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
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classic Pragmatists. The critical results of a careful study of Kant are traceable
in his work.
Lewis’s Pragmatism focusses upon concepts, categories, and principles
through which experience is interpreted. Though the sensuously given is
“unalterable,” how it is taken, how conceptually interpreted, depends on the
purposes and initiatives of the mind – the a priori element in knowledge,
which, functioning as categorical criteria of reality, is “true no matter what.” It
is by means of these that a systematic interpretation of reality is developed.
However, there may be alternative conceptual systems, giving rise to
alternative descriptions of experience, which are equally objective and equally
valid… When this is so, choice will be determined... on pragmatic grounds.
In stressing the purposive character of conceptualization, Lewis is thus
in the main course of American Pragmatism.
Pragmatism in Europe
In his preface to Pragmatism, James commented that the Pragmatic
movement was the focal expression of a number of philosophic tendencies
suddenly becoming conscious of themselves and of “their combined mission.”
He mentioned the French thinkers Maurice Blondel, Édouard Le Roy, and B.
de Sailly and the Italian Giovanni Papini. Blondel was the author of L’Action
(1893) and spokesman for a voluntaristic and activistic theory of knowledge.
He was a founder of the “school of action,” a liberal Catholic group that was
part of the modernist movement (which employed the new historico-critical
approach to the Bible and promoted a rationalistic interpretation of the faith).
As early as 1888, Blondel appropriated the term Pragmatisme, only to
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abandon it when he learned of American Pragmatism, which was a more
naturalistic philosophy than his own. Le Roy, closer to James than other
French thinkers, also called his views Pragmatism. In broad respects he was
like James in holding that the truth and the full significance of beliefs is found
in acting them out. Le Roy was a disciple of Henri Poincaré, who had argued
that scientific theories are not mere summaries of data, nor deduced from
axioms, but are creative constructions, products of human thought and
ingenuity, “conventions.” To the question of what limits are imposed on
otherwise arbitrary conventions, of what justifies them, Le Roy suggested
their convenience in use. James saw similar forms of Pragmatism in Ernst
Mach, Wilhelm Ostwald, Pierre Duhem, and Théodore Ruyssen in “the notion
that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality” and that “their great use is
to summarize old facts and lead to new ones” so that they are a “man-made
language, a conceptual shorthand... in which we write our reports of nature.”
Another French thinker, Georges Sorel, undertook to reformulate
James’s Pragmatism into a “useful” doctrine of social criticism. Mussolini
later cited Sorel and James as two of his philosophic mentors. He claimed to
find in James “that faith in action, that ardent will to live and fight, to which
Fascism owes a great part of its success.” To the democratic James, no lesson
could have been more badly learned.
A more immediate and direct form of James’s Pragmatism occurred in
Italy with its center in the journal Leonardo, under the leadership of the
iconoclastic critic Giovanni Papini. James referred to Papini as “a brilliant,
humorous and witty writer.” He called him a genius and was addressed in turn
by him as “the Master.” Papini’s Pragmatism, derived from James’s “The Will
to Believe,” became a theory of the will to action. In action, through creative
power and passion, man achieves a kind of divinity. This romantic exaltation
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of action was appealing to artists but also to fanatics. Papini and his associate
Giuseppe Prezzolini comprised the “magical” school of Pragmatism (in the
sense of seeking “divinely-creative” power) in contrast to the “logical” school
inspired by Peirce of G. Vailati and M. Calderoni.
Later Tendencies
Certain extensions and applications of Pragmatism are to be found in
current American philosophy. Sidney Hook has directed some of the critical
techniques of analysis against a number of ideologies. In the tradition of the
scientifically oriented Pragmatisms of Peirce and Dewey, he has explored the
relation between the logic of experimental inquiry and the ethic of democracy.
A converging of Pragmatism and Logical Positivism resulted in the movement
of “logical empiricism” which, in addition to Dewey and Lewis, included the
top-rank philosophers of science P.W. Bridgman, Rudolf Carnap, and Ernest
Nagel, and the philosophical semanticist Charles W. Morris, all of whom were
responsive to the Pragmatisms of Peirce, James, and Dewey. More recent and
detailed studies of the structure of science, the nature of theories and
explanation, by Carnap, Lewis, and Nagel, and a new interest in
Instrumentalism deriving from the work of F.P. Ramsey, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, W.H. Watson, and Gilbert Ryle (as well, of course, as from
Dewey) exhibit a further continuation of Pragmatism.
Maintaining a “more thorough Pragmatism” than that of Carnap and
Lewis, who viewed choices made within scientific frameworks as pragmatic
decisions, the prominent logician W.V. Quine has argued against the alleged
boundary between analytic and synthetic truths. No portion of the conceptual
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scheme of science is exempt (as analytic truths were supposed to be) from
possible revision in the flux of experience and in the light of pragmatic
interests in efficacy and comprehension in predicting future experience. In
important respects Quine’s view of the evolution, organization, and function
of the conceptual structure of science is close to that of Schiller, James, and
Dewey.
