This chapter was hard to work through, for any number of reasons—mostly, I think, because it wasn’t directly related to my question. It was mostly historical, though the bridge between Peirce and Rorty is relevant and important.
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Back in his introduction, Bacon explained that a standard history of philosophy states that pragmatism after Dewey was basically eclipsed by logical positivism and empiricism until it was revived by Richard Rorty’s 1979 book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
However, in this chapter, Bacon argues that the critique of logical positivism by three analytic philosophers from the US—Willard Van Orman Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, and Davidson Donaldson—has a clear connection to pragmatic thought, especially that of Peirce.
I never paid much attention to logical positivism because it was introduced to me as having already been pretty much discredited. This makes sense; in 1967, philosopher John Passmore pronounced it “dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes” (though the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy suggests that this is overstated).
Nonetheless, understanding how pragmatism (to mix metaphors) weathered the eclipse requires some understanding of logical positivism.
According to Bacon, logical positivists saw the project of philosophy as “analysing statements with the aim of identifying those that are meaningful”—a project that certainly echoes Peirce. One type of meaning—synthetic truths—was said to come from empirical testing, or science. The other type of meaning—analytic truths—was said to come from the meaning of linguistic terms. Anything outside of linguistic analysis or empirical testing (ethics or religion, for example) was considered meaningless, philosophically speaking.
Quine
Quine begins the takedown of logical positivism in his paper, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” (I love the religious connotations of the term “dogma” in his title.) The first dogma, Quine says, is that analytic and synthetic truths can be distinguished. Sure, some sentences are formally true; “all unmarried men are unmarried” is a true statement no matter what the constituent terms mean.
But “All bachelors are unmarried men” depends on definition, and that definition had to come from somewhere: “Who defined it thus, and when?” These are empirical questions, and that fact undermines the separation between the analytic and synthetic realms.
The second dogma states that no statement can be confirmed or refuted on its own. Drawing on mathematician/physicist Pierre Duhem, Quine argued that evidence is never adequate to such confirmation or refutation. Faced with contrary data, a person might reject the hypothesis—but she also might revise assumptions behind the hypothesis. Quine argued that any statement can be revised or maintained, if we’re willing to adjust our other beliefs.
As Bacon explains it: “We can preserve any belief, even in the face of doubt, if we are prepared to make revisions to other beliefs.” And decisions about these revisions are predominantly pragmatic. (Unless, I suppose, as we’ve seen with QAnon, they’re more conspiratorial.)
Quine drew this connection explicitly; in a 1968 lecture series, Quine stated, “I am bound to Dewey by the naturalism that dominated his last three decades. With Dewey I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with, and that they are to be studied in the same empirical spirit that animates natural science. There is no place for a prior philosophy” (a philosophy with propositions determined prior to, or before, experience).
Over a decade later, Quine discussed two central tenets of pragmatism that he agreed with.
The first was what he called “behaviouristic semantics”—the idea that the meaning of words is a matter of how people use them. This is in contrast to the idea that words have determinate meanings, separate from our behavior. We are able to communicate because we share beliefs and assumptions. (I think this will rear its head in Rorty’s notion of “interpretive communities.”)
The second was the idea of “man as truth-maker.” Even naturalistic science, Quine argues, is manmade: “It is made to fit the data, yes, but invented rather than discovered, because it is not uniquely determined by the data. Alternative systems, all undreamed of, would have fitted the data, too.” (This echoes of one of first books to really blow my mind, when I was much younger: Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.)
Sellars
Sellars challenged the notion of the “given”—the idea that knowledge comes from sensation. His view is more Kantean: we interpret the world through concepts, and these concepts are linguistic. Indeed, he argued, all awareness, all knowledge, is linguistic. The “given” may cause belief, but it can’t justify it. Justifying a belief requires placing it in “the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.”
Sellars argued that the pragmatists understood this, but didn’t take it far enough. Pragmatists were interested in concepts mainly for the way they could be used (”what works”). But Sellars argued that language’s connection to our conduct is “intrinsic to its structure as language, rather than a ‘use’ to which it ‘happens’ to be put.”
