Collected Papers: Volume 2 Studies in Pragmatism 9783110326284, 9783110325355

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Nicholas Rescher Studies in Pragmatism

NICHOLAS RESCHER COLLECTED PAPERS

Volume II

Nicholas Rescher

Studies in Pragmatism

ontos verlag Frankfurt I Paris I Ebikon I Lancaster I New Brunswick

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2005 ontos verlag P.O. Box 15 41, D-63133 Heusenstamm www.ontosverlag.com ISBN 3-937202-79-X

2005 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use of the purchaser of the work

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Contents Preface Chapter 1: PRAGMATISM AND PRACTICAL RATIONALITY 1. Functionalist Pragmatism 2. The Ramification of Purpose 3. Evaluative Rationality and Appropriate Ends: Against the Humean Conception of Reason 4. The Crucial Role of Interests and Nedds: Wants and Preferences are not Enough 5 Practical Rationality Encompasses Theoretical Rationality 6. The Pragmatic Aspect of Inquiry 7. The Primacy of Practice

1 2 6 11 17 18 20

Chapter 2: KNOWLEDGE OF THE TRUTH IN PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Internal Realism and Truth as (Available) Warrant Interdependency Problems A Different Approach: Methodological Pragmatism Validation Issues Being "Realistic" (in Both Senses)

23 26 31 33 34

Chapter 3: PRAGMATISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 1. Introduction 2. Brief Historical Overview 3. The Writers Present Position

41 44 58

Chapter 4: PRAGMATISM AT THE CROSSROADS 1. 2. 3. 4.

The Guiding Idea of the Pragmatic Program The Jamesean Transformation and its Aftermath Postmodern Pragmatism and its Contrary A Return to the Peircean Roots

63 65 68 73

5. Summation 6. The Turn to Methodological Pragmatism

75 78

Chapter 5: IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE AND ONTOLOGY: A FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON PHILOSOPHICAL REALISM 1. Experience is Always Someone’s Personal Experience 2. There is no Logically Compelling Transit From Personal Experience to Objective Fact 3. Interpersonal Discourse Demends Objectivity 4. Objectivity and Postulation 5. The Functionalistic Rationale of Realism 6. Experience and the Rationale of Realism 7. Truth, Systematization, and Difficulties with Inference to the Best Explanation

83 84 85 86 87 90 98

Chapter 6: PRAGMATIC REALISM: A PRACTICALISTIC PERSPECTIVE ON PHILOSOPHICAL REALISM 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Realism in its Regulatice/Pragmatic Aspect Realism as a Requisite of Communication and Inquiry The Utilitarian Imperative Retrojustification: The Wisdom of Hindsight More on Retrojustification: The Closing of the Cycles

111 117 122 124 128

Chapter 7: PRAGMATIC IDEALISM AND METAPHYSICAL REALISM 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The Existential Component of Realism Realism in its Regulative/Pragmatic Aspect The Role of Presumption The Role of Retrovalidation Retrospect

135 138 145 147 148

Chapter 8: COUNTERFACTUALS IN PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE 1. Historical Stagesetting 2. Belief-Contravening Supposition:

151

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

How Apories Arise in Hypothetical Contexts The Centrality of Precedence (Right of Way) Logic as Such does not Resolve Matters Reductio ad Absurdum Argumentation Evidential Contexts The Situation in Philosophy Broader Implications Making Sense of Counterfactuals

Name Index

155 161 164 165 166 167 171 174 179

Preface

P

ragmatism has been at the forefront of my thinking since and indeed before I wrote The Primacy of Practical Reason over thirty years ago.1 The eight essays collected together here are thus only the latest fruits of my deliberations regarding this important approach to philosophical issues. In general, these essays are re-printings (sometimes slightly revised) of papers published in the professional literature during the past three years or so. (Detailed acknowledgements are given in the relevant footnotes.) I am indebted to Estelle Burris for her efficient help in preparing this material for publication. And I am grateful to Rafael Hüntelmann for his collegial interest in the publication of my work. Nicholas Rescher Pittsburgh PA April 2005

1

Oxford: Blackwell, 1973.

Chapter One PRAGMATISM AND PRACTICAL RATIONALITY 1. FUNCTIONALISTIC PRAGMATISM

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ragmatism is an approach to philosophy that puts practice at center stage and sees efficacy in practical activities as a prime goal of human endeavor. But there are two markedly different ways of working out this sort of program. One way of implementing the idea of pragmatism is to see theory and theorizing as being incidental and secondary in importancea “merely intellectual” concern that has a less significant role in human affairs than do matters of action and praxis. This version of the position might be characterized as practicalism. However, a quite different version of pragmatism sees theory as subordinate to praxis not in importance but rather in fundamentality. This approach does not relegate theory to a secondary status in point of interest or importance. On the contrary, it regards theory as something crucial and critically important, but then takes success in matters of practical implementation as the adequacy criterion of successful theorizing. This criteriological version of the theory might be designated as functionalism. Such a functionalistic version of pragmatism regards effective praxis as the arbiter of appropriate theorizing. It takes considerations of purposive effectiveness to provide the test-standard for the adequacy of the operative principles of human endeavoralike in theoretical and in practical matters. Effective implementation is its pervasive standard of adequacy. After all, pragmatism’s historic concern has always been not with the descriptive characteristics of things but with their normative appropriateness. And here its logical starting point is the uncontroversial idea that the natural and sensible standard of approval for something that is in any proceduralanything that has an aspect that is methodological, procedural, instrumentallies in the question of its successful application. Anything that has a teleologythat is an instrumentality for the realization

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of certain purposeswill automatically stand subject to an evaluation standard that looks to its efficacy. For whenever something is in any way purposively oriented to the realization of certain ends, the natural question for its evaluation in this regard is that of its serviceability in endrealization. The close connection between functional efficacy and rationality must be stressed in this context. In any context where the meeting of needs and/or the realization of goals is at issue, a rational creature will prefer whatever method process or procedure willother things equalfacilitate goal realization in the most effective, efficient, and economical way. In this way economic rationality is a definitive dimension of rationality-ingeneral and thereby endows functional efficacy with a normative aspect. 2. THE RAMIFICATION OF PURPOSE Man is a purposive animal. Virtually everything that we do has a purpose to it. Even play, idleness, and tomfoolery has a purposeto divert, to provide rest and recreation to kill time. And certainly our larger projects in the realm of human endeavor are purposive: inquiryto resolve doubt and to guide action. ethicsto encourage modes of conduct in human interactions that canalize these into a generally satisfactory and beneficial form. lawto establish and enforce rules of conduct. educationto acculturate the younger generation so as to enhance the prospect that young people will find their way to personally satisfying and communally beneficial lifestyles. artto create objects or object types exposure to which engenders personally rewarding and enlightening experiences. On this basis a functionalistic pragmatism can encompass the entire range of human concern. It is not (and should not be) a mainly materialistic doctrine concerned only for crass payoffs. It is a multi-purpose resource. The fact of it is that pragmatism is a 2

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multi-purposive resource because a pragmatic approach to validity can be implemented in any purposive setting. Given any aim or objective whatever, we can always provide a correlative validation in terms of effectiveness and efficiency its realization. But a really thorough pragmatism must dig more deeply. It cannot simply take purposes as given—as gift horses into whose mouths we must not look. For purposeadoption too has to be viewed in a pragmatic perspective as an act or activity of sorts that itself stand in need of legitimation. Accordingly, a sensible pragmatism also requires an axiology of purposes, a normative methodology for assessing the legitimacy and appropriateness of the purposes we espouse. We humans live subject to a manifold of processes: physical, chemical, biological, social, economic, and so on. Each such processual realm imposes various purposes upon us, subjecting us to needs, requirements, and desiderata of various sorts. The meeting of these purposes involves us in a wide variety of projects each with its own manifold of purposeaccommodating processes. We are thus committed to such projects as the pursuit of nourishment, or physical security, of comfort, of education, of sociability, of rest and recreation, etc., designed to meet our requirements for food, shelter, clothing, knowledge, companionship, realization etc., and equipment with its own complex of needs and desiderata. And throughout this manifold we encounter the same rationale of end-realization with its inherent involvement with issues of effectiveness and efficiency. Pragmatism’s concern for function efficiency, for success in the realization of ends and purposes, is an inescapable formative factor in an intelligent being’s to make its way in the world by means of the instrumentality of rational agency. In such a purposive setting the pragmatic approach with its concern for functional efficacy is a critical aspect of rationality itself. To be sure, functionalistic pragmatism does not itself tell us what human purposes are mandated by the situation of homo sapiens in the world’s scheme of things. That has to come from other sorts of investigationsinquiries that are effectively factual. But what it does do on this basis is to deploy a standard of normative adequacy via the customary demands of practical rationality: effectiveness and efficiency in the realization of appropriate goals. The justifactory impetus of functionalistic pragmatism accordingly bear directly and immediately upon anything that is of an instrumental nature. On this basis, it applies:

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not directly to truths as such but to processes of truth validation. not directly to acts but to act-recommending norms. not directly to question-resolving answers but to processes to answerdetermination. not directly to scientific hypotheses but to the methods and procedures by which the endorsement of such hypotheses is validated. The deliberations of functionalistic pragmatism accordingly have a methodological bearingone that makes its impact upon methods rather than results, upon process rather than product. But, of course, since the processes at issue are product-productive processes, these deliberations will have an important indirect bearing on issues of product as well. The rational validation of functionalistic pragmatism is accordingly something that is comparatively simple and straightforward. For the approach at issue is validated through the consideration that its modus operandi based on the principle “In all matters of purposive actionselect that among alternative processes and procedures which, as best as you can tell, will enable you to reach the objective in the “most effective and efficient way.” To be sure, such a position will meet with the objection: “surely efficacy in goal-attainment cannot count for all that much. Surely we have to worry about the rationality of ends as well as the rationality of means! Surely there is no sense in pursuinghowever effectivelyan end that is absurd, counter-productive, harmful.” Quite right! There is good common senseand indeed even sound rationalityto such a view of the matter. But, of course, the fact of it is that when we are concerned with the human situation it is far from being the case that all ends are created equalthat giving people needless pain, say, is every bit as appropriate as helping them avoid injury. However, this is an issue that a thoroughgoing pragmatism, one which is altogether true to itself, needs to and can address in pragmatic terms. And the terms of reference at issue here will in the natural course of things have to be those of philosophical anthropology. We are humans, members of Homo sapiens—that is an inescapable given for us. And given along with it are the conditions needed by us humans to lead not just survivable lives (requiring air, food, and shelter) but also those conditions needed by 4

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us to live satisfying lives (requiring self-respect, companionship and a feeling of belonging, and a sense of control over major elements of our life, and the like). And the pragmatic validation of aims and purposes can be established pragmatically in point of their efficiency and effectiveness in the realization of such life-maintaining and life-enhancing requirements that are mandated to us by our position in the world’s scheme of things. The fact of it is that human beings not only have wants wishes and desires. They have needs as well. Individually we need nourishment, physical security and congenial interaction if our physical and psychological well-being it to be achieved and maintained. Collectively we require social arrangements that maximize the opportunities for mutual aid and minimize those for mutual harm. This aspect of the practical scheme of things is built into our very condition as the sort of creatures we are. Some aims and purposes are optionalwe choose them freely. But others are mandatorybuilt into the very fabric of our existence within the nature as members of homo sapiens. These non-optional goals and purposes will obviously have to play a pivotal role in a functionalistic pragmatism built on that paramount demand of reason: efficacy in goal attainment. And this endows functionalistic pragmatism with a second dimension of objectivity. On the one hand it is perfectly objective and nowise a matter of preference what sorts of means are effective in the realization of specified objectives. And on the other hand it is analogously perfectly objective and nowise a matter of preference that humans have certain needscertain requirements that must be satisfied if they are to exist, perdure, and function effectively as the sort of creatures they have evolved as being on the world’s stage. By virtue of their very nature as purposive instrumentalities, value claims can and generally do fall within the domain of reason. For values are functional objects that have a natural teleology themselves, namely that of helping us to lead lives that are personally satisfying (meet our individual needs) and communally productive (facilitate the realizations of constructive goals to the community at large). This state of things has farreaching implications because it indicates that our assessment of values themselves can and should be ultimately pragmatic. Our evaluations are appropriate only insofar as their adoption and cultivation are efficiently and effectively conducive to the realization of human interests—the rationally appropriate endspersonal and communalthat root in our 5

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place in the scheme of things. Accordingly, a pragmatism that is consistent, coherent, and selfsustaining will not just proceed pragmatically with respect to achieving unevaluated ends and purposes but must also apply its pragmatic perspective to the issue of validating ends and purposes themselves in terms of their capacity to facilitate the realization of those considerations which, for us humans, are simply “facts of life.” 3. EVALUATIVE RATIONALITY AND APPROPRIATE ENDS: AGAINST THE HUMEAN CONCEPTION OF REASON But how far can this line of thought carry us? Pragmatism’s standard of adequacy pivots on procedural efficacy. But can this seemingly crass prioritization of utility possibly provide grounds for even acknowledging the significance in human affairs of higher, less crassly utilitarian sorts of values? Can it ever reach beyond the sphere of the bare basic necessities of life? To resolve this question we must go back to basics. Pragmatism pivots the validation of our instrumentalities of thought and action on their effectiveness in goal realization. But goals are certainly not created equal; they clearly have different degrees of merit. There are impersonally valid modes of evaluation by which goals themselves can be assessed, so that the rational evaluation that pragmatism envisions can be implemented in an objectively cogent way. The capacity for intelligent choice turn us humans into rational agents, but it is only through our having appropriate values that the prospect of intelligent choice becomes open for us. The human situation being what it is, existential circumstances spread a vast range of possibilities out before us. At many junctures, life confronts us with alternative directions in which to proceed. And only through the evaluation of such alternatives can we effect a sensible (rationally appropriate and acceptable) choice among them. On this basis, values are instrumentalities that serve to make the satisfactory conduct of life possible. And a commitment to values not only aids in making our lives as intelligent agents possible, they also make it meaningful. For the life of the human individual is brief: here today, gone tomorrow. It is through our commitment to values that we can reach out beyond the restrictive limits of the space and time available to us as individuals in this world, moving towards the realization of something larger and more significant. To be sure, it is often said that values are just matters of taste—of mere 6

PRAGMATISM AND PRACTICAL RATIONALITY

personal predilection. If this were indeed the case, then any and all claims to value objectivity would at once become untenable. But is it so? Evaluation certainly is not—and should not be—a matter of taste. People who are not prepared to back an option of X over Y by cogent reasons of some sort are merely evincing a preference and not actually making any sort of meaningful evaluation at all. Tastes, as usually understood, represent unreasoned preferences and purely subjective predilections. There is consequently no disputing about them: de gustibus non disputandum est. If I prefer X to Y, then that’s that. But values are something quite different. They are by nature functional instrumentalities since their mission is to canalize our action via our rational choices. They have objective impact, relating not to what we do prefer but to what we can and should appropriately deem preferable—that is, worthy of preference. And preference worthiness is something that is always discussible, something that needs to be reasoned about. To be in a position to maintain—in a manner that is sensible and reasonable—that X is preferable to Y, one must be in a position to back one’s claim up with some sort of rationale. And this reason-boundedness of sensible evaluations carries them outside the range of mere matters of taste. Moreover, our values themselves are not—and should not be—arbitrary and haphazard. For in the final analysis, they pivot not on mere wants and the vagaries of arbitrary choice in fortuitous preference, but on our best interests and real needs—on what is necessary to or advantageous for a person’s well being. We humans, being the sort of creatures we are, have need-based interests which as such should (insofar as we are rational) control the validation of our wants and preferences. Validating an evaluation thus is not and cannot be a matter of mere subjectivity. The projects into which our nature impels us—the medical project, say, or the alimentary, or the cognitive—obviously carry a whole host of value commitments in their wake. Just here is where the pragmatic impetus comes into play. For once a goal is given, other connected goals can come to be validated with reference to it. It is thus a grave mistake to think that one cannot reason about values on the supposed ground that values are simply a matter of taste and thus beyond the reach of reason because “there’s no reasoning about tastes.” Such a position founders on the distinction between mere wants and real needs. For the fact is that values are valid just exactly to the extent they serve to implement and satisfy our needs and our correlatively appropriate interests. (The seeming harshness of this view is mitigated by the circumstance that for us humans the 7

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satisfaction of some of our mere wants—seen not in specific but in statistical generality—is itself a need.) A good way to exhibit the inappropriateness of the view that where values begin reason is at an end is thus through a pragmatic appraisal that regards values as practical instrumentalities, tools that aid us in the best approach to understanding what valuation is is to proceed by examinating what valuation does. This purposive aspect of evaluation renders it part and parcel of the pragmatic enterprise, thereby making room for value deliberation within the sphere of practical rationality. And this means that a rational critique of values is not only possible but necessary. In particular, values that impede the realization of a person’s best interests are clearly inappropriate. A priority scheme that sets mere wants above real needs or sets important objectives aside to avert trivial inconveniences is thereby deeply flawed from the rational point of view.1 And even as with needs and interests in general, so even great values may well have to yield to the yet greater. (Some things are rightly dearer to sensible people than life itself.) David Hume drew a sharp contrast between “reason,” which he construed narrowly as concerned solely with means and wholly indifferent to ends, and a very different, entirely reason-detached faculty of motivation that concerns itself with ends—namely the passions. As Hume saw it, the exposition of formal relationships in logic and mathematics apart, reason merely deals with experiential information about the world’s states of affairs and the associative relationships that lie at the root of cause and effect. Accordingly, reason is strictly instrumental: it can inform me about what I must do if I wish to arrive at a certain destination, but only “passion”—desire or aversion—can make something into a destination for me. Hume thus regarded an impetus toward or away from some object— any sort of pro- or con-reaction—as simply the wrong sort of thing to be rational or sensible, an autonomous force operating entirely outside the realm of reason. And he accordingly considered those directive passions as entirely arational. Rationality is totally disconnected from matters of evaluation. When one asks what is to be done, reason as such has no instructions—in its exclusive concern for rationally arbitrary ends, it is wholly a matter of what one happens to want. As Hume thus saw it, reason is a “slave of the passions” where evaluation is concerned. Its modus operandi is strictly conditional: it 1

8

And what other view point would it possibly make sense for us to adopt here?

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dictates hypothetically that if you accept this, then you cannot (in all consistency) fail to accept that. But, all this is a matter of the hypothetical if-then. The categorical “accept this!” is never a mandate of reason, but of those extra-rational passions. Reason herself initiates no commitments; it is inherently conditionalized, never saying what one should (or should not) opt for, but only what one is consequentially committed to if one already stands committed to something else. The assessment of fundamentals, be they cognitive or evaluative, lies beyond the reach of reason. On this basis, Hume insisted: It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. It is not contrary to reason for me to choose my total ruin... It is as little contrary to reason to refer even my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater, and to have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter.2

But all this is obviously very strange stuff. Any conception of reason that has these consequences is deeply problematic. For a “rationality” that excludes the critique of harmful affections and desires is no rationality at all. On any plausible view of the matter, reason cannot simply beg off from considering the validity of ends. Our motivating “passions” can surely themselves be rational or otherwise: those that impel us towards things that are bad for us or away from things that are good for us go against reason, those that impel us away from things that are bad for us and towards things that are good for us are altogether rational. There is certainly such a thing as evaluative, appraisal-oriented reasoning. Meeting people’s needs is (by hypothesis) an imperative necessity. And even meeting their mere desires is a rationally warranted desideratum as long as no larger obstacle stands in the way (their very real vicarious interests in the interests those of others, for example). But some such sort of qualification is always necessary in adjudging the role of preferences. As this perspective indicates, rationality involves two sorts of issue— means and ends. The rationality of means is a matter of factual information alone—of what sorts of moves and measures lead efficiently to objectives. But the rationality of ends is a matter not of information but of legitimation. It is not settled just by factual inquiry, but involves appraisal and evaluative judgment. And in the larger scheme of things both aspects 2

David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, bk. II. pt. iii. sect. 3. For Hume, the only inappropriate desires are those that depend on logically irrational beliefs.

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are needed: ends without requisite means are frustrating, means without suitable ends are pointless. Accordingly, rationality has two sides: an axiological (evaluative) concern for the appropriateness of ends and an instrumental (cognitive) concern for effectiveness and efficiency in their cultivation. The conception of rationality fuses these two elements into one integral and unified whole, seeing that the inherent purposiveness of values makes them part of the rational enterprise. Evaluation is not at odds with reason but is a crucial component of its work. People’s ends and purposes are certainly not automatically valid: they can be self-destructive, self-defeating impediments to the realization of their true needs and best interests. For ends do not lie outside the domain of value but rather serve to define it. And, to reemphasize, the rationality of ends inheres in the simple fact that we humans have various valid needs—that we require not only nourishment and protection against the elements for the maintenance of health, but also information (“cognitive orientation”), affection, freedom of action, and much else besides. Without such varied goods we cannot thrive as fulfilled human beings. The person who does not give these manifold desiderata their due—who may even set out to frustrate their realization—is clearly not being rational. Evaluation thus lies at the very heart and core of rationality. For, rationality is a matter of best serving our overall interests. The person who expends more effort in the pursuit of ends than they are worth is not just being wasteful but foolish, which is to say irrational. The rationality of our actions hinges critically both on the appropriateness of our ends and on the suitability of the means by which we pursue their cultivation. Both of these components—the cogently cognitive (“intelligent pursuit”) and the normatively purposive (“appropriate ends”)—are alike essential to fullfledged rationality. To be sure, the springs of human agency are diverse. We frequently act not for reasons alone, but from “mere motives”—out of anxiety, cupidity, habit, impulse. In such cases we also have ends and purposes in view—but generally not appropriate ones. If rationality were merely a matter of unevaluated goals and purposes as such—if it were to consist simply in the “technical rationality” of goal-efficient action—then the established line between the rational and the irrational would have to be redrawn in a very different place, and its linkage with what is intelligent and well advised would be severed. But where there is no appropriate and thus no meaningful end, rational agency ceases. (There may, of course, still be 10

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room for goal-directed action, but without goals it is bound to be problematic from the rational point of view.) And of course while all people are (hopefully) capable of reason, no well-informed person thinks they invariablyor even generallyexercise this capacity. But the fact remains that the rationality of ends is an indispensable component of rationality at large for two principal reasons. Rationally valued ends must be evaluatively appropriate ones: if we adopt inappropriate ends we are not being rational, no matter how efficiently and effectively we pursue them. The sensible attunement of means to ends that is characteristic of rationality calls for an appropriate balancing of costs and benefits in our choice among alternative ways of resolving our cognitive, practical, and evaluative problems. Reason accordingly demands determination of the true value of things. Even as cognitive reason requires that in determining what we are to accept we should assess the evidential grounds for theses at their true worth, so evaluative reason requires us to appraise the values of our practical options at their true worth in determining what we are to choose or prefer. And this calls for an appropriate cost-benefit analysis. Values must be managed as an overall “economy” in a rational way to achieve overall harmonization and optimization. Economic rationality is not the only sort of rationality there is, but it is an important aspect of overall rationality. Someone who rejects such economic considerations—who, in the absence of any envisioned compensating advantages, deliberately purchases for millions benefits he recognizes as being worth only a few pennies—is simply not rational. It is just as irrational to let one’s efforts in the pursuit of chosen objectives incur costs that outrun their true worth as it is to let one’s beliefs run afoul of the evidence. And the evaluative rationality at issue here is the pragmatic one of the efficient pursuit of appropriate ends.3 4. THE CRUCIAL ROLE OF INTERESTS AND NEEDS: WANTS AND PREFERENCES ARE NOT ENOUGH Functionalistic pragmatism’s concern for success and effectiveness in matters of goal attainment is accordingly something very different from mere preference utilitarianism. Economists, decision theorists, and utilitarian philosophers often maintain that rationality turns on the 3

Other aspects of the presently deliberated issues are treated in the author’s Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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intelligent cultivation of one’s preferences. But this is problematic in the extreme. We cannot extract judgmental rationality from preferences because mere preferences as such are unevaluated wants, and there is no such rationality without evaluation. After all, what I want or merely think to be good for me is one thing; what I need and what actually is good for me is another. To move from preferences and perceived interests to genuine benefits and real interests I must engage in a rational critique of ends—to examine in the light of objective standards whether what I desire is desirable, whether my actual ends are rational ends, whether my putative interests are real interests. The genuinely rational person is the one who proceeds in situations of choice by asking not the introspective question “What do I prefer?” but the objective question: “What is to be deemed preferable? What ought I to prefer on the basis of my best interests?” Rational comportment does not just call for desire satisfaction, it demands desire management as well. The question of appropriateness becomes crucial here. And this is an issue about which people can be—and often are—irrational; not just careless but even perverse, self-destructive, and crazy. We pursue mere will-o’-the-wisps when we impute to our ends a weight and value they do not in fact have. An objectivistic pragmatism will—if at all reasonable—certainly not deny the personalistic element of subjectively originating tastes, desires, inclinations, and personal involvements. But it insists that they must ultimately have a footing in our genuine needs. Wants and preferences as such are not enough; legitimate values must have a rationale. Consider the contrast between: • professed wants: what I say or declare that I want or prefer; • felt wants: what I (actually) do want or prefer; • real (or appropriate) wants and actual needs: what the reasonable (impartial, well-informed, well-intentioned, understanding) bystander would maintain that I ought to want on the basis of what is “in my best interests.” It is this last item—namely what is in my “real” or “best” interests—that is decisive for rationality. Rationality, then, is not just a matter of doing what we want (if this were so, it would be far simpler to attain!), but a matter of doing what we (rationally) ought, given the situation in which we find 12

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ourselves. The rationality of ends is essential to rationality as such; there is no point in running—however swiftly—to a destination whose attainment conveys no benefit. It is useless to maintain “rational consonance” with what we believe or do or value if those items with respect to which we relativize are not themselves rational in the first place. The issue of the rationality of ends is pivotal. Wants per se (wants unexamined and unevaluated) may well provide impelling motives for action, but will not thereby constitute good reasons for action. To be sure, it is among our needs to have some of our wants satisfied. But, it is needs that are determinative for interests, and not wants as such. A person’s true interests are not those he does have but those he would have if he conducted his life’s affairs properly (sensibly, appropriately). A person’s welfare is often ill served by his wishes—which may be altogether irrational, perverse, or pathological.4 This distinction of appropriateness of real, as opposed to merely seeming, wants and interests—is crucial for rationality. The latter turns on what we merely happen to want at the time, the former on what we should want, and thus on “what we would want if”—if we were all those things that “being intelligent” about the conduct of one’s life requires: prudent, sensible, conscientious, well-considered, and the like.5 Clearly, there is nothing automatically appropriate—let alone sacred— about our own ends, objectives, and preferences as such. We can be every bit as irrational and stupid with the adoption of ends as with any other choice. Apparent interests are not automatically real, getting what one wants is not necessarily to one’s benefit, goals are not rendered valid by their mere adoption. People’s ends can be self-destructive, self-defeating impediments to the realization of their true needs. For rationality, the crucial question is that of the true value of the item at issue. What counts for rational validity is not preference but preferability—not what people do want, but what they ought to want; not what people actually want, but what sensible or right-thinking people would want under the circumstances. The 4

See the author’s Welfare (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972). Cf. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 421. Rawls traces this line of thought back to Henry Sidgwick.

5

The contrast goes back to Aristotle’s distinction between desire as such and rational preference. Many aspects of Aristotle’s ethical theory bear usefully on the present discussion.

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normative aspect is ineliminable here. Rationality calls for objective judgment—for an assessment of preferability, rather than for a mere expression of preference, no questions asked. The rationality of ends, their rational appropriateness and legitimacy, is accordingly a crucial aspect of rationality. More is at issue with rationality than a matter of strict instrumentality—mere effectiveness in the pursuit of ends no matter how inappropriate they may be. When we impute to our ends a weight and value they do not in fact have, we pursue mere will-o’-the-wisps. There is an indissoluble connection between the true value of something (its being good or right or useful) and its being rational to choose or prefer this thing. Being desired does not automatically make something desirable, nor being valued valuable. The pivot is how matters ought to be—a region where needs come to dominate over wants. And so, the crucial question for evaluative rationality is not that of what we prefer, but that of what is in our best interests—not simply what we may happen to desire, but what is good for us in the sense of fostering the realization of our needs. The pursuit of what we want is rational only in so far as we have sound reasons for deeming this to be want-deserving. The question whether what we prefer is preferable, in the sense of deserving this preference, is always relevant. For it is not just beliefs that can be stupid, ill-advised, and inappropriate—that is to say, irrational—but ends as well. Valuation can be sensible or perverse, well-oriented or ill-advised, interest-enhancing or interest-retarding in sum, rational or irrational. The fact is that we can be every bit as irrational in the adoption of ends as in any other choice. Apparent interests are not automatically real, getting what one wants is not necessarily to one’s benefit, goals are not rendered valid by their mere adoption. Rationality accordingly calls for critical judgment—for an assessment of preferability, rather than for a mere expression of preference. More is at issue with rationality than a matter of strict instrumentality—mere effectiveness in the pursuit of arbitrarily selected ends, no matter how inappropriate they may be. When we impute to our ends a weight and value they do not in fact have, we pursue mere will-o’-the-wisps. The rational appropriateness and legitimacy of ends is thus an indispensable aspect of rationality at large. Contentions like “Smith is selfish, inconsiderate, and boorish” accordingly do not lie outside the sphere of rational inquiry—nor for that matter do contentions like “Behavior that is selfish/inconsiderate/boorish is against the best interest of people.” The issue of appropriate action in the 14

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circumstances in which we find ourselves is pivotal for rationality. Be it in matters of belief, action, or evaluation, we want—that is to say, often do and always should want—to do the best we can. One cannot be rational without due care for the desirability of what one desires—the issue of its alignment with our real, as distinguished from our putative, or merely seeming interests. But just what is it that is in a person’s real or best interests? Partly, this is indeed a matter of meeting the needs that people universally have in common—health, satisfactory functioning of body and mind, adequate resources, human companionship and affection, and so on.6 Partly, it is a matter of the particular role one plays: co-operative children are in the interests of a parent, customer loyalty in those of a shopkeeper. Partly, it is a matter of what one simply happens to want. (If John loves Mary, then engaging Mary’s attention and affections are in John’s interests—some sorts of things are in a person’s interests simply because he takes an interest in them.) But these want-related interests are valid only by virtue of their relation to universal interests. Mary’s approbation is in John’s interest only because “having the approbation of someone we love” is always in anyone’s interest. Any valid specific interest must fall within the validating scope of an appropriate universal covering principle of interest legitimation. (The development of my stamp collection is in my interest only because it is part of a hobby that constitutes an avocation for me and “securing adequate relaxation and diversion from the stress of one’s daily cares” is something that is in anyone’s interests.) But what of those “mere whims and fancies?” If I have a yen for eating crabgrass then is my doing so not a perfectly appropriate “interest” of mine? Yes it is. But only because it is covered by perfectly cogent universal interest, namely that of “Doing what I feel like doing in circumstances where neither injury to me nor harm to others is involved.” A specific (concrete, particular) interest of a person is valid as such only if it can be subordinated to a universal interest by way of having a basis in people’s legitimate needs. It is these higher-level principles that are the controlling factors from the standpoint of reason. Only through coming under the aegis of those larger universal needs can our idiosyncratic want 6

The issue goes back to the specification of the “basics” (principiae) of the human good in the Middle Academy (Carneades)—things like the soundness and maintenance of the members of the body, health, sound senses, freedom from pain, physical vigor, and physical attractiveness. Compare Cicero, De finibus, V. vii. 19.

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come to be validated. The person who does not give such manifest desiderata their due—who may even set out to frustrate their realization—is clearly not being rational. This certainly can—and does—happen. Like various beliefs, various evaluations are palpably crazy.7 Reason, after all, is not just a matter of the compatibility or consistency of pre-given commitments, but of the warrant that there is for undertaking certain commitments in the first place. An evaluative rationality which informs us that certain preferences are absurd—preferences which wantonly violate our nature, impair our being, or diminish our opportunities—fortunately lies within the human repertoire. Xenophanes of Colophon was doubtless right. Even as different creatures may well have different gods so they might well have different goods. But no matter. For us humans the perfectly appropriate sort of good is our sort of good—the human good inherent in the manner of our emplacement within the world’s scheme of things. In this regard, Aristotle did indeed get to the heart of the matter. For us, the human good is indeed an adequate foundation for substantive, practical rationality. Given that we are what we are, it is this that is decisive for us. We have to go on from where we are. It is in this sense alone that there is no deliberation about ends. The universally appropriate ends at issue in our human condition are not somehow freely chosen by us; they are fixed by the (for us) inescapable ontological circumstance that—like it or not—we find ourselves to exist as human beings, and thus able to function as free rational agents. Their ultimate inherence in (generic) human needs determines the appropriateness of our particular, individual ends and thereby endows a functionalistic pragmatism with a broadly humanistic value orientation. We humans are so situated that from our vantage point (and who else’s can be decisive for us?) various factors can and should be seen as goods— as aspects or components of what is in itself a quintessentially good end in its relation to us. Without achieving such goods we cannot thrive as human beings—we cannot achieve the condition of well-being that 7

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For strict consistency, a rigorous Humean should, by analogy, hold that cognitive reason too is only hypothetical—that “it only tells us that certain beliefs must be abandoned if we hold certain others, and that no beliefs are contrary to reason as such, so that “it is not contrary to reason to think one’s finger larger than the entire earth.”

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Aristotle called “flourishing.” Flourishing as humans, as the sort of creatures we are, patently is for us an intrinsic good (though not, to be sure, necessarily the supreme good). It “comes with the territory” so to speak, being mandated for us by our place in nature’s scheme of things. And this desideratum is itself many-faceted in serving as an umbrella goal that can carry others in its wake. It must, after all, come to be particularized to the concrete situation of specific individuals and thereby becomes complex and variegated. On this basis, the rationality and objectivity of evaluative ends inheres in the simple fact that we humans have various valid needs— that we require not only nourishment and protection against the elements for the maintenance of health, but also information (“cognitive orientation”), affection, freedom of action, and much else besides. Without achieving such varied goods we cannot thrive as human beings. To be sure, a person’s “appropriate interests” will have a substantial sector of personal relativity. One person’s self-ideal, shaped in the light of his own value structure, will—quite appropriately—be different from that of another. And, moreover, what sorts of interests a person has will hinge in significant measure on the particular circumstances and conditions in which he finds himself—including his wishes and desires. (In the absence of any countervailing considerations, getting what I want is in my best interests.) All the same, there is also a large body of real interests that people not only share in common but must pursue in common—for example, as regards standard of living (health and resources) and quality of life (opportunities and conditions). And both sorts of interests—the idiosyncratic and the generic—play a determinative role in the operations of rationality. And both must accordingly figure in a sensible pragmatism’s concern for the efficacious realization of our valid objectives.8 5 PRACTICAL RATIONALITY ENCOMPASSES THEORETICAL RATIONALITY A good case can be made out for saying that even the prime concerns of theoretical reason, namely consistency and coherence, are themselves simply matters of practical rationality. For information that is inconsistent or incoherent is not able to achieve the aims of the enterprise of inquiry that is at issue with theoretical reason. Answers to our questions that are 8

The author’s The Validity of Values (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) offers further perspectives on some of the themes of these deliberations.

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inconsistent (“yes and no”) are effectively no answers at all, and information that is incoherent is “information” in name only. What is wrong with theoretical incoherence is thus ultimately something pragmaticits frustration of the cardinal aim of the practical enterprise of inquiryof securing sensible answers to our questions. The primacy of practical reason must accordingly be acknowledged. Theoretical reason itself stands under its sway. After all, inquiry itself is a practice and in the pursuit of its aims the issue of efficacy and effectiveness in goal realization do and must constitute our criterion of procedural adequacy. Already Thomas Aquinas accordingly saw practical reason (intellectus practicus) as an extension of theoretical reason (intellectus speculativus): intellectus speculativus per extensionem fit practicus (Summa Theologica: qu. 79, art. 11). As he saw it, practical reason is broader than theoretical reason and embraces it: cognitive practice is a special brand of practice in general, practice whose aim is the accession of information and the resolution of questions. And this essentially pragmatic/fundamentalistic view of the matter is surely correct. A practicalistic perspective upon cognition is not only possible but eminently desirable. Ideas, convictions and beliefs, methods as cognitive conditions of cognitive affairs. They are tools we use to solve our problems: answering questions, guiding actions (both theoretical and practical). They can be viewed in their procedural, methodological, useoriented roles. We are embarked here on a broadly economic approach—but one that proceeds in terms of a value theory that envisions a generalized "economy of values," and from whose standpoint the traditional economic values (the standard economic costs and benefits) are merely a rather special case. Such an axiological approach sees theoretical rationality as an integral component of that wider rationality that calls for the effective deployment of our limited resources. 6. THE PRAGMATIC ASPECT OF INQUIRY The characteristic genius of pragmatism lies in its insistence on being practical about things and specifically in its steadfast refusal to allow us to view the very best that we can possibly do as not being good enough. Its operative injunctions are: Approach the issue of the cognitive accessibility of truth by asking the classical pragmatic question: "If that is indeed how realities stand, then what would be the best sort of evidence for it that we 18

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could expect to achieve?" Realize that we have no access to matters of fact save through the mediation of evidence that is often incomplete and imperfect. And realize too that to say that the best evidence is not good enough is to violate Peirce's cardinal pragmatic imperative never to bar the path of inquiry. In line with this perspective, a realistic pragmatism insists upon pressing the question: "If A were indeed the answer to a question Q of ours, what sort of evidence could we possibly obtain for this?" And when we obtain such evidence—as much as we can reasonably be expected to achieve— then pragmatism to see this as good enough. ("Be prepared to regard the best that can be done as good enough" is one of pragmatism's fundamental axioms.) If it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, (and so on) then—so pragmatism insists, we are perfectly entitled to stake the claim that it is a duck—at any rate until such time as clear indications to the contrary come to light. Once the question "Well, what more could you reasonably ask for?" meets with no more than hesitant mumbling, then sensible pragmatists say: "Feel free to go ahead and make the claim." It is not that truth means warranted assertability, or that warranted assertability guarantees truth. What is the case, rather, is that evidence here means "evidence for truth" and (methodologically) warranted assertability means "warrantedly assertable as true." After all, estimation here is a matter of truth estimation and where the conditions for rational estimation are satisfied we are—ipso facto—rationally authorized to let these estimates stand surrogate to the truth. The very idea that the best we can do is not good enough for all relevant reasonable purposes is—so pragmatism and common sense alike insist—simply is absurd, a thing of unreasonable hyperbole. Whatever theoretical gap there may be between warrant and truth is something which the very nature of concepts like "evidence" and "rational warrant" and "estimation" authorizes us in crossing. And so at this point we have in hand the means for resolving the question of the connection between thought and reality that is at issue with "the truth." The mediating linkage is supplied by heeding the modus operandi of inquiry. For cognition is a matter of truth estimation, and a properly effected estimate is, by its nature as such, something that is entitled to serve, at least for the time being and until further notice, as a rationally authorized surrogate for whatever it is that it is or estimate of.

