1

Archived MS. For Patrick Baert and Bryan Turner (eds.), Pragmatism and European

Social Theory

Inquiry and Democracy in Contemporary Pragmatism

Matthew Festenstein, Department of Politics, University of Sheffield

1.

One of the most powerful, elusive and contentious themes in the ‘resurgence

of pragmatism’ (Bernstein 1992) has been the question of the political implications, if

any, carried by the doctrine. On the one hand, he thought that, as the intellectual

historian James Kloppenberg has put it, democracy is the form of social life ‘uniquely

consistent with pragmatism’ (Kloppenberg 1996: 130) has constituted an article of

faith for many of its proponents. On the other hand, pragmatism has been so

frequently identified with a purely sceptical approach toward ‘foundations’ in political

argument as to make this belief incomprehensible (cf. Kloppenberg 1996: 124-5). The

purpose of this essay is to explore the ways in which some of the principal figures in

this resurgence of pragmatism have related the pragmatist conception of inquiry to

democratic political values.

It almost goes without saying that pragmatism is a contested concept, subject

to multiple, sometimes conflicting definitions.1 There are some well known

difficulties encountered in formulating a set of common characteristics which serve to

distinguish all and only those figures conventionally regarded as pragmatists. W. V.

1 For a classic early statement of this scepticism, see Lovejoy 1963: 1-29; and see Brodsky 1971; Bernstein 1991: 323-340; Bernstein 1995.

2

Quine, for instance, confesses that ‘it is not clear to me what it takes to be a

pragmatist. It is not clear in what ways the philosophers who have been called

pragmatists are nearer in outlook to one another than to philosophers who are not so

called. I suspect that the term “pragmatism” is one that we could do without. It draws

a pragmatic blank’ (Quine 1981: 23).

One way of understanding pragmatism is to see it as characterised by a certain

view of the character and role of inquiry in human understanding and practice, and it

is this track which I will follow here. By pragmatism, then, I mean here an outlook

characterised by the following commitments. For pragmatists, the nerve of its account

of inquiry is a ‘radical holism’ which ‘does not privilege or prejudice any domain of

inquiry … It does not pronounce that there are separate orders of fact and value or of

the causal and the normative and then go on to glorify the factual/causal and denigrate

the evaluative/normative’ (Misak 2000: 86). This holism is grounded in a view that

practice, rather than theory, is at the heart of all knowledge, and that the distinctions

to be drawn between different domains of inquiry can only be drawn in the light of

practice.2 We can move beyond the Scylla of objectivism and the Charybdis of

relativism by locating all practices of inquiry and reasoning in the deliberative and

practical orientation of the agents (cf. Putnam 1981; Bernstein 1983).3 Reasoning is

understood as process of deliberation; that is, as a goal-directed activity. Like other

activities, it is pursued in order to achieve particular goals, and in its course one’s

2 On Peirce, however, compare Hookway 1997. 3 Pace MacGilvray (2004: 6-7), this is not to say that the role of the pragmatist conception of inquiry is to be a mediator between ‘dominant schools in contemporary moral and political thought’, or indeed between anything and anything else.

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goals may change, new conceptions of what one is doing emerge and indeed who one

is may emerge, etc.4

Viewed as an interconnected whole, the web of belief contains no component

that is ring-fenced by philosophers against corrigibility (as sense data or analytic

truths have been thought to be, for example). For the pragmatic commitment to

fallibilism, even those beliefs and norms in which we have the utmost conviction may

turn out to be false. Any belief is vulnerable to revision – but only by reference to

other beliefs that are held to be ‘settled’ or ‘stable’ for the purposes of judging this

belief: ‘that one can be both fallibilistic and antiskeptical is perhaps the unique insight

of American pragmatism’ (Putnam 1994: 152; cf. Putnam 1992: 20-1; Larmore 1996:

59-60; Rockmore 2002). Fallibilism is not a doctrine which casts a miasma of doubt

over all beliefs or any particular belief; rather, it insists that when we question a belief

we must do so for specific, justifiable reasons, stimulated by actual doubts.5 and that

therefore we cannot call all our beliefs into question at once. We can therefore view

our beliefs both as rooted in history and practice, and as subject to justification, and

rational criticism. Pragmatism starts from the belief that critical inquiry itself cannot

ground all our beliefs. We can only begin to reason on the basis of the beliefs and

practices that we already have – we cannot call everything into question all at once –

and these are given to us by historical contingency.

