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Pragmatism — Deck 10

Notes on the most American of philosophical traditions — from a metaphysical club in Cambridge, Mass., 1872, through John Dewey's classroom, to the ironist...

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Notes on the most American of philosophical traditions — from a metaphysical club in Cambridge, Mass., 1872, through John Dewey's classroom, to the ironist liberalism of Richard Rorty. Key sections include: Prag matism; What pragmatism is for; I. Charles Sanders Peirce; II. William James; III. John Dewey; IV. Richard Rorty; The pragmatist argument, in one shape; Neopragmatism & the Cambridge pragmatists; The Cambridge of 1872; Key Works.

Key sections

01Prag matism
02What pragmatism is for
03I. Charles Sanders Peirce
04II. William James
05III. John Dewey
06IV. Richard Rorty
07The pragmatist argument, in one shape
08Neopragmatism & the Cambridge pragmatists
09The Cambridge of 1872
10Key Works
11Standing objections
12Why it still matters
13Go Deeper
14Colophon

Topics covered

philosophy pragmatism

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Slide outline

01Prag matism
02What pragmatism is for
03I. Charles Sanders Peirce
04II. William James
05III. John Dewey
06IV. Richard Rorty
07The pragmatist argument, in one shape
08Neopragmatism & the Cambridge pragmatists
09The Cambridge of 1872
10Key Works
11Standing objections
12Why it still matters
13Go Deeper
14Colophon

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Slide 01

Pragmatism

p. 1
Vol VI · Notebook 10
Notes on the most American of philosophical traditions — from a metaphysical club in Cambridge, Mass., 1872, through John Dewey's classroom, to the ironist liberalism of Richard Rorty.
Four names to keep in mind:
Peirce · James · Dewey · Rorty

Slide 02

What pragmatism is for

p. 2
Test ideas by what they do.
Pragmatism is a philosophical method that began with a question Charles Sanders Peirce asked himself in his 1878 paper How to Make Our Ideas Clear: how can we tell, in any particular case, what an idea actually means?
His answer became known as the pragmatic maxim:
Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
C. S. Peirce, How to Make Our Ideas Clear, 1878
In plain talk: an idea's meaning is its difference in use. To say something is "hard" means: it would scratch glass, withstand pressure, etc. There is nothing more — no inner essence — beyond what would, under various conditions, be the case. The maxim is a tool for cutting through scholastic disputes that turn out to make no practical difference.

Slide 03

I. Charles Sanders Peirce

p. 3
1839 — 1914 · Cambridge, Mass.
Peirce — pronounced "purse" — was the son of the Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce. He worked thirty years for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, doing pendulum experiments to measure gravity. He was a logician of genius, a careless careerist, an unstable husband, and the father of three of the most important fields of twentieth-century thought: pragmatism, semiotics, and the logic of relations.
He coined "pragmatism" in conversation at the Metaphysical Club, Cambridge, around 1872 — a group that included William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Chauncey Wright. When James began promoting pragmatism in popular lectures from 1898 onward, Peirce felt his careful method was being misrepresented, and renamed his version "pragmaticism" — "ugly enough," he said, "to be safe from kidnappers."
The four ways of fixing belief (1877)
Tenacity: hold on to your existing beliefs, ignore contradictions.
Authority: believe what the institution says.
A priori: believe what is "agreeable to reason" — i.e., to your taste.
Science: let belief be fixed by something independent of any of us — by inquiry that is open to revision.
Three signs (semiotics)
Peirce distinguished icons (signs by resemblance — a portrait), indices (signs by causal connection — smoke for fire), and symbols (signs by convention — the word "fire"). The triadic theory of signs is one of the founding works of modern semiotics.

Slide 04

II. William James

p. 4
1842 — 1910 · Cambridge, Mass.
The older brother of the novelist Henry James. Trained as a physician, he was Harvard's first professor of psychology, then of philosophy. His Principles of Psychology (1890), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and Pragmatism (1907) made him the most-read American philosopher of his generation.
James turned Peirce's careful maxim into a popular philosophical method.
Truth in our ideas means their power to "work."
William James, Pragmatism, Lecture VI
Or, more carefully: "An idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives." This sentence has caused more trouble than any other in pragmatism. James meant: an idea earns truth-status by what it does in the long run of inquiry, by how it links up with other beliefs and experiences. Critics — Bertrand Russell most loudly — read him as endorsing whatever it is profitable to believe. The disagreement is not yet entirely settled.
The squirrel (1907)
James opens Pragmatism with a camping anecdote. The hikers are arguing whether a man who walks around a tree-trunk on the opposite side of which a squirrel keeps scuttling has, or has not, "gone round" the squirrel. James intervenes: it depends on what you mean by "round." If you mean facing-each-cardinal-direction-relative-to-the-squirrel — yes. If you mean facing-front-back-left-right-of-the-squirrel — no. The dispute is verbal. The pragmatic maxim applied: which practical difference does the dispute mark?
The will to believe (1896)
"Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds." When evidence is genuinely insufficient and the decision is forced, momentous, and live — you may rationally let your needs settle it. Famously applied to religious belief, controversially.

