that an ideology or proposition is true if it works satisfactorily,
that the meaning of a proposition is to be found in the practical
consequences of accepting it, and that unpractical ideas are to be
rejected. Pragmatism originated in the United States during the latter
quarter of the nineteenth century. Although it has significantly
influenced non-philosophers—notably in the fields of law, education,
politics, sociology, psychology, and literary criticism—this article
deals with it only as a movement within philosophy.
The term "pragmatism" was first used in print to designate a
philosophical outlook about a century ago when William James
(1842-1910) pressed the word into service during an 1898 address
entitled "Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results," delivered
at the University of California (Berkeley). James scrupulously swore,
however, that the term had been coined almost three decades earlier by
his compatriot and friend C. S. Peirce (1839-1914). (Peirce, eager to
distinguish his doctrines from the views promulgated by James, later
relabeled his own position "pragmaticism"—a name, he said, "ugly
enough to be safe from kidnappers.") The third major figure in the
classical pragmatist pantheon is John Dewey (1859-1952), whose
wide-ranging writings had considerable impact on American intellectual
life for a half-century. After Dewey, however, pragmatism lost much of
its momentum.
There has been a recent resurgence of interest in pragmatism, with
several high-profile philosophers exploring and selectively
appropriating themes and ideas embedded in the rich tradition of
Peirce, James, and Dewey. While the best-known and most controversial
of these so-called "neo-pragmatists" is Richard Rorty, the following
contemporary philosophers are often considered to be pragmatists:
Hilary Putnam, Nicholas Rescher, Jürgen Habermas, Susan Haack, Robert
Brandom, and Cornel West.
The article's first section contains an outline of the history of
pragmatism; the second, a selective survey of themes and theses of the
pragmatists.
1. A Pragmatist Who's Who: An Historical Overview
a. Classical Pragmatism: From Peirce to Dewey
In the beginning was "The Metaphysical Club," a group of a dozen
Harvard-educated men who met for informal philosophical discussions
during the early 1870s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Club members
included proto-positivist Chauncey Wright (1830-1875), future Supreme
Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935), and two
then-fledgling philosophers who went on to become the first
self-conscious pragmatists: Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), a
logician, mathematician, and scientist; and William James (1842-1910),
a psychologist and moralist armed with a medical degree.
Peirce summarized his own contributions to the Metaphysical Club's
meetings in two articles now regarded as founding documents of
pragmatism: "The Fixation of Belief" (1877) and "How To Make Our Ideas
Clear" (1878). James followed Peirce with his first philosophical
essay, "Remarks on Spencer's Definition of Mind as Correspondence,"
(1878). After the appearance of The Principles of Psychology (1890),
James went on to publish The Will to Believe and Other Essays in
Popular Philosophy (1896), The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902), Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907),
and The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (1909). Peirce,
unfortunately, never managed to publish a magnum opus in which his
nuanced philosophical views were systematically expounded. Still,
publish he did, though he left behind a mountain of manuscript
fragments, many of which only made it into print decades after his
death.
Peirce and James traveled different paths, philosophically as well as
professionally. James, less rigorous but more concrete, became an
esteemed public figure (and a Harvard professor) thanks to his
intellectual range, his broad sympathies, and his Emersonian genius
for edifying popularization. He recognized Peirce's enormous creative
gifts and did what he could to advance his friend professionally; but
ultimately to no avail. Professional success within academe eluded
Peirce; after his scandal-shrouded dismissal from Johns Hopkins
University (1879-1884)—his sole academic appointment—he toiled in
isolation in rural Pennsylvania. True, Peirce was not entirely cut
off: he corresponded with colleagues, reviewed books, and delivered
the odd invited lecture. Nevertheless, his philosophical work grew
increasingly in-grown, and remained largely unappreciated by his
contemporaries. The well-connected James, in contrast, regularly
derived inspiration and stimulation from a motley assortment of
fellow-travellers, sympathizers, and acute critics. These included
members of the Chicago school of pragmatists, led by John Dewey (of
whom more anon); Oxford's acerbic iconoclast F.C.S. Schiller
(1864-1937), a self-described Protagorean and "humanist"; Giovanni
Papini (1881-1956), leader of a cell of Italian pragmatists; and two
of James's younger Harvard colleagues, the absolute idealist Josiah
Royce (1855-1916) and the poetic naturalist George Santayana
(1864-1952), both of whom challenged pragmatism while being influenced
by it. (It should be noted, however, that Royce was also significantly
influenced by Peirce.)
