New Perspectives on Pragmatism and Analytic Philosophy

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON PRAGMATISM AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY

VIBS Volume 228 Robert Ginsberg Founding Editor Leonidas Donskis Executive Editor Associate Editors G. John M. Abbarno George Allan Gerhold K. Becker Raymond Angelo Belliotti Kenneth A. Bryson C. Stephen Byrum Robert A. Delfino Rem B. Edwards Malcolm D. Evans Roland Faber Andrew Fitz-Gibbon Francesc Forn i Argimon Daniel B. Gallagher William C. Gay Dane R. Gordon J. Everet Green Heta Aleksandra Gylling Matti Häyry Brian G. Henning

Steven V. Hicks Richard T. Hull Michael Krausz Olli Loukola Mark Letteri Vincent L. Luizzi Adrianne McEvoy J.D. Mininger Peter A. Redpath Arleen L. F. Salles John R. Shook Eddy Souffrant Tuija Takala Emil Višňovský Anne Waters James R. Watson John R. Welch Thomas Woods

a volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values SPV Harvey Cormier , Editor

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON PRAGMATISM AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY

Edited by

Rosa M. Calcaterra

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Cover Photo: www.dreamstime.com Cover Design: Studio Pollmann The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3321-4 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011 Printed in the Netherlands

Studies in Pragmatism and Values SPV Other Titles in SPV John Shook. Pragmatism: An Annotated Bibliography, 1898-1940. 1998. VIBS 66 Phyllis Chiasson. Peirce’s Pragmatism: A Dialogue for Educators. 2001. VIBS 107 Paul C. Bube and Jeffrey L. Geller, eds. Conversations with Pragmatism: A Multi-Disciplinary Study. 2002. VIBS 129 Richard Rumana. Richard Rorty: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Literature. 2002. VIBS 130 Guy Debrock, ed. Process Pragmatism: Essays on a Quiet Philosophical Revolution. 2003. VIBS 137 John Ryder and Emil Višňovský, eds. Pragmatism and Values: The Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume One. 2004. VIBS 152 John Ryder and Krystyna Wilkoszewska, eds. Deconstruction and Reconstruction: The Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Two. 2004. VIBS 156 Arthur Efron. Experiencing Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Deweyan Account. 2005. VIBS 162 Leszek Koczanowicz and Beth J. Singer, eds. Frederic R. Kellogg and Łukasz Nysler, Assistant Eds. Democracy and the Post-Totalitarian Experience. 2005. VIBS 167 Sami Pihlström. Pragmatic Moral Realism: Pragmatic Moral Realism. 2005. VIBS 171 John Ryder and Gert-Rüdiger Wegmarshaus, eds. Education for a Democratic Society: Central European Pragmatist Forum. Volume Three. 2007. VIBS 179 Michael Taylor, Helmut Schreier, and Paulo Ghiraldelli, Jr. Pragmatism, Education, and Children: International Philosophical Perspectives. 2008. VIBS 192 Hugh P. McDonald. Creative Actualization: A Meliorist Theory of Values. 2011. VIBS 224

CONTENTS

Foreword by Harvey Cormier

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Introduction by Rosa M. Calcaterra

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Acknowledgements

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ONE

Allowing Our Practices to Speak for Themselves: Wittgenstein, Peirce, and Their Intersecting Lineages Vincent Colapietro 1 1. Introduction 1 2. Trying to Understand Our Entanglement in Rules (Our Locus in Practice) 2 3. What’s the Use of Calling Wittgenstein a Pragmatist? 6 4. A Step Back to View the Larger Context 11 5. The Philosophical Recovery of the Everyday World/The Mundane Reorientation of Philosophical Investigation 12 6. Conclusion 15

TWO

Beyond Scientism Mario De Caro 1. Introduction 2. Scientism, Anti-naturalism, and Pragmatism 3. The Features of Scientific Naturalism 4. The Scientistic Character of Scientific Naturalism 5. Some Criticisms of Scientific Naturalism 6. The Premises of Scientific Naturalism Again

21 21 22 24 27 28 30

The Entanglement of Ethics and Logic in Peirce’s Pragmatism Rossella Fabbrichesi

35

Indiana James Maurizio Ferraris 1. Are Popes Infallible? 2. Transatlantic Truth 3. Pacific Truth

45 45 46 49

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

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SEVEN

4. The Automatic Sweetheart 5. The Sun and The Moon

53 55

Action and Representation in Peirce’s Pragmatism Nathan Houser

61

Semiotics and Epistemology: The Pragmatic Ground of Communication Ivo Assad Ibri 1. Introduction 2. A Realistic View of Semiotics 3. Semiotics and Pragmatism 4. Conclusion

71 71 71 75 79

Wittgenstein, Dewey, and Peirce on Ethics Giovanni Maddalena

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EIGHT

Different Pragmatist Reactions to Analytic Philosophy Michele Marsonet 101

NINE

Pragmatism and Intention-in-Action John McDowell

119

Pragmatism as Anti-Representationalism? Eva Picardi 1. Introduction 2. Metaphors We Steer By 3. Inferentialism vs. Representationalism 4. “A sentence says just one thing.”

129 129 131 135 139

TEN

About the Contributors

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Index

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EDITORIAL FOREWORD If we judge by recently published anthologies, this is the era of “new” figures in philosophy. There is a new Nietzsche, who is not just another late Romantic but who challenges the language and thought of onto-theology; a new Husserl, who is not merely a semantic theorist of intentionality and the life world but who also develops a doctrine of non-fictional, Nietzsche-proof, transcendental subjectivity; a new Wittgenstein, who makes not a simple journey from realism to anti-realism but a complex transit from one way of ruling out metaphysical nonsense to another; and, now, perhaps inevitably, there are the new pragmatists, who see truth not as a mere relative matter of whatever we in our culture happen to let each other say but as a connection between our thoughts or words and objective reality. New pragmatism is not to be confused with neopragmatism; in fact, the latter philosophy is the nemesis of the “new” pragmatists. The new pragmatism sets out specifically to challenge the evidently idealistic and relativistic view that “there is only the conversation.” The neopragmatist way of understanding truth, thinking, and reality seems to leave humanity tossing in a sea of arbitrariness, with no real grounds for real criticism of what anyone might actually do or say. The pragmatic revisionists try to restore the possibility of criticism by putting us back in touch with the world beyond thought and language. They set out to locate more objective understandings of truth in the work of the historical pragmatists, and they make their own new arguments in favor of attention to “how things are, anyway” and “getting things right.” Much if not quite all of the work in the present volume fits under the heading of “new” pragmatism. As these essays connect pragmatism with philosophical analysis and its history, they show that pragmatists and analytic thinkers alike have argued for the importance of using logic to deal with philosophical problems, tried to explain scientific method, and offered explanations the idea of the real. The pragmatists have emphasized action in connection with knowledge, and they have emphasized the role of values in our understanding of logical truth and scientific facts, but this has not been either a cause or an effect of Protagorean relativism. Instead, the pragmatists have challenged the idea, present at the birth of analytic philosophy, that facts and truth are real while values are merely emotional and relative. That tenet of logical positivism has fallen by the wayside as analytic philosophy has developed more sophisticated things to say about both science and morality, and, over the course of the last half of the twentieth century, some analytic thinkers have found pragmatism to be more of a complement and less of a competitor.

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The work in this book will help thinkers in both pragmatic and analytic camps understand and constructively criticize both traditions, and it will help pave the way for future cooperation among thinkers in two of the most productive schools of contemporary philosophical thought.

Harvey Cormier Editor, Studies in Pragmatism and Values

INTRODUCTION Rosa M. Calcaterra The lively presence of pragmatist doctrines in early 20th-century international debate, their subsequent slow and apparently inexorable decline, and their recent revival are intertwined with the fate of other currents of thought that have marked the revision of traditional philosophical systems. This volume aims to clarify the most recent developments in this process, focusing on the key theoretical issues in the revival of salient themes in the classic tradition of American philosophy within the context of analytical thought. It will also pinpoint the differences and interactions between these two forms of speculation that, for some time, mutually disregarded one another. The essays in this volume are largely based on the papers presented at the international conference “Pragmatismo e filosofia analitica. Differenze e interazioni,” held in Rome in March 2005, with the participation of the Center for American Studies in Rome, the American Embassy in Italy, Roma Tre University and the Presidency of the Lazio Region. The wide-ranging discussion between the speakers and the audience at this event evinced a lively interest in the themes considered. It also demonstrated both the current tendency of analytical philosophers to define the historical context of their methods of investigation and the commitment of scholars of pragmatism to clarifying the originality and theoretical depth of its canonical works. The pragmatist tradition dominated the American academic scene until the 1930s, when the different strands of analytical philosophy began to develop, introduced by scholars linked to the Vienna Circle – Reichenbach, Carnap, Hempel, Tarski, Neurath and others – who were forced to leave Europe for political reasons. As Richard Bernstein has noted, this period saw the beginnings of a sort of “silent revolution,” which over the space of a few years led to the exclusion of pragmatism from the higher levels of philosophical debate. The project for a “scientific philosophy,” upheld by those who had imported logical neopositivism from Europe, was warmly welcomed in pragmatist circles and occasioned a lively debate which led to the International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science initiative, promoted by John Dewey and Charles Morris. However, the view soon spread that the pragmatists, despite having anticipated the criterion of the verifiability of meaning on which neopositivist thought depended, lacked logical and epistemological rigor. Their works were considered a sort of prehistory of American philosophy, which became increasingly technical and specialized. In Europe, despite the scathing critiques of influential academics like Bertrand Russell, Francis H. Bradley, George E. Moore, Benedetto Croce, and

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of Giovanni Gentile, pragmatism remained a vital presence during the first two decades of the twentieth century. It offered an alternative to neoHegelianism, to positivist philosophy, and to the various forms of neocriticism of Kantian derivation. The subsequent establishment of new currents of thought – phenomenology, Marxism, hermeneutics – led to the near disappearance of pragmatism. Nevertheless, pragmatism returned, especially in Italy, during the aftermath of the First World War, becoming a reference point for liberal democratic laicism. During this phase, attention was devoted almost exclusively to Dewey, and to his commitment to politics and pedagogy, while other pragmatists were mostly ignored by European intellectuals. Indeed, the criticism of the academic establishment at the beginning of the century had led to pragmatism as a whole being widely discredited, and the movement continued to lose ground following some new and extremely harsh critiques. I refer especially to György Lukács who, in his important 1954 work, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, labelled pragmatism as the philosophy of American imperialism, and to the brief but incisive judgements expressed by Heidegger, Horkheimer, and Adorno, who spread the conviction that pragmatist attitudes represented a style of thought wilfully divorced of any principles beyond those of utility and success “here and now.” Towards the end of the 1960s, the judgements of these authors were sidelined and, through the controversies about the “modern” and the “postmodern” inspired by their works, the theoretical legacy of Peirce, James, Mead, and Dewey began to affect the formulation of the new problems of practical philosophy. During the same period, analytical philosophers consolidated their tendency to question the neopositivist epistemological paradigm. Within this critical movement, the references to pragmatism in Quine’s The Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951) allowed for the modification of a series of standard notions in logical neoempiricism. The interaction of pragmatist ideas with the development of “post-positivist” analytical philosophy and the practical philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century has to do with the contemporary problem of determining if and how a constructivist viewpoint can be reconciled with the relativist mentality generated by the crisis of traditional models of rationality. These interactions are often extremely muted (sometimes only recognizable by those who are familiar with classic pragmatist texts) precisely because they form part of the complex range of themes brought into play in philosophical debate. In other words, the “pragmatic turn,” now generally attributed to epistemology and practical philosophy, consists of a way of tackling current problems that leads to the re-emergence of some of pragmatism’s typical concerns. However, this takes the form of a multiplicity of reinterpretations dictated by the interests and theoretical standpoints of individual authors, who generally do not intend to repropose one of the specific doctrines developed within this movement. In any case, there are now

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numerous forms of neopragmatism which sometimes differ profoundly but which nonetheless demonstrate the vitality of a movement that from its origins was characterized by a variety of aspects and directions. The current tendency to abuse the term “pragmatism” aside, in technical debate this word retains its original meaning of a philosophical method tailored to specific theoretical aims. Examples of such aims are: to overcome the various forms of dogmatism that run through the history of Western thought; to construct a concept of rationality able to incorporate Darwinism in order to challenge philosophies based on the notion of consciousness as the autonomous “essence” of cognitive activity, morality, and human experience in general; to assert the processual, social, and potentially fallible nature of every knowledge. The convergence of these aims with the pragmatist concept of action, according to which this constitutes a precise reference point for recognizing the interconnection between rational and empirical knowledge factors, led to a philosophical alternative to traditional empiricism and ration-alism. More importantly, the concept of action served to critique traditional foundationalism and reconstruct the notion of “foundation” through an approach to the concepts of knowledge, truth, and objectivity that emphasises the variety of their constitutive factors – including specific theoretical and methodological choices, all preconstituted beliefs, logical-semantic presuppositions, and more or less explicit metaphysical outlooks. The view of classical pragmatists that our cognitive practices can be debated in a way that may lead us to abandon one or more of the propositions that derive from them – a frequent occurrence in the history of scientific research – does not imply a rejection of the ideas of truth and objectivity themselves. On the contrary, their works suggest that truth and objectivity cannot be conceived in terms of the absolute while defending the indispensable function played by these notions in the various fields of knowledge as well as in the concrete nature of our interactions with the physical world and with other human beings.1 The authors who have contributed to this volume bring new developments and historiographical analyses to bear on the main issues raised by this new season of pragmatism. I will therefore give a brief overview of its best-known protagonists in order to provide a basic theoretical background to the individual essays. These together form a multi-voiced conversation that signals a common interest in cultivating the ethical and social significance of philosophical thought. The “pragmatic turn” in contemporary thought has particularly emphasised this aspect, finding paradigmatic expression in the practical philosophy of Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel. These two philosophers have developed a pragmatic version of the theme of normativity that has become an effective tool for challenging the scepticism and relativism that have accompanied twentieth-century criticism of traditional philosophical systems. The theme of normativity is hotly debated in current analytical

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philosophy, and the pragmatic approach of some parts of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and especially On Certainty, has given rise to interpretations of this theme that share much with the anti-sceptical aims of Apel and Habermas.2 Unlike most theorists of post-modernity, Apel and Habermas do not deny the principle of the universality of moral norms, and attempt instead to reconstruct it through an analysis of communicative processes. This reconstruction is inspired by Kantian ethical rationalism and the pragmatist attempt to uphold the regulatory function of the concepts of truth and objectivity. Seen in this light, a return to pragmatism signifies gathering up the threads of the Enlightenment project of a philosophical foundation for ethics and exploiting the shift from subjectivity to the epistemological paradigm of intersubjectivity which signals the continuity between pragmatist philosophers and the “linguistic turn” in twentieth-century thought. More precisely, it means setting aside the idea of individual consciousness in favour of notions of “linguistic subject” and “communicative action” in order to define the conditions under which rational arguments are possible and the criteria for their objective validity in science and ethics. The outcome of this program is a new functionalism that relies on a consensus theory of truth, emphasizing the performative dimension of discourse rather than its prepositional content. The hypothesis of an “ideal communicative situation,” one free of external restrictions on the logic of discursive communication (which requires the participants in discourse to enjoy equal opportunities to arrive at an intersubjective consensus) has led to a reevaluation of the Kantian transcendental approach to the problem of rationality. Apel has proposed that this approach be applied systematically, developing a “pragmatictranscendental” foundation for ethics. According to him, the aim is to continue Pierce’s transformation of Kantian transcendental philosophy into a “transcendental semiotics”; indeed, the notion of the “unlimited community of rational argumentation” upon which Apel’s “universal pragmatics” hinges refers expressly to Pierce.3 The transcendental course embarked upon by Apel has met with more criticism than consensus within the neopragmatist movement, and even Habermas has gradually distanced himself, preferring an increasingly historicist approach to the justification of ethical norms, which seems more in keeping with the overall approach of the pragmatists. However, the fact remains that Apel and Habermas have placed the analysis of the pragmatic aspects of language at the center of their own interests. This parallels an important branch of analytical philosophy developed in the second half of the twentieth century at Oxford and in the United States: the philosophy of ordinary language of authors such as John Austin and John Searle. Like the two German philosophers, theorists of ordinary language analyze utterances not in themselves but as “acts” produced by the speakers; in this case, however, it would be excessive to speak of

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pragmatist influences. By contrast, there is currently considerable effort to locate the problems of meaning and interpretation within the framework of a “linguistic pragmatism” that, adopting suggestions by Richard Rorty, draws on the “late” Wittgenstein and the anti-Platonist line taken by Willard Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, and Donald Davidson.4 Returning to Habermas, we should remember that, even before Apel, he clarified the linguistic component of the logic in Pierce’s research in his Erkenntnis und Interesse (1968), which laid the groundwork for his own “theory of communicative action.” Later, by contrast, he revived Mead’s intuitions regarding the pragmatic matrix of communication – its role in the evolution of moral norms and the processes of democratization of political life. Specifically, Habermas credits Mead with developing the basic theoretical concepts of the ethics of communication, in other words, the notions of “universal discourse” and the “formal ideal of linguistic comprehension.” Above all, for Habermas, Mead’s importance lies in having clarified that rationally motivated comprehension is not merely a requirement of practical reason, but rather is incorporated into the reproduction of social life, and in having demonstrated the link between the spread of democratic ideas and the transformation of the criteria legitimating the modern state.5 The project of a discursive theory of democracy and law, which Habermas continues to develop alongside his universalist ethics, brings to the fore some characteristic traits of pragmatism, as we can see, for example, in his analysis of the relationship between the contemporary state of affairs and modernity’s Enlightenment roots.6 Above all, there are echoes of the pragmatist concept of action as an exemplary dimension of the unity of logical-formal and empirical-material factors in human experience in his insistence on the need to overcome the binary schemes inherited by continental European thought from Cartesian philosophy. In the context of social and political philosophy, this entails recognizing that action does not tolerate a dualism of material interests and values; values are incorporated within the rational dimension of action and they govern strategies for the fulfilment of material interests. More generally, this recognition is linked to the contemporary awareness of the “imperfect” nature of rationality and entails the need – also expressed by the “noncausalist” analytical theories of action – to conceive of the justification of rational action in terms of a double explanatory code: one that concerns the objective limitations, potentialities, and responsibilities of each individual, and also concerns the beliefs, projects, and imperatives deriving from his or her existence as a social subject.7 The tendency to translate the concept of “foundation” into “justification” also forms an integral part of the thought of Hilary Putnam, which represents a milestone in recent interactions between pragmatism and analytical philosophy. Unlike Rorty, who should be credited with a major contribution in refocusing attention on classic pragmatists, Putnam believes

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that Pierce, Dewey, and James developed a decontextualized philosophical terrain on the basis of which it is possible to contain the attacks of contemporary thought on the bastions of traditional foundationalism. Specifically, they provided the conceptual tools with that give the democratic ideas of tolerance and pluralism an epistemological justification, safeguarding them from the sceptical implications of ethical and religious relativism, while avoiding the trap of moral authoritarianism. At the same time, their works made it possible to establish normative criteria for scientific enquiry, while avoiding the dogmatic pretensions of apriorism. Consequently, he defends a constructivist perspective, drawing on the pragmatists’ affirmation of the fallibility of theoretical acquisitions and their faith in the possibility of constructing logical and behavioral habits corroborated by the intersubjective agreement of reasoning on experience. Putnam’s promotion of an epistemology capable of avoiding the classic opposition between realism and anti-realism includes the conception of truth as a limiting concept, both of the linguistic-conceptual schemes that we ordinarily use and the logical and empirical procedures of scientific research. The presupposition of a progressive move towards factual reality is thus a fundamental normative principle of our speech. Renouncing this presupposition leads to a relativism inconsistent with the actual execution of our logical-semantic functions. This is one of the main theses of the “internal realism” developed in Putnam’s works published between 1975 and 1991, where he stresses the ability of scientific research to achieve “genuine” knowledge that is “justified” both by its technical application and by the resolution of theoretical discrepancies enabled by the development of the individual sciences and their interactions.8 Putnam’s appeal to pragmatism to challenge the puzzles of the realism/antirealism dichotomy gradually takes the shape of a dialogic conception of rationality that combines individual responsibility and the concept of community, naturalism and the relational approach to the problem of epistemic intermediaries, and finally the dimension of facts and that of values. The latter aspect is sanctioned by Putnam’s recent work, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (2002), which explicitly refers to the importance of the challenge launched by classic pragmatists on a conceptual opposition whose roots lie in Hume’s empiricism and which, through the Kantian distinction between synthetic and analytic judgements, has become established to the point of becoming a genuine cliché. Indeed, the entanglement of facts and values is one of pragmatism’s fundamental strengths, and Putnam understands that this also holds true for Pierce, often considered a champion of the separation of science from ethics, in other words of that separation of judgements of fact from judgements of value insisted on by neopositivists. In his commentary on the first of the “Cambridge Lectures” held by Peirce in 1898, dedicated to precisely this problem, he observes that although Peirce’s conclusions were in line with the

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common tendency of his time to propose a classification of the sciences on the basis of distinctions between their methods and objectives, Peirce’s classificatory effort “was based on deeper principles than the classification” and that ultimately, “Peirce burst the frame of the culture that produced him.”9 Putnam also rightly observes that the classification of the sciences is something that has essentially disappeared from the intellectual scene today. However, it is evident that the clarification of epistemic and methodological distinctions is anything but obsolete, and he himself strives to demolish the dichotomy between the logic of facts and that of values. If this means we must set aside “architectonic” intentions, we should reconsider Peirce’s discourse on the intimate relationship between the normative sciences (ethics, logic, aesthetics), if for no other reason than to draw from it ideas for developing what he termed “concrete rationality.” The anti-dichotomic stance of the pragmatists has been widely underscored by its interpreters, and Rorty uses it as a point of reference for transferring fundamental philosophical terms – objective, subjective, internal, external, nature, spirit, fact, value – from the paradigm of foundationalist epistemology to that of hermeneutic-historicist philosophy. The arguments between Putnam and Rorty have led to a wide-ranging debate on their interpretations of pragmatism, which produced and continues to produce important results on the historiographical level, and also for the reconstruction of the shift from neopositivist to post-positivist analytical epistemology. However, from the standpoint of theory, to ask which of the two is the most faithful interpreter of the classic tradition of American philosophy is an irrelevant question. What is important is the fact that the different interpretative paths taken by Rorty and Putnam reflect not only two different ways of understanding the task of philosophical reflection, but also many of the current divergences in the formulation of the classic problems of epistemology, such as those of truth, the relationship between perceptions and judgements, between the mind and the body, between socio-cultural and natural aspects of human interactions with reality, and finally the relationship between ethics and logic. The essays in this volume demonstrate that the texts of Peirce and his companions, directed against Descartes andKantian transcendentalism, and developing Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the nascent scientific psychology in a wholly original way, help usto answer the questions which today’s philosophy has inherited from traditional epistemology. However, this means that it is above all necessary to determine to what extent the problems of the past can be translated into those of today, bearing in mind that the paths indicated by the pragmatists for the reformulation of philosophical research – especially to break with dichotomies and false dilemmas, such as subjective/objective, epistemic/ethical, empirical/rational, internal/external – have in the meantime both encountered new obstacles and developed in new directions.

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Seen in this light, Rorty’s conviction that reevaluating pragmatism is equivalent to building a bridge between analytical and “continental” philosophers can also be understood as an invitation to make different viewpoints interact, without necessarily having to depart radically from our gnoseological tradition. I refer especially to the possibility of interpreting the continuity and divergences between the pragmatists, Kant, and Hegel with the tools of analytical philosophy, in order to tackle the theme of epistemic intermediaries which lies at the heart of the debate between naturalists and anti-naturalists, realists and anti-realists. Rorty’s “historicist nominalism” rightly abandons the idea that tertia play a representationalist role of the Cartesian or Lockian type. However, we may ask ourselves, for example, if reflection on language really requires us to choose between Rorty’s inferentialism and the representationalism of thinkers like Ramsey and Fodor; and in any case, if a systematic theory of meaning is superfluous if we wish to understand the cognitive aspects of language as a tool for reflection and communication. Furthermore, the socio-linguistic world, on which Rortian neopragmatism focuses, may also include a principle of correspondence with reality, without which it would be difficult to recognize the objective limitations of our operative possibilities and our cognitive goals. In more general terms, it remains to be seen whether taking cultural history as the determining factor in the evolution of our conceptual schemes suffices to resolve the problem of deciding whether logical capacities are the result of biological evolution or the autonomy of human intelligence. Recent analytical philosophy has employed sophisticated forms of naturalism (computationalism, supervenience, eliminativism, extensionalism) that fail to answer many questions regarding specifically human abilities, normativity, and the social and moral aspects of our logical and practical skills. If we read the texts of classic pragmatists with care, we will regard the argument between naturalists and anti-naturalists as an improvident conflict between science and philosophy, one that Rorty has not mitigated with his statements of their common nature as “creative” activities. The naturalist vein running through the works of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead maintains the distinction between science and philosophy, recalling the need to establish a synergy between philosophical and scientific research on human beings. This should take the form of a theoretical dialogue that exploits the potential of both philosophy and science for increasing our knowledge of the relevant phenomena and thus for implementing a plurality of ways of tackling the various problems facing us. Above all, these authors should be credited with having left open the question of the relationship between the physical and mental, avoiding absolutist metaphysical choices – both of the spiritualist and the materialist type – which risk compromising the concrete difficulty of the problems and needs that constitute our individual and social lives. Rorty’s wavering between naturalism and historicism nonetheless recalls us to the task of verifying the notion of sociality so dear to the “old”

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pragmatists, opposed to all rigidly reductionist principles and facile Darwininan criteria, with the confirmation that this notion is currently achieving in the field of neuroscience. This implies careful reflection on the role of intersubjectivity with respect to our ability to interact successfully with the world around us. As such, while admitting that “truth” is not a purely objective entity or metaphysical concept, is it sufficient to think that there are no extra-linguistic criteria or ends, as Rorty suggests? In this context, it is worth noting that Quine, Davidson, and Sellars, authors on whom Rortian neopragmatism draws to suggest an interaction between post-positivist analytical philosophy, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer, do not abandon the realist criterion, but rather reformulate in an attempt to overcome the conflict between empiricism and logicism. In other words, we can agree with Rorty in seeing in Quine, Sellars, and Davidson the allies of classic pragmatists, but for different reasons. Quine’s famous challenge to the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions touched on a key point in pragmatist philosophy: the assertion of interference between the logical dimension and the empirical dimension. Furthermore, we can find in Peirce, Dewey, and Clarence Irving Lewis – one of Quine’s teachers – the principle according to which the analysis of scientific propositions must be undertaken considering the theoretical and empirical context of individual statements. This implies that the truth and meaning of scientific propositions cannot be reduced to so-called sense-data–and also that the set of empirical and logical evidence used on any given occasion to justify a theory cannot be taken as definitive proof of its truth. Although Quine thus restated the anti-dualist and fallibilist attitude of classic pragmatists, he nevertheless did not abandon the conviction that the experience of events was a sure, albeit complex, way of knowing something of their reality. Similarly, Sellars’s attacks on the “myth of the given,” which adopted the epistemological criterion of intersubjectivity on which Pierce had based his logical “socialism,” did not imply a conventionalist or antirepresentationalist conception of truth. On the contrary, he stated that scientific propositions are “interpretative” representations of reality, and that they are true exactly insofar as they manage to transfer the non-linguistic into linguistic form. Finally, Davidson’s coherentism includes, as he himself notes, a sophisticated form of correspondentism, in other words a correspondence between beliefs and reality without direct comparison. His rebuttal of what he calls “the third dogma of empiricism,”–the distinction between “conceptual scheme” and “empirical content”– does not stop him from repeating, in his theory of “triangulation,” that the concepts of truth and objectivity gain substance in intersubjective communication, which presupposes that human beings share at least the basic ways of receiving experiential data and reacting to physical stimuli. Finally, pragmatism and analytical philosophy have marked the entire development of twentieth-century North American philosophical culture, and

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this volume aims to represent a moment of reflection on the unfolding of the dialogue between these two lines of thought that has taken place in recent decades. Studies are currently underway on little-known philosophers who acted as intermediaries between American realism and the logical empiricism imported from Europe. This will show that the latter was not extraneous to the American cultural context and will also renew the ties between realism and pragmatism. Perhaps this will allow us to avoid pragmatism’s becoming too rapidly placed in opposition to the original aims of analytical philosophy, and to understand that its history reflects the typical pattern followed by the evolution of philosophical ideas. That is to say, the fact that this is essentially a history of questions and attempts to answer them that, in turn, open up new questions that may lead to the reappearance of needs or suggestions previously set aside.

NOTES 1. For a philological reconstruction of these aspects, see Rosa Calcaterra, Pragmatismo: i valori dell’esperienza. Letture di Peirce, James e Mead (Rome: Carocci, 2003). 2. See Normatività fatti valori, ed. R. Egidi, M. De Caro, M. Dell’Utri (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2003). 3. K. O. Apel, Trasformation der Philosophie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1973); K.O. Apel, Der Denkweg von Charles S. Peirce (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975). See also his essay C.S. Peirce and the Post–Tarskian problem of an Adequate Explication of the Meaning of Truth: Towards a Trascendental– Pragmatic Theory of Truth, in The Relevance of Charles Peirce, ed. E. Freeman (La Salle: The Monist Library of Philosophy, 1983). 4. See R. B. Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 5. J. Habermas, Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns vol. II (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1981). See also J. Habermas, The Paradigm Shift in Mead, in Philosophy, Social Theory, and The Thought of G. H. Mead, ed. M. Abulafia (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991). 6. J. Habermas, Faktizität und Geltung. Beitrage zur Diskurstheorie des recht und des demokratischen Rechsstats (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992). 7. See for example G. H. von Wright’s neo–Wittgensteinian theory of action, a reconstruction of which can be found in R. Egidi, “Von Wright and “Dantes’s Dream”: Stages in a Philosophical Pilgrim’s Progress,” in In Search of a New Humanism. The Philosophy of Georg Henrick von Wright, ed R. Egidi (Dordrecht–Boston–London: Kluver Academic Publishers, 1999). 8. See in particular H. Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 232–51 and pp. 217–31. 9. Reasoning and the Logic of Things, ed. H. Putnam & Kenneth L. Ketner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A good number of these essays were prepared for the international conference “Pragmatismo e filosofia analitica. Differenze e interazioni,” held, at the Center for American Studies in Rome in March 2005, while several others stem from the extensive debate that took place in that occasion. Particular thanks go to the American Embassy in Italy, which offered most part of the financial support to the Conference, as well as to the Presidency of Lazio Region and to the Center for American Studies in Rome, expecially to its director Karim Mezran, both of which generously contributed to the success of the event. I also thank the Department of Philosophy of Roma Tre University for the support to the publication of this volume. I am very grateful to Nicolas Leon for his copy-editing. He has been very helpful in improving the texts and always very kind in discussing his suggestions with the authors. I wish to express my gratitude to Harvey Cormier, the editor of Rodopi, to Giovanni Maddalena for his continuous encouragement and sound advices, and to Maria Luisi for indexing this book. Permission given by Quodlibet publisher to reprint some of the essays previously appeared in the book “Pragmatismo e filosofia analitica. Differenze e interazioni” (2006) is gratefully acknowledged.

One ALLOWING OUR PRACTICES TO SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES: WITTGENSTEIN, PEIRCE, AND THEIR INTERSECTING LINEAGES Vincent Colapietro

1. Introduction Ludwig Wittgenstein explicitly denies that he is a pragmatist and, in turn, many contemporary pragmatists strenuously resist the possibility that the affinities between the later Wittgenstein and the classical pragmatists are anything but superficial. More than anything else, the question of quietism seems to mark, from the perspective of such pragmatists, a difference that makes a decisive and fundamental difference. Wittgenstein insists: “Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.”1 He adds: “It leaves everything as it is.”2 In contrast, William James (a thinker who influenced Wittgenstein) asserts: The really vital question for us is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights.3 For James, then, the truly central question is, What are we going to make of our lives and thus of the world in which we are destined to live our lives? For Wittgenstein, the question does not seem to concern the self in its relationship to the world, in the same sense as that preoccupying the pragmatists. But it unquestionably concerns just this relationship, though in a way in which issues of patience and forbearance, the acceptance of finitude and discipline of self, are more prominent than those of melioration and reparation, the reconstruction of institutions and remaking of our practices. The purpose of this paper is obliquely to consider the self in relationship to the world by directly considering questions about practice (thus, ones about our engagement in, indebtedness to, and estrangement from the practices in and through which human lives acquire their singular shapes).

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This is done in reference to the later Wittgenstein and the classical pragmatists. That is, our concern is with the practical (or pragmatic) meaning of practice, as this meaning is illuminated by Wittgenstein and pragmatism. The clarification of this meaning carries implications for how we ought to conceive, most likely reconceive, the self in its relationship to the world. It also carries implications for how the philosophical recovery of the everyday world of human experience might be accomplished and, of greater urgency, why it must be undertaken. Such recovery both enjoins an acceptance of our finitude and underwrites certain struggles against the actual limits of our inherited worlds. It takes seriously the possibility that human consciousness is, at bottom, exilic consciousness, that human identity is, especially in our epoch, “diasporic identity.”4 But it does so in ways refusing to succumb to the persistent pressure of a largely unacknowledged romanticism, especially that form of romanticism rooted in the quite local ideal of a rootless cosmopolitanism. Such a recovery takes local attachments and actual place, historical contingencies and natural habitats, with utmost seriousness. In the end, part of the answer to the question, “What’s the use of calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist?” is bound up with the vital contribution of the later Wittgenstein to the pragmatic clarification of questions concerning human practices (thus, ones concerning human identity and involvement), questions unquestionably central to pragmatism. The danger of losing the distinctive voice of this singular philosopher by identifying him too closely with pragmatism is offset by the greater risk of failing to clarify adequately, by eschewing his guidance and example, the pragmatic meaning of human practices. One way to examine the relationship between analytic philosophy and American pragmatism is to explore the intersecting lineages of Peirce and Wittgenstein in reference to a pivotal issue (one central in both lineages), for the purpose of addressing this question.5 The question of practice – in truth, a cluster of questions – is especially promising in this respect. 2. Trying to Understand Our Entanglement in Rules (Our Locus in Practice) In On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein observes: “Not only rules, but also examples are needed for establishing a practice.”6 While human practices are governed and indeed defined by constitutive and other kinds of rules, they are not so tightly and completely bound by rules that their institution, maintenance, and indeed revision are solely or even mainly explicable in reference to following rules. Emphasis upon the rule-governed character of human practices, thus, should not be confused with the formalist dream of identifying a finite set of explicit rules underlying the only apparently messy affair of historically evolved and evolving practices. These practices rather are inherently and irreducibly messy and improvisational. Indeed, they might be best described as occasions and resources for improvisations. At any rate,

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practices are exemplified as much, if not more, than regulated: arguably, the dramatic, exemplary performances of competent practitioners are primary, while codifiable, explicit rules are at most secondary.7 Of course, most of the constitutive rules of any human practice are made manifest and attractive by such performances: rules, but also much else, are explained, justified, and learned through exemplification. In reference to human practices, then, the importance of constitutive rules cannot be gainsaid, but the status, character, and operation of these rules is open to a host of questions. Immediately after observing that examples along with rules are needed to establish a practice, Wittgenstein adds: “Our rules leave loop-holes open, and the practice has to speak for itself.”8 The seemingly rudimentary level of human activity which he is willing to accord the status of practice is made clear by the example he himself gives of the point just made: “We do not learn the practice of making empirical judgments by learning rules; we are taught judgments [Urteile] and their connexion with other judgments. A totality [Ein Ganzes] is made plausible to us.”9 Judging whether sugar is sweet, the position of the table is alterable, or the dog is fearsome is a practice or, possibly, a family of practices. We learn to make empirical judgments not in an atomistic fashion (“we are taught judgments and their connexion with other judgments”), but in an expansive context.10 Learning to make such judgments is the initiation into a situated, social practice; for the learner, the context of initiation is a narrowly bounded one, but very quickly the context becomes as the direct result of more effectively integrated competencies an expansive one. Moreover, such judgments are not so much taught as learned by us in reaction to the warnings, corrections, and explanations of others. Though one can learn on one’s own (that is, without teachers), the circumstances on which I am focusing here are ones in which “teachers” are present, thus, ones in which learning and teaching are correlative activities. Hence, when I stress such judgments are not so much taught as learned, I am simply emphasizing the agency of the learner, though in practical response to environing conditions (including the intelligent interventions of other human agents and the unexpected outcomes of the unwitting learner’s own physical engagements – the attempt to hold the flame in her fingers or to move the table with the whole of one’s body).11 They are spontaneously made by irrepressibly active organisms and continuously corrected or modified as a consequence of the objections prompted by our exertions (both the objections of other human beings – for example, “Don’t touch the stove!” – and those emanating directly from the object itself – for example, the experience being burned).12 That is, we as situated actors (or implicated agents) are taught by other persons and indeed also by physical objects the immediately practical meaning of our own exertions and the judgments embodied in these strivings (for example, the judgment that what is delightful to sight must also be delightful to touch).13 Under the tutelage of other persons and things, then, we as spontaneous actors learn to make empirical judgments.

