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John Dewey was concerned with logic and inquiry throughout his entire career. His early book entitled Studies in Logical Theories led Henry James to speak of the “Chicago school of Pragmatism” with Dewey as its leader. In discussing logic and inquiry, Dewey’s starting point is straightforward: human beings think, reason and inquire in an effort to reach their goals. If all our desires were satisfied naturally without effort, thinking would have no practical value. It would be pragmatically useless. But Dewey points out that our desires are not always satisfied. This takes effort. We often find we can’t reach our goals or, having reached them, that we should have aimed at other goals. So if we seek satisfaction, appreciation and enjoyment, we have to inquire into and criticize our own experience. “Philosophy is inherently criticism, having its distinctive position among various modes of criticism in its generality, a criticism of criticisms as it were. Criticism is discriminating judgement, careful appraisal, and judgement is appropriately termed “criticism” wherever the subject matter of discrimination concerns goods or values.” Charles Peirce, the American philosopher and mathematician who founded pragmatism and who significantly influenced Dewey makes clear that this new philosophical criticism and discrimination depend on new methods and procedures of inquiry. “Modern methods have created modern science, in this century, and especially the last twenty-five years have done more to create new methods than any former equal period. We live in the very age of methods. Even mathematics and astronomy have put on new faces. Chemistry and physics are on completely new tracks. Linguistics, history, mythology, sociology, biology, are all getting studied in new ways.1 This is the age of methods.” Dewey says that the philosopher, unlike the sociologist and anthropologist must evaluate how people ought to think as much as how they actually do think. The philosopher seeks to find a pattern of successful inquiry. “We know that some methods of inquiry are better than others in just the same say that we know that some methods of surgery, farming, road making, navigating, or what not, are better than others. It does not follow, in any of these cases, that the better methods are ideally perfect, or that they are regulative or normative because of conformity to some absolute form.” Dewey’s view about good and bad methods of inquiry has three important consequences. First, contrary to most previous philosophy, we can’t derive the way we ought to think from some laws of logic or rules of reason. Instead our logic and our rules must be derived from actual inquiries. Put in philosophical terms our epistemology must be derived from our metaphysics. Put more plainly, our theories have to be derived from our actions. Traditional philosophers discussed concepts, logical relations; they’re noted for thinking and pondering rather than inquiring and acting. But Dewey makes action primary. Action is the essence of his pragmatism. Action is the central thesis of his book: Logic “The theory in summary form is that all logical forms arise within the operations of inquiry and are concerned with control of inquiry so that it may yield warranted assertions. This conception implies much more than that logical forms are disclosed or come to light when we reflect upon processes of inquiry that are in use. Of course, it means that. But it also means that the forms originate in operations of inquiry.” Second, again contrary to most philosophy, Dewey argues that any deficiency of inquiry can be corrected only by further inquiry. Inquiry can improve itself by itself. “The problem, reduced to its lowest terms, is whether inquiry can develop in its own ongoing course the logical standards and forms to which further inquiry shall submit. One might reply by saying that it can because it has. One might even challenge the objector to produce a single instance of improvement in scientific methods not produced in and by the self corrective process of inquiry.” Third, Dewey says that a pattern of inquiry may illuminate and improve actual inquiries but it can’t abstractly deduce or pre-judge them. “The search for the pattern of inquiry is checked and controlled by knowledge of the kinds of inquiry that have and that have not worked. Through comparison and contrast, we ascertain how and why certain means and agencies have provided warrantably assertable conclusions while others have not.” Transcription de « Giants of Philosophy Series: John Dewey » TEXTE 1

