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1. Exploring Pragmatism: A Comprehensive Guide
1.1 The Foundations of Pragmatism
Pragmatism, originating in the United States around 1870, stands as a dynamic alternative to both analytic and Continental philosophical traditions. This movement was initiated by the classical pragmatists, including Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), who conceptualized and championed the view, and William James (1842–1910), who expanded and popularized it. Josiah Royce (1855–1916), James’ Harvard colleague, allied with absolute idealism, served as a valuable voice for these concepts. As Royce became increasingly influenced by Peirce’s work on signs and the community of inquirers, he was recognized as a fellow pragmatist by Peirce. The scientific revolution, particularly evolutionary theory, significantly influenced these early thinkers (Pearce 2020). They focused on theories of inquiry, meaning, and the nature of truth, with James applying these themes to explore truth in religion.
Pragmatism emphasizes the practical consequences of beliefs and ideas. Instead of focusing on abstract theories, it assesses the value and truth of concepts based on their usefulness in the real world. This perspective has broad implications for how we approach knowledge and problem-solving. Understanding the roots and early influences of pragmatism helps to appreciate its development and significance.
1.2 The Evolution of Pragmatism Through Generations
The second generation of pragmatists shifted the focus towards politics, education, and social improvement, deeply influenced by John Dewey (1859–1952) and Jane Addams (1860–1935). Addams, the founder of social work, expressed pragmatist ideas through her profession and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. During this time, W.E.B Du Bois (1868–1963) and Alain Locke (1885–1954) pioneered new philosophies of race, engaging in productive dialogue. George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) contributed to the social sciences, developing pragmatist perspectives on the relations between self and community (Mead 1934). Mary Parker Follett, who studied with Royce and James, critiqued individualist ontologies, developing the concept of “power-with” instead of “power-over” in institutional settings (Follett 1918; 1924), and her insights have recently been recognized (Kaag 2011).
As the progressive ‘New Deal’ era waned and the US entered the Cold War, pragmatism’s influence was challenged. Analytic philosophy rose and became the dominant methodology in Anglo-American philosophy departments. Transitional figures like C.I. Lewis (1883–1964), teacher of W.V.O. Quine (1908–2000), developed a pragmatist Kantianism. In books like Mind and the World Order (1929), Lewis defended a pragmatist conception of the a priori, suggesting that our choices of logic and classification systems should be based on pragmatic criteria (Lewis 1923, 1929; Murphey 2005: ch. four and five). While Lewis and Quine advanced pragmatist themes, their analytic allegiance was evident in their focus on theory of knowledge.
1.3 Neopragmatism and Its Contemporary Relevance
Since the 1970s, pragmatism has seen a significant revival. Richard Rorty (1931–2007) consciously turned to pragmatism to correct what he saw as mainstream epistemology’s mistake: conceiving of language and thought as ‘mirroring’ the world. Rorty’s attacks on ‘representationalism’ led to neopragmatism, with contributions from influential philosophers. Unlike early pragmatists who created systematic philosophies, Rorty treated pragmatism as a critical philosophical project. He argued that there is nothing systematic to be said about truth. The concept does not capture any metaphysical relation between our beliefs and reality. We use ‘true’ to endorse beliefs, but beyond that, there is nothing more to be said. We can’t aim for truth when we inquire because we can never prove our beliefs are true, only that they meet community standards (Rorty 1982; 1991; 1998). Therefore, we can propose new systems of classification and description. We test these systems by seeing how they help us achieve our goals and become better at being human.
Hilary Putnam identified four key characteristics of pragmatism as: i) rejection of skepticism, ii) willingness to embrace fallibilism, iii) rejection of dichotomies such as fact/value, mind/body, analytic/synthetic, iv) what he calls ‘the primacy of practice’ (Putnam 1993; 1994).
