H F Pragmatismo y F Analítica PDF

Pragmatism and Analytic Philosophy

Cheryl Misak
The Oxford Handbook of The History of Analytic Philosophy
Edited by Michael Beaney
Print Publication Date: Jun 2013

Subject: Philosophy, History of Western Philosophy (Post-Classical)
Online Publication Date: Oct 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199238842.013.0020
Abstract and Keywords
Richard Rorty articulates and upholds the received view of the relationship between prag
matism and analytic philosophy, which is that when logical empiricism became the domi
nant force in American philosophy departments, it bullied and chased out the home-
grown pragmatism. This chapter shows that many of the central tenets of logical empiri
cism were already present in early American pragmatism and it is only when Rorty res
olutely followed a less rigorous version of pragmatism did things go awry. It first looks at
Chauncey Wright’s views on mathematics, science, and metaphysics. It then considers C.
S. Peirce’s arguments about logic and science, William James’s concept of pragmatism,
John Dewey’s position on logical empiricism, and W. V. O. Quine’s take on empiricism, nat
uralism, and holism.
Keywords: analytic philosophy, John Dewey, William James, logical empiricism, naturalism, C. S. Peirce, pragma
tism, W. V. O. Quine, Richard Rorty, Chauncey Wright
38.1 The received View

Richard Rorty articulates and upholds the received view of the relationship between prag
matism and analytic philosophy:
Along about 1945, American philosophers were, for better or worse, bored with
Dewey, and thus with pragmatism. They were sick of being told that pragmatism
was the philosophy of American democracy, that Dewey was the great American
intellectual figure of their century, and the like. They wanted something new,
something they could get their philosophical teeth into. What showed up, thanks
to Hitler and various other historical contingencies, was logical empiricism, an
early version of what we now call ‘analytic philosophy’.
(Rorty 1995: 70)
Page 1 of 21
PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights
Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in
Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).
date: 17 May 2020

The received view has it that when the logical empiricists hit America’s shores, there was
a straightforward replacement of pragmatism with a radically different view. Logical em
piricism became the dominant force in American philosophy departments, bullying and
chasing out the home-grown pragmatism.
Louis Menand reaffirms this view in his best-selling and Pulitzer Prize winning history of
American pragmatism, The Metaphysical Club—which was the reading group in the
1860s in which Chauncey Wright, Charles Peirce, Williams James, Oliver Wendell Homes,
and others first hammered out pragmatist ideas. Menand holds that pragmatism is anti-
analytic and ‘belongs to a disestablishmentarian impulse in American culture’. On this
picture, pragmatism is Rorty’s position that there is no certainty, no truth, and no objec
tivity to be had, only agreement within a community (2001: 89).
Menand’s argument is that the American Civil War was, amongst other things, a
(p. 1099)
failure of ideas. It ‘swept away almost the whole intellectual culture of the North’ and ‘it
took nearly half a century for the United States to find a culture to replace it, to find a set
of ideas, and a way of thinking, that would help people cope with the conditions of mod
ern life’ (2001: x). That set of ideas was pragmatism. After the trauma of the Civil War, in
which the lesson was ‘certitude leads to violence’, people were not in the mood for abso
lutist philosophies (2001: 61). Pragmatism thus arose and flourished until its fallibilism
and tolerance were thrown into suspicion by the intellectual climate of the Cold War of
the 1950s (2001: 439). James and Dewey came to be seen then as ‘naïve, and even a little
dangerous’ (2001: 439). With the end of the Cold War, uncertainty was allowable again—
hence Rorty’s revival of pragmatism during the 1980s and ’90s. ‘For in the post-Cold War
world, where there are many competing belief systems, not just two, skepticism about the
finality of any particular set of beliefs has begun to seem to some people an important
value again’ (2001: 441).
But the story is not, as Menand and Rorty would have it, a straightforward replacement of
pragmatism with what was perceived as a safer view (Menand) or as a more exciting view
(Rorty). Scott Soames (2008) is right to say that the pragmatist reverence for logic, re
spect for science, suspicion of metaphysics, and emphasis on practical consequences
made for fertile soil in which logical empiricism could grow. Indeed, the burden of this
chapter will be to show that many of the central tenets of logical empiricism, and analytic
philosophy more generally, were already present in early American pragmatism and con
tinued to flourish in the pragmatist views of C. I. Lewis and Quine. It is only when Rorty
resolutely follows one of the less analytic of the early pragmatists (William James) that
things go awry.
On the James–Rorty understanding of pragmatism, on which truth and objectivity are to

be replaced by something like agreement, pragmatism is indeed in tension with the kind
of analytic philosophy exemplified by certain of the logical empiricists—those who tried to
show how objectivity was possible by bringing together all genuine inquiry under the um
brella of science and the new mathematical logic. Inquiry was to be unified and progress
made possible with all branches of inquiry conducted in the same straightforward, logi
Page 2 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

cal, observational language. The verifiability principle did most of the heavy lifting here:
it required all meaningful beliefs and theories to be reducible, via formal deductive logic,
to statements that are empirically verifiable. Since metaphysics does not meet this test,
aspersion was cast upon it.
I will show, however, that many of these themes were already present in early American
philosophy. If we are to see how the received view of the relationship between pragma
tism and analytic philosophy is wrong-headed, we need to carefully examine this history. I
will then offer an account of the fate of pragmatism that differs substantially from the re
ceived view but which is, I submit, not only more accurate, but much more interesting.
I should note what will already be obvious. I am not taking ‘analytic philosophy’ to be
philosophical analysis, where the philosopher’s job of unpacking of the meaning of words
is engaged prior to first-order inquiry. On this version of analytic philosophy, philosophy is
discontinuous with science and is a non-empirical venture. This is the (p. 1100) analytic
philosophy, on which one term is to be reduced to another set of terms and rendered
clear without residue, that is often caricatured as Oxford ordinary language philosophy.
Rather, I am taking analytic philosophy to be that which was born with Frege and
Russell’s delivery of a new and powerful logic, spent its youth in the optimistic excite
ment of logical empiricism in the 1930s and 1940s, went through a period of disillusion
ment when the strong programme of logical empiricism started to unravel, came into ma
turity with the likes of Quine, and is now perhaps showing itself to be immortal as the
dominant methodology of philosophy. That is, the term ‘analytic philosophy’ marks a way
of doing philosophy that has argumentative rigour, logic, and a focus on science and its
methodology at its centre. I will show that some of the classical pragmatists are not only
completely at home here, but helped to build the house in which modern analytic philoso
phy now lives.
38.2 Chauncey Wright: Science, Mathematics,

