Classical American Pragmatism 9781847600257

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The World is all that is the case

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Classical American Pragmatism Martin A. Bertman

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Publication Data © Martin A. Bertman, 2007 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-025-7

Classical American Pragmatism Martin A. Bertman

Philosophy Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

A Note on the Author Martin A. Bertman PhD is Docent Emeritus of the University of Helsinki where he has taught for 15 years. He was educated at Syracuse, Columbia and Princeton Universities. He is President of the International Hobbes Association and Editor-inChief of Hobbes Studies a journal he founded in 1988. He has been a guest editor for several other journals. He has published six books and 75 articles on philosophical subjects, primarily in modern philosophy, including the subject of this book. He has taught semesters in France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, and Germany, and in the USA, he has taught at the State University of New York for 20 years and has been National Endowment of the Humanities Professor at Scranton University and Distinguished Visiting Professor at two California State Universities. Now he teaches at Akron University. He can be reached at [email protected].

Contents 1. Overview of Classical Pragmatism 2. Pierce on Belief 3. Pierce on Feeling and Metaphysics 4. James on Consciousness and Truth 5. Dewey on Society 6. Dewey: Experience and Pragmatism 7. Conclusion: Dewey on Pierce and James Bibliography

1 Overview of Classical Pragmatism The three classical pragmatists of this essay are Charles Sanders Pierce (1836–1914), William James (1842–1910), and John Dewey (1859–1952). Though their doctrines have some substantial divergences, these three share enough of an intellectual atmosphere, particularly a commitment to experience measured by effectiveness in solving felt difficulties. The classical pragmatists are Americans and, in pragmatic thinking, their American culture is an admittedly determinative factor for their doctrines, especially, and more broadly, the scientific culture of the day. For pragmatists, natural and social conditions and instruments of knowing constitute a contextual web needing an intelligent response because of the limits they impose on progress. Before discussing the theoretical details, the professional background of our three pragmatists is noted and, then, some intellectual currents of their cultural context. James had a medical degree and was a psychologist by profession teaching that and philosophy at Harvard. Dewey taught in departments of Psychology, Education and Philosophy but preferred to call himself an anthropologist, emphasizing his belief in the importance of cultural experience for inquiry. Unlike James and Dewey, Pierce had much experience as a scientist. His early focus was on the method of appropriate inquiry, which influenced James and Dewey; later he wrote more speculatively. His scant academic teaching was at Johns Hopkins for a few years, where Dewey and the outstanding sociologist, Thorstein Veblen, were his students. Primarily because of these three, with the addition of two outstanding colleagues of James, Josiah Royce and George Santayana, Charles Frankel (1960) calls the period of 1870–1930 the ‘Golden Age of American Philosophy’. In this era, influenced by European philosophy since the seventeenth century, the basal cultural energies arose from the sin-haunted Puritanism of Cotton Mather and Jeremy Edwards, Lockean   Cf. Craig R. Eisendrath, The Unifying Moment (Harvard: 1971) 213–4: ‘One sees in James a profound loneliness. … The curious mixture of love and isolation that one senses in the Puritan fathers, such as John Winthrop, seemed to be James’s as well. … Pain, and death, and sin, and wrong—some might be “ministerial to a higher form of good”, but not all; there was evil that could not be gainsaid. Philosophy had to deal with it; the healthy-minded by refusing to recognize it, were denying existence its most profound elements. His flights of confidence have the desperate courage of a man whistling past a graveyard. His sermons are as much for himself as for his audience’.

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Constitutional republicanism, the elusive national unity of a recent civil war, and the great resourcefulness for the ‘cultivation’ of a large slice of a continent by an immigrant absorbing nation. Among these forces was tension among opposing capitalist economic and reformist social policy. Yet, in the depth of the cultural current there was an energy and optimism. The signal American poet, Walt Whitman, a favourite of William James, recognizes a poetic rainbow of tensions and, in the brash manner of his national optimism, said, ‘If I contradict, then I contradict, and the hell with it’. James’s phrase ‘let all doors open outward’ has the forward-looking optimism of Whitman. Yet even when the philosophical task professes openness to experience, with its gritty moil and toil, it does not quite have the poetic heart to say, ‘The hell with contradiction.’ For the pragmatist, contradiction signals the intellectual challenge for its resolution; at the least, the fire of a plausible method must burn the dross of idiosyncratic and mistaken assumptions, the baggage of the historical current. In the earliest moment for the formation of the pragmatic doctrines, such philosophic discussion occurred under the leadership of Chauncey Wright (1830–1875), a philosopher who published little. This Metaphysical Club at Harvard had among its member the future Justice of the Supreme Court, Oliver Wendell Holmes, as well as James and Pierce. Wright influenced James and Pierce’s pragmatism by emphasizing the difficulty of a single and unified philosophical vision; he wrote, ‘The questions of philosophy proper are human desires, fears, and aspirations—human emotions—taking an intellectual form’. Furthermore (1877) ‘Theories, it is true are facts, —a particular class of facts indeed, generally complex ones, but still facts’. Pragmatism validates theory by the ‘cash value’ of its effect and, takes it, once established, as an instrument of action. Wright says (Schneider, 1963): Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects, and if we fancy that we have any other we deceive ourselves and mistake a mere sensation accompanying a thought for part of the thought itself. It is absurd to say that thought has any function unrelated to its only function’ [to organize sensible effects.] In response to this, Pierce and James reflect the different gravitational pulls within Pragmatism: in his early methodological writings, Pierce is particularly concerned with the logical and technical boundaries for fixing belief for action, which later gives way to an evolutionary metaphysics whereas James is most sensitive to the self as a physiological organism that projects emotively driven agendas in a cultural orientation to achieve stability for action and a pleasing self-awareness. James is sensitive

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to the individual dealing with intractable questions about the human condition: the questions of ‘existence’ that religion ‘solves’. Such thoughts provoke emotional disturbances beyond a possible explanation by a natural or scientific solution. Pierce inquiry is oriented to observation; he focuses on science’s characteristic of public repetitions of experiments, under ‘leading principles,’ for the paradigm of rational method. This empirical orientation is continued in Dewey. Dewey (1938) writes: I follow in the main the account given by Pierce of guiding or leading principles. According to this view, every inferential conclusion that is drawn involves a habit in the organic sense of habit since, since life is impossible without ways of action sufficiently general to be properly named habits. For Pierce, meaningful concepts are derivative signs of observed phenomena. By the antipode of pragmatism, James’s mind constantly returns to the moral burdens of being human. Ultimately, these concerns do not necessarily lead to disruption, certainly Dewey, the ‘public intellectual’, is intent on having them united. Yet, the mood of Pierce and James is different and their antipodal gravitational pull makes for different approach, to use Dewey’s phrase, ‘to the difficulties of men.’ Adapting themes from both, Dewey’s interest in inquiry is proactive by engaging his estimate of the social and political context. Unwavering in his commitment to naturalism, the social order is an instrument of individual welfare and the individual is an instrument of social order. He sometimes calls his thinking instrumentalism, and he emphasizes its character by attaching the word ‘humanism’; however, he is not overly interested in stressing such tags. What he wishes to emphasize is interchange between present awareness and a positive reconstruction or flourishing of human contexts to overcome disharmony between society and individual. The two are inseparable in their actual ‘transaction’, when not divided for the sake of some analytical purpose. This holistic transaction’s evolutionary energy arises from inward tension, as well as new circumstances, including tools, for problem solving. Aside from an early Hegelian idealism—he considered himself Hegelian until 1893—that has left its trace, the mature Dewey is deeply and constantly influenced by biological thinking: Aristotle’s functionalism and Darwin’s evolutionary doctrine. Darwin is in the air. Especially Herbert Spencer in England, a now too neglected thinker, presents evolution as the ground of social thinking; unlike Spencer’s mechanical view of nature, Henri Bergson’s understanding of evolution finds appropriateness in intuitive harmony (élan), which opposes cookie cutter principles or mechanical

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determinants (raideur méchanique); for him, the stuff of comedic exaggeration. In capitalist America, an important cultural attitude finds Darwin’s natural struggle concept capable of justifying greed and social ugliness; to use Dewey’s phrase, this is ‘ragged rather than rugged individualism’. This doctrine of social progress applauds striving, but with narrow self-interest. In it, chance and providence play tag like in the theological economics of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’. Both Pierce and Dewey were critical of this sort of justification of greed. Particularly, Dewey’s ‘public intellectual’ impulse is for progress and social health to occur by solving social disharmonies, especially by new legislation and associations. He encouraged social corporations like trade unions—he was influential in founding the American Association of College Professors—and was committed to refurbished social habits and intentions through education. Education is necessary for ingenuity and community loyalty for Dewey’s ‘social intelligence’, the repository of intellectual power to solve problems. Since the individual is not aside from social context, a healthy social context is necessary for action enhancing the good of the individual. Recall Aristotle’s remark that notes context: ‘The good citizen and the good man are not the same, except in the best state (polis)’. After Darwin, Dewey does not have Aristotle’s specie fixed ontology of human nature, expressed in the final form of a social order in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Dewey sees the social context in the ‘historical current’ but as evolving without a fixed goal; human nature is flexible despite having certain physical needs that influence goals. Constructive social ingenuity is foremost: the functionalism impulse in Dewey embraces Pierce’s ‘temporarily’ or hypothetically fixed beliefs and James’s attempt to achieve stability. Consequently, for Dewey, institutional structures, governmental and non-governmental, and education can be useful to bolster communal loyalty. The historical current has its moment of ideology and institutional tools to overcome social chaos and individual inclinations toward antisocial behaviour. Dewey broadly shares with Aristotle and Hegel an ecological view of the individual within the niche provided by community. The focus of Dewey’s view of logic is the conditions of action; this broadens as it incorporates Pierce’s experimental method. In a cultural mode, the pragmatists connect science and technology to the self-image of Americans as a ‘can-do’ society. The cultural implication is striving for the better. Unlike pragmatism, many absolutist metaphysical systems stress a complete and unchanging doctrine of human nature and political maturity. Pragmatism finds such metaphysical doctrines unresponsive to actual life. Pragmatic social strategies are closer to tactics than absolute metaphysics

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fixed social goals. In ‘Fixation of Belief’ (1957) Pierce calls absolute metaphysical theories ‘systems rummaging the garret of the skull to find an enduring opinion about the universe’. Pierce and Dewey’s attraction to scientific method contends against the absolute fixity of an abstract system that does not engage the continuance of concrete actual difficulties. Science is not only empirical, in addition, it is ‘open ended,’ cooperative, and transparent about conclusions. From German romanticism and idealism the aesthetic attitude drove social and philosophical thinking in America, in the formative period of pragmatism and to some extent produced approaches that the pragmatic inclination to the concrete opposes. Unlike the artwork, a scientific product is not uniquely personal at its core, e.g. the presence in a Leonardo painting of his personality, toned in a cultural moment, but a communal endeavour. Achievements of even great scientists, say Newton and Archimedes, become submerged in the stream of an unending advancement of their fields. Dewey emphasizes one cannot reach any conclusion about a final ‘real’, and science is an instrument of policy at an historical moment of knowing, which is an aspect of actuality. The ‘real’ in the history of philosophy moves one to order thinking under some sort of characterization of reason or, perhaps contrariwise, the reasonable. This moment is captured in Plato’s confrontation with sophistic humanism. Pragmatism is inclined to collapse the rational into the reasonable: to give the rational to a method of inquiry and the reasonable to the relative but actual or concrete condition for employing knowledge. Pragmatic knowing is an instrument of interests rather than absolute metaphysics. However, truth is a fixed rational real for Pierce; his metaphysical theory is a speculative supplement to his pragmatism. It deals with evolving laws presenting ‘generals’ or universals for consciousness. On the other hand, in classifying them with the scholastic realist and nominalist tags, James is a sort of nominalist. For James truth is a reasonable construction of experiential longing seeking satisfaction; James’s view of truth, however, finds internecine objections, by its emphasis on personal psychology. This subjectivist posture opposes Pierce’s realist posture, an ideal worked towards truth, corresponds to an objective order. For both Pierce and Dewey the instrument of asserting truth is hypothetical in the mode of scientific inquiry. By his realist metaphysics, Pierce is close to the absolutist tradition, though his belief in the evolution of natural law considers chance a factor of reality: natural laws are thus not fixed but develop with conditions of change. Yet, this belief in chance is perhaps not consistently in harmony with Pierce’s further view of the ‘asymptotic

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awareness of nature’. The latter is a work hypothesis of Pierce’s pragmatic and understanding of inquiry in the empirical mode of science. Avoiding a ‘quest for certainty’, metaphysical speculation, even within the limits imposed by Pierce, has little worth for Dewey; his pragmatic naturalism veers toward James by seeking a reasonable human satisfaction in the present and toward Pierce by an unwavering allegiance to scientific method. A ‘plausible prudence’ the reasonable, is hampered with the widespread human inclination to seek certainty, which Dewey strongly notes. Generally, pragmatic agendas seek to avoid intellectual mummification. Plato and Spinoza, among other ‘metaphysical’ philosophers, sought rationality in nature’s idealized order modelled on mathematics because of clear and distinct credentials for a systematic order. The pragmatic assumption of evolution or progress dislodges the notion of the absolute systematic statement about reality or some aspect of it. Pragmatists are prudential because experimental science is preferred as a model provides a good though not complete explanation for actual contexts, since every science is merely a structural mode for a partial interest of a in a context. Aristotle noticed that but provided further structural categories for reality that were pervasive through any science in what he called first philosophy or theology and which has the traditional editorial name of metaphysics. Despite tolerance for a supernatural explanation for its personal affects, even James lauds the scientific mode of inquiry; his major book, Principles of Psychology, shows him as a committed scientist. It is noteworthy that the classical pragmatists have a Protestant background, which is relatively open to individualism and the secular achievements of science. That is not to say that the pragmatists completely escaped human failure, including the ambiguous doctrinal undercurrents of a broad Christian context. Dewey is most liberated from religion; he seeks a human orientation for the furthest reach of ideal value, which he calls religious in A Common Faith (1934a). Pierce allows religion in his 1878 article, ‘The Order of Nature,’ he writes (1957) ‘But it would be folly to suppose that any metaphysical theory in regard to the mode of being of the perfect is to destroy the aspiration toward the perfect which constitutes the essence of religion.’ His metaphysical theory offers ‘agapism,’ (from the Greek taken for a higher love than a lower self-interested love, eros,) a theory of (Christian) love whose metaphysical principle is to embrace oppositions within itself by creative allowance for the imperfect within humankind’s evolving reality. Thus, in the mss. of 1906, substituting reality for existence, the latter works for facts of nature, Pierce writes (1940) ‘I believe in the reality of God’ and remarks that the error is to try to make this precise

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it is a perceptive seeing of the heart. Here we see a distinction between the belief in a real and the belief in an existent thing; two categories that are putatively bridged by Pierce’s analysis of consciousness, though, with seeming inconsistency, Pierce makes a great point of avoiding intuitions. Less metaphysical and more psychological, open to Freud (whom he invited to Harvard) and with appreciation for the unconscious, particularly as a physiological process, James wrote Varieties of Religious Experience, (1902) which allows a supernatural dogmatic system to succour the inadequacy of ultimate knowledge. For some individuals, James believes it is helpful to stabilize action even with a supernatural belief and, thereby, to bracket or to erode natural fear with a ‘quiet emotive center’. In the most obvious relativistic sophistic manner, truth as something that is judged by its positive affect, a view disputed as theoretically shabby by Pierce and Dewey, allows James to be open to the psychological benefits of dogmatic religion. Dewey, and seemingly Pierce, distinguish the spiritual striving of ‘religious’ from the dogmatic systems of a ‘religion’. Yet, James does limit religion: for him, religion could not impose Paul of Tarsus’ ‘strait is the gate and a narrow is the way’ policy on living experience and tolerance. The intellectual shabbiness of his position is that despite James’s personal tolerance the supernatural dogma if firmly held inclines the holder against tolerance. In any case, tolerance is with justification called ‘a haughty mentality’ by Kant: one that puts the examination of an opposed belief into isolation of mere allowance rather than engagement. It is hard to propose a clear measure for religious considerations of the supernatural—opposing arguments, intelligently made even within the framework of a religion, have a measure of persuasive power. Accepting a fundamental belief beyond reason is ambiguous as a matter of being reasonable. James ambivalent hesitance does not satisfy this difficulty. The problem of knowing, even in a religion’s perspective arises in Numbers: Korah’s rebellion was disproved by a test in a sacrifice to God, though the partial truth of his arguments (against the elitist priesthood of Aaron and his sons) was marked because the sacrificial utensils of Korah were holy and thus used for covering the holy-ark. Belief per se, as Pierce understood by demanding public scrutiny and evidential repetition for its assertions, is not truth; without further ado, it suspicious calm may be rather like the Dead Sea (yam h’melach) that raps a once living branch in salty encrustations petrifying the wood. Pragmatists are tolerant, but aware that the dogmas of religion petrify. James’s allowance for dogmatic religion seems a misplaced compassion not to jettison the bad with the good. For the Platonic Trinitarian Christians of

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the Council of Nicea’s dogma the God of Israel is compromised with pagan idolatry by three persons with one substance: an impossible mathematics but making monotheism’s creator God also a God with a human face and a sort of bird God—Geist or ruach (Mind or Spirit) glaucos: the symbol of Athens) or dove (yonah: the symbol of Israel)—taking historical flight. To use James’s phrase, ‘the block universe’ of metaphysics and miraculous religion have both lost prestige to modern science. Despite science’s incompleteness, its cultural expansion provides an attractive anchor for pragmatism. Yet, viewing the human condition, one finds a captivating tempo in James’s appealing phrasing, viz. ‘the vast slow-breathing unconscious cosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides’ (Thayer 1968). For James, belief has the task of responding beyond solvable difficulties to ‘big questions’ that cannot be solved. The scientific mode is applauded, though the response to its mode of inquiry is recognized to have inevitable limits in relation to human desires of most individuals for unmistakable justice and personal continuance: what science’s ‘cash value’ cannot buy. The responses for such matters have always been either courage to live with the unknown and to quiet such desires, or to make life more bearable through a commitment to some supernatural assumption. Dewey straightforwardly chooses courage and goads desire to work for amelioration of a present context, especially in a cooperative social spirit. James allows a dogmatic response, Pierce asserts a real, cradled in a sensibility (love) that is not specifiable but harmoniously evolving negative desires into (evolutionary) progress. Pragmatists relate to questions that are not answerable by science by a stance called ‘tough minded’ or ‘tender minded’. Science, as product and method, is nevertheless the pragmatic flagship for inquiry. Science’s predictive capacity provides a large measure of cognitive stability, Pierce’s ‘fixing of belief’ making habits and routines for intelligent action; consequently, to repeat, pragmatism finds science a model of a progressive experimental attitude; especially valued is science’s character of orderly experiments that can be repeated by others. The limitation of science is as obvious as that of the human condition. For Dewey, the social moment is within much of our power but yet it is moved by historical currents where progress washes but does not completely cleanse. His courageous ‘common faith’ offers an active qua natural human orientation that contrasts to the otherworldly orientation of supernatural religion: God is defined by a human orientation: ‘the end of all our ends’ (1934a). Pragmatists unabashedly and perhaps naively seek an active and reconstructive response even for the quality of religion as primarily a cultural product. In that spirit of ‘let all doors open outward,’ James said

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to his idealist colleague Josiah Royce ‘Damn the Absolute … Pragmatism looks to the future’ (Thayer, 1968). James writes (1958) ‘Philosophic study means the habit of always seeing an alternative, of not taking the usual for granted, of making conventionalities fluid again, of imagining foreign states of mind’. Accused of it, even James throws doubt on the usual characterization of him as being ‘tender minded’ by providing a physiological basis for habit, viz. in Talks to Teachers, quoting his Psychology, he writes (1958) ‘The great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy … For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can.’ Optimism for the Pragmatism inspires flexibility in a disciplined intellectual habit to the ongoing inquiry for greater knowledge for beneficial action. Progress involves courageous opposition against the status quo when stagnating action for the better. Conventions or social habits are allowed, even encouraged as a unification of a cooperative social order, but they must not be mummified conventions. Just so, despite differences in views and dubious ones as well, there is something challenging the human spirit to progress in all the pragmatists.

