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European Journal of Pragmatism andAmerican Philosophy

IV-2 | 2012Wittgenstein and PragmatismChristiane Chauviré and Sabine Plaud (dir.)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Symposia. Wittgenstein and Pragmatism

Introduction to the Symposium “Wittgenstein and Pragmatism: A Reassessment”Christiane Chauviré and Sabine Plaud

A New Look at Wittgenstein and PragmatismSami Pihlström

Who’s Calling Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?Judy M. Hensley

Streams and River-BedsJames’ Stream of Thought in Wittgenstein’s Manuscripts 165 and 129Anna Bocompagni

Wittgenstein, Ramsey and British PragmatismMathieu Marion

Experience and NatureWittgenstein Reader of Dewey?Christiane Chauviré

Training, Training, TrainingThe Making of Second Nature and the Roots of Wittgenstein’s PragmatismMichael Luntley

Wittgenstein, Dewey, and the Practical Foundation of KnowledgeJörg Volbers

Group Morality and Forms of LifeDewey, Wittgenstein and Inter-SubjectivityRick Davis

A Philosophical BestiaryJoseph Margolis

A Pragmatist Conception of CertaintyWittgenstein and SantayanaGuy Bennett-Hunter

Having Social Practices in Mind. Wittgenstein’s Anthropological Pragmatism in PerspectiveFrancesco Callegaro

A Symposium on J. Margolis, Pragmatism Ascendent: a Yard of Narrative, ATouch of Prophecy, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2012

Joseph Margolis’ Pragmatism between Narrative and Prophecy Rosa M. Calcaterra

Darwinized Hegelianism or Hegelianized Darwinism?Mathias Girel

European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, IV-2 | 2012

1

Nature and ThoughtSome Reflections on Margolis’ Claim of the Indissolubility of Realism and IdealismRoberto Gronda

Margolis on Realism and IdealismSami Pihlström

RepliesJoseph Margolis

Essays

A New Analytic/Synthetic/Horotic ParadigmFrom Mathematical Gesture to Synthetic/Horotic ReasoningGiovanni Maddalena and Fernando Zalamea

McDowell’s Unexpected Philosophical AllySantiago Rey

Book Review

John DEWEY, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophyed. by Philip Deen, Carbondale, Illinois, Southern Illinois University Press, 2012Kevin S. Decker

Roberto FREGA, Practice, Judgment, and the Challenge of Moral and PoliticalDisagreementLexington Books, Plymouth 2012Roberto Gronda

Fernando SAVATER, Acerca de Santayanaed. by José Beltrán & Daniel Moreno, Valencia, PUV, 2012Ángel M. Faerna

M. BUSCHEMEIR, E. HAMMER, Pragmatismus und Hermeneutik: Beiträge zu RichardRortys KulturpolitikHamburg, Meiner, 2011Till Kinzel

William JAMES, A Pluralistic Universeedited and introduced by H. G. Callaway, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008Michela Bella


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Symposia. Wittgenstein andPragmatism


3

Introduction to the Symposium“Wittgenstein and Pragmatism: AReassessment”Christiane Chauviré and Sabine Plaud

1 The connections between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the pragmatist tradition are

often alluded to, but seldom thoroughly explored. It is commonly assumed that

Wittgenstein was scarcely acquainted with such authors as Charles Sanders Peirce or

John Dewey (a false idea, as we shall see), even though he had a rather extended

knowledge of the philosophy of William James. Nevertheless, the converging features

between Wittgenstein and pragmatism are quite striking: we shall hardly need to

mention Wittgenstein’s claim that meaning is use, his insistence on the pictorial

dimension of mathematical proof, or again his emphasis on action in his

characterization of will and intention. On the other hand, modern and contemporary

pragmatist philosophers (R. B. Brandom, H. Putnam...) have often developed a complex

and intricate relationship to Wittgenstein’s philosophy, since they sometimes use it as a

support to their own arguments, but sometimes also point at its insufficiencies, and try

to amend them. Hence the following questions: in what sense may Wittgenstein’s

philosophy be described as ‘pragmatist’? Symmetrically, in what sense may

contemporary pragmatist philosophy be described as ‘Wittgensteinian’? What are the

incompatibilities, if any, between these two traditions? Lastly, what part has been

played by such ‘middlemen’ as C. K. Ogden or F. P. Ramsey in the interactions between

Wittgenstein and pragmatism? Answering these questions should provide an

opportunity to explore the dialogues and/or misunderstandings between a European or

continental tradition in philosophy, and a more specifically American analysis of the

notions of meaning, reasoning, action, etc.

2 On one side, to compare Wittgenstein with pragmatism has become a classical topic

since the ‘pragmatist turn’ in American philosophy in the eighties-nineties, and since

the pragmatism’s revival due to such philosophers as Putnam, Rorty or Brandom, to

speak only of the greatest. On the other hand, many British philosophers, more or less

connected to Wittgenstein, are self-avowed pragmatists: there is a ‘Cambridge


4

pragmatism’ illustrated by Ramsey, Anscombe, von Wright, Mellor, Blackburn, all of

them having something to do with pragmatist topics. And Wittgenstein himself, when

he returned to Cambridge in 1929, developed a philosophy that was very different from

the Tractatus, and distinctly pragmatist in its nature.

3 In this special issue, we would like to submit to our readers the hypothesis that

Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge in 1929 was also a pragmatist turn. This event is

often imputed to the acquaintance with Ramsey and Sraffa. But it seems to us that we

could also impute it to his having read Dewey, especially Experience and Nature (1925).

The whole theme of the return of philosophy to the ordinary which permeates the

Philosophical Investigations is probably borrowed from Dewey’s Experience and Nature. The

idea of equating meaning with use, the emphasis on instrumentalism, the quest of the

ordinary, the account that is now taken of the context of language and of the practical

consequences of what is said, the conception of language as a set of deeds makes up an

overwhelming evidence for the similarity between Wittgenstein and Dewey, as well as

for the affinities between Wittgenstein and pragmatism in general.

4 The papers collected in this issue browse the various aspects of these connections

between Wittgenstein and pragmatism, by focusing on the necessity to reevaluate such

connections. In “A New Look at Wittgenstein and Pragmatism,” Sami Pihlström

reconsiders Wittgenstein’s relation to this tradition by discussing three key issues of

Wittgenstein studies: the distinction between the propositional and the non-

propositional; the tension between anti-Cartesian faillibilism and what has been called

the “truth in skepticism” in Wittgenstein; and the relation between metaphysics and

the criticism of metaphysics in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. In her paper: “Who’s Calling

Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?,” Judith Hensley addresses the debate that surrounds

“pragmatic” interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein. She draws in particular on Hilary

Putnam’s lecture “Was Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?” and on Stanley Cavell’s response

“What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?.” Anna Boncompagni’s paper:

“Streams and River-Beds. James’ Stream of Thought in Wittgenstein’s Manuscripts 165

and 129” focuses on a picture common to Wittgenstein and William James, namely the

image of the flux, stream, or river, by referring to some notes belonging to

Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. This analysis leads to the theme of the relations among science,

philosophy and metaphysics, and to the conclusion that Wittgenstein did appreciate

James for his intuitions and for the power of his imagination, but could not agree on

the explicit formulation of his ideas. The specific connections between Wittgenstein

and British pragmatism are addressed by Mathieu Marion in “Wittgenstein, Ramsey

and British Pragmatism,” where he examines the transmission of some ideas of the

pragmatist tradition to Wittgenstein, in his “middle period,” through the intermediary

of F. P. Ramsey, with whom he had numerous fruitful discussions at Cambridge in 1929.

Marion argues more specifically that one must first come to terms with Ramsey’s own

views in 1929, and explain how they differ from views expressed in earlier papers from

1925-27. One is then in a better position to understand the impact of Ramsey’s astute

critique of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-philosophicus in conjunction with his

pragmatism, and explain how it may have set into motion the ‘later’ Wittgenstein.

5 The issue then proposes a series of paper devoted to the relationships between

Wittgenstein and Dewey. Christiane Chauviré’s “Experience and Nature. Wittgenstein

Reader of Dewey” focuses on Dewey’s influence which is seldom mentioned in the

literature when the relationships between Wittgenstein and pragmatism are addressed.


5

Yet, it should be known that Dewey’s philosophy is clearly echoed in Wittgenstein’s

later philosophy, as it is expressed in his Philosophical Investigations. In particular,

Dewey’s Experience and Nature develops many creeds also taken up by Wittgenstein: for

instance, the critical attitude towards artificial notions that break with primary

experience (e. g., the “Self”), the will to bring philosophy back to the ordinary, or the

emphasis laid on the necessity to pay attention to what lies open to the view. James

Luntley’s “Training, Training, Training: The Making of Second Nature and the Roots of

Wittgenstein’s Pragmatism” is then interested in the influence of pragmatism on

Wittgenstein’s conception of practice, and argues that Wittgenstein’s appeal to practice

is much closer to Dewey’s than to Peirce’s. In “Wittgenstein, Dewey, and the Practical

Foundation of Knowledge,” Jorg Völbers compares the philosophies of Wittgenstein and

Dewey in their connection to a theory of practice: Wittgenstein and Dewey both

express a defense of the “primary of practice”; yet, their philosophies are extremely

different in style, and considering those differences may allow us to examine what kind

of knowledge we should expect from philosophy, a question to which Wittgenstein and

Dewey provide very different answers. In “Group Morality and Forms of Life: Dewey,

Wittgenstein and Inter-subjectivity,” Rick Davis tries to establish connections between

the pragmatist philosophical tradition and the later philosophy of Ludwig

Wittgenstein, and argues that among these connections is the affinity between John

Dewey’s account of the development of group morality and Wittgenstein’s concept of

“form of life.”

6 Lastly, this issue addresses more contemporary issues regarding the connections

between Wittgenstein and pragmatism. In “A Philosophical Bestiary,” Joseph Margolis

notices that different readings have been provided as for the connections between

Wittgenstein and pragmatism, such as for example H. Putnam’s picture as opposed to

R. Rorty’s description that packages Wittgenstein and Dewey together as ‘postmodern’

pragmatists. Joseph Margolis tries to broaden the discussion by including an

examination of Wilfrid Sellars, Gottlob Frege, Robert Brandom, and Huw Price. His aim

it to review the newer challenges of naturalism and deflationism, which, by their own

instruction, should bring us to the decisive contest between the ‘pragmatism’ of the

Investigations and that of Brandom’s Between Saying and Doing. The larger purpose of this

exercise is to assess pragmatism’s best prospects currently, in meeting the gathering

challenges of the day. Guy Bennett-Hunter’s paper: “A Pragmatist Conception of

Certainty: Wittgenstein and Santayana” draws on Duncan Pritchard’s recent reading of

Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, and identifies two important and related points of affinity

between this Wittgensteinian line of thought on certainty and the line of thought on

the same topic articulated in Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith. First, both lines of

thought reflect a pragmatist concept of certainty. Secondly, one may examine the way

in which the pragmatist concept of certainty functions, for the two thinkers, as a

response to scepticism, since both point towards the possibility of a distinctively

pragmatist response to scepticism which involves an anti-epistemological model of the

intimate relation of the human self to the world. Francesco Callegaro’s “Having Social

Practices in Mind. Wittgenstein’s Anthropological Pragmatism in Perspective” seeks to

explain why and how Wittgenstein’s idea of social practices should be considered as

expressing a fundamental pragmatist commitment. In this purpose, Callegaro focuses

on R. Brandom’s attempt to understand Wittgenstein’s second philosophy as belonging

to an intellectual tradition from which his own rationalist pragmatism derives. A

confrontation follows between Brandom and Wittgenstein, whose aim is to highlight


6

the specific tactics of Wittgenstein’s pragmatism as a refusal of Brandom’s idealist

rationalism.

AUTHORS

CHRISTIANE CHAUVIRÉ

Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

christiane.chauvire[at]noos.fr

SABINE PLAUD

Paris Science et Lettres

sabine.plaud[at]univ-psl.fr


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A New Look at Wittgenstein andPragmatismSami Pihlström

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Parts of this paper were presented in the conference, “Cambridge Pragmatism,” at

Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK (May-June 2012). I am grateful to Hanne

Appelqvist, Bob Brandom, Hasok Chang, Heikki Kannisto, Huw Price, Henrik Rydenfelt,

and Mike Williams, as well as an anonymous referee who read an earlier draft of the

essay, for highly valuable critical comments.

1. Introduction

1 Historically, there is presumably relatively little to be added to the already existing

scholarship on the relation between Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the

pragmatist tradition. Russell Goodman’s excellent monograph, Wittgenstein and William

James (2002), tells us most that is worth telling about this issue, at least insofar as we

are concerned with Wittgenstein’s relation to the classical pragmatist William James

(or even to Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey). Any examination of Wittgenstein’s

relation to pragmatism must begin with Goodman’s careful historical work, to which it

is very difficult to add significantly new scholarly results.1

2 Such examinations of Wittgenstein and pragmatism should also appreciate the fact that

Wittgenstein’s own brief remarks on pragmatism – such as the one in On Certainty

where he admits that his views may sound like pragmatism even though they are not

really pragmatist (see Wittgenstein 1969: § 422; cf. also Wittgenstein 1980a: § 266;

Goodman 2002: 11, 158) – must be understood against the background of other

Cambridge philosophers’, especially Bertrand Russell’s and G. E. Moore’s, conceptions

of pragmatism: Wittgenstein was clearly not a pragmatist in the sense of James’s

‘pragmatist theory of truth,’ but then again James himself was hardly a pragmatist in


8

the rather naive sense of pragmatism (and its notorious theory of truth) attributed to

him by his Cambridge critics. On the other hand, it is also clear that Wittgenstein was

already at an early stage familiar with James’s famous work, The Varieties of Religious

Experience (1902), which contains a brief account of the pragmatic method or “Peirce’s

principle,” according to which our conception of the potential or conceivable practical

effects of the object of our thought is our conception of that object in its entirety.2

3 Wittgenstein has also been intensively discussed by ‘neopragmatists’ like Richard Rorty

and Hilary Putnam, as well as their many followers; it is, however, probably too early to

evaluate his contribution to the development of neopragmatist thought, as

neopragmatism itself is still developing as a philosophical orientation.3 One of the

leading contemporary neopragmatists, Huw Price, also insightfully employs

Wittgenstein in his defense of anti-representationalism, global expressivism, and

functional pluralism – and even explicitly refers to the similarity between

Wittgensteinian “plurality of forms of discourse, or ‘language-games’” and the “strong

element of discourse pluralism in the American pragmatist tradition, of which [Nelson]

Goodman and Rorty are the most prominent recent representatives” (Price 2011: 36).4

Thus, it might seem that the relation between Wittgenstein and pragmatism has more

or less been exhausted: while Russell Goodman has taken care of its historical

dimensions, original philosophers of language like Price have made the most

innovative pragmatist use of Wittgenstein’s ideas in contemporary systematic

philosophy.

4 However, philosophically and systematically rather than historically, there is, I believe,

still a lot to say about the relation between Wittgenstein and pragmatism. By making

this distinction, I am not assuming that philosophy and its history are separable;

indeed, I do not believe in such a dichotomy at all. Rather, systematic philosophy and

the history of philosophy should be seen as a holistic network of beliefs and ideas to be

critically examined in toto.5 I only want to emphasize that my discussion of

Wittgenstein’s relation to, or place in, pragmatism is not primarily intended as a

detailed contribution to historical scholarship on what Wittgenstein (or the

pragmatists) ‘really said.’ No new “readings” of Wittgenstein, or striking novel

historical results, will be offered. My main aims are philosophical in the sense that I

want to contribute to the re-evaluation of the pragmatist way of philosophizing today –

and, mutatis mutandis, of the Wittgensteinian way(s) – from the perspective of this

critical comparison.6

5 The conception of pragmatism presupposed in my discussion is, as will emerge as the

argument unfolds, a more or less ‘classical’ one at least in the sense that I am not at all

convinced by Rortyan (or even Pricean) neopragmatist and antirepresentationalist

ideas. I am not strongly committed to any specific account of classical pragmatism

(although I will emphasize the view of beliefs as “habits of action,” originally defended

by Peirce); nor do I see classical pragmatism and neopragmatism as fundamentally

opposed to each other (as some scholars do). For instance, I want to avoid establishing a

new essentialistic dichotomy between classical pragmatism focusing on experience and

post-linguistic-turn neopragmatism focusing on language. A picture of pragmatism

inspired by Peirce, James, and Dewey but self-critically willing to learn from the new

developments of pragmatism itself and its intellectual neighbors (including, say,

analytic philosophy and phenomenology) will remain open and developing,

continuously in the making (cf. Pihlström (ed.) 2011). This dynamic openness is what


9

makes pragmatism a truly living philosophical tradition, and my proposed ‘new look’ at

Wittgenstein from a pragmatist perspective is one attempt to maintain such openness.

6 This paper is organized as follows. First, I will discuss, from a pragmatist perspective,

three key issues of Wittgenstein studies that provide useful insights into the ways in

which Wittgenstein, or the contemporary ‘Wittgensteinian’ philosopher, may be said to

be a pragmatist: the distinction – invoked in recent discussions of Wittgenstein’s On

Certainty, in particular – between the propositional and the non-propositional (section 2);

the related tension between anti-Cartesian fallibilism and what has been called the

“truth in skepticism” in Wittgenstein (section 3); as well as the relation between

metaphysics and the criticism of metaphysics in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and

Wittgensteinian philosophy more generally (section 4). I will also argue that

dichotomous readings of Wittgenstein in terms of these three philosophical (or

metaphilosophical) oppositions lead to unpragmatist and even un-Wittgensteinian

positions. I will then proceed to a more explicitly metaphilosophical consideration of a

fourth, equally harmful dichotomy, the one between deconstructive (therapeutic) and

(re)constructive or systematic, argumentative philosophy – which is, I will argue, again

something that the pragmatist, together with Wittgenstein, ought to overcome rather

than rely on (section 5). These issues are, and largely remain, open questions in

Wittgenstein scholarship. I can here only summarize how a pragmatist reader of

Wittgenstein might, or perhaps should, deal with them; thus, what I will offer is merely

a pragmatist proposal to overcome certain dichotomies or dualisms that in my view

threaten to lead current Wittgenstein scholarship astray. After having gone through

these topics at a general level, I will briefly apply my considerations to the philosophy

of religion, which is an important field of inquiry for both Wittgensteinian and

pragmatist thinkers (section 6). A short conclusion (section 7) will finally pull the

threads together.

2. ‘Hinges’: Propositional and Non-Propositional

7 Wittgenstein’s ‘pragmatism’ has been perceived, especially in On Certainty (1969), to

focus on non-propositional ‘hinges’ – that is, fundamental certainties-in-action that our

thoughts and any meanings those thoughts or our uses of language are able to express

depend on.7 Thus, ‘hinge propositions’ is actually a misleading expression, just as

‘grammatical sentences’ is: hinges, in the full pragmatist sense, are not propositional

but profoundly action-based. Clearly, it is easy to suggest at a general level that

Wittgenstein provides us with a ‘pragmatist’ picture of human language-use and

meaning: any meaning possible for us is grounded in public human ways of acting, that

is, language-games. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy generally can be read as an attempt

to show that it is only against the background of our human form(s) of life, of our

habits of doing various things together in common environments, that meaning and

also the learning of meanings are possible. In this sense, Wittgenstein establishes a

pragmatic philosophical position – arguably as a response to a ‘transcendental’

question concerning the necessary conditions for the possibility of meaning.8

8 The ‘pragmatist’ reading of On Certainty defended by Danièle Moyal-Sharrock makes

these ideas more precise by arguing that, for Wittgenstein, our basic certainties are

‘certainties in action’ instead of propositionally expressible claims known with

certainty to be true. Wittgenstein, after all, says in On Certainty that “an ungrounded


10

way of acting” is prior to any ungrounded presupposition (Wittgenstein 1969: § 110)

and that our “acting,” instead of “seeing,” lies “at the bottom of the language-game”

(ibid.: § 204; original emphases). He also famously quotes, approvingly, Goethe’s Faust:

“In the beginning was the deed” (ibid.: § 402). While this reference to action as such

provides a more or less standard picture of Wittgenstein – also endorsed by Goodman

(2002: 5, 19-20), who notes that the “priority of practice over intellect” and the deep

interrelation of action and thought are among the commitments shared by

Wittgenstein and William James – few scholars have joined Moyal-Sharrock in explicitly

labelling Wittgenstein’s position ‘pragmatist’ (or ‘logically pragmatist,’ ‘pragmatist in a

broad sense’). Moyal-Sharrock strongly emphasizes that the pragmatic certainty at

issue here is non-propositional, non-empirical, and non-epistemic. A central pragmatic

condition of meaning, according to Wittgenstein, is trust, understood as an instinctive,

primitive, unreasoned, immediate reaction. “Without this unflinching trust, there is no

making sense,” Moyal-Sharrock (2003: 133) aptly notes, referring to Wittgenstein’s

(1969: § 509) famous statement that “a language-game is only possible if one trusts

something (I did not say ‘can trust something’).” For instance, the assumption that the

earth has existed for many years “forms the basis of action, and therefore, naturally, of

thought” (ibid.: § 411), and this is something we trust on rather than know or even

believe to be true in the sense in which we know and believe many other things.9

9 In On Certainty, then, the ‘hinges’ of our language-game(s) are the practical certainties

we instinctively and immediately rely on – that is, what we trust without too much

reasoning about the matter. Such hinges, including, say, our continuing trust in the

reality of such things as stones and chairs or other people (not to be conflated with

theoretical claims to know, on the basis of philosophical arguments, for instance, that

physical objects or ‘other minds’ ‘really exist’), ‘enable sense’ instead of themselves

having sense (Moyal-Sharrock 2003: 134). Operating as such hinges, grammatical rules,

in Wittgenstein’s special sense of ‘grammar,’ make language-games possible instead of

being moves within a game (ibid.: 134-5). A hinge, according to this reading of On

Certainty, is an ‘enabler,’ not an hypothesis to be tested (ibid.: 135). Wittgenstein’s anti-

skeptical argumentation concludes that we ‘cannot doubt’ certain things if we are to

(continue to) make sense with our expressions (ibid.: 138). These transcendental-

sounding formulations invoke the practice-laden background of our language-use as

the condition for the possibility of meaning. Moreover, this pragmatist point is

highlighted by the fact that, while Wittgenstein’s philosophy is of course centrally

focused on language, the notion of language must be construed more broadly than as a

mere propositional system – as, instead, a genuine human practice within the natural

world.

10 However, despite my deep appreciation of Moyal-Sharrock’s pragmatist reading, I

would modify her view by arguing that pragmatism blurs the boundary between the

propositional and the non-propositional. The basic idea here is something that already

Peirce and James insisted on: beliefs (and, analogously, any propositional states we

attribute to human beings) are not just propositional attitudes ‘in the head,’ that is, in

the Cartesian-like mind (or brain) of the believer, but ‘habits of action’ in the world.10

The notion of a habit is crucial here. While I must simply use it in a vague and general

sense in this context, referring to the traditional pragmatist idea that to believe

something is to be prepared to act in certain ways, this notion of a habit could in a

more detailed investigation be fruitfully compared to Wittgensteinian notions such as

custom, technique, and perhaps also game.11 After all, Wittgenstein does say in the


11

Investigations (1953, I, § 150) that learning a language is mastering a technique.

Accordingly, engaging in any propositional activity can be said to be based on human

activities or habits, ways of doing things in a normatively governed, though always

possibly changing, manner. There is no fixed or permanent normative structure of

language; as Jaakko Hintikka has often remarked in his studies on Wittgenstein,

language-games themselves are, for Wittgenstein, “prior to their rules.”12

11 There is, then, for a pragmatist reader of Wittgenstein inspired by the classical

pragmatists’ emphasis on habits and habituality, no dichotomy between the

propositional and the non-propositional in the sense of ‘pragmatist’ interpretations of

Wittgenstein such as Moyal-Sharrock’s. Relying on such a dichotomy, which, in Moyal-

Sharrock’s reading, is intended to yield a new form of foundationalism – an action-

based and therefore non-propositional rather than propositional response to

scepticism – is both unpragmatist and un-Wittgensteinian. While Moyal-Sharrock is

certainly correct to point that the ‘hinges’ Wittgenstein invokes are not propositional

in the standard sense (any more than they are epistemic or hypothetical), neither

aspect – the propositional or the non-propositional – of the certainties Wittgenstein

examines should be denied, or even can be denied, as they are inextricably intertwined.

12 This, however, is a pragmatist reinterpretation of (the third) Wittgenstein, not an

attempt to interpret Wittgenstein’s actual views with any detailed historical accuracy.

Even so, the denial of the dichotomy between the propositional and the non-

propositional – or, similarly, between the linguistic and the non-linguistic – does in my

view capture the ‘spirit’ of On Certainty better than a dichotomous interpretation, even

a ‘logically pragmatist’ one.

3. Knowledge and Certainty: Fallibilism and the Truthin Skepticism

13 As a result of its remarkable conception of certainties-in-action, Wittgenstein’s On

Certainty is, furthermore, anti-skeptical and anti-Cartesian in a way strongly resembling

Peirce’s famous anti-Cartesian writings from the 1860s (see again Peirce 1992-98,

vol. 1). Both philosophers maintain, in contrast to Descartes’s notorious methodological

skepticism, that we cannot begin our inquiries from complete doubt. Rather, we must,

inevitably, always begin from within our beliefs – or, what amounts to the same, our

habits of action – that already presuppose a great number of various certainties, or

‘hinges.’ Otherwise there can be no knowledge or inquiry at all, or even any meaning,

according to Wittgenstein (see section 2 above).

14 In Peirce’s philosophy of science, this anti-Cartesian starting point is developed into

the well-known thesis of fallibilism: we could always be wrong, even though we cannot

simultaneously doubt everything we believe. Any of our beliefs could be wrong, and we

might, as inquiry progresses, have reasons to revise or give up even our most strongly

maintained views or theories. We just cannot give all of them up at the same time. We

have to have a firm basis for revising those parts of our belief system that need

revision, even though that basis itself may also be called into question at a different

time or from a different point of view. There is no final, universal, or apodictic

certainty to be had anywhere in human affairs; our inquiries are fallible and revisable

through and through.


12

15 This fallibility or revisability is fully natural for us as the kind of beings we are. As our

factual circumstances change, as our forms of life are continuously recontextualized,

the basic certainties constitutive of our language-games and of the meanings

expressible within them may have to be revised or given up, though not on the basis of

reason or evidence because (as ‘hinges’) they are not based on reason or evidence (cf.

Hertzberg 1994, especially 48-50). In this sense “our language-games are tied to the

actual world we live in” (ibid.: 59).

16 It would presumably be misleading to call Wittgenstein a ‘fallibilist.’ This would

indicate that he has a theory to advance in epistemology and the philosophy of science,

something comparable to Peirce’s (and Dewey’s) pragmatist and naturalist theory of

inquiry emphasizing the gradual revision of our beliefs and habits of action in the

course of experience, where inquiry is launched as a response to the problematic

situations arising from surprising and unexpected results of our actions that make us

doubt the original beliefs (habits) we had been relying on. Yet, while it is clear that he

does not defend such a theory, or presumably any epistemic theory at all, his

conception of the pragmatic hinges briefly explored in the previous section should be

understood in a fallibilistic ‘spirit.’ These practice-embedded certainties are never final

but must be revised and corrected, as our practices and/or forms of life change and

develop. Even the strongest of our hinges may have to be given up in new

circumstances, although we may be unable to even coherently consider the possibility

of having to give up our belief in, say, physical objects. In this general attitude to our

relation to the world we live in (and inquire into), Wittgenstein is, I submit, a pragmatic

fallibilist. Moreover, insofar as Wittgenstein is understood not only as a thinker with

pragmatist inclinations but also as a post-Kantian transcendental philosopher

employing transcendental arguments and reflections (see also section 5 below), this

choice of terminology might also play the important role of reaffirming the

transcendental philosopher’s entitlement to fallibilism and antifoundationalism: even if

we inquire, transcendentally, into the necessary conditions for the possibility of things

we take for granted, the results of such inquiries need not be regarded as apodictically

certain.13

17 This idea has also been expressed by saying that, while Wittgenstein’s late work is

clearly anti-skeptical, there is an appreciation of the ‘truth in skepticism’ to be found in

his philosophy as well. Precisely the fact that our language-games, forms of life, and/or

habits of action14 do not have any metaphysical grounding or foundation can be

understood as such a recognition of the fundamental truth of skepticism, even though,

again, skepticism as a philosophical theory cannot be maintained.15 As a philosophical

position, skepticism results from a theoretical urge that both pragmatism and

Wittgenstein reject. Skepticism should be overcome not by offering a theoretical

argument that finally silences the skeptic (this cannot be done) but by investigating the

ways in which the skeptic’s “game” is dispensable – that is, there is no need for us to

philosophize in terms of that game, following its rules – while containing a

fundamental seed of truth in the sense of making us better aware of our groundlessness

and precariousness.

18 Similarly, the ‘officially’ strongly anti-skeptical pragmatists reject all foundationalist

theoretical attempts to “ground” knowledge, science, meaning – or anything – in anti-

skeptical philosophical arguments. Space does not allow me to elaborate on this theme

further here, but it seems to me that pragmatists and pragmatic fallibilists and


13

naturalists (following Dewey) have often dramatically neglected their clear similarities

to Wittgensteinian antifoundationalism and ‘fallibilism.’ Both sides would benefit from

deepening comparisons that would also strengthen the status of a general

antifoundationalism in contemporary thought still too often troubled by

foundationalist concerns both in epistemology and in ethics and political philosophy.

19 In any case, our conclusion at this point is that there need be no conflict or dichotomy

between our commitment to fallibilism and our commitment to the ‘truth in

skepticism.’ Both are pragmatically needed (and both are available in Wittgenstein),

just like the propositional and the non-propositional cannot be dichotomously

separated but must both be incorporated in our pragmatist picture of practice-

embedded human being-in-the-world.16

4. Reality: Metaphysics and Anti-Metaphysics

20 Both Wittgenstein and the pragmatists have often been regarded as radically anti-

metaphysical thinkers, even though Peirce, in particular, is also famous for his

evolutionary metaphysics (see, e.g., Anderson & Hausman 2012) and even Dewey has

been argued to incorporate metaphysical themes in his naturalism (cf. Sleeper 1986).

For instance, Rorty (typically downgrading Peirce’s importance in the development of

pragmatism) repeatedly pictures both Jamesian-Deweyan pragmatism and

Wittgenstein’s later philosophy in an anti-metaphysical and anti-epistemological

fashion, and more recent neopragmatists like Price (2011) share this negative attitude

to metaphysics. However, as I have argued in several works (e.g., Pihlström 2009) –but

won’t be able to argue in detail here– this is a fundamental misrepresentation of

pragmatism. The pragmatists – and, perhaps analogously, Wittgenstein – can be seen as

offering us a new kind of metaphysics, one based not on the futile attempt to climb

above our forms of life into a God’s-Eye View but on human practices and especially our

practice-embedded ethical and more generally evaluative standpoints and

considerations. Engaging in metaphysics is a way of interpreting our human being-in-

the-world, which cannot be separated from ethical values (or other values, including

aesthetic ones, for that matter). This general idea is also closely related to the

pragmatist rejection of the fact-value dichotomy.17

21 This is not at all to say that either pragmatists or Wittgenstein would not engage in the

criticism of metaphysics. Obviously, they do. They both heavily criticize not only

specific metaphysical ideas (e.g., Cartesian assumptions in the philosophy of mind or

the picture of meanings as mental or abstract entities untouched by the practices of

language-use) but also, and more importantly, the very conception of metaphysics

based on traditional pre-Kantian metaphysical realism (transcendental realism), just as

Kant himself did throughout his critique of reason. However, they need not leave the

matter at that point but are able to offer a reconstructed – or, as we might say, post-

Kantian – pragmatic, naturalized yet in a sense transcendental way of doing

metaphysics in terms of, and on the basis of, human experiential practices (forms of

life, language-games). Pace Price, this is continuing metaphysics “in a pragmatist key”

instead of abandoning metaphysics altogether. Pragmatism and Wittgensteinian

explorations of fundamental, yet revisable and fallible, features of our forms of life here

converge into what we may describe as a pragmatic philosophical anthropology, which,


14

transcendentally interpreted yet pragmatically naturalized, is itself a form of

metaphysics.

22 Moreover, the kind of pragmatism, or pragmatic philosophical anthropology, that

Wittgenstein and philosophers like James share is deeply pluralistic (cf. again Price

2011, chapters 2 and 10). Both James and Wittgenstein insist on the contextuality and

pragmatic circumstantiality of human meanings, thought, and experience; we never

encounter the world as it is in itself but always within one or another context – that is,

a practice or a form of life. Furthermore, as there is no super-context or -practice over

and above all others, there is no single correct way of using language or interpreting

experience, no privileged representations in the sense of the ideal language isomorphic

to the structure of the world that Wittgenstein imagined in the Tractatus (1921);

instead, there is a plurality of equally acceptable ways of conceptualizing reality

through different pragmatic engagements, each with their own valuational purposes

built into them. These may be related to each other through networks of family

resemblances – a famous Wittgensteinian notion that may in fact be drawn from

James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Language-games are not mirrors of an

independent reality, and there is no way of representing the world from a God’s-Eye

View; instead, there are only human, contextual, pragmatically embedded perspectives

from within our forms of life.

23 At this point I would like to draw support from Putnam’s account of Wittgenstein’s

relation to Kant and pragmatism: “Wittgenstein inherits and extends […] Kant’s

pluralism; that is the idea that no one language game deserves the exclusive right to be

called ‘true,’ or ‘rational,’ or ‘our first-class conceptual system,’ or the system that

‘limns the ultimate nature of reality,’ or anything like that” (Putnam 1992, 38). Putnam

continues to observe – very interestingly from the perspective of our project of

integrating Wittgenstein into the pragmatist tradition – that for this reason

Wittgenstein can be said to refute key ideas propounded by two leading twentieth-

century pragmatists, i.e., both W. V. Quine’s reductive naturalism and Rorty’s

relativistic and postmodernist neopragmatism: “he agrees with Rorty, against Quine,

that one cannot say that scientific language games are the only language games in

which we say or write truths, or in which we describe reality; but, on the other hand,

he agrees with Quine as against Rorty that language games can be criticized (or

‘combatted’); that there are better and worse language games” (ibid.).18

24 Arguably, a Wittgensteinian pragmatist may hold that our practice-embedded

perspectives may, and often do, yield (or presuppose) metaphysical insights into the

way the world is, or must be thought to be (by us), from within the various practical

contexts we operate in. These, again, are not insights into the world as it is absolutely

independently of our conceptualizing practices and value-laden practical points of

view, but they are metaphysical – or philosophical-anthropological – insights

nonetheless. For example, the well-known Wittgensteinian thesis (if we may say that

Wittgenstein ever maintained philosophical theses)19 that there can be no private

language in the sense of a language that only its speaker could ever understand or

learn to use, just like the pragmatically pluralistic thesis derivable from the Putnamian

interpretation just cited, can be interpreted as a metaphysical thesis about the way the

world, including language and our life with language, is, for us language-users in the

kind of natural circumstances and contexts (forms of life) we operate in. In this sense,

both pragmatism and Wittgenstein can be understood as critically rethinking the


15

nature of metaphysics – and anti-metaphysics – rather than moving beyond

metaphysics.20

5. Philosophy: Deconstruction and Reconstruction

25 In recent Wittgenstein studies, several noted scholars have suggested that

Wittgenstein’s philosophy is completely different from any traditional attempts to

philosophize in terms of theses and arguments. Those are to be rejected as remnants of

‘dogmatic’ ways of doing philosophy. Instead of engaging with theses and arguments,

philosophy should be therapeutical and deconstructive, helping us get rid of

assumptions that lead us to philosophical problems in the first place. The ‘New

Wittgensteinians,’ taking very seriously Wittgenstein’s encouragement to ‘drop the

ladder’ toward the end of the Tractatus (Wittgenstein 1921: § 6.54) and his later

proposal to lead philosophical thought to peace’ (Wittgenstein 1953, I: § 133), support

this therapeutic-deconstructive program.21

26 Again, we can perceive a misleadingly dichotomous choice between implausible

extremes at work here. To defend a modestly traditional conception of philosophy as a

systematic, argumentative practice employing theses and arguments supporting those

theses is not to be a dogmatic believer in any particular philosophical system. As a brief

illustration of this, I suggest that, despite his criticism of traditional ways of doing

philosophy, Wittgenstein can be seen as employing Kantian-styled transcendental

arguments (e.g., the private language argument) in favour of certain philosophical

conceptions (e.g., the view that our language is necessarily public).22 The private

language argument can be regarded as transcendental precisely because the fact that

language is public is claimed to be a necessary condition for the very possibility of

linguistic meaning. A private language would not be a language at all; as Wittgenstein

notes, rules cannot be followed privately. Similarly, it could be argued that, necessarily,

there must be agreement about certain apparently empirical matters (‘hinges,’ e.g., our

basic conviction about the earth having existed for a long time and not just for, say,

five minutes) in order for there to be meaningful use of language at all.23 I am not

making any claims about the success of Wittgenstein’s arguments, but it seems to me

clear that he can be plausibly read as employing the transcendental method of

examining the necessary conditions for the possibility of something (e.g., meaningful

language) whose actuality we take as given.24

27 Analogously, the pragmatists can also be reinterpreted as philosophers presenting and

evaluating transcendental arguments (or at least, more broadly, transcendental

considerations and inquiries), even though radical neopragmatists like Rorty have tried

to depict not only Wittgenstein but also the classical pragmatists, especially James and

Dewey, in a deconstructive manner, as some kind of precursors of both post-

Wittgensteinian therapy and Derridean deconstruction (and postmodernism more

generally). For a pragmatist, there is no reason at all to resort to any unpragmatic

dichotomy between, say, “transcendental philosophical theory” and “philosophizing as

an activity” (Pleasants 1999: 181). Rather, philosophical theorizing itself is a practice-

embedded human activity, and any activity that can be properly called “philosophical”

surely has theoretical aspects.

28 A healthy pragmatism should, instead of relying on an essentialistic dichotomy

between post-philosophical therapy and systematic argumentation, insist on the


16

compatibility and deep complementarity of deconstruction and reconstruction.

Deconstruction should always be followed by reconstruction. This is in effect what

Dewey argued in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920); as Putnam (1992) later put it,

“deconstruction without reconstruction is irresponsibility.” Thus, whenever a

philosophical concept, problem, or position is “deconstructed” or therapeutically

shown to be optional, a reconstructed pragmatic account of whatever it is that

originally drew philosophers’ attention to that concept, problem, or position should

follow. For example, while Dewey devastatingly deconstructs a whole set of traditional

philosophical dualisms – e.g., those between the mind and the body, experience and

nature, as well as knowledge and action, to name but a few – he also offers a

reconstructed picture of how a non-reductively naturalized philosophy in the service of

democracy as a way of life can deal with the issues that were previously thought to

require these problematic dualisms.25 The move from deconstruction to reconstruction

is a stage in the process of inquiry needed to settle the problematic situation the

philosophers seeks to transform.

29 Therefore, the crude dichotomy between therapeutic and systematic philosophy is,

again, completely unpragmatic and in my view also anti-Wittgensteinian, as it assumes

an essentialistic conception of the proper way of doing philosophy, without letting the

richness of different philosophical aims, methods, and conceptions flourish. It thinks

before looking, to use a Wittgensteinian phrase; or, to adopt a Peircean expression, it

blocks the road of inquiry. Our philosophical inquiries often need both deconstruction

and reconstruction; therefore, to narrow-mindedly restrict proper philosophizing to

one of these impedes philosophical understanding.

30 Just as pragmatism and pragmatically interpreted Wittgensteinianism seek to mediate

between the propositional and the non-propositional and between metaphysics and the

criticism of metaphysics, they also seek to mediate between therapeutic-deconstructive

and systematic-reconstructive conceptions of philosophy. Here pragmatism, also

Wittgensteinianized pragmatism, can reaffirm its role – emphasized by, e.g., James in

Pragmatism (1907, chapter 1) – as a critical mediator, a middle-ground-seeker,

continuously hoping to reinterpret, re-evaluate, and transform traditional

philosophical controversies.

6. Philosophy of Religion: Applying the Criticism of theFour Dichotomies

31 If we are able to avoid the dichotomies and assumptions discussed in the four previous

sections in a pragmatist and (I claim) Wittgensteinian way, we should also be able to

look and see what happens to a particular field of philosophical inquiry, such as the

philosophy of religion, when they are avoided. Even though this paper cannot even

begin to examine the Wittgensteinian tradition in the philosophy of religion, or even

Wittgenstein’s own views on religion, at any length,26 let us very briefly consider

philosophical investigations of religion on the basis of the following four ideas derived

from the treatment of Wittgenstein’s relation to pragmatism above. Moreover,

following Goodman (2002) again, we should recognize that the commitment to the

philosophical importance of religion is shared by Wittgenstein and James, as well as by

most other pragmatists, even though few pragmatists have straightforwardly defended

any traditional religious worldview.


17

32 First, it may be suggested that religious believers’ specifically religious ‘certainties’ –

the basic convictions underlying their religious ‘language-games’ or forms of life – are

both propositional and non-propositional, that is, manifesting or incorporating (if not

simply expressible in the form of) theological theses (e.g., regarding God’s reality) but

not reducible to mere linguistic statements considered in abstraction from human

habits of action. Such certainties are, rather, themselves habits of action, combining

propositional and non-propositional elements (cf. section 2 above).

33 Secondly, religious beliefs, including action-based ‘certainties,’ can be criticized and

rationally rejected in the spirit of fallibilism and general philosophical

antifoundationalism; yet, just as there is no rational grounding for them based on

religiously neutral criteria of reason, they cannot be rejected simply because of the lack

of such grounding. This is comparable to ‘the truth in skepticism’ (see section 3 above).

Religious beliefs, understood as practice-embedded certainties or fundamental

convictions shaping the believers’ lives, are not scientific-like hypotheses to be tested

in the way we test scientific or commonsensical beliefs about the world. Even so, they

can be given up and/or revised in the course of our on-going experience and its

transformations. They are not immune to criticism, because our lives and their

contexts can and do change, requiring us to modify the concepts and language-games

(including religious ones) we (may) employ to make sense of those lives. Or better, if

one’s faith is immune to criticism, then it is not genuinely religious at all (cf. Pihlström

2013, chapter 7).

34 Thirdly, pragmatist philosophers of religion should both criticize traditional

dogmatically metaphysical ways of pursuing theology and the philosophy of religion

(e.g., the ‘proofs’ of God’s existence or the artificial logical puzzles related to the

concept of omniscience, for instance) and be willing to consider metaphysical

expressions for their ideas concerning God, the soul, etc., even though pragmatic

metaphysical inquiries into religion and theology primarily have to start from, or be

subordinated to, ethical reflections on what it means to be a human being (cf.

Pihlström 2013, especially chapters 2 and 5; as well as section 4 above). In addition, for

instance, process-theological reconstruals of the divinity might be worth exploring

from both pragmatist and Wittgensteinian perspectives.

35 Fourthly, philosophy of religion, like Wittgensteinian-cum-pragmatist philosophy

generally, should be both deconstructive and reconstructive (cf. section 5 above): we

should, therapeutically, avoid dogmatic religious and/or theological beliefs but also,

systematically and argumentatively, contribute to the critical analysis and evaluation

of such belief systems. These are two sides of the same coin and equally important as

parts of a philosophico-theological search for an ever deeper understanding of religion.

36 Both pragmatist and Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion should, in my view,

subscribe to something like these formulations concerning the nature and tasks of the

philosophy of religion today –admittedly only very briefly and preliminarily articulated

here. We may, more specifically, join Goodman (2002: 154) in understanding James’s

pragmatic conception of religion as ‘Wittgensteinian’: the significance of religious

terms is ‘established by their use’; our understanding of such terms, symbols, or pictures

is constituted by the ‘service’ we put them to in our lives and practices, which is very

different from claiming, along with the naïve pragmatic theory of truth, that the truth

of religious beliefs would be established by their utility or usefulness. Accordingly, it is

not on the basis of their usefulness –their utility value to the individual or even to the


18

group– that we determine the truth of religious views or beliefs; yet, when trying to

articulate the very meaning of those views and beliefs in the context of human life and

culture, we do have to refer to the ways they are ‘used’ – their ‘service’ for us – within

our practices. They have to ‘make a difference’ somehow, and in many cases the

specific “difference” religious ideas make in our lives is ethical in the sense that they

enable us to see the world and our lives within it in certain value-laden ways.

37 In order to articulate this pragmatist conception of religion in more detail, we need

more than is available in Wittgenstein’s own cryptic and aphoristic remarks on

religious matters in Culture and Value (Wittgenstein 1980b) and in some of his students’

notes; we need a more systematic pragmatic-cum-Wittgensteinian investigation of the

ways in which religious expressions, symbols, beliefs, and worldviews are embedded

and employed in cultural practices. Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion could

therefore – in a more comprehensive discussion –be interestingly compared not only to

James’s pioneering work on religious experience and his pragmatic defense of the

legitimacy of religious beliefs in terms of their morally motivating force (see James

1907, chapter 8) but also to Dewey’s (1934) religious naturalism, which seeks to

accommodate religious experience and values, including even the concept “God,”

within a naturalistic position avoiding any dogmatic commitments to supernaturalist

metaphysics and pre-modern non-democratic social structures and institutions. “The

religious,” according to Dewey – and I suppose we might say, according to Wittgenstein

as well – must be emancipated from historical religions and their dogmatic creeds that

often hinder, instead of enabling, the flourishing of the truly religious qualities of

experience (cf. Pihlström 2013, chapter 3). This paper, however, cannot develop these

themes any further.

7. Conclusion

38 My reflections on Wittgenstein’s relation to pragmatism have been partly

programmatic and certainly need to be made more precise, both historically and

systematically. I do not think I have offered any fundamentally new interpretation of

Wittgenstein (or the pragmatists); this paper has only offered a proposal to consider

these philosophical frameworks together in a certain way. Yet, I hope that by putting

these two philosophical perspectives together in this specific way, questioning the

dichotomies I find pernicious, may help us in reinterpreting both as orientations that

ought to be taken very seriously in today’s philosophical discussions – concerning

metaphysics, religion, or the nature of philosophy itself. In particular, while

philosophical thought must obviously make distinctions and use them for specific

purposes, it is crucially important to move beyond the dichotomies briefly discussed in

sections 2-5 above, as such oppositions tend to hinder philosophical progress instead of

enhancing philosophical understanding.27

39 While there would be no point in insisting that Wittgenstein was a ‘pragmatist,’ given

that ‘pragmatism’ may itself be regarded as a ‘family-resemblance’ term and concept

(cf. Goodman 2002: 178), we may see Wittgenstein as offering a pragmatist (or at least

pragmatic) answer to a transcendental question concerning the very possibility of

meaning. He argues – in his own peculiar non-linear way – throughout his late works

that the possibility of language and meaning is (non-foundationally, fallibly) grounded

in public human practices, or forms of life, within which language is used, that is,


19

practices, or perhaps better, habits of action whose radical contingency and continuous

historical development are among their key features. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s

pragmatist acknowledgment of there being no higher standpoint for us to adopt than

the humanly accessible perspectives internal to our language-games and practices (that

is, that we cannot reach a ‘God’s-Eye View,’ or that aspiring to do that would be a

misunderstanding of the human condition, rather than an attempt to do something

that would be meaningful yet contingently beyond capacities) may be regarded as his

pragmatic reason for pursuing the ‘transcendental’ problem concerning the possibility

of meaning in the first place. The fact that Wittgenstein’s transcendental problems

must be taken seriously even within a pragmatist interpretation highlights the fact that

the Kantian background of both pragmatism and Wittgensteinian philosophy ought to

be acknowledged. As I have suggested, Wittgenstein poses transcendental questions

(e.g., ‘how is meaning possible?’) and offers pragmatic answers to them (e.g., in terms

of ‘certainties-in-action,’ or ‘hinges’). Moreover, it goes very well together with this

Kantian-cum-pragmatist approach to resist any strict, essentialistic dichotomy between

the ontological structure of the world itself and the conceptual structure we impose on

the world through our language-games, and to endorse the moderately constructivist

view that the world we live in is to a considerable extent constituted by our

categorizing it in terms of our language-use.28

40 This Kantian background of pragmatism brings me to my final conclusion. To be a

pragmatist, or to be a Wittgensteinian thinker today, is to be continuously reflexively –

transcendentally, as we may say – concerned with one’s own philosophical perspectives

and approaches, not only with their intellectual but more broadly with their ethical

integrity. It is to turn one’s self-critical gaze toward one’s own practices of

philosophizing, one’s own being-in-the-world, one’s own habits of action, intellectual

as well as more concretely practical. In James’s terms, it is to take full responsibility of

one’s individual “philosophical temperament” (see James 1907, chapter 1) and to self-

critically develop it further, through one’s contextualizing inquiries, hopefully learning

to listen to the richness of the human ‘voices’ speaking to us from within the indefinite

plurality of language-games that our fellow human beings play with each other and

with us.

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(ed.), Pragmatist Epistemologies, Lanham, MD, Lexington Books.

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Continuum.

PIHLSTRÖM S., (2013), Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God, New York, Fordham University

Press, forthcoming.

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Habermas and Bhaskar, London and New York, Routledge.

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PUTNAM H., (1992), Renewing Philosophy, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press.

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PUTNAM H., (2002), The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA and

London, Harvard University Press.

RUDD A., (2007), “Wittgenstein, Global Scepticism the Primacy of Practice,” in Moyal-Sharrock &

Brenner (eds.) (2007).

SLEEPER R. W., (1986), The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey’s Conception of Philosophy, New Haven,

CT, Yale University Press.


22

STENIUS E., (1960), Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: A Critical Exposition of Its Main Lines of Thought, London,

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964.

WALLGREN T., (2006), Transformative Philosophy: Socrates, Wittgenstein, and the Democratic Spirit of

Philosophy, Lanham, MD, Lexington Books.

WERTZ S. K., (1972), “On Wittgenstein and James,” The New Scholasticism 46.

WESTPHAL K. R., (2003), “Can Pragmatic Realists Argue Transcendentally?,” in John R. Shook (ed.),

Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism, Amherst, NY, Prometheus Books.

WHITE M., (2002), A Philosophy of Culture: The Scope of Holistic Pragmatism, Princeton, NJ, Princeton

University Press.

WILLIAMS M., (2004), “Wittgenstein’s Refutation of Idealism,” in McManus (ed.) (2004).

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1921), Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1953), Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford, Basil

Blackwell, 1958.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1969), On Certainty, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M.

Anscombe & Denis Paul, Oxford, Basil Blackwell.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1970), Zettel, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, trans.

G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford, Basil Blackwell.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1980a), Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe,

Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1980b), Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch, Chicago,

University of Chicago Press.

VON WRIGHT G. H., (1971), Explanation and Understanding, Ithaca, New York and London, Cornell

University Press.

VON WRIGHT G. H., (1974), Causality and Determinism, New York and London, Columbia University

Press.

NOTES

1. I will occasionally refer to Goodman’s interpretation throughout this essay, but I try to look at

the relation between Wittgenstein and pragmatism from a slightly different angle (and not to

restrict myself to the comparison of Wittgenstein and James). For some pioneering historical

work on the relations between Wittgenstein and Peirce, see Bambrough 1981, Gullvåg 1981,

Haack 1982, Nubiola 1996, and Crocker 1998. Wittgenstein’s relation to James was discussed by

commentators already earlier (cf. Fairbanks 1966, Wertz 1972, Baum 1980), but Goodman’s

interpretation is much more comprehensive and detailed. (See, however, also Ben-Menahem

1998.) On the other hand, some of the more recent interpreters who find connections between

Wittgenstein and pragmatism fail to consider Wittgenstein in relation to the historical

pragmatist tradition. This is as true about those who read Wittgenstein in relation to

deconstruction and postmodernist (Rortyan) ‘pragmatism’ (see the essays in Nagl & Mouffe (eds.)

2001) as it is about those for whom pragmatism seems to be basically a certain anti-skeptical

position within analytic epistemology (Bilgrami 2004), or a view of norms alternative to

‘epistemological realism’ (Williams 2004, especially 95-6).


23

2. See Goodman’s (2002, especially chapter 2) discussion of Wittgenstein’s reception of James’s

Varieties. On the pragmatic method or pragmatist principle, see, e.g., the various reflections in

Pihlström (ed.) 2011.

3. I do think that Putnam’s readings of Wittgenstein in relation to Kant and the pragmatist

tradition (e.g., in Putnam 1995) are largely on the right track – indeed, Putnam is one of the few

thinkers who admit that both Wittgenstein and the pragmatists share a Kantian heritage – and

therefore part of what I am going to say is to some extent indebted to Putnam, both

philosophically and historically, but I am not going to explicitly rely on his interpretations of

Wittgenstein or the pragmatists here. In this essay, space does not allow me to elaborate on the

interpretation of Wittgenstein as a (neo-)Kantian thinker engaged in transcendental

argumentation. While I share such a picture of Wittgenstein (cf. Pihlström 2003, 2004, 2006),

believing it can be pragmatically enriched, its defense is not necessary for the present

examination of Wittgenstein’s relation to pragmatism. See also Pihlström (ed.) 2006, and see

section 5 below.

4. For Price’s defense of global expressivism as the framework within which Wittgenstein’s

linguistic (functional) pluralism makes sense, see especially Price 2011, chapter 10 (cf. also

chapter 14). For a “Kantian” (and Wittgensteinian) pragmatist, an interesting further question

inspired by Price’s work would be whether global expressivism could be understood as a

pragmatist version of transcendental idealism within which (only) a pragmatic or empirical

realism becomes possible. This paper is not the proper place to examine such an issue further,

though. I should note, however, that where I clearly would not follow Price’s pragmatism is his

strongly anti-metaphysical approach. In my view, the pragmatist should not “escape”

metaphysical and ontological questions, should not simply “replace” them with questions about

thought and language, and should not embrace “anthropology” instead of a (renewed)

metaphysics “in a pragmatist key” (cf. ibid.: 315). For an alternative pragmatist conception of

metaphysics, see Pihlström 2009; cf. also Pihlström (ed.) 2011.

5. This idea could be spelled out, e.g., in terms of Morton White’s holistic pragmatism (e.g., 2002);

cf. also Peperzak 1986.

6. This is something I have to some extent tried to do in earlier publications (cf. Pihlström 2003,

2004, 2006, (ed.) 2006). I am not going to repeat those reflections here; fortunately, I hope I do

have novel points to add. Moreover, while my more recent investigations of pragmatism

(Pihlström 2009, (ed.) 2011, 2013) do not explicitly deal with Wittgenstein, their approach is

compatible with a “Wittgensteinianized” pragmatism as well.

7. The key reference here is Daniele Moyal-Sharrock’s interpretation, as defended in her

monograph on On Certainty and her papers on the ‘third Wittgenstein’: see Moyal-Sharrock 2004,

and (ed.) 2004, as well as Moyal-Sharrock & Brenner (eds.) 2007.

8. On Wittgenstein’s (late) philosophy as a pragmatist response to a transcendental problem, see

also Pihlström 2003, chapter 2. Goodman (2002: 28) also notes that the Wittgensteinian ‘we’ is ‘the

‘necessary’ or ‘transcendental’ we of the ‘human.’ For a more comprehensive treatment of

Wittgenstein and the “transcendental we,” see Lear 1998. Cf. section 5 below.

9. Another scholar explicitly referring to the ‘primacy of practice’ as Wittgenstein’s view is

Anthony Rudd (see his 2007: 153). He even suggests that we might call Wittgenstein’s stance

‘transcendental pragmatism’ (ibid.: 158) – also suggested by myself in Pihlström 2003, chapter 2.

Rudd’s (2007: 146) illuminating discussion of Wittgenstein’s Zettel (Wittgenstein 1970: §§ 413-4) –

the famous example of the realist and the idealist teaching their children the word ‘chair,’ with

no genuine difference in these teachings that would make any practical difference – could also

benefit from an explicit comparison to James’s (1907, chapter 2) pragmatic method, which argues

for the same conclusion: “if a philosophical difference does not show itself in any way in practice,

there is no real point at issue at all” (Rudd 2007: 146).


24

10. Relevant writings by Peirce and James on beliefs as habits of action can be found in Peirce

(1992-98, especially vol. 1 and the classical 1877 essay, “The Fixation of Belief,” contained

therein) and James (1907), particularly chapter 2. In this paper, I cannot discuss these or other

pragmatist classics in any detail.

11. Note, then, that I am not here using the term ‘habit’ in any technical Peircean logical and/or

semiotic sense but more loosely as referring to human habitual practices. This concept is a close

relative of the concept of a form of life in Wittgenstein. However, my usage of ‘habit’ does, I

think, retain a link to the views of the founder of pragmatism, given that it is in terms of habits

that we have to understand our ability to make any sense at all with our linguistic or other

semiotic expressions. Habits are a key to signification – but also to inquiry and belief-fixation, as

both Peirce and later Dewey argued.

12. See the essays collected in Hintikka 1996. This is not to say that Hintikka would accept this

view (“language-game holism,” as it has sometimes been labeled) as a philosophical conception

of language, even though he does believe it was Wittgenstein’s position. Cf. also Price’s (very

different) proposal to give “a pragmatic account of the origins of the semantic” (Price 2011: 205).

Goodman (2002: 14-5) speaks about “pragmatic holism” as a Jamesian view that Wittgenstein felt

coming “uncomfortably close” to his own position.

13. On the possibility of fallibilist transcendental argumentation, see Westphal 2003. Goodman

(2002) in my view makes justice to both aspects of Wittgenstein by both emphasizing that

Wittgenstein and James shared a commitment to antifoundationalism (ibid., 5) and duly noting

that Wittgenstein, unlike James, maintained a clear distinction between philosophy and science,

or philosophical and empirical justification (ibid.: 30-1). Another important difference between

Wittgenstein and pragmatism is political and cultural: Wittgenstein never shared any of the

progressivism of the pragmatists (see ibid.: 167 ff.).

14. I am not saying that these concepts are identical. My point is general enough to be made with

regard to any or all of them, depending on one’s philosophical (and terminological) preferences.

15. This, of course, is something that has famously been elaborated on by Stanley Cavell (see his

1979). However, Cavell, presumably, would find little added value in comparisons between

Wittgenstein and pragmatism. For more comprehensive discussions of Wittgenstein’s relation to

skepticism, see McManus 2004.

16. My use of a Heideggerian phrase here is of course deliberate. In Heidegger’s case as much as

in Wittgenstein’s, the question of possible links to pragmatism has been discussed (e.g., Okrent

1988) and needs further discussion.

17. Cf., e.g., Putnam’s work on this topic, especially Putnam 2002; see also Pihlström 2005.

18. It is far from clear that Quine can be called a “pragmatist” at all, despite his influence on both

Putnam’s and Rorty’s versions of neopragmatism. See Koskinen & Pihlström 2006.

19. I am fully aware that some New Wittgensteinians resist such formulations. See the next

section for a brief pragmatic critique of such views.

20. Another possible example of a metaphysical topic receiving a pragmatic-cum-

Wittgensteinian treatment is the ‘actionist’ (‘interventionist,’ ‘manipulative’) theory of causation

defended by one of Wittgenstein’s distinguished followers, G. H. von Wright (1971, 1974).

However, it is unclear whether we can say that von Wright’s views on, say, causation are

“metaphysical” at all; he is generally an anti-metaphysical thinker, like so many

Wittgensteinians, and he can be said to investigate the concept of causation instead of the

metaphysical structure of causation itself. But then, again, this dichotomy between metaphysical

structures of reality and our conceptualizations of those structures from within our practices

must be called into question by the pragmatist (and, a fortiori, by the Wittgensteinian

pragmatist).

21. See Crary & Read 2000, Wallgren 2006, as well as several essays in Pihlström (ed.) 2006.


25

22. The “Kantian” tradition in interpretations of Wittgenstein goes back at least to Erik Stenius’s

seminal study (Stenius 1960).

23. See the discussion of ‘hinges’ and the ‘logically pragmatist’ interpretation of On Certainty in

section 2 above. The notion of “transcendental pragmatism” was already referred to in that

context (cf. Pihlström 2003; Rudd 2007).

24. Note also that the transcendental interpretation is certainly not the only way of making

Wittgenstein a philosopher of theses and arguments. Wittgenstein has, of course, been employed

in the service of analytic philosophy of language in a distinctively pragmatist manner by Huw

Price (2011): his expressivist, minimalist, and functionally pluralist engagement with

Wittgenstein, or engagement with semantics from a Wittgensteinian perspective, is certainly not

deconstructive in the sense of Rorty’s or the New Wittgensteinians’ projects but genuinely

reconstructive (which does not mean I would agree with his use of Wittgenstein: Price is too anti-

metaphysical a pragmatist for my taste, as was noted above).

25. Similarly, we might say that James (1907, chapters 3-4) first deconstructs, by employing (his

version of) the pragmatic method, several traditional philosophical issues and ideas (e.g.,

substance, the free will, God, and the dispute between monism and pluralism), and then

reconstructs these issues and the corresponding debates in terms of his pragmatist grounding of

metaphysics in ethics. Thus, he does not suggest (deconstructively) that we should simply

abandon those issues or the related philosophical concepts; he (reconstructively) suggests that

we can find their pragmatic core by using the pragmatic method (cf. Pihlström 2009).

26. D. Z. Phillips’s work is, of course, the most widely read – and most controversial – within

‘Wittgensteinian’ philosophy of religion. For a collection of up-to-date essays, see Phillips and

von der Ruhr (eds.) 2005. These discussions rarely connect Wittgenstein, or Wittgensteinian

philosophy of religion, with pragmatism; for some reflections in this regard, see Pihlström 2013,

especially chapter 3; for an earlier attempt to connect Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion with

the pragmatists,’ see Pihlström 1996, chapter 5.

27. There is a sense in which James might even be seen as a more thoroughgoing critic of harmful

dichotomies than Wittgenstein. Yemina Ben-Menahem touches something important in the

following: “James’s pragmatism is no less a critique of traditional fixations than is Wittgenstein’s.

But the philosophical dichotomies Wittgenstein holds fast to, fact and value, internal and

external, causes and reasons, are the very dichotomies James is trying to bridge. Thus, while for

Wittgenstein the description of language is the description of its grammatical internal relations,

for James the internal and the external, the causal and the linguistic, are ultimately inseparable”

(Ben-Menahem 1998: 134). Accordingly, while I have argued that Wittgenstein shares with the

pragmatists a critical attitude to certain dichotomies taken to be foundational to philosophy – or,

perhaps better, that a pragmatist interpreter of Wittgenstein should view Wittgenstein’s

philosophy in such a manner that those dichotomies are left aside – this is not to say that

Wittgenstein and the pragmatists would have rejected all and only the same dichotomies. There

are dichotomies that Wittgenstein, unlike the pragmatists (or at least James) holds fast to.

28. Taking this view ontologically seriously might also throw new light on Wittgenstein’s (1953, I:

§§ 371, 373) well-known claims about ‘essence’ lying in grammar.


26

ABSTRACTS

This essay reconsiders Wittgenstein’s relation to the pragmatist tradition. I first discuss, from a

pragmatist perspective, three key issues of Wittgenstein studies: the distinction – invoked in

recent discussions of On Certainty, in particular – between the propositional and the non-propositional

(section 2); the tension between anti-Cartesian fallibilism and what has been called the ‘truth in

skepticism’ in Wittgenstein (section 3); as well as the relation between metaphysics and the criticism

of metaphysics in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and Wittgensteinian philosophy more generally

(section 4). I then proceed to a more metaphilosophical consideration of yet another problematic

dichotomy, the one between deconstructive (therapeutic) and (re)constructive or systematic,

argumentative philosophy – which, I argue, the pragmatist, together with Wittgenstein, ought to

overcome rather than rely on (section 5). After having gone through these open issues in

Wittgenstein scholarship at a general level, I briefly apply my considerations to the philosophy of

religion, which is an important field of inquiry for both Wittgensteinian and pragmatist thinkers

(section 6).

AUTHOR

SAMI PIHLSTRÖM

Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies & University of Jyväskylä

sami.pihlstrom[at]helsinki.fi


27

Who’s Calling Wittgenstein aPragmatist?Judy M. Hensley

Introduction

1 There is some irony to the fact that the content of this paper will deal with a

controversy surrounding the application of labels to a philosopher who displayed the

root of many philosophical disputes to be disputes over labels and ways of speaking.

The truth of this philosopher’s insight is especially apparent in twentieth century

philosophy, as this century has largely been a breaking away from the philosophical

positions and labels that have marked philosophy since Descartes and a forging of new

positions and, hence, new labels. The result of forging these new philosophical

territories has been a philosophical tendency to dispute the interpretation of past

philosophies in negotiating boundaries.

2 In this paper, I will be focusing on the debate that surrounds “pragmatic”

interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein. By this, I mean the debate between those who

read Wittgenstein as a pragmatist or as having pragmatic affinities and those who

object to this reading. In particular, drawing on Hilary Putnam’s lecture “Was

Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?”1 and Stanley Cavell’s response “What’s the Use of Calling

Emerson a Pragmatist?,”2 I will spell out the similarities seen between Wittgenstein and

pragmatism as well as the divergences emphasized between the two.I will argue that

the teasing out of the similarities and the teasing out of the differences is important to

a) having a clearer understanding of both Wittgenstein and pragmatism; b) showing

elements that make twentieth century philosophy unique; and c) shedding light on

where philosophy is now, what issues and questions are being raised, and what possible

solutions and answers are being offered.


28

Was Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?

3 Hilary Putnam begins his lecture, and I will begin my discussion of his lecture, by

stressing that this question and his title, “Was Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?,” is “in a

way” misleading.3 He clarifies the fact (and repeats it in his concluding remarks) that

his purpose is only to show the shared background and insights of Wittgenstein, Kant,

and the pragmatists. Putnam’s approach to this question aims to place what he takes as

pragmatism’s central insights in philosophical and historical context, showing

continuity, convergence and development of these insights over time. I stress this aim,

because it is crucial to understanding Putnam’s argument (and Stanley Cavell’s

response). Putnam’s intention is not to reduce Wittgenstein to an ‘-ism’ of any kind,

including pragmatism. One almost must skip to the end of Putnam’s lecture to most

clearly understand its beginning and purpose. There, he clearly and explicitly states

that, although Wittgenstein was not a “pragmatist,” he did share a common Kantian

heritage and at least one common insight with them.4

4 Putnam claims there are two philosophical seeds found in Kant that sprout when

placed in the soils of pragmatist and Wittgensteinian philosophy. The first is the

observation that we bring conceptual biases and interests to our descriptions of the

world.5 The second is Kant’s ‘incipient pluralism,’ which recognizes that we have and

use various interactive and interdependent images of the world.6

5 Both of these themes will look significantly different in their ripened form.In the first

case, although Wittgenstein carries over Kant’s observation that our descriptions carry

with them conceptual ‘baggage,’ he adamantly rejects the notion of description without

such “baggage.”7 The idea of a description of the world without conceptual biases

would require the invention of a language independent of our purposes for language,

something that is neither intelligible nor fathomable. As long as language is invented

and used for particular human purposes (i.e. as long as humans use language), our

concepts will be influenced by those purposes and so will our descriptions.

6 In the second theme carried over from Kant, Wittgenstein and the pragmatists take up

and affirm that we use various vocabularies in our interaction with the world, but they

reject Kant’s priority given to scientific images and vocabularies as having privileged

access to true descriptions and knowledge claims.8 Science, its images, and its

vocabulary hold no special access to the world over less sophisticated, ‘primitive,’ and

pre-scientific images such as religion, art and morality. While the pragmatists might

overtly state this point, Wittgenstein, in his typically “deflationary” tone, refuses to

turn his observations into theses and only states the obvious – that our ethical words

also have uses in language.9

7 Putnam’s point in raising these issues is multiple. For one, he is rejecting the commonly

held interpretation of Wittgenstein as ‘the end of philosophy’: the picture that

philosophy is a disease, and Wittgenstein the cure.10 Second, he wants to show that

Wittgenstein is instead trying to convert us from a bad way of looking at things to a

better way of seeing things,11 something Wittgenstein explicitly confesses, as reported

in his “Lectures on Aesthetics.”12 Third, Putnam wants to shed light on what and how

Wittgenstein wants us to see differently. And, lastly, he wants to make explicit a

common Kantian heritage shared by both the pragmatists and Wittgenstein and shared

reactions to that heritage (at least in some respects).


29

8 Moving to the more controversial part of the lecture, Putnam moves to an insight he

sees brought over from Kant and shared by both the pragmatists and Wittgenstein: ‘the

primacy of practical reason.’ In Kant, this takes the form of recognizing that we cannot

justify our knowledge (be it scientific or moral) by beginning with a priori reasoning

but only by beginning with our practical reason.13 As Putnam says elsewhere, the

primacy of practical reason is recognizing that what is indispensable to our practices is

more primary than what our theories can justify.14 This is not to say, however, that

whatever is indispensable to our practices becomes necessarily good, true or right; it

only means that those practices should be taken into account.If something is

indispensable to our practices and all the arguments against it fail, these combined

make a better argument for that something than an argument against it that claims,

since we do not have a justification for it, it cannot be. In short, philosophy must begin

with taking our practices seriously and not with trying to construct “a theory of

everything.”15

9 Putnam’s extension of this to Wittgenstein consists in reading Wittgenstein to be

saying that the possibility of understanding a form of life, without participating in its

practices, is limited.16 As long as the value and purpose of a form of life can only be

stated in the language of that form of life, philosophy cannot provide some rule or

theory to judge it, without participating in its practices or, at least, some of its practices.

For Wittgenstein, the root of moral criticism must be shared practices (including

shared practices of criticism itself) and not some theory of the Good.17 For Dewey, this

same basic idea appears in his view that one purpose for philosophy should be to

criticize the beliefs, customs, policies, institutions of a culture but only through the

other shared beliefs, customs, policies and institutions of such culture.

What’s the Use of Calling Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?

10 Cavell, in his article “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?,” wants to ask

what is at stake in drawing the similarities between Wittgenstein and the pragmatists

(in particular Dewey) and what is at stake in stressing the limitations of the

comparison. Cavell begins by quoting what he takes to be a typical and representative

passage of Dewey: “scientific method is the only authentic means at our command for

getting at the significance of our everyday experiences of the world in which we live.”18

Cavell, by taking this as representative of Dewey’s philosophy, thereby considers

Dewey’s philosophy lacking in what I shall call the moral perfectionist and existential

aspects which Cavell finds in the philosophy of Emerson and Wittgenstein. Cavell

claims that the privileged status that Dewey grants to the method of science is

incompatible with an Emersonian emphasis on concepts such as mourning, objectivity

and the human subject.19 Cavell finds Dewey’s primacy of science and its method

inadequate to the “work,” which Emerson (and Wittgenstein) considered necessary for

philosophy to access the significance of our experiences, especially experiences such as

mourning or skepticism (understood as Cavell’s sense of ‘skepticism’).

11 For Wittgenstein more specifically, Cavell objects to Putnam’s confidence that

Wittgenstein, alongside the pragmatists, grants ‘a primacy of practice.’20 Cavell takes

several passages – one from Philosophical Investigations (§ 217) 21 and a set from On

Certainty (§ 422, § 89)22 – that he claims are used to justify Wittgenstein’s affinities with

pragmatism.23 Cavell interprets these passages as neither invoking practice nor


30

granting a centrality to practical effects; rather, according to him, they mean that,

oftentimes, we are left with patience, waiting, and inaction as our only options.24 At

times, according to Cavell’s Wittgenstein, our practices run short, and we are impotent

to take action.

12 Cavell considers the significance of these passages to be Wittgenstein’s struggle “with

the threat of skepticism,” a threat, he notices, Dewey and James refuse to take seriously

(though James less than Dewey).25 Wittgenstein, according to Cavell, treats skepticism

as a “necessary consequence” of speech and coincident with being human,26 while the

pragmatists, at best, treat it as a temperament found in certain personality types or, at

worst, do not take it seriously at all.27

13 Cavell finds in Wittgenstein an important distinction between a time for practice and a

time for patience, between action and passion, between ‘massive unintelligence’ and

“general despair,” between the call for political change and the necessity of suffering,28

and ultimately between the role of philosophy found in Emerson and Wittgenstein and

that found in Deweyan pragmatism. Cavell’s fear is that by collapsing Wittgenstein and

Emerson’s philosophy into Dewey’s, a philosophy, on Cavell’s reading, oriented toward

the scientific method and focused on political and democratic progress, we will lose

what he considers to be of utmost importance in philosophy. What we will lose is the

necessity of individual self-examination and individual growth, of struggling with one’s

self and allowing one’s self to be changed and transformed by and through philosophy.

Cavell fears that what he finds unique in the role of philosophy cannot be captured by

Dewey’s call to apply the scientific method to our political, social, and economic lives,

because it leaves out wrestling with existential questions, which requires suffering and

patience and ultimately the striving toward moral perfection.29

Negotiating Between the Two Questions

14 My explication of the two sides should at least hint at a problem here: mainly, that

there is no obvious conflict. It would seem that we again have a case of philosophers

talking past each other, or, to be fair, (since Putnam does not have a written response)

our case is one of Cavell talking past Putnam. This becomes apparent by the fact that

Cavell raises Putnam’s application of the primacy of practice yet does not directly

address Putnam’s argument. The reason for this, it seems to me, is that they are not

even talking about the same thing here (even if they share common terminology). In

Putnam’s use of ‘the primacy of practice,’ he is opposing ‘practice’ to abstract

theorizing and a priori justifications; Cavell, in his use, is opposing ‘practice’ to

inaction, patience, and reflection. But Putnam’s use is far broader than Cavell

understands it to be. By practice, Putnam can only mean our human practices, which

entails just as much our silence, patience and reflections as it does forging ahead and

taking action. Putnam’s claim is far less controversial than Cavell’s construal of it;

Putnam’s claim that both Wittgenstein and the pragmatists share the view that our

reflections and theorizing should take our practices – be they political, social, cultural,

economic, scientific, or moral – seriously is not one to which I think Cavell would

object.

15 However, that there are not genuine disagreements in this case of “the primacy of

practice” is not to say that there are not some serious difficulties elsewhere. The

difficulty that I want to mention here is Cavell disregarding aspects of Dewey’s


31

philosophy in order to make his point (but, as I will explain further, this is not fatal to

what I take to be Cavell’s key point).While Dewey does think that science is the best

model we actually have for experimental application of intelligent inquiry to

problematic situations, he does not think that it is the exclusive method, something

Cavell outrightly allows the reader to believe by his choice (and de-contextualization)

of Dewey’s quote about ‘the only authentic means’ of understanding the significance of

our experiences. Dewey does not think science has the supreme and ultimate method;

rather, he believes the scientific method provides a useful model of success, a

paradigm, from which we can draw insights (i.e. experimentalism, application of

intelligence to problems) and apply them to other areas of our lives. Cavell’s portrayal

of Dewey misses that Dewey was not afraid of criticizing science or of pointing out its

shortcomings, nor does he think it appropriate to apply science to all experience.

16 Regardless, Cavell’s key point – that there is a sense that, on the matter of science,

Wittgenstein, on the one hand, and Dewey and the pragmatists, on the other, do part

company – is unaffected by this misrepresentation. I interpret Wittgenstein, from many

of the remarks made in his journals and collected as Culture and Value,30 to have

considered any faith in progress, not just Enlightenment faith in inevitable progress, a

hidden remnant of scientism in Western culture. While Cavell might be wrong about

Dewey’s idealization of the scientific method, I think that Wittgenstein would have

objected to Dewey and the pragmatists’ idealization of progress in general.

Wittgenstein was a deeply pessimistic thinker, even if this does not show in his

published philosophical writings. Nevertheless, he deeply despaired of his age, and, in

part, because everywhere there was “progress,” he saw decline.31

17 This pessimism, I find, incompatible with, and contrary to, the ameliorism of the

pragmatists. While Dewey did not think progress inevitable, he suggested and probably

believed that there is good reason for optimism, as long as we persist with the

application of critical intelligence. However, Dewey was not willing to examine the

limitations of applying his methods to problematic situations, a failure to explore what

Cornel West has called the “tragic.” Cavell has identified a difference here, but it is not

so much based on that Dewey idealizes the scientific method as much as that he

idealizes the notion of progress taken from science.

18 In order to make his point, I claim, Cavell also downplays the moral aspect of Dewey’s

philosophy for the political aspect. For Cavell’s opposition to work, Dewey must be

painted as concerned exclusively with political and social action, and not with the

moral development of the individual. In short, Cavell must ignore Dewey’s Ethics and, in

particular, the part in which he argues that any progress (social, political, economic,

etc.) is not possible without human flourishing, without fulfillment of individuals’

powers and capacities.32 For Dewey, a philosophy concerned with political and social

reform does not make sense without equal concern for individual human flourishing, a

position compatible with Wittgenstein and Emerson’s moral perfectionism. For Dewey,

these things are deeply interconnected and in a dialectical relationship; political and

social progress occurs through individual flourishing and, in turn, individuals are the

agents of social and political progress.


32

Cavell’s Central Challenge

19 Despite difficulties with his description of Dewey, Cavell nonetheless correctly

identifies a key difference between Wittgenstein and Emerson, on the one hand, and

Dewey, on the other: that there is a deep tension between philosophy as an individual

examination of oneself and as a politically engaged method for progress. While

Wittgenstein and Dewey might have shared a scorn for philosophy as metaphysics and

they might have shared the primacy of practice, Dewey does emphasize political practice,

and Wittgenstein does emphasize (personal) moral practice. And while Putnam for his

purposes stresses the commonality, Cavell sees a tension in this difference that he does

not want glossed over.

20 The difference is between the stressing of philosophy as political/cultural criticism and

as an existential/moral exercise, a working on oneself. The tension implicates the

perennial pull between the individual and community. Wittgenstein’s (and Emerson’s)

focus is on the moral and existential suffering that necessarily accompanies human

existence; and philosophy, for them, is centrally a method to help individuals cope with

this. This suffering, oftentimes, requires inaction, if action is understood as changing

one’s circumstances; instead, this kind of suffering demands a working on oneself, a

changing of one’s attitude.33 Dewey’s focus, however, is on an entirely different kind of

suffering: suffering that inhibits personal change and growth; suffering caused by

oppression, torture and inequality; suffering that does not have its roots necessarily in

the iron human predicament but in human and, therefore, malleable socio-economic

institutions; suffering which must be removed before there is any hope or possibility of

‘working on oneself’ or changing one’s attitude.

21 While Wittgenstein largely used philosophy as an internalized working on the self,

Dewey used it to change his external surroundings. Cavell’s objection is that if

philosophy is ‘merely’ a tool for the eradication of social, political, and economic

injustices, philosophy could just as easily be replaced by political science departments,

the legal profession, or the Peace Corps for that matter.34 What I think Cavell fails to

recognize, however, is that philosophy does not have to have a singular aim and that

there is nothing, philosophically, incompatible with Dewey’s and Wittgenstein’s

emphasis on different aims. The incompatibility lies not in pitting Dewey’s philosophy

against Wittgenstein’s, as nothing philosophically requires choosing between them;

rather, philosophically, as probably all those inspired by the pragmatist spirit (from at

least William James to Cornel West) have pointed out, to some degree, the two aims go

hand in hand. However, the tension arises in individuals’ lives: the tug-of-war between

political injustice and the individual struggle toward human flourishing, between social

progress and a person’s own moral progress, between working on communal

improvement and working on self-improvement, between things we can control and

change and things to which we must submit and accept. Where Cavell could have

strengthened the key insight of his paper is not by pitting the two philosophies against

each other but by pitting the two lives against each other. In theory, there does not

seem to be a problem between our political commitments and our existential

commitments. But, if you look at the lives of these philosophers – of Wittgenstein and

Emerson, of James and Dewey – we see in all of them this tension and conflict arise.

22 Emerson often felt riddled by the conflict between, on the one side, his desire for action

and desire to be an agent in social change and, on the other, his contemplative and


33

solitary temperament.35 William James as well felt the tension, and he tended toward

the individual aspect. But the radical contrast can be found in comparing the life of

Dewey to the life of Wittgenstein, and I believe this makes Cavell’s point stronger than

his comparison between Wittgenstein and Emerson’s philosophies and a simplified

Deweyan philosophy.

23 Dewey certainly felt the conflict between his individual morality and his responsibility

to social and political reform. Yet, he consistently chose his commitments to the

community, even, one could argue, at the cost of his personal morality in some cases.

His decision to temper his views or to steer away from radical issues,36 viewed from the

standpoint of Wittgenstein’s moral perfectionism, required an unacceptable

compromise. On the other hand, Wittgenstein’s personal integrity, including an almost

inhuman refusal to compromise, is central to understanding his moral search for purity

as well as his philosophical search for clarity.

24 Wittgenstein’s political engagements in his life show more than anything else his

difference from Dewey. I would argue that Wittgenstein refused to use philosophy in

any political way, beyond the role it played in guiding his own political activities and

decisions. It is those activities and decisions to which I now want to turn in order to

reveal just how deep the contrast between him and Dewey runs. Three biographical

incidences illustrate this point. The first is Wittgenstein’s role in World War I.

Wittgenstein demanded to fight at the front and at the most dangerous post despite

encouragement from military officials that he would better serve the army behind the

lines. This incident shows a view of political commitment that, above all, requires

solidarity of position and circumstance, not just solidarity of views and causes. The

second is Wittgenstein’s decision, at the end of the war, to renounce his inheritance,

not giving it to the poor or a charitable cause (other than contributing minimal

amounts of it to several artists), but to his already abundantly wealthy relatives. This

decision, at a minimum, affirms my interpretation that socially and politically he

believed in activism through solidarity. In a more extreme interpretation of the

decision, this act suggests that Wittgenstein viewed material possessions as corrupt and

felt that he would not be aiding the poor by distributing his wealth to them. This hints

at a view of (economic) suffering as either inevitable, not his responsibility, or

unnecessary to alleviate. The final incident is Wittgenstein’s attempt, later in his life, to

immigrate to Stalinist Russia, which fell through precisely as a result of Wittgenstein’s

demand (and Russia’s refusal) that he work on a collective once there (again, in

solidarity with and along side the “downtrodden”).

25 I believe that comparison of the two lives better highlights the central problem that

Cavell sees with grouping Wittgenstein (and Emerson) as a pragmatist, but I also

believe that this comparison raises one of the central issues with which pragmatism

and neo-pragmatism wrestled with and is wrestling with still today. I think

Wittgenstein and Dewey’s personal philosophical views that guided their individual

decisions are antithetical. Wittgenstein would probably consider Dewey lacking in

courage, hypocritical, and compromised (if not worse).37 Dewey would probably

consider Wittgenstein politically naive, unrealistic, not living up to his full

responsibilities, and, therefore, partially lacking the integrity so prized and valorized

by him.

26 Thankfully, such extreme personalities only occur rarely and some balance can usually

be struck in the life of the individual; however, the tension has been a ubiquitous one in


34

philosophy, accompanying the similar question of philosophy as poetry and philosophy

as science. That the situation will be remedied or the tension resolved ultimately is

unlikely. As long as communities are made up of individuals, there will be conflicts

between personal responsibility and communal responsibility, and the balance can only

be worked out in the life of each individual within the context of his or her particular

community.

27 But to bring us back to the “debate” between Putnam and Cavell, that there is no

debate should be now obvious (at least, not with Putnam’s use of Wittgenstein, and

Cavell does not mention anyone else’s). Putnam himself says Wittgenstein is no

pragmatist, no neo-pragmatist. He certainly never claimed that Wittgenstein and

Dewey shared agreement about everything, and he understands that each was a unique

thinker and a unique character. If Putnam’s point can be said to be about a shared

insight, Cavell’s point could be said to be about a shared game of tug-of-war but also

about the difference in sides taken. But neither of these are incompatible with the

other and, in fact, both properly understood help not only to clarify Wittgenstein’s

philosophy and the philosophy of pragmatism, but also together they show some

unique insights and solutions offered to problems found in twentieth century

philosophy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CAVELL S., (1998), “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?,” in M. Dickstein (ed.), The

Revival of Pragmatism, Durham, Duke University Press.

DEWEY J. & J. TUFTS, (1908), Ethics, New York, Henry Holt and Company.

PUTNAM H., (1994), “Pragmatism and Moral Objectivity,” in J. Conant (ed.), Words and Life,

Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

PUTNAM H., (1995), “Was Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?,” in Pragmatism: An Open Question, Malden,

Blackwell Publishers, Inc.

WEST Cornel, (1989), The American Evasion of Philosophy, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1958), Philosophical Investigations, New York, Macmillan Publishing.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1966), “Lectures on Aesthetics,” in C. Barrett (ed.), Lectures and Conversations,

Berkeley, University of California Press.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1969), On Certainty, New York, Harper Torchbooks.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1980), Culture and Value, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

NOTES

1. Putnam 1995.


35

2. Cavell 1998.

3. Putnam (1995: 27).

4. Putnam (1995: 52).

5. Putnam (1995: 28-9).

6. Putnam (1995: 30).

7. Putnam (1995: 29).

8. Putnam (1995: 31).

9. Putnam (1995: 41).

10. Putnam (1995: 27, 31).

11. Putnam (1995: 27).

12. Wittgenstein (1966: 27-8). He is reported as saying: “What I’m doing is also persuasion […] I

am saying ‘I don’t want you to look at it like that’.” The footnote to that, the alternative report,

is: “I am saying I want you to look at the thing in a different way.” Also, “I am in a sense making

propaganda for one style of thinking as opposed to another. I am honestly disgusted with the

other.” This seems to me further support that there is no “end” to philosophy where philosophy

is understood as a discipline. I interpret Wittgenstein (1958: § 133) to mean that philosophical

questions must have stopping points (i.e. conceivable answers), something the metaphysical and

epistemological projects of traditional philosophy lacked, and it is this type of project to which

he is an end. He generalizes a few passages later in his lecture: “How much we are doing is

changing the style of thinking and how much I’m doing is changing the style of thinking […]

(Much of what we are doing is a question of changing the style of thinking.)” I can only assume

by “we” he means philosophers and by “what we are doing” he means philosophy. This suggests

to me that Wittgenstein did hold a “constructive” view for philosophy; however, as in the case

with all his other views, he does not state it as or in the form of a thesis but rather lets his

observations stand for themselves. I want to make clear however that, considering his later

philosophy as a whole, I do not think that these remarks on persuasion can be interpreted

without mentioning that persuasion: a) must occur within a shared form of life or at least with

some shared forms, b) that it does not mean there is no better or worse way of viewing things,

nor c) that it means there are no external sources from which we can negotiate varying

perspectives.

13. Wittgenstein (1966: 42-3).

14. See Putnam 1994.

15. Putnam (1995: 44).

16. Putnam (1995: 42).

17. See Wittgenstein (1969: § 608-12).

18. Qtd. in Cavell (1998: 73).

19. Cavell (1998: 74).

20. Cavell (1998: 76).

21. Wittgenstein (1958: § 217).

22. Wittgenstein (1969: § 422, § 89).

23. Although Putnam, his ‘straw man,’ does not use any of those passages and Cavell never

mentions nor cites who does.

24. Cavell (1998: 76-7).

25. Cavell (1998: 77-8).

26. Cavell (1998: 78).

27. Cavell (1998: 77-8).

28. Cavell (1998: 77-80).

29. Cavell (1998: 79-80).

30. Wittgenstein 1980.


36

31. See Wittgenstein (1980: 4):“if anyone should think he has solved the problem of life and feel

like telling himself that everything is quite easy now, he can see that he is wrong just by recalling

that there was a time when this ‘solution’ had not been discovered; but it must have been

possible to live then too and the solution which has now been discovered seems fortuitous in

relation to how things were then.” “Our civilization is characterized by the word ‘progress.’

Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features” (ibid.: 7). “It isn’t

absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for

humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will

ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that

mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap.It is by no means obvious that this is not how things

are” (ibid.: 56).

32. See Dewey (1908: 277-80).

33. See Wittgenstein (1980: 16, 53): “Working in philosophy – like work in architecture in many

respects – is really more a working on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s way of

seeing things” and “If life is hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most

important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the

resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us.”

34. Cavell (1998: 80).

35. See West (1989: 21-5).

36. I am thinking here of his decision to not go ahead with his journalist project, Thought News,

and his avoiding Marxism because it was controversial in mainstream academic and intellectual

circles. See West (1989: 81, 108).

37. Wittgenstein’s (unreasonable) disgust with intellectuals who were politically engaged in this

manner is apparent when he wrote in his journal: “the people making speeches against

producing the bomb are undoubtedly the scum of the intellectuals, but even that does not prove

beyond question that what they abominate is to be welcomed” Wittgenstein (1980: 49).

ABSTRACTS

In this paper, I focus on the debate that surrounds “pragmatic” interpretations of Ludwig

Wittgenstein. By this, I mean the debate between those who read Wittgenstein as a pragmatist or

as having pragmatic affinities and those who object to this reading.In particular, drawing on

Hilary Putnam’s lecture “Was Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?” and Stanley Cavell’s response “What’s

the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?,” I will spell out the similarities seen between

Wittgenstein and pragmatism as well as the divergences emphasized between the two. I will

argue that the teasing out of the similarities and the teasing out of the differences is important to

a) having a clearer understanding of both Wittgenstein and pragmatism; b) showing elements

that make twentieth century philosophy unique; and c) shedding light on where philosophy is

now, what issues and questions are being raised, and what possible solutions and answers are

being offered.


