PRAGMATISM

It is a commonplace to describe Americans as pragmatic—sometimes that tag is a compliment; more often it is a slur. However, the philosophy referred to as "pragmatic" involves stances on the nature of reality (metaphysics) and the nature of knowledge (epistemology) even as it embraces an agenda of psychological, social, and ethical positions. While philosophical pragmatism eventually evolved into a sophisticated and subtle body of doctrines, initially it was a response to a cultural endowment of concepts and problems. That is, a common matrix energized the intellectuals—the artists, jurists, clergy, journalists, scientists, philosophers, and novelists—of the turn of the nineteenth century in America even as the big three pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), and John Dewey (1859–1952) systematically worked out the details of philosophical pragmatism.

Any treatment of classical American pragmatism must begin with C. S. Peirce's seminal pair of articles, "The Fixation of Belief" (1877) and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878), both of which first appeared in Popular Science Monthly. Peirce's approach repudiates the whole project of René Descartes (1596–1650), the father of modern philosophy, who postulated methodic doubt to establish an indubitable foundation from which humans embark upon the project of achieving certitude. John Dewey echoes Peirce's stance, explaining that postmodern philosophy had abandoned "the quest for certainty."

Peirce argued that Descartes's goal of certitude was unrealistic, even impossible, and that his strategy of manufactured doubt was, at best, a make-believe exercise and, at worst, could undermine confidence in one's ability to understand and deal with the world. In his 1868 paper "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," describing Cartesian doubt as alternatively feigned and corrosive, Peirce states:

We cannot begin with complete doubt. . . . Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt; and no one who follows the Cartesian method will ever be satisfied until he has formally recovered all those beliefs which in form he has given up. . . . Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts. (Collected Papers 5:265)

Instead, Peirce offers a triad of belief (defined as a habit of action), doubt (described as an irritation prompted by failure), and inquiry (characterized as the process of fixing a problematic situation by proposing a satisfactory plan of action in the form of a replacement belief). In place of wondering whether my hand is before my eyes, whether I am now dreaming, or whether I am being deceived by an evil genius, as Descartes urges us to do, the founder of pragmatism suggests that the paradigm for intellectual inquiry is real-life problem solving. When my car will not start I experience real doubt. The situation demands that I inquire in order to fix the problem so that when the solution is found I can drive down the road in a calm and satisfactory state of belief. In a masterfully compressed sketch of the intellectual development of individuals as well as the human race, Peirce argues that four strategies for fixing belief have evolved: first, tenacity, then authority, then reasonableness, and finally the scientific method. The first three methods are infected with subjectivity and a full range of human biases. Only the fourth method allows reality itself to shape, objectively and systematically, one's beliefs instead of vice versa. Moreover, the scientific method is self-corrective and is the only method that can use doubt as an opportunity (instead of a threat) as it turns difficulties into additional hypotheses waiting testing. Close at hand are redefinitions of both meaning and truth.

If the hypothetical-deductive method is to become the strategy to fix beliefs, then all questions, problems, concepts, and issues will have to be translatable (without loss of content) into patterns of action. Thereby, the meaning of an idea is the behavior it prompts, and its fruitfulness (or failure) will measure its truth (or falsity) as a pattern of action. In the nearly seventy-five years between the publication of Peirce's seminal articles and John Dewey's death in 1952, American pragmatists worked out the profit of and the problems with this radical redefinition of truth and meaning and more generally proposed, as a consequence, a fundamental recasting of the nature of philosophy. (After Dewey's death, classical American pragmatism's influence declined precipitously only to experience a stunning renaissance triggered by the publication of critical editions of the works of Peirce, James, and Dewey in the early 1970s and the emergence of the high-energy, high-profile neopragmatism of Richard Rorty in the 1980s and 1990s.) Though there are many individual differences of detail and emphasis among even the big three pragmatists—Peirce, James, and Dewey—a cluster of six commonly shared commitments can be discerned.

