1 Pragmatism Is a Philosophical Tradition Founded by Three American

1 Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition founded by three American philosophers: Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. Starting from Alexander Bain's definition of belief as a rule or habit of action, Peirce argued that the function of inquiry is not to represent reality, but rather to enable us to act more effectively. He was critical of the "copy theory" of knowledge which had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes, and especially of the idea of immediate, intuitive, self-knowledge. He was also a prophet of the linguistic turn, one of the first philosophers to say that the ability to use signs is essential to thought. Peirce's use of Bain was extended by James, whose The Principles of Psychology (1890) broke with the associationism of Locke and Hume. James went on, in his Pragmatism (1907) to scandalize philosophers by saying that "'The true'...is only the expedient in our way of thinking'. James and Dewey both wanted to reconcile philosophy with Darwin by making human beings' pursuit of the true and the good continuous with the activities of the lower animals--cultural evolution with biological evolution. Dewey criticized of the Cartesian notion of the self as a substance which existed prior to language and acculturation, and substituted an account of the self as a product of social practises (an account developed further by Goerge Herbert Mead). Dewey, whose primary interests were in cultural, educational, and political reform rather than in specifically philosophical 2 problems (problems which he thought usually needed to be dissolved rather than solved), developed the implications of pragmatism for ethics and social philosophy. His ideas were central to American intellectual life throughout the first half of the twentieth century. All three of the founding pragmatists combined a naturalistic, Darwinian view of human beings with a deep distrust of the problems which philosophy had inherited from Descartes, Hume and Kant. They hoped to save philosophy from metaphysical idealism, but also to save moral and religious ideals from empiricist or positivist scepticism. Their naturalism has been combined with an anti-foundationalist, holist, account of meaning by Willard van Orman Quine, Hilary Putnam, and Donald Davidson--philosophers of language who are often seen as belonging to the pragmatist tradition. That tradition also has affinities to the work of Thomas Kuhn, and to the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. l. Classical Pragmatism 2. Pragmatism after the Linguistic Turn 3. Pragmatism as Anti-Representationalism 4. Pragmatism and Humanity's Self-Image 1. Classical Pragmatism Peirce, James, and Dewey--often referred to as the three "classical pragmatists"--had very different philosophical concerns. Except for their shared opposition to the correspondence theory of 3 truth, and to "copy theories" of knowledge, their doctrines do not overlap extensively. Although each knew and respected the other two, they did not think of themselves as belonging to an organized, disciplined, philosophical movement. Peirce thought of himself as a disciple of Kant, improving on Kant's doctrine of categories and his conception of logic. A practicing mathematician and laboratory scientist, he was more interested in these areas of culture than were James or Dewey. James took neither Kant nor Hegel very seriously, but was far more interested in religion than either Peirce or Dewey. Dewey, deeply influenced by Hegel, was fiercely anti-Kantian. Education and politics, rather than science or religion, were at the center of his thought. Peirce was a brilliant, cryptic, and prolific polymath, whose writings are very difficult to piece together into a coherent system. He is now best known as a pioneer in the theory of signs, and for work in logic and semantics contemporaneous with, and partially paralleling, that of Frege. Peirce's account of inquiry as a matter of practical problem-solving was complemented by his criticisms of the Cartesian (and empiricist) idea of "immediate knowledge", and of the project of building knowledge on self-evident foundations (of either a rationalist or empiricist kind). Peirce protested James' appopriation of his ideas, for complex reasons having to do with his obscure and idiosyncratic doctrine of "Scotistic realism"--the reality of universals, considered as potentialities or dispositions. Peirce was more 4 sympathetic to metaphysical idealism than James, and found James' version of pragmatism simplistic and reductionist. James himself, however, thought of pragmatism as a way of avoiding reductionism of all kinds, and as a counsel of tolerance. Particularly in his famous essay "The Will to Believe" (1896), he attempted to reconcile science and religion by viewing both as instruments useful for distinct, non-conflicting, purposes. Although he viewed many metaphysical and theological disputes as, at best, exhibitions of the diversity of human temperament, James hoped to construct an alternative to the anti-religious, science-worshipping, positivism