Abstract
The Americanization of originally European analytic philosophy, beginning with the rise of Nazism in Europe before WWII, has aptly been described as a move “from the Vienna Circle to Harvard Square” (Holton 1993). Not only logical empiricism but also later developments of analytic philosophy have had interesting links with the American tradition of pragmatism. This paper examines the “Viennese” logicalempiricist background of neopragmatism, drawing attention to the ways in which, for instance, some of Hilary Putnam’s ideas can be traced back to Rudolf Carnap’s logical empiricism. It will be suggested that Morton White’s holistic pragmatism ought to be taken more seriously in the contemporary developments of pragmatism in (post-)analytic philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
I will speak of “logical empiricism” instead of “logical positivism”, unless there is some philosophical or historical reason to be more specific about the terminology. By “logical empiricism” I understand the somewhat broader set of ideas and the slightly more inclusive philosophical approach that survived the collapse of the Vienna Circle (and thus the collapse of logical positivism in a strict sense). The Finnish philosopher Eino Kaila may in fact have been the first to coin the term, “logical empiricism” (der logische Empirismus). Unlike some others associated with the Vienna Circle, he was careful to call his view “logical empiricism”, never “logical positivism”.
- 2.
For the distinction between “neopragmatism” and “new pragmatism” (which need not have any explicit relation to the historical tradition of pragmatism), see Misak (2007).
- 3.
For a recent study on Lewis and the “pragmatic a priori”, see Järvilehto (2011); for detailed examinations of the concept of the a priori in logical empiricism, see Friedman (2007) and Mormann (2012). For discussions of Quine ’s problematic place in the pragmatist tradition, see Koskinen and Pihlström (2006) and Sinclair (2013). In this paper, because of my focus on neopragmatism, I will have to mostly ignore both Lewis and Quine . By no means can I hope to aim at any kind of exhaustiveness in my treatment of pragmatism and logical empiricism; I will merely be able to offer some perspectives on the matter, informed by the development of neopragmatism.
- 4.
For instance, Ramsey ’s 1927 essay, “Facts and Propositions”, articulates a pragmatic understanding of the meaning of a proposition in terms of the conduct that would result from asserting the proposition. This is, clearly, a position reminiscent of Charles Peirce ’s and William James ’s views.
- 5.
For more details and exact references (including archival documentation based on Carnap ’s, Schlick ’s, Neurath ’s and others’ papers and correspondence), see Limbeck-Lilienau (2012). For Dewey ’s Encyclopedia contributions, see his (1938) and (1939). Already some years later Dewey was, however, critical of the project and his own involvement in it. For an examination of Dewey’s criticism, see da Cunha (2012).
- 6.
- 7.
See especially Limbeck-Lilienau (2012). The international philosophy congress in Prague in 1934 was a crucial step in the emergence of the mutual recognition of pragmatism and logical empiricism, but as Limbeck-Lilineau concludes, “neither the [logical empiricists’] liberalization of the meaning criterion, nor the introduction of dispositional concepts was initiated through the contact with pragmatism” (107).
- 8.
In fact Charles Morris used the term “neopragmatism” already in 1928. (I owe this piece of information to Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau.) According to him, pragmatism was already then, before its explicit encounters with logical empiricism, living a second phase, after the early phase of Peirce ’s and James ’s works.
- 9.
Richard Rorty ’s – another key neopragmatist’s – more “postmodern” critique of metaphysics is, of course, very different from the logical empiricists’ (and from Putnam ’s), but he shares with Carnap et al. the conviction that in some sense metaphysics fails to make sense.
- 10.
Among Putnam ’s many critics, Kenneth Westphal (2003) is particularly explicit in his criticism of this residual Carnapian element in Putnam ’s internal realist position. Putnam, of course, is not the only neopragmatist whose Carnapian or quasi-Carnapian ideas would be worth examining. For example, if we broaden our concept of neopragmatism to include Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) and other post-positivist thinkers’ “new philosophy of science” – just think of Kuhn’s account of the practice-embeddedness of normal-scientific research within a paradigm – we may certainly appreciate the analogy between the Kuhnian paradigm and the Carnapian linguistic framework. Such analogies have been suggested by Friedman (e.g., 2001, 2003). Richardson (2007, 356) also notes that paradigms and linguistic frameworks play analogous roles as “conditions of scientific knowledge”. See further Pihlström and Siitonen (2005) and Pihlström (2008) and (2012b). In this essay, I will largely have to set aside the Kantian dimensions of pragmatism, even though that topic is also clearly relevant to the reappraisal of neopragmatism in relation to logical empiricism (cf. also Pihlström 2003 and (ed.) 2011b).
