Pragmatism and the Enlightenment

Brandom adds some more background in support of Rorty’s claim that American pragmatism represents a kind of second Enlightenment.

“The motor of the first Enlightenment was the rise of the new natural science — in particular, the mathematized physics of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton…. Because their thought was principally oriented by this project, all of the canonical philosophers from Descartes through Kant can sensibly be seen as at base philosophers of science” (Pragmatism and Idealism, pp. 18-19).

“The physical science they were inspired by and interpreters of put forward mathematical theories in the form of impersonal, immutable principles formulating universal, eternal, necessary laws. Enlightenment empiricism sought to ground all our knowledge in self-contained, self-intimating sensory episodes whose brute occurrence is the most basic kind of knowing. Just how the natural light of reason could extract secure and certain knowledge of things as law-governed from those deliverances of fallible perception was a perennial puzzle” (p. 19).

To put it bluntly, the empiricist theory of knowledge lacks the resources to explain the results of modern mathematicized science. The emperor has no clothes.

“Even had Hume succeeded in his aspiration to become ‘the Newton of the mind’ by perfecting Locke’s theoretical efforts to understand the psychological processes of understanding in terms of the mechanisms of association and abstraction, the issue of how the subject of that science was to be found among the furniture of the universe described by the real Newton would have survived untouched, as an apparently intractable embarrassment” (ibid).

“The founding genius of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Pierce, was, like the original Enlightenment philosophes, above all, a philosopher of science…. He was impressed by the broadly selectional forms of explanation that he presciently saw as common to Darwinian evolutionary biology, at the level of species, and the latest psychological theories of learning, at the level of individual organisms. And he was impressed by the new forms of statistical explanation that were both essential to the new physical science of thermodynamics and becoming increasingly central to the new social sciences of the late nineteenth century” (pp. 19-20).

“Accounts that appeal to natural selection in biology, or to supervised selection in learning, or to statistical likelihood (whether in physics or sociology or economics), show how observed order can arise, contingently, but explicably, out of an irregular background of variation…. Pierce saw this as nothing less than a new form of intelligibility. Understanding whose paradigm is Darwin’s evolutionary theory is a concrete, situated narrative of local, contingent, mutable, practical, reciprocal accommodations of particular creatures and habitats. Pierce speculatively generalized this model to a vision in which even the most fundamental laws of physics are understood as contingently emerging by selectional processes from primordial indeterminateness. No less than the behavior of biological organisms, those laws are to be understood as adaptational habits, each of which is in a statistical sense relatively stable and robust in the environment provided by the rest” (pp. 20-21).

My late father would have appreciated this tribute to the importance of Pierce, in the face of Dewey and Rorty’s neglect. While writing his dissertation on Pierce in the 1950s, he was denied access to various manuscripts by the executors of the Pierce archive at Harvard. He speculated that the executors, who were very concerned to make Pierce “fit in” with the narrow orthodoxy that dominated American academic philosophy at the time, were suppressing evidence of Pierce’s broader interests. Years later, it turned out he was right.

Many writers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries treat a new appreciation for process and the emergence of new forms as characteristic of modernity. Of course, they were preceded in this by Hegel. (And if we read Aristotle on his own terms, rather than in ways beholden to later religious traditions, then behind Hegel stands Aristotle as a philosopher of process and emergence.)

“On the pragmatist understanding, … knower and known are alike explicable by appeal to the same general mechanisms that bring order out of chaos, settled habit from random variation: the statistical selective structure shard by processes of evolution and of learning. That selectional structure ties together all the members of a great continuum of being stretching from the processes by which physical regularities emerge, through those by which the organic evolves locally and temporarily stable forms, through the learning processes by which the animate acquire locally and temporarily adaptive habits, to the intelligence of the untutored common sense of ordinary language users, and ultimately to the methodology of the scientific theorist — which is just the explicit, systematic refinement of the implicit, unsystematic but nonetheless intelligent procedures characteristic of everyday practical life…. This unified vision stands at the center of the classical American pragmatists’ second Enlightenment” (pp. 24-25).

The selectional structure Brandom speaks of here is not necessarily normative. Darwinian natural selection in terms of utility and practical success is its main inspiration. But it does already go beyond a narrowly mechanical view of causality.

“This happy concord and consilience between the distinctively pragmatist versions of naturalism in ontology and empiricism in epistemology stands in stark contrast, not only to the prior traditional British empiricism of the Enlightenment, but also to the subsequent twentieth-century logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. The reductive physicalist version of naturalism and the reductive phenomenalist version of empiricism they inclined to endorse were exceptionally difficult to reconcile with each other. Hume had already shown how difficult it is to provide suitable empiricist credentials for the way in which mathematical laws supporting subjunctive reasoning — the crowning glory of Newtonian physics — outran observable regularities, not only epistemically, but semantically. Adding the powerful methods of modern logic to articulate the phenomenal deliverances of sense did not alter this fundamental mismatch. A threatening and recalcitrant tension accordingly concerned how to proceed when respect for the deliverances of natural science as the measure of what there is and how it is in nature collides with empiricist strictures on when we are entitled to claim to know what there is and how it is” (p. 25).

Without hyperbole, Brandom points out the conflict between mechanist and phenomenalist strategies for explanation.

He exalts the original Enlightenment in the following terms.

“The Enlightenment marks the ending of humanity’s self-imposed tutelage, the achievement of our majority and maturity, for the first time taking adult responsibility for our own character and destiny. It is our emancipation from submission to the alien, nonhuman-because-superhuman authority of Old Nobodaddy in matters of practical conduct. Henceforth we should deem it incompatible with our human dignity to understand ourselves as subject to any laws other than those we have in one way or another laid down for ourselves. No longer should our ideas about what is right and good be understood as having to be dictated to us by a superhuman authority” (p. 27).

“Old Nobodaddy” is a reference to the poetry of William Blake.

(I like to tell a similar story about the birth of ethical reason with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. For me, it is Plato and Aristotle (humanity’s greatest teachers, in Hegel’s words) who are the original sources of this “adulthood” of humanity that Brandom so eloquently commends. They certainly did not take what is right and good to be dictated to us by a superhuman authority. Most of the leading lights of the Enlightenment were more timid by comparison. But Brandom also does not acknowledge the ways in which Hegel uses Aristotle to solve Kantian problems, pointed out so well by Robert Pippin. Dewey, Rorty, and Brandom all show little interest in pre-modern philosophy. Even the great have weaknesses.)

“The first Enlightenment, as Rorty construed it, concerned our emancipation from nonhuman authority in practical matters: issues of what we ought to do and how things ought to be. The envisaged second Enlightenment is to apply this basic lesson to our emancipation from nonhuman authority in theoretical, cognitive matters” (p. 28, emphasis in original).

The “non-human authority” in this latter case is what Rorty calls Reality with a capital R, which is supposed to be what it is completely independent of human discourse and judgment, and which is nonetheless claimed to be somehow known as such by some humans. This was already an implicit target of Kant’s critique of dogmatism. (And once again, Aristotle discusses being principally in terms of the normative saying of “is”, and everywhere inquires about the natures of real things in ways that cannot be separated from a consideration of discourse, language, and judgment. Our nature is to be animals that are in some degree capable of discourse, which is the origin of second nature.) But Rorty and Brandom are quite right in the sense that the kinds of things that Kant collectively called dogmatism have by no means disappeared from the scene today, even though they have long been called out by name.

Pragmatism vs Foundationalism

In his recent Spinoza lectures, Brandom also summarizes the context of the 20th century Anglo-American analytic philosophy criticized by Rorty.