of his day. He approvingly cited Giovanni Papini's description of pragmatism as "like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees praying for faith; in a third a chemist investigating a body's properties...they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it." His point was that attention to the implications of beliefs for practice offered the only way to communicate across divisions between temperaments, academic disciplines, and philosophical schools. Dewey, in his early period, tried to bring Hegel together with evangelical Christianity. Although references to Christianity almost disappear from his writings around 1900, in a 1903 essay on Emerson he still looked forward to the development of "a philosophy which religion has no call to chide, and which knows its friendship with 5 science and with art." The anti-positivist strain in classical pragmatism was at least as strong as its anti-metaphysical strain, and so James and Dewey found themselves attacked simultaneously from the empiricist left and from the idealist right--from Bertrand Russell as well as from F. H. Bradley. Both critics thought of the pragmatists as fuzzy and jejune thinkers. This sort of criticism was repeated later in the century by the disciples of Carnap, most of whom dismissed the classical pragmatists as lacking in precision and argumentative rigor. James wrote a few remarkable essays on ethics--notably "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" (1891), in which, echoing Mill's Utilitarianism, he says that every desire and need has a prima facie right to be fulfilled, and that only some competing desire or need can provide a ground for leaving it unsatisfied. But neither James nor Peirce attempted any systematic discussion of moral or political philosophy. Dewey, however, wrote extensively in this area throughout his life--from Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics (1891) through Human Nature and Conduct (1922) to Theory of Valuation (1939). Dewey urged that we make no sharp distinction between moral deliberation and proposals for change in socio-political institutions, or in education (the last being a topic on which he wrote extensively, in books which had considerable impact on educational practice in many countries). He saw changes in individual attitudes, in public policies, and in strategies of 6 acculturation as three interlinked aspects of the gradual development of freer and more democratic communities, and of the better sort of human being who would be developed within such communities. All of Dewey's books are permeated by the typically nineteenth-century conviction that human history is the story of expanding human freedom, and by the hope of substituting a less professionalized, more politically-oriented, conception of the philosopher's task for the Platonic conception of the philosoher as "spectator of time and eternity." In Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920) he wrote that "under disguise of dealing with ultimate reality, philosophy has been occupied with the precious values embedded in social traditions...has sprung from a clash of social ends and from a conflict of inherited institutions with incompatible contemporary tendencies." For him, the task of future philosophy was not be to achieve new solutions to traditional problems, but to clarify "men's ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day." This conception of philosophy, which developed out of Hegel's and resembled Marx's, isolated Dewey (particularly after the rise of analytic philosophy) from colleagues who thought of their discipline as the study of narrower and more precise questions--questions which had remained substantially unchanged throughout human history. 2. Pragmatism After the Linguistic Turn Peirce was one of the first philosophers to emphasize the importance of signs. "The word or the sign which man uses is the 7 man himself," he wrote, "...my language is the sum total of myslef; for the man is the thought." But, with the exception of C. I. Lewis and Charles Morris, philosophers did not take Peirce's work on signs very seriously. Indeed, for decades Peirce remained largely unread: he had never published a philosophical book, and most of his articles were collected and republished only in the 1930's. By that time philosophy in the English-speaking world was already in the process of being transformed by admirers of Frege, notably Carnap and Russell. These philosophers accomplished what Gustav Bergmann was to baptize "the linguistic turn" in philosophy. The thought it would be more fruitful, more likely to yield clear and convincing results, if philosophers were to discuss the structure of language rather than, as Locke and Kant had, the structure of the mind, or of experience. The early analytic philosophers, however, accompanied this turn with a revival of the traditional empiricist idea that sense-perception provides foundations for empirical knowledge--an idea which the idealists and the classical pragmatists had, at the beginning of the century, united in rejecting.

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