The criteria for what counts as success of failure in inquiry are not pre-given

and external to this process, but are hammered out through it: ‘what we have are

practices which are right are wrong, depending on how they square with our

4 How to understand these goals, and how ‘particular’ they may be was a bone of contention between Peirce, James, and Dewey: see Peirce, CP 5: 508, 555-60 (references to Peirce 1931-60 given in the standard volume: paragraph number form.); James 1907; Dewey 1908: 98-115. 5 The classic statements of this are to be found in the following essays by Peirce: ‘Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man’ (CP 5: 213-63); ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’ (CP 5: 264-317); ‘Grounds of Validity of the Claims of Logic: Further Consequences of Four Incapacities’ (CP 5: 318-57); ‘The Fixation of Belief’ (CP 5: 358-87).

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standards. And our standards are right or wrong depending on how they square with

our practices. This is a circle or, better, a spiral’ – but a virtuous one (Putnam 1990:

304). There is no privileged or Archimedean point outside this spiral from which to

assess either practices or standards. As Raymond Geuss writes, glossing Dewey, ‘[w]e

accept theories because they have been developed using the most appropriate

available methods, because they satisfy our relevant standards of evaluation, and

because they work (i.e. they allow us to do what we wish to do with the theories in

question); we use the methods we do because they have shown themselves to be

efficient in allowing us to come up with acceptable theories’ (Geuss 2001: 125). In

the pragmatist picture of inquiry, any element is open to potential revision: the unit of

agency (the individual, some corporate or collective agent), the agent’s goals,

surroundings, criteria for a good solution to a problem, relevant methods, etc. (cf.

Festenstein 2003). In any particular inquiry, one or more of these must be taken to be

fixed, for the inquiry to get off the ground: as fallibilism insists, we cannot throw

everything into question all at once.

The political valence of this conception of inquiry is a subject of long-standing

debate. At the very least, for many pragmatists ‘the concept of the scientific

community’ has served as a ‘suggestive analogue’ of social and political cooperation

(Scheffler 1974: 9). For Dewey in particular the thought that the methods of the

natural sciences, understood in pragmatist terms, should be extended to address social

and moral problems, and that this entailed the democratisation of decision-making in

those domains, exerted a strong grip. The failure to do so retarded the capacity to

understand and address social problems. For instance, he writes in his Logic: The

Theory of Inquiry:

5

Failure to institute a logic based inclusively and exclusively upon the operations

of inquiry has enormous cultural consequences. It encourages obscurantism; it

promotes acceptance of belief formed before methods of inquiry had reached

their present estate; and it tends to relegate scientific (that is, competent)

methods of inquiry to a specialist technical field. Since scientific methods

simply exhibit free intelligence operating in the best manner possible at a given

time, the cultural waste, confusion and distortion that results from failure to use

these methods, in all fields in connection with all problems, is incalculable.

These considerations reinforce the claim of logical theory, as the theory of

inquiry, to assume and to hold a position of primary human importance. (Dewey

1938: 527)

Undemocratic forms of inquiry fail as inquiry; to be effective, social inquiry must not

be the preserve of a separate class of experts or social engineers -- an argument that

was an important part of The Public and Its Problems (Dewey 1927). So, for instance,

James Kloppenberg argues that democracy is ‘uniquely suited to the twentieth century

… because the democratic community replicates the community of broadly conceived

scientific inquiry’. In democratic and scientific communities alike, ‘free and creative’

participants ‘set their own goals, determine their own tests, and evaluate their results

in a spirit of constructive cooperation’ (Kloppenberg 1998: 90).

Yet while Dewey asserted a link, the precise character of the connection

between Dewey’s pragmatist or instrumentalist conception of inquiry and his view of

democracy is not very clear. There is room to debate the extent to which the latter

derives from the former, as opposed to some other intellectual source.6 I do not

propose to take up this debate here, and will instead look at three ways in which

6 On this theme, see Westbrook 1991; Westbrook 2005; Kloppenberg 1998; Campbell 1995; Festenstein 1997a; Festenstein 1997b; Festenstein 2001; Honneth 1998; MacGilvray 2004: 121-149.

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contemporary proponents or developers of pragmatism have drawn a connection

between the pragmatist conception of inquiry and democracy. What is at stake is the

political identity of the doctrine, particularly, the extent to which the conception of

inquiry offered in contemporary pragmatism provides a critical standpoint for the

appraisal of political arrangements. In the absence of the argument for such a

standpoint, pragmatists may worry that their conception of inquiry may be yoked to

any social and political project. One of the most long-standing and potent charges

against pragmatism from the point of view of political philosophy has been that of

acquiescence.7 Whatever the personal moral or political commitments of particular

pragmatists, this criticism alleges, pragmatism is vulnerable to appropriation by

whatever social forces are most powerful. This criticism takes various forms

(MacGilvray 2004: 97-120), but its core can be fairly simply stated. Pragmatists, as

we have seen, tend to be reticent about setting out ‘final ends’ for the sake of which

the activity of inquiry takes place (Richardson 1999: 122). If participants in inquiry

set their own goals and determine their own tests, however, we may worry that criteria

for what counts as a worthwhile goal or of success in achieving it will in fact be

established through the operations of power or social consensus.

