Abstract
The story of the rise and fall of pragmatism is sometimes called the eclipse narrative. This paper addresses a specific version of this narrative that the logical empiricists arrived in North America in the 1930s and within 30 years had supplanted the pragmatists as the dominant philosophy there. Philosophers such as Alan Richardson and Cheryl Misak have challenged this view by emphasizing the similarities between these two movements. While both seem to admit that there is a distinction between the two when it comes to values, I point out that the issue of values feeds into all aspects of pragmatist thinking, and so despite what seems on the surface to be agreements between the two movements, they were still quite different in all areas of their thinking. I challenge the degree of similarities by arguing that there were some sharp distinctions between the two movements, with the most important being the fact-value distinction and its impact on how each conceived of the term “practical.” I close by addressing how these distinctions should affect how we conceive of the eclipse narrative.
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Notes
See Richardson’s (2003) account on page 4. Also, see James A. Good’s (2003) “The ‘Eclipse’ of Pragmatism: A Reply to John Capps” which also argues against the eclipse view using Neil Gross’ (2002) “Case Studies in the Sociology of Pragmatism” to challenge the assumption of pragmatist dominance and fall.
John Capps argued at the 2015 meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy for a partial eclipse narrative, suggesting both an uptake of pragmatist ideals in analytic philosophy and an eclipse of pragmatism’s social, political, and ethical theory. I won’t address his argument at length, but as my paper will demonstrate, I don’t think we can separate pragmatism’s social and ethical elements from its epistemic ones; an eclipse in one area represents an eclipse in the other.
What will become clear is that for the pragmatists it was most metaphysics, but not all.
Due to space limitations, I won’t be addressing the analytic-synthetic issue with regards to the positions of Dewey, Lewis, Carnap, and Quine.
More on this later.
Richardson mentions that Quine also did not share with pragmatism a place for value. Misak notes the same point, and casts doubt as to whether he can be called a pragmatist.
I have reservations about this interpretation of events (which I will address later).
Misak’s description of Lewis’s fate (Misak, 175).
Misak notes Lewis’s insistence that the inclusion of values importantly differentiated pragmatism from logical empiricism.
In fact, pragmatists often explicated what being a pragmatist meant (with variation) from the earliest articles of Peirce and James to later articles like Dewey’s “The Development of American Pragmatism” (1925b), and Lewis’s “Pragmatism and Current Thought” (1930) and “Logical Positivism and Pragmatism” (1941).
James preferred the term “humanism.” Dewey called his own philosophy “instrumentalism,” as a more specific version of pragmatism (Dewey 1916, 331). In the 1920s Dewey referred more often to the term, yet it is clear he is still uncomfortable with the mythology that the term carries and the association of it with American industrial attitudes (1925b).
Lewis also picks up on this difference stating, “The pragmatic emphasis upon relevance to some active intent is largely or wholly omitted in logical positivism” (Lewis [1941]1970, 94).
There may be several other logical empiricists that agree with and disagree with the pragmatists in different ways and on different issues (see Frank 1950). In keeping my focus on Richardson and Misak, here I am being selective.
Rejecting the problem of knowledge as a pseudo-problem is a position of both the pragmatists and Carnap and Neurath. Both argued that we should think about experience differently, although they differed as to how. Further analysis of disagreements over physicalism can be found in Sect. 3.
Not to be confused with the notion that a protocol statement does not refer to a person as Neurath requires.
I am being deliberately broad here, ignoring both earlier Carnap and the fact that he and Neurath disagreed on what a physical language should look like. My point is to draw attention to the general, yet stark differences that they had with the pragmatists. I will discuss physicalism and the protocol sentence debate later.
As Reisch points out, the pragmatists were not the only ones to make this complaint (Reisch, 133).
“Sense data differs from individual to individual. If they are recognized to be natural events, this variation is no more significant than any change depending upon variation of generating conditions… organisms, because of different positions…introduce differences in the phenomena which they respectively have a share… But make the sense qualities thus produced not natural events… but modes of knowing, and every such deviation marks a departure from true knowing…the deviations are so marked as to lead to the conclusion… that they constitute a world of private existences” (Dewey [1915]1998b, 260).
I’m speaking here of issues about experience and reality, not about the logical empiricists concerns regarding having intersubjectively verifiable protocol sentences.
Not to suggest that the logical empiricists were not politically engaged. The scientific world conception and the unity of science movement aimed at public engagement. The difference between them and the pragmatists lies in how each understood normativity (Jewett, 105).
There are important details that I can’t go into here. Jewett’s paper articulates the cultural differences between the European logical empiricist’s “paternalist” approach which favored expert led cultural change in the direction of socialism over the Americans who preferred more democratic, publicly engaged approaches. The less culturally engaged analytic approach logical empiricists would later give way to a philosophy of science that was value-neutral and apolitical (Jewett 2011).
Some of these attitudes are shared by Frank.
Without this being merely personal or psychological.
Recall that for the pragmatist, value is a part of experience and thus is inherently empirical.
Carnap argues for the distinction between beliefs and attitudes with the former being cognitive while the latter is non-cognitive. This is contrary to the pragmatists position that a belief is a certain disposition to act, but especially for Dewey whose logic holds that propositions are affirmed and judgments are asserted. Both affirmation and assertion represent certain active commitments within inquiry (he excludes “belief” from his logic altogether). This suggests further that differences in their respective logics make agreement on the matter of valuation very difficult. A thorough comparison of Carnap’s and Dewey’s approach to logic would be fruitful, but is outside of the scope of this paper.
She notes, “Carnap is very much in step with this pragmatist theme” (Misak 174).
Notice that the matter is regarding choices about frameworks, not whether the frameworks themselves are correct.
Dewey notes that social scientists have misconstrued how natural science works in the first place.
In fact, Dewey’s logic described universal claims as definitions rather than reductions, so if anything Dewey would prefer the notion of definition over reduction.
Later I will mention Dewey’s description of it’s ineffable qualities which are clearly contrary to Carnap’s physicalism.
Dewey may be closer to Neurath than Carnap on this matter.
Again, not to be confused with immediate empiricism which holds that we do experience reality directly.
Despite remaining a socialist, the FBI did not consider him politically active.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Samantha St. Amand, Heather Douglas, and Shannon Dea for their feedback, in addition to the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this essay.
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Silk, M. Facts and Values in Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism: Addressing the Eclipse Narrative. J Gen Philos Sci 49, 89–119 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-017-9382-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-017-9382-z