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The first part of this entry is devoted to the classical pragmatists distinctive methods, and how they give rise to an original a posteriori epistemology. After that we will briefly explore some of the many other areas of philosophy in which rich pragmatist contributions have been made.Hilary Putnam has at times denied that he is a pragmatist because he does not think that a pragmatist account of truth can be sustained. Indeed, he shows little sympathy for the pragmatic maxim. However, he has written extensively on James, Peirce, and Deweyoften in collaboration with Ruth Anna Putnamand has provided insightful accounts of what is distinctive about pragmatism, and what can be learned from it (See Putnam 1994a). He has identified four characteristics of pragmatism: the rejection of skepticism; the willingness to embrace fallibilism; the rejection of sharp dichotomies such as those between fact and value, thought and experience, mind and body, analytic and synthetic etc; and what he calls the primacy of practice (1994c). With the turn of the twenty first century, he made ambitious claims for the prospects of a pragmatist epistemology. After surveying the apparent failures of the original enlightenment project, and attributing them to the fact that enlightenment philosophers were unable to overcome the fundamental dichotomies mentioned above, he expresses the hope that the future might contain a pragmatist enlightenment (Putnam 2004:89108).
Essay on Philosophy is an academic paper which refers to the discipline concerned with questions of how one should live (ethics); what sorts of things exist and what are their essential natures (metaphysics); what counts as genuine knowledge; and what are the correct principles of reasoning. Compare and contrast the behaviors in the scenario with the philosophical theories of ethical decision-making that are referenced in Unit II. Examples may include Utilitarianism or Deontology application. The third illustration comes from Peirces general theory of signs, or semiotics, which was developed entirely independently of the more well-known semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure, and is one of the most original areas of his thought. Peirces semiotics offers an account of the contents of thoughts as well as language, visual media, music and any other item that can be said to have meaning (for introductions to this area of Peirces thought, see Liszka 1996; Short 2007).
(The worst mistake is just stringing together quotes, which accomplishes nothing. ) Notice also that textual references are given for the quotes, as well as for paraphrased passages. (Normally, I'd use footnotes and have complete citations, but I'm limited by html format here. ) Weve seen that philosophical pragmatism seeks to connect theory to practice. In ethics it can seem natural to interpret this as recommending that normative notions be reduced to practical utility. Thus James embraced utilitarian ethics as one of the branches of pragmatism (James 1907). Peirce, however, took a different view. Initially (around 1898) his naturalism led him to advocate a sentimentalism according to which ethical questions should be settled by instinct, as our conscious reasoning is too recently evolved and fallible to determine vitally important matters. But around 1902 he began to warm towards ethical theorising, as he developed a philosophical architectonic which placed ethics directly prior to logic, since ethics studies what is good in action, and logic studies what is good in thought, which is a species of action.
The core of pragmatism as Peirce originally conceived it was the Pragmatic Maxim, a rule for clarifying the meaning of hypotheses by tracing their practical consequences their implications for experience in specific situations. For Peirce and James, a key application of the Maxim was clarifying the concept of truth. This produced a distinctive epistemological outlook: a fallibilist, anti-Cartesian explication of the norms that govern inquiry. Within that broad outlook, though, early pragmatists split significantly over questions of realism broadly conceived essentially, whether pragmatism should conceive itself as a scientific philosophy holding monism about truth (following Peirce), or a more broad-based alethic pluralism (following James and Dewey). This dispute was poignantly emblematized in arguments between Peirce and James which led Peirce to rename his view pragmaticism, presenting this clarified viewpoint to the world as his new baby which was, he hoped, ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers (EP2: 355).
Steve Mah, BA Philosophy, Canada
There are passages that might seem to suggest i (e.g. 51e, 52a), but again, the obvious problem is that it seems inconsistent with his fundamental principle that one should never do wrong (49a)--at least on the assumption, which Socrates clearly accepts in the Apology, that the state is not infallible as regards judgments of right and wrong. Thus, a more charitable reading would interpret the passages about the moral authority of the state as referring implicitly to cases where the state does not require one to do anything unjust, but merely to endure something (or perhaps to do something that is not itself unjust, such as rendering some political service).
