Joseph Morton Ransdell left a record of experimentation with the communicational process of philosophy from 1992 to his passing in 2010. This record includes the Arisbe website and the peirce-l e-forum and its archives, of which the earliest are not on the Internet, but may yet be recovered and made available. Philosophy’s communication process, and the possibility of creating and developing a telecommunity, as Ransdell called it, were among his chief theoretical and practical interests. Such interests were focused (...) in terms of the ideas of Charles S. Peirce, including fallibilism, pragmaticism, and semiotic, in particular the sign’s determination by the represented object, and iconicity in relation especially to.. (shrink)

Recent attention given to the upstart movement of experimental philosophy is much deserved. But now that experimental philosophy is beginning to enter a stage of maturity, it is time to consider its relation to other philosophical traditions that have issued similar assaults against ingrained and potentially misguided philosophical habits. Experimental philosophy is widely known for rejecting a philosophical reliance on intuitions as evidence in philosophical argument. In this it shares much with another branch of (...) empiricist philosophy, namely, pragmatism. Taking Kwame Anthony Appiah's forthright and cautious endorsement of experimental philosophy as my model, I show that experimental philosophy and pragmatist philosophy share more than adherents of either philosophical method have yet to allow. I then use this comparison to show how the new experimentalisms could benefit from a rereading of century-old pragmatist insights about philosophical methodology. (shrink)

This paper considers three package deals combining views in philosophy of mind, meta-philosophy, and experimental philosophy. The most familiar of these packages gives center-stage to pumping intuitions about fanciful cases, but that package involves problematic commitments both to a controversial descriptivist theory of reference and to intuitions that “negative” experimental philosophers have shown to be suspiciously variable and context-sensitive. In light of these difficulties, it would be good for future-minded experimental philosophers to align themselves (...) with a different package deal. This paper suggests two alternatives. Experimentalists might help fans of “naturalized” approaches discover what natural kinds have been playing an appropriate role in causing us to use concepts as we do. Or, better still, experimentalists might instead help pragmatists and teleo-semanticists discover how our concept usage regularly yields beneficial outcomes, so that we can then craft philosophical analyses that will.. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds, Édouard Machery argues that the results of experimental philosophy should lead us to abandon much of traditional philosophical practice. In its place Machery defends naturalized conceptual analysis as a more modest and pragmatic alternative to standard analytic philosophy. This paper argues that Machery overstates the metaphilosophical significance of x-phi’s results. We can and should keep many of the insights and good methodological habits that come with x-phi. However, if one (...) is not already convinced of pragmatism or naturalism, the discoveries of x-phi are unlikely to make too much difference to one’s metaphilosophical position. (shrink)

The paper seeks to explain in what sense pragmatism was for Peirce a doctrine of logic. It is argued that pragmatism is a doctrine of logic for Peirce because its maxim, the pragmatic maxim, is a maxim of the methodeutic of abduction, i.e., concerns the method of selecting hypotheses for experimental testing. The paper also connects this idea to Peirce’s 1913 thesis according to which pragmatism contributes to the security but not to the uberty of reasoning. (...) The connection consists in that by excluding hypotheses that cannot be tested, the maxim renders the whole process of reasoning more secure, while any explanatory hypotheses is “uberous” in Peirce’s sense as any other. (shrink)

Truth happens to an idea." So wrote William James in 1907; and twenty-four years later John Dewey argued that artistic experience entailed a process of "doing and undergoing." But what do these ideas have to do with music, or with research conducted in and through music - that is, with "artistic research?" In this collection of essays, fourteen very different authors respond with distinct and challenging perspectives. Some report on their own experiments and experiences; some offer probing analyses of noteworthy (...) practices; some view historical continuities through the lens of pragmatism and artistic experiment. The resulting collection yields new insights into what musicians do, how they experiment, and what they experience - insights that arise not from doctrine, but from diverse voices seeking common ground in and through experimental discourse: artistic research in and of itself. (shrink)

Pragmatism gained considerable attention in bioethical discussions in the early 21st century. However, some dimensions and contributions of pragmatism to bioethics remain underexplored in both research and practice. It is argued that pragmatism can make a distinctive contribution to bioethics through its concept, developed by Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey, that ethical issues can be resolved through experimental inquiry. Dewey’s proposal that policies can be confirmed or disconfirmed through experimentation is developed by comparing it to (...) the confirmation of scientific hypotheses, with a focus on the objection that the consequences of following a moral view or policy do not provide guidance on choosing among competing ethical perspectives. As confirmation of scientific hypotheses typically relies on evidence gathered from observation, the possibility of ethically relevant observation is then explored based on Peirce’s views on feelings as emotional interpretants. Finally, the connection between Dewey’s experimental ethics and democracy is outlined and compared to unfettered ethical progressivism. (shrink)

