Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy 3031280415, 9783031280412

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Vienna Circle Institute Library

Sami Pihlström

Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy

Vienna Circle Institute Library Volume 7

Series Editors Esther Heinrich-Ramharter, Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Wien, Austria Martin Kusch, Department of Philosophy and Vienna Circle Institute, University of Vienna, Wien, Austria Georg Schiemer, Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Wien, Austria Friedrich Stadler, Institute Vienna Circle, University of Vienna and Vienna Circle Society, Vienna, Austria Advisory Editorial Board Martin Carrier, University of Bielefeld, Germany Nancy Cartwright, Durham University, UK Richard Creath, Arizona State University, USA Massimo Ferrari, University of Torino, Italy Michael Friedman, Stanford University, USA Maria Carla Galavotti, University of Bologna, Italy Peter Galison, Harvard University, USA Malachi Hacohen, Duke University, USA Rainer Hegselmann, University of Bayreuth, Germany Michael Heidelberger, University of Tübingen, Germany Don Howard, University of Notre Dame, USA Paul Hoyningen-Huene, University of Hanover, Germany Clemens Jabloner, Hans-Kelsen-Institut, Vienna, Austria Anne J. Kox, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands James G. Lennox, University of Pittsburgh, USA Thomas Mormann, University of Donostia/San Sebastián, Spain Edgar Morscher, University of Salzburg, Austria Kevin Mulligan, Université de Genève, Switzerland Elisabeth Nemeth, University of Vienna, Austria Julian Nida-Rümelin, University of Munich, Germany Ilkka Niiniluoto, University of Helsinki, Finland Otto Pfersmann, Université Paris I Panthéon – Sorbonne, France Miklós Rédei, London School of Economics, UK Alan Richardson, University of British Columbia, Canada Gerhard Schurz, University of Düsseldorf, Germany Hans Sluga, University of California at Berkeley, USA Elliott Sober, University of Wisconsin, USA

Antonia Soulez, Université de Paris 8, France Wolfgang Spohn, University of Konstanz, Germany Michael Stöltzner, University of South Carolina, Columbia, USA Thomas E. Uebel, University of Manchester, UK Pierre Wagner, Université de Paris 1, Sorbonne, France C. Kenneth Waters, University of Calgary, Canada Gereon Wolters, University of Konstanz, Germany Anton Zeilinger, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria Honorary Editors Wilhelm K. Essler, Frankfurt/M., Germany Gerald Holton, Harvard University, USA Allan S. Janik, Innsbruck, Austria Andreas Kamlah, Osnabrück, Germany Eckehart Köhler, Munich, Germany Juha Manninen, Helsinki, Finland Erhard Oeser, Wien, Austria Peter Schuster, University of Vienna, Austria Jan Šebestík, Paris, France Karl Sigmund, University of Vienna, Austria Christian Thiel, Erlangen, Germany Paul Weingartner, University of Salzburg, Austria Jan Woleński, Jagiellonian University, Poland Editorial Work/Production Zarah Weiss Editorial Address Wiener Kreis Gesellschaft Universitätscampus, Hof 1, Eingang 1.2 Spitalgasse 2-4, A–1090 Wien, Austria Tel.: +431/4277 46504 (international) or 01/4277 46504 (national) Email: [email protected] Homepage: https://vcs.univie.ac.at/ This peer-reviewed series includes monographs and edited volumes, which complement the format of the related series “Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook” and “Veröffentlichungen des Institut Wiener Kreis”, both published with Springer Nature. The books mainly deal with individual members of the Vienna Circle, the entire Schlick-Circle as a collective, its adherents and critics, as well as with related topics of Logical Empiricism and its periphery in historical and philosophical perspective. Specifically, they are based on so far unpublished primary sources and feature also forgotten and marginalized issues as significant contributions to the most recent research in these fields.

Sami Pihlström

Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy

Vienna Circle Institute Library

Sami Pihlström University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland

ISSN 1571-3083 Vienna Circle Institute Library ISBN 978-3-031-28041-2    ISBN 978-3-031-28042-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28042-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The original versions of the chapters have been previously published and presented as follows: Chapter 2 appeared in Sami Pihlström, Friedrich Stadler, and Niels Weidtmann (eds.), Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism (Springer, 2017), based on a conference organized by Professor Stadler at the Institute Vienna Circle, University of Vienna, Austria (November 2013). A shorter paper of mine on related topics is available in Maria Baghramian and Sarin Marchetti (eds.), Pragmatism and the European Traditions (Routledge, 2017), based on a conference hosted by Baghramian and Marchetti at University College Dublin, Ireland (June 2013). Chapter 3 appeared in Cognitio 8:2 (2007); it was presented in a conference on Robert B. Brandom’s philosophy at the University of Pecs, Hungary (April 2005). Chapter 4 appeared in Sami Pihlström (ed.), Pragmatism and Objectivity: Essays Sparked by the Work of Nicholas Rescher (Routledge, 2017); a brief version was presented in the International Conference on Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science at the University of Helsinki (August 2015). Chapter 5 appeared in Dirk-Martin Grube and Rob Sinclair (eds.), Pragmatism, Metaphysics, and Culture: Reflections on the Philosophy of Joseph Margolis (Nordic Studies in Pragmatism 2, Nordic Pragmatism Network, www.nordprag. org, 2015); in one of its versions, it was presented in a conference honoring Joseph Margolis’s 90th birthday at Temple University, Philadelphia, USA (May 2014), while it also partly draws on discussions at the conference in honor of Professor Margolis I was involved in organizing at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in May 2013, in collaboration with Arto Haapala and Henrik Rydenfelt. Chapter 6 was originally written for a collection of essays examining and honoring Christopher Hookway’s contributions to pragmatism: Robert Talisse, Paniel Reyes Cardénas, and Daniel Herbert (eds.), Pragmatic Reason: Christopher Hookway and the American Philosophical Tradition (Routledge, 2023). Chapter 7 was published in Journal of Philosophical Research 35 (2010); an early version was presented in a Nordic Pragmatism Workshop, organized by Jonathan v

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Knowles, at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway (May 2009). Chapter 8 was published in a special issue of European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 11:2 (2019), edited by Giovanni Maddalena and Friedrich Stadler, collecting papers presented in the conference on “European Pragmatism” hosted by Professor Stadler and his colleagues at the Institute Vienna Circle, University of Vienna, Austria (April 2018). Chapter 9 appeared in European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 4:2 (2012); it was also presented in a conference on “Cambridge Pragmatism” organized by Huw Price at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK (June 2012). As the book chapters are based on articles originally written for various occasions – conferences, journals, and edited collections  – I am grateful to all the above-­ mentioned individuals and institutions that enabled those original contexts of presentation and/or publication. For the inclusion of this collection in the series, Vienna Circle Institute Library, I am deeply grateful to Professor Friedrich Stadler and all the series co-editors; thanks are also due to two anonymous reviewers for helpful critical comments and Zarah Weiss at the University of Vienna as well as the efficient Springer staff for help in the editing process. Even though this book does not strictly speaking represent detailed scholarship on the Vienna Circle, in its own way it contributes, I hope, to the on-going reassessment of the relations between the traditions of analytic philosophy (which was partially established by the Viennese thinkers in the 1920–1930s) and pragmatism (which was initiated in the United States in the late nineteenth century)  – as explained in the “Introduction” (Chap. 1) and Chap. 2 in more detail. By having a chance to place this volume in Professor Stadler’s impressive book series, I also hope in my modest way to contribute to the continuation of the close philosophical relations between Vienna and Helsinki. (I sometimes feel that, for a Finnish philosopher, visiting Vienna is always like going to a second home, because it was from Vienna that Eino Kaila brought logical empiricism to Finland and thus initiated what later became known as the Finnish tradition in twentieth-century philosophy.) While the original versions of many of the chapters (that is, Chaps. 3, 5, 8, and 9) have appeared in open access outlets, I am grateful for the permissions to use copyrighted material to the following copyright holders of the original publications of the other chapters: Springer (Chap. 2), Taylor & Francis (Routledge) (Chap. 4), and Philosophy Documentation Center (Chap. 7). The original versions of these chapters were written in the course of more than 15  years, during which I have worked at various institutions, particularly the University of Jyväskylä, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and the Faculty of Theology at the University of Helsinki. I would like to extend my thanks to a great number of colleagues and friends (not to be specifically listed here) whose comments at various stages of this project have had an important impact on the development of my views. I would never have even begun the work on the topics of

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these essays had I not studied at the Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki, under the guidance of Professor Ilkka Niiniluoto in the early and mid-­1990s, and I see my reflections on pragmatism and realism continuing the dialogue I have engaged in with him since those early days. In fact, many of the essays still explore issues I first started to work on in my doctoral dissertation (1996) supervised by Niiniluoto. In this sense, Niiniluoto is clearly the most significant philosopher behind what I have written on pragmatism and realism, even though in the chapters of this book I only rarely explicitly address his version of scientific realism. Among the pragmatist philosophers discussed in this volume, the late Professor Joseph Margolis stands out as the one who has had the most significant influence on the progress of my work over the years – and it might be mentioned that I first met Joe Margolis thanks to Ilkka Niiniluoto, who asked me to help with some practical arrangements of Joe’s visit when he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Helsinki in 1994. I have been extremely fortunate to have had a chance to meet over the years, and to some extent get to know, many of the other main characters of the chapters, too, including world-leading thinkers like Hilary Putnam, Robert Brandom, Nicholas Rescher, Christopher Hookway, Morton White, and (of course) Georg Henrik von Wright, but Margolis is the one with whom I developed, I suppose, something like a philosophical friendship. Joe Margolis, whom I saw over the decades regularly at conferences, visited Finland for the last time in 2018 on the occasion of the 3rd European Pragmatism Conference, and in 2021 he sadly passed away at the age of 97. The main figures of the book chapters as well as the persons acknowledged above are, unfortunately, predominantly male philosophers, but my deepest thanks go to three admirable women: Professor Sari Kivistö as well as my daughters Meeri Pihlström and Katri Pihlström. Helsinki, February 2023

Sami Pihlström

Contents

1

Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1

2

 the Viennese Background of Harvard Neopragmatism ����������������   19 On 1 Introduction: The Encounter between Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism��������������������������������������������������������������������   19 2 Linguistic Frameworks and Conceptual Relativity: Carnap and Putnam ��������������������������������������������������������������������������   23 3 Pragmatist and Neopragmatist (Anti-)Metaphysics��������������������������   29 4 Wittgenstein and (Neo)Pragmatism��������������������������������������������������   33 5 Holistic Pragmatism��������������������������������������������������������������������������   38 6 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   42

3

Brandom on Pragmatism������������������������������������������������������������������������   43 1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   43 2 Pragmatist Views on Conceptuality, Normativity, and Anti-reductionism����������������������������������������������������������������������   44 3 Brandom vs. Putnam on Classical Pragmatism��������������������������������   50 4 Pragmatism and Ontology����������������������������������������������������������������   55 5 Concluding Critical Remarks������������������������������������������������������������   58

4

 Pragmatic Realism, Idealism, and Pluralism: A Rescherian Balance?����������������������������������������������������������������������������   61 1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   61 2 Rescher as a Pragmatist��������������������������������������������������������������������   62 3 Rescher (and His Critics) on Realism and Idealism – An Uneasy Balance?������������������������������������������������   66 4 Kantian Matters: Things in Themselves and Conceptual Schemes������������������������������������������������������������������   71 5 Holistic Pragmatism and the Science vs. Religion Debate ��������������   76 6 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   80

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Contents

5

“Languaged” World, “Worlded” Language: On Margolis’s Pragmatic Integration of Realism and Idealism����������   83 1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   83 2 Margolis as a Pragmatic Realist��������������������������������������������������������   84 3 Conflicting Versions of Pragmatic Realism��������������������������������������   89 4 Constructivism: Transcendental Idealism by Other Means��������������   93 5 Emergence����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   97 6 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   99

6

 The Will to Believe, Epistemic Virtue, and Holistic Transcendental Pragmatism����������������������������������������������  101 1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  101 2 Virtues, Holism, and the Will to Believe������������������������������������������  103 3 Belief and Hope��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  107 4 The Passional and the Transcendental����������������������������������������������  110 5 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  113

7

 Toward a Pragmatically Naturalist Metaphysics of the Fact-Value Entanglement: Emergence or Continuity?��������������  115 1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  115 2 The Fact-Value Entanglement and Neopragmatism: Lessons from Putnam������������������������������������������������������������������������  117 3 Pragmatists on Emergence����������������������������������������������������������������  125 4 Continuity and Synechism����������������������������������������������������������������  132 5 Ruth Anna Putnam’s “Seamless Web” of “Humanly Created” Facts and Values����������������������������������������������������������������  137 6 Conclusion: Applying the Pragmatic Method����������������������������������  143

8

 Finnish Versions of Pragmatist Humanism: Eino Kaila and Georg Henrik von Wright as Quasi-Pragmatists��������������������������  147 1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  147 2 Kaila’s Early Pragmatist Influences��������������������������������������������������  149 3 Kaila’s Later Pragmatism: “Practical Testability”����������������������������  151 4 Kaila and Jamesian Pragmatism: Further Similarities and Differences ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  154 5 Von Wright on Action and Causation�����������������������������������������������  157 6 Antireductionism and the Disunity of Science ��������������������������������  160 7 Concluding Remarks: Kaila and von Wright as Public Philosophers����������������������������������������������������������������������  163

9

 New Look at Wittgenstein and Pragmatism��������������������������������������  167 A 1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  167 2 “Hinges”: Propositional and Non-propositional ������������������������������  170 3 Knowledge and Certainty: Fallibilism and the Truth in Skepticism��������������������������������������������������������������  173 4 Reality: Metaphysics and Anti-metaphysics������������������������������������  176

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5 Philosophy: Deconstruction and Reconstruction������������������������������  178 6 Philosophy of Religion: Applying the Criticism of the Four Dichotomies ������������������������������������������������������������������  180 7 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  182 References ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  185 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  199

Chapter 1

Introduction

This volume collects together a selection of my articles examining, both historically and systematically, the interfaces of analytic (including late analytic or “post-­ analytic”) philosophy and pragmatism (especially what is today called “neopragmatism”). These essays have not been incorporated in any of my previous books, although their general themes, particularly the relations between pragmatism, realism, and transcendental philosophy, as well as the valuational basis of pragmatist ontology, have been discussed in some of my earlier work (starting in the mid-­1990s). In fact, I often feel that I am continuing to write the same book all over again throughout my entire academic life, returning to the same fundamental issues concerning, for instance, the relation between realism and pragmatism. These are questions that concern very basic features of our humanity and the world we find ourselves living in. Is the world objectively “out there” independently of our conceptual and epistemic perspectives? Or are we in some sense (and if so, in what sense exactly) “constructing” or “constituting” reality? How, moreover, are the ways the world is (“facts”) related to the ways the world ought to be (“values”)? There is, I think, a sense in which it would be hubristic to claim to have been able to settle such philosophical problems – even temporarily. Questions of realism, idealism, and fact and value need constant philosophical attention and cannot just be left unexamined by those seriously in the business of philosophy. Instead of attempting to summarize my current views on these topics in terms of any final or fully worked-out position, I believe this volume shows how I have tried to reflect on such problems over the past 15 years or more in changing contexts but with the same overall aims and goals. The specific topics of the chapters range from general questions concerning pragmatism and realism in metaphysics and epistemology to issues in ethics and metaphilosophy, including the re-evaluation of the legacy of transcendental philosophy and transcendental arguments in the framework of pragmatism. While the chapters can be read individually as case studies of particular (neo)pragmatist philosophers’ ideas, they also manifest (I hope) sufficient © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pihlström, Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy, Vienna Circle Institute Library 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28042-9_1

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1 Introduction

unity to be presented as a whole in this volume. In this introduction, I will draw particular attention to the substantial connections between the chapters. One of the general lines of thought running through all the essays is the idea – centrally present in the pragmatist tradition – that our relation to the world we live in and seek to represent and get to know (and always know better) through our practices of conceptualization and inquiry is irreducibly valuational. There is no way of even approaching, let alone resolving, the philosophical issue of realism without drawing due attention to the ways in which human values are inextricably entangled with even the most purely “factual” projects of inquiry we engage in. This entanglement of the factual and the normative is, as explicitly argued in Chap. 7 but implicitly suggested in all the other chapters as well, both pragmatic (that is, practice-embedded and practice-involving) and transcendental (thus operating at the level of the necessary conditions for the possibility of our representing and cognizing the world in general). Therefore, we need to carefully examine the complex relations of realism, value, and transcendental arguments, and I have chosen to do so at the intersection of pragmatism and analytic philosophy. Obviously, these are not the only philosophical approaches that would be relevant to the topics I am exploring – for example, phenomenologists have had and continue to have a great deal to say about realism and idealism as well as the transcendental method – but the focus of this volume is based on the traditions my own reflections on these matters primarily emerge from. With a basically analytic training and a relatively long experience in pragmatism scholarship, I find it natural to study critically the ways in which different recent and contemporary pragmatists have tried to resolve the realism issue and how they may have employed transcendental arguments in their thought. Most of the eight chapters collected here are primarily “person-centered” rather than thematic, examining both past historical figures of pragmatism and analytic philosophy (e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam, Joseph Margolis, Georg Henrik von Wright) and important living philosophers who continue to make a strong contribution to these interpenetrating traditions (e.g., Robert Brandom, Nicholas Rescher, Christopher Hookway). In addition, some highly significant thinkers (e.g., Morton White, Philip Kitcher, Ruth Anna Putnam) who do not get a chapter of their own in this volume are more briefly discussed in critical comparison to the main figures of the essays. I hope this book could also challenge some received views of who exactly belong to the “canons” of analytic philosophy and pragmatism, though clearly I am focusing on widely acknowledged major thinkers whose contributions are generally agreed to be of lasting relevance. In their different ways, all the philosophers to be considered have raised fundamental issues concerning the relations between realism, pragmatism, and value. They have also explored these issues at a level that may be called “transcendental”, even though most of them have not explicitly described themselves as representatives of the transcendental tradition initiated by Immanuel Kant. By reading, or re-reading, some of their arguments as broadly speaking transcendental, I also hope to show that the scope of

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transcendental reflection is wider than those narrowly restricting transcendental philosophy to a carefully defined argumentative strategy would admit. Obviously, no exhaustiveness of any kind is claimed in this book: I am unable to provide any comprehensive overviews of these important thinkers’ complex views and arguments (let alone the pragmatist and analytic traditions more broadly), and I inevitably have to be highly selective in drawing the reader’s attention to some key issues – particularly realism, in relation to idealism and/or constructivism as well as transcendental arguments – that I find central in their thought as well as vital for the further development of pragmatism (and for the dialogue between pragmatism and analytic philosophy) today. Nor is this book exhaustive in the sense of covering all or most of the thinkers whose philosophy would be relevant to my overall topic. Among the leading neopragmatists, the most striking omission is, presumably, Richard Rorty. However, I have criticized Rorty’s brand of neopragmatism (from the perspective of my own Kantian-inspired pragmatism) in several other writings, most recently in my book, Pragmatist Truth in the Post-Truth Age: Sincerity, Normativity, and Humanism (Pihlström 2021), and accordingly I have not felt it necessary to include any chapter on Rorty here. Yet, I suppose that the towering presence of Rorty’s radical neopragmatist figure is in any event implicit in any discussion of (neo)pragmatism today. Even so, it seems to me that the philosophers I will discuss all differ from Rorty in at least one significant respect: they still believe in the reality of genuine philosophical problems – such as the ones on realism and value, for instance  – and they believe in the power of constructive philosophical thought, argumentation, and theorization as a means of getting a grip of such problems. With the possible exception of Wittgenstein (though this is debatable), the philosophers to be commented upon in the chapters below are (or were) in the business of establishing philosophical views, positions, or theories based upon philosophical analysis and argument. They are (or were) not “end of philosophy” thinkers, and none of them believed that philosophy could, let alone should, be replaced some other activity – in contrast to Rorty’s suggestion that philosophy, or what remains from it after the collapse of “systematic philosophy”, is eventually reducible to “cultural politics”.1 I am, furthermore, fully aware of the deplorable lack of any gender balance – or any other kind of balance  – in the selection of representative pragmatist or

 On Rorty’s famous distinction between systematic and edifying philosophy, see the final chapters of Rorty 1979. On his views on “philosophy as cultural politics”, see his later essays in Rorty 2007. I am of course aware that these brief remarks entirely fail to do justice to Rorty’s complex position, and by no means do I wish to downgrade his seminal importance in the re-emergence of pragmatism as a major tradition in contemporary philosophy, as well as pragmatism scholarship as a flourishing field in the history of philosophy. Any criticism of Rorty’s neopragmatism as exaggerated  – or as ultimately running the risk of losing the normative power of argument (cf. again Pihlström 2021) – must occur in the context of acknowledging Rorty’s highly significant role in shaping the field, indeed at the intersection of pragmatism and analytic philosophy, over the past decades. 1

4

1 Introduction

quasi-pragmatist philosophers to be commented upon.2 The philosophers whose views on realism, pragmatism, value, and related matters I am entering into dialogue with in these chapters are (or were) almost exclusively multiply privileged white Western men (and so, of course, am I), reflecting the broader “canon” of both analytic philosophy and pragmatism that remains strongly male, white, and elitist. The inclusion of a section on Ruth Anna Putnam’s pragmatist views on the fact-­ value entanglement in Chap. 7 is far from sufficient in maintaining anything close to a proper gender balance, but I do think that her ideas on fact and value make a lasting, albeit neglected, contribution to neopragmatism. The canon of pragmatist philosophers this book presupposes is thus problematic in many ways. More generally, however, it is, I suppose, also a positive thing that traditions such as pragmatism and even analytic philosophy have something like a canon, because that is by itself an indication of a certain kind of history-­consciousness of these traditions.3 Let us consider analytic philosophy, in particular, in this respect. One might imagine that some analytic philosophers could deny there being any canon: philosophy, they may argue, is primarily about problems and methods, not about persons or classical texts, and even Aristotle would qualify as an “analytic philosopher”. Accordingly, the very fact that we can so much as consider and problematize the canon of the analytic tradition – for example, by bringing it into dialogue with pragmatism, as I am hoping to do here – is a strong indication of the fact that history is taken seriously, which traditionally has hardly been a chief virtue of analytic philosophy. What I would, thus, like to emphasize is the way in which the canon of a philosophical tradition can be challenged by emphasizing not only non-­ canonized or forgotten philosophers but also the relations between the canonized (and non-canonized) figures of the tradition with figures primarily associated with other traditions. Therefore, an attempt to enter into dialogues with, for example, some historical analytic philosophers in a way that puts them into imagined conversations with, say, pragmatists is a way of both challenging and critically renewing our understanding of the canon(s) of our tradition(s). A related issue is the “re-canonization” of some thinkers within more than one tradition. Perhaps a philosopher like Edmund Husserl does not belong to the canon of analytic philosophy because he is so centrally in (or even the central figure of) another canon, that of phenomenology? Possibly, one major figure can be – at least in a major role – only in one such canon. However, the discussions of philosophers like Hilary Putnam in this book might be seen as challenging this view: Putnam is as clearly a leading philosopher in the analytic tradition as he is in the pragmatist one. Similarly, Wittgenstein can be regarded as not only an analytic philosopher of  For a moment, I considered the possibility of including an early essay of mine, a critical discussion of Susan Haack’s views on pragmatism from 1998, in this collection, but I decided against this because that article is a very old piece in comparison to the ones collected here, and in many ways outdated (See Pihlström 1998c). 3  These brief remarks on “canons” were inspired by a panel discussion I participated in at an online conference on the history of analytic philosophy organized by the University of Tilburg, The Netherlands, in December 2020. 2

1 Introduction

5

language but also as a Kantian transcendental philosopher. In order to appreciate this, we need to place him in the context of these two traditions and their developing histories; moreover, what I am proposing to do here (in Chap. 9) is to view him as a (kind of) pragmatist, too. There is, at least, a way of seeing Wittgenstein as a figure at the margins of the pragmatist tradition, and certainly many (post-)analytic philosophers who have made important contributions to developing (neo)pragmatism have also been crucially inspired by Wittgenstein  – most obviously Rorty and Putnam. Other examples could include Charles S. Peirce, who with his foundational insights in logic and probability theory, among many other things, was undeniably an analytic philosopher in addition to being a founder of pragmatism, analogously to the ways in which both W.V. Quine and Putnam later were both key analytic philosophers and pragmatists (of some kind). This relation between analytic philosophy and pragmatism can even be raised (and to a certain extent is raised in Chap. 2 below) in the case of Rudolf Carnap: it was in the context of and in response to Carnap’s “pragmatism” (instead of the historical tradition of American pragmatism) that Quine in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) claimed to espouse a “more thorough” pragmatism.4 When considering, and perhaps reconsidering and revising, the canons of our philosophical traditions, we should have nothing against canons as such; they help us orientate in our thinking and research. But we should retain a fallibilist and self-­ critical understanding of them. We may at any time have good reasons to question our canonizations and canonization principles. Furthermore, philosophical canons can be claimed to play an interesting double role. They are in a sense thoroughly contingent: they could clearly be different from what they are, as we obviously could have included philosophers we in fact did not include in our canon. Thus, canons are potential objects of critique – always, continuously. At the same time, we need a canon – in some form at least – as a framework that makes critique possible. It is hardly possible to negotiate one’s relation to a certain philosophical tradition without at least some kind of pre-understanding, based on a canon consisting of certain key thinkers and texts, of what that tradition is in the first place. Thus, historical canons can provide necessary pragmatic conditions for the possibility of

 Furthermore, we may ask whether Wittgensteinian thinkers like Rush Rhees, Peter Winch, D.Z. Phillips, and Raimond Gaita are “analytic philosophers” – simply due to their having been influenced by Wittgenstein, who certainly occupies a majestic place within the canon – or whether they perhaps in some ways come closer to what is (misleadingly) labeled Continental philosophy. How about a highly original Wittgensteinian-inspired figure like Stanley Cavell? Another example: regarding my attempts (both in this volume and elsewhere) to develop a quasi-Kantian “transcendental pragmatism”, it would be important to take into consideration philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, whose views are not discussed here (but cf. Pihlström 2003a on Apel’s version of transcendental pragmatism), as well as, again at the intersection of the pragmatist and analytic traditions, C.I. Lewis, famous for his “pragmatic a priori” (cf. Chap. 2). Most of these important thinkers are difficult or even impossible to canonize into any single tradition. Furthermore, see the very interesting re-canonizations of some British analytic philosophers (especially Frank Ramsey but also, in his own way, Wittgenstein) as “Cambridge pragmatists” in Misak 2016a, b; Misak and Price 2017. 4

6

1 Introduction

critique (including the critique of the canon itself) by manifesting a “paradigm”, a general understanding of what is going on in the field and how its main discussions have historically emerged. This brings us to a point familiar from Thomas Kuhn’s famous analysis of scientific change: as Kuhn argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), scientific paradigms tend to make their history invisible. This is, we may suggest, to a certain degree true about, say, the analytic philosophy canon, too. We do not usually “make visible” the full and explicit reasons we include some people in the canon – that is, view them as having shaped the history of the tradition in ways we take to be crucial – and the reasons we exclude some others. Of course any attempt to employ Kuhnian notions here must be treated with extreme caution and must include qualifications: neither analytic philosophy nor pragmatism is a “normal science” in any obvious Kuhnian sense; nevertheless, their “paradigms” might to a certain degree be compared to the scientific paradigms Kuhn discussed, even though Kuhn’s own examples were taken exclusively from the sciences. Perhaps most importantly, the canon as an element of the paradigm of analytic philosophy or pragmatism can be seen as playing the double role that Kuhnian paradigms play, too: we can view canons, as well as paradigms, as “transcendental”, constitutive of the “world” the discipline studies, while seeing them at the same time contingent in the sense of being challenged or at least challengeable by that study itself. Our realization that a neglected figure ought to have been included in a certain canon is analogous to a Kuhnian anomaly that gradually leads to a crisis and eventually to a revolution. For example, the canon of analytic philosophy might be significantly enriched or even fundamentally transformed by the realization that a pragmatist thinker like John Dewey ought to be taken seriously among analytic philosophers.5 Reconsiderations of philosophical canons are ways of creating novel philosophical dialogues between thinkers that are not habitually – in a “normal-scientific” way – set into dialogue with each other. In a sense, my attempts to discuss the topics of this book “dialogically” with the thinkers I have chosen to comment on is also such a reconsideration of their role as canonical figures of pragmatism and analytic philosophy. It is, accordingly, with these caveats that I propose to explore some relatively strongly canonized figures standing at the crossroads of pragmatism and analytic philosophy. Interpreting them as central philosophers for both traditions may have an effect on how we view those traditions themselves. Furthermore, acknowledging that all philosophical traditions (like, again, Kuhnian paradigms) emerge and develop in some particular cultural and historical contexts, never in an imagined ahistorical vacuum, we might pause for a moment to reflect on the geographical dimensions of the traditions this book surveys. Pragmatism has often been described as the only originally American orientation in philosophy, and indeed the classical pragmatists Peirce, James, and Dewey, and many of their students and followers, were influential in the United States.  Readers of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) were generally surprised to see Rorty highlighting the importance of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey as the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century. 5

1 Introduction

7

Pragmatism is also entangled with other currents of thought in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including transcendentalism, “new realism”, naturalism, and process philosophy. However, instead of emphasizing pragmatism as “American philosophy”, I believe it is important to remind the philosophical community about the inherently cosmopolitan nature of pragmatism. The early pragmatists were cosmopolitan thinkers to begin with. James, in particular, was widely known in Europe and spent long periods in various European countries, and Dewey traveled all over the world, including Russia and China. More importantly, the classical pragmatists never claimed to be originally “American” thinkers but both explicitly and implicitly carried ideas from European philosophical traditions into their own thinking – which is, in a sense, a very “American” thing to do. While one very important source of insight for all the three major early pragmatists was British empiricism,6 I will in the chapters of this volume repeatedly refer to the ways in which pragmatism continues the Kantian transcendental tradition. It would be an exaggeration to claim that either the classical pragmatists or the neopragmatists I will mostly focus on would have been Kantian transcendental philosophers in any straightforward sense, but I hope to be able to argue that in an important sense the pragmatists’ (early and late) elaborations on the complex issue of realism vs. idealism and the fact-value entanglement, in particular, take place at what we may call a transcendental level of investigation. I realize, of course, that this claim is controversial within both pragmatism scholarship and historical scholarship on the transcendental tradition, but it is precisely for this reason that I hope my reflections on the pragmatists’ distinctive versions of transcendental arguments might be of some relevance to research within both traditions. Moreover, analytic philosophy, as we know, is not only philosophically but also geographically multifarious, given that its origins were both on the European continent – particularly in Vienna – and in the English-speaking world. In this sense, it perhaps slightly resembles pragmatism as a genuinely cosmopolitan philosophy. As the first main chapter below especially emphasizes, we should view the history of the pragmatist tradition after its classical origins as a continuous dialogue with European logical empiricism, and the post-WWII logical empiricism that was brought to America by emigrating philosophers (and by American philosophers who visited Vienna, most famously W.V. Quine). Both analytic philosophy and pragmatism today are genuinely cosmopolitan philosophies actively discussed and researched not only in Europe and North America but virtually everywhere. While the selection of thinkers discussed in this book is, again, not at all representative regarding the variety of regional and cultural contexts of scholarship, as the philosophers I will focus on are mostly Americans and West-­ Europeans, we should keep in mind that non-American and non-European scholars are increasingly strongly present on the scene. Both analytic philosophy and  Regarding the classical empiricists influences on the classical pragmatists, I am greatly indebted to my doctoral student Sami Kuitunen who is working on this topic (These influences are not discussed in this book). 6

8

1 Introduction

pragmatism can be seen as orientations within “world philosophy”  – whatever exactly this means. But this, on the other hand, should not make us overhastily conclude that their “European” core, such as the largely Kantian issues of realism vs. idealism and transcendental arguments, would be any less significant.7 Different interpretations of what actually is the core of these traditions – representing a wide variety of cultural contexts of interpretation – are certainly welcome in the open, flexible, and pluralistic spirit of pragmatism. When putting this book together, I have made no attempt to substantially revise the originally separately written articles into proper monograph chapters; they will have to stand by themselves as somewhat distinct and partly slightly overlapping contributions that do, however, firmly “belong together” in the sense of continuing basically the same exploration of the problem of realism and value in relation to pragmatism in changing contexts and with variable foci on individual philosophers. Only major and obvious overlaps among the essays have been omitted, and only some essential minor revisions and slight updates have been made, with the exception of one substantial addition, a new section discussing Ruth Anna Putnam’s views on the fact-value entanglement in Chap. 7.8 I like to think of these chapters as offering snapshots of how certain issues (especially realism, value, and transcendental arguments) at the interface of pragmatism and analytic philosophy have manifested themselves to this contingently placed author at the equally contingent time of their initial completion as self-standing articles. It would have been impossible, for the purposes of this book, to substantially revise the essays by taking into consideration major publications by (or on) the philosophers examined that have

 I do recognize that my treatment of pragmatism, for example, as a move within transcendental philosophy (in a broad sense) might seem like a Euro-centrist myopia. On the other hand, I cannot hide my own cultural background and the context I am working in. While I have been extremely fortunate to have had a chance to interact with, say, pragmatism scholars coming from Japan, China, and Latin American countries, my own approach remains heavily European in the sense of emphasizing the entanglement of “American pragmatism” with European classics like Kant and Wittgenstein. 8  More generally, it would unfortunately have been beyond any reasonably sized undertaking to update the chapters in such a manner that all relevant recent scholarly discussions would have been taken into consideration. For example, regarding the basic debates on pragmatism and realism in ontology (see especially Chaps. 2 and 7), some of Hilary Putnam’s latest works (including the collection Putnam 2016) would have to be dealt with; regarding pragmatism and Wittgenstein (see Chap. 9), Anna Boncompagni’s (2016) comprehensive investigation would have to commented upon, especially when it comes to Wittgenstein’s links to Ramsey regarding a pragmatist understanding of truth irreducible to any single traditional “theory” of truth (see also Boncompagni 2017), and also in relation to the development of “Cambridge pragmatism” more generally (cf. Misak and Price 2017); regarding the theme of values within pragmatism more widely (as at least implicitly invoked in many of the chapters), the work by Hugh McDonald on “meliorist theory of values” (see especially McDonald 2011) would have to be responded to; and regarding the complex historical (and systematic) relations between pragmatism and analytic philosophy generally, or pragmatism and logical empiricism specifically, there is plenty of scholarly discussion available (e.g., Calcaterra 2011; Pihlström, Stadler, and Weidtmann 2017; Rydenfelt 2023a, b). 7

1 Introduction

9

appeared after the original completion and publication of the essays.9 Nevertheless, the inquiry into realism and value, pragmatically and transcendentally conceived, runs through the essays and hopefully integrates everything into a coherent whole. Let me briefly summarize the main contents of the chapters and thus sketch the way in which the overall argument of the book can be seen as unfolding despite the fact that the chapters are, inevitably, separate and self-contained. After this introduction, Chap. 2 opens the volume by explaining why appreciating logical empiricism as a key background of later neopragmatism – exemplified by Hilary Putnam’s version of pragmatic realism (labeled “internal realism” in the 1980s), in decisive ways indebted to Rudolf Carnap’s logical empiricism – is important for the understanding of the entire pragmatist tradition. In a crucial sense, the historical lines of influence from classical pragmatism to neopragmatism extended through logical empiricism and thus early analytic philosophy. Therefore, while some pragmatists may still find pragmatism and analytic philosophy opposed to each other, these can also be seen, rather, as currents within a single heterogeneous philosophical tradition, admittedly characterized by many significant tensions, including (again) especially the issue of realism – to which most of the chapters of this volume are in a way or another devoted. Putnam’s version of pragmatism-cum-­ logical-empiricism is also critically compared to the “holistic pragmatism” developed by his one-time Harvard colleague Morton White. Holistic pragmatism is very important for our purposes, because it makes explicit the entanglement of the factual and the normative, or fact and value, in pragmatist considerations of our relation to the world.10 Chapter 3 analyzes somewhat critically the approach to pragmatism adopted in the 1990s and early 2000s by one of the most widely discussed contemporary analytic neopragmatists, Robert Brandom (who was one of Rorty’s most famous students), especially well known for his “inferentialist” semantics and his integration of Kantian, Hegelian, and pragmatist themes in the philosophy of language. While I generally endorse Brandom’s antireductionist views on normativity  – and find such antireductionism highly central to pragmatism generally, as explained in some of the other chapters as well – I do have some reservations concerning his interpretations of the classical pragmatists, at least as he articulated them around the turn of the millennium, and thus concerning his appropriation of the tradition of pragmatism as a whole. These critical points are discussed in dialogue with Putnam’s criticism of Brandom. (Note, however, that this book contains very little in the way of substantial historical interpretation of the classical pragmatists, whose views are commented upon only to the extent that they are present in my readings of the works by the neopragmatists to be explored; historical truth about what Peirce, James, Dewey, or the other great old pragmatists really thought is not primarily pursued in this volume.)  Occasionally, I do indicate some recent publications of my own which explore some of the themes of the chapters more extensively. 10  In my Pragmatist Truth in the Post-Truth Age (Pihlström 2021), I also employ White’s holistic pragmatism in my overall argument. 9

10

1 Introduction

Chapter 4 focuses on yet another major “analytic pragmatist”, Nicholas Rescher, whose numerous contributions to the problem of realism have over the decades significantly contributed to our understanding of that key debate in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science, also consistently emphasizing the relevance of value considerations for such debates. It is especially through a critical examination of Rescher’s arguments for “objective” and realistic pragmatism in this chapter that a distinctively Kantian way of looking at the pragmatist tradition is also introduced to the discussions of this book – creating an implicit dialogue with the Brandomian approach explored in the previous chapter. A pragmatist investigation of the complex relations of realism and idealism requires, I argue, a Kantian-inspired transcendental argumentation strategy, which Rescher insightfully develops; yet, Chap. 4 explains why I nevertheless find his particular version of Kantian pragmatism and pragmatic realism (and idealism) wanting for various reasons. Chapter 5 offers a somewhat parallel investigation of recent discussions of pragmatic realism and (quasi-Kantian, transcendental) idealism by taking a look at how Joseph Margolis – another very important (neo)pragmatist with a strong background in analytic philosophy who sadly passed away in June 2021 (at the considerably high age of 97) – elaborated on these fundamental issues by developing his distinctive version of pragmatism as historicist constructivism integrated with non-­ reductive naturalism. Margolis’s account of the world as “languaged” and language as “worlded” is both interestingly similar to and different from, for example, Putnam’s pragmatic realism (Chap. 2) and Rescher’s combination of pragmatism and realism (Chap. 4). Analogously to both Putnam and Rescher (as well as, though in a different way, Brandom), the availability of a specifically Kantian (transcendental) version of pragmatism, or pragmatic realism, is a critical issue for Margolis’s pragmatist constructivism, even though Margolis never embraced the Kantian transcendental vocabulary and retained a critical distance from Kantian construals of pragmatism. In its own way, Margolis’s pragmatism also interestingly manifests the entanglement of factuality and normativity, and there would be much more work to be done in order to critically compare his contribution to that discussion with, say, Brandom’s and White’s. (This book can only suggest that such comparisons would be important; it is a task for others to complete them.) Chapter 6 continues to explore the complicated relations between realism, pragmatism, and transcendental argumentation by bringing into the discussion yet another argumentative strategy, the “will to believe” idea we owe to William James. The focus of the chapter is the version of pragmatism and realism developed by Christopher Hookway through his appropriation of especially Peirce’s but also to a certain degree James’s pragmatisms. This investigation not only continues to emphasize the entanglement of realism, idealism, and pragmatism in a transcendental and value-laden context of inquiry focusing on our very ability to represent a mind- and concept-independent world but also shows how inescapably the voices of the pragmatist classics, especially Peirce and James, are present in the debates engaged in by leading contemporary pragmatism scholars such as Hookway. Importantly, Hookway is one of the very few recent pragmatists who have appreciated the significance of both transcendental and “will to believe” type of arguments

1 Introduction

11

in the context of the realism discussion. (There is an interesting parallel to Rescher’s views to be observed here as well.) Chapter 7 explicitly addresses a theme implicitly present in all the other chapters exploring the practice-embeddedness and, hence, value-ladenness of pragmatist ontology and epistemology, viz., the fact-value entanglement (as Hilary Putnam, among others, called it), particularly its metaphysical grounds. The inescapably valuational basis of our practice-driven ontological postulations is argued to be transcendental in the sense that it is only in the context of this valuationality that we can so much as have a (conceptualizable, cognizable) factual world at all. Some rival metaphysical attempts to characterize the fact-value entanglement, drawn from the pragmatist tradition (including the classics, especially Peirce, Dewey, and George Herbert Mead), are critically considered, particularly the conflicting proposals that values emerge from facts and that values are continuous with facts. While no complete or thoroughgoing metaphysical theory of the fact-value entanglement can be developed in a single chapter, the metaphysical focus of the chapter importantly supplements, for example, the more restricted epistemological account of the relation between the factual and the normative in White’s holistic pragmatism. Ruth Anna Putnam’s version of the pragmatist account of the fact-value entanglement is explored as a particularly promising way of grounding the contemporary debate in a perceptive reading of the classical pragmatists. Chapter 8 explores the views of two interestingly different twentieth-century philosophers, Eino Kaila and Georg Henrik von Wright, who have only rarely been discussed in relation to pragmatism. (These two thinkers came from my home country, Finland, and while von Wright became an international giant of analytic philosophy, his work has not been actively studied within pragmatism scholarship; nor, of course, has Kaila’s, who himself never gained the international prominence of his most talented student, von Wright.) Notably, Kaila was heavily influenced by James in his youth, and while he later – as a mature logical empiricist – firmly rejected religious metaphysics, he developed a broadly pragmatist account of the “practical testability” of religious, valuational, and metaphysical outlooks of life (or “worldviews”), maintaining that such views may carry a practical meaning even though their theoretical “real content” is minimal, or non-existent. Von Wright, in turn, was not only Kaila’s pupil but, famously, a student and professorial successor of Ludwig Wittgenstein, yet continued to develop a highly original philosophical profile (independent of Wittgenstein) based on his foundational work in logic, in particular. His understanding of human action and causality, as developed in the 1960–1970s, can be, perhaps slightly surprisingly, compared to pragmatism. The chapter proposes that these two Finnish analytic philosophers11 can be interpreted as “pragmatist

 Note that Kaila did not label his own philosophy “analytic”. He was, rather, a “synthetic” philosopher of nature (as explained in Chap. 8), refusing to reduce philosophical problems concerning “reality” to problems that could be resolved by linguistic or conceptual analysis. Thus, again, we have here some historical material for a critical testing of what we understand by the “canon” of analytic philosophy. 11

12

1 Introduction

humanists” and thus seeks to further enrich our picture of the complex relations between pragmatism and analytic philosophy (particularly logical empiricism). Chapter 9, finally, further illuminates, or perhaps rather complicates, the picture of neopragmatism sketched in this volume by bringing into the discussion a classical twentieth-century philosophical voice, namely, Wittgenstein’s. Most of the neopragmatists analyzed in the previous chapters have recognized their profound debt to Wittgenstein, but the relation between Wittgenstein’s work and the pragmatist tradition still deserves a fresh look taking seriously the ways in which both pragmatism and Wittgenstein can be interpreted in a Kantian transcendental fashion by emphasizing the practice-embedded and historically changing conditions enabling us to represent, and live in, a meaningfully organized human world. Without claiming Wittgenstein to have been a pragmatist in any clear sense (and without venturing any strong interpretive claims about his views generally), the chapter considers some of the key issues that the (neo)pragmatist needs to take seriously when interpreting (especially the later) Wittgenstein. Pragmatist readers of Wittgenstein must remember, however, that while most pragmatists emphasize the entanglement of fact and value, or the factual and the normative, in (neo)pragmatism – as manifested in, say, Putnam’s, White’s, and Margolis’s views  – Wittgenstein’s dichotomy between fact and value12 problematizes such claims and thus implicitly invites the pragmatist into a self-critical, hence transcendental, examination of their own position from within. Moreover, Wittgensteinian reflections can, when brought into a dialogue with pragmatist ones, be seen as elaborating on the very concept of the transcendental in ways that pragmatists should also take seriously, even when refusing to embrace Wittgenstein’s specific ideas. It has not been my aim to achieve any fully worked-out unified pragmatist theory of realism, value, and transcendental argumentation in these essays. Rather, I do wish to take very seriously the self-critical fallibilism of any pragmatist inquiry worthy of the name. It is always valuable to seriously investigate views that differ from one’s own.13 Many of the positions and arugments explored in the chapters  This dichotomy is, of course, clearer in the Tractatus than in Wittgenstein’s later work, upon which Chap. 9 focuses (without claiming to make any original interpretive points about Wittgenstein, though). No discussion of the early Wittgenstein can be included in this volume. For my earlier work on the early Wittgenstein and solipsism, in particular, see Pihlström 2020b. 13  One reason (especially for pragmatists but many others as well) for examining, say, Wittgenstein’s early conception of ethics (not discussed here – but cf. Pihlström 2020b) could be the way in which its absolute distinction between the facts of the world describable by language and the value that is considered “higher” can be seen as challenging the kinds of analyses of the fact-value entanglement that many pragmatists develop. Moreover, both the pragmatist defense of the fact-value entanglement (see especially Chap. 7) and the early-Wittgensteinian articulation of ethical value as something “unworldly” and absolute can be grounded in transcendental considerations, and therefore both pragmatists and analytic philosophers need to carefully reflect on what “transcendental” exactly amounts to in such different philosophical contexts, again critically negotiating the canon of the transcendental tradition (in relation to both pragmatism and analytic philosophy). These examples show that the concerns of advancing dialogues between traditions extend far beyond what I can hope to achieve in this volume. 12

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13

below are not that different from mine, though; on the contrary, I see my own views on pragmatism as to a significant degree growing out of my attempts to engage with the thinkers I am commenting on in the chapters collected in this volume. Importantly, the reader should not expect any smooth or final formulation of an overall pragmatist or pragmatically realist position as the end result of these case studies. Such a comprehensive overview cannot be the task of a selection of contributions to the discussion; moreover (as noted in “Acknowledgments” above), I also think of my work on pragmatism and related topics as a continuous process of re-­ examining the ideas I have been dealing with since my earliest philosophical writings in the 1990s. The case studies in these chapters are steps toward a presumably never achieved full-fledged pragmatist theory. Furthermore, the tensions amongst the various views explored in the chapters included in this volume also highlight the multifaceted ways in which transcendental investigations may be relevant to both pragmatism and analytic philosophy. At the metaphilosophical level, we need to embrace a critical and fallibilist attitude to the very philosophical methods we employ, including analytic, pragmatic, and transcendental methodologies. This is one of the implicit messages of the book, and thus also one of the most significant connections between the chapters. Neither analytic philosophers nor pragmatists can just rest satisfied with the methodology they currently employ but need to be ready for constant critical renewal of their philosophical tools. This, again, is an irreducibly value-laden process.14 Our critical pragmatic fallibilism about our own philosophical and metaphilosophical value-­ commitments presupposes that we are able and prepared to continue to critically reflect on those values themselves. Nothing, no fact or value, can ever remain beyond the critical gaze of philosophical inquiry. This is a key pragmatic principle guiding my inquiries in this book. In addition to critical methodological self-awareness, both pragmatism and analytic philosophy at their best – as represented, for example, the philosophers to be analyzed below – manifest an acknowledgment of philosophy as a human activity. It would be an exaggeration to claim these traditions to be “humanistic” in any distinctive sense (though Chap. 8 explicitly takes up a position I label “pragmatist humanism”), and of course many analytic philosophers today advocate radical and reductive forms of naturalism or physicalism seeking to understand features of the human world such as consciousness, normativity, and value as elements of material nature. In emphasizing a certain form of humanism in my integration of pragmatism and analytic philosophy, I am not opposed to reasonable (non-reductive) naturalism  – as should be clear throughout this volume. I do think, however, that the pragmatist-­cum-transcendental reflections engaged in by the philosophers to be discussed are characterized by a self-critical understanding of the fact that we are,  This volume can thus also be read along with my recent book, Toward a Pragmatist Philosophy of the Humanities (Pihlström 2022), which argues for the value-ladenness of the ontology of all human inquiries, particularly inquiries in the humanistic disciplines. In the present book, I try to show how this idea of pragmatist (and Kantian) value-ladenness has taken interestingly different shapes in different neopragmatists’ work. 14

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1 Introduction

when considering philosophical questions such as the issue of realism, inevitably analyzing our place as human beings in the world. In somewhat loose and possibly misleading terms, this project can be described as philosophical anthropology. It seems to me that pragmatism, in particular, is essentially15 focused on enhancing our understanding of the ways the world we live in depends on, or is shaped by, our human activities of conceptualization and inquiry – or human practices in general. It is this dependence that transcendental reflection, in particular, seeks to illuminate. Moreover, the very idea of the world being conceptualizable and cognizable by us only as a “value-laden” world – with the needs, interests, and values inherent in our practices continuously contributing to the shape the world takes as an object of our inquiries – is itself an idea we may describe as “philosophical-anthropological”. It postulates the human subject (not, of course, a Cartesian immaterial self but a practice-embedded and always already culturally and historically situated embodied subjectivity) as the source of any meaningful structure that reality may take, withoug claiming, insanely, that reality would have been created by the human mind. To critically investigate the senses in which pragmatists can be realists despite subscribing to a form of quasi-transcendental idealism (or transcendental pragmatism) finding human valuational activity as ontologically relevant in structuring the world we live in is to be engaged in philosophical anthropology. Insofar as the many syntheses of pragmatism and analytic philosophy I will explore by analyzing the thinkers I have chosen to include in this book are also contributions to such a critical investigation, it is only with a moderate stretch that we may call even some late (post-)analytic philosophers “philosophical anthropologists”. Fortunately, this expression is becoming better entrenched, perhaps also because Roberta Dreon (2022), in her important recent book, makes a very interesting case for a pragmatist philosophical anthropology, summarizing her general picture of “human nature” as “a form of life that is contingent, yet also relatively stable and marked by some basic common features that are still open to change and reshaping because of their constitutive dependence on a natural and naturally sociocultural environment” (ibid., 1).16  By suggesting, occasionally, that pragmatism is “essentially” committed to some idea or line of thought, I am not (I hope) committing myself to any strong essentialism about a set of unchanging defining features of pragmatism, which I find a loose and open-ended philosophical approach not to be adequately captured in any such overarching essence. 16  The main features of our human form(s) of life she analyzes within this overall picture include sensibility, habituality, and “enlanguaged” human experience. Pragmatists from the classical figures of the tradition to neopragmatists like Margolis are obvious references in her project. Dreon describes her general stance as a form of “cultural naturalism”, a philosophical anthropology primarily indebted to John Dewey and secondarily to George Herbert Mead and William James. Following these pragmatists, Dreon maintains that humanity is a “product of natural history”; this dynamically naturalist humanity is “not given once and for all, but constantly becomes what it is by unfolding within a dynamic environment of which it is part” (Dreon 2022, 12). The “human environment” is not merely natural but “naturally social and naturally cultural”, “made up of shared practices that are laden with deep-seated meanings, habits, rules, and so on” (ibid., 63). Dreon further explains: “[…] human nature is not interpreted as an allegedly innate, fixed, and preconstituted endowment that is later exposed to cultural events, a social world, nurture, and empirical occurrences. Human nature is not behind or below the course of events happening to us: 15

1 Introduction

15

In my view, the philosophical investigation of the human being at the center of all conceptual, epistemic, and valuational activities that make the world available to us as an object of cognition and a place for moral reflection and deliberation is something that could, increasingly, be seen as unifying philosophical approaches that might otherwise seem to be worlds apart from each other – at least as long as such approaches are unifiable within a generally humanistic orientation that finds recent “posthumanisms” hopelessly confused (see, e.g., Pihlström 2021, 2022). I hope my attempts to integrate pragmatist and analytic ideas and arguments under the umbrellas of transcendental argumentation and valuational philosophical anthropology (in an extremely broad sense) might also be seen as invitations to other philosophical and metaphilosophical dialogues across traditions. While such dialogues should be open to a variety of different approaches, I see the employment of transcendental methodology as vital to the prospects of pragmatist philosophical anthropology; indeed, what I find rather problematic in Dreon’s (2022) work on pragmatist philosophical anthropology (see the previous footnote) is her repeated rejection of all transcendentalist (or “quasi-transcendentalist”) approaches to human nature, including language and linguistic meaning.17 it is constituted by the rich complexity of organic and environmental circumstances – including material constrains, cultural conditions, and social factors – that are exposed to relative fixation, stratification, changes, and loop effects” (ibid., 12). This is a picture of humanity I believe most pragmatists can easily sympathize with, and I find Dreon’s argument based on the pragmatist classics generally sound and carefully developed. I also agree with a number of more specific claims she makes, including the important observations that pragmatist pluralism and the acknowledgment of the continuous variability of human nature do not entail pernicious cultural relativism and incommensurability and that the extremes of physicalism and cultural reductionism are “two sides of the same coin” (see ibid., 18–19, 25). Moreover, Dreon’s “cultural naturalism” is defined as “a nonreductive form of naturalism that assumes culture to be continuous with nature, rooted in the very organic and environmental conditions of human life, and yet irreducible to the mere associations of preexisting resources” (ibid., 23). 17  In naturalistic terms, our linguistic utterances, Dreon (2022, 4) maintains, derive “from previously existing organic and environmental resources” (see also, e.g., ibid., 9, 146). On the other hand, it could be claimed that the very attempt to integrate sensibility and (linguistic) understanding is, in a broad sense, Kantian. Kant famously synthesized sensibility and understanding (intuitions and concepts) in his account of the necessary conditions for the possibility of human cognition. As “nonfoundational” as Dreon’s view is, the claim that “sensibility and language should be regarded as mutually shaping each other in the human world” (ibid., 36) is not dramatically different from Kant’s general position, according to which human experience arises as a synthesis of intuitions and concepts. More generally, the project of overcoming the simplified dichotomy between experience-centered and language-centered pragmatisms (sometimes seen, thanks to Rorty, Brandom, and others, as the key divide between classical and recent pragmatism) by developing (in Margolis’s terms) an account of human experience as naturally “enlanguaged” (to which Dreon’s chapter 5 is devoted) can be seen as an updated Kantian project of synthesizing linguistic meaning with naturally evolving experience. There is no reason why such a broadly Kantian account could not, in principle, be rearticulated in pragmatist, and even pragmatically naturalized, terms, though I am not going to press this issue at any great length here. Let me just note that while Dreon urges us to “resist the fascination of transcendental options”, which “push us to consider […] relative invariances, constancies, and commonalities [of human nature] as quasi-a priori enabling conditions for empirical actions and events” (ibid., 13), I would still keep the

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These references to the philosophical study of the human condition as central in both pragmatism and transcendental philosophy (and even in analytic philosophy, broadly conceived) remain loose and general, of course. This book is not a detailed investigation of any specific issues in philosophical anthropology,18 but it might be emphasized that the central question – in my view aptly described as “philosophical-­ anthropological” – that concerns the relation between the natural and the normative is at least implicitly present in most of the chapters. In a way or another, all the pragmatist (or close-to-pragmatist) philosophers to be discussed have inquired into how it is possible that the natural world we live in is also a world of normatively structured human practices (see also Pihlström 2021, Chapter 6). I like to think of this as a transcendental question to which only a pragmatist answer is available. (Or perhaps better, we should say that any transcendental answer to such a transcendental question must be irreducibly pragmatist in the sense of taking seriously the embeddedness of whatever transcendental conditions we may identify in our investigation of the very possibility of humanly given actualities such as cognitive experience or linguistic meaning in evolving human practices of conceptualization, inquiry, and world-engagement in general.) Whatever normativity there is, then, to guide and constrain our lives, including our inquiries into the natural and the normative themselves, it must be something that is not handed down to us from any transcendent standpoint (“from above”) but arises from and is entangled with the fully

Kantian-inspired transcendental vocabulary among our options in the task of developing a pragmatist conception of sensibility and understanding – of the way language is a “real part of our lives” (ibid., 14). The transcendental status of the constitutive conditions of experience should not be conflated with “innate” a priori structures contrasted with “nurture” as acquired a posteriori instantiations (ibid., 18). On the contrary, the key pragmatist notion of habit might itself be given a Kantian twist, as Dreon herself claims habits to be “constitutive of human capacities” and at the intersection of “biological and cultural resources”, thus fundamental for her cultural naturalism (ibid., 94). A transcendental philosophy of language, moreover, need not just view language as a “quasi-transcendental horizon for the possibility of meaning” (ibid., 154) but may ask questions about how linguistic meaning is possible, grounding such possibility in naturally evolving human practices and activities (see ibid., 154–155) – and it is not implausible to suggest that Dewey and Wittgenstein were to a certain degree investigating the same basic issues here. Transcendental conditions are not necessarily ahistorically stable structures but, more importantly, practiceembedded and thus changing structures or frameworks of normative enabling. Such conditions are postulated as responses that are found necessary to the kind of “how possible” questions that transcendental thinkers have asked since Kant. I still find it plausible to suggest that pragmatists asked such questions in their own ways, and may continue to do so. Dreon, then, is one of those (many) critics of transcendental philosophy who in my view too strongly emphasize the allegedly unchanging and unchangeable character of transcendental conditions. I obviously agree with her that we need not “share the assumption that either human nature is something deep, unchanging, and preestablished for all human beings prior to the varieties of human behavior and practices it can give rise to, or there is no human nature at all” (ibid., 18). I believe any transcendental pragmatist should agree with this. 18  In some of my earlier work, particularly Pihlström 2016, I investigate philosophical anthropology in general and human mortality in particular from a pragmatist-cum-transcendental standpoint.

1 Introduction

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natural habits of action we engage in.19 But this does not make it any less normative. The peculiar combination of pragmatist and transcendental analyses I am about to investigate  – even when normativity is not their specific topic  – illustrates this antireductionism about normativity conjoined with pragmatic naturalism. Because this set of issues is, to a large extent, about the criteria of viewing our place in the world in an appropriate way, it is only natural that the problem of realism is found at the core of pragmatist articulations of the relationship between the natural and the normative. This also teaches us a lesson in holistic pragmatism (to be further specified in due course): our philosophical questions about realism, value, normativity, naturalism, and the appropriate uses of the pragmatist and the transcendental methods are all included in a holistic totality. By exploring such questions, in terms of case studies, we seek to understand, and critically transform, our human life in a human world.

 Note that this does not entail atheism, or any resolute metaphysical rejection of transcendence, although I am certainly not engaged with such issues in this book. A pragmatist philosophy of religion would have to construe such issues in terms of irreducibly normative inquiry into what transcendentally emerges from our natural human needs. 19

Chapter 2

On the Viennese Background of Harvard Neopragmatism

1 Introduction: The Encounter between Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism The Americanization of originally European analytic philosophy, beginning with the rise of Nazism in Europe before WWII, has aptly been described as a move “from the Vienna Circle to Harvard Square” (Holton 1993). There are, indeed, significant links between the Viennese-based (and more generally European) logical empiricism1 and the American tradition of pragmatism; these links, furthermore, can also be argued to have been influential, albeit often implicitly, in the emergence of what is today known as “neopragmatism”.2 In the United States, C.I.  Lewis, Ernest Nagel, and W.V. Quine, among others, were important mediators between these philosophical schools; accordingly, the Columbia and Harvard philosophy departments were instrumental in the development of this very special dialogue between two key orientations of twentieth century philosophy.3 Another mediating  I will speak of “logical empiricism” instead of “logical positivism”, unless there is some philosophical or historical reason to be more specific about the terminology. By “logical empiricism” I understand the somewhat broader set of ideas and the slightly more inclusive philosophical approach that survived the collapse of the Vienna Circle (and thus the collapse of logical positivism in a strict sense). The Finnish philosopher Eino Kaila may in fact have been the first to coin the term, “logical empiricism” (der logische Empirismus). Unlike some others associated with the Vienna Circle, he was careful to call his view “logical empiricism”, never “logical positivism”. (On Kaila, see Chap. 8 below.) 2  For the distinction between “neopragmatism” and “new pragmatism” (which need not have any explicit relation to the historical tradition of pragmatism), see Misak 2007. 3  For detailed examinations of the concept of the a priori in logical empiricism, see Friedman 2007 and Mormann 2012. For discussions of Quine’s problematic place in the pragmatist tradition, see Koskinen and Pihlström 2006 and Sinclair 2013. In this chapter, because of my focus on neopragmatism, I will have to mostly ignore both Lewis and Quine. By no means can I hope to aim at any 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pihlström, Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy, Vienna Circle Institute Library 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28042-9_2

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figure – some decades earlier – between pragmatism and early analytic philosophy was Frank Ramsey, who could have changed the history of twentieth century philosophy by developing a synthesis of these philosophies, had he lived longer.4 Charles Morris’s “pragmatic empiricism” was yet another milestone between Vienna and America; Morris argued for the complementarity and even convergence of pragmatism and logical empiricism throughout the 1930s, and he returned to the topic in his contribution to the Library of Living Philosophers volume on Rudolf Carnap in the 1960s (see Morris 1937, 1938, 1963; cf. Carnap 1963). Yet, the dialogue between pragmatism and logical empiricism was not restricted to the work of such bridge-builders as Morris and Nagel who have later become somewhat marginalized. Even the giants of the two movements themselves entered into a fruitful dialogue in the early 1930s. The mutual visits across the Atlantic in the beginning of the 1930s and the preparations for the 1934 International Congress for Philosophy in Prague (see Limbeck-Lilineau 2012), as well as Carnap’s and John Dewey’s exchange of views on meaning and the nature of philosophical problems in Philosophy of Science in 1934 are examples of this (cf. Shook 1998, 462), as is Hans Reichenbach’s (1939) criticism of Dewey’s instrumentalist philosophy of science from the point of view of what he regarded as a more realistic understanding of science. In the late 1930s, Dewey also contributed to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, a project launched by the Vienna Circle philosophers.5 Leading scholars of the history of logical empiricism, such as Thomas Uebel (1992, 1996, 2020 [2006]) and Alan Richardson (1998), have investigated the relations between logical empiricism and twentieth century naturalism and pragmatism in great detail, drawing attention, for instance, to how “Quinean” – that is, naturalistic and anti-foundationalist – some of Otto Neurath’s views were already decades before the emergence of Quine’s philosophy (see also Richardson and Uebel 2007). As Richard Creath (2007, 335) points out, Quine’s caricature of Carnap’s conventionalism – as something allegedly entirely different from the more pragmatic naturalism Quine himself advanced  – has unfortunately been “endlessly repeated by others”. Gradually this picture has become more nuanced, to the extent that it is almost a commonplace today to appreciate the many common ideas shared not only by Quine and Carnap but generally by pragmatism and logical empiricism. Therefore, as Cheryl Misak (2013, chapter 9) also argues, the thesis that kind of exhaustiveness in my treatment of pragmatism and logical empiricism; I will merely be able to offer some perspectives on the matter, informed by the development of neopragmatism. 4  For instance, Ramsey’s 1927 essay, “Facts and Propositions”, articulates a pragmatic understanding of the meaning of a proposition in terms of the conduct that would result from asserting the proposition. This is, clearly, a position reminiscent of Charles Peirce’s and William James’s views. See Misak 2016a. 5  For more details and exact references (including archival documentation based on Carnap’s, Schlick’s, Neurath’s and others’ papers and correspondence), see Limbeck-Lilineau 2012. For Dewey’s Encyclopedia contributions, see Dewey 1938, 1939. Already some years later Dewey was, however, critical of the project and his own involvement in it. For an examination of Dewey’s criticism, see da Cunha 2012.

