Pragmatism: a Guide for the Perplexed

the pluralist, 2012

The uniquely pragmatic aspect of Charles Peirce's philosophy is a sentiment that competing theories ought to be referred to a single norm of inquiry and that such a norm will be located only in the contributions these theories make to repairing errant practices in the communities they serve. This pragmatic sentiment informs Peirce's efforts to integrate the two competing tendencies in his own theoretical work: an historicist tendency, exemplified in his critique of Cartesianism, and a foundationalist tendency, exemplified in his transcendentalism. Unmediated by a pragmatic sentiment, these two tendencies divide contemporary pragmatic scholarship into opposing schools of deconstructive historicists and semiotic foundationalists. A suggested remedy is to reread Peirce's later pragmaticism, pragmatically, as a dialoque between two complementary modes of philosophic inquiry: hermeneutics and logic.

2016

Abstract: This paper argues that the tendency in contemporary discussion to overlook the logical roots of pragmatistic philosophy is a symptom of taking language as a universal medium of expression. My thesis is that the two presuppositions concerning the role of logic in pragmatism, universalism and its denial of calculism, delineate two kinds of pragmatisms, pragmatism and pragmaticism. I conclude that the latter, which was Peirce’s original formulation, is methodologically the more tolerant of the two and hence embraces pluralism over and above pragmatism.

Cambridge Pragmatism From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein by Cheryl Misak, 2016, Oxford University Press, 321 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-871207-7, £ 30.00.

Philosophy Journal, 2019

John E. Smith argued that there were almost as many pragmatisms as pragmatists. Almost all pragmatists criticized abstractive and reductive reasoning in the modern academy, but most entertained different visions of how and to what end academic reasoning should be repaired. Smith's vision was shaped by his strong preference for the classical pragmatisms of Peirce, Dewey, James and also Royce, whose differences contributed to the inner dynamism of Smith's pragmatism. Smith was far less impressed with the virtues of neopragmatists who rejected key tenets of the classical vision. My goal in this brief essay is to outline a partial list of these tenets, drawing on Smith's writings and those of a sample of recent pragmatists who share his commitment to the classical vision, such as Richard Bernstein, John Deely, and Doug Anderson. I restate the tenets in the terms of a pragmatic semiotic, which applies Peirce's semeiotic to classical doctrines of habit-change and reparative inquiry. I conclude by adopting the tenets as signs of pragmatism's elemental beliefs. Consistent with Peirce's account of "original" beliefs, these are not discrete claims about the world or well-defined rational principles but a loose and dynamic network of habits. The habits grow, change, inter-mix or self-segregate through the run of intellectual and social history. They can be distinguished but only imprecisely, described but only vaguely, encountered per se only through their effects. Among these effects are sub-communities of pragmatic inquiry, sub-networks of habits, and existentially marked series of social actions and streams of written and spoken words: including context-specific, determinate claims about the world, about other claims, and about habits of inquiry like pragmatism. Among these claims are my way of stating the tenets and my arguments about the history of pragmatism. Such claims are determinate, but the habits and tenets of pragmatism are not.

2008

This paper argues that the tendency in contemporary discussion to neglect the logical roots of pragmatistic philosophy is a symptom of taking language as a universal medium of expression. My thesis is that the two presuppositions concerning the role of logic in pragmatism, universalism and its denial of calculism, delineate two kinds of pragmatisms, pragmatism and pragmaticism. I conclude that the latter, which was Peirce's original formulation, is methodologically the more tolerant of the two and hence embraces pluralism over and above pragmatism.

2017

Peirce saw the universe as an evolving generality. If the universe is observed to be an evolving generality, then semeiosis and thirdness (as part of this universe) are also evolutionary.

Newsletter of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, 2007