Pragmatism

Standford Encyclopeida of Philosophy:

Pragmatism was a philosophical tradition that originated in the United States around 1870. The most important of the ‘classical pragmatists’ were Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859-1952). The influence of pragmatism declined during the first two thirds of the twentieth century, but it has undergone a revival since the 1970s with philosophers being increasingly willing to use the writings and ideas of the classical pragmatists, and also a number of thinkers, such as Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom developing philosophical views that represent later stages of the pragmatist tradition. The core of pragmatism was the pragmatist maxim, a rule for clarifying the contents of hypotheses by tracing their ‘practical consequences’. In the work of Peirce and James, the most influential application of the pragmatist maxim was to the concept of truth. But the pragmatists have also tended to share a distinctive epistemological outlook, a fallibilist anti-Cartesian approach to the norms that govern inquiry.

 

1. ‘Pragmatism’ and pragmatism

When William James published a series of lectures on ‘Pragmatism: A New Name for an Old way of Thinking’ in 1907, he began by identifying ‘The Present Dilemma in Philosophy’ (1907: 9ff), a fundamental and apparently irresoluble clash between two ways of thinking about things. He promised that pragmatism would show us the way to overcome this dilemma and, having thus shown us its importance, he proceeded, in the second lecture, to explain ‘What Pragmatism Means’.  

James's dilemma is a familiar one: it is a form of the question of how we can reconcile the claims of science, on the one hand, with those of religion and morality on the other. James introduces it by observing that the history of philosophy is ‘to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments’, between the ‘tough minded’ and the ‘tender minded’. The tough minded have an empiricist commitment to experience and going by ‘the facts’, while the tender-minded have more of a taste for a priori principles which appeal to the mind. The tender minded tend to be idealistic, optimistic and religious, while the tough minded are normally materialist, pessimistic and irreligious. The tender-minded are ‘free-willist’ and dogmatic; the tough minded are ‘fatalistic’ and sceptical.

By the early twentieth century, ‘never were so many men of a decidedly empiricist proclivity’: ‘our children … are almost born scientific’ (1907: 14f). But this has not weakened religious belief. People need a philosophy that is both empiricist in its adherence to facts yet finds room for religious belief. But all that is on offer is ‘an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough for your purpose’ (1907: 15f). The challenge is to show how to reconcile ‘the scientific loyalty to facts’ with ‘the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type.’ We must reconcile empiricist epistemic responsibility with moral and religious optimism. Pragmatism is presented as the ‘mediating philosophy’ that enables us to overcome the distinction between the tender-minded and the tough-minded: we need to show how adherence to tough-minded epistemic standards does not prevent our adopting the kind of worldview to which the tender-minded aspire. Once we use what he introduced as the ‘pragmatic method’ to clarify our understanding of truth, of free will, or of religious belief the disputes—which we despaired of settling intellectually—begin to dissolve. For James, then, Pragmatism is important because it offers a way of overcoming the dilemma, a way of seeing that, for example, science, morality and religion are not in competition.

William James thus presented pragmatism as a ‘method for settling metaphysical disputes that might otherwise be interminable.’ (1907: 28) Unless some ‘practical difference’ would follow from one or the other side's being correct, the dispute is idle.

[T]he tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. (1907: 29)

The lectures explained this with a memorable illustration of pragmatism in action.  This shows how the maxim enables us to defuse an apparently insoluble (albeit ‘trivial’) dispute. On a visit to the mountains, his friends engage in a ‘ferocious metaphysical dispute’ about a squirrel that was hanging on to one side of a tree trunk while a human observer was standing on the other side:

This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the tree between himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? (1907: 27f)

James proposed to solve the problem by pointing out that which answer is correct depends on what you ‘practically mean’ by ‘going round’. If you mean passing from north of him to east, then south, then west, then the answer to the question is ‘yes’. If, on the other hand, you mean first in front of him, then to his right, then behind him, and then to his left, before returning to being in front of him again, then the answer is ‘no’. Pragmatic clarification disambiguates the question, and once that is done, all dispute comes to an end. The ‘pragmatic method’ promises to eliminate all apparently irresoluble metaphysical disputes.