and the Suspicion of Metaphysics
Chauncey Wright is an under-rated figure, known only to aficionados of American philoso
phy. While a student at Harvard he made a great impression on many of his contempo
raries and on the Professor of Mathematics—Benjamin Peirce, who was Charles Peirce’s
father. After graduation, he became a computer for the American Nautical Almanac,
cramming a year’s work into three or four months and then devoting himself to philoso
phy. He died in 1875, when he was 45, after suffering from general poor health, abuse of
stimulants, and terrible sleep habits.
Wright’s thought was influenced by the work of the psychologist Alexander Bain, and by
Hume, Mill, and Darwin. One thing these thinkers have in common is that they direct
their attention to first-order inquiry and take observation seriously. They treat their sub
ject matter, whether it be chemistry, philosophy, or religion, as ‘a science of causes and
effects’ (Wright 1873: 417). Wright rails against the ‘a priori school’ of philosophy, align
Page 3 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

ing himself firmly with the ‘positive mode of thought’, which investigates the world by ob
servation, experiment, and verification (1865a: 44). He is set against metaphysics, un
known inscrutable powers, intuitions, innate ideas, laws of the faculty of mind, and primi
tive convictions—those supposed truths that have the mark of self-evidence, necessity,
and universality (1865b: 330). These kinds of phenomena are not verifiable and hence
they cannot be the objects of scientific study. He thinks that ‘a priori too often means no
more than ab ignorantia et indolentia’ (1875: 393)—an expression translatable even for
those without any Latin at all.
Wright sees the difficulties and subtleties involved in the verificationist idea straight off
the bat. As Edward Madden (1963: 108ff.) notes, he anticipates a major innovation in veri
ficationism made 60 years after his death. Instead of requiring every hypothesis to be di
rectly testable by experience, Wright has it that hypotheses must ‘show credentials
(p. 1101) from the senses, either by affording from themselves consequences capable of
sensuous verification or by yielding such consequences in conjunction with ideas which

by themselves are verifiable’ (1865a: 46). Decades later, the logical empiricists, under re
lentless pressure to make their verifiability criterion stand up to excellent objections, con
ceded that a theoretical concept can receive some or all of its meaning from the theory in
which it occurs. Carnap, for instance, says that there is in the strict sense no refutation or
confirmation of an hypothesis—tests apply ‘at bottom, not to a single hypothesis but to
the whole system of physics as a system of hypotheses’ (1937: 318). The logical empiri
cists moved, that is, towards what Quine called holism. We need to look to a whole system
of interconnected concepts and hypotheses and then require that theory to be verifiable.
Wright is of the same view. In the paper in which he expresses it, he presages another
devastating objection to logical empiricism:
It is indisputable that verification is essential to the completeness of scientific

method; but there is still room for debate as to what constitutes verification in the
various departments of philosophical inquiry. So long as the philosophy of method
fails to give a complete inventory of our primary sources of knowledge, and can
not decide authoritatively what are the origins of first truths, or the truths of ob
servation, so long will it remain uncertain what is a legitimate appeal to observa
tion, or what is a real verification.
(1865a: 45)
To assume that direct reports from our senses are the sum total of what counts as legiti
mate verification is to blithely assume the answer to some very hard questions.
Unlike Comte, the verificationist most discussed in Wright’s time, Wright does not think
that we can assume that philosophy and theology are superseded by science. They can in
principle coexist with science. But in Wright’s view, science was just coming to maturity
and it promised ‘to throw a flood of light’ on subjects such as history, society, laws, and
morality (1865a: 54). He is the first to set out a defining feature of pragmatism. This is
the idea that experience goes beyond what our five senses deliver; that experience must
Page 4 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

be conceived of broadly; that all inquiry must and can be thought of as being a part of a
seamless whole.
He is also the first to articulate the pragmatic account of truth, which he thought arose
naturally once the new science was taken seriously. He thinks that ‘our knowledges and
rational beliefs result, truly and literally, from the survival of the fittest among our origi
nal and spontaneous beliefs’ (1870: 116).
38.3 Charles Sanders Peirce: Truth and Inquiry

Peirce was by all accounts a very difficult and brilliant man, who found it impossible to
get a permanent position in the academy. He did manage to get a part-time post at Johns
Hopkins, where he taught logic and had a great impact on a select and excellent (p. 1102)
group of students. But in 1884, after four years there, he was fired, never able to return
to a paid position in a university despite his desperation to do so and his manifest talent.
A scandal around his infidelity and the collapse of his marriage seems to have sealed his
fate. What money he had, from then on, was acquired from his day job as a scientist for
the US Coast and Geodetic Survey and from charity organized by William James. During
his 31 years at the Survey, he made significant advances in pendulum studies to deter
mine the shape of the earth, in photometric research on stars, and in chromatics.
Peirce conceived of himself first and foremost as a logician. He says that Jevons, along
with Boole, Whewell, Berkeley, Glanville, Ockham, and Duns Scotus would capture ‘the
purpose of my memoirs’. That purpose is ‘to lay a solid foundation upon which may be
erected a new logic fit for the life of twentieth century science’ (CP 7.161, 1902).2 Logic,
for Peirce, is a normative science. He was forever outlining proposals for a grand book on
logic that had at its centre the study of inquiry aimed at the truth. This is not what we to
day take logic to be, but Peirce was also a brilliant logician in the modern sense. He de
veloped a quantified first-order logic independently of and at the same time as Frege; dis
covered the Sheffer stroke decades before Sheffer; and made lasting advances in the log
ic of statistical reasoning.
Peirce shares Wright’s commitment to science and to a kind of verificationist principle.

Add to that his ability in formal logic and the resemblance to the logical empiricist ex
pression of analytic philosophy is striking. But, as with Wright, there is some distance be
tween the verificationism of Peirce and that of the logical empiricists. In ‘How to Make
Our Ideas Clear’, one of the few papers Peirce managed to publish, he identifies pragma
tism as a way of clarifying our ideas so that they are not subject to metaphysical ‘decep
tions’. Here is that famous, or perhaps infamous, statement: ‘Consider what effects,
which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our concep
tion to have. Then, our conception of these is the whole of our conception of the
object’ (W3: 266).
Page 5 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

