Neopragmatism, sometimes called post-Deweyan pragmatism,
[Pragmatism – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
/ref> linguistic pragmatism, or analytic pragmatism, is the philosophical tradition that infers that the meaning of words is a result of how they are used, rather than the objects they represent.
The ''Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy'' (2004) defines "neo-pragmatism" as "A postmodern
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of moderni ...
version of pragmatism developed by the American philosopher Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and in contemporary analytic phi ...
and drawing inspiration from authors such as John Dewey
John Dewey (; October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the f ...
, Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th centur ...
, Wilfrid Sellars
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (May 20, 1912 – July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism, who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States".
Life and career
His father ...
, W. V. O. Quine W. may refer to:
* SoHo (Australian TV channel) (previously W.), an Australian pay television channel
* ''W.'' (film), a 2008 American biographical drama film based on the life of George W. Bush
* "W.", the fifth track from Codeine's 1992 EP ''Bar ...
, and Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida (; ; born Jackie Élie Derrida; See also . 15 July 1930 – 9 October 2004) was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in numerous texts, and which was developed t ...
". It is a contemporary term for a philosophy which reintroduces many concepts from pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. ...
. While traditional pragmatism focuses on experience, Rorty centers on language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
. The self is regarded as a "centerless web of beliefs and desires".
It repudiates the notions of universal truth, epistemological foundationalism, representationalism, and epistemic objectivity. It is a nominalist
In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. There are at least two main versions of nominalism. One version denies the existence of universalsthings th ...
approach that denies that natural kind
"Natural kind" is an intellectual grouping, or categorizing of things, in a manner that is reflective of the actual world and not just human interests. Some treat it as a classification identifying some structure of truth and reality that exists wh ...
s and linguistic entities have substantive ontological implications. Rorty denies that the subject-matter of the human sciences can be studied in the same ways as we study the natural sciences.
It has been associated with a variety of other thinkers including Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam (; July 31, 1926 – March 13, 2016) was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions ...
,[ W. V. O. Quine,][ and Donald Davidson,][ though none of these figures have called themselves "neopragmatists". The following contemporary philosophers are also often considered to be neopragmatists: ]Nicholas Rescher
Nicholas Rescher (; ; born 15 July 1928) is a German-American philosopher, polymath, and author, who has been a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh since 1961. He is chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science and was for ...
(a proponent of methodological pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. ...
and pragmatic idealism), Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas (, ; ; born 18 June 1929) is a German social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.
Associated with the Frankfurt School, Habermas's wor ...
, Susan Haack
Susan Haack (born 1945) is a distinguished professor in the humanities, Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, professor of philosophy, and professor of law at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.
Haack has written on logic, ...
, Robert Brandom
Robert Boyce Brandom (born March 13, 1950) is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, and his academic output manifests both sys ...
, and Cornel West
Cornel Ronald West (born June 2, 1953) is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, actor, and public intellectual. The grandson of a Baptist minister, West focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and ...
.[
]
Background
"Anglo-analytic" influences
Neopragmatists, particularly Rorty and Putnam, draw on the ideas of classical pragmatists such as Charles Sanders Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce ( ; September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism".
Educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for t ...
, William James
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher, historian, and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States.
James is considered to be a leading thinker of the lat ...
, and John Dewey
John Dewey (; October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the f ...
. Putnam, in ''Words and Life'' (1994) enumerates the ideas in the classical pragmatist tradition, which newer pragmatists find most compelling. To paraphrase Putnam:
#Complete skepticism (the notion that a belief in philosophical skepticism requires as much justification as other beliefs);
#Fallibilism
Originally, fallibilism (from Medieval Latin: ''fallibilis'', "liable to err") is the philosophical principle that Proposition, propositions can be accepted even though they cannot be conclusively proven or Justification (epistemology), justifie ...
(the view that there are no metaphysical guarantees against the need to revise a belief);
#Antidualism about "facts" and "values";
#That practice, properly construed, is primary in philosophy. (WL 152)
Neopragmatism is distinguished from classical pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. ...
(the pragmatism of James, Dewey, Pierce, and Mead) primarily due to the influence of the linguistic turn
The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relations between language, langua ...
in philosophy that occurred in the early and mid-twentieth century. The linguistic turn in philosophy reduced talk of mind, ideas, and the world to language and the world. Philosophers stopped talking about the ideas or concepts one may have present in one's mind and started talking about the "mental language" and terms used to employ these concepts. In the early twentieth century philosophers of language (e.g. A.J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore) thought that analyzing language would bring about the arrival of meaning, objectivity, and ultimately, truth concerning external reality. In this tradition, it was thought that truth was obtained when linguistic terms stood in a proper correspondence relation to non-linguistic objects (this can be called "representationalism
In the philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, the question of direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, is the debate over the nature of conscious experience;Lehar, Steve. (2000)The Function of Consc ...
