PRAGMATISM, THEN
AND NOW
Susan Haack
-- an interview with Sun Yong
SY: Let me begin by asking you to clarify
the history of pragmatism. Thomas English
Hill tells us that Peirce declined the honor
of being the founder of pragmatism; that
he did not, like James, apply the PM to the
concept of truth; & that many of his major
contributions are irrelevant to, even
incompatible with pragmatism.
but your book, Meaning and Action
suggests a very different
picture – can you explain
your view, please?
SH: the classical pragmatist tradition

was a late C19th movement in American
philosophy

growing out of discussions between Peirce
and James at the Metaphysical Club in
Cambridge, MA, in the early 1870s
… a young C. S.
Peirce
… & a young
William James
both Peirce and James

stressed that pragmatism was less a body
of doctrine than a method

-- the method expressed in the Pragmatic
Maxim of meaning
this core idea

was first expressed in CSP’s ”How to Make
Our Ideas Clear” (1878)

but the word “pragmatism” (in its
philosophical sense) didn’t appear in print
until James used it, in 1898

-- acknowledging that the idea was CSP’s
why didn’t Peirce use the word?

at the time he wrote, its meaning in
ordinary language was “officious
meddlesomeness”

which was SO off-putting that (Peirce later
wrote) he didn’t dare use it in print!
so Hill’s account needs correction

so far from “declining the honor,” in 1903
Peirce took his bows as the founder of
pragmatism

& even when, in 1906, he introduced the
word “pragmaticism” for his version, he
says it is NOT to dissociate himself from
James, Dewey -- or even Schiller
moreover

both Peirce and James saw the PM as the
core idea of pragmatism

to be used both negatively -- to dissolve
meaningless metaphysical disputes

& positively -- to explain hard concepts
&

both apply the PM to the concept of truth

James in Pragmatism (1907) and The
Meaning of Truth (1909)

but Peirce much earlier, in “How to Make
our Ideas Clear”
moreover

Hill compounds his mistakes by identifying
“pragmatism” with a bunch of doctrines
held by James, Dewey, or C. I. Lewis

& then saying that Peirce’s views were
“anti-pragmatist” where they diverged
from these
it would be much better to say

that Peirce gradually developed a more
realist, and James a more nominalist,
version of pragmatism

& that what the classical pragmatists had
in common was a congeries of
philosophical attitudes:

distaste for dogmatism & for false
dichotomies

a naturalistic disinclination to philosophize
purely a priori

looking to social aspects of language and
inquiry, & to the future rather than the
past

taking evolution seriously
the realist
pragmaticist
the nominalist
pragmatist
attitudes shared not only by
Peirce and James, but also by …
Dewey
Mead
& Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., the
great pragmatist
legal theorist
Papini’s “hotel” metaphor is helpful
-- within
pragmatism,
people worked
on different
topics, from
different angles –
but all came in
through the
same lobby
SY: Pragmatism says that truth is essentially
verification, and describes the true as “the
expedient in our way of thinking.” But surely
the fact that a belief is expedient is not
sufficient for its being true; and doesn’t
James’s account of truth (as Hill suggests)
lead to subjectivism and even solipsism?
SH: there are differences between

Peirce’s account of truth as the Final
Opinion that would be agreed were inquiry
to continue indefinitely

James’s more nominalist account of truth
as verifiability, and

Dewey’s emphasis on the “tried and true”
but all three agree this far

it is not false, exactly, to say that truth is
correspondence to the facts

but this gives us no real insight, i.e., no
pragmatic insight, into what difference it
makes whether a belief is true

-- a lack each tries, in his way, to fill
Peirce: 3 grades of clarity

ability to use a term

ability to give a verbal (“nominal”)
definition

grasp of the experiential consequences of
the concept’s applying – hence his df. of
truth
of course, this isn’t unproblematic

problem of Buried Secrets

to which P’s reply isn’t fully satisfying – he
can’t say ALL questions would eventually
get settled, so has to say that those that
wouldn’t, lack pragmatic meaning

so “pragmatic meaning” isn’t meaning (?)
but obviously

Peirce’s account of truth is in no way
subjectivist or solipsistic

he can, and does, say that “Truth is SO,
whether you or I or anyone believes it is
so or not”
Hill’s problem probably arises

from a common misinterpretation of
James’s account of truth

James identified “Abstract Truth” with
verifiability, but

“concrete truths” with propositions that
are verified, which he says “become” true,
are “made” true
true, James writes that