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These judgments are not made in isolation from one another or from the circumstances in which desires, fears, and other impulses are continuously operative. These judgments are not only made by agents but also ordinarily take the form of action (the child reaching to touch the dancing flame of a candle is, in the act of reaching to touch this flame, in effect judging). Running away from the dog is, in itself (that is, apart from any verbal articulation or conscious attribution), a somatic, affective judgment: running away is itself a judgment. What are given are hence not disjoined data requiring an intelligent synthesis. What is given is rather life, though not in any amorphous, abstract sense. That is, what is given is life in a structured, concrete sense – a form of life more or less recognizably human or, at least, intelligible to humans14 “What has to be accepted, the given is – so one could say – forms of life [Lebensformen].”16 In the context of a Lebensform, we learn to make empirical judgments under the direct tutelage of respondent others, a sign that all of our learning assumes the structure of a dialogue (an ongoing give-andtake between self and the world in which the self is situated and indeed implicated). The capacity to make such judgments is, as already noted, accorded by Wittgenstein the status of a practice. Because the rules by which our practices are partly defined “leave loop-holes open,” we must grant our practices opportunities to speak for themselves (“die Praxis muß für sich selbst sprechen”).17 In his way, Wittgenstein is committed to a form of investigation in which practices are granted such opportunities, while the pragmatists in their somewhat different way are no less committed to just this task. Thus, one way in which to bring into focus their affinities and differences is to consider how Wittgenstein on the one side and the pragmatists on the other provide in their writings for such opportunities. It might be objected that these philosophers are speaking for the practices under consideration rather than allowing for the practices to speak for themselves. But their speaking is acknowledged on both sides as a mode of action.18 Moreover, it is undertaken ultimately for the sake of facilitating other modes of action and engagement, ones not requiring a justification by appeal to anything outside of these activities or engagements. These ungrounded ways of acting thus turn out to be self-grounded affairs. But Wittgenstein’s insistence upon practices speaking for themselves might be taken in a somewhat narrow sense, meaning only that the weight and authority of a practice, apart from what has been or even what can be explained in reference to rules, be granted their due. His remark might however be taken in a wider sense, one implying the primacy and (in a sense) also the ultimacy of practice. This sense is, arguably, warranted by other passages in the writings of the later Wittgenstein, most notably, a famous text on which much ink has been spilled and around which important debates have turned.19

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In Philosophical Investigations, he notes, “‘How am I am to obey a rule?’ – if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do.”20 The most appropriate form of this question concerns how I as an agent am justified in proceeding as I do (where the manner of proceeding is interwoven with rules and principles to which I am disposed to appeal in my attempt to justify myself). If the question is framed in terms of agential justification rather than causal explanation, and furthermore if the agent has exhausted the process of justification, then s/he has “reached bedrock,” and that agent’s “spade is turned.” At this point, the actor is likely inclined to say, “This is simply what I do.”21 In a parallel text in On Certainty, Wittgenstein stresses, “As if giving grounds did not come to an end sometime. But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting.”22 Allowing our practices to speak for themselves might thus be taken to mean resolutely resisting the impulse to articulate in a systematic form the theoretical grounds justifying a given practice. If anything is self-grounded, it would seem to be practice; if anything is grounded in affairs (pragma) other than itself, it would appear to be theory. The practice of theory has, with Wittgenstein, evolved to the point where the theory of practice, in its historically regnant form, is called into question: insofar as the theory of practice takes the form of a theoretical justification of our allegedly otherwise unjustifiable practices, its value is at best dubious. The justification of a practice is entirely or overwhelmingly immanent. In our attempts to call into the legitimacy or efficacy of a practice, we too infrequently question the limits and bases of our acts of interrogation and criticism, our relationship to that which we are questioning. The later Wittgenstein in his way and the classical pragmatists in theirs are attempting to block certain modes of interrogation, ones continuing the transcendental tradition in Western philosophy, in order to render criticism effective and humane, not impossible. This is less clear in the case of Wittgenstein, for the reason noted at the outset of this paper (his insistence that philosophy “leaves everything as it is”). But, in his later thought, Wittgenstein assembles reminders and offers descriptions often for a polemical purpose.23 Whatever else philosophy might leave as it is, it in its therapeutic efficacy does not leave unaltered the self in relationship to the world – or the everyday world as denigrated in traditional philosophy. The linguistic turn as taken by the later Wittgenstein was a pragmatic turn, an explicit turn toward human practices in their irreducible heterogeneity. Still, just as it was not either solely or even narrowly linguistic, it was not crudely or even avowedly pragmatic (or pragmatist). In On Certainty, he acknowledged: “So I am trying to say something that sounds like pragmatism.” But then he immediately added: “Here I am being thwarted by a kind of Weltanschauung.”24 “The work of the philosopher consists,” Wittgenstein suggests, “in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.”25 In his later thought, he

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assembled reminders principally for therapeutic and clarificatory purposes, but typically in a polemical context. His reminders and descriptions were integral parts of a philosophical argument against the dominant traditions in Western philosophy, at least insofar as their cumulative effect underwrites a dehumanizing disparagement of the everyday world of human experience. In brief, they were part of a polemic. If the critical purposes, the polemical character, of Wittgenstein’s recollections, descriptions, and indeed acknowledgments go themselves unacknowledged, we miss the force and meaning of his writings. In general, the pragmatic character of philosophical reflection is nowhere more evident than in the critical attention given by philosophers to the rival purposes structuring any actual scene of human striving. In his later thought, Wittgenstein was tireless in underscoring the unavoidably agonistic dimension of human endeavor and also the irreducible heterogeneity of human practices. Moreover, the agonistic character of his philosophical reflections – the aversive and self-aversive thrust of the dialogues of this haunted genius – demands explicit recognition. More than this, its centrality must be acknowledged. 3. What’s the Use of Calling Wittgenstein a Pragmatist? In an insightful and forceful essay entitled “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?,” Stanley Cavell argues that assimilating Emerson too completely to the tradition of pragmatism can only result in the deeply impoverishing loss of Emerson’s distinctive voice in American culture. We might push our investigation forward by asking, “What’s the use (or purpose) of calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist?” And we might pose this question with the warning of Cavell vis-à-vis Emerson clearly in mind (calling Emerson a pragmatist would entail the loss of a voice typically speaking at crosspurposes from, say, the voice of Dewey’s instrumentalism). Even so, there might be various justifications for calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist, though with explicit and indeed emphatic qualification. One compelling reason does not concern the categorization of Wittgenstein at all but rather the destabilizing of pragmatism especially as it was articulated by Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, and Lewis. This categorization is destabilizing because Wittgenstein returns to pragmatism a lesson he either learned from James or had corroborated by the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience – the irreducible heterogeneity of human practices. 26 Another weighty reason for calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist is that his decisive break with the Kantian tradition of transcendental justification is in the spirit, though ordinarily not in the style, the of the break by the pragmatists with this tradition.27 He bids us to jettison our demand for transcendental certainty and to return to the solidity of the rough ground. His account of the locus, authority, and function of norms and ideals is, thus, akin to that of the pragmatists. Our inherited practices and their immanent

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transformations are sufficient unto our highest aspirations and deepest convictions. It is however not enough simply to return to the rough ground. We need to find our way around the vast, varied terrain of heterogeneous, yet intersecting practices. “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.”28 It seems to me significant that Wittgenstein used the same metaphor, as did Peirce. The later Wittgenstein and the classical pragmatists insisted, again and again, upon returning to the rough ground. Moreover, they engaged in mapping the rough ground of the everyday world for the diverse purposes animating their strikingly different yet arguably overlapping projects. This point can most convincingly be made in reference to Wittgenstein and Peirce.29 “The relations between these concepts form a landscape which language presents us with in countless fragments; piecing them together is too hard for me. I can make only a very imperfect job of it.”30 “I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.”31 This is related to the signature form of his later work, a point made explicitly about Philosophical Investigations: The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination. – And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction. – The philosophical remarks in which book are … a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings.32 In a number of late manuscripts, Peirce allows his reader the first word – he even gives his reader a formal title: Reader Loquitur.33 MS 598 is an example of this, since it opens with this challenge: “The author,’ the reader will properly remark, ‘professes to have something to say. Before I listen to him, I want to know, in a general way, what it is he has to tell me.’”34 Peirce’s reply to his imaginary reader might be considered to echo the striking passages just quoted from Wittgenstein’s later writings, were it not written first. The author replies: Of course, I have something to say to you, but I have nothing to tell you. I invite you to journey with me over a land of thought which is already more or less known to you [emphasis added]. It is a land where I have sojourned long, and I wish to point out objects for you yourself to see, some of which, I am pretty sure, have hitherto escaped your attention. I promise you they shall be interesting in themselves, and also that they shall be such as shall concern the interests in which you

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Allowing Our Practices to Speak for Themselves are already engaged to know better than you do. It will be important that you keep an itinerary as we go along, and be aware of just where we find each object that concerns us. Otherwise we should bring back from our journey nothing but vague and confused ideas. We must keep something of a log-book of all the courses and distances of our travels … [and] we want, in the first[,] to settle just where our starting-point is.35

But in calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist are we not taking his words out of context, twisting his purposes to our own, and simply distorting him beyond recognition? We always mean something other and more than we meant to mean (Hegel): at any given instant, we cannot grasp the full import of even our most seemingly ordinary assertions: How could human behaviour be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an individual action (on a single occasion), but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see any action.36 That human practices are narrow enclosures affording no effective criteria for transformative criticism suggests the undetected influence of a captivating picture.37 When however we turn around in the room from which are seeking to escape and at last see a door from which to exit this enclosure (one “that has been open all the time!”), we realize our practices are not prisons, but modes of being in the everyday world in all of its humanly sustaining and yet ultimately ungrounded significance.38 In a sense, our lives are abysmal (nothing grounds them but our inheritance, our form of life as gift): nothing stands under us but the earth(!) in its ceaseless movement, our cultural inheritances in their cosmic fragility but human solidity. In the end, the appeal is always to ungrounded practices, not selfwarranting cognitions.39 But the practice of justifying ourselves, in particular, ourselves in reference to a mode of comportment, is an integral part of virtually every human practice. That justification comes to an end, and that it does so often (if not always) in the mood of exhaustion40 – in the willingness to confess, after having spent ourselves in an efforts at justification, “This is simply what I am disposed to do” – signals Wittgenstein’s deepest affinity to, and most basic disagreement with, American pragmatism.41 Allowing our practices to speak for themselves entails eschewing the traditional forms of theoretical justification; it involves, moreover, embracing the immanent yet unrealized possibilities constitutive of any recognizable human practice.42 Human beings are improvisational actors, truly creative agents, not despite but because of the human practices of which they are the ordinarily all too

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ungrateful inheritors. The gratitude for, and loyalty to, this inheritance is not typically registered as a characteristic of any Weltanschauung identified as pragmatist (“So I am trying to say something that sounds like pragmatism, etc”).43 Traditions are not tools we can pick up and put down at will. “Tradition is not,” as Wittgenstein insists, “something a man can learn; not a thread he can pick up when he feels like it; any more than a man can chose his ancestors.”44 One reason, then, for calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist would be to remind ourselves of our definitive indebtedness to our inescapable inheritance, a reminder formulated here principally for the purpose of prompting us to confess our ingratitude. But, in a sense, we do choose our ancestors (for example, Wittgenstein rather than Peirce – or Wittgenstein and Peirce), though only in the largely unacknowledged context of our unchosen inheritance. “Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgment.”45 We might add: fallibilism is at every turn based on contrition (hence, Peirce’s apt expression “contrite fallibilism”).46 Accordingly, allowing our practices to speak for themselves requires of us a degree and forms of acknowledgment and confession not ordinarily associated with pragmatism.47 But our identification with experimental inquiry and democratic deliberation precisely as self-corrective practices, not theoretically justified by any appeal to transcendent grounds but practically inseparable from our identity as human beings, demands of us a willingness to acknowledge the ungrounded or, perhaps better put, self-grounded character of these practices.48 Our ability to go on and even merely our hope to be able to go on in a manner allowing ourselves to see ourselves as the progeny of, say, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein depend upon criteria, rules, and arguably most of all exemplars. “I can” and “we have done.” What we are most in danger of losing when we call Wittgenstein a pragmatist is the therapeutic, self-aversive cast of his later philosophy.49 What we are best in position to attain by identifying him with this tradition is nothing less than a reconstruction of the tradition that is defined by, as much as anything else, its commitment to reconstruction. We do well to honor the irreducible heterogeneity of human traditions and, thus, to acknowledge but also to challenge Wittgenstein’s deliberate efforts to distance himself from the pragmatist Weltanschauung. We should take him at his word and, thereby, avoid risking the loss of his distinctively therapeutic, self-aversive approach to philosophical reflection. But we should also allow his own self-aversive practice of philosophical reflection to speak for itself, to resound in ways not entirely in his control. Even when we do, however, the emphasis on the selfcorrective, melioristic cast of American pragmatist is hardly discernible here. The narrow limits within which human melioration is likely to be effective, rather than counterproductive, needed to be acknowledged, though not as a counsel of despair but rather as an acceptance of our finitude. The pragmatic tradition no less than analytic philosophy was inaugurated by the self-conscious impulse to be the master of our meanings,

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to clarify our words and other signs sufficient for the purposes for which these linguistic and other signs are being employed.50 The purposes for which human agents use ordinary language and other symbolic inheritances are more various and tangled than even Wittgenstein appreciated, as is the degree of mastery over our meanings far more limited than even Peirce acknowledged, who after all did not hesitate to ascribe life to words and other signs.51 “Every sign by itself,” Wittgenstein suggests, “seems dead. What gives it life? – In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there? – Or is the use its life?”52 Signs in use, signs as integral to the countless practices observable in the natural world, display features characteristic of living beings, such characteristics as self-replication, self-reparation, migration, and mutation. They require a minimally hospitable habitat; in addition, they undergo continuous stress and strain, but still maintain recognizable forms for an extended duration. They are generated as well as generative. What gives the texts of Wittgenstein and the pragmatists life is, above all, the uses to which they have been and might yet be put, the purposes for which they were adapted and the ones for which they might be modified to serve or, at least, to serve better than they have to this date. Allowing our practices to speak for themselves encompasses allowing the signs out of which they are partly constituted to replicate, migrate, and mutant even more robustly than they have so far. In turn, nurturing signs in this way calls for the skills and sensitivity of a gardener or farmer, a metaphor to which both Peirce and Wittgenstein were drawn. “Ideas too,” Wittgenstein notes, “fall from the tree before they are ripe.”53 He also contends: “Thinking too has a time for ploughing and a time for gathering the harvest.”54 “There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.”55 Words and other signs, in their actual use, inevitably migrate and mutant. The reminders assembled by Wittgenstein for therapeutic, selfaversive purposes, as well as the hypotheses articulated by the pragmatists for melioristic, self-corrective ones, are no exception. Calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist promises to assist us in reconstructing the tradition of pragmatism, while doing so in a deliberately hesitant, strictly qualified, manner helps us to discern the narrow limits in which even our most effective meliorations ordinarily take place, also the depth of our implication in, and thus identification with, a wide range of largely unacknowledged inheritances. There is, indeed, nothing unequivocal or monolithic about the intellectual tradition known as American pragmatism; rather, this tradition is one in which its adherents are self-consciously celebrating the multiplicity of voices, also the plurality of perspectives, at its center. Hence, the inclusion of yet another dissonant, self-critical voice – even one as radically dissonant and as aversely self-critical as that of Wittgenstein – should be welcome by pragmatists. He would be here, as he was everywhere else (in his hut in Norway no less than his chambers at Cambridge, in his role as a schoolteacher in a village in Austria as his engagement as an architect in the city of Vienna), the

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insider/outsider. We must take him at his word, but then we must also take the measure of his words as he could never do, if only because their patterns of migration and mutation extend beyond the limits of his physical existence and even the control of his unquestionable genius. We must take him at his word: he was explicit about his relationship to pragmatism. Yet we must trace the trajectory of his words beyond what he consciously meant, for they drive in the direction of affirming the primacy and ultimacy of human practices in their irreducible heterogeneity. Moreover, they do so in a tone at times harmonious with the one audible in the texts of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead, but at other, more numerous occasions quite at odds with the tone in these texts.56 The human face of the community of inquirers is a motley association of companionable antagonists. The depth of Wittgenstein’s antagonism toward pragmatism makes his companionship worthy of courting, especially given his painstaking attention to a range of human practices.

4. A Step Back to View the Larger Context Let us not smudge differences, not deny differences that make a difference. The progeny of Peirce and those of Wittgenstein form quite distinct lineages. But the family resemblances among some of the more prominent progeny in these two lineages (that is, the resemblances across lineages) suggest both the possibility of previous liaisons (however secret) and the prospects of future intermingling. Though clarity has been a defining ideal of both analytic philosophy and American pragmatism, purity (especially purity of pedigree) has not. Intellectual purity, propriety, and respectability have been of far greater concern to analytic than to pragmatist philosophers. For several decades, these operate to preclude the philosophical discussion of, for example, a broad range of questions in normative ethics and political philosophy itself. Historically, the scandal of analytic philosophy has been the tendency of analysts to ignore important dimensions of human experience, because these do not fit into the dominant paradigms of analytic debate.57 But, over time, the field of experience canvassed by pragmatism (one inclusive of religion no less than science, art no less than politics, history no less than truth, substantive consideration of questions in normative ethics no less than extensive analysis of myriad issues pertaining to human culture) has, more or less in its entirely, come to define the proper domain of analytic philosophy. The best work in this field now bears remarkable affinities to pragmatism: Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Robert Brandom, Ruth Millikan. With the later Wittgenstein, the linguistic turn was already a pragmatic turn, a turn toward human practices in their irreducible heterogeneity.58 With the most recent developments in analytic philosophy (and by this I mean those in the last three or so decades), the pragmatic drift of analytic philosophy has been

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celebrated by Bernstein and Rorty while being declaimed by Davidson and Dummett. Also, with current developments in the pragmatist tradition (Haack, Margolis, Shook, & Lekan), there is additional evidence of a rapprochement between the two traditions. For institutional, cultural, and other reasons, the progeny of Peirce and that of Russell and Moore, Carnap and Ayer, Wittgenstein and Austin, are almost certainly going to remain largely distinct lineages. The largely unacknowledged ideal of a rational, uncoerced consensus periodically consolidating itself in the ongoing course of philosophical disputes is, however, one that deserves to be not only acknowledged but also criticized. The same kind of consideration that prompts us to ask, “What are one’s purposes and also what are the dangers in calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist?” should prompt us to ask, “What are one’s purposes and also what are the dangers in celebrating the (alleged) convergences of analytic and pragmatist philosophy?” On the side of pragmatism, the bid for academic respectability might court the loss of intellectual boldness. On the side of analysis, a fuller acknowledgment of the pragmatic upshot of recent developments in the analytic tradition might threaten to expose nothing less than the bankruptcy of this tradition (Margolis). But the analytic tradition does not have the degree or kind of coherence permitting one to make such wholesale judgments as does Margolis, whereas the pragmatist tradition does have a sufficiently unified and distinctive character to render highly questionable the continuity claimed by Bernstein between the thought of Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, and Lewis, on the one hand, and Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, Davidson, and Rorty, on the other. The extended family of philosophical traditions making up analytic philosophy are, contra Margolis, far from spent. In turn, the discontinuity between classical American pragmatism and contemporary analytic philosophy is, contra Bernstein, far from an illusion generated by historical myopia and parochial attachments. Put positively, the vitality of contemporary analytic philosophy cannot be gainsaid, while the continuity between American pragmatism and analytic philosophy can only be affirmed, at least in the manner insisted upon by Bernstein, by rendering inaudible the distinctive voice(s) of the pragmatist tradition. 5. The Philosophical Recovery of the Everyday World/The Mundane Reorientation of Philosophical Investigation Broad generalizations are, however, almost without exception destined to die the death of countless qualifications, while deep engagement with specific thinkers, texts, topics, themes, and more problematically traditions promises to provide our philosophical life with a sustaining intensity as well as surprising insights. So, let me begin to draw these reflections to a conclusion by returning to a singular remark by a single figure: “God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone’s eyes.”59 The

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difficulty here is explained elsewhere by Wittgenstein when he notes: “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity” – we might add, also because of their ubiquity and everydayness.60 For pragmatists such as Peirce, James, and Dewey, no less than for Wittgenstein, the task of seeing what stares us in the face is as important as it is difficult. Articulating the intricate contours of our everyday practices requires, first and foremost, a nuanced attention to what is hidden because of its familiarity and ubiquity (hidden not because it is deep but because it is in a sense “superficial”). The purpose of undertaking such articulation is not to secure a transcendental foundation for these historical practices; as fragile as they might be, they tend to have a tenacity and tenure, a solidity and authority, far exceeding the ethereal character of transcendental justification. This purpose is rather to help us find our way around, to bring home to us the world as both our home and the scene of our exile.61 We must bring our words back to their home in ordinary language and, as a way of accomplishing this, sound the depths of our seemingly most superficial vocables. But words in use have a tendency to wander – and our chasing after them, even when done for the sake of bringing them home, is itself a sign at once of being ourselves uprooted but still located somewhere (though not ordinarily anywhere familiar). Sketches of landscapes made in the course of extended and involved wanderings) are useful to both the exile in search of home and the homebound in search of escape. 62 Exile can be celebrated as well as suffered, embraced as well as endured, chosen as well as imposed. As Stanley Cavell has so eloquently shown, part of the significance of the later Wittgenstein resides in the rich resources his mature writings provide for securing a home in the everyday (including the commodious abode of everyday language). But the extent to which one’s inherited home, one’s given culture, one’s traditional place, might be not a false but a real prison is inadequately registered in Cavell’s account of Wittgenstein’s thought, though Wittgenstein’s life was one of self-exile, casting himself out time and again of a given place because of internal restlessness more than anything else.63 To repeat, then, the everyday world is both our inescapable home and the fateful scene of exilic journeys. Allowing our practices to speak for themselves means resisting both the lure of otherworldly justifications and the security of insular everydayness. It means occasionally embracing and often simply enduring exile, twisting our selves free from suffocating confines and making our selves comfortable in unfamiliar places. This complex task calls as often for forbearance and patience as it does for ingenuity and courage, as much for acceptance of our finitude as intelligent revolt against the arbitrary limits imposed by contingent circumstances. Unquestionably, the acceptance of our finitude requires making peace with arbitrariness and contingency, though this tends to be a precarious and provisional peace. The limits of our world are the limits of our forbearance, of what we are able to endure, even if only begrudgingly. The converse of this is that the explosion of our world is

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largely the result of our intolerance, our unwillingness to bear any longer what we feel is unduly limiting or oppressively insular. Wittgenstein in his way and the pragmatists in their own, precisely in their somewhat different engagement with our everyday practices, offer invaluable insights for how and why we might escape the actual confines of our everyday world, also for how and why we must return, time and again, to the everyday, without remorse for the lack of a sphere beyond this one, without regret for the lack of a locus or an authority outside of history. Wittgenstein no less than the pragmatists was trying to twist himself free from a central feature of his actual inheritance – the dispiriting emphasis on the inherent deficiency of the everyday world. He advises us: “Forget this transcendent certainty, which is connected with your concept of spirit [deinem Begriff des Geistes].”64 Embrace, rather, human doubt; but also the practical certainties underlying and indeed underwriting the meaningfulness of such doubt, which is connected with an unblinking acknowledgment of our somatic, situated, and social agency.65 This is less clear in the case of Wittgenstein, for the reason noted at the outset of this paper (his insistence that philosophy “leaves everything as it is”). But, in his later thought, Wittgenstein assembles reminders and offers descriptions often for a polemical purpose.66 Whatever else philosophy might leave as it is, it in its therapeutic efficacy does not leave unaltered the self in relationship to the world – or the everyday world as denigrated in traditional philosophy. Doubt is a form of exile in miniature, for by its disorientation we are thrust, however temporarily and easily recoverably, from the unreflective world of habitual competency. In contrast, the unquestioned certainties simply woven into the intricate fabric our everyway world constitute, in their totality, our characteristically unacknowledged home.67 The recovery and defense of this world signals a deep kinship between the later Wittgenstein and the classical pragmatists. The degree to which Wittgenstein’s understanding of what is entailed in accepting our finitude, of forgetting “transcendent certainty” and acknowledging our mortal animality,68 seemingly tends toward both quietism and a preoccupation with the self marks a divergence from the views of the pragmatists.69 But this is obvious and perhaps not the basis for nearly as stark a contrast as is ordinarily imagined.70 As we have already stressed, the task of philosophy is in part to see what stares us in the face – and to do so as a way both to recover the everyday world and to escape from the confines of a place in which we are nullified.71 Resources for such a recovery and escape are found in the writings of Wittgenstein, on the one hand, and those of Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, and (to a far less extent) Lewis, on the other. That the later Wittgenstein is almost obsessively preoccupied with the recovery of the everyday world, while the classical pragmatists are focused on escapes from nullifying habitats, should not occlude the extent to which both Wittgenstein and these pragmatists affirm the primacy and ultimacy of practice, the degree to which both are

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committed to allowing our practices to speak for themselves. The improvisational yet effective exertions of finite yet ingenious actors are, as much as anything else, an instance of our practices articulating themselves. Cartesian subjects could never carry out the role of such improvisational actors, for such actors are somatic, social, situated, and innovative beings, so much so that the very meanings of “I,” self, mind, and consciousness are lost in dissociation from these features of our agency. From a Wittgenstein and pragmatist perspective, it is impossible even to conceive (say) the “I” apart from these salient features of human agency. 72 6. Conclusion In and through our actions, our practices inevitably speak for themselves. In doing so, they exhibit themselves as something more than completely rulebound affairs. In and through their writings, the later Wittgenstein on the one side and the classical pragmatists on the other struggled to grant authority and ultimacy to practice, by allowing our practices in the context of theory (or philosophy) itself to articulate themselves as self-grounded but also selfaltering histories. This is not simply what they did. It is rather what they insisted, in the name of practice, upon doing in a self-conscious and selfcritical manner. A theoretical (or philosophical) justification of human practices is accordingly inseparable from a practical (or pragmatist) description of our theoretical endeavors. This however does not make theory subordinate to practice; rather it makes practice inclusive of theory. The traditional distinction between theory and practice hence needs to be reinscribed in the field of practice itself, in various ways. One of Dewey’s reinscriptions takes this form: “There is an empirical truth in the common [or inherited] opposition between theory and practice, between the contemplative, reflective type and the executive type, the ‘go-getter,’ the kind that ‘gets things done.’ It is, however, a contrast between two modes of practice.”73 Such re-inscription is simply part of the work of deconstruction, work characteristic of both the later Wittgenstein and classical pragmatism. This becomes evident when we call that, for Derrida, it is necessary “to transform concepts, to displace them, to turn them against their presuppositions, to reinscribe them in other chains, and little by little to modify the terrain of our work and thereby to produce new configurations.”74 He immediately adds: “I do not believe in decisive ruptures…Breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably be undone.”75 The affinity of this approach to both the classical pragmatists and the later Wittgenstein is striking. For all of their help in clarifying and illuminating theory as a mode of practice (as indeed a vast family of quite heterogeneous practices), the later Wittgenstein and the classical pragmatists are both charged with failing to give theory its due. That is, they are criticized for not having allowed out

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theoretical practices in their distinctive character to speak for themselves. Those of us whose philosophical orientations have been formed in the intersecting lineages treated in this essay are in effect called upon to take up the practice of philosophy as nothing less than a theory of practice. But, at this juncture, our accounts of practice must be ones in which more painstaking descriptions of human practices than those offered thus far, than anything found in the classical pragmatists or the later Wittgenstein, are articulated, for a variety of purposes, hence from a plurality of perspectives. The disciplining of the self, the reconstruction of institutions, and the reparation of the world are integral moments in this ongoing task.76 No one of these is a purpose separable from the other two. No single philosophical tradition has done justice to one of these purposes, let alone the complex interplay of all three. Even so, the intersecting lineages of analytic philosophy, at least insofar as it is an ongoing development of the later Wittgenstein, and classical pragmatism illuminates aspects of each of these purposes as well as the interrelationship of these purposes. If for no other reason than this, these intersecting lineages deserve the critical attention of contemporary inquirers.

NOTES 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan Co., 1968), I, #124. “Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden...is of no interest to us.”(Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #126). 2. Cf. Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) and Stanley Cavell, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?”, in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, & Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 1998, pp. 72-80; Naomi Scheman, “Forms of Life: Mapping the Rough Ground”, in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluga and David G. Stern (Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 383-410. 3. William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 62. In “The Relation Between Knower and Known,” an essay included in The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to ‘Pragmatism,’ James writes: “In a world where both the terms and their distinctions are affairs of experience, conjunctions that are experienced must be at least as real as anything else. They will be ‘absolutely’ real conjunctions, if we do not have a transphenomenal absolute ready, to derealize the whole experienced world by, at a stroke” (p. 230). Part of the meaning of the text quoted from Pragmatism concerns the degree to which the everyday world of human experience has been derealized by an invidious contrast to an eternal order of immutable perfect, to an ideal realm (the “earth of things,” i.e., the everyday world of human experience in its irreducible heterogeneity, has been “thrown into shadow by

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the glories of the upper ether”). “The ideal, as we think of it, is,” Wittgenstein notes, “unshakable. You never get outside it; you must always turn back. There is no outside; outside you cannot breathe” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #103). 4. Naomi Scheman, “Forms of Life: Mapping the Rough Ground”, p.402. 5. See Thomas P. Crocker, “Wittgenstein’s Practices and Peirce’s Habits: Agreement in Human Activity,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 15, number 4 (October 1998), pp. 457–493 for, at the very least, a preliminary sketch of how such an exploration might be conducted and also why it is worthwhile. With a quite different emphasis, Russell B. Goodman has undertaken a useful investigation in Russell B. Goodman, “What Wittgenstein Learned from William James,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 11, number 3 (July 1994), 339–354. 6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul & G. E. M. Anscombe (NY: Harper & Row, 1969), #139. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe are using “establishing” to translate “festzulegen.” 7. “This entanglement in our rules is what we want to understand (i.e. get a clear view of),” Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #125. 8. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #139. 9. Ibid., #140. For a different approach to this complex issue, see Nathan Houser’s contribution to this volume. Whereas I only refer in passing to empirical judgments as an illustration of a human practice, he explores this topic in detail. Even so, his attempt to return to a given at a level below that of Lebensformen is quite different from my own inclination to endorse Wittgenstein’s insistence, “What has to be accepted, the given is – so one could say – forms of life” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #226). 10. “The language-game ‘What is that?’ – ‘A chair’ – is not the same as: ‘What do you take that for?’ – ‘It might be a chair.’” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), #417). “To begin teaching someone ‘That looks red’ makes no sense. For he must say that spontaneously once he has leant what ‘red’ means, i.e., has learnt the technique of using the word” (Ibid., #418). “Any explanation has its foundation in training. (Educators ought to remember this.)” (Ibid., #419). “The child learns by believing the adult. Doubt comes after belief” (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #160). “I have learned an enormous amount and accepted it on human authority, and then I found some things confirmed or disconfirmed by my own experience” (Ibid., #161). 11. This example is used by William James: William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), p. 37. In “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” John Dewey recalls James’s use of this example and then adopts it for his own purpose: John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” in John Dewey, The Early Works of John Dewey, vol. 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), pp. 97–98. 12. Cf. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #559. 13. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II, # 226. 14. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #139. 15. “Words are,” Wittgenstein insists, “deeds.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 46; cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #546. 16. The final court of appeal appears to be, for Wittgenstein, “an ungrounded way of acting” (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #110): “‘This is simply what I do’”

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(Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #217). But, as we will see, there might be an important distinction to be drawn between the ungrounded and the selfgrounded. 17. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #217. 18. Ibid. 19. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #110. 20. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #127. 21. Cf. Catherine Legg, “This Is Simply What I Do” in Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, LXVI, 1 (January 2003), pp. 58-80. 22. “Our talk gets its meaning from the rest of our proceedings” (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #229). “How words are understood is not told by words alone. (Theology)” (Wittgenstein, Zettel, #144). 23. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 77: “Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tête-a-tête.” The parallel here with Peirce is striking: As a footnote to an essay on pragmatism written as an exchange between a proponent and critic of this doctrine, Peirce reveals: “I write in the form of a dialogue because it is in that form that my thoughts come to me.” Charles Peirce, The Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1931-1958), vol 5, p. 497, n.1. Richard Rorty writes: “The closer one brings pragmatism to the writings of the later Wittgenstein and of those influenced by him, the more light they shed on each other.” Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Categories and Language,” Philosophical Review 70 (April, 1961), pp. 198–199. 24. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #422. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), #266: “But you aren’t a pragmatist?” LW: “No.” 25. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #127. 26. Cf. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 112. 27. See, for example, John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), pp. 40–41. 28. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #123. 29. Cf. Rorty, “Pragmatism, Categories, and Language.” 30. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 79. 31. Ibid., p. 58. 32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, Preface, p.3. 33. Charles Peirce, MS 596 (Collected Papers, vol. 5, 5.539). 34. Charles Peirce, MS 598 (Collected Papers, vol. 5, 5.541). 35. Ibid. 36. Wittgenstein, Zettel, #567. 37.“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #115). 38. Norman Malcolm recalls a striking observation his mentor made about philosophy: “A person caught in a philosophical confusion is like a man in a room who wants to get out but doesn’t know how. He tries the window but it is too high. He tries the chimney but it is too narrow. And if he would only turn around, he would see

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that the door has been open all the time.” Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 51. 39. Cf. Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Categories, and Language.” 40. Cf. Stanley Cavell, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” 41. For the deeply personal and disconcertingly odd form in which the imperative to confess his failings manifested itself in Wittgenstein’s life, see Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Ch.18. “A confession has to be part of your new life” (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 18). It is, Wittgenstein insists, “of course something external” (Wittgenstein, Zettel, #558). For the external and indeed public character of his confessions, again, see Monk. 42. Cf. Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, trans. Jeremy Gains and Paul Keast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 43. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #422. 44. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 76. 45. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #378. 46. “Indeed, out of a contrite fallibilism, combined with a high faith in the reality of knowledge, and an intense desire to find things out, all my philosophy has seemed to me to grow” (Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 1, p. 14). “But just as it is not the self-righteous man who brings multitudes to a sense of sin, but the man who is most deeply conscious that he is himself a sinner, and it is only by a sense of sin that men can escape its thralldom; so it is not the man, who thinks he knows it all, that can bring other men to feel their need of learning, and it is only a deep sense that one is miserably ignorant that can spur one on in the toilsome path of learning” (Ibid., vol. 5, p. 583). 47. Ray Monk suggests that “for Wittgenstein, all philosophy, in so far as it is pursued honestly and decently, begins with a confession. He often remarked that the problem of writing good philosophy and of thinking well about philosophical problems was one of the will more than of the intellect – the will to resist the temptation to misunderstand, the will to resist superficiality. What gets in the way of genuine understanding is often not one’s lack of intelligence, but the presence of one’s pride. Thus: ‘The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work.’” Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 366. 48. Cf. Stanley Cavell, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?”. 49. Cf. Vincent Colapietro, “Signs and their Vicissitudes: Meaning in Excess of Consciousness and Functionality,” Semiotica 148 (April, 2004), pp. 229-43. 50. Recall in this connection a remark by Wittgenstein quoted earlier, “my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. ix). 51. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #432. 52. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 27. 53. Ibid., p. 28. 54. Ibid., p. 78. 55. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, chapter 26 (“A Citizen of No Community”); Scheman, “Forms of Life,” p. 404. 56. James notes: “‘Tone,’ to be sure, is a terribly vague word to use, but there is no other, and this whole meditation [on the social value of higher education] is over the question of tone. By their tone are all things human either lost or saved.” William

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James, Essays, Comments, and Reviews (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 111. 57. Cf. John McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy in the McCarthy Era (Evansville, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001). 58. In a lecture entitled “The Recovery of Moral Agency?” MacIntyre insists: “We need instead to begin with practice, for theory is the articulation of practice and good theory [the articulation] of good practice.” Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Recovery of Moral Agency,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 28, number 4 (1999), p. 8. 59. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 63; cf. Legg. 60. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #129. 61. Cf. Stanley Cavell, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” 62. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, p. ix. 63. Cf. David Pears, The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, vol. 1,(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987 ), and Naomi Scheman, “Forms of Life: Mapping the Rough Ground.” 64. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #47. 65. “Doubting and non-doubting behaviour. There is the first only if there is the second” (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #354). 66. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #127. 67. “Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning” (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 16). 68. Sabina Lovibond suggests that for Wittgenstein, “the sickness which philosophy sets out to treat…has its origins…in the incomplete acceptance of our embodied condition.” Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 206. 69. Working in philosophy – like work in architecture in many respects – is really more a working on oneself. One one’s own interpretation. On one’s way of seeing things. (And what one expects from them)” Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 16. 70. See Charles Spinosa, “Derridean Dispersion and Heideggerian Articulation: General Tendencies in the Practices that Govern Intelligibility,” in The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 199–212. Here Spinosa examines practices as “conditions for the possibility of various kinds of complicated human comportment” (p. 199). So understood, he claims: “practices tend toward their own elaboration” (p. 200). 71. Think here of a world in which homosexuality is not tolerated or one in which racism is regnant. Cf. Naomi Scheman, “Forms of Life.” 72. It is instructive to recall here the reason why Wittgenstein contends there are no theses in philosophy: “If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #128). 73. Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, vol. 1, pp. 237–38). 74. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 24; emphasis added. 75. Ibid. 76. Cf. Naomi Scheman, “Forms of Life: Mapping the Rough Ground,” p. 404.

Two BEYOND SCIENTISM Mario De Caro

1. Introduction In the last few decades a vast naturalistic turn has taken place in the philosophical world, especially in the analytic community. David Papineau writes that today “nearly everybody wants to be a ‘naturalist’.”1 Similarly, but less sympathetically, Hilary Putnam asserts that Today...philosophers – perhaps even a majority of all the philosophers writing about issues in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language – announce in one or another conspicuous place in their essay and books that they are “naturalists” or that the view or account being defended is a “naturalist” one...It is supposed to be clear that any view that is not “naturalist”…is anathema, and could not possibly be correct.2 These statements raise three main questions. First: Is it true, from a sociological point of view, that naturalism is as fashionable as Papineau and Putnam say? I will offer evidence that this the case. Second: Which of the many versions of naturalism have become so common today? I will argue that the most common views belong to the family of “scientific naturalism” (which, sometimes, is more tendentiously called “scientistic naturalism”). However, as we will see, in recent years some more liberal forms of naturalism have been rapidly growing. I will argue that liberal naturalism incorporates some of the most valuable insights of the masters of pragmatism, whereas scientific naturalism tends to replicate the scientistic spirit of nineteenth century positivism. Finally: What are the respective merits and faults of these forms of naturalism? My thesis will be that scientific naturalism is deeply unsatisfactory, even according to its own standards, while some more liberal forms of naturalism recommend themselves, since they can preserve what is appealing in naturalism without compromising themselves with scientism.

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2. Scientism, Anti-naturalism, and Pragmatism Many different versions of naturalism (such as Pre-Socratic, Aristotelian, Renaissance, Spinozistic, Scottish, Positivist, and Pragmatist) have been developed throughout the history of philosophy. Today, one version is dominant: “scientific naturalism.” Scientific naturalism is an innovative and sophisticated view, but the spirit of scientific naturalism is reminiscent of nineteenth-century positivism. This is because these views share a scientistic spirit. As the term “scientism” has a clearly negative connotation, this may be a controversial remark. Recently, scientism was defined as An exaggerated and often distorted conception of what science can be expected to do or explain for us. One aspect of scientism is the idea that any question can be answered by science. This, in turn, is very often combined with a quite narrow conception of what it is for an answer, or a method of investigation, to be scientific.4 Given such connotations, the application of the term to contemporary scientific naturalism has to be carefully justified. The first thing to notice about the word is that when it first appeared – in English first and then in French – the word “scientism” was a neutral term. It described a doctrine defined by either of these two claims: “[Natural] science alone is capable of providing a true account of reality.”5 “There are no limits to the validity and the extension of scientific knowledge.”6 According to the first claim, the natural sciences can access any knowable truth about reality (but not necessarily all truths); according to the second claim, science can potentially offer a complete account of reality. The more judicious nineteenth-century positivists recognized that the second claim was overly optimistic, since there are issues, and arguably the deepest ones, about which we will remain ignorant forever. Thus, even early positivists recognized that science could not offer a complete account of reality. For this reason, the meaning of the term “scientism” was generally limited to the first of the two above-mentioned claims. The natural sciences covered all our epistemic access to reality. All other ways of knowing and understanding (intuition, philosophy, common sense, the social sciences, the arts) were seen as illegitimate, as parasitic on the sciences, or at best as surrogates for the

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explanations of the natural sciences. Put another way, since we are ignorant, we cannot help but appeal to other, alleged forms of knowledge, but the natural sciences can, in principle, replace or eliminate all of them. It is, then, fair to say that nineteenth-century positivism – by seeing the natural sciences as the only legitimate source of knowledge – was a form of naturalism steeped in scientism. At first, the term “scientism” was not perceived as negative. Soon, however, the anti-positivists, and especially the French spiritualists, began to use the term in a derogatory sense. Bergson, for example, wrote that scientism was impeding metaphysics and that science had to “remain scientific” without becoming an “unaware metaphysics, which is presented to the ignorant under the mask of science.”7 For Bergson and the other spiritualists, metaphysics (that is, philosophy) and science had to be sharply separated. Metaphysics – distinct from the natural sciences – had nothing to say about the natural world. Thus, besides being anti-scientistic, Bergson’s philosophy was also antinaturalistic. The same thing happened – and still happens – with many other philosophies that oppose the ideal of continuity between philosophy and science. For this reason, at the turn of twentieth century, two armies marshalled at either end of the philosophical field. On one side, there were the positivists, who identified philosophical naturalism with scientism, since they saw the natural sciences as the only legitimate way to know reality. On the other side were the spiritualists, who reacted to positivism with a mixture of antiscientism and anti-naturalism. Fortunately, there was an alternative to the scientism of the positivists and the anti-naturalism of the spiritualists: pragmatism. Dewey, for example, made clear how broad a conception of naturalism could be by defining the naturalist as“one who has respect for the conclusions of natural science.”8 This implies a disbelief in supernaturalism, but also a non-scientistic attitude. However, sometimes pragmatism is presented, especially by continental philosophers, as if it were just another version of scientism. This is an understandable characterization, since both Peirce and Dewey explicitly stated that the methods of the natural sciences should be used in every area of inquiry. But before accusing pragmatism of outright scientism, we must consider what the pragmatists meant by “experimental method.” As Hilary Putnam has argued, the pragmatists did not mean that the natural sciences exhaust, even potentially, the space of knowledge. Rather, they only held that, generally speaking, a fallibilistic and experimental method should always be followed when pursuing knowledge.9 Some may reply that even so defined, the pragmatist point of view is a scientistic one, not so much because of its appeal to fallibilism (which only meant that the goal of certainty, sought by the traditional epistemologists, was unreachable), but because of its idea that an experimental method is necessary to reach knowledge. However, the pragmatists used the term “experimental”

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in a broad (and certainly not scientistic) sense.10 When Peirce, for example, said that even mathematical inquiries had to be experimental, he meant that a mathematician had to evaluate the inner experience of considering imagined diagrams.11 Regarding philosophical knowledge, the reference to the experimental method meant that one should reject the traditional method of the unrevisable a priori analysis; this did not imply the illegitimacy of revisable conceptual analyses.12 According to the founders of pragmatism, then, besides the common need of being fallibilistic and non-aprioristic, philosophy should not adopt the methods of the natural sciences.13 In this view, philosophy could not be reduced to the natural sciences nor eliminated by them, not even potentially. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that, as we will see, only some contemporary naturalists (the more liberal ones) keep in mind. 3. The Features of Scientific Naturalism As we have seen, the term “scientism” most frequently refers to the belief that any knowable truth can be accessed by the natural sciences. This thesis still characterizes contemporary scientific naturalism (but not some of the more liberal forms of contemporary naturalism). Now, in order to prove this point, we have first to consider the general features of scientific naturalism. The first thing to be noticed is that scientific naturalism is a global metaphilosophical view, since its scope is philosophy in its entirety. This ambition notwithstanding, few of its many advocates have bothered to define it precisely. A (partial) exception has been Willard Quine, who, in a eulogy for scientific naturalism (which he called simply “naturalism”), wrote, “I admit to naturalism and even glory in it. This means banishing the dream of a first philosophy and pursuing philosophy rather as a part of one’s system of the world, continuous with the rest of science.”14 This is a helpful quotation, since it clearly states two of the fundamental claims of scientific naturalism, which can be called the Antifoundational Thesis and the Continuity Thesis. These claims state, respectively, that there is no first philosophy and that philosophy should be continuous with science. Quine’s words, however, are also interesting because they significantly omit mentioning another, even more basic naturalistic claim according to which nothing exists beyond nature (this claim can be called the Constitutive Thesis). Quine likely considered this thesis too obvious even to mention. Here, on the contrary, it is useful to state it explicitly – for several reasons. First, many anti-naturalist philosophers would not consider that claim obvious at all; second, not all naturalists would interpret it in the same way; finally, it is the most basic claim of naturalism.15 Let us consider the three claims of scientific naturalism in turn, then, starting with the last one. (1) The Constitutive Thesis states that philosophy does not admit any supernatural entities, properties, events, or explanations. Most naturalistic

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views, including all the most common ones nowadays (not just the scientific naturalist ones, but also the more liberal ones) accept this thesis.16 Its exact meaning, however, is controversial. As long as at it amounts to denying the philosophical legitimacy of appealing to things like ghosts, souls, immaterial minds, and prime movers unmoved, this thesis will appear obvious to most contemporary philosophers: this thesis simply means that there is no supernatural “gulf between nature and man,” as John Dewey put it.17 Nevertheless, the constitutive thesis becomes controversial as soon as we consider more difficult cases, such as those of irreducible values, abstract entities, or non-supervenient mental states. Are such items natural or supernatural? The answer to this question is controversial, even if one remains within the naturalistic field. While a scientific naturalist would answer that items that cannot be reduced, even in principle, to the conceptual apparatus of the natural sciences are supernatural (and therefore should be discharged), a more liberal naturalist would say that at least some of these items might be natural even if that reduction is not possible. The crucial point here is that the extension of the category of the supernatural depends on how one defines the complementary category of the natural; and this is exactly what is at stake in the debate between the advocates of the various versions of naturalism. For example, Hartry Field, a radical scientific naturalist, is strict with regard to what should be considered natural: only that which, in principle, is reducible to physics, he says. Field writes, “When faced with a body of doctrine … that we are convinced can have no physical foundation, we tend to reject that body of doctrine.”18 From this point of view, the only ontological commitments we have are the ones that derive from physics. Only physics, and what can be reduced to it, is able to describe reality. In this spirit, Field states that mathematical entities are fictions, in the very same sense in which literary characters, such as Oliver Twist, are fictions. Less radical scientific naturalists are more openminded, however, and would accept the body of doctrines, and the ontological commitments, of all the natural sciences as legitimate – whether these bodies of doctrine be in principle reducible to physics or not. In addition, liberal naturalists are even more tolerant, since they may accept the legitimacy, and the ontological commitments, of other forms of inquiry, such the social sciences, common sense, or the arts. To summarize, all naturalists accept the Constitutive Thesis. They disagree, though, about its content – that is, on how permissive one should be in defining “the natural” (and “the supernatural”). (2) The second premise of scientific naturalism is the Antifoundationalist Thesis. With regard to it, the (direct and indirect) debts of contemporary naturalism to the masters of pragmatism – especially Peirce – are so obvious that there is no need to insist on it.19 As Quine (who explicitly recognized his

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pragmatist inspiration in this respect) puts it in the above-mentioned statement, naturalists have to banish “the dream of a first philosophy,”20 that is, they have to abandon “the goal of a first Philosophy prior to the natural science.”21 There is no such thing as a foundational philosophy, then. Philosophy cannot be asked to determine the legitimacy of the sciences – as Descartes and Kant had claimed – by assuming a foundational role for them. Thus stated, the Antifoundationalist Thesis is defended by all contemporary naturalists. However, as we will see, scientific naturalists (as distinct from liberal naturalists) often substitute the natural sciences for philosophy’s once foundational role – and this is a controversial move. (3) Let’s consider now the last and most controversial premise of scientific naturalism – the Continuity Thesis – which most clearly distinguishes this view from the more liberal forms of contemporary naturalism. For the scientific naturalists, philosophy as such is a part of science. As Quine put it, scientific philosophers pursue “philosophy rather as a part of one’s system of the world, continuous with the rest of science”22 – where, again, the word “science” means merely “natural science,” and possibly only physics. Quine writes, “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.”23 Assuming this thesis, we can infer that philosophy (as long as it covers the study of knowledge, mind, and meaning) has to merge with the sciences. This is a consequence that Quine himself seemed happy to draw. Thus, about epistemology, for example, Quine writes that “it simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz., a physical human subject.”24 Once naturalized, epistemology is just psychology (which potentially is neurophysiology, which potentially is physics). Of course a traditional epistemologist could still ask the scientific naturalist, “How can you account for the normative character of epistemology, for its being connected with the notion of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ justifications?” Quine had a bold answer to this question: “Normative epistemology is a branch of engineering.”25 This means that, in fact, epistemology is not normative at all! Daniel Dennett’s naturalistic perspective is more moderate, but it does not leave a much bigger space for philosophy anyway. Dennett defines naturalism as “the idea that philosophical investigations are not superior to, or prior to, investigations in the natural sciences,” and that they have to act “in partnership with those truth-seeking enterprises.”26 This partnership, however, seems one-sided, since philosophers “cannot claim to be doing their professional duty unless they pay careful attention to the thinking of psychologists…economists…biologists,” whereas the reverse does not seem required.27 Indeed, for Dennett, the goal of philosophy is conceptually subordinated to the results of scientific investigation, since philosophy has “to clarify and unify the often warring perspectives [of the sciences] into a single