Of course, for some (perhaps we should add: self-styled) pragmatists, this is

not a worry at all, but simply follows from a proper recognition of the place of

pragmatism in the order of political argument. In some places, Richard Rorty, for

instance, expresses the view that pragmatism is ‘neutral between democrats and

fascists’ (cited in Westbrook 2005: 8). And indeed sceptical commentators in the

nineteen twenties and thirties quickly noticed that some fascists such as Giovanni 7 See MacGilvray 2004: 97-120, on this as a major theme in the past and current reception of pragmatism, with an up-to-date review of the relevant literature. For the original statement in these terms see Mumford (1957 [1926]) and Dewey’s reply: Dewey (1981-1991 [1927b]), 3: 145-151, and see Westbrook 1990. On Rorty and acquiescence (a discussion on which I draw a bit in section 2 below), see Festenstein 2003.

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Papini and Mussolini himself claimed to have learned from James’s pragmatism.8 In a

different vein, Richard Posner argues that pragmatism ‘has no inherent political

valence’ (Posner 1991: 34). I won’t take up Posner’s views here.9 Rorty, however, is

discussed in the following section, and I argue that his position is rather more

ambivalent than this statement suggests. Just as we should be cautious about Dewey’s

(or the Deweyan’s) claim for a link between the pragmatist conception of inquiry and

democracy, we should be cautious about assertions that there is no such link. In each

case, we need to look in more detail at the particular conception of inquiry developed.

Dewey’s legacy is worth mentioning for another reason, however. It is not

only the difficulty in defining pragmatism that renders obscure the relationship

between pragmatism and democracy. For democracy is also a notoriously contested

concept, subject to multiple and often conflicting ways of specifying what ‘rule of the

people’ means. In reconstructing pragmatism, contemporary writers have converged

with and fed one now rather dominant current conception of democracy, that is, the

deliberative one. For instance, according to Misak, ‘there is a direct connection

between deliberative democracy and the pragmatist theory of truth’ (Misak 2004: 9).

At the core of this ‘deliberative turn’ (Dryzek 2000: 1) in democratic thought is the

intuition that democracy comprises more than just a majoritarian procedure of

decision-making, or a site for the tug of competing forces, but also consists in the

exchange of reasons and arguments.10 The crucial medium for this exchange is the

‘debate, discussion and persuasion’ which Dewey thought raised democracy beyond

8 See Elliot 1928; Diggins 1972. 9 For critical discussion of Posner on this question, see Knight and Johnson 1996; Westbrook 2005: 188-94. 10 There is now a very large literature on deliberative democracy: see, for instance, Bohman 1996; Bohman and Rehg 1997; Bohman 1998; Elster 1998; Dryzek 2000; D’Entrèves 2002. In addition to the authors discussed below, there are important treatments of the link (or lack of link) between pragmatism and deliberative democracy in the work of James Bohman (1999; 2004), and Jack Knight and James Johnson (1996; 1999). For a tart statement of doubt about pragmatism’s contribution, see Dryzek 2004.

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the ‘stupidity’ of mere majority rule. In the following sections, then, I look at three

ways in which recent pragmatist writers have forged a link between the pragmatist

epistemology of inquiry and a deliberative conception of democracy.

2.

Richard Rorty may seem to be an odd starting point. Rorty is assiduously

attempts to strip out epistemology from his pragmatism, and, as we have seen, he

expresses doubts that pragmatism carries with it any specific political implications. I

want to argue that the picture is more complicated than this, and that Rorty is rather

closer to the tradition of argument that I have identified here than may seem at first

blush. Rorty is famous, or notorious, for arguing that social practices, including

practices of inquiry, truth-telling and reason-giving, are not subject to external

theoretical vindication. As John McDowell has observed, the replacement of the

discourse of objectivity with a discourse of consensus or solidarity is presented as the

upshot of a ‘narrative of maturation’ that Rorty finds in Dewey (and in Nietzsche)

(Rorty 2000b: 24; cf. Rorty 1999: 20): ‘[f]ull human maturity would require us to

acknowledge authority only if the acknowledgement does not involve abasing

ourselves before something non-human’ (McDowell 2000: 110). The Western

philosophical tradition is dominated by a discourse of objectivity, which in turn is

understood as the abasement of the merely human before something else – the divine,

the rational, nature’s own language, or one of the other targets of Philosophy and the

Mirror of Nature, and subsequent works (Rorty 1979). Our standards of normativity,

including epistemic authority, are only those given in the practices of reason-giving

and justification of those around us; instead of seeking objectivity in our talk, in the

sense of a connection to something external to it, we should aspire to ‘solidarity’,

