The Pragmatic Turn E-Book

Richard J. Bernstein

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 502

Beschreibung

In this major new work, Richard J. Bernstein argues that many of the most important themes in philosophy during the past one hundred and fifty years are variations and developments of ideas that were prominent in the classical American pragmatists: Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey and George H Mead. Pragmatism begins with a thoroughgoing critique of the Cartesianism that dominated so much of modern philosophy. The pragmatic thinkers reject a sharp dichotomy between subject and object, mind-body dualism, the quest for certainty and the spectator theory of knowledge. They seek to bring about a sea change in philosophy that highlights the social character of human experience and normative social practices, the self-correcting nature of all inquiry, and the continuity of theory and practice. And they-especially James, Dewey, and Mead-emphasize the democratic ethical-political consequences of a pragmatic orientation. Many of the themes developed by the pragmatic thinkers were also central to the work of major twentieth century philosophers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger, but the so-called analytic-continental split obscures this underlying continuity. Bernstein develops an alternative reading of contemporary philosophy that brings out the persistence and continuity of pragmatic themes. He critically examines the work of leading contemporary philosophers who have been deeply influenced by pragmatism, including Hilary Putnam, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Robert Brandom, and he explains why the discussion of pragmatism is so alive, varied and widespread. This lucid, wide-ranging book by one of America's leading philosophers will be compulsory reading for anyone who wants to understand the state of philosophy today.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

Preface

Prologue

1 Charles S. Peirce’s Critique of Cartesianism

Intuitionism

Thought and Signs

The Pragmatic Alternative

2 The Ethical Consequences of William James’s Pragmatic Pluralism

James’s Pluralism

James’s Ethical Concern

James’s Political Interventions

James’s Pluralistic Legacy: Horace Kallen and Alain Locke

3 John Dewey’s Vision of Radical Democracy

The Ethics of Democracy

Democratic Faith

Democracy is Radical

The Failures of Democracy

Beyond Communitarianism and Liberalism

The Role of Conflict in Democratic Politics

Democracy, Social Cooperation, and Education

Dewey’s Contemporary Relevance

4 Hegel and Pragmatism

Dewey’s Early Hegelianism

Peirce’s Ambivalence toward Hegel

James: Hegel’s “Abominable Habits of Speech”

The Revival of Interest in Hegel

Sellars: “Incipient Meditations Hegeliènnes”

The “Pittsburgh Hegelians”: McDowell and Brandom

5 Pragmatism, Objectivity, and Truth

The Correspondence Theory of Truth?

A Pragmatic Account of Objectivity

Ideal Justification and Truth

Truth and Justification without Regulative Ideals

Brandom’s Contribution

Realist Intuitions?

6 Experience after the Linguistic Turn

Peirce: Three Categorial Aspects of Experience

James: The Varieties of Experience

Dewey: The Darwinian Naturalization of Hegel

Experience and the Linguistic Turn Again

7 Hilary Putnam: The Entanglement of Fact and Value

The Context of Putnam’s Thesis

Cognitive Values

Ethical and Political Values

Moral Objectivity

Objectivity, Moral Realism, and Democratic Openness

8 Jürgen Habermas’s Kantian Pragmatism

Kant Detranscendentalized

Truth and Normative Rightness

The Epistemic Conception of Truth

Neither Contextualism nor Idealism

Moral Rightness

Action and Discourse

Moral Constructivism and Epistemological Realism

Janus-Faced Truth?

Moral Constructivism Again

Why Habermas Rejects Moral Realism

9 Richard Rorty’s Deep Humanism

Rorty’s Early Metaphysical Explorations

The Linguistic Turn

Doubts about Analytic Philosophy

Public Liberalism and Private Irony

Rorty’s Humanism

Some Doubts about Rorty’s Humanism

References

Name Index

Subject Index

Copyright © Richard J. Bernstein, 2010

The right of Richard J. Bernstein to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2010 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4907-8 (hardback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4908-5 (paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5946-6 (Single-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5945-9 (Multi-user ebook)

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For Richard and Mary Rorty

Davidson may have been right when he wrote that “a sea change” is occurring in recent philosophical thought – “a change so profound that we may not recognize that it is occurring.” If the change of which Davidson spoke is someday recognized as having occurred [then] Peirce, James, and Dewey may cease to be treated as provincial figures. They may be given the place I think they deserve in the story of the West’s intellectual progress.