37

AUTHOR

JUDY M. HENSLEY

University of Chicago

JHensley[at]rhtax.com


38

Streams and River-BedsJames’ Stream of Thought in Wittgenstein’s Manuscripts 165 and 129

Anna Bocompagni

Introduction

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein’s interest in the writings of William James characterizes the whole

of his philosophical work. We know from a letter to Bertrand Russell that as early as

1912 he was reading The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book that gave rise to his

attraction for mysticism,1 and that he later warmly recommended to his friend Maurice

Drury.2 After his return to philosophy, in his notebooks and typescripts he refers to

James and particularly to The Principles of Psychology (PP) 3 from the beginning of the

Thirties to the end of his life.4 Furthermore, we know that he even thought of using it

as a textbook for his lessons in Cambridge, though according to some critics more as a

set of examples of the mistakes of psychologists than as a handbook in the usual sense.5

Wittgenstein’s interest in James’ psychology, far from diminishing, even increased in

the last years of his life, and was at its greatest after the Second World War: the notes

from his 1946-47 lectures collected by his students Peter Geach, Kanti Shah and

A. C. Jackson6 are full of explicit and implicit references to James, as well as the RPP

(1946-48) and generally the manuscripts of those years; besides, one should not forget

the influence of James’ thought on some relevant, though often neglected, concepts of

the later Wittgenstein, such as those of patterns of life, the indeterminacy of

psychological concepts, the connection between emotions and the expression of

emotions.7

2 In spite of some early positive comments, notably not belonging to the Wittgensteinian

tradition,8 Wittgenstein’s attitude towards James and towards the PP has often been

described by Wittgenstein’s scholars as merely critical and negative. Peter Hacker, for

example, mentions James may times in his extensive commentary on the PI, but usually

as a negative counterpart of Wittgenstein’s ideas, sometimes identifying him with one

of the invisible interlocutors against which the philosopher battles in his remarks.9

Regarding the stream of thought, Hacker depicts it as “philosophical confusion” and

even bluntly affirms that it is “largely a meaningless babble.”10 But, as more recently


39

stated by some other commentators,11 Wittgenstein’s attitude should be better

described as twofold: although he criticized James in many respects, he also

appreciated James’ masterpiece, particularly for its richness of examples, its freshness,

depth and also for the “humanity” of its author.12

3 The PP chapter on the stream of thought is one of the main objects of concern for

Wittgenstein. It is here that we find some examples that he often cited and criticized,

such as that of the “and-feeling,” the “if-feeling” and the like (PP: I, 245; cf. PI: part II,

155, RPP: I, §§ 331, 334), the recalling of a forgotten name or meaning (PP: I, 251; RPP: I,

§§ 174, 180), the feeling connected to the intention of saying something (PP: I, 253; RPP:

II, §§ 242-3, PI: part I, §§ 591, 633, part II, 155, 182), and the case of Mr. Ballard as

showing the possibility of there being thought without language (PP: I, 266, PI, part I:

§ 342).

4 Strangely enough, James’ image of the stream has only rarely13 been associated with

Wittgenstein’s use of the metaphor of the flux or of the river. The latter uses this image

in various periods and with various meanings. During the phenomenological years of

the PR, he speaks about the flux of experiences and of the vagueness of immediate

experience: here the theme is connected to the question whether it is possible or not to

have a language of immediate experience. In these years Wittgenstein sometimes holds

that it is only in the flux of experience that any sentence can be verified, though it is

constitutively impossible for language to directly denote the elements of the flux.14 The

reading of James’ PP may hold some responsibility for the emergence of this set of

problems. When Wittgenstein’s interest turns from the phenomenological language to

the ordinary language, the image of the flux turns from the flux of experiences to the

flux of life and discourse. Again, it is probably James that Wittgenstein has in mind

when he points out that the meaning of any expression is not to be found in the flux of

experiences but in the context of the discourse and, more generally, in the context of

life, with its linguistic games and its background of know-how and culture.15 So, as

Steiner (2012) elegantly surmises, what enables our understanding of psychological

concepts and phenomena is not a mental immanence, but an anthropological-

normative immanence: a logical-grammatical context together with an anthropological

background.16

5 What is still missing in the secondary literature, as far as I know, is a comparison

between James’ stream of thought and Wittgenstein’s river-bed of thoughts, which he

describes in OC with the aim of distinguishing between logical and empirical

propositions. In discussing the river-bed of thoughts Wittgenstein does not explicitly

address James. But the choice of the image and the words used to describe it can and do

suggest such a connection. Is it possible to find in the Nachlass details or evidence

pointing in this direction? Can Wittgenstein’s river-bed be read – among other things –

as a direct comment on James’ stream? As we shall see, the comparison and this

conclusion are legitimated by two remarks contained in Manuscripts 165 and 129.17

1. The Nachlass

6 The name “James” appears 90 times in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, from 193218 to 1950-51.19

In particular, considering both the English expression “stream of thought” and its

equivalent in German “Gedankenstrom,” we can find four contexts in which

Wittgenstein makes use of James’ metaphor, some of which recur more than once.20


40

7 The first entry is in Item 120 (1937-38), a manuscript which is well-known because it

contains three drafts of the future preface of the PI. On February, 27th 1938

Wittgenstein wrote a dozen pages in the manuscript, and it is here that we find the

word “Gedankenstrom” in the context of a discussion concerning if and when a man

can be said to be wrong when speaking about a pain that he is feeling. In the case of

something suspending or changing the direction of the man’s attention, Wittgenstein

says, “the stream of thought is interrupted, and we can only guess how it could have

proceeded.”21 Here, it seems, the meaning of Gedankenstrom is not in question:

Wittgenstein is using it as a unproblematic concept, within the discussion of a peculiar

language game. I shall call this use of James’ expression “the unproblematic stream.”

8 The second occurrence is in Item 124, a manuscript volume containing remarks mostly

from 1944. After considering the problem of the relation between expectation and

fulfillment, and stressing the importance of the circumstances in which an expectation

takes place, Wittgenstein writes: “Here one could speak of the stream of thought, of

which James talks, and point out that, when a well-known name is mentioned to me,

my thoughts pour forth into a series of canals, and they continue to run in them, and

that the meaning of the name is revealed in these streams.”22 In the following lines

there is a critique to James: “He should tell us what happens, while he only tells us what

must happen – Wittgenstein writes –. He wants to communicate an empirical fact, but

he slips and makes a metaphysical remark.” I shall call this occurrence ‘the slippery

stream.’

9 The third entry can be found in Item 165, a pocket notebook with remarks dating back,

again, mostly to 1944 and often mentioned in relation to the debate on following a rule

and on the private language argument. Many of these remarks are crossed through by

vertical or diagonal lines, and this is also the case of the passage we are going to cite.

Since this remark will appear again, with some variations, in a slightly later and more

accurate manuscript with no deletions, it is also worth working on this version, which

is very explicit about James’ ‘mistake.’ In discussing the relation between expectation

and fulfillment, intention and meaning, Wittgenstein proposes an example:

I’m waiting for two people A and B. I say: “When will he come!” Someone asks me:“Who do you mean?” I say, “I thought about A.” And these very words have built abridge. Or he asks “Who do you mean?” I say, “I thought about…” a poem in whichthere is this sentence. I make these connections among what I say in the course ofmy thoughts and actions. (This remark is in relation with what W. James calls “thestream of thought.” The mistake in his picture is that a priori and a posteriorigrammatical and experiential are not distinguished. So he speaks about thecontinuity of the stream of thought and he compares it with that of spaces, not withthat of a sort of jet of water).23

10 The theme of expectation and fulfillment is often present in Wittgenstein’s writings;

the example with the expression “When will he come”! – without the explicit reference

to James’ stream of thought – recurs also in typescripts 211, 212, 213 of the beginning of

the Thirties, in various manuscripts of the Fourties and in Part I of the PI (§ 544).

11 The later manuscript which I mentioned is Item 129, a volume of the second half of

1944. Correcting some previous misprints, Wittgenstein writes:

(I believe, that this remark is in relation with what W. James calls “the stream ofthought.” Even though he certainly does not distinguish a priori and a posteriori,empirical and grammatical propositions).24


41

12 Again and with more clarity, Wittgenstein points out – although now without speaking

of a mistake – that James does not distinguish between a priori and a posteriori; and in

this case he speaks of grammatical and empirical propositions. I shall call this

occurrence, in the two formulations of MS 165 and 129, “the stream with no banks.”

13 In the same MS 129, only a few pages after what we have just read, we find the next

entry. “One could say – writes Wittgenstein –: I would not have an impression of the

room as a whole, if I could not let my glance wonder here and there and myself move

around freely. (Stream of thought.) James.”25 And he continues: “But how does it show

that I have an impression of it as a whole? In the naturalness with which I find my way

in it; in the absence of querying, doubting and surprise; in the fact that within its walls

innumerable activities are encompassed; and in the fact that I sum up all this as ‘my

room’ in the speech.” Here the stream of thought seems to correspond to a mentalist

way of conceiving what it is to know a certain meaning, a conception that Wittgenstein

contrasts by underlying the importance of actions and know-how. This last remark on

the stream of thought is repeated in Typescript 228 (1945-46), with no variations, and

again, with minor variations, in Typescript 233a, which was published as Zettel (in the

published edition we find it as § 203). I shall call this stream “the impressionist

stream.”

14 Let us sum up. The first occurrence of the term seems, as we have seen, unproblematic:

Wittgenstein simply uses it in the context of the discussion of the meaning of internal

states such as pain and of the criterion of attributing truth or falsity to a man’s

assertions about his state. If meaning is to be found in the stream of thought, and the

justification for a true assertion too, then the interruption of the stream of thought

may cause problems in the identification of meaning and truth conditions. But is

meaning to be found in the stream of thought? This question, which is probably already

implicitly present in the “unproblematic stream,” is more explicitly addressed in what I

have called the “slippery” and the “impressionist” streams. In the first case, meaning is

seen as the streams and currents in which thought pours when a well-known name is

mentioned. But this characterization fails in its attempt to catch the empirical,

experiential facts about meaning, and becomes metaphysical. In the case of “the

impressionist stream,” Wittgenstein underlines the importance of some physical and

active elements in the determination of meaning (here, the meaning of a room,

identified with the impression of the room as a whole). Instead of accepting a private

approach which stresses the role of sensory impressions, Wittgenstein directs the

attention towards the practical, behavioural and linguistic elements in which the

possession of the meaning shows itself.

15 The “slippery” and the “impressionist” conceptions of the stream as the inner place of

meaning (and, maybe, also the seemingly unproblematic first version) are both

criticized by Wittgenstein for their commitment to a psychologistic, internalist idea of

the mind and of meaning itself. The critique is addressed not only to James,26 but also to

Wittgenstein’s own phenomenological phase: the argument against a private language

can be read as an implicit critique of the attempt to find truth conditions in the flux of

experiences or of thought, as this flux is intrinsically private and can rely on no public

criteria of assertibility or justification.27 A private language is impossible because, if it is

language, then it is not private:28 this is part of the grammar of the word “language.”

Thus, when James tries to explain meaning by referring to the stream thought, in

Wittgenstein’s view he misses the point. It is true that language and meaning belong to


42

a flux, but this is not the flux of thought: it is the flux of discourse and of life.29 So, its

depth and richness notwithstanding, James’ psychology – in Wittgenstein’s view –

remains anchored to an introspective method which leads us astray (PI: §§ 411-14) and

contributes to the construction of the image of an internal realm, which is not so

distant from the classic Cartesian image. Two aspects must be, anyway, underlined:

that James himself tried to abandon the Cartesian concept of consciousness (Myers

1986: 61), and that his appeal to experimental techniques and physiological theories

aimed at a methodological pluralism which mitigated the importance of introspection.

Wittgenstein evidently thought that it was not enough, and that James’ perspective was

an example of a discipline torn between “experimental methods and conceptual

confusion,” as he famously stated in the final paragraph of the PI.30

16 The remaining two occurrences of the “stream with no banks” are the remarks to

which I would like to dedicate the next section of this paper, for two reasons: because

they allow us to inquire further into one of Wittgenstein’s critiques towards James,

which has not yet been analyzed in depth; and because it can be fruitfully connected to

Wittgenstein’s own image of the river-bed of thoughts.

2. MS 165 and 129 as an Anticipation of the Metaphorof On Certainty

17 Let us take a closer look at these two remarks. MS 165 attributes a mistake to James:

that of not distinguishing between a priori, or grammatical, and a posteriori, or

empirical. Mixing together these two aspects, Wittgenstein explains, James is not

actually speaking of a stream or of a jet of water; it would be more appropriate to say

that he is speaking of spaces and of the continuity of spaces. It is not easy to

understand why it should be so. Perhaps, we can argue, in the case of spaces it is

correct not to distinguish between something fixed and something variable: spaces

have no banks, while streams do have banks and stream-beds, they are defined by

something that does not change – or at least that does not change as rapidly as its

content. In passing from MS 165 to MS 129, which has the character of a more definite

work, this reference to the continuity of spaces is eliminated and the accusation is

mitigated (there are no “mistakes” anymore), but, again, Wittgenstein underlines the

fact that James calls thought a “stream,” in spite of his not distinguishing a priori and a

posteriori. In other words, given his characterization of thought, James should not have

used the picture of a stream; conversely, if this can be said to be a good image of

thought, then James’ description of thought is fallacious.

18 The topic of the distinction between what is empirical (experiential, phenomenal) and

what is grammatical (conceptual, logical) is extensively treated Wittgenstein’s lectures

of the post-war years and in RPP, besides constituting one of the main themes of OC. In

Jackson’s notes of the lectures we can read, for example:

Now consider the suggestion: You’ve already thought the meaning before you speak(James). Is this a psychological statement? If so, how many men does it apply to? Ordoes it apply each time? If it’s a psychological statement it’s an hypothesis: butJames wishes to say something essential about thinking.31

19 Where is, then, the problem with James’ stream: in the description of thought, or in the

image? Evidently, for Wittgenstein, in the description. Indeed, it is exactly the image of

the stream that Wittgenstein himself will adopt, a few years later, in his own


43

characterization of thought. If read in this light, propositions 95 to 99 of OC not only

give a metaphorical description of thought and of the relation between the Weltbild

(picture of the world) and thought; but also constitute an implicit critique of James’ use

of that metaphor. Or, better said, they contribute to an implicit praise of James’ image,

and an implicit critique of James’ interpretation of his image:

95. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind ofmythology. And their role is like that of rules of a game; and the game can belearned purely practically, without learning any explicit rules.96. It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empiricalpropositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such empiricalpropositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this relation altered withtime, in that fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid.97. The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of thoughtsmay shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-bedand the shift of the bed itself; though there is not a sharp division of the one fromthe other.98. But if someone were to say “So logic too is an empirical science” he would bewrong. Yet this is right: the same proposition may get treated at one time assomething to test by experience, at another as a rule of testing.99. And the bank of that river consists partly of hard rock, subject to no alterationor only to an imperceptible one, partly of sand, which now in one place now inanother gets washed away, or deposited.

20 Wittgenstein is here describing the difference and the relation between the

propositions of the world-picture and empirical propositions. The former are those

which allow the latter to work. Any empirical proposition is grounded in the common

sense certainties which shape our Weltbild, the way we see the world, the way we are

minded, the picture or the “mythology” which, so to speak, keeps everything together.

Even when they look like empirical propositions32 – “Here is one hand” is the classical

example33 – Weltbild propositions are different in kind; it is meaningless to ask whether

they are true or false, as they form the background against which truth and falsity

themselves are defined. They are the hinges that must stay put, in order for the door to

move.

21 The literature on Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions is vast and constantly increasing.

For its clarity and conciseness, it is useful to cite Danièle Moyal-Sharrock’s comment

(2007: 72), according to which hinge propositions are:

- indubitable: doubt and mistake are logically meaningless;

- foundational: they do not result from justification;

- nonempirical: they are not derived from the senses;

- grammatical: they are rules of grammar;

- ineffable: they cannot be said;

- in action: they can only show themselves in what we say and do.

22 Hinges, says Moyal-Sharrock, even when they have an apparent propositional nature,

constitute non-propositional certainties, and are akinto instincts, ways of acting,

attitudes. Logic itself, since it is hinged on these certainties, belongs to the reign of

instinct and not to that of reason, and Wittgenstein could be considered the supporter

of a logical pragmatism which asserts the enacted nature of hinge certainties.34

23 Logical propositions are not about facts in the world (notice how near this sounds to

the Tractatus). They work on the level of rules and normativity; it is the level of

certainty, which is categorically distinct from that of knowledge.35 Common sense


44

propositions like the Moorean “Here is one hand” or “The earth existed for a long time

before my birth,” except when they are said in peculiar contexts and circumstances, do

not express a genuine knowledge. In Moore’s (and James’)36 opinion, we know these

propositions for certain, even if we cannot prove them or give a ground for them.

Wittgenstein denies that we have an epistemic relation with what these propositions

assert. The reason why we cannot give a ground for these sorts of belief, is that the

certainty which characterizes them is itself a ground, and it shows itself in the ordinary

“going without saying” of these certainties. In everyday contexts, hinges work tacitly,

they do not require to be formulated; according to Moyal-Sharrock (2007: 94 ff.), they

even require not to be formulated, not to be said, because once said they would not go

without saying. As Coliva (2010: 151, 177) partially corrects, the only possibility for a

hinge proposition to be meaningfully uttered, is when it is used not in a descriptive but

in a communicative and/or normative manner.

24 In Wittgenstein’s metaphor, there is not a sharp division between the movements of

the waters in the river-bed and the movement of the river-bed itself; moreover, the

banks of the river are stratified, consisting partly of rock, partly of sand. This is not to

be interpreted as meaning that, at bottom, no distinction can be made.37 The distinction

is at the same time categorical and not sharp, because one and the same proposition

can work now as empirical and now as logical, but never as both. The shift from one to

the other uses may sometimes be due to slow changes in the Weltbild, as it is clear for

example in the case of Wittgenstein’s own certainty that man has never gone and never

will be able to go to the moon.38 But the change of the Weltbild (river-bed) does not

occur at the same empirical level as the change of what the Weltbild frames (waters).

25 Although Wittgenstein’s interlocutor in OC is primarily Moore, this is evidently the

same kind of objection that in the Manuscript notes he addressed to James. Besides,

Wittgenstein’s discussion of the Weltbild is particularly significant in the context of

psychological concepts and propositions, the “objectivity” of which, as Egidi (1995: 176)

puts it, “is not achieved by reference to objects, of both internal and external nature,

but depends on whether those sentences obey the system of rules of which they are

part,” which, in turn, imply a complex of “pragmatic criteria of significance.”

Wittgenstein’s discussion of psychology in his later years, then, in its connection to the

theme of the Weltbild and to the distinction between grammatical and empirical, can be

read also as an implicit critique of his phenomenological years and of the jamesian

strand which can be identified in his attempts to catch the flux of experiences. This is

another reason which contributes to the plausibility of reading the image of the river-

bed as a sort of correction of James’ image of the stream.

3. Is Wittgenstein’s Critique Justified?

26 In order to ascertain whether Wittgenstein’s critique of James is justified, we now need

to turn to the PP. In the chapter on the stream of thought, James, as is well-known,

characterizes it through five features (PP: I, 225):

- Every thought tends to be a part of a personal consciousness; - Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing;- Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous;- It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself;- It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others, andwelcomes or rejects all the while.


45

27 It is in particular in the second and third characters, change and continuity, that James’

stream differs from Wittgenstein’s. Change is what may suggest, if ever, the

comparison between his stream and Heraclitus’ river, and indeed James is reminiscent

of Heraclitus when he writes that “no state once gone can recur and be identical with

what it was before” (PP: I, 230), that “there is no proof that the same bodily sensation is

ever got by us twice” (231), and of course when he affirms that “of the river of

elementary feeling, it would certainly be true to say, like Heraclitus, that we never

descend twice in the same river” (233). Wittgenstein, on the other hand, remarked that

“The man who said that one cannot step twice into the same river, uttered a falsehood.

One can step twice into the same river,” while explaining that “what we do is to bring

words back from their metaphysical to their normal use in language”39 (both

Wittgenstein and James are referring to a fragment of Heraclitus which is probably

spurious, though since Plato on it is widely accepted as the most famous expression of

Heraclitus philosophy).40 It is then by an appeal to the “rough ground” (PI: § 107) of

ordinary language that the metaphysics implicit in the Heraclitean river is neutralized.

28 With regard to the feature of continuity, James, often compared to Henri Bergson,41

defines the continuous as “that which is without breach, crack or division” (PP: I, 237),

and it is in these pages that he proposes to define consciousness as a stream (239).

Opposing the traditional psychologists and their empiricist background, James explains

that the image of the stream must convey not only the idea of pails or pots of water,

but also the fact that “even were the pail and the pots all actually standing in the

stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow,” because every image

in the mind “is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it” (255). By

acknowledging this, the vagueness that intrinsically characterizes our mental life can

be re-instated in its proper place (254). To describe this intrinsic vagueness – which, as

Fairbanks (1966: 335 ff.) noted, is a very relevant aspect in Wittgenstein too – James

(258) introduces the concept of the fringe, synonyms of which are psychic overtone and

suffusion;42 images or ideas in the mind do not possess definite contours, but fringed

contours, they slowly pass into each other with continuity, and this is due,

physiologically, to the “faint brain-process” that makes us aware of relations and

objects only dimly perceived. The examples and explanations that James uses in these

pages are, as Wittgenstein underlines in MS 165, to be connected more easily with

spaces than with a stream. Indeed, he speaks for instance about the relation between a

thunderclap and the silence which precedes and follows it (240); he compares the life of

thought to the flight of a bird with its resting places and places of flight (243); he

mentions Zeno’s image of the arrow (244); he writes of an “immense horizon” in which

“the present image shoots its perspective before us” (256) and of a “halo” that

surrounds words and sentences (276). This spatial depiction provides an immediate

grasp of the key concept of the continuum, that James will later (in RE) characterize as

pure experience. We shall soon return on this aspect, which, as Calcaterra (2010: 207)

points out, is strictly connected to James’ (and more generally to the pragmatists’) anti-

dichotomic claims.

29 It must be noticed that James does not use the image of the stream without the

awareness of its implications: besides continuity and change, there are also other

characteristics which he is interested in highlighting and which this metaphor

illustrates with clarity. For example, when discussing attention and effort (I: 451-2) he

again turns to his image:


46

The stream of our thought is like a river. On the whole easy simple flowingpredominates in it, the drift of things is with the pull of gravity, and effortlessattention is the rule. But at intervals an obstruction, a set-back, a log-jam occurs,stops the current, creates an eddy, and makes things temporarily move the otherway. If a real river could feel, it would feel these eddies and set-backs as places ofeffort.

30 We may wonder why he did not consider banks and stream-beds as equally relevant

features, besides currents and eddies. Is it that he simply did not see the role of the

banks, that is, the role of logic? This would be a hasty conclusion. In fact, in other parts

of the PP we can find the description of some elements that, in a sense, force the stream

to flow in a certain direction or according to certain rules.

31 The first connection that it is possible to make is with the chapter on habit, in which

the metaphor of a flow of water is used more than once to give account of what

happens in the brain, where, due to the plasticity of the nervous tissue, some

“currents” shape, through time, paths or channels.43 Here, if there is a distinction

between brain-matter and what flows through it, James also remarks that what seems

fixed is not unchangeable. Paths in the brain can be reshaped, and indeed a relevant

part of the chapter is dedicated to the importance of education and training in

choosing, strengthen and, in some cases, change the paths. Hence, if there is a

distinction between river-beds and waters, change is not the crucial element that

discriminates between the two.

32 To find out something more about this distinction we can turn to the last chapter of the

PP, “Necessary truths and the effects of experience.” Here we are not dealing with

behavioural habits or instincts, but with thought and its laws; nevertheless, again,

James’ account has to do with the conformation of the brain. The question from which

his argument starts, is whether necessary truths, due (as “universally admitted”)44 to

the organic structure of the mind, are explicable by experience or not. In the diatribe

between empiricists, who affirm that they are, and apriorists, who affirm that they are

not, James defends the apriorists’ side, but tries at the same time to give a naturalistic

explanation of the cause of these necessary truths. While a single judgment such as that

fire burns and water makes wet, or knowledge of time and space relations, may be

caused by objects with which we become acquainted, the categories for knowing and

judging need to be explained differently (PP: II, 632). It is the Darwinian mechanism of

spontaneous variations in the brain that James is thinking of, attributing to it the

responsibility of all the kinds of ideal and inward relations among the objects of our

thoughts which cannot be interpreted as reproductions of the order of outer

experience. Scientific conceptions, aesthetic and ethical systems are due to this

category, as well as pure sciences of classification, logic and mathematics, all of which

are the result of the fundamental operation of comparison. Comparison “is one of the

house-born portions of our mental structure; therefore the pure sciences form a body

of propositions with whose genesis experience has nothing to do” (626-7). James

connects this theme with that of meaning (a connection which may resemble

Wittgenstein’s insistence on the difference between the conceptual and the

phenomenical), where he, for example, insists that we know the difference between

black and white without needing to consult experience: “What I mean by black differs

from what I mean by white,” and again “what we mean by one plus one is two” because

“we are masters of our meanings.”45 Propositions expressing time and space relations –

summarizes James (644) – are empirical propositions, those expressing the results of


47

comparison are rational propositions. Yet, why is it that rational propositions turn out

to be in agreement with the empirical world? Why is it that the straight line is

effectively, every time we need to go from A to B in the real world, the shortest way to

connect the two points? “Luckily enough” (658), James answers, we find that the space

of our experience is in harmony with our rational suppositions. But we must always

remember that necessary truths are ideal relations and that they do not reveal how

things really are in the empirical world: they always have to be verified. As he explains

in relation to Locke’s conception, with which he seems to agree in this respect, such

ideas “stand waiting in the mind, forming a beautiful ideal network; and the most we

can say is that we hope to discover outer realities over which the network may be flung

so that ideal and real may coincide” (665).

33 We might conclude that in James’ text there is a precise and clear distinction between

empirical and logical levels. Are we to deduce that Wittgenstein’s critique is not

justified? Things are not as simple as they appear to be. As Myers (1986: 282) points out,

in distinguishing necessary truths from empirical facts, James did not mean to abandon

a naturalistic conception of science and of psychology as a science. Besides, these ideas

are necessarily true merely in a formal sense: it is only when they are confirmed by

experience that they can be said to be true in the proper sense; they should be

regarded, then, as “empirical hypotheses.”46 The primacy of the scientific point of view

is not dismissed, and the distinction between necessary truths and the effects of

experience is made within the scientific, naturalistic framework.47

34 This is not a framework that Wittgenstein could share. In an even more pregnant sense,

Wittgenstein’s critique of the confusion between the grammatical and the empirical

can be read as a critique of the confusion between philosophy and science.

4. Philosophy and Science

35 It is probably also (if not only)48 against James’ scientific attitude that Wittgenstein’s

numerous remarks about the importance, in philosophy, to refuse explanation and

embrace description, are directed. Indeed, in Manuscripts 130 and 131 (1946, partly

published in RPP), which contain a large amount of notes about James’ psychology and

related themes, Wittgenstein repeatedly argues against causal explanations and

hypotheses and in favour of description of linguistic games.49

36 Yet some clarification is needed, in order to gain a more accurate account of James’

position. That James, at least at the beginning of his career, meant psychology as

scientific, there can be no doubt. As early as 1867, in a letter to his father, he wrote that

what he was thinking about, as his object of study, was “the border ground of

physiology and psychology, overlapping both.”50 In the opening of the PP (I: 5) he

clearly affirms that “the psychologist is forced to be something of a nerve-physiologist”

and that he has “kept close to the point of view of natural science throughout the

book” (Preface: v). But this confidence in science and in the possibility of a scientific

psychology later vacillates, and in the Epilogue of the BC, written only two years after

the publication of the PP, he confesses that “the natural-science assumptions with

which we started are provisional and revisable things” (401), that metaphysics is

inevitable because “the only possible path to understand [the relations of the known

and the knower] lies through metaphysical subtlety” (399); and, eventually, that “this is

no science, it is only the hope of a science.” These very words testify, in a sense, that


48

the perspective has not changed: the idea of making psychology a science is still there,

though only as a “hope.” In the same year (1982), in fact, replying to George T. Ladd’s

critical review of the PP, he remarked that psychology, in order to be scientific, had to

be kept separate from metaphysics51 and defended the explanatory point of view. As

Perry (1935: II, 119) puts it, “this controversy establishes beyond any doubt the fact

that James was looking for a psychology that explained,” and particularly that explained

scientifically the connections between mind and body.

37 On the other hand, the impossibility of keeping philosophy and science independent

from one another is clear to James, and this is an aspect of the breadth and depth that

distinguishes his approach:

The popular notion that ‘Science’ is forced on the mind ab extra, and that ourinterests have nothing to do with its constructions, is utterly absurd. The craving tobelieve that the things of the world belong to kinds which are related by inwardrationality together, is the parent of Science as well as of sentimental philosophy;and the original investigator always preserves a healthy sense of how plastic thematerials are in his hands.52

38 James did not put science on a pedestal, on the contrary, he often relativized its power

and its claims in respects to other modes of knowledge. This attitude parallels his way

of conceiving rationality: reason is not separate from feeling,53 it springs from feeling,

and again the continuum that characterizes human nature supports an anti-dichotomic

stance. James’ aim, then, can be better described as that of keeping science and

philosophy distinct, but not separate. It is this commitment that allows him to hold a

naturalistic viewpoint, and at the same time to give space to philosophy and

metaphysics, in a fallibilistic and anti-dogmatic spirit54 that Wittgenstein probably

failed to see.

39 Goodman (2002: 71) affirms that the later Wittgenstein, too, was moving in James’

empiricist direction, in recognizing the contingency of language and in stressing the

importance of human natural history,55 but that at the same time he preserved the

distinction between concepts and experiences, which James did not. Actually,

Wittgenstein’s alleged empiricism is not so self-evident, particularly in his later

writings. Sometimes he had his doubts about natural history itself, and sometimes he

even explicitly stated that he did not mean to do natural history.56 What is clear, is that

he retained James’ defense of the contiguity between science and philosophy as

heralding conceptual confusion, and James as unconsciously struggling with

metaphysics:

Philosophical investigations: conceptual investigations. The essential thing aboutmetaphysics: that the difference between factual and conceptual investigations isnot clear to it. A metaphysical question is always in appearance a factual one,although the problem is a conceptual one.57

40 How needed is the work of philosophy is shown by James’ psychology. Psychology, he

says, is a science, but he discusses almost no scientific questions. His movements, are

merely (so many) attempts to extricate himself from the cobwebs of metaphysics in

which he is caught. He cannot yet walk, or fly at all, he only wiggles [this sentence is in

English in the original text]. Not that that isn’t interesting. Only, it is not a scientific

activity.58

41 Yet James was not so unaware of the metaphysical side of his work, and was not so far

from a wittgensteinian perspective when he affirmed that “rightly understood,

[metaphysics] means only the search for clearness where common people do not even


49

suspect that there is any lack of it.”59 Moreover, he generally considered metaphysics as

a vision of the world or a set of beliefs, which could and should be deliberately chosen,

primarily because of their practical and ethical consequences.60 A complete account of

the two philosophers’ conceptions of metaphysics is, of course, beyond the scope of this

paper. It is nonetheless apparent that the different meaning and value that they assign

to metaphysics is one of the reasons why it is difficult to compare their attitudes

towards the relation between the empirical and the conceptual, science and

philosophy.

42 One last remark on this topic is suggested by the phenomenological readings of the PP,61 which often underline James’ progressive awareness of the weakness of science and

his deepening the metaphysical side of the inquiry. Wilshire (1968: 16) particularly

focuses on how James’ early project is wrecked because the scientific side of his

researches is partly overwhelmed by a sort of protophenomenology; but James’ desire

to remain faithful to his naturalistic project prevents him from fully developing his

phenomenological investigations (202). Now, we may ask, would phenomenology – or

radical empiricism – meet Wittgenstein’s demands? This is doubtful. It is indeed in the

overcoming of phenomenology, that Wittgenstein’s conception of grammar takes shape

in the Thirties,62 and this step is never disowned in later years.

43 The point, which can only be roughly sketched here, is that the task of philosophy,

according to Wittgenstein, is somehow indirect. By describing linguistic games, it guides

our attention towards the background that sustains them. The method of perspicuous

presentation allows us to perceive the surroundings which define our linguistic

practices and the form of life within which they take place. It is here that we reach the

bedrock where “the spade is turned,”63 the subtle but always existing border between

rules and moves of the game, or, to get back to our metaphor, the banks and the river-

bed of our thoughts. To show these limits, in Wittgenstein’s perspective, is no task for

any sort of science, nor for any philosophical system as traditionally conceived.

Conclusion

44 Our aim was to show the possibility of comparing James’ stream of thought and

Wittgenstein’s river-bed of thoughts and to read the latter as an implicit comment on

the former. The analysis of some notes belonging to Wittgenstein’s Nachlass has proven

that there can be an effective connection between the two images. Wittgenstein’s river

in an implicit critique of James’ stream, and at the same time an insightful

interpretation of the virtues of that image, which James himself did not see. This is an

example of Wittgenstein’s general attitude towards James: he considered some of his

intuitions as brilliant, but in the main could not agree with him on the explicit

formulation of his ideas. Our inquiry has led us to deepen the analysis of James’

characterization of the stream of thought and this, in turn, has widened our

investigation to the topic of the relation between science and philosophy. Wittgenstein

held that James, in his attempts to be scientific, often lost sight of the richness of his

philosophical remarks, and confused the two levels. The metaphor of the river-bed of

thoughts, then, in its insistence on the distinction between what is empirical and what

is logical, also constitutes a warning against the confusion between science and

philosophy. James’ own treatment of this matter is, we have argued, more complex

than what it appeared to Wittgenstein’s eyes. The latter fails to acknowledge the


50

density and the ethical implications of James’ approach. Yet, Wittgenstein hits the

mark in his underlying that James’ characterization of the stream of thought lacks a

conceptual vision of the relation between thought and its rules, and of the

embeddedness of these rules in the wider context of our form of life with its linguistic

practices. A fully pragmatist stance, one could say; save for Wittgenstein’s negative

attitude towards science, which marks the distance with respects not only to James,64

but, probably, to pragmatism in general. In any case, this is a topic for a much wider

analysis, for which this paper can constitute only a hint.

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NUBIOLA J., (2000), “Ludwig Wittgenstein and William James,” Streams of William James, 2 (3).

PASSMORE J., (1966), A Hundred Years of Philosophy, London, Duckworth.

PERISSINOTTO L., (1991), Logica e immagine del mondo. Studio su Über Gewissheit, Milano, Guerini.

PERRY R. B., (1935), The Thought and Character of William James, Boston, Little, Brown and Co. (2vv.).

PERRY R. B., (1958), In the Spirit of William James, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

SCHUETZ A., (1941), “William James’ Concept of the Stream of Thought Phenomenologically

Interpreted,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1 (4).

SCHULTE J., (1995), “Emotions: Remarks on Wittgenstein and William James,” in Egidi R., (ed.),

Wittgenstein: Mind and Language, Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers.

SHINER R. A., (1974) “Wittgenstein and Heraclitus: Two River-Images,” Philosophy, 49.


52

http://www.ytorku.ca/hjackman/papers/WittJames.pdf

STEINER P., (2012), “Une question du point de vue. James, Husserl, Wittgenstein et le sophisme du

psychologue,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 1 (259).

STERN D. G., (1991), “Heraclitus and Wittgenstein’s River Images: Stepping Twice Into the Same

River,” The Monist, 74 (4).

STROLL A., (1994), Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

TER HARK M., (2004), “‘Patterns of Life’: a Third Wittgenstein Concept,” in Moyal Sharrock D., (ed.),

The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-Investigations Works, Adershot, Ashgate.

WERTZ S. K., (1972), “On Wittgenstein and James,” The New Scholasticism, XLVI (4).

WILSHIRE B., (1968), William James and Phenomenology: a Study of ‘The Principles of Psychology,’

Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1967), Zettel, Oxford, Blackwell.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1969), On Certainty (OC), Oxford, Blackwell.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1974), Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, edited by G. H. von Wright, Oxford,

Blackwell.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1975), Philosophical Remarks (PR), Oxford, Blackwell.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1977), Remarks on Colour (RC), Oxford, Blackwell.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1980), Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (RPP), Oxford, Blackwell.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1981), Personal Recollections, edited by R. Rhees, Oxford, Blackwell.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1988), Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, edited by P. T. Geach,

Brighton, Harvester.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (2000), Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. The Bergen Electronic Edition (BEE), Oxford, Oxford

University Press.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (2001), Philosophical Investigations (PI), Oxford, Blackwell.

NOTES

1. Wittgenstein (1974: 10, 82).

2. Wittgenstein (1981: 121).

3. Hereafter, I will mention James’ and Wittgenstein’s major works by initials; see the

bibliography for details.

4. Goodman (2002: 17).

5. Monk (1991: 477).

6. Wittgenstein 1988.

7. Ter Hark (2004: 131, 137), Goodman (2002: 113), Schulte 1995.

8. Passmore (1966: 434), Fairbanks 1966, Wertz 1972.

9. Particularly in Hacker (1990: ch. 2), Hacker (1996: ch. 4, 5, 6); cf. also Hilmy (1987: ch. 4, 6) and

Gale (1999: 165).

10. Hacker (1990: 305).

11. Nubiola 2000, Goodman (2002: 63 ff.), Jackman 2004.


13. Steiner 2012 is an interesting exception.


53

14. PR: §§ 52-5, 88, 213.

15. RPP: II, §§ 415, 504; PI: part II, 184.

16. Cf. also Boncompagni (2012a: 47, 154).

17. I’m citing 165 before 129 because 165 precedes 129 chronologically.

18. BEE, Items 114, 212, 302.

19. BEE, Item 176.

20. Hacker (1996: 476) affirms that Wittgenstein comments on James’ conception of the stream of

thought only in Manuscripts 124 and 129, and that in both cases he accuses him of conflating a

priori and a posteriori; as we shall see, there are a few more occasions in which James’ stream is

cited and a more complete analysis can show that it was not only with a critical eye that he

looked at this image.

21. “Ist der Gedankenstrom unterbrochen, so können wir nur vermuten, wie er weitergelaufen

wäre” (BEE: Item 120, 97r). I transcribe the original German version only for those parts of the

manuscripts which strictly relate to the stream of thought. Translations from the Nachlass are

mine, unless differently specified.

22. “Hier könnte vom Gedankenstrom, von dem James redet, gesprochen werden und man

könnte darauf hinweisen daß, so wie einmir wohlbekannter Name genannt wird, meine

Gedanken sich gleich in eine Reihe von Kanäle ergießen und in ihnen weiterlaufen und daß die

Bedeutung des Namens sich in diesen Strömen offenbart” (BEE: Item 124, 235).

23. “Ich erwarte zwei Leute A und B. Ich sage: “Wenn er doch nur käme!” Jemand fragt mich.

“Wen meist Du?” Ich sage, “Ich habe an den A gedacht.” Und diese Worte selber haben eine

Brücke hergestellt. Oder er fragt “Wen meinst Du” und ich antworte: “Ich habe an… gedacht,” ein

Gedicht in dem dieser Satz vorkommt. Die Verbindungen dessen was ich sage mache ich im Laufe

meiner Gedanken und Handlungen. (Diese Betrachtung hängt mit dem zusammen was W. James

“the stream of thought nennt.” Den Fehler in seiner Darstellung ist daß a priori und a posteriori

grammatisches und erfahrungsgemäßes durcheinander nicht unterschieden werden So redet er

von der Kontinuität des Gedankestroms und vergleicht sie mit der des Raums, nicht mit der eines

Wasserstrahles etwa.)” (BEE, Item 165: 24-5).

24. “(Ich glaube, diese Betrachtung hängt mit dem zusammen, was W. James “the stream of

thought” nennt. Wenn er freilich auch a priori und a posteriori, Erfahrungssätze und

grammatische, nicht unterschiedet)” (BEE: Item 129, 107).

25. “Man könnte sagen: Ich hätte keinen Eindruck von dem Zimmer als ganzes, könnte ich nicht

meinen Blick schnell in ihm dahin und dorthin schweifen lassen und mich nicht frei in ihm

herumbewegen. (Stream of thought) James” (BEE, Item 129: 114).

26. Goodman (2002: ch. 5).

27. Goodman (2002: 106), Gale (1999: 165).

28. Boncompagni (2012a: 106).

29. RPP: II, § 504; Steiner 2012. James will also speak of the flux of life in subsequent writings (see

for example RE: 93). The context is evidently different, but there are also some similarities. On

the continuity of James’ thought between the two works, see Crosby & Viney 1992; on the

discontinuity, Myers (1986: 78-80).

30. This paragraph, if read together with James’ characterization of psychology in the Epilogue of

the BC, really sounds like a comment on James’ words. Wittgenstein indeed says that “the

confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a ‘young science’; its

state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance in its beginnings” (PI: part II, 197); and

James had written that “at present psychology is in the condition of physics before Galileo and

the laws of motion, of chemistry before Lavoisier and the notion that mass is preserved in all

reactions” (BC: 401).

31. Wittgenstein (1988: 245; see also 92 and 205; and RPP: I, §§ 46, 173, 549; II §§ 214, 264, 321).


54

32. “I am inclined to believe that not everything that has the form of an empirical proposition is

one”: OC § 308 (emphasis in the original). Cf. also §§ 136, 319, 321, 401-2, 494, 569.

33. In Moore 1959b, originally published in 1939. Cf. OC: § 1. Wittgenstein’s remarks also refer to

Moore 1959a, originally published in 1925.

34. Moyal-Sharrock 2003.

35. In this distinction Stroll (1994: ch. 9) grounds what he calls Wittgenstein’s “heterogonous

foundationalism”: certainty can constitute a foundation for knowledge because it is not part of

knowledge.

36. James’ account of common sense (P: Lecture V), though presenting some affinities with

Wittgenstein’s approach, is much more similar to Moore’s, particularly in considering common

sense as a set of pieces of knowledge. Cf. Boncompagni 2012b.

37. Cf. Perissinotto (1991: 173 ff.).

38. There are many remarks on this in OC, the most striking of which is § 286.

39. BEE: Item 110, 34; see also pp. 39 and 155, and Items 116: 226; 120: 50v; 142: 116. The

proposition about metaphysics appears also in PI: I, § 116.

40. Interestingly, the previous formulation of James’ remark, contained in James (1884), is more

attuned with what critics consider the “true” Heraclitus, who spoke about a river which remains

the same with water which flows and changes; James (1884: 11) indeed stated that “of the mental

river the saying of Herakleitos is probably literally true: we never bath twice in the same water

there.” On the interpretations of Heraclitus and the connected images of the river in

Wittgenstein, see Shiner 1974 and Stern 1991. Unfortunately none of the two acknowledges the

importance that James’ image may have had on Wittgenstein’s account.

41. Passmore (1966: 105 ff.). On the relation between the two thinkers see Perry (1935: II, ch.

LXXXVI).

42. Cf. Bailey (1999: 145).

43. PP: I, 106, 107, 113.

44. PP: II, 617.

45. Respectively p. 644 and 655 (emphasis in the original). On James’ different conceptions of

meaning in the PP and in other writings, cf. Myers (1986: 285).

46. Crosby & Viney (1992: 111).

47. For a non naturalistic account, see Flanagan 1997.

48. Hilmy (1987: 207).

49. BEE: Item 130, 35, 71-2 (RPP: I, 46), 218; Item 131, 56 (RPP: I, 257).

50. Perry (1935: I, 254).

51. Giorgi (1990: 69 ff.).

52. PP: II, 667.

53. Cf. The Sentiment of Rationality, in James (1897: ch. 3).

54. Calcaterra (2008: 94 ff.).

55. PI: part I, § 415.

56. RPP: I, § 46; PI: part II, § XII; RC: part III, § 9.

57. RPP: I, § 949 (originally in MS 134: 153).

58. This remarks comes from the same Manuscript 165 (p. 150-1) in which is our first “stream

with no banks” occurrence. I am using, here, Hilmly’s (1987: 196-7) translation.

59. In a letter dated 1888 to the positivist psychologist Ribot, cited in Edie (1987: ix) and in Perry

(1958: 58).

60. For example in James (1897: ch. 1).

61. Schuezt 1941, Wilshire 1968, Edie 1987.

62. Cf. Egidi (1995: 174) and Chauviré (2003: 20).

63. PI: § 217.


55

64. Goodman (2002: 30) too considers the attitude towards science as one of the big differences

between the two thinkers.

ABSTRACTS

The influence of William James on Ludwig Wittgenstein has been widely studied, as well as the

criticism that the latter addresses to the former, but one aspect that has only rarely been focused

on is the two philosophers’ use of the image of the flux, stream, or river. The analysis of some

notes belonging to Wittgenstein’s Nachlass support the possibility of a comparison between

James’ stream of thought, as outlined in the Principles of Psychology, and Wittgenstein’s river-bed

of thoughts, presented in On Certainty. After an introduction which offers a general frame for the

following work, the first section of the paper examines all the Nachlass entries that directly

mention James’ stream. Section 2 focuses on two remarks in which Wittgenstein explicitly

criticizes James’ concept and implicitly anticipates his own way of dealing with this matter.

These remarks, belonging to Manuscripts 165 and 129, both dating 1944, have not been published

in any of Wittgenstein’s edited books, nor is it possible to find the same argument elsewhere.

Wittgenstein’s critique concerns James’ lack of distinction between what is grammatical, or a

priori, and what is empirical, or a posteriori, a distinction which the image of the stream should

have suggested: a stream flows in a stream-bed and within banks. This is exactly the meaning

that Wittgenstein’s own metaphor of the river-bed of thoughts is intended to convey. Section 3

analyses James’ concept of the stream and its corollaries, in order to clarify whether

Wittgenstein’s critique is justified or not. James in effect draws a separation between a priori and

a posteriori, but this separation is conceived from within the framework of empirical science.

This analysis leads to the theme of the relations among science, philosophy and metaphysics,

which is the subject of section 4. The conclusion is that Wittgenstein did appreciate James for his

intuitions and for the power of his imagination: in a sense he even developed them; but he could

not agree on the explicit formulation of his ideas.

AUTHOR

ANNA BOCOMPAGNI

Università di Roma Tre

anna.boncompagni[at]uniroma3.it


56

Wittgenstein, Ramsey and BritishPragmatismMathieu Marion

AUTHOR'S NOTE

In writing this paper, I made use of the draft of an earlier paper, “Ramsey as an

Inferentialist,” delivered at the Third Meeting on Pragmatism: Agency, Inference and the

Origins of Analytic Philosophy in Granada, Spain in the spring 2006, organized by María J.

Frápolli. I wish to thank the participants for their comments and acknowledge my debt

to discussions with Nils-Eric Sahlin and François Latraverse for discussions over the

years on the topic of this paper.

1. Assessing Ramsey’s Impact on Wittgenstein

1 One may establish links between Wittgenstein and pragmatism in an abstract albeit

superficial way à la Rorty,1 or one may try and establish them contextually, i.e., in terms

of what historical evidence about Wittgenstein allows us to infer. I propose to do here

the latter. Historical links would run either from Wittgenstein to the pragmatist

tradition or from the pragmatist tradition to Wittgenstein. I choose to investigate links

of the latter type, hoping that the connections uncovered actually help us to deepen

our understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, albeit on some limited points. There is

to my knowledge no discussion of C. S. Peirce in Wittgenstein’s writings, only a

reference en passant in a conversation by Rhus Rhees,2 which remains unpublished (it is

at all events of peripheral interest), and, although there is quite a lot of discussion of

William James, it is perhaps focused on topics, e.g., psychology and religious

experience, that are not so specific to ‘pragmatism.’ If at first blush the idea of direct

links seems not so promising – I do not wish, however, to say that it is not – perhaps the

role of intermediaries is worth investigating, and this is what I shall do, focusing on

‘British pragmatism,’ and F. P. Ramsey in particular. The expression ‘British


57

pragmatism’ was indeed coined by Nils-Eric Sahlin to characterize Ramsey’s

philosophy,3 and I shall extend it here to an heterogeneous group that includes,

alongside him, C. K. Ogden and Bertrand Russell – a fuller picture should also include

the more marginal figures of F. C. Schiller and Victoria Welby.4 The presence of Russell

might strike one as odd even in such a miscellaneous list, but one should recall the

equally odd remark at the end of Ramsey’s “Facts and Propositions,” to which I shall

come back:

My pragmatism is derived from Mr Russell.5

2 At all events, the focus of this paper will be Ramsey, and what manner of pragmatist

thinking he might have imparted in Wittgenstein. I shall therefore spend most of the

paper explaining in what sense Ramsey may reasonably be said to be a pragmatist, and

will in the last section explain how his critique in the late 1920s might have imparted a

key pragmatist idea in Wittgenstein.6

3 In order to forestall any misunderstanding, I should state plainly that I do not believe

Ramsey to be the chief inspirer of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, my aim is much

more modest; it is simply to try and shed light on one pragmatist idea that might have

been imparted by Ramsey – how important it may be in our overall account of the

development of Wittgenstein’s thought, I leave to others. There are certainly other

topics on which the impact of Ramsey is more readily identifiable. For example,

G. H. von Wright and Nils-Eric Sahlins have shown how much Wittgenstein’s remarks

on probability after 1929 owe to Ramsey.7 (To begin with, he corrected during his visit

in 1923 a mistake in the first edition of the Tractatus.)8 Perhaps more to the point,

Wittgenstein’s later remarks on truth should also be investigated, not in terms of a

‘redundancy’ theory but in terms of Ramsey’s pragmatism.

4 Still, to argue for anything remotely like an ‘influence’ on Wittgenstein is bound to be

controversial because of the habit of using Wittgenstein to pounce on philosophers he

was acquainted with – Ramsey being here one of the prime targets alongside Frege,

Russell, and Carnap – as opposed to aiming at a less brutal but potentially more fruitful

appraisal of their intellectual relation,9 but also because, as we shall see presently, the

textual evidence can easily be mishandled.

5 One should first recall some facts.10 Ramsey first heard about Wittgenstein when an

undergraduate at Cambridge (1920-23), when at the age of 18, he translated

Wittgenstein’s Logisch-philosophische Abhandlungen into English – this is commonly

known as the ‘Ogden translation.’11 Ramsey went twice to Austria, in September 1923,

for the purpose of discussions with Wittgenstein, whom he saw for a fortnight in

Puchberg (where he was a school teacher), and in March 1924, when he underwent a

psychoanalysis with Theodor Reik in Vienna, lasting six months. During his stay,

Ramsey only spend two week-ends with Wittgenstein, again at Puchberg. The contrast

between the two occasions is striking: after his first meeting Wittgenstein, Ramsey

wrote “I use to think Moore a great man but besides W!,”12 while on his second visit in

1924, he wrote back: “He is no good for my work.”13 As it turns out, however, on that

second occasion Ramsey was himself absorbed in his psychoanalysis and hardly capable

of philosophical work. This is again in contrast with the first visit, when Ramsey

discussed the content of the Tractatus with Wittgenstein and tried to pick his brain for

ideas on how to fix Principia Mathematica. This last was a failure, as Wittgenstein

thought Principia Mathematica “so wrong that a new edition would be futile,”14 but their


58

discussion of the Tractatus led to a remarkably astute review of the book by Ramsey in

the October issue of Mind.15

6 Today, a promising young undergraduate such as Ramsey would be warned to stay

away from Wittgenstein, but this was not the mentality back then, and Ramsey wanted

to learn from Wittgenstein ideas that he would use for his own independent work.16 He

pushed Wittgenstein’s ideas in three directions: first, he used Wittgenstein’s idea that

names of properties and relations may occur in elementary propositions to develop a

critique of the distinction between universals and particulars in “Universals,” secondly,

he used Wittgenstein’s conception of logic in his analysis of belief and truth, in “Facts

and Propositions” and “Truth and Probability,” and thirdly, he tried to renovate

Russell’s logicism with help of ideas from the Tractatus. Only the second of these

directions will be the focus of this paper.

7 Ramsey was to meet again Wittgenstein briefly in 1925 at Keynes’ in Sussex (on the

occasion of the latter’s marriage to Lydia); they apparently bitterly quarreled but this

was about psychoanalysis, not philosophy. They also exchanged a pair of letters on

identity through the intermediary of Schlick in 1927, with Wittgenstein raising

objections to Ramsey’s definition of identity in his 1925 paper “The Foundations of

Mathematics”; again we see here how divergent their views on the foundations of

mathematics were.17 Nevertheless, part of Wittgenstein’s intention when coming to

Cambridge in January 1929 was to discuss philosophy with Ramsey, and they

apparently met on a regular basis until the latter’s untimely death a year later, in

January 1930, at the age of 27. Wittgenstein, who was deeply moved by his death,18 had

an ambivalent attitude towards their discussions: in 1929, he described them as

“energic sport” and conducted in “good spirit,” with “something erotic and chivalrous

about them,”19 but a year later he reminisced that although he had a “certain awe” of

Ramsey, the conversations “in the course of time […] did not go well”; he thought

Ramsey had an “ugly mind,” and that repulsed him.20

8 There are many traces of these discussions in Ramsey’s posthumous papers, including a

recently published set of remarks presumably dictated to Ramsey by Wittgenstein from

his own manuscript, MS 106, that may have served as a basis for his paper at the Joint

session in Nottingham in 1929.21 There are also a few remarks in Wittgenstein’s Nachlaß

referring to these conversations, among the many comments on Ramsey, more often

than not negative, that are mostly referring to his printed papers.

9 In order to assess the possible impact of these conversations and of Ramsey’s ideas on

Wittgenstein, one should, for obvious exegetical reasons, stick as much as possible to

texts from 1929. As I said, however, it is very easy to bungle one’s interpretation; one

obvious but common mistake is to appeal to Wittgenstein’s later views in order to

contrast them with Ramsey’s.22 That is presupposing that Wittgenstein had them in

mind in 1929 ready to use to rebut Ramsey, which is plainly false, and, supposing more

rightly that they occurred to him later, that this happened independently of any

impact from Ramsey: if one’s task is to assess the latter, then the procedure is perfectly

circular. Thus, it is better to assume that in 1929 Wittgenstein hardly did any thinking

on his own for years and that he was therefore barely able to articulate in clear terms a

critique of his Tractatus, while Ramsey had already articulated an astute one in his 1923

review and moved further along since.

10 One should also beware of the fact that Ramsey’s views evolved in the last two years of

his life, i.e., in 1928-29: it would thus be mistaken to assess the result of these


59

conversations by helping oneself without proper care to views expressed by Ramsey in

papers published in previous years. Indeed, Ramsey’s major philosophy papers were all

published in 1925-26: “Universal” and “The Foundations of Mathematics” in 1925,

“Mathematical Logic” in 1926, to which one may add the posthumously published

“Truth and Probability” written in the same year, and “Facts and Propositions” in 1927.

His tragic death in January 1930 meant that Ramsey could not complete any new

philosophy papers reflecting his views for 1928-29, but some important manuscripts

were published in 1931, as his ‘last papers.’23 There are important contrasts between

the views expressed in these two sets of papers, and this paper revolves around one of

them. Alas, there is no clear evidence that Wittgenstein read the ‘last papers,’ but it is

clear that their content was known to him through his discussions with Ramsey,

because after 1929 he has abandoned some views held in the Tractatus for reasons

rather akin to Ramsey’s own change of mind.

11 My point is thus that it is a sine qua non condition that one understands Ramsey’s

thought in terms inclusive of these ‘last papers’ in order the assess the impact of his

discussions with Wittgenstein. In particular, one should first notice that almost all of

Wittgenstein’s remarks openly critical of Ramsey’s views concern topics in the

philosophy of mathematics, where they obviously did not see eye to eye. One obvious

topic is infinity: Wittgenstein always stuck to the potential infinite while Ramsey

adhered to an ‘extensionalist’ conception that admits of infinite totalities. But Ulrich

Majer has shown that by 1929 Ramsey had already begun holding finitist views that are

critical of his earlier stance in ‘The Foundations of Mathematics’ and ‘Mathematical

Logic,’24 and I have attempted in the past to show the relevance of these new views for

our understanding of the development of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics.25

Brian McGuinness’ disagreed with what he perceived as the gist of this work:

Ulrich Majer and Mathieu Marion for example think Ramsey taught Wittgenstein toview mathematics in an intuitionist and even finitist way. […] it seems to me thatinfluence is not the right word: we might better remember Gilbert Ryle’s replywhen asked whether he had been influenced by Wittgenstein: “I learnt a lot fromhim.” Now Wittgenstein clearly learnt a lot from Ramsey and came back tophilosophy with a knowledge of the thought of Weyl, Brouwer and Hilbert that hewould not have had otherwise. But he certainly did not adopt a position nearintuitionism under Ramsey’s influence – Ramsey’s conversion (if such it was)occurred after their meeting in 1925 and Wittgenstein’s enthusiasm for Brouwerdid not result from but was the reason for going to the 1928 lecture. It was not aCambridge product.26

12 McGuinness is certainly right about the fact that Wittgenstein was not ‘influenced’ by

Ramsey. There are clear indications that, in 1929, they shared a common ground on a

number of issues in the philosophy of mathematics, grounds that might justify labelling

them as ‘intuitionists’ or ‘finitists.’ Although it is undeniable that Ramsey changed his

mind, manuscripts show that he began to do so in 1928, before Wittgenstein’s return to

Cambridge.27 This being said, McGuinness is quite right in saying that, if Wittgenstein’s

views were indeed close to those of Brouwer, it was not as a result of Ramsey’s

influence: I have argued elsewhere that, in order to understand his stance towards

Brouwer’s intuitionism, one ought to look at what he wrote on mathematics in the

Tractatus, where his view are already remarkably close to Brouwer’s;28 this also serves

to understand his rejection of Ramsey’s earlier views on foundations. For that reason, it

seems also right for McGuinness to deny any ‘influence.’ I should be sorry if, for my

part, I spoke in such terms; it is not possible and to some extend pointless to decide who


60

influenced whom. But it seems wrong merely to reduce for that reason the role of

Ramsey to that of having pointed out to Wittgenstein the existence of a number of

papers by Hermann Weyl and others expressing alternative views on the foundations of

mathematics.

13 More importantly, Wittgenstein kept coming back in his manuscripts to Ramsey’s

earlier ‘extensionalist’ views on identity and infinity in order to criticize them, thereby

giving the impression that he actually took nothing from Ramsey – this is the view

taken, for example, by Wolfgang Kienzler in his careful study of Wittgenstein’s Wende.29

(Wittgenstein’s oracular style that make some of his statement appearing as if conjured

from nowhere else than his mind is also likely to mislead in this respect – I shall give an

example of this below.) In making a proper assessment of Ramsey’s impact, these

passages should not only be dismissed precisely because they cannot refer back to

Ramsey’s views in 1929, and therefore fail to explain anything about their exchanges

during that year, but also, in the context of this paper, because they deal with issues in

the foundations of mathematics, where no pragmatist import could ever be detected.

So we better drop the issue, once these words of caution are expressed.

14 That his discussions with Ramsey had an effect on Wittgenstein’s thought is at the very

least acknowledged in no uncertain terms in the preface to Philosophical Investigations:

For since I began to occupy myself with philosophy again, sixteen years ago, I couldnot but recognize grave mistakes in what I set out in that first book [the TractatusLogico-Philosophicus, M.M.]. I was helped to realize these mistakes – to a degreewhich I myself am hardly able to estimate – by the criticism which my ideasencountered from Frank Ramsey, with whom I discussed them in innumerableconversations during the last two years of his life.30 Even more than to this – alwayspowerful and assured – criticism I am indebted to that which a teacher of thisuniversity, Mr. P. Sraffa, for many years unceasingly applied to my thoughts. It is tothis stimulus that I owe the most fruitful ideas of this book.31

15 Even if we are to follow Wittgenstein and attribute to Sraffa a more significant role, the

bottom line remains that Wittgenstein acknowledged a debt to Ramsey and this simply needs

to be elucidated – there is no going around it.

16 It is true that Wittgenstein seems to imply in his preface that Ramsey’s input was

merely negative, and achieved only through criticism of his older ideas, but a narrow

reading that would deny any positive contribution cannot be wholly right, if only

because the idea of a purely negative critique, short of a Socratic elenchus, is hard to

make sense of. The following pair of quotations support this point. Ramsey is

mentioned only once more in Philosophical Investigations:

F. P. Ramsey once emphasized in conversation with me that logic was a ‘normativescience.’ I do not know exactly what idea he had in mind, but it was doubtlessclosely related to one that dawned on me only later: namely, that in philosophy weoften compare the use of words with games, calculi with fixed rules, but cannot saythat someone who is using language must be playing such a game. – But if someonesays that our languages only approximate to such a calculi, he is standing on the verybrink of a misunderstanding. For then it may look as if what we were talking aboutin logic were an ideal language. As if our logic were, so to speak, a logic for avacuum. – Whereas logic does not treat of language –or of thought– in the sense inwhich a natural science treats a natural phenomenon, and the most that can be saidis that we construct ideal languages.32

17 One may usefully compare this with remarks jotted down by Ramsey in September

1929:


61

Logic, i.e., the laws of thought, is according to L((udwig)) W((ittgenstein)) aconsequence of analytic psychology. Es liegt im Begriff des Denkens dass man p . ≈ pnicht denken kann.Aber dieser Begriff des Denkens ist keiner naturwissenschaftlicher.Die Psychologie von auswärts kann diesen Begriff gar nicht Benützen.It is just like chess; in a game of chess you can’t have 10 white queens on the board,the emphasis is on chess. You can put them on the board if you like but that isn’tchess.So also in thought you cannot have p . ≈ p; you can write that if you like but it willnot be thought.But I think we can define chess.Can we define thought, and is there any such thing? What are its rules and whoplays it? It isn’t common, it is something to which we approximate by getting ourlanguage clear.“All our everyday prop((osition))s are in order” is absolutely false, and shows theabsurdity of interpreting logic as part of natural science.33

18 It is worth noting that none of the German sentences in this passage are to be found in

Wittgenstein’s Nachlaß, it is thus reasonable that they may have come from a

conversation with Wittgenstein. But Ramsey is also referring here to views harking

back to the Tractatus: the last sentence contains a quotation from 5.5563, while the idea

that one cannot think a contradiction is related to the impossibility of “judging a

nonsense” in 5.5422. And, as Wittgenstein himself recognized above, Ramsey’s

standpoint is the right one: when he writes that logic is not a natural science,

Wittgenstein is expressing an idea he clearly got from Ramsey, not merely from having

been effectively criticized. The following will have a lot to do with this positive

contribution.

2. Ramsey and British Pragmatism

19 Ramsey’s gave a concise expression of his own pragmatism in the last sentences of

‘Facts and Propositions’:

In conclusion, I must emphasize my indebtedness to Mr Wittgenstein, from whommy view of logic is derived. Everything that I have said is due to him, except theparts which have a pragmatist tendency, which seem to me to be needed in order tofill up a gap in his system. […] My pragmatism is derived from Mr Russell; and is, ofcourse, very vague and undeveloped. The essence of pragmatism I take to be this,that the meaning of a sentence is to be defined by reference to the actions to whichasserting it would lead, or, more vaguely still, by its possible causes and effects.(Ramsey 1990: 51)

20 This passage already gives us two clues. First, that Ramsey had identified what he

believed to be a gap in the system of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and that he believed his

pragmatism would fill it. Secondly, as already mentioned, Ramsey points to Russell’s

pragmatism as the source of his own pragmatism.

21 As for the first clue, what would that gap be? My suggestion is that we look at Ramsey’s

review of the Tractatus and his critique of Wittgenstein’s analysis at 5.542 of ‘A believes

p’ as “‘p’ says p.” Ramsey’s qualms had to do with the fact that he rejected

Wittgenstein’s grounding of the notion of ‘truth-possibility’ on the notion of ‘possibility

of existence or non-existence of states of affairs,’ in 4.3:

4.3 – Truth possibilities of elementary propositions mean possibilities of existenceor non-existence of states of affairs.34


62

22 Recall here that ‘truth-possibilities’ allow one to form the usual truth-tables (4.31),

given that truth possibilities of elementary propositions are “the conditions of the

truth and falsity of propositions” (4.41), and that

4.4 – A proposition is an expression of agreement and disagreement with truth-possibilities possibilities of elementary propositions.

23 Using Wittgenstein’s own notation, this means, for example, that ‘not simultaneously p

and q’ or

(FTTT) (p, q)

24 is the proposition that expresses disagreement with the first truth-possibility and

agreement for the next three. What this means is that a proposition is identified with a

mapping from truth-possibilities of its elementary propositions to truth-values. In the

case at hand, the first truth-possibility, p and q being true, is mapped onto falsehood,

the next three onto truth. But Wittgenstein notoriously grounds, as we just saw, ‘truth-

possibility’ on the notion of ‘possibility of existence or non-existence of states of

affairs,’ and these depend on what objects there are in the world and their form. This

ontological grounding is the reason for my calling Wittgenstein’s theory ‘static,’ and

my point here is that Ramsey is going to replace it by a more ‘dynamic’ pragmatic

theory. He voiced first his criticisms in his review:

[Wittgenstein’s theory] enables us to substitute for “‘p’ says p.” “‘p’ expressesagreement with these truth-possibilities and disagreement with these others,” butthe latter formulation cannot be regarded as an ultimate analysis of the former, andit is not at all clear how its further analysis proceeds.35

25 He then went on criticizing Wittgenstein’s suggestion at 5.542 that “‘p’ says p” is a

coordination of facts by means of coordination of their objects:

But this account is incomplete because the sense is not completely determined bythe objects which occur in it; nor is the propositional sign completely constitutedby the names which occur in it, for in it there may also be logical constants whichare not co-ordinated with objects and complete the determination of the sense in away which is left obscure.36

26 In ‘Facts and Propositions,’ he also rejected this theory with a powerful argument,

namely that the meaning-explanations in the Tractatus are relative to a language:

We supposed above that the meaning of the names in our thinker’s language mightbe really complex, so that what was to him an atomic sentence might aftertranslation into a more refined language appear as nothing of the sort.37

27 And he pointed out that the presupposition that truth-possibilities are all possible

clashed with Wittgenstein’s assumption that ‘This is both blue and red’ is contradictory

– this being the notorious color-incompatibility problem, one of the first flaws that

Wittgenstein tried to repair in 1929, with well-known consequences. Ramsey nails the

point with the analogy of chess:

This assumption might perhaps be compared to the assumption that the chessmenare not so strongly magnetized as to render some positions on the boardmechanically impossible, so that we need only consider the restrictions imposed bythe rules of the game, and can disregard any others which might conceivably arisefrom the physical constitution of men.38

28 To see what Ramsey’s solution was, we need to deal first with the second of the above

clues. Richard Braithwaite, who was probably Ramsey’s closest friend, described

Cambridge through the early post-war years in these terms:


63

In 1919 and for the next few years philosophic thought in Cambridge wasdominated by the work of Russell […] the books and articles in which he developedhis ever-changing philosophy were devoured and formed the subject of detailedcommentary and criticism in the lectures of G. E. Moore and W. E. Johnson. (ob.1931)39

29 During those years, Russell published “On Propositions: What they Are and How they

Mean” (1919), participated with H. H. Joachim and F. S. C. Schiller in a symposium, in

Mind on “The Meaning of ‘Meaning” (1920), which generated a debate in subsequent

issues, and, finally, Analysis of Mind (1921). In these, Russell went on developing (and

abandoning) what may be called a ‘causal theory of meaning’ which was indeed central

to discussions in Cambridge, as C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richard would go on proposing a

very similar theory in The Meaning of Meaning (1923), and, as we shall see, both theories

were to form part the background to Ramsey’s “Facts and Propositions.” As a matter of

fact, when Ramsey spoke above of Russell’s pragmatism, he was referring to this

theory.40 Wittgenstein, it is well known, was also to read carefully and criticize Russell’s

Analysis of Mind in chapter III of Philosophical Remarks.41

30 In “On Propositions: What they Are and What they Mean,” Russell expressed for the

first time the ‘causal theory’ in those terms:

According to this theory – for which I cannot make any author responsible – thereis no single occurrence which can be described as “believing a proposition,” butbelief simply consists in causal efficacy. Some ideas move us to action, other do not;those that do so move us are said to be believed.42

31 It is interesting to note that Russell does not attribute this theory to anyone, he simply

claims that it is implicitly assumed by James, the only pragmatist whose writings he

really knew at that stage. As it turns out, Russell rejected it but in Analysis of Mind, he

presents his ‘causal theory’ in quasi-pragmatic terms:

We may say that a person understand a word when (a) suitable circumstancesmakes him use it, (b) the hearing of it causes suitable behavior in him.43

The relation of a word to its meaning is of the nature of a causal law governing ouruse of the word and our actions when we hear it used.44

32 C. K. Ogden & I. A. Richards were to propound sensibly the same theory in The Meaning

of Meaning that Ramsey reviewed in Mind.45 Incidentally, one should note Russell’s claim

in those pages that understanding is, to use Gilbert Ryle’s words, a ‘knowing how,’ and

not a ‘knowing that’:

It is not necessary, in order that a man should “understand” a word, that he should“know what it means,” in the sense of being able to say “this word means so-and-so.” […] Understanding language is more like understanding cricket: it is a matterof habits, acquired in oneself and rightly presumed in others. To say that a wordhas a meaning is not to say that those who the word correctly have ever thoguhtout what the meaning is: the use of the word comes first, and the meaning is to bedistilled out of it by observation and analysis.46

33 This is, I believe, the reason why Ramsey spoke of Russell’s pragmatism in the opening

quotation of this section.

34 It would be wrong, however, to conflate Ramsey’s theory in ‘Facts and Propositions’

with these views of Russell and Ogden & Richards, because Ramsey’s theory is more

truly pragmatic and because, on the key point which is his solution the problem note

above in the Tractatus, there is no antecedent in Russell and Ogden & Richards. As a

matter of fact, Wittgenstein criticized these last as follows:


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The essential difference between the picture conception and the conception ofRussell, Ogden and Richards, is that it regards recognition as seeing an internalrelation, whereas in their view this is an external relation.That is to say, for me, there are only two things involved in the fact that a thoughtis true, i.e. the thought and the fact; whereas for Russell there are three, i.e.thought, fact and a third event which, if it occurs, is just recognition. […]The causal connection between speech and action is an external relation, whereaswe need an internal one.47

35 This critique does not apply to Ramsey’s “Facts and Propositions,” as we shall see, since

he does not introduce any third element in modifying the ‘picture conception.’

36 Ramsey relies indeed here directly on Peirce, whose writings he probably discovered

through C. K. Ogden & I. A. Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning,48 published in 1923, which

is also the year of the publication of Chance, Love and Logic, quoted by Ramsey in his

writings. When he wrote in the above-quoted passage that

the meaning of a sentence is to be defined by reference to the actions to whichasserting it would lead […]

37 Ramsey merely expressed an idea one that one can already find in Peirce, who wrote in

“The Fixation of Belief” (1877):

our beliefs should be such as may truly guide our actions so as to satisfy our desires.49

38 Furthermore, in “How to Make our Ideas Clear” (1878), Peirce claimed that “the whole

function of thought is to produce habits of action” and that to make explicit the

meaning of a belief

we have […] simply to determine what habits it produces, for what a thing means issimply what habits its involves.50

39 These passages show that Peirce conceived of beliefs as habits and a guides to action.51

These ideas are to be found almost verbatim in Ramsey’s ‘last papers’:

All belief involves habit.52

The ultimate purpose of thought is to guide our action.53

It belongs to the essence of any belief that we deduce from it, and act on it in acertain way.54

40 What these snippets show is a direct influence of Peirce’s pragmatism on Ramsey. This

influence can be felt in two crucial stages, first in Ramsey’s use of these ideas to rectify

in ‘Facts and Propositions’ the above blemish he found in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and

secondly in the ‘last papers.’

41 Ramsey’s solution to the problems he raised in his review of the Tractatus, discussed

above, consisted simply in identifying a belief in a proposition with the set of truth-

possibilities under which it is true:

Thus, to believe p or q is to express agreement with the possibilities p true and qtrue, p false and q true, p true and q false, and disagreement with the remainingpossibility p false and q false. To say that feeling belief towards a sentence expressessuch an attitude is to say that it has certain causal properties which vary with theattitude, i.e. with which possibilities are knocked out and which, so to speak, arestill left in. Very roughly the thinker will act in disregard of the possibilitiesrejected, but how to explain this accurately I do not know.55

42 In other words, according to Ramsey, who adopts here the pragmatist point of view, for

someone to believe in ‘p F0DA q’ means to “act in disregard of the possibilities rejected.”56

This identification of belief with act is what I called the ‘dynamic’ element, with which

Ramsey corrects the ‘static’ conception of the Tractatus. (One also should note here, in


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relation to Wittgenstein’s critique of Russell and Ogden & Richards quoted above that

Ramsey did not introduce a new element.)

43 Thus both Russell’s and Peirce’s conceptions need to be taken into account in

understanding Ramsey’s pragmatism and the manner in which he sought to rectify the

Tractatus. For the second stage of this influence, one has to bear in mind that Ramsey’s

thought had evolved by 1929 – after all these last three quotations are from the ‘last

papers’ – and one cannot simply refer back to the views in ‘Facts and Propositions’ and

contrast them with Wittgenstein in order to emphasize the disagreements between the

two philosophers. One needs instead to show how the pragmatist insights gained early

evolved into the ‘last philosophy’ of Ramsey (hardly two years later), in order to make

the right sort of comparison with Wittgenstein. This requires, however, that one

provides a ‘non standard’ interpretation of Ramsey’s philosophy.57 By this I mean the

following. If we follow, for example, Christopher Hookway, both Peirce and Ramsey

defend an account of belief which is ‘representationalist’ – this is not Hookway’s term –

because it combines two elements: representations, as they “display a logical structure

which suits them for use in inference,” and:

[…] representations that function as beliefs have a special role in the determinationof action which makes it appropriate to regard them as embodying habits of action.58

44 This might right as a portrayal of Peirce, who held general beliefs to be

representations, but I think that this is not exactly true about the Ramsey of the ‘last

papers’ for reasons that I shall present in the next section.

3. Ramsey’s ‘Human Logic’

45 My starting point will be what Colin Howson called Ramsey’s ‘big idea,’ i.e., the idea

that the laws of probability are rules of consistency for the distribution of partial

beliefs.59 Following the British tradition and Keynes in particular, Ramsey adhered to

the view of logic as the ‘science of rational thought,’ i.e., the science that “tells men

how they should think.”60 (Another influence here might simply be Peirce’s view of

logic as ‘self-control.’)61 This is the view of logic as ‘normative’ that Wittgenstein

mentioned in Philosophical Investigations, § 81, quoted above. Ramsey also used Peirce’s

distinction between ‘explicative’ and ‘ampliative’ arguments,62 to suggest that this

‘science of rational thought,’

[…] must then fall very definitely into two parts: […] we have the lesser logic, whichis the logic of consistency; and the larger logic, which is the logic of discovery, orinductive logic.63

46 The ‘larger’ logic, Ramsey also called ‘logic of truth,’ so we can divide the subject into a

‘logic of consistency’ and a ‘logic of truth.’ The former contains what Ramsey called

‘formal logic’; this is basically what we consider today as ‘logic.’64 His ‘big idea’ was thus

to have seen that the theory of subjective probability actually belongs to the ‘logic of

consistency,’ as a generalization of formal logic. In order to do this, he re-described

formal logic as the ‘logic of consistency’ for full or ‘certain’ beliefs of degree 0 or 1 and

proposed to see his theory of subjective probability as generalization of this to partial

beliefs, i.e., beliefs of degree from 0 to 1. Therefore, the distinction between ‘logic of

consistency’ and ‘logic of truth’ does not overlap the distinction between certain and

partial beliefs:


66

What we have now to observe is that [the distinction between the logic ofconsistency and logic of truth] in no way coincides with the distinction betweencertain and partial beliefs; we have seen that there is a theory of consistency inpartial beliefs just as much as of consistency in certain beliefs, although for variousreasons the former is not so important as the latter. The theory of probability is infact a generalization of formal logic […].65

47 Reasons for this classification have to do with one of the many extraordinary features

of Ramsey’s paper, the Dutch Book Theorem. Following Patrick Suppes,66 one may

distinguish within Ramsey’s subjective probability theory between ‘structure’ and

‘rationality’ axioms. One of the rationality axioms is the well-known ‘transitivity

principle,’ which states that, for all outcomes a, b and c, if a is preferred to b and b is

preferred to c, then a should be preferred to c. Ramsey commented on possible

violations of this principle in the following terms:

Any definite set of degrees of belief which broke [the laws of probability] would beinconsistent in the sense that it violated the laws of preference between options,such as that preferability is a transitive asymmetrical relation, and that if is αpreferable to β, β for certain cannot be preferable to α if p, β if not-p. If anyone’smental condition violated these laws, his choice would depend on the precise formin which the options were offered him, which would be absurd. He could have abook made against him by a cunning better and would then stand to lose in anyevent. (Ramsey 1990: 78)

48 With this remark, Ramsey stated without proof what is now known as the Dutch Book

Theorem – a choice of betting quotients resulting in a certain loss being called by

bookmakers a Dutch Book. The first explicit proof was given by Bruno de Finetti,67 in

complete ignorance of Ramsey’s work. The Dutch Book Theorem is often used as a

justification for the axioms of subjective probability theory. A typical claim derived

from it, made here by Donald Davidson, is that it shows that it is rational to act

according to that theory:

Because the constraints are sharply stated, various things can be proven about thetheory. The intuition that the constraints define an aspect of rationality, forexample, can be backed by a proof that only someone whose acts are in accord withthe theory is doing the best he can by his own lights: a Dutch book cannot be madeagainst him.68

49 It is important at this juncture, especially since much has been made of Davidson’s debt

to Ramsey, to see the latter viewed the matter differently:

We find, therefore, that a precise account of the nature of partial belief reveals thatthe laws of probability are laws of consistency, an extension to partial beliefs offormal logic, the logic of consistency. They do not depend for their meaning on anydegree of belief in a proposition being uniquely determined as the rational one;they merely distinguish those sets of beliefs which obey them as consistent ones.69

50 The thought is repeated a later on:

We found that the most generally accepted parts of logic, namely formal logic,mathematics and the calculus of probability are all concerned simply to ensure thatour beliefs are not self-contradictory. We put before ourselves the standard ofconsistency and construct these elaborate rules to ensure its observance.70

51 It is crucial that one reads these passages very carefully. One should indeed notice that

in these passages Ramsey merely claims that “the laws of probability are laws of

consistency.” There is no implication whatsoever in this passage that to be consistent is

to be rational or that to violate the principle of transitivity is to be irrational. The

words ‘rational’ or ‘reasonable’ are not used at all in that section, except, as a matter of


67

fact, only when the contrary is claimed, i.e., when Ramsey says that the laws of

probability “do not depend for their meaning on any degree of belief in a proposition

being uniquely determined as the rational one” (my emphasis). This was a direct

criticism of Keynes’ views on probability,71 leading to the dismissal of his Principle of

Indifference.72 Here too Ramsey avoided claims concerning rationality, while

emphasizing consistency:

The Principle of Indifference can now be altogether dispensed with; we do notregard it as belonging to formal logic to say what should be a man’s expectation ofdrawing a white or a black ball from an urn; his original expectations may withinthe limits of consistency be any he likes; all we have to point out is that if he hascertain expectations he is bound in consistency to have certain others. This issimply bringing probability into line with ordinary formal logic, which does notcriticize the premises but merely declares that certain conclusions are the onlyones consistent with them.73

52 This textual evidence should show clearly that a shift – a μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος – has

occurred, from Ramsey to Suppes and Davidson. That this shift is for the better or not is

not what is at stake here, we merely need to ascertain what Ramsey’s views were, and

his point clearly was not that inconsistency must be considered irrational. The common

view that Ramsey’s theory is about “an actual human reasoner, like you and me, and

not [about] some ideal reasoner”74 is also misleading in this respect. The basis for this

view must be the opening paragraph of section 4 of “Truth and Probability,” entitled

“The Logic of Consistency”:

We may agree that in some sense it is the business of logic to tell us what we oughtto think; but the interpretation of this statement raises considerable difficulties. Itmay be said that we ought to think what is true, but in that sense we are told whatto think by the whole of science and not merely by logic. Nor, in this sense, can anyjustification be found for partial belief; the ideally best thing is that we should havebeliefs of degree 1 in all true propositions and beliefs of degree 0 in all falsepropositions. But this is too high a standard to expect of mortal men, and we mustagree that some degree of doubt or even error may be humanly justified.75

53 The reference to ‘mortal men’ implies a contrast with God, so the idea here is that the

‘ideal reasoner’ is God, who can reason, given his infinite powers, in terms of full and

certain beliefs that are also true. The point made later on in exactly those terms:

As has previously been remarked, the highest ideal would be always to have a trueopinion and be certain of it; but this ideal is more suited to God than to man.76

54 It is not to be denied that subjective probability theory, as the logic of consistency for

partial beliefs is, by contrast, about humans. It is trivially so. Nevertheless, I find the

point misleading because the cognitive capacities of that ‘actual human reasoner, like

you and me’ are left unspecified by such formulations and may very well be idealized to

begin with and I think Ramsey did not conceive his ‘logic of truth’ in terms of such

idealizations at all. In a nutshell, there is no discussion the passages above of the theory

of subjective probability as providing an explanation of human actions but only as

setting a ‘standard of consistency’ that we should observe and there is no indication

either that Ramsey believed that the ‘actual human reasoner, like you and me’ has the

cognitive capacities needed always to observe that ‘standard.’ But I should first say a

few more things about the other part of the ‘science of rational thought,’ the ‘logic of

truth.’

55 As opposed to most supporters of subjective probability, Ramsey also believed in

‘objective’ or ‘statistical’ probability, which he called ‘frequencies.’77 The ‘logic of truth’


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is in fact concerned with these: given the “standard of consistency,” how do we adapt

to ‘frequencies’? As Ramsey would put it: “we want our beliefs to be consistent not

merely with one another but also with facts.”78 As Ramsey reminds us, the human mind

“works essentially according to general rules or habits,”79 and one wishes to evaluate

such ‘habits,’ i.e., to find out whether the degree of belief an habit produces fits the

frequencies or not, i.e., leads to truth or not.80 (This is why Ramsey spoke of a ‘logic of

discovery’ and, in potentially misleading ways, of ‘inductive logic.’)81 Ramsey was thus

hoping to provide through that procedure a justification for induction as a ‘useful

habit’ so that one can agree that “to adopt it is reasonable.”82 In short, a belief is

deemed ‘reasonable’ if it is obtained by a ‘reliable’ process.83

56 At this stage, however, Ramsey’s ‘logic of truth’ threatens to evaporate into a

‘reliabilist’ program, which would fall prey to Goodman’s Paradox.84 But this issue is,

again, tangential to my attempt at clarifying Ramsey’s views, and I should emphasize

instead another aspect of Ramsey’s ‘logic of truth,’ which is better captured by another

expression which he uses synonymously: ‘human logic.’85 Again, this expression is likely

to mislead: for example, one might think that Ramsey had in mind an empirical

description of how humans actually make choices. But Ramsey excluded such

psychological considerations and wished to retain the normative character of logic,

which “tells men how they should think,”86 or “what it would be reasonable to believe.”87 So Ramsey’s overall classification should be as follows:

Ramsey’s Classification

57 And the situation is nicely summed up in this passage from Keynes:

[Ramsey] was led to consider “human logic” as distinguished from “formal logic.”Formal logic is concerned with nothing but the rules of consistent thought. But inaddition to this we have certain “useful mental habits” for handling the materialwith which we are supplied by our perceptions and by our memory and perhaps inother ways, and so arriving at or towards truth; and the analysis of such habits isalso a sort of logic. […] in attempting to distinguish a “human” logic from formallogic on the one hand and descriptive psychology on the other, Ramsey may havebeen pointing the way to the next field of study when formal logic has been put intogood order and its highly limited scope properly defined.88

58 As I said earlier, Ramsey did not present his theory of subjective probability as

providing an explanation of human actions but only as setting a ‘standard of

consistency’ that we should observe, and he did not give any indication that he


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assumed that we possess the cognitive capacities needed always to observe it. If

anything, in his discussion of subjective probability theory, he pointed out an obvious

obstacle to its applicability:

nothing has been said about degrees of belief when the number of alternatives isinfinite. […] I doubt if the mind is capable of contemplating more than a finitenumber of alternatives.89

59 Thus Ramsey’s view was that we do not have the cognitive capacities necessary always

to observe the standards of consistency set out in both branches of the ‘logic of

consistency’ and that it is precisely for that reason that he believed it necessary to add

a further branch to the ‘science of rational thought,’ whose concerns are precisely with

what it is ‘reasonable’ or ‘rational’ to believe, given that we do not have these

capacities. In other words, there is nothing in what Ramsey says about ‘human logic’

that implies that he believed that it should be some sort of applied subjective

probability theory, as it has more or less been implicitly taken to be since in the work

of Jeffrey, Suppes, and Davidson. The shift to the modern view thus consists of the

conflation of subjective probability theory and the ‘logic of truth’ or ‘human logic.’

Once we have understood what Ramsey’s ‘human logic’ is truly about, we can then

factor in the pragmatism he took on board via Russell, and we can thus begin to look at

what he had to say about ‘variable hypotheticals’ in 1929, and what possible connexions

there are with Wittgenstein had to say about ‘hypotheses.’

4. Ramsey’s Variable Hypotheticals and Wittgenstein’sHypotheses

60 My case will rest on the reading of two passages and on links with remarks found

principally in one of the ‘last papers,’ “General Propositions and Causality.” In the first

passage, which deserves to be read carefully, Ramsey made plain that the “standard of

consistency” set by the ‘logic of consistency’ is “not enough”:

this is obviously not enough; we want our beliefs to be consistent not merely withone another but also with the facts: nor is it even clear that consistency is alwaysadvantageous; it may well be better to be sometimes right than never right. Norwhen we wish to be consistent are we always able to be: there are mathematicalpropositions whose truth or falsity cannot as yet be decided. Yet it may humanlyspeaking be right to entertain a certain degree of belief in them on inductive orother grounds: a logic which proposes to justify such a degree of belief must beprepared actually to go against formal logic; for to a formal truth formal logic canonly assign a belief of degree 1. […] This point seems to me to show particularlyclearly that human logic or the logic of truth, which tells men how they shouldthink, is not merely independent of but sometimes actually incompatible withformal logic.90

61 This passage is quite astonishing. Among all things, Ramsey comes close to stating the

problem of omniscience which is linked with the principle of epistemic closure:91 it is of

course not true that, although one knows the axioms of, say, Peano Arithmetic,

therefore one knows all arithmetical truths which follow from them. Some, such as

Goldbach’s conjecture, are simply not yet decided,92 and Ramsey argues that there

could situations where one ought to be ready to assign to arithmetical truths a partial

belief less than one and thus to go against formal logic. (Although Ramsey does not

draw explicitly this inference, his remarks also imply that one has to be ready to go


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against subjective probability theory.) The conclusion here seems to be this: what is

irrational for a perfect, ideal agent may very well be rational for an agent with limited

cognitive capacities.

62 In the second passage, Ramsey considers possible answers to the question “What is

meant by saying that it is reasonable for a man to have such and such a degree of belief

in a proposition?”:

But fourthly it need mean none of these things; for men have not always believed inscientific method, and just as we ask ‘But am I necessarily reasonable?,’ we can alsoask ‘But is the scientist necessarily reasonable?’ In this ultimate meaning it seemsto me that we can identify reasonable opinion with the opinion of an ideal person insimilar circumstances. What, however, would this ideal person’s opinion be? as haspreviously been remarked, the highest ideal would be always to have a true opinionand be certain of it; but this ideal is more suited to God than man.93

63 This is one of the passages quoted above as textual evidence that Ramsey thought of his

probability theory in terms of an “actual human reasoner, like you and me,” as opposed

to God, except this time he is talking about his ‘human logic.’ What follows, however, is

not another spiel about subjective probability and utility as one would expect. Ramsey

launches instead into a discussion that he admits to be “almost entirely based on the

writings of C. S. Peirce,”94 beginning thus:

We have therefore to consider the human mind and what is the most we can ask ofit. The human mind works essentially according to general rules or habits; a processof thought not proceeding according to some rule would simply be a randomsequence of ideas; whenever we infer A from B we do so in virtue of some relationbetween them.95

64 This point is repeated further on:

Let us put it in another way: whenever I make an inference, I do so according tosome rule or habit. An inference is not completely given when we are given thepremises and conclusion; we require also to be given the relation between them invirtue of which the inference is made. The mind works by general laws; therefore ifit infers q from p, this will generally be because q is an instance of a function ϕx and

p the corresponding instance of a function ψx such that the mind would always

infer ϕx from ψx.96

65 The notion of ‘habit’ seems, therefore to play a key role in ‘human logic.’ As I pointed

out earlier, Ramsey’s idea was that it would allow us to evaluate, praise or blame, these

‘habits’:

Thus given a single opinion, we can only praise or blame it on the ground of truthor falsity: given a habit of a certain form, we can praise or blame it accordingly asthe degree of belief it produces is near or far from the actual proportion in whichthe habit leads to truth. We can then praise or blame opinions derivatively from ourpraise or blame of the habits that produce them.97

66 This, Ramsey believed to be a form of ‘pragmatism,’ in the following sense:

This is a kind of pragmatism: we judge mental habits by whether they work, i.e.,whether the opinions they lead to are for the most part true, or more often truethan those which alternative habits would lead to.98

67 In “General Propositions and Causality” Ramsey introduced a new notion, that of

‘variable hypothetical,’ which actually stands at the heart of his ‘human logic.’ To see

why he needed this new notion, it suffices that we look at ‘general propositions’ in their

simplest form:

x ϕ(x) ® ψ(x)


71

68 In “Facts and Propositions,”99 Ramsey had adopted a convention that he found in

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, according to which one reads the universal quantifier, “x ϕ(

x),” as a conjunction :

“ϕ(a) ∧ ϕ(b) ∧ ϕ(c) ∧…

69 and the existential quantifier, $x ϕ(x), as a disjunction:

ϕ(a) ∨ ϕ(b) ∨ ϕ(c) ∨…

70 Thus, a proposition such as ‘All men are mortal’:

“x ϕ(x) ® ψ(x)

71 has to be interpreted likewise as a logical product, and Wittgenstein assumed at 4.2211

and 5.535 that these sums and products can also be infinite.100

72 However, to speak of an infinitely long product or sum does not have much sense

within ‘human logic.’ If the human mind cannot contemplate an infinite object, how

could one use it as a “guide to action”?

