Interview with Shaun Gallagher

2004

Leigland notes that the relation between radical behaviorism and pragmatism is complex and cites Richard Rorty as an exemplar of pragmatism. But Rorty promotes a bizarre version of pragmatism, not to be associated with radical behaviorism or with pragmatism as Peirce conceived it. Rorty is a monist and a brilliant writer, but he dismisses religion and science in favor of a humanistic ontology that is based on "imaginative literature." Skinner would never agree with such a position, and those who would understand pragmatism are advised to read Peirce, not Rorty.

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2007

American pragmatism, especially in the forms expounded by Dewey and James, has always displayed a respect for the difference personal attitude makes in the quality of our experience. Recently, John Lachs has discussed this characteristic of pragmatism in contrast to the attitudes resident in the tradition of stoic philosophy (2005). He rightly notes that the pragmatism of Dewey (as well as that of James) places importance on certain attitudes or, as I would label them, "orientations," and that the stoic tradition can usefully be seen as a counterweight to pragmatism's emphasized attitude. At issue seems to be the clash between an (at times) overly optimistic hope of the pragmatist with the equally overdone surrender of the stoic. 1 Lachs concludes that a useful permutation can be formed, labeled "stoic pragmatism." Such a combined form would embody a certain humility and realistic hope for the future. I think that Lachs does an admirable job in analyzing both of these traditions and in constructing one way of rebuilding an improved notion of pragmatism. What I fi nd interesting is the room his account opens up for discussion on what I believe is a crucial component to Deweyan pragmatism-that of the orientation of the subject toward experience or activity at some general level. According to Lachs' argument, the orientation of surrender that the stoic putatively has leaves out progress that can be made in light of objective suffering, and the one-sided drive of the pragmatist to reform her environment ignores certain limits to activity and enables grand disappointments. Is the only way to address this issue by forging a "stoic pragmatism"? Or are there resources within pragmatism that offer an interesting way to address such worries? I will argue that what Lachs fi nds so dismaying about the standard form of pragmatism, namely, what he identifi es as the hubristic "commitment to bring life under intelligent and effective control" (99), is not something that must lead to dire consequences for the quality of experience. I will argue that the problem Lachs aptly identifi es-an orientation that ignores limits and sets up great disappointment-stems less from inherent limits to "growth" (used here as a pragmatic term of art), and more from a problem that Dewey hints at-that of the overemphasis on non-present states to the detriment of the present situation.

Philosophical Studies, 2019

Shaun Gallagher applies enactivist thinking to a staggeringly wide range of topics in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, even venturing into the realms of biological anthropology. One prominent point Gallagher makes that the holistic approach of enactivism makes it less amenable to scientific investigation than the cognitivist framework it seeks to replace, and should be seen as a ''philosophy of nature'' rather than a scientific research program. Gallagher also gives truth to the saying that ''if you want new ideas, read old books'', showing how the insights of the American pragmatists, particularly Dewey and Mead, offer a variety of resources and tools that can be brought to bear on modern day enactivism. Here, I suggest that the adoption of enactivist thinking would undermine the assumptions of certain scientific positions, requiring their abandonment, rather than simply making it more difficult to conduct research within an enactivist framework. I then discuss how Mead's work has been used previously as a ''pragmatist intervention'' to help resolve problems in a related 4E endeavour, Gibson's ecological psychology, and make a case for the inclusion of radical behaviorism as another pragmatist resource for 4E cognition. I conclude with a plea for further enactivist intervention in studies of comparative cognition.

After having distinguished several uses of the concept "pragmatism" in contemporary cognitive science, the paper questions the legitimacy of these uses, by focusing on the understanding of action that is associated with them. It is then argued that a pragmatic turn in cognitive science is distinct from a pragmatist understanding of cognition, at least if we consider Dewey's adverbialist theory of cognitive phenomena.

In BBehavioral Pragmatism: No Place for Reality and Truth,^Barnes-Holmes proposed a behavior-analytic version of philosophical pragmatism he called behavioral pragmatism (BP), a perspective which challenges two bedrock tenets of Western culture: (1) metaphysical realism, the view that an external, physical reality exists which is mind-independent and (2) the correspondence theory of truth (CTT), a theory which maintains that true statements are those which correspond to mindindependent reality. Many (perhaps most) behavior analysts accept both of these tenets (though they typically name and describe these tenets using different terms). By contrast, in lieu of the first, BP offers, as a replacement tenet, nonrealism, in place of the second, the pragmatic truth criterion. The account of reality and truth of BP has gained increasing prominence within behavior analysis because of its inclusion within relational frame theory, a perspective with a growing number of adherents. In this paper, I first argue that the realism/pragmatism dispute needs to be resolved because it threatens the coherence of radical behaviorism as a philosophy of science. Next, I present a detailed account of the differing conceptions of reality and truth as articulated within: (1) metaphysical realism, (2) behavioral pragmatism, and (3) Richard Rorty's version of pragmatism (Rortian pragmatism). Finally, using the insights of Rortian pragmatism (RP), I offer three proposals for modifying the core tenets of behavioral pragmatism. If adopted, these proposals would help narrow the realism/pragmatism divide, thereby reducing the threat to radical behaviorism's coherence.

2017

Although this introduction has been a joint effort, Rosa Calcaterra wrote §1 while Roberta Dreon wrote §2.

Peircean pragmatism, by the familiar picture of it, is a logical doctrine or maxim based on the contention that beliefs have the nature of habits: they are rules or dispositions of conduct under some conceivable circumstances. Any genuine belief or change of belief would influence one's conduct under certain conditions. If there is no change in conduct that would ensue from the acceptance of a proposition, the proposition is devoid of content or meaningless (in the relevant sense). And if two propositions, despite differences in their verbal manifestations, would have the same influence on our conduct, they are the same proposition.

Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 2013

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Hans Radder, Vincent Colapietro and Joseph Pitt have all raised interesting comments and concerns regarding the volume on pragmatist ethics. In our reply we will unfortunately not be able to address all of them equally extensive, but we will single out what we perceive to be the running threads through the comments.