Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Nature of Philosophy

Scott F. Aikin, Robert B. Talisse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351811316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

For the past fifteen years, Aikin and Talisse have been working collaboratively on a new vision of American pragmatism, one which sees pragmatism as a living and developing philosophical idiom that originates in the work of the "classical" pragmatisms of Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, uninterruptedly develops through the later 20th Century pragmatists (C. I. Lewis, Wilfrid Sellars, Nelson Goodman, W. V. O. Quine), and continues through the present day. According to Aikin and Talisse, pragmatism is fundamentally a metaphilosophical proposal – a methodological suggestion for carrying inquiry forward amidst ongoing deep disagreement over the aims, limitations, and possibilities of philosophy. This conception of pragmatism not only runs contrary to the dominant self-understanding among cotemporary philosophers who identify with the classical pragmatists, it also holds important implications for pragmatist philosophy. In particular, Aikin and Talisse show that their version of pragmatism involves distinctive claims about epistemic justification, moral disagreement, democratic citizenship, and the conduct of inquiry. The chapters combine detailed engagements with the history and development of pragmatism with original argumentation aimed at a philosophical audience beyond pragmatism.

1
Introduction

The Problems of Pragmatist Philosophers

This volume is the culmination of the first fifteen years of a continuing collaboration aimed largely at thinking within—and yet occasionally against—the longstanding philosophical trajectory known as pragmatism. Many of the chapters that follow have their origin in articles that have been previously published. For that reason, the arguments and perspectives on offer will be familiar to some readers. However, no chapter of the present volume is simply a reprint of its ancestor. We have updated our previous work to reflect our current thinking, and we have included a good deal of material that is new to this volume. That is, the essays contained within are the product of our earnest effort not to merely rework but to rethink the views for which we are already known. As it turns out, this volume contains no drastic departure from conclusions reached in our previously published work; however, this is not for lack of trying to argue ourselves out of those conclusions. The chapters present revised versions of the arguments that produced those general results. We believe that the present formulations are clearer, more precise, better motivated, and more compelling. Accordingly, those who have been following the development of our thinking (we suppose there could be a few) should regard the present formulations as the official versions, superseding previous articulations.

The name of this collection is Pragmatism, Pluralism, and the Nature of Philosophy. It is admittedly ambitious, though also unimaginative. There are at least two reasons for us to have taken this tack. First, although our co-authored work has focused heavily on the three themes identified in the volume’s title, our collaboration is not exclusively devoted to such topics. In addition to our work on the themes of this volume, we have developed a separate research program in argumentation theory and political epistemology; beyond our fourteenth chapter, which ties argumentation theory to pragmatist themes in political philosophy, this work is not represented in this collection. Second, our collaborative work on pragmatism almost always invokes issues regarding pluralism and questions about how philosophy should be done. One might say, then, that this collection gathers our views on pragmatism, and these are largely engaged with themes concerning pluralism and the nature of philosophy. Thus, the trio identified in the book’s title should be understood to identify a crossroads at which we tend to work rather than the list of three discrete topics addressed within.

Although we see this volume as a unified work presenting our current thinking about pragmatism, we have also written the chapters so that each could be read as a self-contained essay. Hence several themes recur from one chapter to the next. We have sought to minimize redundancy, and in no case do we simply repeat ourselves verbatim. In fact, in every case where we found it necessary to return to a point or argument made previously in the volume, we have tried to add additional nuance or detail appropriate for the context.

Some Background

The intersection of pragmatism, pluralism, and metaphilosophy has been a central focus of ours from the very start. In our first co-authored publication, “Why Pragmatists Cannot be Pluralists” (Talisse and Aikin 2005a), we argued that on a plausible understanding of classical pragmatism, and on any informed interpretation of what pluralism is, no classical pragmatist view can coherently embrace pluralism. The argument is simple. Pluralism holds that some value conflicts are intrinsically beyond the power of inquiry to ameliorate. In contrast, pragmatism involves the commitment, or at least the hope, that ongoing inquiry, clarification, and experimentation can ameliorate all legitimate conflicts. Hence pragmatists should reject a view that the very fabric of value guarantees irremediable conflicts among goods. At the very least, pragmatists should regard pluralism as premature. They should say that there is still too much inquiring and experiencing that remains to be done to warrant any such sweeping conclusion about the nature of value, especially when the conclusion in question entails that further inquiry would be misplaced. Pragmatists should regard pluralism as at best a hasty generalization that threatens to preempt inquiry. They should thus not be pluralists.

