What do Social Networking Sites (SNS) ‘do to us’: are they a damning threat or an emancipating force? Recent publications on the impact of “Web 2.0” proclaim very opposite evaluative positions. With the aim of finding a middle ground, this paper develops a pragmatist approach to SNS based on the work of Richard Rorty. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, we analyze SNS as conversational practices. Second, we outline, in the form of an imaginary conversation between Rorty and Heidegger, (...) a positive and negative ‘conversational’ view on SNS. Third, we deploy a reflection, again using Rortian notions, on that evaluation, starting from the concept of ‘self-reflectivity.’ Finally, the relations between these three steps are more detailedly investigated. By way of the sketched technique, we can interrelate the two opposing sides of the recent debates—hope and threat—and judge SNS in all their ambiguity. (shrink)

Pragmatism is often thought to be incompatible with realism, the view that there are knowable mind-independent facts, objects, or properties. In this article, I show that there are, in fact, realist versions of pragmatism and argue that a realist pragmatism of the right sort can make important contributions to such fields as religious ethics and philosophy of religion. Using William James's pragmatism as my primary example, I show (1) that James defended realist and pluralist views in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and (...) philosophy of religion, and (2) that these views not only cohere with his pragmatism but indeed are basic to it. After arguing that James's pragmatism provides a credible and useful approach to a number of basic philosophical and religious issues, I conclude by reflecting on some ways in which we can apply and potentially improve James's views in the study of religion. (shrink)

Joseph Margolis’ philosophical work is both sanguine and fair. It is sanguine because much of it captures the inherent worth and dignity of the human condition. This includes aesthetics, anthropological diversity and history, the diversity of cognitive orientations and objectivity without foundations. Margolis embraces science and naturalism without reductionism. His pragmatism, though, is rooted more in James’ perspectivism, his local nice adaptation, and his relativism than that of Peirce and Dewey and their sense of science and the community of inquirers. (...) Margolis’ strength is his attempt to reconcile positions and his fairness towards others as he tries to wedge his pragmatist position amid others. But he celebrates the subjective stance of James, and downplayed the communal sense of Peirce and Dewey so vital to epistemic advances. (shrink)

Classical pragmatism construed mind as an adaptive organ rooted in biology; biology was not one side and culture on the other. The cognitive systems underlie adaptation in response to the precarious and in the search for the stable and more secure that result in diverse forms of inquiry. Cognitive systems are rooted in action, and classical pragmatism knotted our sense of ourselves in response to nature and our cultural evolution. Cognitive systems should be demythologized away from Cartesian detachment, and towards (...) transactions with others and with nature. (shrink)

This survey article discusses the pragmatist tradition in twentieth century philosophy of science. Pragmatism, originating with Charles Peirce's writings on the pragmatic maxim in the 1870s, is a background both for scientific realism and, via the views of William James and John Dewey, for the relativist and/or constructivist forms of neopragmatism that have often been seen as challenging the very ideas of scientific rationality and objectivity. The paper shows how the issue of realism arises in pragmatist philosophy of science and (...) how some pragmatists, classical and modern, have attempted to deal with it. Various dimensions of the realism dispute are thus discussed, especially realism as contrasted to instrumentalism and realism as contrasted to relativism/constructivism. It is argued that the pragmatist tradition cannot avoid these tensions but is largely constituted by them. (shrink)

These are replies to extended discussion of my published work by Göran Hermerén, Dale Jacquette, and Joanne Waugh largely featuring, separately in the order mentioned, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. The themes that appear most salient feature at least these: that persons are not natural entities but hybrid artifacts, that objective claims including moral objectivity are entirely constructed on the basis of societal practices, and that objectivity cannot escape the same inseparability of the subjective and the objective.

