Pragmatism

09 Mar 2012 22:18

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If we strain out the differences, personal and philosophical, they [the pragmatists] had with one another, we can say what [they] had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea — an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not "out there" waiting to be discovered, but are tools — like forks and knives and microchips — that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals — that ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.

—Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, preface

William James, of course, but also John Dewey and Charles Peirce. (I once, in the early 1990s, drafted an essay about how all the world seemed to be converging on "lower and distorted forms of pragmatism"; now that seems embarrassingly optimistic.)

Bertrand Russell, in his essays on (or rather, against) James's pragmatist conception of truth raised the following objection, which I find compelling. Suppose we need to choose between two irreconcilable beliefs, A and B. James advises that we choose the one with better consequences, as this actually constitutes the truth of the superior alternative. But to do this we must hold a belief c(A,B) about the consequences of believing A or B respectively, and we need to believe c(A,B) in preference to all its alternatives c'(A,B), c''(A,B), etc. Either these second-order beliefs have an old-fashioned sort of truth to them, or we need to have a belief d(c(A,B), c'(A,B), ...) about the consequences of believing any of the second order beliefs: and so on ad infinitum.

See also: Adaptation; America; Collective Cognition; Democracy; Evolution; Evolutionary Epistemology; Philosophy of Science

Recommended (big picture):
• John Dewey
  • Human Nature and Conduct [Online]
  • The Public and Its Problems [Mini-review. Does not appear to be online.]
  • The Quest for Certainty [Online via the Gifford Lectures]
  • Reconstruction in Philosophy [Online]
• William James, Pragmatism
• Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America [A history of the pragmatists, their inspirations, their relations and their influence. A bit too fond of anecdotes and anecdotal connections, like the metaphysical club of the title, but wonderfully well-told.]
• C. S. Peirce, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear"; other writings on-line from peirce.org.
• W. V. O. Quine
• Russell's essays, sparing with James over the meaning of truth, are well worth reading.
• Philip P. Wiener, Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism [Comments]

Recommended, close-ups:
• John Dewey
  • Culture and Freedom
  • Individualism, Old and New
  • The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy [Online]
  • Liberalism and Social Action [Micro-review]
• Peter Godfrey-Smith, "Dewey on Naturalism, Realism and Science", Philosophy of Science 69 (2002): S25--S35 [PDF. Dewey as a misunderstood realist. Discussed elsewhere.]
• Jack Knight and James Johnson
  • "Inquiry into Democracy: What Might a Pragmatist Make of Rational Choice Theories?", American Journal of Political Science 43 (1999): 566--589 [JSTOR]
  • The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism [Profound, but badly written]
• Richard Rorty was one of the leading representatives of pragmatism in philosophy from the 1970s through the early 2000s: and a very good political essayist he is. I actually do like his purely political essays and have linked to them in various and sundry places here in these notebooks, and he can call up an agreeable line of book-chat as well. (But he has no scruples about twisting books around completely to make them agree with him, as when in his review of Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea he makes it seem as though Dennett agreed with Rorty that reductionism is a Bad Thing and that human nature is thoroughly contingent and malleable, when in fact Dennett devotes chapters to arguing just the opposite.) Contingency, Irony, Solidarity is a good place to see Rorty in action; Norman Geras's Solidarity in the Conversation of Human Kind is a fine, if brief, critique. Susan Haack has, through Heaven knows how many hours at the word-processor, created a marvellous piece called " `We Pragmatists ...'; Peirce and Rorty in Conversation," which appeared in the Partisan Review in 1997. It consists entirely of quotations from the two men's published works, and a few interjections from Haack, arranged so as to seem like a debate between Peirce and Rorty, moderated by herself.

To read:
• Barry Allen, Knowledge and Civilization
• Mark Bauerlein, The Pragmatic Mind: Explorations in the Psychology of Belief
• John Beck, Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics
• Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life
• John Dewey
  • Democracy and Education [Online]
  • Essays in Experimental Logic [Online]
  • Experience and Nature [Online]
  • How We Think [Online]
• John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism
• Andrew Feffer, The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism
• Neil Gross, "Charles Tilly and American Pragmatism", The American Sociologist 41 (2010): 337--357
• James Hoopes, Community Denied: The Wrong Turn of Pragmatic Liberalism
• Isaac Levi, The Covenant of Reason: Rationality and the Commitments of Thought
• Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution
• G. H. Mead
  • Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist [Online]
  • The Social Psychology of George Herbert Mead: Selected Writings of an American Pragmatist (ed. Anselm Strauss)
• Alan W. Richardson, "Engineering Philosophy of Science: American Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism in the 1930s", Philosophy of Science 69 (2002): S36--S47
• Joan Richardson, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein [Blurb. Review in Bookforum, via 3 Quarks Daily]
• Alan Ryan, John Dewey
• Jay Schulkin
  • Cognitive Adaptation: A Pragmatist Perspective [blurb]
  • Roots of Social Sensibility and Neural Function [blurb]
• L. Susan Stebbing, Pragmatism and French Voluntarism
• Jaan Valsiner and Rene van der Veer, The Social Mind: Construction of the Idea [blurb]