[1.1.] Pragmatism and Pragmatists.

 

Pragmatism is an approach to philosophy (including logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics) that emphasizes

·         experience and the empirical

·         experimental interactions with one’s environment

·         the practical consequences of claims and beliefs

·         understanding philosophical concepts in terms of actions or deeds.

 

As we will, different pragmatists will use this approach to try to explain the concepts we covered in the last class, concepts dealt with in (what I am calling) the traditional view: knowledge, truth, reality, and belief.

 

While the philosophers we will study are all lumped together as “pragmatists,” there is no doctrine that they all have in common. In fact, “pragmatism” means something slightly different for each one of them.

 

 

[1.2.] Peirce, Pragmatism, and Pragmatic Maxim.

 

There are two events either of which could, with good reason, be described as the birth of pragmatism:

 

1. The Formation of the Metaphysical Club in 1871 or 1872.

 

Formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, no later than January 1872, the Club’s initial members included Peirce, James, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935), who later served on the US Supreme Court for over thirty years.[1]

 

The club name was a joke; they were all critical of much traditional metaphysics.

 

During these meetings, Peirce coined the term “pragmatism” to describe a rule or method for clarifying the meaning of concepts.

 

This rule came to be known as the Pragmatic Maxim.

 

 

 

 

2. The publication of Peirce’s “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878).

 

In that article, Peirce articulated the pragmatic maxim as follows:

 

...consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (p.138)[2]

 

[I don’t expect this to mean much to you now. We will talk at great length about it later in the semester.]

 

So at its birth, pragmatism was a rule or method of clarifying the meaning of concepts/ideas.

 

 

*About the word “pragmatism”:

·         It was James, not Peirce, who first used the term “pragmatism” in public and made it well-known. He did this in 1898, about 26-27 years after Peirce had coined the term privately in meetings of the Metaphysical Club.

·         Soon other philosophers in the US and abroad began describing themselves as “pragmatists.” Peirce was dismayed by this, because these new versions of pragmatism were very different from what he had coined the name to describe. Even James’s version of pragmatism was importantly different from Peirce’s (we will see exactly how they differed when we read James’s article “What Pragmatism Means”).

·         In 1905, Peirce wrote that he would thenceforth call his own position “pragmaticism”—a name he hoped was “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.” (p.166) He did this to distance his form of pragmatism from that of other philosophers who had begun calling themselves pragmatists.

 

[1.3.] From More- to Less-Realist Pragmatism.

 

Peirce accepted

 

realism: (df.) the view that there is a real world. [What this amounts to depends in part on what is meant by the word “real.” We will see in the next couple of weeks what Peirce meant by it.]

 

WARNING: The word “realism” is used in a number of different ways in philosophy.[3]

 

Peirce also believed that:

·         we can discover truths through experience and reasoning;

·         philosophy is a type of inquiry (an attempt to discover truths).

 

The shift away from this realist version of pragmatism began early in the history of the pragmatist movement.  Peirce actually saw this shift occurring in his own lifetime.

 

By the late 20th century, pragmatism had changed significantly.

 

The best-known neo-pragmatist is Richard Rorty, who, when he died in 2007, was professor emeritus of comparative literature at Stanford. Rorty sees himself as inheriting and forwarding the work begun by some of the classical pragmatists, especially Dewey. His form of pragmatism holds that:

 

     There is no such thing as “the way things really are.”

     “True” means whatever you can actually defend against all objections.

·         Philosophy is not inquiry; it is a conversation. Philosophy should think of itself not as an attempt to discover truths but as something more like literature.

 

Although Rorty denies it, some of his critics accuse him of being a relativist:

 

relativism (df.): the view that truth and/or reality [and/or something else] are somehow dependent on (in other words, relative to) human thought [and/or on something else].

 

WARNING: The word “relativism” is used in a number of different ways in philosophy. To say simply that you are a relativist is to say practically nothing at all. One needs to be more specific and say what one is a relativist about, e.g., that one believes that all truth is relative to (dependent on) human belief.[4]

 

Although Rorty himself doesn’t put it this bluntly, his type of pragmatism seems to imply that truth and reality are relative to us (either as a group or as individuals).

 

So the history of pragmatism includes a drift away from a more realist view of truth and reality (there is a real world, and we are capable of having true beliefs about it to a less realist view of truth and reality.

 

 

The evolution of pragmatism from Peirce’s realist philosophy to Rorty’s (alleged) relativism is a theme of this course.

 

 

 

[2.] Charles Sanders Peirce.

 

·         1839-1914

·         Peirce grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts (the location of Harvard University), which by the 1800s was an important center of American intellectual activity.

·         His father was Benjamin Peirce, a professor of mathematics at Harvard and the most distinguished mathematician in America.

·         He graduated from Harvard in 1859, after which he worked for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey.[5] He then returned to college, graduating from Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School with a degree in chemistry in 1863. As we will see, his training as a scientist informs his work in philosophy.

·         He began lecturing and publishing in philosophy in 1863.

·         He taught at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD) from 1879 to 1884 as a part-time lecturer in logic. This was his only regular position with an academic institution.

·         Peirce was forced to resign from both the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and Johns Hopkins by a combination of circumstances, including his difficult personality, circumstances surrounding his second marriage (it was known he had had an affair with his second wife before they were married), and his having made powerful enemies, including Charles Eliot (an instructor of Peirce’s at Harvard, and president of Harvard from 1869 until 1909) and Simon Newcomb (an influential Canadian-American scientist who worked behind the scenes to prevent Peirce from getting tenure at Johns Hopkins and to derail Peirce’s application for an important research grant from the Carnegie Institute). Peirce never held an academic position again after leaving Johns Hopkins.

