PRAGMATISM - SEP.docx

8/12/2019 PRAGMATISM - SEP.docx

1/26

Pragmatism was a philosophical tradition that originated in the United States

around 1870. The most important of the classical pragmatists were Charles

Sanders Peirce (18391914), William James (18421910) and John Dewey

(18591952). The influence of pragmatism declined during the first two thirds of

the twentieth century, but it has undergone a revival since the 1970s withphilosophers being increasingly willing to use the writings and ideas of the

classical pragmatists, and also a number of thinkers, such as Richard Rorty,

Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom developing philosophical views that

represent later stages of the pragmatist tradition. The core of pragmatism was the

pragmatist maxim, a rule for clarifying the contents of hypotheses by tracing

their practical consequences. In the work of Peirce and James, the most

influential application of the pragmatist maxim was to the concept of truth. But

the pragmatists have also tended to share a distinctive epistemological outlook, a

fallibilist anti-Cartesian approach to the norms that govern inquiry.

For much of the twentieth century, pragmatism was largely in eclipse. Few

philosophers were familiar with the works of classical pragmatists such as

Charles Sanders Piece and William James, and pragmatist ideas were not at the

centre of debate. John Dewey, who had been a dominant philosophical figure in

the 1920s was no longer a central figure. Analytical philosophers and their

students had a central role in philosophy. It was not until the 1970s that interest

in the writings of the Pragmatists became widespread and pragmatist ideas were

recognized as able to make a major contribution to philosophy.

Most of this entry is devoted to the ideas of the classical pragmatists, Peirce,

James, and Dewey. But towards the end of the entry we shall explore what are

sometimes called the new pragmatists. These are philosophers who revitalized

pragmatism, developing ideas that evidently belonged to the pragmatist tradition.

As well as the figures mentioned above, these include Philip Kitcher, Huw Price,

and others (Misak 2007, Malachowski 2010. There has also been a growing

interest in the connections between pragmatism and idealism: (Margolis 2010,

Stern 2009, chapters 710).

1. Pragmatism and pragmatism 2. The pragmatist maxim 3. Pragmatist theories of truth

o 3.1 Peirce on truth and realityo 3.2 James on truth

4. The pragmatist tradition
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraMaxhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraMaxhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraTheTruhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraTheTruhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PeiTruReahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PeiTruReahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#JamTruhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#JamTruhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraTrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraTrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraTrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#JamTruhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PeiTruReahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraTheTruhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraMaxhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraPra


2/26

o 4.1 Skepticism and fallibilismo 4.2 Inquiryo 4.3 The pragmatist conception of experienceo 4.4 Representations

5. Other pragmatists

6. Conclusion Bibliography

o Primary texts of the classical pragmatistso Collections of papers by classic and contemporary pragmatists.o Other references and supplementary reading

Academic Tools Other Internet Resources Related Entries

1. Pragmatism and pragmatism

When William James published a series of lectures on Pragmatism: A New

Name for an Old way of Thinking in 1907, he began by identifying The Present

Dilemma in Philosophy (1907: 9ff), a fundamental and apparently irresoluble

clash between two ways of thinking about things. He promised that pragmatism

would show us the way to overcome this dilemma and, having thus shown us its

importance, he proceeded, in the second lecture, to explain What PragmatismMeans.

James's dilemma is a familiar one: it is a form of the question of how we can

reconcile the claims of science, on the one hand, with those of religion and

morality on the other. James introduces it by observing that the history of

philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments,

between the tough minded and the tender minded. The tough minded have an

empiricist commitment to experience and going by the facts, while the tender-

minded have more of a taste for a priori principles which appeal to the mind. The

tender minded tend to be idealistic, optimistic and religious, while the tough

minded are normally materialist, pessimistic and irreligious. The tender-minded

are free-willist and dogmatic; the tough minded are fatalistic and sceptical.

By the early twentieth century, never were so many men of a decidedly

empiricist proclivity: our children are almost born scientific (1907: 14f).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#SkeFalhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#SkeFalhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Inqhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Inqhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraConExphttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraConExphttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Rephttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Rephttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#OthPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#OthPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Conhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Conhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Bibhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Bibhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PriTexClaPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PriTexClaPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#ColPapClaConPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#ColPapClaConPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#OthRefSupReahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#OthRefSupReahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Acahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Acahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Othhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Othhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Relhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Relhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Relhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Othhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Acahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#OthRefSupReahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#ColPapClaConPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PriTexClaPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Bibhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Conhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#OthPrahttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Rephttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#PraConExphttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#Inqhttp://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/#SkeFal


3/26

But this has not weakened religious belief. People need a philosophy that is both

empiricist in its adherence to facts yet finds room for religious belief. But all that

is on offer is an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough and a religious

philosophy that is not empirical enough for your purpose (1907: 15f). The

challenge is to show how to reconcile the scientific loyalty to facts with the oldconfidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the

religious or of the romantic type. We must reconcile empiricist epistemic

responsibility with moral and religious optimism. Pragmatism is presented as the

mediating philosophy that enables us to overcome the distinction between the

tender-minded and the tough-minded: we need to show how adherence to tough-

minded epistemic standards does not prevent our adopting the kind of worldview

to which the tender-minded aspire. Once we use what he introduced as the

pragmatic method to clarify our understanding of truth, of free will, or of

religious belief the disputeswhich we despaired of settling intellectuallybegin to dissolve. For James, then, Pragmatism is important because it offers a

way of overcoming the dilemma, a way of seeing that, for example, science,

morality and religion are not in competition.

William James thus presented pragmatism as a method for settling metaphysical

disputes that might otherwise be interminable. (1907: 28) Unless some practical

difference would follow from one or the other side's being correct, the dispute is

idle.

[T]he tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, isthat there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible

difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object,

then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the

object may involvewhat sensations we are to expect from it, and what

reactions we must prepare. (1907: 29)

The lectures explained this with a memorable illustration of pragmatism in

action. This shows how the maxim enables us to defuse an apparently insoluble

(albeit trivial) dispute. On a visit to the mountains, his friends engage in aferocious metaphysical dispute about a squirrel that was hanging on to one side

of a tree trunk while a human observer was standing on the other side:

This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the

tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite

direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a


4/26

glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this:Does

the man go round the squirrel or not?(1907: 27f)

James proposed to solve the problem by pointing out that which answer is correct

depends on what you practically mean by going round. If you mean passing

from north of him to east, then south, then west, then the answer to the question

is yes. If, on the other hand, you mean first in front of him, then to his right,

then behind him, and then to his left, before returning to being in front of him

again, then the answer is no. Pragmatic clarification disambiguates the

question, and once that is done, all dispute comes to an end. The pragmatic

method promises to eliminate all apparently irresoluble metaphysical disputes.