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adjusting our beliefs and desires to those of others around us. There are particular,

socially located, intersubjective practices within which reasons, authoritative

descriptions, common conceptions of salience and naturalness, etc., may be

promulgated and challenged. But there is no standpoint outside those practices where

practice-independent reasons and descriptions hold true. There is only ‘our

inheritance from, and our conversation with, our fellow-humans as our only source of

guidance’ (Rorty 1982: 166; cf. Rorty 1991b: 39). As a result, according to Rorty,

pragmatists ‘treat inquiry – in both physics and ethics – as the search for adjustment,

and in particular for that sort of adjustment to our fellow humans which we call “the

search for acceptable justification and eventual agreement”’ (Rorty 1999: 72).11

The burden of normativity falls on the shoulders of particular communities,

the argument runs: to recall, we set our own goals and determine our own tests. There

is no extra-communal source of authority about beliefs and practices. Questions about

all forms of authority or normativity become political, then, in the sense that they

become questions about the governing values and boundaries of a specific

community. To view inquiry as adjustment to others in this way, then, raises the

worry about political arbitrariness or acquiescence: it would appear that without an

external vantage point from which to assess the norms of a particular community, the

process of adjustment to those norms inevitably means that the most powerful and

socially current norms and values prevail.

However, Rorty has been at pains to resist the inference from his

‘conversational’ conception of the constraints to some form of relativism.12 Rorty

considers various characterisations of relativism, but the important threat that

concerns him, I think, is the claim that, since criteria for rational appraisal are 11 In addition, see the essays in Part 1 of Rorty 1991b. 12 Rorty 1982; Rorty 1991a: 164-76; Rorty 1991b; Rorty 1998; Rorty 1999: xvi-xxxii.

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constituted by particular ‘vocabularies’ or ‘language games’, it is necessary to

suspend the language of rational appraisal when two radically different language

games confront one another (Rorty 1982: 166; Rorty 1989: 46-7; Rorty 1991b: 22, 42-

3; Festenstein 1997a: 122). For Rorty, the relativist of this stripe is in the grip of the

idea that rational appraisal must either be relative to a specific context that lends the

criteria for appraisal their rational force or merely arbitrary.

Yet this picture, of framework- or criteria-governed rationality on the one hand,

and of arbitrariness, on the other, is the image of rationality that Rorty (in common

with other pragmatists) seeks to undermine. The distinction between criticism

governed by communal criteria and vocabulary-transforming criticism is one of

degree, it should be stressed, although Rorty himself sometimes seems to draw it

rather sharply. For example, in discussing the notion of correspondence, he contrasts

the position of particular beliefs within a language game or vocabulary, which can

intelligibly be held to correspond to features of the world, since criteria for judging

this correspondence have been supplied by the vocabulary, with the position of

vocabularies themselves:

When we consider examples of alternative language games – ancient Athenian

politics versus Jefferson’s, the moral vocabulary of Saint Paul versus Freud’s,

the jargon of Newton versus that of Aristotle, the idiom of Blake versus that of

Dryden – it is difficult to think of the world as making one of these better than

another, of the world as deciding between them. When the notion of

‘description of the world’ is moved from the level of criterion-governed

sentences within language games to language games as wholes, games which

we do not choose between by reference to criteria, the idea that the world

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decides which descriptions are true can no longer be given a clear sense. (Rorty

1989: 5)

In this vein, Rorty seems to suggest that there are two radically different kinds of

deliberation and action: that governed by criterial rationality or communal norms, and

the revolutionary or innovative transformation of the norms through the creation of

new vocabularies or language games (cf. Brandom 2000: 173). A special case of this

is the well-known distinction between private, vocabulary-problematising irony, and

communally conformist public solidarity (Rorty 1989).

However, as Robert Brandom has argued (Brandom 2000: 175-179; Rorty 2000:

188, for Rorty’s acceptance of the point), there is continuum, rather than a sharp break

between claims that are communally governed and those that are transformative. For,

he argues a great deal of ordinary linguistic practice is innovative in the sense of

making novel claims, and these novel claims are subject to novel challenge and

justification.

The game of giving and asking for reasons largely consists in the entertainment

of the possibilities for such novel commitments, and the exploration both of

their consequences and of what would be required in order to be entitled to

them. We spend most of our time on untrodden inferential ground. Although

what else a novel claim would commit one to, what it would be incompatible

with, and what would entitle one to it must in some sense be controlled by

shared norms that antecedently govern the concepts one deploys in making such

a claim, in the sense that the inferential moves are answerable for their

correctness to those norms, it is simply a mistake to think of the antecedent

norms as determining the process … Every use of a vocabulary, every

application of a concept in making a claim, both is answerable to norms implicit

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in communal practice – its public dimension, apart from which it cannot mean

anything (though it can cause something) – and transforms these norms by its

novelty. (Brandom 2000: 176, 179; for more on the notion of practices of giving

and accepting reasons, Brandom 1994)

This begins to address the charge of arbitrariness by softening the distinction between

rational action or deliberation understood as governed by communal criteria, and

merely arbitrary ‘plumping’. Successful action or deliberation does not necessarily

involve matching the outcome to a pre-existent criterion of success. Instead, as in the

fallibilist picture above, norms are viewed as subject to change, and vulnerable to

change in the light of novel inferential moves. We do not have to confront the demand

for criteria by either specifying criteria governing all rational agency or accepting

arbitrary decisionism. The distinction between deliberation and action governed by

communal criteria and deliberation and action which are not governed in this way is

not the distinction between the rational and the arbitrary, from this point of view.

