Philosophical pragmatism has been enjoying something of a renaissance lately, particularly in philosophy of science. The trend is growing but not entirely new: Hilary Putnam ([1981]) began his turn to pragmatism more than forty years ago, Peter Godfrey-Smith ([2002]) and Philip Kitcher ([2005]) began to engage seriously with John Dewey’s thought about twenty years ago, and, a few years later, Cheryl Misak ([2007]) announced the arrival of the ‘new pragmatists’, among their number Ian Hacking (who disputed the label) and Arthur Fine. The last ten years have seen an explosion of work in pragmatist philosophy of science (Barrotta [2018]; Brown [2020]; Gronda [2020]; Chang [2022]; Gronda et al. [forthcoming]). This book, The Pragmatist Challenge: Pragmatist Metaphysics for Philosophy of Science, edited by H. K. Andersen and Sandra D. Mitchell, thus steps into a moment that is well prepared to receive its insights.

The Pragmatist Challenge consists of a substantive introductory chapter by the editors on ‘Pragmatism for Philosophy of Science’ and six chapters by contributors. The book originated in a series of workshops of pragmatist metaphysics and philosophy of science (‘PragMAPS’), and it shows the benefits of steady collaboration between many of its contributors. There is a lot of good material packed into this collection. James Woodward provides a programmatic chapter that pairs nicely with the introduction. Andersen’s chapter explores a pragmatist account of scientific truth, while Mitchell provides a pragmatist metaphysics of ‘affordances’. Edward Hall discusses deflationism, while David Danks gives a pragmatist mediation of the unity versus disunity of science issue. Laura Ruetsche concludes the volume by showing the value of pragmatism in analysing quantum field theory, providing reason to think that fundamental theories in physics will remain pragmatic in nature.

What is pragmatism? What makes a philosophy of science pragmatist? This is a vexed question, and to their credit, many of the authors in this volume acknowledge that it is not at all clear that there’s a univocal sense of ‘pragmatism’ even among card-carrying pragmatists. William James and Charles Peirce both understood pragmatism as a view about the clarification of the meaning of ideas and the significance of disputes: the meaning of an idea is the practical consequences for conduct or experience we take it to have, and there is a genuine dispute if and only if the different views have different consequences (otherwise there is a merely verbal difference). Both considered ‘truth’ to be a key idea for clarification, though they articulated their accounts very differently. Dewey ([1915], p. 22), by contrast, takes pragmatism to be the view that all judgements are practical judgements (in the sense of practical reasoning), that ‘all judgments of fact have reference to a determination of courses of action to be tried and to the discovery of means for their realization’. In my own work, I follow Dewey in thinking of pragmatism as primarily a thesis about inquiry and judgement as practical, and I take it to be a normative stance (Brown [2020], pp. 11–12, 41–43, 238). In his recent book, Hasok Chang ([2022]) characterizes pragmatism in terms of knowledge and action: ‘Pragmatism regards knowledge as an outcome of humble on-the-ground inquiry, and locates it in actual intelligent activities we carry out in life’ (p. 5), and ‘pragmatist philosophers have clearly recognized the need to understand and assess knowledge in the context of action’ (p. 19). Chang specifically distances himself from versions of pragmatism concerned primarily with the analysis of meaning, in favour of pragmatism as ‘a philosophy that helps us think better about how to do things’ (p. 59).

