Is Pragmatist method a contradiction in terms?
In this essay I will discuss the implications of modern Pragmatism for academic method, in particular that of the social sciences. Since Pragmatism rejects epistemological foundationalism, this may seem counter-intuitive. None the less, given a rethinking of what philosophy can tell us about the academy, it is entirely possible. For the purposes of this essay I will define method as the aggregate behaviours and techniques of those involved in the creation and promulgation of academic knowledge. Given this Pragmatist definition of method, Pragmatist method is not a contradiction in terms.
The reinvention of Pragmatism in the wake of the linguistic turn in analytical philosophy coincided with a crisis in the philosophy of science. The foundational project of Falsificationism came under fire from the descriptions of science offered by Kuhn (1996) and, taking things to their logical extreme, Feyerabend (2008). Though these developments were not directly related, they would none the less come to be reconciled into what we might call a Pragmatist method.
The Pragamtist theory of knowledge, or better of knowing, is predicated on the rejection of the observer theory of knowledge and the Cartesian and Platonic baggage that goes with it. Oppositions between objectivity and subjectivity, mind and body and mental and physical are seen as no longer workable. Putnam, drawing on early Pragmatism, described understanding as an ability (Putnam, 1975). This is mirrored in Berstein's reading of Gadamer's hermeneutic method, where application is an intrinsic aspect of understanding (Berstein, 1986, p. 94). Given a linguistic and behavioural conception of knowledge, the logical next step is to look at the context in which language and behaviours happen.
This conclusion, that the implication of the new theory of knowing is that we must ask more questions rather than start making pronouncements, coincides with several other philosophical projects that have had a great impact on Pragmatism today. I have already mentioned the turn away from foundational and directive philosophy of science. The descriptive foundations of the new philosophy of science, which parallels genealogical history, shed light on the great disconnects in theory, vocabulary, method and meaning between consecutive paradigms. Kuhn's principal that when one reads the parts of an old scientific text that seem irrational and try to understand how an intelligent person could have written them, it transforms the meaning of the parts one thought one knew, tells us a great deal about the rootedness of truth claims. The Whiggish approach of scientific text books may be a useful pedagogical feature, but, Kuhn argued, it serves to create a view of science as monolithic and progressive that cannot be readily reconciled with its actual history.
Another narrative which influenced Pragmatism is that of the later Wittgenstein's disillusionment with foundationalism which lead to his reconceptualisation of the role of philosophy as a discipline that should concern itself with describing language games. Noticing the disconnect between religious language and the language of the positivists with whom he was once aligned he argued that philosophy is too ready to take language out of its context, rendering it useless and meaningless. Putting language, and therefore understanding, in a behavioural context is one of the key features of Rorty's Pragmatism as well (Rorty, 1980).
The understanding of knowledge as behavioural gives autonomy to the academy. No longer can it be asked to apply a neutral algorithm handed down by philosophical discoveries about the nature of reality. Philosophy, for Pragmatists, must relinquish its claim to be the foundation of knowledge, or even the only voice describing its creation. Rorty has found difficulty describing quite what philosophy is in the post-epistemological world. In the end he came up with the answer that it is the work of people who have read a certain set of books. Perhaps the implication of this is that those who have spent so long writing footnotes to footnotes to Plato should start writing footnotes to everyone else as well. In other words philosophy becomes the hand maid rather than the queen of inquiry.
After making the initial moves outlined above the idea of a Pragmatist Method seems even more remote than it did to start with. Perhaps it is, but those moves have given us a radically new perspective on what philosophy can offer the rest of the academy and in particular the social sciences. Often times Post-Structuralist deconstruction has been seen as a negative project, and indeed Rorty (1999) has criticised what he calls the Foucauldian left for engaging in something like it on a political level, however I contend that a 'Pragmatist deconstruction' of the academy can offer important insight into its methods that not only clarify how to create knowledge, but can also answer such questions as why.
Knowledge creation, which is far from being the only function of the institutions and individuals that engage in the project, but is the by-product we are here concerned with, has two essential preconditions. Roughly speaking these can be characterised as context and goals. In a sense context dictates goals, but through awareness, goals become servants of an ethnos rather than its rulers. Few things can be said universally about the context of knowledge creation, and almost nothing about goals. However, since method traditional conceived does concern itself with a neutral episteme, it may be useful to point out the extent to which a Pragmatist approach can be reconciled with the concept.