Rather, some deliberation and action takes place outside the space filled by these two

options. In Deweyan terms, we can successfully solve a problem without appeal either

to pre-given criteria or resorting to arbitrary ‘plumping’.

What we do is pretty much the same sort of thing we do when we realize that

we do not love our long-term spouse, and that he or she quite possible despises

us – or when we realize that we loathe our job or our profession, and wish to

God we had never taken it on. In the latter cases, we may wind up changing

spouses or jobs, but it is not clear that we have criteria for choosing the new

ones, nor that we choose them arbitrarily. (Rorty 2001: 30)

The charge of arbitrariness, then, flows from the assumption that the only options are

that of criterion-governed rationality (an idea cashed out in terms of communal

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criteria for Rorty) or mere decision. But if these are not the only options, then the

charge loses its grip.

Where Rorty may seem decisively to break from the current of pragmatism

that I am exploring here is in his scepticism about method.13 He has written that there

are two major differences between ‘the classical pragmatists and the neopragmatists’.

The first is that the latter have made the ‘linguistic turn’, and view philosophical

problems through the lens of language rather than ‘experience’. The second is that

earlier pragmatists (including Peirce and Dewey) share an assumption that their

contemporary inheritors do not: ‘that there is something called “the scientific

method”, whose employment increases the likelihood of one’s beliefs being true’

(Rorty 1999: 35). Scepticism about such a method would seem to cut the link between

pragmatism and democracy. If that claim was that the best route to true or warranted

belief involved cooperative inquiry, and that specifying this route furnishes a rationale

for democratic forms of social and political cooperation, then a form of pragmatism

which rejects any such specific method undermines the rationale for this kind of

cooperation. Yet this is not the conclusion that Rorty in fact draws. For while he

argues against (in a phrase of Sidney Hook’s that he cites) ‘one reliable method for

reaching the about the nature of things’, he believes that what this leaves us with is

only the recommendation of a ‘experimental, fallibilist attitude’ (Rorty 1991b: 66):

‘all that remains is praise of certain moral virtues – those of an open society – rather

than any specific epistemic strategy’ (Rorty 1999: 36). It is less the characterisation of

the ideals of cooperation than their relationship to the goal of arriving at well

grounded beliefs that marks the distinction that Rorty wants to draw here: ‘[i]s the sort

of community which is exemplified by groups of scientific inquirers and by

13 For example, see Rorty 1979: 322-42; Rorty 1982: 191-5; Rorty 1991b: 21-110; Festenstein 1997a: 132-40.

14

democratic institutions a means to an end [sc. true beliefs or warranted assertions], or

is the formation of such communities the only goal we need?’ (Rorty 1991b: 43). Yet,

irrespective of the justification (or lack of justification) of the moral virtues of the

open society or the experimental, fallibilist attitude, their content as virtues of

discursive openness, tolerance, and inclusiveness seems to give Rorty’s pragmatism

the political valence that in another mood he claims it lacks.

I do not think that it is open to Rorty at this point to suggest that these are

merely the virtues of his own preferred form of inquiry: so that, for instance, we

could see a believer in divine revelation as deploying an alternative, conflicting but

equally ‘valid’ mode of inquiry. This is precisely the form of relativism as suspension

of appraisal that Rorty’s anti-relativist argument is intended to rebut. (This is not to

say that the Rortyan pragmatist cannot accept that such an ‘alternative’ mode of

inquiry exists, that it can come in authentic and inauthentic forms, be conducted well

or badly, and so on.) On this reading, the gap between Rorty and other proponents of

pragmatist inquiry is less pronounced than is sometimes thought. Yet there are still

significant differences, the most important of which is the kind of justificatory

account brought forward in support of the virtues of inquiry. For Rorty, any such

account should manage without any appeal to the epistemological superiority of these

virtues: that is, without an account of the relationship of these virtues to the

acquisition of true beliefs. The other two positions that I want to discuss by contrast

take precisely this tack.

3.

