Antifoundationalism Old and Newby Tom Rockmore; Beth J. Singer

North American Philosophical Publications

Some Problems in Recent PragmatismAuthor(s): Tom RockmoreReviewed work(s):Source: History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 3 (Jul., 1993), pp. 277-292Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of North American Philosophical PublicationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27744065 .Accessed: 26/08/2012 02:03

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HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY Volume 10, Number 3, July 1993

SOME PROBLEMS IN RECENT PRAGMATISM

Tom Rockmore

I

WILLIAM James' opposition to monistic idealism is reflected in the title, A Pluralistic Universe, the he gave to his last book.1 If pragmatism eschews monism for pluralism, it is fitting that the pragmatist move

ment to which James belonged do so as well. The aim of this paper is to survey some recent developments in the pragmatist discussion and to draw the moral

as concerns the development of pragmatism. I will argue that the relative lack

of unity in the present pragmatist debate, the failure to agree about much more

than the claim to be interested in pragmatism, that evident lack of agreement

concerning the meaning of the term "pragmatism," is a sign of health, not

conceptual senescence. To avoid possible misunderstandings, let me state that

my concern is less to discuss the founders of the American pragmatist move

ment than to study some recent aspects of the pragmatist discussion.

James' well known description of experience, more precisely immediate

sensible life, as "a big blooming buzzing confusion,"2 obviously intended for

other purposes, is a fine description of the present state of pragmatism. The

current debate about pragmatism provides an unlikely collection of bedfellows

ranging broadly over such disparate writers as Sellars, Rorty, Quine, Putnam,

Margolis, Rescher, and the later Wittgenstein, all either analytical philoso

phers or at least close to the analytical centers of power, with impeccable

analytical credentials, but also such others as Flower, Edel, McDermott, John

E. Smith, and Beth Singer, clearly non-analytical thinkers, who seem only to

share the name in common with their analytical brethren.

The same puzzlement concerning pragmatism arises if we change our per

spective from an instaneous cross-section of the current period to a more

historical view. Earlier members of the pragmatic genus include such writers

as Peirce, James and Dewey, as well as Royce, and more recently C. I. Lewis,

Mead and Hook, but also, depending on one's definition of "pragmatism,"

Emerson, Vico, perhaps Hegel, on some accounts Nietzsche or Davidson, and

even Aristotle. One wonders what, precisely, such disparate writers can

possibly have in common.

We are not helped in that regard by the view of pragmatism that Russell once

277

278 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY

held according to which James and Dewey were said to share "the instinctive

belief in the omnipotence of Man and the creative power of his beliefs which is

perhaps natural in a young, growing and prosperous country, where men's

problems have been simpler than in Europe and usually soluble by energy

alone."3 Literally everything is doubtful about this description, including the assertion that it characterizes something common to James and Dewey or any

other pragmatist with the possible exception of Emerson. Yet this only leaves

the question open as to what pragmatists share.

This paper will consider some of the current varieties of pragmatism, with

special attention to the views of Sleeper, West, Margolis, and Rorty. West and

Sleeper are scholars concerned to specify the nature and limits of the "new"

pragmatism on the basis of their common conviction of the importance of

Dewey within the American pragmatist movement. Margolis is a practicing

pragmatist in the much-widened sense that "pragmatism" has taken on in the

wake of the revolt against foundationalism and certainty. Rorty is one of the

more important neo-pragmatists.

The first point to make is the range of views concerning pragmatism. "Prag

matism" is used in a huge variety of ways leading to a Jamesian "confusion."

To take an extreme example, Heidegger understands the American interpre

tation of Americanism as pragmatism4 and Heidegger himself has recently

been interpreted as a pragmatist.5 It is clear, or at least it should be to anyone

who dips into the literary production of the ever larger, ever more disparate

group of thinkers willing to acquiesce to the label of pragmatism that this word, like that of most, maybe all "isms," has no central credo, a single set of beliefs

accepted by all concerned, perhaps even by the majority. That self-professed

pragmatists quarrel among themselves about the very meaning of the term is

an index of the viability of the movement. For at this late date, pragmatism

has still not yet degenerated into a fixed set of beliefs, the habits, customs and

traditions that Peirce referred to in a famous early article,6 but remains lively

and subject to change. For many years and for many observers, James, Peirce,

and Dewey at least formed the nucleus of a point of view. Yet even the idea that

the main representatives are more closely related to each other than to other

trends or thinkers has lately been questioned.7

II

Philosophy like other fields goes through phases. Different terms come to the fore and dominate the discussion for a time before receding, henceforth to be

known but not to be employed with either the intensity or frequency that characterizes their brief moment of conceptual prominence. Such terms func

tion to pick out a tendency, a movement, an approach to philosophy, which has

often been there all along, but which receives a new focus as it were through

the introduction of a new way of referring to the phenomenon in question, that

from the new angle of vision suddenly appears ubiquitous.