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pragmatism, which had flourished in the United States from William James’s popular philosophy in the early 1900s until Dewey’s late work between the world wars, was “eclipsed” by logical empiricism (and later by analytic philosophy) is problematic, if not outright mistaken. Not only does the pragmatic maxim, which urges us to examine the meaning of our concepts in terms of the potential practical consequences of their objects,6 resemble the logical empiricists’ verificationist theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of a sentence is reducible to its method of verification (and only empirically verifiable sentences are meaningful); also the resolute rejection of unempirical metaphysical speculation, as well as the link between scientific progress and social progress, can be regarded as points of contact between the two traditions. Clearly both the pragmatists and the logical empiricists, at least after the Vienna Circle philosophers’ arrival in the United States, understood this. As Misak concludes: “The similarities between pragmatism and logical empiricism were there (and where recognized) from the beginning.” (Ibid., 175.) Furthermore, there seems to be a growing consensus about the fact that it was the internal self-critical development – rather than any external pressure – of logical empiricism, especially following key Vienna Circle members’ emigration from Europe in the 1930s, that led to positions relatively close to the naturalistic, fallibilistic pragmatism that had been developed by Dewey, Nagel, Lewis, and Morris. Hence, the explicit contacts between the two traditions that were established in the 1930s may not have played any crucial role in this rapprochement.7 The Vienna Circle thinkers might have arrived at their somewhat more relaxed stance – in comparison to the strict verificationism many of them had advocated in the 1920s and early 1930s  – even if they had never directly encountered Dewey and the other pragmatists. Given this state-of-the-art in the scholarship on the history of pragmatism and logical empiricism, there is little I can add to the historical picture of this dialogue; I hope, however, to provide a distinctive perspective on the topic by taking seriously not just the relations between logical empiricism and pragmatism but especially between these two and neopragmatism,8 as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s relevance to both pragmatism and neopragmatism. My focus will, then, be on the philosophical background of neopragmatism rather than on the pragmatist tradition as a whole (or logical empiricism as such, for that matter). My investigation is not intended to throw much new historical light on logical empiricism and its relations to  On the pragmatic maxim and its different versions and applications, see, e.g., Pihlström (ed.) 2011b and Burke 2013. 7  See especially Limbeck-Lilineau 2012. The international philosophy congress in Prague in 1934 was a crucial step in the emergence of the mutual recognition of pragmatism and logical empiricism, but as Limbeck-Lilineau concludes, “neither the [logical empiricists’] liberalization of the meaning criterion, nor the introduction of dispositional concepts was initiated through the contact with pragmatism” (ibid., 107). 8  In fact Charles Morris used the term “neopragmatism” already in 1928. (I owe this piece of information to Christoph Limbeck-Lilineau.) According to him, pragmatism was already then, before its explicit encounters with logical empiricism, living a second phase, after the early phase of Peirce’s and James’s works. 6

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pragmatism, but I do hope that it will philosophically illuminate the ways in which neopragmatism grows out of the pragmatism – logical empiricism dialogue. I will not consider the above-mentioned mediators (e.g., Nagel, Lewis, or Morris) in any detail; my main focus in the early sections of the chapter will be on the leading neopragmatist Hilary Putnam’s “residual Carnapianism” (as I will call it) as well as on some related themes in Wittgenstein scholarship that may be open to pragmatist reconsideration (see also Chap. 9). I will, in particular, critically discuss the status of metaphysics in pragmatism and neopragmatism. This is an important theme in contemporary pragmatism scholarship not only because of its intrinsic interest but also because metaphysics has forcefully returned to the center of mainstream analytic philosophy, and pragmatists need to reflect on their ways of reacting to such developments. While metaphysics may not seem to survive Putnam’s broadly Carnapian criticisms of metaphysical realism, Putnam’s own account of “objectivity without objects” (to be revisited below) can be applied to, for instance, metaphysical topics that no lesser a figure than Immanuel Kant found absolutely central to the very pursuit of metaphysics (viz., the soul, freedom, and God) – instead of being applicable only to the issues in, say, the philosophy of mathematics and ethics to which Putnam himself applies the idea. Indeed, it can be shown that while neopragmatism has successfully moved beyond several logical-empiricist doctrines, such as the dichotomies between the analytic and synthetic as well as between fact and value (not to forget neopragmatists’ general rejection of the scientism we often associate with logical empiricism), neopragmatism still remains committed to other important logical-empiricist ideas, especially the critique of metaphysics. This is still rather clearly manifested, e.g., in Putnam’s Carnapian-like rejection of metaphysical realism as well as his reluctance to formulate his views on the fact-value entanglement in metaphysical terms (see Chap. 7) .9 After the sections on Putnam and Carnap, I will show how Morton White’s – another somewhat neglected philosopher integrating logical empiricism with pragmatism – holistic pragmatism can help us in adopting a truly pragmatist approach to metaphysics (though it also has its residual elements of logical empiricism). In particular, White’s holistic pragmatism crucially contributes to developing an overall view capable of integrating metaphysical and anti-metaphysical ideas and beliefs, just like it enables us to regard factual and normative beliefs as empirically testable within the same holistic totality. In a sense, then, holistic pragmatism points to a way to move on from the dialogue between logical empiricism and (neo)pragmatism – or so I will argue. Taking holistic pragmatism seriously here indicates a commitment to maintaining and further developing the fact-value entanglement that is perhaps the most important departure of neopragmatism from its logical empiricist heritage (see further Chap. 7 below).

 Richard Rorty’s – another key neopragmatist’s – more “postmodern” critique of metaphysics is, of course, very different from the logical empiricists’ (and from Putnam’s), but he shares with Carnap et al. the conviction that in some sense metaphysics fails to make sense. 9

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2 Linguistic Frameworks and Conceptual Relativity: Carnap and Putnam Let us turn more closely to the encounter pragmatism had with logical empiricism by recapitulating some familiar points about Carnap’s doctrine of linguistic frameworks. This discussion will illuminate the role of logical empiricism as a source of insights for neopragmatism especially because of the inspiration Putnam drew from logical empiricism, most notably his greatest teachers Carnap and Reichenbach. Even though Putnam mostly worked with Carnap on inductive logic instead of, say, the realism issue, this background is rather obvious when we consider the striking similarity between Putnam’s (1981, 1990) “internal realism” (his basic position in the 1980s) and Carnap’s (1950) theory of linguistic frameworks and internal vs. external questions of existence.10 Putnam’s late collection of essays, Philosophy in an Age of Science (2012), contains his most recent substantial attempts to deal with his relation to his logical empiricist teachers, especially in relation to the realism issue. That book in fact makes it clear that he has continued to struggle with his logical empiricist heritage until this day; therefore, it is worth examining here. In particular, Putnam’s desire to avoid metaphysics – when developing pragmatism, when developing his theory of the fact-value entanglement, in the philosophy of religion, and in other contexts – can still be seen as a remnant of logical empiricism. The book demonstrates that Putnam, although he has now turned (back) to a form of metaphysical realism and abandoned his former internal realism, continues to defend what he already in the 1980s called conceptual relativity. This idea was the core of his internal or pragmatic realism: there is no single privileged way the world is, no definite set of objects the world consists of, no fundamental “God’s-Eye View” on reality, but a plurality of possible conceptualizations of the world – that is, a plurality of linguistic frameworks we can use to categorize reality and to identify objects whose existence we are committed to. Hence, arguably, Putnam still joins Carnap at a very basic level, though rejecting many of Carnap’s more detailed views, such as the “methodological solipsism” of the 1928 Aufbau (Carnap 1967). Let us therefore explore some continuities and discontinuities between Putnam’s views in the early  Among Putnam’s many critics, Kenneth Westphal (2003) is particularly explicit in his criticism of this residual Carnapian element in Putnam’s internal realist position. Putnam, of course, is not the only neopragmatist whose Carnapian or quasi-Carnapian ideas would be worth examining. For example, if we broaden our concept of neopragmatism to include Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) and other post-positivist thinkers’ “new philosophy of science” – just think of Kuhn’s account of the practice-embeddedness of normal-scientific research within a paradigm – we may certainly appreciate the analogy between the Kuhnian paradigm and the Carnapian linguistic framework. Such analogies have been suggested by Friedman (e.g., 2001, 2003). Richardson (2007, 356) also notes that paradigms and linguistic frameworks play analogous roles as “conditions of scientific knowledge”. See further Pihlström and Siitonen 2005 and Pihlström 2008b, 2012b. In this chapter, I will largely have to set aside the Kantian dimensions of pragmatism, even though that topic is also clearly relevant to the reappraisal of neopragmatism in relation to logical empiricism (cf. also Pihlström 2003a, 2011b; as well as several chapters below). 10

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1980s (that is, the peak of his internal realism) and his final years (that is, in his 2012 volume collecting his late work on realism and other topics).11 While Putnam’s internal realism was often regarded as a form of realism just by name and was in fact seen as involving a strong commitment to anti-realism, especially due to Putnam’s flirtation with the kind of semantic anti-realism and verificationism defended by Michael Dummett (and, of course, already by the logical empiricists), Putnam himself insisted early on – and continues to insist – that what he called, and still calls, conceptual relativity is “fully compatible with realism in metaphysics” (Putnam 2012, 56; see also 101–102). Hence, it is possible to be a realist even if one follows Putnam in maintaining that there is no fundamental metaphysical fact of the matter as to whether, say, mereological sums ought to be included in our ontology of the small “Carnapian world” of three individuals (x1, x2, x3).12 A version of this kind of conceptual relativity can be found already in classical pragmatism, especially in James’s pragmatic pluralism (e.g., James 1975 [1907], chapter 6; see also Pihlström 2008a, b, 2013).13 While James does not operate with linguistic frameworks – he was, after all, a pre-linguistic-turn philosopher – his views on the relativity of objects to humanly constructed perspectives guided by human needs and interests is clearly a precursor of both the Carnapian linguistification of ontology and the Putnamian doctrine of conceptual relativity. Paying due attention to Putnam’s Carnapian ideas, we may ask when neopragmatism emerged. (I am not concerned with the term “neopragmatism” but with the emergence of some of the distinctive ideas we associate with it.) There is no trivial answer. Presumably it emerged only in the 1980s when Putnam was busily defending internal realism and noted its connection with pragmatism (and even pointed out, in his 1987 volume The Many Faces of Realism and elsewhere, that he should

 I cannot here even summarize Putnam’s opposition between metaphysical and internal realism in the way it was elaborated in his famous writings in the 1980s and early 1990s; I hope this material is relatively familiar to my readers, as this complex philosophical debate largely shaped the discussion of realism for decades. For more details, see, e.g., Pihlström 1996 and 1998a as well as (with later reflections) 2009. My focusing on Putnam’s 2012 book here is also motivated by the fact that he there says various new things about his relation to metaphysics that seem to play an important role in the development of his views on realism. (See Putnam 2016; Putnam and Putnam 2017 for his final reflections on realism and pragmatism; the latter joint volume with Ruth Anna Putnam will be cited in Chap. 7 in some more detail.) 12  Putnam discusses this example in many places, including Putnam 1987, 1990, and 2004a. See also Pihlström 1996. It would require a long story to explain how this conceptual relativity differs from Quine’s (1969) “ontological relativity”, according to which ontology is relative to theory or translation. No detailed interpretation of Quine can be offered in this chapter (or book), so I must skip that exercise here. On Putnam’s criticisms of Quine, see, e.g., Putnam 1994 and Koskinen and Pihlström 2006. 13  Putnam, however, distinguishes between conceptual relativity, which involves equivalent or mutually intertranslatable conceptual schemes, and the more general phenomenon of conceptual pluralism, which has no such involvement but recognizes that “the world has many levels of form” irreducible to each other or to any single privileged form. See, e.g., Putnam 2012, 64–65. Another point of comparison here would be Goodman’s (1978) controversial theory of “worldmaking”, which postulates a plurality of “world versions” (see also Pihlström 1998a, b, c, chapter 1). 11

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have called internal realism “pragmatic realism”)? Or perhaps, rather, it emerged in 1979 when Richard Rorty published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and shocked his analytic readers by regarding Dewey as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century?14 Or already in 1951 when Quine in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” exclaimed that our ontological postulations are, “where rational, pragmatic”, and claimed to represent a “more thorough pragmatism” than Carnap?15 There is hardly any philosophical or historical need to agree about the exact timing of the birth of neopragmatism. One possible answer, however, is that neopragmatism emerged already in 1934 (avant la lettre) when Carnap formulated his famous Toleranzprinzip in Logische Syntax der Sprache.16 According to this principle of tolerance, “there is no morality in logic”: “In der Logik gibt es keine Moral. Jeder mag seine Logik, d.h. seine Sprachform, aufbauen wie er will. Nur muss er, wenn er mit uns diskutieren will, deutlich angeben, wie er es machen will, synktaktische Bestimmungen geben anstatt philosophischer Erörterungen.” (Carnap 1934, 45.) We can, then, freely choose our language, provided that we offer syntactic rules and definitions for its expressions. Later Carnap turned more to semantics, modifying his earlier very restrictive conception of philosophy as the logical syntax of science, but the fundamental idea of tolerating different linguistic frameworks serving different purposes survived the changes in the details of his position. This basic view was, as is well known, elaborated by Carnap in his 1950 essay, “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” – famously criticized by Quine in “Two Dogmas” – but the idea of a plurality of languages through which we categorize reality was there already in 1934. In a sense it was at work already in 1928 in Der logische Aufbau der Welt, in which Carnap had suggested that both phenomenalist and physicalist – that is, autopsychological and heteropsychological (or eigenpsychische and fremdpsychische) – starting points for the construction of scientific language (and, hence, for the “logical construction of the world”) are possible, though the phenomenalist one should be preferred (see Carnap 1967; cf. Richardson 1998). It is in fact easy to characterize Carnap’s position as a form of “neopragmatism” by using the terminology he adopts in the 1950 paper. There Carnap distinguishes between “internal” existence questions that are posed within a linguistic framework, concerning the existence of certain entities within that framework, and “external” ones, which concern the adoption of the framework itself. (See Carnap 1950, 209–210.) The external questions lack theoretical significance; only internal

 In addition to Quine, Rorty is another major philosopher that must be more or less neglected in this book. See Pihlström 1996 and 1998a, c for my (already somewhat dated) critical explorations of Rorty’s neopragmatism. For critical comparisons of Putnam’s and Rorty’s views on realism, truth, and religion, see Pihlström 2004a and 2013, chapter 3; cf. Pihlström 2021, chapter 1. 15  “Two Dogmas” is available in Quine (1980 [1953]); for the famous “more thorough pragmatism” quote, see 46. An examination of Quine’s and Carnap’s complex relation would obviously be beyond the scope of this chapter (and book). For their correspondence, see Creath 1990. See also, for useful examinations of Quine’s relation to Carnap, Neurath, and other leading logical empiricists, Isaacson 2004, especially 229–249, as well as Creath 2007. 16  Or perhaps we could say that it emerged already in 1928 when Morris used the term (cf. above). 14

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questions can be answered by means of empirical, scientific research. External questions are resolved only practically; choosing one linguistic framework instead of another is a matter of effectiveness, fruitfulness, and simplicity, among other things – not an empirical or theoretical matter (ibid., 210–212, 219). In particular, the problem of the reality of the “world of things” is, metaphysically understood, a mere pseudo-problem (just like Carnap had already argued in the Aufbau and other early works): To be real in the scientific sense means to be an element of the framework; hence this concept cannot be meaningfully applied to the framework itself. Those who raise the question of the reality of the thing world itself have perhaps in mind not a theoretical question as their formulation seems to suggest, but rather a practical question, a matter of a practical decision concerning the structure of our language. We have to make the choice whether or not to accept and use the forms of expression for the framework in question. (Ibid., 210–211.)

As in 1934, Carnap in 1950 maintains a tolerant view on the plurality of linguistic frameworks. We should, he tells us, “grant to those who work in any special field of investigation the freedom to use any form of expression which seems useful to them”, as the work in that field “will sooner or later lead to the elimination of those forms which have no useful function” (ibid., 228). The paper concludes with a famous rule: “Let us be cautious in making assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.” (Ibid.) This is essentially the view that Putnam rediscovered and defended in the 1980s when arguing that the world possesses no “ready-made” ontological structure of its own but can be “sliced up” differently by using different conceptual schemes or frameworks – and to which he still, after having returned to metaphysical realism, at least to some extent adheres. It does not seem to me that Putnam’s criticisms of, for instance, Carnap’s methodological solipsism (as expressed in the Aufbau) have in any essential way departed from the basic idea of there being a plurality of linguistic frameworks – or conceptual schemes, perspectives, traditions, paradigms (you name it) – through which we language-users categorize reality, frameworks whose critical comparison is a pragmatic matter undecidable by empirical and/or theoretical grounds. Moreover, the attempt to arrive at an empirical or theoretical answer to an external question of existence in an absolute sense, say, to the question whether there “really” are such things as numbers or tables, verges on meaninglessness.17 In this sense Putnam remained a Carnapian even in his late writings – even after his realism became considerably stronger as a result of his rejection of internal realism and its epistemic theory of truth that, arguably, was practically indistinguishable

 Putnam (1995, 69–73) does contrast Carnap’s methodologically solipsist and verificationist empiricism to the classical pragmatists’ cooperative and interactionist view of inquiry; this kind of criticism of Carnap’s “spectator” conception of observation is continued, e.g., by Burke (2013, 68–72). This does not remove Putnam’s and Carnap’s fundamental agreement regarding realism, conceptual relativity, and metaphysics, however. 17

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from the logical empiricists’ verificationism.18 It is undeniable that Quine’s (1969) later ontological relativity, which gave up the Carnapian distinction between internal and external existence questions, also crucially shaped Putnam’s approach to the realism issue. According to Quine and (perhaps) also Putnam, all existence questions have a pragmatic dimension; thus, the division between internal and external questions collapses together with the analytic/synthetic distinction. Yet, Putnam’s many criticisms of Quine make it clear that he never followed Quine’s attack on Carnap to the very end, that is, to the final repudiation of the key Carnapian distinction – even though he does seem to agree with Quine (and Wittgenstein) rather than Carnap when saying that “[w]hat Carnap is trying to do in ‘Semantics, Empiricism and Ontology,’ it would seem to both Quine and Wittgenstein, is to find an external standpoint from which to condemn external questions as meaningless” (Putnam 2012, 345). Thus, while Quine (who has often been described as the “killer” of logical positivism) remained, according to Putnam, “the greatest logical positivist” (see Putnam 1990), we may say that Putnam himself remained faithful to some of the fundamental principles of logical empiricism until the end of his philosophical career. Even though Putnam does not strictly speaking subscribe to Carnapian criteria of meaning or to the view that external questions of existence are literally meaningless, it is, I believe, legitimate to conclude that whenever Putnam defends a position close to, say, James’s or Dewey’s pragmatism (or pragmatic pluralism), he does this, as we may say, in (and not despite) his Carnapian mode. His relatively few remarks on James’s and Dewey’s views on science also presuppose the more recent discussions of scientific realism and its empiricist alternatives that were not available to the pragmatist classics themselves; hence, even those remarks presuppose the context of logical empiricism.19 Neopragmatism more generally  – at least Putnam’s and Rorty’s  – is primarily a language-oriented form of pragmatism in contrast to the more experience-based classical pragmatism (cf. Hildebrand 2003). All of this also indicates how strongly “Carnapian” (rather than, say, “Deweyan”) Putnam’s neopragmatist position on realism vs. antirealism is.20

 One might perhaps apply the pragmatic maxim to find out what, if any, the key difference between Vienna Circle verificationism and Putnam’s 1980s Harvard verificationism was. These might come up as practically identical positions. 19  For instance, I am not quite sure if it is appropriate to call James and Dewey “fictionalists” about theoretical entities (Putnam 2012, 93). For a discussion of the pragmatist tradition from the point of view of the question of scientific realism, see Pihlström 2008b, 2022. 20  In addition to Putnam, Huw Price (2011) is another neopragmatist developing partly Carnapian views even today, defending a Carnapian pluralism of linguistic frameworks. He compares Carnap’s (1950) pluralism about ontological commitment to what would today be called “global irrealism” (Price 2011, 284) and contrasts Carnapian pluralism with Quinean monism, reminding us that a pragmatic or functional pluralism provides motivation for Carnap’s logico-syntactical pluralism (ibid., 289). Quine’s objections to Carnap can, according to Price, be to a large extent defused when we note that the one and the same existential quantifier can be “employed in the service of different functional, pragmatic or linguistic ends” (ibid., 291) – which, in effect, is what Putnam has argued when claiming that words like “exist” or “there is” have a plurality of different 18

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However, we can and should also take seriously the Kantian elements of Putnamian (neo-)pragmatism, and derivatively of logical empiricism, even though this cannot be done in the present inquiry in any detail. It would – as I have suggested elsewhere (e.g., Pihlström 2009) – be perfectly possible for Putnam to admit that our ontologies are humanly constructed in a transcendental sense while the objects and processes of the world we postulate within such ontological theorizing remain empirically (and, hence, factually, causally, and otherwise) independent of us and our theories. Thus, empirical ontological commitments internal to our frameworks have, and need, an extra-human standard (viz., the way things are, when seen through that framework), while the adoption of the framework itself is a kind of transcendental constitutive activity only pragmatically decidable – or criticizable. This idea, when further developed, would come close to C.I. Lewis’s (1923) “pragmatic a priori”. Kantian apriorism, and particularly transcendental idealism, however, are not anything that Putnam would ever be willing to embrace. Putnam has pointed out repeatedly that we should not confuse “making up” our notions with “making up” real systems in the world, unless we want to “slide into idealism”, which is “a bad thing to slide into” (Putnam 2012, 64). Now, of course this is itself a Carnapian distinction, echoing the external vs. internal contrast all over again.21 It is, arguably, a distinction that the classical pragmatists already cast a critical eye on while preserving (in my view) it in a pragmatic form. Something like the transcendental vs. empirical distinction must be made in order for Putnam’s own realism-­ with-­conceptual-relativity to succeed.22 Here, various philosophers’ work on the pragmatically relativized a priori – from Lewis to Michael Friedman et al. – is highly relevant to the emergence of neopragmatism. Similarly, the discussions by classical pragmatists themselves, Dewey in particular, concerning the independence vs. dependence of the objects of inquiry from processes of inquiry are reinterpretable along these transcendental lines (cf. Pihlström 2008b). We might say that the objects of scientific inquiry are, at least generally, empirically independent of inquiry and inquirers while being transcendentally dependent on inquiry because transcendentally constituted through the

uses (e.g., in Putnam 2004a, b). Indeed, Price (2011, 292, n8) perceptively points out that his “Carnapian view” comes close to Putnam’s “pragmatic pluralism”. While Price’s historical comments on Carnap vs. Quine (vs. Putnam) are in my view appropriate, I do not think we need to follow him into the final conclusion that “metaphysics remains where Carnap left it” (ibid., 303), nor to his proposal to integrate pragmatic functional pluralism and metaphysical “deflationism” (ibid.). This is because there is another – more Kantian – strategy for revising (and reviving) pragmatist metaphysics (cf. Pihlström 2009), though that, of course, is an entirely different story not to be told here. 21  Kant (1781/1787) himself would not recommend confusing the two, either, because the things in themselves, in his view, clearly are not “made up”. 22  A similar claim could be made about Philip Kitcher’s (2012) admirable proposal – which comes close to Putnam’s recent views – to integrate realism (especially scientific realism) with pragmatic pluralism and the interest-relativity of our world-categorization (see especially Kitcher on “Carnap and the Caterpillar” in ibid., chapter 8). The in my view essential transcendental dimension is missing from the otherwise very balanced and carefully worked-out position.

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processes of inquiry (along with the construction of relevant linguistic frameworks and/or conceptual schemes, to put it in more logical-empiricst terms). Putnam, however, would presumably regard this way of speaking as “bad” idealism. More generally, Putnam’s anti-metaphysical (indeed, logical-empiricist) background manifests itself in his reluctance to accept any genuine metaphysics of values – indeed, his account of the fact-value entanglement (see Putnam 2002a, 2004a, b) seems to be purely linguistic or conceptual, partly epistemic but certainly non-­ metaphysical – as well as in his resolutely non-metaphysical philosophy of religion indebted to the Wittgensteinian tradition in that field.23 This is what Putnam’s Carnapianism comes down to: a deep-seated avoidance or even fear of metaphysics – even in areas like ethics and religion where he clearly moved very far away from Carnap’s and most logical empiricists’ views. Even if pragmatically needed, metaphysics is to be avoided. Curiously, Putnam’s Carnapian anti-metaphysics and Levinasian “post-onto-theological” approach to moral value (cf. Putnam 2004a) join hands in his campaign for “ethics without ontology”. Putnam does not, then, seem to be sufficiently receptive to the pragmatist idea (arguably at work in William James, among others) that metaphysics should not be a priori dismissed but should itself be pragmatically elaborated and examined; its practice-involving core ought to be traced out by employing the pragmatic maxim in an ethically engaging way (cf. Pihlström 2009).

3 Pragmatist and Neopragmatist (Anti-)Metaphysics Why are Putnam’s twists and turns regarding realism and metaphysics interesting and important? The reason I have invoked Putnam (in relation to Carnap) here is that this specific case may tell us something more general about the ways in which pragmatism and neopragmatism have reacted to the question concerning the status of metaphysics within philosophy – a question that logical empiricism, of course, focused on as well. These issues are at the center of any inquiry into the relations between pragmatism and logical empiricism. Logical empiricism generally, of course, was a strongly anti-metaphysical movement. In A.J. Ayer’s memorable phrase, “no statement which refers to a ‘reality’ transcending the limits of all possible sense-experience can possibly have any literal significance” (Ayer 1936, 46). Philosophy must be sharply distinguished from age-­ old metaphysical speculation (ibid., 55 ff.); metaphysics can only have poetic, aesthetic, moral, emotive, or expressive value – instead of any cognitive value (ibid., 59–61). In particular, Ayer argues that the problem of realism vs. idealism, metaphysically construed, is “fictitious”, devoid of any cognitive or theoretical content  See Pihlström 2013 for some reflections on neopragmatist philosophy of religion, including Putnam’s. Note that Putnam nowhere seems to comment on the classical pragmatists’ relations to the Vienna Circle and logical empiricism, except for what he says in his 1995 volume on Wittgenstein as a kind of pragmatist. 23

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(ibid., 54–55, 182–193). In a similar vein, Moritz Schlick, the leading Vienna Circle figure, rejected the realism issue as meaningless metaphysics: “The denial of the existence of a transcendent external world would be just as much a metaphysical proposition as its assertion; the consistent empiricist does not therefore deny the transcendent, but declares both its denial and its affirmation to be equally devoid of meaning.” (Schlick 1932–1933, 54.) And we can easily find a host of similar statements from Carnap’s writings – and, by extension, even from Putnam’s. We already noted that one clear indication of Putnam’s logical-empiricist background influences is the desire to avoid any commitment to metaphysics, epitomized in his “residual Carnapianism” regarding internal and external questions.24 However, one of the challenges for pragmatism today, in its dialogue with other philosophical approaches, is to contribute in its own specific ways to the kind of discussions emerging within “analytic metaphysics”. Despite the strongly anti-­ metaphysical beginnings of what is today known as analytic philosophy, contemporary analytic philosophy is not only tolerant of but even largely dominated by metaphysics. A viable form of pragmatism today can hardly avoid taking such metaphysical approaches into account. Not all metaphysical theorizing is sheer non-­ empirical speculation. On the other hand, in seeking legitimate forms of metaphysics, or inquiring into the possibility of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy, we do need to take seriously the kind of criticism of metaphysics that both logical empiricism and pragmatism engaged in. This leads to a tension between metaphysics and the criticism of (or even rejection of) metaphysics in contemporary neopragmatist philosophy.25 Let me briefly illustrate this neopragmatist tension between metaphysics and anti-metaphysics by drawing attention to a notion we may call, using Putnamian language, “objectivity without objects”. An example drawn from “special metaphysics” (rather than “general metaphysics”) may help us in cashing out the pragmatic yet metaphysical relevance of this idea. This is of course only one possible way in which metaphysics could be “saved” in pragmatism, but it highlights the

 However, we must be careful here. When Putnam (2012, 487–488) tells us that he “cannot inhabit the intellectual world” of philosophers like Hegel, Spinoza, or Leibniz, he does not mean that such philosophers wrote meaningless sentences; to suggest that they just wrote “nonsense” is “a hangover from the mistaken idea that we should ‘just say no’ to metaphysics” (ibid., 488). Cf. also the above-quoted passage in which Putnam says one can be a realist “in metaphysics” while accepting conceptual relativity (ibid., 56). So Putnam’s rejection of metaphysics is not total; he has, better than some others, recovered from the logical empiricist “hangover”. However, pace Putnam, I would suggest that one can find certain views unintelligible (cf. ibid., 490), or some intellectual worlds inhabitable, as a result of transcendental reflection on human capacities and incapacities, specifically as manifested in one’s own case. Such reflection may, for instance, lead us to a deeper understanding of why one, when faced with, say, an eliminativist physicalist position, “[hasn’t] got these thoughts or anything that hangs together with them” (Putnam, ibid., quoting Wittgenstein’s Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, a work he finds important in his writings on religion as well). 25  Cf. Pihlström 2009 and 2013. For a richer array of investigations of the fate of metaphysics today, see Haaparanta and Koskinen 2012. 24

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sense in which metaphysics can be considered profoundly value-laden within pragmatism. As I have suggested on earlier occasions, when developing a (Jamesian) pragmatist account of metaphysics, especially the famous Kantian metaphysical “transcendental ideas” that for Kant constitute the proper subject matter of metaphysics, viz., God, freedom, and the soul – as a pragmatically reinterpreted version of what Kant in the Second Critique called the “postulates of practical reason”26 – we arguably may make a pragmatically legitimate commitment, from within our practices themselves (especially ethical practices), to a certain kind of reinterpreted transcendence. We employ these “transcendental ideas” in a certain objectively normative and guiding role. The legitimacy or, perhaps, moral necessity of such a commitment might even be defended by means of a kind of practice-involving, hence “naturalized”, transcendental argument: as James argued – though, of course, not explicitly transcendentally – it might be necessary for an individual to embrace a metaphysical postulation of theism, if s/he seeks to maintain a “morally strenuous” mood in life.27 However, we cannot employ this account of theistic metaphysics and its legitimacy to develop a theory of any theological objects, because in the Kantian context only properly transcendental conditions, such as the categories of the understanding (e.g., causality) and the forms of pure intuition (space and time), are necessary conditions for the possibility of the objects of experience in the sense that all empirical objects must conform to them; transcendent and/or theological ideas, such as the metaphysically pregnant ideas of God, freedom, and the immortal soul, do not play such an objectifying and experience-enabling role, even if they can be argued to play a transcendental role as enablers of full moral commitment. More precisely, while the categories, in Kant, can be regarded as normative requirements of objecthood, this cannot be said about the postulates of practical reason, even if their status is also based on a transcendental argument. Hence, even though there can be a certain kind of pragmatic objectivity in ethics, metaphysics, and theology based on the demands of our practices – or so my (real or imagined) Jamesian pragmatist would argue – there cannot be any theological objectivity in the sense of any legitimate rational postulation of theological objects, understood as an analogy to the postulation of, say, theoretical objects in science serving the purpose of explaining observable phenomena. Now, we may see this (Jamesian) pragmatist understanding of theological objectivity, analogous to the Kantian postulates, as a version (or extension) of what Putnam (2002a, 2004a) calls “objectivity without objects”. The examples Putnam himself provides primarily come from mathematics and ethics. We can, and should, understand the objectivity of these quite different practices – and the related fact-value entanglement in ethics  – as not requiring the postulation of any mysterious transcendent objects out  I propose this Kantian-like re-reading of James in Pihlström 2013 and in a preliminary way already in Pihlström 2009, chapter 7; the details must be skipped here. No reading of Kant can, for obvious reasons, be provided here. 27  On James’s pragmatist philosophy of religion and the relation between ethical and metaphysical standpoints, see, in addition to Pihlström 2013, chapter 4, also Rydenfelt and Pihlström 2013. 26

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there, whether mathematical (numbers, functions) or ethical (values, moral facts). As Putnam has argued for a long time, there is no need to think of moral objectivity as needing any ontological commitments to “queer” objects, contra “error theorists” like J.L. Mackie (1990 [1977]) (see Putnam 1981, 1990; cf. Pihlström 2005). We should now, I submit, understand whatever “moral objectivity”, or “theological objectivity”, there is available to the pragmatist along similar lines. The relevant kind of objectivity lies in our practices of engagement and commitment themselves, in our valuational habits of action embodying certain ways of thinking about ourselves and the world in terms of transcendence-involving notions such as God, freedom, and the soul.28 This conception of pragmatic objectivity in metaphysics and theology (and, analogously, in ethics) is compatible not only with certain views on religion as a practice or form of life derived from the later Wittgenstein’s writings, but also with a transcendental position we find in the early Wittgenstein: God does not appear in the world; immortality is timelessness, or life in the present moment, instead of any infinite extension of temporal existence; and my will cannot change the facts of the world but “steps into the world” from the outside (see Wittgenstein 1921, §§ 6.5ff.). Accordingly, God is not an object of any kind, nothing – no thing whatsoever – that could “appear in the world”. Nor can the subject’s freedom or possible (Kantian-­ like) immortality be conceptualized along such objectifying lines. The subject that philosophy deals with – the metaphysical or transcendental subject – is a “limit” of the world rather than any object in the world (ibid., § 5.64). It is from these remarks that the early Wittgenstein’s peculiar form of solipsism emerges. In a sense, for the solipsistic subject of the Tractatus, all the objects in the world are “mine”. But this transcendental solipsism no more sacrifices the objectivity of those objects than the transcendental idealism of Kant’s First Critique, which is compatible with empirical realism.29 This idea is not as foreign to pragmatism as it might seem, either; on the contrary, as soon as pragmatism is reconnected with its Kantian background, something like a Wittgensteinian conception of subjectivity, objectivity, and the world can also, in a rearticulated form, be seen as the core  In addition to the realism issue, Putnam’s philosophy of religion is worth briefly taking up here because of its strong Wittgensteinian influences. Going back to the Viennese background of Wittgenstein (in the sense of Janik and Toulmin 1973) instead of the Vienna Circle proper is therefore the crucial move at this point. While neither Putnam nor other neopragmatists have shared the Vienna Circle’s condemnation of the entire theism vs. atheism debate as a piece of speculative metaphysics  – recall that Carnap, among others, regarded both theism and atheism as equally meaningless metaphysics – Putnam’s pragmatist attitude to religion can again be reconnected with his Carnapian, logically empiricist heritage. Embracing a religious way of thinking is a matter of choosing a certain linguistic framework, or what Wittgenstein called a language-game (though Wittgenstein never simply spoke about religion as a language-game); as Carnap argued, such choices can only be pragmatically justified. Religious beliefs do not mirror a pre-existing reality but are anchored in human beings’ decisions to use certain ways of speaking, or their growing into certain ways of speaking. This, clearly, is more a Wittgensteinian than a Carnapian conception of religion, but it does bear some resemblance to the anti-metaphysical, logical empiricist view on religion as merely poetic language serving purposes quite different from literal, scientific language. 29  For further elucidation, historical and systematic, see Pihlström 2020b. 28

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position of a transcendental-pragmatic account of objectivity and subjectivity. Paradoxically (though this cannot be demonstrated here), a pragmatic, naturalized view of the empirical self is fully compatible – and may even require – the idea of a transcendental subject, and even transcendental idealism. Even this brief discussion of pragmatic objectivity (“without objects”) should lead us to reconsider the prospects of metaphysics in the pragmatist tradition, especially in relation to the logical-empiricist dimensions of pragmatism and neopragmatism. At this point, however, an excursus to Wittgensteinian aspects of (neo)pragmatism – or, conversely, some pragmatist themes in Wittgenstein scholarship – is needed in order to shed more light on the metaphysics vs. anti-metaphysics tension, and also because Wittgenstein is, clearly, a major part of the “Viennese background” of neopragmatism.

4 Wittgenstein and (Neo)Pragmatism30 Although I just speculated about neopragmatism’s possible emergence in relation to the Carnapian principle of tolerance, it could be argued that neopragmatism emerged, instead of 1934, already in 1929–1930 when Ludwig Wittgenstein returned to work on philosophical problems after the decade he had, following the publication of the Tractatus, spent as a school teacher in rural Austria. Hence, the Viennese background of neopragmatism could, arguably, be even more important when we consider Wittgenstein’s influence on the emergence of neopragmatism.31 However, (re)connecting Wittgenstein and pragmatism does not force us to embrace the controversial “resolute reading” of Wittgenstein – a reading to which Putnam has also shown considerable sympathy if not complete acceptance.32 One question – continuing to explore Putnam’s views as a kind of metonymy of neopragmatism generally – is this: could the tension between Wittgenstein and the mainstream of analytic philosophy that grew out of logical empiricism be analogous to a tension observable within Putnam’s neopragmatism between deconstructive (therapeutic) and constructive (systematic, theoretical) philosophy? That is, within Putnam and perhaps neopragmatism more generally we may find a tension between “Wittgensteinian” approaches, on the one hand, and Carnapian and Quinean ones, on the other.

 This section slightly overlaps with  Chap. 9 below (which, however, develops the  comparison between Wittgenstein and pragmatism in much more detail). 31  Note also that Putnam, in one of his many writings on Wittgenstein, brings the later Wittgenstein precisely into the context of discussion shaped by Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s logical empiricism, more specifically by their discussions of the phenomenalist (egocentric, methodologically solipsist) language and “usual language” (or “thing language”); this is exactly where, he argues, Wittgenstein’s treatment of private language and public language becomes urgently relevant (see Putnam 2012, 349–353). 32  Cf. the several essays on Wittgenstein in Putnam 2012, as well as Chap. 9 below. 30

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Let us therefore briefly consider Wittgenstein’s relation to pragmatism, even though, historically, there is little to be added to the existing scholarship on the relation between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the pragmatist tradition. Russell Goodman’s Wittgenstein and William James (2002) tells us most that is worth telling about this issue, at least insofar as we are concerned with Wittgenstein’s relation to James. There are, however, a number of both historical and systematic issues in contemporary Wittgenstein scholarship that could be fruitfully re-examined from a pragmatist perspective. For example, several noted scholars (including James Conant, Cora Diamond, and Rupert Read) have suggested that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is completely different from any traditional attempts to philosophize in terms of theses and arguments. Those are to be rejected as little more than remnants of “dogmatic” ways of doing philosophy. Instead of engaging with theses and arguments, philosophy should be therapeutical and deconstructive, liberating us from assumptions that lead us to philosophical pseudo-problems. The so-called “New Wittgensteinians”, taking seriously Wittgenstein’s encouragement to “drop the ladder” toward the end of the Tractatus and his proposal in the Investigations to lead philosophical thought to “peace”, advance this therapeutic-deconstructive program. From a pragmatist point of view, we can perceive a misleading dichotomous opposition between implausible extremes at work here (see also Putnam 2012, 350). To defend a conception of philosophy as a systematic, argumentative practice employing theses and arguments supporting those theses is not to be a dogmatic believer in any particular philosophical system. As a brief illustration, I would like to suggest that, despite his criticism of traditional ways of doing philosophy, Wittgenstein employs pragmatic versions of transcendental arguments (e.g., the private language argument) in favor of certain philosophical conceptions (e.g., the view that our language is necessarily public). The private language argument can be regarded as transcendental because the fact that language is public is, as a result of this argument, claimed to be a necessary condition for the very possibility of linguistic meaning. A private language would not be a language at all; as Wittgenstein notes, rules cannot be followed privately. Similarly, it could be argued on the basis of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty that, necessarily, there must be agreement about certain apparently empirical matters (“hinges”, e.g., our basic conviction about the earth having existed for a long time and not just for, say, five minutes) in order for meaningful use of language to be possible at all.33 I am not making any claims about the success of these or any other Wittgensteinian arguments, but it seems to me clear that Wittgenstein can be plausibly read as employing a “pragmatized” transcendental method of examining the necessary practice-embedded conditions for the possibility of something (e.g., meaningful language) whose actuality we take as given (cf. Pihlström 2003a).34  For a pragmatic approach to On Certainty (Wittgenstein 1969), see Moyal-Sharrock 2003 and 2004, as well as my critical discussion of her interpretation (Pihlström 2012a). See Chap. 9 below. 34  Putnam (2012, 563–564), among many others, opposes this transcendental reading of the private language argument, referring to James Conant as one of those who successfully explain it away as a misreading of Wittgenstein. In this discussion – in the context of his insightful engagement with 33

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Analogously, the pragmatists and neopragmatists themselves can also be reinterpreted as philosophers presenting and evaluating such transcendental arguments (or, more broadly, transcendental considerations and inquiries), even though neopragmatists like Rorty have tried to depict not only Wittgenstein but also James and Dewey in a deconstructive manner, as some kind of precursors of both Wittgensteinian therapy and Derridean deconstruction (and postmodernism generally), which, ironically enough, may not be very far from the Carnapian deconstruction of all allegedly nonsensical metaphysics. For a pragmatist, there is no reason at all to resort to any unpragmatic dichotomy between transcendental philosophical theory and philosophy as a therapeutically relevant practical activity eliminating unnecessary confusions. Rather, philosophical theorizing itself is, inevitably, a practice-embedded human activity with aims ultimately related to our well-being. A healthy pragmatism should, then, instead of relying on an essentialist dichotomy between post-philosophical therapy and systematic argumentation, insist on the compatibility and deep complementarity of deconstruction and reconstruction. The deconstruction of philosophical problems and ideas should always be followed by a reconstruction. This is in effect what Dewey argued in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920); as Putnam later put it in Renewing Philosophy (1992), “deconstruction without reconstruction is irresponsibility”. The crude dichotomy between therapeutic and systematic philosophy is completely unpragmatic, as it assumes an essentialistic conception of the proper way of doing philosophy, without letting the richness of different philosophical aims, methods, and conceptions flourish. It thinks before looking, to use a Wittgensteinian phrase; or, to adopt a Peircean expression, it blocks the road of inquiry. Our philosophical inquiries often need both deconstruction and reconstruction; therefore, to one-sidedly restrict proper philosophizing to only one of these impedes philosophical understanding. Moreover, to raise an issue closely connected with the systematic vs. therapeutic conceptions of philosophy, both Wittgenstein and the pragmatists – no less than the logical empiricists – have been regarded as radically anti-metaphysical thinkers. For instance, Rorty repeatedly pictures both in this fashion, and more recent neopragmatists like Huw Price (2011) share this negative attitude to metaphysics. However, as I have argued earlier (e.g., Pihlström 2009) – but won’t be able to argue in detail here – this is a fundamental misrepresentation of pragmatism. The pragmatists – and, perhaps analogously, Wittgenstein – can be seen as offering us a new kind of Cavell  – Putnam in my view fails to acknowledge the transcendental nature of his own line of thought (attributed to Cavell): “[…] skepticism universalized, skepticism that refuses to acknowledge any human community, is, to the extent that it is possible, a posture that negates not only its own intelligibility but also the very existence of a speaking and thinking subject, negates the skeptic’s own existence and the world’s” (ibid., 564). I also remain unconvinced by Putnam’s claim that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus would have shown transcendental idealism (which Kant had argued to make empirical realism possible) to be “unintelligible nonsense” (ibid., 342). Putnam’s “deflationary reading of the supposed ‘solipsism’ of the Tractatus”, as he appropriately labels it, of course goes well together with his stubborn refusal to ever acknowledge transcendental idealism as a background of his own pragmatic or internal realism (cf. also Putnam 2006, critically responding to my suggestions in Pihlström 2006).

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metaphysics, one based not on the futile attempt to climb above our forms of life into a God’s-Eye View but on human practices and especially our practice-­embedded ethical standpoints and considerations. Engaging in metaphysics is a way of interpreting our human being-in-the-world, which cannot be separated from ethical values (or other values, including aesthetic ones, for that matter). This general idea is also closely related to the pragmatist rejection of the fact-value dichotomy.35 This is, of course, not at all to say that either pragmatists or Wittgenstein would not engage in the criticism of metaphysics. Obviously, they did and do, just like the logical empiricists did. These philosophers both heavily criticize not only specific metaphysical ideas (e.g., Cartesian assumptions in the philosophy of mind or the picture of meanings as mental or abstract entities untouched by the practices of language-use) but also, and more importantly, the very conception of metaphysics based on traditional pre-Kantian metaphysical realism (transcendental realism), just as Kant himself did throughout his critique of reason. However, they need not leave the matter at that point but can offer a reconstructed – or, as we might say, post-­ Kantian – pragmatic, naturalized yet in a sense transcendental way of doing metaphysics in terms of, and on the basis of, human experiential practices (forms of life, language-games). Pace (say) Price, this is continuing metaphysics “in a pragmatist key” instead of abandoning metaphysics altogether. Pragmatism and Wittgensteinian explorations of fundamental, yet revisable and fallible, features of our forms of life here converge into what we may describe as a pragmatic philosophical anthropology, which, transcendentally interpreted yet pragmatically naturalized, is itself a form of metaphysics. Alternatively, we could speak about the topography – or, with a more evolutionary and dynamic emphasis – the natural history of our forms of life (knowing that Wittgenstein himself was fond of both metaphors). Moreover, the kind of pragmatism that Wittgenstein and philosophers like James share is deeply pluralistic (cf. again Price 2011, chapters 2 and 10). Both James and Wittgenstein insist on the contextuality and pragmatic circumstantiality of human meanings, thought, and experience; we never encounter the world as it is in itself but always within one or another context  – that is, a practice or a form of life. Furthermore, as there is no super-context or -practice over and above all others, there is no single correct way of using language or interpreting experience, no privileged representations in the sense of the ideal language isomorphic to the structure of the world that Wittgenstein imagined in the Tractatus; instead, there is a plurality of equally acceptable ways of conceptualizing reality through different pragmatic engagements, each with their own valuational purposes built into them. We should again note how close this view comes to the Carnapian pluralism about linguistic frameworks. These may be related to each other through networks of family resemblances (to use Wittgenstein’s well-known concept).36 Language-games (or linguistic frameworks) are not mirrors of an independent reality, and there is no way of  Cf., e.g., Putnam’s work on this, especially Putnam 2002a; see also Pihlström 2005.  Wittgenstein may even have derived the notion of a family resemblance from pragmatism, that is, from William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which he is known to have read carefully. See Goodman 2002. 35 36

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representing the world from a God’s-Eye View; instead, there are only human, contextual, pragmatically embedded perspectives from within our forms of life. We may here draw support from Putnam’s account of Wittgenstein’s relation to Kant and pragmatism (thereby highlighting Putnam’s own appreciation of a kind of “Viennese background” of his own neopragmatism): “Wittgenstein inherits and extends […] Kant’s pluralism; that is the idea that no one language game deserves the exclusive right to be called ‘true’, or ‘rational’, or ‘our first-class conceptual system’, or the system that ‘limns the ultimate nature of reality’, or anything like that.” (Putnam 1992, 38.) Putnam continues to observe – very interestingly from the perspective of the proposal to integrate Wittgenstein into the pragmatist tradition – that for this reason Wittgenstein can be said to refute key ideas propounded by two leading twentieth-century pragmatists, i.e., both Quine’s reductive naturalism and Rorty’s relativistic and postmodernist neopragmatism: “[…] he agrees with Rorty, against Quine, that one cannot say that scientific language games are the only language games in which we say or write truths, or in which we describe reality; but, on the other hand, he agrees with Quine as against Rorty that language games can be criticized (or ‘combatted’); that there are better and worse language games.” (Ibid.)37 Arguably, a Wittgensteinian pragmatist may hold that our practice-embedded perspectives may, and often do, yield (or presuppose) metaphysical insights into the way the world is, or must be thought to be (by us), from within the various practical contexts we operate in. These are not insights into the world as it is absolutely independently of our conceptualizing practices and (ethically or more generally valuationally laden) practical points of view, but they are metaphysical insights nonetheless. For example, the well-known Wittgensteinian view (if we may say that Wittgenstein ever maintained philosophical views)38 that there can be no private language in the sense of a language that only its speaker could ever understand or learn to use, just like the pragmatically pluralistic thesis derivable from the Putnamian interpretation just cited, can be interpreted as a metaphysical thesis about the way the world, including language and our life with language, is, for us language-users in the kind of natural circumstances and contexts (forms of life) we are in. In this sense, both pragmatism and Wittgenstein can be understood as critically rethinking the nature of metaphysics  – and anti-metaphysics  – rather than simply moving beyond metaphysics. There are also other debates in Wittgenstein scholarship to which a (neo)pragmatist perspective would offer insightful (but often neglected) perspectives. For instance, two other key issues of Wittgenstein studies provide particularly useful insights into the ways in which Wittgenstein, or the contemporary “Wittgensteinian” philosopher, could be regarded as a pragmatist: the distinction – invoked in recent discussions of On Certainty, in particular  – between the propositional and the  Note, again, that it is far from clear that Quine can be called a “pragmatist” at all, despite his influence on both Putnam’s and Rorty’s versions of neopragmatism. See Koskinen and Pihlström 2006. 38  I am fully aware that some New Wittgensteinians resist such formulations. 37

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non-propositional (see again Moyal-Sharrock 2003, 2004); and the related tension between anti-Cartesian fallibilism and what has been called (by Stanley Cavell) the “truth in skepticism” in Wittgenstein.39 I believe it can be plausibly argued that dichotomous readings of Wittgenstein in terms of these philosophical (or metaphilosophical) oppositions lead to unpragmatist and even un-Wittgensteinian positions, just as the dichotomies between theoretical (constructive) and therapeutic (deconstructive) or between metaphysical and anti-metaphysical approaches do. In Chap. 9, the concluding chapter of this volume, I will investigate these issues further and expand the discussions of this section into a more comprehensive reflection on what it means to take a pragmatist perspective on Wittgenstein.

5 Holistic Pragmatism As we have seen, there are both metaphysical and anti-metaphysical elements in the kind of (e.g., Putnamian) neopragmatism that organically grows out of (Carnapian) logical empiricism while abandoning its total elimination of metaphysics. How to weigh these different views as parts of one and the same pragmatist overall approach? In brief, how to integrate metaphysics with anti-metaphysics? In considering this question, I now want to move on from the Putnamian position toward another type of (neo)pragmatism that may be more promising in offering such an integration. One suggestion for a way of developing an integrated pragmatist approach, returning to the original rendezvous of pragmatism and logical empiricism, is Morton White’s (1956, 2002) holistic pragmatism, which is basically an epistemological position but can be extended to a holistically pragmatist ontology of culture as well as, possibly, to a metaphilosophical account of what is correct and incorrect in both metaphysics and anti-metaphysics.40 In a Quinean manner, White labels his pragmatism “holistic”; like Quine, he follows the anti-Cartesian and more generally anti-rationalist line of pragmatist thought (White 2002, 3–5), abandoning any “first philosophy”. The specific nature of White’s position emerges against the background of Quine’s more extreme views. While both Quine and White begin from a firm rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction and from the holistic idea that our beliefs (or sentences) are not tested individually but “face the tribunal of experience” in corporate bodies, they draw quite different morals from this picture.

 Putnam (2012, 563) perceptively notes that Cavell’s work also aspires to “get us to see than an idea of being totally free of skepticism [in the deep sense of failing to acknowledge the suffering of others] is itself a form of skepticism.” The key reference here is, obviously, Cavell 1979. 40  White, of course, was also a key mediating figure between logical empiricism and pragmatism, along with philosophers like Lewis, Nagel, Quine, and Goodman. For an excellent recent discussion, see Sinclair (2011). Cf. also my essay on White (Pihlström 2011c), on which I to some extent rely here, as well as, again, Koskinen and Pihlström 2006 on Quine and pragmatism. (I also utilize White’s holistic pragmatism in Pihlström 2021.) 39

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Whereas philosophy of science is, for Quine, “philosophy enough”,41 White proposes the kind of holistic approach Quine favors in the philosophy of science to be developed into a philosophy of culture, examining not only science  – as logical empiricism primarily did – but also religion, history, art, law, and morality (ibid., x–xi). This “cultural philosophy” covers philosophy of science as one of its subfields – science, of course, is part of culture, something that human beings “cultivate” – but White insists that other cultural institutions require empirically informed philosophical scrutiny no less than science does (ibid., xiii). In this sense White crucially extends the scope of philosophical activity from the logical-empiricist focus on the philosophy of science. Holistic pragmatism says that “philosophy of art, of religion, of morality, or of other elements of culture is in great measure a discipline that is epistemically coordinate with philosophy of natural science” (ibid., 66). Quine’s way of restricting his philosophical concerns to science should be abandoned as one more unfortunate and by no means necessary remnant from logical positivism (ibid., 3). The idea that ethics, in particular, “may be viewed as empirical if one includes feelings of moral obligation as well as sensory experiences in the pool or flux into which the ethical believer worked a manageable structure” has been strongly present in White’s writings from an early stage to the present (see White 1956, 1981, 2002, passim). This can be regarded as the main novelty in his thought in relation to previous pragmatic holists like Quine. Quine (1980 [1953]) took his famous holistic step by arguing that even logical truths are not immune to revision, because they are tested along with factual claims as components of a large conjunction of statements (White 2002, 71). No general analytic/synthetic division can be drawn, as statements about, say, the synonymity of terms are ultimately empirical statements describing the contingencies of factual language-use (ibid., 71, 73). Despite this fundamental agreement with Quine, White argues that “observation sentences” (e.g., “That’s a rabbit”) and ethical sentences such as “That’s outrageous” cannot be sharply separated from each other any more than analytic and synthetic statements can; their difference is a matter of degree instead of being a difference in kind (ibid., 154–155, 160–163). The ethical sentences at issue are, moreover, genuinely normative: “Avoiding the view that ethical sentences are synonymous with sociological or psychological sentences, and being impressed by the failure of reductive phenomenalism as well as the power of holism to bridge the traditional epistemic gap created by the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic, I propose a nonreductive version of holism in order to bridge the gap between the moral and the descriptive […].” (Ibid., 157.) That is, descriptive statements and normative ethical principles form conjunctions that are tested holistically, just as Quine had argued that scientific and logico-­ mathematical beliefs in science are. Logic, science, and ethics form a unified whole, a holistic web without epistemic dichotomies. Moreover, as logical principles may, by Quinean lights, be given up in the face of sufficiently recalcitrant experience, descriptive statements may be denied in order to preserve a normative principle we

41

 See Quine 1953; cf. Isaacson 2004, 245.

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do not want to give up (ibid., 159), although such situations are rare. White’s point is that ethics is not inferior to science, or immune to empirical evaluation, because feelings of obligation together with sensory observation link ethical sentences to the natural world. Pace Quine, ethics is, then, “anchored in experience” (ibid., 160). Ethics is a “soft science” rather than a “hard” one, but it is a science nonetheless, hardly any softer than Quine’s own naturalized “epistemological science”, the branch of psychology studying human cognition (ibid., 161–162). Furthermore, “feeling sentences” are also fallible and can be surrendered when a conjunction is tested (ibid., 166). Both ethics and science are, then, corrigible but cognitive enterprises – just like classical pragmatists like Dewey maintained. Both are elements of human culture that in the end forms a holistic totality instead of any compartmentalized group of distinct areas with definite boundaries. Knowledge and morals, as White himself formulated his point many years ago, form a “seamless web” (White 1956, 287). I would be happy to construe this view more metaphysically as a thesis about there being no “value-neutral” facts at all (see Pihlström 2005, 2010; cf. Chap. 7 below); however, I doubt that White himself ever intended it in such a metaphysical sense. In any case, White’s holism could be extended from the epistemic justification of different kinds of statements (sentences) to whatever is the equivalent of such normative justification in the critical evaluation of entire cultural practices and institutions. While remaining distinct from each other, such practices (e.g., science, politics, religion, art, and others) are dynamically interrelated and must therefore be “tested” holistically  – whatever it ultimately means to “test” them. One way of supplementing White’s holistic ethics–science “corporatism” would, indeed, be the addition of pragmatist metaphysics into the picture – yielding an even more comprehensive form of holistic pragmatism. One may argue that White himself (just like Putnam in the end) is too faithful a disciple of logical empiricism because he simply goes too far in the somewhat dogmatic project of avoiding metaphysics at all costs.42 Accordingly, also metaphysical statements, like scientific and ethical ones, can thus be holistically evaluated in the pragmatic way White suggests. Pragmatist metaphysics itself can be holistically developed; however, one may argue that it must not be holistic in a monistic way (as in Hegelian holistic idealism criticized by the pragmatists) but genuinely pluralistic, as James famously maintained in Pragmatism and elsewhere. Furthermore, a pragmatist metaphysics of culture must differ, crucially, from metaphysically realistic approaches, in which the nature of cultural entities is examined on the basis of a metaphysical scheme presupposed to be true from a “God’s-Eye View”. Both reductionist (naturalist) and anti-­reductionist (e.g., Platonist?) positions here typically turn out to presuppose such metaphysically realist background assumptions, which the pragmatist must firmly reject. (The  I would thus not suggest that we follow him into, say, the claim that there is no pragmatic difference between Peircean scholastic realism and nominalism (see again White 2002). On the contrary, there is a major pragmatic difference between these positions – but these (and other) metaphysical views indeed have to be understood pragmatically, not as metaphysical theories independent of pragmatic and hence eventually broadly cultural considerations. 42

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pragmatist also rejects, following Dewey, any principled, essentialist dichotomy between culture and nature.) However, pragmatist metaphysics (in the way I am developing it) is a species of transcendental idealism, reinterpreted as transcendental pragmatism. This approach makes ontological/metaphysical postulations and commitments dependent on not just linguistic frameworks but more generally human purposive practices – thus on human culture in a broad sense. Does this lead to a problematic circular structure in our metaphysical system? A further pragmatist inquiry ought to be devoted to analyzing this threat of circularity that seems to emerge from the position sketched here, showing that the relevant kind of circularity at issue need not be vicious but can in fact be self-strengthening. Thus, we begin to notice how the metaphysical relevance of contemporary – originally heavily logical-empiricism-involving – neopragmatism extends from a core position such as Putnam’s conceptual relativity to various “surrounding” views and ideas that often incorporate rich positions on the human condition. Certainly no formal investigation of linguistic frameworks and their logical structures is sufficient to settle the neopragmatist issue of realism vs. antirealism, or neopragmatist tensions between metaphysics and anti-metaphysics. Similarly (returning to concerns raised earlier in this chapter), Putnam’s account of conceptual relativity should in my view be developed in ways that Putnam himself doesn’t find congenial: first, it should be seen as metaphysically relevant, despite Putnam’s residual logical empiricism (i.e., Carnapianism); and secondly, it should be rearticulated as a pragmatized version of transcendental idealism, despite Putnam’s desire to avoid all talk about the “transcendental” (as well as any kind of idealism).43 A full development of these themes would, however, require a book-­ length study. Let me just here assure you that the metaphysical relevance of Putnam’s neopragmatism actually goes well together with the transcendentally idealist reinterpretation of his pragmatic realism, insofar as transcendental idealism itself is a (benign) metaphysical view. This requires, however, that we also give up those interpretations of transcendental idealism itself that treat it as “merely methodological”. Pace Henry Allison (2004), we have to view transcendental idealism, even in its pragmatic rearticulations, as a metaphysically relevant approach to the way the world must be categorized by human beings in order for it to be cognitively experienceable. Here, again, we see how systematic inquiries into realism and other issues in contemporary philosophy need historical backing – and ultimately we need to go all the way back to Kant, not just back to logical empiricism or classical pragmatism.

 As is well known, logical empiricism has recently been observed to have been more strongly neo-Kantian than the received view construes it as being – see, e.g., Friedman 2001 and Richardson 1998 – and the same, arguably, applies to pragmatism and neopragmatism – see Pihlström 2003a, 2009. Indeed, insofar as this neo-Kantian emphasis is on the right track, neopragmatism may be considerably more Kantian than the leading neopragmatists themselves, especially Rorty but even Putnam, have ever acknowledged. On the neo-Kantian character of logical empiricist philosophy of science comparable to Kuhn’s “new” philosophy of science (and, hence, pragmatism), see also Pihlström and Siitonen 2005. 43

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6 Conclusion Contemporary pragmatism and neopragmatism should recognize not only their roots at Harvard (e.g., Peirce, James, Lewis) and Columbia (e.g., Dewey, Nagel) but also their logical-empiricist Viennese background – and should do so in many areas: in metaphysics, anti-metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, and philosophy of religion, among others. This chapter has largely, though not exclusively, focused on Putnam’s neopragmatism, which is a highly illuminating case because of its indebtedness to Carnap’s ideas of “tolerance” and linguistic frameworks; however, the moral of the chapter is more general. Pragmatism is at its best when it flexibly engages in collaboration with other philosophical orientations  – including not only analytic philosophy but also phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and other approaches – while maintaining its own identity. There is much more work to do here. The various pragmatist themes in Wittgenstein scholarship only briefly and tentatively discussed above should be investigated further (see Chap. 9 below). White’s holism should be formulated with greater precision (cf. Pihlström 2021). And so forth. Pragmatism, moreover, ought to speak – and also listen – not only to the canonized philosophical orientations today, such as analytic philosophy or phenomenology, but also to the marginalized, forgotten, and eclipsed ones, whether or not pragmatism itself was ever truly eclipsed by logical empiricism or analytic philosophy.

Chapter 3

Brandom on Pragmatism

1 Introduction A number of leading philosophers today subscribe to pragmatism in a form or another. “Post-analytic” philosophers such as Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty have developed their own distinctive versions of pragmatism, partly by taking a fresh look at classical American thinkers, especially William James and John Dewey. Others, including John McDowell and Charles Taylor, have not labeled their positions pragmatistic, while defending views in some ways similar to pragmatism.1 Among first-rate American philosophers in the beginning of the twenty-first century, Robert Brandom has been more explicit about his pragmatism than, say, his long-time critic and conversant, McDowell. In addition to his magnum opus, Making It Explicit (Brandom 1994), which defends a pragmatist and inferentialist view of meaning and normativity, he has, in a series of writings around the turn of the millennium, examined various versions of pragmatism, innovatively redescribing the pragmatist tradition by extending it not only to neopragmatists like Rorty but also to thinkers not usually classified as pragmatists, such as Hegel or Heidegger – though it must be added that Brandom rarely comments on the classical American pragmatists in any scholarly detail (see also Sect. 3 below). The purpose of this chapter is to critically examine Brandom’s articulation of pragmatism(s), as manifested in Articulating Reasons (Brandom 2000a), a book whose relation to Making It Explicit is analogous to the relation between Kant’s Prolegomena and Critique of Pure Reason, in Tales of the Mighty Dead (Brandom 2002a), and in some of his papers on pragmatism.2 While I am in many ways in  I discuss both McDowell and Taylor from this perspective, attempting to synthesize pragmatism and Kantian transcendental philosophy, in Pihlström 2003a, especially chapters 4 and 6. 2  See Brandom 2000a, especially “Introduction” (1–44), and Brandom 2002a; among his most relevant recent articles, see Brandom 2000b, 2002b and 2004. (My references to Brandom’s work 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pihlström, Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy, Vienna Circle Institute Library 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28042-9_3

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agreement with, and partly indebted to, Brandom’s anti-reductionist conception of normativity – which is one of the central tenets of his pragmatism – I have to make a few critical remarks on his reading of the classical pragmatists, which also leads me to analyze his and Putnam’s differences in responding to the pragmatist tradition. I am afraid that, while Brandom’s rereading of the pragmatist tradition is indeed original and illuminating, it may not only redescribe but also misdescribe the classical philosophers belonging to that tradition. Pragmatism is only one feature of Brandom’s extremely rich position, which he describes as a “constitutive, pragmatist, relationally linguistic, conceptual expressivism” (Brandom 2000a, 9). It is also only one feature of the rich tradition he reconstructs, a tradition of “functionalist, inferentialist, holist, normative, and social pragmatist” insights (Brandom 2002a, 17), a tradition which Jaroslav Peregrin (2003, 422) labels the “IHFPR(inferentialist-holist-functionalist-pragmatistrationalist)-tradition”. Yet, a better understanding of what he means by pragmatism and what we, his readers, should mean by it might throw some light on some of the other aspects of his work, too.