2 Pierce on Belief To the developed mind of man, his own existence is supported by every other fact, and is therefore, incomparably more certain than any one of these facts.

—Pierce Collected Papers 5.237

The tone of the early Pierce is mute to his later speculation about radical evolutionary creativity, where chance and law evolve each other under mutuality, qualified as the factors of necessity and spontaneity. Let us leave aside that wild ride until later. For the Pierce who most influenced James and Dewey, beliefs and the fixing of habits by action grounded in them is central to inquiry that grows knowing and is the bulwark of action. An epistemological opponent of subjectivism, particularly in the early writings, Pierce opposes Cartesian intuitions. Science charts the evolving empirical order: knowing is about observations that ‘force’ belief. Like Hume, after sceptical thoughts in isolation about cause and self-identity, one must nevertheless enter the common world where stones fall to the ground and one has some sort(s) of identity. In the recourse of a community of scientific tests, Pierce takes habitual behaviour between the person who tests and the tested as a pragmatic assumption of rational inquiry. Under such an assumption, experimental methods of science rely on communal experience to warrant the fixing of a belief in the generality of an interest (of empirical things) by the interpersonal icon of ‘truth’. For pragmatists generally the inquiry is stimulated by doubt as well as by interest. Doubt is an irritation: a physiological impulse wanting to rid oneself of irritation. Pierce writes about science, ‘It is excited by the irritation of doubt, and ceases when belief is attained; so that the production of belief is the sole function of thought’. Belief is a habit of thought leading to choice and the ordering of one’s purposes;   Pierce refers to Alexander Bain’s The Emotions and the Will (1859) for providing him with an understanding of the importance of belief for epistemology (5.12).

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indeed, the significance of a belief stands in direct relation to the action it prescribes. The rule for this explanation is what Pierce calls ‘clarity of apprehension’; he says, ‘The whole function of thought is to produce habits of action’ (5.40). Of course, especially social habits once achieved can pose a danger to striving when new conditions arise, particularly in an evolutionary or progressive orientation. In that sense, Pierce says, ‘Habit is mere inertia, a resting on one’s oars, not propulsion’ (Frankel 1960). If belief overcomes the irritation of doubt, which is ‘the privation of habit,’ then what is the process for fixing a belief in Pierce’s understanding? Pierce explains his answer in one of his better-known essays, ‘The Fixation of Belief’ published in 1877. He poses the problem in terms of a proper relation between experience and authority and by holding a belief responsive to evidence, often enlarged from past awareness. Like J. S. Mill, under the positivist influence of August Comte’s cultural stages and positivism, Pierce notes that before modern experimental science, particularly religious authority, aided by powerful political men, spread a faulty idea of reality. Further, before the rise of modern science limited actual accumulation of observational data, metaphysics strove for rational principles but they showed their impracticality, unlike science, by not having the capacity to predict actual events. They were merely a super classification of nature by a logic system. In sum, these metaphysical essays were descriptive without having the capacity for prediction or in creating technologies: the prime factors for a measure of control in relation to natural conditions. For Pierce, warranted belief is not a subjective intuition but a publicly testable matter, in principle and one that cooperatively coordinates communication. Indeed, Pierce claims that intuition as a mode of cognition is in error, despite many classical epistemologies, like that of Descartes, depends on this assumption. This goes against the intuitive certainty attributed to scientific insight by the great figures of the seventeenth century, including Newton and Boyle. For Pierce, science is a corrective enterprise; he writes ‘A marvellous self-correcting property of reason belongs to every sort of science’ (6:526). Science understood as a social task is in contrast to idiosyncratic tenacity, particularly, religious dogmatism. Such a non-empirical mode, intolerantly asserted with tenacity, is a sort of madness. They are beliefs based on a politicized authority for not confirmable assertions, e.g. an ex cathedra monopoly about the character of the supernatural. The proper fixation of belief depends on ‘inquiry’ in the scientific mode: a response to the irritation of doubt based on hypothesis testing. Pierce’s ‘abductive’ logic stresses the relations of things, an assumption of induction, which when considered abstractly as natural law provides a belief structure for future investigations. Absolute certainty is never achieved; yet, fixation of belief destroys

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hesitance; it moves to toward and true existential result: ‘the opinion which would finally result from investigation does not depend on how anybody may actually think’ (5.408). This provides a sort of ideality for an ‘ought’ incoming to a proper opinion under the evidence available to one. Pierce implies it is the cognitive work ethic of an honest investigator. Pierce’s view of evidence is qualified by his understanding of nature as evolutionary; evidence in principle is not a stable matter for it depends on the changes in conditions of an evolutionary reality. Thus, he opposes the mechanistic interpretation of science, at least in the long haul that cannot give a place to the spontaneous creativity of nature. The regularities that one finds in nature and designates law approximate a span of reality within an evolutionary indeterminacy. The Michelson-Morely experiment and the work of Planck and Einstein from the early 1890’s to 1905 provided some justification for Pierce; also discussions after his death, e.g. Heisenberg principle and Bohr’s sub-atomic measurement, adds a dimension beyond the ‘laboratory method’ yet are in harmony with Pierce’s doctrine of ‘fallibalism’ that is, the probability that secures scientific assertion. Pierce argues against Herbert Spencer’s mechanistic evolution because it does not explain the creative and spontaneous in nature; ultimately, he speculates about ‘love’ as ‘the same impulse projecting creations into an ever increasing harmony’ (6.288). Pierce’s ‘The Doctrine of Necessity Examined’ (6:149-164) argues the evolutionary and probabilistic implications of inquiry suggests that complete determinacy is merely a hoped for postulate of philosophy. The banal authority for asserting scientific truth has an institutional component: work proceeds under the belief in a particular paradigm to organize laws and observations, e.g. that of Ptolemy and then the more accurate one of Copernicus for the solar system. A particular paradigm may present an incomplete explanation for observational evidence, Copernicus reduced Ptolemy’s unexplained motions of astral bodies considerably but not entirely, nevertheless the science community provides a cooperative basis through repetitive testing and observations for what is believed to be a factual explanation (cf. Buchler 1939). Pierce says scientific assertions of truth or falsity are signs. Such signs refer to putative objective fact and a scientific theory is a propositional order depending on observations within a paradigm of associated theories (5.467). Hempel points out (1965) ‘It is not correct to speak, as is often done, of the ‘experimental meaning’ of a term or a sentence in isolation’. Scientific statements are buoyed in an ocean of theoretic hypotheses, some of which are not correct or precise enough. Thus, Pierce’s

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experimental method is aware of a complex institutionalized science in addition to a relatively simple psycho-social fixing belief as habit and routine. In ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ like ‘The Fixation of Belief’ also published in 1877, Pierce discusses various levels of clarification. The third and highest level considers the meaning of an idea in its effects having practical bearing; this pragmatic postulate is extended beyond Pierce’s qualification of the scientific mode in the attitude of James’s defence of personal truth. Pierce has an openness to this fixation of belief that Dewey’s instrumental version of pragmatism strongly captures, unlike the closure that is implied in James’s allowance. In ‘Fixation’ (1940) Pierce says ‘But, since belief is a rule for action, the application of which involves further doubt and further thought, at the same time that it is the stopping-place, it is also a new startingplace for thought’. Under his pragmatic star in these early essays, rather than his metaphysical speculation, Pierce says, ‘Metaphysics is a subject much more curious than useful, the knowledge of which, like that of a sunken reef, serves chiefly to enable us to keep clear of it’ (Fixation, 1940). Yet, what does one make of Pierce’s own evolutionary metaphysics of love? Justus Buchler, a close scholar of Pierce’s method, writes (1932) ‘We have seen that the Piercean criterion of ‘admissibility’ is the confirmable and the unconfirmable or the meaningless and Pierce specifically applies the latter designation to much of traditional metaphysics’. Buchler’s evaluation and his book, Charles Pierce’s Empiricism, which does not discuss Pierce’s metaphysics nevertheless, can be read to allow an opening for metaphysics to be a super-theory grounded on the scientific mode of inquiry. If this is the case, Pierce’s metaphysical agenda is embedded in epistemology and has empirical science as its revetment. Indeed, despite his speculative metaphysics, Pierce never retracts pragmatic themes of inquiry in the mode of science. In the 1905 essay, ‘What Pragmatism Is’ Pierce however extends belief to non-scientific value situations. Even in his metaphysical speculation, his scientific orientation is one of natural lawfulness, (despite an ambiguous metaphysical view of ‘pure potentiality’ for a spontaneously evolving nature, where natural law emerges rather than being absolutely fixed). Further, the communicative circumstance of science is a community working within similar interests and experiences; that logical character is likewise the condition of ethics. He writes in that late essay (1958): Logical self-control is a perfect mirror of ethical self-control—unless it is a species under that genus. In accordance with this, what you cannot in the least help believing is not, justly speaking, wrong belief. In other words, for

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you it is the absolute truth. True, it is conceivable that what you cannot help believing today, you might find you thoroughly disbelieve tomorrow. … Two things are all-important to assure one of and to remember. The first is that a person is not absolutely an individual. His thoughts are what he is ‘saying to himself,’ that is, he is speaking to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time. When one reasons it is that critical self that one is trying to persuade; and all thought whatever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language. The second thing to remember is that the man’s circle of society is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of higher rank than the person of the individual organism. Language as an organizational tool for inquiry is most important: Pierce’s theory of signs is primarily taken from the viewpoint of a conceptual structure (thirdness), in relation to the ‘thereness’ of consciousness (secondness), particularly in observation. Signs have a triadic relation for interpretation. Pierce writes (2.228): A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. The sign, which it creates, I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen. This complex theory is not fully worked out; yet there are forays throughout Pierce’s essay that characterize and rely on it. In Knowing and the Known (1949), the cooperative work of Dewey and Bentley, in the chapter ‘A Confused Semiotic’ Bentley writes: Pierce introduced the ‘interpretant,’ not in order to maintain the old mentalistic [the prime Cartesian] view of thought, but for quite the opposite purpose, as a device, in organization with other terminological devices, to shown how ‘thoughts’ or ‘ideas’ as subjects of inquiry were not to be viewed as psychic substances or as psychically substantial, but were actually processes under way in human living. … James and Dewey as well spent a good part of their lives trying to get rid of [the notion of substantial consciousness]. The operative principle for Pierce’s theory of signs for inquiry is that conditional thinking depends on what Quine calls ‘a web of beliefs’ interacting with physical experience. In science this experience is greatly controlled and probative. Each sign

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appropriately has a rather fixed meaning within a theoretical perspective, tested in conceivable practical consequences. Signs have a logical character through the associational web that relates them to each other under theoretical assumptions. Yet because of this suppositional basis, in warranting the result of science any asserted belief is only a placeholder for truth about factual relations. Confirmation through empirical induction gives weight to the acceptance or fixing of a belief, a warrant for truth but not a guarantee of it. To be scrupulously, from a traditional perspective of metaphysics, Pierce does not have a theory of truth, but rather a theory of belief. Pierce’s denial of certainty in the metaphysical search for absolutes is not easily classifiable as relativism; however, it is an acceptance of the limitation of human capacity, of fallibilism. Yet, the following remark by Pierce realigns belief to ‘pragmatic truth’: viz. ‘the rational meaning of every proposition lies in the future’ (5:427). Pierce’s theory of signs influenced the language sociology of Mead; further, they predate but show many similarities to those of (the later) Wittgenstein’s influential views about language. Unlike Wittgenstein, Pierce’s name does not appear in Concise Columbia Encyclopaedia or in Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary which are two common reference books. Unlike dictionary makers or copyright lawyers, scholars understand that ideas are not owned, but they have a spindrift fortune within a social context. Pierce, tangential to academe, inventing awkward language for his philosophy, often crabby as it was idiosyncratic; he even contrasted himself to James as being a writer of ‘a mere table of contents, so abstract, a snarl of twine’. Nevertheless, there is a suggestive power to Pierce’s thinking. In apposing the a priori approach, for Pierce, a formal order is an abstract ‘game’; thus, triangle is a general that is abstract in terms of its sub-set generals, e.g. a scalene or equilateral triangle; none of which are triangular perceptions or phenomenal objects. In the work of inquiry, their value is precisely in their generality but it would be a category mistake to reify generality and consider them aside from the assumed system of measurement. Value generals are more vague. The expression ‘Pierce is a good philosopher (or a good man)’ is vague for it is open to being in some sense both true and false .

  Pierce uses the Greek pragma (facts, deed) in the 1870’s for the awkward ‘pragmaticism’. This is one of many ponderous words from Greek derivations. Maurice Blondel uses ‘pragmatism’ in 1888 for his theory of action but soon deserted it; however, the American influence for the words popularity is due to James’s Pragmatism, published in 1907, in which he cited Pierce and Blondel, and also Dewey as well as several others for the words previous employment or conceptual meaning. See, Thayer Meaning and Action (pp.6f.).   For a recent general appraisal Cornel West writes in The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (p.43): ‘Pierce is the most profound philosophical thinker produced in America’.

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because the system of measurement is not yet clear and available to determine truth or falsity. Pierce writes (1940) ‘Anything is general in so far as the principle of the excluded middle does not apply to it and is vague in so far as the principle of contradiction does not apply to it’. Indeed, poetical phrases, like ideological rhetoric, are used despite their vagueness because they play on ambiguous or varied associative habits of mind. They offer placing the ‘trope’ in different possible interpretive communicative ‘syntax.’ In the end, for Pierce (1940) ‘no sign or concept is precise’ not even those of science. Pierce’s fondness for triadic relations, e.g. firstness, secondness, and thirdness of his epistemology of consciousness (which is yet to be explained in detail) is not unusual in philosophy and theology. In particular Hegel comes to mind, with numerous triadic qualifications, e.g. quality is put into being, determinate being, and being for itself. Also, such abstract qualifications like the idea outside or for itself as nature and idea in and for itself as Geist. For Pierce, living in the intellectual ambiente of Hegel, firstness is a primordial ordering, secondness an actual determination and thirdness the unified fulfillment of order and actuality in a completeness of perception. Pierce moves within this triad, yet because of its relation to his understanding of experimental science as the mode of proper inquiry, his triad stands in contrast to Hegel’s teleological and absolute idealism. Pierce’s fallibilist principle of a probabilistic empiricism is a bulwark against the imperialism of an absolutist viewpoint: he continually says thinking at best is hypothetical or probable. Pierce is not only sensitive to the human possibility of being mistaken but, by extension, scientific or metaphysical systems of signs are not ontologically reified into absolute truth. If even Hume’s scepticism found certainty in geometry but further thinking created non-Euclidean geometries of different topologies by the ambiguity of the assumption of parallel lines of plane geometry and, unlike in the past, there is controversy about closing formal systems, viz. Russell’s theory of types and the foundational mathematics of Frege and Gödel. In considering Riemann’s non-Euclidean geometry, Pierce writes (1957) in ‘Minute Logic’ of 1902: Mathematics is purely hypothetical: it produces nothing but conditional propositions. Logic, on the contrary, is categorical in its assertions. True, it is not merely, or even mainly, a mere discovery of what really is, like metaphysics. It is a normative science. Pierce’s pragmatic inclination toward the empirical rather than a formal determination of generals makes the firmest conceptual system an experiment, relating

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hypothesis to result, whether in action or even in mathematics. The result is fixing value, within a range of interest, open to public replication of effectiveness; he calls a proper hypothesis that is effective an ‘abductive’ or ‘ampliative inference’. In the next section, Pierce’s epistemology of consciousness will be amplified in terms of his triad of firstness, secondness and thirdness. Using them, Pierce’s analysis of consciousness is determinative both for is views of science and speculative metaphysics. In a sense the realist or closed system perspective is more asserted by Pierce when he moves to metaphysical speculation. Here he is influenced by the realist position about universals, especially that of Duns Scotus (Boler 1963). In contrast, unlike Pierce, Dewey more consistent pragmatism tries to avoid metaphysical issues by differentiating his pragmatic logic from the realist and nominalist debate between scholastics following Duns Scotus and Occam. He writes (1938): [I wish] to differentiate it [my theory] rather here to argue for it against other interpretations. The theory agrees with the ‘realistic’ interpretation of generals in affirming the ways of acting are as existential as are singular events and objects. It disagrees in that it holds that while these ways of interaction are necessary conditions, they are not sufficient conditions of logical generality, since the latter accrues only when and as the existentally general is used as a controlling function, in the continuity of inquiry, to attain warranted assertability. The issue for disagreement is a matter of anthropological psychology. For Pierce, consciousness is patterned rather than something with independent parts; its patterned relation has significant parts, by analysis, to be understood in both constructing and interpreting context. Patterning allows the use of signs or words for communication. Of course, this natural structuring of language or significant orders has been projected into philosophical theories of reality. It surely is in concert with the systematic intentions of Hegel’s objective idealism which Pierce admits influences him, albeit usually he puts the matter in a pragmatic mode to which a pragmatist like Dewey can agree. Consequently, for Pierce, awareness and communication as a work of signs, opposes views like that of Plato’s Cratylus that considers words as ideally absolute. Instead, Pierce pragmatically writes (1957) ‘Does something fulfill the same function practically? Then let them be signified by the same word. Do they not? Then let them be distinguished’. This presents Pierce’s belief that ‘pragmatism is not metaphysics. It is merely a method for ascertaining the meanings of hard words and of abstract concepts’ (1957).

