American Pragmatism and Communication Research

David K. Perry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781135657949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This monograph examines the past, present, and potential relationship between American pragmatism and communication research. The contributors provide a bridge between communication studies and philosophy, subjects often developed somewhat in isolation from each other. Addressing topics, such as qualitative and quantitative research, ethics, media research, and feminist studies, the chapters in this volume:
*discuss how a pragmatic, Darwinian approach to inquiry has guided and might further guide communication research;
*advocate a functional view of communication, based on Dewey's mature notion of transaction;
*articulate a pragmatist's aesthetics and connect it to Deweyan democracy;
*discuss the similarities and differences between Dewey's notion of inquiry and the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer;
*apply accommodation theory, linked to symbolic interactionism and more generally to the social behaviorism of George H. Mead and his followers, to media research;
*interpret media-effects evidence in light of pragmatist ideas about inquiry; and
*argue that pragmatism theorizes about despair and life's sense of the tragic. This book is written to be readily accessible to students and professional academics within and outside the field of communication studies without extensive training in specialized areas of communication study.

Chapter 1
Varieties of Pragmatism and Communication: Visions and Revisions From Peirce to Peters

Peter Simonson
University of Pittsburgh

During the past two decades, literature on pragmatism has exploded. From philosophy to film studies, from law to literary criticism, and from history to religion to communication studies, pragmatism has a new generation of defenders and interpreters. This sometimes breathtaking array of thought should remind us that pragmatism is, as it has always been, a many splendored thing.

Amid plurality, pragmatism has always concerned itself with communication. The current revival offers communication studies an opportunity to rethink and creatively revise its canon. This chapter aims to contribute to that process by revisiting first-generation pragmatism and reviewing revivalist work relevant to the field. I draw attention to pragmatist studies in communication from the late 19th century through the contemporary revival, and I highlight the exciting new intellectual lineage established by revisionist work. This is a project of excavation and review intended to make overlooked texts available as resources for theory, criticism, and other practices within the field. Communication studies would be richer, I argue, if we revisited classic texts and expanded our intellectual canons.

Pragmatism can be approached as a doctrine or a historical tradition. As a doctrine (or method or habit of thought), it typically has advanced the notion that the consequences of their adoption determines the meaning of ideas, truth of propositions, or value of proposed actions. Thus, pragmatism has often tied knowledge to social practices and ethics, taken inquiry as communal and historically situated, and held that the world is open ended and in process. It also typically has rejected hard dualisms of mind and body, knowledge and action, fact and value, individual and society. However, one must tread cautiously with generalizations. From the beginning, pragmatism has been pluralistic.

Alternatively, one can understand pragmatism as a tradition that is partly constituted by arguments about its meaning and historical lineage. I favor this tack. As a tradition, certain recurring themes, including the idea of communication and allied concepts, have marked it. Like doctrinal pragmatism, however, the deeply plural tradition resists overarching characterizations. The misleading idea exists that pragmatism is distinctly American, but from the beginning, encounters with Continental thought have fundamentally shaped its arguments. Moreover, Continental thinkers have defended it staunchly. Views colored by American exceptionalism are simply inadequate.

I break the tradition down into three main categories. It was classically articulated by Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead,¹ each of whom formulated ideas and habits of inquiry relevant to contemporary communication studies. Pragmatism then moved beyond that core and in the first half of the 20th century had important defenders not always recognized as pragmatists. This group included Jane Addams, George Santayana, W.E.B.Du Bois, Alain Locke, Walter Lippmann, and C.Wright Mills. Together they pushed the tradition beyond the Protestant Yankee establishment of White males and developed pragmatism’s aesthetics, criticism, sociology, politics, and racial theory. Finally, pragmatism has experienced an energetic revival in the late 20th century, and the final section of the chapter sketches some of its most important theorists. Like their precursors, the revivalists are a diverse lot collectively concerned with communication. Their work ranges from the grand German philosophy of Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel to Stanley Fish’s literary antitheory to the varied, politically accented work of Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, Nancy Fraser, and Cornel West. They also include three heavyweight theorists in the field of communication—James Carey, Michael Schudson, and John Peters. Together they have replayed the intellectual roles of Dewey, Lippmann, and James and given the tradition a high-profile presence in American communication studies.

PRAGMATISM AND COMMUNICATION IN THE FIRST GENERATION

Pragmatism emerged between the Civil War and World War I paradigmatically in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), John Dewey (1859–1952), and George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). This was a group of cultural insiders. All were Yankee WASPs trained in or with sympathy for science, with deep interest in Charles Darwin and serious, although varied, encounters with religion. In their milieu, agnosticism was establishing its first cultural beachheads, the academy was becoming professionalized, modern social science was taking root, and positivism was vying for intellectual hegemony with a revived Absolute Idealism. All of these things shaped first-generation pragmatism.