“In any case, the broadly Hegelian project Rorty was then recommending as an alternative to the degenerating Kantian research program he saw in analytic philosophy did not look to Europe for its inspiration, but to the substantially distinct tradition of classical American pragmatism.”

“Rorty’s remarkable diagnosis of the ills of analytic philosophy as resulting from an uncritical, so undigested, Kantianism is at least equally radical and surprising as the reimagined, redescribed, and revived pragmatism that he developed as a constructive therapeutic response to it. For Kant emphatically was not a hallowed hero of that tradition. Anglophone analytic philosophers thought that the ‘Kant [or] Hegel?’ question simply didn’t apply to them. After all, Russell had read Kant out of the analytic canon alongside Hegel — believing (I think, correctly as it has turned out) that one couldn’t open the door wide enough to let Kant into the canon without Hegel sliding in alongside him before that door could be slammed shut. Both figures were banished, paraded out of town under a banner of shame labeled ‘idealism,’ whose canonical horrible paradigm was the Bradleyan British Idealism of the Absolute” (Brandom, Pragmatism and Idealism, pp. 4-5).

“The dominant self-conception (combatively made explicit by Carnap) was of analytic philosophy as an up-to-date form of empiricism, a specifically logical empiricism, whose improvement on traditional, pre-Kantian, Early Modern British empiricism consisted in the deployment of much more sophisticated logical tools it deployed to structure and bind together essentially the same atoms of preconceptual sensory experience to which the earlier empiricists had appealed” (p. 5, emphasis in original).

Brandom portrays logical empiricism as foundering on the skeptical “trilemma” (circular argument, infinite regress, or appeal to unjustified justifiers) formulated by the Greek Skeptic Agrippa. Foundationalism in the theory of knowledge typically arises from excessive worries about skepticism.

“Attempts to justify empirical knowledge must either move in a circle, embark on an infinite regress, or end by appeal to unjustified justifiers, which must accordingly supply the foundations on which all cognition rests…. The two sorts of regress-stoppers Rorty saw appealed to by epistemological foundationalists were immediate sensory experiences, as ultimate justifiers of premises, and immediate grasp of the meanings of our terms or the content of our concepts, as ultimate justifiers of inferences. In a telling phrase, he refers to these as two sorts of ‘epistemically privileged representations'” (pp. 5-6).

In order to avoid skepticism, foundationalism makes untenable claims about immediate (noninferential) knowledge, which depend on the assumption that certain representations are specially privileged, so as to be immune to questioning. I have always appreciated Brandom’s exceptional clarity on these issues, and it seems that in this he was preceded by Rorty.

“Rorty takes Kant at his word when Kant says that what he is doing is synthesizing rationalism and empiricism. But Rorty takes it that what logical empiricism made of Kant’s synthesis in the end takes over both sorts of privileged representations: the sensory given from the empiricists, and the rational (logical, inferential, semantic) given from the rationalists…. In this story, Carnap shows up as a neo-Kantian malgré lui [in spite of himself] — though that is not at all how he thought of or presented himself. It is, however, how Rorty’s hero Wilfrid Sellars regarded Carnap. (Perhaps the revenant neo-Kantian spirit of Heinrich Rickert, passed on through his student Bruno Bauch, Frege’s friend and colleague and Carnap’s Doktorvater [academic mentor, literally “doctor father”], was just too strong to be wholly exorcised by the empiricist rites and rituals practiced by the Vienna Circle.)” (pp. 6-7).

According to Brandom, Rorty criticizes mid-20th century logical empiricism in terms very similar to Brandom’s, except that Brandom is much less inclined to blame Kant.

“But the roots of those foundationalist commitments can be traced back even further, to Descartes. For he assimilated the images delivered by the senses and the thoughts arising in intellect together under the umbrella concept of pensées precisely in virtue of what he saw as their shared epistemic transparency and incorrigibility” (p. 7).

Descartes makes the extravagant assumption that not only that there is one unified subject of all thought, feeling, and sensation in a human, but that it has perfect transparency to itself, and therefore at a certain level cannot be mistaken about itself.

“In rejecting both sensory givenness and meaning- or concept-analytic inferential connections, Rorty relies on the arguments of two of Carnap’s most important and insightful admirers and critics: Sellars in ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ and Quine in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism, respectively. (These are in any case surely two of the most important philosophical essays of the 1950s.) Tellingly, and with characteristic insight, Rorty finds a common root in their apparently quite different critiques. Sellars and Quine, he sees, both offer ultimately pragmatist arguments, which find the theoretical postulation of such privileged representations to be unable to explain cardinal features of the practices of applying empirical concepts” (ibid, emphasis in original).

These same two essays are recurringly cited by Brandom. I did not know that Rorty preceded him in that.

When Brandom here mentions “meaning- or concept-analytic inferential connections”, he is referring back to what he earlier called “immediate grasp of the meanings of our terms or the content of our concepts”. (There is a very different sense in which material inference can be seen as simultaneously grounded in, and grounding, concrete meaning and the understanding of meaning, as opposed to formal operations. But in that case, the concrete meaning is something arrived at, not something given or immediately grasped. Meaning is always a question, as Socrates might remind us.)

“Rorty then widens the focus of his own critique by deepening the diagnosis that animates it. The original source of foundationalism in epistemology, he claims, is representationalism in semantics. Thinking of the mind in terms of representation was Descartes’s invention” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Representationalism — the explanation of meaning in terms of reference to (nonlinguistic) objects — still dominates mainstream discussions of semantics. It is associated with a view of truth as a correspondence of claims to a reality that is assumed to be independently accessible. But this is not the only way meaning and truth can be explained. I think that, first and foremost, meaning needs to be explained by relating it to other meaning. Variants of this include dictionaries, the coherence theory of truth, and Brandom’s inferentialism.

The Latin term repraesentatio in fact played a large role in scholastic discourse. The status of sensible and/or intelligible “species” or representations was hotly debated. Scholastic discourse also included quite vigorous and sophisticated debates about nuances of representational semantics, under the rubric of the theory of “supposition”. This refers not to speculation, but rather to something close to the modern notion of reference. Scholastic philosophers even tended to treat questions of knowledge and truth in terms of what we might call questions of referential semantics.

Descartes did not invent thinking about the mind in terms of representation, though he certainly practiced it. Arguably, this goes back even past scholastic theories of species and supposition, to Stoic theories of phantasia. The Stoics also had a somewhat foundationalist outlook. They were the original dogmatic realists in Kant’s sense. But Descartes drew especially vivid conclusions from his claim of the incorrigibility of appearances.

Brandom wants to redeem a positive valuation of Kant from Rorty’s hostility, and he even suggests that Rorty is making a Kantian move without realizing it.

“It is perhaps ironic that in digging down beneath epistemological issues to unearth the semantic presuppositions that shape and enable them, Rorty is following Kant’s example. For Kant’s argument, culminating in the ‘Refutation of Idealism’, was that once we understand how to respond to the threat of semantic skepticism about the intelligibility of the relation between representings and what they represent, there would be no residual issue concerning epistemological skepticism about whether any such relations actually obtained: whether things were ever as we represent them to be” (p. 8, emphasis in original).

Kant was understood by scientifically oriented neo-Kantians as effectively putting epistemology, or the justification of knowledge, before all else. A refreshing aspect of Brandom’s reading of Kant is that he shifts the axis toward questions of meaning and value.

Brandom strongly supports Rorty’s critique of epistemological foundationalism, but thinks that Rorty throws out the baby with the bath water when he claims that all talk about representation is implicitly authoritarian. Momentarily playing devil’s advocate, he reconstructs Rorty’s “global anti-representationalist” argument as follows.

