Beyond Realism and Antirealism

John Dewey and the Neopragmatists

David L. Hildebrand

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780826514271
• eBook ISBN: 9780826591692
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Perhaps the most significant development in American philosophy in recent times has been the extraordinary renaissance of Pragmatism, marked most notably by the reformulations of the so-called "Neopragmatists" Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. With Pragmatism offering the allure of potentially resolving the impasse between epistemological realists and antirealists, analytic and continental philosophers, as well as thinkers across the disciplines, have been energized and engaged by this movement.In Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists, David L. Hildebrand asks two important questions: first, how faithful are the Neopragmatists' reformulations of Classical Pragmatism (particularly Deweyan Pragmatism)? Second, and more significantly, can their Neopragmatisms work?In assessing Neopragmatism, Hildebrand advances a number of historical and critical points: • Current debates between realists and antirealists (as well as objectivists and relativists) are similar to early twentieth-century debates between realists and idealists that Pragmatism addressed extensively.• Despite their debts to Dewey, the Neopragmatists are reenacting realist and idealist stands in their debate over realism, thus giving life to something shown fruitless by earlier Pragmatists.• What is absent from the Neopragmatist's position is precisely what makes Pragmatism enduring: namely, its metaphysical conception of experience and a practical starting point for philosophical inquiry that such experience dictates.• Pragmatism cannot take the "linguistic turn" insofar as that turn mandates a theoretical starting point.• While Pragmatism's view of truth is perspectival, it is nevertheless not a relativism.• Pace Rorty, Pragmatism need not be hostile to metaphysics; indeed, it demonstrates how pragmatic instrumentalism and metaphysics are complementary.In examining these and other difficulties in Neopragmatism, Hildebrand is able to propose some distinct directions for Pragmatism. Beyond Realism and Antirealism will provoke specialists and non-specialists alike to rethink not only the definition of Pragmatism, but its very purpose.

1

Introduction

The dualism of matter and mind may no longer overtly supply currently dominant philosophical problems with their raison d’être. The assumptions underlying the cosmic dichotomy have, however, not been eliminated; on the contrary, they are the abiding source of issues which command today the attention of the very philosophers who pride themselves upon having replaced the philosophical “thinking” of a bygone period with a mode of treatment as exact as the former discussions were sloppy.

—John Dewey, “Experience and Nature: A Re-Introduction” (LW 1:349)

Realism, Antirealism, and Neopragmatism

Pragmatism has undergone an extraordinary renaissance in the last two decades. Burgeoning interest in John Dewey, William James, and Charles S. Peirce has led many to embrace pragmatism as a distinctively American via media, capable of bridging the contemporary divide between philosophy as cultural criticism and philosophy as fundamental science. Indeed, the avowal by certain prominent philosophers of pragmatic commitments has been so widespread as to earn them the title of “neopragmatists.” On one central issue, however, these philosophers’ interpretations of classical pragmatists have served to place them in opposing camps. This is the issue of whether the classical pragmatists’ views on truth and reality make them realists or antirealists and whether these views could legitimately serve as foundations for contemporary neopragmatism. For example, two prominent neopragmatists, Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, have taken quite opposite stands on this issue. Rorty derives from classical pragmatism a decidedly antirealistic position, which he calls, alternately, “pragmatism” and “ethnocentrism.” Putnam’s derivation, which he has called “internal realism” and “pragmatic realism” (among other names), is markedly realistic, at least in contrast to Rorty. Prima facie, then, their neopragmatisms appear to be in contradiction, and thus the first questions of parentage arise.