Much discussion about experimental philosophy and philosophical methodology has been framed in terms of the reliability of intuitions, and even when it has not been about reliability per se, it has been focused on whether intuitions meet whatever conditions they need to meet to be trustworthy as evidence. But really that question cannot be answered independently from the questions, evidence for what theories arrived at by what sorts of inferences? I will contend here that not just philosophy's (...) sources of evidence, but also its inferential resources, are in great need of closer examination. (shrink)

Eric Mullis' Pragmatist Philosophy and Dance is a thoroughly multi-disciplinary and transdisciplinary book that is centered on and deeply engaged in the experimental and lived experience of Pentecostal dance in the American and Appalachian South. The focal point for Mullis' research is not observation and critique of dance as embodied religious practice from a critical distance but from the inside, embedding his own person and body into the environment with all the resources of the unifying self that he (...) has at his disposal to not just understand the form but feel it and live it. This makes Mullis a true William Jamesian and John Deweyan pragmatist; he doesn't... (shrink)

The contributors to Pragmatism and the Philosophy of Sport argue that American pragmatism is particularly well suited analyze the experience and development of sport activities. This volume will be a valuable resource in any philosophy of sport class or in a course on pragmatism; it will also be appropriate for kinesiology students. It will give readers a good sense of the themes in the American philosophical tradition as well as those in the burgeoning field of (...) the philosophy of sport. (shrink)

Peirce’s method of categorial development reveals the experimental nature of phenomenology, of metaphysics, and of the relation between their respective claims. The phenomenological categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness come to light as an interrelated set of meanings, abductively generated as a tool for focusing on the richness of experience in order to elicit its illusive, “intangible” but pervasive textures, “traits” “tones or tints”. The move from experiential claims to metaphysical claims is an imaginative extension via analogy. In the (...) development of his metaphysical categories, there is an exaggeration of the experimental method by which we have meaningful everyday experience. There is an exaggeration of the metaphorical, imaginative, creative features of the meanings which arise out of past experience though abductive fixations of experience, and which legislate for the analysis of future experience. Further, there is an exaggerated attentiveness to what appears in experience, to its pervasive features or textures, an attentiveness which both founds the categories and serves to verify their adequacy. The claims of his experimental phenomenology, and hence the claims of the metaphysics which it grounds, are fallibilistic and open to alternative categorial possibilities. (shrink)

The patterns of ecological devastation that mark the present unexpectedly enable an ancient and many-storied question to resurface with renewed force: the question of the arts of living — that is, of learning how to live and die well with others on a precarious Earth. Modernity has all but forgotten this question, which has long been buried under the dreams of progress and infinite growth, colonial projects, and the enthroning of technoscience. But what might it mean to reclaim the question (...) of the arts of living today? In this article Martin Savransky reclaims the connection between pragmatism, education, and the arts of living by proposing both that (1) William James's pragmatist philosophy can be read as an ongoing and unfinished experiment in weaving a certain art of living, and (2) James's pragmatism might provide us with uniquely generative elements to begin to experiment with the profoundly educational and ecological challenge of learning to inhabit the Earth otherwise. (shrink)

This chapter reviews research in the experimental philosophy of consciousness. It discusses recent debates about how to characterize experimental philosophy in general. It then gives an origins story for the experimental philosophy of consciousness, emphasizing work that could be taken to support the claim that there is no folk concept of phenomenal consciousness. It then gets into two strands of subsequent research: work on the folk psychology of group phenomenal minds and work on the (...) cognitive systems responsible for ordinary attributions of phenomenal states in general. (shrink)

In this book, Michael R. Slater provides a new assessment of pragmatist views in the philosophy of religion. Focusing on the tension between naturalist and anti-naturalist versions of pragmatism, he argues that the anti-naturalist religious views of philosophers such as William James and Charles Peirce provide a powerful alternative to the naturalism and secularism of later pragmatists such as John Dewey and Richard Rorty. Slater first examines the writings of the 'classical pragmatists' - James, Peirce, and Dewey - (...) and argues for the relevance of their views for thinking about such topics as the nature of religion and the viability of natural theology. His final three chapters engage with the religious views of later pragmatists such as Rorty and Philip Kitcher, and with current philosophical debates over metaphysical realism, naturalism, and evidentialism. His book will be of particular interest to philosophers of religion, theologians, and specialists in American philosophy. (shrink)

