Summer 2010 Edition
Pragmatism was a philosophical tradition that originated in theUnited States around 1870. The most important of the ‘classicalpragmatists’ were Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), WilliamJames (1842–1910) and John Dewey (1859-1952). The influence ofpragmatism declined during the first two thirds of the twentiethcentury, but it has undergone a revival since the 1970s withphilosophers being increasingly willing to use the writings and ideasof the classical pragmatists, and also a number of thinkers, such asRichard Rorty, Hilary Putnam and Robert Brandom developingphilosophical views that represent later stages of the pragmatisttradition. The core of pragmatism was the pragmatist maxim, a rule forclarifying the contents of hypotheses by tracing their ‘practicalconsequences’. In the work of Peirce and James, the mostinfluential application of the pragmatist maxim was to the concept oftruth. But the pragmatists have also tended to share a distinctiveepistemological outlook, a fallibilist anti-Cartesian approach to thenorms that govern inquiry.
When William James published a series of lectures on‘Pragmatism: A New Name for an Old way of Thinking’ in1907, he began by identifying ‘The Present Dilemma inPhilosophy’ (1907: 9ff), a fundamental and apparently irresolubleclash between two ways of thinking about things. He promised thatpragmatism would show us the way to overcome this dilemma and, havingthus shown us its importance, he proceeded, in the second lecture, toexplain ‘What Pragmatism Means’.
James's dilemma is a familiar one: it is a form of thequestion of how we can reconcile the claims of science, on the onehand, with those of religion and morality on the other. Jamesintroduces it by observing that the history of philosophy is ‘toa great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments’,between the ‘tough minded’ and the ‘tenderminded’. The tough minded have an empiricist commitment toexperience and going by ‘the facts’, while thetender-minded have more of a taste for a priori principles which appealto the mind. The tender minded tend to be idealistic, optimistic andreligious, while the tough minded are normally materialist, pessimisticand irreligious. The tender-minded are ‘free-willist’ anddogmatic; the tough minded are ‘fatalistic’ andsceptical.
By the early twentieth century, ‘never were so many men of adecidedly empiricist proclivity’: ‘our children …are almost born scientific’ (1907: 14f). But this has notweakened religious belief. People need a philosophy that is bothempiricist in its adherence to facts yet finds room for religiousbelief. But all that is on offer is ‘an empirical philosophythat is not religious enough and a religious philosophy that is notempirical enough for your purpose’ (1907: 15f). The challenge isto show how to reconcile ‘the scientific loyalty to facts’with ‘the old confidence in human values and the resultantspontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type.’We must reconcile empiricist epistemic responsibility with moral andreligious optimism. Pragmatism is presented as the ‘mediatingphilosophy’ that enables us to overcome the distinction betweenthe tender-minded and the tough-minded: we need to show how adherenceto tough-minded epistemic standards does not prevent our adopting thekind of worldview to which the tender-minded aspire. Once we use whathe introduced as the ‘pragmatic method’ to clarify ourunderstanding of truth, of free will, or of religious belief thedisputes—which we despaired of settlingintellectually—begin to dissolve. For James, then, Pragmatism isimportant because it offers a way of overcoming the dilemma, a way ofseeing that, for example, science, morality and religion are not incompetition.
William James thus presented pragmatism as a ‘method forsettling metaphysical disputes that might otherwise beinterminable.’ (1907: 28) Unless some ‘practicaldifference’ would follow from one or the other side's beingcorrect, the dispute is idle.
[T]he tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions,however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consistin anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfectclearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only considerwhat conceivable effects of a practical kind the object mayinvolve—what sensations we are to expect from it, and whatreactions we must prepare. (1907: 29)
The lectures explained this with a memorable illustration ofpragmatism in action. This shows how the maxim enables us todefuse an apparently insoluble (albeit ‘trivial’) dispute.On a visit to the mountains, his friends engage in a ‘ferociousmetaphysical dispute’ about a squirrel that was hanging on to oneside of a tree trunk while a human observer was standing on the otherside:
This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by movingrapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrelmoves as fast in the opposite direction, and always keeps the treebetween himself and the man, so that never a glimpse of him is caught.The resultant metaphysical problem now is this:Does the man goround the squirrel or not? (1907: 27f)
James proposed to solve the problem by pointing out that whichanswer is correct depends on what you ‘practically mean’ by‘going round’. If you mean passing from north of him toeast, then south, then west, then the answer to the question is‘yes’. If, on the other hand, you mean first in front ofhim, then to his right, then behind him, and then to his left, beforereturning to being in front of him again, then the answer is‘no’. Pragmatic clarification disambiguates the question,and once that is done, all dispute comes to an end. The‘pragmatic method’ promises to eliminate all apparentlyirresoluble metaphysical disputes.
So James offers his pragmatism as a technique for clarifying conceptsand hypotheses. He proposed that if we do this, metaphysical disputesthat appear to be irresoluble will be dissolved. When philosopherssuppose that free will and determinism are in conflict, James respondsthat once we compare the practical consequences of determinism beingtrue with the practical consequences of our possessing freedom of thewill, we find that there is no conflict.
As James admitted, he explained the pragmatic method through examplesrather than by giving a detailed analysis of what it involves. He didvery little to explain exactly what ‘practicalconsequences’ are. He made no claim to originality:‘Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude inphilosophy, the empiricist attitude’, although he acknowledgedthat it did so ‘in a more radical and in a less objectionableform than it has ever yet assumed’ (1907: 31). It shared withother forms of empiricism an ‘anti-intellectualisttendency’ (ibid), and it recognized that theories (and presumablyconcepts) should be viewed as ‘instruments, not answers toenigmas’. We identify the ‘practical consequences’ ofa theory, concept or hypothesis by describing its role as an instrumentin thought, in inquiry and in practical deliberation.