In recent times, such terms include the idea of a paradigm or a paradigm

PROBLEMS IN RECENT PRAGMATISM 279

shift, and the related conception of incommensurability, both of which are

closely associated with the work of Thomas Kuhn in the philosophy of science. The idea of a paradigm shift is fundamental for other thinkers, including

Collingwood.8 Yet Kuhn certainly gave it a prominence that it had not had in

the previous discussion. Richard Rorty has brought us the idea of a linguistic turn. Yet the idea of a turn in one way or another is a frequent conception in

prior discussion, including such disparate writers as Feuerbach, Marx, Heideg

ger, and certainly Kant.

"Pragmatism" is another such word. Pragmatism until recently was associ

ated with the line of thought initiated by Peirce and James, and later developed by Dewey. The admittedly popular character of the writings of William James,

which form a large part of his corpus, has contributed to undermine the

reputation of the pragmatist perspective in a discussion which has been grow

ing steadily more professionalized and hence less open to the easy, non-techni

cal character of his writings.

More recently, the situation has changed drastically. In part as a result of

the ever more evident failure of foundationalism, the favored epistemological

strategy of modern times, a wide, if somewhat disparate group of thinkers has

begun to invoke the same term to describe rather different views. These include

the older, even "hardcore" pragmatists, those who subscribed to some version

of the doctrine before the term "pragmatism" recently emerged as a kind of

conceptual vadem?cum. These pragmatists of an earlier generation were al

ready uneasy conceptual bedfellows, as witness Peirce's well known efforts to

distance himself from James' conceptual embrace. Dewey's own view can be

described as approximately equidistant between James' and Peirce's, sharing a family resemblance but differing on many points. Yet the already confused

situation has been complicated more recently beyond measure by the wide

spread adoption of the word to designate theories as widely different as those

of Quine and Rorty, Rescher and Margolis, and even Davidson and Putnam.9

When "pragmatism" was taken to refer to a small collection of American

thinkers, including James, Peirce and Dewey, and a couple of additional

English writers, such as F. S. C. Schiller, then it was an interesting and diverse

movement, whose limits mark it off as an alternative to some of the other

approaches. Yet as "pragmatism" has been enlarged so much that it begins to

include nearly every player in the game, it has begun to sound like a catch all

tag, without discernable limits, about as discriminatory as "patriotism" under

stood, in Dr. Johnson's famous phrase, as "the last refuge of a scoundrel."

The more recent development of what is called "pragmatism" in American

philosophy, the extension of this movement to embrace pretty nearly everybody,

strains the limits, if not of credulity, at least of comprehension. We naturally

require some clarification if the very term is not to be stretched so wide as to

be completely distorted, as to be made unrecognizable, even uncognizable.

The clarification of a general term referring to a diverse movement is a


lengthy process. According to Kant, the raison d'?tre of a new body of thought

is centrally concerned with the elucidation of insights employed but often not

understood by their author.10 If this is correct, then in the contemporary

discussion of pragmatism?beyond the fact that it serves in a very obvious way

as a refuge for those who find that analytic thought, or at least in its more

classical formulation, has lost its attraction?we are even now in the process

of becoming clear about the seminal ideas of those we can refer to as the

classical American pragmatists, most obviously Peirce, James and Dewey. This

process will be neither quick nor clean, since it is necessary to find ways to

clarify and to formulate just what it is that these and other earlier figures were

doing, although it is precisely that that is in dispute.

Ill

It is customary to date the birth of American pragmatism from Peirce's early

articles directed against Descartes and his own attempt to clarify scientific

method. Even that is subject to dispute. Yet depending on how one understands

"pragmatism," the ideas it evokes are considerably older, perhaps older than

the term itself. Aristotle, who provides a classical, extraordinarily influential

version of philosophy as the search for knowledge in the most rigorous, uncom

promising sense can also be regarded as an early pragmatist. We need to

distinguish between his views of pure and practical forms of theory. His

statement of pure theory is set out in his treatises on science, logic, and

metaphysics. His incipient pragmatism is expounded in his studies of ethics,

economics, and politics. The difference between the two realms is essential,

since the former provides knowledge of the immutable whereas the latter

concerns the realm of the mutable. The alternative to pure theory, then, as

Marx following Hegel and Fichte later saw, lies in a theory of the practical,

what Marx, who knew Greek and Greek philosophy well, called Praxis.

Another, later anticipation of pragmatism occurs in the writings of the

Neapolitan philosopher Vico. Among recent discussions of Vico's pragmatism, we can mention those by Megill,12 Fisch,13 and Child.14 Megill's aim is to call

attention to the continued viability of the rhetorical tradition that Vico repre

sents against the inattention of contemporary analytic philosophy. Fisch cor

rectly notes that Vico and the pragmatists share a common rejection of the

spectator theory of knowledge. He suggests that had Vico provided a theory of

meaning, the result would have been pragmatism.15 Child makes Vico's famous

verum-factum doctrine central to his study of making and knowing in the

positions of Hobbes, Vico and Dewey.

