PRAGMATISM

"Pragmatic" seems to have been used for the first time in the modern Western philosophical tradition by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804); for him, there was some connection with ethics, but little with science or technology in the modern sense. In the early twentieth century, pragmatics turns up as a third subdivision of a formal semantics triad (see Morris 1938), but it has only a remote connection to science by way of mathematics, and none to ethics or technology.

In most introductory accounts, "pragmatism" as a term for a philosophical approach is usually taken to be synonymous with a "pragmatic theory of truth." We can be sure about something if it has practical or real-world consequences. Enemies of philosophical pragmatism even caricature this as meaning that the test of the truth of a statement—even about ethics—is whether or not it works. Such characterizations are unfair to the nuanced thought of philosophers who have been willing to call themselves pragmatists—as has occurred during two periods: in the period of "classical American philosophy" (see Stuhr 2000) at the beginning of the twentieth century, and again at the end of the twentieth century.

Classical Pragmatists

In the early twentieth century, a number of philosophical pragmatisms sprang up, for example, that of Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) in Italy and Edouard Le Roy (1870–1954) (see Stebbing 1914) in France; but the best known of these was the school (in the loose sense) of American pragmatism, beginning with Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) (who chose to call his approach "pragmaticism") and William James (1842–1910). But the best known of the American pragmatists was John Dewey (1859–1952), whose ideas were closely paralleled by those of his friend and colleague, George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). (On the classical pragmatists, their relationships with one another and with the term, see Menand 2001.)

The basic move of the classical pragmatists was to seek to replace what may be termed the epistemological account of knowledge as justified true beliefs (a definition that can be traced back to Plato [427–347 b.c.e.]) with an analysis of beliefs in terms of relationships to human action. Traditional epistemologies sought to identify the foundations of knowledge in some special cognitive activity or method. Peirce, however, adapting the suggestion of Alexander Bain (1818–1903)—a Scottish philosopher and friend of John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)—argued that beliefs are more properly interpreted as habits of acting than as representations of reality, and so not in need of some special foundations. All pragmatists reject both conceptual reference (concepts are true if they refer to real things) and coherence (concepts are true if they fit together logically) theories of knowledge prominent in empiricism and rationalism, respectively, in favor of some interpretation of inquiry that unites theoretical and practical knowledge as grounded in forms of learning to operate more effectively in the world. Such an approach easily ties knowing into science and technology, and in some instances to ethics, although this happens in different ways in different pragmatisms.

In this respect, the pragmatism of Dewey and Mead exhibited a special relationship to science, technology, and ethics. For Mead and Dewey, ethics is not a theoretical discipline but simply social problem solving using "the scientific method." What this meant for them was applying expert knowledge from all the sciences—from the natural sciences and engineering to sociology or social psychology—in democratic efforts of particular communities to solve urgent social problems. The communities in question ran the spectrum from families and technical communities all the way up to the world community, in the former League of Nations. As one of the best of recent interpreters of Dewey, Larry Hickman (2001, p. 51; see also Hickman 1990), puts the matter, Dewey thought that it is possible "to articulate a general method of intelligence that takes into account successful inquiry in many different areas of human activity," including various sciences, the arts, politics, jurisprudence, and so on. Yet while contemporary science-based technologies have made major contributions to this general method of intelligence, they are only one of many sources. In this way, Hickman thinks, Dewey avoids the charge that he favored scientism. Mead's version of the same general approach can be seen in the title of his "Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences" (1964).

Both Mead and Dewey had lifelong contacts with colleagues in the science departments of their universities and kept abreast of developments in the sciences, perhaps especially in physiological psychology but also in physics and biology and other fields. (On this aspect of Dewey's work, see Dalton 2002.) As for technology, both Mead and Dewey were highly critical of the then-new corporations, with their research and development laboratories. The problem was that the corporations were so often involved in what amounted to private wars to break the power of the new labor unions. For Dewey,"We must wrest our general culture from an industrialized civilization" in which science "is ultimately a reflex of the social conditions under which science is applied [in industry] so as to reach only a pecuniary fruition" (Dewey 1930, pp. 133–134). Mead's work with progressive reformers—for example, trying to mediate the struggle between strikebreaking corporate managers and the unions in Chicago in the early twentieth century—can be seen in Andrew Feffer's 1993 work The Chicago Pragmatists and American Progressivism.