Quine has also defended a methodological Pragmatism and relativism on
ontological questions on the nature of being or reality. This position, also
taken by another contemporary philosopher of science and language, Nelson
Goodman, recalls the earlier Pragmatists’ notion of the “plastic” character of
reality, now seen as conceptually plastic in the sense of being expressible in a
variety of systems of symbols and languages. It is conceptually misguided to
seek the nature of objects, since what there is is not describable in abstracto
from the particular language in which an ontological question has been put.
Objects declared to be real, be they classes, numbers, atoms, or stones, may
differ widely. But differences between the “theoretical” and the “factual”
entities are basically differences of degree and purpose in evolving
conceptualization. Hence reality is anything that it is truly said to be – in any
of many linguistic and symbolic systems; and where differences in ways of
speaking about objects call for choices, the ensuing adjudications will be
pragmatic.
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Evaluation of Pragmatism
Pragmatism has been vulnerable to certain criticisms. It has often been
portrayed as a rationalization of the American business ethos – a portraiture
perhaps inspired, but not by any scrutiny of the writings of the philosophers
themselves. Similarly, the Pragmatic theory of truth has been assailed.
Concerning an idea or belief, James had held that one can say: “ ‘It is useful
because it is true’ or that ‘it is true because it is useful.’ “ “Both phrases,” he
added, “mean the same thing.” Most scholars, however, have denied this
equivalence. His position may seem, moreover, to allow for an idea to be true
(i.e., useful or expedient) for one person and false (inexpedient) for others.
Finally, James was accused of reducing truth to a subjective play of opinions
that one happens to relish or find useful to believe. To these charges James
replied that “what immediately feels most ‘good’ is not always most ‘true’
when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience.” He also warned:
“Woe to him whose beliefs play fast and loose with the order which realities
follow in his experience.”
As a single movement, Pragmatism is no longer extant; but as a body of
ideas it contributes a heritage that is destined for future analysis and
development. Chief among these are the interpretation of thought and
meaning as forms of purposive behavior, of knowledge as evaluative
procedure in which normative and descriptive materials are integrally related,
and of the logic of scientific inquiry as a norm of intelligent conduct in the
affairs of men. Finally, Pragmatism has succeeded in its critical reaction to the
19th-century philosophy from which it emerged. It has influenced the current
conception of philosophy as a critical method of investigating problems and
clarifying communication rather than as a universal synthesis of knowledge.
Pragmatism thus has certain affinities with the critical philosophizing of G.E.
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Moore and Bertrand Russell, as well as with the thought of the French
intuitionist and vitalist Henri Bergson and his disciple Édouard Le Roy, of
Blondel, of the early Positivists Mach and Duhem, of the fictionalist Hans
Vaihinger, of the Vienna Circle and the philosopher of logic and language
Ludwig Wittgenstein, and also of the founder of Phenomenology, Edmund
Husserl, and some of the continuing forms of Phenomenology and
Existentialism. It has recognized the relative, contingent, and fallible (yet still
authentic) character of human reason, rather than perpetuating the dubious
ideal of philosophy as a system of eternal truths. In so doing, and in thus
altering the philosophical scene, Pragmatism has become vitally implicated in
the practices of current intellectual life; and in the light of this fact, a more
pragmatic justification of Pragmatism is difficult to imagine.
Rationalism
Rationalism is the philosophical view that regards reason as the chief
source and test of knowledge. Holding that reality itself has an inherently
logical structure, the Rationalist asserts that a class of truths exists that the
intellect can grasp directly. There are, according to the Rationalists, certain
rational principles – especially in logic and mathematics, and even in ethics
and metaphysics – that are so fundamental that to deny them is to fall into
contradiction. The Rationalist’s confidence in reason and proof tends,
therefore, to detract from his respect for other ways of knowing. Rationalism
has long been the rival of Empiricism, the doctrine that all knowledge comes
from, and must be tested by, sense experience. As against this doctrine,
Rationalism holds reason to be a faculty that can lay hold of truths beyond the
reach of sense perception, both in certainty and generality. In stressing the
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existence of a “natural light,” Rationalism has also been the rival of systems
claiming esoteric knowledge, whether from mystical experience, revelation, or
intuition, and has been opposed to various irrationalisms that tend to stress the
biological, the emotional or volitional, the unconscious, or the existential at
the expense of the rational.
Types and Expressions of Rationalism
Rationalism has somewhat different meanings in different fields,
depending upon the kind of theory to which it is opposed. In the psychology
of perception, for example, Rationalism is in a sense opposed to the genetic
psychology of the Swiss scholar Jean Piaget, who, exploring the development
of thought and behavior in the infant, argued that the categories of the mind
develop only through the infant’s experience in concourse with the world.
Similarly, Rationalism is opposed to Transactionalism, a point of view in
psychology according to which man’s perceptual skills are achievements,
accomplished through actions performed in response to an active
environment. On this view, the experimental claim is made that perception is
conditioned by probability judgments formed on the basis of earlier actions
performed in similar situations. As a corrective to these sweeping claims, the
Rationalist defends a nativism, which holds that certain perceptual and
conceptual capacities are innate – as suggested in the case of depth perception
by experiments with “the visual cliff,” which, though platformed over with
firm glass, the infant perceives as hazardous – though these native capacities
may, at times, lie dormant until the appropriate conditions for their emergence
arise.
