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Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy

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Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy Edited by Gabriele Gava and Robert Stern 6244-678-1pass-0FM-r02.indd 3 8/21/2015 4:17:40 AM First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of the editor to be identiied as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identiication and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [CIP data] ISBN: 978-1-138-79191-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-76244-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC 6244-678-1pass-0FM-r02.indd 4 8/21/2015 4:17:40 AM To Mario 6244-678-1pass-0FM-r02.indd 5 8/21/2015 4:17:40 AM Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 GABRIELE GAVA AND ROBERT STERN 1 German Idealism, Classical Pragmatism, and Kant’s Third Critique 22 SEBASTIAN GARDNER 2 The Fallibilism of Kant’s Architectonic 46 GABRIELE GAVA 3 A Kant-Inspired Vision of Pragmatism as Democratic Experimentalism 67 DAVID MACARTHUR 4 Peirce, Kant, and What We Must Assume 85 CHERYL MISAK 5 Peirce and the Final Opinion: Against Apel’s Transcendental Interpretation of the Categories 94 DANIEL HERBERT 6 Forms of Reasoning as Conditions of Possibility: Peirce’s Transcendental Inquiry Concerning Inductive Knowledge 114 JEAN-MARIE CHEVALIER 7 Kant and Peirce on Belief 133 MARCUS WILLASCHEK 6244-678-1pass-0FM-r02.indd 7 8/21/2015 4:17:40 AM viii Contents 8 Round Kant or Through Him? On James’s Arguments for Freedom, and Their Relation to Kant’s 152 ROBERT STERN 9 Consciousness in Kant and William James 177 GRAHAM BIRD 10 Concepts of Objects as Prescribing Laws: A Kantian and Pragmatist Line of Thought 196 JAMES R. O’SHEA 11 Subjectivity as Negativity and as a Limit: On the Metaphysics and Ethics of the Transcendental Self, Pragmatically Naturalized 217 SAMI PIHLSTRÖM 12 A Plea for Transcendental Philosophy 239 WOLFGANG KUHLMANN 13 Transcendental Argument, Epistemically Constrained Truth, and Moral Discourse 259 BORIS RÄHME Contributors 287 Index 291 6244-678-1pass-0FM-r02.indd 8 8/21/2015 4:17:41 AM 7 Kant and Peirce on Belief Marcus Willaschek According to Peirce, pragmatism (or “pragmaticism”) is Kantianism with- out things in themselves: “The present writer was a pure Kantist until he was forced by successive steps into Pragmaticism. The Kantist has only to abjure [. .] the proposition that a thing-in-itself can, however indirectly, be conceived; and then correct the details of Kant’s doctrine accordingly, and he will ind himself to have become a Critical Common-sensist” (CP 5.452)1 (where “Critical Common-sensism” is an aspect or consequence of what Peirce had previously called pragmatism). As this and many other state- ments by Peirce show, and as has been repeatedly stressed in the literature on the history of pragmatism, Kant was a major inluence on Peirce.2 His inluence can be seen in many aspects of Peirce’s philosophy: his conception of thought as action, his speciic brand of realism, his account of the cat- egorical structure of thinking, just to name a few. In this paper, I will take a closer look at an aspect of Kant’s inluence that has occasionally been noticed (cf. Murphey 1968, 177; Thayer 1981, 138), but to my knowledge never closely investigated. It concerns one of the fundamental concepts of Peircean pragmatism: the concept of belief. My interest, however, will not be primarily historical. Rather, I hope to bring into relief an insight Peirce shares with Kant that still is philosophically important today. Moreover, I will argue that Kant’s account of belief is in a certain sense more radically pragmatist than Peirce’s in that it allows belief to be rationally justiied by recourse to the role it plays in action. While this point moves Kant closer to James than to Peirce, he also differs from James in that the practical justii - cation of a belief is not constituted by its practical consequences, but rather by the belief’s being a presupposition of the action’s being rational. Thus, Kant’s account of belief can be seen as a genuine and original contribution to the pragmatist tradition, sharing features with Peirce’s and James’s ac- counts, but also differing from them in key respects. I will approach my topic somewhat indirectly by irst looking at the Kan- tian origin of the label “pragmatism,” which will take us to