The final member of the classical pragmatist triumvirate is John Dewey
(1859-1952), who had been a graduate student at Johns Hopkins during
Peirce's brief tenure there. In an illustrious career spanning seven
decades, Dewey did much to make pragmatism (or "instrumentalism," as
he called it) respectable among professional philosophers. Peirce had
been persona non grata in the academic world; James, an insider but no
pedant, abhorred "the PhD Octopus" and penned eloquent lay sermons;
but Dewey was a professor who wrote philosophy as professors were
supposed to do—namely, for other professors. His mature
works—Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), Experience and Nature
(1925), and The Quest for Certainty (1929)—boldly deconstruct the
dualisms and dichotomies which, in one guise or another, had
underwritten philosophy since the Greeks. According to Dewey, once
philosophers give up these time-honoured distinctions—between
appearance and reality, theory and practice, knowledge and action,
fact and value—they will see through the ill-posed problems of
traditional epistemology and metaphysics. Instead of trying to survey
the world sub specie aeternitatis, Deweyan philosophers are content to
keep their feet planted on terra firma and address "the problems of
men."
Dewey emerged as a major figure during his decade at the University of
Chicago, where fellow pragmatist G.H. Mead (1863-1931) was a colleague
and collaborator. After leaving Chicago for Columbia University in
1904, Dewey became even more prolific and influential; as a result,
pragmatism became an important feature of the philosophical landscape
at home and abroad. Dewey, indeed, had disciples and imitators
aplenty; what he lacked was a bona fide successor—someone, that is,
who could stand to Dewey as he himself stood to James and Peirce. It
is therefore not surprising that by the 1940s—shortly after the
publication of Dewey's Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938)—pragmatism
had lost much of its momentum and prestige.
This is not to say that pragmatists became an extinct species; C. I.
Lewis (1883-1964) and Sidney Hook (1902-1989), for instance, remained
prominent and productive. But to many it must have seemed that there
was no longer much point in calling oneself a pragmatist—especially
with the arrival of that self-consciously rigorous import, analytic
philosophy. As American philosophers read more and more of Moore,
Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle, many of them found the
once-provocative dicta of Dewey and James infuriatingly vague and
hazy. The age of grand synoptic philosophizing was drawing rapidly to
a close; the age of piecemeal problem-solving and hard-edged argument
was getting underway.
b. Post-Deweyan Pragmatism: From Quine to Rorty
And so it was that Deweyans were undone by the very force that had
sustained them, namely, the progressive professionalization of
philosophy as a specialized academic discipline. Pragmatism, once
touted as America's distinctive gift to Western philosophy, was soon
unjustly derided by many rank-and-file analysts as passé. Of the
original pragmatist triumvirate, Peirce fared the best by far; indeed,
some analytic philosophers were so impressed by his technical
contributions to logic and the philosophy of science that they paid
him the (dubious) compliment of re-making him in their own image. But
the reputations of James and Dewey suffered greatly and the influence
of pragmatism as a faction waned. True, W.V.O. Quine´s (1908-2000)
landmark article "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) challenged
positivist orthodoxy by drawing on the legacy of pragmatism. However,
despite Quine's qualified enthusiasm for parts of that legacy—an
enthusiasm shared in varying degrees by Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889-1951), Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953),
Karl Popper (1902-1994), F.P. Ramsey (1903-1930), Nelson Goodman
(1906-1999), Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989), and Thomas Kuhn
(1922-1996)—mainstream analytic philosophers tended to ignore
pragmatism until the early 1980s.
What got philosophers talking about pragmatism again was the
publication of Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
(1979)—a controversial tome which repudiated the basic presuppositions
of modern philosophy with élan, verve, and learning. Declaring
epistemology a lost cause, Rorty found inspiration and encouragement
in Dewey; for Dewey, Rorty pleaded, had presciently seen that
philosophy must become much less Platonist and less Kantian—less
concerned, that is, with unearthing necessary and ahistorical
normative foundations for our culture's practices. Once we understand
our culture not as a static edifice but as an on-going conversation,
the philosopher's official job description changes from
foundation-layer to interpreter. In the absence of an Archimedean
point, philosophy can only explore our practices and vocabularies from
within; it can neither ground them on something external nor assess
them for representational accuracy. Post-epistemological philosophy
accordingly becomes the art of understanding; it explores the ways in
which those voices which constitute that mutable conversation we call
our culture—the voices of science, art, morality, religion, and the
like—are related.
