The Pragmatic Turn Quotes

“The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of human temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem to some of my colleagues, I shall have to take account of this clash and explain a good many divergences of philosophers by it. Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of this temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other, making a more sentimental or more hardhearted view of the universe, just as this fact or that principle would. He trusts his temperament. Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of the universe that does suit it. He feels men of the opposite temper to be out of key with the world’s character, and in his heart he considers them incompetent and “not in it,” in the philosophic business, even though they may far excel him in dialectical ability. (James 1975a, p. 11)1”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“Much later, I discovered Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr’s wonderful remark about Experience and Nature: “Although Dewey’s book is incredibly ill-written, it seemed to me … to have a feeling of intimacy with the universe that I found unequaled. So methought God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“His primary aim is to criticize Cartesianism and the thesis that we have direct intuitive knowledge – the type of intuition not determined by prior cognitions and one that can serve as an epistemological foundation.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“[I]f we take the whole history of philosophy, the systems reduce themselves to a few main types which, under all the technical verbiage in which the ingenious intellect of man envelops them, are just so many visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole drift of life, forced on one by one’s total character and experience, and on the whole preferred – there is no other truthful word – as one’s best working attitude. (James 1977, pp. 14–15)”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“Nevertheless, Dewey believes (as we all do, when we are not playing the skeptic) that there are better and worse resolutions to human predicaments – to what he calls “problematical situations.” He believes that of all the methods for finding better resolutions, the “scientific method” has proved itself superior to Peirce’s methods of “tenacity,” “authority,” and “what is agreeable to reason.” For Dewey, the scientific method is simply the method of experimental inquiry combined with free and full discussion – which means, in the case of social problems, the maximum use of the capacities of citizens for proposing courses of action, for testing them, and for evaluating the results. And, in my view, that is all that Dewey really needs to assume. (Putnam 1991, p. 227)10”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“Putnam rejects the idea that there is a single “scientific method.” But he also thinks that this is not what Dewey meant when he appeals to scientific method in solving ethical problems. Rather, Dewey is appealing to experimentation, imaginative construction of alternative hypotheses, open discussion, debate, and ongoing self-corrective communal criticism.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“One cannot be a consistent pluralist and accept that at least some people who have other ways of life, religious traditions, and sexual orientations, etc., is “light” and the others are all “darkness.” But this claim defines only a “minimal pluralism.” A stronger form is defined by the claim, which I also accept, that at least some people who have other ways of life, religious traditions, sexual orientations, etc., than mine have insights that I do not have, or that I have not developed to anything like the same extent, precisely because they have those other ways of life, religious traditions, sexual orientations, etc.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“Putnam’s pragmatic strategy is to soften rigid dichotomies by showing that they turn out to be flexible differences related to human interests. This strategy is closely related to his attack on metaphysical realism, his relentless critique of relativism, his rejection of scientism, his rejection of the God’s-eye point of view, his critique of absolutes, and his defense of pluralism. Putnam’s claims about the entanglement of fact and value stand at the heart of his philosophical vision.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“Putnam finds in American pragmatism “a certain group of theses which can and indeed were argued differently by different philosophers with different concerns, and which became the basis of the philosophies of Peirce, and above all James and Dewey” (Putnam 1994, p. 152). Cursorily summarized, those theses are (1) antiskepticism: pragmatists hold that doubt requires justification just as much as belief (recall Peirce’s famous distinction between “real” and “philosophical” doubt); (2) fallibilism: pragmatists hold that there is never a metaphysical guarantee to be had that such-and-such a belief will never need revision (that one can be both fallibilistic and antiskeptical is perhaps the unique insight of American pragmatism); (3) the thesis that there is no fundamental dichotomy between “facts” and “values”; and (4) the thesis that, in a certain sense, practice is primary in philosophy. (Ibid.)”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists seems so absurd on the face of it – for undeniably ‘thoughts’ do exist – that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function. There is, I mean, no aboriginal stuff or quality of being, contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made; but there is a function in experience which thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is invoked. (James 1997, pp. 169–70)”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“In his Principles of Psychology, James already criticized what he took to be the artificial and deeply misleading traditional empiricist accounts of experience. Experience does not consist of discrete atomic units that simply follow or are associated with each other. This is an intellectualist abstraction of philosophers, not an account of concrete experience as it is lived. James emphasizes the dynamic, flowing quality of the “stream of experience” – what he sometimes called the “muchness” and