THE REPUDIATION OF THE PROJECT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY

As noted above, the American pragmatists rejected the search for certain, timeless, universal answers to ultimate questions about Reality, Truth, God, and the Good. Rather than a theoretical pursuit, philosophy is seen as an instrument responding to concrete and tractable real problems. In his seminal essay, "The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy"(1909), Dewey explains that "the bearing of Darwinian ideas upon philosophy" is that "the new logic outlaws, flanks, dismisses—what you will—one type of problems and substitutes for it another type. Philosophy forswears inquiry after absolute origins and absolute finalities in order to explore specific values and the specific conditions that generate them" (Collected Writings: Middle Works 4:10).

THE LITERARY NATURALISTS FRANK NORRIS AND JACK LONDON PRAGMATIZE

The classical American pragmatic philosophers would be hard-pressed to improve upon Frank Norris's account of pragmatic truth in his essay "The Need of a Literary Conscience," which appeared in the December 1901 World's Work. Norris explains that though unreflective persons may think truth is "an abstraction, a vague idea," it has instead "to do with practical, tangible, concrete work-a-day life. . . . [It is] as concrete as the lamp-post on the corner, as practical as a cable-car, as real and homely and work-a-day and commonplace as a boot-jack" (p. 1158).

Also noteworthy in their nod to pragmatism are the last chapters of The Sea-Wolf and Jack London's description of the wildly implausible success that Humphrey Van Weyden (society dandy recently become able-bodied sailor with minimal help from his fiancée, Maud) has in rehabilitating the wrecked and gutted sealing schooner the Ghost. When Humphrey tells Maud he is certain that the foremast he has heroically hoisted and refitted will work, she asks, "Do you know Dr. Jordan's final test of truth?" And then she eloquently pragmaticizes, "'Can we make it work? Can we trust our lives to it?' is the test" (London, Novels and Stories, p. 755). Her source, Donald Pizer points out, was an article by David Starr Jordan, "The Stability of Truth," which appeared in Popular Science Monthly in March 1897 (London, The Sea-Wolf, p. 1017). This was the journal that had, a decade earlier, published the seminal statements of pragmatism, "The Fixation of Belief" and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" by C. S. Peirce.

Dewey further argued that all forms of intelligence are inherently critical; philosophy, because of its generality and fundamental nature, is "criticism of criticisms." Accordingly, philosophy's duty of cultural critique is in the service of social reconstruction and the amelioration of human suffering. "Philosophy," he wrote in a 1917 paper ("The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy"), "recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men" (Collected Writings: Middle Works 10:46).

PHILOSOPHY AS A PLURALISTIC AND HUMANISTIC ENTERPRISE

Pragmatists deem a comprehensive perspective and a total picture beyond the ken of humans. Philosophy's claims are understood to be inherently partial, context-dependent, tentative, and transactional articulations of the human perspective. William James is especially keen on these characteristics. Note these comments from his highly influential Pragmatism (1907): first on pluralism and then on humanism:

But as the sciences have developed farther, the notion has gained ground that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations. The laws themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there is no counting them; and so many rival formulations are proposed in all the branches of science that investigators have become accustomed to the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one of them may from some point of view be useful. Their great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man-made language, a conceptual shorthand, as someone calls them, in which we write our reports of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects. (Works: Pragmatism, p. 33)

Laws and languages at any rate are thus seen to be man-made: things. Mr. Schiller [a contemporary European pragmatist] applies the analogy to beliefs, and proposes the name of "Humanism" to the doctrine that to an unascertainable extent our truths are man-made products too. Human motives sharpen all our questions, human satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a human twist. . . .You see how naturally one comes to the humanistic principle: you can't weed out the human contribution. Our nouns and adjectives are all humanized heirlooms, and in the theories we build them into, the inner order and arrangement is wholly dictated by human considerations, intellectual consistency being one of them. Mathematics and logic are themselves fermenting with human rearrangements; physics, astronomy and biology follow massive cues of human preference. (Works: Pragmatism, pp. 116–117, 122)

Note how sweeping is James's claim: not just philosophy, literature, and the humanities in general but also mathematics, logic, and the empirical sciences are humanistic enterprises. Humans, insists James, must continually acknowledge the irreducible plurality of experience and the inescapable lens of perspective.

