Dewey, Pragmatism and Economic Methodology

Elias Khalil, Elias Khalil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135996673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book brings together, for the first time, philosophers of pragmatism and economists interested in methodological questions. The main theoretical thrust of Dewey is to unite inquiry with behavior and this book's contributions assess this insight in the light of developments in modern American philosophy, social and legal theories, and the theor

Part I: Pragmatism and postmodernism

1 Five milestones of pragmatism

Frank X. Ryan

Introduction

A quarter of a century ago, Willard Quine presented “The Pragmatists’ Place in Empiricism” at a symposium at the University of South Carolina. In it he identifies “five milestones” of a pragmatic empiricism (Quine 1981: 67–75). Intriguingly, the great classical pragmatists, Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey are nowhere in sight here – the quarrymen of Quine’s milestones are J.H. Tooke, Jeremy Bentham, Auguste Comte, Gottlob Frege, and Bertrand Russell. Their great achievement is the progressive broadening of the unit of meaning from idea to word, word to sentence, sentence to sentence set, and sentence set to theory. No longer a mental power or self-contained unit of information, meaning is naturalized as the malleable and context-dependent product of our social and scientific theories.

While not diminishing the genuine worth of such advances, it seems to me these are more yardsticks than milestones toward a pragmatically enlightened empiricism. The “linguistic turn” in philosophy began with the recognition of the inseparable bond between context and meaning: empiricists overcame the folly of hooking sentences to context-free objects in the world by delimiting the reference of sentences to other sentences. The classical pragmatists equally disdained “context-free objects,” but they refused to accept a vacuous nominalism where in the end we only talk about talk. Instead, our world itself is continually contextualized and re-contextualized in ongoing dynamic problem-solving activity – its objects the attained objectives of directed inquiry. Thus, from the very outset Peirce loses the linguistic tethers of “sentence sets” by insisting upon an integral connection between meaning and doing, doing and reality.

This is just one of a series of revolutionary advances I propose as five milestones of pragmatism. Classical pragmatism, as conceived here, is not Quine’s moderate empiricism that dodges thorny “metaphysical” questions, but a radically reconstructed empiricism that reaches from an ontology of primary experience to the transactional “cosmos of fact.”

The milestones we will consider are:

1. doubt-belief and the pattern of inquiry;
2. the pragmatic theory of truth;
3. the ontology of primary experience;
4. the fact–value relation; and
5. transaction.

There is, of course, no claim to having recovered the five milestones of pragmatism. If there are five, there are fifty. Consider, as merely representative, Peirce’s categories and theory of signs; James’s psychology, radical empiricism, and critique of consciousness; Dewey’s generic traits of existences, having an experience, the theory of propositions, and “a common faith”; Mead’s social self – the “I” and “me”; Lewis’s pragmatic a priori. Hopefully, however, these focal five are sufficient to justify classical pragmatism’s current renaissance – a wellspring even Quine, despite his aspiration to a “more thorough pragmatism” (Quine 1953: 46), left largely untapped.

Milestone 1: doubt-belief and the pattern of inquiry

Unlike Quine, whose “unregenerate scientific realism” led him to dismiss “traditional” problems of philosophy, Peirce reports that his genuine experience of “laboratory life” drew him to metaphysics. Early on he immersed himself in scholastic realism in an effort to resolve the venerable problem of mind and reality. Duns Scotus’s insistence upon “real generals” helped Peirce see that relations and inferences are as real as the things related. As we shall see, this prevents nominalism’s perilous slide toward the radical separation of thing and thought: for if only physical substances “out there” are real, and ideas, concepts, or relations about them are mere phenomenal manifestations in our minds, then reality as it is “in-itself” is locked away from our cognitive ability to grasp it.

This result is intolerable, but to avoid it Peirce had to turn the entire paradigm around: reality must be brought within experience such that “the phenomenal manifestation of the substance is the substance” (Peirce 1868). ¹ But how is this possible? Scotus insisted there must be real generals, such as “human,” that (to avoid self-sustaining platonic “forms”) exist only as they are “contracted” within individuals. Though suggestive of a genuine solution, Peirce finds “contraction” unsatisfactory – beyond the antiquated and implausible metaphysics of “contracted forms,” the problem of “real for us” versus “real in itself” is simply recycled into the distinction between “contracted” and “uncontracted” states.

But if real generals are not metaphysical forms contracted into particulars, is there another way to think about them so as not to offend the sensibilities of a “laboratory man”? Scotus left Peirce a valuable clue in noting that beyond real generals cognitively grasped are generals that operate habituliter – that is, as noncognitive feelings or predispositions to actual states of awareness. Scotus could only speculate that this habituliter is an inexplicable “intellectual intuition.” Peirce’s scientific bent, however, drew him to the modern sense of “habit,” and with it a way to bring the uncontracted and contracted into an integral system of “doubt-belief.”