Though neither philosopher is primarily a scholar of classical pragmatism, each has been especially effective in popularizing pragmatism to analytic and continental philosophers, as well as to scholars in disciplines outside of philosophy. Specialists in classical pragmatism see this resurgence as double edged. On the one hand, a renewed curiosity regarding the writings of Dewey, James, Peirce, et al. is a welcome development for philosophy. On the other hand, specialists are rightfully wary of hasty interpretations that belie what the classical pragmatists actually said in the service of contemporary philosophical objectives they would not have countenanced. This concern is both pedagogical and political. One worry is that neophytes may rest content with the neopragmatist version of what pragmatism is, without bothering to read the classical pragmatists and the scholars who have dedicated their careers to interpreting them.¹ Similarly, in many professional philosophical contexts, both analytic and continental, the desire to engage with a pragmatist is too often satisfied by consulting the work of a neopragmatist. In either case, one is nagged by the same questions: What gets lost when the work of classical pragmatists and their scholars is bypassed in favor of the neopragmatists? Do Rorty and Putnam deserve their authority as pragmatists? One need not be an essentialist about the definition of pragmatism to believe these questions have merit and to think it worthwhile for scholars of classical pragmatism to evaluate the accuracy of the neopragmatists’ interpretations and to assess their methods and goals qua pragmatists. If pragmatism is being reconstructed—and I believe that it is—that reconstruction should be done deliberately, fully mindful of pragmatism’s historical roots. Along the way, it should be tested by a crucible of communal inquiry. I see this book as contributing to those tests.²

It was the suspicion that Rorty and Putnam were fundamentally misinterpreting classical pragmatism (and Dewey in particular) that provided me with the impetus for this book. I reasoned as follows. The theories of knowledge and reality devised by classical pragmatists challenged the presuppositions common to realists and idealists and were able to move beyond that debate. Because the contemporary realism/antirealism debate seemed similar in important respects to the one between realism and idealism, classical pragmatism—and any careful derivation of it—should be able move beyond it as well. But the neopragmatists were not doing this; they were perpetuating the realism/antirealism debate. I concluded that there must be a problem with the way the neopragmatists were interpreting Dewey’s pragmatism.

Getting clear about the source and nature of that problem required extensive research into several areas. First, how was Dewey interpreted by his critics, and how did he address the realist/idealist debate that engrossed them? Second, how do the neopragmatists interpret Dewey? Did they see him as supporting realism, antirealism, or something else altogether? Finally, to what degree is there a connection between their interpretations of Dewey’s pragmatism and the convictions that fuel their ongoing conflict over realism and antirealism?

In the remainder of this introduction, I will give a cursory account of the main issue dividing Rorty and Putnam, the general thrust of a Deweyan response, and a brief outline of the forthcoming chapters.

The Rorty-Putnam Debate

The central issue dividing Rorty and Putnam concerns the proper basis for epistemological warrant. Both agree that the correspondence picture of truth is mistaken, as is the ideal of foundational certainty. They also agree that our norms and standards for warrant are historical products that always reflect our interests and values; these norms are capable of reform. However, they are at odds about how we should construe the authority of our epistemological norms. Putnam has argued that warrant must be connected to a “fact of the matter,” some inherent “substantive property” that renders assertions true (or warranted) independently of whether the majority of one’s cultural peers would say so. According to Putnam, Rorty’s denial of this view constitutes an openly relativistic and subjectivistic position. He writes,

Must we then fall back into the [Rortyan] view that “there is only the text”? That there is only “immanent truth” (truth according to the “text”)? Or, as the same idea is put by many analytic philosophers, that “is true” is only an expression we use to “raise the level of language”? . . . [T]he problem with such a view is obvious. . . . [I]f all there is to say about the “text” is that it consists in the production of noises (and subvocalizations) according to a certain causal pattern; . . . if there is no substantive property of either warrant or truth connected with assertion—then there is no way in which the noises that we utter or the inscriptions we write down . . . are more than expressions of our subjectivity. (RHF 113)