Richard Rorty

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for permission to use revised versions of my previously published work. “John Dewey’s Vision of Radical Democracy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dewey, ed. Molly Cochron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); “Hegel and Pragmatism,” in Von der Logik zur Sprache: Stuttgarter Hegel-Kongress, 2005, ed. R. Bubner and G. Hindrichs (Stuttgart: Kett-Cotta, 2007); “Pragmatism, Objectivity, and Truth,” Philosophical Topics, 36/1 (Spring 2008); “The Pragmatic Turn: The Entanglement of Fact and Value,” in Hilary Putnam, ed. Y. Ben-Menahem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); “Rorty’s Deep Humanism,” New Literary History, 39/1 (Winter 2008).

I also want to thank Scott Shushan and Erick Raphael Jiménez who helped in numerous ways to edit the manuscript. Professor Carol Bernstein’s perceptive detailed comments and challenging criticisms were, as always, invaluable. Jean van Altena edited my manuscript with great care and excellent judgment. John Thompson has encouraged me at every stage at working on this book.

Preface

When I wrote my dissertation on John Dewey in the 1950s, interest in Dewey and pragmatism seemed to be at an all-time low among academic philosophers. The pragmatists were thought to be passé and to have been displaced by the new linguistic turn in analytic philosophy. I felt then (and continue to believe) that Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead were really ahead of their time – that they were initiating a sea change in philosophy. Over the years I have explored the works of a variety of thinkers working in Anglo-American and Continental traditions. But it has struck me over and over again that many twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers – some of whom had little or no knowledge of the classical pragmatic thinkers – were dealing with similar themes and coming to similar conclusions. In pursuing their distinctive inquiries, they were frequently refining (and, sometimes, challenging) themes prominent in the classical American pragmatists. Gradually, the rationale for this convergence became clear to me. Pragmatism begins with a radical critique of what Peirce called “the spirit of Cartesianism.” By this Peirce meant a framework of thinking that had come to dominate much of modern philosophy – where sharp dichotomies are drawn between what is mental and physical, as well as subject and object; where “genuine” knowledge presumably rests upon indubitable foundations; and where we can bracket all prejudices by methodical doubt. This way of thinking introduces a whole series of interrelated problems that preoccupied philosophers: the problem of the external world, the problem of our knowledge of other minds, and the problem of how to correctly represent reality. The pragmatic thinkers called into question the framework in which these traditional problems had been formulated. They rejected what Dewey called the “quest for certainty” and the “spectator theory of knowledge.” They sought to develop a comprehensive alternative to Cartesianism – a nonfoundational self-corrective conception of human inquiry based upon an understanding of how human agents are formed by, and actively participate in shaping, normative social practices. And they showed the critical role that philosophy can play in guiding our conduct, enriching our everyday experience, and furthering “creative democracy.”

The sharp critique of Cartesianism is also characteristic of two of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century: Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Neither of them had any serious knowledge of American pragmatism, but in very different ways they were responding to the same deficiencies of modern philosophy that had provoked the pragmatists. It is striking how they (and others influenced by them) came to share many of the same insights of the pragmatists in what Heidegger calls our “being-in-the-world” and Wittgenstein calls “forms of life.”

There is a popular belief that, in the mid-twentieth century, the linguistic turn and analytic philosophy displaced pragmatism. But in the past few decades the continuity between the classical American pragmatists and much of the best work by analytic philosophers – including Quine, Davidson, and Sellars – has become increasingly evident. Pragmatism began as a distinctive American philosophical movement, but it has had a global reach. This is evident in the influence of pragmatism on post-Second World War German philosophy. Apel, Habermas, Wellmer, Honneth, and Joas have all appropriated and contributed to the development of pragmatic themes. Today there are more and more thinkers all over the world who have come to appreciate the contributions of the classical American pragmatists.