James also admitted that he was not the first to defend ‘theprinciple of pragmatism.’ (1907: 29). The principle of pragmatismwas ‘the principle of Peirce’ his friend and colleague ofmany years. Published in 1878 in a paper called ‘How to Make ourIdeas Clear’ (EP2: 124-141), it ‘lay entirely unnoticed byanyone for twenty years’ until James defended it before thePhilosophical Union in the University of California in 1898. If we wanta detailed formulation of pragmatism, we must go back to Peirce'soriginal formulation, although we must also be mindful that thedifferences between the pragmatisms of Peirce and James may be greaterthan James acknowledged. And although ‘the principle ofPeirce’ was published in 1878, it didn't introduce the word‘pragmatism;’ it was only after James's 1898 addressthat ‘pragmatism’ was used publicly in philosophy; and itwas only after James's defence of pragmatism that it becamefamous.
Pragmatism had been born in the discussions at a ‘metaphysicalclub’ in Harvard around 1870 (see Menand 1998). Peirce and Jamesparticipated in these discussions along with some other philosophersand philosophically inclined lawyers. As we have already noted, Peircedeveloped these ideas in his publications from the 1870s. AndJames's lectures in 1898 and later represented the next stages in thedevelopment of pragmatism. Both James and Peirce used‘pragmatism’ as the name of a method, principle, or‘maxim’ for clarifying concepts and hypotheses and foridentifying empty disputes. As we shall see there were differences inhow they understood the method and in their views of how it was to beapplied.
Later thinkers, for example John Dewey and C.I.Lewis, developedpragmatism further. Although they continued to refer back toPeirce's 1878 paper as the source of pragmatism, and theycontinued to regard concepts and hypotheses as functioning asinstruments, they did not always think of ‘pragmatism’ asdenoting ‘the principle of Peirce’. Dewey once describedpragmatism as the systematic exploration of what he called ‘thelogic and ethics of scientific inquiry.’ (LW: 15.24) Both Peirceand James combined their pragmatism with a distinctive epistemologicaloutlook, one which rejected the Cartesian focus upon the importance ofdefeating skepticism while endorsing the fallibilist view that any ofour beliefs and methods could, in principle, turn out to be flawed.This was tied to the study of the normative standards we should adoptwhen carrying out inquiries, when trying to find things out. Inquiry isan activity, and this sort of approach, in Dewey's hands, led toa rejection of there being a sharp dichotomy between theoreticaljudgments and practical judgments. Thus while Peirce and James used‘pragmatism’ in anarrow sense, as referring toPeirce's principle, others may have used it in awidesense as standing for a particular approach to understanding inquiryand the normative standards that govern it. Sections 2 and 3 will beconcerned, primarily, with pragmatism in the narrow sense. Then, insection 4, we shall explore some of the views that are associated withpragmatism in the wider sense.
As we have seen, the pragmatist maxim is a distinctive rule ormethod for becoming reflectively clear about the contents of conceptsand hypotheses: we clarify a hypothesis by identifying its practicalconsequences. This raises some questions. First: what, exactly is thecontent of this maxim? What sort of thing does it recognize as apractical consequence of some theory or claim? Second, what use doessuch a maxim have? Why do we need it? And third, what reason is therefor thinking that the pragmatist maxim is correct? In this section, Ishall examine Peirce's answers to some of these questions but, aswe proceed, we shall also compare Peirce's answers to thesequestions with those offered by James.
We can begin with Peirce's canonical statement of his maxim in‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’.
Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practicalbearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, ourconception of those effects is the whole of our conception of theobject. (EP1: 132)
William James cited this passage when introducing pragmatism in his1906 lectures, and Peirce repeated it in his writings from after1900.
For all his loyalty to it, Peirce acknowledged that this formulationwas vague: it does not explain how we should understand‘practical consequences’. We shall seek clarity by lookingat one of Peirce's illustrative applications of his maxim, bynoting some of his later reformulations, and by identifying the uses towhich it was put in his writings.
Peirce's first illustrative example (‘the simplest onepossible’ (EP1: 132) urges that what we mean by calling somethinghard is that ‘it will not be scratched by many othersubstances.’ I can use the concepthard in contexts whenI am wondering what to do. Unless there are cases wheresomething's being hard makes a difference to what we experienceand what it is rational for us to do, the concept is empty. Theprinciple has a verificationist character: ‘our idea of anythingis our idea of its sensible effects’ (EP1: 132) but theuse of the phrase ‘practical consequences’ suggests thatthese are to be understood as having implications for what we will orshoulddo. This is clear from his later formulations, forexample:
The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the totalof all general modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon allthe possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon theacceptance of the symbol. (EP2: 346).
We become clearer about the concepthard, for example, byidentifying how there can be conceivable circumstances in which we havedesires that would call for different patterns of action if some objectwere hard to from those it would call for if the object were not hard.If I want to break a window by throwing something through it, then Ineed an object which is hard, not one which is soft. It is importantthat, as Peirce hints here, the consequences we are concerned with aregeneral ones: we are to look for the laws that govern thebehaviour of hard things and for laws that show how such modes ofbehaviour on the part of things can make a difference to what it isrational for us to do.
James never worked out his understanding of ‘practicalconsequences’ as fully as Peirce did, and he does not sharePeirce's restriction of these consequences to those that affect‘intellectual purport’ or to general patterns of behaviour.Sometimes he writes as if the practical consequences of a propositioncan simply be effects upon the believer: if religious belief makes mefeel better, then that can contribute to the pragmatic clarification of‘God exists’. It is connected to these differencesthat James looks upon Peirce's principle as a method formetaphysics: he hopes that the attempt to clarify metaphysicalhypotheses will reveal that some propositions are empty or, moreimportant, that, as in the squirrel example, some apparentdisagreements are unreal.
