A Philosophy of Culture

The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism

Morton White

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400825356
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

In this book, one of America's leading philosophers offers a sweeping reconsideration of the philosophy of culture in the twentieth century. Morton White argues that the discipline is much more important than is often recognized, and that his version of holistic pragmatism can accommodate its breadth. Going beyond Quine's dictum that philosophy of science is philosophy enough, White suggests that it should contain the word "culture" in place of "science." He defends the holistic view that scientific belief is tested by experience but that such testing is rightly applied to systems or conjunctions of beliefs, not isolated beliefs. He adds, however, that we test ethical systems by appealing to feelings of moral obligation as well as to sensory experiences.
In the course of his lucidly written analysis, White treats central issues in the philosophy of science, of religion, of art, of history, of law, of politics, and of morality. While doing so he examines the views of Quine, Tarski, Goodman, and Rawls, and shows how they are related to the approaches of Peirce, James, Duhem, Russell, Dewey, Carnap, and the later Wittgenstein. He also discusses the ideas of the legal philosophers Holmes and Hart from a holistic standpoint.
White demonstrates how his version of pragmatism bridges the traditional gulf between analytic and synthetic truth as well as that between moral and scientific belief. Indeed, the high point of the book is a brilliant presentation of his view of ethics, based on the idea that our scientific theories face the tribunal of observation whereas our ethical views face the joint tribunal of observation and moral feeling. Scholars and students of the history of ideas and of philosophy will welcome A Philosophy of Culture as the highly finished product of more than sixty years of philosophical reflection by an important thinker.

VII

Holistic Pragmatism and the

Philosophy of History

ALTHOUGH THE ORIGIN OF HOLISTIC PRAGMATISM is often located in the writings of Duhem, it is fair to say that a germ of it is present in the so-called regularity or covering law theory of explanation espoused much earlier by Hume and Mill. As we have seen, one of the main tenets of holistic pragmatism is that scientists test conjunctions of statements rather than isolated statements, whereas the main tenet of the regularity theory is that a singular causal or explanatory statement that Socrates died because he drank hemlock is established by showing that everyone who drinks hemlock soon dies, that Socrates drank hemlock at a certain time, and that therefore Socrates died soon afterward. Here we do not support our singular causal statement by itself unless we hold the dubious view that we can directly see a causal connection between Socrates’ drinking hemlock and his dying without appealing to any general truths. Instead, according to the regularity theory, we support it by appealing to a well-confirmed conjunction of statements—one universal, the others singular—which is what makes our argument a simple holistic one.

In the middle of the twentieth century, the regularity theory of causal explanation advanced by Hume and Mill was carefully developed by Carl G. Hempel and Karl Popper, both of whom applied it to historical explanation.¹ Their investigations were typical of work carried out by logically oriented philosophers of history, investigations that differed dramatically from the theorizing of Vico, Hegel, and Marx in earlier centuries. Because historical speculation was attacked in the twentieth century for employing such dubious notions as the World Spirit and for lacking empirical support, its reputation declined sharply among British and American philosophers who abandoned neo-Hegelian idealism and who came to look down on what the Oxford epistemologist H. H. Price once called the dreary subject of Kulturphilosophie. Even when Quine tried to blur the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science by accepting on empirical grounds the existence of the sets needed by classical mathematics,² he certainly did not seek to inspire interest in historical speculation. So, for a variety of reasons, the preoccupation of Vico, Hegel, Comte, and Marx with the cycles or stages through which societies go took a backseat to interest in the method of historical inquiry. Isaiah Berlin, staunch admirer of Vico that he was, had little sympathy for Vico’s obsession with triads or with his parallels between the patterns of rise, apogee, and fall of civilizations, calling Vico’s speculative theory “the first in a series of fanciful constructions which culminate in the morphologies of history of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Comte, Ballanche, Spengler, Sorokin, Toynbee”³—a group of thinkers who did not fill Berlin with admiration. However, while many twentieth-century philosophers of history dissociated themselves from those constructions, their interest in historical method should not be confused with the professional historian’s technical interest in the tools of textual criticism, in the method of dating coins and documents, or in the establishment of authorship. So-called analytic, critical, and linguistic philosophers of history are more concerned with the role of general statements in historical explanation and the role that the historian’s interest plays when a narrative is presented.