pluralistic variety of experience. Contrary to Hume and those influenced by him, James argued that we experience “relations,” “continuity,” and “connections” directly. We experience activity – its tensions, resistances, and tendencies. We feel “the tendency, the obstacle, the will, the strain, the triumph, or the passive giving up, just as [we feel] the time, the space, the swiftness or intensity, the movement, the weight and color, the pain and pleasure, the complexity, or whatever remaining characters the situation may involve” (James 1997, p. 282). He does not denigrate or underestimate the importance of our conceptual activity, but concepts are never quite adequate to capture the concreteness of experience. To say this is not to claim that there is something about experience that is in principle knowable, but that we cannot know. Rather, it is to affirm that there is more to experience than knowing. James criticizes the epistemological prejudice, which assumes that the only or primary role that experience plays in our lives is to provide us with knowledge. Paraphrasing Hamlet, James might well have said to his fellow philosophers: “There are more things in experience than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“We do not need to reify a realm of facts that exist independently of any language, thought, or inquiry. Peirce does justice to the fallibility and openness of all justificatory practices and inquiry without losing touch with a reality “that is independent of vagaries of me and you” (Peirce 1992, p. 52). Contrary to the prevailing prejudice that the linguistic turn displaces old-fashioned talk about experience, Peirce’s conception of experience helps us to escape from some of the dead-ends of the linguistic turn.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“The epistemic authority of any cognitive claim is always – in principle – open to challenge, modification, revision, and even abandonment. One of the deepest and most pervasive confusions that gives rise to the Myth of the Given is the confusion of brute constraint and epistemic authority. This is the confusion of Secondness and Thirdness. There is an enormous temptation to confuse the fact that we are constrained (Secondness) with the claim that what constrains us has epistemic authority (Thirdness). This temptation gives rise to one of the most tenacious forms of the Myth of the Given – a Given that is supposed to serve as the epistemically authoritative foundation for empirical knowledge.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“Experience constrains and checks our fancies, prejudices, and speculations. When empiricist and phenomenalist philosophers became more concerned with the character of “sensations,” “impressions,” “sense data,” etc., the brute constraining force of experience tended to get obscured and neglected. But the insight that originally led philosophers to valorize experience – its brute compulsiveness – is what Peirce underscores with Secondness. Acknowledgment of this bruteness – the way in which experience “says NO!” – is required to make sense of the self-corrective character of inquiry and experimentation. Experiments must always finally be checked by experience. Peirce would have been repelled and horrified by Rorty’s claim that the only constraints upon us are “conversational constraints.” To speak in this manner is to ignore the facticity, the surprise, shock, and brute constraint of our experiential encounters.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“Rorty is just as dismissive of James’s many references to ‘experience’ – a word that appears in almost every text that James ever wrote. In short, Rorty’s pragmatism is a pragmatism without experience. And frankly, I agree with those who have strongly argued that to eliminate experience from pragmatism (old or new) is to eviscerate pragmatism, to leave us with a gutless shadow of pragmatism.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“Rorty distinguishes two different attitudes that we can take toward intuitions: (a) an ecumenical attitude where we try to harmonize intuitions and to accommodate as many of these as possible; and (b) a more revolutionary stance where by we are fully prepared to turn a deaf ear to what our opponents claim to be their primary intuitions. Sometimes, it is necessary to say, “so much the worse for your old intuitions; start working up some new ones.” It is desirable to be ecumenical as long as it is reasonable. (This is always a matter of judgment.) As reasonable disputants, we ought to try to do justice to those strongly held intuitions of our opponents. But if someone “digs in” obstinately and is unable to come up with reasonable arguments to support their intuitions, then it is fair game to say “so much the worse for your old intuitions.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“Brandom’s critics, and more generally those critics of pragmatism who hold fast to their strong “realistic intuitions,” want something much more substantial and nonperspectival. They want acknowledgment of a hard-core reality that is not “contaminated” by human subjectivity or perspective.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“Jerry Fodor, a fierce critic of pragmatist approaches to mind and language, puts this sort of criticism in a nutshell when he says: “First the pragmatist theory of concepts, then the theory theory of concepts, then holism, then relativism. So it goes” (Fodor 1994, p. 111).”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“When we engage in a philosophical argument with an opponent, the primary issue is frequently about who has offered the best reasons to support her thesis. It is an illusion to think that there are ahistorical determinate standards to which we can appeal that will sharply distinguish once and for all what “really” are good or better reasons. What counts as “good reasons” is essentially contested.