Child's comments on Hobbes are useful in calling attention to his profoundly

modern view. Hobbes'definition of philosophy as "knowledge of effects acquired

by true ratiocination, from knowledge first had of their causes and generation;

and of such causes or generations as may be, from former knowledge of their

effects or appearances"16 sounds astonishingly like a whole series of contem

porary thinkers, above all Dewey.


IV

Philosophical movements come about through affixing a single name to cover

a variety of related theories. It is harder to identify what the classical American

pragmatists have in common than the ways in which they differ. Peirce, who

is often regarded as the greatest mind of the American pragmatist movement,

even as the single most important American thinker, was apparently not

greatly influential on the views of the classical American pragmatists.

Thayer, a seasoned observer, who regards pragmatism as the most distinc

tive American contribution to philosophy, maintains that it is distinguished less by any specific doctrine than by a rejection of most traditional academic

philosophy.17 Yet although Peirce failed to hold an academic position, and was

by definition as well as temperament an outsider, through his membership in

the Department of Philosophy at Harvard James was instrumental in the rise

of distinctively American philosophy as an academic institution18 that Dewey

in his own way later incarnated at Columbia.

There is a standard but not terribly helpful description of the rise of Ameri

can pragmatism. It is often said that pragmatism arose out of Peirce's formu

lation of a theory of meaning, which was revived a couple of decades later in

James' theory of truth, and then further developed by Dewey and Schiller. The

first document in this movement is held to be Peirce's famous paper on "How

To Make Our Ideas Clear," [1878], the second of a series of six papers printed

in Popular Science Monthly in 1877-1878.19 This view was later picked up and

popularized by James in a lecture entitled "Philosophical Conceptions and

Practical Results."20 Peirce, who had failed to make his ideas clear, but main

tained that his view was distorted, later used the term "pragmaticism" to

dissociate his own view from those of other pragmatists.21 About this time,

Dewey, aided by his colleagues at the University of Chicago, was independently

at work on a logical theory known as instrumentalism with close affinities to

Peirce's approach.

This overly seamless account tends to conceal rather than reveal the differ

ences between the views of the early American pragmatists that bothered

Peirce. Indeed, these differences could be anticipated since it is rarely if ever

the case that philosophers sailing, or held to sail, under the same flag share

precisely the same doctrine. Rather, differences of temperament and relation

to the historical background tend to show up in related, but different views.22

The genuine difference among the older American pragmatists has been

noticed. In a well known paper from 1908, ten years after the official inception

of pragmatism, Lovejoy distinguished no less than thirteen varieties.23 In his

classical article, "How To Make Our Ideas Clear," Peirce maintains that mean

ing is indissociable from future practical consequences. "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."24 Starting from the Peircean conception of pragma


tism as a theory about the meaning of propositions, Lovejoy persuasively shows

how further work on Peirce's insight led to distinctions between future conse

quences, belief in future consequences, and a theory of truth, and eventually

to a whole variety of pragmatisms.

V

The point is not to demean pragmatism as confused, and even less as a hopeless

muddle, but to point out the genuine variety of standpoint among the classical

American pragmatists. The situation does not become clearer when we turn to

recent discussion of American pragmatism. Here dissimilar works by Sleeper 9fi

and West can represent the recent meanders of the scholarly discussion.

Sleeper's book is an informed, clear, reasoned reexamination of Dewey's

thought against the background of Dewey scholarship. Sleeper is particularly skilled at countering other interpretations in a way that even the non-specialist can readily follow. He is especially helpful in pulling together in what one can

27 call an open system the far flung aspects of Dewey's enormous bibliography

that he knows intimately.

Sleeper sees Dewey's conviction that philosophy should have an impact on

the world28 as distinctive to Dewey's pragmatic turn and for the form of the latter's pragmatism.29 For Sleeper, then, Dewey is a philosopher of culture

whose concern is to know and transform the cultural context in which he lived.

Sleeper's most controversial point is the unexpectedly central role that Dewey's

view of formal logic plays in his conception of philosophy. Unlike other com

mentators, Sleeper is committed to defending Dewey against the charge that his pragmatic view of logic is either outmoded or essentially deficient. Accord

ing to Sleeper, Dewey was well aware of and correctly resistant to the rise of

formal logic in the writings of Frege, Russell and others.30

The issue of the correct interpretation of Dewey's theory of logic is a technical

point mainly of interest to Dewey specialists. West's book is very different from

Sleeper's, but shares the latter's interest in an active, some would say even an

activist, approach to the problems of the social world.31 He makes two points

in his interesting book. First, the inadequacy of analytic philosophy for an

effective political philosophy is continuous with the concentration of epistemo logical themes in modern philosophy since Descartes.32 Second, the conse

quences of Rorty's form of neo-pragmatism engage the academy only but not

the wider social world.33

West's main concern is how to bring philosophy to bear on the problems of

the real world. He does so in a study that covers an immense amount of

material in an informed, interesting, clear manner intended to tell the history

of American pragmatism as a single connected story wider either than the tale

describing the three members of its classical phase or that phase as supple

mented by the tale of the recent analytic converts to pragmatism. His inter

pretation is far from ordinary and is no mere retelling of a familiar tale. His

concern is to specify this relation of thought to the context in which it arises


for American pragmatism. He puts forward a novel reading of American prag

matism in the wider sense including such disparate bedfellows as Emerson,

Peirce, James and Dewey, as well as Rorty and Quine, and even Trilling, Hook,

Du Bois, and Niebuhr.