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Though both are related to his epistemology of consciousness, Pierce ‘differentiates’ pragmatism as a theory of inquiry from speculative metaphysics. His theory of signs is one sort of bridge between the two. From the pragmatic attitude, language is treated instrumentally. Appropriating Locke’s word, ‘semiotic,’ and recalling Locke’s psychology, made more sophisticated for Pierce by Reid and Stewart, awareness, perception, abstraction, imagination, make belief a sentence or proposition. Belief is a language of the observed organization of physical events or things. Further like a known language, the grammar of organization and the semantics of facts is a matter of ‘habit of mind, ‘providing a contextual perspective for empirical organization’ (1957). Beliefs fix the meaning of signs or words. Like Pierce’s understanding of logic, belief becomes normative. Communication is open to change and evolution; consequently, signs may change their reference and this that should be noted as a change of a norm for belief; fixed systems of signs or beliefs, like the web of laws of a science, are therefore provisional but determined through the precise measure of appropriate attention; they are regulated by observations, as well as principles of coherence and range of interest. When improper, the science must ameliorate its web of signifying relations. The fixing of belief is therefore the fixing of language, or the matter can be put vice-versa within the qualifications of mutual influence. Dewey catches the complexity of propositions for belief when he writes, in Experience and Nature (1929) ‘The difference between assertion of a perception, belief in it, and merely having an extrinsic difference [is that] the belief, assertion, cognitive reference is something additive, never merely immediate’. Dewey takes ‘immediate’ for percepts not as the immediate of habitual belief but in an analytic approach to consciousness, agreeing with Pierce. Yet Pierce would rather say that the sense perception is not immediate but empty until it finds its organization in a habitual order. In any case, the pragmatic stress on the evolution or change of mental structures is at issue; the fixing of belief or the habit of significant usage is open to reformulation: one should filter beliefs by ‘critical commonsense’. Pierce first uses this term in 1905, in ‘Issues of Pragmatism’. He broadly understands by it a procedure of interrogation in ordinary evaluations similar to laboratory science: an inductive and conceptual examination for verification to fix belief. Repetition makes belief a habit that presents no irritating difficulty for us and consequently no doubt. Hume’ scepticism and, more strongly, Descartes’ provisional scepticism on his quest for certainty in Meditations, cannot be taken seriously by common sense. The language of action of engaging natural signs or events, much dependent on

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interest, much a cultural matter, is represented by the language of ideas; is the discipline of an experiment brings the concepts or the language of a science to clarity and distinctness. Having done that, the fixing of belief relieves the mind of irresolution or confusion, which follows upon a lack of clarity, what Pierce calls a ‘self-reproach’. Only after such a process can Pierce say, ‘In other words, for you it is the absolute truth’ (1940). Pierce’s qualification by the phrase ‘for you’ signals a reflexively admonished provisional aspect. The interesting question is can this assurance be transferred to the habits that are created by and arise from socialization? Pierce adumbrates Dewey’s direction of the organic complex of relations in social action, expressed as ‘social intelligence’ and the transactional method, which provides a contextual habit for social action. Pierce emphasizes that the self is not a formed determinant: in ‘Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man’ he says (1940): Two things are all important to assure oneself of and to remember. The first is that a person is not absolutely an individual. He is in the ‘flow of time’ and his discipline is to debate with himself the historical current or social circumstance in which he finds himself. The second thing to remember is that the man’s circle of society is a sort of loosely compacted person, in some respects of a higher rank than the person of an individual organism. Like other Pragmatists, despite loyalty to experience and strongly endorsing empirical methods, Pierce quarrels with classical empiricism inspired by Locke’s view of sense perception. Pragmatists oppose Locke’s taking sense data to be primary facts. Pierce, and other pragmatists, takes fact in a complicated web of associations and thus a percept taken as fact isolates the process of consciousness that is inductive but also constructive (cf. 6:75-85). Classical empiricism’s reduction of mental phenomena to sense-data lacks consideration of both habitually fixed beliefs and the sphere of action in which those mental phenomena has a presence. Pragmatists oppose this empiricism and presumptuous idealist systems. Neither intellectual current gives proper due to context provides either a proper analysis of consciousness for the fixing of belief for action. However, with some presumptiveness, Pierce does take belief, like Kant’s metaphysical speculations, under the aegis of a ‘rational faith’. Moral and religious norms, generating feelings needing stability, provoke suppositions beyond the scientific method and, for Pierce this provokes a speculation based on an assumed evolutionary reality. The detail of this speculation leads Pierce to speak of himself as a ‘Hegelian

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in a strange dress’ (Smith 1965). With an off-putting choice of coined words, Pierce provides a triadic speculative metaphysic of evolutionary love. In disharmony to ultimate harmony, this triad includes a doctrine of chance or ‘tychism,’ a doctrine of necessity or ‘anacasism’ and a reconciling doctrine of continuity or ‘synechism.’ This triad for cosmic action is moved by evolutionary love or ‘agapasm.’ About this doctrine Pierce writes (1940) in ‘Evolutionary Love,’ it is ‘at which Hegel was aiming’. Firstness, is the primal condition of nothingness as pure potentiality, though it has a presence in consciousness as feeling, secondness is necessity (lawfulness) as it encounters chance (spontaneous freedom), and thirdness is the action of including disharmony in the greater embrace of harmony: ‘the impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony’ (6.288). This seems at a distance from ‘tough minded’ pragmatism. But it has one interesting epistemological apercu that fits the pragmatic attitude. Pierce sees the tychastic or chance orientation without the ordering of law to be heedless and the anancastic or merely the necessary lawful orientation to be inadequate by excluding creative freedom. Thus, there is still an openness to experience that is the hallmark of the pragmatist. In sum, these rather grand projections of an epistemology of consciousness, which is detailed in the next section, for a ‘rational faith’ results in a belief of God whose evolutionary sign is agape or love. Pierce’s metaphysics suggests Dewey’s sense of the religious, reminding one of Emerson’s transcendentalism, rather than a justification of a dogmatic religion. In the 1887 essay, ‘Science and Immortality’ Pierce asserts the warrant for openness to doubt religious doctrines; theological dogmas have historic dependence on social attitudes rather than critical common sense; further, they make for a deadening and narrow form of life. He writes (1940) ‘Man’s highest developments are social; and religion though it begins in seminal individual inspiration, only comes to full flower in a great church co-extensive with civilization’. Albeit this positivist view of progress, institutionalization of religion fights against creative and salubrious vitality: Pierce believes the one thing that ought to carry religion as a social institution, is ‘to hasten the chariot wheels of redeeming love’ (1940). In the end, for Pierce the most important matters of belief seems to be the utility of a mental identity, ‘chariot wheels’, of his feeling of love.

3 Pierce on Feeling and Metaphysics Consciousness alone – i.e. feeling – is the only distinctive attribute of mind.

—Pierce Collected Papers 5.492

The identification of consciousness with feeling is startling and Pierce’s justification of that locates belief within a complex epistemological theory of consciousness. Before proceeding with his own view of consciousness, Pierce’s opposition to intuitionist epistemology, exemplified by Descartes, must be discussed. Since historically psychological states have been often related to theories of knowledge based on intuition, especially as a ‘recollection’ of it a priori real structures, e.g. the slave boy recollecting the Pythagorean theorem in Plato’s Meno, therefore it is useful to recall Pierce’s argument against Descartes’ a priori and substratum intuitionism. Descartes wished not only to oppose the strongest form of scepticism but to present intuition in terms of a consummate idea, viz. an absolute proposition about the existence of a Perfect Being, with a corollary warrant for science, with its less existentially demanding ideas than God. Relying on an intuition of certainty about the existence of a Perfect Being, who as He presented himself to consciousness would also, by implication of His perfection, guarantee clear and distinct ideas, mathematical ones being such par excellence and the method for science as it is more certain in the measure of its ability to make mathematical its subject. Various difficulties about this proposition were noted, particularly when Hobbes and Gassendi responded to Father Mersenne about Descartes’ Meditations. For one, the idea of perfection of a Being implies the Being has no needs beyond Itself. Consequentially, God cannot create creatures; if the argument holds, all that is created must be part of God, as Spinoza noted in his version of the ‘ontological argument’. Even Isaiah 45 speaks about God forming the light and creating the darkness: for Spinoza, Deus sive Natura not understood by the human part may be called shadows of mind. For Descartes’ position, something outside of God is logically necessary for the existence of creatures or things.

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Nevertheless, Descartes’ search for certitude, initially ‘empties’ content by radical scepticism. This procedure provides what no consciousness can doubt if it is rational. Doubting the existence or probity of matters ordinarily taken for granted and, by the possibility of a malevolent power, even simple mathematical calculations, pace Plato’s Meno. Descartes’ (greatest) certitude is the existence of God: a perfect being must exist by one having such an idea. The prodromus, certain but even less certain, is the existence of a self: the cogito ergo sum or dubito ergo sum (I think or doubt therefore I exist). Though this argument has an attraction, Pierce finds such an empty self-made by the play of having a particular awareness and then ‘disowning’ it: that is suspect. He holds that there is a process here of induction in the owned awareness disowning rather than an immediate intuition. Already expressed by Anselm in the tenth century, the ‘ontological argument’ was not accepted by scholastic Aristotelians, e.g. Thomas Aquinas, because for Aristotle the logical notion of existence, the copula, is a notion of language not of reality. This is the position of the nominalists, like Occam, who and Hobbes, who always oppose ontological essentialism and provide epistemological essentialism through the definition of language and that allows the actuality of what is defined to be merely a hypothesis. Indeed, Plato in his late dialogues, Sophist and Statesman, makes the disciple of Parmenides, the Stranger from Elis, allow an epistemological essentialism that distinguishes alethinos (simply true) from alethes (true) because of pragmata things that are of a human concern. The important proposition of nominalism is that the human perspective (even if considered as part (meros) of a whole (kosmos)) must move concepts into a language categorization that does not assert existence, metaphysics is limited to physics: that is on an interest based on empirical experience. Descartes’ contemporary, Thomas Hobbes’ methodological essentialism is expressed by the proposition: ‘truth is a matter of words not of things’ (De Corpore I). Descartes tries to bolster Anselm by intuition of a logical demand, rather like Parmenides. The existence of the conscious self is part of the scala perfectionis to the existential demand of the ontological argument. Noteworthy, Kant’s critical argument by limiting mental functioning opposes this ontological view of logic. Pierce was much influenced by Kant, who accepted Aristotle’s position about logic, viz. logic is a tool that cannot determine the existential nature of propositions. Indeed, as Quine has it, it imposes a bound or existential variable as a supposition. In that sense, Kant says, ‘The idea of money and the having of money are not the same’. Gilbert Ryle, in The Concept of Mind, calls Descartes’ assertion a ‘category mistake’ because perfection is not a concept that can stand with existence rather than with a definition.

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Pierce agrees and further asserts what is called intuition is merely a habit that has arisen from sense impressions creating ideas and like any habit that fixes belief is a hypothetical matter. The subtlety in Pierce’s empiricism is that empirical knowing catches a developmental nature in existential flight. Thus, his metaphysics is suggestive to such process thinkers as Whitehead and Hartshorne. Unlike Kant in the third Kritik or Hegel’s Geist, Pierce does not have recourse to an absolutised teleological orientation for this process; instead, following Darwin, he assumes even chance is a factor of development. This increases the allowance for fallibility of a scientific hypothesis; yet, from Pierce’s evolutionary view of a process toward harmony all mistakes as momentary limits move toward being harmoniously incorporated in some future determination of nature, and that includes the ‘mistakes’ and ambiguities of nature open to scientific investigation. This is a rather radical idea of scientific progress for it must engage the very limits of nature at the present moment of investigation. Obviously this is different than the assumption of a ‘block universe’ in Descartes understanding of science or, for that matter, Kant’s. Time is an arena of struggle for Reals and language, even the descriptive language of science, expresses this struggle halted for consciousness not per se but in the inductive ‘moment’ of fixing belief. In contrast to Descartes dismissal of the ordinary along with probability and the possibility of error, the appropriate fixing of belief for Pierce is based on induction: his ‘laboratory method’. Pierce accepts the position that though the hypothetical and probabilistic nature of induction is open to scepticism nevertheless radical scepticism is pragmatically foolish. Descartes quest for certainty lags in the sort of illusion of the cogito ergo sum. An unnamed Finnish colleague of mine might say the self can be doubted after five large bottles of beer; however, the point is not the notion of a self as an implication of awareness but the content of that awareness, which includes explaining one’s identity. Indeed, in counter distinction to Descartes, Pierce thinks belief in a substratum self is inductively constructed by various experiential relations. Signs or words provide a web to capture assertions; thus, the child learns to use the word ‘self’ by a wealth of empirical relations. The feeling or quality of belief conjoins communication. Pierce opposes Descartes’ intuitive elevation of the cognitive credential of subjectivity, i.e. the soul and Descartes’ ultimate separation of man from the material world. In Meditations, Descartes initially presents a sceptically content empty self or soul and, though the perfect character of God guarantees confidence in the world understood by dissolving the scepticism about (existentially limited, unlike God) a priori ideas, indeed, the difference between self and world makes for a dualism between

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soul and natural objects, like one’s body. Ryle finds this a notion that hangs in the air because there is no connection that can be understandable between the self and the body despite our overwhelming practical experience, e.g. how can my will move my hand since they are two different existents: the Cartesian, Malebranche recognized this difficulty and accepted a divine grounded parallelism between mind and body, but on this approach the Perfect Being would create another illusion that misplaces common sense. In sum, after Darwin, Pierce’s evolutionary and probabilistic viewpoint opposes the mechanistic, necessary, and perduring natural law viewpoint of early modern science, which was the cultural achievement grounded in Descartes. Pierce therefore breaks with the Platonic tradition that had its modest philosophical moment in Descartes reach of presenting a stable and absolute standard for science. Pierce’s evolutionary orientation helps project his opposition to the Platonic and Cartesian cognitive character of intuition. Dewey in the Quest for Certainty writes (1965): Although Descartes defined natural existence as extension, the classic tradition that only sense and imagination, among the organs of the mind, refer to physical existence caused him to feel bound to offer justification for the doctrine that natural phenomena can be state by purely mathematical reasoning without recourse in experimentation. Pierce and Dewey’s experimentally oriented pragmatism opposes the corollary of Descartes’ dualism, having a mechanism for all things except a ‘spiritual’ or rational aspect. Further, because of the intuitivist approach, not Spinoza but others influential thinkers in the Cartesian tradition found moral knowledge based on freedom as spontaneous and without the natural chain of cause and effect; like Leibniz, Kant is influenced by this and takes spontaneous freedom as a ‘pure rational or ethical will’ in a supernatural manner. However, the natural real of cause and effect is determined and its laws are presented by Newton; thus, for Kant, in his speculative metaphysics, reached by the faculty of reflective judgment, there is a dualism that is bridged rather than unified in a strict sense by God’s teleological principle that ultimately allows representation of the unconditional and absolute in the conditional natural order. Kant’s ethical person has an absolute and unconditioned ethical rational essence and is not like personality, which is determined conditionally: thus Kant accepts an essential understanding of Descartes dualism between the mechanically determined nature and, granted its obscurity, supernatural realm. From the viewpoint of the pragmatists, these steps have deep roots in a cultural inclination, especially of the monotheist ver-

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sion of Christianity: intentionally with Descartes, Malebranche and even Kant, it is dogma made rationally respectable. This brief voyage in modern philosophy suggests the difficulty of the paradigm of the a priori orientation and the cultural tendency to justify the monotheistic God of Christianity. Pierce’s pragmatism firmly opposes both Cartesian intuitionism and its dualist corollary signals re-evaluation under the allegiance to scientific method and influenced by the practical successes of science and technology. Pierce writes ‘The Cartesian error supposes that one can doubt at will’ (5.514). Because of this, Pierce’s opposes Descartes’ most unpractical abstract procedure to empty awareness, already a criticism de facto given by Hobbes. Pierce appreciates Hume’s confession that his scepticism is left behind when he leaves his study; feigned scepticism is therefore ‘an idle and self-deceptive pretence’ (Thayer 1968). Pierce demands a warrant for belief and, further, any belief’s content is an assumption, whether mistaken or not. Indeed, in addition to expectations in diurnal experience, science itself must assume fixed beliefs to structure observations. Pierce’s ‘What is Pragmatism’ (1905) puts the content incorporation for the feeling of belief: … as if doubting were as easy as lying. But in truth, there is but one state of mind that from which you can ‘set out,’ namely, the very state of mind in which you actually find yourself at the time you do set out—a state in which you are laden with an immense mass of cognition already formed, of which you cannot divest yourself if you would. Pierce’s view is ‘cognition’ is divested or qualified by ongoing experience or acute argument or a new scientific paradigm for evidence. The direction of the quote is obvious: habit and belief are intimate mental conditions; guiding us in relating ourselves to the world; thus, he writes in that essay, ‘The most striking feature of the new theory [pragmatism] was its recognition of an inseparable connection between rational cognition and rational purpose’. Purpose inevitably presents desire, a particularized feeling. Thus, feeling is now an ever-present condition of awareness and one, by the fixed belief, enters our cognitive horizons. The reaction against Descartes is continuous throughout Pierce’s essays. Pierce criticizes Descartes’ ‘chimerical scheme’; in ‘How to Make our Ideas Clear’ writing (1957) ‘The idea of an idea seeming clear and really being so never occurred to him [Descartes]’. Pierce holds beliefs satisfy or offer an emotional basis for action, however, satisfaction does not assert truth. Fools are satisfied with foolish views. Descartes ‘clear and distinct ideas’ on the a priori theory of the model of mathematics

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or logic is in tandem with the Platonic argument that the true is the good and once the true is known it must be acted upon. This classical posture is at a great distance from the modern disavowal of such ‘block universe’ metaphysics. Pierce’s criticism of Cartesian psychology is further elaborated in ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’ and ‘Questions Concerning certain Faculties Claimed for Man’; he summarizes his conclusions in the latter essay ‘written in the spirit of opposition to Cartesianism’. Pierce contends (1940): 1. We have no power of Introspection, but all knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge of external facts. 2. We have no power of Intuition, but every cognition is determined logically by previous cognitions. 3. We have no power of thinking without signs. 4. We have no conception of the absolutely incognizable. Pierce’s fundamental criticism which is returned to again and again, opposes the cognitive status of intuition in Cartesanism. Introspection, viz. ‘any knowledge of the internal world not derived from external observation’ (5.244) is not possible if the internal is taken as an originative or a priori condition of knowing; for Pierce, the internal return of information originated in the external world under the usual process of inductions conceptually structured. ‘Self-consciousness’ as knowledge of oneself is not a Cartesian given but a result of experience. It arises under a cognitive determination from sense experience: it is ‘of a cognitive nature which the history of our lives has forced upon us’ (5.539). Pierce obviously wishes to move knowing away from the notion of a fixed substratum and a priori contents for percepts. Pierce sees the usualness of this false step even in a critical commonsense thinker like Reid, who follows Locke, via Descartes, via Plato, in substrate thinking (cf. Buchler 1932). Pierce would not deny that in some sense intuition and introspection are apt, e.g. intuitions are perhaps conceptual strands habitually embedded physiologically or somehow below a full awareness of the external relations or structures that are yet understood; introspection, like intuition, does not locate some a priori certitude. Pierce surely understands a general experience, which might be called introspection; that is, remembering past events for the sake of theory about the character of what one called ‘self’. However, this is an inductive matter, viz. there are problems of reliability due to a change of consciousness from the past to the moment of remembering. Importantly, the quality or feeling of a memory is different than the feeling at its occurrence; this puts into question what originally had motivated the remembered

