In Our Time - Pragmatism

Episode Date: November 17, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the American philosophy of pragmatism. A pragmatist "turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad apriori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power". A quote from William James' 1907 treatise Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. William James, along with John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce, was the founder of an American philosophical movement which flowered during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century and the first twenty years of the 20th century. It purported that knowledge is only meaningful when coupled with action. Nothing is true or false - it either works or it doesn't. It was a philosophy which was deeply embedded in the reality of life, concerned firstly with the individual's direct experience of the world he inhabited. In essence, practical application was all. But how did Pragmatism harness the huge scientific leap forward that had come with Charles Darwin's ideas on evolution? And how did this dynamic new philosophy challenge the doubts expressed by the Sceptics about the nature and extent of knowledge? Did Pragmatism influence the economic and political ascendancy of America in the early 20th century? And did it also pave the way for the contemporary preoccupation with post-modernism? With A C Grayling, Professor of Applied Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London and a Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford; Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers' Magazine; Miranda Fricker, Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders and Charles Sanders-Pers were the founders of pragmatism, an American philosophical movement which flowered during the last 30 years of the 19th century and the first 20th century.

It argued that knowledge is only meaningful when coupled with action. Nothing is true or false. It either works for it doesn't. Pragmatism is a philosophy deeply embedded in the reality of life, concerned firstly with the individual's direct experience of the world he or she inhabits. In essence, practical application is all. How did pragmatism harness the scientific leap forward that had come with Charles Darwin's ideas on evolution?

How did this dynamic new philosophy challenge the doubts expressed by the skeptics about the nature and extent of knowledge? and did pragmatism influence the economic and political ascendancy of America in the early 20th century? With me to discuss pragmatism is A.C. Grayling, Professor of Applied Philosophy at Birkbeck College University of London and a fellow of St. Hans College Oxford. Julian Baggini, author, editor, sorry, of the Philosopher's Magazine, and Miranda Frickricker lecturer in philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. Anthony Grayling, can you just tell us who were the pragmatists and what did they stand for? The three classic pragmatists are Charles Sanders Perce, William James, brother of the more famous Henry James novelist, and John Dewey.

And they were near contemporaries. They lived and flourished in the later part of the 19th century, early 20th century. And the pragmatist movement is dated by William James, who is perhaps the principal mouthpiece of the movement, really, the popularizer of it, to meetings that he and Charles Perce and others had in the early 1870s in a rather short-lived club called the Metaphysical Club where these ideas first began to take shape. Of course they weren't invented then, but they were given focus. And how did it kind of come out of nowhere?

What did it build on pragmatism? Well, it had a number of different sources, actually, but I suppose the two principal ones were, first a reaction to the prevailing philosophical ideology of the time, which in the 19th century was very much influenced by Hegel, by absolutist metaphysics, by rather abstract conceptions about truth and reality. And they were reacting against that.

As you put it in your introduction there, pragmatism is a philosophy of practice. It says that beliefs are true only if they work, that everything that we do and think is engaged with matters of actual daily importance. therefore all our interests, all our theorisings, all our activities are really hands-on. And that's a big difference really between that rather practical applied view of philosophy and the much more abstract and absolutist version. But the second thing was that the Civil War had not long finished.

It took place in the early 1860s in America. And there was an entirely new attitude and a great new flourishing of activity and expansion westwards, great capitalist development in America, and a new spirit abroad. And the Americans no longer felt quite the clients of European thinking that they had before. And I think this probably had a large part to play. And what about Darwin's theory? Did that influence some?

It did indeed, yes. One of the people in the metaphysical club, because there were a couple of characters who were members of the metaphysical club who had a great influence, especially on Perse. A man called Chauncey Wright was one of them. Another was a legal theorist called Nicholas Sinjan Green, both of whom died rather young, so their writings are not very extensive. We don't remember them much now, but their views in conversation were tremendously important.

And this man Chauncey wrote, to some extent anticipated, in theory anyway, Darwin's thinking about evolution and welcomed the publication of the origin of species with open arms and what was a great expounder of it in the American context rather than the way that Huxley was in England. And that had a very big impact indeed on thinking in America at the time. Can you just tell us a little about Sanders Perth? Did he was the first person to coin the term pragmatism? He came out of a not academic, not an academic or philosophical background, did he? He was an extraordinary character.