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Idealism as a philosophic system stands in such a delicate relation to experience as to invite attention. In its subjective form, or sensationalism, it claims to be the last word of empiricism. In its objective, or rational form, it claims to make good the deficiencies of the subjective type, by emphasizing the work of thought that supplies the factors of objectivity and universality lacking in sensationalism. With reference to experience as it now is, such idealism is half opposed to empiricism and half committed to it. Antagonistic, so far as existing experience is regarded as tainted with a sensational character; favourable, so far as this experience is even now prophetic of some final, all-comprehensive, or absolute experience, which in truth is one with reality. That this combination of opposition to present experience with devotion to the cause of experience in the abstract leaves objective idealism in a position of unstable equilibrium from which it can find release only by euthanasia in a thorough-going empiricism seems evident. Some of the reasons for this belief may be readily approached by a summary sketch of three historic episodes in which have emerged important conceptions of experience and its relation to reason. The first takes us to classic Greek thought. Here experience means the preservation, through memory, of the net result of a multiplicity of particular doings and sufferings; a preservation that affords positive skill in maintaining further practice, and promise of success in new emergencies. The craft of the carpenter, the art of the physician are standing examples of its nature. It differs from instinct and blind routine or servile practice because there is some knowledge of materials, methods, and aims, in their adjustment to one another. Yet the marks of its passive, habitual origin are indelibly stamped upon it. On the knowledge side it can never aspire beyond opinion, and if true opinion be achieved, it is only by happy chance. On the active side it is limited to the accomplishment of a special work or a particular product, following some unjustified, because assumed, method. Thus it contrasts with the true knowledge of reason, which is direct apprehension, self-revealing and self-validating, of an eternal and harmonious content. The regions in which experience and reason respectively hold sway are thus explained. Experience has to do with production, which, in turn, is relative to decay. It deals with generation, becoming, not with finality, being. Hence it is infected with the trait of relative non-being, of mere imitativeness; hence its multiplicity, its logical inadequacy, its relativity to a standard and end beyond itself. Reason, per contra, has to do with meaning, with significance (ideas, forms), that is eternal and ultimate. Since the meaning of anything is the worth, the good, the end of that thing, experience presents us with partial and tentative efforts to achieve the embodiment of purpose, under conditions that doom the attempt to inconclusiveness. It has, however, its need of reality in the degree in which its results participate in meaning, the good, reason. From this classic period, then, comes the antithesis of experience as the historically achieved embodiments of meaning, partial, multiple, insecure, to reason as the source, author, and container of meaning, permanent, assured, unified. Idealism means ideality, experience means brute and broken facts. That things exist because of and for the sake of meaning, and that experience gives us meaning in a servile, interrupted, and inherently deficient way-such is the standpoint. Experience gives us meaning in process of becoming; special and isolated instances in which it happens, temporally, to appear, rather than meaning pure, undefiled, independent. Experience presents purpose, the good, struggling against obstacles, "involved in matter." Just how much the vogue of modern neo-Kantian idealism, professedly built upon a strictly epistemological instead of upon a cosmological basis, is due, in days of a declining theology, to a vague sense that affirming the function of reason in the constitution of a knowable world (which in its own constitution as logically knowable may be, morally and spiritually, anything you please), carries with it an assurance of the superior reality of the good and the beautiful as well as of the "true," it would be hard to say. Certainly unction seems to have descended upon epistemology, in apostolic succession, from classic idealism; so that neo-Kantianism is rarely without a tone of edification, as if feeling itself the patron of man’s spiritual interests in contrast to the supposed crudeness and insensitiveness of naturalism and empiricism. At all events, we find here one element in our problem: Experience considered as the summary of past episodic adventures and happenings in relation to fulfilled and adequately expressed meaning. Dewey, “Experience And Objective Idealism” TEXTE 2

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The second historic event centers about the controversy of innate ideas, or pure concepts. The issue is between empiricism and rationalism as theories of the origin and validation of scientific knowledge. The empiricist is he who feels that the chief obstacle which prevents scientific method from making way is the belief in pure thoughts, not derived from particular observations and hence not responsible to the course of experience. His objection to the "high a priori road" is that it introduces in irresponsible fashion a mode of presumed knowledge which may be used at any turn to stand sponsor for mere tradition and prejudice, and thus to nullify the results of science resting upon and verified by observable facts. Experience thus comes to mean, to use the words of Peirce, "that which is forced upon a man’s recognition will-he, nill-he, and shapes his thoughts to something quite different from what they naturally would have taken." The same definition is found in James, in his chapter on Necessary Truths: "Experience means experience of something foreign supposed to impress us whether spontaneously or in consequence of our own exertions and acts." As Peirce points out, this notion of experience as the foreign element that forces the hand of thought and controls its efficacy, goes back to Locke. Experience is "observation employed either about external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our minds" as furnishing in short all the valid data and tests of thinking and knowledge. This meaning, thinks Peirce, should be accepted "as a landmark which it would be a crime to disturb or displace." The contention of idealism, here bound up with rationalism, is that perception and observation cannot guarantee knowledge in its honorific sense (science) ; that the peculiar differentia of scientific knowledge is a constancy, a universality, and necessity that contrast at every point with perceptual data., and that indispensably require the function of conception. In short, qualitative transformation of facts (data of perception), not their mechanical subtraction and recombination, is the difference between scientific and perceptual knowledge. Here the problem which emerges is, of course, the significance of perception and of conception in respect to experience. TEXTE 3