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vision of the universe.”28 Considering this opinion, we might conclude that systematic philosophy is back – but only in the restrictive sense that philosophers are supposed to systematize scattered scientific views. From this perspective, philosophy is not credited with any peculiar method, aside from the generic ability to harmonize the results of science. This unsurprising, since many scientific naturalists – most vigorously, Philip Kitcher – explicitly deny the legitimacy of the most traditional methodological tool of philosophy, conceptual analysis, because of its alleged dependence on the possibility of making analytic judgments (a possibility denied by Quine half a century ago).29 But as I have said, even granting Quine’s denial of analytic judgments, the possibility of revisable conceptual analyses is still worth considering. If making such analyses were possible, philosophy would still be methodologically autonomous from science. 4. The Scientistic Character of Scientific Naturalism Scientific naturalism (like other contemporary forms of naturalism) maintains that philosophy has no foundational role to play. That does not mean, however, that scientific naturalism holds that no discipline can play the foundational role once granted to philosophy. In fact, this role is generally attributed to the natural sciences, and often to physics alone. Philosophia Prima has thus become Scientia Prima. As Quine wrote, “It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.”30 Also, as Wilfrid Sellars brilliantly put it, paraphrasing the famous Protagorean motto, “in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.”31 This is a clear expression of scientism (as defined above) – which, by the way, in Quine’s case is at odds with his original holism, since from this point of view no other discipline would be able to limit the natural sciences. They alone would delimit the space of knowledge and, with their ontological commitments, the space of reality. Unsurprisingly, the scientistic thesis of the continuity between philosophy and the natural sciences, which characterizes scientific naturalism, has produced a remarkable number of naturalization projects, and these treat virtually every philosophically relevant concept. Roughly speaking, naturalizing a concept implies that one can either reduce it to naturalistically acceptable concepts or prove that the concept in question can be eliminated altogether. As we have seen, Quine, followed by Goldman and many others, attempted the naturalization of the epistemological concepts of justification and knowledge.32 Fodor, Millikan, Dretske and legions of other evolutionary theorists, cognitive scientists, and information theorists try to naturalize intentionality, while Lycan (1987), Dennett (1992), and many others attempt the same with consciousness.33 Moral concepts have been naturalistically stripped by Railton, Harman, Lewis, Boyd, Gibbard, and Blackburn.34

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Numbers and other mathematical concepts underwent naturalistic treatments by Field and Maddy.35 Also free will and moral responsibility have been naturalistically attacked by Dennett, Wegner, and many others.36 Even the naturalization of aesthetic and religious concepts is on the agenda of a number of contemporary philosophers.37 We should also note the hyper-ambitious attempts at showing that, from an ontological point of view, everything can be reduced to the microphysical level (on the web one can even find a Credo of the so-called “Canberra Plan,” which explicitly states, “We look for intertheoretic reductions, and the supervenience of all on the microphysical”).38 We might wonder what would remain for philosophy to do if these naturalization projects worked. The answer seems to be: not much, really, aside from, perhaps, Patricia Churchland’s Neurophilosophy.39 So many attempts at naturalizing philosophical concepts suggest that Putnam and Papineau are correct in stating that scientific naturalism is now the orthodox view – at least in the Anglo-American world. Scientism is back. 5. Some Criticisms of Scientific Naturalism Scientific naturalism is a common view today. However, it is also highly controversial. There are many reasons to suspect that the current enthusiasm for scientific naturalism is misplaced. Here I can only mention few of them, without entering in the details.40 First, as John Dupré and others have convincingly argued, scientific naturalists unduly idealize contemporary science when they describe it as ontologically and methodologically unitary. As Dupré shows, if one looks at the contemporary natural sciences as they really are developed, one finds out that the monistic ideas of the “Unity of Science” and the “Completeness of Physics” (which are very common among scientific naturalists nowadays) are mere philosophical myths, and actually supernatural myths – since there is no empirical evidence at all that these kinds of Unity and Completeness are present in the natural world! Therefore, paradoxically, scientific naturalism contradicts its own Constitutive Thesis, according to which no reference to the supernatural is acceptable. Another point worth discussing is the “puritanical attitude” of scientific naturalism (as Stephen Stich calls it) with regard to many of the fundamental concepts not just of philosophy but of life in general. That is, with their naturalization projects, naturalist philosophers aim at reducing or eliminating talk concerning intentionality, normativity, consciousness, freedom, and justification. From their point of view, this is understandable, since scientific naturalists have to think that all these concepts are, to use John Mackie’s famous wording, “queer,” and because of their queerness, they should be replaced by naturalistically acceptable concepts or eliminated altogether. This attitude makes scientific naturalists very optimistic about the potential for these reductions or eliminations and, as we have seen, they have proposed a lot of them. Too bad then, as Putnam has ironically written, that “none of

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these ontological reductions gets believed by anyone except the proponent of the account and one or two of his friends and/or students.”41 Moreover, in his splendid essay “The Charm of Naturalism,” Barry Stroud has offered an excellent reason to think that these failures are not contingent.42 He convincingly argued that attempts to eliminate or reduce talk about values, colors, and meaning inevitably fail, since these attempts require that prior to any reduction or elimination we make sense of the content of our beliefs about values, colors, and meaning. This is something that cannot be done with the very meager conceptual resources of scientific naturalism. That most of the attempted reductions or eliminations of “queer” concepts by the scientific naturalists do not, and cannot, really work is a crucial point noted by even the most consistent and boldest scientific naturalists. In the purest spirit of scientific naturalism, for example, Colin McGinn wrote, Nature is a system of derived entities, the basic going to construct the less basic; and understanding nature is figuring out how the derivation goes…Find the atoms and laws of combination and evolution, and then derive the myriad of complex objects you find in nature.43 Predictably, this bold view has philosophical consequences. As McGinn starts to think about “queer concepts” such as consciousness, the self, free will, meaning, and knowledge, he recognizes that There are yawning gaps between these phenomena and the more basic phenomena they proceed from, so that we cannot apply the [scientific] format to bring sense to what we observe. The essence of a philosophical problem is the unexplained leap.44 McGinn’s honest but striking conclusion is that consciousness, the self, free will, meaning, and knowledge are and will always remain “mysteries.”45 According to him, this proves that philosophy, which by definition has the ambition to study such concepts, is “futile.” This is enlightening. McGinn recognizes that consciousness, the self, free will, meaning, and knowledge cannot be explained by the natural sciences, and thus cannot be reduced to scientifically acceptable concepts. They cannot be eliminated either however, since theyare too fundamental for our manifest image of the world (to use Sellars’s phrase) or for our forms of life (to use Wittgenstein’s). Thus, they become unsolvable “mysteries”! In my view, McGinn is right in honestly drawing the consequences of scientific naturalism; however, he also makes two mistakes. First, he says that once scientific naturalism is accepted as the correct philosophical view, consciousness, free will, and so on are seen as “mysteries” that we will never

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be able to solve. This, however, overly indulges scientific naturalism. Normally, when we talk of a “mystery,” we are talking about something that is intrinsically difficult, perhaps impossible, to explain, but at least we can imagine some potential solutions, even if we cannot prove that they are correct. For example, the mystery of the origins of the Ebola virus would be explained if we found out that it was created as a bacteriological weapon; the mystery of Goldbach’s conjecture would be solved by a proof based on mathematical induction; the mystery of who Jack the Ripper was would be solved if we found a written confession by the Prince of Wales. However, as McGinn recognizes, once scientific naturalism is assumed, we do not have a clue as to how we would go about explaining consciousness, free will, or meaning. From this point of view, a solution to these questions does not look conceivable at all, at least for us. Thus, assuming scientific naturalism, we have to conclude that these things, more than “mysteries,” are absurdities. The second mistake by McGinn is more relevant. Once one realizes that scientific naturalism makes our dearest concepts (freedom, meaning, knowledge, and so on) mysteries or absurdities, it becomes unclear why this does not constitute a reductio ad adsurdum of scientific naturalism. A philosophical conception that cannot accept many of our most relevant concepts, but cannot reduce or eliminate them either, has to be judged radically misguided. However, if this is so, which of the premises of scientific naturalism should be given up? 6. The Premises of Scientific Naturalism Again The first premise is, as we have seen, the refusal of the supernatural. This is a thesis that nowadays most philosophers would accept; its exact meaning, however, is controversial, since it depends on how one defines the concept of the “supernatural” (and the complementary concept of the “natural”). There is good reason to suspect that the scientific naturalists’ interpretation of these two concepts is too narrow. This does not imply, however, that one has to swallow anti-naturalism. With regard to this, the lesson of the pragmatists helps us again, since they defended forms of naturalism distinct from both scientism and antinaturalism. The pragmatists believed that philosophy should consider the lessons of the natural sciences without drowning in them. For example, as Nathan Houser argued in the talk at the conference from which this book is derived, the pragmatists recognized that mentality is a product of evolution (Peirce, in particular, insisted that human belief is, in a sense, continuous with animal expectation). They, however, were very far from thinking that the sciences of nature could, in principle, account for all features of mentality. Today, many contemporary scientific naturalists keep asserting that the concept of the “natural” has to be limited by the findings of the natural sciences. Some liberal naturalists, influenced by the pragmatists, defend the

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opposite view that the “space of reasons” – to which the concepts of knowing and thinking belong – cannot be subsumed under scientific laws; that is, they cannot be subsumed under the space of the natural as defined by the natural sciences (the failure of all attempts to naturalize the concepts that belong to the space of reasons offers a strong confirmation of this thesis).46 At the same time, liberal naturalists – repeating a point that the greatest pragmatists unremittingly stressed – strongly deny that the space of reasons should be viewed as unnatural or supernatural because of its irreducibility to the space of laws. As McDowell argues, what we should think is that, as animals, we are part of nature, but in sharing a culture with other human beings (in participating in the space of reasons), we also acquire a “second nature.”47 And a second nature is still nature! As to the second premise of scientific naturalism – the Antifoundationalist Thesis that denies the existence of a “First Philosophy” – it is no news that it was forcefully advocated by Peirce and the other pragmatists. What is highly doubtful, however, is the implicit proviso that many scientific naturalists add to this thesis, which states that the natural sciences (and perhaps only physics) can replace philosophy in its foundational function. Bad consequences derive from this proviso, as we have seen, and it cuts off too much of what is important to us. As to the third premise of scientific naturalism, the Continuity Thesis, it seems even more erroneous than the others. I do not deny that there are cases in which the results and findings of science can, and should, “provide the impetus to philosophical reflection” or even that “they help to undermine one’s philosophical conclusions.”48 The compatibility of a philosophical view with the best scientific theories, when relevant, is a reasonable requirement for all liberal naturalists (Putnam, for example, advocates “a modest nonmetaphysical realism squarely in touch with the results of science”).49 This is why the Intelligent Design argument and the Cartesian solution of the mind-body problem are as unbearable to liberal naturalists as they are to scientific naturalists. However, this does not amount to saying that philosophy should not be autonomous in content, purpose, and method from the natural sciences or that its unique goal should be that of systematizing the scattered results of the sciences. As to this, one should notice that scientific naturalism has a narrow view of the forms that legitimate explanations might assume. We have seen this in the case of one of the most consistent scientific naturalists, Colin McGinn, whose consistent application of the scientific format of explanation to philosophical questions renders them mysteries (or absurdities). In this respect, the pragmatists were characteristically much more open-minded than contemporary scientific naturalists. Peirce, for example, listed 64 different ways of knowing!50 From this perspective, understanding reality is not just figuring out “how the basic goes to construct the less basic” – as many scientific naturalists instead think.

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Finally, another of the Pragmatists’ great merits can only be mentioned. I am referring to their insistence that values and facts are hardly detachable from each other. This is something that scientific naturalists, who seem to have a “horror of the normative,”51 strongly, if unreasonably, deny (remember Quine’s idea that epistemology is just a branch of engineering). As Peirce, Dewey, and the others taught us, one of philosophy’s main tasks is to investigate the role that normativity plays in the space of reasons.52 This is a lesson that a naturalism attempting to purge itself of its ruinous scientistic components should not forget.53

NOTES 1. David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 1. 2. Hilary Putnam, “The Content and Appeal of ‘Naturalism’,” in Naturalism in Question, ed. M. De Caro and D. Macarthur (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 59–70. 3. Ibid. p. 288, n. 20. 4. J. Dupré, Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 1–2. 5. A. Stroll, “Karl Popper and W.V.O. Quine,” in The Columbia History of Philosophy, ed. R.H. Popkin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) pp. 648– 649. 6. N. Abbagnano, “Scientismo,” in Dizionario di Filosofia (Turin: UTET, 1971), p. 770. 7. Henri Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant (Paris: Alcan, 1934), p. 83. 8. For example J. Dewey, “Antinaturalism in Extremis,” in Naturalism and the Human Spirit, ed. Y.H. Krikorian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 2. 9. This point has been repeatedly stressed by Putnam; see for example Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 101–106. 10. Ibid. 11. See C. Hookway, Peirce (London: Routledge, 1985), ch. 6 and pp. 51–58 for a clear explanation of why Peirce's philosophy, even if very respectful of science (particularly psychology), was not a form of scientism. 12. For a contemporary defence of this view, see F. Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defense of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 13. It is very interesting, in this respect, to consider the indelible role played in Peirce’s system by logic, ethics, and aesthetics (the so–called “normative sciences”, which clearly covered most of philosophy: see C. Hookway, 1985, passim.) 14. W. V. Quine, “Reply to Putnam,” in The Philosophy of W.V. Quine, ed. L. Hahn and P. Schilpp (Chicago: Open Court, 1986), pp. 430–431. 15. Notice that the Constitutive Thesis is independent from the other two claims of scientific naturalism, because one can deny the foundational role of philosophy and think that philosophy is continuous with science, but still maintain that

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there exist some supernatural entities or properties (this could be done, for example, by broadening the scope of knowledge, as Medieval philosophers use to do). 16. One exception to this rule is R.M. Adams, who defends a view called “theological ethical naturalism” (but in this context the term “naturalism” is used in the peculiar way suggested by G.E. Moore). 17. John Dewey, “Half–Hearted Naturalism,” Journal of Philosophy XXV (1927), p. 58. 18. Hartry Field, “Physicalism,” in Inference, Explanations, and Other Frustrations: Essays in the Philosophy of Science, ed. J. Earman (Berkeley: University of Californai Press, 1992), p. 271. 19. See C. Hookway, “Mimicking Foundationalism: On Sentiment and Self– Control,” European Journal of Philosophy 1 (1993), pp. 156–174. 20. Quine, “Reply to Putnam,” pp. 430–431. 21. Quine, Theories and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 67. 22. Italics mine. 23. W.V. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 26. 24. Quine , “Epistemology Naturalized,” p. 82 25. Quine, “Reply to Morton White,” in The Philosophy of W.V. Quine, p. 664. 26. Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves, (New York: Viking, 2003), p. 14 27. Dennett, Freedom Evolves, pp. 306–307. 28. Ibid., p. 15. 29. Philip Kitcher, “The Naturalist Return,” Philosophical Review 101 (1992), pp. 53–114. 30. Quine, Theories and Things, p. 21. 31. Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception, Reality (London: Routledge, 1963), p. 173. 32. See H. Kornblith, Naturalizing Epistemology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 33. J. Fodor, Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); J. Fodor, A Theory of Content and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); R. Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Cateogries (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984); F. Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981); W. Lycan, Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1992). 34. See Naturalism and Normativity, ed. E. Villanueva (Atascadero: Ridgeview, 1993). 35. Hartry Field, Science without Numbers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980); P. Maddy, Naturalism in Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 36. Dennett, Freedom Evolves; D. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). 37. See Naturalism, ed. Furst and Skrine (London: Routledge, 1971); K. Nielsen, “Naturalistic Explanations of Theistic Belief,” in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 402–409. 38. See Daniel Nolan URL = http://web.syr.edu/~dpnolan/philosophy/Credo.html.

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39. Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind–Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). 40. Naturalism in Question, ed. De Caro and Macarthur. 41. Putnam, “The Content and Appeal of 'Naturalism',” p. 62. 42. B. Stroud, “The Charm of Naturalism,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 70 (1996), pp. 43–55. 43. Colin McGinn, The Making of a Philosopher (New York: Scribner, 2002), p. 207. 44. McGinn, The Making of a Philosopher, p. 209. 45. Ibid., p. 210. 46. J. McDowell, “Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind,” in Naturalism in Question, pp. 91–105. 47. J. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 48. Naturalism in Question, ed. De Caro and Macarthur, p. 15. 49. Putnam, “The Content and Appeal of 'Naturalism',” p. 66. 50. As reported by Nathan Houser during the debate at the conference from which this book derives. 51. Putnam, “The Content and Appeal of ‘Naturalism’,” p. 70. 52. See McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” in Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Philosophy, ed. R. Husthouse, G. Lawrence, and W. Quinn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 149–179. 53. I thank Nathan Houser for his useful comments on a previous version of this paper.

Three THE ENTANGLEMENT OF ETHICS AND LOGIC IN PEIRCE’S PRAGMATISM Rossella Fabbrichesi

Hilary Putnam has often addressed what he defines as the entanglement of facts and values. He treated this question in The Many Faces of Realism and his recent The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy, and Other Essays is entirely focused on it. It is one of the fundamental elements of his philosophy. I will dwell on this last work and use its conclusions as a starting point for my exposition. Putnam argues that even when value judgments about the soundness of a theory are only implicit, they usually become assumptions in scientific research. Consider, for example, judgments on the consistency, simplicity, plausibility, and order of a particular theoretical approach. These judgments are ethical – remember that the Greek word ethos designates the behaviors, customs, and social and moral habits with which one “inhabits” a certain way of living – but they often take on an objective aspect. Therefore, knowledge of facts always presupposes a knowledge of values. Moreover, Putnam maintains that facts and values or objective and subjective appear to be indistinguishable. The philosophy of science in the last century, however, can be seen as a struggle to escape from this principle. Philosophers attempted to do science using only a deductive logic (Popper), to justify induction deductively (Reichenbach), to reduce science to a simple algorithm (Carnap), and to select theories according to an enigmatic set of “observational conditionals” (Quine). To Putnam’s list we could add attempts to reduce every symbolic mediation to a formalism (twentieth-century logicism) or to equate the working of the human brain with that of a machine by discrete states(current computational cognitivism). All of these approaches attempt to elude, as Putnam puts it, the simple conviction that in every acknowledgment of a pure “fact” there is an implicit value judgment.I In every assumption of objectivity we can find the behavioral and “practical” habits of whoever understands it as such. This type of approach to the question is, as Putnam acutely notes, one of the mainstays of pragmatism: when, it asks, will we stop avoiding the problem and decide to give the pragmatist challenge the attention it merits?1

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Turning from Putnam to pragmatism, we will look at the analyses of the founder of this current, Peirce, and at the definition of his pragmatic maxim. We may thus grasp the problem at the point where it was first formulated, and where it was formulated with the greatest philosophical discernment. I want to start from the Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism of 1903, leaving aside Peirce’s first formulations of pragmatism, which he characterized as too nominalist. The first lecture is entitled The Maxim of Pragmatism and in it Peirce reformulates his ideas through a full consideration of what he called the three normative sciences (aesthetics, ethics, and logic). In 1878, asked what a belief is and answered that “it consists mainly in being deliberately prepared to adopt the formula believed in as the guide to action.”2 A proposition to which one adheres thus functions as a criterion for conduct. But if what we think is to be interpreted in terms of what we are “prepared to do, then surely logic, or the doctrine of what we ought to think, must be an application of the doctrine of what we deliberately choose to do, which is Ethics.”3 Additionally, we must add the consideration of what it is that we are prepared to admire, and this is aesthetics. So, in its very formulation, pragmatism implicitly refers to the three normative sciences: aesthetics, ethics, and logic. The theme is better defined in the fifth Harvard lecture, The Three Normative Sciences. Here, Peirce reminds the listener what the profound significance of his pragmatism is: namely, that the meaning of a concept does not correspond with what we observe happening in given empirical conditions (literally, the effects that conceivably have practical bearings), but with what would be pursued under all possible circumstances, that is, in an “indefinitely prolonged course of action.”4 In his 1905 Issues of Pragmaticism, he expressly states that if the theory of pragmatism is a theory of meaning, it can only be a realist theory, in the sense of medieval scholastic realism, and hence be grounded on the concepts of generality, possibility, conditionality, and vagueness: “The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol.”5 What is Peirce trying to say in this convoluted language? That pragmatism does not teach me that the meaning of a concept can be read in the immediate, practical effect it produces, but that the meaning must be linked to the entire possible and conditional series of resolutions to act that I am willing to put into effect in order to demonstrate my understanding of that concept. Hence, it is not simple action that is referred to but the potential effectuation of habitual behavior, and “no agglomeration of actual happenings can ever completely fill up the meaning of a ‘would be’.”6 The example given is illuminating, and definitively separates Peirce from James and Dewey: if a diamond were formed and kept in cotton-wool without anyone ever trying to scratch it, could we still talk of the diamond’s “hardness”? Yes, answers

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Peirce, because we are not talking about empirical tests that are now being or have been made, but about conceivable and conditional possibilities linked to the use of a certain concept. Hence, we say it is a real possibility that it would withstand any pressure under any given condition. It is not something that I can verify empirically, but a proposition that expresses a belief of a conditional kind modeled on the Stoic inference “if…then,” and it is only valid if I rely on a general conception linked to the series of possible and infinite experiments that I could conditionally think of myself as carrying out. A far cry from the primacy of action! Peirce’s pragmatism is the supremacy of the most abstract of ideas: that of the pure possibility of an unlimited totality, something that by definition does not occupy the area of experience. It is no surprise, then, that Peirce binds pragmatism to a form of extreme scholastic realism. However, this is not to say that he considers this entire logical framework to be based on a simple belief, utmost confidence, or an act of faith, as we will see. Let us look at another definition of pragmatic meaning to be found in a letter to Calderoni. It consists of the conception of what our conduct will be on conceivable occasions. We are now getting closer to the ethical aspect of the pragmatic doctrine, which in those years Peirce could not fail to notice (it had, as we will see, already existed in embryonic form in 1878). Pragmatic meaning is something completely virtual; it does not consist of a fact but of a habit of conduct or of a general moral determination of any procedure that can be actuated. The change is thus effected: theories are not verified by facts, but exist in a pragmatic context of acceptance founded on a willingness to act in accordance with the theories. Being willing and resolved to follow a path on the basis of a “general moral determination to act” because we are convinced of its truth, of the fact that if the totality of the possible conditions for actuation were given (obviously never concretely feasible), then that type of meaning would manifest its persistence and internal coherence. But there is more. If the meaning of a symbol consists of the way in which it could make us act, it is evident – Peirce says also in the Harvard Lectures – that this way is not reducible to the description of a series of mechanical movements but refers to an action that has a particular end.7 Conditionality has, therefore, a strong internal teleological and axiological reference, and pragmatism has to do with the intentions of an action, its ultimate ends, and not with an immediate action and its empirical usefulness. If we are to understand pragmatism “it is incumbent upon us to inquire what an ultimate aim, capable of being pursued in an indefinitely prolonged course of action can be,” in that long run he spoke of in his earliest writings and which defines the space of public truth and reality as an indefinitely future event. However, the object of ethics is precisely the aim of action. Ethics “is the study of what ends of action we are deliberately prepared to adopt,” and so the pragmatist perspective has an inalienable ethical core.8 Moreover, “an ultimate end of action deliberately adopted – that is to say reasonably adopted

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– must be a state of things that reasonably recommends itself in itself, aside from any ulterior consideration. It must be an admirable ideal.”9 Aesthetics is also entangled with logic and ethics; the borderlines between the three disciplines are no longer visible. However, I do not wish to address here the complex problem of the normative sciences in Peirce but, instead, to attempt to understand what makes logic ethical, what – in the terms of recent American philosophy – makes every fact into a value. There is a dual aspect to the path followed by Peirce: while it is true that in his later writings it is the ethical framework that shapes the relation between logic and pragmatics, in his early work he makes an effort to demonstrate that there is also an intrinsic logicality in every ethical choice. We turn now to his 1907 work, Pragmatism, in which Peirce briefly outlines the relationship between sign, object, and interpretant. According to a definition repeated several times, the sign refers to an object for an interpretant and the interpretant is what, even in the absence of a definite real interpreter, is a “would be,” as Peirce says, “that is, is what it would determine in the interpreter if there were one.”10 This recalls the definition of pragmaticist meaning mentioned above and, furthermore, it is in this same work that he asserts the identity between logical final interpretant and pragmatic habit. The result is that the logical interpretant must be conjugated in a future tense, where the mood of the verb is conditional, having the sense of “would be.” But once again, when we say that we understand the meaning of a concept, it means that we are able and willing (logic and ethics) to trust in the series of possible interpretations that could arise in relation to that given concept. It means that we project ourselves into the future and into the chain of possible conditions by which – à la Leibniz – everything hangs together. We put our trust in the chain of interpretants not only preceding our individual interpretation but also potentially future and infinite ones, showing that we firmly believe in a chain of hermeneutical solidarity that reaches far beyond our individual “haecceity” or “thisness.” “According to Pragmaticism, the conclusion of a Reasoning proper must refer to the Future. For its meaning refers to conduct, and since it is a reasoned conclusion must refer to deliberate conduct, which is controllable conduct. But the only controllable conduct is Future conduct…Thus, a belief that Christopher Columbus discovered America really refers to the Future,” that is, it is entrusted to that solidarity of interpreting practices that will continue to hold as real this belief, which thus shows itself not to be a simple fact but, like every reality, “something which is constituted by an event indefinitely future.”11 Now, this type of belief has a strongly ethical tone. Its ethical character lies precisely in this connection to a conditional futurity to which I entrust the possibility for my momentary habit to prove true. If ethics is the site of choice, I choose to believe in the actual infinity of unlimited semiosis as a guarantee of the veracity of every single belief. This kind of thinking, which –

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as we have just seen – developed its full argumentative power and its normative and ontological connections towards the turn of the last century, already existed in a rudimentary form in Peirce’s Illustrations On the Logic of Science of 1878. In The Doctrine of Chances, Peirce begins with the assertion that with respect to a single case it is meaningless to talk of probability; moreover, every conditional proposition is deprived of meaning if correlated with a single case (with respect to pragmatism, with a single concrete action). “Indeed, since the validity of an inference consists in the truth of the hypothetical proposition that if the premises be true the conclusion will also be true, and since the only real fact which can correspond to such a proposition is that whenever the antecedent is true the consequent is so also, it follows that there can be no sense in reasoning in an isolated case at all.” 12 What does Peirce mean by this? He explains using an example that has been taken up and very well elucidated by Putnam.13 A man is told he can choose between a pack of 25 red cards and one black card and another with 25 black cards and one red card, and that if he picks a black card, he will die. There is no doubt that he will pick from the pack with 25 red cards. If he should be so unlucky as to pick the only black card, how can he console himself? By saying that his choice was the only reasonable and intrinsically logical one? But in this individual case his choice led to the only event that was absolutely necessary to avoid, and so was not at all reasonable. On the contrary, as Peirce says, it was completely worthless. If we consider each single choice purely in itself – and I would add for the purposes of our discussion, every fact without any value – then it will never be either reasonable or unreasonable since it can never be grounded in a series of antecedents and consequents, in the conditional and causal series, in the endless chain of signs that underpins every cognitive inference. There is, then, no single real fact corresponding to the truth of the assertion “to choose a red card is reasonable.” The sole fact that confirms its truth is not an empirical fact – the single and fortunate personal choice – but the belief in that “would be” which in an extreme conceptual synthesis projects before me the totality of the possible choices of card. So it is not a question of facts but of values, of beliefs, logical beliefs, that is tropism – to use Rescher’s expression – in respect of the generality and continuity of experience.14 To believe in the universality of logic is an ethical commitment, and ethics is valid in that it provides us with a way to inhabit the edifice of the logos, that “thinking common to all” of which Heraclitus spoke. Returning to the example, if I could each time choose different cards until there are none left, then I would be right to choose from among the pack of red cards. But to count on this conditional possibility without real actuation, elevating it to the foundation of the logic of probability, is a pure act of faith, a hope, an ethical habit. According to another example, the soldier who engages in the battle to conquer a hilltop makes a reasonable choice in that he identifies with his regiment, even though this reasonableness

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may lead him in just one, fatal case to the most unreasonable among all events – namely, his death. Likewise, every single interpreter relies on the infinite possible interpretations of the community to which he belongs, identifying with the community. It is this reference to an interpreting community – “without definite limits, and capable of an indefinite increase of knowledge” – as witness of each single individual choice, that is the prevalent element in the 1878 Illustrations.15 Peirce explains knowledge, semiosis, and the very development of the concepts of truth and reality by appealing to the hope (an ethical and not a cognitive principle) that an ideal and unlimited community will come into being that bears solid witness to the transmitting of every symbol, making its meaning true and actuating its effects. In other words, according to Peirce, homo logicus reasons like the soldier in the battle: he knows that individually he may fail, but he also knows that if he strongly identifies with his entire regiment, even his own individual action will have a greater chance of success. To believe in the intrinsic logicity of events in spite of the fallibilism of all theoriesis a heroic act of sacrifice, the ability to immolate one’s own finite existence in the guaranteed totality of the ultimate interpretant. Truth is not an idiosyncrasy, says Peirce – truth is public. But that also means that truth is not an empirically verifiable fact. Truth is a value entrusted to interpretations on a semiotic basis and reality is the final product of mental action, and not its incognizable cause. It is therefore final in both senses of the word: “last” and destined, terminal and desirable. The possibility of implementing the total series of would bes is never given to me in practice, and my present situation is in reality incommensurable with the series: the conditional seriality of “if…then” can never be experienced as such; it can never be wholly translated into the specific situation, yet it is only on the basis of the belief in it that single choices prove to be reasonable. There is, then, a profound disconnect between the reasons that guide logical synthesis and the unrepeatable nature of individual experience. It is here that the real ethical quandary lies, the tragic character of ethics; we could also say that we are always faced with the individual choice to be made here and now, but the principle of pragmatism teaches us that logical reasoning has to appeal to the series of possible and conditional occasions that could present themselves if we were able to experience not just one but all of them. Translated into traditional metaphysical terminology – into what in my view is the most compelling theme in philosophy – this becomes the question: what is the relation between the general and the particular? How can the unrepeatable emergence of the single occasion and the normative nature of every general rule be rendered congruent? Singularity cannot be appropriated, yet it is the only experience that we have; generality cannot be experienced, yet it offers us the only possibility of order and understanding of the experience itself. Between these two limits the ethical theme has always imposed itself or rather – as Peirce wanted – the logical theme, which can only be grounded in ethics. “Logic

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depends upon mathematics, still more intimately upon ethics; but its proper concern is with truth beyond the purview of either.”16 In this regard, Putnam says that I have a logical reason for doing what is most probable in my single personal situation only because I project my belief into a potentially infinite series of possible experiences. I do this by transferring the singularity of the present result to the future, to every potential site in this infinite series, identifying myself with an unlimited community of people, which I recognize as being like myself and that I call as a witnesses of the general truth of my choices. “It is only because I care about what might happen to people in similar situations that I do what has the best chance in my own situation. My belief that I, in this one unrepeatable situation, am somehow more likely to experience eternal felicity, rather than eternal woe, is fundamentally, then, just what Reichenbach said it was, a fictitious transfer, on Peirce’s view.”17 Hence, my ability to make predictions, inductions, hypotheses, and to calculate probabilities, is not based on anything like John Stuart Mill’s principle of the uniformity of nature but on this act of projection, a projecting identification that understands every fact as a norm, that reinserts every singularity into the potentially infinite series of logical succession. In engaging in any kind of ampliative or synthetic reasoning, therefore, I reason as if the totality of experiences were ideally given to me, not only those that I could legitimately have in an infinite space of time but also those which the hypothetical community of researchers could manage to produce in the long run. Every human being has an implacable inclination to identify with every other human being in a potentially infinite series of references and interpretations that delineate the site of his or her form of life, as Wittgenstein would have put it. “All this requires a conceived identification of one’s interests with those of an unlimited community.”18 This identification, however, is not logically reasonable; if anything, it is ethically reasonable – nothing stops us, according to Peirce, from having “a hope, or calm and cheerful wish, that the community may last beyond any assignable date.”19 That is to say, logic is founded on three sentiments: interest in an indefinite community, recognition of the possibility of this interest being made supreme, and hope in the unlimited continuance of intellectual activity.20 So Peirce moves towards an ethic of social action and, as a deep analysis of this type of “faith” demonstrates, these three sentiments, basic requisites of logic, allude to the evangelical principles of “Charity, Faith, and Hope.”21 The supreme interest that guides us does not provide us with certainties, but with hopes: the hope that the community lasts and guarantees my inferences beyond any assigned limit, that it acts at every moment as a witness of the general truth of my choices, and that reality proves to be true in the final opinion. But this is manifestly a teleological reference not only of ethical, but also religious inspiration, as we have seen. The time we have in mind is time in the Christian sense with a linear unfolding and the Resurrection as its outcome.

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The logical final interpretant is an ethical universal interpretant. Peirce believes that the reason that leads me to behave in such a way that in the long run my behavior can be seen to be reasonable is not reason at all, but a pure act of faith. “It is therefore impossible to be thoroughly and rationally logic except upon an ethical basis.”22 But, we might add in conclusion, it is also impossible to have ethical beliefs that do not proceed in logical directions, that do not help us to construct a “logic of events.” The reason is that this is the ethos that we have to inhabit: the common that Heraclitus already talked about (intentionally connecting it with the logos). Outside of this ethos there is no community and no logic; apart from it, there are only human beings who sleep and have single private opinions. In a nutshell: we are logical if we give up our singularity, if we transform the unrepeatability of each single situation into the possibility of its indefinite repeatability and transformation. Only the transformation of each fact into a sign and its metamorphic repetition within the chain of semiosis – which entails assuming the continuity, limitlessness, and infinity of every interpretation – gives meaning to the unattainability of the blind occurrence, here and now, of each given event.

NOTES 1. Hilary Putnam, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 145. 2. Charles Peirce, The Essential Peirce, ed. The Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), vol. 2, p. 139. 3. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 142. 4. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 202. 5. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 347. 6. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 402. 7. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 202. 8. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 200. 9. Charles Peirce, The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, p. 201. 10. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 409. 11. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 359 and vol. 1, p. 64. 12. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 148. 13. See Hilary Putnam, “Reasonableness as Fact and as Value,” in Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle: Open Court, 1987). This way of seeing probability, which is put forward here and commented upon, has in fact been surpassed by more recent interpretations. They take into account the dynamic quantity of information, thereby going beyond the paradoxes that classical logic held to be insurmountable. However, for our purposes, Peirce’s reasoning remains valid as it is predominantly ethical and theoretical. 14. N. Resher, Peirce’s Philosophy of Science (Notre-Dame and London: The University of Notre-Dame Press, 1978). 15. Charles Peirce, The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, p. 52.

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16. Charles Peirce in Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931-35), vol. 4, p. 240. 17. Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism, p. 82. 18. Charles Peirce, The Essential Peirce, vol. 1, p. 150. 19. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 150. 20. Ibid. 21. This is how Peirce expresses himself at the end of the article. 22. Charles Peirce, The Essential Peirce, vol 2, p. 198.

Four INDIANA JAMES Maurizio Ferraris

1. Are Popes Infallible? Re-thinking James in a congress entitled “Pragmatism and Analytical Philosophy,” right after hundred years have elapsed since James took part to the 5th International Congress of Psychology in Rome, is probably a good opportunity to give to James what is James’s and to Russell what is Russell’s – given Russell’s keenness for a “solid sense of reality” which James sometimes lacks.1 Unsurprisingly then, Russell charged James with the invention of the “Transatlantic Truth”– a truth that turned the question “Have Popes always been infallible?” into the question “Are the effects of thinking them infallible on the whole good?”2 Russell’s imputations did not fall short of a certain malevolence, since he maliciously noticed that Le Roy, a pragmatist, suffered Papal condemnation for writing on the problem of God.3 Here is how James replied: “We affirm nothing of so silly as Mr. Russell supposes. Good consequences are not proposed by us as a sure sign, mark, or criterion, by which truth’s presence is habitually ascertained, tho they may indeed serve on occasion as such a sign.”4 Were Russell and James talking about the very same thing? No, and I will try to demonstrate it, by myself pontificating on God, but also on the dark object of desire of James – namely the Automatic Sweetheart. First of all, I will examine the characteristic of the transatlantic truth, that is, of the pragmatic theory of truth. Secondly, I will confront it with a ontological perspective, what I propose to call the “Pacific Truth”; not just because it reflects common sense, is apparent, but also because it points to Davidson’s example: if language organizes experience, does it organize the Pacific Ocean too?5 Thirdly, I will test the two theories of truth on the Automatic Sweetheart’s case. Lastly, I will reveal the arcane and argue that James’s theory of truth – a William James who at times looks like Indiana Jones, an Indiana James, so to speak – is in fact a theory of scientific research. And at least for a while, a theory of scientific research can be hoped to stay out of ontology. On the contrary, Russell’s theory is indeed a theory of truth, and as such it can never do away with ontology.

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In order to illustrate what we mean by transatlantic truth, I will begin with a passage that Putnam lifted from James in 1999.6 It is found in a note from a well – known conference of 1908, “The Pragmatist Account of Truth and Its Misunderstanders,” subsequently published as chapter VIII of The Meaning of Truth.7 Let us see how James answers his objectors: pragmatism is not a new edition of positivism, it does not stress the action only, nor (and this is the paragraph where we find the note) is it unable to acknowledge those truths that fall out of the range of our experience – either the ones about our best friend’s headache or the ones about God. God is necessary for the pragmatist, since a universe of pure matter would be unsatisfying, and only God can make the universe meaningful. By the same token, James goes on, we want a Real Sweetheart, an Automatic Sweetheart would not make us happy. Let us read the note: I see here a chance to forestall a criticism which some one may make on Lecture III of my Pragmatism, where, on pp. 96 – 100, I said that “God” and “Matter” might be regarded as synonymous terms, so long as no different future consequences were deducible from the two conceptions. The passage was transcribed from my address at the California Philosophical Union, reprinted in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. i, p. 673. I had no sooner given the address than I perceived a flaw in that part of it; but I have left the passage unaltered ever since, because the flaw did not spoil its illustrative value. The flaw was evident when, as a case analogous to that of a godless universe, I thought of what I called an “automatic sweetheart,” meaning a soulless body which should be absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated maiden, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing us, and performing all feminine offices as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her. Would any one regard her as a full equivalent? Certainly not, and why? Because, framed as we are, our egoism craves above all things inward sympathy and recognition, love and admiration. The outward treatment is valued mainly as an expression, as a manifestation of the accompanying consciousness believed in. Pragmatically, then, belief in the automatic sweetheart would not work, and in point of fact no one treats it as a serious hypothesis. The godless universe would be exactly similar. Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as satisfactory, because the chief call for God on modern men’s part is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically. Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, so God

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remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so for definite pragmatic reasons.8 The very same thought is to be found in President Schreber – and I mean Daniel Paul Schreber, President of the Court of Dresden and famous patient of Freud and Jung – who was persuaded that God was taking care of each and every moment of his life. During the same lapse of years he published Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken, where he shows his weird personal intimacy with God and – in the last pages – celebrates the order of the world.9 Thus, as far as God is concerned, if we consider Scherber 1903 and James 1909, there’s no difference between the Memories of My Nervous Illness and The Meaning of Truth. If we must pick one of two crazy hypotheses, then, would it not be more convenient for us to believe in the automatic sweetheart? Is it not a more corroborating and funnier idea than the idea of a God who teleologically organizes the universe? Notice the deep nature of the flaw that James does not seem to perceive here: it is one thing to acknowledge the teleological order of the world and maintain that a clock has to have a clock – maker (a side – remark: there is no need for the clock – maker to be still around, or to care about us: what if it is an assembly line in China?). It is a different thing to have a machine pretending to be a person, who – again – cares for us. In the first case we have the clock on the one side, and on the other side the clock – maker – if any. In the second one we have the clock pretending to be the caring clock – maker as well. This is quite a bit too much of a transatlantic truth, and indeed James brakes: he admits God, but not the Automatic Sweetheart. However, according to his theory, if he admits the first one, he ought to admit the second one too. In fact, James’s theory of truth should, if rigorously applied, allow us to believe in the caring feelings of the automatic sweetheart: “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot.”10 The sweetheart corroborates us, we are not in a position to verify that she is mechanical any more than we are for any being in the world (could not all of us be automatons?). Moreover, we cannot verify that any more than we can verify that God exists. Therefore, everything should be all right with her feelings being true. But than why does James deny the hypothesis? It is likely that James considers, wisely, that the things we meet in the world are not necessarily made to corroborate us. He assumes it, as a common sense rule, but he does not say it, and this is a flaw, or better yet, a “sin.” The troubles began as soon as James in 1907 explained the etymology of “pragmatism”: “The term is derived from the same Greek word pragma, meaning action, from which our terms ‘practice’ and ‘practical’ come.”11 That’s true, but it is only one of the many meanings the word has. Others are “state of affairs” and “real fact”: a real thing that may be good or bad, since

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among the meanings of pragma there are both “good business, useful, profit” and “annoyance, trouble, worry, difficulty.” That there are troubles is a trouble, but it is a fact that there are troubles. Still, there should not be any, if James’ definition of truth – which James absurdly refuses to apply to the automatic sweetheart – held. On the one hand, then, there is the theory: the transatlantic truth. On the other hand, there are common sense and honesty complaining and protesting. And they cannot help protesting against the transatlantic truth, because James does admit the traditional notion of truth as correspondence of the proposition to the thing – even though he adds some modifications. He only objects (rightly) that it is a rather trivial and vague theory, since it is not exactly clear what this correspondence would consist of. Still, the correspondence theory of truth says roughly how actually things go. And these considerations clash badly with the other side of James’s theory of truth – the corroborating truth.12 The co – presence of a theory of truth as correspondence and a theory of truth as happiness raises a serious problem, precisely because it is not always the case that the world smiles at us. Pondering this, the Hermeneutics (who are philosophers less honest than James) have come directly to a theory of truth as openness, as project.13 In fact, I had better believe that the world has sense, that a text has sense, that humanity is moving towards the good, and that I will not die in 20 seconds. Otherwise the range of the things that I can do with truth would be rather limited, for instance I would not start studying physics or the history of the Sumerians, I would not write a constitution, or a project for the reform of social public healthcare in Apulia. Here actually the link between truth and happiness looks tighter, as anyone who has conceived dreams of glory knows.14 The solution is a good one, but again it clashes with common sense. For instance, it does not pass the lie – detector test. Indeed, is the truth reveled by the lie – detector project or correspondence? When, in detective movies, we see people submitted to a lie – detector test, whomever the KGB has not trained reacts in terms of correspondence of the proposition to the thing. “John,” for instance, who has not been trained by the KGB, answers “No” to the question “Have you ever seen Mr.Brown?” If he really has never seen him, then the machine does not jump. If, on the other hand, he has seen him and he is lying, then the machine starts tracing long irregular lines. But “Michael,” who has been trained by the KGB, answers “No,” even though he has seen him, but the machine does not uncover any emotional reaction from him. John follows a theory of truth as correspondence, Michael a theory of truth as project, but Michael is lying, he is not formulating a higher – order truth. It is difficult to avoid correspondence, and James knows it. He had never thought of being a novelist, as had his brother Henry, who in writing The Turn of the Screw told us a story where the truth crumbles into different

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standpoints. Henry adhered implicitly to a theory of truth even more radical than the hermeneutic one: the post – modern theory of truth as non – truth. Maintaining that truth is violent, whereas non – truth is kind, the post – moderns are not liable in any way to the objections to which James (who preserved correspondence) and the hermeneutics (whose truth as project has to come to terms sooner or later with truth as conformity) are liable to. To the contrary, according to the post – moderns, there is nothing at all to verify, not even the program. Having gone that far, they can give free rein to happiness entirely: the era of theory of knowledge is over and we have to switch objectivity for solidarity.15 Is James’ contradiction solved by the post – modernist thesis of truth as non – truth? Obviously it is not. The post – moderns have simply come to a skeptical upshot, the well – known fortress that is very easy to come in but extremely difficult to get out of. And the refutations are utterly obvious. Firstly, whoever says that man is measure of all things cannot explain why should it be so.16 Why not the pig?17 Secondly, if someone says that there is no truth, then either it is right, and then there is truth (his own), or he is wrong, and again there is truth (the others’). Thirdly, and more aptly for this kind of controversy: it is only possible seriously to deny a truth in the name of another truth – a true truth, and not in name of a half – truth or of a non – truth. And a true truth is an objective truth, namely something concerning objects.18 3. Pacific Truth Now, what is the true truth? The Transatlantic or the Pacific Truth? The Pacific one is. The Pacific Truth is such a trouble to James, because as an honest philosopher he holds on to truth as correspondence. Therefore, he cannot enjoy the secondary advantages of the truth as half – truth, nor the extraordinary though useless benefits of the truth as non – truth. If he holds on to correspondence, then he cannot do away with accepting a sphere that is indispensable to truth, that is, the world of objects: the proposition “snow is white” is true if and only if there is the snow, and it is white. James does not feel like denying that. On the other hand, the hermeneuticists would say that, maybe, in the future, snow could turn black; while the post – moderns would say that snow is already now black, white, and colored as you like, and maybe also that there is not even anything like the snow. That is good for the consciousness and the honesty of James, but it is quite bad for his theory of truth, since the impassivity of the objects makes it difficult to claim that “Good consequences are not proposed by us as a sure sign, mark, or criterion, by which truth’s presence is habitually ascertained, tho they may indeed serve on occasion as such a sign.” This is a substantial point. The idea that the last word belongs to truth rather than to non – truth, and that a thesis such as “truth does not exist” may

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be seriously maintained only on the assumption that truth exists, has a lot to do with the evidences of sense experience and with experiences of objects. Its genesis, in fact, is right there in sense experience: I can doubt an optical or tactile illusion just so far as I have sensate certainty. And I can think that there is truth only in so far as I assume that there are subjects that meet objects that are separated from the first, and that confirm or dismiss the expectations. So, the last word goes to the object, not to the subject, since experience is called upon to verify, and then to falsify, and then to verify again, in the clash with the object. It is hard to find better words than those of Husserl to express this: “the un – true, the non – existing goes away by itself already in the passivity.”19 How? It is easy: snow is white if and only if snow is white. And if there is no snow, there is nothing to do, not even for the most Stakhanovist ofpragmatists. And if I saw it pink, but now I realize that it is white, two things – the snow and my eyes – will inform me. Let Husserl speak again: “‘I now see that it is an illusion’ is a mode of evidence too.” 20 This is just what James could not stand, because at the end it points to a passive and contemplative notion of truth. This is the point that I would like for you to focus on. Pragmatists, hermeneuticists, and post – moderns all lack a theory of the object – an ancient theory, a metaphysical theory. Quite a lazy and passive theory indeed, which had been developed in the time of James, and not in lively America, but in the more quiescent Kakania. This is the same region of the Moravian Husserl and it is close to that of the Polish Tarski – the philosopher of white snow. A theory of the object had been thought and written in Gratz, in 1904, by Alexius von Meinong.21 Meinong exaggerated, though, by denouncing the prejudice towards the real and by admitting non – existent objects too (hence he too fell victim to the arrows of Russell, the criticizer of the two worlds).22 Still, as a matter of fact, a good theory of object yields the only way to take the object away from the theories that dissolve it and turn it into something else. Exactly as – with Kazimierz Twardowski, born in Vienna and died in Poland – a good distinction between the act of thinking something and the object to be thought of is the only way not to lose the world.23 Now, does James have a theory of object? No, clearly and necessarily no, at least according to his explicit theory of truth. In “Does Consciousness Exist?”, the conference held in Rome in 1905, James maintained that the dualism between subject and object is a fake, and that “thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are,”24 that is, objects are absorbed into thoughts, or at least thoughts and objects do not differ from each other. Such a theory is as robust as it is bewildering, because I cannot believe that a cultivated man such as James, by writing that “thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are,” did not have in mind Shakespeare’s Tempest: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made of and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.”25 The phrasing is almost identical.