He was a genius, I think. There's almost no question about that. And his contributions to mathematics and especially to logic in which he anticipated very many of the more technical developments in logic after his time were enormous. Now his father was a professor of mathematics at Harvard University, so he'd in that sense come out of an academic background.

The point about him was that his private life was regarded with great suspicion by people. He was quite a handsome man when young and something of a philandra. And his first marriage to a woman called Zena Perth was a very unhappy one. Zena Perst took the view of the people who committed adultery should either be imprisoned

for life or executed. So you can imagine, given that Perce himself had something of an eye for the the ladies. There wasn't a very happy situation at home, and they divorced, and after his divorce, he lived with somebody who turned out to be a gypsy, apparently. And this so scandalised, a very puritanical American society, that he was excluded from academia. He only had a temporary job at Johns Hopkins University for a little while. But despite that, he wrote prodigiously, never really finished anything. He was a great starter of projects and a kind of polymathic

genius. And it was he whom William James credited with inventing that the, that, the, the name pragmatism and also having formalised many of the ideas that influenced the other pragmatists. Julian Begini, let's turn then to William James, the contemporary of Perth. What was his contribution? He came to it by a different route, didn't he? Yeah, there's a kind of a different angle on pragmatism. And the thing about Persis, I mean, for Perth's truth was what works, if you want to put it in those terms. But Perce did think there'd be some kind of agreement in the long term. The scientific method, which he thought was the best method for discovering truth. he believed in the long run all intelligent inquiries would agree on the one view.

So although in one sense it debunks the old idea of truth as something out there absolute to be revered and discovered, on the other hand he retains that view that there is ultimately a one truth, it's just not quite what we think of as truth. But what James kind of did was opened up the possibility that if truth really is what works and if it is what is simply useful to believe, as he put it, then it may well be the case that what is true for someone may not be true for someone else and so forth. And this was particularly evident in his approach to religious belief and belief in God. And he wrote a very famous essay called The Will to Believe,

in which he was talking about how we should approach the question of God's existence. And he thought that, you know, with a question like this, there was no actual rational way of settling the matter and that therefore we were perfectly justified in using non-rational means. to determine whether or not we believe in God. And so this is kind of pragmatism in the kind of perhaps more permissive sense, which I think in certain British philosophers perhaps

thought badly of. They let too much in. In other words, he's saying, if it feels right to you to believe, then that's your choice. You will that to happen, and that's fine. That's, in summary, we did have some sort of good arguments for this.

It wasn't just a kind of view like that. And he thought, if you look at the question of belief in God, there are three things about it. First of all, it's a live option to believe in God or not. In other words, the matter isn't settled either way. It's a genuine choice over whether or not God believes. Secondly, he believes you're somehow forced to take a stance on this. Either you believe in God or you either suspend belief or disbelieve. And you've got to do one of those things.

You can't just sort of shrug your shoulders, because even shrugging your shoulders is to refuse to believe. But thirdly, this is a momentous decision. It really affects how you live your life and your values whether or not you believe in God. Now, given that you've got this open question, it's a forced one, and it's momentous, and given that he thought there was no rational way to settle it,

that's why you're justified in believing purely on the basis of will. So there are arguments behind it. But as I understand it, Perth was horrified by William James' use of pragmatism in this particular direction. Yes, I think that's true. I think what Perth didn't like was that James opened up. He made it too permissive. As he said, you know, it's just,

truth is just what has cash value, just what it is useful for you to believe. And Perth really did believe that, no, we could agree on the one truth, and we wouldn't have this plurality of truths. And so actually Perce renamed his own brand of pragmatism, pragmaticism. Pragmaticism, I can't even say it,

it's such an awkward term, and therefore it hasn't really ever taken off. But in broad terms, would you say that both of those two, agreed that what was true was what was most useful. It could be proved to be useful and efficient. Absolutely. They both agreed on that, but they had very different views on what that meant

in terms of whether or not we would settle on one truth or whether we have to accept a plurality of truths. Miranda Fricker, the third of this term, it is John Dewey, a near enough contemporary person, James. But as I understand he was less interested in theoretical issues and more in how pragmatism was applied in society. Can you take us through that? Yes, I mean, I think that's right. He was, they all shared a certain suspicion of what had happened to academic philosophy. He was getting more and more academic, more and more technical. I think it was James, in fact, who commented that it was surely a crime against humanity, more or less, to write technical philosophy. But Dewey took this further. He described his pragmatism as anti-intellectual. And what he really meant by that was he felt that philosophy ought to be a spur to social change.

