Contemporary Pragmatism Research Articles

Philosophical commitments, empirical evidence, and theoretical psychology

The philosophical or theoretical commitments informing psychological research are sometimes characterized, even by theoretical psychologists themselves, as nonempirical, outside the bounds of methodological consideration, and/or nonrational. We argue that this characterization is incoherent. We illustrate our concern by analogy with problematic appeals to Kuhn’s work that have been influential in theoretical psychology. Following the contemporary pragmatist tradition, we argue that our philosophical/theoretical commitments are part of our larger webs of belief, and that for any of these beliefs to have meaning their content must be informed by our practical engagement with the world, i.e., they are based on empirical evidence, broadly construed. It is this empirical basis that allows us to recognize our commitments at all and rationally to assess and criticize them when necessary. We conclude by demonstrating a rational assessment of the philosophical/theoretical commitments underlying a recent study in the social psychology of religion.

La Pragmatique linguistique: theories, debats, exemples

This volume offers a comprehensive and often extremely detailed exposition of the most important aspects of contemporary pragmatics, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition. The first chapter outlines the different ways of defining pragmatics and discusses code-based and inference-based models of meaning. The following five chapters examine reference, deixis, and anaphora. In Chapter 2 Adriana Costăchescu introduces the concepts and distinguishes philosophical and linguistic approaches to the study of these phenomena. The third chapter shows that personal pronouns can be used deictically and includes a surfeit of annotated examples to demonstrate this. Chapter 4 explores spatial deixis and Chapter 5 temporal deixis. The sixth chapter concludes the discussion of anaphora and deixis with an examination of these properties in verbs. While extremely detailed and well exemplified, Chapters 2–6 are very repetitive and, in terms of their style, will be testing for even the most interested of readers. Chapter 7 discusses a bedrock of linguistic pragmatics: conversational implicature. Costăchescu explains Grice's Maxims, giving (at times, painstaking) explanations of how a particular implicature is derived, but she fails, unfortunately, to consider the difference between particularized and generalized conversational implicatures. It is also surprising that Stephen C. Levinson's Presumptive Meanings (Cambridge: CUP, 2000) is missing entirely from her discussion of neo-Gricean developments. Chapter 8 outlines presupposition and synthesizes the debates arguing that presupposition is either a semantic or a pragmatic phenomenon; here the properties and triggers of presupposition are exemplified particularly thoroughly. The ninth chapter, on speech acts, gives a summary of the Austinian and Searlean approaches and taxonomies of speech acts. Chapter 10 focuses on cognitive pragmatics and provides an account of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's Relevance Theory. As well as outlining its theoretical basis, Costăchescu details how their theory can be applied to fiction, irony, and metaphor. Disappointingly, however, she fails to subject their work to the kind of critical scrutiny seen, for example, in Chapters 7–9, and there is a lack of engagement with the criticism their theory has faced (see, particularly, Stephen C. Levinson, ‘A Review of Relevance’, Journal of Linguistics, 25 (1989), 455–72). Also absent from the book is a final chapter giving Costăchescu the opportunity to present her overall conclusions, mention various recent developments in the field such as the subdisciplines of historical and experimental pragmatics, and indicate possible future directions. A further issue concerns the presentation of the material itself: the typesetting is generally inelegant and the font far too small in places; typographical errors occur on nearly every page of the bibliography. These reservations aside, Costăchescu's study provides a number of thorough explanations, with abundant clarifying examples, of the basic principles of pragmatics. Original English terms are given as well as French translations, allowing the reader to research the literature in English more easily. The level of detail is probably too great for an undergraduate French linguistics course, but the volume is certainly a useful resource for more advanced (doctoral) students and researchers.