Robert Brandom’s philosophical interests differ from those of classical pragmatists. He develops inferentialist semantics to construct accounts of our use of words like ‘true’ and ‘refers to’, liberated from the idea that thought and language transcribe reality. The connection to pragmatism is his focus on what we do with our practices of making assertions. An assertion is its normative pragmatics: the smallest unit of language for which we can take responsibility within a ‘game of giving and asking for reasons’. Logical relations are entitlements to make further moves in this ‘language-game’ (Brandom 1994; 2000). Brandom denies that truth is a substantial property and seeks to construct an account of reference that makes a difference in practice (Brandom 2008).
Jürgen Habermas combines analytic philosophy with a neo-Marxian critique of modernity, drawing on Mead’s analysis of the self as social. His concept of communicative action (Habermas 1981) is advocated as a foil to the instrumentalist rationality that colonizes the human ‘lifeworld’ under capitalism. The discourse ethics he develops owes much to pragmatism’s concept of the community of inquiry (Habermas 2003).
Meanwhile, self-described pragmatists have objected to certain tenets of neopragmatism, seeking to rehabilitate classical pragmatist ideals of objectivity. (Examples include Susan Haack, Christopher Hookway, and Cheryl Misak.) Others have worked to place pragmatist ideas in a broader philosophical context, tracing Peirce’s debt to Kant (Apel 1974, Gava 2014), and connections between pragmatism and 19th-century idealism (Margolis 2010, Stern 2009). Pragmatism’s progressive social ideals lived on with Cornel West, who advanced a prophetic pragmatism (West 1989), while Shannon Sullivan has been a pioneer in ‘whiteness studies’ (Sullivan 2006). Other liberatory philosophical projects in areas such as feminism (Seigfried 1996), disability studies (Keith and Keith 2013), medical ethics (Hester 2001), ecology (Norton 1994; 2005, Alexander 2013), Native American philosophy (Pratt 2002) and Latin American philosophy (Pappas 1998) also look to the pragmatist tradition. Pragmatists have also made contributions to legal philosophy (Sullivan 2007).
Increasingly, pragmatism’s intellectual center of gravity is moving out of North America, with research networks appearing in South America, Scandinavia, central Europe, and China.
1.4 Core Tenets: Pragmatism Explained
Pragmatism’s central ideas originated in discussions at a ‘Metaphysical Club’ that met in Harvard around 1870. (For a popular history of this group, see Menand 1998.) Peirce and James, along with philosophers, psychologists, and lawyers, participated in these discussions. Peirce developed these ideas in publications from the 1870s, and they gained prominence through lectures by James in 1898. Both used ‘pragmatism’ to clarify concepts and identify empty disputes, though they differed in their understanding.
The Pragmatic Maxim, at the core of pragmatism, is a rule for clarifying the meaning of hypotheses by tracing their implications for experience. For Peirce and James, a key application was clarifying the concept of truth. This led to a distinctive, fallibilist, anti-Cartesian explication of the norms that govern inquiry. Early pragmatists split over questions of realism, whether pragmatism should be a scientific philosophy holding monism about truth (Peirce), or a broad-based alethic pluralism (James and Dewey). This dispute led Peirce to rename his view pragmaticism, to distinguish it from James’ interpretation.
2. The Pragmatic Maxim: A Closer Look
2.1 Peirce’s Pragmatic Maxim: Meaning and Application
Peirce’s canonical statement of his Pragmatic Maxim, from his 1878 essay ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’, states:
Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (EP1: 132)
This maxim provides a distinctive method for clarifying the meaning of concepts and hypotheses by identifying the practical consequences we should expect if a given hypothesis is true. This raises questions about what qualifies as a practical consequence and what the use of such a maxim might be. For example, Peirce suggests that what we mean by calling something hard is that ‘it will not be scratched by many other substances.’ The concept hard is useful in contexts when we are wondering what to do, and absent such contexts, the concept is empty.
The principle has a verificationist character: ‘our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects’ (EP1: 132). The phrase ‘practical consequences’ suggests that these are to be understood as having implications for what we will or should do. Peirce later formulated this as:
The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol. (EP2: 346).
If I want to break a window by throwing an object through it, that object needs to be hard. The consequences we are concerned with are general and intelligible: we look for laws that govern the behavior of hard things and draw on them to develop behaviors that advance our goals now and in the future.
