ELEMENTS OF PRAGMATISM

24

Harvey Cormier

WHAT IS THE USE OF CALLING PUTNAM A

PRAGMATIST?

But you aren’t a pragmatist? No. For I am not saying that a proposition is

true if it is useful.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology

Sometimes Hilary Putnam sounds like a pragmatist, sometimes not. For one

of the fairly long periods between his famous changes of mind, he described

his philosophical outlook as “pragmatic realism,”1 but even during that time

he argued against positions associated with both historical and contemporary

figures who have called themselves pragmatists, and since then he has

undergone another change of outlook. He still cites John Dewey as an

influence, and as recently as 2007 he has remarked that he is “not unhappy”

to be called a pragmatist as long as his views are not being assimilated to

Richard Rorty’s;2 but he has compared his outlook as much with the views of

1. He renames the “internal realism” of his middle-period “pragmatic realism” at Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1987), 17.

2. Hilary Putnam, 2007 University College Dublin Ulysses Medal Lecture, “The Fact/Value Dichotomy and its Critics,” unpublished. Thanks to Professor Putnam for generously sending me a copy.

1

the later Wittgenstein as with those of Dewey or William James,3 and there

are good reasons not to think of Wittgenstein as a pragmatist.4

Of course, it is hard to say whether any given thinker is a pragmatist

because different “pragmatists” have said different things. But since Putnam

has had a fair amount to say about William James’s philosophy, we can

compare Putnam’s and James’s views, and then, at least, we can find out

whether Putnam is a Jamesian pragmatist. I try to do this in what follows. In

the end it seems to me that even though he has been right to resist the label,

Putnam could call himself a Jamesian pragmatist if he wanted to. He has

actually been quite explicit in his rejection of James’s pragmatic theory of

truth, and I will examine this rejection here, arguing that Putnam’s logical

approach to the issue of truth leads him to misunderstand how James’s

pragmatism works in a fundamental way. I think that if he reconsidered that

theory, he might well feel welcome in The Metaphysical Club.

I

To argue for this conclusion I need to do two things: First, I have to spell out a

key tenet of Jamesian pragmatism that Putnam seems to me to have trouble

with; then I have to explain why Putnam’s logically-based approach to

philosophical issues causes that trouble.

3. For example, in “The Face of Cognition,” Part One, Lecture Three of Hilary Putnam, The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), Putnam argues that his new “naïve” or natural realism, a practical position between reductionism or verificationism and the embrace of metaphysics, parallels Wittgenstein’s treatment of language in terms of the variety of practices in which our terms play different roles.

4. Russell Goodman’s excellent book Wittgenstein and William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) describes both the large influence James had on Wittgenstein and the significant differences between the two thinkers’ views.

2

Thing one I can do in a few words: Putnam seems to me not quite to

have broken with what John Dewey used to call “the spectator theory of

knowledge,” though criticism of this “theory” was at the heart of James’s

pragmatism. Here, in an underappreciated 1878 essay criticizing Herbert

Spencer—an essay Ralph Barton Perry described both as “perhaps the key to

all of James’s later thought” and “the germinal idea of James’s psychology,

epistemology, and philosophy of religion”5—James describes and rejects the

spectator theory:

The knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foot-hold anywhere, and

passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing.

The knower is an actor, and coefficient of the truth on one side, whilst on the

other he registers the truth which he helps to create. Mental interests,

hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are bases for human action—action

which to a great extent transforms the world—help to make the truth which

they declare. In other words, there belongs to mind, from its birth upwards, a

spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game, and not a mere looker-on; and its

judgments of the should-be, its ideals, cannot be peeled off from the body of

the cogitandum as if they were excrescences or meant, at most, survival.6

Our true knowledge and the minds that contain it are not items that passively

reflect a world of objective realities distinct from them. Knowing is not, or is

at least not “simply,” a matter of mirroring, copying, or corresponding to

5. “Remarks” is found at William James, Collected Essays and Reviews, ed. Ralph Barton Perry (Boston: Longmans, Green, 1920), 43–68. Perry offers these two appreciations of the paper at p. viii and p. 43, respectively. This article is also reprinted in William James, Essays in Philosophy, ed. F. H. Burkhardt, F. Bowers, and I. Skrupskelis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).

6. James, Collected Essays and Reviews, 67.

3

something else apart from the knowing subject, something “simply existing”

that the knower finds waiting and then passively records in theories.

We knowers live and do things in the world—we are “in the game”—

and our active, goal-driven lives are among the things that shape and

reshape both the world and the truth we know about it. Our knowledge is a

thing not just for finding but also for making. It is our fur, fangs, and claws,

our toolkit for survival—and not by any means just for survival, since we

individuals have developed for ourselves over the centuries, and we continue

to develop, lots of new interests that we use knowledge to serve. Those

interests start out subjective, but they can spread widely, and some have

even begun to seem like human interests, or things no thinking, feeling

human being could fail to care about.

James insisted over the years that our understanding of both knowers

and known things must take into account this contingent, observable fact

about the way knowledge actually exists and works in the world. And this is

the pragmatic idea that Putnam does not quite appreciate or accept. In the

end, Putnam holds on to the spectator theory.