“the true is only the expedient in the way
of our thinking”

BUT he adds …

“expedient in the long run and on the
whole, of course … . Experience has ways
of boiling over, and making us correct our
present formulas”
… which reveals
that he is NOT
simply identifying
truth with
expediency, and
that his account is
NOT subjectivist
Dewey

BOTH tells us that Peirce’s is “the best
definition of truth”

AND yet, like James, tends to stress
particular truths over truth-as-such, &
verification over potential verifiability
in 1911 lectures

he presents his pragmatist conception of
truth as intermediate between “realist”
[correspondence] and “idealist”
[coherence] accounts

& writes of a mutual “co-respondence” of
proposition and reality – not subjectivist,
but, arguably, less than fully realist (?)
SY: Dewey was the pragmatist with the
greatest influence in the outside world. Basic
to everything he writes about knowledge is
that we should think of knowing in the
context of inquiry – a kind of contextualism.
But his ontological position seems to deny
the full objectivity and independence of the
world. How should we think of Dewey’s
epistemology as relating to his ontological
views?
SH: Dewey’s Quest for Certainty

gives a historical diagnosis of the
traditional desire for certainty, from Plato
through Descartes to his own day

suggests that this “Spectator Theory” is at
odds with the true character of modern
scientific inquiry
he writes that
“[S]pecial theories of knowledge differ
enormously from each other. Their quarrels
fill the air. The din thus created makes us
deaf to the way they all say one thing in
common. They all hold that the operation
of inquiry excludes any element of practical
activity.”
he seems to mean

in part, that we learn about the world by
active observation and experimentation,
not just passive experience

but also, in part, that by knowing the
world we change it

& perhaps, that we change it substantively
if so

my reaction would be like Peirce’s
“There are certain mummified pendants who
have never waked to the fact that the act
of knowing an object changes it. They are
curious specimens of humanity, and … I
am one of them.”
but I wouldn’t put this in terms of the
objectivity of the “material world”

because, besides real physical (Peirce,
“external”) things, phenomena, and
events

there are also mental (Peirce, “internal”)
things, phenomena, and events that are
real
SY: How do you see Quine as fitting into the
evolving history of American pragmatism?
Could you comment specifically on Quine’s
work in logic, and his views about truth,
ontological commitment, and analyticity?
SH: sometimes it is thought that
Quine is the key link
between classical
pragmatism &
contemporary
pragmatism
I disagree

when Quine describes himself as
espousing “a more thorough-going
pragmatism”

his contrast is with Carnap’s view of
“external” ontological questions
&

the commitment to pragmatism, in our
sense, is doubtful

Q seems to have the ordinary-language (&
Carnap’s) meaning of “pragmatic” in mind

& don’t forget that “The Pragmatists’ Place
… ” became “Five Milestones …”
in logic

Quine reviewed vols 2, 3, & 4 of Peirce’s
Collected Papers when they appeared

but, as his reviews reveal, he didn’t really
appreciate the significance of Peirce’s
logical innovations
Putnam commented that

Quine’s understanding of the history of
logic would have been much richer had he
grasped, e.g., that

while Russell learned quantification theory
from Frege

Whitehead learned it from Peirce
& later Quine apparently came to agree

writing in 1985 that Peirce arrived at
quantification theory a few years after,
and independently of, Frege

& in “Peirce’s logic” (1989) giving CSP
more credit for his influence on the history
of logic
he also

acknowledges Peirce as having
“anticipated the Scheffer stroke”

(though really he should have said that
Scheffer rediscovered the Peirce stroke!)