So James offers his pragmatism as a technique for clarifying concepts and

hypotheses. He proposed that if we do this, metaphysical disputes that appear to

be irresoluble will be dissolved. When philosophers suppose that free will and

determinism are in conflict, James responds that once we compare the practical

consequences of determinism being true with the practical consequences of our

possessing freedom of the will, we find that there is no conflict.

As James admitted, he explained the pragmatic method through examples rather

than by giving a detailed analysis of what it involves. He did very little to explain

exactly what practical consequences are. He made no claim to originality:

Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist

attitude, although he acknowledged that it did so in a more radical and in a lessobjectionable form than it has ever yet assumed (1907: 31). It shared with other

forms of empiricism an anti-intellectualist tendency (ibid), and it recognized

that theories (and presumably concepts) should be viewed as instruments, not

answers to enigmas. We identify the practical consequences of a theory,

concept or hypothesis by describing its role as an instrument in thought, in

inquiry and in practical deliberation.

James also admitted that he was not the first to defend the principle of

pragmatism. (1907: 29). The principle of pragmatism was the principle ofPeirce his friend and colleague of many years. Published in 1878 in a paper

called How to Make our Ideas Clear (EP2: 124141), it lay entirely unnoticed

by anyone for twenty years until James defended it before the Philosophical

Union in the University of California in 1898. If we want a detailed formulation

of pragmatism, we must go back to Peirce's original formulation, although we

must also be mindful that the differences between the pragmatisms of Peirce and


5/26

James may be greater than James acknowledged. And although the principle of

Peirce was published in 1878, it didn't introduce the word pragmatism; it was

only after James's 1898 address that pragmatism was used publicly in

philosophy; and it was only after James's defence of pragmatism that it became

famous.

Pragmatism had been born in the discussions at a metaphysical club in Harvard

around 1870 (see Menand 1998). Peirce and James participated in these

discussions along with some other philosophers and philosophically inclined

lawyers. As we have already noted, Peirce developed these ideas in his

publications from the 1870s. And James's lectures in 1898 and later represented

the next stages in the development of pragmatism. Both James and Peirce used

pragmatism as the name of a method, principle, or maxim for clarifying

concepts and hypotheses and for identifying empty disputes. As we shall see

there were differences in how they understood the method and in their views of

how it was to be applied.

Later thinkers, for example John Dewey and C.I.Lewis, developed pragmatism

further. Although they continued to refer back to Peirce's 1878 paper as the

source of pragmatism, and they continued to regard concepts and hypotheses as

functioning as instruments, they did not always think of pragmatism as

denoting the principle of Peirce. Dewey once described pragmatism as the

systematic exploration of what he called the logic and ethics of scientific

inquiry. (LW: 15.24) Both Peirce and James combined their pragmatism with adistinctive epistemological outlook, one which rejected the Cartesian focus upon

the importance of defeating skepticism while endorsing the fallibilist view that

any of our beliefs and methods could, in principle, turn out to be flawed. This

was tied to the study of the normative standards we should adopt when carrying

out inquiries, when trying to find things out. Inquiry is an activity, and this sort of

approach, in Dewey's hands, led to a rejection of there being a sharp dichotomy

between theoretical judgments and practical judgments. Thus while Peirce and

James used pragmatism in anarrowsense, as referring to Peirce's principle,

others may have used it in a widesense as standing for a particular approach tounderstanding inquiry and the normative standards that govern it. Sections 2 and

3 will be concerned, primarily, with pragmatism in the narrow sense. Then, in

section 4, we shall explore some of the views that are associated with pragmatism

in the wider sense.

2. The pragmatist maxim


6/26

As we have seen, the pragmatist maxim is a distinctive rule or method for

becoming reflectively clear about the contents of concepts and hypotheses: we

clarify a hypothesis by identifying its practical consequences. This raises some

questions. First: what, exactly is the content of this maxim? What sort of thing

does it recognize as a practical consequence of some theory or claim? Second,what use does such a maxim have? Why do we need it? And third, what reason is

there for thinking that the pragmatist maxim is correct? In this section, I shall

examine Peirce's answers to some of these questions but, as we proceed, we shall

also compare Peirce's answers to these questions with those offered by James.

(See Hookway: 2012 passim)

We can begin with Peirce's canonical statement of his maxim in How to Make

our Ideas Clear.

Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we

conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those

effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (EP1: 132)

William James cited this passage when introducing pragmatism in his 1906

lectures, and Peirce repeated it in his writings from after 1900.

For all his loyalty to it, Peirce acknowledged that this formulation was vague: it

does not explain how we should understand practical consequences. We shall

seek clarity by looking at one of Peirce's illustrative applications of his maxim,

by noting some of his later reformulations, and by identifying the uses to which it

was put in his writings.

Peirce's first illustrative example (the simplest one possible (EP1: 132) urges

that what we mean by calling something hardis that it will not be scratched by

many other substances. I can use the concepthardin contexts when I am

wondering what to do. Unless there are cases where something's being hard

makes a difference to what we experience and what it is rational for us to do, the

concept is empty. The principle has a verificationist character: our idea of

anything isour idea of its sensible effects (EP1: 132) but the use of the phrase

practical consequences suggests that these are to be understood as having

implications for what we will or should do. This is clear from his later

formulations, for example:


7/26

The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general

modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible different

circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol.

(EP2: 346).

We become clearer about the concept hard, for example, by identifying how

there can be conceivable circumstances in which we have desires that would call

for different patterns of action if some object were hard from those it would call

for if the object were not hard. If I want to break a window by throwing

something through it, then I need an object which is hard, not one which is soft.

It is important that, as Peirce hints here, the consequences we are concerned with

aregeneralones: we are to look for the laws that govern the behaviour of hard

things and for laws that show how such modes of behaviour on the part of things

can make a difference to what it is rational for us to do.

