Pragmatic Epistemology

· C.S. Pierce

· William James

· John Dewey

· Richard Rorty

American Pragmatism- Epistemology

These thinkers all belong to the same philosophical tradition, and there are connections of influence among them, e.g., Peirce was friends with James and a teacher of Dewey; James has influenced Putnam, and both James and Dewey have influenced Rorty. But there is no specific philosophical claim or doctrine that they all have in common.

What they do all have in common is that each one reacts against a group of traditionally held philosophical doctrines, doctrines about concepts like:

· knowledge

· reality

· truth

· belief

Pragmatists are reacting against “The Traditional View.”

The Traditional View includes the following theories:

1. The Traditional Account of Knowledge:

The JTB theory of knowledge: knowledge is justified true belief; in other words, if a person knows that p, then

a. that person believes that p;

b. it is true that p; and

c. that person is justified in believing that p.

2. The correspondence theory of truth:

Truth is a matter of correspondence with reality. A belief (or sentence, or proposition, or statement, or other truth bearer) is true exactly when it corresponds with some aspect of the real world, i.e., when it represents the world as being how it actually is.

3. Representational Realism with respect to belief:

Representaional realism contended that our beliefs are “representaions” (faithful or flawed) of “the real world.” To believe that p is to have a specific kind of mental representation, (i.e. a representation in one’s mind. )

Example: my belief that there is a tree outside the window is a thought, or an idea, or some other sort of representation of the area outside the window, a representation that is in my mind.

Pragmatists either adds to or modify these theories in important ways. What unites them—what makes pragmatism a single tradition rather than just a group of philosophers who happened to know and influence one another—is that in reacting to the Traditional View, they all emphasize (in different ways and to different degrees):

· the empirical, i.e., experience;

· experimental interactions with one’s environment;

· the practical consequences of claims and beliefs;

· understanding philosophical concepts in terms of actions or deeds… in terms of living, breathing human beings doing things.

C.S. Peirce

He is a “realist,” i.e. that there is a real world. However, what this amounts to depends in part on what is meant by the word “real.”

He also believed that:

· We can discover truths through experience and reasoning;

· Philosophy is a type of inquiry (an attempt to discover truths).

Ultimately, there was a shift away from this realist version of pragmatism, which actually began early in the history of the pragmatist movement. Peirce saw this shift occurring in his own lifetime and rejected it. By the late 20th century, pragmatism had changed significantly.

Pierce on Knowing

Pierce reacted against elements of “Cartesianism”

Four Characteristics of Cartesianism:

C1. Philosophy should begin with universal doubt.

C2. “the ultimate test of certainty is to be found in the individual consciousness.”

C3. In philosophy, it is acceptable to support claims with “a single thread of inference depending upon inconspicuous premises.”

C4. There are “absolutely inexplicable” facts—facts that can never be explained—“unless to say ‘God makes them so’ is to be regarded as an explanation.”

Peirce rejects all four claims of Cartesianism and counters each claim with a claim of his own:

P1. “We cannot begin with complete doubt.”

P2. “We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the community of philosophers."

P3. Philosophy should “proceed only from tangible premises which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and ... trust to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one.”

P4. The supposition that something is “absolutely inexplicable ... is never allowable.”

Pierce on Knowing

1. The Method of Doubt is Impossible.

C1. Philosophy should begin with universal doubt.

P1. “We cannot begin with complete doubt.”

According to Peirce Descartes’ Method of Doubt test is impossible. We cannot actually do what it recommends.

The Method involves a policy of deliberate doubt, in that Descartes tries to doubt as much as he can.

But genuine doubt is not deliberate or voluntary; any deliberate or voluntary doubt is bound to be fraudulent.

The “doubt” that Descartes’ method relies on is no such thing—it is fake doubt.

We must begin inquiry with the beliefs we already have:

“We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt; and no one who follows the Cartesian method will ever be satisfied until he has formally recovered all those beliefs which in form he has given up.”

