Ridling Zaine. Philosophy: Then and Now. A look back at 26 centuries of thought
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Ridling, Philosophy Then and Now: A Look Back at 26 Centuries of Thought
498
History of Pragmatism
Antecedents in Modern Philosophy
Pragmatism was a part of a general revolt against the overly intellectual,
somewhat fastidious, and closed systems of Idealism in 19th-century
philosophy. These boldly speculative Idealists had expanded man’s subjective
experience of mind till it became a metaphysical principle of cosmic
explanation. To the Idealist, all of reality was one fabric, woven from parts
that cohered by virtue of the internal relations that they bore to one another;
and this reality was often interpreted in abstract and fixed intellectual
categories. The theory of evolution, then still new, seemed to the Pragmatists,
on the other hand, to call for a new, non-Idealist interpretation of nature, life,
and reason – one that challenged the long-established conceptions of fixed
species. The new emphasis was on the particular variations and struggles of
life in adapting to the environment. Philosophically, the fact of growth and the
development of techniques for instituting changes favorable to life became the
significant factors rather than the Idealist’s ambitious rationalistic account of
human goals and of the universe in general, and important developments in
natural science and logic also encouraged a critical attitude toward earlier
systems.
There were two main influences on the early formation of Pragmatism:
One was the tradition of British Empiricism in the work of John Stuart Mill,
Alexander Bain, and John Venn, which had stressed the role of experience in
the genesis of knowledge – and particularly their analyses of belief as being
intimately tied in with action and, indeed, as definable in terms of one’s
disposition and motive to act. The work of George Berkeley, an important
18th-century empirical Idealist, which presented a theory of the practical and
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inferential nature of knowledge, of sensations as signs (and thus predictive) of
future experience, led Peirce to refer to him as “the introducer of
Pragmatism.” The other major influence came from modern German
philosophy: from Kant’s analysis of the purposive character of belief and of
the roles of will and desire in forming belief and his doctrine of “regulative
ideas,” such as God or the Soul, which guide the understanding in achieving
systematic completeness and unity of knowledge; from Romantic Idealists, for
whom all reason is “practical” in expanding and enriching human experience;
and from Hegel’s historical and social conception of changing and developing
subject matters. In sum, Peirce was profoundly impressed by Kant and by the
Scottish philosophy of common sense, James by British Empiricism and by
the voluntarisms (stressing the role of choice or will) of the genetic
epistemologist James Ward and the relativistic French Personalist Charles
Renouvier, Dewey by Coleridge’s version of Kant’s active conception of
mind and by neo-Kantian and Hegelian Idealism.
Finally, to these influences must be added that of American social
experience in the 19th century: the rapid expansion of industry and trade and a
popular optimism, with its roots in Puritan theology, holding that hard work
and virtue are bound to be rewarded. Both the precariousness of frontier life,
however, and the rapidly expanding economy weakened the prevailing
Calvinistic belief in a predestined future and encouraged the emergence of
inventiveness, a sense of living still in the New World experiment, and
adoption of the ideal of “making good.”
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The Metaphysical Club
It was in the critical group discussions of the “Metaphysical Club” in the
1870s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that Pragmatism first received
philosophic expression. In addition to Peirce and James, membership in the
club included Chauncey Wright, F.E. Abbot, and Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr. A version of Peirce’s now classic paper “The Fixation of Belief”
(November 1877) seems to have been presented at the club. But James also
published a paper in 1878, “Spencer’s Definition of Mind as
Correspondence,” in which his Pragmatism and analysis of thought and belief
are clearly discernible. It was in a lecture delivered 20 years later, however,
that James introduced Pragmatism, and then fully crediting the idea to Peirce.
It was primarily James’s exposition that became famous and was received by
the world at large.
The Classical Pragmatists
The Pragmatic philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce was part of a more
general theory of thought and of signs. Thought, or “inquiry,” it was held,
results from doubt, a state in which habitual actions are blocked or confused
and from which organic irritation and irresolution result. Resolution,
unobstructed conduct, on the other hand, are products of belief, which is a
form of stability and satisfaction. It is the function of scientific thought to
produce true beliefs. In a prolonged effort to embed this analysis of doubt and
inquiry within a more comprehensive theory of signs in which
communication, thought, knowledge, and intelligent conduct could be fully
understood, Peirce achieved a wealth of original insights. A sign is a socially
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standardized way by which something (a thought, word, object) refers man
(the community of sign users) to something else (the interpretant), which, in
turn, is itself another sign. Peirce’s Pragmatism is thus a method for
translating certain kinds of signs into clearer signs in order to surmount
linguistic or conceptual confusion. Getting at the interpretant involves
determining the “effects” or consequences of the signs or ideas in question.