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7. THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICE Deflationary epistemologistsincluding such soft-line pragmatists as William Jamesare fearful that if we take a hard objectivistic line on the meaning of truth then truth becomes transcendentally inaccessible and scepticism looms. And they accordingly insist that we soften up our understanding of the nature of truth. But another option is perfectly open, namely to retain the classical (hard) construction of the meaning of truth as actual facticity ("correspondence to fact") and to soften matters up on the epistemological/ontological side by adopting a "realistic" view of what is criteriologically required for staking rationally appropriate truth claims. Pragmatists accordingly have the option of approaching "the truth" with a view to the methodology of evidence—of criteriology rather than definitional revisionism. They canand are well advisedto see in pragmatic efficacy not the meaning of truth but merely a factor in its criteriology. And the sort of truth pragmatism that moves in this (surely sensible) direction is one that does not use pragmatic considerations to validate claims and theses directly, but rather uses inquiry methods (claimvalidating processes) for this purpose, while validating these practices themselves not in terms of the truth of the products (a clearly circular procedure), but in terms of the capacity of their products to provide the materials for successful prediction and effective applicative control. Accordingly, the most promising position here would be what might be characterized as a methodological pragmatism rather than a thesis pragmatism. That is, it is a position that assesses thesis assertability in terms of the methodological processes of substantiation and their assesses method appropriateness in terms of the practical and applicative utility— systematically considered—of the thesis from which the methods vouch. Such an approach calls for a prime emphasis on the methodology of truthestimation, bringing into the forefront the processes of evidentiation and substantiation by which we in practice go about determining what to accept as truth. The truth/reality connection that is operative here is certainly not a cognitively isolated issue subject to no sorts of theory-external quality controls. "Thought externalized" objectivity is still in prospect. For with regard to our methodological resources of truth-estimation we can indeed deploy a theory-external means of quality control—viz., applicative efficacy. The success of our thought-guided practice is something that lies 20

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substantially outside of the range of thought itself. And so the arbitrament of practice—of efficacy in matters of application for the purposes of prediction and control (i.e., effective active and passive involvement with nature)—can and will in the final analysis serve as a theory-external monitor over our theorizing. Theory is, in this sense, subordinated to practice, a circumstance that speaks loud and clear on behalf of a realistic pragmatism, affording a position whose orientation is at once realistic and pragmatic because successful praxis is, in the end, the best index of appropriateness that is at our effective disposal.9

9

This chapter is a slightly revised version of a paper of the same title initially published in Contemporary Pragmatism, vol. 1 (2004), pp. 43-60.

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Chapter Two KNOWLEDGE OF THE TRUTH IN PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE 1. INTERNAL REALISM AND TRUTH AS (AVAILABLE) WARRANT

T

he pursuit of knowledge aims at discovering the truth of things. But if truth pivots on the idea that truths state how things actually stand without any inherent reference to our beliefs, views and opinions about that matter—if, as mainstream tradition has it, truth is something altogether detached from human thought and ideas—then how can we possibly achieve knowledge about it? How could we then ever validly claim that our thought corresponds with thought-external reality so as to get at the real truth? How can we get there from here? As Hilary Putnam puts is, a whole host of contemporary philosophers, himself included, react to this formidable challenge by adopting the seemingly heretical view that truth must be construed in terms of humanly available warrant and “that our grasp on the notion of truth must not be represented . . . by a relation called correspondence to something totally independent of the practices by which we decide what is and what is not true.”1 To be sure, ordinarily people (many philosophers included) would hold that the truth is something we discover, and that while we do indeed decide what to accept as true, since acceptance is something that we actually do, we are not ordinarily in a position to decide the actual truth of things. But exactly this distinction between what “really is true” and what “we are prepared to accept as true” is one that philosophers of the tendency Putnam endorses decline to acknowledge. All the same, such a contrast-rejection has its problems. After all, with “what is true” there canby hypothesisbe no further question of correctness. But with what we (or anyone) actually accepts as true, there still 1

Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

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looms before us the ever-additional question, “Is this acceptance really warranted?” However, just this gap between factually actual and normatively appropriate acceptance is one that these “internalist” truth theorists seek to close by injecting some element of normativity into the acceptances at issue. For the we/us group of “we decide what is true” is, on their approach, not the we/us of this imperfect dispensation of ours in the spatiotemporal present, but the “we” of the scientific community of the eventual future—or of some other comparably idealized group of rational inquirers. Already pragmatism’s founding father, C. S. Peirce, initially proposed to domesticate “the truth about reality” by construing it as a matter of ultimate science—that is to say it is the “final irreversible opinion” of the scientific community once its thought becomes settled and fixed. Truth, so regarded, is the opinion that science will eventually reach, being “fated” (as Peirce puts it) to be achieved ultimately by the efforts of the ongoing scientific community. And this led him to his well-known characterization of truth as “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate [by the use of scientific methods].” On third thought, however, Peirce shifted from what the scientific community will (and must) eventually realize to what it would realize if its efforts continued long enough in sufficiently favorable circumstances. With this more cautious approach in view, he held that the truth is “what any man would believe in, and be ready to act upon, if his investigations were pushed sufficiently far.”2 The subjunctive is called upon to do real work here. And along these lines Putnam’s, Representation and Reality also proposes “idealized rational acceptability” as a definition of truth. Nevertheless, such an approach involves difficulties and faces obstacles of which Peirce himself was perfectly aware. The idea that truth is what future science will deliver the truth about nature into our hands is open to a series of “what if” objections: • What if inquiry ended owing to the extinction of intelligent life? • What if inquiry came to a stop because of the indolence (fecklessness, laziness) of scientific workers? • What if inquiry were hamstrung because of human limitations: be2

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C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. 8, ed. A. W. Burks, (Cambridge MA; Harvard University Press, 1958), sect. 8.4 [1885].

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cause scientists are not smart enough or imaginative enough to look upon the theories required correctly to characterize nature’s modus operandi? • What if inquiry were blocked because of a lack of resource commitments: science ought never afford the large scale instruments and experiments needed to advance its frontiers. In the face of “what if” concerns of this sort, a theory that equates the truth with the product of inquiry would undergo the following series of saving transformations and sophistications to the effect that the truth is: • What science will eventually deliver. • What science will deliver in the theoretical long run, that is, what it would deliver if continued long enough. • What ideally able scientists (i.e. those practicing the scientific method with ideal competence) would deliver if they continued their effort long enough. • What ideally able scientists working under ideally favorable conditions (and thus without any resource constraints) would deliver if they continued their efforts long enough. In contemplating this series, three considerations become clear. (1) The demands of plausibility force us to move along this path because otherwise these “what if” objections would render the theory of “truth = product of inquiry” untenable. (2) A continually growing amount of idealization is going on here, as we shift from simple futurity in this world eventually to reach hypothetical realizability under utterly unrealistic conditions. (3) By the time the end of the series, the thrill has run out of the process. For with the equation “truth = the product of idealized inquiry” we arrive at a position that is substantially emasculated, true enough but virtually trivial. No reasonable person could—nor surely would—question that the truth is what absolutely idealized inquiry would deliver into our hands in absolutely idealized conditions. But this result is now not so much an interesting theory about the nature of truth as a near-tautological gloss on what is at issue with “absolutely ideal inquiry.” The problem is that cognitive idealization is not a cost-free resource. 25

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For it is, or should be, clear that the more strongly we gerrymander that group of truth-deciders into an ideal fraternity of rational inquirers proceeding in ideal and unrestrictedly optimized circumstances the more we loose the putative advantage that initially motivated this whole approach. After all, the theorists in view initially wanted to bring the conception of truth down from the transcendental unrealizability of a cognitively unaccessible “correspondence” to the realm of achievable practice. But they now succeed in this only by transposing this practice from the observable operations of an existing community of inquirers to the merely conjectural operations of an idealized community that is every bit as unmonitorable and reality-transcendent as was that transcendental “correspondence” from which we were trying to escape. We seem to be driven to a Hobson’s choice between actual veracity (real truthfulness) on the one hand and cognitive availability (evidential accessibility) on the other. A dilemma looms. If truth is to be construed in ontological terms as a matter of correspondence to authentic (thoughtindependent) reality, then it is not realistically accessible. And on the other hand if truth is construed in epidemic terms as a matter of evidential availability (“warranted assertability” or the like), then there is no assurance that there will be no gap between our evidence and the real and actual condition of things. How can we possibly manage to unite the two factors— factual authenticity and epistemic warrant—that we would ideally like the idea of truth to fuse together for us? If we opt for warrant as the key to truth, then how do we know that actuality is not at risk; but if we opt for actuality as the key, then how can we be assured of epistemic warrant? How are these two disparates to be brought together? 2. INTERDEPENDENCY PROBLEMS Can purely conceptual connections perhaps do the job for us? In Pragmatism: An Open Question, Putnam tells us that while “I do not think this truth can be defined in terms of verification” nevertheless “I do agree with the pragmatists that truth and verification are not simply independent and unrelated notions” (pp. 11-12). But the now operative idea that “being true” and “being (warrantedly) thought be true” are conceptually interdependent but nevertheless interrelated admits of diverse constructions. And this thesis is certainly questionable in its most straightforward construction, which is: We cannot (correctly) characterize what truth is without (adequately) explaining

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KNOWLEDGE OF THE TRUTH IN PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE how it is that people are to go about establishing this, that is: To give a (correct) explanation of the meaning of “p is true” we must be in a position to provide a viable account of how people are to go about showing that this is so. The meaning of the claim that a thesis is true hinges on the process of verification that is at issue.

But can this evidentialist-pragmatic-verificationist vessel hold water? Consider the claim “The Rosetta stone was in the British Museum on the day Germany invaded Poland at the outset of World War II.” No reasonably well informed person would hesitate to acknowledge the truth of this contention. But establishing it is something else again. Should we rely on the memory of some grizzled sage who claims to have seen it there that day? Should we conduct research into the (conceivably destroyed) records of the museum? Need we await the realization of some neo-H.-G.-Wellsian time machine that enables us to go back and check? The possibilities boggle the mind. We can of course leap (figuratively) into the region of speculative possibility via the following schematic supposition: “If someone were to then they would find . . . “ But to take this conditionalistic line is in effect to stand the issue on its head. Those conditional claims are not true because they can (hypothetically) be verified. The actuality of it is the very reverse: they can (hypothetically) be verified because they are true. Truth and verification are indeed “interdependent and interrelated.” But this is not (as per some incautious pragmatists) because verification is the independent and truth the dependent variable here. Verification is not the tail that wags the dog of truth. The matter stands the other way round: truth is the independent variable here and verification the dependent one. William James to the contrary notwithstanding, a true statement is verifiable because it is true, it is not true because it is verifiable. However while the conceptual primacy in the truth/ verification relation thus lies with truth, the matter stands very differently with epistemic primacy. For (and this is the real crux of pragmatism) verification is a practical process which, while not in general determinative of truth as such, is nevertheless perfectly adequate for the probative authorization of rationally appropriate truth claims. It is not that the propositions we evidentiate must ipso facto be (identical with) the truth but rather that evidentiation ipso facto authorizes us in rationally warranted claims to truth. (And even our best efforts can go awry here, which is why sensible pragmatists are fallibilists.) 27

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Let us scrutinize the line of thought that is at issue here somewhat more closely. To all appearances, it roots in the consideration that we face the following aporetic situation: (1) The truth must agree with reality. (2) Therefore, in order to determine the truth we must determine what is really so, that is, what reality is like. (3) We have no access way to reality independent of what we take to be the truth about it. Here (3) says that we can only get at reality via truth but (2) says that we cannot get at truth save via reality. We seem to be trapped in a Catch-22 situation where scepticism—inability to get at truth—is the only outcome. There are three basic alternatives for freeing ourselves from this trap. The first is the “postmodernist” response of simply abandoning the conception of truth. And the second alternative is to reject (1) and reconceptualize “the truth” in a way that does not ask for adequation to reality but merely calls for cognitive access under appropriate (perhaps even ideal) conditions. This is the “deflationist” response of construing truth in terms of knowledge. A third possibility exists, however. For the actual fact is that (1) does not actually necessitate (2) with the result that (1) must be abandoned in the face of the “fact of life” represented by (3). Instead, we can opt for the essentially pragmatic response of abandoning (2) as is, and instead reversing the truth/reality relationship that it envisions. In taking this line we would reject (2) and instead adopt: (2’) To determine what reality is like we must seek out what the truth is (exactly as per (3)): reality determinations supervene upon truth-assessments: the epistemic route is our only access-way to reality: only estimating the truth can we validate claims about the real.

And it is just here that pragmatism enter in. For given this inversion of the truth/reality relationship, pragmatists can—and do—go on to insist that there indeed is a practically effective route to rational truth-estimation, namely the criteriological route afforded by the standard experience-based methodology of inquiry. Thus in retaining the classic construction of truth represented by (1), sensible pragmatists can—and presumably would— 28

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insist on viewing truth-determination in a “realistic” light. But of course what is now at issue is not the meaning of “truth” (for which (1) continues to be decisive) but rather the criteriology of truth-determination by way of rational estimation. What pragmatism of this realistic sort accordingly does is not to abandon truth (as per postmodernist scepticism) nor yet to alter its meaning in evidentialist directions (deflationism), but rather to re-focusing our attention upon the matter of rationality appropriate claims to truth, thereby bringing into the foreground the issue of truth criteriology—of the methodology for making rational estimates of the truth. However, such a perspective indicates that there are two possible versions of pragmatism. One is a meaning-of-truth revisionism that abandons the idea that it is a conceptual part or consequence of the definition of “truth” that truth corresponds to reality. And the second is a truthcriteriology realism that takes the line that our standard epistemological recourses are sufficient—that is, criteriologically sufficient for all sensible purposes—to enable us to decide what is true (i.e., to settle how we can apply the adjective qualifier “is true” in concrete cases, and so to settle in actual practice the matter of truth categorization). And so, while many contemporary pragmatists take the reconceptualization approach and accordingly enroll in the school of meaning-of-truth revisionism, nevertheless a good case can be made out for holding that a more conservative (and sensible) course for pragmatists is to adopt a view of truth that is “realistic” in this respect also. It is the crux of such an approach that it sees the usual criteriology of truth-estimation as good enough for “truth determination” construed not in the sense of airtight guarantees but rather of plausible (and generally effective) evidentiation. Still, the question remains that if truth does not equate to verification by definition, as it were, then what sort of relationship can we claim here? Without an account of how the ever-possible gap between evidentiation and actuality is to be overcome, the truth/verification relationship will (as Putnam rightly says) remain “occult.” As far as I can see Putnam’s own otherwise helpful discussions do not adequately address—let alone resolve—this question. He says: The real worry is that sentences cannot be true or false of an external reality if there are no justifactory connections between things we say in language and any aspects of that reality whatever. (Pragmatism, p. 65)

This is true enough. And Putnam accordingly insists that there must be a “justifactory connection” of some appropriate sort between the appropri29

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ateness of saying “It is OK to say ‘p is true’“ and the fact of p’s actually being true. However, Putnam rejects Davidson’s thesis that the linkage here is one of common cause—that truth and verification are coordinated because the factors that operate so as to authorize us to claim verification are (largely or wholly) just the same factors that engender (or otherwise stand causally coordinate with) the state of things that is at issue in our claim. Since this causal theory has its problems (as Putnam cogently maintains),3 then how does he propose to cross that seeming epistemology/ontology gap and established the language/reality condition that is—to all appearances—critical for the achievement of truth? He certainly does not think that this can be effected by resorting to what “we” (“people-ingeneral,” or “our cultural peers,” or whatever) think.4 For him neither matters of “definition” (analyticity) nor of “convention” (social practice) will do the coordinating job—nor yet will the facts of the world’s causal order do so. Then what will? Regrettably, Putnam is not as clear on this matter as we might wish.5 As best I can tell, his discussion amounts to proposing a “pragmatic” solution to the effect that we should adopt the practical policy of simply ignoring this gap. On this approach, we should not look for any sort of theoretical solution here but simply content ourselves with the experience-validated consideration that we can in practice proceed as though there were no gap and “get away” with it. Such an attitude of proceeding on the presumption that our epistemology is adequate (i.e., is truth-achieving) is eminently sensible as far as it goes. But it does not go quite far enough. It smacks too much of Pascal’s policy Allez en avant et la fois vous viendra (essentially: just press ahead and things will come right in the end.). But philosophers—and sensible people in general—will want to know the reason why. They require such a policy to have the backing of a rationale. Yet, so far as I can see, Putnam’s pragmatism takes the line of an epistemic fideism taking comfort in the democratic consideration that this puts all of us into the same boat. And 3

The next chapter will deal with this issue in detail.

4

Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 21-26.

5

This may well be deliberately so. As his 1994 Dewey lectures indicate (p. 457), he regards clear solution as a “quick fix” to philosophical problems and inclines to the idea that real problems admit of no such fixes.

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there is something deeply unsatisfactory about this. One would surely prefer a more thoroughgoing pragmatism—one that does not rest content with a neo-pragmatic social-practice validation in the descriptive terms of “this is what we (reasonable people) are all involved in doing” but a hard-line pragmatism that asks for validation in the normative terms of “this is the very best that can be done (by anyone) in the circumstances.” 3. A DIFFERENT APPROACH: METHODOLOGICAL PRAGMATISM Deflationary epistemologists are fearful that if we take a hard objectivistic line on the meaning of truth then truth becomes transcendentally inaccessible and scepticism looms. And they accordingly insist that we soften up our understanding of the nature of truth. But another option is perfectly open, namely to retain the classical (hard) construction of the meaning of truth as actual facticity (“correspondence to fact”) and to soften matters up on the epistemological/ontological side by adopting a “realistic” view of what is criteriologically required for staking rationally appropriate truth claims. Pragmatists accordingly have the option of approaching “the truth” with a view to the methodology of evidence—of criteriology rather than definitional revisionism. The sort of truth pragmatism that moves in this (surely sensible) direction is one that does not use pragmatic considerations to validate claims and theses directly, but rather uses inquiry methods (claimvalidating processes) for this purpose, while validating these practices themselves not in terms of the truth of the products (a clearly circular procedure) but in terms of the capacity of their products to provide the materials for successful prediction and effective applicative control. Accordingly, the most promising position here is—as I see it—a methodological pragmatism rather than a thesis pragmatism. That is, it is a position that assesses thesis assertability in terms of the methodological processes of substantiation and their assesses method appropriateness in terms of the practical and applicative utility—systematically considered—of the thesis from which the methods vouch. Such an approach calls for a prime emphasis on the methodology of truth-estimation, bringing into the forefront the processes of evidentiation and substantiation by which we in practice go about determining what to accept as truth. But just how reliable are the truth-estimates that we can manage to get on such a basis? This, clearly, is not the place to write a manual on the epistemology of truth estimation. But three telegraphically brief observations should suffice for present purposes. 31

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(1) Our confidence in the acceptability of a truth estimate varies immensely with its precision. We might be tempted to squabble about the claim that yonder person is 3.735 meters tall. But the truth of the thesis that his height is between 1 meter an 4 meters is beyond (reasonable) question. (2) This trade-off between precision and tenability means that our comparatively imprecise claims about every-day life matters are less science than its presence and highly general claims of natural science. The truth of the claim in science at the theoretical future is not as such as is the truth of claims like “The population of New York exceeds six million.” (3) With those complex issues at the theoretical frontier of science we are well advised to speak not of unqualified truth as such, but rather of our “bestestimates” of the truth as we are able to realize them with the investigative resources at out disposal. (The common sense realism of everyday-life matters is thus on securer ground than a scientific realism which claims that the objects of scientific inquiry exist in just exactly the descriptive manner in which present-day science conceives of them.) The most promising approach to the problem of truth-claim validation would accordingly be to focus on the epistemology of truth estimation and to leave the matter of its definition alone, allowing this to be addressed via the classic conception of truth as adaequatio ad rem, as correspondence with (mind-independent) reality. After all, no useful purpose is ever achieved by attributions of “absolute (or “ultimate”) truth” or “absolute (or “ultimate”) reality in matters of concrete detail.” Where plain “truth” and “reality” will not serve, nothing will. Truth can accordingly be left to enjoy the “transcendental” construction that is has always enjoyed. To be sure, the matter of its accessibility is something else again. But this something can be resolved through epistemic deliberations, via the idea of truthestimation pretty much as standardly conducted. Yet how can we ever determine that we are actually getting at the real truth of things—how can we tell that our truth-estimates are actually good estimates. Here the pragmatically appropriate response, as I see it, goes roughly as follows: “Because they are provided by methods which yield results that work. They emerge from the use of inquiry methods whose products can be implemented successfully in practice—with success monitored in the usual way of effective application and prediction.” However, Putnam takes a very different line here—that of communal favor. For him, with “pragmatists, the model is a group of inquiries trying to produce good ideas and trying to test them to see which ones have value. . . . [so that for them] science requires the democratization of inquiry” (op. cit., pp. 71, 73). With Putnam, as with Dewey, communal acceptance is the key. 32

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This laudably democratic stance nevertheless still leaves us with a dilemma. For if the community is actual, then we leave too much to the vagueness of contingent arrangements, while if it is idealized, then we know not how to get there from here. Instead, the sort of pragmatism I favor looks to cognitive methods of truth-estimation that can be quality controlled through considerations of applicative efficacy.6 (To be sure, if, by good fortune, the community at issue is actual a thoroughly rational one, then the two approaches will not be far apart because the community will then ipso facto use applicative efficacy as its standard of assessment for methodological acceptability.) 4. VALIDATION ISSUES But should we settle for the idea of estimating the truth in scientific matters? Should we not ask for certification—for categorical guarantees? Are mere estimates good enough? The characteristic genius of pragmatism lies in its insistence on being practical about things and specifically on its steadfast refusal to allow us to view the very best that we can possibly do as not being good enough. Its operative injunctions are: Approach the course of the cognitive accessibility of truth by asking the classical pragmatic question: “If that is indeed how realities stand, then what would be the best sort of evidence for it that we could expect to achieve?” Realize that we have no access to matters of fact save through the mediation of evidence that is often incomplete and imperfect. And realize too that to say that the best evidence is not good enough is to violate Peirce’s cardinal pragmatic imperative is ever to bar the path of inquiry. In line with this perspective, a realistic pragmatism insists upon pressing the question: “If A were indeed the answer to a question Q of ours, what sort of evidence could we possibly obtain for this?” And when we obtain such evidence—as much as we can reasonably be expected to achieve— then pragmatism to see this as good enough. (“Be prepared to regard the best that can be done as good enough” is one of pragmatism’s fundamental axioms.) If it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, (and so on) then—so pragmatism insists, we are perfectly entitled to stable the personal claim that it is a duck—at any rate until such time as clear in6

This position is set out in greater detail in the author’s Methodological Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977).

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dications to the contrary come to light. Once the question “Well what more could you reasonably will ask for?” meets with no more than hesitant mumbling, then sensible pragmatists say: “Feel free to go ahead and make the claim.” It is not that true means warranted assertability, or that warranted assertability entails truth. What is the case, rather, is that evidence here means “evidence for truth” and (methodologically) warranted assertability means “warrantedly assertable as true.” After all, estimation here is a matter of truth estimation and where the conditions for rational estimation are satisfied we are—ipso facto—rationally authorized to let that estimate stand surrogate to the truth. The very idea that the best we can do is not good enough for all relevant reasonable purposes is—so pragmatism and common sense alike insist—simply is absurd, a thing of unreasonable hyperbole. Whatever theoretical gap there may be between warrant and truth is something which the very nature of concepts like “evidence” and “rational warrant” and “estimation” authorizes us in crossing. And so at this point we have in hand the means for resolving the question of the connection between thought and reality that is at issue with “the truth.” The mediating linkage is supplied by a methodology of inquiry. For cognition is a matter of truth estimation, and a properly effected estimate is, by its nature as such, an at least pro tem rationally authorized surrogate for whatever it is that it is or estimate of. 5. BEING “REALISTIC” (IN BOTH SENSES) That the actual truth “corresponds” with reality in that it “represents” it correctly is (on such a view) quite right but also close to tautological and thereby unhelpful. The “representative” nature of truth—the fact that the truth of the matter characterizes what is in fact really so—does not root in or emerge from a theory about truth, but is a merely truistic and banal conceptual fact that roots in the very ideas (“truth,” “reality”) that are at issue. A claim does not deserve to be characterized as true that fails “to tell it like it is.” The matter is ultimately one of the groundrules governing the usage of these term. “It is true that p, but nevertheless p is at variance with reality and in conflict with the actual facts of the matter” is a contradiction in terms, a mere bit of unintelligible nonsense. Moreover, we have no access to reality apart from what we think to be true about it. “Tell me something about reality but do it independently of and apart from what you consider the truth of the matter: tell me what the real truth is in contradiction from what you merely think to be true” is an absurd instruction. We can realize 34

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in abstracto that some of the theses we accept as true are false but there is no way in which we could ever then-and-there substantiate this phenomenon. It lies in the nature of things that we cannot conceivably distinguish between our putative truth and the real truth in matters of concrete detail: it would not be our putative truth if we did not regard it as the real truth. And we thus treat our perceptions are innocent until proven guilty. Since the whole course of our thought and experience is such that the standing presumption is on their side. All the same, an unhappy inference confronts us when we turn from perceptual judgments to more sophisticated ones: • The truth must be certain: it makes no sense to say “P is true, but it may possibly eventuate that P is actually not the case.” • In matters at the technical frontiers of science, at any rate, there is no room for categorical certainty. We realize full well that the science of the future may amend, qualify, and correct the science of today. We cannot but acknowledge that the science of the future will regard our science as we ourselves regard the science of 100 years ago. Therefore: • We cannot characterize the frontier theories of the science of the day as unqualified truths. The premisses look to be inescapable here. And this means, in effect, that we cannot claim flat-out truth for our theories at the scientific frontier. Here again we have no choice but to view them not as the truth per se but merely as the best estimates of the actual truth that we are able to make at this juncture. We cannot routinely assume that science as we have it depicts nature as it actually is. To be “realistic” in one sense of this term (the colloquial) we are constrained to moderate our “realism” in another sense (the philosophical). But just what does this mean for our knowledge of reality? Scientific realism in its strongest form stands committed to the thesis that the world is as science holds it to be: that the theories of science state the literal truth about reality as it actually is. But given that we regard the science we have here and now as something corrigible—as subject to revision in respects that we cannot as yet specify—this is a position that is ultimately indefensible. In view of this some theorists propose a weaker theory of convergent 35

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realism. They hold that science is not, indeed, actually right but only approximately right. And this may be alright as a figure of speech. But the trouble with invoking literal approximation is its commitment to the idea of convergence—to getting closer and closer to the real thing—as this requires that the future changes of mind always be small and become ever smaller. This rules out any prospect of further scientific revolutions—of changes which even when introduced by small-scale phenomena (the perihelion of Mercury) pave the way to massive conceptual revisions (the theory of relativity). This consequence surely precludes any endorsement of literal convergence. Alternatively, there is the theory of blind realism proposed by Robert Almeder.7 This holds that the theories of science are mostly right though sometimes wrong, and that this transpires in such a way that we can never say, here and now, which are which. But the shortcoming of such a view is that it maintains that the substantial majority of our present scientific theories are right as they stand and thus exempt from future revision (even though we cannot say which ones they are). And the history of science strongly indicates that even this is an eminently dubious proposition. To arrive at a tenable version of realism we must—as I see it—look in a somewhat different direction. And here it is useful to go back to basics. Increased confidence in the correctness of our estimates can always be purchased at the price of decreased accuracy. There is in general an inverse relationship between the precision of a judgment and its security: detail and probability stand in a competing relationship. We estimate the height of the tree at around 25 feet. We are quite sure that the tree is 25±5 feet high. We are virtually certain that its height is 25±10 feet. But we can be completely and absolutely sure that its height is between 1 inch and 100 yards. Of this we are “completely sure” in the sense that we are “absolutely certain,” “certain beyond the shadow of a doubt,” “as certain as we can be of anything in the world,” “so sure that we would be willing to stake our life on it,” and the like. For any sort of estimate whatsoever there is always a characteristic trade-off relationship between the evidential security of the estimate, on the one hand (as determinable on the basis of its probability or degree of acceptability), and on the other hand its contentual definitiveness (exactness, detail, precision, etc.). A situation obtains. A complimentarity relationship of the sort depicted in Figure 1.1 obtains here as between defi7

36

Robert Almeder, Blind Realism (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992).

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niteness and security.8 Now this state of affairs has far-reaching consequences. It means, in particular, that no secure statement about reality can say exactly how matters stand universally, always and everywhere. To capture the truth of things by means of language we must proceed by way of “warranted approximation.” In general we can be sure of how things “usually” are and how they “roughly” are, but never how they always and exactly are. The variety of nature’s detail prevents its faithful presentation by the imperfect instrumentality afforded by our symbolic resources. ___________________________________________________ Figure 1.1 THE TRADE-OFF BETWEEN SECURITY AND DEFINITENESS IN ESTIMATION

increasing definiteness

increasing security

Note: The representation is merely descriptive and phenomenological. However, given suitable ways of measuring security (s) and definitiveness (d), the curve at issue can be supposed to be the equilateral hyperbola: s x d = constant. (On the ideas at issue here see Chapter 3 of the author’s Cognitive Economy [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989]).

___________________________________________________

8

This circumstance did not elude Niels Bohr himself, the father of complementarity theory in physics: “In later years Bohr emphasized the importance of complementarity for matters far removed from physics. There is a story that Bohr was once asked in German what is the quality that is complementary to truth (Wahrheit). After some thought he answered clarity (Klarheit).” (Stephen Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory [New York: Pantheon Books, 1992], p. 74 footnote 10.)

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The moral of this story is that insofar as our ignorance of the relevant issues leads us to be vague in our judgments we manage to enhance the likelihood of being right. I have forgotten that Seattle is in Washington State and if “forced to guess” might well erroneously locate it in Oregon. Nevertheless, my vague judgment that “Seattle is located in the Northwestern US” is nevertheless correct. This state of affairs means that when the truth of our claims is critical we may be well advised to “play it safe” and make our commitments less definite and detailed. We can purchase truth at the price of imprecision. It is a fact of life of the general theory of estimation that the harder we push for certainty—for security of our claims—the vaguer we have to make these claims, the more general and imprecise we have to make them. And so if we want our scientific claims to have realistic impact we have to fuzz them up. Take the atomic theory. We should not—cannot say—that atoms are in every detail as the science of the day holds them to be: that the “Atomic Theory” sector of our Handbook of Physics succeeds in every jot and title on characterizing reality as it actually is. But if we “fuzz things up”—if we claim merely that physical reality is granular and that atoms exist and have roughly such-and-such features—then what we say is no longer subject to (reasonable) doubt. Accordingly, this line of consideration points towards a different sort of realism, one which it might be appropriate to call myopic realism. And it means that at a more broadbrush level—the level of the looser generalities of “schoolbook science”—we indeed can and should be scientific realists. However, what we obtain on the basis of the present evidentialist approach is not an “internal realism” which sees the truth/reality connection that is operative in our thought and discourse as a closed domestic issue subject to no sorts of theory-external quality controls. “Thought externalized” objectivity is still at our disposal. For with regard to our methodological resources of truth-estimation we can indeed deploy a theoryexternal means of quality control—viz., applicative efficacy. The success of our thought-guided practice is something that lies substantially outside of the range of thought itself. And so the arbitrament of practice—of efficacy in matters of application for the purposes of prediction and control (i.e., effective active and passive involvement with nature)—can and will in the final analysis serve as a theory-external monitor over our theorizing. Theory is, in this sense, subordinated to practice, a circumstance that speaks loud and clear on behalf of a realistic pragmatisma position whose orientation is at once realistic and pragmatic because successful 38

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praxis is, in the end, the best index of reality that is at our effective disposal.9

REFERENCES Robert Almeder, Blind Realism (Savage MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992). Hilary Putnam, Representation And Reality (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1988). Second ed. 1989. [Representation] ———, Realism with a Human Face . (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). [Realism] ———, Pragmatism: An Open Question (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1995). [Pragmatism] ———, “Sense, Nonsense, and the Senses,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 91 (1994), pp. 445-517. [Dewey lectures] Nicholas Rescher, Methodological Pragmatism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978). ———, The Primacy of Practice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973). ———, Realistic Pragmatism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). ———, Scepticism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980). ———, Scientific Realism (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1987).

9

This chapter originally appeared in James Conant and Ursula Ziegler (eds.), Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 66-79.

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Chapter Three PRAGMATISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 1. INTRODUCTION

P

ragmatism as a philosophical doctrine traces back to the Academic sceptics in classical antiquity. Denying the possibility of achieving authentic knowledge (epistêmê) regarding the real truth, they taught that we must make do with plausible information (to pithanon) adequate to the needs of practice. However, pragmatism as a determinate philosophical doctrine descends from the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. For him, pragmatism was primarily a theory of meaning, with the meaning of any concept that has application in the real world inhering in the relations that link experiential conditions of application with observable results. But by the “practical consequences” of the acceptance of an idea or a contention, Peirce meant the consequences for experimental practice—”experimental effects” or “observational results”—so that for him the meaning of a proposition is determined by the essentially positivist criterion of its experiential consequences in strictly observational terms. And, moving beyond this, Peirce also taught that pragmatic effectiveness constitutes a quality control monitor of human cognition—though here again the practice issue here is that of scientific praxis and the standard of efficacy pivoting on the issue of specifically predictive success. Peirce developed his pragmatism in opposition to idealism, seeing that the test of applicative success can lead mere theorizing to stub its toe on the hard rock of reality. But his successors softened up the doctrine, until with some present day “pragmatists” the efficacy of ideas consists in their mere adoption by the community rather than—as with Peirce—in the success that the community may (or may not!) encounter as it puts those ideas into practice. Although Peirce developed pragmatism into a substantial philosophical theory, it was William James who put it on the intellectual map in his enormously influential Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York, 1907). However, James changed (and—as Peirce

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himself saw it—ruined) Peircean pragmatism. For where Peirce saw in pragmatism a road to impersonal and objective standards, James gave it a personalized and subjectivized twist. With James, it was the personal (and potentially idiosyncratic) idea of efficacy and success held by particular people that provided the pragmatic crux, and not an abstracted community of ideally rational agents. For him, pragmatic efficacy and applicative success did not relate to an impersonalized community of scientists but to a diversified plurality of flesh and blood individuals. For James, truth is accordingly what reality impels and compels human individuals to believe; it is a matter of “what pays by way of belief” in the course of human activity within the circumbient environment and—its acquisition is an invention rather than a revelation. With James, the tenability of a thesis is determined in terms of its experiential consequences in a far wider than merely observational sense—a sense that embraces the affective sector as well. Pragmatism has had a mixed reception in Europe. In Italy, Giovanni Papini and Giovanni Vailati espoused the doctrine and turned it into a party platform for Italian philosophers of science. In Britain, F. C. S. Schiller was an enthusiastic follower of William James, while F. P. Ramsey and A. J. Ayer endorsed pivotal aspects of Peirce’s thought. Among Continental participants, Rudolf Carnap also put pragmatic ideas to work on issues of logic and philosophy of language and Hans Reichenbach reinforced Peirce’s statistical and probabilistic approach to the methodology and prolification of induction. However, the reception of pragmatism by other philosophers was by no means universally favorable. F. H. Bradley objected to the subordination of cognition to practice because of what he saw as the inherent incompleteness of all merely practical interests. G. E. Moore criticized William James’ identification of true beliefs with useful ones— among other reasons because utility is changeable over time. Bertrand Russell objected that beliefs can be useful but yet plainly false. And various Continental philosophers have disapprovingly seen in pragmatism’s concern for practical efficacy—”for success” and “paying off”—the expression of characteristically American social attitudes: crass materialism and naive populism. Pragmatism was thus looked down upon as a quintessentially American philosophy—a philosophical expression of the American go-getter spirit with its success-oriented ideology. However, Americans have had no monopoly on practice-oriented philosophizing. Karl Marx’s ideas regarding the role of practice and its relation to theory have had a vast subsequent influence (some of it upon otherwise emphatically non-Marxist thinkers such as Max Scheler). Important 42

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recent developments of praxis-oriented philosophy within a Marx-inspired frame of reference are represented by Tadeusz Kotarbinski in Poland and Jürgen Habermas in Germany. Kotarbinski has endeavoured to put the theory of praxis on a systematic basis within a special discipline he designates as praxiology. Habermas has pursued the concept of praxis deeply into the domain of the sociological implications of technology. Still, be this as it may, pragmatism has found its most favorable reception in the U.S.A., and has never since Peirce’s day lacked dedicated advocates there, however variant their approach. At Harvard in the next generation after James, C. I. Lewis was concerned to apply pragmatism to the validation of logical systems. He focused upon (and in his own work sought to develop) the idea of alternative systems of logic among which one must draw on guides of pragmatic scientifically and utility. And for all his differences with Lewis, W. V. Quine continued this thinker’s emphasis on the pragmatic dimension of choice among alternative theoretical systems. Richard Rorty has endeavored to renovate John Dewey’s rejection of abstract logical and conceptual rigidities in favor of the flexibilities of expediency in practice. In a cognate spirit Joseph Margolis has reemphasized pragmatism’s anti-absolutism based on the transciencies of historical change. And Nicholas Rescher’s “methodological pragmatism” sought to return pragmatism to its Peircian roots by giving the doctrine a specifically methodological turn, seeing that anything methodological—a tool, procedure, instrumentality, program or policy of action, etc.—is best validated in terms of its ability to achieve the purposes at issue, its success at accomplishing its appropriate task. Since cognitive methods must be pivotal here, it follows that even the factual domain can be viewed in such a light that practical reason becomes basic to the theoretical. One overarching and ironic fact pervades the divergent development of pragmatism, namely that the doctrine can be seen either as a validation of objectively cogent standards or as a subverter of them. There is a pragmatism of the right, a Peircian or objective pragmatism of “What works impersonally”—though proving efficient and effective for the realization of some appropriate purpose in an altogether person-indifferent way (“successful prediction,” “control over nature,” “efficacy in need fulfillment”). And there is a pragmatism of the left, a Jamesian or subjective pragmatism of “What works for X” in proving efficient and effective for the realization of a particular person’s (or group’s) wishes and desires. The objective pragmatists stand in the tradition of Peirce and include F. P. Ramsey, C. I. Lewis, Rudolf Carnap; the subjective pragmatists stand in the tradition of 43

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William James and include F. C. S. Schiller and Richard Rorty. (John Dewey straddles the fence by going to an social inter-personalism that stops short of impersonalism.) Looking at James, Peirce saw subjective pragmatism as a corruption and degradation of the pragmatic enterprise since its approach is not a venture in validating objective standards but in deconstructing them to dissolve standards as such into the variegated vagaries of idiosyncratic positions and individual inclinations. And this is how objective pragmatists view the matter down to the present day—this writer included. It is instructive to review the historical situation more closely. 2. BRIEF HISTORICAL OVERVIEW Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) In the hands of this founding father, pragmatism had two principal components; one as regards meaning and one as regards truth.1 Peirce’s meaning pragmatism encompasses a pragmatic view of the meaning of concepts and ideas. The crux, so Peirce maintained, lay in the “pragmatic maxim”: “To ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.”2 Meaning, in sum is, as meaning does. As Peirce put it in his classic essay on “How to Make our Ideas Clear” (1878): “there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.”3 Peirce insisted that the prime function of our beliefs regarding the world is to commit us to rules for action—to furnish guidance to our behavior in point of what to 1

An early edition of Peirce’s works is his Collected Papers published in eight volumes by Harvard University Press between 1936 and 1958. A more recent and complete edition is appearing as Writings of Charles S. Peirce in many volumes still in progress with the Indiana University Press.

2

Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. V (op. cit.), sect. 5.9. Note that Peirce here says “from the truth of that conception”—i.e., from that conception’s: actually being true—and not “from believing the truth of that conception.” This difference is one point that separates him from William James.

3

Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. V (op. cit.), pp. 248-71 see sect. 5.400.