2.2 James’ Interpretation: Practical Consequences
James sometimes writes as if the practical consequences of a proposition can simply be effects upon the individual believer: if religious belief makes me feel better, then that contributes to the pragmatic clarification of ‘God exists’. Peirce insisted that it was a logical principle, including scientific methodology. For instance, he used it to clarify concepts central to scientific reasoning such as probability, truth, and reality. Pragmatism, described by Peirce as a ‘laboratory philosophy’, shows us how we test theories by carrying out experiments in the expectation that if the hypothesis is not true, then the experiment will fail to have some predetermined sensible effect.
Peirce’s description of his maxim as a logical principle is reflected in passages where he presents it as a development of a distinction that had been a staple of traditional logic texts, between ideas that are clear and distinct (EP1: 126f). Peirce understood the first grade of clarity about the meaning of a concept to consist in the ability to identify instances of it, without necessarily being able to say how. He then took his philosophical contemporaries to hold that the highest grade of clarity, distinctness, is obtained when we can analyze a concept into its elements by providing a verbal definition. Peirce complained that ‘nothing new is ever learned by analyzing definitions’, unless we already have a clear understanding of the defining terms. He announced that the Pragmatic Maxim enabled a higher grade of clarity, supplementing the verbal definition with a description of how the concept is employed in practice.
As well as treating the Pragmatic Maxim as part of a constructive account of the norms that govern inquiry, Peirce gave it a negative role as a tool for demonstrating the emptiness of a priori metaphysics. Pragmatic clarification of reality may be used to undermine a flawed ‘nominalistic’ conception of reality that led to the ‘copy theory of truth’, problematic Cartesian certainty-seeking strategies in epistemology, and Kant’s concept of a ‘thing in itself’. A vivid example of using the maxim to undermine spurious metaphysical ideas was Peirce’s early argument that the Catholic understanding of transubstantiation was empty and incoherent, since to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon’ (EP1: 131f). It is important to note, however, that the Maxim is ultimately a tool for clarifying meaning, not Peirce’s theory of meaning proper, which is found in his theory of signs or semiotic.
2.3 James: Bridging Empiricism and Faith
When William James published a series of lectures on ‘Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking’ in 1907, he began by identifying ‘The Present Dilemma in Philosophy’ (1907: 9ff), a clash between two ways of thinking, which he promised pragmatism would overcome. James observes that the history of philosophy is ‘to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments’: the ‘tough-minded’ and the ‘tender-minded’. The tough-minded have an empiricist commitment to experience, while the tender-minded prefer a priori principles which appeal to ratiocination. The tender-minded tend to be idealistic, optimistic, and religious, while the tough-minded are materialist, pessimistic, irreligious, dogmatic, and fatalistic.
By the early twentieth century, James notes, ‘our children … are almost born scientific’ (1907: 14f). But this has not weakened religious belief. People need a philosophy that is both empiricist yet finds room for faith. The challenge is to reconcile ‘the scientific loyalty to facts’ with ‘the old confidence in human values and the resultant spontaneity, whether of the religious or of the romantic type.’ Pragmatism is presented as the ‘mediating philosophy’. Once we use the ‘pragmatic method’ to clarify our understanding of truth, free will, or religious belief, the disputes begin to dissolve. William James thus presented pragmatism as a ‘method for settling metaphysical disputes that might otherwise be interminable.’ (1907: 28) Unless some ‘practical difference’ would follow from one or the other side’s being correct, the dispute is idle.
[T]he tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object, then, we need only consider what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve – what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare. (1907: 29)
James explained this with an illustration of a squirrel and a human observer:
This human witness tries to get sight of the squirrel by moving rapidly round the tree, but no matter how fast he goes, the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction … so that never a glimpse of him is caught. The resultant metaphysical problem now is this: Does the man go round the squirrel or not? (1907: 27f)
James proposed that the answer depends on what you ‘practically mean’ by ‘going round’. If you mean passing from north of the squirrel, east, south, then west, the answer is ‘yes’. If you mean in front of him, to his right, behind him, to his left, then the answer is ‘no’. After pragmatic clarification disambiguates the question, all dispute ends. So James offers his pragmatism as a technique for clarifying concepts and hypotheses so that metaphysical disputes that appear irresoluble will be dissolved. A good example is the dispute between free will and determinism: once we compare the practical consequences of both positions we find no conflict.