A belief […] is a map of neighbouring space by which we steer. It remains such amap however much we complicate it or fill in details. But if we professedly extend itto infinity, it is no longer a map; we cannot take it in or steer by it. Our journey isover before we need its remoter parts.101

73 Thus, Ramsey came to introduce the notion of ‘variable hypotheticals’:102

Variable hypotheticals or causal laws form the system with which the speaker meetthe future. […] Variable hypotheticals are not judgments but rules for judging ‘If Imeet a ϕ, I shall regard it as a ψ.’ This cannot be negated but it can be disagreed withby one who does not adopt it.These attitudes seem therefore to involve no puzzling idea except that of habit;clearly any proposition about a habit is general.103

74 To see the evolution of Ramsey’s thought, one need merely to recall here the point

made at the end of section 2, above: according to Ramsey, in ‘Facts and Propositions,’

for S to believe in ‘p & q’ or ‘p ∨ q’ means for S to “act in disregard of the possibilities

rejected.” In that paper, Ramsey explicitly adopted Wittgenstein’s reading of the

quantifiers,104 but he now realizes that this cannot be possible if the set of truth-

possibilities is infinite.

75 The interpretation as ‘rules for judging,’ above, or ‘fount of judgements’105 is an

adaptation of the reading of universal quantifiers as ‘rules for the formation of

judgments’ or Urteilsanweisungen by Hermann Weyl.106 Together with a reading of the

existential quantifier as ‘judgement abstract’ or Urteilsabstrakte, it allows a constructive

reading of the two axioms of quantification theory:

“x ϕ(x) ®ϕ (a),

ϕ(a) ® $x ϕ(x),

76 with which Ramsey agreed in a note dating 1929, ‘Principles of Finitist Mathematics.’107

The notions are indeed the same, since the point of Weyl’s reading of the quantifiers is

that they are not reducible to conjunctions and disjunctions, and thus cannot be

negated, and this is precisely what Ramsey insisted upon:

[…] when we assert a causal law we are asserting not a fact, not an infiniteconjunction, nor a connection of universals, but a variable hypothetical which isnot strictly a proposition at all, but a formula from which we derive propositions.108


72

77 Thus, variable hypotheticals are rules or schemata, not propositions, they are therefore not

assessable in terms of truth and falsity, so Ramsey’s conception is, contrary to

Hookway’s claim quoted above, thoroughly non ‘representational.’

78 There are many points worth discussing at this stage, for example, Peter Geach’s ‘Frege

point,’109 against which this conception seems to be running afoul. For the purposes of

this paper, that Wittgenstein abandoned his earlier view of the quantifiers in terms of

conjunctions and disjunctions in favour of the very similar conception of ‘hypotheses’

is something one can agree upon,110 and my claim is simply that this may indeed be the

result of conversations with Ramsey in 1929. One can illustrate the point with help of a

number of passages, such as this one:

A hypothesis goes beyond immediate experience.A proposition does not.Propositions are true or false.Hypotheses work or don’t work.A hypothesis is a law for constructing propositions, and the propositions areinstances of this law. If they are true (verified), the hypothesis works; if they arenot true, the hypothesis does not work. Or we may say that a hypothesis constructsexpectations which are expressed in propositions and can be verified or falsified.111

79 As far as foundations of mathematics are concerned, the introduction of variable

hypotheticals forms part of Ramsey’s late move towards intuitionism or finitism,112 but

the point of my paper is not to examine the repercussions on his philosophy of

mathematics of the introduction of a similar notion by Wittgenstein, even though, as I

have already mentioned, he stood probably closer to Brouwer’s intuitionism in the

Tractatus113 and that abandoning his earlier view of the quantifiers may just be a matter

of detail; it did not cause any major shift away from the positions of the Tractatus on

mathematics.114 Nevertheless, I think that it is certainly worth noticing that the

introduction of ‘variable hypotheticals’ in the context of human logic has nothing to do

with issues about foundations of mathematics; it is an argument of a pragmatic nature, whose

premises are already contained in the discussion of ‘human logic’ in “Truth and

Probability” as well as in the pragmatic rectification of the Tractatus in ‘Facts and

Propositions.’115 The issue is thus not limited to the infinite case at all. 116 This much

comes up in a passage from “General Propositions and Causality” where Ramsey tackles

the issue of praise that he already placed at the centre of ‘human logic’ – one sees here

the deep connexion with “Truth and Probability”:

[Variable hypotheticals] form an essential part of our mind. That we thinkexplicitly in general terms is at the root of all praise and blame and muchdiscussion. We cannot blame a man except by considering what would havehappened if he had acted otherwise, and this kind of unfulfilled conditional cannotbe interpreted as a material implication, but depends essentially on variablehypotheticals.117

80 Ramsey’s reasoning here appears to be that when deliberating – or, to speak in the

proper jargon: when making a ‘choice under uncertainty’ – we ask ourselves what will

happen if we do this or that and we can answer in two ways: either we have a definite

answer of the form ‘If I do p, then q will result’ or we assign a degree of probability: ‘If I

do p, then q will probably result.’ In the first case, ‘If I do p, then q will result,’ we have a

material implication which can be treated as the disjunction ‘Not-p or q,’ which only

differs from ordinary disjunctions because we are not trying to find out if it is a true

proposition: in acting we will make one of the disjuncts true. In the second case, ‘If I do


73

p, then q will probably result,’ we are not thinking in terms of ‘Not-p or q’ anymore. As

Ramsey put it:

Here the degree of probability is clearly not a degree of belief in ‘Not-p or q,’ but adegree of belief in q given p, which is evidently possible to have without a definitedegree of belief in p, p not being an intellectual problem. And our conduct is largelydetermined by these degrees of hypothetical belief.118

81 The pragmatic nature of Ramsey’s train of thought should by now be obvious, so one

may ask if there is any trace of this in Wittgenstein’s moves away from the doctrines of

the Tractatus in 1929, over and above the above change of mind on quantifiers. The idea

is, simply, that if Ramsey’s introduction of variable hypotheticals primarily motivated

not by considerations concerning the foundations of mathematics but by the above

pragmatic train of thoughts, then there should be a trace of it in Wittgenstein. It is

already visible in the passage on ‘hypotheses’ quoted above, where the context is

obviously not the foundations of mathematics, I shall endeavour to show this further

with help of passages from the early Middle Period.

82 Recall that an essential part of the ‘static’ conception of the Tractatus was the

requirement that proposition and state of affairs must have the same logical

multiplicity for one to represent the other:

4.04 – In a proposition there must be exactly as many distinguishable parts as in thesituation that it represents.The two must possess the same logical (mathematical) multiplicity.

83 In manuscripts from 1929 and in the Philosophical Remarks, this conception becomes

‘dynamic’:

Language must have the same multiplicity as a control panel that sets off theactions corresponding to its propositions […] Just as handles in a control room areused to do a wide variety of things, so are the words of language that correspondsto the handles.119

84 This point is made in the context of a discussion of the role of intention in language,

and that may explain why it has been hitherto unnoticed that the ‘dynamic’ conception

expressed here is new, it has no source in the picture theory of the Tractatus. The point

is also contained in remarks such as this:

Understanding is thus not a particular process; it is operating with a proposition.The point of a proposition is that we should operate with it. (What I do, too, is anoperation.)120

85 It would be an exegetical blemish simply to assume that this new ‘dynamic’ view was

‘divined’ by Wittgenstein independently of any influence, while one can simply see

here the impact of Ramsey’s pragmatist critique of the Tractatus, and his concomitant

view, quoted above, that

the meaning of a sentence is to be defined by reference to the actions to whichasserting it would lead.

86 Furthermore, a ‘variable hypothetical’ or an ‘hypothesis’ may just be seen as an ‘handle

in a control room,’ precisely because the handles don’t ‘represent’ anything: they set

off actions. It is often said that the move to the later Wittgenstein involved an interest

in moods other that indicative, but as we can see here, it is deeper than that, it reflects

a change in his conception of the meaning of declarative sentences to begin with.

87 In order for this point to become obvious, I needed to take a very long detour into the

interpretation of Ramsey’s philosophy, a prerequisite to any evaluation of the impact of


74

his discussions with Wittgenstein on his evolution from the Tractatus to his later

positions. I hope that this detour will have helped to shed light on this point, in a

manner that does justice to both philosophers.

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NOTES

1. For the first occurrence of this sort of move, see Rorty 1961.

2. I was able to consult a typed copy of Rhees’ notes at the von Wright & Wittgenstein Archives

housed in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Helsinki.

3. Sahlin (1997: 65).

4. Schiller was indeed the first in Britain to describe his own philosophy as ‘pragmatist’ in

“Axioms as Postulates” (1902), a paper that G. E. Moore described as “utterly worthless” (1904:

259), while Peirce considered it “most remarkable” (1931-35: 5.414). He figures significantly in

the sources to Lady Welby’s ‘significs,’ and they are both discussed C. K. Ogden & I. A. Richards’

The Meaning of Meaning, e.g., at (1923: 272f.). They also get a mention in Russell’s My Philosophical

Development (1959: 14). A proper assessment of their legacy falls outside the scope of this paper.

5. Ramsey (1990: 51).

6. Thayer (1981: 313) already expressed the hope that one would clarify the links between

Ramsey, Wittgenstein and American pragmatism, but there are only an handful of studies such as


77

Glock 2005, McGuinness 2006, and Sahlin 1995, 1997, as well as lengthy discussions in Kienzler

1997 and Marion 1998.

7. See von Wright 1982 and Sahlin 1995, 1997.

8. See Sahlin (1997: 74-5 & 82-3, n. 48).

9. One is eager to quote here Paul Grice (1986: 62), on J. L. Austin’s treatment of sense-data

theories such as H. H. Price’s in Sense and Sensibilia: “So far as I know, no one has ever been the

better for receiving a good thumping, and I do not see that philosophy is enhanced by such

episodes. There are other ways of clearing the air besides nailing to the wall everything in sight.”

10. For an overview of Ramsey’s life, see Taylor 2006.

11. See Wittgenstein (1973: 8).


13. Quoted in Sahlin (1997: 64), and Taylor (2006: 5).


15. Ramsey 1923.

16. Today, on the other hand, any non-pledged philosopher mentioning Wittgenstein has to face

a group of commentators reminiscent of the Bandar-log in Kipling’s Jungle Book, starting “furious

battles over nothing among themselves.”

17. See Marion 1993.

18. See the testimony of Frances Partridge, ‘The Death of a Philosopher,’ in Partridge (1981: 169f.).

19. Quoted in McGuinness (2006: 23).

20. Wittgenstein (2003 : 15-7).

21. See Wittgenstein 2010, edited by Nuno Venturinha.

22. If my comments at the very end of htis section on the normative conception of logic are on

the right tracks, then an example of this sort of mistake is found in Hanjo Glock’s appeal to

Wittgenstein’s normative view of logic in Glock (2005: 59), in order to contrast it with a “purely

causal and behaviorist” conception he attributes to Ramsey. (On this last point, I hope to have

shown in section 2 that Ramsey’s views are not to be conflated with those of Russell and Ogden &

Richards.)

23. These papers were grouped under that heading in R. B. Braithwaite’s original edition of

Ramsey’s collected papers in 1931.

24. Majer 1989, 1991.

25. See Marion 1995 and (1998: chapters 4-5).

26. McGuinness (2006: 24-5).

27. See Ramsey (1991b : 33-4), where the notion discussed below in section 4 under the name of

‘variable hypothetical’ is already occurring in 1928.

28. Marion 2003, 2008.

29. See, for example, Kienzler (1997: 75-6).

30. This is strictly speaking incorrect as these discussions only took place between January 1929,

when Wittgenstein came back to Cambridge, and January 1930, when Ramsey died.


32. Wittgenstein (2009: § 81).

33. Ramsey (1991a: 277).

34. Quotations from the Tractatus in this paper refer to the Pears & McGuinness translation in

Wittgenstein 1961.

35. Ramsey (1923 : 471).

36. Ramsey (1923: 471).

37. Ramsey (1990: 48).

38. Ramsey (1990: 48).

39. Braithwaite (1933a: 1).


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40. For a detailed analysis of Ramsey’s debt to Russell’s theory, see the excellent paper by Juan

José Acero 2005. The discussion of Ramsey in this section is heavily indebted to this paper.

41. Wittgenstein (1975: §§ 20-38).

42. Russell (1919: 31).

43. Russell (1921: 197).

44. Russell (1921: 198).

45. Ramsey 1924. For what differences they perceived between their theory and Russell’s, see

Ogden & Richards (1923: 141-2 n.).

46. Russell (1921: 197). It is noteworthy that Russell attributes the view in a footnote to the

behaviourist J. B. Watson.

47. Wittgenstein (1975: § 21). Wittgenstein’s critique is discussed, for example, in Kenny (1973:

123-30) as initiating one of the moves away from the picture theory of the Tractatus.

48. In his review of Ogden & Richards 1923, Ramsey (1924: 109) praised the appendix on Peirce.

See Ogden & Richards (1923: 432-44). It is quite possible that it is through them that Ramsey first

learned about Peirce.

49. Peirce (1992: 114). This paper and ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’ were reprinted in a

collection of Peirce’s essays, Chance, Love and Logic (1923) that Ramsey read. This key idea is

repeated elsewhere, e.g., in the ‘Lectures on Pragmatism’ (1903), where Peirce wrote that “belief

consists mainly in being deliberately prepared to adopt the formula believed in as the guide to

action” (1931-35: 5.27).

50. Peirce (1992: 131). Again, the idea is repeated elsewhere, e.g., in ‘Elements of Logic,’ where

Peirce wrote that “the inferential process involves the formation of a habit. For it produces a

belief, or opinion; and a genuine belief, or opinion, is something on which a man is prepared to

act” (1931-35: 2.148).

51. Incidentally, these ideas were not exactly new to Peirce and can be found already in

Alexander Bain, who thought that “belief has no meaning, except in reference to our actions.”

See Bain (1859: 372). The point was first made by Braithwaite, who also showed that Bain

recanted later on (Braithwaite 1933b: 33). One may even trace the origin of this sort of thinking

to David Hume, according to whom, in Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Sec. V, part I, §

36: “custom” or “habit” is “the great guide of human life.”

52. Ramsey (1991a: 278).

53. Ramsey (1990: 153).

54. Ramsey (1990: 159).

55. Ramsey (1990: 46).

56. I owe the point to Acero (2005: 36).

57. The interpretation proposed in the next section is not entirely new, it is largely based on Nils-

Eric Sahlins’ The Philosophy of F. P. Ramsey (1990).

58. Hookway (2005: 186).

59. Howson (2005: 157). This philosophical idea sets him apart from other early contributors to the

topic such as Bruno de Finetti. See de Finetti 1937.

60. Ramsey (1990: 87).

61. Ramsey (1990: 99-101).

62. Peirce (1992: 161). Ramsey’s use of Peirce’s distinction between ‘explicative’ and ‘ampliative’

arguments was motivated by the fact that he used the expression ‘inductive logic’ as a synonym

for ‘logic of truth,’ while he believed that distinction between the latter and the ‘logic of

consistency’ does not overlap the traditional distinction between ‘deductive’ and ‘inductive’

logic. The reason is clear from his definition of the validity of an inference, see Ramsey (1990: 82).

63. Ramsey (1990: 82).

64. Ramsey’s reasons are pretty much standard today, see Ramsey (1990: 81-2).

65. Ramsey (1990: 82).


79

66. Suppes 1956.

67. See de Finetti 1937.

68. Davidson (2004: 154).

69. Ramsey (1990: 78).

70. Ramsey (1990: 87).

71. For example, at Keynes (1973: 15-6).

72. Stated at Keynes (1973: 121).

73. Ramsey (1990: 85).

74. Howson (2005: 145).

75. Ramsey (1990: 80).

76. Ramsey (1990: 89-90).

77. See Ramsey (1990: 84): “in a sense we may say that the two interpretations [frequentist and

Bayesian] are the objective and subjective aspects of the same inner meaning, just as formal logic

can be interpreted objectively as a body of tautology and subjectively as the laws of consistent

thought.”

78. Ramsey (1990: 87).

79. Ramsey (1990: 90).

80. Ramsey (1990: 92).

81. Ramsey’s use of ‘inductive logic’ is idiosyncratic, but carries potentially confusing

connotations of Carnap’s project of an inductive logic, e.g., in Carnap 1952 and Carnap &

Stegmüller 1959. See footnote 62 above.

82. Ramsey (1990: 94). This idea had been put forward by Ramsey already in 1922, in a paper to

the Apostles, see Ramsey (1991a: 301).

83. Ramsey even began to doubt in 1929 that this use of ‘reasonable’ is appropriate. See Ramsey

(1990: 101). This procedure would itself be inductive, but this ‘induction on inductions’ is not

viciously circular – for obvious reasons – and it would proceed by simple enumeration and thus

be finite.

84. As stated, e.g., in Chapter 3, of Goodman 197.

85. For example, at Ramsey (1990: 87).

86. Ramsey (1990: 87).

87. Ramsey (1990: 89).

88. Keynes (1933: 300-1).

89. Ramsey (1990: 79). Decision theory usually involves an infinite set of alternatives and an

infinity of probability combinations, see, e.g., Davidson, Suppes & Siegel (1957: 7-8).

90. Ramsey (1990: 87).

91. This is the principle that says that if I know that p, and I know that p implies q, then I know

that q. This is, of course a mere epistemic variant of the principle of deductive closure.

92. Recall that Ramsey published a result which is a partial solution to the Entscheidungsproblem.

In this passage, he clearly speaks of decidability in these terms.

93. Ramsey (1990: 89-90).

94. Ramsey (1990: 90, n. 2).

95. Ramsey (1990: 90).

96. Ramsey (1990: 91).

97. Ramsey (1990: 92).

98. Ramsey (1990: 93-4).

99. Ramsey (1990: 48-9).

100. Ramsey used very this point in proposing a new definition of ‘predicative function’ in 1925

in “The Foundations of Mathematics”; see Ramsey (1990: 170f.). Wittgenstein opposed that move,

and came back to it in his notebooks, thus creating the impression that there was no common


80

grounds between him and Ramsey. But, as one can see here, Ramsey also abandoned these views

in 1929 and it is plainly exegetically wrong not to take this into account.

101. Ramsey (1990: 146).

102. The expression appears to originate in John Neville Keynes’s Studies and Exercises in Formal

Logic (1889).

103. Ramsey (1990: 149).

104. Ramsey (1990: 48-9).

105. Ramsey (1991a: 235).

106. Weyl’s reading of the quantifiers was first presented in “Über die neue Grundlagenkrise der

Mathematik” in Weyl 1921; see Weyl (1998: 97-8). For an analysis of the distinction between

Brouwer and Weyl on quantification, see Majer 1988.

107. Ramsey (1991a: 197-202).

108. Ramsey (1990: 159).

109. Geach (1965: 459).

110. See, for example, the testimony of von Wright (1982: 151 n. 28) or Wittgenstein’s avowal in

his classes at Wittgenstein (1980: 119), or Moore (1959: 298). I have argued, however, in Marion

2008 that Wittgenstein got the term ‘hypothesis’ from Brouwer’s 1928 lecture in Vienna. This

does not imply that he realized his mistake hearing Brouwer, simply that he used instead of

Ramsey’s ‘variable hypotheticals’ or Weyl’s ‘Urteilsanweisungen,’ a term borrowed from Brouwer.

It is also important to note here that Brouwer uses the term while discussing the visual field, not

foundations.


112. The view that Ramsey switched to intuitionism under the influence of Weyl on

quantification (among other things) was first propounded by Ulrich Majer (1989, 1991). It is also

acknowledged in Sahlin (1990: chaps. 5 & 6) and further developed in Marion 1995 and Marion

(1998, chap. 4), in relation to Wittgenstein.

113. Again, see Marion 2003, 2008.

114. I have discussed the relevant passages in Marion 1995, and in Marion (1998: chaps.4-6).

115. Conflating the pragmatic argument with issues in the foundations of mathematics is, I think,

the mistake made by McGuinness in the passage quoted above in section 1, that prevents him

from properly assessing Ramsey’s impact on Wittgenstein: since Wittgenstein’s position on

foundations does not change, McGuinness cannot see that he learned anything from Ramsey.

116. As far as the infinite case is concerned, there is a clear link with finitism in the foundations

of mathematics, which is clearly expressed in ‘General Propositions and Causality,’ as well, of

course, as in other notes from 1929, such as Ramsey (1990: 160): “So too there may be an infinite

totality, but what seems to be propositions about it are again variable hypotheticals and ‘infinite

collections’ is really nonsense.”

117. Ramsey (1990: 153-4).

118. Ramsey (1990: 153-4). One could pursue the line of thought here using Ramsey’s own

example of a man deliberating if he is to eat a cake or not (1990: 154-5), and this brings us back to

his famous example of the chicken that believes a certain caterpillar to be poisonous (1990: 40).

119. Wittgenstein (1975: § 13).



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ABSTRACTS

In this paper, I examine the transmission of some ideas of the pragmatist tradition to

Wittgenstein, in his ‘middle period,’ through the intermediary of F. P. Ramsey, with whom he had

numerous fruitful discussions at Cambridge in 1929. I argue more specifically that one must first

come to terms with Ramsey’s own views in 1929, and explain how they differ from views

expressed in earlier papers from 1925-27, so a large part of this paper is devoted to this task. One

is then in a better position to understand the impact of Ramsey’s astute critique of Wittgenstein’s

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in conjunction with his pragmatism, and explain how it may have

set into motion the ‘later’ Wittgenstein. I then argue that Ramsey introduced his notion of

‘variable hypothetical’ as a rule, not a proposition, on pragmatist grounds and that Wittgenstein

picked this up in 1929, along with a more ‘dynamic’ view of meaning than the ‘static’ view of the

Tractatus, and that this explains in part Wittgenstein’s turn to his ‘later philosophy.’

AUTHOR

MATHIEU MARION

Université du Québec à Montréal

marion.mathieu[at]uquam.ca


82

Experience and NatureWittgenstein Reader of Dewey?

Christiane Chauviré

1 Wittgenstein’s so called ‘later philosophy’ is usually read from the point of view of its

Austro-German sources, which he pointed in 1931 when he drew his intellectual

portrait in Culture and Value : Goethe, Schopenhauer, Spengler, even Weininger, Kraus,

Loos have succeeded to Frege and Russell, Hertz and Boltzmann, who inspired the

Tractatus. But, and it’s a surprise, we read in Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1925) a

number of themes that are well known as Wittgensteinian ones, and which we can find

for example in The Blue Book and in the Philosophical Investigations, a fact neglected or

ignored by Wittgensteinian studies. Experience and Nature devotes a large amount of

attention to the criticisms of the ‘private and exclusive’ character of mental

phenomena – a central point in the Philosophical Investigations. Like Heidegger, before

Foucault, but after Nietzsche, Dewey traces (in order to deconstruct it), a genealogy of

Western philosophy and of its subjectivist, idealistic and moralizing stereotypes: ‘the

inner life,’ the Cartesian ‘I,’ the isolation of the ego, the ‘fantomatic entities’

hypostazised from substantive nouns of our language, the quest of essences, the

production of theories and of theoretic dualisms which artificially clive the experience;

the adoption of an ‘empiricist and naturalistic’ method should allow us to dismiss them.

Like the later Wittgenstein, Dewey admits the devastating character of his method,

which “when it is consistently followed, destroys many things once cherished; but […]

destroys them by revealing their inconsistency with the nature of things.” As for

Wittgenstein and his philosophical method, he speaks of only crushing “castles in the

air” (Investigations, § 118).

2 Everything goes as if Wittgenstein had taken advantage of Experience and Nature, even

though this reference to pragmatism was underrated in 1920-30 in Cambridge, where

Russell injustly described it as ‘the philosophy of American businessmen,’ and where

James’ theory of truth had a bad reputation. True, Wittgenstein confesses the

‘pragmatist’ influence exerted on him by Ramsey and Sraffa in the Preface of his

Investigations. But immediately after having mentioned these two proper names, he

adds: “For more than one reason, what I publish here will have points of contact with

what other writers are writing to-day. If my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks


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them as mine, – I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property.” No

doubt, from Wittgenstein’s point of view, pragmatism was not a distinguished

philosophy in the sense of Bourdieu (no more than logical empiricism, which he had

snobed at the beginnings of 1930’s), and neither was American beviahorism, two

tendances of the after-War that provided material to his later philosophy. Of course, in

this same remark of 1931 where he admits that he has been influenced by pragmatist

ideas, Wittgenstein compares himself to Freud as “an example of Jewish reproductive

thinking”:1 “I think I have never invented a line of thinking but that it was always

provided formeby someone else and I have done no more than passionately take it up

for my work of clarification” (Culture and Value). In many passages of the Blue Book and

of the Investigations, the texture lets the Deweyian under-text appear.

3 However, Experience and Nature is in itself a remarkable philosophical enterprise,

unfortunately forgotten or underrated; influenced by such different authors as Peirce,

Hegel, and Nietzsche, Dewey proceeds to a genealogical deconstruction of Western

philosophy – two years before Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit – by means of a method that is

simpler than the (logical) method of dawning logical empiricism: it consists in a

‘naturalistic empiricism,’ or even in a ‘humanist’ empiricism, i. e. in a return to

‘primary experience,’ which is only what it is (Dewey is here following the Peircian

conception of pure quality as primary entity, which is only what it is). Such a return to

experience with a recall of the ‘natural history’ of man and of his philosophical

conceptions are meant to dismiss the claims and false values of a philosophy born in

‘leisure class’ (Dewey has read Thornstein Veblen, an author inspired by Peirce and

James, and who influenced in turn Merton, Bourdieu, Elster), which explains perhaps

its idealism and subjectivism; Dewey points to an underrating of appearances or of

matter (a Nietzschean theme), which, according to him, implies a moral judgment. His

project is simple: bringing philosophy back to ordinary life and practice, restoring the

continuity between mind and nature in the sense of a well-understood naturalism, and

in this purpose, always returning to ‘primary experience’ without falsifying it; the

oblivion and falsification of this experience have given birth to a number of

philosophical harms. Dewey regards as ‘mythological’ the ‘natural history of mind’

reflected in the Western conception of the mental. On these matters, he is inspired by

Darwin and by his notion of adaptation which plays an important part in his

remarkable theory of perception (“To perceive is to acknowledge unattained

possibilities,” 182) as a forerunner of Gibson’s ‘affordances’ theory – which dismisses

the famous ‘spectator theory of knowledge.’ Our primary experience is not a cognitive

one, or only in a derived way: first, there comes experience, which is as such ineffable

(but not in a mystical sense) and existential; then comes the cognitive stance.

4 Before Wittgenstein, Dewey was asking philosophy to go back to the ordinary: “to apply

to in the more general realm of philosophy the thought which is effective in dealing

with any and every genuine question, from the elaborate problems of science to

pratical deliberations of daily life, trivial or momentous” (Preface: viii). Transferred to

language, this idea is echoed in the Investigations, § 116 where Wittgenstein claims:

“What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”

Dewey wants to submit unsolvable philosophical enigmas to the pragmatist test

elaborated by Peirce: a verification through results (intended as conceivable practical

consequences of a conception); he then wants to show that the refuse to consider

“primary experience” has generated those enigmas, along with a lot of abstractions.

But Dewey’s empirical method – as opposed to other kinds of empiricism – is the only


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one, according to him, that does justice to primary experience, as opposed to products

of reflection which, being detached of it, break its original unity: James did point on

this phenomenon in his Essays on Radical Empiricism (1904), when he introduced his

distinction between ‘thing’ and ‘thought,’ a break that only ‘radical’ empiricism allows

to dismiss, by returning to a fluent and continuous experience which is prior to the

distinction between subjective and objective.

5 Western philosophy wrongly considers the products of reflection as a primary given. In

its quest for simple entities, it stripes off from the continuous and fluent stuff of

experience a set of entities which are in no way original: mathematical objects,

Platonician Ideas, Russellian sense-data, objects of logical atomism; all of these are

products of “a selective choice” ending up in the fact that objects are ‘posited’ and

considered as ‘real.’ But this choice goes unnoticed; it is not admitted as such by

philosophy which considers the results of this ‘selective valuation’ as real. The problem

of philosophy, according to Dewey, is to know what we should regard as primary or as

original stuff. Wittgenstein will retain this question, to which he answers in his

Investigations: “Look on the language-game as the primary thing” [das Primäre]” (§ 656);

and the given, the Urphänomen which we should accept, amounts to our “forms of life”

(II, xi, 316), a naturalistic concept referring to an anthropological or even ethological

given. Reading Dewey – if my hypothesis is correct – could only encourage Wittgenstein

to break with the Tractatus’ atomism (which, in Experience and Nature, is perhaps one of

Dewey’s targets along with Russellian acquaintance), and lead him to find the way of an

anthropological naturalism taking into account the “natural history” of man (a concept

which echoes Dewey) and recalling some “very general natural phenomena”

constituting the background [Hintergrund] presupposed [vorausgestzt] by the system of

our concepts, according to the philosophical grammar to which Wittgenstein is now

devoted. The second chapter of Experience and Nature (“Existence as Precarious and as

Stable”), evokes these original phenomena in which the inquiry originates, borrowing

to some British anthropologists a description of the origins of humanity, while in a

similar way and on the same subject, Wittgenstein mentions Renan and Frazer in his

Remarks on the Golden Bough and in Culture and value, while he speaks of the awakening of

human mind as linked to striking, even terrifying natural phenomena, describing the

same category of facts: a ‘precarious and dangerous’ world with impressive phenomena

giving birth to rituals and superstitions. It is by questioning these origins that we may

succeed, according to Dewey, to restore the primary continuity between nature and

mind which Western thought has artificially broken. Similarly, in 1930, Wittgenstein

describes after Renan a primitive humanity afraid of natural impressive phenomena as

thunder, birth, death, and this recalls the Dewey’s second chapter: “Existence as

Precarious and as Stable.” Even better, Dewey, before Wittgenstein, makes use of

counterfactual sentences about regular facts of nature: “Unless nature had regular

habits, persistent ways, so compacted that they time, measure and and give rhythm

and recurrence to transitive flow, meanings, recognizable characters, could not be”

(351). This idea is echoed in the Investigations, where Wittgenstein points to a

correlation between natural regularities and the importance of some concepts; he

invites us to imagine “some general facts of nature” as being different from what they

are, and to draw some consequences of it on the use of some of our concepts which

presuppose these facts: “What we have to mention in order to explain the significance,

I mean the importance, of a concept, are often extremely general facts of nature: such

facts as are hardly ever mentioned because of their great generality” (§ 143). If these


85

facts were different, “our normal language-games would lose [their] point [Witz]”

(§ 142). The presupposed fact consists in what is contemplated in the antecedent of

contrefactual sentence. For Dewey as for Wittgenstein, the presupposed facts are often

(physical or anthopological) natural regularities, which impose conditions on our

language-games and on our conceptual scheme. The idea of regularity is central for

these two authors.

6 The return to purely qualitative primary experience (which cannot, nevertheless,

afford to restore the primary naivety, but only a second one) is the simple medicine

against the gaps introduced by philosophy into the continuity of things related in

experience, this fluent stuff which is prior to the distinction between objective and

subjective: philosophy breaks its original unity, while it believes to capture it by means

of such artificial theorical dualisms as the dualism between matter and mind.

Philosophy must then introduce a tertium quid in order to relate that which has been

unduely separated (97). These criticisms are again taken up by Wittgenstein in his

lectures in the beginning of 1930’s about such propositional attitudes as expectation

and desire: every desire is the desire-of-a specific-something, and there is no gap to be

filled by a tertium quid introduced, as a philosophical artefact, between desire and the

event or object that satisfies it. In particular, the separation between the material and

the mental leads the philosopher to “posit” – as Quine would have said – a fantomatic

entity, exclusive and private: the mind, to which he assigns vague and mysterious

properties (we can find a neat echoe of this account in the Blue Book). On the contrary,

we should bring the mind back into nature – without reducing it to nature –, and restore

the previous continuity of primary experience. Then comes the idea to retrace a

“natural history of mind” (428), a project which caught Wittgenstein’s attention: he too

wants to reinscribe speaking and thinking in the “natural history of man” (PI, §§ 25 and

415), in the same way as walking and eating. What he recalls are not curiosities, but

very general facts of nature “which no one has doubted,” pleads Wittgenstein, facts

that “have escaped our attention only because they are always before our eyes” (PI,

§ 415).

7 Meanings are treated in the same way as mind, and on this point, Dewey’s influence is

not limited to Wittgenstein but also extends to Quine, who was his student (some

analogies that are often pointed between Wittgenstein and Quine, especially regarding

the mythology of meaning, stem in fact from their common pragmatist source).

Meaning is primarily “a property of behavior” (179), and as such, meanings can be

objective and universal without necessarily having a psychic existence (181). It is at this

point that Dewey, who is not an adept of behaviorism, comes closer to it.

8 Man has a tendancy to posit objects (43). For Dewey as later for Quine, entification

begins ‘at home’; abstract divisions are actually a set of mental operations wrongly

reified and hypostazised (a point that Wittgenstein also makes in his Investigations,

when he criticizes introspection). In Dewey’s view, mind is so far from being an

ethereal and private entity that it is described as a ‘function of social interactions’; the

use of a noun like “mind” is misleading, and we would better use an adverb like

‘mentally’ or an adjective (a quasi-grammatical remark, once more taken up by

Wittgenstein). To speak of the mind is a way to speak of especially complex social

transactions or interactions. The Self is one of these ‘ultimate functions which emerge

from organic and social interactions whose organization is highly complex.’ This

emerging mind is not cut off from nature, but it is a fulfilment, a termination of nature.


86

Dewey, like Peirce – whose account Dewey is adopting here – is radically critic towards

egotism, towards Cartesian subjectivity and towards the myths of interiority; he is one

of these authors who echo, like James and Wittgenstein, Lichtenberg’s famous motto:

“We should say it thinks, just as we say it lightens.” Already for Peirce, the sudden

awareness of one’s ego is only the result of failure and error, an illusion of human

vanity, just like ideas of personality and separate mind (actually, the ‘separate selves’

can be fused, as in the case of ‘l’esprit de corps’): Dewey subscribes to this conception. As

a fierce defender (just like Peirce) of the social character of thought (which is not a

private entity and does not necessarily possess a ‘psychical existence’), he firmly

articulates his thesis: “When the introspectionist thinks he has withdrawn into a

wholly private realm of events disparate in kind of other events, made out of mental

stuff, he is only turning his attention to his own soliloquy. And soliloquy is the product

and reflex of converse with others; social communication not an effect of soliloquy”

(170). This is similar to the argument we find in §§ 412-3 of the Investigations, where

Wittgenstein criticizes introspection and its philosophical use. Dewey reproaches

psychology with reinforcing this predjudice concerning the private and exclusive ego.

In Wittgenstein’s view, introspection only produces artefacts of the stance taken up by

philosophers. According to him, too, the philosophical stance creates its own chimeras.

9 According to an enduring legend, thought is a primary given which words only

‘express,’ without indicating any transition from one to another: such is the lesson

which Wittgenstein retains in his Blue Book. Actually, thought is revealed to be one of

the modalities of social interactions. By inscribing the social in the mental, Dewey

allows Wittgenstein to develop one of the main themes of his later philosophy, and

provides him with a basis for his argument against a private language and/or the

private character of rule-following. But Wittgenstein imprints to Dewey’s ideas a

linguistic or grammatical turn which the American philosopher did not think of,

producing a more sophisticated argument at the service of his philosophical grammar.

10 As for Dewey’s conception of ‘primary experience,’ it may shed light on some of

Wittgenstein’s obscure sentences which could be explained by reference to Experience

and Nature: “The things of primary experience are so arresting and engrossing that we

tend to accept them just as they are – the flat earth, the march of the sun from east to

west ans its sinking under the earth” (14). As it provides beliefs which seem to go

without saying because of the strength of the habit, primary experience, according to

Dewey, seems to consist inexorably in basic beliefs about environment, obliterated

from the very fact of their obviousness and ubiquity: these characteristics are also

pointed out by Wittgenstein. PI, § 129 echoes that idea: we tend to forget primary

experience and the striking things which seem to go without saying. Important as they

are, those things, Wittgenstein insists, don’t strike us any more because we are used to

them (ibid.): this is why “the real foundations of his inquiry do not strike a man at all.

Unless that fact has at some time struck him. – And this means: we fail to be struck by

what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.” The result is that we forget an

important part of reality, due to habit and to our ignorance of that which truly

interests us. A similar obscure entry of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough

could be explained, according to us, as an echo of the beginning of Dewey’s Chapter II:

rituals and beliefs “connected with them are the background out of which philosophy

and secular morals slowly developed…” (47); for Wittgenstein, too, this background

makes up the substratum of philosophy, “the real ground of our researchers,” that

which truly interests us, being linked with primary experience; but unfortunately, this


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foundation is forgotten and escapes us. This explains that “the aspects of things that

are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity” and

that the philosophers must learn again to see visible things around them. Similarly,

Dewey writes: “the visible is set in the invisible; and in the end what is unseen decides

what happens in the seen; the tangible rests precariously upon the untouched and

ungrasped” (43-4). Both philosophers agree in deploring this kind of blindness to what

goes without saying, and is not remarked. According to Wittgenstein, such blindness is

also due to the fact that language puts everything as the same level, and does not

recognize differences between words – a Nietzschean idea –: against such a prejudice,

we must fight in order to make grammatical differences visible and avoid grammatical

confusions. A couple of Wittgensteinian texts from the Philosophical Remarks denounce

the fact that things which go without saying and are immediatly obvious are not

considered as the real and important ones: man believes that the real is elsewhere – in

an “other-worldliness,” as Nietzsche would say: “And one should want that this

obviousness – the life – be something accidental, while that about which I do not

ordinarily bother would be the very reality. Otherwise said, that which we cannot and

doesn’t want to go out in order to see from outside would not be the world”

(Philosophical Remarks, § 47). Wittgenstein thus dismisses both realists and idealists, who

actually live in the only one world. It sounds again like Dewey’s Experience and Nature,

which keeps denouncing the implicit metaphysics shared by realism and idealism.

11 We can also find in the Investigations some echoes of Dewey’s account (after Nietzsche),

of the philosopher’s tendency to underrate in a “moral” sense one member of a pair,

for example phenomena as contrasted with reality, the flow as contrasted with the

stable, unity as contrasted with multiplicity. Wittgenstein also notices that some words

are blamed for being ‘vague,’ while other are congratulated as ‘precise.’ And words are

deeds… In Dewey’s work, this moralization is not primary, but only emerges at the

stage of cognition. Cognitive terms are morally connoted, and also denote artificial

entities derived from primary experience. Contrarily to what is taught by Western

philosophy, cognition does not emerge at the level of primary experience, which is

purely existential, but afterwards, when objects of knowledge have been detached from

experience and wrongly posited as real. Such is Dewey’s anti-intellectualism: the

cognitive stance is not primary; it wrongly intellectualizes a purely qualitative and

existential experience. More deeply – and his target seems at this time to be Russell, his

‘sense-data’ and ‘logical constructions,’ –Dewey sees in the fact of giving names of

physical objects encountered in experience a ‘complete metaphysical commitment,’ an

idea which will have its posterity in the work of Quine. But empirical ordinary objects

have nothing to do with physical objects: they are ‘mental things,’ and since there is

nothing but the mental, the word ‘mental’ is deprived of any oppositional and

differential value: if everything is mental, nothing is mental. We can detect again this

refuse to use a word without an antithesis in Wittgenstein’s work: using a word this

way would be to employ it in a ‘typically metaphysical manner.’ In the Blue Book, the

Cambridge philosopher criticizes the misleading application of a physicalist grammar

to the mental vocabulary: by transferring the grammar of physical objects in the

mental field, we introduce ethereal states and proceedings that duplicate our linguistic

performances. But such recourse to mental objects does not throw any light on the

mental, which only a grammar of psychical terms can elucidate. After Peirce, Dewey

criticizes the attitude of speaking of a place where thought proceeds, and Wittgenstein

makes of this criticism one of his most significative problems. The addition of a


88

linguistic and grammatical dimension is the only thing that distinguishes Wittgenstein

from Dewey in several passages.

12 Dewey is, with James, one of the missing links between Peirce and Wittgenstein, whose

resemblances we often pointed in earlier works. Wittgenstein could not avoid

mentioning and criticizing James, very popular at this time; Dewey is not as famous as

James in Europe, Wittgenstein does not even nominate him. His ‘reproductive thinking’

has led him to ‘passionately take up’ Dewey’s ‘line of thought.’ Actually, was he ever

done with pragmatism? Did not he avow, at the end of his life, in On Certainty: “So I am

trying to say something that sounds like pragmatism. Here I am being thwarted by a

kind of Weltanschauung ” (§ 422). Of course, Dewey deserves better than this secret

posterity in Wittgenstein’s work: under modest appearances, Experience and Nature is

one of the most remarkable philosophical enterprises of the twenties, which we may be

ranked side by side with those of Carnap, Husserl, Heidegger, apart from its impact on

the author of the Investigations. Anyway, it will be now known that Dewey’s naturalistic

voice, imprinted with social wisdom and perspicacity, can often be be heard in

Wittgenstein’s polyphonic Investigations.

NOTES

1. This is a perfect example of what historians call the “self-hatred” of Viennese Jews who used to

underrate themselves.

ABSTRACTS

Dewey’s influence is seldom mentioned in the literature when the relationships between

Wittgenstein and pragmatism are addressed. Yet, it should be known that Dewey’s philosophy is

clearly echoed in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, as it is expressed in his Philosophical

Investigations. In particular, Dewey’s Experience and Nature develops many creeds also taken up by

Wittgenstein: for instance, the critic attitude towards artificial notions that break with primary

experience (e.g., the “Self”), the will to bring philosophy back to the ordinary, or the emphasis

laid on the necessity to pay attention to what lies open to the view. Consequently, the influence

of pragmatism on Wittgenstein is far from being limited to the influence of C. S. Peirce or of

W. James.


89

AUTHOR

CHRISTIANE CHAUVIRÉ

Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne

christiane.chauvire[at]noos.fr


90

Training, Training, TrainingThe Making of Second Nature and the Roots of Wittgenstein’sPragmatism

Michael Luntley

1. Introduction

1 As a first approximation, I take the phrase ‘the appeal to practice’ as follows,

The appeal to practice: for a great many cases, perhaps all, understanding a conceptF requires grasp of how use of ‘F’ bears on practice.

2 The appeal to practice is common to Wittgenstein’s pragmatism and that of the

classical pragmatists. Grasp of concepts is embedded in activity. Quite what this means

is a matter for debate, but the methodological force of the appeal to practice is, prima

facie, different between the pragmatists and Wittgenstein.

3 Peirce has a maxim:1

Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, weconceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effectsis the whole of our conception of the object.

4 Wittgenstein has, at best, a homely reminder: “For a large class of cases […] though not

for all […] the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”2 The difference seems to be

that for the pragmatists the appeal to practice is part of a systematic reconstruction of

philosophy. The maxim is a guide for doing philosophy right. In contrast,

Wittgenstein’s appeal to practice is often taken as a deconstruction of the pretensions

of thinking that there is anything left to do in philosophy once we have described the

use of words aright. The pragmatists reconstruct philosophy, for there is philosophical

explanation to be had in showing how grasp of concepts is embedded in practice. In

contrast, Wittgenstein’s appeal to practice is often taken to signal the end of

explanatory projects in philosophy – descriptions alone must take their place.3 When

Wittgenstein appeals to practice to stop the regress of the scepticism about rules, it is

not part of a reconstructive program in philosophical explanation.4 It is part of an


91

admonition to give up philosophical theory; it is a therapy against philosophical

theorizing.

5 This view is given credence by the apparent refusal on Wittgenstein’s part to provide

detail to the concept of practice. The use of the concept at that critical juncture in the

Investigations has the appearance of a primitive. If that were not so, then there would be

more to be said about how the rule-following regress is stopped; there would be detail

to be provided about what it means for practice to provide the glue to the normative

patterns of word use.

6 In this paper I want to challenge the idea that ‘practice’ is a primitive for Wittgenstein.

I do this by focusing on one specific element of the appeal to practice – the nature of

the activities involved in skill acquisition, in particular the role of training. Both Dewey

and Wittgenstein privilege the idea of skills and crafts. Techniques for skillful activity

are central to their appeals to practice. There is, however, a dilemma about skill

acquisition. It arises in an especially acute form given Wittgenstein’s restrictive

concept of training. In showing how to respond to the dilemma, I shall suggest that

Wittgenstein’s appeal to practice is more programmatic than therapeutic.

Methodologically, his position is closer to the classical pragmatists than normally

acknowledged. The point of this re-appraisal of Wittgenstein’s appeal to practice is not

primarily exegetical or historical; it is substantive. It is to begin to make the case for an

examination of the detail that needs to be added to the appeal to practice in order to be

able to do real philosophical work with the concept. I shall suggest that Wittgenstein

laid the foundations for a programmatic appeal to practice that has real explanatory

teeth. The key move in making sense of Wittgenstein’s account of practice focuses on a

concept he shares with Dewey – selective attention. Wittgenstein deploys it

infrequently, but critically. For Dewey it is key to his account of experience although he

gives little sense of the sort of detailed work that I note for it. I want to isolate the role

this concept plays in making sense of the role of training in skill acquisition.

7 The argument proceeds as follows: in section 2 I outline two key concepts that seem

implicated in Wittgenstein’s appeal to practice – the concept of training and the

concept of second nature; in section 3 I detail the dilemma that Wittgenstein’s use of

‘training’ produces in trying to understand the relationship between training and

second nature; in section 4 I show that the dilemma from section 3 is real and provide a

formulation that applies across a wide range of skills training; in section 5 I provide the

general form of the solution to the dilemma – Wittgenstein’s way out – and illustrate

the solution with a range of examples to show how training gives rise to second nature.

The resulting model provides detail on the concept of practice that, although only

hinted at infrequently in Wittgenstein’s own texts, makes better sense of his repeated

use of the concept of training as a basis for developing second nature. It also suggests a

promise of further points of contact between Wittgenstein and Dewey on education.

2. Training and Second Nature

8 Two concepts seem central to Wittgenstein’s appeal to practice – training and second

nature. Wittgenstein’s appeal to practice involves ways of thinking, acting and being in

the world that are second nature. The concept of second nature picks out capacities

that although needing to be learnt (hence not first nature) are nevertheless aspects of

our natural way of being in the world.5 It is their naturalness that absolves us from


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providing a theoretical account of their acquisition, constitution and development. It is

this that suggests that practice is a primitive. That it is second nature for us to go on in

one way rather than another with the use of a word is a fact about who and what we

are. It is not a matter for further scrutiny, for that would only invite further regress.

The capacities that contribute to second nature and the way we come into our second

nature are to be described, not explained.6

9 If the practical capacities of concept use are second nature, then although they are

excused theoretical scrutiny, they still need to be learnt. Wittgenstein emphasizes the

role of training in this regard. The practice of second nature has its roots in training. It

is here that Wittgenstein’s position is at risk of becoming incoherent. The English word

for training covers a broad range of activities, from simple S-R conditioning to a form

of acculturation into practices for which the German word bildung seems appropriate.

Many commentators assume that Wittgenstein’s talk of training can be assimilated into

the bildung end of that spectrum. 7 If so, then talk of training is no more than an

element of the descriptive enterprise of recording the trajectory of learners as they

gain entry into concepts that in time become second nature. If ‘training’ is understood

as akin to bildung, Wittgenstein’s appeal to practice can only be part of a descriptive

methodology. Such a reading is not, however, sustainable.

10 Wittgenstein’s word for training in German is abrichtung. He always uses this word. In

German, this is a concept of training applicable only to animals, never humans. It is a

concept for quite brutal training regimes; it is applicable for whipping horses, but is out

of place in describing regimes for human learning. The restrictive nature of the

concept in Wittgenstein’s original is lost in the breadth of the concept expressed with

the English word ‘training.’ The restrictiveness of Wittgenstein’s original is better

captured with the concept of conditioning.8 For Wittgenstein, training is at the simple

S-R conditioning end of the range of English senses of the word.

11 Does this matter? Here are two options. Either Wittgenstein’s use of training is, despite

the German original, really talking of forms of instruction akin to bildung or it is S-R

conditioning. If the former, Wittgenstein’s trajectory from training to second nature is

wholly descriptive, both phases are conceived in fundamentally the same way as forms

of activity richly saturated with concepts and understanding. That is coherent, but

amounts to endorsing a view that is prima facie quite implausible: there is no such

thing as an account of learning. The trajectory from training to second nature is not a

trajectory that plots a path of concept acquisition, for ‘training’ only applies to subjects

already within the space of concepts. In addition, the appeal to practice is in danger of

being rendered vacuous for there is no granularity to be added to the claim that

concept use is embedded in practice. The account of practice turns out to be an account

of activities saturated with concepts, so it is hard to see precisely what role activity and

practice adds to the account of concepts. It is this that makes Wittgenstein’s appeal to

practice seem wholly negative, a riposte to the urge for a theoretical regimentation of

meaning and the attempt to posit meanings as entities beyond what is given in the

everyday patterns of word use. In place of philosophical theory we get description.

That might involve an extensive ethnology of practice and learning as we describe the

activities, many of which are interestingly social in character, that comprise

meaningful word use. But this only accentuates the move away from philosophical

theory to a more sociological turn of description. And if the appeal to practice is

negative, it then seems distinct from that found in the classical pragmatists.9


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12 Alternatively, Wittgenstein’s consistent use of ‘abrichtung’ and its cognates is taken at

face value: training is S-R conditioning. But that is now hardly compatible with a

descriptivist methodology, for the description leaves a host of challenging and

interesting questions ignored, if not begged. The description would be that some

creatures, e.g. humans, when subject to S-R conditioning regimes with word use gain a

second nature grasp of concepts. But that is a striking fact. With other creatures there

is no such route, but nothing is available in the description to say why this might be so,

nor how it might be so.10 Starting with such an impoverished notion of training makes

the trajectory from training to second nature seem an impressive achievement, but it

tells us nothing about the nature of this. Furthermore, most people take Quine’s

formulation of naturalism as a reductio of the idea that that there is a route from S-R

conditioning to grasp of concepts.11

13 Prima facie, Wittgenstein’s concept of training fails to make sense of a trajectory from

training to second nature. I think there is a real dilemma here.12 In the next section I

set out the dilemma in some detail before turning to a way of reading Wittgenstein that

moves away from the descriptivism normally attributed to him.

3. The Learning Dilemma

14 The dilemma with the trajectory from training to second nature is closely related to

Fodor’s paradox of learning. I start with a sketch of Fodor’s paradox. Consider the

question, ‘How do we learn a new concept?’ The obvious answer is to appeal to

experience. So, let ‘F’ be the concept we want to learn from experience. In order to

learn the concept, we need to have experiences in which things that are F are

experienced as being in common. It is not enough simply to experience things that are

F, we need to experience them as a kind. An experience of such things as of a kind can

only be such if the experience represents them as being alike. To have an experience

that represents these things as of a kind is to exploit a capacity to represent them as

being the same in the relevant way. But a representation of these things as being the

same in the relevant way is the concept of things being F. It might not carry that label,

but it is that concept. In other words, you could not have the appropriate experience if

you did not already have the concept. There is then, no such thing as learning a new

concept. There is only learning of labels for concepts that are innate.

15 A bold response to Fodor’s argument would be to avoid the rich account of experience

that Fodor posits by working with an impoverished Quinean account of experience in

terms of patterns of retinal stimulation. But that just sets the dilemma for an account

of learning. The options are now either attempt what many think impossible and give

an account of how grasp of concepts can be derived from an impoverished base set of

capacities (capacities to differentially respond to stimuli), or endorse a rich account of

the learner with innate concepts. I think the dilemma that Fodor’s argument presents

is real and is worth responding to. I want to locate the issue about the trajectory from

training to second nature in the same framework.

16 You might think that what is wrong with Fodor’s argument for nativism is that it is too

intellectualist in its view of concepts and representation. It ignores the role that

activity plays alongside experience in acquiring concepts. That is to say, a pragmatist

appeal to practice fares better than experience in accounting for concept acquisition.

So consider the alternative hypothesis that deploys encounters with things that are F in


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activities rather than in experience. The thought would be that in order to acquire the

concept F rather than experience things that are F as being relevantly similar, we

encounter things that are F in our activities. Training in activities with respect to

things that are F takes the place of experiences of things that are F. This is not,

however, an improvement.

17 Encounters with things that are F in activities need to be encounters not just with

things that happen to be F but, as we might put it, F-ish encounters. Our active

encounters need to be F-shaped. Another way of putting the point would like this.

Suppose the aim is to get us to act purposely with respect to things that are F, for it is

such practices that manifest grasp of the concept F. But to get us to act purposely to

things that are F requires that our activity has, as it were, an F focus to them. But

having an F focus is surely the target outcome of the training regime, not its input?

18 What this amounts to might be encapsulated somewhat provocatively as follows. The

appeal to practice that sees concept acquisition grounded in activities and training

might be thought to circumvent Fodor’s challenge, but it does not. The target is to

acquire a capacity for doing Y, where doing Y is the activity that manifests the target

concept. To learn this new skill, we are trained. If we cannot yet do Y, for real learning

is on the agenda, then we must start by doing something else. So, when we cannot yet

do Y, what is it that we do in order to learn to do Y? Very simply, how can doing

something else (something that is not a doing Y) help us learn how to do Y? And if

nothing can, are we condemned to accept, with Fodor, a nativism about capacities for

activities alongside conceptual capacities? If not, what can it mean to say that in order

to learn the capacity for doing Y we practice first the capacity for doing X?

4. Learning To Do One Thing By Doing Something Else

19 The problem here is an instance of a more general one: How do we acquire a capacity

for something that we cannot yet do? Or, what do we do in learning how to do

something we cannot do?13 It is enough to take the problem in the simple form: what do

we do in training that enables us to acquire a capacity that we did not have before? In

particular, why does repetition play such a large role in the acquisition of new

capacities? One of the points of Wittgenstein’s appeal to training is that many skills

require repetitive training in order to be acquired. But if we cannot yet do the thing in

question, how does repeatedly doing something else help us acquire the capacity to do

the target thing? How does doing a lot of one thing, help us do something else?14

20 To keep matters simple, I concentrate on the following key claim about training:

(1) Repeatedly doing X brings it about that we can do Y.

21 Unless we concede a nativism about all skills, on which repetition is simply the practice

in deployment of skills already present, then (1) must be true for some skills.

Intuitively, we tend to think it true of most skills. Our dilemma concerns how we make

sense of (1). If we can make sense of (1) then two things seem to follow: (a) we have the

beginnings of an account that resists Fodor’s dilemma; (b) we have within our account

of practice resources for an explanation of the trajectory from training to second

nature and not just a description. And if we have an explanation of the trajectory from

training to second nature, we have explanatory granularity to the appeal to practice;

the appeal is programmatic, not therapeutic. I want to suggest that Wittgenstein has

the resources for a programmatic appeal to practice; furthermore, it is an appeal to


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practice that lays the foundation for a more extensive investigation of practice than

provided by the classical pragmatists. There are points of contact between the model I

draw out of Wittgenstein and aspects of Dewey’s philosophy. I shall note these as I

proceed, but not in any great detail. For the main part, Dewey, like Wittgenstein, left

more unsaid than said in the appeal to practice.

22 Consider training in skills regardless of whether or not concept acquisition is involved.

I think it is often the case that, strictly speaking, we come to learn how to do one thing

by repeatedly doing something else. This is not as odd as it might sound, but even in

cases of acquiring motor skills the details at play suggest something important about

how learning works. It illuminates both the concepts of training and of second nature

and how they are related and thereby provides granularity to the appeal to practice.

23 So consider training in a motor skill such as learning how to produce a forehand top-

spin drive in tennis. You might know in general what is required. You know you need

to produce a sort of upward stroking motion as the racquet strikes the ball, but it is

difficult to get this right and to produce it consistently while also delivering

appropriate power into the drive. Disregard for the moment the role that your

conceptual understanding of what you are doing plays and consider the following

common instruction given by trainers.

24 The tennis coach introduces an activity for you to practice that is not the same as the

activity of producing a top-spin forehand drive. He instructs you in the manner of

placing your leading foot to ensure you stand side-on to the ball when striking it. You

consciously repeat the orientation move and the deliberate and accentuated placing of

the lead foot that anchors your positioning as you lean into the shot. It is this bodily

orientation that you repetitively train. By concentrating on doing this you acquire the

ability to perform consistent top-spin forehand drives. The bodily orientation skill is

not simple. It involves a number of factors, but the one you mostly concentrate on is

the placing of the lead foot and the slight lean into the direction of that foot as you

make the stroke. Call this the platform activity. My suggestion is that repetition of the

platform activity, typically so that it becomes second nature, is what brings it about

that you are able to acquire the target activity – consistent performance of the selected

stroke. This example is similar in form to another familiar learning situation.

25 Novice bike riders find it very difficult to ride with balance. There is a lot to master to

keep a bike upright for a significant period. Rather like the tennis case, it is no good

insisting that the learner persevere with riding properly. The sensible advice is once

again to stage what the learner has to repeat and focus on in their training. Asking

them to concentrate on balancing is asking too much, for they cannot yet balance. Just

as asking the tennis novice to concentrate on producing top-spin drive is asking too

much. You ask the novice cyclist to concentrate on something else: you ask them to

concentrate on riding in a fixed direction, eyes firmly fixed on a point ahead. This is

something they can do and by repeatedly practising that ability they acquire the more

complex ability to ride steadily and balanced. Riding focused on the point ahead is the

platform activity, repetition of which brings the target activity, a complex of muscular

control over the whole body, into focus.

26 The general idea is that repetition of a platform activity makes acquisition of the target

activity possible. Before I outline what this claim commits us to, let me clarify a number

of points about it. In some cases the platform activity is a component of the target

activity. When that is the case, it might be thought that this is not really an instance of


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learning to do one thing by doing another, for we learn to do Y by compiling the

activity out of its component activities of which doing X is just one. If the relation

between doing Y and doing X is that the former is compiled out of executions of the

latter, plus some others, then this is not really a case of learning to do one thing by

doing something else, for the target activity is identified with the sum of the platform

activities. Doing the platform activities just is doing the target activity.

27 Some cases might be like that, but most are not. Consider the tennis example. On first

acquiring the target ability its execution will most likely regularly include the platform

activity of the accentuated placing of the lead foot. There is, however, no reason why

that has to be the case and even when it is, it is possible as the target activity becomes

practiced that you are able to detach it from the platform activity. You learn how to

preserve and enact the appropriate actions independently of the routines repeated in

the platform activity. The scope for this detachment is quite common, even in cases

where the platform activities are clearly assemblies of actions that are components to

be compiled into the learning attempts at the target activity.15

28 If doing X is just a component to be compiled with others to generate doing Y, then the

trajectory from training to second nature could be conceived as merely the rendering

of the component activities second nature so that their integration into the target

activity no longer requires conscious monitoring. There is some plausibility to that

view. It applies to some examples. It seems to provide a simple way of understanding

the trajectory from training to second nature. But care is needed even with such simple

examples to pinpoint precisely what is involved in rendering a skill second nature. The

temptation is to see the trajectory from training to second nature as a trajectory to

silence conscious monitoring. Abilities the execution of which required close conscious

monitoring are practiced until they achieve silent running. But there are different

cases at play.

29 The simple case is where a single ability is practiced so that the initial conscious

monitoring required for its execution can be, as it were, turned off. In the tennis

example, this applies to the transition from consciously placing the lead foot in an

accentuated way to an ability that becomes natural and executed repeatedly and with

ease without conscious monitoring. Call this a case of simple silent running. But that is

quite different to the trajectory at play when practicing the elements of posture in

order to acquire the ability to produce a top-spin forehand drive. The various elements

might be practiced to second nature. Whether or not the elements are conceived as

elements that are compiled into the target activity or the target activity is detachable

from the compiled elements, nevertheless the transition to execution of the target

activity is not a simple silent running transition.

30 Consider first the case in which the platform activities are elements that compile to the

target activity, so the latter is identified with the compiling of the former. Even so, it

would be a mistake to assume that all that is going on in such a case is the move to

silent running. Much depends on what we think goes into compiling. If the compiling is

simply a sequencing, then rendering each component of the target into silent running

could amount to rendering the target activity second nature too. On this scenario,

there is no more to the target activity other than running the platform activities in the

right sequence. There is, therefore, arguably little else for conscious awareness to

attend to once it has ordered the platform activities and rendered them into silent


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running. The archery example above (see footnote) might be thought such a case, but

even that is probably not right.

31 Even if the target activity is compiled by sequencing the platform activities, it is not

true that there is nothing for consciousness to attend to, for consciousness needs to

bring it about that the platform activities are sequenced. You select the platform

activities, you concentrate on performing them in the right order and appropriately

spaced. Even in the simplest case, you work at putting this all together. And the work is

plausibly the work of consciously attending to what you are doing, doing the platform

activities in the right order. It is that conscious sequencing that you eventually silence

with repetition. What we can say with some confidence is that cases in which the target

activity is identifiable with a sequencing of platform activities will be cases in which

rendering the latter into silent running will be to execute the trajectory from repetitive

training of doing X to doing Y second nature. But even in the simple case, the trajectory

from doing X to doing Y is one effected by your consciously attending to the doing X

components in the right sequence so that a doing Y is achieved. It is you, by your

conscious attention, who brings it about that you do Y. I suspect that there are very few

cases that are this simple.

32 Consider again the archery case. The target activity – consistent ability to aim

accurately – is detachable from the platform activities out of which it is compiled.

Initial executions of consistent aimings might be simple sequencing of the platform

activities, but in most cases there is a further stage. There is more content to the idea of

‘compiling’ than the simple case of consciously performing the activities in the right

sequence. The more complicated case is, roughly, like this. By repeatedly practicing the

platform activities to the extent that they are executed on silent running you find that

new things become potential foci for conscious awareness. The practicing of keeping

the shoulders low is not just a device to bring it about that you draw the bow with your

back muscles rather than the arm, it brings it about that you can become conscious of

what it is like to draw with your back muscle. Indeed, as the posture with regard to

shoulders becomes second nature, so the ability to be aware of what your back muscles

are doing becomes more pronounced to the extent that rather than being conscious of

what your back muscles are doing, you become able by concentrating on those muscles

to enact their performance regardless of the precise alignment of the shoulders. Your

conscious awareness shifts, from the shoulders to the back muscles. And it is this that,

in part, explains why the ability to aim accurately acquired by the practice is

detachable from the ability to perform the platform skills. So although the platform

activities are practiced repeatedly so that their execution becomes second nature, that

in itself is not to render the target activity second nature, indeed it is not identifiable

with execution of the target activity. The target activity is detachable from the

performance of the platform activities. That is why we say in such cases that by

repeated practice of the platform activities you acquire a ‘feel’ for what it is to aim

accurately. It is because of this ‘feel’ that you know before the arrow gets to the target

if you’ve done it wrong. Similarly, you recognise a good shot before it reaches the

target. The ability to produce a top-spin forehand drive in tennis is similarly detachable

from the platform routines.

33 These are moderately simple examples. It is not difficult to explain what is happening

in them. Given the sort of musculature that humans have, generations of archery and

tennis tutors have come to realize that training one set of muscles to perform in a


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certain way brings it about that a further muscle configuration becomes salient to the

performer. In some cases, the scaffolding of awareness for the target muscle set turns

on more than the contingencies of the relations between different muscles in the

human frame; the scaffolding can include cultural facts. The scaffolding of the novice

bike rider’s awareness of what goes into balancing draws on the contingencies of the

way that balance control is effected by head position, but it also draws on a cultural

scaffolding – the rider’s parent typically runs along behind with a surreptitious hand

on the rear of the saddle providing an extra contribution to the overall scaffolding of

the target activity. Although simple, the significance of these examples is, I think,

considerable.

34 In general terms, the transition from a training routine that concentrates on repetition

of the platform activity to the acquisition of the target activity is a case of learning to

do Y by doing X. But that is no longer as mysterious as it first sounds. We have some

detail on this transition that not only describes it but explains how it is possible. The

form of the explanation is that skill acquisition is staged. Repeated practice of platform

activities provides the staging for the target activity. There is a transition from the

former to the latter; there is real learning in skills. This means that what we achieve at

the end is, with respect to the earlier stage, new. It is that fact that makes the idea of

learning to do Y by doing X appear mysterious. But the novelty effected by this

transition is explained by what we might call the bridging activity – the activity of

conscious attention.

35 In simple cases, the target activity is compiled by sequencing the platform activities. In

such cases, the role for conscious attention is to sequence the platform activities. In a

great many cases, the target activity is compiled by virtue of the way that repetition of

the platform activities to second nature provides a basis for conscious attention to find

salient the performance of the target activity where that is detachable from the

platform activities. In such cases, genuinely new actions become salient to our

awareness. In both the simple and more complex case, the role for conscious attention

is to extend our activities: what is available to awareness is not restricted to what falls

within the practical scope of the activities already at our disposal. It is conscious

attention in the above description that is effecting the transition from repeatedly doing

X to doing Y.

5. Wittgenstein’s Way Out

36 I noted earlier that Wittgenstein’s account of learning is potentially incoherent. His

emphasis on a particularly crude S-R model of training makes it a mystery how new

skills could be acquired, let alone how S-R training might provide a basis for concept

acquisition. The description above offers a general response to this challenge to

Wittgenstein’s account of learning. The description provides a model of learning that is

essentially staged and such that the transition between stages is effected by conscious

attention. The appeal to attention here is an extension of the role that has been

suggested for consciousness in recent work on reference.16 It is a concept that appears

infrequently but critically in Wittgenstein. It is key to understanding the role of

ostension that Wittgenstein does not critique in the early sections of Philosophical

Investigations.17 It is also closely related to a key concept in Dewey’s account of

experience. Dewey has a key role for the concept of context, ‘the most pervasive fallacy


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of philosophic thinking’ turns on ‘neglect of context.’18 But his notion of context has at

least two ingredients when we consider how it bears on his account of experience. The

key ingredients are background and selective interest. The former is that which is taken

for granted with respect to the particular question that is occupying the field of

thinking. The latter is the ‘attitude’ that frames or shapes the particular case: ‘This

attitude is no immediate part of what is consciously reflected upon, but it determines

the selection of this rather than that subject matter.’19 Like Wittgenstein, Dewey has

selective interest operating not as part of what is reflected upon (what is already

second nature, if not conceptual) but as a prior selection that frames reflection.

37 The model I have outlined comprises a trio of hypotheses:

(a) skill acquisition is typically staged; acquiring a target skill is undertaken by firstacquiring an earlier stage skill.(b) acquiring the target skill is typically made possible by the earlier stage skillbeing rendered second nature.c) there is a general bridging capacity that provides the incremental enhancementfrom a platform of second nature performance of the earlier stage skill to thebeginnings of rote practice for the target skill.

38 I suggest that the general bridging capacity is the capacity for conscious attention,

where this is understood as a basic capacity of consciousness to focus on things made

salient in the environment and where it is a form of awareness that is prior to a

conceptually mediated awareness. The salience to which consciousness attends can be

generated by repeated activities of the platform skill. The intuitive idea here is simple.

The acquisition of the earlier stage skill as second nature brings into salience items

(objects and properties) that attention latches onto as the focus for the first executions

of the target skill. The process iterates, with successive renderings of skills into second

nature providing the platform from which conscious attention reaches beyond what

has been rendered skillful to find new items to act upon. The role of conscious

attention is, if you like, to see into the gaps between the execution of skills already

mastered and to find the territory for further activity. Conscious attention is itself a

form of activity. It is the master activity that drives learning, but it works

incrementally. It is scaffolded by the repetition of those activities that are rendered

second nature. With respect to any particular ability, attention can always outreach

what that ability operates upon. Attention is the general capacity for taking awareness

further. To say that it has this role is just to note a feature of the concept of attention as

I am using it that has been claimed for it recent debates in the philosophy of mind.

39 My appeal to attention is of a piece with the idea that attention picks out a capacity for

making things and properties salient to oneself in experience in a manner that does not

require a conceptual shape to that salience.20 That makes it a general capacity that can

play a generative role in the development of conceptual modes of making things

available to awareness in experience. Just so in the case of capacities for craft skills.

Such skills are ways of organizing our manipulative engagements with things; attention

is the general and generative capacity that first puts things within reach so that

capacities for craft skills can pick them up. But there is a further point about attention

that the craft cases make explicit.

40 The idea of attention as the master capacity is not the idea of a general capacity whose

reach is fully formed. It would be too easy to claim for the capacity for attention that

there was, at the outset, no limit to its power of discrimination. That would fail to

capture what surely seems true: that what falls within the reach of your capacity for


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attention is not open-ended, it is a function of what you have previously attended to

and made secure in its availability either by conceptualizing it or, in the case of

manipulative skills, rendering it second nature. The fineness of grain of the

deliverances of attention is not independent of the developmental trajectory of skills

already in place for the subject. This is the key point to Dewey’s deployment of selective

attention against a background. Attention is not a magic wand that brings anything we

like within awareness. Its operation is constrained. What it can bring to awareness,

although it outruns what has thus far been conceptualized and/or rendered second

nature, is only ever a modest extension in range, not an inexhaustible one. Attention is,

if you like, a ‘seeing beyond’ what has thus far been rendered second nature (whether

in concepts or in manipulative skills).

41 The above model captures an aspect of the phenomenology of learning that is

otherwise difficult to make sense of. Sometimes, practicing an activity in order to

acquire a new activity can feel almost like a blind practice. You repeatedly practice the

placing of the feet in the tennis example with, at first, little or no sense of what

precisely it is you want to acquire. Or, to take a different example, when learning a new

and technically tricky piece on a musical instrument, you practice the mechanics of

striking the right notes with little sense at first of how you’ll ever manage to acquire

the right phrasing and dynamics to produce the performance that properly emulates

the recording you flavor. In these and other cases, it can seem as if you are almost

blindly doing one thing with little more than a vacant hope that the eventual skill will

fall within your reach. That sort of phenomena strikes me as quite common and true to

what it can be like in trying to master a range of manipulative skills. The model I have

outlined makes sense of this, for it is only by repeated practice of the platform skill so

that it becomes second nature that attention can begin to pick out the nuances of the

target skill – the right dynamics of phrasing, the right orientation of back muscles in

making the drive, etc. What this underlines is that although attention outruns or

outreaches what is available in our manipulative engagements with things found in

developed techniques that have become second nature, the character of attention is

best expressed in its almost inquisitive force of reaching beyond the point you’ve

currently achieved. If it wasn’t like this, it would be a puzzle why, at any given stage of

development of craft skills, one wasn’t swamped with data in experience about all the

new things that one might attend to next. But one is never swamped like that and the

reason is because attention is fundamentally incremental in its operation.

42 As it stands, the claim that attention is fundamentally incremental is an hypothesis.

43 The role of attention is delimited by a pair of opposing requirements. If what was

available to awareness did not exceed what was already available within the compass of

those capacities already mastered, then there would be no input to the learning

process. We would be stuck with the puzzle of how, by doing something you can

already do, you thereby learn to do something new. Alternatively, if attention were

profligate and able to pick up just any and everything out with the scope of mastered

capacities, then it would be a puzzle why learning took much time at all and why it

seemed to follow well-worn trajectories of development rather than almost

spontaneous bursts of innovation in capacities followed by a lifetime of relaxation in

the thrall of one’s accomplishments. The reality is somewhere between these two and

can only be so if attention plays an incremental role. That, in a nutshell, explains the

graft of craft: learning takes time and hard work.


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6. Pattern-Making

44 It is important to note that attention is not just a psychological mechanism, a

mechanism for selecting perceptual data for processing. In that sense, lots of animals

have an ability for attention, where that amounts to a selection mechanism answerable

to the need to align the creature’s dispositions with those of the environment. A

creature with a powerful disposition to feed needs to select those parts of the

environment that will satisfy this disposition; for example, keeping track of its prey. In

that sense, attention is the mechanism by which creatures latch onto regularities in

nature and by so doing bring it about that their behavior acquires regularities that

match those in the world around them. So construed, attention is no more than the

mechanism by which the regularities of a creature’s behavior are brought into line with

the regularities of the environment. It is the mechanism by which the creature’s own

teleologically conceived capacities align with the teleology of the world. Construed in

that mechanistic manner, attention is important, but it provides no further input to the

alignment. It is the mechanism of alignment, not a producer of alignment, for the

production of the alignment of such capacities might be wholly explainable by the

appeal to natural selection. Those creatures that fail in the alignment exercise do not

live long enough to reproduce.

45 In contrast, the appeal to attention that I am making falls within a different sort of

explanatory project – the philosophical explanation of how certain things are possible.

We achieve that explanation when we provide a description that reveals how different

elements of our cognitive equipment relate together and by so doing produce

distinctive aspects of our lives – in the case at hand, learning. What makes the

description explanatory is the way it highlights key features of our cognitive

wherewithal whose role dominates the phenomenon and is revelatory of important

truths about ourselves. The key element of the description is the ongoing activity of

conscious attention that drives the trajectory from training to second nature by

latching onto more things than are found within the alignment of skills with the

teleology of the environment. Conscious attention is not a mechanism for alignment, it

is fundamentally an inquisitiveness, a purposeful latching onto things outwith the

patterns of stable alignment between activity and environment. It is the driver for

developing new activities and for searching for and constructing patterns of activity

that contribute to our overarching sense-making. With human subjects, attention is the

driver for a sort of restlessness, an inquisitiveness that gives us the ability to improve

and continually enhance our activities. Whether attention is the resource for this

distinctive feature of human cognition or constitutive of this restlessnes, the way it

operates is what makes human learning so distinctive. It is the reason why practice

cannot be a primitive, for practice is rarely simply shared. Once learnt, our practices

rarely simply align, if those initiated into practice are alert to the opportunities to

allow practice to deliver more things for attention to latch onto and thereby find the

motor for the development of practice.

46 In a real sense, the motor for learning and the ongoing development of practices lies in

the equipment that individual learners bring to bear on their training. And once we

acknowledge this facet of the concept of attention we can begin to see why

Wittgenstein could place such emphasis on training as abrichtung and still get


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something like bildung out of such meager resources. Wittgenstein only gets away with

such a trajectory from bare S-R conditioning to bildung because he implicitly accepts

such a rich constitution of the learning subject. The subject is equipped with the

capacity for attention, the master activity that binds the others into purposeful wholes.21 This makes a significant difference to the way we conceive of practice.

47 I have concentrated on examples of craft skills and sidelined the role that conceptual

understanding plays in such learning. The cases I have used only make sense for

subjects with considerable intentional sophistication and whose conceptual grasp of

what they are doing bears on the learning in all manner of ways. But the bare stripped

down model of the staging of skill acquisition in which attention drives the transition

from platform skills to target skill is a model of sophisticated learning subjects

independently of where concepts fit into the picture. It is a model that has the capacity

for creative development written into the acquisition of manual skills. Learning, even

in the simplest cases is more than mimicry. It is more than aligning behavior with

others or aligning behavior with the demands of the environment. Due to the real sense

of trajectory from platform to target skill, the learning found in training regimes is

never just S-R conditioning. The learner is bringing their interrogative and

inquisitional capacity for attention to bear on the process. This makes the process more

than the mere repetition of platform skills into second nature. It includes the

exploration of the saliences that such second nature makes available and that bring the

target skill into view. And the process iterates. It is no mere homily then to say that the

learner is essentially a subject who ‘joins-in’ the games we play in our activities.

Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the idea of games and the idea that instruction is always an

invitation to join in, sits alongside the harsh regimes of abrichtung. The training is a

scaffolding to the invitation to join-in, it is not the carrot and stick for aligning

behavior, for producing conformity with the group. It is the structure that helps shape

the agency of those who join-in and, having joined in, play their own role in shaping

the ongoing forms of practice.

48 Initiation into practice is not then, for Wittgenstein, a molding into the ways of the

common. It is an open-ended invitation to join-in and take part in the ongoing

sustenance and development of inherited ways of acting. Put very simply, on this way

of reading Wittgenstein’s appeal to practice, what is distinctive about human subjects

as opposed to most other creatures subject to training, is that humans are learners. It is

our equipment for learning that marks us out not our shared patterns of activity. In

other words, we have culture because of who and what we are; it is not that we are who

we are because we have culture.22

49 The craft skills on which I have concentrated are often classified as forms of know-how.

It is contentious to what degree such know-how is independent of the conceptually

structured knowing of know-that. I have ignored that issue.23 But that does not matter,

for whatever you think about know-how, the model of learning that I have outlined

enables us to distinguish between the sort of know-how that could be trained by S-R

conditioning alone and that which demands a contribution from the learning subject

howsoever that contribution is infused with concepts. The following type of know-how

could be trained by S-R conditioning. Suppose a subject is trained to do Y by repetition

of various cases of doing X where these platform actions are compiled into a doing Y

and where ‘compiling’ is a sequencing achieved by S-R conditioning. The right

compiling is achieved by a reward and punishment regime that selects out incorrect


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sequences. Some human learning might be like that. Most animal training is, I suspect,

like that. But most human learning is qualitatively different. It might involve know-

how rather than know-that, but the transition to compile doing X into doing Y is rarely

a function only of external sanctions. That is the Pavlovian model of training, it is pure

abrichtung. Much, if not most, human learning is a function of those sanctions plus a

creative trajectory, for the learning subject is looking for and seeking out patterns onto

which it anchors and about which it forms new activities. The learner is a pattern-

maker, and not just a pattern-follower. These are, of course, the patterns that matter in

making sense of ourselves. They are the patterns for conceptual grasp of what we do,

but the model of skill acquisition I have sketched is distinctively human regardless of

the place that concepts have in its operation. What makes it distinctive is the

repertoire with which the learner approaches training: they make their directions as

well as following directions.

50 The point is there in Wittgenstein. In Investigations § 208 he discusses learning of new

concepts. He speaks of getting the learner to follow and to continue patterns. He says,

I do it, he does it after me; and I influence him by expressions of agreement,rejection, expectation, encouragement. I let him go his way, or hold him back; andso on. (§ 208c)

51 The first sentence might be taken as mere abrichtung, but the idea of letting the pupil

go his own way reveals that the pupil is not merely being conditioned, they start with

their own way of going on. They have a direction and an ability for directing

themselves prior to the sanctions that steer them one way or another. This is why, at

the end of this section, Wittgenstein can say, “Teaching which is not meant to apply to

anything but the examples given is different from that which ‘points beyond’ them”

(§ 208f). The former is the conditioning of abrichtung; the latter is the teaching

applicable to human subjects, those who can see how examples ‘point beyond.’ The idea

that examples ‘point beyond’ is one of the hardest to accept in Wittgenstein’s

discussion of the practice of following rules, but it is perhaps easier to accept if we also

accept the role that attention plays in seeing beyond the second nature routines of

platform activities as we find the purchase for new target skills.

7. Back to Dewey

52 I have sketched a way of developing granularity to the appeal to practice that goes

beyond anything Wittgenstein says. The model makes the concept of practice

programmatic rather than primitive. It makes the appeal to practice in Wittgenstein

not unlike its role for the classical pragmatists. But the model goes further than the

pragmatists in filling out detail to the concept of practice at the cognitive rather than

social level. A significant point of contact between Dewey and Wittgenstein has already

been noted as source materials for the appeal to attention in the detail of initiation into

practice. There are other more general points of contact too.

53 Dewey’s emphasis on context, shaped by selective attention, is what gives his account

of inquiry its distinctively problem-solving characteristic. Inquiry has some of the

hallmarks of the craftsman’s concrete resolution of problems rather than the search for

timeless abstract propositions. This, of course, has echoes in Wittgenstein’s own

methodology in which he chisels away at the search for the right formulation that puts


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words and our understanding in place without the need for abstract structures. But

there is, it seems to me, scope for a much deeper point of contact.

54 The assimilation of inquiry to the craftsmanship of problem solving has, for Dewey, a

deeply ethical and political character that informs his whole approach to education.

Wittgenstein rarely speaks of such matters, but the cognitive detail of the trajectory

from training to second nature suggests the possibility of a deep basis for some of

Dewey’s own preoccupations. I have argued that in order to avoid the incoherence of

appealing to a brute S-R conditioning model of training, Wittgenstein’s way out works

only because it implicitly ascribes to the learning subject a basic inquisitiveness and

interrogation of context by conscious attention. It is because of this that the learner

really is someone who ‘joins-in’ their instruction. They are never passive. They are

active participants both in executing their trajectory from repetition of platform skills

to acquisition of the target skill and in sustaining the practices of these skills by their

going on, their seeing the point of the action that ‘points beyond’ the example. It would

be hasty to rush to ethical conclusions on this basis, but it is tempting to think that it

would be difficult to make proper sense of the deep-seated activity of the learner

without giving due consideration both to the democratizing tendencies of education

and training and the democratizing agenda that enables a proper trajectory from

training to second nature. The conditions for joining-in require not only the

appropriate equipment from the learner, but an appropriate recognition of the learner

by others if they are to realize their opportunities for pattern-making. At this point, the

matter is no more than suggestive, but the deep point of contact between Wittgenstein

and Dewey on attention or selective interest, when construed as part of a

programmatic appeal to practice, might well lead us to find further points of contact in

the superstructure of ideas that, for Dewey, bound issues of education to democratic

ideals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CAMPBELL J., (2002), Reference and Consciousness, Oxford, Clarendon Press.

DEWEY J., (1981-2008), The Later Works 1925-53 (17 volumes), Carbondale, Southern Illinois

University Press.

FODOR J. & E. LEPORE, (2007), “Brandom Beleaguered,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

LXXIV.

FOGELIN R. J., (2009), Taking Wittgenstein at his Word, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

FORMAN D., (2008), “Autonomy as Second Nature: On McDowell’s Aristotelian Naturalism,” Inquiry,

51 (6).

GINSBORG H., (2011), “Primitive Normativity and Scepticism about Rules,” Journal of Philosophy,

CVIII (5)


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HUEMER W., (2006), “The Transition From Causes to Norms: Wittgenstein on Training,” Grazer

Philosophiche Studien 71.

LUNTLEY M., (2008), “Training and Learning,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40 (5).

LUNTLEY M., (2009), “Understanding Expertise,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, 26 (4).

LUNTLEY M., (2010a), “What’s Doing? Activity, Naming and Wittgenstein’s Response to Augustine,”

in A. Ahmed (ed.), Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: A Critical Guide, Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press.

LUNTLEY M., (2010b), “Expectations Without Content,” Mind and Language, 25 (2).

LUNTLEY M., (in preparation), Investigating With Wittgenstein.

MCDOWELL J., (1994), Mind and World, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

PEIRCE C. S., (1992-99), The Essential Peirce, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

SENNETT R., (2008), The Craftsman, London, Allen Lane.

SMITH N. H., (ed.), (2002), Reading McDowell on Mind and World, London & New York, Routledge.

STICKNEY J., (2008), “Training and Mastery of Techniques in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,”

Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40 (5).

WILLIAMS M., (1984), “Language Learning and the Representational Theory of Mind,” Synthese, 58

(2), reprinted in Williams (1999a).

WILLIAMS M., (1999a), Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning: Towards a Social Conception of Mind, London &

New York, Routledge,

WILLIAMS M., (1999b), “On the Significance of Learning in the Later Wittgenstein,” in Williams

(1999a).

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1953), Philosophical Investigations, Revised 4th, Hacker P. M. S. & Schulte J., (eds.),

2009, Oxford, Blackwell.

NOTES

1. Peirce C. S., (1992-99: 132). The passage is from Peirce’s essay, “How To Make Our Ideas Clear.”


3. See Fogelin’s 2009 presentation of the point of Wittgenstein’s well-known exhortation to

replace explanation with description in Philosophical Investigations § 109.

4. Wittgenstein (1953: §§ 201-2).

5. See McDowell 1994, especially lectures III and IV for the idea of second nature. See the papers

in Smith 2002, especially the essay by Bubner for critical discussion of McDowell’s appropriation

of the concept of Bildung in explaining the development of second nature.

6. The idea that an explanatory account of our ways of going on would invite further regress is a

common assumption, but one that warrants challenging. See Ginsborg 2011 for a recent account

of normativity that offers explanatory potential while striking a middle way between the familiar

horns of either a dispositionalist reductionism or the nonreductionism of the descriptivist. For

more on this and the general issue of the status of explanation in Wittgenstein see Luntley (in

preparation: Chapter 4).

7. See Stickney 2008 and my reply Luntley 2008.

8. I am indebted to Huemer 2006 on this point.


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9. The sociological descriptive turn is in evidence in Dewey. See for example Sennett’s appeal to

Dewey in his detailed sociology of craft skills in Sennet 2008.

10. Williams thinks the difference is the community, cf. Williams 1984, 1999b.

11. Proponents of teleological semantics still carry the flag for Quine, but a natural way of taking

the indeterminacy of translation argument is as a reductio of reductionist naturalism about

meaning.

12. Fodor & LePore (2007: 684) claim that Wittgenstein’s account of learning by training is

vacuous. I agree that there is a problem, but disagree on what can be got out of Wittgenstein to

make training a useful concept.

13. See Forman 2008 for a trenchant critique of McDowell’s use of the idea of second nature that

has many points of contact with the concerns of this paper. Forman finds in Aristotle something

very close to the general question just articulated and even suggests that McDowell’s failed

attempt to deploy Aristotle’s concept of second nature ends up revealing that Aristotle’s use of it

leads us to seeing that this question is a genuine paradox about learning.

14. The force of this question is akin to that asked of communitarian accounts of rule-following –

why do lots of people with a disposition to give a particular answer to the ‘add 2’ instruction give

content to the idea of correctness when one person with the same disposition does not?

15. An example that seems more like compiling activity Y out of a set of X activities, rather than

a case of (1), might be this: When learning how to shoot at archery, there are many things you

concentrate on and practice repetitively in learning how to aim. You place your feet deliberately

at the right spacing (no more than shoulders’ width) facing side on to the target, you breath slow

and deep to relax your stance, you turn to face the target in a relaxed and deliberate manner so

as to not disturb the muscle set, you concentrate on keeping your shoulders dropped so that

when you draw the rear shoulder does not rise out of alignment with the lead shoulder, this also

ensures that when you draw you do so with the back muscles and not the arm muscles. In this

case, it seems more plausible to say that these things are not so much the platform for aiming

well, they constitute aiming well. But even here, this is not necessarily so. Nothing rules out your

being able to detach the ability to shoot with a consistent accuracy independently of performing

all the routines first practiced as a novice. Take just one part of this. Ensuring that the shoulders

stay aligned is a device for bringing it about that you draw with the back muscles, not the arm.

But ‘drawing with the back muscles’ is something that the concentration on posture enables you

to feel. You gain an awareness of what it is to draw with the back muscles, an awareness that can

detach from the platform activity of concentrating on posture. The fact that concentration on

posture can enable an awareness of the target activity of drawing with the back muscles is

important. I return to this below.

16. See Campbell 2002 for this move.

17. See my 2010a for detail on this. The critical occurrence is in Philosophical Investigations § 6

where Wittgenstein allows the teacher to direct the child’s attention when engaged in ostensive

teaching. Wittgenstein differentiates ‘ostensive teaching’ from ostensive definition precisely in

terms that absolve it from critique for presupposing grasp of grammar. So attention works for

Wittgenstein independently of a conceptual or grammatical shaping to experience.

18. From Context and Thought,’ Dewey (1981-2008, Vol 6: 5).

19. Dewey (op. cit.: 14).

20. See Campbell 2002 for the formative articulation of this idea in contemporary philosophy of

mind. For a deployment of the idea in a manner related to the current case, see my 2010b and

also 2009.

21. In a passage not often remarked on, Wittgenstein explicitly cites attention as the motor for

learning, cf. (1953: § 6): ‘An important part of the training will consist in the teacher’s pointing to

the objects, directing the child’s attention to them…’ Note also, that this is not ostensive

definition. It is a more primitive teaching, but it is one that requires of the pupil that they have


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the capacity to attend. Attention is not produced by the teacher’s pointing, attention is directed

by the pointing. The teacher provides a scaffold for the child’s attention. They do not bring it

about that they focus, but help them to sharpen their capacity to focus. The role of pointing here

is more akin to that of the parents’ hand on the rear of the saddle as a device for scaffolding the

rider’s sense of balance, not producing the sense of balance. For more on the role of ‘attention’ in

the opening of the Investigations cf. Luntley 2010a. For a contrasting view see Fogelin (2009: 30ff,

esp. 35). Fogelin accepts that the results of training will be a function of the repertoire of

responses available to the trainee, but explicitly limits these, in the human case, to ‘natural and

instinctive responses.’ Fogelin’s ‘defactoist’ reading of Wittgenstein then amounts to the claim

that human natural responses are a function of the society they inhabit. But that just begs the

question of what it is to be responsive to the developed practices of a culture prior to initiation

into culture. This would seem to be a position, like McDowell’s, in which it is ‘bildung all the way

down.’

22. Contra Williams, see the essays in Williams 1999a.

23. But see my 2009 for an argument that most examples of human craft know-how can be

captured with conceptually formed know-that.

ABSTRACTS

Both Wittgenstein and Dewey have a role for the concept of skills and techniques in their

understanding of practices and thereby the possession of concepts. Skills are typically acquired

through training. It can seem, however, that their respective appeals to practice are dissimilar:

Dewey’s appeal is, like Peirce’s, programmatic. It is meant to do philosophical work. In contrast,

for Wittgenstein, the appeal to practice can seem a primitive, something that is meant to put an

end to philosophical work. I argue that Wittgenstein’s appeal to practice is much closer to

Dewey’s. The argument arises out of difficulties with Wittgenstein’s concept of training.

Wittgenstein’s concept of training is inadequate for bridging the trajectory from initial training

to the acquisition of skills that are second nature. The latter seems required for his appeal to

practice and the way that grasp of concepts is embedded our practices of going on. The

inadequacy of Wittgenstein’s concept of training renders the idea of such a trajectory incoherent,

for it manifests a real dilemma about how to understand the transition from rote repetitive

training to mastery of skillful activity. I show how we can make sense of the role that training

plays in developing skillful activity and how by repetitive training we acquire new skills. The

solution to the dilemma comes from acknowledging a point that Wittgenstein shares with Dewey

concerning the role of selective attention. By acknowledging the role that attention plays in

extending the operation of skills, we can make sense of the acquisition of new skills and provide

a granularity to the concept of practice that makes Wittgenstein’s appeal to practice more akin to

Dewey’s: a programmatic concept rather than a primitive. Practice is, for Wittgenstein,

something to be studied and described in a detail that does explanatory work. Furthermore, the

account has a number of points of contact with Dewey.