These pragmatists focused significantly on theorising inquiry, meaning and the nature of truth, although James put these themes to work exploring truth in religion. A second (still termed classical) generation turned pragmatist philosophy more explicitly towards politics, education and other dimensions of social improvement, under the immense influence of John Dewey (18591952) and his friend Jane Addams (18601935) who invented the profession of social work as an expression of pragmatist ideas (and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931). Also of considerable importance at this time was George Herbert Mead (18631931), who contributed significantly to the social sciences, developing pragmatist perspectives upon the relations between the self and the community (Mead 1934), whilst philosophy of race was germinated by pioneering African-American philosophers Du Bois (18681963) and Alain Locke (18851954), who also engaged in productive dialogue with one another. As the progressive Deweyan New Deal era passed away and the US moved into the Cold War, pragmatisms influence was challenged, as analytic philosophy blossomed and became the dominant methodological orientation in most Anglo-American philosophy departments. Transitional or third generation figures included C.
This might be taken to suggest that beliefs are made true by the fact that they enable us to make accurate predictions of the future run of experience, but other passages suggest that the goodness of belief can take other forms. James assures us that it can contribute to the truth of a theological proposition that it has a value for concrete life (1907: 40); and this can occur because the idea of God possesses a majesty which can yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds (1907:40). This suggests that a belief can be made true by the fact that holding it contributes to our happiness and fulfilment. After the introduction, the problem is stated in more depth and detail, with textual references. Notice the spare use of quotes. I quote only a few words here and there, where necessary to illustrate the points. This might be extended to a few sentences, if necessary, but beware of over-quoting and letting someone else's words do your work for you.
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And rather than pulling us into pedantic arguments about obscure philosophical points, Rob engaged us on our level. To talk free will, we looked at our own choices. To talk ethics, we looked at dilemmas we had faced ourselves. By the end of class, Id discovered that questions with no right answer can turn out to be the most interesting ones. This offers a distinctive method for becoming clear about the meaning of concepts and the hypotheses which contain them. We clarify a hypothesis by identifying the practical consequences we should expect if it is true. This raises some questions. First: what, exactly is the content of this maxim? What sort of thing does it recognize as a practical consequence? Second, what use does such a maxim have? Peirces first simple illustrative example urges that what we mean by calling something hard is that it will not be scratched by many other substances. In this way, then, I can use the concept hard in certain contexts when I am wondering what to do, and absent such contexts, the concept is empty. The principle has something of a verificationist character: our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects (EP1: 132).
(Apology, 29c-d) Again, this seems to contradict what he says in the Crito about the supreme moral authority of the state and its laws and orders. In the Crito, Socrates makes some surprisingly strong claims about the moral authority of the state, which might even seem to be inconsistent both with another fundamental claim he makes in the Crito and with certain claims he makes in the Apology. I shall argue that although these claims seem to be in some tension with each other, the crucial claims about the authority of the state in the Crito can plausibly be interpreted in such a way as to remove any real inconsistency with the other claims. Pragmatist epistemologies often explore how we can carry out inquiries in a self-controlled and fruitful way. (Where much analytic epistemology centres around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealised end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology centres around the concept of inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking and how we can improve it.
And, second, he concludes that the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure. Secondly, it might be objected that Socrates' view of the moral authority of the state is inconsistent both with what he did when ordered by the Thirty to capture Leon of Salamis for execution, and with what he says he'd do if ordered by the state to cease practicing philosophy (both from the Apology). When the Thirty ordered him to capture Leon, he refused, on the grounds that this would have been wrong (unjust and impious). (Apology, 32c-d) This seems to be a recognition that one is morally obligated or at least permitted to disobey the state when what it commands is wrong--even if one fails to persuade it of its wrongness. And similarly, Socrates makes clear that he would disobey the state and continue philosophizing if it were to order him to stop--again, on the grounds that it would be wrong for him to stop philosophizing (recall that he saw philosophy as his life's mission, given him by the god).