Peirce’s Pragmatism is therefore primarily a theory of meaning that
emerged from his first-hand reflections on his own scientific work, in which
the experimentalist understands a proposition as meaning that, if a prescribed
experiment is performed, a stated experience will result. The method has two
different uses:
(1) It is a way of showing that when disputes permit no resolution, the
difficulties are due to misuses of language, to subtle conceptual confusions.
Such questions as whether the physical world is an illusion, whether man’s
senses always mislead him, or whether his actions are fated are “not real
problems.”
(2) The method may be employed for clarification. As Peirce wrote:
Consider what effects, that might conceiveably 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.
To say, for example, that an object O is hard means that if the operation of
scratching O is performed, O will not be scratched by most substances. One
thus achieves clarity when one can supply a conditional statement of this kind.
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Similarly, in his theory of truth, one means by truth of belief that if a
certain operation is the subject of continuous scientific inquiry by the
community of investigators, assent to the belief would increase and dissent
decrease “in the long run.” Consequently, not only is thought purposive but
meaning carries a reference to the future. Peirce’s concept of the community
of sign users and inquirers also has social and moral relevance, for it is
nothing less than the ideal of rational democracy.
Witnessing his doctrine undergo a medley of dubious interpretations,
Peirce eventually dissociated himself from these by calling his own view
“Pragmaticism,” a term he called so ugly as to be safe from uninformed use.
Parts of the work of Dewey, of the social Pragmatist G.H. Mead, and of the
conceptualistic Pragmatist C.I. Lewis are a further development of the logical
Pragmatism of Peirce. The English logician F.P. Ramsey and the Italians
Giovanni Vailati and Mario Calderoni also undertook significant extensions of
Peirce’s Pragmatism.
An alternative, though not wholly different, version of Pragmatism was
developed by William James. It took a psychological and moral form largely
unforeseen and unintended by Peirce.
A basic difference between Peirce and James is discernible in their
respective conceptions of the direction to be taken by Pragmatic analysis.
While Peirce construed meaning in general, conditional schema, and
interpretants, James focused upon the distinct contributions that ideas and
beliefs make to specific forms of human experience on the living level of
practical wants and purposes. Between the two close friends there persisted a
fundamental philosophical difference in outlook that affected even their styles.
While James was a Nominalist, holding that the full significance of ideas,
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meanings, and actions lies in their particular concrete existent occurrence,
Peirce – as a scholastic Realist – sharply criticized him at this point, arguing
that “a thing in general is as real as in the concrete.”
The most conspicuous feature of James’s writings on Pragmatism is the
dominant place given to considerations of value, worth, and satisfaction –
consequences of his teleological (purposive) conception of mind (cf. his
Principles of Psychology). James maintained that thought is adaptive and
purposive but also suffused with ideal emotional and practical interests –
“should-be’s” – which, as conditions of action, work to transform the world
and create the future, even to “make the truth which they declare.”
Consequently, truth and meaning are species of value: “The true is the name
of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.”
James took meaning to be an intimate part of the use of ideas for
expediting action. The notion of the difference that a proposition makes in
experience was fundamental in James’s Pragmatic methodology. He remarked
that “it is a good rule in physiology, when we are studying the meaning of an
organ,” to look to the specific function that it performs. In like manner, the
special difference that the presence of mind makes in observable cases,
reflected in its unique functioning, defines the use of “mind”; “In particular,
the pursuance of future ends and the choice of means… are thus the mark and
criterion of the presence of mentality.”
With his training in medicine and psychology and the influence of
Darwin in the background, James considered that the main function of thought
is to help us establish “satisfactory relations with our surroundings.” Thus
man helps to mold the character of reality according to his needs and desires.
Indeed, this is fundamental in James’s defense of the right to believe in his
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famous essay “The Will to Believe” (1897). James argued that we may have a
reasonable right to hold a religious or metaphysical belief (e.g., that there is a
perfect, eternal, and personal aspect of the universe) when the belief in
question would supply a vital psychological and moral benefit to the believer,
when evidence for and against the belief is equal, and when the decision to
believe is forced and momentous. In James’s functional conception of truth,
the “working,” and hence the truth, of ideas is their role in opening up
valuable possible directions of thought and action – ”a leading that is worth
while.”
James’s “working” view of truth and of a reality that man in part makes
by acting out and realizing ideas, and especially his essay “The Will to
Believe,” were enthusiastically received by F.C.S. Schiller in England and by
Giovanni Papini in Italy, and these doctrines became a cause célèbre for
Pragmatists and their critics.