While Putnam’s description of Rorty is right as far as it goes, it is also true that Rorty does not view his conclusions as a cause for alarm. He admits his view is relativistic but maintains that such a relativism is not pernicious. It is all we have. Besides, Rorty says, the Putnamian alternative—that our statements are warranted because there is some “substantive property” or “fact of the matter” that makes them so—should be seen as far more alarming because it is incoherent. It is incoherent because one cannot even imagine what would count as confirmation or disconfirmation of the existence of a “truth-property.” Moreover, Rorty complains, Putnam’s suggestion betrays an antiquated view of the role that philosophy should play in culture. Rather than letting go of old paradoxes, Putnam and his ilk think there is something to be gained from sticking with them. (“Of course philosophical problems are unsolvable,” Putnam writes, “but . . . there are better and worse ways of thinking about them” [RHF 19].) Despite their many protests against traditional philosophical methods and objectives, contemporary realists such as Putnam, Rorty says, actually want to preserve the philosopher’s priestly role as arbiter between appearance and reality. This urge is unacceptable to Rorty, who argues that philosophers’ long-standing ineptitude in this role is sufficient reason for them to “get over” most of the tradition’s intractable problems and focus instead upon the conduct, mediation, and clarification of “conversations.” There, at least, philosophy might make a difference and help us “cope” more effectively. In juxtaposition to Putnam and other analytic philosophers, Rorty describes what a “pragmatist” would do instead:

The intuitive realist thinks that there is such a thing as Philosophical truth because he thinks that, deep down beneath all the texts, there is something which is not just one more text but that to which various texts are trying to be “adequate.” The pragmatist does not think that there is anything like that. He does not even think that there is anything isolable as “the purposes which we construct vocabularies and cultures to fulfill” against which to test vocabularies and cultures. But he does think that in the process of playing vocabularies and cultures off against each other, we produce new and better ways of talking and acting—not better by reference to a previously known standard, but in the sense that they come to seem clearly better than their predecessors. (CP xxxvii)

It is my view that neither of these neopragmatist approaches are legitimate derivations from the classical pragmatists. As I see it, the effect of the proposals regarding truth and reality taken by the pragmatists should serve to undercut the entire realism/antirealism controversy. Dewey avoided such metaphilosophical dualisms by taking as fundamental a starting point that explicitly does not equate knowledge and experience; experience is basal, whereas knowledge concresces within experience, the result of an organized process needed for living. About the emphasis of his instrumentalism, Dewey wrote,

It means that knowing is literally something which we do; that analysis is ultimately physical and active; that meanings in their logical quality are standpoints, attitudes, and methods of behaving toward fact, and that active experimentation is essential to verification. (MW 10:367)

The metaphysics that follows from this pragmatist starting point, I will argue, cannot be placed within the domain of the realism/antirealism controversy, a domain that begins from subjective premises. For Dewey, as for most of the classical pragmatists, neither knowledge nor experience is a solitary, subjectivistic affair; they are both social at root. This fact makes philosophy’s purpose apparent: “There is a special service which the study of philosophy may render. Empirically pursued it will not be a study of philosophy but a study, by means of philosophy, of life-experience” (LW 1:40). This book proposes to show that Rorty and Putnam, intentionally or not, misuse central epistemological and metaphysical views of classical pragmatism for their own ends, all the while sustaining dualisms that the classical pragmatists fought to dissolve. It also argues that neopragmatist attempts to eliminate metaphysics (as an irrelevant enterprise) are based on similar misunderstandings of the nature and role of pragmatic metaphysics. The larger conclusion to be drawn from this enterprise is that Dewey’s position is more original and, indeed, more defensible than the current neopragmatist positions derived from it.

Plan of This Book

Chapters 2 and 3 (“Dewey and Realism” and “Dewey and Idealism”) look back to the first half of the twentieth century to understand the various ways that Dewey’s critics (most of them realists) took pragmatism to be either a form of realism or, more often, of idealism. Both chapters offer Deweyan responses to these characterizations and, where appropriate, give a fleshed out account of Dewey’s views. More specifically, Chapter 2 begins with an account of the philosophical environment of these debates and then goes on to examine the ways in which Dewey’s pragmatism was interpreted by critics to be (1) a variant of realism or (2) distinct but assimilable to realism. Chapter 3 examines further exchanges between Dewey and his critics and shows that Dewey’s pragmatism was taken to be antirealistic in at least three different but related senses: epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical. Taken together, Chapters 2 and 3 make the case that although early realists initially welcomed pragmatism as an ally in their struggle against idealism, they were never able to see how pragmatism undercut their debate altogether. This conclusion provides a historical basis for this book’s later claims that Rorty and Putnam misinterpret Dewey in ways similar to the early realists and that Dewey’s pragmatism offers a substantive and independent alternative not only to those past debates (realism/idealism) but to current ones (realism/antirealism) as well.