"). The thought was that in order for a statement or proposition to be true it must give facts which correspond to what is actually present in reality. This is called the correspondence theory of truth
In metaphysics and philosophy of language, the correspondence theory of truth states that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world and whether it accurately describes (i.e., corresponds with) that world ...
and is to be distinguished from a neo-pragmatic conception of truth.
There were many philosophical inquiries during the mid-twentieth century which began to undermine the legitimacy of the methodology of the early Anglo-analytic philosophers of language. W. V. O. Quine in ''Word and Object'', originally published in 1960, attacked the notion of our concepts having any strong correspondence to reality. Quine argued for ontological relativity which attacked the idea that language could ever describe or paint a purely non-subjective picture of reality. More specifically, ontological relativity is the thesis that the things we believe to exist in the world are wholly dependent on our subjective, "mental languages". A 'mental language' is simply the way words which denote concepts in our minds are mapped to objects in the world.
Quine's argument for ontological relativity is roughly as follows:
# All ideas and perceptions concerning reality are given to our minds in terms of our own mental language.
# Mental languages specify how objects in the world are to be constructed from our sense data.
# Different mental languages will specify different ontologies (different objects existing in the world).
# There is no way to perfectly translate between two different mental languages; there will always be several, consistent ways in which the terms in each language can be mapped onto the other.
# Reality apart from our perceptions of it can be thought of as constituting a true, object language, that is, the language which specifies how things ''actually are''.
# There is no difference in translating between two mental languages and translating between the object language of reality and one's own mental language.
# Therefore, just as there is no objective way of translating between two mental languages (no one-to-one mapping of terms in one to terms in the other) there is no way of objectively translating (or fitting) the true, object language of reality into our own mental language.
# And therefore, there are many ontologies (possibly an infinite number) that can be consistently held to represent reality.
(see Chapter 2, in ''Word and Object'').
The above argument is reminiscent of the theme in neopragmatism against the picture theory of language
The picture theory of language, also known as the picture theory of meaning, is a theory of linguistic reference and meaning articulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus''. Wittgenstein suggested that a meaningful pro ...
, the idea that the goal of inquiry is to represent reality correctly with one's language.
A second critically influential philosopher to the neo-pragmatist is Thomas Kuhn who argued that our languages for representing reality, or what he called "paradigms", are only as good as they produce possible future experiments and observations. Kuhn, being a philosopher of science, argued in ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' that "scientific progress" was a kind of a misnomer; for Kuhn, we make progress in science whenever we throw off old scientific paradigms with their associated concepts and methods in favor of new paradigms which offer novel experiments to be done and new scientific ontologies. For Kuhn 'electrons' exist just so much as they are useful in providing us with novel experiments which will allow us to uncover more about the new paradigm we have adopted. Kuhn believes that different paradigms posit different things to exist in the world and are therefore incommensurable with each other. Another way of viewing this is that paradigms describe new languages, which allow us to describe the world in new ways. Kuhn was a fallibilist; he believed that all scientific paradigms (e.g. classical Newtonian mechanics, Einsteinian relativity) should be assumed to be, on the whole, false but good for a time as they give scientists new ideas to play around with. Kuhn's fallibilism
Originally, fallibilism (from Medieval Latin: ''fallibilis'', "liable to err") is the philosophical principle that Proposition, propositions can be accepted even though they cannot be conclusively proven or Justification (epistemology), justifie ...
, holism
Holism () is the idea that various systems (e.g. physical, biological, social) should be viewed as wholes, not merely as a collection of parts. The term "holism" was coined by Jan Smuts in his 1926 book ''Holism and Evolution''."holism, n." OED Onl ...
, emphasis on incommensurability, and ideas concerning objective reality are themes which often show up in neopragmatist writings.
Wilfrid Sellars argued against foundationalist justification in epistemology and was therefore also highly influential to the neopragmatists, especially Rorty.
"Continental" influences
Philosophers such as Derrida and Heidegger and their views on language have been highly influential to neopragmatist thinkers like Richard Rorty. Rorty has also emphasised the value of "historicist" or "genealogical" methods of philosophy typified by Continental thinkers such as Foucault.
Wittgenstein and language games
The "later" Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considere ...
in the ''Philosophical Investigations'' argues contrary to his earlier views in the ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'' that the role of language is not to describe reality but rather to perform certain actions in communities. The language-game
A language-game (german: Sprachspiel) is a philosophical concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, referring to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven. Wittgenstein argued that a word or even a sentence h ...
is the concept Wittgenstein used to emphasize this. Wittgenstein believed roughly that:
# Languages are used to obtain certain ends within communities.
# Each language has its own set of rules and objects to which it refers.
# Just as board games have rules guiding what moves may be made so do languages within communities where the moves to be made within a language game are the types of objects that may be talked about intelligibly.
# Two people participating in two different language-games cannot be said to communicate in any relevant way.
Many of the themes found in Wittgenstein are found in neopragmatism. Wittgenstein's emphasis of the importance of "use" in language to accomplish communal goals and the problems associated with trying to communicate between two different language games finds much traction in neopragmatist writings.