Yet neoclassical pragmatists say that they embrace pluralism.¹ In fact, they frequently tout pluralism as not only a core pragmatist commitment but also as one that is exclusively pragmatist. Their claim is that pragmatists must be pluralists and only pragmatism can fully embrace pluralism.² The trouble is that neoclassical pragmatists either neglect to say what pluralism comes to, or in saying what pluralism is, they unwittingly affirm the kind of view that we originally identified as pluralism, which is incompatible with central pragmatist commitments. In “Why Pragmatists Cannot be Pluralists,” then, we further argued that the fact that neoclassical pragmatists so often use the term pluralism to describe their view is the product of an unfortunate metaphilosophical tendency among pragmatists to disengage from the larger philosophical world around them. We suggested that the term had come to be deployed among neoclassicalists as a kind of honorific, a self-serving pat on the back, with no discernable content.³ Trade in such terms is unbecoming for a pragmatist.

“Why Pragmatists Cannot be Pluralists” stirred a great deal of debate, and a lot of antagonism as well. The essay appeared in an issue of Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society along with four critical responses and our rejoinder (Misak 2005; Jackman 2005; Eldridge 2005; Sullivan and Lysaker 2005; Aikin and Talisse 2005b). As half of our critics opted to merely dismiss our arguments rather than address them, that initial exchange was not entirely fruitful. Before long, there had developed a minor industry devoted to disproving our conclusion.⁴ And we have since qualified our stance. As we argue in Chapter 10, we now think that there is one variety of pluralism that pragmatists could embrace; however, this version of pluralism is neither exclusively available to pragmatists nor are pragmatists required to adopt it.

The debate over our 2005 essay prompted us to think more deeply about pragmatism, pluralism, and the dominant metaphilosophical ideas that frequently accompany pragmatism, especially in its neoclassical idiom. Subsequent collaboration produced work, both jointly and individually authored, on a range of issues concerning the origins of pragmatism, including Peirce’s view of epistemic justification and his theory of inquiry (Chapters 2 and 3), James’s “will to believe” doctrine and his clumsy engagement with Clifford (Chapter 4), James’s moral philosophy (Chapter 5), and Dewey’s conception of democracy (Chapter 6). Much of what we have written on these additional topics also stirred debate, and again, a degree of antagonism. As with our treatment of the “can pragmatist be pluralists?” question in this volume (Chapter 10), the chapters in Part One are the product of our attempt to rethink our earlier work about classical pragmatism in ways that accommodate the worthy criticisms we have received.

Approaching Pragmatism’s Past

In the course of developing our ideas and addressing the reactions they had prompted from neoclassical pragmatists, we began formulating views about the development and prospects of pragmatism. This occasioned an investigation into the ways in which contemporary pragmatists have understood their history. We were quickly drawn to adopt two general views, both of which again have proved controversial.

First, we realized that the philosophical disputes among the founding pragmatists (Peirce, James, and Dewey) are carried forward throughout the work of the leading post-Deweyan American philosophers, including C. I. Lewis, Sidney Hook, Nelson Goodman, Ernest Nagel, W. V. O. Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, Hilary Putnam, and Nicholas Rescher. In fact, we came to see that the philosophical distance between, say, Peirce and James was in several respects far greater than that which separates James from Goodman. Similarly, we came to see fundamental continuities between leading theses among the founders and the landmark work in the post-Dewey era of philosophy in America. Consider two examples (there are many others): First, Quine’s central argument in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” is best read as an application of Peirce’s pragmatic maxim to the various attempts to formulate a conception of analyticity; second, the line of thought presented in Sellars’ “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” has antecedents in Dewey’s Experience and Nature, which itself owes a significant debt to Peirce’s earliest anti-Cartesian essays.⁵ As examples of this kind multiplied, it struck us that pragmatism is best understood as a more-or-less continuous philosophical endeavor that begins with Peirce, James, and Dewey, but extends uninterruptedly through mid-century philosophy in America, eventually expands in influence beyond America, and continues to this day.

We concluded that pragmatism is among the most successful philosophical trends in the history of thought.⁶ And we came to think that its success owes largely to the fact that pragmatism at its best is neither a doctrine nor method or even a tradition, but rather a still-developing problematic concerning the right way to construe and manage the relation between philosophy and practical affairs. This central problematic forms the thread running throughout the pragmatists from Peirce through Quine and on to the present day. The divisions among pragmatists reflect disputes over what kind of relation is needed and which practical affairs are most important to address philosophically.⁷ To foreshadow a claim that we discuss explicitly in Part Two, pragmatism emerges centrally as an especially fecund metaphilosophical program.

We soon discovered that this way of understanding the history of pragmatism was drastically out of step with the dominant self-understanding among neoclassical pragmatists. That self-understanding is shaped by what we call the eclipse narrative. According to this account, in the years leading up to Dewey’s death in 1952, pragmatism was unjustifiably marginalized, abandoned, and shut out of mainstream philosophy. “Analytic” philosophy came to dominate the discipline, at least in America and England, and the analytic philosophers saw pragmatism as immature, naïve, imprecise, and confused. The story continues that analytic philosophy collapsed in the 1980s under the weight of its own impertinence, and pragmatism reemerged in the work of a group of “neo-pragmatist” philosophers, including Richard Rorty, Cornel West, and Hilary Putnam.⁸ The work of neo-pragmatists revived interest in pragmatism, and by the end of the twentieth century, pragmatism was once again on the agenda of professional philosophy.