The recognized function of habit undermines the old view of associationalist psychology that concepts are formed by piecing together images of discrete particulars. We don’t normally develop the conception of red by recapturing images of red patches from memory. Indeed, Peirce goes so far as to claim “we have no images even in actual [current] perception” (5.303). ² What we typically begin with is not the image of red, but the habit of red – the disposition to act upon, report, or recognize, the actual quality of “red” in response to some problem that requires us to do so. ³ Peirce thus transforms Scotus’s uncontracted form into the habituated disposition for action in the face of the onset of doubt. He also calls this firstness – a “permanent possibility of sensation.”

Belief, for Peirce, is an expression of habit: “the feeling of believing is a more or less sure indication of there being established in our nature some habit which will determine our actions” (5.371). As James later points out, even the most open-minded among us are extremely conservative about our beliefs (James 1981: 31). Even so, belief is invariably challenged by the “irritation of doubt”: an “uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves” to achieve a new state of belief (5.372). This directed struggle, says Peirce, is inquiry: indeed, the resolution of doubt is “the sole end of inquiry” (5.375). We think so that we may overcome doubt.

A belief, then, is a general assertion of what we take to be real. ⁴ But the gap between what we take to be real and what is real is not the contraction of the real into the individual. Instead, beliefs approach reality via experimentation, where successful “adjustments” forge new beliefs. As such, doubt-belief differs from mere contraction in two key ways: First, instead of the containment of one thing in another, or the mere association of similar properties, the movement of inquiry in doubt-belief is inferential: e.g. the predicate expression “is a man” is realized in a fulfilled or verified hypothesis (5.292). ⁵ Second, and coordinate with this, reality is not an antecedent state lurking behind its phenomenal manifestation, but a continually unfolding consequence or achievement of ongoing inquiry.

For Peirce, doubt-belief permeates human experience – it designates “any question, no matter how small or how great, and the resolution of it.” For Peirce, even hunting for a cab fare is an exercise of doubt-belief (5.394).

All grown up, doubt-belief is Dewey’s method of inquiry (Dewey 1976: 360). ⁶ The initial state of secure belief, the matrix of habit, is recast as settled or primary experience, a milestone in itself. The onset of doubt is Dewey’s problematic situation – shock or interruption that calls forth a hypothesis and implementing tools that diagnose the problem then propose a solution. A hypothesis is a sort of “clutch” between imposed danger and instinctive reaction – it’s smarter to lead with one’s mind than one’s chin. The outcome of a successful hypothesis is an attained objective or object. In subsequently returning to and enriching primary experience, a settled object becomes a secure tool for the resolution of future problems.

Dewey reminds us that inquiry is a pattern, not a prescription – nothing is gained quibbling about five, or seven, or nine distinct stages. Sometimes we start in the middle, or with a solution to which there is no clear problem. Many, perhaps most, problems are cut off without recourse to inquiry by calling upon “banked” solutions that need no hypothesis. Contrary to Peirce’s claim about cab fare, when the solution is easy or obvious the full pattern of inquiry is unnecessary.

Milestone 2: the pragmatic theory of truth

Best known of the five milestones, in the lean years this was pragmatism’s survivor – holding out against rival “coherence” and “correspondence” theories in basic texts. Its premise is clear: truth is a relation between beliefs and the world, and thus we require more than the mere coherence or consistency of ideas. But if an idea or statement must correspond to an unknowable thing-in-itself, no purported reference from thought to thing is justified. The pragmatic alternative preserves the notion of correspondence, but recasts it as the experienced relation between an encountered problem and its successful solution. Truth, recast as warranted assertability, is an achievement of inquiry; and since inquiry is open-ended and revisable, there is no pretense of final truth. Instead truth grows, proliferates, flourishes with new discoveries.

James provides the most recognizable account of the pragmatic theory of truth. Where Peirce and Dewey focus upon the incoherence of corresponding to an unknowable thing-in-itself,⁷ James stresses the interpretive role of the human subject, the “trail of the human serpent” that subordinates truth to personal needs, desires, and satisfactions. “A new opinion is ‘true,’ “ he tells us, to the extent it “gratifies the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock” (James 2001: 124).

James skillfully handles the charge that truth is capricious – each new candidate must survive a gauntlet of obstinate existing beliefs. He also deflects the notion that one generation’s truth is as good as another’s. Modern science, for instance, has not merely replaced the Ptolemaic earth-centered “truth” with a heliocentric truth, but declares, retroactively, the Ptolemaic view absolutely false – false for that era as well as our own. ⁸ But he is less successful in establishing an objective basis for truth. That ideas become true by helping “us get into satisfactory relation with other parts of experience” (James 1981: 30) smacks of coherence. And when these relations are elaborated as an orchestration of “concepts and percepts” we again worry about nominalism, and ask ourselves: “what has become of the world in all of this?” ⁹

Here Dewey’s guidance is helpful. Dewey never lets us forget that inquiry underlies both what is experienced and who experiences it. As such, satisfaction is not primarily a personal feeling, but a satisfactory adjustment of hypotheses to consequences (MW 6: 4–5). Dewey goes beyond James in realizing that truth is a process of social adaptation to nature:

knowing is not the condescension of reduplicating a nature that already is, but is the turning of that nature to account in behalf of consequences. And objective truth is the free outworking of nature so interpreted into an intercourse more secure, more varied, and more free.

