Pragmatism

Peirce — pronounced "purse" — was the son of the Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce. He worked thirty years for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, doing pendulum experiments to measure gravity. He was a logician of genius, a careless careerist, an unstable husband, and the father of three of the most important fields of twentieth-century thought: pragmatism, semiotics, and the logic of relations.

He coined "pragmatism" in conversation at the Metaphysical Club, Cambridge, around 1872 — a group that included William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Chauncey Wright. When James began promoting pragmatism in popular lectures from 1898 onward, Peirce felt his careful method was being misrepresented, and renamed his version "pragmaticism" — "ugly enough," he said, "to be safe from kidnappers."

The four ways of fixing belief (1877)

1. Tenacity: hold on to your existing beliefs, ignore contradictions.
2. Authority: believe what the institution says.
3. A priori: believe what is "agreeable to reason" — i.e., to your taste.
4. Science: let belief be fixed by something independent of any of us — by inquiry that is open to revision.

Three signs (semiotics)

Peirce distinguished icons (signs by resemblance — a portrait), indices (signs by causal connection — smoke for fire), and symbols (signs by convention — the word "fire"). The triadic theory of signs is one of the founding works of modern semiotics.

The older brother of the novelist Henry James. Trained as a physician, he was Harvard's first professor of psychology, then of philosophy. His Principles of Psychology (1890), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and Pragmatism (1907) made him the most-read American philosopher of his generation.

James turned Peirce's careful maxim into a popular philosophical method.

Or, more carefully: "An idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives." This sentence has caused more trouble than any other in pragmatism. James meant: an idea earns truth-status by what it does in the long run of inquiry, by how it links up with other beliefs and experiences. Critics — Bertrand Russell most loudly — read him as endorsing whatever it is profitable to believe. The disagreement is not yet entirely settled.

The squirrel (1907)

James opens Pragmatism with a camping anecdote. The hikers are arguing whether a man who walks around a tree-trunk on the opposite side of which a squirrel keeps scuttling has, or has not, "gone round" the squirrel. James intervenes: it depends on what you mean by "round." If you mean facing-each-cardinal-direction-relative-to-the-squirrel — yes. If you mean facing-front-back-left-right-of-the-squirrel — no. The dispute is verbal. The pragmatic maxim applied: which practical difference does the dispute mark?

The will to believe (1896)

"Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds." When evidence is genuinely insufficient and the decision is forced, momentous, and live — you may rationally let your needs settle it. Famously applied to religious belief, controversially.

Dewey lived for 92 years and wrote for nearly seventy of them — 37 volumes in the standard edition. The bibliography is intimidating; the underlying view is simple. Inquiry is what we do when habits break down. A problem arises; we form a hypothesis; we test it in action; the situation is reorganised. Knowing is a feature of doing, not an inner mirror of an outer world.

Dewey's The Quest for Certainty (1929) argues that the entire Western tradition since Plato has been infected by the search for an unchanging realm "behind" the changing world. The pragmatist gives up the quest. We deal with what changes; we redirect inquiry from being to becoming, from contemplation to action.

Education (Dewey's other great theme)

Dewey founded the University of Chicago Laboratory School in 1896 to put his theories to work. Children learn by doing; the curriculum should grow from their experience; democracy and education are tied at the root. Democracy and Education (1916) is read worldwide.

Art (Art as Experience, 1934)

Aesthetic experience is not a special precinct walled off from ordinary life. It is the fullness of any experience that has unity, intensity, and an intelligible course. The Lascaux paintings are art; so, when conditions are right, is the cooking of a meal.

Rorty was trained in analytic philosophy and demolished its self-image from inside. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) argued that the central metaphor of modern epistemology — the mind as a mirror of the world — should be retired. Knowledge is conversation, not reflection. There is nothing for our beliefs to mirror; there are only further beliefs, with which they cohere or do not.

From there Rorty develops what he calls "ironist liberalism." The ironist takes their own deepest commitments to be contingent — historically situated, not grounded in any non-circular justification. The liberal believes cruelty is the worst thing we do. The ironist liberal holds both: contingency about her own foundations, certainty about cruelty.

Three things to give up

1. Truth as correspondence to a mind-independent reality.
2. Knowledge as foundational justification.
3. The self as having a fixed, discoverable essence.

In their place: solidarity, conversation, the gradual extension of our sense of "we" to include people we previously left out. The novel — Rorty was unusual among philosophers in writing seriously about literature — is, he thought, a better vehicle for this expansion than the philosophical treatise.

Hilary Putnam (1926—2016)

Quine's most distinguished student. Putnam moved through realism, internal realism, and pragmatic realism over five decades, partly recovering and partly rebuilding James's project. Pragmatism: An Open Question (1995) is the slim popular statement.

Robert Brandom (b. 1950)

Pittsburgh. Making It Explicit (1994) is the most ambitious neopragmatist treatise — meaning is a matter of being entitled to certain inferences within a normative practice of giving and asking for reasons.

Cheryl Misak (b. 1961)

Toronto. Has done the most to recover Peirce's strict version of the doctrine and to argue, against Rorty, that pragmatism need not give up on truth. The American Pragmatists (2013) is the standard short history.

W. V. O. Quine (1908—2000)

Quine refused the pragmatist label, but the doctrines of "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) — the rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, the holism of meaning — are at root pragmatist moves. He is the most important non-pragmatist pragmatist of the twentieth century.

"It collapses truth into usefulness."

Russell, Moore, and many later analytic critics argued that James's "true means it works" gives up the everyday distinction between believing what is so and believing what is helpful to believe. Reply: pragmatists distinguish short-run convenience from long-run survival under inquiry. The wishful belief that floods are a punishment for sin does not, in the long run, work.

"It is parochial."

Critics charge that pragmatism flattens the depth of metaphysical questions to a peculiarly American practical idiom. Reply: the alternative — to treat metaphysical questions as having determinate answers in principle inaccessible to any inquiry — is not obviously more rigorous; it is, on the pragmatist view, a kind of confidence trick.

"It is conservative — or radical — in the wrong direction."

Some critics accuse Dewey of insufficient critique of capitalism; others call him a creeping socialist. Both kinds of critic agree that his political programme is too tied to existing American institutions. Pragmatist defenders point out that Dewey was a founding member of the ACLU, opposed the Vietnam war (Rorty later did similarly), and consistently expanded the franchise.

"It is anti-philosophical."

Rorty especially is read as ending philosophy by turning it into "edifying" conversation. He would have agreed in some moods. The reply that pragmatists give: we are not ending philosophy, we are returning it to the place where Socrates left it — among ordinary people trying to live with one another.