Although not known as a philosopher of history, George Herbert Mead wrote and taught seriously about the nature of the past and about historical investigation throughout his career. The paper identifies the major documentary sources and interpretive literature with which to reconstruct Mead’s radically social and dynamic conceptualization of history and extends beyond the existing literature to develop striking implications of Mead’s approach in response to possible criticisms and challenges. By connecting Mead’s writings on history with his broader social theory (...) of action, democracy, and consciousness, the paper shows how Mead provides a novel grounding of our understandings of history in ongoing social processes and suggests that better historical knowledge may be related to participatory, inclusive social practices. As a result, historians have a responsibility to social reconstruction and society’s self-reflection, in Mead’s view. Because of the novel ways in which Mead’s approach explores the relationship between history and social progress he warrants renewed attention and scrutiny from researchers and theorists of history. (shrink)

It is commonly supposed that the pragmatisms of Peirce and James are fundamentally opposed; this view is supported by the fact that in 1905 Peirce deliberately chose a new name for his original doctrine. Yet Peirce and James were not only life-long friends but to a surprising extent were life-long collaborators. It is true that their approaches to philosophy were very different, reflecting their distinct personalities, with James exhibiting a pluralistic and humanistic style as opposed to Peirce the analyst and (...) formalist. James was a popular philosopher and Peirce a philosopher for philosophers. But they followed each other’s work, corresponded about philosophical problems, and deeply influenced each other. Peirce never completely renounced James’s broader pragmatism and tried hard to find common ground, even to some extent reshaping his own views to accommodate James’s. (shrink)

Metaphilosophy, Volume 53, Issue 4, Page 431-445, July 2022.

Building on recent texts, I give a characterization of Richard Shusterman’s specific variant of pragmatism, understood as a melioristic or perfectionist pragmatism, where ethical and political dimensions are deeply intertwined with the epistemological one. To do so, I focus on what seems to be Shusterman’s latest contribution to his inter- rupted dialogue with Richard Rorty in Thinking through the Body.

Are there any theoretical resources – conceptual, lexical or argumentative ones – in the interdisciplinary debate on the evolutionary origins of the arts that can help us go beyond the traditional autonomistic conception of art, in favour of a more continuist and inclusive interpretation of human artistic practices? The paper examines the different voices in the debate, against the background of a cultural naturalist attitude inspired by John Dewey, by focusing on those contributions which can be interpreted in non-reductionist, anti-foundationalist (...) and pluralistic terms. What are particularly valuable are those positions emphasizing the phatic, communicative dimension of artifying behaviours in connection with the acute structural exposure of human organisms to their natural and naturally social environment. (shrink)

It is well known that John Dewey was very far from embracing the traditional idea of cognition as something happening inside one’s own mind and consisting in a pictorial representation of the alleged purely external reality out there. His position was largely convergent with enactivist accounts of cognition as something based in life and consisting in human actions within a natural environment. The paper considers Dewey’s conception of cognition by focusing on its potential contributions to the current debate with enactivism. (...) It claims that Dewey’s anti-substantial, continuistic, and emergentistic conception of the mind as a typically human conduct pulls the rug out of the idea of cognition as representation, as well as pushes the current discussion towards a serious reconsideration of representationalist assumptions about conceptuality and language. The paper emphasises that Dewey—differently from enactivists—frames the role of cognition within experience: he argues that cognition concerns those intermediate phases of our experiences of the world which are characterised by an indeterminate or troubled situation, because he claims that human beings’ interactions with their own environment are qualitatively richer and broader than cognition, including as they do many different and intertwined modes of experience. Finally, the author suggests that a coherent development of Dewey’s lines of thought should avoid rigid distinctions and hierarchies between lower and higher degrees of cognition in humans, which are still maintained in certain forms of radical enactivism. Differently, we should consider the impact of the cultural and broadly linguistic configuration of the human–environment even on perception, motor action, and affective sensibility. (shrink)