The rich understanding of experience and science offered by pragmatists may show us how to find an objective basis for the evaluation and criticism of institutions and practices. He is particularly struck by the suggestion that pragmatist epistemology, by emphasizing the communal character of inquiry and the need to take account of the experiences and contributions of other inquirers, provides a basis for a defence of democratic values (1993: 180202). This may be related to Rortys suggestion that pragmatists insist upon the priority of democracy over philosophy (Rorty 1991b). Pragmatisms key ideas originated in discussions at a so-called Metaphysical Club that met in Harvard around 1870. (For a popular history of this group, see Menand 1998. ) Peirce and James participated in these discussions along with some other philosophers, psychologists and philosophically inclined lawyers. Peirce then developed these ideas in publications from the 1870s, and they achieved prominence through a series of public lectures given by James in 1898. Both James and Peirce used pragmatism as the name of a method, principle, or maxim for clarifying concepts and hypotheses and for identifying empty disputes, though we shall see significant differences in how they understood it.
Peirce had some insightful things to say about pedagogy which anticipate todays inquiry-based learning and research-led teaching, but they are scattered across his writings (Strand 2005). The giant figure in philosophy of education is of course Dewey, who pioneered and established it as a separate sphere of study when he first assumed the chair in Philosophy at University of Chicago in 1894. Deweys career coincided with a period in which North Americas population was rapidly growing, industrializing and urbanizing, shifting education delivery out of the home into public institutions, and his ideas had enormous impact. Many of his suggestions derive from his vision of democracy as not merely a system of voting but the idea that every societal institution might be designed to foster maximum flourishing in every citizen. Viewed from this angle, traditional modes of schooling whereby teachers deliver an approved (often employer-sanctioned) set of facts for children to memorise count as despotic. Instead the emphasis should be on enabling children to grow from within, according to their present interests and capabilities, and become lifelong learners, although Dewey equally criticises certain romantic, child-centred educational theorists of his day for neglecting to direct or guide the childs interests in any particular direction (Hildebrand 2008: 127).
Thus, what at first appears to be a blatant contradiction among Socrates' various claims is fairly easily remedied if we interpret the relevant passages in the Crito as making the claim in ii rather than the claim in i above. This interpretation is supported not only by the fact that it helps to reconcile Socrates' seemingly contradictory claims, but also by the fact that Socrates' examples of obedience to the state over one's own objections all involve having to endure something, rather than having to do something. He speaks in Crito 51b, for example, of having to "endure in silence whatever it instructs you to endure, whether blows or bonds, and if it leads you into war to be wounded or killed, you must obey. " Though he does not explicitly formulate his claim as in ii above, his focus is clearly on the issue of having to endure something prescribed by the state, over one's own objections. Therefore, it is consistent with the text to interpret him as making only the claim in ii, which is fully compatible with his claim that one must never do wrong, and with his claim that under certain conditions one should refuse to do something the state orders (such as refusing to capture someone for an unjust execution, or refusing to cease carrying out your divine mission as long as you live).
However the use of the phrase practical consequences suggests that these are to be understood as having implications for what we will or should do. This is clear from Peirces later formulations, for example: Dr Florian Steinberger, Programme Director for the BA Philosophy programme, discusses a range of philosophical topics with experts in the field. Deweys account of experience, which is central to his entire philosophy, contributes an additional twist. Like Peirce, he thought that experience was full of inference, but he arguably took the notion further from the mere contents of individual consciousness than any previous pragmatist. For Dewey, experience is a process through which we transact with our surroundings and meet our needs. He wrote: It would be wrong to conclude that pragmatism was restricted to the United States or that the only important pragmatist thinkers were Peirce, James and Dewey.
Plato's Phaedrus - Sample philosophy analysis essay
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- Compare and contrast the behaviors in the scenario with the philosophical theories of ethical decision-making that are referenced in Unit II. Examples may include Utilitarianism or Deontology application.
This cycle of inquiry includes as stages: articulating the problem and questions which might need to be answered in its resolution, gathering data, suggesting hypotheses which might potentially resolve the problem, and testing or otherwise evaluating those hypotheses. Opening up the classroom to such live thinking generates unpredictability which can be challenging for the teacher to manage, but if the genuine indeterminacy of the problematic situation can be successfully navigated, the reward will be students who have learned not just how to know, but how to think. In that regard, Dewey claimed that his writings on education summed up his entire philosophical position (Hildebrand 2008: 124). For Dewey, all philosophy was philosophy of education. In recent decades, value theory has arguably been under-addressed by pragmatists, due to neopragmatisms strong focus on philosophy of language and metaphilosophy. A notable recent attempt to develop a pragmatist metaethics drawing on classical pragmatism is (Heney 2016), which forms part of the so-called New Pragmatism.
