NEW PERSPECTIVES ON PRAGMATISM AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY pdf

Specifically, Habermas credits Mead with developing the basic theoretical concepts of the ethics of communication, in other words, the notions of “universal discourse” and the “formal id

NEW PERSPECTIVES

ON PRAGMATISM AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY

a volume in

Studies in Pragmatism and Values

SPV

Volume 228Robert Ginsberg

Founding Editor

Leonidas Donskis

Executive Editor Associate Editors

Harvey Cormier , Editor

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Edited by

Rosa M Calcaterra

NEW PERSPECTIVES

ON PRAGMATISM AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY

Cover Design: Studio Pollmann

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”

ISBN: 978-90-420-3321-4

© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Printed in the Netherlands

Studies in Pragmatism and Values

Paul C Bube and Jeffrey L Geller, eds Conversations with Pragmatism: A

Multi-Disciplinary Study 2002 VIBS 129

Richard Rumana Richard Rorty: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary

Literature 2002 VIBS 130

Guy Debrock, ed Process Pragmatism: Essays on a Quiet Philosophical

Revolution 2003 VIBS 137

John Ryder and Emil Višňovský, eds Pragmatism and Values: The Central

European Pragmatist Forum, Volume One 2004 VIBS 152

John Ryder and Krystyna Wilkoszewska, eds Deconstruction and

Reconstruction: The Central European Pragmatist Forum, Volume Two

2004 VIBS 156

Arthur Efron Experiencing Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Deweyan Account

2005 VIBS 162

Leszek Koczanowicz and Beth J Singer, eds Frederic R Kellogg and

Łukasz Nysler, Assistant Eds Democracy and the Post-Totalitarian

Experience 2005 VIBS 167

Sami Pihlström Pragmatic Moral Realism: Pragmatic Moral Realism

2005 VIBS 171

John Ryder and Gert-Rüdiger Wegmarshaus, eds Education for a

Democratic Society: Central European Pragmatist Forum Volume Three

2007 VIBS 179

Michael Taylor, Helmut Schreier, and Paulo Ghiraldelli, Jr Pragmatism,

Education, and Children: International Philosophical Perspectives 2008

VIBS 192

Hugh P McDonald Creative Actualization: A Meliorist Theory of Values

2011 VIBS 224

CONTENTS

Foreword by Harvey Cormier ix

Introduction by Rosa M Calcaterra xi

Acknowledgements xxi ONE Allowing Our Practices to Speak for Themselves:

Wittgenstein, Peirce, and Their Intersecting Lineages

1 Introduction 1

2 Trying to Understand Our Entanglement in Rules

(Our Locus in Practice) 2

3 What’s the Use of Calling Wittgenstein a Pragmatist? 6

4 A Step Back to View the Larger Context 11

5 The Philosophical Recovery of the

Everyday World/The Mundane Reorientation of

2 Scientism, Anti-naturalism, and Pragmatism 22

3 The Features of Scientific Naturalism 24

4 The Scientistic Character of Scientific Naturalism 27

5 Some Criticisms of Scientific Naturalism 28

6 The Premises of Scientific Naturalism Again 30

THREE The Entanglement of Ethics and Logic

4 The Automatic Sweetheart 53

5 The Sun and The Moon 55

FIVE Action and Representation in Peirce’s Pragmatism

2 A Realistic View of Semiotics 71

3 Semiotics and Pragmatism 75

4 “A sentence says just one thing.” 139

About the Contributors 145

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

If we judge by recently published anthologies, this is the era of “new” figures

in philosophy There is a new Nietzsche, who is not just another late Romantic but who challenges the language and thought of onto-theology; a new Husserl, who is not merely a semantic theorist of intentionality and the life world but who also develops a doctrine of non-fictional, Nietzsche-proof, transcendental subjectivity; a new Wittgenstein, who makes not a simple journey from realism

to anti-realism but a complex transit from one way of ruling out metaphysical nonsense to another; and, now, perhaps inevitably, there are the new pragmatists, who see truth not as a mere relative matter of whatever we in our culture happen to let each other say but as a connection between our thoughts

or words and objective reality

New pragmatism is not to be confused with neopragmatism; in fact, the latter philosophy is the nemesis of the “new” pragmatists The new prag-matism sets out specifically to challenge the evidently idealistic and relativistic view that “there is only the conversation.” The neopragmatist way of understanding truth, thinking, and reality seems to leave humanity tossing in a sea of arbitrariness, with no real grounds for real criticism of what anyone might actually do or say The pragmatic revisionists try to restore the pos-sibility of criticism by putting us back in touch with the world beyond thought and language They set out to locate more objective understandings of truth in the work of the historical pragmatists, and they make their own new arguments

in favor of attention to “how things are, anyway” and “getting things right.” Much if not quite all of the work in the present volume fits under the heading of “new” pragmatism As these essays connect pragmatism with philosophical analysis and its history, they show that pragmatists and analytic thinkers alike have argued for the importance of using logic to deal with philosophical problems, tried to explain scientific method, and offered explanations the idea of the real The pragmatists have emphasized action in connection with knowledge, and they have emphasized the role of values in our understanding of logical truth and scientific facts, but this has not been either a cause or an effect of Protagorean relativism Instead, the pragmatists have challenged the idea, present at the birth of analytic philosophy, that facts and truth are real while values are merely emotional and relative That tenet of logical positivism has fallen by the wayside as analytic philosophy has developed more sophisticated things to say about both science and morality, and, over the course of the last half of the twentieth century, some analytic thinkers have found pragmatism to be more of a complement and less of a competitor

The work in this book will help thinkers in both pragmatic and analytic camps understand and constructively criticize both traditions, and it will help pave the way for future cooperation among thinkers in two of the most productive schools of contemporary philosophical thought

Harvey Cormier

Editor, Studies in Pragmatism and Values

Rosa M Calcaterra

The lively presence of pragmatist doctrines in early 20th-century international debate, their subsequent slow and apparently inexorable decline, and their recent revival are intertwined with the fate of other currents of thought that have marked the revision of traditional philosophical systems This volume aims to clarify the most recent developments in this process, focusing on the key theoretical issues in the revival of salient themes in the classic tradition of American philosophy within the context of analytical thought It will also pinpoint the differences and interactions between these two forms of speculation that, for some time, mutually disregarded one another

The essays in this volume are largely based on the papers presented at the international conference “Pragmatismo e filosofia analitica Differenze e interazioni,” held in Rome in March 2005, with the participation of the Center for American Studies in Rome, the American Embassy in Italy, Roma Tre University and the Presidency of the Lazio Region The wide-ranging discussion between the speakers and the audience at this event evinced a lively interest in the themes considered It also demonstrated both the current tendency of analytical philosophers to define the historical context of their methods of investigation and the commitment of scholars of pragmatism to clarifying the originality and theoretical depth of its canonical works

The pragmatist tradition dominated the American academic scene until the 1930s, when the different strands of analytical philosophy began to develop, introduced by scholars linked to the Vienna Circle – Reichenbach, Carnap, Hempel, Tarski, Neurath and others – who were forced to leave Europe for political reasons As Richard Bernstein has noted, this period saw the beginnings of a sort of “silent revolution,” which over the space of a few years led to the exclusion of pragmatism from the higher levels of philosophical debate The project for a “scientific philosophy,” upheld by those who had imported logical neopositivism from Europe, was warmly welcomed in pragmatist circles and occasioned a lively debate which led to

the International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science initiative, promoted by

John Dewey and Charles Morris However, the view soon spread that the pragmatists, despite having anticipated the criterion of the verifiability of meaning on which neopositivist thought depended, lacked logical and epistemological rigor Their works were considered a sort of prehistory of American philosophy, which became increasingly technical and specialized

In Europe, despite the scathing critiques of influential academics like Bertrand Russell, Francis H Bradley, George E Moore, Benedetto Croce, and

of Giovanni Gentile, pragmatism remained a vital presence during the first two decades of the twentieth century It offered an alternative to neo-Hegelianism, to positivist philosophy, and to the various forms of neo-criticism of Kantian derivation The subsequent establishment of new currents

of thought – phenomenology, Marxism, hermeneutics – led to the near disappearance of pragmatism Nevertheless, pragmatism returned, especially

in Italy, during the aftermath of the First World War, becoming a reference point for liberal democratic laicism During this phase, attention was devoted almost exclusively to Dewey, and to his commitment to politics and pedagogy, while other pragmatists were mostly ignored by European intellectuals Indeed, the criticism of the academic establishment at the beginning of the century had led to pragmatism as a whole being widely discredited, and the movement continued to lose ground following some new and extremely harsh critiques I refer especially to György Lukács who, in his

important 1954 work, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, labelled pragmatism as

the philosophy of American imperialism, and to the brief but incisive judgements expressed by Heidegger, Horkheimer, and Adorno, who spread the conviction that pragmatist attitudes represented a style of thought wilfullydivorced of any principles beyond those of utility and success “here and now.”