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Prospero or not, this annihilation of the object was not to the liking of an eminent Austro– Hungarian, Franz Brentano – the master of Husserl, Meinong, and Twardowski. Let us consider another note, this time from the Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie. Brentano upholds the difference between sentient activity (the subject) and what the activity is directed to (the object), between the sensing and what is sensed, between my hatred against an enemy and the enemy. We ought not to mix them up; still, lately – Brentano complains – more and more people do so. Let us read the note: Among the others, William James has endorsed [this point of view] and argued for it extensively in a relation at the International Congress of Psychology in Rome in 1905. When I cast a glance in a room, it appears to me my very act of seeing together with the room; moreover, the fantastic images of sense objects are distinct but by grades from sense images with an objective cause; and lastly, we say that bodies are beautiful, but the difference between beauty and ugly depends on the difference of the movement of the soul. For those reasons the psychic and the physical phenomenon are not to be considered as two classes of distinct phenomena. To me is difficult to understand how the orator could not see the weakness of those arguments. To appear together does not mean to appear as the same thing, as much as showing up together does not amount to being the very same thing. Therefore Descartes could recommend, without undergoing any contradiction, to deny that the room I see exists, and only afterwards to deny that my seeing the room exists. But (…) if a fantasy were distinguished from a perception only by its intensity, as soon as the difference vanishes, what would hinder (for what has just been said) that the full identity of fancying and seeing mean nothing else than their identity with a single psychic phenomenon? In the third argument, he talks about beauty… Now, it is a strange logic indeed according to which from the fact that ‘the pleasure for the beauty’ is something psychic, we would conclude that it has to be psychic also what from whose appearing this pleasure depends. Were it true, then also each sorrow would be identical with what for which someone feel sorrow, and we would guard from repent for a mistake we did, since in repenting we would repeat the mistake.26 We ought not annihilate the object into the subject, what is sensed into the sensing, what is thought into the thinking. This is the basic request of the struggle against the psychologism: thoughts are objects. If thoughts were not separated from the thinker who thinks them, we could not understand each other, and logic would turn into a branch of psychology.27 And if there were no physical objects separated from the subjects – objects that not always coddle us and make us happy – then speaking of truth would be meaningless.

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Here is another substantial point. By absorbing the object into the subject – exactly as Gentile absorbed the historical events into the history that tells and comprehends them, and the Divina Commedia into its comment – James’ theory is reminiscent of a scene from an Indiana Jones movie.28 In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones is about to face a duel with a bully wielding a scimitar, but then he remembers the gun he is carrying, and the story is brought to a sudden end. All right, still, had he been carrying a water – gun, he would not have the same easy way out at his disposal: the gun solves the problem just because it is a real gun, namely because of features immanent to that very object, and because of the subject who needed it and who is corroborated by it. By way of contrast, if in Hitchcock’s The Birds the protagonists’ house had been equipped with shutters, they all would have had a much more enjoyable stay. That is to say: the thing constrains, it is not just a resource, it may be a limit or a hindrance, thereby not ceasing to be a real thing. This fact holds already in the scientific enterprise: the things are at disposal of the interpreter only within a restricted breadth; otherwise there would not be any difference between knowing and believing to know. And we can be certain that if empirical research had rebuffed the theory of relativity, Einstein would not have been glad of that; the theory would then have been false, and the denial of it true. Even more so, in experience, things are not at the disposal of the interpreter: try to clean your ear with a screwdriver and you will notice that. I can hold a doorknob to open the door, but only if it is solid enough, if it is not a drawing of a doorknob, and so forth. I can use a Mont Blanc as a filter to observe a solar eclipse, but I could not do the same with a silver Sheaffer: my room for maneuver is not unlimited, since the material conditions of the object have to be such to allow the performance of its function. Now, the properties that can induce me to make use of higher order performances are based on lower order properties, which are exclusively possessed by the object, and that holds for beings not having the faintest idea of what a door – knob (or a pen or an eclipse) is. For instance, a worm crawling on my Mont Blanc, using it as ground for moving. It is simply not true that any object can be used as any instrument, since a spade may be used as a club, but not the other way around. Moreover, by inverting the natural stance, pragmatism assumes that we spend most of our time grasping objects, people, or theories – in intentional and conscious activities; all the rest being roughly an indistinct, irrelevant, almost non – existent mass. As a matter of fact, we do not stretch towards objects around us very often, we rather shun flies, trams, annoying people; and we cannot accomplish that simply by considering flies, trams, or whatever else as ideas possessing no existence, or as sense data aggregated by a demon who hates us.

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Now, what characterizes objects? The fact that they cannot be corrected, the fact that they are un – amendable: the world is really full of things that cannot be corrected, that hinder us, and make our lives more difficult.29 Luckily though, they also yield a solid ground to our demands, to our happiness, and to our theories – when things go right. Down below things do not change, because they cannot be corrected, that is, because they are so and not otherwise, and we cannot do anything about it. They constrain our actions and define the space of our possibilities. We can say that the table in front of our eyes could be green if we saw it through blue – filtered lens, or black if we switched the light off, but we cannot avoid seeing it as yellow under the actual conditions. On the other hand, we can very well see the flame in the fireplace and think we are in presence of a phenomenon of oxidation rather than the action of phlogiston. This characterization holds not only for a physical object, but also for an ideal one. The properties of a triangle, of the principle of contradiction, or of an arithmetic operation do not depend at all, as far as their essence is concerned, on the construction of a geometer, a logician, or a mathematician, and even less so on their happiness. They are discoveries, and not inventions, as much as a continent or the Pacific Ocean. Here the subject has a role only in socialization: I have discovered a theorem, and I will publish the result. This characterization holds even for social objects. Differently from physical objects, they do not have a being independent from the fact that someone believes them to be (they are not arbitrary notwithstanding, try to leave a bar without paying and you will understand what I mean). Differently from ideal objects, they have a beginning in time. My promise began, let’s say, Friday the 17th, 1984, and before that date it was not there. However, that does not mean that social object are dependent on my will, after that they are constructed as such. The promise I made on Friday 17th can obsess me even if I have changed my mind – that makes me sad, and it does not corroborate me at all, but there is nothing that can be done. 4. The Automatic Sweetheart Now, let us come to the test we were talking about, the one of the Automatic Sweetheart. A hundred years ago, in Rome, James claimed (shocking Brentano) that “Sometimes the adjective wanders as if uncertain where to fix itself. Shall we speak of seductive visions or of visions of seductive things?”30 Now, since (1) “thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are,”31 and (2) “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify,” what hinders the Automatic Sweetheart from making us happy? Moreover: is it not more convenient for us to believe that she is true? Would not she make us happier than a God who orders the universe? Are not we downright masochistic not to believe in her? Is it so difficult to please us? No, we cannot accept the doll, for at least three reasons.

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Firstly, we would not be happy. This is James’s argument: our egos would not be satisfied, because we do not feel affect in return. That is sacrosanct, but just because, pace James, thoughts and things are not made of the same stuff. Even our internal states, in many cases, are determined by the fact of being or not grounded in objects; quite a different thing from the blurring of “seducing visions” and “visions of seducing things.” For instance: we are happy, as often as we are un – happy, for something or someone; otherwise it is “euphoria” or “depression,” which are not exactly sentiments. Antidepressants alert us to the fact that they can cause euphoria; they do not tell us that they can provoke happiness. Now, it is obvious that as a thought experiment the doll does not satisfies us, exactly because there is no thought experiment that can satisfies us, and exactly for the same reason for which happiness is different from euphoria. Still, if James’ theory that there is no distinction between subject and object were true, she should satisfy us. Secondly, she would not be happy too. Because if the doll existed for real, if from the thought experiment we shift from the actual construction of a doll in the real world, then sooner or later the automatic sweetheart could tell us, quite rightly: “don’t call me baby.” In fact, we would deal with Leibniz’s dream, with an “automate spirituel ou formel, mais libre” namely with a person.32 And we would not have any right not to be satisfied; at worst we could start wondering if we are not automatons too. The doll, in this hypothesis, would be as L’Ève future, imagined in 1886 by Villiers de l’IsleAdam: a mechanical android built by Thomas Alva Edison in a dugout of Menlo Park, with a gramophone guiding movement and words, and who, according to Villiers, overcomes humanity in the sense of spirit. Lord Ewald, the stunned visitor, asks Edison how she would answer in a proper way, and Edison, more wisely than James, replies: “Does not the lover say again and again, at every instant, those two delicious and sacred words who has said her thousand of times? And what else does he would demand her, if only the echo of those two words, or a silence loaded with joy?”33 Thirdly, willy – nilly, the doll does not exist, it is an object that is not there: James deals with a thought experiment and Villiers with a feuilleton. God is not a hypothesis verifiable in the world, whereas the Automatic Sweetheart, within certain limits, is: I look for her, but I do not find her; I may find her only in my own mind, and during a thought experiment or in reading a French novel. Thus, when we come to verifying, we realize that the automaton do not satisfy the New Yorker James, any more than – we remain in the American literature – it could satisfy a true Bostonian such as Edgar Allan Poe, who in Von Kempelen and his Discovery (1849) comes across an automaton too. The Turkish chess – player, invented in 1770 by a Hungarian nobleman, was an automaton who defied Franklin and Napoleon, and whom Poe saw in 1983 at Richmond. To speak the truth, the automaton concealed a real chess – player inside. That is to say that at the end of the day automatons

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are a fake, whereas there could never be a similar proof for God. The flaw, hence, is in the object, which not even Indiana James manages to avoid, exactly because he does not despise – wisely generally speaking but disastrously for his own theory – the doctrine of truth as correspondence. Here is the point: we cannot flee from correspondence For this reason the sentence: “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify” has a problem: it is one thing to “assimilate,” and “corroborate,” and “validate,” those are active functions of the subject; it is quite another to “verify” – a function in which the subject is mostly “liable” to the object. 5. The Sun and The Moon Thus James, an adventuring but honest philosopher, has never retreated from the idea that truth needs objects and correspondence . This clashes with his other idea, that truth has to corroborate us and makes us happy. Let us get back where we started – the face off of James and Russell – and let us solve the arcane. It seems clear, so far, that Russell and James do not talk about the same thing when they talk of “truth.” Russell refers to truth, James to the well being of a scientific enterprise. Russell talks about ontology, about what there is, and James talks about epistemology, about what we know and what we have to do for knowing it. Those two tiers, although James does not realize it, do not coincide at all, even if they will meet sooner or later. It is a fact that it is a good hypothesis to seek therapies against cancer, but once we have cancer, it is there for real, and it is true we have it even though it does not enhance our good mood. Otherwise we would be like the crazy man in the Penal Colony who rejoices when the harrow scratches his condemnation on his back. This is what Russell stresses. The pragmatists do not distinguish between “criterion” and “meaning,” between the way of doing research and the objects we are referring to.34 Had they done so, he would have had much less to object to. Their stance, he adds, is a rough generalization from the method of the inductive sciences – the method of working by advantageous hypotheses.35 Having said that, it is still the case that once we assume that the catalogue of the British Museum is faultless; it does not follow that the catalogue would do without the books.36 Which is another way of saying that truth cannot do without objects. James is not alone in making this mistake, since – even if he criticizes the neo – Kantians (they are the polemic target of the conference) – he inherits from Kant exactly the same confusion of ontology and epistemology.37 More precisely, he inherits an entire Kantian package. First of all, the Copernican revolution – the idea that we should not ask how things are in themselves, but how they have to be done in order to be known by us (even worse, since according to James we have to ask how they have to be

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done in order to make us happy). Secondly, and as a consequence, the collapse between ontology and epistemology: encountering something and knowing it is one and the same. Notice that only in this perspective the idea that happiness is a sign for truth might look likely (I may be happy for having discovered a virus, not for having contracted it). Happiness can be a sign of truth only if we collapse truth and reality, swallowing the reality into the truth, exactly as before we had swallowed the object into the subject. Putnam, in his sympathetic review of pragmatic theory of truth, signals the deadly cul de sac where James ends up.38 Once he acknowledges the difficulty he is in (in particular, about the irrevocability of the past), he insists that we have to distinguish between realities, which cannot be changed, namely amended, and truths, which can be changed. Is that true? A judge may say, on the ground of the evidence he or she has available, that Miss Franzoni is a murderer. According to a different judgment she may be considered innocent. Nevertheless, the confrontation here is not between two truths, but rather between a false process truth and a true process truth – between a non – truth and a truth. Otherwise we could not see why Justice should revise the first verdict. What decides the truth is reality, namely a sphere of objects. Yet James was probably thinking about something different, something like the following: the truth of the sun does not change, it is just that Ptolemy could say the sun rotates around the Earth and Copernicus that the Earth turns around the sun. Therefore, reality does not change, truth does. All right, but it changes exactly in the sense that Ptolemy’s theory turns out to be a mistake, and Copernicus’ to be a truth. It is quite difficult that two truths can reign together at the same time. The only example heard of, and thereby often quoted as a proof that maybe it is possible, is the complementarity of the ondulatory and the corpuscular theories of light. At any rate, Copernicus’ and Ptolemy’s theory never touched the nature of objects and the experience thereof, not even at a non – scientific level – otherwise we should conclude that because of his wrong theory Ptolemy has never seen the sun during his whole life. Now, if things are like that, then the theory is epistemology, and the sun ontology. The epistemology is the moon, because it shines always by reflected sunlight – if it is true and for it to be true. I do not know whether this theory of the sun and the moon, with its Dantesque and Mediaeval flavor, can help us to solve the question whether Popes or Emperors are infallible, possibly on the ground of the Führerprinzip. I do think anyway that it would help us to dismiss the Papal infallibility on the ground of the obvious assumption that we apply it to the doctrine and not to the objects – to God and not to the world. However, leaving aside the Pope (lest I end up like Le Roy), I believe that acknowledging the primacy of ontology over epistemology is the only way for retiring Heidegger’s idea that, if truth is openness, “the action that founds a state” too is “a way in which the truth is present.”39 That

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is a somewhat mystical but unequivocal way of justifying the Führerprinzip, and a very sad middle – German application of the transatlantic truth. I conclude with a last “of the season” test, concerning the fact that many of us are involved in the editorial board of P.R.I.N, “Programs of Relevant National Interest” – in applying for funding to scientific programs. The pragmatic theory of truth is what we use when we are trying to have a project of ours accepted by the Ministry. But once the project is accepted we have to report its accomplishment, and in order to do that we must deal with the old conformity of the proposition to the thing. In reporting we have to show not only that we have been in Paris for reasons of study (by way of experiences, tickets, bills, etc.) but, again on the ground of correspondence, that we have found something (and this is science). That is why, unfortunately, the certain sign of truth is not happiness, but very often un – happiness, since we can realize too late that we have had it all wrong – or at least we may realize too late that they will not accept our report. So, epistemology too, sooner or later, has to face ontology, for the very same reason that promises have to be brought about sooner or later. It is sad, but not so much: for the very same reason that things have certain characteristic, which are not reducible to our programs, truth – or something like it – does exist.

NOTES 1. On James and European Philosophy, see S. Poggi, “William James e la filosofia europea. Un capitolo da approfondire,” Revista di storia della filosofia 2 (2001), pp. 257–273. On pragmatism, see Rosa Calcaterra, Il pragmatismo americano (Rome: Laterza, 1997). “Solid sense of reality”: B. Russell, “On Denoting,” Mind 14 (1905), pp. 479–493. 2. First published as B. Russell, “Transatlantic Truth,” The Albany Review 2 (January 1908) 393–410. Subsequent citations from republished edition: B. Russell, “James's Conception of Truth,” in Russell, Philosophical Essays, revised version (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966). 3. Russell, “James's Conception of Truth,” p. 116. 4. William James, “Does Consciousness Exist?” in Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), p. 273. 5. D. Davidson, “Radical Interpretation,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 274. 6. Hilary Putnam, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 119. 7. William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism” (New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), pp. 180–216. 8. Ibid., pp. 189–190. 9. D.P. Schreber, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Leipzig: Oswald Wusse, 1903). 10. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), p. 97. 11. Ibid., p. 28.

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12. This is why James (James, Pragmatism, p. 102) tries to reformulate the theory of adaequatio in a rather baroque way: “To ‘agree’ in the widest sense with a reality, can only mean to be guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put onto such working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if we disagreed.” And this, honestly speaking, it is not very convincing. 13. Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt, 1972). 14. We find this in W.V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951). Quine is an author light–years from Heidegger, but influenced by the pragmatist tradition. Truth is not adequatio intellectus et rei, but the insertion of the datum, the given–as such a flickering entity–in a contest, that is, in the schema of physics as in the best conceptual scheme. This is not very far from H. G. Gadamer, Wharheit und Method (Tübingen: Mohr, 1960), who roughly claims the very same thing; aside from the fact that he takes tradition instead of physics, and language instead of a conceptual scheme. 15. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 16. This is the thesis of the non–truth, subsequently inspired by Schiller too, and touched on by James. 17. Teeteto, 161c. 18. See Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 69: “[…] I believe the simplest rules of logic are unrevisable […] The aim of universal validity is compatible with the willingness always to consider alternatives and counterarguments–but they must be considered as candidates for objectively valid alternatives and arguments.”. And at pp. 23–4: “We discover objective reason by discovering that we run up against certain limits when we inquire whether our beliefs, values, and so forth are subjective, culturally relative, or otherwise essentially perspectival. Certain forms of thoughts inevitably occur straight in the consideration of such hypotheses–revealing themselves to be objective in content. And if we envision the possibility of coming to regard them after al; as subjective, it must mean that we imagine making them the focus of other thoughts whose validity is truly universal. […T]he appeal to reason is implicitly authorized by the challenge itself […] any considerations against the objective validity of a type of reasoning are inevitably attempts to offer reason against it, and these must be rationally assessed.” 19. E. Husserl, Gesammelte Werke XI (Dordrecht, Boston, and Lancaster: Den Haag, 1950), p. 98. For a development of those arguments, see V. De Palma, “Il cogito e l'evidenza. La critica di Husserl a Descartes,” forthcoming, from which I take the quotes from Husserl and Nagel before, and whose considerations have been decisive for my reasoning. 20. Husserl, Gesammelte Werke XVII, p. 164). 21. A. von Meinong, “Über Geganstandstheorie,” in Meinong, Gesamtausgbe (Graz: Akademische Druck und Verlangsanstalt, 1904). 22. Russell, “On Denoting.” 23. K. Twardowski, Zur Lehre vom Inhalt un Gegestand der Vorstellungen (Vienna: Alfred Hölder, 1894). 24. James, “Does 'Consciousness' Exist,” p. 19. 25. Shakespeare, The Tempest, IV, i, 156–157)

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26. F. Brentano, Untersuchungen zur Sinnepsychologie (Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1907), pp. 96–97. 27. Frege, Logical Investigations, trans. P. T. Geach and R. H. Stoothoff (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), p. 25: “In thinking we do not produce thoughts, we grasp them. For what I have called thoughts stand in the closest connexion with truth. What I acknowledge as true, I judge to be true quite apart from my acknowledging its truth or even thinking about it. That someone thinks it has nothing to do with the truth of a thought.” 28. The analogies with Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro (1916) are obvious. 29. See M. Ferraris, Il mondo esterno (Milan: Bompiani, 2001) and M. Ferraris, “Inemendabilità, ontologia, realtà sociale,” Rivista di estetica 19 (2002), pp. 160–199. 30. James, “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist,” p. 18. 31. Ibid., p. 19. 32. Gerhard, IV: 485. 33. Villiers, L'Eve future, ed. Nadine Satiat (Paris: Flammarion, 1992) p. 291. 34. Russell, “James's Conception of Truth,” p. 120. 35. Ibid., p. 126 36. Ibid., p. 121. 37. M. Ferraris, Goodbye Kant! Cosa resta oggi della Critica della ragion pura (Milan, Bompiani, 2004). 38. Hilary Putnam, “James's Theory of Truth,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. R.A. Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 182–183. 39. Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kuntswerkes,” p. 46.

Five ACTION AND REPRESENTATION IN PEIRCE’S PRAGMATISM Nathan Houser

The general theme of this conference forces us to confront the meanings of “pragmatism” and “analytic philosophy.” Reaching agreement on these meanings is notoriously difficult. Nearly a century ago Arthur O. Lovejoy identified thirteen species of pragmatism and if we worked at it we could certainly add several more to his list. But what is it that makes a philosophical doctrine, or a philosophical stance, recognizable as pragmatism at all? What do the many pragmatisms have in common that distinguishes them as the offspring of the legendary original Metaphysical Club pragmatists? I confess that I don’t know the answer to that question, or even know if there is a definitive answer. Can we say more than that, for pragmatists, epistemological concerns are transformed by shifting the ground of justification or warrant from rational foundations to conceived experiential consequences? My best guess so far, in trying to say something more, is that pragmatism is the first teleological philosophy to grow out of the Darwinian conclusion that human intelligence is a natural development and that human thought and language are means by which we mediate our past and present experiences with future expectations. But I am not at all sure that holding such views about human intelligence and the function of thought and language is characteristic of all received forms of pragmatism, especially some of the more political or literary forms, and I realize that fitting this description is not sufficient for belonging in the acknowledged pragmatist camp. Is it any easier to say what analytic philosophy is or what being an analytic philosopher amounts to? I think not. According to Dummett, it is by having the right set of beliefs about the role of language in philosophy that one shows oneself to be an analytic philosopher. He says that what distinguishes analytic philosophy from other schools “is the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a comprehensive account can only be so attained.” Accordingly, Dummett claims that analytic philosophy “was born when the ‘linguistic turn’ was taken.” 1

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But P. M. S. Hacker seems perfectly confident that the beginnings of 20th century analytic philosophy are to be found in the work of Moore and Russell and before the linguistic turn had been taken effectively.2 The key to analytic method, he says, is analysis, “the decomposition of something into its constituents.”3 Hacker recommends that the term “analytic philosophy” be understood “dynamically” and he cautions against the view that it “expresses a family resemblance concept.”4 Avrum Stroll, on the other hand, argues that there is no consensus on what analysis is,5 and he accepts Hans Sluga’s conclusion that “it may be hopeless to try to determine the essence of analytic philosophy.”6 He quotes with approval Sluga’s view, contra Hacker, that “analytic philosophy is to be characterized in terms of overlapping circles of family resemblances and of causal relations of ‘influence’ that extend in all directions . . .”7 Stroll emphasizes the predilection of analytic philosophers for focusing on “the combination of logic and science as a model that philosophical inquiry should follow.”8 After surveying these and other accounts of analytic philosophy, I tried to distil out some key conditions and I came up with the following, which, taken together, seem to mark someone as an analytic philosopher: (1) They consider symbolic logic to be an important tool for philosophy and regard the combination of logic and science as a model for their philosophical work. (2) They employ analysis as a principal method. (3) They have taken the linguistic turn. (4) They belong to the right tradition and exhibit a characteristic “philosophical style.” But, alas, there are philosophers who we all agree are analytic philosophers even though they don’t meet all of these criteria while, on the other hand, there seem to be some philosophers who meet these conditions who do not belong to what Anthony Grayling has called the Church of Analytic Philosophy.9 I think a good case can be made that Charles Peirce falls into the latter camp (although I won’t argue this here). I have come to believe that even if a philosopher meets these four conditions, that philosopher may still not be invited into the Church if he or she holds prohibited ideas and interests, or embraces prohibited methods, or is a member of some other philosophical school or tradition (say, for instance, the Church of Pragmatism). So even though Peirce fulfills most of the positive criteria I have listed, his philosophical home is elsewhere; he belongs to a different intellectual family (although, as with all family trees, there can be a lot of overlapping). This is the same kind of difficulty I encountered in trying to come up with a general characterization of pragmatism. I can only conclude that family ties are more significant than sets of beliefs for deciding our philosophical homes. It may be, in fact, that important belief sets vary only rather slightly between

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some schools (or churches) even though the commonalities are not so obvious due to family idiosyncrasies or, as Dummett says, different “philosophical styles.” Bearing all this in mind, I would like to consider, at least in rough outline, Peirce’s formulation of a way of understanding how thought can be both answerable to the world and also instrumental in the course of events. Whether Peirce’s formulation can be instructive to analytical philosophers who worry about this problem I cannot be sure, but it does seem to me that Peirce addresses a problem–or perhaps, as John McDowell says, an anxiety– that is common to contemporary analytic philosophers who worry about the relation between mind and world. According to McDowell, in his book Mind and World, this anxiety arises because of conflicting predispositions. On the one hand, there is a strong inclination among analytic philosophers toward at least a minimal empiricism from which it follows that our thinking is answerable to experience. On the other hand, there is a strong inclination toward a way of regarding experience that makes it very hard to imagine that it could function as a tribunal for thought. Philosophers who find themselves so conflicted feel a need, a responsibility even, to resolve this conflict even though, at some deep level, they doubt that the tension can be resolved: thus their philosophical anxiety. Peirce was also animated by the spirit of empiricism and was deeply committed to the view that thought has to be tested in the “tribunal of experience.” Even though he believed that sensory experience is the source of all our knowledge, he was equally predisposed to the belief that sensory experience, as such, lies outside the scope of logical thought. It would seem, then, that Peirce should have confronted the same tension, and might have suffered from the same anxiety, that besets analytic philosophers. But by linking his philosophy of perception with the epistemological insights of his pragmatism, Peirce appears to have reached a resolution that relieved the tension without weakening the predispositions. My hope is that even though Peirce’s treatment is based on what we might call “a different set of family of assumptions,” we will find some openings and enough common ground to begin to forge more substantial research links across the boundaries of these traditions. We should recall that American Pragmatism was first formulated by young, philosophically-minded scientists like Charles Peirce, William James, and Chauncy Wright. These men had been educated in the methods of experimental science and were animated by its successes, but it was probably the Darwinian Controversy more than anything else that gave them their new perspective. Some of the key antagonists in the controversy, men like Asa Gray and Louis Agassiz, had been their teachers and even family friends. Chauncy Wright had traveled to England to visit with Darwin and had been encouraged by Darwin to study the problem of “when a thing may properly be

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said to be effected by the will of man.”10 So when Peirce delivered his famous pragmatism lecture to the Metaphysical Club in 1872, it was against this background, and it seems likely that Peirce presented his pragmatism as the lesson of Darwin for philosophy. Peirce was especially attracted to the fact that Darwin’s theory was “nourished by positive observation” and consequently, he supposed, would prove deadly to Mill’s empiricism which he believed to be “nothing but a metaphysical point of view.” The support evolutionism received from positive observations was key for Peirce. He would later say of pragmatism that, whatever else it is, it is at least “a sort of instinctive attraction for living facts.”11 The “standard view” among pragmatists is that the naturalization of the human mind began with Darwin and first became central for philosophy in American pragmatism. Whether pragmatism really was the first modern philosophical naturalism is not of special concern here but only that it was a thoroughgoing naturalism. The conviction that human intelligence is continuous with all of nature has prevailed in American philosophy and, perhaps due initially to Quine, is a key grounding idea for American analytic philosophy (its overriding ideology according to Jaegwon Kim).12 It may be that pragmatic naturalists do not stipulate, as analytic naturalists appear to, that all “truth-bearing explanation is ultimately causal,” nor that “causal explanation is constrained by the ‘causal closure of the physical’,” and certainly these are big differences that will not be easily resolved, yet if we attend to commonalities rather than differences, we see that evolutionary science has loomed large in American thought ever since the early pragmatists and that, in a sense, the American naturalization of epistemology began with them. Returning to Peirce, it is interesting that already by 1868 he was working out a new approach that would replace Cartesian philosophy with a philosophy that was not concerned with epistemological foundations but, instead, with the relation of conceptions to action. Scientific method was Peirce’s model for knowledge acquisition and, for him, it was telling that science is carried out in laboratories, where experiments are made by investigators who identify with a community, working together to achieve a result that no one could accomplish alone. It was equally significant for Peirce that science requires us to test our ideas and theories, that those tests are usually inductive, and that we must be prepared to admit error before we can even hope for progress. This scientific view of philosophy, combined with his evolutionary naturalism, situated Peirce at least in the vicinity of philosophical concerns treated by McDowell in Mind and World. Quite clearly we can say that Peirce was an empiricist or, at least, a minimal empiricist as described by McDowell. He held, rather like Brentano, that the mark of the mental is directedness toward the world (although he thought of this directedness as purposive in some general sense). For Peirce to suppose that thought has a purpose follows straightforwardly from his

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naturalism–from viewing mind in the context of biological evolution. “What is the function of thought?” Peirce asked. “To produce belief,” he answered. And what is belief? “Belief,” Peirce said, “consists in the establishment of habits or rules of action”– very much like software programs that prepare us for what we are likely to confront, or what we at least may confront. Peirce would have agreed with McDowell that this view puts things in a normative context. As McDowell puts it: “This relation between mind and world is normative…in this sense: thinking that aims at judgment, or at the fixation of belief, is answerable to the world–to how things are…”13 Peirce put it this way: “To satisfy our doubts [which we know for Peirce meant to fix our belief] . . . it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanency–by something upon which our thinking has no effect.”14 But how can thought be answerable to the empirical world, McDowell asks, “if not by way of the idea that our thinking is answerable to experience?” Just so, Peirce might have replied. One form of Peirce’s “first rule of reason” states that “[T]he scientific spirit requires a man to be at all times ready to dump his whole cart-load of beliefs, the moment experience is against them.”15 So it seems clear enough that Peirce adhered to McDowell’s minimal empiricism: “the idea that experience must constitute a tribunal, mediating the way our thinking is answerable to how things are, as it must be if we are to make sense of it as thinking at all.”16 This is where things get tricky. How is it possible for experience to serve this function? McDowell rightly points out that much depends on what we mean by “experience,” but that if we mean those sensory impingements and impressions caused by the world around us, it is difficult to see how experience can constitute a tribunal for our normative thought. Normative thought, which is really all thought, belongs in some sense to a logical space of reasons, while experience, as the sensory impact of the world on us, belongs to what McDowell calls “the logical space of nature,” where empirical description is called for, not reasons. These are radically different realms and to suppose that we can judge thought by means of experience is to commit the naturalistic fallacy, namely, the fallacy of supposing “that ‘empirical description’ can amount to placing things in the logical space of reasons.”17 This is very roughly, and over simplistically, how McDowell represents the position of Sellars on this question. So Sellars and other analytic philosophers who hold that experience is non-propositional or, more generally, non-conceptual at the basic level of sensation, while inclining at the same time to a minimal empiricism that makes sense only if thought can be tested in the tribunal of experience, seem to be enmeshed in a contradiction and, to relieve tension, often incline toward abandoning empiricism (McDowell gives a parallel argument from Davidson that I will pass over since my point is only to provide some background to Peirce’s treatment).

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There is more overlap here with Peirce’s views than we might at first imagine, although Peirce would not regard the realm of basic non-conceptual experience as a logical space. For Peirce, to regard any space as logical is to regard it as normative. But Peirce did accept that our knowledge of the world must begin, somehow, with bare non-conceptual sensory experience: following Aristotle, he agreed that nothing is in the intellect that was not first in sense.18 Peirce was well acquainted with the science of his day, and he understood that sensation is caused by the stimulation of nerve-cells and, taken in a certain way, he might have agreed with Quine that “the very business that science itself is engaged in” is the “systematization of our sensory intake.”19 According to Peirce, the fundamental hypothesis of scientific method is that “[t]here are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them . . . [and which] affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are as different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are.”20 Key points here are, first, that sensations are physical states and are unique and not a product of reasoning but, second, that they somehow enter into perception in such a way that they can be reasoned about. So, in perception, Peirce purports to have found a bridge between the so-called “logical space of nature,” and the “logical space of reasons.” If true, there will be no need to abandon empiricism as Sellars and Davidson recommend. Peirce’s analysis of perception is much more elaborate and technical than I can go into here but it will be enough for my purposes to give the simplest account. What I say will largely be drawn from two of the more sustained treatments of perception in Peirce’s writings, both written about the same time: one from Peirce’s 1903 Harvard lecture series on pragmatism and the other from a manuscript for a magazine article he was writing on telepathy and perception. In his final 1903 Harvard Lecture, Peirce summed up the argument he had been making in what is now a well-known passage: “The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action; and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is to be arrested as unauthorized by reason.”21 So our conceptual life proper begins with perception but according to Peirce’s metaphor, perception is a gate through which “the elements of every concept enter into logical thought.” The elements Peirce has in mind are the passive and reactive sensations that make up the two kinds of pre-rational consciousness we find in his philosophy of mind. Peirce calls this sensory component of perception “the Percept” and he stresses that, although it is compelling, it “makes [no] pretension to reasonableness.”22 “The percept,” Peirce says, “is absolutely dumb. It acts upon us, it forces itself upon us; but it does not address the reason, nor appeal to anything for support.”23 It is the perceptual judgment, the other part of perception, that addresses reason. The perceptual judgment “professes to represent the

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percept” and, therefore, belongs in the “logical space of reasons.” Peirce is clear, though, that the perceptual judgment cannot strictly “represent the percept logically” because the percept is not itself conceptual; in fact it is with the judgment itself that conceptualization begins. I think of the perceptual judgment as attaching the equivalent of text, at the propositional level, to the percept and thereby introducing an intellectual component into consciousness (moving, in other words, into “the logical space of reasons”). But what is the bridge that can carry us from dumb percepts (physical states) to conceptual judgments (mental states)? Obviously this is a critical juncture for Peirce, and I am not sure that I have gotten to the bottom of his argument; but the bridging connector is a proto-abductive inference that relies more on instinct, and what Peirce, following Galileo, called “the light of nature,” than on reasoning proper. Peirce recognized that perceptual judgments are the result of a process that is too uncontrolled to be regarded as fully rational, so one cannot say unequivocally that perceptual judgments arise from sensations (or percepts) by an act of abductive inference, but Peirce insisted that “abductive inference shades into perceptual judgment without any sharp line of demarcation between them” and that “our first premisses, the perceptual judgments, are to be regarded as an extreme case of abductive inferences.”24 It is by reasoning from our perceptual judgments, our first premises, that we can draw distant conclusions to be tested and revised over the course of our experience. So it is this virtually unconscious abductive move that issues in a perceptual judgment that takes its place in our life of thought. But abduction is the weakest form of reasoning, and the abductive process that yields perceptual judgments is the weakest of all the forms of abduction. I can find no reason to suppose that perceptual judgments can be justified by any backwards appeal to a tribunal of sensory experience. Peirce is clear, in fact, that the justification for abduction as a form of reasoning is that it “is the only possible hope of regulating our future conduct rationally.”25 Our perceptual judgments serve as predictors of experience to come, of what we expect of future percepts under certain circumstances, and if we get it wrong we will have to emend the text we attached to the percept in the first place. This presupposes that perception is a natural process that developed through evolutionary selection to mediate between our present experiences and future conditions. It is justification by future experience rather than by a backward appeal to sensory causal chains that marks abduction as the signature logic of pragmatism. In a 1905 article for the Monist, Peirce writes that pragmatism “does not intend to define the phenomenal equivalents of words and general ideas, but, on the contrary, eliminates their sential element, and endeavors to define the rational purport, and this it finds in the purposive bearing of the word or proposition in question.”26 This brings us back to a point I made earlier when I asked how it is possible for experience to serve as a tribunal for

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thought and pointed out that McDowell’s observation that “much depends on what we mean by ‘experience’.” Peirce’s minimal empiricism seems to be based on a richer conception of experience than that of philosophers who regard experience as only the sensory impingements and impressions caused by the world around us. On Peirce’s view, the upshot of thought is also a source of experience, but because in this case what is at issue is the reliability of conceived consequences, there is no difficulty is imagining that experience can serve as a tribunal for thought. If our experience conflicts with our expectations, this conflict will itself be experienced as a shock, as a dead end, and we will recognize it as a disconfirmation of the perceptual judgment that underwrote our expectations. We will be forced to revise our judgment–to reconceive the consequences for future experience. It is this second kind of experience, the upshot of thought, that checks the course of logical thought so that it will retain a fidelity to the first realm of experience and so that it will remain answerable to the world. This has been the briefest and roughest sketch of the kind of study that might ultimately find enough common ground to enable analytic philosophers and pragmatists to reconnect as they did in a short-lived way in the 1930’s. It is no doubt all too evident that I have much more work to do to on the subject at hand but I hope I have at least given some glimmer of how Peirce’s pragmatic theory of perception might contribute to the analytic treatment of the problem. An interesting question that I have left untouched is how Peirce’s extended understanding of experience compares with the extended conception that provided a way for McDowell to relieve the anxiety that led Sellars and Davidson to renounce empiricism. But that will have to be taken up on another occasion.

NOTES I want to thank Professor Calcaterra and the Department of Philosophy of University Roma Tre, along with the Center for American Studies, for inviting me to participate in this conference. I also want to thank the US Embassy in Rome very much for supporting international conferences of this kind. 1. M. Dummett, Origins of Analytic Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1993), p. 5. I developed this topic in the papers presented at Bloomington, Indiana, in March 2003 and Helsinki in May 2004. 2. P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth–Century Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 5. 3. Ibid., pp. 3–5 ff. 4. Ibid., p. 5. 5. A. Stroll, Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 6.

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6. H. Sluga, “What Has History to Do with Me? Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy,” Inquiry 41 (1998), p. 107. 7. Stroll, Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy, p. 7. 8. Stroll, Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy, p. 9. 9. A. Grayling, Analysis: Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 10. M. H. Fisch, “Peirce, Semiotics, and Pragmatism” in Proceedings of the C. S. Peirce Bicentennial International Congress, ed. K. Ketner et al. (Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1981), p. 123. 11. Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce vol. 5, ed. C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, and A. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958), p. 64. 12. J. Kim, Philosophy in America at the Turn of the Century (San Francisco: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2003), p.83. 13. J. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. xii. 14. Peirce, Collected Papers vol. 5, p. 384. 15. Peirce, Collected Papers vol. 1, p. 55. 16. McDowell, Mind and World, p. xii. 17. Ibid., p. xv. 18. Peirce, Collected Papers vol. 5, p. 181. 19. W. V. Quine, From Stimulus to Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 20. Peirce, Collected Papers vol. 5, p. 384. 21. Peirce, Collected Papers vol. 5, p. 212; and Peirce, The Essential Peirce vol. 2, ed. N. Houser and C. Kloesel (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 241. 22. Peirce, Collected Papers vol. 7, p. 622. 23. Ibid. 24. Peirce, Collected Papers vol. 5, p. 181. 25. Peirce, Collected Papers vol. 2, p. 270. 26. Peirce, Collected Papers vol. 5, p. 428.