And you also felt that philosophy ought to be informed by society. So there's also two-way input, if you like, between the two of them. And we can see this in his approach to epistemology, which just means theory of knowledge, where traditionally very dry questions are asked about the definition of knowledge and so on. But he insisted we should talk about inquiry, the practices of inquiry. How do we actually discover the nature of the world, in science in particular? And his view of inquiry was that it was something collective and social, so that we each inquiry was responsible to a community of inquiries

for getting it right for exchanging views and sharing evidence and so on. And he thought that inquiry began also from something practical. It was always a problem-solving conception he had from the start, not something that we go in for just to sort of revise our beliefs, but something that you find the world in a state of, what he described as an incomplete or problematic state, perhaps because there's something needs to do and you don't know how to do. Some puzzle has arisen about that you need to solve.

And that would, as it were, spur inquiry, there'd be a sort of transaction between the inquirer and the world or his environment. And then in gaining knowledge through the gathering of evidence and so on, that situation would be calmed, if you like, and become unproblematical because you've found out how to cure an illness or solve some other practical problem. And you also, and this I think is very notably a forerunner for, contemporary ideas about science practice, he thought of it as an ongoing and changing historical mode of inquiry. So it wasn't just that, of course, the state of evidence changes over time

so that we can know more as time goes on, all being well. But also that the very ideas of what counts as good evidence will change. So he had what we've now called a historicist's conception of scientific inquiry, and that I think is quite remarkable. Can you explain for us his notion of warranted assertions, wasn't it? Yes. He, like the other two classic pragmatist, he related truth to what it's useful to believe. But the form that took in him was, in a sense, quite reasoned. He thought that for something to be warrantedly assertible, you have to have, as it were, sufficient reason to state it, presented as true to another person. That's what we mean by a statement being warrantedly assertible.

And he just thought that out of his conception of inquiry we have a conception of knowledge which is just the output of competent inquiry. There's nothing more like some fit between our inquiry and some mysterious external world that needs to guarantee something as true. Knowledge is just the output of competent inquiry and that means that truth is just what competent inquiry

deems it to be. So what you can, in the context of competent inquiry, assert to be true with reason, is all there is to truth. and that's all that's meant by warranted assertibility. Before we leave this, Anthony Grayling, as you, in your opening remarks, hinted out, was this a huge difference and change

in the way philosophy was considered? Yes, it was. Let's say Hegel and Descartes before the two majestic figures before then. Did it sort of fly against them? Very much so, because, as Marrond has just pointed out, in connection with warranted assertibility, and the view that was being reacted, to was that truth is in some sense a correspondence with a reality, a separate independent

reality. Now, if you think about that for a minute, you see that lying behind it is a model of inquiry, a view about the nature of knowledge, in which the mind is in some way a mirror of nature. It reflects the way things are out there in nature. And if the conceptions in the mind are true to or true of what's out there in nature, it's because of this relation of correspondence between them. But Dewey said that there isn't this relationship between mind and nature of that kind, across a gap in which the mind somehow has to pick up on the way that nature is. The relationship is much more the relationship with the hand to reality. The hand is in nature and it's dealing with things. It's not the spectator perspective, but the participant perspective. And therefore,

knowledge is practice. And that's why truth is a matter of warranted assertibility. It's very interesting, because we've already heard that each of the three classic pragmatism gave a slightly different version of this idea that truth is a matter of practicalities. Perst saying that truth is the opinion upon which everybody will converge in the end after a process of inquiry. James saying truth is what works. Dewey saying truth is what you're warranted in saying is true. And all of these are different ways of trying to articulate the thought that it is not a relation of correspondence between truth and fact. Well, I think, you know, Perth would certainly believe that his view was following on,

much from Kant, and that the crucial change had really come there. Because Kant was really the first major philosopher in his idea, this Copernican revolution, to turn around the idea that knowledge is fundamentally about getting our concepts to match the nature of the objective world out there, independent of experience. So Kant had already, as it were, made that step of seeing that perhaps ultimate reality is inaccessible to us, and we have to make do with a sufficiency of understanding, if you like, rather than a totality. Now, I think that paved the way.