As James admitted, he explained the pragmatic method through examples rather than a detailed analysis of what it involves. He did little to explain exactly what ‘practical consequences’ are. He also made no claim to originality: ‘Pragmatism represents a perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy, the empiricist attitude’, although he acknowledged that it did so ‘in a more radical and in a less objectionable form than it has ever yet assumed’ (1907: 31). It shared with other forms of empiricism an ‘anti-intellectualist tendency’ (ibid), and it recognized that theories should be viewed as ‘instruments, not answers to enigmas’.
3. Pragmatist Theories of Truth: Different Perspectives
3.1 Peirce on Truth and Reality: The End of Inquiry
Peirce and James differed in how they applied their respective pragmatisms to clarifying the concept of truth. Peirce’s account of truth is presented as a means to understanding a concept that he claimed was vital for the method of science: reality (3.1). James used his account to defend pluralism about truth (3.2).
The final section of ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’ addresses the concept of reality. This concept seems clear: ‘every child uses it with perfect confidence…’ Thus it reaches Peirce’s first level of meaning-clarity. A second-level verbal definition is also readily forthcoming: ‘we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be.’ But, Peirce announces, if our idea of reality is to be ‘perfectly clear’, we need to apply the Pragmatic Maxim. At this stage the concept of truth enters the discussion: Peirce claims that the object represented in a true proposition is our best understanding of the real. So we must turn to his remarks about truth to see how this works.
His pragmatic clarification of truth is expressed as follows:
The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality. (EP1: 139)
Seven years earlier, in a review of a new edition of the writings of Berkeley, Peirce had described this way of thinking as the ‘realist conception of reality’ (EP1:88–9), in contrast with a ‘nominalist conception of reality’ which many early modern philosophers took for granted. Nominalists assume that the real can only be the antecedent cause of singular sensations which provide our evidence for beliefs about the external world. This naturally leads to a certain (age-old) solipsistic skepticism concerning whether a person can gain knowledge that transcends their own perceptions and epistemic perspective. Peirce’s pragmatist clarification of truth offers an alternative conceptualization of ‘being constrained by reality’, in terms of consequent convergence of opinion, through the process of inquiry, rather than as an antecedent cause of sensations.
This has led Peirce’s account of truth to be expressed in the slogan: truth is the end of inquiry, where ‘end’ is to be understood not as a ‘finish’ but as a goal, telos or final cause. This original understanding of truth has faced challenges that it is ‘too realist’ insofar as it takes for granted that inquiry will converge on just one answer to any given question. Here Bertrand Russell asked, ‘Is this an empirical generalization from the history of research? Or is it an optimistic belief in the perfectibility of man?’, concluding, ‘Whatever interpretation we adopt, we seem committed to some very rash assertion.’ (1939: 146). Similarly, Quine wrote, ‘…we have no reason to suppose that man’s surface irritations even unto eternity admit of any one systematization that is scientifically better or simpler than all possible others’ (1960: 23). However, later in life Peirce urged that the hypothesis of monistic convergence is best viewed as a regulative hope. In 1908, Peirce wrote to a friend, ‘I do not say that it is infallibly true that there is any belief to which a person would come if he were to carry his inquiries far enough. I only say that that alone is what I call Truth’ (cited Haack 1976: 246).
At the same time, others have criticised Peirce’s account of truth for not being realist enough, due to its ‘internal realist’ definition of truth in terms of belief and inquiry. Can there not be claims which no-one ever inquires into or believes, which are nonetheless true? What about ‘lost facts’, such as the number of cakes on a tray during a long-ago party? Here Peirce arguably doubles down on his fallibilism (Legg 2014: 211). How can we be sure that no amount of inquiry will settle such matters?
