Pragmatism is the most important school of American philosophy. Its main representatives in the early stages were C. S. Peirce, W. James and J. Dewey. Charles Sanders Peirce is rightfully considered one of the most original and versatile philosophers that America has ever produced. As an innovative intellectual, he anticipated the development of a wide variety of scientific disciplines. His research left a noticeable mark on both the exact and natural sciences and the humanities. He was a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, surveyor, cartographer and engineer, but also a psychologist, philologist and historian of science. He was one of the first in the United States to engage in experimental psychology and the first to use the wavelength of light as a unit of measurement. His posthumous fame was made up of his works in the field of logic and semiotics, but he was also the author of an original metaphysical system. C. S. Peirce entered the history of philosophy as the founder of the philosophy of pragmatism, another direction of his intellectual creativity.
Peirce was born in 1839 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Peirce graduated from Harvard University in 1859, receiving a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 1863. From 1859 until the end of 1891, he worked – first as a laboratory assistant and technician, and then as an assistant – in the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, engaged primarily in geodetic research. For six years, from 1869 to 1875, Peirce held the position of assistant at the Harvard Observatory. From 1879 to 1884, Peirce combined his work in the Survey with teaching logic as a “visiting lecturer” in the mathematics department at Johns Hopkins University.
Despite his unsuccessful attempts to make an academic career, C. S. Peirce achieved recognition from the scientific community: he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1867), the National Academy of Sciences (1877), the London Mathematical Society (1880), and a number of other prestigious scientific organizations. During his lifetime, his astronomical and geodetic research was primarily appreciated, so the recognition he won was neither universal nor unambiguous: publishers continued to reject his articles, and universities refused to hire him on a permanent basis. Peirce spent the last 26 years of his life in seclusion with his second wife on a small estate near Milford in northwestern Pennsylvania. C. S. Peirce died of cancer in 1914.
Numerous difficulties, including financial insecurity, could not prevent Peirce from devoting all his time to intensive scientific research. He left behind a large number of published articles (about 80 thousand pages of printed text), as well as a huge manuscript legacy, numbering about 100 thousand pages. Peirce became famous only in the 1930s, when the first volumes of the Collected Works were published.
The works of Peirce, who is sometimes called the “American Aristotle”, had a huge influence on the philosophy and science of our time. Unfortunately, this happened after the death of their author. Peirce’s ideas were directly adopted by W. James and J. Dewey, who already interpreted the essence and method of pragmatism in their own way. Peirce’s philosophy inspired K. Popper, W. V. O. Quine, H. Putnam and K.-O. Apel. As for semioticians, W. Eco can be considered his follower. Cognitive science and theories of artificial intelligence also owe much to Charles Peirce, who combined the brilliant intuition of a scientist with a passion for careful and unbiased analysis.
Peirce’s Pragmatism: Basic Principles, Concepts, and Attitudes. Despite the versatility of his talents, C. Peirce is known primarily as the founder of pragmatism. He formulated the program of this movement and coined a term to describe it. In his article “What is Pragmatism?” (1905), Peirce wrote that “perhaps the most striking feature of the new theory was the recognition of the existence of an inseparable connection between rational knowledge and rational purpose” (1: 158).
The foundations of the concept of pragmatism were laid by Peirce in his printed works and speeches dating from 1865 to 1878. Two of Peirce’s articles, “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” first published in Popular Science Monthly in November 1877 and January 1878, respectively, were decisive for the subsequent development of pragmatism as a philosophical movement.
“The Fixation of Belief”. In this article, Peirce introduces two important concepts – the concept of “doubt” and the concept of “belief”. Belief is a polysemantic English word that can be translated as conviction, opinion, or supposition. Peirce, of course, is not talking about the religious meaning, but about the psychological states of faith and doubt that everyone experiences. Both doubt and faith have a positive effect, so each is necessary in its own way. Faith does not make us act immediately, but under certain circumstances it compels us to act in a certain way, i.e., it acts as a predisposition to action. Doubt immediately stimulates us to act until we overcome it. Thus, all human activity has a structure of transition from doubt to faith. The transition from doubt to faith itself – any, and not only related to scientific activity – Peirce calls “research”.