Towards the end of the 1960s, the judgements of these authors were sidelined and, through the controversies about the “modern” and the “post-modern” inspired by their works, the theoretical legacy of Peirce, James, Mead, and Dewey began to affect the formulation of the new problems of practical philosophy During the same period, analytical philosophers consolidated their tendency to question the neopositivist epistemological paradigm Within this critical movement, the references to pragmatism in

Quine’s The Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951) allowed for the modification

of a series of standard notions in logical neoempiricism The interaction of pragmatist ideas with the development of “post-positivist” analytical philosophy and the practical philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century has to do with the contemporary problem of determining if and how a constructivist viewpoint can be reconciled with the relativist mentality generated by the crisis of traditional models of rationality

These interactions are often extremely muted (sometimes only recognizable by those who are familiar with classic pragmatist texts) precisely because they form part of the complex range of themes brought into play in philosophical debate In other words, the “pragmatic turn,” now generally attributed to epistemology and practical philosophy, consists of a way of tackling current problems that leads to the re-emergence of some of pragmatism’s typical concerns However, this takes the form of a multiplicity

of reinterpretations dictated by the interests and theoretical standpoints of individual authors, who generally do not intend to repropose one of the specific doctrines developed within this movement In any case, there are now

numerous forms of neopragmatism which sometimes differ profoundly but which nonetheless demonstrate the vitality of a movement that from its origins was characterized by a variety of aspects and directions

The current tendency to abuse the term “pragmatism” aside, in technical debate this word retains its original meaning of a philosophical method tailored to specific theoretical aims Examples of such aims are: to overcome the various forms of dogmatism that run through the history of Western thought; to construct a concept of rationality able to incorporate Darwinism in order to challenge philosophies based on the notion of consciousness as the autonomous “essence” of cognitive activity, morality, and human experience in general; to assert the processual, social, and potentially fallible nature of every knowledge The convergence of these aims with the pragmatist concept of action, according to which this constitutes a precise reference point for recognizing the interconnection between rational and empirical knowledge factors, led to a philosophical alternative to traditional empiricism and ration-alism

More importantly, the concept of action served to critique traditional foundationalism and reconstruct the notion of “foundation” through an approach to the concepts of knowledge, truth, and objectivity that emphasises the variety of their constitutive factors – including specific theoretical and methodological choices, all preconstituted beliefs, logical-semantic presuppositions, and more or less explicit metaphysical outlooks The view of classical pragmatists that our cognitive practices can be debated in a way that may lead us to abandon one or more of the propositions that derive from them – a frequent occurrence in the history of scientific research – does not imply a rejection of the ideas of truth and objectivity themselves On the contrary, their works suggest that truth and objectivity cannot be conceived in terms of the absolute while defending the indispensable function played by these notions in the various fields of knowledge as well as in the concrete nature of our interactions with the physical world and with other human beings.1

The authors who have contributed to this volume bring new developments and historiographical analyses to bear on the main issues raised

by this new season of pragmatism I will therefore give a brief overview of its best-known protagonists in order to provide a basic theoretical background to the individual essays These together form a multi-voiced conversation that signals a common interest in cultivating the ethical and social significance of philosophical thought

The “pragmatic turn” in contemporary thought has particularly emphasised this aspect, finding paradigmatic expression in the practical philosophy of Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel These two philosophers have developed a pragmatic version of the theme of normativity that has become an effective tool for challenging the scepticism and relativism that have accompanied twentieth-century criticism of traditional philosophical systems The theme of normativity is hotly debated in current analytical

philosophy, and the pragmatic approach of some parts of Wittgenstein’s

Philosophical Investigations and especially On Certainty, has given rise to

interpretations of this theme that share much with the anti-sceptical aims of Apel and Habermas.2

Unlike most theorists of post-modernity, Apel and Habermas do not deny the principle of the universality of moral norms, and attempt instead to reconstruct it through an analysis of communicative processes This recon-struction is inspired by Kantian ethical rationalism and the pragmatist attempt

to uphold the regulatory function of the concepts of truth and objectivity Seen in this light, a return to pragmatism signifies gathering up the threads of the Enlightenment project of a philosophical foundation for ethics and exploiting the shift from subjectivity to the epistemological paradigm of intersubjectivity which signals the continuity between pragmatist philosophers and the “linguistic turn” in twentieth-century thought More precisely, it means setting aside the idea of individual consciousness in favour

of notions of “linguistic subject” and “communicative action” in order to define the conditions under which rational arguments are possible and the criteria for their objective validity in science and ethics The outcome of this program is a new functionalism that relies on a consensus theory of truth, emphasizing the performative dimension of discourse rather than its prepositional content

The hypothesis of an “ideal communicative situation,” one free of external restrictions on the logic of discursive communication (which requires the participants in discourse to enjoy equal opportunities to arrive at an intersubjective consensus) has led to a reevaluation of the Kantian transcendental approach to the problem of rationality Apel has proposed that this approach be applied systematically, developing a “pragmatic-transcendental” foundation for ethics According to him, the aim is to continue Pierce’s transformation of Kantian transcendental philosophy into a

“transcendental semiotics”; indeed, the notion of the “unlimited community of rational argumentation” upon which Apel’s “universal pragmatics” hinges refers expressly to Pierce.3 The transcendental course embarked upon by Apel has met with more criticism than consensus within the neopragmatist movement, and even Habermas has gradually distanced himself, preferring an increasingly historicist approach to the justification of ethical norms, which seems more in keeping with the overall approach of the pragmatists

However, the fact remains that Apel and Habermas have placed the analysis of the pragmatic aspects of language at the center of their own interests This parallels an important branch of analytical philosophy developed in the second half of the twentieth century at Oxford and in the United States: the philosophy of ordinary language of authors such as John Austin and John Searle Like the two German philosophers, theorists of ordinary language analyze utterances not in themselves but as “acts” produced

by the speakers; in this case, however, it would be excessive to speak of

pragmatist influences By contrast, there is currently considerable effort to locate the problems of meaning and interpretation within the framework of a

“linguistic pragmatism” that, adopting suggestions by Richard Rorty, draws

on the “late” Wittgenstein and the anti-Platonist line taken by Willard Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, and Donald Davidson.4

Returning to Habermas, we should remember that, even before Apel,

he clarified the linguistic component of the logic in Pierce’s research in his

Erkenntnis und Interesse (1968), which laid the groundwork for his own

“theory of communicative action.” Later, by contrast, he revived Mead’s intuitions regarding the pragmatic matrix of communication – its role in the evolution of moral norms and the processes of democratization of political life Specifically, Habermas credits Mead with developing the basic theoretical concepts of the ethics of communication, in other words, the notions of “universal discourse” and the “formal ideal of linguistic comprehension.” Above all, for Habermas, Mead’s importance lies in having clarified that rationally motivated comprehension is not merely a requirement

of practical reason, but rather is incorporated into the reproduction of social life, and in having demonstrated the link between the spread of democratic ideas and the transformation of the criteria legitimating the modern state.5 The project of a discursive theory of democracy and law, which Habermas continues to develop alongside his universalist ethics, brings to the fore some characteristic traits of pragmatism, as we can see, for example, in his analysis of the relationship between the contemporary state of affairs and modernity’s Enlightenment roots.6

Above all, there are echoes of the pragmatist concept of action as an exemplary dimension of the unity of logical-formal and empirical-material factors in human experience in his insistence on the need to overcome the binary schemes inherited by continental European thought from Cartesian philosophy In the context of social and political philosophy, this entails recognizing that action does not tolerate a dualism of material interests and values; values are incorporated within the rational dimension of action and they govern strategies for the fulfilment of material interests More generally, this recognition is linked to the contemporary awareness of the “imperfect” nature of rationality and entails the need – also expressed by the “non-causalist” analytical theories of action – to conceive of the justification of rational action in terms of a double explanatory code: one that concerns the objective limitations, potentialities, and responsibilities of each individual, and also concerns the beliefs, projects, and imperatives deriving from his or her existence as a social subject.7

The tendency to translate the concept of “foundation” into

“justification” also forms an integral part of the thought of Hilary Putnam, which represents a milestone in recent interactions between pragmatism and analytical philosophy Unlike Rorty, who should be credited with a major contribution in refocusing attention on classic pragmatists, Putnam believes

that Pierce, Dewey, and James developed a decontextualized philosophical terrain on the basis of which it is possible to contain the attacks of contemporary thought on the bastions of traditional foundationalism Specifically, they provided the conceptual tools with that give the democratic ideas of tolerance and pluralism an epistemological justification, safeguarding them from the sceptical implications of ethical and religious relativism, while avoiding the trap of moral authoritarianism At the same time, their works made it possible to establish normative criteria for scientific enquiry, while avoiding the dogmatic pretensions of apriorism Consequently, he defends a constructivist perspective, drawing on the pragmatists’ affirmation of the fallibility of theoretical acquisitions and their faith in the possibility of constructing logical and behavioral habits corroborated by the intersubjective agreement of reasoning on experience