108

AUTHOR

MICHAEL LUNTLEY

Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick

michael.luntley[at]warwick.ac.uk


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Wittgenstein, Dewey, and thePractical Foundation of KnowledgeJörg Volbers

1 In our time, when classical philosophy of language has long lost its sovereign position

in the philosophical field, it is no longer surprising nor unusual to classify Wittgenstein

(his later works) and Dewey as both belonging to the same family of pragmatists,

understood in a broad sense.1 They both express a common position which can be

roughly defined as claiming ‘the primacy of practice.’ They argue that certain subjects

of philosophical discussion, such as meaning, logical necessity, intentionality and

understanding, have to be understood as primarily rooted, or anchored, in our

practical sayings and doings. If we want to improve our understanding of what we

actually do and believe, we have to look at practice.

2 Given this background, it is nonetheless surprising how different in form and outlook

their philosophies are. The differences in style immediately catch one’s eye.

Wittgenstein’s writings have often been credited with a highly poetical quality. His

thinking is divided into short, sometimes aphoristic paragraphs; he uses questions,

elliptical remarks, and dialogue; he employs images and similes; he does not quote nor

discuss opposing theories explicitly. Dewey, for his part, is much more professional in

this respect. He wrote books, treatises and short essays in which he continuously

developed his central themes and presented them in a (more or less) systematic

manner. He suggested answers to classical philosophical problems and argued against

dissenting theories. The poetic ring of mysticism and aphorism is rather alien to his

literary style. Russell Goodman gives us an accurate picture of the experience of

reading Dewey: “Dewey, I always feel, talks at, rather than to, or with, his readers”

(Goodman 2002: 165). It is exactly the impression of being spoken to that distinguishes

Wittgenstein’s writing when it is at its best. He draws the reader into his thought,

which, by the way, can also be rather disorienting.

3 These differences in style correspond to a rather fundamental divergence in their

principal outlook. Dewey was, like the pragmatist movement in general, keenly

optimistic about the possibility of making the world a better place. He advocated the

power of reflection and praised the progress of experimental science as a paradigm for


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reflective thinking, inquiry, in general. Wittgenstein was a cultural pessimist. He also

saw ‘our civilization’ as characterized by progress, but he expressed deep mistrust

about the idea. The Philosophical Investigations begins with a quotation from Nestroy:

“Progress always appears much greater than it actually is.” Even though one might

argue about whether Wittgenstein’s thinking is inherently conservative,2 it is surely, as

von Wright put it, “anything but ‘prophetic.’ It has no vision of the future; rather it has

a touch of nostalgia about the past” (Von Wright 1982: 115).

4 How should we judge these differences in style and outlook? It would be superficial to

simply dismiss them, especially if one adopts a pragmatic way of thinking. If the

primacy of practice has any value, then it is to remind us that the way we do things is not

secondary to the things done. But then, of course, it would be equally superficial just to

take these first impressions at face value. My thesis is that they point to a more

substantial difference, one which concerns the very core of their philosophies. Even

though both are concerned with the primacy of practice, they have quite a different

understanding of what this appeal to practice, in the end, amounts to. So the difference

I am aiming at actually concerns the very idea of philosophy itself, as both ‘pragmatists

in the broad sense’ understand it. What does it mean to ‘look at the language-games,’ as

Wittgenstein urges us? Why should we put our trust in experience and action, as Dewey

invites us?

5 These methodological questions can be reformulated in a way that allows us to treat

them more directly. The problem is: What is it that we expect from philosophy, what do

we want to learn from engaging in it? What knowledge, or what kind of knowledge,

does philosophy provide? In particular: What kind of knowledge does the appeal to

practice provide? The topic of knowledge is omnipresent in both philosophers’ writings.

Their being classified as belonging to one broad family of pragmatists owes a great deal

to the fact that they develop quite parallel views of what knowledge is, and what it

cannot be. Here is the short story: Both Wittgenstein and Dewey criticize the

traditional philosophical idea that knowledge is a distinctively mental phenomenon,

something residing in a ‘subject’ which is categorically divided from the world it is

acting upon, the ‘object.’ The world is not something which is ‘viewed’ from the

outside, as it were. Instead of indulging in the futile “spectator theory of knowledge,”

they instead put the emphasis on the necessary connection between knowledge, on the

one side, and skills, habits, or capacities on the other. Wittgenstein writes: “Knowledge

is an ability”;3 Dewey follows the pragmatist tradition in arguing that knowledge is

primarily embodied in flexible habits. It is practice which comes first, be it in the form

of habits, skills, language-games or (as Dewey likes to call it) ‘conjoint behaviour.’ What

we experience is a product of this practical involvement, not the other way around. No

surprise then that pragmatism (in the broad sense) has been claimed to be right in the

line of Kantian transcendental philosophy, albeit with a realist leaning (Pihlström

2004).

6 Seen from this perspective, Wittgenstein’s ‘pessimism’ as well as Dewey’s ‘optimism’

regarding progress can be seen as expressing a different attitude toward this

practically embedded knowledge. Stanley Cavell had a good eye for that. What is

missing in pragmatism, he wrote, is a sensitivity for ‘the depth of the human

restiveness’ (Cavell 2004: 3). Varying upon a theme that he has more systematically

exposed in the first part of his Claim of Reason, Cavell uses the subject of knowledge in

order to demonstrate what he means by this. What singles out Wittgenstein as an


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opponent of pragmatism, Cavell claims, is the former’s attitude toward knowledge.

Cavell describes it as a ‘disappointment,’ one which is akin to to skepticism, but yet

substantially different:

Wittgenstein’s disappointment with knowledge is not that it fails to be better thanit is (for example immune to skeptical doubt), but rather that it fails to make usbetter than we are, provide us with peace. (Cavell 2004: 3)

7 Two conclusions can be drawn from this statement. Its first is that pragmatism upholds

the belief in knowledge; it hopes that knowledge can ‘make us better than we are.’

Conversely, Cavell holds that Wittgenstein sees a limit to the capacity of knowledge,

limits which affect his philosophy as a whole. These two conclusions do not only align

with the differences in philosophical outlook with which this paper began – Dewey

putting his trust in science and progress, Wittgenstein mistrusting it deeply. It will also

explain, I believe, their differences in style and finally in method. Thus, the pragmatic

conception of knowledge which is shared by both authors – that knowledge is somehow

‘constituted’ through practice, or ‘embedded’ in it – turns out to be the pivotal point

from which to assess their respective differences.

8 I will begin, then, by elaborating Dewey’s understanding of knowledge and practice,

always keeping an eye on the question concerning the implications it has for the role of

philosophy (Cavell’s ‘making us better than we are’). I will then turn to Wittgenstein

and try to show how his latest remarks, collected in On Certainty (1968), support Cavell’s

judgment. In these remarks Wittgenstein introduces a distinction which is foreign to

Dewey, namely, that we might well have practically upheld “certainties” which do not

correspond to knowledge, that is, that neither express it nor stand in an instrumental

relation to it. These certainties point to other ways we are related to the world and to

others. I will call this Wittgenstein’s discovery of the essentially social dimension of

practice. For him, our practical standing in the world is not primary upheld by

practically acquired certainties, but by the dynamic net of responses, expectations and

disappointments in which we are embedded. Knowledge and inquiry, from this point of

view, lose their sovereign position as the most serious game in the town.

Dewey’s Inquiry Into Inquiry

9 Does it make any sense to say that for Dewey knowledge ‘makes us better than we are,’

as Cavell’s statement implies? Dewey’s characterizations of knowledge and knowing are

ambiguous in that respect. There is, for one, his straight rejection of a philosophical

tradition which conceives of knowledge in terms that are all too high and too

theoretical. Following the well-trodden path of religion, philosophy had detached

theoretical activities from practice, placing itself firmly on the side of theory. It took

thinking to be a contemplative art, theoria in the Greek sense, dealing “with a realm of

higher Being” (Dewey 1988: 11). Knowledge, then, is thought of as being something

immutable, something which ideally does not change and thus provides us with

insights into reality as it is. ‘Knowing,’ in the traditional sense, as Dewey reconstructs

and criticizes it, can thus serve a fundamental need: It provides a means to fulfil the

human, all-too-human, ‘Quest for Certainty’ by giving the knower access to something

which holds fast. It establishes a certainty which is beyond all doubt. The doctrine of

‘pure knowing’ thus forms an essential part of the tradition Dewey criticizes: “Quest for


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complete certainty can be fulfilled in pure knowing alone. Such is the verdict of our

most enduring philosophic tradition” (Dewey 1988: 7).

10 Dewey’s criticism of this traditional conception of knowledge is a fine example of

dialectical reasoning. He does not argue directly against the ‘Quest for Certainty,’ but

rather tries to show that it fails on its own terms. The knowledge it seeks, Dewey

claims, cannot be had because we cannot rid ourselves of uncertainty. Uncertainty is

the “distinctive characteristic of practical activity […] Of it we are compelled to say:

Act, but act at your own peril. Judgment and belief regarding actions to be performed

can never attain more then precarious probability” (Dewey 1988: 5). This is not a direct

refutation of the traditional claim, since it leaves intact the possibility that we shift the

grounds. A defender of the tradition might argue that we have to concentrate on

theoretical knowledge precisely because Dewey’s characterization of practical activity is

correct. Dewey’s task, then, is to point out that this conclusion rests on an untenable

dualistic separation of these two ‘realms’ of theory and practice. One important

argument to that purpose is Dewey’s historical claim that this separation reflects a

mere cultural prejudice. The high esteem of theory conforms to the values of a social

elite which devalues and depreciates the activities of those “lower” classes on which it

depends (Dewey 1988: 21-39). If we drop that prejudice, we will see that the separation

between knowledge and action has no real grounds – theory is also an activity.

11 Having reached this point, one might conclude that Dewey invites his readers to

completely dismiss the traditional estimation of knowledge. Being on a par, both theory

and practice have to rely on a disloyal ‘practical activity.’ Does this not imply that the

inherent uncertainty of practice also extends to theoretical activities? Here the

ambiguity of Dewey’s position becomes visible. He rejects the traditional praise of ‘pure

knowing,’ but he still holds knowledge in high esteem. What has changed is the ground

upon which we assert the value of knowledge. For Dewey, the destruction of the

traditional barrier between knowledge and action frees our minds for a better (or more

justified) appraisal of knowledge’s real value. It helps us to see that we do, as a matter of

fact, possess quite numerous certainties. There is knowledge; but it cannot be found

where philosophy has looked for it. It is embodied in those impure and ordinary works

of artisanry which have been ignored by the tradition.4 As opposed to philosophers,

these practitioners do not waste their time with “framing a general theory of reality,

knowledge and value once for all,” but are rather occupied with “finding how authentic

beliefs about existence as they currently exists can operate fruitfully and efficaciously”

(Dewey 1988: 36). These men and women just act, and in acting, they devise tools,

understanding and values.5

12 It is a misunderstanding to believe that Dewey’s philosophy glorifies science. Science,

for Dewey, is important because it best exemplifies the general pattern exhibited by

these practical activities. The tremendous success of science is not based on its superior

mode of reflection or ratiocination in the way traditional philosophy understands it,

but rather on its picking up the impure methods and practical inclinations of artisanry.6 Experimental science embodies “the actual procedures of knowledge” (Dewey 1988:

38) and thus form the model of what Dewey considers to be the one and only way to

gain knowledge in the face of the uncertainties of practice. This pattern, as it is well

known, is called inquiry.

13 I have taken the trouble to establish such a well-known key-concept of Dewey’s

philosophy in order to show how utterly realistic his understanding of knowledge is.


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This is not intended to mean that he has ‘found the right thing,’ but rather that his

trust in the power of inquiry is firmly based on facts (or so he claims). Dewey’s method

aims at confronting philosophical presumptions with what he considers to be a more

realistic picture of what we do. If the topic in question is knowledge, we have to go and

look at the actual procedures in which knowledge is gained. Instead of defining

knowledge beforehand and then looking for its manifestations, we will rather gain a

better understanding of what we are actually looking for by first looking at the practices

in which knowledge is operative. “The fundamental advantage of framing our account

of the organs and processes of knowing on the pattern of what occurs in experimental

inquiry is that nothing is introduced save what is objective and is accessible to

examination and report” (Dewey 1988: 183).

14 This whole procedure bears a close resemblance to Wittgenstein. Dewey would have

agreed upon statements like the following, which can be found in the Philosophical

Investigations: “For our forms of expression prevent us in all sorts of ways from seeing

that nothing out of the ordinary is involved, by sending us in pursuit of chimeras”

(Wittgenstein 1969: sec. 94). Knowledge, we could say, is nothing out of the ordinary, it

is there, and the traditional mistake is to assume that knowledge must have a specifally

‘pure’ form. Rather, it is the ordinary use – embodied in actual practice – which shows

us how the phenomenon in question is really to be taken. I take this to be the gist of

what Dewey calls his ‘denotative’ or ‘empirical’ method. In adopting for a realistic

attitude, we are not to begin with the “results of reflection” (Dewey 1981: 19), but

rather look at how reflection is done.

15 But there is a certain twist to Dewey’s approach which, as we will see, sets him apart

from Wittgenstein. Knowledge, for Dewey, is not just some conception among others to

which we can turn. To a pragmatist’s ear, Cavell’s contention that knowledge ‘makes us

better than we are’ must sound like a tautology. For Dewey, such a claim comes close to

a definition of what knowledge can sensibly be. Inquiry is always an attempt to improve

our situation and eventually our place in the world: “Anything that may be called

knowledge, or a known object, marks a question answered, a difficulty disposed of, a

confusion cleared up, an inconsistency reduced to coherence, a perplexity mastered”

(Dewey 1988: 181).

16 Two aspects are important here. For one, Dewey’s understanding of inquiry has the

effect of insulating the uncertainties immanent to practice. Doubt is, as it were, only

possible locally; it arises in the form of problems within the confines of the objective

‘situation’ (as Dewey calls it). Following Peirce, Dewey’s general pattern of inquiry

assumes that we act with full certainty, and it is the goal of inquiry to regain this

capacity. The second point is that inquiry, as Dewey understands it, is always a response

to an objectively problematic situation. Inquiry is not an idle, isolated activity. It is an

essential part in our struggle to cope with all the uncertainties that permeate our

practical activities. We are obliged to inquire.

17 The ubiquity of inquiry is obvious for those pre-intellectual, more or less subconscious

forms of reflective inquiry that are at work in our continuous bodily interaction with

the environment. But Dewey expands this pattern to include those elaborated practices

by which we consciously try to solve problems. To be sure, there is a decisive difference

between these two poles of inquiry: intellectual inquiry is dependent on the use of

language, broadly understood as the capacity to use signs which embody meaning. It

allows the inquiring subject to relate the currently experienced traits of the situation


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to past and future ones; it introduces rational discourse and the capacity to form

distinctive ideas about what to expect and what to do. But that modification, though it

introduces a significant qualitative change, is according to Dewey but an extension of

the original organic disposition towards reflective interaction with the environment.7

18 This short synopsis shows that knowledge, for Dewey, is something we cannot not have.

Inquiry is hardwired into our biological and cultural pattern of life; it is the principal

instrument of survival. It is the origin of all the certainties we have at our disposal. If

there is some stability and knowledge in a world that condemns us to act at our own

peril, it is the result of the inquiries which permeate our organic life and which define

our current place in history.

19 As we have seen, the methodological justification for this view is the idea that in

‘inquiring into inquiry,’ we are de facto just looking at what we really do. What is

curious, though, is that the result of this operation echoes the very idea from which it

critically parted: “The quest for certainty,” Dewey writes, “is a quest for a peace which

is assured, an object which is unqualified by risk and the shadow of fear which action

casts” (LW4: 7). In the context of this passage, it becomes clear that Dewey rejects this

quest, belonging to the faulty doctrine of ‘pure knowing.’ But what does Dewey’s

philosophy offer us, if not a new reason to find peace again? For the tradition, the quest

for peace has been directed towards the objects of knowledge. For Dewey, reassurance

can be found in the truth of inquiry. ‘Pure knowledge’ proves to be a quasi-religious

dogma, but knowledge in the pragmatic sense is everywhere. In submitting all

knowledge to situational inquiry, Dewey creates a stable frame wherein the content of

inquiry might change, but in its very form it remains stable.

20 We have seen that Dewey’s attitude towards knowledge and ‘peace’ has two sides. His

whole philosophical outlook is based on the idea that every practical activity is

threatened by uncertainty; we live in an instable world in which we cannot attain the

kind of knowledge the tradition has looked for. But at the same time, this very

contingency also forms our capacity to reflect. (“But where danger is/Deliverance also

grows,” Hölderlin would remark.) Inquiry itself is not a contingent practice, but the

very pattern by which life upholds itself. Inquiry and contingency are two sides of the

same coin. In the end, our knowledge is as certain as anything can be in this precarious

world. If we accept the world’s contingencies (by turning our back to the false demands

of an elitist tradition), we can again gain the peace philosophy has always been looking

for.

Wittgenstein’s Remarks On Certainty

21 For Dewey, knowledge indeed does make us better and also provides us with some

(non-traditional) form of peace. Now it is time to investigate Wittgenstein’s attitude

towards knowledge and certainty. We set out with Cavell’s claim that Wittgenstein, as

opposed to pragmatists such as Dewey, was ‘disappointed’ with the delivering potential

of knowledge. This subject has been extensively treated by Cavell under the heading of

‘skepticism.’ For Cavell, Wittgenstein is not a skeptic in the classical epistemological

sense. He rather articulates the ‘truth’ of skepticism, which is, according to Cavell, that

“our relation to the world as a whole, or to others in general, is not one of knowing,

where knowing construes itself as being certain” (Cavell 1979: 45).


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22 The way Cavell reads Wittgenstein, an interesting contrast with Dewey’s position

emerges. Both Wittgenstein and Dewey seem to be occupied with the problem of

certainty and its relation to knowledge, and both can be seen as acknowledging a

certain truth to skepticism.8 Of course, neither Dewey nor Wittgenstein are

straightforward skeptics.9 But Dewey’s whole philosophy is based on the assumption

that uncertainty is irrefutable, and the presence of an encompassing state of doubt is

Dewey’s definition of the beginning of inquiry (Dewey calls it “the indeterminate

situation,” cf. Dewey 2008: 109-11). So we might say that Dewey transforms skepticism,

tames it, as it were.

23 In order to see how Wittgenstein treats the topic of certainty, and how it contrasts with

Dewey, let us now turn to the collection of remarks which bears it in the title. On

Certainty is not a book which Cavell has discussed extensively, but I believe it can well

illustrate the very point Cavell – or Wittgenstein – is up to. There has been quite some

discussion about the right way to read On Certainty, and it has been argued that this last

book represents a new phase in his thinking, called the ‘third Wittgenstein.’10 I will

concentrate here on one point that particularly attracts attention: Wittgenstein’s style

of argumentation is reminiscent of transcendental philosophy, since he is investigating

the necessary conditions of the possibility of meaning and experience. For Sami

Pihlström, these last writings show that Wittgenstein, too, can be rightly called a

‘pragmatist.’ Their common position is “that it is only against the background of our

human form(s) of life, of our habit of doing various things together in a common

environment, that meaning and that learning is possible” (Pihlström 2004: 298).

24 Of course, this kind of transcendental inquiry differs greatly from the classical Kantian

approach. Wittgenstein is not inquiring into reason, but rather looks at our practical

involvement as the ‘framework,’ or the ‘transcendental ground,’ which constitutes our

thinking. Pihlström introduces the nice expression ‘certainty-in-action’ in order to

illustrate this genuine practical dimension. Wittgenstein argues that language-games

are grounded in our practical actions, in certainties which we do not doubt “in deed”

(Wittgenstein 1969: sec. 342). He likens these “primitive reactions” to the act of taking

hold of a towel (Wittgenstein 1969: sec. 510). In the beginning, we just do act in a

certain way, and this is the condition for any subsequent linguistic refinement and

normative assessment.

25 One particular subject where this transcendental argument comes to the fore is the

practice of learning, which plays a central role in Wittgenstein’s reflections.11 In order

to learn at all how to normatively assess an utterance, to give it sense, we first have to

learn to participate in the corresponding practice. This ‘entry’ into the language game,

though, is not itself rationally structured. It begins with imitation and obedience. The

student (the novice, the learner) first has to take for granted what the teacher tells her.

“The schoolboy believes his teachers and schoolbooks” (Wittgenstein 1969: sec. 263).

This is a logical condition. Without such an “ur-trust” (as Moyal-Sharrock calls it),

there is no way to acquire the competencies which define a language-game.12 These

competencies go beyond simple conditioning. They include forming an understanding

of the point of the game, a shaping of interest, and minimally a perception of the salient

properties which mark the actions and items of the language-game.

26 In the case of learning, we have a forceful illustration of how our “relation to the world

and to others,” as Cavell formulates it, “is not one of knowing.” Training in the sense

discussed here may include explanation, but firmly rests on non-epistemic factors such


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as bodily exercises, authority, trust, love, power, and of course the ‘black box’ of the

individual (its talent, its wit, its capacity to understand what the teacher is trying to

convey). We also have a good illustration of Wittgenstein’s peculiar version of

transcendentalism: If sense and meaning depend upon (among other things) training,

the acquired “certainty-in-action” (Pihlström 2004: 299) indeed constitutes a

background which is both necessary for understanding, and yet non-epistemic.

27 For this reason, Pihlström feels justified, as it has been remarked above, to include

Wittgenstein on the list of those “pragmatized” versions of transcendentalism which

examine “the conditions for the possibility of some given actuality […] ‘from within’ the

sphere (of experience, of meaning) constrained and limited by those conditions”

(Pihlström 2004: 293). And the similarities to Dewey’s ‘empirical method,’ which is

looking at the ways we do in fact gain knowledge, cannot be denied. But there is an

important difference which Pihlström ignores. In his argumentation, he continuously

employs the first person in plural form. It is ‘we’ who investigate the (practical) limits

of sense, and the conditions revealed are ‘ours,’ as are the practices. The inclusive ‘we’

is a common stylistic element in all attempts to offer a full-fledged transcendental

reading of Wittgenstein, and it characterizes Dewey’s style as well. But this position, in

which the author assumes to be fully representative of the practice, misses

Wittgenstein’s insistent struggle to place the self, or the ‘I,’ within this ‘we.’ I take that

to be Cavell’s major discovery, which can be also identified in On Certainty. There we

find numerous references to the problem how we, as individuals, become a part of the

practice, and to what bars us from such a participation, respectively. As such, the topic

of an irreducible tension between the practice and the subject who participates in the

practice is introduced.

28 The prominent role of learning in Wittgenstein’s remarks already illustrates this point.

We have to learn in order to participate. That this process of learning is not an

automatism upon which we can always rely – like a machine – is something which

occupies Wittgenstein’s reflections in the Philosophical Investigations (1967: sec. 208). A

transcendentalist reading, like McDowell’s (1984), would now point to the fact that we

do in fact learn and convey meanings, and that accordingly any philosophical

skepticism is just out of place. But this observation only captures one dimension of the

normativity of practices: its objectivity. The subjective dimension shows up when

Wittgenstein discusses, for example, those fundamental and often irreconcilable

clashes of understanding where each party calls the other a fool or heretic (cf.

Wittgenstein 1969: sec. 239, 611). On Certainty is not just interested in our certainties,

but also explores their limitations. It confronts the reader with strange tribes,

improbable evidence (like discovering sawdust in a head, sec. 211), men from Mars (sec.

430), mental disturbances (sec. 71), illusions (sec. 19), drugs (sec. 676) and straight out

madness (sec. 355, 281, 674).

29 Here we touch on an important point. If it is true that any substantial doubt already

presupposes a functioning language-game in which it can be judged, what then is the

opposite of certainty? It is true that we agree, often, in language; this practical

agreement is, as Wittgenstein had already remarked in the Investigations, fundamental

for our capacity to understand each other. (Wittgenstein 1969: sec. 241) In these limit-

cases of sense just quoted, this precondition of sense collapses. Considering that

agreement forms a logical condition for the possibility of meaning, its lack cannot be

stated in logically valid terms. It is not a simple contradiction.13


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30 Doubt, as the contradictory of certainty, is something we can resolve by transforming it

into a problem. This is Dewey’s suggestion, the initial step of inquiry. But Dewey also

emphasizes that in itself, doubt is too indeterminate to guide action. It is necessary to

give it a definite form by qualifying it (cf. Dewey 2008: 111f.). The cases Wittgenstein

discusses in On Certainty refuse such a determination. The lack of agreement cannot be

qualified in an objective way since it implies a “revision,” as Wittgenstein writes, which

“would amount to an annihilation of all criteria”14 (Wittgenstein 1969: sec. 492).

31 In that sense, the opposite of certainty is not plain doubt, but that irritating sense of

‘being wrong’ which is more rightly associated with the onset of madness. On several

occasions, Wittgenstein discusses the case that something which constitutes the

ineliminable background of our understanding might be contradicted by everybody (cf.

Wittgenstein 1969: sec. 614). Madness is looming there, since we cannot imagine how a

world looks like in which these certainties are wrong. Wittgenstein emphasizes that

this madness cannot be rejected by just pointing to the practice, since the certainty in

question is essentially subjective:

I, L.W., believe, am sure, that my friend hasn’t sawdust in his body or in his head,even though I have no direct evidence of my senses to the contrary. I am sure, byreason of what has been said to me, of what I have read, and of my experience. Tohave doubts about it would seem to me madness – of course, this is also inagreement with other people; but I agree with them. (Wittgenstein 1969: sec. 281)

32 Note that the cases of uncertainty Wittgenstein discusses are mostly not the

philosopher’s doubts. His favourite examples are children, madmen, historically

shifting understandings or just strange confrontations with people whose convictions

threaten ‘our’ certainties. These examples suggest that our life does not only consist of

certainties, but also of that irritating evidence which challenges our self-

understanding. Things like this happen, and they lead quite naturally – in deed, as

Wittgenstein would say – to these seemingly “nonsensical” questions of how we, as

individual subjects, can hold fast to the certainties that permeate our life.

33 Contrary to what the transcendental reading suggests, Wittgenstein is not assuring us

that, in face of these doubts, ‘we’ do know what is right, and what is not. He rather

probes our attitude towards certainty, traces it back to its origins (in learning), its

conditions (social and natural), expressions and variations. A teacher might cut off a

young student’s doubt with the harsh remark to stop interrupting, since his doubts do

not yet make any sense (Wittgenstein 1969: sec. 310). The grown-up philosopher,

though, is not in the position of a novice. James Conant’s reading (1998) that any

skeptic or realist who tries either to prove the external world or to refute it, is uttering

plain nonsense, devoid of any meaning, is not Wittgenstein’s position. Wittgenstein is

not assuming the teacher’s position towards his fellow philosophers. Even though he

clearly sees that Moore’s attempt to prove the external world by raising his hands is

nonsense, he does not content himself with that observation. He admits that these are

attempts to “express something which cannot be expressed like that” and thus require

“an investigation” in order to identify where the claim went wrong (Wittgenstein 1969:

sec. 37; cf. sec. 76). The philosopher’s nonsense has some sense, expresses something,

even though it cannot be easily captured.

34 What emerges is a picture of a subject – “I, L.W.” – which struggles with the certainty to

which it finds itself bound from a logical point of view.15 This is what I mean by

‘subjective’ dimension of certainty. Wittgenstein is neither a skeptic nor is he assuming


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a plain transcendental position. The practically constituted certainties belong to the

‘scaffolding’ of our thoughts (Wittgenstein 1969: sec. 211), but it is a certainty in which

we do trust, not something in which we can trust (cf. Wittgenstein 1969: sec. 509). The

certainty which forms a condition of all thought is not a solid ground; it can be

questioned, and this questioning – if it is more than an academic exercise – requires an

investigation which assumes the form of an exploration. This observation helps to

understand Wittgenstein’s particular style of writing. Since our certainties are implied

in our very subjectivity, putting forth arguments cannot do all the work. We have to try

to show the other how we think they should think. And we should not believe that our

own position is immune to doubts and misunderstandings, since the way we have

learned the rules is itself dependent on an “indeterminate” (Wittgenstein 1969: sec. 28)

practice: “Not only rules, but also examples are needed for establishing a practice. Our

rules leave loop-holes open, and the practice has to speak for itself” (Wittgenstein 1969:

sec. 139).

35 In this section, we have seen in what sense the skeptic is ‘disappointed’ by knowledge.

Wittgenstein is rejecting the common identification of knowledge with certainty,

giving the latter priority. We might be certain that things are so and so, but this is not a

knowledge to which we can appeal in the face of the irritating counter-evidence which

Wittgenstein discusses. So there remains a gap between mind and world, a gap which

does not call for more knowledge, but to a critical investigation of the place such

knowledge plays in our life. These kind of ‘inquiries’ assume a completely different

form than in the work of Dewey. Since the foundation of our practices is non-epistemic,

we have to resort to non-epistemic means in order to clarify what it is we wanted to

say, what troubles us, or how to counter the irritating evidence which threatens our

very subjectivity. There is no definite form to these kinds of investigations; they should

be rather thought of as constituting our intellectual life – devices such as conversation,

analysis, comparison, exposure to new, strange or irritating experiences. The

important point is that they cannot be thought of as simply enriching or correcting our

present knowledge, but rather as ways to change the way we look at things, at

ourselves and at others. They are, as I would like to put it, practices of the

transformation of the self. Philosophy is one of these practices – it is, as Wittgenstein

claims in “Culture and Value,” a “work on oneself.”16

Varieties of Practice

36 Our comparison of Dewey and Wittgenstein’s respective understandings of practice has

revealed deep differences. For Dewey, practice, though inherently uncertain, also

constitutes the certain ground to which we should turn if we seek – in the light of the

irrefutable contingency – some orientation. This idea condenses in Dewey’s conception

of inquiry. The general pattern of inquiry is not just a practice, but also represents the

very form of our coping with the world; its form remains identical, whether inquiry is

performed collectively or individually. In this way, Dewey can argue that we should put

all our trust into inquiry and its power to transform our experiences. The argument is

transcendental: we cannot not inquire, so to inquiry we should turn in order to re-

adjust our self-understanding.17

37 Wittgenstein, on the other hand, is offering two arguments against this rationalization

of practice. He shows that our practical capacity to judge – the basis of inquiry – is itself


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grounded in non-rational relations (“an ungrounded way of acting,” Wittgenstein 1969

sec. 110). Practices such as teaching assume non-epistemic means by which the subject,

as Meredith Williams (2000) calls it, is ‘calibrated’ in order to acquire the normative

contrast without which no sense is made. This includes behavioural conditioning, but

extends to such “non-epistemic” influences such as trust, acknowledgment, and the

whole range of means by which human beings govern each other.

38 In a sense, this argument picks up a similar point as Dewey. Dewey’s naturalistic

pragmatism points to the ‘integrated unity’ of organism and environment, inferring

that any reflection upon reflection has to take into account that this unity is the factual

starting point, the transcendental basis, from which any further act of differentiation

has to proceed. For Wittgenstein, this ‘integrated unity’ is better represented in the

practice of learning. In learning, the individual assumes the norms, rules and “views”

of the practice into which it is initiated. It is integrated in the ‘environment’ of

practice. But contrary to Dewey, Wittgenstein does not believe that this logical unity

holds fast over time. He allows for disturbances and overlapping claims, for irritating

evidence and unforeseen individual confrontations. So Wittgenstein’s second argument

is that our initially acquired practical certainty, though in sense a transcendental

condition of thought, can turn out to be ‘wrong’ in the sense of ‘going mad’ described

above. Note the strict logical form this argument assumes: Our knowledge which is

embedded in our practically acquired certainties cannot be used to prove or refute our

relation to the world (and to others) precisely because our certainty does not reflect a

prior state of the world, but rather constitutes the transcendental ground of sense and

meaning.

39 This difference between Wittgenstein and Dewey boils down, I believe, to a diverging

assessment of the sociality of practice. For Wittgenstein, practice is an essentially social

form. This is why learning, as being something which requires someone else

representing the constitutive norms of the practice, plays such a pivotal role. Belonging

to a practice does not just mean to be involved in an activity, but also to be exposed to

the judgments and expectations of the others. This dependency also implies a certain

vulnerability, to which Wittgenstein was quite sensitive. After learning is done, this

dependency does not disappear. It creates new problems which Wittgenstein discusses,

for example, in On Certainty when everybody else openly contradicts you. Thus, the

tension between the subjective position and the objective demands of the practice

emerges, a tension which cannot be dissolved, but has to be explored.

40 For Dewey, the paradigm of practical activity is the individual (or organic) habit.

Sociality is introduced as a new environment, thus retaining the general ecological

logic of interaction between organism and environment.18 Language, or

communication, is defined as the collective use of signs in order to attain shared

experiences. Dewey describes meaning as a “community of partaking” (Dewey 1981:

146), caused by the joint use of symbols. Disagreement, accordingly, is just a failure of

coordination and does not form a substantial threat to meaning and understanding. It is

at this point that the contrast to Wittgenstein stands out most clearly. Both agree that

language presupposes agreement in order to function. But for Wittgenstein, this is a

logical insight, which consequently allows for the possibility of a mismatch between our

inculcated subjective logical certainties and their objective practical realisation. For

Dewey, this agreement is an objective presupposition, the failure of which causes


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confusion and weakens our intellectual powers, but does not weaken the general

conviction that our practice is, as it is, a secure foundation of all thinking.

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DIAMOND C., (1991), The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind, Cambridge, Mass, MIT

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Language,” Synthese, 105 (1).

GOODMAN R., (2002), Wittgenstein and William James, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

MCDOWELL J., (1984), “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,” Synthese, 58 (3).

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WITTGENSTEIN L., (1967), Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, Blackwell.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1969), On Certainty, Oxford, Blackwell.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1980), Culture and Value, Oxford, Blackwell.

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NOTES

1. Brandom’s family picture includes Kant, Peirce, James, Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Quine,

Sellars, Davidson and Rorty – and of course, himself (Brandom 2003: 40).

2. Cora Diamond, for example, exclaims that calling Wittgenstein’s philosophy inherently

conservative is just ‘nutty’ (Diamond 1991: 34).

3. ‘Wissen ist ein Können’ (MS 164 from the Bergen Edition (2000), dated 1941).

4. Cf. in addition to the following also Ch. 4 of Dewey’s Experience and Nature (Dewey 1981: 100-31).

5. Garrison 1995 accordingly sees the ‘experience of working’ as the key to understand Dewey

and profitably compares this idea with the early works of Hegel.

6. This thesis has also been defended by Hans Blumenberg 1983, who argues that scientific

progress is exactly due to the abandonment of speculative reflection. A more contemporary

elobaration of the philosophical implactions of this idea can be found in Allen 2004.

7. Cf. Dewey (2008: 48-65).

8. Terry Pinkard 1999 argues that in fact all philosophy of the 20th century, analytic, post-

analytic as well as continental, has been driven by modern “experience of skepticism.”

9. John McDowell 1984 shows that Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein as a skeptic must fail.

10. For an overview of the different views on On Certainty, cf. Moyal-Sharrock & Brenner 2007.

For a discussion of the ‘third Wittgenstein,’ cf. Moyal-Sharrock 2004b.

11. As Meredith Williams 1999 has argued, the topic of learning is essential both to

understanding the Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty.

12. Cf. Moyal-Sharrock (2004a: 97).

13. Cf. Wittgenstein (1983: sec. VI-49).

14. Anscombe translates the German original “Maßstäbe” with “yardsticks”; I amended the

translation since Wittgenstein is talking here of criteria in general. This being said, the yardstick

is Wittgenstein’s favorite metaphor for these kind of judgments which are immune to doubt

because they constitute the way we assess normative contrasts (Williams 1999).

15. “One might say: ‘I know’ expresses comfortable certainty, not the certainty that is still

struggling” (Wittgenstein 1969: 357).

16. Wittgenstein (1980: sec. 16e). I develop this position more fully in my Selbsterkenntnis und

Lebensform (2009) which argues that Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy is assuming the

traditional form of a ‘spiritual exercise,’ as Pierre Hadot calls it, and I extend this conception with

Foucault’s notion of a ‘practice of the self.’

17. Dewey’s thinking here is Hegelian in form and spirit. The following quote, for example,

echoes the Hegelian idea that we are not just contingent byproducts of nature, but rather

embody a necessary dialectical step in the continous process in which the absolute (or nature)

tries to overcome its self-alienation through the means of self-knowledge: “In modern science,


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learning is finding out what nobody has previously known. It is a transaction in which nature is

teacher, and in which the teacher comes to knowledge and truth only through the learning of the

inquiring student” (Dewey 1981: 122).

18. “We may say […] that natural operations like breathing and digesting, acquired ones like

speech and honesty, are functions of the surroundings as truly as of a person. They are things

done by the environment by means of organic structures or acquired dispositions. The same air

that under certain conditions ruffles the pool or wrecks buildings, under other conditions

purifies the blood and conveys thought” (Dewey 1983: 15).

ABSTRACTS

Even though both Dewey and Wittgenstein have been rightly classified as both being ‘pragmatist’

thinkers in a broad sense, they stand in stark contrast with respect to their writing style and

their general attitude towards the future of western civilization. This article reflects these

differences and traces them back to their diverging conceptions of knowledge. Dewey criticizes

the philosophical tradition for erecting an artificial barrier between theory and practice, but he

retains the traditional high esteem for knowledge by re-describing it as practical inquiry.

Consequently, all practically acquired beliefs and certainties are either justified or a potential

subject-matter for further inquiries. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, shows the limitation of the

very idea of knowledge by pointing to the knowing subject’s fragile relation to its own lived

practices. He claims that there are practically acquired beliefs and certainties which are out of

reach for the inquiring subject. Thus, the seemingly superficial divergence in style and method

shows to be grounded in far-reaching philosophical differences.

AUTHOR

JÖRG VOLBERS

FU Berlin

jvolbers[at]zedat.fu-berlin.de


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Group Morality and Forms of LifeDewey, Wittgenstein and Inter-Subjectivity

Rick Davis

1 This paper argues that among the connections between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and

the pragmatist tradition is the commonality between Dewey’s account of the

development of group morality and Wittgenstein’s concept, ‘forms of life.’ To my

knowledge there is nothing in the literature that has focused on the affinity between

these aspects of each philosopher’s work. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the

growing literature on Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the pragmatist tradition in a way

that prompts further discussion about concepts that are not so often addressed by

scholars making similar connections.

2 This paper proceeds in the following way: first, I provide a brief review of literature

that has alluded to connections between the philosophies of Dewey and Wittgenstein;

second, I briefly review and show important connections between the aspects of each

philosopher’s work with which this research is concerned: Dewey’s group morality and

Wittgenstein’s form of life; third, I raise and address potential and anticipated

criticisms; finally, I conclude by reiterating my main points and stating why this

research is important. My overarching argument here is that both the form of life

concept and Dewey’s account of group morality are dependent on inter-subjective

experience.

Prior Work on Dewey and Wittgenstein

3 Despite the growing literature on Wittgenstein and Pragmatism, there is surprisingly

little, if any, systematic study dedicated exclusively to the philosophies of Dewey and

Wittgenstein in relation to one another. Robin Haack’s excellent essay (1984) is perhaps

the most satisfying treatment of the connections between Wittgenstein and Dewey, but

this analysis is strongly supplemented by equally thorough treatments of Peirce, James,

Rorty, and pragmatism more generally. This takes away from the force of the

connections she establishes. Nonetheless, Haack’s insights are invaluable to any study

looking to establish connections. For instance, she argues that there are ‘naturalistic’


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elements in both Dewey and Wittgenstein and that these elements have similar

relationships to the two philosopher’s accounts of “meaning, behavior, and

justification” (1984: 163). Moreover, Haack observes that Wittgenstein and Dewey both

associate meaning with behavior. In Philosophical Investigations (1952), Wittgenstein

writes that in most cases the meaning of any linguistic item is its use. Since

Wittgenstein understood language as an activity, this is close to Dewey’s claim that

“Meaning is primarily a property of behavior” (in Haack 1984: 164). This, Haack

concludes, means both Wittgenstein and Dewey hold that language – its structure and

meaning – cannot be understood if divorced from its context.

4 Richard Rorty’s (1982) well-known account makes strong claims about consistencies in

Dewey’s and Wittgenstein’s work within the history of philosophy, but he spends more

time comparing the so-called ‘Early’ and ‘Later’ Wittgenstein to the philosophy and

significance of Kant and Dewey, respectively. “The later Wittgenstein belongs with

Dewey,” he writes, “as the earlier Wittgenstein belongs with Kant” (1982: 28). This

comparison obscures more than it elucidates, however; connections between Dewey

and Wittgenstein are a part of a broader claim about the import of Wittgenstein’s

philosophy in relation to changes in philosophy as practiced during his early and later

work. As a result, Dewey’s philosophy is compared to Wittgenstein’s within the history

of professional philosophy. Important claims are made, but not toward the sole end of

establishing affinities between the two. Rather, Rorty more situates Wittgenstein’s

philosophy in the Western philosophical tradition.

5 The significance of Rorty’s essay, however, should not be underestimated. It has been in

opposition to Rorty’s interpretation that some of the best work regarding Dewey and

Wittgenstein has been advanced. For instance, Richard Prawat (1995) rejects Rorty’s

claim that Dewey was a postmodernist before his time, but he goes on to entertain the

notion that in being critical of traditional philosophical problems, Dewey does move

away from philosophy as practiced at the time. Through his project of “reconstruction”

(Dewey 1920), Prawat suggests, Dewey was able to develop and “move into” a new

language game within professional philosophy. What this means is that Dewey was able

to establish a vocabulary regarding topics of his interest that his peers were willing to

accept as a part of ‘legitimate’ philosophical discourse. This falls short, though, of the

being on equal footing with ideas developed and advanced in the so-called linguistic

turn, since the language of pragmatism was seen as a subset of a broader and accepted

philosophical discourse.

6 Prawat goes on to discuss how Dewey’s alternative to the mind-body problem in

traditional philosophy was a “triangular relationship between the individual,

community, and the world mediated by socially constructed ideas” (1995: 14). This is

similar to Wittgenstein’s remarks on the ‘from of life’ concept, although it does not

seem that Wittgenstein was directing these remarks at the mind-world problem as much

as toward philosophy itself. For Wittgenstein, as we will see, there is an inherent

relationship among the individual, community, and the social conventions rooted

therein. For both philosophers, then, communally developed and agreed upon beliefs,

practices, etc., contribute to meaning and conduct. Language use and what is and is not

considered legitimate behaviors, like any communal activities, are the result of

cooperation.

7 Other approaches are less entangled in differences in interpretation: James Farr (2004),

for example, aptly argues that there are elements in Dewey and Wittgenstein that can


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contribute to the ‘Social Capital’ literature in the social sciences. This is an accurate

observation. Both Dewey and Wittgenstein are concerned with the manner in which

agreement in a community grounds activity, behavior, and communication. Both also

hold that this strengthens group solidarity. This can be a powerful supplement to Social

Capital Theory: Social Capital Theory holds that strong social ties among members of a

community contribute to the betterment of a community in a variety of ways. These

ties, it is maintained, have dissipated overtime, culminating in a dire social

arrangement perpetuated by a variety of factors (depending on which theorists one

consults) that encourages and/or enables a reclusive life over public and civic

engagement (Putnam 2000). Given the emphasis on communally agreed upon standards

of conduct, among other aspects of social life in both Dewey and Wittgenstein, it is

appropriate to incorporate them into debates concerning the concept of Social Capital

and its role in group life.

8 These and other studies give those who wish to show strong connections between

Wittgenstein and Dewey a good place to start. It is also evident in the limited literature

that many of these connections are to be found in aspects of each thinker’s philosophy

with which this research is concerned: how group dynamics, norms, and practices

influence and indeed organize and guide the activities of the individuals of which a

given community is comprised. This, I believe, justifies pursuing this research. Both

Dewey and Wittgenstein see the demarcation between community and individual as

one that is blurred to a significant extent. For both, there is no other way to understand

such a relationship. An individual detached from her social context is nothing more

than a social fiction.

Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Inter-Subjective Experience

9 In Dewey’s middle period, he places a great deal of emphasis on the dynamics of group

life, especially as they pertain to communal practices and ethical norms. For Dewey,

there is an intimate and reciprocal relationship between the individual and the

community of which she is a part. This, according to Dewey, has been the hallmark of

group life since antiquity: “Individual judgment,” he suggests, “is caught up, repeated,

and plays its part in group opinion” (1972: 56). The inverse is also true. Broader

communal or group morality influences the manner in which a person develops her

moral system. Dewey writes, “customs and mores have in them an element of social

approval, which makes them vehicles for [individual] moral judgments” in that one’s

moral judgments are reinforced by the fact that they are derived from a communally

approved moral system.Although these judgments can at times “sink to the level of

mere habit” there are safeguards derived from group life that bring them back to the

level of “conscious agencies.” Dewey lists a few:

The education of the younger, immature members of the group and theirpreparation for full membership. (2) The constraint and restraint of refractorymembers and the adjustment of conflicting interest. (3) Occasions which involvesome notable danger or crisis and therefore call for greater attention to […] avertdisaster. (1972: 59)

10 For my purposes here, it is only important to note that institutionalized group

practices not only provide members of a community with their initial code of behavior,

but also provide the means by which this behavior is regulated, suggesting that certain

actions are grounded in the dynamics of group life. In this way, these “conscious


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agencies” are encouraged by the community to remain an engaged part of public life as

opposed to devolving into passive beliefs or mere habit (59).

11 The standards of group morality, Dewey continues, are social, but only unconsciously

so. Dewey puts it better when he explains that standards of group morality are not

those that “each member deliberately makes his own. [Rather,] he takes it as a matter

of course. He is in the clan, “with the gang”; he thinks and acts accordingly” (1972: 72).

This means that the contours of group morality are internalized early in one’s life and

become increasingly entrenched the more one participates in communal practices

governed by, and rooted in, those standards. Indeed, “The young are carefully trained

to observe them” (1972: 55). Dewey continues:

Whenever we find groups of men living together […] we find that there are certainways of acting which are common to the group […] There are approved ways ofacting, common to the group, and handed down from generation to generation.Such approved ways of doing and acting are customs. (1972: 56)

12 These customs in turn influence and guide individual conduct: “they imply the

judgment of the group that they are to be followed. The welfare of the group is

regarded as somehow imbedded in them” (1972: 54-5). This means that a person’s

actions are either validated or invalidated depending on the extent to which those

actions accord to group standards. This is different from other ethical traditions such

as utilitarian or deontological approaches in that an ethical system is derived from, and

grounded in, a particular communal context as opposed to adhering to abstract

principles or social calculus.

13 Daniel Savage (2005) has examined group life and morality as articulated by Dewey and

has coined the phrase ‘intersubjective verification.’ Savage’s concept is helpful in

coming to a clearer understanding of Dewey’s account of the development of group

morality and is therefore worth briefly reviewing here. The phrase is quite intuitive: it

is meant to refer to the aspects of Dewey’s philosophy that hold individual moral values

and standards to be derived from, and logically justified by, group or communal

customs and mores. Savage also notes the inter-subjective experience goes both ways:

ideas often begin with individuals and are inter-subjectively verified by the broader

group or community. He provides the excellent example of the technological

innovation leading to the development of the heavy plow:

Motivation for the invention came from dissatisfaction with, or criticism of, currentmethods of cultivation. Although the idea for the new design must have originatedin a single individual’s imagination, this individual did not have to start fromscratch. His or her idea contributed to a progressive development of cultivation […]It was [subsequently] verified as the best existing plow through the intersubjectiveexperience of individual farmers. The spread of its use across Europe was the resultof the communication of its effectiveness. (2005: 11)

14 Moreover, inter-subjective verification applies not only to technological innovation but

also to normative ethical and political ideas. In almost the same breath, Savage argues:

The concept of individual rights has a similar history. It was motivated by criticismof, and therefore dissatisfaction with, existing political institutions […] It was thebest idea regarding the organization of a political community devoted to the goodof its members that had been developed up until that time. This was verifiedintersubjectively through the experience and communication of the populations ofWestern Europe and North America. (2005: 11)

15 The emerging point is that ideas – be they in regard to technological innovations or the

development of normative ethical and political ideas – operate within the intimate


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relationship of the individual and community. The individual is at once the product of,

and a contributor to, social norms and practices. This is the crux of Dewey’s account of

group morality and is consistent with his pragmatist philosophy more generally. This

connection between morality and practical problem-solving is something that is

echoed in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. For Wittgenstein, there is also an inherent

connection among group standards of conduct and a variety of actions.

16 Dewey’s account is similar to Wittgenstein’s remarks on what he calls a ‘form of life.’

However, given its importance to his later philosophy, the ‘form of life’ concept is

rarely mentioned by Wittgenstein. Upon further examination, however, the thoughtful

reader understands that other concepts important to Wittgenstein’s philosophy are

dependent thereon. For instance, to paraphrase one commentator, the term ‘form of

life’ helps one to understand that the manner in which we develop our proficiency in

language games is dependent on context and a socially embedded complex of language,

rules, behavior and action (Ayer 1985). In Wittgenstein’s words: “to imagine a language

is to imagine a form of life” (1952: § 19). What this suggests is that our ‘form of life’ is

an “interweaving of culture, world view, and language” (Glock 1996: 124). This being

the case, a proficient understanding of the context-dependent nature of what

Wittgenstein calls language games helps one better understand the role of the form of

life concept in Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

17 The connection between language games and a form of life becomes clearer as

Wittgenstein proceeds: in response to his interlocutor’s inquiry in the Investigations

about what constitutes truth or falsehood in a language game, Wittgenstein explains

that the truth and falsehood of an utterance is determined by “what human beings say;

and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinion,

but rather in a form of life” (1952: § 241). This means that linguistic practices are

derived from one’s environment, a community or culture that is of course shared with

others. Social convention binds human beings together in a form of life based on a

general agreement about a diverse set of social interactions. As Wittgenstein suggests

as early as the Blue and Brown Books (1958), to imagine a language is to imagine a

“culture” (1958: 134). Accordingly, a form of life can be understood as “a culture or

social formation, the totality of communal activities in which language-games are

embedded” (Glock 1996: 124-5).

18 Related to the concept of language games is Wittgenstein understanding of meaning as

use. For Wittgenstein, meanings of terms are not their referent or an abstract idea;

rather, meaning is derived from the manner in which terms are used in regular social

interaction, in everyday conversation. As he explains,

For a large class of cases of the use of the word “meaning” – even if not for all cases– the word can be explained thus: The meaning of the word is its use in language.(1952: § 189)

19 In fact, the later Wittgenstein is hostile to referential theories of meaning that

characterized his early work. In the opening of the Investigations, Wittgenstein refutes

Augustine’s account of language. He explains the account holds,

a certain picture of the essence of human language: that the words of languagename objects – that propositions are combinations of such names. In this picture oflanguage we find the root of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. Thismeaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands.(1952: § 1)


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20 The referential theory of meaning is problematic for several reasons. As one example,

given this account, after the object ceases to exist the meaning remains. How, then, can

a referential theory of meaning allow for such a term to be meaningful. What

Wittgenstein sees as the shortcomings of such theories of meaning leads him to believe

that one cannot understand a language until she sees how it functions in a form of life,

as a “pattern in the weave of life recurring in different variations” (1952: § 43).

21 Not only are the concepts of forms of life, language games, and meaning as use

intimately connected, but there is also a connection between these concepts and

Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules and rule following. As Mark Addis notes, “a rule, as

with meaning, is rooted in a form of life” (2006: 104). Similarly, in the Investigations,

Wittgenstein writes, “the word language-game is used here to emphasize the fact that

the speaking of a language is part of a [rule-governed] activity, or of a form of life”

(1952: § 23, emphasis in original). Furthermore, he states “obeying a rule is a practice”

(1952: § 99). Language games and related conduct, simply put, adhere to rules. These

rules, of course, emerge from social context.

22 Like the above-mentioned concepts, following a rule is embedded in a form of life. For

Wittgenstein, a rule, like meaning, is not abstract, nor does it govern activity in the

same way with every application. To the contrary, he thought that much of the

misunderstanding of rules and rule-following can be attributed to the fact that most

people understand rules as being applied in the same way in all situations. Wittgenstein

understood rules as normalized behavior in a particular form of life. He writes: “to obey

a rule, to make a report, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions).” As

such, rules do not transcend their applications, but rather their applications are rooted

in different social contexts, different forms of life (1952: § 202).

23 For Wittgenstein, activity in linguistic communities is governed by customs and social

convention based on agreement in a form of life. This is not limited to linguistic

activity, but extends to all activity (1952: § 241). These activities are in turn rule-

governed, the rules having been established by agreement in a form of life. This is

similar to the claim made by Dewey that different kinds of activity are based on

agreement in a community. Furthermore, for both Dewey and Wittgenstein social

practices are provided with a significant degree of legitimacy by virtue of their being

accepted and seemingly validated by the broader community, as well as by past

generations. These customs are seen as having been inter-subjectively verified by the

group. Concomitantly, these same practices serve as a starting point for individual

innovation in regard to group practices that, if deemed useful, will also be inter-

subjectively verified. For both Dewey and Wittgenstein, then, inherited customs

influence social conduct, interactions, and practices of all kinds. Ideas concerning

social practices spread through social approval, through inter-subjective experience.

24 Both Dewey and Wittgenstein understood that group activity is governed by a complex

of rules, traditions, norms, etc. They saw group life as an elaborate social matrix

established and perpetuated by agreement among the members of the group. Both also

realized that this agreement and the resulting complex of social conventions can be

blindly accepted by successive generations, and this might have negative implications.

But the affinity between Dewey’s account of the development of group morality and

Wittgenstein’s forms of life that concerns this research lays in their shared emphasis

on the important role of inter-subjectivity. Both the concepts of Dewey’s group

morality and Wittgenstein’s forms of life depend on the transfer and approval of ideas.


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The inter-subjective experience binds groups and forms of life together in social

arrangements, the basis of which is a kind of social consensus in regard to what

constitutes legitimate social behavior of different kinds.

Potential Objections

25 At this point some objections might be raised. One of the most obvious might be that

Dewey and Wittgenstein are not directing their analyses to comparable topics. It is true

that Wittgenstein was primarily a philosopher of language, and Dewey was, for lack of a

better term, a social theorist. Therefore, it could be argued that they are concerned

with different things (language and morality, respectively). But insofar as each account

is concerned with interaction between the individual and social customs in regard to

social action, there is a strong connection. Each acknowledges that social customs have

a significant influence on the development of one’s basis for action. Similarly, there is a

voluminous literature on the relation between ethics and moral action. So even though

on a superficial level there might seem to be some conceptual incongruity, upon

further examination it is clear there is consistency in these concepts in regard to social

action that is guided by social conventions.

26 Another objection that might be raised, similar to the first, is that Dewey places a lot of

focus on the extent to which an individual’s actions and ideas can influence adopted

modes of social behavior by being integrated into group morality – what some might

call moral agency. Wittgenstein is comparatively silent on this point. Wittgenstein is

more concerned with how what one learns from a form of life influences their

knowledge of, and action in, the world. This does not mean, though, that for

Wittgenstein an individual is somehow trapped in the worldview established by her

form of life. For instance, in his discussion on rule-following Wittgenstein explains that

although one is taught to observe rules, the nature of those rules allows for some

deviation, some latitude for the individual. Such behavior might of course be deemed

inappropriate since it would be inconsistent with a form of life, but the point is that

individuals are not held captive. They are merely limited by the social norms that

comprise them. The same can be said of any established worldview, which in his

subsequent work Wittgenstein addresses (Wittgenstein 1969).

27 Finally, it might be argued that my treatment of the ‘form of life’ concept is incorrect

or incomplete. The argument can be made that my account is incomplete in that it

spends a roughly equivalent amount of time discussing related concepts. However, as

mentioned, the term ‘form of life’ is mentioned only a few times in Wittgenstein’s

published work, and therefore supplemental concepts, such as those mentioned above,

are needed to elucidate this idea. This is an appropriate course of action because a

proficient reading of Wittgenstein shows the extent to which language games, meaning

as use, and rule-following are dependent on a form of life. Given the scarce remarks on

the concept, in concert with how these remarks explicate the connection among other

important concepts, a discussion of forms of life necessitate a discussion of these other,

related concepts.


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Conclusion

28 I have argued in this brief paper that the similarities between Dewey’s account of the

development of group morality and Wittgenstein’s concept of forms of life are among

connections between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the pragmatist tradition. I have

done this by focusing on how both concepts can be understood as dependent on inter-

subjectively established group customs. I have also argued that Dewey and

Wittgenstein see communal life as one in which an individual is of one’s community as

opposed to being detached in some way. The implications of this, I have argued, are

that one’s action – be they moral or linguistic – are governed by rules that are accepted

as legitimate. In short: both Dewey and Wittgenstein see group life as an interwoven,

context-dependent system of language, behavior, action, and more. In this way, I have

attempted to show the extent to which Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the pragmatist

tradition (represented here by Dewey) are in accord with one another.

29 I also raised and addressed some potential and anticipated criticisms: that Dewey and

Wittgenstein’s approaches are directed at different issues, that Dewey places much

emphasis on the extent to which an individual can influence a group’s system of

customs, whereas Wittgenstein is more concerned with what can be called

epistemological issues, and finally that my handling of the Wittgenstein’s concept of

form of life is incomplete. In the prior section, I address these potential criticisms in

turn and argue that they can be resolved by a careful reading of both Dewey and

Wittgenstein. Although neither, to my knowledge, employ the term ‘inter-subjectivity,’

the concept itself teases out connections between the two concepts with which this

study is concerned.

30 This research picks up where previous, relevant research leaves off: focusing solely on

connections between Dewey and Wittgenstein. Such a study can only contribute to the

growing literature concerning Wittgenstein and pragmatism, even if only through

stimulating more discussion about the potential relationship. That is, even if others do

not agree that these connections exist or are important, this study will have achieved

the objective toward which is directed: a contribution to the ongoing and important

debates relating to Wittgenstein and pragmatism. This is important because it fills a

‘gap’ in the existing literature.

31 Furthermore, by establishing affinities between what are sometimes considered vague

or ambiguous Wittgensteinian concepts with concepts that are part of a seemingly

more coherent philosophical system such Dewey’s might help to stimulate discussion

on these concepts by providing a viable interpretation. The only way philosophical

problems (or puzzles) are worked out is through discussion. Providing even a possibly

‘correct’ interpretation of difficult concepts will no doubt contribute to debates that

seek to elucidate these concepts. Concomitantly, through comparison each

philosopher’s account of group life is made clearer. To put this differently, there is a

mutual clarification when comparing two or more philosophers in that by teasing out

similarities, each concept or philosophy necessitates a careful reading of each

philosopher.

32 Also, Dewey and Wittgenstein were contemporaries, although it is not clear that they

read one another (although Wittgenstein was quite fond of James and was therefore

exposed to pragmatism). Regardless, the contemporaneous relationship suggests

research such as this that establishes strong similarities between two or more


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philosophers holds promise for studies in the history of philosophy. Through

establishing these (and other) kinds of similarities one can better understand the

interplay of philosophy and other social factors in a given period. Too often,

philosophies are treated as addressing perennial, trans-generational issues, which is

not counter-productive in itself, but it is unrealistic to think that inquiries into these

ideas proceeds in manner independent of historical context. The political historian and

theorists Quentin Skinner (1988), who by his own account is heavily influenced by

Wittgenstein, argues that although philosophy is often concerned with such ‘timeless’

questions, such an approach is of lesser value if it ignores historical and linguistic

context.

33 Finally, in showing affinities between Dewey and Wittgenstein, other comparisons

might be prompted and established, not only between Dewey and Wittgenstein but also

among Wittgenstein and other pragmatists: as an example, Peirce’s interest in the

manner in which we come to develop our doubts and beliefs bears a resemblance to

many of Wittgenstein’s remarks in On Certainty (1969). Also, James’ holism is something

that can at once be compared to Dewey and Wittgenstein (Haack 1984). Given the

diversity of views within the pragmatist tradition, this holds great promise. If parallels

can be drawn among Wittgenstein and more than one pragmatist (and this has been

done, but more research in this area is needed), the connections between the two

traditions will seem more evident. If ideas between, say, James or Holmes and

Wittgenstein are shown in a convincing way, this is indicative of an inherent

connection between Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Many of pragmatists have ideas that

correspond with many of Wittgenstein’s concepts. This research can be a step in

thedirection of demonstrating these parallels.

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SAVAGE D., (2002), John Dewey’s Liberalism: Individual, Community, and Self Development, Carbondale,

Southern Illinois University Press.

SHULTE J., (1992), Wittgenstein: An Introduction, New York, State University of New York.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1953), Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1969), On Certainty, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Major Works, New York, Harper

Collins, 2009.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1994) “Following a Rule,” in Anthony Kenny (ed.), The Wittgenstein Reader,

Blackwell Publishers Ltd., Oxford.

ABSTRACTS

In this paper, I attempt to establish connections between the pragmatist philosophical tradition

and the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I argue that among these connections is the

affinity between John Dewey’s account of the development of group morality as articulated in his

early work and Wittgenstein’s admittedly vague concept, ‘form of life.’ I argue that this affinity is

evident in that both are dependent on inter-subjective experience. Moreover, both Dewey’s

account of the development of group morality and Wittgenstein’s concept of form of life suggests

an intimate relationship between the individual and the community. I argue further that both

Dewey’s account of group morality and Wittgenstein’s form of life concept hold that there is a

significant influence of inherited norms, conventions, traditions, etc., on the development of the

individual and her conduct in a variety of social interactions. I go on to raise and address

potential and anticipated criticisms. In this section I take what I consider to be the most

penetrating of the potential criticisms of the arguments presented in this paper: that Dewey and

Wittgenstein direct their analyses at different issues (the former directs his analysis toward

group moral development and social issues, while the latter directs his toward linguistic activity

and its grounding social context), that Dewey focuses much of his attention on moral agency,

whereas Wittgenstein is more concerned with what might be called epistemological issues, and

finally that my treatment of the form of life concept is incomplete in that I spend a roughly

proportionate amount of time discussing related concepts: language games, meaning as use, and,

to a lesser extent, rule- following. I respond to these criticisms in turn by arguing that a careful

reading of these aspects of each philosopher’s work circumvents such criticisms. The goal of this

paper is to contribute to the growing literature on connections between Wittgenstein’s

philosophy and the Pragmatist tradition. The subject matter might also be a contribution to the

history of philosophy and possibly have implications for epistemology. There is also the hope

that in establishing commonalities between the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Dewey one can

provide an interpretation of some of the more vague concepts in Wittgenstein’s philosophy,

prompting further discussion on these concepts. Finally, this research might pave the way for

further research into connections among different aspects of Dewey’s and Wittgenstein’s

philosophies. This paper is a first step toward a study of a much larger scope and should not be

taken as conclusive.


133

AUTHOR

RICK DAVIS

Washington State University

richard.davis[at]email.wsu.edu


134

A Philosophical BestiaryJoseph Margolis

1 When Hilary Putnam asked, “Was Wittgenstein a pragmatist?” he admitted straight out

that the title of his lecture was “misleading, for I will [he explained] be talking as much

or more about the relation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to Kant’s as about its relation

to, say, William James’s.” He meant, he says, that he could have titled it just as aptly,

“Was Wittgenstein a Neo-Kantian?”1 Of course. Although the added clue was meant to

be as inexplicit as the question, a warning of sorts about an unmarked danger, a piece

of induction. The fact is, Putnam viewed Wittgenstein’s “later philosophy” as

“paralleling certain themes in Pragmatism” and signaled that he regarded the

resemblance as being important to the direction (very probably, the redirection) of

current philosophy.2 He ventured a hint he knew would be widely construed as favoring

a traditional or conservative treatment of the future of pragmatism and analytic

philosophy (and philosophy at large) by remarking at once, within his triangulation, his

intention “to combat the prevalent idea that Wittgenstein is simply an ‘end of

philosophy’ philosopher.”3 He draws a similar lesson from his remarks on Kant. He

means to restore a proper sense of his own relationship to Wittgenstein and the classic

pragmatists – to John Dewey, preeminently – in order to provide (against a skeptic’s

misreading of philosophy in the large) a corrected sense of how the kinship between

Wittgenstein and the pragmatists helps to secure our own bearings under a widening

threat.

2 There can be no doubt that, here, Putnam is combating what he regards as Richard

Rorty’s picture of Wittgenstein – hence, then, Rorty’s pragmatism as well. But to

concede the complexity of that admission is, as we shall see, to enter into the

rollercoaster inquiry of where pragmatism may now be headed. In my reading, twenty

years later, that’s to conjure not only with Rorty, Putnam, and Wittgenstein – and Kant

(and James and Dewey and Peirce, on Putnam’s view) – but also with Wilfrid Sellars,

Gottlob Frege, Robert Brandom, and (I would add) Huw Price, who have not, until

recently, been counted as the nearly indispensible (not entirely reliable) pragmatist

players they have become in current disputes about pragmatism’s fortunes. I take the

inclusion of figures Putnam does not mention to help define an expanding agon that

cannot be confined to Putnam’s original confrontation with Rorty. Brandom, for


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instance, is not a Rortyan skeptic, though his own ‘recovery’ of pragmatism is itself a

response to Rorty’s provocation. The sense of Putnam’s question has become more

diffuse, but also more compelling.

3 I’m unwilling to say that any of the last group mentioned affords an acceptable

instruction as to pragmatism’s prospects: I don’t think any of them actually does. But

the best advice, bearing in mind the sense of Putnam’s question, arises from engaging

their challenges, just as, close to forty years ago, the best sense of pragmatism’s

resources arose quite naturally from the minor distraction of that dead end of a dispute

between Rorty and Putnam that brought the last decades of the last century to a

surprising close – without Rorty or Putnam being responsible for any forceful revision

of pragmatism’s future.

4 Putnam’s question is an important one, though Putnam himself is drawn to an

unpromising distraction. Certainly, neither Rorty nor Kant nor James can be expected

to adjust our philosophical compass now in any fresh way; and though Wittgenstein

remains remarkably rewarding, Putnam’s own clue regarding Wittgenstein’s

innovation is more than coy. Brandom’s challenge is finally more important than

Rorty’s, but it too threatens to be a very large distraction in favor of an entirely

subsidiary adjustment – within the boundaries of formal semantics (however notionally

applied to natural-language discourse). Nevertheless, I’m convinced that we shall find

ourselves on firmer ground, as pragmatists, focused on the movement’s best prospects

(from here on out), if we can get clear about why it is that the philosophical turn

Brandom pursues among his closest discussants is, finally, a deflection from the main

topics that should confront us.

5 The question about Wittgenstein draws us to an important clue that cannot (I surmise)

be adequately examined solely in accord with Wittgenstein’s own strategies. Ironically,

Brandom’s misreading of Wittgenstein returns us (quite unintentionally) to a more

promising venture: namely, to the reconciliation of pragmatism and naturalism on the

strength of new priorities, the defeat of newer versions of deflationism that have

replaced the failed energies of Rorty’s “postmodern” pragmatism and those of the

impossible extremes of twentieth-century scientism, as well as the dawning sense of

the primacy of the resources of the human self, which begin to set decisive constraints

on the redefinition of a defensible naturalism committed to the actuality of the self’s

powers. Count all that the barest sketch of a brief in favor of a new beginning – hardly

captured by the contest to be examined here. You cannot fail to see that the work of a

figure like Brandom is bound to play a not insignificant role in the articulation of a

suitable explanation of pragmatism in our time, to match the role Rorty and Putnam

played in the final decades of the last century. But I intend no invidious comparisons:

the pertinent contests of the two periods are very different indeed.

6 Rorty, of course, packaged Wittgenstein and Dewey together (and Heidegger, let us not

forget) as ‘postmodern’ pragmatists of his own persuasion. All that’s gone by now;

nevertheless, part of the dismissive intent of Rorty’s ‘pragmatism’ has morphed into

the revival of the deflationary and minimalist proposals of more recent, more

eccentric, self-styled pragmatists in pursuit of their own often extreme economies

along the lines of certain forms of naturalism (as in the work of the Australian

philosopher, Huw Price, actively engaged in debate with Brandom) and, of course, of

inferentialism (in Brandom’s own vigorous proposals).


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7 It’s my conviction that, partly because of its remarkable revival, pragmatism is being

drawn, separately, into close dialogue with certain temptingly spare forms of analytic

philosophy and other temptingly florid forms of settled continental philosophy. On the

analytic side, it should be clear that it will be useful to revisit with care the question

what might now be the best way to integrate the often divisive concerns of pragmatism

and naturalism and, as a direct consequence, the unexpected revival of the distinctly

remote projects of formal semantics, now somehow reconciled with pragmatism itself.

I’m persuaded that these confrontations should serve in shaping a better answer to

Putnam’s question about Wittgenstein: partly because Wittgenstein (early and late) is

so engaging to Fregeans and Deweyans alike, as he is to discussants like myself who are

drawn to the need to neutralize the self-impoverishing ‘disenchantment’ so much in

vogue in late scientistic philosophies.

8 Price and Brandom share these themes – as, indeed, did Rorty and Putnam in rather

different ways. Brandom strikes me as the natural stalking horse for our present

purpose: he is certainly more than Rorty’s principal student, undoubtedly the most

unorthodox self-styled pragmatist of the movement’s recent history, without a doubt

the single most visible, skillful proponent of a radically reoriented (still incompletely

articulated) ‘pragmatism’ for our day, engaged with all the themes I’ve mentioned (and

more); and, I should add, author of an unavoidable challenge as to how philosophy

might now best proceed. (I press this advice without prejudice as to what may prove to

be the ultimate verdict on Brandom’s bold gamble: that is, I urge it opportunistically.)

9 I happen to think that Price and Brandom have gone astray in certain decisive ways

that need to be addressed and ‘corrected’ in the interest of ensuring a continually

tenable, hopefully up-to-date and adequately informed pragmatism. I take the charge

to usher in a decidedly useful way of meeting Putnam’s question. It should come to rest

in due course in the implicit confrontation between Brandom and Wittgenstein. In any

event, that is to be the highlight of my own reading of Putnam’s question: because I

mean to review the newer challenges of naturalism and deflationism, which, by their

own instruction, should bring us to the decisive contest between the ‘pragmatism’ of

the Investigations and that of Between Saying and Doing. I trust it will be clear that the

larger purpose of the exercise is to assess pragmatism’s best prospects currently, in

meeting the gathering challenges of the day.

10 It will take a bit of patience to mark the argument’s trail convincingly. (I must give

notice here that I will not reach all of my intended targets in this single paper.) The

inquiry itself falls very naturally into two parts: the preparatory challenges of

naturalism and deflationism, which, apart from inferentialism, are Brandom’s principal

sources for generating alternative options of genuine interest. In that spirit, the first

part of the argument – at least the part being sketched here – makes its contribution

without fulfilling the essential promise of the second part – or the third. They’ll take

their turn in due course. But in widening the scope of Putnam’s question the issue

demands a freer canvass of the entire sweep of contemporary philosophy.

11 Rorty, I note, is unfailingly explicit in the Introduction to Philosophy and the Mirror of

Nature. He takes the “three most important philosophers [and pragmatists] of our

century –Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey – [to have] broke[n] free of the Kantian

conception of philosophy as foundational”:


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The aim of [this] book [Rorty says] is to undermine the reader’s confidence in “themind” as something about which there ought to be a “theory” and which has“foundations,” and in “philosophy” as it has been conceived since Kant.4

12 Putnam condemns the pragmatism Rorty constructs in his “picture of language

speakers as automata, ‘as’ deeply un-Wittgensteinian.”5 On that reading, Putnam is

entirely justified. But I doubt it’s an accurate reading of what Rorty says. I must admit,

somewhat against Putnam, that I’m persuaded that when Rorty compares discursive

‘criteria’ with ‘programs’ and speaks of ‘language games’ as “governed by what he calls

‘algorithms’ or ‘programs’,” he may be signaling, very distantly (and misleadingly), no

more than his endorsement of some early version of Brandom’s inferentialism (well

before the publication of Between Saying and Doing), rather than an endorsement of the

apparent automatism Putnam claims to find in Rorty’s pertinent texts. Though I

thoroughly agree that Rorty offers no compelling case for the ‘postmodern’

pragmatism of The Mirror of Nature that I’ve barely sampled; it’s also reasonably clear

that, in rejecting the Cartesian theory of mind, Rorty does indeed endorse the larger

doctrine, to the effect that “the wholehearted behaviorism, naturalism, and

physicalism I [Rorty] have been commending […] help us avoid the self-deception of

thinking that we possess a deep, hidden, metaphysically significant nature which

makes us ‘irreducibly’ different from inkwells or atoms.”6 Imagine!

13 I say this cannot count as a fresh strain of pragmatism, if it ever did. Which, of course,

would require a proper grounding if we were tempted to impose new constraints on

pragmatism, naturalism, realism, deflationism, the relationship between semantic

analyses and metaphysics, and the like. At the very least, then, against Rorty; it may be

entirely reasonable to support both a ‘folk’ account of the self’s career and whatever in

the way of the leanest possible materialism the physical sciences may be deemed able

to produce. In that event, such ‘pictures’ may be said to ‘model’ rather than to ‘map’

reality. I see in this a perfectly plausible warning against the excessive claims of a

deflationary naturalism (Rorty’s and Price’s, both). There’s a blind spot in Rorty’s

verdict that will surface in a new guise (much later), in Brandom’s formalist rendering

of inferentialism.

14 Rorty has a penchant for introducing preposterous specimens of what otherwise

appear to be entirely valid forms of philosophical hypothesis, and then dismissing at a

stroke the entire encompassing enterprise as impossible to redeem. Where’s the

argument? None of Rorty’s ‘most important philosophers’ follows him in going over the

philosophical cliff. But you must see that, increasingly, we are being threatened by a

glut of indefensible or unrewarding pragmatisms.’

15 I venture to say, in the way of a preliminary caution, that pragmatism acknowledges (i)

the robust functionality, the realist status, of what, unproblematically, we call the

human self or person (subject or agent), without insisting that the self must be

construed as a determinate ‘substance’ of this or that kind or as possessing an essential

nature, or anything of the sort. (I take this to be close to Dewey’s view, in Experience and

Nature.) There may indeed be strongly ‘deflationary’ views of the functioning of the self

– somewhat akin to the sense in which there are promising deflationary accounts of

‘truth’ – that cannot be ignored. But as matters now stand (and for the forseeable

future), it makes no sense to speak of the achievements of the sciences without

admitting some ‘strong’ sense of truth on which an admittedly subordinate deflationary

proposal may afford a useful economy. In much the same sense, I argue that there can


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be no achievement of the kind we name “science” unless there are also actual agents of

inquiry who can be credited with the feats that need to be explained. I should say at

once that I mean to return to the improbably strategic importance of the analysis of

truth to the future prospects of pragmatism – and the whole of the Eurocentric

tradition. The point of the linkage, I dare say, is not yet clear. Let me suggest, for the

moment, that the entire inquiry centers on the conceptual relationship between

pragmatism and naturalism and what that contested topic brings into view.

16 To return to the tally I’ve just begun, the upshot of item (i) at once yields, as item (ii),

the additional thought that realism (in the pragmatist sense) is bound to be

constructivist but not subjectivist (say, in the classic empiricist or Kantian – ‘idealist’ –

manner), ‘pluralist’ (as it is now often said to be, to avoid pretensions of privilege of

any sort); hence, indissolubly linked to one or another acceptably conjectured (post-

Kantian) ‘Idealist’ picture of the real world (‘Idealist’ with a capital ‘I’: meaning that it is

not at all a merely psychological doctrine), which (in the manner of Peirce or Cassirer

or, with charity, Hegel) is what I mean by an ‘objective’ constructivism that avoids all

claims of actually constructing the natural world that we say our science knows.7

17 If so, then (I dare continue), (iii) pragmatism is bound to treat all distinctions between

the ‘subject-ive’ and the ‘object-ive,’ pertinent to the resolution of standard

epistemological and metaphysical questions (of the sort Rorty rejects unconditionally),

as matters entirely internal to one or another realist (or realist/Idealist) space of

inquiry, indissolubly posited in the sense just broached in item (ii) of the tally that’s

now unfolding. (I expect you realize that my tally is entirely programmatic.) All that I

can say, for the moment, in its favor is, as I’ve hinted, that the salient weaknesses of the

so-called “pragmatist” ventures of figures like Brandom, Price, and Sellars

inadvertently instruct us in the need to fashion a more robust alternative to collect

pragmatism’s best prospects.

18 I now add item (iv) to our tally, namely, that in keeping with pragmatism’s avoidance of

all presumptions of privilege and contrived or arbitrary disjunctions that might

otherwise yield unearned (and unwanted) advantages in resolving cognitive questions,

all valid attributions of a cognitively qualified sort are, paradigmatically (or, if

preferred, derivatively), ascribed to the nature and agency of functionally apt selves;

that is, that, on the thesis that the analysis of language (or meaning) and the analysis of

the world we claim to know are indissolubly intertwined – the known world being

‘enlanguaged’ and natural language, ‘enworlded’ – the analysis of language, world, and

knowledge is insuperably conjectural, penetrated by human interests, holistically

indissoluble and determinably realist in its outlook, in accord once again with item (ii).

Coordinately, I think we must also postulate, as item (v), the idea that, qua agent, the

self is – wherever speaking, thinking, acting, reflecting, and the like are affirmed – the

nominal site of all such acknowledged powers, holistically engaged, uniquely emergent

under conditions of biological and cultural evolution and enlanguaged Bildung, capable

(in maturity) of being reflexively experienced (though not sensorily), entitled to realist

standing in whatever respect and degree is accorded the “things” of the world we deem

accessible to the sciences and practical inquiry.

19 I dare venture two further premises easily accepted by any viable, reasonably standard

form of pragmatism: (vi) that the career of a living self is itself history or a history, or

historied; that is, selves are reflexively aware that their conceptual, perceptual,

affective, agentive, and related powers are informed and affected by historical changes


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as a result of having mastered (internalized) the language and culture of the society in

which they first emerge and subsequently live; and (vii) that the description and

explanation of all the powers of the self and the processes and attributes of the world

the self inhabits, comes to know, manipulates, understands, or affects, may, it is

supposed, be cast entirely in naturalistic terms, though any viable naturalism must,

accordingly, accommodate whatever among the self’s first-personal powers prove to be

resistant to any dismissive form of deflation or reduction or elimination. I’m touching

here on some of the dawning contests on which the fortunes of pragmatism and the

whole of Western philosophy depend: in particular, those that mark the importance of

the distinctive (but not especially orderly) confrontation with figures like Brandom,

Price, Sellars, Rorty, and Wittgenstein.

20 Once you have a schema of this scope and plausibility in hand, you see at once how easy

it is to detect deflections from, deformations and abandonments of, presumptions

beyond, the modest demands of classic pragmatism. So, for example, the daring of

Rorty’s ‘postmodern’ pragmatism cannot possibly be an admissible form of pragmatism

if we yield in the direction of the tally I’ve just contrived. Similarly but for very

different reasons, everything remotely in accord with Kant’s transcendentalism (but

not the ‘transcendental’ question itself) cannot possibly pass muster. But then,

Putnam’s ‘internal realism’ – which Putnam himself acknowledges founders on its

adopting an empiricist form of representationalism (very possibly misled by James) –

cannot be defended (as a viable form of pragmatism) any more than the thesis that

worried Kant in his famous letter to Marcus Herz.8 Nevertheless, ‘representationalism’

in any benignly Hegelianized (‘presuppositionless’) form of phenomenological

‘presentationalism’ (as in Peirce’s variant) may actually be needed to offset,

convincingly, every illicit form of perceptual or cognate privilege.

21 It may not seem so, but I am indeed responding to Putnam’s question. I take Putnam to

be asking: “If Rorty calls himself a pragmatist, then can we reasonably call Wittgenstein

a pragmatist?” The question has to do with pragmatism’s future. So that now that

Brandom has actually formulated his picture of the pragmatist promise of his own

inferentialism – what he calls ‘analytic pragmatism’ – we begin to recognize an entirely

fresh attempt to subsume or adjust pragmatism’s classic intuitions under auspices that

threaten to drown out or effectively marginalize what are pragmatism’s best insights

vis-à-vis the most important and likeliest contests of our day.

22 In this sense, the answer to Putnam’s question is, quite simply, No! Wittgenstein is not

a pragmatist in any instructive sense; Rorty is, finally, a pragmatist only in the comic

sense in which any large doctrine may be completely disorganized by turning its own

commitments against its ‘truer self’; and Brandom may be counted a pragmatist chiefly,

I would say, on the basis of equivocating between the ‘pragmatic’ commitments of any

standard version of philosophical pragmatism and the so-called “pragmatic” features of

the semantic analysis of discourse directed at making explicit the inferential

implications of what we do by way of verbal and nonverbal behavior, that may be

expressed (functionally or ‘logically’) in terms of what we ‘say’ (or may say) ‘expresses’

the implicit inferential import of what we actually ‘do’; and partly on the strength of

Brandom’s affection for the ‘pragmatism’ of figures as diverse as Rorty, Dewey, Sellars,

Frege, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Heidegger and others labeled by Rorty (at one time or

another) as pragmatists. The moniker hardly matters, but the confusion that results is

hardly helpful. Pragmatism faces a remarkably open opportunity to strengthen its


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various undertakings in our own time. I would hate to see it squandered in the newly

refurbished quarrels now intriguingly resurrected from the past.

23 Here, if I understand Brandom correctly – I’m not sure I do understand him, I’m not

sure Brandom’s introductory remarks about the inferentialist program he introduces,

in Between Saying and Doing, are entirely transparent – I would be willing to say that we

could, without the least disadvantage, construe our pragmatist reading of the functional

use of any so-called ‘target’ vocabulary (in terms of any so-called ‘base’ vocabulary

favored for the inferentialist game) as either ‘representational’ or ‘expressive.’ We

would, of course, have to admit some sort of benign ‘privilege’ at least two foci in either

sort of account: in the sense, first, that something meaningful would have had to be

‘given’ (presuppositionlessly) in the target vocabulary, which we would wish to

preserve in our explication; and, second, that the explication itself would, thus far at

least, adequately preserve the ‘meaning’ thus given. Alternatively put, any deflationary

or reductionist or similar search for would-be ‘semantic’ economies would have to be

independently defended.9 There is no a priori reason why a representational theory of

language or an epistemologically qualified theory of truth must be unacceptable within

the terms of the leanest form of naturalism adequate to pragmatism’s needs. But I don’t

deny that that’s a quarrelsome claim.

24 Brandom introduces his own undertaking as follows:

What I want to call the “classical project of analysis” [formal semantics, or, morenarrowly, what Brandom names “semantic logicism”] […] aims to exhibit themeanings expressed by various target vocabularies as intelligible by means of thelogical elaboration of the meanings expressed by base vocabularies thought to beprivileged in some important respects – epistemological, ontological, or semantic –relative to these others.

25 This Brandom calls ‘the core program’; the famous ‘extension’ he wishes to add (to

round matters out) – that is, the rules of inferentialism – comes from ‘the pragmatist

challenge’ (he says) he associates chiefly (always by way of Wilfrid Sellars’s very

different labors) with Wittgenstein’s distinction between ‘meaning’ and ‘use,’ which

Brandom regards as the nerve of ‘Wittgensteinian pragmatism.’10 So he means to

answer Putnam’s question as well!

26 You see, of course, if you allow the liberty, that it no longer matters whether we prefer

to speak in the idiom of ‘representation’ or that of ‘expression’ (which both Price and

Brandom worry in terms of deflationist preferences of different degrees of daring): we

can invoke either notion at any point in the same exercise (or both together); each (we

suppose) addresses the substantive aspect of discourse that we would not want any

strictly deflationary or deflationary naturalist maneuver to displace. Beyond all that,

which must be examined more carefully, I see no reason to disallow Brandom’s attempt

to provide ‘a complete account of semantics’: the only questions that arise ask

(benignly), Is the program viable? Is it robust enough to be worth pursuing? Are there

restricting or disabling complications that have not yet been acknowledged? Does it

qualify as an enlargement of pragmatism’s own program? Has Brandom read

Wittgenstein correctly? Sellars? Dewey? Frege? Or, indeed, Peirce?11 (We have only to

resist the fatal conviction that deflationism is an autonomous semantic discipline that

overrides any “old-fashioned” metaphysics). Deflationism, I say, is always an

encumbered and dependent philosophical strategy: it cannot completely disjoin

semantic analysis and “metaphysics.”12


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27 Curiously, Brandom reports Rorty’s actual response to drafts of his Locke lectures (now

collected as Between Saying and Doing), which reads as follows: “Why in the world would

you want to extend the death throes of analytic philosophy by another decade or two?”13 Rorty saw at once, you realize, the retrograde possibilities of Brandom’s innovation.

Imagine! Given Brandom’s response, it’s perfectly clear that the answer is in good part

a matter of philosophical taste. Nevertheless, Brandom’s answer does begin to explain

the sense in which his venture is much more traditional and conservative than one

might have supposed –possibly even regressive when compared with Wittgenstein,

Dewey, Rorty, Putnam, and Sellars – despite his affirming his openness to

‘epistemological, ontological, and semantic’ issues and his willingness to address the

resources of ‘folk’ vocabularies. Rorty’s reaction is rather more puzzling, because Rorty

surely knew what Brandom was up to. (I can only think that Rorty’s remark was meant

to be reported as a comic putdown.)

28 Huw Price, a rising Australian philosopher and an ally (and opponent) of Brandom’s,

actually suggests that Brandom may be a ‘counter-revolutionary’ analyst or pragmatist

or ‘analytic pragmatist.’14 The point at stake is that Brandom cannot be easily pinned

down as to where, precisely, he stands with respect to the conceptual issues his own

inferentialism poses regarding topics like empiricism, naturalism (especially

naturalism), deflationism, traditional metaphysics, realism, minimalisms of various

kinds, defensible ways of speaking of subjects and objects, the relationship between

epistemology, ontology, and semantics and the like. It’s not clear at all that Brandom

addresses theses issues adequately (or as a committed pragmatist) – as when he lays out

the largely formal schema of the inferentialist program sketched in Between Saying and

Doing. That is, from the side of naturalism and realism, for instance, or from the side of

semantic analysis informed by same. There’s the question we must pursue if we are to

answer Putnam’s opening question perspicuously: to catch a glimpse of what new

philosophical options may be in the offing. Brandom is surprisingly guarded about

committing himself ‘metaphysically,’ though I would not say that he equivocates there.

He hasn’t fully resolved the question in his own mind!

29 In fact, the topics just mentioned, which are among the principal topics of the day,

seem overly familiar – as of course they are. But the novelty persists: What, finally,

should we regard as the most tenable account of the relationship between pragmatism

and naturalism? Through the whole of the analytic tradition of the last century, the

favored answer has been this: that pragmatism must yield to the scientistic (or

reductive) economies of naturalism. I venture to say that, now, it makes more sense to

hold that naturalism must concede the prior force and standing of the essential

requirements of pragmatism (if, that is, something close to the pragmatist themes I’ve

tallied a short while ago can be reasonably defended). Naturalism is a variable doctrine

subaltern to our adherence to some more fundamental claim: pragmatist or

reductionist, for example. I regard the change as a tribute to the rising importance of

the theory of the self. Price, I may say, takes an uncertain view of the primacy of the

human subject: he clearly rejects the ‘popular’ naturalistic thesis that holds that, in

relevant contexts, “philosophy” must yield to ‘science.’15 But I cannot see how he finally

eludes its grasp; he does not explain the proper scope of deflationism, which cannot fail

to be a subaltern strategy. In a way, I welcome Price’s insistence (his ‘Priority Thesis’)

to the effect that “subject naturalism is theoretically prior to object naturalism”

(which stalemates reductionism, if I read it aright); but that does not quite settle the


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relationship between naturalism and pragmatism. There must be suitable (pragmatist)

constraints on deflationism, if the Thesis is to be read, finally, along pragmatist lines.

30 In effect, the required shift now means our being prepared to rebut any and all

impoverishing deflationary economies with regard to metaphysics and epistemology.

That is, if we correctly perceive that naturalism has no privileged standing. Indeed,

neither has pragmatism. Nevertheless, in different ways, the admission is compromised

by both Price and Brandom. Brandom and Price have, then, begun to occupy the

eccentric successor roles of the opposition Putnam and Rorty originally shared at the

end of the twentieth century. Both of the new contenders are clearly caught up with a

nostalgia for the scientistic: Price (influenced by Simon Blackburn’s ‘quasi-realism’)

perhaps more daringly than Brandom. My own guess has it that the freshest and most

engaging moments of the developing contest, which ranges far beyond any merely local

skirmish, will come to rest among the pros and cons (once again) of deflationary and

counter-deflationary treatments of truth and disputes regarding representationalism

and realism and the strategies of metaphilosophy.

31 Now, what am I actually offering in the way of a guess at pragmatism’s changing

prospects? I’m persuaded that we’re approaching a new agon obliquely. The center of

gravity will be the consolidation of a simplified, greatly strengthened. An enlarged

pragmatism and the leanest possible form of naturalism we can defend. The current

forays that command attention are all at least partially retrograde. The best of these

favors semantic deflationisms of a variably reductionist or eliminativist or merely

extensionalist cast: most wildly in Rorty; traditionally and rather one-sidedly (thus far),

in Brandom; and possibly in the riskiest way, in the deflationary sense, in Price. I don’t

believe it’s the power of conceptual invention that’s decisive; it’s the provocation of

largely neglected or incompletely examined puzzles suddenly remembered because

they have been revived in a more confrontational and more insistent form than is

usual.

32 What I surmise has happened is that a new tension is beginning to make itself felt

regarding the analysis of the human self or subject: that’s to say, regarding the most

essential topic of the entire movement we know as pragmatism. On the one hand, the

conjunction of deflationism (as with the semantics of truth and meaning) and the

continuing attraction of the supposed primacy and autonomy of semantic analysis

(with respect to marginalizing ‘traditional’ metaphysics and epistemology) threaten to

recover reductive and eliminativist intentions by semantically and informationally

contrived strategies; and, on the other hand, conceptual economies regarding the

functionality of the self (in science and morality, or in accord with the ‘natural

artifactuality’ of language and enlanguaged and encultured human life) are beginning

to require a fresh assessment of the sense in which the self remains a thoroughly

natural kind of being. You realize, therefore, that the more promising, newer

constraints cut against the older scientistic wave of naturalism – a fortiori, against the

scientistic strains of deflationism.