Peirce sees uses for his maxim which extend beyond those that James hadin mind. He insisted that it was alogical principle and itwas defended as an important component of the method of science, hisfavoured method for carrying out inquiries. This is reflected in theapplications of the maxim that we find in his writings. First, he usedit to clarify hard concepts that had a role in scientific reasoning:concepts likeprobability,truth, andreality. We shall discuss his view of truth below. It also hada role in scientific testing. The pragmatist clarification of ascientific hypothesis, for example, provides us with just theinformation we need for testing it empirically. Pragmatism,described by Peirce as a ‘laboratory philosophy’, shows ushow we test theories by carrying out experiments (performing rationalactions) in the expectation that if the hypothesis is not true, thenthe experiment will fail to have some predetermined sensible effect. Inlater work, Peirce insisted that the maxim revealedall theinformation that was need for theory testing and evaluation (EP2:226ff). The pragmatist clarification revealed all the informationwe would need for testing hypotheses and theories empirically.
Peirce's description of his maxim as a logical principle isreflected in passages where he presents it as a development of adistinction that had been a staple of traditional logic texts, thedistinction, familiar to readers of Descartes, between ideas that areclear and ideas thatdistinct (EP1: 126f). As Peircedescribed contemporary versions of this distinction, the highest gradeof clarity, distinctness is obtained when we can analyze a concept (forexample) into its elements by providing a verbal definition. Peircecomplained that ‘nothing new is ever learned by analyzingdefinitions’, and we can learn from a definition only if wealready have a really clear understanding of the defining terms. Heannounced that a higher grade of ‘perspicuity’ waspossible, one that supplemented the verbal definition with a detaileddescription of how the concept is employed in practice. This wasprovided by applying the pragmatist maxim.
As well as treating the pragmatist maxim as part of a constructiveaccount of the norms that govern inquiry, Peirce, like James, gave it anegative role. The maxim is used as a tool for criticism, demonstratingthe emptiness of a priori ‘ontological metaphysics’. Insection 3.1 we shall see how the pragmatic clarification ofreality could be used to undermine the flawed‘nominalistic’ conception of reality that led to the‘copy theory of truth’, to Cartesian strategies inepistemology and the Kantian assumption that we can possess the conceptof a ‘thing in itself’. Such applications reflectPeirce's concern with logic: he uses the maxim to criticizeconcepts whose use can be an impediment to effective inquiry. A morevivid non-logical example of using the concept to undermine spuriousmetaphysical ideas was in showing that the Catholic understanding oftransubstantiation was empty and incoherent (EP1: 131f). All we canmean bywine is something that has certain distinctive effectsupon the senses, ‘and to talk of something as having all thesensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senselessjargon.’
Why should the pragmatist maxim be accepted? Here another differencebetween James and Peirce emerges. James made no concerted attempt toshow or prove that the principle of pragmatism was correct. In hislectures, he put it into practice, solving problems about squirrels,telling us the meaning oftruth, explaining how we canunderstand propositions about human freedom or about religious matters.But in the end, inspired by these applications, we are encouraged toadopt the maxim and see how well things work out when we do so.
Since Peirce presented the maxim as part of the method of science,as a logical or, perhaps better, methodological principle, he thoughtthat it was important to argue for it. Indeed, after 1900, he devotedmuch of his energy to showing that the maxim could receive amathematical proof. He used several strategies for using this. In 1878,he relied upon the idea that beliefs are habits of action: when we forma belief, we acquire a disposition to act in some distinctive way.Applying the pragmatist maxim to the clarification of a proposition, heargued, involved describing the habits of action we would acquire if webelieved it (EP1: 127f). In the lectures on pragmatism which hedelivered at Harvard in 1903, he adopted a different strategy. Heoffered a detailed account of the cognitive activities we carried outwhen we used the method of science: these consisted in the three kindsof inference, inductive, deductive and abductive. His strategy then wasto argue that the pragmatist clarifications brought to the surface allthe information that was required for responsible abductive reasoning,and that our use of inductive and deductive arguments made no use ofconceptual resources that could show that pragmatism was mistaken.(EP2: 225-241; Hookway 2005) None of these arguments fully satisfiedhim, and the task of fine tuning these arguments and seeking foralternatives was his major philosophical concern of the last ten yearsof his life. Although he remained optimistic of success in this, he wasnever satisfied with his results.
These differences in motivation become clearest when we consider howboth Peirce and James applied their pragmatist maxims to theclarification of the concept oftruth. Peirce's accountof truth is presented as a means to understanding a concept that wasimportant for the method of science:reality (3.1); whileJames was ready to use his account to defend the pluralist view thatthere can be different kinds of truths (3.2).
The final section of ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’promises to ‘approach the subject of logic’ by consideringa fundamental logical conception,reality. It possesses anform of unreflective clarity: ‘every child uses it with perfectconfidence, never dreaming that he does not understand it.’ Anabstract definition is also readily forthcoming: ‘we may definethe real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody maythink them to be.’ But, he announces, we shall need to apply thepragmatic maxim if our idea of reality is to be ‘perfectlyclear’. It is at this stage that the concept oftruthenters the discussion: Peirce's strategy for clarifying theconcept of reality is, first, to give an account of truth, and, then,to observe that ‘the object represented in [a true proposition]is the real’. So we have to turn to his remarks about truth tosee how the kind of mind-independence captured in the abstractdefinition of reality is to be understood from a pragmatist perspective.