2 Pragmatist Views on Conceptuality, Normativity, and Anti-reductionism Brandom distinguishes between a narrow and a broad meaning of “pragmatism”. The former is associated with the “classical American triumvirate of Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey”, whereas the latter, denoting any philosophy celebrating “the primacy of the practical”, extends to the thought of Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, Davidson, and Rorty (Brandom 2002b, 40). More specifically, Brandom links pragmatism with semantics, reserving the label “pragmatism” for views claiming that “semantic theory must answer in various ways to pragmatic theory”, e.g., by arguing for an explanatory priority of pragmatics over semantics (ibid., 41).3 He has, in various publications, offered us several more specific characterizations of different pragmatist theses, which I will basically just list here, postponing my own critical comments.

on pragmatism are restricted to these writings from the very early 2000s; he has examined these topics in more recent books and articles as well. In particular, some of the essays cited here were later integrated into Brandom’s 2011 volume, Perspectives on Pragmatism, which also contains a highly useful substantial introduction summarizing Brandom’s account of how pragmatism, primarily understood as a normative theory of judgment, emerges from Kant and Hegel.) 3  I wonder whether this characterization of pragmatism would accommodate thinkers such as Jaakko Hintikka, who – though being a model-theoretical semantician par excellence – insists on the idea that semantics is to be built on the basis of pragmatics (in his case, by means of gametheoretical semantics). In any case, what Brandom calls pragmatism is broad enough to accommodate Hegel and Heidegger (see Brandom 2002a, chapters 7, 10, and 11).

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In his treatment of the issue of conceptuality, i.e., of what conceptuality is and how it is possible, Brandom defines conceptual pragmatism – and contrasts it with platonism – as a view which “offers an account of knowing (or believing, or saying) that such and such is the case in terms of knowing how (being able) to do something” and which, therefore, “approaches the contents of conceptually explicit propositions or principles from the direction of what is implicit in practices of using expressions and acquiring and deploying beliefs” (Brandom 2000a, 4; see also 8).4 Brandom, obviously, does not deny the natural (or even material) basis of conceptuality and/or normativity (who would?),5 but contrary to “assimilationist” accounts of conceptuality and normativity, he is interested in the “discontinuities between the conceptual and non- or preconceptual”, in what is “special about or characteristic of the conceptual” (Brandom 2000a, 3; cf. 10–11). It is puzzling, however, to hear him say that here his project is distinguished not only from contemporary naturalized semantics (e.g., Fred Dretske, Jerry Fodor, Ruth Millikan) but also from classical American pragmatism and Wittgenstein’s later philosophy (ibid.). While the classical pragmatists subscribed to Brandom’s version of pragmatism by attempting to understand conceptuality in terms of concept-using practices, theirs was, he tells us, not a linguistic pragmatism along the lines of Wilfrid Sellars’s principle, according to which to grasp a concept is to master the use of a word (ibid., 6).6 The linguistic pragmatist maintains that “engaging in specifically linguistic practices is an essential necessary condition for having thoughts and beliefs in a full-blooded sense” (Brandom 2002b, 47).7 Moreover, not all practices of language-­ use are equally relevant for the understanding of conceptuality. Brandom’s pragmatism is a rationalist pragmatism, emphasizing the practices of “giving and asking for reasons”, which are understood as “conferring conceptual content on performances, expressions, and states suitably caught up in those practices” (Brandom 2000a, 11; cf. 23, 34). It is somewhat unclear (to me, at least) what exactly is the relation between the distinctions in Articulating Reasons and the ones Brandom introduces in “Pragmatics

 This, of course, is also a key to his Making It Explicit (1994). In Brandom 2002b, 46, essentially the same doctrine is labeled fundamental pragmatism, which says that explicit theoretical beliefs can be rendered intelligible only against the background of implicit practical abilities; the contrast is “platonistic intellectualism”. Again, in Tales of the Mighty Dead, Brandom (2002a, 50, 194) defines conceptual pragmatism as the view that “grasp of a concept (conceptual content) is a practical capacity, mastery of a practice, or the capacity to undergo or engage in a process; it is the capacity to do something”. A couple of pages later, he speaks about a “fundamental pragmatist thesis” according to which “the use of concepts determines their content”, that is, “concepts can have no content apart from that conferred on them by their use” (ibid., 52). 5  Joseph Margolis makes some reservations about this, however, claiming that Brandom’s inferentialism, because of its separation between sensory experience and belief or judgment, is “profoundly anti-Darwinian”. See Margolis 2003a, 159. 6  I wonder whether Brandom is too permissive in his acknowledgment that, in addition to the later Wittgenstein, Quine, and Sellars, even Dummett and Davidson are “linguistic pragmatists” (Brandom 2000a, 6). 7  See also Brandom 2002a, 357, for the claim that Sellars is a methodological linguistic pragmatist. 4

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and Pragmatisms”. In the latter paper, he defines methodological pragmatism as the thesis that the “point” of our talk about the content or meaning of a linguistic expression lies in explaining (some features of the) use of that expression. Here, “pragmatic theory supplies the explanatory target for semantic theory” and provides the source of the criteria of adequacy to assess the success of theorizing about language (Brandom 2002b, 42).8 Semantic pragmatism is a distinct thesis, starting from the (in Brandom’s view, plausible) idea that “it is the way practitioners use expressions that makes them mean what they do” (ibid., 43). Semantic pragmatists include philosophers as diverse as Hegel, (early) Heidegger, and (later) Wittgenstein: in all these three thinkers a “functionalism about intentionality” is formulated as the semantically pragmatist view that “the content expressed by linguistic expressions must be understood in terms of the use of those expressions” (Brandom 2002a, 32; see also 210). Pragmatism in this functionalist, semantic sense is, roughly, a “use theory” of meaning and content (ibid., 47). The difference between these two pragmatisms (methodological and semantic) is that while the methodological pragmatist seeks to explain the practice of using expressions (that is, what pragmatics is about) by referring to the contents associated with those expressions (semantics), the semantic pragmatist hopes to explain the association of contents with expressions by referring to the practice of using the expressions (Brandom 2002b, 44).9 Furthermore, normative pragmatism is a fundamental (or conceptual) pragmatism acknowledging that there are norms implicit in our practices, in what we, as practitioners, do (instead of being codified as explicit rules defining the practice); a pragmatism such as Wittgenstein’s can, according to Brandom, be characterized along these lines, given its commitment to “normative pragmatics”, to an irreducibly normative vocabulary in the articulation of the notion of practice (ibid., 48–49). Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger exemplify normative pragmatism, understood as the “pragmatic commitment to the explanatory priority of norms implicit in practice over those explicit in rules” (Brandom 2002a, 327). In any case, the pragmatist approach in semantics is a “top-down” rather than a “bottom-up” one, because it starts with the use of concepts, that is, their applications in judgments and human action in general; indeed, here Brandom approves of Kant’s view of judgments as minimal units of experience, of what we may take responsibility for (Brandom 2000a, 13; see 80, 195).10 The choice of a top-down strategy motivates an interpretative suggestion. Brandom does not articulate his

 Brandom describes Kant as a methodological pragmatist  – in the sense of “conditioning the semantic account of content on the pragmatic account of force – the way the story about what is endorsed is shaped by the story about what endorsing is” (I am here quoting from his presentation at a conference on his philosophy in Pécs, Hungary, April 25–26, 2005). 9  Brandom’s complex distinctions enable him to formulate various kinds of mixed positions, including “reductive fundamental semantic pragmatism” (Brandom 2002b, 47). 10  Kant, Brandom (2002a, 21) notes, “makes a normative turn”, a shift from Cartesian ontological characterization of selves to a deontological one: selves are “loci of responsibility”, and judgments are minimal units of experience precisely because they are the minimal sorts of things we can be cognitively responsible for. 8

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position in terms of the concept of emergence – nor do most other pragmatists. This concept, popular in recent metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science, might, however, be employed in order to explicate certain key ideas in non-­ reductive naturalism that pragmatists like Brandom defend. We might say that Brandom’s discussion of what is distinctive in conceptuality and/or normativity serves as an example of the (strong) emergence of the conceptual and the normative from the “merely natural”. The bottom-up strategy is hopeless from the start: there is no way of accounting in any plausible way for distinctively human concept-use or normative commitments by starting from what we share with “mere animals”. We need to view conceptuality and normativity as emergent products of specifically human forms of life. This is a view that pragmatists ought to applaud.11 It is impossible to provide any full-fledged theory of emergence in these pages, but I propose to read Brandom’s statements that (1) products of social interactions (or the discursive practices humans engage in) “are not studied by the natural sciences – though they are not for that reason to be treated as spooky and supernatural” and that (2) the realm of culture “rests on, but goes beyond”, the (exercise of the) differential responsive dispositions of “merely natural creatures” as (tentative) commitments to emergentism (Brandom 2000a, 26). Conceptuality and normativity, or anything typical of our practices and interactions insofar as we are specifically human, arise out of, but cannot be reduced to, our lives as animals. Brandom is almost explicit here: Although of course cultural activities arise within the framework of a natural world, I am most concerned with what is made possible by the emergence of the peculiar constellation of conceptually articulated comportments that Hegel called “Geist.” Cultural products and activities become explicit as such only by the use of normative vocabulary that is in principle not reducible to the vocabulary of the natural sciences (though of course the same phenomena under other descriptions are available in that vocabulary). Indeed, the deployment of the vocabulary of the natural sciences (like that of any other vocabulary) is itself a cultural phenomenon, something that becomes intelligible only within the conceptual horizon provided by the Geisteswissenschaften. (Ibid., 33.)

This is something that anti-reductionist pragmatic naturalists ought to sympathize with. So is Brandom’s (2000b, 171) suggestion for the following way of understanding what pragmatism is: “Pragmatism ought to be seen as comprising complementary vocabularies generated by the perspectives of naturalism and historicism, of common purposes and novel purposes, rather than as restricting itself to one or the other.”12 Furthermore, Brandom’s thesis that claims and inferences both sustain and transform the tradition in which there are implicit conceptual norms governing the process of sustainance and transformation (ibid., 177). A normative tradition is

 For a discussion of the relations (both historical and systematic) between pragmatism and emergentism, see El-Hani and Pihlström 2002. 12  This passage occurs in the context of a critical, yet sympathetic, discussion of Rorty’s dialectics with naturalist and historicist “vocabularies”. 11

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constantly emerging. “To use a vocabulary is to change it” (ibid.).13 The pragmatist who subscribes to this view may be seen as joining the generally processualist thought characteristic of emergentism. If emergent normativity is granted a sufficiently high level of autonomy in relation to non-normative (“merely animal”) behaviour, it will be obvious that the use of linguistic expressions that the semantic pragmatist insists on as a ground for, or a condition of, the meaning or content of those expressions must not be restricted to use specified in a non-normative vocabulary; correct and incorrect – normatively described – use is something we actually (one might be tempted to say, “naturally”) engage in (Brandom 2002a, 386). Brandom is to be blamed, however, for leaving his emergentism largely implicit. What does it actually mean that the “same” phenomena can be described in both vocabularies (that is, in the natural-scientific one and in the geisteswissenschaftliche one)? Are those phenomena (the “same” ones) themselves ultimately natural or cultural, or is this question somehow meaningless or irrelevant? How autonomous and irreducible, ultimately, are the normative phenomena that can be sufficiently accounted for only “top-down”, not “bottom-up”? Insofar as they are, qua such phenomena, causally efficacious, do we have to sacrifice the principle of the causal closure of the physical world, accepted by most contemporary naturalists? Brandom should, I am suggesting, be more directly concerned with ontological issues, and he should connect his pragmatism with ontology, not only with semantics. He should tell us, in pragmatic terms, what it means that the world is a natural world which nevertheless consists of different emergent “levels” corresponding to, say, merely natural entities or processes and cultural practices. He might start by raising the concept of emergence as a response to the question, “How does what we have actually done with the terms, the judgments we have actually made, settle what we ought to do with them in novel cases?” (ibid., 13), characterizing the normative (and more generally the valuational) as an emergent, or constantly emerging, structure grounded in but not reducible to the factual. He does say, in fact, if only in passing, that “a norm emerges as an implicit lesson” through prior decisions and applications (ibid.)14; what is needed is an explicit way of connecting this loose notion of emergence with the philosophical notion of emergence at work in recent literature. While Brandom does not draw any detailed attention to the emergence debates, we can speculate a bit about what a “Brandomian” pragmatist account of the emergence of normativity might look like. It is clear, given his “rationalist” and “anti-­ assimilationist” (and even “non-naturalist”) program, insisting on the differences between concept-using and non-concept-using beings,15 that the conception of emergence to be invoked here must be a strong rather than a weak one.16 Moreover,  See also the discussion of a historicist conception of rationality in the “Introduction” to Brandom 2002a, especially 13. 14  Compare, however, Brandom’s use of the term “emergent” in his description of the classical pragmatists’ conception of nature, in Brandom 2004, e.g. 3). 15  See, again, the way these doctrines are articulated in the “Introduction” to Brandom 2000a. 16  For distinctions between various forms of emergence theories, see Stephan 1999; El-Hani and Pihlström 2002. 13

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and more importantly, the standard emergentist debate over downward causation seems irrelevant in Brandom’s picture, given the inappropriateness of causal vocabularies for accounting for the specifically human normative and conceptual dimensions that separate us from mere animals. Yet, no dualism is assumed, because these are nothing “supernatural”; on the contrary, they may be said to be parts of our human nature. We might argue, further, that a weak notion of emergence, emphasizing the compatibility of emergence and ontological reduction, will, when applied to the problem of normativity, only yield a causal, (socio-)psychological explanation of why people de facto behave as if they followed norms, or why they act in accordance with norms. The analogy would be a computer following the rules of calculation without being committed to them, or an animal following, invariably or ceteris paribus, its instincts. A stronger notion of the emergence of norms from human practices – as something, in Brandom’s terms, implicit in the very practitioning within those practices – is required to account for the possibility of our being committed to norms, of our being normatively committed to certain ways of thinking and acting. The key issue here is very different from causal, scientific explanation, though not in contradiction with it – simply different. The pragmatist may here reassure us that no dualism haunts this non-reductive view: on the basis of pragmatic pluralism, there is no problem in there being a plurality of different perspectives from which the world (including human beings in it) can be legitimately viewed. The causal (merely descriptive) and the normative are such different perspectives. The possibility of viewing ourselves sub specie rationis or sub specie legitimationis is available to us, as it (strongly) emerges from our factual existence, our animal nature. This perspective must, indeed, be available to us, if we are to make any choice between, say, the two perspectives involved here. So, for us – the kind of normatively oriented responsible agents we inevitably take ourselves to be (even, and especially, when engaging in scientific or philosophical theory-construction) – the causal perspective cannot be the whole story.17 This, in brief, is the basic rationale for strong emergence I wish to invoke here; and I believe Brandom might, at least partly, agree. Finally, it is worth emphasizing that the ultimate grounding for the strong emergence I am defending is pragmatic in the sense that what we really need (in this case, strongly emergent normativity) is ipso facto real for us. A pragmatic need to see the world in a certain way is transformed into a valuational commitment to the way the world, for us, is.

 An analogous (transcendental) argument against reductive naturalism can be found in Pihlström 2003a, 2003c. 17

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3 Brandom vs. Putnam on Classical Pragmatism Articulating Reasons contains little historical interpretation of pragmatist philosophers (and Tales of the Mighty Dead even less), but Brandom does make the claim that the classical pragmatists committed the sin of “identifying propositional contents exclusively with the consequences of endorsing a claim, looking downstream to the claim’s role as a premise in practical reasoning and ignoring its proper antecedents upstream” (Brandom 2000a, 66). One should, in order to identify conceptual or propositional content, look both upstream and downstream, identifying the role the claim plays in inferential practices. Brandom describes pragmatist classics like James and Dewey as instrumental pragmatists, for whom (to put it in Rortyan words) the use of vocabularies is to be modeled on the use of tools (Brandom 2000b, 159).18 Thus, he criticizes the classical pragmatists’ view of rationality as “instrumental intelligence” and, more generally, their utilitarian conception of instrumental reason (cf. Brandom 2004). A more detailed statement from “Pragmatics and Pragmatisms” is worth quoting at length: As I read them, [the classical American pragmatists] are pragmatists in all of the senses I have distinguished so far. They manifest their endorsement of what I have called ‘fundamental pragmatism’ by giving pride of place to habits, practical skills and abilities, to know-how in a broad sense, and in the way they distinguish themselves from the intellectualist tradition in terms of this explanatory priority. They manifest their endorsement of methodological pragmatism by taking it that the point of our talk about what we mean or believe is to be found in the light it sheds on what we do, on our habits, our practices of inquiry, of solving problems and pursuing goals. They manifest their endorsement of semantic pragmatism by taking it that all there is that can be appealed to in explaining the meaning of our utterances and the contents of our beliefs is the role those utterances and beliefs play in our habits and practices. I also think that the classical American pragmatists endorse a normative pragmatics, and therefore, given their fundamental pragmatism, a normative pragmatism. But this generic commitment is to some degree masked by the specific account they go on to offer of the norms they see as structuring our broadly cognitive practices. For they focus exclusively on instrumental norms: assessments of performances as better or worse, correct or incorrect, insofar as they contribute to the agent’s success in securing some end or achieving some goal. […] They understand truth in terms of usefulness, and take the contents possessed by intentional states and expressed by linguistic utterances to consist in their potential contribution to the success of an agent’s practical enterprises. Peirce, James and Dewey are instrumental normative pragmatists. (Brandom 2002b, 50; emphases in the original, an endnote omitted.)

 See also Brandom 2002b, 55–58. Brandom’s criticism of instrumental pragmatism (see below) should be seen as a rejoinder to Rorty’s all too easy reading of him (and Sellars) as a pragmatist in the sense that “truth is a matter of the utility of belief rather than of a relation between pieces of the world and pieces of language”. See Rorty 1998, 127. 18

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Brandom goes on to emphasize the classical pragmatists’ evolutionary approach: construing norms instrumentally demystifies them and helps us to reconcile the Kantian emphasis on the normativity of discursive practices with “post-Darwinian naturalism” (ibid., 51). He finds, however, the broader pragmatism captured in his above-cited theses much more plausible than the narrowly instrumental construal of norms he reads into classical pragmatism (ibid., 51–54), ending up with his familiar account of implicit conceptual commitments as social statuses instituted by participants’ practical attitudes in the context of irreducibly social linguistic practices (ibid., 54). Brandom’s reading of the classical pragmatists, at least in the essay cited, is, as Putnam (2002c) persuasively argues, unfortunately naive – which is all the more deplorable given Brandom’s otherwise interesting and plausible pragmatist project.19 According to Putnam, the instrumentalist interpretation of “the classical American triumvirate” is “completely wrong”: none of the three great pragmatists of the past either reductively identified what is true with what promotes success in desire-satisfaction, or eliminated truth in favor of such success-promoting, or even held that promoting success in the satisfaction of wants or desires is more important than what is true (ibid., 59–60). James is perhaps the most difficult among the classics (at least more difficult than Peirce) to accommodate to this non-instrumentalist account, but Putnam draws attention to the “epistemologically realist” passages in his work, passages characterizing truth as “agreement with reality” and acknowledging a “pre-human fact” that we did not simply make up, yet insisting on the need to explain (pragmatically) what such agreement or correspondence is (ibid., 60–63).20 Dewey, too, can be saved from Brandom’s charges, given his refusal to identify the resolving of a problematical situation with the satisfying of wants  – because we might have the wrong wants (ibid., 61).21 Putnam even notes (correctly) that the misunderstandings Brandom is now guilty of were already corrected by James and Dewey themselves in their lifetime (ibid., 64). These thinkers simply did not hold that the truth of our beliefs consists in the beliefs’ being useful tools or instruments for us to get what we want. Putnam concludes: “[S]erious students of pragmatism have spent almost a century rebutting this sort of travesty of the thought of the classical pragmatists. It is regrettable that Brandom is putting it back into circulation.” (Ibid., 65.)  Putnam also acknowledges Brandom’s brilliance and points out that his criticism is limited to Brandom’s interpretation of the classical pragmatists: see Putnam 2002c, 59. According to Putnam, Brandom should have spoken about Rorty’s narrowly instrumental pragmatism, instead of ascribing that view to Peirce, James, and Dewey (ibid.). 20  Instead of directly citing James’s pronouncements on truth here, I simply refer the reader to Putnam and Putnam 2017, as well as some of my own discussion of James’s pragmatism (with some comparisons to Putnam, among others) in Pihlström 1998a, 2008a, 2021.  21  Putnam’s own favorite version of pragmatism, which focuses on the fact/value entanglement in particular, is largely indebted to Dewey (though also to the other classical pragmatists, especially James, as well as Wittgenstein). See here especially Putnam 1994, 1995, 2002a, 2004a. I discuss Putnam’s pragmatic (Deweyan) defense of moral objectivity in Pihlström 2005, chapter 1–2. See also Chap. 7 below. 19

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It ought to be noted, however, that Brandom’s worries about classical pragmatism are set in a context of significant sympathy, especially in his 2004 paper, “The Pragmatist Enlightenment”. He admits that the classical pragmatists ideas were “progressive” in several respects: they were evolutionary naturalists; they offered a conception of experience as Erfahrung rather than Erlebnis, emphasizing experience as “situated, embodied, transactional” learning process; they found semantic issues explanatorily prior to epistemological one, thus learning one of Kant’s lessons; they understood the normativity of semantic concepts; they strived after a “nonmagical”, functional, and scientific theory of content by seeking to explain content in terms of what we do (practice); and they privileged “practical knowing how”, thus offering a corrective to classical englightenment intellectualism (Brandom 2004, 14–15).22 Their mistakes – that they, as noted above, only emphasized the role of beliefs as premises in practical inferences, as well as only their role in justifying or producing actions (and not their role in justifying further beliefs); that they (in Brandom’s view) emphasized actions and beliefs at the cost of the “third component”, viz., desires, preferences, goals, or norms, as independent of beliefs23; and that they equated the success of actions with the satisfaction of desires – were only mistaken specifications of these broadly plausible ideas (ibid., 11–13). Moreover, Brandom’s instrumentalist account of classical pragmatism is an instrumentalism about the assessment of practices; he says (in discussion) that he does not think (pace Putnam) that the pragmatists proposed a naively instrumentalist theory of truth, although he does claim that they had a “successor notion” to the classical concept of truth (ibid., 12). Brandom’s criticisms may be partly justified from the perspective of his own program in semantics, but he ought to realize that the classical pragmatists’ philosophical pursuits may simply have been quite different. They did not, as he notes (ibid., 15), share the interest in language characteristic of twentieth century philosophy, and they should not be blamed for living before the linguistic turn. Be that as it may, Brandom’s reservations undercut parts of Putnam’s criticism. Nevertheless, even if they partly miss their mark, given Brandom’s more positive larger-scale picture of pragmatism, Putnam’s critical points are still worth emphasizing in the discussion of the pragmatist classics; in any event, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to investigate whose (Brandom’s or Putnam’s) interpretations of the classical pragmatists are historically more reliable. In my own work, I have ended up with promoting views much closer to Putnam’s than to Brandom’s, and to

 In particular, I agree with Brandom that the pragmatists reconceptualized both theory and practice “in terms of ecological-adaptational processes of interaction of organism and environment of the sort epitomized by evolution and learning” (Brandom 2004, 10; see also 2–5). 23  This charge against pragmatism can hardly be even understood. Upon really reading the classical pragmatists, one can hardly get the impression that they overlooked the role played by goals or preferences in our actions. It is almost as hard to believe that the pragmatists – say, Dewey, for whom problematic situations were the starting point of inquiry  – would have ignored circumstances in favor of consequences (Brandom 2004, 12). Also, the claim that pragmatists were materialists (ibid., 6) is too straightforward and misleading. 22

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some extent inspired by and indebted to his.24 This, however, should not prevent me  – nor, of course, anyone else  – from learning a lot from Brandom’s positive project, the one he detaches from classical pragmatism. As I suggested in the previous section, an emergentist re-reading of pragmatism might even enforce this kind of non-reductively naturalist pragmatism about what is distinctive in normativity and conceptuality. In any case, it may seem, surprisingly, that Brandom has not kept in mind his carefully laid out principles of historical interpretation25 in his own discussions of the classical pragmatists. Another historical issue related to the interpretation of classical pragmatism, not discussed by Putnam, is the role played by Hegel as a background figure of the pragmatist tradition. It is true that Hegel can, according to Brandom, be classified as a pragmatist only in a broad sense; yet, it is worth noting that some pragmatists, most prominently William James, found Hegelian absolute idealism as their main enemy. On the other hand, Peirce and Dewey were crucially influenced by Hegel, and even James’s processualist, panexperientialist metaphysics of “pure experience” has, arguably, its Hegelian roots.26 In Brandom’s (2002a, 47) view, it is Hegel who (in contrast to Kant) “brings things back to earth” by treating the transcendental structure of our “cognitive and practical doings” as being “functionally conferred on what, otherwise described, are the responses of merely natural creatures, by their role in inferentially articulated, implicitly normative social practices”. Hegel stands to Kant as W.V.  Quine stands to Rudolf Carnap: both Hegel and Quine offer a monistic “one-level account” of meaning and normativity, refusing to accept the Kantian and Carnapian “two-level” view that theories about the world are tested on the basis of experience only after meanings are first stipulated. Our practice of language-­use is not merely the application of concepts but simultaneously the institution of the conceptual norms governing the correct use of our linguistic expressions; it is our actual use of language itself that settles the meanings of our expressions. (Ibid., 53, 214–215.)27 Nonetheless, James might have strongly resisted the inclusion of Hegel in the pragmatist school. The monism associated with Hegelian idealism was, for James, the very opposite of pragmatic pluralism. If this Jamesian criticism is taken

 See Pihlström 1998a and 2003a. See also Chap. 2 above.  See Brandom 2002a, chapter 3, on the distinction between de re and de dicto interpretations of historical figures. Perhaps Brandom’s statements about classical pragmatists should be read de re, that is, as attempts to say what “really follows” from the claims these thinkers made, what “is really evidence for or against them”, and what they were really committed to, regardless of their own opinions (ibid., 102). However, if Putnam is right, nothing like naïve instrumentalism “really follows” (de re) from a view like James’s, nor did James believe so (de dicto). 26  Cf. here Sprigge 1993. For James’s polemics against Hegelianism, see especially James 1975 [1907]. 27  Brandom explicitly speaks about “Quine’s pragmatism” (Brandom 2002a, 53, 214, 390; original emphasis); it is another historical issue, not to be decided here, whether Quine should be included in the pragmatist tradition or not – and, if so, whether he should really be included in this, or any, tradition as a companion of Hegel (!). 24 25

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seriously, Kant might, after all, be judged the more important background thinker for pragmatism – though James did not much like him, either. Yet another historical issue might be raised regarding Heidegger’s entitlement to membership in the pragmatist tradition. Heidegger himself saw pragmatism as one element of the technologically oriented, scientistic and naturalistic philosophical tradition that was destroying our original relation to Being. However, Brandom – together with some other pragmatist interpreters28  – describes Heidegger’s basic project in Sein und Zeit as a pragmatist one of grounding Vorhandensein in Zuhandensein: a necessary (transcendental?) background for understanding how it is possible for us to judge, state, or represent how things are from a disinterested perspective is found in “our practical nonconceptual dealings with things”; thus, “knowing that” is to be explained in terms of “knowing how”, and the possibility of conceptually explicit contents is to be explained in terms of what is implicit in nonconceptual practices (Brandom 2002a, 77). Brandom explicitly regards Heidegger’s strategy for explaining how the vorhanden “rests on” the zuhanden as “pragmatism about the relation between practices or processes and objective representation” (ibid., 80).29 He explicates this as “pragmatism concerning authority”: matters of (particularly epistemic) authority are matters of social practice, not simply objective factual matters; the distinctions between ontological categories such as Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein (and indeed Dasein itself) are social (ibid., 301). Heidegger is also explained as maintaining a normative pragmatism (cf. Sect. 2 above), in which norms implicit in practice are taken as primitive and explicit rules or principles are defined in terms of them (ibid., 324–325).30 Brandom in effect takes Heidegger’s normative pragmatism to be the combination of two theses: (1) the factual is to be understood in terms of the normative; and (2) propositionally statable rules, explicit norms, are to be understood in terms of implicit norms, viz., “skillful practical discriminations of appropriate and inappropriate performances” (ibid., 328). Social normativity, then, is irreducibly present in the very project of ontology. What is zuhanden, “ready-to-hand”, that is, “equipment”, is (Brandom notes) characterized by Heidegger himself as pragmata, “that which one has to do with in one’s

 Including, among others, Mark Okrent: see his 1988. Rorty’s version of pragmatism also makes heavy use of Heidegger: see, e.g., Rorty 1991. 29  However, the dependence of Vorhandensein on Zuhandensein is not the whole story. Heidegger’s pragmatism must be qualified by the interpretation that, for him, there can be no Dasein (nor, therefore, Zuhandensein) without language, “thematizing”, and thus without Vorhandensein. Brandom seeks to establish a reciprocal sense dependence between these ontological regions. (See Brandom 2002a, 81, and especially chapter 11, 329ff.) 30  This kind of pragmatism might not be congenial to the emergentist proposal made above: while the philosophical tradition treats the factual as basic, explaining the normative as an addition, the Heideggerian proposal, on Brandom’s reading, is that social normativity should be seen as primitive and the factual should be explained as a special case by “subtracting” relations to human projects (Brandom 2002a, 324). If this is so, then the normative does not emerge from the factual; rather, one might say that the factual emanates from the normative. 28

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concernful dealings” (ibid., 303).31 Pragmatism, for Brandom’s Heidegger, is not simply semantic, conceptual, or normative, but also ontological: Heidegger sees social behaviour as generating both the category of equipment ready-to-­ hand within a world, and the category of objectively present-at-hand things responded to as independent of the practical concerns of any community. In virtue of the social genesis of criterial authority (the self-adjudication of the social, given pragmatism about authority), fundamental ontology (the study of the origin and nature of the fundamental categories of things) is the study of the nature of social Being  – social practices and practitioners. (Ibid., 322.)

The Heideggerian world, in short, is “a holistic totality of […] practical normative equipmental involvements” (ibid., 325). It is hard to think of a more fitting one-line description of the pragmatist’s world, and I am happy to accept such an ontologically pregnant picture of pragmatism. Although Brandom, as we have seen, is not primarily dealing with ontological issues – for instance, he is reluctant to invoke the concept of emergence in any ontologically strong manner – his reading of Heidegger interestingly, yet problematically, ends up with an “ontologically pragmatist” picture of social practices as “generating” the categories of fundamental ontology. I do believe the pragmatist (even the non-Heideggerian pragmatist) should say something similar, redescribing ontology as the project of identifying and classifying the most fundamental categorial features of a humanly inhabited and practically conceptualized, hence value-embedded, reality. Yet, it is an open issue how closely Heidegger should actually be tied to this pragmatist ontological framework – and, as we shall see next, it is an open issue how the relation between pragmatism and ontology should be understood.

4 Pragmatism and Ontology Insofar as pragmatism is one of the central philosophical frameworks in the market today, it is a worthwhile task to investigate whether some of the most widely read philosophers of our time can be seen as pragmatists in some sense. This is particularly interesting in the case of someone like Brandom who labels his position “pragmatism”, while maintaining some distance to the classics of the tradition. I have in this chapter suggested that there is much to be said for the compelling articulation of a pragmatically naturalist yet anti-reductionist picture of conceptuality and normativity Brandom holds, though we might invite him to clarify the relations between the various versions of pragmatism we have seen him distinguish  – conceptual, linguistic, rationalist, methodological, semantic, normative, instrumental, ontological, and so forth. Such a plethora of pragmatisms may not, after all, be helpful for the one who seeks to understand the unifying features of the pragmatist tradition.32  The reference is to section 15 of Heidegger 1961 [1927].  Let me note that I have left several possible criticisms of Brandom’s pragmatism intact here. For an argument to the effect that pragmatism in semantics, such as Brandom’s, ties understanding too 31 32

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Brandom, clearly, is extremely good at spelling out a distinctively pragmatist account of conceptuality and normativity; for the pragmatist who does not merely want to appeal to the normativity of social practices as something given but who needs a conception of what normativity actually amounts to, his inferentialist position is a highly recommendable choice, partly because of his willingness to connect pragmatism with the Kantian-Hegelian tradition.33 It is compatible with this attitude to his work to question his interpretation of the classics, however. James and Dewey arrived at much more sophisticated views than Brandom – or many other critics of classical pragmatism – have been willing to admit. We need not endorse Brandom’s views on these classics in order to make pragmatic use of his inferentialism in debates with non-pragmatists or reductive naturalists who want to explain normativity away. Brandom is also extremely good at identifying a philosophical tradition which is only implicit in the standard narratives of the development of modern philosophy. In the introduction to Tales of the Mighty Dead, he describes a historical conception of rationality as a conception that understands rationality “as consisting in a certain kind of reconstruction of a tradition – one that exhibits it as having the expressively progressive form of the gradual, cumulative unfolding into explicitness of what shows up retrospectively as having been all along already implicit in that tradition” closely to mastery of epistemic practice, see Rosenkranz 2003. 33  In terms of the “transcendental pragmatism” I defend elsewhere (see Pihlström 2003a), we might speak about the transcendental role played by Brandom’s practices of giving and asking for reasons in the constitution of normativity and conceptuality, hence of the very possibility of thought. Occasionally, Brandom’s formulations are almost explicitly transcendental: in addition to some of the passages already quoted in section 2, he says, for instance, that inferential practices – claiming, justifying claims, using claims to justify others, etc. – are “what in the first place make possible talking, and therefore thinking”, and that sophisticated linguistic or discursive practices are “intelligible in principle only against the background of the core practices of inference-and-assertion” (Brandom 2000a, 14–15). In the same introductory chapter, he describes Hegel’s views by John Haugeland’s dictum that “all transcendental constitution is social institution”, adding that “[t]he background against which the conceptual activity of making things explicit is intelligible is taken to be implicitly normative essentially social practice” (ibid., 34; see also Brandom 2002a, 47–49, 216–217). See also Brandom’s interpretation of Rorty as a Kantian – contrary to Rorty’s self-pronounced statements – on the basis of his (Rorty’s) sharp distinction between the natural (causation) and the normative (justification) in Brandom’s “Introduction” to Brandom (ed.) 2000, xv; cf. Brandom 2000b, 160–161. What Brandom here calls “pragmatism about norms” is also transcendentally formulated: “only in the context of a set of social practices – within a vocabulary – can anything have authority, induce responsibility, or in general have a normative significance for us” (ibid., 161). (Cf. also the above-cited discussion of “normative pragmatism” in Brandom 2002a.) Rorty’s (2000) response to Brandom 2000b does not address the Kantian reading but repeats polemics against realism and representationalism familiar from many of Rorty’s recent writings; Rorty’s chapter on Brandom in Rorty 1998 also takes up Kantian issues while culminating in standard Rortyan antirepresentationalism. Furthermore, note that Brandom at least once labels the tradition he is sketching in Tales of the Mighty Dead as a “Kantian” one (Brandom 2002a, 89). I have nothing against combining Kantianism and pragmatism, two heterogeneous traditions, in this manner, although we must also remember that Brandom’s reading of Kant is not intended as pure Kant scholarship but is subordinated to his systematic concerns and heavily influenced by his Hegelianism (cf. Brandom, conference paper at the Pecs 2005 conference mentioned above).

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(Brandom 2002a, 12). The tradition he finds most important for his own systematic philosophical concerns is, of course, the “rationalist” and inferentialist (if also, to some extent, pragmatist) one extending from Spinoza and Leibniz through Hegel and Frege to Heidegger and Sellars. The “historicist” or traditionalist understanding of rationality is an addition to inferentialism, because it does not take for granted the inferentially articulated norms we use but asks further, “under what conditions are determinate conceptual norms possible?”, emphasizing a pragmatist answer. (Ibid., 12–13.)34 Putnam’s (2004a, Part I) recent admiration of classical pragmatism culminates in his criticism not only of certain naturalistically distorted ontologies but of the very project of ontology. Here I do not follow his interpretation of pragmatism, however (see Pihlström 2009).35 I believe that pragmatism should be developed as an ontologically – not only semantically or epistemically – relevant philosophical framework, and this is one of the reasons why I think that the concept of emergence, invoked above in Sect. 2, ought to be employed within pragmatism, too (and partly explicated through pragmatism). In relation to Brandom, no one has pointed this out better than another recent pragmatist, Joseph Margolis (which is not to say that I would entirely agree with his treatment of pragmatism, either; see Chap. 5 below): The fatal weakness in Sellars’s argument – very possibly in Rorty’s (and, it may be added, in Robert Brandom’s “Rortyan” treatment of Sellars) – lies with the metaphysical standing of language itself: it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to treat selves eliminatively (as Sellars does) and yet allow the continued objective standing of truth (and language) in the scientific realist’s sense. You cannot find in Rorty or Sellars [or, we may add, Brandom] any explanation of how to admit language without admitting the realist standing of mind. (Margolis 2002, 61.)36

While his criticism of Brandom remains implicit, hidden under the more explicit criticism of Rorty and Sellars, Margolis makes a very important point: the pragmatist ought to be a (pragmatic) realist about the various normative structures, including language and the mind (or the self), which s/he anti-reductionistically acknowledges. In Margolis’s preferred terms, the emergence of cultural entities (including language) should be accepted – and human selves should also be seen as cultural products in this ontological sense, yet fully real, contra the kind of eliminativism we find in the work of Brandom’s and Rorty’s quasi-pragmatist hero,  Of course, not all the “mighty dead” Brandom discusses can be called pragmatists even in a broad sense. For instance, it would be difficult to read Frege as a pragmatist. But even Frege can, Brandom suggests, be seen as “open[ing] the doorway” to the kind of pragmatism about content described above as a Wittgensteinian-like “use theory” of meaning, “though he clearly is not tempted to pass through it himself” (Brandom 2002a, 75). In any case, it is a problem worthy of further investigation how the unorthodox tradition Brandom identifies and reconstructs is actually related to (identifications and reconstructions of) the pragmatist tradition. 35  I discuss the ontological significance of pragmatism at greater length in Pihlström 1996 and 2009. See also the brief remarks on Heidegger and ontological pragmatism at the closing of Sect. 3 above. 36  Margolis argues in a similar manner in several other works of his, though seldom against Brandom in any textual detail. 34

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Sellars.37 This adds a further reason for seeking (for instance) a pragmatist account of emergence, or alternatively, an emergentist reconceptualization of pragmatism (more specifically, of pragmatic realism about irreducible cultural entities, including values, that we need to commit ourselves to ontologically) – a project in which Brandom’s non-reductive naturalism may be helpful, as indicated in Sect. 2 above.38 Accordingly, while we certainly have to make the normative and pragmatic “turns” away from Cartesian ontological assumptions, turns that Kant (as well as the pragmatists later) taught us to make,39 we should now, in the current situation in the development of pragmatism, be prepared for another turn, the ontological one. This, however, should not be a turn back to Cartesian assumptions but a turn forward, to a new, still developing Kantian-cum-pragmatic understanding of what the ontologically inescapable transcendental categories of a humanly inhabitable world are. Such an understanding will have to take seriously what has been learned in the normative and pragmatic turns Brandom celebrates.

5 Concluding Critical Remarks Another critical point that might be raised about Brandom’s project as a whole concerns the very notion of “making it explicit”. Charles Taylor (2003, 159) has argued, criticizing Rorty, that we should appreciate what he calls the “background”, defined as “the skein of semi- or utterly inarticulate understandings that make sense of our explicit thinking and reactions”, something to be drawn from Heidegger’s notion of “being-in-the-world” or from Wittgenstein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s similar notions.40 Could this background be made explicit? Would something be lost, if it were? For Taylor, the background plays a transcendental role as a condition for the possibility of thought or intentionality, and he is also a pragmatist in the sense of treating the

 Margolis frequently claims (and I am tempted to agree with him) that Rorty’s and Brandom’s attempts to put Sellars’s work to do a pragmatist job fails. Sellars, he says, “cannot be made into a pragmatist of any sort (as Rorty and Brandom pretend to do) except by deliberate deformation – which I’m bound to say both are willing to embrace” (Margolis 2003a, 5; see also 107, 142–143). The reason for this, from Margolis’s perspective, is Sellars’s stubborn scientism, according to which “manifest image” entities such as tables and chairs and human persons do not exist in the ontologically privileged “scientific image”. For critical discussion from the point of view of pragmatism, see also Pihlström 1996, chapter 4. 38  See Pihlström 1996, chapter 5, as well as El-Hani & Pihlström 2002. Margolis is one of the few contemporary pragmatists to explicitly employ the vocabulary of “emergence”. Putnam, for instance, refuses to use this concept, although his anti-reductionism, too, would be naturally explicable in emergentist terms. Brandom admits (in discussion) that he is a realist about culture and social statuses and that emergence may be an appropriate notion to describe his position in this regard. 39  Again, this was discussed by Brandom in the conference paper in 2005 cited above. 40  For further discussion of the “background” along similar lines, see also Taylor 1995, especially ch. 4. 37

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background as more or less equivalent with our worldly practices, similar to Wittgenstein’s “form of life” (cf. Chap. 9). But is Taylor’s theory of the background either a pragmatist or a transcendental theory in the sense in which Brandom’s is? Hardly: he is, it seems, more willing to leave certain things implicit in our thought and language-use. The true transcendental pragmatist, someone like Taylor might argue, will abandon the project of semantic theory, however irreducibly normativist, and just leave the background inarticulate. Taylor’s criticism of Rorty proceeds along these lines. He argues that Rorty – just like Quine and, perhaps, also Brandom? – fails to get rid of representationalism, after all, if representationalism is committed to the claim that “the only inhabitants of the space of reasons are beliefs” (ibid., 169). Rorty fails to note “the embedding of our explicit beliefs in our background grasp of things” (ibid.), the way in which “[o]ur explicit thinking about the world is framed and given its sense by an implicit, largely unarticulated background sense of our being in the world” (ibid., 176). While Taylor avoids attributing Rorty’s (failed) position to Brandom, he does take issue with Brandom’s defense of Rorty’s pragmatism as a project continuing the Enlightenment by liberating us from modern gods and authorities (such as the commitment to the way things really are, etc.):41 But to assume that the transition from the infantile-dependent to the mature-emancipated sums up the movement of the twentieth century […] is a simplification of almost comic-­ book crudity. It adopts a naively flattering view of self and an utterly unobservant view of the other. If we were dealing with one culture’s view of another, we would speak of “ethnocentrism”; what is the corresponding word when it’s a matter of metaphysical views? (And some of these people call themselves pragmatists! What would William James say to this?) (Ibid., 179.)42

This is indeed one of the questions we should bear in mind. When Brandom tells us his stories about pragmatism, and about the ways in which his preferred tradition (however it is described: inferentialism, rationalism, functionalism, holism, the “Kantian tradition”, or just IHFPR) is related to the pragmatist tradition properly so called, or carries “enlightening” pragmatist themes along with it, we should remember to ask what pragmatists such as James would have said. Would James  – or should the contemporary pragmatist – accept the project of making explicit implicit practice-laden norms in order to produce a systematic semantic theory? Would he – or should we – view the pragmatist tradition culminating in Rorty as a continuation of Enlightenment? Are we really, genuinely, liberated if we follow Rorty in the rejection of accurate representations and the way things are, or, indeed, in the

 Cf. Brandom’s introduction to his (ed.) 2000, xi. See also Brandom 2002c, as well as Brandom 2004. Brandom’s own position and his reading of Rorty on this issue may, however, be more nuanced than Taylor acknowledges, but he does talk, with a Rortyish voice (and referring to Rorty), about a second (pragmatist) enlightenment which sees norms for belief and action as “our doing and our responsibility”, without need for an alien authority or “non-human Reality” (Brandom 2004, 9). 42  For Taylor’s (to a large extent sympathetic) reading of William James’s pragmatist philosophy of religion, see Taylor 2002. 41

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rejection of the very issue of realism itself? Moreover, similar questions ought to be asked not only in relation to the classical pragmatists, such as James, but also to the thinkers Brandom unorthodoxly describes as pragmatists, such as Heidegger.43 Here I cannot further review these debates, however. Putnam, Margolis, and Taylor are very different critics, but they all rightly question the Rortyan (and Sellarsian) commitments of Brandom’s pragmatism. The main thing I hope to have achieved in this chapter, with the help of these authors, is a critical stance toward Brandom’s interpretation and appropriation of the pragmatist tradition, combined with an endorsement of his synthesis of systematic philosophical theorizing and historical reconstructions,44 and with a significant agreement about the various things he hopes to be able to do with the help of the tradition(s) he reconstructs, including (pace both Brandom and Putnam) a promise of a future synthesis of pragmatism and emergentist metaphysics, to be developed as a substantial ontological rearticulation of a pragmatic non-reductive naturalism about normativity. Thus, I hope it is clear, by now, that we can learn a lot from thinkers like Brandom (or Putnam), if we want to “soften” naturalism (which today takes all too scientistic forms)45 both methodologically, e.g., by allowing transcendental reflection on the enabling conditions of meaning, and metaphysically, e.g., by allowing rich emergent “levels” of reality, including normativity, meaning, and value, in particular. This interplay of metaphysical and methodological insights into non-scientistic naturalism should receive more attention as the critical discussion of pragmatism and naturalism unfolds.

 There is also the further issue of whether all the major neopragmatists – Putnam, Rorty, Brandom, and others – understand pragmatism (and philosophy in general) in a too strongly linguistic manner. Some Deweyans, for instance, argue that “primary experience” is something more fundamental than language or “vocabularies” and that the linguistic turn has thus obscured some of the most plausible ideas of classical pragmatism. See, e.g., Hildebrand 2003. 44  See Brandom 2002a, 15–16. I also sympathize with Brandom’s notion of “talking with a tradition”, which can be understood “instrumentally” (the tradition is employed as a means of expression) or “conversationally” (moving back and forth between the tradition and our own commitments) (ibid., 110). 45  See, again, Margolis’s criticisms in his 2003a. 43

Chapter 4

Pragmatic Realism, Idealism, and Pluralism: A Rescherian Balance?

1 Introduction One of the most remarkable features of the kind of pragmatism committed to advancing scientific rationality and objectivity – and thus to criticizing subjectivist and relativist misconstruals of pragmatism – that Nicholas Rescher has defended for several decades is its attempt to maintain a balance of a number of philosophical ideas that are often thought to be in tension with each other. Rescherian pragmatism is realistic (even “metaphysically realistic”), but it is also idealistic (in the sense of what he calls “conceptual idealism” or “pragmatic idealism”); moreover, its realism and objectivism do not seem to preclude a pluralistic conception of a variety of different perspectives (or “systems”, “conceptual schemes”) that we may employ for conceptually categorizing reality. These views are highly relevant to the general realism discussion as well as its special applications in the philosophy of science, to which Rescher has been a key contributor for decades. Starting from some of Rescher’s own formulations of these and related ideas – spanning dozens of years and volumes of systematic philosophical work, from Conceptual Pragmatism (1973b) via A System of Pragmatic Idealism (1992–1994) to Realistic Pragmatism (2000b) and beyond – this chapter will critically examine the Rescherian attempt to overcome the potential conflicts between realism, idealism, and pluralism. Thus, I am aiming at a relatively general outline of the specifically Rescherian position in the contemporary debates over realism. The core of Rescher’s distinctive realistic project, in my view, is his pragmatism. Although Rescher has hardly presented any truly novel interpretations of the classical thinkers of the pragmatist tradition, his discussions are highly valuable as they distinguish between significantly different currents within the movement from the standpoint of his own preferred form of pragmatism. In particular, he powerfully

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pihlström, Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy, Vienna Circle Institute Library 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28042-9_4

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argues, against Richard Rorty and some other neopragmatists inclined toward relativism, that pragmatism should not be construed (or, rather, deconstructed) as a form of “antiphilosophical nihilism” abandoning systematic argumentative work in philosophy conceived as a rational project (Rescher 2000b, xi). Pragmatism, he urges, is compatible not only with scientific realism and objectivity but also with a conception of philosophy itself as a systematic cognitive enterprise (and, thus, as broadly speaking “scientific”). Rescher, indeed, is a profoundly systematic philosopher; yet, he wishes to recognize a certain plurality in the possible ways in which one can be systematic and argumentative.1 I will, inevitably moving significantly beyond Rescher’s own position and its historical development,2 yet in a continuous critical dialogue with Rescher, seek to articulate a pragmatist approach whose key aim is a critical balance of Rescher’s allegedly mutually incompatible philosophical commitments. Such a balance will be sought by utilizing Rescher’s own systematic rational methods. I will, in particular, suggest that the holistic pragmatism defended by Morton White (who, like Rescher, is a somewhat neglected pragmatist thinker fighting against various subjectivist and relativist tendencies within pragmatism) since his Toward Reunion in Philosophy (1956) is a helpful, albeit not unproblematic, resource for integrating pragmatic realism, idealism, and pluralism (see also Chap. 2 above for a more substantial discussion of holistic pragmatism; cf. Pihlström 2021). I will argue that the Rescherian type of pragmatic realism-cum-idealism, even when enriched by White’s holism, needs to take seriously the Kantian (and, therefore, transcendentally idealistic) background of pragmatism, pluralistically reinterpreted. Furthermore, in order to illustrate these issues, I will briefly apply the problem of pragmatic realism and objectivity to the science vs. religion debates.

2 Rescher as a Pragmatist As anyone acquainted with his writings knows, Rescher is an exception in contemporary philosophy in the sense that he is not only a pragmatist but also an idealist. He has for decades insisted that reality, as experienced by us humans, is inescapably “our reality”, that is, constructed, conceptually grasped, or schematized by us. While some pragmatists – most famously, or notoriously, William James, and more  For Rescher’s views on philosophical systems and their diversity, see Rescher 1985.  Rescher has authored so many books that it would be impossible to discuss the minute differences between the various different formulations of his views in any detail here. As textual evidence, I will simply use some selected works by Rescher that I have over the years found useful for the purpose of my own research. Nor will I be able to take into account secondary literature in any comprehensive manner, but I will cite some helpful contributions illustrating the basic tension I will identify in Rescher’s project. Therefore, while I will take a detailed look at some representative writings by Rescher, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s up to the early 2000s, this inquiry focuses on what we may call “Rescherian” pragmatism, realism, and idealism (instead of primarily focusing on Rescher’s own views in their historical development). 1 2

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recently Hilary Putnam – have also often been regarded as idealists in a roughly similar sense,3 it is possible to interpret Rescher’s commitment to pragmatism itself as “a counterweight to idealism”: far from subscribing to any antirealist form of idealism, pragmatism reminds us that our mental activities cannot be detached from our natural needs, corporeality, and interests; accordingly, a pragmatic “reality principle”, while still compatible with idealism, prevents idealism from going too far in its legitimate emphasis on human world-construction.4 According to Rescher, such a reality principle is “an objective monitor whose operations lie above and beyond the reach of our own arbitrary contrivings”; it is with reference to “the nature of things” that the question of the pragmatic, purposive efficacy of particular means for particular ends is to be settled (Rescher 2000b, xiii). In this sense, pragmatism is, for Rescher, a realistic doctrine: pragmatic efficacy is sought and found in the operations of our conceptual machinery in a largely mind-independent reality. As Rescher explains, the pragmatist method of evaluating methods of inquiry in terms of their efficiency can also be applied to itself; far from leading to any vicious circularity, this makes pragmatism “self-substantiating” (ibid., 240–242). Indeed, Rescher maintains that his realistic pragmatism “fares well by its own standards of utility” (ibid., 248). Curiously, Rescher’s idealism, strongly emphasized, for example in his three-­ volume System of Pragmatic Idealism, one of his main works in the 1990s, is virtually absent as we arrive at his key statement of pragmatism, Realistic Pragmatism.5 Possibly he there wishes to emphasize the realistic element in pragmatism so strongly that there is no room for his former idealism in the book any longer – or perhaps he had by year 2000 come to the conclusion that what he earlier called “idealism” (or “conceptual idealism”)6 is actually quite far from any recognizably idealistic doctrine. In any event, his failure to connect idealism with pragmatism in his work around the turn of the millennium is obviously related to another striking feature of Realistic Pragmatism, namely, his failure to acknowledge Immanuel Kant as one of the central background figures of the pragmatist tradition. I am afraid we

 See, e.g., James’s well-known discussion of how human categorizations “carve out” reality in James 1975 [1907], Lecture VII. Putnam’s association with idealism became a topic of hot debate when he announced his turn from metaphysical to internal realism in the late 1970s; see especially Putnam 1981. Later, he moved back to something like metaphysical realism. See again also Chap. 2 above. 4  See Wüstehube’s (1998) essay in Wüstehube and Quante 1998, 9. 5  Cf. Rescher 1992–1994. In the 2000 book, Rescher speaks about “idealistic pragmatism” only when he defends the compatibility of pragmatism and a concern for “higher values” (Rescher 2000b, 189, 229). 6  See Rescher 1973b. In this earlier book, Rescher characterizes conceptual idealism as the view that “nature, as we standardly conceive it, is conceived by us in terms of reference whose adequate analysis or explication requires some reference to the characteristically mental processes like imagining, supposing, and the like”, and that the mind “makes” “the mode-and-manner-determining categories” we employ to conceive nature (3). The argument then unfolds by seeking to show that such ontological categories as possibility, particularity, and lawfulness are “mind-involving” in this sense. 3

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cannot get rid of idealism so easily – either Kant’s, the pragmatists’, or Rescher’s own. Or so I will try to argue, returning to Kantian matters more explicitly in Sect. 4 below. It can also be argued that Rescher’s understanding of pragmatism is based on an unnecessarily sharp distinction between what he regards as objectivist and subjectivist (or realist and relativist) forms of pragmatism. His own version, the objectivist and realist one seeking an impersonal reality principle in real-world considerations of purposive efficacy, follows Charles S. Peirce’s and C.I.  Lewis’s pragmatism, whereas subjectivist pragmatism originates, in Rescher’s view, with James and F.C.S. Schiller, culminating in Rorty’s more straightforwardly relativistic thought. As a picture of pragmatism, this is rather crude, however, and can only serve as a rough summary of the history of the tradition.7 There is, admittedly, a great difference between Peirce and Rorty, and Schiller’s “humanistic” pragmatism in particular has been (presumably somewhat inaccurately) regarded as a radically subjectivist and relativist doctrine hard to reconcile with the spirit of objective scientific thinking, but there are also interesting intermediary positions that may be more plausible than either Peirce’s or Rorty’s (or Schiller’s). I believe (although I am unable to argue for this view here) that James’s and Dewey’s pragmatisms were among such intermediary positions and that in our days, too, a Jamesian or Deweyan pragmatist may be able to avoid both strongly realist metaphysical speculations and the relativist and antiphilosophical swamps of mere Rortyan “conversation”.8 The Rescherian objective pragmatist’s “reality principle” can be considered self-­ subsistent and person-indifferent, but Jamesian or Deweyan pragmatists need not be irresponsible subjectivists or relativists, either. While Rescher may be on the right track in criticizing Schiller’s personalism and Rorty’s postmodernist ironism, he is somewhat unfair to James: while it may be correct to note that James “opened the way to fragmenting truth into a plurality of contextualizations” (Rescher 2000b, 17), it is far from clear that James himself walked that road of fragmentation and started a “deconstructive transformation of pragmatism” (ibid., 61).9 Such an

 Another contemporary philosopher committed to a strongly realist (Peircean) understanding of pragmatism in a manner closely resembling Rescher’s is, as Rescher himself notes (2000b, 60–61n1), Susan Haack (e.g., 1998). In addition, H.O. Mounce (1997) has defended the view that there are essentially two forms of pragmatism, the Peircean realistic one and the antirealistic one emerging from James. As Rescher (2000b, 79–80) points out, however, Mounce’s way of dividing the pragmatist territory is somewhat different from his. Both defend a basically realistic interpretation of pragmatism, though. 8  For my attempts to interpret and develop the pragmatist tradition in these ways, implicitly critical of Rescher’s, see, e.g., Pihlström 2003a, 2009, and the editorial chapters in Pihlström 2015. 9  Moreover, it is misleading to claim that James emphasized non-epistemic, affective, factors in belief validation (Rescher 2000b, 17, 20) and that he developed pragmatism into “a personalistic and psychologistic orientation towards matters of affective and subjective satisfaction” (ibid., 18). It would be much more accurate to point out that James sought to offer a thoroughly pragmatic interpretation of epistemic concepts, deliberately blurring the kind of traditional dichotomies that have set the epistemic or cognitive on one side and the affective or “merely practical” on the other. James, as pragmatism scholars have for a long time recognized, did not give up objective corre7

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overhasty attack on James illustrates how Rescher himself falls back to a number of rather unpragmatic conceptual dichotomies, reflecting the most fundamental distinction he makes, i.e., the one between realistic “pragmatism of the right” and relativistic “pragmatism of the left” (ibid., chapter 2; cf. 246–247). He subscribes to the dualisms between, say, epistemic and non-epistemic (affective), cognitive and normative/evaluative, objective and subjective, impersonal and personalistic, as well as legitimation and de-legitimation (ibid., 49, 245).10 Instead of showing that pragmatism simply ought to take an objective (“Peircean”) route, Rescher thus succeeds in demonstrating how surprisingly unpragmatic some allegedly Peircean realistic and objectivist commitments are, at least on a strongly realistic interpretation. Rescher’s classifications of different forms of pragmatism – semantic, epistemic, metaphysical, moral, and political – are clarifying, but by proposing a return to what he takes to be the Peircean roots of the tradition he loses much of what is philosophically valuable in later pragmatism. Rescher’s most problematic, and presumably the most important, division lies between “thesis pragmatism” and “method pragmatism” (or methodological pragmatism). The latter, which he subscribes to, urges that pragmatic considerations ought to be applied to methods and procedures employed in the validation of theses, not to theses themselves (ibid., 77, and chapter 3). Apart from historical inaccuracies,11 the obvious problem with this view is that it hardly acknowledges the idea of the theory-dependence of methods. It is a simplification to state that “a thesis can be justified by application of a method”, which, in turn, is justified by practical criteria (ibid., 96). The very possibility of using some particular method, let alone the availability of the practical criteria with reference to which the method is assessed, may crucially depend on assumptions concerning the truth of certain “theses”, i.e., on researchers’ being committed to a theoretical framework that takes the world to be in some way rather than another. Methods can scarcely be developed and evaluated in total abstraction from the theoretical theses they are used to validate; it sounds suspicious to suggest that there even could be a completely “theory-­ external quality control upon cognition” (ibid., 97). The threatening circularity built

spondence truth, either, but required true beliefs to be in “agreement” with reality and sought to reinterpret this concept of agreement in terms of pragmatic efficacy. 10  Other dualisms that make his approach superficial from the perspective of Jamesian or Deweyan pragmatism are the ones between the definition of truth and the criterion of truth (Rescher 2000b, 52) and between “user-oriented” conditions of warrant and “reality-oriented” conditions of truth (ibid., 150). It is one of the key insights of James’s (admittedly often unclear and confusing) discussions of truth that no such foundationalist dichotomies can be drawn: while there is no denying of the fact that truth in some highly general sense means “agreement with reality”, no abstract definition of truth independently of epistemic warrant can provide us with a “meaning” of the notion of truth as we use that notion in ways inextricably tied to our human epistemic affairs. 11  While it may be correct to say that methodological pragmatism is inspired by Peirce and the pragmatic evaluation of specific theses by James (see, e.g., Rescher 2000b, 89), this dichotomy is once again too straightforward: we should not forget that James also wanted to apply pragmatism to the evaluation of our methods or strategies of belief-acquisition (not only in science but in nonscientific, such as ethical and religious, matters as well).

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into the view that methods depend on theories and vice versa has been widely debated in the philosophy of science at least since Thomas Kuhn, but especially in Realistic Pragmatism Rescher simply fails to pay sufficient attention to this issue. Paradoxically, then, his “scientific” pragmatism is harmed by his not being sufficiently responsive to developments in the philosophy of science in, and since, the 1960s. On the other hand, Rescher is certainly right  – and obviously philosophically up-­to-date – in conceiving of “the scientific method” as “not a single and uniform mode of procedure but a vast manifold of thought-tools”, as a fallible “procedural organon that is itself evolving under the pressure of considerations of pragmatic efficacy” (ibid., 114). Here, I think, all (not only pragmatist) philosophers of science should follow him; however, the notion of pragmatic efficacy, inviting the pragmatic realist’s “reality principle”, brings us back to the question of realism, the main issue of our discussion. Examining (again) this overarching problem may help us see how profoundly topics in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science are, for pragmatists like Rescher, entangled with value and normativity.