33 I admit I favor the anti-scientistic turn, particularly the enrichment of the theory of the

self, where it favors joining Hegelian and Darwinian themes. But these have not yet

been picked up with conviction by more recent inquiries –which, to my thinking,

confirms the continuing attraction of regressive impulses among analysts, pragmatists,

and naturalists alike. For similar reasons, there’s little that’s arresting in the way of

novel treatments of social, cultural, historical, biological, paleontological, evolutionary,


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normative, communicative, informational phenomena among naturalists and

pragmatists. My intuition is that the recovery of a robust conception of the self will

proceed along artifactualist and constructivist lines; otherwise, insistence on a merely

functionalist treatment of the self is likely to retreat to the effective autonomy of

semantic economies, the minor exercise of testing the tolerable limits of a dependent

deflationism, and the inchoate reduction (or elimination) of the cultural and linguistic

world in biochemical and neurophysiological terms. I offer in evidence the amusing but

otherwise impoverished conclusion steadfastly championed by Daniel Dennett.16

⁂

34 The importance of Huw Price’s contribution to the growing dispute regarding

pragmatism’s future lies with his rather daring sense of naturalism’s liens on

pragmatism’s options. For one thing, he’s suspicious of philosophy’s ‘old-fashioned’

metaphysics and epistemology; he favors the authority and competence of ‘science’ (in

what degree, is not entirely clear) to determine all pertinent facts regarding what may

be found in the world. As he says, ”there is no framework-independent [extra-

linguistic] stance for metaphysics.”17 I agree. (But, surely, one must concede the inverse

with regard to semantic analyses as well.) Price also supports the following quite

ingenious thesis, which he calls ‘functional pluralism,’ the conception of which (if it

entails no prejudice to the standing of any substantive claim) I find entirely congenial:

A functional pluralist accepts that moral, modal, and meaning utterances aredescriptive, fact-stating, truth-apt, cognitive, belief-expressing, or whatever – andfull-bloodedly so, not merely in some ersatz or “quasi” sense. Nevertheless, thepluralist insists that these descriptive utterances are functionally distinct fromscientific descriptions of the natural world; they do a different job in language.They are descriptive, but their job is not to describe what science describes.18

35 Pluralist strategies may be reconciled with naturalism, therefore, if we possess

arguments sufficient to make the case. For instance, I willingly concede that there are

no ‘moral norms’ to be found in the world as ‘actual’ or ‘real’ or ‘existent’ in any respect

in which human persons are found in the world. But, for one thing, I reserve the right

of any philosopher to attempt to make the contrary case. For a second, I would not

deny that humans have indeed constructed plausible forms of moral discourse that

answer to their interests and are capable of sustaining rational dispute and rational

commitment firm enough to vindicate their (that is, our) practice of speaking of moral

truths and moral facts. For a third, I would not support a similar claim against the

actuality of words and sentences or persons or families or artworks or money or

political states or the like. And, for a fourth, I see no plausible way of precluding the

question of the naturalist standing of selves across science and morality (or similar

categorical demarcations).

36 Given such constraints, I would argue that there is no disjunctive line to be drawn

between science and philosophy (or metaphysics), or indeed between science and non-

science; and that, as a consequence, there are no compelling arguments to be had in

favor of the ‘primacy of science’ over (say) philosophy or art criticism or history – or,

any privileged disjunction between semantic analysis and metaphysics. Hence, I take

the following characterization (by Price) of the “functional pluralist’s” position to be

seriously misguided or at least indefensible:


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functional pluralists […] speak from within the scientific framework, but about otherframeworks. This gives the scientific framework a kind of perspectival primacy. Ourviewpoint is internal to science, but external to morality, for example. It is aviewpoint which allows us to refer directly to the objects and propertiescountenanced by science, but not to the objects countenanced by the moral stance.

37 This spells out (very briefly) what Price means by his subscribing to what he names ‘the

Carnap Thesis’ (regarding ‘internal’ and ‘external’ questions).19 But I cannot see that

the ‘functional pluralist’s’ demarcation policy has any plausible payoff regarding the

relationship between pragmatism, naturalism, and deflationism, unless it’s to debar us

from posing essential questions. The philosophical standing of the self or person is

simply too important to be settled by verbal devices: the self belongs, if it belongs

anywhere, to science and morality alike. (If so, then the ‘Priority Thesis’ is not well

formed).

38 It’s on such grounds that Price comes to favor potentially privileged, often quite

extreme deflationary (or minimalist) strategies: for example, what he calls the ‘Priority

Thesis,’ according to which (broadly conceived), “if the claims and ambitions of

philosophy conflict with what science tells us about ourselves [and, it would seem,

about the world that science knows] then philosophy needs to give way.” Nevertheless,

Price also notes that science “cannot turn its spotlight on the language of science

itself.”20 So there are unresolved aporiai at the very heart of Price’s naturalism; hence,

grounds for serious objections affecting not merely his own proposals but all efforts to

ensure the objective standing of deflationary and minimalist economies ranging over

all ‘metaphysical,’ ‘epistemological,’ and ‘semantic’ disputes. As Price concedes: “the

contribution on our side [regarding whatever counts as an objective picture of the real

world] never goes to zero.”21

39 I cannot see how these views can be coherently reconciled. But then, you glimpse, here,

the sense in which arguments (by Brandom and Price) said to be hospitable to

pragmatism’s future prospects instruct us (unwittingly) about what is closer to

pragmatism’s true fortunes among the contests that are just now surfacing along

potentially productive lines.22

40 I would say Brandom’s intuition was more promising than Price’s (but noticeably less

explicit), just where Price takes Brandom to be equivocating or to be actually

inconsistent – in the spirit of Price’s provocatively deflationist option (barely bruited

here). Nevertheless, Brandom’s own attraction to deflationism (or what he offers as its

‘prosentential’ analogue)23 all but wipes out the gain he nearly secures. Both Price and

Brandom seek roundabout formulations of what, without prejudice (or ‘metaphysical’

intent), we may as well call seeking truth – though in such a way that both Price and

Brandom manage to preclude the actual use of ‘true’ as an ascribable predicate that

serves (in Brandom’s deprecating characterization) as explanatory ‘guarantor of the

success of our practical endeavors’24 – what I’ve dubbed ‘seeking truth’ solely to keep

our disputed goal in view. The only reliable objection to Brandom’s deflationary charge

(but the objection does indeed count) is that ‘true’ fills predicative roles that are not

committed in any way to cognitive privilege (or, for that matter, to ordinary

‘explanatory’ tasks). I am prepared to argue that every strong deflationary paraphrase

of ‘true’ omits what we cannot afford to leave out, or circularly implicates what we

claim to have dismissed, or is tautologically uninstructive with regard to the elusive

consideration in question. I mean, of course, the realist import of the truth predicate.

Recall that, on my view, philosophical semantics is metaphysics in another guise. If I’m


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right about this, then even the most effective and compelling deflationary treatment of

‘truth – surely, the treatment Paul Horwich accords it – signals its own ineluctable

defect.

41 We’ve arrived, then, at an essential contrast, a place at which to begin to decide the

respective fate and fortune of the deflationary/anti-deflationary treatments of ‘truth,’

‘represenationality,’ ‘reference,’ ‘evidence,’ ‘knowledge,’ ‘reality,’ and the like, essential

(as I see matters) to deciding the right or best (or, perhaps better, ‘second-best’) way to

reconcile pragmatism and naturalism in our time. I take ‘truth’ to be the exemplary

case, and Price and Brandom to have failed us in the pragmatist’s quest. Effectively,

there is a function of the predicate ‘true’ that is inseparable from the epistemic

function of ‘fact’ or ‘confirmed fact’ (or the like), which deflationists cannot

convincingly account for or explain away semantically.

42 I can spare very little space here to specify the force of what I take to be the pragmatist

complaint, perhaps most clearly anticipated in Peirce’s paper, “The Fixation of Belief” –

but surely implicit in the classic pragmatists’ treatment of ‘truth’ (no matter how

tortured). I find the nerve of the quarrel adumbrated, unintentionally, in Brandom’s

chapter, titled “Why Truth is Not Important in Philosophy.” Consider, for instance, the

following lines:

I’ve said that my claim that truth is not important in philosophy should not beunderstood as denying the importance of truthfulness, epistemicconscientiousness, or assessments of knowledge. But I’ve also said that in each ofthese cases, though we may if we like talk about the phenomena in question interms of truth, we need not do so, and lose nothing essential if we do not.25

43 This sounds reasonable but it is not: it falls far short of what a full-blooded pragmatism

would (rightly) require. What is the point of separating ‘truth’ and ‘epistemic

conscientiousness’ if truth is treated in the strongest deflationary way?

44 There remains a still-unanswered objection: namely, that a would-be essential use or

function of true’ (which Brandom and Price intend to displace or deflate in somewhat

different ways) cannot be secured by any merely psychological or semantic element

(unless suitably linked to what is epistemologically still missing); hence, that the

function needed cannot be derived from any would-be prior inferential linkage

between what we say and what we do (according to Brandom’s strategy). I’m convinced

that this single challenge stalemates every merely deflationary account of ‘truth’ –

hence, also, every inferentialist program (of Brandom’s sort) that claims to be full-

service (including Brandom’s own variant).

45 I’m certain we can do better in reconciling pragmatism and naturalism, because there

are a good many ‘methodologically temperate’ factual discoveries about the advent of

language, the functionalities of the emergent self, the nature of enlanguaged cultures

(drawn in part from post-Darwinian paleoanthropology) that are in noticeable accord

with the pragmatist’s essential commitments (tallied earlier) – where pragmatism is

clearly not in accord with scientism – commitments Price tends to discount or ‘deflate’

if he can, preferring scientism’s seemingly more robust facts, all the while he presents

himself as a pragmatist (as in his seemingly robust ‘Priority Thesis’).

46 Price’s executive commitment insists that the analysis of ‘representationalism’ and

(say) ‘truth’ should be conducted from a vantage that “remain[s] resolutely on the

‘word’ side of the word/world divide.”26 (A policy meant to hold for pragmatists and

naturalists alike – but is plainly nowhere secured.) Price is either arbitrary here or in


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tow to his own unguarded metaphysics. I find the worry confirmed, however

innocently, in Price’s so-called ‘Priority Thesis,’ which I’ve mentioned in passing and

which is best read as a deflationist’s version of pragmatism:

Subject naturalism [Price says] is theoretically prior to object naturalism, becausethe latter depends on validation from a subject naturalist perspective.27

47 Certainly, this much of Price’s view may seem to accord with pragmatism’s priorities.

But the formulation is hardly perspicuous. We are not told how to distinguish between

the claims of science and the claims of philosophy, and we are not told how the

argumentative resources of the ‘two’ sorts of naturalism are to be shared or divided –

or indeed what ‘priority’ now means. We are hardly told what ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’

are.

48 By ‘object naturalism’ Price intends the doctrine, ontological or/and epistemological,

that holds that ‘all there is the world studied by science’ or/and that ‘all genuine

knowledge is scientific knowledge.’ By ‘subject naturalism,’ however, he means,

eccentrically, that “science tells us that we humans are natural creatures, and if the

claims of and ambitions of philosophy conflict with this view, then philosophy needs to

give way.” But surely that means (may at least be construed as meaning) that ‘subject

naturalism’ is itself subsumed under the umbrella of ‘object naturalism’ (or is entitled

to claim evidentiery resources that are not yet spelled out), which sets the stage for an

extensive deflationism – a fortiori, for a deflationary version of pragmatism itself. It’s

also possible that Price is committed to inconsistent readings of his ‘subject

naturalism’: on the one hand, subject naturalism is addressed to a sub-topic of object

naturalism and is subject, therefore, to the latter’s priorities: on the other hand, the

whole of object naturalism presupposes the validative ‘priority’ of subject naturalism,

so subject naturalism is characterized in some privileged way.28 Beyond all that, Price

explicitly says that he is committed to ‘naturalism without representationalism’29 –

which is, of course, the first salvo of a very strong deflationism that cannot fail to

undermine the ‘normal’ priorities of a pragmatist’s reading of the ‘Priority Thesis.’

(Representationalism, like truth, is a profoundly equivocal notion, as Kant discovered.)

49 The clue I spy is naive enough. For one thing, I agree with what Price calls the

‘insubstantialist’ account of truth: namely, ‘that truth itself plays no significant causal-

explanatory role’ of its own.30 For a second, I have no doubt that what we mean by

‘truth’ (as well as what we mean by ‘knowledge’ and ‘reality’), within the context of any

body of science, cannot be simply discovered, must be a reasoned construction of some

kind relative to human interests; hence, that to hold that semantic analysis is

inseparable from metaphysics (and epistemology) produces no paradox at all.

Nevertheless, there is a third consideration to conjure with: namely, that truth

concerns a distinctive kind of relationship between (what is often called) the

‘assertoric’ use of language and whatever belongs among the ‘things’ of the world that

assertion and action engage (as by ‘saying and doing’) – a relationship that, invoking

our understanding of the nature of human selves and their interests, supports an all

but indefeasible, generic, realist conviction, without indefeasible criteria or

conceptions of any sort regarding meaning, knowledge, reality, or the like.

50 In this sense, I would not say, with Price, that truth is merely ‘insubstantialist’: it does

answer to our ‘substantialist’ sense of the actuality of our world; the uniqueness of our

discursive and reflexive powers ubiquitously involved in all our engagements with the

world; and, most important, our practical or effective inability (in what may be rightly


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qualified as ‘pragmatic’ – in Peirce’s and Dewey’s convergent picture of the continuum

of the animal and the human) to ‘doubt’ or deny the realist import of our involvement

with the world. In short, for all our philosophical cleverness, we cannot (in the

pragmatist sense) shake free of our spontaneous, more or less ubiquitous commitment

to the realist cast of assertoric ‘success,’ which, of course, is hardly hostage to any

particular truth-claim. Furthermore, although there are, admittedly, important

parallels between the functions of cognitive and moral norms and even between

‘realist’ beliefs regarding truth and (may I say) beliefs of moral ‘correctness,’ the

insuperable ‘persuasion’ of the first cannot be matched by that of the second.

51 In this sense, ‘truth’ answers primordially to a presumptive realist relationship

between assertion and world, whereas moral ‘assertion’ at its most fundamental cannot

claim to rest on a similarly irresistible presumption. I take that to be a very strong

abductive intuition, impossible to confirm decisively.

52 Price may have been too quick, then, in denying Brandom a better option against his

own sort of minimalism. He cites Brandom’s words against Brandom’s unguarded

tendency toward metaphysical ‘inflation,’ hence, toward an old-fashioned, outmoded

way of doing metaphysics; that is, he signals that Brandom is equivocally attracted to

representationalism all the while he (Brandom) assures us that he means to address

such matters ‘semantically.’ But I see no inconsistency there, only a small philosophical

confusion.

53 In a perfectly straightforward sense, ‘metaphysics’ and ‘epistemology’ cannot be

philosophically separated from ‘semantic analysis,’ or it from them. Semantics is

metaphysics by another name (pace Carnap, Quine, Michael Dummett, and an army of

others): we need a test of sorts (however provisional or ad hoc) by which to settle the

pragmatist status of figures like Brandom, Sellars, Frege, Quine, Carnap, Rorty, Putnam,

and (now) Price, and perhaps Wittgenstein; and the test we need cannot apply

disjunctively to human ‘subjects’ and physical ‘objects’ (or to what Price speaks of as

‘subject naturalism’ and ‘object naturalism’) – or to sorting the ‘purely verbal’ function

of ‘semantic’ distinctions from those that are (somehow) metaphysically freighted.

There’s the nerve of the emerging agon involving pragmatism and naturalism. The

unlikelihood of vindicating any such disjunction is classic pragmatism’s ace – whatever

quarrels may appear to arise regarding truth, validation, knowledge, meaning, or

reality! Abduction (in Peirce’s best sense) takes a distinctly holist and realist cast that

corresponds very neatly to what Wittgenstein calls ‘a form of life.’

54 I’ll add a small bit more regarding Paul Horwich’s exemplary attempt to secure the

sparest possible (most unyielding) form of deflationism that can be found (what

Horwich calls ‘minimalism’), to assure you that the objection I’ve advanced applies to

Horwich’s thesis as readily as to Price’s and Brandom’s alternatives. The following is

the leanest version of deflationary minimalism that I’m familiar with:

Deflationism begins by emphasizing the fact that no matter what theory of truth wemight espouse professionally, we are all prepared to infer The belief that snow is white is truefromSnow is whiteand vice versa. And, more generally, we all accept instances of the ‘truth schemata’The belief (conjecture, assertion supposition....) that p is true iff p.But instead of taking the traditional view that an analysis of truth still needs to begiven – a reductive account deeper than the truth schemata, which will explain why


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we accept their instances – the deflationist maintains that, since our commitmentto these schemata accounts for everything we do with the truth predicate, we cansuppose that they implicitly define it.31

55 I take this to be irreconcilable with pragmatism, simply because the use of ‘true’ is

inseparable from whatever counts as the outcome of successful inquiries regarding

worldly things viewed in terms of human interests. Speaking rather unguardedly, the

essential issue is either not the analysis or definition of the ‘truth predicate’ (along the

lines of the ‘truth schemata’ given) or it concerns the relationship between the use of

the truth predicate (in something like the first sense) and the usual accounts of

metaphysical and epistemological questions having to do with what we regard as an

actual body of knowledge (suitably validated) that, for that reason, counts as a proper

part of the analysis (of the use) of the predicate ‘true.’ In this sense, though I regret

having to say so, Horwich is finally evasive.

⁂

56 This concludes the first part of my answer to Putnam’s question. I realize it may appear

to leave us all at loose ends. Well, not completely. Let me mollify you some. What I’ve

done thus far is provide a set of considerations in terms of which Putnam’s question

should be met (and would be met effectively) by staging a confrontation between

Brandom and Wittgenstein rather than by featuring a reminder of Rorty’s extravagant

(and improbable) readingof Wittgenstein, or a tepid picture of Wittgenstein’s

convergence in the direction of certain of Kant’s concessions. (This is, in fact, the nerve

of what is to be the second part of the larger inquiry of which the first part is now

before you: the fundamental disagreement between Brandom and Wittgenstein

regarding a matter that supposedly affects the pragmatist standing of each.) The

decisive reason, I’ve suggested, is simply that it is indeed Brandom who has effectively

challenged every conventional form of pragmatism and analytic philosophy to change

its orientation along the lines of what Brandom calls ‘analytic pragmatism.’ Brandom

has made an arresting case for a new constellation of convergences involving strenuous

options drawn especially from the different, sometimes overlapping interests of

naturalism, deflationism, and inferentialism.32

57 That is, I suggest we try to answer Putnam’s question by looking to the most salient

topics of our imminent future. I have no doubt that the central agon will at least

include, certainly for a not insignificant season, the pragmatist and analytic critique of

Brandom’s inferentialism. (The second part of this essay centers on what I take to be

Brandom’s profound misreading [or misunderstanding] of Wittgenstein’s

‘meaning’/’use’ distinction, on the strength of which Brandom claims to base the

pragmatism of his own undertaking.) Nevertheless, I think it may well be that the

general suggestion I’ve been exploring here is, finally, more important than the specific

confrontation I recommend. If that proved true, it would yield a striking, however

distant, analogue of the original stalemate between Rorty and Putnam (which went

nowhere philosophically and yet revitalized the academy’s interest in pragmatism in

the most remarkable way). In any event, the original question only seems to elude us as

its implications become more evident.

58 According to Putnam, Wittgenstein and the pragmatists converge. I grant the point –

and move on to a greener comparison. I suggest we consider instead the respect in


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which, misreading Wittgenstein, Brandom utterly fails to bring his project into accord

with the most minimal considerations essential to pragmatism. The trouble is, the

argument leading to Brandom’s conclusion should accord with the findings I’ve now

laid out regarding the resources of naturalism and deflationism; here, standard

arguments examined in terms of specimens drawn from Price and Horwich prove to be

very difficult to make convincing. Furthermore, the actual argument involving the

comparison between Brandom and Wittgenstein has proved to be about as long as the

preliminary argument now before you. In fact, it requires its own stage-setting, which I

couldn’t possibly have included here. So I’m obliged to stop and signal (all too briefly)

just how the rest of the argument should play out and what it should entail. I can only

hope, therefore, that you find this part of it intriguing enough to wait to see how its

sequel plays out.

59 Reasonable cautions against the excesses of deflationism and those of scientistically-

minded naturalisms do not need to wait for the second part of the argument. They are

reasonably free-standing and convincingly concluded here; and, of course, they count

straightforwardly in favor of any moderate pragmatism – say, conceptions more or less

in accord with the tally earlier provided. So that if Brandom cannot rely on his reading

of Wittgenstein to buttress the genuinely pragmatist character of his inferentialism,

which in fact relies almost entirely on extending the (already) settled work of

algorithmically regularized inference-forms drawn from the special vocabularies of

formal semantics (introduced in Between Saying and Doing), then it should become quite

clear that Brandom’s misreading of Wittgenstein (if confirmed) might well signify that

he’s made no use of any sustained analysis (Wittgensteinian or not) of the actual and

possible ways in which inferential linkages in language-games or fragments of ordinary

natural-language discourse are processed and discerned or reasonably imputed.

60 But if so, then I, for one, cannot see the force of claiming that Brandom’s own model of

a ‘semantic logicism’ is a full-bodied form of pragmatism.33 It’s entirely possible that

Brandom means little more, by “pragmatic,” than that, in pertinent contexts, we are

entitled to replace the inferentially implicit “content” of what speakers ‘do’ (verbally

and non-verbally) with the appropriately matched ‘content’ of what, on Brandom’s own

argument, we say speakers could then ‘say,’ preserving implicit inferential intentions

(or intended content) ranging over expressive and behavioral episodes. But strategies

of these sorts have surely not yet earned the right to claim a privileged approach to the

analysis of the ‘logical’ life of natural-language discourse! Yet that is precisely what

Wittgenstein’s exercises (in Investigations) put at mortal risk. That is the key to the

tempting suggestion that Wittgenstein may have been a pragmatist after all. (In effect:

distancing himself as far as possible from what, as it turns out, Brandom actually calls

Frege’s ‘pragmatism.’) Furthermore, to have stalemated the extreme uses of

deflationism and naturalism (more strenuously championed by Price than by Brandom)

is to deprive Brandom of the other principal dialectical resources he himself invokes in

his attempt to lay a proper ground for inferentialism. But then, as it turns out,

Brandom’s mistake in pressing a deflationist reading of ‘true’ unexpectedly anticipates

the import of his misreading of Wittgenstein.


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NOTES

1. See Hilary Putnam, “Was Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?,” (1995: 27).

2. Putnam (1995: xi).

3. Putnam (1995: 27).

4. Richard Rorty (1979: 5, 7).


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5. Putnam (1995: 34-6).

6. Rorty (1979: 373). Rorty claims to be an opponent of analytic scientism, but his proclivities

remain eliminativist, as they’ve been for a very long time. Compare Hilary Putnam (2000),

“Richard Rorty on Reality and Justification”; and Rorty’s “Response to Hilary Putnam,” in the

same volume. Putnam may have made too much of some lines in Richard Rorty, Contingency,

Irony, and Solidarity, (1989: 6-7) (within the whole of the essay, “The Contingency of Language”).

The simple fact is that Rorty is often indifferent to seeming paradox and inconsistency – and,

very possibly, at times, to stubborn inconsistency (for example, his own).

7. I provide the details of such a form of realism (among the pragmatists) in my Pragmatism

Ascendent: A Yard of Narrative, An Ounce of Prophecy, (2012).

8. John McDowell’s “Toward Rehabilitating Objectivity,” (2000), notes that Rorty (1991), approves

of Putnam’s having argued that "notions like ‘reference’ – semantical notions which relate

language to nonlanguage – are internal to our overall view of the world"; that "From the

standpoint of the representionalist, the fact that notions like representation, reference, and

truth are deployed in ways that are internal to a language or a theory is no reason to deny them"

(6; cited at 114 by McDowell). I’d forgotten this nice piece of civility. But I think I may say that,

here, both Rorty and Putnam are clearly pragmatists, but neither was able to hold the line: not

Rorty in what I’ve already cited from The Mirror of Nature, and not Putnam, in his Dewey Lectures,

(1994: 495-517).

9. I take this to be the ‘conserving,’ the deliberately ‘conservative,’ import of Brandom’s entire

program – opposed, if I may say so, to the radical economies of Rorty’s postmodern pragmatism

and, as we shall see, to the very differently motivated ‘semantic minimalism’ of the kind of

naturalism favored by Huw Price, who is otherwise an ally of Brandom’s. Brandom makes it clear

at the very start of his account that his formulation (what he calls ‘semantic logicism’) is meant

to be hospitable to all kinds of ways of treating ‘semantic relations between vocabularies’

(serving inferentialism’s program): “analysis, definition, paraphrase, translation, reduction of

different sorts, truth-making, and various kinds of supervenience” – where “it is characteristic of

classical analytic philosophy that logical vocabulary is accorded a privileged role in specifying

these semantic relations” (Between Saying and Doing, 2). I make the worry explicit because Rorty

seems to be a bit shocked by Brandom’s effort (which is odd) and Price seems baffled by

Brandom’s way of proceeding (which might well be puzzling to an extreme deflationist).

10. Brandom (2008: 1).

11. Two short pieces come to mind that have helped me in reviewing these matters. The first is

Brandom’s “Response to John McDowell,” addressed to John McDowell, “Comment on Lecture

One” (of Between Saying and Doing), one of a series of instructive papers by different hands (and

responses to each by Brandom), collected in Philosophical Topics, 36 (2), 2008. Here, Brandom

confirms his intent to bring analytic philosophy and pragmatism together in order to launch his

‘analytic pragmatism’ (135). But he also explains the sense in which he’s not wedded to any

particular ‘paradigmatic core program’ (empiricism, naturalism, artificial intelligence,

functionalism, or the like) (135). He’s prepared to shift from one to another, quite freely,

wherever any such option proves to be particularly helpful.

The other piece is a trim Critical Notice of Brandom’s book: Daniel Whiting (2009). Whiting

expresses doubts about the novelty of Brandom’s general approach: “Both its proximity to

pragmatism and, especially, its distance from traditional analytic philosophy (as he characterizes

both) seem overstated. VV-sufficiency and -necessity claims [that is, claims involving matched

target and base vocabularies] are the traditional fodder of analytic philosophy (as Brandom

describes it) and can be arrived at without the apparatus of MURs [that is, 'meaning-use

relations']” (606). Compare the text of Ch. 1, Between Saying and Doing. Whiting’s doubts also

suggest considering anticipations in (say) Dewey’s Logic and Peirce’s pragmatic ‘maxim’ (in “How


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to Make Our Ideas Clear”). I must thank my assistant, Phillip Honenberger for drawing my

attention to, and making available, these (and related) materials.

12. Compare Michael Dummett (1981, Introduction).

13. Brandom (2008: 202).

14. See Huw Price (2011: 308-9).

15. See Price (2011: 186).

16. See Daniel C. Dennett 1991.

17. Price (2011: 137).

18. Price (2011: 136).

19. Price (2011: 147). On the ‘Carnap Thesi,’ see 136-7.

20. Price (2011: 30-2, 185-7).

21. Price (2011: 31). That Price entertains the idea at all is already completely incompatible with

any viable form of pragmatism – hence, on my argument, any defensible form of naturalism.

22. See Price (2011: xi, 319-21). Compare Robert B. Brandom (2011: 140-1). See, also, Simon

Blackburn (1993, Ch. 1), which colors the exchange between Price and Brandom.

23. See Robert B. Brandom (2009: 163-5). Brandom cites as the original source of the idea,

D. Grover, J. Camp, & N. Belnap (1975), which I have not read.

24. See Robert B. Brandom, “Why Truth is Not Important in Philosophy,” (2009: 159).

25. Brandom (2009: 158); but compare the rest of the chapter.

26. Price (2011: 318); compare Brandom (2008: 177-8).

27. Price (2011: 186).

28. Price (2011: 186).

29. Price (2011: 185-7).

30. Price (2011: 116-7; see, also, 115).

31. Paul Horwich, “The Minimalist Conception of Truth,” slightly revised, abstracted from his

Truth, 2nd. ed., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, in Truth, S. Blackburn and K. Simmons

(eds.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, 240.

32. Regarding the first two themes, see, further, Brandom (2011, Introduction and Ch. 7).

33. See Brandom (2008: 48-54).

ABSTRACTS

The paper notices that different readings have been provided as for the connections between

Wittgenstein and pragmatism, such as for example H. Putnam’s picture as opposed to R. Rorty’s

description that packages Wittgenstein and Dewey together as ‘postmodern’ pragmatists. Joseph

Margolis tries to broaden the discussion by including an examination of Wilfrid Sellars, Gottlob

Frege, Robert Brandom, and Huw Price. His aim it to review the newer challenges of naturalism

and deflationism, which, by their own instruction, should bring us to the decisive contest

between the ‘pragmatism’ of the Investigations and that of Brandom’s Between Saying and Doing.

The larger purpose of this exercise is to assess pragmatism’s best prospects currently, in meeting

the gathering challenges of the day.


153

AUTHOR

JOSEPH MARGOLIS

Temple University

josephmargolis455[at]hotmail.com


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A Pragmatist Conception ofCertaintyWittgenstein and Santayana

Guy Bennett-Hunter

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I would like to thank the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the

University of Edinburgh for awarding me the Postdoctoral Research Fellowship that

made possible the research for, and writing of, this paper between January and August

2012.

1 Goodman (2002) has perceptively drawn attention to some ways in which

Wittgenstein’s thought can be regarded as ‘pragmatist.’ Using James’s Pragmatism as his

main point of reference, he identifies a number of pragmatist themes in Wittgenstein’s

(1969) On Certainty, among which we also find Wittgenstein’s (1969: § 422) direct

statement, “I am trying to say something that sounds like pragmatism.” Notably,

Goodman (2002: 21-3) identifies the Wittgensteinian notion of hinge propositions as

being among these pragmatist themes.1 In the first part of this paper, I want to set out

briefly the conception of hinge propositions as articulated in On Certainty and then

draw on Pritchard’s (2011, 2012) recent reading of their nature and significance to

articulate the Wittgensteinian concept of certainty implied by that reading.

2 Wittgenstein develops the notion of hinge propositions from the observation that,

whenever we doubt something, there must always be something which is not doubted,

taken for granted, as the background against which the doubt arises. If we have a doubt

about whether something is the case, we may engage in the practice of checking or

testing the object of the doubt. As Wittgenstein (1969: § 163) illustrates the way in

which this checking process works:

We check the story of Napoleon, but not whether all the reports about him arebased on sense-deception, forgery and the like. For whenever we test anything, weare already presupposing something that is not tested.


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3 Later on, he makes the same point by pointing out that when I conduct an experiment

to test the truth of some proposition of which I am doubtful, I do not doubt the

existence of the apparatus before my eyes (Wittgenstein 1969: §§ 163, 337). The practice

of testing certain propositions, the truth of which is not beyond doubt, presupposes

that the truth of certain propositions is beyond doubt: that the documents about

Napoleon are not forged, that the apparatus really exists and so on. Wittgenstein (1969:

§ 88) contrasts such propositions with “the route travelled by inquiry”; the route of

inquiry is so structured as to exempt certain propositions from doubt. If they are ever

even explicitly formulated, such propositions ‘lie apart’ from the route of inquiry; they

are “the places inquiry does not go” (Wittgenstein 1969: § 88; Goodman 2002: 21). Such

propositions are, for Wittgenstein (1969: §§ 342, 613) “in deed not doubted,” since a

doubt about such propositions, off the route of inquiry, would have the unwelcome

consequence of “drag[ging] everything with it and plung[ing] it into chaos.” Finally,

Wittgenstein (1969: §§ 475, 359) describes our commitment to such propositions as

“primitive” and “something animal.” Unlike our commitment to propositions on the

route of inquiry, the truth of which is believed on the basis of our commitment to these

indubitable propositions, our commitment to a proposition of this latter kind does not

reflect a belief but rather “a way of acting” (Wittgenstein 1969: § 110).

4 Propositions of this kind are known as ‘hinge propositions’ after a metaphor

Wittgenstein uses to illustrate their nature. Wittgenstein (1969: § 341) writes,

the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositionsare exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.

5 As he goes on to explain a little later, “[w]e just can’t investigate everything and for

that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn,

the hinges must stay put” (Wittgenstein 1969: § 343).

6 It seems intuitively clear that hinge propositions are subject to an attitude of certainty

and, indeed, there is plenty of evidence in Wittgenstein’s text to support this view. But

Pritchard’s work makes clear that the certainty with which we are typically committed

to hinge propositions is quite different from the certainty at which traditional

epistemology aims, the special kind of knowledge sought by Descartes and his

successors.

7 Pritchard (2012) provides an argument to support the idea that it is just the certainty

with which we are committed to hinge propositions that is the obstacle to viewing

those commitments as matters of belief or knowledge. As he points out, for something

to be a ground for doubt, it has to be more certain than the target proposition which

one is calling into doubt. If it were not more certain than the target proposition,

Pritchard suggests, one would have a better basis for rejecting the ground for doubt

than for rejecting the belief which is the target of the doubt itself. As he observes, this

connects with Wittgenstein’s (1969: § 125) question, “What is to be tested by what?” Let

us take the proposition, in normal circumstances, that one has two hands as an

example of a proposition of which we are as certain as we are of any proposition. A

doubt about the proposition that I have two hands would “drag everything with it and

plunge it into chaos” for, in that case, it would not make sense to check my belief that I

have two hands by looking for them, “[f]or why shouldn’t I test my eyes by looking to

find out whether I see my two hands?” (Wittgenstein 1969: § 125). It follows that I must

be more certain of some other proposition (one functioning as a hinge proposition) than

one that I call into doubt. Wittgenstein seems to want to treat the proposition that I


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have two hands, in normal circumstances, as just such a hinge proposition. Pritchard

draws the conclusion that hinge propositions are “logically immune to a rationally

irresistible doubt since by definition any ground for doubt in these propositions would

be itself more dubitable than the target proposition itself” (Pritchard 2012: 256). There

can therefore be no rational requirement to doubt a hinge proposition. Pritchard

observes that this point about doubt applies, in equal measure, to its counterpart,

belief. He writes,

just as grounds for doubt need to be more certain than the target belief that isdoubted, so grounds for belief need to be more certain than the target propositionwhich is believed otherwise they can’t be coherently thought to be playing therequired supporting role. A direct consequence of this point is that just as there canbe no rational requirement to doubt that which one is most certain of, so onecannot rationally believe it either. (Pritchard 2012: 257)

8 Contra G. E. Moore, then, the certainty with which one is committed to the proposition,

for example, that one has two hands is not an indication that one believes or has

knowledge of that proposition. As Pritchard argues elsewhere, this certainty is, for

Wittgenstein, just what prevents the Moorean claim that one knows (or, a leviori,

believes) these propositions:

Wittgenstein’s claim is that whatever would count as a reason in favour of a claimto know must be more certain than the proposition claimed as known, sinceotherwise it would not be able to play this supporting role. But if the propositionclaimed as known is something which one is most certain of, then it follows thatthere can be no more certain proposition which could be offered in its favour andstand as the required supporting reason. (2011: 525, cf. Wittgenstein 1969: § 243)

9 Pritchard examines, and finds wanting, various recent readings of Wittgenstein which

attempt to defend the possibility of belief in, or knowledge of, hinge propositions. He

puts forward the alternative suggestion that hinge commitments do not put us in the

market for knowledge, are not beliefs (which could be acquired by the process of

competent deduction, for example) and, while they may be treated as propositional

attitudes, they cannot be treated as the specific propositional attitude of belief. While

he admits that agents can recognise the logical relationships between non-hinge

propositions and hinge propositions, Pritchard disputes that recognition of those

relationships can be “part of a process through which one acquires belief, and thus

rational belief, in these hinge propositions” (Pritchard 2012: 270). It follows that it is in

the very nature of rational support that it is essentially local, a fact which Pritchard

thinks is disguised by our ordinary epistemic practices in which doubts about hinge

propositions do not, as a matter of fact, typically arise. The conclusion of Pritchard’s

argument is that the propositions of which we are most certain are not, even

potentially, rationally supported but are rather the ‘hinges’ “relative to which we

rationally evaluate – and thus ‘test’ – other propositions” (Pritchard 2012: 257). The

essentially local nature of rational support and the consequent rational groundlessness

of our hinge commitments2 implied by this non-epistemic reading is what Pritchard

takes Wittgenstein (1969: § 166) to be referring to when he writes of the

‘groundlessness of our believing.’

10 Pritchard draws from Wittgenstein’s ‘hinge’ metaphor for these certainties the thought

that the rational groundlessness which they imply is not an optional or accidental

feature of our epistemic practices but is, rather, “essential to any belief-system.”3 But, in

my view, the hinge metaphor also indicates an altogether more pragmatist import of

this Wittgensteinian line of thought, captured by Wittgenstein’s (1969: § 343) phrase “If


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I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put.”4 In my view, this phrase, “If I want the

door to turn…,” implies the relativity of our exemption from doubt of certain

propositions to our practical interests, the dependence of that exemption on the fact

that, at any given time, we are trying to get things done. And another of Wittgenstein’s

(1969: §§ 94-8) metaphors, contrasting the river bed with the flux of the river itself,

takes this line of thought further. Wittgenstein (1969: §§ 94, 105) thinks of our picture

of the world (to which the set of our hinge commitments is clearly integral) as the

background to all our doubts, beliefs and inquiries: not itself a true or false proposition

but the background against which true and false are distinguished; not itself an

argument but the “element in which arguments have their life.” This certain,

indubitable background is compared to the bedrock of a river, the river itself being the

flux of our dubitable beliefs, constantly open to question in the light of our hinge

commitments. But, in metaphorical terms, parts of the bedrock may break off and

become part of the flux of the river, while parts of the river itself may harden and

become bedrock. The same shifting relationship obtains between our ordinary beliefs

and the hinge commitments which form the background against which those beliefs

make sense; although there must be a distinction, at any given time, between what is

open to doubt and what is beyond doubt, that distinction is not, and cannot be a sharp

or permanent one. The course of our experience, and our ‘ways of acting’ in relation to

it, may cause us to re-evaluate things and to doubt what was once part of the

indubitable background or it may lead us to take for granted something that was

previously open to question. To my mind, the river metaphor carries the important

implication that what counts as a hinge proposition at one time, in one context, may

not count as a hinge proposition in a different context. The river metaphor seems to

indicate not only that, for Wittgenstein, the fact that we exempt certain propositions

from doubt is dependent on the fact that we have practical interests but also that the

set of specific propositions that are exempted from doubt at any given time is relative

to the specific practical interests we have at that time. To take an illustration from

Wittgenstein (1969: § 421) mentioned by Goodman (2002: 24), the proposition that I am

in England could be ‘on the route of inquiry’ at one time, for example, if I am lost near

the border between England and Scotland. At another time, however, it might express a

hinge commitment which I take for granted when, for instance, I doubt whether next

Monday is a national holiday. The shifting nature of what counts as a hinge

commitment constitutes evidence for the relativity of hinge commitments, and

therefore of the certainty with which we are necessarily committed to them, to our

practical concerns. This relativity is connected, I think, with the Wittgensteinian

rejection of the idea that hinge propositions, and the certainty with which we are

committed to them, have to do with belief and knowledge.

11 It is in this sense, I suggest, that the Wittgensteinian conception of certainty may

reasonably be described as a ‘pragmatist’ one. It embodies what Cornel West (1989: 89 et

passim) has referred to as the specifically pragmatist hallmark of ‘anti-epistemology’ or

the ‘evasion’ of philosophy centred around epistemology, as traditionally understood.

In the next part of this paper, I want further to defend this view by considering the

affinity between the Wittgensteinian conception of certainty just set out and the one in

play in the work of the neglected thinker, broadly included among the pragmatists,

George Santayana.

⁂


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12 Santayana develops his concept of ‘animal faith,’ which I want to read as a pragmatist

concept of certainty, as a direct response to the Cartesian problem of scepticism. He

criticises the Cartesian quest for knowledge based upon foundations of absolute

certainty,5 arguing that there can be no such foundations and therefore, on this

conception, no knowledge. Santayana offers his concept of animal faith as a more

satisfactory idea on which to base an account of knowledge.

13 Santayana’s (1923: 14ff., cf. Sprigge 1995: 34-5) argument is that solipsism is a no less

coherent response to Cartesian-style scepticism than the more popular insistence on

the existence of the external world. And he argues that, to be consistent, the sceptic is

compelled to subscribe to an even more radical solipsism, what he calls ‘solipsism of

the present moment.’ That experience exists is indubitable for the sceptic, as Descartes

recognised, but a sense of identity and of a temporal order of experiences is only

possible if it is assumed that the experiences are those of a being not simply composed

of experiences. But this is one of the very points in question and the sceptic has no

grounds for the assumption. As Santayana (1923: 28-9) explains, the solipsist might

experience qualities which those committed to the existence of the external world

would call ‘pastness’ or ‘futurity’ but without having any commitment to the existence

of a real succession of events. Whether or not it is actually possible to live in this kind

of state, it is the only theoretical position which involves no element of faith or belief

that is not either itself certain or founded upon a certainty construed as a form of

knowledge. Timothy Sprigge (1995: 38ff.) takes up Santayana’s argument for the view

that, if we confine ourselves to the goal of certainty in the knowledge sense, we will

have no reason to believe in change since the experience of apparent change is perfectly

compatible with fundamental doubt about the existence of real change. Someone might

object that the solipsist accepts the existence of an experiential flux and that this flux

just consists in experiences really giving way to one another, therefore even the

solipsist should conclude that change really occurs: the flux of experience just consists

in things which are in real, and not just specious, temporal relations to one another.

But, in defence of Santayana, Sprigge (1995: 37) counters this objection by asking us to

think of the experience of a swinging pendulum – which is the single experience of the

pendulum in action. For real change to be experienced, this experience would have to

give way to another experience. But this kind of change cannot be experienced in the

same sense as the experience of the pendulum, which could be specious. Whereas it is

possible to have an experience of the swinging pendulum without believing in the

existence of anything other than that experience, it is not similarly possible to

experience real change without being committed to some larger context, other than

experience, within which the change occurs from one experience to another. In the

experience of real change, a second experience would take over the story told by the

first. And if this really happens they cannot just be aspects of a larger experiential

content, existing only in the present, as the solipsist of the present moment would be

forced to suggest. In other words, the solipsist of the present moment could not

possibly believe in real change and is not compelled to believe in anything external to

experience itself as it appears to her in the present moment.

14 So on the conception of knowledge aimed at by the Cartesian practitioners of the quest

for certainty in the knowledge sense, there can be none. But, as Sprigge (1995: 47)

summarises, “On the whole Santayana’s explorations of scepticism are designed to

show the hopelessness of a certain ideal of knowledge, that for which knowledge must


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be based on indubitable foundations, not to show the impossibility of knowledge on a

more sensible interpretation of the term.” That more sensible interpretation is referred

to by Santayana as ‘animal faith’: human beings are compared to animals who have to

cope with a difficult environment, their survival depending on a kind of implicit

responsiveness to that environment of which belief in that environment’s existence is

not much more than a self-conscious expression (Sprigge 1995: 48). There may be no

rational grounds for this belief but it is psychologically irresistible and practically

indispensable. The phenomenon of shock is Santayana’s (1923: 139ff.) specific example

which he refers to as “the great argument for existence of material things” which

“establishes realism” (Santayana 1923: 145, 142). He responds to the solipsist,

understood as the connoisseur of the character of experience, in the following way:

“But when a clap of thunder deafens me, or a flash of lightning at once dazzles and

blinds me, the fact that something has happened is far more obvious to me than what it

is that has just occurred” (Santayana 1923: 140).

15 The commitment to the existence of the external world, as Santayana describes it here,

as a prime example of animal faith, is functioning in precisely the same way as a

Wittgensteinian hinge commitment. It is an indubitable, ‘animal’ commitment, not

itself subject to inquiry, which is taken for granted when anything is believed or

doubted: the belief that the noise was a clap of thunder, for instance. In harmony with

Pritchard’s reading of Wittgenstein, it is taken to be rationally groundless. This

commitment is what, for Santayana, forms the background to our ordinary everyday

beliefs and doubts; in Wittgenstein’s terminology, it is embodied in the groundless ‘way

of acting’ which rationally grounds those beliefs. That this is so can be seen by one of

Santayana’s descriptions of animal faith as it is operative in everyday life, the way it

functions in relation to the bread I am eating:

The bread, for animal faith, is this thing I am eating, and causing it to disappear tomy substantial advantage […]; […] bread is this substance I can eat and turn into myown substance; in seizing and biting it I determine its identity and its place innature, and in transforming it I prove its existence. (Santayana 1923: 83)

16 As Sprigge (1995: 63) summarises Santayana’s general epistemology, it consists in “the

recommendation to develop our view of the world on the basis, not of some supposed

elementary data of consciousness, but of everyday beliefs which it is dishonest to

pretend we do not hold.” And it is this kind of epistemology, which Cornel West refers

to as an anti-epistemology or an evasion of epistemology traditionally construed, that

was further developed by the classical pragmatists like James and Dewey and their neo-

pragmatist successors. West says of Dewey that he wilfully commits ‘intellectual

regicide’: “he wanted,” West writes, “to behead modern philosophy by dethroning

epistemology” (West 1989: 89). Pragmatism can be understood as being motivated by a

desire to evade epistemology as it has evolved under Descartes’s shadow, inseparable

from the quest for certainty in the knowledge sense. For Santayana, the scepticism

which Descartes strategically embraced – in order eventually to replace it with

certainty in the knowledge sense – is irrefutable and leads us into a hopeless solipsism

of the present moment in which it is very likely impossible to live. And if we take

certainty as our ideal of knowledge, we will soon find that there can be none: a

consistent theoretical position, perhaps, but practically pointless and inconsistent with

our everyday assumptions. So the pragmatist focus on, and understanding of, lived

experience involves a very different concept of certainty and builds in the interaction

between self and world which is questioned by the radical sceptic (Goodman 2002: 23).


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Experience does not yield the kind of certain knowledge which Descartes sought but

rather commitments that, while rationally groundless, are practically indubitable and

indispensable to us. And our commitment to propositions of this kind, which Santayana

saw as the self-conscious expressions of ‘animal faith’ is ineluctably dubitable and

uncertain if certainty is taken to be a kind of rationally supported belief or knowledge.

To carry on the metaphor of faith: these commitments are like the tenets of a religion

as it is lived and practiced, with all the attendant doubts, rather than as formalised in

dry definitions and dogmas designed to exclude ambiguity and uncertainty.

17 I suggest, with Wittgenstein and Santayana, that the sense in which we take such non-

optional, yet rationally groundless commitments as certainties can have nothing to do

with certainty in the knowledge sense. I have been arguing, on the contrary, that

reflection on the nature of these commitments points to what I call a ‘pragmatist’

concept of certainty, found to be operative in the work of both Wittgenstein and

Santayana. For both thinkers, propositions which express certainty do not express

beliefs or knowledge but rather express the arational, ‘animal’ commitments which, as

Pritchard (2012) shows, nonetheless ground all (essentially local) rational justification,

functioning as the ‘hinges’ relative to which we test and evaluate other propositions

and which are presupposed by these epistemic practices of testing and evaluation.

⁂

18 In this section I discuss a point of apparent contrast between the lines of thought on

certainty identified in the works of Wittgenstein and Santayana: namely, the way in

which their views on this topic respond to the sceptical problem.

19 Santayana’s account of animal faith which, I have argued, involves a pragmatist

conception of certainty is presented as a direct response to the problem of scepticism.

In the preface to Scepticism and Animal Faith, Santayana (1923: vi) states, “I stand in

philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life […] and admit the same encircling

ignorance.” As regards the first principles, the discovery of which motivated Descartes,

he says, “[t]hey can never be discovered, if discovered at all, until they have been taken

for granted, and employed in the very investigation which reveals them” (Santayana

1923: 2). His account of animal faith, with its pragmatist conception of certainty, is

offered, then, as the more congenial alternative to an irrefutable scepticism whose

consequences are practically intolerable. Wittgenstein (1969: §§ 359, 475), in an

apparently similar move, criticises the thought that reasons come to an end with

special, foundational reasons and suggests instead that “when we reach bedrock we

discover only a rationally groundless ‘animal’ commitment […], a kind of ‘primitive’

trust” (Pritchard 2012: 259). Are Wittgenstein and Santayana offering the same kind of

response to the problem of scepticism?

20 In my view, there are reasons to think that they are not. Santayana’s response to

scepticism is not a reductio ad absurdum. He does not attempt to show, or succeed in

showing, that scepticism is incoherent or entails something incoherent. He admits that

it entails a position (solipsism of the present moment) that is so far from being self-

contradictory that “it might, under other circumstances, be the normal and invincible

attitude of the spirit” (Santayana 1923: 17). The difficulty he finds in maintaining such a

position is the fact that it is signally unsuited to the “social and laborious character of

human life” as a opposed, for example, to the life of a “creature whose whole existence


161

was passed under a hard shell” which “might find nothing paradoxical or acrobatic in

solipsism” and “might have a clearer mind”; such a creature “would not be troubled by

doubts, because he would believe nothing” (Santayana 1923: 17). Santayana’s response

to scepticism, then, is an appeal to the impracticality of the position it entails. His

response to scepticism is to accept the possibility of its truth while refusing to accept

its truth on account of the unwelcome and impractical implications. The implications

would perhaps not be so unwelcome for a creature under a shell who would doubt

nothing because he believed nothing. But we human beings would be compelled to

doubt everything that we believed and, on account of the ‘social and laborious’

character of our lives, could not live in such a state. It is partly for this reason that he

professes to “stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life”: he views the local

project of doubting everyday beliefs as analogous to the global sceptical project of

doubting everything. For Santayana the sceptical project of applying doubt universally,

although impractical, is perfectly coherent.

21 Wittgenstein, by contrast, wants to distinguish the sceptical practice of universal doubt

from ordinary epistemic practices, including doubting. In Pritchard’s (2011a: 524) view,

Wittgenstein’s implicit claim is that “the philosophical picture that the sceptic uses is

completely divorced from the non-philosophical picture that we ordinarily employ.” In

ordinary life, our claims to know are connected with the practice of resolving doubts.

For a doubt to be resolved, as mentioned earlier, the reason in support of the relevant

belief has to be more certain than the belief itself in order to play the required

supporting role. This Wittgensteinian picture of the structure of reasons operative in

everyday life also applies to doubt:

a reason needs to be offered to motivate the doubt and, crucially, such a reasonmust be more certain that what is doubted since otherwise one would have morereason to doubt the reason for doubt that to doubt what is doubted. (Pritchard2011: 527)

22 As Pritchard points out, this is the point of Wittgenstein’s (1969: § 553) claim that if, in

the absence of a reason to doubt it, I need to check by looking whether I have two

hands, I might as well doubt my eyesight as well. In other words, doubt, operative in

our everyday epistemic practices, requires grounds that are more certain than the

doubt itself, namely, hinge commitments which are “in deed not doubted.” The sceptical

project, on the other hand, denies such certainties: it demands that we doubt even

what is most certain. But, if as Wittgestein thinks “there are hinges on which any

epistemic evaluation must turn,” this is an incoherent idea (Pritchard 2011: 530).6 A

doubt applied universally, not constrained in the way that our ordinary epistemic

practices are constrained, could have no supporting grounds, would be of no practical

significance and, in Wittgenstein’s (1969: § 450) words, “would not be a doubt.”

23 So unlike Santayana, Wittgenstein does not accept the coherence or legitimacy of the

sceptical problem on account of the illegitimacy of its isolation and abstraction of the

practice of doubting from its ordinary epistemic context, a context in which certainty,

conceived in a pragmatist way, is operative in the form of hinge commitments. He

accepts something of the spirit of scepticism in that hinge propositions, and the kind of

certainty with which we are committed to them, point to ‘the groundlessness of our

believing.’ But it is the very existence and necessity of hinge commitments that

prevents Wittgenstein from accepting the sceptical idea that doubt can legitimately be

applied universally and without restriction, even to what we take to be most certain. It

is perhaps significant that, in the very paragraph where Wittgenstein (1969: § 359)


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echoes Santayana’s epithet and describes certainty as ‘something animal,’ he goes on to

explain it, in contrast to him, as “something that lies beyond being justified or

unjustified.” Whereas Santayana shares Wittgenstein’s pragmatist conception of

certainty, this is because, like the sceptic, he regards our certainties to be unjustifiable

rather than moving beyond the distinction between being justified or unjustified as

Wittgenstein attempts to do.

24 So although Wittgenstein and Santayana share a pragmatist conception of certainty,

this concept constitutes a very different kind of response, for each thinker, to the

problem of scepticism. For Santayana, it is a way of avoiding a very real and

threatening problem; for Wittgenstein it is a means of exposing it as a pseudo-problem.

Santayana’s response to scepticism is a pragmatic one whereas Wittgenstein’s is a

logical one. I explore, in the concluding section, the broader implications of this

difference between Wittgenstein’s and Santayana’s use of the pragmatist conception of

certainty as a response to scepticism.

⁂

25 It might be thought, firstly, that Wittgenstein’s logical response pre-empts Santayana’s

pragmatic one and that Wittgenstein’s use of the pragmatist conception of certainty to

expose the problem of scepticism as a pseudo-problem closes off the route to

pragmatism, as further developed by philosophers like James and Dewey. This thought

is expressed in Bertrand Russell’s statement that the “scepticism embodied in

Pragmatism is that which says ‘since all beliefs are absurd, we may as well believe what

is most convenient’” (Russell 1910: 98). Wittgenstein’s logical response to scepticism

denies the premise that all beliefs are absurd; his argument, as we have seen, is that it

is in the nature of rationally grounded beliefs that they turn on ‘hinges’ for which it

makes no sense to demand further rational justification.

26 Apart from the fact that Russell’s second phrase (‘we may as well believe what is most

convenient’) is a crude caricature of the pragmatist position,7 the main import of

pragmatism (its focus on lived experience, on the practical context in which

apprehension occurs and on the consequences of beliefs for specific problematic

situations) is perfectly compatible with the Wittgensteinian picture (Dewey 1952:

571-2). If scepticism is indeed a pseudo-problem, it seems perfectly reasonable to focus,

as the pragmatists do, on the consequences of beliefs rather than on their foundations

or hinges. As Wittgenstein pointed out, moreover, these hinges are rarely explicitly

formulated or questioned in real life – they are “in deed not doubted.” Pragmatists like

Dewey are concerned with human practices of inquiry (logic included) insofar as they

ramify in this practical demesne of lived experience; as Dewey puts it, pragmatists are

concerned with truth and falsity as having existential application, and as somethingdetermined by means of inquiry into material existence. For in the latter case thequestion of truth or falsity is the very thing to be determined. (Dewey 1952: 573)

27 If Dewey’s pragmatic emphasis is preferred, the Wittgensteinian response to scepticism

will count as a welcome further warrant for the pragmatist focus on lived experience,

albeit one provided by a thinker who did not claim to be a pragmatist but to be merely

“trying to say something that sounds like pragmatism.” If, on the other hand,

Wittgenstein’s logical emphasis is preferred, the only route to pragmatism that is

closed off will be the one mapped out by Santayana: one whose point of departure is


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acceptance of the irrefutability, and potential truth, of scepticism, an admission which

presupposes the coherence of the sceptical problem. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s argument

might give someone with a logical turn of mind a much better reason than Santayana

provides to avoid scepticism and instead to make the move into pragmatism. If we are

not content, in Jamesian style, to allow temperament to decide the philosophical issue,

we shall have to look for other grounds on which to base our decision whether, given

our reflections on certainty, to view pragmatism as a live philosophical option. My own

view, to repeat, is that both the logical and the pragmatic perspectives potentially leave

the route to pragmatism open. Since Wittgenstein’s argument can be used to justify in

logical terms the taking of a pragmatist route (given an appropriate attitude to

scepticism as a pseudo-problem, an illusory threat illegitimately abstracted from

ordinary epistemic practices), and since the pragmatist perspective cannot endorse a

purely logical point of view with no necessary existential application, my own view is

that such a pragmatist route is the one that should be taken in preference to the

narrow kind of logical route taken by Russell. It is, I suspect, one that most of us, in our

less explicitly philosophical moments, will find that we have already taken.

28 So the first implication of the difference between Wittgenstein and Santayana on the

issue of scepticism is that the move into pragmatism can be supported by the

recognition of the compatibility of an appropriate version of pragmatism with the

Wittgensteinian picture. To take this point further, secondly, this move has humanist

implications, apparently recognised by both philosophers. Despite their difference on

the issue of scepticism, both Wittgenstein and Santayana preserve what Cavell (1979:

241) has called the ‘moral’ of scepticism.8 Both agree, though for different reasons, that

our beliefs are ultimately groundless, that they are not based upon foundations of what

we would ordinarily call ‘knowledge,’ still less ‘certainty’ in the knowledge sense. This

recognition of the ultimate groundlessness of our beliefs is developed by the classical

pragmatists in the form of humanism. William James (1907: 242) endorses

F. C. S. Schiller’s understanding of ‘humanism’ as “the doctrine that to an

unascertainable extent our truths are man-made products,” the humanistic principle

being succinctly expressed as follows: “you can’t weed out the human contribution”

(James 1907: 254). It is our concrete human concerns that determine the kind of

attention we pay to things. And the kind of attention we pay to things determines what

we find – it determines what stands out as salient to us, what seems worth mentioning,

and what fades into the background – and this will not necessarily be the same in every

context because, in each context, our practical concerns may be different. In

Wittgenstein’s language, our practical interests determine what is the bedrock and

what is the river. James (1907: 251) illustrates with a relatively simple example: “You

can take a chess-board as black squares on a white ground, or as white squares on a

black ground, and neither conception is a false one.” It is clear that, for James (1907:

253), all perception is interpretation, all seeing is ‘seeing-as’; which, if any, of our

perceptions may be treated as the more true, he thinks, “depends all together on the

human use of it.” To be a humanist, for James (1907: 247), is to recognise that “We

receive […] the block of marble, but we carve the statue ourselves.” Since, in his phrase,

“[m]an engenders truths upon [reality]” (James 1907: 257, 260), it follows that although

the finite experiences which make up our human world are dependent upon each

other, ‘lean’ on each other, as it were, the whole of human experience, if it makes sense

to speak of such a whole, itself “leans on nothing”; when it comes to human experience


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as a whole, James (1907: 260) writes: “Nothing outside of the flux secures the issue of

it.”

29 In conclusion, then, it is clear that this pragmatist form of humanism (which correlates

with existential forms championed by certain European philosophers of the twentieth

century) is bolstered by Wittgenstein’s argument for the groundlessness of our

believing. Thus humanism, according to which it makes no sense to speak of the world

apart from the various modes of human engagement with it, is a major consequence of

the pragmatist conception of certainty which, I have argued, is shared by Wittgenstein

and Santayana. That conception preserves, in an illuminating way, Cavell’s ‘moral’ of

scepticism: the realisation that our beliefs are ultimately groundless. And that moral

finds most direct expression in the humanism involved in the Jamesean version of

pragmatism just mentioned. What that pragmatist form of humanism reflects, I think,

is what West calls ‘anti-epistemology’ or the ‘evasion’ of philosophy, epistemologically

construed. The implication is not that we are unable to provide legitimate rational

justification for our beliefs but that a philosophical search for rational justification of

those beliefs as a whole, a whole which ‘leans on nothing,’ will inevitably be frustrated.

Wittgenstein’s arguments, and Pritchard’s readings, articulate very clearly just why

this is so. They provide good arguments for adopting the humanistic evasion of

epistemology which is a hallmark of existential phenomenology as well as pragmatism.

And this evasive kind of philosophy begins with Cavell’s (1980: 145) observation, made

in relation to Emerson’s thought, that our relationship to the world’s existence is

“closer than the ideas of believing and knowing are made to convey.” If Wittgenstein is

right about the a-rationality of certainty, the great value of the philosophies of

existential phenomenology and pragmatism lies in their joint recognition that the main

task of philosophy is to articulate the nature, and the various modes, of that intimate

relationship.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CAVELL S., (1979), The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, New York,

Oxford University Press.

CAVELL S., (1980), “An Emerson Mood,” in The Senses of Walden, Chicago, Chicago University Press,

1992.

DEWEY J., (1952), “Experience, Knowledge and Value: A Rejoinder,” in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The

Philosophy of John Dewey, New York, Tudor Publishing Company, 2nd ed.

GOODMAN R. B., (2002), Wittgenstein and William James, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

JAMES W., (1922), Pragmatism: A New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking, New York, Longmans,

Green and Co [1907].

PRITCHARD D. H., (2011), “Wittgenstein on Scepticism,” in Kuusela O. & McGinn M. (eds.), The Oxford

Handbook of Wittgenstein, Oxford, Oxford University Press.


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PRITCHARD D. H., (2012), “Wittgenstein and the Groundlessness of Our Believing,” Synthese 189.

RUSSELL B., (1952), “Dewey’s New Logic,” in Schilpp P. A. (ed.), The Philosophy of John Dewey, New

York, Tudor Publishing Company, 2nd ed.

RUSSELL B., (2009), “Pragmatism,” in Philosophical Essays, Abingdon, Routledge Classics [1910].

SANTAYANA G., (1923), Scepticism and Animal Faith, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons.

SPRIGGE T. L. S., (1995), Santayana: An Examination of his Philosophy, London, Routledge.

WEST C., (1989), The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmantism, Madison, WI,

University of Wisconsin Press.


NOTES

1. I call it a ‘Wittgensteinian’ concept, mindful of the limitations, recognised by Pritchard 2011, of

the extent to which arguments extracted from On Certainty can confidently be attributed to

Wittgenstein. As Pritchard reminds us, the material in this book was not prepared or sanctioned

for publication by Wittgenstein himself.

2. A ‘hinge commitment’ is just a commitment to a hinge proposition.


4. Italics mine.

5. I shall refer to this ultimate aim of the Cartesian project as ‘certainty in the knowledge sense.’

6. Italics mine.

7. Russell 1910, cf. Dewey 1952.

8. I owe this reference to Cavell to a remark made by Duncan Pritchard at a meeting of the

Edinburgh Epistemology Research Group in April 2012.

ABSTRACTS

The ways in which Wittgenstein was directly influenced by William James (by his early

psychological work as well his later philosophy) have been thoroughly explored and charted by

Russell B. Goodman. In particular, Goodman has drawn attention to the pragmatist resonances of

the Wittgensteinian notion of hinge propositions as developed and articulated in the

posthumously edited and published work, On Certainty. This paper attempts to extend Goodman’s

observation, moving beyond his focus on James (specifically, James’s Pragmatism) as his

pragmatist reference point. It aims to articulate the affinity between Wittgenstein’s thought on

the topic of certainty and that of the neglected pragmatist thinker, George Santayana.

The paper draws on Duncan Pritchard’s recent reading of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty in order to

articulate the concept of certainty involved in the notion of hinge propositions. It identifies two

important and related points of affinity between this Wittgensteinian line of thought on

certainty and the line of thought on the same topic articulated in Santayana’s Scepticism and

Animal Faith. The paper argues, firstly, that, both lines of thought reflect a pragmatist concept of


166

certainty, according to which our most fundamental certainties are not conceived as purely

theoretical objects of belief or knowledge but rather as the arational presuppositions of beliefs

and practical action. Secondly, it examines the way in which the pragmatist concept of certainty

functions, for the two thinkers as a response to scepticism. It argues that although the two

thinkers’ responses are very different, they are mutually compatible and, together, point towards

the possibility of a distinctively pragmatist response to scepticism which involves an anti-

epistemological model of the intimate relation of the human self to the world.

AUTHOR

GUY BENNETT-HUNTER

University of Edinburgh

guy.bennett-hunter[at]ed.ac.uk


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Having Social Practices in Mind. Wittgenstein’s Anthropological Pragmatism in Perspective

Francesco Callegaro

Introduction

1 As Wittgenstein says in a well-known paragraph of the Investigations, commenting St.

Augustine’s question on time, it belongs to the “essence” of a philosophical inquiry that

“we do not seek to learn anything new by it,” only to “understand something that is

already in plain view”: philosophy deals with what is already known, but somehow

forgotten, something, therefore, “that we need to remind ourselves of” (PI, § 89). Thus,

if there is something new in philosophy, it is not, as in science, a discovery going

beyond evident and common experience, but the rediscovery of “the phenomena of

everyday,” as St. Augustine says in a passage quoted by Wittgenstein later:

“Manifestatissima et usitatissima sunt, et eadem rursus nimis latent, et nova est inventio

eorum” (PI, § 436). Like an orator, the philosopher must find out the metaphorical

language capable of shedding a new light on common places, thus making the forgotten

evidence of ordinary phenomena shining again. If this is the task Wittgenstein assigned

to philosophy, I think he has fulfilled it, first and foremost, by developing a language

that opens us to a new understanding of what we are. Indeed, presupposed by and

developed through all his grammatical remarks, removing our philosophical prejudices

on a given topic, lies a fundamental image calling back to mind what it means and is

needed for us to have a mind at all. Since we all spontaneously are, in our reflective

attitudes toward ourselves, awfully Cartesians, even when we think we are empiricists,

Wittgenstein’s new image can be summed up by two major shifts. The first is a move

from internal, mental cognition to external, expressive action, whether linguistic or

not. The second is a move from an isolated, self-sufficient individual to a related,

essentially dependent member of a community. Putting these two moves together, we

could say that Wittgenstein tried to remind us that we owe what we are to the

existence of social practices. It is this anthropological perspective, lying at the heart of

his second philosophy, which becomes fully explicit in On Certainty: there Wittgenstein

finally acknowledges, somewhat bewildered, that, by stressing the primacy of socially


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instituted action as the entry and basis of language games, he is putting forward a

perspective “that sounds like pragmatism” (OC, § 422). The aim of this paper is to

clarify what, if anything, sounds like “pragmatism” in Wittgenstein’s conception of

mind and meaning as being grounded in social practices.

2 To this end, I will not look backward at the criteria of use fixed by the inventor of the

word, C. S. Peirce, or by his immediate followers, James and Dewey,1 but rather replace

Wittgenstein’s animating idea in the context of contemporary debates, which are

reshaping the very meaning of ‘pragmatism.’ I will focus, in particular, on R. Brandom’s

attempt to understand Wittgenstein’s philosophy as belonging to an intellectual

tradition from which his own rationalist pragmatism should be seen as deriving.

Indeed, by so distinguishing a broad pragmatist framework from the narrower

instrumentalist perspective of the American founders, Brandom frees the way for an

analysis in which Wittgenstein’s own pragmatism can be properly understood.2 Instead

of looking for local comparisons with the specific tactics of classical pragmatism, which

requires endorsing Darwinian naturalism, seeing beliefs as effective means to

successful action, while thinking of meaning as being fixed in the experimental context

of a fallibilist inquiry, Brandom outlines a more general theoretical strategy, which

consists in taking ‘discursive intentionality’ as springing from a more basic form of

‘practical intentionality’: the later Wittgenstein and the early Heidegger would belong,

together with Dewey, to this ‘fundamental pragmatism,’ which found in Kant one of its

first expressions.3 In this general theoretical framework differences can further be

explained as ways of accounting for the primordial practical intentionality, according

to whether it refers to purposive instrumental action or to expressive, socially

instituted interaction, language itself being either a useful tool for survival or the

paradigmatic form of a socially instituted expressive interaction.

3 Brandom’s re-appropriation of Wittgenstein’s fundamental pragmatism focuses, in the

opening pages of Making It Explicit, on a close reading of the rule-following argument.

This is where a critical confrontation should take place, which can help us pointing out

the specific tactics of Wittgenstein’s pragmatism. Indeed, if Brandom’s reading clarifies

Wittgenstein’s central idea of social practices, by making the structure of the argument

explicit and by developing its consequences through a systematic discussion of its

possible developments, it must be admitted, at the same time, that the rationalist

pragmatism he elaborates on this basis deeply departs from Wittgenstein’s own

pragmatist perspective. This is because Brandom’s reading is ultimately rooted in his

commitment toward the rationalist tradition of German idealism, which he now sees as

the true origin of American pragmatism to which we should return: thus, just as Sellars

used Wittgenstein to answer to some of peculiar problems of the rationalist tradition,4

Brandom takes up Wittgenstein’s conception of social practices to socialize Kantian

philosophy of mind, embracing, as a result, a renewed Hegelian philosophy. This is the

perspective of Brandom’s reading: his discussion of the rule-following argument is a

dialogue between Kant and Wittgenstein whose result must be Hegel, at least his own

reading of Hegelian idealism. Bearing in mind Brandom’s formula –

Kant+Wittgenstein=Hegel – his whole strategy can be reduced to one single argument,

which will give us the right point of entry for a critical confrontation with

Wittgenstein. The argument is the following:

1: Concepts express rules. (This is Wittgenstein after Kant);


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2: Rules express normative social practices. (This is Kant after Wittgenstein);

3: Concepts express normative social practices. (This is Hegel, in Brandom’s reading).

4 The conclusion of the argument is the starting point of Brandom’s rationalist

pragmatism, according to which the game of giving and asking for reasons is the

normative social practice that articulates concepts. If we want to resist this rationalist

conclusion and rediscover Wittgenstein’s pragmatism understanding of what we are,

we must critically examine the two premises. McDowell has recently argued, from a

supposedly Wittgensteinian perspective, against Brandom’s reconstruction of the rule-

following argument, whose conclusion is stated in the second premise: thus, I will first

present, discuss and defend Brandom’s reading, trying to explain why his discussion

offers us an interesting philosophical contribution which enables us to understand the

meaning and justification of Wittgenstein’s animating idea of social practices.

Following some key suggestions of V. Descombes, I will then argue that it is rather the

very Kantian framework, grounding Brandom’s as well as McDowell’s understanding of

the first premise, which should be rejected, since it is indifferent to the difference of

normative vocabularies that Wittgenstein constantly underlined in order to articulate

the irreducibility of grammatical rules. Having questioned the continuity between Kant

and Wittgenstein, I will be able to conclude by uncovering the structural features of

Wittgenstein’s anthropological pragmatism.

Rules Express Normative Social Practices: Brandom’sReading of Wittgenstein’s Argument

The Structure of the Argument

In order to see how Brandom reconstructs the whole discussion on rule-following, it is

useful to start at the end, by a sketchy description of the very phenomenon which is

supposed to be there, under our eyes, in the manifest light of everyday life, if it was not

obscured by bad philosophical theorizing that must be refuted to understand it fully.

Let us take Wittgenstein’s example: while driving in the street, we have no doubts

about the way indicated by a sign-post (See PI, § 85). The somewhat puzzling aspect of

what would otherwise seem to be a perfectly obvious phenomenon is that we

spontaneously follow what has nonetheless to be taken as a rule: the very possibility of

describing our intentional action presupposes both a distinction between what the rule

says and what we actually do, on one side, and our effective capacity to follow it, on the

other. The starting phenomenon has, therefore, these two constitutive dimensions:5

- Practical-psychological dimension: the rule governs our behavior effectively, through

our understanding of it.

- Prescriptive-epistemic dimension: the rule dictates the following step and it is by

reference to the rule that we justify our step as the right one.

5 According to Brandom, the melody of Wittgenstein’s argument follows this theme:

philosophical theories, trying to explain the original phenomenon of rule-following, give

an account of only one side of it, while we have to explain both. This is why Brandom

focuses on two opposed perspectives. The first is too much struck by the prescriptive

nature of rules: regulism is the general philosophical perspective according to which

explicit rules, intellectually grasped, govern our intentional behavior. Wittgenstein

helps us refuting it through a regress argument, showing that, unless one already


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knows how to apply a rule correctly, a regress opens up, concerning the right

application of the rule telling us which is the right step to make. This argument shows

the immediately practical side of rule-following. The second philosophical account is

then too much struck by the practical nature of rules: regularism is the general

philosophical perspective according to which rules are nothing but generalized

regularities read off from our actual behavior. Wittgenstein helps us refuting it through

the gerrymandering argument, showing that a normative rule cannot be derived from a

set of observed regularities since any sequence of steps can be read retrospectively as

following a given rule. This argument shows the necessary prescriptive side of practical

rule-following, which cannot be accounted for without seeing its social nature. Hence,

the idea of social practices as the result of Wittgenstein’s critical refutation of

traditional accounts. To discuss the details of Brandom’s reconstruction, and to see if

and how he understands Wittgenstein, it is useful to start by answering to McDowell’s

objections.

Against Regulism

6 According to McDowell, Brandom would have missed the whole point of Wittgenstein’s

argument: throughout the discussion on rule-following, there would be not two but

“only one master argument,” showing the bad consequences of the “temptation” to

open a “conceptual gap between the expression of a rule and performances that are up

for assessment according to whether or not they conform to the rule” (2009: 108-10).

The problem would not be the rules’ explicit nature but the fact that they are signs

which, unless one already understands them, would need an extra meaning-giving

interpretation opening a disastrous regress of interpretations. Beyond the regress of

interpretations, Wittgenstein would therefore rediscover the immediate understanding

of signs. According to McDowell, the argument ends here. Regulism is “simply

irrelevant” (2009: 99) to Wittgenstein’s reflections on rule-following, since “nothing is

done,” in his philosophy, to conceive “a level of normativity below that at which

correctness can be conceived as conformity to rules” (2009: 110). Now, despite the

existence of a more fundamental regress of signs, which occurs elsewhere in

Wittgenstein, for instance in the Blue Book,6 it is enough to go back to one the first

movement in the rule-following sonata to see why these two claims are simply wrong.

7 In § 81 we find a seminal discussion on the normative nature of language. Commenting

Ramsey’s assertion on logic as a normative science, Wittgenstein explains it through

the game comparison. In philosophy “we often compare the use of words with games

and calculi which have fixed rules”: the problem is how to keep the idea of a normative

dimension in language, linked to logic, without saying that our languages only

“approximate” an “ideal language”; the only way out is to try to understand understanding:

“For it will then also become clear what can lead us (and did lead me) to think that if

anyone utters a sentence and means or understands it he is operating a calculus

according to definite rules” (PI, § 81). Wittgenstein wants, therefore, to free us from the

idea of understanding as following fixed, definite rules. This is why he asks: “What do I

call ‘the rule by which he proceeds?” (PI, § 82). He distinguishes, then, three kinds of

rules. The first kind is the rule conceived as a “hypothesis” explaining regular observed

behavior, while the second is the one an individual “looks up when he uses signs” or

“the one which he gives us in reply if we ask what his rule is”: if the first is the rule as

regularity, the second is the explicit rule; but Wittgenstein is interested in the


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possibility of not finding an answer, either through “observation” or by “question”: the

problem is then to know what “meaning” the expression “the rule by which he

proceeds” (PI § 82) could still have. Now, the very point of the “analogy between games

and language” is to “throw light” (§ 83) on this problem of a more than regular, norm-

governed behavior, yet not entirely covered by explicit rules. Thinking of language

through the language-game metaphor helps us seeing that “the application of word is

not everywhere bounded by rules” (PI, § 84). Here “rules” must mean explicit, that is,

fixed and definite, rules. This is why we find here a first formulation of the regress

argument, taken up by Brandom: “But what does a game look like that is everywhere

bounded by rules? […] Can’t we imagine a rule determining the application of a rule,

and a doubt which it removes – and so on?” (PI, § 84).7 This is the point from which

Wittgenstein comes to the concrete metaphor of the sign-post, saying: “A rule stands

there like a sign-post” (PI, § 85). Wittgenstein wants here to make clear that normative

behavior should be conceived first with this example in mind. We know how to deal

with a sign-post, despite the fact that a lot of questions could be asked, questions

concerning even its meaning, this is why he asks: “But where is it said which way I am

to follow it” (PI, § 85)? A simple, spontaneous answer could be: in the rules of the road,

in the same way as the meaning of the king in chess is fixed “in the list of the rules of

the game” (PI, § 197). There is no philosophical account in this answer, because there is

no philosophical problem to answer to. The philosophical debate starts when,

forgetting our know-how, we start thinking to rule-following exclusively in terms of

following an explicit rule. This is regulism. As Brandom says, it is against this

“intellectualist, Platonist conception of norms” according to which “to asses

correctness is always to make at least implicit reference to a rule or principle that

determines what is correct by explicitly saying so” that Wittgenstein’s regress of

application argument is directed: it shows that “explicit rules do not form an

autonomous stratum of normative statuses,” but “rest on properties governed by

practice” (1994: 20). The point is not one of reduction, but of conceptual priority:

“Norms that are explicit in the form of rules presuppose norms that are implicit in

practices” (ibid.).

Understanding Practical Understanding

8 The conclusion of the first part of the argument can be stated as follows: to have the

prescriptive side of a rule, one must first acknowledge its internal link with practice.

Thus, even if there are explicit rules codifying signs, as with chess rules, the connection

between rules and actions, as Wittgenstein says, cannot be made unless one adds “the

day-to-day practice of playing” (PI, § 197).8 Knowing a rule is the practical

understanding which consists in knowing how to follow it. This is what Wittgenstein

means when he says that “the grammar of the word ‘knows’ is evidently closely related

to that of ‘can’, ‘is able to.’ But also closely related to that of ‘understands.’ (‘Mastery’ of

a technique)” (PI, § 150). Here lies a first pragmatist commitment in Wittgenstein’s

picture. We cannot stop here, however, since a problem remains: how should we

conceive, indeed, the relation between the actual behavior and the rule, if the latter has

to preserve its prescriptive nature?

9 According to McDowell, Wittgenstein has an answer to this question. Yet, since,

according to his reading, there is only one master argument, he can state it only as a

supposed evidence: “Of course the practice with sign-post is essentially norm-


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involving” (2009: 105). Actual understanding is not, therefore, a “mere

uncomprehending disposition to react to what are in fact sign-posts in ‘appropriate’

ways” (2009: 101). Furthermore, when we ask how practice can be normative in this

way, McDowell answers once again with a supposed evidence: “Of course not everyone

who encounters a sign-post gets told which way to go. Sign-posts do not speak to those

who are not party to the relevant conventions” (2009: 101). McDowell makes, therefore,

two related, although unwarranted, steps after the first conclusion of the rule-

following argument: practice is normative and it is normative because it is social. Now, if

this has to be Wittgenstein’s image, it might be interesting to know why. After all, one

has only to think to those who argued, like Kripke, that practice is social, but for this

very reason not normative, and those who answered him by saying that practice is

normative, but for this very reason not social. Brandom’s discussion of regularism can

be helpful here, since it shows, against these two readings, the necessity of the two

steps that McDowell invites us to make without giving us good reasons to do it.

Against Regularism

10 Regularism resolves the problem of the relation between actual behavior and rules by

thinking of rules as hypothesis read off from actual behavior, according to the first of

the three conceptions of rules that Wittgenstein discusses in § 82 we have seen above.

Brandom develops it through a reading of Sellars, who elaborated a scenario we already

find in Wittgenstein: “we say that [a game] is played according to such-and-such rules

because an observer can read these rules off from the practice of the game – like a

natural law governing the game” (§ 54)9. In this framework we have, on one side, an

agent displaying regularities in behavior with the aid of the relevant dispositions, and,

on the other, an observer, trying to extract the rules to which the agents is implicitly

conforming to. Now, what Brandom labels the gerrymandering argument, taken from

Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein,10 is the inevitable consequence of the confusion

between norms and laws implicitly pointed out by Wittgenstein. Indeed, once we

presuppose that rules are explanatory hypothesis, not only nothing can prevent us but

we are even obliged to modify previously made generalizations in light of new

behavior, in such a way that there is no more any way of distinguishing between

correct and incorrect actual behavior. Rules as explanatory hypothesis describe natural

dispositions, while we were looking for rules governing normative dispositions.

11 The fundamental lesson is, according to Brandom, a Kantian one: “Kant takes it that

everything in nature happens according to rules. Being subject to rules is not special to

us […] What is distinctive about us is the way in which we are subject to norms (for

Kant in the form of rules). As natural beings we act according to rules. As rational

beings, we act according to our conceptions of rules” (1994: 30). This is a general point

about the normative nature of intentional behavior that Wittgenstein has inherited

from Kant, through Frege, while helping us overcoming Kant’s fixation on explicit

rules.11 The problem is therefore to see how our own representations can single out

regularities as the normatively relevant ones, so as to make a distinction, at the level of

practice, between what happens and what ought to happen. To put the point in

Wittgenstein’s own words, we need to understand how a “practice” can be a way of

“grasping a rule” (PI, §§ 201-2). In order to find an answer, we must follow the question

Wittgenstein asks himself after having imagined the possibility of an observer

extracting the rule from actual behavior: “how does the observer distinguish […]


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between players’ mistakes and correct play?” (PI, § 54). This is the question we have to

answer if we want to give a prescriptive force to the rules emerging from actual

behavior.

From Individual Behavior to Social Practice

12 A first strategy would be to take Wittgenstein’s own suggestion seriously: there are

“characteristic signs” of the normative distinction between behavior and norm “in the

players’ behaviour. Think of the behaviour characteristic of correcting a slip of tongue”

(PI, § 54). Although Brandom consecrates only a footnote to such a perspective,12 it

deserves to be discussed in detail, since this is what Hacker and Baker think

Wittgenstein was after. According to their reading, if we add self-correcting behavior to

actual behavior we have, as they say, “regularities of action complex enough to produce

norms.”13 Self-correcting behavior would be, therefore, the only missing element to

bridge the gap between rule and behavior: through it, an agent would prove his

sensitivity to norms, rules being the objective dimension hidden in his complex actual

behavior. Wittgenstein would not endorse, therefore, social readings of practices: what

we have here is public evaluable behavior, but an isolated individual, like Robinson

Crusoe, could do this all by himself. The problem of this answer is that it smuggles a

fundamental normative distinction into an account that it is supposed to be free of it.

Indeed, for observed regular behavior to produce norms one needs to conceive the self-

correcting behavior as more than mere self-observation, otherwise the gerrymandering

problem occurs again at the level of self-correction, which itself open to an evaluation.

Self-correction must be, therefore, the manifestation of judging oneself in light of a

previously given norm: the right couple, so to speak, is not that of an agent and an

observer, but that of an agent and a judge. Now, unless we go back to regulism,

thinking that the agent has access, when judging, to a pre-established rule containing

all its applications, we have to think of self-correcting behavior as the manifestation of

a practical sanctioning disposition interiorized from an external, previously existing,

social relation.

13 This is why Brandom moves directly toward theories that reconstruct Kant’s

distinction between rules as natural laws and rules as conceived norms in the frame of

a “social theory,” by appealing to the “distinction of perspective between assessing a

performance and producing a performance” (1994: 37). A first step in this direction is

J. Haugeland’s heideggerian analysis of Wittgenstein.14 For Haugeland, norms are

constituted and manifested in the difference between the dispositions to act of an agent

and the dispositions to sanction of a judge: “Haugeland’s censorious herd animals shape

each other’s behavior by their capacity not only to perform but to censure performance.

Each animal in the community that is thereby constituted may […] be able to do both,

but as he conceives it, each act of censure involves two organisms, the censuring and

the censured” (1994: 37). The naturalistic vocabulary is there to show that the

distributed complex behavior is supposed to engender norms without already

presupposing explicit rules: the distinction between what is done and what ought to be

done is, therefore, entirely dependent upon the dispositions to sanction, which are

supposed to manifest sensitivity to norms as such. This perspective does not go,

however, deep enough. Indeed, as Brandom points out, since “assessing, sanctioning, is

itself something that can be done correctly or incorrectly,” one has to make room for

the difference between “actually being punished” and “deserving to be punished” (1994:


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36). This means that the assessor puts forward, by sanctioning, a claim to authority:

sanction, far from establishing authority, presupposes it.

14 We have to move, therefore, to what Brandom acknowledges as a “more robust” theory

of social practices: the authority of the assessor, far from producing common norms,

rests upon the authority of a “communal assessment” (1994: 37). As a matter of fact, this

is where Wittgenstein, pace Hacker and Baker, wanted to lead us. Norms cannot be

conceived unless they are common (See PI, §§ 198, 199): from a grammatical point of

view, we can indifferently use, as Wittgenstein does very often, “understanding a sign,”

“using it as we always use it” and “having being taught to use it in such a way” (PI,

§ 190). Here we have a conceptual network which throws light on the original

phenomenon of normative intentional behavior, conceived as expressive action

following a social practice after a training period. Wittgenstein thought that this

rediscovery of the ordinary was all that philosophy, as a dialectical refutation of bad

theorizing, should do. Having another conception of philosophy, Brandom thinks the

phenomenon is not yet fully understandable.

The Internal Structure of Social Practices

Indeed, the move to a community view, despite its necessity, is ever more demanding,

since we are now explaining norms through normative notions. On the side of the

assessed, we have the problem of “community membership,” which is a “normative

status”: here the circularity is evident, since we explain why someone has to do

something in some circumstances by saying that, being a member of the community, he

“ought to conform to the norms implicit in the practice of the community” (1994: 39).

On the side of the assessors, we have the problem of who is entitled to the authority

claim: leaving aside the meaningless solution of the Community as a possible assessor,

we face the problem of “experts,” those who have “the authority to speak for the

community” (1994: 39). Once again this is a normative status, so we are obliged to make

“a distinction between actually assessing and being entitled to assess” (1994: 39-40).

This twofold problem shows that the reference to the community only shifts the

problem: the structure of social practices, based on the “distinction of normative

statuses” between “the experts, the ones who have authority” and “those who are

subject to that authority” (1994: 39-40), needs to be accounted for.

Thus, if Brandom criticizes the “orienting mistake” of “treating I-We relations rather

than I-Thou relations as the fundamental social structure,” it is not because it would be

a mistake to develop a community view, but because we need substantive theorizing to

understand what it means for a community to be there in the first place: now,

privileging I-We relation only make us think that there is something other than

individuals – The Community – making assessments, whereas “assessing, endorsing,

and so on are all things we individuals do and attribute to each other, thereby

constituting a community, a ‘we’” (1994: 39). This is where Brandom starts developing a

Hegelian perspective. Indeed, at the bottom of the mutual attributions that constitute

norms lies the very normative structure making these attributions possible:for

common norms to be there in social practices, we need first to think of the attitude of

attributing authority, while taking the responsibility to act, and the attitude of attributing

responsibility, while taking the authority to judge. As Brandom explained in a later essay,

this is, in his view, the “reciprocal structure of authority and responsibility” that Hegel

put forward under the heading of “mutual recognition.”15 It is through this Hegelian


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conceptual framework that Brandom tries to clarify the social institution of conceptual

norms, that is, the possibility for concepts, as socially instituted norms, to incorporate

nonetheless, in and by their historical development, an objective commitment. Despite

the relevance of this possible socio-historical Hegelian development of Wittgenstein,

however, Brandom’s philosophical edifice rests on some questionable presuppositions,

due to the narrow Kantian way in which he understands conceptual norms themselves.

Concepts Express Rules: Some WittgensteinianObjections to Brandom’s Rationalism

Brandom’s Narrow Kantian Framework

15 The whole discussion on rule-following is framed by a general point that Brandom

makes in some introductory pages about the normative nature of concepts considered as

Kant’s main contribution to philosophy. After Kant, he says, the mental has not to be

understood, as with Descartes, around the ontological distinction with the physical, but

around a deontological distinction with the causal. What thus characterizes us as

knowers and agents is our capacity to add conceptual rules to given regularities,

whether to know natural necessities or to act upon moral necessities. Understanding

this point requires, accordingly, understanding the peculiar Kantian idea of necessity

(Notwendikgeit). As Brandom says, the “nature and significance of the sea change from

Cartesian certainty to Kantian necessity will be misunderstood unless it is kept in mind

that by ‘necessary’ Kant means ‘in accord with a rule’”: the Kantian, proto-pragmatist

commitment to the “primacy of the practical” for cognitive and practical activity can

be understood only by seeing that the “key concept of both is obligation by a rule” in

the sense articulated by the “deontic modality of commitment and entitlement, rather

than the alethic modality of necessity and possibility” (1994: 10). Further philosophical

thought would have only made this Kantian point more clearly by developing the two

constitutive dimensions of concepts, truth and inference. Thus, while acknowledging

that Wittgenstein developed an original reflection on “the nature of norms,” Brandom

explains it by making and remaking the same Kantian point: “Many of his

[Wittgenstein’s] most characteristic lines of thought are explorations of the inaptness

of thinking of the normative ‘force’ which determines how it would be appropriate to

act on the model of a special kind of causal force” (1994: 14). From this point of view,

Brandom is naturally led to read Wittgenstein’s question “How am I able to obey a

rule?” (PI, § 217) in the following way: “it is a question about what actions accord with

the rule, are obliged or permitted by it, rather than with what my grasp of it actually

makes me do” (1994: 15).

16 The problem of such a Kantian translation of Wittgenstein’s question is easy to miss,

since Brandom constantly makes a double move, while believing he is only making one.

For, on one side, he is putting forward the very general distinction we saw at work

above in the criticism of regularism: to think about a norm, of whatever kind, as

opposed to mere regularities, one has to make a distinction between what happens and

what must happen according to the rule. Yet in thinking about what must happen,

Brandom endorses, at the same time, the moral-legal framework that Kant inherited from

modern thought.16 Thus, he explains the distinction between “the force of causal

‘must’s’ and “the force of logical or rational ‘must’s’” invoked by Wittgenstein by


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reducing it to this more specific framework, in which the “government by norms”

essentially requires “the possibility of mistakes, of those subjects to norms going wrong,

failing to do what they are obliged by those norms to do”: thus, whereas attributions of

natural laws are “incompatible” with the idea of not conforming to them, attribution of

norms requires, according to Brandom, “leaving room” for “mistakes and failures,” this

being “one of the essential distinguishing features of the ‘ought’s’ that express

government by norms” (1994: 30-31, I emphasize). It is clear enough that despite its

supposed generality, Brandom’s distinction refers to norms capable of sorting out

behavior as appropriate or inappropriate, both possibilities being intelligible: the very

normative vocabulary of commitments and entitlements refers, indeed, to “the

traditional deontic primitives of obligation and permission,” freed of the “stigmata

they contain betraying their origin in a picture of norms as resulting exclusively from

the commands or edicts of the superior, who lays an obligation on or offer a permission

to a subordinate” (1994: 160). Thus, if Brandom follows Wittgenstein in criticizing

regulism, he only changes the operative level, not the conception, of norms: if rules are

norms implicit in practice, they are still conceived as obligations, prohibitions and

permissions. It is this narrow conception of normativity, and therefore of concepts,

which must be criticized from a Wittgenstenian perspective. I will follow here V.

