Even if James probably derive this theory of truth from the maxim, i don't think it make justice to pragmatism potiential to characterize it as mere instrumentalism. Still, Dewey theory of truth is interesting from a instrumental or naturalistic perspective. — Nzomigni
In this BBC episode of In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss American Pragmatism. According to William James, the pragmatist "turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power". William James, along with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, were the founders of the American philosophical movement which flowered during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century and the first twenty years of the 20th century. It took knowledge to be meaningful only when coupled with action. The function of thought was taken not to represent or "mirror" the world, but instead was considered an instrument or tool for prediction, problem-solving, and action. In this way, it was a philosophy deeply embedded in the reality of life, concerned firstly with the individual's direct experience of the world they inhabit. How did pragmatism harness the huge scientific leap forward that had come with Charles Darwin's ideas on evolution? And how did this dynamic new philosophy challenge the doubts expressed by the skeptics about the nature and extent of knowledge? Did pragmatism influence the economic and political ascendancy of America in the early 20th century? And how does it relate to relativism and post-modernism? Melvyn Bragg discusses some of these questions regarding pragmatism with A. C. Grayling, Julian Baggini, and Miranda Fricker.
This is from the BBC radio program In Our Time. For a more in-depth discussion of pragmatism, check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjNyp...
Dewey theory of truth is interesting from a instrumental or naturalistic perspective. — Nzomigni
Thought is for action, if the object of one your idea don't have any effects that have pratical bearings, it might aswell be meaningless. Using this maxim ground your thoughts on the pratical, on the problem-solving and prediction etc. — Nzomigni
One of the similarities in the "pragmatist" schools are that they don't consider the metaphysics, — Nzomigni
Dewey thought that "true" carried so much baggage with it that it was best avoided. So, he took to using (in his writings, anyhow) "warranted assertibility." Dewey rejected the "spectator" or correspondance view of knowledge, and instead claimed that what we know results from our interaction with the rest of the world. Ideally, that would be the result of inquiry, through the employment of the scientific method in some cases, but could be the result of trial and error, solving problems, and seeing what "works" in particular circumstances. With enough evidence obtained through inquiry, we may be warranted in asserting that something is the case, and may act upon it in the future. "Truth" is better applied to judgments than propositions as a result. As a result what we consider "true" or what we think we "know" may change, as new evidence is received. Truth isn't static, therefore. — Ciceronianus the White
I liked the BBC text that Amity quoted, in particular:
It took knowledge to be meaningful only when coupled with action. The function of thought was taken not to represent or "mirror" the world, but instead was considered an instrument or tool for prediction, problem-solving, and action. In this way, it was a philosophy deeply embedded in the reality of life, concerned firstly with the individual's direct experience of the world they inhabit. — T Clark
According to William James, the pragmatist "turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power".
This is followed by an 'Introduction to American Pragmatism' (41:26)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmbyCybs_QI — Amity
The pragmatic maxim is used in the process to make concept clearer in relating to the pratical. If the object of an concept don't relate to the pratical anyhow, it's meaningless as the goal of thought is to create habit of action. — Nzomigni
I am with Dewey in not being overfond of certain uses of the word 'true'. Acting on warranted assertion - or a confidently held fact - following inquiry as described - that makes sense to me.
It is true that what we consider 'true' or what we think we 'know' may change. — Amity
I see thought or thinking as a tool but not just for practical decision-making but also leaning 'towards power' or creativity or energy. It includes imagination...which is not particularly 'concrete'. — Amity
By the way, Libravox (Libravox.com) has a reading of James' "Pragmatism" that I really like. — T Clark
Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education
An important, controversial, and often cited work on public education. Dewey discusses the role of public education in a democracy and the different methods for achieving quality in education. After its initial publication, this book began a revolution in educational thinking; one that emphasized growth, experience, and activity as key elements in promoting democratic qualities in students and educators alike. — Librivox - Democracy and Education by John Dewey
Ciceronianus the White or anybody who knows - which book would you pick for starters ? — Amity
Of books by Dewey? Probably Reconstruction in Philosophy or The Quest for Certainty are the most readable. — Ciceronianus the White
...I would say the historical situation is that Peirce formed an absolutely coherent view of pragmatism/semiotics. But then because of social forces, that never broke out the way it should have at the time. What came through into the public was the diluted Jamesian understanding of pragmatism (stripped of its semiotic backbone), or the Deweyian version (stripped of the metaphysical ambition).
...And then there are a host of non-philosophical reasons why Peirce's impact was only as a whisper in the ear of AP. And why Pragmatism is viewed shallowly in terms of the metaphysically and logically unambitious retellings by James and Dewey. — apokrisis
I just found this article really elucidating on the magnitude of Ramsey's pragmatic approach to philosophical issues having influenced Wittgenstein's transition and later period. Hope someone enjoys it:
https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-truth-on-ramsey-wittgenstein-and-the-vienna-circle — Shawn
...Wittgenstein was stung by this onslaught. In 1930, he wrote: ‘Ramsey’s mind repulsed me’; he had no capacity for ‘genuine reverence’; he had an ‘ugly mind’; and ‘his criticism didn’t help along but held back and sobered’. He told his friends that Ramsey was a ‘materialist’. Ramsey thought that Wittgenstein’s philosophy needed sobering up, and needed to pay attention to human beliefs, rather than independently existing propositions.