3 Rescher (and His Critics) on Realism and Idealism – An Uneasy Balance? Rescher labels his basic view of reality – which he considers not only compatible with pragmatism but supported by it – metaphysical realism, defined as the doctrine that “there indeed is a real world – a realm of mind-independent, objective physical reality” (Rescher 2000b, 126; see also 147), i.e., that “the world exists in a way that is substantially independent of the thinking beings that inquire into it, and that its nature – its having whatever characteristics it does actually have – is also comparably thought independent” (Rescher 1992–1994, I, 255).12 A critic of realism might question the notion of (mind-)independence here, problematizing statements such as the one about objective things existing and functioning “in themselves”, “without specific dependence on us” (Rescher 2000b, 131). In the terms of Rescher’s (earlier) idealism, the objective world might still be regarded as “conceptually” dependent on us – and not everybody, and certainly not every pragmatist, maintains that conceptual and (say) existential or ontological (in)dependence can be sharply distinguished from one another. In any event, realism is, in Rescherian pragmatism, a deeply human commitment, not a description of the world in itself or of things in themselves from a God’s-Eye-View. It is “a commitment that we presuppose for our inquiries rather than discover as a result of them” (ibid., 126). We cannot discover, on the basis of  A realistic conception of truth is also a key part of Rescher’s position. See his discussion of the distinction between “use conditions” and “truth conditions” in Rescher 2000b, chapter 6. One may wonder, however, what has happened to his earlier defense of a coherence theory of truth. (Cf. Rescher 1973a.) 12

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evidence, that such a general thesis as realism is true; we can only presuppose realism as something that makes sense of and regulates our inquiries and other practices. Realism can, then, be supported by means of something like a transcendental argument: it is a necessary precondition for the possibility of inquiry and communication (ibid., 134–135; see also, especially, Chap. 6 below). It is not a view to be defended on the basis of evidence but to be postulated in order for us to be able to collect any evidence for any view whatsoever (or better, in order for us to be able to make sense of our “given”, unproblematized practice of gathering evidence for any other view). In this sense, Rescher’s realism is a transcendentally grounded commitment arising from what seems to be a transcendentally idealistic (Kantian) conception of the necessary constitutive conditions for the possibility of certain given actualities of human life (i.e., inquiry, discovery, conceptualization, and communication). Again, one may wonder, therefore, why Rescher has not devoted more space to Kantian issues in his discussions of pragmatism, though he does refer to Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism” (ibid., 127, n1). It is not clear without further investigation that the transcendental mode of argumentation (in favor of realism or anything else) could be employed entirely independently of transcendental idealism.13 A key issue here is the relation between pragmatism and Kantian-styled transcendental argumentation, since realism, transcendentally defended, is also for Rescher “ultimately a principle of practice”, justified because “we need it to operate our conceptual scheme” (ibid., 134),14 that is, a principle of inquiry pragmatically “retrojustified” (see ibid., 145–146). The very same principle is treated simultaneously as a transcendentally necessary condition for the possibility of certain purposive human activities and as a pragmatically useful postulate enabling us to engage in those activities efficaciously – that is, as a postulate itself pragmatically validated. A pragmatist conception of human activity is both a presupposition of realism (understood as a practical commitment) and something that itself requires a realistic conception of the world in which human beings act. In this sense, we may say that the transcendental cuts both ways: something can be a transcendental precondition of something else while also being itself “conditioned”. These different Rescherian commitments could also be seen as constituting a set of mutually supportive philosophical principles that are themselves constitutive elements of inquiry (see also Sect. 5 of this chapter below). However, one may wonder why Rescher calls his realism “metaphysical”. He might have chosen a more neutral term, but presumably he wants to draw, again, a (rather unpragmatic) distinction: he wishes to be able to say that although one might, epistemologically, embrace conceptual idealism, one can and should be a realist in metaphysical matters. The meaning of the term is here different from what  For a famous Kantian argument seeking to establish a necessary connection between transcendental idealism and transcendental philosophy generally, see Allison 2004 [1983]. 14  The notions of “practice” and “need” should, as always in Rescher’s texts, be interpreted in a wide sense: we are reminded that “intellectual accommodation” in the world is “one of our deepest practical needs” (Rescher 2000b, 141). 13

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Hilary Putnam, another influential neopragmatist, meant by “metaphysical realism” in his famous attack on that doctrine.15 In any case, it is clear that the problem of realism vs. idealism lies at the heart of pragmatist philosophizing; it is considerably less clear that Rescher has adequately settled this vexing question. Realistic Pragmatism – as just one selected example of his enormous oeuvre – makes it very clear that several tensions remain in his position. Turning to a diagnosis of what might be going wrong in Rescher’s project, it might be suggested that one of the reasons why he has difficulties with the issue of realism is his failure to pay due attention to what he takes to be merely the subjectivist trend in pragmatist thought, especially to James’s pragmatism, which views any realistic commitment to an objective reality as a commitment based on concrete, individual human purposes and thus arrives (arguably) at a genuinely pragmatic form of realism, in which realism is subordinated to pragmatism (rather than vice versa). The key problem in Rescher’s (and many others’) accounts of realism and idealism is the (transcendental) role played by human conceptualizations, idealizations, and schematizations in the structuring of reality. The issue of realism cannot, therefore, be discussed independently of our philosophical views on what it is to be a human being intelligently examining the world. The most important lesson that Rescher’s reflections on pragmatism may teach us is the unavoidability of something like philosophical anthropology in the realism discussion. We have to acknowledge the relevance of philosophical inquiries into “human nature” regarding our disputes over realism and idealism (and several other philosophical disputes as well). Realists, after all, claim that the world is independent of us humans (or, more precisely, of our ways of conceptualizing it and inquiring into it), whereas idealists regard it as being somehow (but exactly how?) dependent on us. Rescher interestingly argues that pragmatism, rightly developed, leads to an ethically (and metaethically) responsible realistic position (Rescher 2000b, chapters 7 and 8; see also Rescher 1992–1994, II). Here, I believe, his case for realistic pragmatism is at its strongest, at least if his pragmatic defense of moral realism can be distinguished from the more problematic assumptions of metaphysical realism. The view that there are not only descriptive but also evaluative or “morally laden” facts (Rescher 2000b, 198, 220) – or that facts and values are inseparably entangled – has been central in the pragmatist tradition since James and Dewey.16 A key idea in Rescher’s axiology and metaethics is that the pragmatic principle of rational evaluation through purposive efficacy should be extended to the normative area. Values, no less than methods employed in factual belief-acquisition, ought to be pragmatically assessed; they are not just “matters of taste”. What is decisive in such assessment is the capacity of our values to contribute to the realization of human interests. Hence, philosophical anthropology is needed in the pragmatic legitimation and rational criticism of values (ibid., 168–169). Morality is ultimately  In addition to Putnam’s 1981 book cited above, see, e.g., Putnam 1990. For some comparisons between Putnam and Rescher, see, e.g., Niiniluoto 1999. 16  On pragmatic moral realism and the fact-value entanglement, see, e.g., Pihlström 2005 and 2021, chapter 4. 15

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grounded, Rescher maintains, in our inherently rational “ontological duty of self-­ realization”, “the fundamental obligation of endeavoring to make the most of one’s opportunities for realizing oneself as fully as possible as the sort of being one is” (ibid., 213). The kind of value objectivism Rescher advances is certainly worthy of being taken more seriously than is customary in contemporary moral philosophy, but Rescher’s strong emphasis on rationality in axiology and ethics may also be misleading, as not all pragmatists would join him in defining morality as something essentially “geared to the benefit of rational agents” (ibid., 199) – or as anything grounded in any metaphysical principles whatsoever.17 Not only is Rescher himself caught in the problematic web of realistic, idealistic, and pragmatist commitments; the same is true of some of his sympathetic critics who are trying to resolve the tensions we find in his work. I will conclude this section by taking a look at how some of his commentators contributing to the essay collection, Pragmatic Idealism (1998), have tried to deal with these matters. As one of the editors of the collection, Axel Wüstehube, clearly explains, Rescher endorses a conceptual idealism which states that “everything real is knowable, and all knowledge includes [human] conceptualizations” (Wüstehube 1998, 15). On the other hand, we have to be realists and acknowledge the independent existence of the natural world – even though this realism is, again, our conception, only pragmatically justified (ibid., 15). We presuppose in our inquiries and practical actions the reality of an objective, mind-independent world; as noted above, we do not discover it on the basis of evidence (cf. also Rescher 1992–1994, I, especially chapter 15). This defense of realism is thoroughly anthropocentric and pragmatic, as it appeals to our practical need to be realists. Wüstehube concludes that while we must accept realism, “we cannot but be conscious of the fact that realism does not describe the world as it really is” (Wüstehube 1998, 15). This is a puzzling statement, however. If Rescher’s realism is distinguished from what Putnam and others have called metaphysical realism, as Wüstehube claims (ibid., 15–16), then it of course cannot describe the world “as it really is” (as seen from a “God’s-Eye View”), for the concept of such a world does not make sense. If, however, Rescher’s realism amounts to something weaker, e.g., to a mere “internal realism” in Putnam’s sense, or perhaps “empirical realism” in Kant’s sense, it can be seen as describing the world as it really is (empirically speaking), from within a human, practice-embedded perspective, or rather, as describing the relation between our descriptions and the world we take them to be about.18  Jamesian pragmatists may feel that Rescher over-intellectualizes morality by assuming that all ethical issues are in principle rationally answerable. For those (pragmatists and non-pragmatists) who have come to think – with James, or perhaps with Wittgenstein – that ethical problems are ultimately personal and cannot be settled theoretically at all, Rescher’s rationalistic moral pragmatism may seem to be a violation of the seriousness of moral thought. His repeated insistence on the idea that rationality is “inherently impersonal” and objective (Rescher 2000b, 222) may appear as irrelevant in the ethical sphere. 18  Discussing Rescher’s conception of the objectivity of values in Wüstehube’s and Quante’s 1998 collection, Timo Airaksinen suggests that Rescher’s moral realism might be called “internal moral realism” (Airaksinen 1998, 35). Lorenz Puntel, in turn, speaks about internal realism in connection 17

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While Rescher does call his view “metaphysical realism”, he qualifies his notion of mind- or thought-independence by admitting that his pragmatic argument for this kind of realism does not establish the mind-independent reality of physical entities (e.g., stones), but only establishes the fact that our conception of them is a conception of something mind-independently real (Rescher 1992–1994, I, 274). Realism is, then, as emphasized above, our human pragmatic commitment, not a description of the world in itself or of things in themselves. At this point, a critic might claim that Rescher’s combination of idealism and realism is quite trivial. The world as we know or experience it is unavoidably a world reflecting our cognitive peculiarities. What we know or experience is, as Kant already emphasized, a “world for us”. Even a rather strong (metaphysical) realist could easily accept Rescher’s allegedly idealistic statement that our knowledge of the world is “a knowledge of it in our own, characteristically human terms of reference” (ibid., I, 323). Not even the strongest of realists would claim that realism is anything else than a human picture of the world, or of the relation between human inquiries and the world (even though such a realist might claim – albeit somewhat circularly, I would argue – that it is a true picture independently of whether we humans regard it as true or not, that is, that the truth of any humanly maintained view, realism itself included, is ultimately determined by the mind-independent world). If, on the other hand, conceptual idealism is construed in a stronger way, unacceptable to the realist who refuses to admit that human beings construct the world in any sense, it may threaten to take us into the kind of subjectivist pragmatism Rescher abandons. Hence, the critic would argue, Rescher’s “idealism” is either vacuous (because it is, in the end, realistic) or, if genuinely idealistic, too implausible or even crazy (too strongly constructivistic) to be acceptable by a rational, realistically-minded thinker. Helmut Pape, in his contribution to Pragmatic Idealism, illuminates Rescher’s realistic requirement of the “stubbornness of things” and the “bruteness of facts” with reference to Peirce’s pragmatic idealism.19 He succeeds in formulating a crucial question (Pape 1998, 122): “What is the ontological status and what is the epistemological connection between mind-independent reality and mental processes? In what sense is Rescher’s conceptual idealism still a form of idealism if it treats mind, consistent with the causal autonomy of nature and its physical processes, as a non-causal factor in the general scheme of things that has an

with Rescher’s coherentist conception of truth (Puntel 1998, 165). Finally, Michele Marsonet (in the same volume) explicates the Rescherian view that science is a matter of truth estimation, not truth presentation, and that no particular scientific theory can give us the final and fundamental true picture of reality (see also Rescher’s response, in Wüstehube and Quante 1998, 240–242; cf. Marsonet 1994). 19  Pape’s essay, “Brute Facts, Real Minds and the Postulation of Reality”, is one of the most interesting contributions of Wüstehube’s and Quante’s (1998) volume from the point of view of our current interest in realism and idealism. See also Pape 2017.

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explanatory role to play?” That is, in what sense is Rescher still an idealist, if he insists (as we saw above) on metaphysical realism?20 In his response to Pape, Rescher reformulates his combination of realism and idealism in explicitly Peircean terms (Rescher 1998, 245): “With Peirce, I want to be a scholastic realist who sees mental phenomena as the causal product of an extra-­ mental reality.21 […] [T]he ‘extra-mental reality’ that is at issue here is itself a creature of theory  – a mind-postulated thought-product. What we thus have is a commitment to realism of sorts that is itself embedded in an idealistic position.” Now, idealism again seems to be the basic commitment, somehow more fundamental than realism, as realism needs to be embedded in idealism. Hence, the reality external to the mind postulated by the realist is, according to Rescher, “ultimately ideal”, a “mental projection”, but yet, astonishingly, mental only in its “status” and extra-mental in its “nature” (ibid., 245–246). Neither this distinction between status and nature nor Pape’s Peircean considerations can, I am afraid, fully settle the dialectics of realism and idealism we have arrived at. Both realism and idealism seem to be mutually presupposed; neither is self-standing without the other; and yet it remains unclear how exactly they are integrated. Indeed, Peirce’s own form of realistic idealism or idealistic realism is entangled with the same bunch of problems. In the spirit of Peirce, Rescher, and Pape, we may agree that realism and idealism should somehow “come into alignment” (ibid., 245), but none of these philosophers has shown in detail how this can be achieved. Essential tensions seem to remain at the heart of pragmatist realism-cum-idealism. At this point I propose revisiting the Kantian background of these issues  – with Rescher’s help.

4 Kantian Matters: Things in Themselves and Conceptual Schemes I already hinted at the Kantian features of Rescher’s thought by characterizing his argument for realism as “transcendental”. More generally, his interpretation of realism and idealism reminds us of Kant’s critical combination of empirical realism and transcendental idealism; famously, Kant maintained that empirical realism is possible only insofar as we embrace transcendental idealism. Furthermore, while Rescher neglects, at least in Realistic Pragmatism (Rescher 2000b), the Kantian

 Pape here defends Rescher by arguing that a notion of a mind-independent reality is, idealistically, constitutive for perceptual experience (Pape 1998, 124). For both Peirce and Rescher, reality is both real (i.e., it clashes with our interpretations and expectations) and ideal (i.e., general statements about it refer to future possibilities that are necessarily “mind-invoking”) (ibid., 133). 21  This, of course, does not by itself make anyone a scholastic realist in Peirce’s sense. What scholastic realism requires is a realistic attitude to the reality of “generals”, such as habits, laws, and dispositions. 20

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background of pragmatism, he has elsewhere interpreted Kant’s philosophy in a (broadly) pragmatist manner, elaborating on the idea that philosophizing, according to Kant, is “ultimately a matter of practical rather than theoretical reason”, as practical reason addresses both moral and cognitive interests and thus in a sense guides our entire project of reason-use. It is now time to examine further the (pragmatistically updated) Kantian idea  – integrating idealism and realism  – that humanly developed conceptual schemes organize or categorize a mind- and scheme-­ independent world of “things in themselves”. This is realism, given that the reality of things in themselves (or a world in itself) is not denied, but it is also idealism, given that the independent world is always inevitably categorized by means of human conceptual schemes – schemes that are, as Rescher repeatedly emphasizes, practice-laden and crucially involve value commitments. The postulation of Kantian-like things in themselves starts from the above-­ discussed idea that realism is something that we must presuppose instead of maintaining on the basis of any conceivable evidence. We do not, Rescher reminds us, discover that there is an objective, mind-independent reality; rather, the assumption of the existence of reality is justified on the basis of its utility and functionality, as we observed above (see Rescher 1992–1994, I, chapter 15). “As Kant clearly saw”, he writes, “objective experience is possible only if the existence of such a real, objective world is presupposed from the outset rather than being seen as a matter of ex post facto discovery about the nature of things” (ibid., I, 257). This presupposition is necessary for various reasons: we need to maintain distinctions between truth and falsity and between reality and appearance; we need a basis for intersubjective communication and for a “shared project of communal inquiry”; and we need to endorse fallibilism and conceive of inquiry in terms of a causal model based on the interaction between the inquirer and the world (ibid., I, 260–264). Thus, realism is both a presupposition of inquiry and retrospectively justified by the cognitive and practical success of inquiry (ibid., I, 266–270).22 As we already saw above, Rescher’s validation of realism is pragmatist in the sense that we need to be realists: an “intellectual accommodation to the world” is, we are told, “one of our deepest practical needs” (ibid., I, 265–266). This is directly related to what Rescher has to say about the Kantian postulation of things in themselves. He argues that the notion of a thing in itself does not commit Kant to any ontological category of “wholly mind-independent reality” (Rescher 1981, 289, 298).23 Things in themselves are not “things” in the sense of “real things”, but rather some kind of mental products, creations of the human

 Rescher maintains that metaphysical validation is more generally “retrospective revalidation”, as metaphysics elucidates the “presuppositional backyard” of scientific knowledge by means of “second-order reflection” on the answerability of questions about reality. See Rescher 2000a, 4–5. Our realism, again, also becomes validated in such a manner, along with various forms of “systematicity” that Rescher regards as conditions for the possibility of inquiry (ibid., 18–19). 23  It can be suggested that in this essay Rescher defends a version of the “one world” interpretation of Kant’s distinction between things in themselves and appearances, familiar from Henry Allison’s work, in particular (see Allison 2004 [1983]). 22

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understanding, or “thought-things” (ibid., 296–299). Their role, for Rescher, or Rescher’s Kant, is epistemological rather than metaphysical. They serve as “an instrumentality of our thought about the real world” (ibid., 298). Our conception of them is “a self-imposed demand of the human understanding needed to implement its commitment to the externality of things with which it has to deal on the basis of the deliverances of sensibility and understanding” (ibid., 295), that is, “a mental contrivance to which our reason finds itself unavoidably committed” (ibid., 297). Hence, we can never know the existence of things in themselves but we have to postulate them (ibid., 295), just as we have to postulate realism while admitting that our knowledge is confined to things “carved out” (idealistically) within our cognitive practices. Even if there were, per impossibile, a “realm of mind-independent realia that exist altogether ‘in themselves’”, such things would, “literally, be nothing to us” (ibid., 297). Rescher writes: The conception of a thing in itself […] is a creature of the understanding to which we stand irrevocably committed in viewing our experience as an experience of something that is itself experience-external […]. The existence of things in themselves thus emerges as a postulate of the human understanding. To be fully objective and authentic, an appearance must be an appearance of something; there must be an underlying something that does the appearance – that grounds it in a nonphenomenal order. […] Our understanding is committed to the postulate or supposition that such experience-external nonsensuous entities exist, however little we may know about them […]. (Ibid., 292.)

This is somewhat puzzling, as Rescher says we do postulate things in themselves as existing, yet in effect he is saying that they are dependent on our postulating them (as mind- and postulation-independent, though). There is a kind of dialectic of ontological dependence and independence at work here. The ontologically independent world paradoxically depends on our actively granting it such a status, although it is postulated precisely as being independent of any such activities of ours. In essence, Rescher’s argument for the reality of things in themselves is the same as his argument for realism: these postulations are needed for us to be able to make sense of our experience. This is at the same time a pragmatic and a transcendental argument. It also implies that the Kantian notion of a thing in itself needs to be thoroughly humanized and “pragmaticized”. Our postulation of Dinge an sich selbst is not a metaphysical postulation of an unknown and unknowable transcendent realm, but a transcendentally necessary pragmatic postulation playing a functional role in our dealings with the world we inquire into. This turns our realism itself thoroughly pragmatic.24 Again, this also means that realism is justified by a “fundamentally idealistic basis” (Rescher 1992–1994, I, 271; cf. Rescher 2000a, 115). The worry here may be that this realism – or the pragmatic postulation of practice- and experience-external things in themselves – verges on triviality. Of course we cannot conceptually make  Another term Rescher uses in describing his realism is “contextualistic”: metaphysical realism, he tells us, “maintains investigation-antecedently that there is a physical state of natural reality”, but “‘what reality is like’ is nothing definitive and categorical but something contextual and limited to a particular state-of-the-art level of sophistication in point of scientific technology”. (Rescher 2000a, 71.) 24

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sense, or categorize, any other reality than the reality we do, or at least can, conceptually categorize. Of course we can know only a world reflecting our conceptual capacities, because any other world would be completely beyond our cognitive and conceptual reach. Of course philosophical concepts such as the concept of things in themselves are only our conceptual ways of making sense of the externality of reality. Even a rather strong metaphysical realist not subscribing to anything like “conceptual idealism” or even pragmatism could agree with Rescher that our knowledge of the world is “knowledge of it in our own, characteristically human terms of reference” (Rescher 1992–1994, I, 323), without agreeing that this commits us to any sort of idealism.25 In a way, his explicit treatment of things in themselves as merely human “thought-things” – indicating simply our commitment to there being something external to our experience – makes this even clearer. But we cannot get rid of the paradox, as that externality itself depends on us. In my view, only an explicitly transcendental (albeit not for that reason non-pragmatist) approach (reinvoking Kantian idealism) yields a plausible account of realism and idealism qua pragmatically interpreted. Let us complete our picture of Rescher’s various tensions by turning from things in themselves to the other “pole” of the relation, namely, our concepts. I will again phrase this discussion by citing a relatively early paper by Rescher, in this case an essay in which he examines Donald Davidson’s celebrated argument against “the very idea of a conceptual scheme” (see Rescher 1980).26 Rescher argues against Davidson’s conception of the necessary intertranslatability of languages (or schemes) by pointing out that if the descriptive, taxonomic, and/or explanatory mechanisms of two languages are “substantially” different from each other, no genuine translation can take place between them; yet, they may still be mutually interpretable without being mutually translatable. The functional role of languages in communication and human action in general is what makes them languages. (Ibid., 327–329.) The idea of alternative conceptual schemes is, therefore, intelligible, as our concepts are theory-laden and make factual commitments: “A conceptual scheme comes to be correlative with and embedded in a substantive position as to how things work in the world.” (Ibid., 330.) If conceptual schemes differ from each other, this does not mean that different truth-values are given to the same statements about the world or that the same questions are answered in different ways. Instead, different schemes approach the world from entirely different perspectives. They do not make different statements about the same things but speak about different things. (Ibid., 331–333.) Rescher’s view would undoubtedly be classified by Davidson and his sympathizers as just another version of the conceptual relativism the argument against  See here also Rescher’s exchange with several critics in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1994), containing a book symposium on Rescher 1992–1994, as well as Marsonet 1994. Perhaps a slightly stronger attempt to formulate an interesting form of idealism is Rescher’s suggestion that idealism incorporates a “value-informed view of the world and one’s place within it” (Rescher 1992–1994, II, 252–253), but even this need not be any threat to realism. 26  Davidson’s famous essay, originally published in 1973–74, is reprinted in Davidson 1984. 25

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different schemes seeks to silence. However, here again Rescher is a pragmatist – and a pragmatic pluralist (cf. Rescher 1992–1994, III, chapter 4) – instead of being simply a relativist. As a pragmatist, he suggests that conceptual schemes describing experience, or the world, in different yet equally valid and equally objective ways can be compared to each other only on the basis of criteria of pragmatic efficacy. Successful human practice is the “semantically neutral” judge in the comparison between rival schemes. (Rescher 1980, 342–343.) Moreover, there is no need to presuppose any “preexisting ‘thought-independent’ and scheme-invariant reality that is seen differently from different perceptual perspectives” (ibid., 337); that is, the idea (presupposed by Davidson), that the “content” of the rival conceptual schemes would have to be something like “the given” or “the world in itself” is itself (like the notorious “myth of the given”) a myth. The Davidsonian argument is based on the false assumption that the content must be invariant, neutral, or ready-made. Insofar as such assumptions are rejected, the argument against the so-called scheme vs. content dualism becomes either trivial or unsound. I am not going to settle the issue regarding conceptual schemes and conceptual relativism here. It is, however, important to consider the possible links between Rescher’s views on things in themselves and his views on conceptual schemes. While the “content” of the schemes need not be any world in itself, we might say that we pragmatically need the concept of a thing in itself in order to make sense of the very idea that we may through our conceptual scheming categorize the world in a plurality of different ways, while also retaining the “reality principle” according to which our categorizations do not just make up the world but pragmatically contribute to shaping the world “for us” into a cognizable and experienceable structure. We may also say that the notion of a thing in itself is one of the presuppositions of our conceptual schemes, the very schemes we need to employ in our inquiries. This, again, yields a transcendental argument for realism – as Rescher puts it in a slightly different context, a “transcendental argument […] from the character of our conceptual scheme to the acceptability of its inherent presuppositions” (Rescher 2000a, 112). This all goes back, ultimately, to Rescher’s pragmatic views on the compatibility and (so to speak) interpenetration of realism and idealism. This is a most pragmatic position to take, even though it also rests on a kind of transcendental argument. Yet, the tension between realism and idealism still seems to remain unresolved, like (arguably) in Kant himself and the classical pragmatists. Let us therefore briefly examine one more attempt to integrate these views into a coherent whole, utilizing the idea of holistic pragmatism already familiar from Chap. 2, thus inevitably moving beyond Rescher’s own position while remaining indebted to it.

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5 Holistic Pragmatism and the Science vs. Religion Debate How could we try to find a way of living with the Kantian tensions of realism and idealism? It might, indeed, be argued that the pragmatist should attempt to critically reconcile, instead of dissolving, such tensions as the one between realistic and idealistic commitments. There is no way, and no need, to establish either realism or idealism as the most fundamental commitment; even attempting to do something like that would be against the even more fundamental pragmatist principle of anti-foundationalism. We may learn from Rescher’s reflections on these matters that realism and idealism, far from being the kind of philosophical rivals or opposites they are often claimed to be, presuppose each other and are mutually entangled and self-­supporting. Moreover, their interdependence can be analyzed, again in quasi-Kantian terms (departing from Rescher’s actual views), as a “transcendental” interdependence: the relations of presupposition that run both ways are transcendental in the sense that very possibility of realism requires idealism, and the very possibility of (the relevant kind of) idealism requires realism. This is because both are ultimately pragmatic doctrines. So what we have here is an illustrative case of mutually supporting pragmatic transcendentalia. In addition to going back to the Kantian tradition of transcendental philosophy (including transcendental idealism) in order to make sense of the Rescherian entanglements (and tensions) of realism and idealism, we may also find useful resources within the pragmatist tradition itself. What I would like to suggest here is that Morton White’s (2002) holistic pragmatism (already discussed in Chap. 2 above) can be used to systematize the holistic commitments to realism and idealism, as well as, at the meta-level, to pluralism and pragmatism, that Rescher makes but leaves into a state of tension. Helping ourselves to White’s views at this point is a way of endorsing Rescher’s own systematic rational methods of philosophical and metaphilosophical inquiry. In particular, the Rescherian idea that valuational issues, no less than factual ones, are open to rational consideration and argumentation is fundamentally important here. Indeed, a crucial part of White’s holism is the entanglement of the rational evaluation of factual and valuational beliefs. As we saw in Chap. 2, White maintains that the kind of holistic, empirical approach Quine famously developed in the philosophy of science can be extended to a full-fledged philosophy of culture, covering not only science but also religion, history, art, law, and morality (ibid., x–xi).27 Philosophy of science is, of course, one of its subfields – but White insists that other cultural institutions require empirically informed philosophical scrutiny no less than science does.28 In particular, logic,

 In this regard, White’s philosophical temperament (employing a Jamesian phrase) is much closer to Rescher’s (than to Quine’s), as Rescher also strives for a comprehensive philosophical system. 28  In an earlier work, White (1981) labeled his view “epistemological corporatism”, meaning by it roughly the doctrine he later started to call “holistic pragmatism”. Note that this is a methodological or epistemic thesis about the testing or justification of the different types of statements forming 27

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science, and ethics form a unified whole, a holistic web without epistemic dichotomies (cf. White 1956, 257). Knowledge and morals form a “seamless web” (ibid., 287; see also Chap. 7 below). Now, how might White’s approach save us from the tensions inherent in Rescher’s pragmatism? How can Rescher’s pragmatism, philosophical or metaphilosophical, be rendered truly holistic? I would like to suggest that realism and idealism (as well as related meta-level views such as pluralism and pragmatism) form a critically and holistically testable web of (philosophical or metaphilosophical) beliefs in Rescher’s system, none of which can be assessed individually but all of which need to be assessed as a corporate body. In this sense, Rescher’s “systematic” tendencies need to be taken very seriously: to be systematic in his sense, we may argue, is to be a holistic pragmatist in White’s sense. The relevant kind of systematization in our philosophical web of beliefs can be achieved when we subordinate our entire philosophical framework to a meta-level pragmatic testing. In this sense, Rescher’s entire system should primarily be approached from the perspective of pragmatism – albeit without turning even pragmatism into a fundamentalist dogma. Let us, by way of an analogy, pursue this further by re-examining a reflexive problem concerning the internal coherence of White’s holistic pragmatism (see again Chap. 2). White tells us that holistic pragmatism enables us to evaluate both factual (descriptive) and valuational (normative, e.g., ethical) beliefs or statements. However, isn’t holistic pragmatism itself a normative view within morality, in the sense that it is a position that contains a significant ethical element, having to do with what we can or should (legitimately) think or say about human cultural institutions? Aren’t we, if we follow White’s own principles, testing the whole conjunction of our beliefs, holistic pragmatism included (if it indeed is among our beliefs), whenever we test any belief, scientific or ethical? An analogous case in Rescher would be, e.g., the apparent unsurrenderability of realism itself. Could our holistic meta-level inquiry into the tensions between realism and idealism lead us to revise, or even abandon, the principle of realism (or the pragmatic “reality principle”) adopted as a way of making sense of our commitments in inquiry? White (2002, chapter XI) steps on the meta-level when he suggests that holistic pragmatism itself ought to be conceived as a rule rather than a descriptive statement. The holistic pragmatist behaves like a legislator transforming a custom into a law when s/he formulates the rule that no experience may disconfirm holistic pragmatism itself, because this is the method we should employ in testing our beliefs (ibid., 179). White thus saves the normativity of epistemology, but he hastens to add that even such rules are not immutable, any more than legal statutes are (ibid., 180, 186). “Resolving to accept holistic pragmatism does not mean that it can never be altered or surrendered, but it does mean that a very powerful argument would be required to effect either of those changes” (ibid., 181).

the holistic totality, not a – much more radical – semantic or metaphysical claim about there being no difference between those types of statements, or their objects, at all. As such, it resembles Rescher’s methodological pragmatism.

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White intends his holism to be a normative view of how philosophers should philosophize, and about which topics (ibid., 134–135) – hence, it can be seen as a broad cultural thesis about the way in which a certain area of human culture, philosophy, ought to be organized – but he does not put it forward as a non-revisable norm. It is neither analytic, a priori, necessary, nor self-evident (ibid., 186); in a quasi-Rescherian spirit, it is just our best guess so far, and as things are we ought to follow this rule, in a fallibilist spirit. Yet, it is very important to observe here that to admit this possibility of critically evaluating and “testing” holistic pragmatism is to already work within holistic pragmatism. In this qualified sense, I grant that White has made a very powerful case for his position, even though some of its details perhaps cannot be fully accepted. Arguments against his conception of ethics should be evaluated within the overall normative scheme he develops. The analogy to Rescher becomes obvious as soon as we compare holistic pragmatism to the Rescherian kind of pragmatism that includes both realism as a pragmatic “reality principle” and idealism as the “conceptually idealist” view maintaining that human principles such as realism are our ways of making sense of the world rather than pictures or descriptions of the world in itself. This combination of realism and idealism can itself be reflexively and pragmatically examined within the overall pragmatist-realist-idealist picture it affirms. Furthermore, this integration – this holistic totality  – of Rescherian philosophical theses bound together by the systematic use of pragmatist methodology is itself neither a priori, analytic, necessary, nor self-evident. It is, Rescher might agree with White, our best guess so far, and it is on the basis of such a guess that we need to develop our total picture of pragmatic commitments of inquiry. Now, an interesting test case for Rescher’s pragmatism (interpreted along the lines of White’s holism) is the heated debate on the relation between science and religion. Is there a role for holistic, pluralistic pragmatism integrating realism and idealism to play here? Let us once more recapitulate the essential tension of pragmatism, as applied to realism and idealism. Pragmatism can, as I have suggested, be seen as a philosophical approach seeking to mediate between realism and idealism in a manner comparable to Kant’s attempt to argue that empirical realism is compatible with (and even requires) transcendental idealism. While the realism vs. idealism tension is inevitably present in pragmatism, both classical and “neo”, pragmatists have typically attempted to move beyond this tension in interesting ways. The Rescherian pragmatist can maintain that the world is (empirically) independent of us (realism), but its independence is itself a human construct within our purposive practices (idealism) possibly receiving different forms within different practices (pluralism). Moreover, the world and whatever exists or is real within it can exhibit a number of different practice-laden forms of mind-independence. For example, the mind-independence of electrons, of historical facts, and of God (if, indeed, all of these entities or structures are mind-independently real) are all quite different kinds of mind-­independence, and it makes sense to speak about these different kinds only within different purposive practices in which they play some functional roles. The practice of physical science within which the independent existence of electrons is at issue does not,

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presumably, have any function for God to perform, but on the other hand the religious person’s prayer addressed to a God believed to be real independently of that activity of praying hardly presupposes that electrons, or any other pieces of material world, are real. There is no need to reduce all these to an essence of what it means to be mind-­ independent. This is a key observation in the philosophy of religion and the science vs. religion debate. Pragmatic realism – whether Rescher’s or, say, Putnam’s – is itself “practice-involving”, not just a view held for “practical” (e.g., non-theoretical or instrumental) reasons.29 Rearticulating realism (especially, in this special case, realism about religious and/or theological views) in terms of human practices is the key program of pragmatic realism in the philosophy of religion, analogously to the philosophy of science. This program is very different from the more radical neopragmatist (Rortyan) program of giving up realism, or even the issue of realism, altogether. Some recent pragmatists, including Eberhard Herrmann and Niek Brunsveld, have suggested that the realism issue in religion and theology can be articulated in terms of Putnam’s distinction between internal and metaphysical realism; according to Herrmann, in particular, Putnam’s internal realism can plausibly be used as a model for realism in theology and religion.30 This may or may not be a pragmatically workable approach (I have some modest reservations regarding the “Putnamian” internal realism theologians’ views); what is worth pointing out here is that, similarly, one could rely on Rescher’s combination of realism and idealism in developing a pragmatist perspective on the realism issue in the philosophy of religion. There is no reason why we could not start developing a plausible pragmatic realism in the science vs. religion debate from the Rescherian entanglement of realism and idealism. We could start doing this by admitting that both realism and idealism are human ways of making sense of reality, religious and/or theological reality included. No human view, religious or theological views included, can be regarded as a picture of reality as it is in itself, let alone of divine reality, which, if real, must almost per definitionem be beyond human cognitive and conceptual capacities. In such a pragmatist philosophy of religion, one relies on realism insofar as one claims that religious and/or theological statements are about reality (and not merely, e.g., about subjective religious experiences or religious language). On the other hand, one relies on idealism by claiming that such statements, just like the realistic (and idealistic) statements themselves at a meta-level, are necessarily human attempts to make sense of the world we live in, whether or not that world is taken to

 At this point, a critic could point out that occasionally Rescher’s pragmatic realism does go too far in this direction, i.e., it is in the danger of collapsing into a merely instrumentally held position enabling us to make sense of our practices of inquiry rather than being constitutively tied to those practices. I leave this question open here. Rescher’s own pronouncements could be interpreted in both ways in some contexts. 30  See especially Herrmann 2003, Brunsveld 2012. I discuss the relevance of Putnam’s and Rorty’s versions of pragmatism to issues in pragmatist philosophy of religion in Pihlström 2013, chapter 3. See also Pihlström 2020a. 29

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contain religious and/or theological aspects. Doing all this, one would then also rely on pragmatism, and more precisely holistic pragmatism, as one would subordinate one’s entire system of beliefs, realism and idealism (and even pragmatism and holistic pragmatism) included, to a pragmatic evaluation in terms of its success in enabling us to make sense of the world we live in and our practices of living in it, including both cognitive and valuational practices (with no dichotomy between the two). Seeking to develop a holistic pragmatism inspired by White would be a subtly Rescherian undertaking in the sense that, even without any explicit connections to Rescher in this context, we would be operating on the basis of a rational, systematic pragmatism with a carefully construed realistic yet not non-idealistic “reality principle”. Even this brief example shows that Rescher’s approach has very interesting applications also outside the philosophy of science.

6 Conclusion The relevance of Rescher’s position to the philosophy of religion cannot be further discussed here. What is important to observe, both historically and systematically, is that Rescher can be in interesting ways compared not only to the classical pragmatists (Peirce, James, Dewey) but also to contemporary neopragmatists like Putnam, for whom the realism–idealism tension seems to be very similar. Already in the 1970s and 1980s, it became clear that Rescher’s conceptual idealism shares several insights with Putnam’s internal realism – which is something that Putnam later gave up, in a way going through a similar development as Rescher.31 In addition, there are less well known approaches in recent philosophy that would offer at least as interesting points of comparison, such as Rein Vihalemm’s “practical realism”.32 It seems to me that these and many other pragmatists and neopragmatists seeking to maintain realism within some form of constructivism or idealism (or vice versa) would be saved from the trouble of moving back and forth between different philosophical commitments apparently in tension with each other by explicitly interpreting their realism-cum-idealism as a non-reductive, pragmatically naturalized form of (quasi-Kantian) transcendental idealism.33 This could, I believe, be most fruitfully done by construing this combination of realism and idealism as a holistic pragmatically testable set of commitments, to be analyzed in terms of White’s holistic pragmatism.  For Putnam’s most recent discussions of why he moved back to realism, even metaphysical realism, and gave up the verificationism associated with internal realism, see Putnam 2012, 2016. 32  See Vihalemm 2012; for other recent contributions (including my own reflection on pragmatic realism in Pihlström 2014b) to the on-going discussion of the relation between realism and pragmatism, see Westphal 2014. 33  This is what I suggest in several earlier writings, including Pihlström 2009. 31

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Finally, it is worth pointing out that Rescher, while developing an original and insightful version of pragmatic idealism-cum-realism, entirely seems to lack interest in the meta-level worry regarding the coherence or meaningfulness of the realism debate that has been part of Putnam’s pragmatist and partly Wittgensteinian approach to these issues for decades. Rescher is a systematic theory-builder, primarily or even exclusively concerned with the truth and/or rational acceptability of philosophical theses such as metaphysical realism (albeit as pragmatic postulates). He is certainly no Wittgensteinian and does not find the coherence of the realism issue itself a problem worth serious consideration. This, depending on his reader’s philosophical temperament, may be a vice or a virtue in his system.

Chapter 5

“Languaged” World, “Worlded” Language: On Margolis’s Pragmatic Integration of Realism and Idealism

1 Introduction Joseph Margolis, who sadly passed away in June 2021, argued for decades, against mainstream forms of realism and antirealism, that the world is “languaged” while our language is “worlded” (e.g., Margolis 1994b, 523; cf. also Margolis 1993b, 323). What this means, in a first approximation, is that reality and the language(s) we use to categorize it are inseparably entangled, and there is no epistemically accessible language- or categorization-independent way the world is, even though the world cannot simply be regarded as a human construction, either. Analogously, the epistemic and the ontological dimensions of the realism issue, as well as realism and idealism as general philosophical perspectives, are deeply integrated. We cannot reach die Welt an sich, but we should not maintain that il n’y a pas de hors-texte, either. As noted in the first three chapters above, all these themes have also come up, with variations, in other pragmatists’ such as Hilary Putnam’s, Robert Brandom’s, and Nicholas Rescher’s work. This chapter will examine issues that are themselves entangled and cannot, I think, really be separately addressed. First, Margolis’s synthesis of realism and idealism will be interpreted as a version of pragmatic realism (which is, given the entanglement of realism and idealism as articulated by Margolis, also a version of pragmatic idealism).1 I will also briefly show how it differs from some other pragmatic realisms, here exemplified by Philip Kitcher’s views (2012). Secondly, it will be investigated whether, and in what sense, this pragmatic  Note, however, that Margolis does not subscribe to “pragmatic idealism” in Nicholas Rescher’s (1992–94) sense. As we saw in Chap. 4 above, Rescher’s idealism is… well, more realistic. A separate discussion would be needed for a detailed study of the similarities and differences of these two pragmatic realism-cum-idealisms. For Margolis’s critical reflections on Rescher, see Margolis 1994c, 2017. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pihlström, Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy, Vienna Circle Institute Library 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28042-9_5

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realism-cum-idealism can be regarded as an instance of pragmatist metaphysics, especially – given Margolis’s emphasis on the embodied yet constructed and historical nature of cultural entities – of pragmatist metaphysics of culture. Margolis’s notion of emergence will also be briefly revisited in this context. Thirdly, it will be suggested that the kind of pragmatic and (moderately) constructivist realism-cumidealism that Margolis defends can be reinterpreted as a “naturalized” form of (quasi-)Kantian transcendental idealism, or better, transcendental pragmatism, and that Margolis’s (broadly Hegelian) criticism of Kantian transcendental philosophy therefore remains problematic. In any event, the blurring of the boundary between the empirical and the transcendental will be crucial to the success of this overall project.2

2 Margolis as a Pragmatic Realist One starting point for the present discussion is the exchange I had with Joseph Margolis in the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (vol. 4, no. 2, 2012). This exchange occurred in the context of a book symposium on Margolis’s Pragmatism Ascendent (Margolis 2012a; see also Margolis 2012c for a related essay). While I very sympathetically discussed Margolis’s integration of realism and idealism (or “Idealism”, as he prefers to write it) as a version of pragmatic realism, I also suggested that he had failed to do full justice to Immanuel Kant’s transcendental considerations.3 One reason for this is that, although I very much  Note that I will not discuss in any detail either the historical readings of other philosophers Margolis offers (and there are many of them, as his reflections canvass the entire history of Western philosophy) nor the developments and changes in his own positions (that would be a topic for a monograph rather than a chapter). Indeed, I agree with Margolis (2005, 11) that realism is “the master theme of the whole of modern philosophy”; it would be impossible to capture it in a single chapter. 3  In addition to my essay in the journal (Pihlström 2012b), see my more comprehensive paper on pragmatic realism (Pihlström 2014b), which incorporates the same basic arguments. One might wonder why we should worry about getting Kant right in this context – that is, the context of developing pragmatism and pragmatic realism and naturalism further in contemporary philosophy. Well, perhaps it doesn’t matter that much. However, Margolis himself says that the “Darwinian effect”, that is, “the import of the bare evolutionary continuum of the animal and human”, yields the “single most important philosophical challenge to Western philosophy since the appearance of Kant’s first Critique” (Margolis 2014b, 5). Insofar as it is pragmatism, especially John Dewey’s naturalistic pragmatism, that takes seriously Darwin’s influence on philosophy, and insofar as pragmatism can thus be seen as a critical synthesis or fusion of Darwinism and Kantianism (cf. Pihlström 2003a), it does seem to matter to our story about how this happens, and how indeed it is possible, whether we get Kant right or not. I am certainly not making any interpretive claims about Kant (or other historical classics) here; what I want to insist on is a certain way of integrating Kantian transcendental idealism into the story about the importance and relevance of pragmatism to the contemporary debate on realism and idealism. 2

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appreciate Margolis’s Hegelian and Peircean project of “pragmatizing” and historicizing Kant, I remained (and still remain) slightly suspicious of his criticism that Kant does not introduce “a working distinction between appearances and the objects they are appearances of” (Margolis 2012a, 19). A “one world” Kantian response to this charge is obviously that appearances are appearances of things in themselves; these are not two different classes of objects (as more traditional “two worlds” interpretations maintain) but, rather, the “same” objects considered from two different perspectives, or articulated through two different types of considerations.4 Moreover, I argued in the same essay that Margolis does not pay due attention to the distinction between the quite different empirical and transcendental ways in which, say, space and time can be said to be “in us”. He partly relies on P.F. Strawson’s (1966) relatively conventional interpretation which has been heavily criticized by “one world” Kantians. Margolis thus claims repeatedly that Kant’s transcendental project is incoherent from the very start, but he never (as far as I can see) explains in any great detail, or in full communication with relevant scholarship, why this is so. This is a serious setback in his otherwise admirable treatment of the realism issue (and we will come back to this matter in due course). Pace Margolis, the story of the emergence of pragmatism could, it seems to me, be told by starting from Kant – and perhaps at least partly skipping Hegel – just as it can be told (and is generally compellingly told by Margolis) by beginning from Hegel’s historicization of Kant. Such a story, even when it remains more Kantian than Hegelian, may also join Margolis’s story in rejecting any “principled disjunction between the empirical and the transcendental”.5 In brief, I still remain somewhat unconvinced by Margolis’s idea that only Hegel, rather than Kant, offers a sustainable version of the inseparability of realism and Idealism. Kant rejects such an exclusive disjunction as firmly as Hegel. I further argued, in the same paper, that when Margolis writes that Peircean “Idealism” is “construed ‘epistemologically’ (in the constructivist way) rather than  See, e.g., Allison 2004 [1983]. I am not saying that Allison is right about Kant, but for a pragmatist Kantian, his reading is helpful and makes it easier to render transcendental idealism compatible with pragmatism. Whether this is in the end a pragmatic virtue of one’s reading of Kant cannot be assessed here. 5  This is what I try to do in Pihlström 2003a. Margolis briefly comments on my effort in his previous book, Pragmatism’s Advantage (Margolis 2010), especially 110–111; see also Margolis 2017. Cf. Margolis 2014b, 6: “[…] there is, then, no principled difference to be made out between ‘transcendental’ discovery and broadly ‘empirical’ conjecture”. From this, however, I would not infer, as Margolis does, that transcendental “demands” would no longer play any “‘constitutive’ role vis-à-vis the cognizable world” (ibid.) but only that they may continue to play that role in a naturalized and pragmatized form. Similarly, I would be happy to reinterpret Kant’s “transcendental dualism regarding autonomy and causality” (ibid., 7) as a compatibilist entanglement: autonomy is part of human nature, seen through Kantian-Darwinian double spectacles. Note, furthermore, that even though I have frequently defended something I like to call “transcendental pragmatism”, this approach significantly differs from the much better-known views of philosophers like Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, who, according to Margolis, are “the final regressive advocates of Kantian fixities among the Frankfurt school” (ibid., 22). 4

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‘metaphysically’ (disjunctively)” and is thus restricted to “our constructed picture” of reality rather than the “actual ‘constitution’ of reality itself” (ibid., 91), one might ask whether he isn’t himself resorting to new versions of dichotomies or disjunctions he wants to set aside. Instead of the realism vs. Idealism dichotomy (which, reasonably, he wants to move beyond), we now have (still) the one between metaphysics and epistemology, and also the corresponding one between our picture of reality and reality in itself. Note that these dichotomies – or, to be fair, more absolute versions of them – are standardly used in the kind of mainstream analytic philosophy that Margolis wisely wants to leave behind. In my view, all these dualisms should be critically examined in terms of the pragmatic method and thereby aufgehoben as different versions of the age-old subjective vs. objective disjunction to be given up (at least in its conventional forms) in any viable post-Kantian (and postHegelian) pragmatism.6 In his “Replies”, Margolis reacts to my requirement of a “fuller statement of [his] treatment of realism and idealism” (Margolis 2012b, 202) as follows: He [Pihlström] clearly sees that I reject what Kant rejects, what Kant calls ‘transcendental realism’, as well as what Putnam calls ‘metaphysical realism’, all the while I favor a constructivist form of realism that “accepts the idea that there is… a reality independent of us,” viewed solely from human perspectives. Pihlström is cautiously open to my preferring Hegel to Kant, though I believe he takes me to have misread Kant’s resources in the first Critique: he signals (so it seems) that I might have secured my own claims within the bounds of Kant’s vision. (On my view, Kant’s transcendental idealism ultimately requires what he names transcendental realism.) […] I, however, am quite persuaded that Kant, committed to his ‘transcendental idealism’, found it impossible to pass from subjective (or mental) appearings to empirically real things without investing (fatally, I would say) in some form of ‘transcendental realism’, which was surely a doctrine he strenuously opposed. (Ibid.)

He then goes on to explain, once more, why this is so. Kant is still committed, according to Margolis, to a dualism between the subjective and the objective and cannot overcome it remaining on “this side” of the divide (ibid.). He repeatedly

 Yet, my proposed re-entanglement of the metaphysical and the epistemological at the transcendental level – the level at which constructivism provides a framework for any viable realism – must somehow also accommodate the (re-)entanglement of the transcendental and the empirical. Here I see the real challenge for the current pragmatist who wishes to develop further the insights of naturalized transcendental philosophy and apply them to the realism debate. However that challenge can be met, the pragmatist can certainly agree with Margolis’s “précis”: “[W]e must, as realists, replace representationalism with some form of constructivism; […] we must, again as realists, avoid characterizing reality as itself constructed […] and hold instead that what we construct are only conceptual ‘pictures’ of what we take the real world to be […]; and […] we must acknowledge that the realism thus achieved is itself cognitively dependent on, and embedded in, our constructivist interventions.” (Margolis 2012a, 55.) This can, I think, be offered as a useful characterization of the program of pragmatic realism, insofar as we are able to give up Margolis’s in my view too sharp distinction between (the construction of) reality itself and our pictures of it. When developed in Margolis’s way, pragmatic (constructivist) realism is reflexively conscious of its own status as a human pragmatic posit rather than an imagined God’s-Eye View picture of how things absolutely are. 6

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argues that transcendental idealism presupposes metaphysical necessities and invariants in a manner unacceptable to pragmatists (cf., e.g., Margolis 2003a, 14). The same theme continues in some of Margolis’s more recent essays.7 He maintains that “Kant’s constructivism yields an intractable paradox regarding our cognitive access to the intelligible world, that is in principle completely relieved (if not entirely resolved) by restricting the constructivist aspects of human intervention to whatever falls out as a consequence of the artifactual emergence of the functional self itself” (Margolis 2014a, 5–6). Now, a naturalized transcendental philosophy would be happy with this: it is indeed the emerging functionality of the human self, in its various linguistic and other symbolic and representational (and therefore inescapably normative) articulations, that “constructs” the categorizations of reality we are able to use for our purposes (themselves constructed through the same historical processes).8 Moreover, the phrase “intelligible world” is problematic here, because Kant himself denies that we have any cognitive access to the “intelligible world” (mundus intelligibilis), as our cognition is not purely intellectual (i.e., we human beings do not possess the capacity of intellectual intuition) but also sensible. Kant, as much as Darwin and the pragmatists, is concerned with what human beings, given the kind of beings they (we) are, are capable of; philosophical anthropology, hence, is at the heart of the realism issue itself – and this, moreover, is in my view a fundamental unifying feature between Kantian and pragmatist approaches to realism and idealism. The pragmatist, in any case, can fully endorse Margolis’s view that an “artifactualist” picture of the self can overcome what he regards as “Kantian dualisms” (if there really are any such pernicious dualisms in Kant) and that a kind of artifactuality characterizes both normativity and the self (ibid., 8–9).9 However, Margolis continues: Kant seems, effectively, to have equated the intended realism of the noumenal world (a completely vacuous, even incoherent conjecture) with the realism of a “subject-ively” (but not solipsistically) “constructed” world that, according to Kant’s own lights, is the “only world” we could possibly know (a completely self-defeating posit […]). What Kant requires (I suggest) is the notion of an “independent world” (neither noumenal nor confined to “subject-­ive” construction) that we may discern (though we deem it to be ontologically independent of human cognition). But, of course, to concede this would already obviate the entire labor of Kant’s “transcendental idealism.” (Ibid., 6.)  Margolis 2014a and 2014b. He presented early versions of both papers at the conference, Metaphysics of Culture, which was organized in honor of his philosophy at the University of Helsinki in May, 2013. See Grube and Sinclair 2015. 8  I will briefly return to the notion of emergence below. Moreover, note that my disagreement with Margolis is obviously dramatically softened, as he points out that he has no interest in either attacking or defending “‘transcendental’ variants that abandon apriorism – or effectively concede (say, along C.I. Lewis’s lines) that the a priori may simply be an a posteriori posit” (Margolis 2014a, 23); this, clearly, is exactly what my version of naturalized transcendental philosophy seeks to do (though perhaps dropping the word “simply”). 9  This is compatible with admitting that there may be vestiges in Kant of what Margolis (2002, 38) regards as Kant’s “Cartesian” representationalism. For a different critical discussion of Margolis’s own vestiges of Kantianism, focusing on Husserlian transcendental phenomenology rather than Kantianism per se, see Hartimo 2015. 7

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I will later turn to Margolis’s own earlier writings in order to suggest that there are, within his philosophy, resources to develop a (quasi-)Kantian softly transcendental approach to realism as well as other “second-order” legitimation questions of philosophy. This leads to a version of transcendental idealism, but without pernicious dualisms, unpragmatic apriorisms, or illegitimate commitments to the transcendent or the noumenal. Note also that it is a bit hard to understand why, and how, Kant’s transcendental idealism should, or even could, be based on transcendental realism, as Margolis maintains. Aren’t these two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive alternatives, as Allison (2004 [1983]), among others, has argued? This leads to the traditional opposition between Strawson’s (1966) and Allison’s interpretations of transcendental idealism all over again: while the former found the “metaphysics of transcendental idealism” problematic or incoherent – and is joined by Margolis who maintains that transcendental idealism presupposes transcendental realism – the latter regards transcendental idealism as “merely methodological”, albeit (contra, say, Strawson) necessary for the Kantian system as a whole. For the pragmatist Kantian, as I have argued on a number of occasions, the truth lies in the middle (whether or not this accurately captures Kant’s own position): the epistemological or methodological, on the one side, and the metaphysical or ontological, on the other side, are themselves deeply entangled here. This inseparability of the epistemological and the ontological in the formulation of pragmatism and transcendental idealism is in fact something that Margolis is explicitly opposed to in my previous attempts to articulate a pragmatist version of transcendental idealism (see Margolis 2010, 110–111). He says I am going too far here. I am not sure whether a fundamental disagreement like this can be argumentatively settled. It is in the end related to the stronger point I would like to make (but cannot argue here) about not only the epistemological but also the ethical grounds of ontological inquiry – in pragmatism and more generally (cf. Pihlström 2009). It also seems to me that this mild dispute may be related to Margolis’s and my own different preferences regarding the old pragmatists: while Peirce and Dewey are clearly the two key pragmatist classics for Margolis  – the former because of his uniquely insightful (re-)entangling of realism and Idealism, the latter because of his Darwinization of Hegel – for me James is, clearly, number one.10 However, I will not dwell on these differences but will try to move forward in our dialogue (a dialogue that, sadly, came to an end with Margolis’s death in 2021).

 For the record, it might be added that for the same reason, it seems to me that Margolis does not pay sufficient attention to the central role played by the philosophy of religion in classical pragmatism. It is, of course, most prominent in James. I discuss pragmatist philosophy of religion in some more detail, also in relation to the realism vs. idealism issue, in Pihlström 2013 and Pihlström 2020a, in particular. 10

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3 Conflicting Versions of Pragmatic Realism Let me therefore continue the exchange and critically reintroduce Margolis’s specific contribution to the debates over realism, idealism, and pragmatism by contrasting his pragmatic realism and idealism with a position recently defended by another major contemporary pragmatist and realist, namely, Philip Kitcher. I will do this by briefly addressing Kitcher’s argument in his book, Preludes to Pragmatism (2012). Kitcher’s defense of realism begins from what he (with reference to Arthur Fine’s notorious “Natural Ontological Attitude”) calls the “Natural Epistemological Attitude” (NEA): we form action-guiding representations of the world around us; that is, the world “puts human beings into states that bear content” (ibid., 72), and while we often represent things accurately, we also occasionally misrepresent them. By “double extrapolation”, what Kitcher labels “real realism” follows from this commonsensical point of departure as soon as we acknowledge that we can accurately represent things far removed from everyday observation and that we can thus meaningfully also speak of “a world of objects independent of all subjects” (ibid., 74). It is from these relatively simple beginnings that Kitcher launches a detailed argumentation countering the semantic and epistemological worries of both empiricist and constructivist antirealists. He argues that the accuracy of our representations is an objective matter in the sense that an external observer could in principle observe that a subject’s representational relations to an object either obtain or fail to obtain independently of that subject, and this can be generalized – or extrapolated – to situations in which there is no observer present. Kitcher’s “Galilean” extrapolation argument says, in brief, that “our purchase of the idea that some objects are independent of some of us (although observed by others) suffices to make intelligible the thought that some objects are independent of all of us, that they would have existed even if there had been no humans (or other sapient creatures), even though, had that been so, there would have been no observation of them or thought about them” (ibid., 97).11 Kitcher’s pragmatism, however, crucially supplements his realism as he accepts the constructivist’s view that relations of reference obtain “in virtue of what speakers (writers, cartographers, thinkers [i.e., anyone using representations]) do” (ibid., 98). This, however, need not be construed antirealistically. The realist may insist, against straightforward constructivism, that  At this point Kitcher’s critic (such as, possibly, Margolis?) might argue that while this may suffice to make “intelligible” the realistic thought about the independence of some objects from all of us, it is another matter whether this thought is rendered more plausible than its denial by this argument – or whether the intended contrast between realism and antirealism really makes sense. A critic of (strong) realism like Hilary Putnam would not oppose the idea that in any relevant sense of “independence”, some objects (e.g., stars) are independent of us all and would have existed even if there had never been humans; see, e.g., Putnam’s exchange with Michael Devitt in Baghramian 2013. Moreover, this independence is something that we can intelligibly commit ourselves to only given that we are indeed here to make such a commitment; Kitcher’s critic could maintain that in a world without humans it would make no sense to say that the world is independent of subjects. The pragmatic realist with a constructivist (Kantian) orientation could, hence, still argue that the realist’s “independence” is itself humanly constructed. 11

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patterns of causal relations among objects, representations, and human behavior constitute sign–object connections. Accordingly, the relations of reference are independent of observers. This, however, reinvokes the debate between, for example, Putnam and his metaphysically-­realistic critics. Putnam argued in the 1980s against philosophers like David Lewis and Michael Devitt that the causal structure of the world (as postulated by the “metaphysical realist”) cannot by itself single out any referential or representational relations; to believe it does would be to subscribe to something like “medieval essentialism” (cf. Putnam 1990). Kitcher here takes the side of Putnam’s realistic critics but wants to do this in a pragmatic and metaphysically minimalistic manner. Margolis, in contrast, seeks to transcend the entire controversy, but is actually closer to Putnam – and, hence, idealism (perhaps against his own will, it seems). While being sympathetic to causal accounts of reference, Kitcher admits (with Putnam) that a certain kind of interest-relativity is at work in the notion of causation itself. In our causal talk, “we do make an interest-relative selection from the total succession of states that make up complete causal chains” (Kitcher 2012, 101). Here, however, the Galilean strategy, showing “how real realism begins at home, and how it never ventures into the metaphysical never-never-lands to which antirealists are so keen to banish their opponents” (ibid., 105), can again be employed: Even though our notion of reference gains its initial application in circumstances in which an observer is explaining the behavior of a subject, we should not conclude that the notion applies only to situations when there is an observer present. For, given the observer’s interests, there is a particular set of relationships that constitute reference and there is no reason for thinking that the obtaining of those relationships depends on the presence of the observer. (Ibid., 101.)

The basic claim seems to be that the constructivist cannot block the realist’s appeal to the independence of causal relations constitutive of reference by invoking the idea of the interest-dependence of causation. It is right here that pragmatic realism accommodates both independence and interest-relativity. While the constructivist may try to accuse the realist of assuming a heavy metaphysics of essences or “mysterious noumena” (which comes close to Margolis’s occasional criticisms of various versions of metaphysical fixities), the “real realist’s” pragmatic response is that what we represent are no such metaphysical entities but “the things with which we interact all the time” (ibid., 103). For the realist, there is “no causally relevant difference” between situations in which properties of things can be observed and situations in which they cannot. Just as I would like to defend Kant against Margolis, I am not entirely convinced that Kitcher succeeds in refuting Kantian-inspired transcendental arguments against (metaphysical, transcendental) realism and in favor of a certain kind of (transcendental) idealism – that is, arguments that we may attribute, possibly, to Kant himself and to some post-Kantian philosophers, including arguably Wittgenstein and even

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the pragmatists (e.g., Putnam).12 When Kitcher argues (like Margolis?) that there is no helpful distinction to be made between objects as experienced and objects in themselves (e.g., ibid., 102), he employs the Kantian-sounding distinction between appearances and things in themselves in a non-transcendental manner. A transcendental employment of this distinction would already involve transcendental idealism.13 When Kitcher maintains, along his Galilean line of thought, that there is no causally relevant difference between situations in which observers are present and those in which there are no observers, from the Kantian point of view he illegitimately helps himself to the category of causality as if it were available independently of the human cognitive capacity and applicable to the world in itself. The Kantian Dinge an sich selbst are individuated neither as objects nor as causal relations; the notions of objectivity and causality only apply to appearances. Similar problems in my view trouble Margolis’s project, albeit from an opposite direction, so to speak. Kitcher overemphasizes metaphysical independence at the cost of the historicized constructive activity of subjectivity, while Margolis overemphasizes the latter at the cost of transcendentality. In any event, Kitcher is correct to distinguish his view from Putnam’s internal and metaphysical realisms. His real realism, again like Margolis’s version of pragmatic realism, is something different. It agrees with pragmatic pluralism and what Putnam calls conceptual relativity in maintaining that the divisions we make in nature reflect our purposes – and here there is certainly a Kantian ring to it. However, again, this does not sacrifice realism: “Once we adopt a language, then some of the sentences in that language will be true in virtue of the referential relations between constituent terms and entities that are independent of us. The adoption itself, however, is guided not only by nature but by what is convenient and useful for us in describing nature.” (Ibid., 108–109.) Margolis would presumably endorse this combination of realism and linguistic or conceptual relativity, championing a sophisticated version of relativism (see especially Margolis 1991). Furthermore, Kitcher also offers us a plausible rearticulation of James’s pragmatist arguments in the context of contemporary debates, integrating pluralism and constructivism (as well as the view that truth “happens” to an idea) with scientific realism. The realism again comes into the picture when we admit that, although the world that is independent of us is not “pre-divided into privileged objects and kinds of objects” (Kitcher 2012, 136) and the divisions depend on our interests, nevertheless “given particular capacities and particular interests, some ways of dividing up independent reality work better than others” (ibid., 137). But why? What is – and this is, obviously, a question that Margolis could also ask – “independent reality”, after all? Does it, prior to any human categorization, possess some structure, and if so, is that fundamental ontological structure

 Only Kantians would be happy to call this argumentation “transcendental”, though. See, however, Chaps. 4 and 6. 13  See again Allison 2004 [1983], especially chapters 1–2. 12

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pre-­organized independently of our interests? Putnam, for example, might find Kitcher’s argument a version of the “Cookie Cutter Metaphor” he criticized in the late 1980s and early 1990s (see, again, Putnam 1990). The world is compared to “dough” from which we cut “cookies” by using different conceptual “cutters”. But then the dough itself must already have some structure. Margolis avoids this problem by rejecting any humanly accessible yet ahistorical and construction-­ independent structure. But then he needs something like the constitutive activity of the transcendental subject upon which any historical process of structuration depends. Kitcher perceptively notes that pragmatists need to take for granted a language identifying capacities and interests when stating their thesis about the interest-­ relativity of the languages used for identifying objects relevant to us. That language will then “invite a reiteration of pragmatist pluralism” (Kitcher 2012, 138). There is an infinitely deep reflexivity in pragmatism: “Pragmatic pluralism invites us to take a stand by committing ourselves to a particular way of speaking, while recognizing that the uses of that language to recognize and appraise other linguistic choices could legitimately give rise to a parallel scrutiny and appraisal of the commitments that have been presupposed” (ibid., 138). This, however, also applies to our talk about “independence”. It is a human way of speaking, presupposing a language used to categorize the world as categorization-independent. We may view Margolis’s arguments as an extended attempt to lead us to appreciate this point. There is no language-neutral way to any insights about reality, including the reality of human language(s) and their uses in our attempts to speak about language-independence. It is right here that we should re-emphasize Margolis’s sophisticated view of realism itself as a human posit. Far from being a metaphysical feature of mind- and discourse-independent reality an sich, realism is itself (along with language, discursivity, normativity, rationality, agency, and cognition, among other things) one of the “artifactualities” Margolis posits (Margolis 2014a, 29). This is one of Margolis’s crucial advantages in comparison to many contemporary realists, who somehow still seem to hold on to a metaphysical conviction about realism itself being somehow the world’s “own” account of itself. It is also what brings Margolis closely in touch with the Rescherian position regarding realism we explored in Chap. 4: realism itself, far from granting us an access to a non-human, metaphysically independent world, is itself a human commitment made within (and transcendentally needed) within our practices. So how does Margolis deal with the realistic “independent world” that he still in some (redefined) sense needs? He says, among other things, that the independent world is “neither Kant’s noumenal world nor any constructed (would-be realist) world: it answers to what we conjecture, constructively, is our best ‘picture’ of the world. Its realist standing depends on our epistemology […].” (Ibid., 6.) It is to this entanglement of epistemology and ontology at the core of the constructivist reconceptualization of realism – an entanglement not very far from the kind of pragmatic realism-cum-idealism that we in the previous chapter saw Rescher advocate – that we now need to (re)turn, also drawing help from some of Margolis’s earlier pronouncements.