Six SEMIOTICS AND EPISTEMOLOGY: THE PRAGMATIC GROUND OF COMMUNICATION Ivo Assad Ibri

1. Introduction In this essay we intend to show the epistemological aspect of Semiotics as its ampler theoretical range, beyond its well known role as a general theory of signs. Giving support to this broader understanding of Semiotics, Charles S. Peirce’s (1839 – 1914) Pragmatism will propose itself as a general rule for meaning as well: the sign’s internal side should aim to be a phenomenical exteriority for its possible cognitive meaning. To make evident the Semiotics epistemological character, we begin with the understanding that Semiotics isn’t only a system of signs in which the human languages and their respective logics are organized, giving ground to the knowledge contents, but, also, that it is a pragmatic science in its broader aspect. In other words, it will allow not only a reading of intersubjective communication phenomena, but, equally, a realistic reading of the world in which the natural signs are transitively interconnected, namely, are communicatively and pragmatically meaningful. An epistemology of communication will show, then, that Semiotics, when associated to a meaning principle given by the relationship between sign and the action caused by it, namely, to Pragmatism, will acquire the true realistic range required by its author. 2. A Realistic View of Semiotics How can we understand semiotics within the larger spectrum of Peirce’s philosophy? How can we conceive it as broader than a theory of signs created by man, as encompassing a realm of meaning independent of human language? Perhaps we should consider this question before answering it, because it certainly sounds odd: would there be a realm of meaning outside language? Would we not be entering the domain of an excessively essentialist metaphysics by proposing meaning as an attribute of something exterior to the human? There is an almost circular difficulty in finding the real scope of concepts within Peirce’s philosophy. Its realism always requires and implies

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considering them as referred to subject and object in a hypothesis of theoretical symmetry which is a consequence of the structure of its categories. Such a hypothesis of symmetry is one of form, assuring a conception of equality of logical rights between man and the world. In the light of this hypothesis, Peirce’s philosophy naturally emerges as rejecting any kind of anthropocentrism and, consequently, any sort of logocentrism. But does this symmetry derive from any genetic logical assumption, or from any logical necessity inherent to the very system of ideas that is constructed? No. Among the possible choices that may guide a theoretical system, Peirce’s is a poetical one,1 which, actually, will not reveal itself as such in its language (as many philosophies do) but rather in its logical construction and in the consequences it may bring about.2 It is, then, a matter of finding out how that categorial symmetry, imposed by firstness, secondness, and thirdness, establishes this formal indifference between subject and object, taking due care to avoid ways in which language is foundationist and the subject a constituting pole. We should, therefore, look for the possibility of a saying that transcends the limits of a merely linguistic expression, whether verbal or mathematical. A saying that, evidently, may be represented in our human language without the latter grounding its meaning. In this way, language would not be the giver of meaning, but its representative, without this requiring any support from some form of extreme essentialism: reflection belongs to the realm of logic, without determining the choice for formal symmetry – we emphasize that it is a poetic option. This is the main boundary condition of semiotics itself, which makes it logically harmonious with categorial symmetry: it should understand the objects of representation as meaningful in themselves and independent of the sign. This independence derives from its non – foundationalism. But how can we besure that language will not ground the meaning of its objects? Wouldn’t it be an illusion to require that language should just represent and not ground its objects? It is here that a commitment with Peirce’s realism emerges. Strictly speaking, however, realism is a doctrine from the sphere of metaphysics and this, in the classification of the sciences proclaimed by Peirce, depends on semiotics. The answer to those objections should come from the sciences that precede semiotics, namely, those that precede it in the aforementioned classification: mathematics, phenomenology, aesthetics, and ethics. The matter, though, grows more complex if we remember that, according to Peirce, “semiotics” is another name we give to logic.3 With this in mind, we should also suppose that the logical symmetry between sign and object commits semiotics to an ontological logic, a logic of real forms, such as the one proposed by Aristotle. Thus, realism is almost peremptorily required as a support for semiotics, while it is forbidden, (under risk of explicit circularity) to admit it, at least in the instance of the grounding of that

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science.4 We cannot constitute a science that explicitly has an empirical field, that brings within its very definition of sign the tacit concept of real object, endowed with an exhaustive inventory of signic forms, without our knowing what we want to represent, that is: real forms.5 The construction of semiotics must have an interplay with the forms of the object if for no other reason than it only comes into being by means of the phenomenological presence of the world, as fishing nets are woven in accordance with the kinds of fish one wants to catch.6 Certainly, there must be a going to and coming from experience, so that the repertoire of signic forms may come about, and if we admit that this is the method through which semiotics structures itself so as to fulfill its heuristic role,7 we must discard its transcendental foundation.8 Peirce did not even admit that mathematics, which is totally independent of phenomenology, had a transcendental constitution, though he conceived it constructively, as Kant did. But the categorical symmetry between subject and object, understood as modes of appearing, was already presaged as modes of being in phenomenology: realism is there in nascent form, as the categories indifferently permeate the external and internal worlds by means of an amplification of the concept of experience, by making them encompass those worlds: …to admit that experience is the only source of any kind of knowledge, I grant it at once, provided only that by experience he means personal history, life. But if he wants me to admit that inner experience is nothing…he asks what cannot be granted.9 Semiotics has the support of aesthetics and ethics, requiring it to consider not only the forms of representation of the experiences of firstness, whose phenomenological substance is found in feelings, but also conduct as an expression of values on the sphere of practical reason, where the exercise of will is brought about. While possessing the language for an expression inherent to thought, semiotics must catch the meaning that, in turn, is inherent to feelings and conduct. Now, we have here the problem of knowledge and of its communication. How can their meanings be caught? And here we use the expression catch intentionally: it is the putting to use of the metaphor of the fisherman. It is nothing but respect for a realism defended by Peirce: there is no foundation of meaning in language other than its translation based on the object, in universal forms, in which knowledge is materialized and so, consequently, is the possibility of its communication. In this respect, Peirce is explicit when he says, “…the essence of the realist's opinion is that it is one thing to be and another thing to be represented.”10

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Semiotics, then, under a realistic viewpoint, must flow out of the boundaries of the intersubjective signic universe; providing it, however, with its catch of natural meanings, a stance that implies acknowledging the otherness not only of particular objects with regard to representations, but also of the general forms under which those objects become a matter of not only sensitive but essentially cognitive experience. Under this aspect, we must observe that the broadening of the concept of experience in Peirce is not only confined to the categorial indifferentiation between inner and outer worlds, but is also linked to mediate objects, namely, those that only reveal their phenomenological being in time. This is, perhaps, one of the most complex points, epistemologically speaking, in the history of philosophy: if time solely possesses the subjective dimension that lends objectivity to the world, then all mediation derives from subjectivity and, thus, the realism of the continua11 would be made untenable by any form of nominalism whatsoever. Generally and exemplarily, Hume’s skepticism is grounded on the exclusive admission of immediate experiences whose mediate relations become a logical – ontological presumption but which, in fact, are nothing more than a psychological illusion, according to this author. Though proposing a solution to this Humean atomism, Kant does not validate mediation as a form present in experience, endowed with its own temporality; consequently, subjectivity must provide the form of mediation, becoming, thus, the condition for all understanding. This, in fact, seems to be Kant’s great lesson: the understanding and, consequently, all cognitive possibility, is only possible through causality, which, without jeopardizing this principle, could be replaced by structures possessing a pattern, upgrading the concept of causality to that of correlation among variables. The issue can, again, be related to the realism of the continua. There is no doubt that our cognitive ability acquires its condition of possibility over signs that constitute a pattern. One must, however, acknowledge the origin of this pattern. If it occurs exclusively in language, then the categorial symmetry proclaimed in Peirce’s philosophy is broken. By acknowledging such a symmetry, one is, consequently, admitting realism. It is interesting to note that semiotics cannot be confined to signs solely configured by patterns; in other words, by signs of thirdness, being thus restricted to symbols, signs which, in language, bear concepts and hence cognition. The broad spectrum of the universe of experience revealed by phenomenology should be acknowledged in signic forms. In fact, it is already signic in nature; names and classes of signs must be ascribed to it. In this task of semiotics, one must recognize signs that designate from the most indeterminately vague to the most determinately defined; from those immediately inserted in language to those which can barely be uttered. In this task, Semiotics ought to be open to all that potentially signifies and which, somehow, can somehow be said. And this is much more than what is bound by language.

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3. Semiotics and Pragmatism We have here emphasized the fact that philosophy, to Peirce, starts with phenomenology. Such a beginning is coherent with the entire theoretical stance of the author, who states that we cannot start from presuppositions that promote sheer disharmony with what humanconduct reveals or, in other words, presuppositions whose consequences are not able to affect the way we would be willing to act. Thus, all would begin with a being in the world, with a hypothesis that philosophy should start from states of life, seeking to explain an experienceable semiotic trade between subject and object, or between external and internal worlds. The central hypotheses of this philosophy is precisely that of the symmetry between these two worlds, established by the author through the doctrine of the categories, already in the sphere of phenomenology: they, indiscriminately, subsume the internal and external forms, enabling a free experiential interplay between them. Peirce’s realistic philosophy will require an investigation of a theory of the world, an ontology, in such a manner that such a hypothesis of symmetry may be brought about, as it has already been mentioned, from appearing to being.12 It has also been emphasized that one should not take the hierarchy of sciences in the classification proposed by Peirce as relations of foundation, under penalty of each of these sciences having to justify themselves, without an interaction required by retro – feeding processes characteristic of a knowledge that takes experience reflexively for its own growth, not only of content, but also of form. It is thus legitimate to understand, beforehand, the relationship between sciences as a kind of task sharing rather than as a hierarchical grounding. Pragmatism, by promoting a link between the universe of concepts and beliefs with the concrete experiences that they may cause, does no more than follow the necessary linkage between thirdness and secondness, in such a way that the generality contained in the third category appears through its particular side.13 In other words, pragmatism proclaims that the inner side of the mental universe appears through its outer face, namely, particular existence. Peirce, in a passage where he is referring to the inductive argument, explicitly affirms that “…the validity of induction depends upon the necessary relation between the general and the singular. It is precisely this which is the support of Pragmatism.”14 However, the question of the general appearing as particular, although it may satisfy other conceptions of pragmatism, is insufficient for that of Peircean extraction.15 This point must meet the condition of its reflexivity. Therefore, by understanding the external side of the concept as the action that it predisposes to occur, this must not become an end in itself, but rather, be an instance in which thought sees itself as its necessary existentialization and,

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thus, reverts to its original form as a process of retroanalysis deriving from this interaction between the theoretical and practical spheres: “Pragmatism is correct doctrine only in so far as it is recognized that material action is the mere husk of ideas… But the end of thought is action only in so far as the end of action is another thought...”16 Peircean pragmatism thus requires a kind of dialogue between thought and action, in which the ultimate end is eminently cognitive and general, whose growth must be reflected in conduct.17 There is, so to speak, an effective communication between the external and internal worlds wherein the signic universe on the sphere of logic is not solely confined to the propositional, linguistic – in sum, normative – instance, but rather to all facticity that is drawn through action. One must also consider, as it has been mentioned beforehand, the signic universe not immediately reducible to symbolic language, comprising what does not properly follow patterns and that, therefore, requires other forms of being represented. Within the intersubjective realm, action has a meaning of its own, provided it appears as a pattern. In this aspect, the category of firstness covers precisely the phenomena that do not represent patterns for they present themselves as particulars marked by their singularity, namely, their idiosyncrasy, which prevents them from being inserted in a system of general relations. The proposition that meaning is already found in the form of experience is normally taken uncritically. In this case, the meaning of human action in language occurs tacitly, not through catching, but through a symbolical grounding in its interior. However, one could ask why the particular instance of facticity can validate or disavow the general of the concept? Has this not been the most common criterion of truth for phenomenologically based propositions? This is an issue that Peircean pragmatism, as a rule of meaning, can only handle when appealing to other hypotheses derived from the basic hypothesis of categorial symmetry, namely, hypotheses that explain the success of communication procedures, in which language refers to an empirical field recognizable for common experience. It is not the case of merely describing phenomena, as if it were possible to reduce cognition to a kind of linguistic contemplation of the world, but rather of arduously gathering patterns that allow one to suppose that the object is under some rule or real system of rules that enable one to predict the future course of its conduct. All the success of human rationality, in its adventure of mediation between man and world, it seems to us, is contained in this clause and it does not merely refer to the judgments we make about human actions, but also to the sciences in general, while constructing their theories, through the catch made through experience. It falls to philosophy to justify such a success, which amounts to finding what grounds this free trade of meanings between the particular, which appears,

Semiotics and Epistemology: The Pragmatic Ground of Communication 77 and the general, which is thought. One could imagine a kind a communicating vessels system wherein information would circulate through the same familiar fluid. The necessary hypothesis for such justification must consider that experience, in its contingency, affects the mental world and, for that reason, Peirce defends that it should be connatural with the mind. This hypothesis about the structure of the real is, in short, substantially speaking, an idealism of objective content, based on the presupposition that ideality permeates subject and object, refusing, thus, any sort of mind – matter dualism.18 So, the communicative trade of signs between the particular and the general occurs against the backdrop that, in other words, recognizes that the pattern caught is of the very same nature as the logical structures of the language that catch it. This point is nothing more than consistent with the basic hypothesis of categorial symmetry. Hence, Peircean idealism justifies the reflexivity between meaning and practical consequences without having to impose the ideality of a constitutive subject.19 It should be stressed here that objective idealism underpins Peirce’s realism, whilst a bad formulation of both doctrines customarily places them as antagonistic.20 This co – naturality between thought and experience seems to be the logical condition that explains the continuum of reflexivity which, as a matter of fact, seems to be a justification of what in semiotics terminology is called the continuum of the interpretants. For the latter to be equivalent to the former, it is a must that one admits that the instance of the particular, namely, the facticity of secondness, must express interpretation. In other words, occurrences, actions constitute themselves interpretative instances in such a way that one may consider, in the sphere of meaning, a commitment between the particular and the general in an indefinitely infinite process, in which new mediations are established or efficient mediations are reinforced, that is, those that assist rational action. When we intentionally mentioned occurrences side by side with actions, we intended to refer to the fact that, in the light of Peirce’s realism, natural laws perform a symmetrical role to deductive thought, namely, they impose the necessity for a given conclusion, in such a way that a natural occurrence be derived from the pattern provided by the law that acts as general form of the particular. Thus, far from being a mere metaphor, since categorial symmetry determines that meaning is not to be centered on subjectivity, natural laws constitute interpretations of the sequence of facts that they prescribe, for they have been caught in the symbolic net, they circulate reflexively in it and validate true interpretations or disown those that reveal disharmony between the general and the particular. The term disharmony is nothing but the logical and symmetrically realistic link between meaning and practical consequences present in the Peircean versions of the Pragmatism maxim.

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There is, thus, a communicative trade of signs that overflows from the sphere of subjectivity and extends throughout the universe. Each natural event, inserted in a pattern, may now be read as an instance of interpretative actuation of the laws that apply to it. For this reason, Peirce proposes a classification of the interpretant signs that is able to handle this rupture of limits in which communication is no longer confined to the symbolic realm of language, as if only in it meaning could circulate. The latter, understood in its pragmatic character, ends up binding thought and conduct in the sphere of subjectivity, in which the former is the internal side of the latter and, conversely, the latter is the external side of the former. If meaning then appears under the form of facticity, the latter should participate in the same ideality as a particular form of the general. Only thus can the estrangement between experience and concept be broken, proposing a possible solution to the ubiquitous question over the legitimacy of the logical relations between them. Semiotically speaking, we can say that in the famous triad sign, object, and interpretant, the object is also of the nature of the sign, and this clause is consonant with the hypothesis of objective idealism, which supposes the conaturality between representation and object represented. Equally, under the criterion of categorial symmetry, the continuum of interpretants establishes a vector of growth for thirdness, whether in the sphere of subjectivity or in nature, configuring what is called semiosis. This extension of the concept of semiosis to natural processes evidently requires that one consider a cosmology or a cosmogenesis, where this growth of thirdness can be explained. It is interesting to observe how phenomenology is already pregnant with an ontology, and how logic or semiotics inherits from aesthetics a self – sufficient poetic value, and from ethics, a conduct that should tend toward general objectives, never particular ones, so that the general unity of such poetics may remain whole.21 This legacy of the sciences that precede semiotics demand from it a truly challenging task, which, though already mentioned, must again be emphasized, namely, to designate signs that can cope with the universe of feelings on the one hand, and of conduct, on the other. It is, thus, clear why semiotics cannot solely be a science of linguistic signs, but a logical net that catches all that can signify pragmatically, whether particular or general. Yet, the presence of firstness, responsible for what in phenomena appears as erratic, averse to patterns, interacts with the law under the form of chance. This is a principle of efficient freedom in nature that promotes deviations in relation to what would be proclaimed by a system of perfect laws. In Peircean thought, there is the explicit acknowledgment of an indeterminism that both permeate human action and natural events. One could say that firstness and thirdness contain the principles of freedom and necessity, in this order, flowing toward a theater of existence, secondness.

Semiotics and Epistemology: The Pragmatic Ground of Communication 79 Erraticity appears, in the same way as order. Both are, by the way, the mainstay that phenomenologically grounds these categories. It should be remembered that this erraticity is the fulcrum of the Peircean doctrine of fallibilism, according to which one must abandon absolute certainties, and ultimate exactness, in the factual world. No representation is perfect, neither is any law, since all factical processes never follow the presumed rule that subsumes it. The future is impregnated with a principle of randomness that prevents it from being a mere necessary consequence of the past. History, in light of a system of ideas such as Peirce’s, cannot thus be conceived as a mere deductive process. The theoretical conflicts that the classical duet between necessity and freedom assume in the history of ideas seem to reach a kind of appeasement in the Peircean system which, in our view, is attained through the symmetry provided by the categories. Once the myth of infallibility in matters of fact is deconstructed, it provides our human gaze upon the world with a new reference.22 The conviction that our knowledge floats upon a sea of uncertainties forces us to seek in phenomena not only the symmetries of patterns(a task which reason cannot abdicate) but also the irregular as a legitimate manifestation of a principle of freedom that fixes its mark of spontaneity on existence.23 Pragmatism tries, decisively, to break with the estrangement between the general and the particular: they are the faces of the same whole, enabling to see the external side of the internal one and connecting thought within a communicative net, not only as a uniquely human phenomenon, but also in its cosmic dimension, provided by the hypothesis of the symmetry of the categories which, in this case, highlights thirdness. This indifference in nature between the general and the particular, between the external and the internal, thus seems to be the base of all epistemological possibility: “It is the external world that we directly observe. What passes within we only know as it is mirrored in external objects.”24 4. Conclusion Phenomenological categories in Peirce’s philosophy have shown that we have three modes of experience. We may abstract from temporality and contemplate the world impartially, by immersing ourselves in its absolute present, so as to feel it in its living presence. Though apparently easy, this experience is in fact difficult, mostly because we have been brought up to overcome the resistance imposed by reality against what we wish, making intelligent mediation the semiotic resource through which the other is cognitively revealed in its form in time and, therefore, somehow predictable. Faced with its expected conduct, we plan our own. This seems to be the most habitual stance we adopt in the face of the world, for this very reason, that

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disinterested attitude, which has no immediately useful gain to offer, is kept aside as a kind of rest of the warrior. Provided with mediations and models to read the real, we filter experiences according to their theoretical criteria, catching the fish that their nets can hold. Nevertheless, many of them are not even noticed, passing safely through the conceptual gaps as they do not belong to a pattern. They often share a name that is intrinsically strange to them because, as with every name, it relates to a class of objects that, in essence, has little or nothing to do with them. In that familiar and mediatized world, configured in language and with evident empirical references, human communication is established. Regarding the latter, we have here offered a few brief remarks – through a short exposition of semiotics – viewed in its realistic commitment within Peirce’s philosophy, by highlighting the conditions of its possibility supported by Pragmatism. We must emphasize that whatever possesses a pattern is of vital importance to reason, as it is what may objectively determine future conduct, since it is what can be under self – control.25 By considering what appears as singular to be signs possessing meaning – and something like this always happens in every experience, despite our grasping solely what fits the concept – semiotics draws attention, in its phenomenological commitment, to something that may pragmatically affect conduct, revealing itself as cognitively new and making us abandon the mediation employed due its inadequacy to a present time.26 This “something new” will require a new form of saying it, provided that, so to speak, one has the courage to divest reason of its anchors in the conceptual ground of the past which, in effect, numb sensitivity against that which claims its semantic place among us humans. How can we raise this experience to the level of the communicatively cognitive? It seems to us that the semiotic space of art will emerge from this question and, consequently, we are already gratified by formulating it. A new game between the internal and external worlds is in the offing for a reflection within the theme proposed herein. Now, however, totally out of the conceptual safety provided by what is referentially insertable in what is endowed with pattern, but which for this very reason, calls for enjoyment as something that holds in it the embryo of the effectively new.27

NOTES 1. See Ivo Ibri, “Reflections on a Poetic Ground in Peirce’s Philosophy”: Transactions of Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. XLV, no 3, 273-307, 2009.

Semiotics and Epistemology: The Pragmatic Ground of Communication 81 2. For example Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. 3. Peirce, The Essential Peirce vol. 2, ed. N. Houser and C. Kloesel (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 327. 4. One should keep the realism of Peirce’s continua in mind, and not only the acceptance of the existence of a world of things independent from us, as it is currently discussed. Incidentally, we think Peirce would consider this focus on the subject as completely distant from the problem of realism according to his own approach. 5. By the otherness in relation to the sign that Peirce attributes to it; see for example Charles Peirce in Semiotic and Significs–The Correspondence Between Charles Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, ed. Charles S. Hardwick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 80–81. That is why Semiotics does not mix with Mathematics, although it considers the forms of representation and meaning. Mathematical forms develop intra–linguistically, requiring only the universe of possibilities inherent to their languages. 6. A metaphor we have already employed before in Ibri, “Reflections on a Poetic Ground.” 7. On the heuristic role of semiotics see Ivo Ibri, “The Heuristic Exclusivity of Abduction in Peirce's Philosophy,” in Semiotics and Philosophy in C. S. Peirce, ed. Rossella Fabbrichesi and Susanna Marietti, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006). 8. As defended by Karl-Otto Apel, “C. S. Peirce and the Post–Tarskian Problem of an Adequate Explication of the Meaning of the Truth: Towards a Transcendental–Pragmatic Theory of Truth, Part I,” The Monist 63 (July, 1980), pp. 386–407 and Karl-Otto Apel, “C. S. Peirce and the Post–Tarskian Problem of an Adequate Explication of the Meaning of the Truth: Towards a Transcendental– Pragmatic Theory of Truth, Part II,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 1, vol. X VIII (1982), pp. 3–17. 9. Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce vol. 4, ed. Hartshorne, Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur Burks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958), p. 91; Peirce here refers to John Stuart Mill. 10. Charles S. Peirce, Contributions to the Nation vol. 3, ed. Kenneth Kertner and James Cook (Lubbuck: Texas Tech Press, 1975–1987), p. 86. 11. Peirce, Contributions to the Nation vol 4., p. 343. 12. As for Peirce’s ontology, Carl Hausman, Charles S. Peirce's Evolutionary Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) is already a classical work which deals brilliantly with the theme. 13. These, in effect, can always be reduced to concepts and are of the nature of concepts even when unconscious to one who believes. 14. Peirce, Collected Papers vol. 5, p. 170. 15. As in William James, who reduces the meaning to the instance of action, while to Peirce it is merely a stage in which thought perfects itself. See Peirce’s criticism of this reduction in Peirce, Collected Papers vol. 5, pp. 3, 414, and 429. 16. Peirce, Collected Papers vol. 8, p. 272. 17. Cornelis De Waal, “Science Beyond the Self: Remarks on Charles S. Peirce's Social Epistemology,” Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia 7/1 (Sao Paulo: EDUC, 2006) brilliantly shows the dialogical and social character of thought. 18. As original as the mention here may seem as an answer to an epistemological justification, such a hypothesis is not alien to the history of ideas, its

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origin in notably metaphysical speculations notwithstanding. In Berkeley, for example, the issue arises from the negation that something alien to the spirit, matter, could somehow affect it, motivating this author to deny a material world separate from the mind. In Schelling, on the other hand, aesthetic experience on natural beauty made him conceive an objective idealism in which the whole universe is the ideality revealed of the Absolute. 19. Incidentally, markedly present in the maxim of pragmatism as enunciated by Peirce in 1878. 20. The opposition between the doctrines of realism and idealism is manifest in contemporary epistemology with the former conceptualized as a subjective idealism and the latter as a realism that admits the existence of an external world. Although one may acknowledge the relevance of this opposition, it is inadequate within the realm of Peirce’s philosophy because of the distinct conceptualization that these doctrines adopt in the author’s thought. 21. There is no space in this essay for a more extensive discussion on the commitment between the normative sciences in Peirce, although we have previously addressed the general character of the poetic unity, in Ibri, “Reflections on a Poetic Ground.” Despite our different approach from those that are object of classical considerations regarding normative sciences, it is nonetheless fitting to recommend a reading of the excellent text by Kelly Parker, “Reconstructing the Normative Sciences,” Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia 4/1 (Sao Paulo: EDUC, 2003) 22. Besides to give us a meaningful feeling of epistemological humility, as Nathan Houser emphasizes in Nathan Houser, “Pragmatism and the Loss of Innocence,” Cognitio: Revista de Filosofia 4/2 (Sao Paulo: EDUC, 2006). 23. Not only because we are fallible beings, but also because Peircean philosophy acknowledges that the real is permeated with accidentalities promoted by a principle of Chance. 24. Peirce, Collected Papers vol. 8, p. 144 25. Ibid. 26. And this, we must say, comes from a time past. 27. It would be interesting here to bring again a reflection on the principles of fallibilism.

Seven WITTGENSTEIN, DEWEY, AND PEIRCE ON ETHICS Giovanni Maddalena

In his introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism, Richard Rorty says that it is time to abandon such questions as “what is true” or “what is good.” As he explains in his following books, his proposal is not to provide a new set of definitions but to “change argument,” to abandon these kinds of problems and to try to live both according to private satisfaction and public utility.1 These two fields can be developed parallel to and independently from one another, without implying the existence of any such spiritual entity as “the unity of the self” or “consciousness.” We can simply live without worrying about the reality that is “out-there,” as long as we adopt the ethical habit of a wide and charitable solidarity that stems from the depths of our hearts. This radical interpretation has a long history in the progressive widening of the gap between what is “normative,” namely what is true, good, and beautiful, and “what is real” according to our knowledge. Rorty shows how this gap ends in the final rejection of the normative level of life. Rorty is well aware of this development and considers himself a legitimate heir of his analytical and pragmatist predecessors who, according to him, indicated precisely this path. In this sense, we can define him as the last philosopher, the one who declares the final surrender of philosophy to literature on the one hand, and to politics on the other. There are two worlds: the fantasy world of novels and poems and the practical and public world of social connections. The question is whether it is possible to find or reconstruct the link between these two worlds that philosophy (as epistemology) traditionally guaranteed. I will try to follow the development of this huge gap between norm and reality both in the analytical and pragmatist traditions, and to understand why and how it became so vast that the normative was declared useless. We should note that while this gap is widely known inanalytic philosophy is; it is unclear how Rorty can mention classical pragmatism as one of the sources of his inspiration.2 But I hope to show how this can happen. I will explore whether this is the inevitable end of these two kinds of thought or if it is possible to find an alternative capable of addressing the demands from which these philosophies stemmed–without putting an end to philosophy itself.

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Why should we save philosophy? Because it guarantees the possibility of founding both literature and politics on a rational ground. Otherwise, literature would become a fantasy without meaning and criterion, and politics would become tantamount to the power of imposing the views of a state or an organization of states. This is a theoretical problem, but one with huge consequences: the survival of those “immutable laws written in human heart” that even in ancient Greece were the ultimate criteriaby which one judged human actions. This analysis will begin with Wittgenstein and Dewey because Rorty quotes them as representatives of his analytical and pragmatist background. These two great thinkers share some characteristics: (1) They consider ethics as a gnoseological tool and not as a special science of what is morally good or bad (which is just a consequence of the broader view they take). (2) They struggle to describe the ethical in a way as close as possible to common sense and to experience as we perceive it. (3) They find this ethical perspective necessary in our society, but threatened with extinction. Wittgenstein’s and Dewey’s solutions are different but closer than critics often think and we will try to find the common thread that links their work to Rorty’s. Finally, we will attempt to use the same three categories along the lines suggested by Charles Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, in order to see whether they can provide an alternative to Rorty’s solution. In doing this, I also hope to find an answer to the dichotomy Maurizio Ferraris finds between the analytical description and the pragmatist theory of meaning. He sees them as, respectively, a “real” approach to reality and a normative hope in a future meaning. He prefers the first solution, thus once again proposing and fostering the dualism between norms and ideals. 1. For Wittgenstein – in the Tractatus – human reason can only remain silent in the worlds of ethics and aesthetics.3 In his early masterpiece, he originally accepted as true only what is scientifically verifiable and/or logically demonstrable (according to formal logic). Reason can only work within the boundaries of language and therefore can say nothing about either aesthetics or ethics, both of which describe worlds complete in themselves, wholly separate from the world where assertions must be evaluated by logic or scientific verification.4 He then reinserted aesthetics and ethics into the

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compass of human knowledge, but on a normative level. “Normative,” in his view, is different from the reason of logical arguments: therefore, since the only truth – as we usually understand it – lies either in logic or in science, whatever is not connected with truth is “normative.” Besides, the three normative sciences (including even logic) do not enter the process of representation that happens between facts and their presence in thought. This relationship is just due to a logical “copy” of the formal model of reality that happens in our brain. In the Tractatus, epistemology, the branch of philosophy that studies thethe connection between reality and thought does not appear. In this first description Wittgenstein does not despise ethics and aesthetics. He merely shows that they are beyond, and somehow above, the limits of language against which we dash our reasoning. It is worth noticing that here Wittgenstein appears quite aware of the three characteristics I indicated. First, the normativity of ethics is not limited to behavior, it is not only the consequence of what we think. On the contrary, ethics and aesthetics are different ways of looking at the world, from above rather than “from within.” In this sense, he will write that the whole of the Tractatus is an attempt to describe the ethical “from within”: his real interest – he seems to declare – was to leave the field free to adhere to this aesthetic and ethical view of the world without confusing it with a false sense of truth that belonged to logic and, even less importantly, to science. The most important thing can remain pure and beyond the boundaries of exact sciences. It is a view of the world and not behavior; it is knowledge, even if expressed in a negative way, not morality. Second, in this way Wittgenstein certainly thinks that he is respecting both the common intuition that one must look at the world from the point of view of values and the common inability to define them clearly. Third, he finds that precisely this way of looking at the world is needed in order to live with dignity in our world. Georg von Wright illustrates this need when he says that Wittgenstein was fighting against the ancient ruins of Robert Musil’s Kakania as well as against the positivist trust in science and technique. Wittgenstein’s philosophy and also his life was a protest against these trends and an effort to set an example of a “changed mode of thought and life” which, if followed, might provide a cure for what he thought of as a sick time.5 There is a second description of ethics that Wittgenstein gives in his 1929 lecture at the Heretical Club. Here his view is similar to the one expressed in the Tractatus, even if the first characteristic is deeper than it was before. Wittgenstein makes it clear that his look on ethics is a gnoseological one. Like aesthetics, ethics denotes our original way of looking at the world as a miracle. This is why we have to look at experience more than at theory. There

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is no theory before language was formed, and so there is no discourse that can talk about ethics or aesthetics. So, Wittgenstein passes here from considering the ethical from within to analyzing it directly: but to do that he must shift his accent from the theory of language to phenomenology. What is our first ethical experience? The experience of looking at the world, as it were, the first time. Our sense of marvel, our perceiving the world as a miracle is the content of this first experience. And the second phenomenological experience is to find oneself completely secure. Those two phenomenological experiences tell what the ethical is positively: its content rather than its boundaries as he described them in the Tractatus. But Wittgenstein’s judgment remains unchanged: these experiences, strictly speaking, are nonsense. They are more important than any other knowledge but incomprehensible from any sensible standpoint. So Wittgenstein thinks that his theory is a paradox, and in recognizing this position he quotes a very interesting predecessor: Kierkegaard.6 Kierkegaard is the author par excellence of the paradox that what saves life is beyond our reason and strength, so we need to jump into the nonsense in order to save ourselves. Wisdom and reason are against salvation and faith. This paradox sounds even more dramatic in Wittgenstein because we understood ethics as the source of knowledge: wisdom as knowledge and reason are against living and ethics. In the conversation referred to by Friedrich Waisman this sense of paradox causes Wittgenstein to maintain that the theological view that sees the Good as Good because God wants it as more profound that the one in which God wants the Good because it is Good.7 In this sense, Wittgenstein is really Kierkegaard’s disciple. God and the Good must stay beyond facts as we can describe them in our language. This dualism was deeply rooted in Kierkegaard’s revolution against Hegelians monism. In a very puritanical way (which Wittgenstein inherits), Kierkegaard opposed what is bound to the senses and what is true, bound to the soul, faith, God.8 The same dualism, reviewed in light of the linguistic turn of the Tractatus, is the horizon of Wittgenstein’s 1929 lecture. His “positive” and phenomenological description of ethics ends by pushing the absolute values of ethics outside the world of comprehension–that is, the world of language. The link between the world of language and the world of ethics is only the “running up against the limits of language.” For Wittgenstein this “running against the limits of language” is a real indication that these absolute values somehow exist and deserve our respect. I regard it as very important to put an end to all the chatter about ethics – whether there is knowledge in ethics, whether there are values, whether the Good can be defined, etc. In ethics, one constantly tries to say something that does not concern and can never concern the essence of the matter. It is a priori certain that, whatever definition one may give of the Good, it is always a misunderstanding to suppose that the

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formulation corresponds to what one really means (Moore). But the tendency, the thrust points to something.9 This acknowledgment that the tendency “points to something” is the highest point Wittgenstein can accord to a sort of semiotical epistemology (“running against the limits of language,” semiotically speaking, is an index). Paradox is not used as a type or form of knowledge. It is a barrier to inquiry that can only be crossed by a leap of “faith” that is totally foreign to sensible reality. We know there is a “second Wittgenstein” and that many things in his views changed. The description of ethics too changed between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. However, while content changed, or rather the definition of the absolute value, the strategy of inquiry that leads to the value and the relationship between this value and the structure of our knowledge remained the same. Wittgenstein talks about ethics in the following passage from the Philosophical Investigations: If someone were to draw a sharp boundary I could not acknowledge it as the one that I too always wanted to draw, or had drawn in my mind. For I did not want to draw one at all. His concept can then be said to be not the same as mine, but akin to it. The kinship is that of two pictures, one of which consists of colour patches with vague contours, and the other of patches similarly shaped and distributed, but with clear contours. The kinship is just as undeniable as the difference.10 And if we carry this comparison still further it is clear that the degree to which the sharp picture can resemble the blurred one depends on the latter's degree of vagueness. For imagine having to sketch a sharply defined picture 'corresponding' to a blurred one. In the latter there is a blurred red rectangle: for it you put down a sharply defined one. Of course – several such sharply defined rectangles can be drawn to correspond to the indefinite one. But if the colours in the original merge without a hint of any outline won't it become a hopeless task to draw a sharp picture corresponding to the blurred one? Won't you then have to say: "Here I might just as well draw a circle or heart as a rectangle, for all the colours merge. Anything – and nothing – is right." And this is the position you are in if you look for definitions corresponding to our concepts in aesthetics or ethics. In such a difficulty always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word ("good" for instance)? From what sort of examples? in what language-games? Then it will be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings.11

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When we analyze this description, we understand the change in the content of ethics for Wittgenstein. The absolute value, which was not even pronounceable in the Tractatus and was only hinted at phenomenologically in the 1929 lecture, has lost its “absoluteness.” Now the object of ethics is the value as it is embodied in use, which is the secret ground on which our language rests. Therefore, the realm of the ethical here coincides with the basic “use” or “practice” understood as the situation in which we play our linguistic games. This value is essentially vague, as the transcendent ethics for which world existence was a miracle was vague; however, the linguistic games that define it every time we act or speak are not vague and in a way always depend on it. Once again, we cannot speak of the ethical: this time its vagueness and not its mystical attitude make it impossible for our knowledge to grasp it. The result is the same: knowledge, however we understand it, remains foreign to the realm of ethics, even in the humanized form it takes in the Philosophical Investigations. In the Philosophical Investigations the acknowledgment of paradox disappears but it is easily identifiable; in the year 1947, still writing the second part of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein states it in a desperate form, “Wisdom is grey.” Life on the other hand and religion are full of colour.”12 Dualism is the fundamental feature of Wittgenstein’s conception of ethics and values. Moreover, one part of this dichotomy is always so beyond our intellect that it becomes understandable how Rorty can treat it as useless and threatening: if it does not work in actual and concrete reality, what is it good for? 2. The three characteristics that we mentioned (the gnoseological view of ethics, common sensism, and the need for ethical progress) are even more evident in Dewey’s work. In his solution, Dewey tries to avoid any dualism. This is why it is so interesting to understand the reason that Rorty merges Dewey’s pragmatism and analytical tradition. For Dewey, ethics is a form of knowledge about “what should be esteemed so that approbation will follow what is decided to be worth approving, instead of designating virtues on the basis of what happens to be especially looked up to and rewarded in a particular society.”13 In Dewey’s eyes, the idea of rational principles applying to the ethical level does not make sense. That is the old dualistic view that pragmatism rejects. Experience and its evolutionary essence is the only ground from which thought arises and to which it must return. In this sense, the distinction between theory and practice has become obsolete in any pragmatistic account. The real problem is to establish how one moves from the immediate experience, which we encounter at the beginning of an inquiry, to the final experience, which is a habit of

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conduct. When he talks about logic, Dewey calls these two experiences “experience had” and “experience known.” Dewey concentrates his explanation on this. Values are part of both experiences and they undergo a transformation, just as every datum does in knowledge. Hence, judgment must determine ethics as it does any other intellectual field. Reasoning is the heart of a new reflective morality opposed to a “compulsive” standard, the kind of morality in which the good is just what a certain society approves of. On the contrary, in reflective morality there are two requirements: The task of moral theory is thus to frame a theory of Good as the end or objective of desire, and also to frame a theory of the true, as distinct from the specious, good. In effect this latter need signifies the discovery of ends which will meet the demands of impartial and farsighted thought as well as satisfy the urgencies of desire. 14 In this sense, intellectual judgment enters into moral theory providing a new kind of utilitarian calculation. Dewey calls it a “revised version”of utilitarianism, and I would like to call it a “normative calculation” pointing out its focus on values. This revised version recognizes the great part played by factors internal to the self in creating a worthy happiness, while it also provides a standard for the moral appraisal of laws and institutions. For aside from the direct suffering which bad social arrangements occasion, they have a deteriorating effect upon those dispositions which conduce to an elevated and pure happiness.15 We should conclude, as Dewey does, that thought and practice are really united: Are praise and blame, esteem and condemnation, not only original and spontaneous tendencies, but are they so ultimate, incapable of being modified by the critical and constructive work of thought? Again, if conscience is a unique and separate faculty it is incapable of education and modification; it can only be directly appealed to. […] But if moral consciousness is not separate, then no hard and fast line can be drawn within conduct shutting off a moral realm from a non-moral. Now our whole previous discussion is bound up with the latter view.16 However, Dewey’s unification is not that as strong as he claims. Dualism will rise again in the middle of his moral theory, affecting the judgment of value that should be the unifying point of the whole theory. We will analzye this passage, but before doing that, we will look thoroughly at Dewey’s moral theory so that we can start to see that this thin but resistant and persistent dualism lies in the premises as well. Thought and approval do not begin

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united, and this is why any later unification fails. We can recognize this dualistic attitude when Dewey says that there are two aspects of voluntary action: the relationship with desire and the relationship with thought. From the peculiar union of desire and thought in voluntary action, it follows that every moral theory which tries to determine the end of conduct has a double aspect. In its relation to desire, it requires a theory of the Good: the Good is that which satisfies want, craving, which fulfills or makes complete the need which stirs to action. In its relation to thought, or as an idea of an object to be attained, it imposes upon those about to act the necessity for rational insight, or moral wisdom.17 The defense of common sense in any case will be as basic to Dewey as to any pragmatist. This common sense is both the beginning and the end of moral inquiry. At the beginning we find a psychological situation that Dewey takes from James: it is the fight between desire and reason, which Dewey will reformulate as a conflict between “a desire which wants a near-by object and a desire which wants an object which is seen by thought to occur in consequence of an intervening series of conditions, or in the 'long run'.” 18 The aim of inquiry is to transform the society by questioning its old traditions.19 It is in this power of renewal that lies the strength of Dewey’s moral proposal. Ethical issues are important if understood in this way: ethics is the practical stand we choose in accordance with our inquiry. Its values are the final position that we take in our thoughts and actions. Moreover, this embodiment of thought in action decides of the only real advantage we can draw from knowledge: namely, the advantage of using thought to change the world in practice, aiming at what is better not as a far abstract ideal, but as the next step that our thought must take to be true to itself. Now, having ascertained that Dewey shares Wittgenstein’s normative longing and need, let us look up at the center of this morality in order to verify whether our “hypothesis of dualism” works. Only in this way will we be able to say whether Rorty’s conclusions are philologically plausible, and whether they can be accepted. For Dewey the most important thing about ethics is the judgment of value that it requires. This judgment is the end of a long path of inquiry that begins with interest and ends with the application of this judgment to deliberation.20 Ethics is a form of inquiry having social welfare as object and intelligence as method. Therefore, the judgment of value is the point at which ethics shows to be a kind of inquiry.21 In what does this judgment of value consist? Besides, what is a value (“good”) for Dewey? “Good” to the child signifies that which tastes good; that which satisfies an immediate craving. “Good” from the standpoint of the more experienced person is that which serves certain ends, that stands

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in certain connection with consequences. Judgment of value is the name of the act which searches for and takes into consideration these connec-tions. […] [...] The change explains the fact that judgments of value are not mere registrations of previous attitudes of favor and disfavor, liking and aversion, but have a reconstructive and transforming effect upon them, by determining the objects that are worthy of esteem and approbation.22 At the beginning of the ethical issue, we have an immediate satisfaction as the answer to a stimulus that we call desire. In this sense, the formal explanation of happiness is the satisfaction of a desire.23 This satisfaction is an immediate “value” both ethically and aesthetically confirming Wittgenstein’s phenomenological appraisal of this kind of experience.24 Dewey acutely observes that if these values were infinite, we would not know any other kind of happiness. But values are changeable because we live in a problematic experience which questions our previous certainties and makes us look for different values. It is worth noticing that this is the moment in which we need to formulate our satisfaction through inquiry and that this novelty stems from the experience itself, which is doubtful. In this way, there is no a-priori, ready-made “self” who wants to doubt, as in the Cartesian account of research and knowledge.25 Because of the character of experience, we need to transform “immediate values” into something else using the power of our intelligence. Here we cannot follow the whole path of inquiry as Dewey explains it in Logic: a theory of inquiry, but we can sum it up, recalling its birth from the responsestimulus model and focusing upon the moment in which our intelligence reformulates the immediate datum as sign and then as symbol. It is this passage that transforms “data” into “objects” and, on an ethical level, immediate values into social good. Here we come to the centre of every inquiry, either ethical or theoretical: we need the work of reasoning to transform any kind of “experience had,” namely of immediate experience, into “experience known” or “critical knowledge.”26 But reasoning operates through propositions, propositions are representations, and representations are symbols. How can we get to a symbolization beginning from facts and the superficial satisfaction they allow? Dewey distinguishes two levels of signification that constitute the progressive development from vagueness of suggestion to applicability of reasoning. (1) The binomial sign-significance is the first degree of signification. At this level, the word “sign” denotes facts in “their connection with one another” such as the connection between smoke and fire. In these cases, the sign is always a “natural sign” which presents the objects.27 The relationship the sign

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describes is called connection or involvement. The kind of idea that stems from this first step of inquiry is a pre-logical suggestion that Dewey calls “inference.” (2) The binomial symbol-meaning is the second degree of signification. Here the connection is not just a presentation but also a re-presentation. Quality recedes into the background of inquiry. The representation allows the setting aside of the reciprocal connection between facts so that meaning can be freely used. Symbols describe two kinds of relationships: on the one hand the relationship between this representation and reality (what we call now “reference”), on the other hand, the relationship that symbols live among themselves.28 Symbols are “artificial signs” and the basis of the “implication” in discourse, “the relations of meanings to one another.”29 In its turn, implication is the basis of reasoning, which is the peak of every discourse: “for to think is to look at a thing in its relations with other things.”30 A completely developed representation can point out conditions for its experimental verification. In the experiment, facts and ideas show their common operational nature: every fact is subject matter already selected and transformed into representational content, and every hypothesis is a new organization of facts. In this way he established what “criticism” is and how it works: Criticism is discriminating judgment, careful appraisal, and judgment is appropriately termed criticism wherever the subject-matter of discrimination concerns goods and values. Possession and enjoyment of goods passes insensibly and inevitably into appraisal. First and immature experience is content simply to enjoy. But a brief course inexperience enforces reflection; it requires but brief time to teach that some things sweet in the having are bitter in the aftertaste and in what they lead to. Primitive innocence does not last. Enjoyment ceases to be a datum and becomes a problem. As a problem, it implies intelligent inquiry into the conditions and consequences of the value-object; that is, criticism. If values were as plentiful as huckleberry, and if huckleberry-patch were always at hand, the passage of appreciation into criticism would be a senseless procedure. If one thing tired or bored us, we should have only to turn to another. But values are as unstable as the forms of the clouds. The things that possess them are exposed to all the contingencies of existence, and they are indifferent to our likings and tastes.31 The realistic consideration of how shortly satisfaction lasts leads to its transformation into an instrument the intelligence can manipulate and use. This normative utilitarian view is the only sense we can attach the word “real.”