Several recent studies of early modern natural philosophy have claimed that corpuscularism and experimental philosophy were sharply distinct or even conflicting views. This chapter provides a different perspective on the relation between corpuscularism and experimental philosophy by examining Domenico Guglielmini’s ‘Philosophical Reflections’ on salts (1688). This treatise on crystallography develops a corpuscularist theory and defends it in a way that is in line with the methodological prescriptions, epistemological strictures, and preferred argumentative styles of experimental (...) philosophers. The examination of the ‘Reflections’ shows that early modern philosophers could consistently endorse, at the same time, corpuscularism and experimental philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter aims to articulate the motivation behind an insurrectionist philosophy. On this account, insurrectionist philosophy is about rejecting a world (and its norms and intervening background assumptions) and creating the possibility for transvaluation or a radical revolution of values. To shed light on this, McBride offers an account of Leonard Harris’s idiosyncratic philosophy born of strife and struggle, clarifying the role of Alain Locke’s critical pragmatism and the insurrectionist spirit needed to disavow the conventional norms (...) and the intervening background assumptions that lurk tacitly behind the dominant order of things. (shrink)

Theorists have had less success in analyzing the truth conditions of generics. Philosophers of language have offered a number of theories. This chapter surveys several semantic accounts of generics. However, the focus is on generics and experimental philosophy. It briefly reviews empirical work that bears on these semantic accounts. While generics constitute an interesting linguistic phenomenon worthy of study in their own right, the study of generics also has wide‐ranging implications for questions beyond the philosophy of language, (...) including questions in social psychology and cognitive science more generally. The chapter also reviews empirical work on the relationship between generics and cognition. Existing empirical work strongly supports the generics‐as‐defaults hypothesis: the hypothesis that generics reflect a cognitively default, fundamental mode of generalizing in humans. Finally, the chapter elucidates evidence that generic language and generic modes of generalizing play an important role in stereotyping and prejudice. (shrink)

Humans often attribute the things that happen to one or another actual cause. In this chapter, we survey some recent philosophical and psychological research on causal attribution. We pay special attention to the relation between graphical causal modeling and theories of causal attribution. We think that the study of causal attribution is one place where formal and experimental techniques nicely complement one another.

Practitioners of the new ‘experimental philosophy’ have collected data that appear to show that some philosophical intuitions are culturally variable. Many experimental philosophers take this to pose a problem for a more traditional, ‘armchair’ style of philosophizing. It is argued that this is a mistake that derives from a false assumption about the character of philosophical methods; neither philosophy nor its methods have anything to fear from cultural variability in philosophical intuitions.

Hans Lipps compares pragmatism (William James and John Dewey) existentialism (Friedrich Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard, and Martin Heidegger) in this 1936 article translated from French. He claims that they aim at the same goals, e.g., a return to lived experience and a rejection of the Cartesian legacy in philosophy. While summarizing the commonalities of each, he engages in a polemic against philosophy then that remains relevant now into the next century.

Aesthetic testimony is testimony about aesthetic properties. For example, in aone straightforward case, one person might tell another that something is beautiful. Philosophical discussion about aesthetic testimony centers on the question of whether there are any important differences between aesthetic testimony and testimony about non-aesthetic descriptive matters. In particular, the focus is often on the respective epistemic credentials of aesthetic and non-aesthetic testimony relative to firsthand judgments in the respective domains. Most are inclined to think that in some way and (...) to some degree we typically treat aesthetic testimony as being epistemically inferior to testimony about non-aesthetic matters. Assuming an asymmetry in the way we typically treat aesthetic and non-aesthetic testimony, the philosophical debate then asks a number of questions. Is aesthetic testimony actually epistemically inferior? If so, in what ways, and what explains its inferiority? If not, why do our ordinary ways of thinking, talking, and engaging with aesthetic testimony treat it as being inferior? In this chapter, I consider various ways in which experimental philosophy can contribute to these debates. Drawing on extant work and some new empirical studies, this chapter provides an overview of what experimental philosophy has told us so far, and summarizes the implications for philosophical debate. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the relation between Christian Wolff's philosophy and the methodological views of early modern experimental philosophers. The chapter argues for three claims. First, Wolff's system relies on experience at every step and his views on experiments, observations, hypotheses, and the a priori are in line with those of experimental philosophers. Second, the study of Wolff's views demonstrates the influence of experimental philosophy in early eighteenth-century Germany. Third, references to Wolff's empiricism and rationalism are (...) best identified or replaced with references to his endorsement of the tenets of experimental philosophers and of a mathematical demonstrative method. (shrink)

Critical Review of The Philosophical Project of Carnap and Quine, edited by Sean Morris, Cambridge University Press, 2023.Scholarly opinion concerning the Carnap–Quine relationship and their centra...