II

This will seem unlikely, to say the least. Putnam has often, in more than one

period of his thinking, criticized the picture of the mind and the world as

items found always on distant, opposite ends of a quasivisual copying,

correspondence, or mirroring relation. In the introduction to one of his best

known books, he claimed that:

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the mind does not simply ‘copy’ a world which admits of description by One

True Theory. But my view is not a view in which the mind makes up the world,

either. . . . [T]he mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world.

(Or, to make the metaphor even more Hegelian, the Universe makes up the

Universe—with minds—collectively—playing a special role in the making up.)7

The mind would seem to be “in the game” according to this story, as it plays

a “special role” in making the reality of which it is a part. Putnam is

introducing here his middle period view, according to which “‘objects’

themselves are as much made as discovered, as much products of our

conceptual invention as of the ‘objective’ factor in experience, the factor

independent of our will.”8 This story, “internal” or “pragmatic” realism,

features objects of knowledge reminiscent of the “objects as they appear,” as

opposed to the “objects as they are in themselves,” found in Kant’s first

Critique.9 But Putnam does not argue, as Kant at least sometimes seems to,

that there are two worlds, one internal, mind dependent, and knowable while

the other is external, mind independent, and unknowable. Instead, Putnam

rejects the very idea “that there is a coherent ‘external’ perspective, a theory

which is simply true ‘in itself’, apart from all possible observers.”10 He wants,

more Hegelianly, to challenge any effort to draw the traditional distinction

between mind and world, inner and outer, subjective and objective. Thus he

7. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), xi.

8. Ibid., 54. 9. Putnam argues at Reason, Truth and History, 60–62 that he and Kant both try to

show the meaninglessness of talk about a world beyond thought and perception. He argues that Kant is best read as his kind of “internal realist.”

10. Ibid., 55. Of course, it is not perfectly clear that Kant is trying to establish the existence of two worlds when he distinguishes the empirical or phenomenal from the noumenal. Henry Allison’s Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) offers a well known argument for the idea that Kant understands these realms to be two aspects of one world or reality.

5

seems to be trying even harder than Kant did to close any transcendental

gap across which knowers might look at the known world. How could this

effort be compatible with the spectator theory?

Moreover, the preceding quotes are from Putnam’s middle period.

Since then he has left “internal” realism behind for “direct” or “natural”

realism, an even more hands-on account that he attributes more directly to

William James himself. Even as he explicitly rejects James’s pragmatic theory

of truth, he endorses James’s affirmation of the everyday real objects that we

perceive and interact with. For example, James argues:

I am a natural realist. The world per se may be likened to a cast of beans on a

table. By themselves they spell nothing. An onlooker may group them as he

likes. . . . Whatever he does, so long as he takes account of them, his account

is neither false nor irrelevant. If neither, why not call it true? It fits the beans-

minus-him and expresses the total fact, of beans-plus-him. . . . All that Schiller

and I contend for is that there is no “truth” without some interest, and that

non-intellectual interests [that is, interests in things apart from mapping and

counting] play a part as well as intellectual ones. Whereupon we are accused

of denying the beans, or denying being in any way constrained by them! It’s

too silly!11

Putnam endorses this remark, according to which mind-independent reality

has to be out there beyond our language, interests, and knowledge, doing its

part to make truths true and to constrain what we say.

Objects for middle-period Putnam were something like Kant’s

empirically real, representation objects; they did not exist only subjectively, 11. James’s letter to Dickinson S. Miller, dated August 5, 1907, in The Letters of William

James, vol. 2 (Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1920), 295; cited at Putnam, The Threefold Cord, 5.

6

in the minds of particular observers, but they were relative to the perceptions

and conceptually organized knowledge of beings like us. There would be no

such things if there were no human observers or if our theories and

perceptions were entirely different. (Think of constellations of stars.) But

prephilosophically we think of “real” objects as existences on which our true

thoughts depend, not as things that depend on our thoughts for existence.

That independence of human thinking and acting is the distinctive

characteristic of the (nonmental) real, and without the real we have nothing

to point to in explanation of our scientific success or in support of our moral

praise and criticism. There are real gold coins and fake, real moral exemplars

and real moral monsters, and the truth about all of them depends on their

being independent of what we individuals think or say. Or, at least, so say the

ordinary persons on the street. (Unless they are on their way to their first

freshman philosophy class, where they are just as likely to say the opposite,

in my experience.)

Putnam in his latest period wants to return to these ordinary intuitions,

and he has therefore renounced his middle period Kantianism. He says that

he has undertaken a journey from the familiar to the familiar and entered a

second naïveté.12 In no sense of “dependent” are all real objects dependent

on our thinking and perceiving, but neither are real objects unknowable

denizens of the world beyond an “interface” of perception or conception. We

cannot so much as make sense of either of these possibilities. Instead, our

cognitive powers reach all the way to independent real things.

12. Putnam, The Threefold Cord, 15.

7

As Putnam has held during all three of his philosophical periods,

intentionality “ain’t in the head.”13 We can speak or know about things only if

we have perceptual contacts with them; and in those events of perception,

we do not perceive mental perceptions that copy objects, we perceive

objects. External objects do cause perceptions or brain-states “inside”

individual thinkers, but both inner and outer objects also play roles in public,

social relations among individuals, relations into which we are initiated when

we learn what we should say of those objects. And now Putnam has given up

the sophisticated Kantian idea that the objects we speak of depend for their

being on our perceptions, or conceptually organized batches of them. In his

second naïveté, Putnam holds that mind-independent things in the world not

only cause perceptions but exert what John McDowell calls “rational control”

over them and our perceptual judgments. Because of this we can make

genuinely correct or incorrect judgments about the world we perceive.14 Our

perceptions are “conceptualized”; like our sentences and thoughts, they are

best understood not as hidden, inner mental things but rather in terms of

their roles in our later-Wittgensteinian forms of life. We are initiated into

perception just as much as we are into our languages, and this initiation

takes place in ways that involve public contact with extra-mental things.

