CLASH OF THE PRAGMATISTS
David Buchanan
December 2006
According to the conventional meaning, the pragmatic
approach is aimed at practical solutions and characterized by a fair-minded
and unbiased acceptance of whatever works. It’s exactly the kind of thing
that doesn’t make one’s blood boil. It wouldn’t be entirely misleading
to characterize philosophical Pragmatism in such terms but it’s not quite
as superficial or as dull as that might suggest. Pragmatists have inspired
many heated debates (found at www.moq.org)
and, in the process of investigating the differences between Richard Rorty’s
neoPragmatic theory of truth and the metaphysics of William James and
Robert Pirsig, I found radicals, revolutionaries, a defector and a mystic
or two. In this case, it’s easy to take Rorty’s advice, to drop our pretensions
about objectivity and instead view the debate as a drama with good guys and
bad guys (Rorty 1991, 79). In this case, there is an all-star cast, conflict
among the characters and nothing less than the truth is at stake.
The plot is complicated by the fact that the Radical
Empiricism of William James stands on its own and need not be married to
pragmatism (Pirsig 1991, 363). Like James, Pirsig is both a Pragmatist and a
Radical Empiricist, but the latter claims to have woven them together “into a
single fabric” (Pirsig 1991, 365). The task of comparing their Radical
Empiricism with Rorty’s theory of truth is further complicated by the fact that
Rorty refuses to have a theory of truth, a position that has led David
Hildebrand to the conclusion that Rorty’s anti-metaphysical view removes much
of the significance (i.e. “constitutes an evisceration”) of the pragmatic view (Hildebrand
2003, 154). Fortunately, sorting out such matters is beyond the scope of this
essay. Each of the players calls himself a Pragmatist and the disputes occur
against that background, but the debate will focus upon their epistemological
positions, their theories of truth or lack thereof.
Since Rorty’s view lacks an empirical theory per se,
the best that can be hoped for here is an examination of the reasons behind his
refusal. For that purpose, I will begin with a look at his essay “Texts and
Lumps”, which was published as a chapter in Objectivity, Relativism and
Truth. After hearing from Rorty in his own voice some of his critics will
be introduced. This preliminary drama will serve to set the stage for the final
conflict, for his showdown with Radical Empiricism. For the latter, I will rely
on James’ Essays in Radical Empiricism as well as Pirsig’s Zen and
the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila.
Rorty’s central concern in “Texts and Lumps” is to persuade
the reader that philosophy is no more scientific than literary criticism.
He’d like to convince the reader to erase that distinction. He suggests that
it would be better to think of philosophy as a form of literary criticism,
one that is different only because it serves a particular genre of literature
and not because of it has any kind of primary status or special access to
the Truth.
“When applied to literary criticism, pragmatism offers
reasons why critics need not worry about being scientific’, and why they should
not be frightened of the appearance of ‘subjectivity’ which results from the
adoption of an untheoretical, narrative style. It suggest that we […] simply
proceed to praise our heroes and damn our villains by making invidious
comparisons” (Rorty 1991, 79).
It’s likely that Rorty would receive praise from
critics and be damned by scientists for this assertion, but that’s a different
battle. For the purpose of this essay, it is fortunate that Rorty begins his
essay with “a general account of pragmatism’s view of the nature of truth and
of science” (Rorty 1991, 79). Here is a relatively succinct description of his
reasons for refusing to have a theory of truth, or rather for his view that
none of us can have one. By looking at his largely negative points we can, at
least, find out what kind of “God” he doesn’t believe in.
“Pragmatists say that the traditional notion that
‘truth is correspondence to reality’ is an uncashable and outworn metaphor. […]
On this view, the notion of reality as having a ‘nature’ to which it is our
duty to correspond is simply one more variant of the notion that the gods can
be placated by chanting the right words” (Rorty 1991, 79-80).