The third episode reverses in a curious manner (which confuses present discussion) the notion of experience as a foreign, alien, coercive material. It regards experience as a fortuitous association, by merely psychic connections, of individualistic states of consciousness. This is due to the Humian development of Locke. The " objects " and " operations," which to Locke were just given and secured in observation, become shifting complexes of subjective sensations and ideas, whose apparent permanency is due to discoverable illusions. This, of course, is the empiricism which made Kant so uneasily toss in his dogmatic slumbers (a tossing that he took for an awakening); and which, by reaction, called out the conception of thought as a function operating both to elevate perceptual data to scientific status, and also to confer objective status, or knowable character, upon even sensational data and their associative combinations. Here emerges the third element in our problem: The function of thought as furnishing objectivity to any experience that claims cognitive reference or capacity. Summing up the matter, idealism stands forth with its assertion of thought or reason as (1) the sponsor for all significance, ideality, purpose, in experience,-the author of the good and the beautiful as well as the true; (2) the power, located in pure conceptions, required to elevate perceptive or observational material to the plane of science; and (3) the constitution that gives objectivity, even the semblance of order, system, connection, mutual reference, to sensory data that without its assistance are mere subjective flux. Dewey, “Experience And Objective Idealism”

I begin the discussion with the last-named function. Thought is here conceived as a priori, not in the sense of particular innate ideas, but of a function that constitutes the very possibility of any objective experience, any experience involving reference beyond its own mere subjective happening. I shall try to show that idealism is condemned to move back and forth between two inconsistent interpretations of this a priori thought. It is taken to mean both the organized, the regulated, the informed, established character of experience, an order immanent and constitutional; and an agency which organizes, regulates, forms, synthesizes, a power operative and constructive. And the oscillation between and confusion of these two diverse senses is necessary to. Neo-Kantian idealism. When Kant compared his work in philosophy to that of the men who introduced construction into geometry, and experimentation into physics and chemistry, the point of his remarks depends upon taking the a priori worth of thought in a regulative, directive, controlling sense, thought as consciously, intentionally, making an experience different in a determinate sense and manner. But the point of his TEXTE 4

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answer to Hume consists in taking the a priori in the other sense, as something which is already immanent in any experience, and which accordingly makes no determinate difference to any one experience as compared with any other, or with any past or future form of itself. The concept is treated first as that which makes an experience actually different, controlling its evolution towards consistency, coherency, and objective reliability; then, it is treated as that which has already effected the organization of any and every experience that comes to recognition at all. The fallacy from which he never emerges consists in vibrating between the definition of a concept as a rule of constructive synthesis in a differential sense, and the definition of it as a static endowment lurking in " mind," and giving automatically a hard and fixed law for the determination of every experienced object. The a priori conceptions of Kant as immanent fall, like the rain, upon the just and the unjust; upon error, opinion, and hallucination. But Kant slides into these a priori functions the preferential values exercised by empirical reflective thought. The concept of triangle, taken geometrically, means doubtless a determinate method of construing space elements; but to Kant it also means something that exists in the mind prior to all such geometrical constructions and that unconsciously lays down the law not only for their conscious elaboration, but also for any space perception, even for that which takes a rectangle to be a triangle. The first of the meanings is intelligible, and marks a definite contribution to the logic of science. But it is not "objective idealism"; it is a contribution to a revised empiricism. The second is a dark saying. That organization of some sort exists in every experience I make no doubt. That isolation, discrepancy, the fragmentary, the incompatible, are brought to recognition and to logical function only with reference to some prior existential mode of organization seems clear. And it seems equally clear that reflection goes on with profit only because the materials with which it deals have already some degree of organization, or exemplify various relationships. As against Hume, or even Locke, we may be duly grateful to Kant for enforcing acknowledgment of these facts. But the acknowledgment means simply an improved and revised empiricism. Dewey, “Experience And Objective Idealism”

