Controles

This chapter deepens the discussion of the “Introduction” by taking a closer look at the methodology of pragmatist inquiry, as well as some central prob-lems that pragmatists are, and have been, preoccupied with. Typically, prag-matists rely on both historical and conceptual methodology and, while employing philosophical distinctions, reject pernicious dualisms, dichotomies, and essen-tialisms, including the widespread dualism between historical and purely con-ceptual or analytic philosophical approaches. This att itude to philosophical methodology, especially the so-called pragmatic method, will here be explained, defended, and illustrated with reference to a number of ongoing disputes within specifi c areas of philosophy; further material can be found in the con-tributed essays below. Accordingly, this chapter will off er one way of under-standing the pragmatic method, as applied to a few central philosophical problems. This is by no means a complete survey of the diff erent uses of the pragmatic method. Unresolved metaphilosophical problems also related to pragmatist methodology, such as the extent to which current pragmatists can successfully be public intellectuals, will be identifi ed and discussed in the “New Directions” chapter, as they bear on the future of pragmatism as a philosophical approach.

The Pragmatic Method: An Overview

First, the pragmatic method, especially its diff erent interpretations by Peirce and James, must be substantially discussed and analyzed. A critical elaboration of the relevance of, and some diff erent employments of, this method is the core of this chapter. We will begin with some remarks on the history of the pragmatic method, thus for a moment returning to the historical discussion of the intro-ductory chapter.

In the The Varieties of Religious Experience, James (1902, p. 351) speaks about

“the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism,” referring to “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878) and applying the principle to a discussion of

God’s metaphysical att ributes. The same article by Peirce was already quoted by James in his “The Function of Cognition” in 1884, a paper that later formed the fi rst chapter of The Meaning of Truth (James, 1909b).¹ James’s reception of Peircean pragmatism culminates in his 1898 address at the University of California in Berkeley, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results.” Later, in Prag-matism, James reports:

The term [“pragmatism”] is derived from the same Greek word [πραγµα], meaning action, from which our words “practice” and “practical” come. It was introduced into philosophy by Mr. Charles Peirce in 1878. In an article entitled “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in the “Popular Science Monthly”

for January of that year Mr. Peirce, a er pointing out that our beliefs are really rules for action, said that, to develop a thought’s meaning, we need only determine what conduct it is fi tt ed to produce: that conduct is for us its sole signifi cance. And the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fi ne as to consist in anything but a possible diff erence of practice. To att ain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable eff ects of a practical kind the object may involve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare.

Our conception of these eff ects, whether immediate or remote, is then for us the whole of our conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive signifi cance at all. // This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. It lay entirely unnoticed by anyone for twenty years, until I, in an address before Professor Howison’s philosophical union at the university of California, brought it forward again and made a special application of it to religion. By that date (1898) the times seemed ripe for its reception. [ . . . ] To take in the importance of Peirce’s principle, one must get accustomed to applying it to concrete cases. (James, 1907, pp. 28–29)

In this passage, James seems to believe, mistakenly, that Peirce had used the term “pragmatism,” in his 1878 paper, although he had only used it in unpub-lished discussions at the Metaphysical Club in the early 1870s, James’s own 1898 usage being the fi rst one in print. Peirce’s original, o -quoted text from the 1878 paper reads as follows: “Consider what eff ects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these eff ects is the whole of our conception of the object” (CP 5.402/W3:266).² When presenting Peirce’s principle, James, however, appears to slide from acknowledging Peirce’s notions of possible diff erences and conceivable eff ects to the requirement that those diff erences or eff ects should really be actualized in our concrete experiences or practices, whether immediately or remotely.

Accordingly, one of the diff erences between Peirce’s and James’s formula-tions of the pragmatic maxim is that James required the practical consequences of our conceptions to be, above all, particular. This requirement, based on James’s insistence that abstract ideas ought to be put to work among the actual facts of the world we experience, confl icts with Peirce’s stronger focus on generality and habits of action, as Peirce (especially in his later thought) consistently emphasized—in contrast to any particular, actualized bearings—the “conceiv-ably practical bearings” in which “the entire meaning and signifi cance of any conception” lies (EP2:145, 1903; see also EP2:234–235). The Peircean formula-tion allows that our concepformula-tions, though always concepformula-tions of “conceivable practical eff ects,” “reach far beyond the practical”; it is only required that we maintain a connection with some possible practical eff ect when examining the meaning of any given concept(ion) (EP2:235, 1903).