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actions. Feelings recalled, assuming change of individual consciousness, stand in an inductive relation to present awareness; and because of a lack of public inspection about feeling one has to rely on the confirming evidence of others who witnessed the past actions that he and they remember. Obviously, this sort of objectivity is more questionable than a ‘laboratory experiment’ that has predictive as well as postdictive power. Of course, it is not entirely useless to try to understand past motivations; indeed the present formation of habits or character, an important matter to a human being, is somewhat of a guide to deciphering the past. Indeed, if the point of the introspective exercise is to understand oneself in terms of present habits for action and their quality as feelings. Pierce’s opposition to the Cartesian orientation is echoed in other pragmatists, e.g. in Experience and Nature (1929) Dewey writes ‘The Cartesian school relegated experience to a secondary and almost accidental place’. Dewey reminds us of Pierce’s significant orientation that belief as a feeling engages the ‘external’ world. Engagement of course is adequate or not for fixing belief. Pierce’s psychology of belief provides four modes for relating to belief: tenacity, authority, a priori science. Tenacity—what one might term Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith,’ e.g. she (or God, for whom she is a stand-in) loves me despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—discounts reasonable evidence, as Kierkegaard’s relation to Kristina who had already married someone else. Kierkegaard calls himself a ‘knight of infinite resignation’. In Fixation (1957) Pierce says this mode of belief is fit for hermits, i.e. the existential isolation of individuality, and ‘it will not be able to hold its ground in practice’. Authority (either institutional or customary fashion) is much superior to tenacity by having a public order of actual relations; however, history and wide cultural awareness finds this sort of social tenacity or dogmatism a mere fashion and without a warrant for creditable (or probative) assignment of truth. Note religious dogmatists feel the need of perceptual evidence when they call upon miracles, e.g., in Catholicism, to certify sainthood. The third determinant of belief is accepted by the Platonic tradition and revivified for modern science by Descartes in the seventeenth century, is the a priori method. Pierce’s example is Plato’s (Pythagorean) influence on Kepler initially to accept circular motion for the planetary trajectory because the circle was considered a more ‘perfect form’ than the ellipse by a putative a priori intuition. Pierce is sympathetic to erroneous science’s theoretical categorization on the basis of the prestige of plane geometry; however, its authority is properly limited by observational evidence, e.g. Tycho Brahe’s observations changed Kepler’s mind. Pierce says in Fixation (1957)

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‘we are driven, in Lord Bacon’s phrase, to a true induction … [whereas] this [a priori] method does not differ in a very essential way from authority’. This of course is the most serious philosophical matter about a fixation of belief that the above winding discussion of Descartes challenged. Disregarding the above ways to fix belief as flawed or completely mistaken, Pierce offers science or critical inquiry as the proper method (Fixation 1957) ‘The method must be such that the conclusion of every man shall be the same. Such is the method of science’. In defending this, he speaks to the assumption of the method of induction but ties it to his more speculative or abstract realist assumption. He writes (Fixation 1957): There are real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinion of them; those Reals affect our senses according to regular laws, and, though our sensations are different as are our relations to the objects, yet, by taking advantage of the laws of perception, we can ascertain by reasoning how things really and truly are; and any man, if he have sufficient experience, and he reason enough about it, will be led to the one True conclusion. The new conception here is that of reality. Here Pierce’s connection of fixing beliefs for the goal of Reals departs from James, who takes the salubrious quieting of the mind, especially about the ‘big questions’ to be more significant than achieving Pierce’s warranted fixation of belief grounded in the mode of science. James would even to allow the designation of true on the basis of emotive satisfaction. James’s pragmatic gravity is at the opposite pole of Descartes rationalism but one with him in making a subjective condition the measure of truth. Pierce’s pragmatic gravity opposes Cartesian rationalism based on intuition but opposes James because Pierce does not allow any proposition about fact—that is, the product feeling of a belief in its appropriateness to ‘Reals’—not to be a matter of mere emotive satisfaction. Beliefs are to be tested by scientific inquiry for the certification as true. Yet, the path of abstraction from scientific investigation leads Pierce to his consummate view of Reals in an evolutionary path and this belief provides the quality or feeling he calls love. It is Piercean to say that each mode of fixing belief or proposals for knowing has a feeling quality; our consciousness has the aspect of feeling. Otherwise, awareness would be emotionally empty; consequently, even Descartes’ most sceptical moments in the First Meditation the feeling of scepticism exists. So it seems that when Descartes says he exists because of his awareness of consciousness, Pierce understands his feel-

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ing of scepticism or doubt ultimately relates to an induction, albeit a very primitive one in childhood with its particular feeling. Thus, feeling is attached to all modes of consciousness and to all its contents. ‘I think therefore I feel’ is truer than I think therefore I am. I understand that by induction that ‘I am’ even during an anaesthetic or when asleep. In the tradition of Hume, Wittgenstein excellently provides such a Piercean argument for self-identity. Feeling is therefore fundamental for Pierce’s metaphysics, albeit the feeling of metaphysical love is grounded in the empirical work of science projected by logical acuity. The actuality warrant, oriented by empiricism, separates his feeling saturated metaphysics from James’s tolerance of accepting supernatural dogmas on the basis of emotive satisfaction and utility for a program of action. Rooted in induction Pierce proceeds to Reals of natural law, and from that cognitive orientation to metaphysical speculation based on the way consciousness works. Now, despite his evolutionary view, metaphysically, Pierce associates himself with Plato. In ‘A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God’ of 1908, Pierce dubiously, without appropriate scholarly qualification, from the viewpoint of objective reality, attaches Plato to his own view of reality: he writes (1940): Plato’s idea denotes anything whose Being consists in its mere capacity for getting fully represented, regardless of any person’s faculty or impotence to represent it. ‘Real’ is a word invented in the thirteenth century to signify having Properties, i.e., characters sufficing to identify their subject, and possessing these whether they be anywise attributed to it. For Pierce, reality is not only the foundation of the public, communal, replication of laboratory experience—‘man’s power of perceiving Inductive Certainty’ (Neglected 1940) yet also it has the ‘august practicality’ of the hypothesis of God bring action in conformity with his doctrine of emergent, creative nature. In his consummate ‘spiritual’ aspect of consciousness, Pierce writes about God, though under his own epistemological constraints. In the above essay, he further writes: the hypothesis of God’s Reality, and pursues that line of reflection in scientific singleness of heart, will come to be stirred to the depths of his nature by the beauty of the idea and by its august practicality, even to the point of earnestly loving and adoring his strictly hypothetical God, and to that of desiring above all things to shape the whole conduct of life and the springs of action into conformity with that hypothesis. Pierce’s (1958) metaphysical speculation is in concert with Kant’s statement in

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the first Critique: Although the assumption [of God] itself belongs to the theoretical reason alone, as a ground of explanation, it can be called a hypothesis; but in relation to the intelligibility of an object given us by the moral law (the highest good), and consequently if a need for practical purposes, it can be called a belief. The feeling of such a belief has the quality of goodness and beauty that is not unconditioned per se but radically significant to enhance subjectivity and guide action. The belief of the rightness of (mundane) action carries forward the feeling attached to the divine hypothesis. Pierce speaks of this consummate and radical condition of consciousness as a hypothesis qua the gorgeous rhetoric of ‘reflection in scientific singleness of heart’. As the above points out, the scientific basis here is not immediately evidence but rather the method of theory construction. Certainly Pierce has little patience with non-public justifications of reality or those that can be explained by psychological frailty or a poor mode of inquiry. In ‘Science and Immortality’ Pierce scoffs at evidence for communication with the dead presented by the Psychical Research Society, of which James was President for many years. Pierce’s proper fixation of belief is complicated but necessary for his theoretical construction in science and metaphysics: it is based on a triadic modal for understanding consciousness. Pierce’s view of consciousness is made explicitly by his discussion of firstness, secondness and thirdness. His explanation of the triadic modes of the construction of consciousness provides a bridge from uncharted feeling to theory construction. In one bare bones summary of their salient character or intent, Pierces writes (6.32): First is the conception of being or existence independent of everything else. Second is the conception of being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else. Third is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and second are brought into relation. Justus Buchler’s collection of Pierce’s writings has these modes discussed under the title ‘Principles of Phenomenology,’ which are presented in late manuscripts, mostly from 1903–5. Pierce view of their use in complex abstractions, the ‘inextricable mix’, results because theories tend to emphasis one of the three at the expense of the others; nevertheless, despite their actual synthesis, in his analysis, Pierce offers their definite modal distinctness. One must note that the analysis begins with secondness or the mode of phenomena. Firstness, the uncharted moment, is the ground for

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the resulting empirical moment of secondness and the higher abstractions of thirdness. Secondness is the rather nominalist making of descriptions or laws on the way to relating to the Reals that have determined secondness and located in Thirdness. Though there is some temporality involved, the thing to remember that this is a synthetic view of consciousness. Pierce writes (Phenomenology 1940): By the phaneron [phenomenon] I mean the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind … There is nothing quite so directly open to observation as phanerons … What I term phaneroscopy [phenomenology] is the study of the direct observation of phanerons and generalizing its observations, signalizes several very broad classes of phanerons; describes the features of each; shows that although they are so inextricably mixed together that no one can be isolated, yet it is manifest that their characters are quite disparate; then proves, beyond question, that a certain very short list comprises all of these broadest categories. … there are three modes of being. I hold we can directly observe them in elements of whatever is at any time before the mind in any way. Thus, though they are three modes they have a unified or, at least, a ‘none isolatable’ presence in any conscious content made intelligible. The slippage is that Pierce sometimes speaks of firstness as metaphysical factor and thirdness as an inductive construction and therefore they are not directly observed, if directly observed means a percept. His multiple explanations, often to different audiences about such a most complex matter, lack a measure of consistency. In addition, Pierce makes another complex distinction: a mode of being is not the same as an existence; its reality is in the realm of logical analysis. If as Parmenides and later Spinoza noted we have only one system for Being that does not allow us to make Pierce’s distinction between existence and real. The problem results because the existence of things does not allow a real to be isolated from (natural) things, whereas in speculative metaphysics there is a consummate condition, God, that seems more than natural as a moving principle of nature, though the concept of God is a natural hypothesis. For example, when Pierce speaks of God in ‘Concept of God,’ (1906), he writes ‘I take the liberty of substituting reality for existence. … I myself always use exist in its strict philosophical sense of react with the other things in its environment’. In this sense of ‘exist’ God cannot exist in solitariness, say before he created creatures. Yet, he must be termed a real to ‘explain’ (natural) instances of existence’.

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In the epistemology of consciousness, existence is apt for the mode of secondness or of percepts, because secondness involves signification or identification of things. Pierce writes, ‘existence means reaction with environment, and so it is a dynamic character’ (5.503). Therefore, Pierce begins his discussion of the three modes with secondness: the mode of actuality, not potential and not the real of universals; this is the realm of inquiry, of observations en route to thirdness, to the inductive ordering of phenomena into law (thirdness). He writes (Phenomenology 1940): Let us begin with considering actuality, and try to make out just what it consists in. If I ask you what the actuality of an event consists in, you will tell me that it consists in its happening then and there. The specifications then and there involve all its relations to other existents. The actuality of an event seems to lie in its relation to the universe of existents. He continues to write ‘Actuality is something brute. There is no reason in it. …We have a two-sided consciousness of effort and resistance, which to me comes tolerably near a pure sense of actuality. I call that secondness’. Keeping that in mind that there is a conscious quality in the phenomenal assemblage that needs explication, let us consider this statement. Secondness is direct perception, though we know that for consciousness it presents itself with structural assumptions.. The percept per se is not in this moment related to the qualities that compose it or considered within a set of relational determinants: that awaits thirdness. Pierce’s use of ‘then and there’ parallels Kant’s intuitions of time and space schematized with the categories of the understanding. Another Kantian sign is Pierce’s word ‘pure’—(rein as used in Kritik der reinen Vernunft)—in the phrase ‘pure sense of actuality’. But then to speak of secondness in terms of a psychology of movement by ‘effort and resistance’ seems to bring the matter into more than ‘thereness’ because movement must have a relational character there is a demand for intellectual determination. This means that a percept or phenomenon is structured in its presentation by a root in something initially below consciousness and determination for belief or verification must be in what is external to consciousness. The former is firstness, posed as something like the Kantian thing-in-itself, with a sort of causal pressure on the other processes of consciousness and the latter is being understood in the process of reflection: induction ascertaining universals: ‘reals’. All operations of mind produce quality or feeling; its ‘products are distinct in ‘quality, fact, and thought’. Feeling is not aside from a specific content focus; however, the full content includes associations, relations and modes of ordering. Many

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matters needing analysis grounded in induction. The object of consciousness, e.g. a red chair is not only an inductive conclusion of ‘redness’ and ‘chairness’ but has associations like ‘the favourite chair of my favourite uncle’ and a colour seen in a dim light. But then the feeling of this particular red chair has ranged over modes and objects for a unity in consciousness and a therefore a synthesis of feeling. Feeling can move quickly in mental associations and computations, often in an undertow of uncharted impositions. ‘Fact’ as thereness is disconcertingly unstable because of the complexity of shifting perspectives that continue or may structure it; Pierce (Phenomenology 1940) says ‘it is contingent or accidentally actual … [And] whatever involves an unconditional necessity that is a force without law or reason, brute force’. For Pierce, thirdness determines the organization of perceptions or experience and is the method to assert truth or a conceptual fact about reality. It provides stability for fixing belief but is a hypothesis; nevertheless, here we have both a stable and an unstable element for feeling to chew upon. In a concession to chance and unknown forces, Pierce writes (Phenomenology 1940): Firstness is the mode of being which consists in its subject’s being positively such as it is regardless of aught else. That can only be a possibility. Possibility without cognitive assertion has a seeming ‘purity’ in bracketing relations and therefore action. For as long as things do not act on one another there is no sense or meaning in saying that they have a being [perhaps Pierce slips and should use ‘existence’ and not ‘being’] unless it be that they are such in themselves that they may come into relation with others. Pierce’s views firstness as a disembodied notion of quality (ibid): I do not mean the sense of actually experiencing these feelings, whether primarily or in any memory or imagination. That is something that involves these qualities as an element of it. But I mean the qualities themselves which. In themselves, are mere may-bes, not necessarily realized. … That mere quality, or suchness, is not in itself an occurrence, as seeing a red object is; it is a mere may-be. Its only being consists in the fact that there might be such a peculiar, positive, suchness in a phaneron. When I say it is a quality, I do not mere it ‘inheres’ in a subject. That is a phaneron [phenomenon] peculiar to metaphysical thought, not involved in sensation itself, and therefore not in the quality of feeling, which is entirely contained, or superseded, in the actual sensation.

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The avoidance of ‘inhering in a subject’ provides realist metaphysical character, and Pierce, because he consummates the conscious process in thirdness, associates realism with objective idealism. This mode of being since it outside of subjectivity; indeed, unlike ‘brute perception’ it is a ‘may-be’. It needs the other two modes to establish its modal identity. Secondness is immediately preliminary to thirdness, the fulcrum mode. Pierce speaks of relational possibilities of secondness: he mentions its product as such percepts as red, hard, tedious, heartrendering, noble; ‘It is sufficient that wherever there is a phenomenon there is quality’ (Phenomenology 1940). In classical metaphysics there is the problem of Being and becoming. The fixity of Reals in Pierce is broadly similar to Plato’s ideas on the level of episteme. Plato’s supreme unifying reality, the Idea of the Good on the level of nous, merely seems transferred by Pierce to a feeling of cosmic love that somehow is involved in the evolution of things. It is treated as the supreme Real or Being but not as an existent in the lower level of ‘ordinary’ scientific work. His triadic analysis tries to achieve the relation of universals in the existential order of lawfulness. However, specific percepts relate to Being, the evolutionary process in nature, and they in their specificity are understood in the ‘subtle doctor’s,’ Duns Scotus’s scholastic terminology by the term ‘haecceity’: a Being weighted object of awareness. ‘They [the ‘stuff’ of firstness] merge into one another. They have no perfect identity, but only likenesses, or partial identities’. This has a theoretic similarity to unformed or prime matter in Plato and Aristotle before it receives ideational distinction. However, for Platonic Ideas there seems no Piercean ‘possible’. One problematic aspect of the triad is that firstness is not presented as a mix of qualities but redness and heartfeltness are qualities to be mixed with other qualities in consciousness. Pierce writes (Phenomenology 1940) ‘We suppose they [the ‘contents’ of firstness] have capacities in themselves which may or may not be actualized’. An ontological ambiguity arises and, I think, is never resolved with the notion of ‘we suppose’. Perhaps, in a general manner, Pierce’s epistemological point of departure can be considered in this way. For the pragmatist, Kant’s epistemological maxim that concepts without percepts are empty and percepts without concepts are blind is ultimately disturbing. For pragmatic inquiry, there is no actual separation between the two. Thus, pragmatism opposes the sort of empiricism or idealism that unifies the basis of knowing at the expense of either concepts or of percepts (observation). Pierce and Dewey’s view of inquiry attempts to see concepts and percepts intrinsically unified; that is part of their arguments to close the gap between knowing and acting.

