[1.] Introduction to Pragmatism.

 

This course will focus on the philosophical tradition called pragmatism, the only major philosophical tradition to have originated in the United States.

 

The classical American pragmatists are:

·         Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)

·         William James (1842-1909)

·         John Dewey (1859-1952)

 

More recent American pragmatists include:

·         Hilary Putnam (b.1926)

·         Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

·         Susan Haack

 

[We will be covering all of these thinkers in this course, but note that this is nowhere close to a complete list of American pragmatists and neo-pragmatists.]

 

These thinkers all belong to the same philosophical tradition, and there are connections of influence among them, e.g., Peirce was friends with James and a teacher of Dewey; James has influenced Putnam, and both James and Dewey have influenced Rorty. But there is no single philosophical claim or doctrine that they all have in common.

 

Each in his or her own way attempts to provide new insights into, or new ways of thinking about, traditional philosophical concepts like:

·         knowledge

·         reality

·         truth

·         belief

 

Each pragmatist has views that differ, either a little or a lot, from what I will call the traditional view of these concepts. The traditional view includes the following theories:

 

The JTB theory of knowledge: knowledge is justified true belief; in other words, if a person knows that p, then that person believes that p; it is true that p; and that person is justified in believing that p. [This dates back to Plato.]

 

The correspondence theory of truth: truth is a matter of correspondence with reality.  A belief (or sentence, or proposition, or statement, or other truth-bearer) is true exactly when it corresponds with some aspect of the real world, i.e., when it represents the world as being how it actually is. [This dates back to Aristotle.]

 

Representationalism about belief: to believe that p is to have a representation in the mind, e.g., my belief that the sky is blue is a thought, or idea, or other sort of representation of the sky, a representation that is in my mind.

 

As we will soon see, each of the pragmatists either adds to or modifies these theories in important ways.

 

 

Stopping point for Monday August 22. No reading for next time (the first reading assignment from your textbook will be due this coming Friday), but I recommend that you review any lecture notes you have from your Introduction to Philosophy class or your Modern Philosophy class about Descartes’ Meditations. One of the first things we cover will be Charles Peirce’s criticisms of the approach to philosophical inquiry that Descartes took in that work.