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4 Constructivism: Transcendental Idealism by Other Means Margolis has argued for decades that ontological and epistemological questions are inseparable in the pragmatist vindication of (historicized, constructivist) realism. He repeatedly characterizes realism as the view that there is a cognitively accessible yet mind- and inquiry-independent world (Margolis 1986a, 111, 215–216), arguing that realism and “robust relativism” are reconcilable (Margolis 1986a, 1991). The general idea is that we must view reality through our historically and culturally conditioned, hence practice-laden, epistemic perspectives; there is no God’s Eye View available, no epistemic neutrality to be achieved in metaphysics. The world is not transparent, or describable in abstraction from our constantly developing local perspectives. Given this entanglement of reality and language, Margolis’s ideas seem to lead, pace his own self-understanding, to a fruitful combination of pragmatism and transcendental philosophy. For him, the world is always already humanly “constructed” and our understanding of it is “historied”; what we are dealing with (and living in) is a Kantian-like “symbiotized” world in which the subject and object are mutually dependent on each other, never to be fully separated. In this context, Margolis has also interestingly discussed – arguably somewhat more carefully than other neopragmatists, including Putnam and Kitcher – a more specific case, Peirce’s scholastic realism. He has tried to show that Peirce’s insistence on realism of generality can be appreciated from a considerably less realistic (or at least less metaphysically-realistic) and more historicist point of view than Peirce’s own. He suggests that a realism that preserves the Peircean (triadic) “resemblance” between human thought and the structure of the “intelligible reality”14 is possible only on a constructivist and historicist basis, connected with a Kantian-­ inspired symbiosis of “subject” and “object”: The world is intelligible because its structure is constituted [...] through the very process of our experiencing the world. Things share real generals in the symbiotized world; but there are no antecedent generals formed in the world, separated from human experience, that experienced things are discovered to share. (Margolis 1993b, 323.) The ancient quarrel about universals is a great confusion; we need no more than “real generals” to secure objectivity. But then, “real generals” have no criterial function either; they are no more than a (nominalized) shadow thrown by objective discourse. That is, if we admit objective truth-claims, then predication must have a realist function. In that sense (alone), there are “real generals.” But there are none that can be antecedently discerned, in virtue of which objectivity may be conferred. [Real generals] are implicated in the lebensformlich viability of natural-language discourse. (Margolis 1995, 128.)

Realism of generality can, and should, then, be regarded as inseparable from, or inherent in, our thinking, language-use, and forms of life (Margolis 1993b,

14

 See, however, the critical remarks on this concept above.

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325–326).15 In short, any realism that is not subordinated to historicist constructivism is, according to Margolis, hopeless, if one does not believe in the possibility of a Platonic or Aristotelian “first philosophy”. Our social, open-ended, thoroughly historicized practice of language-use – i.e., our practice of applying general predicates in describing our world – must be the (non-foundational) ground of our realism of generality. Realism can only be grounded in such predicative practices, which are inevitably in flux, historically changing.16 More generally, Margolis, as a pragmatist, seeks to avoid the strong (“robust”, “metaphysical”) realism favored by many contemporary realists and “naturalizers” of philosophy. Throughout his writings, he sets against each other two quite different forms of realism: the first assumes a “freestanding priority” of the changeless over the changing or historical, whereas the second, Margolis’s own pragmatic, constructive, and historicist option, finds any such prior, first-philosophical claim about what reality is apart from what we take ourselves to know or to believe to be true as arbitrary, thereby questioning the alleged necessity of maintaining that reality must be changeless and that change itself is intelligible only in terms of the changeless. Naturally, the defense of the second kind of realism is closely related to Margolis’s numerous explorations of the historicity of thought and of what he calls the doctrine of the “flux” (cf. Margolis 1993a, 1995, 2000b, 2003b). Although Margolis does not subscribe to any Kantian transcendentalism (as has become clear above), it is again worth noting that he should be classified as one of the key contemporary naturalizers and historicizers of Kantianism. Like Kant, he certainly turns toward the conditions for the possibility of our being able to cognize the world, albeit historically developing ones. This is so even though he does not want to explicitly speak about transcendental conditions or arguments. Moreover, he teaches us an important lesson about the unavoidability of normative, second order questions of legitimation regarding realism and the way in which pragmatism, too, is intimately connected with the Kantian aspiration of avoiding both robust realism (or what he calls objectivism) and skepticism (see also Margolis 1999).17  See also Margolis 2000c, focusing on Husserlian phenomenology rather than Peircean realism.  It is, again, beyond the scope of this presentation to examine any specific problems in Margolis’s historicist and relativist views. Margolis’s constructivist modification of Peirce’s realism has raised some controversy (which I discuss, referring to Carl Hausman and Douglas Anderson, among others, in Pihlström 2009, chapter 6; cf. Anderson and Hausman 2012). 17  Let me, however, note here that even though I sympathize with most of the things Margolis says about pragmatic realism, historicity, etc., I have some doubts about his at least occasional ontological intolerance toward entities such as universals, propositions, facts, meanings, and thoughts. He seems to regard them as fictions, claiming that these things do not exist. An alternative pragmatic strategy would be to dispense with the univocality of “exist(ence)” and admit that many different kinds of things exist, or are real, in quite different ways, depending on the pragmatic, constructed, historically evolving frameworks within which we regard them as existent. This, indeed, is what Margolis’s reconstruction of Peirce’s realism should, in my view, amount to. It should be noted, furthermore, that Margolis is not alone in his historicist, constructivist doctrine of generality. Tom Rockmore distinguishes, in a related manner, between ahistorical (Platonic) essences or universals and general ideas or “generals”, by which he means “ideas, or concepts, which are not beyond time and place but that derive their cognitive utility from their temporary acceptance at a given time and 15 16

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Margolis has also emphasized the difference between the rather trivial denial of “a fixed, necessary and sufficient, transparent, certain, or presentational access that human cognizers have to the world, reality, Being, or the like” and the almost equally trivial, albeit actively forward-looking, recognition of there being “a reasonable, reliable, functioning, operative sense in which human cognizers find their way around the world” (Margolis 1994a). It is this distinction that according to Margolis gives us a clue to appreciating some major differences between Jacques Derrida and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein. In postulating an “‘originary’ origin” and rightly denying that we could ever discover it, Derrida (possibly deliberately) confuses “the false realism of a completely transparent metaphysics with the mundane realism of actually functioning societies which it would be merely mad to deny” (ibid., 176). Both Derrida and Wittgenstein reject “transparent realism”, but the latter maintains a “pragmatized realism” (ibid., 178). As has become clear, Margolis has throughout his career sought to articulate a form of realism taking seriously not only pragmatism and idealism but also constructivism. This theme figures strongly in, e.g., a series of books he published about two decades ago (cf. Margolis 2002, 2003a). I will now argue that it is only by integrating Margolis’s constructivism into a (pragmatically naturalized) transcendental idealism that we have a real alternative to a more mainstream pragmatic realism such as Kitcher’s. While maintaining that realism must “take a constructivist form”, Margolis criticizes some other pragmatists and constructivists for maintaining that we must still distinguish between the epistemic and the ontic: “the inseparability of the subjective and the objective applies to the epistemic and not to the ontic aspects of realism” (Margolis 2002, 15).18 For the (pragmatic) transcendental realist, the ontological (rather than the merely “ontic”) will be inevitably epistemic precisely because ontology itself is a transcendental matter. However, we should not, pace Margolis’s repeated insistence on our not constructing the actual world, understand the pragmatist metaphor of the mind or language (or, more generally, human practices) as “organizing” the world in a “constituting (‘idealist’) way” (ibid., 17) as (merely) ontic but as (genuinely) ontological. That is, I fear that Margolis himself ultimately applies to a non-constructivist dichotomy between the epistemological and the ontological. Constructivism, according to Margolis, is not idealism (see also, e.g., ibid., 39); however, place” and that are, hence, “mutable, impermanent, malleable, alterable”, “come into being and pass away”. Such historicized generals “emerge from, and remain relative to, the sociohistorical context”. (Rockmore 2000, 54–55, 57–59.) I want to leave to dedicated Peirce scholars the quarrells regarding how close Peirce’s actual position (at different phases of his philosophical development) may have been to the view Margolis proposes. In any event, as Margolis’s reference to the “Kantian-like” symbiosis of subject and object suggests, the critique of metaphysical realism has been an important theme in the Kantian tradition of transcendental philosophy; indeed, the rejection of such realism is the key Kantian theme at the background of the pragmatist tradition. 18  The specific target of Margolis’s (2002) criticism in this context is Putnam’s internal realism. See also, e.g., Margolis 1986a, 1991, and 1993a for his earlier criticisms focusing on Putnam’s notion of truth as an epistemic Grenzbegriff. (See also Margolis 2002, 143.)

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5  “Languaged” World, “Worlded” Language: On Margolis’s Pragmatic Integration… Constructivism means at the very least that questions of knowledge, objectivity, truth, confirmation, and legitimation are constructed in accordance with our interpretive conceptual schemes – the interpretive qualification of the indissoluble relationship between cognizer and cognized; and that, though we do not construct the actual world, what we posit (constructively) as the independent world is epistemically dependent on our mediating conceptual schemes. (Ibid., 22.)19

This constructivism, I take it, is, according to the pragmatist Kantian, just transcendental idealism by other means, or perhaps only in other words. The transcendental idealist in this sense is happy to join Margolis in maintaining that “the objectivity of our beliefs and claims about the world is itself a constructive posit that we impose holistically and without privilege of any kind” (ibid., 44). The “independent-world-­ as-it-is-known-(and-knowable)-to-us” is again something we construct (ibid., 45).20 Margolis makes the relevant notion of construction somewhat clearer  by saying (again in the context of redefining constructivism, coming close to the 2002 pronouncements) that whatever is constructed as ontically independent of human inquiries is epistemically dependent (Margolis 2003a, 51). But I fail to see why this is not equivalent to the Kantian synthesis of empirical (factual) independence and transcendental (epistemologico-ontological) dependence. I see no reason why the transcendental idealist (unlike some other type of idealist) would have to maintain that the world is “ontically dependent” on us (pace ibid., 54). I would, rather, drop the category of the “ontic” altogether as a mere placeholder for something that is always already constructed in a historical, value-dependent, and practice-embedded way – albeit often constructed as independent. Margolis’s (ibid., 13–14) claim that transcendental idealism “confuses matters by conjoining constructivism and idealism” and cannot be reconstructed in naturalistic terms is, in my view, refutable by his own words. It is precisely by following Margolis up to the point of regarding realism itself as a human posit that we may naturalize transcendental idealism into a constructivist pragmatic realism. I agree that we need not maintain that “reality is constructed by the human mind” by maintaining that we construct “what we take to be independently real” (ibid., 100) – to do so would precisely be to conflate empirical with transcendental constitution – but  See also Margolis 2002, 43, and 2003a, 89. In a somewhat more detailed way, Margolis (ibid., 41) concludes: “(1) every viable realism must be a constructivism (or a constructive realism), in the sense that there can be no principled disjunction between epistemological and metaphysical questions, no neutral analysis of the disjunctive contributions to our science drawn from cognizing subjects and cognized objects; (2) the admission of (1) precludes all necessities de re and de cogitatione; (3) the admission of (1) and (2) disallows any principled disjunction between realism and idealism, as these are defined in the Cartesian tradition […]”. I wonder why the epistemology– metaphysics entanglement is acceptable while the world’s “ontic” construction by us is still denied. In short, I am not convinced we need the category of the (merely) “ontic” at all, if we endorse Margolis’s position. Furthermore, see Margolis’s critique of Putnam’s pragmatic pluralism as insufficiently epistemic (ibid., 105–106; see also Margolis 2003a, 46-48). 20  In a slightly different (Deweyan) context, Margolis (2002, 128) speaks about the constitution and reconstitution of objects and situations. I would again reinterpret this as a process of transcendental constitution in which the practices of resolving (Deweyan) problematic situations play a transcendental role. 19

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we can still say that the independent world in the realist’s sense is itself, like realism as our interpretation of it, a human epistemic-ontological transcendental construct.

5 Emergence As the frequent references to historicity and temporality suggest, the notions of evolution and emergence are central to Margolis’s pragmatism, constructivism, and pragmatic realism (see also Chap. 7 below). It should be obvious that his version of realism-cum-idealism (or pragmatism) cannot in the end be separated from his realistic account of emergence and cultural entities. There is a complexly arranged picture of the emergence and embodiment of cultural entities (such as artworks, but also persons and, presumably, values) in Margolis’s earlier (Margolis 1978, 1980, 1984) as well as more recent work (Margolis 1995, 2002, 2003a). According to Margolis, cultural entities are embodied yet autonomous “tokens-of-types”. They need a material basis, but they cannot be adequately accounted for in any naturalized theory restricted to that basis. “Naturalizing” strategies, according to Margolis, desperately fail as theories of culture – and as theories of the mind.21 We should be able to ascribe to cultural entities a causally relevant (and thus also explanatorily relevant) role – in this sense, they must be seen as autonomous, without sacrificing the materialist demand for a material basis of embodiment (see Margolis 1984, 14). Furthermore, we should view the human self itself  – the subject of world-­ structuring  – as an historically emerging perspective of constructive world-engagement. Indeed, I already pointed out above that philosophical anthropology is crucial for the realism issue. Characterizing human persons and other cultural formations, such as works of art, as emergent, embodied tokens-of-types, neither identical to nor reducible to their material composition, Margolis argues that our ontology of cultural entities ought to recognize these entities as real, while being compatible with materialism and allowing cultural entities to enter into causal relations and to support causal explanations (ibid.). He thus favors a form of “downward causation” as a key element of his pragmatic emergentism. Instead of reviewing his discussions of the concept in detail, I just quote from one of his numerous publications: By an emergent order of reality [...] I mean any array of empirical phenomena that (i) cannot be described or explained in terms of the descriptive and explanatory concepts deemed adequate for whatever more basic level or order of nature or reality the order or level in question is said to have emerged from, and (ii) is causally implicated and cognitively acces-

 See especially Margolis 2003a for a devastating critique of scientistic assumptions in twentieth century American philosophy. For a partly Margolis-inspired pragmatist attempt to develop a “cultural naturalist” philosophical anthropology in the spirit of Dewey and Mead, also utilizing the concept of emergence, see Dreon 2022 (discussed in Chap. 1 above). 21

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5  “Languaged” World, “Worlded” Language: On Margolis’s Pragmatic Integration… sible in the same “world” in which the putatively more basic order or level is identified. (Margolis 1995, 257; original emphases)22

In this sense, human cultural constructions, such as normativity and values, can be said to constitute, or belong to, an “emergent order of reality” insofar as they cannot be fully accounted for in terms of merely factual concepts at a “more basic” level, even though they are fully natural – entangled with natural facts – in the sense of belonging to the “same world” with the latter.23 Margolis emphasizes the link between realism and the emergence of the self in a particularly helpful manner in relation to Robert Brandom’s and Richard Rorty’s in his view highly problematic versions of neopragmatism that are both indebted to Wilfrid Sellars’s ideas (see also Chap. 3 above): The fatal weakness in Sellars’s argument – very possibly in Rorty’s (and, it may be added, in Robert Brandom’s “Rortyan” treatment of Sellars) – lies with the metaphysical standing of language itself: it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to treat selves eliminatively (as Sellars does) and yet allow the continued objective standing of truth (and language) in the scientific realist’s sense. You cannot find in Rorty or Sellars [or, we may add, Brandom] any explanation of how to admit language without admitting the realist standing of mind. (Margolis 2002, 61.)

While his criticism of Brandom here remains implicit, hidden under the more explicit criticism of Rorty and Sellars (see also, e.g., Margolis 2000a), Margolis makes a very important point: the pragmatist ought to be a (pragmatic) realist about the various normative structures, including language and the mind (or the self), which s/he anti-reductionistically acknowledges. In Margolis’s preferred terms, the emergence of cultural entities (including language), and hence the emergence of human world-construction, should be genuinely acknowledged – and human selves should also be seen as cultural products in this ontological sense, yet fully real, contra the kind of eliminativism we find in the work of Brandom’s and Rorty’s quasi-pragmatist hero, Sellars.24 This adds a further reason for seeking (for instance) a pragmatist account of emergence, or alternatively, an emergentist reconceptualization of pragmatism (more specifically, of pragmatic realism about irreducible cultural entities we need to commit ourselves to ontologically). Moreover – and here I  See also, e.g., Margolis 1995, 219.  Margolis’s position, while giving us an idea of what a pragmatically understood concept of emergence may look like, is by no means the first pragmatist elaboration on the idea of emergence; on the other hand, emergence theories have never been part of the mainstream orientations of pragmatism, nor vice versa (see, e.g., El-Hani and Pihlström 2002). I have argued elsewhere at some length that the concept of emergence ought to be employed within pragmatism, too (and partly explicated through pragmatism). 24  Margolis frequently claims (and I am tempted to agree) that Rorty’s and Brandom’s attempts to put Sellars’s work to do a pragmatist job fails (see also Chap. 3 above). Sellars, he says, “cannot be made into a pragmatist of any sort (as Rorty and Brandom pretend to do) except by deliberate deformation – which I’m bound to say both are willing to embrace” (Margolis 2003a, 5; see also 107, 142–143). The reason for this, from Margolis’s perspective, is Sellars’s stubborn scientism, according to which “manifest image” entities such as tables and chairs and human persons do not exist in the ontologically privileged “scientific image”. 22 23

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depart from Margolis – the transcendentality of the historically emerging self must itself be seen as an emergent feature of the evolving of human Lebensformen. Margolis returns to emergence in some of his most recent writings. He now maintains that there are “two entirely different forms of emergence, both within nature”. One is the “Intentional transformation of natural-kind kinds, collecting the irreducible emergent of the specifically human world”, while the other is restricted to the (merely) “natural emergent” of the physical world. (Margolis 2014a, 11.) However, is this dualism between two types of emergence just a replacement of more traditional substance vs. attribute dualism? How well does it go together with Margolis’s desire to avoid any dualisms (including the Kantian ones discussed in the beginning of this chapter)? When Margolis (2014b, 11–12) comments on Sellars’s influential views on the manifest and the scientific image (as articulated in “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”, Sellars 1963, chapter 1), he perceptively draws attention to the notion of “placing” in Sellars’s project of placing the human being in the scientific image. Here a natural follow-up question is who places? To place something or someone into a certain “image” is already to move within the space of reasons (in a Sellarsian phrase). A transcendental argument opens up here: you must have that space, and a transcendental self that engages in the project of “placing”, already in place in order to be able to treat anything as a person. An argument within the ontology of persons and cultural entities thus seems to presuppose a transcendental, and arguably transcendentally idealistic, account of subjectivity. A realism of emerging world-constructing selfhood is a transcendental presupposition of pragmatic (constructivist) realism. While this reasoning need not be construed as a transcendental argument (cf. also Dreon 2022), for a pragmatist inclined to interpret the world- and objectivity-enabling role of the emergent human self should nevertheless feel free to develop such a construal.

6 Conclusion We hence return to the transcendental – Kantian – picture of realism and idealism that we started out from when beginning to examine Margolis’s peculiar version of pragmatic realism. The issues concerning the artifactuality of the self and of normativity, and the related pragmatic metaphysics of culture, are all in the end indistinguishable from the basic issue of realism vs. idealism, as examined in relation to the entanglement of the “languaged world” and “worlded language”. Let me quote Margolis once more: Realism […] is a late artefact of our reflections, not a first principle of any kind; hence, never more than provisional, perspective, “interested,” “instrumental” […], fluxive, constructed, lacking any invariance or necessity or essential telos or privilege or unique validity. (Margolis 2002, 117.)

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Accordingly, realism itself is emergent – and deeply, irreducibly, valuational as a human practice-based posit. Furthermore, the metaphysics of emergence, as well as of emergent normativity and mentality (including the emergence of values and valuations), itself emerges historically through our practices of categorizing reality, as does ultimately our realism itself, both our general pragmatic realism about reality and our more specific pragmatic realism about processes of emergence (again understood as valuational human “posits”, i.e., as our ways of making sense of the “independence” of the world we live in). It is with this pragmatically holistic and reflexive as well as, I hope, genuinely Margolisian thought that I wish to conclude.

Chapter 6

The Will to Believe, Epistemic Virtue, and Holistic Transcendental Pragmatism

1 Introduction While Christopher Hookway has always been primarily a “Peircean” pragmatist rather than a “Jamesian” one, many of his writings manifest a remarkably sensitive and appreciative approach to William James’s thought. In this chapter, I will, engaging with Hookway’s views, explore the complex entanglement of a number of philosophical topics we may find in Jamesian pragmatism: the “will to believe”, virtue epistemology, a holistic conception of pragmatic reasons for belief, as well as what we may (pace James) call the transcendental reflection on the preconditions of our practices of belief-fixation and inquiry. All of these issues are crucial for a deeper pragmatist understanding of the dependence of our epistemic and ontological relation to the world upon our value-embedded practices. I have recently argued (Pihlström 2021, chapter 4), without explicitly commenting on Hookway’s work at any great length, that we should interpret and evaluate James’s famous, or notorious, will to believe argument (see James 1979 [1897]) from the perspective of holistic pragmatism, as developed by Morton White (see White 2002, 2005; cf. also Chaps. 2 and 4 above). This approach to James naturally involves a recognition of the virtue-epistemological dimension of the will to believe discussion; interestingly Hookway (2011) also seeks to bring James’s will to believe idea into critical comparison with virtue epistemology.1 Although integrating all these ideas into a coherent account of James would require a comprehensive and very complex line of argument impossible to develop within a single chapter, I do believe that we can get an enriched sense of how exactly the will to believe  Another major pragmatism scholar, Peter Hare also suggested that virtue epistemology could “thicken” White’s holistic pragmatism (Hare 2015, especially chapter 8), and he investigated, in his early papers, the complicated doxastic and volitional structure of the Jamesian will to believe (see ibid., chapters 1–2). 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pihlström, Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy, Vienna Circle Institute Library 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28042-9_6

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argument may be legitimately extended from the philosophy of religion (James’s original context) to broader philosophical frameworks by bringing holistic pragmatism and a virtue-epistemological analysis to bear, in conjunction, on this matter. By briefly examining this idea, I hope to make a gesture toward indicating the distinctive sense in which James can be seen as a pragmatic holist. I also hope to show that in this area we need to pay attention not only to the details of the will to believe argument but also to what Hookway and many others have (albeit usually outside Jamesian contexts) analyzed under the rubric of “transcendental arguments”. Therefore, my engagement with Hookway’s views may be considered an attempt to contribute to the development of transcendental pragmatism.2 In a holistic assessment of the practices of inquiry providing reasons for our beliefs about the world, we may draw attention to the relation between, and the possible entanglement of, pragmatic reasons of (at least) two different kinds: the will-to-believe type and the pragmatic-transcendental type. Both kinds of pragmatic reasons may be essential for us to be able to so much as engage in the practices of inquiry that we do engage in, and a holistic pragmatist analysis may highlight this “transcendental” point. While my examination of Hookway’s account of James requires a few remarks about the relation between Peirce’s and James’s pragmatisms, this comparison must be mostly set aside here; a full-fledged version of transcendental pragmatism would have to take due notice of these two classical pragmatists’ somewhat conflicting conceptions of the conditions of inquiry.3

 See also several essays in Gava and Stern 2016; cf. Pihlström 2003a, 2020a, 2021. There are several philosophers, including Apel (1998), who have famously used the label, “transcendental pragmatism”, in slightly different senses, which cannot be explored here (for a critical discussion of Apel’s transcendental appropriation of Peirce, see Herbert 2016). Hookway’s (1985, 2000) discussions of transcendental reflection (as well as transcendental idealism) in Peirce focus on Peirce’s ultimate rejection of the transcendental method (with qualifications, as we will see); in comparison, I am somewhat unorthodoxly considering whether James (particularly in defending the will to believe) might actually have come closer to transcendental philosophy than Peirce – despite his own resolutely anti-Kantian self-conception (cf. Pihlström 2021). Clearly, any exploration of the relation between the pragmatists and Kantian transcendental philosophy should appreciate the complexity of Peirce’s relation to transcendental idealism, in particular; Hookway (1985, 113–117, 287–288) analyzes this issue with admirable care and rigor. On Peirce’s rejection of the transcendental method, see, e.g., Hookway 2000, 37. 3  Hookway (1997) provides one of the best accounts of this relation between the founders of pragmatism. He argues that the (at least still in the 1990s) received view according to which James simply misunderstood Peirce’s pragmatism is itself a serious misunderstanding; instead, the two great pragmatists’ different ways of employing the Pragmatic Maxim resulted from their diverging philosophical aims (see further Hookway 2000). Peirce, as is well known, was primarily interested in the meaning of scientific concepts, whereas James applied pragmatism more broadly in existential matters, including ethics and religion. Hookway also notes that Peirce and James, far from rejecting the correspondence theory of truth, offered their somewhat different elucidations of what correspondence means in practical and experiential terms. Instead of simply disagreeing with Peirce on truth, James endorsed rather than rejected or misunderstood Peirce’s equation of truth with the eventual outcome of inquiry, or the convergence of belief, while restricting this conception to the account of “absolute truth”, which merely serves a regulatory function in our inquiries. (See 2

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I have structured the chapter as follows. I will first offer a concise exposition of Hookway’s account of the Jamesian will to believe, with some remarks on the connection to virtue epistemology he emphasizes. I will then contextualize this account into a more inclusive virtue- and vice-theoretic understanding of James, analyzed in terms of holistic pragmatism. Finally, I will examine Hookway’s views on the relation between the concepts of belief and hope (briefly revisiting the relation between Peirce and James), and thereby eventually the similarities and differences between the Jamesian passional (will to believe) and the transcendental pragmatist argumentation strategies. A brief concluding section will then (inevitably inconclusively) pull the threads together. It should be noted that my main object of investigation is not James’s will to believe argumentation as such but, on the one hand, Hookway’s understanding of this argumentation and, on the other hand, the ways in which it might be further developed within a holistic transcendental pragmatism. Thus, this chapter primarily seeks to contribute to the advancement of pragmatism in contemporary philosophy, rather than historical scholarship on pragmatism – but it is clear that in both of these indistinguishable pursuits Hookway’s work will remain one of our guiding lights. Indeed, Hookway is one of those philosophers and pragmatism scholars who teach us that we cannot neatly separate our “philosophical” and “historical” pursuits. Our understanding of the relation between belief and hope, for instance, or of transcendental arguments and will to believe arguments, depends on our understanding the ways in which historical figures like Peirce and James employed these and related concepts. Metaphilosophically, then, Hookway’s approach to the history of pragmatism is vital for our full grasp of the historicity of our philosophical inquiries themselves.

2 Virtues, Holism, and the Will to Believe Hookway’s (2011) analysis of James’s “The Will to Believe” – the famous essay opening the volume with the same title (James 1979 [1897]) – not only interprets James through virtue epistemology but also explains James’s commitments to epistemic contextualism and conservatism, as well as the “passional nature” of belief. Let us first briefly consider these dimensions of Jamesian pragmatism. Both are, clearly, manifestations of the deep-rooted pragmatist tendency to view epistemology (and even ontology) as value-embedded, and even ethically embedded, in a fundamental sense. The will to believe strategy is, Hookway (2011, 2) explains, contextualistic in the sense that in “identifying the particular circumstances in which belief can be formed on ‘passional grounds’”, James specifies “the sort of context in which belief may be

ibid., 44, 82, 89.) I won’t dwell on the topic of pragmatic truth any further in this chapter, however; cf. Pihlström 2021.

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legitimate when we have no or little relevant evidence”. Whether we should prioritize the value of believing truth or the one of shunning error (cf. James 1979 [1897], 17–18) crucially depends on the context – on, for example, whether we are discussing scientific or ethical issues (Hookway 2011, 3). Accordingly, though Peirce’s and James’s views on belief and “matters of vital importance”4 are sometimes taken to be almost diametrically opposed to each other, Hookway perceives that they may not be as far apart as is often assumed. Peirce did claim that belief has no place in science, but when we interpret the will to believe in terms of epistemic contextualism, it is entirely plausible to maintain that “we should be tentative about believing current scientific results” (ibid., 5). Moreover, James was certainly not at his best as a philosopher of science and occasionally, especially in the will to believe framework, spoke rather carelessly about our having to “believe” scientific theories in order to acquire evidence for them; this hardly needs any will to believe but merely tentative acceptance in the interest of critical experimentation. Hence, we hardly need to reject any core idea James cherished in order to agree with Peirce that believing our theories is not central to the scientific enterprise. Furthermore, while the will to believe is usually primarily regarded as a strategy for embracing religious belief (and this, of course, is its immediate relevance in James’s original 1897 essay), it can, according to Hookway, be understood in terms of epistemic conservatism in the sense that our beliefs are “innocent unless we think there is a positive reason for doubting them” (ibid., 6). James may offer sufficient reasons to someone already holding a religious belief for not giving up their faith; moreover, insofar as both Peirce and James found religious belief manifesting “in attitudes and practices” (ibid., 7), they – again – may not have been as far from each other as is sometimes imagined. Peirce also maintained that the religious person is not forced out of their faith by scientific results. Perhaps most importantly, Hookway reminds us about a profound link between the will to believe discussion and the examination of philosophical temperaments in the first lecture of Pragmatism (James 1975 [1907]). When guided by “temperamental traits”, such as the “tough-minded” (empiricist) and the “tender-minded” (rationalist) temperaments that James distinguishes (ibid., Lecture I), we are guided by “passional considerations” in a sense reminiscent of the will to believe discussion (Hookway 2011, 7). In our choices of fundamental philosophical standpoints we may thus be ultimately led by a will to believe (though this is not exactly Hookway’s way of putting the matter).5 This highlights the need to apply the insights of virtue epistemology to the will to believe discussion, and indeed to James’s pragmatism more generally.6 The will to believe is holistically operative in our lives, rather than  For an analysis of Peirce’s and James’s conflicting views on this phrase, related to Peirce’s 1898 Cambridge Conferences Lectures (partly available in Peirce 1992–1998, vol. 1), see Atkins 2016. 5  Indeed, it would have been very interesting to see how Hookway might have developed this comparison between The Will to Believe and Pragmatism in more detail. I cannot claim to have command of his entire oeuvre, but I have failed to come across any specific investigation of the matter. 6  See also Hare 2015. Pappas (1994) already drew attention to the virtue-epistemological features of James’s views decades ago. 4

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just an argumentative strategy in the service of our adoption of particular beliefs. It is hence also a tool of the holistic pragmatist who seeks to understand our doxastic practices in their inevitable entanglement with ethical – and, for some of us, religious  – ones, and it is open to a virtue- and vice-epistemological analysis of the habitual doxastic traits we develop and maintain in our practices of belief-fixation. Admittedly, James’s will to believe method might seem (and has, from the perspective of several critics, seemed) to harbor intellectual or epistemic vices rather than virtues. From the standpoint of Peirce’s pragmatist theory of inquiry, for example, James’s suggestion that our “passional nature” legitimately may (and does) play an active role in the fixation of beliefs may amount to excessive credulity. Does it, we might ask, even collapse to what Peirce called the “method of tenacity” (as distinguished from the scientific method)? Does the will to believe method, that is, allow us to (tenaciously?) stick to beliefs simply based on our hopes, wishes, prejudices, or personal existential commitments, rather than “Real things” independent of us and our idiosyncracies, thus neglecting Peirce’s (quasi-transcendental) account of the postulation of “Real things” as a presupposition of the possibility of inquiry? If so, is the will to believe an epistemic vice, after all – assuming that Peirce, in “Fixation”,7 tells us what it pragmatically means to be a virtuous believer? Does it legitimize credulity and wishful thinking in opposition to critical, evidence-based belief-fixation based on the scientific method? If the will to believe manifests credulity or wishful thinking, then it is presumably (primarily) an epistemic vice. Excessive courage and cowardice in religious, existential, and other existential or weltanschaulichen matters should here be opposed to each other; presumably, an Aristotelian middle path between them would be the best balanced and thus most virtuous option. If, on the other hand, the will to believe method exemplifies genuine (sufficient but not excessive) courage in, e.g., adopting a religious or existential hypothesis without sufficient evidence at one’s personal risk in a situation of “genuine options”, then it is, according to its defenders, a virtue, after all – as long as it does not stretch the boundaries of courage too far by becoming epistemically hazardous. A pragmatically holistic evaluation of virtues and vices in the context of an entire human life is needed here. It may be difficult or impossible to determine whether a particular application of the will to believe is virtuous; this may have to be discussed, by analogy to virtue ethics and epistemology generally, in terms of the entire doxastic life a person leads. Specifically, the vice of credulity might, from a Peircean-Hookwayan point of view, be manifested in our tendency to believe in what we take to be presupposed by (or to be indispensable given our commitment to) the practices of inquiry we engage in. One such belief could be the heart of the Peircean scientific method itself, that is, the postulation of “Real things” that are independent of our beliefs and hopes and that we allow, when inquiring scientifically, to have an effect on the formation of our beliefs about reality. Now, our question is, first, whether we should be committed to

 Peirce’s theory of inquiry is classically laid out in “The Fixation of Belief” (1877), available in Peirce 1992–1998, vol. 1, and comprehensively discussed in Hookway 1985, 2000. 7

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such “Real things” by means of a will to believe argument as something that we need to postulate within our practices, or by means of a transcendental argument as something that we cannot fail to postulate insofar as we take ourselves to be able to inquire scientifically at all; and secondly, if we do postulate such real things (by whatever argument), whether we are actually entitled to a (pragmatic or transcendental) belief in their reality – or something weaker, such as hope. In my view, the Jamesian (rather than Peircean) pragmatist may here propose to run these two types of argument together: in the end it matters little, pragmatically speaking, whether our commitment to Peircean real things emerges as a result of a transcendental argument or a will to believe. It is, however, compatible with, and even required by, such a Jamesian attitude to inquiry and its presuppositions that we continue to self-­critically evaluate our own postulations (whether will-to-believe type or transcendental type) in terms of a virtue-epistemological analysis of our doxastic character traits.8 Does James, we may further ask – when moving from scientific to more existential inquiries – replace epistemically constrained belief-fixation by practical (moral) considerations that may (in his view) in certain cases (i.e., “genuine options”) legitimately influence our habitual belief-fixation processes? Remember that W.K.  Clifford, against whom James launched his will to believe considerations, maintained that it is not only epistemically but also morally wrong to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. To be sure, it is epistemically wrong, too, but it is perhaps more importantly ethically wrong, according to Cliffordian evidentialism. When reacting against Clifford, James defends both our moral right and our intellectual (epistemic) right to voluntarily adopt beliefs in cases of “genuine options” that cannot be settled on purely intellectual grounds. Importantly, we should see the epistemic and the ethical as thoroughly, inseparably, intertwined here – characteristically for James’s pragmatism as a whole (cf. Pihlström 2013, 2021). This, in my view, is arguably the most important way in which holistic pragmatism9 is present in James – and present as a position in pragmatist ways of thinking about what we humans are like as the kind of creatures we are. Given the way we are (our “human nature”), there is, for us, no principled dichotomy between the epistemic and the ethical. I propose to interpret this to mean that James deliberately blurs the dichotomy between the epistemic and the ethical, as well as the one between fact and value more generally. This begins in the will to believe essays but continues more explicitly in the later pragmatist writings growing naturally out of those earlier discussions. This leads to a tension within pragmatism, because Peirce more clearly keeps epistemic and ethical matters distinct. If, hence, the will to believe is a virtue or a vice, then it is, in a Jamesian context, a holistic virtue or a holistic vice: it concerns  I will get back to the relation between belief and hope in the next section.  Here we may speak about holistic pragmatism specifically in White’s (2002) sense: the pragmatic holism defended by Quine, culminating in the rejection of the analytic/synthetic dualism, is extended to a holism abandoning the fact/value dualism as well, committed to evaluating our factual and normative beliefs as elements of a holistic “web”. (See also, again, the references to White’s holistic pragmatism in Chaps. 2 and 4 above.) 8 9

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our lives in their entirety, the kinds of individuals we are as participants of our normative practices of inquiry. This also entails that, according to James, whenever we discuss epistemic vices or virtues, we are inevitably also discussing ethical vices or virtues. Our epistemic, intellectual lives cannot be detached from our practical, valuational lives – especially in the case of religion but also generally (cf. Pihlström 2013, 2020a, 2021). The claim that they can amounts to what James called “vicious intellectualism”, which he took to be a thoroughly misguided and unethical conception of the human condition. Avoiding such intellectualism by means of an adequately holistic picture of human lives as both epistemic and ethico-existential, we may also take a Jamesian step toward reconciling individual sincerity about existential commitment with intersubjective pursuit of truth.10 James is, as White (2005, 249) reminds us, right to maintain that “our view of what ought to be may sometimes legitimately determine our view of what is the case” – and this, indeed, is a key idea not only of the will to believe but also of holistic pragmatism entangling the normative and the factual into a “seamless web” (cf. White 2002, 2005). Our general virtues (and vices) and particular instances of the will to believe are to be holistically evaluated in terms of our on-going critical examination of the practices of inquiry that for us are inevitably an entanglement of epistemic and ethical issues. It is, however, a crucial part of such examination to investigate at a transcendental level the commitments needed for us to be able to be committed to those practices of inquiry in the first place.

3 Belief and Hope Let us, equipped with some tentative holistic-pragmatist insights, return to Hookway’s discussion of James’s relation to Peirce. Painstakingly investigating Peirce’s conception of belief and inquiry,11 Hookway (2000, 13–14) notes its connections with the will to believe idea, distinguishing Peirce’s views from the Jamesian one that passions may play a role in the fixation of all of our beliefs, yet

 See Pihlström 2021 for an extended discussion of the complex interplay of individual sincerity and the pursuit of truth in existential matters within (broadly Jamesian) pragmatism. 11  One of the most illuminating critical engagements with Hookway’s account of Peirce’s theory of inquiry is Cooke 2006, chapter 7. Cooke argues that hope has a transcendental function in thought and inquiry as a necessary condition for the possibility of asking questions initiating inquiry (ibid., 129). Hookway’s work on Peircean hope is an obvious reference here (see ibid., 132–135), but Cooke goes beyond Hookway in interpreting hope as a transcendental concept (ibid., 135). Her pragmatic transcendental argument unfolds as follows (ibid., 136): “(P1) If we ask a question, we necessarily presuppose that the question will be answered. (P2) We do ask questions. Therefore, we presuppose that our questions will be answered.” When posing “real questions”, instead of insincere questions based on “paper doubts”, we must hope that they are answered; we presuppose they are answerable. Generally, not just questions but “all utterances presuppose a hope for a response” (ibid., 138). For a lucid analysis of the conditions of inquiry in the framework of Peirce’s “naturalized Kantianism”, see Misak 2016b. 10

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showing that Peirce may have come relatively close to the will to believe in his own way. Even though belief, according to Peirce, has no place in science (as noted above), when it comes to “vitally important matters”, things are different: “Vital matters should be settled with the aid of instinct, sentiment; we should trust our commonsense standards in making major decisions. Rather than wait for ‘evidence’, we must go by what is agreeable according to standards that are manifested in our sentimental or ‘passional’ responses.” (Ibid., 14.) Peirce’s 1908 essay, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God”, takes “a step further towards James”, Hookway claims, because Peirce there argues that we need “a natural religious belief” before being able to “obtain the evidence that can fuel a ‘scientific’ argument for God’s reality” (ibid.).12 We may be unable to justify our belief in God on the basis of evidence before endorsing such a belief, but if a religious person already firmly holds that belief, they may find evidence for it partly on the basis of the belief itself.13 If this is what Peirce maintained, he did arrive rather close to James. Furthermore, in order to engage in successful inquiry at all, we may, Hookway says, need “confident common-sense belief in propositions that we are only really warranted in hoping are true” (ibid., 14–15), though this hope does not entail that we would be justified in believing those propositions to be true (ibid., 6). As Hookway (1985, 115–116) put it in his earlier Peirce book: “If we have no transcendental guarantee that knowledge of reality is possible, then, Peirce thinks, at least we have the best grounds for hoping that our cognitive strategies will put us into contact with the noumenal reality.” (See also ibid., 287–288.) This remains, indeed, a mere hope rather than a legitimately acquired belief. The beliefs – or, perhaps slightly less demandingly, confident convictions – we may need in order to inquire are, then, “passional”. Even in the context of his critical engagement with W.V. Quine’s radical naturalism (an approach that would hardly find any passional commitments relevant in philosophy), Hookway (1988, chapter 12) recognizes the role played by our underlying passions and temperaments guiding the ways in which, and the degree to which, we might take science, or for Quine just physics, to represent reality. Hookway explicitly uses the phrase “transcendental pragmatism”14 here: as we inevitably have to operate “within” one or another  See Peirce 1992–1998, vol. 2, for this 1908 essay. The relation between what Peirce has to say about “vital matters” and James’s “will to believe” is complex, though, and Hookway’s interpretation is somewhat controversial. See again Atkins 2016, especially chapter 1, for a thoroughgoing historically learned examination of this issue. On the relevance of James’s will to believe considerations to the investigation of transcendental conditions of inquiry in a Peircean context, see also Herbert 2016, 105–108. 13  It would, however, be a matter of extensive pragmatist critical inquiry to show how this nevertheless fundamentally differs from, say, the kind of “Christian philosophy” defended by religious apologists like Alvin Plantinga and other “reformed epistemologists”. Their religious exclusivism is, in my view, very far from a true pragmatist spirit of pluralism and intellectual diversity. 14  For Hookway’s insightful remarks on (Carnapian) “transcendental pragmatism” and (Quinean) merely “relatively transcendental” frameworks that we always remain within, see Hookway 1988, 208–209. 12

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framework of encountering reality, our realism about the physical world must be contextualized into a pragmatically established frame of reference that makes such world-engagement possible; crucially, it is a partly “temperamental” matter how exactly we compare the different frameworks that might be available. Just as Peirce may be “Jamesian” to a certain degree, so may, surprisingly though only implicitly, even Quine.15 Hookway writes: There seem to be differences of philosophical mood or temperament, according to whether one finds [with Quine] the austere physicists’ conception of reality all that is required for an account of what is ‘really real’, or whether one prefers one’s philosophy to make sense of all facets of human experience and thought. (Ibid., 218.)

It is, according to Hookway, impossible to purely theoretically resolve or make a substantive choice between the Quinean physicalist framework and a more inclusive philosophical framework taking, say, human values and meanings seriously as elements of reality – a framework, that is, from within which Quinean resolute physicalism will inevitably seem narrowly reductionist or even eliminativist (see ibid., 218–220). There is a sense in which Quine simply ignores, instead of systematically arguing against, traditional metaphysical issues not captured by his physicalist approach (Hookway 1994, 470). Hookway thus concludes: “If [traditional philosophical] questions do not arise for him, he does not need to deal with them. He need only confront the naturalistic issues of how people came to be interested in such issues. It seems that both Quine and his critics are rational to stick to their guns.” (Ibid., 482.) They are rational, hence, within their own passional philosophical temperaments that quasi-transcendentally define the relevant – or even possible – philosophical issues for them. It seems to me clear that we are at least to a certain degree dealing with a Jamesian conflict of philosophical temperaments here. The kinds of reasons we may have for our beliefs within a pragmatic framework enabling inquiry into the ways the world is, as analyzed in terms of transcendental pragmatism, come in different types. Our pragmatic reasons for embracing a religious belief, for instance, may be based on a Jamesian-like “passional” will to believe argument. However, pragmatic reasons may on the other hand be based on (quasi-)transcendental conditions we find necessary for the very possibility of the functioning of our practices. Arguments seeking to elucidate such conditions for the possibility of things we take for granted in our epistemic and other practices are standardly referred to as transcendental arguments (typically traced back to Kant); indeed, Hookway is one of the few pragmatism scholars who have fully appreciated the philosophical significance of both transcendental arguments and pragmatic will to believe arguments à la James.16  This, of course, is not a proper place to deal with the development of Quine’s naturalism and physicalism; for a classical formulation of naturalized epistemology, see Quine 1969; cf. also Hookway 1994. 16  See Stern 2011 for a recent overview of transcendental arguments. For an excellent collection of insightful essays, see Stern 1999. For my own early proposal to integrate pragmatism with transcendental arguments, see Pihlström 2003a (containing my attempt to argue that Peircean scholastic realism may be defended by means of a pragmatically naturalized transcendental argument). 15

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It is highly significant that Hookway clearly distinguishes between the concepts of belief and hope in his analysis of what transcendental considerations of the necessary conditions for the possibility of inquiry may legitimately yield. Yet, I am not completely convinced that he sufficiently appreciates that the will to believe is precisely a key to integrating the concepts of hope and belief in a Jamesian formulation of pragmatism, which ultimately amounts to a holistic pragmatic-­transcendental account of virtuous belief-fixation practices. Hope and belief are, as James himself suggested in Pragmatism and elsewhere, deeply entangled here. While transcendental arguments (or the transcendental method more generally), according to Hookway’s analysis of Peirce, can only yield hope as a presupposition of inquiry, not warranted belief (that is, we can only secure the necessity of hoping that there are “Real things” independently of us, not any justified belief that there are), these two notions, per the will to believe argument, are deeply intertwined, and thus transcendental reflection may in the end yield legitimate belief, too. A genuinely transcendental pragmatism is achieved when we integrate the will to believe and (pragmatic) transcendental argumentation, hence also integrating belief and hope in a Jamesian fashion. This can only happen in a holistic framework that analyzes the constitutive commitments of inquiry  – whether beliefs or hopes  – as forming a “seamless web” under a virtue-epistemological analysis. At a meta-level, it is, thus, virtuous – in an epistemic but arguably also in an ethical sense – to entangle hope and belief in this holistic manner.

4 The Passional and the Transcendental The discussion of the relation between belief and hope in Peircean and Jamesian pragmatisms brings us to some final remarks on the relation between the “passional” will to believe reasoning and the transcendental method. Hookway (2000, 110n5, 185–186, 296) accurately points out (as already observed) that Peirce was suspicious of the claim that transcendental arguments investigating the conditions for the possibility of inquiry could demonstrate the truth of a proposition they identify as a presupposition of logic or rational inquiry (e.g., “There are real things”), or justify our beliefs in such truths, while maintaining that such arguments may nevertheless provide us with warrant for hoping that such a proposition is true.17 In particular, the truth of these propositions cannot be demonstrated on the basis of their being “indispensable” for inquiry, although we have a practical reason to hope that they are true. As suggested above, it is right here that the Jamesian pragmatist, pace Peirce and Hookway, brings hope and belief more closely together. More generally, we here need to draw attention to the contextuality of all transcendental principles, when  This argument is discussed comprehensively in Hookway 2000, especially chapters 4, 7, and 12. Hookway (1999, 180–185) also interestingly considers whether Peirce’s argument about “intellectual hope” and the presuppositions of inquiry as merely regulative would be analogous to what has later (e.g., in Stern 1999) been labeled “modest” transcendental arguments. 17

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pragmatically analyzed – thus returning (at a transcendental level) to the kind of epistemic contextualism Hookway (2011) discusses with regard to James and the will to believe. No transcendental principle needed to account for the possibility of, say, cognitive experience or meaningful language can be demonstrated to be true; they only need to be presupposed in order for us to be able to have experiences (or to conceive of ourselves as having experiences) of an objectively structured reality, or for us to be able to mean anything by our linguistic expressions. Hookway is, indeed, right to maintain that Peirce did not regard our pragmatically indispensable presuppositions as legitimately committing us to more than hopes, but a slightly more relaxed (especially Jamesian) pragmatist may view precisely these indispensable hopes as pragmatically equivalent to practically unavoidable beliefs that we need to entertain in order to be able to be, or remain, committed to the practices defined by those commitments. Accordingly, while it might seem that the will to believe argument is very different from any Kantian-like transcendental considerations, it is possible to bring these two argumentative strategies together in a holistic examination of our pragmatic reasons for arriving at and maintaining the beliefs we (unavoidably) find constitutive of our engagement in belief-fixing inquiries. Hookway’s carefully considered remarks on Jamesian “passional” epistemology (Hookway 2011), on the one hand, and on the nature of transcendental arguments (Hookway 1999, 2000) and transcendental pragmatism (Hookway 1988), on the other, are extremely helpful for our arriving at this point, even if it is a point he would not share. In terms of the vocabulary of the “will to believe”, when you already are in a situation in which you have “genuine options” – that is, irreducibly valuationally conceptualized options that are live, forced, and momentous in James’s memorable terms (James 1979 [1897], 14–16) – you are, according to James, entitled to employ your will to believe in order to arrive at an hypothesis (within this option) that cannot be settled by purely intellectual or evidential means. However, in order to ascertain that you indeed are in such a situation – that you have the genuine options you do have and that the will to believe strategy is thus at your disposal – it may be suggested that you need to engage in a transcendental consideration of what necessary conditions make it possible for you to be, or remain, committed to your practices of thought, inquiry, and belief-fixation in the first place. Accordingly, the employment of the will to believe must be based on the results of a prior transcendental argument (or, if not strictly speaking an argument, at least a transcendental reflection or consideration on how we are, or can remain, committed to our practices of inquiry). Conversely, however, you might need to “passionately” resort to a will to believe in a situation in which your transcendental argument does not seem to enjoy the apodictic certainty that Kant himself, the father of transcendental arguments, required those arguments to have.18 Hookway may be right in arguing – within a  See again Hookway’s important contributions to the contemporary discussions of transcendental arguments, especially the debate over what “modest” transcendental arguments could achieve (Hookway 1999; cf. Stern 1999, 2011). 18

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Peircean epistemology clearly distinguishing between belief and hope – that, when identifying conditions that are indispensable for inquiry, we are unable to secure the truth of those conditions but only our having to hope that they are true, insofar as we take our inquiry to be possible. However, holistically conceived, our inevitably having to hope in this practice-constitutive sense yields, by Jamesian lights, our finding such conditions legitimate objects of belief structuring our practices of inquiry not merely regulatively but at a constitutive (yet always historically revisable) level. What we have to adopt as a sincere hope on the basis of what our inquiries presuppose (upon critical pragmatic examination, as seen from within our practices of inquiry themselves) is, from a Jamesian point of view, for us ipso facto pragmatically true, or at least taken to be true with pragmatic legitimacy. Consider a final Kantian analogy. If Peirce and Hookway tell us that we can legitimately only hope that the indispensable conditions for the possibility of inquiry, such as there being “Real things” constraining our beliefs, are realized – and that we lack the epistemic justification for believing them to be realized – does this mean that our Peircean realism about “Real things” (or our realism more generally) is analogous to the legitimate hope we may in the Kantian context attach to the reality of Kant’s “postulates of practical reason” (viz., God’s existence, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the will), which do have to be postulated (according to Kant) in order for us to be able to genuinely pursue the summum bonum that the moral law commands us to pursue, and which thus in a sense transcendentally constitute our moral pursuit, but which do not enjoy the kind of transcendental constitutivity that full-blown transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience (such as the categories) in the Kantian picture have? In short, are Peircean “Real things” analogous to Kant’s God? Or perhaps more obviously, are they analogous to Kant’s “things in themselves”, which are another transcendental postulation that we nevertheless cannot know anything about? These questions must be left open here. I only wish to suggest that when Jamesian pragmatism enters this discussion, the “indispensable” (“passional”, will-to-belive-type) postulation of whatever we pragmatically need to postulate – be it a Kantian-like divinity needed for moral purposes, or realism needed for the possibility of inquiry – is smoothly shifted from a transcendental hope to a pragmatic-transcendental justification for belief. As the will to believe and transcendental argumentation are integrated, such indispensable postulations become pragmatic beliefs-cum-hopes. When transcendental argumentation is given a Jamesian twist, it is as fallible and insecure as the will to believe argumentation. Moreover, pragmatic transcendental argumentation could, just as the will to believe, be used to establish a conclusion we already believe – such as, again, there being “Real things” – rather than a new surprising belief we would first acquire as a result of the argument (cf. Hookway 1999, 184). Indeed, Jamesian will to believe may be used as an argument rendering religious faith justified for someone already having such faith, and the scope of the Peircean quasi-transcendental analysis of the conditions of inquiry may be similar. We are, after all, already committed to continuing inquiry when inquiring into what makes inquiry possible. Clearly, this is a deeply value-laden commitment.

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According to James (1975 [1907], Lecture III), pragmatism is a philosophy of hope. Insofar as the Peircean view that we can, at the end of inquiry, arrive at a final opinion (viz., the truth) manifests a kind of transcendental hope constitutive of the possibility of inquiry, Peirce can be claimed to be transcendentally concerned with the necessary conditions for the possibility of inquiry.19 But so can, in the sense spelled out here, James. His will to believe method, interpreted in terms of virtue epistemology and holistic pragmatism, itself operates at the level of transcendental hope. Clearly it cannot be reduced to anything like transcendental argumentation (nor, of course, is any converse reduction possible), but it ought to be recognized much more explicitly than scholars typically do that these forms of argumentation are not incompatible with each other but rather mutually reinforcing within an overall transcendental pragmatism concerned with the practice-embedded conditions necessary for inquiry to be possible. More provocatively, it might even be suggested that the transcendental and will to believe types of argument are “reciprocally contained” in a quasi-Quinean sense (cf. Quine 1969).20 This reciprocal containment would then be what holism practically amounts to when applied to the entanglement of reflexive pragmatic and transcendental inquiries into the constitutive presuppositions of our inquiries.

5 Conclusion Hookway once characterized Peirce’s philosophical concern as the one of reconciling “the view that reality has an objective character which is independent of our view of it with the claim that this character is available to us if we conduct our inquiries efficiently or correctly” (Hookway 1985, 1). This characterization in my view fits pragmatism much more generally, including Jamesian versions of pragmatism. It also implicitly contains the entanglement of pragmatic and transcendental dimensions of our understanding of inquiry: we are dealing with the normative correctness (including virtuousness) of our practices; however, it is only through our engagement in such normatively structured practices that the objective world can be cognitively available to us. In the absence of any epistemically given “ready-made world”, this is a fundamental transcendental concern for us. I have in this chapter suggested that we need to appreciate the way in which pragmatic belief and hope are entangled in our responses to this concern. Indeed, as Hookway reminds us, the real is, for the Peircean pragmatist, definable in terms of inquiry, but the process of inquiry needs to be characterized in  For a highly useful discussion of Hookway’s reading of Peirce with regard to transcendental conditions of inquiry, see again Cooke 2006. (I briefly respond to Cooke’s views in Pihlström 2009, chapter 5.) 20  In Quine, this reciprocal containment primarily concerns the relation between ontology and epistemology. See also Chap. 7 below for a discussion of the reciprocal containment of ethics and ontology. 19

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non-­psychologistic terms as a process “fated” to converge toward the final opinion of the community of inquirers (cf. ibid., 37–39). James’s “passional” inquiries are obviously more psychological than this Peircean conception of inquiry.21 Yet, just as Hookway argues that Peirce, while avoiding subjective idealism (and rejecting transcendental idealism as well, at least in its standard versions), may nevertheless have come close to something like transcendental idealism in insisting that the nature of reality reflects the constitutive activities of our cognitive faculties (ibid., 285–288), we may, I believe, claim James to have come close to such transcendental idealism in refusing to view the structure of the world as fundamentally independent of the processes of either scientific or ethical inquiries. One way of cashing out transcendental idealism in the Jamesian context is the disinclination to endorse any principled, essentialist gulf between belief and hope (as discussed above). The status of sincere hopes is, for the Jamesian pragmatist, pragmatically indistinguishable from their status as convictions we inescapably need in our lives (lives of inquiry included) – convictions that are, for this reason, true for us in a pragmatic sense. I have argued that we need holistic pragmatism (as developed by White) in order to appreciate this interplay of the will to believe and transcendental argumentation within a pragmatist context of belief-fixation. This result would hardly be possible without Hookway’s insightful analyses of both types of argumentation in the framework of pragmatism.

 Even so, I would be hesitant to simply reduce the difference between Peirce and James to the distinction between antipsychologism and psychologism (nor to the one between realism and nominalism); their relationship is more complex than that. Even the Jamesian concept of a philosophical temperament need not be reductively psychologistic, insofar as it is characterized at a transcendental level as defining the frameworks within which we may engage in philosophical (or other) inquiries. 21

Chapter 7

Toward a Pragmatically Naturalist Metaphysics of the Fact-Value Entanglement: Emergence or Continuity?

1 Introduction Pragmatists, early and late, have heavily criticized the so-called fact-value dichotomy. Hilary Putnam (1990, 1994, 2002a, 2004a), in particular, plausibly suggests that the rejection of this age-old dichotomy has been a key pragmatist theme since the work of William James and John Dewey. While I find Putnam’s elaborations on the fact-value entanglement – and his attribution of that entanglement to the classical pragmatists  – highly interesting and worth developing further (cf. Pihlström 2005), I want to inquire into the metaphysical status of this entanglement. Even though pragmatism is often presented as an anti-metaphysical standpoint, there is no reason for pragmatists to abandon metaphysics; metaphysical theorizing is, rather, part and parcel of an adequate pragmatist analysis of our practice-embedded being-in-the-world (Pihlström 2009). A crucial issue for a pragmatist metaphysician is the exact nature of the fact-value entanglement. This problem is particularly important for a pragmatically naturalist metaphysician, because it is vital to investigate how our valuational activities are entangled with  – continuous with and/or arising from – the natural facts surrounding and constituting us. However, the metaphysics of the fact-value entanglement ought to be of interest not merely for pragmatists but for anyone inquiring into fundamental metaphysical questions. Therefore, I am confident that the relevance of the argument that will unfold reaches beyond mere pragmatism scholarship. This chapter will proceed as follows. First, I will present Putnam’s argument for the fact-value entanglement and its connection with pragmatism, also hoping to make the notion of non-reductive naturalism precise enough for our purposes. In contrast to Putnam’s primarily conceptual and linguistic approach, possibly

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pihlström, Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy, Vienna Circle Institute Library 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28042-9_7

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inherited from his Carnapian logical empiricist background,1 focusing on the relation between factual and evaluative judgments rather than the metaphysical items in the world those judgments are about, I suggest that the fact-value entanglement ought to be studied in an unashamedly metaphysical manner. I will then propose two different metaphysical ways of understanding the entanglement, based on the concepts of (i) emergence and (ii) continuity. Both are pragmatically naturalist, but in different ways. The former may be used to explicate the idea of “novelty” – especially the “new” levels of organization that come into existence in complex systems  – and thus to argue that values in a sense emerge from their factual base. Normativity is “new” in relation to the merely factual ground upon which it is based; nevertheless, contra reductive forms of naturalism, it is not reducible to that basis, though “growing out of it”. The latter concept, epitomized in Charles S. Peirce’s doctrine of synechism, may, however, be used to question the very idea of emergence. The Peircean metaphysician insists on continuity, abandoning “mysterious” leaps onto new levels of reality. Accordingly, the synechist views facts and values as continuous with each other: no gap needs to be crossed by means of an emergencelike qualitative transformation. The question is whether we should, or could, explicate the relation between fact and value in terms of emergence, with values emerging from facts, presupposing yet transcending them, or in terms of continuity and synechism, without any fact-value gaps. This key tension lies at the heart of the Putnamian neopragmatist “entanglement thesis”, because both emergence and synechist continuity seem to explicate aspects of the relevant kind of entanglement. The pragmatic effects and significance of both options should be carefully scrutinized. Such a work can only barely be begun in this chapter, but pragmatists (and nonpragmatists) are invited to study the issue further. Toward the end of the chapter, I will also suggest that important insights for continuing this work can be found in Ruth Anna Putnam’s pragmatist reflections on the fact-value entanglement (available in her many contributions to Putnam and Putnam 2017). In investigating the tension between emergence and continuity, I will not claim that one of the alternatives is clearly superior to the other. They might even be, pragmatically, indistinguishable  – at least if a proper use of the pragmatic method (intended to “make our ideas clear”, as Peirce famously put it) does not yield any conceivable practical difference between them. We might thus have here a case of a metaphysical issue to be treated by means of the pragmatic maxim or principle developed, in their distinctive ways, by Peirce and James. More generally, the problem we are concerned with may play a role in illuminating the quite different ways pragmatism has been developed after its founding fathers. Arguably, the fact that there are tensions in pragmatism – e.g., the one between realism and idealism (cf. Pihlström 1996, 2008a, 2008b, 2009), or between emergent novelty and  For a critical discussion of Putnam’s Carnapian assumptions in his “internal realism” and the related doctrine of conceptual relativity, see Westphal 2003. (See also Chap. 2 above.) Niiniluoto (2009), criticizing the pragmatist entanglement thesis, also legitimately wonders why Putnam formulates his position in terms of evaluative judgments; Niiniluoto himself prefers to discuss values themselves as ontologically emergent, culturally constructed entities. 1

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panpsychism, another doctrine of continuity (cf. Pihlström 2008a)  – makes the pragmatist tradition a truly living one. It is crucially constituted by the open questions that its advocates are entangled with, as is also suggested by Talisse’s and Aikin’s (2008) introduction to pragmatism: precisely because it cannot be dogmatically captured into any single unified doctrine, pragmatism is a living tradition.2 I will, hence, not only be concerned with the fact-value entanglement but, through this special case, more broadly with the kind of metaphysical tensions pragmatic naturalism both vitally needs and continuously seeks to settle. Thus I hope to examine the viability of two importantly different non-reductively naturalist options available to metaphysicians of value today, whether pragmatists or non-pragmatists. While my approach to the fact-value entanglement is pragmatistic, which is reflected in the material I focus on, ranging from classical pragmatism to Putnamian neopragmatism, the issue itself is, I trust, intriguing not just for pragmatists but for anyone who wishes to both acknowledge the insights of modern science-based naturalism and affirm the genuine, irreducible reality of humanly relevant structures such as values.