In this same passage Rorty shows that only very
simple assertions of a certain kind can produce anything like a correspondence
to reality, using a cat on a mat as his example. Here we have a case where a
common, solid, observable object can be located on another solid, observable
object. It doesn’t take much to seriously complicate this situation. How can
the same kind of correspondence apply when we say the cat is not on the
mat? How can we get our assertions to match up with “other chunks of reality”
when we speak of highly abstract concepts or talk about the things that give us
pleasure? I think if Rorty sounds like a Positivist here it is only partly due
to his background in the analytic tradition. It may appear, at first glance,
that he is only saying objective truth can be had with respect to physical
objects and that any sentences that venture beyond that are merely subjective,
but Rorty is not done yet. Objective Truth is the god he doesn’t believe in,
the god of his former faith. In the second part of his pragmatic argument he
makes a case against factuality, against the so-called hardness of scientific
truths.
“Here the pragmatist invokes his second line of
argument. He offers an analysis of the nature of science which construes the
reputed hardness of facts as an artifact produced by our choice of language
game. We construct games in which a player loses or wins if something definite
and uncontrollable happens. […] The hardness of fact in all these cases is
simply the hardness of the previous agreements within a community about the
consequences of a certain event” (Rorty 1991, 80).
Rorty insists that he is not merely confusing the data
with its interpretation here. He agrees that the data itself is real and that
“there is such a thing as brute physical resistance […] but he sees no way
of transferring this nonlinguistic brutality to facts, to the truth of sentences”
(Rorty 1991, 81). So it's not that he refuses to admit the distinction between
the data and its interpretation. The problem is that there is no way to finally
say which one of the interpretations is correct. Rorty uses Galileo’s eyeball
as an example here. Light waves traveled through space and the telescope to
exert pressure on that sense organ, or so the story goes, but question of
whether or not this “fact” shattered the crystalline spheres is up for grabs.
There are countless ways to interpret such things, some of which may have
nothing to do with crystalline spheres or even waves of light. To those who
would insist that something real had an effect upon Galileo’s retina,
Rorty just shrugs. He says it’s “pointless” to demand respect for “unmediated
causal forces” because we have “no choice” but to respect them.
This brings him to his conclusion about the
possibility of having a theory of truth. For these reasons, he believes that we
can’t have an “ideal empirical theory” because we can’t directly translate “the
brutal thrusts of reality into statement and action” (Rorty 1991, 81). This is
where he returns to the suggestion that philosophers and critics should just
tell their stories, the ones with heroes, villains and “invidious
comparisons”. It seems he’s not just giving us a reason to be comfortable
with subjectivity. He’s saying that it’s all we can have. The brute
facts by themselves are trivial. “In the case of texts, these forces merely
print little replicas on our retinas” (Rorty 1991, 82). Like the light waves on
an astronomer’s retina, the meaning of the data can be shaped in any number of
ways and there is no way to strip it “bare of human concerns” (Rorty
1991, 83).
The thing to notice, for the purposes of our story
about the clash of truth theories, is that Rorty is working within a
subject-object metaphysical (SOM) framework even as he makes a case that it
doesn’t work. Here we get the impression that Rorty’s universe is one big
Kantian thing-in-itself to which we can never have access. We can never have
the objective scientific truth of the Positivists, not even about objects. My
hunch is that Rorty is like a man fated to marry his true love’s poorly
educated little sister. His interest in a post-Philosophical culture shows that
he thinks the best thing to do is make the best of his disappointment. This SOM
framework will presently be discussed in some of the criticisms of Rorty’ view
and the rejection of this framework, it will be seen, is central to the doctrine
of Radical Empiricism.
There is support for both parts of this critique in
David Hildebrand’s Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the
Neopragmatists, where he gives voice to Hilary Putnam’s speculative charge
that Rorty could not quite “shed the ideological vestiges of positivism, his
philosophical roots” (Hildebrand 2003, 169). There he also makes specific
reference to the “subject-object dualism” as the source of the problem
for both Rorty and Putnam, as well as John Dewey’s New Realist critics
(Hildebrand 2003, 185). He succinctly describes the landscape of Dewey’s time
as suffering from the same SOM assumptions. “Realists and idealists assume that
subject and object are discrete and then debate which term deserves first rank”
(Hildebrand 2003, 27). His characterization evokes a debate that would have to
be both circular and ridiculous, like twins fighting over which one of them has
the best parents.