… it is unphilosophical to suppose that, with regard to any given question (which has any clear meaning), investigation would not bring forth a solution of it, if it were carried far enough… Who can be sure of what we shall not know in a few hundred years? (EP1: 140)
The objectivism of Peirce’s account of truth derives not from a world entirely external to our minds, but from the potential infinity of the community of inquiry, which exposes all of our beliefs to future correction: ‘reality is independent, not necessarily of thought in general, but only of what you or I or any finite number of [persons] may think about it…’ (EP1: 139). By means of this mathematical analysis, Peirce deftly synthesises insights from traditional realisms and idealisms (Legg 2014: 212; Lane 2018).
3.2 James on Truth: Expediency and Experience
James departed from Peirce in claiming that pragmatism was itself a theory of truth, and his writings on this topic rapidly became notorious. They are characteristically lively, offering contrasting formulations, engaging slogans, and intriguing claims which often seem to fly in the face of common sense. In his own words:
The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons. (1907: 42) ‘The true’, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole, of course. (1907: 106)
Other formulations fill this out by giving a central role to experience:
Ideas … become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience. (1907: 34) Any idea upon which we can ride …; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally. (1907: 34)
This might be taken to suggest that beliefs are made true by the fact that they enable us to make accurate predictions of the future run of experience, but other passages suggest that the ‘goodness of belief’ can take other forms. James assures us that it can contribute to the truth of a theological proposition that it has ‘a value for concrete life’ (1907: 40); and this can occur because the idea of God possesses a majesty which can ‘yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds’ (1907:40). This suggests that a belief can be made true by the fact that holding it contributes to our happiness and fulfilment. Such passages may seem to support Bertrand Russell’s famous objection that James is committed to the truth of “Santa Claus exists” (Russell 1946: 772). This is unfair; at best, James holds that the happiness that belief in Santa Claus provides is truth-relevant. He might call the belief ‘good for so much’ but it would only be ‘wholly true’ if it did not ‘clash with other vital benefits’. It is easy to see how, unless it is somehow insulated from the broader effects of acting upon it, belief in Santa Claus could lead to many surprising and disappointing experiences.
4. Pragmatist Epistemology: A Return to Common Sense
4.1 Skepticism versus Fallibilism: The Cartesian Influence
The pragmatists saw their epistemology as providing a return to common sense and experience, rejecting a flawed philosophical heritage which had distorted the work of earlier thinkers. The errors to be overcome include Cartesianism, nominalism, and the ‘copy theory of truth’: these are all related.
The roots of pragmatism’s anti-skepticism can be found in Peirce’s early (1868) paper ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’ (EP1: 28–30). Here he identifies ‘Cartesianism’ as a philosophical pathology that lost sight of certain insights that were fundamental to scholastic thought, and more suited to the philosophical needs of his own time. The paper identifies four problematic teachings of modern philosophy:
- One can and should doubt all one’s beliefs at once.
- The ultimate test of certainty lies in individual consciousness.
- The ‘multiform argumentation’ characteristic of the Middle Ages should be replaced by a single chain of inference.
- Where scholasticism consciously limited its explanatory capacity, Cartesianism’s stated ambition to explain everything renders its own presuppositions hidden, mysterious, and philosophically dangerous.
The first, and most important of these Cartesian teachings was the method of universal doubt, whereby we should retain only beliefs that are absolutely certain. The test of this certainty, as Peirce next points out, lies in whether the individual consciousness is satisfied. Importantly, this self-examination includes reflection on hypothetical possibilities: we cannot trust our perceptual beliefs because we cannot rule out that they might be produced by a dream, or an evil demon. (See Hookway 2012, ch. 2,3.) The initial pragmatist response is that this is a strategy that in practice we cannot carry out effectively, and there is no reason to adopt it anyway. Peirce claims that any attempt to adopt the method of doubt will be an exercise in self-deception because we possess a variety of certainties which it does not occur to us can be questioned. So there will be no ‘real doubt’; these beliefs will lurk in the background, influencing our reflection. Peirce urges us not to ‘pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts’ (EP1: 29).