In this essay, the effects Peirce is concerned with are ‘effects, direct or indirect, upon our
senses’ (W3: 266). He asks about the meaning of ‘this diamond is hard’ and finds that it
amounts to ‘it will not be scratched by many other substances’ (W3: 266). He says, set
ting up pragmatism for trouble for a century to come: ‘There is absolutely no difference
between a hard thing and a soft thing so long as they are not brought to the test. Sup
pose, then, that a diamond could be crystallized in the midst of a cushion of soft cotton,
and should remain there until it was finally burned up’ (W3: 266). His suggestion is that it
is meaningless to speak of such a diamond as being hard.
He tinkered with and improved this published account of the pragmatic maxim over the
course of many years. He sees, for instance, that the use of the indicative conditional—it
will not be scratched—is highly problematic and is insistent on replacing (p. 1103) the
‘will-be’ with a ‘would-be’.3 But even in ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’, it wasn’t obvious
that the principle Peirce was articulating was designed to be a semantic principle about
the very meaning of our concepts. As the very title of the paper suggests, the maxim is
about achieving clarity. Pierce took his contribution to be one in a well-worn debate. ‘The
books’, he says, ‘are right in making familiarity with a notion the first step toward clear
ness of apprehension, and the defining of it the second’ (W3: 260). He wants to add an
important third ‘grade of clearness’ or grade of ‘apprehensions of the meanings of
words’: knowing what to expect if hypotheses containing the concept are true.
The pragmatic maxim, that is, is designed to just capture one—albeit very important—as
pect of what it is to understand something. In addition to connotation and denotation,
Peirce thinks that there is a third thing that someone needs to understand when they un
derstand a concept. They have to know what to expect if beliefs containing the concept
are true or false. If a belief has no consequences—if there is nothing we would expect
would be different if it were true or false—then it lacks a dimension we would have had to
get right were we to fully understand it.
Rather than take that snappy summary provided in ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ as
capturing Peirce’s intentions, we should focus rather on the following kinds of expres
sions. We ‘must look to the upshot of our concepts in order to rightly apprehend
them’ (CP 5.4, 1901). In order to get a complete grasp of a concept, we must connect it to
that with which we have ‘dealings’ (CP 5.416, 1905). Or: ‘we must not begin by talking of
pure ideas,—vagabond thoughts that tramp the public roads without any human habita
tion,—but must begin with men and their conversation’ (CP 8.112, 1900). Peirce’s idea is
nicely articulated by David Wiggins (2002: 316). When a concept is ‘already fundamental
to human thought and long since possessed of an autonomous interest’, it is pointless to
try to define it. Rather, we ought to attempt to get leverage on the concept, or a fix on it,
by exploring its connections with practice. This is the insight at the very heart of Peircean
pragmatism.
When Peirce shines the light of the pragmatic maxim on the concept of truth, the upshot
is an aversion to ‘transcendental’ accounts of truth, such as the correspondence theory,
on which a true belief is one that corresponds to, or gets right, or mirrors the believer-in
Page 6 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

dependent world (CP 5.572, 1901). Such accounts of truth are examples of those
‘vagabond thoughts’. They make truth the subject of empty metaphysics. For the very
idea of the believer-independent world, and the items within it to which beliefs or sen
tences might correspond, seem graspable only if we could somehow step outside of our
corpus of belief, our practices, or that with which we have dealings. We would do better
to illuminate truth by considering its linkages with inquiry, assertion, and belief, for those
are the human dealings relevant to truth. Peirce’s view of truth is a naturalist view—we
should not add anything metaphysical to science, or to any other first-order inquiry. We
have to extract the concept of truth from our practices of inquiry, reason-giving, and de
liberation.
That concept of truth is as follows. A belief is true if it would be ‘indefeasible’; or

(p. 1104)
would not be improved upon; or would never lead to disappointment; or would forever
meet the challenges of reasons, argument, and evidence. A true belief is the belief we
would come to, were we to inquire as far as we could on a matter. Peirce initially put this
idea in the following unhelpful way: a true belief is one which would be agreed upon at
the hypothetical or ‘fated’ end of inquiry (see W3: 273, 1878). But his considered and
much better formulation is this: a true belief is one which would withstand doubt, were
we to inquire as far as we fruitfully could into the matter. A true belief is such that, no
matter how much further we were to investigate and debate, it would not be overturned
by recalcitrant experience and argument (CP 5.569, 1901, 6.485, 1908). On the whole, he
tries to stay away from unhelpful ideas such as the final end of inquiry, perfect evidence,
and the like.
As Peirce’s thoughts about the pragmatic maxim matured, he also made amendments re
garding the nature of the practical consequences required by the pragmatic maxim. He
tries to divert our focus from sensory experience and direct it to a broader notion of expe
rience. Experience, he argues, is that which is compelling, surprising, unchosen, involun
tary, or forceful. This extremely generous conception of experience is clearly going to al
low for a criterion of legitimacy that encompasses more than beliefs directly verifiable by
the senses. For one thing, Peirce thought that mathematical and logical beliefs were con
nected to experience in the requisite way. They have consequences in diagrammatic con
texts—when we manipulate diagrams, we can find ourselves compelled and surprised.
This thought certainly pulls against the logical empiricist’s distinction between observa
tional and logical statements and against their requirement that sensory experience is the
only testing ground for belief. A. J. Ayer is right to think that Peirce’s pragmatic maxim
was a clear predecessor of the verifiability criterion: it ‘allows no truck with metaphysics.
Its standpoint is closely akin to that which was later to be adopted by the logical posi
tivists’ (Ayer 1968: 45). But he is wrong to think that the maxim is ‘identical … with the
physicalist interpretation of the verification principle’ (1968: 45). For Peirce offered a
much broader account of experience than the verificationists ever envisioned and he was
very clear that he was talking about an aspect of meaningfulness, not the whole of it.
Page 7 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

Ayer discovered Peirce long after the height of logical empiricism’s popularity. But even
at the apex of logical empiricism, Peirce was seen by those who knew of him as a kindred
spirit. Ernest Nagel, at the fifth International Conference for the Unity of Science held at
Harvard in 1940, gave a talk titled ‘Charles S. Peirce: Pioneer of Modern Empiricism’.
There he asserted:
One is not minimizing the contributions of the Vienna Circle in pointing out that
many of its recent views have been taken for granted for some time by American
colleagues, largely because the latter have come to intellectual maturity under the
influence of Peirce.
(Nagel 1940: 70)
Nagel points to the antipathy to metaphysical speculation, the emphasis on cooperative

scientific research, and the fact that the pragmatic maxim ‘was offered to (p. 1105)
philosophers in order to bring to an end disputes which no observation of facts could set
tle because they involved terms with no definite meaning’ (1940: 73).
But, as we shall see below, another stream of pragmatism took a turn away from analytic
philosophy. It took this turn during Peirce’s lifetime, causing him to bemoan that the term
‘pragmatism’
gets abused in the merciless way that words have to expect when they fall into lit
erary clutches.… So then, the writer, finding his bantling ‘pragmatism’ so promot
ed, feels that it is time to kiss his child good-by and relinquish it to its higher des
tiny; while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he
begs to announce the birth of the word ‘pragmaticism’, which is ugly enough to be
safe from kidnappers.
(CP 5.414, 1905)
‘Pragmaticism’, he says, should be used in a narrow sense—for his own doctrine only—
and ‘“pragmatism” should … be used somewhat loosely to signify affiliation with Schiller,
James, Dewey, Royce’ and others who have drifted away from what Peirce saw as the spir
it of pragmatism as he and Chauncey Wright envisioned it (CP 8.205, 1903).
38.4 William James: Truth and Usefulness

