Suggestions for Further Reading (Including Internet Resources)
1 C. S. Peirce et al., Pragmatism, The Classic Writings, ed. H. S. Thayer (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982). A handy selection that includes readings by Peirce, William James and John Dewey, with editorial introductions.
2 A useful collection of essays is J. R. Shook and J. Margolis (ed.), A Companion to Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). See esp. Chapter 2 on James, and Ch. 1 on Peirce.
3 For a compelling neo-pragmatical defense of the philosophical ideas of James and Dewey see H. Putnam and R. A. Putnam, Pragmatism as a Way of Life: The Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey, ed. David Macarthur (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2017).
4 For an introduction to C. S. Peirce, see C. Hookway, Peirce (London: Routledge, 1985) and also A. Atkin, Peirce (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015).
5 The more advanced reader may want to consider R. Rorty’s Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982) – a provocative exploration into the contributions of pragmatist American philosophers.
6 In terms of online resources, there are a couple of useful entries on William James and pragmatism to be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/ (by C. Legg and C. Hookway) and at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/ (by R. Goodman). The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has the following entries: https://www.iep.utm.edu/james-o/ (by W. P. Pomerleau) and https://www.iep.utm.edu/pragmati/ (by D. McDermid).
7 M. Bragg and his panel discuss the American philosophy of pragmatism on his radio program In Our Time (2005) at https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003k9f5.
8 In the following episode of the Philosophy Bites podcasts, R. Tallisse talks about the pragmatist movement and some of the differences between the ideas of its founders James, Peirce and Dewey: https://philosophybites.com/2010/02/robert-talisse-on-pragmatism.html.
Notes
* William James, ‘What Pragmatism Means’, abridged with minor formatting changes from the second in a series of lectures given in Boston and Columbia University in 1906–1907 and published as a book in 1907 under the title Pragmatism (Longmans Green, New York).
1 1 Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ (1878).
2 2 ‘Regnant’: in control, dominant (literally ‘ruling’).
3 3 For nominalism, see introduction to Part III, section 3.
4 4 For utilitarianism, see Part VIII, section 7.
5 5 For positivism, see Part II, section 11.
6 6 F. C. S. Schiller (1864–1937), an influential pragmatist thinker of the time; John Dewey (1859–1952), leading pragmatist philosopher, psychologist and educational theorist, who developed a version of pragmatism he called ‘instrumentalism’.
7 7 See introduction to Part VI, section 7.
11 Against Scepticism: G. E. Moore, A Defence of Common Sense*
In our earlier extracts from the writings of Kant, and even more in Hegel, we can see the style and language of philosophy becoming increasingly technical, with a consequent loss of the transparency and directness at which many of its earlier practitioners had aimed. In our own time, the writings of Hegel and his followers, in particular, have often been accused of being at best hard to follow, and at worst verging on the rankly unintelligible. At the start of the twentieth century, with the rise of the so-called ‘analytic’ movement, there was something of a revulsion against philosophical obscurantism, and a move towards a more down-to-earth approach. As far as the philosophy of knowledge is concerned, one important influence was the work of George Edward Moore, widely regarded as one of the founders of the analytical philosophy which now predominates in the English-speaking world.
In his famous essay ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ (1925), Moore pours a cold douche on the tortuous agonizings of many past philosophers about the possibility of genuine knowledge. He lists a number of basic ‘truisms’ of which he insists he is entitled to be quite certain – for example the proposition that the earth exists, and existed for a large number of years before he was born. (Remember that Descartes, in the Meditations (extract 4, above), had used his method of doubt – the dreaming argument, the hypothesis of a malicious deceiver – to call into question just such apparently obvious beliefs as the belief in an external world.) For Moore, such plain common-sense beliefs are just known to be true, and any philosopher who maintains the contrary is sooner or later bound to be trapped in inconsistency.
We can see here something of an echo of Hume’s scathing attacks against the wilder kinds of philosophical scepticism. But whereas Hume (extract 7, above) had pointed to our irresistibly strong human beliefs as being too strong for the sceptic to subvert, Moore suggests that what is wrong with philosophical scepticism is that it is inevitably trapped in a self-refuting paradox. The very fact that some philosophers have called into question the existence of the earth, for example, shows that the existence of the earth cannot be denied ‘for when I speak of “philosophers” I mean, of course, as we all do, exclusively philosophers who have been human beings, with human bodies that have lived on the earth’.
The argument is not entirely convincing as it stands, since there is surely nothing to prevent the sceptic presenting his or her position in a more guarded way that avoids commitment to the supposed common-sense view (Descartes, indeed, aimed to do just that). Moore none the less succeeds in raising the interesting thought that the philosopher’s job might be not so much to propound high-flown theories as to remove the confusions and mistakes of previous theorists. The idea was taken up in a more sophisticated way by the famous Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who argued in On Certainty (first published in 1969, eighteen years after his death) that the basic propositions instanced by Moore form part of a fundamental framework that is unavoidable if it is even to make sense to raise questions about what we know: ‘I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false … All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis, takes place within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments; no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure as the element within which arguments have their life … I should like to say Moore does not know what he asserts he knows, but it stands fast for him, as also for me; regarding it as absolutely solid is part of our method of doubt and enquiry.’1 Whatever judgement one passes on Moore’s approach, it continues to provoke important questions about the relationship between philosophical theorizing about knowledge and the seemingly unshakeable everyday beliefs which we all share.
In what follows I have merely tried to state, one by one, some of the most important points in which my philosophical position differs from positions which have been taken up by some other philosophers … I am going to begin by enunciating, under the heading (1), a whole long list of propositions, which may seem, at first sight, such obvious truisms as not to be worth stating: they are, in fact, a set of propositions, every one of which (in my own opinion) I know, with certainty, to be true …
(1) The propositions to be included in this list are the following. There exists at present a living human body, which is my body. This