Doubt must be a “living”, vital doubt, i.e. it must be tied to a specific situation. This is not Descartes’ universal doubt, to which the philosopher resorts arbitrarily, as a tool for finding the truth. Doubt in Peirce arises naturally and is primarily associated with the emergence of circumstances that do not fit into the usual picture of the world. Later, John Dewey introduced the concept of a “problematic situation” and formulated the main features of such a situation, but the original idea belonged, as we see, to Peirce. Belief is interpreted by pragmatism as the establishment of a habit, a “habit of mind”, which determines our future actions.
What is needed to fix a belief? Peirce lists four ways or methods, dwelling in detail on their advantages and disadvantages.
The method of persistence is a psychological method originating in the instinctive psychology of man, when a person tries to overcome doubt by defending his usual beliefs to the last. The method of authority has a socio-psychological nature, is a “natural product of public consciousness”. Historically, its direct conductors were the state machine or the clergy, and its object was the subjects or the mass of believers, whose consciousness was influenced by propaganda, preaching, and more severe measures. Compared with the method of persistence, the method of authority, according to Peirce, has an undoubted moral and even intellectual superiority, but when moving from the life of a loner to public life, a person faces a new danger – to become a “spiritual slave”. The a priori method is a method of establishing opinions, which is used by “personalities rising above the once and for all established state of affairs.” Historically, Peirce considers the teachings of metaphysicians, for example, Descartes or Hegel, to be the most successful example of the a priori method. The disadvantages of this method, on the other hand, are obvious. The creators of a theory as a set of beliefs start from their “natural preferences” from the very beginning, without bothering to verify them with facts. This is the reason for Peirce’s conclusion that such a method “makes of research something like the improvement of taste.” The scientific method, according to Peirce, is distinguished by the fact that the beliefs based on it “are determined not by purely human circumstances, but by some constancy external to the mind, on which our thinking has no influence” (1: 117). Let us now turn to the advantages of the scientific method. The first and main advantage is that the scientific method is the only one of the four methods that provides a clear criterion for distinguishing between the right and wrong paths of research.” This means that all other methods contain a criterion of correctness in themselves, i.e., what is correct is what is arbitrarily accepted as such, which in fact means the absence of a criterion. Another important and also unique advantage of the scientific method is its correspondence to the facts. Neither the method of persistence, nor the method of authority, nor, finally, the a priori method rely on facts or rely on them to an insignificant degree, so that the verification from sensory experience is always only of an unimportant, secondary nature.
“How to Make Our Ideas Clear”. The previous article dealt with doubt and belief. Now, against the background of the same concepts, Peirce builds his doctrine of thinking, since defining the process of thinking is a preliminary and necessary condition for answering the question “How to make our ideas clear?” Peirce is an empiricist. Thinking is based on sensations. Thoughts are sequences of sensations in consciousness. “Thought,” as Peirce metaphorically defines it, “is a thread of melody that runs through the whole sequence of our sensations” (1: 133). Thought is one of the systems of relations between sensations. Despite the fact that the essence of thought is movement, the main goal of any mental activity is to achieve rest, i.e., to achieve belief. One does not contradict the other, since, “being a place where thought stops, belief is also an area that draws thought into new movement” (1: 134). On the other hand, belief itself is characterized by Peirce through three functional properties: (1) awareness; (2) removal of the irritation caused by doubt; (3) establishment of habit. Behind our thoughts, even the most abstract, lies a system of sensations.