Others among the early American pragmatists in some cases had similar views, but there were also many differences. James, for example, credited Peirce with the originating idea of American pragmatism, referring to Peirce's famous "pragmatic maxim": "A conception can have no logical effect or import differing from that of a second conception except, so far as ... it might conceivably modify our practical conduct" (from his "Lectures on Pragmatism," 1903). But Peirce was primarily a scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher of science, not a social reformer.

James accepted the pragmatic maxim, which he rendered this way: "Grant an idea or belief to be true," then, "what concrete difference will its being true make in one's actual life?" (James 1907; see also James 1909). He was certainly pro-science enough to have founded the experimental psychology program at Harvard, but he also dabbled in spiritualist theories in ways that alienated other experimental psychologists. Moreover, though James was progressive in a patrician sort of way, he seems never to have given a thought to union organizing, and watched the "Chicago school's" activism in, at best, a detached sort of way (see McDermott 1967 and Gale 1999).

In summary, among these early American pragmatists, Peirce was primarily a philosopher of science interested in doing away with any certainty-seeking foundationalism of a Cartesian sort. James was the suave elder statesman, interested in pushing science, especially evolution, as a new cultural force, while maintaining a place for a liberal religion in this new culture. Mead and Dewey pushed pragmatism in the direction of progressive social reform, including a critique of the newly-powerful science-based corporations, basing their reforms on "the scientific method." This meant primarily a respect for expertise of all kinds, as long as it was combined with a democratic citizen activism aimed at challenging old verities while working out new and better social arrangements. Dewey was explicit that the only contribution of theoretical philosophizing in the traditional sense (however important on other grounds) was in "divesting ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place" (1925, p. 40; the view is best represented in The Quest for Certainty, 1929, and Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1920).

John Stuhr (2000) places the early pragmatists within a tradition of "classical American philosophy," and in doing so he adds context. Their works appeared among and were related to writings of significant American women writers (Jane Addams [1860–1935]), American idealists and personalists (Borden Parker Bowne [1847–1910]), African-American philosophers (Alain Locke [1886–1954]), and non-pragmatist naturalists. (Stuhr, p. 695, cites John Herman Randall, Jr. [1899–1980], as an example.) A similar, equally controversial contextualizing, appears in Cornel West's The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989).

Late Twentieth Century Pragmatism

Joseph Margolis (2002) characterizes all the above as the "early" American pragmatism, with which he contrasts the "revival" of pragmatism in American analytic philosophy after about 1980. The main representatives of this revival are Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), Donald Davidson (1917–2003), Hilary Putnam (born 1926), and Richard Rorty (born 1931). In the revived version of American pragmatism, the focus is not on Mead and Dewey's "meliorizing" progressivism, with its suspicion of large science-based corporations, but on quarrels over different versions of epistemology. With the exception of Rorty, who wants his pragmatism (he says it is more literary than philosophical) to join in leftist causes (1998), none of the revived pragmatists have much interest in ethics, less in technology, and an interest in science that is reducible to a scientistic model of human knowing—or opposition to it.

Margolis's is the best summary of these disputes, which he characterizes as involving two challenges to pragmatism: naturalism and postmodernism. The primary debate is between "pragmatism" and "naturalizing"—especially several debates between Rorty (claiming to speak for Quine and Davidson as well as himself) and Putnam. The conflict has to do with how to safeguard a "true" pragmatism from relapsing into a Cartesian quest for a guaranteed foundation of knowledge in science.