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think, say and do—above all, to canalize our expectations in matters of observation and experiment in scientific contexts. And much the same sort of story here told with respect to meaning holds also with respect to truth. Those theses are true whose implementation in practice “work out” by way of yielding success in matters of prediction and application. For Peirce the best route to this distinction is the scientific method whose rivals—evidence ignoring tenacity, pious adherence to authority, a priori speculation, and such like— simply cannot compare with it in point of producing trustworthy results.4 True factual beliefs, ipso facto, are those that achieve efficacy through guiding in our expectations, beliefs, and actions in satisfying ways—where specifically cognitive satisfactions are at issue. And they must achieve this on a systemic basis. As Peirce saw it, truth in scientific matters consists in those contentions that are “fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate [scientifically].”5 It is what the community of rational inquirers is destined to arrive at in the end—the ultimate consensus of informed opinion among investigators committed to the principles of science. To his mind, it is not mere inquiring as such but properly conducted inquiring that must eventually get at the truth of things. As Pierce saw it, it is the scientific method—not the scientific doctrine of the day—that is crucial for rational inquiry. And he rejected an ideology of the look-to-science-for-all-the-answers sort for the same reason that he rejected dogmatism of any sort, because it is itself ultimately unscientific. William James (1842-1910) William James adopted an approach to pragmatism that was distinctly different from that of Peirce.6 For, as he saw it, pragmatism’s characteristic tactic is to construe truth in terms of a potentially diversified utility in whose light there is nothing fixed or monolithic about truth: 4

Charles S. Peirce, op. cit., Vol. V, sect. 377-87.

5

Charles S. Peirce, op. cit., Vol. V, sect. 5.407.

6

James’ writings are being (re-)published in many volumes under the general editorship of Frederick Burkharat by Harvard University Press. A comprehensive bibliography is given in Ruth Anna Putnam (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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The Truth: what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind! I read in an old letter— from a gifted friend who died too young—these words: “In everything, in science, art, morals, and religion, there must be one system that is right and every other wrong.” How characteristic of the enthusiasm of a certain stage of young! At twenty-one we rise to such a challenge and expect to find the system. It never occurs to most of us even later that the question “What is the Truth?” is no real question (being irrelevant to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural.7

On this basis, James held that “‘the true’ is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in our way of behaving.”8 He sought to replace “the truth” by a diversified plurality of truths. For James, pragmatism seeks to reject the construction of “highfallutin” philosophical conceptions like truth, beauty, and justice, and to put work-a-day utility, serviceability, efficiency, and effectiveness in their place. And pragmatic “success” is seen as a matter of getting things done in the setting of our everyday life affairs. As James put it, “ideas become true just insofar as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience,”9 where those “other parts” reach beyond the range of theorizing, of inquiry and question-resolution. Turning away from matters of rational inquiry as such James rejected the idea that there is a “pure,” disinterestedly neutral and wholly impersonal realm of meaningful cognition. To his mind, concepts like “knowledge,” “truth,” “meaning,” and the like are to serve the interests of not just of rational inquiry but of life in general. James accordingly construed pragmatic success not in terms of specifically epistemic efficiency in scientific matters of prediction and control but rather in terms of psychological satisfactions. After all, “Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification-processes . . Truth is made, just as health, wealth, and strength are made, in the course of experience.”10 And at times James came perilously close to a “wishful thinking” view of truth that conflated the narrower evidential reasons for the substance of a belief with the broader prudential reasons why its adoption 7

William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press), p. 115.

8

William James, The Meaning of Truth, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press: 1975), p. 6/170.

9

William James, Pragmatism (op. cit.), p. 34.

10

William James, Pragmatism (op. cit.), p. 104.

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could prove advantageous. And so while Peirce construed those pragmatically pivotal “practical consequences” as being consequences that are observationally and experimentally determinable in a uniform way by any community of scientific investigators, James took them to relate to the bearing of beliefs on the affective condition of individuals. James thus construed pragmatism very differently from Peirce, not as a doctrine that provides a fixed standard of adequacy, but as an invitation to pluralism—to a relativistic diversity of views that allowed not only for differences among individuals but even differences within individuals as an embodiment of many selves with natural inclinations operating in diverse circumstances. Peirce’s pragmatism was indeed success oriented—but the success it envisioned was that of the communally impersonal objectives of science. But with James it became a matter of serving the personal needs of differently constituted human individuals in their varying subjective reactions to objective conditions.11 And so with James, reality lies substantially in the eyes of the beholder: “Each thinker, however, has dominant habits of attention; and these practically elect from among the various [thought] worlds someone to be for him the world of ultimate realities.”12 Walt Whitman’s “I am multitudes” was an idea that appealed to James. While “inconsistencies” may worry some of his readers, but they did not faze William James himself. It was not for nothing that he saw the idea of an objective and fixed truth as a specter that must give way to expediency.

John Dewey (1859-1952) With John Dewey a yet different approach to pragmatism emerged— one that was not grounded in science (à la Peirce) or in personalistic psychology (à la James), but in social ethics.13 For Dewey regarded the scope 11

Thus James complains that a critic is “taking the word ‘true’ irrelatively, whereas the pragmatist always means ‘true for him who experiences the working:” (The Meaning of Truth [Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1975], p. 97)

12

William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 923.

13

For a comprehensive bibliography of Dewey’s prolific writings see The Philosophy of John Dewey ed. By Arthur Schilpp in The Library of Living Philosophers (Chicago: Northwestern University, 1939).

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of practicable intellectual effort as confined to determinations of utility for us humans as beings coexisting in organized societies. As Dewey saw it, ideas and beliefs are nothing but artificial thoughtinstruments, mere conveyers of man-made meanings, shaped by social processes and procedures. Dewey joins with the other pragmatists in emphasizing the primacy of experience and experiment over the indications of speculation and over the urgings of experience-abstractive theorizing. As he saw it, theoretical logic is a direly insufficient basis of knowledge because “such logic only abstracts some aspect of the existing course of events in order to reduplicate it as a petrified eternal principle by which to explain the very change of which it is the [static] formalization.”14 Truth is not a matter of logically static fixity; instead, it is that which gets endorsed and accepted by the community. Its sole validation is the sanction of social approbation and custom, and when those “truths” no longer satisfy social needs others are found to replace them. Truth resides in agreement: social consensus does not merely evidentiate truth, but is its creator.15 In this way, Dewey turned pragmatism into a more decidedly social direction. To be sure, Peirce too had looked to a community; but this was only the abstraction of an idealized long-run community of scientific inquirers. Dewey’s community, however, was the concrete society as it actually functions about us here and now. His enterprise was the improvement of that society, specifically its movement in the direction of a more perfect democracy. As he saw it, only in a healthy democracy will personal development achieve its best prospects and only enlightened individuals will operate a thriving democracy. Accordingly, Dewey regarded education—the training of an intelligent electorate—as a key requisite for a viable society. The natural Darwinism of cultural selection militates alike for social, cultural, and individual progress. Dewey viewed the human condition in terms of an ongoing process of communally beneficial selfdevelopment. 14

John Dewey, “Darwin’s Influence upon Philosophy,” The Popular Science Monthly, vol. 75 (1909), pp. 90.88.

15

The later Dewey backed away from this position. Thus in his reply to Arthur Murphy in The Philosophy of John Dewey ed. by Paul Schilpp (2nd ed., La Salle IL: Open Court, 1951) Dewey endorses the stronger classical doctrine. Discussing his earlier theories that “Scientific conceptions are not a revelation of prior and independent reality” in The Quest for Certainty (New York: Minton Balch, 1929, p. 165), Dewey now indicates that the negative emphasis belongs on “revelation” and not on “prior and independent reality” (op. cit., pp. 560-565).

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John Dewey, like Peirce before him, saw inquiry as a self-corrective process whose procedures and norms must be evaluated and revised in the light of subsequent experience. But Dewey regarded this reworking as a social and communal process proceeding in the light of values that are not (as with Peirce) connected specifically to science (viz. prediction and experimental control), but rather values that are more broadly rooted in the psychic disposition of ordinary people at large—the moral and aesthetic dimension now being specifically included. Peirce’s pragmatism is scientifically elitist, James’ is psychologically personalistic, Dewey’s is democratically populist. To be sure, Dewey here envisioned a community that sensibly acknowledges the findings of science. But this proved no problem for him because he saw the good society, the rational society, as more or less automatically geared to a commitment to scientific endeavors and principles. For all his rejection of metaphysics the 19th century vision of socio-cultural progressiveness was deeply rooted in Dewey’s mind. C. I. Lewis (1883-1964) C. I. Lewis and Rudolf Carnap were pragmatists of a stripe rather different from their predecessors. For in their hands, pragmatism came to focus not on issues of effectiveness in factual inquiry—let alone on satisfactions in the conduct of life—but rather on the acceptability of claims in formal systems of logic or mathematics. Not the experiential knowledge of everyday life or of natural science but the abstract truths of the formal sciences were the subject of their pragmatism. With Lewis, the fundamental fact that pragmatism had to address was the proliferation of different mathematical systems (different geometries, for example) and of different logical systems (such as classical, modal, and many-valued logic). As Lewis saw it, this meant that there is no one single right system among competitive rivals. For when pragmatic utility is our guide, here the question is not which system is correct but which system is optimal for the purposes at hand. The framework of Lewis’ reflections was already well formed before his 1929 magnum opus Mind and the World Order16, in which he proposed to project pragmatism into the domain of logic. A logical system, so he 16

C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order (New York: Dover Publications, 1956 reprint). But see also C. I. Lewis, “A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 20 (1923), pp. 169-77.

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maintained, is a purely formal structure—abstract and detached from sensory experience so that impersonal facts are irrelevant to its contents. Accordingly, contentions of the format “the thesis T obtains in the formalized logical system L” will be true analytically. But this of course pivots the issue of T’s actual acceptability upon that of L. And here Lewis took a pragmatic line, holding that we have to appraise the acceptability of entire systems on the pragmatic grounds of their efficacy with respect to the range of correlative purposes. As Lewis saw it, considerations of the format “The particular logical system L is the appropriate instrumentability with respect to a certain range of application” (e.g., “Intuitionistic logic is the proper instrument for developing arithmetic”) provide the pivot on which the acceptability of the theses at issue in such systems depends. Only on the basis of experience—by trying and seeing—can one validate such judgments. Pragmatic success is once again our standard, but now the experiential data at issue are not sensory facts but cognitive facts about abstract relationships, not success in accommodating observations but success in meeting the needs of efficient reasoning. And it is thus formal (inferential) rather than physical (experiential) practice that is at issue. Lewis extended this line of thought from a pragmatic validation of the a priori propositions of logic and mathematics to articulate also a neoKantian pragmatic account of the conceptual categories that afford the terms of reference for our thought about the world. He held that while it is indeed necessary to use a priori categories for the descriptive and explanatory characterization of experience, nevertheless these categories are not absolute and fixed but variable and capable of alteration or replacement in the light of our experience regarding what is useful and effective for these purposes.17 The categories are thus a priori with respect to any particular inquiry or group thereof—but not with absolutely, respect to our inquiriesin-general. On this basis, Lewis contended, the pragmatic approach represents the proper way to assess both the acceptability of logical and mathematical systems and that of the fundamental presuppositions and principles of empirical inquiry. And so, in refusing to follow James and Dewey into an enlarged pragmatism of success with lived experiences at large, Lewis returned to the Peircean idea of a strictly epistemic pragmatism geared to efficacy with respect to our specifically cognitive operations. Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) 17

50

Ibid.

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In focusing on logico-mathematical issues Lewis was followed by Rudolf Carnap, who explicitly acknowledged this indebtedness.18 Carnap maintained that the appropriateness (acceptability) of a formal system— say, classical vs. intuitionistic mathematics—lies in how effectively we can operate with the system at issue in the relevant functional context (calculation or mathematical demonstration, for example). Applicative utility is once again the key consideration here. In much the same spirit as that of Lewis, Carnap maintained that two sorts of issues arise in communicative contexts: system-external questions about the existence of the entities that are supposedly available as objects of discussion, and system-internal questions about the substantive features that are being attributed to such objects. Internal issues have factual answers that can be substantiated through the rules and procedures of the given language-framework; external issues relate to the initial choice of that framework itself. As Carnap saw it, those external issues relating to the adoption of a particular linguistic framework are subject to his socalled Principle of Tolerance: “We have in every respect complete liberty with regard to the forms of language. Everyone, that is, is free to choose the rules of his language, and thereby his logic, in any way he wishes.”19 Or at least this is so insofar as considerations of theoretical general principles go, for such a decision is not actually a “cognitive” or “factual” but rather is a practical decision that can (and should) be motivated by functional consideration of purposive efficacy such as simplicity, efficiency, and fruitfulness. To this extent, then, Carnap moved in the direction of pragmatism. But then he came to a sticking point. For while Carnap saw the choice among alternative frameworks as subject to constraints of rationality and was prepared to accept the finding of one framework’s being more efficient and effective than another relative to certain purposes, he was unwilling to move from classing choices in the spectrum better/worse to classing them as correct/incorrect—and not even in the contextualized mode of “correct for this particular application.” For Carnap, applicative efficacy was not evidence of appropriateness but was 18

See Carnap’s statement in E. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (LaSalle IL: Open Court, 1963), p. 861. This work contains a comprehensive bibliography of Carnap’s writings.

19

The Logical System of Language (London: Kegan Paul Trench, 1937), p. xv.

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the decisive factor in its own right. By thus totally disassociating the issues of utility and correctness, Carnap emptied pragmatic considerations of any evidential bearing upon matters in science or everyday life. Thus, for him, the superior utility of (for example) a framework of discussion based on the centrality of substantial things would not—even if established— support a claim that things/substances exist, and would not authorize truthattribution for any claims to reality here.20 Accordingly, Carnap remained a strict conventionalist: he did not operate a pragmatic epistemology but set the epistemic and the pragmatic dimensions into a diametrically opposed contrast with one another. Carnap’s pragmatism only warrants choice in matters of procedure and never provides for the substantiation of factual contentions, which, on his approach, one can never maintain as true but only as more or less probable. Pragmatic considerations here became a substitute rather than a basis for claims to matters of truth or existential fact. With Carnap a pragmatically oriented probability is all-predominant and matters of truth are consigned to oblivion. W. V. Quine (1908-2002) Quine’s pragmatism took a line that was, in a way, even more radical than Carnap’s. For with Quine the cognitive status of human languageformulated cognition as a whole—rather than that of some particular system or concept-framework—becomes the pivot upon which pragmatic considerations are to be hinged. To his mind, the issue of validation is uncompromisingly holistic. Rejecting Carnap’s probabilism Quine returned to the earlier evolutioninfluenced standpoint of Dewey. And he followed Dewey in his commitment to a pragmatic approach to language as an instrumentality of human communicative practice. As he himself put it: Philosophically I am bound to Dewey by the rationalism that dominated his last three decades. With Dewey I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with and that they are to be studied in the same empirical spirit that actuates natural science. There is no place for a priori philoso-

20

52

Rudolf Carnap, Introduction to Symbolic Logic and its Applications (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), p. 208.

PRAGMATISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY phy.21

Like Dewey before him, Quine rejected the idea of a somehow absolute foundation for knowledge. For him, the authorizing basis of any such theory must lie in its broader role in our cognition, and specifically in its contribution to our scientific view of the world’s modus operandi, recognizing the impracticability of claiming any absolutistic correspondence between a concept framework and the independent reality it purportedly depicts. Quine is first and foremost a “naturalist” in regarding science as a court of final appeal. As he sees it, natural science constitutes an inquiry into reality which, while fallible and corrigible, is not answerable to any suprascientific tribunal, and needs no further justification. Observation and the hypothetico-deductive method provide for all that we need within science and all that we need for validating our claims about science as well.22 And to this scientific naturalism Quine adds a Peirce-reminiscent touch of evolutionism in that for him scientific realism—the position that, as best we can possibly tell it, things really are as science depicts them to be—is simply part and parcel of our evolutionary imprinted cognitive endowment. “The very notion of an object at all, concrete or abstract, is a human contribution, a feature of our inherited approaches for organizing the amorphous matter of neural input.”23 But of course how we configure that “notion of an object” depends on the substantive state of things in the science of the day—a variable situation that turns on the comparative success of competing scientific theories. And so a decidedly pragmatic perspective— one that encompasses explanatory utility, fallibility, success in prediction and control, and the like—enters into Quine’s thought via his commitment to the primacy of scientific method. Thus for Quine, as for C. I. Lewis, our fundamental categories of thought, while indeed a priori in the local context of our particular investigations, are based a posteriori in the wider setting of our experience-guided inquiry-at-large, and can always be chal21

W. V. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 26.

22

W. V. Quine, Theories and Things (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 72.

23

W. V. Quine, “Structure and Nature,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 89 (1992), pp. 5-9 (see p. 6).

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lenged and changed under the pressure of enlarged experience.24 However, Quine’s approach to pragmatism has decided limitations. For as one of his expositor’s puts it, “Quine’s empiricism intervenes to assign a meaning to the term ‘pragmatic’ . . . . .pragmatism requires us to ensure that our beliefs are answerable to experience.”25 This looks altogether right-minded—in both senses of that term (i.e., both realistic and correct), although it sounds a good deal more like empiricism than pragmatism. However, one important qualification is in order. Quine’s own construction of “experience” is exceedingly narrow, taking only observational experience to count as such. Now that is all very well in matters of factual inquiry—i.e., of natural science. Here a realistic pragmatism must indeed look to the efficient and effective systematization of our observational experience (in the broadest sense of that term, with technologically mediated objection emphatically included. But of course for most of us—Quine perhaps excluded—human life and experience is (fortunately) not limited to matters of inquiry alone. Human experience also has its affective, social, aesthetic, and spiritual dimensions. Our minds do not yearn for observational information alone but for appreciation as well—else the scope for imagination would be greatly abridged. And so a sensible pragmatism must be sufficiently diversified and prismatic to take these other dimensions of experience into account. There is not only the issue of what proves to be efficient and effective in the interests of human knowledge, but in the interest of the other dimensions of human life as well.

Hilary Putnam (1926- ) Hilary Putnam embodies the continuity of Harvard’s pragmatist tradi24

See C. I. Lewis, “A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 20 (1923),pp. 169-77. Quine acknowledges Lewis’ influence in Perspectives in Quine ed. by R. B. Barrett and R. F. Gibson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 292. For a fuller account of Quine’s pragmatism see Leemon B. McHenry, “Quine’s Pragmatic Ontology,” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 9 (1995), pp. 147-58.

25

Christopher Hookway, Quine: Language, Experience, and Reality (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

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tion.26 As Putnam sees it, pragmatism’s salient idea is something that he (together with Wittgenstein, Rorty, and philosophical modernists generally) is prepared to endorse—namely that is makes no sense to try to get at “the actual truth” of things if this is taken to involve anything like the Kantian contrast between “how things are in themselves” and “how things appear to us humans.” Putnam has it that if this is what is at stake in the philosophical quest for truth, then the whole project must be abandoned because the very idea of such a deeper truth is nonsense upon stilts (to use Jeremy Bentham’s vivid expression), seeing that it is truth from our human point of view that is the only thing that could possibly be of concern for us. All this is decidedly reminiscent of Putnam’s philosophical hero William James. Moreover, Putnam’s approach to pragmatism also returns to the wider perspective of James, Mead, and Dewey rather than to the narrower focus on logic, language, and mathematics favored by C. I. Lewis and Carnap. He construes pragmatism as insisting upon the decisive role for normative appraisal of the quality of life as its livers experiences it. And so for Putnam, as for James and Dewey, pragmatism advances philosophy’s project of enlightenment as an organon for criticism of accepted ideas of all sorts on the basis of practical considerations. Putnam is highly effective at presenting Jamesian views in the contemporary idioms of philosophical discussion. He is outstanding among contemporary expositions in his ability to describe James thought in a way that at once renders it relevant to issues of contemporary debate and to highlight its philosophical creativity. Consider an example. In expounding his formula that truth is a matter of expediency—of success in application James is shockingly indecisive as to what exactly constitutes this sort of success—is it evidential adequacy, predictive efficacy, psychological congeniality, contextual fit and coherence, or what? To the frustration of his adherents and to the vexation of his interpreters, James will sometimes take the one line and sometimes the other. But here Putnam offers an ingenious resolution. A sensible pragmatism, he suggests, would not see this vacillation as a matter of inconsistency. It would, rather, exploit the idea that what is at issue is not an indecisive disjunction but a complex conjunction, and that true success “is a matter of satisfying these [multiple] desiderata si26

His principal discussion of the subject is in Pragmatism: An Open Question (Oxford UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1995). He also discusses James in several essays in his Realism with a Human Face (Harvard University Press, 1990)

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multaneously,” so that the issue becomes “a matter of trade-offs rather than final rules.”27 To his credit, Putnam seeks to free pragmatism from the anarchic relativism of the postmoderns. He writes: From the earliest of Peirce’s Pragmatist writings, Pragmatism has been characterized by antiscepticism . . . [even while conceding] that there are no metaphysical guarantees to be had that even our most firmly held beliefs will never need revision. That one can be both fallibilistic and antisceptical is perhaps the basic insight in American Pragmatism. (Pragmatism, pp. 20-21)

But while Putnam is emphatic in his desire that our cognitive theorizing should move away from scepticism to objectivistic realism under the aegis of a pragmatism of the life-enhancing sort that he favors, he is by no means as clear and detailed as one might wish on the questions of just how it will manage to do so. Richard Rorty (1931- ) Richard Rorty’s “pragmatism” is decidedly post-modern in its tendency to subjectivistic relativism. For as Rorty sees it, questions of truth and validity should not concern the philosopher at all: pragmatism insists “that one can be a philosopher precisely by being anti-Philosophical.”28 And despite his avowed attachment to Dewey (whom he deems one of the twentieth century’s three most important philosophers, along with Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein), the threads of pragmatic thought that Rorty weaves together into his own so-called “neopragmatism” are substantially nihilistic in tenor and tendency. For Rorty in effect pictures pragmatism as an essentially negative and deconstructionist position. According to him, pragmatism “says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about” (p. xiii). The pragmatist accordingly advocates the “post-Philosophical culture [of] the philosopher who has abandoned pretensions to [traditionalistic] Philosophy” (p. xl). Such a pragmatism abandons any idea of rational quality27

Pragmatism: An Open Question (op. cit.), p. 10.

28

Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xiii. The page references given in the text over the next few paragraphs are to this work.

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control on the processes of inquirers and question-resolving deliberations. As Rorty himself puts it: Let me sum up by offering a . . . characterization of pragmatism: it is the doctrine that there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones—no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow inquirers . . . . The pragmatist tells us that it is useless to hope that objects will constrain us to believe the truth about them, if only they are approached with an unclouded mental eye, or a rigorous method, or a perspicuous language. . . . The only sense in which we are constrained to truth is that . . . we can make no sense of the notion that the view which can survive all objections might be false. But objections— conversational constraints—cannot be anticipated. There is no method for knowing when one has reached the truth, or when one is closer to it than before.29

It is curious, however, to see how readily a doctrine that rejects “wholesale constraints” is willing to offer wholesale generalizations. For Rorty has it that “truth, on this view I am advocating, is the normal result of normal discourse,”30 while ignoring that discourse, normal or otherwise, takes us no further—even at best and most—than to what its participants happen to purport to be true. For to say that there are no rational constraints on the products in inquiry apart from those imposed by the conventions and practices of the inquirers is giving them unrealistically inflated credit. The community may agree by convention what words like “cat” and “mat”—or “just” and “unjust”—mean and what the accepted criteria for relating such terms to one another are to be. But once these matters of convention are settled, the issue of whether a cat is actually on the mat or whether selfserving deceit is unjust hinges on other matters—matters that relate to the world’s realities. To think that the former is the whole story whereas the latter is a negotiable irrelevancy is to take a stance that is, to put it mildly, problematic. Rorty writes: If we give up this hope [for getting at the truth of things in contexts of inquiry regarding nature’s ways] we shall lose what Nietzsche called “metaphysical comfort,” but we may gain a renewed sense of community. Our identification with our 29

Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (op. cit.), pp. 165-66.

30

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

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community—. . . our intellectual heritage—is heightened when we see this community as ours rather than nature’s, shaped rather than found, one among many which men have made. In the end, the pragmatists tell us, what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together in the dark, not our hope of getting things right. James, in arguing . . . that “the trail of the human serpent is over all” was reminding us that our glory is our participation in fallible and transitory human projects, not in our obedience to personal nonhuman constraints.31

When William James wrote that “Human arbitrariness has done away with the divine necessity of scientific logic,”32 he half regretted this supposed fact. But Rorty rejoices in it. For him, the desirable stance in that of the “ironists”—those “never quite able to take themselves seriously” because of a recognition of the limited and imperfect nature of their own cognitive positions. For Peirce’s fallibilism notwithstanding, commitment to doing the very best that we can manage in the circumstances makes good rational sense. Rorty’s dismissive “ironism” embraces the insouciant indifference of the standpoint that “hundred years hence it all won’t matter anyhow.” One recent defender of his position declares that “To many contemporary pragmatists, Rorty’s disinterest in the practical consequences of intellectual discourse—his valuing of a discourse that makes no difference— disqualifies his membership [in the pragmatic movement].”33 There is much to be said for this. 3. THE WRITERS PRESENT POSITION Rescher’s methodological pragmatism has it that while base-level issues about thought and action are to be resolved in terms of standards, those standards themselves are to be evaluated in terms of their efficacy and efficiency with respect to the teleology of the domain in question.34 To be 31

Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (op. cit.), pp. 166.

32

William James, Pragmatism (op. cit), p. 57.

33

Leonore Langsdorf and Andrew R. Smith in the Introduction of their anthology, Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of Communication (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 7.

34

On Rescher’s pragmatism see his Methodological pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), A Useful Inheritance (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), and Realistic Pragmatism (Albany, NY: SUNY press, 2000).

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sure, this matter of goal realization calls for different modes of implementation depending on the domain at issue. In the case of formal sciences like logic and mathematics, the superiority of one method over another may become manifest through purely theoretical considerations of problemsolving effectiveness in theoretical matters. Here we need never leave our armchairs. But with other enterprises—inquiry in the natural sciences, for example, or the management of political and public affairs—there is no substitute for experiencing the results of our actual efforts “out in the field,” so to speak. And—obviously—we have no inquiry-independent way of telling what this truth is so as to compare the products of our inquiries with it. Any attempt to appraise the adequacy of our theorizing on its own, purely theoretical terms is thus ultimately futile. And this indicates the need for a belief-independent control of the correctness of our theorizing, some theory-external reality principle to serve as a standard of adequacy.35 And just here is where pragmatism can come to the rescue by bringing methodology into the foreground. On this basis Rescher proposes to have pragmatism revert to its scientific roots in Peirce’s thought. To be sure, historical experience indicates there are various alternative approaches to determining “how things work in the world.” The examples of such occult cognitive frameworks as those of numerology (with its benign ratios), astrology (with its astral influences), and black magic (with its mystic forces) indicate that alternative explanatory frameworks exist, and that these can have very diverse degrees of merit. Now in the Western, Faustian36 intellectual tradition, the ultimate arbiter of rationality is represented by a very basic concept of knowledgewed-to-practice, and the ultimate validation of our beliefs lies in the combination of theoretical and practical success, with “practice” construed in its pragmatic and affective sense. Here the governing standards of scientific rationality are implicit in the description-transcending goals of explanation, prediction, and preeminently control over nature. (And thus the crucial factor is not, for example, sentimental “at-oneness with nature”— think of the magician vs. the mystic vs. the sage as cultural ideals.) It is the issue of whether or not our thought-guided actions actually achieve their intended goals that provides for a theory-external check on the adequacy of 35

Compare the discussion of the so-called Wheel Argument (diallelus) in Rescher’s Methodological Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), pp. 15-17 and passim.

36

Im Anfang war die Tat, as Goethe's Faust puts it.

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our theorizing. Such a pragmatic approach to science does not take an instrumentalistic stance that abandons the pursuit of truth and sees the practical issues of prediction and control as the sole goals of the enterprise. Rather, it sees praxis as paramount because there just is no prospect of any more direct alternative, any immediate comparison of these claims with the scienceindependent “real-truth” of things. The capacity of our cognitive tools to meet their theoretical goals can be monitored obliquely, by appraising their realization of our practical goals. The practical and purposive aspects of cognition thus comes to the fore. The governing quality controls of our mechanisms of inquiry—its methods, concepts, etc. that furnish the whole machinery by which we build up our world-picture (knowledge, epistêmê, science)—emerge as fundamentally pragmatic. We are led to the recognition that here effective praxis is the ultimate quality-control arbiter of acceptable theoria: that we must monitor the adequacy of our scientific knowledge by way of assessing the efficacy of its applications in guiding our expectations and actions in matters of prediction and control. And at this point Rescher brings rational selection upon the scene. For in a community of rational agents, there is bound to be a parallelism between applicative efficacy and substantiative justification. This circumstance has far-reaching ramifications, since pragmatism here becomes conjoined to evolutionism. And control is a pivotal factor here. To be sure, if a bounteous nature satisfied our every whim spontaneously, without effort and striving on our part, the situation would be very different. For then the beliefs which guide and canalize our activities would generally not come into play—they would remain inoperative on the sidelines, never being “put to the test.” There would then be no need for active (and thoughtguided) intervention in “the natural course of things” within an uncooperative (at best indifferent, at worst hostile) environment. But as things stand we are constantly called upon to establish varying degrees of “control over nature” to satisfy even our most basic needs (to say nothing of our virtually limitless wants). The developmental perspective and the pragmatic approach thus join together into a seamless whole. A continuous thread links together the entire tradition of realistic pragmatism in its conviction that the ongoing work of an enduring community of rationally competent inquirers will be selfmonitoring—that mistakes will be detected and reduced in the course of time. The guiding conviction is that the community will, over the course of time, learn how to improve its procedures of inquiry through the processes 60

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of inquiry itself so that rational inquiry is in this sense self-monitoring and self-corrective. And here we cannot reasonably look on nature as a friendly collaborator in our human efforts, systematically shielding us against the consequences of our follies and crowning our cognitive endeavors with a wholly undeserved success that ensues for reasons wholly independent of any actual adequacy vis-à-vis the intended range of purpose. And so, Rescher reaffirms Peirce’s grounding insight. Our cognitive methods are able to earn credit as giving a trustworthy picture of the world precisely because they evolve under the casual pressure of that world. In sum, science stands forth as superior in its claims to providing an appropriate inquiry method on grounds that are essentially pragmatic. And this pragmatic superiority of science as a resource in matters of effective description, explanation, prediction and control both manifests and serves to explain its emergence in cognitive evolution by rational selection.37

Further References Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphy, A History of Philosophy in America, Vol. 2 (New York: Capricorn Books, 1977). Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America: 1720-2000 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). Joseph Margolis, Reinventing Pragmatism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). John P. Murphy, Pragmatism From Peirce to Davidson (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990). Henry S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of American Pragmatism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968).

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This chapter was originally published in The Edinburgh Companion to 20th Century Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).

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Chapter Four PRAGMATISM AT THE CROSSROADS 1. THE GUIDING IDEA OF THE PRAGMATIC PROGRAM

A

noteworthy—and distinctly curious—aspect of contemporary American philosophy relates to the fate of “pragmatism,” which has undergone a remarkable deformation from its original conception. Many— indeed most—philosophers nowadays think of pragmatism as something radically different from what was originally at issue with this conception. And, oddly enough, this latter-day sort of pragmatism is not a “new, improved version” but a markedly inferior product. To be sure, when one surveys pragmatism’s historical development, one soon comes to realize that pragmatism is not a doctrine or theory, but a complex of diverse tendencies of thought that move in different directions. And this diversity—or even dissonance—occurs even where a single idea or issue is involved, such—for example—as the topic of truth in which we shall focus here. For it must be acknowledged that from the very outset there really has not been such a thing as “the pragmatic theory of truth.” Rather, that as A. O. Lovejoy argued in his classic 1908 paper on “The Thirteen Pragmatisms,” This dissonance has become increasingly clear over the subsequent decades, until today it is strikingly clear that pragmatism has come to a crossroad at which we are faced with two drastically opposed positions with regard to a pragmatic approach to truth. Classical pragmatism as envisioned by Charles Sanders Peirce was designed to provide a standard of objectivity, a test of the appropriateness of our factual beliefs. Its motivating rationale lay in the question: How are we to tell that our beliefs about the world—and our scientific claims above all—are objectively true and indeed (and even more fundamentally) that they are actually meaningful in characterizing reality in the way that we intend? Truth as traditionally conceived is a matter of agreement with reality (adaequatio ad rem), but of course we cannot tell what is really so independently of our beliefs, so as to be able to test these beliefs in terms of their agreement with this otherwise predetermined truth. However, as

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Peirce saw it, what we can do—and all that we can do—is to act on our beliefs and take note of the results. We can implement them in application to real-world conditions in the setting of ordinary life experience or, better yet, of scientific observation and experimentation, and then proceed to see if this provides for successful prediction of and effective control over the observed course of events. The obvious standard for the validation of our beliefs with respect to their claims to meaningfulness and truth lies in their capacity over the long run to convince rational inquirers of their cogency. And applicative efficacy is the best available means for doing this. Sensible believing is as such believing does. So, in effect, reasoned C. S. Peirce. The founding father of this quintessentially American tendency of thought accordingly held that pragmatism affords a cogent standard for assessing the merit of our cognitive productions (ideas, theories, methods, procedures)—a standard whose basis of validity reaches outside the realm of pure theory into the domain of real-world actuality by way of the successful practical applications and implementations of such thoughtinstruments upon issues that concern the scientific community of rational inquirers. The guiding idea of pragmatism—in relation to knowledge, at any rate—is that propositional knowledge-that not only enjoys no priority over operational how-to knowledge but even stands subordinate to it. The crux of our knowledge of things does lie in their descriptive characterization; rather it is a matter of knowing what to do with them—how they can function in the setting of our own doings and dealings. Even theoretical knowledge itself is something that has to be discovered, formulated, confirmed, systematized—and all this stands subject to processes of the howto-do-it sort. In Peirce’s hands, pragmatism certainly did not endorse the abandonment of principles; on the contrary, its task was to provide a high road to the experientially mandated confirmation and consolidation of principles on the basis of the effectiveness of their applicability in practice. Accordingly, pragmatism was intended in the mind of its originator as a doctrine for the rational substantiation of knowledge claims—in the realm of empirical knowledge above all. The root idea was that (1) the meaning of term or conception is constituted by the use that we make of it in the course of our communicative operations and other activities, and (2) it is appropriate and warranted to class a proposition involving such conceptions as true insofar as and to the extent that such applications are successful and effective in enabling us to realize the correlative aims and purposes. Alike by training and disposition, Peirce was a natural scientist. For him the pragmatically pivotal factors of “successful application” and “pur64

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posive efficiency” were geared to physical operations in the natural world, with the activity of a scientific laboratory seen as the principal model. For Peirce, then, what mattered was exactly the sort of pragmatic “success” at issue with the applicative efficacy at stake in science—success at prediction and control. Practice (praxis) is to serve as the arbiter of theory (theoria). Not personal satisfaction but objective efficacy is what matters for fixing opinion in a community of rational inquirers. And so, as it originally took shape in Peirce’s thought, pragmatism was certainly not designed to be at odds with general principles. Rather, it took the ingenious line of using applicative efficacy—functional effectiveness, if you will—as the adequacy standard for our cognitive resources. The leading idea was that those principles which prove to be most successful in the course of utilization and application are (for that very reason) to be taken to be optimal. Practice, in sum, is to monitor theory: theory is to be evidentiated through its capacity to provide for successful product. We are not to abandon principles for the sake of expediency in the manner of a socalled “pragmatic” politician, but rather to insist on principles—albeit on exactly those expedient principles of process that prove themselves to be systematically effective in application. This, roughly speaking, is how pragmatism stood in the thought of C. S. Peirce.1 2. THE JAMESEAN TRANSFORMATION AND ITS AFTERMATH Various later pragmatists, however, saw the matter in a very different light. They envisioned subjective satisfactions rather than objectively de1

One contemporary philosopher who acknowledges and prizes this harder, more rigoristically and “tough-minded” Peircean sort of pragmatism is Susan Haak, whose articles on the subject go back to 1976. See her papers: “The Pragmatists Theory of Truth.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 27 (1976), pp. 231-49; “Pragmatism and Ontology: Peirce and James.” Revue Internationale de Philosophy, vol. 31 (1977), pp. 377-400; “Can James’s Theory of Truth be Made More Satisfactory?” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. 20 (1984), pp. 269-78; “Pragmatism,” in Nichlas Bunnin and E. P. Tsui-James, eds. The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), pp. 643-61; “Concern for Truth: What it Means, Why it Matters,” Annuals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 775 (1996), pp. 57-63; “The First Rule of Reason,” in Jacqueline Brunning and Paul Forster, eds., The Rule of Reason: The Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 24160; “‘We Pragmatists . . .’ : Peirce and Rorty in Conversation,” Partisan Review, vol. 64 (1997), pp. 91-107.

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terminable functional efficacy as being the aim of the enterprise. It is instructive to examine how this deconstructive transformation of pragmatism has come about and to consider its implications and ramifications—as well as the prospects for its avoidance. William James in particular had an agenda very different from that of Peirce. He was concerned less with the modus operandi of nature than with the psychology of humans, and his interests focused upon matters of affectivity and religion rather than upon the physical machinations of the natural world. In his characteristically jaunty way he wrote: Any idea that will carry us prosperously from any part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor, is true for just so much.”2

What James cared about in articulating his pragmatism was “success” in living—leading a satisfying life in terms of personal happiness and contentment. And James gave this idea a distinctly subjectivistic construction: what makes you happy might well be something quite different from what makes me happy. For James, pragmatism was accordingly a way of loosening things up. Where Peirce focused on the established goals of a communal project of natural sciences—rational inquiry into objective facts— James, by contrast, took a personalistic approach geared to individual psychological satisfaction. Still, when G. E. Moore mocked William James’ contention that “true ideas pay”3 he was so focused on what people might ordinarily mean by saying this sort of thing that he did not concern himself sufficiently with what James actually did mean, ignoring altogether the cautions and qualification that James attaches to assertions of this tendency. The sort of satisfactions that mattered to James were not typified by the crass euphoria that accompanied the conclusion of a profitable business deal. James was decidedly reluctant to say the sorts of things with which Moore and his friend Russell charged him. And of course Peirce was even further removed from this sort of position. For pragmatists in the tradition of Peirce, the truthindicative “success” of proposition is certainly not a matter of economic 2

William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 34.

3

G. E. Moore, “William James’ Conception of Truth” Philosophical Studies )London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 123-46.