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Concerning beliefs and their objects taken in their immediacy “nondisputandum” holds, as truly as it does concerning tastes and their objects. If a man believes in ghosts, devils, miracles, fortune-tellers, the immutable certainty of the existing economic régime, and the supreme merits of his political party and its leaders, he does so believe; these are immediate goods to him, precisely as some color and tone of combinations are lovely, or the mistress of his heart is charming. When the question is raised as to the “real” value of the object for belief, the appeal decides by the law of conditions and consequences. Inquiry duly pursued leads to the enstatement of an object which is directly accepted, good in belief, but an object whose character now depends upon the reflective operations whose conclusion it is.32 In this way, we unify reasoning and reality, desire and thought, satisfaction and wisdom. Working by reason, we can forecast consequences of our conduct through experiments. At this point, our immediate value used as symbol is a deliberation ready to operate in a wider context that can avoid direct reference to the problem from which it stemmed and can form a standard basis for social duty or understanding of righteousness. Good has become wisdom. This path of inquiry creates what we can call “reality.” The “real” object is the one which has passed the semiotization and verification of the experiment. A real value is socially useful, purified from the craving of desire in which private judgments consist. In this sense the value is a tool for further social development that is at the same time moral, cognitive, and “metaphysical.” Dewey is not a relativist: his values are the most lasting that intelligence could find and they are tested by a long history of experiments. We should also notice that in Dewey’s account there is no “ghostly” agent of this change. There is neither “metaphysical” nor “transcendental” ego. The ego coincides with this delay in the response to a stimulus: we can call this delay thought or reasoning. Consciousness is not an entity that produces new attitudes or activities because of a new meaning. On the contrary, “consciousness is, literally, the difference in process of making.”33 In conclusion, we can say that Dewey avoids Wittgenstein’s dualism so that he strongly maintains a metaphysical realism. But then why does Rorty claim to follow Dewey? The unity between datum and response, the semiotical transformation we have seen, is weak. Dewey does not acknowledge other kinds of signs beside “sign” and “inference” or “symbol” and “implication”: the reality built on those signs does not bring an intrinsic link to the situation from which it stems. Accordingly, the social values that intelligence creates are tested by experiments but are only the fruit of the work of intelligence. What would

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happen if we avoided this passage through signs? Dewey too thinks that social values can only be judged through their consequences when intelligence has already transformed the datum into object. So duality remains between the reality from which inquiry comes and the reality to which it leads, between satisfaction and wisdom. As a confirmation, we can see that in Dewey’s account there is always a gap between mathematical and moral knowledge: in the former, there is just the thought, in the latter there is also approval.34 If the first reality, the datum, is just the occasion for the work of intelligence and cannot allow any verifying standpoint, what prevents us from saying that every interpretation is good and therefore that the ethical coincides with the double standard of the privately satisfactory and the publicly useful? Is it possible to find a different kind of continuity that could realize what Dewey’s process of inquiry promises? 3. In pragmatism there is another account that can suggest the way of getting that unity between theory and practice, knowledge and morality to which Dewey was aiming. This way is pointed out by Peirce’s account of normative sciences. For Peirce too thought is the arch that extends its arms between the proofs of experience understood both as starting point and as the end of any kind of reflection about meaning. But this arch of thought has different features in Peirce’s discourse. His way of looking at the normative sciences can help us to find a way out of this gap between reality and thought that he used to call “nominalism.” Peirce classifies ethics as the second step of normative sciences: aesthetics, ethics, and logic. This position means, according to this classification that Peirce borrowed from Comte, that ethics receives its principles from aesthetics and furnishes them to logic. In turn, all the normative sciences occupy the second step in philosophy where they follow phenomenology and precede metaphysics. In this sense, they are the link between reality and complete knowledge. But how are they defined? And what is their role? Peirce made his position clear only at the turn of the century and expressed it in the Harvard and Lowell Lectures he held in Cambridge in 1903. Here we find aremarkable summary that I will now adumbrate. Normative sciences examine mental operations that fall under our selfcontrol. Peirce begins by considering logic. “Inference essentially involves approval of it – a qualitative approval,”namely a voluntary act because of our self-control.35 “Now,” Peirce concludes, moving to ethics, “the approval of a voluntary act is a moral approval. Ethics is the study of what ends we are deliberately prepared to adopt.”36 In this sense, Peirce chooses a description of ethics as a gnoseological science: badness or rightness do not refer to moral

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conduct but to the ability to direct one’s intellectual forces toward an ultimate end deliberately adopted. But how can we decide which ultimate aim is worth achieving? What would be our criterion in judging the ultimate aim? Peirce says that this is the task of aesthetics, that is the study of a state of things that “reasonably recommends itself in itself” as an admirable ideal. Therefore, according to the definition of their respective sciences the logical good appears as a particular species of the ethical good and the ethical good as a species of the aesthetical good. Here we find again the connection we saw both in Wittgenstein and in Dewey but with the slight difference that now there is a hierarchical order not just the reference to the same field of experience. Now, what are the ethical and the aesthetic good? Peirce tries to define them. The ethical good has just one characteristic: it must be an ultimate aim. If it is not an ultimate goal, man cannot be blamed and his life is beyond any sort of control. We do not blame a hog for the way it behaves, Peirce says bitterly. Namely, if the aim is not “ultimate,” there will be no freedom. Here we can ask: “What about the partial aims?” Peirce seems to think that a partial aim cannot be admirable in itself because it requires a further aim to draw us forward. This is tantamount to saying that freedom requires a final satisfaction, whatever this might be, although Peirce will indicate (as we shall see) a special kind of quality as the only possible satisfaction. Of course, here we can see that in Peirce two different ideas of freedom are in conflict: on the one hand freedom is just self-control or critical control as it is in the liberal tradition; on the other hand, freedom is the ability to achievefull satisfaction as it is in the scholastic definition. We can see this double nature in Peirce’s description of the characteristics that an aim must have to be “ultimate.” “Ultimate” means that the aim must be valid in every circumstance. This means that first,it should be consistent with the “free development of the agent’s own aesthetic quality” (we will see what this means); and second, it cannot be damaged by any intervention of the outward world on which it is supposed to act. Peirce concludes: “It is plain that these two conditions can be fulfilled at once only if it happens that the aesthetic quality toward which the agent’s free development tends and that of the ultimate action upon him are parts of one aesthetic total.”37 In this way, he unifies the double nature of the ultimate aim by postulating an aim that is inward but that at the same time is the final good of every inward and outward experience. It is worth noticing that the postulation that Peirce invokes concerns ethics, but not every normative science: it can be demonstrated in aesthetics. As Potter suggests, the dilemma between good and bad from an ethical point of view does not find its solution within ethics but within aesthetics.

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Now, what is the aesthetical good that we need in order to understand the characteristics of ethical good (the concurrence with free development of the agent’s own aesthetic quality and its total? Peirce’s description is the following: “[…] I should say that an object, to be esthetically good, must have a multitude of parts so related to one another as to impart a positive simple immediate quality to their totality; and whatever does this is, in so far, esthetically good, no matter what the particular quality of the total may be.”38 The strategy is the same: goodness and badness are never judged from within the science one is involved in, but from within a higher one. But here they cannot refer to the higher, because aesthetics is the highest normative science. Therefore, Peirce refuses the notion of an aesthetic badness. “If it be correct, it will follow that there is no such thing as positive esthetic badness.”39 Accordingly, aesthetical goodness is a simple quality. Are there “innumerable varieties of esthetic quality”?40 Or is there the simplicity that coincides with that “inward state that anybody may hope to attain or approach” and that seems to indicate one ultimate quality?41 Peirce seems to waver between the two answers, but in the end he states that there must be an ultimate quality. He then analyzes whether it would be possible to identify this quality with pleasure, as the hedonistic view holds. He concludes that it is a valid alternative when we are looking for an aim admirable in itself in so far as it contemplates infinity of desire. We must here remember that the characteristic of infinity is part of the great freedom which determinates part of Peirce’s definition of ultimate aim and freedom. But he cannot agree with it because of the static result. “…[H]ow can we be expected to allow the assumption to pass that the admirable in itself is any stationary result?”42 Peirce’s solution is that aesthetical goodness coincides with reasonableness, the ability to embody general reason when we have to rule or govern individual events.43 Reason as such cannot ever be completely embodied but our task, what is “up to us” is to satisfy the deeper root of our being in making reasonableness grow.44 Therefore, what satisfies us is not what gives us the feeling of logicality – as Sigwart maintained – but what is true according to reason. Peirce gives this solution, although he knew that this was the biggest problem of his reconstruction of the dynamic of knowledge (to which he devoted the better part of his later years), namely, how to explain the singularity of events within the growth of an ever more absorbing generality. Peirce’s solution looks like a circle because what is true is good, what is good is beautiful, and what is beautiful is true according to reason. But the circle disappears if we understand the first and the second “true” in two different ways. The first means “logical,” the second means “reasonable.” Accordingly, what is logical is good, what is good is beautiful and what is beautiful is reasonable. Logic is part of reasonableness but does not exhaust it. In logic we have to draw our inferences from premises to conclusions, in

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reasonableness we have to look for premises in the continuum world of reality. Peirce sometimes identifies this kind of reasoning with the rational instinct, the function that presides over the hypothetical turn of abduction. In this search we are dealing with ethics and aesthetics from a gnoseological point of view. They serve to read signs that we find in a problematic or a new condition. However, here we have a different semiotic, much richer than Dewey’s. We find again symbols, but before them we find also indices and icons. Indices are signs that testify a direct, brute reference to the object as a road sign. They are equivalent to the first degree we encountered in Dewey’s account. Icons are signs that represent their object by similarity, reproducing the “ideal” form of the object as a geometrical diagram does with its objects. Aesthetics and ethics, then, have a precise role in knowledge. In this sense, unity among the three normative sciences is neither a paradox (as it was for Wittgenstein) nor a critical construction (Dewey). Only in this real continuity is it possible to go beyond Rorty’s dualism. Without this “working hypothesis,” Rorty is right in denying any possibility of unity in knowledge– and in moral life as well. The way indicated by Peirce can be a new way of looking at the unity of goodness, truth, and beautythat the modern crisis of reason questioned.

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NOTES 1. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 2. Rorty cites Heideggerian hermeneutics as an influence on his work as well. But here we are focusing on the other two philosophies that he mentions because their relationship to neo–pragmatism is stronger due to the intellectual biography of Rorty and other representatives of neo–pragmatism such as Putnam and Brandom. 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico–Philosophicus, 5th edition (London: Routledge, 1951), pp. 182–189. 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, 2nd edition (London: Blackwell, 1979), pp. 83 and 86. 5. G. H. von Wright, “Wittgenstein and the Twentieth Century” in Wittgenstein: Mind and Language, ed. Rosaria Egidi (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), p. 16. 6. Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, ed. Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 68. 7. Ibid., p. 69. 8. Soren Kierkegaard, Enten–Eller, in Samlede Voerker, volumes 1 and 2, ed. J.L. Heiberg (Kjøbenhavn: 1920; Italian translation, Gli stadi erotici immediati, ovvero il musicale–erotico, in Enten–Eller, ed. A. Cortese, Adelphi, Milan: Adelphi, 1989), pp. 156–158. 9. Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, ed. Brian McGuinness. 10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), p. 36. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 62e. 13. John Dewey, The Collected Works: 1882–1953, (Carbondale– Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–1990), p. 237. 14. Dewey, Collected Works, vol. 7, p. 191. 15. Ibid., p. 245. 16. Ibid., p. 263. 17. Ibid., pp. 190–191. 18. Ibid., pp. 188. 19. Ibid., pp. 314–315. 20. Ibid., p. 291. 21. Ibid., p. 245. 22. Ibid., p. 265. 23. Ibid., p. 245. 24. Ibid., p. 271. 25. Dewey, Collected Works, vol. 12, p. 109. 26. Dewey, Collected Works, vol. 7, p. 272. 27. Dewey, Collected Works, vol. 12, p. 57. 28. Ibid., pp. 57–60. 29. Ibid., p. 60. 30. Dewey, Collected Works, vol. 7, p. 265. 31. Dewey, Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 298. 32. Ibid., p. 303.

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33. Ibid., p. 239. 34. Dewey, Collected Works, vol. 7, pp. 274–275. 35. Charles S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce volume 2, ed. The Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 200 36. Ibid. 37. Peirce, The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, p. 203. 38. Ibid., p. 201. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., p. 202. 41. Ibid., p. 460. 42. Ibid., p. 254. 43. Ibid., p. 255. 44. Ibid.

Eight DIFFERENT PRAGMATIST REACTIONS TO ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY Michele Marsonet

1. Many thinkers nowadays react against the strictures of the analytic tradition by reviving the American philosophy par excellence: pragmatism. The forenunner of this trend of thought in the second half of the past century is Quine, even though he has never been a full-fledged pragmatist: it is more accurate to say that he inserted pragmatist elements in a largely analytic (and even logical empiricist) stance.1 Following Quine we find Rescher, who began reevaluating pragmatism in the late 1960’s.2 Rescher’s work, however, is less popular than other, more recent neopragmatist endeavors, essentially due to Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. In my opinion, the reason may mainly be found in Rescher’s particular brand of idealistically flavored pragmatism. Idealism has never been popular in analytic philosophy, and this despite the well-known connections between British idealism and early analytic philosophy, and the unconscious linguistic idealism endorsed by prominent representatives of the analytic tradition. Apart from the bad reputation that idealism continues to have in the Anglophone world, Rorty (whose present distance from analytic philosophy is far greater than Putnam’s) also took advantage of the growing challenges that the analytic paradigm began to face in the late 1970’s and early 80’s to launch his more hermeneutically inspired critique. In any event, the revival of pragmatism has been for several years a typically American phenomenon. In continental Europe all those thinkers who were previously trained in the analytic tradition and subsequently got tired of it, are generally more interested in the so-called epistemology of complexity or in the naturalistic turn. Only in the last few decades has neopragmatism become popular in Europe, mainly thanks to Rorty’s writings which were extensively translated.3 No doubt the neopragmatism that is currently fashionable is closer to James (and to the early John Dewey) than it is to Peirce, C.I. Lewis, and to the most mature of Dewey’s writings. The central tenet of pragmatism is then viewed in a Jamesian fashion: the pragmatic

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method is primarily devised for settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable, and for interpreting philosophical notions by tracing their practical consequences. And if there is no practical means to settle disputes between philosophical systems, then the alternatives will generate the same consequences and all dispute is idle. Rescher’s pragmatism is distant from theses like these. Because, if we say that we are only justified in believing that which is useful to us, and if we add that the sole task of philosophy is to help to improve humankind’s conditions, we will have serious problems in defining just what these improvements are supposed to consist in. In other words, if we give up any kind of objective standard, it will become impossible just to know which theories are useful in obtaining the aforementioned improvements in human life.4 Clearly, we need some kind of standard, even though admitting that “truth” is somehow a human artifact, and not a metaphysical idea living its own life in a Platonic world of eternal forms. Prior to the present revival, pragmatism was never really popular in Europe; most European thinkers, in fact, took it to be a typical expression of the American utilitarian spirit (where “utilitarian” had a negative valence). The deep sense of the pragmatist stance was understood to be embodied by one of William James’ most famous statements: “True is what is good in the way of belief” and, needless to say, a parodistic version of pragmatism was reported in philosophical textbooks. Only now that the cultural climate is changing have Europeans come to understand that pragmatism is the forerunner of several theses made popular by the post-empiricist turn. For instance, many affinities were discovered between pragmatism and the thought of the later Wittgenstein, and the same is true even for Popperian fallibilism. Hilary Putnam has published a book titled Pragmatism: An Open Question.5 But why, one might ask, should pragmatism be an “open question” for an American philosopher like Putnam? It makes sense to speak of the reevaluation of pragmatism in Europe, but this should not be the case in the United States, given the fact that pragmatism is taken to be the archetypal American philosophy. In order to answer this question, we need to take a short historical detour. Starting from the late 1930’s, the United States became the major center of activity for analytic philosophy and logical positivism. Up to that time pragmatism was by large the philosophical trend dominating American universities. Following the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, Austria’s annexation, and the subsequent German occupation of Poland, most representatives of logical positivism – and of scientifically oriented philosophy in general – emigrated to the U.S. (a few of them, including Karl Popper, chose England instead). Rudolf Carnap, Alfred Tarski, Hans Reichenbach, Carl Gustav Hempel, Herbert Feigl and many others were given chairs in American universities. The reasons for this philosophical diaspora are clear: racial persecution apart, none of these thinkers could stand Nazi

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anti-intellectualism and irrationalism. American pragmatists largely favored this exodus, and Willard Quine, who was at that time a young instructor of logic at Harvard University, played a pivotal role. He had met personally many analytic philosophers – including the main representatives of the Vienna Circle and of the Lvov-Warsaw School – during a trip he made in Europe in 1933. Supported by C.I. Lewis, a pragmatist who was particularly sensitive to logical, linguistic, and scientific issues, Quine worked hard to bring the European thinkers to the American continent. Here is how he describes those heroic years: I returned in the fall of 1933 [from the trip to Europe] and was appointed junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard. In 1938 I became an instructor, and I’ve been here ever since. Carnap came over on the occasion of Harvard’s tricentenary, in 1934. I had given several public lectures on Carnap, and I hoped that Harvard would hire him, but we didn’t swing it; he was hired by the University of Chicago. But we had good times when Carnap was in this part of the world. Tarski arrived in 1939 and we found him a job at City College in New York. Thirty-eight to ’41 were splendid years.6 At this point we should note two things. In the first place logical empiricism and pragmatism certainly are compatible philosophical outlooks on the world, and this greatly helped the European thinkers to settle in their new environment. Secondly, American analytic philosophy was, in its early period, much closer to neopositivism than to the everyday language analysis which was thriving in the British universities. The Tractatus Logicophilosophicus was well known, while some decades would still have to pass for Americans to be interested in the theses of the second Wittgenstein. Pragmatism on the one hand, and analytic philosophy on the other (particularly in its logical positivist brand) present many similarities: both are interested in scientific results and methodologies; both trust human reason and its capacity to comprehend nature; both ask that philosophers give serious and rigorous reasons in support of their assertions. In sum, Intersubjectivity plays a key role in both traditions, and this marks their difference from all those trends of thought which, instead, exalt intuition and pure subjectivity. However, the neopositivists deemed formal logic fundamental and, after a little while, they began to attack an alleged lack of rigor on the part of the pragmatists. Today we can summarize the situation in a few words: the neopositivists endorsed scientism while the pragmatists did not. According to pragmatism scientific knowledge is indeed central, but by no means the only kind of knowledge important to mankind; according to neopositivism, instead, all kinds of knowledge must be reduced to the scientific one. On the one side we thus have monism and reductionism (neopositivism), and on the other pluralism and anti-reductionism (pragmatism).

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As always happens, the young scholars were fascinated by the more radical and newer approach of neopositivism, so that the pragmatist hegemony in the American academic institutions soon vanished. Despite all appearances, however, the neopositivists did not score a total victory. Pragmatist ideas continued to influence, like an underground river, the brightest representatives of American analytic philosophy. Carnap himself adopted a somehow pragmatist stance in his later works, while Quine’s thought can be defined as a brilliant synthesis of analytic, neopositivist, and pragmatist tendencies (think of his famed paper “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”). Today neopragmatism can thus be traced back to this permanent – even though not always visible – Influence of traditional pragmatism on American philosophy. Quine’s refusal to set up a precise borderline between analytic and synthetic propositions, and his image of the field of force where all propo-sitions are subject to revision, is one of the key theses endorsed by neopragmatist thinkers in the last few decades. Quine’s thought became, thus, a sort of bridge between the old and the new. But, while the Harvard philosopher never threw neopositivism away, some of his pupils – Donald Davidson, for instance – go well beyond his benevolent criticisms to endorse more radical positions. In the aforementioned book, Hilary Putnam rightly underlines the importance of some beautiful remarks by William James concerning the relationships between theory and observation. According to James, in fact, “the knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foothold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor, and coefficient on the truth and registers the truth on one side, while on the other he registers the truth which he helps to create.”7 If we recognize that the theoretical and the observational dimensions cannot be neatly separated, we are no longer sticking to a neopositivist view of the mind’s working, but endorse, to the contrary, a view which was made popular by post-empiricist authors. It might even be said – speaking inductively – that despite the appearances pragmatism was more “modern” than neopositivism, even though “modernity” is a concept always bound to be tied to the particular period of time in which it is put forward. The principle of the primacy of practice led the pragmatists to deny a milestone of logical empiricism,that is, the existence of the true method to be adopted in both philosophical and scientific inquiry, a method obviously based on the tools offered by mathematical logic. John Dewey understood – well before the post-empiricist turn – that such a unified method, conceived of as an algorithm able to solve any problem, is only a philosophical utopia. And even pragmatism’s intuitions about the relationships between science and ethics deserve mention here. This theme is, nowadays, at the center of the philo-sophical stage, while the logical positivists did not deem it all that important. Dewey, for instance, used to claim that the primary purpose of

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science is not that of creating abstract and formal models, but of solving human problems. In his view any rigid dichotomy between pure and applied science is meaningless: they are interdependent activities, so that scientific research must be “democ-ratized” to some extent in order that human community at large can control its actual goals. The last thing I will note is that pragmatism, thanks to its broader speculative perspectives, is likely to favor a greater influence of philosophers on political, social, and ethical issues. The best example is, of course, given by John Dewey, who became an ideologist of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. But pragmatism as a whole is certainly far distant from the analytic tradition, whose hyperspecialization has almost always isolated it from the rest of society. The following passage depicts this situation well: If it is true that, starting with Quine and continuing with Davidson, Nozick, and Danto, the analytic project has been hollowed out from the inside using its own tools, with Rorty and Cavell it finds itself attacked from the outside. Cut off from its ties with the present, it is embalmed as a museum piece, its scientific hypotheses seen as one system among many when rechanneled into a historicist world view. The analytical movement is accused of a tangle of faults, such as canonizing a philosophical discourse that remains within rigid disciplinary and professional confines, bleakly isolating philosophy from history, culture, and society. This knot was created by the analytical isolation, but it is untied with the recovery of two crucial traditions of thought in the intellectual history of the United States, pragmatism and transcendentalism. Rorty was the first to resurrect in a new key that distinctively American line of thought inaugurated at the end of the nineteenth century by Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. Thanks to the long life of John Dewey, that tradition grew throughout the first half of the twentieth century, only to disappear, swallowed up by the Viennese emigration between the two world wars.8 So the almost exclusive emphasis on formal logic and the analysis of language – be it scientific or ordinary – caused the isolation of analytic philosophy from the other sectors of culture. Let us now illustrate Rescher’s position, since Rorty was not the first philosopher to resurrect the tradition of American pragmatism. Let us then start with Willard Quine, to whom Rescher often pays homage in his works. According to the logical empiricists, a proposition may be defined as “analytic” if its truth is granted by definition, while on the other hand “synthetic” propositions are directly related to some available experience. Reductionism naturally follows from these premises, since the meaning of factual statements resides in the capability of ultimately reducing them to synthetic ones. Quine rejects the thesis that there actually are

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“neutral” synthetic observations that are supposed to give meaning its ultimate ground, and added that experience – in and by itself – can make no statement true. In other words, observation and background beliefs are not separated by a neat borderline, and no statement is immune to revision. His famous article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” marked, on the one hand, the end – at least for many contemporary philosophers – of the so-called analytic/synthetic distinction which played a key role in the logical empiricists’ speculation, and on the other a resurgence of holism within the analytic tradition. It is not difficult, at this point, to understand the similarities between Quine and Rescher, who agree in rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction. There is a common pragmatist heritage shared by the two authors. But differences soon come to light because, while Rescher clearly endorsed a fullfledged pragmatist stance starting from the late 1960’s, Quine always tried to reconcile its pragmatist insights with some of the main tenets of the analytic tradition, viewing formal logic and the philosophy of language as the milestones of any significant philosophical enterprise. This explains why we can find some inconsistency in Quine’s thought. A pragmatist would be expected to endorse logical pluralism and to maintain that the choice among alternative systems ultimately rests on practical considerations. Rescher made this step, while Quine did not. From a purely historical viewpoint it is interesting to note that they went in just the opposite direction with the passing of time. In the 1950’s, Quine shocked analytic philosophers by saying that “The totality of our socalled knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges...Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections – the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field.”9 No doubt this is full-fledged pragmatism in the best tradition of Peirce, James, Dewey, and C.I. Lewis. Starting with the 1960’s, however, Quine slowly turned back to logical positivism and linguistic analysis, with the final outcome that a sort of logical monism opposing all kinds of “deviant” logics replaced the pluralistic stance implicit in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” On the one side, the Harvard philosopher ends up supporting a strong version of empiricism, according to which reality is simply (and only) what we can have experience of from the sensory viewpoint; while, on the other, he endorses a sort of logical and linguistic realism, according to which reality is simply (and only) what we are able to express within our language adequately modified by recourse to logical formalization (that is, first order logic). He does not seem to have a clear perception of the difficulty of putting together the two alternatives just mentioned. His neopositivist legacy led him

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to a form of radical empiricism, while his logical realism took him in quite a different direction. To all this we must add a strongly behaviorist stance. In the end, this means that Quine only takes into account language on the one side and human behavior on the other. But, of course, we need something else to explain how our language really works. If all that we have to work with is observable behavior and language use – and nothing else – then we are driven to perplexity by the problem of other minds. In contrast, Rescher’s evolutionary approach is distant from both behaviorism and linguistic absolutism. In noting that man is an integral part of nature, he claims that “The intellectual mechanisms we devise in coming to grips with the world – in transmuting sensory interaction with nature into intelligible experience – have themselves the aspect of being nature’s contrivances in adjusting to its ways a creature it holds at its mercy. It is no more surprising that man’s mind grasps nature’s ways than it is surprising that man’s eye can accommodate nature’s rays or his stomach nature’s food. Evolutionary pressure can take credit for the lot.” 10 Theoretically, Quine would have nothing to object to such statements, but his rigid behaviorist stance, coupled with the overestimation of the role of language in human knowledge, prevent him from providing a picture broad enough to sustain his self-proclaimed empiricist and naturalistic attitude. However, there are some inconsistencies (or tensions, if you prefer) in Rescher’s writings as well. This is particularly evident in the way he deals with the distinction between factual and logical truths. In the late 1960’s, he provided a pragmatic philosophy of logic where, endorsing a functionalistic instrumentalism, the choice between various systems of logic is taken to be guided by purpose-relative considerations of effectiveness, efficiency, convenience, and economy. Logic, thus, is neither a descriptive discipline nor a Platonic search for abstract objects located in a world different from ours, but a man-made manufacture of intellectual tools. Needless to say, this stance agrees with Quine’s pragmatist position in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” A few years later, however, one finds in Rescher’s The Coherence Theory of Truth a rather different kind of remark: Our difference from Quine [in “Two Dogmas”] lies in our refusal to combine logical with factual considerations so as to throw everything at one go into the melting-pot of simultaneous re-evaluation. We are prepared to retain the traditional distinction between logical and f actual theses [...] The validation of logical machinery [...] is to be resolved first with primary reference to the non-empirical domain of mathematical, semantical, and logical considerations [...] Only after the mechanisms of logic are secured can we press on [...] to deploy coherence mechanisms in the factual domains [...] Our own theory envisages a multi-stage process, within each phase of which the logical and the factual sectors are kept separate and treated differently,

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Such statements are by no means isolated in Rescher’s works. Thus in 1977 we were told that “Without logic to guide us we might conceivably be in a position to describe how people do reason, but we are muzzled on the topic of how they ought to reason so as to resolve belief-conflicts.”12 In these and the preceding remarks logic is still held to have a slightly aprioristic character, which establishes its ultimate superiority over praxis. However, the later Rescher no longer endorses such a thesis. Like mathematics, logic is the hybrid of a two-sided story in which nature and our evolved conceptual apparatus play a joint game. Nature is always the same, but conceptual machinery places heavy constraints on nature-as-we-see-it (which, in turn, is the only nature to which we have direct access). This being the situation we face in everyday life, it would be quite misleading to say that logical theses have some kind of priority over the factual ones. We must instead resort to a sort of “holistic circle.” A causal dependence of logical theses from factual ones can be envisioned, without forgetting, however, that a conceptual dependence of factual from logical theses may be detected as well. Rescher’s holistic attitude has it that the realms of logic and factuality are indeed coordinated and interrelated. Some similarities can, however, be found between Quine’s and Rescher’s approaches to the problem of the relations between ontology and epistemology. Quine’s thought reflects an unexpressed Kantian influence, in the sense that a distinction between linguistic-experiential “phenomena” and non-linguistic “noumena” often surfaces. We can find there two different concepts of reality. According to the first, reality is composed by commonsense objects that we perceive through our sensory apparatus. Language differentiates reality into particular objects, which means that, whenever talking about reality, we do it relatively to language. In a second sense, reality is less determined, because it resembles a sort of raw material that produces the flux of experience (a substratum). In Quine’s view (but it should be recalled that often he seems to endorse different positions in this regard) ontological talk rises when the human mind – which cannot be clearly distinguished from language – gives an order to the disordered fragments of raw experience which, in turn, are provided to us by the just mentioned substratum. And, needless to say, this notion closely recalls a concept of nondifferentiated reality similar to the Kantian one. Quine’s ontological criterion does not reveal “what there is,” but is built in order to let us understand what a certain assertion or theory “claims” about reality. From this it would seem to follow that we can never reach reality-in-itself, but only reality-as-we-(humans)-say-it-is. If we now shift our attention from language to thought, and from philosophy of language to the theory of knowledge, Quine’s and Rescher’s pictures do not appear to be very

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distant. In both cases we have no hope of getting to an absolute ontology, and must therefore admit that an ontology-for-us is the only choice which is available to human beings. We can see two main differences here. In the first place, Rescher never assumes that language has a sort of priority and sees it as one (out of many) forms of human activity. Secondly, in Rescher the creative role of our conceptual machinery is both argued for and supported by his doctrine of conceptual idealism. In Quine, instead, it never transpires in a neat way, probably because an admission of this sort would clearly be at odds with his self-proclaimed empiricist behaviorism. To sum up, we arrive at the following overview: Quine abandoned his pragmatism of the 1950’s turning into a basically analytic philosopher who keeps some pragmatist elements in his speculative building. Rescher, by contrast, tried for several years to reconcile pragmatism with the ideological tenets of linguistic analysis, turning eventually into a full-fledged pragmatist, whose basic theses are at odds with the ideological tenets of logical empiricism and the analytic tradition at large. Both of them are faithful to analytic “methodology.” This observation brings us to the second philosopher we will consider in the present section, Wilfrid Sellars. The major link between Sellars and Rescher is given by the fact that they are both systematic thinkers. For example, we read with respect to Sellars that: While much of recent philosophy has been of the piecemeal variety, one contemporary philosopher who has carried on the tradition of philosophy in the “grand manner” is Wilfrid Sellars. His work not only ranges over the various systematic areas of philosophy but unifies the various areas in terms of a distinctive perspective. As a result, while the corpus of most contemporary philosophers is simply the sum of self-intelligible atoms of inquiry, in Sellars’s case the result is a systematic unity. Moreover, his synoptic vision involves not simply a theoretical unification of scientific understanding with our ordinary conception of the world but also embraces the practical dimensions of human existence.13 Exactly these same words could apply to Rescher, who often declared his distaste for piecemeal philosophy and expressed a determination to restore a concern for wholeness and system – not by abandoning the penchant for exactness and detail of the pre-war generation, but by fusing details into meaningful structures. However, while Sellars was not a typically orthodox analytic philosopher, nevertheless, even in his case the dictum that analysis of language provides the best (and, in most cases, the only) way for understanding the world applies. As was the case before with Quine, then, this overevaluation of language analysis marks a first and significant difference

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between Sellars and Rescher. A second, more specific difference is that Sellars held a typically “representationalistic” (and, thus, non-pragmatist) theory of knowledge. In other words, we get to know the objects of the world through representations which, in turn, must share with them at least some of their features. A representation is a partial reproduction of “similar” features belonging to the object that we purport to known. Thus Sellars maintained that knowledge is no replica or reproduction, but a sort of “projective” relation between the structure of reality on the one side, and mental states and practical activities on the other. Things must be that way because, otherwise, physical reality would be unknowable to consciousness. The main job of consciousness is in turn translation, especially with regard to physical events. It follows that it is incorrect to claim that conceptualization prevents our knowledge of an external world. Language truly “describes” the world in the sense that linguistic expressions are nothing but linguistic projections of nonlinguistic objects, even though the key notion of “projection” is always given, in Sellars’s writings, a metaphorical meaning, so that it is not clear what he really intended it to be. Rescher’s holistic and evolutionary epistemology is rather different, since he argues that conceptualization is not a veil that hides the real world, but our way for dealing with it. While in Sellars there seems to be a neat separation between the knowing subject and an amorphous world that waits to be known, in Rescher the relation subject/object has a dynamically interactive character (as in Dewey, for instance). Our capacity to know is not an inevitable feature of conscious organic life, but a peculiarly human instrumentality that can – and must – be explained in terms of evolutionary heritage. So knowledge is not an abstract picturing relation holding in only one direction (that is, from us to the things), but is itself praxis, stemming from the fact that a rational animal, as such, is practically forced to explain what goes on around him. To put it in another way, knowledge is the outcome of a practical impetus to “coherent information,” so that “information represents a deeply practical requisite for us humans. A basic demand for understanding and cognitive orientation presses in upon us, and we are inexorably impelled towards (and are pragmatically justified in) satisfying that demand.”14 Turning once more to the “hermeneutic circle,” we cannot oversimplify a process that is intrinsically very complex. The causal dependence of mind from physical reality is balanced by the conceptual dependence of reality from the mind. As long as we are concerned, we are bound to conceive the world along peculiar lines, which are in turn dictated by the particular niche we have come to occupy in the history of evolution at large. In other words, we “scan” the world in ways that may be very different from that of other living beings. Nothing prevents us from imagining alien intelligent creatures whose view of reality is totally different from ours, because they gear it to physical parameters to which we pay no attention or

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that we may even be unable to perceive with our sensory apparatus. Sellars is still tied to the typical – and abstract – theory of knowledge of the analytic tradition, while evolutionary epistemology takes Rescher into a radically new path. A third and major difference has to do with the problem of scientific realism, which plays a pivotal role in both Sellars’s and Rescher’s systems. This happens because these two authors take science seriously, deeming it the best instrument for getting to know reality. On his part, Sellars put forward a constant effort to define the proper place of science in his global view of the human situation. This is his famous “synoptic vision,” defined as follows: The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under “things in the broadest possible sense” I include such radically different items as not only “cabbages and kings,” but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death [...] It is therefore, the “eye on the whole” which distinguishes the philosophical enterprise [...] the philosopher is confronted [...] by two pictures of essentially the same order of complexity, each of which purports to be a complete picture of man-in-the-world, and which, after separate scrutiny, he must fuse into one vision. Let me refer to these two perspectives, respectively, as the manifest and the scientific images of man-in-the-world [...] by calling them images I do not mean to deny to either or both of them the status of “reality.” I am, to use Husserl’s term, “bracketing” them, transforming them from ways of experiencing the world into objects of philosophical reflection and evaluation.15 Sellars then depicts what he calls the “manifest image” in terms that might even recall Rescher’s theses, since he claims that the transition from preconceptual patterns of behavior to conceptual thinking had an holistic character, a sort of jump which determined the coming into being of man. All the great speculative systems of ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy have been built around the manifest image of man-in-the world. As for the second kind of image we mentioned above, Sellars admits that it is an idealization, because thare are as many scientific images of man as there are sciences that have something to say about man. Nevertheless, he thinks that there is the scientific image that stems from the many ones which it is supposed to integrate. And we must also note that a typical theoretical image like the scientific one is a construction whose foundations are always provided by the manifest image. This means that the latter has a methodological priority over any theoretical construction. Now, it happens that the two images advance conflicting claims concerning the true and complete account of man-in-the-world, so that any serious philosophy must,

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nowadays, take such conflicting claims into account in order to evaluate them. Sellars’s conclusion is that the dualism of the two images must be transcended (if only in imagination), because “the conceptual framework of persons is not something that needs to be reconciled with the scientific image, but rather something to be joined to it. Thus, to complete the scientific image we need to enrich it not with more ways of saying what is the case, but with the language of community and individual intentions, so that by construing the actions we intend to do and the circumstances in which we intend to do them in scientific terms, we directly relate the world as conceived by scientific theory to our purposes, and make it our world and no longer an alien appendage to the world in which we do our living.”16 No doubt there are many elements of this picture that can be reconciled with Rescher’s general perspective. But Rescher would cast many doubts about the possibility of construing the scientific image (however idealized) as Sellars has it. The Rescherian question in this regard would most likely be: Which scientific image are we talking or thinking about? He would deem a stable synthesis like the envisioned by his former colleague practically unachievable. Unlike the logical positivists, Sellars indeed takes history into account, but he does that only to a limited degree. In other words, one has often the impression that Sellars wrote as if scientific research could come to a resting point, while Rescher argues that we have no evidence that this is the case (or, even better, evidence goes in just the opposite direction). To shed more light on the two perspectives at issue, we may note that, according to Rescher: One cannot move from scientific knowledge-claims to the objective characterization of reality without the mediating premiss that these claims are substantially correct. And this mediating premiss is not available with respect to existing science – science in the present stateof-the-art – but only with respect to ideal science. Only in the idealized case of an unrealistic perfection can we unproblematically adopt the stance of a theory-realism that holds that the world actually is as theorizing claims it to be. The canonization of the theory-claims of science as reality-descriptive requires the idealized stance that science is substantially correct. 17 What kind of account of man-in-the-world can an image – which admittedly is an idealization – provide? It should be noted, furthermore, that even the manifest image cannot be taken to be stable. As a matter of fact it continuously evolves, bringing within its framework elements that come from the scientific image. Sellars’s and Rescher’s points of departure in philosophy are ultimately different. Sellars’s reference point has always been the “received view” of the logical empiricists. Of course he criticized at length their conclusions,18 but

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this, after all, remained his conceptual horizon. His criticisms of logical empiricism, in fact, are more internal modifications – sometimes even radical – than real upsets of the neopositivists’ global account of the relations between philosophy and science. In Rescher’s case, instead, the initial fascination with neopositivism was soon replaced by an ever-growing critical attitude towards all brands of analytic philosophy. By the end of the 1960’s Rescher’s turn to pragmatism and conceptual idealism was already underway, to be completed a few years later. 2. As a matter of fact there are many pragmatisms, so that it is a little misleading to present this variegated trend of thought as if it were a monolithic doctrine. The founding fathers, too, were anything but unanimous. Peirce was not in agreement with James on many issues. Dewey, in turn, did not like various aspects of both Peirce’s and James’ philosophy, while C.I. Lewis’ views on logic were quite different from those held by Dewey. It should not be surprising, then, to find the same amount of disagreement in today neopragmatism, where Rescher and Rorty, who both define themselves pragmatists, hold different opinions on most subjects. In the present section we shall draw some sketchy comparisons between the ideas of these two thinkers. Rescher views the contrast between himself and Rorty as a continuation of the struggle between an objective pragmatism (or “pragmatism of the right”) which includes the triad Peirce-Lewis-Rescher, and a subjective one (or “pragmatism of the left”) which comprises James, the early and middle Dewey, and Rorty. The later Dewey assumes, in this picture, a middle-of-the-road position. While Rorty must certainly be praised for both overcoming the linguistic turn and making pragmatism popular again in American philosophy following several decades of relative forgetfulness, Rescher argues that the Rortyan interpretation of pragmatism is too partial. In particular, by taking Rorty too seriously one is led to believe that pragmatism implies relativism. On the contrary, Rescher insists that relativism is practically absent in the writings of Peirce and C.I. Lewis, so that Rorty ends up with providing an image of pragmatism which is substantially misleading. All these remarks are important, especially for the historians of contemporary thought. The contrast between the two authors, however, is not only (or better yet, not mainly) historical, but theoretical. Although sharing some basic opinions, among which the reevaluation of pragmatism and the overcoming of analytic philosophy’s ideological tenets play a key role, they go in opposite directions so far as many and fundamental philosophical issues are concerned. Rorty for instance claims that logical positivism and, in general, the whole kind of

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philosophy which stems from Russell and Frege – that is, analytic philosophy – was not a revolutionary mode of thought, but a reactionary movement. It is: Like classical Husserlian phenomenology, simply one more attempt to put philosophy in the position which Kant wished it to have – that of judging other areas of culture on the basis of its special knowledge of the “foundations” of these areas. “Analytic” philosophy is one more variant of Kantian philosophy, a variant marked principally by thinking of representation as linguistic rather than mental, and of philosophy of language rather than “transcendental critique,” or psychology as the discipline which exhibits the “foundations of knowledge.”19 The emphasis on language, according to Rorty, although important in itself, does not change the Cartesian-Kantian problematic, and thus does not really give philosophy a new self-image. Analytic philosophy is (or was) still committed to the construction of a permanent, neutral framework for inquiry, and thus for all culture. This idea amounts to saying that there are “nonhistorical conditions of any possible historical developments,” and that we can escape from history. Instead we should totally adhere to Dewey’s dictum that philosophers “are parts of history, caught in its movement; creators perhaps in some measure of its future, but also assuredly creatures of its past.”20 Conversely, according to Rescher, the overcoming of analytic philosophy’s poorly-based foundationalism means neither the end of philosophy itself, nor the refusal to recognize its cognitive value. He agrees with Rorty’s assertion that philosophers cannot detach themselves from history or forsake the everyday and scientific conceptions that provide the stage setting of their discipline, but nevertheless contends that the dissolution of philosophy is a deeply wrong answer. Skeptics of all sorts would like to “liberate” humankind from the need of doing philosophy, pointing out that it has thus far been unable to answer our questions in a proper way. Rescher, to the contrary, invites us to take sides because “abandoning philosophical subjects is a leap into nothingness.”21 Of course we can escape into the history of philosophy conceived of in merely philological terms, or into technical minutiae, but this is tantamount to cognitive vacuity. The need to philosophize stems from our very nature of inquiring beings and is, so to speak, built in the cultural evolutionary heritage that we all share. We might even say that we need intellectual accommodation at least as much as physical accommodation is requested in our daily life. So, when the skeptics invite to forget about abstract thinking and philosophy in order to focus on practical needs, it may be answered that: They overlook the crucial fact that an intellectual accommodation to the world is itself one of our deepest practical needs – that in a position

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of ignorance or cognitive dissonance we cannot function satisfactorily. We are creatures for whom intellectual comfort is no less crucial than physical comfort. The human condition is such that we are going to have some view (after all, scepticism itself is just one such). The question is simply whether we are going to have one that is well thought out or not.22 Even someone like Rorty who claims that no philosophical position at all should be endorsed, himself in the end puts forward what is simply another view among many in the spectrum of possibilities at our disposal. The problems that Rorty faces by adopting such a stance emerge very well in his political philosophy (“ironic liberalism”). In this context let us only note that his tenet, according to which philosophy is more or less harmless, is hardly tenable if we recall the enormous practical consequences that the rise and development of a doctrine like Marxism has had on the contemporary world. No devotee of the Western democratic thought is inclined to deny that the image of the “philosopher-king” is dangerous and, as a matter of fact, Popper has given us some illuminating analyses in this respect. The real point at stake, however, is not this one. Rorty claims – correctly – that any absolute view of reality, which aims at subordinating praxis and history to some philosophical a priori axioms in order to build an ideal social order, is bound to failure. Not only that: it even threatens to create more problems than it was meant to solve. But why should we draw, from this correct premise, absolutely relativistic conclusions like Rorty’s? I perceive, in sum, a sort of intellectual jump between his basic assumptions and the results he deduces from them. We do not need to shift from the refusal of any totalitarian view of reality to a complete relativism which – as such – threatens to lead the democratic societies of the Western world to a dangerous nihilism. Some years ago, dealing with Rorty’s thought, Ian Hacking remarked that Rorty’s version of pragmatism is yet another language-based philosophy, which regards all of our life as a matter of conversation. Dewey rightly despised the spectator theory of knowledge. What might he have thought of science as conversation? In my opinion, the right track in Dewey is the attempt to destroy the conception of knowledge and reality as a matter of thought and of representation. He should have turned the minds of philosophers to experimental science, but instead his new followers praise talk.23 This is in my view a very good point. In the first place it reminds us that Rorty’s reading of Dewey is certainly original, but also problematic: in other words, we should be careful not confuse “Rorty’s Dewey” with the real one. Secondly, it is correct to claim – as I did several times – that he overcame the

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ideological tenets of analytic philosophy. Nevertheless, language keeps in his thought a paramount importance. It no longer is the ideal language of logical empiricism, but the language as envisioned by the second Wittgenstein with his theory of the linguistic games. The outcome is that Rorty dissolves reality within a concept of “sociolinguistic practice” that is too loose to explain anything (and this move is not a pragmatist one). Bearing all this in mind, we may now understand why Rorty does not see favorably Davidson’s contention that there is a public and objective world which is not created by us and is the ultimate source of our beliefs. Rorty’s daring move is, instead, to make that world coincide with our beliefs, which once again puts him at odds with Rescher’s philosophy. In fact Rescher, who is a self-declared conceptual idealist, turns out, on this matter, to be much less idealistically inclined than Rorty. I believe that the preceding analysis shows well how distant from each other are two authors both of whom take themselves to be pragmatists.