Kant’s distinc- tion between pragmatic and moral belief. I will then present Kant’s account of belief in the Canon section of the Critique of Pure Reason and, after sketching Peirce’s conception of belief, highlight the many differences, but 6244-678-1pass-007-r02.indd 133 8/21/2015 4:19:12 AM 134 Marcus Willaschek also the much more important commonalities, between them. Finally, I will very briely compare Kant’s account with James’s in “The Will to Believe” in order to bring into view both the genuinely pragmatist character of Kant’s account of belief and the way in which it differs both from Peirce’s and James’s. 1 PRAKTISCH AND PRAGMATISCH As Peirce recollects in 1905, the term “pragmatism” derives from Kant inso- far as labels such as “practicalism” or “practicism” appeared inappropriate to Peirce because of the moral and metaphysical connotations of the term “practical” in Kant: “for one who had learned philosophy out of Kant [. .] and who still thought in Kantian terms most readily, praktisch and pragma- tisch were as far apart as the two poles, the former belonging in a region of thought where no mind of the experimentalist type can ever make sure of solid ground under his feet, the latter expressing relation to some deinite human purpose” (CP 5.412). Peirce was surely correct in thinking that from a Kantian perspective the label “pragmatism” was much more itting for his own philosophy than “practicalism” or “practicism.” However, this is not for the reason Peirce himself offers, since “praktisch” and “pragmatisch” in Kant are by no means opposites, related as the North Pole is to the South Pole. Accord- ing to Kant’s most general deinition of “practical,” which we ind in the Canon of the Critique of Pure Reason, “everything is practical that is pos- sible through freedom” (CPR A800/B828), where “freedom” is freedom of choice. Thus, in this wide sense, the practical concerns the realm of human agency, broadly conceived, and there is no apparent reason why a “mind of the experimentalist type” should shy away from it. It is within this prac- tical realm that Kant goes on to distinguish between “pragmatic laws of free conduct for reaching the ends recommended to us by the senses” and “pure practical laws whose end is given by reason completely a priori,” the latter being “the moral laws” (CPR A800/B828). Thus, in the Canon we encounter a contrast not between the practical and the pragmatic, but rather between the pragmatically practical, which is empirical, and the morally practical, which is a priori or “pure.”3 Similarly, in a passage from the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant distinguishes between “technical,” “pragmatic” and “moral” imperatives (KGS 4:416f.), all of which are “practical principles” (cf. KGS 4:414–5). Moral imperatives are supposed to hold a priori, whereas prag- matic imperatives—although they presuppose an end of which we know a priori that every human being pursues it, namely one’s own happiness (KGS 4:415)—are empirical insofar as what will or will not contribute to some particular person’s happiness is an empirical question (KGS 4:418).4 So again, the contrast is not one between the practical and the pragmatic, 6244-678-1pass-007-r02.indd 134 8/21/2015 4:19:13 AM Kant and Peirce on Belief 135 but rather one within the practical between the pragmatic and the moral.5 In fact, Kant never draws a contrast between the practical and the pragmatic, but consistently treats the pragmatic as one species of the practical.6 So it seems that what Peirce must have had in mind with his reference to Kant’s use of “praktisch” and “pragmatisch” is rather the distinction between the moral (as the realm of “pure practical reason”) and the prag- matic. Since the moral realm, according to Kant, is based on the moral law, which holds a priori for all rational beings and requires us to think of our- selves as part of an intelligible world (KGS 4:452), the moral in the Kantian sense is indeed a “region of thought” that is necessarily suspect to the exper- imentalist philosopher. Kant draws a distinction between the pragmatic and the moral in various different contexts, and he applies it to different kinds of objects: to laws (CPR A800/B828), imperatives (KGS 4:416–7; 6:391), ends (KGS 6:354), forms of friendship (KGS 6:472), education (KGS 6:281; 9:455) and culture (KGS 9:470), just to name a few.
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