James never worked out his understanding of practical consequences as fully as

Peirce did, and he does not share Peirce's restriction of these consequences to

those that affect intellectual purport or to general patterns of behaviour.

Sometimes he writes as if the practical consequences of a proposition can simply

be effects upon the believer: if religious belief makes me feel better, then that can

contribute to the pragmatic clarification of God exists. It is connected to these

differences that James looks upon Peirce's principle as a method formetaphysics:

he hopes that the attempt to clarify metaphysical hypotheses will reveal that some

propositions are empty or, more important, that, as in the squirrel example, someapparent disagreements are unreal.

Peirce sees uses for his maxim which extend beyond those that James had in

mind. He insisted that it was a logicalprinciple and it was defended as an

important component of the method of science, his favoured method for carrying

out inquiries. This is reflected in the applications of the maxim that we find in his

writings. First, he used it to clarify hard concepts that had a role in scientific

reasoning: concepts likeprobability, truth, and reality. We shall discuss his view

of truth below. It also had a role in scientific testing. The pragmatist clarificationof a scientific hypothesis, for example, provides us with just the information we

need for testing it empirically. Pragmatism, described by Peirce as a laboratory

philosophy, shows us how we test theories by carrying out experiments

(performing rational actions) in the expectation that if the hypothesis is not true,

then the experiment will fail to have some predetermined sensible effect. In later

work, Peirce insisted that the maxim revealed allthe information that was need


8/26

for theory testing and evaluation (EP2: 226ff). The pragmatist clarification

revealed all the information we would need for testing hypotheses and theories

empirically.

Peirce's description of his maxim as a logical principle is reflected in passages

where he presents it as a development of a distinction that had been a staple of

traditional logic texts, the distinction, familiar to readers of Descartes, between

ideas that are clearand ideas that distinct(EP1: 126f). As Peirce described

contemporary versions of this distinction, the highest grade of clarity,

distinctness is obtained when we can analyze a concept (for example) into its

elements by providing a verbal definition. Peirce complained that nothing new is

ever learned by analyzing definitions, and we can learn from a definition only if

we already have a really clear understanding of the defining terms. He announced

that a higher grade of perspicuity was possible, one that supplemented the

verbal definition with a detailed description of how the concept is employed in

practice. This was provided by applying the pragmatist maxim.

As well as treating the pragmatist maxim as part of a constructive account of the

norms that govern inquiry, Peirce, like James, gave it a negative role. The maxim

is used as a tool for criticism, demonstrating the emptiness of a priori

ontological metaphysics. In section 3.1 we shall see how the pragmatic

clarification of realitycould be used to undermine the flawed nominalistic

conception of reality that led to the copy theory of truth, to Cartesian strategies

in epistemology and the Kantian assumption that we can possess the concept of athing in itself. Such applications reflect Peirce's concern with logic: he uses the

maxim to criticize concepts whose use can be an impediment to effective inquiry.

A more vivid non-logical example of using the concept to undermine spurious

metaphysical ideas was in showing that the Catholic understanding of

transubstantiation was empty and incoherent (EP1: 131f). All we can mean

by wineis something that has certain distinctive effects upon the senses, and to

talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in

reality blood, is senseless jargon.

Why should the pragmatist maxim be accepted? Here another difference between

James and Peirce emerges. James made no concerted attempt to show or prove

that the principle of pragmatism was correct. In his lectures, he put it into

practice, solving problems about squirrels, telling us the meaning of truth,

explaining how we can understand propositions about human freedom or about

religious matters. But in the end, inspired by these applications, we are


9/26

encouraged to adopt the maxim and see how well things work out when we do

so.

Since Peirce presented the maxim as part of the method of science, as a logical

or, perhaps better, methodological principle, he thought that it was important to

argue for it. Indeed, after 1900, he devoted much of his energy to showing that

the maxim could receive a mathematical proof. He used several strategies for

this. In 1878, he relied upon the idea that beliefs are habits of action: when we

form a belief, we acquire a disposition to act in some distinctive way. Applying

the pragmatist maxim to the clarification of a proposition, he argued, involved

describing the habits of action we would acquire if we believed it (EP1: 127f). In

the lectures on pragmatism which he delivered at Harvard in 1903, he adopted a

different strategy. He offered a detailed account of the cognitive activities we

carried out when we used the method of science: these consisted in the three

kinds of inference, inductive, deductive and abductive. His strategy then was to

argue that the pragmatist clarifications brought to the surface all the information

that was required for responsible abductive reasoning, and that our use of

inductive and deductive arguments made no use of conceptual resources that

could show that pragmatism was mistaken. (EP2: 225241; Hookway 2005)

None of these arguments fully satisfied him, and the task of fine tuning these

arguments and seeking for alternatives was his major philosophical concern of

the last ten years of his life. Although he remained optimistic of success in this,

he was never satisfied with his results.

3. Pragmatist theories of truth

These differences in motivation become clearest when we consider how both

Peirce and James applied their pragmatist maxims to the clarification of the

concept of truth. Peirce's account of truth is presented as a means to

understanding a concept that was important for the method of

science: reality(3.1); while James was ready to use his account to defend the

pluralist view that there can be different kinds of truths (3.2).

3.1 Peirce on truth and reality

The final section of How to Make our Ideas Clear promises to approach the

subject of logic by considering a fundamental logical conception,reality. It

possesses a form of unreflective clarity: every child uses it with perfect

confidence, never dreaming that he does not understand it. An abstract definition


10/26

is also readily forthcoming: we may define the real as that whose characters are

independent of what anybody may think them to be. But, he announces, we shall

need to apply the pragmatic maxim if our idea of reality is to be perfectly clear.

It is at this stage that the concept of truthenters the discussion: Peirce's strategy

for clarifying the concept of reality is, first, to give an account of truth, and, then,to observe that the object represented in [a true proposition] is the real. So we

have to turn to his remarks about truth to see how the kind of mind-independence

captured in the abstract definition of reality is to be understood from a pragmatist

perspective.