In The Pragmatist Challenge, we find many ideas about what pragmatism involves and entails. Rather than present a unified programme, it presents a variety of approaches in a broadly pragmatist spirit—and in this it reflects the variety found under the heading of ‘pragmatism’, classical and contemporary. In Andersen and Mitchell’s introduction, pragmatism amounts to rejecting ‘unattainable ideals’ (p. 5), is a tool for making progress on metaphysical, conceptual, and methodological problems by connecting them with scientific practice (p. 8), and helps chart a middle way between anti-realism and immodest realism, and between unity and pluralism (p. 9). Woodward articulates several commitments that he takes on from classical and contemporary pragmatists—emphasis on ‘usefulness’ understood as means–ends analysis, rejection of a spectator theory of knowledge, and scepticism about representationalism and ‘ambitious’ metaphysics—as well as others he rejects—‘community assent’ accounts of truth and scepticism about causation and modality (p. 15). In this sense, Woodward is not completely abstemious about metaphysics, but he is much more so than the highly ambitious metaphysician Peirce or even the metaphysically tolerant James, and even some of the other more ambitious authors in the present volume. Andersen’s account of pragmatism also allows us to find a middle way between ‘knee-jerk scientism and anti-science, anti-expertise trends’ (p. 70), but it is also centrally a theory of truth (p. 77). Danks offers a helpful definition: ‘a pragmatist approach to, or theory of, X is one that focuses on the practical functions and impacts of X, as well as the functional needs of users of X’ (p. 160). Danks also provides a helpful distinction between ‘philosophy of pragmatist science’, where the scientists themselves are described as taking a pragmatist approach towards their subject-matter, and ‘pragmatist philosophy of science’, where the philosopher takes a pragmatist approach to science (pp. 161–62). This permits the possibilities of ‘realist philosophy of pragmatist science’ (which Danks sees most avowed contemporary pragmatist philosophers of science doing) and ‘pragmatist philosophy of realist science’ (which Danks things characterizes much of the work on methodology despite not being typically called ‘pragmatist’), as well as ‘pragmatist philosophy of pragmatist science’. Danks claims that there have been few examples of the latter (p. 177), but I would describe my own work (Brown [2020]) this way, and I think Chang would as well.

Most interesting about the new pragmatist philosophy of science, to someone who has been tracking these developments for a long time, is the new confidence in pragmatist ideas that had previously been considered disreputable. Earlier appropriations of pragmatism tended to accept broadly epistemological and meta-philosophical insights, while taking a critical approach to pragmatist metaphysical and semantic views on truth, meaning, and reality. Chang ([2022]), in contrast, rehabilitates recognizably pragmatist accounts of truth and reality, clarifying them by reference to ideas of ‘operational coherence’ and ‘ontological pluralism’ that he has defended previously. In the present collection, we find chapters that articulate new versions of meta-philosophical pragmatism that make room for (modest) metaphysics, as well as spirited defences of core pragmatist metaphysical and semantic ideas that would have been dismissed flippantly by earlier re-appropriations of pragmatism. Andersen and Mitchell articulate the titular ‘pragmatist challenge’ itself as a Jamesian meta-philosophical approach to philosophical (especially metaphysical) problems and debates that requires one to identify what difference a philosophical view makes to experience, using a more capacious account of ‘experience’ than verificationists or positivists (pp. 5–6). Pragmatism thus helps resolve seemingly intractable disputes (p. 11). Woodward’s wide-ranging chapter provides another approach to addressing philosophical questions: means–ends analysis. In order to give an account of the nature of causation, say, one first identifies the various goals in scientific practice that causal claims are meant to help achieve, and then one investigates how causal claims might operate effectively as means to those ends, and so one might adopt an interventionist account of causation. This is a partly empirical, partly normative inquiry that builds on existing scientific knowledge, and it results only in a kind of ‘minimal’ rather than ‘ambitious’ metaphysics. Woodward, like James but unlike vulgar conceptions of pragmatism, thinks that there is a plurality of such goals, not one ur-goal of ‘usefulness’. Hall pursues a third meta-philosophical approach, that of articulating a stance of ‘respectful deflationism’ towards certain essential philosophical concepts, a middle way between ‘robust realism’ and ‘modest eliminativism’ (pp. 135–37).