Perceptions, the real perceptions that are intrinsically different from illusions

and hallucinations, are less like passively received mirror images and more

13. See Hilary Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 215–271. That paper, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’” lays out Putnam’s “externalism,” according to which linguistic meaning is tied to real objects in the natural world rather than being a matter of internal mental states or states of the brain.

14. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) is mainly a theory of experience that allows the facts that constitute the world to exert rational control on human thought.

8

like parts of games, which are norm-governed, public activities containing

representations and objects alike.15

Considering all this, how can I charge either middle- or latest-period

Putnam with having a spectator theory of knowledge? All along, as he has

tried to keep subjectivism and skepticism at bay, Putnam has tried to picture

knowers as being in cognitive touch with the things they know. And especially

in his new explicitly Jamesian phase, that cognitive connection has been an

active connection, one described in terms of what we human beings do and

how we live. How is any of this compatible with the spectator theory as it is

opposed by Dewey and James?

III

To appreciate Putnam the spectator theorist, we have to think not of his

praise of James but his criticisms. He has described James’s pragmatism as

having a “fatal” flaw; in James’s theory, “the truth value of every statement

about the past depends on what happens in the future—and that cannot be

right.”16 We can see this clearly, says Putnam, if we draw a connection—

disregarding James’s explicit warning to avoid doing this17—between James’s

idea of pragmatic truth and his metaphysical and epistemological position,

“radical empiricism.”18

15. Cf. Putnam, The Threefold Cord, 153–154, for a discussion of McDowell’s “disjunctive” theory of perception.

16. See Hilary Putnam, “James’s Theory of Truth,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, ed. Ruth Anna Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 182.

17. William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 6. (This text is hereafter cited as PMT.)

18. This paragraph and a number of the ones following it are adapted from Harvey Cormier, The Truth Is What Works (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 130–50.

9

James’s pragmatic truths are, according to Putnam, the ideas or

judgments that meet and are verified—actually, manifestly verified—by what

radical empiricism identifies as “conjunctive relations” or “conjunctive

experiences.” They connect what we have imagined, thought, or believed

with the experiential realities we encounter as we act. If my thoughts of and

beliefs about Memorial Hall on the Harvard campus allow me to take

someone there and have, as we walk around, only satisfying experiences of

similarity to what I imagine and remember, then my earlier mental pictures

and thoughts count as cognitions, and my beliefs are verified. But

disconcerting experiences would have shown that those thoughts were not

cognitions of an external object but rather subjective parts of my own

internal mental processes. Those earlier ideas would have wound up a lot of

“flat psychological surface” unconnected to an outer world.19 Thus, thanks to

this experiential verification process, some truth about Memorial Hall is, as

James would say, “made.” However, if nothing like this verification process

actually takes place, then my ideas are not made true and thus cannot be

true.20

Obviously, nothing like this can happen to many beliefs about the past.

Putnam offers the example of a belief concerning whether Lizzie Borden killed

her parents. James distinguishes between what was real in the past and what

is true about the past, so that Borden either did kill her parents or did not,

irrespective of what anybody may experience in the future.21 If there arises

irresistible future evidence that Borden did commit the murders, then, on

19. James, PMT, 272, cited at Putnam, “James’s Theory of Truth,” 174.20. Putnam, “James’s Theory of Truth,” 172–79.21. Putnam, “James’s Theory of Truth,” 182–83. James, at PMT 108, 272–73, and 320–

25, among other places, draws a general distinction between the real and the true, and he accuses some of his critics of confusing the two in their criticisms.

10

James’s pragmatic theory, “‘L. B. is the killer’ is true” itself “becomes” or is

“made” true, even if Borden did not really kill anyone and “L. B. is the killer”

is still false. Or it might be that she did it, thus making “L. B. is the killer”

true, even if the judgment that she did never “becomes true” by getting

verified, and “‘L. B. is the killer’ is true” turns out to be false. Either way,

James’s theory winds up “contradicting the principle that, for any judgment p,

p is equivalent to the judgment that p is true.”22

And surely there are also judgments like this about the present. In

another paper, Putnam argues that since “we cannot have any causal

interaction of any kind with space-time regions outside our light cone (i.e.,

with regions such that a signal from those regions would have to travel faster

than light to reach us)” it follows that, concerning even the present moment,

“We can know that there are some things which are possible . . . but which

are such that if they are the case, then we cannot know that they are the

case.”23 For example: “There do not happen to be any stars arranged as the

vertices of a regular 100-gon (in a region of space otherwise free of stars).”24

This “statement” may or may not be true, but we know as well as we know

any scientific thing that we will never be able to verify it.