The pragmatist maxim, which has become known as “Peirce’s principle,” is as follows: “… consider what consequences we think the object of our concept has, which may be of practical importance. Then our concept of these consequences is a complete concept of the object” (3: 278). A methodology based on this principle, and only it, can lead to clear ideas. Not only our concepts of real things as such (wine, flower, etc.), but also abstract concepts (as well as their systems – theories and laws) should be considered through the prism of this principle. Revealing any content of thought through the listing of all its possible practical consequences, we simultaneously eliminate the causes that lead to the emergence of most scientific and philosophical disputes. As examples illustrating the application of the pragmatist maxim, Peirce cites the concepts of hardness, gravity, force, and also free will. However, the most important thing should be considered the definition of the concept of reality by means of the pragmatist maxim.
Reality is “that whose properties are independent of what anyone may think of them” (3: 289). i.e., something independent of our thinking. We recognize something as real when it affects our senses. Peirce distinguishes between “external reality” and the reality of our inner world. Both a dream and a scientific law are real in a certain sense: while remaining a product of human consciousness, they receive a real existence independent of the subsequent work of consciousness. In the definition given, however, the pragmatist maxim has not yet been used, namely, it must make clear the idea or concept of reality. The concept of reality, according to this rule, is reduced to the “sensible effects” that real things produce. Therefore, we must find out what these effects consist of. The main effect (sensible effect) of real things is the production of beliefs.
“What is pragmatism?” We will dwell on several ideas that are fundamental to understanding the essence of pragmatism. If pragmatism is philosophy, then the question of what should be considered the beginning of philosophy comes to the fore. From Peirce’s point of view, it is necessary to begin not with universal doubt, as Descartes did, and not with observation of the first impressions of feeling, as empiricism or positivism do, but with “a state in which you are burdened with an immeasurable mass of already formed knowledge and from which you could not free yourself even if you wanted to” (1: 164). The procedure of “purification”, so beloved by philosophy from Descartes to empiriocritics and even Husserl, cannot, as it turned out, ensure adequate knowledge of the subject, bringing in too much of its own, conditioning the final result with a theoretical element of its own production.
And yet pragmatism does engage in “purification”, but this is a completely different procedure, which much later, thanks to L. Wittgenstein, was called philosophical “therapy”. We are talking about purifying philosophy from “ontological metaphysics”, which Peirce, without mincing words, calls “meaningless gibberish” and “downright absurdity”. What do we get as a result? As Peirce writes, “in a philosophy purified of such rubbish there remains only a number of problems which can be quite easily investigated by the methods of observation proper to the genuine sciences” (1: 169). The above statement is reminiscent of similar statements by positivists. But Peirce does not object to such a parallel and even calls pragmatism a kind of “prope-positivism”, i.e. a teaching close to positivism. The following distinguishes pragmatism from positivism: (1) preservation of the purified philosophy; (2) complete acceptance of the main body of our instinctive convictions; (3) persistent adherence to the truth of scholastic realism.
The concept of truth in pragmatism. Representatives of pragmatism in general and Peirce in particular have never been fans of the concept of “truth”. It is not the truth that is important, but a firm opinion or belief. When we have reached a firm and unambiguous opinion on this or that matter, we are no longer interested in its truth or falsity. Of course, we can say that we strive for a “true opinion”, but don’t we treat each of our opinions as true? In this sense, Peirce is a supporter of the redundant theory of truth. The main thesis of this theory can be formulated as follows: to say that something is true means to say nothing, since the property of truth does not affect the concept of the object in any way, does not add anything to it. Thus, the concept of truth turns out to be redundant or superfluous. In relation to pragmatism, the adoption of the redundant concept of truth means, in particular, that the statement “Some belief is true” is considered a tautology. Peirce has a negative attitude towards the coherent concept of truth, the most widespread among the philosopher’s contemporaries. And, of course, Pierce is an opponent of the metaphysical absolutization of truth.
The fundamental role of doubt in the process of cognition forces us to rethink the concept of truth. It is necessary to distinguish two concepts of truth: (1) a belief that leads to behavior that satisfies the corresponding desire and is useful for human survival and adaptation; (2) the final conviction of the majority as a natural and necessary result of a long study conducted using the scientific method.