The more specific thesis that West argues in some detail is formulated as a

generalization about the nature of American pragmatism:

The fundamental argument in this book is that the evasion of epistemology-cen tered philosophy?from Emerson to Rorty?results in a conception of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism in which the meaning of America is put forward by intellectuals in response to distinct social and cultural crises.34

In my opinion, West's reading of American philosophy suffers from his exces

sive emphasis on reading pragmatism as a whole from an Emersonian angle

of vision as well as from his interest in Rorty. It is correct to regard Emerson as a kind of cultural critic whose main concerns are not epistemological at all.

With the signal exception of Rorty, who claims to have abandoned epistemology for what sounds increasingly like cultural criticism, West's claim that correctly

describes Emerson does not correctly describe the varied terrain of American

pragmatism in general.

None of the classical American pragmatists abandoned epistemology, al

though each found reasons to give up the traditional philosophical concern with

perfect knowledge, the kind of knowledge that Descartes thought was beyond

doubting. Dewey, for instance, held that when we give up the idea of certainty35 that has so long bewitched us we can reconstruct philosophy as arising from

and responsible to the stresses and strains of social life.36 Such recent converts

to pragmatism as Quine, Putnam,37 Margolis and perhaps Rescher, neither aban

don the term "epistemology" nor the claim to explore the problem of knowledge.

It is fair to say that the turn to "pragmatism" by so many former analytic philosophers is motivated by the desire to pursue a concern with knowledge while acknowledging the inability to continue the epistemological debate

through appeal to many of the traditional strategies, including transcendental

arguments, transparency or cognitive privilege, foundationalism, and so on.

The pragmatic turn by former analytic philosophers often takes shape, as for

Putnam or Quine,38 through the progressive retreat from a rather hard line

form of positivism. Quine, who considers himself a pragmatist in virtue of his

refutation of the analytic-synthetic distinction,39 argues in favor of naturaliz

ing epistemology.40 This can hardly be construed as giving up theory of knowl

edge that he clearly continues by other means. Hence, it will not do simply to

equate American pragmatism with an abandonment of epistemology in favor

of cultural criticism.

VI

Sleeper and West suppose that pragmatism is the way to go, that this is the

only viable alternative. In comparison, Joseph Margolis' differs through his


effort to demonstrate this supposition underlying many more scholarly but

philosophically less venturesome discussions of pragmatism.

Depending of the meaning of "pragmatism," Margolis has been one of the

most prolific recent writers on this theme in a series of books on such topics as

non-reductive materialism,41 philosophy of psychology,42 relativism43 and so

on. Pragmatism is an underlying, but unfocused theme in all these and many

other texts. Margolis focuses this theme most clearly in the first volume of his

recent trilogy on realism.44

In this book, Margolis is concerned to continue the epistemological discus

sion, while avoiding the tendency to scepticism following from the ever clearer

failure to make out any known form of epistemological foundationalism, the favored epistemological strategy of modern times. What is pragmatic about

Margolis' position is its form of antifoundational theory of knowledge reconcil

ing realism and relativism. From the angle of vision of classical pragmatism,

he implicitly rejects Dewey's well known rejection of epistemology. He is, then, closer to James and above all Peirce.

Central to Margolis'theory regarded as pragmatism is his attempt to formu

late an acceptable form of relativism?Margolis calls it Protagoreanism, or

robust realism?that suspends the law of excluded middle. The resultant

theory is related to realism understood as the claim that our cognitions of the

world as revealed in experience are confirmed in experience:

Minimally, by realism one signifies that, one way or another, the capacity of humans to sustain and discipline an investigation into what they take to be the real world?and, doing that, to state what is true about the world?is a capacity justifiably affirmed.45

Margolis understands realism in a non-standard, weak sense, weaker than

the more frequent metaphysical realism, or realism tout court, roughly the

doctrine that we can know the way the world in itself is, what has sometimes

been called, under the influence of James, the really real. At least since Kant

it has become increasingly clear that we know nothing of the sort. Margolis is Kantian in maintaining that what has come to be called the transparency

thesis, the claim that the mind grasps the world in undistorted form, as it in fact is, must be abandoned.

