Pragmatism, Old and New

Susan Haack

The reformist philosophy of the classical pragmatist tradition has gradually evolved into the now-fashionable revolutionary styles of pragmatism, some scientistic, some literary. This evolution is traced from Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead, through Schiller, Lewis, Hook, and Quine, to Rorty’s literary-political neo-pragmatism. Rather than get hung up on the question of which variants qualify as authentic pragmatism, it is better — more fruitful, and appropriately forward- looking — to ask what we can learn from the older tradition, and what we can salvage from the new.

It has probably never happened that a philosopher has attempted to give a general name to his own doctrine without that name’s soon acquiring, in general philosophical usage, a signification much broader than was originally intended.... Charles Peirce (CP 5.413)

There never was such confusion. The tower of Babel was monotony in comparison. ...Dewey is obscure; Schiller bumptious and hasty; James’s doctrine of radical empiricism ... has been confounded with pragmatism; pragmatism itself covers two or three distinct theories ... the upshot has made one despair of man’s intelligence. But little by little the mud will settle to the bottom.... William James (Pragmatism, 134)

It was William James who put “pragmatism” into philosophical currency and made it famous; but he acknowledged that it was Peirce who first introduced the word, in their discussions in the early 1870s at the “Metaphysical Club” in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In fact, the spirit of pragmatism already pervades the remarkable anti-Cartesian papers Peirce published in 1868-69, as well as “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” published in 1878. Later, Peirce wrote that he had been shy of introducing “pragmatism” with a special philosophical meaning, for fear of confusion with its ordinary, non-philosophical usage. But he had come to think that this had been a mistake, that philosophers not only can but must adapt familiar 4 SUSAN HAACK words to new meanings, or introduce new words, as clarity demands. It is ironic, then, that there has been a tendency, increasingly marked as time has passed, for pragmatism in Peirce’s special, philosophical sense to be confused with pragmatism in the more ordinary sense of concern for expediency rather than principle. What Peirce proposed was a reformed, scientific philosophy guided by the pragmatic maxim, which identifies the meaning of a concept with “the consequences for deliberate, self-controlled conduct ... of the affirmation or denial of the concept” (1904, 56). Though broadly akin to positivism, Peirce’s pragmatism was not anti-metaphysical. For, unlike the narrower positivism of Auguste Comte, “instead of merely jeering at metaphysics, [pragmatism] extracts from it a precious essence” (CP 5.423) replacing the old, failed, a priori approach with a reformed, scientific metaphysics. The reformed philosophy Peirce envisaged would be undertaken with the “scientific attitude,” from a genuine desire to discover the truth — which “is SO, whether you or I or anybody thinks it is so or not” (CP 2.135); and would use “the most rational methods it can devise, for finding out the little that can as yet be found out about the universe of mind and matter from those observations which every person can make in every hour of his waking life” (CP 1.126). But, though it would “rescue the good ship Philosophy for the service of Science from the hands of lawless rovers of the sea of literature” (CP 5.449), Peirce’s pragmatism was not scientistic; it would not turn philosophical questions over to the natural sciences to answer, nor displace them in favor of natural-scientific questions. Somehow, however, classical, reformist pragmatism was gradually trans- muted into the revolutionary neo-pragmatism fashionable today, and Peirce’s aspiration to reform philosophy by making it more scientific gradually diverted into an aggressive scientism, on the one hand, and an airy literary dilettantism, on the other. These two apparently contrasting styles of neo-pragmatism have this much in common: each in its own way, repudiating traditional philosophical projects, is closer to the most aggressively anti-philosophical style of positivism than to classical pragmatism. Both are more revolutionary than reformist; both are more or less overtly anti-intellectual in tendency. Richard Rorty, most influential of contemporary neo-pragmatists, proposes in the name of pragmatism that the metaphysical and epistemological territory at the traditional center of philosophy be abandoned and not re-occupied; that the old preoccupation with method and argument be given up as we acknowledge that “to know your desires is to know the criterion of truth” (1991a, 31), and that to call a statement true is just to give it “a rhetorical pat on the back” (1982, xvii); and that philosophy should disassociate itself from science and remake itself as a genre of literature, “in the service of democratic politics” (1989, 196). And philosophers of