NOTES 1. It should not be forgotten, however, that Quine owes much to C.I. Lewis, who was one of his teachers at Harvard. Donald Davidson claims in this regard that “Lewis had a tremendous influence on Quine,” The American Philosopher, ed. G. Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 43. 2. See, for instance, his substantially pragmatist philosophy of logic in Nicholas Rescher, Many–Valued Logic (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), ch. 3. 3. Putnam’s case is different, because his criticisms of the analytic tradition are certainly milder and less destructive than the ones put forward by Rorty. 4. These are exactly the problems that Rorty’s political and social philosophy does not address. See Michele Marsonet, “Richard Rorty’s Ironic Liberalism: A Critical Analysis,” Journal of Philosophical Research 21 (1996), pp. 391–403. 5. H. Putnam, Pragmatism: An Open Question (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995). 6. Borradori (ed.), The American Philosopher, p. 33. 7. Putnam, Pragmatism, p. 17. Putnam’s quotation is drawn from James’s essay “Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence.” 8. Borradori (ed.), The American Philosopher, p. 20. 9. Willard V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View, 4th Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 42. 10. Nicholas Rescher, The Riddle of Existence (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1984), p. 89. 11. Nicholas Rescher, The Coherence Theory of Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 362–365. 12. Nicholas Rescher, Methodological Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), p. 280.

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13. C.F. Delaney, M.J. Loux, G. Gutting, W.D. Solomon, The Synoptic Vision. Essays on the Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. ix. 14. Nicholas Rescher, A Useful Inheritance (Savage: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990), p. 4. 15. W. Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in W. Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 1–5. 16. Ibid., p. 40. 17. Nicholas Rescher, Scientific Realism (Dordrecht–Boston: Reidel, 1987), p. 148. 18. Many authors, Richard Rorty and John McDowell included, take Sellars to be one of the forerunners of post-analytic thought, mainly due to his critique of the “Myth of the Given.” 19. R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 8. 20. John Dewey, Philosophy and Civilization (New York: Capricorn Books, 1963), p. 4. 21. Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), p. 248. 22. Ibid., p. 249. 23. Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 63.

Nine PRAGMATISM AND INTENTION-IN-ACTION John McDowell

1. The theme from pragmatism that I want to work from is the suspicion that other philosophical approaches over-intellectualize their conception of how practical intelligence is manifested in action, and thereby tend towards a problematic interiority in their understanding of intelligence or the ability to think in general. If, when we think about practical thought, we concentrate on actions whose details are planned in advance, we shall be inclined to see practical intelligence as primarily located in the planning and the thinking as opposed to the acting. From here, we are close to a picture in which thought, even though we acknowledge that it can be practical in its point and culmination, is conceived as happening in an inner mental sphere, in principle separable from any publicly available behavior. We are now at risk of familiar philosophical difficulties, which might be summed up by saying that our conception of the inner looks Cartesian. As a corrective, one strand of pragmatism focuses on action that is the unreflective exercise of, for example, a skill. A good tennis player may have an overall scheme for doing well against a particular opponent, but the details of what she intentionally does at any point during the match – perhaps trying a drop shot – cannot be provided for in any advance plan. Instead, her action will be an immediate response, in the heat of the moment, to the specifics of the situation: her position, the bounce of the ball, the position of her opponent, and so forth. In one frame of mind we might say such activity is unthinking. But in another frame of mind we can see such skilled actions, unreflective though they are, as informed by thought, precisely because they are intentional. In this frame of mind, it is natural to see a cultivated practical intelligence in the actions themselves. If we take this kind of case as a paradigm of practical intelligence, and perhaps as a paradigm of intelligence überhaupt, that can serve as a corrective against the philosophical tendency to locate thought – the operations of intelligence – in a more or less mysterious inner realm, concealed from people other than the thinker herself.

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2. Wilfrid Sellars teaches that we should understand unexpressed thought on the model of speech, in which thought is made public. According to this doctrine, the first move in making sense of the conceptual is to characterize the role of conceptual capacities in the competent use of a language, activity in which actualizations of conceptual capacities are overt. Since concepts of speech acts serve as models from which to arrive (by analogy) at concepts of thought not made explicit in speech, we can then extend our understanding to conceptual goings – on that are not overt.1 As for the role of conceptual capacities in speech – the basis for an understanding of the conceptual in general – Sellars proposes conceiving linguistic practice as playing a language game.2 He distinguishes three kinds of moves in language games. Moves of the first kind are intralinguistic, transitions from one position in the game to another: inferences. Moves of the second kind are language-entry transitions, transitions starting from something that is not a position in the game and issuing in something that is a position in the game: that is, moves whose termini are reports of what is perceived to be the case. Moves of the third kind – rounding out the possibilities in the obvious way – are language-exit transitions, transitions starting from something that is a position in the game and issuing in something that is not a position in the game. This is how Sellars invites us to conceive acting on an intention – an intention expressed in speech in the original application of the picture, or an intention not expressed in speech when we exploit Sellars’s recommendation to understand non-overt conceptual goings-on on the model of overt concep-tual goings-on. If the play of the game is to include language-exit transitions, the inventory of possible intralinguistic positions must include starting-points for such transitions, positions occupied by giving explicit expression to intentions. And if these positions can be occupied because of moves of the first of Sellars’s three kinds, intralinguistic transitions or inferences, the account of reasoning from one intralinguistic position to another must provide for reasoning that issues in intentions; this is how Sellars conceives practical reasoning. Sellars has much to say about practical reasoning, but I want to consider the general picture and not the details. Sellars represents this feature of his picture of language games, its provision for actions as exit moves, and the associated provision for practical reasoning, as a concession to an insight he credits to pragmatism, the insight that language – and thereby thought, if we follow the recommendation to model thought on language – are falsified if we do not acknowledge their “conduct guiding role.”3 Sellars does not conceive his proposal about how to conceive linguistic practice as itself a variety of pragmatism. But Sellars’s picture of linguistic practice is the inspiration for fundamental aspects of the

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picture of linguistic practice Robert Brandom gives in Making It Explicit, and Brandom frames his version of the picture as a variety of pragmatism.4 What Brandom counts as pragmatist is the thought that the norms whose authority over goings-on, whether overt or not, constitutes those goings-on as conceptual should be understood in the first instance as norms implicit in linguistic practice, with linguistic practice conceived as a language game in an essentially Sellarsian way. I doubt that much turns on this difference of self-description. Sellars avoids the label “pragmatist” only because he does not want to be taken to endorse a familiar kind of analysis of, for instance, truth in terms of utility.5 Brandom explicitly separates what he is willing to call “pragmatism” about the norm-governed character of the conceptual from such positions, which he calls “stereotypical pragmatism.”6 Nothing substantive lies behind their divergence over whether to count the idea that linguistic practice is playing a certain kind of game as a contribution to pragmatism. In any case, the terminological issues that arise here are some distance from the pragmatist theme I began with, and the question I want to raise relates to that theme. The strand of pragmatism I began with exploits the idea that practical thought informs actions themselves, rather than being a target for postulation as lying behind them. My question is whether that attractive idea is consistent with the conception of actions as the termini of exits from the sphere of language. It may seem obvious that there is no problem here. But in questioning whether the kinds of action I began with fit the Sellarsian conception of actions as departures from language, I am not suggesting, absurdly, that a tennis player’s attempt at a drop shot, say, is a linguistic move, a speech act. Remember that linguistic practice figures, in the Sellarsian picture, not only as a topic in its own right but also as the model on which we are to understand thought not made explicit in linguistic performances. If we follow Sellars’s recommendation about how to conceive non-overt conceptual goings-on, and apply it to his account of acting on expressed intentions, according to which acting is an exit from the sphere of the linguistic, the result should be a conception of actions as exits from the sphere of the conceptual. And that seems hard to square with the idea that the sort of practical thought that intention is can be present in intelligent behavior, not just a separable item to which intelligent behavior responds. It should be possible to see conceptual capacities as actualized in acting itself, not just in something that is the starting-point of a transition one makes in acting. I introduced the idea that actions are themselves informed by thought as a pragmatist corrective to a tendency to depict thought as a problematically interior phenomenon. I am not suggesting Sellars lapses into a Cartesian conception of the realm of thought. Quite the opposite: much of the point of his recommendation to model thought on speech is precisely to make the idea of inner conceptual episodes philosophically unthreatening. The point is just

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this: if he does make unavailable to himself the idea that bodily behavior can itself be informed by practical thought, not just a transition from it, then he deprives himself of one possible aid in exorcizing bad pictures of the inner life. And anyway there is something to be said for considering in its own right, independently of its potential utility in such a project, a conception according to which action has thought in it, rather than being a response to thought, a departure from the sphere of the conceptual. 3. There may seem to be an internal problem for Sellars’s picture, before we even start assessing its adequacy to the phenomena of action. The proprieties governing intralinguistic moves are what constitute the norm-laden sphere to and from which players make entries and exits. But surely, we may be tempted to say, engaging in linguistic practice is itself acting. In that case those intralinguistic moves already need to be seen as exits, if anything does. To draw a conclusion overtly one must make an utterance. But if making an utterance, as overt behavior, is itself an exit, the picture seems incoherent; if the intralinguistic moves are already exits, there is apparently nothing left to constitute the sphere into and out of which we are supposed to see the entry and exit transitions as made. For Sellars, however, playing a language game is made up of doings that are not actions in the relevant sense. “An action,” Sellars stipulates, “is the sort of thing one can decide to do”; or again, “actions are essentially the sort of thing one can do ‘on purpose.’”7 Linguistic behavior, in Sellars’s picture, is first of all made up of acts such as spontaneously noticing-out-loud, the overt counterpart to, and model for the concept of, noticing as a mental act; or spontaneously concluding-out-loud, the overt counterpart to concluding as a mental act; or spontaneously resolving-out-loud to do something, the overt counterpart to forming an intention as a mental act. Noticing something, or drawing a conclusion, or deciding to do something, are not things one can decide to do or things one can do on purpose.8 Reason is operative in all these acts, most obviously in drawing a conclusion; but not in the way in which it is operative in actions in the sense Sellars stipulates, performances undertaken for reasons.9 Sellars notes a possible source of confusion in “the fact that every linguistic episode falls under a description such that an episode of that description can, indeed, be a performance” (that is, an action in the stipulated sense).10 If one notices-out-loud that such-and-such is the case, one says that such-and-such is the case, and saying that such-and-such is the case is something one can decide to do, a possible action in Sellars’s restricted sense. But a saying that is a noticing-out-loud cannot be intentional under a specification of the form “noticing-out-loud that such-and-such is the case.”11

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So the moves that define a language game are not actions. One way Sellars puts this point is to say that the “oughts” that apply in connection with ground-level competence in a language game are of the species ought-to-be rather than the species ought-to-do. The rules associated with these “oughts” are not rules for doing, followed by the players of the game, but rules for criticizing, followed by those who educate others into being competent players of the game.12 One ought to be the kind of subject who, say, concludes-out-loud that something is the case, when, and because, one takes something else to be the case, only if there is a good inference from the premises of one’s inference to the conclusion. Parents do their best to ensure that children get to be as they ought to be, in that and similar respects. If we tried to get “oughts” of the ought-to-do variety to apply to concluding-outloud, we would be treating drawing a conclusion as something one can decide to do, which it is not. This distinction dissolves that apparent difficulty about the internal coherence of Sellars’s picture. It is actions that are exits from a language game. And it is acts, not actions, that are governed by the norms that constitute the sphere from which an action is an exit. Under the relevant specifications, moves within a language game, though they are overt behavior, are not actions, so they do not need to be seen as themselves already exits from the game.13 4. Brandom explicitly applies the Sellarsian apparatus of actions as exits, responses to one’s occupation of positions in a language game, only in connection with intentions for the future. He distinguishes intentions for the future, prior intentions, from intentions-in-action, and in the case of intentions-in-action he says acting can itself be acknowledging a practical commitment, as contrasted with responding to a separable item that is the acknowledgement of a commitment.14 That seems to say that acting can itself be a move in the game, an alteration of one’s deontic score. Does this mean that, however things stand with Sellars, Brandom has no problem accommodating the pragmatist idea I began with, the idea that practical thought can be present in action itself? There are two sorts of intentions-in-action. One can intentionally do something that one did not have, in advance, an intention to do; one simply sets to and does it.15 Or one can intentionally do something in execution of what was, before one started doing it, a prior intention to do that. For instance, on Monday one forms an intention to leave home at 8 a.m. on Tuesday; then, not having changed one’s mind in the interim, and having kept track of the time, one intentionally leaves home at 8 a.m. on Tuesday.16 It is in connection with the first of these two sorts of intentions-inaction, those without prior intentions, that Brandom says acting itself can

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count as acknowledging a commitment. But his treatment of intentions-inaction in general is shaped by Sellars’s treatment, under the label “volitions,” of the second sort, intentions-in-action that were once prior intentions but have, as it were, matured.17 Brandom quotes Sellars describing how a thought expressible, at a certain time, by “I shall raise my hand in ten minutes” persists in a subject who keeps track of time, though it needs to be expressed differently as time passes: “I shall raise my hand in nine minutes,” “I shall raise my hand in eight minutes,” and so on, until we get to “I shall raise my hand now”.18 Sellars’s official policy is to earmark “shall” for expressing intentions in general, not just intentions for the future. The idea is that in the kind of progression he describes, “shall” shifts from expressing an intention for the future to expressing an intention-in-action (a “volition”) as, with the passage of time, the time-specification shifts from, say, “in ten minutes” to “now.” But I think the plausibility of Sellars’s description of the progression trades on the fact that “shall” is naturally heard as a tense-indicating device. So we might ask whether Sellars’s picture – and hence Brandom’s, which is based on it – really succeeds in capturing anything recognizable as intentions-in-action. “I shall cross the street now” has the form that figures at the end of Sellars’s progression. But it is something I might start saying while I am standing on the curb, with the moment at which I finally utter “now” being (ideally) the moment at which I step off and begin crossing. While I am saying “I shall cross the street now,” I am not yet crossing the street; I only start to cross the street at the moment at which I get to the end of saying it. This suggests that “I shall cross the street,” even with that emphatic “now,” does not naturally serve as a verbal expression for an intention-in-action. “I shall cross the street now” naturally expresses an intention for what is still, until one gets to the end of uttering it, the future – a future that starts only when one gets to the end of the utterance. The appropriate verbal expression for an intention-in-action, for this example, is “I am crossing the street,” something truly sayable only after one has begun crossing.19 Of course those words cannot by themselves determine that uttering them expresses an intention. I might say “I am crossing the street” in the course of being swept along by a flood. If the words are to express an intention, they must express practical knowledge, to invoke a concept G. E. M. Anscombe takes from Aquinas.20 My utterance of those words must give voice to knowledge of what I am doing that is not derived from the fact known, as it would be in the case in which I am swept along by a flood. The conceptual dependency between the knowledge and the fact known must be the other way around. If things go amiss in the exercise of the capacities that issue in this sort of knowledge – so that I am not in fact doing what, taking myself to have knowledge of this sort, I take myself to be doing – the error is not in my thought about what I am doing, as it would be if the knowledge were speculative rather than practical, but in what I am doing. But it is still

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the case that the natural verbal expression of an intention-in-action is an expression, in a special mode, of the thought that one is doing something. The concept of intentional action is bound up with the concept of practical reason.21 This risks obscuring the point I am making. The involvement of practical reason in an action may, but need not, be a matter of the action’s resulting from practical reasoning. If it is, the reasoning at least starts before one acts, even in a case in which the occasion for acting is at hand. (There is also the kind of case in which one reasons about what to do later.) That can make it seem natural to suppose acting begins only as reasoning ends. And it can then be tempting to formulate a conclusion for the reasoning from a temporal perspective at which one is on the brink of acting but not yet acting, perhaps with a Sellarsian “shall” statement ending in that emphatic “now.”22 But we must remember that one can act for reasons, and hence intentionally, without prior practical reasoning. (In such a case the relevance of practical reasoning is that one’s reasons can be reconstructed in the form of reasoning one might have gone through, though one did not.) That should remind us that the “shall” formulation is a poor fit for an intention-inaction. And, remembering that, we should resist the temptation to argue, from the fact that reasoning about what to do is under way before one acts, that the conclusion of the reasoning is an intention for the immediate future. We should deny that acting begins only as reasoning ends. We should follow Aristotle and say acting is drawing the conclusion. Practical reasoning for the here and now culminates in an intention-in-action, which is to say it culminates in acting. Now what about Brandom’s thesis that acting can itself be acknowledging a commitment? Does this acquit Brandom of the charge that, with Sellars, he conceives acting as a departure from the realm of the conceptual? Brandom insists that his conception of intentions in terms of practical commitments is not to be understood on the model of, say, being bound by a promise.23 Practical commitments are to be seen, rather, in parallel to the doxastic commitments undertaken by making claims. Perhaps we can capture the idea by saying that, as one can say “Yes” to a proposition, one can say “Yes” to an action. Here we have two kinds of assent, and, just as such, each counts as the undertaking of a commitment.24 And this is not disrupted if we deny Brandom the “shall” formulation for an intention-in-action. It seems plausible that one can have practical knowledge of what one is doing, expressible in a form of words like “I am crossing the street,” only because one’s behavior is informed by practical assent – commitment in that sense – to one’s acting in the way one describes. So behavior that is observably intentional under some description can, as Brandom urges, make it right for a scorekeeper to attribute a commitment. It can license a scorekeeper to attribute the deontic status undertaken by a practical assent. But the thought that intentional action expresses practical assent, and so manifests commitment in that sense, cannot be restricted to cases where

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there was no prior intention. It is just as appropriate for a case in which the intention-in-action, the practical assent at the time of acting, is practical assent that first took shape when the action was merely in prospect, and has persisted – the agent not having changed her mind in the meanwhile – into the time of acting. If we use the concept of intention-in-action at all, we must recognize intention-in-action whenever there is intentional action, whether the action is execution of what used to be a prior intention or not. An action, whether issuing from a prior intention or not, is not just an overt happening, perhaps involving limb-movements and the like, available to view even for a witness who does not bring what observably happens under concepts of thought. Even a bodily action has an “inner” aspect. And an intention-in-action just is an action, conceived in a way that emphasizes that “inner” aspect. We are encouraged to go in this direction – to resist separating action from practical thought – if we follow the pragmatist focus on exercises of skills when we consider the role of thought in action. Brandom’s thinking does not point this way at all. Actions as themselves acknowledgements of commitments figure for him only as a special case of the kind of performance that licenses a scorekeeper to enter a practical commitment in someone’s ledger of deontic statuses – a default substitute for linguistic performances in which practical assent is discursively explicit. And granting this scorekeeping significance to some actions does not affect Brandom’s general conception of the relation in which overt behavior stands to acknowledgements of commitments, not now as performances but as attitudes towards deontic statuses.25 Brandom’s conception of that relation is framed in terms of what, in his scorekeeping terms, looks like a different kind of case, in which the ledger entry of commitment to an action, practical assent, has already been made, on the basis of a linguistic performance, in advance of the time for acting. That allows Brandom’s conception of the relation between intention and action to be centred on the idea of dispositions to respond to acknowledgements of commitments, which is what he makes of Sellars’s idea of language-exit proprieties. The idea that there must be intention in action even when the ledger entry predates the acting makes no real appearance in Brandom’s thinking. The case in which the ledger entry is warranted by the action itself does not dislodge him from his willingness to characterize the relation between intention and action in terms of responsive dispositions. So the scorekeeping significance Brandom credits to intentional action when there is no prior intention is not really a move towards finding intention in action, not really a move towards integrating practical thought into its expression in behavior, as opposed to picturing practical thought as something to which acting is a response. And the question I raised about Sellars – whether he can accommodate the insights of the strand of pragmatism I began with – is just as pressing about Brandom. I think the answer, in both cases, is “No,” and that this departure from a pragmatist insight is to the detriment of both of them.

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NOTES 1. See especially the first stage of the myth of Jones, in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Wilfrid Sellars’s Science, Perception, and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963; reissued Atascadero: Ridgeview, 1991). 2. See especially “Some Reflections on Language Games,” in Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality. 3. Sellars, “Some Reflections on Language Games,” p. 340. 4. Robert B. Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). Of course there is a great deal in Brandom that is not just adding detail to Sellars. 5. See Sellars, “Some Reflections on Language Games,” p. 340. 6. See Brandom, Making It Explicit, p. 285 and following. 7. Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967; reissued Atascadero, California: Ridgeview, 1992), p. 74. 8. It takes some care to appreciate this point. We need to distinguish, say, drawing a conclusion from, say, asking oneself what follows from something one takes to be the case. Reflecting about consequences is something one can decide to do; its culmination, drawing a conclusion, is not. 9. Sellars describes a community whose “initial concepts of rationality” are restricted to concepts of linguistic acts (not actions) of this sort; for the phrase, see Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, p. 72. 10. Ibid. 11. Can it be intentional under the corresponding specification of the form “saying that such-and-such is the case”? Sellars notes that “after reaching years of discretion, a person’s utterances just might all be actions, performed in the presence of his auditors to achieve perhaps devious, perhaps noble, ends” (Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, pp. 74–75). But if a performance expressive of a noticing is intentional under a specification of the “saying that” form, it seems natural to say it cannot count as a noticing-out-loud; the point of that concept is closely connected to the possibility of saying that acts that fall under it are, as such and essentially, spontaneous. 12. See Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, pp. 75–76. No doubt conceiving the rules as rules for criticizing is conceiving them as rules for doing, applied to those who criticize. But in their application to the players of the game they are not rules for doing. 13. It is worth noting that this Sellarsian idea points in a different direction from Brandom’s controlling conception of norms implicit in practice. Brandom’s implicit norms are implicit “oughts” of the ought-to-do variety. As far as I can see, his position takes no account of Sellars’s thought that the moves that are constitutive of a language game at the fundamental level are not actions. 14. See Brandom, Making It Explicit, pp. 256–257. For a helpful brief presentation of the outlines of Brandom’s thinking about action, see “Action, Norms, and Practical Reasoning,” in Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), ch. 2. 15. See John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 84–85. Searle mentions two sorts of case: cases in which there was no prior intention at all, and cases in which there was

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a prior intention but it did not determine something one is intentionally doing in the course of executing it, as when one shifts gears in the course of executing a prior intention to drive to one’s office. 16. I do not think Searle’s conception of the relation between intentions for the future and intentions-in-action allows for this kind of thing to count as an intention-inaction. For Searle, intentions-in-action differ from intentions for the future not just in their relation to time. Intentions for the future are directed at actions, whereas intentions-in-action are directed at component parts of actions. I shall not follow Searle in this. 17. See Brandom, Making It Explicit, pp. 256–258. 18. See Sellars’s “Thought and Action,” in Freedom and Determinism, ed. Keith Lehrer (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 110; cited by Brandom at Making It Explicit, p. 258. 19. Searle gets this right: Searle, Intentionality, p. 84. Brandom says intentionsin-action are directed at particular actions: Brandom, Making It Explicit, p. 258. But one may be crossing the street and never cross the street (perhaps halfway over one is knocked down by a bus); see G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), p. 39. There may never be a particular action of the sort that figures in the specification of one’s intention-in-action. And this is also true (a fortiori, I am inclined to say) in the case of “I shall cross the street now,” which one at least starts saying before one has even begun to cross the street. 20. See Anscombe, Intention, p. 82 and following. 21. Anscombe specifies intentional actions as those to which the question “Why?” is given application, in a certain sense: Anscombe, Intention, p. 24. The sense is in fact that in which the question requests a reason for acting, though Anscombe attempts a specification of the sense in terms that do not include expressions for concepts like that of a reason for acting, so that such concepts can be elucidated along with the elucidation of the concept of the intentional: Ibid., p. 22. Note that “No particular reason” does not reject the question as inapplicable: Ibid., p. 25. Donald Davidson exploits this; he remarks that it is only in the context of the idea that “No particular reason” counts as giving a reason that one might define intentional actions as actions done for reasons: “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” in Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 6. This preempts a jab Brandom tries to throw at Davidson: Brandom, Making It Explicit, pp. 254–255. 22. One might be encouraged in this by the fact that “So I’ll have some” is one of Anscombe’s suggestions for a “verbalised form” of the conclusion of a practical syllogism: Anscombe, Intention, p. 61. 23. See Brandom, Making It Explicit, pp. 262–266. 24. One can say “Yes” to an action “in one’s heart”. The point of this notion of commitment is completely separate from the idea that if one expresses an intention for the future to someone, one licenses that person to form expectations of one’s future behavior and so undertakes an obligation to that person, akin to the obligation that binds someone who has promised (perhaps even a case of that obligation). 25. Acknowledging in Brandom’s treatment oscillates awkwardly between performances that license attributing statuses, on the one hand, and attitudes towards statuses, on the other. For a passage in which acknowledgements are explicitly attitudes, see, e.g., Brandom, Making It Explicit, pp. 236–237.

Ten PRAGMATISM AS ANTIREPRESENTATIONALISM? Eva Picardi

1. Introduction “Pragmatism as Anti-Representationalism” is the title of Richard Rorty’s introduction to the posthumously published book by John Murphy, Pragmatism: from Peirce to Davidson. The main tenet of anti-representationalism is the rejection of the spectator view of knowledge and, according to Rorty and Murphy (or Murphy as read by Rorty), this re-orientation is part of the legacy of the Pragmatist tradition. Rorty credits Davidson with a number of fundamental insights that have helped to uncover the path leading from representationalist conceptions of belief contents to the pernicious doctrines of relativism and reductionism – scientism being a corollary of an extreme form of materialistic reductionism. A chief ingredient of representationalism is the idea – foreign to the tradition of American Pragmatism, as Rorty construes it – that truth can be characterized as a relation of correspondence between bits of language and bits of reality. Davidson has contributed like few others to showing the weakness of this picture, while still assigning a central role to the notion of truth in his theory of radical interpretation. Should anti-representationalism, as Rorty conceives it, be viewed as a substantive doctrine, or does the prefix “anti” signal the injunction to give up all attempts to construct systematic theories of epistemology that could replace the misleading pictures inherited from the Cartesian tradition? Rorty, when speaking on behalf of therapeutic Wittgensteinians, favors the latter reading: he is already beyond the representationalism/inferentialism dispute, for he declines to participate in it. However, Rorty does not follow this policy consistently, and occasionally slips into the role of the constructive Wittgensteinian. For instance, in his introduction to a reprint of Sellars’s classical essay of 1956, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, he applauds the distinction between representationalists and inferentialists made by Robert Brandom in his book, Making it Explicit. Unsurprisingly, the good guys fall squarely within the inferentialists’ camp, for it is within this broadly pragmatistic framework that the explicit interpretive equilibrium, described by

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Brandom as a form of social self-consciousness, can be realized. Rorty considers the notion of a social practice employed by Sellars and Brandom reminiscent of the tradition of Mead and Dewey. Seen from this perspective, inferentialism is a substantive doctrine whose aim is to replace the mistaken doctrine of representationalism. Who are the bad guys in Rorty’s scenario? The place of honor is occupied by Michael Dummett, with Thomas Nagel a close second, and by all those philosophers who take the issue of realism-antirealism seriously, concern themselves with the construction of substantive theories of meaning, and in their writings make use of notions belonging to traditional metaphysics.1 Since Brandom’s program is an obvious heir to Dummett’s justificationist theory of meaning, Rorty’s declared philosophical preference is surprising. But, as we shall see, there are significant differences between Dummett’s and Brandom’s philosophical programs – differences insufficient, however, to justify Rorty’s differential assessment. One of Dummett’s books bears the title The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, and makes a number of controversial claims on behalf of the role that the theory of meaning can play in solving traditional metaphysical disputes. In addition to a better grasp of the role played by the notion of truth in shaping the contents of our thoughts, Dummett also believes that we can shed light on old problems such as the freedom of the will, our conception of time and tense, and the dispute between Platonists and Intuitionists over the status of logical and mathematical propositions. In Rorty’s opinion, Dummett’s error is to remain in the thrall of these discredited metaphysical notions – an error that goes hand in hand with his rejection of the semantic holism of Quine and Davidson and an incurable nostalgia for foundations. Rorty holds Crispin Wright in higher esteem. Wright, unlike Dummett, places less weight on the semantic issue of bivalence and no longer works with a monolithic concept of truth. Moreover, Wright, unlike Dummett, is inclined to believe that the construction of a systematic theory of meaning is not a promising program in philosophy. However, in Rorty’s opinion, Wright fails to appreciate the lesson implicit in the pragmatists’ dismissal of metaphysics, and the deep truth of the philosophical quietism implicit in their works. According to Rorty, pragmatists share with the later Wittgenstein precisely this inclination to quietism, and a deflationary attitude towards the problems surrounding the relations between truth and meaning. Pragmatists – Rorty urges – should see themselves as working at the interface between the common sense of their community, a common sense much influenced by Greek metaphysics and by patriarchal monotheism, and the startlingly counter-intuitive selfimage sketched by Darwin, and partially filled in by Dewey. They should see themselves as involved in a long term attempt to change the rhetoric, the common sense, and the self-image of their community.2

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The seed of quietism is implicit in Wittgenstein’s injunction that the proper method of philosophy is description (and not theory-construction) and its goal is the attainment of an übersichtliche Darstellung, a “perspicuous representation,” of the workings of our language. This is a worthy endeavor because it uncovers the source of our metaphysical worries and, in so doing, puts philosophy literally at rest. At all stages of his philosophical development Wittgenstein believed that philosophy must strive for “complete clarity.” Such clarity, once attained, leaves everything as it is. I don’t share Rorty’s reading of Wittgenstein’s injunction, but I have dealt with this aspect of Rorty’s views elsewhere.3 What interests me here is Rorty’s interpretation of the legacy of the American pragmatist tradition and, in particular, his singling out of antirepresentationalism as the distinguishing mark of what philosophers such as Quine and Davidson have in common with the tradition inaugurated by Peirce and James and carried out by Dewey.

2. Metaphors We Steer By

A concise statement of what endorsing anti-reprentationalism amounts to can found in Davidson’s essay on “The Myth of the Subjective.” Here Davidson writes: It is good to get rid of representations, and with them the correspondence theory of truth, for it is thinking that there are representations that engenders thought of relativism. Representations are relative to a scheme: a map represents Mexico, say – but only relative to a mercator, or some other, projection.4 As we know from his earlier work, Davidson believes that philosophers who use the notion of a conceptual scheme are held captive by misleading images. They conceive of a scheme a something that helps in organizing (systematizing, dividing up) experience, or else in fitting (predicting, accounting for, facing) experience. These pictures add nothing to the simple concept of being true applied to sentences uttered in appropriate contexts: truth, in turn, cannot be divorced from translation (and interpretation). Like Frege, Davidson considers truth primitive and indefinable. The remarks that we are tempted to make on the truth-predicate (Frege, for instance, claimed wrongly that it adds nothing to the assertion of a sentence; Ramsey held it redundant) or about the connection between truth, coherence, and correspondence, should be taken as elucidations of one of our most basic concepts, and not as definitions. Interpretation confronts us with the interdependence of meaning and belief: in

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the attitudes of “accepting as true,” directed at sentences, Davidson sees the basic evidence for a theory of radical interpretation. In his Introduction to Murphy’s book, Rorty quotes with approval Davidson’s statement to the effect that sentences are true or false, but they represent nothing. Yet Rorty wants to rescue the map metaphor of which Davidson is so critical in the passage I have just quoted, for he goes on to say that [the relativity to a language] is no more dangerous than the fact that any representation of a sphere on a plane must have its accuracy judged relative to the mercator of some other projection. To hope for absoluteness, however, would be to hope for something analogous to the claim that, for example, the mercator projection is truest to the way the sphere really is.5 This observation of Rorty’s jibes well with the idea that there are many ways of interpreting speech that do equal justice to the speaker’s attitude and conduct (a point that Davidson often clarifies by appealing to the analogy between measuring in inches and measuring in centimeters), but obscures one of Davidson’s reasons for giving up the scheme/content distinction. Once we give up this distinction, Davidson contends at the close of On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, we “re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.”6 As I have argued elsewhere, Davidson, unlike Quine, wants to separate, at least to some extent, issues of ontology and issues of reference.7 The notions of satisfaction and reference are inevitably relative to the language for whose predicates and singular expressions we lay down the inductive clauses of a truth theory that forms the basis of a theory of interpretation. Objects and events are not relative to a language in the way in which, for example, the satisfaction clauses for simple predicates are relative to the truth-theory for the language to which they belong, for otherwise they could not play the causal role that Davidson ascribes to them in the triangulation model. Objects and events are the distal causes responsible for the similarities of responses and reactions between speaker and interpreter (according to the triangulation model): it is with the notions of belief and intention that relativity to human interests, which Pragmatists are so eager to emphasize, enters the picture, not with the notion of truth. My impression is that there is much in Davidson’s conception of truth that, contrary to Rorty’s surmise, agrees with the Representationalism broadly construed, at least with the variety of Representationalism which incorporates a number of externalist insights. If this is correct, then, it is far from obvious that the non-negotiable core of Pragmatism is (militant) Anti-Representationalism. Before turning my attention to Brandom’s conception of inferentialism, I want to dwell a bit on the map metaphor. I have two reasons for doing this:

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the first has to do with the deep entrenchment of the metaphor of belief as a map we steer by in the classical pragmatist tradition; the second relates to the shattering criticisms to which this metaphor has been subjected by Quine and Davidson. This criticism is part and parcel of their rejection of the pragmatist conception and truth and, above all, of their endorsement of semantic holism. If, like Rorty, you subscribe to semantic holism, then you should warn the reader against such pictures instead of choosing them as captivating titles of book reviews. In his review of Alan Ryan’s book on Dewey (John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism) Rorty quotes approvingly Ryan’s paraphrase of Dewey’s dictum that “to call a statement ‘true’ it is no more than to say that “it is good to steer our practice by it.”8 But not all that is useful is true. Nevertheless, Rorty insists that we should stop distinguishing between “the usefulness of a way of talking and its truth,” thus incurring Davidson’s renewed criticism.9 But the most decisive criticism of belief as a guide for action, and, in this sense, as a map to steer by, was leveled by Quine in Two Dogmas of Empiricism and rehearsed in his essay of 1981, The Pragmatists’ Place in Empiricism where he discusses Peirce’s conception of belief. The formulation of the map metaphor that I like best occurs in Ramsey’s posthumously published piece “General Propositions and Causality” (1929), which bears witness to his interest in constructivism and mathematical intuitionism. Ramsey was deeply sceptical of the American pragmatists’ way of characterizing truth as what is useful to believe or what is conducive to greater expected utility. In a posthumously published fragment, he offers the (now famous) conjunctive definition of a true belief, according to which to say that A has a true belief is to say that “B is a true belief if there is a proposition p such that A believes that p, and p.”10 Like Kant, Ramsey considers the a idea that the truth is a correspondence of sorts is a truism, something that we should take as “geschenkt and vorausgesetzt” and concentrates on the difficult problem of what believing and judging a proposition with a given propositional reference consists of.11 In the fragment on “General Propositions and Causality,” Ramsey writes: A belief of the primary sort is a map of the neighbouring space by which we steer. It remains such a map however much we complicate it or fill in details. But if we professedly extend it to infinity it is no longer a map; we cannot take it in or steer by it. Our journey is over before we need its remotest part.12 At the close of Facts and Propositions, published in 1927, Ramsey, after having said that his logic derived from Wittgenstein, remarks: My pragmatism is derived from Mr Russell; and is of course very vague and undeveloped. The essence of pragmatism I take it to be this,

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Ramsey here draws a connection between meaning, assertion, and action, leaving the notion of truth out of the picture. Conceptions of meaning as use, theories of meaning in terms of assertibility and justifiability, originate precisely from the perceived need to specify what it is that we do with our statements (when it is correct to assert them and to which consequences our assertions implicitly commit us), over and above forming pictures of how things stand, if they are true. However, if one adopts semantic holism, there is no way of spelling out the content (and the specific consequences) of an individual belief of a primary sort without saying a good deal about the whole theory or language to which the given sentence belongs. In his survey of the Pragmatists’ Place in Empiricism, Quine points out the many difficulties inherent in Peirce’s view of belief as a basis for action, and comes to the conclusion that “any general theory of belief or sentence meanings, along these lines, is of course moonshine – to borrow and epithet from James. Dispositions to behaviour are of very limited service as criteria of belief.”14 The fundamental flaw that Ramsey’s doctrines share with those of the American pragmatists consists in the failure to appreciate the system-involving character of belief: The professing pragmatists do not relate significantly to what I took to be the five turning points in post-Humean empiricism. Tooke’s shift form ideas to words and Bentham’s from words to sentences, were not detectable in Peirce’s pragmatic maxim, but we found Peirce’s further semantic discussions to be sentence-oriented in implicit ways. Peirce seemed at odds with Duhem’s system-centered view, until we got Peirce’s theory of truth; but this we found unacceptable. Other pragmatists were sentence-oriented in an implicit way, but still at odds with the system-centred view (…) On the analytic-synthetic distinction, and on naturalism, the pragmatists blew hot and cold.15 For this very reason, there is simply no telling what “acting on” a specific belief amounts to. Even if we knew the desires of the agent, the interdependence of meaning and belief would stand in the way of specifying the individual content of an agent’s belief in isolation from his whole body of beliefs. However, if we give up the idea of belief as a basis for action, it is unclear whether there is any substantive aspect of the pragmatist legacy that survives, apart from a generic allegiance to behaviorism that Quine, of course, stresses with approval. The key move here is the one made by Davidson, that

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of viewing belief as the basis of meaning in the framework of a theory of human rationality. Brandom’s pragmatism comes to the fore in his endeavour to spell out what is involved in our mastery of concepts in terms of inferential abilities, while endorsing both belief holism and semantic holism. The mention of mastery of concepts brings us to the core of the controversy between inferentialist and representationalist conceptions of mind and language

3. Inferentialism vs. Representationalism

Among the protagonists of today’s animadversions are Robert Brandom, the champion of inferentialism, and Jerry Fodor, the proponent of a sophisticated form of representationalism. Dummett’s justificationist theory of meaning and Wittgenstein’s no-theory theory are also obvious alternatives to representationalism. However, Robert Brandom explicitly contrasts his own program with representationalism in the philosophy of mind and, like Rorty, sees himself as carrying out the program of the American pragmatist tradition. Recently, Timothy Williamson has launched an attack on inferentialism, employing a battery of arguments to rebut a suggestion put forward by Paul Boghossian concerning the role played in the meaning constitution of logical connectives by inference rules. In the context of his criticism of inferentialism, Williamson opposes the suggestion put forward by Dummett and elaborated on by Brandom and Boghossian concerning the meaning of pejoratives.16 Williamson’s positive account draws substantively on Frege’s remarks on tone and coloring, thus indirectly joining forces with Fodor in the anti-inferentialist camp. Frege’s insights on the compositionality of meaning and of understanding have been greatly emphasized by Fodor and Lepore. The young Frege, on the other hand, had been enrolled by Brandom in the inferentialist camp.17 Both Brandom and Fodor incorporate bits and pieces of Frege’s doctrines into their own work. Fodor takes Frege’s principle of compositionality as the cornerstone of his theory of mental representations. In Fodor’s construal, the principle applies primarily to the language of thought. Considerations of normativity, rationality, and context dependence may play a role in accounting for communication in public languages, but have no bearing on the individuation of items in the language of thought. Frege’s insight that the meaning of a sentence is constructed out of the meanings of its component parts, with the attending clauses on productivity and systematicity, forms the cornerstone of semantic atomism. Fodor adopts a building block version of the principle of compositionality while rejecting Frege’s context principle, which gives pride of place to sentences put forward in acts of judgement.18 Conceptual role semantics offend against the principle

