I'm starting to wonder whether "Pragmatism" any longer serves as a useful label for a branch of contemporary philosophy.  (I'll use the capitalized word "Pragmatism" here to emphasize it is the philosophical theory I'm talking about.) Most of the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy address either individual philosophers, or areas of philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, and Heidegger; Ethics, Philosophy of Science, and Early Modern Philosophy, for example.  Only 3 others address particular traditions of thought with a definite point of view, on Feminism, Rationalism, and Relativism.  None of the Oxford Handbooks in Philosophy address particular traditions, The series of Cambridge Companions to Philosophy, Religion and Culture, numbering 117 at present, including ones on Postmodern Theology, German Idealism, and Critical Theory, does have one on Peirce, but none on Pragmatism.  Christopher Hookway in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Pragmatism says in the introduction that, "The core of pragmatism was the pragmatist maxim, a rule for clarifying the contents of hypotheses by tracing their ‘practical consequences’. In the work of Peirce and James, the most influential application of the pragmatist maxim was to the concept of truth. But the pragmatists have also tended to share a distinctive epistemological outlook, a fallibilist anti-Cartesian approach to the norms that govern inquiry."  He mentions Rorty, Putman and Brandom as modern pragmatists, but points out that Putnam denies that he is a pragmatist. 

This collection edited by Shook and Margolis is a large volume with over 430 pages and 38 contributions.  It is divided into three sections: "Major Figures," "Transforming Philosophy," and "Culture and Nature."  The 12 major figures include, in addition to the obvious candidates, F.C.S. Schiller, Jane Addams, Alain Locke, Quine, Putnam, and Habermas.  The essays in this section include some biographical information and vary in their scope.  Roger Gibson's article on Quine points out (twice, due to bad editing) that there are no distinctive tenets shared by card-carrying Pragmatists, and Gibson merely leaves it up to the reader to decide whether Quine should count as a Pragmatist.  Harvey Cormier argues that Putnam is more of a Pragmatist than he realizes.  Joseph Heath claims that Habermas can be helpfully seen as a Pragmatist philosopher, although in a confusing move, he devotes most of his short essay to comparing Habermas to Kant.  They key to his argument is that seeing rationality in terms of social practices, he revives Kant's view that morality is tightly tied to rationality.  Heath says nothing to explain why a focus on practices makes Habermas a Pragmatist, rather than, for example, a Wittgensteinian. 

The second section has 12 papers mostly focusing on "-isms": rationalism, idealism, realism, dualism, naturalism, expressivism, Marxism, and an extremely big-themed chapter by Margolis on "Pluralism, Relativism, and Historicism."  The authors examine the relevance of Pragmatism to these various positions, mainly through examination of central historical figures in the field.  I was especially struck by the claims of BT Ramberg that Quine, Davidson and Dennett, and at the end, McDowell, all count as Pragmatists.  He examines their naturalist anti-reductionist views through their interpretivism–probably most familiar in Dennett's idea that we attribute propositional attitudes to others through adopting an Intentional Stance and seeing them as rational. 

The third section has, for me at least, the more interesting collection of papers.  They address ethical, political, religious, aesthetic, social and scientific questions.  Hilary Putnam discusses Dewey's critique of utilitarianism.  Ruth Anna Putnam discusses Dewey's ethics, in which all one's values are subject to revaluation, and the democratic respect for other people's values, allowing for individual flourishing.  Robert Westbrook surveys possible connections between Pragmatist thought and democracy.  Judith Green argues that Pragmatist approaches to pluralism can aid in our conceptualizing deliberative democracy.  Mark Johnson celebrates the anti-Cartesianism in Pragmatism and argues that now that cognitive science has come to see the importance of embodiment, it is possible for Pragmatism and cognitive science to work more closely together.  Other papers address relatively sophisticated issues regarding truth and scientific realism.

This is a strong collection showing the variation in the different lines of thought stemming from the Pragmatists.  All are relatively short, so even when they are technical, it is possible to follow them with careful attention.  For those who are already knowledgeable about Pragmatism, this will be a good collection.  For those who are looking to learn about the tradition, there are some useful papers here too.  There are some obvious omissions: especially the lack of anything detailed on the work of Robert Brandom, and very little in applied ethics, especially regarding medical ethics and the resurgence of pragmatism there. 

However, there remains the question I started with: is Pragmatism a useful label anymore?  Given that it was never a well defined theory, and the collection of views under it has become more diverse in the last hundred years.  While a Pragmatist theory of truth is relatively well defined, the range of other views covered in this collection is extremely broad.  They generally fit into under some category of non-reductionism, nominalism and naturalism, but so do a large proportion of other contemporary theories in philosophy.  This means that there is basically nothing distinctive about the general notion of a Pragmatist theory, and the main use for the label is simply to refer to a historical tradition. 

© 2009 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York.

Keywords: pragmatism