Experimental philosophy brings empirical methods to philosophy. These methods are used to probe how people think about philosophically interesting things such as knowledge, morality, and freedom. This paper explores the contribution that qualitative methods have to make in this enterprise. I argue that qualitative methods have the potential to make a much greater contribution than they have so far. Along the way, I acknowledge a few types of resistance that proponents of qualitative methods in experimental (...) class='Hi'>philosophy might encounter, and provide reasons to think they are ill-founded. (shrink)

In this paper we claim that pragmatist philosophical practice is incompatible with scientistic philosophy. The kind of pragmatism used for making this case follows the spirit and method of philosophical pragmatists such as William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, and a related pragmatic tradition, Confucian Philosophy. Pragmatism starts from immediate experience, and refuses to cleave off the reality and salience of what is found in such experience in the process of thinking. Pragmatism also concerns itself (...) with social problems, broadly conceived. In contrast to this focus on immediate experience, the influence of science in much philosophizing involves a kind of scientism through which the relevance, value, and even reality of experience is brought into question. It also concerns itself with a narrowly defined set of so-called philosophical problems. In this regard, pragmatist philosophical practice is fundamentally opposed to scientistic philosophical practice. We will start by modelling the kind of philosophical practice that stems from pragmatism, and the role of immediate experience in it. Subsequently, we will introduce two modes of philosophizing that diminish if not negate the role of experience. One is bald naturalist philosophizing, and the other is a priori scientific philosophizing. In the last section, we will show how main commitments of both of these traditions are incompatible with a pragmatist philosophy that remains committed to the original impulse of pragmatism. (shrink)

Pragmatism is typically understood as a philosophy embedded in scientific inquiry. Thinkers, like Charles Peirce (1877), C.I. Lewis (1923) and Susan Haack (1998) envisioned pragmatism and its scientific inquiry as a method of systematizing our beliefs and acquiring knowledge. They thought that scientific practice and its implied standards, techniques, and values is the only source of hope for scientific and philosophical progress. In this dissertation, I construct a pragmatic approach to the meta-ethical questions of our moral truths, (...) beliefs and principles that proposes a normative systematization of ethics grounded in moral practice, development and experimentation. I argue that maintaining a pragmatic faith in the origination and formation of our moral constitutions will provide us with a realist, cognitivist and objective view of reality subject to the capacities of our human cognition and empirical evidence and not subject to metaphysical and universal methods of reasoning. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers are often puzzled as to why many armchair philosophers question the philosophical significance of their research. Armchair philosophers, in contrast, are often puzzled as to why experimental philosophers think their work sheds any light on traditional philosophical problems. I argue there is truth on both sides.

This new book by Michael Slater significantly extends the argument articulated in his earlier study of William James on Ethics and Faith, also published by Cambridge University Press. Slater was committed there as here to demonstrating the compatibility of pragmatism with some form of metaphysical realism. There as here he was interested in showing the affinities between James’s thought and certain ideas developed by contemporary analytical philosophers of religion. In Pragmatism and the Philosophy of Religion, however, the (...) scope of analysis is broadened from a focus on James to a consideration of pragmatism more generally conceived. Two early chapters on James are followed by chapters on Charles S. Peirce... (shrink)

The strong influence of pragmatism in the early 20th-century international debate, its subsequent and apparently inexorable decline, and its recent revival are intertwined with the fate of other currents of thought that have marked the development of contemporary philosophy. This volume clarifies the most recent events of this development focusing on key theoretical issues common both to American classic philosophical tradition and analytical thought. Many essays in this volume belong to what we can call “new” pragmatism, namely (...) a pragmatist perspective that is different from the postmodernist “neo” pragmatism à la Rorty. The volume shows that both pragmatists and analytic thinkers stress the importance of logic and scientific method in order to deal with philosophical problems and seek for a clarification of the relation between our ethical values and our understanding of natural facts. Moreover, the anti-skeptic attitude that characterizes pragmatism as well as most part of analytic philosophy, and their common attention to the problems of language and communication are emphasized. The more sophisticated tools for addressing both theoretical and methodological problems developed by analytic philosophy are pointed out, and the essays show the possible integration of these two forms of speculation that, for too a long time, mutually disregarded one another. (shrink)

1. In “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” Sellars argues that the notion of “self-authenticating nonverbal episodes” that would provide a foundation for empirical knowledge is a myth; nothing merely causal, not already in conceptual shape, could possibly play the justificatory role required of such a foundation. Rorty takes Quine, in “Two Dogmas,” to make the complementary point that the notion of analytic claims true by virtue of meaning, of self-authenticating verbal episodes that might provide a foundation for another (...) sort for knowledge, is again a myth. A third moment in the dismantling of the myth of a foundation—this time for the contentfulness of our thoughts rather than for the truth of our beliefs—is due to Rorty himself. As he argues in “Realism and Reference”, the notion of reference as a nonintentional or “external” word-world relation that would ground our thoughts’ representational bearing on things, and so explain how thoughts can so much as purport to be true, again involves illicit appeal to the idea that independent of what we take it as an object can have cognitive significance. An external relation of reference cannot serve as the unmoved mover of the contentfulness or aboutness of thought. Nor, if Quine is right about the breakdown of the analytic/synthetic distinction, can meanings or word-word relations play this role. (shrink)

