How to Be a Pragmatist in the End: Objectivity, Skepticism, and the Demands of Agency
Pragmatists face serious difficulties in accounting for the objectivity of truth and knowledge. For they clarify our beliefs’ meaning and truth by appeal to their practical success, and practical success seems relative to particular contexts, or even particular believers. Some pragmatists verge on simply accepting this consequence, but others attempt to secure objective standards of truth and justification. My dissertation interprets and evaluates this objective pragmatist tradition. I argue for three key claims. First, there are two conceptions of objectivity prominent within this tradition, which stand in serious mutual tension: an empiricist conception, on which objective constraints on belief are provided by possible experiences, and a realist-causal conception, on which they are provided by causal interaction with the mind-independent natural world. These conceptions dominate in different historical periods, marking the transition from classical pragmatism to neo-pragmatism. The classical pragmatists most concerned with objectivity, C. S. Peirce & C. I. Lewis, opt for the former conception (notwithstanding apparent realist-causal sympathies in Peirce’s work that ultimately explain the emergence of the latter). Neo-pragmatists who preserve objectivity, like Wilfrid Sellars, opt for the latter. Second, neither camp effectively deploys its conception to provide an adequate account of the epistemic objectivity of our beliefs and assertions: the former camp falls prey to phenomenalism (and so, among other problems, fails to accommodate other minds satisfactorily), while the latter fails in its effort to leverage semantic externalism into an adequate response to skepticism. Finally and in consequence, pragmatism's most fruitful contribution to thinking about objectivity turns out not to lie in its treatments of meaning and truth, but in its independent epistemology: specifically, in Peirce’s and Sellars’s arguments that our right to accept our basic empirical beliefs is a pragmatic warrant. I develop this stance by arguing that our warrant to accept that our perceptual beliefs are likely to be true derives from our commitment to being effective agents and, ultimately, from the value of control over our empirical circumstances.
American Philosophy, C. I. Lewis, Charles Sanders Peirce, History of Analytic Philosophy, Pragmatism, Wilfrid Sellars
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