Peirce's motivations are evident when he says that the ideas of truth and

falsehood, in their full development, appertain exclusively to the scientific (in a

later revision he altered this to experiential) method of settling opinion. This

reflects a law which is evident from scientific experience: when different people

use different methods to identify, for example, the velocity of light, we find that

all tend to arrive at the same result:

So with all scientific research. Different minds may set out with the most

antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force

outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion. This activity of thought by

which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a foreordained goal, is like the

operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of

other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape

the predestinate opinion. (EP1: 138)

In the 1878 paper, his pragmatic clarification is quite tersely expressed:

The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is

what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.

That is the way I would explain reality. (EP1: 139)

Peirce had presented this way of thinking about realityseven years earlier when

he described it as the realist conception of reality (EP1:889). In doing this, he

contrasts it with another nominalist conception of reality, which he thinks is

flawed, but which many earlier philosophers had accepted. In a review of a new

edition of the writings of Berkeleya philosopher who, according to Peirce, was

in the grip of this misleading picturePeirce asks where the real is to be found,

observing that there must be such a real because we find that our opinions (the

only things of which we are immediately aware) are constrained. While


11/26

acknowledging that there is nothing immediately present to us but thoughts, he

continues:

These thoughts, however, have been caused by sensations, and those sensations

are constrained by something out of the mind. This thing out of the mind, which

directly influences sensation, and through sensation thought, because it isout of

the mind, is independent of how we think it, and is, in short, the real. (EP1: 88)

We can then think of the real only as the cause of the (singular) sensations which,

in turn, provide our sole evidence for beliefs about the external world, and this

naturally leads to both nominalism about universals and skepticism about

empirical knowledge. Peirce's pragmatist clarification of truth offers an

alternative conceptualization of being constrained by reality. It is explained in

terms of this fated agreement of convergence through the process of inquiry

rather than in terms of an independent cause of our sensations. Although the

nominalist theory is not clearly worked out here, it is clearly related to the

intellectualist or copy theory of truth attacked by other pragmatists. It

articulates a metaphysical picture that all pragmatists tried to combat. See (Misak

2007, 69f) where Cheryl Misak emphasises that Peirce does not offer a

traditional analysis of truth. Rather, he provides an account of some of the

relations between the concepts of truth, belief, and inquiry, She describes this as

a naturalistic understanding of truth, and calls it an anthropological account of

how the concept is used.

3.2 James on truth

Claims about truth had a much more central role in James's work and he was

even prepared to claim that pragmatism wasa theory of truth. And his writings

on this topic rapidly became notorious. They are characteristically lively, offering

contrasting formulations, engaging slogans, and intriguing claims which often

seem to fly in the face of common sense. We can best summarize his view

through his own words:

The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief,

and good, too, for definite assignable reasons. (1907: 42)

The true, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking,

just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.Expedient in


12/26

almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole, of course.

(1907: 106)

Other formulations fill this out by giving a central role to experience:

Ideas become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory

relations with other parts of our experience. (1907: 34)

Any idea upon which we can ride ; any idea that will carry us prosperously

from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things

satisfactorily, working securely, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so

far forth, true instrumentally. (1907: 34)

This might be taken to suggest that beliefs are made true by the fact that they

enable us to make accurate predictions of the future run of experience, but otherpassages suggest that the goodness of belief can take other forms. James

assures us that it can contribute to the truth of a theological proposition that it has

a value for concrete life (1907: 40); and this can occurbecause the idea of God

possesses a majesty which can yield religious comfort to a most respectable

class of minds (1907: 40). This suggests that a belief can be made true by the

fact that holding it contributes to our happiness and fulfilment.

The kind of passages just noted may lend support to Bertrand Russell's famous

objection that James is committed to the truth of Santa Claus exists (Russell1949: 772). This is unfair; at best, James is committed to the claim that the

happiness that belief in Santa Claus provides is truth-relevant. James could say

that the belief was good for so much but it would only be wholly true if it did

not clash with other vital benefits. It is easy to see that, unless it is somehow

insulated from the broader effects of acting upon it, belief in Santa Claus could

lead to a host of experiential surprises and disappointments.

4. The pragmatist tradition

So far, we have concentrated on the pragmatist maxim, the rule for clarifying

ideas that, for both Peirce and James, was the core of pragmatism. When we

think of pragmatism as a philosophical traditionrather than as a maxim or

principle, we can identify a set of philosophical views and attitudes which are

characteristic of pragmatism, and which can lead us to identify as pragmatists

many philosophers who are somewhat sceptical about the maxim and its


13/26

applications. Some of these views maybe closely related to the maxim and its

defence, but we shall now explore them rather as distinctive characteristics of the

pragmatist tradition. The first of the themes that we shall consider is

epistemological, and it picks up on Hilary Putnam's claim that one mark of

pragmatism is the combination of anti-skepticism and fallibilism.

Like some other philosophers, the pragmatists saw themselves as providing a

return to common sense and the facts of experience and, thus, as rejecting a

flawed philosophical heritage which had distorted the work of earlier thinkers.

The errors to be overcome include Cartesianism, Nominalism, and the copy

theory of truth: these errors are all related.

4.1 Skepticism and fallibilism

The roots of the anti-sceptical strain can be found in an early paper of Peirce's,Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (EP1: 2830). He identifies

Cartesianism as aphilosophical pathology that lost sight of the insights that

were both fundamental to scholastic thought and also more suited than

Cartesianism to the philosophical needs of his own time. The paper begins by

identifying four characteristics of the sort of modern philosophy that is

exemplified by Descartes' writings. In each case, Descartes self-consciously

made a break with the scholastic tradition, and, in each case, the outlook that he

rejected turns out to be the outlook of the successful sciences and to provide the

perspective required for contemporary philosophy. The first, and most important,of these characteristics was the method of doubt: [Cartesianism] teaches that

philosophy must begin with universal doubt. We are to try to doubt propositions

and we should retain them only if they are absolutely certain and we are unable

to doubt them. The test of certainty, as Peirce next points out, lies in the

individual consciousness: trial through doubt is something that everyone must do

for him or her self. And the examination of our beliefs is guided by reflection on

hypothetical possibilities: we cannot trust our perceptual beliefs, for example,

because we cannot rule out the possibility that they are produced by a dream or

by wicked scientists manipulating our brains. (See Hookway 2012, chapters 2,3.)

The initial pragmatist response to this strategy has several strands. It is a strategy

that we cannot carry out effectively, and there is no reason to adopt it anyway.