And here their debate breaks off, for Ramsey died on 19 January 1930, aged just 26. But years later, Wittgenstein would come around to Ramsey’s side.
When he did, he stopped saying nasty things about his friend, and instead thanked him in the preface to his second great treatise, Philosophical Investigations, which charted a very different course than the Tractatus:
since I began to occupy myself with philosophy again, 16 years ago, I could not but recognise grave mistakes in what I set out in that first book. I was helped to realise these mistakes – to a degree which I myself am hardly able to estimate – by the criticism which my ideas encountered from Frank Ramsey, with whom I discussed them in innumerable conversations during the last two years of his life. — Cheryl Misak
Ciceronius stated that the pragmatists, for the most part, ignored what Wittgenstein had to say about meaning and use or utility. Why is that?
— Posty McPostface
I think it's more accurate to say that the Classical Pragmatists were unaware of Wittgenstein. Peirce died in 1914, James in 1910. There would be no reason for them to know Wittgenstein; the Tractatus didn't come out until after the First World War. As for Dewey, I don't know whether he knew of Wittgenstein or his work. Wittgenstein isn't mentioned in any of the works of Dewey I've read, (I haven't read them all, of course) and I think their interests differed for the most part. From what I've read, Wittgenstein was fond of James' Varieties of Religious Experience. It's the "neo-pragmatists" who have championed the view that Wittgenstein was a kind of pragmatist, so far as I know. — Ciceronianus the White
I wonder whether there's something about metaphysics that sends those who indulge in it into Never-Never Land. I don't think Dewey avoided it entirely, however. He just was a naturalist. — Ciceronianus the White
Curious now.
@Ciceronianus the White - what did you think of apokrisis: — Amity
I've never been much of a fan of Pierce's Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness and his Triadism, though, — Ciceronianus the White
This is a common misconception, or at best an incomplete definition. For Peirce, pragmatism is a theory of meaning, not a theory of truth. The core idea is that the ultimate meaning of a concept consists in the general mental habits and resulting deliberate conduct of its interpreters, not the law-governed behavior of its object.The core idea pragmatism is that the object of an idea equates the sensible effects that the object might have. — Nzomigni
This is an important point, although Peirce himself never calls it "the pragmatic maxim"--it is occasionally either "the pragmatistic maxim" or "the pragmaticistic maxim," and much more often either "the maxim of pragmatism" or "the maxim of pragmaticism." His original formulation appeared in 1878, but there are at least 13 variants and 47 restatements or clarifications in Peirce's writings after James began popularizing pragmatism 20 years later, which I present and discuss in a recently published paper.Pierce came up with more than one version of the pragmatic maxim ... — Ciceronianus the White
Peirce did not clarify until 1907 that he specifically had intellectual concepts in mind, "those upon the structure of which arguments concerning objective fact may hinge," such as hard vs. soft but not red vs. blue. That year, about the same time that James published his book called Pragmatism, Peirce drafted an article with the same title intended to introduce his version of it to a broad audience. He ended up drafting over 500 handwritten pages, and we can only wonder how the course of philosophy in general and pragmatism in particular would have been different had either The Nation or The Atlantic Monthly published one of the finished texts that he submitted to their editors.It's been a long time since I read that essay you mentioned, so I can't recall if he had particular concepts in mind. — Ciceronianus the White
It is another common misconception that Peirce's three universal categories are fundamentally metaphysical. On the contrary, they are primarily phenomenological in a sense that is distinct from that of Hegel or Husserl--1ns as quality, 2ns as reaction, and 3ns as mediation are the irreducible elements of whatever is or could be present to the mind in any way. As for pragmatism, Peirce is adamant that it "is, in itself, no doctrine of metaphysics, no attempt to determine any truth of things. It is merely a method of ascertaining the meanings of hard words and of abstract concepts."I've never been much of a fan of Pierce's Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness and his Triadism, though, if that's what's intended by pragmatism's "metaphysical ambition." — Ciceronianus the White
Peirce's classification of the sciences is grounded in the idea that the more concrete fields depend on the more abstract fields for their principles. Accordingly, metaphysics as the study of reality depends on logic as the normative science of how we ought to think if our aim is having stable beliefs/habits, which he generalized to semeiotic, the study of all signs and semiosis. Pragmatism falls within its third branch, speculative rhetoric or methodeutic, and thus depends on its second branch, critical logic or logic proper, which in turn depends on its first branch, speculative grammar--loosely aligned with what is commonly (and in Peirce's view mistakenly) called epistemology. Again, his categories come from phenomenology, which is the most basic of the "positive sciences" and depends only on mathematics, the discipline that draws necessary conclusions about strictly hypothetical states of things.It might help to separate pragmatism as a triadic epistemology from semiosis as a triadic ontology. — apokrisis