Rarely these days are philosophy books both bold and sweeping, but Maddalena’s The Philosophy of Gesture is both. Whether you think that is good will surely depend on your philosophical temperament. Personally, I consider it bad taste to criticize a philosopher for striking out on a new path. Philosophy, as any student of Peirce’s works will affirm, is an experimental science. Some of those experiments might well lead you to the hinterlands, but at least you will (...) have a more detailed map. As with reading any book, the question to ask is not: What is wrong with it? But: What can I learn from it? Reading Maddalena’s book, I had the distinct sense of reading something like James’s Pragmatism. Much is... (shrink)

Providing a bold and original rethinking of environmental ethics, Ben Minteer's Refounding Environmental Ethics will help ethicists and their allies resolve critical debates in environmental policy and conservation practice. Minteer considers the implications of John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy for environmental ethics, politics, and practice. He provides a new and compelling intellectual foundation for the field - one that supports a more activist, collaborative, and problem-solving philosophical enterprise. Combining environmental ethics, democratic theory, philosophical pragmatism, and the environmental social sciences, (...) Minteer makes the case for a more experimental, interdisciplinary, and democratic style of environmental ethics - one that stands as an alternative to the field's historically dominant "nature-centred" outlook. Minteer also provides examples of his pragmatic approach in action, considering a wide range of application and issues, including invasive species, ecological research, biodiversity loss, protected area management, and conservation under global climate change. (shrink)

After sketching familiar pragmatist arguments that seem to show that relations of reference and meaning shed no light on the role of language in our claims to knowledge, an alternative conception (inspired by Kripke's work on proper names and Sellars' conception of concepts and causal laws) is outlined. Neither relations of reference nor meanings are given; instead both essentially involve commitments that are different in kind from the sorts of propositional commitments made in judgment. If so, the pragmatist is mistaken (...) in concluding that meaning is a philosopher's fiction and reference nothing more than a technical notion of formal semantics. (shrink)

This paper argues that the activist, feminist and pragmatist Jane Addams was an experimental philosopher. To defend this claim, I argue for capacious notions of both philosophical pragmatism and experimental philosophy. I begin in Section 2 with a new defence of Rose and Danks’ [‘In Defense of a Broad Conception of Experimental Philosophy’. Metaphilosophy 44, no. 4 : 512–32] argument in favour of a broad conception of experimental philosophy. Koopman [‘Pragmatist Resources for (...) Experimental Philosophy: Inquiry in Place of Intuition’. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 1 : 1–24] argues that many twentieth-century American pragmatists can make important contributions to contemporary experimental philosophy. In Section 3, I argue that while this may be true, it is also true that under the broad conception, many of the pragmatists just were experimental philosophers. In Section 4, I argue that as a pragmatist philosopher in her own right, Jane... (shrink)

It has been standard philosophical practice in analytic philosophy to employ intuitions generated in response to thought-experiments as evidence in the evaluation of philosophical claims. In part as a response to this practice, an exciting new movement—experimental philosophy—has recently emerged. This movement is unified behind both a common methodology and a common aim: the application of methods of experimental psychology to the study of the nature of intuitions. In this paper, we will introduce two different views (...) concerning the relationship that holds between experimental philosophy and the future of standard philosophical practice (what we call, the proper foundation view and the restrictionist view), discuss some of the more interesting and important results obtained by proponents of both views, and examine the pressure these results put on analytic philosophers to reform standard philosophical practice. We will also defend experimental philosophy from some recent objections, suggest future directions for work in experimental philosophy, and suggest what future lines of epistemological response might be available to those wishing to defend analytic epistemology from the challenges posed by experimental philosophy. (shrink)

While Kant introduces his critical philosophy in continuity with the experimental tradition begun by Francis Bacon, it is widely accepted that his Copernican revolution places experimental physics outside the bounds of science. Yet scholars have recently contested this view. They argue that in Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant’s engagement with the growing influence of vitalism in the 1780s leads to an account of nature’s formative power that returns experimental physics within scientific parameters. Several critics (...) are sceptical of this revised reading. They argue that Kant’s third Critique serves precisely to deflate the epistemological status of experimental physics, thereby protecting science from the threat of vitalism. In this paper I examine Kant’s account of science in the context of the experimental tradition of philosophy, particularly in relation to the generation dilemma of the eighteenth century. I argue that Kant does not deflate the epistemological status of experimental physics but rather introduces systematicity to the experimental tradition. By identifying the reflective use of reason to organize laws of experience into a systematic whole, Kant aims to ground experimental inquiry on the secure course of a science, opening a conception of science as a research programme. (shrink)

