Pragmatism

Pragmatic or Practical?

James was interested in the experiencing individual, for whom practical events marked the test of ideas. As he put it in Pragmatism: “The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one” ([1907] 1977:379). Philosophy is taken by James to be a means for practical life, whereas for Peirce, pragmatism was a method for attaining clarity of ideas within a normative conception of logic, that is, within the norms of continuing, self-correcting inquiry directed toward truth. Logical meaning, for Peirce, is not found in “definite instants of our life” but in the context of the community of self-correcting inquiry. And truth is that opinion the community would reach, given sufficient inquiry, and which is known fallibly by individuals.

The earliest roots of pragmatism are to be found in the remarkable series of papers from around 1868, published when Peirce was 29 years old. In “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” and its four denials of Cartesianism, he destroyed the Cartesian foundations of modern philosophy. Against Descartes's attempt to base science on the indubitable foundations of immediate knowledge, Peirce argued that we have no powers of introspection or of intuition, using these terms in their technical logical sense as meaning direct, unmediated, dyadic knowledge. Cognitions are instead determined by previous cognitions, and all cognitions are inferences or mediate signs that, in turn, address interpreting signs. The possibility of scientific truth does not derive from indubitable foundations but by the self-correcting process of interpretation. Peirce, who rejected foundationalism, proposed a regulative ideal of an unlimited community of inquirers, capable of inquiry into the indefinite future as a basis for fallible, objective knowledge. It is within this context of a general community of interpretation that the “conceivable consequences” of pragmatic meaning are to be found.

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