Peirce begins his response by claiming that any attempt to adopt the method of

doubt will be an exercise in self-deception because we possess a variety of

certainties which it does not occur to uscanbe questioned. What is produced


14/26

will not be a real doubt and these beliefs will lurk in the background,

influencing our reflection when we are supposed to be suspending judgment in

them. Peirce urges that we should not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we

do not doubt in our hearts. We should doubt propositions only if we have a real

reason to do so. It is necessary to separate some different threads here.

First, there is something unnatural about the Cartesian strategy. Inquiries

normally occur within a context: we address particular issues, relying on a body

of background certainties that it does not occur to us to question. The Cartesian

suggestion that we should begin by trying to doubt everything appears to be an

attempt to step outside this context, relying upon no beliefs that we have not

ratified though reflective inquiry. Sometimes we may have to question some of

our assumptions, but our practice is not to do so unless there is a positive reason

for this. Second, the Cartesian strategy requires us to reflect upon each of our

beliefs and ask what reason we have for holding itthe sceptical challenges are

then used to question the adequacy of these reasons. This is at odds with our

normal practice. Many of our familiar certainties are such that we cannot offer

any concrete reason for believing them, certainly not one that is wholly

convincing. We tend to treat our established beliefs as innocent until proved

guilty. We need reasons for our beliefs when we propose to change them, or

when they have been challenged. It is doubt that needs a reason, and we trust our

everyday beliefs until given a positive reason for doubting them. The mere lack

of a conclusive reason for belief does not itself provide us with a reason for

doubt. The Cartesian strategy adopts an unorthodox, revisionary understanding

of reason for beliefand reason for doubt.

Descartes, of course, might have conceded this, but responded that the revision is

required because, once we allow error to enter our corpus of beliefs, we may be

unable to escape from its damaging effects. His was a time of controversy about

how we should go about fixing our opinions, and he was sensitive to the number

of false beliefs he had acquired from his teachers. The pragmatist response here

is to question some of his assumptions about how we reason and form our

beliefs. First, Descartes' picture is too individualist and to make singleindividuals absolute judges of truth is most pernicious:

In sciences in which men come to agreement, when a theory has been broached,

it is considered to be on probation until this agreement has been reached. After it

is reached, the question of certainty becomes an idle one, because there will be

no one left who doubts it. We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the


15/26

ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for

the communityof philosophers. (EP1: 29)

Peirce also questions Descartes' understanding of reasoning, suggesting that he

holds that we must rely on a single thread of inference that is no stronger than

its weakest link:

Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to

proceed only from tangible premises which can be subjected to careful scrutiny,

and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the

conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no

stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender,

provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected. (EP1: 29)

Where the Cartesian begins from the concern that unless we begin from premisesof which we can be absolutely certain we may never reach the truth, the

pragmatist emphasises that, when we do go wrong, further discussion and

investigation can hope to identify and eliminate errors. The possibility of error

provides us with reason to be contrite fallibilists, aware that any of our opinions

may, for all we know, require revision in the future, but it does not provide us

with any reason for skepticism. The focus of epistemological inquiry should not

be on showing how we can possess absolute certainty; instead, we need to

understand how we can possess methods of inquiry that contribute to our making

fallible progress. Inquiry is a community activity, and the method of science hasa self-correcting character. Such are the checks and balances that we can be

confident in our cognitive activities.

William James makes similar observations. In The Will to Believe, he reminds

us that we have two cognitive desiderata: we want to obtain truth; and we want to

avoid error (James 1897: 30). The harder we try to avoid error, the more likely it

is that we will miss out on truths; and the more strenuous we are in searching for

truths, the more likely we are to let in errors. The method of doubt may make

sense in the special case where an enormous weight is given to avoiding error,even if that means loss of truth. Once we recognize that we are making a

practical decision about the relative importance of two goods, the Cartesian

strategy no longer appears to be the only rational one. What reason is there to

give primary weight to reducing the risk of error?


16/26

In his lectures on Pragmatism, James defends a kind of epistemic conservativism

that accords with the idea that we do not needreasons for our beliefs when there

are no challenges to them to be defeated. He describes how, in the normal case,

we have an established body of views and opinions, and issues about what to

believe arise when a new experience puts them under strain. We will accept anew opinion when it preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of

modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but

conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible. Thus a true idea

marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to a show a minimum of jolt, a

maximum of continuity. (1907: 345) Once again, our beliefs possess a kind of

inertia: we need positive reasons to disturb them; but in order to preserve them,

all that is required is that we have no reason to abandon them.

James's remarks lead on to the views defended by Dewey in The Quest for

Certainty. In developing his views about truth, James saw his antagonist as the

rationalist or intellectualist. The rationalist seeks substantive a priori knowledge

of the nature of truth or of reality, knowledge that is cut off from the exigencies

of practice. The traditional distinction betweenknowledgeand opinionsuggested

that opinion, the useful guide to conduct and practice, is second rate when

compared with the secure certainties provided by the philosophers. Rational

certainties are supposedly risk-free: untainted by the contingencies of experience,

such knowledge is testament to our capacity to grasp the necessary structure of

the world. The desire for certainty is part of a perspective that gives little weight

to the needs of practice. For the rationalist, the operation of inquiry excludes any

element of practical activity that enters into the construction of the object

known. For the pragmatist, the needs of practice are allowed to contribute to the

constitution of objects.

4.2 Inquiry

As has already been suggested, pragmatist accounts of the normative standards

we should follow in arriving at beliefs about the world are cast in terms of how

we can carry out inquiries in a disciplined, self-controlled way. They provide richaccounts of the capacities we must possess in order to inquire well and the rules,

or guiding principles, that we should adopt. A canonical statement of this is

found in Peirce's classic paper The Fixation of Belief. Inquiry is a struggle to

replace doubt with settled belief and Peirce argues that the only method of

inquiry that can make sense of the fact that we are disturbed by inconsistent

beliefs and that we should reflect upon which methods are correctis the Method


17/26

of Science. The method of science is an experimental method, and the

application of the pragmatist maxim reveals how hypotheses can be subject to

experimental test. A knower is an agent, who obtains empirical support for her

beliefs by making experimental interventions in her surroundings and learning

from the experiences that her actions elicit. Peirce's writings provide asophisticated and historically informed account of just how the method of science

can work (see Levi 2012).