I still agree, though, with Anthony, that the pragmatist's interpretation of that and how they moved that forward was quite a radical break. But it did have its origins back there in Kant. Yes, this closing of the gap between inquiries, where mind, what confronts us in inquiry and world, the thing that we thought before we were trying to copy or mirror when we were aiming for knowledge,

is a fascinating move in a sort of anti-sceptical way, because all three pragmatists also had in common a real anti-Cartesian. They were against the skepticism that Descartes had set up as a preoccupation for the tradition. I should stay briefly in defence of poor old Descartes, that he wasn't a skeptic. Descartes posed a very powerful skeptical idea. How do we know, do we have absolute certainty that we're not mistaken? And he had this idea that what if we were being deceived by an evil demon?

Everything we take ourselves to know might in fact be false, except one little thing that I am thinking. But Descartes had his own solution to that. He thought that, roughly speaking, a benevolent god wouldn't let that be so. But unfortunately, his real legacy is the anxiety about scepticism. And the form it takes is this idea that's a gulf between what's before the mind in inquiry, the realm of mere appearances, how things seem to me to be, and how they might really be in the external world.

Now, the pragmatists were against this idea intellectually, and also in a way ideologically, certainly Dewey especially thought that it was just a kind of silly intellectual game and philosophy shouldn't be asking these sorts of questions. And we can see how starting with the idea that truth is internal to inquiry, it's something that owing to the nature of inquiry is readily available to us, it's just what we have reason to present as true, just closes off this question of there being a gap between how things seem according to our best reasons to be and how they actually are.

Truth is, as it were, brought in, I had to say, brought into their mind, it's brought into our practice of inquiry. Taking up John Dewe, Julian, he took it, you could say he took the pragmatist philosophy into society rather emphatically with his involvement in Roosevelt's New Deal. Can you, let's talk about this, for a little one, about the Americanness of this philosophy

and the way it influenced American society. The Americanness is interesting, and certainly the pragmatists were sort of invoked in the New Deal, although Dewe himself was critical of it from a left-wing perspective. I think the relevant, the obvious relevance of Dewey's view to politics is this idea that Miranda was talking about that really finding solutions to our problems

is a communal effort, it's not an individual thing, so we get away from the idea of the philosopher in the garret just reasoning a priori on their own. There's a sort of social endeavour, also because the problems of philosophy, or as he puts it, the problems of men, not the problems of philosophy, you know, in that detached sense. And so that means that there's a,

a natural sympathy here with ideas of democracy and democratic participation and solving our problems through that collective endeavour and also that collectivism I think was what made it sympathetic to certain New Deal ideas. But however, the New Deal itself, I think from Dewey's point of view, was an inadequate move in that direction. Anthony Greil, can we just keep moving into the Americanness of it? and this notion of the frontier thesis, how does that play in an argument about pragmatism?

Well, indirectly, I think, because it's part of the socio-economic background of pragmatism. The frontier thesis, put forward by Turner, is that the tremendous leap forward in the American economy in the second half of the 19th century was the result of the westward expansion. They opened up tremendous new resources, really, natural resources, timber, minerals, the opportunities offered to entrepreneurs.

And this gave such a great infusion of energy into the American economy that it expanded rapidly. It was, so to speak, the China of its day. It grew so fast. And it was also, therefore, an economy that demanded practicalities. It wanted engineers, people who could build railways, people who could put up buildings and dig mines. It didn't want to get lost in abstractions. It also created a number of important social tensions because whereas on the one hand, there were lots and lots of opportunities

and the immigrants who were flooding into America at that time had a marvellous field for their endeavours and opportunities. It also meant that it was an insufficiently regulated economy. In other words, people weren't protected in simple things like health and safety at work and the rest. And Dewey's own interest in these matters was sparked off by being caught on a Pullman train during a train strike and he sat and talked for hours and hours so the people who were on strike and why they were

and what their conditions of work were like, what their wages were. Immediately out of this experience, he wrote to his wife and said, I'm just bowled over by how things are out there and what we ought to be doing as thinkers is trying to engage with this and provide solutions. That's why as Julian says he was critical of the New Deal, not because he was opposed to it, but because he didn't think it meant anywhere near far enough.

