Controles

Pragmatism has o en been seen as a practical new philosophy for the New World; and, as a philosophical movement, it was continuous with the rest of the developing American society. Still, it needs to be distinguished from at least two other pragmatic strains. One of these strains is rooted in the simple practi-calism of the traditional American lifestyle. In part, this admitt ed pragmatism refl ects a popular anti-intellectualism that sees action as more important than thinking, especially when the latt er is speculative or purely ornamental or “use-less.” In part, this practicalism also refl ects the immense felt task of taming the American Frontier, where idleness was suspect. A second pragmatic strain in American society, more or less present in all societies, is the shallow opportun-ism of self-styled pragmatists in many fi elds of endeavor, individuals whose single-minded concern with personal victory is condemned by William James as “the exclusive worship of the bitch-Goddess SUCCESS” (James, 1992, 11:267).

Distinct from these two strains is philosophical pragmatism—the work of James, Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey and others—that developed a the-ory of meaning and a thethe-ory of truth grounded in a broader vision of an ade-quate human existence.

An initial sketch of this larger pragmatic vision might consider four of its central themes. The fi rst is pragmatism’s att empt to understand our natural place. Here we fi nd humans as experimenters who are both celebrating our rela-tionship with nature and striving for control of our natural situation. We fi nd as well post-Darwinian explorations of the embodied human organism, and of human consciousness and self-consciousness as the means to understand and direct our lives. A second theme in this pragmatic vision is a series of hypothe-ses about experience in its various forms. If we att end in an unprejudiced man-ner to the stream of experience as it comes, for example, we will more fully grasp its meaning and be bett er prepared to resist routinization. Similarly, adopting a critical stance toward experience off ers us a means to challenge the tyranny of dogma and to replace it with values developed from the numerous apparent goods. A third theme that is central to pragmatism is possibility. This emphasis upon openness includes both fostering means for individuals to make more of their lives in a practical fashion and appreciating the connection between the everyday and the eternal. Further, pragmatism’s emphasis upon

possibility recognizes that we can use our tentative webs of knowledge, with-out foundation or fi nality, to help meliorate our existence. Here, both individu-als’ ability to create systems of living personal beliefs, compelling and free from the interference of others, and their responsibility to develop the educational and social possibilities by means of which society can present vibrant possibili-ties to future generations, are important. A fourth theme central to an adequate understanding of pragmatism is community, which serves both as a means and a goal. Vibrant community provides the means through which cooperative inquiry tests and directs social practice. Without losing a sense of the impor-tance of individuals, the community of cooperative inquirers helps to direct the intellectual life of society to a recognition and celebration of the enrichments of shared existence. As it moves into the future, the pragmatic community addresses our problems of living—metaphysical and scientifi c and social—and challenges the purely intellectual solutions to which philosophers too o en acquiesce.

A quick survey of the early history of pragmatism would consider such high points as: the Metaphysical Club of Cambridge, Massachusett s, in the early 1870s; a long period of latency that included Peirce’s essays in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (Peirce, 1982, 2:161–272) and Popular Science Monthly (Peirce, 1982, 3:241–338); James’s 1897 volume, The Will to Believe (James, 1897), followed by his 1898 address, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” at the University of California in 1898 (James, 1898); the development of the Chicago School from 1894 through at least the publication of the coopera-tive volume Studies in Logical Theory in 1903 (Dewey et al., 1903) and Dewey’s departure in 1904; the publication of James’s Pragmatism in 1907 (James, 1907), and The Meaning of Truth in 1909 (James, 1909); and the appearance of Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Att itude in 1917 (Dewey et al., 1917).