Slide 05

III. John Dewey

p. 5
1859 — 1952 · Burlington · Chicago · New York
Dewey lived for 92 years and wrote for nearly seventy of them — 37 volumes in the standard edition. The bibliography is intimidating; the underlying view is simple. Inquiry is what we do when habits break down. A problem arises; we form a hypothesis; we test it in action; the situation is reorganised. Knowing is a feature of doing, not an inner mirror of an outer world.
Dewey's The Quest for Certainty (1929) argues that the entire Western tradition since Plato has been infected by the search for an unchanging realm "behind" the changing world. The pragmatist gives up the quest. We deal with what changes; we redirect inquiry from being to becoming, from contemplation to action.
Education (Dewey's other great theme)
Dewey founded the University of Chicago Laboratory School in 1896 to put his theories to work. Children learn by doing; the curriculum should grow from their experience; democracy and education are tied at the root. Democracy and Education (1916) is read worldwide.
Democracy is much broader than a special political form, a method of conducting government... It is, primarily, a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.
John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 1916
Art (Art as Experience, 1934)
Aesthetic experience is not a special precinct walled off from ordinary life. It is the fullness of any experience that has unity, intensity, and an intelligible course. The Lascaux paintings are art; so, when conditions are right, is the cooking of a meal.

Slide 06

IV. Richard Rorty

p. 6
1931 — 2007 · Princeton · Virginia · Stanford
Rorty was trained in analytic philosophy and demolished its self-image from inside. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) argued that the central metaphor of modern epistemology — the mind as a mirror of the world — should be retired. Knowledge is conversation, not reflection. There is nothing for our beliefs to mirror; there are only further beliefs, with which they cohere or do not.
From there Rorty develops what he calls "ironist liberalism." The ironist takes their own deepest commitments to be contingent — historically situated, not grounded in any non-circular justification. The liberal believes cruelty is the worst thing we do. The ironist liberal holds both: contingency about her own foundations, certainty about cruelty.
Three things to give up
Truth as correspondence to a mind-independent reality.
Knowledge as foundational justification.
The self as having a fixed, discoverable essence.
In their place: solidarity, conversation, the gradual extension of our sense of "we" to include people we previously left out. The novel — Rorty was unusual among philosophers in writing seriously about literature — is, he thought, a better vehicle for this expansion than the philosophical treatise.
Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people.
Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 1989

Slide 07

The pragmatist argument, in one shape

p. 7
Borrowing from Peirce-via-Putnam-via-Misak, in skeleton form:
The point of belief is to settle action — beliefs are habits of action.
To say a belief is true is to say something about how it would behave under inquiry.
If a belief would survive any further inquiry indefinitely — would not be overturned — then there is nothing more to say in calling it true.
A belief that no possible inquiry could ever discriminate from another contributes nothing to action.
So claims that purport to make a difference but cannot connect to inquiry are empty — they are noise.
Truth is not correspondence to a thing-in-itself. Truth is the limit toward which inquiry tends.
The argument is a hinge. James's "what works" version pivots toward usefulness; Peirce's stricter version pivots toward the long run of inquiry. Putnam's later "internal realism" tries to get the realist intuition without the metaphysical price tag. Different pragmatists pick different tunings of these pivots; what they share is a refusal to treat truth as a mysterious extra ingredient floating above belief and behaviour.

Slide 08

Neopragmatism & the Cambridge pragmatists

p. 8
Pragmatism didn't end in 1952 with Dewey. It came back.
Hilary Putnam (1926—2016)
Quine's most distinguished student. Putnam moved through realism, internal realism, and pragmatic realism over five decades, partly recovering and partly rebuilding James's project. Pragmatism: An Open Question (1995) is the slim popular statement.
Robert Brandom (b. 1950)
Pittsburgh. Making It Explicit (1994) is the most ambitious neopragmatist treatise — meaning is a matter of being entitled to certain inferences within a normative practice of giving and asking for reasons.
Cheryl Misak (b. 1961)
Toronto. Has done the most to recover Peirce's strict version of the doctrine and to argue, against Rorty, that pragmatism need not give up on truth. The American Pragmatists (2013) is the standard short history.
W. V. O. Quine (1908—2000)
Quine refused the pragmatist label, but the doctrines of "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) — the rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, the holism of meaning — are at root pragmatist moves. He is the most important non-pragmatist pragmatist of the twentieth century.