In subsequent writings—Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Achieving Our Country (1998), Philosophy
and Social Hope (1999), and three volumes of Philosophical Papers
(1991, 1991, 1998)—Rorty has enthusiastically identified himself as a
pragmatist; in addition, he has urged that this epithet can be
usefully bestowed on a host of other well-known philosophers—notably
Donald Davidson (1917-2003). Though Rorty is the most visible and
vocal contemporary champion of pragmatism, many other well-known
figures have contributed significantly to the resurgence of this
many-sided movement. Prominent revivalists include Karl-Otto Apel (b.
1922), Israel Scheffler (b. 1923), Joseph Margolis (b. 1924), Hilary
Putnam (b. 1926), Nicholas Rescher (b. 1928), Jürgen Habermas (b.
1929), Richard Bernstein (b. 1932), Stephen Stich (b. 1944), Susan
Haack (b. 1945), Robert Brandom (b. 1950), Cornel West (b. 1953), and
Cheryl Misak (b. 1961). There is much disagreement among these
writers, however, so it would be grossly misleading to present them as
manifesto-signing members of a single sect or clique.
2. Some Pragmatist Themes and Theses
What makes these philosophers pragmatists? There is, alas, no simple
answer to this question. For there is no pragmatist creed; that is, no
neat list of articles or essential tenets endorsed by all pragmatists
and only by pragmatists. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify
certain ideas that have loomed large in the pragmatist
tradition—though that is not to say that these ideas are the exclusive
property of pragmatists, nor that they are endorsed by all
pragmatists.
Here, then, are some themes and theses to which many pragmatists have
been attached.
a. A Method and A Maxim
Pragmatism may be presented as a way of clarifying (and in some cases
dissolving) intractable metaphysical and epistemological disputes.
According to the down-to-earth pragmatist, bickering metaphysicians
should get in the habit of posing the following question: "What
concrete practical difference would it make if my theory were true and
its rival(s) false?" Where there is no such difference, there is no
genuine (that is, non-verbal) disagreement, and hence no genuine
problem.
This method is closely connected to the so-called "pragmatic maxim,"
different versions of which were formulated by Peirce and James in
their attempts to clarify the meaning of abstract concepts or ideas.
This maxim points to a broadly verificationist conception of
linguistic meaning according to which no sense can be made of the idea
that there are facts which are unknowable in principle (that is,
truths which no one could ever be warranted in asserting and which
could have absolutely no bearing on our conduct or experience). From
this point of view, talk of inaccessible Kantian
things-in-themselves—of a "True World" (Nietzsche) forever hidden
behind the veil of phenomena—is useless or idle. In a sense, then, the
maxim-wielding pragmatist agrees with Oscar Wilde: only shallow people
do not judge by appearances.
Moreover, theories and models are to be judged primarily by their
fruits and consequences, not by their origins or their relations to
antecedent data or facts. The basic idea is presented metaphorically
by James and Dewey, for whom scientific theories are instruments or
tools for coping with reality. As Dewey emphasized, the utility of a
theory is a matter of its problem-solving power; pragmatic coping must
not be equated with what delivers emotional consolation or subjective
comfort. What is essential is that theories pay their way in the long
run—that they can be relied upon time and again to solve pressing
problems and to clear up significant difficulties confronting
inquirers. To the extent that a theory functions or "works"
practically in this way, it makes sense to keep using it—though we
must always allow for the possibility that it will eventually have to
be replaced by some theory that works even better. (See Section 2b
below, for more on fallibilism.) An intriguing variant on this theme
can arguably be found in Popper's falsificationist philosophy of
science: though never positively justified, theories (understood as
bold conjectures or guesses) may still be rationally accepted provided
repeated attempts to falsify them have failed.
b. Anti-Cartesianism
From Peirce and James to Rorty and Davidson, pragmatists have
consistently sought to purify empiricism of vestiges of Cartesianism.
They have insisted, for instance, that empiricism divest itself of
that understanding of the mental which Locke, Berkeley, and Hume
inherited from Descartes. According to such Cartesianism, the mind is
a self-contained sphere whose contents—"ideas" or "impressions"—are
irredeemably subjective and private, and utterly sundered from the
public and objective world they purport to represent. Once we accept
this picture of the mind as a world unto itself, we must confront a
host of knotty problems—about solipsism, skepticism, realism, and
idealism—with which empiricists have long struggled. Pragmatists have
expressed their opposition to this Cartesian picture in many ways:
Peirce´s view that beliefs are rules for action; James's teleological
understanding of the mind; Dewey's Darwinian-inflected ruminations on
experience; Popper's mockery of the "bucket theory of the mind";
Wittgenstein's private language argument; Rorty's refusal to view the
mind as Nature's mirror; and Davidson's critique of "the myth of the
subjective." In these and other cases, the intention is emancipatory:
pragmatists see themselves as freeing philosophy from optional
assumptions which have generated insoluble and unreal problems.
