Misak Ch. (ed.). New pragmatists

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NEW PRAGMATISTS

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New Pragmatists

Edited by

CHERYL MISAK

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

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ISBN 978–0–19–927997–5

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Contents

List of Contributors vi

Introduction 1

1. On Our Interest in Getting Things Right: Pragmatism

without Narcissism 7

Jeffrey Stout

2. On Not Being a P ragmatist: Eight Reasons and a Cause 32

Ian Hacking

3. Relativism, Pragmatism, and the Practice of Science 50

Arthur Fine

4. Pragmatism and Deﬂationism 68

Cheryl Misak

5. Pragmatism, Quasi-realism, and the Global Challenge 91

David Macarthur and Huw Price

6. Pragmatism and Ethical Particularism 122

David Bakhurst

7. Was Pragmatism the Successor to Idealism? 142

Terry Pinkard

8. Pragmatism and Objective Truth 169

Danielle Macbeth

Index 193

List of Contributors

David Bakhurst is Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston,

Canada. His areas of expertise include ethics, epistemology, and Russian

philosophy and psychology. In addition to many articles in books and journals,

he is the author of Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy (Cambridge

University Press, 1991) and co-editor (with Christine Sypnowich) of The Social

Self (Sage, 1995) and (with Stuart Shanker) of Jerome Bruner: Language,

Culture, Self (Sage, 2001).

Arthur Fine is Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Physics and of

History at the University of Washington. Past President of the Philosophy of

Science Association and of the Central Division of the American Philosophical

Association, his research concentrates on the foundations of quantum physics

and interpretative issues relating to the development of the natural and social

sciences. His works include The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism and the Quantum

Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Ian Hacking is Professor of Philosophy and History of Scientiﬁc Concepts at

the Coll

ege de France, author of numerous books on probability, experimental

science, the philosophy of language, and psychiatric disorders. His most recent

books are The Social Construction of What? (Harvard University Press, 1999)

and Historical Ontology (Harvard University Press, 2002).

David Macarthur is a Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the Univer-

sity of Sydney. His interests include scepticism, pragmatism, philosophy of

psychology, history of modern philosophy, Wittgenstein, and aesthetics. He

co-edited (with Mario De Caro) Naturalism in Question (Harvard University

Press, 2006).

Danielle Macbeth is Professor of Philosophy at Haverford College in Penn-

sylvania. She is the author of Frege’s Logic (Harvard University Press, 2005),

and has also written on issues in the philosophy of language, the philosophy

of mind, and the history and philosophy of mathematics. Her current major

project is ‘The Metaphysics of Judgment: Truth and Knowledge in the Exact

Sciences’.

Cheryl Misak is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. She is the

author of Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth (Clarendon

Press, 1991 and 2004), Veriﬁcationism: Its History and Prospects (Routledge,

1995), and Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation (Routledge,

2000).

List of Contributors vii

Terry Pinkard is University Professor at Georgetown University. He is the

author of Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge University

Press, 1994), Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and

German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge University

Press, 2002).

Huw Price is Federation Fellow and Challis Professor of Philosophy at the

University of Sydney, where he heads the Centre for Time in the Department

of Philosophy. He was formerly Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the

University of Edinburgh. His publications include Facts and the Function of

Truth (Blackwell, 1988), Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point (Oxford University

Press, 1996), and a range of articles in journals such as Journal of Philosophy,

Mind, British Journal of Philosophy of Science,andNature.

Jeffrey Stout is a member of the Department of Religion at Princeton, where he

is also associated with the departments of Philosophy and Politics, the Center

for Human Values, and the Center for the Study of Religion. His most recent

book is Democracy and Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2004).

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Introduction

As Robert Westbrook, our best intellectual historian of pragmatism,

notes, pragmatists have always disagreed amongst themselves about the

content of the position. Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of the

doctrine,

quickly denied paternity of the child James had adopted and announced he

would henceforth refer to his own doctrine as ‘pragmaticism’, a word ‘ugly

enough to be safe from kidnappers’. John Dewey, though deeply indebted to

James’s thinking, nonetheless took care to distinguish his own ‘instrumentalism’

from what he took to be James’s more tender-minded efforts to use pragmatism

to secure religious belief. Peirce, in turn, responded to Dewey’s praise of his

essay on ‘What Pragmatism Is’ (1905) with a puzzled letter noting that Dewey’s

instrumental logic ‘forbids all such researches as those which I have been

absorbed in for the last eighteen years’. (Westbrook 2005: 1)

New Pragmatists can be seen as the latest contribution to this long-

standing set of debates. Some of the papers in this volume explicitly

try to reclaim the label ‘pragmatism’ from a particular i nterpretation of

it—from Richard Rorty’s view that there is no truth or objectivity to

be had, only solidarity, or agreement within a community, or what our

peers will let us get away with saying. But all the papers—even those with

no mention of Rorty—are united in their efforts to articulate a position

that tries to do justice to the objective dimension of human inquiry.

Ian Hacking calls Rorty’s view ‘neo-pragmatism’ to distinguish it from

classical pragmatism. I’m happy enough to put up with the infelicity

and distinguish Rorty’s neo-pragmatism from what I am calling ‘new

pragmatism’. Jeffrey Stout’s terminology for the view which interests

us here is the ‘revisionist movement in contemporary pragmatism’.

Whatever we call it, this kind of position is emerging from a variety

of sources—such as the work of Simon Blackburn, Robert Brandom,

Donald Davidson, John McDowell, and Crispin Wright. It is not

of much concern in this volume whether these philosophers have in

fact been inﬂuenced by the classical pragmatists or whether they see