2 The Fact-Value Entanglement and Neopragmatism: Lessons from Putnam One of Putnam’s central arguments for the fact-value entanglement and the related picture of moral objectivity he defends is the one he labels the “companions in the guilt argument” (see Putnam 1990), which also is a kind of indispensability argument.3 Putnam points out that objective, action-guiding moral values (that is, values that are no more subjective than facts) should not  – pace moral skeptics, radical relativists, and “error theorists” like J.L. Mackie (1990 [1977]) – be dismissed as objects hard to locate in the natural-scientific picture of the universe. Mackie famously claimed that objective moral values, if they existed, would be “queer”: “entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe”, knowable only by means of “some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else” (ibid.: 38). This moral skepticism or anti-realism is, however, fundamentally misguided, according to Putnam. Were values ontologically suspect in the sense invoked in Mackie’s “argument from queerness” (ibid.), all normative notions, including the ones we need to rely on in defending the scientific conception of the world that Mackie and other critics of objective values regard as ontologically superior to ethical, value-laden

 For their discussion of Putnam’s entanglement thesis and its problems, see Talisse and Aikin 2008, 123–128. 3  I have discussed this Putnamian understanding of the fact-value entanglement on several earlier occasions, including Pihlström 2005 and 2021, chapter 4. 2

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conceptions, would be equally suspect. We would have no “empirical world” at all as the object of our (scientific and non-scientific) descriptions, if we did not subscribe to the objectivity of at least some values. In order to have a coherent concept of a fact, Putnam believes, we must invoke values. The ways in which we discuss factual matters reveal and presuppose our entire system of value commitments; values are, in this sense, indispensable in our dealings with the world. There is no coherent way to deny the normative, action-guiding role played by the notions of rational acceptability, warrant, justification, and the like, and if such notions are allowed in our scientific conceptual scheme(s), then there is no clear motivation for excluding moral values.4 From Mackie’s and other moral anti-realists’ perspective, the reality of objective values would run into conflict with scientific naturalism. It is, however, crucial to characterize naturalism itself in a satisfactory manner. Far from being located in any transcendent realm beyond the natural and social reality familiar to us, values are, according to Putnam’s pragmatism, entangled with the ordinary, natural facts we find ourselves surrounded by and immersed in. The pragmatist questions the error theorist’s tendency to regard virtually everything non-scientific as ontologically second-rate. In short, the error theorist’s naturalism is reductive or eliminative, either completely eliminating values from the scientific worldview or reducing them to something else – presumably, purely factual entities and/or processes – while a truly pragmatic naturalism must be non-reductive, ontologically preserving a wide variety of what may be taken to be entirely natural features of our human world, including normativity. There is no reason, then, to see the pragmatist’s defense of the objectivity of moral values as non-naturalistic; on the contrary, we need to rethink our very idea of naturalism and accommodate distinctively human activities, including valuation, within nature, just as Dewey  – the paradigmatic pragmatic naturalist  – did (see Putnam 2004b). An adequate understanding of the relation between fact and value requires an essentially richer form of naturalism than the ones found in mainstream analytic debates in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind (and elsewhere). Largely, the search for such a moderate naturalism – to which the following discussion attempts to contribute – is a search for alternatives to standard reductionisms, which tend to claim that such humanly ineliminable realms of reality as mentality, normativity, or value are in the end nothing but, or can be thoroughly accounted for in terms of, scientifically describable complexes of physical, or perhaps biological, entities and processes. Values and normativity should be “naturalized” without reducing them to a physical world conceived as fundamentally empty of value. Naturalism should thereby be emancipated from crude scientism. Obviously, the concept of naturalism, along with those of “natural” and “naturalizing”, ought to be spelled out more carefully. When speaking about values as  Putnam’s reasoning can be reconstructed as a pragmatic transcendental argument (Pihlström 2003a, chapter 7, 2005, chapter 2). Nothing in this chapter depends on the possibility of interpreting pragmatism as a naturalized form of transcendental philosophy; see, however, my final concluding remarks in Sect. 5 below. 4

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natural, or when sketching a non-reductive naturalism which is able to ontologically accommodate values and normativity, I simply mean that we need not postulate any other-worldly, transcendent source of value. Rather, values, like everything else we encounter in the human world, are based on what we think and do. They are simply part of the reality we find ourselves in, connected with the for us natural habits of action that continuously transform our worldly surroundings. Describing and examining them requires no mysterious capacities of intuition; it is sufficient that we describe, explain, and try to understand, scientifically or otherwise, individual and social structures of human life. Values are not Platonic Forms beyond the empirical world but core elements of any “lifeworld” we are able to recognize as human. They are, admittedly, not natural in the sense in which, say, elementary particles or genes are natural, but are obviously social and cultural structures or “entities”. Yet, one of the insights of pragmatic naturalism is that we need to significantly enrich our concept of nature from the narrowly scientific understanding of nature. Thus, nothing exists outside nature, but nature for us is much more than the merely causal structure of physical entities and processes that scientists seek to describe and explain. Mackie and other moral anti-realists assume an extremely restrictive concept of nature when claiming that values are impossible to accommodate in our scientific picture of the natural world and that they must therefore be dismissed as “queer”. In contrast to such views, non-reductive pragmatic naturalism refuses to draw any principled distinction between nature and culture  – any more than between fact and value. However, I cannot here actually argue for this enriched understanding of naturalism, although its basic ideas must be kept in mind when reviewing Putnam’s defense of the reality of values. My argument in what follows can be seen as an attempt to examine some of the key options, regarding the fact-value entanglement, that we have if we endorse something like the non-reductive version of naturalism sketched above. In connection with the softening of the boundary between “nature” and “culture”, we should also note that one of the defining features of the pragmatist tradition, from James to Putnam, is that ethical and more generally valuational issues are no less cognitive or rationally negotiable than scientific or everyday (“factual”) ones (see Putnam 1994, 2002a).5 Putnam repeatedly refers to actual cases of valuational  On James’s and Dewey’s ways of rejecting the fact-value dichotomy, see also R.A. Putnam 1998 and 2002 (and see further the section on her views below). It may, admittedly, be more difficult to find support for this view in the work of the father of pragmatism, Peirce (but cf. Misak 2000, 2004a, 2004b). An essentially pragmatist defense of the fact-value entanglement can be found in Morton White’s writings on the topic (e.g., White 2002). The rejection of the fact-value dichotomy can be traced back to one of the predecessors of the pragmatist movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose writings offer a true mixture of metaphysical and ethical perspectives on fundamental human issues such as civilization, society, solitude, art, and fate (see, e.g., the essay “Fate”, in Emerson 2006 [1860]), although Putnam does not consider the Emersonian background of the fact-value entanglement. Putnam (1987, 1994, 1995) does, however, support his case by invoking the Kantian idea of the primacy of practical reason and our moral “image” of the world (as compared to other, including scientific, images of reality). Such images are continuously painted by us 5

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language-use, drawn from, say, political debate, at crucial points of his argument against the fact-value dichotomy: Our life-world […] does not factor neatly into “facts” and “values”; we live in a messy human world in which seeing reality with all its nuances […] and making appropriate “value judgments” are simply not separable abilities. […] It is all well and good to describe hypothetical cases in which two people “agree on the facts and disagree about values,” but in the world in which I grew up such cases are unreal. When and where did a Nazi and an anti-Nazi, a communist and a social democrat, a fundamentalist and a liberal, or even a Republican and a Democrat, agree on the facts? Even when it comes to one specific policy question […], every argument I have ever heard has exemplified the entanglement of the ethical and the factual. There is a weird discrepancy between the way philosophers who subscribe to a sharp fact/value distinction make ethical arguments sound and the way ethical arguments actually sound. (Putnam 1990, 166–167; original emphasis.)6

Putnam draws attention to the actualities defining our practices of ethical evaluation and argues that as soon as we adequately take that practical context into account, as any pragmatist should, there is no room for an artificial philosophical dichotomy between factual and evaluative discourse – nor, consequently, for a reductively naturalist (physicalist) picture of reality that takes only scientifically established facts seriously and disregards values. The human world is “messy”, he tells us. If there is any distinction at all, it is inevitably fuzzy and contextual. Putnam also defends the objectivity of moral value judgments as an element of “commonsense realism”, analogously to the objectivity of mathematical judgments (Putnam 2001, 143, 185–186). There is no need to postulate “moral facts” in a transcendent  – non-­ naturalist – sense in order to avoid radical moral relativism and to account for the objectivity of morality (or of mathematics) (ibid., 182–183). We just need to understand “the life we lead with our concepts in each of these distinct areas” (ibid., 186). There is a peculiar kind of “objectivity without objects” regarding values, mathematics, and other areas of discourse and practice: we need not postulate abstract entities as “really existing” in such areas of reflection (see Putnam 2002a, 33; cf. Chap. 2 above). This view is a key element of Putnam’s non-metaphysical defense of the fact-­ value entanglement. While I am sympathetic to his pragmatically realist attitude to values and normativity, the claim that no metaphysics needs to be done when examining the fact-value entanglement will be criticized below. First, however, we need to take a closer look at how exactly Putnam seeks to avoid metaphysics in his pragmatic philosophy of value. When defending “ethics without ontology”, Putnam abandons both inflationary and deflationary (eliminativist, reductionist) metaphysics and replaces such confusions by a “pragmatic pluralism”, noting again that our everyday language consists of different discourses or “language games” and that it is therefore an illusion to

through the evaluative language-use we engage in. For further discussion of moral realism and its alternatives in (late) twentieth-century philosophy, see the essays in Sayre-McCord 1991 [1988]. 6  See also Putnam 1981, 139, 1990, 150, and 1992, 85–88. For an interesting background for Putnam’s views, see Murdoch 1997, 363–385.

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think that there is a privileged language-game adequate for describing reality as a totality (Putnam 2004a, 21–22). We should, especially in the ethical case, reject the metaphysical quest for absoluteness, because ethics, and hence the reality of values, is prior to any metaphysical inquiry into the relation between our conceptions and the world. An ethical orientation is presupposed by anyone’s genuinely engaging in such an inquiry (cf. Pihlström 2005). This is what it means to begin from our practices rather than from any supposedly prior metaphysical project. As Putnam (2002a, 9–10) also usefully reminds us, a pragmatist attack on a dualism is not automatically an attack on a corresponding distinction; the distinction between facts and values may be useful in different contexts, but an essential dichotomy or dualism is pernicious. Hence, we must note the crucial distinction between a philosophical dualism and a philosophical distinction (ibid., 10). Moreover, while “valuings” (a Deweyan term) are not simply to be contrasted with factual descriptions, these are not identical, either, because there are (ethical) valuings that are descriptions and valuings that are not (Putnam 2004a, 74) – and even the latter are not beyond the notions of truth and falsity, or good and bad argument (ibid., 76–77). As Putnam reflects: “If we disinflate the fact/value dichotomy, what we get is this: there is a distinction to be drawn (one that is useful in some contexts) between ethical judgments and other sorts of judgments. This is undoubtedly the case […]. But nothing metaphysical follows from the existence of a fact/value distinction in this (modest) sense.” (Putnam 2002a, 19; original emphasis).7 Criticizing Bernard Williams’s (1985) notion of “absoluteness” by arguing that the dream of an absolute scientific conception of the world fails to make sense

 We might, of course, ask whether the distinction between a dualism and a (mere) distinction is itself a dualism (or a dichotomy) or only a distinction. As a dualism-debunking pragmatist, Putnam should perhaps opt for the latter alternative. Or perhaps this distinction is itself contextual, construable strongly or weakly depending on our pragmatic purposes. As this meta-level issue is not central to our concerns, I simply leave it open. Another worry that a critic might raise here is that if some valuings are not descriptions but can nonetheless be called true or false, then we must be able to apply the notion of truth to something that is not a mere statement of facts. But here pragmatism comes to the rescue. On a pragmatist conception of truth, as distinguished from a standard correspondence conception, it is possible to say that an evaluative judgment whose aim is not just to “copy” the facts can be (or fail to be) satisfactory, rewarding, etc., and hence pragmatically true; still, such pragmatic truth need not be subjective or idiosyncratic, as it can be based on our social interests and criteria of satisfaction. Again, I must leave the much debated pragmatist theory of truth aside here. For Putnam’s own reflections on it, see, e.g., Putnam 1995; for comparisons between James and Putnam, see Pihlström 1996 and 1998a. In short, we should not expect the truth of ethical evaluations to be grounded in the merely factual correspondence truth of the factual constituents of such evaluative judgments. There are no such purely factual constituents – for us. There is, according to Putnam (and presumably other pragmatists), no purely factual truth to be found anywhere in human affairs. The pragmatist conception of truth – irrespective of how, in the end, it should be technically formulated – offers a richer perspective on the “truth-aptness” of our irreducibly normative ordinary language, in which ethical judgments are phrased. It is hopeless to try to find a more fundamental language from which ethical elements would have been eliminated. 7

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(Putnam 2002a, 40–42),8 Putnam ends up with the ungrounded, non-foundationalist status of the ethical: The language of coming to see what [the ethical] standpoint requires of one is internal to that standpoint and not a piece of transcendental machinery that is required to provide a foundation for it. […] Ethical talk needs no metaphysical story to support it (or, in a postmodernist version of the metaphysical temptation, to “deconstruct” it); it only needs what ethical talk – both in the narrower senses of “ethical,” and in the wide sense of talk about the good life – has always needed: good will, intelligence, and respect for what can be seen as grounds and difficulties from within the ethical standpoint itself. (Ibid., 94–95.)

Again, Putnam appeals to the classical pragmatists, especially Dewey, when reminding us that experience is not value-neutral but “comes to us screaming with values” (ibid., 103) and that value is something that “has to do with all of experience” (ibid., 135). He approves of Dewey’s notion of philosophy as criticism and the importance of the criticism of valuation, yielding a vital distinction between the valued and the valuable (ibid., 103). On Deweyan grounds, it is possible to maintain that the (pragmatic) principles governing inquiry in general also hold for value inquiry (ibid., 104). Furthermore, Putnam praises Dewey for observing, with Aristotle, that from a non- or pre-ethical standpoint the reasons for being ethical are “not apparent”, that is, that “one must be educated into the ethical life” through a “transformation of one’s interests”; there is no way of justifying ethical life or giving reasons for the objectivity of ethical judgments from an outside perspective, or on the basis of non-­ ethical reasons (Putnam 2004b, 18, cf. 2002b, and 2004a, 3, 29, 102). Recalling our need to reconstruct and enrich the very notion of naturalism, it may be added that this process of education, of bringing a human person into maturity and into touch with the moral standpoint and its values, is humanly natural. It is part of our “human nature” to occupy the ethical standpoint and, more generally, to come to operate within what philosophers like Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell have called the “space of reasons”.9 What the Deweyan approach also reminds us of is that, though ethical life cannot be justified externally, it by no means follows that epistemic concerns like reason  See Putnam 1990, 1992 for his earlier critique of Williams. See also Dilman 2002, chapters 4 and 5, for a lucid treatment of Williams. 9  As the ethical is in no need of external justification, no science can teach us to make the kind of distinctions requiring “moral perception”; making such distinctions (for instance, between someone’s “suffering unnecessarily” and her or his “learning to take it”) requires skills that are inseparable from our mastery of moral vocabularies (Putnam 2002a, 128). Evaluative properties – epistemic or ethical – can be perceived only when one has learned to understand and to “imaginatively identify with” the relevant evaluative outlook (Putnam 2004a, 69). Putnam, together with Murdoch, McDowell, and others, is thus strictly opposed to the picture in which ethics is treated as something to be justified “from outside”, be that picture evolutionary, utilitarian, or contractarian (Putnam 2002a, 131). All these pictures try to defend ethical values in non-ethical terms, which, for a pragmatist trying to view the demands of morality “from within” them, is a fundamental mistake. The influence of McDowell’s Mind and World (1996), especially its program of “rethinking” the concept of nature (and naturalism) in terms of the notion of “second nature”, on Putnam’s thinking (and neopragmatism generally) must, however, remain a topic for another discussion. See Pihlström 1996 and 2003a, 2003c. 8

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and argument have nothing to do with ethics. People who are seriously committed to ethical life tend to disagree, seriously, about how to live, and therefore reason, argumentation, and justification do have a significant role to play within the ethical standpoint itself, although mere argumentation can rarely settle deep ethical issues. The ethical and the epistemic are entangled, mixed up, inseparable. So are, then, facts and values – for us, in the natural world which we live in and which we continuously, again fully naturally, structure through our world-categorizing practices.10 According to Putnam’s Deweyan fallibilism, experimentalism, and democratization of (moral) inquiry, though there is no final set of moral truths, and moral value judgments are not true or “matters of objective fact” in a “recognition-­ transcendent” sense (ibid., 108–110), such judgments do possess a kind of objectivity, objectivity “humanly speaking”, for us. It is unclear whether any factual judgment about the humanly categorized world – the world we conceptually structure in and through our practices  – could enjoy any essentially stronger kind of objectivity, either. In Ilham Dilman’s (2002) terms, moral value judgments refer to real elements of our “human world”, the morally relevant reality we encounter in our action and language-use. The pragmatist insight here is that such a reality is inseparable from the factual world we describe in our apparently non-ethical practices. The human world is ethically structured through and through; this structuring, furthermore, is not at all non-natural but simply part of what nature is for us, given that we are the kind of naturally developed creatures we are. However, despite his compelling articulation of the fact-value entanglement and the related view that values are no less cognitively objective and no less natural than facts, Putnam fails to make the metaphysical relation between fact and value precise enough. Every fact “realizes” some value(s), and every value is inevitably materialized in or supported by some fact(s), we may say, but what exactly does this mean? How are values entangled with facts, and how are they real for us? How exactly do our “humanly speaking” objective moral value judgments refer to, or pick up, values and/or evaluative properties? Insofar as we take these questions seriously, we should not follow Putnam (2004a) into a wholesale rejection of metaphysics (cf. Pihlström 2009). A pragmatic middle ground is needed here, as it so often is: we may abandon what Putnam used to call “metaphysical realism” (and what Kant called “transcendental realism”) without abandoning metaphysics as such, as we can reinterpret metaphysics itself pragmatically. In order to acquire sufficient resources for exploring the fact-value entanglement as an issue in pragmatist metaphysics, we will examine two

 There are differences between epistemic and ethical values (Putnam 2002a, 31), but their difference, Putnam points out, is not that epistemic values are related to the project of objective description and ethical ones are not. Both types of value open up, for us, a distinctively human world. Even epistemic values admit no “external” justification: “[…] if these epistemic values [e.g., simplicity, coherence, predictive success, etc.] do enable us to correctly describe the world (or to describe it more correctly than any alternative set of epistemic values would lead us to do), that is something we see through the lenses of those very values.” (Ibid., 32–33.) The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to ethical values. 10

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metaphysical concepts, pragmatically articulated: emergence (Sect. 3) and continuity (Sect. 4). Presumably, other candidates for an account of the metaphysical relation between fact and value – as distinguished from a merely conceptual or semantic one – could also be considered. For instance, one might suggest that if facts and values are entangled, some (general) value is always instantiated by a (particular) fact roughly in the sense in which universals are instantiated in particulars, according to Aristotelian realists about universals.11 The entanglement thesis might also be expressed in terms of truthmaking: any truths about the world require as their truthmakers not only facts (or their constituents, e.g., particulars and universals) but also values.12 Alternatively, values may be claimed to be realized by facts, not enjoying any fact-independent existence;13 then the entanglement thesis would also include the reverse idea that facts are realized by values. A detailed study of these or other metaphysical notions that might be taken to explicate the fact-value relationship is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, even if the pragmatist metaphysician focuses on, say, emergence or continuity in this discussion, nothing prevents her/ him from further investigating the connections between her/his preferred pragmatist metaphysics of value and concepts like instantiation, realization, or truthmaking. In any case, the notions of emergence and continuity have been chosen for closer scrutiny here not only because they offer two distinct metaphysical elaborations of the fact-value entanglement but also because they help us to appreciate two different “lines” of the pragmatist tradition. While synechism is a Peircean invention, emergence finds its home in Deweyan pragmatic naturalism and has, arguably, its background in James’s emphasis on novelty in experience. A lot could and should be said about the historical development of these different aspects of pragmatist thought; I can in this chapter only scratch the surface. I do hope, however, that my focusing on emergence and continuity is for these reasons sufficiently well motivated from the perspective of both pragmatism scholarship and metaphysics seeking to understand the nature of value.

 Whether this instantiation is best understood as, say, a sui generis “non-relational tie” (Armstrong 1978) or “partial identity” (Armstrong 2004), or something else, is another matter. Below, when discussing Peircean synechism, we will encounter the idea that values are something like Peirce’s “real generals”. In any case, it seems clear that values are not like particular things, such as tables and chairs; what the ultimate ontological nature of values is must, however, remain beyond my pragmatist treatment, however metaphysical. I prefer to approach the metaphysics of values by examining their relations to facts, instead of attempting to determine what they ultimately are. 12  See, again, Armstrong 2004 for the metaphysical importance of truthmakers – the worldly items needed to “make true” the (or any) truths there are – and see Pihlström 2009 for a pragmatist discussion of this concept. 13  On the notion of realization and its role in “realization physicalism”, see Melnyk 2003. 11

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3 Pragmatists on Emergence We will now take a look at how the notion of emergence might play a role – and how it has played a role  – in pragmatism, in order to examine whether the fact-value entanglement could be metaphysically explicated in terms of the idea that “values emerge from facts”. Emergence, after all, is a concept favored by non-reductive naturalists of various stripes. Very roughly, the idea is to argue that something (e.g., factual reality, material nature) is required for something else (e.g., values, normativity) to arise, even though the latter cannot be metaphysically or conceptually reduced to the former. Values are real, naturally emerging structures, appearing only in (human, cultural) systems with a sufficiently high degree of complexity, just as, we may suppose, a neural system with sufficient complexity is required for mental states and processes to emerge. As the famous slogan goes, emergent “wholes” are something “more” than mere sums of their parts.14 Occasionally, pragmatists (e.g., Rosenthal 1982, 1990) loosely refer to something like emergence, usually without making the concept clear. The classical tradition of British emergentism, represented by C. Lloyd Morgan, Samuel Alexander, and C.D. Broad, among others, arrived at its culmination in the 1920–1930s, i.e., somewhat later than the pragmatist tradition (cf. McLaughlin 1992; Stephan 1999). Yet, concepts close to emergence – e.g., novelty, creativity, chance – were widely used by the classical pragmatists, and there was even some mutual influence between pragmatism and emergentism, especially via the work of G.H.  Mead (see Blitz 1992). Both emergentists and pragmatists have embraced process metaphysics by emphasizing the dynamic development of reality, instead of static, unchanging structures. Joseph Margolis, a neopragmatist emergentist, characterizes human persons and other cultural formations, such as works of art, as emergent, embodied tokens-of-­ types, neither identical to nor reducible to their material composition. He argues that our ontology of cultural entities – presumably including values – ought to recognize these entities as real and emergent, while being compatible with materialism and allowing cultural entities to enter into causal relations and to support causal explanations (Margolis 1984, 14). He thus favors a form of “downward causation” as a key element of his pragmatic emergentism. Instead of reviewing his discussions of the concept in detail, I just quote from one of his numerous publications (see also Chap. 5 above): By an emergent order of reality […] I mean any array of empirical phenomena that (i) cannot be described or explained in terms of the descriptive and explanatory concepts deemed adequate for whatever more basic level or order of nature or reality the order or level in  Obviously, this is not a right place for a detailed analysis of the concepts of reduction and emergence. See, e.g., Stephan’s (1999) comprehensive monograph; for pragmatist views on emergence, see El-Hani and Pihlström 2002 and Pihlström 2002. On pragmatism and emergence, see also Dreon 2022. In this chapter, I am merely concerned with pointing out the relevance of the concept of emergence to pragmatist metaphysics of the fact-value entanglement, not with any detailed characterizations of what emergence might in the end amount to. 14

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question is said to have emerged from, and (ii) is causally implicated and cognitively accessible in the same “world” in which the putatively more basic order or level is identified. (Margolis 1995, 257; original emphases)

In this sense, values can be said to constitute, or belong to, an “emergent order” insofar as they cannot be fully accounted for in terms of merely factual concepts at a “more basic” level, even though they are fully natural – entangled with natural facts – in the sense of belonging to the “same world” with the latter. Margolis’s position, while giving us an idea of what a pragmatically understood concept of emergence may look like, is by no means the first pragmatist elaboration on the idea of emergence. In his exhaustive historical and systematic overview of the emergence debate, Achim Stephan (1999, 134–138) mentions both Dewey’s and F.C.S. Schiller’s critiques of emergentism, as well as Mead’s and A.N. Whitehead’s role in the development of emergentism (ibid., 252–253).15 However, he does not discuss James;16 nor does he mention Margolis as a leading contemporary emergence theorist, let alone lesser figures associated with pragmatism who commented upon emergentist theories in the early decades of the twentieth century.17 Dewey’s pragmatic evolutionary naturalism, in particular, may be interpreted as an “emergent theory of mind” (Tiles 1990 [1988], chapter 3; cf. Savery 1951 [1939]; Alexander 1992). However, while the evolutionary character of pragmatist thought is well known, and this feature of pragmatism has been noted also in connection with emergentism (see, e.g., Patrick 1922, 701; Goudge 1973; cf. Tully 1981), little explicit scholarly work has been devoted to the pragmatists’ actual conceptions of emergence or their relations to major emergence theorists such as Alexander or Broad. Yet, as Goudge (1973, 133) notes, the pragmatists were “the first group of philosophers to work out in detail a philosophy of mind based on evolutionary principles”.18

 See also Stephan 1992. As a personalist idealist, Schiller did not accept the emergentist idea that inanimate matter would be ontologically primary to experience and thought. Schiller (1930, 243) judged the term “emergence” to be “an ambiguous insinuation that the alleged novelties are not truly new but have been lurking obscurely in the dark and waiting for an opportunity to break forth into the light of day”, preferring the notion of novelty to those of emergence, evolution, or creation. 16  As James put it already in a letter in 1869, “all is Nature and all is reason too” (cited in Menand 2001, 218) – this indicates that Jamesian pragmatism was, from its inception, designed to accommodate both naturalism and human freedom, thought, reason, normativity, etc. 17  For relevant discussions in the 1920s and 1930s, see Patrick 1922; Lloyd 1927; Dewey 1960 [1929], 1932; Schiller 1930; Mead 1932; and Boodin 1934. It should not be forgotten that James’s pragmatism, as well as his work in psychology, was influenced by Mill and Fechner, whom Stephan rightly regards as precursors of emergentism (Stephan 1999, chapters 6 and 7), and that the notion of novelty plays a crucial role in James’s dynamic experiential conception of reality (James 1996 [1911]). Nor should the connections between Peirce and Fechner be ignored. 18  Goudge’s essay is a valuable introduction to Peirce’s, Dewey’s and Mead’s evolutionary philosophies of mind. Goudge (1973, 134–135) points out that, in the pragmatists’ Darwinian picture, the mind “must have a causal capacity of its own” in order to be able to respond to goals or ends and to initiate purposive actions. He thus sees downward causation as an essential ingredient in the pragmatists’ emergentism. 15

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Some pertinent examples of pragmatist conceptualizations of emergence, potentially applicable to the emergence of values from facts, can be drawn from Dewey’s and Mead’s naturalistic works. Dewey (1960 [1929], 214–215) writes: “The intellectual activity of man is not something brought to bear upon nature from without; it is nature realizing its own potentialities in behalf of a fuller and richer issue of events.” What gradually emerges out of the initially inanimate world in Dewey’s system is life, mind, freedom, and – eventually – value. For Dewey, such emergent properties are “real features of […] complex systems which cannot be accounted for in terms that would be adequate if the same constituents were organized in a less complex way” (Tiles 1990 [1988], 148). In an earlier study, William Savery (1951 [1939], 498) described Dewey’s view by saying that “our perspectives [on nature and experience] are emergent natural events” having a “continuous flow”. Although Dewey was a naturalist, roughly in the non-reductive sense of naturalism outlined above, he rejected the metaphysically realistic dream of representing nature as it is in itself from an absolute perspective. For him, any ontological structure of reality is a humanly established and, therefore, value-laden structure, itself emerging in the course of experience and inquiry. In this sense his realism about emergent properties and structures, such as values, is thoroughly pragmatic. In the evolutionary flow of experience, both facts and values emerge. Dewey was not entirely happy with the term “emergence”, however. Late in his life, jointly with Arthur Bentley, he argued that the “natural man” who talks, thinks, and knows should not, “even in his latest and most complex activities”, be surveyed “as magically ‘emergent’ into something new and strange” (Dewey and Bentley 1989 [1949], 45). He contrasted his transactional view of emergence to previous views thus: At a stage at which an inquirer wants to keep “life,” let us say, within “nature,” at the same time not “degrading” it to what he fears some other workers may think of “nature” – or perhaps similarly, if he wants to treat “mind” within organic life – he may say that life or mind “emerges,” calling it thereby “natural” in origin, yet still holding that it is all that it was held to be in its earlier “non-natural” envisionment. The transactional view of emergence, in contrast, will not expect merely to report the advent out of the womb of nature of something that still retains an old non-natural independence and isolation. It will be positively interested in fresh direct study in the new form. It will seek enriched descriptions of primary life processes in their environments and of the more complex behavioral processes in theirs. (Ibid., 121.)

Thus, while being careful with the word “emergence”, Dewey did not reject the idea but only what he saw as its magical overtones. He simply required scientific, experimental research on the emergence of life and mind – and presumably, by extension, of values. Mead’s pragmatism, influenced by Dewey’s, includes a notion of emergence as essentially “social” and an analysis of sociality as a character of emergent evolution. Mead develops further an essentially Deweyan pragmatic emergentism. In his prefatory remarks to the posthumous publication of Mead’s The Philosophy of the Present, Dewey insisted that Mead took the doctrine of emergence “much more fundamentally” than “most of those who have played with the idea” (Dewey 1932,

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xxxviii). According to Dewey, Mead “felt within himself both the emergence of the new and the inevitable continuity of the new with the old” (ibid., xxxix). This statement contains the pragmatist tension between emergence and continuity in a nutshell. For Mead, the problem of emergence is intimately connected with the notions of the past and the present. He defines emergence as “the presence of things in two or more different systems, in such a fashion that its presence in a later system changes its character in the earlier system or systems to which it belongs” (Mead 1932, 69; see also 66).19 An emergent property (or “the emergent”) cannot, by definition, follow from the past “before it appears”, but when it appears it always does this (ibid., 2, 11). Emergent properties, pragmatically viewed, do not have any definite ontological status prior to our conceptualizing them in terms of past and present: the emergent, Mead says, “has no sooner appeared than we set about rationalizing it”, showing that it can be found in the past (ibid., 14). The emergent, then, is both a conditioning and a conditioned factor (ibid., 15). Mead joins those emergentists – among them major British emergence theorists like Alexander and Broad  – who maintain that even exactly determined events can scientifically be conceived as emergent (ibid., 17). Emergence, then, must not be confused with indeterminism, which is a separate metaphysical issue. As for Dewey, the emergence of life is a particularly important theme for Mead, because it “confers upon the world characters quite as genuine as those it confers upon living beings” (ibid., 35). In any case, the emergent arises out of conditions that make its arising inevitable: “What we seek in the environment [of experience] is a statement of the world out of which the emergent has arisen, and consequently the conditions under which the emergent must exist, even though this emergence has made a different world through its appearances.” (Ibid., 42).20 Moving to the social aspects of emergence, Mead somewhat puzzlingly notes that the “social nature of the present” arises out of its emergence through a process of readjustment: nature “takes on new characters”, e.g., life, and this process of readjustment is what “social” refers to (ibid., 47). Such a social character can, he argues, “belong only to the moment at which emergence takes place, that is to a present” (ibid., 48). This leads to an acknowledgment of the “social character of the universe”. It is hardly far-fetched to think that the emergence of socially created moral values is for Mead a crucial – even inevitable – feature of the evolution of the universe, thus conceived. Mead thus provides us with one more pragmatically naturalist account of the emergence of values out of factual events and processes. According to Goudge (1973, 142), Dewey and Mead employed the notion of emergence in order to resist “the classical thesis that (1) since mental phenomena  In Stephan’s (1992, 1997, 1999) terms, Mead’s, like most pragmatists’, emergentism is diachronic rather than synchronic, because temporality plays a key role in his position. Because of their dynamic attitude to metaphysics in general, the classical pragmatists were not much interested in synchronic dependence relations, which contemporary emergence and supervenience theoreticians usually focus on. 20  Here, Mead (1932, 43–44) refers to Alexander’s and Lloyd Morgan’s views. 19

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now exist, they must have been implicitly or potentially present in evolution from the very start; and (2) their potential presence played an active part in their later realization, and was not merely an abstract possibility”. But the evolutionary emergence of mentality is not a sudden leap; it is “prolonged, successive” (ibid.) – to the extent that one finds in these pragmatists’ philosophy of mind “a conceptual tension between the category of emergence and that of continuity” (ibid., 144). As Goudge notes, Peirce gave priority to continuity in his metaphysics (see below), while Mead emphasized emergence and Dewey remained somewhere in between. This is precisely the tension that pragmatist views on the fact-value entanglement yield. Neither Mead nor Dewey carefully analyzes the notion of emergence, or argues for the reality of emergent properties and structures in any straightforwardly pragmatic manner. We cannot here determine the correct interpretation of either Dewey’s or Mead’s emergentism, but their non-reductive naturalisms are so closely related to emergentist ideas that they should be seen not merely as critics of emergentists (as Stephan considers Dewey to be) but as some of the most creative representatives of emergentism.21 Yet, it should be admitted that no major pragmatist, perhaps excluding Margolis, has so far presented any careful conceptual treatment of emergence. Among neopragmatists, Putnam has been a leading critic of reductive naturalism, as we noticed in Sect. 2 above; accordingly, one might regard him as an ally in developing a philosophically useful pragmatic notion of emergence. Putnam (1999, 169–170) reminds us, in a much more resolutely anti-Cartesian way than contemporary physicalists, that mind “is not a thing; talk of our minds is talk of world-­ involving capabilities that we have and activities that we engage in”. In order to avoid both Cartesian and materialist conceptions of the mind, he proposes not only a return to pragmatism and the later Wittgenstein, but also to Aristotle (Putnam 1994, 2000). Although Putnam is usually unwilling to describe himself as a naturalist,22 his attachment to Dewey and Aristotle justifies such a label, properly qualified as Deweyan naturalistic humanism.23 However, it still remains to be

 More generally, the early pragmatist tradition is characterized by the frequent use (in addition to James, Dewey, and Mead, also by philosophers like Charles Hartshorne, Sidney Hook, and Ernest Nagel, among others) of notions such as creativity, freedom, evolution, and novelty, which quite naturally find a place in emergentism. Other authors who recognize, but do not elaborate on, the connections between pragmatism and emergentism include Blitz (1992, 133–135, 200), McLaughlin (1992, 57), and Emmeche et al. (1997, 89). 22  Putnam occasionally admits that he is a naturalist in a harmless anti-reductionist sense (Putnam 1994, 289, 312, cf. 2004b). 23  Cf. Munitz 2001, 340. This may help us in further articulating the richness and open-endedness of the concept of naturalism at work in pragmatist views on emergence and the fact-value entanglement. Obviously, Aristotelianism is a form of naturalism, too, though highly non-reductive and teleological as compared to the causal materialism of reductive naturalists or physicalists. Putnam’s neo-Aristotelian philosophy of mind might even be compared to the suggestion that downward causation should be interpreted along the lines of Aristotelian formal causality instead of efficient causality (see El-Hani 2002; El-Hani and Pihlström 2002). His mild Aristotelian naturalism (like Deweyan naturalism) might provide us with resources for a reasonable pragmatic realism about irreducibly emergent features of the world, including values. 21

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considered whether his naturalism can accommodate the notion of emergence, either generally or in its application to the fact-value issue. Analogously to his suggestion to defend “objectivity without objects” in ethics, Putnam believes we can eliminate the alleged mystery of consciousness in the philosophy of mind (Putnam 1999, 171–175). This mystery, he says, is typically treated as a scientific issue, arising out of the assumption that the mind is some sort of object existing in the natural world, capable of being scientifically explained, and the prospects of our being able to solve this mystery are regarded either as optimistic or pessimistic. The final goal, either to be achieved or to be avoided, is the reduction of this mystery to the worldview of fundamental physics, but this mistakenly presupposes that such a reduction makes sense. The recent analytic literature on emergence is largely committed to the same project of coming to terms with this great mystery. Pragmatically, Putnam wants to give up the talk about mystery, as well as the metaphor of emergence, which he considers a bad metaphor: It is a bad metaphor because it suggests that all the true statements expressible in the vocabulary of the “basic” sciences of physics, chemistry, biology […] might have been true without there being consciousness or intentionality. In short, it suggests that we might conceivably have all been Automatic Sweethearts,24 and that it is “mysterious” that we aren’t. (Ibid., 174.)

Clearly, Putnam does not encourage pragmatists to intervene in the emergence debate. Instead of seeking a pragmatic account of the reality of emergents, he prefers giving up the concept. This, however, does not prevent us from employing his pragmatic ideas in our treatment of metaphysical issues implicated in the emergence discourse. Rejecting the mystery of consciousness or values need not destroy their pragmatic reality. Pragmatically defined, within a pragmatic framework of ontological commitments, emergence should be entirely acceptable to a Putnamian anti-reductionist thinker, whose conception of the mind and the world is mainly derived from philosophers like Aristotle, Kant, James, Dewey, and Wittgenstein.25 It is hardly necessary to avoid the notion of emergence in developing the fact-value entanglement thesis, despite Putnam’s reservations. In short, it is hard to see how a pragmatic pluralist like Putnam could coherently tell us that emergence is not an ontologically acceptable concept, or that the world cannot or must not be ontologically “structured” in terms of this concept. However, we should not overlook a problem easily arising from a pragmatist construal of emergence. A pragmatic realism about emergent properties grounds the reality of such properties in human practices. More generally, pragmatic realism states that any properties, whether cultural, mental, or physical, emerge out of  The notion of an “automatic sweetheart” is an allusion to James, who imagined a soulless, mechanically constructed girl practically (observationally) indistinguishable from a real lovely young woman. 25  Even Putnam himself has earlier appealed to the notion of emergence, at least in arguing against naturalized semantics and epistemology that “[t]ruth, reference, justification […] are emergent, non-reducible properties of terms and statements in certain contexts”, though undeniably supervenient on physical properties (Putnam 1994, 493; original emphasis). 24

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human practices. There is no metaphysically absolute, practice- or categorization-­ independent way the world is an sich; in particular, there is no absolute sense of the question of whether there are or are not emergent (or any) properties. This may eventually make the notion of emergence trivial: any property, entity, law, or what not, will turn out to be emergent in relation to the practice-embedded points of view from which we make our ontological commitment to its reality. Ontology, for a pragmatist, is human ontology. In a way this was already observed by relatively early contributors to the discussion of pragmatism and emergentism. Alfred H. Lloyd (1927, 309), dissatisfied with the materialist orthodoxy of emergentism, claimed that matter is also emergent: “[E]ven lifeless and, still more, unknowing and unthinking, quite hopeless and soulless matter has emerged with quite as much novelty and éclat as anything else […].” Drawing upon the pre-Socratics, among others, but not unlike more recent Putnamian pragmatists who abandon the gap between the metaphysically objective real world and subjective human (valuational) perspectives, he argued that “[t]he ‘objective,’ material or natural […] is not original, but is as much an emergent as the subjective” (ibid., 325). A few years later, J.E. Boodin, defending what he called functional realism as an alternative to both “naïve” and “critical” realism, explicitly held that all properties are emergent, as there is “no substance which has a character by itself”, because nature “reveals itself as sense-aspects in its action upon human nature” (Boodin 1934, 170), and perceived qualities and relations are “functions of objective nature and the percipient organism in perspective relation to one another” (ibid., 147). In the spirit of James, he characterized “things” as “the result of interest and conceptual interpretation” (ibid., 151). Insofar as any property or thing is a result of interpretation based upon human interests and hence values, or of Deweyan transactions between experiencing and inquiring organisms and their natural environment, nothing is non-emergent – even those transactions themselves. Is this the final outcome of pragmatic naturalism and emergentism? If so, the prospects of maintaining even non-reductive naturalism within pragmatism may turn out to be dim. Nature itself emerges from our ways of dealing with it; it does not exist independently of us and cannot thus function as the metaphysically fundamental “emergence base” of our categorizations and valuations of it. Is this threatening anti-naturalism one of the reasons why Putnam regards emergence as an unhappy notion? Apparently, if the notion of emergence is to be useful for us, it should contrast with something. There is a pragmatic “cash value” in the theory that some entities, properties, or structures are emergent only if the theory also says that something else is not emergent. Conversely, the concept of naturalism will be trivialized, if virtually anything can be regarded as a natural process. If the emergence of nature itself out of human inquiry and practices is also “natural” – part of nature – no contrast between nature and something that is not nature, or not natural, remains. In a way or another, the pragmatic naturalist, however non-reductive, ought to be able to maintain that not just anything can be incorporated into a naturalistic worldview. Naturalism must be able to distinguish itself from non-naturalistic positions, actual or potential. In Sect. 2 above, I characterized non-reductive naturalism as a view avoiding the postulation

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of transcendent entities over and above the empirical world – including entities like the Platonic Forms – and suggested that insofar as values are pragmatically naturalized and entangled with facts, they must not be taken to be such transcendent entities. A pragmatic commitment to the reality of values is thus not a commitment to the existence of such non-natural beings. However, if this pragmatic construal of naturalism requires a notion of emergence that threatens to be so overwhelming that everything turns out to be emergent, it is not clear that the pragmatist will end up with a coherent and non-trivial conception of naturalism at all. The threat of trivialization, it seems, can be avoided only by carefully constructing, pluralistically, several different notions of emergence applicable to different philosophically interesting cases. Thus, pragmatic pluralism might be an answer to the trivialization threat. The sense in which all properties or things “emerge” out of practices is, presumably, quite different from the sense in which, say, mental properties emerge from physical ones, or normativity from factuality. Analogously, the sense in which values, as emergent structures, are “natural” is quite different from the sense in which elementary particles are natural. Again, pragmatic pluralism rejects essentialistic dichotomies both between fact and value and between nature and culture. Be that as it may, emergence is certainly a promising picture of the fact-­ value entanglement: values arise out of facts, based upon them, yet are something “new” in relation to them and cannot be either conceptually, ontologically or explanatorily reduced to any merely factual structure of the world, such as the causal laws and processes postulated by the natural sciences. This is one way of cashing out the general idea of non-reductive naturalism: values, just like mental states, are fully natural, yet not reducible to nature as it is described by the physical sciences. Insofar as there is, then, a role for the notion of emergence to play in pragmatism, there is no reason for the pragmatist advocating the fact-value entanglement to deny such emergence of the “level” of values and normativity irreducible to “mere” factuality. Even though Putnam seems to be ambivalent about emergence, and even Dewey was critical of it, the pragmatist tradition offers rich resources for a substantial theory of emergent, naturally evolving “orders of reality”.

4 Continuity and Synechism We will, however, now turn from emergentism to a somewhat different metaphysical idea, namely, Peircean synechism. The expression is derived from the Greek term, synechismos, derived in turn from synecho, “to hold or keep together, to continue, to preserve” (Peirce 1992–1998, vol. 2, 503n1). As is well known among Peirce scholars, the synechist position, the doctrine of continuity, is – along with tychism, the doctrine of chance, and agapasm, the doctrine of “evolutionary love” – a central thesis in Peirce’s speculative metaphysics and evolutionary cosmology. Closely associated with what he called scholastic realism, the doctrine that there are “real generals” (e.g., habits, dispositions, laws, tendencies, potentialities, etc.), synechism is the view that everything is continuous with everything else; there are no

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atomistic elements of reality fundamentally discontinuous from each other. Reality as a whole, insofar as it can be an object of experience and inquiry, is a system of continuous elements bound together by laws and habits. Generality, habituality, and continuity, instead of particularity and discontinuity, are keys to Peirce’s metaphysics.26 Peirce’s defense of synechism is tied to his broader project of developing both a pragmatic theory of the meaning of our (scientific, intellectual) concepts and a speculative metaphysical theory of the evolution and basic principles of the universe that would be scientifically acceptable. The details of this immense philosophical undertaking, or Peirce’s reasons for maintaining his peculiar version of realism and the synechistic view related to it, need not concern us in this chapter. Nor do I find it necessary to explicate here Peirce’s system of categories, which also are connected with both scholastic realism and synechism. We will mainly focus on the idea of continuity itself. We must remember, in any case, that Peirce’s affirmation of the reality of general habits and tendencies – the thesis of scholastic realism – is intimately linked with the synechistic emphasis on continuity (see Peirce 1931–1958, 6.172–173 [1902]; cf. Pihlström 2009, chapter 6). Ultimately, there can be no self-­ sufficient individuals discontinuous from each other, because the universe is tied together by general laws and habits. Synechism is a broad metaphysical doctrine that nevertheless has important applications in various more specialized areas, including the philosophy of value. Indeed, if Peirce’s insistence on the reality of generals is taken seriously in this area, it is plausible to suggest that values, far from being somewhat mysterious abstract individuals equally mysteriously “existing” in a transcendent realm – a view that critics of objective values following J.L. Mackie might with some justification consider “queer” (cf. Sect. 2 above) – are “real” precisely in the sense of being real generals governing the evolution of the world as a whole, humanly experienced and conceived. In this way, values, qua real generals, would be continuous with whatever factually exists or takes place in the world. According to synechism, both being as such and specific modes of being, such as mentality, spontaneity, or again (presumably) value, are matters of degree, instead of being sharply separable from their opposites. Nor is there any ontological gap between reality or being, on the one hand, and appearances or phenomena, on the other (Peirce 1992–1998, vol. 2, 2 [1893]). Peirce describes synechism as “the tendency to regard everything as continuous”, in a way that includes “the whole domain of experience in every element of it” (ibid., 1 [1893]). He defines it as “that tendency of philosophical thought which insists upon the idea of continuity as of prime importance in philosophy and, in particular, upon the necessity of hypotheses involving true continuity” (Peirce 1931–1958, 6.169 [1902]; cf. 1992–1998, vol. 1, 313 [1892]). Synechism is, thus, both metaphysical and methodological. However,  See, e.g., Hausman 1993, 15, 141, 177–178; Parker 1998; Reynolds 2002; and especially Esposito 2007. For insightful applications of Peirce’s synechism in metaphysics more broadly, see Rosenthal 1986. This is not the right place to examine the medieval scholastic background influences (e.g., Duns Scotus) of Peirce’s metaphysics of generality, nor the general issue of realism vs. nominalism regarding universals. 26

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it is not “an ultimate and absolute metaphysical doctrine” but (rather like pragmatism is for Peirce) a “regulative principle of logic” guiding our choice of hypotheses (Peirce 1931–1958, 6.173 [1902]).27 Peirce believed that a successful proof of pragmati(ci)sm28 would establish the truth of synechism (ibid., 5.415; Peirce 1992–1998, vol. 2, 335 [1905]), since continuity is essentially involved in pragmaticism, which emphasizes habits of action instead of individual actions. Like pragmati(ci)sm and scholastic realism, synechism was, for Peirce, “a purely scientific philosophy”, although he noted that it may even support the reconciliation of science and religion (Peirce 1992–1998, vol. 2, 3 [1893]).29 Peirce explains that the synechist must deny the Parmenidean distinction between being, which is, and not-being, which is nothing, arguing that being is “a matter of more or less, so as to merge insensibly into nothing” (ibid., 2 [1893]). Thus, synechism rejects dualisms of all kinds, including the classical dualism of the physical and the mental (psychical) as “unrelated chunks of being”. Instead of being distinct categories, the physical and the psychical are “of one character”, although there are obviously differences in degree between things that are more mental and spontaneity-involving and things that are more material and less spontaneous. Similarly, synechism rejects sharp discontinuities between the living and the non-­ living, offering even grounds for a qualified defense of immortality, as well as discontinuities between oneself and the others: “your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself” (ibid., 2–3 [1893]). Accordingly, synechism may be seen as a metaphysical basis of panpsychism, as well as of the ethically vital capacity for empathy.30 Against this anti-dualistic background, it is natural for a pragmatist synechist to view fact and value as continuous as well. These are “entangled” not in the sense of

 Joseph L. Esposito (2007, 1) offers the following, somewhat more detailed characterization in the Digital Encyclopedia of Charles S. Peirce: “Synechism, as a metaphysical theory, is the view that the universe exists as a continuous whole of all of its parts, with no part being fully separate, determined or determinate, and continues to increase in complexity and connectedness through semiosis and the operation of an irreducible and ubiquitous power of relational generality to mediate and unify substrates. As a research program, synechism is a scientific maxim to seek continuities where discontinuities are thought to be permanent and to seek semiotic relations where only dyadic relations are thought to exist.” Mentioning no less than ten (!) different ideas Peirce invoked in relation to synechism, Esposito especially emphasizes that synechism and pragmatism were regarded as mutually supportive by Peirce, as “synechism provides a theoretical rationale for pragmatism, while use of the pragmatic maxim to identify conceivable consequences of experimental activity enriches the content of the theory by revealing and creating relationships” (ibid.). 28  Famously, Peirce rebaptized his pragmatism as “pragmaticism” in 1905, in order to distinguish his logical principle of “making our ideas clear” from the use of the term “pragmatism” in the “literary journals” of the time. Here we need not pay attention to the development of Peirce’s pragmaticism. See the relevant writings from 1905 and 1907 in Peirce 1992-1998, vol. 2; for further discussion, cf. Pihlström 2008a, chapter 1. 29  In his 1892 article, “The Law of Mind” (Peirce 1992–1998, vol. 1, 312–333), Peirce argues for the “law” that ideas tend to spread continuously, affecting each other, and that they lose intensity but gain generality in this process. 30  This chapter, however, is not concerned with panpsychism (cf. Pihlström 2008a, chapter 7); nor am I claiming that ethics could be based upon the capacity for empathy (cf. Pihlström 2005). 27

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values arising out of facts (which could in principle be devoid of value), as the emergentist would have it, but in the sense of being, synechistically, continuous and inseparable from the very start. Whereas the analogy from the philosophy of mind to the emergentist version of the fact-value entanglement is the non-reductive emergent materialist view that mental states arise out of sufficiently complex material systems, the parallel analogy to the synechist version is the panpsychist position, according to which the most fundamental building blocks of nature are already (proto-)mental. There are no “mere facts” at all in the sense of isolated facts that would be discontinuous with values. The latter, in turn, may be understood as “real generals” in the sense of Peirce’s scholastic realism, as already suggested. That is, values are to be metaphysically construed as habits and developmental tendencies or principles – ascribable to humans and their schemes and maxims of action, primarily, but potentially to the universe at large, given Peirce’s speculative metaphysical cosmology – rather than particulars of any kind, even particular human actions. The fact-value entanglement, synechistically reinterpreted, thus means that factual and valuational tendencies are deeply interwoven and inseparable in the processual reality that constitutes the world for us. No separate process of the merely factual evolution of the universe, say, can be distinguished from the evolution of values. Furthermore, insofar as there is, as Peirce suggests, a fundamental continuity between oneself and others, there is great human – valuational, ethical – relevance in the seemingly extremely abstract metaphysical issues of synechism and scholastic realism. Peirce’s famous rejection of nominalism, the doctrine that only particular entities exist, is quite explicitly intended as morally significant, as it is not only formulated as a criticism of a certain abstract metaphysical position but also as an attack on individualist egoism and what he labeled the “Gospel of Greed” (cf. Peirce 1992–1998, vol. 1, 357 [1893]).31 Moral values are, hence, implicated in Peirce’s metaphysics in a fundamental way. If I subscribe to the view that, “I am altogether myself, and not at all you”, I am in the grip of a “metaphysics of wickedness”, which the synechist must “abjure” (ibid., vol. 2, 2 [1893]). The person, Peirce says, “is not absolutely an individual”; rather, a “man’s circle of society” is itself a “loosely compacted person” (ibid., 338 [1905]). This is a crucial application of synechism. If we fail to acknowledge our continuity with others – with a potentially unlimited community of fellow humans, especially fellow inquirers  – it will be impossible for us to distinguish between absolute truth, which Peirce famously saw as an ideal limit of scientific inquiry, the “final opinion” to be ultimately arrived at by those who employ the scientific method, and what we merely in fact do not doubt at a given moment (cf. ibid., 338 [1905]). Values are, then, crucially involved in Peirce’s thought about generality and continuity, as well as his theory of inquiry. The entanglement of the pragmatic, fallibilist theory of inquiry and the related conception of truth as the final opinion with the critique of the undesirable moral

 Synechism, which Peirce says has applications to the philosophy of religion (Peirce 1992–1998, vol. 1, 331 [1892]), even “calls for” a philosophy of evolutionary love (ibid., 354; Peirce 1931–1958, 6.289 [1893]). 31

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consequences of nominalism is a further indication of the profound continuity of fact and value in Peircean pragmatism and realism. As even this brief discussion indicates, Peirce’s synechism and scholastic realism are complex doctrines, whose adequate characterization lies beyond the scope of the present inquiry. It should be clear, however, that they can be developed into a direction that makes them highly relevant to the fact-value entanglement we have been considering from the perspective of pragmatic non-reductive naturalism. That relevance does not depend on the technical formulations needed to make those doctrines precise. The significance of the notion of continuity for the fact-value entanglement in pragmatist metaphysics is not exhausted by Peircean synechism, however. Let us, therefore, before concluding this section, briefly turn from Peirce to James. According to the idealist or spiritualist position James defends against materialism and atheism, in the third lecture of Pragmatism (James 1975 [1907], especially 55–56), the universe must be continuous with us and our values. We need this kind of “eternal moral order” of the universe (cf. ibid., 55); indeed, it is one of the truly vital needs we have, according to James. As he frequently puts it, the universe is expected to be “congruous with our spontaneous powers” (James 1979 [1897]).32 On the basis of our discussion above, we may ask whether this continuity, which is strikingly similar to what later pragmatists like Putnam call the fact-value entanglement, could be understood in terms of Peirce’s synechism (which James seldom, if ever, explicitly comments on).33 Even though James emphasized the idea of novelty, the moral order he postulates does not just magically emerge from the merely factual order of the universe – nor from any supposed essential cosmic order that would be prior to our human valuations and needs, something that Jamesian “humanist” pragmatism could hardly accommodate – but is postulated, by us, as a structural feature of the world we live in, a world which must somehow be continuous with us and, hence, with our values. For the Jamesian pragmatist, human valuational perspectives cover and color all of reality. There are no value-independent facts, because any facts or indeed any other metaphysical categories we may pragmatically postulate depend on our categorizing the world we live in in terms of our needs and interests. One way of making sense of this idea is through Peircean synechism. Yet, the tension between continuity and emergence can hardly be avoided. James is, once again, a non-reductive naturalist, too; somehow our valuational activities and perspectives must grow out of our fully natural existence as physiological creatures.

 The early essay, “The Sentiment of Rationality” (1879), reprinted in James 1979 [1897], is particularly relevant here. 33  James, as a pluralist, was critical of the idea of continuity insofar as it entails monism. However, his criticism is not dogmatic or based upon a prior metaphysical theory; rather, he applies the pragmatic method in order to explicate both continuity and discontinuity, both unity and disunity, in terms of their practical functions in our lives. See James 1975 [1907], 66–67, and 1996 [1911], chapter 10. It would be an interesting question for historical research, not only utilizing James’s published writings but also his correspondence and other material, what exactly his relation to Peirce’s synechism was. 32

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We have arrived at an attractive (re)construal of the fact-value entanglement in terms of synechism. There is no emergent “leap”, after all – no metaphysical “gap” between facts and values to be bridged in terms of emergence  – but the two are deeply, inseparably, continuous, just because we are (naturally) the kind of valuing beings we are and live in the kind of inevitably “valued” universe we do live in, unable to separate valuation from our continuously experiencing and acting on facts. This view can be backed up by key pragmatist writings at least as strongly as the emergentist one can. While the emergentist strand of pragmatic naturalism about fact and value requires that we turn to Dewey and Mead, the synechist strand employs Peirce’s scholastically realist version of pragmatism, postulating “real generals” such as habits, though it may also find significant resources in James’s views on the continuity between the universe and our “spontaneous powers”. The problem is how – or, indeed, whether – to choose between the two options we have distinguished. The very definition of pragmatic naturalism is as open as it was in the beginning of this chapter. Two quite different views on how the fact-value entanglement can be a thoroughly natural feature of our lifeworld seem to be both pragmatically supportable.

5 Ruth Anna Putnam’s “Seamless Web” of “Humanly Created” Facts and Values Having in this chapter cited a number of classical and more recent pragmatists whose views are, in my view, helpful in articulating a sophisticated conception of the fact-value entanglement but have also (as we have seen) led to a not easily resolvable tension between emergentist and synechist ways of interpreting the metaphysics of this entanglement, let me pause for a moment to reflect on the work of a pragmatist thinker whose ideas in this area are important and original but have unfortunately largely been shadowed by those of many other pragmatists, including her more famous husband. Ruth Anna Putnam was an insightful scholar of classical pragmatism, particularly James and Dewey, and developed her own account of the relation between fact and value quite independently of the above-discussed views of Hilary Putnam, even though some of the Putnams’ investigations of fact and value were jointly authored and have been included in their collaborative collection of essays, Pragmatism as a Way of Life (Putnam and Putnam 2017). A defense of the fact-value entanglement seems to be, for both of the Putnams, an essential element of their pragmatism(s). As Ruth Anna Putnam notes in an essay originally published in a collection on Hilary Putnam’s philosophy (but included in their joint volume), “taking pragmatism seriously” means, among other things, recognizing that one lives in a world one shares with others, not as a “spectator” but as an “agent in the world”, and that in this world there is no “sharp distinction between moral problems and other problems, or between moral inquiry and other inquiry”; accordingly,

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“taking pragmatism seriously is to reject the fact/value distinction – that is, to deny that that distinction will bear any ontological or epistemological weight” (ibid., 17–18). As an extended inquiry into what it means to “take pragmatism seriously”, Pragmatism as a Way of Life is my main source for discussing Ruth Anna Putnam’s views in this section. While she offers interesting insights into the justification of value commitments, the deeply personal nature of moral problems, the problem of evil, as well as the significance of democracy as a (Deweyan-inspired) “way of life”, and a range of related issues, I will – continuing the main argument of this chapter – focus on what she has to say about the metaphysical status of values (and their relation to facts).34 Using a phrase employed earlier by Morton White (e.g., 1956), Ruth Anna Putnam maintains that fact and value constitute a “seamless web” (see especially Putnam and Putnam 2017, chapter 5),35 indeed (as also argued by White over the decades) a web perceptually “anchored in” or “attached to” experience (see ibid., 403, 417). We perceive values as much as we perceive facts – just as White teaches us that moral feelings (that is, value perceptions) can function in the empirical testing of our holistic totality of beliefs as well as sense perceptions can.36 In this sense, Ruth Anna Putnam’s view can be regarded as an expression of the “synechistic” thesis (albeit without that label) according to which facts and values are continuous with each other. This continuity is, however, for her epistemological rather than metaphysical. In particular, when discussing (in the context of a critical treatment of Rorty’s views) moral knowledge and arguing against conceptions of such knowledge as certain and dogmatic, which in her view can only lead to fanaticism or moral skepticism, Putnam writes: In fact, pragmatists believe that the distinction between moral knowledge and the rest of knowledge is a very superficial distinction, marking end points on a continuum. Descriptions of facts, value judgments (moral, cognitive, aesthetic, etc.), and theories (scientific, economic, literary, philosophical, etc.) are deeply and inextricably interwoven. These views have been defended by pragmatists since the days of James and Dewey and are being defended to this day. (Ibid., 106–107.)