- 11.
I cannot here even summarize Putnam ’s opposition between metaphysical and internal realism in the way it was elaborated in his famous writings in the 1980s and early 1990s; I hope this material is relatively familiar to my readers, as this complex philosophical debate largely shaped the discussion of realism for decades. For more details, see, e.g., Pihlström (1996) and (with later reflections) (2009). My focusing on Putnam’s 2012 book here is also motivated by the fact that he there says various new things about his relation to metaphysics that seem to play an important role in the development of his views on realism.
- 12.
Putnam discusses this example in many places, including Putnam (1987), (1990), and (2004). See also Pihlström (1996). It would require a long story to explain how this conceptual relativity differs from Quine ’s (1969) “ontological relativity”, according to which ontology is relative to theory or translation. No interpretation of Quine can be offered in this essay, so I must skip that exercise here. On Putnam ’s criticism of Quine , see, e.g., Putnam (1994) and Koskinen and Pihlström (2006).
- 13.
Putnam, however, distinguishes between conceptual relativity, which involves equivalent or mutually intertranslatable conceptual schemes, and the more general phenomenon of conceptual pluralism, which has no such involvement but recognizes that “the world has many levels of form” irreducible to each other or to any single privileged form. See, e.g., Putnam (2012), 64–65. Another point of comparison here would be Goodman ’s (1978) controversial theory of “worldmaking”, which postulates a plurality of “world versions”.
- 14.
In addition to Quine , Rorty is another major philosopher that must be more or less neglected in this essay. See Pihlström (1996) for my (already somewhat dated) critical exploration of Rorty ’s neopragmatism. For critical comparisons of Putnam ’s and Rorty ’s views on realism, truth, and religion, see Pihlström (2004) and (2013), chap. 3.
- 15.
“Two Dogmas” is available in Quine (1953a); for the famous “more thorough pragmatism” quote, see 46. An examination of Quine ’s and Carnap ’s complex relation would obviously be beyond the scope of this article. For their correspondence, see Creath (1990). See also, for useful examinations of Quine’s relation to Carnap , Neurath , and other leading logical empiricists, Isaacson (2004, especially 229–249), as well as Creath (2007).
- 16.
Or perhaps we could say that it emerged already in 1928 when Morris used the term (cf. above).
- 17.
Putnam (1995, 69–73) does contrast Carnap ’s methodologically solipsist and verificationist empiricism to the classical pragmatists’ cooperative and interactionist view of inquiry; this kind of criticism of Carnap’s “spectator” conception of observation is continued, e.g., by Burke (2013, 68–72). This does not remove Putnam ’s and Carnap ’s fundamental agreement regarding realism, conceptual relativity, and metaphysics, however.
- 18.
One might perhaps apply the pragmatic maxim to find out what, if any, the key difference between Vienna Circle verificationism and Putnam ’s 1980s Harvard verificationism was. These might come up as practically identical positions.
- 19.
- 20.