I mean, in a sense, he was also almost an American socialist. But added to that, especially in the case of Dewey, was the fact that he thought that the society was not taking enough thought about how it educated people for life in that society. He was tremendously interested in education. And in fact, while he was at the University of Chicago, he founded a school. It seems odd to us now that it was called the laboratory school because they were going to experiment on these children

to see what the best form of education was. And he said, people for this society of ours and for this economy, or ought to be educated in a way that fully engages them on all fronts. And so he thought that the cookery classes were tremendously important, not just because you could feed yourself, but because you would learn mathematics by weighing and measuring ingredients. You would learn chemistry by seeing how they interact with one another in the cooking pot. You would learn geography because you know where the ingredients came from.

You would learn, you know, etc., etc. So he was very, very much a pragmatist in every sense of the term. Yes, the laboratory school still exists, actually, and its mission statement is still learning through doing, and it's absolutely still identified with that Dewey and ideal. But I think with the Americanists, there was this particular moment called the Progressive Era, just sort of after 1900,

and where there was a moment of great hope and the idea that many different disciplines, intellectual disciplines, can come together and help promote democracy and promote social change. Now Dewey was the head of a multidisciplinary department at the University of Chicago, not just philosophy but psychology. And he was terrifically involved in these educational practices.

His great friend Jane Adams, who was a pioneer in the settlement movement, this movement which actually started in England in the East End, where educated men normally would go and live with the poor and help learn from then about how things were. And you can see the Dewey connection there and also help promote social progress. and I think this great moment of optimism in American history, which was just a span of a few years, coincided with the rise of pragmatism,

and there was a great sort of flourishing of optimism and the idea that you could have a real causal impact through intellectual activity. Did pragmatism have an effect on American feminist philosophers? Yes, certainly. There's a fascinating, gradual unveiling of the number of women who were influenced by and had an influence on pragmatism. Jane Adams is one of them.

And I think the explanation is this question of what was going on in the progressive area. Pragmatism was a philosophy that spoke to people who cared about social change. Now, feminists cared about social change and wanted to think that it was possible to use their minds to be activists. And I think that's one of the reasons it was so attractive to them. I mean, Gertrude Stein was a pupil of James' as was Mary Witton Culkins, who became the first woman head of the American Philosophical Association. Charlotte Perkins Gilman knew Dewey, was a contemporary of Dewey, and shared a certain ambivalent relationship with Darwinism that Dewey did,

as we were pro the idea that we were engaged in an evolutionary progress and sharing the idea that we were natural beings, not radically separate from the animals, but also very suspicious of the nasty side of the individualism and the survival of the fittest that seems to come from Darwin. I think the question of Americanness is an interesting one. I think all attempts to link the national character of the philosophy are always going to be slightly speculative. But there does seem to be a not just coincidental link,

that in a way pragmatism is a philosophy without deep foundations, in the sense that America is a country without those deep foundations. You know, from the point of view of the white Americans, America was a clean slate, which of course it wasn't, on which they went and built their new way of life from scratch, finding out what worked as they went. And I think pragmatist philosophy is very much in that. same spirit, whereas in Europe there is much more and still a preoccupation with what the

ultimate foundations of philosophy and knowledge are. You know, we want that ultimate grounding. It's all very well to say this is what we believe and it works, but is it really built on ultimate principles that are true? For the American philosophers, this doesn't seem to matter. And you do wonder whether it's connected with the whole national mythology, which is that we built this country and we can build a philosophy too. Can we develop that a little, an undergradium, because as I read it, philosophers in this country were rather sniffy about pragmatism. Well, at the time that pragmatism became famous, and it's very, very interesting, by the way, that the famous 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica already had an article on pragmatism in it. I mean, that's pretty early days. So great was the impact of it intellectually, given that William James had only really started to popularize it in the 1890s.