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The unification of consciousness has a quality or feeling marking individuality, despite any specific awareness attached to it. Individual feeling of self is separated from the veracity of knowing things and things and relations needs inquiry: just so Pierce seeks to escape the subjectivist’s ‘ego-centric predicament’ that turns the character of inquiry posed by Kant’s limits for knowing, that a Kantian like Schopenhauer can reasonably take to be an illusion. Though not been much considered by expositors of Pierce, often not even mentioned, his discussion of feeling is ‘at the heart’ of Pierce’s understanding of mind. Pierce, despite his complexity and his empirical qua scientific loyalty, travels the road of romantic intuitions or sentiments elevating ‘feeling first.’ For Pierce, feeling opens to love as the creative power of nature’s God; Pierce’s harmonious agape is identified with God’s consciousness at work in a process of natural evolution. It is the rectifier of another sort of chaotic love, ‘eros,’ which has the quality of disharmony. For Pierce, agapastic love as the grounding feeling about one’s existence is the proper leitmotiv of all other feelings and a bulwark against vanity and greed, et al ‘disharmonious’ aspects of ‘eros.’ Pierce’s metaphysics of love as the harmony of continuous creation refers to notions of simplicity, richness and harmony. These notions are especially apt, albeit with difference, for the rational systems of Spinoza and Leibniz. Firstness is Pierce’s simple: he speaks of it as self-contained, even using Leibniz’ word ‘monad’—‘quality is the monadic aspect of the world’—though this ‘quality’ for him is only ‘a mere abstract potentiality’ rather than the actualized monad of Leibniz. Richness, if taken for secondness, the terminus of relation, is ‘the element of struggle’. Pierce remarks that ‘experience is broader than perception’ involving ‘vicissitudes, that is, ‘compulsions and constraints’. Pierce’s understanding of knowing as merely probable restrains his conclusions; he writes ‘There is nothing at all that is absolutely confrontational; although it is quite true that the confrontational is continually flowing in on us’ (7.653). Pierce always eschews a final absolute. He writes (5.436): The truth is that pragmaticism is closely allied to the Hegelian absolute idealism, from which, however, it is sundered by its vigorous denial that the third category (which Hegel degrades to a mere stage of thinking) suffices to make the world, or is even much as self-sufficient. Had Hegel, instead of regarding the first two stages with a smile of contempt, held on them as independent or distinct elements of the triune Reality, pragmaticists might have looked upon him as a great vindicator of their truth.

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(One must note, Pierce first used the word pragmatism and thirty years latter chose to use ‘pragmaticist’ on the ground that others had ‘kidnapped’ his original intentions under the former, more elegant term.) For Pierce, ‘synthesis’ brings together ‘quality and reaction.’ It is the realm of meaning in theory, viz. ‘every genuine triadic relation involves meaning. A triadic relation is inexpressible by means of a dyadic relation’ (Phenomenology 1940). The evolving natural order is dependent on synthesis for the three characteristics of simplicity, richness qua infinity, and harmony qua justice. Further, what is usually overlooked about Pierce’s psychology of consciousness is the importance of feelings as part of the process of cognition (Phenomenology 1940): Every kind of consciousness enters into cognition. Feelings, in the sense in which alone they can be admitted into as a great branch of mental phenomena, form the warp and woof of cognition, and even in the objectionable sense of pleasure and pain, they are constituents of cognition. Pierce apparently speaks of feeling as a distinct monad, viz.: By a feeling, I mean an instance of that kind of consciousness which involves no analysis, comparison or any process whatever, nor consists in whole or in part of any act by which one stretch of consciousness is distinguished from another, which has its own positive quality which consists in nothing else, and which is of itself all that it is, however it may be brought about. That response does not detract from the indefinite multiplication of the multiple qualities of objects and relational awareness. Pierce seems to speak incoherently or at least ambiguously; for example ‘Feeling is an immediate consciousness … yet there is no consciousness in it because it is instantaneous’. In ‘The Architecture of Theories’ of 1891 we see his attempt to impose the conscious order by yet other categories—mind, matter, and evolution—that brings forth yet further questions about theoretical coherence. Yet, he gives us a sort of summation of a modal procedure in relation to feeling. Pierce writes (1940): The one intelligible theory of the universe is objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. … The origin of things, considered not as leading to anything, but in itself, contains the idea of First, the end of things that of Second, the process mediating between them that of Third. … Mind is First, Matter is Second, Evolution is Third. Such are the materials out of which a philosophical theory ought to be built, in order to represent the state of knowledge to which the nineteenth century has brought

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us. … We can readily foresee what sort of metaphysics would appropriately be constructed from these conceptions. … It would suppose that in the beginning—infinitely remote—there was a chaos of unpersonalized feeling, which being without connection or regularity, would properly be without existence. This feeling, sporting here and there in pure arbitrariness, would have started the germ of a generalizing tendency. Its other sportings would be evanescent, but this would have a growing virtue. Thus, the tendency of habit would be started; and from this, with the other principles of evolution, all the regularities of the universe would be evolved. At any time, however, the element of pure chance survives and will remain until the world becomes an absolutely perfect, rational, and symmetrical system, in which mind is at last crystallized into the infinitely distant future. That idea has been worked out by me with elaboration. It accounts for the main features of the universe as we know it—the characters of time, space, matter, force, gravitation, electricity, etc. The wild ride of Pierce’s metaphysic of cosmological love is a projection of more accessible pragmatic methods of inquiry, which influenced James and Dewey. From their pragmatic viewpoint, the cosmological theory’s ‘cash value’ is an attempt to stabilize feeling in a profound posture.

4 James on Consciousness and Truth The word ‘I’ is primarily a noun of position like ‘this’ and ‘here’.

—James A Pluralistic Universe

If the word ‘I’ is a position, one question is how is it a reference to an actual position with content? James writes (1908) ‘For twenty years I have mistrusted ‘consciousness’ as an entity, for eight years past I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience’. James suggests the mobility of the reference of ‘I’ to actual (changing) relations and yet he finds various relations to translates the word for self awareness, viz. ‘the empirical equivalent of experience’. This statement is at the least culturally radical, like Pierce’s denial of intuition and introspection; such view are deeply embedded in communicative speech. Further, in James, one notes a carelessness in not distinguishing between the relations of awareness of the ‘owner of the ‘I’ and the relations to him by others using the words ‘he’ or ‘she’ as an experiential focus. The putative self not only has certain relations to others also it is aware of their relation. Later in the same work, James writes, ‘with a superhuman life with which we may, unknown to ourselves be co-conscious’. Aside from an unclear use of the term ‘spiritalism,’ James uses consciousness here without giving us the above ‘pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience’. Having a notion is a sort of experience but it is not one that Pierce would allow to warrant it be taken as a sort of foundational building block for a theory of reality, rather it must be inductively explained as a natural effect. This seems to express the fault line in James writing, if not his thinking, between something one might broadly say while attempting to be scientific and what one says when using casual language, language that has not been prepared by a proper intellectual scouring for communication. Like Pierce, James is sensitive to different audiences that read his work; however, because he has different audiences in mind at the same time, that difficulty often seems to unmoor conceptual associations. They clash and flow into unstable venues, though he offers a prose that sparkles in

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memorable phrases and flashing insights. On the other hand, his physiological psychology is more restrained and, broadly, has a professional, scientific manner. James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) argues from the position of sensationalism—‘in terms of action, concepts are feelings in the flow of time’—which is something of a contrast to the psychology shown in his popular writings on pragmatism. However even in the popular Talks to Teachers (1958) James writes ‘The fact is that there is no sort of consciousness whatever, be it sensation, feeling or idea, which does not directly and of itself tend to discharge into some motor effect’. In Psychology: the Briefer Course, he writes (1904) ‘The uniform correlation of brain-states with mind-states is a law of nature’. This correlate leaves it in doubt whether James is a ‘materialist’ or a ‘dualist.’ He does not want to solve the ambiguity. Yet it seems, upon specification, James does not consider sensations the ground of conceptualization; instead, he relates concepts to feelings, granting of the physiological obscurity of their origin. Feelings are operatively emphasized for his pragmatism. Consequently, for scientific inquiry, his modus operandi agrees with Pierce and Dewey’s opposition to Descartes’ dualism; yet, for actions of individuals in ordinary circumstances, certain feelings of stability and happiness—or pleasure in a mood that one describes by the word ‘happiness’—becomes central. As a backdrop for this, James opens the Cartesian possibility of soul and thus a dualism edged in mystery; he writes in a dualist trope (1890) ‘The relation of mind to its own brain are of a unique and utterly mysterious sort’. Having said that, and one knowing his sympathy to spiritualist agendas, it is understandable that in his popular writings, the self is implied to be a substance. Yet, whatever his ‘substance dualism’ implies for a spiritual language, for James the pragmatic restraint of the a person’s interaction with perceptions moves him to a more Piercean construction of consciousness (1900) ‘Mental life is primarily teleological; that is to say, that our various feelings and thinking have grown to be what they are because of their utility in shaping our reactions to the outer world’. The pragmatic impulse toward action is treated as a decision rather than mere brain behaviour via a materialist orientation of infinite chains of causes and effects. This point is gorgeously asserted even in Principles of Psychology, viz.: But the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life, depends on our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.

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Yet again, when speaking of purpose, James is rather undisciplined. He is not analytic enough and he does not offer a consistent epistemological vision. Because his pragmatism rests on two separated approaches to consciousness, his sense of pragmatism is not of a unitary method but relies on the human consideration of importance. In a confusing world of not integrated experiences and ideologies, the result is that the same person can expresses views with different theoretical implications. These can be either tangential or contradictory when vetted. The scientist qua scientist may act on a fundamentally monistic materialist orientation and the same individual, faced with some harsh and unsolvable personal difficulty, may take comfort in a dualist dogmatism of a religion. One reason for this being less of a problem for James than for philosophers with rational systematic intent is how he thinks of what he calls pure experience. In his ‘Radical Empiricism’ James uses the phrase ‘pure experiences’ in the lineage of Pierce’s mode of firstness, speaking obscurely of different ‘stuff’ as an originative mental condition. Here James can be seen to be sympathetic to Freud’s notion of the unconscious. Again, like in Pierce, this suggests the influence of Kant. The Kantian influence that emerges in James is that of limiting knowing to the natural world of causal chains and yet basing ‘rational faith’ not only on a teleological principle for a speculation whose assumptions cannot be empirically searched but also and flatly on hope. Like Kant, James’s approach has two theoretical modes, practically tangential and not easily if at all combined into a unified articulation. The outcome is James’s acceptance not only of Pierce’s scientific fixing of belief but, unlike Pierce, a greater openness to ‘fixing belief’ by authority or tenacity. James thinks pragmatism is an attitude and for him that implies neutrality about theory and also a limit to it for personal decision like supernatural belief; thus, surface oppositions are not taken as contradictory but as oxymoronic for a consciousness. For James, consciousness can achieve harmonious pluralism by taking purpose and action within different theoretical orders or almost none at all. The Cartesian shadow of subjectivism is apparent: James writes in ‘Sentiment of Rationality’ (1956): The philosopher will recognize rationality as he recognizes everything else, by certain subjective marks with which it affects him. When he gets the marks he may know he has got the rationality. What then are these marks? A strong feeling of ease, peace, rest, is one of them. James calls ‘relief and pleasure’ a ‘sentiment of rationality’. It is just this that Pierce objects to because this sort of rational is open to the egocentric predicament

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that reduces truth to feeling, rather than a public (scientific) credential. Feeling for Pierce persists in achieving the warrant of induction and probability that scientifically fixes belief. James is less bound by an attempt at the unification of natural principles in an ultimate realist posture of Pierce’s objective idealist process thinking. James is open to even consider Fechner’s view of the ‘collective consciousness of the entire earth’ and more such striking spiritualist but doubtful notions because of his sympathy with what the Watchman suggests at the opening of Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon. James writes (Myers 1986): The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders of body. … Materially considered that whole system, along with whatever else that may be, is the body of that totalized consciousness of the universe in which men give the name God. In a yet more mundane psychological view, the human desires for continuance and the often success of injustice are satisfied by a belief in immortality and a just God; these divine capacities satisfy what cannot be satisfied in experience. In approaching the suppositional aspect of such an ideal by his pragmatic separation of concerns, James writes (Pragmatism 1907) ‘The greatest enemy of one of our truths may be the rest of our truths’. ‘One of our truths’ may be a consummate value or meaning not only other than reflecting Pierce’s method of laboratory experience yet suggesting actions opposed by a natural orientation. Would not martyrdom be such? So in ‘The Will to Believe’ (1956) James writes: The thesis I defend is, briefly stated this: Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances ‘Do not decide, but leave the question open’ is itself a passional decision,—just like deciding yes or no—and is attended with the same risk of loving the truth. This is exactly the fundamental element in the positions of Sartre and Heidegger, no matter their qualified sense of what is not open to ‘intellectual grounds’ (1956). Thus, James allows particular activities or ‘forms of life’ to warrant truth differently; the individual as scientific researcher must rely on public credential or intersubjective evidence to assert truth, whereas, the truth of social and personal values, as for Hume, is separated and warranted differently, even with idiosyncratic determination albeit, from an ‘outward perspective,’ this personal determination is related to cultural formations. James’s ‘will to believe’ is open to criticism about the meth-

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odological allowance of subjective marks of ‘peace and pleasure’ in accepting subjectively determined value. The existentialists would say we are identified by our choices, meaning we organize our relations to others and to the difficulties we face by our choices. James’s emphasis on the limits of experience makes his argument attractive. Human beings have a strong psychological need for a consummate belief to orient action as well as feeling they are in control of their identity, if not the full scope of their destiny. This is what Spinoza considers (introducing his phrase to be prefaced by one from Santayana) the ‘normal madness’ of believing that one is ‘a world within a world’. For James some views beyond evidence, are allowed the creative option of hope’s project. These are beliefs, from the scientific view, without a natural foundation. This subjectivity is pragmatic truth in an enlarged sense of ‘personal’ orientations for actions. James argues for its validity in Varieties of Religious Experience and The Will to Believe. In emphatic italics, James says (Pragmatism 1907): Truth is one species of the good, and not, as usually supposed, a category distinct from the good, and coordinate with it. The true is the name for whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons. In The Meaning of Truth, James presents a triadic methodological version with some similarities to Pierce’s firstness, secondness and thirdness for his ‘radical empiricism.’ He writes (1909) ‘Radical empiricism consists first of a postulate, next of a statement of fact, and finally of a generalized conclusion’. For James, in the empirical spirit of Locke, perception—enlarged to include that of the ‘good’ of values, pure and direct perceptions—becomes the more usual starting point of investigation: a postulate. This is somewhat like Pierce’s secondness yet certainly not epistemologically presented as ‘modes of being’. In any case, a postulate for James still contains a vagueness leading to the doubt usual to pragmatism’s task of fixing belief by organizing facts. Thus James writes (1909) ‘The postulate is that the only things that can be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience’. The final fixing of belief into ‘generalized conclusion’ reminds one somewhat of Pierce’s thirdness. The classical pragmatic view is relations among value perceptions are matters of direct existence, neither more nor less so than perceptions of things. They have a status for action; however, where the debate among the pragmatist is about how to

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interrogate value perceptions for action. Unlike Pierce and especially Dewey, James’s pragmatism allows a ‘direct apprehension’ of something beyond nature to be primitive for action rather than a perception needing inquiry from a natural orientation. James’s approach to value perception qualifies the guide to action of the naturalism of the following statement in The Meaning of Truth (1912) ‘The directly apprehended universe needs, in short, no extraneous trans-empirical connective support, but possesses in its own right a concatenated or continuous structure’. Yet, a recognition of something more primitive for action than the empirical structures of a science moves James’s pragmatism (Pluralistic Universe 1977): ‘Concrete pulses of experience appear pent in by no such definite limits as our conceptual substitutes are confined by. They seem to run into each other continually and seem to interpenetrate’. For James, connective determinations of experience, some open and some closed in conscious association, work on basic experience; consequently, there are variations in personal situations. Different individuals do not stand in a similar manner to a given problem or fact. In a holistic view, the supposed similar fact or problem is propelled into a personal context. Thus, pragmatism in James, like in Dewey, has a good measure of individualism in encountering experience and because this is a common sense observation as well as an outcome of his approach, James struck a popular cord, especially with an American audience’s applause of individualism. However James speaks of his philosophy as pluralistic. Pluralism recognizes a functional social determination for communication that blurs some measure of difference between an individual perception and the communicative condition. This projects a public sociability, along with individuality as another side of the coin of liberalism, and indeed of the American ideology. Bertrand Russell presents a sharp example of social communication: several individuals are in a circle around a penny and are asked about for the shape of the penny. They respond that it is round though from their particular perceptional vantage the coin has various oblong shapes because of their different perspectives. They have neutralized their immediate personal perceptions by a gestalt about perspectives: this helps with social relations as well. The recognition that human beings see and interpret the world differently, though they generally defer to a communicative condition which has a presence in social habituation. James captures the popular cultural mind by his allowances, which can claim a methodological accommodation with social practice; however, this seems to make ambiguous his views under critical interrogation. Pierce writes about the difference between his and James’s Pragmatism (letter to Christine Ladd-Franklin quoted in Thayer Meaning and Action p.140):

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Although James calls himself a pragmatist, and no doubt derived his ideas on the subject from me, [as James generously concedes] yet there is an essential difference between his pragmatism and mine. My point is that the meaning of a concept … lies in the manner in which it could conceivably modify purposive action, and in this alone. James, on the contrary, whose natural turn of mind is away from the generals, and who is besides so soaked in ultra-sensationalist psychology that like most modern psychologists he has lost the power of regarding matters from the logical point of view, in defining pragmatism, speaks of it as referring ideas to experiences, meaning evidently the sensational side of experience, while I regard concepts as affairs of habit or disposition, and of how we react. Pierce’s criticism is against the inexactness of James’s epistemology and also, related to the former, of James’s willingness to secure emotional needs by a theory presented not by science but a web of beliefs even of those spun by an absolutist and supernaturally oriented religion. Here is another quote to punctuate that direction. In the ‘Will to Believe’ he writes (1956): If religious hypotheses about the universe be in order at all, then the active faiths of individuals in them, freely expressing themselves in life, are the experimental tests by which they are verified, and the only means by which their truth or falsehood can be wrought. Likewise, to continue, in the spirit of Hume’s separation of values from a fact of sense (1956) ‘A moral question is not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist’. James’s value pluralism anchoring individualism by accepting a broad openness to not testable perceptions or, if testable, not tested, results in producing uncritical ‘alternative possible actuals’. Pierce opposes this openness in James by a realist science: he writes ‘Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion’ (5.407). Without the convergence of experience pragmatism inclines to identify any meaning with truth and that makes for the isolation of doctrine from doctrine; for James, the unintended social result is the isolation of groups or cultures from one another. Though perhaps James has in mind something similar to what Michael Walzer champions by pluralism to enhances democracy structured by a general unity within the public civil order and also many internal sub-cultures that are ‘experiments in living’. Certainly the generous and social personality of James