“The starting point is the Cartesian idea that if we are to understand ourselves as knowing the world by representing it (so that error is to be understood as misrepresentation), there must be some kind of thing that we can know nonrepresentationally — namely, our representings themselves. On pain of an infinite regress, knowledge of representeds mediated by representings of them must involve immediate (that is, nonrepresentational) knowledge of at least some representings. Our nonrepresentational relation to these representings will be epistemically privileged, in the sense of being immune to error. For error is construed exclusively as misrepresentation. (This is the representationalist semantic analogue of the justificatory epistemological regress on the side of premises.)”

“Next is the thought that when we ask about our knowledge of the relation between representings and representeds, another potential regress looms if we are obliged to think of this knowledge also in representational terms, that is, as mediated by representings of it. (This is the representationalist semantic analogue of the justificatory epistemological regress on the side of inferences.) On this dimension, too, appeal to nonrepresentational access to representational relations seems necessary…. Rorty saw that according to such a picture, the epistemological choice between foundationalism and skepticism is already built deeply into the structure of the semantic representational model” (p. 9).

Brandom recounts that in 1996 discussions with Rorty on the occasion of Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism lecture in Gerona, “We all agreed that if one found oneself obliged to choose between epistemological skepticism and epistemological foundationalism, then somewhere well upstream something had gone badly wrong conceptually” (p. 11).

I wholeheartedly concur with that conclusion. Skepticism (claiming that there is no knowledge) and foundationalism (claiming to systematically ground knowledge in certainty) are both equally implausible, extreme positions.

“For Rorty, a principal virtue of the sort of pragmatism he endorsed that it had no need and no use for the traditional concepts of experience and representation in talking about how vocabularies help us cope with the vicissitudes of life. Indeed, from a pragmatist point of view, the very distinction between epistemology and semantics becomes unnecessary — a lesson he took himself to have learned from ‘Two Dogmas’…. He sums up his anti-representationalist pragmatism in the pithy slogan: ‘language is for coping, not copying‘” (p. 12).

The kind of experience at issue here is not that which is acquired over a period of time, but the immediate experience that is supposed to be a privileged source of knowledge in empiricism. Brandom recalls John Dewey’s unsuccessful attempt to get the public to change the prevailing notion of “experience” as something immediate.

“Dewey worked tirelessly to give ‘experience’ the processual, interactive, broadly ecological sense of Hegelian ‘Erfahrung,’ rather than the atomic, episodic, self-intimating, epistemically transparent Cartesian sense of ‘Erlebnis’. (Dewey’s is the sense in which, as he says, it is perfectly in order for a job advertisement to specify ‘No experience necessary’. It is not intended to be read in the Cartesian sense, which would invite applications from zombies.) But Dewey signally failed to get the philosophical and generally educated public to shake off the Cartesian associations of the term” (ibid).

Brandom endorses Rorty’s sharp critique of experience talk.

“I was entirely of [Rorty’s] mind as far as the concept of experience is concerned. Outside of explicitly Hegelian contexts, where it figures in his conception of recollective rationality, it is not one of my words…. I agree that the associations and correlated inferential temptations entrained with the term ‘experience’ go too deep, easily to be jettisoned, or even for us to success in habituating ourselves completely to resist. The light of day neither drives out the shadows nor stays the night. We are on the whole better off training ourselves to do without this notion” (pp. 13-14).

But Brandom does not accept Rorty’s “global anti-representationalism”.

“But by contrast to the concept of experience, it seemed to me then, and seems to me still, that things are otherwise with the concept of representation. There are many things that one might mean by ‘anti-representationalism’. When I use the term ‘representationalism’, I mean a particular order of semantic explanation. It starts with a notion of representational content (reference, extension, or truth conditions) and understands proprieties of inference in terms of such already representationally contentful contents. Those contents must accordingly be assumed to be, or made to be, theoretically and explanatorily intelligible antecedently to and independently of the role of representations in inference. ’Representationalism’ in this sense contrasts with inferentialist orders of semantic explanation, which begin with a notion of content understood in terms of its role in reasoning, and proceed from there to explain the representational dimension of discursive content. I recommend and pursue inferentialist rather than representationalist semantic explanations,” (p. 14, emphasis in original).

“But not giving representation a fundamental explanatory role in semantics does not disqualify it from playing any role whatsoever…. [T]here is a big difference between rejecting global representationalism, in the sense of denying that the best semantics for all kinds of expressions assigns them a fundamentally representational role, and being a global anti-representationalist, by insisting that no expressions should be understood semantically to play representational roles” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Here Brandom makes a very Hegelian kind of point. All-or-nothing, black-and-white distinctions like the forced choice between skepticism and foundationalism can only be defended by a kind of sophistry.

“It seemed to me in Gerona, and still does today, that a suitable pragmatist explanatory strategy, beginning with social practices of using expressions to give and ask for reasons, could unobjectionably both underwrite theoretical attributions of representational content to some locutions and also underwrite the viability and utility of the common-sense distinction between what we are saying or thinking and what we are talking or thinking about” (p. 15, emphasis in original).

Brandom takes the reasonable position that we don’t have to ban all talk about representation in order not to be representationalist. What he wants to get away from is the notion of privileged representation that is supposed to be beyond question.

Authority, Representation, Pragmatism

The controversial American philosopher Richard Rorty was a mentor and colleague of Robert Brandom. In the essay I will treat here, he presents himself as especially identifying with the pragmatism of John Dewey.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rorty’s 1967 edited collection The Linguistic Turn “did much to cement the idea of a linguistic turn… as a sea change in the history of philosophy”. He came to sharply criticize analytic philosophy as then practiced, as well as the prevailing self-perception of modern science, but did so from a modernist point of view.

Rorty is best known for his radical critique of modern representationalism — from Descartes to analytic philosophy — in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Like Brandom’s more constructive development of an “inferentialist” alternative approach to meaning in Making It Explicit (1994), that book takes as its point of departure Wilfrid Sellars’ critique of the Myth of the Given in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, and W. V. O. Quine’s essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”.

Here, however, I will focus on Rorty’s very informal 1999 essay “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism”. For an initial sketch of my own views relevant to this, see Authority. This is all in preparation for upcoming coverage of recent lectures by Brandom that shed new light on Brandom’s extremely important work, by explicitly relating it to Rorty’s.

Rorty begins, “There is a useful analogy to be drawn between the pragmatists’ criticism of the idea that truth is a matter of correspondence to the intrinsic nature of reality and the Enlightenment’s criticism of the idea that morality is a matter of correspondence to the will of a Divine Being. The pragmatists’ anti-representationalist account of belief is, among other things, a protest against the idea that human beings must humble themselves before something non-human, whether the Will of God or the Intrinsic Nature of Reality. Seeing anti-representationalism is a version of anti-authoritarianism permits one to appreciate an analogy which was central to John Dewey’s thought: the analogy between ceasing to believe in Sin and ceasing to accept the distinction between Reality and Appearance” (p. 7).

The parallelism he points out between two kinds of correspondence does seem significant. This is actually the main contribution of Rorty’s essay. However, the essay’s main body consists of Rorty’s historical storytelling about pragmatism, with a digression on Freud’s critique of religion.

The formulation about ceasing to accept the distinction between appearance and reality is too blunt. Their relation is very far from being a simple binary opposition, but they cannot simply be identical either. Explanation, understanding, and intelligibility depend on making distinctions of degrees of reality within appearance. This is part of what Hegel calls the “logic of essence”.

Epistemological foundationalism — typically associated with a correspondence theory of truth — is the claim that there is such a thing as noninferential knowledge. I say that whatever is claimed to be noninferential knowledge is not knowledge at all in the proper sense, but rather what Plato called opinion (doxa). And again, knowledge in Aristotle’s sense is an ability to explain itself. Explanation appeals to inference, not to a supposed registering of brute facts. Foundationalism is dogmatic in Kant’s sense. It puts ultimate principles beyond any possibility of explanation or understanding. This also makes it arbitrary.