It follows that James’s kind of pragmatic verificationism can be no

more than partly right. Pragmatists are right to connect “empirical concepts”

with perceptual justifications, so that a concept like “chair” could not be

explained to a being that lacked a body to sit or perceive with; but “our

conceptual powers” extend beyond the verifiable. Thanks to logical

22. Putnam, “James’s Theory of Truth,” 182–83.23. Hilary Putnam, “Pragmatism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95 (1995):

291–306. The passage cited is from 294.24. Putnam, “Pragmatism,” 294.

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quantifiers, we can conceive of realities that exist out beyond our verification

processes, and we know of truths that cannot possibly be verified or shown to

“work.” We cannot know that these truths are true, but, thanks to logic alone,

we know that they are out there, with the realities, independent of our

verifications.

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IV

James was admittedly not much of a logician himself; he called himself

“almost blind mathematically and logically.”25 But he described our “great

systems of logical and mathematical truth” as composing an “ideal order” or

abstract reality with which our ideas must agree “under penalty of endless

inconsistency and frustration.”26 Logical principles were as real as anything

else we human beings had to use or to struggle with. Still, his biggest target

for pragmatic criticism was what he called “diseased abstractionism,” or the

tendency among some philosophers to picture logical principles, truth, and

meanings as if they were knowable and real independently of the struggles of

human life.27

His preeminent rationalistic opponents in this struggle were Hegel and

Hegelians like Royce, whom he took to describe a Parmenidean “block

universe,” or a world without real individuality or future possibility. Their view

seemed to James to treat all the messy, painful, and plural experiences of

individual human beings as insignificant and even illusory by contrast with

the unified, rational, rationally knowable, and eternally good universe that

seemed to contain them. Nothing could, and nothing should, really change in

such a rational, orderly world. 28 James’s pragmatism thus exists mainly as an

anti-Hegelianism.

In this contest James is debating philosophers, and he therefore uses

the language of traditional philosophy. But it is a mistake to evaluate his

theories exclusively by the standards of epistemology and metaphysics.

25. William James, Some Problems of Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1940), 183.

26. James, PMT, 101.27. James describes Russell’s view as displaying “diseased abstractionism” at PMT, 318.28. The opening chapter of James’s Pragmatism (PMT, 9–26) establishes this theme.

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Instead of attempts to lay out what is undeniably real in the universe, James’s

writings, many of which originated as popular public lectures, are a rallying

cry. James wants to help individuals to acknowledge the evils of their

circumstances, to stop hating their own mistakes and fallibilities, to overcome

their despair, and to see how, especially if they think of themselves as free

and work to share their ideas and motivations with others, they can develop

power to change the world around them.29 Living in an open universe with a

changeable future, and in societies that amplify their efforts, individual

human beings can fight, can be pivot-points of history, and can make

genuinely bad things better.

James’s single most famous remark is probably the one he made in his

diary describing the beginning of his recovery from the obsessive thought

that his acts were ineffectual. He wrote on April 30, 1870, as he realized that

at least his attention was in his control:

My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. I will . . . voluntarily

cultivate the feeling of moral freedom. . . . I will go a step further with my will,

not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and

creative power.30

James will henceforth think of himself as a free human agent, focusing his

attention on his volitions and their results. This theory will change what he is,

and this change will then result in more and more powerful volitions. And

pragmatism is the philosophical self understanding of this developing and

struggling organism. It is James’s way of seeing his thoughts and beliefs as

29. Cormier, The Truth Is What Works, is an exploration of this idea.30. William James, The Letters of William James, vol. I., edited by his son, Henry James

(Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920), 148.

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tools that he has made for himself in his struggles to make real changes in

the real world.

But though the Hegelians were his main opponents, James also had to

battle a brand new group of in-some-ways abstractionist thinkers, the

“analytic” philosophers. G. E. Moore, in “Professor James’ ‘Pragmatism,’”

criticized James’s verificationism:

One historian thinks that a certain event took place, and another that it did

not; and both may admit that they cannot verify their idea. Subsequent

historians may, no doubt, sometimes be able to verify one or the other. . . .

But is it certain that this will always happen? . . . Surely the probability is that

in the case of an immense number of events, with regard to which we should

like to know whether they happened or not, it never will be possible for any

man to verify either the one hypothesis or the other. Yet it may be certain that

either the events in question did happen or did not.31

The ideas we generate and verify for our own benefit are one thing, the

reality we sometimes know by means of those ideas is another. There is no

necessary connection between the two. Getting truth is finding something

that somehow matches that reality, not creating “verified” idea-tools. As

Bertrand Russell observes,

the truth ‘A exists’, if it is a truth, is concerned with A, who in that case is a

fact; and to say that ‘A exists’ may be true [because useful or verifiable] even

if A does not exist is to give a meaning to ‘truth’ which robs it of all interest.

Dr Schiller [James’s fellow pragmatist] is fond of attacking the view that truth

must correspond with reality; we may conciliate him by agreeing that his

31. G. E. Moore, Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 103.

15

truth, at any rate, need not correspond with reality. But we shall have to add

that reality is to us more interesting than such truth.32

Ultimately the analytics think that by analyzing the logical meanings of truth,

knowledge, and reality, we can learn all we philosophically need to know

about the real and its relations to our theories. In particular we will see that

details about which beliefs benefit us and how are entirely beside the point.