15

Hilary Putnam has offered a different account of the relationship of the pragmatist

conception of inquiry to democracy, which aims to plug the justificatory gap.14

Developing an account of Dewey’s logic of inquiry, he sets out this logic in the terms

outlined here in the first section. The best way to ‘fix’ beliefs is through the practices

of communities of inquiry, acting under the stimulus of doubt. Their findings should

be treated in a fallibilist spirit, which encompasses not only the specific beliefs arrived

at but the criteria employed to test beliefs and theories. This conception of inquiry

applies equally to ‘factual’ and ‘evaluative’ matters: as Putnam writes, Dewey thought

that ‘we have learned something about how to conduct inquiry in general, and that

what applies to intelligently conducted inquiry in general applies to ethical inquiry in

particular’ (Putnam 1992: 186, emphasis removed; cf. Putnam 1994: 175). 15

Communities of inquiry must be democratic, the argument then runs, since

particular characteristics of democracy are required for the cognitive success of their

enterprise: that is, a community that wants to undertake ethical and practical inquiry

‘should organize itself in accordance with democratic standards and ideals, not only

because they are good in themselves (and they are) but because they are the

prerequisites for the application of intelligence to the inquiry’ (Putnam 1994: 175).

Putnam gives three reasons for this. First, ‘scientific procedure in general’ requires

that hypotheses and points of view must be open to scrutiny, challenge and revision.

This requires such fundamental democratic institutions as freedom of thought and

speech (Putnam 1992: 188; Putnam 1994: 172, 175). Second, ‘privilege inevitably

produces cognitive distortion’ (Putnam 1992: 189; Putnam 1994: 217). Here Putnam

14 It should be noted that two of the important texts were written with Ruth Anna Putnam: Putnam 1994: 198-241. 15 This is a major theme in Putnam’s work: see Putnam 1990, 1992, 1994, 2004 (together with the invaluable introductions by James Conant to some of these). In the current connection, I have examined some of Hilary Putnam’s moral and political philosophy in Festenstein 1995; Festenstein 1997a: 169-86; see also Shusterman 1997, and (particularly on the relationship of Putnam’s ‘reconsideration of Deweyan democracy’ to the historical Dewey, which is not discussed here) Westbrook 2005: 180-7.

16

alludes to Dewey’s argument, set out in The Public and Its Problems against reliance

on government by a class of expert technocrats. Such a class of putative experts ‘is

inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private

interests and private knowledge, which in social matters is not knowledge at all’

(Dewey 1927: 365).16

The openness that for Putnam is the key characteristic of a democratic

‘discourse ethics’ furnishes a third reason for believing that practical and ethical

inquiry must take this form. For ‘the materials to be used in the defense’ of

democracy ‘cannot be circumscribed in advance’ (Putnam 1992: 189). Rather, ‘we do

not know what our needs and interests are and what we are capable of until we engage

in politics’. A ‘corollary of this is that ‘there can be no final answer to the question

“How should we live?”, and that we should, therefore, always leave it open to further

discussion and experimentation. And that is precisely why we need democracy’

(Putnam 1992: 189). Once we recognise the provisionality and fallibility of any

answer to this question, we should see that how we approach answering it needs to be

guided by a pragmatist conception of inquiry: that is, by a conception that explicitly

exposes the criteria for a successful answer to scrutiny, test and revision – where these

are justified.

However, the claim that democracy is required because (and where) there is

no final answer to the problem of how to organise collective life needs more support

than this argument provides. The fallibilist thought that there is no final answer to this

question may lead in the direction of a radical libertarianism, which in the name of

individual freedom to make one’s mind up allows a plethora of non-democratic social

forms (cf. Kukathas 2003). Precisely since we cannot answer in advance the question

16 For the background to this argument see especially Westbrook 1991. I discuss its relationship to Dewey’s democratic theory more generally in Festenstein 1997b.

17

‘How should we live?’, this response to Putnam runs, we should allow individuals to

live in all sorts of ways, including non-democratic ones. My point is not that this is an

alternative conclusion that we should accept (cf. Festenstein 2005: 93-5), only that

this ‘epistemological’ argument does not supply the resources to rebut it. Here the

Putnam-inspired pragmatist may respond by recalling the scope of the notion of

inquiry: if an illiberal or undemocratic group really wishes to think of itself as seeking

out and exploring a conception of the good life, as inquiring in this sense, then it

should be governed by the pragmatist’s canonical virtues (cf. Talisse 2005). So while

there may of course be a variety of ‘answers’ to the question of how to organise

collective life, only those that embody these virtues can in fact be taken to be

inquiring into that question. This line, however, requires that the pragmatist say more

about what grip inquiry in this specific sense should then have on someone inclined to

come up with a non-liberal, non-democratic answer to the question of collective

organisation.

4.