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affluence or social acclaim or public popularity. After all, how pragmatic considerations should be brought to bear is something that very much depends. It itself is a pragmatic issue where considerations of effectiveness are paramount. Clearly if the question at hand relates to the conduct of a happy life, then matters of life-satisfaction can and should be brought into it. But if the question at hand is one of the truth of historical claims then the matter stands differently. It might be eminently distressing to discover that grandfather was a horsethief but this is not a consideration that bears on the truth of this contention. Still, while Peirce’s pragmatism looked to applicative efficacy as an acid test of impersonal adequacy—an individual-transcending reality principle able to offset the vagaries of personal reactions—various later “pragmatists” followed William James’ lead in turning their backs on this pursuit of universalized objectivity. For Peircean pragmatism’s generalized concern with “what works out for anyone (for humans in general) by impersonal standards” they substituted a subjectivistic egocentrism of “what works out for us”—those of some limited in-group—in our own subjective assessment. In their hands the defining objective that gave the pragmatic tradition its initiating impetus—the search for objective and impersonal standards—now shattered into a fragmentation of communities in the parochial setting of limited concerns. There are no person-indifferently true statements about the world; the adequacy of any way of construing it is relative to an individual’s particular make-up and subjective aims. In this way, so Peirce himself already believed, James hijacked and—as Peirce thought—corrupted pragmatism.4 Its founder to the contrary not withstanding, pragmatism assumed a life of its own. As James already exemplified, pragmatism was to be well beyond its inaugurating ideas and interests to develop in very different, and decidedly less objectivistic directions. Nor did this process stop with William James. In recent years, pragmatism has been further transmogrified by theorists who have quite other axes to grind. In their hands too, it has become something very different from its Peircean original—an instrument not for pursuing objective validity but rather one for demolishing the very idea of objectivity in these matters. In this way, pragmatism has been transformed step by step with postmodern theorists from William James to Richard Rorty into a means for authorizing a free and easy “anything goes” paro4

Peirce even proposed to re-name his doctrine as “pragmaticism” to distance it from what James was up to.

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chialism that casts objectivity to the winds. We have here a total dissolution—a deconstructionism or indeed destruction—of the Peircean approach that saw the rational validity of intellectual artifacts to reside in the capacity to provide effective guidance in matters of prediction, planning, and intervention in the course of nature. 3. POSTMODERN PRAGMATISM AND ITS CONTRARY The long and short of it is that two importantly different versions of epistemic pragmatism must then be distinguished: The first “soft” version is deflationary and deconstructionist. Its motto is “Forget about truth and focus on praxis.” It is pointless to think of truth as correspondence to reality because, after all, we have no way to get at reality independently of what we think to be true. We must change our view of the nature of truth: truth is simply a matter of expediency—of what we find to be efficient in practice. In sum—abandon truth as traditionally understood and concern yourself with what is expedient. This soft pragmatism is, in substance, the position of such pragmatic philosophers as William James, John Dewey (in some of his moods), and Richard Rorty. But there is also a very different, “hard” version of pragmatism. This position insists on retaining the traditional conceptions of truth as adequation to fact (adaequatio ad rem) and maintains the traditional definition of the concept in its gearing to truth-reality coordination. And it accordingly regards the role of effective praxis in a very different light—not as governing the meaning of truth, but merely as affording an effective test criterion for our estimates in matters of factual truth. It views the relation of the sort of efficacy we can determine here and now and “the actual truth” as evidential and epistemic. The applicative efficacy of our beliefs is seen and the best-available standard we have in forming our estimates of what the truth of the matter happens to be. So here the recourse to praxis does not come to abolish and supplement a concern for truth as traditionally understood but to underpin and support it. It is a theory that does not enjoin us to abolish “the quest for truth” but rather to guide us on its rational pursuit. This very different sort of position is at issue with the pragmatism of such philosophers as C. S. Peirce, C. I. Lewis, and the present writer. As these considerations indicate, pragmatism’s development has seen an ever widening split between a soft version of the posits that regards this position as a doorway to flexibility and variability—to cognitive relativity 68

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and pluralism—and a hard version that sees the position as a source of stability, a pathway to cognitive security and uniformity. The latter is the pragmatism of C. S. Peirce, C. I. Lewis, and, among contemporaries, of Hilary Putnam, Susan Haak, and the present writer; the former is the pragmatism of William James, F. S. C. Schiller, and Richard Rorty. Although they share a common label, the two approaches represent diametrically opposed tendencies of thought. The soft version of pragmatism is inexorably drawn to the Jamesean approach of “what works for the satisfaction of people’s variable wishes and preferences.” Hard pragmatism, by contrast, is concerned with what is efficiently/effective for the satisfaction of universal needs (general human desiderata). The one views the aim of the enterprise as a matter of loosening things up, of overcoming delimiting restraints; the other as a matter of tightening things up, of providing for and implementing rationally acceptable standards of impersonal cogency and appropriateness. Soft pragmatism accordingly takes roughly the following line: The core of pragmatism is utilization of the standard of “what works.” But this splinters apart when we add the question: For whom? Different people have different purposes—different needs, preferences, and goals. They have a different personality-structure (as per William James’ tough-minded and tender-minded). And much the same is the case with different groups. Accordingly, pragmatism countenances a live-and-let-live multiplicity of views that is as broad and flexible as the range of human idiosyncrasy and cultural variation.

Such a pragmatism looks to the doctrine as a means of loosening up our thinking—of asserting its idiosyncratic and parochial diversity. It seeks to liberate our thought from impersonal constraints in the interests of achieving an outcome whose acceptability is subjectivistic, personalistic, and relativistic. The crux of such a free-wheeling (“postmodernist”) pragmatism lies in its abandonment of the ideal of objectivity—its dismissal of the traditional theory of knowledge’s insistence upon judging issues by impersonal or of any rate person-indifferent standards. For the objective issue of efficacy in the pursuit of a generic even universal project, this approach to pragmatism substitutes the achievement of the idiosyncratic satisfactions of a person or group. Thus relativized to matters of individual taste, pragmatic efficacy in now viewed as a matter of either personal preference or social convention—the mores of the tribe. In effect, such a position takes roughly the following line:

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Nicholas Rescher • Collected Papers II Since truth stands coordinate with reality as it is—and not just as we think it to be—we have no access way to the truth as such. Ergo—the whole idea should be abandoned. Truth is a mere chimera—an unrealistic, situatable, utopian unsuitable fiction. Let us concern ourselves with the results of implementing our beliefs and abandon the while issue of “truth” and “fact.” Truth and fact are illusions of innocence—akin to the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. The idea of “the truth” as such is at best a convenient fiction and at most a misleading illusion.

And this is just the starting point. For from here it is but a short step to an even more radical destination. Instead of addressing the issue of the truth of our beliefs we should concern ourselves with “what works.” It is the “cash value” of our beliefs in terms of their capacity to underwrite successful action that should concern us. And here “success” is a matter of meeting our human wishes and desires. So in the end successor surrogate “truth”—is something man-made since the issue is that of what is serviceable to our purposes and ends.

This, then, is for deconstructionist pragmatism. What it proposes to do is, in sum, to abandon the classic view of that as adequation to fact and shift to a surrogate conception of serviceability to human purposes and desires. In contrast to this soft and deconstructive pragmatism, the hard or reconstructive version stands diametrically opposed to these disintegrative tendencies. It sees pragmatism’s concern for efficacy as a means of substantiation, solidification, and objectification. The pragmatists of the right take roughly the following line: Pragmatism is concerned with what works—with the effective and efficient achievement of purpose. And the purposes at issue are not idiosyncrasies of individuals, but rather those collective, across-the-board human enterprises whose rationale is rooted in the nature of the human condition at large. Our empirical knowledge, in particular, is concerned with the achievement of active (interactionistic) and passive (predictive) control over nature. Those ways of proceeding which prove themselves effective and efficient here are ipso facto substantiated, so that people engaged in the project are rationally impelled to adopt them. We may propose, but nature disposes—it is reality not we ourselves that is the arbiter of what works in relation to our actions in the world. Pragmatism is a road that leads not to subjectivity but to objectivity; it speaks not for relativistic preferences but for objective constraints.5 5

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The author’s fullest defense of this version of pragmatism is in his Methodological Pragmatism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977).

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Such an approach looks to pragmatism as a “reality principle” that imposes rather than abolishes constraints and limitations. Whether the key opens the lock or jams it or whether the mushroom nourishes or kills us is not dependent on the predilections of people but on the modus operandi of impersonal nature in a way that is in practice determinable by anyone and everyone. Its emphasis is on effectiveness in goal attainment. What actually works for the realization of human needs is, after all, something independent of our idiosyncratic wants and preferences. Soft pragmatism by contrast is oriented to the local and personal. By contrast, a pragmatism of the right is oriented towards the global and universal, seeking to reach out beyond parochial limits towards the community of rational people at large. Its position is that expediency in relation to the teleology of science—explanation, prediction, and control, above all— constitutes our best operating criterion for the truth of a belief. And it takes this line because it holds that nature knows no favorites—that in matters of belief and action a decision process that is geared to the impersonal standard of successful applications provides an acid test for the objective cogency which alone affords a correct view of the world and its ways. You can choose your goals, but the effectiveness of the means for their realization is wholly outside your control. Whether those ideas and beliefs actually work or not—whether the engine starts or the bulb lights—is not a matter of social custom but of the world’s impersonal ways. Hard pragmatism accordingly pivots on a self-subsistent and person-indifferent reality principle—its cutting edge lies not with people’s idiosyncratic convictions but with the world’s ways as themselves in principle determinable through rational inquiry. Such a position has its roots in C. S. Peirce’s commitment to the idea that, given that our intellectual mechanisms are part and parcel of our evolutionary heritage, it is clear that the prime function of thought is to facilitate effective action in the service of our nature-mandated wants and needs. This harder, less wishy-washy form of pragmatism is accordingly characterized by four key features: (1) It adopts an objectivistic stance that averts the fragmentation of subjectivistic relativism. (2) It is geared universalistically to the needs and interests of human beings at large, and not just to the wants of some small-scale contingently constituted subgrouping (let alone the idiosyncratic preferences of individuals). Accordingly, (3) it locates the crux for the quality control of our cognitive proceedings not in the sphere of diversified human wishes and desires but in the impersonal 71

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dealings of nature in their (often unwelcome) impact upon us so that pragmatic “success” pivots on the impersonal issue of functional efficacy in the achievement of objectives mandated for us by the inexorable demands of a world not of our own designing—something that we clearly do not make up as we go along but that lies in the objective nature of things.6 Finally, (4) it places emphasis on an impersonally normative rationality that enables it to implement this pursuit of objectivity. On this basis, pragmatists of the harder school tend to follow Peirce into an adherence to metaphysical realism. As they see it, existence precedes knowledge: inquiry does not engender reality but rather yields products that are crucially conditioned by its independent operations. Beliefs that issue from a properly coordinated inquiry are in substantial measure constrained by conditions and circumstances that are themselves beliefindependent. The two pragmatisms are diametrically opposite in purport and intention. Soft pragmatism wants to abandon the classical idea of inquiry as the paramount of truth. For soft pragmatism truth is an illusion, an unrealizable figment of the imagination. There is no such thing as truth, all we can ever achieve are convenient fictions. By contrast, with hard pragmatism the classic idea of truth remains in place. Success in application is in a substitute for truth but serves as one of the key touchstones by which we decide its presence. As concerns truth what we have here is a pragmatism that purposes to be not deconstructive but constructive.

6

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It is important in this connection to note that many of the projects in which we engage are ones that we confront as part of the non-optimal realities of our situation in this world rather than ones that we voluntarily select: they are given rather than chosen.

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4. A RETURN TO THE PEIRCEAN ROOTS Richard Rorty’s post-modern version of pragmatism is particularly radical in this regard. With Rorty, pragmatism collapses into a free-wheeling speculative free-for-all: Let me sum up by offering a . . . final characterization of pragmatism: it is the doctrine that there are no constraints or inquiry save conversational ones—no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, of its language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow inquirers.7

On such a view, clearly, the idea of constraints or standards that root in consideration of impersonal cogency drops altogether from view. The original Peircean insight that the applicative efficacy of its products constitute an objective quality-control standard for our cognitive proceedings is consigned to limbo. Pragmatism is no longer a impersonal standard of objective cogency but an instrumentality of conversational etiquette. In a recent essay Rorty writes that “it is essential to my view that we have no prelinguistic consciousness to which language need be adequate.”8 This may be true enough, but only because it aims at that comparatively easy target: “prelinguistic consciousness.” Yet if for this we substantiate “language-independent constraints” the situation is no longer quite that simple. And it is exactly to these language-detached realities—rainstorms and heatwaves, airplane crashes and dam collapses, and such-like events and occurrences and processes that pragmatism concerns itself. It is just at this point that there is a parting of the ways between the two modes of pragmatism. Pragmatism of the left views our scientific knowledge as a mere human contrivance, an unfettered invention devised for practical purposes that it serves more or less well, but without any claims to actual or approximate truth. Pragmatism of the right, by contrast, rejects such negativism and in its place substitutes a fallibilism that takes our scientific knowledge to represent the best currently available estimate of the actual truth of things. It maintains the linkage of scientific assertion to truth 7

Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 165.

8

Richard Rorty “The Contingency of Language” in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 3-22 (see p. 22).

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via the idea of rationally warranted claims to being true. It was, after all, only on the basis of some rather confused thinking that William James was able to take his distinctly cavalier attitudes about truth in saying that “truth is made, just as health, wealth, and strength are made.”9 Consider a truth on the order of “Lead is heavier than copper.” Are such truths indeed man-made? What certainly is man-made is the conception of lead, copper, and weight. Those English words and the ways in which they collect things together are human artifacts. But once those ideas that we characterize as “meanings” are in place, the rest of the situation— i.e., the fact that lead outweighs copper—is actually outside the sphere of human control. At that point, however—after those communicative conventions are in place—the rest of the story is a matter of the world’s ways. Neither our piety nor our wit can have any influence from here on in. Those “meanings” are up to us, but the “facts” that we are able to formulate by their means are beyond our power. They are something we do not make but at best learn or discover. When James says that “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by event,”10 he no longer maintains the needful distinction between the discovery of a fact on the one side, and on the other the fact that is discovered. In the end, then, there is no question that pragmatism at large encompasses a spectrum of positions, and Table 1 gives a survey of them in order of their placement in the softness/subjectively spectrum of increasing “hardness,” so that descending order reflects the movement from left to right that has been at issue in the present discussion. ___________________________________________________ Table 1 FORMS OF PRAGMATISM • Individuality/Subjectivistic Pragmatism — Voluntaristic [James] — Personalistic [Schiller] • Social/Communitarian Pragmatism — The political community [Dewey] 9

William James, Pragmatism (op. cit.), p. 104.

10

Ibid., p. 97.

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— The ideal community (rational/ ultimate-scientific) [Peirce] • Functionalistic Pragmatism (an objectivistic pragmatism of the right as sketched above) ___________________________________________________ 5. SUMMATION Yet what advantages does that harder objective pragmatism enjoy—just where do its claims to superiority lie? The answer here turns on its capacity to deal effectively with the sorts of objections to which pragmatism has traditionally been subject, prominently including the following three: 1. Pragmatism is too indefinite, equivocal, and many-sided to constitute a definite philosophical position: there is not one pragmatic philosophy; there are many. (A. O. Lovejoy) 2. A Peirce-style pragmatism to truth is too closely geared to science: it leaves other important domains of human experience out of account. (William James) 3. Pragmatism is too “materialistic,” too grossly “American” in its emphasis on success and practical efficacy; it is the philosophical equivalent of dollar imperialism. (Numberless European critics) Let us examine these objections more closely to see how they can be dealt with in the setting of rightist pragmatism's objectivistic perspective. The first objection goes back to Arthur Lovejoy's provocative 1908 paper on “The Thirteen Pragmatisms,” which stressed that pragmatism suffers a serious identity crisis.11 Lovejoy complained that there seem to be as many pragmatisms as pragmatists—and perhaps even more if he was right regarding the equivocation at work among pragmatist thinkers. To all appearances, pragmatism is not a unified theory but a grab bag of very different doctrines which bear only remote similarities to one another. There is no question that, from the standpoint of the present deliberations, Lovejoy's classical objection still holds good. Indeed all the more so, seeing that the spectrum of pragmatist theses and doctrines has even ex11

A. O. Lovejoy, “The Thirteen Pragmatisms,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol 5 (1908), pp. 5-12 and 29-39.

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panded since his day. It is clearer than ever that pragmatism as a whole is a tendency that comprises a collection of rather different doctrines and that if one is to be a pragmatist one must make a choice among them. But of course it constitutes no valid objection to any one particular version of pragmatism that there exist alternatives to it! The existence of an inadequate pragmatism does not impede the prospect of an adequate version of the theory. No real shortcoming is at issue here that need faze and pragmatist who maintains the tenability not of pragmatism-in-general, but of one particular version of the doctrine. We next turn to the William-James-style objection that a classical (Peircean) pragmatism is too narrow and that its focus on the epistemic success of factual theories in engendering consensus through effective prediction and application leaves the whole normative-idealeological sector of faith and morals out of account. As James has it, Peirce's more narrowly focused pragmatism geared to success in the specifically cognitive area is simple too restrictive in its operation. The success at issue must (so James insisted) be construed in its broadest sense, as relating to the “pursuit of happiness” in general, and so also extends to the affective area of human feeling and satisfactions. But this position is deeply problematic. Already in 1919, Bertrand Russell, who then knew pragmatism only in its Jamesean version, urged exactly the objection that troubled Peirce himself. This is that “success” and “working out” in cognitive and above all in scientific contexts relates to effective experiential/discordant prediction and control in relation to observational matters, while James understands “working” on the very different sense that the effects of believing something are good in relation to affective, emotional, and psychological issues.12 This, of course, is something very different from what Peirce had in view—and one whose bearing on the matter of actual truth is, if anything, rather tenuous, as in fact James himself later ultimately came to recognize when he acknowledged that he had earlier on confused “consequences of have ideas per se and consequences of ideas qua believed by us.”13 12

Bertrand Russell, “William James’ Conception of Truth” in Philosophical Essays (New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1910), pp. 127-49.

13

Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (2 vol's; Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1935), pp. 481. This objection goes back at least to A. O. Lovejoy's “The Thirteen Pragmatisms,” The Journal of Philosophy, Sociology, and Scientific Methods, vol. 5 (1908), pp. 1-39.

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In any case, doubtful whether the "success" geared to desire-satisfaction that James had in view can indeed serve his objective of providing an appropriate test for principles of ethics and religion, seeing how questionable is the thesis that the satisfaction of our desires here and now is actually the object of such an enterprise. But even apart from this issue, the fact remains that while a classical epistemic pragmatism aimed at a criteriology for meaning and truth may indeed reflect a limitation of pragmatism, this does not mean that it is thereby defective. The circumstance that a religious pragmatism may be in difficulty is no objection to cognitive pragmatism. There is no reason why a pragmatist should not, like anyone else, proceed one step at a time. There is no rational objection to any narrowing of scope that is required in the interests of adequacy. Here, as elsewhere, the use of limited claims betokens not their futility but of their constructive precision. There yet remains the "European" objection to pragmatism's supposed reflection of "Yankee" dedication to the ideal of the "self-made man" with its focus on a successful pursuit of crass, materialistic ends. Europeans (and especially Germans) often maintained in response to pragmatism that philosophy cannot properly pivot on people's commonplace wants and base desires; it must be geared towards elevated ideas and higher ideals. To hinge philosophical deliberations upon concrete and practical issues is to degrade the subject.14 Now this sort of thing is a conceivable objection to a Jamesean expansion of a psychological-satisfaction pragmatism into the domain of faith and morals. Conceivable—but certainly arguable. For it can and should be argued that pragmatic "success" can encompass merely crass materialistic well-being but also the realization of higher values—not Epicurean or utilitarian happiness, but rather the sort of higher-level satisfaction at issues with Aristotelian rational contentment (reflective satisfaction, eudaimonia). But be this as it may, the complaint at issue is clearly no sensible objection to a classical (Peirceanly objectivistic) pragmatism of a criteriology of factual truths, where "success" over the correlatively narrower range of relevant purpose (viz. the scientific desiderata of prediction and effective 14

Thus Martin Heidegger asserted that “Dewey is not worthwhile; his thought lacks philosophical substance” (Dewey ist nicht die Mühe wert weil er ohne eigene philosophische Substanz ist). And he maintained that: “Americanism . . . is an as-yetuncomprehended species of the gigantic . . . . . The American interpretation of Americanism by means of pragmatism still remains outside the metaphysical realm”. The End of Philosophy tr. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 99.

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application) that is clearly appropriate, given what is at issue in matters of scientific inquiry. The salient consideration, then, is that an objectivistic pragmatism of the right is well situated to meet and overcome the traditionally prominent objections to which pragmatism has been subjected over the years. 6. THE TURN TO METHODOLOGICAL PRAGMATISM There yet remains, however, another rather more subtle objection addressed specifically to the classical pragmatism's practicalistic approach to matters of meaning and truth. This objection turns on the contention that a pragmatic theory of truth is defeated by the fact that applicative success is achievable without getting it right—that the application and implementation of an erroneous belief can—nevertheless—yield success, and that applicatively successful theories will not ipso facto be true. In Bertrand Russell's hands, this criticism of the pragmatists was bolstered by various quaint examples—among them this: "Dr. Dewey and I were once in the town of Changsha during an eclipse of the moon; following immemorial custom, blind men were beating gongs to frighten the heavenly dog, whose attempt to swallow the moon is the cause of the eclipses. Throughout thousands of years, this practice of beating the gongs has never failed to be successful; every eclipse has come to and end after a sufficient prolongation of the din."15

In such cases it is not the epistemic merit of the beliefs at issue, but rather, luck alone to which the pragmatic successes are to be attributed. Perhaps, then, pragmatism's truths are no more than Nietzschean "errors that we can get by with in this life." After all, we do sometimes find ourselves in the happy position that it can readily occur that all goes well in circumstances where we are far off the mark—where success in applications prevails despite our mistakes. You need nourishment. And nature confronts you with something and asks "Is it edible?" in circumstances where success hinges on getting this right. You say "yes" because you think it is a pear. You are wrong—it is an apple. But since apples too are edible, "all's well that ends well." Still, it is certainly not the case that what you are dealing with is approximately an apple. But the crucial point is that you are wrong in ways that are (ex hypothesi) immaterial to the application 15

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“Dewey's New Logic,” in P. Schlipp (ed.), The Philosophy of John Dewey (New York, 1939), pp. 143-56.

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in question—this item is edible. Your error just does not matter for the question in view. After all, Ptolemaic astronomy underwrote many successful applications, but this does not show that it is true. All it means is that there is a better theory (Newtonian astronomy) that explains how it was able to achieve those "unmerited" successes. Galenic medicine with its complex congeries of humors actually enjoyed many therapeutic successes in its prescriptions and treatments. But that does not establish its claims to truth. (All we can say is that there is a superior theory—modern scientific medicine—which can be used to explain how it is that those Galenic remedies were therapeutically useful.) To overcome this eminently cogent-seeming objection to cognitive pragmatism it will be necessary—and sufficient—to make a transition from thesis pragmatism to method pragmatism. This stratagem of a methodological perspective means that instrumental/pragmatic considerations are to be deployed not on theses at all (be they of particular or of generalized bearing), but rather upon the methods and procedures by which the acceptance of theses is validated. The justificatory situation comes to be very different here. For methodological pragmatism does not look to individual theses but deploys the pragmatistic standard as a validating resource for those generalized instrumentalities. Accordingly, an inquiry procedure is fundamentally methodological in character: it seeks to provide a substantiate method, a logico-epistemological procedure for warranting acceptance of certain propositions. After all, working well—that is, manifesting effectiveness and efficiency in discharging the tasks for which it is designed—is the key standard for the rational evaluation of methods. The justification of the cognitive modus operandi represented by an inquiry procedure is thus seen in standardly instrumental—i.e., purposive—terms. On this approach, then, the linkage between pragmatic utility and the truth of theses is broken apart, and methods are inserted into the gap that opens up. Pragmatic consideration are not to be brought to bear on theses directly. The relationship becomes indirect and mediated: a specific knowledge claim is supported by reference to a method, which in its turn is supported on pragmatists lines. Methodological pragmatism in the context of cognitive methods becomes a matter of effectiveness for the attainment of specified cognitive ends—specifically the classic quartet of description, explanation, prediction, and control. This mediation of methods between pragmatic considerations and thesis-acceptance is central to, and indeed definitive of, the specifically methodological pragmatism at issue here. After all, an inquiry procedure is by 79

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its very nature a method having a uniquely vast range and comprehensiveness: it represents an effectively boundless methodology for the verification of theses. These considerations lay bare a critically important aspect of the generality of the such a methodological approach to pragmatism—an approach whose generality is crucial to its capacity to overcome the shortcomings inherent in thesis-pragmatism. By its very nature as such, a thesisoriented pragmatism cannot afford to concede possible discrepancies between success and truthfulness. But a methodological pragmatism is something else again. Theses perish in unfavorable circumstances, but methods can live on to fight another day. For the success of a method is a factor whose systematic nature gives it great probative weight in spite of occasional failings. A cognitive methodology is something so general and so open-ended in its orientation that gratuitously lucky success in the implementation of its products on a systematic basis can be ruled out as a genuine prospect. And so, to summarize. The most serious of the problems and difficulties that pragmatism has encountered during the century of its existence all issue from the same basic circumstance: an ill-advised departure from the original Peircean concern for purposive adequacy as the hallmark of rational cogency. Not only can a return to this concern for applicative efficacy in matters of inquiry and practice protect pragmatism against the sorts of objections that have become prominent in the subsequent philosophical dialectic, but in its recorrelation to methods and principles it can also countervail against the presently fashionable postmodernist disintegration of pragmatism into relativistic vacuity. As these deliberations indicate, three steps are needed to arrive at a viable version of pragmatism: • With Peirce one should construe pragmatic “success” as success in the essentially epistemic sector of effective prediction, explanation, and control. Affective success in the conduct of everyday life affairs is not the issue. • The sort of success to which one should look in developing an objectivistic pragmatism in the epistemic domain is neither an individual’s personal success nor a particular group’s success in the management of collective affairs. Rather, it is a person-indifferent or impersonal success in scientific matters (effective prediction, explanation, and control). 80

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• However, one should adopt a method-oriented rather than a thesisoriented version of the doctrine: The objects of pragmatic assessment must be the methods of inquiry rather than individual contention. The present-day crisis of pragmatism be met effectively by adopting not a revisionary but a reconstructive understanding of what pragmatism is all about—one that keeps the doctrine close to its Peircean roots in the criteriology for assessing meaning and truth in matters of fact regarding the world’s ways. That putative crisis does not, in the end, militate against the pragmatic program’s viability, but rather provides a productive occasion for sharpening our understanding of the direction in which the program can and should be developed.16

16

This chapter was originally published in the Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society, vol. 41 (2005).

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Chapter Five IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE AND ONTOLOGY: A PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE ON PHILOSOPHICAL REALISM 1. EXPERIENCE IS ALWAYS SOMEONE’S PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

F

irst a word about experience. Immediate experience comes in many forms: There is external sense experience (seeing, hearing, smelling, etc.); inwardly sensuous experience (pain, seasickness, hunger); affective experience (fear, elation); cognitive experience (puzzlement, interest); aesthetic experience; religious experience; and others. But the present deliberations will focus on the first of these, and in particular on the relation between people’s own perceptions and the objective arrangements regarding which they are generally supposed to inform us. Experience as such is inevitably subjective. It is invariably somebody’s personal experienceit is always owned by some individual. At the level of immediacy there is no such thing as impersonal experiencesuch experiences have an ineliminably biographical character: they arise with particular individuals or particular occasions. And this poses the big problem of how we are to get from here to there. How can immediate experience that is personal and subjective manage to inform us about impersonal fact and objective reality? That our immediate experience bears upon and characterizes an authentically real item that lies objectively outside the experiential domainthat it authorizes us to make claims about such an experience-transcendent realityis accordingly something one cannot establish solely by invoking such experiences themselves. So whence are we to secure the objectivity required for objective factual claims?

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2. THERE IS NO LOGICALLY COMPELLING TRANSIT FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE TO OBJECTIVE FACT Of course, the experience of people can agree. And when this happens we can move from I to WE: “We take ourselves to be looking at a dog”; “We are all under the impression that the pavement is wet”; etc. The experiences of individuals need not be discordant: they can manage to be alignedand often are. But accordant or not they remain what they are— the inevitably personal experiences of particular individuals. Experiences that agree are still just so many personal experiences: consensus is not yet objectivity. There is an unavoidable information gap between perceptual experience and objective fact. Claims on the order of “it appears to me/us that there is a cat on the mat” or “I/we take myself/ourselves to be looking at a cat on the mat” will inevitably fall short of stating an objective fact as per “There is a cat on the mat.” For seeming does not constitute fact. The reality of it is that statements of experience are autobiographical. The natural reaction to a claim like “I take myself to be seeing a cat on the mat” or “I am having a cat-on-the-mat seeing experience” is: “You sound like an interesting person, tell me more about yourself.” Be these idiosyncratic or consensual, all such experience-detailing statements will, strictly speaking, be about the experiencing individuals at issue and not about the real world as such. Experimental reports are invariably autobiographical. There is, accordingly, an unavoidable evidential gap between statements regarding the experience of people, and those that concern the world’s objective arrangements. And the experience of people in the language of appearance—no matter how elaborately multiplied—can never close the information gap that separates its substance from the assertive context of our objective factual claims. The very meaning of objective statements is such that no volume of claims in the language of experience can stand equivalent to reality-geared theses of objective fact. If objective information regarding the world’s arrangements is what we are after in ontology, then immediate experience by itself cannot take us there. And it is instructive to consider the reason why. As already indicated in chapter 1, it is clear that any real real-world object has more facets than it will ever actually manifest in experience if only because every objective property of a real thing has consequences of a dis-

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positional character which are never surveyable in toto.1 The very concepts at issue (viz. “experience” and “manifestation”) are such that we can only ever experience those features of a real thing that it actually manifests. But the preceding considerations show that real things do and must always have more experientially manifestable properties than they can ever actually manifest in experience. The experienced portion of a thing is similar to the part of the iceberg that shows above water. All real things are necessarily thought of as having hidden depths that extend beyond the limits, not only of experience, but also of experientiability. To say of something that it is an apple or a stone or a tree is to become committed to claims about it that go beyond the data we have—and even beyond those which we can, in the nature of things, ever actually acquire. The “meaning” inherent in the assertoric commitments of our factual statements is never exhausted by its verification, real things are cognitively opaque—we cannot see to the bottom of them. Our knowledge of things can thus become more extensive without thereby becoming more complete. Their idiosyncratic identity outruns the reach of experientially available information about them. 3. INTERPERSONAL DISCOURSE DEMANDS OBJECTIVITY This situation is not particularly good news. For the fact is that we cannot achieve interpersonal communication without achieving an objectivity that goes beyond the limits of our experience. Agreement and disagreement about common objects of concern requires impersonal objectivity. Where we do not focus on a common object whose status and standing is inde-

1

To be sure, abstract things, such as colors or numbers, will not have dispositional properties. For being divisible by four is not a disposition of sixteen. Plato got the matter right in Book VII of the Republic. In the realm of abstracta, such as those of mathematics, there are not genuine processes—and process is a requisite of dispositions. Of course, there may be dispositional truths in which numbers (or colors, etc.) figure that do not issue in any dispositional properties of these numbers (or colors, etc.) themselves—a truth, for example, such as my predilection for odd numbers. But if a truth (or supposed truth) does no more than to convey how someone thinks about a thing, then it does not indicate any property of the thing itself. In any case, however, the subsequent discussion will focus on realia in contrast to fictionalia and concreta in contrast to abstracta. (Fictional things, however, can have dispositions: Sherlock Holmes was addicted to cocaine, for example. Their difference from realia is dealt with below).

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pendent of our own experiential stance, no agreement or disagreement is possible. If you say “I take myself to be seeing a cat on a green mat and it looks brown to me” while I say “I take myself to be seeing a cat on a green mat by a stone fireplace and it looks white to me” we neither agree or disagreeour statements deal with disjointed issuesyour subjective experience and mine, respectively. Contentions about distinct items cannot be brought into coordination. Here there is no prospect of disagreement or disagreement. What is needed to achieve this communicatively essential desideratum is a commonality of focus that only becomes available through an objectivistic realism that altogether transcends the resources of immediate experience. But given the limited bearing of immediate experience can such a realism lay claim to rational warrant? Does it actually have a legitimative rationale? 4. OBJECTIVITY AND POSTULATION The fact that we do and should always think of real things as having hidden depths inaccessible to us finite knowers—that they are always cognitively opaque to us to some extenthas important implications that reach to the very heart of the theory of communication. Any particular thing—the moon, for example—is such that two related but critically different versions can be contemplated: (1) the moon, the actual moon as it “really” is and (2) the moon as somebody (you or I or the Babylonians) conceives of it. The crucial fact to note in this connection is that it is virtually always the former item—the thing itself—that we intend to communicate or think (= self-communicate) about, the thing as it is, and not the thing as somebody conceives of it on the basis of experience. Yet we cannot but recognize the justice of Kant’s teaching that the “I think” (I maintain, assert, etc.) is an ever-present implicit accompaniment of every claim or contention that we make. This factor of attributability dogs our every assertion and opens up the unavoidable prospect of “getting it wrong.” 86

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Communication requires not only common concepts but common topics—shared items of discussion. However, this fundamental objectivityintent—the determination to discuss “the moon itself” (the real moon) regardless of how untenable one’s own ideas about it may eventually prove to be—is a basic precondition of the very possibility of communication. If my statements dealt with my moon and yours with yours, then neither agreement nor disagreement would be possible. We are able to say something about the (real) moon thanks to our subscription to a fundamental communicative convention or “social contract”: to the effect that we intend (“mean”) to talk about it—the very thing itself as it “really” is—our own private conception or misconception of it notwithstanding. When I speak about the moon—even though I do so on the basis of my own conception of what is involved here—I will nevertheless be taken to be discussing “the real moon” in virtue of the basic conventionalized intention at issue with regard to the operation of referring terms. Any pretentions to the predominance, let alone the correctness of our own potentially idiosyncratic experientially based conceptions about things, must be put aside in the context of communication. The fundamental intention to deal with the objective order of this “real world” is crucial. If our assertoric commitments did not transcend the information we ourselves have on hand, we would never be able to “get in touch” with others about a shared objective world. No claim is made for the primacy of our conceptions, or for the correctness of our conceptions, or even for the mere agreement of our conceptions with those of others. The fundamental intention to discuss “the thing itself” predominates and overrides any mere dealing with the thing as we ourselves conceive of it. In the context of communication our own idiosyncratic experience of things becomes subordinated to a fundamental presumption of impersonal objectivity. Our discourse reflects our conceptions of things and perhaps conveys them, but it is not in general substantively about them but rather about the objective and impersonal affairs upon which they actually or putatively bear. 5.

THE FUNCTIONALISTIC RATIONALE OF REALISM

A glance at any philosophical dictionary suffices to show that ontology constitutes philosophy’s endeavor to resolve fundamental questions about the status and the nature of reality. From the very outset there are two fundamental issues here: 87

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(1) What entitles us to claim that there is such a thing as mindindependent reality. (2) What can we justifiably say regarding what that reality is like? The first of these issues comes down to the question of what entitles us to claim that subjective experience yields adequate grounds for claiming the existence of an extra-experiential objective order. And this, as we have just argued, is a matter of presumption and indeed postulationof a stipulative commitment that is ultimately retrojustified ex post facto through functional efficacythrough the useful and productive consequences for which it provides. “Just go forward on this basis and confidence in its prosperity will emerge in due course.” On the other hand, the second issue is ultimately resolved by means of an inference to the optimal systematization. That is to say that if you want to know what natural reality is really like, then the best estimate available to us lies in the teachings of the actual science of the day. What experience rather than theoretical reflection shows is that if one seeks to know what natural reality is likewhat is its composition and modus operandithen natural science offers our best available option. That our best is no more than an imperfect estimate is itself of course one of the salient object lessons of the history of science. But significant though it doubtless is, it is and remains our best available estimate. And here, as elsewhere, no more can reasonably be asked of us than to do the very best that we can actually manage in the prevailing circumstances. Now, reality (on the traditional metaphysicians’ construction of the concept) is the condition of things answering to “the real truth”; it is the realm of what really is as it really is. The pivotal contrast is between “mere appearance” and “reality as such,” between “our picture of reality” and “reality itself,” between what actually is and what we merely think (believe, suppose, etc.) to be. And our allegiance to the conception of reality, and to this contrast which pivots upon it, is rooted in an acknowledgement of fallibilism. For if we deem reality to be exactly as we ourselves think to it be then the essential requisite for communicable inquiry and interpersonal communication is abolished. Our commitment to the mind-independent reality of “the real world” stands conjoined with our acknowledgment that, in principle, any or all of our present ideas as to how things work in the world, at any present, may 88

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well prove to be untenable. Our conviction in a reality extending well beyond our imperfect understanding of it roots in our sense of the imperfections of our scientific world-picture—its tentativity and potential fallibility. In abandoning our commitment to a mind-independent reality, we would lose our hold on the very concept of inquiry. For we need the conception of reality in order to operate the causal model of inquiry about the real world. Our standard picture of man’s place in the scheme of things is predicated on the fundamental idea that there is a real world (however imperfectly our inquiry may characterize it) whose causal operations produce inter alia causal impacts upon us, providing the basis of our world-picture. Reality is viewed as the causal source and basis of the appearances, the originator and determiner of the phenomena of our cognitively relevant experience. “The real world” is seen as causally operative in providing for the thought-external shaping of our thought and thereby in providing an underlying basis for the adequacy of our theorizing. Moreover we also need the conception of reality to possibilize effective communication. Language, after all, is not a categorical givena gift horse into whose mouth we are not entitled to look. It is an instrumentalitya functional resource whose work is (inter alia) to facilitate coordinative communication among different individuals. And the fundamental realism of our discourseits inherent claim to address the objective realities rather than our personal opinions about themis only one salient illustration of this state of affairs. The conception of a mind-independent reality accordingly constitutes a central and indispensable element in our thinking about communication and cognition. In both areas alike we seek to offer answers to our questions about how matters stand in this “objective realm” and the contrast between “the real” and its “merely phenomenal” appearances is crucial here. Moreover, this is also seen as the target and telos of the truth-estimation process at issue in inquiry, providing for a common focus in communication and communal inquiry. The “real world” thus constitutes the “object” of our cognitive endeavors in both senses of this term—the objective at which they are directed and the purpose for which they are exerted. And reality is seen as pivotal here, affording the existential matrix in which we move and have our being, and whose impact upon us is the prime mover for our cognitive efforts. All of these facets of the concept of reality are integrated and unified in the classical doctrine of truth as it corresponds to fact (adaequatio ad rem), a doctrine that only makes sense in the setting of a commit89

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ment to mind-independent reality. Accordingly, the justification for this fundamental presupposition of objectivity and realism is not evidential at all, seeing that postulates are not based on evidence. Rather, it is functional. For we need this postulate to operate our conceptual scheme. The justification of this postulate accordingly lies in its utility. We could not form our existing conceptions of truth, fact, inquiry, and communication without presupposing the independent reality of an external world. We then simply could not think of experience and inquiry as we do. Their inherent realism is accordingly something that is not learned but postulated. What we have here is a “transcendental argument” of sorts from the character of our conceptual scheme to the acceptability of its inherent realistic presuppositions. The argument has the following generic structure: If you want to achieve certain communicative ends then you must function as the basis of certain substantive commitments of a realistic and objectivistic sort. The fact of it is that our concept of a real thing is such that it provides a fixed point, a stable center around which communication revolves, an invariant focus of potentially diverse conceptions. What is to be determinative, decisive, definitive, etc., of the things at issue in my discourse is not my conception, or yours, or indeed anyone’s conception at all. The conventionalized intention to a discursive coordination of reference means that a coordination of conceptions is not decisive for the possibility of communication. For your statements about a thing will and should convey something to me even if my conception of it is altogether different from yours. To communicate we need not take ourselves to share views of the world, but only take the stance that we share the world being discussedit is the things taken to be at issue that matter, and not our opinions about them. This commitment to an objective reality underlying the diversified data at hand is indispensably demanded by any step into the domain of the publicly accessible objects essential to communal inquiry and interpersonal communication about a shared world. We could not establish communicative contact about a common objective item of discussion if our discourse were geared to the substance of our own idiosyncratic ideas and conceptions. 6. EXPERIENCE AND THE RATIONALE OF REALISM Philosophical realism is a complex business. Realism has two indispensable and inseparable constituents—the one existential and ontological, the 90

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other cognitive and epistemic. The former maintains that there indeed is a real world—a realm of concrete, mind-independent, objective reality. The latter maintains that we can to some extent secure adequate descriptive information about this mind-independent realm—that we can validate plausible claims about some of the specifics of its constitution. This second contention obviously presupposes the first, seeing that behind the question “Are our claims about an item correct?” there unavoidably stands the question “Is there indeed such an item for our claims to be about?” But how can that pivotal, ontological thesis of metaphysical realism be secured within a generally pragmatic approach? How can functional considerations of use and purpose come to have a relevant, let alone formative bearing on theoretical matters of correctness, truth, and fact? Metaphysical realism with its claim of an order of mind-independent reality behind the manifold of our experience—is clearly not an inductive inference secured through the scientific systematization of our observations, but rather represents a regulative presupposition that renders observation significant and thereby makes science possible in the first place. If we did not assume from the very outset that our sensations somehow relate to an extra-mental reality, we could clearly make no use of them to draw any inference whatever about “the real world.” The realm of mind-independent reality is something we cannot discover—we do not, cannot learn that it exists as a result of inquiry and investigation since it is an indispensable requisite for any such endeavor. How could we ever learn from our observations that our mental experience is itself largely the causal product of the machinations of a mind-independent matrix, that all those phenomenal appearances are causally rooted in a physical reality? All this is clearly something we do not learn from inquiry. For what is at issue is, all too clearly, a precondition for empirical inquiry—a presupposition for the usability of observational data as sources of objective information. That experience is indeed objective, that what we take to be evidence is evidence, that our sensations yield information about an order of existence outside the experiential realm itself, and that this experience constitutes not just a mere phenomenon but an appearance of something extra-mental belonging to an objectively self-subsisting order. All this is something that we must always presuppose in using experiential data as “evidence” for how things stand in the world. And so, realism with its correlative objectivity represents a postulation made on functional rather than evidential grounds: we endorse it in order to be in a position to learn by experience at all. We do not learn or discover 91

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that there is a mind-independent physical reality, we presume or postulate it. As Kant clearly saw an objective world is presupposed from the outset rather than comprising an ex post facto discovery about the nature of things.2 Accordingly, the crucial existential (ontological) component of realism is not a matter of discovery, a part of the findings of empirical research. It is a presupposition for our inquiries rather than a result thereof. We have to do here not with an evidential discovery about the constitution of nature as such, but rather with an enabling assumption that undergirds our view of the nature of inquiry. Without subscribing to this idea, we just could not think of our knowledge as we actually do. Our commitment to the existence of a mind-independent reality is thus a postulate whose justification pivots—in the first instance—on its functional utility in enabling us to operate as we do with respect to inquiry. Of course, after an objective reality and its concomitant causal operation is once postulated, then principles of inductive systematization, of explanatory economy, and of common cause consilience can work wonders toward furnishing us with plausible claims about the nature of the real. But we indispensably need that initial existential presupposition to make a start. Without commitment to a reality to serve as ground and object of our experience, its cognitive import will be lost. Only on this basis can we eventually proceed with the exploration of the interpersonally public and objective domain of a physical world-order that we share in common. To be sure, that second, descriptive (epistemic) component of realism stands on a very different footing. Reality’s nature is something about which we can only make warranted claims through examining it. Substantive information must come through inquiry—through evidential validation. Once we are willing to credit our observational data with objectivity, and thereby with evidential bearing, we then can, of course, make use of them to inform ourselves as to the nature of the real. Scientific observations no more reveal an “underlying” observationally inaccessible reality than do our sensory observations. Our endorsement of the general idea of unobserved causes in nature is thus not based on science but on metaphysics. Science does not (cannot) teach us that the observable 2

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Kant held that we cannot experientially learn through perception about the objectivity of outer things, because we can only recognize our perceptions as perceptions (i.e., representations of outer things) if these outer things are supposed as such from the first (rather than being learned or inferred).

