A Gift that Keeps on Giving

In today’s NYT Opinionator, Stanley Fish offers an essay entitled “Pragmatism’s Gift”. The essay, which is a bit academic but nevertheless quite good, concludes that:

“When pragmatism tells us that there are no first principles, it not only disqualifies itself as the source of guidance and justification; it disqualifies the whole enterprise, at least in its more ambitious forms. What it leaves are the pleasures of doing philosophy, the pleasures of thinking about thinking freed from the burdensome expectation that we will finally get somewhere. Now there’s an advantage and a gift to boot.”

I have seen this “end of purposeful philosophy” argument before and always find it a bit curious. If anything, it seems to me that the Pragmatist’s view of the world is the beginning of philosophy if only because it sets before us the enormous task of justifying our intentional actions in human terms. Instead of asking what is the “true” nature of reality, we must ask, what does it mean to be human?

The practical value of Pragmatism goes well beyond its intuitive elegance. At the very least, the benefit of the Pragmatist’s constructivist view of the world is threefold.

1. The view explains why our illusions of certainty (ideology, dogma, and natural law) are being dis-confirmed in scientific inquiry and why our delusions of certainty have produced our history of perpetual conflict.

2. The view transforms our conception of a world that is limited by divine and/or natural laws into of world of possibilities based in intentionality.

3. The view opens the door to a methodology humans can use to get “unstuck” and move forward to improve their enterprises — To muddle through better. (W. E. Deming summarized this methodology as PDSA.)

In other words, Pragmatism places the onus of responsibility on we humans, as intentional actors in the world, rather than on metaphysical beings and “natural laws” that supervene our actions.

NOTE: When you read through the comments following Stanley’s essay, it is interesting to see that even though his first paragraph is intended to dispel the common understanding of the term “pragmatist”, most of the commentators still don’t get it. Pragmatism is a very simple idea but it is immensely counter-intuitive.