Representationalist theories of knowledge are implicitly foundationalist, and commonly have recourse to a correspondence theory of truth. Pragmatism, meanwhile, is largely defined by its opposition to the correspondence theory. Pragmatists also tend to downplay the distinction between ontology and epistemology. It does seem that the correspondence theory of truth implies something like Rorty’s Reality with a capital R, that is what it is entirely independent of the knower. This ignores the essential role of interpretation and relating things together in understanding.

What Brandom calls the authority-obedience model of normativity is presented by Rorty, not unreasonably, as an insistence on simple correspondence or conformity to the presumed will of God. Simple obedience and simple correspondence have equally little use for reasons or reasoning. For them, everything is supposed to be a matter of sheer fact, with no thought required in its uptake. Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic preceded the pragmatists in showing that purported facts alone (mere being or objects of immediate consciousness, in Hegel’s terms) do not provide an adequate basis for either understanding or ethical action.

Some of Rorty’s claims about Dewey have been disputed. Not knowing Dewey very well, I am unsure how close the part about ceasing to believe in Sin is to Dewey’s own ways of expressing himself. Rorty doesn’t say much here about what he means by the belief in Sin that he rejects, but I think his idea is that it stresses mere obedience over actual ethical goodness.

I would say that the kind of view that unequivocally puts divine will or command first, above any consideration of the good, is far from accurately typifying all religion. Such radical voluntarism or commandism is indeed horrible in its consequences, but it is certainly not good Thomism, to mention but one example.

Much more common than radical voluntarism are views that equivocate in this area. Rorty seems to lump those who equivocate together with the unequivocal voluntarists. But Leibniz sought to convince equivocating mainstream theologians to actively side with him against radical voluntarism. I like this more optimistic point of view.

Pragmatists are generally recognized as having their own distinctive theories of truth — in one way or another emphasizing the roles it plays in human practices — in competition with the correspondence theory, which is closely tied to representationalism. The correspondence theory of truth, while formally distinct from any particular variety of philosophical realism, at the same time seems to suggest a kind of naive realism that is difficult to separate from the dogmatism that was criticized by Kant. I put Aristotle closer to the pragmatists here than to medieval or modern realists or representationalists.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was convinced that the romance of democracy, a romance built on the idea that the point of a human life is free cooperation with fellow humans, required a more thorough-going version of secularism than either Enlightenment rationalism or nineteenth-century positivism had achieved. As Dewey saw it, whole-hearted pursuit of the democratic ideal requires us to set aside any authority save that of a consensus of our fellow humans” (ibid).

Democracy and consensus were strong themes of Dewey’s. But even to my shallow acquaintance, the picture Rorty paints of Dewey’s views of religion is a bit one-sided. In A Common Faith (1934), Dewey seems to aim to heal the rift between science and religion. He says in effect that the dogmatically religious and the dogmatically anti-religious both identify religion with belief in the supernatural. Dewey rejects that identification, as Hegel does. As a pragmatist, he is more concerned with what people actually do in their lives.

Rorty continues, “Dewey was quite willing to say of a vicious act that it was sinful, and of ‘2+2=5’ or ‘Elizabeth the First’s reign ended in 1623’ that these sentences were absolutely, unconditionally, eternally, false. But he was unwilling to gloss ‘sinful’ or ‘falsehood’ in authoritarian terms. He did not want to say that a power not ourselves had forbidden cruelty, nor that these false sentences fail to accurately represent the way Reality is in itself. He thought it much clearer that we should not be cruel than that there was a God who had forbidden us to be cruel, and much clearer that Elizabeth I died in 1603 than that there is any way things are ‘in themselves’. He viewed the theory that truth is correspondence to Reality, and the theory that moral goodness is correspondence to the Divine Will, as equally dispensable.”

“For Dewey, both theories add nothing to our ordinary, workaday, fallible ways of telling right from wrong, and truth from falsity. But their pointlessness is not the real problem. What Dewey most disliked about both traditional ‘realist’ epistemology and about traditional religious beliefs is that they discourage us by telling us that somebody or something has authority over us. Both tell us that there is Something Inscrutable, something toward which we have duties, duties which have precedence over our cooperative attempts to avoid pain and obtain pleasure” (pp. 8-9).

These two paragraphs seem pretty solid. He then gives a capsule history of pragmatism, seemingly intended as a sort of advertisement. In another part, he says one of the things he likes about Dewey is Dewey’s historical storytelling. Here Rorty practices such storytelling himself.

“Peirce kicked pragmatism off by starting from Alexander Bain’s definition of belief as a rule or habit of action. Starting from this definition, Peirce argued that the function of inquiry is not to represent reality, but rather to enable us to act more effectively. This means getting rid of the ‘copy theory’ of knowledge which had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes — and especially of the idea of intuitive self-knowledge, knowledge unmediated by signs” (p. 10).

Hegel was Pierce’s great predecessor in the critique of representation. This has not been adequately appreciated. And Dewey’s views on democracy in part reflect a continued serious engagement with broadly Hegelian themes.

“Peirce was anti-foundationalist, coherentist, and holist in his view of the nature of inquiry. But he did not, as most of Hegel’s anglophone followers did, think of God as an all-inclusive, atemporal experience which is identical with Reality. Rather, as a good Darwinian, Peirce thought of the universe as evolving. His God was a finite deity who is somehow identical with an evolutionary process” (ibid).

James and Dewey “focused on the profound anti-Cartesian implications of Peirce’s development of Bain’s initial anti-representationalist insight. They developed a non-representationalist theory of belief acquisition and testing” (ibid).

“Peirce thought of himself as a disciple of Kant, improving on Kant’s doctrine of categories and his conception of logic. A practicing mathematician and laboratory scientist, he was more interested in these areas of culture than were James or Dewey. James took neither Kant nor Hegel very seriously, but was far more interested in religion than either Peirce or Dewey. Dewey, deeply influenced by Hegel, was fiercely anti-Kantian. Education and politics, rather than science or religion, were at the center of his thought” (p. 11).

“James hoped to construct an alternative to the anti-religious, science worshipping, positivism of his day” (ibid).

“Dewey, in his early period, tried to bring Hegel together with evangelical Christianity” (ibid).

“The anti-positivist strain in classical pragmatism was at least as strong as its anti-metaphysical strain” (ibid).

“All of Dewey’s books are permeated by the typically nineteenth-century conviction that human history is the story of expanding human freedom” (p. 12).

“I take the anti-representationalist view of thought and language to have been motivated, in James’ case, by the realization that the need for choice between competing representations can be replaced by tolerance for a plurality of non-competing descriptions, descriptions which serve different purposes and which are to be evaluated by reference to their Utility in fulfilling these purposes rather than by their ‘fit’ with the objects being described” (p. 14).

This idea of a plurality of noncompeting descriptions serving different purposes is no less important for being elementary. But for foundationalists and fundamentalists, everything has to reduce to black and white, and claims to truth are exclusive.

“If James’ watchword was tolerance, then Dewey’s was, as I have said, anti-authoritarianism. His revulsion from the sense of sinfulness which his religious upbringing had produced led Dewey to campaign, throughout his life, against the view that human beings needed to measure themselves against something non-human. Dewey used the term ‘democracy’ to mean something like what Habermas means by the term ‘communicative reason’: for him, the word sums up the idea that human beings should regulate their actions and beliefs by the need to join with other human beings in cooperative projects, rather than by the need to stand in the correct relation to something non human. This is why he grabbed hold of James’ pragmatic theory of truth” (ibid).

