Pragmatism

This is from a piece on Aeon by Michael Bacon:

Pragmatism is the United States’ most important contribution to philosophy, emerging in the late 19th century, developing throughout the 20th, and flourishing today. At its heart is a rejection of what one of its founders, John Dewey (1859-1952), calls ‘the spectator theory of knowledge’. This theory, which can be traced to Plato, holds that reality is composed of two discrete entities: the world of objects, which exist independently of us, and the minds, which perceive and seek accurately to represent that world. In the alternative account offered by pragmatists, the mind is, rather, a part of the world, in which it plays an active role. Pragmatists, accordingly, describe us not as seeking to represent reality as it exists independently of us, but rather as developing more effective and imaginative ways of coping with the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

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The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) founded pragmatism in reaction to what he called ‘the spirit of Cartesianism’, a spirit that he saw as haunting philosophy since the 17th century. What is this spirit? The French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) inaugurated modern philosophy by redescribing the Platonic view of knowledge by locating representations within the mind, and asking whether we can know that they represent the outer world. From this starting point, he asked us to call into doubt all of our beliefs about the external world (and even beliefs about our own selves) in order to establish an unimpeachable foundation upon which to build our knowledge. If we could find something that cannot be doubted, we would know that it is true. And Descartes thought he alighted upon an indubitable certainty when he proclaimed ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ – I think, therefore I am. By virtue of thinking, you cannot doubt that you are.

Peirce argues, in the essay ‘Some Consequences of the Four Incapacities’ (1868), that what he calls the ‘Cartesian maxim’ is wholly artificial, arising only as the consequence of Descartes’s unhelpful description of the mind and its relation to the world. ‘We cannot,’ he tells us, ‘begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy.’ The importance of this remark for pragmatism can be appreciated by taking note of Peirce’s choice of the words ‘cannot’ and ‘must’. We ‘cannot’ begin by doubting all our prejudices – a pejorative word for our beliefs – and ‘must’ begin there because they constitute our selves.

Peirce rejects the idea of a self as an entity that exists before its encounters with the world, and which might separate itself from its beliefs about that world. This point has been taken up by one of the most influential pragmatists of recent years, Richard Rorty (1931-2007). Rorty describes the self as being composed of its mental states, its beliefs, desires, moods, and so on. But, as he emphasises in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1990): ‘The important thing is to think of the collection of those things as being the self rather than as something which the self has.’ You cannot then step aside from your beliefs in order to call them into question, for the reason that there is no self to the side of its beliefs that might conduct such questioning.

But while we must, as Peirce argues, begin with all the beliefs that constitute ourselves, we do not end there. A necessary condition for something’s being a belief is that one would be prepared to act on it. As we move through the world, we run into circumstances that call into question, and make us doubt, some of our beliefs. This is not, however, the kind of radical doubt that Descartes describes and that Peirce dismisses. ‘A person may,’ Peirce writes, ‘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.’ He concludes with the sensible and pragmatic suggestion that we should ‘not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts’.

This aligns so closely with what I believe. The purpose of my explorations is indeed to develop "more effective and imaginative ways of coping with the circumstances in which we find ourselves." In addition, I agree with Rorty that there is "no self to the side of its beliefs", and I go further: there is no consciousness to the side of these beliefs. Sight is not sight if you are not seeing; consciousness is not consciousness unless you are conscious of something.