We can understand the third contemporary version of the argument for democracy as

a requirement of the pragmatist conception of inquiry, which has been given a lucid

statement by Cheryl Misak, as an attempt to answer this question (Misak 2000). For

this account, the active search for well-grounded beliefs about how to deal with social

and political problems entails a set of non-discretionary commitments on the part of

anyone who wants such beliefs. Why search for such beliefs? The first step is that

such a search is intelligible, in the sense that ethical and political beliefs and positions

are not viewed as insulated from rational appraisal but as ‘genuine beliefs with truth

18

as their aim’ (Misak 2000: 98; cf. Misak 2004). This rests on what Misak calls a ‘low

profile’ conception of truth, not as correspondence, but (in Peircean terms) as belief

that is indefeasible in a process of inquiry – ‘if a belief is indefeasible, it would stand

up to whatever could be thrown at it, by whatever community of inquirers’ (Misak

2004: 10; cf. Misak 2000: 49). Truth is the aim of specific practices of inquiry, but is

one that we achieve only by meeting the more local aims of those practices: by

arriving at beliefs that have explanatory and predictive power, are fruitful, are

consistent with other well-grounded beliefs, and so on. If a belief can successfully

meet all of these local aims, then it is true – there is nothing more we can ask of it

(Misak 2004: 14).

The search for true beliefs involves pragmatist canons of inquiry: no belief is held

to be a priori certain or beyond the reach of criticism and revision. The search for a

well-grounded belief involves testing claims against as wide a range of different

experiences as possible. In particular, it requires us to seek out and attend to different

perspectives and arguments, in order to test and, if necessary, revise our current

conceptions. Our beliefs and judgements aim at being true, and being true, on this

pragmatist account, means fitting with reasons and experience. This apparently

innocuous condition has critical bite:

Engaging in genuine moral inquiry – searching for principles and for particular

judgements which will not be susceptible to recalcitrant experience and

argument – requires that we take our beliefs to be responsive to new arguments

and sensibilities about what is good, cruel, kind, oppressive, worthwhile, or just.

Those who neglect or denigrate the experiences of others because of their

gender, skin colour, or sexual orientation are adopting a very bad means for

19

arriving at true or rational beliefs. They can be criticised for failing to aim at

truth properly. (Misak 2000: 104)17

This general methodological principle provides support for democratic political

deliberation: ‘[d]eliberation is justified because it is the best way of exposing and

communicating the reasons that matter and democratic deliberation is justified

because we need to expose all of the reasons that matter not just a subset of them’

(Misak 2004: 15). We test our political principles and judgements by exposing them

to as wide a range as possible of different arguments, reasons, and experience. Public

discussion open to all, together with appropriate mechanisms for the implementation,

criticism and revision of decisions arrived at, seems to provide the best means for this.

And to duck this process of public discussion, then, is to evade the responsibility to

act on the basis of the best judgements that one can reach. As Robert Talisse puts it in

his version of this argument, to hold a belief is to be committed to democratic

deliberation, in some form, and to viewing others as fellow deliberators and seeing

deliberators as ‘equal participants in the discussion, with equal access to the

conversation, whose voices must be listened to and whose considerations must be

addressed’ (Talisse 2005: 105). For democratic deliberation to achieve ‘politically

wise results’ (Talisse 2005: 112) requires that it be undertaken in the right spirit.

Talisse outlines a set of deliberative virtues which tend to foster in individuals the

intellectual dispositions requisite for deliberation and hence wise beliefs, including

honesty, modesty, charity, and integrity. The claim here is not that every individual is

equally well equipped to arrive at a ‘politically wise’ answer to a moral or political

17 An important dimension of Misak’s discussion, which I won’t deal with here, is the concern to refute the non-cognitivist for whom moral and political positions can only be mere matters of decision or assertion of will. In different ways this is a concern of Rorty’s and Putnam’s too. And see Talisse 2005, for a complementary approach.

20

problem. Rather, ‘truth requires us to listen to others, and anyone might be an expert’

(Misak 2000: 96).

None of this entails making the unwarranted and distinct assertions that there

will always be convergence on a single point of view on every issue, or that decisions

will not sometimes have to be made in the absence of conclusive reasons pointing one

way or the other on some contested issue (cf. Misak 2000: 136-154). In this ‘modest’

rather than ‘strenuous’ cognitivism, moral judgements ‘aspire to truth and have

varying chances of attaining it’ (Misak 2000: 144). But it doesn’t follow that all moral

and political questions have single determinate right answers. Decisions may have to

be made in the absence of a determinate rational solution, and in the light of a range

of evaluative considerations. Yet we should be guided by our beliefs in arriving at

such judgements; and that means that we should respect the pragmatist, and hence,

democratic canons of inquiry.