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“Cheryl Misak, who is perhaps the strongest defender of a Peircian conception of truth, reality, and objectivity, acknowledges the difficulties with Peirce’s formulation. She offers an alternative formulation of the notion of a true belief that takes account of Peirce’s revisions, one that is also intended to defuse some of the obvious objections: “A true belief is one that would withstand doubt, were we to inquire as far as we fruitfully could on the matter. A true belief is such that no matter how much further we were to investigate and debate, that belief would not be overturned by recalcitrant experience and argument.” Misak’s formulation “does not require the pragmatist to attempt the doomed task of saying just what is meant by the hypothetical end of inquiry, cognitively ideal conditions, or perfect evidence, whatever these might be. Any attempt at articulating such notions will have to face the objection that it is a mere glorification of what we presently take to be good” (Misak 2007, pp. 49–50).9”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“It is agreeable to imagine a future in which the tiresome ‘analytic–Continental split’ is looked back upon as an unfortunate, temporary breakdown of communication – a future in which Sellars and Habermas, Davidson and Gadamer, Putnam and Derrida, Rawls and Foucault, are seen as fellow-travelers on the same journey, fellow-citizens of what Michael Oakeshott called a civitas pelegrina. (Rorty 1997a, pp. 11–12)”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“All these things make his present-day readers wish to tear their hair – or his – out of desperation” (James 1977, p. 44). “The only thing that is certain is that whatever you may say of [Hegel’s] procedure, someone will accuse you of misunderstanding it.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“Despite these heady attractions, Dewey gradually drifted away from Hegel. Darwin replaced Hegel as a source of inspiration for the organic, dynamic, changing character of life. But the “subjective” factors that originally attracted Dewey to Hegel stayed with him throughout his life and deeply marked his own experimentalist version of pragmatism. Dewey, in effect, naturalized Hegel. Dewey’s concept of experience as a transaction that spans space and time, involving both undergoing and activity, shows the Hegelian influence. Subject and object are understood as functional distinctions within the dynamics of a unified developing experience. Like Hegel, Dewey is critical of all dualisms and the fixed dichotomies that have plagued philosophy, including mind and body as well as nature and experience. Dewey’s hostility to the merely formal and static was inspired by Hegel. Dewey, like Hegel, was alert to the role of conflicts in experience: how they are be overcome in the course of experience, and how new conflicts break out. Typically he approaches philosophical problems in a Hegelian manner by delineating opposing extremes, showing what is false about them, indicating how we can preserve the truth implicit in them, and passing beyond these extremes to a more comprehensive resolution.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“There is a tendency to overemphasize the role and potential power of rational argumentation. Dewey was never happy with the way in which philosophers and political theorists characterized reason – especially when they sharply distinguished reason from emotion, desire, and passion. He preferred to speak about intelligence and intelligent action. Intelligence is not the name of a special faculty. Rather, it designates a cluster of habits and dispositions that includes attentiveness to details, imagination, and passionate commitment. What is most essential for Dewey is the embodiment of intelligence in everyday practices.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“Dewey consistently argues that any theory of human beings that fails to acknowledge that human beings “are not isolated non-social atoms” is defective, a misleading abstraction of philosophers.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“It is curious how little countenance radical pluralism has ever had from philosophers. Whether materialistically or spiritually minded, philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled. They have substituted economical and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangle; and whether these are morally elevated or only intellectually neat, they were at any rate always aesthetically pure and definite, and aimed at ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of structure. As compared with all these rationalizing pictures, the pluralistic empiricism which I profess offers but a sorry appearance. It is a turbid, muddled, gothic sort of affair, without sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility. (James 1977, p. 26)”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“The capital error of Hegel which permeates his whole system in every part of it is that he almost altogether ignores the Outward Clash” (Peirce 1992, p. 223).”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“A conclusion cannot be more certain than that some one of the facts which support it is true, but it may easily be more certain than any one of those facts. Let us suppose, for example, that a dozen witnesses testify to an occurrence. Then my belief in that occurrence rests on the belief that each of those men is generally to be believed upon oath. Yet the fact testified to is made more certain than any one of those men is generally to be believed. In the same way, to the developed mind of man, his own existence is supported by every other fact, and is, therefore, incomparably more certain than any one of these facts. (Peirce 1992, pp. 20–1)”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“Philosophy ought to imitate the successful sciences in its methods, so far as to proceed only from tangible premises which can be subjected to careful scrutiny, and to trust rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness to any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibres may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected. (Peirce 1992, p. 29)”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn

“Any scientist will admit (and should insist) that most of our current hypotheses and theories will need revision in the future. In other words, strictly speaking, as they currently stand, they are “false.” But it would be absurd to conclude that because we will revise or abandon current hypotheses and theories we do not “really know” anything about the world. We should always seek to test our knowledge claims with the best possible evidence and the strongest arguments, but with an honest sense of human fallibility”
― Richard J. Bernstein, The Pragmatic Turn