In this paper, I argue that positions from the historical tradition of pragmatism can offer insights into the role that values play in ameliorative projects. By focusing on Sally Haslanger’s ameliorative project regarding gender, I will try to show how the Deweyan idea of the circuit provides a convincing understanding of the mutual interplay between values and conceptual revision within ameliorative approaches. I propose to understand this circuit as a process of articulation, through which our understanding of an initially vague (...) value becomes more detailed and fine-grained. To this end, I will focus on a specific aspect of Haslanger's recent intellectual production, namely the idea that ameliorative projects are inspired and organized by partially indeterminate values. In the final part of the paper, I will discuss a potential moral and political pitfall associated with ameliorative projects – i.e. the proliferation of cultural bubbles which are mutually exclusive and unable to communicate among themselves. This discussion addresses a further challenge for implementation, which is connected to the field of values, and not merely to the domain of concepts. (shrink)

The notion of politicization has been often assimilated to that of partisanship, especially in political and social sciences. However, these accounts underestimate more fine-grained, and yet pivotal, aspects at stake in processes of politicization. In addition, they overlook cognitive mechanisms underlying politicizing practices. Here, we propose an integrated approach to politicization relying on recent insights from both social and political sciences, as well as cognitive science. We outline two key facets of politicization, that we call partial indetermination and contestability, and (...) we show how these can be accounted for by appealing to recent literature in cognitive science concerned with abstract conceptual knowledge. We suggest that politicizing a concept often implies making its more abstract components more salient, hence legitimating its contestable character. Finally, we provide preliminary suggestions to test our proposal, using the concept of gender as case study. (shrink)

In this article I want to reconstruct some threads of the recent discussions on pragmatism and genealogy. As a starting point for this discussion, I will discuss Koopman’s proposal of a division of labor between genealogy and pragmatism. While preserving his emphasis on the centrality of problematization in genealogical inquiry, I will try to challenge his ideas about the incompatibility between genealogies that problematize, and genealogies that vindicate. In the subsequent parts of the paper, I aim at developing the hypothesis (...) about the compatibility between problematization and vindication by discussing two different pragmatist approaches to genealogy: Hans Joas’s genealogy of human rights, and Mathieu Queloz’s pragmatic genealogy. In the final part of the article, I will sketch a possible contribution to the understanding of the normative status of genealogies, by focusing on Dewey’s concept of evaluation. More specifically, I hope to show that evaluative genealogy inquiries can preserve their sui generis normative force, without being reduced to a tool for defending and backing ready-made moral and political positions. (shrink)

Peirce’s anti-psychologism hinges on two main assumptions. First, logic and psychology belong to two separate disciplines – respectively, the normative sciences and the experimental sciences. Second, externalism must be understood as a crucial and inescapable epistemological criterion. The introspectionist illusion, according to which individuals have direct and epistemologically flawless access to their own internal states, should be dismissed. As Colapietro (2003) and Calcaterra (2006) observe, Peirce’s standpoint is far different from the Kantian classical account of anti-psychologism. This original take on (...) anti-psychologism leaves room for a functional distinction between logic and psychology, emerging from a semiotic and communicative continuity. This means that psychology, unlike logic as a formal doctrine of signs, will be epistemologically appropriate for dealing with internal psychological states, on the condition that this inquiry be focused on the communicative processes through which these internal states are expressed and conveyed. Such a Peircean account of anti-psychologism forms the epistemological background of this paper. My goal is to show how Peirce’s approach to communication and semiosis can be applied in order to discuss a specific psychological theory, in this case, attachment theory. Specifically, I propose employing Giovanni Maddalena’s Peircean distinction between complete and incomplete gestures (Maddalena 2015) to account for the distinction between secure, dismissing and preoccupied attachment patterns. To this end, I will be discussing three different measurements of attachment: the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI, George, Kaplan & Main 1985), the Adult Attachment Projection (AAP, George & West 2006), and the Patient Attachment Coding System (PACS, Talia, Miller-Bottome & Daniel 2015). Throughout this discussion, I will examine the connection between the semiotic and phenomenological category of completeness, and the psychological category of security. This connection involves an interesting normative import, which I briefly discuss in the conclusions. (shrink)

Abstract:"Issues of Pragmaticism" (1905) contains the only published version of Peirce's doctrine of "critical common-sensism." One of the claims of that doctrine is that common sense beliefs are invariably vague. In this paper, we seek to explain this claim. We begin by providing a philological reconstruction of the drafts of "Issues of Pragmaticism" and a comparison of Peirce's several, successive expositions of critical common-sensism across those drafts. Then we examine Peirce's theory of vagueness; we show that there is both a (...) "subjectal" and a "predicative" variety of vagueness, and that Peirce construes predicative vagueness according to three distinct models. Finally, we assess in what sense, i.e., according to which of the three models, common sense beliefs may be said to be invariably vague. (shrink)

Michela Bella & Matteo Santarelli – What was the state of Pragmatism studies when you first encountered pragmatism? Larry A. Hickman – After completing my undergraduate degree in psychology I decided that I wanted to study philosophy. In order to prepare for graduate school, I spent a year taking philosophy courses at the University of Texas in Austin. The faculty included Charles Hartshorne, who was co-editor of the Peirce Collected Papers. There was also David L. Miller and George Gentry, b...