Peirce's motivations are evident when he says that ‘theideas of truth and falsehood, in their full development, appertainexclusively to the scientific (in a later revision he altered this to‘experiential’) method of settling opinion’. Thisreflects a law which is evident from scientific experience: whendifferent people use different methods to identify, for example, thevelocity of light, we find that all tend to arrive at the sameresult:
So with all scientific research. Different minds may set out withthe most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carriesthem by a force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion.This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish,but to a foreordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. Nomodification of the point of view taken, no selection of other factsfor study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape thepredestinate opinion. (EP1: 138)
In the 1878 paper, his pragmatic clarification is quite terselyexpressed:
The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all whoinvestigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object representedin this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explainreality. (EP1: 139)
Peirce had presented this way of thinking aboutreality sevenyears earlier when he described it as the ‘realist conception ofreality’ (EP1:88-9). In doing this, he contrasts it with another‘nominalist’ conception of reality, which he thinks isflawed, but which many earlier philosophers had accepted. In a reviewof a new edition of the writings of Berkeley—a philosopher who,according to Peirce, was in the grip of this misleadingpicture—Peirce asks ‘where the real is to be found’,observing that there must be such a ‘real’ because we findthat our opinions (the only things of which we are immediately aware)are constrained. While acknowledging that there is ‘nothingimmediately present to us but thoughts’, he continues:
These thoughts, however, have been caused by sensations, and thosesensations are constrained by something out of the mind. This thing outof the mind, which directly influences sensation, and through sensationthought, because itis out of the mind, is independent of howwe think it, and is, in short, the real. (EP1: 88)
We can then think of the real only as the cause of the (singular)sensations which, in turn, provide our sole evidence for beliefs aboutthe external world, and this naturally leads to both nominalism aboutuniversals and skepticism about empirical knowledge. Peirce's pragmatist clarification of truth offers an alternative conceptualization of ‘beingconstrained by reality’. It is explained in terms of this fated agreement of convergence through the process of inquiry rather than in terms of an independent cause of our sensations. Although the nominalist theory is notclearly worked out here, it is clearly related to the‘intellectualist’ or ‘copy’ theory of truthattacked by other pragmatists. It articulates a metaphysical picturethat all pragmatists tried to combat.
Claims about truth had a much more central role in James'swork and he was even prepared to claim that pragmatismwas atheory of truth. And his writings on this topic rapidly becamenotorious. They are characteristically lively, offering contrastingformulations, engaging slogans, and intriguing claims which often seemto fly in the face of common sense. We can best summarize his viewthrough his own words:
The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the wayof belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons. (1907:42)‘The true’, to put it very briefly, is only theexpedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient inalmost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole, ofcourse. (1907: 106)
Other formulations fill this out by giving a central role toexperience:
Ideas … become true just in so far as they help us to getinto satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience. (1907:34)Any idea upon which we can ride …; any idea that will carryus prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part,linking things satisfactorily, working securely, saving labor; is truefor just so much, true in so far forth,true instrumentally.(1907: 34)
This might be taken to suggest that beliefs are made true by thefact that they enable us to make accurate predictions of the future runof experience, but other passages suggest that the ‘goodness ofbelief’ can take other forms. James assures us that it cancontribute to the truth of a theological proposition that it has‘a value for concrete life’ (1907: 40); and this can occurbecause the idea of God possesses a majesty which can ‘yieldreligious comfort to a most respectable class of minds’ (1907:40). This suggests that a belief can be made true by the fact thatholding it contributes to our happiness and fulfilment.
The kind of passages just noted may lend support to BertrandRussell's famous objection that James is committed to the truthof ‘Santa Claus exists’ (Russell 1949: 772). This isunfair; at best, James is committed to the claim that the happinessthat belief in Santa Claus provides istruth-relevant. Jamescould say that the belief was ‘good for so much’ but itwould only be ‘wholly true’ if it did not ‘clash withother vital benefits’. It is easy to see that, unless it issomehow insulated from the broader effects of acting upon it, belief inSanta Claus could lead to a host of experiential surprises anddisappointments.
So far, we have concentrated on the pragmatist maxim, the rule forclarifying ideas that, for both Peirce and James, was the core ofpragmatism. When we think of pragmatism as a philosophicaltradition rather than as a maxim or principle, we can identifya set of philosophical views and attitudes which are characteristic ofpragmatism, and which can lead us to identify as pragmatists manyphilosophers who are somewhat sceptical about the maxim and itsapplications. Some of these viewsmay be closely related tothe maxim and its defence, but we shall now explore them rather asdistinctive characteristics of the pragmatist tradition. The first ofthe themes that we shall consider is epistemological, and it picks upon Hilary Putnam's claim that one mark of pragmatism is thecombination of anti-skepticism and fallibilism.
Like some other philosophers, the pragmatists saw themselves asproviding a return to common sense and the facts of experience and,thus, as rejecting a flawed philosophical heritage which had distortedthe work of earlier thinkers. The errors to be overcome includeCartesianism, Nominalism, and the ‘copy theory of truth’:these ‘errors’ are all related.
The roots of the anti-sceptical strain can be found in an earlypaper of Peirce's, ‘Some Consequences of FourIncapacities’ (EP1: 28-30). He identifies‘Cartesianism’ as a philosophical pathology that lost sightof the insights that were both fundamental to scholastic thought andalso more suited than Cartesianism to the philosophical needs of hisown time. The paper begins by identifying four characteristics of thesort of modern philosophy that is exemplified by Descartes'writings. In each case, Descartes self-consciously made a break withthe scholastic tradition, and, in each case, the outlook that herejected turns out to be the outlook of the successful sciences and toprovide the perspective required for contemporary philosophy. Thefirst, and most important, of these characteristics was the‘method of doubt’: ‘[Cartesianism] teaches thatphilosophy must begin with universal doubt’. We are to try todoubt propositions and we should retain them only if they areabsolutely certain and we are unable to doubt them. The test ofcertainty, as Peirce next points out, lies in the individualconsciousness: trial through doubt is something that everyone must dofor him or her self. And the examination of our beliefs is guided byreflection on hypothetical possibilities: we cannot trust ourperceptual beliefs, for example, because we cannot rule out thepossibility that they are produced by a dream or by wicked scientistsmanipulating our brains.
