Neo-Pragmatism and its Critics

Abstract

A basic idea of pragmatism can be formulated as the view that it is action, rather than consciousness, that is the vehicle of thought.¹ Moreover, pragmatists link actions to inventive self-development and creative problem solving. In the modern period, we find this inchoate idea emerging both in Bacon’s conjoining of the ideas of knowledge and power and in Descartes’s somewhat ambivalent suggestion that results are the ultimate test of a theory’s truth. By the late nineteenth century these ideas inspired the development of a series of theories of inquiry and reason that began with Peirce, and continued through James to Dewey and Mead. But pragmatism has never enjoyed a singular canonical characterization. Arthur Lovejoy, in fact, outlines no fewer than 13 varieties of pragmatism.² Under the influence of the later Wittgenstein, contemporary forms of pragmatism shifted into the neo-pragmatic variants we find in Quine, Sellars, Putnam, Rorty, Apel, Habermas, Brandom, and perhaps Davidson. Goodman, Kuhn, and Toulmin could probably be added to the list.

Giving grounds… comes to an end; — but the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is no a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting which lies at the bottom of the language-game.

Wittgenstein, On Certainty