Environmental Pragmatism

Eric Katz, Andrew Light

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135634391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Environmental pragmatism is a new strategy in environmental thought. It argues that theoretical debates are hindering the ability of the environmental movement to forge agreement on basic policy imperatives. This new direction in environmental thought moves beyond theory, advocating a serious inquiry into the merits of moral pluralism. Environmental pragmatism, as a coherent philosophical position, connects the methodology of classical American pragmatic thought to the explanation, solution and discussion of real issues.
This concise, well-focused collection is the first comprehensive presentation of environmental pragmatism as a new philosophical approach to environmental thought and policy.

Part 1

ENVIRONMENTAL THOUGHT AND CLASSICAL AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY

1

PRAGMATISM AND ENVIRONMENTAL THOUGHT

Kelly A. Parker

“Pragmatism” here refers to a school of philosophical thought – American pragmatism – and not to that shortsighted, allegedly “practical-minded” attitude towards the world that is a major obstacle to environmentally responsible behavior in our time.¹ The insight behind “environmental pragmatism” is that American pragmatism is a philosophy of environments. Although the founders of pragmatism rarely had occasion to write explicitly on what we would today call environmental concerns, the fundamental insights of environmental philosophy are implicit in their work. The observations that the human sphere is embedded at every point in the broader natural sphere, that each inevitably affects the other in ways that are often impossible to predict, and that values emerge in the ongoing transactions between humans and environments, for example, are all central concepts for the pragmatists – as for many contemporary philosophers of environment.

Part 1 of this essay outlines the main features of American pragmatism. So that readers new to pragmatism may more readily situate its main tenets with respect to other philosophical approaches, the major points are here presented as critical responses to familiar positions in epistemology, metaphysics, and value theory. Part 2 situates pragmatism with respect to some of the major issues in current ecophilosophy. Here, too, the presentation is largely a critical response to prevailing views. It must be stressed, however, that pragmatism is a constructive philosophical approach: the purpose of criticism, after all, is to open the way for new insight. Part 2 particularly stresses the question of a metaphysical grounding for environmental ethics, an area of environmental philosophy where pragmatism may have the most to offer.

1 PRAGMATISM

Pragmatism emerged as a school of thought around the beginning of this century.² The major early pragmatists were Charles S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. We might also include Alfred North Whitehead and George Santayana as “honorary” pragmatists who rejected the label, but some of whose views bear close affinity to pragmatism.

Although the pragmatists’ views are certainly diverse when it comes to particulars, some characteristic themes appear throughout their writings. First, all agree in their rejection of foundationalist epistemology. There are no innate beliefs, intuitions or other indubitable “givens” upon which our knowledge is built, or in terms of which the truth or meaning of concepts can be analyzed. To say that a belief is true, according to James, is to say that the belief succeeds in making sense of the world and is not contradicted in experience.³ Peirce’s version of pragmatism asserts that the meaning of an idea consists entirely in the effects that the idea could in principle have in subsequent thought and experience.⁴ We have no absolutely indubitable beliefs; only a stock of importantly undoubted ones. We have no absolutely clear, immutable concepts; we do have many concepts that are sufficiently clear and stable to let us make pretty good sense of experience. Experience, however, can at any time expose our settled beliefs as false, or reveal an unsatisfactory vagueness or confusion in our concepts. Knowing is thus an open-ended quest for greater certainty in our understanding; if we forget that our understanding is fallible, the philosophical quest for wisdom may devolve into a pathological crusade for absolute certainty.

The most interesting aspect of pragmatist epistemology for ecophilosophers is its rejection of the dualistic “spectator theory” of knowledge and its companion, the simple “correspondence theory” of truth. To object to James’ definition (as many have) because it does not make truth consist in the conformity of a belief in the knower’s mind to the objective state of things in the external world, is to miss what the pragmatists have to say about the nature of mind, the world and the activity of knowing.

It often comes across, even in the hands of those friendly to pragmatism, that pragmatism is only a theory of truth. This is as correct, and as incomplete, as saying that democracy is only a theory of political sovereignty. In both cases, the theories have significant practical implications. It is in tracing out these implications that we can begin to see ourselves and our world in a new light.