The initial pragmatist response to this strategy has several strands.It is a strategy that we cannot carry out effectively, and there is noreason to adopt it anyway. Peirce begins his response by claiming thatany attempt to adopt the method of doubt will be an exercise inself-deception because we possess a variety of certainties which‘it does not occur to uscan be questioned.’ Whatis produced will not be a ‘real doubt’ and these beliefs willlurk in the background, influencing our reflection when we are supposedto be suspending judgment in them. Peirce urges that we should not‘pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in ourhearts’. We should doubt propositions only if we have a realreason to do so. It is necessary to separate some different threadshere.
First, there is something unnatural about the Cartesian strategy.Inquiries normally occur within a context: we address particularissues, relying on a body of background certainties that it does notoccur to us to question. The Cartesian suggestion that we should beginby trying to doubt everything appears to be an attempt to step outsidethis context, relying upon no beliefs that we have not ratified thoughreflective inquiry. Sometimes we may have to question some of ourassumptions, but our practice is not to do so unless there is apositive reason for this. Second, the Cartesian strategy requires us toreflect upon each of our beliefs and ask what reason we have forholding it—the sceptical challenges are then used to questionthe adequacy of these reasons. This is at odds with our normalpractice. Many of our familiar certainties are such that we cannotoffer any concrete reason for believing them, certainly not one that iswholly convincing. We tend to treat our established beliefs as innocentuntil ‘proved guilty’. We need reasons for our beliefs whenwe propose to change them, or when they have been challenged. It isdoubt that needs a reason, and we trust our everyday beliefs untilgiven a positive reason for doubting them. The mere lack of aconclusive reason for belief does not itself provide us with a reasonfor doubt. The Cartesian strategy adopts an unorthodox, revisionaryunderstanding ofreason for belief andreason fordoubt.
Descartes, of course, might have conceded this, but responded that therevision is required because, once we allow error to enter our corpusof beliefs, we may be unable to escape from its damaging effects. Hiswas a time of controversy about how we should go about fixing ouropinions, and he was sensitive to the number of false beliefs he hadacquired from his teachers. The pragmatist response here is toquestion some of his assumptions about how we reason and form ourbeliefs. First, Descartes' picture is too individualist and‘to make single individuals absolute judges of truth is mostpernicious’:
In sciences in which men come to agreement, when a theory has beenbroached, it is considered to be on probation until this agreement hasbeen reached. After it is reached, the question of certainty becomes anidle one, because there will be no one left who doubts it. Weindividually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophywhich we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for thecommunity of philosophers. (EP1: 29)
Peirce also questions Descartes' understanding of reasoning,suggesting that he holds that we must rely on ‘a single thread ofinference’ that is no stronger than its weakest link:
Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods,so far as to proceed only from tangible premises which can be subjectedto careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and varietyof its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoningshould not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, buta cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they aresufficiently numerous and intimately connected. (EP1: 29)
Where the Cartesian begins from the concern that unless we begin frompremises of which we can be absolutely certain we may never reach the truth, the pragmatistemphasises that, when we do go wrong, further discussion andinvestigation can hope to identify and eliminate errors. Thepossibility of error provides us with reason to be ‘contritefallibilists’, aware that any of our opinions may, for all weknow, require revision in the future, but it does not provide us withany reason for skepticism. The focus of epistemological inquiry shouldnot be on showing how we can possess absolute certainty; instead, weneed to understand how we can possess methods of inquiry thatcontribute to our making fallible progress. Inquiry is a communityactivity, and the method of science has a self-correcting character.Such are the checks and balances that we can be confident in ourcognitive activities.
William James makes similar observations. In ‘The Will toBelieve’, he reminds us that we have two cognitive desiderata: wewant to obtain truth; and we want to avoid error (James 1879: 30). Theharder we try to avoid error, the more likely it is that we will missout on truths; and the more strenuous we are in searching for truths,the more likely we are to let in errors. The method of doubt may make sense in the special case where an enormous weight is given to avoiding error, even if that means loss of truth. Once werecognize that we are making a practical decision about the relativeimportance of two goods, the Cartesian strategy no longer appears to bethe only rational one. What reason is there to give primary weight toreducing the risk of error?
In his lectures on Pragmatism, James defends a kind of epistemicconservativism that accords with the idea that we do notneedreasons for our beliefs when there are no challenges to them to bedefeated. He describes how, in the normal case, we have an establishedbody of views and opinions, and issues about what to believe arise whena new experience puts them under strain. We will accept a newopinion when ‘it preserves the older stock of truths with aminimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admitthe novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leavespossible.’ Thus a true idea ‘marries old opinion to newfact so as ever to a show a minimum of jolt, a maximum ofcontinuity.’ (1907: 34-5) Once again, our beliefs possess a kindof inertia: we need positive reasons to disturb them; but in order topreserve them, all that is required is that we have no reason toabandon them.
James's remarks lead on to the views defended by Dewey inTheQuest for Certainty. In developing his views about truth, Jamessaw his antagonist as the ‘rationalist’ or intellectualist.The rationalist seeks substantive a priori knowledge of the nature oftruth or of reality, knowledge that is cut off from the exigencies ofpractice. The traditional distinction betweenknowledge andopinion suggested that opinion, the useful guide to conductand practice, is second rate when compared with the secure certaintiesprovided by the philosophers. Rational certainties are supposedlyrisk-free: untainted by the contingencies of experience, such knowledgeis testament to our capacity to grasp the necessary structure of theworld. The desire for certainty is part of a perspective that giveslittle weight to the needs of practice. For the rationalist, ‘theoperation of inquiry excludes any element of practical activity thatenters into the construction of the object known.’ For thepragmatist, the needs of practice are allowed to contribute to theconstitution of objects.