Pragmatists also find the Cartesian "quest for certainty" (Dewey)
quixotic. Pace Descartes, no statement or judgment about the world is
absolutely certain or incorrigible. All beliefs and theories are best
treated as working hypotheses which may need to be modified—refined,
revised, or rejected—in light of future inquiry and experience.
Pragmatists have defended such fallibilism by means of various
arguments; here are sketches of five: (1) There is an argument from
the history of inquiry: even our best, most impressive
theories—Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics, for instance—have
needed significant and unexpected revisions. (2) If scientific
theories are dramatically underdetermined by data, then there are
alternative theories which fit said data. How then can we be
absolutely sure we have chosen the right theory? (3) If we say (with
Peirce) that the truth is what would be accepted at the end of
inquiry, it seems we cannot be absolutely certain that an opinion of
ours is true unless we know with certainty that we have reached the
end of inquiry. But how could we ever know that? (See Section 2e below
for more on Peirce's theory of truth.) (4) There is a methodological
argument as well: ascriptions of certainty block the road of inquiry,
because they may keep us from making progress (that is, finding a
better view or theory) should progress still be possible. (5) Finally,
there is a political argument. Fallibilism, it is said, is the only
sane alternative to a cocksure dogmatism, and to the fanaticism,
intolerance, and violence to which such dogmatism can all too easily
lead.
Pragmatists have also inveighed against the Cartesian idea that
philosophy should begin with bold global doubt—that is, a doubt
capable of demolishing all our old beliefs. Peirce, James, Dewey,
Quine, Popper, and Rorty, for example, have all emphatically denied
that we must wipe the slate clean and find some neutral, necessary or
presuppositionless starting-point for inquiry. Inquiry, pragmatists
are persuaded, can start only when there is some actual or living
doubt; but, they point out, we cannot genuinely doubt everything at
once (though they allow, as good fallibilists should, that there is
nothing which we may not come to doubt in the course of our
inquiries). This anti-Cartesian attitude is summed up by Otto
Neurath's celebrated metaphor of the conceptual scheme as raft:
inquirers are mariners who must repair their raft plank by plank,
adrift all the while on the open sea; for they can never disembark and
scrutinize their craft in dry-dock from an external standpoint. In
sum, we must begin in media res—in the middle of things—and confess
that our starting-points are contingent and historically conditioned
inheritances. One meta-philosophical moral drawn by Dewey (and
seconded by Quine) was that we should embrace naturalism: the idea
that philosophy is not prior to science, but continuous with it. There
is thus no special, distinctive method on which philosophers as a
caste can pride themselves; no transcendentalist faculty of pure
Reason or Intuition; no Reality (immutable or otherwise) inaccessible
to science for philosophy to ken or limn. Moreover, philosophers do
not invent or legislate standards from on high; instead, they make
explicit the norms and methods implicit in our best current practice.
Finally, it should be noted that pragmatists are unafraid of the
Cartesian global skeptic—that is, the kind of skeptic who contends
that we cannot know anything about the external world because we can
never know that we are not merely dreaming. They have urged that such
skepticism is merely a reductio ad absurdum of the futile quest for
certainty (Dewey, Rescher); that skepticism rests on an untenable
Cartesian philosophy of mind (Rorty, Davidson); that skepticism
presupposes a discredited correspondence theory of truth (Rorty); that
the belief in an external world is justified insofar as it "works," or
best explains our sensory experience (James, Schiller, Quine); that
the problem of the external world is bogus, since it cannot be
formulated unless it is already assumed that there is an external
world (Dewey); that the thought that there are truths no one could
ever know is empty (Peirce); and that massive error about the world is
simply inconceivable (Putnam, Davidson).
c. The Kantian Inheritance
Pragmatism's critique of Cartesianism and empiricism draws
heavily—though not uncritically—on Kant. Pragmatists typically think,
for instance, that Kant was right to say that the world must be
interpreted with the aid of a scheme of basic categories; but, they
add, he was dead wrong to suggest that this framework is somehow
sacrosanct, immutable, or necessary. Our categories and theories are
indeed our creations; they reflect our peculiar constitution and
history, and are not simply read off from the world. But frameworks
can change and be replaced. And just as there is more than one way to
skin a cat, there is more than one sound way to conceptualize the
world and its content. Which interpretative framework or vocabulary we
should use—that of physics, say, or common sense—will depend on our
purposes and interests in a given context.