It is more or less of a commonplace to speak of the crisis which has been caused by the progress of the natural sciences in the last few centuries. The crisis is due, it is asserted, to the incompatibility between the conclusions of natural science about the world in which we live and the realm of higher values, of ideal and spiritual qualities, which get no support from natural science. The new science, it is said, has stripped the world of the qualities which made it beautiful and congenial to men; has deprived nature of all aspiration towards ends, all preference for accomplishing the good, and presented nature to us as a scene of indifferent physical particles acting according to mathematical and mechanical laws. This effect of modern science has, it is notorious, set the main problems for modern philosophy. How is science to be accepted and yet the realm of values to be conserved? This question forms the philosophic version of the popular conflict of science and religion. Instead of being troubled about the inconsistency of astronomy with the older religious beliefs about heaven and the ascension of Christ, or the differences between the geological record and the account of creation in Genesis, philosophers have been troubled by the gap in kind which exists between the fundamental principles of the natural world and the reality of the values according to which mankind is to regulate its life. Philosophers, therefore, set to work to mediate, to find some harmony behind the apparent discord. Everybody knows that the trend of modern philosophy has been to arrive at theories regarding the nature of the universe by means of theories regarding the nature of knowledge-a procedure which reverses the apparently more judicious method of the ancients in basing their conclusions about knowledge on the nature of the universe in which knowledge occurs. The "crisis" of which we have just been speaking accounts for the reversal. Since science has made the trouble, the cure ought to be found in an examination of the nature of knowledge, of the conditions which make science possible. If the conditions of the possibility of knowledge can be shown to be of an ideal and rational character, then, so it has been thought, the loss of an idealistic cosmology in physics can be readily borne. The physical world can be surrendered to matter and mechanism, since we are assured that matter and mechanism have their foundation in immaterial mind. Such has been the characteristic course of modern spiritualistic philosophies since the time of Kant; indeed, TEXTE 5

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since that of Descartes, who first felt the poignancy of the problem involved in reconciling the conclusions of science with traditional religious and moral beliefs. It would presumably be taken as a sign of extreme naïveté if not of callous insensitiveness, if one were to ask why all this ardour to reconcile the findings of natural science with the validity of values? Why should any increase of knowledge seem like a threat to what we prize, admire and approve? Why should we not proceed to employ our gains in science to improve our judgments about values, and to regulate our actions so as to make values more secure and more widely shared in existence? I am willing to run the risk of charge of naïveté for the sake of making manifest the difference upon which we have been dwelling. If men had associated their ideas about values with practical activity instead of with cognition of antecedent Being, they would not have been troubled by the findings of science. They would have welcomed the latter. For anything ascertained about the structure of actually existing conditions would be a definite aid in making judgments about things to be prized and striven for more adequate, and would instruct us as to the means to be employed in realising them. But according to the religious and philosophic tradition of Europe, the valid status of all the highest values, the good, true and beautiful, was bound up with their being properties of ultimate and supreme Being, namely, God. All went well as long as what passed for natural science gave no offence to this conception. Trouble began when science ceased to disclose in the objects of knowledge the possession of any such properties. Then some roundabout method had to be devised for substantiating them.