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order is explicable in terms of underlying causes and that the phenomena of observation are signs or symptoms of this extra- and sub-phenomenal order of existence; we know this a priori of any world in which observation as we understand it can transpire. (After all, observations are, by their very nature, the results of interactions.) What science does teach us (and metaphysics cannot) is what the descriptive character of this extraphenomenal order is. What we learn from science is not that an unobservable order of physical existence causally undergirds nature as we observe it, but rather what these underlying structures are like. Let us consider this basic reality postulate somewhat more closely. Our standard conception of inquiry involves recognition of the following facts. (1) The world (the realm of physical existence) has a nature whose characterization in point of description, explanation, and prediction is the object of empirical inquiry. (2) The real nature of the world is in the main independent of the process of inquiry which the real world canalizes or conditions. Dependency is a one-way street here: reality shapes or influences inquiry, but not conversely. Our opinions do not affect the real truth but, rather, our strivings after the real truth engender changes in our opinions. (3) In virtue of these considerations, we can stake neither total nor final claims for our purported knowledge of reality. Our knowledge of the world must be presumed incomplete, incorrect, and imperfect, with the consequence that “our reality” must be considered to afford an inadequate characterization of “reality itself.” The crucial question is this: Assuming that there are objective facts, beyond the reach of observation, how can we possibly come to acquire knowledge of them? What sort of presuppositions must we make if our subjective experience—which is limited and episodic—is to provide a basis of legitimacy for maintaining objective and general claims? Two gulfs must be transcended: (1) From experiential appearances to objective facts—from “That looks like a red apple to me” to “That is a red apple”—from appearance to reality and from phenomena to actual facts. (2) From particular cases to universals and from specificities to generalities—from “These apples all contain seeds” to “All apples contain seeds.” To effect these transitions, we must simply presuppose (for how could we 93

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possibly preestablish this?) that such ampliating moves can be made on the basis of available evidence: that subjective phenomena are (typically) indicators of objective realities, and that particular cases are (typically) exemplifications of universal arrangements. Rudolf Carnap argued long ago that our commitment to various sorts of objects (preeminently the theoretical entities of theories to which we subscribe for the essentially pragmatic reason that they succeed in matter of prediction and control),3 affords a sound basis for realism. But this particular sort of pragmatic validation of scientific realism is not presently at issue. For such a validation of realism pivots on the findings and consequences of science, whereas our present deliberations pivot on its enabling assumptions and presumptions. Our endorsement of the reality of observation-engendering causes in nature is not based on empirical investigation but on general principles of a procedural character. What we learn from science is not and cannot be that an inherently unobservable sub-observable order of physical causality undergirds nature as we observe it, but rather what—with their reality taken as given—these underlying and preliminarily presumed agencies must specifically be like. Science does not (cannot) teach us that the observable order emerges from underlying unobserved causes and that the phenomena of observation are signs betokening this extra- and sub-phenomenal order of existence. For this is something that we must presume from the outset of any world in which observation as we understand it can transpire. What science does teach us (and metaphysics cannot) is what can plausibly take to be the descriptive character of this phenomena-engendering order once its existence is taken for granted. For once an objective reality and its concomitant causal operation has been postulated, then principles of inductive systematization, of explanatory economy, and of common cause consilience can work wonders in exploiting the phenomena of experience to provide the basis for plausible claims about the nature of the real. But we indispensably need that initial existential presupposition to make a start. Without that natural commitment to a reality serving as ground and object of our experience, its cognitive import will be lost. Only on this basis can we proceed evidentially with the exploration of the interpersonally public and objective domain of a physical world-order that we share in common. Only by way of a facilitating presupposition—albeit that is ultimately ret3

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See Rudolf Carnap, Philosophical Foundations of Physics, ed. by M. Gardner (New York: Basic Books, 1966).

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rovalidated through its applicative utility and efficacy—can we ever hope to establish that our observational experience (unlike our dream experience) is ever evidence for anything objectively mind-external, that is, is ever able to provide information about a “real world.” Commitment to a mind-independent reality is, all too clearly, a precondition for empirical inquiry rather than a consequence of it—a presupposition we have to make to be able to use observational data as sources of objective information. We really have no alternative but to presume or postulate it. Objectivity represents a postulation made on functional (rather than evidential) grounds: we endorse it in order to be in a position to learn by experience. What is at issue here is not so much a product of our experience of reality as a factor that makes it possible to view our experience as being “of reality” at all. As Kant clearly saw, objective experience is possible only if the existence of such a real, objective world is an available given from the outset rather than the product of experience—an ex post facto discovery about the nature of things.4 Accordingly, that second, descriptive (evidential) component of realism stands on a very different footing from its first, existential (presuppositional) component. For reality’s nature is something about which we can only make warranted claims through actually examining it. Substantive information must come through inquiry—through evidential validation. Once we are willing to credit our observational data with objectivity—with reality-orientation and thus with evidential bearing—then we can, of course, make use of them to inform ourselves as to the nature of the real. But the objective bearing of observational experience is not something that we can preestablish; it is something we must presuppose in the interest of honoring Peirce’s pivotal injunction never to bar the path of inquiry. And the functional nature of this practice-enabling presupposition means that the validation process at work must—at this fundamental level—be altogether pragmatic. It represents a step we take prospectively—in order to put ourselves into a position to satisfy our goals. The foundations of objectivity and realism thus do not rest on the find4

As Kant summarizes the matter in the “Refutation of Idealism”: “Idealism assumed that the only immediate experience is inner experience, and that from it we can only infer outer things—and this, moreover, only in an untrustworthy manner. . . . But in the above proof it has been shown that outer experience is really immediate. . . .” (Critique of Pure Reason, B276). Here “is really immediate” is to be construed as: “must be accepted noninferentially from the very outset, because inference could not accomplish what is needed to arrive at those outer things.”

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ings of science. They precede and underlie science, which would itself not be possible without a precommitment to the capacity of our senses to warrant claims about an objective world-order. Objectivity is not a product of inquiry; we must precommit ourselves to it to make inquiry possible. It is a necessary (a priori) input into the cognitive project and not a contingent (a posteriori) output thereof. The objective bearing of experience is not something we can preestablish; it is something we must presuppose in the interest of honoring Peirce’s pivotal injunction never to bar the path of inquiry. With respect to our cognitive endeavors, “man proposes and nature disposes,” and it does so in both senses of the term: it disposes over our current view of reality and it will doubtless eventually dispose of it as well. Our view of the nature of inquiry and of the sort of process it represents is workable only because we stand committed from the very outset to the idea of ourselves as a minuscule component of a mind-independent reality. We can act and affect various things in it. But in the main it has the whip hand and we merely respond to its causal dictates. And this is true in cognitive aspects as well—where we must simply do the best we can with the relatively feeble means at our disposal. Our commitment to realism accordingly inheres in a certain practical modus operandi, encapsulated in the precept: “Proceed in matters of inquiry and communication on the basis that you are dealing with an objective realm, existing quite independently of the doings and dealings of minds.” We standardly operate on the basis of the “presumption of objectivity” reflected in the guiding precept: “Unless you have good reason to think otherwise (that is, as long as nihil obstat) treat the materials of inquiry and communication as veridical—as representing the nature of the real.” The ideal of objective reality is the focus of a family of convenient regulative principles—a functionally useful instrumentality that enables us to transact our cognitive business in the most satisfactory and rewarding way. What legitimates this metaphysical realism’s postulating that experience affords data regarding an objective and mind-independent domain and thus provides for viable information about the real? Given that the existence of such a domain is not a product of but a precondition for empirical inquiry, its acceptance has to be validated in the manner appropriate for postulates and prejudgments of any sort—in terms of its ultimate utility. This, to be sure, is only the starting point. Having made such a start what we can—and do—ultimately discover is that by taking this realistic stance we are able to develop a praxis of inquiry and communication that proves effective in the conduct of our affairs. What 96

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experience can teach us is that matters run swimmingly once we initially embark on this postulationthat essential human enterprises such as inquiry and communication work out in an efficient and effective way when we proceed on this basis. And so ultimately the factor of pragmatic efficacy comes along to satisfy these demands. Undeniably, this pragmatic impetus is also based on “experience”but now in a rather different sense of the term. After all, the term “experience” is very equivocal in English. It can mean: • Immediate perceptive experience via the internal or external senses (seeing, hearing, feeling queasy, hungry, etc.) German: Empfindung. • Personal participation in an eventuation of some sort (an earthquake, a muting, a famine). German: Erlebnis. • A complex or general course of events in which one participatesas per “experience teaches,” the experience of many years indicates,” “a long course of experience shows.” German: Erfahrung. Now the sense of the term operative in the present deliberations at this stage is not that of immediate experience (Empfindung) but of experience in the variant, systemic sense of Erfahrungof a course of historical experience that involves a communal trial and error amidst the vicissitudes of world history’s complex manifold of contingent and often fortuitous occurrences. Thus what is pivotal for ontology in the light of these deliberations is not immediate experience but historical experience in its larger transtemporal and transpersonal sense of the idea of experience. Ontology is a matter of conception rather than perception. Perceptival interaction with the word is of course a necessary condition for securing information about it by a finite intelligence. And so, to effect a transition from “experience” to ontology we have to recognize that immediate experience is no more than a starting point. Only experience in the larger, collective and historical sense of the term at issue with Erfahrung can provide the more powerful instrumentality required for a cognitive transit from the realm of experiential phenomenology into that of a realistic ontology. And just here, systematization comes to play a crucial role.

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7. TRUTH, SYSTEMATIZATION, AND DIFFICULTIES INFERENCE TO THE BEST EXPLANATION

WITH

In recent decades, “inference to the best explanation” has become a very fashionable mode of reasoning in epistemology and philosophy of science, as well as other areas of philosophy.5 But while the idea of “inference to the best explanation”—or ITBE as one might abbreviate it—seems very appealing on first view, it runs into difficulty when one looks more closely into the details. One salient problem with “inference to the best explanation” is posed by the question of just what “best” is to mean here. Is it the best possible or the best available? If the former, the theory is trivialized. For the best possible explanation of a fact is of course the actual explanation of that factthe real, true, authentic explanation of its obtaining. That this explanation is true is no problem. But of course the fact that the best possible explanation is bound to be true one is of no help whatever in a situation of inquiry. It is just this that we are trying to find. On the other hand, if that “best” explanation is the best availablethe best within the range of our current contemplationthen we confront the potentially embarrassing question of whether the best among the currently contemplated alternatives is really good enough. What assurance have we for accepting it as the actual truth of the matter? Consider an example. The plane crashes. The investigative committee issues its report. Its bottom line is that the evidence is indecisive and leaves open several potential explanations: mechanical failure with a probability of 45 percent, human error with a probability of 35 percent, and other possibilities with an aggregate probability of 20 percent. On this basis mechanical failure looks to be the best explanation. Yet we would surely do 5

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The idea was launched on its career in this particular terminological guise with Gilbert Harman “The Inference to the Best Explanation,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 74 (1965), pp. 88-95, and developed in his book Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). It was criticized in Keith Lehrer, Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) and others (Richard Boyd, William Newton Smith). Its philosophy of science applications were discussed in Paul Thagard, “The Best Explanation: Criteria for Theory Choice,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 75 (1978), pp. 76-92. A general survey of the terrain is Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation (London: Routledge, 1991).

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well to hesitate to accept it as the truth considering that it is more likely false than not.6 Again, suppose it to be known only that someone won a prize for good work in language study at an American school early in the present century. And the question arises: What sort of prize was he or she awarded? Given the circumstances, the inductively indicated answer is clearly a book, considering their predominant popularity for this sort of purpose. But there is no “inference to the best explanation” operative here. For what is being explained? That he or she was given a book? But this is the very item in question and not a given fact in need of explanation. That he or she won a prize? Surely the best explanation of this is that he or she did superior work. While the model of inference to the best explanation works splendidly in some inductive contexts (the move from the smoke to the fire, for example), it simply does not work in general.7 Accordingly, induction is on our approach seen rather as a matter of “inference to the best systematization” than one of “inference toor strictly speaking, conjecture ofthe best explanation.”8 After all, what does the idea of a “best explanation” involve? And explanation of what? The sensible reading of what it is whose explanation is to be at issue is “the actual facts.” We usually have some fact or other in view and are concerned (1) to look for its possible explanations and then (2) to accept as actual that one among the available (i.e., knowledge-consonant) possibilities which could best explain that fact—that is, would (if true) do better at evidentiating or probabilifying that fact than its competitors would do. Thus if we want to explain why it is that the light went out, then among the avail6

For criticisms of ITBE in the mode of “inference to the likeliest cause” see Lipton, op. cit., chapter 4. See also Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) pp. 89-91.

7

Inference to the only available explanation seems unproblematic. But the instruction to infer the only conceivable explanation is hardly helpful. Accordingly, we have no alternative but to construe “the best explanation” as “the best of the available explanations”—the best within our range of vision. And we should—and do— realize full well that to represent the best of the available explanations as the correct one is a very problematic step indeed.

8

For a more detailed account of what is at issue throughout the plausibilistic deliberations of this chapter, see the author’s Plausible Reasoning (Assen, 1976).

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able explanations we have: “someone turned it off,” or “there was a power failure,” or “some other appliance blew the fuse,” and so on. Presumably the first of these alternatives is the best available explanation in the circumstance, and so the ITBE principle at issue would have it that this is the explanation to infer. But there are big problems here. For one thing, no considerations of general principle can ensure the best available explanation of fact A is compatible with the best available explanation of fact B. A small mammal flits across the field. X claims it is a ferret, Y claims it is a lynx. The best explanation of X’s claim is that it is in fact a ferret. The best explanation of Y’s claim is that it is in fact a lynx. But we cannot have it both ways. (Ironically, it was in actuality a cat which is clearly something that scarcely qualifies as the best explanation of the facts at hand.) Following the guidance of ITBE could easily embroil us in inconsistency. What really follows from “The proposition p forms part of our currently best-available explanation of the fact f ”? Certainly not that p is actually true (we have just seen that). And it does not even follow that “it is reasonable to believe that p.” For the given premiss does nothing to ensure that not-p might not be part of the best available explanation of some other fact. Thus let it be that we are concerned with the contention “The butler did it.” Then while this may indeed be part of the best-available explanation of one fact (Sir Reginald’s being poisoned)—seeing that the butler had ample opportunity and motive, nevertheless its negation might well be part of the best-available explanation of some other fact (say the butler had also taken a swig from the whiskey bottle into which the poison had been put). The inference from explanatory optimality of truth is impeded by the consideration that explanatory optimality is generally a local phenomenon whereas truth is by nature global and context-independent. In terms of the practical politics of the matter, optimal systematization is the best we can do. And as though all this were not bad enough there is yet another substantial difficulty with the realistic construal of optimal explanations. For how is the merit at issue with optimality to be construed? The crucial fact is that explanations are the sort of thing where various different criteria of merit come into play: the truth (or probable truth) of the premisses; the tightness with which these premisses entail the conclusion; the specificity of that conclusion; and various others. Now the trouble with situations of multicriterial merit is that they disassemble the idea of “the best” and leave it suspended in a deconstructive limbo. Consider an analogy. I commission you to go forth and buy “the 100

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best car” for me. At once you are faced with the proliferation of criteria of merit: purchase economy, operating economy, crash safety, breakdown infrequency, acceleration, road performance, stability, comfort, etc. all come into it. And these play off against one another in potential conflict. No sensible person wants a car that is supersafe but has a top speed of 5 m.p.h.; virtually nobody wants a car that is the last word in passenger comfort but spends much of its time in the repair shop getting all those springs refitted and cushions readjusted. And in general when criteria of merit play off against each other in this sort of way that you cannot maximize them all at once but must pay for increases in one at the price of decreases in others. The very idea of categorical optimality thus runs into problems here. And this is certainly so with respect to explanation as well because idea of “the best explanation” is caught up in exactly this bind of possibilityconflicting desiderata.9 Many distinct and different parameters of merit clearly come into play with explanations: (1) the here-and-now availability of all the information that the explanation requires. (2) the simplicity and elegance of the explanatory account. (3) the probability of the evidential premisses. (4) the probability of the explanatory conclusion relative to the explanatory premisses. (5) the extent to which the evidential premisses render the evidential conclusion more probable than it otherwise would be. (6) the definiteness of the explanatory conclusion relative to possible alternatives. (7) the overall extent of relevant evidence that is taken into account. (8) the inherent breadth and scope of the explanatory principles being 9

Peter Lipton (op. cit., pp. 61-64 et. passim) frames this objection by contrasting the loveliness of explanations with their likelihood: which is to be paramount in determining “the best”?

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used. (9) the similarity to a range of other, preestablished explanations. The fly in the ointment is that these desiderata can come into conflict. The fact of it is that, exactly as with the automobile case cited above, it simply makes no sense to ask for the concurrent all-at-once satisfaction of all those various criteria of evidential merit. For the fact is that with simplicity, plausibility, comprehensiveness, consilience, analogy, we confront a condition of potential tension and conflict.10 On the other hand, a recourse to the idea of best systematization offers a distinctly more promising alternative to that of best explanation.11 A proposition that is part of our best-available systematization of all the relevant facts is not thereby necessarily true, but it indeed is thereby qualified to count as our best-available estimate of the truth. To be sure, the present conjecture of “best systematization” approach to induction does indeed bear some points of kinship to the more familiar “inference-to-the-best-explanation” approach, seeing that in many cases the route to the best answer is bound to proceed via the best explanation.12 However, the two approaches are by no means identical, and the advantages lie with the former. Thus suppose, for example, that we want to know “Is p the case or not?” in a circumstance where Smith, a generally reliable source, reports that p (and where no other significant information regarding the truth status of p is otherwise available). Our present, enthymematicplausibilistic approach would lead us to maintain that p is truewhich is 10

See Lehrer, op. cit., p. 165, and Thagard, op. cit., p. 77.

11

This is a line of thought the author initially urged in a series of publications of the 1970s: The Coherence Theory of Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); Cognitive Systematization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979); Methodological Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977).

12

This approach was formulated by Max Black as a (mis-?)interpretation of Popperianism: “Those who agree [with Popper] would rewrite putatively inductive inferences to make them appear explicitly as [optimal] hypothetical explanations of given facts.” (Art. “Induction” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by P. Edwards, Vol. 4 [New York, 1967], p. 173.) Its rationale is given fuller articulation by Gilbert Harman in “The Inference to the Best Explanation,” Philosophical Review, vol. 63 (1966), pp. 241-247; and also in “Knowledge, Inference, and Explanation,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 5 (1968), pp. 164-73.

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clearly the inductively appropriate answer to the question at hand. Its reasoning would run roughly along the lines of the enthymeme: Smith generally speaks the truth [ex hypothesi]

∴Smith speaks the truth in this case (In this case) Smith says that p [ex hypothesi] ∴p is true The enthymematic premiss at issue (“this case conforms to the general run”) is clearly more plausible than the available alternatives in the circumstances here being assumedincluding the absence of counter-indications of any sort. And so, given the conditions of the problem, the argument runs a smooth course to the desired conclusion. By contrast, however, an “inference to the best explanation approach” would not enable us to get past “Smith believes that p”—which is, after all, a vastly better explanation of Smith’s saying that p than p’s actually being the case would be.13 Systematization is a resource of cognitive validation that is significantly different from explanation. Explanation is a retail commodity: one generally explains facts one at a time. But systematization is a wholesale commodity. It will, by the very idea of the thing itself, be boundlessly synoptic. And so the many-factors objective to a “best explanation” is not operative with regard to a best systematization. For while an explanation can be better or worse in this or that aspect (e.g., premiss-confirmation vs. inferential rigor) a systematization by its very nature has to comprehend and balance out all relevant facts concurrently and overall. We cannot appropriately “infer” the best explanation E1 of a fact f1 precisely because there may be some other fact f2 whose best explanation E2 is incompatible with that aforementioned E1. But with systematization the matter stands differently. By its very nature as such, systematization must be coherent overall. We must not, however, speak or think of inference to the best systematization. For there is no question here of inference. Systematization is not a matter of conclusion-drawing but of construction: we do not infer a system from the data but construct it on this basis. What we can infer here, and all we can “infer” on the basis of the general adequacy of the system, is acceptability as such. That is to say we have good reason for accepting the best overall account we can provide as thereby true—or at any rate as af13

To be sure, p’s being the case may well in its turn form part (but only part) of the best explanation of Smith’s believing that p. But that’s another matter.

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fording us the best estimate of the truth that is available in the circumstances. To be sure, it has been objected against an epistemic acceptance criteriology based on explanatory coherence that “two systems of belief may each have a maximum of explanatory coherence and yet be inconsistent with each other.”14 But this objection does not hold against an explanatory systematization epistemology. For systematization requires both coherence and a maximum of achievable comprehensiveness. And the worry that a coherent set of beliefs S1 may endorse p while another set S2 endorses not-p vanishes in the face of the consideration that what matters is where S1 + S2 stands.15 Issue resolution via optimal systematization is clearly the sensible direction for developing a coherentists epistemology. It is ironic that what some writers see as instances of best explanation argumentation on closer inspection actually turn out to be nothing other than best-systematization projection. For example, one recent author claims that the following question “shows that Darwin’s argument in The Origin of Species consists in showing that his [evolutionary] theory provides the best explanation”:16 It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. It has recently been objected that this is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method used in judging of the common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest natural philosophers.17 But as Darwin’s emphasis on “the several large classes of facts” at issue makes all too clear, it is not with explaining this or that fact but rather with

14

Keith Lehrer, Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 181.

15

If these sets are inconsistent, then we obviously have a deficient systematicity (in point of inconsistency). If they are consistent but indecisive on P1 vs. P2, then clearly we have another sort of deficient systematicity (in point of comprehensiveness).

16

Thagard, op. cit., p. 77.

17

On the Origin of Species (New York: Collier, 1962), p. 476.

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explanatory systematization overall that he is concerned.18 But does this idea of optimal systematization not run into a difficulty analogous to that encountered above—a problem of potentially discordant criteria of merit for systems? The answer is negative. For while systems can indeed display various sorts of merits or defects, these are not involved in a potential conflict or tension. For all of them are subordinate to one single uniform governing desideratum: the overall efficacy and economy of intellectual effort. Economy of cognitive operation is the bottom line for systematization. And it provides for an across-the-board basis of comparison. With systematization the critical factor of merit is that of economy overall, and from the angle of economic costs we can indeed “compare apples and oranges.” As the previous deliberations indicate, a thesis that forms part of the best (available) explanation of a fact need certainly not thereby be true or indeed even probable (unlike one that forms part of the only explanation of a fact). But any thesis—explanatory ones included—that forms part of the optimal systematization of the facts-in-general must for that very reason square with our best understanding of the overall situation. And on this ground alone we can plausibly view it as endowed with a natural warrant for acceptance, seeing that systematization to all appearances affords the best route to truth-estimation that is at our disposal. This line of thought points toward a new and importantly different role for systematicity. Its bearing is now radically transformed. From being a hallmark of science (as per the regulative idea that a body of knowledgeclaims cannot qualify as a science if it lacks a systematic articulation), systematicity is metamorphosed into a standard of truth—an acceptability criterion for the claims that purport to belong to science. From a desideratum of the organization of our “body of factual knowledge,” systematicity is metamorphosed into a qualifying test of membership in it—a standard of facticity. The effect of the Hegelian inversion is to establish “the claim of system as an arbiter of fact,” to use F. H. Bradley’s apt expression. This idea of systematicity as an arbiter of knowledge was implicit in Hegel himself, and developed by his followers, particularly those of the 18

Thagard in his 1978 paper defended ITBE against its critics by bringing the factors of explanatory consilience and analogy into the foreground. But the way in which he purposes to do this indicates that he engaged in changing the topic from the explanations offered for particular facts to that of explanatory systematization in general. His deliberations put him well en route toward the position of the present deliberations.

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English Hegelian school inaugurated by T. H. Green. This Hegelian inversion leads to one of the central themes of the present discussion—the idea of using systematization as a control of substantive knowledge. F. H. Bradley put the matter as follows: The test [of truth] which I advocate is the idea of a whole of knowledge as wide and as consistent as may be. In speaking of system [as the standard of truth] I always mean the union of these two aspects [of coherence and comprehensiveness] . . . [which] are for me inseparably included in the idea of system. . . . Facts for it [i.e., my view] are true . . . just so far as they contribute to the order of experience. If by taking certain judgments . . . as true, I can get some system into my world, then these “facts” are so far true, and if by taking certain “facts” as errors I can order my experience better, then these “facts” are errors.19

The plausibility of such an approach is easy to see. Pilate’s question is still relevant. How are we men—imperfect mortals dwelling in this imperfect sublunary sphere—to determine where “the real truth” lies? The Recording Angel does not whisper it into our ears. (If he did, I doubt that we would understand him!) The consideration that we have no direct access to the truth regarding the modus operandi of the world we inhabit is perhaps the most fundamental fact of epistemology. We must recognize that there is no prospect of assessing the truth—or presumptive truth—of claims in this domain independently of our efforts at systematization in scientific inquiry. The Hegelian idea of truth-assessment through systematization represents a hard-headed and inherently attractive effort to adjust and accommodate to this fundamental fact. To see more vividly some of the philosophical ramifications of this Hegelian approach, let us glance back once more to the epistemological role of systematicity in its historical aspect. The point of departure was the Greek position (in Plato and Aristotle and clearly operative still with rationalists as late as Spinoza) which—secure in a fundamental commitment to the systematicity of the real—took cognitive systematicity (i.e., systematicity as present in the framework of “our knowledge”) as a measure of the extent to which man’s purported understanding of the world can be regarded as adequate via the principle of adaequatio ad rem. Here systematicity functions as a regulative ideal for the organization of knowledge and (accordingly) as a standard of the organizational adequacy of 19

“On Truth and Coherence,” Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), pp. 202-218; see pp. 202-203 and 210.

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our cognitive claims. But the approach of the Hegelian school (and the Academic Sceptics of classical antiquity who had anticipated them in this regard) moves well beyond this position. Viewing systematicity not merely as a regulative ideal for knowledge but as an epistemically constitutive principle, it extends what was a mere test of understanding into a test of the evidential acceptability of factual truth claims. Explanatory systematicity comes to operate as evidential warrant. Important metaphysical implications for the bearing of systematicity on the interrelation between truth and reality emerge from this perspective. Let us approach the issue in its historical dimension. A line of thought pervasively operative since antiquity may be set out by the syllogism: Reality is a coherent system Knowledge agrees with reality Knowledge is a coherent system With Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” this traditional mode of appeal to the classical conception of truth as adaequatio intellectu ad rem came to be transformed to: Knowledge is a coherent system Knowledge agrees with (empirical) reality Reality (i.e. empirical reality) is a coherent system While the original syllogism effectively bases a conclusion about knowledge upon premisses regarding reality, its Kantian transform bases a conclusion about reality upon premisses regarding knowledge. In the wake of Kant’s Copernican Revolution, the ontological emphasis becomes secondary and derivative, seeing that our only available pathway to reality itself leads via our reality: our cognitive endeavors to form a picture of the real. With this aspect of Kant’s Copernican Revolution we reach the idea that in espousing the dictum that “truth is a system,” what one is actually claiming to be systematic is not the world as such, but rather our knowledge of it. Accordingly, it is what is known to be true regarding “the facts” of nature that is systematized, and systematicity thus becomes—in the first instance—a feature rather of knowledge than of its subject matter. The idea of system can—indeed must—be applied by us to nature, yet not to nature in itself and an sich, but rather to “nature insofar as nature conforms to our

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power of judgment.”20 Correspondingly, system is at bottom not a constitutive conception descriptive of reality per se, but a regulative conception descriptive of how our thought regarding reality must proceed. Kant’s successors wanted to “overcome” Kant’s residual allegiance to the Cartesian divide between our knowledge and its object. Waving the motto that “The real is rational” aloft on their banners, they sought to restore the system to its Greek position as a fundamentally ontological rather than “merely epistemological” concept. In this setting, however, the concept of the systematization of truth played the part of a controlling ideal more emphatically than ever. Hegel, in effect, went back to the Greeks and asked: How do we really know that knowledge is a coherent system? He was discontented with Kant’s setting up as major premiss what for him (and the Greeks) ought to have been a conclusion, and so insisted once more on the centrality of this question. But he answered it in a very different way. His starting-point here was the key principle of the Hegelian Inversion: If a thesis coheres systematically with the rest of what is known, then—and only then—is it a part of real knowledge (which accordingly characterizes reality itself).

Now it is clear that once we adopt this principle as our operative defining standard (criterion, arbiter) of knowledge—so that only what is validated in terms of this coherentist principle is admitted into “our knowledge”—then the crucial contention that “knowledge is a coherent system” at once follows, and so returns to the status of a conclusion rather than a premiss. If, as is only sensible, the epistemic constituting of our (purported) knowledge takes place in terms of considerations of systematic coherence, then it follows—now without any reference to directly ontological considerations— that the body of knowledge so constituted will have to form a coherent system. (But in here taking such an epistemic rather than an ontological route, we Hegelians too reveal ourselves as true children of the era inaugurated by Kant’s Copernican Revolution.21)

20

Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgment in Werke, vol. V; Academy edition (Berlin: Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1920), p. 202.

21

However, it will emerge that the “knowledge agrees with reality” principle cannot be construed in such a way that the systematicity of our knowledge of reality guar-

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The preceding discussion can be summarized in brief compass. We have offered a three-part answer to the question: “What is the point of cognitive systematization?” (1) Systematization provides a vehicle for making claims intelligible. (2) Systematization authenticates a body of knowledge as developed scientifically: it is a test of the scientific adequacy for expositions of knowledge. (3) In thus providing quality control at the wholesale level of a body of knowledge, systematicity also provides a means for testing purported knowledge-claims for inclusion in our “body of knowledge.” It thus affords a probative instrument—a test of acceptability (or correctness) for factual claims. And to these three fundamental points, the Hegelian Inversion adds yet another: (4) Systematization provides the definitive constituting criterion of knowledge: it is the operative mechanism for authenticating knowledge as such.22 While (3) comes to a test-standard “if adequately systematized, then presumably true,” (4) comes to the very different “if fully systematized, then certainly true.” In all these varying but yet related ways, systematization can serve a crucial role in the quality control of knowledge in the factual domain.23 antees that of reality itself. In this regard our present position parts company with the tradition. 22

Presumably this is the cash value of the Hegelian view of explanation according to which “nothing can be known rightly, without knowing all else rightly” (Bernard Bosanquet, Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888], p. 393). If our system is to control our knowledge, then the system must be constructed before the monitoring can be accomplished.

23

This chapter was originally published in the Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. 29 (2004), pp. 113-24.

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Chapter Six PRAGMATIC REALISM: A PRACTICALISTIC PERSPECTIVE ON PHILOSOPHICAL REALISM 1. REALISM IN ITS REGULATIVE/PRAGMATIC ASPECT

T

he ontological thesis that there indeed is a mind-independent physical reality to which our inquiries address themselves more or less adequately—and no doubt always imperfectly—is the key contention of realism. But on the telling of the present analysis, this basic thesis of realism has the epistemic status of a presuppositional postulate that is validated in the first instance by its functional utility and thereafter ultimately retrovalidated by the satisfactory results of its implementation (in both practical and theoretical respects). Without a presuppositional commitment to objectivitywith its acceptance of a real world independent of ourselves that we share in commoninterpersonal communication and communal coordination would become impracticable. Realism, then, is not a factual discovery, but a functional postulate justified, in the first instance at any rate, by its practical utility or serviceability in the context of our cognitive and practical aims and purposes, seeing that if we did not take our experience to serve as an indication of facts about an objective order we would not be able to validate any objective claims whatsoever. Realism, so conceived, is a position to which we are initially led not by the push of evidence but by the pull of purpose. At bottom, a commitment to realism is an input into our investigation of nature rather than an output thereof. At bottom, it does not represent a discovered fact, but a methodological presupposition of our praxis in communication and inquiry; its status is not constitutive (fact-descriptive) but regulative (practicefacilitating). Its ultimate validation lies in its power to enable us effectively to accomplish essential objectives. Now insofar as ontological realism ultimately rests on such a pragmatic

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basis, it is not based on considerations of independent substantiating evidence about how things actually stand in the world, but rather on considering, as a matter of practical reasoning, how we do (and must) think ontologically about the world within the context of the projects to which we stand committed. Bearing this pragmatic perspective in mind, let us take a closer look at the issue of utility and ask: What can this postulation of a mindindependent reality actually do for us? The answer is straightforward. The assumption of a mind-independent reality is essential to the whole of our standard conceptual scheme relating to inquiry and communications. Without it, both the actual conduct and the rational legitimation of our communicative and investigative (evidential) practice would be destroyed. Much of what we do in this cognitive domain would make no sense if we did not subscribe to the conception of a mindindependent reality. To begin with, we indispensably require the notion of reality to operate the classical concept of truth as “agreement with reality” (adaequatio ad rem). Given that to assert a statement is to assert it as true—that is, give that p if it is true that p—the very idea of declaration with assertion content counts as to a (harmlessly minimalistic) version of realism. For once we abandon the concept of reality, the idea that in accepting a factual claim as true we become committed to how matters actually stand—“how it really is”—would also go by the board. The very semantics of our discourse constrain its commitment to realism; we have no alternative but to regard as real those states of affairs claimed by the contentions we are prepared to accept. Once we put a contention forward by way of serious assertion, we must view as real the states of affairs it purports, and must see its claims as facts. We need the notion of reality to operate the conception of truth. A factual statement on the order of “There are pi mesons” is true if and only if the world is such that pi mesons exist within it. By virtue of their very nature as truths, true statements must state facts: they state what really is so, which is exactly what it is to “characterize reality.” For, as we saw in chapter 1, conceptions of truth and of reality come together in the notion of adaequatio ad rem—the venerable principle that to speak truly is to say how matters stand in reality, in that things actually are as we have said them to be. In the second place, the nihilistic denial that there is such a thing as reality would destroy once and for all the crucial Parmenidean divide between appearance and reality. And this would exact a fearful price from us: we would be reduced to talking only of what we (I, you, many of us) think to 112

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be so. The crucial contrast notion of the real truth would no longer be available: we would only be able to contrast our putative truths with those of others, but could no longer operate the classical distinction between the putative and the actual, between what people merely think to be so and what actually is so. We could not take the stance that, as the Aristotelian commentator Themistius put it, “that which exists does not conform to various opinions, but rather the correct opinions conform to that which exists.”1 The third consideration is the issue of cognitive coordination. Communication and inquiry, as we actually carry them on, are predicated on the fundamental idea of a real world of objective things, existing and functioning “in themselves,” without specific dependence on us and so equally accessible to others. Intersubjectively valid communication can only be based on common access to an objective order of things. The whole communicative project is predicated on a commitment to the idea that there is a realm of shared objects about which we as a community share questions and beliefs, and about which we ourselves as individuals presumably have only imperfect information that can be criticized and augmented by the efforts of others. This points to a fourth important consideration. Only through reference to the real world as a common object and shared focus of our diverse and imperfect epistemic strivings are we able to effect communicative contact with one another. Inquiry and communication alike are geared to the conception of an objective world: a communally shared realm of things that exist strictly “on their own” comprising an enduring and independent realm within which and, more importantly, with reference to which inquiry proceeds. We could not proceed on the basis of the notion that inquiry estimates the character of the real if we were not prepared to presume or postulate a reality for these estimates to be estimates of. It would clearly be pointless to devise our characterizations of reality if we did not stand committed from the outset to the proposition that there is a reality to be characterized. The fifth factor implies a recourse to mind-independent reality which makes possible a “realistic” view of our knowledge as potentially flawed. A rejection of this commitment to reality an sich (or to the actual truth about it) exacts an unacceptable price. For in abandoning this commitment we also lost those regulative contrasts that canalize and condition our view 1

Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, ed. by M. Friedländer (London: George Routledge & Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1904), I, 71, 96a.