William James’s version of the pragmatic maxim makes short work of many long-standing
and seemingly intractable philosophical problems. ‘If no practical difference whatsoever
can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is
idle’ (James 1907 [1949]: 45). Once you trace the consequences of two views, you might
very well find them empirically equivalent. Hence all sorts of philosophical problems will
be seen to be pseudo-problems, to use the language of the logical empiricists.
Page 8 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

But while Peirce is the archetype of what James called a ‘technical’ philosopher, James
makes it clear at the beginning of Pragmatism that he is not interested in being one: ‘the
philosophy which is so important to each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or
less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means’ (1907 [1949]: 5). He goes on: ‘I
have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philosophy in this very hall, but they
soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results were only partially encouraging.’
James was not good at the new formal methods, but he was very successful in getting phi
losophy to the educated masses. This popularizing ambition tended not to impress profes
sional philosophers. In his rather bad-tempered (indeed, generally bad) Anti-Pragmatism,
Albert Schinz rants: ‘Popular science, popular art, popular theology—only one thing was
lacking—popular philosophy. And now they give that to us. What a triumph for a weak
cause!’ (Schinz 1909: xvi).
Two very different versions of the pragmatic account of truth and objectivity arise from
applying the pragmatic maxim to the concept of truth. One is the naturalism which origi
nates in Wright and Peirce. It focuses on the practices of inquiry and tries to capture
(p. 1106) our cognitive aspirations to objectivity. It is this view that manifests itself in
Quine and then almost drops out of sight as a recognizably pragmatist view. That is, it
ceases to be thought of as pragmatism.
The other orginates with James. It is the view which took root in Rorty, and which became
identified with pragmatism between the 1970s and 1990s. James argues that truth is
what works for us: ‘Any idea upon which we can ride … any idea that will carry us pros
perously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactori
ly, working securely, simplifying, saving labor, is … true instrumentally’ (1907 [1949]: 58).
‘Satisfactorily’, for James, ‘means more satisfactorily to ourselves, and individuals will
emphasize their points of satisfaction differently. To a certain degree, therefore, every
thing here is plastic’ (1907 [1949]: 61). Sometimes he puts his position as follows: ‘True
ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify’; ‘truth happens to
an idea’ (1907 [1949]: 200). He rather infamously suggested that if the belief in God
made a positive impact on someone’s life, then it could reasonably be taken as true by
that person.
Two giants of analytic philosophy—Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore—took a kind of glee

in dismantling James’s view. Russell notes in 1910 that he is sympathetic with
pragmatism’s turning its back on a priori reasoning and towards concrete facts and con
sequences (1966 [1992]: 196). Nonetheless, he thinks that James’s account of truth is se
riously defective. Russell turns the pragmatist account of truth on itself, as it were, and
notes that if it is to be useful, there must be a way of telling when the consequences of a
belief are useful or good (1966 [1992]: 201):
We must suppose that this means that the consequences of entertaining the belief
are better than those of rejecting it. In order to know this, we must know what are
the consequences of entertaining it, and what are the consequences of rejecting it;
Page 9 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

we must know also what consequences are good, what bad, what consequences
are better, and what worse.
(Russell 1966 [1992]: 201)
This, of course, is a very tall order, illustrated by Russell with two examples. First, the
consequences of believing the doctrine of the Catholic faith might make one happy ‘at the
expense of a certain amount of stupidity and priestly domination’ (1966 [1992]: 201). It is
unclear how we are to weigh these benefits and burdens against each other. Second, the
effects of Rousseau’s doctrines were far-reaching—Europe is a different place from what
it would have been without them. But how do we disentangle what the effects have been?
And even if we could do that, whether we take them to be good or bad depends on our po
litical views.
In a related objection, Russell points that one can take ‘works’ or ‘pays’ in two very differ
ent ways. In science, a hypothesis works if
the effects of believing it are good, including among the effects … the emotions
entailed by it or its perceived consequences, and the actions to which we are
prompted by it or its perceived consequences. This is a totally different conception
(p. 1107) of ‘working’, and one for which the authority of scientific procedure can
not be invoked.
(Russell 1966 [1992]: 210)4
Moore reviewed James’s Pragmatism in the 1907 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
The review is harsh, with Moore finding James’s assertions to be ‘silly’ (1907: 49). Here is
a catalogue of his objections to James’s view. First, he points to a problem that dogs all
pragmatist views of truth. If truth is tightly connected to what we can verify, what do we
think about statements for which the evidence has been destroyed, or statements that are
so trivial that no one has bothered to collect any evidence for them, or statements the evi
dence for which lies buried deep in the past? (1907: 36–9).5 Second, with Russell, Moore
interrogates the linkage between the true and the useful. If usefulness is a property that
may come and go, then (in James’s own words) ‘a belief, which occurs at several different
times, may be true at some of the times at which it occurs, and yet untrue at oth
ers’ (1907: 61). The truth of a belief, that is, seems to vary from time to time and from
culture to culture. Truth is not a stable property of beliefs and that, Moore thinks, is an
anathema. Third, Moore takes on James’s claim that we make the truth: ‘I think he cer
tainly means to suggest that we not only make our true beliefs, but also that we make
them true’ (1907: 72). Moore thinks that it is crazy to suggest that my belief that p makes
it true that p. My (correct) belief that it rained today did not make it rain today.
One can see that under a barrage of well-formed criticism such as this, pragmatism’s rep
utation across the Atlantic was bound to suffer. It came under similar stress at home.
Page 10 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