Putnam thinks Rorty’s position amounts to a relapse
into “metaphysical realism” (Hildebrand 2003, 169). In his article“Rorty,
Putnam, and the Pragmatist View of Epistemology”, Teed Rockwell says he would
prefer to call it “Idealism in denial” (Rockwell 2003, 4). It does
seem that Rorty is trapped within the assumptions that would usually lead
a philosopher to choose one or the other, but in this case I don’t see him
picking sides so much as giving up on such debates. He believes that history
has shown that they never pay off. He wants to forget about trying to bridge
the epistemic gap between subject and object, to give up the attempt to get
them to match up in any meaningful way, and yet he remains unwittingly committed
to the assumptions that have generated the gap. It seems he has concluded
that there is a gap between subject and object but that it’s impossible to
cross the gap. I believe this is what leads Rorty to commit an “illegitimate
inference”, as Hildebrand calls it.
“Rorty’s zeal to dismiss certain aspects of the
history of philosophy – such as the very possibility of any kind of
representationalism – causes him to make an illegitimate inference from the
unintelligibility of metaphysical realism (especially the idea that words have
meaning by virtue of a fixed totality of things outside them) to a total
skepticism toward any representation relation at all. This conclusion is
unwarranted” (Hildebrand 2003, 168-9).
Hildebrand also quotes Putnam making a similar
complaint against Rorty, saying that Pragmatism is only opposed to “a certain
style of metaphysics” while Rorty would “get rid of metaphysics once and for
all” (Hildebrand 2003, 167). Teed Rockwell spotted the same logical leap in
Rorty. He doesn’t disagree with Rorty’s assessment that the traditional
epistemological projects have failed. “But it doesn’t follow from this fact
that therefore epistemology itself should be abandoned” (Rockwell 2003, 2). It
looks like these complaints register different aspects or pieces of the same
basic mistake. Each of them refers to Rorty’s apparent belief that the failure
of epistemology is final. Rorty’s attitude seems to be that the goal of those
failed projects was an impossible dream all along. Like immorality, the Truth
is something we’ve imagined and hoped for despite the complete absence of any
actual progress towards that goal. It’s pretty clear that Rorty would like to
abandon the whole thing and simply change the subject. From his point of view,
to continue with any such epistemological project would only be to so much
dead-horse kicking.
I think this is why Rorty is so interested in reforming
the poorly educated little sister. It seems that “solidarity” is something
like a consolation prize for those who can’t have objectivity. His most famous
slogans come out of this reform project. He describes the alternative to Truth
as “agreement with one’s cultural peers” as a quest for intersubjective agreement
and, as we saw in his “Texts and Lumps”, fearless subjectivity and good story-telling.
“For Rorty, talk is all we’ve got” (Hildebrand 2003, 166). This relatively
modest goal, as Rorty sees it, is based on “a no-metaphysics metaphysic” (Hildebrand
2003, 167). In fact, Rorty is a defector from Philosophy. He left it behind
in 1982 and joined the Humanities department instead. As I see it, all this
is a result of Rorty’s failure to escape the SOM assumptions. He insists that
it’s useless to keep trying to get them to match up, but apparently he has
not seriously entertained the possibility that there is something wrong with
the most basic premise, that subjects and objects are discrete, that there
is an epistemic gap between knower and known. This is where Radical Empiricism
comes riding in to save the day.
Teed Rockwell says that Dewey’s Experience and Nature
and James’ Essays in Radical Empiricism, “contain some of the best
expressions of pragmatist metaphysics and epistemology, and ignoring them
is to lose an essential part of the pragmatist worldview” (Rockwell 2003,
2). In the same paragraph, he also quotes Rorty describing these essential
books, “as pretty useless, to my mind” (Dewey between Hegel and Darwin
1994, 320). Rockwell also quotes from page 59 and 60 of the same book where
Rorty says, “James and Dewey, alas, never made up their minds whether they
wanted just to forget about epistemology or whether they wanted to devise
a new improved epistemology of their own. In my view they should have opted
for forgetting” (Rockwell 2003, 4). This account makes it clear that Rorty
might have been rescued by Radical Empiricism or by Dewey’s alternative to
SOM, but apparently didn’t hear the offer. Maybe he thought no help was needed
or that an alternative was impossible. In any case, it’s obvious that he did
not see Radical Empiricism as a viable alternative.