Margolis' opposition to anything resembling the claim to grasp the ways things are in independence of us logically extends to his reluctance to admit

efforts to recover the tradition, or what he calls traditionalism. This is a

tendency that countenances the appeal to praxis and historicity, yet strives to

recover conceptual invariance, the very sort of claim that traditional metaphys

ics ruled in but the rejection of transparency rules out. This effort to recover

or to maintain traditional philosophical claims about the way things really are,

or truth in the strong sense, while acknowledging its necessarily historical and

practical character, motivates various thinkers such as Hegel, and more re

cently Gadamer46 and Bernstein.47 Yet from Margolis' perspective, it merely

represents the impossible concern to maintain a traditional claim for knowl


edge of an invariant real world, the kind of claim already salient, say, in

Aristotle, while conceding that cognition has lost the theoretical and an his

torical character apparently required to make it out.

Margolis' effort to combine realism and relativism yields a form of pragma

tism marked by two main traits. On the one hand, there is the priority of praxis

arising most clearly out of Marx's philosophical position, reinterpreted here in

an emergentist reading of the efforts of human beings to come to grips with the

problems of production and reproduction of life within a natural environment.

On the other hand, there is the related concept of the process of human inquiry in all its forms as a historical process. This point is made independently by

many writers in the continental philosophical tradition, but it is rare in the

analytic side of the discussion where the problem of knowledge is still most

frequently approached as a purely logical problem.48

Margolis' weak, or pragmatic form of realism invites comparison with the

anti-realism and anti-representationalism recently favored by such writers as

Dummett and Rorty. For Dummett, tacitly following Kant, realism is a claim

about the ways things are in independence of our relation to them, in short, in

Kantian language, an assertion to know things-in-themselves, and anti-real

ism is the view that we can go no further than the evidence provided by

experience.49 Like Dummett, Margolis is Kantian in asserting that we do not

know the way things are, that knowledge is confined to what Kant called

appearances, in a word to the world as revealed in experience.

Margolis' view of realism has attracted criticism in virtue of the indemon

strable assumption of scientific realism that we share a common world.50 I

agree that scientific realism is unable to demonstrate anything stronger than

a fallibilist position; yet this apparently modest claim, certainly modest in

respect to the stronger, controversial assertion of metaphysical realism it

replaces, is also problematic.

Margolis' optimism about the satisfactory performance of human cognition

seems unjustified. The problem is neither realism as such nor its compatibility

with pragmatism. Peirce, who was influenced by Duns Scotus, favored what

he called scholastic realism.51 The problem is rather the meaningfulness of

Margolis' own view of realism.

Margolis' view of realism admits of two, significantly different readings. It is true that we seem to know what we take to be the real world. Yet this claim is so weak that no one would oppose it. It only becomes interesting when it is raised

in slightly stronger fashion, in the assertion, say, that we in fact know our world.

But nothing in Margolis'theory justifies this epistemological optimism. We make our way around what is given in experience, and history seems to record a

progressive adaptation between human beings and the human world. Yet unless

we infer, like Vico and Kant, or Hegel and Marx that the world we know is not only the one that we experience, but that it is in some sense our own product, unless

we take a constructivist line, there is no basis for this optimistic assessment.


VII

The recent revival of pragmatism has tended to center around the return to

favor of John Dewey, for many years the main American pragmatist thinker.

This approach is clear in the books by West and certainly Sleeper, less so in the work by Margolis who is concerned elaborate his own theory. Not surprisingly,

Richard Rorty who has recently emerged as a philosophical superstar is a

firm fan of Dewey. One way to understand Rorty's own view of pragmatism

is through the lens of his ongoing dialogue with his illustrious pragmatist predecessor.

If we take his relation to Dewey as a clue to his own pragmatism, then we

can say that Rorty's early linguistic turn is never renounced but later supple

mented by a further pragmatic turn, in which pragmatism is depicted as a

linguistic affair through a revision of Dewey's position. In Rorty's earlier, more

analytic phase, he identified with linguistic philosophy understood as the very

Wittgensteinian thesis that philosophical problems can be solved or dissolved by reforming our language or at least by examining it.52 Although he was indeed

critical of this perspective, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the linguistic turn.

Rorty's pragmatism emerged initially through his promotion of the views of

holism and pragmatism shared by Sellars, Quine and the later Wittgenstein that he contrasted with the supposedly misbegotten attempt running through

out traditional philosophy to make out "rationality" and "objectivity" through some conception of accurate representation.53 This is roughly the same view

that, as we have seen, Dummett rejects under the heading of repre

sentationalism. Rorty's later depicted his espousal of edifying conversation in

place of traditional philosophy as casting his lot with the pragmatists. In the wake of the failure of foundationalism, a pragmatist is roughly someone who

abandons the idea that truth corresponds with reality.54 He has recently bolstered this point in a long discussion of Davidson's theory of truth that he