The founders of pragmatism recognized the philosophical implications of evolutionary theory. The characteristics and activities of any organism are always understood in light of the organism’s relations to its environments. The human capacities of thinking and knowing are no exception. Consciousness, reason, imagination, language and sign use (mind, in short) are seen as natural adaptations that help the human organism to get along in the world.

The world we inhabit is the world as known. Its fabric is woven of a plurality of phenomena which can be functionally distinguished into two general types – though we fall into paradox and confusion if this functional distinction is uncritically taken as a metaphysical one. The world of experience deals harshly with absolute distinctions, at whatever level they are made. On the one hand, however, we can identify the matrix of conceptual constructs, both tacit and theoretical, that bring order to raw experience. On the other hand, we find the “stuff” of chaotic, unassimilated raw experience. The world we live in is surrounded by a fringe of the unknown, an ineffable but insistent existential reality that is larger than ourselves and our settled knowledge.⁵ It is on this fringe, and in those parts of our knowledge that occasionally become unsettled, that the transformative activity of knowing goes on.

Mind is not apart from the world; it is a part of the world. “Knowing the world” is not a detached activity. It is, rather, a mutual transaction between the organism and its surroundings. In this transaction an uncertain, doubtful, indeterminate situation is reconstructed so as to make more sense, to be more intelligible.⁶ The process of reconstruction transforms both the knowing subject and the known object. T S. Eliot described his poetry as “a raid on the inarticulate.”⁷ The phrase aptly characterizes any mode of knowing, and it is crucial to note that, in a raid, both sides are liable to be affected in unforeseen ways. In creating a poetic vision, developing a scientific theory, or articulating a conception of ethics, we literally transform both ourselves and the world as it previously stood. Subjects and objects are not absolute entities; knower and known are inextricably twined together from the beginning. Subjects and objects are nexus of relations in an ever-shifting universe of complex relationships. The venerable distinction between subject and object is thus a convenience of speech that does not bear up under metaphysical scrutiny. It names an important but objectively vague distinction between two poles in a primordially continuous field of experience.⁸ Any reconciliation between self and world in the act of knowing is tentative and fallible. To say that knowledge is true means only that the reconciliation is satisfactory. To say that it is absolutely true means that it will never stand in need of readjustment – something we can perhaps accomplish, but can never judge with certainty to be the case. Experience may shock us into doubt tomorrow.

Clearly, this epistemology involves a fundamental critique of traditional metaphysics, but the pragmatists’ attitude towards metaphysical speculation was ambivalent. Peirce reportedly opened one lecture at the Johns Hopkins University with a wholesale denunciation of metaphysics as mere moonshine unworthy of attention. He ended the same lecture by urging his students to establish a metaphysical club where these crucial issues could be discussed. The story nicely illustrates what I take to be the pragmatists’ typical attitude: traditional accounts of reality are so misleading as to be best ignored, but all the same, we need a. sound metaphysics. As Peirce observed, those who resolve not to engage in metaphysical speculation do not thereby avoid metaphysics – they only condemn themselves to seeing the world through the filter of whatever “crude and uncriticized metaphysics” they have picked up along the way.⁹

Peirce and Royce enthusiastically embraced the project of articulating a metaphysics; James and Dewey were often reluctant to use the word except in a pejorative sense. Whether they called it metaphysics or not, though, the pragmatists were all concerned to develop an analysis of reality that both makes sense of experience and does not overstep the bounds of knowledge legitimately derived from experience. (Peirce and James frequently cite Hegel as a philosopher whose speculative system was a spectacular failure in both respects.) The value of metaphysical thought depends upon its making only justifiable assumptions and on following a methodology that allows for correction of its assertions.

Immanuel Kant provided the starting point for pragmatic metaphysics. The noumenal world, the world as it is in itself independent of the ordering categories of the mind, is by definition incapable of entering into knowledge or experience. To a pragmatist, the concept of a world, entity or property existing apart from the ordering influence of mind is strictly meaningless. To speak of the world at all is thus to speak of what Kant called the phenomenal world. To be real is to be capable of entering into experience; a thing’s effects, its relations to other phenomena, are thus all there is to be known about the thing. The early pragmatists accordingly dropped talk of forms, essences and substances, and set about developing a new metaphysics born of experience. Their resulting views tend to cut across such standard philosophical dichotomies as “idealism vs. realism.”