& that CSP saw the correspondence truthfunctions and electric circuits
however

there is really nothing in Quine’s logical
work that is distinctively pragmatist

nor, presumably, would he have much
approved of Peirce’s forays into 3-valued
and intensional logic
on truth

Quine explicitly rejects Peirce’s definition

indeed, it was his dismissive remarks in
chapter 1 of Word and Object that led me
to start reading CSP’s Collected Papers
moreover

Quine’s own understanding of truth is far
from clear, and not in any obvious way
pragmatist

he seems to endorse Tarski’s theory

but then runs this together with
“disquotationalism,” which Tarski would
have emphatically rejected
on ontology

we can understand Quine’s views via two
slogans
1)
“to be is to be the value of a variable” –
criterion of ontological commitment
2)
“no entity without identity” -- in effect,
extensionalism
Q’s criterion of ontological commitment

reflects Q’s insistence that there is only
one sense of “exists”

& means that, if he acknowledged
properties, propositions, etc., it would
have to be as abstract particulars
whereas CSP

distinguishes existence (of particulars)
and reality (of generals)

& distinguishes his own scholastic realism,
which says that there are real generals

from “Nominalistic Platonism,” which says
that universals exist
&

moreover, CSP does not share Q’s
extensionalism

(in his later philosophy) he acknowledges
real, unactualized possibilities

& developed modal logic (probably C. I.
Lewis’s inspiration)
on analytic/synthetic

Q’s position has some affinity with
pragmatists’ rejection of “untenable
dualisms” (& CSP’s critique of Kant’s
“explicatory” propositions)

but much less affinity than Morton White’s
earlier rejection of the a/s distinction,
which is directly influenced by Dewey
SY: Do you think that Richard Rorty’s
“Vulgar Pragmatism” (as you call it) is a
consequence of difficulties within
pragmatism itself, that there is some lack in
pragmatism that was bound to lead to
radical postmodernist conclusions? Or do
you think RR’s conclusions stem from the
ways James’s and Dewey’s versions of
pragmatism differ from Peirce’s?
SH: Neither of
the above!
Vulgar Pragmatism

is Rorty’s own invention, falsely advertised
as “pragmatism”

perhaps because, as the only home-grown
American philosophy, its name has great
resonance, & is good PR
for example

RR’s account of truth as here-&-now
agreement strips CSP’s account of
everything that ties it to the world

RR’s response to the flaws of spectator
theories of knowledge is to abandon
epistemology, not, like Dewey, to
reconstruct it
&

classical pragmatists, unlike positivists,
wanted reformed metaphysics

e.g. agapism, tychism (CSP); the
pluralistic universe (WJ); experience and
nature (JD)
while

Rorty wants to abandon metaphysics

eschew any notion of objective truth

& repudiate the idea that there is a “way
the world is”
which
reminds me
to tell you a
story …
& on philosophy and democracy

the appearance of agreement with JD is
misleading

for JD knows that to improve society we
must know how it is now, & what changes
would produce a desired result

impossible if there is no “way the world is”
SY: What is your assessment of the
prospects for the future of pragmatism?
Is traditional pragmatism nearing
extinction? Or can we rescue
pragmatism from its seemingly
inevitable demise? What do you see as
the future of pragmatism in the U.S.?
first, the present situation

continuing scholarship on the pragmatist
tradition

working philosophers in the pragmatist
tradition – inc. Putnam, Rescher, me!

& many outside philosophy (e.g., in
economics) influenced by pragmatism

RR’s influence seems to have declined
since his death

but neo-analytic philosophy is now trying
to domesticate social epistemology,
feminist epistemology, etc., -- and
pragmatism

Brandom, Blackburn, etc.
I am reluctant to make predictions

there are just too many unforeseeable
contingencies

e.g., when I began, there was no internet
– who could have foreseen how much
influence Brian Leiter’s website would
have on our profession?
but what I hope

because the pragmatist tradition, in all its
variety, was so fruitful, and in some ways
far ahead of our time as well as its own

is that there will continue to be those who
learn from it and develop its insights in
new and fruitful ways (including marrying
with other traditions)
dakujem za vasu
pozornost!
thank you for
your attention!