James Pratt is the American critic who takes the most care with James’s view. He sees
two ambitious claims at the heart of it. The first is about truth: ‘in morality and meta
physics and religion, as well as in science, we are justified in testing the truth of a belief
by its usefulness’ (1909: 13). A true claim is a ‘verified human claim’ (1909: 83). The sec
ond is about meaning: ‘the meaning of any philosophical proposition can always be
brought down to some particular consequence in our future practical experience’ (1909:
25).
Pratt, like Russell, asks whether the pragmatist account of truth is itself true. It is cer
tainly useful to pragmatists, he says, but not to others (1909: 127). The fact that pragma
tists will want to respond by saying that the truth of pragmatism consists in something
more robust shows that they too think that there is some more transcendental account of
truth in play—the pragmatist is ‘making use of the very conception of truth which he is
trying to refute’ (1909: 129).
Pratt also tackles James’s view that religious hypotheses are true if they are good for us
to believe. Here he echoes Moore’s distinction between the two senses of what works or
what is good. Pragmatism, Pratt says, (p. 1108)
seeks to prove the truth of religion by its good and satisfactory consequences.
Here, however, a distinction must be made; namely between the ‘good’, harmo
nious, and logically confirmatory consequences of religious concepts as such, and
the good and pleasant consequences which come from believing these concepts. It
is one thing to say a belief is true because the logical consequences that flow from
it fit in harmoniously with our otherwise grounded knowledge; and quite another
to call it true because it is pleasant to believe.
(Pratt 1909: 186–7)
The difference between the views of Peirce and James can be nicely summarized by
Pratt’s distinction. Peirce holds that ‘a belief is true because the logical consequences
that flow from it fit in harmoniously with our otherwise grounded knowledge’ and James
seems to hold that a belief is true ‘because it is pleasant to believe’.6 Indeed, Peirce antic
ipated and tried to avoid or work through the catalogue of objections set out above (see
Misak 1991). James, on the other hand, tended to merely rail against them, claiming that
they had a ‘fantastic’ and ‘slanderous’ character and were based on wilful misinterpreta
tion (1909 [1914]: xv, 180). Paul Carus captures the general attitude towards James’s
protestations: ‘He seems to be in the habit of sometimes saying what he does not mean
and then blames the world for misunderstanding him’ (1911: 23). Pragmatism struggled,
from this point onward, to shake its unhappy reputation amongst analytic philosophers.
38.5 John Dewey and Logical Empiricism

John Dewey’s long life and working span connected him to both classical pragmatism and
to modern analytic philosophy. He studied with Peirce during Peirce’s brief stint at Johns
Page 11 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

Hopkins and although the logical empiricists arrived in America after Dewey’s retirement
from Columbia in 1929, he actively engaged with them. Although Dewey, on the received
view, is seen as standing against the rising and dangerous tide of analytic philosophy, it is
important to understand that he shared the central concern of the logical empiricists: to
unify all inquiry through the experimental method.
This affinity was fully noticed during the rise of logical empiricism. In 1933, before the
mass immigration of the Vienna Circle, Otto Neurath started The International Encyclope
dia of Unified Science and this, teamed with a set of influential conferences on the unity
of science, was for a long time the official forum for logical empiricism—its ‘organized
contemporary expression’, as Neurath put it (Neurath et al. 1938: 2). Once (p. 1109) the
logical empiricists hit the shores of America, Dewey was immediately seen as a kindred
spirit. He was on the Encyclopedia’s Advisory Committee, he was one of the introducers
of the very first volume of the new series (alongside Otto Neurath, Niels Bohr, Bertrand
Russell, Rudoph Carnap, and Charles Morris), and in 1939 he was the sole author of a
volume—Theory of Valuation—which tried to bring values under the umbrella of science.
One subtle difference between Dewey and the logical empiricists is found in their attitude
towards value. Dewey wanted to find a place for value in the scientific world-view. The
project of the logical empiricists, on the other hand, was to work out the implications of
the scientific world-view, without a prior requirement that a place be held for value. Many
of the logical empiricists thought that the unifying project left little room for value, while
Dewey thought that it left plenty of room. One exception here is Neurath, who, as Alan
Richardson (2008) notes, is remarkably similar to Dewey in thinking that an increasingly
scientized world is one which will be socially progressive.
In Theory of Valuation Dewey argued that value judgements must be understood opera
tionally or in terms of behaviour. Dewey set this scientific account of value against that
favoured by many of the logical empiricists: the boo-hurrah (or as Dewey puts it, ‘ejacula
tory’) theory of value, on which to say that something is good is to applaud it and to say
that something is bad is to say ‘boo-hiss’ to it. On this view, statements about value are
statements about how one feels; they are not candidates for truth, falsity, warranted as
sertion, or rational belief in the way that statements about the world are candidates for
such normative concepts.
This debate, it is important to notice, was a debate within the circle of those who insisted
that value judgements, if they are to be legitimate, must be empirical. While there was
some disagreement between Dewey, Ayer, Neurath, and Carnap on how to conceive of
ethics, the disagreement can be described as interfamilial.7 But as interfamilial relations
often are, this one was tense. Dewey was upset at the logical empiricists sparking what
he saw as the loss of relevance of philosophy. In the 1948 introduction to the new edition
of Reconstruction in Philosophy he bemoaned what he saw as contemporary philosophy’s
concern ‘for the improvement of techniques’ and a ‘withdrawal from the present
scene’ (1920 [1948]: vi–vii).
Page 12 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

As Morton White, an analytic pragmatist who lived through these times, puts it, the 1940s
were marked by polemics in which ‘liberalism, Communism, pragmatism, and positivism
often did battle with each other on political and personal levels’ (1999: 87). The fact that
Dewey was not a technically proficient logician, and yet spoke against the use of logical
techniques, did not help. In Dewey’s hands, pragmatism seemed to be out of step with the
new methods, despite its being in step with the general aims of logical empiricism.
But as logical empiricism modified itself in response to relentless criticism from within
the analytic tradition, it moved closer and closer to adopting the pragmatist epistemology
and account of truth. Neurath’s famous image of inquirers having to (p. 1110) rebuild our
boat of knowledge plank by plank while at sea carries precisely the same message as
Peirce’s central metaphor: that of inquirers walking on a bog, saying only ‘this ground
seems to hold for the present. Here I will stay until it begins to give way’ (CP 5.589,
1898).
Indeed, what gets called the left wing of logical empiricism in the end expressly em
braced the pragmatist account of truth. Hans Hahn says: ‘As against the metaphysical
view that truth consists in an agreement with reality—though this agreement cannot be
established—we advocate the pragmatic view that the truth of a statement consists in its
confirmation’ (1933 [1987]: 43).8 And here is Philipp Frank:
The physicist in his own scientific activity has never employed any other concept
of truth than that of pragmatism. The ‘agreement of thoughts with their object’,
which the school philosophy requires, cannot be established by any concrete ex
periment.… In reality, physicists compare only experiences with other experi
ences. They test the truth of a theory by what it has become customary to call
‘agreements’.
(Frank 1930b [1949]: 101–2)
38.6 Quine: Empiricism, Naturalism, and