This paper offers an overview of Joseph Margolis’s philosophy of culture, highlighting how Margolis’s radical historicism is not inconsistent with our realistic intuitions regrading facts and objectivity. While Margolis identifies interpretation as the work of culture, the paper suggests that a much more basic sense of human labor needs to be thematized more fully than Margolis does in any defensible account of culture. Margolis of course appreciates work in this sense, but he does not consistently make it integral to his (...) conception of culture. Even so, what he so forcefully defends is, as one commentator has put it, “beautiful. It’s also erudite, elegant, and insightful (and frightfully, dialectically intricate).”. (shrink)

This paper begins with a memoir of the author’s interactions with Joseph Margolis that delineates both Margolis’s importance as a teacher and their disagreements on aspects of American philosophy. It then turns to Margolis’s discussions of pragmatism as a philosophical movement, with an emphasis on his understanding of John Dewey. The paper considers, third, Margolis’s account of the decline and rebirth of pragmatism, the latter process attributed largely to the work of Richard Rorty. The paper concludes with an examination of (...) what it sees as Margolis’s most valuable work: his explorations of the nature of the self and of human society. (shrink)

Is Joseph Margolis a member of the often neglected school of “Columbia naturalism”? Columbia naturalism promoted a distinctive non-reductive nationalism in mid-twentieth-century America. Inspired by pragmatism, and Dewey in particular, its members included Ernest Nagel, John Herman Randall, Joseph Blau, Herbert Schneider, and Justus Buchler. Margolis received his degree from Columbia in 1953. Neither his early work in aesthetics nor his mature attempt to justify pragmatic themes in an uncompromising dialogue with analytic and continental philosophy seems particularly “Columbian.” Neither does (...) his radical endorsement of a kind of relativism. However, Margolis is after all some kind of naturalist. Furthermore, the Columbians shared a forgotten doctrine, called “objective relativism.” If the combination of naturalism and relativism is a Columbian fruit, Margolis may have has fallen closer to the tree than first appears. (shrink)

Pragmatism’s naturalism is inconsistent with the phenomenological tradition’s anti-naturalism. This poses a problem for the methodological consistency of phenomenological work in the pragmatist tradition. Solutions such as phenomenologizing naturalism or naturalizing phenomenology have been proposed, but they fail. As a consequence, pragmatists and other naturalists must answer the phenomenological tradition’s criticisms of naturalism.

Expressivism, the view that ethical claims are expressions of psychological states, has advantages such as closing the gap between normative claims and motivation and avoiding difficulties posed by the ontological status of values. However, it seems to make substantive moral disagreement impossible. Here, we develop a suggestion from William James as a pragmatist extension of expressivism. If we look at a set of moral claims from the perspective of the maximally comprehensive set of co-possible satisfactions, then a claim can be (...) treated as true if it is part of that set. There then is a practical “fact of the matter” about the members of such a set. This makes the notion of moral truth analogous to pragmatic notions of scientific truth, defined as what will withstand inquiry to its ideal limit, and thereby provides a way for expressivists to make sense of moral disagreement. (shrink)

Fallibilism, as a fundamental aspect of pragmatic epistemology, can be illuminated by a study of law. Before he became a famous American judge, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., along with his friends William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, associated as presumptive members of the Metaphysical Club of Cambridge in the 1870s, recalled as the birthplace of pragmatism. As a young scholar, Holmes advanced a concept of legal fallibilism as incremental community inquiry. In this early work, I suggest that Holmes treats common (...) law cases more like scientific experiments than as deductive applications of already clear rules. Common law rules may be seen as a product of 1) the conflicts that occur in society, 2) the channeling of conflicts into legal disputes, 3) the gradual accumulation of judicial decisions classified into groups, and 4) the development of consensual understanding, expressed in rules and principles, as to how future cases should be classified and decided. This does not involve only lawyers and judges. Especially in controversial cases, it may indirectly involve an entire community. The legal process is seen as an extended intergenerational process of inquiry. It illuminates the relation of thought, expression, and conduct among a community of inquirers, applied to the problems of social ordering. (shrink)