Despite similarities, the classic pragmatists forged distinct and sometimes competing modes of thought, and they bear different legacies for communication studies. One can begin by distinguishing Cambridge from Chicago pragmatism, with Peirce and James in the former camp, Dewey and Mead in the latter. The Cambridge duo was half a generation older, sat uneasily with the emerging research university, and was never attracted to Hegel in the way Dewey and Mead once were. Although the Chicago pragmatists eventually rejected philosophical Idealism, they brought from Hegel a communitarian social ontology that eventually led them to give the idea of communication a central place in their thought. Although attentive to communication, the Cambridge pragmatists never gave the term the same explicit attention. Still they offer important things to communication studies: Peirce a highly sophisticated semiotic theory and links between knowledge, reality, and communicative practices; and James a mode of inquiry open to the radically other and unwilling to reduce pluralistic truths to a singular system.

Cambridge Beginnings

Pragmatism traces its roots to an early 1870s reading group that half ironically called itself The Metaphysical Club. The Harvard-based group included James, Peirce, Nicholas St. John Green, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Chauncey Wright. All had either legal or scientific training, and each wanted to explore the implications of Darwinian theory. Green, largely forgotten today, urged the others to examine the practical significance of every proposition and, according to Peirce, insisted belief was “that upon which a man is prepared to act.” Here appeared one important element of pragmatist thought (Kuklick, 1977, pp. 48–54; Peirce, 1906, p. 270; see also Brent, 1993, chap. 2; Wiener, 1949, chap. 2).

As a material souvenir of the group, Peirce wrote an essay in 1872 (published as “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”) that set out key principles later associated with pragmatism. Attacking Cartesian introspective inquiry, Peirce (1878/1955a) argued that “the whole function of thought is to produce habits of action” and “what a thing means is simply what habits it in-volves” (p. 30). In much of Peirce’s work, the key habit was disciplined scientific investigation. Inquiry was a decidedly communal affair, so communication was central. He defined truth and reality as “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate” (p. 38). Logic was also “rooted in the social principle” (1878/1955b, p. 162) and inquiry conducted not by solitary thinkers but rather “for the community of philosophers” (1868/1955, p. 229). Peirce offered an anti-Cartesian philosophy opposed to monological reason and the introspective method and committed instead to communication as the basis of truth, logic, and, in Peirce’s (e.g., 1893/1955) grander religious moments, evolutionary love.

Peirce began developing his important semiotic theory in the late 1860s. As James Hoopes has pointed out, it offers an alternative to the Continental tradition that emerged from Ferdinand de Saussure’s lectures on linguistics (1906–1911) that subsequently shaped poststructuralism and Marxian cultural studies. While Saussure posited two elements arbitrarily connected with one another, signifier and signified (elements Derrida destabilized into endless free play), Peirce’s system had three elements: object, sign, and interpretant (see e.g., Peirce, 1868/1955, 1873/ 1991, 1897/1955; Hoopes, 1991). A sign stands for an object to an interpretant, which is a subsequent thought or action that determines the meaning of the sign. Thoughts are themselves signs that give rise to other signs, including the sign that is the self.² The interpretant anchors the signifying process with disciplined habits of thought and action. As a result, “Peirce’s semiotic was constructive rather than deconstructive” (Hoop...

Table of contents

• LEA’S COMMUNICATION SERIES
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Varieties of Pragmatism and Communication: Visions and Revisions From Peirce to Peters
• Chapter 2 Pragmatism as a Way of Inquiring With Special Reference to a Theory of Communication and the General Form of Pragmatic Social Theory
• Chapter 3 Transactional Philosophy and Communication Studies
• Chapter 4 William James and the Uncertain Universe
• Chapter 5 Art, the Public, and Deweyan Cultural Criticism
• Chapter 6 Dewey and Gadamer on Practical Reflection: Toward a Methodology for the Practical Disciplines
• Chapter 7 Truth or Consequences: Pragmatism, Relativism, and Ethics
• Chapter 8 Pragmatism and Mediated Communication
• Chapter 9 Shattering the Mirror: Linking Media-Effects Research and American Pragmatism
• Chapter 10 Intersections of Feminism and Pragmatism: Possibilities for Communication Theory and Research
• Chapter 11 Habermas, Dewey, and Pragmatism
• Chapter 12 Pragmatism and Tragedy, Communication and Hope: A Summary Story
• Author Index
• Subject Index