Locating Rorty: Feminism and Poststructuralism, Experience and Language

many contemporary pragmatists reject Richard Rorty’s views because they think he neglects an important, if not pivotal, aspect of the classical pragmatists’ thought: experience. His claim that Dewey’s metaphysics of experience unwittingly perpetuates foundationalism has been met with both incredulity and frustration among contemporary scholars who are interested in revitalizing Dewey’s work. Similarly, one of the main reasons feminists have offered for their hesitance to ally themselves with the neo-pragmatists, focusing their efforts instead on the allegiances to be forged between and the resources to be borrowed from the classical pragmatists, is the former’s neglect of experience. For example, in Pragmatism and Feminism, Charlene Haddock Seigfried rejects Rorty’s work because she thinks it “unacceptably narrows the resources pragmatism has to offer feminist theory” (5).1 In this paper, I explore pragmatist and feminist tendencies to reject Rorty’s views because of his “linguistic pragmatism” by comparing the experience-language debate among pragmatists with feminist debates about poststructuralism.2 Viewing the former debate through the lens of the latter reveals that Rorty’s views are often misconstrued. This is because feminists and pragmatists alike focus too much on Rorty’s similarities with poststructuralism, rather than his similarities with pragmatism. Or, to put it another way, both feminists and pragmatists tend to neglect Rorty’s later cultural-political work, which is where the question of experience is raised again most forcefully. By bringing the later political work into view, we can see that Rorty takes what I call a “combinatory approach” similar to the combinatory approach taken by some feminists in response to poststructuralism. The specific debate that I will use as a lens to explore the experience-language debate revolves around the work of historian Joan W. Scott, who takes a poststructuralist approach to the discipline of history. Kathleen Canning,

Contributions from Pragmatist Perspectives towards an Understanding of Knowledge and Learning in Organisations

The purpose of this article is to present an understanding of knowledge and learning in organisations from pragmatist perspectives. Relying on the work of early pragmatists as well as contemporary pragmatists, we introduce a conceptualisation of knowledge as the outcome of inquiry. Knowledge, in this article, is presented as provisional, multi-perspective, both particular and general. Our point of departure here is that the chief value of knowledge is its usefulness in solving problems. Pragmatist views of knowledge are further explicated in our discussion of four pragmatist themes, which we have identified as particularly viable on the basis of Jane Addams’ pragmatist view and the practice of democracy in organised life: 1) Knowledge as transactional in organisations, 2) Reciprocity and learning in organisations, 3) Experience-based knowledge and meaning-making in organisations, and 4) Sustainability as an ongoing, democratic process in organisations. In the pragmatist school of thought we draw upon, a predominant issue is always also the very purpose of knowledge, or what we refer to as ‘usefulness’. Under discussion, we argue that a pragmatist understanding of knowledge and learning in organisations allows us to move beyond the polarisation of cognitive-possession — social-process and instead work from an alternative framework, with a focus on processes of learning and knowledge in organisations that aim at integrative, democratic problem solving.

Introduction to International Symposium on Richard Rorty

This issue of Contemporary Pragmatism is devoted to reassessing the figure of Richard Rorly, as an intellectual and a person, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of lus death. In May 2013 in Buenos Aires a diverse group of scholars came together for a symposium organized by Graduate Program of Philosophy and the History of Science at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), which we had the honor to coordinate, along with Michael Williams, the invaluable help of Cesar Lorenzano and Veronica Tozzi, and the support of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP).The symposium was an opportunity to honor the memory of the author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in the presence of former students, friends, colleagues, and scholars of lus work, from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Norway, Pera, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. In a spirit that himself would have appreciated, also paramount was a critical engagement with his work and its importance both within and outside philosophy for nearly 50 years. This issue contains some of the contributions presented at the symposium and evidences the ongoing relevance of Rortian ideas and texts for a wide range of philosophical areas, including epistemology, political philosophy, etlucs, philosophy of language, aesthetics, and philosophy of science, to name only a few. Rorty continues as a great heir of classical pragmatist tradition and its philosophical spirit of not being tied to fashion or committed to excessive specialization.The articles that follow aie organized into two sections, one directed toward epistemological issues, and one attuned to topics of practical philosophy, with emphasis on political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of history and the links between literary and philosophical activity. What follows is a brief outline of the articles.The first section opens with Richard J. Bernstein's, 'So Much the Worse for your Old Intuitions, Start Working up Some New Ones', the newest entry in the senes of theoretical interventions that the author of Beyond Relativism and Objectivism has been developing since at least the 1980's on the work of Ins friend and former colleague at Yale. Tins time, Bernstein focuses on Rorty's critique of the foundational role of intuitions, as pre-linguistic entities that serve as epistemological givens and as basic beliefs that allow for resolving philosophical disagreement. Bernstein deploys Ins analysis of these ciitical arguments and resumes Ins interrogation of Rortian antirepresentationalism, which claims a needless all or nothing choice between two conceptions of rationality, an algorithmic one and an incommensurabilitist one.In Roity and Dewey on Warrant, Angel Faema traces similarities and differences between the thought of and John Dewey, whose work was always considered by the author of Contingency, Irony Solidarity as an essential background of Iris project but with whom he also remained in disagreement on some specific insights. The text stresses the Rortian ambivalence with Dewey, but also emphasizes the nodal points of coincidence that both philosophers have about the concept of epistemological warrant. Faema's dialectical strategy is to bring both philosophers together through a questioning of Robert Brandom's criticisms of classic pragmatism.In How to Be a Pragmatist Without Surrendering to Naturalism, Eleonora Cresto presents the various ways in which Rorty is assumed to be a naturalist and draws attention to the possibility of reaching, from Darwinian premises, an uncritical form of naturalism that embodies serious difficulties for an account of the phenomenon of rationality from a first person point of view. Consequently, she defends the idea that there is a sense in which it is true that reason cannot be naturalized, and that it can be deployed from a pragmatist perspective perfectly compatible with Rortian antirepresentationalism. …