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would find radical cultural isolation within a nation distasteful. In any case, the methodological argument is fundamental. Pierce disagrees with James that truth means (Pragmatism 1907) ‘nothing but this, that ideas (which themselves are part of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into a satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience’. James’s sympathetic allowance for psychological needs moves him to embrace—with an influence from Bergson’s élan intuitionism—a ‘living, forced and momentous option’ (‘Will to Believe’ 1956). For Pierce this orientation would allow Pragmatism to be a method for miasmic fear leading to irrational assumptions. Of course, this is too hard on James as a rhetorician rather than James as a methodologist; abstractly his position does allow such insanity, as it abstractly it allows cultural isolation, yet his obvious attitude of generosity and tolerance provides mimetic restraint. In fact, just so as a pragmatist James is sensitive to personal presentation in bringing forward an emotive press for communicative influence. Like Pascal, evidenced by his Wager, James further understands the deep human need to have an orientation that can moderate fears, and other emotions, with hope. Fears and resentments assuaged even by hopes for justice and continuance escaping natural experience are not to be disparaged. Of course, as a ‘mere’ theoretic postulate, Pierce like G. E. Moore, in ‘Professor James’s Pragmatism’ has no difficulty in attacking this position. In sum, though James is open to methodological credentials, nevertheless, by emphasizing the limits of experience, he does not limit truth to scientific inquiry. James’s view of truth is extended by the importance of feeling. It allows an ideal to be an overarching coherent program for action; yet further, feelings come in strands of experience and engagement with circumstance, James has a plural allowance for several, coherent or not, sub-orders for action. Thus, James’s pragmatism allows a medley of belief systems beyond critical intelligence in an existential engagement with some hopes not scientifically assessable. These overarching ideals are true because of organizing one’s relationships to others and the world. James writes (‘Will to Believe’ 1956) ‘In truths dependent on a personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing’. With a different gravity, Dewey like Pierce is more cautious about the epistemological import of ideals. Dewey unifies in principle means-end relationships in a committed naturalism with a scientific mode of inquiry. Dewey says (Essays in Experimental Logic 1916 p.320): Since Mr. James has referred to me as saying ‘truth is what gives satisfaction’ I may remark (apart from the fact that I do not think I ever said truth is

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what gives satisfaction) that I have never identified any satisfaction with the truth of an idea, save that satisfaction which arises when the idea as working hypothesis or tentative method is applied to prior existences in such a way as to fulfill what it intends. Dewey and James capture two human inclinations in facing harsh aspects of reality: Dewey appeals to courage and James to reconciliation. For James, from the perspective of the etiology of human beings, experience begins as ‘a buzzing, blooming, confusion’ but, in time, with a reasonable orientation, experience continues to bear fruit. This can be said generally of the pragmatists. Yet, the experience that James radicalizes is a personal leap of insightful feeling. Here fears and hopes, often those common to one’s community, if not humankind, need quieting. Supernatural faith is therefore acceptable to create happy sensations and provide an orientation for action. In opposition, Plato’s Socrates offers courage associated with dignity of the ‘tough minded’ non-acceptance of what we are ignorant. The Socratic ideal is closer to Pierce and Dewey’s reliance on science, albeit for these pragmatists science is not an absolute provider of knowledge. But, Socrates was condemned by Athens for corrupting youth and not without good reason since few of the young would ever form a Socratic character: a caution to all teachers of philosophy. In a way, James is consistent with the pragmatic intention to construct conditions for the usual or ‘actual’ individual. James sees man as not merely a spectator of events but especially in matters of great normative interest to him, an ‘existentialist’ creator or chooser of the framework of life. Dewey, the educational theorist, and even Pierce, also believe in choice as a response to life but for them the response is restrained by natural experience sifted by a scientific mode of inquiry; the dignity of the Socratic inquirer is more important to them than mere satisfaction (at any price). In that, one recalls on the eve of his death in the Crito, with radical courage, Socrates saying, ‘The only thing that can harm a man is mutilation of soul’. Obviously, a startling and not commonsensical statement: one far beyond Pierce’s ‘critical commonsense’. James is willing to use the portentous word ‘truth’ for an ideal’s dynamic satisfaction: perhaps this is his own way to move beyond common sense. Always deferential to Pierce as the inspiration of his Pragmatism, James realizes that he went further than Pierce about the character of truth. He writes (Pragmatism 1907) ‘I think myself that it [pragmatism] should be expressed more broadly than Mr. Pierce expresses it’. James may be seen to confuse the emotional and the logical basis involved in reasonable interpretation; yet, that is from Pierce’s scientific inquiry perspective. Pierce’s

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and yet more Dewey’s orientation has the greater weight in my own mind because it is generally too dangerous to allow the bottom-line to be personal satisfaction. The gravity of inquiry for truth also has a dignity that courage brings in not going beyond what one knows; Mill in a raw manner put it, ‘Better to be Socrates unsatisfied than a pig satisfied’. James takes (some consummate) feeling to be a condition of truth rather than taking feeling, as Pierce does, as a condition of consciousness. where Pierce’s pragmatism forbids the transformation of an unwarranted or unjustified belief into truth. James, Pierce said, ‘remodeled the matter’ (5.44).

5 Dewey on Society Human beings illustrate the same traits of both immediate uniqueness and connection, relationship, as do other things.

—Dewey Experience and Nature

Among pragmatists, John Dewey is most conscientious about the difficulties of the relation of individual and society, and his reconstruction of liberalism intends a balanced unity of these ‘factors.’ His key ‘logical’ terms for the human condition in this constructive attempt are continuity, situation, inquiry and growth. They are logical because Dewey does not separate scientific and moral investigation, knowing and values, and, indeed, they merge for social progress. Social progress—a humanistic value—is not separated from nature and the problems of mankind: all meanings have reference to natural events albeit in the flow of history. That naturalism is embedded in Dewey’s understanding of consciousness (1929a): Consciousness, an idea, is that phase of a system of meanings which at a given time is undergoing re-direction, transitive transformation. … Consciousness is the meaning of events in the course of remaking; its ‘cause’ is only the fact that this is one of the ways that nature goes on. Dewey often quotes James dynamic phrase ‘alteration of flights and perchings’ for a ‘stream of consciousness,’ e.g. in Human Nature and Conduct. Awareness in that orientation is not truth but truths in Pierce’s mode of scientific inquiry (1922): Truths already possessed may have practical and moral certainty, but logically they never lose a hypothetical character. They are true if: if certain other things eventually present themselves; and when these latter things occur they in turn suggest further possibilities; the operation of doubt-inquiry occurs. Thus, for Dewey, the social order is a natural circumstance, circumstance, part brute nature and part historical trace, organized by human capacities, and better organ-

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ized by the ingenuity of intelligence, for creating institutions. Since human constructs are in the ‘stream’ of changing circumstances, they have only provisional claim for an intelligent determination of flourishing growth. In fact, whether the social order flourishes or progresses depends on practical intelligence securing solutions to difficulty and cooperation. These are fundamental characteristics of the mode of inquiry in science and, for Dewey, even are factors for good theorizing. In this progressive attitude, such matters as institutions, legal and political constitutions and even the treatment of others are not to be considered fixed dogmatically or ideologically; the springboard is a functional consideration for flourishing within an actual context in its dynamic transformation. Dewey does provide a general framework for a good social order (1922): A just and good state would be one brought into existence by voluntary convention: by promises exchanged and obligations mutually undertaken. A good state exists not by nature [though conventions are certainly grounded in man’s nature, for Dewey like for Hobbes, viz.] but by the contriving activities of individual selves in behalf of the satisfaction of their needs. Note, again like Hobbes, Dewey’s analysis at a certain level of discourse separates natural and artificial; yet, it must be understood, his synthetic, complete doctrine is naturalistic. Natural forces, human and not human, known and unknown, are presented in actuality; therefore, Dewey’s analytic categories are to be seen as qualifications and communications within a holistic yet dynamic orientation. In Democracy and Education, he finds ‘it a mistake to think of growth as having an end it is an end’. Fulfilment occurs by meeting and overcoming challenges. Amelioration not formal finality is a functional postulate; thus, Dewey does not provide the traditional logical or formal determinations of a classical metaphysical system. Not even the moderate ontological absolutism of the species functionalism of Aristotle, much less that of the determined historical order of Hegel. The health, if not the strict continuity between a culture and human being, is a continuous and incremental solution to difficulties within a particular social and political context. In Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, Dewey writes (1938) ‘What is designated by the word ‘situation’ is not a single object or set of objects and events. For we never experience nor form judgments about objects and events in isolation but only in connection with a contextual whole’. Further, he defines inquiry by a more dynamic sense of social construction than Pierce (1938) as ‘the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is determinate in its constituent distinctions and

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relations as to convert the elements of the situation into a unified whole’. Dewey’s social theory exemplifies his understanding of pragmatic logic as a program for dealing with change in circumstance. Thus, with the awareness that he is an acculturated individual in a distinct period and place of ‘the historical current’ Dewey presents a theory of ‘renascent liberalism’. He believes that it offers a necessary amelioration of historic liberal doctrines. Dewey’s liberal doctrine expresses his pragmatism, though his pragmatic orientation is offered under different names. Perhaps ‘naturalistic humanist’ and ‘instrumentalist’ best projects the tone of his reconstituted liberalism. In 1935, at the age of 75, in the USA, Dewey published Liberalism and Social Action; it appeared in a time of expanding fascism and communism. Fascism was projecting violence through the symbols of a corporate and xenophobic edged national identity and communism, in the name of a moral and free human future, was enslaved to historical mythologies demanding revolutionary violence in the present. On native grounds, Dewey, like Pierce, observes greedy capitalism corrupting democracy and endangering community. These are three ‘isms’ he strongly opposes; yet a philosopher is not an ideologue. Dewey’s ideal retains beneficial characteristics that had made Fascism, Communism and Capitalism attractive; respectively, these are community loyalty, moral inclination and ingenuity. His reconstituted liberalism captures these human positives, while trying to avoid their despicable ideologies and practices. Reconstructed liberalism ameliorates ‘historic liberalism’s’ outworn dogmas by a new ideal relation of individual to society. In consideration of the above description, the word ‘relation’ here is not between two fundamentally separated individuals, e.g. Locke’s dualist separation of individual and state. However, the state as a formal entity, structured by civil laws, is sometimes more understandable on a mechanistic model that is analytic, though work within the state by socialized individuals can be understood in a holistic, organic mode. Dewey does not want to distinguish, on principle, between the state and society. The state, qua formal order, is an outgrowth of society and is best seen as part of a social organism. Hobbes and Locke’s contractual approach to civil construction has a mechanistic modal quality, which is aside from historical social formation. Hobbes’ epistemological essentialism or nominalism is expressed in his ‘Introduction’ to de Cive as ‘escaping from the shoals of history’. Dewey opposes that as a wrong-minded attempt to construct a program for action. Dewey’s reconstructed liberalism sees itself within a ‘historical current’ of socialization where only an awareness of specific actuality can succor flourishing social transformation.

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Dewey contends past formulations of liberalism have been dualistic about society’s relation to the individual and not clear enough about historical context. Nevertheless, they progressively increased freedom during their particular historic moments; however, to continue such political theories is to mislay progress to overcome the specific difficulties of the present. The logic of past liberalism has outworn ideologies. Outworn political and religious residues or traces—often projected as metaphysical reifications—are no longer appropriate. For Dewey’s reconstructed liberalism one must take account of the complex of relations that mutualises individual and society in organic transaction, which does keep in mind, but not slavishly, as a conventionalist politics, continuity with the historic past. Consequently, Dewey has the consistent liberal intent to maximize freedom and general welfare by social change and to replace Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Adam Smith’s assumption of the isolated or essential individual, albeit responding to a social partner by contracts. And certainly, he has not Smith’s providential faith in a divine moral guidance. These traditional liberal views are not holistic but assume a duality between the individual and the political order or human relations. Dewey, in concert with the character of pragmatism, opposes an inner substance view of self, like that of Descartes, that projects a dualism with an external world and Kantian dualism between nature man the mechanism and supernatural man the person (1922): ‘The traditional psychology of the original separate soul, mind or consciousness is in truth a reflex of conditions which cut human nature off from its natural objective relations’. The dualism of past liberalism tends to promote competition rather than cooperation by assuming self-enclosed or subjective ontology. The individual is not isolated from social conditions, including modes of thinking, institutions, and ideologies. Dewey views Lockean inspired historic liberalism’s treatment of individuality (all quotes, unless specified, are from Liberalism and Social Action 1935): ‘as something ready-made, already possessed, and needing only the removal of certain legal restrictions to come into full play. It was not progressing and flourishing. Because of this failure the dependence of the individual on social conditions was made little of.’ This misunderstanding occurs particularly in doctrines that assume natural rights are grounded in ethical natural laws. Dewey writes: The real fallacy lies in the notion that individuals have such a native or original endowment of rights, powers and wants that all that is required on the side of the institutions and laws is to eliminate the obstructions they offer to ‘free’ play of the natural equipment of the individuals.

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Dewey’s pattern of individuality locates the individual’s specific situation for action within cultural forces. His logic not only recognizes interaction but that interaction in the ordinary concourse of social action is properly guided by a ‘transactive’ mentality: ‘the actual “laws” of human nature are laws of individuals in association, not of beings in a mythical condition apart from association’. Obviously, contractual or interactive relations among human beings are in a often necessary social mode, but this fact should not be projected abstractly; that makes for a too thin content about action in actual circumstance. The contractual notion asserts an abstract notion of fairness, which can be neutral to an ethical orientation, whereas ethics for Dewey attaches social action to fruitful growth. Social contracts in the old liberal tradition alienate a vital sense of community by self-interest; self-interest in Dewey’s ethicalfunctional mode is holistically attached or intimate to community; otherwise selfinterest separates individual identity from communal forces. Dewey’s holistic notion is a normative ideal qua agenda to guide social problem solving. Yet, this ideal notion of harmony between individual and external interests is often contrary to actuality qualities, even imperfections, which separate individual and community identity. The hidden implicative argument about championing the contractual position is the assumption that fear and intellectual or slothful dullness is the general glue for every social order, even when that order is opposed to self-interest. Dewey’s consummate ideal opposes theories that assume the civil order is basically established to protect and guide vice. Dewey is optimistic about positively benevolent intelligence: he emphasizes an intelligent response to experience by inquiry needs cooperation and is for the best both for individuals and their society. This seems a hope and a goal. Inquiry based on a cooperative scientific mode is considered to be a reliable instrument for realistic appraisal and response to concrete difficulties. Like Aristotle and Hobbes, Dewey believes and teaches that the individual’s major interests are within the social order. Dewey’s notion of ‘social intelligence’ implies this because it is instrumentally necessary for community. Social intelligence—broadly, its possible ‘technology’ for positive transformation—is the inherited condition of the meaning and knowledge achievements of a culture. Dewey emphasizes that intelligence does not separate science from engineering. The normative pattern for cooperation in knowing and doing engages problems to be solved. Dewey’s renascent liberalism links intelligence to communal progress because ‘scientific method in investigation and the engineering mind in the invention and projection of far-reaching social plans are demanded’.

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Social intelligence hinges on the cooperative repository of knowledge in the social order: it is a product of coordinate and cooperative developments of the past. Dewey illustrates this by the example of the automobile mechanic, whose fixing of an automobile involves the result of generations of intellectual effort for creating a complex technological product and its repair tools. Deweys recapitulates liberal theory only within the historical current of the AngloSaxon tradition. Avoiding French, Italian and other liberal traditions, his discussion is simplified and perhaps this narrowness is apt for the mentality of his American audience in 1935. In that, Dewey outlines the tensions between an initial phase and later phases of liberalism. By their inadequacies, these historic phases are put in contrast with his ‘renascent liberalism.’ This is important since Dewey anticipates a response to contemporaneous views similar to one or another of the historic phases of liberalism. In Dewey’s classification the two phases are the Locke/Smith phase and the Bentham/Mill phase. In the first phase there is a contractual emphasis on economic individuality, first in moral terms and then providentially; the second phase focuses on achieving the greatest amount and quality of individual happiness through an active reorganization of social life. For Dewey, as mentioned, both are burdened by the psychological assumption of an isolated or socially separated view of individuality, which assert an essential human freedom aside from socialization. Historic liberalism thus can rely on phrases like ‘individual autonomy’ and ‘individual authenticity’ to separate the individual from social forces. In the first phase, particularly in the Adam Smith moment, the individual is morally justified or excused by a concept of providence or hidden economic laws for self-interested commercial striving. The second phase is a moral demand for benevolent social engineering to replace self-interest but continues to be deficient by an inappropriate view of individuality. Dewey considers the second phase beneficial progress in relation to the first phase. Liberalism is consistently a progressive orientation by intending to free a larger measure of human capacities within the environment of a social order. Dewey believes renascent liberalism’s organic socio-human individuality is pragmatic. As doctrinal progress, it erodes ideological competition qua outworn and ineffective ideas. Dewey writes, ‘Liberalism has had a chequered career and has meant in practice things so different as to be opposed to one another’. These historic stages of liberalism will be discussed in more detail. Before the word ‘liberalism’ itself came into vogue—its seems first to have appeared in Spain against the rule of Napoleon’s brother—Dewey locates the first phase of liberalism in

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Locke, with further determination in Adam Smith. Locke’s emphasis on the natural rights of individuals ‘makes for the primacy of the individual over the state not only in time but in moral authority’. In addition, Dewey continues ‘It defined the individual in terms of liberties of thought and action already possessed by him in some mysterious ready-made fashion, and which was the sole business of the state to safeguard’. Dewey’s phrase ‘some mysterious ready-made’ is to be remembered for an eventual contrast with his ‘reasonable’ reconstruction of liberalism. Locke held the principle that the individual had a natural right to the work of his own body: to the product of his individual character or virtues. For Locke, the capacity to prosper is a moral condition. Locke can be read more profoundly; nevertheless, Dewey has caught the main thrust of Locke’s influence. Locke understands the individual to be a given, a substratum, and ownership a result of an individual’s prudently used capacity: to own the work of one’s body becomes a natural right. This isolate individual stands in an independent relation to society; indeed, he contracts to enter society by a prudent response to the desires for security and prosperity. In Locke’s state of nature there are no formal social structures like civil law. The employment of natural capacities, the complex of natural powers in work’s product, establishes the moral basis of ownership. Ownership is the basis of the important public relationship of commercial contracts: moral individuality justifies exchange. Decisively, Dewey opposes contract theory, a staple of modern political theory since Hobbes. Dewey also rejects under the broad sweep of the notion of experience another modern political theoretical concept, often partnered with the notion of contract: the contrast between natural man and artificial society (though he occasionally uses the distinction for analytic purposes.) Thus he locates and stands against the theoretical underpinnings of political theory in the modern era. Locke’s liberalism inspired Jefferson, Paine, and other ‘founding-fathers’ of the United States, whose ethical politics invokes inalienable natural rights. Thus, liberalism stood against not only a royalist state culture that allowed confiscating property, ‘taxation without representation,’ but, more clearly and importantly, it offered a justification for the economic freedom of commercial investment and for the workers selling their services by wage contract. Dewey sees this as an enlargement of social freedom and economic progress through ideas responding to the era’s changing social conditions of ownership: Locke educated the Anglo-American public to social realities by teaching an ethic of work where ‘labor and not the [hereditary elitist ownership of] land was the source of wealth’. Adam Smith provides the second moment of this Lockean phase. Though Smith