Other authors in this collection pursue more ambitious defences of pragmatist metaphysical and semantic views. Andersen seeks to rehabilitate a Jamesian pragmatist theory of truth as ‘trueing’—by analogy to the process of truing a bicycle wheel. Truth is not a static or abstract property of propositions, but a process of bringing theories, models, maps, diagrams, and so on into alignment with the world in such a way as to permit us to successfully navigate it. This creative approach captures many of James’s key claims about truth: that truth is temporally indexed, that truth is something that happens to an idea, that truths help us get on in the world. Mitchell provides a metaphysics of affordances in the sense of Gibson as the target of scientific realistic commitment. Although she does not mention Dewey, Mitchell’s approach bears striking resemblance to Dewey’s so-called transactionalism, where he takes organism–environment complexes as the starting point for many of his philosophical analyses. Danks provides a particularly pragmatist spin on discussions of unity and disunity in science, arguing that if one interprets science as a realist-essentialist enterprise, it seems hard to reconcile actually existing science with unifiability; on the other hand, if one interprets science as a pragmatist enterprise, then one should expect unifiability wherever various attempts to predict and control the world are met with consistent responses from the world. The sense of unification here is modest, not depending on reification of the objects postulated by scientific theories.

In my experience, many mainstream philosophers take pragmatism’s intertwining of epistemological and metaphysical issues as a straightforward mistake, a symptom of the lack of clarity characteristic of the period before the rise of ‘analytic’ philosophy. The Pragmatist Challenge forcefully hits back against this charge, showing in multiple ways that when we ground our inquiries in reflection on concrete scientific practice rather than a priori fantasies, epistemological and metaphysical questions become inextricable. Thus, in the book, Andersen and Mitchell argue against a quietist rejection of metaphysics sometimes associated with pragmatism (p. 2), in favour of inquiry that integrates epistemological and metaphysical considerations into a unified inquiry (p. 3). On their account, the pragmatist evaluates and explains the success of methods through appeal to metaphysics, while it constrains metaphysical speculations epistemologically, requiring that metaphysical distinctions do actual work in inquiry (p. 7). Woodward seeks to explain epistemic normativity by appeal to a ‘minimal metaphysics’ built on ordinary empirical facts (p. 18). Andersen’s rehabilitation of a Jamesian pragmatist theory of truth relies on the productive interplay of metaphysical and epistemological concerns, showing the poverty of traditional epistemology for addressing science. Likewise, Chang ([2022], p. 89) argues that ‘the neat separation between epistemology and metaphysics is impossible to maintain’.

One issue that receives little attention in the present volume and indeed in much other recent work in pragmatist philosophy of science is the topic of science and values, broadly construed. The issue of science and social values is mentioned several times in the book as one that is relevant for pragmatist philosophers of science (pp. 8, 69, 76, 96, 183),^[1] but it is never explicitly taken up. This is unfortunate, given the positive role given by several chapters of the book to James’s attempt to use pragmatism to address metaphysical disputes, since his original application of the thesis of inductive risk in ‘The Will to Believe’ included metaphysical questions such as the existence of God (James [1896]; cf. Magnus [2022]); his argument seems obviously applicable to questions of metaphysics of science as well. If we take Danks’s definition of pragmatism above, the ‘practical functions and impacts of’ science seem obviously to include ethical and political functions and impacts, and users of science seem desperately in need of analyses of these aspects of science in order to trust and use science. My own work of course has focused on these topics, as has that of Pierluigi Barrotta ([2018]), and one hopes that these disparate pragmatisms in philosophy of science will become more engaged with each other.

