Button, T

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The chair that is used to sit inTIM BUTTONThe American Pragmatists. By Cheryl MisakOUP. 304pp. £25.00 (US $40)Tis  review  appeared  in  The  Times  Literary  Supplement on  18  October  2013.  Tis document is a pre-print; the definitive version is available via the TLS.As  a  philosophical  movement,  American  pragmatism  is  sometimes  described  in nationalistic terms: for example, as a philosophical reaction to a brutal American Civil War,  which  drew  upon  a  distinctively  American  atitude  of  practical-minded individualism  and  which  was  ultimately  made  extinct  by  the  arrival  of  the  logical  empiricists, immigrants from Europe. Cheryl Misak tells it diferently: the intellectual roots of American pragmatism reached back across the Atlantic to empiricism and positivism, so that pragmatism could both anticipate and be continuous with logical empiricism and today’s analytic philosophy. Indeed, far from being made extinct, pragmatism walks among us today. Every narrative has its heroes and villains, and in Professor Misak’s hands the villains of  American pragmatism are William James, John Dewey and Richard Rorty. At their worst – or perhaps, their most incautious – the villains are capriciously subjectivist, claiming that inquiry aims not at the truth, but at what works for me. And at their best – for they are  not  entirely  villainous  –  they stumble towards the insights  of  Misak’s  pragmatist  heroes: most notably, C.S. Peirce and C.I. Lewis. Te heroes are adamant that inquirers aim to get things right, and they recognize that this amounts to more than “what seems right to me, right now”. Cheryl  Misak  is  particularly  keen  to  defend  Peirce’s  view  of  truth,  which  she characterizes thus: “a true belief is the belief we would come to, were we to inquire as far  as  we  could  on  a  mater”.  Tis  goes  hand-in-hand  with  “a  regulative  assumption  of  inquiry that, for any mater into which we are inquiring, we would find an answer to the question that  is  pressing in on us”.  Te appeal to “regulative assumptions” of  inquiry  represents an intriguing Kantian streak in pragmatism, which Misak fruitfully explores.  Tat said, the regulative assumption just mentioned is implausible. What if all significant evidence,  concerning the precise happenings at  some  past  moment,  were irrevocably obliterated?  Alternatively:  what  if  the  world  is  configured  so  that  you  can  either determine whether A, or determine whether B, but that obtaining any evidence about the one would prevent you from obtaining any evidence at all about the other; and yet it  just happens to be the case that both A and B? In either case, there would be a truth that  no amount of inquiry could reveal; but neither case can be ruled out just by considering our own practices of inquiry. Truth and inquiry are not, then, quite as intimately linked as Peirce (and Misak) would have us believe. Nevertheless, there must be some link between them, if we are to retain  pragmatism’s distinctive opposition to the sceptical worry that what is true could come apart entirely from what we seem to have reason to believe. Te challenge is to articulate  this link, and this is a live concern for contemporary philosophers. (Indeed, these past  two paragraphs trace work by Wolfgang Künne, Hilary Putnam and Crispin Wright.) Misak also extracts from Peirce and Lewis a particular conception of the relationship between  experience  and  reality.  Roughly:  we  start  with  the  inefable  “given”  of  thin experience. Once we are at the stage of saying, as it might be, “I (seem to) see a chair”, we  have  gone  beyond  thin  experience,  since  we  have  ofered  an interpretation,  and any interpretation depends upon us (as, indeed, do things-as-known, such as chairs). And we  can say nothing at all about the things that do not depend upon us – the things-as-they-are – except that they exist. Once  again,  then,  Misak  highlights  a  Kantian  impulse  in  Peirce  and  Lewis.  But,  in  general, philosophical systems cannot get much juice out of postulating objects about which we can say nothing. And in this particular case, if we can say nothing at all about the nature of things-as-they-are, or about thin experience, what could it mean to say that the  things-as-they-are  determine  our  thin  experiences?  Misak’s  heroes  are  clearly  in something of a predicament, and Misak does not provide them (or us) with much of a solution. So let me close by ofering one. According to Dewey, perception does not amount to having thin experiences, or even to interpreting them. Rather, when we look at a chair, we see, as Dewey puts it, “the chair  which was bought, that is placed in the room, and that is used to sit in… the chair of  direct experience, of use and enjoyment, a thing with its own independent origin, history and career”.  More generally, both James and Dewey insist that philosophers must not focus solely on an organism’s experiences, to the neglect of the organism’s actions. But once  we  register  the  importance  of  actions,  including  interactions  and  transactions between an organism and the objects in its environment, we should lose the motivation to think of a chair as a mere “thing-as-known”, or a “thing-as-perceived”. Rather, the chair  is  an  artefact  that  someone  crafed,  that  someone  bought,  that  takes  the  weight  of someone’s feet, that someone might yet smash into firewood and burn, and about which we now speak and think. In  casting  Peirce  and Lewis  as  the  heroes  of  American  pragmatism,  with  James  and Dewey as the villains, Misak establishes an impressive continuity between pragmatism and both logical empiricism and contemporary analytic philosophy. Te general price she pays is that she underplays the pragmatists’ interest in action. Tis is a shame. It is, however, no criticism of her stimulating treatment of her heroes. Indeed, the main arc  that Misak traces – from Kant, through Peirce and Lewis, and then on to W.V. Quine and into wider philosophical orthodoxy – deserves to become widely known.

The chair that is used to sit in. Review of: The American Pragmatists, by Cheryl Misak

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10115491/1/Button%282013%29MisakWebArchive.pdf

The chair that is used to sit in. Review of: The American Pragmatists, by Cheryl Misak

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