Introducing Pragmatism

A Tool for Rethinking Philosophy

Cornelis de Waal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000428421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This unique introduction fully engages and clearly explains pragmatism, an approach to knowledge and philosophy that rejects outmoded conceptions of objectivity while avoiding relativism and subjectivism. It follows pragmatism's focus on the process of inquiry rather than on abstract justifications meant to appease the skeptic. According to pragmatists, getting to know the world is a creative human enterprise, wherein we fashion our concepts in terms of how they affect us practically, including in future inquiry. This book fully illuminates that enterprise and the resulting radical rethinking of basic philosophical conceptions like truth, reality, and reason.

Author Cornelis de Waal helps the reader recognize, understand, and assess classical and current pragmatist contributions—from Charles S. Peirce to Cornel West—evaluate existing views from a pragmatist angle, formulate pragmatist critiques, and develop a pragmatist viewpoint on a specific issue.

The book discusses:

• Classical pragmatists, including Peirce, James, Dewey, and Addams;
• Contemporary figures, including Rorty, Putnam, Haack, and West;
• Connections with other twentieth-century approaches, including phenomenology, critical theory, and logical positivism;
• Peirce's pragmatic maxim and its relation to James's Will to Believe;
• Applications to philosophy of law, feminism, and issues of race and racism.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Philosophically, what characterizes the twentieth century is that old ways of thinking could no longer be relied upon. Theories of evolution, most prominently Darwin’s, opened up ways of looking at the world that no longer demanded fixed categories or a divine creator to explain the order of nature. Independently, advances in logic showed that traditional logic—which was long considered to represent rationality as God had bestowed it on us—is woefully out of touch with what is happening in the sciences. To make things worse, there appear to be numerous equally acceptable logics, so that one must choose which logic to apply. Something similar happened in Euclidean geometry, long considered the only way physical space could be. Mach and Einstein further showed that the very idea of absolute space and time—a core presupposition of Newtonian mechanics that carried deeply into modern philosophy—cannot be maintained. With it, we had to give up on the idea that the universe is some big empty space where things happen at set locations in a set order, as if in a watchmaker’s workshop. In consequence, the traditional notion of reality as a ready-made world created especially for us, and truth as how an all-knowing God takes it all in, can no longer be taken for granted. This has resulted in a rather peculiar situation. The nineteenth century witnessed enormous progress in the applied sciences, while at the same time, the foundations of science began to crumble. When it appeared that we got a better grip on the world, it became more difficult to argue that we can know its true nature.

It is not just in our conception of the external world that we see dramatic changes. When Descartes famously concluded “I think, therefore I am,” he assumed that he had an immediate, full, and transparent access to his own mind. Because how could it be otherwise? After Freud, however, this is no longer so obvious. Not only do we have only limited access to our own mind (merely the tip of the iceberg), but our mind is also very skilled at deceiving us, even (perhaps especially) when we reason. During the twentieth century it also becomes increasingly clear that rationality, though immensely powerful (especially when reinforced by technology) is neither neutral nor intrinsically good. As is well documented, both the natural and social sciences are painfully implicated in industrialized warfare, mass propaganda, genocide, and the creation of weapons that are capable of unprecedented destruction.

In brief, great shifts have been taking place in how we understand ourselves and the world we encounter. In this book, we look at pragmatism, an approach to philosophy that embodies one response to these shifts. The chapters that follow give you a thorough familiarity with the origin and history of pragmatism and guide you through some of the challenges of the twentieth century. The intention is not just to give you a working knowledge that will enable you to engage in current debates—both within pragmatism and in philosophy more generally—but also to set the stage for new strategies that will enable you to engage with the problems we face today.

Pragmatism originated in the early 1870s, when a small group of young men from Cambridge, Massachusetts, began to meet regularly to talk philosophy. The group includes William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Nicholas St. John Green. As Peirce later writes, “we called ourselves, half-ironically and half-defiantly ‘The Metaphysical Club,’—for agnosticism was riding its high horse, and was frowning severely upon all metaphysics” (EP2:399).¹ At some point their discussions congregate on Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as “that upon which a man is prepared to act.” Once we settled on that definition, Peirce later recalls, pragmatism follows almost instantly as its natural outcome.² This is not to say that the Metaphysical Club members think that this pragmatism is something entirely new—a revolutionary method that had never before been discovered. Rather, they see it as a conscious and systematic adoption of a method that philosophers have been practicing from antiquity onward, even if often unawares. To put it briefly, pragmatism originated from a certain fermentation of ideas within a small group of people that came together in the early 1870s in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Since pragmatism is generally considered to be an approach to philosophy, or a school within philosophy, we should first ask what philosophy is, or at least what pragmatists think it is. Returning to the Greek origin of the term, philosophy can be described as the exercise of a love of wisdom that is being engaged in for its own sake. According to Immanuel Kant, its main concern centers on three questions: What can I know?, What must I do?, and What may I hope?³ To this we can add a fourth question, one that becomes especially prominent within the twentieth century: Who, or what, are we?