Holism
Not only did logical empiricism come very close to pragmatism, but the next major move
in analytic philosophy came even more so. Willard Van Orman Quine arrived at Harvard
in 1930 as a graduate student in philosophy, with a BA in mathematics. Two of his cours
es during his intense graduate introduction to philosophy were taught by C. I. Lewis, the
inheritor of Peirce’s analytic pragmatism. It was here that Quine acquired his introduc
tion to pragmatism (Quine 1990: 292). Indeed, he pretty much adopted his teacher’s
views.9 Quine was never a scholar of texts—he was not, that is, terribly interested in the
history of pragmatist ideas. He told Morton White that reading Josiah Royce was like go
ing through muck. White tried to persuade him otherwise, with no success (White 1999:
121–4). But the naturalized, holist epistemology that Quine was to make famous was tak
en, almost word for word and unacknowledged, from Lewis.10 For his part, Lewis got his
Page 13 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

view straight from Peirce, duly acknowledged. When he arrived at Harvard as a faculty
member in 1920, he ‘practically lived with’ the ‘manuscript remains’ of Peirce for two
years. This massive bulk of papers had been left to Harvard in a state of disarray by
Peirce’s widow and there was some hope that Lewis would start to put them into order
(Lewis 1968: 16). He was already on a Peircean path, guided there by Royce. Lewis came
to the view that (p. 1111) the ‘originality and wealth’ of this ‘legendary figure’ was not ful
ly evident in Peirce’s meagre published writings and not well represented by those who
were influenced by him—James and Royce (1970 [1930c]: 78). It is very clear that he
studied and absorbed these papers closely.
Quine ushered in the next stage in analytic pragmatism. When he first put his position
forward, he was happy placing it firmly in the pragmatist camp. In the abstract of his fa
mous ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, he asserts that one upshot of the paper is ‘a shift to
wards pragmatism’ (1980: 20). He argues that our entire belief system must be seen as
an interconnected web. Mathematics and logic are at the centre, gradually shading into
the theoretical sentences of science, and then to specific observation sentences at the pe
riphery. When faced with recalcitrant experience, we must choose where to make adjust
ments in our web of belief. No sentence is immune from revision. Indeed, it was Quine
who made famous Neurath’s metaphor: we are like sailors adrift at sea, never able to re
turn to dry dock to reconstruct our boat out of the finest materials. We work with what
we have, replacing our boat of knowledge plank by plank, as required by the surprise of
experience. Quine unpacks that metaphor as follows:
The naturalistic philosopher begins his reasoning within the inherited world theo
ry as a going concern. He tentatively believes all of it, but believes also that some
unidentified portions are wrong. He tries to improve, clarify, and understand the
system from within.
(Quine 1981: 28)
Here are two later Quinean pragmatist thoughts:
As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool,

ultimately for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical
objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries
—not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits compa
rable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist,
believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods … But in point of epistemologi
cal footing the physical objects and the gods enter our conceptions only as cultur
al posits. The myth of physical objects is superior to most in that it has proved
more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure
into the flux of experience.
(Quine 1980: 44)
Page 14 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

Philosophically I am bound to Dewey by the naturalism that dominated his last

three decades. With Dewey I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of
the same world that they have to do with, and that they are to be studied in the
same empirical spirit that animates natural science. There is no place for a priori
philosophy.
(Quine 1969: 26)
But Quine’s relationship to pragmatism is complex. He often distances himself from the
position, taking it to be the Jamsesian view that truth is what works for individuals.11
(p. 1112) And as White notes, Quine recoiled from extending his holism, to include ethics
(2002: 53). Quine asserted that ‘apart from a salient marker or two’ one found only ‘un
charted moral wastes’ there (Quine 1987: 5). Much more often than not, Quine declined
to call his position ‘pragmatist’.
38.7 Richard Rorty and the Fortunes of Prag

matism
When Quine abandoned the pragmatist camp, he left the ground wide open to be taken
over by a new Jamesian in the person of Richard Rorty. In the late 1970s and early 1980s
Richard Rorty turned pragmatism away from the analytic Peircean variety that took sci
ence and logic to be important and towards the less analytic Jamesian variety (Rorty
1995: 71). Indeed, Rorty goes farther than James. He argues that if we look at the prac
tices of first-order inquiry, we see that notions of truth and objectivity are irrelevant to in
quirers. What we aim at is not truth, but solidarity or agreement with our peers. Truth
and objectivity are plastic—they are what our peers will let us get away with saying
(1979: 176). What he would like to see is a ‘post-philosophical culture’ in which there are
no appeals to authority of any kind, including appeals to truth and rationality (1982: xlii).
We are to ‘substitute the idea of “unforced agreement” for that of “objectivity”’ in every
domain of inquiry—science as well as morals and politics (1991: 36, 38).
While the young Rorty worked, in sometimes an uneasy way, within analytic philosophy,
by the early 1970s he had become an explicit opponent of it. Analytic philosophy, he ar
gued, had installed itself as the dominant view and it was exiling other genres of philoso
phy, such as pragmatism and the history of philosophy.12 Rorty was not alone in his dislike
for analytic philosophy. The 1960s and 1970s saw a movement of ‘pluralist’ philosophers,
who wanted to see more diversity in the kinds of papers presented at the American Philo
sophical Association meetings and in the kind of hires made in top departments. In 1979
Rorty was president of the Eastern Division of the APA and faced an unheard-of nomina
tion from the floor for his successor. The pluralists had packed the business meeting to
back John E. Smith, a Yale scholar of American pragmatism. There were questions about
the legitimacy of the manoeuvre and about procedural irregularities but in the end Rorty
Page 15 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

declared the election valid. He thus became even more publicly identified with the chal
lenge to the dominance of analytic methods. The episode made the New York Times.13
Rorty also delivered that year’s Presidential Address—‘Pragmatism, Relativism and Irra
tionalism’—calling on philosophers to revisit the American pragmatists. He noted
(p. 1113) that the pragmatists were acknowledged by analytic philosophers for having
made ‘various holistic corrections of the atomistic doctrines of the early logical empiri
cists’ (Rorty 1982: 160). But he argued that what is really going on in Dewey and James is
a wholesale rejection of the aims of analytic philosophy, not an attempt at making it bet
ter. Pragmatists, he argued, urge the abandonment of the ideas of truth and objectivity.
Of course analytic philosophy cannot be identified with the reductionist, foundationalist