Indeed, Peirce remarked in a lett er in December 1904 that James’s “Human-ism and Truth” (reprinted in James, 1909b) had distorted his views:

You have a quotation from me which greatly astonishes me. I cannot imagine when or where I can have used that language: “The serious meaning of a concept lies in the concrete diff erence to some one which its being true will make.”³ Do tell me at once where I so slipped, that I may at once declare it to be a slip. I do not think I have o en spoken of the “meaning of a concept”

whether “serious” or not. I have said that the concept itself “is” nothing more than the concept, not of any concrete diff erence that will be made to someone, but is nothing more than the concept of the conceivable practical applications of it. (Perry, 1935, II: pp. 432–433)

There is, however, a sense in which James’s pragmatism was more consis-tently pragmatic than Peirce’s. Arguably, James applied pragmatism to itself, treating the pragmatist principle as pragmatically true (cf. Conant, 1997; Pihlström, 1998, 2008a). In contrast to Peirce’s continuous struggle with “proving” prag-matism, no logical demonstration of the truth of pragprag-matism, independently of pragmatism, was needed or even possible for him; the pragmatic effi cacy and the truth of pragmatism were prett y much the same thing for James, though not for Peirce. The maxim that ideas ought to be tested practically by experience covers this pragmatist idea itself, the requirement of the practical testability of ideas in terms of possible experience.

This meta-philosophical diff erence over the status and provability of the pragmatic maxim was a corollary of the opposition between the logical and psy-chological orientations of Peirce and James, respectively (cf. “Introduction”

above). We may say that for James the evaluation of the philosophical status of generalities or abstract ideas was among the applications of the pragmatic maxim, whereas for Peirce the reality of “generals” was a presupposition that

made pragmatism possible. James could have responded to Peirce by saying that any such presupposition must itself, again, be pragmatically assessed.

Peirce obviously also maintained that the pragmatic maxim, as he understood it, had pragmatic consequences. James, however, was willing to let such conse-quences—which for him constituted a more open and inclusive class than the merely scientifi cally relevant consequences Peirce was interested in—determine the philosophical value of pragmatism in a pragmatic manner, independently of any prior logical demonstration. Peirce’s pragmatism was subordinated to logic; according to James, whatever philosophical value logic had was to be explained on more fundamental pragmatic grounds.

The following discussion of the pragmatic method will not be faithful to either Peirce’s or James’s original pronouncements. It will be argued below that the pragmatic method—if not in its original Peircean employment, then at least in its subsequent Jamesian and Deweyan employments—entails a pluralistic (and, hence, antireductionist) and contextualist approach to philosophical inquiry:

all the relevant conceivable practical, experiential results of a given philosophi-cal (or scientifi c) concept or conception ought to be taken into account when examining its pragmatic signifi cance in a certain context. What these relevant practical results are crucially depends on the context we are operating in. Prag-matists are usually happy to admit that philosophical problems cannot be use-fully examined in abstraction from the contexts of inquiry (and, more generally, our orientation in the world) they genuinely emerge in for real human beings, as “live” issues rather than artifi cial puzzles. Our criteria for pragmatic rele-vance, including human signifi cance, are themselves contextual, dependent on our ongoing practice-embedded refl ection on such criteria (and the meta-level criteria for the viability of such criteria, and so on, potentially indefi nitely). Inso-far as this contextualist pluralism (as we may call it) is emphasized as a key to the proper employment of the pragmatic method, James’s version of pragmatism emerges as a truer heir of Peirce’s original maxim than has o en been supposed by those who tend to view James’s pragmatism as a misunderstanding of Peirce’s. However, it would be contrary to the pluralistic spirit of Jamesian prag-matism to raise it to the status of the uniquely correct form of pragprag-matism.

