Pragmatism is the view that our philosophical concepts must be
connected to our practices - philosophy must stay connected to
first order inquiry, to real examples, to real-life expertise. The
classical pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and
John Dewey, put forward views of truth, rationality, and morality
that they took to be connected to, and good for, our practices of
inquiry and deliberation. When Richard Rorty, the best-known
contemporary pragmatist, looks at our practices, he finds that we
don't aim at truth or objectivity, but only at solidarity, or
agreement within a community, or what our peers will let us get
away with saying. There is, however, a revisionist movement amongst
contemporary philosophers who are interested in pragmatism. When
these new pragmatists examine our practices, they find that the
trail of the human serpent is over everything, as James said, but
this does not toss us into the sea of post-modern arbitrariness,
where truth varies from person to person and culture to culture.
The fact that our standards of objectivity come into being and
evolve over time does not detract from their objectivity. As Peirce
and Dewey stressed, we are always immersed in a context of inquiry,
where the decision to be made is a decision about what to believe
from here, not what to believe were we able to start from scratch -
from certain infallible foundations. But we do not go forward
arbitrarily. That is, these new pragmatists provide accounts of
inquiry that are both recognizably pragmatic in orientation and
hospitable to the cognitive aspiration to get one's subject matter
right. The best of Peirce, James, and Dewey has thus resurfaced in
deep, interesting, and fruitful ways, explored in this volume by
David Bakhurst, Arthur Fine, Ian Hacking, David Macarthur, Danielle
Macbeth, Cheryl Misak, Terry Pinkard, Huw Price, and Jeffrey Stout.
General
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