In his Pragmatism, William James indicates that the term is “derived from the same Greek word πράγμα, meaning action, from which our words ‘practice’

and ‘practical’ come” (James, 1907, p. 28). He further notes that “pragmatism”

was a term that like “post-structuralism” or “modernism” in our time—was in the air. As he writes, “at present it fairly spots the pages of the philosophic jour-nals” (James, 1907, p. 29). James lays out a very broad ancestry for what he calls his “new name for some old ways of thinking” (James 1907, p. 1), indicating that, while Peirce was the founder of the modern pragmatic movement, in some form or other pragmatism had been practiced by such seemingly diverse think-ers as Socrates, Aristotle, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and James Mill (cf. James, 1898, pp. 268–269; 1907, p. 30; Peirce, 1931, 5.11–12). While James’s listing may accurately delineate the roots of the pragmatic spirit that he felt existed in the Western philosophical tradition, it fails to explore any possible American roots.

Similarly, he underplays the role of Kant, or at least of Kantian ideas. Kant had distinguished sharply between praktisch and pragmatisch, and Peirce dutifully

avoided the former because of its a priori associations. In Peirce’s own words:

“for one who had learned philosophy out of Kant . . . praktisch and pragmatisch 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 latt er expressing relation to some defi nite human purpose”

(Peirce, 1931, 5.412). In spite of Peirce’s Kantian terminology, however, more idiomatic uses of the term continued, and eff orts to explicate the nature of the relationship between thinking and practical activity became an ongoing task of the proponents of pragmatism. While this might seem to be an unlikely base upon which to build a philosophical movement, pragmatism became a power-ful force within philosophical circles and a tremendously popular topic of dis-cussion outside of them.

Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was a mathematical and scientifi c genius of the fi rst order who, for reasons both personal and social, came late to public recognition from the philosophical and broader intellectual community. Peirce describes his own work at one point as “the att empt of a physicist to make such conjecture as to the constitution of the universe as the methods of science may permit, with the aid of all that has been done by previous philosophers.” His goal was not to develop demonstrable truths but rather to advance likely hypotheses that would grow out of science’s past eff orts and that would be

“capable of being verifi ed or refuted by future observers” (Peirce, 1931, 1.7). We are these observers; and, for Peirce, we are at our best when we are engaged in cooperative att empts to overcome our intellectual problems.

Central to Peirce’s work is his emphasis upon the importance of cooperative inquiry. Dewey writes that Peirce was “notable among writers on logical theory for his explicit recognition of the necessity of the social factor in the determina-tion of evidence and its probative force.” Further, Dewey notes that Peirce “was the fi rst writer on logic to make inquiry and its methods the primary and ulti-mate source of logical subject-matt er” (Dewey, 1938, pp. 484 n.3, 17 n.1). Build-ing upon his assumption of ongoBuild-ing social inquiry, Peirce continues that truth itself is to be understood as the result of “endless investigation” or study that goes on “forever” (Peirce, 1931, 5.565). And, because Peirce writes that “[t]he opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth” (Peirce, 1931, 5.407), he admonished individual inquirers to maintain an att itude of doubt and openness at each particular point in the cooperative process.

“Do not block the way of inquiry,” Peirce writes (Peirce, 1931, 1.135). In our lives as inquirers, we should live by the cautious attitude that he calls

“fallibilism,” that contains among its tenets the following assumptions: no questions are unanswerable, no answers are absolutely true, no formulations are fi nal, no level of examination is ultimate, and so on. In inquiry, there is always more that can be done; and even a failed experiment is an advance, for all possibilities must be considered. The human weakness against which we must be ever on guard, Peirce reminds us, is our o en-demonstrated willing-ness to sett le issues too soon by acquiescing to hasty and inadequate methods for the fi xation of belief (cf. Peirce, 1931, 1.13, 5.358). We must thus reject what conforms to personal dogmatism, however simple; resist society’s unquestioned traditions, however important to social cohesion; and challenge what seems most “reasonable,” however comfortable. Peirce’s advice is to turn to the meth-ods of science, including cooperation, testing, verifi cation, and publication.