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In the comparative study of languages, a similar nativism was developed
in the 1950s by the innovating syntactician Noam Chomsky, who,
acknowledging a debt to Descartes, explicitly accepted the rationalistic
doctrine of “innate ideas.” Though the 4,000 languages spoken in the world
differ greatly in sounds and symbols, they sufficiently resemble each other in
syntax to suggest that there is “a schema of universal grammar” determined by
“deep structures” or “innate presettings” in the human mind itself. These
presettings, which have their basis in the brain, set the pattern for all
experience, fix the rules for the formation of meaningful sentences, and
explain why languages are readily translatable into one another. It should be
added that what Rationalists have held about innate ideas is not that some
ideas are full-fledged at birth but only that the grasp of certain connections
and self-evident principles, when it comes, is due to inborn powers of insight
rather than to learning by experience.
Common to all forms of speculative Rationalism is the belief that the
world is a rationally ordered whole, the parts of which are linked by logical
necessity and the structure of which is therefore intelligible. Thus in
metaphysics it is opposed to the view that reality is a disjointed aggregate of
incoherent bits and is thus opaque to reason. In particular, it is opposed to the
logical atomisms of such thinkers as David Hume and Ludwig Wittgenstein,
who held that facts are so disconnected that any fact might well have been
different from what it is without entailing a change in any other fact.
Rationalists have differed, however, with regard to the closeness and
completeness with which the facts are bound together. At the lowest level,
they have all believed that the law of contradiction “A and not-A cannot
coexist” holds for the real world, which means that every truth is consistent
with every other; at the highest level, they have held that all facts go beyond
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consistency to a positive coherence; i.e., they are so bound up with each other
that none could be different without all being different.
In the field where its claims are clearest – in epistemology, or theory of
knowledge – Rationalism holds that some, at least, of man’s knowledge is
gained through a priori (prior to experience), or rational, insight as distinct
from sense experience, which too often provides a confused and merely
tentative approach. In the debate between Empiricism and Rationalism,
Empiricists hold the simpler and more sweeping position, the Humean claim
that all knowledge of fact stems from perception. Rationalists, on the contrary,
urge that some, though not all, knowledge arises through direct apprehension
by the intellect. What the intellectual faculty apprehends is objects that
transcend sense experience – universals and their relations. A universal is an
abstraction, a characteristic that may reappear in various instances: the
number three, for example, or the triangularity that all triangles have in
common. Though these cannot be seen, heard, or felt, Rationalists point out
that man can plainly think about them and about their relations. This kind of
knowledge, which includes the whole of logic and mathematics as well as
fragmentary insights in many other fields, is, in the Rationalist view, the most
important and certain knowledge that the mind can achieve. Such a priori
knowledge is both necessary (i.e., it cannot be conceived as otherwise) and
universal, in the sense that it admits of no exceptions. In critical philosophy,
epistemological Rationalism finds expression in the claim that the mind
imposes its own inherent categories or forms upon incipient experience.
In ethics Rationalism holds the position that reason, rather than feeling,
custom, or authority, is the ultimate court of appeal in judging good and bad,
right and wrong. Among major thinkers, the most notable representative of
rational ethics is Immanuel Kant, who held that the way to judge an act is to
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check its self-consistency as apprehended by the intellect: to note, first, what it
is essentially, or in principle – a lie, for example, or a theft – and then to ask if
one can consistently will that the principle be made universal. Is theft, then,
right? The answer must be “No,” because, if theft were generally approved, no
one’s property would be his own as opposed to anyone else’s and theft would
then become meaningless; the notion, if universalized, would thus destroy
itself, as reason, by itself, is sufficient to show.
In religion Rationalism commonly means that all of man’s knowledge
comes through the use of his natural faculties, without the aid of supernatural
revelation. “Reason” is here used in a broader sense, referring to man’s
cognitive powers generally, as opposed to supernatural grace or faith – though
it is also in sharp contrast to so-called existential approaches to truth. Reason,
for the Rationalist, thus stands opposed to many of the religions of the world,
including Christianity, which have held that the divine has revealed itself
through inspired persons or writings and which have required, at times, that its
claims be accepted as infallible, even when they do not accord with natural
knowledge. Religious Rationalists hold, on the other hand, that if the clear
insights of man’s reason must be set aside in favor of alleged revelation, then
human thought is everywhere rendered suspect – even in the reasonings of the
theologians themselves. There cannot be two ultimately different ways of
warranting truth, they assert; hence Rationalism urges that reason, with its
standard of consistency, must be the final court of appeal. Religious
Rationalism can reflect either a traditional piety, when endeavoring to display
the alleged sweet reasonableness of religion, or an anti-authoritarian temper,
when aiming to supplant religion with the “goddess of reason.”