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owes much to the French Physiocrats, in the milieu of England’s commercialism and nascent industrialism, unlike them and in agreement with Locke, he did not base economics on agriculture. Smith unlike Locke, however, did not find moral justification adequately expressed by equating prosperity directly with the individual’s work since the actual conditions of economic life made that equation impossible. Even to Locke it was obvious that the very use of the artificial or institutional device of money, allowing the inheritance of (great) wealth, which—rather than a barter economy of a natural simplicity—did not capture the moral range of natural rights. Adam Smith’s task in this ‘first phase’ was to justify capital accumulation without any direct (natural) relation either to moral desert or to the general welfare. The entrepreneur becomes a servant of providence. Smith’s justification of this proposition depends on assuming natural laws order the economic sphere, viz. nature’s ‘invisible hand’ moves economic practices and institutions. Modelled on Newtonian physics, providential gravity adjusts markets for broad social betterment not only despite but through decidedly self-interested economic competition. In Smith, Mandeville’s snide assertion of private vices for public benefits is embraced and theologically clothed. Though Smith himself put some restrictions on laissez-faire economics, he promotes the ideology that the state should not intrude to limit or to arrange conditions of commercial or industrial life. Before evolutionary biology inspired some of the Social Darwinians to partner this view, Smith view is that the economic sphere has internal forces for (eventual) orderly arrangement and sustaining power in a beneficial complexity of social life. Thus, Smith, like Locke, provides a moral determination through nature and, provides the paradigmatic theological justification for seeking personal wealth. However, one must say, Smith’s moral theory, rooted in Hutcheson’s moral sense doctrine, is more complex than Dewey’s picture of him. Yet, in the Wealth of Nations, competition initiated by the desire for individual advantage brings about, loosely speaking, the best possible moral and cultural consequences to the ‘social order’ as a whole. The result is a beneficent comportment of God’s natural creation better than one constructed by any human artifice or design: ex natura, jus. In sum, this first phase of liberalism increases freedom by a release for the commercial individual from impediments of government, especially the era’s parasitic British ruling class. This liberal doctrine services the rising commercial class. Dewey begins historic liberalism’s second phase with Bentham. Bentham is suspicious of rights theory, of the approach of Locke, believing it to be a fictional assertion of claims. However, though Dewey does not mention it, in ‘Outline of Pauper Management Improved’ Bentham agrees with the self-interest orientation of Smith,

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he writes (1830): Every system of management which has disinterestedness pretended or real for its foundation is rotten at the root, susceptible of momentary prosperity at the outset, but sure to perish in the long run. That principle of action is most to be depended upon whose influence is most constant, most uniform, most lasting and most general among mankind. Personal interest is that principle and a system of economy built on any other foundation is built on quicksand. Bentham’s gives government the task of referee over economic and social competition; but more, government must manage by constructing civil law to regulate greed into the least offence order of the general welfare. Bentham continues in the Hobbes tradition of legal positivism or constructivism with a strong sovereign, which rubs against Locke’s more passive and restricted view of government’s function. The debate between these views of government continues among contemporary liberals e.g. consider John Rawls, who like Hobbes, starts from a constructivist communitarian orientation whereas Robert Nozick, like Locke, limits government and takes a libertarian view of individuality. When Dewey considers this phase, in its contrary aspect to the first phase, he notes government is asked to involve itself, especially through the judicial system, to engineer social and economic conditions. This second phase demands government intervention to enlarge freedom and welfare of the many: Bentham’s utilitarian principle is to act for ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. Again there is a natural basis for political doctrine: for Bentham, happiness depends on the pleasure/pain ratio of sensation and feeling: sensations are within the boundary and condition of an individual body. This means that the fundamental basis of individuality is a prime natural condition for social constructions: social policy ought to increase pleasure. Pleasure is amenable to quantification by a ‘hedonistic calculus’. Dewey finds this quantification of pleasure with its reliance on a distinctive natural body to be an immature doctrine, though he applauds Bentham’s attempt to overcome social rigidity through government management and planning in the service of general welfare and, in doing that, not being bound by custom and using constructive intelligence to respond to conditions hampering welfare. Yet for Dewey, Bentham’s utilitarianism, despite its practical and empirical orientation, is incomplete and too narrow in its assessment of human motivation. Bentham continues to view the individual outside the social process: a quantified happiness assumes the individual is distinctly separate from the complex of relations in which he acts and which are the

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conditions awaiting action. Nevertheless, progress in liberal doctrine is achieved. Bentham encourages social flexibility and ingenuous construction and his legal positivism, reacts against ‘the abuses, corruptions, and inequalities of England’s Common Law tradition, whose conservatism retrogressively preserves the status quo’. The utilitarian principle, Dewey adds, ‘made the well-being of the individual the norm of political action in every area in which it operates’. Dewey credits Bentham with a Piercean desire to ‘extend the experimental method of reasoning from the physical branch to the moral’. Dewey sums up his appreciation: ‘Bentham’s influence is proof that liberalism can be a power in bringing about radical social change:—provided it combine capacity for bold and comprehensive invention with a detailed study of particulars and with courage in action’. Dewey himself has little respect for iconic symbols, e.g. he believes the Constitution of the United States is dated. Any static warrant for governmental action, no matter how much honoured, needs the interrogation of actual conditions to justify its guidance. This is a staunch pragmatic discounting the effect of symbols in favour of no nonsense intelligent response. Arguably, it is somewhat insensitive to such iconic documents as important conditional factors of national stability. The English king is another such icon. In the second phase, a second and better moment of utilitarian liberalism includes qualitative enhancement of individuality. Romanticism added this for John Stuart Mill’s advance on Bentham; though, Dewey notes, Mill still thinks of the individual in isolation rather than the individual in a transactional or holistic organic mutuality. Mill accepts Bentham’s assault on ‘natural rights by attending to the actual consequences of government to the individual’; yet, according to Dewey, with better psychological insight about quality. Indeed, Mill’s retention of the notion of the isolate individual marks the pivotal difference between his position about individuality and Dewey’s. Romantic inspired quality seems somewhat of a departure for Dewey’s claim to ‘naturalistic empiricism’. Dewey is often surprising in a sort of existential aestheticism; it obviously is, within a pragmatic perspective, his appreciation of James’s sensitivity to consummate quality; in the next chapter, Dewey’s naturalist piety will be discussed. In Freedom and Culture, published a few years after Liberalism and Social Action, Dewey returns to Mill’s social logic. He writes, ‘The classic expression of this point to view which would explain social phenomena by psychological phenomena is that of John Stuart Mill in his Logic—a statement that probably appeared almost axi-

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omatic when it was put forth: ‘All phenomena of society are phenomena of human nature … and if therefore the phenomena of human thought, feeling and action are subject to fixed laws, the phenomena of society cannot but conform to law’. And again, ‘The laws and the phenomena of society are and can be nothing but the laws of the actions and passions of human beings united in the social state’. And then, as if to state conclusively that being united in the social state makes no difference as to the laws of individuals and hence none in those of society, Mill adds, ‘Human beings in society have no properties but those which are derived from and may resolve into laws of the nature of the individual man’. This reference to the ‘individual man’ disclosed the nature of the particular simplification that controlled the view and policies of this particular school’ (1939). For Dewey, Mill’s mistake arises from the Lockean substrate view of a human being, which has a gravity toward establishing the doctrine of natural rights for a normative guide. Liberals who hold the natural rights doctrine must make explicit what design of human nature guarantees natural rights. Dewey believes they cannot do that; he only admits a broad and flexible range of general human characteristics. The exposition of Mill’s doctrine ends Dewey’s description of historic liberalism. The romantic influence on Mill, like the organic notion of romanticism in German Idealists, especially Hegel, enters Dewey’s own reconstructed liberalism. It allows Dewey, in the path of Pierce, to consider feeling in a perception of context, which he clearly asserts is positive when individual and social creativity expresses intelligence, cooperation, and loyalty. The creative aspects of romanticism, reinforced by the Darwin’s evolutionary science, find a tone in a dynamic action. Freedom is a notion intimate to positive or evolutionary growth. In the liberal attempt for balance between individual freedom and social order the new liberalism discovers its task. Dewey’s holistic understanding of this ordination prompts a comment by Santayana: ‘In Dewey there is a pervasive quasi-Hegelian tendency to dissolve the individual into his social functions, as well as everything substantial or actual into something relative and transitional’ (‘Dewey’s Naturalistic Metaphysics’ quoted in Thayer 1968) Yet, Santayana’s comment, though directionally appropriate, is somewhat unfair to Dewey. In ‘Philosophies of Freedom’ (1963) he writes: The common criticism is that the liberal school was too ‘individualistic’; it would be equally pertinent to say that it was not ‘individualistic enough. Its philosophy was such that it assisted the emancipation of individuals having a privileged antecedent status, but promoted no general liberation of all indi-

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viduals. The real objection to classic Liberalism does not then hinge upon the concepts of individual and society. The real fallacy lies in the notion that individuals have such a native or original endowment of rights, powers, and wants that all that is required on the side of the institution is to eliminate the obstructions they offer to the ‘free’ play of natural equipment of individuals. Yet, certainly Hegel’s analysis of social phases as conflict dialectically elevated (aufgehoben) is part of Dewey’s pragmatic logic, albeit not Hegel’s teleological determination of form as ‘an end to history’. In addition, Dewey admires Hobbes understanding of restlessness: where humans go from fulfilment of a desire to some new desire and from one solution or achievement to the next, without a terminus. Organically, the condition of the solution to a difficulty provides a different context with new problems. Thus, Dewey holds tensions within a society to present the conditions for change, and social intelligence is the instrument for increasing chances for successful growth; the individual’s contribution depends on intelligence to see the actual context and to solve its difficulties and limitations. Education is therefore a social instrument for growth and, in the measure of a dynamic process, for the continuance and stability of a social order. Liberalism and Social Action makes the point: The end is no longer a terminus or limit to be reached. It is the active process of transforming the existent situation. Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim in living … Growth itself is the only moral goal. Thus, liberalism is constant evolution without end, unlike a necessitated or absolute doctrine of political maturity; Dewey writes: The idealist philosophy taught that men are held together by the relations that proceed from and that manifest an ultimate cosmic mind. It followed that the basis of society and the state is shared intelligence and purpose, not force nor yet self-interest. The state is a moral organism, of which government is one organ. Dewey’s ideal of a ‘Great Community’ is betterment by the process functioning of an ethical humanity. The ‘Great Community’ ideal is a consequently his liberal culture’s guide for behaviour and institutional goals. It speaks to egalitarian cooperation for social goals by varied capacities of a nation’s citizen in a democratic quality. Dewey believes this ideal, like any ideal, can be never fully achieved; after all, it is a formula that has some guidance but no firm determination for his sense of open-ended progress.

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Actual community life has a continuous and ever changing context. Social continuity if taken absolutely, that is as more than a goal for intelligence and cooperation, would be in tension with Dewey’s emphasis on striving. Indeed, a progressive assumption for liberalism deflates the status of a detailed consummate ideal. For Dewey, such an ideal can only present itself to be a hypothetical strategy or a guiding theme, and not a tactical pragmatic policy. Ideals for pragmatists, even in value considerations, must be taken hypothetically. There is a relativism that haunts pragmatic theory, particularly in James and Dewey. Pierce’s realism tries to escape historical vagaries. Pierce’s criticism of James’s consummate religious ideal, which can be extended to say a moral or political ideal, is that it cannot be disconfirmed, unlike matters of natural fact. Generally speaking, ideals are definitional primitives of a political theory. They do not allow prediction about actualities because they merely are a measure for social facts. Granted, they may be potent enough to make humans perform in a certain way, yet they are immune from empirical evidence in the fundamental that they cannot be dislodged by evidence. They are not self-correcting because they are not hypotheses that undergo confirmation. Pierce classifies dogmatic assertions—and ideals do fall somewhat into that category—under the rubric of the tenacity among beliefs. In this regard of Pierce’s apt criticism one notes that Dewey does not openly use the ‘Great Community’ ideal as a hypothesis; rhetorically, it signals the tone of his liberal doctrine. For pragmatism, consummate ideals must be considered utopian projections whose content is limited by present experience. Compare Zephaniah 3: 9, ‘For when will I restore to the peoples a pure language, so they may speak the name of the Lord and serve Him with one consent’. Morality ruled by an ideal fixes the process of evaluation; it thus imposes circularity upon evaluation. Thus, Dewey’s ideal of ‘communion’ and other such relational qualities are projected when the organic norm is not yet actually achieved and trumps alternative values. This circularity is an abstract consideration of comparing acting toward a goal and achieving a goal when offering an ideal. In his later work, Knowing and the Known, Dewey recognizes and defends the circularity: for him, it is a sort of ‘hermeneutic circle’. This turn occurs viciously when ideals have an ontological fixity, e.g. Aristotle’s biology and Hegel’s logic, where the form of a ‘species’ is embedded in its function. Perhaps, for Dewey, it is rhetoric about one’s understanding of the present horizon above the current of history since for him action never ends in its encounter with change and that is the basis of ideology. Continual growth implies going darkly into the future with a reliance on one’s present personal or social ideals. If this is

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indeed Dewey’s fundamental theoretical orientation, then the ideal implies sophistic humanism or ‘humanistic naturalism’ and therefore, there is relativism—qua a convinced perception—about the ideals of democracy or even of liberalism. His following text (1939) is suggestive of that point, ‘We have to see that democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail; we should be frank and open in our recognition that the proposition is a moral one—like the idea that concerns what should be’. Dewey argues, however, for science’s mode of cooperation and progress to be attached to democracy. In addition, in some of his writings—e.g. Art and Experience and Experience and Nature—as mentioned, an existential aesthetic or appreciative quality emerges to conjoin the scientific mode of inquiry as a sort of natural piety. This provides an aesthetic-moral character to his liberal ideal that is not quite at theoretical coordination with his pragmatic commitment to scientific method. In less of a personal quality, Dewey argues democracy is in structural conformity with science since it cannot exist without critical intelligence: ‘The future of democracy is allied to the spread of the scientific attitude. It is a guarantee against propaganda. More important still, it is the only assurance of the possibility of a public opinion intelligent enough to meet present social problems’. The democratic ideal, in the light of his theory of progress and the contingencies of future conditions may be considered a special pleading in the ‘glue’ of Dewey’s own cultural situation.

6 Dewey: Experience and Pragmatism Genuine theoretic knowledge penetrates reality more deeply, not because it is opposed to practice, but because a practice that is genuinely free, social, and intelligent touches things at a deeper level than a practice that is capricious, egoistically centered, sectarian, and bound down to routine.

—Dewey ‘Perception and Organic Action’

Experience is a very difficult concept and Dewey, despite his frequent and central use of it, finally concluded that it was of very limited communicative use. Allowable under specific qualification or in a broad rather rhetorical thrust, ‘experience’ has unclear and too ambiguous references in ordinary language. For one, it refers to the reception of impressions that can attach themselves to different aspects of human mental functioning. Thus, the same impression can become a building block of a different context or warrant for action. Mental operations organize or, by describing a mere impression, assert what is presented as experience. Broadly, experience taken as a structure of associated memories—composed of fixed beliefs and hypothetical arrangement of impressions—happen in web of associations between the construction of a mental past and a current happening, e.g. noticing a bird building a nest can recall caring for one’s own young or a painting seen that day, etc, and without any finite determination. In any case, these are some of the things that can be said of experience. Indeed, people speak of a scientific experience, a religious experience and an artistic experience: each suggests some (complex) conscious event in relation to an interest; that is, a past engendering of mind that is the residue of what one has been aware of and retains. The vagueness of the term suggests further questions, e.g. can one imaginatively project something as an experience, e.g. thinking oneself dating a movie star? How do the event of a novel that one reads or a play one sees become experience, and obviously, when so spoken about, does one refer to say the play or novel itself or to something that has changed the structuring of associations in the mind. Does imagi-

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nation form one’s character in the same way as an external experience and become the basis of a habit reflected in action? What sort of action? Indeed, certainly not in the same fashion or at all for all persons. These are merely a few of the questions that bumble and buzz in a meaning analysis of ‘experience’ and they show why Dewey finally discarded the word. Yet experience is a central concept for the bulk of Dewey’s philosophical writings. Two of his important works Experience and Nature (1929a) and Art and Experience (1934b) have the word in their titles. In the latter, a mature and broad summary of Dewey’s broad position, the first chapter is titled ‘Experience and Philosophic Method’. Pragmatic doctrines are associated with the interchange or structuring capacity of experience for action. Nevertheless, in Dewey’s last book with Bentley, Knowing and the Known (1949) the word experience is found to be no longer useful. Two quotes offered from that work explain why. As a general thing it would be well to use such words as concern, affairs, etc., where now the word experience is used. They are specific where the latter word is general in the sense of vague. Also they are free from the ambiguity that attends experience on account of the controversies that have gathered around it. However, when a name is wanted to emphasize the inter-connectedness of all concerns, affairs, pursuits, etc., and it is made clear that experience is used in that way, it may serve the purpose better than any word that is as yet available. The next quote, unlike the former is not a footnote but a paragraph in a chapter of that book, titled ‘A Trial Group of Names.’ It reads: Experience: This word has two radically opposed uses in current discussions. These overlap and shift so as to cause continual confusion and unintentional misrepresentation. One stands for short extensive-durational process, and extreme form of which is identification of an isolated sensory event or ‘sensation’ as an ultimate unit of inquiry. The other covers the entire spatially extensive, temporally durational application; and here it is a counterpart for the word ‘cosmos’. The word ‘experience’ should be dropped entirely from discussion unless held strictly to a definite use: that, namely, of calling attention to the fact that Existence has organism and environment as its aspects, and cannot be identified with either as independent isolate. The latter quote appears to be jargon pointing to a biological reception into consciousness but then drifts into vagueness for which the book as a whole provides

