Pragmatism as a way of life": Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam on the philosophical legacy of James and Dewey

The writings of Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam, collected by David Macarthur for Harvard UP, invite us to take a fresh look at the history of American pragmatism. William James and John Dewey are viewed as paradigmatic pragmatists, the only true representatives of the tradition. It is widely believed that James played a secondary though, no doubt, practically important role in the development of pragmatism. The Putnams disagree: William James can be rightly considered to be a co-founder of the pragmatist school. In his debut article published in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy in 1878, James acutely criticises Spencer's positivism. The naive-realistic model of cognition as representation (the spectator's point of view) is contrasted here with the idea of interaction with reality through its study and adaptation (the agent point of view). James's "knower" does not passively register facts and ready-made truths, reflecting an order he comes upon and finds simply existing, but "creates" truths. In apprehending the world, we change it. For pragmatists, human experience is never "neutral": verification and valuation are "interdependent". In the Putnams' reconstruction, Dewey and James were mainly concerned with rectification and adaptation of Peirce's ideas. The key concept of Peircean pragma-ti(ci)sm, "doubt", transforms in Dewey's writings into a "problematic" (existentially uncertain) situation, and "belief' with its psychological and possibly relativistic connotations is replaced by "warranted assertion". It is not the perceiver's state of mind, R.A. Putnam says, but the situation itself that is problematic. A true hypothesis is like the key that fits a lock; it enables us to move from an indeterminate situation into one that is determinate, not from feeling of doubt to feeling of certainty. Dewey and James were fallibilists, but certainly not skeptics. According to classicopragmatism, any of our hypotheses can be refuted, and expectations frustrated, but that is no reason to suspend all belief, or to refuse to use the term "true". Doubts require justification just as much as beliefs. That one can be both fallibilistic and anti-skeptical is "the basic insight" of American pragmatism, the Putnams suggest.

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