While it is wrong to suggest that there is a “consensus metaphysics” among the pragmatists (and recognizing that “neo-pragmatists” such as Richard Rorty would maintain that it is a mistake to talk about metaphysics at all), we can identify some characteristic themes in pragmatic thought about the world. There is an irreducible pluralism in the world we encounter. There is the idea (supported by contemporary physics) that indeterminacy and chance are real features of the world. Change, development, and novelty are everywhere the rule. The pragmatists also attend to certain common – perhaps even universal – structures and relations that appear throughout our experience. Pragmatism, then, sees reality as process and development, and sees beings as relationally defined centers of meaning rather than as singular entities that simply stand alongside one another in the world. It emphasizes not substantial beings, but interrelations, connectedness, transactions and entanglements as constitutive of reality. All of this is based on rigorous attention to what is actually there in experience, and not on what this or that philosophy suggests we should find. This commitment to experience itself as the primary authority in speculative matters led James to call his philosophy “radical empiricism.”¹⁰

The pragmatists proposed reforms of epistemology and metaphysics that turn Enlightenment thought inside out. The implications of pragmatic thought about value are no less revolutionary. The central emphases on experience, and on the experimental approach to establishing our knowledge and practices, make for a value theory that highlights the aesthetic dimension, sees ethics as a process of continual mediation of conflict in an ever-changing world and lays the groundwork for a social and political philosophy that places democratic and humanitarian concerns at the center of social arrangements.

All value emerges in experience. The question of ethics – “What is good?” – ultimately brings us back to concrete questions about what is experienced as good in the interaction of the organism with its environment. The inquiry does not end with. the individual’s affective experience, of course, but it recognizes this as the only possible birthplace of value. In determining the aesthetic significance of experience, pragmatists maintain a Jamesian radical empiricism: nothing is introduced that is not experienced, but due consideration must be afforded to all that is experienced.¹¹ The first question about value, then, is not “What ought we to desire?” but “What do people in fact desire, and why?” The answers are many and complex, and are not fully reducible, for example, to the categories of a utilitarian pleasure–pain calculus.

In aesthetics, as in metaphysics, the sheer pluralism that appears in lived experience gives us pause. The valued elements are there, and not just in private consciousness. Satisfactions arise in the semiprivate, semi-public domain that is the organism-in-environment, and as such they have significance not only for the being that apprehends them but also for the environment itself and for all those other beings that inhabit it. The diversity and tangibility of aesthetic values, though, must give rise to conflict as soon as more than one valuing organism inhabits an environment.¹²

Thus arises the need for ethics, a systematic understanding of the relations that ought to obtain among various values, a theory of what is right. Based as it is on the view that value arises in a dynamic, infinitely complex system of organisms-in-environments, it is a basic tenet...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Environmental pragmatism and environmental ethics as contested terrain
• Part 1 Environmental Thought and Classical American Philosophy
• 1 Pragmatism and Environmental Thought
• 2 How Pragmatism is an Environmental Ethic
• 3 Nature as Culture John Dewey's pragmatic naturalism
• 4 The Environmental Value in G. H. Mead's Cosmology
• 5 The Constancy of Leopold's Land Ethic
• Part 2 Pragmatist Theory and Environmental Philosphy
• 6 Integration or Reduction Two approaches to environmental values
• 7 Before Environmental Ethics
• 8 Compatibilism in Political Ecology
• Part 3 Pragmatist Approaches To Environmental Problems
• 9 Pragmatism and Policy The Case of Water
• 10 Towards a Pragmatic Approach to Definition “Wetlands” and the politics of meaning
• 11 A Pluralistic, Pragmatic and Evolutionary Approach to Natural Resource Management
• 12 Laws of Nature VS. Laws of Respect Non-violence in Practice in Norway
• 13 Teaching Environmental Ethics as a Method of Conflict Management
• Part 4 Environmental Pragmatism An Exchange
• 14 Beyond Intrinsic Value Pragmatism in environmental ethics
• 15 Searching for Intrinsic Value Pragmatism and despair in environmental ethics
• 16 Unfair to Swamps Unfair to Foundations?
• 17 Environmental Pragmatism as Philosophy or Metaphilosophy? On the Weston–Katz debate
• Index