Putnam’s promotion of an epistemology capable of avoiding the classic opposition between realism and anti-realism includes the conception of truth

as a limiting concept, both of the linguistic-conceptual schemes that we ordinarily use and the logical and empirical procedures of scientific research The presupposition of a progressive move towards factual reality is thus a fundamental normative principle of our speech Renouncing this presupposition leads to a relativism inconsistent with the actual execution of our logical-semantic functions This is one of the main theses of the “internal realism” developed in Putnam’s works published between 1975 and 1991, where he stresses the ability of scientific research to achieve “genuine” knowledge that is “justified” both by its technical application and by the resolution of theoretical discrepancies enabled by the development of the individual sciences and their interactions.8

Putnam’s appeal to pragmatism to challenge the puzzles of the realism/antirealism dichotomy gradually takes the shape of a dialogic conception of rationality that combines individual responsibility and the concept of community, naturalism and the relational approach to the problem

of epistemic intermediaries, and finally the dimension of facts and that of

values The latter aspect is sanctioned by Putnam’s recent work, The Collapse

of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (2002), which explicitly refers

to the importance of the challenge launched by classic pragmatists on a conceptual opposition whose roots lie in Hume’s empiricism and which, through the Kantian distinction between synthetic and analytic judgements, has become established to the point of becoming a genuine cliché Indeed, the entanglement of facts and values is one of pragmatism’s fundamental strengths, and Putnam understands that this also holds true for Pierce, often considered a champion of the separation of science from ethics, in other words of that separation of judgements of fact from judgements of value insisted on by neopositivists In his commentary on the first of the

“Cambridge Lectures” held by Peirce in 1898, dedicated to precisely this problem, he observes that although Peirce’s conclusions were in line with the

common tendency of his time to propose a classification of the sciences on the basis of distinctions between their methods and objectives, Peirce’s classificatory effort “was based on deeper principles than the classification” and that ultimately, “Peirce burst the frame of the culture that produced him.”9Putnam also rightly observes that the classification of the sciences is something that has essentially disappeared from the intellectual scene today However, it is evident that the clarification of epistemic and methodological distinctions is anything but obsolete, and he himself strives to demolish the dichotomy between the logic of facts and that of values If this means we must set aside “architectonic” intentions, we should reconsider Peirce’s discourse on the intimate relationship between the normative sciences (ethics, logic, aesthetics), if for no other reason than to draw from it ideas for developing what he termed “concrete rationality.”

The anti-dichotomic stance of the pragmatists has been widely underscored by its interpreters, and Rorty uses it as a point of reference for transferring fundamental philosophical terms – objective, subjective, internal, external, nature, spirit, fact, value – from the paradigm of foundationalist epistemology to that of hermeneutic-historicist philosophy The arguments between Putnam and Rorty have led to a wide-ranging debate on their interpretations of pragmatism, which produced and continues to produce important results on the historiographical level, and also for the reconstruction

of the shift from neopositivist to post-positivist analytical epistemology However, from the standpoint of theory, to ask which of the two is the most faithful interpreter of the classic tradition of American philosophy is an irrelevant question What is important is the fact that the different interpretative paths taken by Rorty and Putnam reflect not only two different ways of understanding the task of philosophical reflection, but also many of the current divergences in the formulation of the classic problems of epistemology, such as those of truth, the relationship between perceptions and judgements, between the mind and the body, between socio-cultural and natural aspects of human interactions with reality, and finally the relationship between ethics and logic The essays in this volume demonstrate that the texts

of Peirce and his companions, directed against Descartes andKantian transcendentalism, and developing Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the nascent scientific psychology in a wholly original way, help usto answer the questions which today’s philosophy has inherited from traditional epistemology However, this means that it is above all necessary to determine

to what extent the problems of the past can be translated into those of today, bearing in mind that the paths indicated by the pragmatists for thereformulation of philosophical research – especially to break with dichotomies and false dilemmas, such as subjective/objective, epi-stemic/ethical, empirical/rational, internal/external – have in the meantime both encountered new obstacles and developed in new directions

Seen in this light, Rorty’s conviction that reevaluating pragmatism is equivalent to building a bridge between analytical and “continental” philosophers can also be understood as an invitation to make different viewpoints interact, without necessarily having to depart radically from our gnoseological tradition I refer especially to the possibility of interpreting the continuity and divergences between the pragmatists, Kant, and Hegel with the tools of analytical philosophy, in order to tackle the theme of epistemic intermediaries which lies at the heart of the debate between naturalists and anti-naturalists, realists and anti-realists Rorty’s “historicist nominalism”

rightly abandons the idea that tertia play a representationalist role of the

Cartesian or Lockian type However, we may ask ourselves, for example, if reflection on language really requires us to choose between Rorty’s inferentialism and the representationalism of thinkers like Ramsey and Fodor; and in any case, if a systematic theory of meaning is superfluous if we wish to understand the cognitive aspects of language as a tool for reflection and communication Furthermore, the socio-linguistic world, on which Rortian neopragmatism focuses, may also include a principle of correspondence with reality, without which it would be difficult to recognize the objective limitations of our operative possibilities and our cognitive goals In more general terms, it remains to be seen whether taking cultural history as the determining factor in the evolution of our conceptual schemes suffices to resolve the problem of deciding whether logical capacities are the result of biological evolution or the autonomy of human intelligence

Recent analytical philosophy has employed sophisticated forms of naturalism (computationalism, supervenience, eliminativism, extensionalism) that fail to answer many questions regarding specifically human abilities, normativity, and the social and moral aspects of our logical and practical skills If we read the texts of classic pragmatists with care, we will regard the argument between naturalists and anti-naturalists as an improvident conflict between science and philosophy, one that Rorty has not mitigated with his statements of their common nature as “creative” activities The naturalist vein running through the works of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead maintains the distinction between science and philosophy, recalling the need to establish a synergy between philosophical and scientific research on human beings This should take the form of a theoretical dialogue that exploits the potential of both philosophy and science for increasing our knowledge of the relevant phenomena and thus for implementing a plurality of ways of tackling the various problems facing us Above all, these authors should be credited with having left open the question of the relationship between the physical and mental, avoiding absolutist metaphysical choices – both of the spiritualist and the materialist type – which risk compromising the concrete difficulty of the problems and needs that constitute our individual and social lives

Rorty’s wavering between naturalism and historicism nonetheless recalls us to the task of verifying the notion of sociality so dear to the “old”

pragmatists, opposed to all rigidly reductionist principles and facile Darwininan criteria, with the confirmation that this notion is currently achieving in the field of neuroscience This implies careful reflection on the role of intersubjectivity with respect to our ability to interact successfully with the world around us As such, while admitting that “truth” is not a purely objective entity or metaphysical concept, is it sufficient to think that there are

no extra-linguistic criteria or ends, as Rorty suggests? In this context, it is worth noting that Quine, Davidson, and Sellars, authors on whom Rortian neopragmatism draws to suggest an interaction between post-positivist analytical philosophy, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Gadamer, do not abandon the realist criterion, but rather reformulate in an attempt to overcome the conflict between empiricism and logicism In other words, we can agree with Rorty in seeing in Quine, Sellars, and Davidson the allies of classic pragmatists, but for different reasons Quine’s famous challenge to the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions touched on a key point

in pragmatist philosophy: the assertion of interference between the logical dimension and the empirical dimension Furthermore, we can find in Peirce, Dewey, and Clarence Irving Lewis – one of Quine’s teachers – the principle according to which the analysis of scientific propositions must be undertaken considering the theoretical and empirical context of individual statements This implies that the truth and meaning of scientific propositions cannot be reduced to so-called sense-data–and also that the set of empirical and logical evidence used on any given occasion to justify a theory cannot be taken as definitive proof of its truth Although Quine thus restated the anti-dualist and fallibilist attitude of classic pragmatists, he nevertheless did not abandon the conviction that the experience of events was a sure, albeit complex, way of knowing something of their reality

Similarly, Sellars’s attacks on the “myth of the given,” which adopted the epistemological criterion of intersubjectivity on which Pierce had based his logical “socialism,” did not imply a conventionalist or anti-representationalist conception of truth On the contrary, he stated that scientific propositions are “interpretative” representations of reality, and that they are true exactly insofar as they manage to transfer the non-linguistic into linguistic form Finally, Davidson’s coherentism includes, as he himself notes, a sophisticated form of correspondentism, in other words a correspondence between beliefs and reality without direct comparison His rebuttal of what he calls “the third dogma of empiricism,”–the distinction between “conceptual scheme” and “empirical content”– does not stop him from repeating, in his theory of “triangulation,” that the concepts of truth and objectivity gain substance in intersubjective communication, which presupposes that human beings share at least the basic ways of receiving experiential data and reacting to physical stimuli