A correlate of Peirce’s call for ongoing cooperative inquiry is his belief that we could develop more precision in our philosophical formulations if we could develop a theory of meaning that off ered a more adequate public criterion. The focus of Peirce’s eff orts here was in clarifying our use of “intellectual concepts”

or “of hard words and of abstract concepts” like “hard,” “weight,” “force” and

“reality” (Peirce, 1931, 5.467, 5.464, 5.403–5.410). He writes that “a conception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life.” Consequently, he continues,

“since obviously nothing that might not result from experiment can have any direct bearing upon conduct, if one can defi ne accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affi rmation or denial of a concept could imply, one will have therein a complete defi nition of the concept” (Peirce, 1931, 5.412). The important points in this theory of meaning, in addition to its connec-tion to long-term, group inquiry, are that Peirce is interested in applying it only to certain words or concepts and that he requires a consideration of all eff ects.

The weaknesses that this version of pragmatism displays, from James’s point of view, follow directly from Peirce’s emphases: it focuses too narrowly on the issues of the natural sciences, mathematics and formal logic, and it emphasizes too strongly the public forum of verifi cation.

James

William James (1842–1910) was a trained, if nonpracticing, physician, more interested in the novel and the unique than Peirce. Thus James preferred to explore more individual aspects of experience. And, while James saw himself as carrying forward Peirce’s pragmatism, he formulated it more broadly. James wanted to develop pragmatism into a tool for overcoming apparently insoluble philosophical controversies. “The pragmatic method,” he writes, “is primarily a method of sett ling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable”

(James, 1907, p. 28). Although the initial example that he uses is the homey one of the squirrel on the trunk of the tree, the issues to which he intended to apply this method are matt ers of larger human and philosophical concern. Among them are the questions of substance and att ributes, materialism versus theism, and free will or determinism. “The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences,” he con-tinues. “What diff erence would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?” (James, 1907, p. 28).

While James’s concern with results is continuous with the work of Peirce, this shi is fundamental; and, seen in the light of his personal interests, all of James’s modifi cations to Peirce’s approach appear to be deliberate. He writes, for example, that “the principle of pragmatism . . . should be expressed more broadly than Mr. Peirce expresses it” (James, 1898, p. 259). James moves away from Peirce’s concern with long-term eff ects for the group of inquirers and his interest in the full spectrum of eff ects, as might be appropriate when studying the specifi cs of a planet’s orbit or the etiology of HIV/AIDS. And, perhaps most importantly, James moves beyond Peirce’s tightly focused concern with only certain words and ideas to consider the meaning of broad philosophical doc-trines. James thus revises what he calls “Peirce’s principle” to allow for both broader application and narrower verifi cation. As James writes, for example,

“the eff ective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence, in our future practical experience”

(James, 1898, p. 259).

In addition, James went still further, bringing into a central position in his pragmatism the topic of truth. For James, pragmatism should have something to say not only about the meaning but also about the meaningfulness, and ulti-mately about the truth or falsity, of philosophic positions. Once we are able to move beyond idle philosophical controversies to real ones—that is, controver-sies about which we can “show some practical diff erence that must follow from one side or the other’s being right” (James, 1907, p. 28)—James believes that we can use the pragmatic method to decide truth and falsity. As he writes,

“the whole function of philosophy ought to be to fi nd out what defi nite diff er-ence it will make to you and me, at defi nite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-world-formula be the one which is true” (James, 1898, p. 260).

For example, the confl icting answers to the question of materialism versus the-ism yield what he calls “opposite outlooks of experience.” Materialthe-ism, for its part, means “simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutt ing off of ultimate hopes,” whereas theism means “the affi rmation of an eternal moral order and the lett ing loose of hope” (James, 1898, pp. 263–264). Peirce’s emphasis upon what in the long run is fated to be agreed upon by the limitless group of belief-suspending inquirers off ers us litt le help in deciding such questions.