As is documented by Thayer, there were pragmatists in Oxford, in France and, especially, in Italy in the early years of the twentieth century (Thayer 1968, part III, Baldwin 2003: 889). Moreover we can mention several other important American pragmatists, for example Josiah Royce. Commonly thought to be an idealist opponent of James and a critic of pragmatism, Royce increasingly came to be influenced by Peirces work on signs and on the community of inquirers and was acknowledged as a fellow pragmatist by Peirce himself. C. I. Lewis, the teacher of Quine and of several generations of Harvard philosophers developed a philosophy that was a sort of pragmatist Kantianism. Murray Murphey has identified him as the last great pragmatist (Murphey 2005).
) So pragmatists often provide rich accounts of the capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and the rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirces classic early paper The Fixation of Belief. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with settled belief, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to ones favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institutions dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method). Notable recent reinterpretations and defenses of Peircean pragmatist epistemology include (Haack 1993 and Cooke 2007). (See also Skagestad 1981. ) A young man in jeans, Mr. Jonesbut you can call me Robwas far from the white-haired, buttoned-up old man I had half-expected.
He noted, though, that such a normative science should be understood to study what goodness is, not whether particular actions are good (by contrast to much normative ethics today) since, a science cannot have for its fundamental problem to distribute objects among categories of its own creation (CP ). Recently scholars have turned with renewed interest to developing Peirces ethics (e. g. Massecar 2016; Atkins 2016). This MSc in Organizational Psychology focuses on the social and psychological processes operating in organizations. The Pragmatic Maxim suggests that pragmatism is a form of empiricism (an idea recently explored further in Wilson 2016). Our ability to think about so-called external things, and steadily improve our understanding of them, rests upon our experience. Yet most pragmatists adopted accounts of experience and perception radically different from the views of modern empiricists from John Locke and David Hume to Rudolf Carnap, as well as the intuition posited by Kant. The established view interpreted experience as what is sometimes (following C.
Seven years earlier, in a review of a new edition of the writings of Berkeley, Peirce had described this way of thinking as the realist conception of reality (EP1:889), in contrast with a nominalist conception of reality which many early modern philosophers took for granted. Nominalists assume that the real can only be the antecedent cause of singular sensations which provide our evidence for beliefs about the external world. This naturally leads to a certain (age-old) solipsistic skepticism concerning whether a person can gain knowledge that transcends their own perceptions and epistemic perspective. Peirces pragmatist clarification of truth offers an alternative conceptualization of being constrained by reality, in terms of consequent convergence of opinion, through the process of inquiry, rather than as an antecedent cause of sensations. The experience has taught me to look at things a little more philosophicallyand not just because it was a philosophy class! I learned that if I let go of my preconceptions, I can actually get a lot out of subjects I was previously dismissive of. The class taught mein more ways than oneto look at things with an open mind.
This general idea has attracted a remarkably rich and at times contrary range of interpretations, including: that all philosophical concepts should be tested via scientific experimentation, that a claim is true if and only if it is useful (relatedly: if a philosophical theory does not contribute directly to social progress then it is not worth much), that experience consists in transacting with rather than representing nature, that articulate language rests on a deep bed of shared human practices that can never be fully made explicit. Pragmatism originated in the United States around 1870, and now presents a growing third alternative to both analytic and Continental philosophical traditions worldwide. Its first generation was initiated by the so-called classical pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce (18391914), who first defined and defended the view, and his close friend and colleague William James (18421910), who further developed and ably popularized it. James Harvard colleague Josiah Royce (18551916), although officially allied with absolute idealism, proved a valuable interlocutor for many of these ideas. A significant influence in those early years was the scientific revolution then taking place around evolutionary theory, of which first generation pragmatists were keen observers and sometime participants (Pearce 2020).
Unlike Saussure, Peirce insisted that the sign-relation was essentially triadic in structure, comprising a representation, an object and an interpretation. In other words: a sign is about some object because it is understood, in subsequent thought, as a sign of that object. This subsequent thought Peirce calls the signs interpretant. In understanding or interpreting a sign, we may feel things about it (which at times Peirce called the emotional interpretant), undertake actions that are rational in the light of the sign and the other information we possess (the dynamic interpretant), or an indefinite number of inferences may be drawn from it (the logical interpretant) (Jappy 2016). Interpretation is generally a goal-directed activity and, once again, the content of a sign is determined by the ways in which we use it (or might do so). Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that very broadly understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it.
