Time for American philosophy, which is something other and more than philosophy produced by Americans or in America… “classic” American philosophy, we sometimes call it. These are my people. They’re not saps, just SAAPs.
American philosophy generally, as previously noted, has been very friendly to the evolutionary hypothesis, in many ways a direct and favorable response to it. Pragmatism is America’s indigenous philosophy – unless we’re talking about the thought of its indigenous peoples, of course.
Charles Sanders Peirce (our text misspells his name, and you’ll mispronounce it if you don’t rhyme it with “purse”) was the eccentric and bumptious genius William James tried to credit with the original idea of Pragmatism as a distinctively American approach to philosophy. Peirce shunned the praise, though, and said he’d rename his position “pragmaticism” to keep it safe from kidnappers. What an ingrate.
Peirce said: “The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I shall term this struggle inquiry… When doubt ceases, mental action on the subject comes to an end; and, if it did go on, it would be without a purpose.” (Fixation of Belief)
That’s very different from Descartes’ method of hyperbolic doubt, which he despised. “Inquiry” as he defines it proceeds by steps, is self-correcting and non-dogmatic (without “tenacity”), and does not rely on unquestioned authorities. It’s tools are experience and honest observation. “Do not block the road of inquiry,” he challenged, lest you compromise the integrity of your belief.
Peirce was also big on something he called “evolutionary love,” but despite its seeming squishiness he really was pretty hard-nosed, in a positivistic sort of way. Our cartoonish text puts a few words in CSP’s mouth, depicting him as a philosophic gunslinger out of the wild west (he was actually the son of a Harvard mathematician) but they’re pretty much in the spirit of his thought, and of his particular variety of pragmat(ici)ism:
If words mean anything, we should be able to test them… if they relate to qualities about which we can discover no practical effects, then they are meaningless.
It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence… almost every proposition of ontological metaphysics is either meaningless gibberish or else downright absurd…
Excepting “evolutionary love” maybe, Chuck? But CSP’s greatest love was for truth pursued scientifically, for
to avoid looking into the support of any belief from a fear that it may turn out rotten is quite as immoral as it is disadvantageous. The person who confesses that there is such a thing as truth, which is distinguished from falsehood simply by this, that if acted on it should, on full consideration, carry us to the point we aim at and not astray, and then, though convinced of this, dares not know the truth and seeks to avoid it, is in a sorry state of mind indeed.
Peirce’s friend and frequent rescuer William James did not think there was any insuperable incompatibility between religion and the new Darwinian science. But for himself, he said,
I believe myself to be (probably) permanently incapable of believing the Christian scheme of vicarious salvation, and wedded to a more continuously evolutionary mode of thought.
But James was more receptive than Peirce to the possibility, at least, that one person’s “meaningless gibberish” might be another’s raison d’etre. “Concrete consequences” for him were tied more to persons and their experience, than to the meanings of their words. Others might find the “Christian scheme of vicarious salvation” more believable, i.e., more actionable and more productive of positive consequences.
Here’s a terrific James site… and a pretty good book about his philosophy… and Richardson’s bio… and some of his letters (II…III…more & more), which are what drew me to his thought in the first place. And here’s Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club, of which James and Peirce were real members (along with Oliver Wendell Holmes and others) and John Dewey an honorary/retrospective one.
For lots more about WJ, just enter his name in this site’s search box (and in Delight Springs‘).
John Dewey called his version of pragmatism “instrumentalism,” and set up an experimental school to try it out. He wrote The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy (and other essays on this theme).
If all organic adaptations are due simply to constant variation and the elimination of those variations which are harmful in the struggle for existence that is brought about by excessive reproduction, there is no call for a prior intelligent causal force to plan and preordain them…
Philosophy forswears inquiry after absolute origins and absolute finalities in order to explore specific values and the specific conditions that generate them…
a philosophy that humbles its pretensions to the work of projecting hypotheses for the education and conduct of mind, individual and social, is thereby subjected to test by the way in which the ideas it propounds work out in practice. In having modesty forced upon it, philosophy also acquires responsibility.
What I like most about Dewey is his insistence that philosophers ought to devote themselves less to the intellectual problems posed by other philosophers and more to the practical problems of ordinary men and women.
The very best, of course, do both. A.C. Grayling is trying… but he’s no John Dewey.
Harvard’s turn-of-the-century philosophy department was a hotbed of pragmatism, but also included the metaphysical idealist Josiah Royce (who was James’s office-mate and next-door neighbor in Cambridge, MA) and the Spanish ex-pat George (“those who do not remember the past”) Santayana. Lately, Richard Rorty (of Princeton and UVA, among other places) wore the mantle of neo-pragmatist.
Another recent Harvard philosopher, John Rawls, wrote A Theory of Justice. His colleague Bob Nozick came up with the Experience Machine. Their colleague W.V.O. Quine (who I met in one of my professors’ kitchen in 1978, btw) said experience is a “web of belief.”
James’s favorite contemporary philosopher Henri Bergson, a “vitalist,” said there’s a mysterious “life force” behind everything…
But that’s enough for now. “Whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence.” So we’ll get to Wittgenstein et al next class.
Up@dawn 