In addition to Putnam , Huw Price (2011) is another neopragmatist developing partly Carnapian views even today, defending a Carnapian pluralism of linguistic frameworks. He compares Carnap ’s (1950) pluralism about ontological commitment to what would today be called “global irrealism” (Price 2011, 284) and contrasts Carnapian pluralism with Quinean monism, reminding us that a pragmatic or functional pluralism provides motivation for Carnap ’s logico-syntactical pluralism (ibid., 289). Quine ’s objections to Carnap can, according to Price , be to a large extent defused when we note that the one and the same existential quantifier can be “employed in the service of different functional, pragmatic or linguistic ends” (ibid., 291) – which, in effect, is what Putnam has argued when claiming that words like “exist” or “there is” have a plurality of different uses (e.g., in Putnam 2004). Indeed, Price (2011, 292, n8) perceptively points out that his “Carnapian view” comes close to Putnam’s “pragmatic pluralism”. While Price ’s historical comments on Carnap vs. Quine (vs. Putnam ) are in my view appropriate, I do not think we need to follow him into the final conclusion that “metaphysics remains where Carnap left it” (ibid., 303), nor to his proposal to integrate pragmatic functional pluralism and metaphysical “deflationism” (ibid.). This is because there is another – more Kantian – strategy for revising (and reviving) pragmatist metaphysics (cf. Pihlström 2009), though that, of course, is an entirely different story not to be told here.
- 21.
Kant (1781/1787) himself would not recommend confusing the two, either, because the things in themselves, in his view, clearly are not “made up”.
- 22.
A similar claim could be made about Philip Kitcher’s (2013) admirable proposal – which comes close to Putnam ’s recent views – to integrate realism (especially scientific realism) with pragmatic pluralism and the interest-relativity of our world-categorization (see especially Kitcher on “Carnap and the Caterpillar” in ibid., chap. 8). The in my view essential transcendental dimension is missing from the otherwise very balanced and carefully worked-out position.
- 23.
See Pihlström (2013) for some reflections on neopragmatist philosophy of religion, including Putnam ’s. Note that Putnam nowhere seems to comment on the classical pragmatists’ relations to the Vienna Circle and logical empiricism, except for what he says in his 1995 volume on Wittgenstein as a kind of pragmatist.
- 24.
However, we must be careful here. When Putnam (2012, 487–488) tells us that he “cannot inhabit the intellectual world” of philosophers like Hegel, Spinoza, or Leibniz , he does not mean that such philosophers wrote meaningless sentences; to suggest that they just wrote “nonsense” is “a hangover from the mistaken idea that we should ‘just say no’ to metaphysics” (ibid., 488). Cf. also the above-quoted passage in which Putnam says one can be a realist “in metaphysics” while accepting conceptual relativity (ibid., 56). So Putnam’s rejection of metaphysics is not total; he has, better than some others, recovered from the logical empiricist “hangover”. However, pace Putnam, I would suggest that one can find certain views unintelligible (cf. ibid., 490), or some intellectual worlds uninhabitable, as a result of transcendental reflection on human capacities and incapacities, specifically as manifested in one’s own case. Such reflection may, for instance, lead us to a deeper understanding of why one, when faced with, say, an eliminativist physicalist position, “[hasn’t] got these thoughts or anything that hangs together with them” (Putnam , ibid., quoting Wittgenstein ’s Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, a work he finds important in his writings on religion as well).
- 25.
- 26.
- 27.
- 28.
In addition to the realism issue, Putnam ’s philosophy of religion is worth briefly taking up here because of its strong Wittgensteinian influences. Going back to the Viennese background of Wittgenstein (in the sense of Janik and Toulmin 1973) instead of the Vienna Circle proper is therefore the crucial move at this point. While neither Putnam nor other neopragmatists have shared the Vienna Circle’s condemnation of the entire theism vs. atheism debate as a piece of speculative metaphysics – recall that Carnap , among others, regarded both theism and atheism as equally meaningless metaphysics – Putnam ’s pragmatist attitude to religion can again be reconnected with his Carnapian, logically empiricist heritage. Embracing a religious way of thinking is a matter of choosing a certain linguistic framework, or what Wittgenstein called a language-game (though Wittgenstein never simply spoke about religion as a language-game); as Carnap argued, such choices can only be pragmatically justified. Religious beliefs do not mirror a pre-existing reality but are anchored in human beings’ decisions to use certain ways of speaking, or their growing into certain ways of speaking. This, clearly, is more a Wittgensteinian than a Carnapian conception of religion, but it does bear some resemblance to the anti-metaphysical, logical empiricist view on religion as merely poetic language serving purposes quite different from literal, scientific language.
- 29.
For further elucidation, historical and systematic, see Pihlström (2004).
- 30.