One of the primary aims of the historian is to tell a story that is mainly concerned with a group of persons and in the case of biography with one; and sometimes he writes a history of a belief or of a set of beliefs. That distinguishes the historian’s task from that of the physicist, whose main aim is to present theories and laws; it also distinguishes it from that of the moralist, who tries to guide and justify action by citing moral principles and singular statements of fact. The historian’s causal explanations usually rely on laws or generalizations that are far less speculative than those advanced by Hegel and Marx, generalizations that appear in sciences like psychology, sociology, and economics or in that informal discipline or institution called common sense. Furthermore, it is the historian’s interest that determines the selection of what is to be explained and what explains it. One of the main tasks of the critical or analytic philosophy of history, therefore, is to say how generalization—whether homemade by the historian or borrowed from other disciplines—plays a part in historical explanation, and how a historian’s judgments of importance or interest operate in the construction of a narrative. The historian seeks to tell the truth as natural and social scientists do, but his main aim is not to generalize. When telling a story, he is concerned with what Alcibiades did and suffered, as Aristotle said, or with what a group of people did and suffered—but telling a story about Alcibiades or the Greek people is not a matter of writing or uttering a short sentence of the kind that might appear on a gravestone.Telling a story is writing or uttering a comparatively long conjunction of interconnected causal statements that depend on general statements and that focus on the doings of a person or of a group of persons in an effort to show how that person or group developed from an earlier stage.

A history, like a scientific theory, should lead logically to statements that can be confirmed by experience, whereas a theoretical scientist who accepts the kinetic theory of gases or Newton’s law of gravitation takes deductive steps when deriving less general laws while en route to testing by experience. In the course of a narrative, the historian typically says that because Japan lacked foodstuffs at the beginning of the Meiji era, it became a maritime nation; but when the physicist says that Boyle’s Law is true because the kinetic theory of gases is, the physicist usually intends to assert a deductive relation rather than a relation of causal efficacy between the theory and the law—to assert that the law can be deduced from the kinetic theory and other statements. Yet, though the historian does not deduce the singular statement that Japan became a maritime nation directly from the singular statement that it lacked foodstuffs, general truths may play a part in his thinking. When attempting to defend the singular causal statement that links these two statements, the historian may do so by deducing the statement that Japan became a maritime nation from the statement that it lacked foodstuffs and a general statement, thereby supporting it by means of a miniature Duhemian conjunction.

Generalization and Historical Explanation

If a historian says that a singular causal statement is true if and only if there is a general statement linking Japan’s lacking food in the Meiji era and Japan’s becoming a maritime nation, he may be asked to specify that general statement. One temptation is to answer that the relevant law or general statement is “Whenever a nation lacks a steady supply of food, it becomes a maritime nation,” but such a simple generalization is often false, as it is in this case. That is why, when Arnold Toynbee maintained that Holland became a prosperous nation merely because it was responding to the challenge of the sea, his Dutch critic Pieter Geyl replied that we cannot attribute Holland’s prosperity simply to the challenge of the sea, because the alleged law, “Whenever a nation is challenged by the sea, it prospers,” is false as it stands.⁴ Geyl’s point was that other events and circumstances combined with the sea’s challenge to produce Holland’s success: for example, its excellent soil, the expertise in dyke building that it had learned from the Romans, and the excellent maritime situation created by its great ports. This point committed Geyl to accepting the more complex generalization: “Whenever a nation is challenged by the sea, and it has excellent soil, and it is expert at dyke building, and it has an excellent maritime situation, it prospers.”

But suppose that this enlarged generalization also turns out to be false. In that case, Geyl would probably search for still other factors that would turn it into a true generalization if he were confident that the combination of factors first mentioned by him were partly responsible for Holland’s success. If Geyl knew what the missing factors were, he would be able to present a full-fledged deductive explanation; but how would Geyl know that there is such a full-fledged explanation if he could not produce these supplementary factors? How does he know that there are other features of Holland that, together with the features he mentions, constitute what Mill called the whole cause of Holland’s prosperity? Even to say that certain factors are partial or contributing causes, he must know that there is a whole cause of which they are parts, and so the question arises: How does Geyl show that there is a whole cause and therefore that there is a general truth of the kind that he needs if he cannot say what that general truth is? He may attempt to do this by adducing statistical evidence that justifies his saying that there is such a law.Medical doctors frequently make such an inference from statistical evidence to the assertion that there is a causal connection between taking a certain medicine and curing a disease, and I think historians do something similar when they present explanations that rest on statistical correlations even though they may not be as likely as medical researchers to present those correlations.