Dewey’s Gifford Lectures, published as The Quest for Certainty, are a wonderful presentation of his philosophy, including his ethical philosophy. One of the finest things about them in my opinion, is the analogies that Dewey sees between the blinkers that traditional philosophers wear when they discuss epistemology and the blinkers they wear when they discuss ethics. It is, of course, in the case of empiricism that these analogies are surprising. We are not surprised to be told that rationalism (in the extended sense of the belief that important truths about the cosmos and about how we are supposed to live in it can be known a priori) receives the same criticism from pragmatism whether the subject be the nature of the world, or how human beings should act, or what kind of knowledge is worthy of the name. Dewey’s concern, however, is not just to attack rationalism, but to distinguish himself carefully from traditional empiricism. And here Dewey has some unexpected things to say. One of these things is that the defects of empiricism are not altogether different from the defects of rationalism. (To be sure, Hegel had already said something of the kind, and it is important that Dewey began his philosophical career as an idealist.) As Dewey puts it (180): “Just as sensationalism ignores the functional role and hypothetical status of sensible qualities in an inquiry, so rationalism makes a fixed an independent matter out of the utility of conceptions in directing inquiry to solve particular problems.” Let us see what Dewey means by this claim. Rationalism, famously, thinks the general form of scientific explanations can be known a priori: we know a priori the laws of geometry and even the fundamental principles of mechanics, according to Descartes (and Kant even attempted a “transcendental deduction” of Newton’s theory of gravity4). But empiricism equally thinks that the general form of scientific data, indeed of all empirical data, can be known a priori (even if it doesn’t say so in so many words). From Locke, Berkeley and Hume down to Ernst Mach, empiricists held that all empirical data consists of “sensations”, conceived of as an unconceptualized given against which putative knowledge claims can be checked. Against this William James had already insisted that while all perceptual experience has both conceptual and non-conceptual aspects, the attempt to divide any experience which is a recognition of something into parts is futile. “Sensations and apperceptive idea fuse here so intimately [in a ‘presented and recognized material object’] that you can no more tell where one begins and the other ends, than you can tell, in those cunning circular panoramas that have lately been exhibited, where the real foreground and the painted canvas join together.”5 Dewey, continuing the line of thought that James had begun, insists that by creating new observationconcepts we “institute” new data. Modern physics (and of course not only physics) have richly born him out. A scientist may speak of observing a proton colliding with a nucleus, or of observing a virus with the aid of an electron microscope, or of observing genes or black holes, etc. Neither the form of possible explanations nor the form of possible data can be fixed in advance, once and for all. TEXTE 6

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Of course, neither James nor Dewey denies the existence of a preconceptual substratum of sensation. But for Dewey – and we will shortly see how he extends this idea to the field of ethics – sensation which is unconceptualized or inadequately conceptualized is problematic; rather than constituting data, evidence, it poses a problem to be solved. So, for example, in the fifth chapter of The Quest for Certainty (“Ideas at Work”), Dewey writes: “Now so deeply engrained are the conclusions of the old tradition of rationalism versus (sensationalistic) empiricism that the question will still be raised: What other certification could be given or can now be given for the properties of scientific physical objects save by inferential extension of the universally found properties of all objects of sense perception? Is there any alternative unless we are prepared to fall back upon a priori rational conceptions supposed to bring their own sufficient authority with them? “It is at this point that the recent recognition that the conceptions by which we think scientific objects are derived neither from sense nor from a priori conceptions has its logical and philosophical force. Sense qualities, as we saw in the previous chapter, are something to be known, they are challenges to knowing, setting problems for investigation. … For experimental activity or thinking signifies directed activity, doing something which varies the conditions under which objects are directly had, and instituting new arrangements among them.” (122-123). And Dewey goes on to explain that the formation of these “conceptions under which we think scientific objects” is inseparable from the discovery of operations to be performed on those objects and of relations between them. “These operations have been continuously refined and elaborated during the history of man on earth,” he writes, “although it is only during the last few centuries that the whole affair of controlled thinking, and of its issue in genuine knowledge, has been seen to be bound up with their selection and determination.” (p. 123) Returning to the topic in Chapter VII (“The Seat of Intellectual Authority”), Dewey writes, “The history of the theory of knowledge or epistemology would have been very different if instead of the word ‘data’ or ‘givens,’ it had happened to start with calling the qualities in question ‘takens’. Not that the data are not existential and qualities of the ultimately ‘given’ – that is, the total subject matter which is had in noncognitive experiences. But as data they are selected from this total original subject-matter which gives the impetus to knowing; they are discriminated for a purpose; - that, namely, of affording signs or evidence to define and locate a problem, and thus give a clue to its resolution.” (p. 178). Hilary Putnam, “Dewey’s Central Insight.” “Old ideas give way slowly for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predisposition, deeply ingrained attitudes of aversions and preference. Moreover, the conviction proves this, though history proves this to be a hallucination, that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present . But in fact, intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume. An abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them, we get over them.” This central and revolutionary insight pervades the work of the great American pragmatist John Dewey. Philosophy must not strive to provide new and better answers to old questions. Rather it must address new questions, important issues raised by far-reaching recent developments and changes in human life. On the whole, Dewey thinks that philosopher after philosopher failed to give up traditional but now trivial concerns and old-fashioned but now outdated methods. “Intellectual advance occurs in two ways. At times increase of knowledge is organised about old conceptions while they are expanded, elaborated, and refined, but not seriously revised, much less abandoned. At other times the increase of knowledge demands qualitative rather than quantitative change, alteration, not addition. Men’s mind grow cold to their former intellectual concern, ideas that were burning, fade, interest that were urgent, seem remote. Men face in another direction, their older perplexities are unreal, considerations passed over as negligible loom up. Former problems may not have been solved, but they no longer press for solutions. Philosophy is no exception to this rule. But it is unusually conservative, not necessarily in proffering solutions but in clinging to problems.” Dewey says that nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy was too conservative. It has failed to come to grips with new problems, new realities. Of course philosophers disagree about the proper answers to philosophical questions. But a more significant fact is often obscured. Traditional philosophers largely agree TEXTE 7