The connection he makes between Dewey and Habermas seems sound to me.

There is a multi-page digression on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which I will skip. According to Rorty, Freud would have “seen worship of the bare Idea of Father as the origin of the conviction that it is knowledge, rather than love, which is the most distinctively human” (p. 18).

Here I must beg to differ. I see no polar opposition between knowledge and love. The twin pinnacles of Aristotle’s ethics are intellectual virtue, and friendship or love. Hegel stresses both as well. A principled rejection of epistemological foundationalism does not entail the rejection of knowledge — quite the contrary.

“This conviction of the importance of knowledge runs through the history of what Derrida calls ‘the metaphysics of presence’…. The quest for such a reassuring presence is, for all those who resonate to Aristotle’s claim that ‘all men by nature desire to know’, the proper way of life for the good child. To devote oneself to getting knowledge as opposed to opinion — to grasping unchanging structure as opposed to awareness of mutable and colorful content — one has to believe that one will be cleansed, purified of guilt and shame, by getting closer to something like Truth or Reality” (ibid).

The sharp Platonic opposition between knowledge and opinion is something I want to defend. I would completely dissociate it from bad or harmful concepts of authority and representation (still leaving aside the relation between these two). I would sooner associate bad or harmful concepts of authority with opinion that is claimed to take precedence over actual knowledge.

The story about Aristotle and presence is Heidegger’s, not Aristotle’s. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence really has nothing to do with Aristotle (his immediate target was actually Husserl). I agree that the metaphysics of presence — a variant of the privileging of immediacy that Hegel opposes — is a terrible idea. At least from the time of Plotinus and perhaps from that of the Stoics, the Western tradition has been affected by it. But to claim that the whole history of philosophy has been hegemonically dominated by it is a gross oversimplification.

Strangely, Rorty finishes, “[Dewey’s] anti-authoritarianism was a stage in the gradual replacement of a morality of obligation by a morality of love. This is the replacement which, in the West, is thought to have been initiated by certain passages in the New Testament” (p. 20).

I would say that the moment Socrates initiated the free ethical inquiry that was taken up and developed by Plato and Aristotle, the authority-obedience model no longer universally held sway. Plato and Aristotle are less beholden to it than the leading lights of the moderate Enlightenment. Even among the Latin scholastics, there was plenty of genuine inquiry.

Rorty never gets any further in explaining the relation between representationalism and authoritarianism that he began with. It seems this is just a provocative metaphor, with a conciliatory gesture at the end. But my real interest is in Brandom’s very different presentation, when he relates and contrasts his own work and Rorty’s.

The globally negative reference to obligation may also reflect Rorty’s very negative view of Kant.

In a footnote, Rorty claims with winking anachronism that “eventually [Dewey’s] bete noir became the doctrine which [later writer Thomas] Nagel makes explicit: that something less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions which shape a human being’s moral identity is necessary if morality is not to be an illusion” (p. 16n).

This goes way beyond the scope of the rest of the essay. I have little appreciation for arguments that claim something else is necessary for morality to be possible, so I was hoping to find common ground. But now Rorty is objecting to anything “less contingent and more universal than the empirical, environmental conditions”. To me, this sounds more like the positivism that the historic pragmatists opposed.

The pragmatist tradition in general has an ambiguous relation to mainstream varieties of empiricism. Here Rorty sounds like an empiricist.

Earlier in his career, he was known as a defender of eliminative materialism, the view that mental states simply do not exist. Coming from this kind of direction, he would scarcely have needed metaphorical talk about authoritarianism to arrive at a repudiation of representationalism.

I’m very critical of the notion of mental states myself. But I don’t see this as a black-and-white question of whether or not something exists. It is rather a question of how we interpret things. Posing the question in terms of existence implies that there is nothing to interpret, that we already know what all the things in life are. This is an example of the attitude that Kant called dogmatic.

More on Contemplation

I’m still, as it were, contemplating Aristotelian contemplation or theoria (see also But What Is Contemplation?; Kantian “Contemplation”?).

The two main English meanings of theoria — “contemplation” and “theory” — have a rather different connotative feel. What is tricky is that by all accounts, contemplation is also an activity. But it is not grammatically obvious that the English “theory” is an activity. Indeed, a theory is commonly taken to be a kind of inert representation, and not an activity.

Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to say that “theory” by itself can also refer to a corresponding activity. Theory’s activity would be contemplative, and would not in itself aim at any external result. At least on a relative scale applicable to humans, it would be pure thinking. Meanwhile, contemplation for Aristotle is a kind of activity that does not in itself have an external result.

In the contemporary revival of American pragmatist philosophy, figures like Brandom and Pippin insist that thinking is a kind of doing. Rather than a distinction between theory and practice, this leads to a distinction between specifically “contemplative” or “theoretical” practice, and practice in general. Doing and practice in English can thus have the full generality that activity has in Aristotle. Not all doing is “external” doing; not all practice is “external” practice.

Human pure thinking may implicitly issue in a kind of result — a relatively coherent representation, or broadly speaking a “theory” of what it holds to be the case — but it may still be said that this implicit result is “internal”, until some additional external action gives the representation some kind of embodiment.

However, Hegel might remind us that the very distinction between “internal” and “external” is problematic. He argues that it is not really possible to draw an unambiguous line between them, and that internal and external are instead related by a kind of continuity.

(Hegel confusingly calls this a speculative “identity”, though he is very clear that a speculative identity is not a formal, exact identity. Having come to see the value in what Paul Ricoeur calls narrative identity — another “identity” that is not a formal, exact identity — I don’t object as strenuously to Hegel’s nonstandard uses of “identity” as I once did, though I still prefer to use some other word when what is meant is anything weaker than exact isomorphism or substitutional equivalence.)

The continuity of internal and external seems to me like a very Aristotelian point, albeit one that Aristotle does not himself make. But unlike Hegel, Aristotle has no need to respond to a sharp Cartesian or Lockean dualism between consciousness and its representations on the one hand, and everything else on the other.

I think most people would allow that contemplation may involve representations, but contemplation itself is neither an activity of representing, nor a simple consciousness of static representations.

The English connotations of contemplation and reflection are closely aligned. Connotations of words do not count as a philosophical argument for identifying terms that might be claimed to stand for different concepts, but such alignment is nonetheless helpful, because in doing philosophy we are also concerned with communicating clearly, and there are always issues with translated terms not meaning quite the same thing on the two sides of a translation.

Aristotle identifies contemplation with thought thinking itself. I am suggesting that thought thinking itself can be strongly identified with reflection in the sense discussed by Kant, Hegel, Ricoeur, and Pippin, which builds on the common one. That would mean that contemplation can be identified with reflection.

Though the precise meanings of reflection and apperception in Kant are debated by scholars, there seems to be broad agreement that Kant strongly connects pure reflection with pure or transcendental apperception, and a more empirical reflection with a more empirical apperception. (See also Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity).

These same concepts are fundamental to Hegel’s Logic. The three “logics” he develops there concern mere assertion; reflection or reflective constitution; and reflective or apperceptive judgment. Hegel innovatively explains the constitution of essence in terms of a pure reflective determination that presupposes no fixed terms, but builds determination from relations between terms. Then he explains judgment as normatively applying reflective determination to appearances.

I want to suggest that Hegelian reflective or apperceptive judgment should be considered as a more detailed elaboration of Aristotelian deliberation and practical judgment.