Finally, pragmatism and analytical philosophy have marked the entire development of twentieth-century North American philosophical culture, and

this volume aims to represent a moment of reflection on the unfolding of the dialogue between these two lines of thought that has taken place in recent decades Studies are currently underway on little-known philosophers who acted as intermediaries between American realism and the logical empiricism imported from Europe This will show that the latter was not extraneous to the American cultural context and will also renew the ties between realism and pragmatism Perhaps this will allow us to avoid pragmatism’s becoming too rapidly placed in opposition to the original aims of analytical philosophy, and

to understand that its history reflects the typical pattern followed by the evolution of philosophical ideas That is to say, the fact that this is essentially

a history of questions and attempts to answer them that, in turn, open up new questions that may lead to the reappearance of needs or suggestions previously set aside

NOTES

1 For a philological reconstruction of these aspects, see Rosa Calcaterra,

Pragmatismo: i valori dell’esperienza Letture di Peirce, James e Mead (Rome:

Monist Library of Philosophy, 1983)

4 See R B Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000)

5 J Habermas, Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns vol II (Frankfurt a M.: Suhrkamp, 1981) See also J Habermas, The Paradigm Shift in Mead, in Philosophy, Social Theory, and The Thought of G H Mead, ed M Abulafia (Albany:

Kluver Academic Publishers, 1999)

8 See in particular H Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp 232–51 and pp 217–31

9 Reasoning and the Logic of Things, ed H Putnam & Kenneth L Ketner

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992)

A good number of these essays were prepared for the international conference “Pragmatismo e filosofia analitica Differenze e interazioni,” held,

at the Center for American Studies in Rome in March 2005, while several others stem from the extensive debate that took place in that occasion Particular thanks go to the American Embassy in Italy, which offered most part of the financial support to the Conference, as well as to the Presidency of Lazio Region and to the Center for American Studies in Rome, expecially to its director Karim Mezran, both of which generously contributed to the success of the event I also thank the Department of Philosophy of Roma Tre University for the support to the publication of this volume

I am very grateful to Nicolas Leon for his copy-editing He has been very helpful in improving the texts and always very kind in discussing his suggestions with the authors I wish to express my gratitude to Harvey Cormier, the editor of Rodopi, to Giovanni Maddalena for his continuous encouragement and sound advices, and to Maria Luisi for indexing this book Permission given by Quodlibet publisher to reprint some of the essays previously appeared in the book “Pragmatismo e filosofia analitica Differenze e interazioni” (2006) is gratefully acknowledged

ALLOWING OUR PRACTICES TO SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES: WITTGENSTEIN, PEIRCE, AND THEIR INTERSECTING LINEAGES

Vincent Colapietro

1 Introduction

Ludwig Wittgenstein explicitly denies that he is a pragmatist and, in turn, many contemporary pragmatists strenuously resist the possibility that the affinities between the later Wittgenstein and the classical pragmatists are anything but superficial More than anything else, the question of quietism seems to mark, from the perspective of such pragmatists, a difference that makes a decisive and fundamental difference Wittgenstein insists:

“Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it.”1 He adds: “It leaves everything as it is.”2 In contrast, William James (a thinker who influenced Wittgenstein) asserts:

The really vital question for us is, What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself? The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore alter its place The earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must resume its rights.3

For James, then, the truly central question is, What are we going to make of our lives and thus of the world in which we are destined to live our lives? For Wittgenstein, the question does not seem to concern the self in its relationship

to the world, in the same sense as that preoccupying the pragmatists But it unquestionably concerns just this relationship, though in a way in which issues of patience and forbearance, the acceptance of finitude and discipline

of self, are more prominent than those of melioration and reparation, the reconstruction of institutions and remaking of our practices

The purpose of this paper is obliquely to consider the self in relationship to the world by directly considering questions about practice (thus, ones about our engagement in, indebtedness to, and estrangement from the practices in and through which human lives acquire their singular shapes)

This is done in reference to the later Wittgenstein and the classical pragmatists That is, our concern is with the practical (or pragmatic) meaning

of practice, as this meaning is illuminated by Wittgenstein and pragmatism The clarification of this meaning carries implications for how we ought to conceive, most likely reconceive, the self in its relationship to the world It

also carries implications for how the philosophical recovery of the everyday

world of human experience might be accomplished and, of greater urgency, why it must be undertaken Such recovery both enjoins an acceptance of our finitude and underwrites certain struggles against the actual limits of our inherited worlds It takes seriously the possibility that human consciousness

is, at bottom, exilic consciousness, that human identity is, especially in our epoch, “diasporic identity.”4 But it does so in ways refusing to succumb to the persistent pressure of a largely unacknowledged romanticism, especially that form of romanticism rooted in the quite local ideal of a rootless cosmopolitanism Such a recovery takes local attachments and actual place, historical contingencies and natural habitats, with utmost seriousness

In the end, part of the answer to the question, “What’s the use of calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist?” is bound up with the vital contribution of the later Wittgenstein to the pragmatic clarification of questions concerning human practices (thus, ones concerning human identity and involvement), questions unquestionably central to pragmatism The danger of losing the distinctive voice of this singular philosopher by identifying him too closely with pragmatism is offset by the greater risk of failing to clarify adequately,

by eschewing his guidance and example, the pragmatic meaning of human practices One way to examine the relationship between analytic philosophy and American pragmatism is to explore the intersecting lineages of Peirce and

Wittgenstein in reference to a pivotal issue (one central in both lineages), for

the purpose of addressing this question.5The question of practice – in truth, a cluster of questions – is especially promising in this respect

2 Trying to Understand Our Entanglement in Rules (Our Locus in

Practice)

In On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein observes: “Not only rules, but also

examples are needed for establishing a practice.”6 While human practices are governed and indeed defined by constitutive and other kinds of rules, they are not so tightly and completely bound by rules that their institution, maintenance, and indeed revision are solely or even mainly explicable in reference to following rules Emphasis upon the rule-governed character of human practices, thus, should not be confused with the formalist dream of identifying a finite set of explicit rules underlying the only apparently messy affair of historically evolved and evolving practices These practices rather are inherently and irreducibly messy and improvisational Indeed, they might

be best described as occasions and resources for improvisations At any rate,

practices are exemplified as much, if not more, than regulated: arguably, the

dramatic, exemplary performances of competent practitioners are primary, while codifiable, explicit rules are at most secondary.7 Of course, most of the constitutive rules of any human practice are made manifest and attractive by such performances: rules, but also much else, are explained, justified, and learned through exemplification In reference to human practices, then, the importance of constitutive rules cannot be gainsaid, but the status, character, and operation of these rules is open to a host of questions

Immediately after observing that examples along with rules are needed

to establish a practice, Wittgenstein adds: “Our rules leave loop-holes open, and the practice has to speak for itself.”8 The seemingly rudimentary level of human activity which he is willing to accord the status of practice is made clear by the example he himself gives of the point just made: “We do not learn the practice of making empirical judgments by learning rules; we are

taught judgments [Urteile] and their connexion with other judgments A totality [Ein Ganzes] is made plausible to us.”9 Judging whether sugar is sweet, the position of the table is alterable, or the dog is fearsome is a practice

or, possibly, a family of practices We learn to make empirical judgments not

in an atomistic fashion (“we are taught judgments and their connexion with

other judgments”), but in an expansive context.10 Learning to make such judgments is the initiation into a situated, social practice; for the learner, the context of initiation is a narrowly bounded one, but very quickly the context becomes as the direct result of more effectively integrated competencies an expansive one Moreover, such judgments are not so much taught as learned

by us in reaction to the warnings, corrections, and explanations of others Though one can learn on one’s own (that is, without teachers), the circumstances on which I am focusing here are ones in which “teachers” are present, thus, ones in which learning and teaching are correlative activities Hence, when I stress such judgments are not so much taught as learned, I am simply emphasizing the agency of the learner, though in practical response to environing conditions (including the intelligent interventions of other human agents and the unexpected outcomes of the unwitting learner’s own physical engagements – the attempt to hold the flame in her fingers or to move the table with the whole of one’s body).11 They are spontaneously made by irrepressibly active organisms and continuously corrected or modified as a consequence of the objections prompted by our exertions (both the objections

of other human beings – for example, “Don’t touch the stove!” – and those emanating directly from the object itself – for example, the experience being burned).12 That is, we as situated actors (or implicated agents) are taught by other persons and indeed also by physical objects the immediately practical meaning of our own exertions and the judgments embodied in these strivings (for example, the judgment that what is delightful to sight must also be delightful to touch).13 Under the tutelage of other persons and things, then, we

as spontaneous actors learn to make empirical judgments

These judgments are not made in isolation from one another or from the circumstances in which desires, fears, and other impulses are continuously operative These judgments are not only made by agents but also ordinarily take the form of action (the child reaching to touch the dancing flame of acandle is, in the act of reaching to touch this flame, in effect judging) Running away from the dog is, in itself (that is, apart from any verbal articulation or conscious attribution), a somatic, affective judgment: running away is itself a judgment

What are given are hence not disjoined data requiring an intelligent synthesis What is given is rather life, though not in any amorphous, abstract sense That is, what is given is life in a structured, concrete sense – a form of life more or less recognizably human or, at least, intelligible to humans14