Descombes, who has recently argued that this Kantian reading of Wittgenstein misses

the very point of his whole philosophy.17 This will help us pointing out the fundamental

tactics of Wittgenstein’s pragmatism.

Kinds of Rules

17 According to Descombes, one cannot understand Wittgenstein’s discussions on rules

unless one sees that the main contrast orienting his philosophy, after the Tractatus, was

not the one between causal regularities and rational obligations but that between

causal and logical impossibilities, or necessities. To understand this difference, let us

take Wittgenstein’s example: “it is impossible for a human being to swim across the

Atlantic” (1958: 54). Here the incompatible assertion – a human being can swim across

the Atlantic – is perfectly intelligible: as Descombes points out, the failure depends on

our physical capacities, so that “we can understand what it would mean to succeed”

and even “try one’s luck” (2007: 402) against what the assertion says it is impossible to

do. This is not the case with logical impossibilities. The “logical obstacle” is not, as

Descombes says, a “hyperphysical obstacle,” since here we do not even understand

what it would mean to overcome it: what Wittgenstein wanted to underline with this

contrast was, therefore, that logical impossibilities do not concern human “finitude,”

but the conditions of “meaning” (2007: 402-3).

18 The peculiar nature of the normative force attached to the logical ‘must’ cannot be

understood, however, unless we contrast it, furthermore, with the one attached to the

moral ought, at the center of Brandom’s Kantian framework. Thus, the second move

consists in further distinguishing between two kinds of rules. Logical impossibilities

and necessities belong to the domain of constitutive rules. As Descombes says, if the

logical impossibility is characterized by “the impossibility of trying to do what is

asserted impossible,” this is because the action itself “can be understood and described

only by reference to the constitutive rules defining it” (2007: 404). Consequently, the

normative force of logic is different from that of practical rules. Indeed, as Descombes

points out, a “constitutive rule is not a commandment (a law prescribing or forbidding


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an action)” (2007: 404): commandments belong to the domain of regulative rules, which

are understandable only insofar as two intelligible alternatives are already there,

independent of the rule, whereas constitutive rules leave open only one intelligible

possibility, sorting out the contrary as unintelligible.

19 This is why Descombes goes as far as to say that constitutive rules are not prescriptive.

What he means is that these rules do not say “what one ought to do (what one is obliged)

to do” but “what there is and what there isn’t (according to our institutions, our

conventions)” (2007: 405). There is an interesting point here about the expressive power

of normative vocabulary. Indeed, a constitutive rule seems to be characterized by the fact

of authorizing the elimination of normative vocabulary: as Wittgenstein says in Zettel,

instead of saying “one can’t castle in draughts,” we should just say “there is no castling

in draughts” (Z, § 134). In this way, what seems to be a prescription is turned into a

description: a description of a normative fact, however, implied by the constitutive rules,

as opposed to the purely factual description presupposed by obligations and

prohibitions. It is clear, therefore, that the translation from the imperative to the

indicative only works for someone already knowing the game. As Descombes

acknowledges, commenting some remarks of Wittgenstein in The Lectures on the

Foundations of Mathematics, when explaining to someone the rules of our game we go

back to the normative vocabulary, since we say precisely such things as: “Here the rule

says you must turn; here you may go whichever way you like” (2007: 442).18

20 Opposed to the realm of natural regularities, the logical must is nonetheless opposed to

obligations as constitutive rules are opposed to regulative rules. The latter points to an

independently intelligible behavior as appropriate, sorting out the contrary as

inappropriate: this is the most general genus of a host of different practical rules -

strategies, moral maxims, positive laws, etc. Constitutive rules are of a different nature,

since here the rule enters into the very conditions of a meaningful action. This is the

genus where we find an important kind of practical rules, “conventional necessities”: now,

as Descombes says, when we interpret conventional necessities and impossibilities as

obligations and prohibitions “we simply lose sight of the meaning of the institution,”

since we “wrongly imagine an institution as a natural activity” that “men try to

domesticate” by “imposing some restrictions to its free exercise” and we fail to

understand “the constitutive or creative nature of rules when they function as rules of

a game” (2007: 407-8).

21 If Brandom is not interested in social practices based on constitutive conventional rules

creating a social world, it is because he thinks that this kind of “socially instituted

norms” cannot be our model for understanding what he calls “conceptual norms”:

indeed, the latter “incorporate objective commitments,” which contrasts with the error-

free nature of conventional rules; to take Brandom’s example, whatever “the Kwakiutl

treat as an appropriate greeting gesture for their tribe, or a correctly constructed

ceremonial hut, is one; it makes no sense to suppose that they could collectively be

wrong about this sort of thing” (1994: 53). This means that in thinking of conceptual

norms, Brandom has in mind descriptive concepts concerning the natural world, such as

“mass” (1994: 53), which essentially require the distinction between what we take as a

correct application and what is a correct application of them. As intuitive as the

objectivity claim may be, it rests on a narrow conception of concepts which parallel the

narrow conception of normativity we have just seen.


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Kinds of Concepts

22 In thinking of conventional necessities, Wittgenstein did not just want to give a logical

reading of social conventions, but also a conventional reading of logic: he was not only

explaining the meaning of social institution, but the social institution of meaning. As

Descombes points out, in thinking of the specific nature of the ‘logical must’ through

the game analogy Wittgenstein wanted, first and foremost, to reform traditional

philosophical thinking about the nature of a priori concepts: his aim was to discard the

implicit assimilation between a priori and a posteriori propositions, leading to a reading

of logical propositions as stating “a priori facts concerning the world” (2007: 437). In

place of this, Wittgenstein underlined the function of the logical must: the “necessity”

of “es muß,” when added to a proposition, transforms it into a “norm of representation”

(2007: 436) ruling out in advance facts that might contradict it. Thus, the distinction

between constitutive and regulative rules, derived from the language game analogy,

sheds light on the very nature of cognitive concepts. If there certainly are many ways

of understanding Wittgenstein’s conventionalism,19 the first step is to understand the

very distinction between two kinds of conceptual norms.

23 Thus, if Wittgenstein has done something in philosophy after Kant is not just to

criticize the regulist conception of rules, at the basis of Kant’s semantics, but to clarify

the different nature and content of concepts in light of the pluralist conception of rules

we have just seen: whereas Kant still thought of categories as regulative rules applied

to a recalcitrant nature, Wittgenstein constantly pointed out that the presuppositions

of contentfulness, which he extended far beyond the categories of the understanding,

are best understood if we see in them a system of constitutive rules. Far from

contenting himself with the very general idea of concepts as rules, Wittgenstein

articulated the difference between regulative descriptive concepts and constitutive

normative concepts. This is the distinction between empirical and grammatical

propositions that Wittgenstein very often clarified by reference to the function and

nature of the negation. In the Philosophical Investigation, for instance, he explains how

the sentence “I can’t imagine the opposite of this” must be understood, when used in

connection with such claims as “only I myself can know whether I am feeling pain”: “Of

course, here ‘I can’t imagine the opposite’ doesn’t mean: my powers of imagination are

unequal to the task [compare with: swimming across the Atlantic]. These words are a

defense against something whose form makes it look like an empirical proposition, but

which is really a grammatical one” (PI, § 251). At the end of the paragraph Wittgenstein

adds: “((Remark about the negation of an a priori proposition)).” The general idea of a

normative nature of concepts is first developed, in Wittgenstein, to understand the

specific way in which a priori propositions rule the world by ruling empirical thought.

24 This is Wittgenstein’s notion of grammar, as what cannot be contradicted without

falling into meaningless speech. With grammatical propositions we have, to use

Brandom’s vocabulary, commitments one cannot fail to endorse, unless one still wants

to think something. The right question concerning this kind of commitments cannot

concern their entitlement. They are constitutive conceptual commitments placed, as such,

beyond justification: being the condition of any kind of discursive practice, the question

of their being justified or not is simply meaningless. Now, this central point of

Wittgenstein’s philosophy implies the refusal of the rationalist framework Brandom

inherited from Kant: indeed, if there is a structural distinction between two types of


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conceptual norms, then meaning cannot be equated with inference, since the rational

understanding displayed in the game of giving and asking for reasons through

assertions presupposes another kind of understanding, which concerns the arbitrary

conditions of rational understanding. What is perhaps less obvious is to consider this

central point as the heart of Wittgenstein’s pragmatism as an overcoming of classical

rationalism. For this, it is necessary to see how Wittgenstein finally developed a new

way of accounting for the distinction of conceptual norms based on his fundamental

commitment to social practices.

Conclusion: Wittgenstein’s AnthropologicalPragmatism

25 The distinction of two conceptual norms sheds a new light on the function assigned by

Wittgenstein to social practices. Indeed, Wittgenstein did not only distinguish norms

implicit in practice from rules explicit in language, but looked for those social practices

which incorporate the constitutive logical norms governing the use of regulative

empirical rules in language: what social practices have to account for is, in the first

place, the tacit conditions of meaningful linguistic exchange. This is the perspective he

developed in On Certainty, in a way that is particularly interesting for contemporary

debates on pragmatism, since, in the context of a confrontation with Moore on the

skeptic’s challenge about knowledge’s claims, Wittgenstein clarified, as never before,

the way in which social practices are the condition of rational activity. It is the

pragmatist tactics elaborated in this text that I want to explain as a conclusion.

26 In order to appease the skeptical anxiety, without falling, like Moore, in its trap,

Wittgenstein analyzes, in On Certainty, the ordinary functioning of assertions, especially

the use of ‘I know that.’ As he says, this explicit propositional knowledge has to be seen

as an answer to a “practical doubt” (OC, § 19), based on definite reasons: in “normal

linguistic exchange” (OC, § 260) the expression “I know” expresses the readiness to give

“compelling grounds” in favor of the assertion (OC, § 243). Now, the skeptical doubt

transgresses this normal functioning of assertions, by asking reasons for any kind of

commitment. A regress of justifications results, which forces Moore, and all other

philosophers, in order to answer the challenge, to look for a special kind of self-evident

knowledge: propositional and yet not justified by any reason. Against this bad

foundationalist strategy, Wittgenstein answers by questioning the conditions of a

meaningful doubt: “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as

doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty” (OC, § 115). To

be intelligible, a doubt presupposes the language in which it can be expressed:

therefore, it presupposes the certainties presupposed by language. This is why a

distinction must be made between the propositional knowledge expressed through

assertions and its tacit conditions of possibility.

27 The view Wittgenstein explicitly endorses in On Certainty is that these conditions are

fixed in and through action: “Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes

to and end; – but the end is not certain propositions’ striking us immediately as true,

i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the

language game” (OC, § 204). The supposedly self-evident knowledge is, in fact, practical

know-how, which does not follow the norms of propositional knowledge, since it

governs this knowledge as a norm. Thus, at the fundamental level of practical


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certainties, one should not say “I know that,” since this opens the unanswerable

question of entitlement, but use some grammatical indicators, disqualifying the

entitlement question in advance: “It is my unshakeable conviction that” (OC, § 103),

“Nothing in the world will convince me of the opposite” (OC, § 380), “I can’t be making

a mistake about it” (OC, § 630), or simply “Dispute about other things; this is

immovable” (OC, § 655). If action lies at the bottom of language, expressing some

constitutive conceptual commitments on which the discursive practice rests, it is

because practical know-how is the point of entry in language. The child does not learn

first to think and say, through assertions, that things are thus-and-so, but “to react in

such-and-such a way; and in so reacting it doesn’t so far know anything. Knowing only

begins at a later level” (OC, § 538). The relation between mind and world is not, to begin

with, a cognitive one: what we first learn are ways of knowing how to do things with

things. This means that experience is originally organized by an intentional behavior

carrying with it the logical structure of the world. When an individual finally come to the

linguistic game which consists in an exchange of assertions, a whole system is already

established, turning around the fundamental distinction, established in and through

practice, between logical and empirical propositions: grammar is already there, as the

implicit structure of ordinary experience, the skeleton of the phenomena we talk and

deal with.

28 In giving such a foundational role to practice Wittgenstein deeply changed his notion of

grammar.20 On Certainty proposes a functional classification of concepts, which explains

the force of the logical must by looking to the “peculiar logical role” played by some

concepts in the “system of our empirical propositions” (OC, § 136). From this

functionalist perspective, even apparently empirical propositions, such as ‘I have two

hands’, can play the logical role of grammatical propositions. This is precisely what

Wittgenstein understood thanks to the skeptical challenge and the bad answer of

Moore. He thus developed a new conception of logical constitutive rules, structuring

thought in the background: what counts is no more the content of the proposition, in

any possible way, but its place and role in a hierarchical system structured by a

complementary opposition, defined by a difference of “status” between propositions. If

no proposition is intrinsically privileged within the system, this does not mean that our

beliefs form a homogeneous system facing the tribunal of experience, as in Quine’s

pragmatism: the relation between the propositions can be “altered with time, in that

fluid propositions hardened, and hard ones became fluid” (OC, § 96), but the system as

such must make a structural distinction between propositions open to “test by

experience” and those functioning as a “rule for testing” (OC, § 98). The internal

organization of this intellectual system depends on practice, since the genetic primacy

of the practical know-how fixes its basis. Yet this practice is, at the same time, social.

The structural organization of experience in practice is learned in an active relation

with an adult, considered as an authoritative expert: the active “trust” that is necessary

for a language game to be possible at all (OC, § 509) derives from a first relation of trust

from the child to some “authorities” (OC, § 493). Thus, by taking part in some bedrock

practices, the individual swallows a whole shared “world-picture” (OC, § 167). It is

against this “inherited background” that he can distinguish between “true and false”

(OC, § 94), since it is only on this basis that a meaningful exchange of assertions can

take place, starting with a particular practical doubt: “the questions that we raise and

our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubts […] like


181

hinges on which those turn” (OC, § 341). This is why the hierarchical system coincides

with the whole of social practices.

29 Of course, just as we cannot separate the two halves of the system, we cannot separate

bedrock social practices, which deposit the first layer of beliefs as constitutive

conceptual commitments, from those linguistic social practices which enable us to play

the rational game of doubts, questions and answers, through assertions. Wittgenstein

describes, in a sketchy way, this progressive development of the system through a

differentiated practical learning:

The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e., it learns to act according to thesebeliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system somethings stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What standsfast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather heldfast by what lies around. (OC, § 144)

30 In order to understand this development, and the way in which the structural

distinction within the intellectual system reflects a difference in social practices, we

certainly need a detailed description of the discursive practice, such as Brandom’s

account of the game of giving and asking for reasons, considered as a further step after

bedrock social practices. The place, meaning and functioning of such discursive

practice must be deeply reconsidered once we see it through the lens of Wittgenstein’s

pragmatism. Indeed, if we take seriously the double distinction of norms and concepts

as he finally elaborated it in On Certainty, we have to admit that a more complex

account is needed: in order to fully understand discursive practice as the articulation of

rational ought’s we have to understand it against the background of socially instituted

constitutive norms fixing the conditions of objectivity. A lot of substantive work is still

needed to fully have social practices in mind.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOUVERESSE J., (1987), Le mythe de l’intériorité: expérience, signification et langage privé chez

Wittgenstein, Paris, Minuit.

BRANDOM R., (1994), Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment, Cambridge

(Mass.), Harvard University Press.

BRANDOM R., (2002), Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality,

Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press.

BRANDOM R., (2011), Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent and Contemporary, Cambridge

(Mass.), Harvard University Press.

CONANT J. & U. ZEGLEN (2002), Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism, London, Routledge.

DESCOMBES V., (2007), Le raisonnement de l’ours, Paris, Seuil.

BAKER G. P. & P. M. S. HACKER, (1984), Skepticism, Rules and Language, Oxford, Blackwell.

HAUGELAND J., (1982), “Heidegger on Being a Person,” Nous 16.


182

HAUGELAND J., (1998), Having Thought, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press.

KRIPKE S., (1982), Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition, Cambridge,


MCDOWELL J., (2009), The Engaged Intellect: Philosophical Essays, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

MOYEL-SHARROCK D., (2004), Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, New York, Palgrave

Macmillan.

PUTNAM H., (1995), Pragmatism: An Open Question, Oxford, Blackwell.

SELLARS W., (2007), In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, Cambridge, Harvard

University Press.

WILLIAMS M., (1999), Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning: Toward a Social Conception of Mind, London, New

York, Routledge.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1953), Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, Blackwell.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1958), The Blue and Brown Books, Oxford, Blackwell.

WITTGENSTEIN L., (1967), Zettel, Oxford, Blackwell.


NOTES

1. For this strategy see, for instance, J. Bouveresse, “Le ‘pragmatisme’ de Wittgenstein” in

Bouveresse (1987), and H. Putnam, “Was Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?,” in Putnam 1995.

2. Brandom has first formulated this distinction in “Pragmatics and Pragmatism,” Conant, Zeglen

2002. Putnam strongly criticized in his answer to Brandom his simplified view of the American

pragmatism. Brandom has now developed a more complex account in Brandom 2011, to which I

refer in what follows.

3. See R. Brandom, “From German Idealism to American Pragmatism – and Back,” in Brandom

2011.

4. See W. Sellars, “Some reflections on language games,” now in Sellars 2007.

5. See also Williams (1999), ch. 6, for a similar analysis.

6. See the passage quoted in McDowell (2009: 106).

7. For this regress argument in Brandom, see Brandom (1994: 21).

8. We also need “the teaching” (§ 197), as we will see.

9. For Brandom’s discussion of Sellars, see Brandom (1994: 26).

10. See Kripke 1982.

11. As we will see below, the question is to know whether Wittgenstein shared Kant’s conception

of conceptual normativity or whether Brandom merges a general claim with a narrower concept

of rules and concepts derived from Kant.

12. See Brandom (1994: 658), footnote 45.

13. See Baker, Hacker (1984: 42).

14. See Haugeland 1982, and Haugeland 1998.

15. See R. Brandom, “Some pragmatist themes in Hegel’s Idealism,” in Brandom (2002).

16. See Brandom’s discussion of Pufendorf and Enlightenment contract theories in Brandom

(1994: 47-52).

17. See Descombes 2007.


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18. Descombes quotes a passage from L. Wittgenstein, Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics,

Cambridge 1939, from the notes of R. G. Bosanquet, Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, and Yorick

Smythies, edited by Cora Diamond, The University of Chicago Press, 1975, 241.

19. For instance, in developing Wittgenstein’s view, Descombes comes curiously closer to the

instrumentalist perspective of American pragmatists. Indeed, according to him, since logical

norms fix the condition of cognitive activity, they cannot belong to the cognitive realm. They are

a matter of decision: just as conventions depend ultimately on what is “desirable” (2007: 408), a

priori representations are not justified “by their conformity to an (ideal) reality” but by our

“different practical necessities,” that is, by our “different needs” (2007: 443). This is a further

and, in my view, wrong step, which is not necessarily implied by Wittgenstein’s distinction

between two types of conceptual norms.

20. The development of grammar in On Certainty through a pragmatist reading of hinge

propositions is explained in detail by D. Moyal-Sharrock 2004.

ABSTRACTS

This paper clarifies why and how Wittgenstein’s animating idea of social practices should be

considered as expressing a fundamental pragmatist commitment.To this end, I do not take the

retrospective perspective, which traces “pragmatism” back to the criteria of use fixed by the

inventor of the word, C. S. Peirce, but rather replace Wittgenstein in the context of contemporary

debates. I focus in particular on R. Brandom’s attempt to understand Wittgenstein’s second

philosophy as belonging to an intellectual tradition from which his own rationalist pragmatism

derives. A confrontation follows between Brandom and Wittgenstein, whose aim is to highlight

the specific tactics of Wittgenstein’s pragmatism as a refusal of Brandom’s idealist rationalism.

First, I present and defend R. Brandom’s reading of Wittgenstein’s argument on rule-following as

a decisive clarification of the general idea of social practices. Second, I criticize Brandom’s

narrow Kantian framework, explaining why it prevents us from understanding Wittgenstein’s

conception of rules and concepts, and, therefore, of the very normativity of concepts. In light of

the distinction between two kinds of conceptual norms, empirical and grammatical, I finally

show, through a reading of On certainty, that the function assigned by Wittgenstein to social

practices is to account for the conditions of possibility of conceptual contentfullness as expressed

in rational activity.

AUTHOR

FRANCESCO CALLEGARO

École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales

fra.callegaro[at]gmail.com


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A Symposium on J. Margolis,Pragmatism Ascendent: a Yard ofNarrative, A Touch of Prophecy,Stanford University Press, Stanford,2012


185

Joseph Margolis’ Pragmatismbetween Narrative and Prophecy Rosa M. Calcaterra

1 It is common knowledge that pragmatism acquired a new and quite relevant space

within European philosophical debate during the second half of Nineteen Century, and

the leading actors of such a renewed interest for the classics of American thought have

been Karl Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. Especially in Italy, the so called revival of

pragmatism took place via their neo-kantianianism, and actually one could say that the

pragmatist thought has been, so to speak, cleared from previous discredit or, in the

best cases, from a wide-ranging disregard just because of the persistent influence of

Kantian theories on contemporary European philosophy. At the same time, the Apel-

Habermas neo-kantian reevaluation of Peirce, Dewey and Mead appears striking if one

considers that the most unsympathetic European receptions of pragmatism typically

were, at the beginning of last century, from the neo-kantian milieu. For instance, it is

worth mentioning the 1908 Third International Philosophical Conference that took

place in Heidelberg, whose main subject of discussion was the pragmatist theory of

knowledge or, more precisely, that one offered by William James in his book

Pragmatism. In fact, this book was considered by the majority of European intellectuals

as the manifesto of the entire pragmatist philosophy; neo-kantians or neo-criticists,

who were predominant within German academic contest of that time, reacted to its

overall approach to traditional questions with a deep disappointment. Giovanni Vailati,

one of the very few Italian supporter of pragmatism at the moment, informs us that

these negative reactions marked the atmosphere of the Conference and finally some

supplementary sessions for discussing pragmatist epistemology were organized.1 One

should add that also a number of current commentators feel quite uncomfortable in

reading classical pragmatists’ assertions about Kantian philosophy, including those by

Peirce who, as everybody knows, declared his debts to Kant in so many occasions of his

multifaceted work.

2 The importance of Kant’s philosophy with regard to pragmatist European ‘adventures’

– both negative and positive – is obviously much more complex than I have said in the

very brief and necessary incomplete note above sketched. Anyway, Kantian paradigm


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surely can be considered as a pivotal, even thought non always explicit, reference point

of the whole debate, old and new, on classical pragmatism and of its many-sided

developments. Joseph Margolis’ book Pragmatist Ascendent. A Yard of Narrative. A Touch of

Profecy provides quite remarkable indications in that regard, pinpointing both the

American and the European philosophical scene. More precisely, Margolis presents, in

his usual intriguing style, engaging reasons for an ample historical and theoretical

understanding of Kant’s philosophy relevance not only within the international

discussions on pragmatism but also for the making up of its own mostly distinctive

features. In fact, according to him, this movement of thought mainly consists in a

complex critical review of Kantian transcendentalism, a review which took up the

Hegelian emphasis on the historical nature of all human expressions and achievements.

The European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy is particularly pleased to host

a symposium on this book, which indeed represents a fascinating drawing of the deep

philosophical roots of pragmatist standpoints as well as of its contemporary increasing

relevance.

3 Joseph Margolis’ philosophical work is extremely vast and ranges from ancient to

modern and contemporary thought, including epistemological, aesthetical, ethical and

analytic philosophy. He is without doubt a leading figure in the philosophical American

scene and, at the same time, one of the most lively representative of pragmatism,

analytic and European philosophy’s complex interweaving. In my opinion, it is relevant

considering his interest in Protagora and Aristotele, which was in the early years of his

research, in fact I think that his subsequent philosophical production retains, in

various outlines, some traces of ontological, epistemological and ethical problems they

consigned to our cultural history. I limit myself to mentioning Protagora’s issue of the

epistemological relativism that, in Margolis’ philosophical discourse, seems to result in

his basic assertion of the constitutive function played by historical and cultural factors

for the epistemic decoding of reality. Similarly, Aristotle’s biology and his work’s

realistic constituents seem influential on his repeated efforts for concealing relativism

and realism, which he has always been playing in a contrast with scientistic

implications of U.S. analytic philosophy.

4 The volume to which our symposium is dedicated contains a number of polemic

references to the latter current of thought that, as everybody knows, dominated the

American academic scene since the 1930s, when was introduced by scholars linked to

the Vienna Circle – Reichenbach, Carnap, Hempel, Tarski, Neurath and others – who

were forced to leave Europe for political reasons. Richard Bernstein described this

period as the beginnings of a sort of “silent revolution,” which over the space of a few

years led to the exclusion of pragmatism from the higher levels of philosophical debate.

Margolis now underlines the turnoraund, so to speak, that has occurred both at

American and European level, namely the international recovery of pragmatist

perspectives and the transcription of some typical pragmatist issues in the conceptual

and methodological framework of analytics, which have apparently exhausted – he

maintains – their previous importance. Margolis principally reproaches the analytic

philosophers for having ignored Hegel’s critics to Kant, or the Hegelian opposition of

historicity to Transcendentalism and, therefore, for being victims of the rigorism

deriving from the Kantian apriori categories’ doctrine. Just this basic deficiency

resulted, according to the American philosopher, the various forms of scientism that

characterized analytic thought since its outset and continues also nowadays, despite

some attempts to mitigate such a trait have emerged within its own circle. The


187

reputation of analytic philosophy – he writes – “still rests with its rigor, but rigor is

doubtful wherever its best efforts are too slow to admit the failure of its reductionisms,

supervenientisms, eliminativisms, axiomatizations, systems of causal closure or the

rest of the its utopian projects” (111).

5 The criticism of the analytics’ lack of understanding Hegel’s contribution to the

overcoming of Kantian transcendentalism mirrors perfectly Margolis’ conception of

philosophy as well as his pragmatism’s ‘narrative’ and ‘prophecy.’ To be sure, the

Hegelian emphasis on the historical dimension is a liet motiv of his several books

concerning pragmatist philosophy and its specific position within contemporary

philosophy, particularly: Pragmatism without Foundations: Reconciling Relativism and

Realism, Reinventing Pragmatism. American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century,

and Pragmatism Advantages: American and European Philosophy at the End of Twentieth

Century. As regards to the conception of philosophy, there is a tight connection

between Hegelian concept of Bildung and Margolis constructivist perspective on

scientific and philosophical inquiries, a connection whose theoretical nucleus appears

in his assertion that the most essential Hegel’s legacy is the demonstration that

“contingencies of the historical or geistlich variety” prop up philosophy as “an

interpretive discipline that never pretends to grasp (or need) the impossible rigors of

Kantian transcendental necessity or a realist reading of ‘absolute Idealism’ at its

absolute limit” (43). This is probably a questionable reading of Hegelian idea of

philosophy but, as a matter of fact, such assertion summarizes Margolis’ open option in

favor of Hegel’s historicism, and this properly means defending an overall anti-

dogmatic perspective, according to which there aren’t sharp boundaries neither

between philosophical and scientific enquiries and acquirements nor between the

objective and the subjective sides of knowing and reasoning. It is an option that

evidently implies the rejection of any kind of apriorism and, accordingly, the refusal of

the Kantian quest for definitive necessity and universality of our ‘rational’ assertions.

However, all that does not mean embracing skepticism. Otherwise, what is firmly

maintained is the inevitable interference of the cultural and the natural dimensions

involved in both the knowing and the known, so that all rational-logical-scientific

practices must be considered as constructive processes of truth and objectivity that are

always corrigible and improvable.

6 It is not difficult noticing the correspondence of Margolis’ constructivist perspective

with one of the most documented features of pragmatist philosophy in general. In fact,

he himself assigns the distinctive mark of contemporary and future pragmatism to a

more and more aware and attentive constructivism, and this particularly means

inviting to get free from the anxiety of ahistorical principles and tools for knowing and

acting. It is worth repeating once again that what here is at stake is the Kant-Hegel

controversy, and the net conviction of the American philosopher that Hegel corrected

transcendentalism introducing an irreversible way of thinking – “the conceptual

novelty of a historied and encultured world” –, which has been confirmed by most of

philosophical and epistemological trends developed in late twentieth-century. Of

course, Margolis does not undervalue Kant’s great contribution to the growth of

Eurocentric philosophy. In fact he considers Hegel’s philosophy as a “continuation of

the Kantian project,” asserting that any further progress of philosophical researches

cannot but draw the Kantian-Hegelian line, which marks all contemporary philosophy

even thought in so many different ways. Thus, Ernest Cassirer – to whom Margolis

dedicated his interesting 2010 essay Toward a Theory of Human History – is more than


188

once quoted as representative of a “Hegelianized Kantianism” that, in his opinion, also

characterizes Peirce’s philosophy, especially as far as the founder of pragmatism

depicts scientific research as an intersubjective activity that is inevitably effected by

historical circumstances and constrains. One could expect a more detailed comparison

between these two thinkers, both so much engaged in theoretical reflection on the

logic-symbolic level of human performances, but anyway there is a very attractive

suggestion for a possible combination of their own analysis, provided the differences –

as Margolis underlines – in their reception of Darwinism.

7 The philosophical importance of Darwinian biological evolutionism is one of the key-

subjects of the book: it makes up Margolis’ constructionism, his reading of Peirce’s

most important questions and, eventually, his ‘prophecy’ for the advancement of

pragmatism. In a nutshell, his basic thesis is that what present and future philosophy

needs is to enhance pragmatist essential achievements “by conjoining the essential

lessons of Hegel and what, independently, has been made of Charles Darwin’s and post-

Darwinian inquiries” (54). In other words, the future of the whole of Eurocentric

philosophy calls for ‘Darwinizing Hegel’ and ‘Hegelianizing Darwin,’ as – according to

Margolis – classical pragmatists more or less explicitly actually did, although without a

full understanding of the implications of such a philosophical strategy (119-20). This is

a task still open but it is essential considering that classical pragmatism was a

continuation of Hegel’s corrections of Kantian transcendentalism along a naturalistic

line. The improvement of pragmatism implies just a development of such very special

naturalistic line, taking advantage from the post-darwinian paleoanthropology so that

constructivism would result the only inevitable solution to the problem of knowledge.

8 In a quite complex passage of the book, Margolis describes what he means by

‘constructivism’:

I use the terms ‘constructed,’ ‘constructive,’ ‘constructivist’ in two quite differentbut hardly unrelated senses: in one, ‘constructive’ means ‘artifactual’ (or ‘hybrid’) –in the specific sense in which the self and all things cultural are artifactualtransforms of the biological or material; in the other, ‘constructivist’ means‘conceptually inseparable’ – in the sense in which the contribution of the subjectiveand objective “parts” of cognitive states cannot be separately assessed. The firstdraws attention to the cultural dimensions of all forms of inquiry and humanintelligence; the second, the impossibility of outflanking the contingency ofcognitive claims. Together, the two senses account for the ‘constructivist’ nature ofthe realism of science (and metaphysics) – consistent with preserving thedistinction between metaphysical and epistemological questions. (38-9)

9 I think this passage can be considered as a significant summary of the overall Margolis’

theoretical contribution to contemporary philosophy, a contribution which, in my

opinion, is perfectly in line with the non reductionist form of naturalism that is claimed

by classical as well as by the majority of today’s pragmatists.

10 Of course, the attribution of a naturalism of some kind to Peirce – as Margolis invites –

is quite open to discussion, in fact a lot of critical studies insist definitely on peircean

anti-naturalist assertions. As far as I am concerned, Margolis’ interpretative line is

more than justified, provided my conviction that any interpretation of great

philosophical works cannot but favouring some particular aspect, and this is especially

relevant in relation to Peirce’s non systematic and typically many-sided work. Indeed,

in agreement with Gadamer, I am convinced that the readings of works of the past

could be all the more fruitful the more they are nourished by the need to find possible


189

answers to current question, and this seems to me Margolis’ constant attitude towards

the writings of the classical pragmatists as well as of Kant, Hegel and other great

figures of Western philosophical history. I consider this aspect as a salient and very

positive feature of his intense research activity, which this book establishes as

promising of new, meaningful suggestions, mainly with regard to a more and more

fertile relationship of philosophy with human and natural sciences that should

generate a theory of the self actually coherent with the non reductionist naturalism he

theorizes.

11 Let me conclude my remarks by pointing out Margolis’ effort to demonstrate the

centrality of fallibilism within Peirce’s thought, and above all his indication of the

essential strength of peircian concept of ‘infinite hope’ for reconciling realism and

idealism. However, I do not find important to demonstrate that fallibilism is, so to

speak, the ‘very essence’ of Peirce’s philosophy, as Margolis apparently claims along his

debate with Nathan Hauser. The search for a philosopher’s unique, definitive

conceptual devise or purpose seems to me in contrast not only with his interpretative

style of philosophical works, as above mentioned, but also with the following

paradigmatic peircian assertion

Philosophy ought […] trust rather to the multitude and variety of its argumentsthan to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain whichis no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibres may be ever soslender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.2

12 Thus, I wonder whether it would not be useful to turn to James, who is mostly

neglected in this book, reflecting in particular on Jamesian perspectivism and pluralist

metaphysics in order to corroborate the theoretical framework advocated by Margolis.

Indeed, in my opinion, one can find on both sides motives quite compatible with the

perspectives of the book here at issue: above all, on the one hand, one could appeal to

the realist instance that pervades James’ perspectivism and, more generally, to his own

effort to combine realism and idealism; on the other hand, one could find a specific

reference point for a non reductionist naturalism in the concept of ‘possibility’

supporting Jamesian metaphysics, which indeed gets rid of the concept of ‘essence’ so

central in Western traditional metaphysics. Most probably, especially Margolis’ crucial

conception of the self as ‘natural artifact’ could take advantage from Jamesian

philosophical translation of Darwin’s biological evolutionism, considering also the deep

ethical implications assigned to the category of possibility by the author of The

Principles of Psychology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FERRARI M., (2010a), “Heidelberg 1908. Giovanni Valilati, Wilhelm Jerusalem e il pragmatismo

Americano,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 1.

FERRARI M., (2010b), “William James a Vienna,” in R. M. Calcaterra & G. Maddalena (eds.), Itinerari

pragmatisti, Paradigmi, no. 3.


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PEIRCE Ch. S. (1992), Some Consequences of Four Incapacities, in The Essential Peirce, N. Houser and

C. Kloesel (eds.), vol. 1, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.

NOTES

1. For an account of early German and Austrian reception of pragmatism, see M. Ferrari 2010a,

and 2010b.

2. Peirce (1992: 29).

AUTHOR

ROSA M. CALCATERRA

Università Roma Tre

calcater[at]uniroma3.it


191

Darwinized Hegelianism orHegelianized Darwinism?Mathias Girel

1 It has been said that Peirce was literally talking “with the rifle rather than with the

shot gun or water hose” (Perry 1935, vol. 2: 109). Readers of his review of James’s

Principles can easily understand why. In some respects, the same might be true of the

series of four books Joseph Margolis has been devoting to pragmatism since 2000. One

of the first targets of Margolis’s rereading was the very idea of a ‘revival’ of pragmatism

(a ‘revival’ of something that never was, in some ways), and, with it, the idea that the

long quarrel between Rorty and Putnam was really a quarrel over pragmatism (that is

was a pragmatist revival, in some ways). The uncanny thing is that, the more one read

the savory chapters of the four books, the more one feels that the hunting season is

open, but that the game is not of the usual kind and looks more like zombies, so to

speak. Not the kind of zombies that tramp the corridors of philosophy of mind

textbooks, but philosophical zombies, positions whose lifespan has been over for long but

that still resurface, or, if the reader is of more inclined towards the Classics, some

philosophical equivalents of the ghosts that Ulysses has to face in Book XI of the

Odyssey and that lead whatever kind of half-life they have by sucking the blood of the

living. Starting at least with Emerson in America and Nietzsche in Europe, the idea that

the best promises of philosophy could be doomed by the tradition, and in particular by

giving too much weight to what was mislead in the tradition, that one could be

deprived of one’s own standing by too many tales about the ‘mighty dead,’ has been a

matter of concern. Hence the twofold task of Margolis’s books: what is at stake is not

only the imperative of saying what would be philosophically the best option, here and

now, it is also to show that even philosophies that do not mention the tradition in an

ostensible way can still endorse options that have been dead for a long time –

unbeknownst to their proponents – and err indefinitely as a result. One-sided

eliminative naturalism, analytic scientism were such options. These last days, the focus

has been on Brandom’s pragmatism, as participants to the 2012 Rome Conference could

attest. But this critical task should in no way hide the fact that the general purpose is of


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a constructive kind, which might seem close at times to the perfectionist stance but

under strong constraints,1 and this last book makes this point tellingly.

2 Margolis has a tantalizing formula to make this constructive dimension explicit, which

comes from Peirce, who used it in one of his reviews for The Nation.2 Since the formula

captures one of the central insights of Margolis’s last book, it might be worth looking

into it more closely.

3 Peirce’s motto, as quoted by Margolis in his introduction is: “Darwinizing Hegel and

Hegelianizing Darwin.”3 This means, at the very least and to give only the most general

description, that one should not have to choose between biological naturalism and the

post-kantian emphasis on history and culture, and that, in order to account for the

modes of existence of human selves in particular, any one-sided approach is sure to fail.

The ‘and’ is decisive in the motto and in the gloss that follows since it will preclude any

comfortable choice between extreme biological naturalization and a kind of cultural

anthropology that would be oblivious of biological evolution. This captures thus nicely

what Margolis deems to be the best and most perspicuous direction for a

reconstruction of philosophy, where “the analysis of biology and culture must be seen

to be very differently conceived but inseparably joined” (5). Margolis sees in Peirce’s

motto a commitment that is at the core of the prophecy that he is himself spelling out

in the book and that might be pragmatism’s best promise: the commitment to “the

radical thesis that the self is a hybrid artifact of biological and cultural evolution that

makes possible the entire run of the uniquely enlanguaged forms of human

intelligence, thought, understanding, reason, feeling, experience, activity, conduct,

creation, and knowledge that marks our race for what it is” (5-6). The revival of

Pragmatism will not be the repetition of something that already took place, it will

borrow its vitality to the ‘interval spanning Kant and Hegel’ and to the kind of

naturalism that developed after Darwin’s Origin, a major inspiration for the whole first

wave of pragmatism, and it will take the best from these two strands, at the junction of

Eurocentric philosophy and American Pragmatism. These insights are beautifully and

convincingly developed in the book.

4 It is all the more interesting to look at Peirce’s original review, not to find faults in

Margolis’s reading, but to compare his project and Peirce’s. If some significant

differences obtain in the process, they might give us some clues as to the actuality, and

also the novelty, of Margolis’s own stance.

5 Peirce’s review was about the now forgotten Scottish philosopher Ritchie who, in his

book, tried to provide a Hegelian account of the principles of evolution, or, in Peirce’s

words, to “determine how far the conceptions of Hegel can advantageously be applied

in Darwinian speculation.”4 Peirce was not convinced by the result and he claimed

clearly that this dialectical reconstruction of Evolution, playing as it does with the

empty notions of Identity and Difference and their ‘interaction,’ would not do:

One of the worst faults of the Hegelian philosophy is that its conceptions arewanting in this definiteness, and that its consequences are not unmistakable. WhenMr. Ritchie undertakes to “Hegelianize natural selection” by the remark that“Heredity and Variation are just particular forms of the categories of Identity andDifference, whose union and interaction produce the actually existing kinds ofliving beings,” he makes us think that Hegelianism needs to be Darwinized muchmore than Darwinism needs to be Hegelianized. (Peirce, CN1, 201)

6 As we can see clearly, in Peirce, or, to be a bit more cautious, in that particular review,5

‘Darwinized Hegelianism’ and ‘Hegelianized Darwinism’ are in no way on the same


193

footing. The ‘and’ that seems central in Margolis’s prophecy is not on Peirce’s agenda in

this text, since Peirce clearly opts in favor of the first option: reading Hegel – or is just

Hegelian dialectics? – through Darwinian lenses, more than the reverse. So far, so good:

one could say that what is already a form of Hegelianized Kantianism in Peirce (if one

allows most of the argument of Chapter II on Peirce’s fallibilism) is submitted to

another new transformation, and that, as a consequence, the two dimensions –

Hegelianism and Darwinism – will be fused in the final result, so that the rest is mere

quibble. Still, would Margolis be content with only one part of the motto and say that

“Darwinized Hegelianism” is enough? That would be my first question.

7 But what does Peirce mean by “Darwinizing” here? I am not totally sure that this fits

perfectly in the picture Margolis gives and that it refers primarily to biological

evolution and to what we usually associate with naturalism. Peirce does not say that we

should renounce Hegel’s insights (and that might confirm in some way the reading of

Peirce’s fallibilism that Margolis gives in his Chapter II), but he does not say, neither,

that one should have a reading of Hegel based on biological evolution, or that one

should endorse a kind of naturalized hegelianism where ‘naturalized’ would refer to

the living. Of course, one could read the text in such a way that it addresses the way

chance plays a part of the stable forms of human life. Peirce has some fine lines on

Darwin’s tack on the notion of ‘purpose’: he notes that Darwin’s challenge is to assess

“how teleological or purposed action can be a secondary effect of non-teleological

action,” but he does not take sides here on this issue. The faults Peirce finds in Hegel

are not related to a choice in favor of History and Culture against Biology. It is that

Hegel’s conceptions are not ‘definite’ enough, that one cannot draw experiential

consequences from them. “To Darwinize” is not equivalent, here, to ‘include into a

biological narrative,’ it is used in an idiosyncratic way – and all the question is to assess

whether it is only a local phenomenon or something that has more far-reaching

implications – where this means rather, if one can stand a bit of anachronism:

“Popperianize.”6 Since it is not likely that Margolis would accept “Popperianize Hegel

and Hegelianize Popper” as a motto for his own book, let’s see if that reading, if daring,

is credible.

8 The main merit of Darwin, in Peirce’s account, lies not so much in the idea of evolution

than in the scientific method he used to give an account of the origin of species. That’s

the ‘lesson of logic’ mentioned in the Illustrations. As we know, Evolution was in the air

before Darwin’s epoch-making book and Darwin does not use the word in a technical

sense in 1859, even though he gives the first scientific account of evolution. From that

standpoint, Peirce often opposes Darwin and Spencer. They might seem to have the

same theory, as regards content, but the method is drastically different:

(The Spencerians) cannot understand that it is not the sublimity of Darwin’stheories which makes him admired by men of science, but that it is rather hisminute, systematic, extensive, strict, scientific researches which have given histheories a more favorable reception – theories which in themselves would barelycommand scientific respect. (CP: 1.33)

9 If one just sticks to the idea of biological evolution, ‘Spencerianize Hegel’ or

‘Hegelianize Spencer’ would basically do the same job as the motto, but would of course

be less appealing (or are they?). Peirce says more about what he has in mind a few lines

later: ‘Hegelianizing’ Darwin would be in fact prefixing an empirical inquiry with a

particular metaphysics, and “whatever could conceivably be settled by experiment,

metaphysics should abstain from settling in advance” (Peirce, Ketner et al., 1975, vol. 1:


194

202). Peirce has Comte in mind but I think it is not totally inappropriate, today, to say

that the faults he finds in Hegel involve the use of Unverifiable hypotheses and that he

dismisses them in a way that has already a Popperian twist: they are “unverifiable in

the sense of leading to no unmistakable consequences capable of being put to the test

of comparison with observation” (ibid.). The problem with ‘Hegelianizing’ is that it

leaves finally no room to ‘scientifically observed facts’ and to ‘he test of comparison

with observation’:

Hence the moment a philosopher, upon a-priori or epistemological grounds,enunciates any proposition whatever as true, we are warned to be upon our guardagainst some jugglery. Where we have no scientifically observed facts to go upon,the prudent thing is to confess our downright ignorance. Even where we have suchfacts, we are subject to a probable error. From this pregnant fact, if one only takesit to heart, can be developed a whole Darwinianized Hegelism, having fruitfulsuggestions and indications for the prosecution of science and for the conduct oflife. (Peirce, CN1, 202)

10 This brings me to my second question. Would Margolis say that Peirce’s actual motto is

a kind of slip of the pen and that what he really meant was something closer to his own

motto in the Preface? Or would he concede that this motto, as offered in his book, has a

radical novelty of its own, that it is ‘Margolisian’ first and foremost, even though it

might be rooted deeply in the authors he mentions in Pragmatism Ascendent?

11 Or, does it reveal something that would make Peirce less ‘enrollable’ in the prophecy

and thus in the reconstruction of what is still alive in Classical Pragmatism he is

offering, maybe because the stress, here, is more on the scientific method than on the

kind of naturalism we commonly attribute to Darwin? Is the Darwin in question in

Peirce’s review the one that Margolis wants to use in his prophecy?

12 Or, again, if what has just been said about what Peirce meant by ‘Darwinizing’ belongs

in the end to the fallibilist stance described in Chapter II of Pragmatism Ascendent, are

we getting anywhere out of Hegel?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAUVIRÉ C., (1981), “Peirce, Popper et l’abduction,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger

171, 441-59.

HAACK S., (1977), “Two Fallibilists in Search of the Truth,” Aristotelian Society, Supplementary

volume 51.

PEIRCE C. S. & K. KETNER et al. (1975), Contributions to “The Nation,” Lubbock, Texas, Texas Tech

University.

PERRY R. B., (1935), The Thought and Character of William James: As Revealed in Unpublished

Correspondence and Notes, Together with His Published Writings, Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 2

vols.


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NOTES

1. “Philosophy has no point (for me) if it has no convictions about the right orientation of human

life; but it has no resources of its own by which to validate any such change directly – except by

subtraction. So it plays its part under extraordinary constraints,” Preface, p. x. The “subtractive”

part is integral part of the constructive part.

2. Review of David G. Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel, with Other Philosophical Studies, London, Swan

Sonnenschein & Co., New York, Macmillan & Co, (1893). The review is contemporary of Peirce’s

Monist series, which includes Evolutionary Love and The Law of Mind. Retrieved in Peirce, Ketner et

al. (1975 vol. 1: 199-202).

3. This was also prominent in a Lecture entitled A Pragmatist Trajectory, delivered at the École

normale supérieure (Paris), on March, 6th, 2012, and Margolis used the motto also in “A Word of

Thanks for Peter Hare’s Patience,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 46 (1), 2010, 3-8.

4. Peirce, Ketner et al. (1975 vol. 1: 199).

5. I have not found any clear equivalent of the motto in other texts by Peirce, even though one

could embark into a close reading of the Monist series, and see in which measure they agree with

the motto, but this is a task for a book more than for the present contribution.

6. Chauvire 1981, Haack 1977, and some others have stressed the resemblances and differences

between these philosophers. We could of course say simply ‘Peircianize,’ but it would obscure the

particular point, which relates to the way theories are put to the test.

AUTHOR

MATHIAS GIREL

École Normale Supérieure, Department of Philosophy, USR3308 CIRPHLES

mathias.girel[at]ens.fr


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Nature and ThoughtSome Reflections on Margolis’ Claim of the Indissolubility of Realism andIdealism

Roberto Gronda

1 Among many other things, Margolis’ new book, Pragmatism Ascendent: A Yard of

Narrative, A Touch of Prophecy, is a successful attempt to articulate in a thoroughly

naturalistic way the fundamental tenet of Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy – that

is, the idea that idealism and realism are not two alternative metaphysical options, but

rather two ways of dealing with the very same thing, the concrete experience that

human beings have of their world. One of the most characteristic errors of traditional

philosophies has been that of holding apart subject and object, thus assuming either

realism or idealism to be true. In the first case, the object is treated as an entity wholly

independent from the cognitive activities of the subject; in the second case, the

autonomy of the object is firmly denied, and the object is completely absorbed in the

subject. The defect of this alternative is that it does not contemplate the possibility of a

third way between these two extremes. It was Kant who had the merit of realizing that

transcendental idealism and empirical realism not only can but also should be

simultaneously embraced. Indeed, idealism refers to the necessary relation that

knowledge entertains with the subject, while empiricism refers to the kind of validity

that human knowledge possesses. So, no contradiction stems from their simultaneous

assumption. Kant explains this fundamental trait of the critical philosophy by

remarking that to say that space and time are transcendentally ideal is only to say that

they are not properties of the things-in-themselves. The recognition of their

dependence upon the cognitive structures of the agent does not imply that judgments

about space and time cannot be empirically assessed (Kant 1781/87: A369-70).

2 Margolis follows Kant in rejecting any contraposition between the subjective and the

objective. However, he considers the transcendental way that Kant has taken to be too

committed to rationalistic and dualistic presumptions. Accordingly, Margolis

distinguishes between Kant’s constructivist approach – which represents his most

valuable contribution to the philosophical discourse of the ‘modernity of modernity,’

and consists in the recognition of the fact that objects are theory-laden – and his

illegitimate belief in the possibility of singling out a set of categories that constitute


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experience. The commitment to a list of fixed and unchanging concepts is what he

names ‘transcendentalism.’ Consequently, Margolis depicts the history of the post-

Kantian philosophy as a series of efforts aiming at shaping a form of constructivism

free from ‘transcendentalist’ prejudices. Referring to the heated debate on the nature

of geometry that characterized nineteenth century German philosophy, Margolis finds

no difficulty in showing that what Kant believed to be a necessary condition of

possibility of experience – namely, the Euclidean space – was in reality a hypothesis

that was wholly legitimate at a certain moment of history, but which was subsequently

abandoned when the evolution of physical sciences required the creation of new tools

to handle new problems. On Margolis’ reading, a correct interpretation of the history of

science leads therefore to the conclusion that the categories of Vernunft – the faculty of

reason in general – are contingent, context-dependent, and constantly under process of

revision. Far from being the immutable structures of understanding, they are products

of a transient flux whose validity as principles of construction of experience is local and

historical.

3 Plausible as this reconstruction may seem to contemporary philosophers, I think that

some reservations should be advanced against Margolis’ treatment of the “indissoluble

union of realism and idealism” (Margolis 2012: cap 2. 54). I would like to call attention

to two different, yet interrelated points that I find particularly problematic. Firstly, I

cannot accept Margolis’ decision to restrict the constructivist option to the analysis of

what Sellars has called ‘the scientific image of the world.’ Margolis is rather explicit in

maintaining that what he is dealing with is not the general concept of objectivity, but

the particular kind of objectivity that is proper of the entities postulated in science.

The constructivism that he has in mind is therefore much less radical than one could

expect: the view that he wants to defend is the modest thesis that “what is constructed

is one or another picture of the world” (Margolis 2012: cap. 2. 12). I think that such a

restriction is not only unwarranted, but also illegitimate. In section I, I will try to show

that it relies on a conception of the nature and role of thought that seems to be not

completely consistent with the tenets of a pragmatist theory of knowledge.

4 Secondly, I am not convinced that Margolis’s argument in favor of the rejection of the

notion of the transcendental is really conclusive. Margolis does not always distinguish

clearly between transcendental and a priori, thus implicitly assuming that the

criticisms that have been directed against the latter can be extended without

modification to the former. Now, no one can deny that in Kant’s original formulation

the two notions are essentially interwoven. Kant defines transcendental as the

cognition “that is occupied […] with our a priori concepts of objects in general” (Kant

1781/87: A11-12/B25). Similarly, it is not by chance that the transcendental deduction

of categories is preceded by a metaphysical deduction in which Kant attempts to derive

the different ways of constructing experience from the immutable structure of

understanding. So, if they are directed against the way in which Kant defines and uses

the notion of the transcendental, Margolis’ criticisms are undoubtedly effective. But

this does not mean that a different conception cannot be developed. In section II, I will

attempt to sketch the broad outlines of a different view of what transcendental

philosophy may be within a thoroughly naturalistic framework. My goal is to suggest

that the ‘constructivist naturalism’ endorsed by Margolis can make room for a

transcendental analysis of the conditions of possibility of scientific experience without


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being compelled to accept the foundationalism that has been traditionally associated

with it.

⁂

5 One of the most relevant contributions of the book is the reading of the pragmatist

tradition as a particular way of coming to term with Kant’s transcendental insight. In

the context of an attempt to defend his idiosyncratic interpretation of Peirce’s concept

of fallibilism, Margolis writes:

Let me remind you once again that, as I read the matter, “idealism” (lower-case “i”)is either independent of or neutral with regard to “realism” or disjunctivelyopposed to “realism”; whereas “Idealism” (capital “I”) is hospitable toincorporating some forms of constructive “realism” (as among the GermanIdealists). Furthermore, “idealism” (in the Kantian sense) holds that what isempirically “real” is actually constituted (in part at least) by what is subjective inorigin and nature; whereas “Idealism” (in Peirce's best sense) is (so to say)construed “epistemologically” (in the constructivist way) rather than“metaphysically” (disjunctively), hence is restricted to our “picture” (ourconstructed picture) of reality rather than addressed to the actual “constitution” ofreality itself. (Margolis 2012: Chapter 2, 56)

6 The argument is undoubtedly well grounded. Margolis criticizes the realistic

interpretation of Peirce’s theory of truth for not paying due attention to the anti-

subjectivist constructivism that is implicit in the definition that the founder of

pragmatism gives of truth as the “opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by

all who investigate” (Peirce 1878/1986: 273). As is well known, in How to Make Our Ideas

Clear Peirce puts forward a thesis that may seem paradoxical. He writes: “on the one

hand, reality is independent, not necessarily of thought in general, but only of what

you or I or any finite number of men may think about it; […] on the other hand, though

the object of the final opinion depends on what that opinion is, yet what that opinion is

does not depend on what you or I or any man thinks” (Peirce 1878/1986: 274). The air of

paradox disappears when it is reminded that, after Kant, the structure of the object

cannot be separated from the conceptual apparatus through which a knower

understands the world. Consequently, the passage quoted above not only supports

Margolis’ claim that Peirce cannot be read as a pre-Kantian realist, but also allows him

to conclude that a mature, self-conscious form of realism cannot escape from a

“thoroughly constructivist account” of objectivity.

7 The form of constructivism that Margolis wants to defend has two distinctive features.

Firstly, it is radically anti-subjectivist, where by ‘subjectivism’ Margolis means two

different things: on the one hand, the unilateral and excessive emphasis on the creative

power of the self to the detriment of the legitimate rights of the object; on the other

hand, the idea that the categories of understanding are a priori fixed features of the

human mind. Secondly, it is intended to hold only for the refined pictures of reality

generated by sciences. For these reasons, his version of constructivism is less ambitious

than Kant’s original one. Indeed, it does not pretend to provide a general account of

objectivity, but only to clarify the main aspects of the process of ‘epistemological’

constitution of scientific entities. Similarly, it does not accept Kant’s idea that a

satisfactory account of objectivity depends upon the discovery of a list of immutable

categories from which to derive the ways in which a mind imposes transcendental

constraints on everything that can count as an object of experience. The conception of


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a liberalized ‘a priori’ is the horizon within which Margolis formulates his rejection of

the notion of transcendental necessity (Margolis 2012: Chapter 2, 31). Following the

footsteps of Hegel, Margolis argues that the very idea of a transcendental necessity

should be replaced with a more empirical view according to which the categories of

understanding are “continually relativized to the habituated practices of a given ethos”

(Margolis 2012: Chapter 1, 40).

8 This is, I think, the sense of Margolis’ long statement quoted at the beginning of the

present section, in which the reasons of his dissatisfaction with Kant’s transcendental

project are clearly expressed. By contrasting Kant’s idealism with post-Kantian

Idealism, Margolis aims at calling attention to Kant’s unwarranted assumption that the

‘subjectivist’ identity of idealism and realism entails the “ontic construction of the

whole of ‘reality’ itself” (Margolis 2012: Chapter 1, 47; see also Margolis 2010: 100-11).

This move is probably due to his fear of laying himself open to the charge of

metaphysical constructivism. But is it truly so? Is Margolis entitled to draw such a

conclusion from the remark that “‘idealism’ (in the Kantian sense) holds that what is

empirically ‘real’ is actually constituted (in part at least) by what is subjective in origin

and nature”? To state it more clearly, is Margolis right in believing that the

‘subjectivity of the categories of understanding’ is intimately connected to the

possibility of accounting for reality – the empirically real – as a construction, and that

such an extension of the constructivist paradigm implies an idealistic ontology? Isn’t it

possible to take a step back and to see these two aspects – transcendentalism and

constructivism – as responding to different problems that Kant unfortunately attempts

to merge together? I will try to argue for the latter position in the following way. First

of all, I will show that, contrary to what Margolis seems to believe, the notion of

constructivism is metaphysically unproblematic. Then, I will focus attention on the

general philosophical consequences that follows from the recognition of this fact.

Finally, I will spend a few words to explain why I believe that a thorough naturalism

cannot make the distinction between the empirically real and the scientific pictures of

the world.

9 Constructivism is usually defined as that epistemological position which emphasizes

the role of mind in the construction of known reality (Parrini 2006: 2374, see also

Margolis 2012: Chapter 1, 46). The origins of this view can be traced back to Vico and

Hobbes, but its most influential version has been formulated by Kant. In a central

passage of the second-edition Transcendental Deduction Kant writes: “An object […] is

that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united” (Kant 1781/87:

B137). On this view – which Margolis correctly conceives of as the most important

theoretical achievement of modern philosophy – the identity of object and concept,

subjective and objective, realism and idealism, is explicitly stated. Reality and our

understanding of it convertuntur since the unity of the object is nothing but the unity of

its correspondent concept. Unfortunately, Kant’s dualism prevents him from

developing a consistent idealism. In this sense, the history of post-Kantian philosophy

from Fichte to C. I. Lewis can be profitably depicted as a series of attempts to overcome

the dichotomy of sense and understanding, a posteriori and a priori, synthetic and

analytic. However, in the Transcendental Schematism Kant provides the conceptual

means to extend his constructivist insight to hold for every kind of object. Indeed, here

Kant maintains that the schema of sensible concepts and the schema of a pure concept

of understanding share the same fundamental structure: the schema of a concept – no

matter whether pure or empirical – “signifies a rule of the synthesis of imagination” in


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accordance with that general concept (Kant 1781/87: A141/B180). But this means that

constructivism can be separated without loss from the ‘transcendentalist’ and

‘subjectivist’ hypothesis of the fixed nature of the categories of human understanding.

The intelligibility of an object is the result of its being constructed according to an

universal rule: this is the whole meaning of a mature constructivist position. Its core is

the functional account of objectivity. Object is everything that can be constructed in

accordance with a concept. Consequently, both the objects of common sense – what

Margolis calls the ‘empirically real’ – and the postulated entities of science are

constructs. Indeed, not only the entities postulated in sciences, but also the objects

encountered and used in our everyday transactions with the environment possess a

degree of intelligibility that makes it possible for a knowing agent to understand their

behavior in the context of a purposeful activity.

10 In the light of what has been said until now, it should be easier to see why a

constructivist approach to the issue of objectivity should be considered metaphysically

unproblematic. Indeed, what is constructed is not the existence of an object but its

meaning. Reality and concept are semantic notions, and the idealism that stems from

the adoption of the constructivist viewpoint – pace Margolis – is a critical idealism that

inquires into the conditions of possibility of the meaningfulness of the human world. It

is very likely that Margolis’ reservations are due at least in part to his almost exclusive

interest in the problem of truth, which obviously entails the problem of the

relationship between thought and reality. However, no one better than a pragmatist

should appreciate the importance of this shift from existence and truth to meaning. In

the end, Peirce’s pragmatic maxim is nothing but a refined way of formulating the

semantic identity of object and concept – the mediating element being the much

discussed notion of conceivable practical bearings. So, it is rather surprising that

Margolis does not see that the semantic thesis that human beings construct their objects

in conformity to the rules involved in their concepts does not seem to support the

metaphysical conclusion that human beings constitute what is empirically real.

11 What is even more surprising is that, in order to reject the metaphysical interpretation

of constructivism, Margolis contrasts the real world with our pictures of it. In an

extremely obscure passage Margolis writes: “Nothing […] requires that the real world

must be constructed by human agents: what is constructed is one or another picture of

the world” (Margolis 2012: Chapter 2, 12). I must admit I find hard to locate the source

of Margolis’ difficulties. However, this excerpt seems to me to be surprising because the

distinction that Margolis introduces seems to presuppose the distinctions between

subjective and objective he wants to criticize. This point can be highlighted by

reflecting upon a passage drawn by Kant’s Jäsche Logic. Writing about the difference

between form and matter in cognition, Kant remarks:

If a savage sees a house from a distance, for example, with whose use he is notacquainted, he admittedly has before him in his representation the very sameobject as someone else who is acquainted with it determinately as a dwellingestablished for men. But as to form, this cognition of one and the same object isdifferent in the two. With the one it is mere intuition, with the other it is intuitionand concept at the same time. (Kant 1992: 544-55)

12 In the context of an analysis of the empirical differences generated by the possession of

a concept, the statement is perfectly correct. But if it is taken to mean something more

than that – and Margolis seems to be willing to draw relevant conclusions from it –, it

becomes malicious. In Kant’s argument, the epistemic access to a meaningful world is


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presupposed as an implicit premise. On the contrary, Margolis’ distinction between the

real world and its scientific images seems to question precisely the validity of this

premise. If I understand him aright, Margolis is saying here two different things: a) that

all the pictures that have been constructed in the history of science refer to an

underlying reality of which they are all pictures; and b) that the real world has a kind

of intelligibility that is not the one proper of the object of sciences.

13 But what is ‘the real world’? In my opinion, the only answer that does not commit

Margolis to an untenable and contradictory metaphysical dualism is the one that

identifies the real world with the world of common sense. Besides, the very contrast

between real world and scientific images makes sense if and only if the real world does

not lie beyond the scope of our experience. Copernican and Ptolemaic theories give

radically different representations of the astronomical reality, but their common

ground is the man that looks at the sky and sees the rhythm of day and night. As Dewey

puts in the opening chapter of Experience and Nature, the world of common sense, the

world that the human beings inhabit, is the pillar to which “the vine of pendant theory

is attached” (Dewey 1929/81: 11).

14 However, if the real world is taken to be the world of common sense rather than an

unknowable thing in itself, Margolis’ restriction of the constructivist explanation of

meaning to the account of the entities of science loses great part of its force. To say

that the objects of common sense are not constructed but given would entail the

admission of a source of meaning and objectivity that cannot be explained in

experimental and naturalistic terms. Indeed, one of the great theoretical advantages of

the adoption of a constructivist point of view is that it allows us to provide a simple, yet

comprehensive account of the processes through which a human being succeeds in

creating a meaningful and ordered world. Meanings are traced back to the acts of an

organism bringing together means and ends, stimuli and responses, as a consequence

of which the latter can be read into the former (Dewey 1896/1972: 98). This, for

instance, is the way in which Dewey explains the constitution of the moral world out of

morally meaningless impulses in the pages of Human Nature and Conduct.

15 For a pragmatist, meaning is the act of anticipating the consequences of a certain

event, and the fact that objects have a meaning is the condition of possibility of there

being a world. The world of common sense is therefore the world structured by the

habits of behavior an agent has acquired in the course of his prior experience and

education. The objects of common sense are nothing but settled ways of responding to

the standard stimuli presented by the environment. This is the sense of Dewey’s

otherwise puzzling remark that objects are “habits turned inside out” (Dewey 1922/83:

127). But this means that the real world is constructed in the same way – and in the

very same sense – in which the postulated entities of science are constructed: that is, by

singling out those elements that can be used as reliable signs of future possible

consequences.

⁂

16 From what has been said above it follows that classical pragmatists – notably, Dewey,

but the same holds true for James – believe constructivism to be the only theory of

meaning compatible with a thorough naturalism. In recent times, many scholars have

tried to recover the genuine constructivist spirit of pragmatism. However, in order to


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outline the main features of a neo-pragmatist and post-analytic account of objectivity,

they have unfortunately relied on the language of transcendental philosophy. So, for

instance, Pihlström has maintained that pragmatism is “the key to the naturalization of

transcendental conditions,” where by ‘transcendental conditions’ he means the social,

cultural and historical constraints that are imposed on us as people of a certain age

(Pihlström 2001: 230). On this reading, human beings agree in a form of life: its general

structures define the “(quasi-) transcendental conditions” that determine how its

members should think and act (Pihlström 2001: 230).

17 Even though this lax use of ‘transcendental’ is now widely accepted, I agree with

Margolis that the identification of constructivism with transcendentalism is

misleading. As has already been remarked above, constructivism is an extremely

general theory revolving around the idea of the essential interwovenness of the

subjective and the objective, while transcendental philosophy is only one of the

possible forms in which the constructivist insight can be articulated. This remark is

particularly relevant for our purposes since, as Margolis has pointed out, the history of

pragmatism cannot be properly understood if this distinction is not borne in mind.

Pragmatism is an ambitious attempt to continue Hegel’s (and Kant’s) project “along

naturalistic and post-Darwinian lines” (Margolis 2012: Chapter 1, 36). For this reason, I

think that Pihlström is wrong in interpreting the habits of action that structure our

common-sense knowledge of the world as (quasi-)transcendental rules of construction of

reality. Undoubtedly, the habits of action are the naturalistic counterparts of the

Kantian categories of understanding: they are a priori rules of constitution of

objectivity whose validity can be accounted for in terms of their effectiveness in

construing an ordered and intelligible world. But they are not transcendental because

the naturalization of the Kantian a priori dramatically undermines the theoretical

framework that makes it possible to speak in a meaningful way of transcendental

conditions for our having a world in view.

18 This point can be highlighted with an example. In a certain sense, it is possible to argue

that the fact of having a brain with a particular structure should be conceived of as one

of these (quasi-)transcendental conditions. Indeed, if our brain were different, our

experience would not be possible – or, at least, it would be markedly different. This is a

formally valid transcendental argument since it states a necessary relationship

between the protasis and the apodosis, Now, a ‘transcendental’ argument so

constructed seems to be a reductio ad absurdum of the whole theory rather than a step

towards the naturalization of transcendental philosophy. Obviously, a defender of

transcendental arguments would remind us that the kind of necessity holding between

the protasis and the apodosis is not empirical, but metaphysical. It is taken to express

“certain metaphysical constraints that can be established by reflection,” and that hold

in every possible world (Stern 1999: 3). However, such a move is not open to a

pragmatist. Since he is both a thorough naturalist and a radical constructivist, he

cannot admit either the idea of a metaphysical constraint or the distinction between

reflection and empirical observation. Every habit of behavior is a natural event, a

particular way in which the biological nature of a human being realizes itself.

Accordingly, the necessity that characterizes the structuring conditions of our

experience is not metaphysically, but functionally and historically a priori: it is the

necessity of a rule that prescribes a certain course of action to an agent, and whose


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provisional validity is a consequence of its having proved itself to be efficient as a norm

of conduct.

19 I think that Margolis is completely right on this point: the adoption of a relativized

conception of the a priori compels us to accept the radical view that reason is going to

become “increasingly fragmentary, parochial, fluxive, historicized” because of the

increasing complexity of the world with which human beings interact (Margolis 2012:

Chapter 1, 44). In my view, this is the essential core of a consistent constructivist

naturalism. However, this does not mean that the notion of transcendental should be

cast aside as a completely useless tool. Margolis’ rejection of it seems to me a little bit

too rash. If we pay attention to the way in which Kant defines this concept, we notice

that ‘transcendental’ does not refer to our objects, but only to our knowledge of these

objects insofar as this is possible a priori (Kant 1781/87: A 11-12/B 25). This remark

gives us a clue about how to develop a plausible conception of transcendental

philosophy which could be incorporated within a thoroughly naturalistic framework.

20 Since it is not possible to discuss in detail all the various issues involved in this way of

conceiving transcendental philosophy, I will limit myself to sketch its general outlines.

It has been noted above that transcendental is not a property of a set of concepts, but a

possible attitude that an agent may take regarding the nature and validity of the a

priori conditions of experience. The structure of the sui generis logical space of

transcendental reflections is not different in principle to that of the most advanced

sciences: indeed, the methods and procedures used to confirm or reject an assertion are

the same through and through. This is, I think, the cash value of Margolis’ thesis of the

“inseparability of our first- and second-order questions” (Margolis 2012: Chapter 1, 11).

The questions concerning our knowledge of the world are methodologically continuous

with the questions concerning our knowledge of knowledge. But this does not imply

that the aim of the transcendental attitude is to provide a general theory of objectivity.

This is the ultimate reason why I believe that it is important to keep constructivism and

transcendental philosophy separated. The aim of a transcendental approach is much

more modest than that: it is to provide a general account of what it means to be a

scientific picture of reality. Transcendental reflection takes the results of natural

sciences as given, and inquires into the conditions of possibility of these practices of

knowledge. From Kant’s transcendental standpoint, the problem is that of finding a

metaphysical warrant for the objective validity of the categories. From a naturalistic

perspective, the search for such a warrant is meaningless because scientific concepts

are historical products. Again, Margolis is right in saying that “the contingency of our

first-ordered answers ineluctably infects the conditions of validity of all answers to our

second-order questions” (Margolis 2012: Chapter 1, 11).

21 But if this is true, what is the function performed by transcendental reflection? I think

that its function is to formulate testable hypotheses about the nature of rationality,

which can be used as basis for future scientific inquiries. Even though they both are

ways of constructing a meaningful world, common sense and science differ in their

complexity. The processes that constitute scientific entities are controlled and self-

critical, while the biological activities that constitute everyday objects are largely

imprecise and incomplete. They are incomplete because common-sense concepts are

undetermined with regard to many of the properties of their correspondent objects.

This is a consequence of the fact that our everyday transactions with the world do not

require the kind of precision needed in modern scientific experiments. The concept of


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water enables us to forecast the behavior of that object in standard conditions, but it

does not say anything about its possible behavior in exceptional circumstances: water

is what can be used to drink and wash clothes (Dewey 1929/84: 126ff.). At the very same

time, the relative simplicity of the transactions constituting everyday objects

guarantees the relative stability of the world of common sense. On the contrary,

scientific objects are defined intra-theoretically: so, the meaning of water varies

according to the different scientific frameworks used to interpret it. Now, it is of the

nature of scientific objects to be subjected to a continuous process of refinement, with

the aim to increase their explanatory power. This process of revision can be guided by a

regulative idea of what human beings, at a certain time in history, consider a

satisfactory conception of reason, meaning, and objectivity. Traditionally, this idea has

taken the form of a unified theory of rationality. My suggestion is that the goal of

transcendental refection is precisely to impose some constraints of this sort on the way

in which a scientific theory should be made. Obviously, all these constraints are only

provisional and tentative. Nonetheless, they are not arbitrary. They are justified,

retrospectively, by their being attuned to the most advanced scientific and technical

knowledge of the time, and, prospectively, by their being expression of the cognitive

needs and desires of (some) members of a scientific community. This constructivist

conception of the transcendental is genuinely naturalistic, so that a pragmatist should

not feel uncomfortable with it even though it sets itself to counterbalance the

dissolution of the unity of reason determined by the relativization of the Kantian a

priori. On this reading, transcendental philosophy is one of the tools that human beings

have created in the long course of their history in order to enhance the understanding

of reality (Preti 1973: 149ff.). There is no legitimate reason not to exploit it apart from

the empirical assessment of its uselessness.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

DEWEY J., (1896/1972), “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” in The Early Works of John Dewey,

Vol. 5, ed. by J. A. Boydston, Southern Illinois Press, Carbondale, 96-110.

DEWEY J., (1922/83), “Human Nature and Conduct,” in The Middle Works of John Dewey, Vol. 14, ed.

by J. A. Boydston, Southern Illinois Press, Carbondale 1983.

DEWEY J., (1929/81), “Experience and Nature,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, Vol. 1, ed. by J. A.

Boydston, Southern Illinois Press, Carbondale.

DEWEY J., (1929/84), “The Quest for Certainty,” in The Later Works of John Dewey, Vol. 4, ed. by J. A.

Boydston, Southern Illinois Press, Carbondale.

KANT I., (1781/87), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews, Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press.

KANT I., (1992), The Jäsche Logic, in Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Logic, trans. J. M. Young, Cambridge,

Cambridge University Press.


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MARGOLIS J., (2010), Pragmatism’s Advantage. American and European Philosophy at the End of the

Twentieth Century, Stanford, Stanford University Press.

MARGOLIS J., (2012), Pragmatism Ascendent: A Yard of Narrative, A Touch of Prophecy, Stanford

University Press, Stanford.

PARRINI P., (2006), “Costruttivismo,” Enciclopedia Filosofica, Milano, Bompiani.

PEIRCE C. S., (1878/1986), “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in Writings of Charles S. Peirce, Vol. 3,

Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 257-76.

PIHLSTRÖM S., (2001), “Naturalism, Transcendental Conditions, and the Self-Discipline of

Philosophical Reason”, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 15, 3.

PRETI G., (1973), “Un colloquio con M. Foucault,” in E. Migliorini (ed.), Umanismo e strutturalismo.

Scritti di estetica e di letteratura con un saggio inedito, Padova, Liviana.

STERN R., (1999), “Introduction,” in Transcendental Arguments, R. Stern Ed., Oxford, Clarendon

Press.

AUTHOR

ROBERTO GRONDA

Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

roberto.gronda[at]sns.it


206

Margolis on Realism and IdealismSami Pihlström

1 Joseph Margolis has written on the problem of realism voluminously over several

decades – in addition to the enormous number of other philosophical debates he has

contributed to in original ways. His latest book, Pragmatism Ascendent,1 discusses a wide

spectrum of philosophical issues, including the transformations of transcendental

philosophy today in terms of (Hegelian) historicity and ‘flux,’ as well as the question of

“what it is to be a human self” (Margolis 2012: x), but once again the realism debate is

one of the central themes covered, to a large extent in relation to these other complex

debates. In this brief paper, I will examine Margolis’s arguments for the special kind of

integration of realism and idealism (or “Idealism,” as he prefers to write)2 in relation to

his attempt to develop a viable version of pragmatism conscious of its Kantian and

especially Hegelian roots, yet promising to develop the pragmatist tradition further in

philosophy today.

⁂

2 Margolis’s overall argument is, as usual, complicated, and it would be impossible to

even try to summarize it here. One of his characterizations of what the book offers is

this: “a descendent3 strategy argumentatively (or genealogically) derived from the

transcendental turn turned pragmatist by refusing to concede any strong disjunction

between broadly ‘empirical’ first-order inquiries and broadly ‘rational’ second-order

speculations about the legitimacy of both the first and the second” (4). In this context of

inquiry, the realism issue is never the primary topic; it is commented on repeatedly as

the genealogical and quasi-transcendental examinations of Hegel’s response to Kant, of

Peirce’s fallibilism, and of the inadequacies of contemporary philosophy of mind and

social ontology unfold. These philosophical and metaphilosophical contexts turn out to

be relevant to the very special – indeed highly unusual – integration of realism and

Idealism that Margolis proposes.

3 The first substantial comment on the realism issue in the volume is this, from the

opening of Chapter 1:


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The viability of the transcendental question (apart from the fortunes oftranscendentalism) makes no sense, unless we also concede that the viability ofempirical realism cannot be separated from “idealism” (the “Idealism” alreadyimplicated in the transcendental question itself): that consideration already signalsthe importance of deciding whether the human version of “reason” reflexivelyaffects what we affirm to be possible regarding “what there is” in the whole ofreality independent of human cognition. […] I take “realism” and “Idealism” to beinseparable within any “constructivist” form of realism – it being the case thatthere is no other viable form of realism. I take that to be both Hegel’s and Peirce’sview. (8)

4 So realism is maintained: there is something that can be called ‘reality independent of

human cognition,’ and we can and do, quite legitimately, affirm things about ‘what

there is’ in that reality. Yet this is something that we affirm, or fail to affirm, and the

transcendental question (that is, the second-order question concern legitimation

itself), as Margolis notes, reflexively addresses whether human reason – its structure,

or perhaps its history – inevitably affects these affirmations. Thus, realism, when

considered transcendentally, cannot be all-inclusive or full-blown. It must be restricted

to a human perspective available in a pragmatic analysis.

5 This is what it means to take the issue of realism not just metaphysically but also

epistemologically seriously: we need to construe a form of realism that we are able to

‘live with’ within our always inevitably historically situated and finite inquiries,

processes that are themselves continuously in flux. There is no return to what Kant

labeled ‘transcendental realism’ (which, notoriously, conflates appearances with things

in themselves) or to what Hilary Putnam two centuries later famously called

‘metaphysical realism’ (which postulates a ‘God’s-Eye View’ on the world). These

appeals to an imagined super-human perspective on what there really is go

considerably beyond the more minimal realism that Margolis favors, a realism that

accepts the idea that there is such a reality independently of us but insists on there

being only human views or perspectives – no divine ones – on that reality. Margolis

repeatedly reminds us (e.g., 30) that we construct our “pictures” of reality, but not

reality itself, even when the inseparability of realism and Idealism is recognized.

6 Constructivism, for Margolis, is fully compatible with realism and does not entail any

“ontic construction of the whole of ‘reality’ itself” (39). Accordingly, while what we,

within Idealism, may find ‘determinately real’ presupposes ‘the ability of a cognitive

agent to discern the fact,’ this by no means requires the real world to be constructed by

such agents; again, ‘what is constructed is one or another picture of the world’ (59-60) –

presumably including, reflexively, this very picture of realism itself. Charles S. Peirce’s

realism, in particular, is a “constructivist posit supported in terms of what we

rationally Hope holds true at the end of infinite inquiry” (60). This is – and here Peirce’s

special kind of fallibilism truly comes into the picture – because realism cannot be a

“free-standing epistemological option,” if inquiries “must be infinitely extended”;

rather, realism requires (possibly a naturalized version of) an “Idealist supplement”

(73).

7 Given his Peircean elaborations, it is easy to see that Margolis’s realism is not just the

minimal affirmation that there is something we never constructed. It is a significantly

richer position, accommodating an acknowledgment of realism itself being a

distinctively human conception of reality. Our realism itself is a ‘human face’ that the

world, as seen from our human perspective, has.4 Realism, as Margolis has put it is


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several previous publications, is a human ‘posit’ rather than the world’s ‘own’ picture

of itself. It is not Nature’s ‘own’ image of itself but our image of the world, natural and

historic-cultural.5

⁂

8 How is this view on realism and Idealism related to pragmatism, and the historical

developments that led to the emergence (and the current re-emergence) of

pragmatism? Margolis links these processes of development with Peirce’s peculiar

fallibilism, which along with “the inseparability of realism and Idealism” is one of the

defining features of “the sense in which pragmatism […] cannot fail to be construed as

an ingenious and especially promising spare variant of Hegel’s own undertaking, now

naturalized […]” (10). Hegel, then, is Margolis’s historical hero – not Kant, even though

Kant was the first to insist on the compatibility of realism and idealism (or, more

specifically, empirical realism and transcendental idealism). Indeed, Kant’s account of

empirical realism is claimed to be “completely subjectivist” and incoherent by Hegelian

lights (10); Kant cannot “recover any robust form of empirical realism” (20). The proper

recovery of realism then eventually takes place, after Hegel, in Peirce; indeed, Peirce

and Hegel form the pair of philosophical heroes that Margolis celebrates throughout

the book.

9 It is understandable that Margolis emphasizes Hegel’s role as a background figure of

pragmatism in contrast to Kant’s. The latter has been emphasized by other pragmatism

scholars (including the present author), and Hegel has often been unduly neglected.

Margolis’s criticism of Kant’s arguments for transcendental idealism could be

compared to Kenneth Westphal’s, who also suggests that Hegel was the first “pragmatic

realist.”6 Westphal could, I believe, easily join Margolis in acknowledging that

“objectivity becomes historicized and constructivist” in a pragmatist reinterpretation

(or, as Margolis says, “fragmentation”) of Hegel’s “recovery of realism” (21) and that

Hegel’s critique of Kant leads to a robust realism about the objects of experience.

10 Given that this narrative plays a very important role in Margolis’s overall argument, it

might have been appropriate for him to acknowledge Westphal’s work, both his careful

historical examinations of both Kant’s and Hegel’s arguments and his more systematic

efforts to show both that Kantian transcendental idealism is not a viable option –

neither for Kant himself, given his anti-Cartesian and fallibilist approaches, nor for us –

and that the realist can nevertheless argue transcendentally (yet fallibly). The reader

familiar with Westphal’s ideas would find a comparison highly valuable.

⁂

11 While the key figure of Margolis’s first chapter is Hegel, the central philosopher of the

second one is Peirce. Margolis there argues that Peirce develops further the Hegelian

unity of realism and Idealism – to the extent that it would be wrong to say that Peirce

was a realist and an Idealist (54). He is both but not in the disjunctive sense these

doctrines are traditionally understood in relation to each other. On Margolis’s reading,

Peirce “believed that it was only within the terms of his Idealism that the realist thesis

would prove compelling at all” and therefore “saw no viable disjunction in pressing the

realism of science and the need for an Idealist metaphysics” (54). Or, more precisely,


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Peirce was “not a realist and also, independently, an Idealist” (55); these two doctrines

could not coherently be maintained independently according to him (or so Margolis

urges).7 What Peirce uniquely developed, in a post-Hegelian environment, is a

constructivist (Idealist) version of scientific realism.

12 By emphasizing the inseparability of realism and Idealism, or the inevitable

embeddedness of realism in constructivism, in Peirce, Margolis insightfully criticizes

some of the leading more strongly realist interpreters of Peirce, all the way from Max

Fisch to Cheryl Misak and others.8 He also suggests – as he has done on a number of

earlier occasions – that Peirce’s scholastic realism about the reality of ‘generals’ should

be replaced by a constructivist account of “predicable ‘generals’” (76).9 Such generals,

in a way, are not independent of human thought (78) – though again I would rather

emphasize their transcendental dependence and, correspondingly, empirical

independence.

13 Margolis recognizes very important similarities in Peirce’s and Dewey’s fallibilisms and

their versions of the union of realism and Idealism, which, in Dewey, is more explicitly

naturalized and evolutionarily laid out. Where Margolis in my view goes wrong is in his

neglect of William James. He claims that James was “little more than a secondary

figure” in comparison to the two other great classical pragmatists (86) and speaks

about the “damage of James’s well-known, attractive informality” (90) and even about

his “disastrous” conception of truth (92). Even though he may be right to point out that

the realization that the Peircean notion of what is “independent of the vagaries of you

and me” is itself constructed by pragmatist means does not validate James’s account of

truth as such (106), he unfortunately seems to ignore James’s independent role in the

development of the pragmatic method – and in the pragmatist articulation of the

realism issue in terms of that method, which in effect makes ontology dependent on, or

entangled with, ethics.10

⁂

14 Occasionally – to go backwards in the historical story Margolis is telling us – it also

seems to this reader at least that Margolis fails to do full justice to Kant’s

transcendental considerations. For example, though I very much appreciate Margolis’s

Hegelian and Peircean project of ‘pragmatizing’ and historicizing Kant, I remain

unconvinced by the criticism that Kant does not introduce “a working distinction

between appearances and the objects they are appearances of” (19). A ‘one world’

Kantian response to this charge is obviously that appearances are appearances of things

in themselves; these are not two different classes of objects (as more traditional ‘two

worlds’ interpretations maintain) but, rather, the ‘same’ objects considered from two

different perspectives, or articulated through two different considerations.11 Moreover,

Margolis does not pay due attention to the distinction between the quite different

empirical and transcendental ways in which, say, space and time can be said to be ‘in

us’ (29). He partly relies on P. F. Strawson’s relatively conventional interpretation

which has been heavily criticized by several ‘one world’ Kantians. Margolis thus claims

repeatedly that Kant’s transcendental question is incoherent from the very start, but

he never (as far as I can see) explains in any great detail, or in full communication with

relevant recent scholarship, why this is so. This is a serious setback in his otherwise

admirable treatment of the realism issue.


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15 The story of the development of pragmatism can, it seems to me, be told by starting

from Kant – and partly skipping Hegel – just as it can be told (and is generally

compellingly told by Margolis) by beginning from Hegel’s historicization of Kant. Such

a story, even when it remains more Kantian than Hegelian, may also join Margolis in

rejecting any “principled disjunction between the empirical and the transcendental”

(30).12 In brief, I remain somewhat unconvinced by Margolis about the idea that it is

only Hegel, not Kant, who offers a compelling version of the inseparability of realism

and Idealism. Kant rejects such an exclusive disjunction as firmly as Hegel.

16 Margolis is in fact relatively modest when insisting on the possibility of preserving the

distinction between metaphysical and epistemological questions even given the

“constructivist” character of his realism. He could have gone further by saying that

inasmuch as realism itself is inevitably constructivist (pragmatic), all metaphysical

questions about the way the world is are inevitably also epistemological, or invoke

epistemological positioning. This would yield a more radical pragmatism. In fact such

an entanglement of the metaphysical and the epistemological would have been a more

Kantian position and would come closer to a Kantian-cum-pragmatist (instead of

Hegelian-cum-Peircean) naturalization of transcendental philosophy.

17 Next, take a look at this:

Kant defeats the realist metaphysics of the rationalists all right; but, then, he alsoobliges the “objectivity” of science and metaphysics to depend on transcendental(subjective) sources and, in doing that, he makes “empirical realism” no more thanan artefact of those same subjective sources: accordingly, he cannot separate, asHegel can, epistemological and metaphysical constructivism. (39)

18 But isn’t Margolis in his own way doing more or less the same when making realism

constructivist? Epistemological and metaphysical versions of constructivism may

themselves be claimed to be entangled, necessarily, in a (Kantian) transcendental

sense, while of course being disentangled at the empirical level. (We do not construct

the world in any empirical, factual, or concrete sense – here I of course agree with

Margolis. But it does not follow that the concept of construction fails to do important

transcendental work that is not just epistemological but also, albeit in a qualified sense,

metaphysical.) Similarly, the claim that Kant’s objects are mere “internal accusatives of

subjective experience itself” (40) is misleading, because, again, we can endorse a one

world reading (à la Allison and others) and view empirical objects and things in

themselves as (ontologically) identical and only methodologically distinguishable.

19 Therefore, when Margolis writes that (once again) Peircean “Idealism” is “construed

‘epistemologically’ (in the constructivist way) rather than ‘metaphysically’

(disjunctively)” and is thus restricted to “our constructed picture” of reality rather

than the “actual ‘constitution’ of reality itself” (91), one might ask whether he isn’t

himself resorting to new versions of dichotomies or disjunctions he wants to set aside.

Instead of the realism vs. Idealism dichotomy, we now have (still) the one between

metaphysics and epistemology, and also the corresponding one between our picture of

reality and reality in itself. Note that these dichotomies – or, to be fair, more absolute

versions of them – are standardly used in the kind of mainstream analytic philosophy

that Margolis wisely wants to leave behind. In my view, all these dualisms should be

critically examined in terms of the pragmatic method and thereby aufgehoben as

versions of the age-old subjective vs. objective disjunction to be given up (at least in its

conventional versions) in any viable post-Kantian (and post-Hegelian) pragmatism.


211

20 Yet, my proposed re-entanglement of the metaphysical and the epistemological at the

transcendental level – the level at which constructivism provides a framework for any

viable realism – must somehow also accommodate the (re-)entanglement of the

transcendental and the empirical. Here I see the real challenge for the current

pragmatist who wishes to develop further the insights of naturalized transcendental

philosophy and apply them to the realism debate. However that challenge can be met,

the pragmatist can certainly agree with Margolis’s ‘précis’:

We must, as realists, replace representationalism with some form of constructivism;[…] we must, again as realists, avoid characterizing reality as itself constructed […]and hold instead that what we construct are only conceptual “pictures” of what wetake the real world to be […]; and […] we must acknowledge that the realism thusachieved is itself cognitively dependent on, and embedded in, our constructivistinterventions. (55)

21 This can, I think, be offered as a useful characterization of the program of pragmatic

realism, insofar as we are able to give up Margolis’s in my view too sharp distinction

between (the construction of) reality itself and our pictures of it. When developed in

Margolis’s way, pragmatic (constructivist) realism is reflexively conscious of its own

status as a human pragmatic posit rather than an imagined God’s-Eye View picture of

how things absolutely are. Ironically, Margolis notes, “Peirce’s most strenuous

insistence on reality’s being independent of belief […] is, contrary to what he actually

says, not ‘independent of what anybody may think them to be’” (85). For the reflexively

sophisticated pragmatist, the real is indeed independent of what anyone of us thinks,

but this independence is always inevitably affirmed within and on the basis of human

thought.

⁂

22 Even if I mildly disagree, in the manner explained above, with Margolis on Kant’s place

in the story of pragmatism that needs to be told, and in the ways in which the story

could continue into the future, I warmly agree with him on the deep integration, or

even inseparability, of realism and Idealism – and even Idealism and naturalism,

because these need not be any more incompatible than realism and Idealism in

Margolis’s Hegelian pragmatism. I would again simply prefer to rephrase this in

Kantian transcendental terms. I also agree that this transcendental approach itself,

though naturalized within pragmatism, precludes any reductive naturalism or

eliminativism, which in a sense presuppose the God’s-Eye View that only stronger

forms of realism (avoiding any link to any form of idealism) try to help themselves to.

Margolis’s criticism of Wilfrid Sellars is relevant here: the scientific image, he says, “is

itself a proposal advanced by the same intelligence that, on his [Sellars’s] own

argument, congenially offers the ‘manifest image’” (26).13 Similarly, I agree with

Margolis on the need to develop a truly non-reductive philosophical anthropology of

the human self (or person), which is something very different from what is done within

in mainstream philosophy of mind today – a field of philosophy that has for a long time

just ignored pragmatism. Moreover, perhaps one of Margolis’s most genuinely

innovative ideas is the link he builds between the two post-Hegelian and post-

Darwinian topics he elaborates throughout the book, “the historicity of the human

world and the artifactuality of the self” (51).


212

23 There would be much more to say – about the artifactual self, its cultural emergence,

intentionality (or, again, ‘Intentionality,’ as Margolis prefers; see, e.g., 143),14 the

relations between the natural and the human sciences, and many other topics,

including the endlessly disputable interpretations of philosophers such as the classical

pragmatists, Ernst Cassirer, and John Searle (all of whom Margolis discusses in some

detail). Clearly, (re)connecting all this with the realism issue, the main topic of this

paper, would lead us too far. In any event, Margolis’s book, once again, offers plenty of

food for philosophical thought on fundamental issues that are with us to stay, whether

one’s interests lie primarily in realism, philosophy of science, or philosophical

anthropology.

