Tag Archives: William James

The American Pragmatists by Cheryl Misak

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This is an entry in a series called The Oxford History of Philosophy, written by an expert on the philosophical school known as “pragmatism”. Here’s how Oxford University Press describes the book:

Cheryl Misak presents a history of the great American philosophical tradition of pragmatism, from its inception in the Metaphysical Club of the 1870s to the present day. She identifies two dominant lines of thought in the tradition: the first begins with Charles S. Peirce and Chauncey Wright and continues through to Lewis, Quine, and Sellars; the other begins with William James and continues through to Dewey and Rorty. This ambitious new account identifies the connections between traditional American pragmatism and twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy, and links pragmatism to major positions in the recent history of philosophy, such as logical empiricism. Misak argues that the most defensible version of pragmatism must be seen and recovered as an important part of the analytic tradition.

According to Professor Misak, “the most defensible version of pragmatism” is the version initiated by C. S. Peirce and Chauncey Wright in the 19th century and carried forward by C. I. Lewis, W. V. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars in the 20th. She argues that it is more defensible because it considers truth to be less subjective. In the caricature or simplification of pragmatism as set forth by William James and criticized by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, true statements are those that “work for us”. If religious beliefs make your life better, for example, they’re true. By contrast, the tradition that began with Peirce treats truth more objectively. Statements may “work for us” even though they’re false. The Peircean pragmatists see a stronger relationship between truth and how the world is, regardless of human goals or interests.

It isn’t easy to briefly explain what pragmatism is, but Prof. Misak gives it a try in the Preface:

Pragmatists are empiricists in that they require beliefs to be linked to experience. They want their explanations and ontology down-to-earth (natural as opposed to supernatural) and they require philosophical theories to arise out of our practices. As Peirce put the pragmatic maxim, we must look to the upshot of our concepts in order to understand them….

[But] pragmatists reject the part of empiricism that says that all of our beliefs originate in experience and that our beliefs can be linked in an atomistic way to discrete experiences…. They reject any naturalism that gives ontological priority to matter or physicality — they want to consider whether value, generality, chance, etc. might be part of the natural world. They are holists, taking their view to encompass all of science, logic, mathematics, art, religion, ethics and politics. Unlike most of their empiricist predecessors, they fence off no realm of inquiry from the principles they set out.

In the Conclusion, she adds:

The core pragmatist thought is about the human predicament. We must try to explain our practices and concepts, including our epistemic norms and standards, using those very practices, concepts, norms and standards. This is the pragmatist’s task and we have found that, within the pragmatist tradition, there are different ways of trying to fulfill it.

I’ll finish with a brief example of pragmatist thinking. The great Scottish philosopher David Hume is sometimes viewed as a skeptic (e.g. he believed there is no rational basis for ever thinking that one event causes another). The pragmatist John Dewey, however, saw Hume as a predecessor:

While in his study, Hume finds skepticism compelling, but as soon as he leaves that secluded place of theoretical philosophizing, skepticism loses any force it might have had. The skeptic’s doubts, as Peirce would put it, are paper doubts [107].

According to the pragmatists, what matters, even from a philosophical perspective, is how our ideas connect with our lives outside the philosophy class.

Update (January 2020): Without realizing I’d already read it, I read it again. More here.

Mowing the Lawn and the Moral Equivalent of War

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Gardening has a genteel image, especially among people who don’t garden. I avoid gardening whenever possible, since it involves dirt, sweat, insect bites and bending over.

There are gardening activities that I find hard to avoid, however: pulling weeds, cutting hedges and mowing the lawn. Mainly mowing the lawn. Most of our neighbors are in an unspoken competition to have lawns that look like putting greens. Our next door neighbor mows his lawn every day or two. He’s definitely got a nice-looking lawn. Very flat and very green.

As I was mowing the lawn today, amid the sunshine and high humidity (trying to avoid a confrontation with the lawn police), it occurred to me that cutting the grass is a lot like warfare. The plants, mostly grass, but various other forms of plant life too (especially on our lawn), are trying to claim territory, either horizontally or vertically. We grant them the right to spread out horizontally, for the most part, but draw the line some inches above the ground. Cross that line and you will be mowed down, just like World War I soldiers poking their heads up out of their trenches or scrambling across no man’s land. 

We don’t use bullets in this war. We use blades. Most of us have made the transition to mechanized warfare (I’ve got an aging red Toro). Those of us who don’t want to get our hands dirty hire mercenaries (many from other countries). Some of us use chemical weapons. There is even a nuclear option (concrete, sand, ivy, etc.).

It’s true that when we mow the lawn, we aren’t trying to kill our grass — we just want to limit its growth (although we don’t mind killing interlopers like dandelions). We love our grass. We want it to prosper. Some of us even nurture it. So the war metaphor only goes so far.

But in the heat of battle, marching along, cutting the tops off thousands of living things, remembering past battles, knowing that this force of nature won’t give up, it will counterattack again and again, this labor certainly feels like the “Moral Equivalent of War”.

To quote William James from his essay of that name, written in 1906:

“If now — and this is my idea — there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man’s relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women [!] would value them more highly, they would be better fathers [!] and teachers of the following generation.”

And lawns would be quite neat.

“The Moral Equivalent of War”