While rooted in careful study of Mead’s original writings and transcribed lectures and the historical context in which that work was carried out, the papers in this volume have brought Mead’s work to bear on contemporary issues in metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science, and social and political philosophy.

Michela Bella & Matteo Santarelli – What did you know about Pragmatism when you started? Where did you start as a student? Charlene Haddock Seigfried – I came to pragmatism by way of existentialism. During the late sixties, I took my first graduate class at the University of Southern California – an introduction to empiricism – which I didn’t like at all, and I also attended a lecture on existentialism, which intrigued me. But I was always interested in social and (...) political issues and I was m... (shrink)

La critique de la philosophie de William James qu’Émile Durkheim développe dans Pragmatisme et sociologie est examinée selon deux aspects : 1) le désaccord entre James et Durkheim sur le problème des concepts et de la conceptualisation ; 2) l’échec presque total de Durkheim à considérer le thème le plus proprement sociologique du travail de James : sa théorie de l’ habit (ou habitude). Dans les deux cas, référence est faite au rôle joué (et parfois non joué) dans la critique (...) de Durkheim par les Principles of Psychology. Malgré l’influence du contexte historique et les malentendus qui en découlent, la réception du pragmatisme par Durkheim touche ainsi parfois des nerfs sensibles de la philosophie et de la psychologie de James. (shrink)

Giancarlo Marchetti’s La contingenza dei fatti e l’oggettività dei valori is a collection of nine essays concerning the fact–value debate. Among the authors, we find some of the most important protagonists of contemporary philosophy, including Donald Davidson and Hilary Putnam, to whom we probably owe the renaissance of the issue discussed in Marchetti’s volume. Undoubtedly, Putnam’s 2002 book The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Lo...

This article aims to apply the classification of incomplete gestures introduced by Maddalena as a tool for understanding and classifying different attachment patterns. In the first section the classification of incomplete gestures proposed by Maddalena will be reconstructed. In the second part the relationship between communication and attachment will be introduced through a brief critical survey of the psychological literature dedicated to this subject. In the third part I aim to show how the specific communication of the insecure avoidant pattern (...) is characterized by two specific types of incomplete gestures: schematization and projection. Specifically, the avoidant seems to adopt communicative strategies that allow to minimize, deactivate or at least limit the conjunction between the two phenomenological qualities of firstness and secondness. In the conclusions, I will briefly analyse some theoretical repercussions of the approach adopted, especially with regard to the relationship between incompleteness and completeness. (shrink)

The crisis of democracy is among the most compelling problems of our times. This crisis has prompted and provoked heterogeneous theoretical answers, of which the deliberative and the agonistic models represent two of the most important responses. The first proposal – as an example I will take Habermas’s version – states the importance of a mutually recognized normative background, which allows for the construction of a ground level of agreement and makes democratic discussion possible. The se...

Che cos'e la realta, cosa definisce il reale? Hegel ci ha detto che tutto cio che e reale e razionale, ma non ci ha detto che cosa e reale. Una roccia e reale o sono reali solamente i suo elementi primari? Sembrano interrogativi piuttosto eccentrici e con scarsa valenza pratica giornaliera. Eppure filosofi, scienziati e studiosi di scienze sociali si vanno interrogando sui fondamenti della realta e sulle ragioni del realismo, il costrutto teorico del reale. Questo testo per la prima (...) volta propone in sequenza i contributi di alcuni dei maggiori studiosi di questa materia, provenienti dalle tre aree del pensiero coinvolte nel dibattito sulla reality: la filosofia, la scienza e le scienze sociali. Si tratta di testi impegnativi da leggere, seppur spiegati e commentati dai loro giovani curatori. Eppure la loro lettura vi dara una ricompensa unica come quella di un paesaggio terrestre osservato da una vetta alpina dopo averla scalata.". (shrink)

The Philosophy of Gesture by Giovanni Maddalena is a multilayered volume: It is a "history of philosophy" book, endorsing a challenging anti-Kantian interpretation of Peirce and pragmatism. It is a "theoretical philosophy" book, dealing with classic issues—for example, the difference between synthetic and analytic, the definition of identity—and introducing a new concept, that of complete gesture. Finally, it is a book of "applied philosophy," pointing to a further application of the new concept of complete gesture to the fields of pedagogy, (...) morality, psychology, and literature.Dealing with all these three aspects in a single review would be impossible, maybe even unfair. Therefore, I will focus here mainly on the... (shrink)