Chomsky in his work on linguistics and the universal grammar used the idea of a limited infinity. He said that whilst there are effectively an infinite number of manifestations of language, we can still set limits for what those manifestations might look like. Whilst the incursion of materialist models of the mind on Philosophy itself has been poorly received, as Rorty notes (1980, p. 214; 1982, p. 32), in terms of assessing the possibilities of theory, they are invaluable. Unfortunately the nature the constraints of human understanding are, like James'(1950) idea of the 'I', a logical extrapolation, and are inherently non-experiential. None the less, a neurological account of knowledge creation sheds light on why some disciplines, particularly maths, proceed so uniformly, whilst others seem riddled with internal conflict. Whilst most people agree that numbers have no more 'objective' existence (that is existence external to human systematisation) than do class or race, numerical categories tend to be far more closely constrained by human neurology than do social ones. Whilst we may acknowledge that almost all mathematical concepts, from set theory to the number three, have not existed in some cultures, we must concede that the possibilities for mathematical variation and progress are rather more constrained than those of sociology.
Chomsky's use of the concept of limited infinities is founded in neurology. However, we can usefully use it to analyse cultural rootedness. Whilst language may be constrained by neurology, it is, none the less, a cultural artefact. So are other tools of inquiry, from telescopes to journals. The acknowledgement of this rootedness, be it biological or sociological, is central to the Pragmatist view of method since it has such strong implications for how to go about acquiring knowledge. Its central lesson is that we do not receive knowledge, we make it.
Returning then to context and goals, we have learned something about the context in which all human knowledge is created. The application of Pragmatism to more specific contexts offers further insight. In order to do so a word on the goals of social science is worthwhile.
Social Science's relationship with the idea that knowledge should be created for a purpose has always been a turbulent one, haunted by the illusory spectre of the pure representationalism of the natural sciences. Pragmatism abolishes this idea immediately with the claim that knowledge always is created for a purpose, so the question is no longer about objective vs. advocational approaches, it is about which goals to peruse. Rorty calls for philosophy and the social sciences to pursue emancipatory projects. After all, social facts always have social implications, as well as different meanings within different paradigms. Therefore, we must be aware of the sort of facts we wish to create. If Pragmatists are right about the inapplicability of the idea of objectivity, then when it is applied it may very well be a mask for the smug recreation of tacit assumptions or persual of tacit goals. There is nothing wrong with setting as our goal the creation of theories that meet various standard matrices that in the past have been used to measure objectivity. However, an awareness of why these standards coincide with our goals in creating a theory is vital in Pragmatist method. The move beyond objectivity has always been a rather moot point in certain fields, including much of psychotherapy and some of political or economic theory, where achieving goals quite removed from the world in which knowledge is created, be it recovery from depression or recovery from a depression, has always been a central theme. However, grounding other fields of social inquiry in social goals , whatever those are, is key to both understanding knowledge creation but also to harnessing its power.
Having established that goals are the sine qua non of any research project, can Pragmatism tell us anything about how such research projects should proceed? Pragmatists refuse to deal in methodological specifics since the multiplicity of goals, knowledge producing communities, available techniques, objects of inquiry and so on necessitate methodological diversity (Baert, 2005 p. 150). None the less, Pragmatism does have something to say about how a theory or project can be successful. Central to the idea of success in Pragmatist method is the idea of consensus, which is central for two reasons. First, Pragmatists hold that consensus is the best legitimate analogy for the illegitimate idea of objectivity that we have -agreement after discussion within a community of inquirers, Rorty (1991) uses the phrase solidarity, is the best test of truth- and second, the achievement of social goals must include the creation of some degree of consensus within the communities those goals concern – emancipatory projects must move out of academy and into the ethnos at large.
Pragmatism is unusual as a result of this in implying that the creation of consensus is part of the method of any successful project. This echoes Kuhn's(1996) claim that when people cease to work within the paradigm the community of their peers, they cease to be scientists. The implication is stronger than that however, and includes the perhaps scandalous idea that persuasion, rhetoric and inter-personal relationships are as much a part of academic projects as are experiments or essays. In some communities the rules for the creation of consensus are firmly established and easy to use. It is rare to hear two mathematicians arguing over the validity of piece of algebra. In the rather autistic mathematical and physical disciplines rather autistic interactions and language can still create consensus (Baron-Cohen, 2003). However, in the social sciences it is inappropriate to replicate such modes of discourse. Bernstein (1983) complains that too often in the Geistesswissenschaften academics see their role as building systems ('intellectual fortresses') and knocking down those of others. He calls for discussion rather than confrontation. Such a discussion might even include the people social research seeks to produce knowledge about. Ethnography in particular offers opportunities for this that, more recently, have been taken up by many of those using the technique.