On Peirce’s view, it is no coincidence that Descartes winds up back with his old beliefs (e.g., that God exists, that the mind is not the same thing as the body) by the end of the Meditations—because his claim to have given those beliefs up was “mere self-deception.”

He never really gave them up in the first place!

“A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.”

2. Against Individual Certainty.

C2. “the ultimate test of certainty is to be found in the individual consciousness.”

P2. “We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the community of philosophers."

Descartes employed “clearness and distinctness” as a standard of certainty.

On his view, any belief that is clear and distinct is epistemically certain (i.e., anyone who believes it cannot be wrong about it). And whether or not a belief is clear and distinct for an individual can reliably be judged by that very individual.

Peirce goes on to assert that “to make single individuals absolute judges of truth is most pernicious.”

pernicious (df.): destructive; tending to cause great harm.

Why, on Peirce’s view, is Descartes’ standard of clearness and distinctness pernicious?

It is pernicious for inquiry, and especially philosophical inquiry. If each individual is the absolute judge of what is true, then there is no need to pay attention to the results of others’ inquiry, even when they disagree with you. When individual inquirers, such as philosophers, are intellectually isolated from each other, each caring nothing about the opinions of others, even when those opinions diverge dramatically from their own, there is no hope that agreement among those individuals will ever be reached.

By employing the Cartesian criterion, philosophers have failed to achieve the consensus (i.e., general agreement; unanimity) that is frequently reached in the physical sciences:

“[M]etaphysicians will all agree that metaphysics has reached a pitch of certainty far beyond that of the physical sciences;—only they can agree upon nothing else. In sciences in which men come to agreement, when a theory has been broached it is considered to be on probation until this agreement is reached. After it is reached, the question of certainty becomes an idle one, because there is no one left who doubts it. We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the community of philosophers.”

And so here is the claim with which Peirce replaces C2:

P2. “...We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the community of philosophers.”

This passage suggests that progress in philosophy can happen only if individual philosophers begin to collaborate with each other the way that scientists do: sharing their results, taking account of the previous findings of others, noting when those findings disagree with one’s own, etc. No one philosopher, working in complete isolation from others, can build a complete philosophical system, any more than a single physicist could, on her own, arrive at a complete account of the physical universe.

Against Certainty, Period.

Lurking behind C2 is Descartes’ assumption that epistemic certainty is attainable.

Peirce’s view was that we will never attain the certain beliefs that Descartes sought. Even if it were possible voluntarily to doubt everything, this would not help us identify a set of certain beliefs.

In short, Peirce rejects two assumptions made by Descartes:

1. that individual inquirers can attain epistemic certainty, and

2. that epistemic certainty is possible for human inquirers at all, whether they are acting alone or in collaboration.

But in doing so he does not give up the belief that we can discover things about the world. Human inquiry is never guaranteed to be perfect, but it is frequently successful—it does frequently result in true beliefs.

3. Chain vs. Cable.

C3. In philosophy, it is acceptable to support claims with “a single thread of inference depending upon inconspicuous premises.”

Peirce is making two claims here:

a. The first claim is that the premises in philosophical arguments need to be clearly stated so as to be subject to careful examination. This is a sensible piece of advice not only for philosophy but for any area of inquiry.

b. The second claim is a bit more complicated....Philosophical reasoning should be less like a chain constructed from single links, one link connecting only with the previous and the next, and more like a cable woven from many different threads.

A claim that is supported by multiple arguments is more warranted than a claim supported by only a single argument, just as a scientific claim, e.g., that exposure to a certain chemical tends to cause cancer in humans, is better supported if multiple studies by different researchers in different laboratories reach that conclusion than if only a single study by only a single group of researchers does so.

Peirce suggests that instead of this single-link Cartesian chain, an individual might employ an exceedingly thick cable to support the claim that she herself exists.