This argument rests on a claim that is conditional but thought to be fairly

uncontroversial: that we value the truth (in the ‘low profile’ sense outlined here), and

so value the conditions under which we can arrive at true beliefs. This is a premise

that we may reject, but, Misak thinks, on the whole will not: she claims that it is

‘relatively uncontentious’ that ‘everybody claims to be after’ true beliefs (Misak

2000: 107). It may be true that well-grounded beliefs are what we are after, if we

view ourselves principally as inquirers, but it is much more contentious to think that

we chase true beliefs at the expense of pursuing other interests and goals. Political

agents may put other considerations, such as building coalitions, flattering friends and

avoiding embarrassment ahead of adhering to the conditions for the production of a

true belief. Furthermore, one of the contexts in which we may question whether the

epistemic virtues should be paramount in guiding political action is when (we know

21

that) these virtues are unevenly diffused across deliberators. For you to deliberate

conscientiously with integrity, honesty, charity and modesty, while I energetically

pursue my narrow self-interest may result in a worse political outcome (which may be

an epistemically worse outcome) than if you were equally energetic on your own

behalf. In response, the deliberative democrat may rely on an appeal to ‘endogeneous

mechanisms’ within the social psychology of public discussion that make the

energetic pursuit of self-interest awkward: so it is meant to be difficult in public

deliberation to offer as a reason for all to adopt a policy that it just suits me.18

However, I am not sure that this is a line that proponents of the argument for

democratic deliberation as epistemically valuable such as Misak and Talisse should

embrace. If what is at stake is the cognitively best political outcome – a true belief

about what to do – then this kind of repositioning on the part of deliberators in the

face of what (they think) other deliberators will find acceptable isn’t an obviously

cognitively beneficial strategy, since it seems to smack of ‘group think’ and the

suppression of that range of different arguments and experience that is invoked here

as the means for testing beliefs.

One response to this objection is in effect concessive, allowing that this

objection points to a limit of the pragmatist account, but that this limit should not be

understood as a flaw. Pragmatism is concerned to show that the search for truth in

inquiry imposes certain constraints on inquirers, but this argument is not the only, or

even primary, way in which the beliefs and actions of others can be praised or

criticised (Misak 2000: 124). In thinking about why a democracy should be inclusive

and accommodating, we should appeal to different level of argument. First, we may

appeal to ‘substantive principles of morality’ such as a judgement that others ought to

18 See Elster 1997; many of the essays collected in Elster 1998.

22

be treated with consideration and respect. Second, particularly in the case of

deliberative democracy, we may judge that ‘listening to others increases the

likelihood that law and policy will be accepted’ (Misak 2000: 125). It is important to

make the distinction between these levels of argument if we are to avoid concluding,

as Seyla Benhabib does at one point (Benhabib 1992: 37-38) that the reason that we

ought not to inflict unnecessary suffering on others is that doing so would undermine

the possibility of dialogue with them. In other words, the pragmatist can and should

allow the weight and normativity of a range of considerations in practical deliberation

independent of the higher-order judgement about the necessary conditions for inquiry.

However, the values on which democratic inclusiveness is based are independent of

the preconditions of inquiry. The commitment to inquiry gets us only as far as what

may be called non-democratic inclusiveness: the inquirer must be open to the input of

all, but that is different from holding that all should have a say in the output, since it is

open to the inquirer to dismiss the opinions and interests that are expressed, on the

grounds that they are flawed, not properly thought through, ignorant of relevant facts,

and so on.

I think that this difficulty appears as sharply if we consider another response to

this objection. For this sort of pragmatist may respond that pragmatism provides some

critical leverage on this instrumentally-oriented political agent, and this is exactly the

point of the pragmatist account of truth and deliberation. After all, even if I

concentrate on coalition-building and vote winning, I will want to do so on the basis

of true beliefs: this commitment, and so what follows from it, should not be regarded

as dispensable. However, this response does not get to the core of the objection,

which is that in any given case it may be sensible (rational, justified) for me to

overlook the point of view of various particular others. And, if that is so, it is not clear

23

what grip the consideration that in general I should arrange things so that my beliefs

are tested against as wide as possible range of experience and argument has or should

have.

5.

The focus of this essay has been the robustness of the philosophical bridge between

the pragmatist conception of inquiry and democracy, especially considered in its

deliberative aspect. For proponents of the ‘epistemic’ view of this bridge, such as

Putnam and Misak, for whom inquiry is the search for true or well-grounded beliefs,

governed by norms of openness, fallibility and inclusiveness, the difficulty

encountered is showing how the kind of inclusiveness invoked is securely democratic.

A proponent of what we may call a ‘communitarian’ conception of this bridge, such

as Rorty, does not meet this problem not (as I have argued) by virtue of lacking a

normatively significant conception of inquiry, but through suggesting that we

abandon the idea of independent cognitive criteria for the success of this inquiry.

From the epistemic point of view, the virtues of inquiry become merely arbitrary, on

this account, and the space for pragmatism, as the account of why they are not

arbitrary, disappears.

24

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