All of this leads to the conclusion that Aristotelian contemplation — at least the contemplation that he explicitly makes the goal of human life — can be explained as the exercise of reflective or apperceptive judgment. It is not clear to me that the contemplation attributed to the first cause also issues in judgment, but it certainly does seem to be a kind of pure reflection such as Hegel associates with the determination of essence, and this tracks with Aristotle’s claim that the what-it-is of things depends on the first cause.

Hegelian Semantics

Brandom begins his second Brentano lecture saying, “On the ground floor of Hegel’s intellectual edifice stands his non-psychological conception of the conceptual. This is the idea that to be conceptually contentful is to stand in relations of material incompatibility and consequence (his “determinate negation” and “mediation”) to other such contentful items. The relations of incompatibility and consequence are denominated “material” to indicate that they articulate the contents rather than form of what stands in those relations. This is his first and most basic semantic idea: an understanding of conceptual content in terms of modally robust relations of exclusion and inclusion” (p. 39).

I think Aristotle and even Plato would have agreed with all of this: both the nonpsychological nature of concepts and the fundamental role of modally robust relations of exclusion and inclusion in determining meaning. But the Latin medieval to European early modern mainstream was in this regard much more influenced by the Stoic explanation of meaning by representation, and by the “psychological” cast of Augustine’s thought.

Brandom goes on to characterize Hegel’s position as a “bimodal hylomorphic conceptual realism”, carefully unpacking each part of this dense formula. The two modalities in question are the two fundamental ways in which things have grip on us: the “bite” of reality and the moral “ought”. Brandom holds that there is a deep structural parallel or isomorphism between these two kinds of constraints that affect us. Further, the isomorphism is also a hylomorphism in the sense that the two modalities are not only structurally similar, but so deeply intertwined in practice as to be only analytically distinguishable. Concepts and normativity are interdependent. Finally, it is through concepts and normativity that all our notions of the solidity of reality are articulated.

This kind of conceptual realism in Hegel is complemented by what Brandom calls a conceptual idealism. “At the grossest level of structure, the objective realm of being is articulated by nomological relations, and the subjective realm of thought is articulated by norm-governed processes, activities or practices. It can be asked how things stand with the intentional nexus between these realms. Should it be construed in relational or practical-processual terms?” (p. 43). “Hegel takes there to be an explanatory asymmetry in that the semantic relations between those discursive practices and the objective relations they know about and exploit practically are instituted by the discursive practices that both articulate the subjective realm of thought and establish its relations to the objective realm of being. This asymmetry claim privileging specifically recollective discursive practices over semantic relations in understanding the intentional nexus between subjectivity and objectivity is the thesis of conceptual idealism.” (p. 44).

Plato had talked about recollection in a mythical or poetic way in relation to paradoxes of learning. Hegel’s more “historiographical” recollection is also related to a kind of learning, but Hegel specifically stresses the importance of error as the stimulus to learning. Brandom says there is both a “subjunctive sensitivity of thought to things” (ibid) and a “normative responsibility of thought to fact. What things are for consciousness ought to conform to what things are in themselves.” (p. 45). This translates into a central obligation to repair our errors, and for Hegel the specific way to do this is through a recollective account of what was right in our previous stance; how we came to realize that it went wrong; and what we did to fix it.

“The normative standard of success of intentional agency is set by how things objectively are after an action. The idea of action includes a background structural commitment to the effect that things ought to be as they are intended to be. Conceptual idealism focuses on the fact that all these alethic and normative modal relations are instituted by the recollective activity that is the final phase of the cycle of cognition and action” (ibid).

“Conceptual realism asserts the identity of conceptual content between facts and thoughts of those facts. (Compare Wittgenstein: ‘When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this—is—so.’ [PI§95]) Conceptual idealism offers a pragmatic account of the practical process by which that semantic-intentional relation between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves is established. Pragmatics, as I am using the term, is the study of the use of concepts by subjects engaging in discursive practices. Conceptual idealism asserts a distinctive kind of explanatory priority (a kind of authority) of pragmatics over semantics. For this reason it is a pragmatist semantic explanatory strategy, and its idealism is a pragmatist idealism. The sui generis rational practical activity given pride of explanatory place by this sort of pragmatism is recollection” (pp. 45-46).

Brandom says that Hegel’s notion of experience has two levels, corresponding to two top-level kinds of concepts he distinguishes: ordinary practical and empirical concepts, and meta-level philosophical, categorial or “logical” concepts.

“The master-strategy animating this reading of Hegel (and of Kant) is semantic descent: the idea that the ultimate point of studying these metaconcepts is what their use can teach us about the semantic contentfulness of ground-level concepts, so the best way to understand the categorial metaconcepts is to use them to talk about the use and content of ordinary concepts… The pragmatic metaconcept of the process of experience is first put in play in the Introduction, at the very beginning of [Hegel’s Phenomenology], in the form of the experience of error. It is invoked to explain how the consciousness-constitutive distinction-and-relation between what things are for consciousness and what things are in themselves shows up to consciousness itself. Hegel assumes that, however vaguely understood it might be at the outset, it is a distinction-and-relation that can at least be a topic for us, the readers of the book” (pp. 47-48).

The most naive human awareness already implicitly recognizes a distinction between appearance and reality. “The question is how this crucial distinction already shows up practically for even the most metatheoretically naïve knowing subject. How are we to understand the basic fact that ‘…the difference between the in-itself and the for-itself is already present in the very fact that consciousness knows an object at all’… Hegel traces its origin to the experience of error” (p. 48).

“Hegel finds the roots of this sort of experience in our biological nature as desiring beings…. What a creature practically takes or treats as food, by eating it, can turn out not really to be food, if eating it does not satisfy the hunger that motivated it…. This sort of experience is the basis and practical form of learning” (p. 49). This is “the practical basis for the semantic distinction between representings and representeds, sense and referent” (pp, 49-50).

“[A]n essential part of the acknowledgment of error is practically taking or treating two commitments as incompatible. Such genuinely conceptual activity goes beyond what merely desiring beings engage in. The origins of Hegel’s idea here lie in Kant’s earlier broadly pragmatist account of what knowing subjects must do in order to count as apperceiving” (p. 50).

“Hegel breaks from the Kantian picture by adding a crucial constraint on what counts as successful repairs…. Successful repairs must explain and justify the changes made, in a special way” (p. 52). This takes the form of a historical recollection. “To be entitled to claim that things are as one now takes them to be, one must show how one found out that they are so. Doing that involves explaining what one’s earlier views got right, what they got wrong, and why…. This is the progressive emergence into explicitness, the ever more adequate expression, of what is retrospectively discerned as having been all along implicit as the norm governing and guiding the process by which its appearances arise and pass away” (p. 53). “Recollection… turns a past into a history” (p. 54).

All this serves as an explanation of how we come to have representations that actually refer to something, in terms of how we express our concerns. “In general Hegel thinks we can only understand what is implicit in terms of the expressive process by which it is made explicit. That is a recollective process. The underlying reality is construed as implicit in the sense of being a norm that all along governed the process of its gradual emergence into explicitness” (p. 56).

“Kant had the idea that representation is a normative concept. Something counts as a representing in virtue of being responsible to something else, which counts as represented by it in virtue of exercising authority over the representing by serving as a standard for assessments of its correctness as a representing. It is in precisely this sense that a recollective story treats the commitments it surveys as representings of the content currently treated as factual” (p. 58). Brandom says that Hegel reconstructs in expressive terms what the representationalists were right about, while strongly contrasting this way of thinking with representationalism.

“Hylomorphic conceptual realism then underwrites the idea of the categorial homogeneity of senses as graspable thoughts and their referents (what they represent) as correspondingly conceptually contentful, statable facts. This makes intelligible the idea that thoughts are the explicit expressions of facts. They make explicit… how the world is” (p. 60).