The pragmatic method, then, is a meta-method, which may be used to evalu-ate different philosophical methods (e.g., conceptual analysis, phenome-nological reduction, transcendental arguments, or other methods of inquiry philosophers have defended and employed) and their “promised” outcome and/or relevance in diff erent actual contexts of philosophical inquiry.⁴ Accord-ingly, the pragmatic method should not be understood as a rival to these other philosophical methods but, rather, as providing a context of inquiry within which their specifi c effi cacy in view of particular philosophical problems can be critically examined. Thus understood, the pragmatic method is much broader than a merely meaning-theoretical principle designed to “make our ideas clear.”

Making our ideas clear is highly central to the pragmatic method, but it is essen-tial that ideas are made clear by experimentally putt ing them into practice, by genuinely orientating in the world—in scientifi c, everyday, artistic, political, religious, and other contexts—in terms of them, and by seeing what happens, prepared to learn from one’s mistakes.

The pragmatic contextualism and pluralism emerging from the commitment to the pragmatic method, in the (more Jamesian than Peircean) sense outlined above, will now be highlighted in relation to four selected philosophical prob-lems and research areas. We will examine pragmatism at work in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of value, and philosophy of religion. All these topics—and many others—will, of course, be more fully covered in the articles below; this chapter will approach them in a methodological fashion, showing how the pragmatic method functions in these areas of inquiry.

The Pragmatic Method in Metaphysics

As metaphysics is, in the Aristotelian tradition, the “fi rst philosophy,” it is natu-ral to start our exploration of the employment of the pragmatic method from metaphysics. But what is pragmatic metaphysics, and can there even be such a thing? Aren’t pragmatists suspicious of any fi rst philosophy, including metaphysics?

It may be argued that pragmatists can accommodate metaphysical methods usually employed by, say, analytic philosophers, such as “truthmaking” consid-erations and the analysis of “ontological commitments.”⁵ Even more importantly, however, pragmatist metaphysics must make sense of the profound “practice-dependence” or “scheme-“practice-dependence” of all of our ontological postulations (whether these are explicated in terms of ontological commitments or truthmak-ers): there is, for pragmatists, no “ready-made world” absolutely independent of the practice-laden perspectives from which we structure and categorize it. How-ever, the distinction between scheme-dependent and scheme-independent enti-ties may itself be contextualized to diff erent practical contexts of inquiry. Nothing is just scheme-dependent or scheme-independent absolutely, non-contextually, not even the distinction between scheme-dependence (or context-dependence) and scheme-independence (or context-independence) itself.

My own entry in this volume, “Metaphysics” (as well as a recent book, Pihlström, 2009a), makes the case for pragmatist metaphysics generally. Here, I will only discuss one—albeit also extremely general—issue, the contextuality of meta-physical (ontological) commitments.

We may start from the observation that, in the central traditions of modern philosophy, including the pragmatist tradition, several thinkers have argued that the existence and/or identity of things (entities, facts, or whatever there is

taken to be in the world) is in a way or another relative to, or dependent on, the human mind, linguistic frameworks, conceptual schemes, practices, language-games, forms of life, paradigms, or something similar. Among the historically infl uential defenders of key variations of this “dependence thesis”—starting already from the pre-history of pragmatism, including fi gures only marginally involved in pragmatism, and ending up with relatively recent neo-pragmatism—

are, for instance, Immanuel Kant (the empirical world is constituted by the tran-scendental faculties of the mind, that is, the pure forms of intuition and the pure concepts or categories of the understanding), William James (whatever we may call a “thing” depends on our purposes and selective interests), F. C. S. Schiller (we “humanistically” construct the world and all truths about it within our purposive practices), John Dewey (the objects of inquiry are constructed in and through inquiry, instead of existing as “ready-made” prior to inquiry), Rudolf Carnap (ontological questions about whether there are certain kinds of entities can only be sett led within linguistic frameworks, “internally,” whereas “exter-nal” questions concern the pragmatic criteria for choosing one or another lin-guistic framework), W. V. Quine (ontology is not absolute but relative to a theory, language, or translation scheme), Ludwig Witt genstein (the “essence”

of things lies in “grammar,” thus in the language-games we engage in, instead of transcending our language-use and form of life), Hilary Putnam (there is no

“ready-made world” but only scheme-internal objects), Nelson Goodman (we

“make worlds,” or “world versions,” by employing our various symbol sys-tems), Thomas S. Kuhn (diff erent scientifi c paradigms constitute diff erent