The concept of truth in the first case is revealed by the following definition, which Peirce gives in a note from 1903 to the article “The Fixation of Belief”: “… Truth is neither more nor less than the character of some proposition, namely, that the belief in that proposition, if justified by experience and reflection, will lead us to such conduct as will tend to satisfy the desires which that belief will determine. To say that truth means anything more is to assert that it does not mean anything at all” (1: 104). But then any belief turns out to be true, due to the fact that we simply cannot think of it as untrue, since it would then cease to be our belief. What a person considers true is simultaneously his firm belief. Thus, awareness of truth is necessarily accompanied by confidence, a state opposed to doubt.
In the second case, the true fully correlates with the real. In the article “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” Peirce gives the following, narrower definition of truth compared to the above: “By an opinion which is destined to become the general agreement of all inquirers, we mean truth; and the object represented by such an opinion is the real object” (1: 151). The preference given to the concept of scientific truth, associated with the concept of reality, forces Peirce to critically reconsider the thesis on the identification of truth and belief. Psychological conviction cannot replace objectivity.
Later Peirce narrows the concept of truth even more, limiting it to what is accepted as true in science. The concept of truth is now characterized by fallibilism (from the English fallible – subject to error, fallible), according to which the idea of ”scientific truth” also includes the extent to which it is false. One of the negative consequences of fallibilism is the elimination of the concept of absolute certainty from science, the basis and engine of scientific progress. Peirce, deeply devoted to science throughout his life, as we have repeatedly noted, finds a way out of this situation through the concept of “practical certainty.” That which justifies itself in practice is practically infallible and practically reliable.
Deduction, induction and abduction. According to Peirce, any knowledge must come from facts and be confirmed by observation. As for the “types of reasoning” that lead scientific research to some positive result, i.e. knowledge, there are three of them: deduction, induction and abduction (retroduction). Abduction is called upon to play a central role in scientific research, although it is extremely difficult to draw fixed boundaries between the three methods of cognition. A remark that is valid for all three methods concerns their rational nature – in each of them, the process of cognition remains consistently rational. We are talking, therefore, about the most general typology of scientific methods, i.e. those that can ensure the objectivity of the research and the validity of its results.
Peirce’s innovation, of course, is abduction, which complements the two well-known methods of deduction and induction, which previous philosophy had assumed exhausted our possibilities in the field of knowledge. The fact that some, like Descartes, favored deduction, while others, like Bacon, favored induction, did not prevent representatives of both camps from agreeing on the simple fact that human knowledge can move either from the general to the particular, or, conversely, from the particular to the general. Peirce makes significant amendments to this self-evident assertion.
Peirce makes the following two demands on a scientific hypothesis, no matter by what method it is obtained: (1) the hypothesis must be formulated in interrogative form and (2) it must be subject to experimental testing. The concept of hypothesis is central to any of the methods: to deduction, since it tests the initial hypothesis with particular facts, to induction, since it leads to a generalizing hypothesis on the basis of experimental data. The method of abduction is responsible for the birth of the hypothesis and in this sense is of primary importance. According to Peirce, abduction includes two stages: the generation of explanatory hypotheses and the selection from these hypotheses of the most promising explanation for the phenomenon under consideration. At the same time, Peirce’s works contain not one, but several, often conflicting explanations regarding which rational procedures determine the discovery and selection of explanations. A significant property of abduction is its riskiness. Indeed, the choice from a range of hypotheses, even under the condition of experimental testing, is a risky undertaking, since it determines the further course of the research. The justification of the choice will only become clear at the end. In this regard, Peirce speaks of the need for a research “feeling” or “instinct”, since “a man who has no inclination that agrees with the inclination of nature itself has no chance at all of understanding nature” (1: 310).