Note also that Putnam , in one of his many writings on Wittgenstein , brings the later Wittgenstein precisely into the context of discussion shaped by Carnap ’s and Reichenbach ’s logical empiricism, more specifically by their discussions of the phenomenalist (egocentric, methodologically solipsist) language and “usual language” (or “thing language”); this is exactly where, he argues, Wittgenstein ’s treatment of private language and public language becomes urgently relevant (see Putnam 2012, 349–353).
- 31.
- 32.
- 33.
Putnam (2012, 563–564), among many others, opposes this transcendental reading of the private language argument, referring to James Conant as one of those who successfully explain it away as a misreading of Wittgenstein . In this discussion – in the context of his insightful engagement with Cavell – Putnam in my view fails to acknowledge the transcendental nature of his own line of thought (attributed to Cavell): “[…] skepticism universalized, skepticism that refuses to acknowledge any human community, is, to the extent that it is possible, a posture that negates not only its own intelligibility but also the very existence of a speaking and thinking subject, negates the skeptic’s own existence and the world’s” (ibid., 564). I also remain unconvinced by Putnam ’s claim that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus would have shown transcendental idealism (which Kant had argued to make empirical realism possible) to be “unintelligible nonsense” (ibid., 342). Putnam’s “deflationary reading of the supposed ‘solipsism’ of the Tractatus”, as he appropriately labels it, of course goes well together with his stubborn refusal to ever acknowledge transcendental idealism as a background of his own pragmatic or internal realism (cf. also Putnam 2006, responding to my contrary suggestions in Pihlström 2006).
- 34.
- 35.
Wittgenstein may even have derived the notion of a family resemblance from pragmatism, that is, from William James ’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which he is known to have read carefully. See Goodman (2002).
- 36.
Note, again, that it is far from clear that Quine can be called a “pragmatist” at all, despite his influence on both Putnam ’s and Rorty ’s versions of neopragmatism. See Koskinen and Pihlström (2006).
- 37.
I am fully aware that some New Wittgensteinians resist such formulations.
- 38.
- 39.
White , of course, was also a key mediating figure between logical empiricism and pragmatism, along with philosophers like Lewis , Nagel , Quine , and Goodman . For an excellent recent discussion, see Sinclair (2011). Cf. also my recent paper on White (Pihlström 2011a), on which I to some extent rely here, as well as, again, Koskinen and Pihlström (2006) on Quine and pragmatism.
- 40.
- 41.
I would thus not suggest that we follow him into, say, the claim that there is no pragmatic difference between Peircean scholastic realism and nominalism (see again White 2002). On the contrary, there is a major pragmatic difference between these positions – but these (and other) metaphysical views indeed have to be understood pragmatically, not as metaphysical theories independent of pragmatic and hence eventually broadly cultural considerations.
- 42.
As is well known, logical empiricism has recently been observed to have been more strongly neo-Kantian than the received view construes it as being – see, e.g., Friedman (2001) and Richardson (1998) – and the same, arguably, applies to pragmatism and neopragmatism – see Pihlström (2003) and (2009). Indeed, insofar as this neo-Kantian emphasis is on the right track, neopragmatism may be considerably more Kantian than the leading neopragmatists themselves, especially Rorty but even Putnam , have ever acknowledged. On the neo-Kantian character of logical empiricist philosophy of science comparable to Kuhn’s “new” philosophy of science (and, hence, pragmatism), see also Pihlström and Siitonen (2005).
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Acknowledgments
This paper is based on a presentation at the workshop, Pragmatism and Logical Empiricism, Vienna Circle Institute, University of Vienna (November 8–9, 2013). Related material was also presented at the conference, Philosophical Revolutions, University College Dublin (June, 2013). I should like to thank Maria Baghramian , Sarin Marchetti , Larry Hickman , Friedrich Stadler, Ilkka Niiniluoto , and Heikki J. Koskinen , among many others, for valuable comments and discussion. I also gratefully acknowledge the critical comments by an anonymous referee.
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Pihlström, S. (2017). On the Viennese Background of Harvard Neopragmatism. In: Pihlström, S., Stadler, F., Weidtmann, N. (eds) Logical Empiricism and Pragmatism. Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50730-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50730-9_8
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