The five big divisions of pragmatism

Have been steadily plugging away at The American Pragmatists by Cheryl Misak. Note that my readings might be error-prone and over-simplistic, but this is what I’ve seen so far…

Pragmatism puts a special emphasis on language, as value and meaning is communicated between multiple people. Reality tends to result in a semblance of agreement. The willingness of that agreement to depart from its relation to reality defines modern philosophy and, to some extent, different notions of pragmatism itself. At the same time, pragmatism is feeling around in a dark room for the boundaries/walls of scientific truth.

To make a long description short, the boundaries between the self and the modern world are messy, there’s not a clear line between the person and the world, and we should seek to use our resources (clear language, agreement and an emphasis on the results of our beliefs) as a notion of what constitutes reality.

Five major splits in pragmatism that I’ve noticed, all relating to notions of truth:

1. The initial split between pragmatism and empiricism: Empiricism was defined by verification of phenomena through the five senses. Yet science conjectures things all the time without relying on sense faculties. For instance, astronomers use gravitational pull to confirm the existence of planets and other celestial bodies. Atomic theory was also advanced well before humans had a method of confirming it. Likewise, evolution is a theory with a historically steadily increasing body of support (and the founders of pragmatism were in contact with Darwin), but it took more than the senses to confirm fact and theory. Pragmatism came about in an age of science where conjecture and hypothesis served as the first steps to confirmation. At this moment, the creation of the split between pragmatism and empiricism seems to relate to the split between verificationism and falsificationism; that is, is something only true because you can verify it, or can you hold something as useful if it cannot yet be falsified. The classical pragmatists believed the second statement, with the caveat that it creates an imperative to test the hypotheses.
2. The second split appears to relate to usefulness, creating a division between pragmatism and pragmaticism: Does a feeling of religiosity, for instance, represent a “fact” if the results are good? There’s a social and philosophical concept of a “noble lie,” where everyone knows something is bogus, yet holding that believe keeps society harmonious. If the results are positive, then that belief has value, whether or not it’s traditionally true. William James believed this concept and stretched the boundaries of pragmatic truth. This belief was also Straussian (and Platonic), and illustrated that “truth” and utility were seen as different. Charles Sanders Peirce disagreed, speaking from the perspective of a more traditional scientist, logician, and mathematician. The classical pragmatists backed Pierce, noting that the terms “positive” and “value” are loaded, and asked who is the arbiter of that decision. Peirce created his own version of pragmatism, called pragmaticism, to differentiate his version from James’.
3. The third split was created by the logical empiricist return to verificationism. The logical empiricists opened their definition of truth to both empirical observation and logical proof, which is an improvement upon strict empiricism. The overarching idea is that a more stringent and scientific approach to philosophy would lead to a more exact view of reality and avoid equivocations. Karl Popper and others felt that this was still too strict and held onto falsification as an objective standard of meaningfulness. Popper presented the problem of induction, in that induction doesn’t actually happen in science. Instead, we conjecture and attempt to disprove our hypothesis. Thus, the scientific approach to life is to find and correct errors rather than appealing to authority to find truths.
4. The fourth split in pragmatism related to John Dewey’s instrumentalism, which replaced representationalism with usefulness. Can an idea elucidate upon some notion of reality? Instrumentalism argued that scientific theory does not actually get at the nature of metaphysical truth, but just tests things that are observable. At the same time, Dewey held up political and non-political democracy within fields as paramount. Instrumentalism argues that entrenched regimes create power constellations and attempt to “capture” truth, creating regimes of irrationality. The power of democracy can better elucidate what benefits the masses and can topple inserted philosophical elements that exist to protect entrenched power. Critics argue that extracting the explanatory power of scientific experimentation is critical and that scientific experiments reveal real elements of reality, no matter their interpretation.
5. The fifth split went in the opposite direction of the logical empiricists, where the neopragmatists dispensed with moral truth and the search for it. Taking James’ and Dewey’s more open definition of pragmatism further, neopragmatists like Richard Rorty stated that truth was what groups of people were willing to communally believe. When we free ourselves from this historical philosophical exercise of finding “truth,” and clear out our meta-narrative cache, we can see ourselves as actors within a system that uses science and language as tools of control. This concept took its post-modern reality from experience and language. Truth ceased being tethered to reality and became a strict tool of usefulness. If a community of people call a chair a table, then it’s a table. Rorty saw community politics as an exercise in increasing the communal “We,” progressively increasing the scope of collectivism with in a liberal community. Taking Dewey further, neopragmatism argues that any belief that aids in the human struggle for happiness is valuable.

The criticisms of Rorty and the neopragmatists were fast and furious. Rorty was cast as extremely relativistic by the new breed of classical philosophers who saw threads of Rorty way back in William James and John Dewey. The notion of ejecting even the possibility of finding universal moral principles in science was argued as not traditionally pragmatic (Peirce saw himself as a Kantian) and morally relativistic. Rortians argue that, “well, yeah, since values can only be justified by the location and time a culture lives in, you can’t argue moral superiority.” But the neopragmatists aren’t immoral or amoral — they’re meta-ethical. The neopragmatists see smaller communities as holders of shared beliefs.