“The plight of finite knowing and acting subjects metaphysically guarantees liability to empirical error and practical failure. The experience of error is inescapable. What I earlier called the ‘false starts, wrong turns, and dead ends’ of inquiry can be retrospectively edited out of the sanitized, Whiggish vindicating recollective narrative, but they cannot be avoided going forward.

“Why not? In short because the rational, conceptual character of the world and its stubborn recalcitrance to mastery by knowledge and agency are equally fundamental primordial features of the way things are” (pp. 61-62).

“For Hegel, the experience of error requires not just the revision of beliefs… but also of meanings” (p. 62). “The manifestation of stubborn, residual immediacy in thought is the inevitability of the experience of error…. [T]he ineluctability of error and the realistic possibility of genuine knowledge [both] express valid perspectives on what is always at once both the experience of error and the way of truth. The important thing is not to seize exclusively—and so one-sidedly—on either aspect, but to understand the nature of the process as one that necessarily shows up from both perspectives” (p. 63).

“One of Hegel’s animating ideas is that the independence of immediacy (its distinctive authority over structures of mediation) is manifested in its role as a principle of instability, as providing a normative demand for change, for both rejection and further development of each constellation of determinate concepts and commitments articulated by them. The independence of mediation (its distinctive authority over immediacy) is manifested in all the retrospective recollective vindications of prior constellations of commitments as genuine knowledge, as resulting from the expressively progressive revelation of reality by prior claims to knowledge.” (pp. 64-65).

“The forward-looking obligation to repair acknowledged incompatibilities of commitment acknowledges error and the inadequacy of its conceptions. The backward-looking recollective obligation to rationalize as expressively progressive previous, now superseded, repairs and recollections institutes knowledge, truth, and determinate concepts whose incompatibilities and consequences track those articulating (in a different modal key) the objective world…. The recollective process is also what Hegel calls ‘giving contingency the form of necessity.'” (p. 65).

“The key in each case is to understand [truth and error] not as properties, states, or relations that can be instantiated at a single time, but as structural features of enduring experiential processes” (p.66).

This is to move from what Hegel calls Understanding to what he calls Reason. Understanding focuses on the fixity of concepts; Reason also has regard for their malleability. To think of experience as asymptotically approaching objective facts and relations belongs to the Understanding that disregards the mutation of meanings.

“The world as it is in itself as distinct from how it is for consciousness is not a brute other, but in that distinctive sense the product of its own recollective activity in experience” (p.72).

Instrumentalism?

In the last post I gave positive mention to an “instrumentalist rather than realist view of scientific explanation”. I think an instrumental view of science is the natural one from an engineering point of view, which the philosophy of science ought to take very seriously. I actually work as an engineer in my day job, and have a bit of engineering education. Though these days I privately think of myself mainly as a moral philosopher, I truly enjoy engineering for its practical orientation. Engineers learn that the real world doesn’t always conform to theoretical simplifications, and they have to make what are actually value judgments all the time.

Curiously, it seems to me that in spite of our culture’s obsession with technology and all the stereotypes about nutty scientists, engineering as a discipline doesn’t have nearly as much social prestige as science. For the reasons just mentioned, I think engineering deserves the higher status, as the actually more comprehensive concern. Modern science is first and foremost a tool used in engineering. But in our culture’s mythology of science, there is a popular prejudice that engineers — unlike real scientists — just make rote applications of formulae developed by scientists. Meanwhile science students — if I may be forgiven a broad-brush picture — all too often seem to get the message that the latest Science is Truth, and everything else is irrelevant. This can unfortunately make them arrogant and dogmatic in later life. I think engineers on the whole are more attuned to the provisional status of assumptions.

On the historiographical side, I think the over-propagandized scientific revolution was actually more of an engineering revolution. The design of experiments can be considered a kind of engineering, as can the development and use of therapeutic techniques in medicine. The very practical, experiment-oriented work of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in its broad parameters at least is a much better model for science in the modern sense than the new mechanist/voluntarist dualist world view promoted by Descartes, or even the empiricism of Locke. In terms of the long time-scale of human development, engineering long predates science, and I think that generally speaking, historical causality flows that way, with engineering driving science rather than following it.

These varied considerations seem to me to jointly favor an “instrumentalist” view in the philosophy of science. This is another example of the mediated or “long detour” type of approach to knowledge that seems most sound to me.

In analytic philosophy in recent decades, there has been a big debate about realism versus anti-realism. Implicitly, this mainly applies to the philosophy of science, but in many circles there are still prejudices that theory of knowledge comes first in philosophy, and that science is the most important kind of knowledge. This can make it seem as if realist or anti-realist positions in the philosophy of science must be applied across the board at a sort of ontological level, but I want to argue against that.

I think that ethical reason and interpretation come before the theory of knowledge in the overall order of explanation relevant to human life, and that normative practical judgment actually grounds what we think of as exact knowledge. From an ethical standpoint, it is vitally important to recognize there is a “push-back” of reality we need to respect and take into account, so I want to argue for a kind of realism. The true home for a respect for realism, I want to say, should be ethics and not the philosophy of science. We can meet all the ethical needs related to concern for objectivity in a way that is entirely compatible with an instrumentalist and “anti-realist” philosophy of science. Meanwhile, a more modest view of science — as a valuable tool rather than a source of ultimate truth — can help heal the false rift between science and values that permeates our culture. Further, if science is a tool and we also say that higher forms of faith are expressed not in propositions but in action and attitude (as I would respectfully suggest), then in the world of what should be, there is no possibility of conflict from either side. (See also Kinds of Reason.)

Which Pragmatism?

“Pragmatism” is said in many ways. There is the crude, morally disreputable sort that means pursuit of narrow self-interest. There is the broad sort associated with a kind of flexible adaptation, which could be viewed either positively or negatively. There are several philosophical pragmatisms, none of which should be understood in terms of either of these.

Philosophical pragmatisms usually avow a deflationary, coherentist theory of truth, and stand in contrast to Cartesian, representationalist, and foundationalist views. They also tend to be associated with an instrumentalist rather than realist view of scientific explanation. I’m not in the habit of calling myself a pragmatist, but am sympathetic to all of this.

Charles Pierce (1839-1914) is generally regarded as the founder of philosophical pragmatism, and it was he who invented the word. The quite different version promulgated by William James (1842-1910), however, was initially far better known. At a very broad level it could be said that where Pierce was more Kantian, James was closer in spirit to the British utilitarians and the British empiricist tradition. Pierce apparently had severe misgivings about the work of James, and resented James’ takeover of his term. In later works, he ceded the name “pragmatism” to James and adopted the new term “pragmaticism”, in an attempt to separate their views.

Pierce’s pragmatism, I’d like to think, references the Kantian primacy of practical reason. He broadens the sense of “practical” far beyond Kant’s initial ethical focus, but without losing touch with its Kantian basis. He treats Kant’s rejection of “intellectual intuition” as decisive and deeply related to this, preferring to develop meanings through a kind of practical inference. His original “pragmatic maxim” is as follows: “Consider what effects, that 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” (“How to Make Our Ideas Clear”). I’m no Pierce scholar, but I think that Pierce’s uses of “practical” are meant to apply in both Kantian and utilitarian/empiricist senses, whereas it seems James lost the Kantian aspect.

Though his interests were wide-ranging, Pierce was initially known for his work in mathematical logic and semiotics, and a few seminal essays. He made pioneering contributions to the mathematics of relations, and is widely regarded as the founder of modern semiotics, or the general study of signs.

