In a 2006 interview, Bruno Latour, distancing himself from the French philosopher Alain Badiou, casually remarks, “I’m the only French pragmatist, so it winds up that I have absolutely no contact with the French”. Latour’s remark is curious insofar as the work performed by the coupling reveals his own dissociation of French philosophy with pragmatism. If Latour is French, he cannot possibly be a pragmatist, but if he is a pragmatist, he cannot possibly be French, so better to refer to (...) himself by this new hybrid, “French pragmatist.”Perhaps it is not so peculiar for Latour to describe himself as a “pragmatist,” since references to classical pragmatist figures like William James and John... (shrink)

Debates over the relative priority of experience and language have been among some of the most vexed, but also generative, disputes in pragmatist philosophy over the past few decades. These debates have, however, run into the ground such that both positions find themselves at a definitive standstill. I argue for a rejuvenation of pragmatism by way of moving beyond both the experience option (here represented by Dewey) and the linguistic turn in pragmatism (here represented by Brandom). We can move beyond (...) these two categories, I argue, by resuscitating the categorical conception that has always been at the heart of pragmatism all along: action or, as I prefer to put it, conduct. In this paper, I develop an argument for “conduct pragmatism” on the basis of a return to William James’s earliest statements of pragmatism, statements that indeed occur prior to the official announcement of “pragmatism” in 1898. I draw on a dispute with Charles Sanders Peirce over the best interpretation of pragmatism as well as on a number of James’s early psychological writings from the 1880s leading up to the Principles of Psychology of 1890. These texts definitively establish that the early James was what I call a “conduct pragmatist” well before his radical empiricism facilitated what was only a late turn toward the “experience pragmatism” that would come to impress Dewey and later scholars of classicopragmatism. The early James thus represents, I argue, a promising seed for a new third generation of pragmatism that may find its way beyond the endings of both experientialism and lingualism, as well as their impasses with one another. (shrink)

Rorty's aversion to metaphysics is well known, so the extent of his early work on Whitehead might come as a surprise. This article examines the young Rorty's critical assessment of Whitehead to show how it demonstrates the consequences of diverging metaphilosophical orientations. It argues that Rorty's insistence on judging Whitehead's work through an exclusively epistemological frame causes him to miss its more radical existential and epistemic implications. After examining how Rorty and Whitehead operate with different cost-benefit analyses as to the (...) risks and benefits of speculative philosophy, it suggests that closer attention to the fuller stakes of Whitehead's project shows that his metaphysics are not opposed to the “poeticized” culture that Rorty calls for, one where the distinction between making and finding is no longer metaphysically foundational. (shrink)

The ubiquitous human practice of spontaneously gesturing while speaking demonstrates the embodiment, embeddedness, and sociality of cognition. The present essay takes gestural practice to be a paradigmatic example of a more general claim: human cognition is social insofar as our embedded, intelligent, and interacting bodies select and construct meaning in a way that is intersubjectively constrained and defeasible. Spontaneous co-speech gesture is markedly interesting because it at once confirms embodied aspects of linguistic meaning-making that formalist and linguistic turn-type philosophical approaches (...) fail to appreciate, and it also forefronts intersubjectivity as an inherent and inherently normative dimension of communicative action. Co-speech hand gestures, as linguistically meaningful speech acts, demonstrate both sedimentation and spontaneity (in the sense of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic of linguistic expression ( 2002 )), or features of convention and nonconvention in a Gricean sense ( 1989 ). Yet neither pragmatic nor classic phenomenological approaches to communication can accommodate the practice of co-speech hand gesturing without some rehabilitation and reorientation. Pragmatic criteria of intersubjectivity, normativity, and rationality need to confront the non-propositional and nonverbal meaning-making of embodied encounters. Phenomenological treatments of expression and intersubjectivity must consider the normative nature of high-order social practices like language use. Reciprocally critical exchanges between these traditions and gesture studies yield an improved philosophy that treats language as a multi-modal medium for collaborative meaning achievement. The proper paradigm for these discussions is found in enactive approaches to social cognition. Co-speech hand gestures are first and foremost emergent elements of social interaction, not the external whirring of an isolated internal consciousness. In contrast to current literature that frequently presents gestures as uncontrollable bodily upsurge or infallible imagistic phenomenon that drives and dances with verbal or “linguistic” convention (McNeill 1992 , 2005 ), I suggest that we study gestures as dynamic, embodied, and shared tools for collaborative sense-making. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of inter-normative engagement, of constructing dialogical interaction across substantive normative difference. Focusing on how this affects democratic and pluralistic contexts, it argues that a social-practice-based approach to normativity and reasoning offers unique resources to understand and frame such encounters. It specifically draws on pragmatism and the work of Richard Rorty to reframe normativity, authority, identity, and reason, linking these understandings to recent trends to deliberative political inclusivism in democratic theory. The upshot is that framing inter-normative (...) engagement as calls to responsive engagement between diverse systems of normative authority offers real insights for constructing and maintaining ongoing democratic engagements in a non-hierarchical manner. This, the article argues, extends emerging methodological trends in the broader literature while overcoming the morass between conflict- and consensus-oriented approaches in democratic th... (shrink)