AN EXPERIENTIAL, EVOLUTIONARY, AND PROCESS ORIENTATION

Pragmatists see Experience, not Reality, as the subject matter for reflection and analysis. John Dewey, for example, describes the project of metaphysics as the discovery of the generic traits of reality. Among the traits that Dewey examines are experience as stable, precarious, eventful, active, genuine, spurious, nurturing, hazardous, changing, continuous, practical and experimental, filled with initiations and consummations, funded with meanings, and social.

Pragmatism replaces the spectator view of knowledge, including its assumption that one's ideas "copy" a static universe, with the view that, as a knower, one is an involved participant who makes and remakes the universe. As part of pragmatism's war campaign against all dualisms (subject/object, matter/spirit, appearance/reality, means/ends), James and Dewey looked for terms that would get behind (or under) the known/knower opposition. Dewey, in particular, was adamant that experience (not reality or things or consciousness) is problematic and in need of investigation. To further stress the active and interactive process involved in knowing, Dewey initially described knowledge as a "transaction"; later he preferred the term "negotiation." "Experience," he writes in "The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,"

is primarily a process of undergoing: a process of standing something; of suffering and passion, of affection, in the literal sense of these words. The organism has to endure, to undergo, the consequences of its own actions. Experience is no slipping along in a path fixed by inner consciousness. . . .Undergoing, however, is never mere passivity. . . .Experience, in other words, is a matter of simultaneous doings and sufferings. Our undergoings are experiments in varying the course of events; our active tryings are trials and tests of ourselves. (Collected Writings: Middle Works 10:8–10)

The impact of Darwinian evolution is pervasive in pragmatic philosophy. If all of reality is in evolutionary flux, there are no immutable natures to anchor knowledge or to ground values. Given the ascent of Darwin, everything is in process.

A SCIENTIFIC PARADIGM FOR PHILOSOPHY

As also noted above, if the scientific method is the only trustworthy and defensible method of inquiry, then ideas are best understood as tools. If every belief is corrigible, one's standards for knowledge must be modestly downgraded to an expectation of high probability. Dewey offers "warranted assertability" (instead of certainty or Truth) as a realistic and assessable goal for true beliefs. Pragmatism's antifoundational stance treats every belief as criticizable and revisable. Peirce writing in 1897 observed that "no man of self-respect ever now states his result without affixing to it its probable error" (Collected Papers 1:9)— a posture he dubbed "fallibilism." He further urged that all dogmas be greeted with extreme skepticism. Peirce kept every issue open to reexamination, offering as "the first rule of reason. . . . 'Do not block the road to inquiry'" (Collected Papers 1:136). In his famous "The Will to Believe" essay, James stresses the importance of sustaining a tension between trusting and questioning our beliefs.

I live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them—I absolutely do not care which—as if it never could be re-interpretable or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the whole history of philosophy will bear me out. (Works: The Will to Believe, p. 22)

The pragmatic notion of ideas as trustworthy tools can be highlighted by a favorite paradigm: an idea as map. Ideas do not duplicate sensations or impressions nor do they picture reality; ideas guide. A map is an extraordinarily compact summary of past experience that literally leads us. A reliable map gets one to one's destination (and a faulty one gets one lost). Note that one more naturally speaks of a reliable or good or useful map instead of a true one. In Pragmatism, James puts it this way:

Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. . . .

Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted. (Works: Pragmatism, pp. 42, 44)

In short, for the pragmatists reflective thought is a response to concrete, real-life problems, and truth is proximately measured by its effectiveness in accomplishing specific, practical goals and ultimately gauged by its ability to promote long-term human flourishing.

MELIORISM, HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY, AND A FINITE GOD

Pragmatists reject both pessimism and optimism in favor of the view that improvement is possible. Accordingly humans are responsible for designing workable, ongoing, revisable solutions to better the lot of their fellows. Lest human freedom, initiative, and responsibility be compromised, God is seen as a powerful, though finite, partner in improving the world. In the final chapter of Pragmatism, James asks his readers to imagine God, at the moment of creation, putting the following case to his human cocreators:

I am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own "level best." I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust other agents enough to face the risk? (Works: Pragmatism, p. 139)

With regard to religion, the pragmatists are, predictably, more interested in assessing the valuable (and sometimes deleterious) effects of belief in God (rather than in engaging in debate about the perennial philosophical questions regarding the existence and attributes of God). In this connection, James argues that with no other reasons to believe in God, "men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest" (Works: The Will to Believe, p. 161). In other words, religion's chief value is as a catalyst for the strenuous mood.