But there were two reactions to it. One was, at the time, the dominant outlook in philosophy in the UK anyway, was neo-Hagalian absolute idealism. And the great man there was Francis Herbert Bradley at Merton College. Now, right next to Merton College is Corpus Christi College, at which there was a man called Schiller, who is the only English pragmatist of any note. And Schiller had been criticising Bradley and publishing his views on his version of pragmatist,

and Bradley was asked about it and he rather loftily replied Mr Schiller's writings have failed to attract my attention so it shows you that one part of the attitude to pragmatism was lordly disdain but the other reaction to it a reaction principally mediated by Bertrand Russell but also at some extent G.E. Moore was extreme hostility.

Russell wrote often and sometimes quite vitriolically about pragmatism and his chief objection to it was that it just simply cannot be right to think that truth is what works. I mean, this idea that James would rather, I think, unfortunately expressed by saying, you know, true belief is the expedient in our action and moral goodness is the expedient in our social action. And this really irritated people on this side of the water because, as GE Moore pointed out, there are lots of inconvenient truths, you know, and that's just a sort of fact of moral life. And Russell certainly wanted to be the case that there are hard facts out there that are quite independent of us and our efforts at inquiry,

and which we can genuinely discover. And if you think about the etymology of that term, discover, you can lift the lid off them and see that things were quite other than you thought they were. That if you were seriously wedded to the pragmatist ideal, you would be committed to the sort of metaphysics of the caveman, as Russell put it, because, you know, your practice, your actual experience of the world tells you, for example, that it's flat and that the sun goes around it and that all these things are false. And we only find that out by deeper and different kinds of inquiry. And so there was a very, very hostile reaction to it here. This is where I think Perth has the edge rather on James and Dewey because Perce, although he, of course, maintains a connection between what's useful and truth, Purse had an idealised conception of it

So truth is what we find at the ideal end point of science That's how he put it So for him, there can be a distinction between what seems to be true And what is actually true Our actual modes of inquiry now Inperfect State of Evidence and theorising and so on May seem to be true They may be warrantedly assertible

They may be agreed by all They may be extremely useful But they might be false But the standard for falsity is that at an ideal end point of scientific inquiry, we would be able to see that they were false. So he retains this idea that truth is in principle accessible. It says it were internal to our modes of inquiry,

but internal at the idealised end, whereas James and Dewey were much more, as it were, boldly historicists. They couldn't maintain that distinction between what seems to be true within competent inquiry and what in fact is true. And that is a problem. You don't have to be a sort of correspondence theory of truth or some grand metaphysician to think that's a problem. It falls out of just how we use the word true.

I just want to almost to nip back for 20 minutes in that. Something I forgot to bring up earlier, quickly, Julian, you gave a very good example in the notes of yours I read about the different ways of looking at protons, neurons, neuron, and so on and so forth, as this was an example of a good example of a pragmatic approach compared to the different sort of approach. Could you just give that? Because I thought that was very...

Well, yeah, I think the what I'm trying to get out here is the difference between the, as Anthony described it, the kind of mirror representational view of truth and a pragmatic one. Because if you, and I think this actually helps to resolve some of those doubts we might have, that to say what is true is, what is useful is just too flabby. If you take, say, a scientific hypothesis such as there are things as neutrons, protons and electrons, and so forth, on the traditional view, and perhaps the common sense view, we take that to mean that we have concepts of neutron, proton, and electron and so forth,

and that these things correspond or label, as it, were things that are really out there in the real world. Now, there are philosophical problems with that view, which are hard to sort of make sound credible to common sense. But the kind of pragmatist view is to kind of almost sort of sidestep that and say we needn't worry about that. The point is that if we treat the world as if these things do exist, then we find that we can manipulate it and we can make things work in it much better.

And the point about this is that you can't just choose anything. What is useful is not just... just on our whim to choose. This is a useful way of looking at the world because it works much better than other ones. And so therefore you don't have to worry, as perhaps some English philosophers have thought, that if you go down the pragmatic route,

you can believe the world is flat. Because actually, ultimately, it isn't useful to believe the world is flat. All sorts of things won't work if you construct your view in that way. So again, these are tools, these concepts we have are tools for helping us to manipulate the world,

and some work better than that. than others, and on purses of you, ultimately there's only one way of looking at it which is going to work the best. Can we just now look at the legacy of pragmatism, Anthony Grayling, and let's turn into the last century, I was about to say this century, in the middle of it, and would you say that