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about the proper questions in philosophy. Of course traditional philosophers includes Platonists, Aristotelians, Cartesians, Kantians, Hegelians, or Nietzscheans. They might be mystics, materialists, idealists, empiricists, sceptics, or nihilists. They all focus on their differences from one another but from a wider perspective these differences are relatively small, superficial, mostly […]. Dewey believes traditional philosophers have pursued tedious theoretical issues unconnected to recent development in social life and science. He says that traditional philosophic inquiry increasingly has little practical value. The very idea that this philosophy might be pragmatic seems fanciful if not self-contradictory. Dewey admonishes these philosopher and demands change. “The sort of things that philosopher of an earlier period did is now done. In substance, it is no longer called for. Persistence in the repetition of a work that has little or no significance in the life conditions that now exist is as sure a way as could be found for promoting the remoteness of philosophy by reducing it to a kind of highly professionalized busy work” Dewey’s point is not that early philosophy is false. Rather, he says that new developments have rendered it useless, inert, insignificant. “The displacing of this wholesale type of philosophy will doubltless not arrive by sheer logical disproof, but rather by growing recognition of its futility.” Transcription de « Giants of Philosophy Series: John Dewey », Knowledge Products.

Neopragmatism, sometimes called "linguistic pragmatism" lacks precise definition. It has been associated with a variety of thinkers, among them Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, W.V.O. Quine, Donald Davidson, and Stanley Fish though none of these figure have called themselves "neopragmatists." Neopragmatists, particularly Rorty and Putnam, draw on the ideas of Classical Pragmatists such as Peirce, James, and Dewey. TEXTE 8