Regarding the creation of consensus as a methodological problem may shed some light on the perceived failure of the method of social sciences as compared to the natural sciences. Given a Pragmatist reflection on the issue it becomes clear that the problem arises not because social scientists are taking the wrong approach to their subject, but, more often than not, because they are taking the right approach. There should be a multiplicity of goals and voices in the social sciences, just as there are a multiplicity of goals and voices in the ethnos it springs from. Indeed, if there were not fundamental disconnects in the societies creating social science, there would hardly be any call for the disciplines. There is far less call for a social analysis of gender in a society where gender is not confusing anyone than in our own, and the same goes for every issue in the social sciences. After all, doubt is crucial to inquiry. Without doubt there is no impetus for new discovery.
The issue of doubt is crucial to Pragmatist method. In a sense Pragmatism springs from a crisis of confidence in the west predicated on such phenomena as Nietzsche (the end of intellectual adherence to dominant narratives) and the five day week (the luxury of a society to think-Rorty has explicitly described doubt as a luxury). Doubt has had a long history of treatment in theology, and the theology of Paul Tillich offers us a way out of the crisis of doubt that characterises 'post-modern' society. For Tillich (2001) doubt is part of faith, with out the one, the other really makes no sense. So our doubt need not be the same as despond. Tillich talks of God as the ultimate concern of the believer. Perhaps then Pragmatism might point to the need to move beyond belief in our society and its projects to faith. Rorty (1991, p. 63) explicitly describes Tillich as saying the same things as Dewey to a different audience, saying he sees no difference between his theology and Pragmatist philosophy of religion. Rorty (1999) in many ways embraces this approach to social theory in his analysis of the historical significance of the United States. For Tillich the apparent discrepancy between doubt and faith is overcome through hope, and it is clearly hope which, for Rorty, defines the emancipatory project of Pragmatism.
Just as Pragmatism favours hope as a solution to the hole created by the absence of objectivity, it favours responsibility as being ultimately the answer to the question 'with what should we replace epistemology?' Just as we must be aware of our own prejudices (Bernstein, 1983, p.97; Baert, 2005, p.155) we must be aware of the contradictions they produce. Through this self awareness we can hope to reconcile the desperate goals both tacit and explicit of our own ethnos through discussion. Whilst we cannot hope to step outside of our ethnos, through greater self awareness we can hope to take it in the direction we wish it to go, towards the goals we wish to achieve. We can no longer hide behind the Enlightenment's prejudice against prejudice, the stern refusal to examine one's own culture in the hope of holding on to objectivity, though it seems that such phenomena as the rise of the Christian Right in the US or the so called science wars of the 90s indicate a sincere desire to do so. The responsibility of the academy to the ethnos and vice versa is perhaps the most important implication of the Pragmatist move beyond objectivity.
Pragmatist method, in the final analysis, is not an epistemology, rather a description of the methods we see used when we look at the academy through a Pragmatist lens. Social facts always have social implications, and Pragmatist analysis certainly has implications for how social scientists might rethink their relationship with their subject matter and with their communities. A traditional model of method simply tells one how to mirror reality. A Pragmatist discussion of method suggests ways in which one might create knowledge to serve your goals and the goals of your ethnos. Pragmatist method is not a contradiction in terms so long as we do not rely for our ideas on what method should mean on traditional epistemology.
Bibliography:
Baert, Patrick: Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism, Cambridge : Polity, 2005
Baron-Cohen, Simon: The essential difference : men, women and the extreme male brain, London : Allen Lane, 2003
Bernstein, Richard: Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermenuetics and Praxis, Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983
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Feyerabend, Paul: Against Method, London : Verso, 2008
James, William: The Principles of Psychology, New York : Dover Publications, 1950
Kuhn, Thomas: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1996
Putnam, Hillary: Philosophical papers, Vol.2, Mind, language and reality, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1975
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Rorty, Richard: Philosophical Papers Volume 1: Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1991
Rorty, Richard: Philosophy and Social Hope, London : Penguin, 1999
Tillich, Paul: The Dynamics of Faith, London : Harper Perennial, 2001
Pragmatist philosophy and academia