Providing a bold and original rethinking of environmental ethics, Ben Minteer's Refounding Environmental Ethics will help ethicists and their allies resolve critical debates in environmental policy and conservation practice. Minteer considers the implications of John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy for environmental ethics, politics, and practice. He provides a new and compelling intellectual foundation for the field - one that supports a more activist, collaborative, and problem-solving philosophical enterprise. Combining environmental ethics, democratic theory, philosophical pragmatism, and the environmental social sciences, (...) Minteer makes the case for a more experimental, interdisciplinary, and democratic style of environmental ethics - one that stands as an alternative to the field's historically dominant "nature-centred" outlook. Minteer also provides examples of his pragmatic approach in action, considering a wide range of application and issues, including invasive species, ecological research, biodiversity loss, protected area management, and conservation under global climate change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Philosophy of George Engel and the Philosophy of MedicineJeffrey P. Spike (bio)KeywordsGeorge Engel, psychosocial medicine, medical education, medical humanities, interviewing skills, philosophy of medicine, scientific methodDoctor Brad Lewis has encouraged us to consider George Engel’s philosophy with his excellent essay on Engel and Pragmatism. As a philosopher teaching full time in a medical school, it is refreshing to have an opportunity to analyze (...) the work of two physicians at this level of reflection and abstraction. It is even more of a pleasure because I knew Dr. Engel personally while I was teaching at the University of Rochester School of Medicine. I will make some observations of the philosophy behind Dr. Engel’s work, both published and practical, that is, as reflected in his writing but also in his influence in the medical curriculum at the institution that he called home for some thirty years (as seems appropriate when considering someone’s bona fides as a pragmatist).Engel’s Philosophy and Medicine’s PhilosophyGeorge Engel’s primary philosophical concern was to fight the powerful belief (or perhaps delusion) that medicine was evolving into a pure physical science, an extension of biochemistry and cell biology, or as we would now call them, proteomics and genomics. There is little evidence that he espoused any one methodology for basic science, so much as he opposed any one methodology for medicine. So to say he was a pragmatist seems underdetermined by his words, if that is taken to mean he advocated for changing the methodological model for scientific research. Rather the question is whether his preferred medical methodology is best characterized as pragmatic, or by some other description. On that score I agree with Lewis wholeheartedly.Of course, it might be that the claim of pragmatism is not meant to suggest a change in method for basic science, but to advocate for retaining an appreciation for the whole range of approaches to knowledge, from experimental science to epidemiology, and from epidemiology to acculturation. By that definition of pragmatism, Engel was indeed a pragmatist. Interpreted this way, he wanted medicine to stop worshipping the scientific method and appreciate that there are many paths to knowledge besides through the wet lab.It might be said that there are different scientific methods for different sciences, and Engel wanted us to appreciate that the reductionist methods [End Page 315] appropriate to the sciences of the small are not necessarily methods that can be applied to all sizes of objects we study, or all levels of reality (like the psychological and social). This is the truth about the world, although I am not sure that this is what Engel meant. As Lewis notes, Engel’s writing does sometimes sound as if he worshipped at the alter of science, as if all subjects of importance can be studied scientifically. But if he believed that, he was not correct. It might be, if all the subjects of the university that Lewis mentions are important, that some will turn out to be able to be studied in academically rigorous methods that are not scientific in any of the usual meanings of the word. Consider philosophy itself, for example.To the degree that it may stretch the evidence to say that Engel would have advocated for a pragmatic scientific method, it is still the case that pragmatism as outlined by Lewis and Engel’s biopsychosocial model can both be used to help medicine understand itself and overcome the temptation to idolize science. Medicine is not a science, or at least it is not just a science; in fact, I would suggest that it never was a science, and it will never be a science. Medicine is about health and illness, and uses whatever science it can to promote health and to treat (ameliorate or cure) illness.None of this should necessarily lead us to idolize pragmatism either. If each subject has its own ideal methodology for study, then it may be that pragmatism is the preferred method for, say, clinical judgment, whereas the scientific method is the best for the ‘hard’ sciences, and logic for philosophy. Or perhaps pragmatism and inductive logic are competing models for clinical... (shrink)