V

James wrote rather impatiently to Peirce in 1909 that “I am a-logical, if not

illogical, and glad to be so when I find Bertie Russell trying to excogitate what

true knowledge means, in the absence of any concrete universe surrounding

the knower and the known. Ass!”33 James was unrelentingly critical of

Russell’s effort to define truth as a matter of pure abstract logic:

He attempts this feat by limiting the discussion to three terms only, a

proposition, its content, and an object, abstracting from the whole context of

associated realities in which such terms are found in every case of actual

knowing. . . . There is no problem at all in truth and falsehood; . . . “some

propositions are true and some false, just as some roses are red and some

white; . . . belief is a certain attitude towards propositions, which is called

knowledge when they are true, error when they are false”—and he seems to

think that when once this insight is reached the question may be closed

forever!34

32. Bertrand Russell, Philosophical Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), 123.33. Cited at Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Nashville:

Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), 368.34. James, PMT, 318.

16

James thought that the what of these philosophical abstractions, however

rigorously investigated, answers no interesting questions without an account

of their how or their why. Why bother getting truths? How do we use them in

the fight to make our lives worth living? The logical meaning of “truth” is only

interesting if it helps us see the practical meaning—the significance, the

value in life—of the thing called by that name.

James was especially skeptical regarding Russell’s abstract

“propositions”:

I do not say that for certain logical purposes it may not be useful to treat

propositions as absolute entities, with truth or falsehood inside of them

respectively, or to make of a complex like ‘that-Caesar-is-dead’ a single term

and call it a ‘truth.’ But the ‘that’ here . . . sometimes . . . means the fact that,

and sometimes the belief that, Caesar is no longer living. When I then call the

belief true, I am told that the truth means the fact; when I claim the fact also, I

am told that my definition has excluded the fact. . . .35

If propositional logic is helpful, propositions are as real as anything else; but

we will not understand truth if we get confused about where propositions

come from and how they work. Is a proposition something we generate as we

are driven by circumstances to think? That is, is it some kind of belief?36 Or is 35. James, PMT, 317.36. At William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950), 2:286–87,

James agrees with Franz Brentano that “conception and belief . . . are two different fundamental psychic phenomena” and that “the mere thought of the object may exist as something quite distinct from the belief in its reality.” He goes on to allow that the content or object of thought is a “proposition,” a combination of ideas by means of a copula that can be believed or disbelieved. But James also says of the propositional objects of our thought, “Any object which remains uncontradicted is ipso facto believed and posited as absolute reality.” (James, Principles of Psychology, 2:289; emphasis in original.) That is, unbelieved “propositions” are no more than beliefs at odds with other beliefs—beliefs about things in an inner world of imaginings rather than the outer spatial world. Again: “all propositions . . . are believed through the very fact of being conceived, unless they clash with other propositions believed at the same time. . . .” (James, Principles of Psychology, 2: 290; emphasis in original, once again.) Propositions are not pure logical entities distinct from the psychic activities of

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it a “fact,” a reality, part of the circumstances driving us to believe? Or is the

bearer of truth something else entirely, a being of pure logic that exists,

waiting to have its truth or falsity discovered, in a timeless realm

independent of both human thinkers and the world of objects and events

those thinkers live in? In his battle with Russell, James is most critical of the

last alternative. What is true is not a “bare logical entity” but a “belief” or an

“idea,” a “postulate,” or, perhaps most tellingly, a “hypothesis.” James uses

all of these terms at different times to mean the same thing, namely, a “rule

for action” or a guide to making life better, a thing that we create and then

test as we try to remake our world.37 When these things work or provide good

results, we have truths. Before we create those real-life guides to action,

there is no truth because there is nothing to work this way or to be true.

real human thinkers.37. James adopts Peirce’s “principle of pragmatism” and his related idea that beliefs are

rules for action at PMT, 29.

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VI

Putnam’s critique of James’s verificationism is strikingly similar to Russell’s

and Moore’s criticisms, though he does acknowledge that James rejected the

idea of purely abstract propositions, and he accordingly puts his

antipragmatic criticisms in terms of “judgments” and “statements” that

presumably have actually been made by someone on the basis of some kind

of evidence. And there was, of course, evidence in the case of Lizzie Borden:

there were well known family quarrels over money; the ashes of one of

Borden’s dresses were found in the furnace a few days after the killings; the

maid was seen departing with a mysterious parcel. Borden was acquitted, but

there was evidence enough so that her neighbors in Fall River did something,

namely, ostracize Lizzie for the rest of her life.

But if we turn back to Putnam’s giant stellar polygons beyond all our

possible perceptions, do we really find “judgments” and “statements” about

that? Who made them and why? Surely there are no hypotheses about any

such things. Why would anyone produce any? How would it help anything?

And there are no “beliefs” in this vicinity, at least as pragmatists understand

belief. What would anyone do to show that she or he believed or disbelieved

in unknowable vast stellar polygons? What kind of “rule for action” would that

be? Thus, it is simply not true that there are any vast stellar polygons beyond

our light cone—because there is no “it” to be true.38 “It” is not false, either, 38. From James, PMT, 322:

PRAG:—Then I beg you again to tell me in what this truth consists, all by itself, this tertium quid intermediate between the facts per se, on the one hand, and all knowledge of them, actual or potential, on the other. What is the shape of it in this third estate? Of what stuff, mental, physical, or ‘epistemological,’ is it built? What metaphysical region of reality does it inhabit?

ANTI-PRAG:—What absurd questions! Isn’t it enough to say that it is true that the facts are so-and-so, and false that they are otherwise?