“What has to be accepted, the given is – so one could say – forms of life [Lebensformen].”16 In the context of a Lebensform, we learn to make

empirical judgments under the direct tutelage of respondent others, a sign that all of our learning assumes the structure of a dialogue (an ongoing give-and-take between self and the world in which the self is situated and indeed implicated) The capacity to make such judgments is, as already noted, accorded by Wittgenstein the status of a practice

Because the rules by which our practices are partly defined “leave loop-holes open,” we must grant our practices opportunities to speak for

themselves (“die Praxis muß für sich selbst sprechen”).17 In his way, Wittgenstein is committed to a form of investigation in which practices are granted such opportunities, while the pragmatists in their somewhat different way are no less committed to just this task Thus, one way in which to bring into focus their affinities and differences is to consider how Wittgenstein on the one side and the pragmatists on the other provide in their writings for such opportunities It might be objected that these philosophers are speaking for the practices under consideration rather than allowing for the practices to speak for themselves But their speaking is acknowledged on both sides as a mode

of action.18 Moreover, it is undertaken ultimately for the sake of facilitating other modes of action and engagement, ones not requiring a justification by appeal to anything outside of these activities or engagements These ungrounded ways of acting thus turn out to be self-grounded affairs

But Wittgenstein’s insistence upon practices speaking for themselves might be taken in a somewhat narrow sense, meaning only that the weight and authority of a practice, apart from what has been or even what can be explained in reference to rules, be granted their due His remark might however be taken in a wider sense, one implying the primacy and (in a sense) also the ultimacy of practice This sense is, arguably, warranted by other passages in the writings of the later Wittgenstein, most notably, a famous text

on which much ink has been spilled and around which important debates have turned.19

In Philosophical Investigations, he notes, “‘How am I am to obey a

rule?’ – if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do.”20 The most appropriate form of this question concerns how I as an agent am justified in proceeding as I do (where the manner of proceeding is interwoven with rules and principles to which I am disposed to appeal in my attempt to justify myself) If the question

is framed in terms of agential justification rather than causal explanation, and furthermore if the agent has exhausted the process of justification, then s/he has “reached bedrock,” and that agent’s “spade is turned.” At this point, the actor is likely inclined to say, “This is simply what I do.”21In a parallel text in

On Certainty, Wittgenstein stresses, “As if giving grounds did not come to an

end sometime But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting.”22 Allowing our practices to speak for themselves might thus be taken to mean resolutely resisting the impulse to articulate in a systematic form the theoretical grounds justifying a given practice If anything is self-grounded, it would seem to be practice; if anything is

grounded in affairs (pragma) other than itself, it would appear to be theory

The practice of theory has, with Wittgenstein, evolved to the point where the theory of practice, in its historically regnant form, is called into question:

insofar as the theory of practice takes the form of a theoretical justification of

our allegedly otherwise unjustifiable practices, its value is at best dubious The justification of a practice is entirely or overwhelmingly immanent In our attempts to call into the legitimacy or efficacy of a practice, we too infrequently question the limits and bases of our acts of interrogation and criticism, our relationship to that which we are questioning The later Wittgenstein in his way and the classical pragmatists in theirs are attempting

to block certain modes of interrogation, ones continuing the transcendental tradition in Western philosophy, in order to render criticism effective and humane, not impossible This is less clear in the case of Wittgenstein, for the reason noted at the outset of this paper (his insistence that philosophy “leaves everything as it is”) But, in his later thought, Wittgenstein assembles reminders and offers descriptions often for a polemical purpose.23 Whatever else philosophy might leave as it is, it in its therapeutic efficacy does not leave unaltered the self in relationship to the world – or the everyday world as denigrated in traditional philosophy

The linguistic turn as taken by the later Wittgenstein was a pragmatic turn, an explicit turn toward human practices in their irreducible heterogeneity Still, just as it was not either solely or even narrowly linguistic,

it was not crudely or even avowedly pragmatic (or pragmatist) In On

Certainty, he acknowledged: “So I am trying to say something that sounds

like pragmatism.” But then he immediately added: “Here I am being thwarted

by a kind of Weltanschauung.”24

“The work of the philosopher consists,” Wittgenstein suggests, “in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.”25 In his later thought, he

assembled reminders principally for therapeutic and clarificatory purposes, but typically in a polemical context His reminders and descriptions were integral parts of a philosophical argument against the dominant traditions in Western philosophy, at least insofar as their cumulative effect underwrites a dehumanizing disparagement of the everyday world of human experience In brief, they were part of a polemic If the critical purposes, the polemical character, of Wittgenstein’s recollections, descriptions, and indeed acknowledgments go themselves unacknowledged, we miss the force and meaning of his writings In general, the pragmatic character of philosophical reflection is nowhere more evident than in the critical attention given by philosophers to the rival purposes structuring any actual scene of human striving In his later thought, Wittgenstein was tireless in underscoring the unavoidably agonistic dimension of human endeavor and also the irreducible heterogeneity of human practices Moreover, the agonistic character of his philosophical reflections – the aversive and self-aversive thrust of the dialogues of this haunted genius – demands explicit recognition More than this, its centrality must be acknowledged

3 What’s the Use of Calling Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?

In an insightful and forceful essay entitled “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?,” Stanley Cavell argues that assimilating Emerson too completely to the tradition of pragmatism can only result in the deeply impoverishing loss of Emerson’s distinctive voice in American culture We might push our investigation forward by asking, “What’s the use (or purpose)

of calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist?” And we might pose this question with the warning of Cavell vis-à-vis Emerson clearly in mind (calling Emerson a pragmatist would entail the loss of a voice typically speaking at cross-purposes from, say, the voice of Dewey’s instrumentalism)

Even so, there might be various justifications for calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist, though with explicit and indeed emphatic qualification One compelling reason does not concern the categorization of Wittgenstein at all but rather the destabilizing of pragmatism especially as it was articulated by Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, and Lewis This categorization is destabilizing because Wittgenstein returns to pragmatism a lesson he either learned from

James or had corroborated by the author of The Varieties of Religious

Experience – the irreducible heterogeneity of human practices.26

Another weighty reason for calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist is that his decisive break with the Kantian tradition of transcendental justification is in the spirit, though ordinarily not in the style, the of the break by the pragmatists with this tradition.27 He bids us to jettison our demand for transcendental certainty and to return to the solidity of the rough ground His account of the locus, authority, and function of norms and ideals is, thus, akin

to that of the pragmatists Our inherited practices and their immanent

transformations are sufficient unto our highest aspirations and deepest convictions

It is however not enough simply to return to the rough ground We need to find our way around the vast, varied terrain of heterogeneous, yet intersecting practices “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know

my way about’.”28 It seems to me significant that Wittgenstein used the same metaphor, as did Peirce

The later Wittgenstein and the classical pragmatists insisted, again and again, upon returning to the rough ground Moreover, they engaged in mapping the rough ground of the everyday world for the diverse purposes animating their strikingly different yet arguably overlapping projects This point can most convincingly be made in reference to Wittgenstein and Peirce.29 “The relations between these concepts form a landscape which

language presents us with in countless fragments; piecing them together is too

hard for me I can make only a very imperfect job of it.”30 “I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around.”31 This is related to the signature form of his later work, a point

made explicitly about Philosophical Investigations:

The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination – And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction – The philosophical remarks in which book are … a number

of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings.32

In a number of late manuscripts, Peirce allows his reader the first word – he

even gives his reader a formal title: Reader Loquitur.33 MS 598 is an example

of this, since it opens with this challenge: “The author,’ the reader will properly remark, ‘professes to have something to say Before I listen to him, I want to know, in a general way, what it is he has to tell me.’”34 Peirce’s reply

to his imaginary reader might be considered to echo the striking passages just quoted from Wittgenstein’s later writings, were it not written first The author replies:

Of course, I have something to say to you, but I have nothing to tell you I invite you to journey with me over a land of thought which is

already more or less known to you [emphasis added] It is a land where

I have sojourned long, and I wish to point out objects for you yourself

to see, some of which, I am pretty sure, have hitherto escaped your attention I promise you they shall be interesting in themselves, and also that they shall be such as shall concern the interests in which you

are already engaged to know better than you do It will be important that you keep an itinerary as we go along, and be aware of just where

we find each object that concerns us Otherwise we should bring back from our journey nothing but vague and confused ideas We must keep something of a log-book of all the courses and distances of our travels

… [and] we want, in the first[,] to settle just where our starting-point

is.35

But in calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist are we not taking his words out of context, twisting his purposes to our own, and simply distorting him beyond recognition? We always mean something other and more than we meant to mean (Hegel): at any given instant, we cannot grasp the full import of even our most seemingly ordinary assertions:

How could human behaviour be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what

one man is doing now, an individual action (on a single occasion), but

the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which

we see any action.36

That human practices are narrow enclosures affording no effective criteria for transformative criticism suggests the undetected influence of a captivating picture.37 When however we turn around in the room from which are seeking

to escape and at last see a door from which to exit this enclosure (one “that has been open all the time!”), we realize our practices are not prisons, but modes of being in the everyday world in all of its humanly sustaining and yet ultimately ungrounded significance.38 In a sense, our lives are abysmal