Since I have discussed this question at length in another place,⁵ I will be comparatively brief here. First of all, we must recognize that it is very difficult to support a statement that there is an explanation of a certain kind if we cannot produce such an explanation. If I say “Someone hates John,” I can support my statement by mentioning Jane, who hates him. But when I cannot mention a particular person who hates John and yet persist in saying that someone hates him, I am in a tight spot. Of course, I may give up my statement that someone hates John, and the counterpart to this would be to recant my statement that there is a conjunction of factors and a general truth that constitute a full-fledged explanation of Holland’s prosperity. But, as I have said, even if the historian claims to present a partial or contributory cause instead of the whole cause of Holland’s prosperity, he implies that there is a general truth that links all the contributory or partial causes with Holland’s success. Philosophers who find this situation disturbing may respond differently. Some say that the trouble lies in the requirement that the generalization in a fullfledged explanation be universal, such as “Whenever a nation is challenged by the sea, and it has excellent soil, and it is expert at dyke building, and it has an excellent maritime situation, it prospers.” Instead, they say, the supporting generalization need only begin with the words “Usually when” instead of “Whenever”—the historian need only produce or assert the existence of an explanatory argument whose major premise asserts a high probability. To this other philosophers reply that using a statistical generalization as a premise will not do, because Holland may have been one of the cases that the statistical generalization does not cover—and so, if we want to know what explains Holland’s prosperity, we should not be satisfied by talk about what is true for the most part. An appeal to statistical regularity will not satisfy these philosophers; only the production of a strict regularity will suffice.

In reaction to such a criticism of the regularity theory, some philosophers have argued that we should abandon it altogether because it just doesn’t fit history; they hold that it is a mistake to try to squeeze history into a Procrustean bed made for natural science.While rejecting a regularity theory of historical explanation, R. G.Collingwood said that all history is the history of human thought.⁶ He admitted that natural science, which he contrasted with history, explains a particular piece of litmus paper’s turning pink by saying that all pieces of litmus paper that are dipped in acid turn pink, and also saying that the particular piece of paper was dipped in acid.But, according to Collingwood, when a historian asks why Brutus stabbed Caesar, the question he means to ask is “What did Brutus think which made him decide to stab Caesar?”; and this, Collingwood also says, cannot be answered in accordance with the regularity theory of explanation. Unfortunately, however, Collingwood oscillates when he tries to tell us what the explained event is on his view.Sometimes he says it is Brutus’s thought that Caesar’s constitutional policy was wrong; sometimes he says it is the stabbing itself; and at still other times it is something that Collingwood says has two sides:an inside which is a thought and an outside which is a stabbing. If this unity or combination of the outside and inside of an event⁷ is what is explained by historians, we may ask what the relation is between Brutus’s inside thought that Caesar’s constitutional policy was wrong and the Collingwoodian combination of that inside thought and Brutus’s outside blood-spilling.

Suppose we express such a Collingwoodian explanation by means of the following strange sentence in which Brutus’s thought is the explainer, so to speak, and the conjunction of Brutus’s thought and his action is what is explained: “Since Brutus thought Caesar’s constitutional policy was wrong, Brutus thought Caesar’s constitutional policy was wrong and Brutus spilled Caesar’s blood.” Here the antecedent, the statement of the explainer, is “inside” the consequent because it is a logical conjunct of the latter. But if we apply the logical principle that “Since p, then p and q” is equivalent to “Since p, then q” to our “since”-statement, we see that it is equivalent to the sensible statement “Since Brutus thought Caesar’s constitutional policy was wrong, Brutus spilled Caesar’s blood,” where the antecedent statement about Brutus’s thought is no longer inside the consequent statement of effect. We therefore find ourselves making a straightforward statement asserting a causal connection between an “inside” thought or belief and an “outside” action, a statement that I think may be interpreted in accordance with the regularity theory of causal explanation. Moreover, even though Brutus went through a moral argument supporting his thought or belief that Caesar’s policy was wrong, the connection between the conclusion of that argument and his killing Caesar is causal. The fact that Brutus arrived at his conclusion about the wrongness of Caesar’s policy by moral reasoning does not militate against viewing the connection between his concluding belief and his action in this way. A belief or thought may explain an action, and we may show that it does by appealing to a general statement about Brutus which says that whenever he is in a certain state and in certain circumstances, and believes that an action is wrong, he acts in a certain way.

Turning from Collingwood’s criticism of the regularity theory, I now want to consider another objection to using it when analyzing the explanation of an event like that of Holland’s prosperity—an objection made by philosophers who think that historians do not appeal to regularities. Suppose we support an explanation of Holland’s rise to prosperity by appealing to...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Prologue
• I Holistic Pragmatism and the Philosophy of Culture
• II William James: Psychologist and Philosopher of Religion
• III John Dewey's Philosophy of Art
• IV The Dualisms of Earlier Pragmatism
• V Early Epistemological Holism and the Dualisms of Logical Empiricism
• VI Holistic Pragmatism and Natural Science: Tarski and Quine
• VII Holistic Pragmatism and the Philosophy of History
• VIII Philosophy of Art as Philosophy of Language: Nelson Goodman
• IX Rule, Ruling, and Prediction in the Law: Hart v. Holmes
• X Holistic Pragmatism, Ethics, and Rawls's Theory of Justice
• XI Philosophy as Philosophy of Culture