Rorty and Dewey on Warrant

1. Rorty between Putnam and BrandomIn an interview for the film American Philosopher, by Phillip McReynolds,1 one can hear Hilary Putnam saying: says that the notion of warrant, justification, is a sociological notion. None of the classical pragmatists was a cultural relativist about warrant. The statement is plain and straightforward, as one should expect from a philosopher trying to convey a crucial point to a non-specialized audience. We skilled philosophers know that each and every word of it needs further qualification, though it captures in an admirably concise form the core of the Putnam-Rorty debate. A second merit of Putnam's statement is that its two sentences, taken as premises of an enthymeme, confront us with the twofold character of that debate. On one hand, it is a debate about the nature of justification, and in what relation it stands to cultural or sociological determinations. On the other hand, it is a debate about what it means to give a response to that problem, for Putnam's argument points to the unstated conclusion: No one who believes that is a sociological notion is m the same boat with classical pragmatists. According to Putnam, a true interpretation of should avoid the kind of cultural relativism that Roity allegedly promoted.Another influential representative of contemporary pragmatism, Robert Brandom, considers that Roily was, in other respects, still too close to the classical conception of warrant, that is, of our nonnative assessments of beliefs and assertions. According to Brandom, pragmatism in the broad sense claims that beliefs or judgments must be understood in tenus of practical commitments.' Brandom's view is that such commitments refer to other assertions inferentially related to the judgment or belief, whereas for the classical pragmatists and Rorty they are instrumental and refer to non-mferential consequences. Roity's characteristic talk of vocabularies as more or less useful would not provide a satisfactoiy account, by Brandom's lights, of what is involved in a belief being justified or warranted/In what follows I will not attempt to disentangle the rather vexing questions posed by the Putnam-Rorty-Brandom debate about what pragmatism is or should be. More modestly, I wish to take Putnam's and Brandom's criticisms as a starting point for a summary re-examination of Roity's position in relation to classical pragmatism, and to Dewey in particular. My remarks will be aimed to show that Rorty was not as far from the ideas of the classical pragmatists as Putnam suggests, nor as close to Brandom's interpretation of those ideas as he suggests. In a sense, then, this is a vindication of Roily as a respectable pragmatist (whatever this may mean), despite the real differences that will also emerge between lus position and that of the old school.2. Warranted Assertibility and InstrumentalismContemporary pragmatists agree that Jolui Dewey transformed the approach to epistemological problems in a decisive way. In a nutshell, Dewey suggested that we should drop the abstract notion of knowledge as an unfathomable subject/object relationship, and ask instead what lies at the bottom of our knowledge claims, or what entitles us to think that we are light in believing what we believe. If one makes this sluft, then the problem of which beliefs count as trae knowledge amounts to, as far as we are concerned - that is, as far as knowledge is considered a human activity - the problem of what aie we in believing. Pragmatist epistemologists therefore adopt the Deweyan concept of warranted assertibility as the proper object of concern for epistemology. As we have seen, it is the nature of that warrant which is controversial, so let us turn first to the concept as originally stated.The tenu warranted assertibility was introduced by Dewey in lus 1938 Logic. It appears for the first time in the following paragraph:That inquiry is related to doubt will, I suppose, be admitted. …

Are Residential Dwellers Marking and Claiming? Applying the Concepts to Humans Who Dwell Differently