(nothing grounds them but our inheritance, our form of life as gift): nothing

stands under us but the earth(!) in its ceaseless movement, our cultural inheritances in their cosmic fragility but human solidity

In the end, the appeal is always to ungrounded practices, not warranting cognitions.39 But the practice of justifying ourselves, in particular, ourselves in reference to a mode of comportment, is an integral part of virtually every human practice That justification comes to an end, and that it does so often (if not always) in the mood of exhaustion40 – in the willingness

self-to confess, after having spent ourselves in an efforts at justification, “This is

simply what I am disposed to do” – signals Wittgenstein’s deepest affinity to, and most basic disagreement with, American pragmatism.41 Allowing our practices to speak for themselves entails eschewing the traditional forms of theoretical justification; it involves, moreover, embracing the immanent yet unrealized possibilities constitutive of any recognizable human practice.42Human beings are improvisational actors, truly creative agents, not despite but because of the human practices of which they are the ordinarily all too

ungrateful inheritors The gratitude for, and loyalty to, this inheritance is not

typically registered as a characteristic of any Weltanschauung identified as

pragmatist (“So I am trying to say something that sounds like pragmatism, etc”).43 Traditions are not tools we can pick up and put down at will

“Tradition is not,” as Wittgenstein insists, “something a man can learn; not a thread he can pick up when he feels like it; any more than a man can chose his ancestors.”44 One reason, then, for calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist would be

to remind ourselves of our definitive indebtedness to our inescapable inheritance, a reminder formulated here principally for the purpose of prompting us to confess our ingratitude

But, in a sense, we do choose our ancestors (for example, Wittgenstein rather than Peirce – or Wittgenstein and Peirce), though only in the largely

unacknowledged context of our unchosen inheritance “Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgment.”45 We might add: fallibilism is at every turn based on contrition (hence, Peirce’s apt expression “contrite fallibilism”).46Accordingly, allowing our practices to speak for themselves requires of us a degree and forms of acknowledgment and confession not ordinarily associated with pragmatism.47 But our identification with experimental inquiry and democratic deliberation precisely as self-corrective practices, not theoretically justified by any appeal to transcendent grounds but practically inseparable from our identity as human beings, demands of us a willingness to acknowledge the ungrounded or, perhaps better put, self-grounded character

of these practices.48 Our ability to go on and even merely our hope to be able

to go on in a manner allowing ourselves to see ourselves as the progeny of, say, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein depend upon criteria, rules, and arguably most of all exemplars “I can” and “we have done.”

What we are most in danger of losing when we call Wittgenstein a pragmatist is the therapeutic, self-aversive cast of his later philosophy.49 What

we are best in position to attain by identifying him with this tradition is nothing less than a reconstruction of the tradition that is defined by, as much

as anything else, its commitment to reconstruction We do well to honor the irreducible heterogeneity of human traditions and, thus, to acknowledge but also to challenge Wittgenstein’s deliberate efforts to distance himself from the

pragmatist Weltanschauung We should take him at his word and, thereby,

avoid risking the loss of his distinctively therapeutic, self-aversive approach

to philosophical reflection But we should also allow his own self-aversive practice of philosophical reflection to speak for itself, to resound in ways not entirely in his control Even when we do, however, the emphasis on the self-corrective, melioristic cast of American pragmatist is hardly discernible here The narrow limits within which human melioration is likely to be effective, rather than counterproductive, needed to be acknowledged, though not as a counsel of despair but rather as an acceptance of our finitude

The pragmatic tradition no less than analytic philosophy was inaugurated by the self-conscious impulse to be the master of our meanings,

to clarify our words and other signs sufficient for the purposes for which these linguistic and other signs are being employed.50 The purposes for which human agents use ordinary language and other symbolic inheritances are more various and tangled than even Wittgenstein appreciated, as is the degree of mastery over our meanings far more limited than even Peirce acknowledged,who after all did not hesitate to ascribe life to words and other signs.51

“Every sign by itself,” Wittgenstein suggests, “seems dead What gives

it life? – In use it is alive Is life breathed into it there? – Or is the use its

life?”52 Signs in use, signs as integral to the countless practices observable in the natural world, display features characteristic of living beings, such characteristics as self-replication, self-reparation, migration, and mutation They require a minimally hospitable habitat; in addition, they undergo continuous stress and strain, but still maintain recognizable forms for an extended duration They are generated as well as generative What gives the texts of Wittgenstein and the pragmatists life is, above all, the uses to which they have been and might yet be put, the purposes for which they were adapted and the ones for which they might be modified to serve or, at least, to serve better than they have to this date

Allowing our practices to speak for themselves encompasses allowing the signs out of which they are partly constituted to replicate, migrate, and mutant even more robustly than they have so far In turn, nurturing signs in this way calls for the skills and sensitivity of a gardener or farmer, a metaphor

to which both Peirce and Wittgenstein were drawn “Ideas too,” Wittgenstein notes, “fall from the tree before they are ripe.”53 He also contends: “Thinking too has a time for ploughing and a time for gathering the harvest.”54 “There are remarks that sow and remarks that reap.”55

Words and other signs, in their actual use, inevitably migrate and mutant The reminders assembled by Wittgenstein for therapeutic, self-aversive purposes, as well as the hypotheses articulated by the pragmatists for melioristic, self-corrective ones, are no exception Calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist promises to assist us in reconstructing the tradition of pragmatism, while doing so in a deliberately hesitant, strictly qualified, manner helps us to discern the narrow limits in which even our most effective meliorations ordinarily take place, also the depth of our implication in, and thus identification with, a wide range of largely unacknowledged inheritances There is, indeed, nothing unequivocal or monolithic about the intellectual tradition known as American pragmatism; rather, this tradition is one in which its adherents are self-consciously celebrating the multiplicity of voices, also the plurality of perspectives, at its center Hence, the inclusion of yet another dissonant, self-critical voice – even one as radically dissonant and as aversely self-critical as that of Wittgenstein – should be welcome by pragmatists He would be here, as he was everywhere else (in his hut in Norway no less than his chambers at Cambridge, in his role as a schoolteacher in a village in Austria as his engagement as an architect in the city of Vienna), the

insider/outsider We must take him at his word, but then we must also take the measure of his words as he could never do, if only because their patterns of migration and mutation extend beyond the limits of his physical existence and even the control of his unquestionable genius We must take him at his word:

he was explicit about his relationship to pragmatism Yet we must trace the trajectory of his words beyond what he consciously meant, for they drive in the direction of affirming the primacy and ultimacy of human practices in their irreducible heterogeneity Moreover, they do so in a tone at times harmonious with the one audible in the texts of Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead, but at other, more numerous occasions quite at odds with the tone in these texts.56 The human face of the community of inquirers is a motley association of companionable antagonists The depth of Wittgenstein’s antagonism toward pragmatism makes his companionship worthy of courting, especially given his painstaking attention to a range of human practices

4 A Step Back to View the Larger Context

Let us not smudge differences, not deny differences that make a difference The progeny of Peirce and those of Wittgenstein form quite distinct lineages But the family resemblances among some of the more prominent progeny in

these two lineages (that is, the resemblances across lineages) suggest both the

possibility of previous liaisons (however secret) and the prospects of future intermingling Though clarity has been a defining ideal of both analytic philosophy and American pragmatism, purity (especially purity of pedigree) has not Intellectual purity, propriety, and respectability have been of far greater concern to analytic than to pragmatist philosophers For several decades, these operate to preclude the philosophical discussion of, for example, a broad range of questions in normative ethics and political philosophy itself

Historically, the scandal of analytic philosophy has been the tendency

of analysts to ignore important dimensions of human experience, because these do not fit into the dominant paradigms of analytic debate.57 But, over time, the field of experience canvassed by pragmatism (one inclusive of religion no less than science, art no less than politics, history no less than truth, substantive consideration of questions in normative ethics no less than extensive analysis of myriad issues pertaining to human culture) has, more or less in its entirely, come to define the proper domain of analytic philosophy The best work in this field now bears remarkable affinities to pragmatism: Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Robert Brandom, Ruth Millikan With the later Wittgenstein, the linguistic turn was already a pragmatic turn, a turn toward human practices in their irreducible heterogeneity.58 With the most recent developments in analytic philosophy (and by this I mean those in the last three or so decades), the pragmatic drift of analytic philosophy has been

celebrated by Bernstein and Rorty while being declaimed by Davidson and Dummett Also, with current developments in the pragmatist tradition (Haack, Margolis, Shook, & Lekan), there is additional evidence of a rapprochement between the two traditions

