Pragmatism to the Rescue?

Abstract

In Telling the Truth about History, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob challenge the argumentative camps of metaphysical realism and anti-realism under the guise of relativism. They offer middle ground-practical realism which they defend as the best route to discovering the Best in the descriptive sense that it properly captures how historians work. Best prescriptively in the sense that it properly allows for the advocacy of seeking as collective enterprise in which many voices should be heard. For the authors, practical realism offers to steer course between what they think of as the absolutism of metaphysical realism and the nihilism of anti-realism. They also argue that practical realism itself finds its direction from core elements of the American pragmatist tradition. As the authors tell the story, we labor in the shadow of tradition which they call the model. This misleading model presents as absolute truth and not just as true enough for the time being but as true always and absolutely.' Beyond this conception of truth, the heroic model carries particular view of knowledge, namely, that things can be known in ways that correspond to actual objective existence and that there is a tight fit between nature and human knowledge.2 The counterpoint to this tradition, born, the authors argue, in reaction to it, is family of relativisms that reaches its most extreme manifestation in the non-referential views about language championed by poststructuralists and associated views which undermine the value of truth-seeking as an enterprise understood as anything that has much to do with truth. In contrast to these polar alternatives, the authors offer third way dubbed practical realism which owes its core to conception of pragmatism: emerges in collective enterprise even if tentatively and contingently.