To summarize the account, at some cost to nuances, Margolis argues that although they call themselves pragmatists, Quine, Davidson, and Putnam are all concerned with essentially epistemological issues, and that they approach these in ways that are ultimately unfaithful to pragmatist inspirations. Insofar as Quine and others attempt to understand knowing in naturalistic or scientific terms, and turn epistemology into an empirical examination of cognition, they tend to put forth a new kind of foundationalism, which was just what the original pragmatists were at pains to avoid. The late-twentieth-century epistemological pragmatists tend toward realism rather than instrumentalism: that is, they want to defend a view of scientific knowledge as providing a privileged view of the world rather than the process of science as a privileged means or method for living in the world.

Margolis's account of the challenge of postmodernism and its manifestation in Rorty is easier to state. Postmodernism rejects not just science as a privileged form of knowing but science as a privileged method for living. Rorty's postmodernism is thus incompatible with classical pragmatism and its reliance on (but not idolization of) science specifically and expertise generally. For classical pragmatism, the need for the democratic governance of expertise does not reject or deny its benefits.

In the end, Margolis derives his own version of pragmatism from the failures of naturalism and postmodernism. This version places constructivism at the center of pragmatism. In Margolis's words, "questions of knowledge, objectivity, truth, confirmation, and legitimation are constructed in accord with our interpretive conceptual schemes." Thus, "though we do not construct the actual world, what we posit (constructively) as the independent world is epistemically dependent on our mediating conceptual schemes" (p. 22).

Future Prospects

At the end of his analysis, Margolis confesses doubt as to whether even his constructive pragmatism, with its unique combination of the best in pragmatism with the best in recent European philosophy, will succeed in the twenty-first century. (On European, especially German, interest in pragmatism, see Aboulafia, Bookman, and Kemp 2002.) Instead, Margolis fears that the naturalizers will continue to dominate analytical philosophy, especially in neo-Darwinism viewed as the best reductive model of the cultural world; in extreme linguistic views (originating with Noam Chomsky); and in a computational analysis of every form of human perception and intelligence. But Margolis still has hope, though he says at the end that pragmatists have little more than their original intuition to rely on. Other pragmatists would argue that pragmatisms are not based on mere intuition; that pragmatists have good arguments, for example, against reductionism.

All of this epistemological nitpicking among recent pragmatists would leave the earlier pragmatists shaking their heads. Mead and Dewey, and probably also James and Peirce, thought they had good reason to reject any epistemology based on foundationalist projects; such epistemologies are simply inconsistent with their scientific and progressive project (Palmer 2002). Mead (1934, p. 94), as one example, rejected all epistemology as "riff-raff"; and he pointed out, one by one, how all traditional epistemologies (traditional at the time of his writing) depended on individualist assumptions that are incompatible with a view of science as a social undertaking, dependent on a world taken for granted within particular science communities (Mead 1964).

Moreover, the earlier pragmatists have their non-analytic followers; examples include Larry Hickman (1990, 2001) on technology; Sharyn Clough (2003) on feminist science studies; and Glenn McGee (1997), providing a pragmatic ethics of genetic engineering.

Still, it is true that even the earlier version of American pragmatism has difficulties to face—in addition to Margolis's claim that it is analytically naïve and unsophisticated. Some criticisms of a Deweyan philosophy of technology have been collected in Paul Durbin's special issue of Techne (2003), and they come from Heideggerians and neo-Heideggerians, from critical theorists and neo-Marxists, among others. In the end, it should be obvious that even the best philosophical version of pragmatism will continue to have its detractors.

PAUL T. DURBIN

SEE ALSO Democracy;Dewey, John;Expertise;Pierce, Charles Sanders;Science Policy.

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INTERNET RESOURCES

Durbin, Paul T., ed. (2003). Techne 7(1). Available from http://spt.org. Special author-meets-critics issue on the Deweyan philosophy of technology of Larry Hickman.

Hickman, Larry A. (2003). "Revisiting Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture." Techne 7(1): 74–93. Available from http://spt.org.