Like Leibniz, Pierce left a huge mass of unpublished manuscripts, editing of which will continue for many decades to come. According to my late father, who wrote his dissertation on Pierce in the late 1950s, Pierce’s executors deliberately impeded research into Pierce’s significant engagement with Kant and Hegel and his correspondence with Husserl, in order make Pierce fit better into the American philosophical mainstream of the day, which was a much narrower, more intolerant, and more anti-historical kind of analytic philosophy than prevails among English-speaking professional philosophers today.

John Dewey (1859-1952) was another better known American figure with whose name the term “pragmatism” also became more closely linked than that of Pierce. Like James, he was a psychologist as well as a philosopher. He is known for his writings on education and democracy.

Philosopher, sociologist, and social psychologist George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) developed a pragmatist theory of social life known as symbolic interactionism. John Herman Randall, Jr. (1899-1980) developed a pragmatist reading of Aristotle, and also argued that Italian Renaissance Aristotelianism played a larger and far more positive role in the development of modern science than is commonly recognized.

In the mid-20th century, analytic philosophers W.V.O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars used pragmatist arguments to criticize logical positivism, initiating a gradual sea change in Anglo-American philosophy over the next several decades. Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom are also known as analytic pragmatists.

(“Pragmatics” in the study of natural and artificial languages — a discipline concerned with questions of use — comes from the same Greek root, but is otherwise independent of the “pragmatisms” delimited here.)

Between Transcendentalism and Pragmatism

Josiah Royce (1855-1916) was known as the leading American exponent of absolute idealism. He was recognized for contributions to philosophy of religion, psychology, and logic, as well as metaphysics. I thought of him because apparently, at least in his earlier works, he really did identify the Absolute with an all-embracing, divine consciousness that was supposed to include and underwrite all of reality, quite opposite to the way I read Hegel’s Phenomenology as an extended critique of the point of view of consciousness.

Also quite unlike the “deflationary” approach taken here, he straightforwardly identified his Absolute with God and with Being. Royce’s was a definitely personal God, also existing in time rather than eternally. Early in his career, he developed a novel argument for the existence of God based on the existence of error. According to Royce, the very existence of error presupposes the existence not only of truth against which the error can be recognized, but of a Knower who knows the truth.

Royce had strongly communitarian ethical views, sharply criticizing both the “heroic individualism” of the American Transcendentalists, with whom he shared an interest in German Idealist philosophy, and the individualist views of his close friend, the pragmatist William James. Among other things, Royce thought James in his famous Varieties of Religious Experience focused too much on intensely private experiences of extraordinary individuals, to the detriment of attention to the community aspect of religion. In his theology, Royce strongly associated God with an ideal of a Universal Community.

In his late work, he was increasingly influenced by the great founder of pragmatism, Charles Pierce. He became fascinated with Pierce’s notions of signs, semiotics, and interpretation. While this was not quite the full-fledged anti-foundationalist notion of interpretation developed here, I think it at least points in a similar direction. At this point, Royce developed a new notion of God as “the Interpreter Spirit” providing a metaphysical ground in time for all acts of interpretation, without the interpreters necessarily being aware of this. He extended his notion of the Universal Community, now explicitly calling it a “Community of Interpretation”. I think the latter is a fascinating partial anticipation of Brandom’s much more detailed work on mutual recognition, which also draws on the pragmatist Kantianism of Wilfrid Sellars.

(From Brandom’s point of view, Royce’s communitarianism would still be a one-sided overreaction to individualist trends. It seems to me that Brandom and Ricoeur converge on a very attractive alternative to this old seesaw, putting concrete relations with others and intersubjectivity before either individuality or community.)

Martin Luther King, Jr., acknowledged Royce as the source of King’s own more elaborated notion of the ideal of the Beloved Community, a vision of tolerance and mutual acceptance. I have not evaluated claims of a recent book that in spite of this, Royce also in effect promoted a cultural version of the racist “white man’s burden”.

Royce attempted to derive all of ethics from a single principle of loyalty, understood as loyalty to a cause. He claimed that loyalty to vicious or predatory causes fails to meet a criterion of “loyalty to loyalty” intrinsic to his principle of loyalty. Thus the argument seems to be that loyalty has the kind of universality that Kant claimed for the categorical imperative. However, I don’t think the argument succeeds nearly as well as Kant’s. Kantian respect for people gives a crucial human face to Kant’s formalism in ethics. Even if loyalty to loyalty is concerned to avoid undermining the loyalty of others to the cause, as Royce argued, that seems to me to be a much narrower kind of concern for others. Also, loyalty is by nature particular, whereas Kant’s various formulations of the categorical imperative are actual tests for universality.

Aristotelian Probability

Things Aristotle calls “probable” have nothing to with statistics. The legal notion of “probable” cause is much closer to Aristotle’s concept of probability. It refers to conclusions for which there are good reasons, but which are not expected to be established beyond reasonable doubt.

Mathematics achieves certainty and rigorous necessity through the artifice of abstracting away real-world complication and ambiguity. Whenever we are concerned with the real world as we actually experience it, whatever conclusions we reach at best follow probably rather than necessarily.

Keeping in mind the probable character of judgment in general should not prevent us from acting decisively. This kind of “probability” is all the basis we need to have well-founded practical confidence. We can have strong confidence without false pretenses of certainty.

To claim certain knowledge in these cases amounts to what Kant called dogmatism. The deep roots of American pragmatist philosophy have more to do with something like an Aristotelian emphasis on the practical sufficiency of probable judgments than with later reductive, utilitarian theories of value. (See also Aristotelian Dialectic; Dialectic Bootstraps Itself; The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle; Demonstrative “Science”?; Kantian Discipline; Copernican.)

Hopes Dashed

The Dash — The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (2018), by Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda, advertised itself as a tour de force vindication of absolute knowing in Hegel, but hardly even mentions absolute knowing. Thick rhetoric rehearsing common Žižekian themes introduces more rhetoric and a few bits of Hegelian trivia. This little book is organizationally reminiscent of middle-period Derrida’s focus on obscure “minor” points, but lacks the redeeming grace of Derrida’s literary sparkle and prolonged thoughtfulness. I am terribly disappointed, and must beg forgiveness from my readers for another defensive response to what come across as very unfair comments about the kindly Brandom, who may be as misunderstood as Hegel himself.

According to the authors, “self-avowed Hegelian pragmatism — undoubtedly the most influential form of Hegelianism today” constrains us to remain within an allegedly preestablished “space of reasons” (scare quotes in original) “legitimized within a restricted sphere” that “cannot be fundamentally changed” (emphasis in original) “with all exits and entrances sealed” so that “the terms of rational agency are already determined such that alternate forms of practical rationality are ruled out from the outset”. I’m really sorry, but I don’t know what planet these people live on. They make something beautiful sound like a source of oppressive conformism.

The “space of reasons” introduced by Sellars and promoted by Brandom simply names the abstract possibility of ethical reasoning and dialogue. It is the wide open space of all possible Socratic questioning (see What and Why; Context). It is not the shared beliefs of some empirically existing community. Existing unjust practices are an affront to reason.

Because the space of reasons is not an empirically existing thing to begin with, talk about changing it or opting out reflects a complete misunderstanding. We could opt out from the established practices of an existing community, or change them. But it doesn’t make any sense to talk about “opting out” from an abstract possibility of questioning. In fact, those who want to opt out from the possibility of questioning are those who want to claim special privilege or to abuse others. (See also Stubborn Refusal.)

By the same token, “alternate forms” of rationality are automatically ruled in to the space of reasons. The autonomy of reason means that no one gets to dictate. Ethically speaking, there is an implied, rather minimal standard of reasonableness and good faith. However, as an abstract thing, the space of reasons can’t enforce anything at all. The social danger is not that reason could possibly oppress us, but that it is too often ignored. (See also Recognition; Fragility of the Good.)