I think Rorty’s refusal has something to do with the
fact that this alternative is so weird. It defies common sense. At first glance
it might even look like nonsense or madness. Maybe our heroes don’t ride to
the rescue or engage in a shootout as in a western, but rather rescue Rorty
from SOM in the same way that Neo rescues Morpheus from “The Matrix”.
Science fiction is a more suitable genre for this story because Radical Empiricism
says, “everything thing you think you are and everything you think you perceive
are undivided” (Pirsig 1974, 126). In this account, Pirsig is both a revolutionary
and a mystic and both roles are predicated on his critique of the subject-object
metaphysical assumptions. As Hildebrand noted earlier, this is the assumption
that Rorty and Putnam both failed to address so fueling the debate between
the Realists and Idealists more than a few decades ago. It was the underlying
problem with Dewey’s New Realist critics. Similarly, Eugene Taylor and Robert
Wozniak have written an introduction to Pure Experience, the Response to
William James, which is a collection of responses to Radical Empiricism
when it was new. They tell us that this part of James’ work was “largely ignored
or misunderstood” and that it was “sidestepped by his contemporaries” (Taylor
and Wozniak 2000, 1).
“The fact was, nothing in their history had prepared
Western philosophers and psychologists for radical empiricism. As reaction to
his writings showed, it is exceptionally difficult to suspend our logical
categories and see the immediate moment shorn of our labels of it. […] Yet we
have in James’s radical empiricism a position that goes right to the heart of
theWestern viewpoint, exposing its limits. In this he resembles, not chaos and
anarchy, as some of his rationalist critics might have supposed, but more the
position in Western philosophy of European existentialism and phenomenology, or
the metaphysics of Far Eastern psychology …the Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of
co-dependent origination (pratityasammutpada); or Zen suchness (tathata)”
(Taylor and Wozniak 2000, 9).
If these writers are correct, the problematic SOM
assumptions go back much further than a century or two. We can’t exactly blame
Descartes or Kant or even Modernity for this conceptual framework. It is at “the
heart of the Western viewpoint”. This is consistent with Rorty’s view. He
famously and repeatedly attributes the failed epistemological project to a
persistent Platonism. James says it has been with us, “from Democritus’s time
downward” (James 1912, 11). Pirsig also traces the problem back to the ancient
philosophers and to the very structure of the grammar we’ve inherited from the
“old Greek mythos”. By contrast, he says, “cultures such as the Chinese, where
subject-predicate relationships are not rigidly defined by grammar, one finds a
corresponding absence of rigid subject-object philosophy” (Pirsig 1974,
315-16). In any case, the point is simply that SOM is widely felt and long
established. That’s why the alternatives seem so weird. But, as Pirsig points
out, a person can get used to the idea and the lack of “weirdness isn’t the
test of truth” anyway (Pirsig 1991, 98-99). So what, finally, is this weirdness
all about? What is Radical Empiricism?
“To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into
its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude
from them any element that is directly experienced” (James 1912, 42). At this
point I am forced to reverse myself and say that this doesn’t seem strange at
all. If I understand it properly, this is an extraordinarily modest starting
point. This is an exceptionally reasonable principle insofar as James is only
saying that we ought not ignore any experience in our account of reality nor
are we allowed to make up stuff. We can’t exclude any portion of experience nor
should we posit abstract metaphysical entities or principles which are supposed
to stand behind experience or act as the cause of experience. Things only start
to get weird when it is seen that subjects and objects are among the suspicious
metaphysical entities that Radical Empiricism would scrutinize.