regards, despite Davidson's disclaimers to be a pragmatist, as finally employ

ing Frege's insights to confirm Dewey's holist and pragmatist doctrines.55

Rorty never clearly identifies with pragmatism. He mainly backs into prag

matism through efforts to detect it in the views of others, often well known

analytic philosophers, but even including Nietzsche.56 His recent review of a

series of books by and on Dewey and others helps us to see how he understands

the relation between his own version of pragmatism and those found in the

founding fathers, particularly Dewey. As is his custom, although he continues

to claim the label of pragmatist for himself, Rorty does not actually publicly

identify himself with any particular member of the creed. Once again, in an

effort to blur distinctions, he points to Russell who at one, uncharacteristically

uncombative point said that where his metaphysic differs from Dewey's there

are no arguments that do not beg the issue.57 This backhanded way of putting

the matter is as close as Rorty comes to identifying with the figure of the

classical pragmatist tradition that he most clearly admires.


As he has done consistently in his pragmatic phase, Rorty puts the claim for

pragmatism in terms of the idea of truth. In a review of Rorty's recent work,

Anthony Gottlieb suggests, perhaps with William James in mind, that for a

pragmatist utility is more useful than truth.58 Rorty does not go quite that far since he is content merely to find in Dewey the point that he has been urging for some time. Pragmatists are not concerned with the correspondence between

our picture of the world and the world since like Dewey "they do not think that there is a Way the World is."59 Dewey, then, appears once again as the Hegelian

contextualist who replaces the idealism of the spirit with Darwinism.

Rorty's version of pragmatism follows an antimetaphysical line popular

among Vienna Circle thinkers as well as such recent continental writers as

Heidegger and Derrida. Rorty seems to think that the contextualism that

Dewey took over from Hegel and T. H. Green somehow remains after one

discards the unfortunate metaphysical residue known as spirit. But certainly

one of the meanings of spirit in the Hegelian position is the cultural context in which meanings are meaningful. Hence, it is difficult to see how one could

discard what amounts to the view of the social and cultural background and

still maintain a contextualism in other than a very thin linguistic version,

something like alternate language games. Rorty claims to disagree with Dewey

in asserting that meanings come into being with language.60 Yet this is insuf

ficient since the process of coming to grips with the world in experience is not

just like going to a restaurant where one can order just anything from the

menu. It is more like a series of specials on the menu where one must pick

among certain choices that are identified by or at least consonant with the

current state of the social context.

Rorty seems to like insouciantly mixing together various positions on the

assumption that at this late date everyone is more or less professing pragma

tism. His idea that pragmatism politicises philosophy is even more distressing.

In turning away from the Kantian view of the "powers of the human mind" we

naturally turn towards "the socio-cultural conditions of human inquiry."61 Yet

philosophy has always been political. It did not suddenly become political through the rise of pragmatism or even through the emergence of a particular

species of the genus. Ever since Plato the view has been making the rounds

that philosophy is indispensable for the good life.

The idea that philosophy is socially indispensable or even socially relevant

has never been obvious. It is certainly less so in the wake of Heidegger's

identification with National Socialism and Luk?cs' identification with Stalinism.62 Rorty's effort to spruce up this idea after the decline of foundation

alism suffers from the weaknesses of previous efforts to defend it.

Rorty provides a restatement of this venerable notion in his identification

with what he calls the liberal ironist or typical modern intellectual that abandons claims to refer to something beyond time and chance while continu

ing to hope "that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human

beings by other human beings may cease."63 The problem with this expression


of liberal faith is that it parts company with one of the best aspects of pragma tism as practiced, for instance, by Dewey, namely the concern to bring together

knowledge and action that runs throughout his writings.

Depending on what "pragmatism" means we have to be careful in associating

it in an unqualified sense with a liberal stance. Certainly, Nietzsche, whom

Rorty regards as a pragmatist, if not the anti-Semite fascist his sister dreamed

of, was not your average democrat. Dewey, Rorty's hero at this point, was

always ready to break a lance for truth and freedom, to link thought with

action, to emerge from the academy to come to grips with the surrounding

world. The trouble with Rorty, increasingly our leading antiacademic, is that like so many other academic thinkers he seems still to confuse thought with

action.64

VIII

In his introduction to The Writings of William James, John McDermott, a well known observer of the pragmatic scene, confidently states that "the central

problem of pragmatism is to account for mediation between an interest-ori

ented self and a processive pluralistic world." This assertion, which is in

tended to be self-evident or at least non-controversial, silently assumes that

the pragmatic movement has at least reached a phase in which its essence or

at least its general contours are clear, agreed upon, and easily described. Yet

as our discussion has shown, there is considerable disagreement about how to

understand "pragmatism." This review of some aspects of the recent pragma

tist debate reveals that for this movement as for others there is no unanimity

about its intrinsic nature or even its main tenets. Controversy continues to

rage about the relation of pragmatism to earlier theories, including the main

sense of the term "pragmatism" which opposed Peirce and James, to whose

views Dewey later added his own. The situation is further obscured by the more

recent recruits to pragmatism from the analytic fold. It can fairly be said that at no time has there been as much confusion about the basic meaning of the

term.