An admirer and friend of James, Schiller, now nearly forgotten, was
once the most famous Pragmatist in England and Europe. Schiller was initially
a humanist in the sense that, for him, both reality and knowledge are
reflections of human activity – “the taken” rather than “the given.” He first
came to appreciate James’s “The Will to Believe” in 1897 and subsequently
acknowledged its impact on his thinking in an early and important paper,
“Axioms As Postulates” (1902). He was a tireless critic of the “closed”
systems of Idealism of F.H. Bradley, J.M.E. McTaggart, and Bernard
Bosanquet and an advocate of the intellectual freedom that consists in “open,”
plural, changing, and to some extent never finished philosophical theorizing.
According to Schiller, reality and truth are “man-made” rather than eternal
verities. The true and the false are basically forms of good and bad and are
relative to the private purposes of some particular person. He attempted to
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describe and analyze the “logic” of the experimental “trying” through which
such needs are satisfied. For Schiller, reality is wholly plastic; and, starting
out from initial postulates, one proceeds to construct one’s schemes for
achieving a satisfactory outcome of desire, finally rendering one’s unformed
possibilities (hyle) into a common world of language and action. On this view,
all of science derives from and is inescapably guided by the psychological
process of human thought; man is the measure of all things.
John Dewey once noted that “Peirce wrote as a logician and James as a
humanist.” This distinction characterizes not only the course of Pragmatism
but also the shaping of Dewey’s own thought. Dewey first felt the influence of
James in the 1890s, during the period in which he was struggling to free
himself from the hold of Hegelian Idealism. Later, he recognized the value of
Peirce’s work, which clearly prefigured certain ideas that he had developed
independently.
With indefatigable effort and care Dewey reformulated Pragmatism,
critically readjusting some of its conflicting doctrines, drawing upon his own
work in psychology and education, and finding stimulation in the social
Pragmatism of his friend George Herbert Mead. The resulting construction
was Instrumentalism, which Dewey conceived as a single coherent theory
embracing both the logical and humanistic currents of Pragmatism and thus
integrating the methods and conclusions of scientific knowledge with beliefs
about values and purposes.
While scientific, moral, and social experiences may differ in subject
matter, the method of thought functioning “in the experimental determinations
of future consequences” remains the same for all inquiry. Initially provoked
by doubtful or problematic conditions, intelligent conduct is addressed to a
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resolution and settling of these conditions and to a “warranted assertion” –
Dewey’s version of “truth.” Such is the “mediative function” of reason.
“Truth” is thus identified with the outcome of competent inquiry. Actions
occurring on the organic level, if they be at first confused and obstructed, can
then become organized, coherent, and liberated through such inquiry.
Dewey’s analysis of the organic, cultural, and formal conditions of
intelligent action implies that all reflective conduct issues in an evaluation of a
situation with respect to future action and consequences: thus inquiry is
essentially an evaluative procedure. This method, most impressively applied
in the sciences, is nonetheless a paradigm of moral activity as well. In ethics,
“the action needed to satisfy” the situation is not to be found simply by the
application of moral codes. The meaning has to be searched for [since] there
are conflicting desires and alternative apparent goods… Hence inquiry is
exacted… The good of the situation has to be discovered, projected and
attained on the basis of the exact defect and trouble to be rectified.
In general, for Instrumentalism, moral ideals and “ends” function as
means and hypotheses in guiding the deliberative process directed to
controlling experience and attaining future goods. Not health as an end fixed
once for all, but the needed improvement in health – a continual process – is
the end and good… Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring
process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living… Growth itself is
the only moral ‘end.’
Inquiry possessed a genuine religious significance for Dewey, and in its
functioning as a critical, self-corrective social process of human growth he
envisaged the working ethic of democracy.
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Other American Pragmatists
Two important contributions to American Pragmatism, which have not
yet received the attention that they deserve, came from Mead and Lewis.
Mead’s orientation was social psychology. He had studied physiological
psychology in Germany, had earlier worked under James and Josiah Royce at
Harvard, and was also familiar with Peirce’s analyses of thought and signs.
Dewey regarded him as one of the most fertile minds in American philosophy.
Mead developed the most comprehensive of the Pragmatist theories of
mind. He depicted the evolution of mind and self-consciousness as emerging
from social interactions and the use of gestures and “significant symbols”
such as words. In contrast to other creatures, an individual regarded as having
mind, engaging with others in social acts, can respond to his own gestures as
others respond to them – thus taking on social roles and becoming an “other”
in respect to himself. It is therefore by means of language, the use of
“significant symbols,” that mind emerges.
Fundamental to Mead’s philosophy is his conception of the social act, in
which individuals modify and direct one anothers’ activities, work out their
purposes, and accordingly transform their environments. In the social act the
future controls present conduct, and this is distinctive of consciousness. Since
the function of intelligence is to render the world “favorable for conduct,”
Mead viewed the development of scientific knowledge and the evolutionary
process as coinciding.
Lewis’s theory of “conceptualistic Pragmatism” was derived partly from
his study of modern logic and partly from the influence of Royce and the