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for the obvious analogous reason. The idea that there might be such a truth,

a true judgment, or a true proposition, existing apart from all our real-life

verification efforts or our efforts to make the world better, is nothing less

than a Russellian case of “diseased abstractionism.”

The Lizzie Borden situation is, once again, a little better. Since there

actually was and is some evidence, there actually were and are people with

hypotheses or beliefs about the Borden murders. Back then there were

Lizzie’s appalled neighbors, and today there are feminist historians who think

that Borden was acquitted only because a sexist, all-male jury of that period

could not believe a woman capable of those particular killings even after

looking at the evidence.39 The neighbors and the historians alike have

convincing empirical and historical evidence of their shared hypothesis, and,

more important, they have found a use for that hypothesis in the future-

oriented project of improving their lives and their society. Thus there really

PRAG:—‘It’ is true that the facts are so-and-so–I won’t yield to the temptation of asking you what is true; but I do ask you whether your phrase that ‘it is true that’ the facts are so-and-so really means anything really additional to the bare being so-and-so of the facts themselves.

ANTI-PRAG:—It seems to mean more than the bare being of the facts. It is a sort of mental equivalent for them, their epistemological function, their value in noetic terms.

PRAG:—A sort of spiritual double or ghost of them, apparently! If so, may I ask you where this truth is found.

James is challenging the idea that the “it” in “it is true that” refers to some entity existing somehow in between real things and our true beliefs (theories, hypotheses) about those things.

39. I was unaware of the feminists when I considered this case at The Truth Is What Works, 133–39. One such writer argues:

The jury, twelve middle-aged, middle class New England gentlemen, proved unable to accept [the prosecutor Hosea] Knowlton’s radical reinterpretation of nineteenth-century sex roles, unable to accept the notion that women might be like men, and perhaps, most importantly, unable to envision the possibility that if Lizzie Borden could commit parricide might not [sic] their own wives and daughters be capable of the same act? Within an hour they returned a verdict of not guilty.

From Ann Schofield, “Lizzie Borden Took an Axe: History, Feminism, and American Culture,” American Studies 34, no. 1 (1993), 99.

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are hypotheses or beliefs about Lizzie Borden that might be true or false. And

Putnam, channeling Russell and Moore, argues that James’s account of those

beliefs runs afoul of the logic of truth. In James’s picture, our thoughts could

wind up being “true” of events that never happened. Pragmatic

verificationism is thus a kind of dualism, putting up an “interface” partition

between reality and our “true” thoughts.

However, it is really Putnam who is doing the dualistic world-dividing

here, not James. Even, or maybe especially, in his latest period, Putnam is

implacably committed to dividing the world into us thinkers and our interests,

on the one hand, and a realm of things mostly independent of and unaffected

by our thoughts and interests, on the other. Putnam’s dualism is not the

dualism of a (stereotypical) Cartesian, who sees spirits on one side of an

ontological gap and material things on the other, with sensory qualia as an

interface. Nor is it that of a materialist who sees brain-representations as

coming between us sociable neural systems and the world around us. But it is

resolutely a dualism dividing the made from the found. In Putnam’s world

there are things and events we human beings produce through willed

choices, and there is a different and vastly larger amount of stuff that is just

there whether we like it or not, stuff that would just go its own way even if we

were not here. We have some control over ourselves—some—and we can

change a few pitiful things—not by any means everything—on earth and in its

spatial vicinity; but the vast preponderance of the realities in spacetime,

including quite a lot of the stuff we know as part of the local human

environment and even human nature, is as it is no matter what we want or

can possibly do. There are also logical principles that we have no choice

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about, like “For any p, p is equivalent to ‘p is true’”; and even the languages

we have created have meanings that “ain’t in the head” and depend on

features of that world beyond our control. The logical and physical universe

around our tiny demesne is just there, not to be wrestled with but only to be

found and then appreciated . . . that is, to be looked upon passively.

Putnam’s picture of our relationship to the world is a kind of spectator theory

of knowledge.

Our thinking usually is and always should be controlled by the stuff

that is just there. When it is not, what results is a “disaster” like James’s

pragmatic theory of truth, according to which human thinking is free to go

wherever human desires might take it. Pragmatic thinkers can think and say

anything they find satisfying and no other person or thing can stop them.

Anything goes, in their world—or so the pragmatic thinkers think, anyway. Of

course they are wrong; some thoughts are irrational and dangerous. They

lead us into bad social and physical situations. We should avoid such

thoughts and pursue and develop thoughts with good consequences, ideas

that make our lives better. Sometimes ideas can even make our lives better

or worse in ways we have not anticipated; not only are we not omnipotent,

we are also not omniscient. We have to go along using our tentative

hypotheses, things that we believe to be true only as long as they keep

satisfying us and that we toss away when they let us down. But we can, do,

and should go along this way, and that is in fact how we have successfully

advanced in our understanding of the world, how we have developed lives

that feature fewer and fewer bad surprises. We have scientific, logical,

moral, and even religious ideas that seem to help us in life, and we use our

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ongoing experiences to improve and expand that ever more powerful arsenal

of intellectual weapons.