It is doubtful that the pragmatic movement has a fixed shape that in any case has so far failed to win agreement among its many enthusiasts. It is,

hence, rather difficult to characterize pragmatism at a time when after many

lean years so many writers who seemed to be enthusiasts for other points of

view, particularly analytic philosophy, are suddenly claiming to be pragmatists,

even to have been pragmatists all along. McDermott's description perhaps

applies most closely to his own conception of pragmatism than to any essential

overlap between the views of the classical American pragmatists, Peirce,

James, and Dewey, to say nothing of more recent writings in a pragmatic vein.

McDermott's description presupposes an ability to discern something like

the essence of pragmatism. Now essentialism is not without its difficulties. In

the eighteenth century Carl von Linn? worked mightily to establish a coherent and systematic identification of plants. His system was controversial and he


was forced to emigrate from Sweden. We are still waiting for a philosophical

Linn? who will provide an unambiguous classification of the essence of various

philosophical tendencies. It is notoriously difficult to identify the essence of a

philosophical position or even a broad movement, say, philosophical analysis.

It is even more difficult to pick out the central characteristics of a form of

thought that has not yet congealed and is in the process of change. Like other

movements, so for pragmatism it is likely that there is no single specifiable

essence that all of its supposed members share other than the trivial claim to

belong in some unclear, unspecified, perhaps unspecifiable manner to pragma

tism in general.

It would be hasty to abandon the effort to define our terms since that is basic to the philosophic discussion, however understood. Yet it would be an error to

regard the disagreements among the various self-appointed or self-anointed

pragmatists as a sign of weakness. Disagreement in any philosophical move

ment is a sign of philosophical strength, an indication that the movement in

question is still viable, that its representatives are struggling with the issues,

that it is still in the process of growth that precedes its later decline. For it is

only when the main options have already been laid out, when a theory has

assumed its definitive form, that we can say precisely what it is; but when this

occurs, then it belongs to the past. I conclude that in spite, in fact in virtue of

the many basic differences that characterize contemporary American pragma

tism, that what we may call its very Jamesian "confusion" is a firm indication

that this movement is still very much a live, significant philosophical option.

Duquesne University

Received December 18, 1992

NOTES

1. See William James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912).

2. William James, Some Problems of Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, and

Co., 1948), p. 50.

3. Russell, cited in Richard Rorty, "Just one more species doing its best," in London

Review of Books, 25 July 1991, p. 3.

4. See "The Question Concerning Technology," in The Question Concerning Technol

ogy and Other Essays, translated and with an introduction by William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 153.

5. See Mark Okrent, Heidegger's Pragmatism: Understanding Being and the

Critique of Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

6. See "The Fixation of Belief," in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus

Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), pp. 5-22.

7. Sleeper notes that Toulmin sees Dewey as closer to Heidegger and to Wittgenstein than to Peirce and James. See R. W. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism: John

Dewey's Conception of Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. x. A


similar idea is implicit in Rorty's study of Heidegger and Wittgenstein. See Richard

Rorty, "Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey," in Rorty, Consequences of

Pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1982.

8. This is a leading theme in Collingwood's thought. See, e.g., R. G. Collingwood, The

Idea of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960).

9. See "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth," in Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1991).

10. See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (London and New York: Macmillan and St. Martin's Press, 1961), B 862, pp. 654-55.

11. For a discussion that brings out the link between Marx and Aristotle, see Nicholas

Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press), 1967.

12. See Allan Megill, "The Identity of American Neo-Pragmatism; or, Why Vico Now?," in Vico Studies, vol. 5 (1987), pp. 99-116.

13. See Max Fisch, "Vico and Pragmatism," in Giambattista Vico: An International

Symposium, edited by Giorgio Tagliacozzo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,

1969), pp. 401-24.

14. See Arthur Child, "Making and Knowing in Hobbes, Vico, and Dewey," in Univer

sity of California Publications in Philosophy, vol. 16 (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1953), pp. 271-310.

15. See Fisch, "Vico and Pragmatism," p. 423.

16. Thomas Hobbes, "Concerning Body," Bk. IV, xxv, I, p. 387, cited in Childs, "Making and Knowing," p. 278.

17. See H. S. Thayer, "Pragmatism," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul

Edwards (New York and London: Macmillan, The Free Press, Collier Macmillan, 1972), vol. 5-6, pp. 430-31.

18. See Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy (New Haven and London:

Yale University Press, 1977).

19. See C. S. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, pp. 23-41.

20. See William James, Collected Essays and Reviews (New York: Longmans, Green, 1920).

21. See "What Pragmatism Is" [1905], in Values in A Universe of Chance: Selected

Writings of Charles S. Peirce, ed. Philip P. Wiener (Garden City: Doubleday, 1958), pp.

180-202, esp. 186-87.