The volume is a highly programmatic one, sketching broad approaches, new perspectives, and conceptual transformations that both problematize the uncritical assumptions of mainstream philosophy of science and promise fruitful tools for new analyses of science. As a result, most of the chapters in the volume do more telling than showing, that is, they give us an abstract, theoretical presentation of pragmatism rather than demonstrating its virtues in application to first-order analyses of scientific practices. The exception to this is Ruetsche’s final chapter, which is closely engaged with quantum field theory. Unfortunately, Ruetsche’s concreteness does not help out the rest of the authors, due to the nature of the volume—Ruetsche does not really use the tools developed in prior chapters, but rather her own account of pragmatism as a way of interpreting the content of theories. It is tempting here to point out a kind of performative contradiction perhaps best captured by a witticism widely attributed to Sidney Morgenbesser, that pragmatism is absolutely correct in theory, but does not work out in practice. However, if this is a sin, it is one the authors share with most of the classical pragmatists. Except for Jane Addams, whose philosophical writing is always embedded in concrete details of practice, Peirce, James, and Dewey all have a penchant for the abstract and programmatic in much of their writing. Personally, I have some sympathy with Woodward’s defence of ‘general philosophy of science’ as against only doing case study-driven philosophy of particular sciences; without the kind of general philosophical discussions featured in this book, philosophy of science is in danger of becoming ‘mere science reporting’ or ‘science journalism’ (p. 16), or what I would call ‘rationalist micro-sociology of science’.

When I was a student in the first decade of this century, writing my dissertation on Dewey and pragmatist philosophy of science, pragmatism still had a pretty bad reputation in mainstream philosophy. The situation is very different today; pragmatism is seemingly being discussed everywhere, Dewey is being read by enthusiastic students, and books like The Pragmatist Challenge are bringing central, once-disparaged pragmatist ideas into the mainstream conversation. The essays in this book are all rich and complex pieces, and I have only scratched the surface of what is interesting about each. No doubt the book will repay careful re-reading and application to future issues. It makes me feel that now is a good moment to be a pragmatist philosopher of science.

My only note of caution is that we not make the mistake of earlier ‘revivals’ of the pragmatist tradition by focusing exclusively on the epistemological and metaphysical, to the exclusion of the ethical and political. To do so is to make a mistake on pragmatist grounds as large as the mistake identified in this volume of treating epistemology and metaphysics as separate rather than inextricable inquiries. The epistemology and metaphysics of science likewise cannot be treated separately from the ethics and political philosophy of science. This focus also ignores some of the most valuable resources in pragmatism for treating some of the most pressing problems of contemporary science, including the role of experts in democratic society and public trust of scientists and scientific knowledge. In line with this, I will end with a quotation from Dewey ([1931], pp. 19–20) that has long been my lodestar: ‘To work exclusively within the context provided by the sciences themselves is to ignore their vital context. The place of science in life, the place of its peculiar subject-matter in the wide scheme of materials we experience, is a more ultimate function of philosophy that is any self-contained reflection upon science as such’.

Matthew J Brown
Southern Illinois University
matt.brown@siu.edu

Notes

^[1] Compare (Chang [2022], p. 20).

References

Barrotta, P. [2018]: Scientists, Democracy, and Society: A Community of Inquirers, Cham: Springer.

Brown, M. J. [2020]: Science and Moral Imagination: A New Ideal for Values in Science, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Chang, H. [2022]: Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dewey, J. [1915]: ‘The Logic of Judgments of Practice’, in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Middle Works, 1899–1924, vol. 8, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 14–82.

Dewey, J. [1931]: ‘Context and Thought’, in J. A. Boydston (ed.), The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 6, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 3–21.

Godfrey-Smith, P. [2002]: ‘Dewey on Naturalism, Realism, and Science’, Philosophy of Science, 69, pp. S25–35.

Gronda, R. [2020]: Dewey’s Philosophy of Science, Cham: Springer.

Gronda, R., Janack, M. and Marchetti, G. [forthcoming]: Pragmatism and Philosophy of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, London: Routledge.

James, W. [1896]: ‘The Will to Believe’, The New World, 5, pp. 327–47.

Kitcher, P. [2005]: ‘The Hall of Mirrors’, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 79, pp. 67–84.

Magnus, P. D. [2022]: ‘William James on Risk, Efficacy, and Evidentialism’, Episteme, 19, pp. 146–58.

Misak, C. J. [2007]: New Pragmatists, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Putnam, H. [1981]: Reason, Truth, and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.