Here, as we can see, the focus is on the continuum of different kinds of knowledge – or, perhaps better, on there not in the end being radically different “kinds” of knowledge within the continuum at all – rather than on any alleged metaphysical continuum  In this context, I will also again have an opportunity to cite, albeit only in passing, the work of another important recent pragmatist, Roberta Dreon, whose recent book on pragmatist philosophical anthropology (Dreon 2022) also thematizes the issue of emergence vs. continuity (see also some brief references above and a couple of long footnotes in the “Introduction”). 35  Ruth Anna Putnam’s essay, “Weaving Seamless Webs” (chapter 5 of Putnam and Putnam 2017), was originally published in 1987, around the time when Hilary Putnam was also deep in the process of developing his devastating criticism of the fact/value dichotomy (see above). 36  Putnam does not cite White when explicitly discussing our “perceiving values” (see chapter 25, “Perceiving Facts and Values”, in Putnam and Putnam 2017), but she at least once invokes White’s “epistemic corporatism” in her elaboration on the “seamless web of science and morality” (ibid., 85). 34

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of fact and value that could be spelled out, for instance, in terms of Peircean synechism. We might speculate that the anti-metaphysical orientation that Hilary Putnam derived from logical empiricism (see especially Chap. 2 above) is reflected in Ruth Anna Putnam’s ways of formulating the fact-value entanglement, even though she does not seem to have been indebted to the Vienna Circle philosophers’ criticism of metaphysics in the way her husband was. On the other hand, referring to Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty (see Dewey 1960 [1929]), she does seem to, in a more metaphysical vein, and in fact criticizing the very idea of our “knowing” values, speak about the disappearance of any “gap” between the natural world and the “reality” of values: “The gap vanishes, Dewey maintains, when values are understood not as something to be known but rather as something that guides conduct and when science is understood to provide the means to realize (in this temporal world) more efficiently, more securely the things we value. In other words, when theory and practice are united.” (Putnam and Putnam 2017, 295; see also 313.) Moreover, not only do factual and valuational knowledge lie on a continuum; more strongly, rejecting the fact/value dichotomy in Putnam’s sense (a rejection she attributes to James and Dewey) entails that there is no value-free factual knowledge at all: “what we call factual knowledge is shaped by our values”, as “we inquire into matters that matter to us” (ibid., 353–354). Even physicists inevitably make value judgments about relevance, plausibility, reliability, and so on, and in this sense “every object-of-knowledge is an object-of-evaluation” (ibid., 415–416). Even moral judgments enter into science, including not only applied science but even sciences like fundamental physics, by playing a role in determining what will be investigated and which methods are acceptable (ibid., 426).37 To make things somewhat more complicated, however, we should note that Ruth Anna Putnam also has, in addition to the (primarily epistemic) continuum conception of the fact-value entanglement, her own version of emergentism about value to offer.38 In “Creating Facts and Values” (ibid., chapter 24), she argues that values do  This, as Ruth Anna Putnam herself acknowledges (Putnam and Putnam 2017, 426), is something that Hilary Putnam has also argued in a series of works spanning over several decades (see, e.g., Putnam 1981, 1990, 2002, 2004a, 2004b); see the early sections of this chapter. 38  She does not use the term “emergence” (or related terms) in any technical sense, as far as I am aware, but she does say, for instance, that “facts and values emerge at the end of inquiry on an equal footing: the facts are value-laden and the values are fact-laden” (Putnam and Putnam 2017, 408). This explicitly suggests that the process of creation through which facts and values “emerge” is the process of inquiry – analogously to the sense in which Dewey (e.g., 1960 [1929]) maintained that the objects of inquiry emerge from inquiry instead of being “there” ready-made prior to inquiry. (This issue is discussed in the context of pragmatist philosophy of the humanities in Pihlström 2022.) The matter remains slightly unclear, however, because Putnam variously speaks about either values themselves or our knowledge of values as emerging from inquiry. She maintains, for example, that “perceiving/valuing is only the beginning of a process of inquiry/evaluation at the end of which we are entitled to claim knowledge of facts and of values” (Putnam and Putnam 2017, 420). Is the “product” at the end of inquiry the value itself or our knowledge of that value? Or is she perhaps claiming that not only are facts and value entangled with each other but also facts and values, on the one hand, and whatever knowledge we may have about them, on the other hand, are entangled, too? The latter would be a form of even more strongly holistic pragmatism. 37

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not exist as as ready-made absolute or transcendent entities in some non-natural realm (as claimed by at least some moral realists) but are something that we human beings make, just as we make various artefacts that serve our needs and interests. However, rather than simply maintaining that values asymmetrically emerge from facts (e.g., in the sense of being constructed in response to our natural needs), she argues that both facts and values emerge from our human activities of fact- and value-making. Facts are no less made, or “created”, than values, and values are not distinguished from facts by being created by us in contrast to facts remaining what they are in an “uncreated” or metaphysically independent sense. Both facts and values are emergent constructs, something we human beings produce through our activities of inquiry and world-engagement. Moral skepticism that questions the objectivity of moral values by appealing to, say, cultural relativism, the alleged “queerness of value” (cf. again Mackie 1990 [1977]), and moral disagreements as reasons for denying the reality of values is a non-starter against such a pragmatic account of the metaphysics of value (which Putnam does not label “metaphysical”, though). As a process taking place within our practices for which we are continuously morally responsible, the creation of values is itself a morally relevant process, not simply something that metaphysically grounds our participation in moral practices. Thus, we “make” moral values – indeed, “we cannot escape the responsibility of making values” (Putnam and Putnam 2017, 72) – when (always already, inescapably) engaging in moral practices, especially practices of moral inquiry. The reasons for this value-making are themselves pragmatic, and thus the view that values are made by us is, indeed, inherent to Putnam’s pragmatism, arguably one of its most important characteristics. We make values, she says, “because we need moral values”, more or less like we make other things we need in our lives (ibid., 73; cf. 389), and the values we thus “produce” are “objective enough” (ibid., 389), though not superhumanly objective in the sense required by the absolutist moral realist (or the disappointed moral skeptic).39 We also, pragmatically, assess our success in such value-making activities in terms of their contribution to our lives and societies: we “evaluate moral values by how well they succeed in grounding stable human societies and in fostering human flourishing” (ibid., 74). Our values being “part of a seamless web of facts and values” enables us to “evaluate our values” (ibid., 81; see also  In her account of value-making, Putnam is crucially indebted to Nelson Goodman’s (1978) famous, or notorious, views on “worldmaking” (see Putnam and Putnam 2017, 390–395). Employing Goodman’s ideas, she hopes to respond to the charge of arbitrariness: our value-making need not be any more arbitrary than our fact-making. Because “we get along well enough with facts although they are made-by-us, we should entertain the suggestion that we can get along well enough with made-by-us moral values”, she reminds us (ibid., 390). More precisely, “even if all of the structure [of values] is made by us, the structure neither in its parts nor as a whole is arbitrary – it is no more arbitrary than the structure of facts, no more arbitrary than a work of art, no more arbitrary than the work of an artisan” (ibid., 400). A crucial question here, of course, is how exactly the notion of worldmaking ought to be understood in order to keep it even minimally plausible; clearly any reasonable pragmatic naturalist or pragmatic realist must admit that we are not creating the facts of the world we live in ex nihilo (see also, e.g., Pihlström 1996, 1998a, 2009). 39

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119). Nothing we do is, then, beyond such pragmatic evaluation – and nothing is in principle beyond human “making”, as even “the facts of worldmaking are themselves made” (ibid., 397). Thus, importantly, we should understand Putnam as claiming that even though values are made in response to our natural human needs, those needs themselves, as parts of the world we live in – as facts surrounding us, in a way – are also “made” by us through our worldmaking practices. Even the needs that give rise to our values are not just “there” independently of human activity but are constantly shaped and reshaped by us as we inquire into how they shape our lives. A possible worry here might be whether our making of moral values will in the end have to be tested against some conception of the flourishing of individuals and societies (meeting their “needs”) that would be taken to be more fundamental than those moral values themselves. I find Putnam’s reasoning slightly too straightforward when she tells us that we need (and therefore make) values “in order to have reasons (of the kind that may serve as justifications) for our actions, and more generally in order to choose” (ibid., 399).40 We already have to be able to choose among alternative courses of action, to justify (or fail to justify) our choices, and thus to have (or lack) some kind of relevant reasons for doing so, in order to be able to engage in the actions of value-making (or “worldmaking”) in the first place. Putnam does admit that the non-foundational character of our worldmaking – especially our knowledge and morality lacking any firm foundations  – may cause a “vertigo” (ibid., 394–395). Basically I agree with her that the entire set of fact- and value-­ making practices we engage in must be reflexively accounted for in terms of something like holistic pragmatism, but I would be cautious in seeing the values we create as simply emerging from our (natural) need to be able to justify and have reasons for our actions. In a more fundamental and less instrumentalist-sounding way, we should be able to say that values are always already invoked in our being so much as able to conceptualize ourselves as agents of any kind, even agents of value-making. I will not press this point further here, however; I am confident that a version of holistic pragmatism (presumably in the end not very different from White’s) can be developed out of these ideas, emphasizing the irreducibly moral character of the entire “web” of values, needs, and factual beliefs that we continuously “make” in responding to the world around us – and the equally irreducibly moral character of that “making” itself. At least it is not necessary to claim our construction of values to serve any ultimate non-moral interests.41 Not only are fact and value seamlessly entangled, then. The more original and radical suggestion made by Ruth Anna Putnam is that they are both in some sense “created”, analogously to the sense in which we, according to Nelson Goodman (1978), make or create “world versions”, and thereby “worlds”. It would seem  She also perceptively points out that our need for new values arises especially in situations where “old values clash” (Putnam and Putnam 2017, 401). See also her remarks on fallibilism and on moral inquiry as value inquiry transforming our habits (ibid., 431–433). 41  For pragmatist reflections on the irreducibility of the moral point of view, see, e.g., Pihlström 2011a and 2021. 40

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natural – even for ordinary realists – to speak about values as something that we human beings create, but few of us would straightforwardly wish to extend that way of speaking to facts; indeed, many mainstream scientific or metaphysical realists are some kind of constructivists about value. The very important pragmatist point that Putnam helps us appreciate is that by creating values we also continuously “create” facts, including the facts about our needs on the basis of which we create values, thereby creating, or at least continuously shaping and structuring, the human world we live in, to the extent that there is no “world” at all to be meaningfully discussed beyond that human reality dependent on our activities of “making”. I find it natural, and pragmatically justified, to interpret Putnam’s crucial concept of “creation” along broadly Kantian lines, but I know that here I am departing from Ruth Anna Putnam’s (as well as Hilary Putnam’s) version of pragmatism. The obvious reason for this is that it hardly makes sense to seriously claim that we would be creating facts in the sense in which we create tables, houses, artworks, or social institutions. (To claim this about values presumably makes more sense, according to most realists, but this appearance may be deceptive and may  – I agree with the Putnams – lead to pernicious ways of trying to maintain a fact/value dichotomy.) This much we must, I think, grant to ordinary commonsense realism – or to what Roberta Dreon (2022) calls “nondogmatic realism”.42 However, at a deeper philosophical level – the transcendental level, I would like to suggest – it can, importantly, be suggested that we create facts and values in the same sense. Ruth Anna Putnam makes this claim but does not connect it with transcendental philosophy. Both fact- and value-making are grounded in our human practices of world-­ engagement, which are thoroughly valuational to begin with. There is, for us, no way of encountering any facts of the world without doing so through a framework of values. As Hilary Putnam noted a long time ago, a being with no values would have no facts, either (see Putnam 1981, chapter 9). I find it slightly disappointing that Ruth Anna Putnam (any more than her husband) does not explicitly characterize her notion of “creation” along such

 This is a form of realism “immune from the metaphysical claim that reality is out there, completely and definitely equipped before and regardless of any human intervention”, rejecting “the traditional dichotomy between an independent subject and a merely external reality, completely defined, once and for all, before any human engagement with it” (Dreon 2022, 56). For the nondogmatic realism defended by pragmatist cultural naturalists and pluralists, “reality is neither separate from living beings nor already completely made before they start interacting with it” (ibid., 213). It is precisely this “interaction”, “engagement”, or “intervention” structuring reality from human perspectives that I have argued (in, e.g., Pihlström 2003a, 2020a, 2021) to need a (quasi-)Kantian transcendental interpretation (instead of any straightforwardly causal or empirical one) in order to be even minimally credible. Therefore, even if pragmatism can be developed entirely independently of any Kantianism, as Dreon (2022) hopes to do, I do believe that the Kantian dimension adds further resources to pragmatist theorization about realism. In the context of Dreon’s work more generally, realism could also be seen as a unifying issue that brings together the problems of naturalism, emergence, and culturalism that philosophical anthropology needs to address. It is a problem that fundamentally concerns the way(s) in which we human beings are “in” the world. Therefore, it is the core of pragmatist philosophical anthropology, too. 42

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transcendental lines.43 This is, indeed, my reinterpretation or further development of her views, not an accurate reading of what she means by “value-making”. But I do propose that we join her in taking seriously the metaphor of creation. It indicates that we do not live in a ready-made world but in a world that is, inevitably, shaped in terms of, and in response to, our human needs and interests (the facts about which are themselves, again, something that we shape or “make” as we inquire into the ways they constrain our lives, including our values). This position, as such, does not resolve the issue of emergence vs. continuity (synechism) either way; both metaphysical accounts of the relationship between fact and value are compatible with the notion of creation in its pragmatic-cum-transcendental articulation. It might be suggested, however, that the “creationist” philosophy of fact and value we derive from Ruth Anna Putnam might be somewhat more hospitable to an emergentist construal of this relation, because one way of seeing both facts and values as “created” would be to see them as emerging from our human activities of engaging with reality within our normatively structured practices. This, however, would have to be understood as a symmetrical rather than asymmetrical relationship: not only do values then emerge from facts, but facts also in their way emerge from values, from the plurality of valuational frameworks that we (necessarily) employ in encountering the world in the first place.

6 Conclusion: Applying the Pragmatic Method No matter how we choose to construe the central metaphors of creation and making, the world of fact and value that we “make” is a human world. In a sense the distinctively human (especially normative) structures of reality arise from something that is “merely natural”, but in another sense nothing is “merely natural” in the sense of failing to belong, for us, to the (emergent) human world. This, it seems to me, is one way of expressing the tension that we encounter in Ruth Anna Putnam’s construal of the fact-value entanglement  – as well as in Hilary Putnam’s views on the same issue. Let us briefly consider, by way of conclusion, a pragmatic view of the metaphysical distinctness of “the human” (that is, personhood, value, culture) that might, again, be seen as either pragmatically emergentist or synechist, as defended by Margolis (2008). According to Margolis, human culture (including, again, values) is not “distinct” in the sense of being placed somehow over and above nature. Such a

 She does refer to “shared minimal rationality” and “some shared moral values” as presuppositions for moral discussion and reasonable disagreement on moral issues, though (see Putnam and Putnam 2017, 78–79). This argument could be developed into a transcendental reflection on the necessary conditions for the possibility of moral discussion and disagreement. In commenting on the “creation” of facts and values, she also acknowledges that casting doubt (with Goodman) on “the notion of facts independent of us” takes place “in a tradition which goes back at least to Kant” (ibid., 391). 43

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dualistic view would contradict his emergentist picture of cultural entities (cf. Sect. 3 above). On the contrary, culture “penetrates” nature; there is no nature for us in the absence of cultural – and thereby valuational – categorization.44 This is a pragmatist position: the natural world is what it is for us because of the purposive practices we engage in, depending on our needs and interests, and hence on our values and/or valuational activities. What results is a synechist picture of the deep continuity between our valuations, which themselves are natural activities within the world we valuationally categorize, and the natural world thereby categorized. The “distinctness” of “the human” lies precisely in its not being a distinct category of its own to be found in some particular corner of the natural world. The human, especially the valuational, is distinct in being (“non-distinctively”) everywhere, in penetrating nature thoroughly.45 Throughout this chapter, we have been searching for an adequate characterization, if not an explicit definition, of pragmatic non-reductive naturalism. (While Ruth Anna Putnam rarely speaks about naturalism, she also maintains, as we saw in the previous section, that our creation of facts and values is nothing non- or supernatural but based on natural human needs.) The interpenetration of the natural and the human might be one promising proposal here. However, we have not arrived at any fully satisfactory solution to the problem of choosing between emergence and continuity, both of which could be employed to render this interpenetration easier to understand. So how should we, and how can we, choose, when faced by the tension between emergentist and synechist construals of the metaphysics of the fact-value entanglement? Should we think of the fact-value entanglement in terms of emergence – with values emerging, as “new” levels of reality, from the “merely factual” level – or in terms of synechism  – with values and facts “shading into” each other? This is a fundamental metaphysical question for any pragmatist defense of the fact-value entanglement. As in many other metaphysical issues, we should, as pragmatists, apply the pragmatic method.46 We should ask what “cash value” there is, or what kind of conceivable practical differences there might be, in the metaphysical alternatives we have distinguished. But are there any? I am not convinced that there are any genuine practical differences to be found here, although I am not claiming, either, that no practical differences could be found. Both the emergentist pragmatic naturalist and the synechist pragmatic naturalist live in (in Margolis’s terms) a distinctively human world in which there is no dualistic break between nature and culture, or fact and value. They just understand this non-­ dualism somewhat differently. Both will face the challenge of making their key  This is a relatively liberal paraphrase of a position I take to be at least close to Margolis’s. I do not claim to faithfully interpret his views here. For a more extensive discussion of Margolis’s version of pragmatism (and realism), see Chap. 5 above. 45  The pragmatic moral realist may, and should, defend the parallel view that ethics is not a special human practice but penetrates human life and culture through and through (cf. Pihlström 2005). 46  For an extended discussion of the role of the pragmatic method in the service of metaphysical thought, see Pihlström 2009, cf. also 2008a, chapter 3. 44

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metaphysical concepts more precise; given the ontologically tolerant and pluralistic approach characteristic of pragmatic naturalism, both ways of categorizing, in pragmatically metaphysical terms, the fact-value entanglement may have their legitimate roles to play in certain human practices, which themselves depend upon, or arise as responses to, our valuational categorizations of reality and the natural human needs they serve. Both may contribute to the further development of pragmatic naturalism, and though their contributions may not be compatible as ultimate metaphysical theories about the structure of reality as it is “in itself”, it must not be forgotten that for pragmatists this is not what metaphysical theories should be like in the first place. Metaphysics, for a pragmatic naturalist, is an instrument for living forward in the natural, yet distinctively human, world we find ourselves embedded in. It is not a search for any final theory but a way of making sense of our existence, always fallibly and revisably. In short, beliefs – including metaphysical ones – are habits of action for pragmatists.47 Therefore, our theory of the fact-value entanglement should also enable us to live forward in the factual-valuational world we inhabit. This “living forward” is itself a kind of pragmatic inquiry with its distinctive value-laden structure. Values are already irreducibly implicated in these very concepts of belief and inquiry, as well as the related concept of metaphysics. Values can, then, as proposed above in Sect. 4, be regarded as Peircean real generals, guiding, as habits and general principles, our purposive actions and even the evolution of the world we live in, thus structuring any way the world can be for us, when viewed pragmatically, from the agent’s perspective. Please don’t misunderstand my position: I am not claiming that emergentist and synechist perspectives on the fact-value entanglement can simply be reconciled by employing the pragmatic method. Certainly for Peirce himself such a reconciliation would have been unacceptable. Synechism, according to Peirce, is required, if we wish to make sense of the projects of science and scientific metaphysics. Emergentism, with its leaps from one metaphysical level to another, would be a philosophy of discontinuity, too nominalistic for Peirce’s taste. There are real, irresolvable tensions in the pragmatist tradition, and this is one of them. With these qualifications in mind, we may appreciate the fact that both emergentist and synechist metaphysics of the fact-value entanglement may capture some important insights that need to be captured in our efforts of making sense or our world. Admittedly, both may fail to make our ideas entirely clear. These views are certainly not final, completed answers to our metaphysical problems of fact and value. Yet, both, as we have seen, are intuitively acceptable perspectives for pragmatist, non-reductively naturalist metaphysicians, both can be supported by the pragmatist tradition, classical and recent, and both may be to some extent needed in understanding the non-dualistic “distinctness” of human values in a natural world. There is, however, one more important problem to be taken up. A pragmatically naturalist metaphysics of the fact-value entanglement, especially if emergentistically

 The pragmatist notion of beliefs as habits of action goes back to Peirce’s early writings in the 1870s: see especially “The Fixation of Belief” (1877), reprinted in Peirce 1992–1998, vol. 1. 47

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construed, understands the entanglement as a contingent, broadly empirical thesis: the world we live in happens to be such that values emerge from facts. The Putnamian argument for the entanglement examined in Sect. 2 is, however, not just pragmatic but also transcendental: values, for us, are necessarily connected with facts – with any facts we can postulate from within our practices  – given the kind of natural beings we are and the kind of language- and concept-use we naturally engage in to structure our world. The fact-value entanglement is, therefore, not contingent or empirical  – not just a factual feature of the natural world, as we might say – but necessary, albeit in a relativized and contextualized sense, like the Wittgensteinian impossibility of a private language, for instance.48 We might, to emphasize the analogy to Wittgenstein, even talk about the pragmatist argument for the impossibility of value-free facts. Observing the “modalized”, transcendental nature of the fact-value entanglement may also be necessary for fully appreciating one of the Putnamian ideas briefly taken up above, namely, the “unjustifiable” character of the ethical: it would be a fundamental misunderstanding of the very nature of the moral standpoint to require it to be justified or legitimated from an extra-­moral perspective. It is – transcendentally, I would like to add – only from within the moral standpoint itself that we are able to perceive its binding nature, the way in which it colors our entire world. This “coloring” can have no foundation external to itself. The need to understand the entanglement thesis as not just one more empirical thesis describing facts that could be otherwise, but as a more strongly metaphysical, even transcendental, account of something that is (contextually) necessary, given the kind of (inevitably value-directed) life we lead, might give a slight advantage to the synechist construal of the thesis. On the other hand, emergence may also be reconceptualized to meet the demands of this pragmatic transcendental naturalism. In any event, clearly, the metaphilosophical status of our metaphysical theorizing about the fact-value entanglement requires further investigation.

 Recall that in Sect. 5 above, I also proposed a way of seeing Ruth Anna Putnam’s (explicitly non-transcendental) position in (quasi-)transcendental terms. 48

Chapter 8

Finnish Versions of Pragmatist Humanism: Eino Kaila and Georg Henrik von Wright as Quasi-Pragmatists

1 Introduction Philosophers active in Europe in the early decades of the twentieth century developed not only insightful and original responses to the American pragmatist tradition but also philosophical ideas not explicitly influenced by the American pragmatists yet bearing striking resemblance to pragmatist thought. Philosophers in the Nordic countries were no exception. Pragmatist themes were discussed early on especially in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. (For historical examinations of “Nordic pragmatism”, see Pihlström 2010; Rydenfelt 2018.) This chapter will not trace the general history of Nordic pragmatism reception. I will only examine, as a case study, two major Finnish philosophers, Eino Kaila (1890–1958) and Georg Henrik von Wright (1916–2003), whose contributions to pragmatism were perhaps not obvious – and are certainly less known and less frequently acknowledged than their contributions to logical empiricism and analytic philosophy – but were nevertheless original and potentially relevant to the on-going re-evaluation of the pragmatist tradition and its European influences and analogies. Obviously, pragmatism has never been a major current of thought in Finland or any of the other Nordic countries; even so, William James’s writings, in particular, were relatively widely read in the 1910s, and some critical discussions continued in the 1920–1930s, although after those decades pragmatism was – as in many other places, too – eclipsed by logical empiricism.1 Some Finnish thinkers were genuinely interested in pragmatism even in the 1940s and 1950s, when analytic philosophy became overwhelmingly dominant. The grand old man of Finnish analytic philosophy, von Wright, referred to Peirce and James in his early introductory book on  The reception of pragmatism in Finland has been more comprehensively discussed in some earlier writings of mine (plus some other that are available only in Finnish): see Pihlström 2003b, 2010, 2012a, c, 2014c, see also 2015. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pihlström, Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy, Vienna Circle Institute Library 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28042-9_8

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logical empiricism (von Wright 1943). Oiva Ketonen, who (like von Wright) was Kaila’s pupil and who became Kaila’s successor as Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, wrote an essay on Dewey after Dewey’s death (Ketonen 1954), and his Deweyan naturalism is also visible, for instance, in his popular work on “the worldview of the European man”, Eurooppalaisen ihmisen maailmankatsomus (Ketonen 1981 [1961], chapter 10). However, most Finnish philosophers around that time, and perhaps even more so in the 1970s and 1980s, were presumably relatively unfamiliar with pragmatism. None of the internationally well-­established analytic philosophers in Finland  – von Wright, Ketonen, Erik Stenius, Jaakko Hintikka, Raimo Tuomela, Ilkka Niiniluoto – can be said to have been a pragmatist, but upon closer inspection it is clear that most if not all of them have been preoccupied with pragmatist or at least quasi-pragmatist themes.2 The most important figure in the early Finnish reception and development of pragmatism was undoubtedly Eino Kaila. As a young man, Kaila was impressed by James’s philosophy and other pragmatist ideas (cf., e.g., Jääskeläinen 1983, 13, 16–18; Niiniluoto 1990, 18). Already in 1911, he wrote an essay on Henri Bergson (Kaila 1911a), whose vitalism and anti-intellectualism had influenced James’s late views, and in the same year he published another short paper with references to philosophers close to pragmatism – Bergson, Emil Boutroux, and F.C.S. Schiller (Kaila 1911b). In 1912 he interpreted James’s views to the readers of the newspaper Uusi Suometar in a paper to be discussed in some detail shortly. He then reviewed several Finnish translations of James’s works (Kaila 1914, 1915, 1916). While Kaila soon turned to other ways of philosophizing and became a kind of external member of the Vienna Circle in the late 1920s and early 1930s, his logical empiricism still contained significant traces of pragmatism, as can be seen by studying his later works (Kaila 1986 [1943], 2014 [1939]).3 Among Kaila’s many students who later became distinguished professors, von Wright stands out as the most eminent figure. The pragmatist dimensions of his thought were much less explicit than Kaila’s, though. It would be impossible even to begin to describe von Wright’s enormous impact on the development of logic, philosophy of science, theory of action, and many other fields; I will only, after having explored Kaila’s pragmatism at some length, provide some remarks on a pragmatist aspect we may perceive in von Wright’s views on causation and action (see further Pihlström 2014c).

 Hintikka’s relation to pragmatism would clearly deserve a separate comprehensive study. In particular, his research on Peirce and abduction is an original contribution to the development of the specifically Peircean strand of pragmatism (as is Niiniluoto’s work on abduction; cf. Niiniluoto 2018). It might be mentioned that Hintikka was President of the Charles S.  Peirce Society in the 1990s. 3  In addition to his early articles on James, he also published a brief monograph in Finnish on Ernest Renan’s work on religion (Kaila 1917), dealing with related matters. Kaila’s most important writings, including some of the early pieces of the 1910s (e.g., the James article and selections of the Renan book), are collected in Kaila 1990. The writings on Renan, James, and other figures testify about Kaila’s deep interest in religious issues and the conflict between science and religion. 2

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I will begin by an exposition of some of Kaila’s views relevant to the topic of this chapter – first his early pragmatist writings and then his later discussions of “practical testability”  – and subsequently move on to consider von Wright’s pragmatist lines of thought. Overall the chapter will suggest that these two philosophers and the many others around and succeeding them (not to be discussed here) might be seen as having established a hidden tradition of Finnish philosophy: a kind of pragmatist humanism. Their versions of such pragmatism are quite different, however. Whereas Kaila moved from a Jamesian pragmatist humanism concerned with religion and metaphysical Weltanschauungen to logical empiricism and its critique of metaphysics, von Wright’s humanist or pragmatist ideas are to be found, for example, in his theory of action and “actionist” theory of causation. As a public philosopher engaged with societal and cultural issues, von Wright was, moreover, closer to Deweyan social humanism than Kaila (without any explicit Deweyan influences, though).

2 Kaila’s Early Pragmatist Influences The 1912 article on James is, clearly, the most important among Kaila’s early contributions to pragmatism. In this relatively popular essay Kaila emphasizes the significance of James’s pragmatism as a new, revolutionary philosophy. James, he claims, has shown us that we are not mere passive spectators of the world but, above all, actors (Kaila 1912, 84). According to Kaila, James’s view is a “new answer” to the problem of how someone who does not want to give up reason and rationality, or make any easy intellectual compromises, can still deal with their religious needs, with their hope to reach “higher” spirituality in life, a hope whose satisfaction might be necessary for the happiness of their entire life (ibid., 81–82). Kaila here endorses James’s doctrine of the “Will to Believe” (see James 1979 [1897]): a religious or “idealistic” hypothesis concerning the significance of human life in connection with a more spiritual eternal universe can be accepted through an active, voluntary effort; yet, we have to embrace such beliefs with our own risk, being unable to ever finally “prove” any such hypotheses. Still, according to both James and Kaila, it is better to believe and act on the basis of such an insecure belief than to fall into skeptical or agnostic inactivity. Only thus can life have a deeper meaning and be worth living (Kaila 1912, 84–86.) The same idea is repeated, for instance, in Kaila’s (1917) short biography of Ernest Renan. These early writings demonstrate that Kaila was intensely preoccupied with religious and existential issues, even though his professional academic work focused, at that time, mostly on empirical psychology. Let me quote Kaila (paraphrasing James) at some length: All life, therefore, consists essentially in daring, “risking” – life-threatening experiments, in which we expose a great deal of things to risk, and a great deal of things, perchance, will be won by us. Yet, if we do not expose anything to risk, neither will we gain anything; that, for one, is certain.

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This primordial wisdom of everyday experience William James has elevated into a philosophical principle, making it one of the cornerstones of his pragmatic philosophy. At the center of each world-view is the question concerning the value of life. […] To the question concerning the value of life we must thus respond: this is contingent on the living person. If I tend not to dare anything simply because no one can prove the value of life to me, I surrender myself to doubt, and the victory of skepticism is sure, the world around me pitch-black. Should I dare believe, on the other hand, in the meaning of life even at the risk of error, so life will be luminous at least on this spot, and if death puts an end to it all, I couldn’t have faced it better. (Kaila 1912, 84)4

In the same essay, Kaila also discusses, albeit only briefly, James’s notorious pragmatist theory of truth, pointing out that while James is sometimes obscure and even contradictory, his theory amounts to the thesis that a mere “agreement” of an idea with reality is insufficient as a criterion of truth and that we therefore have to use the “working” of ideas as such a criterion (ibid., 91). Hence, Kaila joins those, presumably including James himself, who consider the mere correspondence-­theoretical “agreement” between a truth and what it is true about empty or trivial while endorsing the correspondence theory as a basically correct general account of true. This view is, clearly, compatible with a correspondence theory insisting on the distinction between the meaning of truth (correspondence) and the criterion of truth (pragmatic working, usefulness, value, satisfactoriness, etc.), even though a more sophisticated pragmatist account of truth might continue to question the sharpness of this dichotomy between meaning and criterion. In his review of the 1913 Finnish translation of James’s Pragmatism, Kaila remarks that the pragmatist theory of truth may remain an “awkward mistake”, but goes on to say that all those preoccupied with “ultimate questions” should read James’s work (Kaila 1914). On the whole, Kaila’s attitude to James and pragmatism seems to have been very positive throughout most of the 1910s. The pragmatist theory of truth was never his main concern; above all, he was interested, as James also was, in the application of pragmatism to profound weltanschaulichen questions about the significance of human life and the possible role of religion regarding such questions. He was vitally concerned with the question of whether we, being unable to ever reach any certainty about religious conceptions, could nevertheless find some value and direction to our lives. Kaila, then, was never (even in his early thought) a pragmatist in anything like the full sense of the term, but as a reader of the 1912 James essay easily notices, he did substantially contribute to pragmatist examinations of the relation between science and religion, in particular. Moreover, his contribution was not restricted to his early enthusiasm with James; nor did he merely embrace and interpret Jamesian pragmatist ideas but proposed, as we will see, original developments of the pragmatist views he had originally adopted from James.

 I am here quoting from Heikki A. Kovalainen’s 2011 translation of Kaila 1912, though otherwise my page references are to the reprinted version of the original Finnish essay available in Kaila 1990. The last sentence in the quotation seems to have been taken almost directly from James’s essay, “Is Life Worth Living?”, reprinted in James 1979 [1897]. (Other quotations from Kaila’s writings in this chapter are my own translations.) 4

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3 Kaila’s Later Pragmatism: “Practical Testability” Turning to Kaila’s later thought, let us start from the obvious: as a logical empiricist, Kaila was of course “officially” sharply critical of religion and metaphysics, including the kind of Jamesian-inspired pragmatist philosophy of religion he had defended in the 1910s. Famously, leading logical empiricists like Rudolf Carnap maintained that religious and theological questions concerning, say, theism and atheism were meaningless pseudo-problems, lacking cognitive content.5 The mature Kaila of the 1930–1940s was, in the spirit of the Vienna Circle, primarily a philosopher of science, also introducing modern logical and epistemological ideas in Finland. However, Kaila never abandoned his early Jamesian idea that truth about religious issues and, more generally, metaphysical or weltanschaulichen questions concerning the significance of human life must be assessed from the point of view of practice. As metaphysical and religious statements fail to meet the rigorous criteria of scientific meaningfulness set by the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, Kaila’s criticism of metaphysics culminates in the “principle of testability”, a variation of Carnap’s and other logical empiricists’ related principles: any statement about reality must be constructed in such a way that a set of empirical statements (the “real content” of the original statement) can be derived from it; the truth or probability of the statement can only be assessed on the grounds of its real content (for detailed formulations, see the essays collected in Kaila 1979). Now, even though metaphysical and religious views are not scientifically acceptable in this sense, they may, as Kaila (1946 [1934], 365) suggests in his psychological magnus opus on human personality, function as “spiritual insurance companies” defending us against various threats of life, especially the fear of death. Metaphysical and religious conceptions need not be entirely fruitless, as they may still be critically tested and evaluated, albeit only in a practical way. Accordingly, Kaila argued – pragmatistically, we might say – that religious and metaphysical worldviews may be “practically testable”, even if they cannot meet the requirement of empirical testability applied to scientific theories because of their minimal “real content”. What Kaila calls practical testability has nothing to do with the real content of beliefs or statements; rather, it focuses on their results in practical action and ways of living. Religious and metaphysical ideas may serve as motives for action, and they may even be endorsed insofar as their practical results are worthwhile (Kaila 1986 [1943], 188–189). Religions may, then, be acceptable as “systems of action”, not as systems of beliefs. Their “practical truth” must, however, be distinguished from “truth in the proper sense”, the pursuit of which is the concern of scientific theories (ibid., 190). Religions and religiosity must, furthermore, be

 See, however, Ramharter 2022 for a very important collection of essays re-evaluating the Vienna Circle logical empiricists’ relations to religion. 5

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clearly distinguished from each other: religiosity is the “deep-mental”6 or spiritual core of religions. Mental life, Kaila maintained, is “deep-mental” (deeply spiritual) when the depth dimension of an emotion reaches its maximum value, i.e., when the object of the feeling, some value, is perceived as “sacred” (Kaila 1946 [1934], 364–365; cf. 239). Taking a more detailed look at Kaila’s richest elaboration of the concept of “deep-mentality”, i.e., the book Syvähenkinen elämä (1943, 3rd ed. 1986), it is interesting to note that Kaila there explicitly proposes to apply, “without restrictions, the way of thinking called pragmatism” to metaphysical “explanations of the world”, pointing out that pragmatism leads to contradictions when applied to theoretical conceptions of the world but may legitimately be applied to “views of life”. Echoes from the early James essay are identifiable here. However, here deep-­ mentality is not merely an instrument for saving religious and metaphysical views; it seems to become a normative concept to be applied in ethics as well; indeed, deep-mentality or spirituality in this sense is argued to be the most important thing in human life (cf. Niiniluoto 1992a, 19–20). However, the basis of this normative concept lies in our biological nature. Kaila remained a naturalist, though an antireductionist one. From the biological and psychological point of view, deep-mentality belongs to the emergent totality of our needs. The pragmatically most interesting reasoning here proceeds as follows (as anticipated in the 1934 psychology book cited above). While the “real content” of religion and metaphysics is small, virtually zero, religious and metaphysical Weltanschauungen can, according to Kaila, be significant in a practical sense. “Practical testability” does not assess the real content of a system of beliefs, but rather its consequences in our practical actions and the ways the belief system tested is able to satisfy our human needs. Kaila, the son of a Lutheran arch-bishop, did not approve of religions as systems of beliefs, but he did respect them in his own critical manner and maintained that they might be (at least partially) justified as systems of action. Eubulos, one of the fictitious characters and presumably his alter ego in Syvähenkinen elämä, reflects: Views of life are testable on the basis of the results they have as motives of action. From their fruits you shall know them. Those views of life are good which have good fruits. For my part, I am inclined to judge metaphysical “explanations of the world” from this perspective. I would apply to them, without restrictions, the way of thinking called pragmatism, which leads to contradictions and other impossibilities, if applied to theoretical conceptions: whatever is good is “true”. Some view of life is “true”, that is: acceptable, insofar as it leads to acceptable results when followed in practice. But this “practical truth” is of course something else than truth in the proper theoretical sense. (Kaila 1986 [1943], 189)

Hence, while pragmatism for some of its critics was an enemy not only of science and rationality but also of ethics and objective values, humanly vitally important  Niiniluoto, in his introduction to Niiniluoto et al. 1992, uses this as a translation of Kaila’s most original terminus technicus, “syvähenkisyys”. This concept has been discussed in Jääskeläinen 1983, Niiniluoto 1992a, and Salmela 1998, among other secondary sources. See also the essays in Niiniluoto and Pihlström 2012. 6

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value judgments and the metaphysical or religious views of life within which such judgments are embedded were, for Kaila, eventually only pragmatically justifiable.7 There are, we may note, a number of important parallels between Kaila and James, even if we consider Kaila’s mature work. Both men were  – especially in early stages of their careers – psychologists as much as philosophers. Even more strikingly, both were extremely broad in their intellectual profiles, combining scientific perspectives with strong “romantic” sentiments focusing, rather, on art and religion. Indeed, Syvähenkinen elämä is explicitly a dialogue between a scientifically-­ minded and a more romantically-oriented character with process-metaphysical ideas. In Kaila’s case, perhaps more than James’s, the scientific “ego” was stronger. However, even in that late work from the 1940s, James’s voice can be heard in Aristofilos, the “romantic” and more metaphysical character – as Kaila explicitly admits both in the preface and in the dialogue itself (ibid., 8, 202). Indeed, Aristofilos points out, as James himself might have done, that theoretical and practical testability may in the end collapse into one another, especially when we are dealing with “theories about the spiritual”. Thus, Kaila’s “scientific” alter ego Eubulos is seriously confronted by Aristofilos, whose point of view is also to some extent Kaila’s own. It is Eubulos, the scientific-­ minded clear-headed philosopher representing logical empiricism, who formulates the above-mentioned distinction between the two versions of the testability principle and the corresponding distinction between truth in its theoretical and practical sense, but it is Aristofilos, the religiously and aesthetically inclined partner in the dialogue, whose pragmatism is more thoroughgoing. His words could indeed have been written by James himself:8 It seems to me that you are making a mistake when you distinguish in a strict and principled way between this “theoretical testability” and the “practical testability” through which the “validity” of views of life is determined. It seems to me, on the contrary, that they are close to each other. […] […] When we are dealing with theories about the spiritual, theoretical and practical testability collapse together. (Ibid., 192.)

 It is, however, still an open question whether we should say that what Kaila thought to be pragmatically acceptable or justifiable could be regarded as (pragmatically) “true”. Kaila clearly does not follow the pragmatists all the way down, because he still insists on distinguishing between theoretical and practical testability (and truth). Furthermore, Salmela (1998, 2012) claims that Kaila’s principle of practical testability is applicable only to religion and metaphysics, not to value judgments. There is still room for further scholarly discussion of Kaila’s metaethical position: did he subscribe to some kind of emotivism, or are his treatments of deep-mentality reinterpretable on the basis of a pragmatic moral realism? For a detailed account of Kaila’s relation to other twentieth-century Finnish developments in the philosophy of culture and values, see Salmela 1998. 8  Kaila does regard James (along with Carlyle and Tolstoy) as one of the background figures of Aristofilos’s feelings about life (see Kaila 1986 [1943], 8, 202; cf. also Pihlström 2023, chapter 4). Kaila’s diaries in 1941–1948 indicate that he was thinking about James while writing Syvähenkinen elämä during World War II. He mentions James at least on December 13, 1941, and on May 4, 1942. On January 24, 1943, he formulates the distinction between theoretical and practical testability. 7

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For example, God may, according to both Kaila’s Aristofilos and William James, need our faith as a support of His existence (ibid., 193). This is a suggestion that the “winner” of the dialogue, Kaila’s scientific ego, of course firmly rejects, but one can hardly deny that Kaila was internally tormented by these diverging ideas, perhaps partly as a result of his early admiration of James, a philosopher also troubled by conflicting “temperaments” – and the need to reconcile them. He may have seen the identification of theoretical and practical testability as a temptation of his own philosophical temperament (to employ a Jamesian concept),9 a temptation he nevertheless at least mostly succeeded in resisting. The two voices of the dialogue are both genuinely his own, while the scientific one ultimately prevails. While Aristofilos is not just an opponent of Kaila’s logical-empiricist position expressed by Eubulos but an organic part of Kaila himself, it is Eubulos who won the battle within Kaila – and in Finnish philosophy at large.

4 Kaila and Jamesian Pragmatism: Further Similarities and Differences Kaila’s philosophy, when it comes to “ultimate questions”, is very close to James’s at least in one significant respect: he is, we may say, a “pluralist” not in the metaphysical sense that would conflict with his monism (cf. von Wright 1992) but in a more metaphilosophical sense manifested in his philosophical methodology, especially in the dialogical work Syvähenkinen elämä. Different voices – the different philosophical temperaments appearing in that book  – deserve to be heard, to be carefully listened to, and taken seriously. While a dialogue may in the end be a disguised monologue (see Kaila 1986 [1943], 7), and thus “monistic”, there are sometimes genuinely diverging “voices”, e.g., scientific and religious ones, within a single thinker. Developing and maintaining a fundamentally monistic view of the world may be a special challenge for such a person, a challenge that can only be met by engaging in a genuine internal dialogue. James himself, I believe, would have been happy with the merging of theoretical and practical testability – to the extent that something like their integration could even be regarded as a corner-stone of his pragmatism. Moreover, James was characteristically ambivalent between focusing on the (conceivable, potential) practical effects of believing something, on the one side, and focusing on the (conceivable, potential) practical effects that might follow from that belief being true (and he has often been criticized because of this ambivalence). Insofar as there were, in the end, no fundamental difference between theoretical and practical testability  – that is, insofar as the pragmatic consequences of one’s believing in a certain (e.g., metaphysical or religious) proposition that might come about in one’s life played a role in determining the actual content of that proposition and its “truth” in a more literal  On the notion of a philosophical temperament, see James 1975 [1907], Lecture I.

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sense – this ambivalence would be better justified than it would if based on a more conventionally realistic picture of beliefs and their relation to a belief-independent reality. To collapse this difference would be to take extremely seriously the original pragmatist idea of beliefs as “habits of action”. It is clear that Kaila never went that far in his admiration of James – not even in his early 1912 essay – and it is unclear whether even James ever embraced pragmatism in such a strong form. However, James’s pragmatism (but presumably not Kaila’s) can be developed into a conception of ethical values penetrating into the very core of our metaphysical beliefs and postulations (cf. Pihlström 2009). Such developments of pragmatism might be cashed out in terms of Kaila’s notions of theoretical and practical testability. In addition to the fact that Kaila was, thus, in the end more scientifically focused than James, a major philosophical difference between the two is that while James was, famously, a philosophical pluralist, Kaila was always strongly tempted to advance a monistic position and struggled throughout his career to find an adequate philosophical expression for this idea. Since his early “philosophical awakening” as a teenager, he was convinced that the world is a monistic totality (see Kaila 1953; cf. von Wright 1992). At some points of his intellectual development, he may therefore have been close to something like the “neutral monism” advocated by Ernst Mach, Bertrand Russell, and others – a position often compared to James’s “radical empiricism” – although he opposed, from early on, the “superficiality” of such positivistic forms of monism, their tendency to overlook the highly significant “riddle of reality”; indeed, Kaila never joined the logical positivists in regarding that problem as a pseudo-issue.10 Another dimension to Kaila’s monism is metaphilosophical: philosophers’ dialogues, presumably including his own construction of an imagined dialogue in that book, are often just “monologues in disguise” (Kaila 1986 [1943], 7). In any case, Kaila’s monism was always nonreductive;11 he never accepted reductive mechanical materialists’ scientistic views, any more than James did. However, it might also be suggested that the very controversy between monism and pluralism is among those that should, on the basis of Kaila’s own principles, in the end be evaluated – “tested” – practically, not theoretically. While Kaila himself viewed this controversy as a scientific one, to be settled within “scientific philosophy” – or, possibly, synthetic philosophy of nature based on the most advanced findings of science – I believe we should join James in construing the monism vs. pluralism debate in more pragmatic terms, as a fundamental weltanschaulich issue to be explored in terms of the question concerning our ability of finding ourselves “at home” in the universe. It is clear that Kaila never became a thoroughgoing pragmatist. As a strict empiricist he was, despite his early admiration of Bergson and James, unable to arrive at the kind of dynamic, active, and holistic concept of experience that may be seen as one corner-stone of pragmatist philosophy. Accordingly, he was never able to build  On Kaila’s life-long concern with the issue of scientific realism and the “riddle of reality” in the context of the logical empiricists’ criticism of metaphysics, see Niiniluoto 1992b, 2012, 2017; cf. also Neuber 2012. 11  See von Wright 1992 for some elaborations of this. 10

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a sustainable bridge between normativity (deep-mentality) and naturalness (its bio-­ psychological basis), although he sincerely tried. On the other hand, there is also a touch of pragmatic pluralism in Kaila’s suggestion, toward the end of the 1912 James essay, that the “man of action” understands the multi-layered structure of reality better than the person who views the world solely from the natural-scientific perspective. For a narrow-sighted scientistic reductionist, Beethoven’s string quartet is just something material and physical (“[r]ubbing horse’s mane against cat’s intestines”) (Kaila 1912, 91; again quoted from the 2011 English translation). In contrast, the pragmatist realizes that there are multiple contexts and perspectives of description and inquiry, with their different pragmatic grounds and purposes. The world as a “structured whole”12 is thus, though monistic in a basic naturalistic sense, not reductively monistic but enormously rich and deep. Within such monism, the conflict between monism and pluralism may in the end vanish, at least as a traditional metaphysical issue, when seen from a pragmatic point of view.13 Kaila’s non-reductive monism is in some ways even close to panpsychism, refusing to draw any dualistic distinction between mind and matter. “Allt är materia, allt är själ”, “Everything is matter, everything is soul”, as Kaila (1952) put it in the title of one of his essays written in Swedish.14 For a pragmatist, one way of accounting for the different “layers” of reality could be by means of the kind of “relativization of reality” Kaila proposed in his late work. According to Kaila, real objects can be “ordered” in terms of their increasing invariance, which is connected with increasing conceptualization, with theoretical scientific entities as the most conceptualized (and in a sense the most “real”) ones.15 While this position is neither Kantian nor pragmatist but in an important sense scientifically realist, it might be compared to Hilary Putnam’s internal realism, which, in turn, was one of the most important neopragmatist approaches to the realism issue in the late twentieth century.16 Kaila’s

 Kaila’s last work, only fragments of which were posthumously published, was tentatively titled Hahmottuva maailma (“The World as a Structuring Whole”, or perhaps just “The Structuring World”, or maybe “The Self-Structuring World”). For English translations of some material that Kaila intended as part of that volume, see Kaila 1979, especially the essay “The Perceptual and Conceptual Components of Everyday Experience” (259–312). 13  Compare James’s own discussion of monism and pluralism in James 1975 [1907], Lecture IV. While James obviously favors pluralism, even that conflict is for him an issue that needs pragmatic adjudication. Cf. Pihlström 2023, chapter 3. 14  This 1952 paper is reprinted in Kaila 1992. 15  Again, see the elaboration of this idea in Kaila’s posthumous essay, “The Perceptual and Conceptual Components of Everyday Experience”, in Kaila 1979. See also Niiniluoto 1992b, 111. 16  This is suggested, with some reservations, in Niiniluoto 1992b, 112–113. I agree with Matthias Neuber (2012) that Kaila cannot be interpreted as an internal realist in the Putnamian sense, because he never accepted the Kantian view that reality is dependent on our conceptualizations and categorizations. (This Kantian idea is in my view crucial in pragmatist and neopragmatist ways of dealing with the problem of realism. I would also be happy to agree with Neuber that Putnamian internal realism, at least insofar as it is a pragmatist position, is indeed very close to Kantian-like idealism.) Even so, the link between conceptualization and reality is tight in Kaila. 12

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stance to the problem of realism remains ambivalent, but his relativizing move might be employed, by a pragmatist at least, in the nonreductive project of acknowledging the (contextualized) reality of both physical, scientifically conceptualized reality and everyday phenomenal experiences – as well as values and other cultural structures and processes. This would take us beyond Kaila’s own concerns with the problem of reality, though.

5 Von Wright on Action and Causation Let us now turn to Kaila’s most important student, G.H. von Wright, who, as was mentioned, already referred to pragmatism  – Peirce and James  – as an informal precursor of logical empiricism in von Wright (1943), even though pragmatism never explicitly played any important role in the philosophical views von Wright is famous for all over the world. What I would like to suggest (cf. also Pihlström 2014a,c) is that von Wright’s later philosophy of action and the related theory of causation are the places to look for any pragmatist aspects of his views. We should, however, start by noting that there is a sense in which von Wright’s well-known theory of action is not particularly pragmatist: it primarily considers individual actions rather than continuous habits of action, whereas the latter instead of the former would be in the focus of a paradigmatically pragmatist approach to action theory. However, there are four areas in which we might view von Wright’s philosophy “pragmatist” in a broad sense.17 First, von Wright (1971, 1974) famously defends a controversial theory of causation essentially linked with the concept of action. He labels this theory “actionist”, “manipulative”, and “experimentalist”, suggesting that the notion of cause is “essentially tied to the idea of action and therefore, as a scientific notion, to the idea of experiment” (von Wright 1971, 36–37; cf. 189–190, see also 1974, 57).18 While admitting that etymology is not decisive here, he also refers to the link between the concepts of cause and guilt captured by the corresponding words in classical languages (as well as Finnish) (von Wright 1971, 64–65). Regardless of etymology, “we cannot understand causation, nor the distinction between nomic connections and accidental uniformities of nature, without resorting to ideas about doing things and intentionally interfering with the course of nature” (ibid., 65–66). More precisely, the connection between causation and action is spelled out by von Wright as  The Library of Living Philosophers volume devoted to von Wright (Schilpp and Hahn 1989), a 942-page tome, does not seem to recognize von Wright’s pragmatist aspects in any explicit way. See, however, Hartshorne 1989 for some references to Peirce and James in the context of engaging with von Wright. 18  Huw Price’s work on causation might be seen as coming close to von Wright’s, because Price (2011, 31) also suggests that “uses of causal concepts in science” may reflect the “agentive perspective”. 17

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follows: “p is a cause relative to q, and q an effect relative to p, if and only if by doing p we could bring about q or by suppressing p we could remove q or prevent it from happening” (ibid., 70). Thus, by manipulating the cause we can, in principle, bring about the effect; this is of course crucial in scientific experimentation. In a slightly later work, von Wright specifies the theory while connecting it to the issue of determinism. The leading argument is that “[t]he idea that causal connections are necessary connections in nature is rooted in the idea that there are agents who can interfere with the natural course of events” (von Wright 1974, 1–2). In our conceptual order, so to speak, action is the primary concept and causation the secondary one (ibid., 2). The conclusions he eventually arrives at regarding the determinism vs. indeterminism dispute are not ontological or metaphysical, either, but rather of a conceptual or epistemic nature (see ibid., 136). Von Wright concludes: To say that to establish the ontic certainty of a change presupposes an epistemic certainty […] is but another way of saying that establishing causal bonds in nature presupposes action. It is by virtue of these relationships that I say that the concept of cause presupposes the concept of action. Action, however, cannot rightly be said to presuppose the existence of ontic alternatives in nature, i.e. the truth of some form of indeterminism. What action presupposes is only the epistemic certainty which, as long as it is not undermined, entails the belief in the ontic contingency of some changes and thus takes for granted a certain margin of indeterminism in the world. (Ibid.; original emphasis.)

This theory of causation, which might be claimed to come somewhat close to the “interventionist” developments in contemporary discussions of causality and explanation (e.g., Woodward 2003), has often been criticized because it appears to make causation “human-centered” in a problematic way. The relations between cause and effect seem to be relative to what we can, or could, manipulate and what we cannot. However, von Wright makes it clear that he is not aiming at any anthropocentric metaphysics of causation, even though he maintains that “to think of a relation between events as causal is to think of it under the aspect of (possible) action” (von Wright 1971, 74). This is only a matter of how we must think, or how we (must) organize our concepts; it does not mean that there is any genuine agency involved in causation (ibid., 73). Causation, after all, “operates throughout the universe – also in spatial and temporal regions forever inaccessible to man.” (Ibid.) Von Wright (1974, 48–50) makes this more precise by saying that while causation is conceptually dependent on agency, it is “ontically independent of agency” (ibid., 49; original emphasis). The “conceptual” dependence lies between “the notion of a (causal) counterfactual conditional and action”, instead of lying directly between cause and action (ibid., 50). Thus, in brief, “the concept of causal connection rests on the concept of action” (ibid., 53; original emphases). In any event, this conceptual link does connect von Wright’s views with pragmatism: our world-picture generally, including our conception of causal relations in particular, must be thought of in terms of, or on the basis of, our conception of our own agency.19  Regarding this deep connection between the ways we talk and think about the world generally and the ways we talk and think about human agency, it might be speculated that von Wright’s later views on the conceptual dependence of causation on action might be partly based on, or at least 19

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The second pragmatist aspect of von Wright’s views I want to highlight emerges from the fact that, while causation must be thought of in terms of, or “under the aspect of”, possible action, human actions cannot, according to von Wright, be simply causally explained. To attempt to do so would be to commit a kind of category mistake. Von Wright’s (1971, 1980, 1998) “non-causalist” conception of action, agency, and freedom – and their proper explanation – is arguably more relevant in contemporary philosophy of mind and action than has been generally acknowledged by mainstream philosophers in these fields. Von Wright consistently opposed attempts to reduce intentionality or agency to a causal, natural-scientific picture of the world.20 The concept of freedom, in particular, cannot be accommodated in such a picture. Denying that agents are free would be “to commit a contradiction in terms”, while the “mystery” of human freedom is nothing more than the “mystery” that “there are agents and actions” (von Wright 1980, 77–78). Freedom, then, is a fully non-mysterious feature of agency based on our ability to understand human beings as persons and to rationally explain their actions on that basis. No non-­ natural causal connections between the mental and the physical are presupposed, because intentions are reasons, not causes; there is no need to postulate such Cartesian-like interactionist causation, according to von Wright (1998, 109). As Rosaria Egidi (2009) emphasizes, von Wright shares with Deweyan pragmatism the reconciliatory desire to develop a worldview rich enough for both human agency and natural science – a “naturalistic humanism”. This humanism is something that we can see both Kaila and von Wright sharing with a number of other pragmatists as well, though the exact senses in which pragmatism amounts to “humanism” need to be spelled out in greater detail on another occasion.21 parallel to, his earlier idea – originated during his Cambridge years (1948–1951), leading up to his pioneering work on modal and deontic logic, with the first publications in the early 1950s – that there is an analogy between the behaviors of the standard quantifiers of first-order predicate logic, on the one hand, and the operators expressing modalities and deontic modalities, on the other. Thus, our basic logical concepts “some”, “all”, and “no” can be seen as functioning in ways analogous to modal concepts (“possible”, “necessary”, and “impossible”) and deontic ones (“allowed”, “obligated”, “forbidden”). Von Wright (2001, 179) tells us that this analogy came to him as a sudden insight when he was walking along the river Cam (presumably around 1950). For Kaila’s and von Wright’s correspondence during those years, and throughout their friendship, see Österman 2020. 20  On the relevance of von Wright’s “actionistic” account of causation for an “anti-naturalistic” “humanization of nature”, see Egidi 1999, 4–5. Similarly, pragmatists are generally naturalists, but their naturalism is never reductive but always already “humanized” – and the same, as we saw, holds for von Wright’s teacher Kaila. Calcaterra (1999) is one of the very few scholars explicitly comparing von Wright’s theory of action and (James’s) pragmatism, pointing toward a “non-causalistic” theory of action and an “emancipation of the discussion about human freedom from traditional epistemological and ontological approaches” (ibid., 139). See Egidi’s (ed., 1999) volume more broadly for several investigations of von Wright’s views on action (among other things) and their significance for “humanistic” philosophy. 21  As von Wright explains in his autobiography (von Wright 2001), he later came to resist the term “humanism”, though. For more recent discussions of von Wright’s humanism and his views on “the human condition”, see Niiniluoto and Wallgren 2017. (The notion of humanism would be too complex to discuss at any length here; it clearly needs a separate treatment. I have investigated

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6 Antireductionism and the Disunity of Science Thirdly, von Wright might be read as a pragmatic pluralist not only in his theory of explanation but also at a metaphilosophical level. He defends a conceptual and explanatory pluralism according to which our different levels of inquiry and explanation, or different perspectives of description and conceptualization (i.e., the neural, the behavioural, and the mental or psychological), each have their own roles to play in our overall understanding of human experience and action. These different schemes, “vocabularies” (as a Rortyan pragmatist would prefer to put it), or language-­games (in Wittgensteinian terms) are each legitimate for their own purposes – just like the two essentially different modes of explanation, the causal and the intentional (teleological), investigated in von Wright’s seminal work on explanation and understanding (von Wright 1971). When explaining any event taking place in the world, we must always explain it under some description, first conceptualizing and thereby understanding it either as a natural event to be causally explained or as a human action with meaning, to be intentionally, rationally, and hence teleologically explained. In this sense, explanation – and even the notion of causation insofar as it is involved in causal explanations, in contrast to intentional or teleological explanations – is interest-relative (as is, of course, intentionality or teleology, as well). At this point, we might, in addition to von Wright’s pragmatism, even speak about his fundamental Kantianism. Just as Kant sought to reconcile the “worlds” of causally determined nature, on the one hand, and human action and moral responsibility, on the other, von Wright investigates the pragmatic interest-relativity of different explanations of the “same” world under different aspects. Furthermore, if the same compatibility of nature and freedom – determinism and moral responsibility – is also a pragmatist theme, Kantianism and pragmatism seem to converge on this key issue. This idea becomes extremely important in von Wright’s late work on the philosophy of mind (von Wright 1998), which is less generally known and appreciated among philosophers today than his action-theoretical investigations from the 1960s and 1970s.22 Von Wright’s antireductionism and his resistance to any reductively naturalist “unity of science” also clearly links him to his teacher Kaila, whose antireductionism was discussed above (see also von Wright 1992). As nonreductive naturalism has been a major theme in pragmatism – arguably all the way from the classical figures Peirce, James, and Dewey to contemporary neopragmatists23  – these two

pragmatist humanism in the philosophy of religion, in particular, in Pihlström 2023. For a “cultural naturalist” pragmatist philosophical anthropology, already referred to in earlier chapters, see Dreon 2022). 22  I am here indebted to Antti Kuusela’s (2010) work on von Wright’s philosophy of mind, with comparisons to not only Wittgenstein but also Donald Davidson. 23  Dewey, of course, contributed to the logical empiricists’ International Encyclopedia of Unified Science with his Theory of Valuation in 1940 and was in this sense not exactly a critic of the “unity of science” movement but rather one of its supporters. On the other hand, Dewey’s version of

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Finnish philosophers’ ways of developing similar ideas make them original contributors to a stream of thought at least analogous to pragmatism if not pragmatist properly speaking. The difference to pragmatism proper, however, is that the different schemes, vocabularies, or language-games that von Wright distinguishes and whose irreducibility he defends are not all ontologically relevant in the same way. While rational (intentional) explanations of actions, referring to reasons instead of causes (von Wright 1998, 19–20, 38–39), can be said to be epistemically prior to behavioral and neural explanations, because mental (psychological) states are epistemically prior to neural (physiological) states, and while behavior in turn can be regarded as semantically prior to mental states, because the content of mental states is available only through observations of outward actions,24 neural processes within the organism are, von Wright admits, causally prior to behavior. In a nutshell, an action, according to von Wright, is a bodily movement “viewed under the aspect of intentionality” (ibid., 142); the muscular activity and the action share the same “robust reality” while being differently described and conceptualized (ibid., 34–35; original emphases). Thus, there is a sense in which the neural or neuro-physiological processes giving rise to certain behavior are ontologically fundamental in comparison to everything else in human action and agency. The pluralism of relevant conceptualizations and explanations is not to be conflated with ontological pluralism. This is a key contrast to, say, Hilary Putnam’s (1995, 2002a) conceptual relativity and pragmatic pluralism – or to James’s (1975 [1907]) pluralistic constructivism, according to which objects themselves arise out of human purposive practices.25 I would be tempted to add that this is also a somewhat non-Wittgensteinian dimension in von Wright’s pragmatic pluralism – despite his profound and long-lasting exposition to Wittgenstein’s work. If any ontological or metaphysical inquiry can be said to be possible or acceptable in Wittgenstein’s philosophy at all, Wittgenstein would presumably resist the conclusion (or, rather, assumption) that some schemes, vocabularies, perspectives, or language-games are ontologically serious while some others are not (though here I won’t make any detailed comments on the Finnish pragmatists’ relations to Wittgenstein, as important as those relations are). The very distinction von Wright relies on in his theory of causation, that is, the distinction between, as we may say, the ontological order of the world and the conceptual order of our ways of thinking about the world – a distinction crucially manifested in his contention that while the concept of causation presupposes the concept of agency, causation itself, as operative throughout nature, is independent of actions and agents  – is, for a pragmatist, precisely the problematic starting-point of pragmatic naturalism is clearly one of the most influential accounts of non-reductive naturalism available. It would require another inquiry to determine in what sense exactly a nonreductive (and in this sense “rich” or “soft”) version of naturalism can be committed to the idea of “unity” (i.e., in what sense, if any, unity itself can be reconstructed in a non-reductive manner). 24  The mental, von Wright (1998, 162) tells us, is “the meaning of complex patterns of bodily reactions”. 25  See also Pihlström 2009 for some developments of these versions of pragmatism.

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metaphysical realism that leads to philosophical difficulties. Both classical pragmatists like James (and even Peirce and Dewey, suitably interpreted) and neopragmatists like Putnam would argue, in opposition to this distinction, that we can have access only to a world that we have conceptualized from the perspectives of our practice-­ embedded categorial (categorizing) frameworks or language-games. Hence, the distinction between ontic (ontological) and epistemic (conceptual) conclusions regarding indeterminism to be drawn from von Wright’s (1974) application of the theory of causation to the determinism vs. indeterminism issue might also be argued to be problematic from a pragmatist perspective (cf. again, e.g., Pihlström 2009). Even so, von Wright in his late work arrived at a position denying the unity of the scientific worldview  – maintaining that there is an irreducible plurality in our descriptions and explanations of reality in the sense sketched above  – and this endorsement of the “disunity” of science may be seen as a truly pragmatist theme in his work. At least von Wright joins the pragmatists, classical and contemporary, in resisting any reductive physicalism about human action and culture.26 He also joints his teacher Kaila in developing an (admittedly very different) combination of nonreductive naturalism and pragmatist humanism. There is, furthermore, one interesting remark in von Wright’s Wittgenstein, in his essay on Wittgenstein’s views on certainty, that connects von Wright’s interpretation of Wittgenstein with his theory of action and explanation. Having examined at some length On Certainty and Wittgenstein’s (1969) conception of the “non-­ propositional” or “pre-propositional” – hence pragmatic –character of the “world-­ picture” and forms of life underlying our language (cf. also, e.g., Pihlström 2003a), he observes: “But in order that my behaviour should be describable as actions of a certain kind, it must be interpreted in terms of the notions of the language-game itself. So, to this extent the praxis at the basis of the language-game is a pre-praxis, one could say, and not yet a full-fledged action.” (Von Wright 1982, 179; original emphases.) This is a profound remark. We too easily speak about action lying at the basis of our language-games, or about “the  deed” being “in the beginning”. Wittgenstein himself says things of this kind. But actions properly speaking are something that are always already conceptualized – they have reasons. They can be conceptualized and understood only within a language-game, or more generally within a meaningful human practice. Hence, the “action” that incorporates and manifests our most fundamental (albeit revisable) certainties – the action constituting our “hinges” – cannot really be action in this sense. The non-propositional hinges enabling language-­games and meanings are not themselves meaningful; in the same sense, the actions manifesting those hinges are not proper actions. In this pre-praxis, we

 Von Wright’s view on causation has also inspired, among others, Karl-Otto Apel (cf. Apel 1998, 22–23, 133). The “interventionist” position has been important for Apel as a background idea in his defense of critical hermeneutics and “transcendental pragmatism” in the Erklären vs. Verstehen controversy (see also Wallgren 2003, 543). 26

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might say, we follow rules blindly and our “spade is turned” (cf. Wittgenstein 1953, I, §§ 217, 219). To take a von-Wrightian example: it belongs to my “pre-praxis”, to my fundamental certainties (“hinges”), that I do not first make sure that I still have my two hands before engaging in the proper “praxis” or action of opening the window (manifested in certain kind of outward behavior) with the intention of cooling the room. However, the pragmatist insisting on beliefs and other propositional states being “habits of action” might resist this division of human behaviors into proper actions and (a kind of) pseudo-actions, or the corresponding division of our activities into proper praxis and pre-praxis. There is, arguably, a continuity here instead of any sharp separation reflecting an essentialistic difference. The very notion of a habit of action can be employed to highlight this continuity.27

7 Concluding Remarks: Kaila and von Wright as Public Philosophers The fourth dimension of von Wright’s so-called pragmatism is presumably better known to his Finnish and Scandinavian colleagues and followers than to his international academic audience. In his home country Finland, he was a widely respected “public philosopher” in a manner perhaps comparable to, say, Dewey in the United States or even Jean-Paul Sartre in France. Probably his best known work in this area is Vetenskapen och förnuftet (Science and Reason, 1986), which criticizes the self-­ destructive tendencies of Western civilization, particularly the way in which human reason itself, through its scientific and technological advances and applications, has driven the world close to ecological destruction.28 Had he lived to witness the growing worries about the global climate change in the 2000s, he might have ended up even more pessimistic than he was in his old days.  The issue of continuity is also related to the question concerning the possible intentionality (or lack thereof) of the actions or behaviors of higher animals. Is there an evolutionary continuity here or a fundamental difference between our intentional actions and the purely causally explainable non-intentional (though possibly intentional-seeming) behavior of animals? I must here leave this question untouched, but I should like to note that the difference between those who find human beings essentially different from animals in this regard and those who find them not essentially different but only very different – that is, see them continuous yet very far from each other regarding capacities for reasoned action – may itself be a problematic distinction, or even a distinction without (pragmatic) difference. The pragmatic method could perhaps be employed here in order to show that there is no conceivable difference in the potential practical effects of these only apparently different views. I imagine that this issue could be interestingly investigated in the context of Kaila’s and von Wright’s ideas, too. 28  Some of von Wright’s “cultural” writings of this kind have been translated into English: see von Wright 1993. Here I am not even trying to summarize his profound views on “the myth of progress”, the self-destructiveness of human reason, and cultural pessimism. Von Wright’s career as a cultural discussant did not begin with his politically engaged comments in the 1960s but goes back to his early essays in the 1940s on Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. 27

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Clearly, a pragmatist thinker may be expected to be active in public issues such as environmental problems, social policy, or war and peace. In contrast to many pragmatists’ (especially Dewey’s) progressivism and optimism, von Wright as a publically well-known figure commenting on deep issues facing our human civilization shared the cultural pessimism of figures like Wittgenstein and Oswald Spengler. Neither Wittgenstein nor von Wright felt completely “at home” in the world and culture they lived in.29 Thus, again, von Wright was not a pragmatist properly speaking while developing a pragmatic way of doing philosophy as cultural criticism. The kind of profile as a public philosopher that Kaila had was somewhat different – and closer to that of someone like James. For Kaila, public engagements by philosophers were essential (or so it seems) primarily because the kind of “ultimate questions” he dealt with in Syvähenkinen elämä deserved to be discussed in a generally accessible way; while Kaila himself was an aristocratic elitist, he seems to have felt that his general readers and listeners had a right to find deeper layers of meaning in their lives, and that he could offer something like philosophical guidance in this respect. Von Wright’s and Kaila’s cases demonstrate that one can be a pragmatist in many different ways. Here we may see pragmatic contextuality and (Wittgensteinian) family resemblance at work. One can be a pragmatist in “first-order” issues but also in “second-order” or meta-level ones, or both. There is very little we find in von

 The correspondence between Kaila and von Wright edited by Österman (2020) exhibits a certain kind of delicacy in the process of von Wright’s development from Kaila’s student into a disciple of Wittgenstein and eventually a professional philosopher in his own right, obviously shaped by but independent of both great teachers. Focusing on problems of reality rather than language, Kaila was never a fan of Wittgenstein; von Wright becomes gradually careful in discussing Wittgenstein in the letters. In one of his first characterizations of Wittgenstein to Kaila on April 5, 1939, he notes that Wittgenstein is rather far from the lines of thought he had learned in Helsinki but that there may be a “common core” and a minor change of orientation might be necessary for him. On June 29, 1939, when von Wright was still visiting Cambridge as a student and had become better acquainted with Wittgenstein, he tells Kaila that his meetings with Wittgenstein have revealed “entirely new worlds” that he had never imagined before (“helt nya världar, som jag aldrig anat”). On July 6, 1939, Kaila perceptively notes that von Wright seems to have more “congenial sympathy” to Wittgenstein’s way of thinking than he himself does (cf. Österman 2020, 83). After Wittgenstein’s death in 1951, von Wright decides to leave his professorship in Cambridge and to return to Helsinki, writing to Kaila that, “[a]long with you”, the now deceased Wittgenstein was “the person who meant the most to my spiritual development” (June 9, 1951). Kaila’s response is enthusiastic, expressing a new confidence in the future of philosophy “in this poor country” (June 17, 1951). In addition to Wittgenstein, the letters testify about the two philosophers’ many international connections, with multiple occurrences of names like Moore, Broad, Tarski, Popper, and Gödel, among many others. Kaila also mentions a visit to Victor Kraft’s summer house in Austria – at a time after the Anschluss and close to the outbreak of the war (July 6, 1939). Österman explains, with reference to von Wright’s 2001 autobiography, that on the one hand Wittgenstein liberated von Wright from Kaila’s logical empiricism but on the other hand von Wright maintained from his student years with Kaila an interest in formal logic, which enabled him to develop his own philosophical approach independently of Wittgenstein (71). He is, with good reason, often considered the most original and autonomous among Wittgenstein’s closest pupils. 29

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Wright’s thought that can be directly linked with pragmatism, but at the meta-level there is, in fact, a lot. To sum up, we may say that Kaila was a logical empiricist and, perhaps, a quasi-­ pragmatist with explicit Jamesian influences, while von Wright was never really influenced or even very much inspired by any of the old pragmatists. He was, thus, an original “European pragmatist” in the sense that his pragmatic view of causation was truly his own innovation, not derived from any of the pragmatist classics (unlike, it seems, Kaila’s idea of practical testability, which can to a certain degree be traced back to James). As a quasi-pragmatist, von Wright was, then, more independent, but both were equally independent as central figures of Finnish and European philosophy throughout the twentieth century. Kaila’s and von Wright’s pupils and followers developed their own versions of pragmatic humanism – or so, at least, we may interpret Oiva Ketonen’s work on naturalism in a broadly Deweyan context, and possibly even Ilkka Niiniluoto’s critical scientific realism, which is to a large extent based on Peircean ideas of scientific progress, while maintaining a humanistic acknowledgment of the autonomy of philosophy and its irreducibility to empiricial science.30 On the other hand, Jaakko Hintikka’s relation to this tradition (if it can be called by that name) seems to be much more complicated.31 In a way or another, all these Finnish thinkers have engaged in a critical dialogue with the program of naturalism and naturalization in analytic and post-analytic philosophy. In this sense, too, their projects resemble the classical pragmatists’ and are also central background views for those of us (in Finland and elsewhere) working on the history of pragmatism.