Richard Rorty and anti-representationalism
Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and in contemporary analytic phi ...
was influenced by James, Dewey, Sellars, Quine, Kuhn, Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Heidegger. He found common implications in the writings of many of these philosophers, as he believed that these philosophers were all in one way or another trying to hit on the thesis that our language does not represent things in reality in any relevant way. Rather than situating our language in ways in order to get things right or correct Rorty says in the Introduction to the first volume of his philosophical papers that we should believe that beliefs are only habits with which we use to react and adapt to the world. To Rorty getting things right as they are "in themselves" is useless if not downright meaningless.
In 1995, Rorty wrote: "I linguisticize as many pre-linguistic-turn philosophers as I can, in order to read them as prophets of the utopia in which all metaphysical problems have been dissolved, and religion and science have yielded their place to poetry." This "linguistic turn" strategy aims to avoid what Rorty sees as the essentialisms ("truth," "reality," "experience") still extant in classical pragmatism. Rorty wrote: "Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United Sta ...
, thanks to its concentration on language, was able to defend certain crucial pragmatist theses better than James and Dewey themselves. ..By focusing our attention on the relation between language and the rest of the world rather than between experience and nature, post-positivistic analytic philosophy was able to make a more radical break with the philosophical tradition."[''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 21, no. 1 ''(Winter 1985).]
Distinguished from idealism and epistemic relativism
One way to understand the motivation and themes of the neopragmatist is to understand how neopragmatism (and pragmatism in general) distinguishes itself from both idealism
In philosophy, the term idealism identifies and describes metaphysical perspectives which assert that reality is indistinguishable and inseparable from perception and understanding; that reality is a mental construct closely connected to ide ...
and relativism. Neopragmatism is to be distinguished from idealism primarily in the fact that it does not, like idealism, believe that what is actually in the world is affected in any way by what individuals believe concerning it. Neopragmatism holds to the doctrine of a mind-independent reality while simultaneously maintaining that this world is not knowable in the classical Cartesian Cartesian means of or relating to the French philosopher René Descartes—from his Latinized name ''Cartesius''. It may refer to:
Mathematics
*Cartesian closed category, a closed category in category theory
*Cartesian coordinate system, modern ...
sense of the word "know". The neopragmatist views mind-independent reality to causally influence people's minds but whatever way that influence may be on the individual mind is up to the individual. Neopragmatism is to be distinguished from epistemic relativism
Factual relativism (also called epistemic relativism, epistemological relativism, alethic relativism or cognitive relativism) argues that truth itself is relative. This form of relativism has its own particular problem, regardless of whether one i ...
on the force of the idea that in order to be an epistemic relativist one must be concerned about getting one's ideas "right" in relation to reality. The neopragmatist thesis views this to be a concern which is of no use and therefore is to be discarded. Neopragmatists hold that it makes no sense to talk about getting reality right due to the fact that this adds no utility to do so. The neopragmatist is concerned with developing beliefs and habits which allow one to adapt to one's environment with success rather than generating pictures used in order to describe reality. Since neopragmatism lacks any concern for generating descriptive pictures of reality the whole question of epistemic relativism is meaningless.
See also
* Conceptual pragmatism
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality. Pr ...
* Confirmation holism
In philosophy of science, confirmation holism, also called epistemological holism, is the view that no individual statement can be confirmed or disconfirmed by an empirical test, but rather that only a set of statements (a whole theory) can be so. ...
* Constructivist epistemology
Constructivism is a view in the philosophy of science that maintains that scientific knowledge is constructed by the scientific community, which seeks to measure and construct models of the natural world. According to the constructivist, natura ...
* Direct and indirect realism
In the philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, the question of direct or naïve realism, as opposed to indirect or representational realism, is the debate over the nature of Consciousness, conscious Qualia, experience;Lehar, Steve. (200 ...
* Fallibilism
Originally, fallibilism (from Medieval Latin: ''fallibilis'', "liable to err") is the philosophical principle that Proposition, propositions can be accepted even though they cannot be conclusively proven or Justification (epistemology), justifie ...
* Linguistic turn
The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relations between language, langua ...
* Ontological pluralism Pluralism is a term used in philosophy, meaning "doctrine of multiplicity," often used in opposition to monism ("doctrine of unity") and dualism ("doctrine of duality"). The term has different meanings in metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and log ...
* ''Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
''Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature'' is a 1979 book by the American philosopher Richard Rorty, in which the author attempts to dissolve modern philosophical problems instead of solving them by presenting them as pseudo-problems that only exist ...
'', the foundational text of the tradition[
* ]Postanalytic philosophy
Postanalytic philosophy describes a detachment from the mainstream philosophical movement of analytic philosophy, which is the predominant school of thought in English-speaking countries. The ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' defines the mo ...
Notes
References
* Hylton, Peter, "Willard van Orman Quine", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .
Further reading
*
*
External links
Neo-pragmatist Philosophy of Education
{{Philosophy topics
Epistemological theories
Pragmatism
Metatheory