However, as told by neoclassical pragmatists, the eclipse narrative is resentful. The neoclassicalists hold that, as the neo-pragmatists are by and large reformed analytic philosophers, they resuscitated pragmatism in an inferior, diminished form. According to the neoclassicalists, the neo-pragmatists promote a version of pragmatism that understands Peirce, James, and Dewey to have taken the same linguistic turn that gave rise to the analytic philosophy that had marginalized pragmatism. Thus, although the neo-pragmatists had lifted the eclipse of pragmatism, the picture of pragmatism that was projected by the neo-pragmatists was merely an after-image, a blending of classical pragmatism with the toxic residue of the hostile analytic program that had shoved pragmatists aside. According to the neoclassicalists, neo-pragmatism is in the grip of a philosophical Stockholm Syndrome; what is required, therefore, is a recovery of the classical pragmatists, a return to the state of play in philosophy that prevailed in Dewey’s heyday. Thus the genre of neoclassical pragmatism is dominated by commentaries, rehearsals, and reprisals of the founding texts, all under the pretext of—but actually at the expense of—carrying forward the pragmatist project.

This led to our second general view concerning the history and development of pragmatism: The account of pragmatism’s history that animates the scholarship of those most deeply invested in the classical idiom is severely distorted. More importantly, it is distorted in a way that is philosophically debilitating. The eclipse narrative engenders a recovery effort, which promotes a nostalgic portrait of pragmatism that renders it a backward-looking philosophical relic. In short, the self-appointed contemporary custodians of classical pragmatism embrace a conception of pragmatism’s past that serves only to constrict pragmatism’s horizons and weaken its prospects.

Hence our two general views about pragmatism and its history: (1) Pragmatism is centrally a highly influential metaphilosophical project that is inaugurated in Peirce, James, and Dewey, and continues undiminished throughout the twentieth century in America and elsewhere. (2) The dominant understanding of pragmatism’s history and development is factually incorrect and philosophically pathological. To be sure, a lot more needs to be said about both of these claims. As for the first, we offer the whole of this collection as a demonstration of its warrant. The essays that follow attempt to reckon with pragmatism’s history (Part I) while pressing forward with the task of forging an articulation of how philosophy can help us to manage our lives (Part II) in light of certain inescapable tensions, ruptures, and conflicts (Part III). Along the way we will engage with the misconceptions and distortions that dominate the self-understandings of neoclassicalists. But it will be helpful, we think, to directly take up our second general view in greater detail, for it provides the backdrop for much of what follows.

Against the Dominant Self-Image

Some philosophical movements are founded, while others are federated. The British Empiricists, for example, were obviously allied on several central philosophical issues. Yet Locke, Berkeley, and Hume did not see themselves as a philosophical school or movement. They came to be seen as such only in the work of subsequent philosophers; the British Empiricists were federated post hoc, as it were. Contrast this with the British Idealists; they regarded themselves as a movement within philosophy, a distinctive school based in a particular inheritance from Hegel and other post-Kantian figures on the Continent. Although it might be difficult to point to a moment where British Idealism was founded, those who worked within that idiom understood themselves to be part of the larger philosophical effort on behalf of idealism.

Pragmatism was most definitely founded, and moreover, the founding was self-conscious. Despite the fact that pragmatism’s two initiating documents—Peirce’s “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”—make no mention of the term pragmatism (even though Peirce had apparently coined the term years prior to their publication), the earliest writings on pragmatism from Peirce, James, and Dewey reveal that, from the very start, a leading item on their philosophical agenda was establishing what pragmatism is. They each deliberately sought to found a distinctively American philosophical school, and their earliest exchanges with each other are largely devoted to how best to foment the movement. Indeed, much of Peirce’s agitation with James had to do with the fact that James’s articulation of pragmatism, which Peirce regarded as inferior to his own, was quickly becoming the locus of a broader philosophical trend. And in the lectures that would become his Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, James is keen to present pragmatism as a fully formed international and cross-historical philosophical movement.⁹

Like other philosophical movements that are the result of a self-conscious founding, pragmatism began not simply as a series of philosophical ideas but also as a self-image. That is, pragmatism’s founding was bound up with a particular understanding of pragmatism’s place in the history of philosophy. This is overt in the writing of Peirce, James, and Dewey; each tells his own story of how pragmatism uniquely succeeds where previous philosophy has failed. Notably, pragmatism originates in a self-ascribed historical triumph. It is no surpr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: The Problems of Pragmatist Philosophers
• PART 1 Encounters with the Classical Idiom
• PART 2 Pragmatism and Metaphilosophy
• PART 3 Pragmatist Proposals
• Works Cited
• Index