“Let us suppose ... that a dozen witnesses testify to an occurrence. Then my belief in that occurrence rests on the belief that each of those men is generally to be believed upon oath. Yet the fact testified to is made more certain than that any one of those men is generally to be believed. In the same way, to the developed mind of man, his own existence is supported by every other fact…”

An argument for one’s own existence can be built using as premises every other fact of which one is aware. This would form an enormously thick cable, in contrast to the feeble thread by which Descartes’ belief in his own existence dangles.

4. Against the Inexplicable.

C4. There are “absolutely inexplicable” facts—facts that can never be explained—“unless to say ‘God makes them so’ is to be regarded as an explanation.”

P4. The supposition that something is “absolutely inexplicable ... is never allowable.”

Pierce on Knowing

Against the Inexplicable.

Peirce asserts P4 in the following passage:

“Every unidealistic philosophy supposes some absolutely inexplicable, unanalyzable ultimate; in short, something resulting from mediation itself not susceptible to mediation. Now that anything is thus inexplicable can only be known by reasoning from signs. But the only justification of an inference from signs is that the conclusion explains the fact. To suppose the fact absolutely inexplicable, is not to explain it, and hence this supposition is never allowable.”

There is a lot going on here, and we will not be able to discuss all of it. Let us limit our explanation to just a few points.

First, about the word “unidealistic”…

Peirce tends to use the word “idealism” in a nonstandard way…

idealism (as traditionally defined) the view that everything that there is, is (in some sense) mind, or mental, or an idea.

On this definition of idealism, perhaps the most straightforward example of idealism is the view of George Berkeley (18651753) that to be is to be perceived (“esse est percipi”).

(Peirce’s very broad df.)Idealism: the view that everything that there is, is cognizable, i.e., everything that there is can be thought about, can be an object of cognition.

On this broad sense of “idealism,” Berkeley’s idealism is a form of idealism, but it is not the only form. One may accept Peirce’s broad form of idealism without maintaining that everything there is, is mind or mental.

By “unidealistic philosophy,” Peirce means a philosophy according to which there are aspects of reality that, for whatever reason, cannot be the object of an idea and that will therefore always be beyond the comprehension of human inquirers.

On such a view, there are things about the universe that no human being could ever even think about, let alone fully understand.

Peirce believes that Descartes’ approach is “unidealistic” in this sense. The tricky part is seeing why he thinks this... It has to do with Descartes’ view about the mind and the body.

On Peirce’s view, if we adopt Cartesian dualism, then we have given up any possibility of explaining how the mind and body interact:

In 1890’s “Logic and Spiritualism,” he says that

“[t]he obsolete Cartesian dualism, that soul and body are two substances, distinct, independent, [is] untenable as positing a double absolute, rendering connection of soul and body absolutely inexplicable either on mechanical or on psychological principles”.

In his “The Fixation of Belief,” he begins to explain his conceptions of belief and of doubt. But note at the outset that by “doubt,” he does not mean negative belief. If you say “I doubt that the Dolphins will win the Super Bowl,” you may be expressing a negative belief: you believe that the Dolphins probably will not win the Super Bowl. This is not what Peirce has in mind. By “doubt,” he means absence of settled belief one way or the other.

Imagine that you are going to class on the first day of the semester. You pull out your schedule to see what room your first class meets in and discover that the class locations are not listed there. You have no beliefs about whether your class meets in DM, or PC, or any other specific building. Now you are experiencing what Peirce means by doubt about the location of your class.

He begins by describing three differences between believing and doubting:

1) They feel different. The sensation accompanying belief is unlike the sensation accompanying

doubt: “...there is a dissimilarity between the sensation of doubting and that of believing.”

2) A belief involves a habit, a disposition to act, to do something. A doubt involves the absence of such a habit. “The feeling of believing is a more or less sure indication of there being established in our nature some habit which will determine our actions. Doubt never has such an effect.”