The upshot of all this is that the world does not impose some unique
description on us; rather, it is we who choose how the world is to be
described. Though this idea is powerfully present in James, it is also
prominent in later pragmatism. It informs Carnap's distinction between
internal and external questions, Rorty's claim that Nature has no
preferred description of itself, Goodman's talk of world-making and of
right but incompatible world-versions, and Putnam's insistence that
objects exist relative to conceptual schemes or frameworks.
Then there is the matter of appealing to raw experience as a source of
evidence for our beliefs. According to the tradition of mainstream
empiricism from Locke to Ayer, our beliefs about the world ultimately
derive their justification from perception. What then justifies one's
belief that the cat is on the mat? Not another belief or judgment, but
simply one's visual experience: one sees said cat cavorting on said
mat—and that is that. Since experience is simply "given" to the mind
from without, it can justify one's basic beliefs (that is, beliefs
that are justified but whose justification does not derive from any
other beliefs). Sellars, Rorty, Davidson, Putnam, and Goodman are
perhaps the best-known pragmatist opponents of this foundationalist
picture. Drawing inspiration from Kant's dictum that "intuitions
without concepts are blind," they aver that to perceive is really to
interpret and hence to classify. But if observation is
theory-laden—if, that is, epistemic access to reality is necessarily
mediated by concepts and descriptions—then we cannot verify theories
or worldviews by comparing them with some raw, unsullied sensuous
"Given." Hence old-time empiricists were fundamentally mistaken:
experience cannot serve as a basic, belief-independent source of
justification.
More generally, pragmatists from Peirce to Rorty have been suspicious
of foundationalist theories of justification according to which
empirical knowledge ultimately rests on an epistemically privileged
basis—that is, on a class of foundational beliefs which justify or
support all other beliefs but which depend on no other beliefs for
their justification. Their objections to such theories are many: that
so-called "immediate" (or non-inferential) knowledge is a confused
fiction; that knowledge is more like a coherent web than a
hierarchically structured building; that there are no certain
foundations for knowledge (since fallibilism is true); that
foundational beliefs cannot be justified by appealing to perceptual
experience (since the "Given" is a myth); and that knowledge has no
overall or non-contextual structure whatsoever.
d. Against the Spectator Theory of Knowledge
Pragmatists resemble Kant in yet another respect: they, too,
ferociously repudiate the Lockean idea that the mind resembles either
a blank slate (on which Nature impresses itself) or a dark chamber
(into which the light of experience streams). What these august
metaphors seem intended to convey (among other things) is the idea
that observation is pure reception, and that the mind is fundamentally
passive in perception. From the pragmatist standpoint this is just one
more lamentable incarnation of what Dewey dubbed "the spectator theory
of knowledge." According to spectator theorists (who range from Plato
to modern empiricists), knowing is akin to seeing or beholding. Here,
in other words, the knower is envisioned as a peculiar kind of voyeur:
her aim is to reflect or duplicate the world without altering it—to
survey or contemplate things from a practically disengaged and
disinterested standpoint.
Not so, says Dewey. For Dewey, Peirce, and like-minded pragmatists,
knowledge (or warranted assertion) is the product of inquiry, a
problem-solving process by means of which we move from doubt to
belief. Inquiry, however, cannot proceed effectively unless we
experiment—that is, manipulate or change reality in certain ways.
Since knowledge thus grows through our attempts to push the world
around (and see what happens as a result), it follows that knowers as
such must be agents; as a result, the ancient dualism between theory
and practice must go by the board. This insight is central to the
"experimental theory of knowledge," which is Dewey's alternative to
the discredited spectatorial conception.
This repudiation of the passivity of observation is a major theme in
pragmatist epistemology. According to James and Dewey, for instance,
to observe is to select—to be on the lookout for something, be it for
a needle in a haystack or a friendly face in a crowd. Hence our
perceptions and observations do not reflect Nature with passive
impartiality; first, because observers are bound to discriminate,
guided by interest, expectation, and theory; second, because we cannot
observe unless we act. But if experience is inconceivable apart from
human interests and agency, then perceivers are truly explorers of the
world—not mirrors superfluously reproducing it. And if acceptance of
some theory or other always precedes and directs observation, we must
break with the classical empiricist assumption that theories are
derived from independently discovered data or facts.