“worlds”), Richard Rorty (our “vocabularies” constitute the ways the world is for us, and we must “ethnocentrically” start from within the vocabularies we contingently possess), and possibly even Wilfrid Sellars (the best-explaining scientifi c theories are the “measure” of what there is and what there is not), as well as many others.⁶

In their distinctive ways, these and many other thinkers have suggested that there is no absolute world an sich that we could meaningfully conceptual-ize or cognconceptual-ize; if there is such a world, as Kant held, it is a mere limit of our thought and experience, a problematic Grenzbegriff . What there is for us is a world we have constructed, and are continuously constructing, relative to our schemes of categorization and inquiry. Pragmatists, however, may follow—or should follow—Kant in embracing something like empirical realism (and natu-ralism) within a broader pragmatist position comparable to Kantian transcen-dental idealism. Pragmatists should not simply opt for antirealism or radical constructivism and relativism in ontology but, rather, moderate pragmatic realism compatible with naturalism. The problem is how to combine the scheme-dependence of entities⁷ with their pragmatic scheme-independence (at the empirical level) in pragmatist metaphysics. This is, essentially, the prag-matist version of the Kantian problem of maintaining both empirical realism

and transcendental idealism—both the empirical independence of things and their “transcendental” dependence on the ways we construct them through our various schemes.⁸ For Kant, spatiotemporal objects in the empirical world are really “outside us” and in this sense exist empirically speaking mind- or scheme-independently. Nevertheless, they are transcendentally dependent on us, because the spatiotemporal (and categorial) framework making them pos-sible as objects of experience (appearances) arises from our cognitive faculties (i.e., sensibility and understanding). Replace the latt er with human cognitive and conceptualizing practices, and you have the pragmatist issue of ontological (in)dependence.⁹

A proposal that might be att ractive to pragmatists here is the contextualiza-tion of the distinccontextualiza-tion between scheme-dependent and scheme-independent entities.¹⁰ Nothing is absolutely scheme-(in)dependent but is dependent or inde-pendent only in a given context, or from a specifi c perspective, rather than from an imagined God’s-Eye View. Thus, pragmatists may deny not the scheme-dependence versus scheme-inscheme-dependence distinction (understood as contextu-alizable) but only the corresponding dichotomy or dualism (understood as absolute, non-perspectival, uncontextualizable).¹¹ The former can be maintained by redescribing it through practice-relative contextualization.

However, the contexts or perspectives invoked here are also “entities” that need to be contextualized in order to be identifi able as contexts at all. A context C is “real,” and contextualizes the scheme-(in)dependence of certain entities (a, b), only within a further context C’, and so on (ad infi nitum). Not even the contextualization—and, hence, the contextual validation—of the distinction between scheme-dependence and scheme-independence is non-contextual or absolute (or absolutely scheme-independent). It is in and through our schemes, which describe the contexts we are able to work within in given situations, that we determine the contexts within which things can be scheme-dependent or scheme-independent. This process of contextualization is indefi nitely long, as any refl exive process potentially is. The “situations” we are “in,” giving rise to certain contexts of thought and inquiry, can themselves, again, be only contex-tually identifi ed as such. Moreover, “we” are whatever we are only in certain contexts we fi nd ourselves in.

The contextualization we are trying to articulate here amounts to a kind of pragmatic “naturalization” of Kantian transcendental idealism.¹² It is fully nat-ural for us—given the kind of creatures we (context-embeddedly) are—to live within context-dependent and context-creating forms of life and/or practices that constitute (again contextual) conditions for the possibility of various things we assume to be actual in our lives, such as cognitive experience or meaningful language. These practices contain “relative a priori” conditions that structure our lives. A key observation here is that this pragmatic, naturalized view is

“transcendentally idealistic” in the sense of emphasizing the constitutive role

played by our natural practices of coping with the world we live in, that is, in the sense of acknowledging the dependence of not just social reality but the natural, worldly objects surrounding us on our specifi cally human, context-laden ways of representing them from standpoints lying within our practices,

played by our natural practices of coping with the world we live in, that is, in the sense of acknowledging the dependence of not just social reality but the natural, worldly objects surrounding us on our specifi cally human, context-laden ways of representing them from standpoints lying within our practices,