Dewey's conception of inquiry, found in hisLogic: the Theory of Inquiryis richer

and more radical (ED2: 16979). He sees inquiry as beginning with a problem;

we are involved in an indeterminate situation. And inquiry aims for the

controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is

so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the

elements of the original situation into a unified whole. (ED2: 171) As John E

Smith has put it, Peirce aimed at fixing belief, whereas Dewey aimed at

fixing the situation. (1978:98) It is important here that it is the situation that

is objectivelyindeterminate, and it is the situation that is transformed during the

course of the inquiry; Dewey is rejecting the common assumptions that all that

change are our beliefs about the situation, and that describing the situation as

problematic or indeterminate is simply a way of saying that wedo not have a

clear grasp of it. We begin in a situation where we don't know our way around,

and inquiry comes to an end when we do. The pattern of inquiry that he

describes is common to practical problem solving, common sense investigations

of our surroundings, scientific inquiry, the information gathering of animals and

so on. Dewey recognizes that when we first face a problem, our first task is to

understand our problem through describing its elements and identifying their

relations. Identifying a concrete question that we need to answer is a sign that we

are already making progress. And the logical forms we use in the course of

inquiry are understood as ideal instruments, tools that help us to transform things

and resolve our problem. The continuities he finds between different kinds of

inquiry is evidence of his naturalism and of his recognition that forms of

scientific investigation can guide us in all areas of our lives. All the pragmatists,

but most of all Dewey, challenge the sharp dichotomy that other philosophers

draw between theoretical beliefs and practical deliberations. In some sense, all

inquiry is practical, concerned with transforming and evaluating the features of

the situations in which we find ourselves.

Dewey's work developed these ideas about inquiry. Shared inquiry directed at

resolving social and political problems or indeterminacies was central to his


18/26

conception of the good life and to his account of the democractic ideal. Others,

closer to Peirce than to Dewey, identify scientific inquiry as the model of

democratic problem solving (see Bernstein 2010: chapter three, Talisse 2008,

Misak 1999, Westbrook 1991.

4.3 The pragmatist conception of experience

As is evident from the pragmatist maxim, pragmatism is a form of empiricism.

Our ability to think about external things and to steadily improve our

understanding of them rests upon our experience. However, the pragmatists all

adopted accounts of experience and perception that were radically different from

the views of most earlier modern philosophers such as David Hume and

Descartes (see, for example, Smith 1978: chapter three). The established view

linked experience to what is sometimes called the given: we are the passive

recipients of atomistic, determinate and singular sensory contents, the kinds of

things that are sometimes called sense data. Experience provides the material for

knowledge and conceptualization, but it does not itself have a content that is

informed by concepts, practical needs, or anything else non-sensory. Our only

contact with the external world is through receiving such experiences that, we

suppose, are caused by external things; but since these sensory inputs are our

only source of knowledge of the external world, we have no direct sensory

awareness of external things. It is no surprise that this way of thinking about

experience can easily lead to skepticism about the external world.

In different ways, Peirce, James, and Dewey all argued that experience is far

richer than the tradition had supposed, and that earlier philosophers were

mistaken in their belief that we could identify experiences or sense data as

separable constituents of cognition. We can begin with James's radical

empiricism, of which he said that the establishment of the pragmatist theory of

truth [was] a step of first-rate importance in making [it] prevail (1909: 6f). The

connection with pragmatism is evident from the fundamental postulate of

radical empiricism: the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers

shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. But this requires thatexperience be far richer than earlier philosophers had supposed. First, he

announced that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive,

are just as much matters of direct experience, neither more nor less so, than the

things themselves. And, second, he concludes that the parts of experience are

held together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of

experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous


19/26

trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated

or continuous structure.

This suggestion is echoed in Peirce's account of perception. He too emphasizes

the continuous character of perceptual experience, and also adds that we directly

perceive external things as external, as other, that we can perceive necessary

connections between events, and that experience contains elements of generality.

As with James, this is supported by a phenomenological account of our

experience, and, again as with James, it is supported by a system of pragmatist

metaphysics, a general account of the sorts of things and features that the

universe contains.

Dewey's account of experience contributes an additional twist. Like Peirce, he

thought that experience was full of inference. Experience is a process through

which we interact with our surroundings, obtaining information that helps us to

meet our needs. What we experience is shaped by our habits of expectation and

there is no basis for extracting from this complex process the kind of thin given

beloved of sense datum theorists. We experience all sorts of objects, events and

processes, and we should not follow philosophers who seek to impose a

distinction between the thin uninterpreted data of experience and the inferential

processes which lead us to interpret what we experience as books, people and so

on. The dichotomy between the passive given of experience and the rich results

of our active conceptualization is not supported by our experience. It is yet

another of the philosophers distortions.

4.4 Representations

Having discussed pragmatist emphases upon the activity of inquiry and the

richness of experience, we should turn to their views about the nature of thought.

It has been common for philosophers to assume that the content of a thought,

judgment, or other mental state is a kind of intrinsic property that it possesses.

Perhaps it offers a picture or idea of some state of affairs, and we can identify

this content simply by reflecting upon the thought itself. All pragmatists haverejected this idea, and all have held that the content of a thought or judgment is a

matter of the role it fills in our activities of inquiry. The content of a thought or

belief is to be explained by reference to what we do with it or how we interpret it.

I shall illustrate this by considering three particular pragmatist views.


20/26

First, all of the classic pragmatists identified beliefs and other mental states

as habits. According to Peirce, our beliefs Guide our desires and shape our

actions (EP1: 114). The content of a belief is not determined by its intrinsic

phenomenal character; rather, it is determined by its role in determining our

actions. This was reflected in Peirce's formulations of his pragmatist maxim. Inorder to be clear about the content of a concept or hypothesis, we must reflect

upon its role in determining what we should do in the light of our desires and our

background knowledge. In Robert Brandom's happy form of words, the

philosopher makes explicit aspects of our practice that are implicit in our habits

and dispositions. The role of tacit habits of reasoning and acting in fixing our

beliefs and guiding our actions is a theme that recurs in the work of all of the

pragmatists.