24 Admittedly, what Margolis has provided us with by publishing this new book is yet

another relatively general and wide-ranging survey of the field of philosophy and the

prospects of pragmatism in the field quite generally, instead of any fully worked-out

detailed theory of any specific issue (even realism and Idealism). Even so, his discussion

does include a number of highly illuminating new formulations of age-old problems,

historical and systematic, as well as new ways of understanding how those problems

and some of the proposed answers to them have been, and are, made possible. The

historically sensitive pragmatist – and any pragmatist interested in philosophy’s future

should be historically sensitive – should take Margolis’s reflections seriously, both

regarding the realism debate and more generally.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALLISON H. E., (2004), Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense – A Revised and

Enlarged Edition, New Haven, NH, Yale University Press, 2nd ed. (1st ed., 1983).

MARGOLIS J., (1984), Culture and Cultural Entities, Dordrecht, D. Reidel.

MARGOLIS J., (1986), Pragmatism without Foundations, Oxford, Blackwell.

MARGOLIS J., (1995), Historied Thought, Constructed World, Berkeley, CA, University of California

Press.

MARGOLIS J., (2010), Pragmatism’s Advantage, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA.

MARGOLIS J., (2012), Pragmatism Ascendent: A Yard of Narrative, A Touch of Prophecy, Stanford, CA,

Stanford University Press.

PIHLSTRÖM S., (2003), Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View, Amherst, NY, Prometheus/

Humanity Books.

PIHLSTRÖM S., (2009), Pragmatist Metaphysics: An Essay on the Ethical Grounds of Metaphysics, London,

Continuum.

PUTNAM H., (1990), Realism with a Human Face, ed. J. Conant, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University

Press.


213

WESTPHAL K. R., (2004), Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism, Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press.

NOTES

1. The unspecified page references in the text are to this book (Margolis 2012).

2. I will continue to write ‘Idealism’ when referring to the kind of idealism Margolis subscribes to

(and finds compatible with realism). This must be distinguished from some more traditional

idealisms that are contrasted with realism. The difference between the two doctrines (or sets of

doctrines) is that ‘idealism’ is “either independent of or neutral with regard to ‘realism’ or

disjunctively opposed to ‘realism’,” while ‘Idealism’ with a capital ‘I’ is “hospitable to

incorporating some forms of constructive ‘realism’” (91).

3. The book title, however, suggests an ascendence of pragmatism (!). Presumably, we are being

told that ascendence and descendence are not incompatible and may both be needed as

philosophical strategies.

4. Compare this to Hilary Putnam’s notion of realism with a human face as developed in Putnam

1990.

5. Margolis’s other relevant discussions of realism include, e.g., Margolis 1986 and 1995.

6. See, e.g., Westphal 2004.

7. He also points out that “Peirce’s fallibilism is meant to explain just why we cannot, post-Kant

and post-Hegel, fall back again to any separate realism or Idealism” – and that John Dewey’s

version of fallibilism in a way inherits this feature from Peirce’s (67), even though the realism/

Idealism issue is only marginally present in Dewey in comparison to Peirce (69-70).

8. He remarks, also, that “most of those who have followed Max Fisch’s reading of Peirce are also

committed to what Putnam opposes as the ‘God’s-Eye view’” (170, n26.). This relation between

the two slightly different realism disputes would deserve more historical scrutiny.

9. For my own earlier reflections on Peircean realism about generality, already inspired by

Margolis’s constructivist and historicist account of predicable generals, see Pihlström (2003: ch.

3) and (2009: ch. 6).

10. This is what I argue in Pihlström 2009.

11. Allison 2004.

12. This is what I try to do in Pihlström 2003. Margolis briefly comments on my effort in his

previous book (Margolis 2010).

13. In relation to his criticism of reductive naturalism – also a theme to which he seems to return

again and again – Margolis emphasizes yet another inseparability, that of the natural and the

human sciences (Ch. 3, 22). Both are human attempts to inquire into the world whose character

we constructively posit.

14. According to Margolis’s characterization here, “whatever is culturally significant or

significative is inherently Intentional” (Ch. 3, 46). For Margolis’s previous discussions of this

topic, see, e.g., his 1984 and 1995.


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AUTHOR

SAMI PIHLSTRÖM

Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies

sami.pihlstrom[at]helsinki.fi


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RepliesJoseph Margolis

1 My general impression, reading my commentators reading Pragmatism Ascendent, is

that, however generous and patient they may be, they would like to have a clear

statement of my sense of my own standing as a pragmatist vis-à-vis Kant and Hegel.

Rosa Calcaterra has caught the book’s essential thrust – the last of a series on

pragmatism’s second life, that were never intended to run on as a single study – that

begin, opportunistically, with the rather inconclusive dispute between Richard Rorty

and Hilary Putnam, the most prominent self-styled pragmatists of their day, debating

aimlessly in a philosophical desert from about the late 70s to the end of the century.

The books remain alert, however, to the developing “exclusion [as Calcaterra reports]

of pragmatism from the higher levels of philosophical debate,” a subliminal policy of

sorts already underway quite early in the 20th century; they then acknowledge (as they

must) the decline and near demise of pragmatism itself from the late 40s through the

70s, a kind of self-imposed retreat beginning close to the end of John Dewey’s life; they

go on to record a completely gratuitous reprieve and a suddenly robust second life,

deprived of the least sign of fresh undertakings forceful enough to explain that

improbability; and then, at last, something of a possible opening appears in the new

millennium encouraging a new beginning, cast in terms of a rereading of pragmatism’s

Kantian/Hegelian inspiration (which others have also sensed) that might be

prophetically directed to a larger future, the true sense of which I’ve glimpsed,

eccentrically, in a chance motto drafted by Peirce himself, which I trust Pragmatism

Ascendent will help to explicate: that is, ‘Darwinizing Hegel and Hegelianizing Darwin.’ I

don’t believe the most promising reading of the motto is likely to be easily guessed at

the moment. That is, the sense of the motto. Not the sense Peirce might have favored,

though a sense entirely congruent (I would say) with the promise of Peirce’s own

contribution suitably reinterpreted. I should also add to Calcaterra’s recollection the

plain truth that any attempt to redeem pragmatism in terms restricted to the

achievements of its classic figures would only hasten the movement’s end. The record

spanning the late 40’s to the 70’s provides the evidence.

2 The theme that seems to have puzzled my commentators most concerns a heterodox

reading of the treatment of realism and idealism, read back as a solution of certain


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stalemates within the Kantian/Hegelian setting, drawn chiefly from Peirce’s distinctive

speculations. It is indeed the key to the novelty of the reorientation I have in mind.

Roberto Gronda is distinctly wary about my notion of the ‘indissoluble union of realism

and idealism.’ So I must make its meaning clear. Gronda favors, if I read him correctly,

Kant’s joint advocacy of ‘transcendental idealism and empirical realism’ – that is, two

separate accounts of the same state of affairs – which I fear, taken in Kant’s sense,

proves incoherent. Gronda also has doubts about my use of the terms ‘transcendental’

and ‘a priori’ and my heterodox reading of ‘constructivism’ intended to service the

(indissoluble) realism/Idealism thesis – according to which, ‘transcendental’ is not to

be read as ‘transcendentalist’ or ‘apriorist,’ as in Kant’s usage. (A barbarous invention!)

I won’t pretend that I haven’t taken liberties with Kant’s conceptions. Of course I have.

But, Hegel had already found it impossible to support Kant’s transcendentalism in the

very process of co-opting his transcendental questions under the transformative

conditions of evolving history.

3 More to the point, I take Kant to have equivocated on the concept of an ‘object’ –and to

be unable to provide a criterial distinction between two very different concepts (both

of which he means), as well as a rule by the use of which to pass reliably from the one

to the other: that is, first, regarding ‘objects’ conceived to be sensibly intuited as

unifying some manifold of intuited qualities (a use Gronda emphasizes, drawn from the

first Critique); the other, regarding ‘objects’ conceived in the first sense but now able to

count as well (somehow) as independent things, things not confined to our own minds

(which play an important role, for instance, in the proposed refutation of idealism).

Think here of Macbeth’s ‘seeing’ a dagger before him.

4 Gronda is aware of the two uses, of course; but he apparently believes (in accord with

Kant’s idealism), that the first use is sufficient to accommodate the second. (He admits

that Kant failed to formulate a ‘consistent idealism.’) But I honestly don’t find that he

addresses the seeming difficulty that the first use speaks of objects confined subject-

ively to the mind and the second (still mysteriously) permits us to speak of objects no

longer thus confined, though still within the terms of an idealism presumably freed of

Kant’s inconsistent formulation. (I don’t believe it can be done.) There’s the fatal

weakness of Kant’s dual idiom of transcendental idealism and empirical realism; the

intended advantage of my heterodox replacement (realism/Idealism); and the essential

charge of Hegel’s original critique of Kant. It’s entirely possible, of course, that I’ve

misread Gronda.

5 Sami Pihlström, I venture to say, requires a fuller statement of my treatment of realism

and idealism. He clearly sees that I reject what Kant rejects, what Kant calls

‘transcendental realism,’ as well as what Putnam calls ‘metaphysical realism,’ all the

while I favor a constructivist form of realism that “accepts the idea that there is […] a

reality independent of us,” viewed solely from human perspectives. Pihlström is

cautiously open to my preferring Hegel to Kant, though I believe he takes me to have

misread Kant’s resources in the first Critique: he signals (so it seems) that I might have

secured my own claims within the bounds of Kant’s vision. (On my view, Kant’s

transcendental idealism ultimately requires what he names transcendental realism.) He

also chides me mildly for having ‘neglected’ James’s contribution to ‘the development

of the pragmatic method’ and its distinctive application to the realism issue.

6 I, however, am quite persuaded that Kant, committed to his ‘transcendental idealism,’

found it impossible to pass from subjective (or mental) appearings to empirically real


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things without investing (fatally, I would say) in some form of ‘transcendental realism,’

which was surely a doctrine he strenuously opposed. But the charge regarding James is

entirely just: James’s ‘temperament’ is always attractive; but I confess he foils my every

effort to read what he says, wherever I look for a pertinently sustained argument on

the realism issue – for instance, in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe.

7 Kant, I daresay, never met his deepest worries successfully, the most decisive ones, for

instance, that he shared with Marcus Herz before the publication of the first Critique:

the reason lies, it seems to me, with his unnecessary insistence on the complete

passivity of what is ‘given’ as the ‘effects’ of unknown external factors, on which all

empirical knowledge (which should rightly read: all knowledge) depends. Kant thereby

entrenches a stubborn dualism that he cannot overcome ‘this side’ of the subject-ive/

object-ive divide. He cannot, I think (as Hegel clearly signals, in his lectures on the

history of philosophy), extend the resources of his “transcendental idealism” to cover

our knowledge of objective, independent things, without yielding to the (unacceptably)

privileged claims of ‘transcendental realism,’ which he means to defeat utterly. Had he

favored the thrust of Hegel’s critique, he would have had to construe his categories in

terms of the joint play of object-ive as well as subject-ive elements. Kant never

completes the argument he envisages. He couldn’t have, without displacing the entire

Critique. (Think of the ‘refutation of idealism.’) Hegel’s contribution, which, as I say, I

read genealogically, construes ‘appearings’ as ‘appearances-of-things-present-in-

experience’ (Erscheinungen): what, therefore, is ‘given’ in (active) experience and

perception, presuppositionlessly, however qualified by reason’s (or the mind’s)

engagement in the middle of our reflections, without privilege of any kind (without

strict necessities or universalities), invites (in fact, requires) the continual redefinition

as what to count as an ampler picture of the ‘objects’ of our experience, as we review as

much of our evolving thought and experience as we grasp.

8 I regard Hegel’s method as marking a profound revision (and recovery) of the essential

point of Kant’s transcendental question, shorn of Kant’s transcendentalism, under the

condition of historied experience, well on its way (by strategies potentially superior to

the fiddling of both Peirce and Cassirer) toward a naturalistic rendering of the

‘transcendental’ (or its surrogates), addressed to the infinite openness of inquiries of

every kind governed or guided by considerations of truth and reality. (An anticipation,

in effect, of fallibilism.) Peirce’s phenomenology (or phaneroscopy) is itself a

pragmatist variant of what Hegel intended by the phenomenologically ‘given.’ The

‘given,’ which is given presuppositionlessly, may be continually reinterpreted or

reconstructed, in the search for an adequate account of what is real — a thoroughly

meaningful world, we may say; but what we abstract as the merely physical need not be

said to be itself constructed in the process. With the reconstruction of our ‘pictures’ of

the world, we may consistently construct an account of ‘that world’s’ independent

existence. I see no fatal dualism there – and nothing lost. Realism is meant to be a

picture of reality, not reality itself. It’s for this reason that I dwell on Peirce’s fallibilism

more than on Dewey’s theorizing economies (possibly more useful, finally, then Peirce’s

strenuous story); James has nothing to say about Hegel’s critique of Kant. But once

we’re clear about the genealogy, there’s no particular reason we can’t allow this part of

Peirce’s theory (and Cassirer’s neo-Kantian mate) to yield up its control of

pragmatism’s center stage.


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9 Western philosophy (particularly what I call ‘Eurocentric philosophy’ – ‘modern

modern’ philosophy) begins with Kant’s efforts to defeat continental rationalism and

dogmatism and ‘transcendental realism.’ The trouble is, Kant was always in danger of

being recaptured by the metaphysical ‘realists,’ in meeting the dawning needs of his

own transcendental idealism. I say he fails in this; and (of course) Hegel ‘warns’ him

much too late to be of any help. What I believe I’ve come to appreciate in Peirce’s

fallibilism is his invention of a viable form of realism/Idealism that bridges, seemingly

for the first time, the excessive economies of the empiricists and the extravagances of

the transcendentalist Kant. This is the burden of Peirce’s grand intuitions regarding

‘abductive Hope,’ which I read in Hegelian terms, though it remains unclear what

Peirce’s debt to Hegel finally is. Nevertheless, once we gain this lesson, we see that

there cannot be any facultative division between sensory perception and experience

and thought or reason. The pragmatists have the additional advantage of their viewing

the human animal along Darwinian (more precisely: post-Darwinian) lines. There’s a

very good reason, there, for refusing the fantastic extravagances of transcendental

idealism, particularly where it is tempted to borrow – what it cannot legitimately reach

from its own resources – from those of transcendental realism.

10 Let me say straight out that I’ve read the figures I principally discuss, as advocates of

particular doctrines that confront my own commitments in important ways; but I don’t

report their views in order to make the best case for any standard reading of their

views. I read them, rather, as congenial or uncongenial to a defense of a viable

pragmatism for our time, consistently (as far as possible) with the main thrust of their

actual texts. I regard my readings of Kant, Hegel, and Peirce (chiefly) as a sort of

genealogy skewed (not unfairly, I hope) for the sake of a strengthened and redirected

pragmatism for the present future. Hence, I make the best case for challenging the

realist reading of Peirce; and I try to show how the inherent bafflements of Kant’s

transcendentalism are unproductive, unnecessary, and distinctly inhospitable to

pragmatist concerns.

11 My Hegelian reading of Kant is meant to show how historicizing the transcendental

question, while abandoning transcendentalism altogether, would relieve Kant of an

impossible task and enable him to ‘anticipate’ Hegel, Peirce, and Cassirer (in different

ways) and even our present needs and undertakings. I’m quite willing to concede that

Cassirer’s variant of the endless run of inquiry in the sciences is far leaner and more

apt in methodologically explicit ways than Peirce’s fallibilism (as I’ve tried to

demonstrate). Yet it remains Peirce who is the best champion of a constructivist

realism within an Idealist (not an idealist or subjectivist) account of inquiry concerned

with truth-claims. In short, I take realism/Idealism as an improvement over Kant’s

conjunction of empirical realism and transcendental Idealism: Kant cannot quite secure

his realism, and the idealism is already (or is on its way to being) a form of

transcendentalism.

12 Nevertheless, I do oppose the ‘separability thesis’ (in the sense of P. F. Strawson’s The

Bounds of Sense and in the views of strong commentators like Paul Guyer, who yields to

Strawson): ‘transcendental idealism,’ though a form of transcendentalism, cannot be

excised from the first Critique without dismembering it completely. (Henry Allison is

certainly right about that.) For similar reasons, we must accept the ‘discursivity thesis’

(in Kant’s account of cognition and in our own: that is, that the analysis of cognition

requires, as Allison affirms, ‘both concepts and (sensible) intuitions.’ (I believe Allison


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coined both terms.) Similarly, if the a priori is construed (say) as the science of what is

‘transcendentally necessary,’ then it is already ‘apriorist’ or ‘transcendentalist’ – and,

thus, incompatible with pragmatism. Otherwise, the ‘a priori’ may be treated in an a

posteriori way, as a conjecture about the conditions of possibility of this or that sort of

inquiry: hence, as resting on what may be contingently projected from perceptual and

experiential sources that our enabling concepts and categories themselves rely on (but

cannot and need not be confined to). The key problem concerns the source of ‘concepts’

and ‘categories.’ Allison may not be entirely consistent here.

13 Kant never succeeds (never could) in ‘converting’ appearances into independent things;

if he had, he would (on my reading) have had to adopt a form of ‘transcendental

realism,’ which would have violated (as well) his insistence that space and time are

never more than subject-ive forms of human perception and experience. (I don’t see

how that notion could possibly be a synthetic a priori truth.) Kant never provides an

adequate distinction between noumena and things “independent of the mind” (though

not noumena). Accordingly, he has no way to distinguish between representations and

what representations represent in the external world. (The subject-ive version is either

redundant or confines knowledge to a constructed reality of its own invention.) Still, in

favoring Hegel over Kant, it may be entirely fair to say that it’s only when Hegel’s own

argument is rendered in naturalistic terms that its distinctive rigor and advantage may

be rightly grasped.

14 Furthermore, if (as I believe) it’s best to adopt some form of the realist/Idealist option

(though not for apriorist reasons), then it’s a simple matter to deny that the ‘external

world’ we claim to know is itself constructed when we conjecture, by constructivist

hypotheses, whatever we take to be the true nature of the world (that ‘part’ of the

world). The external world is not a noumenal world, though it is a world whose nature

we surmise we know through our hypotheses (or ‘pictures’), which (according to our

lights) we count, however provisionally, as true or false. Here, again, Peirce’s ‘long run’

explains why there is no redundancy or dualism or fatal form of representationalism to

be excised.

15 However, it is true, and my commentators are entirely justified in noting, that I have

not sought to explain (here) the linkage between normative considerations (truth and

rationality as well as moral and aesthetic value) – or culturally enlanguaged meaning

and significance – and the realist/Idealist thesis I explore primarily with an eye to

laying a proper ground for objective claims about the ‘external world.’ I’ve tried my

hand, in numerous settings, at resolving some of the largest puzzles of that enormous

issue. I have no intention of ignoring any of that. But if I may say so, I take the

complaint to be a sort of compliment – a kindly impatience to get on with the rest of

the story! So many discussants have fallen short in these matters that I must take care

to shape the argument correctly. May I say that, in my own view, the answer rests with

the analysis of the hybrid, natural artifactuality of the human self. There’s the essential

theme of the continuing inquiry that I hope, in time, to share with you.

16 There are, also, deeper infelicities confronting Kant’s system that I hope to avoid. The

very distinctions between empirical and transcendental concepts (candidates for what,

on Kant’s view, would be regarded as transcendentally necessary) seems to be no more

than a promissory note that Kant can never completely redeem. Think, here, of the

uncertainty of ever discerning any demonstrably invariant concept of causality or

nomologicality or even of what may be supposed to be ‘an independent object,’ or the


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completely adequate form of a ‘rule’ by which judgment serves the essential function of

the understanding.

17 Answers to any of these ‘transcendental questions’ I take to be provisional conjectures

–thoroughly rational in their way but impossible to confirm in the strong form Kant

claims for them. They remain defeasible, but not (perhaps) by dint of rigorous

argument. Indeed, I take them to be cousins of Peirce’s abductive Hope. Philosophy

trails off here into something deeper and more informal – and, I believe, caught up with

larger currents of changing cultural conviction. I cannot do justice to the issue that’s a-

dawning here, and I haven’t got this part of my speculation sufficiently worked out. But

for what it’s worth, reading Kant, Hegel, Peirce, Dewey, and Cassirer with an eye to

pragmatism’s ‘recovery,’ I find Wittgenstein (or my reading of Peirce’s fallibilism in

Wittgensteinian terms) particularly convincing: our medium-sized philosophical

arguments begin to be judged more and more in terms of their accord with the deepest

abductive instincts of our Lebensform. It’s in some such sense that I believe Peirce’s

extravagant version of fallibilism may reasonably yield to something closer to

Cassirer’s less encumbered vision, and Hegel’s decisive critique of Kant may, once

secured, encourage us to shed Hegel’s unmanageable language for a leaner pragmatist

idiom. That’s what I mean by reading philosophical sources ‘genealogically’:

ineluctably, we recast the philosophical gains we claim to have clinched (for instance,

the need to replace Kant’s realism and idealism, as argued) in accord with the

somewhat inchoate ‘rational instinct’ of our form of life – what I sometimes call our

‘metaphilosophical culture,’ from which, inventively, we draw evolving arguments.

‘Genealogy’ is the name I give to this effort to bridge philosophy’s history, ‘meta’-

philosophically. I foresee the need to eclipse the classic pragmatists in the same sense

in which we are in the process of eclipsing Kant and Hegel.

18 Here, Mathias Girel has anticipated me. He requires a more straightforward answer to

my intended use of what I call Peirce’s chance motto: “Darwinizing Hegel and

Hegelianizing Darwin.” I suppose I should say that I intend the motto to be read

genealogically (in my own labile way). In fact, Pragmatism Ascendent is no more than a

first step in the attempt to ‘recover’ (or ‘reinvent’) pragmatism, in and for our time,

within the genealogical space spanned by an inspiration drawn from Kant and Hegel

and Darwin that, in retrospect, a dozen years into the 21st century, must turn back to

consider what it can now afford to shed or transform. There’s the point of my realism/

Idealism proposal: it cannot be more than a genealogical argument: it’s a fresh

construction, a proposal: post-Kant, post-Hegel, post-Darwin, and, I imagine, post-Peirce

(and post-Cassirer). Minimally, as Girel remarks, the motto must signal my guess that

pragmatism’s best prospects (also, those of analytic philosophy, if you allow the

distinction) lie in the direction of intertwining “biological naturalism and the post-

Kantian emphasis on history and culture.” I mean that much at least; though, having

completed the book before you, I don’t at all wish to rely on the potential infelicities of

Peirce’s doubts about either Hegel or Darwin. Girel has in a way forced my hand. I’ve

settled, at least in part, my account of Hegel, culminating in the realism/Idealism

proposal. I see no gain in a Hegelian account of (biological) evolution; though once the

problematic fit of human evolution within the Darwinian account becomes clear, the

hybrid form of human evolution cannot be gainsaid. I’ve deliberately left all but

untouched the Darwinian issue itself, except to flag “my radical thesis” (which Girel

cites), “that the self is a hybrid artifact of biological and cultural evolution that makes


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possible the entire run on the uniquely enlanguaged forms of human intelligence…”

and so on. But that’s my prophecy.

19 The topic is still too huge to take on in the present context: it’s part of what I hope will

be the start of a new undertaking, centered on the human self. The novel intertwining

of the Hegelian and the Darwinian is anticipated there: in the analysis of culture and

history along post-Hegelian lines, explicated in terms of the advantages of the realist/

Idealist proposal, which suggests (to my mind) a new way of construing the ‘unity of

the sciences’; also, then, in the analysis of the formation and functioning of the self

itself, explicated in terms of the advantages of the artifactuality thesis, pursued along

post-Darwinian line. Actually, Darwin has rather little to contribute to the argument

directly; my genealogical sources here have more in common with the work of the

philosophical anthropologists (who can be wild in their own way) and with the

paleoanthrology and paleontology of Homo sapiens within the genus. So I may have

misled Girel. At any rate, that’s the reason I don’t attempt to recover Peirce’s meaning.

The book ends in a promissory note, but this intent makes sense only if we do not

return to the separate strands of Hegelian and Darwinian thought textually anchored in

Hegel and Darwin. I have yet to explain what that entails.

AUTHOR

JOSEPH MARGOLIS

Temple University

josephmargolis455[at]hotmail.com


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Essays


223

A New Analytic/Synthetic/HoroticParadigmFrom Mathematical Gesture to Synthetic/Horotic Reasoning

Giovanni Maddalena and Fernando Zalamea

1. From Analytics to Synthetics: Kant’s Heritage andPeirce’s Pragmatism

1 Peirce’s pragmatism introduces many new philosophical tools – suffice it to mention

semiotic, abductive logic, a heuristic based on continuity, scholastic realism – all

essential components of a never fully realized broader philosophical project. Peirce

usually identified it as ‘the truth of continuity’ or ‘the truth of synechism’ (Peirce 1998:

335), or else the method of justifying the ‘nature of Sequence,’ namely the nature of

pragmatism, the rule that enables to know meanings through conceivable effects. But

this project required a vast panoptic view necessarily covering different fields,

according to a particular order. An ordered list of topics could be the one proposed in

‘Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism’ (Peirce 1931-35: vol. 4, § 530-84):

continuity, phaneroscopy, signs, existential graphs, kinds of reasoning. In the drafts

and the articles of the series written for The Monist (1905-06) he stressed also the role of

normative sciences. In that entire series and in the following years he tried in vain to

fully explain this or a similar order he had in mind.

2 These efforts were ‘in vain’ because Peirce tended to lose his track while tilling the

‘virgin soil’ (Peirce 1931-35: vol. 1, § 128) of those many fields of research he himself

discovered. And here a complementary question arises: why did he get lost? Part of the

reason is that all the above topics were products of his original insight, and Peirce was

eager to explain them precisely. The mathematical definition of continuity stemmed

from his thirty years of studying Cantor’s set theory, and Peirce had independently

discovered Cantor’s theorem and Cantor’s subsequent paradox. Peirce could not know

that Cantor had discovered the same paradox and, in contrast with the German

mathematician, he saw the immense philosophical impact of this discovery. But in his


224

lectures and in his papers or drafts he spent a lot of time explaining the mathematical

basis of the theorem and, after 1900, of the paradox, saving little time and space for

their philosophical impact. As a result, his articles and manuscripts often treat either

the mathematical explanation alone or the philosophical consequence alone, and it is

difficult to put the two together.

3 Another part of the reason for the lack of a final systematization is that Peirce did not

get lost for lack of direction but for failing to get out of his analytic pattern. What does

that mean? According to Kant, an analytic judgment subsumes a predicate under a

subject, while a synthetic judgment has to look outside the subject-concept into

experience, to capture how the predicate is connected to, but not subsumed within, the

concept. As Quine, and Kripke after him, stressed, in Kant’s work analysis, aprioricity,

and necessity form a circular cluster where any element justifies, but also coincides

with, the others. Analytic judgments are necessary because they are a priori, and being

a priori they are necessary and hence analytic. In this way logic (analysis), epistemic (a

priori), and metaphysical (necessary) levels coincide, furnishing the pattern of true or

warranted knowledge.

4 But Kant’s aim was not at all the defense of the uniqueness of analytic judgments. He

was aware that, as much as analytic judgments are important, they do not bring about

acquisition of new knowledge, which is characteristic of synthesis. What is the kind of

synthesis Kant was looking for? There is a synthesis which is only the reverse of

analysis. This is the operation of combining elements that come from the ‘dissection of

concepts’ produced by analysis. Once we have broken up the concept of the subject, we

can work on the elements we found.

5 The other ‘synthesis’ is the one which gives ‘unity.’ But when Kant talks about the

original synthetic unity of apperception as the kind of combination that analysis

presupposes, he qualifies it as ‘pure,’ not empirical, ‘one and the same’ (Kant 1781/87,

177, B 132). The unity that this pure apperception creates is ‘transcendental’ (ibid.), and

‘precedes a priori all my determinate thought’ (Kant 1781/87, 177, B 135). Synthesis

precedes analysis but the character of universality (here conjoined with ‘sameness’)

and aprioricity would shape it according to the analytic pattern, which remains the

ideal sample of every knowledge.

6 Summing up, the idea of knowledge is really founded upon an analytic pattern, and

that is why Kant seeks to solve the problem of knowledge by using critical, that is,

analytic tools only. Kant provides an analytic of synthetic judgments whereby he

defines (analytically) the steps through which we arrive at a synthetic representation

of reality. Only by breaking down this path step by step is Kant assured of having

caught the gist of what knowledge is. The only real synthesis would come up with the

critique of judgment, but once again it will have a form that combines (adds to one

another) elements of the two previous critiques. In this way Kant simply systematized

the long heritage of Western philosophy, but he made it clear that theoretical or pure

knowledge is either analytic or something that is analyzable, namely broken down into

necessary, a priori pieces.

7 Young Peirce shows no awareness of the complex, presupposed circularity among

aprioricity, analyticity, and necessity. But he had enough philosophical insight to sense

immediately that something was missing. As early as 1869, in ‘Validity of the Laws of

Logic,’ he pointed out that far more fundamental than the question of the possibility of

synthetic apriori reasoning was that of the possibility of synthetic judgments merely


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(Peirce 1981-2010: vol. 2, 267-8). Peirce wanted to go farther than his German master in

criticizing judgments, and to do so he got rid of the a priori principle. A different path

of reasoning was needed, and Peirce tried to provide it through both semiotics and the

a posteriori method of science. Accordingly, Peirce listed aprioricity as one of the weak

ineffective methods for fixing a belief (Peirce 1981-2010: vol. 3, 252-3). The method of

science always remained for Peirce an a posteriori method; he spent his life trying to

explain and justify the nature of ‘ampliative’ reasoning, another phrase for synthetic

reasoning.

8 However, when in the 1877-78 Popular Science Monthly series Peirce gave the

justification for induction – which at the time he thought included also hypotheses – he

surprisingly relied metaphorically on an ‘extension’ of the a priori principle (Peirce

1981-2010: vol. 3, 304). It is of course a rhetorical expedient, since Peirce’s conception

of experience had already been forged in the semiotic a posteriori hearth, but it is still

a significant episode.

9 Peirce would then explain that synthetic inference is founded upon the manner of

obtaining facts, thus ensuring only the ‘degree of trustworthiness of our proceeding’

(Peirce 1981-2010: vol. 3, 305). In this way Peirce transforms Kant’s a priori principle

into a methodological guarantee resting on a certain interpretation of the general

statement that ‘whatever is universally true is involved in the conditions of

experience.’ So then does the idea of necessary, universal truth move from Kant’s a

priori categories to Peirce’s methodological conditions. In such a passage, universal

analytic truth loses part of its ‘necessity’ by becoming merely ‘trustworthy.’ Still, the

path Peirce follows remains through the idea of necessity or universality. Like Kant

with his schematism, Peirce is after synthetic reasoning but gets to it through the

analytic path. The outcome is that ampliative or synthetic arguments do not tend to the

necessity of content but to the necessity of method.

10 In 1903’s Lowell Lectures Peirce distinguishes synthetic from analytic judgments,

attributing the former to mathematics (hence to necessary reasoning) and the latter to

logic, which tries ‘to find out how inferences necessary and probable are composed.’

Once again, logic is confined to the analytic scheme of composition/decomposition.

Therefore, reasoning can be necessary or ampliative, but the logician’s work is in both

cases to find its composition, confirming that analysis presides over our

methodological research even when, as in induction or hypotheses, it does not preside

over the concepts at stake.

11 But in spite of Peirce’s analytic project, pragmatism chiefly concerns our concrete

synthetic way of thinking. The synthetic process, however, is not the Kantian one that

seeks to attain, in both form and content, the kind of clearness that analysis has. All the

tools Peirce crafted, from the list of categories to perceptual judgments, from the

pragmatic maxim to abduction, from existential graphs to rational instinct, describe a

changing synthetic process of thinking rather than the fixed analytic/synthetic

reasoning (and judgment) described by Kant. Peirce does not seem to have realized that

his tools were hinting towards a completely different path of thought. This tension

between the analytic background of his thought and the ‘true synthetic’ [only

‘synthetic’ from now on] purpose of those same analyses explains also Peirce’s

progressive shifts from Kant to Hegel, and his more and more evident epistemic turn in

the philosophy of science. This tension shows a different kind of possibility. How can


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we define synthetic and analytic starting from the change in thought that Peirce was

tracking down without seeing the different picture he was formulating?

2. A New Paradigm: Analytics, Synthetics, Horotics

12 We proceed with some new definitions. A synthetic judgment is a judgment that

recognizes identity through changes. An analytic judgment is a judgment that loses

identity through changes. A horotic judgment (from horos, border)1 is a judgment that is

blind to identity through changes. In these three definitions one can change ‘judgment’

by ‘reasoning,’ opening thus new doors to inquire an extended gnoseological spectrum

(for further development of the definitions see Maddalena 2009).

13 Why do we need a new definition? One of the reasons for this change is required by

Peirce’s failed attempt to make complete sense of many tools he himself provided. We

already described the tension between Peirce’s analytic tools and his synthetic project.

Beyond that, there are other compelling reasons. One is the clear impasse of analytic

philosophy. That kind of philosophy, to which contemporary thought owes so much for

its precision and productivity, seems now stuck in a scholasticism full of definitions

detached from experiential reality and not really committed to improving our

understanding of the world and its transformations. The fact is that analytic

philosophy has now come to manifest the incompleteness of the criterion of necessity/

analyticity/aprioricity displayed by Kant. And its critiques, most importantly Quine and

Kripke, offered only internal criticisms that failed to change the criterion itself.

14 The good results of analytic philosophy are due to an efficient understanding of a

certain kind of logic (first-order classical logic) based on a certain kind of mathematics

(Cantorian set theory). But the ‘scholasticism’ currently in vogue underlines a

limitation of this logic: though analytic logic serves pretty well to split up definitions as

called for Kant’s heritage, it is intrinsically an endless process. From science to

grammar, definitions rarely provide an exact fit: they are always too large or too tight.

They are a useful tool but are not the only one, and for sure not the one apt to grasp

changes in reality. New mathematics and new kinds of logics have already arisen (see

section 5): the time has come to try a new philosophical paradigm.

15 And why do we need this new definition we are proposing? Synthetic reasoning is the

original kind that we use in everyday life, and it needs a new paradigm that we will try

to expose and justify in the rest of this article. This study does not want to deny,

minimize or deconstruct the success of analytic reasoning as it has been carried on so

far. We want only to show that analytic reasoning needs and has always used a

complementary type of understanding in order to work properly. The possibility of

both and the transition between them are the pillars of this different view. We will see

that the logical core of synthetic reasoning is both analytically and synthetically

describable. Arising from Peirce’s studies, this view immediately understands the

logical importance of horotics, as the indispensable complement to the two kinds

proposed.

16 The first task in order to show the plausibility of our paradigm is to explain what is

change and how we can study it. We recall that Peirce’s phenomenology (phaneroscopy

in his terminology) postulates the existence of three basic categories in nature and

knowledge: firstness (immediacy, possibility, monadicity), secondness (action-reaction,

actuality, binarism) and thirdness (mediation, necessity, continuity). We will


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understand change from a systemic point of view, in the sense that a given in-

formation (first) produces a new trans-formation (third) through precise preparation,

correlation and creative techniques (seconds) which help to master and modify the

initial data. Then, given an informational change, an analytic judgment emphasizes

differences and thus loses identities of data, focusing on the result of the

transformation. On the other hand, a synthetic judgment proposes an integrating view

which recognizes fragments of identity, focusing on similar structural processes of the

transformation. Finally, a horotic judgment defines a frontier, a border, a sort of

pendular differential and integral calculus which focuses on the possibility of relations,

that is on the relative spectrum of the transformation, and is thus blind to detect actual

identities.

17 Horotics can, in turn, be approached from three distinct points of view: (i) extrinsically,

(ii) intrinsically, (iii) synthetically. Extrinsically (i), horotics can be understood as a

completion of the classical dyad analysis/synthesis with respect to Peirce’s three

categories. Since Greek thought, analysis and synthesis have appeared as

complementary polarities (decomposition/composition, part/all, discontinuous/

continuous, element/structure, etc.), but the intermediate transit between polarities

has not been well investigated. In a similar vein to the emergence of generalized

quantifiers in Abstract Model Theory à la Lindström, which study intermediate

situations between the particular (Ε) and the general (A) associated to intermediate

classes of structures, horotics pretends to open the way to general forms of reasoning

beyond the polarity analysis/synthesis. Intrinsically (ii), horotics can be seen as the

exact study of the borders of knowledge, merging thus with a strong tradition of critical

thinkers akin to the visualization of frontiers and their crossovers: Peirce (logic of

continuity), Florenski (borders between science, art and theology), Warburg

(seismography of art history), Benjamin (residues in cultural studies), Bakhtin (literary

frontiers), Merleau-Ponty (Humanity as a border between Culture and Nature),

Blumenberg (evolution of metaphorical images), among many other indispensable XXth

century thinkers. Synthetically (iii), horotics achieves its full richness through self-

reference and self-regulation processes (frontiers of the frontier, limits of the limit,

progressive refinement of borders, etc.) which foster the growth of phenomenological,

epistemical and metaphysical orders (topological object, continuous logic, Peirce’s

synechism, etc.).

18 In what follows, we will be detailing our general paradigm along three main case

studies – Peirce’s ‘mathematical gestures’ (section 3), Gödel’s synthetic approaches to

intuitionistic logic (section 4), forces in play in Contemporary Mathematics (section 5)

–, and we will finish prospecting its pertinence (section 6) for the coming years.

3. The Paradigm Along Peirce’s MathematicalGestures

19 The triad analytics/synthetics/horotics glues naturally if we use Peirce’s fundamental

insight: the concept of continuity, the ‘keystone’ of pragmatism. The study of

continuity from a mathematical and a logical standpoint shows how to understand

change and invariance. From the very beginning of Peirce’s intellectual proposal,

continuity is paired with representation, or cognition, becoming increasingly unified

with it the more he was discovering the real mathematical structure of continuity.


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There are many changes in Peirce’s mathematical approach to the topic, but

substantially they all focus on the proof of Cantor’s theorem and paradox that Peirce

independently discovered in the late 1890s. With this proof Peirce understood that

there is an infinite series of multitudes that Cantor’s set theory can reach, but that

those multitudes are always bounded to an imperfect or pseudo-continuity that

depends on the unavoidable singularity of the initial definition of set or collection

(Peirce 1976: vol. 3, 774-5). Peirce’s definition implies that a collection is an individual

whose existence depends on the regularities among other individuals. These

‘regularities’ can be identified by the characters its members possess (ineunts) or

exclude (exeunts) (Peirce 1976: vol. 3, 776). Therefore, if a collection implies by

definition a scheme of otherness ineunts-exeunts, the collection of all the collections, not

having by definition any exeunt, is unthinkable. Cantor’s paradox mathematically

confirms this evidence that Peirce first attains through the categorical and semiotic

status of individual. Real continuity is beyond any calculation that set theory can reach.

20 So what is this ‘real’ or ‘perfect’ continuity, which is beyond the ‘pseudo-continuity’

that sets can reach? Peirce changed his mind many times on this issue, trying first to

tie continuity to necessity and then to possibility. Peirce first thought of making

continuity the complete evolution of reality, the perfect ‘generality’ in his logical

terms. In this version (1900-05), any singularity is a rupture of perfect continuity. But

afterwards (1907-14) he connected continuity to a more complex pattern in which

continuity is a possibility, namely a model that may be realized. Singularities are now

realizations of that original possibility tending to a general cohesiveness (Peirce

1931-35: vol. 4, § 642).

21 It is in this second sense that our conception of change must be seen. We can

understand change as a perfect continuity of possibilities of which any actual

occurrence is a realization. Continuity is a law (general) whose internal regularity is ‘an

immediate connection’ that we can understand as the condition of every possible

realization (possibility). We can define a Peircean perfect continuum by four

characters: modality (plasticity), transitivity, generality, and reflexivity, each

underlying one aspect of the relationship between the parts and the whole of

continuity, as seen in Zalamea 2001. Generality is the law of cohesiveness among parts

beyond any individual and any possibility of metrically measuring it; modality means

plasticity, namely the fact that a continuum is not tied to actualities but involves both

possibility and necessity; transitivity is the internal passage between modalities

(possibility, actuality, and general necessity); reflexivity means that any part shall have

the same properties of the whole to which it belongs.

22 According to Peirce’s ‘extreme’ realism, continuity coincides with reality and, thus, it

founds mathematics. Since we discover continuity at the ‘end’ of inquiry on sets, it is an

a posteriori foundation that happens while we are ‘doing mathematics’ through our

scribing graphs and diagrams whether on the sheet of the mind or on some physical

sheet. Mathematical diagrams work because they act synthetically, namely – according

to an old Kantian definition – in mathematics we are dealing with universals in

particulars, while in philosophy we have to deal with universals abstracted from

particulars. The great power of generalization of mathematics is due to these

contracted universals. We will call ‘mathematical gesture’ this kind of synthetic

approach to mathematics through ‘doing.’


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23 There is a second interrelated approach to change in Peirce’s late writings. It is the

approach through logical modalities as such. Possibility, actuality, necessity, became

the way in which Peirce explained transition within the continuum itself. If Cantor’s

paradox showed the existence of an original higher continuum of reality that exceeds

our computations, modalities define the internal life of this continuity. But in what do

these modalities consist? Possibility is the mode of reality in which the principle of

contradiction does not hold. Actuality or existence is the mode of reality in which both

the principle of contradiction and excluded third hold. Necessity is the mode of reality

in which the principle of excluded third does not hold, that is, both alternatives can be

false. Peirce’s short version of the discovered ontological stands of modalities sums

them up as ‘may be’s’ (possibility), ‘actualities,’ and ‘would be’s’ (necessity or

generality). All three modalities are ‘real’ – meaning that they are independent from

what any number of minds can think – or rather they coincide with the evolving

continuity of reality. Reality actualizes possibilities and tries to develop them as

generalities. According to Peirce, it is impossible to describe reality without modalities.

24 The logic of modalities implies a different understanding of stechiology (doctrine of

elements). A term can be vague, determinate, and general (Peirce 1998: 350-3)

according to the characters inhering in it. If any character is predicated universally and

affirmatively or recognized as inherent the term is determinate. If it requires further

determination by the utterer, it is vague; if it requires further determination by the

interpretant it is general. Vagueness, determination, and generality fall under the same

description of the logical modalities. What we have here is a transition in

determination which is based on the ontological reality of the logical modalities. A

term or a concept can be vague and become determinate and even general (and vice

versa).

25 Vagueness has such an importance because it is the possible state of things from which

ideas stem. Possibility as firstness can also be understood as a not yet actualized border

from where actions (secondness) and ideas (thirdness) eventually emerge. The horotics

of knowledge cannot thus dispense the complete triad vagueness/incarnation/

abstraction. Moreover, it is precisely in the horotic transposition between particulars

(seconds) and generals (thirds) where many logical forces enter the panorama.

Creativity spurs from initial vagueness and many correlations between imagination

(first) and reason (third) can be then precisely stated along the synthetic/horotic

paradigm.

26 Logical features respect the four characteristics of the continuum: reflexivity,

generality, possibility, transitivity. Every element has the same properties of general

modalities (reflexivity); the passage among vagueness, determination, and generality

(transitivity) is the law of the development of meaning through categories (generality);

this latter depends on the possible inchoative status of vague meaning (possibility).

Now, mathematical and logical characteristics of continuity showed what change is,

and we are ready to explain what we mean by ‘recognizing an identity through

changes,’ our definition of synthetic reasoning.

27 For our explanation we will rely on Peirce’s Existential Graphs (hereafter EG), his

iconic-based logics. EG were the way in which Peirce himself sought to represent

continuity, and it is possibly one of the few scientific strategies of getting to the

structure of ‘recognizing’ (see Roberts 1973). EG are the iconic formalization of logic of

propositions (Alpha), first order (Beta), and modalities (Gamma). In comparison to


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formalization by symbols that happened in the same years, EG display a greater

simplicity and uniformity (same rules for the three fragments, propositional, first order,

modal). EG were still analytic, but their overall project was a synthetic one (Zalamea

2010). Using the phrase introduced above, they are a kind of ‘mathematical gesture’

and from this point of view they are synthetically conveying universals into

particulars.

28 The synthetic ‘doing’ of the EG permits ‘evidence’ and ‘generality.’ Both properties are

fundamental in Peirce’s understanding of mathematics; and semiotics gave him the

tools to understand their actual working. ‘Evidence’ is due to the iconic property of the

graphs. Icons give to diagrams the fundamental visual character that makes them

‘graspable’ through perception. ‘Generality,’ is due to the so called ‘hypostatic

abstraction’ that enables us to consider as object, and thus as diagram, any quality or

aspect of reality. This kind of abstraction is the logical tool through which we pass

“from ‘good’ to ‘goodness’ and the like” (Peirce 1998: 270n). The combination of the

properties of ‘evidence’ and ‘generality’ accounts for our capacity of reading a diagram

in a general way and to understand its relations. Generalization happens in ‘doing’ or

‘scribing’ those diagrams. If the generalization is the analytic result of the diagrams,

diagrams are the synthetic happening of generals. ‘Recognizing’ is part of this synthetic

‘happening’ and should have the same evidence and generalization.

29 Recognizing always implies an object: ‘recognizing something’; and the easiest way to

look at it is to look at the case of identity. Here we will focus on an identity that is not a

plain correspondence A=A, which according to Peirce himself is only a degenerate form

of the real identity A=B. Identities are always passing through changes. A=A is the static

correspondence drawn from the set-theoretical definition of multitudes and it is a

simplification of a ‘more primitive’ form of relation (Peirce 1976: vol. 4, 325-8).

30 Given our diagrams with their power of evidence and generalization, how can they help

us understand our ‘recognizing an identity’? In order to answer this question we have

to represent both the continuity of change and the identity we want to inquire within

this change. The first kind of continuity, the continuity of reality, is represented by the

sheet of assertion. The sheet represents the universe of discourse we are dealing with

in Alpha and Beta parts (logic of propositions and first order). But in the Gamma graphs

(modal logic), when we want to represent change through modalities, we need a

different continuum that ‘must clearly have more dimensions’ (Peirce 1931-35: vol. 4,

§ 512). This plastic multidimensional continuum is more ‘original,’ and the sheet of

assertion of the Alpha and Beta parts is only a picture of this original continuum. In

this continuum we are really scribing not the propositions as they actually are, but as

they might be. We could think of them as marks or qualities, which cannot be

numerable anymore – they are not assertions anymore – and they will exceed any

multitude, according to our definition of ‘perfect continuity’. This multidimensional

continuum is apt to represent time or ‘Becoming’ (Peirce 1976: vol. 4, 330).

31 Now that we have the tool for representing the continuum of change, we can look for

identity. In the Beta Graphs we have a graphical tool for identity: the line of identity,

that can solve the problem of quantifiers. The line represents the existential quantifier

when it is evenly enclosed and the universal quantifier through an appropriate nested

double cut. But the definition becomes more complex when we do not have to deal with

the two dimensional sheet of assertion, but with the multidimensional plastic

continuum. When we scribe a line of identity on the multidimensional plastic


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continuum we are representing the identity into the continuum of possibilities. The

line of identity continues to assert the identity of the individuals denoted by its

extremities, but here it means the continuity of possibilities of an individual considered

as a changing object in its becoming, i.e. the winner of Leipzig and the loser of

Waterloo. This switch from using a line of identity on a sheet of assertion to using it on

a multidimensional continuum implies the passage from an Assertoric view of Truth to

a broader conception of truth and identity based on possibility. Identity is not anymore

A=A but a non-purely-symbolizable iconic identity passing from A to B.

32 This switch also implies that the line of identity when it is scribed on a

multidimensional continuum must become a line of teridentity, namely a line in which

one of the extremities is a loose end. Teridentity represents two relations of co-identity

and means that there are two different relations of identity that have in common one

end and part of the line. The loose end of the line of teridentity means that there is or

was also a different possibility even if it is or was not being actualized. It means that we

know identity as a continuity but we do not know at which point it would stop and the

point might be or have been different from the one we have. We have to allow the

possibility that brute existence will be different since we are not representing actuality

but potentiality. Finally, the line of identity has a direction or an aim because we draw

it starting from one point and ceasing at another.

33 This is the tool Peirce crafted to define a changing identity analytically, but in order to

grasp the synthetic view of identity, it is not EG’s logical analytic use that is needed.

The interesting features of the line of identity and teridentity come from Peirce’s

comment on the nature and the meaning of it: the line of identity, and a fortiori the

line of teridentity, is another ‘perfect continuum’ along with the multidimensional

continuum of assertion and, thus, it has the same properties we ascribed to continuity.

34 The line of identity is made of icons interpreted, and in so far is made of possibilities

whose realizations are connected by a general rule (possibility and generality). The

loose end guarantees the fullness of reflexivity: any part of the line, included the ends,

are possibilities that might be realized according to a general law. Besides, every single

dot actualized on the multidimensional continuum realizes a possibility according to

the general law, and might have a different branch – the loose end – as a different

actualization of the same possibility. So there is a transition from possibility to

necessity through actuality. The translation of modalities in terms of vagueness,

determination, and generalization is easy to see: identity is a progressive

determination of possible qualities tending toward a generalization (tending to identify

forever the winner of Leipzig and the loser of Waterloo) during the development (the

‘becoming’) expressed by the continuum within which they are inscribed.

35 How can this representation of identity be also the representation of ‘recognizing an

identity’? Peirce could unify ‘identity’ and ‘recognizing an identity’ by virtue of the

practical ‘scribing’ on the sheet of assertion or on the multidimensional continuum.

‘Recognizing an identity’ in EG means to draw a line of identity between two points,

knowing that there is always a different, loose possibility. The drawing itself is our

recognizing; in EG there is no recognition without the actual drawing of the line. It can

be a mental or a virtual act, but it has to be a kind of diagram within a general

interpretation. It is what we call a mathematical gesture.

36 What is a gesture? Gesture is any performed act which carries a meaning (from gero = to

bear, to carry). We can say we really understood something when we are ready to act


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according to our ideas; so, it is the performance that synthetically involves our

reasoning. But if every gesture carries meaning, not every gesture serves to recognize

an identity. So, any gesture is meaningful, but not every gesture embodies a synthetic

reasoning. In order to understand ‘syntheticity’ we have to look for a ‘perfect or

complete gesture,’ a gesture that respects all the characters we found following EG.

37 We should call a ‘perfect or complete gesture’ a gesture which has all the semiotic

elements blended together almost equally. Now, for a gesture to be perfect it has to be a

general law (symbol) that generates replicas; it is actual when it indicates its particular

object (index); and it expresses different possibilities of aspects of the object which it

refers to (icon). The three semiotic characteristics describe what a perfect gesture is:

creative because of possible aspects, singular in its individuality, recognizable for its

conformity to an established pattern. Moreover, gestures carry a possible and vague

meaning that progressively gets determinate till a new habit is established. So we can

easily find in this movement generality, modality, and transitivity.

38 Our new paradigm implies that a synthetic judgment (and reasoning) is a judgment

(and reasoning) that recognizes – with evidence – identity through changes. How can

we perform this reasoning? We do that through perfect gestures, where creativity,

particularity and generality overlap. Perfect gestures – like the line of identity in EG –

save identity through changes because of their continuous semiotic nature. We obtain

analytic reasoning by differentiation and horotic reasoning through a pendular

‘integral and differential calculus’ (see section 5). Analytic reasoning loses the identity

through changes because it is concerned with breaking up the identity, as its etymology

suggests (from analyo, discomposing, breaking up). It is very profitable in many cases

but perfectly hopeless in many of our everyday businesses, and sometimes also – like in

the case of discoveries or assessments of meaning – in many of our scientific activities

(see section 5, for the case of Contemporary mathematics). A horotic reasoning does

not recognize an identity, but it is probably the richer state of our knowledge, the one

in which our primeval beliefs lie.

4. The Paradigm Along Gödel’s Work

39 Gödel’s work is an outstanding example of the production of a great logician/

mathematician/philosopher, being able to explore in depth the full triad analytics/

synthetics/horotics. If his analytic power has been celebrated many times, his synthetic

vision has been less so, in spite of his lifelong interest for intuitionistic logic (from

Gödel 1932 up to Gödel 1972), his unusual physical imagination (Gödel 1949, 1952) and

his enormous output of philosophical reflections (most still unpublished, beyond the

‘standard’ compilation Collected Works III; for an original, ‘non standard’ approach, see

Cassou-Noguès 2007). Gödel’s comprehensive and correlative interest in logic,

mathematics and philosophy rests in fact on a synthetic understanding of knowledge.

Moreover, in fairly detailed moments of Gödel’s work one can disclose strong horotic

forces, as we will indicate in this section.

40 In one of his philosophical discussions, Gödel proposes a ‘general schema of possible

philosophical world-views’ which proves fruitful ‘for the analysis of philosophical

doctrines admissible in special contexts, in that one either arranges them in this

manner or, in mixed cases, seeks out their materialistic and spiritualistic elements’

(Gödel 1961: 375, our emphasis). Here, a synthetic perspective (‘schema,’ ‘world-views’)


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is presented first, and then applied to the analysis of philosophical doctrines along

pragmatic situations (‘special contexts,’ ‘mixed cases’). A pendulous horotics between

matter and spirit governs the schema, and it is precisely in the border, mixed cases

where the schema comes to be the most fruitful. Further, if we see that ‘skepticism,

materialism and positivism stand on one side, spiritualism, idealism and theology on

the other,’ Gödel affirms that ‘it is a familiar fact, even a platitude, that the

development of philosophy since the Renaissance has by and large gone from right to left

– not in a straight line, but with reverses, yet still, on the whole’ (Gödel 1961: 375, our

emphasis; ‘right’/spiritualism, ‘left’/materialism). The pendulum, with its back-and-

forth horotics, is unavoidable. For Gödel, the deep mathematical concepts lie on right,

against Hilbert’s formalism tending to the left. Then, beyond the ‘Hilbertian

combination of materialism and aspects of classical mathematics’ (Gödel 1961: 381), a

‘workable combination’ (Gödel 1961: 383), which reflects the idea that ‘truth lies in the

middle’ (Gödel 1961: 381), should be proposed. Surprisingly, Gödel finds that such a

middle horotics should be founded on Husserl’s phenomenology, in order to capture an

in-depth perception of mathematical objects. Thus Gödel comes very close to Peirce’s

ideas, as we have presented them in the previous sections, even if Gödel probably never

knew Peirce’s phaneroscopy and philosophy of mathematics (in Gödel’s published

work, there is only one reference to Peirce, on his calculus of relations (Gödel 1944:

120)).

41 On the technical side, all Gödel’s papers on intuitionism include outstanding examples

of synthetic and horotic strategies. His very first paper on intuitionism (Gödel 1932)

exhibits already a precise synthetic property (non existence of a finite model which

would capture provability of the intuitionistic calculus Int), and a precise horotic one

(existence of infinite systems between intuitionistic and classical propositional calculi).

Gödel 1933a extends, to first order, part of Glivenko’s translatability criterion between

Int and the classical propositional calculus, presenting, first, an intuitionistic Herbrand

system H’ with number variables (synthetic construction with enough signs for the

semantics), and, second, a translation of the classical properties of partial recursive

functions into H’ (horotic transformation of calculability into intuitionistic provability).

Gödel 1933b shows a new translation (horotic transformation) between Int and modal

S4, and conjectures their equiconsistency (full synthetic comparison). Finally, Gödel’s

famous Dialectica paper (Gödel 1958) presents a translation of provability in Heyting

Arithmetic into computability of finite type functionals. Both the fairly detailed

arithmetic systems (synthetics) and the translations (horotics) in play, acquire there in-

depth stratified refinements.

42 One can understand Gödel as a thinker extremely sensible both to the recto and verso of

a given situation (not only mathematical: his biography is full of such borderline

sensitivities). We contend here that it is precisely thanks to this horotic temperament

that Gödel’s genius may have emerged. The presence of important horotic lines in

Gödel’s work can also in fact be signaled in what may be his most celebrated logical

results. On one side, if, in his doctoral thesis, Gödel proves completeness of classical

first-order logic, just one year later he discovers the incompleteness of Peano

Arithmetic. The thin line where the tendency to insure completeness breaks (following

Post, Presburger, Herbrand and Gödel himself) is a frontier that could only be

conceived by an unusual mathematician, open both to the borders of proofs and to a via

negativa approach to knowledge. Beyond Herbrand’s bounded quantification, Gödel

discovers the exact border – full induction – where incompleteness phenomena begin


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to occur. On the other side, if with the constructible universe Gödel proves the relative

consistency of the Continuum Hypothesis (CH), in his later years he proceeds again

‘through the looking glass’ and postulates natural axioms that force c=Χ2, negating thus

(CH). All these examples in Gödel’s work – philosophical and mathematical at large,

logically detailed in his intuitionistic contributions – show perhaps the pertinence of

our newly defined analytics/synthetics polarity and his natural extension to horotics.

5. The Paradigm Along Contemporary Developmentsof Mathematics

43 The XXth Century French School in Philosophy of Mathematics (with names such as

Poincaré, Brunschvicg, Cavaillès, Lautman, Desanti, Vuillemin, Châtelet, Petitot,

Badiou) has stressed the central role of mathematical gestures for a fair understanding

of mathematical creativity. Mathematical practice, contrasted with logical architecture,

has to deal permanently with blind spots, obstructions, inconsistencies, contradictions.

In such a perilous mathematical activity, often paths are explored through structural

equilibrium or esthetic awareness (Shelah considers ‘beauty’ as the main reason for

studying Set Theory), before rearranging the envisioned ideas on a sound logical basis.

In these endeavors, both synthetic and horotic perspectives are fundamental.

44 Albert Lautman, possibly the most original philosopher of Modern mathematics

(1830-1950), had stressed five main characteristics of mathematical ‘higher’ creativity

(Galois, Riemann, Hilbert, E. Cartan, mainly studied by Lautman): (i) complex hierarchy

of mathematical theories, irreducible with respect to intermediate deductive systems,

(ii) semantic richness, irreducible to syntactical considerations, (iii) unity of structural

methods behind the previous multiplicity, (iv) dynamics of mathematical practice/

gesture, (v) theorematic back-and-forth between unity and multiplicity (Lautman 2005).

Lautman, a good friend of Charles Ehresmann, had anticipated the growing emergence

of Category Theory (see, in particular, his brilliant analysis of the local/global polarity

before the emergence of Sheaf Theory (Lautman 2010)), and our synthetic/horotic

paradigm can also be traced back to Lautman’s work. The global view fostered by (i) and

(ii) require in fact synthetic approaches, while the bordering/dialectical view

underlined in (iii)-(v) deals directly with an horotic approximation to knowledge. The

dynamic structuralism in Philosophy of Mathematics proposed some decades ago

(Awodey, Hellman, see Shapiro 2005), fully developed in the 1930’s by Lautman, is thus

much closer to a synthetic/horotic (mathematical) paradigm than to the analytic

(logical) paradigm which encompassed the main ‘Philosophy of Mathematics’ (in fact,

‘Philosophy of Logic’) schools in the XXth century.

45 Extending Lautman’s project to Contemporary mathematics (1950-today), we have

underlined (Zalamea 2008) some features of contemporary mathematical creativity

where the synthetic/horotic viewpoint helps to organize better the panorama: (vi)

arithmetical structural impurity (Langlands, Deligne, Wiles, etc.), (vii) systematical

geometrization (sheaves, co-homologies, geometric logic, etc.), (viii) freeness and

schematization (groupoids, categories, topoi, motives, etc.), (ix) fluxion and

deformation (non linearity, non commutativity, non elementarity, quantization, etc.),

(x) reflexivity (classification, monster model, fixed points, etc.) In the amazingly

productive period since 1950 (following Dieudonné, 99 % of our actual mathematical

knowledge would have therein emerged), the mathematical practice permanently


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breaks all analytic borders, merging together very diverse subfields of mathematics.

Synthetic mixing is a source of inventiveness, and the horotic crossing of problems and

ideas from different fields is a source of freshness for the discipline.

46 Grothendieck’s presence behind the developmental lines (vi)-(x) is central. Since many

appearances of synthetic and horotic forces vertebrate Grothendieck’s work – his

schemes, topoi or motives, crucially influential for Contemporary mathematics – one

can also measure the importance of the synthetic/horotic paradigm for a fair

understanding of the Philosophy of Mathematics. Grothendieck 1960-67 unifies and

synthesizes, in the schemes, Riemann’s vision (understanding of a complex curve

through the ring of meromorphic functions over the curve) and Galois/Dedekind’s

vision (understanding of an algebraic variety through the spectrum of its maximal

ideals). A horotic transposition helps to capture together, in a general setting, the ideas

of non ramification and local/global gluing (through sheaves on the spectrum of prime

ideals). Grothendieck 1960-69 axiomatizes, through topoi, the movements of relative

mathematics, generalizes the notion of point, discovers new geometric invariants and

constructs the correct (co)homologies which would eventually lead to the solution of

Weil’s conjectures. Combining a synthetic view (mathematics from the top) and horotic

gestures (multitude of new definitions, theorems and examples), Grothendieck explores

systematically the borders of mathematical regions. On the other hand, inventing

motives, Grothendieck looks for archetypes which lie at ‘the heart or soul’ of

mathematical thought (Grothendieck 1985: 45). Beyond the multiplicity of

(co)homologies, motives look for an initial or generic unity behind the various

algebraic attempts to capture the fundamental mathematical contradiction

discreteness/ continuity.

47 Some basic trends in Contemporary mathematics can be described through an iterated

horotics between forms of idealism and realism (for a detailed account, see (Zalamea

2008: 99-150)). Eidal mathematics (from eidos, idea, and idein, vision) encompasses many

works which open new territories through very general ideas and strong visual

capabilities (Serre, Langlands, Lawvere, Shelah can be seen as such visionaries, for

example). Quiddital mathematics (from quidditas, ‘what it is’) combines the capacity to

work with rare abstract machineries and concrete physical problems (as in the work of

Atiyah, Lax, Connes or Kontsevich). Archeal mathematics (from arkhê, beginning, and

arkhên, commanding) unravels archetypical invariants along the eidal/quiddital transit,

such as Friedman’s reverse mathematics, Freyd’s allegories, Zilber’s trichotomy

(extended by Hrushovski) or Gromov’s h-principle. In each case, the dynamical forces of

Contemporary mathematics, always crossing frontiers, always contaminating its

diverse techniques, reveal a horotic factum difficult to understand from the perspectives

of Analytic Philosophy.

48 An example of such a crucial mathematical contamination is obtained around the

double analytic/synthetic content of the notion of sheaf (one of the main conceptual

and historical border lines between Modern and Contemporary mathematics). On an

analytic approach, the sheaf glues a coherent covering of neighborhoods, and, on a

synthetic perspective, it produces a section which adequately preserves local

properties of projections and restrictions (see figure 1):


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Figure 1. Sheaves from Complementary Perspectives

49 If we transpose the analytic notion of ‘covering’ through the synthetic hierarchy

‘section-preservation-projection-restriction’, we obtain a horotic transformation that

we may call Grothendieck’s Transform. In fact, the emergence of Grothendieck’s

topologies, at the beginning of Topos Theory, comes precisely from such a synthetic

understanding of covers. But even better, Grothendieck’s ‘rising sea’ technique is a

profound methodological instance of that horotic transposition: to understand a

mathematical concept/object (metaphorically a nut, with its hard shell), just cover it

through diverse synthetic categories and functorial contexts (rising tides) until the

concept is properly understood (the ‘nourishing flesh’ is then analytically uncovered,

as the shell dissolves) (Grothendieck 1985: 552-3).

50 Grothendieck’s Transform uses two distinct forms of understanding. Through

transversality, it introduces a reference lattice where contrasts, coherence, asymptotic

behavior and gluings can operate. In this way, for example, a non absolute, non

analytic, notion of truth emerges, where a density of correct correlations stands as an

approximation to truth, without invoking an ideal limit or a correspondence theory. On

the other hand, through coverings, it introduces a dynamic fluidity, crucial for a sound

comprehension of saturation processes in mathematics (a central characteristic first

studied in all details by Lautman). Our epistemological perspectives change then

radically, just by the simple fact of smoothing the situation: beyond polarities, the

mediating transformations are integrated in an evolving fabric, closer to mathematical

practice. Transversality in the work of Serre and in Langland’s program, adjoint

dialectics in Lawvere, tame coverings in Shelah’s pcf theory, Atiyah’s index theorem,

harmonic analysis applied to the non euclidean wave equation in Lax’s work, Freyd’s

intermediate categories, Zilber’s proto-geometry, Gromov’s h-principle, are very

precise examples where transversality of coverings is fundamental. Since we are listing

many great creative advances in Contemporary mathematics that cannot be

understood from analytic perspectives, a natural space for a Synthetic/Horotic

Philosophy of Mathematics emerges.

51 Beyond the usual ideal/real polarity, mathematical practice, particularly at the high

level of Contemporary advances, is in fact producing an extremely interesting

epistemological back-and-forth. The back-and-forth postulates not just a systematic

oscillation between extremes, but one which is rooted on a coherent covering of the

diverse partial approximations. Lindström’s use of Cantor’s back-and-forth in Abstract

Model Theory is a paradigmatic use of the idea, but one can also detect it in

Grothendieck’s elucidation of the functorial properties of Teichmüller’s space, in

Shelah’s structural amalgamation techniques, in Gromov’s polynomial group growth,

etc. All these processes reflect partial, hierarchical, distributed knowledge, which can

be correctly understood only from perspectives open to transits along borders of

mathematics, just what the synthetic/horotic paradigm indicates.


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6. Forms of Synthetic/Horotic Reasoning for the XXIstCentury

52 Mathematical practice, as we have seen in previous sections – Peirce’s mathematical

gesture and his logic of continuity, Gödel’s synthetic interplay between intuitionism

and classical logic, contemporary mathematical developments along Grothendieck’s

legacy – fosters a full triadic vision where analytic, synthetic and horotic techniques

should complement each other. Nevertheless, from the viewpoint of Philosophy of

Mathematics, the analytic preponderance in the XXth century has been overwhelming,

and a balance is far from having been reached. In this final section we will (i) present

the rough lines of how one should understand a Synthetic Philosophy, complementary to

Analytic Philosophy, (ii) indicate a back-and-forth horotics between the two

approaches, (iii) prospect a generalization of the situation for more extended cultural

contexts, beyond mathematics.

53 A Synthetic Philosophy captures many ideas from what has been called ‘Continental

Philosophy,’ but a systemic and systematic counterbalance with Analytic Philosophy

can render clearer the panorama (see figure 2). Our main bet for the emergence and

growth of such a Synthetic Philosophy may be summed up in the following diagram:

Figure 2. A New Paradigm for XXISt Century

54 After due attention given to the right column in the preceding diagram, a more

balanced understanding of the Philosophy of Mathematics should emerge in the next

coming years. A full horotic back-and-forth between the two columns would then

accommodate the guidelines of mathematical practice. In particular, the very complex

‘Gromov’s cloud’ (Langevin 2000) – which tries to examine, under a new metaphor,

exponential nodes, dense gluings, local wells, and all sort of multidimensional objects

in Hilbert’s mathematical tree – indicates that new geometric forms, particularly

sensible to synthetic and horotic perspectives, are invading mathematical knowledge.

55 The philosophical generalization of the suggested scheme should show the breadth of

its perspectives. Philosophy can find a new vein in the synthetic/horotic paradigm,


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eventually escaping the boundaries self-attributed according to the analytic pattern.

We can easily observe that good philosophical fruits matured from the mathematical

discoveries of the past two centuries. To them we owe the precision of the philosophy

of language, the development of forms of artificial intelligence and their tools, good

works in logic and their applications to informatics, a closer focus on single ethical,

esthetical, and even ontological issues. As we pointed out, the analytic pattern from

which all of that sprang involved a breaking down of problems to smaller and smaller

theoretical pieces, in an endless run toward an impossible ultimate element. The new

synthetic pattern built on ‘recognizing an identity’ will re-write epistemology, ethics,

metaphysics, and pedagogy according to the same complementary attitude that we

fostered all along in this paper. Semiotics and pragmatism will warrant the full horotic

back and forth between the two patterns.

56 A few hints may suggest future ways of inquiry. In epistemology there are many topics

that will have a different treatment and a complete list is impossible at this stage. But

some topics are immediately questionable according to the synthetic/horotic pattern.

First, we will look for a semiotic description of ‘gestures’ that can explain their working

both analytically and synthetically. From Peirce’s Existential Graphs we will be able to

observe the semiotic structure of gestures understood as embodied in synthetic

reasoning. When the pattern is established from a philosophical perspective, it is

important to verify its plausibility in relationship with the actual development of

mathematics. Second, many epistemological fields that did not find a complete

explanation in the analytic pattern can be faced now through a synthetic view of

reasoning relying upon semiotic based gestures. Among these unsolved topics, it is

worth recalling: i) reference theory – so far blocked in the sterile alternative between

descriptivism and causalism; ii) the theory of hypotheses – often mistaken as a

psychological attitude; iii) creative processes, that have to be understood from both a

logical and ontological perspective; iv) personal identity, which is directly connected

with the ratio of synthetic reasoning as ‘recognizing an identity’; v) the theory of the

development of language, which can now be comprehended from the outset as a

synthetic phenomenon of meaning, in transition from vagueness to generality. Third,

our proposed synthetic/horotic pattern can change the approach to ethical and

pedagogical issues. From the personal identity issue sprouts a different conception of

ethics which has to be studied and developed. Gestures can encompass and overtake

the alternative between a narrative historical pattern for ethics and a deontological

one. An ethics founded on gestures can account for the continuity of moral personality

and for our embodying rules and norms in a technical way, thanks to the mathematical

ground and the semiotic structure of gestures. Finally, a pedagogy based on gestures

should deepen the insight of Dewey’s theory of education, which intended to mingle

theory and practice, problems and solutions, precision of technical teaching and broad

views of the unity of wisdom. Synthetic/horotic reasoning will overcome the fatal

distinction between human and natural sciences that has determined a specialization

without creativity and a creation without precise method.


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[1996].

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1950-2000, Boston, Birkäuser.

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PEIRCE C. S., (1931-35), Collected Papers, vols. I-VI, P. Weiss & C. Hartshorne (eds.), Cambridge,


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Bloomington-Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.

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NOTES

1. Since 2001, through diverse books and articles, we had been wandering around the ideas of

frontier, border, thirdness and vagueness, in order to get a natural completion of the dyad

analytics/synthetics, when Roberto Perry offered us (2009) the perfect, unspoiled, term: horotics.

We gratefully acknowledge his support.

ABSTRACTS

We study a contemporary need to complement analytic philosophy with pendular, synthetic

approaches. We provide new definitions of the dyad analytics/synthetics and complete it with a

natural third, horotics. Some historical trends to support a synthetic/horotic paradigm are

studied: (i) Peirce’s ideas around his logic of continuity – non Cantorian continuum and

existential graphs – emphasizing the importance of mathematical gestures, (ii) Gödel’s

understanding of intuitionism as a synthetic counterpart of classical logic, along with a new

horotic approach to his work, (iii) Contemporary mathematical achievements (1950-2000),

difficult to understand from analytical philosophy perspectives. Finally, we indicate some main

features that a systematical synthetic/horotic reasoning should enforce, in order to fulfill its

historic sequence.

AUTHORS

GIOVANNI MADDALENA

Università del Molise

gmaddal3[at]hotmail.com


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FERNANDO ZALAMEA

Universidad Nacional, Colombia

fernandozalamea[at]gmail.com


242

McDowell’s UnexpectedPhilosophical AllySantiago Rey

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I am grateful to Richard J. Bernstein, Michael Becker, Alice Crary, Ramon del Castillo,

Judith Green, Hugh McDonald, and Carlos Thiebaut for comments on previous drafts of

this essay.

1 With his Presidential Address to the APA Hubert Dreyfus initiated a series of exchanges

with John McDowell regarding the role of conceptual capacities in our openness to the

world. According to Dreyfus, McDowell is able to “successfully describe the upper floors

of the edifice of knowledge” only at the high price of “ignoring the embodied coping

going on on the ground floor" (Dreyfus 2005: 37). By defending the view that human

experience and action is infused with reason, McDowell supposedly falls for what

Dreyfus calls ‘The Myth of the Mental,’ an intellectualist position according to which

“mind is everywhere the pure given is not” (Dreyfus 2005: 52). In Dreyfus’ words, “the

Myth of the Mental is just this transcendental claim that every way we relate to the

world must be pervaded by conceptual, rational, mental activity” (Dreyfus 2009: 2). The

problem with this intellectualist position, according to Dreyfus, is that it ignores

instances of embodied coping from which conceptual mindedness is completely absent.

When we are fully absorbed in action we respond to different solicitations and

affordances in a way that need not be conceptualized or articulated in thought. The

world we live in is a “shifting field of attractions and repulsions” (Dreyfus 2009: 5),

which is neither conceptual nor rational in any way. Indeed, this seems to be the

position defended by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who, according to Dreyfus, develop

phenomenological approaches that successfully register embodied coping.

2 In order to counter Dreyfus’ objections, McDowell has to show that the thesis of the

pervasiveness of mind is continuous with, and in fact supplements, a proper

phenomenology of embodied coping skills. To do so, he has to challenge Dreyfus’


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conception of mindedness as “detached from immersion in activity” (McDowell 2009b:

324), and show that even absorbed coping is pervaded by conceptuality and rationality.

This, however, is not an easy thing to achieve, especially when we consider the rich and

detailed phenomenological descriptions provided by Dreyfus as evidence of the non-

rational and non-conceptual nature of absorbed coping. Not only must McDowell

provide an account of the pervasiveness of conceptuality in our openness to the world;

he must do so without neglecting and distorting the phenomenon of coping.

Fortunately, he is not alone in this task: in fact, McDowell is very close to the

philosophical tradition of hermeneutics that came into prominence in the twentieth

century with figures like Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. This kinship,

however, is discounted by Dreyfus’ famous interpretation of Heidegger, which reduces

our most basic mode of Being-in-the-world to the non-rational and non-conceptual. Of

Course, Dreyfus concedes that in Mind and World McDowell “sounds as if he is

channeling Heidegger when he speaks of ‘our unproblematic openness to the world’

and how ‘we find ourselves always already engaged with the world’” (Dreyfus 2009: 1).

However, he claims the parallel comes to an abrupt end where McDowell speaks of our

openness to the world as a ‘conceptual’ activity. According to Dreyfus, Heidegger’s

‘world’ is an interconnected totality of solicitations that is opened to us “only through

our unthinking and unthinkable engaged perception and coping” (Dreyfus 2005: 59).

My main purpose in this paper is to present an alternative reading of Heidegger that

places him closer to John McDowell, and further removed from Dreyfus’ existential

phenomenology. By briefly examining some key concepts of Heidegger’s early

hermeneutics, I will try to elucidate his affinities with McDowell’s project and examine

the possibility of a shared answer to Dreyfus’ objections.

The Meaningful World of McDowell and Heidegger

3 In her article Hermeneutics Cristina Lafont defends the view that

the central feature of Heidegger’s hermeneutic turn lies in his replacement of thesubject-object model, that is, the model of an observing subject posed over againstthe world as the totality of entities, by the hermeneutic model of an understandingDasein which finds itself always already in a symbolically structured world. (Lafont2004: 6)

4 At first, it might come as a shock that Lafont refers here to the world in terms of a

symbolic structure – especially if we accept Dreyfus’ interpretation of ‘world’ as a web

of non-conceptual, non-rational solicitations. To say that the world is symbolically

structured is to commit oneself to the view that our openness to the world is

“conceptual all the way down,” as McDowell likes to put it. But can we really attribute

this view to Heidegger? First of all it is important to appreciate that, for Heidegger, far

from a totality of objects,

worldhood is constituted in references, and these references themselves stand inreferential correlations, referential totalities. It is not things but references whichhave the primary function in the structure of encounter belonging to the world.(Heidegger 1992: 200)

5 Dreyfus seems to acknowledge this structure of references when he speaks about the

web of solicitations, attractions and repulsions that constitute our openness to the

world. He even goes so far as to say that these solicitations have their own kind of

intelligibility, which is not reducible to the kind of intelligibility proper to rationality


244

and conceptual meaning. But rather than as a context of meaningful relations, Dreyfus’

existential notion of “world” is composed by forces that attract and repel us – a model

which does not require concepts and in fact precludes them. The problem with this

interpretation, however, is that it ignores Heidegger’s emphasis on ‘meaningfulness’

(Bedeutsamkeit) as the constitutive structure behind his original concept of world. In a

lecture presented two years before the publication of Being and Time, we find the

following illuminating passage:

When we say that the basic structure of worldhood, the being of the entity whichwe call world, lies in meaningfulness, this amounts to saying that the structure aswe have characterized it thus far, the references and the referential contexts, arebasically correlations of meaning, meaningful contexts. (Heidegger 1992: 203)

6 This by itself does not undermine Dreyfus’ thesis that the ‘world’ has its own non-

conceptual, non-rational intelligibility. Someone sympathetic with his interpretation

could still argue that Heidegger’s notion of meaningfulness refers to the understanding

we posses by virtue of being unthinkingly absorbed in a web of non-conceptual

solicitations. Nevertheless, the problem with a reading along these lines is that it fails

to grasp the relationship that Heidegger is trying to establish between the notion of

Bedeutsamkeit and linguistic meaning. In the same lecture cited above, Heidegger points

to this relation when he frankly admits that he was unable to find a better expression

that would

give voice to an essential connection of the phenomenon with what we designate asmeaning in the sense of the meaning of words, inasmuch as the phenomenonpossesses just such an intrinsic connection with verbal meaning, discourse. (Heidegger1992: 202)

7 Beyond our ability to respond unthinkingly to a constellation of attractions and

repulsions, our most basic openness to the world consists in our capacity to

understandingly navigate a system of meaningful relations. Certainly, Dreyfus is on the

right track when he recognizes that Heidegger seems to be a conceptualist with the

claim that, “my being in the world is nothing other than this already-operating-with-

understanding” (Heidegger 1976: 144). Instead of just coping with the forces around us,

we live in the midst of a meaningful world that is opened to us through our shared

traditions and language.

8 Heidegger’s revolutionary notion of world enables us to think of human beings as

“inhabiting a symbolically structured context, in which everything they encounter is

already understood as something or other” (Lafont 2007: 2). Furthermore, one of the

main features of his hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology was the discovery

of the as-structure that underlies and permits our openness to the world:

The ‘as’ makes up the structure of explicitness of something that is understood. Indealing with what is environmentally ready-to-hand by interpreting itcircumspectively, we ‘see’ it as a table, a door, a carriage, or a bridge; but what wehave thus interpreted need not necessarily be also taken apart by making anassertion. Any mere pre-predicative seeing of the ready-to-hand is, in itself,something which already understands and interprets. (Heidegger 1962: 189)

9 This passage suggests that Heidegger’s notion of world is not as non-conceptual and

non-rational as Dreyfus would like us to think. On the contrary, Heidegger’s emphasis

on the universality of the as-structure should be read as an indication that our

openness to the world is meaningful all the way down. Clearly, this conflicts with

Dreyfus’ understanding of world as a web of solicitations in which we find ourselves in


245

pure absorbed and unthinking immersion. For Heidegger what matters is that Dasein is

always already open to a symbolically structured world of significance, which should

not be confused with Dreyfus’ world of interconnected solicitations. This thought is

compounded when Heidegger affirms that “being-a-sign-for can itself be formalized as

a universal kind of relation, so that the sign-structure itself provides an ontological

clue for characterizing any entity whatsoever” (Heidegger 1962: 107). That is to say, in

our openness to the world it is not to “attractions and repulsions” that we respond, but

to the totality of significance that is articulated in the traditions we inhabit and the

language we speak. In one of his early papers, Heidegger writes:

Factic life always moves within a particular interpretedness that has been handeddown, or revised, or worked anew. Circumspection gives to life its world asinterpreted according to those respects in which the world is encountered andexpected as the comprehensive object of concern. These respects, which are for themost part available in an implicit form, and into which factic life has simply slippedby way of habit, prefigure the paths for the movement of caring upon which thismovement can actualize itself. (Heidegger 2007: 160)

10 What is so wonderful about this early passage is that it expresses the core of

Heidegger’s hermeneutic thought. Everything we encounter in the world is already

understood as something or other owing to the interpretations that have been handed

down to us by language and tradition. There is nothing mysterious about Heidegger’s

account of meaning; it is just the result of being raised in a certain way. As Lafont

points out, “part of what it takes to grow up into a culture, that is, to become familiar

with the whole of significations available within it, is first of all to learn the normative

patterns of interpretation and conduct that such a culture prescribes” (Lafont 2007: 8).

The same point is made by McDowell in Mind and World in the context of his discussion

of second nature and our openness to the intelligibility of the space of reasons. There,

his central claim is that in our life “what we experience is not external to the realm of

the kind of intelligibility that is proper to meaning” (McDowell 1996: 72), and he echoes

Heidegger in claiming that all we require to be open to the totality of significance – the

space of reasons – is a proper upbringing. Once initiated into the traditions and

practices of our ancestors, we have our eyes opened to a world of meanings that

‘prefigure’ the way we experience and understand everything around us. There is

nothing unnatural about this process of upbringing; nothing, at any rate, that would

mystify our openness to the world. Although it is easy to be seduced by the picture of a

supernatural space of meaningfulness constituted “independently of anything

specifically human,” McDowell argues that our responsiveness to meaning “belongs to

our way of actualizing ourselves as animals” (McDowell 1996: 78).

The Pervasiveness of Meaning and Embodied Coping:A Response to Dreyfus’ Objection

11 By exploring a little further this responsiveness to meaning that is so central for both

Heidegger and McDowell, we will be able to address some of Dreyfus’ objections

regarding embodied coping skills. As I mentioned above, Dreyfus thinks that

McDowell’s account of experience (i.e. being conceptual all the way down) is

incompatible with a proper phenomenology of engaged action and perception. His

basic idea is that


246

if we understand concepts as context-free principles or rules that could be used toguide actions or at least make them intelligible, a phenomenology of expert copingshows concepts to be absent or even get in the way of masterful response to thespecific situation. (Dreyfus 2005: 58)

12 Moreover, Dreyfus claims mindedness is the enemy of embodied coping because it

completely distorts the phenomenon of our openness to the world. On Dreyfus’ reading,

a proper phenomenology of expert coping shows that in immersed action we respond

to solicitations without concepts or rationality being involved. He gives the example of

a Grandmaster playing a form of chess called lightning chess in which all moves must

be carried out within a two minute frame. At such a speed, the player only has time to

respond to the solicitations of the game without thinking or stepping back to assess the

situation from a distance. Thus, Dreyfus concludes, to be absorbed in the game is to be

submerged in a field of forces that attract and repel us. “When the Grandmaster is

playing lightning chess he is simply responding to the patterns on the board. At this

speed he must depend entirely on perception and not at all on analysis and comparison

of alternatives” (Dreyfus 2005: 53). Dreyfus is thus led to conclude that expertise does

not require concepts, just responsiveness to the web of solicitations that constitute the

world of absorbed coping. In this light, “masterful action does not seem to require or

even to allow placement in the space of reasons” (Dreyfus 2005: 58).

13 It is easy to see why from Dreyfus’ perspective McDowell must be wrong when he

claims that our openness to the world is conceptual all the way down. For Dreyfus

rationality entails detachment and distance, the human ability to step back and reflect.

Consequently, McDowell’s world can only be a world of objective facts and

propositional structures to which we rationally respond from a distance. And as

Dreyfus persistently points out, in such a conception of ‘world’ there is no room for an

appropriate account of everyday absorbed coping; the phenomena is lost completely.

What McDowell needs to show, in order to meet Dreyfus’ objection, is that our

meaningful (rational) openness to the world is not something artificial or supernatural

but just our way of actualizing ourselves as animals. Moreover, if he wants to avoid the

Myth of the Mental that Dreyfus burdens him with, or the accusation of intellectualism,

McDowell must demonstrate that mindedness is not the enemy of embodied coping.

14 Contrary to Dreyfus’ conception of rationality as the human ability to step back from

absorbed immersion, McDowell defends the view that mindedness is not absent from

engaged action and perception. Indeed, from his early essays, McDowell has

persistently pointed out the inconsistencies of a conception of rationality that

understands concepts as “context-free principles or rules that could be use to guide

actions,” to use Dreyfus’ words. Following Aristotle’s notion of phronesis, McDowell

rejects the assumption that concepts should be conceived of as detached universal rules

that are to be applied to particular situations. In other words, he rejects the idea “that

the content of practical wisdom, as Aristotle understands it, can be captured in general

prescriptions for conduct, determinately expressively independently of the concrete

situations in which the phronimos is called on to act” (McDowell 2009a: 311).

Nonetheless, if we really want to do justice to McDowell’s view of concepts we must

acknowledge the huge influence that Kant – one his great philosophical heroes – exerts

on his thinking. In the opening lines of Mind and World, just after stating that his

general topic is “the way concepts mediate the relation between minds and the world,”

McDowell makes the following claim: “One of my main aims is to suggest that Kant

should still have a central place in our discussion on the way thought bears on reality”


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(McDowell 1994: 3). McDowell appeals to Kant’s conception of empirical intuitions in

the first Critique in order to support his idea that conceptual capacities are drawn on in

receptivity. Based on his reading of the Transcendental Deduction he arrives to the

conclusion that one of Kant’s main insights was the realization that intuitions should

be conceived of as “configurations in sensory receptivity that are categorically

structured” (McDowell 2009c: 127). But McDowell doesn’t stop here. He also wants to

preserve the Kantian relation between conceptual capacities and spontaneity,

understood as the freedom that allows us to reflectively participate in what Wilfrid

Sellars has called the ‘space of reasons.’ In lecture III of Mind and World we find the

following revealing passage,

The way I am exploiting the Kantian idea of spontaneity commits me to ademanding interpretation of words like “concept” and “conceptual.” It is essentialto conceptual capacities, in the demanding sense, that they can be exploited inactive thinking, thinking that is open to reflection about its own credentials. WhenI say the content of experience is conceptual, that is what I mean by “conceptual.”(McDowell 1994: 47)

15 McDowell connects the idea of conceptual capacities with a notion of rationality that

requires the ability to step back from embodied coping and reflectively respond to the

norms of reason. However, what is crucial here is to realize that McDowell is not

suggesting that the ability to assess reasons through judgment and reflective thinking

should be operative all the time. All that matters is that the rational subject possesses

the capacity to step back from embodied coping and rationally assess the situation.1 Of

course, McDowell concedes that when we are absorbed in engaged bodily action we are

not exercising the ability to step back. Nevertheless he wants to insist that “the

capacities that are operative in ordinary engagement with the world belong to the

subject’s rationality in the strong sense” (McDowell 2009: 324). Ultimately, McDowell

establishes this connection between conceptual capacities and spontaneity because he

needs to dodge the “Myth of the Given” and show that receptivity doesn’t make “an

even notionally separable contribution to its co-operation with spontaneity”

(McDowell 1994: 51). With this he achieves one of the main goals of his philosophical

project, namely, the defense of what he calls minimal empiricism. McDowell argues that

if we want to do justice to the empiricist claim that experience has an epistemic role,

we have to endorse the idea that the world exerts rational constraint over human

beings. And as McDowell has persuasively shown throughout his work, this is only

possible if spontaneity ‘goes all the way down.’

16 Dreyfus is certainly right when he claims that the ability to step back is crucial for

McDowell’s understanding of conceptual capacities. However, as we have seen,

McDowell’s picture of rationally is much more complex. For one thing, it is clear that

for McDowell mindedness is not the enemy of embodied coping but just the opposite; it

is the condition for the possibility of human experience. Opposing Dreyfus’ excessively

narrow conception of rationality as “detached conceptual intentionality,” McDowell

defends the view that our absorbed coping “is part of the way of being that is special to

rational animals” (McDowell 2009a: 315). In other words, our absorption in the world

does not entail leaving our rationality aside and letting our animal nature take over.

This bizarre split between the rational and the animal is rather the consequence of

Dreyfus’ notion of rationality as something detached from worldly engagement. Thus,

he can sincerely claim that happily for us, “we are only part-time rational animals”

(Dreyfus 2007a: 354) the rest of the time we are just animals responding to attractions


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and repulsions like other members of the animal kingdom. To put it in McDowell’s

terms, according to Dreyfus we are “peculiarly bifurcated with a foothold in the animal

kingdom and a mysterious separate involvement in an extra-natural world of rational

connections” (McDowell 1994: 78). This is precisely the idea that McDowell wants to

challenge when he introduces the notion of second nature, and the related distinction

between inhabiting an environment and having an orientation to the world.

17 Our responsiveness to the space of reasons is not the detached activity that Dreyfus

pictures, but our own way of actualizing ourselves as animals. In McDowell’s words,

“we need to see ourselves as animals whose natural being is permeated with

rationality” (McDowell 1994: 85). In our brief discussion of the notion of ‘world’ in the

philosophy of the young Heidegger, we suggested that, by virtue of our human

upbringing, our eyes are opened to a world that is no longer a field of attractions and

repulsions but a ‘totality of significance.’ In Being and Time Heidegger makes clear that,

“this everyday way in which things have been interpreted is one into which Dasein has

grown in the first instance, with never a possibility of extrication” (Heidegger 1962:

213). McDowell arrives at a similar conclusion when, drawing from a reading of

Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, he introduces the notion of second nature in lecture IV of

Mind and World. Through a normal human upbringing, we obtain a second nature that

enables us to recognize the dictates of reason and participate in the space of meaning.

“Human beings acquire a second nature by being initiated into conceptual capacities,

whose interrelations belong in the logical space of reasons” (McDowell 1994: xx).

Upbringing (Bildung) is not a mysterious process whereby human beings gain access to a

supernatural structure but the “normal coming to maturity of the kind of animals we

are” (McDowell 1994: 88). Rather than thinking of reason as a mysterious thing that is

added to our underlying animal nature, McDowell argues that we must see rationality

and openness to meaning as constitutive elements making us the kind of creatures we

are. Once our eyes are opened to the demands of the space of reasons, there is no going

back, it becomes part of our animal nature. This doesn’t mean that we become some

sort of artificial beings mysteriously responding to a supernatural structure. In fact,

when our eyes are opened to the requirements of reason, what we see is nothing

spooky but the world itself.