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a contextual argument. Indeed, some of the terms given above as specific are not without an argument as a context. It seems that the last quote makes the cautionary point about feeling secure in using vague terms like ‘cosmos’ and ‘existence’. This is quite different than as a ‘flag’ for three thematic terms that Dewey has used in the past: naturalism, empiricism, and humanism. Thus, strikingly, in the first paragraph of Experience and Nature he writes ‘The title of this volume, Experience and Nature, is intended to signify that the philosophy here presented may be called either empirical naturalism or naturalistic empiricism, or, taking ‘experience’ in its usual signification, naturalistic humanism’. Perhaps the very vagueness of ‘experience’ has resulted in pragmatism considered to be an inadequate philosophy or approach. Pierce’s ‘critical common sense’ in its dependence on experience is taken to be merely prudent common sense, aside from the public inductive procedure of science. Pierce has said of pragmatism, assuming he meant its popular reception—unlike science—that it is an attitude not a method. It seems that might be an attitude about the relation of experience to action, two difficult concepts for philosophers. In somewhat sharpening the popular understanding, Dewey in Reconstruction in Philosophy, in the chapter called ‘Experience and Reason’, contrasts his instrumentalist view of experience to the tradition of taking it as a passive given. He (1920) writes, ‘Experience becomes an affair of primarily doing’. From ‘experience in a vital and significant sense’, he continues, ‘certain important implications for philosophy follow. In the first place, the interaction of the organism and environment, resulting in some adoption which secures utilization of the latter, is the primary fact, the basic category’. Thus, in Dewey’s ideational context, experience is narrowed to a dynamic response to problems by actions based on an ‘experimental and adjusting intelligence’. Further, the reach of experience is about value related to social institutions and human relations. Dewey’s biological or ecological pragmatism considers all experience natural; the primary fact of experience is that humanity is knower of nonhuman nature and also of human action as a constructive social and political factor. John J. McDermott, a distinguished student of Dewey, has in two volumes collected this thinking under titles that assert the importance of this ultimately vague concept: Philosophy of Dewey: The Structure of Experience and Philosophy of Dewey: The Lived Experience. In these copious selections, experience comes forward again and again as a dynamic and organic understanding of action in all the spheres of human doings, e.g. in Art as Experience (1934b) ‘Experience is the result, the sign, and the reward of that intervention of organism and environment which, when it is carried to

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the full, is a transformation of interaction into participation and communication’. ‘Participation’ in the quote is a referential hint to ‘natural piety’ about human existence in its reach towards perceptive action. It is the defining mood of Dewey’s humanism, a term he often uses for his approach to ‘the problems of men’. This aspect of nature is optimistically taken as an adventure of personal and cultural vitality, which makes prudence and ingenuity the more important for his pragmatic or instrumental humanism. The hazards of existence are present despite humankind’s best method: science bound with technology. Nevertheless, in Experience and Nature (1929a) one reads the large importance Dewey sometimes gives to experience as itself a method, viz.: Experience presents itself as the method, and the only method, for getting at nature, penetrating its secrets, and wherein nature empirically disclosed by the use of the empirical method in natural science deepens, enriches and directs the further development of experience. It is the active relation to the methods of science and the understanding of the ‘organic’ relation of knowing to action that moves pragmatism as an attitude to a certain focus, an orientation that is attached to the method of experimental science. After all, in the human sphere an act is an experiment whose success is satisfaction; and the quality of this satisfaction is growth. This may be seen as the domination of an environment by asserting our capacity to participate in the bounds of our existence. Though Dewey wants to keep the term ‘experience’ for a positive striving in the scientific mode of interrogating and reacting to environments, he recognizes a bad sort of ‘experiencing’: an inappropriate passive isolate of consciousness not associated with the vitality of growth and progress. He writes (1929a): When objects are isolated from experience through which they are reached and in which they function, experience itself becomes reduced to the mere process of experiencing, and experiencing is therefore treated as if it were complete in itself. We get the absurdity of an experiencing which experiences only itself, states and processes of consciousness, instead of things of nature. Clearly, the ambiguity of the term is full face: experience is different than (some sorts of) experiencing. The basis of this fumble is the use of the term in a synthetic and then again in some sort of analytic sense. All consciousness is experience but good experience is narrowed to specify Dewey’s humanistic and organic pragmatism.

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In technical apparatus for pragmatism, the methodological ground for a non-formal, ‘practical or process logic’ Dewey relates inquiry to experience. Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938) gives the outline of an instrumental logic project: One fundamentally important phase of the transformation of the situation which constitutes inquiry is central in the treatment of judgment and its functions. The transformation is hence existential and temporal. The pre-cognitive unsettled situation can be settled only by modification of the existential constituents. Experimental operations test how one continues to structure observations. Reasoning, as such, can provide means for effecting the change of conditions but by itself cannot affect it. Only execution of existential operations directed by the idea in which ratiocination terminates can bring the re-ordering of environmental conditions required to produce a settled and unified situation. Since this principle also applies to meanings that are elaborated in science, the experimental production and re-arrangement of physical conditions involved in natural science is further evidence of the unity of the pattern of inquiry. This is a quintessential pragmatic statement—albeit its need for clarification— because it emphasises method in the scientific mode engaging experience to change future experiences for growth in a more complex order that has more harmony as offers possibilities of further complexity and freedom of action. It carries the weight of James’s understanding of a moment of harmonious stability and Pierce’s understanding of a dynamic evolutionary process tied to a proper mode of inquiry. Dewey’s pragmatic allegiance to naturalism wishes to respond to the challenge of Hume’s sceptical attitude to the derivation of value from fact. In that orientation, W. F. Frankena, in 1939, or G.E. Moore, from the viewpoint of intuitionism, called the attempt to secure the moral good by natural characteristics or principles the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. To this challenge, Dewey responds in the tradition of Aristotle and Hobbes’ functionalist approach for value or moral action. However, Dewey sees human nature to be more flexible than Aristotle or Hobbes; yet he captures the organic or ecological mode of Aristotle’s naturalism and the constructive mode of Hobbes’ art of political and social construction because of desires or interests. He writes (1922) ‘Moral science is not something with a separate province. It is physical, biological, and historic knowledge placed in a human context where it will illuminate and guide the activities of men’. Dewey’s notion of morality embraces only nature; the naturalistic fallacy arises only dualistically when a Cartesian or Kantian mentality projects

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the inner life of man as something different and separable from the sort of natural being he is. Further, because of the evolutionary influence of Darwin, yet also of Hegel and Marx, Dewey sees institutional ‘superstructures’—the legal system, cultural products, etc, in the ‘current of history’ by inner tensions and accretions. This includes dogmatic ideologies and new natural or human situations, e.g., in the post-Dewey world, global warming and global economics. Like any pragmatist, for Dewey such tensions or problems have no absolute or determined solution. Yet, growth or progress in the social sphere needs the mode of inquiry that is effective in the sciences. Dewey’s tactic is sometimes to separate the practical from the theoretical into different conditions for inquiry. Satisfaction with an action based on proper inquiry is not completely a wildcard because it results from a relation to biological and historical or social determining tendencies projected (properly) by intelligent choice. Dewey’s functional approach to morals, among other things, provides a limited promise in terms of the human condition, as experience shows. Yet, within his natural orientation, open to a scientific mode of inquiry, a moral ‘is’ is functionally to be considered in a measurable range for each person as an organism; this takes into account the interconnection of context and functional need. However, Dewey does not take this process of intelligent choice in an absolute determination. He writes (1938) ‘The conjunction of problematic and determinate characters in nature renders every existence, as well as every idea and human act, an experiment in fact, even though not in design’. Sometimes progress creating a new situation trumps ‘fixedness’ or dislodges some current cultural specificity. Since ethical belief guides action from only partially known facts, in principle a normative wobble remains. Values do not emerge without some hesitance in how to approach a substantially changed situation, not only because of ignorance but also because hopes and feeling intrude for response. The human individual and the social order are on the march to an identity that never is final until death, though like a movie, it can be halted in frames as the result of our choices. Dewey writes in Human Nature and Conduct (1922), ‘Choice is not the emergence of preference out of indifference. It is the emergence of a unified preference out of competing preferences. … All deliberation is a search for a way to act, not for a final terminus’. Dewey’s humanist liberalism is reflected in his logic, which projected how he understands growth in an organic manner. In Logic: the Theory of Inquiry, Dewey writes:

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The primary postulate of a naturalistic theory of logic is continuity of the lower (less complex) and the higher (more complex) activities and forms. The idea of continuity is not self-explanatory. But its meaning excludes complete rupture on one side and mere repetition of identities on the other, it precludes reduction of the ‘higher’ to the ‘lower’ just as it precludes complete break and gaps. In addition, each decision is a sort of a small theory: a frame for interrogation before it escapes into the not completely humanly controlled process of making future frames. This is particularly discombobulating for the status of ideals and moral principles; indeed, if rigid and played against inhospitable conditions, these cannot be easily trumped or dislodged and therefore impede proper functioning. Consequently ethical beliefs, principles, and ideals are like experiments rather than eternal verities. They have a problematic aspect because changing conditions relate to their effectiveness: contingency and ignorance, not only of the present context, but also of future contexts (note the plural) is a factor of their probable usefulness. Like Pierce’s ‘fallibalism,’ Dewey has a healthy respect for probability as the operative notion of experience. Thus, there is certainly a difficulty about the ‘fixedness’ of fixed ethical beliefs. This suggests the hypothetical mode of science for values. However, there is some consolation for moral instability if one grants some broad human needs to be satisfied, e.g. certainly those that maintain body functioning provide an important factor for various contexts. Dewey’s humanism merges with his pragmatism in just this viewpoint about human needs. Some of these are relatively firm and become the fundamentals or goals of social order searching for operative or instruments for their satisfaction. Thus, a pragmatic response to morals has some universal and solid elements for Dewey and indeed all pragmatists. This sort of ‘humanism’ can be forgotten when inquiry is made into the entire conditions of a social or personal context. Among pragmatists, especially Dewey understands struggling with imperfections in humans encountering imperfect social contexts to choose agendas. Nevertheless human imperfection, there is a broad personal, if culture projected, ‘experiential’ awareness of the appropriate, which provides something of a moral centre to act in relation to the provision of circumstance. With that factor of a moral centre, pragmatism offers a gloss on a maxim like ‘love thy fellow (re’akha) as thyself’ (Leviticus 19:18). Of course, one can only act on love by one’s measure, qualitative and quantitative, of desire and knowledge and therefore there is a humbling message of doing the best that one can in the Biblical injunction. Just that attempt at the positive sug-

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gests the wide-ranging need and struggle for a disciplined manner for organizing human relations. At the least, especially in Dewey’s naturalistic view, the individual and the society must have a web of human relations taken as a unitary whole that projects humanism.

7 Conclusion: Dewey on Pierce and James In ‘Development of American Pragmatism’ Dewey cites Pierce’s pragmatic orientation with broad agreement. First he quotes Pierce (1940): The pragmatist does not make the summum bonum to consist in action, but makes it to consist in the process of evolution whereby the existent comes more and more to embody generals …’. Dewey continues (1963): Pierce is quite conclusive with respect two errors that are commonly committed in regard to the ideas of the founder of pragmatism. It is often said of pragmatism that it makes action the end of life. It is also said of pragmatism that it subordinates thought and rational activity to particular ends of interest and profit. It is true that the theory according to Pierce’s conception implies essentially a certain relation to action, to human conduct. But the role of action is that of an intermediary. In order to be able to attribute a meaning to concepts, one must be able to apply them to existence. Now it is by means of action that this application is possible. And the modification of existence, which results from this application, constitutes the true meaning of concepts. Pragmatism is, therefore, far from being that glorification of action for its own sake which is regarded as the peculiar characteristic of American life. Dewey also has much in common with James but sees an important failure in his conception of truth. Dewey’s review of James’s Pragmatism of 1907 appears in Essays in Experimental Logic as Chapter XII, under the title ‘What Pragmatism means by Practical’. First, Dewey like James acknowledges Pierce’s ‘laboratory method’ to be an inspiration. Dewey begins his review (1916) writing, ‘Pragmatism, according to Mr. James, is a temper of mind, an attitude; it is also a theory of the nature of ideas and truth; and, finally, it is a theory of reality’. Dewey excuses James for not making crisp and detailed distinctions because he intends to reach a popular audience. Dewey has broad agreement with James about pragmatism as an attitude; he quotes (1916) James ‘The essential contrast (between pragmatism, as empirically based, and rationalism) is that reality … for pragmatism is still in the making’. Here Dewey acknowledges that pragmatism is future directed through human

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agency, contextual at the moment of considering action, and unlike rationalism is not tied to search for absolute and eternal principles that facts merely represent in the shadows of temporal ontology. Consequently pragmatism aligns itself with empirical and prudential thinking with the intent to influence the new and a hopefully, progressively better human future. The pragmatic attitude is that humans must dominate nature in their own interest while recognizing that one is working within nature as one of its parts: so Dewey can write (1916) that ‘The object of knowledge marks and achieved triumph, a secured control—that holds by the very nature of knowledge’. Dewey shows his commitment to naturalism and opposes James’s encouragement of religious ideas or dogmas that cannot be explained in principle but give a satisfaction by orienting a person’s actions. Dewey bristles at James’s making an unqualified and thus misleading reference about his view viz (1916): Since Mr. James has referred to me as saying ‘truth is what gives satisfaction,’ I may remark (apart from the fact that I do not think I ever said that truth is what gives satisfaction) that I have never identified any satisfaction which arises from the idea as a working hypothesis with the truth of an idea, save that satisfaction which arises when the idea as a working hypothesis or tentative method is applied to prior existences in such a way as to fulfill what it intends. Consequently, an appropriate distinction in the establishment of truth is the difference between meanings of the sort given to fabulous creatures like centaurs and fact. Of course, one should not be confused because of a secondary sense of the factual where any held belief is a fact, a truth about a held belief but not a fact that has been purified in the flames of empirical method. Further, a source of confusion is the broad use of the word ‘meaning’. Dewey writes (1916): Situations and problems are diverse; so much so that, while the meaning of each may be told on the basis of ‘last things,’ ‘fruits’, ‘consequences’, ‘facts’, it is quite certain that the specific last things and facts will be different in the diverse cases, and that very different types of meaning will stand out. Again, the implication is language is not properly untied from the relational conditions of concrete situations. Here Dewey moves against Pierce’s metaphysics of love as a complex wishful thinking cradled in the rhetoric of ‘love’. One may use the word ‘love’ to refer to both a wife and a painting, but it would seem only the latter is appropriate for hanging on a wall.

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Dewey asks an important question: ‘Is or is not a personal factor found in truth evaluations’? Perhaps having in mind the strictures of Pierce about public verification and replication of laboratory experiments, Dewey writes (1916) ‘If it is, pragmatism is not responsible for introducing it’. He here seems to forget the idiosyncratic situation or web of relations that makes for a distinctive context for each individual, noted by both Pierce and James, aside from a general cultural orientation and context for action. Dewey does quote James’s emphasis on the personal, ‘The most potential of all our premises are never mentioned’ and dismisses an implication of the personal when it is extended by James’s ‘subjectivity’ of satisfaction that erodes a habit of ‘objective’ inquiry. However, Dewey writes (1916) ‘Now the moment the complicity of the personal factor in our general philosophic evaluations is recognized fully, frankly, and generally, that moment a new era in philosophy will begin. … The only way to control it is by recognizing it’. Thus, the limit of the personal is set; in response to James’s ‘tenderminded’ acceptance of satisfying but not provable ideas, e.g. immortality, Dewey distinguishes the worth of a belief founded on (scientific) inquiry from the critical weakness of such amiable ideas. He writes (1916) ‘Mr. James is likely to pass lightly from the consequences that determine the worth of a belief to those which decide the worth of an idea’. We can understand by Dewey’s naturalism that he takes James’s adventures in supernatural ideas or Pierce’s metaphysical realism at the periphery of what is valuable for pragmatism, viz. openness to objective evaluation of the web of relations that make a condition in readiness for reformative or progressive action. Though pragmatism, especially in the instance of Dewey, because it is so wedded to the scientific mode of inquiry is a naturalist doctrine, it can veer toward overestimating human power to control nature and underestimate the stability offered by custom, albeit his focus is right about conservatism’s often inert and unreasonable character. Yet, the problematic juncture of science and social concern brings consideration of the concept of truth in the pursuit of inquiry. Dewey’s courageous naturalism does not limp. It is forged in the mode of scientific inquiry to guide action and to hold firmly pragmatism’s flag, i.e. James’s ‘let all doors open outwards’.

Bibliography Charles Sanders Pierce Pierce, C. S. (1931–35). Collected Papers. (eds.) Hartshorne, C. and Weiss, P. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ——. (1940). Philosophical Writings. (ed.) Buchler, J. London: Routledge & Kegan, Paul. ——. (1957). Pierce: Essays in Philosophy of Science. (ed.) Thomas, V. New York: Liberal Arts Press. ——. (1958). Values in a Universe of Chance: Essays by Charles Pierce. (ed.) Wiener, P. Stanford: Stanford U. Press.

William James James, W. (1977). Pluralistic Universe. Cambridge: Harvard UP. ——. (1907). Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. ——. (1890) Principles of Psychology. New York: Holt. ——. (1900) Psychology: The Briefer Course. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. ——. (1912). Radical Empiricism. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. ——. (1958). Talks to Teachers. New York: W.W. Norton. ——. (1979). The Meaning of Truth. Cambridge: Harvard UP. ——. (1956). The Will to Believe and Other Essays. New York: Dover. ——. (1902). Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.

John Dewey Dewey, J. (1934a). A Common Faith. New Haven: Yale U. Press. ——. (1934b). Art and Experience. New York: Putnam.

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——. (1916) Essays in Experimental Logic. New York :Dover ——. (1929a). Experience and Nature. New York: Dover. ——. (1939). Freedom and Culture. New York: Putnam. ——. (1922). Human Nature and Conduct. New York: Holt. ——. (1935). Liberalism and Social Action. New York: Putnam. ——. (1938). Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Holt. ——. (1963). Philosophy and Civilization. New York: Capricorn. ——. (1929b). Quest for Certainty. New York: Minton. ——. (1920). Reconstruction in Philosophy. New York: H. Holt and Company ——, and Bentley, A.F. (1949). Knowing and the Known. Boston: Beacon.

Secondary Works Ayer, A. J. (1968). The Origins of Pragmatism. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper and Co. Bentham, J. (1830). Principles of Legislation. (ed.) Dumont, M. Boston: Wells and Lilly. Boler, J. F. (1963). Charles Pierce and Scholastic Realism. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Buchler, J. (1939). Charles Pierce’s Empiricism. New York: Kegan, Paul. Eisendrath, C. R. (1971). The Unifying Moment: James and Whitehead. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Feibleman, J. K. (1946). Introduction to the Philosophy of Pierce. Cambridge: MIT Press. Frankel, C. (1960). Golden Age of American Philosophy. New York: George Braziller. Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of Scientific Explanation. New York: Free Press. Hume, D. (1888). Treatise of Human Nature. (ed.) Selby-Bigge, L. A., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. (1958). Critique of Pure Reason. (ed.) Smith, N. K. London: Macmillan. McDermott, J. J. (1973). Philosophy of Dewey. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Myers, G. E. (1986). William James: His Life and Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press. Perry, R. B. (1935). Thought and Character of William James. Boston: Little Brown. Ryle. G. (1949) The Concept of Mind. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press.

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Scheffler, I. (1974). Four Pragmatists. London: Routledge. Schneider, H. W. (1963) American Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press. Smith, J. E. (1965). The Spirit of American Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thayer, H. S. (1968). Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. West, C. (1989). An Evasion of Philosophy: A Geneology of Pragmatism. Madison: University of Madison Press. Wright, C. (1877). Philosophical Discussions. New York: Brown.

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