Putnam, in Words and Life (1994) enumerates which ideas in the Classical Pragmatist tradition newer pragmatists find most compelling. To paraphrase Putnam: (1) antiscepticism (the notion that doubt requires justification just as much as does belief; (2) fallibilism (the view that there are no metaphysical guarantee against the need to revise a belief; (3) antidualism about "facts" and "values"; and (4) that practice, properly construed, is primary in philosophy. (WL 152) In 1995 Rorty wrote, "I linguisticize as many pre-linguistic-turn philosophers as I can, in order to read them as prophets of the utopia in which all metaphysical problems have been dissolved, and religion and science have yielded their place to poetry." ["Response to Hartshorne." In Rorty and Pragmatism : The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, edited by Herman J. Saatkamp (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 35.] This "linguistic turn" strategy aims to avoid what Rorty sees as the essentialisms ("truth," "reality," "experience") still extant in classical pragmatism. Rorty writes, “[A]nalytic philosophy, thanks to its concentration on language, was able to defend certain crucial pragmatist theses better than James and Dewey themselves. ...By focusing our attention on the relation between language and the rest of the world rather than between experience and nature, postpositivistic analytic philosophy was able to make a more radical break with the philosophical tradition." [Rorty, "Comments on Sleeper and Edel," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 21, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 40.] Hilary Putnam suggests that the reconciliation of antiskepticism and fallibilism is the central goal of American pragmatism. Although all human knowledge is partial, with no ability to take a 'God's -eye-view,' this does not necessitate a globalized skeptical attitude.… Doubt, like belief, requires justification. It arises from confrontation with some specific recalcitrant matter of fact (which Dewey called a 'situation'), which unsettles our belief in some specific proposition. Inquiry is then the rationally self-controlled process of attempting to return to a settled state of belief about the matter.

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Fallibilism is the philosophical doctrine that absolute certainty about knowledge is impossible; or at least that all claims to knowledge could, in principle, be mistaken. As a formal doctrine, it is most strongly associated with Charles Sanders Peirce, who used it in his attack on foundationalism, but it is already present in the views of early philosophers, Xenophanes, Socrates and Plato. Unlike scepticism, fallibilism does not imply the need to abandon our knowledge - we needn't have logically conclusive justifications for what we know. Rather, it is an admission that because empirical knowledge can be revised by further observation, any of the things we take as knowledge might possibly turn out to be false. Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to prominence during the 20th Century… It is characterised by the following features: - First, the positivist view that there are no specifically philosophical truths and that the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts…. - Second, the view that the logical clarification of thoughts can only be achieved by analysis of the logical form of philosophical propositions. The logical form of a proposition is a way of representing it (often using the formal grammar and symbolism of a logical system) to display its similarity with all other propositions of the same type… - Third, a rejection of sweeping philosophical systems in favour of close attention to detail. Among some (but by no means all) analytic philosophers, this rejection of "grand theory" has taken the form of a defence of common sense and ordinary language against the pretensions of metaphysicians.[5]

Abstract: Pragmatists often find themselves under fire for being relativistic. Not surprising, given that most anti-foundationalist epistemologies occasionally have to weather this. But pragmatists can count on frequent attacks largely because of public association with Richard Rorty, the most famous living pragmatist who is, for many philosophers and cultural critics, also the most notorious relativist. My paper has two parts. First, while many aspects of Rorty’s work explicitly oppose traditional (or absolutist) doctrines, several Rortyan ideas should dissuade us from calling him a relativist. “Absolutist” is a better label. Second, the meliorism ingredient in Dewey’s pragmatism renders it especially defensible against the pejorative label, “relativism.” Meliorism connects pragmatism to moral life and can help pragmatists exculpate their views and distinguish them from Rorty’s narrower linguistic/ethnocentric neopragmatism. The danger posed by relativism is overestimated; preoccupation with relativism distracts us from more pernicious obstacles to moral progress: jingoism, dogmatism, careerism, and absolutism. TEXTE 9

Defining Relativism Definitions of “relativism” are much discussed. Today, I’m concerned with relativisms which fall along the following lines: 1. Reality (Metaphysical relativism)— there is no world radically external to us, i.e., no complete and determinate set of mind-independent objects whose existence and character subsist regardless of whether we are around to know them. 2. Truth and knowledge (Epistemological relativism, perspectivism)—all knowledge is relative to a perspective (perhaps individual, perhaps cultural). Because of this, all knowledge is necessarily correlative in scope and certainty with its knower; this goes for the objective of knowledge as well, which is why it is more accurate to speak of knowledge allowing one to “cope” or “succeed in one’s objective,” than to speak of correspondence to reality. Philosophical truth, then, is a fiction, created by abstracting from particular past successes and hypostatizing them into a singular and general object. 3. Values and Principles (Ethical relativism)—there are no immovable and eternal values to discover. Values are conventions, constructed by individuals or groups/cultures and applied to objects and events; value judgments, and the principles that guide those judgments, are also matters of convention.