So James offers his pragmatism as a technique for clarifying concepts and hypotheses. He proposed that if we do this, metaphysical disputes that appear to be irresoluble will be dissolved. When philosophers suppose that free will and determinism are in conflict, James responds that once we compare the practical consequences of determinism being true with the practical consequences of our possessing freedom of the will, we find that there is no conflict.

As James admitted, he explained the pragmatic method through examples rather than by giving a detailed analysis of what it involves. He did very little to explain exactly what ‘practical consequences’ are. He made no claim to originality: ‘Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude’, although he acknowledged that it did so ‘in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed’ (1907: 31). It shared with other forms of empiricism an ‘anti-intellectualist tendency’ (ibid), and it recognized that theories (and presumably concepts) should be viewed as ‘instruments, not answers to enigmas’. We identify the ‘practical consequences’ of a theory, concept or hypothesis by describing its role as an instrument in thought, in inquiry and in practical deliberation.

James also admitted that he was not the first to defend ‘the principle of pragmatism.’ (1907: 29). The principle of pragmatism was ‘the principle of Peirce’ his friend and colleague of many years. Published in 1878 in a paper called ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’ (EP2: 124-141), it ‘lay entirely unnoticed by anyone for twenty years’ until James defended it before the Philosophical Union in the University of California in 1898. If we want a detailed formulation of pragmatism, we must go back to Peirce's original formulation, although we must also be mindful that the differences between the pragmatisms of Peirce and James may be greater than James acknowledged. And although ‘the principle of Peirce’ was published in 1878, it didn't introduce the word ‘pragmatism;’ it was only after James's 1898 address that ‘pragmatism’ was used publicly in philosophy; and it was only after James's defence of pragmatism that it became famous.

Pragmatism had been born in the discussions at a ‘metaphysical club’ in Harvard around 1870 (see Menand 1998). Peirce and James participated in these discussions along with some other philosophers and philosophically inclined lawyers. As we have already noted, Peirce developed these ideas in his publications from the 1870s. And James's lectures in 1898 and later represented the next stages in the development of pragmatism. Both James and Peirce used ‘pragmatism’ as the name of a method, principle, or ‘maxim’ for clarifying concepts and hypotheses and for identifying empty disputes. As we shall see there were differences in how they understood the method and in their views of how it was to be applied.

Later thinkers, for example John Dewey and C.I.Lewis, developed pragmatism further. Although they continued to refer back to Peirce's 1878 paper as the source of pragmatism, and they continued to regard concepts and hypotheses as functioning as instruments, they did not always think of ‘pragmatism’ as denoting ‘the principle of Peirce’. Dewey once described pragmatism as the systematic exploration of what he called ‘the logic and ethics of scientific inquiry.’ (LW: 15.24) Both Peirce and James combined their pragmatism with a distinctive epistemological outlook, one which rejected the Cartesian focus upon the importance of defeating skepticism while endorsing the fallibilist view that any of our beliefs and methods could, in principle, turn out to be flawed. This was tied to the study of the normative standards we should adopt when carrying out inquiries, when trying to find things out. Inquiry is an activity, and this sort of approach, in Dewey's hands, led to a rejection of there being a sharp dichotomy between theoretical judgments and practical judgments. Thus while Peirce and James used ‘pragmatism’ in a narrow sense, as referring to Peirce's principle, others may have used it in a wide sense as standing for a particular approach to understanding inquiry and the normative standards that govern it. Sections 2 and 3 will be concerned, primarily, with pragmatism in the narrow sense. Then, in section 4, we shall explore some of the views that are associated with pragmatism in the wider sense.

 

 

 

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