Some Pragmatist Themes (review)
- Some Pragmatist Themes
David S. Clarke is clearly passionate about pragmatism. In this short, compelling book he explores what he calls "two fundamental claims" of pragmatism. He does this, he explains, with the "conviction that if pragmatism is to continue as a viable force in contemporary philosophy it must incorporate advances in philosophical method introduced by the linguistic philosophers of the past century" (xi).
The two fundamental claims that interest Clarke are as follows:
that cognitive inquiry and belief are to be understood in terms of their relation to purpose and action rather than as a means of simply satisfying intellectual curiosity;
[x]
that relationships between belief, purpose, and action within us as individuals and within society at large have parallels in the infrahuman species from which we have evolved.
[x–xi]
After an introductory chapter, which provides an overview of the two claims, Clarke provides a more detailed picture of each claim in chapters 2 and 3, before exploring their implications within three areas: pragmatics and the philosophy of language (Ch. 4), moral conduct (Ch. 5), and metaphysics/ontology (Ch. 6).
In the introduction, Clarke explains the two fundamental claims by means of some familiar pragmatist themes: Bain's view of beliefs as dispositions to act, Peirce's pragmatic maxim, the influence of evolutionary theory, and the significance of introspection for philosophical method. Clarke expresses concern that contemporary pragmatists regard these ideas as distinct from, or even opposed to analytic philosophy, suggesting that such writers "seem to have conveniently ignored the central role played by the pragmatic maxim in the early development of pragmatism" (6). Clarke rightly highlights that Peirce's views on meaning foreshadow those of the logical positivists, such as Schlick and Ayer. Specifically, Peirce's goal in devising the maxim was similar to that of the logical positivists in developing the verificationist theory [End Page 143] of meaning, namely to clarify meaning as an expedient to furthering inquiry (6), and to distinguish the meaningful from the nonsensical. Pragmatism diverged, Clarke suggests, because its goals were "more inclusive," viz. Bain's account of belief and evolutionary theory (7).
Chapter 2, "Belief, Acceptance, and Truth" focuses on the first claim and its implications for theories of truth. Clarke identifies a range of different and often inconsistent views on the nature of truth within the writings of the classical pragmatists. He explores the idea that "the true is the useful," as attributed to James and Schiller, as well as Peirce's conception of truth as the final opinion. The latter conception, which seems to me the most promising of the classical pragmatists' ideas about the nature of truth, is rather quickly set aside as Clarke moves on to exploring Dewey's views on warranted assertability. Potentially fascinating ties with contemporary work on the topic, particularly that of Crispin Wright, also merit only a passing mention. In the end Clarke settles on the view that "there are as many varieties of truth of propositions as there are forms of discourse in which they are expressed, since each discourse context will have justificatory standards associated with it" (25). This is the first of several occasions in the book where I felt a potentially compelling position was stated all too briefly, and in a way unlikely to persuade a non-pragmatist reader.
Chapter 3, "Human and Infrahuman Continuity," contains more novel and engaging material. Clarke charts the influence of evolutionary theory on the classical pragmatists, focusing on its effects on what we now call the philosophy of mind, most significantly a reorientation towards broadly behaviorist approaches. These approaches, Clarke suggests, represented the first systematic response to the question of how our human mental or cognitive capacities evolved via the process of natural selection. In exploring this trend, Clarke draws an interesting distinction between Peirce and James on one hand (the panpsychists) and Dewey and the Chicago school (Mead, Morris) on the other (the behaviorists). The distinction comes about because the two sets of pragmatists had different responses to the same problem, namely how to describe the continuity between humans and infrahuman species:
We can extend...