 In their distinctive ways, Ketonen and Niiniluoto have also continued the tradition of “public philosophy”. For example, in his popular writings and talks, Niiniluoto has recently been a strong critic of the corruption of the commitment to reason and truth in our “post-truth” era. 31  I have deliberately avoided discussing any of Hintikka’s complex views here, as his relations to pragmatism would deserve a separate analysis (cf., e.g., Hintikka 1998, as well as the relevant footnote in Sect. 1 above). He was obviously greatly influenced by both Kaila and especially von Wright. 30

Chapter 9

A New Look at Wittgenstein and Pragmatism

1 Introduction Historically, there is presumably relatively little to be added to the already existing scholarship on the relation between Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the pragmatist tradition. Russell Goodman’s excellent monograph, Wittgenstein and William James (2002), tells us most that is worth telling about this issue, at least insofar as we are concerned with Wittgenstein’s relation to the classical pragmatist William James (or even to Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey). Any examination of Wittgenstein’s relation to pragmatism must begin with Goodman’s careful historical work, to which it is very difficult to add significantly new scholarly results.1

 This chapter was first written and published before other important scholarly contributions appeared. For a comprehensive recent study on the pragmatist aspects of Wittgenstein’s late philosophy, see Boncompagni 2016. In addition, as has often been pointed out, Frank Ramsey played an important role as a link between Peirce and Wittgenstein, though it is unclear whether Wittgenstein ever really read Peirce’s writings and it is not easy to identify any specific Peircean view that Wittgenstein might have entertained. (See further Misak 2016a, chapters 6-7; Misak and Price 2017; Boncompagni 2017.) I will occasionally refer to Goodman’s interpretation throughout this chapter, but I try to look at the relation between Wittgenstein and pragmatism from a slightly different angle (and not to restrict myself to the comparison of Wittgenstein and James). For some pioneering historical work on the relations between Wittgenstein and Peirce, see Bambrough 1981; Gullvåg 1981; Haack 1982; Nubiola 1996; and Crocker (1998). Wittgenstein’s relation to James was discussed by commentators already before Goodman (cf. Fairbanks 1966; Wertz 1972; Baum 1980), but Goodman’s interpretation is much more comprehensive and detailed. (See, however, also Ben-Menahem 1998.) On the other hand, some of the more recent interpreters who find connections between Wittgenstein and pragmatism fail to consider Wittgenstein in relation to the historical pragmatist tradition. This is as true about those who read Wittgenstein in relation to deconstruction and postmodernist (Rortyan) “pragmatism” (see the essays in Nagl and Mouffe 2001) as it is about those for whom pragmatism seems to be basically a certain anti-skeptical posi1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pihlström, Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy, Vienna Circle Institute Library 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28042-9_9

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Such examinations of Wittgenstein and pragmatism should also appreciate the fact that Wittgenstein’s own brief remarks on pragmatism – such as the one in On Certainty where he admits that his views may sound like pragmatism even though they are not really pragmatist (see Wittgenstein 1969, § 422; cf. also Wittgenstein 1980, § 266; Goodman 2002, 11, 158) – must be understood against the background of other Cambridge philosophers’, especially Bertrand Russell’s and G.E. Moore’s, conceptions of pragmatism: Wittgenstein was clearly not a pragmatist in the sense of James’s “pragmatist theory of truth”, but then again James himself was hardly a pragmatist in the rather naive sense of pragmatism (and its notorious theory of truth) attributed to him by his Cambridge critics. On the other hand, it is also clear that Wittgenstein was already at an early stage familiar with James’s famous work, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which contains a brief account of the pragmatic method or “Peirce’s principle”, according to which our conception of the potential or conceivable practical effects of the object of our thought is our conception of that object in its entirety.2 It is not implausible to suggest, at a highly general level, that Wittgenstein’s (later) examinations of language and meaning in terms of use follow the spirit, if not the letter, of this pragmatic maxim. Wittgenstein has also been intensively discussed by “neopragmatists” like Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, as well as their many followers; it is, however, probably too early to evaluate his contribution to the development of neopragmatist thought, as neopragmatism itself is still developing as a philosophical orientation.3 One of the leading contemporary neopragmatists (and one of the leading “Cambridge philosophers” today), Huw Price, also insightfully employs Wittgenstein in his defense of anti-representationalism, global expressivism, and functional pluralism – and even explicitly refers to the similarity between Wittgensteinian “plurality of forms of discourse, or ‘language-games’” and the “strong element of discourse pluralism in the American pragmatist tradition, of which [Nelson] Goodman and Rorty are the most prominent recent representatives” (Price 2011, 36).4 Thus, it might tion within analytic epistemology (Bilgrami 2004), or a view of norms alternative to “epistemological realism” (Williams 2004, especially 95–96). 2  See Goodman’s (2002, especially chapter 2) discussion of Wittgenstein’s reception of James’s Varieties. On the pragmatic method or pragmatist principle, see, e.g., the various reflections in Pihlström (ed.) 2015. 3  I do think that Putnam’s readings of Wittgenstein in relation to Kant and the pragmatist tradition (e.g., in Putnam 1995) are largely on the right track – indeed, Putnam is one of the few thinkers who admit that both Wittgenstein and the pragmatists share a Kantian heritage – and therefore part of what I am going to say is to some extent indebted to Putnam, both philosophically and historically, but I am not going to explicitly rely on his interpretations of Wittgenstein or the pragmatists here. In this chapter, space does not allow me to elaborate on the interpretation of Wittgenstein as a (neo-)Kantian thinker engaged in transcendental argumentation. While I share such a picture of Wittgenstein (cf. Pihlström 2003a, 2004b, 2006), believing it can be pragmatically enriched, its defense is not necessary for the present examination of Wittgenstein’s relation to pragmatism. See also Sect. 5 below. 4  For Price’s defense of global expressivism as the framework within which Wittgenstein’s linguistic (functional) pluralism makes sense, see especially Price 2011, chapter 10 (cf. also chapter 14). For a “Kantian” (and Wittgensteinian) pragmatist, an interesting further question inspired by

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seem that the relation between Wittgenstein and pragmatism has been exhausted: while Russell Goodman has taken care of its historical dimensions, original philosophers of language like Price have made innovative pragmatist use of Wittgenstein’s ideas in contemporary systematic philosophy. However, philosophically and systematically rather than historically, there is, I believe, still a lot to say about the relation between Wittgenstein and pragmatism. By making this distinction, I am not assuming that philosophy and its history are separable; indeed, I do not believe in such a dichotomy at all. Rather, systematic philosophy and the history of philosophy should be seen as a holistic network of beliefs and ideas to be critically examined in toto.5 I only want to emphasize that my discussion of Wittgenstein’s relation to, or place in, pragmatism is not primarily intended as a detailed contribution to historical scholarship on what Wittgenstein (or the pragmatists) “really said”. No new “readings” of Wittgenstein, or striking novel historical results, will be offered. My main aims are philosophical in the sense that I want to contribute to the on-going reappraisal of pragmatism – and, mutatis mutandis, of Wittgensteinian philosophy today – from the perspective of this critical comparison.6 Hence, this chapter examines how certain issues in “Wittgenstein studies” look like from a pragmatist standpoint. This is, of course, only a pragmatist way of “looking at” those issues; perhaps I should just say that I will show how a pragmatist may or might study them. This chapter is organized as follows. First, I will discuss three key issues of Wittgenstein studies that provide useful insights into the ways in which Wittgenstein, or the contemporary “Wittgensteinian” philosopher, may be said to be a pragmatist: the distinction – invoked in discussions of On Certainty, in particular – between the propositional and the non-propositional (Sect. 2); the related tension between anti-­ Cartesian fallibilism and what has been called the “truth in skepticism” in Wittgenstein (Sect. 3); as well as the relation between metaphysics and the criticism of metaphysics in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and Wittgensteinian philosophy generally (Sect. 4). I will also argue that dichotomous readings of Wittgenstein in terms of these three philosophical (or metaphilosophical) oppositions lead to unpragmatist and even un-Wittgensteinian positions. I will then proceed to a more explicitly metaphilosophical consideration of a fourth, equally harmful dichotomy, the one between deconstructive (therapeutic) and (re)constructive or systematic, Price’s work would be whether global expressivism could be understood as a pragmatist version of transcendental idealism within which (only) a pragmatic or empirical realism becomes possible. This is not the proper place to examine such an issue further, though. I should note, however, that where I clearly would not follow Price’s pragmatism is his strongly anti-metaphysical approach. In my view, the pragmatist should not “escape” metaphysical and ontological questions, should not simply “replace” them with questions about thought and language, and should not embrace “anthropology” instead of a (renewed) metaphysics “in a pragmatist key” (cf. ibid., 315). For an alternative pragmatist conception of metaphysics, see Pihlström 2009; cf. also Pihlström 2015. 5  This idea could be spelled out, e.g., in terms of Morton White’s holistic pragmatism (e.g., 2002); cf. also Peperzak 1986. 6  This is something I have to some extent tried to do in earlier publications (cf. Pihlström 2003a, 2004b, 2006, 2020a). I am not going to repeat those reflections here.

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argumentative philosophy – which is, I will argue, again something that the pragmatist, together with Wittgenstein, ought to overcome rather than rely on (Sect. 5). These issues are, and largely remain, open and debated questions in Wittgenstein scholarship. I can here only summarize how a pragmatist reader of Wittgenstein might, or perhaps should, deal with them. After having gone through these topics at a general level, I will briefly apply my considerations to the philosophy of religion, which is an important field of inquiry for both Wittgensteinian and pragmatist thinkers (Sect. 6). A short conclusion (Sect. 7) will then finally pull the threads together.

2 “Hinges”: Propositional and Non-propositional Wittgenstein’s “pragmatism” has been perceived, especially in his On Certainty (1969), to crucially focus on non-propositional “hinges”  – that is, fundamental certainties-­in-action our thoughts and actions depend on.7 Thus, “hinge propositions” is actually a misleading expression, just as “grammatical sentences” is: hinges, in the full pragmatist sense, are not propositional but profoundly action-­ based. Clearly, it is easy to suggest at a general level that Wittgenstein provides us with a “pragmatist” picture of human language-use and meaning: any meaning possible for us is grounded in public human ways of acting, that is, language-games. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy generally can be read as an attempt to show that it is only against the background of our human form(s) of life, of our habits of doing various things together in common environments, that meaning and also the learning of meanings are possible. In this sense, Wittgenstein establishes a pragmatic philosophical position – arguably as a response to a “transcendental” question concerning the necessary conditions for the possibility of meaning.8 The “pragmatist” reading of On Certainty defended by Danièle Moyal-Sharrock makes these ideas more precise by arguing that, for Wittgenstein, our basic certainties are “certainties in action” instead of propositionally expressible claims known with certainty to be true. Wittgenstein, after all, says in On Certainty that “an ungrounded way of acting” is prior to any ungrounded presupposition (Wittgenstein 1969, § 110) and that our “acting”, instead of “seeing”, lies “at the bottom of the language-game” (ibid., § 204; original emphases). He also famously quotes, approvingly, Goethe’s Faust: “In the beginning was the deed.” (Ibid., § 402.) While this reference to action as such provides a more or less standard picture of Wittgenstein – also endorsed by Goodman (2002, 5, 19–20), who notes that the “priority of  The key reference here is Danièle Moyal-Sharrock’s interpretation, as defended in her monograph on On Certainty and her papers on the “third Wittgenstein”: see Moyal-Sharrock 2004 and (ed.) 2004, as well as Moyal-Sharrock and Brenner (eds.) 2007. 8  On Wittgenstein’s (late) philosophy as a pragmatist response to a transcendental problem, see also Pihlström 2003a, chapter 2. Goodman (2002, 28) also notes that the Wittgensteinian “we” is “the ‘necessary’ or ‘transcendental’ we of the human”. For a more comprehensive treatment of Wittgenstein and the “transcendental we”, see Lear 1998, chapters 11–12. 7

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practice over intellect” and the deep interrelation of action and thought are among the commitments shared by Wittgenstein and William James – few scholars have joined Moyal-Sharrock in explicitly labelling Wittgenstein’s position “pragmatist” (or “logically pragmatist”, “pragmatist in a broad sense”). Moyal-Sharrock strongly emphasizes that the pragmatist certainty at issue here is non-propositional, nonempirical, and non-epistemic. A central pragmatic condition of meaning, according to Wittgenstein, is trust, understood as an instinctive, primitive, unreasoned, immediate reaction. “Without this unflinching trust, there is no making sense”, MoyalSharrock (2003, 133) aptly notes, referring to Wittgenstein’s (1969, § 509) famous statement that “a language-game is only possible if one trusts something (I did not say ‘can trust something’)”. For instance, the assumption that the earth has existed for many years “forms the basis of action, and therefore, naturally, of thought” (ibid., § 411), and this is something we trust rather than know or even believe to be true in the sense in which we know and believe many other things.9 In On Certainty, then, the “hinges” of our language-game(s) are the practical certainties we instinctively and immediately rely on – that is, what we trust without too much reasoning about the matter. Such hinges, including, say, our continuing trust in the reality of physical objects like stones or other people (not to be conflated with a theoretical claim to know, on the basis of some philosophical argument, for instance, that physical objects or “other minds” “really exist”),10 “enable sense” instead of themselves having sense (Moyal-Sharrock 2003, 134; original emphasis). Operating as such hinges, grammatical rules, in Wittgenstein’s special sense of “grammar”, make language-games possible instead of being moves within a game (ibid., 134–135). A hinge, according to this reading of On Certainty, is an “enabler”, not an hypothesis to be tested (ibid., 135). Wittgenstein’s anti-skeptical argumentation concludes that we “cannot doubt” certain things if we are to (continue to) make sense with our expressions (ibid., 138). These transcendental-sounding formulations invoke the practice-laden background of our language-use as a condition for the possibility of meaning. Moreover, this pragmatist point is highlighted by the fact that, while Wittgenstein’s philosophy is of course centrally focused on language, the

 Another scholar explicitly referring to the “primacy of practice” as Wittgenstein’s view is Anthony Rudd (see his 2007, 153). He even suggests that we might call Wittgenstein’s stance “transcendental pragmatism” (ibid., 158) – as also suggested in Pihlström 2003a, chapter 2. Rudd’s (2007, 146) illuminating discussion of Wittgenstein’s Zettel (Wittgenstein 1970, §§ 413–414)  – the famous example of the realist and the idealist teaching their children the word “chair”, with no genuine difference in these teachings that would make any practical difference – could also benefit from an explicit comparison to James’s (1975 [1907], Lecture II) pragmatic method, which argues for the same conclusion: “if a philosophical difference does not show itself in any way in practice, there is no real point at issue at all” (Rudd 2007, 146). 10  It is not clear that “physical objects exist” actually is a hinge (proposition), according to Wittgenstein. The very concept of a physical object can be argued to be a philosophical abstraction that cannot serve as an element of the kind of down-to-earth, action-based certainty that a more genuine hinge such as “tables, chairs, stones, etc. exist” exhibits. I owe this observation to Mike Williams. 9

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notion of language must be construed more broadly than as a mere propositional system – as, instead, a genuine human practice within the natural world. However, despite my deep appreciation of Moyal-Sharrock’s pragmatist reading, I would propose to modify her view by arguing that pragmatism blurs the boundary between the propositional and the non-propositional. The basic idea here is something that already Peirce and James insisted on: beliefs (and, analogously, any propositional states we attribute to human beings) are not just propositional attitudes “in the head”, that is, in the Cartesian-like mind (or brain) of the believer, but “habits of action” in the world.11 The notion of habit is crucial here – and it can be fruitfully compared to Wittgensteinian notions such as custom, technique, and (of course) game. After all, Wittgenstein does say in the Investigations (1953, I, § 150) that learning a language is mastering a technique. Accordingly, engaging in any propositional activity can be said to be based on human activities or habits, ways of doing things in a normatively governed, though always possibly changing, manner. There is no fixed or permanent normative structure of language; as Jaakko Hintikka has often remarked in his studies on Wittgenstein, language-games themselves are, for Wittgenstein, “prior to their rules”.12 Grammatical rules and the normativity of language generally are implicit in practice, in our lives with language. There is, then, for a pragmatist reader of Wittgenstein inspired by the classical pragmatists’ emphasis on habits and habituality, no dichotomy between the propositional and the non-propositional in the sense of “pragmatist” interpretations of Wittgenstein such as Moyal-Sharrock’s. Relying on such a dichotomy is both unpragmatist and un-Wittgensteinian. While Moyal-Sharrock is certainly correct to point out that the “hinges” Wittgenstein invokes are not propositional in the standard sense (any more than they are epistemic or hypothetical), neither aspect – the propositional or the non-propositional  – of the certainties Wittgenstein examines should be denied, or even can be denied, as they are inextricably intertwined. These certainties we are disposed to act upon are also beliefs, because that is what beliefs generally are, according to pragmatism. More generally, pragmatism, in my view, rejects all sharp dichotomies between theory and practice, or knowledge and action.

 Relevant writings by Peirce and James on beliefs as habits of action can be found in Peirce (1992–1998, especially vol. 1 and the classical 1877 essay, “The Fixation of Belief”, contained therein) and James 1975 [1907], particularly Lecture II. Here I cannot discuss these or other pragmatist classics in any detail. It might be noted, however, that Peirce originally adopted the characterization of beliefs as habits of action from the Scottish thinker Alexander Bain: a belief is something we are disposed to act on. 12  See the essays collected in Hintikka (1996). This is not to say that Hintikka would accept this view (“language-game holism”, as it has sometimes been labeled) as a philosophical conception of language, even though he does believe it was Wittgenstein’s position. Cf. also Price’s (very different) proposal to give “a pragmatic account of the origins of the semantic” (Price 2011, 205). Goodman (2002, 14–15) speaks about “pragmatic holism” as a Jamesian view that Wittgenstein felt coming “uncomfortably close” to his own position. The primacy of the pragmatic to the semantic is, of course, also one of the fundamental ideas of yet another version of contemporary pragmatism, Brandom’s (e.g., 2000a) inferentialism. See Chap. 3 above. 11

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Pragmatism is not an anti-intellectual or anti-epistemic position but a reconsideration of what is epistemic and/or intellectual.13 This, however, is a pragmatist reinterpretation of (the third) Wittgenstein, not an attempt to interpret Wittgenstein’s actual views with any detailed historical accuracy.14 Even so, the denial of the dichotomy between the propositional and the non-­ propositional – or, similarly, between the linguistic and the non-linguistic – does in my view capture the “spirit” of On Certainty better than a dichotomous interpretation, even a “logically pragmatist” one. Indeed, a strict dualism between the propositional and the non-propositional could here be considered a remnant of logical empiricism roughly analogously to the way some of Putnam’s views were seen as such in Chap. 2.

3 Knowledge and Certainty: Fallibilism and the Truth in Skepticism As a result of its remarkable conception of certainties-in-action, Wittgenstein’s On Certainty is, furthermore, anti-skeptical and anti-Cartesian in a way strongly resembling Peirce’s famous anti-Cartesian writings from the 1860s (see again Peirce 1992–1998, vol. 1). Both philosophers maintain, in contrast to Descartes’s notorious methodological skepticism, that we cannot begin our inquiries from complete doubt. Rather, we must, inevitably, always begin from within our beliefs – or, what amounts to the same, our habits of action – that already presuppose a great number of various certainties, or “hinges”. Otherwise there can be no knowledge or inquiry at all, or even any meaning, according to Wittgenstein (see Sect. 2 above). In Peirce’s philosophy of science, this anti-Cartesian starting point is developed into the well-known thesis of fallibilism: we could always be wrong, even though we cannot simultaneously doubt everything we believe. Any of our beliefs could be false, and we might, as inquiry progresses, have reasons to revise or give up even our most strongly maintained views or theories. We just cannot give all of them up at the same time. We have to have a firm basis for revising those parts of our belief system that need revision, even though that basis itself may also be called into question at a different time or from a different point of view. There is no full universal metaphysical certainty to be had anywhere in human affairs; our inquiries, scientific and everyday, are fallible and revisable through and through.

 In a Ludwig Wittgenstein Lecture on On Certainty and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics, Martin Kusch (as reported by Daniel Hutto in the British Ludwig Wittgenstein Society Newsletter, available electronically: http://www.editor.net/BWS/newsletter/newsletter14.htm), also argued against Moyal-Sharrock’s and others’ anti-intellectualist and non-epistemic interpretations, specifically regarding Wittgenstein’s views on mathematics. 14  In this sense, I am not thinking of my remarks as in any way rivalling Boncompagni’s (2016) learned historical treatment of the pragmatist dimensions of On Certainty, in particular. 13

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This fallibility or revisability is fully natural for us as the kind of beings we are. As our factual circumstances change, as our forms of life are continuously recontextualized, the basic certainties constitutive of our language-games and of the meanings expressible within them may have to be revised or given up, though not on the basis of reason or evidence because (as “hinges”) they are not based on reason or evidence (cf. Hertzberg 1994, especially 48–50). In this sense “our language-games are tied to the actual world we live in” (ibid., 59). And in this sense, then, Wittgensteinian language-games, while constituted by their rules (and hence thoroughly normative – just like the humanly natural practices or habits of action the pragmatists emphasize) – are responsive to natural events and processes, or to whatever we take to be natural from the point of view of those language-games and practices themselves. It would presumably be even more misleading to call Wittgenstein a “fallibilist” than to call him a pragmatist. This would indicate that he has a theory to advance in epistemology and the philosophy of science, something comparable to Peirce’s (and Dewey’s) pragmatist and naturalist theory of inquiry emphasizing the gradual revision of our beliefs and habits of action in the course of experience, where inquiry is launched as a response to the problematic situations arising from surprising and unexpected results of our actions that make us doubt the original beliefs (habits) we had been relying on. Yet, while it is clear that he does not defend such a theory, or presumably any epistemic theory at all, his conception of the pragmatic hinges briefly explored in the previous section should be understood in a fallibilistic “spirit”. This is because the practice-embedded certainties Wittgenstein draws our attention to are never absolute or final but always contextual and possibly changing; they must be revised and corrected, as our practices and/or forms of life change and develop. That is to say, even the strongest of our hinges may have to be given up in new, unexpected circumstances, although we may be unable to even coherently consider the possibility of having to give up our belief in, say, physical objects or other minds (keeping in mind the reservation about the concept of physical object being itself a philosophical abstraction of some kind). In this general attitude to our relation to the world we live in (and inquire into), deeply opposed to the very idea of there being a skeptical problem to be solved, Wittgenstein is, I submit, a pragmatic fallibilist. Moreover, insofar as Wittgenstein is understood not only as a thinker with pragmatist inclinations but also as a post-­ Kantian transcendental philosopher employing transcendental arguments and reflections (see also Sect. 5 below), this choice of terminology might also play the important role of reaffirming the transcendental philosopher’s entitlement to fallibilism and antifoundationalism: even if we inquire, transcendentally, into the necessary conditions for the possibility of things we take for granted, the results of such inquiries need not be regarded as apodictically certain.15  On the possibility of fallibilist transcendental argumentation, see Westphal 2003. Goodman (2002) in my view does justice to both aspects of Wittgenstein by both emphasizing that Wittgenstein and James shared a commitment to antifoundationalism (ibid., 5) and duly noting that Wittgenstein, unlike James, maintained a clear distinction between philosophy and science, or 15

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This antifoundationalist idea has also been expressed by saying that, while Wittgenstein’s late work is clearly anti-skeptical, there is an appreciation of the “truth in skepticism” to be found in his philosophy as well. Precisely the fact that our language-games, forms of life, and/or habits of action do not have any metaphysical grounding can be understood as such a recognition of the fundamental truth of a certain kind of skepticism, even though, again, skepticism as a philosophical theory cannot be maintained.16 As a philosophical position, skepticism results from a theoretical urge that both pragmatism and Wittgenstein reject. Skepticism should be overcome not by offering a theoretical argument that finally silences the skeptic (this cannot be done) but by investigating the ways in which the skeptic’s “game” is dispensable – that is, there is no need for us to philosophize in terms of that game, following its rules – while containing a fundamental seed of truth in the sense of making us better aware of our groundlessness and precariousness.17 Similarly, the “officially” strongly anti-skeptical pragmatists reject all foundationalist theoretical attempts to “ground” knowledge, science, meaning – or anything – in terms of an anti-skeptical philosophical argument. Space does not allow me to elaborate on this theme further here, but it seems to me that pragmatists and pragmatic fallibilists and naturalists (following Dewey) have dramatically neglected their clear similarities to the Wittgensteinian antifoundationalism and “fallibilism” available in On Certainty, in particular. Both sides would benefit from deepening comparisons that would also strengthen the status of a general antifoundationalism in contemporary thought still too often troubled by foundationalist concerns both in epistemology and in ethics and political philosophy. In any case, again, our key conclusion here is that there need not be any conflict or dichotomy between our commitment to fallibilism and our commitment to the “truth in skepticism”. Both are pragmatically needed (and both are available in Wittgenstein), just like the propositional and the non-propositional cannot be dichotomously separated but must

philosophical and empirical justification (ibid., 30–31). Another important difference between Wittgenstein and pragmatism can be regarded as political and cultural: Wittgenstein never shared any of the progressivism of the pragmatists (see ibid., 167 ff.). 16  This, of course, is something that has famously been elaborated on by Stanley Cavell (see his 1979). However, Cavell, presumably, would find little added value in comparisons between Wittgenstein and pragmatism. For more comprehensive discussions of Wittgenstein’s relation to skepticism, see McManus 2004. When discussing Wittgenstein and the “truth in skepticism”, I do not have in mind Saul Kripke’s famous skeptical interpretation of the rule-following considerations of the Investigations, however. 17  Note that this emphasis on Wittgenstein’s antifoundationalism is, again, directed against interpreters like Moyal-Sharrock who construe Wittgenstein as offering a new (that is, action-based instead of propositional) form of foundationalism in terms of the non-propositional “hinges”. Giving up the propositional vs. non-propositional dichotomy thus helps us appreciate the antifoundationalist character of Wittgenstein’s projects – and, hence, the truth in skepticism. Wittgenstein is not offering us any kind of foundationalism, not even a pragmatic one; nor are the pragmatists.

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both be incorporated in our pragmatist picture of practice-embedded human being-in-the-world.18

4 Reality: Metaphysics and Anti-metaphysics Both Wittgenstein and the pragmatists have been regarded as radically anti-­ metaphysical thinkers. For instance, Rorty repeatedly pictures both in this fashion, and more recent neopragmatists like Price (2011) share this negative attitude to metaphysics. However, as I have argued in several works (e.g., Pihlström 2009) – but won’t be able to argue in detail here – this is a fundamental misrepresentation of pragmatism (see also Chaps. 2 and 7). The pragmatists – and, perhaps analogously, Wittgenstein – can be seen as offering us a new kind of metaphysics, one based not on the futile attempt to climb above our forms of life into a God’s-Eye View but on human practices and especially our practice-embedded ethical standpoints and considerations. Engaging in metaphysics is a way of interpreting our human being-in-­ the-world, which cannot be separated from ethical values (or other values, including aesthetic ones, for that matter). This general idea is also closely related to the pragmatist rejection of the fact-value dichotomy.19 This is not at all to say that either pragmatists or Wittgenstein would not engage in the criticism of metaphysics. Obviously, they do. They both heavily criticize not only specific metaphysical ideas (e.g., Cartesian assumptions in the philosophy of mind or the picture of meanings as mental or abstract entities untouched by the practices of language-use) but also, and more importantly, the very conception of metaphysics based on traditional pre-Kantian metaphysical realism (transcendental realism), just as Kant himself did throughout his critique of reason. However, they need not leave the matter at that point but can offer a reconstructed – or, as we might say, post-Kantian  – pragmatic, naturalized yet in a sense transcendental way of doing metaphysics in terms of, and on the basis of, human experiential practices (forms of life, language-games). Pace Price, this is continuing metaphysics “in a pragmatist key” instead of abandoning metaphysics altogether. Pragmatism and Wittgensteinian explorations of fundamental, yet revisable and fallible, features of our forms of life here converge into what we may describe as a pragmatic philosophical anthropology, which, transcendentally interpreted yet pragmatically naturalized, is itself a form of metaphysics. Alternatively, we could speak about the topography  – or, with a more evolutionary and dynamic emphasis  – the natural history of our forms of life (knowing that Wittgenstein himself was fond of both metaphors).  My use of a Heideggerian phrase here is of course deliberate. In Heidegger’s case as much as in Wittgenstein’s, the question of possible links to pragmatism has been discussed (e.g., Okrent 1988) and needs further discussion. 19  Cf., e.g., Putnam’s work on this, especially Putnam 2002a; see also Pihlström 2005 and 2021. See Chap. 7 above for a more comprehensive discussion. 18

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Moreover, the kind of pragmatism, or pragmatic philosophical anthropology, that Wittgenstein and philosophers like James share is deeply pluralistic (cf. again Price 2011, chapters 2 and 10). Both James and Wittgenstein insist on the contextuality and pragmatic circumstantiality of human meanings, thought, and experience; we never encounter the world as it is in itself but always within one or another context – that is, a practice or a form of life. Furthermore, as there is no super-context or -practice over and above all others, there is no single correct way of using language or interpreting experience, no privileged representations in the sense of the ideal language isomorphic to the structure of the world that Wittgenstein imagined in the Tractatus (1921); instead, there is a plurality of equally acceptable ways of conceptualizing reality through different pragmatic engagements, each with their own valuational purposes built into them. These may be related to each other through networks of family resemblances – a famous Wittgensteinian notion that may in fact be drawn from James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Language-games are not mirrors of an independent reality, and there is no way of representing the world from a God’s-Eye View; instead, there are only human, contextual, pragmatically embedded perspectives from within our forms of life. At this point I would like to draw support from Putnam’s account of Wittgenstein’s relation to Kant and pragmatism: “Wittgenstein inherits and extends […] Kant’s pluralism; that is the idea that no one language game deserves the exclusive right to be called ‘true’, or ‘rational’, or ‘our first-class conceptual system’, or the system that ‘limns the ultimate nature of reality’, or anything like that.” (Putnam 1992, 38; original emphasis.) Putnam continues to observe – very interestingly from the perspective of our project of integrating Wittgenstein into the pragmatist tradition  – that for this reason Wittgenstein can be said to refute key ideas propounded by two leading twentieth-century pragmatists, i.e., both W.V. Quine’s reductive naturalism and Rorty’s relativistic and postmodernist neopragmatism: “[…] he agrees with Rorty, against Quine, that one cannot say that scientific language games are the only language games in which we say or write truths, or in which we describe reality; but, on the other hand, he agrees with Quine as against Rorty that language games can be criticized (or ‘combatted’); that there are better and worse language games.” (Ibid.)20 Arguably, a Wittgensteinian pragmatist may hold that our practice-embedded perspectives may, and often do, yield (or presuppose) metaphysical insights into the way the world is, or must be thought to be (by us), from within the various practical contexts we operate in. These are not insights into the world as it is absolutely independently of our conceptualizing practices and (ethically or more generally valuationally laden) practical points of view, but they are metaphysical  – or philosophical-anthropological – insights nonetheless. For example, the well-known  It is far from clear that Quine can be called a “pragmatist” at all, despite his influence on both Putnam’s and Rorty’s versions of neopragmatism. See Koskinen and Pihlström 2006. Note also that Putnam’s 2012 collection of essays contains plenty of material on Wittgenstein. This chapter is by no means an attempt to evaluate his interpretation of Wittgenstein; the developments of his views in this regard would require a separate study. 20

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Wittgensteinian view (if we may say that Wittgenstein ever maintained philosophical views)21 that there can be no private language in the sense of a language that only its speaker could ever understand or learn to use, just like the pragmatically pluralistic thesis derivable from the Putnamian interpretation just cited, can be interpreted as a metaphysical thesis about the way the world, including language and our life with language, is, for us language-users in the kind of natural circumstances and contexts (forms of life) we are in. In this sense, both pragmatism and Wittgenstein can be understood as critically rethinking the nature of metaphysics  – and anti-­ metaphysics  – rather than simply moving beyond metaphysics.22 While they are undisputably critics of metaphysics, this does not make them thoroughgoing anti-metaphysicians.

5 Philosophy: Deconstruction and Reconstruction In recent Wittgenstein studies, several noted scholars have suggested that Wittgenstein’s philosophy is completely different from any traditional attempts to philosophize in terms of theses and arguments. Those are to be rejected as remnants of “dogmatic” ways of doing philosophy. Instead of engaging with theses and arguments, philosophy should be therapeutical and deconstructive, helping us get rid of assumptions that lead us to philosophical problems in the first place. The “New Wittgensteinians”, taking very seriously Wittgenstein’s encouragement to “drop the ladder” toward the end of the Tractatus (Wittgenstein 1921, § 6.54) and his later proposal to lead philosophical thought to “peace” (Wittgenstein 1953, I, § 133), support this therapeutic-deconstructive program.23 Again, we can perceive a misleadingly dichotomous opposition between implausible extremes at work here. To defend a modestly traditional conception of philosophy as a systematic, argumentative practice employing theses and arguments supporting those theses is not to be a dogmatic believer in any particular philosophical system. As a brief illustration of this, I suggest that, despite his criticism of traditional ways of doing philosophy, Wittgenstein can be seen as employing Kantian-styled transcendental arguments (e.g., the private language argument) in  I am fully aware that some New Wittgensteinians resist such formulations. See the next section for a brief pragmatic critique of such views. 22  Another possible example of a metaphysical topic receiving a pragmatic-cum-Wittgensteinian treatment is the theory of causation and action defended by one of Wittgenstein’s distinguished followers, G.H. von Wright (see Chap. 8 above). However, it is unclear whether we can say that von Wright’s views on, say, causation are “metaphysical” at all; he is generally a non-metaphysical thinker, like so many Wittgensteinians, and he can be said to investigate the concept of causation instead of the metaphysical structure of causation itself. But then, again, this dichotomy between metaphysical structures of reality and our conceptualizations of those structures from within our practices must be called into question by the pragmatist (and, a fortiori, by the Wittgensteinian pragmatist). See further Sect. 7 below. 23  See Crary and Read 2000; Wallgren 2006; as well as several essays in Pihlström (ed.) 2006. 21

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favor of certain philosophical conceptions (e.g., the view that our language is necessarily public).24 The private language argument can be regarded as transcendental precisely because the fact that language is public is claimed to be a necessary condition for the very possibility of linguistic meaning. A private language would not be a language at all; as Wittgenstein notes, rules cannot be followed privately. Similarly, it could be argued that, necessarily, there must be agreement about certain apparently empirical matters (“hinges”, e.g., our basic conviction about the earth having existed for a long time and not just for, say, five minutes) in order for meaningful use of language to be possible at all.25 I am not making any claims about the success of Wittgenstein’s arguments, but it seems to me clear that he can be plausibly read as employing the transcendental method of examining the necessary conditions for the possibility of something (e.g., meaningful language) whose actuality we take as given.26 Analogously, the pragmatists can also be reinterpreted as philosophers presenting and evaluating transcendental arguments (or at least, more broadly, transcendental considerations and inquiries), even though radical neopragmatists like Rorty have tried to depict not only Wittgenstein but also the classical pragmatists, especially James and Dewey, in a deconstructive manner, as some kind of precursors of both Wittgensteinian therapy and Derridean deconstruction (and postmodernism more generally). For a pragmatist, there is no reason at all to resort to any unpragmatic dichotomy between, say, “transcendental philosophical theory” and “philosophizing as an activity” (Pleasants 1999, 181). Rather, philosophical theorizing itself is a practice-embedded human activity, and any activity that can be properly called “philosophical” surely has theoretical aspects. A healthy pragmatism should, instead of relying on an essentialistic dichotomy between post-philosophical therapy and systematic argumentation, insist on the compatibility and deep complementarity of deconstruction and reconstruction. Deconstruction should always be followed by reconstruction. This is in effect what Dewey argued in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1948 [1920]); as Putnam (1992) later put it, “deconstruction without reconstruction is irresponsibility”. The crude dichotomy between therapeutic and systematic philosophy is, again, completely  The “Kantian” tradition in interpretations of Wittgenstein goes back at least to Erik Stenius’s seminal study (Stenius 1960). Here, of course, I am following an eminent tradition in Wittgenstein scholarship; see also several essays in Appelqvist 2020. 25  See the discussion of “hinges” and the “logically pragmatist” interpretation of On Certainty in Sect. 2 above. The notion of “transcendental pragmatism” was already referred to in that context (cf. Pihlström 2003a, 2020a; Rudd 2007). 26  Note also that the transcendental interpretation is certainly not the only way of making Wittgenstein a philosopher of theses and arguments. Wittgenstein has, of course, been employed in the service of analytic philosophy of language in a distinctively pragmatist manner by Huw Price (2011): his expressivist, minimalist, and functionally pluralist engagement with Wittgenstein, or engagement with semantics from a Wittgensteinian perspective, is certainly not deconstructive in the sense of Rorty’s or the New Wittgensteinians’ projects but genuinely reconstructive (which does not mean I would agree with his use of Wittgenstein: Price is too anti-metaphysical a pragmatist for my taste, as was noted above). 24

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unpragmatic and in my view also anti-Wittgensteinian, as it assumes an essentialistic conception of the proper way of doing philosophy, without letting the richness of different philosophical aims, methods, and conceptions flourish. It thinks before looking, to use a Wittgensteinian phrase; or, to adopt a Peircean expression, it blocks the road of inquiry. Our philosophical inquiries often need both deconstruction and reconstruction; therefore, to narrow-mindedly restrict proper philosophizing to one of these impedes philosophical understanding. Just as pragmatism and pragmatically interpreted Wittgensteinianism seek to mediate between the propositional and the non-propositional and between metaphysics and the criticism of metaphysics, they also seek to mediate between therapeutic-­deconstructive and systematic-reconstructive conceptions of philosophy. Here pragmatism, also Wittgensteinianized pragmatism, can reaffirm its role – emphasized by, e.g., James in Pragmatism (1975 [1907], Lecture I) – as a critical mediator, a middle-ground-seeker, continuously hoping to reinterpret, re-evaluate, and transform traditional philosophical controversies.

6 Philosophy of Religion: Applying the Criticism of the Four Dichotomies If we are able to avoid the dichotomies and assumptions discussed in the four previous sections in a pragmatist and (I claim) Wittgensteinian way, we should also be able to look and see what happens to a particular field of philosophical inquiry, such as the philosophy of religion, when they are avoided. Even though this chapter cannot even begin to examine the Wittgensteinian tradition in the philosophy of religion, or even Wittgenstein’s own views on religion, at any length,27 let us very briefly consider philosophical investigations of religion on the basis of the following four ideas derived from the treatment of Wittgenstein’s relation to pragmatism above. Moreover, following Goodman (2002) again, we should recognize that the commitment to the philosophical importance of religion is shared by Wittgenstein and James, as well as by most other pragmatists, even though few pragmatists have straightforwardly defended any traditional religious worldview. First, it may be suggested that religious believers’ specifically religious “certainties” – the basic convictions underlying their religious “language-games” or forms of life – are both propositional and non-propositional, that is, manifesting or incorporating (if not simply expressible in the form of) theological theses (e.g., regarding God’s reality) but not reducible to mere linguistic statements considered in  D.Z.  Phillips’s work is, of course, the most widely read  – and most controversial  – within “Wittgensteinian” philosophy of religion. For a collection of up-to-date essays, see Phillips and von der Ruhr (eds.) 2005. These discussions rarely connect Wittgenstein, or Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, with pragmatism; for some reflections in this regard, see Pihlström 2013, chapter 3, and 2020a, chapter 5; for my earlier attempt to connect Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion with the pragmatists’, see Pihlström 1996, chapter 5. 27

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abstraction from human habits of action. Such certainties are, rather, themselves habits of action, combining propositional and non-propositional elements (cf. Sect. 2 above). Secondly, religious beliefs, including action-based “certainties”, can be criticized and rationally rejected in the spirit of fallibilism and general philosophical antifoundationalism; yet, just as there is no rational grounding for them based on religiously neutral criteria of reason, they cannot be rejected simply because of the lack of such grounding. This is comparable to “the truth in skepticism” (see Sect. 3 above). Religious beliefs, understood as action-based, practice-embedded certainties or fundamental convictions shaping the believers’ lives, are not scientific-like hypotheses to be tested in the way we test scientific or commonsensical beliefs about the world. Even so, they can be given up and/or revised in the course of our on-going experience and its transformations. They are not immune to criticism. Or better, if one’s faith is immune to criticism, then it is not genuinely religious at all (cf. Pihlström 2013). Thirdly, pragmatist philosophers of religion should both criticize traditional dogmatically metaphysical ways of pursuing theology and the philosophy of religion (e.g., the “proofs” of God’s existence or the artificial logical puzzles related to the concept of omniscience, for instance) and be willing to consider metaphysical expressions for their ideas concerning God, the soul, etc., even though pragmatic metaphysical inquiries into religion and theology have to start from, or be subordinated to, ethical reflections (cf. Pihlström 2013, especially chapters 2 and 5; as well as Sect. 4 above). In addition, for instance, process-theological reconstruals of the divinity might be worth exploring from both pragmatist and Wittgensteinian perspectives. Fourthly, philosophy of religion, like Wittgensteinian-cum-pragmatist philosophy generally, should be both deconstructive and reconstructive (cf. Sect. 5 above): we should, therapeutically, avoid dogmatic religious and/or theological beliefs but also, systematically and argumentatively, contribute to the critical analysis and evaluation of such belief systems. These are two sides of the same coin and equally important as parts of a philosophico-theological search for an ever deeper understanding of religion. Both pragmatist and Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion should, in my view, subscribe to something like these formulations concerning the nature and tasks of the philosophy of religion today – admittedly only very briefly and preliminarily articulated here. We may, more specifically, join Goodman (2002, 154) in understanding James’s pragmatic conception of religion as “Wittgensteinian”: the significance of religious terms is “established by their use”; our understanding of such terms, symbols, or pictures is constituted by the “service” we put them to, which is very different from claiming, along with the naïve pragmatic theory of truth, that the truth of religious beliefs would be established by their utility or usefulness. In order to articulate this pragmatist conception of religion in more detail, we need more than is available in Wittgenstein’s own cryptic and aphoristic remarks on religious matters in Culture and Value (Wittgenstein 1980) and in some of his students’ notes; we need a more systematic pragmatic-cum-Wittgensteinian

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investigation of the ways in which religious expressions, symbols, beliefs, and worldviews are embedded and employed in cultural, inescapably valuational, practices of life. Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion could therefore – in a more comprehensive discussion  – be interestingly compared not only to James’s pioneering work on religious experience and his pragmatic defense of the legitimacy of religious beliefs in terms of their morally motivating force (see James 1975 [1907], Lecture VIII) but also to Dewey’s (1991 [1934]) religious naturalism, which seeks to accommodate religious experience and values, including even the concept “God”, within a naturalistic position avoiding any dogmatic commitments to supernaturalist metaphysics and pre-modern non-democratic social structures and institutions. “The religious”, according to Dewey  – and I suppose we might say, according to Wittgenstein as well – must be emancipated from historical religions and their dogmatic creeds that often hinder, instead of enabling, the flourishing of the truly religious qualities of experience (cf. Pihlström 2013, chapter 2). This chapter, however, cannot develop these themes any further.

7 Conclusion My reflections on Wittgenstein’s relation to pragmatism have been programmatic and certainly need to be made more precise, both historically and systematically. I have hardly offered any new interpretation of Wittgenstein (or the pragmatists), but I hope that by putting these two philosophical perspectives together in the way I have done, questioning the dichotomies I find pernicious, may help us in reinterpreting both as orientations that ought to be taken very seriously in today’s philosophical discussions  – concerning metaphysics, religion, or the nature of philosophy itself. In particular, it is important to move beyond the dichotomies briefly discussed in Sect. 2–5 above, as such oppositions tend to hinder philosophical progress instead of enhancing philosophical understanding.28  There is a sense in which James might even be seen as a more thoroughgoing critic of harmful dichotomies than Wittgenstein. Yemina Ben-Menahem touches something important in the following: “James’s pragmatism is no less a critique of traditional fixations than is Wittgenstein’s. But the philosophical dichotomies Wittgenstein holds fast to, fact and value, internal and external, causes and reasons, are the very dichotomies James is trying to bridge. Thus, while for Wittgenstein the description of language is the description of its grammatical internal relations, for James the internal and the external, the causal and the linguistic, are ultimately inseparable.” (Ben-Menahem 1998, 134.) Accordingly, while I have argued that Wittgenstein shares with the pragmatists a critical attitude to certain dichotomies taken to be foundational to philosophy – or, perhaps better, that a pragmatist interpreter of Wittgenstein should view Wittgenstein’s philosophy in such a manner that those dichotomies are left aside – this is not to say that Wittgenstein and the pragmatists would have rejected all and only the same dichotomies. There are dichotomies that Wittgenstein, unlike the pragmatists (or at least James) holds fast to. Moreover, when pragmatically deconstructing harmful dichotomies or (perhaps better) dualisms, we should be careful to allow pragmatically useful, contextually relevant uses of the corresponding distinctions – even though this distinction 28

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While there would be no point in insisting that Wittgenstein was a “pragmatist”, given that “pragmatism” may itself be regarded as a “family-resemblance” term and concept (cf. Goodman 2002, 178),29 we may see Wittgenstein as offering a pragmatist (or at least pragmatic) answer to a transcendental question concerning the very possibility of meaning. He argues – in his own peculiar non-linear way – throughout his late works that the possibility of language and meaning is (non-foundationally, fallibly) grounded in public human practices, or forms of life, within which language is used, that is, practices, or perhaps better, habits of action whose radical contingency and continuous historical development are among their key features. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s pragmatist acknowledgment of there being no higher standpoint for us to adopt than the humanly accessible perspectives internal to our language-games and practices (that is, that we cannot reach a “God’s-Eye View”, or that aspiring to do that would be a misunderstanding of the human condition) may be regarded as his pragmatic reason for pursuing the “transcendental” problem concerning the possibility of meaning in the first place. The fact that Wittgenstein’s transcendental problems must be taken seriously even within a pragmatist interpretation highlights the fact that the Kantian background of both pragmatism and Wittgensteinian philosophy ought to be acknowledged. As I have suggested, Wittgenstein poses transcendental questions (e.g., “how is meaning possible?”) and offers pragmatist answers to them (e.g., in terms of “certainties-in-action”, or “hinges”, as we have seen). Moreover, it goes very well together with this Kantian-cum-pragmatist approach to resist any strict, essentialistic dichotomy between the ontological and the conceptual and to endorse the moderately constructivist view that the world we live in is to a considerable extent constituted by our categorizing it through our fully natural practices of language-use.30 This Kantian background of pragmatism brings me to my final conclusion. To be a pragmatist, or to be a Wittgensteinian thinker today, is to be continuously reflexively – transcendentally – concerned with one’s own philosophical perspectives and may itself be unclear and to be ultimately deconstructed, too. Generally, pragmatists can allow distinctions; this goes without saying, because there could hardly be coherent thought without distinctions. Philosophical dichotomies should be criticized and deconstructed only when they are pernicious and prevent us from understanding deeper continuities. While I owe this reflection to Bob Brandom and thank him for his critical comment on the issue, I must note that I also find his and some other neopragmatists’ dichotomy between linguistic pragmatism and more traditional pragmatism focusing on experience (or something similar, before the “linguistic turn”) yet another problematic dichotomy. For more critical discussion of Brandom’s version of pragmatism, see Chap. 3. 29  G.H. von Wright’s case, as examined in Chap. 8 above, also demonstrates that one can be a pragmatist in many different ways. Here we can see Wittgensteinian contextuality and family resemblance at work again. One can be a pragmatist in “first-order” issues but also in “second-order” or meta-level ones, or both. Keeping in mind that von Wright was Wittgenstein’s student and successor, we may note that there is very little we find in von Wright’s thought that can be directly linked with pragmatism, but at the meta-level there is, in fact, a lot. 30  Taking this view ontologically seriously might also throw new light on Wittgenstein’s (1953, I, §§ 371, 373) well-known claims about “essence” lying in grammar.

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approaches, not only with their intellectual but more broadly with their ethical integrity. It is to turn one’s self-critical gaze toward one’s own practices of philosophizing, one’s own being-in-the-world, one’s own habits of action, intellectual as well as more concretely practical, and the multiplicity of human values manifested in them. In James’s terms, it is to take full responsibility of one’s individual “philosophical temperament” (see James 1975 [1907], Lecture I) and to self-critically develop it further, through one’s contextualizing inquiries, hopefully learning to listen to the richness of the human “voices” speaking to us from within the indefinite plurality of language-games that our fellow human beings play with each other and with us.

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Index

A Action, 11, 46, 52, 69, 74, 123, 131, 134, 135, 141, 145, 148, 149, 151, 152, 156–163, 170–172, 174 Agency, 92, 158, 159, 161 Alexander, S., 125 Allison, H.A., 72 Analytic philosophy, x, 2–14, 16, 19–22, 30, 33, 42, 86, 147, 179 Antifoundationalism, 76, 174, 175, 181 Antirealism, 27, 41, 83 Aristotle, 4, 122, 129, 130 Aufbau, 23, 25, 26 B Belief(s), 22, 38, 39, 45, 50–52, 59, 76, 77, 80, 96, 101–114, 138, 141, 145, 149, 151, 152, 154, 155, 158, 163, 169, 172–174, 181, 182 Bergson, H., 148, 155 Boodin, J.E., 126, 131 Boutroux, E., 148 Brandom, R., xi, 2, 9, 10, 15, 43–60, 83, 98, 172, 183 Broad, C.D., 125, 126, 128, 164 C Carnap, R., 5, 20, 22–30, 32, 33, 42, 53, 151 Causation, 49, 90, 97, 125, 148, 149, 157–162, 165

Certainty, 34, 37, 111, 139, 150, 158, 162, 163, 168–176, 180, 181 Clifford, W.K., 106 Conceptual idealism, 61, 63, 67, 69, 70, 74, 80 Conceptual relativity, 23–29, 41, 91, 161 Conceptual schemes, 26, 29, 61, 67, 71–75, 96, 118 Constructivism, 3, 10, 80, 87, 89, 91, 93–97, 161 Continuity, 23, 115–146, 163 Conventionalism, 20 Creath, R., 20, 25 D Davidson, D., 44, 45, 74, 160 Deconstruction vs. reconstruction, 35, 178–180 Deep-mentality, 152, 156 Determinism, 158, 160, 162 Dewey, J., 6, 20, 43, 64, 88, 115, 148, 167 Dilman, I., 122, 123 Dreon, R., 14, 15, 97, 99, 125, 138, 142, 160 Dualism, 49, 75, 86, 99, 121, 134, 173 E Egidi, R., 159 Emergence, 19, 20, 24, 28, 33, 47–49, 55, 57, 58, 84, 85, 87, 97–100, 115–146 Emergentism, 47, 48, 97, 125–127, 129, 131, 132, 139, 145

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Pihlström, Realism, Value, and Transcendental Arguments between Neopragmatism and Analytic Philosophy, Vienna Circle Institute Library 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28042-9

199

200

Index

Empirical realism, 32, 69, 71, 78 Empiricism, 5, 7, 20, 25, 27, 155 Epistemology, 1, 10, 11, 42, 66, 77, 86, 92, 101, 103–105, 111–113, 174, 175 Ethics, 1, 22, 29, 31, 32, 39, 40, 42, 69, 77, 78, 105, 120, 121, 123, 130, 152, 175

I Idealism, 1–3, 7, 8, 10, 14, 28, 29, 40, 41, 53, 61–81, 83–100, 114, 116 Inferentialism, 56, 57, 59 Intentionality, 46, 58, 130, 159–161 Internal realism, 9, 23–26, 69, 79, 80, 156

F Fact-value distinction, 120, 121, 138 Fact-value entanglement, 4, 7, 8, 11, 22, 23, 29, 31, 51, 115–146 Fallibilism, 12, 13, 38, 72, 123, 169, 173–176, 181 Family-resemblance, 36, 164, 177, 183 Fine, A., 89 First philosophy, 38, 94 Freedom, 22, 26, 31, 32, 112, 127, 159, 160 Friedman, M., 19, 23, 28, 41 Functionalism, 46, 59

J James, W., 6, 21, 43, 62, 88, 101, 115, 147, 167

G God, 22, 23, 31, 32, 36, 37, 40, 66, 69, 78, 79, 108, 112, 154, 180–182 “God’s-Eye View”, the, 23, 36, 37, 40, 66, 69, 86, 93, 176, 177, 183 Goodman, N., 24, 140, 141, 168 Goodman, R.B., 34, 36, 167–170, 172, 174, 180, 181, 183 Goudge, T.A., 126, 128, 129 H Habits of action, 17, 32, 119, 134, 145, 155, 157, 163, 172–175, 181, 183, 184 Hegel, G.W.F., 30, 43, 44, 46, 47, 53, 56, 57, 85, 86, 88 Heidegger, M., 6, 43, 44, 46, 54, 55, 57, 58, 60, 176 Hinges, 34, 162, 163, 170–174, 179, 183 Hintikka, J., 44, 148, 165, 172 Historicism, 47 Holism, 39, 40, 42, 59, 62, 76, 78, 103–107, 113 Holistic pragmatism, 9, 11, 17, 22, 38–41, 62, 75–80, 101–103, 106, 107, 113, 114, 139, 141 Hookway, C., xi, 2, 10, 101–105, 107–114 Hope, x, 1, 2, 7, 15, 21, 22, 46, 60, 100, 102, 103, 105–114, 117, 124, 149, 182 Humanism, 3, 13, 129, 149, 159, 165 Husserl, E., 4

K Kaila, E., x, 11, 19, 147–165 Kant, I., 2, 22, 43, 63, 84, 109, 123, 160, 176 Ketonen, O., 148, 165 Kitcher, P., 2, 28, 83, 89–93, 95 Knowledge, 40, 69, 70, 73, 74, 77, 96, 108, 138, 139, 141, 172–176 Kuhn, T.S., 6, 23, 41, 66 L Language-games, 36, 37, 120, 121, 160–162, 168, 170–172, 174–177, 180, 183, 184 Lewis, C.I., 5, 19, 21, 28, 38, 42 Linguistic frameworks, 23–29, 36, 41, 42 Lloyd, A.H., 125, 126, 128, 131 Lloyd Morgan, C., 125 Logical empiricism, ix, x, 7, 9, 12, 19–23, 27–30, 33, 38–42, 139, 147–149, 153, 157, 164, 173 Logical positivism, 27, 39 M Mackie, J.L., 32, 117–119, 133, 140 Margolis, J., 2, 57, 83, 125 McDowell, J., 43, 122 Mead, G.H., 11, 14, 97, 125–129, 137 Merleau-Ponty, M., 58 Metaphysical realism, 22, 23, 26, 36, 66, 68–71, 79–81, 86, 123, 162, 176 Metaphysics, ix, 1, 10, 11, 22–24, 29–33, 35–38, 40–42, 47, 53, 60, 66, 84, 86, 88, 90, 93, 95, 99, 100, 115–146, 149, 151, 152, 158, 169, 176–178, 180, 182 Misak, C., 5, 8, 19–21, 119, 167 Moore, G.E., 168 Morris, C., 20, 21, 25 Moyal-Sharrock, D., 34, 38, 170–173, 175

Index N Nagel, E., 19–22, 38, 42, 129 Naturalism, 7, 10, 13, 17, 20, 47, 51, 58, 60, 108, 115–119, 122, 124, 126, 127, 130–132, 136, 137, 144–146, 148, 160, 162, 165, 182 Neopragmatism, 1, 3, 4, 9, 12, 19–42, 98, 117–124, 168, 177 Neutral monism, 155 “New Wittgensteinians”, the, 34, 37, 178, 179 Niiniluoto, I., xi, 68, 116, 148, 152, 156, 159 Normativity, 3, 9, 10, 13, 16, 17, 43–49, 51–56, 60, 66, 77, 87, 92, 98–100, 116, 118–120, 125, 132, 156, 172 Noumena, 90 Novelty, 39, 116, 124, 125, 131, 136 O Objectivity, ix, 22, 30–33, 61, 62, 91, 93, 96, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 130, 140 Ontological relativity, 27 Ontology, 1, 11, 24, 25, 27–29, 38, 48, 54–58, 92, 95, 97, 99, 103, 120, 125, 131 P Pape, H., 70, 71 Paradigms, 6, 26 Peirce, C.S., 5, 42, 44, 64, 88, 103, 116, 147, 167 Phenomenology, 4, 42 Philosophical anthropology, 14–16, 36, 68, 87, 97, 138, 142, 160, 176, 177 Philosophical temperaments, 76, 81, 104, 109, 114, 154, 184 Philosophy of culture, 39, 76 Physicalism, 13, 109, 162 Pluralism, 24, 27, 36, 37, 49, 53, 61–81, 91, 92, 120, 132, 155, 156, 160, 161, 168, 177 Practical realism, 80 Practical testability, 11, 149, 151–155, 165 Pragmatic a priori, 28 Pragmatic idealism, 61, 63, 69, 70, 83 Pragmatic maxim, the, 21, 27, 29, 102, 116, 134, 168 Pragmatic method, the, 86, 116, 136, 143–146, 163, 168, 171 Pragmatic realism, 9, 10, 23, 25, 41, 58, 61–81, 83, 84, 89–92, 95–100, 130 Pragmatism, ix–xi, 1–14, 16, 19–25, 27–38, 40–68, 70–72, 74, 76–78, 80, 84–86,

201 88, 89, 92–95, 97, 98, 101–118, 124–127, 129, 131, 132, 134, 136–138, 140, 142, 147–161, 163, 165, 167–184 Pragmatist humanism, 13, 147–165 Price, H., 5, 8, 27, 35, 36, 157, 167–169, 172, 176, 177, 179 Putnam, H., xi, 2, 4, 8, 9, 11, 22, 43, 63, 68, 83, 86, 89–93, 95, 96, 115, 116, 118, 137–143, 156, 161, 162, 168, 173, 176, 177, 179 Putnam, R.A., 2, 4, 8, 11, 24, 116, 137–144, 146 Q Quine, W.V., 5, 7, 19, 20, 24, 25, 27, 28, 37–40, 44, 45, 53, 59, 76, 106, 108, 109, 113, 177 R Rationalism, 59 Realism, xi, 1–4, 7–12, 14, 17, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 41, 60, 61, 66–81, 83–100, 109, 112, 116, 120, 127, 131–136, 142, 156, 157 “Real things”, 73, 86, 105, 106, 110, 112 Reductionism, 58 Reductive naturalism, 37, 129, 161, 177 Relativism, 62, 74, 75, 91, 93, 120, 140 Religion, 17, 23, 29, 32, 39, 40, 42, 62, 76–80, 102, 107, 134, 149–153, 170, 180–182 Renan, E., 148, 149 Rescher, N., 2, 61, 92 Richardson, A., 20, 23, 25, 41 Rorty, R., 3, 5, 6, 9, 15, 22, 25, 27, 35, 37, 41, 43, 44, 47, 50, 51, 54, 56–60, 62, 64, 79 Russell, B., 155 S Sartre, J.-P., 163 Savery, W., 126, 127 Schiller, F.C.S., 64, 126, 148 Schlick, M., 20, 30 Scientific realism, xi, 27, 62, 91, 165 Sellars, W., 44, 45, 50, 57, 58, 98, 99, 122 Skepticism, 38, 94, 117, 138, 140, 150, 169, 173–176, 181 Spengler, O., 164 Stadler, F., x, 8 Stenius, E., 148, 179 Stephan, A., 48, 125, 126, 128, 129

202

Index

Strawson, P.F., 85, 88 Synechism, 116, 124, 132–137, 139, 143–145

U Uebel, T., 20 Ultimate questions, 150, 154, 164

T Taylor, C., x, 43, 58–60 Theology, x, 31, 32, 79, 181 Things in themselves, 66, 70–75, 85, 91, 112 Transcendental arguments/argumentation, 1–3, 7, 8, 10, 12, 15, 31, 34, 35, 67, 73, 75, 90, 99, 102, 103, 106, 109–114, 168, 174, 178, 179 Transcendental idealism, 28, 32, 33, 35, 41, 67, 71, 76, 78, 80, 84, 86–88, 91, 93–97, 114, 169 Transcendental ideas, 31, 35 Transcendental philosophy, 1, 3, 16, 76, 84, 87, 93, 142 Transcendental realism, 36, 86, 88, 123, 176 Truth, 3, 9, 26, 37–39, 50–52, 57, 64, 65, 70, 72, 81, 88, 91, 96, 98, 104, 107, 110, 112, 113, 121, 123, 124, 134, 135, 150–154, 158, 168, 169, 173–177, 181 Tuomela, R., 148

V Value(s), 1–4, 8–14, 17, 22, 29, 32, 36, 58, 60, 66, 68, 69, 72, 97, 98, 100, 104, 106, 109, 116–128, 130–146, 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 176, 181, 182, 184 Vienna Circle, the, x, 19–21, 27, 29, 30, 32, 139, 148, 151 Vihalemm, R., 80 von Wright, G.H., xi, 2, 11, 147–165, 178, 183 W Weiss, Z., x Whitehead, A.N., 126 White, M., xi, 2, 9, 38–40, 62, 76–78, 80, 101, 107, 114, 119, 138 Williams, B., 121 Will to believe, the, 10, 101–114, 149 Wittgenstein, L., 2, 21, 44, 69, 90, 129, 161, 167 World, the, 1, 21, 48, 65, 83, 101, 115, 148, 172 Wüstehube, A., 63, 69