A more ordinary example: Suppose that you believe that the liquid in a given container is water. Your belief involves a group of dispositions to do certain things, e.g., pick it up and drink it; pour it on your houseplants or in your dog’s water bowl; use it to brush your teeth or wash your hair or your car; etc. If you aren’t sure whether it is water, i.e., if you doubt that it is water in Peirce’s sense of “doubt,” then you will not know what to do with it. You will not have any dispositions to behave in a certain way towards it.

So on Peirce’s view, having a belief is not simply a matter of having a thought or cognition or other sort of representation in your mind or of feeling a specific way. Beliefs involve habits of action, and we have those habits even when we’re not consciously thinking about the object of the belief (we have dispositions to act certain ways with regard to water, even when we’re not thinking about water).

So having a belief involves having a habit. And to doubt is to lack such a habit. It is “a condition of erratic activity.”

It is here that Peirce adds something to the Traditional View’s representationalism about belief

… Having a belief is not simply a matter of having a representation in one’s mind. It is also a matter of having a habit of behaving a certain way.

3) We are content with belief, but we tend to try to escape from doubt, to eliminate doubt and replace it with belief.

“Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.”

Inquiry as the Struggle to Escape Doubt and Fix Belief.

Many philosophers would define inquiry something like this: “an attempt to discover truths about the world.”

But at this point in “The Fixation of Belief,” Peirce describes inquiry differently, as the struggle to escape doubt and attain a settled state of belief:

“The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief. I shall term this struggle inquiry, though it must be admitted that this is sometimes not a very apt designation.”

For Peirce, doubt is unpleasant and is satisfied only by a new belief.

Once thrown into doubt, we go through some process or other until belief is “fixed” (settled, made permanent). The goal of such a process is stable belief. The process itself is inquiry. Inquiry as the Struggle to Escape Doubt and Fix Belief.

Peirce considers an objection to this definition of inquiry:

Isn’t inquiry the attempt to arrive at, not a fixed or permanent belief, but a TRUE belief?

As Peirce himself put the objection:

“We may fancy that this [namely, the permanent settlement of belief] is not enough for us, and that we seek not merely an opinion, but a true opinion.”

The idea behind this objection is this:

When we are engaged in the activity of eliminating doubt and settling belief, we don’t simply want to make just any beliefs permanent. If that were our goal, we would be perfectly satisfied swallowing a belief-fixing pill—a pill that could “fix” (make permanent) some belief in our minds regardless of the content of that belief. What we want to do, rather, is replace our doubts with accurate, true beliefs.

Peirce’s response to this objection:

“The most that can be maintained is, that we seek for a belief that we shall think to be true. But we think each one of our beliefs to be true, and, indeed, it is mere tautology to say so. ... [T]he settlement of opinion is the sole end of inquiry...

If you believe that p, then you also believe that it is true that p.

(This is why Peirce says “We think each one of our beliefs to be true” is a tautology: to believe that p is to think that it is true that p.)

As long as you have no actual reason to doubt your belief that p, you will think that your belief that p is true. Only when you pass from the satisfactory state of belief to the unsatisfactory state of doubt do you question whether it is true that p.

So Peirce does not think we should define inquiry as an attempt to arrive at true beliefs, for the following reason… As soon as someone believes that p, she believes that it is true that p, and so she is “entirely satisfied” with that belief.

So far as the “fixity” of her belief is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether it is actually true or false. The actual truth of a belief is irrelevant to whether the believer is satisfied with it—all that matters is that she believes that it is true. If one’s belief that p is genuine, it is pointless to say “I now believe that p. But I wonder whether p?”

Peirce’s point seems to be methodological, i.e., it seems to be about the method that people use to establish beliefs. The method that says “seek to believe only that which is true” is a pointless method—it says nothing but “seek to have beliefs.”

He concludes: “the settlement of opinion is the sole end of inquiry”