James
The rapid and widespread dissemination of pragmatism in the United States began in 1906, when Charles Peirce’s follower
William James (1842-1910) delivered a course of popular lectures, which were published under the title “Pragmatism”. In 1869, James received a diploma from the medical faculty at Harvard. From 1873, he taught anatomy and physiology at Harvard, and from 1875 he began teaching psychology. James stood at the origins of the formation of psychology as a scientific and academic discipline. In 1890, his book “Principles of Psychology” was published, which became widely known among his contemporaries. Among James’s major works, the following must be mentioned: The Will to Believe (1897), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), The Moral Equivalent of War (1904), Pragmatism (1907), and The Pluralistic Universe (1909).
James on Pragmatism. Pragmatism, as James understands it, is a “method of settling philosophical disputes.” The task of philosophy, according to James, is “to point out what certain difference it would make to you and me at certain moments of our lives if this or that formula of the world were true.” In other words, if no difference is found, then there is nothing to argue about, i.e., the subject of possible discussion disappears. Pragmatism is further characterized as a doctrine that lacks immutable postulates or dogmas. Instead, pragmatism offers a doctrine of method. Thus, as James believes, the concept of pragmatism is exhausted by the concept of the pragmatic method. In the application of the pragmatic method, it is not the particular results that are valuable, but the new points of view (attitudes).
The Interpretation of Truth in James’s Pragmatism. In his essay “Humanism and Truth” (1904), James criticizes the most common theory of truth, according to which truth is a reflection of reality. At the same time, James does not reject the requirement that this theory implies – “agreement with reality.” James only rethinks, gives a new interpretation to this thesis. Agreement with reality means that a true idea helps us work better with this reality. Thoughts as part of our experience, according to James, are true only to the extent that they help us come to a satisfactory attitude towards other parts of our experience.
The criterion of truth is usefulness. James’s utilitarianism should not be narrowed – the benefit brought by a particular idea concerns not only a specific or immediate situation, but also the future. Therefore, truth always appears as historical – it is a scientific picture of the world corresponding to a given time. Incidentally, another understanding of pragmatism follows from here – pragmatism as a “genetic theory of truth”.
Reality is represented by sensations, pre-existing beliefs, abstract relationships, which are the subject of mathematics. Thus, not only truth, but also reality, is changeable.
James’s Radical Empiricism. Radical empiricism regards any relations given in experience as equal elements of experience along with objects (which can be things, perceptions, ideas, etc.). It is postulated that the relations connecting the elements of experience must be given in experience and not brought into it from outside. James distinguishes two types of relations that are essential for experience, those relations thanks to which it is possible to universalize the concept of “experience”, considering everything that exists as part of it and believing that nothing exists outside of it. The role of such relations is played by: (1) relations of transition, which reflect the continuity of experience (of one consciousness) or the discontinuity of experience (between different consciousnesses); (2) relations of substitution, which determine the process of cognition and the way of recording and preserving its results. Relations of substitution underlie conceptual thinking. Substitution takes place when we replace a thing with a word or a number of things with a concept.
The continuity of experience, as James believes, can save us from metaphysics. Thus, the concepts of subject and object are characteristic, according to James, of a certain metaphysics. Transcendentalism, the theory of reflection, and common sense concepts are forced to use them. Once introduced, these concepts fix an insurmountable gap between the knowable and the knower. But these concepts themselves — the knowable and the knower — become superfluous if we fully realize the continuity of experience. Instead of the subject and object of knowledge, we should talk about knowledge itself, which may or may not be successful. Knowledge is successful if it is confirmed in subsequent practice. The thesis that consciousness does not exist means, from the point of view of constructing a philosophical system, that consciousness ceases to be an “epistemological necessity.”
The next important position of radical empiricism is pluralism. Experience is seen not as a coherent system with as yet unexplored links, but as chaos. Chaos of theories (replacing immediate experience) and emotions (immediate experience as such). Thus, one should distinguish between “pure experience” and the comprehension of experience. Any system is the result of comprehension, which can only approach (for example, if we reject metaphysics) what is given to us directly in experience. Hence the postulate of the uncertainty of the true picture of the world.
