Let me say, right off the bat, that I don’t know what it
means today to be a pragmatist. Richard Rorty calls himself a pragmatist, but I
am inclined to think that his pragmatism is profoundly different from that of,
say, John Dewey. The key words in Dewey’s philosophy as I understand it are
‘interaction’ and ‘inquiry’, the key words in Rorty’s recent philosophy are ‘conversation’
and ‘solidarity’. Not that Dewey would not approve of conversation and
solidarity – both are essential to inquiry – but he would insist that what
prompts the inquiry and what must be its ultimate upshot is experience, that
is, interactions between a human organism and its environment. I have been
puzzled for years why Rorty fails to note the role of experience in Dewey’s
thinking, the word ‘experience’ occurs in the titles of several of Dewey’s most
important later books. Nor is this emphasis on experience unique to Dewey; we
find it as well in the philosophies of Peirce and of James.
So, perhaps I ought to consider another
contemporary philosopher, say, Hilary Putnam. He certainly does not ignore
inquiry, and while I don’t recall frequent occurrences of the word
‘interaction’ in his writings, he has been emphasizing the importance of
practice, or the agent’s point of view. And like Rorty, he frequently refers to
the works of one or the other of the great pragmatists. But Hilary Putnam has
said in recent lectures, ‘I am not a Pragmatist’. He is not a pragmatist, he
says, because he rejects the pragmatist theory of truth. So I cannot answer the question, ‘What does
it mean today to be a pragmatist?’ I am not sure whether I am a pragmatist or
what it would mean to say that I am one. So, I want to change the question. Let
me try to say what it means to me to take pragmatism seriously. Dewey wrote, in the introduction to
Reconstruction in Philosophy.
‘Philosophy will recover itself when it ceases to
deal with the problems of philosophers and addresses the problems of men’,
where, of course, he meant by ‘men’ human beings. Taking pragmatism seriously
means to me developing a philosophy that will enable us to deal more
effectively with the great problems that confront humanity. I said, ‘a philosophy
that will enable us . . .’ who are we? We are not merely philosophers but
anyone whose thinking may be affected directly or indirectly by what
philosophers are writing and saying. The two early articles of Charles S.
Peirce that everyone remembers when they think of the founding of pragmatism
were part of a series of five articles published in a journal called Popular
Science Monthly. Many of James’ famous papers, for example, the notorious ‘The
Will to Believe’, were addressed to general student audiences. His lectures on
pragmatism were addressed to educated ladies and gentlemen, and his most widely
read and most frequently reissued book, Varieties of Religious Experience is
clearly accessible to a large segment of the literate public.
Similarly, many
of Dewey’s books are accessible to a wide audience. The first copy I owened of
his Human Nature and Conduct, a book on social philosophy, was issued on thin
paper and in thin paper covers for the use of members of the United States
Armed Forces in World War II. And what
are the problems that pragmatism wants us to confront more effectively? Well,
whatever problems we actually have. William James testified before the
Massachusetts legislature when that body considered what to do about what we
now call ‘alternative medicine’. James suggested that, on the one hand, the
practice of alternative medicines should be permitted – not to do so would be
to block the path of inquiry – but on the other hand the practitioners of those
forms of healing should not be permitted to call themselves ‘doctor’ – because
the patients needed to know whether they were consulting a graduate of a
medical school or a healer belonging to some alternative tradition.
Dewey comes
to mind as someone who frequently entered the public arena both as an author
and as an active participant. What is, of course, particularly dear to American
academics is his role in founding the American Association of University
Professors in order to protect academic freedom. So, what does it mean to turn away from the
problems of the philosophers? It means to me – and here I am using a phrase
from David Hume rather than the pragmatists – that I seek a philosophy that I
don’t have to leave behind in the study. It means, first of all, what Cornel
West has called ‘the American Evasion of Philosophy’, by which he meant the
evasion by American philosophers of the problematique of Cartesian scepticism.
Peirce
rejected Cartesian doubts as paper doubts that could not possibly stimulate
anyone to real inquiry – where real inquiry, scientific inquiry, presupposes,
for Peirce, that there are real things, things that are what they are
regardless of what anyone thinks they are. James pointed out that out of a
multitude of private worlds not even a God could construct a public common
world. And Dewey noted that the question, ‘How can we infer or construct the
external world from our private and fleeting sense data?’ presupposes the very
world it presumes to call into question. So, to take pragmatism seriously means
to me, first of all, that I don’t question that I live in the same world with
you. It means also that there is no interface, no iron curtain between me and
the commonsense world of what John Austin called middle-sized dry goods. To
take your problems – where you stand as a representative of humanity –
seriously, I must take it for granted that the toe I would step on were I not
to take care is the toe in which you would feel pain. What I just said suggests already the second
problem of the philosophers that one evades if one takes pragmatism seriously,
the problem of other minds. Here I need to interrupt myself, lest I be
seriously misunderstood.
When I say that pragmatists evade the Cartesian
problem of our knowledge of the external world, I am not saying that they have
no philosophy of perception, I am saying that their philosophy of perception is
not meant to be a response to scepticism. Similarly, I am not saying that if
one takes pragmatism seriously one does not work in philosophy of mind or in
philosophy of language, but, once again, one does it neither as a metaphysical
realist nor as a sceptic. One does it taking our commonsense beliefs for
granted; taking it for granted, for example, that we sometimes think of the
same building, and that we can sometimes communicate this fact to each other,
and so we sometimes succeed to meet at an appointed time in a certain place. But
this is not the place to elaborate on pragmatist epistemology or pragmatist
philosophy of language or of mind. For the way in which pragmatists take the
existence of other people seriously – and it is, of course, significant that I
say ‘other people’ rather than ‘other minds’ – is more basic.