Consider this scenario: A terrorist just bombed the subway in London, which resulted in the casualties of numerous innocent people. His act can be considered well-planned for he fully knew what consequences his act would bring. If determinism is true, is it possible that the terrorist in question bombed the subway out of free will? An incompatibilist would respond to this question with a resounding “no”. A compatibilist, on the other hand, would answer yes, as long as the terrorist possessed (...) certain psychological characteristics, causal histories, etc. This underlies the basis of disputes between the compatibilists and incompatibilists, who appear to hold opposite views on whether it is possible for someone to act out of free will if determinism is true. However, as I shall discuss in Chapter One, this disagreement is partly a verbal one that stems from the diverse meanings of the term “free will”. This thesis aims to transcend the verbal disagreement and explore where the deeper, more substantial disagreements may lie between compatibilists and incompatibilists. One possible sphere where substantial disagreements between compatibilists and incompatibilists may lie is the content of the ordinary concept of free will, or that of the strongest sense of control condition necessary for securing the ordinary concept of moral responsibility. On this view, the metaphysical question and the conceptual question about free will are inseparable; in order to find out the metaphysical satisfaction conditions of free will, one must first identify the conceptual satisfaction conditions of free will. Further, the latter is reflected in everyday free will/ moral responsibility ascriptions about hypothetical or real scenarios. In Chapter Two, I analyze how the recent experimental philosophy movement bears on this issue. By examining the findings of some current experimental philosophy studies, I argue that neither compatibilism nor incompatibilism can sufficiently capture the ordinary concept of free will or moral responsibility. In the light of my discussions in Chapter Two, I explain in Chapter Three why each of the various traditional accounts of free will cannot independently provide an adequate “package deal” of solutions for the problem of free will. Near the end of the chapter, I propose a pluralistic, agnostic account of free will as an alternative solution. Despite its great instrumental value, experimental philosophy is not widely recognized as a philosophically significant methodology. Hence, Chapter Four is devoted to discussing the actual and potential values of experimental philosophy in the light of its contribution to the free will debate. I conclude that the encounter between the free will debate and the experimental philosophy movement is a fruitful one; the former proves the value of the latter by receiving helpful insights from it. (shrink)

This chapter reviews and then criticizes the dominant approach that experimental philosophers have adopted in their studies on free will and moral responsibility. Section “Experimental Philosophy and Free Will” reviews the experimental literature and the shared approach: probing for intuitions about the so-called compatibility question, whether free will is compatible with causal determinism. Section “The Intervention” argues that this experimental focus on the compatibility question is fundamentally misguided. The critique develops in the form of a (...) dialogue: a staged “intervention” for an experimental philosopher who works on free will. The chapter concludes with some thoughts about how the literature can move in a more fruitful direction. (shrink)

Enrique Dussel and John Dewey share commitments to philosophical theory and practice aimed at addressing human problems, democratic modes of inquiry, and progressive social reform, but also maintain productive differences in their fundamental starting point for political philosophy and their use of the social sciences. Dussel provides a corrective to Dewey’s Eurocentrism and to his tendency to underplay the challenges of incorporating marginalized populations by insisting that social and political philosophy begin from the perspective of the marginalized and (...) excluded. Simultaneously, Dewey encourages a modest experimental and fallibilist approach to social transformation that promises more feasible social reforms than Dussel’s approach rooted in phenomenology and the critical social sciences. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce was acknowledged by William James as the founder of pragmatism; however, while James’ appreciation for psychology is well taken into account in his philosophy, the role that psychological inquiry played in Peirce’s thought remains largely unexplored. Few excellent studies indicate Peirce as the first American experimental psychologist (Cadwallader 1974, 1975; Fisch 1986) and as the first to perform a truly modern experiment in psycho-physics (Hacking 1988). Nonetheless, Peirce’s commitment to psycho-physics fails to be fully (...) integrated with the broader project of his philosophy. This integration is crucial to gain a better understanding of the complexity of Peirce’s system of thought and of his position in the psychologistic-antipsychologistic divide. On the logical side, making Peirce’s position on psychology explicit leads to investigating his material logic; on the psychological side, Peirce’s scientific approach to psychology has its theoretical foundation in Kant and further marks the distinction between Peirce’s pragmatism and James’. (shrink)