As has already been suggested, pragmatist accounts of the normativestandards we should follow in arriving at beliefs about the world arecast in terms of how we can carry out inquiries in a disciplined,self-controlled way. They provide rich accounts of the capacities wemust possess in order to inquire well and the rules, or guidingprinciples, that we should adopt. A canonical statement of this is foundin Peirce's classic paper ‘The Fixation of Belief’.Inquiry is a ‘struggle’ to replace doubt with‘settled belief’ and Peirce argues that the only method of inquirythat can make sense of the fact that we are disturbed by inconsistentbeliefs and that we should reflect upon which methods arecorrect is the ‘Method of Science’. The method ofscience is an experimental method, and the application of thepragmatist maxim reveals how hypotheses can be subject to experimentaltest. A knower is an agent, who obtains empirical support for herbeliefs by making experimental interventions in her surroundings andlearning from the experiences that her actions elicit. Peirce'swriting provide a sophisticated and historically informed account ofjust how the method of science can work.
Dewey's conception of inquiry, found in hisLogic: the Theoryof Inquiry is richer and more radical (ED2: 169-79). He seesinquiry as beginning with a problem; we are involved in ‘anindeterminate situation’. And inquiry aims for ‘thecontrolled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situationinto one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions andrelations as to convert the elements of the original situation into aunified whole.’ (ED2: 171) As John E Smith has put it,‘Peirce aimed at “fixing” belief, whereas Dewey aimedat “fixing” the situation.’ (1978:98) It is importanthere that it is the situation that isobjectively indeterminate,and it is the situation that is transformed during the course of theinquiry; Dewey is rejecting the common assumptions that all that changeare our beliefs about the situation, and that describing the situationas problematic or indeterminate is simply a way of saying thatwe do not have a clear grasp of it. We begin in a situationwhere we don't know our way around, and inquiry comes to an endwhen we do. The ‘pattern of inquiry’ that he describes iscommon to practical problem solving, common sense investigations of oursurroundings, scientific inquiry, the information gathering of animalsand so on. Dewey recognizes that when we first face a problem, ourfirst task is to understand our problem through describing its elementsand identifying their relations. Identifying a concrete question thatwe need to answer is a sign that we are already making progress. Andthe ‘logical forms’ we use in the course of inquiry areunderstood as ideal instruments, tools that help us to transform thingsand resolve our problem. The continuities he finds between differentkinds of inquiry is evidence of his naturalism and of his recognitionthat forms of scientific investigation can guide us in all areas of ourlives. All the pragmatists, but most of all Dewey, challenge the sharpdichotomy that other philosophers draw between theoretical beliefs andpractical deliberations. In some sense, all inquiry is practical,concerned with transforming and evaluating the features of thesituations in which we find ourselves.
As is evident from the pragmatist maxim, pragmatism is a form ofempiricism. Our ability to think about external things and to steadilyimprove our understanding of them rests upon our experience. However,the pragmatists all adopted accounts of experience and perception thatwere radically different from the views of most earlier modernphilosophers such as David Hume and Descartes (see, for example, Smith1978: chapter three). The established view linked experience to what issometimes called ‘the given’: we are the passive recipientsof atomistic, determinate and singular sensory contents, the kinds ofthings that are sometimes called sense data. Experience provides thematerial for knowledge and conceptualization, but it does not itselfhave a content that is informed by concepts, practical needs, or anythingelse non-sensory. Our only contact with the external world is throughreceiving such experiences that, we suppose, are caused by externalthings; but since these sensory inputs are our only source of knowledgeof the external world, we have no direct sensory awareness of externalthings. It is no surprise that this way of thinking about experiencecan easily lead to skepticism about the external world.
In different ways, Peirce, James, and Dewey all argued that experienceis far richer than the tradition had supposed, and that earlierphilosophers were mistaken in their belief that we could identify‘experiences’ or ‘sense data’ as separableconstituents of cognition. We can begin with James's‘radical empiricism’, of which he said that ‘theestablishment of the pragmatist theory of truth [was] a step offirst-rate importance in making [it] prevail’ (1909: 6f). Theconnection with pragmatism is evident from the fundamental‘postulate’ of radical empiricism: ‘the only thingsthat shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable interms drawn from experience’. But this requires that experiencebe far richer than earlier philosophers had supposed. First, heannounced that ‘the relations between things, conjunctive as wellas disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct experience, neithermore nor less so, than the things themselves.’ And, second, heconcludes that ‘the parts of experience are held together fromnext to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. Thedirectly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneoustrans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right aconcatenated or continuous structure.’
This suggestion is echoed in Peirce's account of perception. Hetoo emphasizes the continuous character of perceptual experience, andalso adds that we directly perceive external things as external, as‘other’, that we can perceive necessary connections betweenevents, and that experience contains elements of generality. As withJames, this is supported by a phenomenological account of ourexperience, and, again as with James, it is supported by a system ofpragmatist metaphysics, a general account of the sorts of things andfeatures that the universe contains.
Dewey's account of experience contributes an additional twist.Like Peirce, he thought that experience was ‘full ofinference’. Experience is a process through which we interactwith our surroundings, obtaining information that helps us to meet ourneeds. What we experience is shaped by our habits of expectation andthere is no basis for extracting from this complex process the kind of‘thin given’ beloved of sense datum theorists. Weexperience all sorts of objects, events and processes, and we shouldnot follow philosophers who seek to impose a distinction between thethin uninterpreted data of experience and the inferential processeswhich lead us to interpret what we experience as books, people and soon. The dichotomy between the passive given of experience and the richresults of our active conceptualization is not supported by ourexperience. It is yet another of the philosophers’distortions.