“The second of James’ two main systems of philosophy,
which he said was independent of pragmatism, was his radical empiricism. By
this he meant that subjects and objects were not the starting point of
experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from
something more fundamental which he described as ‘the immediate flux of life
which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual
categories’. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective
thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object,
mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure
experience cannot be either physical or psychical: It logically precedes this
distinction” (Pirsig 1991, 364-5).
For Rorty, “nothing pre-linguistic is conceivable”
(Hildebrand 2003, 186). He shares the view with many that the world as we know
it is “text all the way down”. Interpretation is bottomless, so to speak. But
that is exactly what Dewey and the radical empiricists are willing to defy. It
hardly matters whether we call it “pure experience” as James did, the
“undifferentiated aesthetic continuum” as Northrop did, the “whole
situation” as Dewey did or the “primary empirical reality” as Pirsig
does. A rose is a rose. The idea is simply that everything follows from that
first and most basic experience. All the conceptual distinctions are secondary
to that, are derived from that. We are not talking about some other realm or
any kind of thing. And this is not meant to suggest that the world as we know
it suddenly pops into existence the moment a subject conceptualizes it. We are
simply taking about experience before one has a chance to think about it,
before it has been interpreted by our conceptual schemes.
This pre-linguistic moment of experience has gone
unnoticed as James says, because only “only new born babes” and people in
extraordinary circumstances have access to pure experience (James 1912, 93).
The infant also appears as an example in Pirsig’s explanations (Pirsig 1991,
118-9). The “unverbalized sensations” of experience are “identified and fixed
and abstracted” into the shapes we recognize as the world of things (James
1912, 94). For adults, arguably like myself, these abstractions have been fixed
for so long and are used so automatically and habitually that they are
invisible. This habits of mind have developed and evolved over long periods and
are inherited by us from the culture in the normal maturation processes, in the
process of acquiring language in childhood. I think this explains why SOM has
assumed such a powerful role in Western conceptions of reality. The radical
empiricists are saying they are not reality, that SOM is a theory that
doesn’t look like a theory. Its a metaphysical abstraction so old and pervasive
that it has become common sense.
Dewey and Pirsig both think of themselves as
Copernican revolutionaries and SOM is their pivot point. For Pirsig this
“Copernican inversion” is aimed at SOM generally and scientific materialism in
particular (Pirsig 1974, 221). Dewey, on the other hand, “characterizes his
philosophy as effecting a Copernican revolution, this time upon Kant himself”
(Hildebrand 2003,60). It seems they were working in different times, but were
using some of the same terms and applying them to the same problem. James may
not have invoked the famous astronomer, but attacks the Kantian subject as a
fiction, humorously asserting that its all hot air. “Breath”, of the sort that
comes out of one’s nose, he says, “is the essence out of which philosophers
have constructed the entity known as consciousness” (James 1912, 37). Pirsig
concurs. “There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is just
an assumption” (Pirsig 1991, 99).
These three pragmatists seem to differ very little on
this point. Each saw the possibility of a new empirical theory as an
alternative to the failed projects of SOM. Their perspectives are similar enough
that a side-by-side comparison of one succinct quote on each of them could
serve to paint something like a synoptic view of this metaphysical alternative.
“The instant field of the present is at all times what
I call the ‘pure experience’. It is only virtually or potentially either a
subject or an object as yet” (James 1912, 23).
“Dewey assumes that what is primary is a whole
situation – ‘subject’ and ‘object’ have no a priori, atomistic existence but
are themselves derived from situations to serve certain purposes, usually
philosophical” (Hildebrand 2003, 27).
“When a subject-object metaphysics regards matter and
mind as eternally separate and eternally unalike, it creates a platypus bigger
than the solar system” (Pirsig 1991, 153).
In each case we see that subjects and objects them
selves are not the problem. The trouble begins when they are taken beyond the
realm of conventional concepts and turned into the pre-condition of experience,
the pre-existing and atomistic entity that does the experiencing or the
eternally separated ontological categories. The problem is when subjects and
objects are seen as the starting point of reality.