Charles Peirce, who is generally acknowledged as having given birth to pragmatism, defines philosophy by contrasting it to the specialized sciences. He describes it broadly as the discipline that “contents itself with a more attentive scrutiny and comparison of the facts of everyday life, such as present themselves to every adult and sane person” (EP2:146; see also Chapter 6). Its aim, Peirce continues, is that of developing a comprehensive conception of the world and our relationship to it—in short, a Weltanschauung. Consequently, it seeks to address questions such as, What is truth?, What makes something real?, What do we mean by “a thing”?, etc. This view is partially reflected in the Oxford English Dictionary, which currently defines philosophy as the discipline that studies “the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, and the basis and limits of human understanding”—a definition that oddly leaves out ethics and a critical reflection on the human condition, something Peirce’s does not. In fact, within twentieth-century philosophy we see a growing divide between the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which is fairly represented by the Oxford dictionary, and the continental European tradition, which puts greater emphasis on the philosophers’ responsibility to reflect critically on the human condition. The American pragmatist Richard Rorty wryly observes that, in contrast to Europe, people in British and American philosophy departments who engage in the latter are not thought of as true philosophers. “The Anglo-American notion of what philosophers are good for,” he writes, “is at the opposite pole from Husserl’s claim, in The Crisis of the European Sciences, that only rigorous phenomenological analysis can save us from barbarism.”⁴ On the whole, pragmatism aims to remain clear from this divide, and when it encounters it, seeks to bridge it. As the pragmatist John Dewey puts it, aligning himself with both Rorty and Husserl, “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men” (MW10:46).

Having defined philosophy as the discipline that “contents itself with a more attentive scrutiny and comparison of the facts of everyday life,” Peirce observes that when we engage in it, we should not do it aimlessly, but we should do it deliberately. This means that we need to have some idea of what the outcome is likely to be. Philosophy, Peirce argues, is a deliberate, purpose-directed activity. And that, he continues, naturally leads to pragmatism (R478:4). In brief, for Peirce, pragmatism is what philosophy should be, and in part the aim of the present volume is to bear this out.

It is not Peirce, however, who brings pragmatism to the forefront of philosophy. That honor goes to William James. As a gifted lecturer and writer, James attracts much attention, and by the time of his death in 1910, most philosophers know about pragmatism and have an opinion about it, even if not always a positive one. James’s take on pragmatism, however, is quite different from Peirce’s, and we can discern in pragmatism a Peircean and a Jamesean strand that still exists today.

In his 1710 Principles of Human Knowledge, Bishop Berkeley famously remarks that philosophers are very good at confusing themselves and others. “Upon the whole,” he writes,

I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to ourselves. That we have first raised a dust and then complain, we cannot see.⁵

It is this propensity to confusion that Peirce’s pragmatism seeks to address. Peirce, as we will see, considers pragmatism primarily as a method for doing philosophy, one that aims to guarantee that the concepts we use have meaning. Concepts that have no conceivable practical consequences are to be thrown out as meaningless, and if the conceivable practical consequences of two concepts are the same, they are to be considered synonyms.

When James introduces pragmatism to mainstream philosophy, however, he uses an analogy to describe its core idea—an analogy that proved far too powerful for its own good. What we need to focus on, James writes, is the cash value of our concepts in terms of concrete experiences. James even comes to identify truth as the cash value of our ideas. The analogy sticks, but not in a good way. Pragmatism is quickly associated with crass American capitalism, even by those who are otherwise favorably disposed to it. It is interpreted as the apology of a culture where the value of a painting is settled on the auction block, and where the greatness of a book, movie, or theater production is determined by how much money it brings in. What doesn’t generate revenue is meaningless. Martin Heidegger dismissively calls it a Weltanschauung for engineers—a utilitarian philosophy that makes everything into an exploitable resource. Bertrand Russell, certainly no fan of Heidegger, similarly complains that it robs life “of all that gives it value, and [makes] man himself smaller by depriving the universe which he contemplates of all its splendour.”⁶ Similar sentiments are expressed by Max Horkheimer, who sees in it the philosophy of a society that has no time to spare for reflection or meditation. The British author and culture critic G.K. Chesterton sums it all up well when he writes, “Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.”⁷ Ironically, the main motivation that drove James is exactly the opposite of what he is being accused of. He hoped to restore a place for religious faith in an age that in his view has become overly materialistic and scientistic. Peirce expresses similar sentiments when he calls capitalism “the gospel of greed.”

It is fair to say that James’s cash-value analogy harmed the early European reception of pragmatism. As we will see, however, it did not stop it. Russell comes to embrace enough of it to make Frank Ramsey call him a pragmatist; the logical positivist Rudolf Carnap converts to pragmatism, thanks to Charles Morris; Horkheimer’s intellectual heirs embrace it; there are clear similarities between Heidegger and pragmatism, and so on. Not everyone is on board, though. Quite recently, the American bioethicist Leon Kass dismissed it as a thoughtless advance toward whatever serves expediency,⁸ and the Israeli jurist Michal Alberstein calls it “a philosophical discourse that is general, hysteric, external, practical, and progressive.”⁹

Unfair as these criticisms may be, the fact that pragmatism originates in America is not without significance. In general, we can say that philosophy is to an important extent always the expression of a culture. The shift from the schoolmen, with their focus on God, to modern philosophy, with its focus on science, is not due to some isolated insight but is intimately intertwined with developments such as the Protestant Reformation, the emergence of cities, the growth of the merchant class, and the invention of the printing press. As John Dewey keenly observes in Reconstruction in Philosophy, “The distinctive office, problems and subject matter of philosophy grow out of stresses and strains in the communit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Peirce and the Principle of Pragmatism
• 3 William James: Pragmatism and the Will to Believe
• 4 The Pragmatic Humanism of F.C.S. Schiller
• 5 European Reception: France and Italy
• 6 Peirce Revisited: The Normative Turn
• 7 Josiah Royce and George Herbert Mead
• 8 Pragmatism and the Problems of Life: Dewey, Addams, and Bourne
• 9 Conceptual Pragmatism: From Lewis to Davidson
• 10 The European Reception Revisited
• 11 The Neopragmatism of Richard Rorty
• 12 Hilary Putnam: Philosophy With a Human Face
• 13 Susan Haack: Reclaiming Pragmatism
• 14 Legal Pragmatism
• 15 Prophetic Pragmatism and Feminist Inspirations
• 16 Pragmatism and the End(s) of Philosophy
• Annotated Reading Guide
• References and Select Bibliography
• Index