Mitch Rose's paper in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (volume 30, issue 5, pages 757–771) arguing that dwelling involves acts of marking and claiming offers bountiful conceptual tools for understanding the dwelling experience. Here, I apply Rose's ideas to the modern residential dweller and use this application to assess Rose's claims. Specifically, the typical and mainstream modern home dweller is contrasted with several different empirical case studies of people who dwell differently, using alternative technologies, practices, and forms of organization in residential dwelling. These case studies are explored using the language of ‘marking’ and ‘claiming’ as put forth by Rose (pace Martin Heidegger) to illustrate what these concepts offer for understanding the experience of dwelling in a home. The observations of residential dwellers who dwell differently suggest that Rose's concepts do help to elucidate the dwelling experience, but that intellectual assistance from other sources, including classical and contemporary pragmatist thought and the work of Marcel Mauss on the relationship between action and thought as well as Paul Harrison's claims regarding relationality and variation in dwelling, helps to further develop Rose's abstract formulaic and connect the dots between conceptualization and the empirical experiences of residential dwelling.

Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Sentimental Subject

The author joins the company of Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Erin McKenna, and Shannon Sullivan in attempting to restore women to the history of pragmatism. Arguing that classical pragmatism emerged in postbellum America as an adaptation of antebellum sentimental discourse, the author identifies some of John Dewey, Jane Addams, and William James’s rhetorical innovations, using them to outline a theory of pragmatic subjectivity. The paper also advocates connecting pragmatism more deeply to moral sentimentalism, both to construct genealogies of pragmatist feminism and to help contemporary pragmatist feminists reflect on the lingering influence of sentimentalism on their own thought.

Three Tools for Moral First Aid

The tension between naturalism and humanism is at its greatest when it comes to ethics and morality. By drawing on the affinity between the evolutionary humanistic philosophies of classical pragmatist John Dewey and contemporary pragmatist Daniel Dennett, I modify Dennett’s ethical technology, Moral First Aid, to include a kit as well as Dennett’s proposed manual. The contents of this kit draw on Dewey’s reconstructed moral genealogy in which three factors, goods, rights, and virtues, become stock parts for the technoscience of ethics. Lacking in Dennett’s account is an adequate ideal by which to measure moral success. I propose that moral first aid take up Dewey’s moral ideal of democracy as the guide for resolving moral exigencies.

Pragmatism and moral progress

John Dewey developed a pragmatic theory of inquiry to provide intelligent methods for social progress. He believed that the logic and attitude of successful scientific inquiries, properly conceived, could be fruitfully applied to morals and politics. Unfortunately, his project has been poorly understood and his logic of inquiry neglected as a resource. Contemporary pragmatists, like Richard Rorty, for example, dismiss his emphasis on method and avoid judgments of moral progress that are in any way independent of the biases of particular cultures. In this article, I argue that Dewey’s theory of inquiry indeed provides intelligent methods and intellectual criteria for engaging moral and political matters. Inquiry, as Dewey conceives it, issues in judgments that are increasingly objective, reliable and refined in application. These judgments are rooted in particular times and places, in actual ‘situations’, but are not entirely hostage to specific cultures. I then apply Dewey’s theory to two standard moral problems to demonstrate how it works. The conclusion is that Dewey’s theory of inquiry gets it just right: it provides solid ground for criticism and moral progress while remaining acutely sensitive to cultural differences and changing circumstances.

Was Jane Addams a promiscuous pragmatist?

Contemporary pragmatist and feminist scholars have proposed the possibilities for “changing the theoretical analyses and concrete practices” of both feminism and classical American pragmatism offered by its recuperation through feminism. Particularly, scholarship on Jane Addams has reached back to retrieve her activism, ethics, and social theory as emblematic of what a feminist pragmatism can offer. Whereas most of this scholarship recuperates an almost seamless integration of these theoretical and philosophical orientations in Addams’ work, in this paper, I trouble those efforts by offering a promiscuous reading of Addams’ feminist pragmatism from two dimensions. First, I offer an analysis of Addams’ promiscuous appropriation of pragmatism and feminism that interrupts and perplexes both orientations. Second, I read Addams promiscuously through the ontoepistemological framework of material feminism, specifically Karen Barad’s “agential realism”, and prompt reconsiderations of how Addams performed how “matter matters” in knowing through being in twentieth-century Chicago.