I mentioned above
that Peirce rejects Cartesian doubt. The other thing Peirce does in his seminal
paper ‘The Fixation of Belief ’ is to examine what he calls ‘methods of
inquiry’ and to reject three of them before he comes to the scientific method. What interests me here about Peirce’s
comments on these other methods, methods that do not fix belief as a result of
experience, is that he says that they succumb to the social impulse rather than
that they succumb to experience. Why does he say that? Well, to the extent that
one’s beliefs are altered in the light of contrary experience one is following
the scientific method. So, what Peirce is asking is, what will move someone
from a dogmatically held belief, a belief which one claims to be immune to
falsification, if one is not willing to count any sense experience as contrary evidence,
or if the belief is such that no sense experience could count as contrary
evidence. And his answer is that it will be one’s coming to see that these
beliefs are not shared by others. Thus, one may have accepted the religious
beliefs of one’s community until one discovers that other people have different
religious beliefs, or none at all, and that will cause one to rethink these
matters. Or one may have been persuaded by Descartes until one discovers other
philosophers who question Cartesian assumptions. But this is not just a piece
of clever psychology, for two quite distinct reasons.
On the one hand Peirce
holds that we cannot defend using the scientific method to fix beliefs and
using the probabilities so established to guide our conduct unless we are
interested not in our own success but in the success of humanity as a whole, or
as Peirce would say, the community of inquirers indefinitely prolonged. On the other hand, and this holds whether or
not one accepts Peirce’s theory of truth, all pragmatists insist on the social
character of inquiry. What is wrong with the Cartesian question, ‘How do I know
that there is an external world?’ is not only that it reflects an unreal doubt
but that it assumes that this doubt can be laid to rest by a single individual.
Of course, if one takes the Cartesian doubt seriously one would have to take
the solipsism seriously as well. But even if one does not take Cartesian doubt
seriously, there are times when one doubts one’s own objectivity, and only
others (and thus one’s trust in these others) can lay such doubts to rest.
Finally, and commonsensically, all our knowledge is built upon foundations laid
by our predecessors, and most of our new knowledge depends on the work of
communities of inquirers. So, to take pragmatism seriously is to take oneself
to be living in a world that one shares with others, others with whom one
cooperates in inquiry, other with whom one may compete for scarce resources or
with whom one may cooperate in seeking to achieve common goals. It is to see
oneself not as a spectator of but as an agent in the world. And that means that
one confronts often the question, ‘What is to be done?’ In other words, I have finally
come to the problems of human beings. What then does it mean to take pragmatism
seriously when one confronts moral and social problems.
First of all, it means
that one does not see a sharp distinction between moral problems on one side
and social or political problems on the other; every social or political
problem is a moral problem. Second, it means that one does not see a sharp
distinction between moral problems and other problems, or between moral inquiry
and other inquiry. A moral problem is a problem, the same methods of inquiry
apply here as in the case of, say, an engineering problem or a physics problem.
In Dewey’s language it is to reject the distinction between means and ends, to
replace it by a means/ends continuum. Dewey speaks of ends-in-view rather than
ends simpliciter, for we may discover as we seek to realize our ends-in-view
that the price we would have to pay is too high, that we must modify or even abandon
our cherished goal. Or we may discover, having achieved our goal, that we now
confront worse problems than before. Think, for example, of the environmental
problems we have created in the process of raising our standards of living. Dewey says, more than once, morality is
social. That seems obvious – how could there be morality unless there were
people interacting, having to do with each other, taking an interest, not
necessarily benevolent, in each other? But consider how philosophers have
approached morality since the Enlightenment, since they understood that
morality is a human enterprise.
In morality more than anywhere else, we have
taken seriously Kant’s injunction, ‘Für sich selber denken’ – think for
yourself. Of course, taking pragmatism seriously does not mean giving up on
thinking for oneself, on rejecting blind faith in an authority. But thinking
for oneself does not mean ‘thinking by oneself ’. In morality as in science
inquiry is a cooperative enterprise. Subjectivity in the sense of giving too
much weight to one’s own interests, or in the sense of taking one’s own
perspective as the only perspective, can be avoided only by engaging with
others, with all relevant others. Finally, and I have hinted at this already,
taking pragmatism seriously is to reject the fact/value distinction, that is,
to deny that that distinction will bear any ontological or epistemological
weight. I have already indicated that value inquiry is like scientific inquiry;
I need only to add that there is no scientific inquiry that does not involve
the making of value judgments, not only judgments of relevance and reliability,
but judgments that something is interesting, is worth one’s while pursuing,
etc. To gesture at just one way in which the fact/value distinction does not
bear ontological weight, I might just suggest that our moral codes (or the
implicit norms that guide our conduct) like our scientific theories are means
by which we find our way in this complex world so full of opportunities and of
dangers; they are, each in its own way, products of human ingenuity, as are our
tools, from stone age choppers to the latest automated machine. We don’t question
the reality of the latter, why should we question the reality (call it
objectivity) of the former? That’s what
taking pragmatism seriously means to me: to try to philosophize in ways that
are relevant to the real problems of real human beings.
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