philosophy of the early logical empiricists. Rorty does not always make this mistake:
Even at Yale the suspicion was growing that Carnap and Quine might be riding the
wave of the future. So I began looking around for analytic philosophers who were
less reductionistic and less positivisitic than they, less convinced that philosophy
had only recently come of age. This led me to the work of Sellars, whose work I
have spent the rest of my life trying to clear and broaden. Sellars combined a Car
napian style (lots of numbered premises, bedecked with lots of quantifiers) both
with a thorough acquaintance with the history of philosophy and with an exuber
ant metaphysical imagination. That mixture of logic-worship, erudition and ro
mance was reminiscent of Peirce …
(Gross 2008: 312–13)
This is a telling passage. Wilfrid Sellars was very much an analytic pragmatist in the spir
it of Peirce and Lewis.14 Had Rorty stuck more closely to this kind of pragmatism, prag
matism and analytic philosophy would never have seemed to have parted ways. Rorty’s
mark on the history of pragmatism is deeply interesting in that he is almost single-hand
edly responsible for the currently perceived cleavage between analytic philosophy and
pragmatism and for the reintroduction and promotion of the looser, more relativist, prag
matist view. In the 1970s pragmatism became identified with the Rortian–Jamesian posi
tion and it stepped out of the mainstream.
The analytic pragmatism I have traced in this chapter is, however, still alive and well.
These pragmatists continue to emphasize fallible first-order inquiry while arguing that
the fact that standards of objectivity are historically situated (they come into being and
evolve over time) does not detract from their objectivity.15 They include Arthur Fine, Isaac
Levi, Susan Haack, Huw Price, Jeffrey Stout, and, I would argue, Ian Hacking. These
philosophers agree with James that the trail of the human serpent is over everything—
standards of truth and objectivity are our standards. But as James himself did not always
see, this does not toss us into the sea of arbitrariness, where truth varies from person to
person and culture to culture. Nor does it require us to abandon our concepts of truth
and objectivity.
Page 16 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

All pragmatists argue that we are always immersed in a context of inquiry, where the de
cision to be made is a decision about what to believe from here, not what to believe were
we able to start from scratch—from certain infallible foundations. But as Fine (p. 1114)
(2007) puts it, we do not go forward arbitrarily. The central and deep pragmatist question
is how we should go from present practice to a future practice, where our very standards
themselves may be thrown into question. How can we come to genuinely normative con
cepts in science, in mathematics, and in morals, when we have nothing to go on but our
actual practices? That is a question that will never disappear from philosophy and it is the
question that the analytic pragmatists—Wright, Peirce, Lewis, Quine, Sellars, and their
successors—engage with rigour and precision.
References
Ayer, A. J. (1968). The Origins of Pragmatism. London: Macmillan.
Carnap, Rudolf (1937). The Logical Syntax of Language. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Carus, Paul (1911). Truth on Trial: An Exposition of the Nature of Truth. Chicago: Open
Court. Repr. in volume 3 of Shook (2001), pp. 1–143.
Dewey, John (1920 [1948]). Reconstruction in Philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press.
Dewey, John (1939). Theory of Valuation. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science,

vol. II, no. 4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fine, Arthur (2007). ‘Relativism, Pragmatism, and the Practice of Science’. In Misak
(2007), pp. 50–67.
Frank, Philipp (1930a [1949]). Modern Science and Its Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Har
vard University Press.
Frank, Philipp (1930b [1949]). ‘Physical Theories of the 20th Century and School Philoso
phy’. In Frank (1930a [1949]), pp. 90–121.
Gross, Neil (2008). Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Chicago: Uni
versity of Chicago Press.
Hahn, Hans (1933 [1987]). Logik, Mathematik, Naturerkennen. Vienna: Wolf.
James, William (1891 [1979]). ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’. In The Will to
Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, The Works of William James, volume 6,
ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, pp. 141–62.
James, William (1907 [1949]). Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.
New York: Longmans, Green and Co.
Page 17 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

James, William (1909 [1914]). The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism. New York:
Longmans, Green and Co.
Lewis, Clarence Irving (1968). ‘Autobiography’. In Paul Schlipp (ed.), The Philosophy of C.
I. Lewis. La Salle: Open Court, pp. 1–21.
Madden, Edward (1963). Chauncey Wright and the Foundations of Pragmatism. Seattle:
University of Washington Press.
Menand, Louis (2001). The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Misak, Cheryl (1991). Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Misak, Cheryl (ed.) (2007). New Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Misak, Cheryl (ed.) (2008). The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
(p. 1115) Misak, Cheryl (2013). The American Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Misak, Cheryl (forthcoming). Cambridge Pragmatism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moore, G. E. (1907). ‘Professor James’s “Pragmatism”’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian

Society 8: 33–77.
Nagel, Ernest (1940). ‘Charles S. Peirce: Pioneer of Modern Empiricism’, Philosophy of

Science 7(1): 69–80.
Neurath, Otto, Niels Bohr, John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles
Morris (1938). Encyclopedia and Unified Science. International Encyclopedia of Unified
Science, vol. I, no. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Olin, Doris (ed.) (1992). William James’s Pragmatism in Focus. London: Routledge.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931–58). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. I–IV,
ed. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, 1931–35; vols. VII–VIII, ed. A. Burks. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1982). The Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edi
tion, gen. ed. N. Houser. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders Microfilm: Charles S. Peirce Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard
University.
Pratt, James B. (1909). What is Pragmatism? Repr. in volume 1 of Shook (2001), pp. 1–
269.
Page 18 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

Quine, Willard Van Orman (1969). Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Co
lumbia University Press.
Quine, Willard Van Orman (1980). ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’. In Quine, From a Logical
Point of View, 2nd edn. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 20–46.
Quine, Willard Van Orman (1981). ‘The Pragmatist’s Place in Empiricism’. In Robert J.
Mulvaney and Philip M. Zeltner (eds.), Pragmatism: Its Sources and Prospects. Columbia,
SC: University of South Carolina Press, pp. 21–39.
Quine, Willard Van Orman (1987). Quiddities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Quine, Willard Van Orman (1990). ‘Comments on Parsons’. In Roger Gibson and Robert
Barrett (eds.), Perspectives on Quine. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 291–3.
Reisch, George (2005). How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy
Slopes of Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Richardson, Alan (2008). ‘Philosophy of Science in America’. In C. Misak (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of American Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 339–74.
Rorty, Richard (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni
versity Press.
Rorty, Richard (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minneso

ta Press.
Rorty, Richard (1991). Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, volume 1.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard (1995). ‘Response to Richard Bernstein’. In H. J. Saakamp (ed.), Rorty and
Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to his Critics. Nashville: Vanderbilt University
Press, pp. 68–71.
Russell, Bertrand (1966 [1992]). ‘William James’s Conception of Truth’. In Russell, Philo
sophical Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin. Repr. in Olin (1992), pp. 196–211.
Schinz, Albert (1909). Anti-Pragmatism: An Examination into the Respective Rights of In
tellectual Aristocracy and Social Democracy. Boston: Small, Maynard and Company. Repr.
as volume 2 of Shook (2001).
Shook, John R., (ed.) (2001). Early Critics of Pragmatism, 3 vols. Bristol: Thoemmes Con
tinuum.
Soames, Scott (2008). ‘Analytic Philosophy in America’. In C. Misak (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of American Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 449–81.
Thayer, James Bradley (1878 [1971]). Letters of Chauncey Wright: With Some Ac
(p. 1116)
count of his Life. New York: Lennox Hill.
Page 19 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