Willard van Ormond Quine took forward the pragmatic base in his work, and if did so, what was important about him? He did, to a very large extent. In fact, the pragmatist influence on more recent American philosophy is very large really when you dig about in it. Quine accepted from the pragmatists the view that we are part of nature and that our relations with nature,

especially our epistemic ones, are therefore a matter for empirical psychology to describe. We don't get involved in the old epistemological enterprise of trying to determine how our thoughts match up to reality whenever they do, but rather we just think of our beliefs as having been formed by the inputs, the stimuli that nature gives us. And our theories and our actions, based on those theories, are the outputs that result. So that's very, very much a pragmatist view because the pragmatist, especially purse, were much influenced by this idea that a contingent, naturalistic view of our activity in the world and how we form our beliefs in the world is very, very much a matter for that kind of empirical understanding.

Interestingly, William James had started out as a psychologist and an empirical psychologist and in talking about our cognitive faculties about our interests, our choices, our selection of saliances in the environment to take notice of and so on. He regarded our activities as something that should be explained ultimately on a biological basis. And this is the underlying assumption made by Quine. So he's very influenced by that. He's also influenced by some other things too. Peirce said that even our axioms, even the axioms of our thinking are empirical facts about us.

And this led Quine much later on to say that there is no distinction between so-called analytic and so-called synthetic truths or between necessity and contingency. Even the laws of logic, Quine at one point said, are matters that might be changed by experience. This was something that he inherited from Perth. Miranda, can you tell us about Hillary Putnam and what effect I'm just, we're trying to take a pragmatism through America, through other American philosophers. Yes. Well, Putnam is very explicitly identified as a pragmatist. He's written on the pragmatist quite a bit. And he explicitly embraces a conception of truth as idealized rational acceptability.

So that's very close to the notion of just warranted assertibility, what you have reason to present as true. But in this case, he's putting it in terms of what you have good reason to accept. But in some idealized way. Now, so he sounds like he's a bit of a mixture between persons. Dewey and James on this front. He is mainly against metaphysical realism, as they all were. So he's against the idea that the world has a character in itself, which we have to try and map our concepts and our thoughts onto.

He thinks we can't make sense of the idea of an independent world, except as grasped through our concepts. So he embraces a view that he calls conceptual relativity. And what falls out of this idea is that he's a realist, he says, and so were, as it were, the pragmatist. Dewey thought that we could grasp the nature of reality through our inquiry. But he calls it internal realism, which I was regard as thoroughly unfortunate,

because it carries on this unfortunate metaphor of what's internal and what's external. But he thinks we can't make sense of the idea of the external in that radical way. So we go ahead with our inquiry in the normal sort of historicist way. We make conceptual choices. We grasp the world and gain knowledge about it through these concepts. And what counts as true is just what, as it were, all being well in an ideal situation, so as it were, nothing's obscuring our vision, so to speak, is rationally acceptable. Now he laments the fact that he was sometimes read as a Percyon

explicitly in this. He rejects Perth's idea that we can make sense of a single unified ideal end point of inquiry. He thinks the notion of ideal circumstances for observing how many people are around this table are quite different from ideal epistemic circumstances for knowing about the nature of protons, for instance, and we can't necessarily unify our, conception of ideal circumstances. So he's less than Persian in that sense, but he's more than Dewey and James' idea that it's just what's useful or acceptable.

And the scene to be three at the beginning of this conversation and three at the end, because the third person would like to mention is Richard Rorty. Julian, can you bring him into the argument? Yeah, well, Warty's interesting. I think perhaps we see him as an successor more of Dewey, perhaps than the other two, because his interests are very much political.

The thing about Rorty is that he does reject this idea of truth with a capital T, as all the pragmatists do. But the thing is, it's not so much that he thinks it's a philosophical mistake to think we can have that kind of truth which represents the world. I mean, he does think that's a mistake. But I think that's more importantly, he thinks it's just not that important or relevant. And he kind of like, his attitude to philosophers who are very preoccupied it, like a lot of his British critics like Simon Blackburn and the late Bernard Williams,

is that these people really need to kind of grow up. And sort of this is this preoccupation is irrelevant. Because what matters for the spreading of liberal values, broadly liberal values, is not fundamentally whether or not we can show their truth value, as it were, in a traditional philosophical sense. It's whether or not we can gain the kind of social solidarity in agreement, which allows people to take them up and to share them and to live together. So again, it's that idea of trying to create political values are based on those things of sharing. and truth isn't irrelevant.