For institutional, cultural, and other reasons, the progeny of Peirce and that of Russell and Moore, Carnap and Ayer, Wittgenstein and Austin, are almost certainly going to remain largely distinct lineages The largely unacknowledged ideal of a rational, uncoerced consensus periodically consolidating itself in the ongoing course of philosophical disputes is, however, one that deserves to be not only acknowledged but also criticized The same kind of consideration that prompts us to ask, “What are one’s purposes and also what are the dangers in calling Wittgenstein a pragmatist?” should prompt us to ask, “What are one’s purposes and also what are the dangers in celebrating the (alleged) convergences of analytic and pragmatist philosophy?” On the side of pragmatism, the bid for academic respectability might court the loss of intellectual boldness On the side of analysis, a fuller acknowledgment of the pragmatic upshot of recent developments in the analytic tradition might threaten to expose nothing less than the bankruptcy of this tradition (Margolis) But the analytic tradition does not have the degree or kind of coherence permitting one to make such wholesale judgments as does

Margolis, whereas the pragmatist tradition does have a sufficiently unified

and distinctive character to render highly questionable the continuity claimed

by Bernstein between the thought of Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, and Lewis,

on the one hand, and Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, Davidson, and Rorty, on the other The extended family of philosophical traditions making up analytic philosophy are, contra Margolis, far from spent In turn, the discontinuity between classical American pragmatism and contemporary analytic philosophy is, contra Bernstein, far from an illusion generated by historical myopia and parochial attachments Put positively, the vitality of contemporary analytic philosophy cannot be gainsaid, while the continuity between American pragmatism and analytic philosophy can only be affirmed,

at least in the manner insisted upon by Bernstein, by rendering inaudible the distinctive voice(s) of the pragmatist tradition

5 The Philosophical Recovery of the Everyday World/The Mundane

Reorientation of Philosophical Investigation

Broad generalizations are, however, almost without exception destined to die the death of countless qualifications, while deep engagement with specific thinkers, texts, topics, themes, and more problematically traditions promises

to provide our philosophical life with a sustaining intensity as well as surprising insights So, let me begin to draw these reflections to a conclusion

by returning to a singular remark by a single figure: “God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone’s eyes.”59 The

difficulty here is explained elsewhere by Wittgenstein when he notes: “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity” – we might add, also because of their ubiquity and everydayness.60 For pragmatists such as Peirce, James, and Dewey, no less than for Wittgenstein, the task of seeing what stares us in the face is as important as it is difficult Articulating the intricate contours of our everyday practices requires, first and foremost, a nuanced attention to what is hidden because of its familiarity and ubiquity (hidden not because it is deep but because it is in a sense “superficial”) The purpose of undertaking such articulation is not to secure a transcendental foundation for these historical practices; as fragile as they might be, they tend to have a tenacity and tenure,

a solidity and authority, far exceeding the ethereal character of transcendental justification This purpose is rather to help us find our way around, to bring home to us the world as both our home and the scene of our exile.61 We must bring our words back to their home in ordinary language and, as a way of accomplishing this, sound the depths of our seemingly most superficial vocables But words in use have a tendency to wander – and our chasing after them, even when done for the sake of bringing them home, is itself a sign at once of being ourselves uprooted but still located somewhere (though not ordinarily anywhere familiar) Sketches of landscapes made in the course of extended and involved wanderings) are useful to both the exile in search of home and the homebound in search of escape. 62 Exile can be celebrated as well as suffered, embraced as well as endured, chosen as well as imposed

As Stanley Cavell has so eloquently shown, part of the significance of the later Wittgenstein resides in the rich resources his mature writings provide for securing a home in the everyday (including the commodious abode of everyday language) But the extent to which one’s inherited home, one’s given culture, one’s traditional place, might be not a false but a real prison is inadequately registered in Cavell’s account of Wittgenstein’s thought, though Wittgenstein’s life was one of self-exile, casting himself out time and again of

a given place because of internal restlessness more than anything else.63 To repeat, then, the everyday world is both our inescapable home and the fateful scene of exilic journeys Allowing our practices to speak for themselves means resisting both the lure of otherworldly justifications and the security of insular everydayness It means occasionally embracing and often simply enduring exile, twisting our selves free from suffocating confines and making our selves comfortable in unfamiliar places This complex task calls as often for forbearance and patience as it does for ingenuity and courage, as much for acceptance of our finitude as intelligent revolt against the arbitrary limits imposed by contingent circumstances Unquestionably, the acceptance of our finitude requires making peace with arbitrariness and contingency, though this tends to be a precarious and provisional peace The limits of our world are the limits of our forbearance, of what we are able to endure, even if only begrudgingly The converse of this is that the explosion of our world is

largely the result of our intolerance, our unwillingness to bear any longer what we feel is unduly limiting or oppressively insular Wittgenstein in his way and the pragmatists in their own, precisely in their somewhat different engagement with our everyday practices, offer invaluable insights for how and why we might escape the actual confines of our everyday world, also for how and why we must return, time and again, to the everyday, without remorse for the lack of a sphere beyond this one, without regret for the lack of

a locus or an authority outside of history Wittgenstein no less than the pragmatists was trying to twist himself free from a central feature of his actual inheritance – the dispiriting emphasis on the inherent deficiency of the everyday world He advises us: “Forget this transcendent certainty, which is

connected with your concept of spirit [deinem Begriff des Geistes].”64

Embrace, rather, human doubt; but also the practical certainties underlying and indeed underwriting the meaningfulness of such doubt, which is connected with an unblinking acknowledgment of our somatic, situated, and social agency.65 This is less clear in the case of Wittgenstein, for the reason noted at the outset of this paper (his insistence that philosophy “leaves everything as it is”) But, in his later thought, Wittgenstein assembles reminders and offers descriptions often for a polemical purpose.66 Whatever else philosophy might leave as it is, it in its therapeutic efficacy does not leave unaltered the self in relationship to the world – or the everyday world as denigrated in traditional philosophy

Doubt is a form of exile in miniature, for by its disorientation we are thrust, however temporarily and easily recoverably, from the unreflective world of habitual competency In contrast, the unquestioned certainties simply woven into the intricate fabric our everyway world constitute, in their totality, our characteristically unacknowledged home.67 The recovery and defense of this world signals a deep kinship between the later Wittgenstein and the classical pragmatists The degree to which Wittgenstein’s understanding of what is entailed in accepting our finitude, of forgetting “transcendent certainty” and acknowledging our mortal animality,68 seemingly tends toward both quietism and a preoccupation with the self marks a divergence from the views of the pragmatists.69 But this is obvious and perhaps not the basis for nearly as stark a contrast as is ordinarily imagined.70

As we have already stressed, the task of philosophy is in part to see what stares us in the face – and to do so as a way both to recover the everyday world and to escape from the confines of a place in which we are nullified.71Resources for such a recovery and escape are found in the writings of Wittgenstein, on the one hand, and those of Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, and (to a far less extent) Lewis, on the other That the later Wittgenstein is almost obsessively preoccupied with the recovery of the everyday world, while the classical pragmatists are focused on escapes from nullifying habitats, should not occlude the extent to which both Wittgenstein and these pragmatists affirm the primacy and ultimacy of practice, the degree to which both are

committed to allowing our practices to speak for themselves The improvisational yet effective exertions of finite yet ingenious actors are, as much as anything else, an instance of our practices articulating themselves Cartesian subjects could never carry out the role of such improvisational actors, for such actors are somatic, social, situated, and innovative beings, so much so that the very meanings of “I,” self, mind, and consciousness are lost

in dissociation from these features of our agency From a Wittgenstein and pragmatist perspective, it is impossible even to conceive (say) the “I” apart from these salient features of human agency.72

6 Conclusion

In and through our actions, our practices inevitably speak for themselves In doing so, they exhibit themselves as something more than completely rule-bound affairs In and through their writings, the later Wittgenstein on the one side and the classical pragmatists on the other struggled to grant authority and ultimacy to practice, by allowing our practices in the context of theory (or philosophy) itself to articulate themselves as self-grounded but also self-altering histories This is not simply what they did It is rather what they insisted, in the name of practice, upon doing in a self-conscious and self-critical manner A theoretical (or philosophical) justification of human practices is accordingly inseparable from a practical (or pragmatist) description of our theoretical endeavors This however does not make theory subordinate to practice; rather it makes practice inclusive of theory The traditional distinction between theory and practice hence needs to be re-inscribed in the field of practice itself, in various ways One of Dewey’s re-inscriptions takes this form: “There is an empirical truth in the common [or inherited] opposition between theory and practice, between the contemplative, reflective type and the executive type, the ‘go-getter,’ the kind that ‘gets things done.’ It is, however, a contrast between two modes of practice.”73

Such re-inscription is simply part of the work of deconstruction, work

characteristic of both the later Wittgenstein and classical pragmatism This becomes evident when we call that, for Derrida, it is necessary “to transform concepts, to displace them, to turn them against their presuppositions, to

reinscribe them in other chains, and little by little to modify the terrain of our

work and thereby to produce new configurations.”74 He immediately adds: “I

do not believe in decisive ruptures…Breaks are always, and fatally, reinscribed in an old cloth that must continually, interminably be undone.”75The affinity of this approach to both the classical pragmatists and the later Wittgenstein is striking