I believe, however, that it is possible to read the crucial passages about the authority of the state in the Crito in such a way as to render them consistent with Socrates' exhortation never to do wrong, and with his remarks about disobedience in the Apology. To see this, it is necessary to distinguish first of all between two issues: (a) what the law might require you to do, and (b) what the law might require you to endure. With this distinction in mind, consider the following possible interpretations of Socrates' claim about the moral authority of the state in the Crito: The result is a problem-centred pedagogy which looks to pragmatist epistemology understood as the theory of inquiry for its structure. The teacher begins by facilitating contact with some phenomenon which proves genuinely puzzling to the students, then guides them through a cycle of inquiry which (if all goes well) resolves the problematic situation to the satisfaction of all present.
Its also worth noting that Dewey sees education as primarily a social not an individual process since, as noted above, he views human identity formation as irremediably social. The final section of How to Make our Ideas Clear promises to consider a fundamental logical conception, reality. This concept seems clear: every child uses it with perfect confidence, never dreaming that he does not understand it. Thus it reaches Peirces first level of meaning-clarity. A (second-level) verbal definition of the concept is also readily forthcoming: we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be. But, Peirce announces, we shall need to apply the Pragmatic Maxim if our idea of reality is to be perfectly clear. At this stage the concept of truth enters the discussion: Peirce claims that the object represented in a true proposition is our best understanding of the real. So we have to turn to his remarks about truth to see how the mind-independence alleged in the abstract definition of reality is to be operationalized and thus properly understood from a pragmatist perspective.
I. Lewis and Wilfrid Sellars) called the given: we are passive recipients of determinate and singular sense-data. Experience provides raw material for knowledge, but does not itself have content informed by concepts, practical needs, or anything else non-sensory. Our only contact with the external world is through receiving such experiences. So this way of thinking about experience can easily lead to skepticism about the so-called external world. In different ways, Peirce, James, and Dewey all argued that experience is far richer than this, and that earlier philosophers were mistaken to claim that we could identify experiences or sense-data as antecedents to, or separable constituents of, cognition. We can begin with James radical empiricism, of which he said that the establishment of the pragmatist theory of truth [was] a step of first-rate importance in making [it] prevail (1909: 6f). The connection with pragmatism is evident from the fundamental postulate of radical empiricism: the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience. But this requires that experience be newly understood. First, he announced that the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more so nor less so, than the things themselves.
I. Lewis (18831964) and . Quine (19082000); although these philosophers developed a number of pragmatist themes, their analytic allegiance may be seen in their significant focus on theory of knowledge as first philosophy (which Dewey deprecated as the epistemological industry). As for the plausibility of Socrates' view, I believe that it is still overly demanding, even when qualified as in ii above. It's unclear why any of the factors Socrates mentioned should give the state such overriding moral authority that one should be morally obliged to endure execution without resistance even in cases where the state is genuinely in the wrong. It seems more plausible to hold that if one stands to be unjustly executed, one can rightly resist this punishment (even if it would equally be permissible not to resist). One could do this, I think, without showing any contempt for the laws, or challenging their authority, since one still grants the state's authority to do its best to carry out the punishment, and simply asserts a moral right to do one's best in turn to avoid such wrongful punishment. But that's a topic for another paper.
Having discussed pragmatists emphases upon the activity of inquiry and the thickness of experience, we turn to their views about the nature of thought. It has been common for philosophers to assume that the content of a thought, judgment or proposition is a kind of intrinsic property that it possesses. Perhaps it offers a picture or idea of some state of affairs, and we can identify this content simply by reflecting upon the item itself, and its structural properties. All pragmatists have rejected this idea as a key driver of an antinaturalistic Cartesian dualism. Instead, they have held that the content of a thought, judgment or proposition is a matter of the role it fills in our activities of inquiry, and is to be explained by reference to how we interpret it or what we do with it. This shall be illustrated by considering three particular pragmatist views. For both Peirce and Dewey, references are given to collections of their writings. This is because Peirces philosophical writings consist of a great number of papers and manuscripts and because Dewey wrote so many books that it would be impossible to list all of them.
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