(MW 6: 68)

Milestone 3: the ontology of primary experience

We sometimes hear that Peirce founded pragmatism as a theory of meaning, James added truth, and Dewey evolved an ontology and a naturalistic metaphysics. Though this is an oversimplification, Dewey’s 1905 essay “The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism” is a distinct ontological watershed; for here is boldly proclaimed – “things are what they are experienced to be” (MW 3: 159). Eight apocalyptic words – so direct, yet so enigmatic! What is Dewey saying? I inadvertently carry a nine two places in my account ledger, and experience an unexpected boon to my balance. Am I suddenly wealthier? Do I find the best deal to Kansas by closing my eyes, clicking my heels, and experiencing myself as being in Kansas?

If the experience of things made them so in the world, we’d live as infallible gods, creating realities at will. Clearly this is not what Dewey means by “things are what they are experienced to be.” But, again, what is he saying? I suggest tackling this on two fronts. First, relieve the word “thing” from any requisite concreteness or particularity: for Dewey, “thing” is more an indefinite “something” or “subject matter” than a discrete “object.” ¹⁰ Second, add this qualification: “What is is what it is experienced as – in primary experience.” Primary experience is the qualitative immediacy of any experience – the feel or sense of what it is. This holds both for cognitive knowing as well as for what Dewey calls noncognitive having. In the case of the two account balances, both experiences are cognitive. I have the qualitative immediacy of a certain balance; later I experience the “true” balance. In this instance, “what is is what it is experienced as” reminds us that the comparison between the initial balance and the revised balance is between two reals of experience, not between an “appearance” and a “reality”:¹¹ I did experience the initial balance just as I experienced it. Ontologically, however, this isn’t very interesting, for it’s just the tautology that my experience of the initial balance was indeed just that experience.

But different, and really more instructive for getting to the heart of “what is,” is primary experience as the qualitative immediacy of the noncognitive “fringe and background” that is far more pervasive than any focal awareness. ¹² For example, throughout my travails with my account book, what was the status of … my desk light? the ink flowing from my pen? the tactile sense of paper-edge on fingertip? Certainly these experiences were there, they were had, but were they experienced as had by me? To be experienced as had by me would have involved some disruption, some intervening problem – the light blown out with a pop, the pen running dry, a nasty paper cut. Then I find myself having to do something – I must devise a plan of action – albeit a very simple plan of replacing the bulb or pen, or treating the wound.

The brilliance in the postulate of immediate empiricism – applied to noncognitive primary experience – is that it undercuts – yea, dare I say “solves?” – the dualism of subject versus object, and with it the problem of how “mind” gets to “reality.” The experience of the unanalyzed totality is fully real – as are the subsequent discriminations of “myself” and “the desk light” made for specific purposes within inquiry (LW 16: 288—289). Of course, cognitively I not only recognize “myself” and “the desk light,” but quite rightly say, “both were there, as separate existences, all along.” This subsequent judgment is more informative about the circumstances of my original experience – it cites relations between cognitively discrete objects. But this judgment does not make the experience of the unanalyzed totality any less real. Nor, unlike the account book example, does it falsify this experience – not because having is an ultimate truth, but because truth and falsity fall within the realm of cognitive judgment, not noncognitive having. ¹³

Still, have we not taken leave of Kansas, if not our senses? Is Dewey really saying that self and object magically spring to existence with the onset of a problem, then meld back into an amorphous glob when the job is done? Emphatically, and thankfully, no. Dewey isn’t talking about the described contents of the physical world. Instead, he means a way or a method: a how, not a what; a relational reality, not a concrete existence. Directed inquiry is how we get to objective knowledge; it is, to risk allegiance with Kant, a condition of objectivity in general, and a self is a discriminated means to this end.

Kenneth Chandler once predicted that primary experience would one day be recognized as the “alpha and omega of all theorizing” (Chandler 1977: 51), and we should note that Dewey’s postulate predates Heidegger’s tools “ready to hand” by two decades. But even among pragmatists Dewey’s so-called “struggle with the ineffable” has produced lingering aftershocks. Today we find a new flirtation with direct realism, albeit a realism of having or “practical engagement” rather than the traditional claim to somehow knowing an object “just as it is” independent of the act of knowing. The question then turns on whether such having is a brute encounter with “independent reality” or the settled product of previously reflective consequences. Hilary Putnam leans toward the former; Dewey insists it’s the latter: what is “immediately present,” he reminds us, “has meaning because of prior mediation which it would not otherwise have had” (MW 13: 52). Naive realism? Indeed – but a “cultured naivete,” not the “transparent perception” of direct realism.

Milestone 4: the fact–value relation

In Dewey’s day, as in our own, the legitimacy of values was much in doubt. Following the model of the physical sciences, the positivists recognized only two forms of meaningful statements: analytic assertions most useful in mathematics and logic, and synthetic statements about empirical facts subject to strict verification. Since values are not analytic claims, they must be reducible ...