Recognising life – A study in the atheist micro-bio-politics of drugs

The author attempts a micro-bio-politics of drugs, starting from an excerpt of an interview with a couple of young drug users in a Copenhagen social youth work facility that pushes harm reduction in 1996. The article is guided by Derrida's idea of ‘drugs as the religion of atheist poets’ – that the contemporary discursive pragmatics of more or less pharmaceutical life practices still include forms of transcendence – and by the wish to fertilize the field of bio-politics with the indexical inter-subjectivity of the concept of ideology, as derived from an anti-essentialist reading of Hegelian–Marxist traditions. The analysis unfolds as an ideology critique that reconstructs, and seeks ways to overcome, particular forms of recognition that are identifiable in the data and in the field of drug practices, and how these form part of the constitution of singular collectives and participants – in these life practices, but also in the research practice that engaged with them through the interview.

Kelly A. Parker and Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski, ed. Josiah Royce for the Twenty-First Century: Historical, Ethical, and Religious Interpretations. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2012. 330 pp. Hardcover ISBN 978-0-7391-7336-7.

Kelly A. Parker and Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski, ed. Royce for Twenty-First Century: Historical, Ethical, and Religious Interpretations. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2012. 330 pp. Hardcover ISBN 978-0-7391-7336-7.Although he has often been relegated to fringe status among figures constitutive of American philosophical tradition, in recent years there has been a renewal of scholarly attention to Royce's thought. Royce for Twenty-First Century is one of latest testaments to this resurgence of interest in The essays of this volume are collected Fourth Annual Conference on American and European Values held in Opole, Poland in 2008. The conference was co-organized by John Lachs, Kelly Parker, Jason Bell, and Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski. Parker and Skowronski serve as editors of collection, which reflects rather open-ended nature of theme of conference: Josiah Royce. Contributors are diverse, representing international interest in Royce younger scholars to more established. Diverse, too, are contributions, organized in these headings: Reinterpretations, Ethics: Interpretations of Loyalty, Religious Philosophy, and Contemporary Implications. Readers new to Royce will find, in content of these essays, a number of engaging entrees into his corpus. Readers already acquainted with Royce, including those who have worked very closely on his thought, will almost certainly find something in pages of this volume that will provoke further interaction with Royce's ideas. Consequently, I recommend this volume of interesting and well-written engagements of Royce's philosophy to all readers with any level of interest in Royce.Readers of this journal may be particularly interested in implications of title: What does volume offer to those interested in contemporary pragmatism, in application of pragmatist to problems of (to quote title of volume) the twenty-first century? In introduction to volume, Parker holds that Royce's has potential for sharpening and refining contemporary versions of pragmatism and appears poised to emerge as an influential voice in what is admittedly only a nascent post-pragmatist, post-analytic, and post-Continental style of thought (Parker and Skowronski, 3). What is more, in looking back at Royce, we follow Royce's lead, as he used philosophical past to develop innovative concepts that are startlingly relevant a century later (Parker and Skowronski, 7). In short, if we revisit Royce's attempts to deal with philosophical problems of his day, we may be led in new and fruitful directions as we grapple with philosophical problems of our own time.Explicit spelling out of contemporary relevance of these engagements with Royce is most conspicuously absent, though perhaps least surprisingly so, in Part I, Historical Reinterpretations. In a shortened version of a chapter of his Time, Will, and Purpose: Living Ideas Philosophy of Royce,1 Randall E. Auxier examines Royce's theory of individuality and how individuals both experience and exist. Auxier argues that Royce's theory of individuality is more complex and nuanced than has been understood in interpretive literature, and seeks to remedy this deficiency. Focusing on notion of uniqueness in Royce's thought, Auxier traces its meaning from psychological individuality, through phenomenological individuality, and, employing ethical imperatives Royce embraces, through moral philosophy and up to borders of metaphysics (Auxier, 42). One gains a sense for comprehensiveness intended in Auxier's fuller study.Marc M. Anderson examines Royce's argument regarding conditions for possibility of error (first articulated in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy), holding that Royce's argument arises out of a Kantian framework. In fact, Anderson describes argument as Royce's bid to update Kant, making a transition world of moral postulation to one of scientific postulation (Anderson, 49). …