As I read it, Rorty’s central thesis in “Texts and Lumps”
is predicated on the existence of an epistemic gap between us and reality. The
Radical Empiricism of James and Pirsig, by contrast is like Dewey’s empiricism.
“No transcendental gaps are posited; we are of nature, live with nature”
(Hildebrand 2003, 60). This has the magical effect of making some of the most
serious problems of traditional epistemology disappear. It doesn’t give answers
to old riddles. It simply dissolves the questions. “This obviates the need to
argue for ‘access’ to reality by insisting that this access is something we
find we already possess” (Hildebrand 2003, 154). Hildebrand was referring to
Dewey in both of these statements but my contention is that it applies equally
well to our radical empiricists. They are not saying that they’ve found a way
to cross the gap between subjective experience and the objective world. Nor are
they saying that it is an impossible gap. They’re saying there is no gap. This
doesn’t deny subjects and objects, which are real enough as concepts. As a practical
matter, the idea that we live in a world of objects distinct from ourselves is
extremely useful. It is very handy in traffic, for example. They’re just saying
that the gap created in that distinction does not cut us off from reality. They
are saying reality is entirely pervious.
As you may have noticed, Rorty is the villain in this
story. Everybody in the cast is a pragmatist of some sort and there are many
reasons to be sympathetic with Rorty’s view, but they say a movie is only as
good as its bad guy. I think the whole idea of truth as agreement among one’s
cultural peers is a dangerous view. Mentioning Nazis at this point is likely to
givethe impression that I’m a little too desperate for drama, but fascism is
ethnocentrism gone wild. At best, truth by agreement would all but eliminate
the marginal cranks, the hopeless dreamers and others who disagree with their
cultural peers. In my opinion, the finest examples of humanity come from these
ranks and any version of truth that excludes them has to be wrong. Those are
the people most worth telling stories about, after all. They say people like
happy endings so I’ll offer one last thought about the future. If Taylor and
Wozniak are correct and Pirsig’s use of Radical Empiricism is any sign that
they are, this epistemology may serve to unite the philosophies of East and
West.
“When Zen teachers introduce students to nirvana
(which the MOQ translates as the world of pure undifferentiated value) they do
not do so with books and thesis. They sit the students in a room until their
clutter of intellectual knowledge is abandoned (especially values judgments!)
and the pure vision of the newborn infant is regained” (McWatt 2004, 83).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
James,
William. 1912. Essays In Radical Empiricism: A Pluralistic Universe. New
York, London and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Company, ed. Henry James.1947.
Hildebrand,
David. 2003a. Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists.
Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.
Hildebrand,
David. 2003b. “The Neopragmatist Turn”. Published in Southwest Philosophy
Review, Vol. 19, no 1 (January, 2003).
McWatt,
Anthony. 2004. A Critical Analysis of Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of
Quality. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Liverpool. Unpublished.
Pirsig, Robert.
1974. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.
New York: Bantam Books.
Pirsig,
Robert. 1991. Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. New York: Bantam Books.
Rockwell,
Teed. 2003. “Rorty, Putnam, and the Pragmatist View of Epistemology and
Metaphysics.” Education and Culture: the Journal of the John Dewey Society
(Spring 2003). Accessed online 11/16/06 at
users.California.com/~mcmf/rorty.html.
Rorty,
Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Rorty,
Richard. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers.
Cambridge University Press.
Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2001. Online entry for Richard Rorty. First published
2/3/01 and accessed on11/18/06 at plato.Stanford.edu/entries/rorty/.
Taylor,
Eugene and Wozniak, Robert 2000 “Pure Experience, the Responses to William
James: An Introduction”. Posted online by York University, Toronto, March 2000.
Accessed 11/30/06 at psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/TaylorWoz.htm. (Originally
published 1996. Pure Experience: The Response to William James (pp
ix-xxxii). Bristol: Thoemmes Press.)
Please note that the copyright of this paper remains with the author who need to be contacted directly for permission to use this material elsewhere.
Another paper of David’s, “Fun with Blasphemy”, can also be found on Anthony McWatt's website here.
It now features the full “director’s cut” so don’t miss it!