The only unambiguous criterion of knowledge is its confirmation in experience, but most of our knowledge is verified only in possibility. This fact is accepted by James not as an imperfection of the cognitive process, but as its integral feature. Conceptual or conceptual knowledge, although divorced from experience (being secondary), ensures a sufficiently high efficiency, scale and speed of knowledge, which would be immeasurably less if we coordinated each of our steps with our own sensations.
Dewey
John Dewey was born in 1859 in Burlington, Vermont, the son of a tobacco factory owner. In 1879, he graduated from the University of Vermont in the liberal arts program and went to work at a high school. It is no coincidence that his interest in philosophy and psychology was directly related to his teaching practice. Dewey is considered the founder of the so-called “progressive school.” In 1884, he received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University. Dewey chose Kant’s psychological theory as the topic of his dissertation. In 1894, Dewey received the position of professor and dean of the Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Education at the University of Chicago. From 1904 to 1930, Dewey taught at Columbia University, where he held the post of professor emeritus after his retirement. Dewey died in 1952 in New York.
Among Dewey’s major works we will name the following. Works devoted to education: “Education. School and Society” (1899), “Experience and Education” (1938), “The Psychologists” (1886). Studies in philosophy: “How We Think” (1910), “Essays in Experimental Logic” (1916), “Reconstruction in Philosophy” (1920), “Human Nature and Behavior” (1922), “Experience and Nature” (1925), “The Search for Certainty” (1929), “Logic as a Theory of Inquiry” (1938), “Freedom and Culture” (1939).
Instrumentalism of J. Dewey. Dewey’s philosophical views were greatly influenced by W. James, but Dewey developed his own original version of pragmatism, which was called “instrumentalism”. Thinking is instrumental and goal-oriented. Acts of cognition must be considered in the context of problematic situations that a person encounters both in his everyday life and in scientific activity. Analysis of the situation leads to the emergence of hypotheses that may be correct, i.e. leading to a solution to the problem, or they may be incorrect, in which case new research and new hypotheses are required. Like Peirce, Dewey believes that research is the basic structure of the thinking process. The essence of research lies in the transition from an indeterministic situation to a situation that, thanks to the analysis of unknown elements and their interrelationships, is perceived as a single whole.
According to Dewey, reason forms a single whole with the human organism and is formed not before, but in the process of empirical mastery of the world. Thus, thinking turns out to be a function of human activity. Dewey considered the scientific method to be the preferred method for solving emerging problems, since it embodies genuine freedom of thought. In other words, unlike other areas of culture that are bound by tradition and age-old dogmas, science is oriented toward critical knowledge of reality, facts as elements of a problematic situation. At the same time, freedom of thought has, as Dewey believed, its limits. Respect for tradition disciplines thinking, sets it in the right direction, while spiritual anarchy makes a person a slave to his momentary desires.
The concept of “experience” is also central to Dewey’s pedagogical concept. He defines education as “that reconstruction or reorganization of experience which increases the significance of the experience already possessed, and the power to direct the course of assimilation of subsequent experience.”
The concept of truth in the instrumentalism of J. Dewey. Dewey’s views on truth largely repeat Peirce. Dewey agrees with Peirce’s fallibilism, and also with the fact that only that which is recognized by the true scientific community, and not that which is recognized as such in everyday life, is worthy of being called “true”. Particular (intermediate) scientific statements should also not be called “true” or “false”. Being only research tools, they act as effective or ineffective, appropriate or not, etc. Only the final judgment (the result of the research), since it is in agreement with the ideal limit to which science strives, can be considered true. Recognition of the existence of scientific truths is combined in Dewey with the denial of the existence of eternal truths, since scientific truth is always only relative, and eternal truth claims to be absolute. It should therefore come as no surprise that Dewey believed that neither philosophy, nor morality, nor religion could provide mankind with once and for all established truths.
Literature
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