Talisse’s Epistemic Justification of Democracy Reconsidered

Paul Ott offers three related arguments that Robert Talisse's epistemic conception of democracy fails. Together, they are intended to support proposition that a Deweyan approach to democracy provides a better explanatory basis for how to facilitate democracy. I argue that each argument provided by Ott fails. As a result, they do not reflect a successful critique of Talisse's conception of democracy. Nor do they provide support for Ott's defense of Dewey. I close by offering a more promising line of criticism against Talisse's epistemic justification.1. IntroductionIn a recent essay appearing in Contemporary Pragmatism, Paul Ott argues that Robert Talisse's most recent iteration of his epistemic conception of democracy fails. He offers three related arguments to make his case:Argument 1P] Moral pluralism, as Talisse characterizes it, is a plurality of held (Ott 2011, 146)P2 A plurality of fundamentally held doctrines is democratically untenable.Ci Democracy cannot accommodate moral pluralism, as Talisse understands it.Argument 2P^sub 1^ Endorsement of Talisse's epistemic justification is necessary for embracing Talisse's conception of democracy.P^sub 2^ One cannot endorse both a fundamentally held doctrine and also be persuaded by Talisse's epistemic justification.C^sub 2^ Talisse's own conception of democracy is inconsistent with value practice. (ibid., 146)Argument 3P;Talisse's claim that epistemic justification is sufficient to motivate (2009, 7; original emphasis) a commitment to democracy is &1~eP^sub 2^ The epistemic justification lacks persuasiveness for those not already morally committed to democracy.C^sub 3^ Democracy moral justification and motivation.Taken together, Ott intends these arguments to support proposition that a Deweyan approach to democracy, which, he states, requires an affective and moral motivation (ibid., 146), provides a better explanatory basis for how to facilitate democracy than does Talisse's epistemic justification. I will not rehash whether we should accept or reject Deweyan democracy; Talisse's (2007, 2011a) challenge to it strikes me as decisive.1 I will instead focus on merits of Ott's three arguments, arguing that each is invalid - or at least that Ott has failed to firmly establish validity of each. As a result, they do not reflect a successful critique of Talisse's epistemic justification. Nor do they provide any support for Ott's wider Deweyan proposition. This is not to say that Talisse's epistemic justification should be endorsed, however. I close by offering what I take to be a more promising line of criticism against it.2. Argument 1Given description provided in first premise of Argument 1 (i.e., 1P0, Talisse characterizes moral pluralism as a plurality of fundamentally held doctrines. According to Ott, that a doctrine is held fundamentally - that one engages in fundamental value practice - says nothing about content of that doctrine. This instead refers to the way in which doctrines, or values, are practiced (Ott 2011, 146). Namely, one engages in fundamental value practice, or fundamentalism (ibid., 149) for short, insofar as they hold and practice values in ... extreme ways, most notably by holding values as non-negotiable, regardless of changing circumstances (ibid., 148). Drawing on Dewey, Ott concludes that such a mode of practice reflects nothing less than carelessness, conceit, irresponsibility, and rigidity - in short, absolutism (ibid., 149).If it is case that moral pluralism is a fact of social and political life, that there exists a plurality of doctrines whose adherents have fundamental commitments that they refuse in principle to abandon or revise no matter what circumstances, Ott contends that said adherents cannot be expected to embrace democracy. …