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of compositionality, as Fodor and Lepore construe it, and Brandom’s inferentialism is no exception to the rule. Needless to say, Quine’s and Davidson’s construals of Frege’s principle(s) of compositionality in the framework of their theories of radical translation and interpretation are anathema to representationalists like Fodor, for these theories are committed to semantic holism. While Fodor can allow for a moderate holism of belief fixation, semantic holism is incompatible both with atomistic theories of content and with molecularist theories of meaning and understanding like the one advocated by Michael Dummett. No wonder that many arguments put forward long ago by Dummett against Quine’s indeterminacy theses have their counterpart in an atomistic scenario. The fundamental issue over which representationalists and inferentialists part company is how thinking should be conceived. Is thinking the ability to extract information from the environment at a conceptual and non-conceptual level, or is it the ability to deploy reliably gained information in thought, action, and communication? Brandom opts for the latter characterization, Fodor for the former. He sees himself as carrying out a philosophical program which has its roots in Kant’s philosophy; further developments of Kant’s legacy can be traced in the work of Frege, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Dummett. Brandom’s more specific aim is to work out a pragmatist theory of concept possession and linguistic competence. But not all pragmatists are inferentialists: Quine and Davidson share a pragmatist heritage, but neither of them is committed to the strong inferentialism advocated by Brandom, who contrasts his idea of expressive rationality with the notion of instrumental rationality characteristic of the pragmatist tradition (from Peirce to Davidson via Ramsey). As Lepore and Fodor point out in their review article of Brandom, most semantic pragmatists hold a dual aspect theory of content: grasping content is viewed as a matter of knowing both how a word or concept behaves in inferences and how to apply the concept to objects.19 They go on to claim that in Brandom’s approach the applying is dropped in favor of the inferential aspect. This criticism would be appropriate if Brandom endorsed a form of hyper-inferentialism, but he only subscribes to strong inferentialism–the claim that the inferential articulation, broadly construed, is sufficient to account for conceptual content. The qualification “broadly construed” suggests that non-inferential circumstances of application and their consequences are taken into account. Concepts such as “red” obviously have non-inferential circumstances of application and strong inferentialism must account for them without falling back on the myth of the given, forcefully criticized by Wilfrid Sellars.20 Strong inferentialism, as I understand it, claims that conceptual contents present themselves to thinkers in a form that makes them implicitly available for inferential deployment. Mere differential behavior when presented with certain stimuli achieves the status of conceptualization only when it becomes inferentially elaborated “as providing reasons for making

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other moves in the language game, and as themselves potentially standing in need of reasons that could be provided by making still other moves.”21 Many creatures can spot red surfaces, but only few are aware of them as red; conceptualization, for all we know, is a prerogative of linguistic creatures. Expressing content is conceptualizing it, “addressing it in a form that can serve as and stand in need of reasons, making it inferentially significant.”22 Brandom also emphasizes the characteristically rational and social character of content. Concepts are norms determining the correctness of various moves in the game of giving and asking for reasons. The commitments one undertakes in using a word concern both what follows from its application and what is incompatible with it. Whereas Frege and the young Wittgenstein concentrated on logical structure, Brandom, following Wilfrid Sellars, stresses the importance of material inference. Material inferences are our primitive way of articulating the bearing of a concept on another concept: the conditional is the linguistic construction that brings this bearing to the fore and thus opens the possibility of acceptance and critical scrutiny. Brandom believes that the exclusive concentration on the logical machinery of deductive reasoning to account for the inferential articulation of our concepts has been misleading. According to Brandom, recognizing the priority of judging over other kinds of mental acts is what inferentialists such as Kant, Frege, and himself have in common. Undeniably, Frege emphasized the priority of sentences expressing judgements over the semantic function of proper names and concept-words. But this allotment of priority is fully compatible with representationalism. As Lepore and Fodor correctly point out, this does not make Kant or Frege inferentialists, because the idea that “thoughts are the units of inference” is entirely compatible with the view that “concepts are the constituents of thoughts.”23 However, the chief objection that Fodor and Lepore level against all brands of holistic conceptual role semantics is that such accounts must supply an answer to two key-questions: (1) Which inferences are meaning constitutive? (2) How is the compositionality of meaning to be explained? They doubt that any such answer can be supplied, unless one revives the analytic/synthetic distinction which has been shown to be untenable by Quine, and Brandom shows no inclination in this direction. A natural answer to the first question raised by Fodor and Lepore for anyone who does not shareQuine’s judgement on analyticity, is that the content of a concept is constituted by its analytic entailments and, possibly, by its definition. The inferential role exploits the semantic structure of concepts, but is not constitutive of it. Apparently Lepore and Fodor believe that they can follow Quine in rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction, while

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avoiding endorsing his semantic holism. I believe that an answer to the first question can be supplied and that the construal of analyticity offered by Frege contains valuable insights. Since Fodor, Lepore, and Brandom agree with Quine on the issue of analyticity, I am bound to disagree with them. In fact, a chief criticism of Brandom’s interpretation of Frege (which I have voiced elsewhere)is that it overlooks Frege’s insights on analyticity and that it misconstrues his contribution to semantics.24 Fodor and Lepore view representational theories of mind as “Semantic Cartesianism,” which they characterize as follows: Anybody is a Semantic Cartesian who holds that having the concept F is being able to think about F-ness (as such) and, correspondingly, that having an expression that means F is being able to express one’s thought about F-ness (as such.) According to this sort of theory, the appeal to semantic notions (like ‘representation of’, ‘thinking about’) in accounts of linguistic and conceptual content is ineliminable. The order of exposition, according to all versions Semantic Cartesianism is from the semantic to the intentional, not the other way around.25 Needless to say, they believe that the Cartesian is on the right track. Representationalists assume that thinking about (for example, about foolishness) is what is basic to theories of content; thinking that (for example, thinking that this man in front of me is a fool) requires that we think of the man in question and of foolishness. According to representationalists, thinking about an object has primacy over thinking that, that is, over propositional thought; Brandom believes that judging has the conceptual priority, for assertoric contents are the smallest units that can enter into inferences. My impression is that this alternative is too stark. Evans’s generality constraint – which encapsulates a (number of) genuine Fregean insights – intimates that thinking a thought requires the discernment of structure. We are never presented in thought with a bare object: an object is always thought, perceived, conceived in a certain way which need not be propositional in character but lends itself to assessment of correctness. A minimum requirement for understanding a concept is that we think of it as a feature that should be capable of being instantiated in many episodes of thinking that involve different objects. Fodor’s atomism runs afoul of Evans’s generality constraint, whereas Brandom’s rational expressivism sets the standards of the conceptual too high, at the level of full-fledged contents capable of featuring as premises and consequences of an argument, thus neglecting a whole range of intermediate cases. For one may wonder whether, as a matter of fact, the material presented to us in judgments based on perception offers itself in a format ready for inferential processing.

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As I said at the beginning, I see no reason why a pragmatist, or anyone else for that matter, should deprive him or herself of many important insights concerning the world-involving character of thought; Davidson’s endorsement of cognitive externalism goes in that direction. As John McDowell has pointed out , Davidson holds that experience cannot justify a belief not because its connection to belief is causal, but because it is extraconceptual.26 They both agree that only what is conceptually shaped can justify a belief – a thought which seems difficult to resist, but that many have tried to resist. In sum, nothing in what has been said so far shows that pragmatism is incompatible with representationalism – unless the latter is narrowly construed so as to comprise only internalist accounts of the contents of our minds. Is there, then, no substance at all to Rorty’s contention that talk of correspondence of bits of language to bits of world is bound to evoke a picture that distorts our understanding of how the words we utter bear upon the world? Here is a tentative suggestion as to where to look for such substance.

4. “A sentence says just one thing.”

At the beginning of this essay I mentioned the criticism leveled by Davidson against the map metaphor in the context of his discussion of conceptual schemes and the myth of the subjective. Now I should like to call attention to a criticism of a different sort made by Davidson about the idea that a sentence can be usefully compared to a picture (diagram, map, or photograph); this criticism occurs in a remark that he makes in passing in the paper “What Metaphors Mean.” The gist of that marvelous paper is that sentences – whether or not they are put to a metaphorical use – mean what their component words and the way they are put together literally mean. Metaphorical statements can bring about many effects, not necessarily of a propositional format or of cognitive significance, but they operate their wonders not by forcing changes in what words mean. Similarly, a picture or photograph may make you think of a variety of contents or suggest many insights, but, unlike a metaphorical statement, says nothing at all: How many facts or propositions are conveyed by a photograph? None, an infinity, or one great unstatable fact? Bad question. A picture is not worth a thousand words, or any other number. Words are the wrong currency to exchange for a picture.27 In a different context but in a similar a spirit Michael Dummett, commenting on Wittgenstein’s picture theory, has written:

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A sentence cannot be a fact because it states just one thing; and the hearer, if he understands the language, must know just what it is that it states. A diagram is not a fact, it is an object; and there are many facts about a diagram. [….] But a sentence is not like this : though a sentence may imply many things, it says just one thing, and if you understand it at all, you must know what it says; you cannot, just by studying the sentence more closely, elicit new things that it says, that you had not noticed before.28 That there is a non-negotiable core of “what a sense literally and in the strict sense says” was also, mutatis mutandis, the lasting concern underlying Grice’s program. Where Dummett, Grice, and Davidson differ is in the sort of account that a theory of meaning should offer of such content and, above all, whether there is a uniform way of accounting for the content that a sentence conveys when it is used on its own to make an assertion and the content that it contributes when it occurs unasserted as a component of larger sentence. A theory of truth-conditions has the uniformity requirement built in it: word meaning must be specified in an inductive fashion along the lines of Tarski’s treatment of the truth-predicate in formalized languages. I think that oversimplistic conceptions of the content conveyed by the utterance of a sentence in a given context have fostered the impression that content is given by truth-conditions, possibly disquotationally construed, and that we can depend on the Gricean machinery of conversational and conventional implicatures to handle the extra ingredients of content that do not fall within the scope of a truth-conditional account. Davidson of course realizes that there is much in language that does not fit into the Tarskian scheme: not only the semantics of indexicals and demonstratives, but all that exceeds the limits of the literal. However, while he holds that the semantics of indexicals requires a more sophisticated formal framework and goes beyond the bounds of a Tarskian truth theory, he is convinced that certain phenomena that exceed the limits of the literal, such as malapropisms, can be handled by means of the distinction between passing and prior theories of interpretation, while others, such as metaphor, concern language use and hence fall within the scope of pragmatics (whatever that is). But the distinction between semantics and pragmatics on which Davidson’s account rests has proved very controversial. Here I see the Grundgedanke characteristic of representationalist conceptions of content, that is, the assumption that a sentence says just one thing, and that the goal of a semantic theory is to spell out that one thing that a sentence says, in the favored sense of saying. But it seems to me that the time is ripe for reconsidering this assumption: the large majority of the sentences we utter lack specificity (which is perhaps a form of vagueness, but of a very special kind) and in this respect they are quite unlike maps. It is the context of

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use of that infuses life into them. Because of this very feature, they have a contextual pliability which maps obviously lack. What requires investigation is, on the one hand, the way in which the context of utterance together with the audience directed intentions of the speaker contributes to the determination of what is said in each given case and, on the other, the interplay between that which is explicitly and overtly said and that which is implicitly suggested by dint of lexical choices and syntactic structure. I will provide an example to illustrate what I mean. Consider Stephen Neale’s suggestion concerning a possible use of Frege’s notion of tone or coloring. Neale believes, along with almost everybody these days, that Frege’s mistake was to describe the contribution of proper names to the truthconditions of a sentence by appealing to the notion of sense: a proper name. A proper name – Neale contends – contributes via its referent to the thought and truth conditions of the sentences in which it occurs, though it often conveys an element of coloring. Neale urges that we adopt a modified version of a proposal once made by Russell, according to which, for example, the name “Hesperus” means “the object called ‘Hesperus’.” He suggests that we add a very general sortal and render the axiom governing the word “Hesperus” in a truth-conditional account à la Davidson by saying that “Hesperus” refers to “the planet called ‘Hesperus’.” This trivial “descriptive name” gives rise, in contextually specified circumstances, to truth-conditions appropriate to a general proposition where proper names are treated descriptively. Such general propositions can give rise, again in contextually specified circumstances, to singular propositions where the proper name behaves rigidly. Neale suggests that we view a sentence as consisting of a set of instructions for generating a sequence of propositions: which proposition in the sequence is activated depends on the pragmatic features of the communicative situation. Neale’s proposal rests on a combination of Gricean and Fregean insights. I have drawn a parallel between Frege and Grice in much the same way as Neale.29 However, the conclusion I am inclined to draw from the joint lessons of Frege and Grice goes in the opposite direction. My surmise is that co-designative proper names can differ both in sense and tone (coloring), and that the difference in tone survives the discovery that the names in question are co-designative. I have mentioned Neale’s suggestion because the idea of multiple propositions goes, I think, in an interesting direction and has a vast range of applications. Similar ideas have been put forward by Kent Bach in a very ambitious paper devoted to exploding the myth of conventional implicature and the underlying thought on which it rests, which Bach encapsulates in the dictum “One sentence, one proposition.”30 As a matter of fact, in the literature on propositional attitudes a version of the dictum “One sentence, one proposition” had already been called into question, and there are at least two instances of a deviation from the received wisdom, the first from the writings of Michael Dummett and the second from

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the writings of direct reference theorists. Consider, for instance, the distinction between assertoric content and ingredient sense put forward by Michael Dummett in the framework of such a reconstruction. Should we say that a proposition is that which is conveyed by an assertion of a sentence or that which is conveyed by the sentence’s ingredient sense, namely by its contribution when occurring in the scope of modal operators or complex sentences in which it occurs unasserted? It is only on the assumption that a sentence’s semantic contribution is uniform that we can ignore this distinction. But this assumption, characteristic of truth-conditional semantics, requires justification: it is not the delivery of an intuition that can go unchallenged. Dummett has argued that assertoric content is the right candidate for elucidating the notion of a proposition as something that can be justified, judged, challenged.31 A theory of meaning should concentrate its attention on this notion. The notion of ingredient sense is needed to account for the way the sentence contributes to the truth-conditions of compound sentences, and we should concentrate on this notion when constructing a semantics for a language. There simply is no answer, in advance of a theory of meaning, to the question of what proposition is expressed by a sentence on a given occasion of its use. As to the second instance, it is enough for us to rehearse the criticisms leveled against Frege’s theory of sense and reference: the notion of cognitive significance – so the objection goes – is guilty of blurring the distinction between the proposition expressed by a given sentence in a certain context of use and the proposition(s) communicated by means of it in the same context, or between semantically imparted information and pragmatically imparted information.32 Semantics has to do with the proposition expressed, while pragmatics has to do with the proposition(s) communicated or the information otherwise imparted. The basic idea here is that in the singular propositions expressed proper names behave rigidly, and not as Frege surmised. The “proposition expressed” admits of a variety of construals, ranging from Russellian propositions to structured propositions, sets of possible worlds, etc. Pragmatics deals with the proposition(s) “communicated”: Grice’s work provides the tools for handling this aspect of utterance meaning. Grice’s account is naturally married to a truth-conditional theory of meaning. Unlike Rorty, I am still convinced that theories of meaning are useful tools for clarifying the content and structure of our thoughts. A more articulated conception not only of contents of our utterances but also of the ways in which an utterance is capable of conveying a content is the best antidote against correspondence theories of truth. Not only are we at a loss to spell out which bits of world make up the fact to which a given sentence corresponds, if true; also as far as the sentence itself is concerned, isolated from its context of use, we experience a similar difficulty. For the vast majority of the sentences we utter contain indexicals and demonstratives, display vagueness and lack of specificity, have possibly unarticulated

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constituents, in short, are such that disquotational truth-theories tell us very little about their content. I would be quite surprised if a different conception of the contents of our utterances had no repercussion on our conception of how we apprehend the world in though and, indirectly, on the spectator view of knowledge so dear to Rorty’s heart. The appeal of representationalism rests on the “intuition” that in judgment we aim at an optimal fit with states of affairs. The intuition as such is harmless: it becomes misleading if we take it as picturing a landscape populated by intelligent beings intent on hitting a target, oblivious of the point of their exercise, and knowing full well that they, unlike an omniscient observer, have no way of telling whether or not they have hit the target in any particular case. However, they stand fast in their conviction, of which they proudly remind their obliging friend, the sceptic, that they can’t possibly miss the target every time. Although belief is by nature veridical – as some version or other of well-known transcendental arguments is supposed to have shown – they can’t be sure of the truth of any particular belief. It is at this stage that the picture of truth of the metaphysical realist comes to the fore, a picture that I find untenable. It makes no overt appeal to correspondence, and yet it stands in glaring contrast with the fundamental tenets of pragmatism, old and new.

NOTES 1. Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, vol.2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 57–58. 2. Richard Rorty, “Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry?”, The Philosophical Quarterly 45/180 (1995), pp. 299–300. 3. Eva Picardi, “Rorty, Sorge and Truth,” in Internationl Journal of Philosophical Studies, 9/3 (1991), pp. 431–439. 4. Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 46. 5. Richard Rorty in John Murphy, Pragmatism: From Peirce to Davidson (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), introduction, p. 3. 6. Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 198. 7. Eva Picardi, “Davidson and Quine on Observation Sentences,” in Language, Mind and Epistemology: On Donald Davidson’s Philosophy, ed. Gerhard Preyer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 97–116 and Eva Picardi, “Sensory Evidence and Shared Interests,” in Interpretations and Causes: New Perspectives on Donald Davidson’s Philosophy, ed. Mario De Caro (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), pp. 171–185. 8. Richard Rorty, “Something to Steer By,” The London Review of Books (June 20, 1996) pp. 7–8. 9. Donald Davidson, “Truth Rehabilitated” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

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10. Frank P. Ramsey, On Truth, Original Manuscript Materials (1927–29) from the Ramsey Collection at the University of Pittsburgh, ed. Nicholas Rescher and Ulrich Majer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), p. 15. 11. Ibid., p. 23. 12. Frank P. Ramsey, Foundations, ed. Hugh Mellor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 134. 13. Ibid., p. 57. 14. Willard Quine, “The Pragmatists’ Place in Empiricism,” in Pragmatism: Its Sources and Prospects, ed. Robert J. Mulvaney and Philip M. Zeltener (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1981). 15. Willard Quine as quoted in Murphy, Pragmatism, pp. 92–93. 16. Timothy Williamson, “Understanding and Inference,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (2003), pp. 249–293. 17. Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). 18. Jerry Fodor, Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 19. Ernest Lepore and Jerry Fodor, “Brandom’s Burdens: Compositionality and Inferentialism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXIII (2001). 20. Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2000) p. 28). 21. Ibid., p. 17. 22. Ibid., p.16. 23. Lepore and Fodor, “Brandom’s Burdens.” 24. Eva Picardi, “Was Frege a Proto–Inferentialist?”, in Facets of Concepts, ed. Juan Jose Acero and Paolo Leonardi (Padova: Il Poligrafo, 2005) pp. 35–49. 25. Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore, The Compositionality Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 137. 26. John McDowell, “Response to Hilary Putnam,” in Reading McDowell on Mind and World, ed. Nicholas Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 293. 27. Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 263. 28. Michael Dummett, “Frege and Wittgenstein,” in Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, ed. Irving Block (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), p. 37. 29. Eva Picardi, “Compositionality,” in Grice’s Heritage, ed. Giovanna Cosenza (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), pp. 52–72. 30. Kent Bach, “The Myth of Conventional Implicature,” Linguistics and Philosophy 22 (1999), pp. 327–366. 31. Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (London: Duckworth, 1991). 32. Cf. Nathan Salmon, Frege’s Puzzle (Cambride, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986) and Scott Soames, Beyond Rigidity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Rosa M. Calcaterra is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Knowledge at Roma Tre University. Her areas of interest are Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, American and European Pragmatism, Analytic Philosophy, with special reference to the theories of knowledge, ethics, and philosophy of psychology. She edited collections of interna-tional studies and published a number of essays and volumes including Ideologia e razionalità. Saggio su Jürgen Habermas (1984); Interpretare l’esperienza. Scienza etica e metafisica nel pensiero di Ch. S. Peirce (1989); Introduzione al pragmatismo americano (1997); Pragmatismo: i valori dell’esperienza. Letture di Peirce, James e Mead (2003). She is the General Editor of the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy and the co-founder and President of Associazione Pragma (www.associazionepragma.com). Vincent Colapietro is full Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His books include Peirce's Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity (1989), A Glossary of Semiotics (1993), and Fateful Shapes of Human Freedom (2003). He has also published numerous articles on Peirce, pragmatism, semiotics, con-temporary French philosophers, psychoanalysis. Metaphysics, aesthetics, and philosophy of literature are also among his areas of systematic research, as well as the reception of Darwin in the United States, the traditions of naturalism in Western philosophy, and the inter-section of various contemporary movements. In recent years he has served as President of The Metaphysical Society of America, the Semiotic Society of America, and the C.S. Peirce Society. Mario De Caro is Associate Professor of Moral Philosophy at Rome Tre University. He has been a Fulbright Fellow at Harvard University and, since 2000, he has also been teaching at Tufts University. Besides authoring the books Dal punto di vista dell’interprete (1998), Il libero arbitrio (2004), Azione (2008) and several anthologies in Italian, in English he has edited with David Macarthur Naturalism in Question (2004/2008), Naturalism and Normativity (2010) and two volumes of essays by Hilary Putnam, Philosophy in an Age of Science (Harvard UP forthcoming). He is interested in action theory, the free will problem and the viability of non-reductionist naturalism. Rossella Fabbrichesi teaches Hermeneutics at the State University of Milan. She published two collections of Peirce’s writings, several essays and books on Peirce including Sulle tracce del segno(1986), Il concetto di relazione in Peirce (1992), Introduzione a Peirce (1993), and edited Semiotics and Philosophy in C.S.Peirce (2006). She also worked on the link between Peirce

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and Wittgenstein and the connexions between both authors and the Leibnizian tradition (with F. Leoni, Continuità e variazione. Leibniz, Goethe, Peirce, Wittgenstein. Con un’incursione kantiana, 2005). Recently, she turned to Nietzsche and a parallelism between hermeneutics and pragmatism. She coedits the first Italian web-site entirely devoted to Peirce (www.centrostudipeirce.it). and is part of the Advisory Committee of the Peirce Society. Maurizio Ferraris is full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at University of Turin, where he founded and directs the “Laboratorio di ontologia teorica e applicata.” He wrote many books among which Storia dell’ermeneutica (1988), reprinted five times and translated into English and Spanish, Estetica razionale (1997), where he revives the debate on Aesthetics as theory of perception. His most recent publications include: Experimentelle Ästhetik (2001) Il mondo esterno (2001); Ontologia (2003); Introduzione a Derrida (2004); Dove sei? Ontologia del telefonino (2005), Jackie Derrida. Ritratto a memoria (2006); (con altri autori, Milano 2008); Documentalità. Perché è necessario lasciar tracce (2009). He is also co-editor of Storia dell’ontologia (2008) and, with J. Derrida, of A taste for the Secret (2001). Nathan Houser is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University in Indianapolis (IUPUI). He has been Director of the Peirce Edition Project and Director of IUPUI’s Institute for American Thought. He has served as President of the Charles S. Peirce Society and as President of the Semiotic Society of America. His research focuses on Peirce studies, pragmatism, semiotics, philosophy of text, and philosophy of mind. Since 1993, he has been the General Editor for the Indianapolis critical edition of Peirce’s writings and he has co-edited the two-volume Essential Peirce and Studies in the Logic of Charles Sanders Peirce. Other publications include the historical introductions to vols. 4, 5, 6, 8 of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce. Ivo Assad Ibri is full Professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUCSP), Brazil. He got his PhD in philosophy from the University of São Paulo and is the founder and director of the Center for Pragmatism Studies of PUCSP, editor of Cognitio and general coordinator for the São Paulo annual International Meetings on Pragmatism. His main research interest is American pragmatism and the theoretical connections between Peircean thought and German idealism. He published several essays and the book Kósmos Noétos. He is researcher of the Brazilian National Counsel of Technological and Scientific Development and member of the board of consultants of the Peirce Edition Project.

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Giovanni Maddalena (PhD Roma Tre University) is Assistant Professor at the University of Molise. He works on American Philosophy, espe-cially focusing on Charles S. Peirce and classic pragmatists.In his monographs Istinto razionale. Studi sulla semiotica dell’ultimo Peirce (2003) and Metafisica per assurdo (2009), as well as in his many articles on international Journals he underlines the possibility of a philosophy of language based on signs and open to metaphysics. He edited, translated and introduced a large Italian anthology of Peirce’s work: C. S. Peirce, Scritti scelti, (2005). He is Executive editor of the “European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy”. He has been a Fulbright Research Scholar at Indianapolis University. Michele Marsonet received his degrees from the Universities of Genoa (Italy) and Pittsburgh (U.S.A.), and is now Professor of Philosophy of Science and Head of Philosophy Department, University of Genoa. He has been Visiting Professor in several universities around the world, and Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. His areas of study are in Pragmatism, Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics, Methodology of the Social Sciences, Political Philosophy and Philosophical Logic. He wrote many books in Italian and English, among which: Science, Reality, and Language (1995), The Primacy of Practical Reason (1996),La verità fallibile (1997), Prassi e utopia (1998), I limiti del realismo (2000), The Problem of Realism (ed, 2002), Idealism and Praxis (2008). John H. McDowell is University Professor of Philosophy. Before coming to Pittsburgh in 1986, he taught at University College, Oxford. He has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, UCLA, and Princeton University. He was the John Locke Lecturer at Oxford University in 1991. His major interests are Greek philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology, and ethics. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His selected publications are Mind and World (1994; reissued with a new introduction, 1996), Mind, Value, and Reality (1998), Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (1998), “Responses”, in Nicholas H. Smith, ed., Reading McDowell: on Mind and World (2002). Eva Picardi is Professor of Philosophy of Language at the University of Bologna. She has devoted many articles and essays to Frege and his conception of logic, with special reference to his controversy with Benno Kerry, Bertrand Russell, and Giuseppe Peano and to his critique of Psychologism. She has also written extensively on Dummett’s, Davidson’s, and Quine’s theories of meaning. She is the author of Linguaggio e analisi

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filosofica (1992), La chimica dei concetti (1994), Le teorie del significato (1999). Her most recent publications deal with Frege’s notion of colouring, Davidson’s account of predication and propositional unity, Heidegger’s project of a fundamental ontology, and Wittgenstein’s conception of primitive language games and concept-mastery.

Index Adams, Robert Merrihew, 33 n16 Adorno, Theodor, xii Agassiz, Louis, 63 America, 38; 50; 102 Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret, 118; 124, 128 n19, n20, n21, n22 Apel, Karl-Otto, xiii; xiv; xv; 81 n8 Aristotle, 66; 72; 125 Austin, John Langshaw, xiv; 11 Austria, 102 Ayer, Alfred Jules, 11 Bach, Kent, 141 Bentham, Jeremy, 134 Bergson, Henri, 23 Berkeley, George, 82 n18 Bernstein, Richard, xi; 11, 12 Blackburn, Simon, 27 Boghossian, Paul, 135 Boyd, Richard, 27 Bradley, Francis Herbert , xii Brandom, Robert, xx n4; 11; 98 n2; 121; 123-126; 127 n13, n14; 128 n17, n18, n19, n21, n23, n25; 129; 130; 132; 135-139 and inferentialism, 135-139 and intentions, 121; 123-126 Brentano, Franz, 51; 53; 64 Calcaterra, Rosa Maria, xx n1; 57 n1 Calderoni, Mario, 37 Cambridge (Massachusetts), xvii; 94 Carnap, Rudolf, xi; 11; 35; 102104 Cavell, Stanley, 6; 13; 16 n2; 18 n40, n48; 19 n61; 105

Churchland, Patricia, 28 Colapietro, Vincent, 19 n49 Columbus, Christopher, 38 Comte, Auguste, 94 Copernicus, 56 Croce, Benedetto, xii Crocker, Thomas P., 16 n5 Danto, Arthur, 105 Darwin, Charles, xiii; xvii; xix; 9; 63-64; 130 Davidson, Donald, xv; xix; 11; 12; 45; 57 n5; 63; 65; 66; 68; 104; 105; 116, 116 n1; 128 n21; 129144 and language, 136 and metaphors, 139 and representation, 140 de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Auguste, 54 De Waal, Cornelis, 81 n17; Dennett, Daniel, 27; 28 Derrida, Jacques, 15 Descartes, René, xvii; xviii; 26; 51 Dewey, John, xi; xii; xvi; xviii; xix; 6, 10; 12; 14; 15; 17 n11; 18 n27; 20 n 73; 25; 32; 32 n8; 36; 84; 88-99; 101; 104; 105; 106; 110; 113-115; 130-133 and different kinds of pragmatism, 113-115 and dualism, 88 and ethics; 84; 89 and instrumentalism, 6 and naturalism, 23 and science, 104-105 and signification, 90-91 and values, 90-91 Dretske, Frederick, 27 Duhem, Pierre, 134 Dummet, Michael, 11; 61; 63; 68 n1; 130; 135-136; 139; 140-142 Dupré, John, 28

150 Edison, Thomas Alva, 54 Einstein, Albert, 9; 52 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 6 England, 63; 102 Europe, xi-xii; xix-xx; 101-103 Evans, Gareth, 138 Feigl, Herbert, 102 Ferraris, Maurizio, 84 Field, Hartry, 25; 28 Fodor, Jerry, xviii; 27; 135-144 Franklin, Benjamin, 54 Franzoni, Anna Maria, 56 Frege, Gottlob, 59 n27; 114; 131; 135-138; 141-142 Freud, Sigmund, 47 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, xix, 58 n14 Galilei, Galileo, 67 Gentile, Giovanni, xii; 52 Germany, 102 Gibbard, Allan, 27 God, 12; 45-47; 53-56; 86 Goldbach, Christian (Goldbach’s conjecture), 30 Goldman, Alvin, 27 Goodman, Russell, 16 n5 Gray, Asa, 63 Grayling, Anthony, 62 Greece, 84 Grice, Paul, 149-142 Haack, Susan, 11 Habermas, Jürgen, xiii, xiv; xv Hacker, Peter Michael Stephan, 62 Hacking, Ian, 115 Harman, Gilbert, 27 Harvard, 103-106; 116 n1 Harvard Lectures, 36; 37; 66; 94 Hausman, Carl, 81 n12 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xviii; xix; 7; 86

INDEX Heidegger, Martin, xii; xix; 56; 58 n13, 14; 98 n2 Hempel, Carl Gustav, xi; 102 Heraclitus, 39; 42 Hitchcock, Alfred, 52 Horkheimer, Max, xii Houser, Nathan, 16 n9; 17 n11; 30; 34 n50, n53; 82 n22 Hume, David, xvi; 74; 134 Husserl, Edmund, ix; 51; 111; 114 Jack the Ripper, 30 James, Henry, 48-49 James, William, xii; xv; xviii; 1; 6; 10; 12; 14; 16 n3; 36; 45-59; 63; 81 n15; 90; 101-102; 104-106; 113; 116 n7; 131; 134 and God, 45-46 and observation, 102-103 and the “Automatic Sweetheart”, 51-52 and his theory of objects, 45-59 and his theory of truth, 45-59 Joas, Hans, 18 n42 Jung, Carl Gustav, 47 Kakania, 50; 85 Kant, Immanuel, xii; xiv; xvi; xvii; xviii; 6; 26; 55; 73; 74; 108; 114; 133; 136-137 Kierkegaard, Søren, 86 Kim, Jaegwon, 64 Kitcher, Philip, 27 Legg, Catherine, 17 n21 Le Roy, Edouard, 45; 56 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 38; 54 Lekan, Todd, 11 Lepore, Ernest, 135-138 Lewis, Clarence Irving, xix; 6; 12; 14; 27; 101; 103; 102; 106; 113; 116 n1 Locke, John, xviii Lovejoy, Arthur Oncken, 61

INDEX Lovibond, Sabina, 19 n68 Lowell Lectures, 94 Lukács, György, xii Lycan, William, 27 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 11 Mackie, John, 28 Maddy, Penelope, 28 Malcolm, Norman, 18 n38 Margolis, Joseph, 11; 12 McCumber, John, 19 n57 McDowell, John, 31; 34 n52; 63; 64-65; 68; 117 n18; 139 McGinn, Colin, 29 Mead, George Herbert, xii; xv; xviii; 6; 10; 12; 14; 130 Mill, John Stuart, 41; 64; 81 n9 Millikan, Ruth, 11; 27 Monk, Ray, 17 n26; 18 n41, 47; 19 n55 Moore, George Edward, xi, 11; 33 n16; 62; 87 Morris, Charles, xi Murphy, John, 129; 132 Musil, Robert, 85 Nagel, Thomas, 58 n18, 19; 130 Napoleon, 54 Neale, Stephen, 141 Neurath, Otto, xi New York, 103 Newton, Isaac, 9 Nietzsche, Friedrich, ix; xix; 81 n2 Nozick, Robert, 105 Pacific Ocean, 49; 53 Pacific Truth, 49-53 Papineau, David, 21; 28 Paris, 57 Pears, David, 19 n63 Peirce, Charles Sanders, xii; xivxvii; xix; 2; 6-12; 14; 17 n23; 18 n46; 23-24; 25; 30-32; 32 n11,

151 n13; 36-43; 61-69; 71-82; 9597;101; 105; 106; 113; 129; 131; 133-134; 136 and empiricism, 62-63 and evolutionism, 64 and interpretant, 38; 40; 42; 7778 and natural sciences, 25 and normative sciences, 36-40; 65-66; 76; 82 n21; 84; 94-97 and perception, 66-68 and phenomenology, 72-75; 78; 94 and semiotics, 71-82 and the maxim of pragmatism, 3637 and theory of meaning, 36-37 and ultimate aims, 94-95 Plato, 102; 107 Poe, Edgar Allan, 54 Poland, 50; 102 Popper, Karl, 35; 102; 115 Ptolemy, 56 Putnam, Hilary, xv; xvi; xvii; xx n8; 21; 23; 28; 31; 32 n2, 9; 34 n41, 49, 51; 35-36; 39; 41; 42 n13; 46; 98 n2; 101; 102; 104 Quine, Willard, xii; xv; xix; 12; 24-27; 35; 58 n14; 64; 66; 101; 103-117; 111; 124-127; 130 and analytic philosophy, 101-117 analytic and synthetic, 104; 131 and belief, 133 ontology and epistemology, 108 Railton, Peter, 27 Ramsey, Frank, xviii; 131; 133134; 136 Reichenbach, Hans, xi; 35; 41; 102 Rescher, Nicholas, 39; 97; 98; 102-116 Rome, xi; 45; 50; 53; 68

152 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 105 Rorty, Richard, xv-xix; 11-12; 18n29, n39; 83-84; 88; 90; 93; 97; 98n2; 101; 105; 113-116; 116 n3, n4; 117 n18; 129-131; 132-133; 135; 139; 142-143 and analytic philosophy, 101; 105; 113-116; 116 n3; 117 n18 and representationalism, 129-139 Russell, Bertrand, xii; 11; 45; 50; 55; 62; 114; 133; 141 Ryan, Alan, 133 Salmon, Nathan, 144 n32 Schelling, Friedrich, 82 n18 Scheman, Naomi, 16 n2, n4; 19 n55 Schiller, Ferdinand, 58 n16 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 47 Searle, John, xiv; 127 n15; 128 n16, n19 Sellars, Wilfrid, xv; xix; 12; 27; 29; 65-66; 68; 111-112; 117 n18; 120-126; 128 n18; 129; 130; 136; 137 and representation, 109-112 and scientific realism, 111-112 language and action, 120-123 Shakespeare, William, 50 Shook, John Robert, 11 Sigwart, Christoph, 96 Sluga, Hans, 62 Spinosa, Charles, 19 n70 Stich, Stephen, 28 Stroll, Avrum, 62 Stroud, Barry, 29 Tarski, Alfred, xi; 50; 81 n8; 102103; 140 Taylor, Charles, 11 Thomas Aquinas, 124 Twardowski, Kazimierz, 50 United States, xiv; 102; 105

INDEX Vienna, 10; 50; 103 Vienna Circle, xi; 103 von Meinong, Alexius, 50 von Wright, Georg Henrik, xx n7; 85

Waisman, Friedrich, 86 Williamson, Timothy, 135 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ix; xiv; xv; xx n7; 1-20; 29; 41; 84-88; 90; 91; 93; 95; 97; 102; 103; 116; 129133; 135 and ethics, 84-88 and judgments, 3-4 and practices, 1-20 and pragmatism, 1-20 and signs, 9-10 and the everyday world, 12-14 in the Tractatus, 84-87 theory and practice, 4-5; 14-15 Wright, Chauncy, 63 Wright, Crispin, 130

VIBS The Value Inquiry Book Series is co-sponsored by: Adler School of Professional Psychology American Indian Philosophy Association American Maritain Association American Society for Value Inquiry Association for Process Philosophy of Education Canadian Society for Philosophical Practice Center for Bioethics, University of Turku Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Central European Pragmatist Forum Centre for Applied Ethics, Hong Kong Baptist University Centre for Cultural Research, Aarhus University Centre for Professional Ethics, University of Central Lancashire Centre for the Study of Philosophy and Religion, University College of Cape Breton Centro de Estudos em Filosofia Americana, Brazil College of Education and Allied Professions, Bowling Green State University College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology Concerned Philosophers for Peace Conference of Philosophical Societies Department of Moral and Social Philosophy, University of Helsinki Gannon University Gilson Society Haitian Studies Association Ikeda University Institute of Philosophy of the High Council of Scientific Research, Spain International Academy of Philosophy of the Principality of Liechtenstein International Association of Bioethics International Center for the Arts, Humanities, and Value Inquiry International Society for Universal Dialogue Natural Law Society Philosophical Society of Finland Philosophy Born of Struggle Association Philosophy Seminar, University of Mainz Pragmatism Archive at The Oklahoma State University R.S. Hartman Institute for Formal and Applied Axiology Research Institute, Lakeridge Health Corporation Russian Philosophical Society Society for Existential Analysis Society for Iberian and Latin-American Thought Society for the Philosophic Study of Genocide and the Holocaust Unit for Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Autonomous University of Barcelona Whitehead Research Project Yves R. Simon Institute

Titles Published Volumes 1 - 193 see www.rodopi.nl 194. Danielle Poe and Eddy Souffrant, Editors, Parceling the Globe: Philosophical Explorations in Globalization, Global Behavior, and Peace. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 195. Josef Šmajs, Evolutionary Ontology: Reclaiming the Value of Nature by Transforming Culture. A volume in Central-European Value Studies 196. Giuseppe Vicari, Beyond Conceptual Dualism: Ontology of Consciousness, Mental Causation, and Holism in John R. Searle’s Philosophy of Mind. A volume in Cognitive Science 197. Avi Sagi, Tradition vs. Traditionalism: Contemporary Perspectives in Jewish Thought. Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein. A volume in Philosophy and Religion 198. Randall E. Osborne and Paul Kriese, Editors, Global Community: Global Security. A volume in Studies in Jurisprudence 199. Craig Clifford, Learned Ignorance in the Medicine Bow Mountains: A Reflection on Intellectual Prejudice. A volume in Lived Values: Valued Lives 200. Mark Letteri, Heidegger and the Question of Psychology: Zollikon and Beyond. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 201. Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, Editors, A New Kind of Containment: “The War on Terror,” Race, and Sexuality. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 202. Amihud Gilead, Necessity and Truthful Fictions: Panenmentalist Observations. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 203. Fernand Vial, The Unconscious in Philosophy, and French and European Literature: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century. A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 204. Adam C. Scarfe, Editor, The Adventure of Education: Process Philosophers on Learning, Teaching, and Research. A volume in Philosophy of Education

205. King-Tak Ip, Editor, Environmental Ethics: Intercultural Perspectives. A volume in Studies in Applied Ethics 206. Evgenia Cherkasova, Dostoevsky and Kant: Dialogues on Ethics. A volume in Social Philosophy 207. Alexander Kremer and John Ryder, Editors, Self and Society: Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Four. A volume in Central European Value Studies 208. Terence O’Connell, Dialogue on Grief and Consolation. A volume in Lived Values, Valued Lives 209. Craig Hanson, Thinking about Addiction: Hyperbolic Discounting and Responsible Agency. A volume in Social Philosophy 210. Gary G. Gallopin, Beyond Perestroika: Axiology and the New Russian Entrepreneurs. A volume in Hartman Institute Axiology Studies 211. Tuija Takala, Peter Herissone-Kelly, and Søren Holm, Editors, Cutting Through the Surface: Philosophical Approaches to Bioethics. A volume in Values in Bioethics 212. Neena Schwartz: A Lab of My Own. A volume in Lived Values, Valued Lives 213. Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, Values and Powers: Re-reading the Philosophical Tradition of American Pragmatism. A volume in Central European Value Studies 214. Matti Häyry, Tuija Takala, Peter Herissone-Kelly and Gardar Árnason, Editors, Arguments and Analysis in Bioethics. A volume in Values in Bioethics 215. Anders Nordgren, For Our Children: The Ethics of Animal Experimentation in the Age of Genetic Engineering. A volume in Values in Bioethics 216. James R. Watson, Editor, Metacide: In the Pursuit of Excellence. A volume in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

217. Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, Editor, Positive Peace: Reflections on Peace Education, Nonviolence, and Social Change. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 218. Christopher Berry Gray, The Methodology of Maurice Hauriou: Legal, Sociological, Philosophical. A volume in Studies in Jurisprudence 219. Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo, Containing (Un)American Bodies: Race, Sexuality, and Post-9/11 Constructions of Citizenship. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 220. Roland Faber, Brian G. Henning, Clinton Combs, Editors, Beyond Metaphysics? Explorations in Alfred North Whitehead’s Late Thought. A volume in Contemporary Whitehead Studies 221. John G. McGraw, Intimacy and Isolation (Intimacy and Aloneness: A Multi-Volume Study in Philosophical Psychology, Volume One), A volume in Philosophy and Psychology 222. Janice L. Schultz-Aldrich, Introduction and Edition, “Truth” is a Divine Name, Hitherto Unpublished Papers of Edward A. Synan, 1918-1997. A volume in Gilson Studies 223. Larry A. Hickman, Matthew Caleb Flamm, Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński and Jennifer A. Rea, Editors, The Continuing Relevance of John Dewey: Reflections on Aesthetics, Morality, Science, and Society. A volume in Central European Value Studies 224. Hugh P. McDonald, Creative Actualization: A Meliorist Theory of Values. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values 225. Rob Gildert and Dennis Rothermel, Editors, Remembrance and Reconciliation. A volume in Philosophy of Peace 226. Leonidas Donskis, Editor, Niccolò Machiavelli: History, Power, and Virtue. A volume in Philosophy, Literature, and Politics 227. Sanya Osha, Postethnophilosophy. A volume in Social Philosophy 228. Rosa M. Calcaterra, Editor, New Perspectives on Pragmatism and Analytic Philosophy. A volume in Studies in Pragmatism and Values