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of the nature of inquiry (and indeed shape our conception of this process as it stands within the framework of our conceptual scheme). We could no longer assert: “What we have there is good enough as far as it goes, but it is presumably not ‘the whole real truth’ of the matter.” The very conception of inquiry as we conceive it would have to be abandoned if the contract conceptions of “actual reality” and “the real truth” were no longer available. Without the conception of reality we could not think of our knowledge in the fallibilistic mode we actually use—as having provisional, tentative, improvable features that constitute a crucial part of the conceptual scheme within whose orbit we operate our concept of inquiry. After all, reality (on the traditional metaphysicians’ construction of the concept) is the condition of things answering to “the real truth”; it is the realm of what really is as it really is. The pivotal contrast is between “mere appearance” and “reality as such,” between “our picture of reality” and “reality itself,” between what actually is and what we merely think (believe, suppose, etc.) to be. And our allegiance to the conception of reality, and to this contrast that pivots upon it, root in the fallibilistic recognition that at the level of the detailed specifics of scientific theory, anything we presently hold to be the case may well turn out otherwise—indeed, certainly will do so if past experience gives any auguries for the future. Our commitment to the mind-independent reality of “the real world” stand together with our acknowledgement that, in principle, any or all of our present scientific ideas as to how things work in the world, at any present, may well prove to be untenable. Our conviction in a reality that lies beyond our imperfect understanding of it (in all the various senses of “lying beyond”) roots in our sense of the imperfections of our scientific worldpicture—its tentativity and potential fallibility. In abandoning our commitment to a mind-independent reality, we would lose the impetus to inquiry that lies at the core of the human condition. Sixthly and finally, we require the conception of reality in order to operate the causal model of inquiry about the real world. Our standard picture of man’s place in the scheme of things is predicated on the fundamental idea that there is a real world (however imperfectly our inquiry may characterize it) whose causal operations produce inter alia causal impacts upon us, providing the basis of our world-picture. Reality is viewed as the causal source and basis of the appearances, the originator and determiner of the phenomena of our cognitively relevant experience. “The real world” is seen as causally operative both in serving as the external moulder of thought and as constituting the ultimate arbiter of the adequacy of our theorizing. 114

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In summary, then, we need that postulate of an objective order of mindindependent reality for a cluster of interrelated versions including at least the following six. • To preserve the distinction between true and false with respect to factual matters and to operate the idea of truth as agreement with reality. • To preserve the distinction between appearance and reality, between our picture of reality and reality itself. • To serve as a basis for intersubjective communication. • To furnish the basis for a shared project of communal inquiry. • To provide for the fallibilistic view of human knowledge. • To sustain the causal mode of learning and inquiry and to serve as basis for the objectivity of experience. What is at stake here is thus ultimately a principle of practice—though, to be sure, it is thought-practice that is at issue. Accordingly, the justification for this fundamental presupposition of objectivity is not evidential at all; postulates as such are not based on evidence. Rather, it is practical and instrumentalistic—pragmatic, in short. It is procedural or functional efficacy that is the crux. The justification of this postulate lies in its utility: we need it to operate our conceptual scheme. We could not form our existing conceptions of truth, fact, inquiry, and communication without presupposing the independent reality of an external world. In its absence, we simply could not think of experience and inquiry as we actually do. (What we have here is a “transcendental argument” of sorts, namely one that from the character of our conceptual scheme to the unavoidability of accepting its inherent presuppositions.) A commitment to the mind-independent reality of “the real world” stands alongside our fallibilistic acknowledgment that in principle any or all of our present scientific ideas as to how things work in the world, at any present, may well prove to be untenable. Our conviction of a reality that lies beyond our imperfect understanding of it (in all the various senses of “lying beyond”) roots in our sense of the imperfections of our scientific world-picture—its tentativity and potential fallibility. In abandoning this commitment to a mind-independent reality, we would lose the impetus of 115

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inquiry. And yet realism’s epistemic status is not that of an empirical discovery, but that of a presupposition whose ultimate justification is a transcendental argument from the very possibility of the projects of communication and inquiry as we standardly conduct them. The presuppositional conception of a mind-independent reality accordingly plays a central and indispensable role in our thought about matters cognition. It is seen as the epistemological object of veridical cognition, in the context of the contrast between “the real” and its “merely phenomenal” appearances. Moreover, it is seen as the target of telos of the truthestimation process at issue in inquiry, providing for a common focus in communication and communal inquiry. (The “real world” thus constitutes the object of our cognitive endeavors in both senses of this term—the objective at which they are directed and the purpose for which they are exerted.) And, further, reality is also to be seen as the ontological source of cognitive endeavors, affording the existential matrix in which we live and move and have our being—and whose impact upon us is the prime mover for our cognitive efforts. All of these facets of the concept of reality are integrated and unified in the classical doctrine of truth as it corresponds to fact (adaequatio ad rem), a doctrine that not merely invites but indeed requires a commitment to mind-independent reality as constituting at once the framework and the object of our cognitive endeavors in science. And their ultimate ratification lies in their role as indispensable presuppositions for our unavoidable practices. *** One can of course abandon realism and accept the negativities surveyed above. But doing so exacts a fearful price.2 For as these deliberations indicate, the conception of a mindindependent reality plays a central and indispensable role in our thinking with respect to matters of language and cognition. In communication and inquiry alike we seek to offer answers to our questions about how matters stand in this “objective realm.” It is seen as the epistemological object of veridical cognition, in the context of the contrast between “the real” and its 2

To be sure, adopting a correspondistic view regarding the meaning of “truth”—and thus regarding the consequences of truth-claims—does nothing whatever to address the issue of the criteriology of truth and the evidentistic of truth claims. This point has been stressed by many truth-theorists including the present author in his Coherence Theory of Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).

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“merely phenomenal” appearances. Again, it is seen as the target of telos of the truth-estimation process at issue in inquiry, providing for a common focus in communication and communal inquiry. (The “real world” thus constitutes the “object” of our cognitive endeavors in both senses of this term—the objective at which they are directed and the purpose for which they are exerted.) And further, reality is seen as the ontological source of cognitive endeavors, affording the existential matrix in which we move and have our being, and whose impact upon us is the prime mover for our cognitive efforts. All of these facets of the concept of reality are integrated and unified in the classical doctrine of truth as it corresponds to fact (adaequatio ad rem), a doctrine that only makes sense in the setting of a commitment to mind-independent reality. And in the face of the evident utility of this conception in matters of knowledge and action alike, there is no good reason for paying the price of its abandonment. However, the justification for this fundamental presupposition of objectivity is not evidential at all; postulates are not based on evidence. Rather, it is functional. We need this postulate to operate our conceptual scheme. The justification of this postulate lies in its utility. We could not form our existing conceptions of truth, fact, inquiry, and communication without presupposing the independent reality of an external world. We simply could not think of experience and inquiry as we do. (What we have here is a “transcendental argument” of sorts from the character of our conceptual scheme to the acceptability of its inherent presuppositions.) The primary validation of that crucial objectivity postulate roots in its basic functional utility in relation to our cognitive aims. Let us explore this aspect of the matter more fully. 2. REALISM AS A REQUISITE OF COMMUNICATION AND INQUIRY The information that we may have about a thing, be it real or presumptive information, is always just that—information we ourselves purport and lay claim to. And we recognize that this varies from person to person. Our attempts at communication and inquiry are thus undergirded by an information-transcending position—the stance that we communally inhabit a shared world of objectively existing things, a world of “real things” amongst which we live and into which we inquire but about which we do and must presume ourselves to have only imperfect information at any and every particular stage of the cognitive venture. This realism is clearly not 117

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something that we learn from the course of experience. The “facts of experience” can never reveal it to us. It is something we postulate or presuppose. Its epistemic status is not that of an empirical discovery, but that of a presupposition whose ultimate justification is a transcendental argument from the very possibility of the projects of communication and inquiry as we standardly conduct them. Our commitment to an objective reality that lies behind the data at hand is indispensably demanded by any step into the domain of the publicly accessible objects essential to communal inquiry and interpersonal communication about a shared world. We could not establish communicative contact about a common objective item of discussion if our discourse were geared to the substance of our own idiosyncratic ideas and conceptions. But the objectivity at issue in our communicative discourse is a matter of its status rather than one of its content. For the substantive content of a claim about the world in no way tells us whether it is factual or fictional. This is something that we have to determine from its context: it is a matter of the frame, not of the canvas. The fact-oriented basis of our information-transmitting exchanges is provided for a priori by a conventionalized intention to talk about “the real world.” This intention to take real objects to be at issue, objects as they really are, our potentially idiosyncratic conceptions of them quite aside, is fundamental because it is overriding—that is, it overrides all of our other intentions when we enter upon the communicative venture. Without this conventionalized intention we should not be able to convey information—or misinformation—to one another about a shared “objective” world. We are able to say something about the (real) moon or the (real) Sphinx because of our submission to a fundamental communicative convention or “social contract” to the effect that we intend (“mean”) to talk about the very thing itself as it “really” is—our own private conception of it notwithstanding. We adopt the standard policy in communicative discourse of letting “the language we use,” rather than whatever specific ideas and conceptions we may actually “have in mind” on particular occasions, be the decisive factor with regard to the things at issue in our discussions. When I speak about the Sphinx (even though I do so on the basis of my own conceivably strange conception of what is involved here), I will be discussing “the real Sphinx” in virtue of the basic conventionalized intention governing our use of referring terms. This fundamental intention of objectification, the intention to discuss “the moon itself” regardless of how untenable one’s own ideas about it may eventually prove to be is a basic precondition of the very possibility of 118

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communication. It is crucial to the communicative enterprise to take an egocentrism-avoiding stance that rejects all claims to a privileged status for our own conception of things. In the interests of this stance we are prepared to “discount any misconceptions” (our own included) about things over a very wide range indeed—that we are committed to the stance that factual disagreements as to the character of things are communicatively irrelevant within very broad limits. The incorrectness of conceptions is venial. If we were to set up our own conception of things as somehow definitive and decisive, we would at once erect a barrier not only to further inquiry but—no less importantly—to the prospect of successful communication with one another. Communication could then only proceed with the wisdom of hindsight—at the end of a long process of tentative checks. Communicative contact would be realized only in the implausible case where extensive exchange indicated retrospectively that there had been an identity of conceptions all along. And we would always stand on very shaky ground. For no matter how far we push our investigation into the issue of an identity of conceptions, the prospect of a divergence lying just around the corner—waiting to be discovered if only we pursued the matter just a bit further—can never be precluded. One could never advance the issue of the identity of focus past the status of a more of less well-grounded assumption. And then any so-called communication would no longer be an exchange of information but a tissue of frail conjectures. The communicative enterprise would become a vast inductive project—a complex exercise in theory-building, leading tentatively and provisionally toward something which, in fact, the imputations groundwork of our language enables us to presuppose from the very outset. Communication requires not only common concepts but common topics, interpersonally shared items of consideration, a common world constituted by the self-subsistently real items basic to shared experience. The factor of objectivity reflects our basic commitment to a communally available world as the common property of communicators. Such a commitment involves more than merely de facto intersubjective agreement. For such agreement is bound to be a matter of a posteriori discovery, while our view of the nature of things puts “the real world” on a necessary and a priori basis. This stance roots in the fundamental convention of a shared social insistence on communicating—the commitment to an objective world of real things affords the crucially requisite common focus needed for any genuine communication. What links my discourse topically with that of my interlocutors is our common subscription to the a priori presumption (a defea119

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sible presumption, to be sure) that we are both talking about a shared thing, our own possible misconceptions of it notwithstanding. This means that no matter how extensively we may change our minds about the nature of a thing or type of thing at issue, we are still dealing with one common item. It assures reidentification across theories and belief-systems. Our very conception of a real thing is such that it provides a fixed point, a stable center around which interpersonal communication revolves, an invariant focus of potentially diverse conceptions. What is to be determinative, decisive, definitive, etc., of the things at issue in my discourse is not my conception, or yours, or indeed anyone’s conception at all. The conventionalized intention discussed means that a coordination of conceptions is not decisive for the possibility of communication. Your statements about a thing will convey something to me even if my conception of it is altogether different from yours. To communicate we need not take ourselves to share views of the world, but only take the stance that we share the world that is being discussed. The commitment to objectivity is basic to any prospect of our discourse with one another about a shared world of “real things,” to which none of us is in a position to claim privileged access. This commitment establishes a need to “distance” ourselves from things, that is, to recognize the prospect of a discrepancy between our (potentially idiosyncratic) conceptions of things and the true character of these things as they exist objectively in “the real world.” The ever-present contrast between “the thing as we view it” and “the thing as it is” is the mechanism by which this crucially important distancing is accomplished. And maintaining this stance means that we are never entitled to claim to have exhausted a thing au fond in cognitive regard, to have managed to bring it wholly and fully within our epistemic grasp. For to make this claim would, in effect, be to identify “the thing at issue” purely in terms of “our own conception of it,” an identification which would effectively remove the former item (the thing itself) from the stage of consideration as an independent entity in its own right, by endowing our conception with decisively determinative force. And this would lead straightaway to the unacceptable result of a cognitive solipsism that would preclude reference to intersubjectively identifiable particulars, and would thereby block the possibility of interpersonal communication and communal inquiry. Any pretensions to the predominance, let alone the correctness, of our own conceptions regarding the realm of the real must be set aside in the context of communication. In communication regarding this we must be able to exchange information about them with our contemporaries and to 120

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transmit information about them to our successors. And we must be in a position to do this on the presumption that their conceptions of things are not only radically different from ours, but conceivably also rightly different. Thus, it is a crucial precondition of the possibility of successful communication about things that we must avoid laying any claim either to the completeness or even to the ultimate correctness of our own conceptions of any of the things at issue. This renders it critically important that (and understandable why) conceptions are not pivotal for communicative purposes. Our discourse reflects our conceptions and perhaps conveys them, but it is not substantively about them. What is crucial for communication, however, is the fundamental intention to deal with the objective order of this “real world.” If our assertoric commitments did not transcend the information we have on hand, we would never be able to “get in touch” with others about a shared objective world. No claim is made for the primacy of our own conceptions, for their correctness, or even for their mere agreement with those of others. The fundamental intention to discuss “the thing itself” predominates and overrides any mere dealing with the thing as we conceive it to be. Certainly, that reference to “objectively real things” at work in our discourse does not contemplate a peculiar sort of thing—a new ontological category of “things-in-themselves.” It is simply a shorthand formula for a certain communicative presumption or imputation rooted in an a priori commitment to the idea of a commonality of objective focus—a presumption that is allowed to stand unless and until circumstances arise to render this step untenable. How do we really know that Anaximander of Miletus was talking about our earth in his discussion in the sixth century BC? He is not here to reassure us. He did not leave elaborate discussions about his aims and purposes. How can we be so confident about what he meant in that strange talk about a slablike object suspended in equilibrium in the center of the cosmos? The answer is straightforward. That he is to be taken to mean that our earth is such an object is something that turns, in the final analysis, on two very general issues in which Anaximander himself plays little if any role: (1) our subscription to certain generalized principles of interpretation with respect to the Greek language; and (2) the conventionalized subscription by us and ascription to other languages users in general of certain fundamental communicative policies an intentions. In the face of appropriate functional equivalences we allow neither a difference in language nor a difference of “thought-worlds” to block an identity of reference. The realism at issue pertains to the fact that there is an objective reality 121

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and leaves for another occasion the issue of what it is like. We deliberately put the whole matter of conceptions aside—abstracting from the question of the agreement of my conception with yours, and all the more from the issue of which one of us has the right conception. This sort of epistemic humility is the price we pay for keeping the channels of communication open. Seen in this light, the key point may be put as follows: it is indeed a presupposition of effective communicative discourse about a thing that we purport (claim and intend) to make true statements about it. But for such discourse it is not required that we purport to have a true or even adequate conception of the thing at issue. On the contrary, we must deliberately abstain from any claim that our own conception is definitive if we are to engage successfully in profitable discourse with others. 3. THE UTILITARIAN IMPERATIVE But now consider the following objection: Let it be granted that this general approach makes sense—that the idea of a mindindependent reality is a presupposition basic to the conceptual framework that undergirds our project of inquiry and “knowledge” acquisition and communication. But why should one see this assumption as validated by its serviceability in this regard? After all, perhaps the entire project is simply unjustified. Consider the analogy of religion. God is essential to the project of religion and worship: the “external world” is essential to the project of inquiry and cognition. But perhaps those entire projects are simply inappropriate.

In countering this considered objection with respect to cognition, we must stress the inappropriateness of the analogy. For the religious project is optional, one could simply decline to enter in. But the cognitive project is not so easily evaded. We must act to live: must eat this or that, move here or there, do something or other. And, being the sort of creatures we are, our actions are guided by our beliefs. Is this substance edible? Is that place safe? Is that action goal-conducive? If we do not form views on these subjects and allow our actions to be guided by “knowledge”—or pretensions thereto—then there are but few alternatives (all duly noted and recommended by the skeptics of classical antiquity): —to follow custom and “do what is generally done”; —to follow instinct or “hunch”; 122

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—to follow our desires and the modes of “inclination”; —to be guided by clues, indications, and “probabilities.” But none of these noncognitive alternatives seem very promising, none have much appeal to a creature who demands good reasons for acting. (Thus even to begin to validate a reliance on probabilities we need facts.) The impetus to inquiry for knowledge-acquisition reflects the most practical of imperatives. Our need for intellectual accommodation in this world is no less pressing and no less practical than our need for physical accommodation. But in both cases, we do not want just some house or other, but one that is well built, that will not be blown down by the first wind that sweeps along. Skeptics from antiquity onward have always said, “Forget about those abstruse theoretical issues; focus on your practical needs.” They overlook the crucial fact that an intellectual accommodation to the world is itself one of our deepest practical needs—that in a position of ignorance or cognitive dissonance we cannot function satisfactorily. The project of communal inquiry is not optional—at any rate not for us humans. Its rationale lies in the most practical and prudent of considerations, since it is only by traveling the path of inquiry that we can arrive at the sorts of good reasons capable of meeting the demands of a “rational animal.” And given the mandatory nature of the cognitive project, we have no real choice but to “buy in” on its presuppositions. We thus arrive at an overall course of justificatory argumentation whose structure runs as follows: (1) We cannot survive and flourish in this world without effective action. (2) We cannot act effectively without rationally warranted confidence in our (putative) knowledge. (3) We cannot achieve confidence-inspiring knowledge without rational inquiry. (4) Commitment to a real world is an essential requisite for rational inquiry. Therefore: 123

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(5) Realism (i.e., commitment to a real world that is the object of our inquiries) is a rational imperative on the side of practical reason—a sine qua non for a rational creature like ourselves to survive and to flourish. Its justifactory rationale thus, in effect, lies in its being a situational imperative of our condition in the world’s scheme of things. Only by subscribing to these fundamental reality postulates can we take the sort of view of experience, inquiry, and communication that we in fact have. Without it, the entire conceptual framework of our thinking about the world and our place within it would come crashing down. As realists throughout the ages have rightly insisted, the utility of the conception of reality is such that even if reality were not there, we would have to invent it. 4. RETROJUSTIFICATION: THE WISDOM OF HINDSIGHT How can considerations of need and functional utility by themselves provide an adequate validation of authenticity? A “validation” in terms of functional utility establishes our claims to mind-independent reality not by the cognitive route of learning but by the pragmatic route of an eminently useful postulation. Crucial though this may be, it clearly cannot be the entire story. The consideration that we must proceed in the way of objectivitypresuming cognition as a matter of the functional requisites of our cognitive situation—seeing that otherwise there is just no alternative if our aims are to be attained and our needs and purposes served—stops well short of being totally satisfactory. It does not offer us any assurance that we actually will succeed in our endeavor if we do proceed in this way; it just has it that we will not if we do not. The issue of actual effectiveness remains untouched. And so a nagging doubt still remains which in the challenge: “Let us grant that this line of approach provides a cogent practical argument. All this shows is that realism is useful. But does that make it true? Is there any rational warrant for it over and above the mere fact of its utility?” To address this issue, we have to move beyond presupposed functional requisites to address the issue of actual effectiveness. We must now have recourse to the resources of actual experience. For what is learned by experience—and can only be learned in this way—is that in proceeding on this prejudgment our attempts do, by and large, work out pretty well vis-à124

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vis the purposes we have in view for inquiry and communication. We want and need objective information about “the real world.” This, of course, is not to be had directly without the epistemic mediation of experience. And so we treat certain data as evidence—we extend “evidential credit” to them as it were. Through trial and error we learn that some of them do indeed deserve it, and then we proceed to extend to them greater weight—we “increase their credit limit” as it were and rely on them more extensively. And, of course, to use those data as evidence is to build up a picture of the world, a picture which shows, with the “wisdom of hindsight,” how appropriate it was for us to use those evidential data in the first place. To clarify the pragmatic rationale of realism, consider a cat-on-the-mat experience where “I take myself to be seeing a cat on the mat.” On its basis I would arrive quite unproblematically at the following contentions: • It seems plausible to suppose that there is a cat on the mat • There is presumably a cat on the mat In the circumstances to claim unqualified assurance that there indeed is a cat on the mat would be stretching matters too far. Classical skepticism is right in this, that there is a possibility of illusion or delusionthat something controversial might be being done with mirrors or puppets, etc. But the indicated pro-inclination toward the theses at issue is certainly warranted. Conclusiveness may be absent but plausibility is certainly there. Yet how is one to get beyond such tentativity? To step from that visual experience to an objective factual claim on the order of • There actually is a cat there • There actually is a mat there • The cat is actually emplaced on the mat is a move that can be made—but not without further ado. Let us consider what sort of “further ado” is required here. The position at issue is a “direct realism” of sorts. The step from a sensory experience (“I take myself to be seeing a cat”) to an objective factual claim (“There is a cat over there and I am looking at it”) is operationally direct but epistemically mediated. And it is mediated not by an inference 125

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but by a policy, namely the policy of trusting one’s own senses. This policy itself is based neither on wishful thinking nor on arbitrary decisions: it emerges in the school of praxis from the consideration that a long course of experience has taught us that our senses generally guide us right—that the indications of visual experience, unlike, say, those of dream experience, generally provide reliable information that can be implemented in practice. But how would this business of policy validation from a body of experience work in practice? The concept of presumption is the key that unlocks this issue. The classical theories of perception from Descartes to the sense-datum theorists of the first half of the twentieth century all involve a common difficulty. For all of them saw a real and deep problem to be rooted in the question: Under what circumstances are our actual experiences genuinely veridical? In particular: which facts about the perceptual situation validate the move from “I (take myself to) see a cat on the mat” to “There is a cat on the mat”? How are we to monitor the appropriateness of the step from “perceptual experiences” to actual perceptions of real things-in-the-world, seeing that experience is by its very nature something personal and subjective.

The traditional theories of perception all face the roadblock of the problem: How do we get from here to there, from personal and subjective experience to warranted claims of objective fact? However, what all these theories ignore is the fact that in actual practice we operate within the setting of a presumption-based concept-scheme that reverses the burden of proof here: that our perceptions (and conceptions) are standardly treated as innocent until proven guilty. The whole course of relevant experience is such that the standing presumption is on their side. The indications of experience are taken as true provisionally—allowed to stand until such time (if ever) when concrete evidential counterindications come to view. Barring indications to the contrary, we can and do move immediately and unproblematically from “I take myself to be seeing a cat on the mat” to “There really is a cat on the mat and I actually see it there.” But what is at issue here is not an inference (or a deriving) from determinable facts but a mere presumption (or a taking). The transition from subjectivity to objectivity is automatic, though, to be sure, it is always provisional, that is, subject to the proviso that all goes as it ought. For unless and until something goes amiss—i.e., unless there is a mishap of some sort— those “subjective percepts” are standardly allowed to count as “objective facts.” 126

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To be sure, there is no prospect of making an inventory of the necessary conditions here. Life is too complex: neither in making assertions nor in driving an automobile can one provide a comprehensive advance survey of possible accidents and list all the things that can possibly go wrong. We can no more inventory all possible ways of epistemic mishaps that are in merely all possible ways of atomistic mishaps. But the key point is that the linkage between appearance and reality is neither conceptual nor causal: it is the product of a pragmatic policy in the management of information, a ground rule of presumption that governs our epistemic practice. With presumption we take to be so what we could not otherwise derive. This idea of such presumptive “taking” is a crucial aspect of our languagedeploying discursive practice. For presumptively justified beliefs are the raw materials of cognition. They represent contentions that—in the absence of preestablished counterindications—are acceptable to us “until further notice,” thus permitting us to make a start in the venture of cognitive justification without the benefit of pre-justified materials. They are defeasible all right, vulnerable to being overturned, but only by something else yet more secure some other preestablished conflicting consideration. They are entitled to remain in place until displaced by something better. Accordingly, their impetus averts the dire consequences that would ensue of any and every cogent process of rational deliberation-required inputs which themselves had to be authenticated by a prior process of rational deliberation—in which case the whole process could never get under way. The key consideration is that we must proceed in the way of objectivitypresuming cognition as a matter of the functional requisites of our situation because there is just no viable alternative if our aims are to be attained and our needs and purposes served, still stops short of being altogether conclusive. For it does not offer us any assurance that we will actually succeed in our endeavor if we do proceed in this way; it just has it that we will not if we do not. And so, the issue of actual effectiveness remains undecided and a nagging doubt still remains, one which roots in the challenge: “Let it be granted that this line of approach provides a cogent practical argument. All this shows only that realism is useful—perhaps so much so as to be effectively indispensable for us. But does that make it true? Is there any rational warrant for it over and above the mere fact of its utility?” Indispensability apart, then, what is it that justifies making presumptions, seeing that they are not established truths? The answer lies substantially in procedurally practical considerations. Presumptions arise in contexts where we have questions and need answers. It is a matter of faute de mieux, of this or nothing (or at any rate, nothing better). Presumption is a 127

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thought instrumentality that so functions as to make it possible for us to do the best we can in circumstances where something must be done. And so presumption affords yet another instance where practical considerations play a leading role on the stage of our cognitive and communicative practice. For presumption is, in the end, a practical device whose rationale of validation lies on the order of pragmatic considerations. The obvious and evident advantage of presumption as an epistemic recourse is that it enables us vastly to extend the range of questions we are able to answer. It affords an instrument that enables us to extract a maximum of information from communicative situations. Presumption, in sum, is an ultimately pragmatic resource. To be sure, its evident disadvantage is that the answers that we obtain by its means are given not in the clarion tones of knowledge and assertion but in the more hesitant and uncertain tones of presumption and probability. We thus do not get the advantages of presumption without an accompanying negativity. Here, as elsewhere, we cannot have our cake and eat it too. 5. MORE ON RETROJUSTIFICATION: THE CLOSING OF THE CYCLES Yet how is it that those realism-grounding presumptions become entitled to claims of rational appropriateness. The crux of the answer has already been foreshadowed. A twofold process is involved. Initially it is a matter of the generic need for answers to our questions: of being so circumstanced that if we are willing to presume we are able to get . . . anything. But ultimately we go beyond such this-or-nothing consideration, and the validity of a presumption emerges ex post facto through the utility (both cognitive and practical) of the results it yields. We advance from “this or nothing” to “this or nothing that is determinably better.” Legitimation is thus available, albeit only through experiential retrovalidation, retrospective revalidation in the light of eventual experience. It is a matter of learning that a certain issue is more effective in meeting the needs of the situation than its available alternatives. Initially we look to promise and potential but in the end it is applicative efficacy that counts. The fact is that our cognitive practices have a fundamentally economic rationale. They are all cost effective within the setting of the project of inquiry to which we stand committed (by our place in the world’s scheme of things). Presumptions are the instrument through which we achieve a favorable balance of trade in the complex trade-offs between ignorance of fact and mistake of belief—between unknowing and error. 128

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We proceed in cognitive contexts in much the same manner in which banks proceed in financial contexts. We extend credit to others, doing so at first to a relatively modest extent. When and as they comport themselves in a way that indicates that this credit was warranted, then we extend more. By responding to trust in a “responsible” way—proceeding to amortize the credit one already has—one can increase one’s credit rating in cognitive as much as in financial contexts. In trusting the senses, in relying on other people, and even in being rational, we always run a risk. Whenever in life we place our faith in something, we run a risk of being let down and disappointed. But in such matters, no absolute guarantees can be had. And yet there is little choice about the matter: it is a case of “this or nothing.” If we want answers to factual questions, we have no real alternative but to trust in the cognitively cooperative disposition of the natural order of things. We cannot preestablish the appropriateness of this trust by somehow demonstrating, in advance of events, that it is actually warranted. Rather, its rationale is that without it we remove the basis on which alone creatures such as ourselves can confidently live a life of effective thought and action. In such cases, pragmatic rationality urges us to gamble on trust in reason, not because it cannot fail us, but because in so doing little is to be lost and much to be gained. A general policy of judicious trust is eminently cost effective in yielding useful results in matters of cognition. Charles Sanders Peirce put the issue with characteristic clarity: “It may be asked how I know that there are reals. If this hypothesis is the sole support of my method of inquiry, my method of inquiry must not be used to support my hypothesis.”3 Peirce placed his finger on exactly the right question. Yet while this reality-hypothesis is indeed not a product of inquiry, but a presupposition for it, nevertheless, it is one whose justification ultimately stands or falls on the success of the inquiries it facilitates. Its validation cannot be preestablished through evidence but can only be provided ex post facto through the justificatory impetus of successful implementation. The starting point of our justifactory reasoning was a basic projectfacilitating postulation. Yet this does not tell the whole story. For there is also the no-less-important fact that this postulation obtains a vindicating retrojustification because the farther we proceed on this basis, the more its obvious appropriateness comes to light. With the wisdom of hindsight we come to see with increasing clarity that the project that these presupposi3

Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers, Vol. 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), sect. 5.383.

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tions render possible is an eminently successful one. The pragmatic turn does crucially important work here in putting at our disposal a style of justificatory argumentation that manages to be cyclical without vitiating circularity. What is at issue is a matter of unavoidable presumptions whose specific mode of implementation is ultimately retrovalidated in the light of experience. We want and need objective information about “the real world.” This, of course, is not to be had directly without the epistemic mediation of experience. And so we treat certain data as evidence—we extend “evidential credit” to them as it were. Through trial and error we learn that some of them do indeed deserve it, and then we proceed to extend to them greater weight—we “increase their credit limit” as it were and rely on them more extensively. And, of course, to use those data as evidence is to build up a picture of the world, a picture which shows, with the “wisdom of hindsight,” how appropriate it was for us to use those evidential data in the first place. On this basis, the substantive picture of nature’s ways that is secured through our empirical inquiries is itself ultimately justified, retrospectively as it were, through affording us with the presuppositions on whose basis inquiry proceeds. As we proceed to develop science there must come a retrojustifactory “closing of the circle.” The world-picture that science delivers into our hands must eventually become such as to explain how it is that creatures such as ourselves, emplaced in the world as we are, investigating it by the processes we actually use, should do fairly well at developing a workable view of that world. As we saw in the preceding chapter’s discussion of “rational selection,” the “validation of scientific method” must and can in the end itself become scientifically validated. Though the process is cyclic and circular, there is nothing vicious and vitiating about it. The process of rationally validating our cognitive procedures must in the end be cyclical and close on itself in systematic consideration. The substantive picture of nature’s ways that is secured through our empirical inquiries is itself ultimately justified, retrospectively as it were, through validating the presuppositions on whose basis inquiry has proceeded. As we develop science there must come a “closing of the circle.” The world-picture that science delivers into our hands must eventually become such as to explain how it is that creatures such as ourselves, emplaced in the world as we are, investigating it by the processes we actually use, should do fairly well at developing a workable view of that world. The “validation of scientific method” must in the end itself become scientifically validated. Science must (and can) retrovalidate itself by providing the 130

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material (in terms of a science-based world-view) for justifying the methods of science. The rational structure of the overall process of justification accordingly looks as follows: (1) We use various sorts of experiential data as evidence for objective fact. (2) We do this in the first instance for practical reasons, faute de mieux, because only by proceeding in this way can we hope to resolve our questions with any degree of rational satisfaction. (3) As we proceed two things happen: (i) On the pragmatic side we find that we obtain a world picture on whose basis we can operate effectively. (Pragmatic revalidation.) (ii) On the cognitive side we find that we arrive at a picture of the world and our place within it that provides an explanation of how it is that we are enabled to get things (roughly) right—that we are in fact justified in using our phenomenal data as data of objective fact. (Explanatory revalidation.) The success at issue here is twofold—both in terms of understanding (cognition) and in terms of application (praxis). And it is this ultimate success that justifies and rationalizes, retrospectively, our evidential proceedings. Though the process is cyclic and circular, there is nothing vicious and vitiating about it. The reasoning at issue is not a matter of linear sequence but of systemic coherence. We thus arrive at the overall situation of a dual “retrojustification.” For as all the presuppositions of inquiry are ultimately justified because of a “wisdom of hindsight” this enables us to see that by their means we have been able to achieve both practical success and a theoretical understanding of our place in the world’s scheme of things. Here successful practical implementation is needed as an extra-theoretical quality-control monitor of our theorizing. And the capacity of our scientifically devised view of the world to underwrite an explanation of how it is that a creature constituted as we are, operating by the means of inquiry that we employ, and operating within an environment such as ours, can ultimately devise a relatively ac131

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curate view of the world is also critical for the validation of our knowledge. The closing of these inquiry-geared loops validates, retrospectively, those realistic presuppositions or postulations that made the whole process of inquiry possible in the first place. Realism thus emerges as a presupposition-affording postulate for inquiry—a postulation whose ultimate legitimation eventuates retrospectively through the results, both practical and cognitive, which the process of inquiry based on those yet-to-be-justified presuppositions is able to achieve. The retroactive component of the justification at issue is critical for present purposes. That a priori presumption of realism could be validated by the “essential presupposition” argument that if we do not proceed in this way then success in the projects at issue (inquiry and communication) simply becomes impossible. So far so good. But not quite enough. For this pivots the matter on the issue of the mere possibility of success. It does nothing to extend any sort of assurance that success will actually be attained. (We remain at the level of necessary conditions without embarking on the issue of sufficiency.) And this is something that can only be achieved ex post facto—after we actually go on to proceed with the process of inquiring. That this is achievable in a reasonable degree is something that has to be a matter of actual discovery. And it is here that the factor of pragmatic efficacy at issue with such retrojustification comes to play its critical role. Of course, when it comes to this issue of actual efficacy, we have no choice but to proceed experientially—through the simple stratagem of “trying and seeing.” Functional requiredness remains a matter of a priori considerations, but efficacy—actual sufficiency to our purposes—will be a matter of a posteriori experience. It is, and is bound to be, a matter of retrojustification—a retrospective revalidation in the light of experience. And this empirically delivered pragmatic consideration that our praxis of inquiry and communication does actually work—that we can effectively and (by and large) successfully communicate with one another about a shared world, inquiry into whose nature and workings proceeds successfully as a communal project of investigation—is the ultimately crucial consideration that legitimates (through “retro-validation”) the evidencetranscending imputations built into the objective claims to which we subscribe. What we began with was a view of realism as a basic project-facilitating postulation. But this does not tell the whole of the justificatory story. For there is also the no less important fact that this postulation obtains a vindicating retrojustification because the farther we proceed on this basis, the 132

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more its obvious appropriateness comes to light. With the wisdom of hindsight we come to see with increasing clarity that the project that these presuppositions render possible is an eminently successful one. And this pragmatic turn does crucially important work in putting at our disposal a style of justificatory argumentation that manages to be cyclical without vitiating circularity. The closing of these inquiry-geared loops validates, retrospectively, those realistic presuppositions or postulations that made the whole process of inquiry possible in the first place. Realism thus emerges as a presupposition-affording postulate for inquiry—a postulation whose ultimate legitimation eventuates retrospectively through the results, both practical and cognitive, which the process of inquiry based on those yet-to-be-justified presuppositions is able to achieve. In the end we achieve a realism all right, but one that is heavily indebted to pragmatic and idealistic lines of thought. *** Let us review the overall line of these somewhat convoluted deliberations. Metaphysical realism—the doctrine that there is a mind-independent reality and that our experience provides us with a firm cognitive grip upon it— does not represent a learned fact but a presuppositional postulate. As such, it has a complex justification that comes in two phases. The first, initial phase is prospective, proceeding with a view to the functional necessity of taking this position—its purpose-dictated inevitability. For this step alone renders possible a whole range of activities relating to inquiry and to communication that is of the highest utility for us—and indeed is a practical necessity. In possibilizing4—that is, bringing it within the range of the feasible—a host of purpose-mandated activities, the postulate of metaphysical realism obtains its initial justification in the practical order of reasoning. Such initial functional justification is good but not good enough. The second phase of justification goes further, albeit retrospectively. It proceeds by noting that after we actually engage in the goal-directed practice that the postulate in question possibilizes, our applicative and explanatory efforts are, in fact, attended by success—that making that the initial postu-

4

In current English usage there is no single-word verb “to make possible” akin to the German ermoeglichen. To adopt “possibilize” would perhaps be sensible and certainly convenient.

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late has an immense pragmatic payoff. And in its retrospective aspect, this issue of actual efficacy is ultimately crucial for the overall systemic justification of the practical postulate at issue. A notion that has such important work to do as is the case with that of mind-independent reality cannot be dismissed as vacuous or superfluous. As was observed above, the utility of the conception of reality is so great that if it were not already there we would have to invent it. But the pragmatic success that ensues when we put this conception to work goes to show that we have not in fact done so.5,6

5

Readers intrigued by the issues of this chapter may want also to examine the treatment of cognitive issues in the author’s Methodological Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), Induction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). Empirical Inquiry (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982), Scientific Realism (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987), and Realistic Pragmatism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).

6

This chapter is an expanded version of a September 2003 presentation to the luncheon Lecture series of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh.