Slide 09

The Cambridge of 1872

p. 9
The Metaphysical Club met in private homes around Harvard Square. They were friends; they argued; their philosophy was one quietly insistent point. We are creatures who must act — under partial information, in finite time, with the world giving back its consequences. Theories that ignore that situation are theories about something other than us.

Slide 10

Key Works

p. 10
AuthorWorkYearNote
Peirce"The Fixation of Belief"1877four ways of fixing belief
Peirce"How to Make Our Ideas Clear"1878the pragmatic maxim
JamesThe Principles of Psychology (2 vols.)1890"stream of consciousness"
James"The Will to Believe"1896permission to believe under genuine option
JamesThe Varieties of Religious Experience1902Gifford Lectures
JamesPragmatism1907popular lectures
DeweyThe Influence of Darwin on Philosophy1910essays
DeweyDemocracy and Education1916major work in education
DeweyExperience and Nature1925metaphysics, naturalist
DeweyThe Quest for Certainty1929against the spectator theory
DeweyArt as Experience1934aesthetic theory
DeweyLogic: The Theory of Inquiry1938logic as method of inquiry
Quine"Two Dogmas of Empiricism"1951holism, analytic/synthetic
Sellars"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind"1956against the Myth of the Given
RortyPhilosophy and the Mirror of Nature1979retiring an image
RortyContingency, Irony, and Solidarity1989ironist liberalism
BrandomMaking It Explicit1994inferentialism
MisakThe American Pragmatists2013compact history

Slide 11

Standing objections

p. 11
"It collapses truth into usefulness."
Russell, Moore, and many later analytic critics argued that James's "true means it works" gives up the everyday distinction between believing what is so and believing what is helpful to believe. Reply: pragmatists distinguish short-run convenience from long-run survival under inquiry. The wishful belief that floods are a punishment for sin does not, in the long run, work.
"It is parochial."
Critics charge that pragmatism flattens the depth of metaphysical questions to a peculiarly American practical idiom. Reply: the alternative — to treat metaphysical questions as having determinate answers in principle inaccessible to any inquiry — is not obviously more rigorous; it is, on the pragmatist view, a kind of confidence trick.
"It is conservative — or radical — in the wrong direction."
Some critics accuse Dewey of insufficient critique of capitalism; others call him a creeping socialist. Both kinds of critic agree that his political programme is too tied to existing American institutions. Pragmatist defenders point out that Dewey was a founding member of the ACLU, opposed the Vietnam war (Rorty later did similarly), and consistently expanded the franchise.
"It is anti-philosophical."
Rorty especially is read as ending philosophy by turning it into "edifying" conversation. He would have agreed in some moods. The reply that pragmatists give: we are not ending philosophy, we are returning it to the place where Socrates left it — among ordinary people trying to live with one another.

Slide 12

Why it still matters

p. 12
Pragmatism's influence has spread far beyond philosophy departments. Dewey's instrumentalism shaped twentieth-century American education, social work, and the design of the New Deal. James's psychology was the springboard for the cognitive revolution. Peirce's semiotics is foundational for linguistics and information theory.
In the present, pragmatism speaks to a recurring question of public life: how do we deliberate when our shared fixed points are dwindling? The pragmatist answer is roughly Dewey's — we work out, in particular cases, by experiment and conversation, what we can hold together. The work is slow and revisable. It is also, the pragmatist will say, the only kind of work in moral and political life that has ever produced anything durable.
A philosophy for people who must, before sundown, decide.

Slide 13

Go Deeper

p. 13
Cheryl Misak's lectures and the BBC's In Our Time on William James are the best two starting points; Crash Course Philosophy treats pragmatism in one episode of its run. Embed below.
Watch · BBC In Our Time · William James / Pragmatism
Watch · Richard Rorty · lectures
Watch · Crash Course Philosophy · Pragmatism
Further reading
Louis Menand · The Metaphysical Club (2001) · Pulitzer-winning history
Cheryl Misak · The American Pragmatists (2013)
Hilary Putnam · Pragmatism: An Open Question (1995)
Robert Westbrook · John Dewey and American Democracy (1991)
Susan Haack · Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (1998)
→ Peirce
→ James
→ Dewey
→ Rorty
→ Putnam
→ Misak

Slide 14

Colophon

p. 14
The trail of the human serpent is over everything.
William James, Pragmatism, Lecture II
Deck 10 of Philosophy · Vol. VI

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