Frequently, academic philosophers speak about the Anglo-American analytic/Continental split, but this unfortunate dichotomy obscures more than it illuminates. Philosophers from both sides of the “split” are discovering how much they can learn from styles of thinking that initially seem so alien. My basic thesis is that, during the past 150 years, philosophers working in different traditions have explored and refined themes that were prominent in the pragmatic movement. In the Prologue, I examine the origins of American pragmatism and set forth my general thesis about the dominance of pragmatic themes in contemporary philosophy. The next three chapters explore central issues in Peirce, James, and Dewey. I then turn to examining the Hegelian influence on pragmatism; the pragmatic understanding of justification, objectivity, and truth; and the role of experience after the linguistic turn. The final chapters deal with three of the most important thinkers shaped by the pragmatic tradition: Hilary Putnam, Jürgen Habermas, and Richard Rorty.

This book is not intended to be a history or survey of pragmatism. I have lived with the pragmatists for more than 50 years, and I want to share what I have learned from them. I believe that my original intuitions about the importance of pragmatism and the sea change it initiated have been fully vindicated. Today, the vigorous creative discussion of pragmatic themes by thinkers all over the world is more widespread than it has ever been in the past.

Prologue

“Isms” in philosophy are notorious, and this is certainly true of “pragmatism.” It is fashionable in philosophy to speak about “isms”: “materialism,” “idealism,” “existentialism,” “realism,” “nominalism,” “naturalism,” etc. The advantage of this type of talk is that it enables us to label philosophical positions, orientations, and theses that presumably share distinctive characteristics. But there are also dangers, because we may be seduced into thinking that there is an essential hard core to a particular “ism.” What is worse, we often use these expressions carelessly, frequently assuming that our hearers and readers have a perfectly clear idea of what we mean. Yet when we closely examine the positions advocated by representatives of these “isms,” we discover enormous differences – including conflicting and even contradictory claims. Even the anti-essentialist idiom of “family resemblances” has become a cliché. Not only are differences in a family as striking as any resemblances, but in an actual family, we can typically appeal to common biological factors to identify a family. There is nothing comparable to this in philosophy. So it might seem advisable to drop all talk of “isms” in order to avoid confusion, ambiguity, and vagueness. Yet this would also impoverish our ability to understand what we take to be positions and thinkers who, despite significant differences, do share important overlapping features.

These general observations are relevant to pragmatism. In the case of pragmatism, we have the advantage of being able to specify the precise date when the word was first introduced publicly to identify a philosophical position. On 26 August 1898, William James delivered an address before the Philosophical Union of the University of California in Berkeley. Characteristically in his eloquent, gracious, and informal manner, James introduces pragmatism in his talk, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results.”

An occasion like the present would seem to call for an absolutely untechnical discourse. I ought to give a message with a practical outcome and an emotional accompaniment, so to speak, fitted to interest men as men, and yet also not altogether to disappoint philosophers – since philosophers, let them be as queer as they will, still are men in the secret recesses of their hearts, even here in Berkeley. (James 1997, pp. 345–6)1

James tells us that “philosophers are after all like poets.” They are pathfinders who blaze new trails in the forest. They suggest “a few formulas, a few technical conceptions, a few verbal pointers – which at least define the initial directions of the trail” (James 1997, p. 347). With this initial flourish, he introduces pragmatism.

I will seek to define with you what seems to be the most likely direction in which to start upon the trail of truth. Years ago this direction was given to me by an American philosopher whose home is in the East, and whose published works, few as they are scattered in periodicals, are no fit expression of his powers. I refer to Mr. Charles S. Peirce, with whose very existence as a philosopher I dare say many of you are unacquainted. He is one of the most original of contemporary thinkers, and the principle of practicalism – or pragmatism, as he called it, when I first heard him enunciate it at Cambridge in the early 70’s – is the clue or compass by following which I find myself more and more confirmed in believing we may keep our feet upon the proper trail. (James 1997, p. 348)