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Chapter Seven PRAGMATIC IDEALISM AND METAPHYSICAL REALISM 1. THE EXISTENTIAL COMPONENT OF REALISM

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ealism has two indispensable and inseparable components—the one existential and ontological, the other cognitive and epistemic. The former maintains that there indeed is a real world—a realm of concrete, mind-independent, objective reality. The latter maintains that we can to some extent secure adequate descriptive information about this mindindependent realm—that we can validate plausible claims about some of the specifics of its constitution. This second contention obviously presupposes the first, seeing that behind the question “Are our claims about an item correct?” there unavoidably stands the question “Is there indeed such an item for our claims to be about?” But how can that pivotal, ontological thesis of metaphysical realism be secured within a generally pragmatic approach? How can functional considerations of use and purpose come to have a relevant, let alone formative bearing on theoretical matters of correctness, truth, and fact? The answer here lies in the consideration that metaphysical realism represents a commitment that we presuppose for our inquiries rather than discover as a result of them. For we do not—cannot—discover as a result of (mind-managed!) inquiry and investigation that a totally mind-detached reality actually exists. This is clearly not an inductive inference issuing from the scientific systematization of our observations, but rather represents a regulative, thought-guiding presupposition that makes empirical inquiry possible in the first place. How could we possibly learn from observation that our mental experience is itself largely the causal product of the machinations of a mind-independent manifold—that subjective experience has objective bearing because all those phenomenal appearances are causally rooted in an altogether mind-external physical realm whose reach and range outrun the confines of our experience? What is ultimately at issue here is a practice-enabling presupposition

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that experience is indeed objective. That what we take to be evidence indeed is evidence, that our sensations yield information about an order of physical existence outside the experiential realm itself, and that this experience is not just merely phenomenal but represents the appearance of something extra-mental belonging to an objectively self-subsisting order—all this is something that we must always presuppose in using experiential data as “evidence” for how things stand in the world. For if we did not presume from the very outset that our sensations somehow relate to an extramental reality so as to be able to evidentiate claims about its nature, then we could clearly make no use of them to draw any inference whatever about “the real world.” Commitment to a mind-independent reality is, all too clearly, a precondition for empirical inquiry rather than a consequence of it—a presupposition we have to make to be able to use observational data as sources of objective information. We really have no alternative but to presume or postulate it. Objectivity represents a postulation made on functional (rather than evidential) grounds: we endorse it in order to be in a position to learn by experience. What is at issue here is not so much a product of our experience of reality as a factor that makes it possible to view our experience as being “of reality” at all. As Kant clearly saw, objective experience is possible only if the existence of such a real, objective world is an available given from the outset rather than the product of experience—an ex post facto discovery about the nature of things.1 Our endorsement of the reality of observation-engendering causes in nature—which as causes of experience in the order of being also do double duty as inferences there from in the order of learning—is not based on empirical investigation but on general principles of a procedural character. What we learn from science is not and cannot be that an inherently unob1

Immanuel Kant held that we cannot experientially learn though perception about the objective reality of outer things, because we can only recognize our perceptions as perceptions (i.e., representations of outer things) if these outer things are supposed as such from the first (rather than being learned or inferred from representations). As he summarizes the matter in the “Refutation of Idealism”: “Idealism assumed that the only immediate experience is inner experience, and that from it we can only infer outer things—and this, moreover, only in an untrustworthy manner . . . . But in the above proof it has been shown that outer experience is really immediate . . . .” (Critique of Pure Reason, B276). Here “is really immediate” should be construed as: “must be accepted noninferentially from the very outset, because inference could not accomplish what is needed to arrive at those outer things.”

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servable sub-observable order of physical causality undergirds nature as we observe it, but rather what—with their reality taken as given—these underlying and preliminarily presumed agencies must specifically be like. Science does not (cannot) teach us that the observable order emerges from underlying unobserved causes and that the phenomena of observation are signs betokening this extra- and sub-phenomenal order of existence. For this is something that we must presume from the outset of any world in which observation as we understand it can transpire. What science does teach us (and metaphysics cannot) is what can plausibly take to be the descriptive character of this phenomena-engendering order once its existence is taken for granted. For once an objective reality and its concomitant causal operation has been postulated, then principles of inductive systematization, of explanatory economy, and of common cause consilence can work wonders in exploiting the phenomena of experience to provide the basis for plausible claims about the nature of the real. But we indispensably need that initial existential presupposition to make a start. Without that natural commitment to a reality serving as ground and object of our experience, its cognitive import will be lost. Only on this basis can we proceed evidentially with the exploration of the interpersonally public and objective domain of a physical world-order that we share in common. Only by way of a facilitating presupposition—albeit that is ultimately retrovalidated through its applicative utility and efficacy—can we ever hope to establish that our observational experience (unlike our dream experience) is ever evidence for anything objectively mind-external, that is, is ever able to provide information about a “real world.” Accordingly, that second, descriptive (evidential) component of realism stands on a very different footing from its first, existential (presuppositional) component. For reality’s nature is something about which we can only make warranted claims through actually examining it. Substantive information must come through inquiry—through evidential validation. Once we are willing to credit our observational data with objectivity,—with reality-orientation and thus with evidential bearing—then we can, of course, make use of them to inform ourselves as to the nature of the real. But the objective bearing of observational experience is not something that we can preestablish; it is something we must presuppose in the interest of honoring Peirce’s pivotal injunction never to bar the path of inquiry. And the functional nature of this practice-enabling presupposition means that the validation process at work must—at this fundamental level—be altogether pragmatic. It represents a step step we take prospectively—in order to put our137

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selves into a position to satisfy our goals. 2. REALISM IN ITS REGULATIVE/PRAGMATIC ASPECT The preceding deliberations point clearly in the direction of a pragmatic justification for a realistic stance toward our experience as intensionally indicative of something beyond itself. The commitment to realism is the possibilizing instrumentality for a certain practical modus operandi. Accordingly, we have good reason—good pragmatic reason—for standardly operating on the basis of the “presumption of objectivity” reflected in the guiding precept: “Unless you have good reason to think otherwise (that is, as long as nothing impedes: nihil obstat) treat the materials of inquiry and communication as veridical—as representing the nature of the real.” The ideal of objective reality is the focus of a family of convenient regulative principles—a functionally useful instrumentality that enables us to transact our cognitive business in the most satisfactory and effective way. And so, bearing this pragmatic perspective in mind, let us consider this issue of utility and ask: What can this postulation of a mind-independent reality actually do for us? The answer is straightforward. The assumption of a mind-independent reality is essential to the whole of our standard conceptual scheme relating to inquiry and communication. Without it, both the actual conduct and the rational legitimation of our communicative and investigative (evidential) practice would be destroyed. To be evidentially meaningful, experience has to be experience of something. And nothing that we do in this cognitive domain would make sense if we did not subscribe to the conception of a mind-independent reality. And since this is not a learned fact it is—and must be!—an assumption whose prime recommendation is its utility. To begin with, we indispensably require the notion of reality to operate the classical concept of truth as “agreement with reality” (adaequatio ad rem). Once we abandon the concept of reality, the idea that in accepting a factual claim as true we become committed to how matters actually stand—”how it really is”—would also go by the board. The very semantics of our discourse constrains a commitment to realism; we have no alternative but to regard as real those states of affairs that are affirmed by the contentions we are prepared to accept. Once we put a contention forward by way of serious assertion, we must view as real the states of affairs it purports, and must see its claims as facts. We need the notion of reality to operate the conception of truth. A factual statement on the order of “There are 138

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pi mesons” is true if and only if the world is such that pi mesons exist within it. By virtue of their very nature as truths, true statements must state facts: they state what really is so, which is exactly what it is to “characterize reality.” The conception of truth and of reality come together in this notion of adaequatio ad rem—the venerable principle that to speak truly is to say how matters stand in reality, in that things actually are as we have said them to be. In the second place, the nihilistic denial that there is such a thing as an objectively mind-independent realm would destroy once and for all the crucial Parmenidean divide between appearance and reality. And this would exact a fearful price from us, since we would then be reduced to talking only of what we (I, you, many of us) think to be so. The crucial contrast notion of the real truth would no longer be available: we would only be able to contrast our putative truths with those of others, but could no longer operate the classical distinction between the putative and the actual, between what people merely think to be so and what actually is so. We could not take the stance that, as the Aristotelian commentator Themistius put it, “that which exists does not conform to various opinions, but rather the correct opinions conform to that which exists.”2 The third point relates to the issue of cognitive coordination. Communication and inquiry, as we actually carry them on, are predicated on the fundamental idea of a real world of objective things, existing and functioning “in themselves,” without specific dependence on us and so equally accessible to others. Inter-subjectively valid communication can only be based on common access to an objective order of things. All our ventures at communication and communal inquiry are predicated on the stance that we communally inhabit a shared world of things. They presuppose there is a realm of “real objects” amongst which we live and into which we inquire as a community, but about which we ourselves as individuals presumably have only imperfect information that can be criticized and augmented by the efforts of others. This points to a fourth important consideration. Only through reference to the real world as a common object and shared focus of our diverse and imperfect epistemic strivings are we able to effect communicative contact with one another. Inquiry and communication alike are geared to the conception of an objective world: a communally shared realm of things that exist strictly “on their own” within which and, more importantly, with ref2

Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M Friedländer (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1904), I, 71, 96a.

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erence to which inquiry proceeds. We could not proceed on the basis of the notion that inquiry estimates the character of the real if we were not prepared to presume or postulate from the very outset a reality for these estimates to be estimates of. It would clearly be pointless to devise our characterizations of reality if we did not stand committed from the outset to the proposition that there is a reality to be characterized. The fifth consideration is that the very idea of inquiry as we conceive it would have to be abandoned if the conceptions of “actual reality” and “the real truth” were no longer available to serve their crucial contrasting roles. We could no longer assert: “What we have there is good enough as far as it goes, but it is presumably not ‘the whole real truth’ of the matter.” Without the conception of reality we could not think of our knowledge in the fallibilistic mode we actually use—as having provisional, tentative, improvable features that constitute a crucial part of the conceptual scheme within whose orbit we operate our concept of inquiry. For our commitment to the mind-independent reality of “the real world” stands together with our acknowledgment that, in principle, any or all of our present scientific ideas as to how things work in the world, at any present, may well prove to be untenable. The information that we may have about a thing, be it real or presumptive information, is always just that—information we lay claim to. We recognize that it varies from person to person. Our attempt at communication and inquiry are thus undergirded by the stance that we communally inhabit a shared world of objectively existing things, a world of “real things” amongst which we live and into which we inquire (but about which we do and must assume that we have only imperfect information at any and every particular stage of the cognitive venture). Our conviction in a reality that lies beyond our imperfect understanding of it (in all the various senses of “lying beyond”) roots in our sense of the imperfections of our scientific world-picture—its tentativity and potential fallibility. In abandoning our commitment to a mind-independent reality, we would lose the indispensably objective impetus of inquiry. After all, reality (on the traditional metaphysicians’ construction of the concept) is the condition of things answering to “the real truth;” it is the realm of what really is as it really is. The pivotal contrast is between “mere appearance” and “reality as such,” between “our picture of reality” and “reality itself,” between what actually is and what we merely think (believe, suppose, etc.) to be. Our allegiance to the conception of reality, and to the appearance/reality contrast that pivots upon it, roots in the fallibilistic recognition that, at the level of the detailed specifics of scientific theory, 140

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anything we presently hold to be the case can possibly turn out otherwise—indeed, certainly will do so if past experience give any auguries for the future. Sixthly and finally, we need the conception of reality in order to operate the causal model of empirical inquiry regarding the real world. Our standard picture of man’s place in the scheme of things is predicated on the fundamental idea that there is a real world (however imperfectly our inquiry may characterize it) whose causal operations produce inter alia causal impacts upon us, providing the basis of our world-picture. Reality is viewed as the causal source and basis of the appearances, the originator and determiner of the phenomena of our cognitively relevant experience. “The real world” is seen as causally operative both in serving as the external moulder of thought and as constituting the ultimate arbiter of the adequacy of our theorizing. In summary, then, we need that postulate of an objective order of mindindependent reality for at least six important reasons. • To preserve the distinction between true and false with respect to factual matters and to operate the idea of truth as agreement with reality. • To preserve the distinction between appearance and reality, between our picture of reality and reality itself. • To serve as a basis for inter-subjective communication. • To furnish the basis for a shared project of communal inquiry. • To provide for the fallibilistic view of human knowledge. • To sustain the causal mode of learning and inquiry and to serve as basis for the objectivity of experience. Above all, it is crucial for realism that the idea of mind-independent reality is functionally pivotal in matters of communication. Subscription to an objective reality is indispensably demanded by any step into the domain of the publicly accessible objects essential to communal inquiry and interpersonal communication about a shared world. We could not establish communicative contact about a common objective item of discussion if our discourse were geared to our own idiosyncratic experiences and these con141

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ceptions bound up with them. But the objectivity at issue in our communicative discourse is a matter of its very status as putatively communicative, rather than somehow depending upon its specific content. For the substantive content of a claim about the world in no way tells us whether it is factual or fictional. This is something that we have to determine from its context, which means, in effect, that in general it is provided for by a preestablished conventionalized intention to talk about “the real world.” This intention to take real objects to be at issue, objects as they actually are, our potentially idiosyncratic conceptions of them quite aside, is fundamental because it is overriding—that is, it overrides all of our other intentions when we enter upon the communicative venture. Without this conventionalized intention we should not be able to convey information—or misinformation—to one another about a shared “objective” world that underlies and connects those variable experiences of ours. If it were not reality as it actually is that we are concerned with to discuss, but merely “reality-as-I-conceive-it-to-be,” then we could not really manage to agree or disagree with one another. Indeed we then just could not communicate successfully in the informative mode. We are able to say something about the (real) moon or the (real) Sphinx because of our submission to a fundamental communicative convention or “social contract” to the effect that we intend (“mean”) to talk about the very thing itself as it “really” is—our own personal conception of it notwithstanding. We adopt the standard policy in communicative discourse of letting the communally established language rather than whatever specific informative notions and conceptions we may actually “have in mind” on particular occasions, be the decisive factor with regard to the things at issue in our discussions. When I speak about the Sphinx (even though I do so on the basis of my own conceivably strange conception of what is involved here), I will be discussing “the real Sphinx” in virtue of the basic conventionalized intention governing our use of referring terms within the wider community. Any effective venture in communication must be predicated on the fundamental intention to deal with the objective order of this “real world.” What is at stake here is thus ultimately a principle of practice—though, to be sure, it is thought-practice that is at issue. Accordingly, the justification for this fundamental presupposition of objectivity is not evidential at all; postulates as such are not based on evidence. Rather, it is practical and instrumentalistic—pragmatic, in short. It is procedural or functional efficacy that is the crux. The justification of this postulate lies in its utility: we need it to operate our conceptual scheme. We could not form our existing 142

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conceptions of truth, fact, inquiry, and communication without presupposing the independent reality of an external world. In its absence, we simply could not think of experience and inquiry as we actually do. (What we have here is a “transcendental argument” of sorts, namely one that from the character of our conceptual scheme to the unavoidability of accepting its inherent presuppositions.) Any and all pretensions to the primacy and predominance, let alone the definitive correctness, of our own conceptions regarding the realm of the real must be set aside in the context of communication. In communication regarding things we must be able to exchange information about them with our contemporaries and to transmit information about them to our successors. And we must be in a position to do this on against the background of the recognition that their conceptions of things may not only be radically different from ours, but conceivably also rightly different. Thus, it is a crucial precondition of the possibility of successful communication about things that we must avoid laying any claim either to the completeness or even to the ultimate correctness of our own conception of any of the things at issue. This renders critically important that (and understandable why) conceptions are not pivotal for communicative purposes. Our discourse reflects our conceptions and perhaps conveys them, but it is not substantively about them. We thus deliberately abstain from any claim that our own conception is definitive if we are to engage successfully in discourse. We deliberately put the whole matter of conceptions aside—abstracting from the question of the agreement of my conception with yours, and all the more from the issue of which one of us has the right conception. This sort of epistemic humility is the price we pay for keeping the channels of communication open. But why embark upon the objectivity-presupposing projects of inquiry and communication at all? Why not settle back in comfortable abstention from this whole complex business? The answer is straightforward. The impetus to inquiry for knowledgeacquisition reflects the most practical of imperatives. Our need for intellectual accommodation in this world is no less pressing and no less practical than our need for physical accommodation. But in both cases, we do not want just some house or other, but one that is well built, that will not be blown down by the first wind to sweep along. Sceptics from antiquity onward have always said, “Forget about those abstruse theoretical issues; focus on your practical needs.” They overlook the crucial fact that an intellectual accommodation to the world is itself one of our deepest practical 143

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needs—that in a position of ignorance or cognitive dissonance we cannot function satisfactorily. After all, the project of cognitive development is not optional—at any rate not for us humans. Its rationale lies in the most practical and prudent of considerations, since it is only by traveling the path of inquiry that we can arrive at the sorts of good reasons capable of meeting the demands of a “rational animal.” Man has evolved within nature into the ecological niche of an intelligent being. In consequence, the need for understanding, for “knowing one’s way about,” is one of the most fundamental demands of the human condition. The practical benefits of knowledge, on the other hand, relate to its role in guiding the processes by which we satisfy our (noncognitive) needs and wants. The satisfaction of our needs for food, shelter, protection against the elements, and security against natural and human hazards all require information. And the satisfaction of mere desiderata comes into it as well. We can, do, and must put knowledge to work to facilitate the attainment of our goals, guiding our actions and activities in this world into productive and rewarding lines. And this is where the practical payoff of the information we secure through inquiry and communication comes into play. Here again, pragmatic considerations are paramount. And so, our commitment to the mind-independent reality of “the real world” stands alongside our fallibilistic acknowledgment that in principle any or all of our present scientific ideas as to how things work in the world, at any present, may well prove to be untenable. Our conviction of a reality that lies beyond our imperfect understanding of it (in all the various senses of “lying beyond”) roots in our sense of the imperfections of our scientific world-picture—its tentativity and potential fallibility. In abandoning this commitment to a mind-independent reality, we would lose the impetus of inquiry. And yet realism’s epistemic status is not that of an empirical discovery, but that of a presupposition whose ultimate justification is a transcendental argument from the very possibility of the projects of communication and inquiry as we standardly conduct them. The presuppositional conception of a mind-independent reality accordingly plays a central and indispensable role in our thought about matters of cognition. It is seen as the epistemological object of veridical cognition, in the context of the contrast between “the real” and its “merely phenomenal” appearances. Moreover, it is seen as the target of telos of the truthestimation process at issue in inquiry, providing for a common focus in communication and communal inquiry. (The “real world” thus constitutes the object of our cognitive endeavors in both senses of this term—the ob144

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jective at which they are directed and the purpose for which they are exerted.) And, further, reality is also to be seen as the ontological source of cognitive endeavors, affording the existential matrix in which we live and move and have our being—and whose impact upon us is the prime mover for our cognitive efforts. All of these facets of the concept of reality are integrated and unified in the classical doctrine of truth as it corresponds to fact (adaequatio ad rem), a doctrine that not merely invites but indeed requires a commitment to mind-independent reality as constituting at once the framework and the object of our cognitive endeavors in science. And their ultimate ratification lies in their role as indispensable presuppositions for our unavoidable practices. 3. THE ROLE OF PRESUMPTION That our experience relates to the lineaments of an objective thoughtindependent order of things is not something that we learn: it is something we presume from the outset. With presumption we take to be so what we could not otherwise derive. This idea of such presumptive “taking” is a crucial aspect of our languagedeploying discursive practice. For presumptively justified beliefs are the raw materials of cognition. They represent contentions that—in the absence of pre-established counter-indications—are acceptable to us “until further notice,” thus permitting us to make a start in the venture of cognitive justification without the benefit of pre-justified materials. They are defeasible alright, vulnerable to being overturned, but only by something else yet more secure, some other preestablished conflicting consideration. They are entitled to remain in place until displaced by something better. Accordingly, their impetus averts the dire consequences that would ensue of any and every cogent process of rational deliberation required inputs which themselves had to be authenticated by a prior process of rational deliberation—in which case the whole process could never get under way. Yet indespensability apart, what is it that justifies making presumptions, seeing that they are not established truths? The answer lies substantially in procedurally practical considerations. Presumptions arise in contexts where we have questions and need answers. It is a matter of faute de mieux, of this or nothing (or at any rate nothing better). Presumption is a thought instrumentality that so functions as to make it possible for us to do the best we can in circumstances where something must be done. And so presumption affords yet another instance where practical considerations 145

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play a leading role on the stage of our cognitive and communicative practice. For presumption is, in the end, a practical device whose rationale of validation lies on the order of pragmatic considerations. The obvious and evident advantage of presumption as an epistemic recourse is that it enables us vastly to extend the range of questions we are able to answer. It affords an instrument that enables us to extract a maximum of information from communicative situations. Presumption, in sum, is an ultimately pragmatic resource. To be sure, its evident disadvantage is that the answers that we obtain by its means are given not in the clarion tones of knowledge and assertion but in the more hesitant and uncertain tones of presumption and probability. We thus do not get the advantages of presumption without an accompanying negativity. Here, as elsewhere, we cannot have our cake and eat it too. We proceed in cognitive contexts in much the same manner in which banks proceed in financial contexts. We extend credit to others, doing so at first to a relatively modest extent. When and as they comport themselves in a way that indicates that this credit was warranted, then we extend more. By responding to trust in a “responsible” way—proceeding to amortize the credit one already has—one can increase one’s credit rating in cognitive as much as in financial contexts. In trusting the senses, in relying on other people, and even in being rational, we always run a risk. Whenever in life we place our faith in something, we run a risk of being let down and disappointed. Nevertheless, it seems perfectly reasonable to bet on the general trustworthiness of the senses, the general reliability of our fellow men, and the general utility of reason. In such matters, no absolute guarantees can be had. But, one may as well venture, for, if venturing fails, the cause is lost anyhow—we have no more promising alternative to turn to. There is little choice about the matter: it is a case of “this or nothing”. If we want answers to factual questions, we have no real alternative but to trust in the cognitively cooperative disposition of the natural order of things. We cannot preestablish the appropriateness of this trust by somehow demonstrating, in advance of events, that it is actually warranted. Rather, its rationale is that without it we remove the basis on which alone creatures such as ourselves can confidently live a life of effective thought and action. In such cases, pragmatic rationality urges us to gamble on trust in reason, not because it cannot fail us, but because in so doing little is to be lost and much to be gained. A general policy of judicious trust is eminently cost-effective in yielding useful results in matters of cognition. 146

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4. THE ROLE OF RETROVALIDATION Of course, further difficulties yet remain: Pragmatic utility is all very good but what of validity? What sorts of considerations validate our particular presumptions as such: how is it that they become entitled to this epistemic status? The crux of the answer has already been foreshadowed. A two-fold process is involved. Initially it is a matter of the generic need for answers to our questions: of being so circumstanced that if we are willing to presume we are able to get . . . anything. But ultimately we go beyond such this-or-nothing consideration, and the validity of a presumption emerges ex post facto through the utility (both cognitive and practical) of the results it yields. We advance from “this or nothing” to “This or nothing that is determinably better.” Legitimation is thus available, albeit only through experiential retrovalidation, retrospective validation in the light of eventual experience. It is a matter of learning that a certain issue is more effective in meeting the needs of the situation than its available alternatives. Initially we look to promise and potential but in the end it is applicative efficacy that counts. The fact is that our cognitive practices have a fundamentally economic rationale. They are all cost-effective within the setting of the project of inquiry to which we stand committed (by our place in the world’s scheme of things). Presumptions are the instrument through which we achieve a favorable balance of trade in the complex trade-offs between ignorance of fact and mistake of belief—between unknowing and error. The starting point of our justifactory reasoning was a basic projectfacilitating postulation. Yet this does not tell the whole story. For there is also the no less important fact that this postulation obtains a vindicating retrojustification because the farther we proceed on this basis, the more its obvious appropriateness comes to light. With the wisdom of hindsight we come to see with increasing clarity that the project that these presuppositions render possible is an eminently successful one. The pragmatic turn does crucially important work here in putting at our disposal a style of justificatory argumentation that manages to be cyclical without vitiating circularity. What is at issue is a matter of unavoidable presumptions whose specific mode of implementation is ultimately retro-validated in the light of experience. We want and need objective information about “the real world.” This, of course, is not to be had directly without the epistemic mediation of ex147

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perience. And so we treat certain data as evidence—we extend “evidential credit” to them as it were. Through trial and error we learn that some of them do indeed deserve it, and then we proceed to extend to them greater weight—we “increase their credit limit” as it were and rely on them more extensively. And, of course, to use those data as evidence is to build up a picture of the world, a picture which shows, with the “wisdom of hindsight,” how appropriate it was for us to use those evidential data in the first place. We accordingly arrive at the overall situation of dual “retrojustification.” For all the presuppositions of inquiry are ultimately justified because of a “wisdom of hindsight” enables us to see that by their means we have been able to achieve both practical success and a theoretical understanding of our place in the world’s scheme of things. Here successful practical implementation is needed as an extra-theoretical quality-control monitor of our theorizing. And the capacity of our scientifically devised view of the world to underwrite an explanation of how it is that a creature constituted as we are, operating by the means of inquiry that we employ, and operating within an environment such as ours, can ultimately devise a relatively accurate view of the world is also critical for the validation of our knowledge.3 The closing of these inquiry-geared loops validates, retrospectively, those realistic presuppositions or postulations that made the whole process of inquiry possible in the first place. Realism thus emerges as a presupposition-affording postulate for inquiry—a postulation whose ultimate legitimation eventuates retrospectively through the results, both practical and cognitive, which the process of inquiry based on those yet-to-be-justified presuppositions is able to achieve. In sum, while our presumptions possibilize science in the first place, in the end its successor retrojustifies them. 5. RETROSPECT Let us then review the overall line of deliberation. Metaphysical realism—the doctrine that there is a mind-independent reality and that our experience can provide us with a firm cognitive grip upon it—does not represent a learned fact but a presuppositional postulate. As such, it has a complex justification that unfolds in two phases. The first, initial phase is prospective, proceeding with a view to the 3

Compare the discussion of cognate issues in the author's Methodological Pragmatism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977).

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functional necessity of taking this position—its purpose-dictated inevitability. For this step alone renders possible a whole range of activities relating to inquiry and to communication that is of the highest utility for us—and indeed is a practical necessity. In possibilizing4 a host of purposemandated activities—that is, bringing them within the range of the feasible—the postulate of metaphysical realism obtains its initial justification in the practical order of reasoning. However, such an initial functional justification of metaphysical realism is good but not good enough. And so, a second phase of justification goes further—indispensably albeit only retrospectively. It proceeds by noting that when (which is to say after) we actually engage in the goal-directed practice that the postulate in question possibilizes, our applicative and explanatory efforts are, in fact, attended by success—that making the initial postulate has an immense pragmatic payoff since what is involved is not just pragmatic utility but pragmatic efficacy. This issue of actual efficacy is ultimately crucial for the justification of the practical postulate at issue. In this way, then, the overall strategy of validation has two phases—the one preliminary and prospective, the other substantiative and retrospective. That we must take on a commitment to realism is presupposed for the conduct of inquiry as we understand it. However, that we fare well through proceeding in this way in matters of communication and inquiry is something that has the status of an ex-post-facto discovery. Insofar as actual evidentiation is asked for, we have all that we can reasonably hope to obtain, given the inevitable realities of the situation we confront in this domain. And so, in seeking for the most plausible rationale for realism we enter the region of pragmatic presuppositions retrojustified through their applicative and implementational efficacy. The utility of the conception of reality is so great and the service it renders so important that if it were not already there we would have to invent it. But the pragmatic success that ensues systematically when we put this conception to work goes to show that in doing so we have not proceeded capriciously.5 4

In English, we have no one-word verb “to make possible” akin to the German ermoeglichen, apart from the obsolete possibilitate, nowadays known only to readers of the O.E.D. To adopt “possibilize” for this purpose would perhaps be sensible and certainly convenient.

5

The author's Empirical Inquiry (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982) and his Realistic Pragmatism (Albany, NY.: State University of New York Press, 2000) present considerations relevant to this theme.

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Now insofar as realism stands on this pragmatic basis, it does not rest on considerations of independent substantiating evidence about how things actually stand in the world, but rather it is established by considering, as a matter of practical reasoning, how we do (and must) think about the world within the context of the projects to which we stand committed. Such a position sees this commitment to a mind-independent reality in an essentially utilitarian role—as a functional requisite for our intellectual resources (specifically for our conceptual scheme in relation to communication and inquiry). Thanks to its enmeshment in considerations of aims and purposes, it is clear that this sort of commitment to an objectivistic realism harks back to the salient contention of classical idealism that values and purposes play a pivotal role in our understanding of the nature of things. Seeing that a pragmatic line of approach pivots the issue on what is useful for us and productive for us in the context of our evaluatively legitimated aims and purposes, we return to the characteristic theme of idealism—the active role of the knower not only in the constituting but also in the constitution of what is known. To be sure, this sort of idealism is not substantive but methodological. It is not a denial of real objects that exist independently of mind and as such are causally responsible for our objective experience. Quite the reverse, it is designed to facilitate their acceptance. But it insists that the justificatory rationale for this acceptance lies in a framework of mind supplied purpose. For our mind-independent reality arises not from experience but for it—i.e. for the sake of our being in a position to exploit our experience to ground inquiry and communication with respect to the objectively real. Accordingly, what we have here is an object-level realism that rests on a presuppositional idealism at the justificatory infralevel. We arrive at a realism that is founded—initially at least—on a fundamentally idealistic basis. In sum, paradoxical though it may seem, we obtain a realism the tenor of whose justifactory basis is thoroughly idealistic.6

6 This chapter was originally written for a yet unpublished Joseph Margolis Festschrift.

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Chapter Eight COUNTERFACTUALS IN PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVE 1. HISTORICAL STAGESETTING

O

ne of the philosopher's principal devices is to clarify what is through its contrast with what is not. And this calls for the projection of hypotheses—to ask how things would stand if matters differed in this or that respect from their actual condition. Such hypothetical reasoning lies at the heart and core of philosophical methodology. It is thus instructive—and important—to note that the situation that ensues upon making a beliefcontravening assumption replicates exactly the situation of aporetic antinomy that the preceding chapter considers in some detail. In the one case we have a conflict within a certain family of belief candidates; in the other a conflict among consistency of beliefs plus supplementary assumptions. The structure of the situation—the resolution of an aporetic inconsistency within a family of "data"—is the same either way. And the resources needed for conflict resolution are also essentially the same either way. It is easy to see why logicians would be interested in "counterfactual" conditionals; the very circumstance that their antecedent is contrary-to-fact in stipulating something that is seen as a falsehood sets them apart from the way in which our reasonings proceed when, as is usual, we make inferences from accepted propositions. But why should counterfactuals be taken to have a specifically philosophical importance? There are at least three principal reasons for this: (1) They have long played a prominent role in philosophical reasoning and methodology. (Philosophers—unlike historians—have always interested themselves in what would be the case if things were in some way different.1) (2) They provided an important occasioning factor in the collapse of the nominalistic extensionalism central to the logical positivism that flourished in the middle third of the 20th cen1

In particular, counterfactuals are essential to the clarification and explanation of issues relating to matters of causality, natural lawfulness, and freedom of the will.

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tury. And (3), their explanation was one of the main motives for the possible-worlds ontology that has been popular among metaphysically minded semantical theorists of the past three decades.2 A brief preliminary word about each of these developments is in order. From the very dawning of philosophy in the days of the Presocratics, reasoning by means of counterfactual conditionals has played a prominent role in this domain. Xenophanes of Colophon (b. ca. 570 B.C.) already resorted to the explanatory use of counterfactual thought experiments as the following passage shows: "But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or could draw with their hands and do the works that men can do, then horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves."3 This style of reasoning may be depicted as follows: • Things being as they are, we accept that P must be true. • But suppose—by way of a "thought experiment"—that our situation were appropriately different (as mutatis mutandis it well might be). Then we would not accept P at all, but rather something else that is incompatible with P. • Hence we aren't really warranted in our categorical acceptance of P (seeing that, after all, this is merely a contingent aspect of our particular, potentially variable situation). What we have here is a resort to counterfactual thought experimentation as an instrumentality of deliberation that is powerfully skeptical in its impetus. By way of another illustration, consider the following argument presented by Xenophanes: "If god had not made yellow honey, men would

2

For a gripping account of current controversy in this area see Jim Holt, "Whose Idea is it Anyway?, A Philosophers' Feud," Lingua Franca, January/February 1996 issue, pp. 29-39.

3

See G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 169, fragment 15; Clement, Stromata, v, 109, 3.

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consider figs far sweeter."4 The reasoning of this last passage answers to the pattern: • Things being as they are, honey is "the sweetest thing in the world"— the very epitome of sweetness. • But suppose that honey didn't exist. • Then figs would be the sweetest thing we know of, so that they would be the epitome of sweetness. • Hence we should not maintain that honey is actually the epitome of sweetness; it merely happens to be the sweetest thing we know of. Xenophanes repeatedly employed this general technique to support his deeply skeptical position to the effect that: "No man knows, or ever will know, the truth about the gods and about everything I speak of: for even if one chanced to say the complete truth, yet one knows it not. Seeming is wrought over all things."5 The very formulation of the position reflects the use of the following thought experiment: "Suppose even that we asserted the full truth on some topic. The fact still remains that we would not be able to identify it as such." In this way, Xenophanes relied on thought experiments to establish the relativity of human knowledge, a device that was later to prove a major armament in the arsenal of the Skeptics. Of all the Presocratics, however, it was Heraclitus of Ephesus (b. ca. 540) to whom thought experimentation came the most naturally. The projection of "strange" suppositions is a prominent precept of method in his philosophizing, for: "If one does not expect the unexpected, one will not make discoveries [of the truth], for it resists discovery and is paradoxical."6 Sometimes, Heraclitus' epigrams have the lucid pungency of proverbial 4

Kirk & Raven, p. 180, fragment 38.

5

Frag. 34; Kirk & Raven p. 179.

6

Frag. 18/7; Burnet, p. 133; Kirk & Raven, p. 195. The fragments of Heraclitus are here numbered in the order: Diels/Bywater. I have generally adopted Bywater's translation as improved by John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1892; 4th ed. 1930). But see also G.S. Kirk, Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954).

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wisdom: "[Offered the choice,] donkeys would choose straw rather than gold."7 A nice flight of fancy—who, after all, ever did, or would, offer gold to a donkey?! As with Xenophanes, Heraclitus also employed factdismissive thought experiments to argue that if reality differed in a certain respect, things could not be as they are in other, correlative respects: "If the sun did not exist, it would [always] be night [despite all the other stars]."8 As such considerations indicate, philosophers have from the start tried to illuminate the nature of reality by contrasting it in the counterfactual mode with the situation that would obtain if matters did not stand as they do. Let these indications suffice as regards the early historical situation,9 and let us now leap ahead to the present (twenties) century and to the context of analytic philosophy. The classical, extensionalistic approach of the inter-bellum logical positivists ran into difficulty with the strict (i.e. necessity-modalized) if-then implications at issue in nomological conditionals which could not be accommodated by the straightforwardly truthfunctional methods then in vogue. And these difficulties became even more acute with counterfactual conditionals, which resisted all attempts at truth-functional analysis. Following the lead of Rudolf Carnap, post-war analytic philosophers proposed to avert the problem by shifting from an existentially geared extensionalism to one of possibilia. The semantics of possible worlds, so it was now often and influentially maintained, could overcome the difficulties and objections encountered by the classical approach.10 But at the same time some positivistically inclined philosophers were daunted by the substantial price incurred by this semantical approach, whose demands for a 7

Frag. 9/51; Burnet p. 137.

8

Frag. 99/31; Burnet, p. 135.

9

For further detail see Nicholas Rescher, "Thought Experimentation in Presocratic Philosophy" in his Essays in the History of Philosophy (Aldershot UK: Avebury, 1995), pp. 27-38.

10

The possible-worlds approach to counterfactuals was pioneered in Robert Stalnacker, "A Theory of Conditionals," in Nicholas Rescher (ed.), Studies in Logical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), pp. 98-112. Its principal development is in David Lewis, Counterfactuals (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1973) and Donald Nute, Topics in Conditional Logic (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980). For a useful anthology of relevant discussions see Ernest Sosa (ed.), Causation and Conditionals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).

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manifold of merely possible, actually nonexistent worlds went far beyond the extensionalistic minimalities with which the positivists felt comfortable. And yet matters want from bad to worse. For, to accommodate counterfactuals by possible-world machinery, these semantico-ontological theorists were driven to project a topologically ordered manifold of possibilia within which the divergence of possible worlds from a given world could be assessed and compared. And at this stage possible world semantics incurred not only the basic ontological price of a proliferation of possible worlds but also the additional surcharge of outfitting this universe of possible worlds with an ontological structure-manifold within which the overall "distance" of other possible worlds from this one and from one another could be compared. Recourse to such a structured manifold of possible worlds is clearly a philosophical liability of substantial proportions.11 And it is, accordingly, somewhere between necessary and desirable to contemplate the development of a theory of counterfactuals that rests on a very different basis. 2. BELIEF-CONTRAVENING SUPPOSITION: HOW APORIES ARISE IN HYPOTHETICAL CONTEXTS Against this background, it seems well worthwhile to explore the prospects of an earlier and very different approach to counterfactuals—one that leaves possible world theory aside, and instead proceeds via aporetics, the

11

For David Lewis' position see his books Counterfactuals (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1973) and On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Lewis goes to great lengths to maintain that his treatment of counterfactuals does not require a metrically structured manifold of degrees of similarity among possible worlds but only the machinery of comparison that makes it possible to indicate that one world is more similar to a second than it is to a third. (There is no need for a measure of how much more similar.) But even this is a very strong requirement. Similarity comes in respects and there is no way in general of transforming this into an overall aggregate. Take colored and scented geometric shape. We can say unproblematically that two of them are more similar than to a third to another in a given aspect—say in area or shape, in color or odor. But the idea of an all-in, everything considered similarity, is beyond the prospect of plausible implementation.

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theory of reasoning is the presence of inconsistent premisses.12 An apory (from the Greek aporia13) is a group of propositions each of which is individually plausible by way of bearing some claim upon us for acceptance— but which are collectively unacceptable because taken together in the aggregate they are mutually inconsistent. Thus consider a typical counterfactual conditional: "If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride." It is clear that this contention occurs in the setting of an enthymematic context where the following situation obtains: Accepted propositions: (1) Beggars cannot realize their wish for horses. [Fact about beggars] (2) People who have horses generally ride them on appropriate occasions. [General fact of human modus operandi] (3) Beggars do not (generally) ride horses. [Fact about beggars] Supposition: Suppose not-(1), i.e. suppose that beggars could realize their wish for horses. Note that an apory arises here through inconsistency. And of course that stipulated supposition means that we must automatically reject (1). But this is not enough. For given not-(1), (2) entails that beggars would generally ride, and this contradicts (3). Having rejected (1), we must therefore also 12

His commitment to this aporetic approach dates back to the author's 1961 paper on "Belief-Contravening Suppositions," The Philosophical Review, vol. 70 (1961), pp. 176-96, reprinted in H. Feigl et al. (eds.) New Readings in Philosophical Analysis (New York, 1972), pp. 530-45 and partially in E. Sosa (ed.) Causation and Conditionals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 156-64. It was developed further in Hypothetical Reasoning (Amsterdam: D. Reidel, 1964), and see also Plausible Reasoning (Assen and Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1976). I was motivated to return to the issue of counterfactual reasoning through discussions with Eduardo Flichman which contributed helpfully to the clarification of several points in the present paper.

13

It seems sensible and appropriate to render Greek aporia as English apory, on analogy with harmony, melody, and indeed analogy itself.