22. Lovejoy perceptively points out that "All philosophies...are the result of the

interaction of a temperament (itself partly molded by a historical situation) with

impersonal logical considerations arising out of the nature of the problem...." Arthur O.

Lovejoy, Thirteen Pragmatisms and Other Essays (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1963), pp. 88-89.

23. See "The Thirteen Pragmatisms," in Lovejoy, Thirteen Pragmatism and Other

Essays, pp. 1-29.

24. Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, p. 31.

25. See R. W. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism.

26. See Cornel West, The American Evasion of Pragmatism, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

27. Ibid., p. 201.

28. Ibid., p. ix.

29. Ibid., p. ix.


30. Ibid., pp. x-xi.

31. Megill's essay, mentioned above, is mainly an elaborate review of this collection.

See Megill, "The Identity of American Neo-Pragmatism."

32. See West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, pp. 194-209.

33. According to West, pragmatism evades the epistemology-centered form of philoso

phy in virtue of its response to cultural crises. See West, The American Evasion of

Philosophy, p. 5.

34. West, The American Evasion of Philosophy, p. 5.

35. See John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (New York: Putnam, 1960).

36. See John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston: Beacon, 1960).

37. After early writings close to the Vienna Circle view, at least since the early 1980's

Putnam has become increasingly friendly to pragmatism. See Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

38. Quine's adoption of a generally extensionalist position in such important works

as Word and Object, which he interprets in a pragmatic sense, is combined with a

deliberate rejection of the more extreme physicalism represented in Carnap's thought. See W V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960).

39. For Quine's claim that his view leads to or is a form of pragmatism, see "Two

Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point of View (New York: Harper, 1961),

pp. 20-46.

40. Quine's insistence that philosophy belongs to psychology marks the inversion of

the effort by Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle to conceive the unity of

sciences [Einheitswissenschaft] on a quasi-Platonic model. See "Epistemology Natural

ized," in W. V. O. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1969), pp. 69-90.

41. See Joseph Margolis, Persons and Minds: The Prospects of Nonreductive

Materialism (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978).

42. See Joseph Margolis, Philosophy of Psychology (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984).

43. See Joseph Margolis, The Truth About Relativism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).

44. See Joseph Margolis, The Persistence of Reality, including Pragmatism without

Foundations: Reconciling Realism and Relativism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), Science without Unity: Reconciling the Human and Natural Sciences (Oxford: Basil

Blackwell, 1987); and Texts without Referents: Reconciling Science and Narrative

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

45. Margolis, Pragmatism without Foundations, p. xiv.

46. For discussion of some aspects of Gadamer's effort to recover the tradition, see

Tom Rockmore, "Herm?neutique et ?pist?mologie: Gadamer entre Heidegger et Hegel," in Archives de philosophie, vol. 53 (1991), pp. 547-58.

47. See Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Herme

neutics, and Praxis, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983, p. 8: "By

'objectivism,' I mean the basic conviction that there is or must be some permanent, ahistorical matrix or framework to which we can ultimately appeal in determining the

nature of rationality, knowledge, truth, goodness, or Tightness."

48. Rorty helpfully remarks that "the gap between 'analytic' and 'non-analytic' phi

losophy nowadays coincides pretty closely with the division between philosophers who

are not interested in historico-metaphilosophicala reflections on their own activity and

philosophers who are." Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical

Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 21.


49. See Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge: Harvard Univer

sity Press, 1978), p. 146. This view is followed by Rorty in his recent work. See Richard

Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth.

50. See Charlene Haddock Seigfried, "The Pragmatist Sieve of Concepts: Description Versus Interpretation," The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 37 (1990), p. 586.

51. See, e.g., Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders

Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931-1958, vol. V, pp. 93-107.

52. See his introduction to The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical

Method, ed. by Richard Rorty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 3.

53. See Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 10-11.

54. See "Introduction: Pragmatism and Philosophy," in Richard Rorty, Consequences

of Pragmatism, p. xvii.

55. See "Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth," in Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and

Truth, pp. 126-50.

56. See "Introduction: Pragmatism and post-Nietzschean Philosophy," in Richard

Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2, pp. 01-06.

57. Bertrand Russell, cited in Rorty, "Just one more species," p. 3.

58. Anthony Gottlieb, "The Most Talked-About Philosopher," New York Times Book

Review, June 2, 1991, p. 30.

59. Rorty, "Just One More Species," p. 3.

60. Ibid., p. 6.

61. Ibid., p. 6.

62. See Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 1992) and Tom Rockmore, Irrationalism:

Luk?cs and the Marxist View of Reason (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

63. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. xv. See also ibid., pp. 73, 89.

64. For a recent defense of Rorty as a humanist, see Konstantin Kolenda, Rorty's Humanistic Pragmatism: Philosophy Democratized (Tampa: University of South

Florida Press, 1990).

65. John McDermott, The Writings of William James, p. xxxv, cited in Sleeper, The

Necessity of Pragmatism, p. 202.

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