Yes, that is an excellent short introduction. For a more detailed overview, I recommend The Continuity of Peirce's Thought by Kelly A. Parker.I read Charles Pierce's Guess at the Riddle by John Sheriff, and found that helpful. — Ciceronianus the White
es, that is an excellent short introduction. For a more detailed overview, I recommend The Continuity of Peirce's Thought by Kelly A. Parker. — aletheist
He ended up drafting over 500 handwritten pages, and we can only wonder how the course of philosophy in general and pragmatism in particular would have been different had either The Nation or The Atlantic Monthly published one of the finished texts that he submitted to their editors. — aletheist
Richard Robin catalogued Peirce's 500-plus handwritten pages of multiple drafts for "Pragmatism" under manuscript numbers 317-322 and 324. The five major variants that came chronologically last and have their first nine pages in common are all under 318, as diagrammed by Priscila Borges for the Peirce Edition Project. He abandoned the second and fourth without finishing them, while the third and fifth appear in Volume 2 of The Essential Peirce (pages 398-433). Surprisingly, the first has never been published, even though it seems likely to be the one that he initially submitted to The Nation because it bears his signature at the end. Fortunately, that is about to change--I have prepared my own annotated transcription, which has been accepted by an online journal and will hopefully appear there soon.Is that article available somewhere? — Ciceronianus the White
I provided this link in my previous post.What about your article? — Ciceronianus the White
I share your fascination with that article, and likewise wrote a paper about it. It is important to recognize the distinction that Peirce makes between an argument as "any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief" and an argumentation as "an Argument proceeding upon definitely formulated premisses." His "Neglected Argument" is the former, not the latter, and it is retroductive (or abductive) rather than deductive or inductive--careful contemplation of the universe ("musement") prompts the hypothesis of God's reality (not existence, another important distinction for Peirce) as a plausible explanation of its origin and nature, not a certain or even probable conclusion drawn from specific premisses or evidence.For quite some time, I've been somewhat fascinated with Pierce's A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God and his concept of "musement." — Ciceronianus the White
Again, his categories come from phenomenology, which is the most basic of the "positive sciences" and depends only on mathematics, the discipline that draws necessary conclusions about strictly hypothetical states of things. — aletheist
Except that for Peirce, reasoning (semiosis) as studied within the normative science of logic (semeiotic) is emphatically not a psychological process. Rather, psychology is a special science that studies the actual thinking of individual embodied human minds. In other words, psychology depends on logic (and metaphysics), not the other way around.As I said, there is the triadic epistemology that is a model of psychological processes of reasoning. — apokrisis
Except that for Peirce, the growth of concrete reasonableness is discovered within the normative science of esthetics (not metaphysics) as the only aim that is admirable in itself. Ethics depends on it for this principle in ascertaining what constitutes good conduct, and logic depends on both esthetics and ethics in ascertaining what constitutes good reasoning--again, regardless of any facts of psychology.The Cosmos could be understood the growth of universal reasonableness - an ontological strength application of the trichotomy. — apokrisis
Right, although it can also serve as the very first stage of scientific inquiry, just pondering the phenomena as they present themselves and relying on instinct to supply plausible explanatory hypotheses about them.As I understand "musement" it is, at first at first at least, a process by which our observations suggest that something is the case, but not as part of an inquiry on our part. — Ciceronianus the White
Indeed, Peirce lays out the entire process of scientific inquiry in the article--formulating a hypothesis (retroduction) is followed by explicating what would follow from it if it were true (deduction) and then examining whether those predictions are borne out (induction).More traditional forms of reasoning may come into play after that takes place. — Ciceronianus the White
Except that for Peirce, reasoning (semiosis) as studied within the normative science of logic (semeiotic) is emphatically not a psychological process. Rather, psychology is a special science that studies the actual thinking of individual embodied human minds. In other words, psychology depends on logic (and metaphysics), not the other way around. — aletheist
Except that for Peirce, the growth of concrete reasonableness is discovered within the normative science of esthetics (not metaphysics) as the only aim that is admirable in itself. — aletheist
The Cosmos could be understood the growth of universal reasonableness - an ontological strength application of the trichotomy. — apokrisis
The universe could be teaching itself how to evolve into a better, more stable, cosmos. That's the far-out idea proposed by a team of scientists who say they are reimagining the universe.
Peirce's actual efforts at a pan-semiotic ontology were limited by what was known scientifically in his day. And they were also confused with theistic tendencies. — apokrisis
Peirce always said that what we see as scientific laws are simply habits of nature. — Wayfarer
That's the fly in the naturalist ointment, ain't it. — Wayfarer
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