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drop either (2) or (3). We confront an aporetic situation where the set {not(1), (2), (3)} constitutes an inconsistent family. Two alternatives accordingly lie before us as regards acceptance/rejection: I. (2)/(1), (3) II. (3)/(1), (2) Thus (1) must go in any case, and either (2) must yield to (3) or the other way round. Now observe that if, as seems reasonable in these merely hypothetical situations, we were to adopt the principle of making facts of lesser generality give way to facts of greater generality, then this means that we would abandon thesis (3), thereby arriving at option I so as to validate the counterfactual: "If beggars could realize their wish for horses, then beggars would generally ride." Abstract logic alone, without any substantive suplementation, carries us no further than the indecisive: "If not-(1) then either not-(2) or not-(3). Again, consider the counterfactual: "If this rubber band were made of copper, it would conduct electricity." Here we have the following situation: Accepted givens: (1) This band is made (i.e., predominantly made) of rubber. (2) This band is not made of copper. (3) This band does not conduct electricity. (4) Objects made of rubber do not conduct electricity. (5) Objects made of copper do conduct electricity. Assumption: Not-(2), i.e.: This band is made of copper. Note that even with (2) deleted from the givens (1)-(5), the result of adding not-(2) still leaves us with an inconsistent set of propositions. Given this state of affairs, two consistency-restoring alternatives stand before us as regards acceptance/rejection: I. (3), (4)/(1), (2), (5) 157

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II. (4), (5)/(1), (2), (3) In these circumstances, (1) and (2) will have to be rejected come what may, and (4) is an innocent bystander that can be retained, come what may. The only residual issue is whether to make (3) give way to (5) or the other way round. Again, if in these purely hypothetical situations we adopt the principle of making particular facts give way to general laws, then we would arrive at option II and thereby validate that initial counterfactual. Examples of this sort typify a general situation. Each of our beliefs is surrounded by a family of others in such a way that the introduction of a belief-countervailing assumption introduces logical inconsistencies, and the resolution of these inconsistencies can be accomplished in a variety of different ways, since in such conflicts there are generally different ways of making some of the conflict-engendering beliefs give way to others. Thus consider the following example, due to Nelson Goodman: Accepted givens: (1) New York City is located in New York State. (2) New York State is disjoint from Georgia. (3) New York City is not located in Georgia. Assumption: Not-(3), i.e.: New York City is included in Georgia. Two alternatives now stand before us as regards acceptance/rejection: I. (1)/(2), (3) II. (2)/(1), (3) Here (3) must of course be rejected come what may (by the assumption). But we have a choice between (1) and (2), that is between changing the state-emplacement of New York City or changing the separation of New York State from Georgia. The question is: Which gets the priority, (1) or (2)? Depending on which alternative is adopted, we would validate one of the following:

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• If New York City were in Georgia, then Georgia would overlap with New York State. • If New York City were in Georgia, then New York City would not be located in New York State The second seems to us as the more natural of the two, presumably because in the effort to protect generality it seems less drastic to relocate cities than to relocate states. Here, as elsewhere, we would want to make more disruptive alternatives give way to those that are less so. To be sure, counterfactuals sometimes (albeit comparatively seldom) do not constrain a choice and thus do not require any prioritization. In these cases, reasoning from that hypothesis-constructed premiss is in and of itself sufficient to resolve consistency. Thus consider the following example: Givens: (1) Peter never helps John if asked when he (Peter) is angry with him (John). (2) Peter is always angry with John when they have quarreled recently. (3) Peter and John quarreled yesterday. (4) John does not ask Peter for help today. Assumption: Not-(4) = John asks Peter for help today Note first of all that the set {(1), (2), (3), not-(4)} is a consistent set, so that ejection of (4) requires no further sacrifice—and constrains no choice— among the residual premisses (1)-(3). Moreover, it clearly follows from this premiss set that: (A) Peter does not help John today. In this situation we have the counterfactual: If not-(4), then (A). Observe that while the antecedent here is indeed contrary-to-fact, the consequent is not so, and indeed presumably true seeing that it also follows from (1)-(3). Careful usage would indicate this circumstance with the marker EVEN . . . STILL: "Even if John had asked Peter for help today, Peter still would not help him." 159

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More commonly, however, counterfactuals engender a fairly complex choice situation. Thus consider the following schematic example. Accepted givens: (1) p v q (2) q v r (3) p & r (4) q ⊃ p (5) p ⊃ r (6) q ⊃ r Note that these are all compatible, being realized (just exactly) when p & ~q & r. Suppose now that we make the following supposition: Assumption: Not-(3), i.e.: ~p v ~r Note that the result of replacing (3) by not-(3) in the setting of (1)-(6) yields a result that is still inconsistent. For (1), (2), not-(3) entails q. And in the presence of q, (4) and (6) entail p & r which contradicts not-(3). We thus have four alternatives for reestablishing consistency given not(3), as follows: Alternative No. I II III IV

Retain/Reject

Amounts to accepting

(1), (2), (5), (6)/(4) ~p & q & r (1), (2), (4)/(5), (6) p & q & ~r (1), (4), (6)/(2), (5) p & ~q & ~r (2), (4), (5), (6)/(1) ~p & ~q & r

On this basis, not-(3) engenders four more or less plausible counterfactuals namely:

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If not-(3) were so, then we would have: (i) not-(4), (ii) neither (5) nor (6), (iii) neither (2) nor (5), (iv) not-(1). But observe that only alternative IV enables us to save all but one of the initially accepted givens, so that this alternative alone is minimally at odds with what we take ourselves to know. "If not-(3) were so, then not-(1) would be so" accordingly seems to be our best available and most plausible counterfactual option. A general conclusion emerges. The proposed treatment of counterfactuals calls for seeing them as simply a special case of apory resolution required by the introduction of a belief-contravening supposition. And the approach to consistency restoration that is appropriate to this situation is that of making the optimal—minimally disruptive—readjustment in our accepted beliefs compatible with introducing that belief- contravening assumption among them. The crux of counterfactual analysis is thus not a matter of scrutinizing the situation in other possible worlds but rather of prioritizing our beliefs about this actual one. But just how is prioritization to be determined? How is one to decide what propositions must be made to give way to which? 3. THE CENTRALITY OF PRECEDENCE (RIGHT OF WAY) As the preceding examples indicate, apory resolution pivots on principles of precedence—on the availability of considerations to determine the allocation of the "right of way" in cases of propositional conflict. The validation of counterfactuals lies in the comparative prioritization of the relevant beliefs. The long and short of it is that this matter of belief prioritization is bound to be context-specific. It is something that turns either on the substance of the question being addressed or perhaps even on the particular way in which this question is formulated. Consider the Bizet-Verdi example, due to W. V. Quine. Are we to have "If Bizet and Verdi were fellow countrymen, then Bizet would be Italian." or

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"If Bizet and Verdi were fellow countrymen, then Verdi would be French." Here two salient facts lie before us: (1) Bizet was a Frenchman (2) Verdi was an Italian The indication of priority here may well be set by the exact formulation of the question we propose to address. There are three major possibilities here: i. If Bizet were a countryman of Verdi, what nationality would they be? ii. If Verdi were a countryman of Bizet, what nationality would they be? iii. If Bizet and Verdi were fellow countrymen, what nationality would they be? With the first wording of the question we are, in effect, instructed to prioritize (2) over (1). With wording ii the reverse is the case and (2) gains the priority. But wording iii deliberately avoids priority guidance, and for that very reason permits no definite conclusion. Here all that we can say with confidence is that: If Bizet and Verdi were fellow countrymen, then either both would be French or both would be Italian. This rather weak counterfactual is the best that we can now obtain. As usual with these cases, abstract logic alone takes us no further than an indefinite disjunction of alternatives. But we can often do better, even with purely speculative hypothetical counterfactuals. For the sake of an illustration consider the following example due to David Lewis. The case is one where (by hypothesis) we take ourselves to know:

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(1) J. F. Kennedy was assassinated. (2) J. H. Oswald assassinated Kennedy. (3) No one other than Oswald assassinated Kennedy. Suppose now that we are instructed to suppose not-(2), and assume the Kennedy was not killed by Oswald. Then we clearly cannot retain both (1) and (3), since in the presence of not-(2), (3) entails that no-one assassinated Kennedy which contradicts (1). Either (1) or (3) must go—one must be subordinated to the other. And now the very way in which a counterfactual is formulated instructs us as to the appropriate resolutions: (A) If Oswald did not assassinate Kennedy, then someone else did. (Subordinates (3) to (1).) (B) If Oswald had not assassinated Kennedy, then Kennedy would not have been assassinated at all. (Subordinates (1) to (3).) To be sure if we supplement our beliefs (1)-(3) with a conspiracy theory by way of adopting (4) Kennedy was the assassination victim of a successful conspiracy. then we would also arrive at (C) If Oswald had not assassinated Kennedy, then someone else would have (Subordinates (3) to (4).) The very way in which these conditionals are formulated informs us about (and corresponds to) the sorts of subordination relationships that are at work among those "factual" items we take ourselves to know within the information-context of the counterfactual at issue. These considerations teach an important lesson. The analysis of counterfactuals hinges on a very sensitive way on two considerations: (1) What exactly we take to be the "givens"—the statements that we see as constituting the information-context of the situation.

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(2) Our policy of conflict resolution—that is, the sort of rules of precedence that we propose to employ in restoring consistency when one among several statements must be made to give way to the others with which it is, in the situation at hand, collectively incompatible. The second point is particularly crucial. In such conflict situations we require a functional analogue of a traffic director at a road intersection to determine who is to have the right of way, indicating which statements are to give way to the others in cases of conflict. 4. LOGIC AS SUCH DOES NOT RESOLVE MATTERS Counterfactual assumptions raise issues and engender problems that formal logic as such is simply incapable of addressing. Thus suppose one knows p and p ⊃ q. Then (so logic tells us) one also has it the q. But now suppose that, with p, p ⊃ q, and q all in hand, one asks: "Now suppose ~p , what then?" At this point logic insists that one must, of course, drop p from our acceptances in the interests of mere consistency. We would then be left with ~p , p ⊃ q, and q. So far so good. No problem. But let us assume that instead of being told to suppose ~p we had been instructed: Suppose that ~q. We would, of course, now drop q. However, we are clearly not in a position simply to add q to p and p ⊃ q, seeing that this would result in an inconsistency. So what would we be left with? Here logic as such has little to say. At most, it would present us with a choice between ~p and p ⊃ q, that is with p v (p ⊃ q). But since this is equivalent with p v ~p v q we are, in effect, left with . . . nothing. The sensible thing would of course be to proceed via the following reflection: We are driven to a choice between making p ⊃ q give way to p or else making p give way to p ⊃ q—to giving one of these two premisses precedence over the other. What we thus need to do is to look for a reasonable way to decide such matters of precedence. Now given that p ≡ p & q v p & ~q p ⊃ q ≡ p & q v ~p & q v ~p & ~q where the second alternative is the more indefinite, it is clear that (other things equal) p is a stronger, more decisive statement than p ⊃ q. So given a pragmatic rule along the lines of such examples as: 164

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• In purely hypothetical contexts, stronger statements take precedence (on informative grounds) over weaker ones. • In inductive (evidential) contexts weaker statements take precedence (on probative grounds) over stronger ones. we would—depending on the context—at once have a way to resolve conflicts of the sort that confront us. As it turns out, the machinery of logic (semantics included) does not help us here. Its resources pivot on matters of meaning, truth, and deducibility, and thus only decide questions of compatibility; on questions of priority it has nothing to say. And this is the first and foremost lesson of counterfactual analysis: cognitive resources (viz., principles of prioritization) that go beyond the traditional issues of purely logico-semantical concern are required. For, as we have seen repeatedly, logic also takes us no further in these situations than an informatively impoverished disjunction of alternative possibilities. However, while logic and orthodox semantics leave us in the lurch in these conflict-resolving situations, the pragmatic (contextually purposive) circumstances of the case may well prove to be such that the guidance requisite for conflict resolution is available to us. It is instructive to consider on closer detail how this prospect comes to be realized in various situations. 5. REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM ARGUMENTATION In examining more closely the bearing of context on thesis prioritization, let us begin with an area close to that of logical theory itself, namely argumentation by reductio ad absurdum—a special case of probative reasoning. Reductio too is a matter of introducing a belief-contravening supposition. The situation is as follows. The object of the enterprise is to establish a certain proposition P where certain firmly established and, as it were, categorical commitments have already been undertaken. The argumentation process at issue proceeds thus: (1) Assume that not-P. (2) Show that, in the presence of these prior, already established commitments (A1, A2, . . . An), this engenders some self-contradictory proposition X as a deductive consequence:

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not-P, A1, A2, ..., An ⇒ X (3) conclude that P is thereby established. This reasoning is, of course, tailor made for accommodation to an aporetic approach. The crux is that {not-P, A1, A2, ..., An} is an inconsistent family. Either not-P must give way to A1, A2, . . ., An, or at least one of the Ai must be sacrificed to not-P. It is again a question of priorities. But here our categorical commitment to the givens, A1, A2, ..., An, means that rejecting not-P—and thus accepting P—is the natural resolution of the aporetic conflict. Here the priority principle of conflict resolution is clear: Assumptions must yield the right of way. In situations of reductio ad absurdum reasoning the operative principle of procedure is: "Restore consistency while preserving at all cost what is already established, sacrificing, if need be, your initial conflict-generating assumption to this body of preestablished fact." A rule to the effect that established propositions prevail over mere assumptions, come what may, makes conflict resolution in these reductio ad absurdum cases a straightforward business.14 6. EVIDENTIAL CONTEXTS Evidential contexts afford a very different cognitive environment. Here we have to come to terms with the fact that evidence can be equivocal— that it can speak on behalf of inconsistent claims. Thus if I am tossing a die, each of the following is substantially likely: • The die will not come up a 1 when thrown. — — — • The die will not come up a 6 when thrown. The evidential situation is such that a good deal can be said for each one of these on grounds of probabilistic considerations. But of course when we now add the inevitable "The die must come up a 1 or a 2 or a 3 or . . . or a 6 when thrown" we have an inconsistent group. 14

To be sure, it has to be noted that this rule would be abandoned by those who join the mathematical intuitionists in rejecting reductio argumentation.

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In evidential/inductive contexts we often face probatively equivocal situations. That is exactly what makes traditional murder mysteries so suspenseful—there is reason to see the accusing finger of potential guilt point in different directions—at the suave butler, the surly gardener, the suspicious neighbor, etc. And of course what we should look for here is exactly the strongest evidential case, that which best accommodates all of the data and does the least violence to the overall fabric of evidence. The governing rule of prioritization is simple here. In these evidential/inductive contexts we standardly resolve conflicts by making that which is more weakly evidentiated and less firmly substantiated give way to what is more so. Here, then, we once more have a straightforward rule of right-of-way determination that provides a means for conflict-resolution.15 7. THE SITUATION IN PHILOSOPHY Situations of aporetic inconsistency are also common in the context of philosophizing. They arise when there is conflict among the data at our disposal in a particular problem-setting. But just what sort of things constitute "the data" of philosophy? They include presystematic "givens" of the following sorts: (1) Common-sense beliefs, common knowledge, and what have been "the ordinary convictions of ordinary people since time immemorial"; (2) The facts (or purported facts) afforded by the science of the day; the views of well-informed "experts" and "authorities"; (3) The lessons we derive from our dealings with the world in everyday life; (4) The received opinions that constitute the worldview of the day; views that accord with the "spirit of the times" and the ambient convictions of one's cultural context; (5) Tradition, inherited lore, and ancestral wisdom (including religious tradition); 15

On these issues see Nicholas Rescher, Induction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980).

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(6) The "teachings of history" as best we can discern them. Such data, however, constitute a plethora of fact (or purported fact) so ample as to threaten to sink any ship that carries so heavy a cargo. The difficulty is—and always has been—that the data of philosophy afford an embarrassment of riches. They generally engender aporetic paralogisms— creating a situation of cognitive overcommitment within which inconsistencies arise. Consider, for example, the following group of contentions, all of which were viewed favorably by Presocratic philosophers, and regarded as plausible: (1) Reality is one: real existence is homogeneous. (2) Matter is real (self-subsistent). (3) Form is real (self-subsistent). (4) Matter and form are distinct (heterogeneous). Here (2)-(4) entail that reality is heterogeneous, thereby contradicting (1). The whole of the group (1)-(4) accordingly represents an aporetic cluster that reflects a cognitive overcommitment. And this situation is typical: the problem context of philosophical issues standardly arises from a clash among individually tempting but collectively incompatible overcommitments. The issues standardly center about an aporetic cluster of this sort—a family of plausible theses that is assertorically overdeterminative in claiming so much as to lead into inconsistency. In such situations, whatever favorable disposition there may be toward these plausible theses, they cannot be maintained in the aggregate. Something has to give. In particular, we can proceed: • To reason from (2)-(4) to the denial of (1), • To reason from (1), (3), (4) to the denial of (2), • To reason from (1), (2), (4) to the denial of (3), • To reason from (1)-(3) to the denial of (4).

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Accordingly, the ancient Greek philosophers confronted the following range of possibilities: (1)-denial: Pluralism (Anaxagoras) or form/matter dualism (Aristotle) (2)-denial: Idealism (the Eleatics, Plato) (3)-denial: Materialism (atomism) (4)-denial: Dual-aspect theory (Pythagoreanism) Or consider the following aporetic cluster, which sets the stage for controversy about freedom of the will: (1) All human acts are causally determined. (2) Humans can and do make free acts of choice. (3) A genuinely free act cannot be causally determined (for if it is so determined then the act is not free by virtue of this very fact). These theses represent an inconsistent triad in which consistency can be restored by any of three distinct approaches: Deny (1):

"Voluntarism"—the exemption of free acts of the will from causal determination (Descartes).

Deny (2):

"Determinism" of the will by causal constraints (Spinoza).

Deny (3):

"Compatibilism" of free action and causal determination—for example, via a theory that distinguishes between inner and outer causal determination and sees the former sort of determination as compatible with freedom (Leibniz).

Here too the whole of the cluster is too much—something has to give way; the bare demand of logical consistency requires the elimination of some of these theses. But there just is no easy way out here that is relatively costfree. The issue is always one of a choice among alternatives where, no matter how we turn, we find ourselves having to abandon something which on the surface seems to be plausible—some contention that, circumstances 169

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permitting, we would want to maintain and whose abandonment makes a real difference in the larger scheme of things. And this is exactly where philosophy starts: not only in curiosity and wonder but also in confusion—in puzzlement and paradox engendered by the inconsistency of our cognitive inclinations.16 Curiosity enters in because we have questions about the world to which we seek answers. But confusion also enters because too many jostling contentions strive for our approbation and acceptance. In answering our various questions about the world and our place within it, we undertake commitments that engender an internally conflicting overcommitment, so that we find ourselves plunged into perplexity. The prime mover to philosophizing is the urge to systemic adequacy—to bringing consistency, coherence, and rational order into the framework of what we accept regarding our place in the world's scheme of things. Its work is a matter of the disciplining of our cognitive commitments in order to make overall sense of them. Here again it is a matter of making some of our commitments yield the right of way to others—and to do this in an optimally effective way. Philosophy is the policeman of thought, as it were, the agent for maintaining law and order in our cognitive endeavors. But how to proceed? What is our standard of priority to be? With philosophy, our guidance for making these curtailments lies in the factor of systematicity. The operative principle at work here is that of achieving the optimum alignment with experience—the best overall balance of informativeness (answering questions and resolving problems) with plausibility (keeping to claims which on the basis of our relevant experience there is good reason to regard as true). We want answers to our questions but we want these answers to make up a coherent systematic whole. It is neither just answers we want (regardless of their substantiation) nor just safe claims (regardless of their lack of informativeness) but a reasonable mix of the two—a judicious balance that systematizes our commitments in a func-

16

Kant wrote: "Now wonder is a shock of the moral sense, arising from the incompatibility of a representation . . . with the principles already lying at its basis, which provokes a doubt as to whether we have rightly seen or rightly judged" (Critique of Judgment, sect. 62, trans. J. H. Bernard [London, 1892], p. 211). Our present construction of the term generalizes this overly narrow construal to include a conflict of "beliefs" as well as one of "representations."

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tionally effective way.17 The situation in philosophy is thus neither one of pure speculation where informativeness alone governs conflict resolution nor one of scientific/inductive inquiry where evidential coherence governs this process, but a judicious amalgam of the two.18 8. BROADER IMPLICATIONS As was noted above, the problem of resolving aporetic conflicts recurs in a diversified variety of contexts, preeminently including the purely hypothetical, the proof-theoretic (reductio ad absurdum), the evidential, and the philosophical. But two master principles are throughout determinative for the process of resolving aporetic inconsistency: • Restore consistency with minimal disruption! • Assess disruptivness in terms of the purposive nature of the enterprise! And so the proper modus operandi here will be a function of the particular purposive context at issue. And here, as we have seen, one must distinguish the following four cases: 1. Purely hypothetical contexts: In restoring consistency, salvage as much information as you can. Hence give priority to the comparatively more informative—contextually stronger—statements. 2. Reductio ad absurdum contexts: In maintaining consistency give priority to what has already been established. Therefore, it will be those conflict-engendering assumptions themselves that must give way. Assert their negation.

17

To be sure, philosophers positioned in different experiential contexts will accomplish this differently. Their judgments of priority are bound to differ.

18

The aporetic nature of philosophy and its implications are explored in detail in Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985). The book is also available in Spanish, Italian, and German translations.

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3. Evidential contexts: In restoring consistency, preserve as much as you can of the probative/evidential fabric. Always make more weakly evidentiated claims give way to those that are more strongly evidentiated. 4. Philosophical contexts: In restoring consistency maintain overall credibility. Give priority to those propositions that provide for the systematically optimal combination of plausibility (evidentiation) and problem resolving (informativeness). [The process here is accordingly a hybrid mix—a balanced combination or fusion of the evidential and the hypothetical approaches.] Distinct precedence principles are thus appropriate to different sorts of purposive contexts in line with their different aims—the different sorts of issues that they address: • Strictly hypothetical contexts: "What are the informatively weakest links in the chain of inconsistency?" • Reductio contexts: "Which claims are minimally at odds with what is already established?" • Evidentiary-inductive contexts: "Where are the evidentially weakest, probatively most vulnerable links in the chain of inconsistency?" • Philosophical contexts: "What are the least plausible links in the chain of inconsistency—those whose abandonment would minimally impede the construction of a coherent system of understanding?" Different purposes are at work in different contexts: with hypothetical reasoning, determining implications; with reductio reasoning, demonstrative proofs; with evidential reasoning, evidential substantiation; with philosophical reasoning, rational systematization. The purposive/teleological character of the particular enterprise at issue here provides the guiding basis for the different ground-rules of precedence-determination that are operative in these different contexts. The priority or precedence at issue with propositions that conflict in these aporetic situations need not and generally will not be absolute or categorical; rather it is something that is variable and context-dependent. Thus, for example: 172

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• In reductio ad absurdum contexts we sacrifice hypotheses to givens; in purely hypothetical contexts we do the reverse. • In evidential contexts we sacrifice generalities to specificalies; in purely hypothetical contexts we do the reverse. • In philosophical contexts we must take evidential considerations into account; in purely hypothetical contexts we do not worry ourselves about them. But such rules of precedence do not emerge via general principles from purely logical or semantical considerations. (As we have seen, abstract theoretical analysis proves insufficient here.) Rather, the principles of priority determination—of "right of way" in cases of conflict—are pragmatic and purposively context dependent. What qualifies as the natural or appropriate way of proceeding in these different cases is a matter of the governing aims of the relevant domain. In each case we proceed on the basis of guiding principles determined by the purposive nature of the particular endeavor at hand, so that the contextuality of the principles of propositional prioritization must be noted and acknowledged. And it should accordingly be stressed that the priority among conflicting propositions in aporetic settings is not a matter of the personal preferences and predilections of individuals, but is determined objectively relative to the purposive orientation of different contexts of discussion. The paramount lesson, then, is that the resolution of aporetic conflicts is a pragmatic issue whose outcome varies with the purposive context at hand. In such pragmatic situations, the matter of appropriate procedure will be context dependent in line with the environing range of purposive concerns.19 19

The context-dependent nature of the project of conflict resolution means the aporetic approach is able to unify important aspects of the theory of reasoning in very different domains (proof theory, empirical inquiry, hypothetical reasoning, philosophical reasoning) within a single overarching integrating perspective. This unification patently integrates the author's approach to these various issues in such books as Hypothetical Reasoning (1967), Plausible Reasoning (1974), Empirical Inquiry (1982), and The Strife of Systems (1985), and thereby unifies in a synoptic perspective the pragmatic tendency of his overall position.

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9. MAKING SENSE OF COUNTERFACTUALS Let us now return to our starting point and focus once more on issues arising from the speculatively hypothetical concerns of counterfactual reasoning. As already noted above, the most popular current approach here proceeds within the framework of an analysis geared toward the idea of alternative possible worlds. However, the drawback and deficit of this possible-worlds approach to counterfactuals that is so popular among contemporary semanticists lies in its inherent intractability. This becomes apparent through such examples as "If four were greater than five, then arithmetic would be involved in a contradiction." We clearly cannot handle this by contemplating the situation in those possible worlds where four is greater than five, since there obviously are not any. Nevertheless, no one would have any difficulty making sense of that counterfactual, and in fact the present aporetic analysis validates it straightforwardly.20 By their very nature, counterfactuals involve claims that are at odds with how matters actually stand. To accommodate them to the usual ground-rules of truth-value semantics would accordingly force us to contemplate their truth status not in this actual world but in other possible ones—which is exactly how orthodox semanticists go at it. But this course is deeply problematic. The fact is that across the board, in every sort of setting or situation, the validation of counterfactuals and the resolution of the question of their appropriateness is not a matter of anything as metaphysical, massive, and demanding as an ontology of possible worlds. It is, 20

In the setting of our present approach, we have the following accepted propositions: (1) Four is not greater than five. (2) The consistency of arithmetic [as we know it] entails (1). (3) Arithmetic is—and ought to be—consistent. If not-(1) were to be assumed, then we would be forced into an abandonment of either (2) or (3), seeing that the trio {not-(1), (2), (3)} is logically inconsistent. Since there is no viable way around (2), this means that we would have to give up (3) and see arithmetic as involved in contradiction. And this validates the counterfactual under consideration.

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rather, a mere matter of precedence and priority among the relevant beliefs that are at work in the setting of particular questions. What is needed is a localized micro-process and not a globalized macro-process. When we make belief-contravening suppositions in ordinary workday situations we are not shifting the frame of reference to other possible worlds but merely testing the comparative solidity and staying power of our actual claims in the contextual neighborhood. As with an Agatha Christie detective story, a closer scrutiny of the proximate suspects immediately involved in the context at issue will suffice to resolve the mystery. As the aporetic approach to the matter indicates, in the analysis of counterfactuals, there is simply no need to look beyond the cluster of propositions immediately relevant to the particular counterfactual at issue, and certainly no need to become involved in anything as grandiose as a possible world. The world at large does not come into it. An important larger issue revolves about this point. Throughout the present discussion, deliberate care has been exercised to characterize counterfactuals as appropriately assertable or valid, but never as true. And there is good reason for this. Truth as traditionally understood is a matter of agreement with fact (adaequatio ad rem) and counterfactuals by nature are at variance with facts. Counterfactuals are not true or false; rather, they are contextually appropriate or not, as the case may be. Their assertability is a matter not of truth but of appropriateness—of validatability not as correct but as tenable. Truth as such does not come into it. The shortcoming of the currently fashionable possible-worlds approach to the semantics is that it is predicated on some rather problematic presumptions. The beauty of an ordinary mechanism—a typewriter, say, or an electronic computer—is that its functioning is deterministic. Its modus operandi is fixed: when one provides particular inputs it responds in certain definite ways. It is accordingly supposition-definite: if you suppose certain things to be done, it will respond in definite and (in principle) predictable ways. But, of course, not all systems are like that: people presumably are not, for example, and the world as a whole is certainly not. Here you simply cannot, in general, say "what would happen if"—and not just because you lack available information but because the system has not as yet made up its mind how to respond. One thus has no clue as to what possible worlds we associate with certain hypothetical changes in this actual one. There is simply no workable way of constructing alternative possible worlds—even only in hypothesis.

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Possible world semanticists talk and reason as though possible worlds were somehow given, were part of what is available and in hand to work with. Where these worlds are to come from—how we can actually get there from here—is a question they simply ignore. They never tell us how we are to arrive at possible worlds given our de facto starting point in this one. They proceed as though one could obtain by mere fiat that which would have to be the work of honest toil. Authentic world-descriptions are not all that easy to come by. Theorists who so glibly conjure with other possible worlds have seldom thought through the complications that arise unavoidably in this context. "But surely it's not all that difficult. A variant world could, for example, be just like this one except for Caesar's deciding not to cross the Rubicon on that fateful occasion." Very well. But now just exactly what does happen in such a world? Does Caesar change his mind a nanosecond later and proceed as before with just a minor delay? Is he carried across by force majeure and then decides to carry on as was? And if he doesn't cross, then exactly what does he do? And what will all those who interacted with him afterwards be doing instead? The resulting list of questions is endless. The idea of identifying a possible world in some descriptive way or other is simply infeasible. Even this actual world is not adequately describable by us—though, fortunately, we can—thanks to our emplacement within it— individuate it ostensibly as "this actual world of ours." But once we depart from the convenient availability of the actual we are inevitably "all at sea" where the specification of nonexistent particular worlds is concerned. As W. V. Quine forcefully emphasized some fifty years ago,21 it must be acknowledged that possible worlds are something of a philosophical enormity if taken sufficiently seriously enough to be seen as somehow existing in their own right. To be sure, there is nothing particularly problematic about the idea of scenarios viewed merely as oversimplified conceptual thought-artifacts answering to thoroughly incomplete world descriptions.22 But possible worlds are something else again. Surprisingly, theo21

W. V. Quine, "On What There Is," The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 2 (1948), pp. 21-38; reprinted in his From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953, pp. 1-19).

22

Just this was the approach of the author's A Theory of Possibility (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975). To question the appropriateness of possible worlds is not automatically to gainsay the semantical utility of scenarios in semantical analysis—i.e., fictions that characterize possible courses of events in ways that are fragmentary and

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rists about other possible worlds have the audacity to employ a machinery of clarification entities of a sort of which they are unable to provide even a single identifiable example.23 Even when viewed epistemically as mere methodological thought tools, possible worlds are deeply problematic. Once we start fiddling with the law-structure of the world we don't really have a clue how to proceed. If electromagnetic radiation propagated at the speed of sound how would we have to readjust cosmology? Heaven only knows! (Leibniz had the right idea here.) We can certainly sometimes say what particular consequences would follow from a fact-contravening law hypothesis. (If the law of gravitation were an inverse cube law, their significantly lesser weight would permit the evolution of larger dinosaurs.) But we could not redesign the entire world—too many issues would have to be left unresolved. In a welldesigned system of geometry, the axioms are independent—each can be changed without affecting the rest. But we have little if any knowledge about the interdependency of natural laws, and if we adopt an hypothesis to change one of them we cannot concretely determine what impact this will have on the rest. The design of alternative possible worlds—let alone the assessment of their overall similarity to our real world—is an utterly impracticable task. (Is a world with two-headed cats closer to or more remote from ours than one with two headed dogs?) Possible worlds are both a philosophical oddity and a philosophical superfluity deserving to be seen in an Occamist perspective as items multiplied beyond necessity. incomplete in their overall bearing. Compare for example, the analysis of imperatives in the author's The Logic of Commands (London: Routledge, 1969). Moreover, such scenarios could, in theory, be coordinated with descriptively incomplete worlds along the lines of the theory of inconsistent and incomplete possible world semantics expounded in N. Rescher and R. Brandom, The Logic of Inconsistency (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). Such an approach would have to trade on the important estimation between a complete picture of an incomplete world as constructed with an incomplete picture of a complete world. The point of the above critique is that complete pictures of complete worlds are unavailable so that explanatory recourse to standard possible-worlds is thus vitiated. 23

Leibniz, to be sure, was entitled to compare with alternative possible worlds because they were, for him theoretical resources as instances God's entia rationis. Were one to ask him where possible worlds are to come from, he would answer "Only God knows." As that is exactly correct—only God does so. We feeble humans have no way to get there from here.

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Possible world theorists view this resource as an across-the-board semantical device. They accordingly think that a counterfactual hypothesis will stand coordinate with a certain set of possible worlds. But this is very questionable and highly problematic. For the issue can and should be seen as one of pragmatics, with different propositional priorities arising in a variable, context-determined manner. The most practicable and efficient approach to the analysis of counterfactuals is to all appearances one that proceeds not via a semantics of truth conditions geared to possible worlds but via a pragmatics of use conditions geared to the priority conventions governing our real-world oriented discourse.24 And it is exactly this prospect that underlies the presently contemplated program of a contextualized pragmatics of epistemic priority. It is accordingly fortunate that we simply do not need entire possible worlds to manage counterfactuals. Logic apart, all that we ever require here is a handful of plausible rules of precedence to settle matters of conflict resolution—of "right of way" in a conflict of aporetic inconsistency among the immediately involved reality-appertaining propositions. And to operate in this way we do not need any global device of the sort at issue with possible worlds; all we ever need is a local device for assessing (in context!) the relative priority of a few propositions. To take recourse to a genetically structured manifold of possible worlds to settle the questions of the assertability of counterfactuals would be like using a sledge hammer to squash a gnat. The basic lesson is clear: to validate counterfactuals as informatively productive assertions we need not go so far as to launch conjectural global forays into other world domains. It suffices to take note of the relevant local ground-rules about the prioritization of claims in the settling of this actual one.25

24

For further details regarding pragmatics vs. semantics in the context of the important distinction between truth-conditions and use-conditions see Chapter One, "Meaning and Assertability" in Nicholas Rescher, Empirical Inquiry (Totowa NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982).

25

This essay is a somewhat expanded version of a paper of the same title in The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 50 (1996), pp. 35-61.

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Name Index Almeder, Robert, 36n7, 39 Anaximander of Miletus, 121 Aquinas, Thomas, 18 Aristotle, 13n5, 17, 106 Ayer, A. J., 42 Bentham, Jeremy, 55 Black, Max, 102n12 Bohr, Niels, 37n8 Bosanquet, Bernard, 109 Boyd, Richard, 98n5 Bradley, F. H., 42, 105, 106 Brandom, Robert, 177n22 Burnet, John, 153n6, 154n7, 154n8 Carnap, Rudolf, 42-43, 49, 51-52, 51n18, 52n20, 55, 94, 94n3, 154 Carneades, 15n6 Cartwright, Nancy, 99n6 Cicero, 15n6 Darwin, Charles, 104 Davidson, Donald, 30 Descartes, René, 126 Dewey, John, 30n5, 33, 43-44, 47-49, 51, 48n1, 48n2, 48n3, 52-53, 55-56, 68, 75, 78, 77n14 Diels, Hermann, 153n6 Flichman, Eduardo, 156n12 Flower, Elizabeth, 61 Goethe, J. W. von, 59n36 Goodman, Nelson, 158 Green, T. H., 106 Haak, Susan, 65n1, 69 Habermas, Jürgen, 43 Harman, Gilbert, 98n5, 102n12 Hegel, G. W. F., 108 Heidegger, Martin, 56, 77n14 Heraclitus of Ephesus, 153, 153n6, 154

Holt, James, 152n2 Hookway, Chirstopher, 54n25 Hume, David, 8, 9, 9n2 James, James, William, 27, 41, 42, 43-47, 44n2, 45n6, 46n7, 46n8, 46n9, 46n10, 47n11, 47n12, 48, 51, 55, 55n26, 58, 58n32, 66, 66n2, 67, 67n4, 68, 69, 74, 74n9, 75, 76 Kant, Immanuel, 92, 92N2, 95, 95N4, 107, 108, 136, 136n1, 170n16 Kirk, G. S., 152n3, 153n4, 153n5, 153n6 Kotarbinski, Tadeusz, 43 Kuklick, Bruce, 61 Langsdorf, Leonore, 58n33 Lehrer, Keith, 98n5, 102n10, 104n14 Leibniz, G. W., 177, 177n23 Lewis, C. I, 43, 49-51, 50n16, 51, 54-55, 54n24, 68-69 Lewis, David, 154n10, 155n11, 162 Lipton, Peter, 98n5, 99n6, 101n9 Lovejoy, A. O., 63, 75, 76, 76n11, 77n13 Maimonides, 113n1, 139n2 Margolis, Joseph, 43, 61 Marx, Karl, 42 McHenry, Leemn B., 54n24 Mead, Margaret, 55 Moore, G. E., 42, 66, 66n3 Murphy, Arthur, 48n15 Murphy, John P. 61 Murphy, Murray, G., 61 Newton, William, 98n5 Nietzsche, Friedrich58 Papini, Giovanni, 42 Pascal, Blaise de, 30 Peirce, C. S., 24, 24n2, 33, 41-49, 56, 58-59, 61, 63-67, 68-69, 71, 75-76, 81, 95-96, 129, 137 Perry, Ralph Barton, 77n13 Plato, 85, 106 Popper, Karl R., 102n12 Putnam, Hilary, 23-24, 23n1, 26, 29-30, 30n4, 32-33, 39, 55-56, 69

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Quine, W. V. O., 43, 52-54, 53n21, 53n22, 53n23, 54n24, 161, 176, 176n21 Ramsey, F. P., 42, 43 Raven, J. E., 152n3, 153n4, 153n5, 153n6 Rawls, John, 13n4 Reichenbach, Hans, 42 Rescher, Nicholas, 39, 43, 58-61, 59n1, 59n2, 154n9, 167n15, 171n18, 177n22, 178n24 Rorty, Richard, 43-44, 55-58, 57n29, 57n30, 58n31, 67-69, 73, 73n7, 73n8 Russell, Bertrand, 42, 76, 77n12, 78 Scheler, Max, 42 Schiller, F. C. S., 44, 69, 75 Smith, Andrew R., 58n33 Spinoza, Baruch, 106 Stalnacker, Robert, 154n10 Thagard, Paul, 104n16, 105n18 Thayer, Henry S., 61 Themistius, 113 Vailati, Giovanni, 42 Vurkharat, Frederick, 45n6 Weinberg, Stephen, 37n8 Whitman, Walt, 47 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 55-56 Xenophanes of Colophon, 16, 152-154

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Nicholas.Rescher@ontosverlag Nicholas Rescher Cosmos and Logos Studies in Greek Philosophy

Nicholas Rescher Value Matters Studies in Axiology SERIES: Practical Philosophy Vol. 8 140 pp., Hardcover € 58,00 ISBN 3-937202-67-6

This is a study of key issues in value theory, setting out a case for regarding evaluation as a rational and objective enterprise. The principal issues dealt with include the purposive rationale of evaluation, the modus operandi of value reasoning, the fallacies that can arise here, and the role of values in the larger context of philosophical deliberation. A special feature of the book is its defence of absolute values in the face of widespread contemporary antagonism to this idea. Table of Contents 1. By the Standards of their Day 2. On the Import and Rationale of Value Attribution 3. Nomic Hierachies and Problems of Relativism 4. Is Reasoning about Values Viciously Circular? 5. Rational Economy and the Evolutionary Impetus 6. Evaluation and the Fallacy of Respect Neglect 7. Credit for Making a Discovery 8. Optimalism and the Rationality of the Real (on the Prospect of Axiological Explanation) 9. The Revolt against Absolutes in Twentieth Century American Philosophy

SERIES: Topics in Ancient Philosophy, Vol. 1 130 pp., Hardcover € 58,00 ISBN 3-937202-65-X

The six studies comprising this volume deal with some fundamental issues in early Greek thought: cosmic evaluation in Anaximander, the theory of opposites from the Pre-Socratics to Plato and Aristotle, thought experimentation in PreSocratic thought, the origins of Greek Scepticism among the Sophisists, the prehistory of “Buridan’s Ass” speculation, and the role of esthesis in Aristotle’s theory of science. In each case the early discussion seeks to show how certain ideas bore unexpected fruit during the subsequent development of philosophical thought. Table of Contents 1. Cosmic Evolution in Anaximander 2. Contrastive Opposition in Early Greek Philosophy 3. Thought Experimentation in Presocratic Philosophy 4. Greek Scepticism’s Debt to the Sophist 5. Anaximander, Aristotle, and “Buridan’s Ass” 6. Aristotle on Ecthesis and Apodeitic Syllogisms

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