Uebel, Thomas (2004). ‘Carnap, the Left Vienna Circle and Neopositivist Antimeta
physics’. In S. Awodey and C. Klein (eds.), Carnap Brought Home: The View from Jena.
Chicago: Open Court, pp. 247–77.
White, Morton (1999). A Philosopher’s Story. University Park, PA: University of Pennsylva
nia Press.
White, Morton (2002). A Philosophy of Culture: The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism. Prince
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wiggins, David (2002). ‘An Indefinibilist cum Normative View of Truth and the Marks of
Truth’. In R. Schantz (ed.), What is Truth? Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 316–33.
Wright, Chauncey (1865a). ‘The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer’. In Wright (1877 [1971]),
pp. 43–96.
Wright, Chauncey (1865b). ‘McCosh on Intuitions’. In Wright (1877 [1971]), pp. 329–41.
Wright, Chauncey (1870). ‘Limits of Natural Selection’. In Wright (1877 [1971]), pp. 97–
127.
Wright, Chauncey (1873). ‘John Stuart Mill: A Commemorative Notice’. In Wright (1877
[1971]), pp. 414–28.
Wright, Chauncey (1875). ‘Speculative Dynamics’. In Wright (1877 [1971]), pp. 385–93.
Wright, Chauncey (1877 [1971]). Philosophical Discussions, ed. Charles Eliot Norton.
New York: Burt Franklin.
Notes:
(1) This chapter is a whirlwind tour of an argument I make in The American Pragmatists
(Oxford University Press, 2013).
(2) References to Peirce’s Collected Papers are in standard form: volume number, fol
lowed by paragraph number. Reference to Peirce’s Writings are in the form: volume num
ber, followed by page number.
(3) See CP 5.453, 5.457, 8.208.
(4) Frank Ramsey, another icon of analytic philosophy, made the same objection to
James’s view, and then went on to put forward a pragmatist account of truth that was
very much like Peirce’s (and indeed, was heavily influenced by Peirce). See Misak (forth
coming).
(5) Peirce worried about this set of issues. See Misak (1991) for his careful attempt at re
solving them.
Page 20 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

(6) There are two caveats. The first is that Peirce insisted on a subjunctive formulation: a
belief is true if the logical consequences would fit harmoniously with our otherwise
grounded knowledge, were we to pursue our investigations as far as they could fruitfully
go. The second caveat is that James sometimes put forward a more careful and subtle ac
count of truth, one that was much closer to Peirce’s. He was concerned to characterize
truth as something that was of human value, without making a true belief what this or
that human finds valuable at this or that time. The true, he says, is ‘the expedient’, but
the expedient ‘in the long run and on the whole, of course’ (James 1909 [1914]: vii).
(7) Although Reisch does not use this term, see his (2005: 92).
(8) The translation is Uebel’s (2004).
(9) See Misak (2013) for this argument.
(10) See Misak (2013) for the details.
(11) See, for instance, Quine (1981).
(12) See Gross (2008: 192–8).
(13) 30 December 1979. See Gross (2008: 219–27) for a blow-by-blow account.
(14) See Misak (2013) for this argument.
(15) See the essays collected in Misak (2007).
Cheryl Misak
Cheryl Misak is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. She is the au
thor of Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth (Clarendon Press,
1991, rev. 2004), Verificationism: Its History and Prospects (Routledge, 1995), Truth,
Politics, Morality (Routledge, 2000), and the editor of New Pragmatists (Oxford Uni
versity Press, 2007) and The Cambridge Companion to Peirce (Cambridge University
Press, 2004).
Page 21 of 21
date: 17 May 2020

H F Pragmatismo y F Analítica PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

H F Pragmatismo y F Analítica PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Pragmatism and Analytic Philosophy

Pragmatism and Analytic Philosophy

Print Publication Date: Jun 2013

Abstract and Keywords

38.1 The received View

(Rorty 1995: 70)

date: 17 May 2020

On the James–Rorty understanding of pragmatism, on which truth and objectivity are to

date: 17 May 2020

38.2 Chauncey Wright: Science, Mathematics,

date: 17 May 2020

sensuous verification or by yielding such consequences in conjunction with ideas which

It is indisputable that verification is essential to the completeness of scientific

date: 17 May 2020

38.3 Charles Sanders Peirce: Truth and Inquiry

Peirce shares Wright’s commitment to science and to a kind of verificationist principle.

date: 17 May 2020

date: 17 May 2020

That concept of truth is as follows. A belief is true if it would be ‘indefeasible’; or

date: 17 May 2020

(Nagel 1940: 70)

Nagel points to the antipathy to metaphysical speculation, the emphasis on cooperative

(CP 5.414, 1905)

38.4 William James: Truth and Usefulness

date: 17 May 2020

Two giants of analytic philosophy—Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore—took a kind of glee

date: 17 May 2020

(Russell 1966 [1992]: 201)

(Russell 1966 [1992]: 210)4

date: 17 May 2020

(Pratt 1909: 186–7)

38.5 John Dewey and Logical Empiricism

date: 17 May 2020

date: 17 May 2020

(Frank 1930b [1949]: 101–2)

38.6 Quine: Empiricism, Naturalism, and

date: 17 May 2020

(Quine 1981: 28)

Here are two later Quinean pragmatist thoughts:

As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool,

(Quine 1980: 44)

date: 17 May 2020

Philosophically I am bound to Dewey by the naturalism that dominated his last

(Quine 1969: 26)

38.7 Richard Rorty and the Fortunes of Prag­

date: 17 May 2020

Of course analytic philosophy cannot be identified with the reductionist, foundationalist

(Gross 2008: 312–13)

date: 17 May 2020

Dewey, John (1920 [1948]). Reconstruction in Philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press.

Dewey, John (1939). Theory of Valuation. International Encyclopedia of Unified Science,

Hahn, Hans (1933 [1987]). Logik, Mathematik, Naturerkennen. Vienna: Wolf.

date: 17 May 2020

Misak, Cheryl (forthcoming). Cambridge Pragmatism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Moore, G. E. (1907). ‘Professor James’s “Pragmatism”’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian

Nagel, Ernest (1940). ‘Charles S. Peirce: Pioneer of Modern Empiricism’, Philosophy of

date: 17 May 2020

Rorty, Richard (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minneso­

count of his Life. New York: Lennox Hill.

date: 17 May 2020

(3) See CP 5.453, 5.457, 8.208.

date: 17 May 2020

(8) The translation is Uebel’s (2004).

38.7 Richard Rorty and the Fortunes of Prag

Rorty, Richard (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minneso