. The antirealist forces the realist to defend his or her position piecemeal, taking on not the general tenets noted above, but specific conclusions reached by the realist with regard to supposedly “‘effectively decidable’ statements.”¹⁸ The idealist would see the realist’s conceptions of reality itself as objective and somehow hidden from us (at least in part) and of truth as some sort of privileged relation between a statement and a fact as a total misconception of the natures of reality and truth respectively. The antirealist, on the other hand, simply attacks the efficacy of the realist’s arguments. Second, this disagreement between the realist and the antirealist with regard to the efficacy of the realist’s arguments leads to a disagreement between the antirealist and the idealist. Although the idealist’s arguments would counter the realist’s, the antirealist would see the idealist’s arguments as vulnerable to the very same attacks.

In Dummett’s work, the cardinal rule for both realism and idealism is the principle of bivalence, according to which “every statement—so long as it is not too vague—is determinately either true or false.”¹⁹ By contrast, the antirealist is wed to no such rule and is allowed to take the obvious vagueness of our everyday discourse at face value. Since Dummett’s original attack on the principle of bivalence, some realists have eschewed the principle in the strict sense noted in favor of a version of realism that can take account of the vagueness of everyday language. A realist of this ilk may continue to hold that the principle of bivalence holds for descriptive or declarative statements while admitting that most ordinary discourse, which includes imperative, exclamatory, and interrogatory sentences, need not adhere to this strict principle.²⁰ Furthermore, many realists—most notably John Searle and Hartry Field—have eschewed the notion that realism, as a strict ontological doctrine, requires any particular set of claims with regard to issues of truth and falsity. That is, they would deny Dummett’s central contention that realism is wed to the principle of bivalence because realism as an ontological doctrine has no necessary consequences for issues of truth and falsity.

All this is simply to suggest that realism, although originally engaged in debate with idealism and skepticism over the general tenets noted above, has slowly evolved through its debate with antirealism into something more specific and more restricted in scope than the position marked by these general tenets. It is also important to note at this point that although the realism marked by these tenets could be traced back through the history of philosophy and attributed to any number of philosophical schools (empiricists, scholastics, Aristotleans, and others), realism and antirealism in their current forms belong largely to the Anglo-American analytic tradition.²¹ This more specific and more restricted form of realism, which is opposed to antirealism rather than idealism, is now most often referred to as “metaphysical realism” in order to distinguish it from the more general form of realism. In addition, just as realism has evolved through its debate with antirealism, so too has antirealism evolved to attack more than the principle of bivalence, and it now has its own metaphysical species, “metaphysical antirealism,” which holds to the falsity of the tenets of the metaphysical realism to which it is opposed.

The three tenets of metaphysical realism

Because there are numerous ways to describe the major tenets of metaphysical realism, perhaps our best course is to use the words of one of its proponents.²² In “Realism and Relativism” Hartry Field, a self-proclaimed metaphysical realist, sketches the three tenets that metaphysical realism takes to be true:

T1) The world consists of a fixed totality of mind-independent objects.

T2) There is exactly one true and complete description of the way the world is.

T3) Truth involves some sort of correspondence.²³

In order to get from this synopsis of metaphysical realism to the delineation of the four positions with which this section is concerned, one need not go far. In fact, each position is marked by its claim that one or more of the above tenets is true or false.

Metaphysical realism accepts the first tenet as true outright. This form of realism is “metaphysical” in that it is the affirmation of an ontological claim regarding the furniture of the universe. As John Searle has put it: “[R]ealism is an ontological theory: It says that there exists a reality totally independent of our representations.”²⁴ Like Searle, Michael Devitt holds that this claim is purely metaphysical—it is necessary to keep the realist cart in front of the epistemic horse.²⁵ A metaphysical realist, as I will continue to use the term, simply accepts that Tenet 1 is both a metaphysical (non-epistemic) claim and a true claim at that. A metaphysical antirealist, on the other hand, agrees with the metaphysical realist that Tenet 1 is a metaphysical claim but holds that it is false.

On the face of it, Searle might seem to imply that metaphysical realism is not committed to Tenet 2. In fact, he states baldly that it is a mistake “to suppose that realism is committed to the theory that there is one best vocabulary for describing reality, that reality itself must determine how it should be described.”²⁶ This is a denial that realism, so defined, requires a particular theory of language. Searle’s denial that realism provides a theory of language is a denial that metaphysical realism has necessary epistemic consequences and is not, therefore, necessarily a denial of Tenet 2. Rather, it is an attempt to preserve Tenet 1 as metaphysical. If Tenet 2 were to be considered a metaphysical and not an epistemic tenet, then Searle’s denial of epistemic consequences for Tenet 1 would not need to undercut Tenet 2. In its proper light, his denial that realism provides a theory of language can be seen simply to be the further bolstering of the claim that Tenet 1 is a metaphysical tenet. However, the possibility of equivocation about whether Tenet 2 is metaphysical or epistemic points to further problems regarding it.

The question of whether Tenet 2 is metaphysical or epistemic meets of no easy answers in the writings of either metaphy...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Continuum Studies
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Realisms, Antirealisms, Nonrealisms, and Pragmatisms
• 2. Doubt, Skepticism, and Method
• 3. Thoughts, Things, and Theories
• 4. Inquiry, Metaphysics, and Rationality
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index