All of which is to say, of course, that Putnam’s worries about the

looming disaster of pragmatic truth seem misplaced. James only wants us to

do what Putnam himself wants us to do, namely, pay attention to life and the

way it really works when we develop our philosophical self-understanding.40

Putnam thinks that pragmatism’s “anything goes” theory of truth will impede

our efforts to do this, but, as Stanley Fish has pointed out, James’s theory

entails not that anything goes but that “anything that can be made to go

goes.”41 James is telling us not to ignore the world outside ourselves but

rather to pay attention to all and only things, wherever they might be, that

we have a reason to pay attention to.42

Concepts do not become an “interface” between two realms in James’s

story. Tools are not an interface, or at least not always. If I use my opposable

thumbs to pick up an object, I am not (necessarily) using my thumbs to

represent the object to myself or creating a representation that comes

between me and the thing. I am literally—literally—in direct touch with it. If I

deal with that object with forceps or a hammer, I am no longer literally in

direct touch, but neither am I interposing a representation between myself

and the object. And James, once again, treats concepts as tools, not unlike

40. Putnam concludes his Dewey Lectures with the observation that “if there was one great insight in pragmatism, it was the insistence that what has weight in our lives should also have weight in philosophy.” Putnam, The Threefold Cord, 70.

41. Stanley Fish, “Truth and Toilets,” in The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 307.

42. Can we really rest content with “verified” truths that are not intrinsically connected to reality? Should we? In the case of Lizzie Borden, we will be failing to investigate what really happened—a bloody murder!—and paying attention instead to what we just happen to find it helpful or convincing to believe. Can that be the right thing to do? It is if there is no difference between trying to find out what happened and trying to find out what it is best to believe about what happened. In the course of a real life inquiry, the evidence is always exactly the same in both cases.

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hammers and forceps, for dealing with objects, for managing them and trying

to get from them what we want and need for life. Concepts are

extraordinarily useful tools that can change the world we live in. They can

even work at a distance; the ideas of fertilizer and irrigation, for the kind of

mundane example Dewey might have pointed to, have spread all around the

world and changed many lives. And, just like some physical tools, ideas can

be used to horrible effect. The idea of racial superiority has killed millions

more human beings than any species of physical weapon. When ideas lead

to consequences we understand as bad, we call them false and try to get rid

of them, whether they are scientific, religious, or of any other kind.

Future ideas will even work to help us deal with past events. Gavin

Stevens, a character in a William Faulkner fiction, famously observes that

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”43 This imaginary person has a

point. Past events can have left world shaping consequences, and our

hypotheses about those events can help us navigate those consequences.

Moreover, if this were not true, we would not develop any such hypotheses.

They originate in our need to deal with the past and we hold on to them only

as long as they keep proving helpful. We may later find out that a newer idea

of the past is better than the idea that we started with, and then we will then

say that that new idea was always true even before we knew it, but what we

will mean is that the new idea would always have proven useful, just as

hammers or bows and arrows would have proven useful before they were

invented. This will not commit us to the idea that there is or was always

some pure, ideal abstraction called the truth, unrelated to the rule-for-action

43. From William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage, 1975), Act I, Scene III.

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beliefs and hypotheses we have made, waiting out there with the rest of the

realities to be found. And that is a good thing, for that is an idea that only a

logician could love.

VII

The made versus the found: this may really be the last dogma of empiricism

—that is, of “logical empiricism” or what became analytic philosophy. Maybe,

indeed, the other “dogmas,” the dualisms of analysis and synthesis

(according to Quine),44 scheme and content (Davidson),45 and value and fact

(Putnam)46 are in the end all variations of this Über-dogma, a distinction

between what we human beings make up in our own minds and what is just

there for our minds to work on. Obviously this is not a distinction marked by

empiricists alone; almost all philosophical thinkers of almost all varieties have

taken something like it for granted. Nonphilosophers usually do, too, though

half-heartedly at most. (Again, think of day one in Philosophy 101.) But it is

especially bad for empiricist philosophers to assume the reality of this

distinction if there is no empirical evidence for it, or no principled, non-

question-begging way to mark it in experiential terms. And the distinction

seems especially important to empiricists, who typically make a point of

basing their thinking on the evidence they scientifically find (or are “given”)

rather than on a priori ideas that thinkers willfully make to suit their personal

tastes. (At least this is C. S. Peirce’s polemical picture of the a priori method

44. See W. V. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 20–46.

45. See Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 183–98.

46. See Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact-Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, esp. 135–45.

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in “The Fixation of Belief.”)47 But what kind of empirical evidence is there that

the made is distinct from the found? What kind of evidence could there be?

If this is the last pillar of the empiricist temple, it may fall, like those

other empiricist articles of faith, to an assault by pragmatism. It seems clear

that James wants to challenge the made/found distinction as he tries to

transcend both empiricism and rationalism. Especially in the chapter of

Pragmatism called “Pragmatism and Humanism,” James says things that

Putnam the natural realist will find obnoxious, including: “Does the river

make its banks, or do the banks make the river? Does a man walk with his

right leg or with his left leg more essentially? Just as impossible may it be to

separate the real from the human factors in the growth of our cognitive

experience,”48 and “We create the subjects of our true as well as of our false

propositions.”49 It seems hard to square passages like these with the story of

the beans, which let us count them and put them into bean constellations but

are nevertheless there to be found, in their beanhood, controlling what we

think about them and setting a discernible limit beyond which we cannot

truthfully go.

However, one important thing to notice about these antirealist

sounding passages, and the whole Pragmatism lecture in which we find them,

is that James is not discussing his own view. Here, in some of his best-known

remarks, he is actually describing and defending the “humanism” of F. C. S.

