I love how contested and contentious pragmatism has been — and that it’s been that way from the beginning.
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Chapter 1 of Bacon’s introduction to pragmatism deals with its first two thinkers: Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.
Pragmatism arose from Peirce’s rejection of several arguments from René Descartes, whom many consider the “father of modern philosophy.” The most relevant among those arguments (Descartes was fairly prolific, after all):
- The mind is completely separate from the world (dualism, or the “mind-body split,” as I’ve heard it called).
- Knowledge is a mental representation of that world — and, since the mind is separate from the world, we only have direct access to that representation.
- Certainty is defined as immunity from doubt — any belief that rests on a notion that can be doubted is undermined (radical skepticism).
- Foundationalism (“the belief that we can locate indubitable beliefs which can be known ‘immediately'”) is the defense against radical skepticism. Thus, the cogito: find something that can’t be doubted, and then create, link by link, a chain of reasoning from there.
In contrast, Peirce argued that:
- The mind exists in the world and is a part of the world. There are thus no intuitions that exist prior to experience.
- At the same time, the world has “external permanency.” Our thinking has no effect on it: “There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them.” (That’s what makes science work.)
- Doubt that is manufactured for the sake of a philosophical exercise is fake; real doubt arises — and demands to be addressed — when our conceptions are genuinely challenged by the external world.
- Knowledge should be seen not as a chain of reasoning, but as “a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.”
Bacon calls Peirce’s position antiskeptical fallibilism: “While any particular belief might, in the course of inquiry, be upset and overturned, they are unproblematically relied upon until reason to question them is given.” (This reminds me a little of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms — which makes sense, given Peirce’s focus on science.) Truth, for Peirce, is “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate.” (Again, science: public verifiability.)
One of Peirce’s central concepts came to be known as the “pragmatic maxim,” the bit that I latched onto in the simplified pragmatism that I’d embraced: what difference does it make? Or, in Pierce’s more precise language:
Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our concept to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.
A concept’s meaning is identified by the courses of action that would follow from the concept — and since he’s focused on scientific inquiry, the results of those actions will be independent of the inquirer. (If you and I test a diamond’s hardness with a piece of piece of cubic zirconia, for example, we’ll discover the same thing, regardless of our attitudes or culture or whatever: the cubic zirconia will not scratch the diamond.) And for Pierce, this means that ontology, religion, etc. are “meaningless gibberish” or “downright absurd.”
William James — the psychologist and philosopher who is responsible for popularizing Peirce’s ideas — rejected that last bit. He believed that the pragmatic maxim should be expanded beyond the natural sciences because psychological effects are as important to humans as physical effects. He was more interested in human needs than in scientific inquiry.
For James, the mind acts in and changes the world. This may be more or less true depending on what part of the world is being acted upon; empirical scientific inquiry carries a lot of constraints, for example (a diamond is hard, no matter who tests it, or when). But there are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than in your natural sciences. There are other people, other cultures. There are philosophies, religions. There is art. There is contingency.
Pragmatism, James argues, is meant not only to derive meaning, but to help humans cope in the world.
According to Bacon, Peirce’s response to how James (and others) expanded the pragmatic maxim beyond the realm of science “wavered between the cautiously appreciative and the downright hostile.” For the most part, and especially as time went on, he tried to distance himself from the broader application, going so far as to rename his philosophy “pragmaticism” (in part because no he thought one would appropriate such an ugly word).
A lot of the criticism of pragmatism, as a philosophy — in particular, that it’s too subjective because psychological effects may be individual — can be (and was) leveled at James, perhaps in part because one of his famous essays is called “The Will to Believe,” a title he came to regret because he never meant to argue that one is free to believe whatever one wishes. There are constraints on what we can choose to believe — experience, previous beliefs, societal and cultural conditioning, etc.
Further — and this is most relevant to my specific inquiry — James envisioned the success of pragmatism in terms of its ability to help us cope with experience in its entirety. “Truth” is contingent: what “works” now might not work in the future, under different conditions; or truth that works for me might not work for others, especially in a pluralistic society. Recognizing that our truth might need to change — that we are fallible — leads to a humility, a recognition that none of us necessarily has the whole truth. Indeed, there is no whole truth to have. Truth, or good, or right are all “objects of feeling and desire.” They are not independent of us.
I probably fall somewhere between Peirce and James, though I lean more toward the latter. I mean, I have little interest in a significant part of his project: James sought, in part, to reconcile science and religion. At the same time, I agree that psychological effects are important, including those created by religious belief.
I’m also more comfortable with subjectivism and relativism than James was. I’m certainly less concerned than he was with defending against such charges.
That said, I’m not perfectly comfortable with relativism, as evidenced by this very inquiry. In some ways, I’m asking for an ethical foundation for pragmatism — something that pragmatism (and I, myself!) would resist. Nonetheless, I’m not comfortable with the idea that something is justified simply because it works for me (or a group of which I’m a member) — especially when it evidently isn’t working for others.
So how would Peirce and James answer the question I asked at the beginning of this inquiry? What mechanism, if any, does pragmatism offer to ensure a reasonable level of ethics?
My best guess so far:
- Peirce might tell me that I’m misapplying his concept to ethics and politics, when they really only apply to experimental sciences.
- James might tell me that I’m panicking to quickly; pragmatism needs to be seen in the context of the whole of our experience — over the long term, not just in our troubled time.
That second possibility resonates with me. We’re already seeing indications that what has been “working” for Trump and his toadies may be failing; the self-consuming nature of what “works” in the realm of reality TV doesn’t “work” in the long term in governance and leadership.
Even more, in the Black Lives Matter protests, we’re seeing that even established, unconscious, systemic “truths” — what has worked for whites in a rigged system — can be challenged. Fallibilism — the insight that the “truth” of “what works” can always be questioned and overturned — is at the heart of the pragmatic worldview. It’s humbling — and better than all the idealist (often faux-idealist) shouting that “all lives matter.”
An interesting (amusing?) aside: I am starting to wonder to what extent my inquiry is a holdover from my (ex-Christian) foundationalism. When I was Christian, I often heard people ask (hell, I probably asked it myself): If there is no god, then what is the basis of your morality? I think I may be asking a similar question of pragmatism: “Hey, ‘what works’ has taken a pretty dark turn; how do you justify that? What’s your ethical foundation?”
But central to the pragmatic insight is the notion that there is no foundation. Our ethics, like everything else, arises from our experience in the world. It doesn’t come from some higher, or even outside, source — though it also doesn’t simply come from each individual’s experience (though some people try to live that way). It arises out of philosophies, belief systems, worldviews, interests, temperaments, and so on — everything that the mix of evolution and culture impresses on us, and that we embrace or resist, and that shapes us, and that we, in turn, shape.
This is one in a series of posts in which I explore the philosophical tradition of pragmatism.
Why would I do such a silly thing? I’m pursuing questions that I raised in Post-truth pragmatism: when “what works” stops working.
And if you want to see the series (however far along I am), here’s a collection of posts about this book, as well as a collection of posts in the larger series. (The two lists will be the same until I start a second book, if I ever do….)
[UPDATE: I changed the title (I decided that the format I’d chosen for the titles within the series were boring and too long).