Royce and Bernstein on Evil

This article has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it aims to reconstruct Josiah Royce's views on evil. On the other hand, it intends to examine these Roycean views within the framework of Richard Bernstein's work, particularly his books Radical Evil: a Philosophical Investigation and The Abuse of Evil. I conclude that, despite some shortcomings regarding his notion of evil, Royce's philosophy should be recovered as a classical voice in order to fight against the abuse of evil.Realization of the evil men can do and have done to men is integral to any intelligent appraisal of human history. -Sidney Hook(1974, 30)1. IntroductionOn the first pages of The Abuse of Evil, Richard Bernstein relates how after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, evil unexpectedly became a concept of immense political significance. Just a few days before then, he had finished writing Radical Evil: A Philosophical Investigation where a very old philosophical, theological, and practical issue is examined, namely the problem of evil. Though universal in its scope, Radical Evil mainly refers to the intellectual (and political) history of Europe turning on the atrocity of the Nazi Holocaust. The core of his interpretation is grounded in two related axes: on the one hand, the enormous impact of Auschwitz on philosophy, and on the other hand, the impossibility to accept a healing theodicy. Unsurprisingly, Bernstein's research is focused exclusively on European thinkers.However, as Bernstein writes, the political and intellectual context abruptly changed after 9/11, particularly in America, where evil became practically synonymous with terrorism.1 Consequently, after 9/11, war against evil and war against terrorism acquired the same meaning. In the face of this new situation, a philosophical investigation on evil centered only on Auschwitz without making reference to terrorism would be regarded as incomplete by contemporary (especially American) readers. Thus, Bernstein wrote The Abuse of Evil as a complement to Radical Evil. Despite the vastness of the topic, one could say that the former was a philosophical project serenely written (a historical and philosophical balance where the horror of the twentieth century and Auschwitz plays the central role). By contrast, The Abuse of Evil is an intellectual response to the immediate challenges of the present as well as an attempt to rethink evil within this new frame. Another major difference between both books is related to their respective sources: in The Abuse of Evil Bernstein relies mainly on classical pragmatism, America's native philosophy, rather than on European thinkers.Why does Bernstein turn to classical pragmatism in this time of terror? He thinks that the new circumstances were favourable to a political American monster. In other words, one of Bernstein's theses is that absolutism, a political consequence of the war against terror, corrupts both politics and religion. Such absolutism is grounded in Christian fundamentalism, which in Bernstein's opinion is one of the central of America. Classical pragmatism (or pragmatic fallibilism, as he labels it) constitutes another fundamental American mentality, too. Bernstein accurately relies primarily on Dewey and James (but also Peirce and Mead are within this vein looking for a political (and religious) alternative to fundamentalism.Although Bernstein's account of this clash of mentalities is coherent, there is a classical American figure that is lacking in his reconstructive approach: Josiah Royce. For both Radical Evil and The Abuse Of Evil, Royce's philosophy arises as a relevant work in connection with Bernstein's purposes. First, taking Radical EviTs issues and developments, Royce's philosophy is connected with Bernstein's contemporary pragmatism to the extent that both deal explicitly with the problems of evil and theodicy as well as with their links with German idealism. Second, within the frame of The Abuse of Evil, Royce thinks that face to face interaction (what he calls wise provincialism) constitutes an indispensable political element (here Royce's viewpoint converges with the other classics', namely Peirce, James, Mead, and Dewey). …

Heidegger on Assertion, Method and Metaphysics

In Sein und Zeit Heidegger makes several claims about the nature of ‘assertion’ [Aussage]. These claims are of particular philosophical interest: they illustrate, for example, important points of contact and divergence between Heidegger's work and philosophical movements including Kantianism, the early Analytic tradition and contemporary pragmatism. This article provides a new assessment of one of these claims: that assertion is connected to a ‘present-at-hand’ ontology. I also indicate how my analysis sets the stage for a new reading of Heidegger's further claim that assertion is an explanatorily derivative phenomenon. I begin with a loose overview of Heidegger's position and then develop a sharper formulation of the key premises. I go on to argue that existing treatments of the supposed link between assertion and the ‘present-at-hand’ are unsatisfactory, and advance a new, ‘methodological’, interpretation of that link. Finally, I sketch the implications of my interpretation for the further claim that assertion is explanatorily derivative.

Research Survey Article: Micro- and Macro-Pragmatics: Remapping Their Terrains

The publication of Levinson’s celebrated Pragmatics in 1983 systematized the field of pragmatics and marked the coming of age of pragmatics as a linguistic discipline in its own right. Today pragmatics is one of the most vibrant and rapidly growing fields in linguistics and the philosophy of language. It is also a particularly complex subject with all kinds of disciplinary influence, and few, if any, clear boundaries. The aim of this article is to survey the representative research areas in contemporary pragmatics and present an authoritative and up-to-date description of the contemporary landscape of pragmatics, in the hope that it will help shape the development of the discipline in the next decade or so.

Recovering American Philosophy

Misak’s The American Pragmatists goes a long way towards correcting the distorted account of pragmatism’s founding and development that prevails among contemporary pragmatists invested in the “classical” idiom. Yet Misak does not give enough attention to the different conceptions of metaphilosophy at work in the early pragmatists. As it turns out, the “subjectivist” strands within pragmatism that Misak rejects are frequently accompanied by an overly robust metaphilosophy, whereas the “objectivist” pragmatism that Misak favors is metaphilosophically modest. This correlation is not coincidental. In this paper, the author draws out the metaphilosophical differences among pragmatists and argues that pragmatism’s more ambitious metaphilosophical impulses should be abandoned.