Having discussed pragmatist emphases upon the activity of inquiryand the richness of experience, we should turn to their views about thenature of thought. It has been common for philosophers to assume thatthe content of a thought, judgment, or other mental state is a kind ofintrinsic property that it possesses. Perhaps it offers a‘picture’ or ‘idea’ of some state of affairs,and we can identify this content simply by reflecting upon the thoughtitself. All pragmatists have rejected this idea, and all have held thatthe content of a thought or judgment is a matter of the role it fillsin our activities of inquiry. The content of a thought or belief is tobe explained by reference to what we do with it or how we interpret it.I shall illustrate this by considering three particular pragmatistviews.
First, all of the classic pragmatists identified beliefs and othermental states ashabits. According to Peirce, our beliefs‘Guide our desires and shape our actions’ (EP1: 114). Thecontent of a belief is not determined by its intrinsic phenomenalcharacter; rather, it is determined by its role in determining ouractions. This was reflected in Peirce's formulations of hispragmatist maxim. In order to be clear about the content of a conceptor hypothesis, we must reflect upon its role in determining what weshould do in the light of our desires and our background knowledge. InRobert Brandom's happy form of words, the philosopher‘makes explicit’ aspects of our practice that are implicitin our habits and dispositions. The role of tacit habits of reasoningand acting in fixing our beliefs and guiding our actions is a themethat recurs in the work of all of the pragmatists.
The second illustration concerns a passage in which James defended hisaccount of truth by urging that it was the concept used in successfulscience. He identified the ‘traditional view’ that, forearly scientists, the ‘clearness, beauty andsimplification’ provided by their theories led them to thinkthat they had deciphered authentically the eternal thoughts of theAlmighty. By contrast, contemporary scientists held that ‘notheory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any of them mayfrom some point of view be useful …’. A scientific theorywas to be understood as ‘an instrument: it is designed toachieve a purpose—to facilitate action or increaseunderstanding’ (James 1907: 33). For James and Dewey, this holdsof all our concepts and theories: we treat them as instruments, asartefacts to be judged by how well they achieve their intendedpurpose. The content of a theory or concept is determined by what weshould do with it.
The third illustration comes from Peirce's general theory ofsigns, which offers an account of the contents of thoughts as well asof public signs and language. Peirce insisted that the sign-relationwastriadic: a sign or thought is about some object because itis understood, in subsequent thought, as a sign of that object. Thesubsequent thought is itsinterpretant. In understanding orinterpreting a sign, we will probably draw inferences from it, orundertake actions that are rational in the light of the sign and theother information we possess. Interpretation is generally a goaldirected activity. In such cases, our action or the conclusion of our inference is the interpretant; interpretation is not primarily a matter of intellectual recognition of what a sign means. The theory is complex and I will not explore itfurther here, beyond emphasizing, once again, that the content of athought is determined by the ways in which we can use it in inferenceand the planning of action.
It would be wrong to conclude that pragmatism was restricted to theUnited States or that the only important pragmatist thinkers werePeirce, James and Dewey. As is documented by Thayer, there werepragmatists in Oxford, in France and, especially, in Italy in the earlyyears of the twentieth century (Thayer 1968, part III, Baldwin 2003:88-9). Moreover we can mention several other important Americanpragmatists, for example Josiah Royce. Commonly thought to be anidealist opponent of James and a critic of pragmatism, Royceincreasingly came to be influenced by Peirce's work on signs andon the community of inquirers and was acknowledged as a fellowpragmatist by Peirce himself. C.I.Lewis, the teacher of Quine and ofseveral generations of Harvard philosophers developed a philosophy thatwas a sort of pragmatist Kantianism. Murray Murphey has identified himas ‘the last great pragmatist’ (Murphey 2005). In bookssuch asMind and the World Order (1929), he defended apragmatist conception of the a priori, holding that our choices of lawsof logic and systems of classification were to be determined bypragmatic criteria (Lewis 1923, 1929; Murphey 2005: chapters four andfive). Of comparable importance was George Herbert Mead (see Mead 1934).Close to Dewey, Mead contributed to the social sciences, developingpragmatist perspectives upon the relations between the self and thecommunity.
Dewey's longevity meant that pragmatism remained a philosophicalforce in the United States well into the twentieth century. The influxof philosophers from Europe in the late 1930s and early1940s—logical empiricists, members of the Frankfurt School, andothers—led to Pragmatist ideas becoming marginalized in themid-century by providing new and exciting ideas when the pragmatisttradition may have begun to grow stale. Even then it retained someforce. The work of Frank Ramsey at Cambridge (Ramsey 1926) in the1920s developed Peirce's views on statistical reasoning and on inquiryin ways that provided fertile research programmes through much of thecentury, for example in the work of Isaac Levi at Columbia (Levi1999). As Russell Goodman has documented (2002), Wittgenstein's laterthought acquired a pragmatist flavour though his reading ofJames'sVarieties of Religious Experience (1902). And therewas always a relatively small but lively group of scholars who stroveto maintain the values of what was championed as a distinctiveAmerican philosophical tradition even when this tradition was largelyignored by the philosophical establishment.
In the last few decades of the twentieth century, scholarly work onpragmatist philosophy increased in both quantity and quality, makingpossible an appreciation of the sophistication of the pragmatistphilosophers and enabling readers to escape from the of familiarcaricatures of the position. Lacking the space to discuss all aspectsof these developments, I shall comment on just two or three leadingphilosophers who have allowed their reading of the pragmatists to shapetheir conception of philosophy (Misak (ed) 1999 passim; Haack1993).