Chapter 4 (“Rorty, Putnam, and Classical Pragmatism”) critically examines the neopragmatists’ interpretive work on Dewey as well as the neopragmatisms they derive from it. (Note: readers whose primary interest is neopragmatism might start by reading from Chapter 4 to the end of the book and only then return to Chapters 2 and 3.) Chapter 5 (“Neopragmatism’s Realism/Antirealism Debate”) describes the locus and substance of the contemporary debate. After offering general and contextual definitions of terms such as “realism” and “antirealism,” brief accounts of Putnam’s “internal realism” and Rorty’s “ethnocentrism” (or, as I come to call it, “antirealism”) are given. Next, the central issues of their realism/antirealism debate are described. The chapter concludes by contrasting their different visions of the best role for a “post-analytic” philosophy.

Chapter 6 (“Beyond Realism and Antirealism”) synthesizes and condenses the evidence of Chapters 2 through 5 to pinpoint why Deweyan pragmatism can dissolve the neopragmatists’ debate over realism and antirealism. Further parallels between early realists and neopragmatists are drawn, and an approach common to both periods is identified, which I shall call the “theoretical starting point” (TSP). Their assumption of this theoretical approach, it is argued, helps explain some basic errors that the neopragmatists make in their interpretations of Dewey; at the same time, it sheds light upon the source and nature of their own debate. An alternative, what I shall call the “practical starting point” (PSP), is offered as an essentially Deweyan response to the shortcomings of neopragmatism.

A full discussion of the PSP and its difference from the TSP does not appear until Chapter 6. But since occasional references to these starting points are made in the earlier chapters, a preliminary characterization is useful here. P. F. Strawson’s distinction between what he calls the “participant” (or “involved”) standpoint and the “objective” (or “detached”) standpoint is roughly analogous to what I have called the practical and theoretical starting points. Strawson writes,

Viewed from one standpoint, the standpoint that we naturally occupy as social beings, human behavior appears as the proper object of all those personal and moral reactions, judgments and attitudes to which, as social beings, we are naturally prone. . . . But if anyone consistently succeeded in viewing such behavior in what I have called the “purely objective,” or what might better be called the “purely naturalistic,” light, then to him such reactions, judgments, and attitudes would be alien; . . . rather, he would observe the prevalence of such reactions and attitudes in those around him . . . and generally treat this whole range . . . as yet another range of natural phenomena to be . . . understood, but not in the way of understanding which involves sharing or sympathizing with.³

There are problems in Strawson’s language here, but his distinction, crude as it is, may suffice at this point to provide a sense of what is at issue in the contrast.⁴ I would briefly note that despite the initial parallel with Strawson’s two standpoints, our positions quickly diverge about the nature of their internal tension and how philosophy should handle it. Strawson correctly observes that both standpoints are “associated with a certain range of attitudes and reactions” and are “not only different, [but] profoundly opposed.” But he goes on to say that they “tend in the limit to mutual exclusion” and that it is therefore natural to ask, “Which is the correct standpoint? Which is the standpoint from which we see things as they really are?”⁵ I do not agree that this reductionist question is either natural or necessary for philosophy to pursue.

As the pages that follow illustrate, many of pragmatism’s critics have shared...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Dewey and Realism
• 3. Dewey and Idealism
• 4. Rorty, Putnam, and Classical Pragmatism
• 5. Neopragmatism’s Realism/Antirealism Debate
• 6. Beyond Realism and Antirealism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index