It is necessary to separate some different threads in this argument. First, there is something unnatural about the Cartesian strategy. Inquiries normally occur within a context: we address particular questions or problems, relying on background certainties that it does not occur to us to doubt. The Cartesian suggestion that we should begin by trying to doubt everything appears to be an attempt to step outside of this. Second, the Cartesian strategy requires us to reflect upon each of our beliefs and ask what reason we have for holding it; skeptical challenges are then used to question the adequacy of these reasons. This is again at odds with normal practice. Many of our familiar certainties are such that we cannot offer any concrete or convincing reason for believing them. We tend to treat our established beliefs as innocent until ‘proven guilty’. The mere lack of a conclusive reason for belief does not itself provide a reason for doubt.
Descartes, of course, might have conceded this, but responded that his approach is required because once we allow error to enter our belief-corpus we may be unable to escape from its damaging effects. His was a time of methodological ferment, and he appreciated how many false beliefs he himself had acquired from his teachers. The pragmatist response here is to question some of Descartes’ assumptions about how we reason and form beliefs. First, his strategy is individualist and ‘to make single individuals absolute judges of truth is most pernicious’. Peirce noted that the natural sciences which were so conspicuously successful in Descartes’ day took a very different approach:
In sciences in which men come to agreement, when a theory has been broached, it is considered to be on probation until this agreement has been reached. After it is reached, the question of certainty becomes an idle one, because there is no one left who doubts it. We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the community of philosophers. (EP1: 29)
Peirce also questions Descartes’ understanding of reasoning in holding that we may rely on ‘a single thread of inference’ that is no stronger than its weakest link:
Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to…trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected. (EP1: 29)
Where the Cartesian holds that unless we begin from premises of which we can be absolutely certain we may never reach the truth, the pragmatist emphasises that, when we do go wrong, further discussion and investigation can identify and eliminate errors, which is our best hope for escaping their damaging effects. The possibility of error provides us with reason to be ‘contrite fallibilists’, not skeptics. The focus of epistemological inquiry should not be on showing how we can possess absolute certainty, but on how we can develop self-correcting methods of inquiry that make fallible progress.
William James makes similar observations. In ‘The Will to Believe’, he reminds us that we have two cognitive desiderata: to obtain truth, and avoid error (James 1897: 30). The harder we try to avoid error, the more likely we will miss out on truth; and vice versa. The method of doubt may make sense in special cases where enormous weight is given to avoiding error, but only there. Once we recognize our practical and forced decision about the relative importance of two goods, the Cartesian strategy no longer appears the only rational one. Later, Dewey in The Quest for Certainty similarly urged that a focus on eliminating all error from our beliefs is both doomed and destructive, with the added twist of a social diagnosis of the quest itself: the uncertainty, pain and fear of much early human life led to the erection of ‘priestly’ forms of knowledge which, in promising to intercede with Heavenly stability, sundered a priori theory from a posteriori practice, thereby enabling the knowing classes to insulate themselves from a more humble empiricism. The ‘quest’ continues, however, in many debates in contemporary mainstream epistemology.
4.2 Inquiry: The Process of Knowledge-Seeking
Where much analytic epistemology centers around the concept of knowledge, considered as an idealized end-point of human thought, pragmatist epistemology examines inquiry, considered as the process of knowledge-seeking, and how we can improve it. Pragmatist epistemologists often explore how we can inquire in a self-controlled and fruitful way, offering rich accounts of capacities or virtues that we must possess in order to inquire well, and rules or guiding principles that we should adopt. A canonical account is Peirce’s classic early paper “The Fixation of Belief”. Here Peirce states that inquiry is a struggle to replace doubt with ‘settled belief’, and that the only method of inquiry that can make sense of the fact that at least some of us are disturbed by inconsistent beliefs, and will subsequently reflect upon which methods of fixing belief are correct is the Method of Science, which draws on the Pragmatic Maxim described above. This contrasts with three other methods of fixing belief: i) refusing to consider evidence contrary to one’s favored beliefs (the Method of Tenacity), ii) accepting an institution’s dictates (the Method of Authority), iii) developing the most rationally coherent or elegant-seeming belief-set (the A Priori Method). Notable recent reinterpretations and defenses of Peircean epistemology include (Haack 1993 and Cooke 2007). (See also Skagestad 1981.)