For James, the question of “God or no God?” can be reduced to the more personal question of “promise or no promise?” (James, 1909, p. 6). James, as we might surmise from his emphasis on hope, maintains that a position may be considered to be true as the result of a test diff erent from Peirce’s: “Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfacto-rily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally” (James, 1907, p. 34). For James, an idea or a philosophical position is true if it satisfi es this test of workability. Using as an example a matt er close to James’s heart, if the theistic viewpoint provides what he calls “a value for concrete life,” it will be true, he writes, “in the sense of being good for so much” (James, 1907, p. 40).

Because of his enthusiastic public championing of these unorthodox views in Pragmatism and elsewhere, James quickly became the center of a fi restorm of criticism. Peirce himself thought James’s changes were harmful; and he rechris-tened his own, narrower position “pragmaticism,” a name he thought would be

“ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (Peirce, 1931, 5.414). But James’s position, however startling it may initially seem, contains many valuable aspects. One of these is that, because his understanding of human nature grounds the activities of mind in the problems of living, his position connects truth with other human values. As James puts it, “truth is one species of good”

(James, 1907, p. 42). A second value of James’s pragmatism is that, as with Peirce’s (cf. Peirce, 1931, 5.427), it is forward-looking rather than backward-looking. Pragmatism exemplifi es, James writes, “[t]he att itude of looking away from fi rst things, principles, ‘categories’, supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (James, 1907, p. 32). For James, this means that truth is a process in which we play a role; and, in cases like marriages or careers, our ongoing contributions can be decisive. While “for rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity”, he writes, “for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future” (James, 1907, p. 123).

A third value of James’s view is his emphasis on the importance of the practical over the purely intellectual. Rather than being satisfi ed with terms like “God”

or “Reason” as what he calls “solving names,” James requires us to “bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of [our]

experience” (James, 1907, pp. 31–32). Purely intellectual solutions solve nothing but purely intellectual problems; and, for James, “[t]he earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights”

(James, 1907, p. 62).

Still, James’s position on the nature and possibilities of pragmatism has been seen to contain potentially problematic aspects. Some of them can be quickly cleared away before turning to the central issue of James’s understanding of truth. The fi rst is James’s claim, unsett ling to some, that truth lives in large measure

“on a credit system.” As a result, most of our lives are spent only loosely engaged with truths like the realities of locations and events whose verifi cation we never bother to perform. “We trade on each other’s truth,” he writes (James, 1907, p. 100). Except for James’s idiosyncratic use of the term “truth” here, this is precisely the point made by Peirce when he writes, “our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy” (Peirce, 1931, 1.171). A second side issue is James’s belief that truth “happens to an idea.” Rather than focusing upon abstracted propositions or upon static relationships of unchanging validity, his concern is with inquiry, with the process by means of which a particular belief or idea that “becomes true, is made true by events” (James, 1907, p. 97). Third, there is no validity to the charge that James somehow believes that any delusion whatever can be true. “ ‘Reality’ is in general what truths have to take account of”, he writes (James, 1907, p. 117). “Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities follow in his experience: they will lead him nowhere or else make false connexions” (James, 1907, p. 99).

The central diffi culty with James’s position on truth is the problem that, in Peircean terms, it would allow people to “fi x belief” too soon, based upon lim-ited evidence or only individual confi rmation. As an example of James’s impul-siveness, we can consider the following: “A new opinion counts as ‘true’ just in proportion as it gratifi es the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock” (James, 1907, p. 36). The weakness of James’s approach here is that it does not require us to take the time necessary to refi ne

The central diffi culty with James’s position on truth is the problem that, in Peircean terms, it would allow people to “fi x belief” too soon, based upon lim-ited evidence or only individual confi rmation. As an example of James’s impul-siveness, we can consider the following: “A new opinion counts as ‘true’ just in proportion as it gratifi es the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock” (James, 1907, p. 36). The weakness of James’s approach here is that it does not require us to take the time necessary to refi ne