On the Apparent Differences between Contemporary Pragmatists: Richard Rorty and the New Pragmatism

Throughout its history pragmatism has been criticised for failing to account for the roles truth and objectivity play in our lives and inquiries. Pragmatists have long sought to guard against this objection, but recently some proponents have identified a form of pragmatism which they think is deficient in the manner identified by its critics. This has led them to claim that pragmatism should be understood as falling into two distinct varieties, and to argue for the superiority of the one over the other. In this paper I argue that behind the apparent differences between contemporary pragmatists lies greater agreement than is commonly thought. Taking Richard Rorty to represent what some find unattractive in their philosophy, I claim that there is little if any substantive difference between pragmatists about the concepts of truth and objectivity. Further, Rorty’s work shows that it is misleading to distinguish pragmatists in terms of whether they highlight the constraints imposed by social practices or whether they seek to free us from such constraint; properly understood, freedom and constraint are a necessary condition of one another.

Distributing Epistemic Authority: Refining Norton’s Pragmatist Approach to Environmental Decision-Making

Environmental pragmatists are committed to analyzing questions of environmental policy. Bryan Norton's pragmatic critique of environmental decision-making shows how an implicit commitment to the fact/value distinction has hindered productive environmental action. Nonetheless, Norton, as well as the majority of environmental ethicists, have devoted more attention to theorizing value disagreements as a primary cause of controversy than to examining epistemic structures. A case study demonstrates why and how Norton's procedural account may be supplemented with sensitive attention to the construction of epistemic authority in environmental disputes. I recommend supporting the development of local knowledges and just distributions of epistemic authority.1. Pragmatism and Environmental Policy-MakingPragmatist environmental philosophers have made noteworthy contributions to persistent philosophical problems in environmental ethics, such as the source of value in nature, the nature of our moral obligations to the environment and to living creatures, and the objectivity of environmental value. But pragmatists have an additional interest beyond these ethical and ontological questions - they believe that philosophers can help make ideas clear in order to improve policy and action. To this end, pragmatists have contributed to debates in agricultural biotechnology (Thompson 2003), ecological restoration (Light 2000), water policy (Thompson 1996), and livestock production (McKenna 2004).In doing so, pragmatist environmental philosophers are following the lead of earlier pragmatists such as John Dewey who recognized that pragmatism can and ought to have real-life practical consequences and should not be limited to debates of a merely academic or scholastic nature. From this standpoint, contemporary pragmatists can contribute to the resolution of environmental problems by examining the process of inquiry and by evaluating procedures for political participation. Thus, pragmatists are well positioned to expand environmental philosophy beyond its current focus on ethics. A broader scope for environmental philosophy ought to include both an epistemological examination of what is known about natural environments and the application of social and political theory to evaluate and improve environmental decisionmaking. Such pragmatist contributions will:a. avoid, disintegrate, demystify, and disarm confusing metaphysical disputes,b. investigate how epistemic practices operate to resolve or, on the other hand, to amplify environmental problems,c. search for practical solutions to environmental controversies that are acceptable to all parties, andd. encourage participants in inquiry to be open to social learning and change.2. Bryan Norton's Pragmatic ProceduralismA good example of this is Bryan Norton wide-ranging account of public environmental decision-making in his recent book Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management (2005). Drawing on Deweyan pragmatism, he develops a procedural framework for reaching democratic resolutions to environmental problems. Norton believes that one of the largest obstacles to resolving environmental controversies and to implementing solutions to environmental problems is that people fail to communicate. The role of the philosopher here is twofold: first, to outline and justify general procedures for inquiry and action; and second, to help the parties to disputes make their goals clear as they work toward mutually acceptable (in the ideal case, win-win) solutions.Both of these philosophical goals have Deweyan roots - in other words, Norton has contextualized Deweyan inquiry for the environmental policy arena. To this end, Norton proposes that participants in environmental problem solving pick what he calls indicators. An indicator is a measurable quantity that is tied to an environmental goal. Importantly, Norton holds that the ideological basis for the goal is not directly relevant. …