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  • Pragmatic vs. Skeptical Empiricism:Hume and Dewey on Experience and Causation
  • Jason Jordan

All knowledge 'begins with experience,' but it does not therefore 'arise' from experience.

—Husserl, Logical Investigations

1. Introduction

The classical American pragmatists are usually considered to be either empiricists or heirs to the empiricist tradition in philosophy. This is unsurprising given the nature of the pragmatist philosophical program as a late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century reaction against transcendental idealism. Pragmatists sought to ground their inquiry resolutely in experience sans speculative metaphysics. However, the pragmatists were also stridently opposed to certain doctrines and epistemological tendencies in British empiricism that they regarded as either implicitly idealist, or as laying a groundwork that stood as the foundation for transcendental idealism,1 as well as the contemporary Anglo-Austrian phenomenalism of Mach, Russell, and Ayer.

This paper is concerned with elucidating the grounds of this disagreement, which primarily concerns the differing conceptions of "experience" held by both schools; namely, the pragmatists' rejection of the conceptual/ empirical dichotomy implicit to British empiricism, and their insistence that relations are latent within experience and not generated by a synthetic faculty of the mind. In particular, this dispute will be examined concerning the issues of experience, causation, and causal explanation.2 When considering British empiricism, I shall focus on its most influential exemplar, and an obvious object of the pragmatist's ire: David Hume. As far as the pragmatists are concerned, I shall focus primarily on John Dewey, who among his peers addressed the issues under consideration most thoroughly and forcefully.

The general thesis of this paper is twofold. First, I argue that a good deal of the disagreement is exaggerated, as the classical pragmatists maintained [End Page 31] an overly skeptical and phenomenalist interpretation of Humean epistemology.3 In response, I examine the many ways in which Hume, considered as a skeptical realist rather than a phenomenalist idealist, is in agreement with many basic principles of pragmatism. Second, insofar as significant differences remain between Hume and his pragmatist detractors, I distinguish between "pragmatist" and "skeptical" (but realist and anti-phenomenalist) empiricism, arguing that the "pragmatist" account of experience is problematic and that a coherent and tenable account of particular relations within experience (e.g., causation) requires Hume's dichotomous conceptual/empirical framework.

2. The Pragmatist Hume

Classical pragmatists, such as Schiller, have long been suspicious of Hume's supposedly tepid appeal to custom as inauthentic and pis aller, insofar as it followed seemingly as an afterthought from his viciously deflationary skepticism.4 Much of this suspicion was bound to a fin de siècle interpretation of Hume as in general agreement with and the progenitor of contemporary British phenomenalism. As G. B. Mathur notes in his early comparison of Hume and the pragmatists:

[Hume] is supposed to have proved to our chagrin that the conceptions of matter, self, cause, etc. . . . have no immutable and intrinsic meaning in themselves. They are just so many conventions, true and helpful as far as they go, but absolutely unfit for the job they are commanded to perform. And from this he is shown to draw purely sceptical conclusions, where the world is cheated of all its objective stability and enduring existence.5

It is precisely this interpretation of Hume and his "cheat" that drew the ire of the pragmatists. However, it should be noted that the goal of Hume's skepticism—the elimination of "a priorism" and rationalist system building in philosophy—was shared wholeheartedly between them, as Schiller conceded.6 The issue, aside from the sensationalist model of experience, thus seems to hang on the "thickness" of Hume's conception of custom and its ability to preserve the natural attitude in the face of his philosophical skepticism.

Hume "confesses" in the Treatise that his "intention never was to penetrate into the nature of bodies, or to explain the secret causes of their operations."7 Deeming "such an enterprise . . . beyond the reach of human understanding," Hume resolves to content himself "with knowing perfectly the manner in which objects affect my senses, and their connections with each other, as far [End Page 32] as my experience informs me of them."8 Briefly, in the Treatise he divides the...

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