Dewey’s conception of inquiry, found in his Logic: the Theory of Inquiry is also rich, and arguably more radical than Peirce’s in its underlying ontology (ED2: 169–79). Dewey sees inquiry as beginning with a problem; it aims for ‘the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole’ (ED2: 171). As John E. Smith notes, where ‘Peirce aimed at “fixing” belief, Dewey aimed at “fixing” the situation’ (1978: 98). It is important to note that here the situation is objectively indeterminate, and is itself transformed by inquiry. The ‘pattern of inquiry’ that Dewey describes is common to the information-gathering of animals, practical problem solving, common sense investigations of our surroundings and scientific inquiry. He recognizes that when we face a problem, our first task is to understand it through describing its elements and identifying their relations. Identifying a concrete question that we need to answer is a sign that we are making progress. And the ‘logical forms’ we use in the course of inquiry are understood as ideal instruments, tools that help us to transform things and resolve our problem. The continuities Dewey finds between different kinds of inquiry are evidence of his naturalism and his recognition that forms of scientific investigation can guide us in all areas of our lives. All the pragmatists, but most of all Dewey, challenge the sharp dichotomy that other philosophers draw between theoretical beliefs and practical deliberations. In some sense, all inquiry is practical, concerned with transforming and evaluating the features of situations in which we find ourselves. Shared inquiry directed at resolving social and political problems or indeterminacies was also central to Dewey’s conception of the good life and, relatedly, the democratic ideal: more on this below.
4.3 Pragmatist Conceptions of Experience: Beyond “The Given”
The Pragmatic Maxim suggests that pragmatism is a form of empiricism. Yet most pragmatists adopted accounts of experience and perception radically different from the views of mainstream empiricists from John Locke and David Hume to Rudolf Carnap, as well as the ‘intuition’ posited by Kant. These empiricists interpreted experience as what is sometimes called ‘the given’: we are passive recipients of determinate and singular ‘sense-data’. Experience provides raw material for knowledge, but does not itself have content informed by concepts, practical needs, or anything else non-sensory, and our only contact with the external world is through receiving such experiences. This way of thinking about experience can easily lead to skepticism about the so-called ‘external world’.
In different ways, Peirce, James, and Dewey all argued that experience is far richer than this, and earlier philosophers were mistaken to claim that we could identify ‘experiences’ as antecedents to, or separable constituents of, cognition. We can begin with James’ radical empiricism, of which he said that ‘the establishment of the pragmatist theory of truth [was] a step of first-rate importance in making [it] prevail’ (1909: 6f). Its fundamental ‘postulate’ is that ‘the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience’. But this requires that experience be newly understood. He announced that ‘the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience as the things themselves.’ Relatedly, ‘the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are themselves parts of experience. The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure.’
Peirce too emphasizes the continuous character of perceptual experience, adding that we directly perceive external things as ‘other’ to ourselves, that we can perceive necessary connections between objects and events, and that experience contains elements of generality (citing a picture of a connected series of circles which can be seen as a stone wall, in the manner of Wittgenstein’s famous duck-rabbit diagram). Around 1902–3, Peirce developed a complex and original theory of perception which combines a percept which is entirely non-cognitive, with a perceptual judgement which is structured propositionally and lies in the space of reasons. In this way he seeks to capture how perception is both immediately felt and truth-evaluable. In contrast to standard British Empiricist analyses of the relation between impressions and ideas, Peirce does not claim that a perceptual judgment copies its percept. Rather, it indexes it, just as a weather-cock indicates the direction of the wind. Although percept and perceptual judgment are intrinsically dissimilar, over time certain habits of association between the two are reinforced, leading them to (literally) grow in our minds and link with other habits. This enables percepts and perceptual judgments to mutually inform and correct one another, to the point where every perception is fallible and subject to reinterpretation in the light of future perceptions (Rosenthal 1994; Wilson 2016). The end result