Anglais philosophique/Philosophie anglo-saxonne. ANB102LY. Philippe Birgy

Many facets of relativism can be discussed, but the one worth fixing on here is the way epistemological and metaphysical relativisms (1 and 2, above) entail, for many critics, relativism about morality (3)—and a pernicious, dangerous relativism at that. Blackburn on Rorty To get motivated, let’s consider something current. In the April 2003 issue of the British popular magazine, Prospect Simon Blackburn ambushes Richard Rorty. Initially describing Rorty as a pragmatist, a relativist, a “postmodernist” (about whom Blackburn snidely quips, “the very word is like a knell”), and a “radical American who is against the war in Iraq” Blackburn goes on to denigrate Rorty’s views by identifying them with relativism. About Rorty’s project, Blackburn writes, Rorty takes from Darwin the idea that language is an adaptation and words are tools…[that] …have their purpose, and…can be retired when that purpose is done, while other projects and other tools rise to supersede them. Rorty calls this a change of vocabularies….[and] believes he can now walk away from the traditional problems with his head held high. He does not have to accept the labels of relativism or skepticism that the old dialectic forced upon us. [But Rorty’s] solution looks worse than the problem: [because words are] not there to represent how things stand—what an absurd idea—[but are] tools [you can] pick up any you like, and the Darwinian jungle, not reason, will determine which comes out on top. In [Rorty’s] après-truth literary world, the aim of voicing opinion is not to arrive at the truth, but to bring the others to your opinion, thereby gaining their solidarity with you…i Rorty, lost lamb, has no patience for talk of Enlightenment-style rationalism (in the mode of Locke, Kant, or Rawls) that argues that it is irrational to choose to live in an illiberal or undemocratic state. Using “irrationality” as a yardstick to measure this choice is, Rorty thinks, useless. All we can say is that “theocratic states seem not to work very well [in] comparison with liberal democracies… we can cope, and theocracies cannot.”ii There is one main consequence Blackburn hopes we’ll consider before imbibing this postmodern Rortyan relativism: it renders one useless: Blackburn continues, …[G] iven his reputation as a fearsome radical, Rorty turns out not to be much use to anyone who fears that the US is on the way to becoming a world tyrant. Economic and military domination is, after all, extremely useful for those doing the dominating. It is even more useful if you can shelve the literature of classical liberalism, and discount the humanity of the dominated.…Rorty talk[s] in terms of intellectual virtues of curiosity, open-mindedness, diligence, modesty, and so on, and he even allows the idea of some audiences being better informed than others. But how can these virtues survive if they are stripped of all connection with the idea of an earned authority or of getting something right? iii Blackburn’s is a standard complaint against pragmatists and relativists. It boils down to this: by denying that there is an absolutely objective world that can be known—gotten right, is another reiterated mantra— the pragmatist subordinates knowledge to whatever dominates any given moment. Truth is then defined by the whims and desires of Darwinian pugilists or the victors of military domination.iv Once knowledge and truth are relativized (in Rorty’s case, to language) moral arguers are helpless, left without objective value protections; all philosophers have left is the power to rationalize the discounted humanity of the dominated. David L. Hildebrand, “Neopragmatism and the Relativist Menace” NOTES i Prospect, Issue 85: APRIL 2003 http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/ArticleView.asp?accessible=yes&P_Article=11896 ii Blackburn, ibid. iii Blackburn, ibid. iv John McDowell, far less of an antagonist to Rorty or pragmatism expresses a similar worry in Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). He wants to find a way to stand up for the constraints placed on our knowledge by "the way things are" without resorting either to a Given (of the kind Sellars warned us about) or a Davidson-style coherentism (where beliefs can be justified only by other beliefs, not by some kind of epistemic relation to something extra-mental). The prospect of looking for such a constraint in some shared (Kantian) ability to make concepts raises for McDowell "the spectre of a frictionless spinning in [the] void." (MW 18) We need, McDowell writes, "rational constraints on thinking and judging, from a reality external to them, if we are to make sense of them as bearing on a reality outside thought at all." (MW 25)

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