Who is going to persuade someone to adopt, say, broadly Western liberalism on the basis that it is the truth, no one? Who's going to get someone to share them on the basis that, look, this is how we can live together, this is how we can work, this is how we can get respect, maybe that stands a better chance? Do you think that there's a sense of which pragmatism has run its course and has made its entrance and is about to make its exit? It's a very insightful comment by Louis Menand who wrote a wonderful book called The Metaphysical Club,

which is an examination of the origins and the arguments of pragmatism. And right at the end of that book, he says during the period of the Cold War, when ideas that have a left-wing bias, and Julian just described Rorty's views here, talking about sort of centre-left kind of liberalism, which arises from a conversation about a mutable reality. in which we need to adapt our ideas and construct our beliefs as responses

to how things actually are in that society and inheritor therefore of the Dewey view that to be socially engaged is to recognize that all strata in society have to be given their due weight and importance that that view sort of went out of the window during the Cold War because you might put it this way for brevity,

right-wing verity has mattered much more in the great struggle with the Soviet Empire. But it's suddenly come back into focus. We're now much more conscious of the fact that people like Putnam and Quine and Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty have these very deep pragmatist roots. And people are re-reading the pragmatists and thinking about them again, writing about them in a way which is, you know, we haven't really seen for half a century. I think that their influence will probably expand rather than diminish.

I quite agree. There's in a funny sort of way, Rorty, who many, as it were, fans and followers of the original pragmatists are pretty angry with Rorty for his co-opting pragmatism into a very relativistic-sounding programme. And many of defenders of liberal values, the same values Rorty espouses, would want to say, well, hang on a minute. It may not be that we persuade others of liberal values by talking about truth. But my goodness, if you're living in an oppressed state, you really care whether it was true that you were a spy or not when you're sitting in prison. It really matters what is true and what is not. And so there is an unfortunate relativistic drift in Rorty's co-option of pragmatism.

And yet he is partly responsible for bringing it all back to our attention and bringing people to read it again. And I think it's now being taught much more than it was for a while. And if you pick up a reader in truth or something these days, you're much more likely to find something by James or Perse or Dewey in it as representing pragmatism than you were a few years ago. And there's a great feminist interest too because of all these women who are involved in pragmatism

and because of how extremely conducive to feminist progressive thinking and historicist modes of thought pragmatism is as a philosophical background. I think that relativistic drift which Miranda just talked about is very interesting. I think is why pragmatism is perhaps more interesting now in Britain than it ever has been. Because I still think in Britain we rather have this polarised view that we either have to hold on to this very rigid correspondence idea of truth. There is the truth that is correspondence to reality, full stop, or else you end up being a relativist.

and I think this is always the accusation livid at these people. Anthony was saying earlier this is what Russell was complaining about in the pragmatists. And I think the thing about pragmatism is those various different shades. Some perhaps are at that relativistic end. But it kind of gestures towards, I think,

a way perhaps of understanding truth which can avoid those two polarities. We can still have truth, get all the things we need from truth, i.e. a sense that we are answerable to something other than our own whims without necessarily having the hard metaphysics of the truth being out there in an weird absolute sense.

Yes, I mean, if one had been reading the American philosophers in the last decade or more, one would notice a very noisy dispute between Putnam and Rorty, who in fact in many ways are rather close to one another, and Rorty keeps on trying to get claim anyway that Putnam is singing from the same hymn sheet as he is. And Putnam is disclaiming this, but the pointed issue between them is the degree to which the view that Rorty holds is relativistic. Putten doesn't like that.

And so what we've been witnessing in a way is an attempt to try to have pragmatism without the relativism in Puttenham and Rorty just accepting that if you're going to go all the way down the pragmatist route, that's where you might end up. So it's an open debate, it's an open question now and a very interesting one.

Thank you all three very much indeed. Thank you, Anthony Grayling, June, Bajini and Miranda. Fricker. Next week, we'll be talking about the Graviton a hypothetical elementary particle that transmits the force of gravity. That's what we'll be talking about next week. Thank you for listening.

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