Schiller. Schiller saw himself as a pragmatist, but while his general

philosophical views were compatible with James’s pragmatism, they were not

all contained in it. Schiller held that the world we think about is an 47. Found at Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 2, 4.358–4.387.48. James, PMT, 120.49. James, PMT, 122.

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Aristotelian ὕλη (hȳlē) or prime matter with no essence, no is, apart from what

“is what is made of it. Hence . . . the world is plastic” or ours to shape in our

truth making processes.50 But while pragmatism is compatible with this

picture of reality as “a mere unresisting ὕλη,”51 it does not entail it. James says

that:

Other pragmatists may reach more positive beliefs about the sensible [that is,

experienceable] core of reality. . . . They may make theories that tell us all

about it; and if these theories work satisfactorily they will be true. The

transcendental idealists say there is no core, the finally completed wrapping

being reality and truth in one. Scholasticism still teaches that the core is

‘matter’. . . . Messrs. Dewey and Schiller treat it as a ‘limit.’ Which is the truer

of all these diverse accounts, or of others comparable with them, unless it be

the one that finally proves the most satisfactory?52

And perhaps James might have added that his own radical empiricism treats

the “core” of reality as sensations and memories in changing experienced

conjunctive relations. Radical empiricism is one more epistemological and

metaphysical theory that is compatible with, but not either entailed or

presupposed by, pragmatism. Pragmatism, by making sense of truth in

verificationist terms, makes it possible for James to theorize a reality of plural

facts and experienced conjunctions among them; but it does not require in

50. F. C. S. Schiller, Personal Idealism: Philosophical Essays by Eight Members of the University of Oxford, ed. Henry Sturt (London: Macmillan, 1902), 60. Cited at James, PMT, 117.

51. James, PMT, 120. Actually, James is being a little unfair to Schiller in this particular description. James himself has just noted, at PMT 117, the “resistance” provided by reality in Schiller’s picture. At Personal Idealism, 59, Schiller says, “Let it be observed, therefore, that our activity always meets with resistance, and that in consequence we often fail in our experiments.” Even plastic things can put up some resistance.

52. James, PMT, 120.

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advance that this or any other story of reality be the true one. That would be

dogmatic, not pragmatic.

Thus Putnam is mistaken to treat James’s pragmatic truths as ideas

that must be occurently verified by conjunctive experiences. Pragmatic truths

may wind up putting us in touch with a kind of reality entirely different from

James the radical empiricist’s world—or with no reality at all. We cannot say

now; we have to wait and see what works out. The truth about the nature of

reality is just like the truth about anything else.

And, thus, we have another reason to think that there is no special

difficulty connected with pragmatic truth about the past. To say that the truth

is what works is not necessarily to say that a particular truth has to provide

actual events of satisfying contact with any “reality,” perceptual or

otherwise.53 This is good; it means the pragmatist need have no special

trouble with truth about fictions, for one thing. There are beliefs about

Sherlock Holmes or Gavin Stevens that work and there are beliefs that do

not, and that is all there is to it. And, what’s more, while it is perfectly

reasonable to think that the kind of perceptual contact with the past that

James is talking about is possible—the kind that involves profitable use in

lived experience of an idea of Julius Caesar, Martin Luther King, Jr., or the first

nanoseconds of the Big Bang—if one wants both to insist that the past is 53. Actually, James can treat verifications just as subjunctively as Peirce, and it is

important to recognize that he makes a point of doing so. Truth is, for him, a “habit”; it is the disposition or tendency of beliefs to provide good experienced consequences, not the manifest provision of those good experiences. At James, PMT, 106, we find:

The scholastics, following Aristotle, made much of the distinction between habit and act. Health in actu means, among other things, good sleeping and digesting. But a healthy man need not always be sleeping, or always digesting, any more than a wealthy man need be always handling money, or a strong man always lifting weights. All such qualities sink to the status of ‘habits’ between their times of exercise; and similarly truth becomes a habit of certain of our ideas and beliefs in their intervals of rest from their verifying activities. But those activities are the root of the whole matter, and the condition of there being any habit to exist in the intervals.

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utterly gone and still believe that pragmatic truth about the past is possible,

that particular metaphysical position can work out, too.

Moreover, if someone is also convinced that there is a real world

entirely beyond what we say and think, an objective world that justifies us—

somehow, in some way unrelated to what we happen to find evident or

helpful—in our beliefs, then there is room under the pragmatist tent for that

person, too. I think this accurately describes Hilary Putnam, and I therefore

think that while Putnam will not want to be a Schillerian humanist, he may

well find Jamesian pragmatism, properly understood as a thing independent

of James’s radical empiricism, to be congenial.

According to James’s pragmatism, we do not need to appeal to any

purely objective realities to make sense of our truth-seeking process, and we

had better not try dogmatically to spell out now what things are out there in

the purely objective world. The history of scientific and other investigative

surprises is a long one, and it shows our need to stay open to future

evidence. (Who knows: someday some evidence may show us that it was not

such a good idea to call those particular legumes “beans.”) But is any

objective world of things out there at all? Thanks to the same pragmatic

investigations we make into nonmetaphysical matters, we can give this

question the confident answer: We shall see.

HARVEY CORMIER

STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY

JUNE 2011

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