American pragmatism and democratic faith

2008 ChoiceReviews  
Any attempt to describe pragmatism in brief will undoubtedly be inadequate, as it embodies many variants and subtly different approaches. But Louis Menand, whose Pulitzer prize-winning The Metaphysical Club has revived popular and scholarly interest in pragmatism, has perhaps come the closest to capturing its essence in a few words! If we strain out the differences, personal and philosophical, they had with one another, we can say that what these four thinkers had in common was not a group of
more » ... eas, but a single idea-an idea about ideas. They all believed that ideas are not "out there waiting to be discovered, but are tools-like forks and knives and microchips-that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals-that ideas are social. They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability. 2 Ôf course, to suggest there is an "essence" to pragmatism belies what it is trying to do, for its adherents reject essences; they reject the notion that there is an a priori truth or an objective reality of which, if we work hard enough, our minds can produce a mirror image. A priori truth may in fact exist, but we do not have the capacity to attain it. No matter how much logic, reason, prayer, meditation, or study we devote to our quest for 24 the method of science. Peirce suggests that the "method of 8016006"-unlike our individual experiencesis a reliable arbiter of truth. It is a "method. . .by which our beliefs may be determined by nothing human, but by some external permanencyby something upon which our thinking has no effect." While James agreed that the method of science was vital. Peirce made a point of stressing that his "conception of truth" must be "public"otherwise, it tails to be scientific. It only applied to "one individual" and not to "every man" it "might affect, then the method is not adequately scientific. Peirce summarized his social and consensual conception of truth as follows: "The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. Truth, then, is an agreement among a community of inquirers. To state this in statistical terms: As the number of inquirers grows to constitute the entire population ot the community in question (i.e., as the sample size approaches the entire population size), the proximate truth will converge on the actual truth (i.e., the standard error will become negligible). Another element of pragmatism to which we should pay attention is its understanding of habit. Ideas and beliefs are "rules for action," according to the pragmatists, and when they work, these rules quickly become engrained in us; they form into habits. In fact, both Peirce and James suggested that even natural laws are really just 39 Peirce, "The Fixation of Belief," Collected Papers , 5.384. 40 Peirce, "Flow to Make Our Ideas Clear," Collected Papers , 5.407. 65 Often called proponents of deliberative democracy, they acknowledge that civic participation will work best with those issues that affect people directly. More 64 Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, 130.
doi:10.5860/choice.45-6435 fatcat:uy5ovhgwc5ej5exr5g32w4lgku