The second illustration concerns a passage in which James defended his account

of truth by urging that it was the concept used in successful science. He identified

the traditional view that, for early scientists, the clearness, beauty and

simplification provided by their theories led them to think that they had

deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of the Almighty. By contrast,

contemporary scientists held that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality,

but that any of them may from some point of view be useful . A scientific

theory was to be understood as an instrument: it is designed to achieve a

purposeto facilitate action or increase understanding (James 1907: 33). For

James and Dewey, this holds of all our concepts and theories: we treat them as

instruments, as artefacts to be judged by how well they achieve their intended

purpose. The content of a theory or concept is determined by what we should do

with it.

The third illustration comes from Peirce's general theory of signs, which offers an

account of the contents of thoughts as well as of public signs and language.

Peirce insisted that the sign-relation was triadic: a sign or thought is about some

object because it is understood, in subsequent thought, as a sign of that object.

The subsequent thought is its interpretant. In understanding or interpreting a

sign, we will probably draw inferences from it, or undertake actions that arerational in the light of the sign and the other information we possess.

Interpretation is generally a goal directed activity. In such cases, our action or the

conclusion of our inference is the interpretant; interpretation is not primarily a

matter of intellectual recognition of what a sign means. The theory is complex

and I will not explore it further here, beyond emphasizing, once again, that the


21/26

content of a thought is determined by the ways in which we can use it in

inference and the planning of action.

5. Other pragmatists

It would be wrong to conclude that pragmatism was restricted to the United

States or that the only important pragmatist thinkers were Peirce, James and

Dewey. As is documented by Thayer, there were pragmatists in Oxford, in

France and, especially, in Italy in the early years of the twentieth century (Thayer

1968, part III, Baldwin 2003: 889). Moreover we can mention several other

important American pragmatists, for example Josiah Royce. Commonly thought

to be an idealist opponent of James and a critic of pragmatism, Royce

increasingly came to be influenced by Peirce's work on signs and on the

community of inquirers and was acknowledged as a fellow pragmatist by Peirce

himself. C.I.Lewis, the teacher of Quine and of several generations of Harvard

philosophers developed a philosophy that was a sort of pragmatist Kantianism.

Murray Murphey has identified him as the last great pragmatist (Murphey

2005). In books such asMind and the World Order(1929), he defended a

pragmatist conception of the a priori, holding that our choices of laws of logic

and systems of classification were to be determined by pragmatic criteria (Lewis

1923, 1929; Murphey 2005: chapters four and five). Of comparable importance

was George Herbert Mead (see Mead 1934). Close to Dewey, Mead contributed

to the social sciences, developing pragmatist perspectives upon the relations

between the self and the community.

Dewey's longevity meant that pragmatism remained a philosophical force in the

United States well into the twentieth century. The influx of philosophers from

Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940slogical empiricists, members of the

Frankfurt School, and othersled to Pragmatist ideas becoming marginalized in

the mid-century by providing new and exciting ideas when the pragmatist

tradition may have begun to grow stale. Even then it retained some force. The

work of Frank Ramsey at Cambridge (Ramsey 1926) in the 1920s developed

Peirce's views on statistical reasoning and on inquiry in ways that provided fertileresearch programmes through much of the century, for example in the work of

Isaac Levi at Columbia (Levi 1999). As Russell Goodman has documented

(2002), Wittgenstein's later thought acquired a pragmatist flavour though his

reading of James's Varieties of Religious Experience(1902). And there was

always a relatively small but lively group of scholars who strove to maintain the


22/26

values of what was championed as a distinctive American philosophical tradition

even when this tradition was largely ignored by the philosophical establishment.

In the last few decades of the twentieth century, scholarly work on pragmatist

philosophy increased in both quantity and quality, making possible an

appreciation of the sophistication of the pragmatist philosophers and enabling

readers to escape from the of familiar caricatures of the position. Lacking the

space to discuss all aspects of these developments, I shall comment on just two or

three leading philosophers who have allowed their reading of the pragmatists to

shape their conception of philosophy (Misak (ed) 1999 passim; Haack 1993).

Richard Rorty has described his philosophy as pragmatist on a number of

occasions. Where Peirce and Deweyand even perhaps Jameswere engaged

in working out systematic philosophical visions, Rorty treated pragmatism as

something more negative. What pragmatists teach us about truth, he tells us, is

that there is nothing very systematic or constructive to say about truth at all. In

particular, this concept does not capture any systematic or metaphysical relation

between our beliefs and utterances, on the one hand, and reality on the other. We

can describe what we do with the word true: we use it to express our

endorsement of beliefs and sentences, and sometimes we might find it useful to

express our fallibility by saying that some of our beliefs may not be true. But,

beyond talking about the rather trivial formal properties of the concept, there is

nothing more to be said. He also uses what he describes as a pragmatist

principle to show that the truth cannot be our aim when we inquire. Thisprinciple holds that we can only adopt something as an aim when we are able to

recognize that it has been achieved: it must thus make a practical difference

whether a proposition is true or not. And since we are fallible, we are never in a

position to recognize that one of our beliefs is actually trueall we can

recognize is that it meets standards of acceptance that are endorsed, for the time

being, in our community (Rorty 1991a: chapter one; 2000; Davidson 2005: 7;

Hookway 2007). The consequentialist character of pragmatist ideas is also

reflected in his account of how we can criticize and revise our view of the world.

We should be free to propose new vocabulariessystems of classification anddescription. We do not test these vocabularies by seeing whether they enable us

to discover truthsor by showing that they can be read off the nature of reality.

Instead, we evaluate them by seeing how they enable us to achieve our goals and

formulate better and more satisfying goals (Rorty 1995).