Richard Rorty has described his philosophy as ‘pragmatist’on a number of occasions. Where Peirce and Dewey—and evenperhaps James—were engaged in working out systematicphilosophical visions, Rorty treated ‘pragmatism’ assomething more negative. What pragmatists teach us abouttruth, he tells us, is that there is nothing very systematicor constructive to say about truth at all. In particular, this conceptdoes not capture any systematic or metaphysical relation between ourbeliefs and utterances, on the one hand, and reality on the other. Wecan describe what we do with the word ‘true’: we use it toexpress our endorsement of beliefs and sentences, and sometimes wemight find it useful to express our fallibility by saying that some ofour beliefs may not be true. But, beyond talking about the rathertrivial formal properties of the concept, there is nothing more to besaid. He also uses what he describes as a ‘pragmatist’principle to show that the truth cannot be our aim when we inquire.This principle holds that we can only adopt something as an aim whenwe are able to recognize that it has been achieved: it must thus makea practical difference whether a proposition is true or not. And sincewe are fallible, we are never in a position to recognize that one ofour beliefs is actually true—all we can recognize is that itmeets standards of acceptance that are endorsed, for the time being,in our community (Rorty 1991a: chapter one; 2000; Davidson 2005: 7;Hookway 2007). The consequentialist character of pragmatist ideas isalso reflected in his account of how we can criticize and revise ourview of the world. We should be free to propose new‘vocabularies’—systems of classification anddescription. We do not test these vocabularies by seeing whether theyenable us to discovertruths or by showing that they can be read off the nature ofreality. Instead, we evaluate them by seeing how they enable us toachieve our goals and formulate better and more satisfying goals (Rorty1995).
Hilary Putnam denies that he is a pragmatist because he does not thinkthat a pragmatist account of truth can be sustained. Indeed, he showslittle sympathy for the pragmatist maxim. However he has writtenextensively on James, Peirce, and Dewey—often in collaborationwith Ruth Anna Putnam—and he has provided insightful accountsof what is distinctive about pragmatism and about what can be learnedfrom it (See Putnam 1994a). He has identified four characteristics ofpragmatism: the rejection of skepticism; the willingness to embracefallibilism; the rejection of sharp dichotomies such as those betweenfact and value, thought and experience, mind and body, analytic andsynthetic etc; and what he calls ‘the primacy of practice’(1994c). He appears to count as a pragmatist in the wider sense but notas a pragmatist in the narrow sense that requires acceptance of the pragmatist maxim. With the turn of the twentyfirst century, he has made ambitious claims for the prospects of apragmatist epistemology. After surveying the apparent failures of theoriginal enlightenment project, and attributing them to the fact thatenlightenment philosophers were unable to overcome the fundamentaldichotomies mentioned above, he expresses the hope that the futuremight contain a ‘pragmatist enlightenment’ (Putnam 2004:89-108). The rich understanding of experience and science offered bypragmatists may show how to find an objective basis for the evaluationand criticism of institutions and practices. He is particularly struckby the suggestion that pragmatist epistemology, by emphasizing thecommunal character of inquiry and the need to take account of theexperiences and contributions of other inquirers, provides a basis fora defence of democratic values (1993: 1180-202). This may be related toRorty's suggestion that pragmatists insist upon the priority ofdemocracy over philosophy (Rorty 1991b).
Another symptom of a pragmatist revival is found in the work of RobertBrandom, in books such asMaking it Explicit, andArticulating Reasons. Brandom's philosophical interestsare rather different from those of the classical pragmatists. Indeed,the classical pragmatists, of whom he is quite critical, do notevidently influence his work. It owes more to philosophers such asWilfrid Sellars and Quine and his teacher Richard Rorty. His concernsare mostly with semantics and the philosophy of language, developing aversion of inferential role semantics in order to construct accounts ofour use of words like ‘true’ and ‘refers to’which are liberated from the ‘representationalist’ ideathat the function of thought and language is ‘to provide atranscript of reality’. The connection to pragmatism is that hisapproach to language is focused upon what wedo withlanguage, with our practices of making assertions and of challenging orevaluating the assertions of others. He joins the pragmatists indenying thattruth is a substantial metaphysical property thatcan be possessed by some propositions and not be others, and infocusing upon how this kind of discourse has a role in our practices,upon how truth or reference makes a difference in practice.
We have examined pragmatism in the narrow sense (the pragmatistmaxim as a rule for clarifying concepts and hypotheses) and pragmatismin a wider sense. The latter involves a range of approaches to problemsin epistemology, metaphysics and many other areas of philosophy thattend to display a broad common pattern. When pragmatism began, in thework of Peirce and James, pragmatism in the narrow sense was mostimportant; while more recent manifestations of pragmatism have tendedto give most weight to pragmatism in the wider sense. Many recentpragmatists are doubtful that a defensible form of the maxim can befound. However the connections between the two are clear. Thepragmatist maxim was first developed in the context of a fallibilist,broadly empiricist approach to the study of inquiry, and it is thisapproach to inquiry that is central to pragmatism in the widersense.
As well as identifying some of the primary texts of pragmatism andlisting works referred to in the article, the bibliography alsocontains some books which can be studied to supplement the currentarticle.
For both Peirce and Dewey, references are given to excellent twovolume collections of their writings. This is because Peirce'sphilosophical writings consist of a great number of papers andmanuscripts and because Dewey wrote so many books that it would beimpossible to list all of them.
Dewey, John |Dewey, John: aesthetics |Dewey, John: moral philosophy |Dewey, John: political philosophy |feminism, approaches to: pragmatism |James, William |Lewis, Clarence Irving |Peirce, Charles Sanders |Peirce, Charles Sanders: theory of signs |pragmatic arguments and belief in God |Rorty, Richard