For all of their help in clarifying and illuminating theory as a mode of practice (as indeed a vast family of quite heterogeneous practices), the later Wittgenstein and the classical pragmatists are both charged with failing to give theory its due That is, they are criticized for not having allowed out

theoretical practices in their distinctive character to speak for themselves Those of us whose philosophical orientations have been formed in the intersecting lineages treated in this essay are in effect called upon to take up the practice of philosophy as nothing less than a theory of practice But, at this juncture, our accounts of practice must be ones in which more painstaking descriptions of human practices than those offered thus far, than anything found in the classical pragmatists or the later Wittgenstein, are articulated, for

a variety of purposes, hence from a plurality of perspectives The disciplining

of the self, the reconstruction of institutions, and the reparation of the world are integral moments in this ongoing task.76 No one of these is a purpose separable from the other two No single philosophical tradition has done justice to one of these purposes, let alone the complex interplay of all three Even so, the intersecting lineages of analytic philosophy, at least insofar as it

is an ongoing development of the later Wittgenstein, and classical pragmatism illuminates aspects of each of these purposes as well as the interrelationship

of these purposes If for no other reason than this, these intersecting lineages deserve the critical attention of contemporary inquirers

us.”(Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #126)

2 Cf Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) and Stanley Cavell, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?”, in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, & Culture, ed Morris

Dickstein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 1998, pp 72-80; Naomi Scheman,

“Forms of Life: Mapping the Rough Ground”, in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, ed Hans Sluga and David G Stern (Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge

University Press, 1996), pp 383-410

3 William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1975), p 62 In “The Relation Between Knower and Known,” an essay included in

The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to ‘Pragmatism,’ James writes: “In a world where

both the terms and their distinctions are affairs of experience, conjunctions that are experienced must be at least as real as anything else They will be ‘absolutely’ real conjunctions, if we do not have a transphenomenal absolute ready, to derealize the whole experienced world by, at a stroke” (p 230) Part of the meaning of the text

quoted from Pragmatism concerns the degree to which the everyday world of human

experience has been derealized by an invidious contrast to an eternal order of immutable perfect, to an ideal realm (the “earth of things,” i.e., the everyday world of human experience in its irreducible heterogeneity, has been “thrown into shadow by

the glories of the upper ether”) “The ideal, as we think of it, is,” Wittgenstein notes,

“unshakable You never get outside it; you must always turn back There is no outside;

outside you cannot breathe” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #103)

4 Naomi Scheman, “Forms of Life: Mapping the Rough Ground”, p.402

5 See Thomas P Crocker, “Wittgenstein’s Practices and Peirce’s Habits:

Agreement in Human Activity,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 15, number 4

(October 1998), pp 457–493 for, at the very least, a preliminary sketch of how such an exploration might be conducted and also why it is worthwhile With a quite different emphasis, Russell B Goodman has undertaken a useful investigation in Russell B

Goodman, “What Wittgenstein Learned from William James,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 11, number 3 (July 1994), 339–354.

6 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed G E M Anscombe and G H von

Wright, trans Denis Paul & G E M Anscombe (NY: Harper & Row, 1969), #139

Paul and G E M Anscombe are using “establishing” to translate “festzulegen.”

7 “This entanglement in our rules is what we want to understand (i.e get a

clear view of),” Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #125

8 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #139

9 Ibid., #140 For a different approach to this complex issue, see Nathan

Houser’s contribution to this volume Whereas I only refer in passing to empirical judgments as an illustration of a human practice, he explores this topic in detail Even

so, his attempt to return to a given at a level below that of Lebensformen is quite

different from my own inclination to endorse Wittgenstein’s insistence, “What has to

be accepted, the given is – so one could say – forms of life” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #226)

10 “The language-game ‘What is that?’ – ‘A chair’ – is not the same as: ‘What

do you take that for?’ – ‘It might be a chair.’” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, ed G H

von Wright, trans G E M Anscombe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), #417) “To begin teaching someone ‘That looks red’ makes no sense For he must say that spontaneously once he has leant what ‘red’ means, i.e., has learnt the

technique of using the word” (Ibid., #418) “Any explanation has its foundation in training (Educators ought to remember this.)” (Ibid., #419) “The child learns by believing the adult Doubt comes after belief” (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #160) “I

have learned an enormous amount and accepted it on human authority, and then I

found some things confirmed or disconfirmed by my own experience” (Ibid., #161)

11 This example is used by William James: William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), p 37 In “The

Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” John Dewey recalls James’s use of this example and then adopts it for his own purpose: John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in

Psychology,” in John Dewey, The Early Works of John Dewey, vol 5, ed Jo Ann

Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), pp 97–98

16 The final court of appeal appears to be, for Wittgenstein, “an ungrounded

way of acting” (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #110): “‘This is simply what I do’”

(Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #217) But, as we will see, there might

be an important distinction to be drawn between the ungrounded and the grounded

self-17 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #2self-17

18 Ibid

19 Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #110

20 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #127

21 Cf Catherine Legg, “This Is Simply What I Do” in Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, LXVI, 1 (January 2003), pp 58-80.

22 “Our talk gets its meaning from the rest of our proceedings” (Wittgenstein,

On Certainty, #229) “How words are understood is not told by words alone (Theology)” (Wittgenstein, Zettel, #144)

23 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p 77: “Nearly all my writings are private

conversations with myself Things that I say to myself tête-a-tête.” The parallel here with Peirce is striking: As a footnote to an essay on pragmatism written as an exchange between a proponent and critic of this doctrine, Peirce reveals: “I write in the form of a dialogue because it is in that form that my thoughts come to me.” Charles

Peirce, The Collected Papers of C S Peirce (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1931-1958), vol 5, p 497, n.1

Richard Rorty writes: “The closer one brings pragmatism to the writings of the later Wittgenstein and of those influenced by him, the more light they shed on each

other.” Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Categories and Language,” Philosophical Review

25 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #127.

26 Cf Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York:

Penguin, 1990), p 112

27 See, for example, John Dewey, The Later Works of John Dewey, vol 1, ed

Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), pp 40–41

28 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #123

29 Cf Rorty, “Pragmatism, Categories, and Language.”

30 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p 79

31 Ibid., p 58

32 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, Preface, p.3

33 Charles Peirce, MS 596 (Collected Papers, vol 5, 5.539)

34 Charles Peirce, MS 598 (Collected Papers, vol 5, 5.541)

35 Ibid

36 Wittgenstein, Zettel, #567

37.“A picture held us captive And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #115)

38 Norman Malcolm recalls a striking observation his mentor made about philosophy: “A person caught in a philosophical confusion is like a man in a room who wants to get out but doesn’t know how He tries the window but it is too high He

tries the chimney but it is too narrow And if he would only turn around, he would see

that the door has been open all the time.” Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p 51.

39 Cf Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Categories, and Language.”

40 Cf Stanley Cavell, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?”

41 For the deeply personal and disconcertingly odd form in which the imperative to confess his failings manifested itself in Wittgenstein’s life, see Monk,

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Ch.18 “A confession has to be part of your new life” (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p 18) It is, Wittgenstein insists, “of course something external” (Wittgenstein, Zettel, #558) For the external and indeed

public character of his confessions, again, see Monk

42 Cf Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, trans Jeremy Gains and Paul

Keast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)

seemed to me to grow” (Peirce, Collected Papers, vol 1, p 14) “But just as it is not

the self-righteous man who brings multitudes to a sense of sin, but the man who is most deeply conscious that he is himself a sinner, and it is only by a sense of sin that men can escape its thralldom; so it is not the man, who thinks he knows it all, that can bring other men to feel their need of learning, and it is only a deep sense that one is

miserably ignorant that can spur one on in the toilsome path of learning” (Ibid., vol 5,

p 583)

47 Ray Monk suggests that “for Wittgenstein, all philosophy, in so far as it is

pursued honestly and decently, begins with a confession He often remarked that the problem of writing good philosophy and of thinking well about philosophical problems was one of the will more than of the intellect – the will to resist thetemptation to misunderstand, the will to resist superficiality What gets in the way of genuine understanding is often not one’s lack of intelligence, but the presence of one’s pride Thus: ‘The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled And that is terribly hard

work.’” Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p 366

48 Cf Stanley Cavell, “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?”

49 Cf Vincent Colapietro, “Signs and their Vicissitudes: Meaning in Excess

of Consciousness and Functionality,” Semiotica 148 (April, 2004), pp 229-43

50 Recall in this connection a remark by Wittgenstein quoted earlier, “my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against

their natural inclination” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p ix)

51 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, #432

52 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p 27

53 Ibid., p 28

54 Ibid., p 78

55 Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, chapter 26 (“A Citizen of

No Community”); Scheman, “Forms of Life,” p 404

56 James notes: “‘Tone,’ to be sure, is a terribly vague word to use, but there

is no other, and this whole meditation [on the social value of higher education] is over the question of tone By their tone are all things human either lost or saved.” William