Pragmatic vs. Skeptical Empiricism: Hume and Dewey on Experience and Causation

Abstract

The classical American pragmatists are usually considered to be either empiricists or heirs to the empiricist tradition in philosophy. This is unsurprising given the nature of the pragmatist philosophical program as a late nineteenthand early twentieth-century reaction against transcendental idealism. Pragmatists sought to ground their inquiry resolutely in experience sans speculative metaphysics. However, the pragmatists were also stridently opposed to certain doctrines and epistemological tendencies in British empiricism that they regarded as either implicitly idealist, or as laying a groundwork that stood as the foundation for transcendental idealism,1 as well as the contemporary Anglo-Austrian phenomenalism of Mach, Russell, and Ayer. This paper is concerned with elucidating the grounds of this disagreement, which primarily concerns the differing conceptions of “experience” held by both schools; namely, the pragmatists’ rejection of the conceptual/ empirical dichotomy implicit to British empiricism, and their insistence that relations are latent within experience and not generated by a synthetic faculty of the mind. In particular, this dispute will be examined concerning the issues of experience, causation, and causal explanation.2 When considering British empiricism, I shall focus on its most influential exemplar, and an obvious object of the pragmatist’s ire: David Hume. As far as the pragmatists are concerned, I shall focus primarily on John Dewey, who among his peers addressed the issues under consideration most thoroughly and forcefully. The general thesis of this paper is twofold. First, I argue that a good deal of the disagreement is exaggerated, as the classical pragmatists maintained