Одной из особенностей прагматизма является, как известно, трактовка познания, свободная от апелляции к корреспондентной теории истины и постулирования независимой (от человека) реальности. Все прагматисты, к каким бы воззрениям по частным вопросам они ни склонялись, придерживаются операциональной концепции познания. Согласно этой концепции, достаточным основанием знания является его применимость на практике. Данный аспект неоднократно затрагивался в ходе дискуссий о сходствах и различиях марксизма и прагматизма. Несмотря на существенное расхождение между прагматизмом и марксизмом в понимании природы знания, многие исследователи пытались провести параллели между (...) этими двумя интеллектуальными традициями. В частности, Бертран Рассел указывал на близость философии Дьюи «доктрине другого экс-гегельянца, Карла Маркса, как она была сформулирована в его “Тезисах о Фейербахе”». По мнению Рассела, если не придавать слишком большого значения терминологическим нюансам, Марксова теория деятельности, или праксиса, в главных моментах «едва отличима от инструментализма». Этот взгляд получил распространение даже среди прагматистов, а также американских марксистов (точнее, троцкистов), которые в конце 40-х годов прошлого века трактовали прагматизм Дьюи как прямое продолжение и развитие марксизма. Дж. Новак, к примеру, утверждал, что «самым выдающимся современным мыслителем, впитавшим в себя все лучшее, что было у Маркса, является Дьюи». В. Ленина — как практика, а не теоретика — Новак считал, в свою очередь, «скрытым последователем» Дьюи. Согласно бывшему марксисту С. Хуку, прагматизм — это философия «экспериментального натурализма», т. е. теория, «развивающая наиболее здравые и продуктивные идеи Маркса о мире». В статье (с опорой главным образом на аргументацию советских марксистов) критически пересматривается философский диалог между марксизмом и прагматизмом. Основное внимание уделяется понятию деятельности, или праксиса, а также взаимосвязи субъекта и объекта в познании. // It is well-known that pragmatism advocates an approach on cognition without appealing to man-independent reality and truth as correspondence with reality. Instead, pragmatists, notwithstanding the diversity of their particular views, hold an operational conception of knowledge, according to which all that is needed is knowledge to have a suitable kind of correspondence with practice. This point has been scrutinized in the long standing discussion about the convergences and deviations between Marxism and pragmatism. The profound divergence between Marxism and pragmatism with regard to the aforementioned issues was not enough to prevent philosophers from attempting to trace affinities between these two distinct intellectual trends. For example, Bertrand Russell pointed out the “close similarity” of Dewey’s doctrine to “that of another exHegelian, Karl Marx, as it is delineated in his Theses on Feuerbach.” Russell thinks that Marx’s concept of activity or praxis is in spite of differences in terminology “essentially indistinguishable from instrumentalism.” This line of reasoning seems to be quite influential, even among pragmatists. Notably, some American Marxists (especially Trotskyists, to be exact) at the late 40’s overemphasized the affinity between Dewey’s pragmatism and Marxism, and even understood Dewey’s pragmatism as a continuation of Marxism. For example, G. Novack comments that “[t]he most outstanding figure in the world today in whom the best elements of Marx’s thought are present is John Dewey,” and presents Lenin as “an unavowed disciple of Dewey in practice.” According to S. Hook, a former Marxist who turned to pragmatism and became one of the most influential philosophers who discussed the relation between Marxism and pragmatism, the latter is “the philosophy of experimental naturalism” which can be regarded “as a continuation of what is soundest and most fruitful in Marx’s philosophical outlook upon the world.” In this paper, I intend to critically reassess this philosophical dialogue between Marxism and pragmatism, by further deploying the argumentation provided mainly by Soviet Marxists with regard to the aforementioned issues, focusing especially on two of them: the concept of activity (or praxis) and the interrelation of subject and object in cognition. (shrink)

Many, and perhaps most, American philosophers will, if pressed, say that they are pragmatists. What they typically mean by this is that they think there is some class of philosophical questions that can’t be answered philosophically. If you don’t think that in the end philosophical arguments can possibly settle metaphysical questions, pragmatism is an appealing response. Pragmatism becomes a kind of default position which one reverts to when one removes a topic from the list of topics that can (...) be reasonably addressed using philosophical methods. When Richard Rorty characterized himself as a pragmatist, he meant that he was in favor of removing topics from philosophy on a wholesale basis, which implied for him the end of philosophy at least as traditionally conceived. Philosophical students of pragmatism weren’t very happy with this formulation, not so much for its conclusions, but because it omitted the content of the default that John Dewey himself had in mind, namely something like the scientific method, or the scientific method understood and generalized as something like an experimental approach. The people who thought Rorty had travestied pragmatism focused, correctly, on the difference in their attitudes toward science. Patrick Baert has written a very interesting textbook on the philosophy of social science which winds up embracing at least the term pragmatism and reflecting on Rorty in a way that arrives at a novel position. As his concluding argument is the most original part of the book and the one that is most relevant in this setting, I shall confine my comments to the question of what both a pragmatist approach to social science and to a “philosophy” of social science might be, and further confine it to the Deweyan and Rortyian variations on this general theme. (shrink)