23/26

Hilary Putnam denies that he is a pragmatist because he does not think that a

pragmatist account of truth can be sustained. Indeed, he shows little sympathy for

the pragmatist maxim. However he has written extensively on James, Peirce, and

Deweyoften in collaboration with Ruth Anna Putnamand he has provided

insightful accounts of what is distinctive about pragmatism and about what canbe learned from it (See Putnam 1994a). He has identified four characteristics of

pragmatism: the rejection of skepticism; the willingness to embrace fallibilism;

the rejection of sharp dichotomies such as those between fact and value, thought

and experience, mind and body, analytic and synthetic etc; and what he calls the

primacy of practice (1994c). He appears to count as a pragmatist in the wider

sense but not as a pragmatist in the narrow sense that requires acceptance of the

pragmatist maxim. With the turn of the twenty first century, he has made

ambitious claims for the prospects of a pragmatist epistemology. After surveying

the apparent failures of the original enlightenment project, and attributing them tothe fact that enlightenment philosophers were unable to overcome the

fundamental dichotomies mentioned above, he expresses the hope that the future

might contain a pragmatist enlightenment (Putnam 2004: 89108). The rich

understanding of experience and science offered by pragmatists may show how

to find an objective basis for the evaluation and criticism of institutions and

practices. He is particularly struck by the suggestion that pragmatist

epistemology, by emphasizing the communal character of inquiry and the need to

take account of the experiences and contributions of other inquirers, provides a

basis for a defence of democratic values (1993: 1180202). This may be related

to Rorty's suggestion that pragmatists insist upon the priority of democracy over

philosophy (Rorty 1991b).

Another symptom of a pragmatist revival is found in the work of Robert

Brandom, in books such asMaking it Explicit, andArticulating

Reasons.Brandom's philosophical interests are rather different from those of the

classical pragmatists. Indeed, the classical pragmatists, of whom he is quite

critical, do not evidently influence his work. It owes more to philosophers such

as Wilfrid Sellars and Quine and his teacher Richard Rorty. His concerns are

mostly with semantics and the philosophy of language, developing a version of

inferential role semantics in order to construct accounts of our use of words like

true and refers to which are liberated from the representationalist idea that

the function of thought and language is to provide a transcript of reality. The

connection to pragmatism is that his approach to language is focused upon what

we dowith language, with our practices of making assertions and of challenging


24/26

or evaluating the assertions of others. He joins the pragmatists in denying

that truthis a substantial metaphysical property that can be possessed by some

propositions and not by others, and in focusing upon how this kind of discourse

has a role in our practices, upon how truth or reference makes a difference in

practice.

6. Conclusion

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, more philosophers became ready

to describe themselves as pragmatists, leading to new ways of articulating

pragmatism and original ways in which philosophy can be shaped by pragmatist

ideas. These new pragmatists include Huw Price (2013), Robert Brandom and

Philip Kitcher. Their understanding of pragmatism is not always the same, but

we shall describe some of the most important developments. (See Bacon 2012,

chapters 6, 7).

First, what features do we look for in deciding whether a philosopher is a

pragmatist? Most pragmatists embrace a form of naturalism, employing a

methodology which uses the method of science and is open to exploring the

different kinds of methods that are employed in different sciences. Although they

are ready to move away from the views of the classical pragmatists, they will

often be exploiting particular examples of pragmatic clarifications from Peirce,

James, and Dewey. A good example of this is provided by Cheryl Misak's use of

what she calls Peirce's naturalist account of truth (Misak 2007: 69f). She insiststhat Peirce did not want to define pragmatism. Rather it is the heart of

pragmatism that Peirce does not offer a transcendental account of truth or a

philosophical analysis'. Rather than trying to identify the essence of truth, she

claims, pragmatists try to describe the role of the concept in our practices. Thus

Peirce's account of truth examines the relations between the concept of truth and

notions such as belief, assertion, and inquiry. Her approach is thus naturalistic

because it is a sort of anthropological investigation; and the result of the

investigation is neither a necessary truth nor something that is established a

priori.

This adoption of pragmatism is accompanied by a rejection of a priori

metaphysics and of intellectualist accounts of thought. Peirce grounds this on his

pragmatic maxim, a logical rule that shows the emptiness of concepts which

have no practical consequences. This rejection of a a priori metaphysics is shared

with Price, Brandom and other philosophers who embrace new forms of


25/26

pragmatism. In similar vein, Kitcher's On the Role of Correspondence Truth

(2012: chapter 4) provides a clarification of truth which builds on William

James's view that true propositions are ones that enable us to function well, that

function successfully as instruments.

We have examined pragmatism in the narrow sense (the pragmatist maxim as a

rule for clarifying concepts and hypotheses) and pragmatism in a wider sense.

The latter involves a range of approaches to problems in epistemology,

metaphysics and many other areas of philosophy that tend to display a broad

common pattern. When pragmatism began, in the work of Peirce and James,

pragmatism in the narrow sense was most important; while more recent

manifestations of pragmatism have tended to give most weight to pragmatism in

the wider sense. Many recent pragmatists are doubtful that a defensible form of

the maxim can be found. However the connections between the two are clear.

The pragmatist maxim was first developed in the context of a fallibilist, broadly

empiricist approach to the study of inquiry, and it is this approach to inquiry that

is central to pragmatism in the wider sense.

Brandom's influential views introduce some different ideas. He focuses on the

normative regulation of our practices, especially the practices involved in

reasoning and cognitive activities. Rather than being influenced by the classical

pragmatists, Brandom's work shows the influence of his teacher Wilfrid Sellars

and also his reading of Kant and some of the writings of Hegel. Rationality

involves possessing the ability to recognize the force of reasons. The requiredconnection with agency is manifested in the ways in which reasoning and

deliberation are active activities ; and we can take responsibility for how well we

deliberate and reason. In works likeMaking it Explicit(1994) he develops a

systematic system of normative pragmatics which examines the rules that should

guide the exercise of linguistic practices. His defence of naturalism resembles the

anthropological approach of Misak: we understand our concepts by showing how

they are used in our practices. Brandom also emphasises the importance of the

fact that we can adopt different vocabularies, adopting different ways of

describing and reasoning in different contexts (seeBetween Saying and Doing:Towards an Analytic Pragmatism, 2010). This is reflected in Brandom's distinct

kind of naturalism. As well as forging a vocabulary for evaluating our reasons

and participating in communal reasoning and discussion, he explores how one

vocabulary can be understood as grounded in others, for example in the

vocabulary of fundamental science. This does not conflict with our using other

vocabularies,for different purposes. He follows Rorty in rejecting the aspiration


26/26

to provide accurate representations of our surroundings. Ways of talking are not

to be evaluated in terms of whether they accurately describe our surroundings;

rather, they are evaluated by the by the virtues of the practices that are involved

in our use of them.

Documents

PRAGMATISM - SEP.docx