In the division between analytic and continental thought, pragmatism has often been cast as a middle way. Fundamentally critical of each, it also shares resonances with both of these traditions. However, while this observation is common, remarkably little has been done to examine its truth in contemporary political thought. Drawing on recent trends in political theory, including ‘New Realism’, critical genealogical methods and a surge in pragmatic approaches, this article identifies an emerging situated turn in political thought. Emerging from several (...) major traditions in contemporary political thinking, this trend has pragmatic themes at its centre. Having identified this as a fertile opportunity for inter-methodological work across the analytic/continental divide, it then turns to the late work of Richard Rorty in order to expose his productive framework for such cross-border exchanges. Arguing for its fundamentally democratic and pluralistic nature, this analysis also exposes this framework’s weaknesses before illustrating how recent methodological exchanges between genealogy and pragmatism rectify these deficiencies while providing a viable model for future work across traditional philosophical boundaries. (shrink)

A variety of commentators have explored the similarities between pragmatism and Thomas Reid’s Philosophy of Common Sense. Peirce himself claims his version of pragmatism either (loosely) is, or entails, a Critical Common-sensism, a blend of what is best in Kant and Reid. In this paper I argue for a neglected aspect of the relation between Peirce and Reid, and of each to common sense: linguistics. First, I summarize Peirce’s account of what distinguishes his common-sensism from Reid’s. Second, I argue for (...) the importance of appeals to linguistic universals by Reid as both a source for identifying common sense beliefs, and a basis for justifying them. While Peirce is occasionally tempted by such appeals, overall he is critical of appeals to language, especially as most Western philosophers have been familiar with a small set of (Indo-)European languages; say, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, and Latin. This leads to the third section, which concerns Peirce’s familiarity with major nineteenth century linguists, and his contention that the ‘peculiarity’ of Western European languages has impeded the development of logic and philosophy. In particular, I look at unpublished manuscripts where Peirce summarizes his own study of non-European languages, ranging from Arabic, to Ngarrindjeri, to Xhosa. Peirce was only an amateur linguist, and also aware of the challenges of doing cross-cultural linguistics through comparative grammar; e.g., the temptation to force unfamiliar languages onto the “Procrustean Bed of Aryan grammar” (CP 2.211). Nonetheless, this study left him suspicious of any claims of linguistic universals, and supported his anti-psychologism. That is, not only should logic and philosophy not be based upon psychology (at least as a special science), they should also be independent of linguistics. However, Peirce also advances something like the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language determines, or at least conditions, thought. The question now becomes what is the nature of a philosophy of common sense, even a critical one, without a common language, or possibly no commonalities across languages? (shrink)