Bacon explains that Sellars also echoed the pragmatic view, especially that of Pierce, that denied foundations for knowledge. Empirical knowledge (the meat and potatoes of logical positivism) is rational, but “not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise.”
The challenge, for Sellars, was to bring together two images or our place in the world, without elevating one over the other, nor reducing one to the other.
On the one hand, there’s the “manifest image”—”a philosophical conception of personhood … according to which human beings are viewed as being both sentient creatures and agents capable of rational action.”
On the other hand, there’s the “scientific image,” which “regards that [manifest] image merely as a first approximation at understanding reality which is now more adequately offered by the sciences.”
The manifest image focuses on intentionality; the scientific image focuses on description of the way things are. Sellars hoped to make room for both of them: the scientific image, with its descriptive, naturalistic framework; and the manifest image, with its intentional, normative framework.
Davidson
Bacon says that Davidson’s “claim to pragmatism” is the result of Rorty’s “efforts to read him into the pragmatist tradition”—a view that “is not without basis.”
Davidson accepts Quine’s two dogmas, but adds a third: “the view that there are two parts to our picture of the world”—uninterpreted experience, and a mind imposing structure on that experience. He rejects the notion that subjective experience is the foundation of empirical knowledge; instead, he argues that “empirical knowledge has no epistemological foundation, and needs none.”
Experience (or, more properly, “sensory stimulation”) leads to beliefs, but it does not justify the beliefs. We build knowledge by using some beliefs to justify others.
Bacon delves fairly deeply in to a critique that Davidson brings against Descartes’s use of skepticism. Descartes explored how we might start with the subjective, but develop knowledge of the external world. Davidson argues that one does not lead to the other—indeed, Davidson sees three kinds of knowledge (of the self, of the external world, and of others’ minds). None of these knowledges is perfect or complete, but neither does any have “conceptual priority” over the others. They’re all part of our overall structure of understanding or knowledge.
Truth becomes interpersonal, a “radical interpretation” that brings the personal and interpersonal into contact—and that interacts with the speakers’ shared environment.
I think I’m again seeing hints toward the notion of “interpretive communities,” which is an important concept to Rorty.
This helps explain why Rorty drew on Davidson as a pragmatist, even though Davidson resisted that association, since he criticized pragmatism as a kind of relativism. He argued that that the pragmatists rejected objectivity and identified truth with usefulness (”truth is what works”), and that’s a problem:
I agree with the pragmatists that we can’t consistently take truth to be both objective and something to be pursued. But I think they would have done better to cleave to a view that counts truth as objective, but pointless as a goal.
Objective, but pointless: objective, in that sense of calibration among the subjective, the interpersonal, and the shared environment (not from an outsider position identifying “Truth”); but pointless in that knowledge is always growing and changing, and there’s no way to know when your knowledge is in fact true: “Since it is neither visible as a target, nor recognizable when achieved, there is no point in calling truth a goal.”
Wrapping up for now
It’s been over two and a half years since I worked through the previous chapter on Dewey.
This neglect was partly because the chapter seemed more dense to me—a fairly challenging (especially to a non-philosopher) and somewhat detailed look at three different thinkers, none of whom are fully within the tradition of pragmatism, as a philosophical movement. I read the chapter, but then procrastinated on summarizing or thinking about it—and then had to read it again because I’d forgotten so much.
And then, I would say, I lost the urgency I felt when I started reading the book. I’m not sure why; it’s not like we’re in a post-post-truth world. But so much that I’d been so frustrated by has become somewhat normalized, which—even though this is more dangerous—has removed that urgency.
And when I came back to just get on with it, I found that I’d forgotten everything again, and had to reread the chapter.
It’s embarrassing, to be honest.
I plan to keep pushing forward. The new semester has just started, and I have a lot of things that will take my attention, so it won’t be easy. But the philosophical narrative returns to recognizable pragmatism, so I don’t think I’ll have the same “block” I had dealing with this sort-of interlude.
We’ll see. The new pragmatists aren’t by any stretch of the imagination easy; I mean, maybe they’re not Heidegger or Derrida, but they’re not Dr. Suess, either.
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….)
Top photo by Wai Siew on Unsplash