18 Certainly, if Dreyfus had a notion of second nature, he wouldn’t be so disturbed by

McDowell’s suggestion that absorbed coping is permeated with mindedness. Instead, he

would see that a “normal mature human being is a rational animal, with its rationality

part of its animal, and so natural, being, not a mysterious foothold in another realm”

(McDowell 1994: 91). Although we share perception with other members of the animal

kingdom, our perceptual sensitivity to the environment is informed by mindedness and

reason. To participate and respond to the demands of the space of reason is our way of

actualizing ourselves as animals, as McDowell likes to put it. Thus, “we have what mere

animals have, perceptual sensitivities to features of our environment, but we have it in

a special form” (McDowell 1994: 64). While animals respond to the biological imperatives

of their environment – what Dreyfus calls attractions and repulsions – human beings

have an orientation toward the world. When a decent upbringing (Bildung) opens our

eyes to the space of reasons “our lives come to embrace not just coping with problems

and exploiting opportunities, constituted as such by immediate biological imperatives,

but exercising spontaneity” (McDowell 1994: 115). Therefore, our openness to the world

shouldn’t be assimilated to the model of animal coping, precisely because when we

acquire second nature the world is no longer a succession of problems and


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opportunities but a context of meaning. The difference between inhabiting an

environment and having an orientation towards the world (an idea that McDowell

borrows from Hans-Georg Gadamer) indicates the ‘free and distanced orientation’ we

gain once Bildung has opened our eyes to the space of reasons. Unlike human beings,

Gadamer writes, “other creatures do not have a relationship to the world, but are, as it

were, embedded in their environment” (Gadamer 2006: 441). Once again it is important

to insist that this ‘free and distanced orientation’ is not to be equated with detachment

and distance from practical engagement, but with a normative status that is acquired

through normal upbringing.

19 Whereas the environment is just a web of solicitations for the creature that is

embedded in it, “the world is where a human being lives, where she is at home”

(McDowell 1994: 118). This, however, is not to say that human beings are free from

biological imperatives and the solicitations of the environment. On the contrary, what

McDowell wants to show is that once we acquire second nature, our relation to the

environment is transformed and becomes something different. In his response to

Dreyfus we find the following passage:

There is more to our embodied coping than there is to the embodied coping of non-rational animals. Becoming open to the world, not just able to cope with anenvironment, transforms the character of the disclosing that perception does forus, including the disclosing of affordances that, if we had not achieved openness tothe world, would have belonged to a merely animal competence at inhabiting anenvironment. (McDowell 2009a: 315)

20 The main idea here is that “our embodied coping is not exhausted by its similarity to

the embodied coping of non-rational animals” (McDowell 2009a: 317). From McDowell’s

perspective, Dreyfus is wrong when he claims that human beings share absorbed

coping with infants and animals. And he is not alone in this conclusion. Both Heidegger

and Gadamer make very clear that openness to the world is an exclusively human

phenomenon. As we have seen from our brief overview of Heidegger’s notion of world,

once we learn how to speak, our experience is no longer a response to a field of

attractions and repulsions but an active participation in a world of meaning. This is

precisely the idea that Heidegger wants to defend with the introduction of the as-

structure, which lies at the heart of his hermeneutic transformation of

phenomenology. Dreyfus, however, misrepresents this crucial idea when he says that

for Heidegger most of our activities “don’t have a situation specific as-structure”

(Dreyfus 2007b: 371). We have seen that for Heidegger our openness to the world is

always mediated by understanding, which means that the as-structure is constitutive

for what we are as human beings. On the other hand, “the animal’s behavior is never an

apprehending something as something. Insofar as we address this possibility of taking

something as something as characteristic of the phenomenon of world, the as-structure

is an essential determination of the structure of the world” (Heidegger 2001: 311). In

plain and simple terms, animals and infants don’t have a world, and they don’t have it

precisely because they have no access to the as-structure that we acquire through

normal human upbringing and language.

21 Although it is uncertain whether McDowell would accept the universality of the as-

structure,2 it might be helpful to illustrate his conception of mindful absorbed coping

with some assistance from this Heideggerian notion. Imagine a simple action like

entering a room through a door. It is true that a trained dog or monkey can easily

perform the same action and successfully enter the room after opening the door. The


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question here is whether human action can be exhausted “by its similarity to the

embodied coping of non-rational animals.”3 It is clear that Dreyfus answer would be

‘yes’: absorbed coping is the same for infants, animals, and human beings. If I am

absorbed in the activity of opening a door, “I don’t see the doorknob as a doorknob”

(Dreyfus 2007a: 361), but just respond to the solicitations of the situation and enter the

room. This, however, conflicts with Heidegger’s insistence on the universality of the as-

structure and his refusal to accept that animals have a world. According to Heidegger,

“an animal can only behave but can never apprehend something as something –which

is not to deny that the animal sees or even perceives. Yet in a fundamental sense the

animal does not have perception” (Heidegger 2001: 259). Evidently this fragment is

closer in spirit to McDowell’s philosophical project than it is to Dreyfus’ existential

phenomenology. For human beings, opening a door is much more than just responding

to situation-specific solicitations; it is an activity that involves conceptual mindedness

and meaningfulness. In other words, when we enter the room what we experience is

the door as a door and not a mysterious field of forces pushing us to act in a certain

way. We don’t just respond automatically to solicitations; we understand solicitations as

this or that. Thus, “a human individual’s relation to affordances is no longer what it

would have been if she had gone on living the life of a non-rational animal” (McDowell

2009a: 315). Since McDowell and Heidegger each share the view that in normal human

experience what is disclosed is a world of significance in which we dwell

understandingly, they have no problem providing an account of absorbed coping that

includes mindedness and meaning.

22 What ultimately lies at the heart of the McDowell-Dreyfus debate is a contrast between

two different views of what it is to be a human being. While Dreyfus thinks we are only

part-time rational animals, McDowell advances the idea that rationality is not alien to

our animal nature. I think it is not unfair to say that Dreyfus falls prey to a Cartesian

dualism4 between mind and body that makes him blind not only to McDowell’s

proposal, but also to some of the key insights of one of his phenomenological heroes,

namely, Martin Heidegger. With his rigid distinction between the rational and the

animal, Dreyfus departs from Aristotle’s conception of what it is to be a human being.

In his existential phenomenology, “reason is separated from our animal nature, as if

being rational placed us partly outside the animal kingdom” (McDowell 1994: 108).

McDowell, on the other hand, follows Aristotle and supplies a very convincing account

of the way in which rationality and animal nature go hand in hand. Accordingly,

responsiveness to reasons should be seen as part of what Wittgenstein calls our natural

history; “the natural history of creatures whose nature is largely second nature”

(McDowell 1994: 95). Unfortunately, Dreyfus’ narrow conception of rationality restrain

him from seeing that mindedness is not the enemy of our being-in-the-world, but its

very possibility.


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BIBLIOGRAPHY

DREYFUS H., (2005), “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the

Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical

Association, 79 (2), 47-65.

DREYFUS H., (2007a), “The Return of the Myth of the Mental,” Inquiry, 50 (4), 352-65.

DREYFUS H., (2007b), “Response to McDowell,” Inquiry, 50 (4), 371-7.

DREYFUS H., (2007c), “Detachment, Involvement, and Rationality: Are We Essentially Rational

Animals,” Human Affairs 17, 101-9.

DREYFUS H., (2009), “The Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental,” unpublished manuscript.

GADAMER H., (1975), Truth and Method, translated by J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall, New York,

Continuum, 2nd Revised Edition.

HEIDEGGER M., (1962), Being and Time, translated by J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, New York, Harper

and Row.

HEIDEGGER M., (2001), The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, Bloomington,

Indiana University Press.

HEIDEGGER M., (2007), “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle,” in Theodore

Kisel & Thomas Sheehan (eds.), Becoming Heidegger, Evanston, Northwestern University Press.

LAFONT C., (2000), Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure, Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press.

LAFONT C., (2002), “Replies,” Inquiry 45, 229-48.

LAFONT C., (2004), “Hermeneutics,” in The Blackwell Companion to Heidegger, H. Dreyfus &

M. Wrathall eds., Cambridge, Blackwell Publishing.

MCDOWELL J., (1994), Mind and World, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

MCDOWELL J., (2009a), “What Myth?,” Inquiry, 50 (4), 338-51.

MCDOWELL J., (2009b), “Response to Dreyfus,” Inquiry, 50 (4), 366-70.

MCDOWELL J., (2009c), “Conceptual Capacities in Perception,” in Having the World in View: Essays on

Kant, Hegel, and Sellars, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

NOTES

1. McDowell’s position regarding this issue is succinctly summarized in the following passage:

“Let me stress that what matters is the capacity to step back and assess whether putative reasons

warrant action or belief. If someone actually steps back, of course that shows she has the capacity

to do so. But if the capacity is present without being exercised, we have in view someone who can

respond to reasons as the reasons they are. And rationality in the sense I am explaining may be

actually operative even though the capacity to step back is not being exercised. Acting for a

reason, which one is responding to as such, does not require that one reflects about whether

some consideration is a sufficient rational warrant for something it seems to recommend. It is

enough that one could” (McDowell 2009c: 129).


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2. Here there seems to be some tension between McDowell’s insistence on a formal account of the

role of conceptuality in our openness to the world and the hermeneutic philosophy of both

Heidegger and Gadamer. Indeed, the as-structure of understanding implies more than just

categorically unified experiences; it prescribes the specific way in which things show up in the

world as something or other. Thus what we experience, according to Heidegger, is a manifold

that is already articulated and ‘carved out,’ to use McDowell’s expression.

3. A similar question is raised by Heidegger in the following passage: “But a skilful monkey or dog

can also open a door to come in and out. Certainly. The question is whether what it does when it

touches and pushes something is to touch a handle, whether what it does is something like

opening a door. We talk as if the dog does the same as us; but there is not the slightest criterion

to say that it comports itself towards the entity, even though it relates to what we know as an

entity” (GA 27, 192 trans. Cristina Lafont).

4. This point is made by McDowell in “Response to Dreyfus,” where he accuses Dreyfus of “taking

for granted that mindedness is detached from engagement in bodily life” (McDowell 2009b: 328).

ABSTRACTS

In this paper I will explore the philosophical exchange between Hubert Dreyfus and John

McDowell regarding the role of conceptual capacities in our openness to the world. According to

Dreyfus, McDowell fails to do justice to instances of embodied coping from which conceptual

mindedness is completely absent. That is to say, when we are fully, pre-reflectively absorbed in

our activities, we respond to the affordances and solicitations of the environment without the

assistance of mindedness or conceptual articulation. On Dreyfus’ view, McDowell displays serious

symptoms of ‘intellectualism’ – privileging the higher levels of our cognitive abilities and

overlooking what occurs in engaged, bodily activity. In order to counter Dreyfus’ objections,

McDowell must provide a satisfactory account of the pervasiveness of conceptuality in our

openness to the world, without neglecting and distorting the phenomenon of embodied coping.

Fortunately, he is not alone in this task: in fact, McDowell is very close to the philosophical

tradition of hermeneutics that came into prominence in the twentieth century with thinkers like

Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer. This affinity, however, is discounted by Dreyfus’

reading of Heidegger with its emphatic insistence on the preconceptual and prelinguistic

character of our most basic openness to the world. My main purpose in this paper is to suggest an

alternative reading of Heidegger that places him closer to John McDowell, and further removed

from Dreyfus’ phenomenology of absorbed coping.

AUTHOR

SANTIAGO REY

The New School for Social Research

reys537[at]newschool.edu


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Book Review


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John DEWEY, Unmodern Philosophy andModern Philosophyed. by Philip Deen, Carbondale, Illinois, Southern Illinois UniversityPress, 2012

Kevin S. Decker

REFERENCES

John DEWEY, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, ed. by Philip Deen, Carbondale,

Illinois, Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

1 If it is true, as Raymond Boisvert wrote almost a decade ago in the Transactions of the

Charles S. Peirce Society, that there are two schools of Dewey scholarship – the ‘method-

centered’ set and the ‘lived experience’ group – then the publication of this manuscript,

once thought lost, should be a force for reunification of the two.1 Indeed, providing a

common vocabulary between science and generic values such as freedom and

consummatory experience, a vocabulary generated through a critical theory of society

and culture, is precisely what Dewey claims to be about in this book. In the first chapter

assembled from a number of manuscripts in the Dewey Collection in Southern Illinois

University’s Special Collection, he writes:

Time generally reveals indeed a considerable amount of illusion in the suppositionthat prior science has been dealing with material pure from social adulteration. Butthe presence of this illusory does not affect the ideal of science; as it progresses, itdevelops a technique and a symbolism for the purpose of discounting the sociallycontributed factor, of reducing it to a minimum. Philosophy, on the other hand, ispre-eminently occupied with precisely this intervening factor. It is at home whenengaged in criticizing, evaluating, clearing up, and systematizing sociallyconditioned beliefs. (15)What Dewey would want to cement in the minds of readers of this “lost”manuscript is that “the sickliest way in which a student of philosophy can approachhis subject-matter is that of a search for ultimate impersonal revelation of truth.”(16)


255

2 Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy (UPMP), stitched together from fragments

written by Dewey between 1941 and 1943 by editor Phillip Deen, is a sprawling text

with a not-too-unfamiliar thesis: “we have never been modern.” However, coining the

right term for what western philosophical life has become over its 2500 year history is

an opportunity for that rarest of occurrences, the Deweyan neologism. The adjective

‘unmodern’ jars, but as the reader will discover, it is an apposite term for what Dewey

sees as an unfortunate double movement in intellectual history: first, a fragmented and

unprogressive dialectic of epistemology and metaphysics constrained by ideas from

Greek and medieval thought; second, the production of the illusion of revolutionary

change around the time of Descartes, flowering in the Enlightenment and consolidated

and sharpened by scientific and analytic philosophies in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. ‘Unmodern’ as the name for this double movement in history thus

serves as a stark contrast to Dewey’s own programmatic statement of ‘cultural

naturalism’ – a truly modern philosophy – offered in the second part of the book. Taken

together, Deen calls the pieces of UPMP a “cultural history of modern philosophy” (xli).

His general introduction and editor’s notes are informative, and he provides a short but

well-chosen bibliography of texts that allow interested readers to culturally and

philosophically contextualize Dewey’s late work output.

3 The structure of the book, assembled as it has been out of “a manuscript of 160,000

words broken into hundreds of fragments” (xli), is more difficult to use than Dewey’s

other extant works criticizing “with malice prepense” the history of philosophy,

including Reconstruction in Philosophy, The Quest for Certainty, and the early, highly

significant essay “The Significance of the Problem of Knowledge.” According to Deen,

the completeness of portions of the text was highly variable – for example, the chapters

“The Search for Salvation,” regarding medieval philosophy and theology, and “The

Supreme Human Art,” dealing with advances from Hume to Hegel, were extremely

fractured. Other chapters were extensively rewritten, but a few, particularly those in

the latter part of the book, in which Dewey weighs in on supposedly perennial

questions of philosophy, were largely extant. In general, the farther one reads into the

book, the repetitions become fewer and textual gaps become narrower, plus the

narrative becomes more cohesive while the arguments are more incisive. It is entirely

possible to read the last six of the book’s fourteen chapters on their own in order to

access a distillation of Dewey’s thinking during a time, of his own admission, when

“philosophy didn’t seem to have much place in this hell of a world” (xli).

4 The themes of UPMP resound with other of Dewey’s well-known if shorter contributions

from this period, like “Nature in Experience (1940), “Anti-Naturalism in Extremis”

(1943), and his extensive introduction to the collection The Problems of Men (1946). This

latter source provides a favorite quotation of Dewey’s from Matthew Arnold that serves

as both the title for a pivotal chapter in UPMP and the theme of the entire book:

“Wandering between two worlds, one dead/The other powerless to be born.” UPMP

serves not only as Dewey’s effort to diagnose the reasons for this kind of wandering,

but also as an opportunity to clarify his opposition to a certain self-defeating view of

philosophy’s role in general in fueling intelligent social progress. Also in the

introduction to Problems of Men, Dewey introduces the challenge by taking aim at the

Humean dimensions of Bertrand Russell’s social theory, claiming:

A distinguished member of this school of contemporary thought has recentlywritten that “the actions of men, in innumerable important respects, havedepended their theories asto the world and human life, as to what is good and evil.”


256

But he has also written that what men hold about “what is good and evil” is whollya matter of sheer likes and dislikes. They, in turn, are so completely private andpersonal – in the terminology of philosophy so “subjective” – as to be incapable ofjudgment having “objective” grounds. Likes and dislikes are immune tomodification by knowledge since they dwell in inaccessible privacy.2

5 Questioning Hume’s emotivism, but endorsing his anti-intellectualist slogan, “Be a

philosopher, but amid all your philosophy be still a man,” Dewey launches a program of

“cultural naturalism” in UPMP.

6 ‘Culture’ became an extremely important term for Dewey in the last few of his major

publications. Just as a number of other Dewey scholars has done, Deen muses on why

Dewey would have chosen to replace the titular ‘experience’ with ‘culture’ in the

unfinished reintroduction to Experience and Nature. “It is clear that it is a term inclusive

of the whole range of human association,” Deen writes. “By turning to ‘culture,’ Dewey

once again hoped to escape the inherited dualisms and divisions that had brought

down experience, practice, and a host of other terms” (xli). It also seems clear that, by the

point Dewey began the project of UPMP, he realized that ‘experience’ was an

appropriate term to unite the organic metaphors that Experience and Nature was

structured around. Indeed, he says just this in introducing the final chapter of UPMP,

“Experience as Life-Function.” Even here, however, the distinction between

‘experience’ and ‘culture’ cannot be clearly made, since the former, as a synonym for

‘living’ and ‘life-functions,’ “stand for events whose nature is most clearly and fully

presented in human living, a fact which is equivalent in general to recognition of the

soci-cultural nature of the phenomena dealt with” (315). Building on this, the ‘culture’

of ‘cultural naturalism’ represents a plethora of distinctive types of experience –

explored, for example, in the arguments of A Common Faith and Art as Experience. In the

indexing of UPMP, Deen calls our attention to Dewey’s own formulation of ‘cultural

naturalism’ as a way of broaching the artificial distinction between the categories of

‘material’ and ‘ideal.’ After contrasting the approach of historical materialism to social

phenomena with neo-Hegelian views equating Reason with the state, Dewey claims:

The issue as between these two schools of thought is not even debatable, providedthe social phenomena in question are defined in cultural terms. For when theidentity of social in its human sense and bearing with the cultural is admitted, it hasalso to be admitted that material aspects of culture […] exist and act only inconnection with that which is non-material; only in connection with knowledge,valuations and communication of meanings, while it is equally true that the latterexist in a social sense only through the instrumentality of a more or less complexequipment of material agencies. And, to repeat, the material and the non-materialare so fused or interpenetrated in culture that the subject matters in questionrepresent only distinctions in inquiry and discourse, not separations in existence.(294)

7 UPMP demonstrates that ‘culture’ can be substituted for ‘experience’ in the same way

that Dewey once claimed that experience is both process and product. Thus the

Deweyan critical cultural theory in this book utilizes cultural resources to critique

other strains of culture, without every displaying the need to resort to a transcendental

level of criticism. In point of fact, Dewey is extraordinarily vocal about why there is no

need to move to such a level in this manuscript, an unnecessary strategy that he terms

in one place a “maze of reduplications” (165).

8 As previously mentioned, UPMP is sweeping in its scope, and this is perhaps the reason

why Dewey thought that the project had gotten away from him in correspondence with


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Ratner. Its first chapter, “Philosophy and the Conflict of Beliefs,” sees Dewey delving

far back into human prehistory in an effort to ground his analysis on pre-philosophic

beliefs. His starting point is “the distinction drawn […] between the ordinary and the

extraordinary,” which will eventually be treated as the natural and the supernatural.

Advocates of naturalism may have a more difficult time gauging the birth of genuinely

philosophical thought (as opposed to rationalists, who can point to methodological

considerations in Thales or other Presocratics) without simply referring to the shift

from religious, supernatural thinking, but Dewey doesn’t lean on that post here.

Instead, he claims that the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary

(which may itself be divided into the ‘lucky’ and the ‘sacred’) is one based on

“immediate emotional and imaginative experience” (6). Heightened emotional states –

and in particular, those based in fear and the need for security – led beliefs about the

extraordinary to a higher estate in the hearts and minds of early peoples. This analysis

works well with Dewey’s understanding of the social forces underlying classical Greek

philosophy as utilizing hierarchical metaphysical principles to guard cherished values,

a view presented in UPMP and “The Signficance of the Problem of Knowledge,” among

other works. In this early chapter, Dewey also displays a degree of foresight about

cultural universals reflected more currently in the work of Kwasi Wiredu. Wiredu has

famously shown that the animistic Akan tradition does not couch their notion of the

supernatural in terms of a material/spiritual distinction. Similarly challenging the

notion that “primitive man, in that early stage wherein some religious belief

demonstrably exists, had attained a definite notion of any coherent psychological

unity,” Dewey calls such a view about “the centre of thought” as being “the outcome of

a highly sophisticated subjective doctrine” of much later times (10).

9 The Greek philosophical heritage is assayed in two chapters, “The Story of Nature” and

“The Discovery of Rational Discourse.” In dealing with Greek naturalism, Dewey points

to the importance of the early Greek sensitivity to change and often reminds us that

physis was understood in terms of principles, or archê, not substances. Establishing at

least partial connections with his own naturalism, Dewey notes, “Nature is the native,

the inherent and abiding, and also the normal, the pattern of regularity, the base-line

from which to measure deviations” (25). Up until Aristotle, the absence of a concept of

substance, with all its inherent problems, provides both “a relief and a perplexity” to

modern thought, according to him (23). By contrast, one intriguing thesis that Dewey

develops here is the connection between the Greek agrarian tradition, the notion of

growth and later philosophical systems that that rely on a picture of “orderly change”

through “the resolution of the opposed tendencies of growth between opposites and by

union of opposites, and of stable, unchanging kinds” (28). More familiar to students of

Dewey’s work on the prehistory of science will be the countervailing tendency toward

promoting values discovered through techne and craftsmanship – the idea that “since

the reshaping of things comes from without,” for example, “it is absurd to ascribe to

natural elements a tendency toward some particular outcome…” (30). When we move

to the Athenian Greeks in the following chapter, Dewey’s examination is more de

rigueur, save for the interesting spin put on the character of Socrates implied by the

title. In “discovering rational discourse,” Socrates was not merely paving the way for

the abstraction and specialization that all philosophizing requires, but also asking the

question, “What is the nature of thinking when it reaches or purports to reach its goal:

the truth about things?” (40). The attempt to answer this question from Platonic and

Aristotelian perspectives occupies Dewey for the rest of this chapter.


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10 The chapter inquiring into the conditions of philosophizing during the Middle Ages is

where Dewey begins to reveal the persistent hold that certain ancient ideas continue to

have on modern philosophy. One of these is the legacy of scholasticism, which for

Dewey is less about a particular body of knowledge or even deductive ‘scientific’

method, but rather about spectatorship and disciplinary power. Participation in remaking

the social order was not to be spontaneous, but “dictated from the side of Being,” on

this scheme, and those in charge of the most important social affairs, medieval

theologians whom Dewey compares to Platonic philosopher-kings, work in the service

of rigid social stratification. Dewey also begins to develop a critical focus on the history

of the concept of ‘law’ beginning with the Romans, continuing on through the

conception of physical laws and the Kantian moral law. In his view, the primary

contribution of Roman culture to western philosophy was providing an opportunity for

will to usurp the place of reason: not only the Stoics tell us that “Moral laws are

inherently rational. They come to us as commands in that Supreme Being, Reason and

Will are one” (60).

11 When we come to the early modern period and the scientific revolution that is so key in

Dewey’s revaluation of episteme, phronesis, and techne, we must ask, “what is genuinely

modern in the philosophies that have appeared since the sixteenth century?” (74). As

mentioned earlier, the four middle chapters form the ‘spine’ of this book’s arguments;

together, they represent an interpretation of philosophy from Bacon through Hegel,

with a particular emphasis on the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Locke.

This period, framed by the ‘moral crisis’ of Copernicanism, is one of false starts and

intellectual cul-de-sacs, Dewey explains. He points out the period’s hidden “new

emphasis,” appearing in germ in this period, on the meaning and implications of “the

discovery of human nature as a potential means of directing the human career

emancipated from submergence in the cosmic scheme” (74). To oversimplify, Dewey

sees this new emphasis as resting on three realizations: first, an aversion to fatalism in

the discovery of new human powers; second, the way to operationalize this discovery

through a “new method of knowing,” freed from pre-scientific pretenses by thinkers

like Descartes and Hume; and third, the end toward which this all tends, “what Bacon

called the advancement of the human estate” (75).

12 Much of what Dewey ponders regarding Descartes and Locke in these chapters –

particularly the chapter “From Cosmic Nature to Human Nature” – should be of

interest not only to scholars of pragmatism and Dewey’s genealogical method of

criticizing the tradition, but also to those interested in comparative investigations of

rationalism and empiricism. In particular, Dewey links the problem of solipsism in

Descartes’s Meditations not only to his proof for the existence of God, but to the fatal

flaw of assigning certainty to mathematical knowledge fundamentally. Through a close

examination of Locke’s theory of ideas, Dewey lays the groundwork for a closer

association of this British physicist with Gottfried Leibniz than is normally assumed to

exist. Dewey’s assertion that “‘sensations’ in the case of Locke are not mental; they are

rather physiological; they become ideas when the power of perception is directed upon

then” opens up the possibility that for Locke, as well as for Leibniz, there is more in

sensation that what is perceived at any given time (89, n. 32). Dewey also spends time

examining Locke’s hypostatization of reason, an investigation that leads him to assert

that, at least “in the popular sense of the word rationalist,” Locke was more of a

rationalist than Descartes.


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13 Three strategies undergird the transition from the ‘unmodern’ residue of European

philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Dewey’s reconstruction of

philosophical problems of “Mind and Body” and “The Practical and the Theoretical”

(among others) in the last six chapters. The first will be familiar to those well versed in

Dewey’s “The Need for a Recovery in Philosophy” (1917): the critique of generic

epistemological problems about knowledge in favor of local epistemologies of practice.

The second takes this framework of criticism and reconstruction and applies it to the

examination of idiomatic uses of philosophical terms like ‘mind’ (a strategy also

employed by Paul Ricœur in looking at etymological usage and which might interest

those attempting to define a Deweyan hermeneutic as Charlene Haddock Seigfried did

for William James).3 Dewey believes that when idiomatic usage strays far from even the

simplest philosophical usage, the former can provide pragmatic clues to the meanings

attached to behaviors that use the term, and that this provides a significant type of

behavioral (but not behaviorist!) analysis. For example:

The word minding in these cases is equivalent to an attentive act, an act of caring forwhich involves doing something with or to surrounding circumstances, and hence,truistically, involves organic action, that is, the body. As long as we take our clewfrom and find our relevant data in observable facts, we are bound to employ thekind of behavior exemplified in the above words as the subject matter on the groundof which to form a theory of mind and [the] mental. (207)

14 Another trenchant analysis of the term “person” in the chapter “Things and Persons”

presents innovative views that complement the important essays “The Unity of the

Human Being” (1939) and “Time and Individuality” (1940). In this chapter and “Mind

and Body” there are a number of passages that relate Dewey’s cultural naturalism to

commitments and normative statuses, and should be of interest to those who look at

pragmatism through the lens of Robert Brandom’s analytic philosophy. The project of

these later chapters can also be read to engage with Richard Rorty’s deflationary

concept of the role of philosophy as an ongoing conversation. Although Dewey would

agree that this conversation on values and vocabularies should, by its very nature, not

have a terminus, it’s clear from the mode of presentation of the chapters in Part Two

that Dewey believes considerable work needs to be done by public intellectuals

deploying cultural naturalism to criticize and revise beliefs, attitudes, practices and

institutions.

15 Deen’s edition of Dewey’s book should be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of

Dewey scholars. They will find much in the chapters in Part One of the book to be

repetitive, as we have a manuscript that Dewey was not able to refine nor subject to the

editorial concerns of his own time and place. However, as noted above there are

significant new passages in Part One; Part Two, on crafting a genuinely modern,

distinctively American philosophy, is well worth one’s careful and close attention.

Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy not only asserts the impact of scientific

method and technology on Dewey’s burgeoning cultural naturalism, providing a bridge

allowing Boisvert’s ‘method-centered’ and ‘lived experienced’ Deweyans to converse

more freely, it also demonstrates both a harder edge to Dewey’s criticism of the

tradition as well as his incipient romanticism. Dewey not only frames the central

chapter of the manuscript around Victorian poet and social critic Matthew Arnold’s

“Wandering between two worlds” stanza, but he initiates that chapter with an

extensive quotation from Arnold that, in many ways, conveys Dewey’s entire project.

“Modern times find themselves with an immense body of institutions, established facts,


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accredited dogmas, customs and rules, which have come to us from times not modern.

In this system their life has to be carried forward; yet they have a sense that their

system is not of their own creation, and that it by no means corresponds exactly with

the wants of their actual life; that, for them, it is customary, not rational. The awakening

of this sense is the awakening of the modern spirit” (92). The genius of Dewey’s critical

history of philosophy is his ability to defer the creation of an artificial end for this

practice, just as in his political philosophy he abjured predicting or prescribing final

ends because authentic politics requires inclusion of individuals. “Those who live with

a sense of [a] definitely achieved present exist in a state of hallucination,” he writes;

and this idea, no matter how unsettling, is genuine possibility (92).

NOTES

1. Raymond Boisvert, “Updating Dewey: A Reply to Morse,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce

Society, 37 (4), Fall 2001, 576.

2. Dewey J. (1985), The Problems of Men, in The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953, vol. 15, ed. Jo

Ann Boydston, Carbondale, Illinois, Southern Illinois University Press, 159.

3. Charlene Haddock Seigfried (1990), William James’ Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy, Albany,

State University of New York Press.

AUTHORS

KEVIN S. DECKER

Eastern Washington University

kdecker[at]ewu.edu


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Roberto FREGA, Practice, Judgment, andthe Challenge of Moral and PoliticalDisagreementLexington Books, Plymouth 2012

Roberto Gronda

REFERENCES

Roberto FREGA, Practice, Judgment, and the Challenge of Moral and Political Disagreement,

Lexington Books, Plymouth, 2012

1 The book reviewed here, Roberto Frega’s Practice, Judgment, and the Challenge of Moral

and Political Disagreement, is an important and ambitious book. It is ambitious because it

addresses the problems at stake in contemporary philosophical debates without any

kind of awkwardness and shyness. Frega believes pragmatism to be a theoretically

viable option, and tries to prove its soundness by adopting it as the conceptual

framework of a theory of moral objectivity alternative to the ones formulated by

analytic philosophers (e.g., Rawls), defenders of communicative reason (Habermas),

and critical theorists. It is important precisely because it suggests a new account of

objectivity able to overcome the pitfalls that plagued previous attempts to explain the

validity of moral and political judgments. Moreover, it is also important because it

provides an analysis of the notion of moral objectivity that highlights the main features

of originality of the pragmatist tradition, and, in doing so, supplies us with a set of

criteria through which it is possible to distinguish among the various lines of thought

that coexist in that tradition.

2 The last point is particularly relevant, and it is not by chance that the book begins with

a discussion of the similarities and differences between Peirce and Dewey. Pragmatism

is becoming a respected voice on moral and political issues, but different interpreters

have chosen different aspects of the theory as worthy of being preserved. Different


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images of pragmatism have therefore arisen, and Deweyan and Peircean conceptions of

justification, objectivity, pluralism, and so on, have been compared and contrasted.

Peirce has been read as advocating a realistic view of objectivity. Objectivity should be

defined in terms of truth: there is one way in which things are, and a judgment is true if

and only if it adequately represents the way in which things are. On the contrary,

Dewey’s philosophy has been read as an attempt to get rid of these strong forms of

realism in favor of a contextual account of objectivity. According to this view,

objectivity depends on the particular point of view from which reality is described.

3 Contrary to interpreters such as Talisse and Misak, who have emphasized the

differences between Peirce and Dewey, Frega’s approach is much more irenic. While

endorsing a theory of objectivity that is largely indebted to Dewey and highly critical of

Peirce’s scientism, Frega does not introduce any sharp distinction or break between the

two versions of pragmatism. Certainly, he recognizes that many aspects of Peirce’s

theory of rationality are not useful for developing a satisfactory account of the logical

processes through which moral and political problems are solved. The Fixation of Belief –

or, at least, a certain reading of it – shows that, according to Peirce’s epistemology,

practical problems cannot be solved by using rational methods of inquiry. It is true that

Peirce believes science to be the best method for fixing beliefs, but he also maintains

that recourse to science does not hold when we are confronted with practical affairs

because, in all these cases, we do not want to know primarily how things are, but how

we should act. So, if science is the search for general laws governing reality, and if the

discovery of such laws depends on the possibility of bracketing individual preferences,

science cannot be of any use to an agent when he is engaged in practical reasoning.

4 However, Frega argues for the validity of Peirce’s general account of rationality. From

his point of view, Dewey’s logic of inquiry completes Peirce’s analysis of the structure

of reason because it shows how to transform “Peirce’s naturalistic insight into a full-

fledged naturalistic account of thinking and knowledge” (12). This naturalistic insight

is the idea that rationality is a process of belief fixation that has evolved through time,

thus selecting the methods and concepts that have proven themselves to be reliable

rules of action. Their reliability as rules of action depends on their responsiveness to

experience and to arguments: valid beliefs are those that are not contradicted by facts

to which the other agents have access and agree with the beliefs held by other

participants to the activity (or practice). Reason is therefore conceived as a natural

property that characterizes the way in which complex biological organisms experience

the world and handle problematic situations. Broadly speaking, it consists in the

capacity of an agent to adopt a self-reflective stance towards his actions, and to

evaluate the correctness of a certain course of action in terms of its consequences.

5 Frega moves from this point to elaborate his pragmatist account of moral objectivity.

Its basic assumption is that everything that has logical validity is not a given but a

construct. The two notions which Frega relies on in order to articulate his views on the

nature of rationality are the concept of judgment and the idea of normative practice.

“Normative practice” is the term chosen by Frega to name the “critical and

justificatory activities through which agents defend or criticize given behaviors,

opinions, or institutions” (22). It is a concept that does not belong to the pragmatist

tradition, but which happily expresses an insight that pragmatists had the merit of

formulating with clarity and consistency. This is the idea that normativity cannot be

boiled down to an act of following a given rule. If one calls to mind Peirce’s distinction


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between the first and the third degree of clearness of a general concept formulated in

How to Make Our Ideas Clear, it is easy to understand what Frega means to say. There is a

distinction to be drawn between habit as a mechanical repetition of acts and a

purposeful course of action which is habitual because it represents a general

disposition that is essentially self-corrective. Human activities – Frega’s normative

practices – are truly human only insofar as they are meaningful, and their being

meaningful depends upon the reflective analysis of the consequences that follow from a

certain action.

6 On the contrary, judgment is a technical term in pragmatist vocabulary. As is well

known, in his Logic Dewey defines judgment as “the settled outcome of inquiry”, and

distinguishes judgment from propositions on the basis of their different existential

import (LW 12: 123). While propositions are tentative solutions of a problematic

situation, judgment is the result of a process through which doubt is settled and new

beliefs are established. Frega accepts the theoretical framework provided by Dewey in

his Logic, and uses some of the latter’s insights to sketch a theory of reasoning powerful

enough and broad enough to account not only for scientific research but also for moral

and political inquiries.

7 One of Frega’s most important achievements in the book is the clarification of the

structure of judgment (in general) and of moral judgment (in particular). As Dewey has

shown, judgment is composed of two ‘moments’: an articulative and a transformative

phase. Articulation and transformation are therefore the two operations thanks to

which the reconstruction of a problematic situation can be brought about. Through

articulation the problem that originates reflection is defined as a problem. Frega is very

careful to remark that articulation should not be confused with analysis: contrary to

the latter, indeed, articulation does not assume its objects as something which is at the

disposal of the agent from the very beginning of the inquiry. The objects that an agent

employs in his search for the solution of a certain problem are the outcome of a process

of articulative inquiry. Central for the understanding of the peculiarity of this process

is the notion of situation. Situation should be taken here in strict Deweyan sense as the

“complex existence that is held together in spite of its internal complexity by the fact

that it is dominated and characterized throughout by a single quality” (LW 5: 246;

quoted at page 53). Following Dewey, Frega argues that the unarticulated whole

characterized by a single, unique quality is what can be properly called ‘the given.’

However, it is a given not in the sense of being an epistemologically simple entity, but

rather in the sense of being the ultimate and untranscendable horizon of every possible

logical activity. A situation is articulated in thought when objects that satisfy the

requirements of inquiry are constructed and, in doing so, pave the way for the solution

of the problem.

8 Once the situation is constructed as problematic and further articulated in the inquiry,

an agent can elaborate a plan of action whose raison d’être is to enable him to transform

reality according to the goals that he has assumed as his own. Transformation is

therefore a logical notion, whose most adequate exemplification is the modern

experimental conception of knowledge. Inquiry transforms the existential conditions

that gave birth to reflection as well as the system of beliefs of the agent. The two

aspects are closely related: if the hypothetical course of action identified in reflection

proves itself to be successful, then “thus-far hypothetical belief is stabilized and a new

pattern of habits emerges” (56). The notion of transformation crosses the boundaries


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between public and private, objective and subjective, thus revealing the anti-Cartesian

attitude of pragmatist epistemology.

9 This is almost commonsensical knowledge for any pragmatist scholar. Frega has the

merit to provide evidence that it is possible to build on these tenets to develop a

consistent theory of moral reasoning. Two are the most interesting issues in moral and

political philosophy that he takes into account. The first one concerns the definition of

the notion of public. Public is a momentum concept for moral and political philosophy

because it represents the fact of intersubjectivity. The traditional distinction between

public and private relies on the possibility of distinguishing what is done in order to

satisfy private, personal desires and what is pursued on behalf of the interest of the

community. For a reasoning to be public an agent has to take the point of view of the

other members of the community, and, consequently, has to sacrifice what could give

him personal gratification. Frega shows with great clearness and force that such an

alternative is not necessary. The unquestioned assumption at the basis of all the

approaches that acknowledge the validity of the dichotomy between public and private

is the idea that both the public and the private are well-formed entities even before

entering in relationship, and that they are governed by different and incommensurable

‘logics’. Now, if this were true, an individual could not completely realize himself in his

community: his realization would always be partial because the adoption of the point of

view of the community follows from the renunciation – Frega speaks of “purification”

(108) – of some of his desires and pretensions. This would entail a break in the unity of

experience, whose epistemological consequences are the split of rationality into a

private and a public dimension and, consequently, the destruction of the unity of

reason.

10 The insistence on the constructive power of judgment enables Frega to overcome all

these difficulties. According to his convincing diagnosis, Habermas and Rawls – and the

traditions that stem from them – have failed to give an adequate account of public

reasoning because they have not realized that the community to which an individual

refers is not something which has to be accepted and justified, but something which

has to be constructed and transformed. The public has often been conceived as a set of

beliefs that the private agent has to subscribe or reject. Now, such an intellectualistic

approach to the issue of the relationship between the public and the private has

generated an unfortunate misunderstanding of the nature of the public. Indeed, it has

prevented many from seeing that disagreement – disagreement between an individual

and his community as well as between two (or more) individuals belonging to the same

community – should not be treated as a logical contradiction that can be overcome if

and only if at least one of the competing points of view is shown to rely on false beliefs.

In reality, disagreement is a fact of human experience, a fact that is becoming more and

more dominant and inclusive as a consequence of the increasing complexity of

modernity. The challenge of modern life is to shape conceptual tools for handling the

conflicts originated by different and competing ideals and ways of life, not to elaborate

conceptual strategies aiming at questioning the legitimacy of a plurality of opinions,

beliefs and points of view.

11 It is in this sense that Frega states that the aim of moral and political reflection is not

justificatory but transformative: “constitution through inquiry, and not representation

through justification, defines the proper core of public reason” (97). Far from being a

static entity that has to be taken into account in inquiry, the public is the “outcome of


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the reflective process of inquiry aimed at the identification of the consequences” (102).

The point that Frega wants to emphasize is that the notion of the public should be

defined in functional terms. The idea of the public arises when an action is conceived as

producing consequences that are neither natural effects nor epistemic implications but

consequences having a social impact. More clearly stated, “[t]he concept of public

refers only to those consequences (intended or unintended) that affect people beyond

those directly involved in the action” (101). So, a particular public is brought into being

when agents engaged in a common enterprise realize that the consequences of their

actions have relevant effects on other people.

12 The functional definition of the public shows the theoretical fertility of the pragmatist

conception of rationality of inquiry. Indeed, the latter provides a general framework in

which it is possible to formulate the problems of moral and political philosophy in a

way that makes it easier to find their solution. Moral and political issues, on the one

hand, and the public – conceived as that community of people who share an interest in

the consequences of a certain group of actions –, on the other hand, are mutually

determined and constructed in the process of inquiry through which a problematic

situation is solved. The public, the issues to be dealt with in a political and moral

inquiry, the interests and aims of the agents engaged in a public activity acquire

significance only as a consequence of a process of construction of their meaning – a

process that consists in discovering the possible consequences of an action. For this

reason, I am not completely persuaded of what Frega says about the public being “the

outcome of a political quest” (104). I fully agree with Frega that the passage to a

transformative conception of public reasoning grounded on a issue-centered approach

to politics determines a dynamic conception of the public. However, since the public

originates from a problematic situation, according to a pragmatist epistemology it

should disappear when the problem is solved. As is evident, if this is correct the public

cannot be the outcome of a political and moral inquiry, but should be treated as an

extremely refined tool that is constructed and used in inquiry but has no logical

validity outside of it. Here Frega seems to relapse into a structural and anti-pragmatist

way of intending the concept of the public, which relies on a misunderstanding of the

logical nature of the conceptual instruments employed in reasoning.

13 Leaving aside the last critical observation, it is important to note that Frega’s notion of

the public is extremely interesting for another order of reasons. As has been remarked

above, it follows directly from the rejection of the classical distinction between the

public and the private that the former should not be treated as the result of a process of

purification of personal interests, but rather as the ‘locus’ where agents can find their

most complete realization. It is very likely that some sort of Hegelian suggestion about

the relation between the particular and the universal is at work here. In any case, the

point that deserves attention is not historical but theoretical: it has to do with the idea

that an internal relationship links together the public and public reasoning. The polemic

target that Frega has in mind here is the way critical theorists conceive the structure of

the public. According to them, the public is a field of conflicting forces in which there is

no other rule than power: the dominating position is not the one that is (more) correct

or (more) fair, but the one which better represents the interests of the majority.

According to this view, therefore, it does not make any sense to search for a logic of

public reasoning because reasoning is at best a way of concealing the real nature of the

public, that is, the instable equilibrium of conflicting interests.


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14 As Frega explicitly acknowledges, the solution he advocates is a third way outside the

dichotomy between accepting the classical distinction of “public” and “private” ways of

conducting an inquiry and denying logical validity to public reasoning (115). Following

Dewey, Frega wants to stress the fact that the public represents a possible way in which

agents tackle the problems that are caused by their actions, and in doing so they can

find a possible realization of their interests and desires. In order to achieve this goal he

relies on the notion of ‘expression’ or ‘expressive inquiry.’ This is the second important

contribution that Frega gives to the theory of moral reasoning.

15 Expressive inquiry is the idea that moral reasoning has a strong articulative power, and

that the process of articulation consists of a process of expression of the self. As has

been said above, every inquiry has an articulative moment: this is the phase in which a

situation is constructed as a problematic situation. In the case of moral inquiry, what

has to be articulated is not only the external situation but also the net of beliefs that

define the character of the moral agent. Therefore, moral judgment is more

complicated than scientific judgment because the former cannot be concerned

exclusively with the articulation of external conditions. Moral action is an action in

which what is at stake is the kind of person that the agent wants to be. Consequently,

moral judgment has to be expressive of the self, both in the sense of taking into

account the beliefs of the agent about what is right to do and to be and in the sense of

being the factor that helps the self develop and express its potentialities. It is for this

reason that Frega says that moral inquiry encompasses “a broad array of thinking

activity”: not only the reflection on the possible consequences of an action, but also

self-analysis, the comparison of the situation with the agent’s desires, criteria, and

expectations, the making of hypotheses about the way to become the kind of person

that one wants to be (80).

16 It should be evident now that Frega’s expressivism has nothing to do with the versions

of expressivism elaborated by analytic philosophers. Indeed, far from supporting a non-

cognitivist interpretation of morality, Frega’s expressivism denotes a particular quality

of moral reasoning and, consequently, of moral rationality. At the same time, however,

the insistence on the concept of expression makes it possible for Frega to avoid the

strong cognitivist implications of the thesis that inquiry is the best method that an

agent has to fix his beliefs. Again, Frega’s aim is to find a via media between two equally

unsatisfactory alternatives.

17 This point stands out clearly if one takes into consideration Frega’s discussion of

relativism. According to Frega, relativism should not be considered as a problem

haunting moral reflection but as a fact constitutive of human experience (132). It is a

fact that there is a plurality of perspectives since it is a fact that human beings

interpret reality in different ways according to their interests, desires, and beliefs.

Consequently, to criticize relativism at this level is nonsensical because it would

amount to denying an essential aspect of (moral) reality. Relativism can be criticized

only as a philosophical theory that challenges not the fact of disagreement, but the

very possibility of moral agreement.

18 This assumption has important bearings on the evaluation of theoretical tenability of

relativism. First of all, as a consequence of the shift of attention from relativism as a

problem to relativism as a fact of experience Frega can formulate the issue at stake in

the debate between relativists and realists in a radically new way. The traditional

conception of relativism is grounded in two independent theses: “the claim that


267

different views on any given issue may be incompatible and yet coexist” and the thesis

that that claim entails “the impossibility to attain context-independent normative

standards” (137). According to this view, the fact of relativism (de facto level) implies a

distrust in the possibility of achieving an agreement founded on rational norms (de jure

level). This kind of relativism – which Frega labels as ‘dogmatic’ – brings about an

equally dogmatic form of realism which assumes that both de facto and de jure

relativisms are false. Dogmatic anti-relativism is an account of moral objectivity which

holds a) that it is always possible to “reach an uncontroversial solution within a

reasonable (not indefinite) time” if the inquiry is not distorted by personal interests;

and b) that “[t]he outcome of any well-conducted inquiry is independent of the

inquiring agents’ epistemic conditions” (138).

19 Frega convincingly argues that a relativist is not forced to accept both the theses

mentioned above. If he holds the first – the idea that pluralism is not contradictory –

and drops the second – the idea that the fact of pluralism does not support moral

objectivity – he can endorse a kind of relativism which is epistemologically less

vulnerable to anti-relativist criticisms. It is less vulnerable not because it concedes

something that an anti-relativist account of objectivity cannot deny – the possibility of

objectivity –, but because it dramatically alters the epistemological framework that

makes the very contraposition between relativism and anti-relativism possible.

20 This is the ultimate meaning of the expressivist turn that Frega gives to the theory of

moral reasoning. Moral inquiry should not be conceived as the search for a

representation of what is morally true, but rather as the search for a satisfactory

compromise among the different interests, desires, and beliefs of the members of a

community. Stated in Kantian terms, it can be said that, according to Frega, the notion

of truth is not the principle of moral judgments. Frega’s contention is that if one tries

to understand moral inquiry as a type of reasoning relying on the principle of non-

contradiction and aiming at achieving a form of objectivity similar to the one achieved

in science he is easily led to misconceive the role that moral reflection plays in our life.

What we want from moral objectivity is a method for fixing beliefs: “objectivity,” Frega

writes, “names the capacity of these regulations [habits] to successfully respond to

challenges” (158). The objectivity that is the goal of moral reasoning is the construction

of a new way of life that can be judged fair and correct by all its participants since it is

the expression and articulation of their points of views. It is for this reason that

disagreement is so important for Frega: it is the fact that the plurality of perspectives

on what is good cannot be overcome on an epistemological level – that is, it is not

possible to ascertain the true opinion on the conduct of life because all the different

perspectives represent legitimate ways of conceiving moral reality – that grounds the

validity of moral constructivism. In other words, truth cannot be the key to

understanding morality because in moral inquiry agents “do not aim first at ‘getting

things right’ but rather at ‘getting things done’” (162).

21 The last remark brings us to the core of Frega’s constructivism. Keeping in mind

Dewey’s definition of object as what is “produced and ordered in settled form by means

of inquiry,” it is not difficult to see how Frega can defuse the problems that motivate

the traditional rejection of relativism (LW 12: 122). Constructivism means that human

beings have to find a method to solve the difficulties that arise from social, political,

economical inequalities, and that the validity of the solution they produced is

warranted by its effectiveness in constructing a satisfactory way of life. Consequently,


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even without embracing a cognitivist conception of objectivity, Frega’s constructivism

is not exposed to the risk of relativism because a morally objective belief is the one that

shows in practice what is its meaning and what is its epistemic value.

22 It is for this reason that Frega puts such a great emphasis on the notion of practice, in

general, and of normative practice, in particular. The latter is the cornerstone of

Frega’s expressivism since it is the theoretical device that enables him to account for

moral objectivity in pragmatic terms. However, there is a price to be paid for this

choice. Indeed, the primacy of practice over theory implies a dramatic restriction of the

creativity of reason which, in turn, implies a restriction of the transformative power of

inquiry. Frega accepts this conclusion. He speaks of an “inescapability of the context of

practice” to refer to the fact that every tool constructed in inquiry – no matter how

refined and sophisticated it could be – has to be brought back to the particular context

from which it arises and to be used to solve the problem that has called up moral

reflection (139). More clearly stated, the point that Frega wants to emphasize is that

normative practices set limits to the acts of reasoning that take those very normative

practices as their subject-matter.

23 However strange it may seem, this description catches an important element of moral

inquiry. As is well known, one of the most important traits of moral reasoning is the

search for moral justifications. To use Frega’s own words, justification is “the activity

through which an agent proffers arguments intended to show belief, decision, or action

to be legitimate” (179). Now, an agent undertakes a justificatory activity when some of

his moral and political beliefs are put into question by another person. This statement

is not as trivial as it may seem at a first glance. Traditionally, the search for moral

justification has been conceived as an armchair activity made by philosophers, “an

intellectual undertaking whose relevance does not depend on its effectiveness in

answering real doubts such as they emerge in social life” (179). According to this view,

an inquirer searches for a justification of, say, democracy because he has a purely

intellectual interest in it. Against this intellectualistic account of justification, Frega

calls the attention to the nature of the disagreement that has to be resolved by moral

judgment: “the source of disagreement,” he writes, “must be living” (179). This does

not mean simply that the agents have a practical interest in solving that problem. It

means, first and foremost, that they cannot escape from the particular conditions in

which they are immersed.

24 It is important to understand the epistemic consequences of this strong form of

contextualism. The epistemological primacy of existing normative practices implies

that the argumentative strategies that are available to be used to reach agreement

among the members of a community are limited to their actual ‘knowledge’. “Each

practice,” Frega observes, “is spatio-temporally determined, in order to limit its

reference to the conditions that define the possibilities of inquiry in a given place and

time” (172). It follows therefore that if the critics of a certain normative practice – for

instance, our democratic way of living and handling conflicts – are not disposed to

accept the entire framework of that form of life, it is not possible for its members to

provide a justification of its legitimacy. There is an important distinction that has to be

drawn, Frega warns us, between internal and external justification. External

justification is a type of justification that holds universally for all rational persons. This

kind of justification – whose possibility is at the basis of the successes of scientific

inquiry – cannot be achieved in moral reasoning because in this case it is impossible to


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‘bracket’ the differences among individuals. The differences of beliefs, of values, of

interests, of desires are the source of disagreement, and to say that to overcome

disagreement one should not pay attention to them is like saying that moral

disagreement is not worthy of attention. Consequently, the only justification that can

be provided for the legitimacy of a normative practice is internal. More clearly stated,

since moral inquiry is the construction of a new normative practice in which the

members of a community can find a satisfactory expression of their perspectives on

what is morally relevant, the different points of view must not be irreconcilable.

Indeed, justifications can be effective if and only if the individuals who challenge the

legitimacy of a certain normative practice share a common framework. Frega is clear

on this point: “it is very unlikely that someone who has exited democratic practice (or

has never taken part in it) will come back into it (or will join it) on the basis of an

argument demonstrating that people should be democratic so that their beliefs may be

more justified.” And he adds: “[w]ith the Schmittian there is no common ground, no

shared practice on which to build a common framework” (185). Incidentally said, the

idea that moral justification must be internal is just another way of formulating the

fundamental pragmatist insight that doubt cannot be universal: if one doubts of

everything the conclusion that has to be drawn is not that nothing is certain, but that

his is not a real doubt. The problematic situation must have in itself the possibility of

its solution.

25 In conclusion, the point of Frega’s argument is that justification is a practice which is

effective only within the boundaries of a particular community of members sharing

common ideas and opinions. Disagreement on a specific moral issue is possible only

because there is a more substantial agreement on the essential structure of moral

reality. Such a more substantial agreement that makes disagreement possible is the

result of common experiences, of common interests, of common problems and, in

particular, of a common education. It is rather surprising that Frega does not use the

language and the basic ideas of virtue epistemology and virtue ethics – in particular,

the concepts of habit and virtue. I believe that if Frega had addressed the issue of the

relationship between reason and will, his defense of constructivism and contextualism

would have been much clearer and sounder. In the last analysis, indeed, the truth of

Frega’s contextualism of normative practices is a consequence of the fact that

normative practices do not depend on reason for their legitimation. However, this lack

of conceptual resources does not affect the soundness of the conclusions that Frega

draws from the idea of a primacy of practice over theory. Frega convincingly argues

that normative practices have legitimation not because it is always possible to provide

an universal justification of their validity, but because of the practical consequences

they engender (184). The legitimacy of democracy relies on the fact that it is a “solution

that has evolved over time, overcoming the social and political challenges that Western

society have faced over several centuries,” a solution that continues to work well in a

society that is growing more and more complicated and conflictual (213).

26 This is the root of Frega’s pragmatist and anti-intellectualist philosophy. Consequently,

the rigorous exposition and clarification of its fundamental concepts and principles is

the most important achievement of the book. Now, to be clear, I believe that it is

impossible to overestimate the importance of this approach to philosophical questions

for the future of pragmatism. Frega’s constructivist theory of rationality leads to an

empiricization of philosophical reflection that goes hand in hand with a substantial

redefinition of the language of philosophy. According to this view, philosophers should


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start conceiving their professional activity as a contribution to the amelioration of

existing normative practices, and not as a purely intellectual effort devoted to find an

unshakable basis for our beliefs. These are conclusions that Frega is certainly willing to

endorse since he is deeply committed to fostering the mutual interchange of ideas

between philosophy and social sciences. But these are conclusions that every scholar

interested in pragmatism should be, if not willing to endorse, at least willing to pay due

attention to because they represent the most ambitious attempt to give a definition of

theoretical concepts in terms of their practical effects.

27 However, I think it is important to warn against a possible misunderstanding – a

misunderstanding from which Frega’s work, too, seems sometimes to suffer. As has

been remarked above, to insist on the primacy of practice over theory is certainly

correct, but it should not lead to deny the autonomy of theory from practice. Theory

can be defined operationally as that ensemble of normative practices whose function is

to construct tools that help agents to be more effective in handling problems

encountered in life. Now, history of technology has shown that the success of these

practices depends on the possibility of reaching higher and higher levels of abstraction.

Tools created to handle a practical problem become the subject-matter of a higher

science. Consequently, new and more refined tools are constructed that enable

scientists to tackle those problems that affect the application of the “original” tools to

the specific situations they were intended to handle. This is a platitude, but this

platitude entails an important corollary. Indeed, it follows from it that in some

particular cases it may be useful to adopt an extremely general attitude toward

morality. In some cases, for instance, it may be useful to inquire into the formal

structure of moral justification or to discuss what counts as morally significant. This

because there is no agreement among discussants on these points. As is evident, formal

analyses of this kind do not have immediate practical bearings. So, if the ultimate

criterion of validity of moral reasoning is its effectiveness in transforming and

meliorating existing normative practices, it would be difficult to accept them as correct

forms of moral inquiry even though it would be equally difficult to question that they

are legitimate moves in the “game of morality.” As the increasing complexity of human

social systems has brought about new needs and demands, it has brought about also a

plurality of autonomous contexts of inquiry. This plurality is a fact of scientific

experience, and has therefore to be acknowledged in its own right. But if this is true,

then the emphasis on the primacy of practice over theory risks to be a too restrictive

criterion.

28 I do not want to say that Frega’s pragmatism of normative practices programmatically

rules out the possibility of recognizing a certain degree of autonomy to the various

levels of reflection. Rather the contrary, I do believe that this insight can be easily

accommodated within the framework of his constructivism. It is even possible that

Frega would consider the problems of defining the nature of moral justification and of

clarifying what is morally significant as scientific (theoretical) rather than moral

issues. Nonetheless, I think that his insistence on practice, his criticism of external

justification, his suspiciousness of what he calls “an understanding of human

experience […] dominated by a hyper-rational conception of human reason” may lead

to a form of anti-intellectualism that sacrifices much that should be preserved (110-2).

And this is a risk that does not concern only Frega’s masterful investigations of moral

inquiry, but the entire pragmatist movement.


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AUTHORS

ROBERTO GRONDA

Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

roberto.gronda[at]sns.it


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Fernando SAVATER, Acerca deSantayanaed. by José Beltrán & Daniel Moreno, Valencia, PUV, 2012

Ángel M. Faerna

REFERENCES

Fernando SAVATER, Acerca de Santayana, ed. by José Beltrán & Daniel Moreno, Valencia,

PUV, 2012

1 This book compiles 17 short pieces in which the renowned Spanish philosopher and

intellectual Fernando Savater (San Sebastián, 1947) evokes the thought and character

of George Santayana. The selection spans over more than 30 years – the earliest text

was originally published in 1977 and the last one dates from 2010 –, revealing Savater’s

sustained interest in, and fondness for the figure of Santayana. Completing the

collection of self-contained texts there are two more sections: one of fragments picked

up from other writings by Savater in which the author makes a significant use of

quotations from Santayana in order to illustrate or reinforce his own ideas, and the

third one consisting of extracts from published interviews and conversations where

Savater occasionally praises the opinions of the Spanish-American philosopher and

pays tribute to his teaching.

2 In a brief Introduction, the editors account for their purpose in compiling a volume

that they do not hesitate to brand as “atypical” (17). Profs. Beltrán and Moreno are not

only competent scholars but also enthusiastic promoters of whatever initiatives that

can make Santayana’s philosophy better known among the Spanish public. Thus, it is

only natural that they intended to make the most of the fact that one of the more

conspicuous intellectuals in the present Spanish (and Hispanic) milieu has paid such an

enduring attention to their philosophical hero. To this extent the move is both astute

and effective. But they point at the second reason that made the project appealing to

them: to explore the elective affinity that Savater overtly feels toward the thinker


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whose vision and temperament were diametrically opposed to his in many respects.

Trying to solve this riddle is probably the more stimulating challenge of the book,

because the Introduction does not go into it in any depth. The editors pose the question

“How to explain Savater’s interest in Santayana?” (18) but then let the reader find the

answer as she reads the book.

3 Let me begin with some obvious contrasts. Fernando Savater has the typical profile of a

public intellectual, someone who is eager to engage in social and political debates and

to influence public opinion. Indeed he is a skilled polemist – he likes to describe his

writings as ‘diatribes’ – and has a regular presence in the mass media. This disposition

is clearly at odds with the characteristic detachment of Santayana, who always looked

distantly at the conflicts and agitations of his time. Secondly, and more substantially,

Savater’s philosophical stance is ethically oriented; he is what Richard Rorty used to

call an ‘edifying philosophe,’ or even an educator. The philosophy of Santayana, on the

contrary, though it certainly can inspire definite ethical views, is nevertheless

grounded on a deliberately de-humanized perspective on things: in Santayana it is not

only possible but almost inevitable that the several threads of his thought culminate in

a sort of metaphysical vision, a dimension which is absolutely lacking in Savater’s case.

Finally, there are important differences in the way each philosopher envisages their

own tasks. Savater does not feel at ease with being described as a ‘philosopher,’ he finds

the name too ambitious and too pretentious for him. As he cleverly puts it in one of the

conversations included in the book: “the great masters [like Santayana] avoided

engagement because they were persuaded that the others would look for them and that

they would be eventually heard. I do not assume to be worthy of being looked for, it is

me who goes to meet others, like those who stand on the side of the road spraying cold

water over the passing cycle-race, refreshing some of the cyclists and maybe disturbing

others” (186). Santayana, in turn, looks exactly like the kind of philosopher who

displays his thinking irrespective of what the world would say or expect, just waiting

for a sympathetic reader to appear.

4 On the other hand, there are also similarities that make Savater’s interest in Santayana

less improbable. For one thing, they both disdain the sort of philosophy that is

practiced within the walls of the academy. The spirit, Savater suggests (15) and

Santayana would agree, cannot fly free if chained to the ground by footnotes.

Professionalism and sheer scholarship are to their eye incompatible with a truly

philosophical mind. This does not mean, however, that they fail to recognize the

specificity of philosophy. If anything, in “Borges, Philosophical Poet” Savater adheres

to the view, put forward by Santayana in Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and

Goethe, that philosophy differs from literature in method as well as in scope.

Nevertheless, poetic intuition and philosophical vision aspire to apprehend the same

order in the world: philosophy stems from a comprehensive experience which lies also

at the bottom of poetry in its peak. No wonder, then, that literature can convey

theoretical insights or philosophers can occasionally resort to literary expression in

order to capture that experience. This taste for literature as a proper companion to

philosophy is characteristic of Santayana and Savater, and it is a pity that the latter

does not pursue this particular topic any further. His brief comment on Borges is well-

aimed and insightful, but the parallelisms between Borges and Santayana deserved a

much more developed treatment.


274

5 Another coincidence is a shared scepticism, not just in the confined epistemological

sense of the term, but as a general attitude toward abstract ideals and comforting

illusions. Savater bows to what Santayana himself described as his ‘philosophical

cruelty.’ And he admires it all the more because in Santayana such attitude was not

pathetic or resented, it did not invite resignation nor despair, but a tranquil

acceptation, if at all. Savater quotes repeatedly Santayana saying that “we live

dramatically in a world that is not dramatic”; he places his name in a list including

Seneca, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Cioran (15). All these are important

influences in Savater’s own philosophy, of course, but he acknowledges that he finds

Santayana’s ironic and non-emphatic tone especially congenial. Savater’s intellectual

mood is more playful than ironic, and his personality definitely more sanguine as

compared to Santayana’s cold affability, but he rightly detects the subtle humour that

Santayana’s polished prose often exudes.

6 Most pages of the book are devoted to evoke Santayana’s oddity: the man who

preferred to be a life-long student rather than a professor, the cosmopolitan that

refused to settle down and make his home in any place, an outsider who never

belonged nor cherished belongings. Savater praises Santayana for being a genuinely

original person, not just an eccentric (117), and his independence fascinates him. But

this fascination is punctuated with drops of impatience: “Maybe he lacks rapture, folly,

passion […]. He is always a bit too outside as to arouse whether adhesion or abhorrence:

out of time, out of taste, out of fashion and tradition, out of orbit” (65). This was

certainly the impression that Santayana made on those who met him. Savater says that

he first knew about Santayana by reading Bertrand Russell’s Portraits from Memory, and

it is plain that Russell’s lack of enthusiasm for Santayana left a permanent mark on

Savater’s opinion.

7 The philosophical topic on which Savater seems to be closer to Santayana is aesthetics.

The most remarkable text of this anthology, to my view, is “Concept and Aesthetics in

George Santayana” (41-51); originally published in Spanish in 1985, it was later

translated into English and published in Overheard in Seville. Bulletin of the Santayana

Society, 13 (1995). This is a brief but penetrating, cogent essay on Santayana’s ideas

concerning the relationship of aesthetics to ethics and on Santayana’s rejection of

aestheticism as being the mark of ‘barbarism’ in modern art. Arguing against the

idealism of Benedetto Croce or Bernard Bosanquet, Santayana claimed that beauty is

connected and eventually subordinated to the whole of human values, thus affirming a

full-blooded naturalism in aesthetics. Savater finds an echo of these ideas in some

criticisms that the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss directed in Le regard éloigné

(1983) against modern painting. Though Savater sees some partiality in their judgment,

he recognizes the soundness and pertinence of the general position that both

Santayana and Lévi-Strauss were trying to enforce. On this point, Santayana’s

naturalism and Savater’s ethical perspective seem to find a common ground and

eventually endorse the same position.

8 By contrast, Savater disregards Santayana’s endeavour to produce a system of

philosophy. He finds the project outdated even in its time (66, 129), which is a rather

striking remark provided that Santayana was contemporary with Royce, Whitehead,

Husserl, Dewey, and Russell, to mention only a few philosophers who also attempted to

build a sort of philosophical system. When it comes to metaphysics Savater’s interest

loses heart and his perspicacity decays; the author reveals a poor understanding of


275

Santayana’s ontological distinctions (as, for instance, on page 128) or indulges in

shallow, offhand comments (67-8).

9 Overall, this book bears testimony of a philosophical friendship. It is not scholarly or

comprehensive, but it rewards the reader with a fresh presentation of Santayana as a

remarkable philosopher and as a man of genius. It also benefits from Savater’s

readable, witty prose. The exhaustiveness of the compilation yields annoying, if

inevitable repetitions. Anyway, a stronger editorial hand would have been appreciated

in suppressing typos and superfluous editorial footnotes.

AUTHORS

ÁNGEL M. FAERNA

Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha

Angel.Faerna[at]uclm.es


276

M. BUSCHEMEIR, E. HAMMER, Pragmatismus und Hermeneutik:Beiträge zu Richard RortysKulturpolitikHamburg, Meiner, 2011

Till Kinzel

REFERENCES

M. BUSCHEMEIR, E. HAMMER, Pragmatismus und Hermeneutik: Beiträge zu Richard Rortys

Kulturpolitik, Hamburg, Meiner, 2011

1 Richard Rorty is rightly considered one of the most interesting authors in the field of

intellectual pursuits. This vague formulation also indicates that Rorty’s thinking and

writing cannot simply be classified as philosophy, although by and large they seem to

be part and parcel of the pragmatist tradition. For Rorty clearly confronts a number of

traditional problems of philosophy, even when he suggest getting rid of the problem by

redescribing the issue or changing the perspective. There is thus a strong element of a

critique of philosophy in Rorty’s work, for all the use he makes of philosophical

concepts. Rorty’s interest in subjects and writers beyond the confines of academic

philosophy makes his work particularly interesting to those working in neigbouring

disciplines, such as literary scholarship. And it is this theme that guides the collection

under review here, a book published as a special number of the German journal für

aesthetics and general science of art and including contributions both in German

(seven) and English (four).

2 The papers included in this collection all take their starting-point in some form of

pragmatist thinking, mostly that of Rorty, in order to address issues of hermeneutics

and literature that are particularly relevant for scholars of literature who want to


277

expand their theoretical focus beyond the standard fare of what often counts as

‘theory’ in literature departments. On the other hand, the analyses also point to gaps in

Rorty’s appropriation of other thinkers, highlighting Rorty’s own structures of

reception and providing avenues for further explorations. In this review, I will

primarily focus on the contributions written in German, however not without

mentioning the topics of those in English.

3 To pose the question of hermeneutics within the paradigm of pragmatism is not

without problems, since Rorty’s rejection of the usefulness of the term truth seems to

circumvent any consideration of the truth of any given interpretation. In other words,

under conditions of Rorty’s pragmatism it does not make much sense to ask whether

one has understood something correctly. Rorty’s provocation consists in his rejection

of epistemology, as Matthias Buschmeier explains, and Rorty regards the recognition of

the impossibility of any final justification for knowledge as a hermeneutical insight

(34). Rorty’s hermeneutics aims at some kind of understanding, trying to bring about

overlapping understandings of topics or ideas in order to secure social cohesion. What

remains to be seen, however, is what ‘understanding’ can mean if this is not tied to at

least some kind of regulative idea of true understanding. Whatever one may think

about this1 – Buschmeier is consistent enough not to present an account of Rorty’s

intentions (22), although it would surely be useful to have a plausible presentation of

such an intention. Buschmeier makes two points that I want to mention in this context:

1) he draws attention to what is surely a serious deficiency in Rorty’s concept of

literature, namely a kind of instrumental understanding of literature as a means to

further human sympathy. This entails a corresponding lack of of recognition on Rorty’s

part of the literary aesthetics proper, a major problem for any theory of aesthetics that

wants to make sense. 2) the humanities would seem to be in a ‘better’ position than the

sciences, because they have left epistemology, i.e. codes of true /false-distinctions,

behind (39-40). One might, however, want to qualify Buschmeier’s criticism by drawing

attention to Ulf Schulenberg’s recognition of two different kind so of books: There are

not only those help us to become better human beings, but also those which enhance

our projects of private self-creation (178).

4 It is in line with Buschmeier’s criticism of Rorty’s view of literature that Richard

Eldridge provides a mostly negative answer to the question whether poets (first and

foremost) have ideas. He takes issue with Rorty’s claim that poets above all provide us

with new vocabularies to talk about what we want to become. Although he argues, and

quite rightly in the reviewer’s mind, that Rorty’s claim in this matter ‘is mostly wrong,’

he nevertheless reaches this conclusion on the basis of a comprehensive agreement

with Rorty’s eight commitments to anti-representationalism, anti-foundationalism,

opposition to metaphysics, philosophy as engaged criticism, humanism, Americanism,

philosophy as an activity, generosity (141-4). The devil, however, dwells in the details,

which means that Rorty’s employment of rigid dichotomies can be “crude and obtuse”

(144), with Rorty beating one term into submission and extolling the other one, e.g., in

the case of the oppositions “discover vs. invent, represent vs. intervene, public vs.

private, philosophy vs. literature” and so on (144). What this means for literary

scholarship is the following: Rorty considerably downplays the non-inventive part of

literary scholarship, presenting a lopsided view influenced by French literary critics

but hardly true to the actual workings of literary critics (147). In a Wordsworthian vein,

Eldridge suggests poetry presents rather a transfigurative than a pragmatic


278

hermeneutics; and he exemplifies this by taking a closer look at one example, Seamus

Heaney’s “Digging” (149-52).

5 The German literary scholar Friedmar Apel contrasts the rather idyllic picture of a

poeticised culture in Rorty’s sense (and inspired by Dewey) to the much more critical

perspective of German aesthetic theory in the work of Adorno and Blumenberg.

Romantic notions of human self-empowerment are much closer linked to the desire to

control nature than projects of poeticizing the world realize, as Apel explains (155).

Apels’ comparatively brief paper is supplemented by a more comprehensive discussion

of the connection between pragmatism and romanticism by Ulf Schulenberg, a scholar

who has thorough studied more recent forms of American pragmatist cultural politics.

He looks at what he calls Rorty’s anti-fundamentalist history of progress by drawing

attention to romanticism as crucial influence on pragmatism. This aspect has been

neglected in earlier discussions of pragmatism, according to Schulenberg, but in order

to understand the so-called ‘renaissance of pragmatism,’ one needs to clarify the

precise relationship between romanticism and pragmatism (174). Rorty’s place in this

confrontation is of great importance, as he has repeatedly dealt with romanticism in

his essays. Rorty’s construction of parallels extends to the rejection of the

correspondence theory of truth as well as the predominance of the imagination over

reason. Strangely enough, Rorty still holds on to concepts like ‘progress,’ e.g., when he

suggests that “philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by

becoming more imaginative” (179). Rorty’s understanding of romanticism is usefully

explained by Schulenberg in its complexity, including a critique of romanticism, and

this is then linked to what Rorty considers as an important representative of a literary

culture, namely the liberal ironist. For Schulenberg, the combination of romanticism

and pragmatism should lead to the rejection of the abstract and unmediated

confrontation of poetry and politics (195).

6 Further contributions emphasize the value of a pragmatist poetics (Florian Klinger) and

of a kind of literary epistemology (Christian Kohlroß). Although even here we find that

Rorty’s apostrophe of literature nowhere leads to structural analyses or hardly ever to

any attention to linguistic features of literary texts (197). Rorty’s concept of literature

and literary criticism is closely tied to his ‘post-metaphysical’ stance, but there seems

to be a problem here, since one will always have to take recourse to some sort of

metaphysical notions if one wants to discuss general concepts e.g. of ‘language.’

Kohlroß, who is the author of the only major German treatise on pragmatism and

literature (cf. 17 n.18),2 introduces the issue of the epistemic status of literature, a

theme that has received considerable attention in recent years, at least among scholars

of literature. Literary epistemology could be considered as that which would or could

have come into being if philosophy had integrated the aspect of literary presentation

into its consideration instead of regarding it as a danger to its rationality; and if

literary scholarship had also considered the substantial issues expressed in the texts

under consideration (161-2). Rorty exemplifies the possibility for this kind of

rapprochement of philosophy and philology that would ultimately lead to a utopian

place beyond philosophy and philology. But, as Kohlroß goes on to argue, there is a

surprising insight. For if we ask what really distinguishes philological knowledge from

philosophical knowledge, the answer is that there is no difference (164). For, as

Kohlroß shows, the five myths Rorty recognized as connected to the metaphor of the

mirror apply in equal manner to philology and philosophy. Literary epistemology in

the sense ascribed to Rorty would then be a practice that is not guided by a concern for


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the truth; in fact, literature can do without truth – we read Tristram Shandy and Don

Quixote as well as The Critique of Pure Reason or Hegel’s Science of Logic not because they

are true but because of the way they present their views of the world (168). The

knowledge of literature is thus a knowledge of the ways in which convictions are

formed by the meanings of language, for meaning, in contrast to truth, is in fact

indispensable. For Kohlroß and Rorty this furthermore leads to the recognition that

gthe general is only accessible through the particular and not as a pre-given notional

entity to which all particulars only need to be subsumed (172). The general, according

to Rorty, cannot be reduced to a concept but is inextricably linked to experience – and

this is why the experience of reading novels can offer ever new opportunities for

reaching general conclusions through the medium of particular stories.

7 Rorty is famous for appropriating a rather large number of different thinkers and

writers for his own ends. But what is the precise structure of this appropriation? Oliver

Jahraus, a specialist in the sociological systems theory of Niklas Luhmann,3 addresses

this question in his contribution. He tries to find points of convergence between the

theories of Rorty and Luhmann, based on the observation that Luhmann is not covered

by Rorty anywhere. Starting from observations of similarities and difference between

Rorty and Derrida, Jahraus points to the possibilities of art to show that which

philosophy cannot express. He reads a famous painting by Magritte, Reproduction

interdite, with Rorty to consider the issues of reflection. Rorty considers reflection as

the point of attack in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and, according to Jahraus,

suggests abandoning a form of thinking in terms of media. Literature as well as literary

scholarship are considered by Rorty as forms of reflection overcome as well as of

deconstruction overcome (94). In Magritte’s painting, reflection only works with the

book represented (Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym) but not with the subject looking in the

mirror. Reflection, here, works precisely where it is not necessary: we would have to

see the mirror image of the subject in order to recognize it, whereas the book only

remains readable if it is not mirrored (although Jahraus here underestimates the

possibility, which is of course a mere matter of training, to read mirrored script) (95).

Rorty and Luhmann can be regarded as an interesting constellation, because it adds a

third option to the two positions on the aporias of reflection put forth by Rorty and

Derrida: Luhmann’s systems theory transforms the aporias of reflection into paradoxes

that become constituents of its own theory design. Contingency becomes the key

concept which Rorty and Luhmann address in different ways: Luhmann describes social

systems as huge engines of the elimination of contingency; Rorty regards social systems

as fields of contingency in which this phenomenon can be made (98). Both Luhmann

and Rorty, according to Jahraus, attempt to leave behind any foundational justification

based on the subject and they try to do mthis by means of hermeneutics.

8 The issues of subjectivity are also raised by a number of other papers, most notably

Bjørn Torgrim Ramberg, who focusses on the struggle of pragmatism with subjectivity

and reaches the conclusion that final vocabularies, “as structures of commitment and

orientation, are […] something we as thinking agents operate in and through” (58). For

Torberg, his reflections lead to a “significant reinterpretation of Rorty’s notion of a

final vocabulary.” Final vocabularies turn out to be not final but rather present “the

momentary shape of our rational responsiveness to the world and our dynamic ability

to engage the world, and to be engaged by it, as thinking and thus ever changing

agents” (59).


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9 This collection, as my summaries have demonstrated, offers rich food for thought and

is to be recommended for anyone who wants to consider the relationship of

pragmatism to hermeneutics and to literature. Not the least of the benefits of this

collection is the fact that diverging viewpoints have not been ignored or hamonized,

e.g., with regard to the role of the future in Rorty’s pragmatism (26). This also means

that some points of Rorty’s pragmatism and cultural politics which are affirmed in one

part of the book are called into question in another. But that, of course, is as it should

be, if we do not want to accept Rorty’s own vocabularies as final.

NOTES

1. A mostly non-pragmatic discussion of these issues can be found in my recent article “Wahrheit

ohne Methode? Hermeneutischer Relativismus als Herausforderung,” Philotheos: International

Journal for Philosophy and Theology, 12, 2012, 3-16.

2. Christian Kohlroß, Literaturtheorie und Pragmatismus oder Die Frage nach den Gründen des

philologischen Wissens, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 2007.

3. He is the co-editor of a recent standard reference work Luhmann-Handbuch: Leben – Werk –

Wirkung, Stuttgart, Metzler, 2012.

AUTHORS

TILL KINZEL

TU Braunschweig, Germany

Till.Kinzel[at]gmx.de


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William JAMES, A Pluralistic Universeedited and introduced by H. G. Callaway, Newcastle upon Tyne,Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008

Michela Bella

REFERENCES

William JAMES, A Pluralistic Universe, edited and introduced by H. G. Callaway, Newcastle

upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008

1 This recent edition of A Pluralistic Universe (1909), edited and introduced by

H. G. Callaway, is a recovery and a close examination of James’s pluralism. The editor

proposes a study edition of this famous text, which is the latest book published during

James’ lifetime. His long preface, his work on lexicon, his notes, and the attention he

gives to the historical background are great tools to pragmatism students and scholars

for critical reading.

2 In this book, in many ways James argues against absolute monism and explains his

promotion of Pluralism, very well orchestrating the rhythm of partes destruens and pars

construens in his discourse. His strategy is to make his audience more and more

convinced about the insufficiency of idealism, as to give them concrete consistency of

the pluralistic alternative. He starts to notice that the idealistic Weltanschauung cannot

fully satisfy our need of feeling at home in the world, and it is this necessary to justify

James’s attempt to support and encourage other possible choices. In fact, although

empiricism and rationalism have – in a pantheistic sense – a spiritualistic vision in

common, there is a fundamental discordance between these two philosophical and

temperamental portraits. The former is, indeed, defined by James as “the habit of

explaining wholes by parts,” and the latter as the opposite “habit of explaining parts by

wholes” (5). As it is well known, the text moves from the assumption that our ways of

looking at the world are built on aesthetical and practical interests and that we reclaim

to the consequences of our preferences a necessitatis ratione. James maintains that we all

are led by beliefs that we try to support and justify in order to keep our beliefs going. In


282

this process, he says, a certain finality always appears to be prior to other reasons,

since our ‘will to believe’ is strictly connected to our interested human nature.

3 The book is based on a series of lectures James held at Oxford University in 1908.

Callaway focuses his attention on the continuation between James and Ralph Waldo

Emerson, both of whom had a main role in exporting American philosophy in England.

The editor also gives an important account of the historical framework of Hibbert

Lectures, considering the political and cultural context of United States before the first

World War. At that time British imperialism and European nationalism were at their

peak, and European countries contended one with another for US powerful naval

army’s alliance. In the first conference James recollected USA and England common

cultural backgrounds and wished they returned to their common philosophical routes –

as classical empiricism was –, identifying their common enemy with the pedantic and

over-technical German academic way of philosophizing. Callaway remarks on the

political tune running through the text, and he points out the famous and ambiguous

similarity proposed by James, the one saying that the pluralistic world is “more like a

federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom” (195).

Pluralism, Humanism and Nominalism

4 The philosophical critique to absolute monism is, however, the book’s very guideline.

James attacks such a theory both as it was acknowledged by Idealists of the end of the

XIX century and as it was sustained by Hegel. In On some Hegelisms (1882) James had

already expressed some objections to idealism and his ongoing questions seemed to be

whether ideal identity or concrete variety is the basis of our vision of the universe. He now

attempts to show pluralism as a pursuable view against rationalist metaphysics and its

main implications (determinism and perfectionism).

5 As Callaway very well underlines, James is mainly concerned with the nature of relations:

he wants to state the possibility of external relations, which were completely excluded

from monistic idealism. Absolute idealists didn’t believe a universe made up of

“collective or addicted form” is real, but they thought there could only be what James

called a “block-universe.” This refers to a reality thoroughly and systematically

predetermined in its parts from the all. In his discussion James is, of course, referring

to metaphysics quarrels on the nature of universals, but his socio-political concerns

can also be detected in his arguments. Callaway tries to separately follow these two

lines of analysis – theoretical and political – of the book, beginning with a critical

inquiry of the identitarian implications of James’s pluralism on theoretical and social

levels. According to pluralism:

there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality maynever get totally collected, […] and that a distributive form of reality, the each-form,is logically as acceptable and empirically as probable as the all-form commonlyacquiesced in as so obviously the self-evident thing. The contrast between thesetwo forms of a reality which we agree to suppose substantially spiritual is the topicof this course of lectures. (21)

6 James’s pluralistic view contests that an absolute logical union of reality could never be

possible, and he makes clear his thought denying the possibility of exclusive “internal

relations,” which means relations only internal to their terms. Conceptual identity can

never fully grasp reality in all of its variety. Such a view should be also considered the


283

core of James nominalist temptation. As Callaway sustains, nominalism is in accordance

with classic pragmatist fallibilism, which is a methodological and theoretical view

through which our theories and scientific laws should always leave margins for growth

and revision. There is nothing in our universe that can be considered definitive a priori,

neither in our scientific knowledge, nor in our social bonds or identitarian relations.

The pluralist suggests that reality is not a complete unity, all connected and perfect,

but there is always something escaping from our knowledge: something “not yet

considered.” Pragmatist anti-essentialism and humanism, as clearly disclosed in the

preface of this edition, are important to corroborate the conviction that doesn’t exist

such a previous nature of the world, something ready-made and absolute; it is time to

figure out another image of human relations where ideas don’t fall down from above,

but human beings are “real causes in nature.”

7 According to one of James’s most persistent and original claims of all his psychological

and philosophical thought, potentialities of human agency should be considered the

center of our natural dimension. Callaway proposes a careful analysis of James’s

critique to what is called ‘vicious intellectualism’ – as it is variously declined from

absolute monists –, which represents a very helpful and convincing contribution of his

preface to discussions on the text. By the words ‘vicious intellectualism’ James meant:

The treating of a name as excluding from the fact named what the name’sdefinition fails positively to include, is what I call ‘vicious intellectualism.’ (38)

8 Such a “radical rationalism” is at odds with James’ radical empiricism hence the

priority he gave to perception compared to the conceptual dimension. James took into

account many idealist authors and bitterly criticized their fallacies. They are all used to

go from one extreme to another suggesting false dilemmas, thus reducing ad absurdum

the thesis they disagree with. They mean only absolute independence by accident, so

that if relations have to be accidental, these authors can easily understand that it is

impossible to connect parts with one each other. In reverse, assuming that relations

can only be essential, they can say that the absolute union of all things is necessary. In

particular James analyses Lotze, Royce and Bradley’s arguments. Lotze attempted to

develop a spiritualistic conception of reality, gaining hints to Leibniz’s monadism and

pluralism. But, in the end he grew so concerned about avoiding the same pluralist

outcomes of his own theory that he tried to recover the Unity of all beings and

processes through his analysis of the empirical nature of interaction. James retains

Lotze’s concept of interaction among independent elements as a pure verbal operation,

it is a vain attempt to introduce the logical level of reasoning to avoid contradiction in

his theory.1 James did not believe such an abstract and speculative approach was

required. Reality – he said – is already coherent and he wonders why we should look for

a noumenic identity to fund and explain the phenomenic continuity.

9 His comparison with Hegel’s theories, started in his article published in 1882 on “Mind”

and later in The Will to Believe (1897), is the true background of James’s thought about

pluralism. He is now definitively refusing to assume knowledge to be total and

complete, as far as to negate everything, which is not positively included in the

conceptual knowledge of something. In James’s view, this kind of double negation

activates the Hegelian dialectic process:

Now Hegel himself, in building up his method of double negation, offers the vividestpossible example of this vice of intellectualism. Every idea of a finite thing is ofcourse a concept of that thing and not a concept of anything else. But Hegel treatsthis not being a concept of anything else as if it were equivalent to the concept of


284

anything else not being, or in other words as if it were a denial or negation ofeverything else. Then, as the other things, thus implicitly contradicted by the thingfirst conceived, also by the same law contradict it, the pulse of dialectic commencesto beat and the famous triads begin to grind out the cosmos. (66)

10 James uses the phrase “vicious intellectualism” to explain this general defect of

absolutistic reasoning. He believes the Hegelian system is based on the identity of

contradictories’ principle and the principle of totality. This second principle states that to

know one part, it is necessary to know the totality of that part. In 1882 James

underlined the ‘abstractness’ and logical fallacies of Hegelian definitions which the

famous philosopher made to reach his conclusions. James was particularly upset by the

fact that Hegel did not distinguish the respect under which he used terms. In regard to

this critique, Callaway points out pivotal passages where James’s nominalist drift is

undeniable. He is also interested in stressing James’ nominalist inclination to remark a

great distinction between the view of the American philosopher and his famous

colleague, R. W. Emerson.

James and Emerson

11 The comparison between James and Emerson is a very appealing feature of Callaway’s

preface and, of course, his research interests.2 The great work he did on lexicon and

historical context is valuable, it allows students to approach these texts more easily.

Here he states that despite their discontinuity about nominalism, both James and

Emerson sustained, more or less consciously, forms of pluralism. The orator of Concord

was a good friend of James’s father, their friendship was due to their common ties with

Transcendentalism and in fact common to both Emerson and James was a certain

emphasis on spiritual rebirth and the aversion to passive fatalism. Notwithstanding,

James considered Emerson’s idea of Absolute so close to the Hegelians’ one and he did

not feel at ease with such an idea of transcendence, suggesting a reality which is

‘unexperiencable.’ As a matter of fact, James associates idealistic absolutism with some

kind of unavoidable predetermination. And, because of this linkage, he just could not

easily hold the attention Emerson gave to individuality together with his faith in a

divine plan.

12 In Callaway’s closer analysis, Emerson is an anti-predestinationalist and a convinced

anti-nominalist. The Emersonian meliorism was routed in his realistic thinking of

natural and moral law, which he considered to be in fieri. Such a belief contrasts with

the nominalist temptation we recognize in James’s pluralism and in his psychological

interests, as well. Callaway also points out that with James there is neither the same

stress Emerson put on Law, nor the same attention he gave to connections between

human individual freedom and our growing skill in understanding Laws.

13 James and Emerson clearly shared a similar attention to individuality as much as

Callaway can talk about radical pluralism for both of them. He also considers how

Emerson was less conscious of his own pluralistic outcomes than, of course, James was.

Moreover, their perspectives remain different in regards to the rule they gave to action:

James focused on the importance of human activity to freedom as much as Emerson

emphasized its theoretical development, though Emerson maintained in his proto-

pragmatism style that ‘every thought is for the sake of action.’ In a nutshell, Callaway

considers Emerson to be still anchored in Platonic and Neo-Platonic tradition, while


285

James decidedly kept away from that philosophical view. In conclusion, it is also

important to remember the critical attitude these two thinkers shared towards

contemporary forms of political imperialism.

Pluralism in United States of America nowadays

14 The alternative between absolutism and pluralism, which James strived to mark out at

a philosophical level, can also be considered a very useful tool to investigate

contemporary American socio-political order and its historical issues. In this spirit, on

a political level, Callaway retains the quest for an ideal “organic unity” to be taken

primarily as a philosophical mistake: we need to keep in mind that this idea is just an

insidious and dangerous abstraction which does not help the USA to gain concrete

equilibrium between the unity of the country and the diversity of its constitutive

elements. From James’s achievements on, variety has always been retained a source for

America, which is a country that is from its foundation searching for a balance between

nationalism and federalism. As James stated, the “ever not quite” should be a monitum

stating that a space for difference and its growth is always to be preserved. Even if

difference is not a good in itself, we can anyway consider it a potentiality to protect:

only through difference we can develop and enrich our cultural and political

exchanges, hence bringing meliorisms into our society.

15 American national identity is not set on models of ethnic or religious routes, it has

never been a homogeneous unity but a created one: “One from Many.” Such an

historical formation allows American society how important it is to combine the best

qualities of every single group and persons through democratic procedures. It also

permits them to achieve new goals which couldn’t be realized independently. As

Callaway highlights, there is a nominalist tendency first in James and then in Dewey

stressing the experiential and individual side in regards to the legal one. This does not

mean democracy can be morally vacant. Instead, it should always be ruled and led from

institutions. A democratic society needs laws to guarantee our possibility of living

together, but it also needs uniformity and suppression of pluralities to be avoided. If

constitution preserves freedom and diversities, it is also useful to control their

excesses. Callaway retains constitutional tradition to be a shelter against any possible

excess committed by the majority of the Congress. He considers auto-formation and

civil organization – often based on models of religious congregations – to be

fundamental. In the end it is important to notice, as Callaway does, that democracy and

pluralism need a ground of shared moral values to be preserved, because institutional

procedures alone cannot totally control neither forms of excessive centralization of

power nor lobbyists’ pressures.


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BIBLIOGRAPHY

EMERSON R. W., (2006), The Conduct of Life: A Philosophical Reading, H. G. Callaway (ed.), University

Press of America.

EMERON R. W., (2008), Society and Solitude, Twelve Chapters. A New Study Edition with Notes,

Philosophical Commentary, and Historical Contextualization, H. G. Callaway (ed.), Edwin Mellen Press.

KRAUSHAAR O. F., (1939), “Lotze as a Factor in the Development of James’s Radical Empiricism and

Pluralism,” The Philosophical Review, 48, 5, 455-71.

NOTES

1. Kraushaar 1939.

2. Emerson 2006, and 2008.

AUTHORS

MICHELA BELLA

Università di Roma Tre

michela.bella[at]uniroma3.it


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