·         In 1887, he retired to Milford, PA. There he spent the rest of his life in poverty, writing almost constantly on philosophical and scientific issues.

·         Biographer Joseph Brent has argued that Peirce was a victim of bipolar disorder. Another scholar, David Pfeifer, has argued that Peirce’s behavior was more consistent with the form of autism known as Asperger syndrome.

 

Of the three classical pragmatists—Peirce, James, and Dewey—Peirce is the least widely known. The reasons for this include[6]:

·         he never held a permanent academic position, so he had very few students to disseminate his ideas;

·         he was relatively isolated from academia for the last few decades of his life; and

·         his work is reputed to be difficult and inaccessible because of (1) his use of symbolic logic and (2) his use of difficult terminology which he himself coined.

 

Another reason his work is difficult to understand is that he was a system-builder. Like Aristotle and Kant, he wanted to build an all-encompassing philosophical system.

 

But he never articulated a complete and definitive statement of that system. This can make studying Peirce somewhat frustrating, to say the least.

 

There is also the following:

·         Peirce scholars disagree about which of his writings are the most important for understanding his thought.[7]

·         Peirce wrote a tremendous amount of philosophical material, much of which was published in his lifetime, but the majority of which was not… and still has not been.

 

 

[2.1.] Peirce vs. Cartesianism.[8]

 

Our first reading from Peirce is his 1868 article “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities.”

 

It is the second of three papers by Peirce published in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy from 1868 to 1869. These papers are referred to collectively as “the cognition series”:

 

·         “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man”[9]

·         “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities”[10]

·         “Grounds of Validity of the Laws of Logic: Further Consequences of Four Incapacities”[11]

 

One thing Peirce does in these papers is criticize the account of philosophical inquiry put forward by René Descartes (1596-1650; French rationalist) in his Meditations on First Philosophy.[12]

 

 

[2.1.1.] Descartes: Method of Doubt, Quest for Certainty.

 

One of Descartes’ goals in the Meditations was to show that skepticism is false.

 

skepticism (df.): the view that knowledge is impossible; human beings never actually have knowledge about anything.

 

In other words, Descartes was trying to show that human beings do have knowledge.

 

His strategy was to search for beliefs that are epistemically certain (that absolutely cannot be false), and build up from there.

 

epistemic certainty (df.): S is certain that p when S believes that p and S cannot possibly be mistaken in that belief; certainty requires the impossibility of error.

 

This is very different from

 

psychological certainty (df.): a feeling that a belief one has must be true, e.g., when I see and feel the desks in this room and come to believe that the room contains desks, I feel certain that there are desks in the room.

 

It is possible to feel certain that p even if it is false that p; e.g., a gambling addict might feel certain that she is going to win the next hand of blackjack, even if in fact she is not.

 

 

It is as if his current beliefs are an unstable building, and he wants to knock the entire thing down so that he can identify a stable foundation upon which he can build something new.

 

How did he intend to identify these certain beliefs? Descartes employed a test to discover which beliefs are certain, i.e., which are stable enough to serve as a foundation for the rest of his knowledge.

 

This test is his “Method of Doubt”:

1.      Try to think of a reason to doubt a belief. It doesn’t have to be a plausible reason… it just has to be possible.

2.      If you can come up with a reason to doubt it—any reason at all, no matter how unlikely that reason is to be true—then you set that belief aside. It is not epistemically certain, and so it cannot be part of a stable foundation.

3.      Whatever beliefs are left “pass” the method of doubt test and are epistemically certain: they cannot be false.

·         There is no guarantee that there will be any beliefs that pass the method of doubt test.

 

At one point, Descartes thinks that he has found a reason to doubt just about everything:

it is possible that there is “some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning” deceiving us about anything and everything.[13]

 

The Method of Doubt test asks: since it is possible that there is an all-powerful demon who has the power to fool us about anything, is there any belief which we can hold with certainty?

 

But, says Descartes, here is at least one thing about which an evil demon could not fool me:

 

1. I am having thoughts and experiences.

 

If it seems to you that you are having an experience, then you are having an experience. What that experience represents to you may be completely false, but it is still the case that you are having an experience.

 

And this leads to another belief in which I can be certain:

 

2. I exist.

 

If I did not exist, it would be impossible for me to experience or think anything.

 

Among our ideas is the idea of God. But (says Descartes) this is different than our ideas of desks and books and clouds... etc. The idea of God is the idea of a perfect being—and a being that does not exist is not perfect. So Descartes thinks he has yet another belief that is immune from doubt:

 

3. God exists.

 

And this is the key to dispelling doubt about the bulk of our beliefs regarding the world outside our minds. Since God is perfect, he is not a deceiver, and he would not create us in such a way as to allow us to be completely deceived. So he can be certain that

 

4. I am not being fooled by an evil demon.

 

Once he has identified a group of beliefs that (he says) are certain, he asks: what it is about these beliefs that makes them certain?

 

His answer: his grasp of the belief that he is an existing thing that thinks is so clear and distinct that that belief cannot possibly be false.

 

So Descartes identifies this as the criterion of certainty: Any belief that is clear and distinct (like the belief that he is a thinking thing) is certain.

 

From this basis, Descartes went on to argue for various claims about the world outside his mind.

 

Stopping point for Wednesday August 24. For next time, read the first few pages of "Some Consequences..." (69-72, to the end of the first full paragraph). Be prepared to answer questions about what Peirce is up to in this reading.