Again, it is proverbial that facts are stubborn things. If we want to
find out how things really are, we are counseled by somber
common-sense to open our eyes (literally as well as figuratively) and
take a gander at the world; facts accessible to observation will then
impress themselves on us, forcing their way into our minds whether we
are prepared to extend them a hearty welcome or not. Facts, so
understood, are the antidote to prejudice and the cure for bias; their
epistemic authority is so powerful that it cannot be overridden or
resisted. This idea is a potent and reassuring one, but it is apt to
mislead. According to holists such as James and Schiller, the
justificatory status of beliefs is partly a function of how well they
cohere or fit with entrenched beliefs or theory. Since the range of
"facts" we can countenance or acknowledge is accordingly constrained
by our body of previous acquired beliefs, no "fact" can be admitted
into our minds unless it can be coherently assimilated or harmonized
with beliefs we already hold. This amounts to a rejection of Locke's
suggestion that the mind is a blank slate, that is, a purely receptive
and patient tabula rasa.
e. Beyond The Correspondence Theory of Truth
According to a longstanding tradition running from Plato to the
present-day, truth is a matter of correspondence or agreement with
reality (or with the aforementioned "facts"). But this venerable view
is vague and beset with problems, say pragmatists. Here are just four:
(1) How is this mysterious relation called "correspondence" to be
understood or explicated? Not as copying, surely; but then how? (2)
The correspondence theory makes a mystery of our practices of
verification and inquiry. For we cannot know whether our beliefs are
correspondence-true: if the "Given" is a myth, we cannot justify
theories by comparing them with an unconceptualized reality. (3) It
has seemed to some that traditional correspondence theories are
committed to the outmoded Cartesian picture of the mind as Nature's
mirror, in which subjective inner representations of an objective
outer order are formed. (4) It has also been urged that there is no
extra-linguistic reality for us to represent—no mind-independent world
to which our beliefs are answerable. What sense, then, can be made of
the suggestion that true thoughts correspond to thought-independent
things?
Some pragmatists have concluded that the correspondence theory is
positively mistaken and must be abandoned. Others, more cautious,
merely insist that standard formulations of the theory are
uninformative or incomplete. Schiller, Rorty, and Putnam all arguably
belong to the former group; Peirce, James, Dewey, Rescher, and
Davidson, to the latter.
Apart from criticizing the correspondence theory, what have
pragmatists had to say about truth? Here three views must be
mentioned: (1) James and Dewey are often said to have held the view
that the truth is what "works": true hypotheses are useful, and vice
versa. This view is easy to caricature and traduce—until the reader
attends carefully to the subtle pragmatist construal of utility. (What
James and Dewey had in mind here was discussed above in Section 2a.)
(2) According to Peirce, true opinions are those which inquirers will
accept at the end of inquiry (that is, views on which we could not
improve, no matter how far inquiry on that subject is pressed or
pushed). Peirce's basic approach has inspired later pragmatists such
as Putnam (whose "internal realism" glosses truth as ideal rational
acceptability) as well as Apel and Habermas (who have equated truth
with what would be accepted by all in an ideal speech situation). (3)
According to Rorty, truth has no nature or essence; hence the less
said about it, the better. To call a belief or theory "true" is not to
ascribe any property to it; it is merely to perform some speech act
(for example, to recommend, to caution, etc.). As Rorty sees it, his
fellow pragmatists—James, Dewey, Peirce, Putnam, Habermas, and
Apel—all err in thinking that truth can be elucidated or explicated.
3. Conclusion
For the most part, pragmatists have thought of themselves as reforming
the tradition of empiricism—though some have gone further and
recommended that tradition's abolition. As this difference of opinion
suggests, pragmatists do not vote en bloc. There is no such thing as
the pragmatist party-line: not only have pragmatists taken different
views on major issues (for example, truth, realism, skepticism,
perception, justification, fallibilism, realism, conceptual schemes,
the function of philosophy, etc.), they have also disagreed about what
the major issues are. While such diversity may seem commendably in
keeping with pragmatism's professed commitment to pluralism,
detractors have urged it only goes to show that pragmatism stands for
little or nothing in particular. This gives rise to a question as
awkward as it is unavoidable—namely, how useful is the term
"pragmatism"? That question is wide open.
4. References and Further Reading
* Borradori, G. (Ed.) The American Philosopher. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994.
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