AN EMERGENT, COMMUNAL, AND SOCIAL SELF

Because pragmatism sees the assessment of social and public policies as an essential task, concerns with individual insight and personal satisfaction are relegated to the periphery. Even more fundamentally, a preexistent, inner transcendental self is supplanted by a model of selfhood in which both self-awareness and self-constitution are socially and behaviorally generated.

The pragmatists' interest in psychology is striking. Following the publication of his monumental and groundbreaking two-volume masterpiece The Principles of Psychology (1890), James turned in 1895 to applied psychology, giving summer school lectures in Boston, at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York, and as far west as Colorado Springs. These lectures were published as Talks to Teachers in 1899. Dewey's work followed the same pattern. Beginning with several volumes devoted to psychological issues, he then turned to pedagogy and related educational issues. His sustained critique of the American educational establishment's misguided views of human development and its faulty emphasis on recitation and memorization in the curricula had a profound impact upon American society.

With regard to human development, the contributions of a second-generation pragmatist, George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), are also noteworthy. Mead—who had been a disciple of John Dewey at theUniversity of Chicago—was neither a prolific nor a popular philosopher, but his theories were revolutionary and influential. His approach to selfhood is explicitly developmental and behavioristic. The title of one of his influential essays asked: "Mind Approached through Behavior—Can Its Study Be Made Scientific?" Mead's response to his own question was, of course, "yes"—as his study of the gestures of lower animals (concentrating on the growls and barks of dogs) led to his theories about human development:

How can an individual get outside himself (experientially) in such a way as to become an object to himself? This is the essential psychological problem of selfhood or of self-consciousness; and its solution is to found by referring to the process of social conduct or activity in which the given person or individual is implicated. . . . The individual experiences himself as such, not directly, but only indirectly from the particular standpoints of other individual members of the same social group, or from the generalized standpoint of the social group as a whole to which he belongs. . . . in so far as he first becomes an object to himself just as other individuals are objects to him or in his experience; and he becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself within a social environment or context of experience and behavior in which both he and they are involved. . . . It is impossible to conceive a self arising outside of social experience. (Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, pp. 138–140)

Most of Mead's writings appeared from the mid-1930s onward. There is, therefore, good reason to believe that, in this case, the clear vector of influence was from literature to philosophy (and psychology). That is, American literary realism and naturalism—the focus upon behavior, environment, materialism, and the human animal, found in the work of such authors as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser—were undoubtedly the decisive influences upon philosophers, not vice versa.

See alsoPhilosophy; Pragmatism; Realism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Dewey, John. The Collected Writings of John Dewey, 1882–1953. 37 vols. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–1991.

James, William. The Correspondence of William James. 11 vols. Edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–2003. Twelve volumes are projected.

James, William. The Works of William James. 19 vols. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975–1988.

London, Jack. Novels and Stories. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982.

London, Jack. The Sea-Wolf. 1904. Edited by Donald Pizer. New York: Library of America, 1986.

Mead, George Herbert. The Individual and the Social Self: Unpublished Work of George Herbert Mead. Edited by David L. Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934.

Norris, Frank. "The Need of a Literary Conscience." In his Novels and Essays, pp. 1157–1160. New York: Library of American, 1986

Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers. 8 vols. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Wiess. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960. Includes "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities" (1868), "The Fixation of Belief" (1877), and "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878).

Peirce, Charles Sanders. Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. 6 vols. Edited by Max W. Fisch, Nathan Houser et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982–2002. Thirty volumes are projected to complete this edition.

Rorty, Richard. The Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.

Secondary Works

Dooley, Patrick. "William James on the Human Way of Being." Personalist Forum 6 (1990): 75–85.

McDermott, John J. Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.

Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.

Menand, Louis. "The Return of Pragmatism." American Heritage 89 (October 1997): 48–63.

Singer, Marcus G., ed. American Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Stuhr, John J., ed. Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretative Essays. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Wilshire, Bruce. "But Where Are the Metaphysics?" Times Literary Supplement, 26 July 2002, pp. 28–29. Review of Menand's The Metaphysical Club.

Patrick K. Dooley